Category Archives: It’s Natural

GISTEMP is High

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“GISTEMP is High“. Steven Goddard discovers that temperatures measured at ground-level are not the same as temperatures measured in the troposphere. Well, learning is a good thing I suppose.

He also discovers that different data-sets have a different geographic basis! The GISS data-set attempts to include high Arctic value, while the HadCRUT3 data-set (which Steven calls “Had-Crut”) excludes those values. Shocking.

The dastardly GISS data-set estimates 2010 to be the “warmest ever“, while HadCRUT3 expects 2010 to be the “fifth warmest ever“. It seems that Steven has been reduced to trying to cherry-pick the data-set that shows the least warming. Whatever happened to the claims of cooling? An inconvenient memory apparently.

WUWT Arctic Sea Ice News #5

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“WUWT Arctic Sea Ice News #5“. Steven Goddard tries to explain that “not much has changed during the last two weeks.” Well, other than the fact that Arctic Sea Ice Extent continues to track well below “normal”. But as we learned a few days ago, Steven has decided that the conventional climatologists were right and Sea Ice Extent doesn’t mean much. Mainly because the evidence isn’t proving useful to him. He’s also very quiet about Arctic Sea Ice Volume.

Still there’s always the Catlin Arctic Survey to mock. They’ve finally arrived at the North Pole, those wimps.

Steven tries to change the subject and talk about some cherry-picked trends from the first half of the 20th Century. Suddenly 1938 is the magical date. Good luck.

Extraterrestrial Global Warming

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“Extraterrestrial Global Warming“. Anthony Watts hints at the idiotic denialist idea that other planets are warming too, so Earth’s Global Warming (which isn’t happening!) is natural too. This is deliberately ignorant and wrong.

R.I.P. El Niño

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“R.I.P. El Niño“. Steven Goddard tells us that El Niño is over, now things are going to get really cold. Yes, that’s it. Nothing but natural cycles here. Move along, move along.

Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget

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“Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget“. Sometimes denialists proclaim that there is NO GREENHOUSE EFFECT, sometimes they admit that it is REAL BUT SMALL. Dr. Roy Spencer takes the latter approach here. He’s been “slicing and dicing the [Earth’s radiation budget data] different ways” trying to find a value of CO2 sensitivity that lets him claim the climate impact is small. Guess what? He found one.

Dr. Spencer's usual blob of data without chronological context.

Spencer does it “without going into the detailed justification” by:

  • Ignoring data from polar areas, where most of the climate change has occurred.
  • Comparing global radiation data to ocean temperatures.
  • Pretending that 7 years of satellite data is a sufficient time span for climate analysis (try 30 years).
  • Restricting his plot to just month-to-month variation.
  • Using only monthly temperature changes that were greater than 0.03°C.
  • Ignoring decades of independent empirical studies that conclude that climate sensitivity must be somewhere between 2.3 to 4.1°C.
  • Sweeping away the 0.6°C warming over last 100 years as natural (therefore a similar estimated rise for this century must also be natural).
  • Ignoring the reality check that ice ages are impossible if CO2 sensitivity is as low as he declares.

What does Dr. Spencer end up with? I mean besides the WUWT comments declaring him a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize. He ends up with an artificial statistical correlation with no physical explanation to support it.

Hyperventilating on Venus

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“Hyperventilating on Venus“. More juicy idiocy from Steve Goddard! I’m starting to love this guy. Steve is pondering why Venus is so hot. First he tells us that Carl Sagan, who popularized the concept of the ‘runaway greenhouse effect’, smoked marijuana. Next he tells us that sunlight doesn’t reach the surface of Venus because of thick clouds. Then that Venus is twice as reflective as Earth. So why is Venus hot? “Because it has an extremely high atmospheric pressure“! Not because of the 96% CO2 atmosphere blocking re-radiation. Not because it receives twice the solar radiation as Earth. He must be right, because weirdo Lubos Motl agrees with him…

End of story. Well… not really. This is stupid on several levels but time is short so I’ll just point you to Tamino’s Open Mind blog for some quick insight.

I’ll note that Steve inadvertently admits that “Each doubling of CO2 increases temperatures by 2-3C.” Stay on message Steve!

Pielke Sr. on Revkin’s question

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“Pielke Sr. on Revkin’s question“. In spite of abundant evidence to the contrary, Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. is more convinced than ever that NO! is his answer to a question posed in 2005 by journalist Andy Revkin: “Is most of the observed warming over the last 50 years likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations?”

He now says that Dr. Spencer’s assertion that it’s all because of a reduction in cloud cover, in a somehow on-going 50 year pattern, explains it. Especially since he still thinks the “missing heat” statement by Kevin Trenberth last month was an admission that the heat “wasn’t there” rather than that it can’t be identified by current instrumentation.

Dr. Pielke backs his assertion with a collection of references to debunked denialist fellow-travelers and right-wing “conferences”. Confirmation bias in three, two, one, now.

[Note: In the comments Dr. Pielke thanks the WUWT readers for editorial corrections. My god, sloppy typing as well as sloppy thinking!]

New paper: Tropical cyclone response to solar UV

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“New paper: Tropical cyclone response to solar UV“. Anthony Watts posts parts of a Geophysical Research Letters paper, Daily tropical cyclone intensity response to solar ultraviolet radiation by three geographers at Florida State University, about cyclone intensity over the Caribbean and an inverse relationship to the number of sunspots (full copy here). The “compelling” hypothesis is that it is changes in UV radiation that are significant and not Total Solar Insolation (TSI). No real-world physical model is offered to explain it.

Here’s the quote from the conclusions that Anthony likes, because it can be waved about to suggest that climate change is all due to the sun:

a tropical cyclone can act to amplify the effect on the Earth’s climate of a relatively small change in solar output.

More local evidence used to infer global meaning. More grasping at straws for a random theory to magically “prove” humans aren’t contributing to Global Warming. Anther shiny thing to swing back and forth in front of Anthony’s readers.

“Catastrophic” retreat of glaciers in Spitsbergen

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““Catastrophic” retreat of glaciers in Spitsbergen“. Someone’s sent Anthony Watts a scan of an anecdotal Soviet (can we trust those Commies?) report about Arctic Ice from 1943. Gosh, there’s natural climate variability? No. Way!

So how could anything happening now be anything other than natural? Stands to reason.