Category Archives: Misdirection

The Royal Society: Still Embarrassing Science

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“The Royal Society: Still Embarrassing Science“. Indur Goklany tries to gets some digs in at the Royal Society’s new publication about Climate Change. It’s an embarrassment to science! Anthony Watts, of course, agrees. His argument seems to devolve into a series of nit-picking over particular word choices and hostile semantic interpretations. That’s it?

He gets his big whopper in right off the top, for attention-challenged readers. Is it true that, as he tries to suggest, the Royal Society “now acknowledges that climate science may not be as settled as it previously implied”? Nope, that’s just a standard denialist straw-man. Like most science-based organizations the Royal Society has always made reference to statistical and historical uncertainties in the evidence of AGW.

Play on.

Pielke on ground water extraction causing sea level rise

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“Pielke on ground water extraction causing sea level rise“. Roger Pielke Dr. discovers a new excuse for why sea-level is rising – groundwater extraction! Yes, we’re sucking our way to oblivion. Groundwater extraction is causing sea-level rise! No need to turn off the power plants after-all.

A rising tide floats all boats? Source: Wikipedia.

Actually, Groundwater extraction is a well-known contributor to local subsidence. Happens over oil fields. Happens in areas of intensive irrigation by groundwater. Happens naturally in river deltas as the weight of new sediments squeezes water out of underlying sediment. Happens over underground mining operations sometimes. Is it really the cause of sea-level rise, or just a contributing factor?

I wonder what the article Pielke Sr. briefly notes and that Anthony Watts wants us to believe is YAFNCSLR (Yet Another Final Nail in the Coffin of Sea-Level Rise) really says?

“Although the role of groundwater depletion in rising sea levels had already been acknowledged, it was not addressed in the most recent IPCC report due to a lack of reliable data to illustrate the severity of the situation. Our study confirms that groundwater depletion is, in fact, a significant factor.” (italics mine)

Hmm… They suggest that about a quarter of the sea-level rise can be attributed to groundwater extraction, which of course means that Pielke and Watts are conveniently forgetting the other three-quarters. Still, that’s 7.62928887 × 1013 gallons of groundwater drawn out every year! An interesting topic, but for Pielke and Watts it’s just a useful factoid that has served the purpose of distracting their readers.

It’s tiresome to repeat these criticisms, but why does Pielke Sr. have to keep making false representations about AGW?

“This is yet another paper that shows the interconnection among the components of the climate system. The attribution of a climate effect (in this case sea level rise) to just one cause (e.g. ocean warming and glacial melt due to positive radiative forcing from anthropogenic greenhouse gases) is too narrow of a perspective.”

Show me a scientific paper that claims that modern sea-level rise is entirely due to AGW! He’s dismissing an argument that was never made. (That’s called a straw-man.)

Loehle: Vindication

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“Loehle: Vindication“. Craig Loehle uses Anthony Watts’ blog to declare “victory!” over criticisms of his 2008 temperature reconstruction, which claimed to overthrow Mann’s “hockey-stick” reconstruction, in the discredited journal Energy & Environment (A 2000 Year Global Temperature Reconstruction based on Non-Treering Proxy Data).

At the same time, I have been repeatedly insulted about it on the web. It is claimed that it has been debunked, is junk, that E&E is not a “real” journal, that I’m a hack, that I “only” used 18 series (though 2 were composites covering China & North America), etc. In the ClimateGate emails, Mann called it “awful” (which I’ll take as a compliment!). Lot’s of fun. In this post I demonstrate perhaps a little vindication.

Feel good to get that off your chest Craig?

Craig Loehle's misleading comparison of his discredited temperature reconstruction to a new one by Ljungqvist.

So was this victory achieved? Apparently through a new paper by Fredrik Ljungqvist called “A new reconstruction of temperature variability in the extra-tropical northern hemisphere during the last two millenia“, in Geografiska Annaler. And all Loehle has to do is cheat the charts a bit! Don’t align over the calibration period, center “on their respective long-term mean values”, ‘warm’ the new reconstruction a bit to get it closer to yours, use non-comparable baselines, and… victory!

An honest comparison of Loehle's proxy reconstruction. Loehle's is the red high one, Ljungqvist's is the green one in middle with the rest. By Zeke Hausfather

Funny that the Ljungqvist abstract ends with this, uh, inconvenient quote (underline mine):

Our temperature reconstruction agrees well with the reconstructions by Moberg et al. (2005) and Mann et al. (2008) with regard to the amplitude of the variability as well as the timing of warm and cold periods, except for the period c. ad 300–800, despite significant differences in both data coverage and methodology.

I guess Loehle and Anthony were too lazy to read the whole thing, even though they pasted it into their article. Is this what passes for “vindication” in denialist circles these days?

Wasted Opportunities

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“Wasted Opportunities“. Thomas Fuller steps up to the plate for Anthony Watts again. He thinks it’s a shame that so much effort has gone into renewable energy sources: solar, wind and biofuels (no love for hydro or tidal?). We should be using cogeneration! Ah, if only we all lived beside a power plant.

Oh, wait, we are using cogeneration! 7% of energy in the US, even more in some Scandinavian countries. So, Thomas’ point is what exactly? Use more somehow? He also claims cogeneration “gets little attention from environmentalists”, but doesn’t really put much effort into the accusation. This post is just Fuller filler.

New paper in Nature on ocean cycles finally causes recognition in media

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“New paper in Nature on ocean cycles finally causes recognition in media“. Anthony Watts’ “European friend” Pierre Gosselin has discovered some important science in Der Spiegel. Apparently the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) controls our entire climate, which no-one except denialists knew about until just now!

It’s all explained by a Der Spiegel article about a Nature paper  titled An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970 that is completely demonstrated by a denialist blogger’s bulls**t fake chart. Dr. Phil Jones is one of the authors! He’s starting to admit all the lies!!!! The denialists have won!

Who doesn't like crayons?

Oops, someone didn’t read the article that Der Spiegel tried to summarize. The AMO has been well described for many years, oceanic circulation patterns are a well-known factor in climate change (remember last year when Anthony spent all his time posting bunk about El Niño?), the AMO cycles don’t correlate with the recorded global temperature changes (neither did the El Niño ones). In fact, the paper is a perfectly good investigation of historical circulation patterns in the Atlantic Ocean.

Too bad it’s not useful for the purpose that Anthony tries to squeeze out of it. Why is Anthony promoting a blog post that so clearly misrepresents the paper it is ostensibly about? Oh, and once again we see Anthony likes suddenly computer models when he thinks they are saying what he wants to hear…

Engelbeen on why he thinks the CO2 increase is man made (part 4)

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“Engelbeen on why he thinks the CO2 increase is man made (part 4)“. Anthony pats himself on the back for letting someone with a “narrative contrary to the blog owner(s) view” post on his website. Of course although retired engineer Ferdinand Engelbeen happens to accept the scientific principles and evidence for increasing CO2 levels, he has similar ideas about how this has nothing to do with Global Warming. Which of course isn’t happening.

Regardless if that is man made or not, I think we agree that the influence of the increase itself on temperature/climate is limited, if observable at all.

Poor Ferdinand Engelbeen thinks that patiently explaining, in this post, how useful “background” CO2 levels are actually derived, how sampling locations and techniques dramatically diminish the value of many historical records, and how the ratio of stomata openings to the total number of cells on leaves are a poor proxy for CO2 levels, will stem the flow of ignorant commentary.

Good luck Ferdinand! And good luck with the nothing’s happening theory.

Hint to Anthony Watts: the d13C ratios show that the added CO2 has come from fossil fuel sources. Engelbeen explained it to you a week ago. End of story.

Surprise: Peer reviewed study says current Arctic sea ice is more extensive than most of the past 9000 years

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“Surprise: Peer reviewed study says current Arctic sea ice is more extensive than most of the past 9000 years“. A blogger discovers a paleoclimate paper by McKay, et.al. in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences from 2008 and Anthony Watts is on it like white on rice. “Peer reviewed!” “More ice now than ever!” “Natural!!!!”

Oh, it’s only referring to a bit of the western Arctic. Oh, they’re only comparing to Arctic Sea Ice extent of a decade ago, when there was in fact rather more sea ice. Oh, they aren’t suggesting that such low ice extents were common. Oh, dinocyst proxies are a bit dodgy. Oh, the paper is merely titled Holocene fluctuations in Arctic sea-ice cover: dinocyst-based reconstructions for the eastern Chukchi Sea, not “there’s more ice than ever now!”

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.

Global Sea Surface Temperature Cooling Continues

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“Global Sea Surface Temperature Cooling Continues“. Dr. Roy Spencer lets us know that the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) as recorded by NASA’s Aqua satellite is continuing to fall. It’s been falling for months! That’s a trend! Not.

Yes, the well-known El Niño/La Niña circulation pattern in the tropical east Pacific Ocean has entered a phase that brings colder water to the surface. No, the oceans are not cooling now.

NOAA SST Anomaly Chart for 2010-08-03

Cold snap freezes South America – beaches whitened, some areas experience snow for the first time in living memory

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“Cold snap freezes South America – beaches whitened, some areas experience snow for the first time in living memory“. Anthony Watts wants us to know it’s cold somewhere (Chile) according to denialist website ICECAP, so everyone can ignore the reports that 2010 is so far the hottest year ever globally.

He prefixes the stupid with a disclaimer of sorts, but expects his readers to swallow the thing.

From the “weather is not climate” department, more chilling news from the southern hemisphere.

After all, Global Warming must mean that everything warms up all at once, right?