Category Archives: The Cherry Orchard

Where the !@#$% is Svalbard?

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“Where the !@#$% is Svalbard?” Willis Eschenbach posts his 2006 “paper” printed in the discredited journal Energy & Environment. Willis was trying to nit-pick the weather-station records for Svalbard Norway, and didn’t like the way he was treated (to my eye he was a simply making a pest of himself). The best he could do was gnaw a tiny bit on the probability that the post by Michael Mann & Phil Jones assigned to the Svalbard 2006 spring temperatures.

His “paper” really boils down to a rant against the climatologists at Real Climate. It’s full of unsupported speculation, irrelevant “he said, she said” passages and claims of blog comment censorship and unfair treatment. Now it’s updated with praise of Anthony Watts’ website as a shining(!) example of good scientific blogging.

Thanks for the chuckle, but what a sad example of the crap that Energy & Environment was publishing then.

Taiwan sinking: Subsidence or Global Warming Induced Sea Level Rise?

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“Taiwan sinking: Subsidence or Global Warming Induced Sea Level Rise?“. Anthony Watts wants you to think that rising sea-levels anywhere on Earth are due to subsidence and subsidence alone. Especially in Taiwan. And if anyone, such as in this AFP news report Rising sea levels threaten Taiwan, suggests that it could be sea-level rise due to Global Warming, they should be flooded with hostile correspondence.

It’s certainly true that uncontrolled groundwater (or oil) extraction can produce significant local subsidence. The problem with Anthony’s attempt at misdirection is that this kind of subsidence is highly variable, even within the affected locality. So it’s kind of hard to use as an excuse to wave away regional sea-level changes.

Come to think of it, this is exactly like Anthony’s discredited obsession with surface station temperature records. Cherry-picked instances invoked in the hope of discrediting the wider trend. We’ll be hearing more mutterings on this topic, I think.

“The decrease in upper ocean heat content from March to April was 1C – largest since 1

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“The decrease in upper ocean heat content from March to April was 1C – largest since 1979“. Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. tries on his deceptive “where’s the beef?” complaint about measurement of ocean heat content again. Phil Klotzbach from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center has just reported that there has been a drop in the upper ocean heat anomaly.

Actually, the Climate Prediction Center is only talking about the upper 300m of the ocean, and only in the eastern half of the Pacific Ocean. So Dr. Pielke is enthusiastically extrapolating well beyond his data while also carefully ignoring as much inconvenient data as possible. He even chooses to display only 12 months of data to prove the climate trend! That’s weather, not climate, and when denialists do this they’re usually trying to hide something.

So we’ve got an non-significant time period and a global conclusion being drawn from a regional information. Even still the trend only applies to a cherry-picked subset (upper 300m) of that data! Everything else is waved away. We’re not watching Perry Mason at work here, are we?

Here’s Dr. Pielke’s dubious plot:

And here’s an example I pulled together from the CPC’s original data with a bit longer timeline:

Doesn’t look like the death of Global Warming after all. Just ordinary Pacific Ocean patterns on top of the well-established warming trend.

Speaking of warming, where does Dr. Pielke in his thoughtful scientific way declare that the “missing” heat has gone? He speculates that it was magically transported into space. In other words, he has no idea. But it’s certainly more entertaining than considering good old-fashioned ocean currents.

If Sea Level Was Rising, Wouldn’t Someone Have Noticed?

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“If Sea Level Was Rising, Wouldn’t Someone Have Noticed?” Anthony Watts gives us a post by Steven Goddard, who asks a stupid question and provides a stupid answer.

Short smart answer: the scientists noticed. They’re the ones who measure things.

Somehow alleged-geologist Steven thinks that cherry-picked historical photos from the California coast, a region with notable geological faulting and oil extraction, are conclusive proof that the sea-level has not risen. Also, apparently tides don’t exist. Nor do any other causes of subsidence or uplift.

This is typical of Steven’s posts; a tiny actual fact turned 180°, taken out of context and then used to draw support unwarranted conclusions.

Another indication of MWP and LIA being global

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“Another indication of MWP and LIA being global“. Suddenly Anthony Watts likes temperature proxies because here they seem to go his way… In this case he’s been pointed toward a juicy Letter in Nature back in August of 2009 that proves that the Medieval Warm Period was global. At least in one place. OK then, what do we really have?

The denialist CO2 Science website (aka “Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change”, founded by a Peabody Energy operative) posted their own summary and “adapted” figure from the Nature Letter “2,000-year-long temperature and hydrology reconstructions from the Indo-Pacific warm pool.” It used Oxygen18 isotopes from planktonic foraminifera to estimate historical temperatures.

Strangely neither Anthony or CO2 Science provide a quick link to the claimed proof, but you can read the abstract here. Perhaps their coyness was triggered by the last sentence of the real abstract (emphasis mine)?

A companion reconstruction of delta18O of sea water—a sea surface salinity and hydrology indicator—indicates a tight coupling with the East Asian monsoon system and remote control of IPWP [Indo-Pacific warm pool] hydrology on centennial–millennial timescales, rather than a dominant influence from local SST variation.

Although the authors also state that “Reconstructed SST was, however, within error of modern values” that doesn’t stop Anthony’s buddies from slapping a ruler on the “adapted” figure and declaring “we calculate that the Medieval Warm Period was about 0.4°C warmer than the Current Warm Period.“

GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought

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“GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought“. Anthony Watts thinks this ‘alarmist’ post “might also be one of the most important” ever because it explains how people “can wreck a whole month’s worth of climate data.” His commenters, of course, agree and praise his insight.

Surprise, it’s nothing but cherry-picked examples of human error in recording negative temperatures and how such entries are handled by automated aviation weather reports. As noted at The Whiteboard, none of the 12 aviation weather report errors Anthony found made it into data-sets used by climatologists. Much more satisfying to rage about alleged errors that to actually make the effort to prove they’re significant. Standard Operating Procedure at WUWT.

Anthony prefers satellite measurements, presumably because of the automated nature of their collection. But I think his real reason is that the satellite record is still too short to conclusively represent long-term climate patterns. Can’t act on Global Warming until then, can we?

But wait, what is the satellite global temperature trend? The same as the surface stations trend. Both are… up.

Amusingly, it seems that Anthony though better of this incidental defamatory accusation (italics mine):

Around 1990, NOAA began weeding out more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. They may have been working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It can be shown that they systematically and purposefully, country by country, removed higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.

The replacement text reads:

Around 1990, NOAA/NCDC’s GHCN dataset lost more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. It can be shown that country by country, they lost stations with a bias towards higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.

This is a long debunked meme of Anthony’s. Perhaps this new fabricated controversy serves to obscure the fact that he still hasn’t proven his charge against NOAA?

My Thanks and Comments for Dr. Walt Meier

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“My Thanks and Comments for Dr. Walt Meier“. Now it’s Willis Eschenbach’s turn to pick at Dr. Walt Meier’s response to Willis’ “questionnaire”. This is just the trap that Willis hoped to spring on Dr. Meier. After some self-congratulatory remarks about civil discussion and the like, he can now nit-pick, throw out cherry-picked counter examples, argue over word choices, casually repeat denialist memes, and generally posture and enjoy the superficial connection to a “real scientist”.

Dr. Meier finds the denialist welcome depicted in this stock photo used at WUWT contains a surprise.

This goes on for about 7300 words. Two points from his “conclusions” bear comment:

1. Reading Dr. Meier’s answers to the questions has been very interesting and very productive for me. It has helped to identify where the discussion goes off the rails. [Implying that it’s Dr. Meier that :”goes off the rails”, not Willis. The departure is in Willis’ head, refusal to accept basic science is why the denialists fail to understand the evidence of Global Warming.]

7. Since the null hypothesis that the climate variations are natural has not been falsified, the AGW hypothesis is still a solution in search of a problem. [This chance to make this unsupported claim is the entire point of Willis’ extended debating exercise. In fact, no scientifically honest climate models can’t match historical climate trends without human factors.]

It feels like Anthony and his associates are chasing their own tails in ever-tightening circles.

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?”.

March Modeling Madness

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“March Modeling Madness“. Steven Goddard cherry-picks his way around Climate Central’s new interactive depiction of average US March temperatures.

He does this by picking a location that is not predicted to rise above freezing and then claiming that charts confirming this are proof that the models are wrong. He also picks a juicy starting point and uses a scale that obscures any trends that aren’t blindingly large to assist denialists in looking past them.

Next, Steven will prove that water is wet.

A UHI Tale of Two Cities

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“A UHI Tale of Two Cities“. Anthony Watts, the “old faithful” of thermometer-haters, spouts again. We get a lovely tour of Anthony’s weather station photo album and a few wiggly charts, such as this one:

Temperatures (apparently) from two different places!

Anthony (and fellow obsessive Steven Goddard) talk about what’s happened in Fort Collins but they have nothing to say about their “comparable” station in Boulder. Still, they’re comfortable concluding:

We have two weather stations in similarly sited urban environments. Until 1965 they tracked each other very closely.  Since then, Fort Collins has seen a relative increase in temperature which tracks the relative increase in population. UHI is clearly not dead.

Real conclusion: Temperatures from two different places will be different. So what? UHI is not the only explanation of that variation unless it is the only one you allow yourself to consider. Regardless, the effect of UHI in the temperature records used for climatological research has been proven to be completely irrelevant.