Category Archives: It’s Natural

Obituary: Ernst Georg Beck

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“Obituary: Ernst Georg Beck“. Ernst Georg Beck, teacher, blogger and “co-founder of the European Institute for Climate and Energy” and contributor to the disregarded journal Energy & Environment has died. His research interest was to collate historical CO2 chemical measurements, apparently regardless of their source or methodology (they’re all over the place!) and will apparently be “the final nail in the AGW coffin.” If only he’d lived to see the day?

For Anthony Watts an anti-IPCC rant disguised as an obituary is the perfect response. He even lets through comments that ponder whether Beck’s cancer was “given to him in some shape or form by those with a vested interest in such things as global governance.” Alway the high ground with Anthony…

Arctic isolated versus “urban” stations show differing trends

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Arctic isolated versus “urban” stations show differing trends. Anthony Watts has a serious man-crush on anyone who shares his obsession with weather station micro-analysis. Today’s candidate is mechanical engineer Pierre Gosselin, who loves the “gate” suffix and knows that “climate change” is a religion. He sets us all straight on how them dang climate scientists have it all wrong.

Correction: the analysis is by Pierre Gosselin’s “guest author” Ed Caryl, whose credentials seem limited to being a balding white male who likes to parrot that Antarctic ice is expanding. But that’s better than most of Anthony’s esteemed sources.

Apparently any collection of more than two people constitutes an urban setting and hence all that Arctic warming must be discounted as the product of the notorious Urban Heat Island effect! Except there isn’t an Urban Heat Island bias in the weather station records…

All the usual cherry-picking and statistical ignorance (“Looks like an awfully good fit”) are present. Arbitrary selection of “useful” weather stations, comparing carefully chosen “peak to peak” comparison points, reams of amateur photos and charts, uninformed mutterings about station histories, invoking long-duration natural cycles that we should wait out for better understanding.

Noise and dishonesty. Amusingly, Gosselin’s own website is called No Tricks Zone.

Oh no! Greenland glacier calves island 4 times the size of Manhattan

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“Oh no! Greenland glacier calves island 4 times the size of Manhattan“. Anthony Watts returns to a favorite dishonest pastime – mocking environmental reports. The Petermann Glacier in Greenland has calved an “ice island” four times the size of Manhattan into the Nares Strait.

Petermann Glacier calves an ice island! Source: U. of Delaware.

The last time something similar happened was in 1962. If something has ever happened before it can’t be happening now because of Global Warming. Is that the message Anthony? After all, there were no SUV’s back then, right?

Climate Craziness of the Week: NW Passage open “first time in history” and all that…

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Climate Craziness of the Week: NW Passage open “first time in history” and all that… Anthony Watts fires before aiming yet again. Apparently the archaeologists finding the British naval ship HMS Investigator proves that the Northwest Passage was navigable back in the 1850’s. Therefore, there has been no Global Warming. Or, it’s all natural. Both are good.

HMS Investigator sailing the open Northwest Passage? Source: Wikimedia

Years ago I visited the site where the ships the Griper and Hecla spent the winter of 1820 ice-bound off Melville Island, within sight of the western end of the Northwest Passage. Here are two reading comprehension pointers for Anthony’s.

  • The HMS Investigator was stuck in the ice for two years before the crew abandoned it.
  • The wreckage was easily discovered this year because the sea ice has melted away from the search area.

So how is this “Climate Craziness”? Oh, by the way, the claim that this “shows Arctic Sea Ice conditions similar to 1853″ is just another denialist blogger making things up.

Open Water At The North Pole

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“Open Water At The North Pole“. Anthony Watts wants his followers to hear this news from him first so he can frame it properly. He scours the internet for useful “there was less ice in the olde days” tales and finds photos of surfaced nuclear submarines and some old speculative newspaper articles.

Yes, there’s open water near the north pole now. No, it’s not uncommon at the height of Arctic summer. Big whup. This is called weather. The real story, as always, is the long-term trend. But Anthony’s anecdotes apparently trump that.

Arctic Sea Ice Anomaly, August 3, 2010. Trend is... down. Source: Cryosphere Today

Wait, what’s this? Anthony reports:

The UIUC [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] seems to have “lost” their archive of ice concentration maps. It has been offline for two weeks now, so we can’t use that valuable resource for the time being. I wonder what’s up with that?

Yes! Conspiracy and hiding of data! Back to work.

UAH Global Temperature – still in a holding pattern

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“UAH Global Temperature – still in a holding pattern“. Thanks for the weather observation from Roy Spencer, Anthony. I wonder if Anthony will ever stop pretending not to understand that good old natural climate variation, such as the eastern Pacific Ocean El Niño circulation pattern, will continue while the progressive human impacts express themselves. It’s not either/or.

It’s well understood that natural “cooling” climate variations can suppress the man-made rise, but when they swing back to “warming” they will magnify it. All Anthony is doing is pretending that these pauses are significant. “Expect drops in the months ahead” says Anthony. So what? But it will be interesting to watch him squirm out of his meaningless prediction if it fails to come to pass.

UAH Global Temperature, 1979 - present

Interesting admission from Dr. Spencer:

As of Julian Day 212 (end of July), the race for warmest year in the 32-year satellite period of record is still too close to call with 1998 continuing its lead by only 0.07 C.

Doesn’t sound like cooling to me. Spencer and sundry denialists are still clinging to that crazy 1998 El Niño as the answer to the painfully obvious warming trends.

New “Our Climate” iPhone app released

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Man-made climate drivers needn't apply.

“New “Our Climate” iPhone app released“. Want a collection of cherry-picked, out of context climate facts in your pocket? How ’bout some falsified charts and incorrect scientific explanations? Want to vote on the climate? There’s an app for that! “Our Climate” is an iPhone app by Aeris Systems Pty Ltd. from Australia and it has “made it through Apple’s review process unscathed”. That must have been a surprise. Conspiracy theorists are buying it as fast as possible so they can get their copy before the secret world gubmint shuts it down.

Anthony Watts must love to see his favorite claims packaged neatly in a context that conceals all criticism. The developer promises that “if any material errors have slipped through, rest assured that such errata will be readily addressable.” I won’t hold my breath on that one.

Funny the “warmist” climate science equivilent, Skeptical Science’s iPhone app, shows denialist claims, the scientific responses, and the to-and-fro comments on their website. I guess they’re not quite as afraid of scrutiny.

Which “key climate blogs” are readers driven too in the “Our Climate” app I wonder.

La Niña Is Not The Opposite Of El Niño – The Videos

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“La Niña Is Not The Opposite Of El Niño – The Videos“. WUWT re=posts Bob Tisdale’s blog entry about El Niño and La Niña in 1997-99. Yes, the Pacific Ocean circulates? Bob’s theory is buried in the embedded YouTube videos; “both El Niño and La Niña result in warming of the East Indian/West Pacific Ocean”.

This seems to be laying the groundwork for a revision of the denialist claim that the La Niña circulation pattern will produce global cooling any day now. That will be an unfortunate claim to have to defend when it doesn’t happen…

A study: The temperature rise has caused the CO2 Increase, not the other way around

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“A study: The temperature rise has caused the CO2 Increase, not the other way around“. Anthony Watts posts a retired physicist’s enthusiastic number crunching that proves… if there’s any global warming it’s not because of CO2. It’s the other way ’round!  However, Lon Hocker has to admit that “we offer no explanation for why global temperatures are changing“. It’s amazing what you can conclude when you remove the atmospheric CO2 trend before starting your number games.

Hocker tells us in the comments that “Excel isn’t all that hard to use, though I admit I had a bunch of learning to go though to write this. Remember I’m just using well accepted data, and high school math.” This is pretty much a confession that he’s a victim of Dunning–Kruger syndrome.

What Hocker has shown is that annual CO2 variations are, indeed, the result of seasonal temperature change and the resulting variation in vegetative CO2 production. In other breaking news, water is wet.

Minority report: 50 year warming due to natural causes

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“Minority report: 50 year warming due to natural causes“. Anthony Watts reposts a blog article by Dr. Roy Spencer. Roy has fiddled around (from his own comments: “this was the result of a couple of hours of work on the weekend, and I didn’t mean to start a whole new research effort”) and managed to amaze himself by extracting a correlation that he uses to claim an unspecified natural cause (“changes in cloud cover”?) for the last 50 years of warming.

How does he do this? Why by mashing together the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) and Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and only considering temperature change rate.

I've added the causation to Roy's correlation... After Roy Spencer, 2010/06/06.

Roy often shoots himself in the foot when he tries to use numbers and sure enough a disclaimer about a calculation error was posted within hours. Through the magic of denialist revision its gone now though. I should have grabbed the page for your entertainment.

Let’s say it together: “correlation is not causation.” Roy needs to present a clear mechanism for what he is describing. Turns out that what Roy has actually been plotting is temperature vs temperature, which obviously tracks itself very well…

Note that this computer model is getting a free pass from Anthony’s commenters as is the use of the “corrupt” CRUTem3 temperature data set from the vilified Dr. Phil Jones’ Climate Research Unit…