“NSIDC: Arctic Sea Ice Melt Season – latest start on record“. Anthony Watts feints amnesia to infer that an NSIDC Sea Ice News report called “Cold snap causes late-season growth spurt” means that a cold Arctic winter has disproved Global Warming.
Remember why this is the latest start on record, Anthony? We both posted about it two days ago.
Sugar, you're goin' down. Source: NSIDC.
More “hiding the decline”. Anthony Watts excerpts a Steve McIntyre post about some oxygen isotope data (a temperature proxy) from the Law Dome in Antarctica that wasn’t used by the evil climatologists because it proves that there was a Medieval Warm Period all over the world.
Except it doesn’t. It’s just one in a collection of historical southern hemisphere temperature proxies. Some are more reliable than others, some show warming trends during different time periods and some don’t. The Law Dome oxygen isotope data exclusion was described in the report, but McIntyre chooses to label that as insufficient. Surprise!
Why wasn’t used? McIntyre has only conspiracy theories. His ignorance must be hard-won because he includes, but completely disregards, this quote from Dr. Jonathan Overpeck in a stolen “Climategate” e-mail:
If we have multiple conflicting temp recons from Law Dome, and one can’t be shown from the literature as being the best, then we should state that, and show neither.
That seems like a clear reason to me. But hey Steve throw it against the wall, mutter a bit, and see if it sticks!
I love “Dr.” Steve’s quote from his own IPCC AR4 Review comments:
6-1231 B 34:12 34:12 What happened to the Law Dome proxy? Why isn’t it shown? [Stephen McIntyre (Reviewer’s comment ID #: 309-115)]
The distilled essence of obsessive nit-picking! Not an ounce (err, gram) of scientific purpose behind the comment. A useful comment would have made a case for including the Law Dome proxy, but all Steve can say is “why?”.
Singer's denialist project.
“Singer on Climategate Parliamentary Inquiry“. I love it when Anthony Watts quotes Fred Singer. Trained as an electrical engineer, this guy has spent the last thirty years collecting contrarian, anti-regulation causes. CFC’s and UV damage, DDT risks, second-hand smoke, etc, etc. He’s associated with fourteen different anti-regulation “foundations”, he was behind the debunked Leipzig Declaration, and he or his organizations receive significant financing from oil interests and far-right ‘libertarian’ benefactors. When Fred opens his mouth you know that nothing but beautifully constructed bullshit will flow out. He loves the sound of his own voice.
This post is an ‘editorial’ titled “ClimateGate Whitewash” tries to inject some energy into the denialist chant about the British House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee’s ‘Climategate’ Inquiry. The Inquiry was pretty conclusive that the fabricated accusations against Dr. Phil Jones and the Climate Research Unit were groundless. This leaves the denialists with only the tactic of waving their hands wildly and talking loudly about things that the Inquiry didn’t talk about because they weren’t relevant. A pretty low-percentage play if your audience is paying attention.
Singer flails away enthusiastically and completely without evidence:
Only a thorough scientific investigation will be able to document that there was no strong warming after 1979, that the instrumented warming record is based on data manipulation, involving the selection of certain weather stations, [and the de-selection of others that showed no warming], plus applying insufficient corrections for local heating.
Thirty years and he still hasn’t proven a thing.
“Bengal Island succumbs to global warming nonsense – AP gets nutty over the loss of a sandbar“. A newspaper suggests that a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal has sunk below sea-level due to “global warming”. This sets Anthony Watts and Steven Goddard off on a rant that sea-level change can be due to sea-level rise or surface subsidence.
This is true! There are a number of local factors that affect “sea-level” in either direction. Sediment compaction. Erosion. Sediment deposition. Changes in ocean circulation patterns. Storm activity. Glacial rebound. Earthquakes. Plate tectonics. What does this have to do with global sea-level changes? Nothing.
Next up is the discovery of an ancient city 36 metres below sea-level off India’s western coast. Anthony says “How many Hummers were they driving 9,000 years ago? Chalk up another clueless AGW claim.” I guess Anthony and Steven haven’t heard of earthquakes.
It’s the denialists who are trying to build the straw-man argument that global warming is the only recognized source of sea-level change. Real scientists know better.
“Scandal brewing in the Euro carbon credits market“. If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s greedy people gaming any system for personal profit at the expense of others. Damn those ‘capitalists’! It looks like individual carbon permits are sometimes being sold to more than one buyer. Prices and volumes have plummeted in the aftermath.
This is standard financial fraud, but to Anthony it means that the carbon credit system is a failure. He also doesn’t like three of the 18 members of the Chicago Climate Exchange.
“Mister Mean Green“. People who buy “green” products are less ethical, says Anthony Watts. Because a psychology study at the University of Toronto says so (PDF here). This is Anthony’s chance to infer that environmental bloggers and “warmers” are similarly unethical.
Another press release that Anthony didn’t look past. This is about consumer behavior.
“Rewriting the decline“. Anthony Watts’ friends have been down in their basement and found a 1976 issue of National Geographic with a temperature history chart of North America that looks different from current global temperature histories! Could there really be a decline in temperatures since the 1960’s that evil climatologists have tried to hide from us?
After admitting that “the global records are not available to check, it’s impossible to know how accurate or not this graph is” they proceed to make the usual speculations and accusations ( including the suitably Orwellian “history has been rewritten”) based largely on a digital photo of a squished magazine illustration. (The version I post here includes more of the original figure than the denialists revealed.)
Art illustrations as scientific evidence. Note: chart in the lower left, excluded from the discussion, is apparently NOT evidence.
The j’accuse comes pretty quick: “the data had been adjusted (surprise)“, backed by this supporting evidence:
But, as usual, the adjustments were in favor of the Big Scare Campaign, and the reasons and the original data are not easy to find.
So in other words, they have no idea why the modern, global, chart differs.
Anthony compounds this ignorance as usual by failing to understand the term “accuracy”, but he really got my attention with his sudden conversion to dendrochronology.
Many tree rings showed a decline after 1960 that didn’t “concur” with the surface records. Perhaps these tree rings agree with the surface records as recorded at the time, rather than as adjusted post hoc? Perhaps the decline in the tree rings that Phil Jones worked to hide was not so much a divergence from reality, but instead was slightly more real than the surface-UHI-cherry-picked-and-poorly-sited records??
Anthony, do you really think that the temperature records were maliciously altered around the world to suit an implied political agenda? And that now we should trust the innocent, uncorrupted, tree rings?
“IOP fires back over criticism of their submission to Parliament“. Anthony Watts copies and pastes an entire article from Physics World entitled Concerns raised over Institute of Physics climate submission that he thinks shows the Institute of Physics defending their widely criticized assessment of the “Climategate” issue. (Their submission was authored by their “Energy Sub-group”, which has clear links to denialist interests.) Read that article title again, Anthony!
Let’s have a look at some of the quotes from the article…
…“there is no doubt that climate change is happening, that it is linked to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, and that we should be taking action to address it now”.
…”we are already reviewing our consultation process for preparing policy submissions”
…the IOP’s submission appears to prejudge the outcome of the inquiry
…The Institute also says it “strongly rebuts” accusations of “being overly influenced by one ‘climate-change sceptic’ on the energy sub-group
That’s rock-solid, Anthony. No wonder you’re encouraging your followers to flood the article comments section…
“The global economy carbon yin yang“. Anthony Watts tells us that it’s all China’s fault, which suggests that the USA doesn’t have to do anything. Anthony strangely doesn’t mention that industrial CO2 emissions only account for about 15% of the total.
According to the National Academy of Sciences, “A new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution finds that over a third of carbon dioxide emissions associated with consumption of goods and services in many developed countries are actually emitted outside their borders.”
The manufacturing exports of China certainly contribute substantially to global industrial carbon emissions. But that’s the purpose of the various carbon taxes, Cap and Trade, etc. Make the carbon emissions directly impact the cost of goods and encourage industries to adapt!
“Accuracy of climate station electronic sensors – not the best“. Anthony Watts loves to talk about the accuracy of weather stations and temperature sensors. It’s an excellent way to distract from the fact that statistical analysis does a great job of detecting and removing the effect of such systemic issues.
This paper, Sensor and Electronic Biases/Errors in Air Temperature Measurements in Common Weather Station Networks by X. Lin and K. G. Hubbard gives him the perfect, and pointless, opportunity.
Look below at the chart Anthony posts as evidence and draw the obvious conclusion – over the range of common real-world conditions, the instrument error is flat! Even outside that range the worst-case inaccuracy is only on the order of 0.5%.
Notice the errors all happen away from common real-world temps.
It goes without saying (especially by Anthony) that instrumentation issues are closely watched and corrected for in the climate record, through the magic of statistical analysis.
P.S. Anthony, what is the difference between “accurate” and “consistent”? Which would be a better quality, for example, in a train station clock?
Wott's Up With That? 