Category Archives: The Cherry Orchard

Is It Time To Stop The Insanity Of Wasting Time and Money On More Climate Models?

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“Is It Time To Stop The Insanity Of Wasting Time and Money On More Climate Models?” (2015-09-14). Wait a second. Hasn’t the only faintly credible denialist argument been that all the climate modelling and climate projections are too preliminary? We should keep waiting, twiddling our thumbs, until perfect data and projections are in hand? Then, presumably, the denialists will swing into righteous eco-warrior action. No, for Dr. Tim Ball it’s now about wasteful funding. Apparently ignorance is again bliss.

I still flick a bored eye over to Anthony Watts’ clown convention every now and then, and this post made me laugh enough to spend a moment scrolling through the “science.”

Today Anthony has loaned his dunce’s pulpit to Sky Dragon kook Dr. Tim Ball so he can mutter that climate projections aren’t as precise as he requires, that there aren’t enough “stations”, and that if you copy and paste carefully enough even the IPCC can be made to admit that the data is awful. Shut the whole thing down!

Hard to put much credence in Dr. Ball’s “career as a climatologist” (actually he’s a retired geographer and semi-pro Letter to the Editor writer) when he’s still trying to sell the out-of-context “hide the decline” source code quote from 2009. That dog won’t hunt. Also, does he really think that climatologists are trying to forecast climate? Ball seems to have a very rudimentary notion of how his alleged profession gathers climate data, or how it is used. Most of his gotcha quotes stop just before the actual meaning is explained, but this can possibly be put down to a short attention span.

Hell, Dr. Ball seems to have even forgotten that “stations” aren’t the only way we gather climate data. Maybe he should dust off those National Geographic magazines and look for articles about “satellites.” They’re brill. They go everywhere!

Actually, Dr. Ball seems to hold Australian garden-variety denialist and conspiracy enthusiast (ask her about the Rothschilds) Joanne Nova in high esteem, so perhaps he’s hidden an admission of poor judgement amongst his contemptuous bluster.

IPCC AR5 draft leaked, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing – as well as a lack of warming to match model projections, and reversal on ‘extreme weather’

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“IPCC AR5 draft leaked, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing – as well as a lack of warming to match model projections, and reversal on ‘extreme weather’“ (2012-12-13). What’s this? A GAME-CHANGING revelation about global warming? That’s, like, the tenth time! This one’s gotta stick, right Anthony?

Let’s see… this is a leak by an actual insider IPCC expert! Now that ought to get everyone’s attention! Oh, our expert is just Anthony Watts’ blogging buddy Alex Rawls and his “expertise” consists of being able to promise that he wouldn’t release any of the IPCC AR5 draft text. (Looks like he dropped that ball pretty quick via a bit of self-sainting: “As for my personal confidentiality agreement with the IPCC, I regard that as vitiated by the systematic dishonesty of the report“.) Actual science credentials? Zip. He’s just another denialist nutter who thinks he’s the next Galileo.

But still, he must have found something juicy to break his earnest confidentiality pledge! Wazzit? Here’s the game-changing sentence Alec decided to hang his hat on:

The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link.

Here’s what NewScientist said in covering the tomfoolery:

if Rawls had read a bit further, he would have realised that the report goes on to largely dismiss the evidence that cosmic rays have a significant effect. “They conclude there’s very little evidence that it has any effect”

So the juicy sentence was just a minor aspect of a solar influence discussion (spoiler: the influence is big, obviously, but so invariant as to be irrelevant to modern climate trends). Really, how could there be anything “game-changing” in an IPCC report? It’s freakin’ based on the existing published science!

Is Alec stupid enough to think that a bit of draft text from a scientific summary would be how we suddenly recognise a paradigm shift in climate science? Apparently, yes. Alec also consider’s himself a national hero for bravely blowing his whistle. Both of these beliefs merit a solid whack on the side of the head.

A few other worthwhile comments on the matter:

  • RealClimate – “A review of cosmic rays and climate: a cluttered story of little success”
  • Skeptical Science – “IPCC Draft Report Leaked, Shows Global Warming is NOT Due to the Sun”
  • Scientific American – “Climate deniers used the leak to press their case but the new IPCC report closes the case on a human cause for global warming”
  • NewScientist – “Leaked IPCC report reaffirms dangerous climate change”
  • The Guardian – “Global warming is not due to the sun, confirms leaked IPCC report”

Helping Bloomberg understand ‘stupid’

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“Helping Bloomberg understand ‘stupid’“ (2012-11-01).  Oh Anthony! To understand stupid all one has to do is visit your little weblog. It’s the distilled essence of same.

For the thousandth time Anthony Watts hauls out the assertion that weather has nothing to do with climate. Think about that for a minute… But when business magazines like Bloomberg Businessweek start calling denial of Global Warming “stupid” you know the penny is finally dropping. So much for Anthony’s pleasure over the absence of climate issues in the current Presidential campaign.

Communist rag Bloomberg Businessweek’s Nov. 1st cover, addressing A. Watts personally.

Anthony’s expert climate refutation? “Hurricane Expert” political economist Roger Pielke Jr. and infamous climate liar Steve Goddard. ‘Nuff said.

P.S. Anthony: If you’re gonna fake up a passive-aggressive mock magazine cover figure out line formatting or you’ll just come across as grade-school.

Apparently Governor Brown, you’ve never visited the weather station at Lake Tahoe

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“Apparently Governor Brown, you’ve never visited the weather station at Lake Tahoe” (2012-08-13). Anthony Watts gets his shorts in a knot because the Governor of California, whom he derisively refers to as “moonbeam” says that “Global warming’s impact on Lake Tahoe is well documented.”

Now if there’s one thing Anthony likes it’s a tasty cherry-pick. His (unqualified) buddy Russ Steele has done the ‘sciencey analysis’ for him too! It’s all laid out on Russ’ website, concerned with “AGW Defeat” as well as security, liberty and property.

First Russ/Anthony decides that the Governor is referring to a particular Lake Tahoe weather station, one that they can spin to their own benefit.

Then he declares that the rise is all “Urban Heat Island” effect – a tennis court was built nearby in 1980! Actually, as Anthony knew, the courts were built in 1973 and can’t be honestly linked to the alleged artificial 1980 change in temperature trend. Which kinda happened globally, so that’s one heck of a tennis court.

Next, it’s also all bad weather station siting. There’s a fire barrel nearby, it must burn constantly! Anthony, of course, has no evidence about how long the fire barrel has been there, how often it was used, or at what time of day it was lit in comparison to the times of measurement. Still, fire barrel!

Next, he selects some other stations that show a different temperature trend (still up though, unless you squint… which Anthony does). This is the one thing that could be a legitimate argument, but of course he restricts himself to selected weather stations that suit his argument, not a scientifically legitimate regional comparison. Doing that might not make his case…

Finally, he declares that the scientists involved are “political hacks”. Surely if this was likely to stick he’d start and finish with this. And maybe demonstrate it clearly.

Well! Done and dusted for Anthony. A disused fire barrel and tennis courts in place long before a disputed temperature trend started have proven, once and for all, that there is no Global Warming. Never mind that his argument never rises above vague, un-verified supposition.

Note: This post was written so that comments made in a recent but unrelated post could be associated with the correct topic. It’s just run-of-the-mill denialist noise on Anthony’s part.

P.S. Love Anthony’s ominous reference to a critical commenter’s personal details, gleaned from IP address snooping. Classic passive-aggression and misdirection!

Analysing the complete hadCRUT yields some surprising results

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“Analysing the complete hadCRUT yields some surprising results” (2011-08-04). Anthony Watts learns from a post by right-wing “Global Warming Policy Foundation” lobbyists about a post by Luboš Motl that proves that 30% of the Earth has cooled. Run from the Ice Age! Or something like that.

After five years of denialist pretense that the data was being hidden from them (because they had to go to the trouble of requesting it from the various national meteorological organizations that owned it) the unified release of the global data set used by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has forced them to switch to a new fake numbers game. Expect a lot more of this kind of transparent misdirection, designed to keep the uninformed public distracted. Expect Anthony to make a big fuss about it each time.

Luboš Motl's plot of HADCRU3 data showing historical warming or cooling trend.

Look at how much of that cRaZy blue there is!

So if we are to believe Motl, the Earth is actually 30% cooler than it was 77 years ago. Run from the Ice Age! No wait; some places have cooled even though most other places have warmed, so it’s not global warming. No wait, it’s that the HadCRUT3 temperature data comes from weather stations that only represent particular small areas, so it can’t tell us anything about global temperature. (Dang! They should have just used that one temperature station that records the whole planet.)

Err, maybe this is why scientists use statistics? To collect and objectively interpret large data sets with complex trends and arrive at an objective understanding.

Hold on. Is Motl really trying to make the point that unless every station shows a warming trend then we can’t claim that there is global warming? Is his point really so dogmatically stupid? Maybe, because in spite of his self-declared brilliance Motl has to admit that he got “standard deviation” mixed up with “root mean square“. Unfortunately he says “I don’t have the energy to redo all these calculations – it’s very time-consuming and CPU-time-consuming” but I’m sure it’s a wash, huh?

Anthony Watts and the “Global Warming Policy Foundation” are certainly happy to overlook this, because to them the fact that 30% of the recording stations show a cooling history apparently makes their heads reel. Not climate scientists however. Only an idiot would expect a trend to be uniformly expressed throughout a complex natural system.

Oh, that’s right. We’re talking about Anthony Watts, aren’t we?

Pat Frank: The New Science of Climate Change

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“Pat Frank: The New Science of Climate Change“ (May 14, 2011). Anthony Watts’ blog buddy “John A” wants us to read chemistry PhD Pat Frank’s May 6th post on Jeff Id’s blog (ah, “social networking”). It proves that Global Warming is all just fiddling by them dang lyin’ climate scientists. They adjusted the early 20th century surface temperatures upwards to create the appearance of a late-century warming trend! What sneaks.

This increase in rate wasn’t due to an accelerating late 20th century trend. It’s mostly due to modifications of the 1880-1920 record.

Wait, haven’t the denialists been claiming that early instrument records were adjusted downwards to maximize apparent warming? Could it be that they’re adjusting in both directions at once? It staggers the mind.

Pat Frank’s rigorous scientific technique is to scan the published graphics and convert them to numerical values. How this is supposed to inspire confidence in his conclusions remains unknown because Frank offers no discussion of the reasons for changing the data selection that produced the plots. I suppose that would take both knowledge of the details as well as scientific insight.

His accusation is that the earliest instrument data was ‘adjusted upwards’ by GISS  from earlier presentations to fraudulently lower the slope of early century warming and make post-1975 AGW warming look comparatively steeper. So Frank adjusts the values in the direction that suits him by cherry-picking some starting points (What’s special about 1950? Nothing.), adds in some x-axis squashing for more visual minimization, and declares victory. Now that’s post-normal.

This all boils down to more accusations of “Post-Normal Science”, which denialists like to sling about when ever climate scientists refine their theories or improve historical analyses. Any change in “the record” is malicious don’t you know.

I wonder why Frank doesn’t discuss Total Solar Irradiance, which was increasing during the early part of the century and level later in the century when all the Global Warming happened? After-all he does make a half-hearted stab at blaming the warming on “solar variation”.

Western snow pack is well above normal, Squaw Valley sets new all time snow record

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“Western snow pack is well above normal, Squaw Valley sets new all time snow record” (May 18, 2011). Anthony Watts returns to his habit of noting “Snow! Somewhere!“, in this case in the Western US where it turns out there is a lot of snow this spring:

All of the western states have snowpacks that are currently 110 to over 180 percent above normal with the exception of southern Colorado!!!!!!! [OK, the exclamation marks are my addition]

Thus disproving global warming forever and showing that those climate scientists were damn liars when they said that snowpack would decline because of global warming and cause terrible water shortages. (Which raises the question: can we really trust anything the government says? Maybe this snowpack data is a trick too!)

These posts are Anthony’s way of deceiving dim-wits who fail to realise that:

  • Climate change is not a uniform and linear global transition.
  • This is a very small cherry-picked region of the Earth that happens to match Anthony’s agenda.
  • Anthony’s trying to refute long-term predictions by drawing attention to short-term variation. (Hence his preëmptive admission that his post is from the “weather is not climate” department.)
  • Increased evaporation over oceans due to the warmer temperatures results in increased precipitation over land.
  • In a warmer world it’s less frequently too cold to snow (look up relative humidity).
  • Anthony is quoting newspaper articles of “alarmist” warnings about declining snowpack, not the published science.
  • Bet you can add a few more yourself.

Funny how taking a step back is always so fatal to Anthony's arguments.

The surfacestations paper – statistics primer

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“The surfacestations paper – statistics primer“ (May 12, 2011). Was Anthony Watts hiding his light under a bushel when he announced the surfacestations paper was in press? Is this post the meaty one, and the announcement mis-fire just rope-a-dope? Heres comes co-author Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon’s science! (Apparently John, a meteorologist who is the politically-appointed “Texas State Climatologist”, came on-board after Anthony’s own statistical efforts were tossed.) [Update: apologies for following Anthony’s misspelling of his co-author’s name.]

First of all John admits a “subtle point”. It turns out they “didn’t assess the differences in individual station measurements”, which unfortunately was what Anthony had been shouting about for years. Oh really?

John also admits that “NCDC’s preliminary analysis of siting quality used a gridded analysis, but we checked and our numbers weren’t very different.” (emphasis mine). Oh really?

Another curious admission from John is that “you have to work with anomalies or changes over time (first differences) rather than the raw temperatures themselves.” This seems strange, because the denialist howling has always been that only the raw temperatures can be trusted.

Fourth, John tells us that “a station should matter more in the overall average if it is far from other stations, and matter less if lots of other stations are nearby.” Isn’t weighting stations how the mainstream climate scientists rigged the numbers? Oh dear, there’s a pattern emerging. Regular science.

What was the ingenious analysis that pulled all this together into the final nail in the coffin of global warming? The “Monte Carlo approach”.

In fact, it’s so simple you don’t need to know statistics to understand it.  Given two classes of stations whose trends needed comparing, I randomly assigned stations to each class, while making sure that the total number of stations in each class stayed the same and that each climate region had at least two stations of each class.  I then computed and stored the difference in trends.  I then repeated this process a total of 10,000 times.

Then of course you cherry-pick the few comparisons that randomly show the trend you want to claim is real and ignore the other 9,990. This is what denialist statistician-to-the-stars Steve McIntyre did in his attacks on Dr. Mann’s temperature reconstructions, and was so ham-handedly reproduced by Dr. Edward Wegman.

So what’s left? Weak mutterings about how “many stations underwent simultaneous instrumentation and siting changes” in the 1980’s. Apparently no-one knew this (not).

This paper is sounding more and more like an ass-covering way to justify several years of wasted and misguided effort. The demonized scientific process has pinned Anthony and his team like bugs under a magnifying glass, holding them accountable for every squeak. The result? Laryngitis.

Stanford claims farmers “dodged impacts of global warming” in the USA, but you have to find it first.

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“Stanford claims farmers “dodged impacts of global warming” in the USA, but you have to find it first.“ (May 6, 2011). When Anthony Watts does his own posting you can be sure that it will be short and dishonest. Here Anthony disputes a Stanford University report on the impact of global warming on US crop production, which states:

Global warming is likely already taking a toll on world wheat and corn production, according to a new study led by Stanford University researchers. But the United States, Canada and northern Mexico have largely escaped the trend.

Anthony rebuttal is to slap together charts of US corn yield and US temperature to “prove” that noisy regional weather data shows no global warming. He also alludes to the comical “CO2 is essential for life” argument.

Yep, US corn yields are going up. It’s gotta mean something! Anthony grudgingly allows that “some of the gains seen below are likely the result of improved seed lines”, but the honest first approximation is that all of corn yield gains are “likely the result of improved seed lines”. After-all he’s pretty sure that there hasn’t been any change in the climate, isn’t he? Sez Anthony:

What global warming? The last two years of annual mean temperature for the USA (2009, 2010) is about the same as it was in 1980 and 1981, and lower than many years since.

So Anthony’s entire argument is to compare two years of the US annual mean temperature, 1980 and 1981, against the two most recent years and declare that since they are “about the same” this proves that there’s no global warming? Dude, you’re a frickin’ cherry-pickin’ idiot.

Anthony’s lame “we’ve seen exactly this before” deception is only faintly plausible if he deliberately removes the default trend line from his chart. We can fix that though (replicate it here, but ignore Anthony’s advice to exclude the trend line):

Anthony Watts took care to remove the trend from his version of this chart.

As usual Anthony’s also using several levels of cherry-picking to gin-up his “What global warming?” climate claim aside from the two-year comparison windows. The US Corn Belt is not the same geographic area as the continental US, so he’s not demonstrating anything at all about the Corn Belt climate. Likewise, the continental US represents only a fraction of the global record.

The Stanford article also mentions an US trend towards anomalously cooler summers, which coupled with the unequivocal rise in annual average temperature implies warmer winters. US agriculture has been partly insulated from global warming by keeping the growing season temperatures within the crop’s tolerance zone. Why didn’t Anthony address that? Hmmm.

The GISS divergence problem: Ocean Heat Content

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“The GISS divergence problem: Ocean Heat Content“. Butter wouldn’t melt in citizen-scientist Bob Tisdale’s mouth, would it? He’s back with new proof that there’s no global warming and that them gubmint scientists is stupid. Anthony Watts approvingly notes the alleged “[denialist] reality versus [Goddard Institute for Space Studies] projection disparity” and declares “a GISS miss by a country mile.” Game over, yuck, yuck, yuck!

Tisdale’s claim is that Ocean Heat Content (OHC) hasn’t risen as fast as an old GISS model projected (note that this was not a prediction). Why? Well, because he can slap a projected straight line (Bob still loves ’em) on a chart that rises faster than the observations. Therefore, warmists are liars and their computers are too. This handily side-steps the real issue: Ocean Heat Content is unquestionably rising. We call this global warming.

Except… Even Anthony has to give Bob a nudge in the comments for failing to admit that his citizen-science fair project is showing “anomalies” i.e. deviations from the trend and not the trend itself. Sure, the target man on the street won’t spot it, but it’s like plastering “kick me” all over your own back for the benefit of informed scientific observers like Tamino, to whom Bob’s posts are like candy to a baby. Tamino indulges his sweet tooth in Favorite Denier Tricks, or How to Hide the Incline.

So how does Tisdale think he’s proven that the alarmist GISS projection of increasing OHC doesn’t match the measured increase? By using the classic denialist trick of showing the projection over a very particularly chosen time period from on a very particularly chosen point. This allows him to imply that OHC is flat but the GISS projection is increasingly divergent from “reality”. Anthony is silent on the this half of Bob’s deception because in the denialist playbook cherry-picking is enthusiastically endorsed.

The following graphic collates Tamino’s deconstruction of Bob Tisdale’s game-playing. Perhaps Bob should submit his work to the National Science Fair’s Beeville branch?

New cherry-picking and tunnel vision from Bob "Magoo" Tisdale. Deconstruction by Tamino.