Category Archives: Pull the Other One

Is Melting Ice Warming The Arctic?

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“Is Melting Ice Warming The Arctic?” Steven Goddard has an insight to offer about today’s earlier WUWT post about Screen and Simmonds’ 2010 Letter to Nature about  the contribution of Sea Ice melting to Arctic warming. Did you know that “ice loss has occurred mainly during the summer“? This is one of those curious posts where, to attack a conclusion, the denialist argument implicitly accepts that climate change is happening. Here Steven has chosen to argue about which months the warming is happening, not whether it is happening at all…

UAH Arctic Temp vs NSIDC Ice. After "climateinsiders.wordpress.com".

Enthusiastic arm-waving follows. Steven’s confused by the fact that Arctic climate warming appears stronger in the winter months. Guess what? Ice won’t melt at either -20°C or -2°C, only at 0°C. What happens when ice melts? It absorbs energy. Perhaps the melting of sea ice is buffering rising Arctic temperatures in the summer months.

What will happen when Steven discovers that apples fall down? Stay away from high school physics textbooks Steven, you might have your world rocked.

Quote of the week #34: NASA doubts climate model certainty

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“Quote of the week #34: NASA doubts climate model certainty“. Anthony Watts wants you to believe that because a NASA pamphlet from 1998 is not “completely certain” about Global Warming, they must now be taking orders from the secret Al Gore gubmint. It’s called science, Anthony. Better data, better understanding, better conclusions. Is that a difficult concept?

It’s the denialist mind that is frozen in time and unable to process new information. That’s why they’re called denialists.

Anthony’s also jumping onto this month’s denialist theme that “historic temperatures can be modeled with a constant linear trend + a 60 year cycle.” Too bad they can’t actually explain the correlation, too bad the correlation doesn’t persist, too bad the “constant linear trend” is up (what’s behind that I wonder).

Global warming: The Oxburgh Inquiry was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

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“Global warming: The Oxburgh Inquiry was an offer he couldn’t refuse.” A criminal conspiracy theory from Thomas Fuller, a denialist political commentator at the San Francisco Examiner, who asks a number of ominous leading questions about the Oxburgh Inquiry into the claimed scientific criticisms that arose from the Climategate e-mails.

Do I believe the ‘mob directed the investigation?’ Of course not. Do I believe that Lord Oxburgh had additional reasons to weight the findings of his investigation in favor of the status quo? It’s certainly possible. Do I think that having an underworld connection to renewable energy subsidies prejudices almost every decision made about renewable energy? Definitely.

Eeek! Sounds like a job for Steven Seagal.

Note that Fuller was a very early actor in the effort to leverage the inconsequential stolen Climate Research Unit e-mails into a scientific and political scandal.

Of Hawks and Handsaws

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“Of Hawks and Handsaws“. Willis Eschenbach, citizen-scientist, has more pretty pictures with data stuck on top of them. He’s figured out that if you slap a bunch of thick lines representing cyclic annual trends on top of each other and obscure their order, you can hide the incline pretty handily.

His expert eyeballing tells him that there’s an Urban Heat Island effect at work in Scandinavia! You betcha. And there’s nothing like a quote from Shakespeare to give an intellectual air to an empty argument. (The cheesy clip-art kind of undermines that though.)

Who needs to bother with statistical analysis when you can pull a powerful ‘intuitive’ conclusion like this from thin air? Italics mine:

At least part of the warming in the US and the NORDKLIM datasets is the result of UHI distortion of the records. An unknown but likely significant amount of this UHI heating is due to direct energy consumption in the cities.

You know what would give this claim some credibility? Credible statistics.

Where’s the Climate Beef?

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“Where’s the Climate Beef?” Willis Eschenbach decides he can disprove Global Warming by talking about just the USA. And the WUWT commenters are gobbling it up.

I don’t think anything further needs to be said…

Levy walks, solar flares, and warming

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“Levy walks, solar flares, and warming“. Once more with conviction: there is no link between solar flare cycles and global temperature trends. A statistical analysis by Martin and Kristoffer Rypdal, discussed at Physorg.com here, puts the solar climate theory of Scafetta and West to bed.

No correlation between Solar Flare Index and Climate. This would be a better presentation if the time scales matched...

You know that a “disproof” of AGW is pretty stinky when even Anthony Watts is reluctant to use it. His readers seem less picky though and are fighting over whether they can still cling to it.

To quote the paper authors:

A corresponding theory of global warming of solar origin does not exist. What does exist is a set of disconnected, mutually inconsistent, ad hoc hypotheses. If one of these is proven to be false, the typical proponent of solar warming will pull another ad hoc hypothesis out of the hat. This has been the strategy of Scafetta and West over the years, and we have no illusion that our paper will put them to silence.

This remark seems to also have relevance to the recently discussed amateur climate theories of Stephen Wilde…

A New And Effective Climate Model

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“A New And Effective Climate Model“. A 5,699 word guest post by Stephen Wilde, who has falsely identified himself as a meteorologist, states that existing climate models have “no predictive skill whatever despite huge advances in processing power and the application of millions or even billions of man hours from reputable and experienced scientists over many decades“. That’ll surprise the climatologists who have been predicting things pretty well for some time now.

But he’s here to set it all right. He’s got a “serious hypothesis”! It involves talking about “Solar surface turbulence”, boiling pots and sandwiches. Backed up by newspaper article references. Groan. Looks like textbook example of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Why is Anthony posting this goof-ball rubbish? Oh I see. This line, buried 3/4 of the way down – “The contribution of the Greenhouse effect is miniscule.”

In spite of the generally credulous welcome given to this nonsense in the WUWT comments, Solar Physicist Leif Svalgaard makes this authoritative and entertaining comment, taking two sentences to address Wilde’s 5,699 words:

I think the first two points:
1: Solar surface turbulence increases causing an expansion of the Earth’s atmosphere.
2: Resistance to outgoing longwave radiation reduces, energy is lost to space faster.
are wrong, and hence the rest.
The part of the atmosphere [the thermosphere] that expands and contracts is 1 centimeter thick [if at same pressure as at the surface] and contains 1/1000,000 the number of molecules, so has no measurable effect on point 2.

Sediments Show Pattern in Earth’s Long-Term Climate Record

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“Sediments Show Pattern in Earth’s Long-Term Climate Record“. Anthony Watts wants us to know about a press release detailing UC Santa Barbara geologist Lorraine Lisiecki’s analysis sediment records as they correlate with the Earth’s long-term climate record. Thus all Global Warming is natural!!!!!!

Note the scale in hundreds of thousands of years. Source: wikimedia

This may be an interesting refinement of the long-known influence of fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit, but these extremely gradual changes play no part in the rapid changes we are experiencing now.

Try again, Anthony.

More “hiding the decline”

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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?”.

Spaceweather alert – first “red alert” in 6 years

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“Spaceweather alert – first “red alert” in 6 years” A solar wind substorm is approaching, according to the  Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite. Standby for Global Warming! Actually, this post is fundamentally irrelevant to the Global Warming debate.

Anthony Watts shows this chart of Total Solar Insolation, which I’ve recreated for clarity, that his readers may decide implies that the Sun’s energy output is variable and hence the natural and temporary source of any Global Warming:

Jan-Apr 2010 Total Solar Insolation as recorded by the SORCE instruments. Note highly truncated vertical scale (click to enbiggen).

But isn’t this chart a more honest depiction of the data?

Same data with the full vertical scale used. Click to enbiggen.

The SORCE experiment is sound and the data is good, but it’s hilarious that this deceptive chart is the very next thing that Anthony posts after Frank Lansner’s allegations about IPCC Report chart “tricks”.