The Met Office Bullhockey

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“The Met Office Bullhockey“. Anthony Watts joins the Met Office criticism that is suddenly, but purely by chance, reappearing across the denialist blogosphere. Anthony says (I think he’s talking about the Met Office, not the denialist assault):

The spin you are about to witness is Maytag quality spin. It is shameless, stupid, and beyond anything I’ve ever seen.  Both James Delingpole and Autonomous Mind take the Met Office out for a spin cycle that ends up in a full stop. The propaganda is shameless, the smell odious, and the public relations disaster is even worse than before. They apparently just don’t know when to stop talking.

So what are the charges? Apparently the Met Office was incompetent because they were making long-term predictions, and now they’re incompetent because they’re not making long-term predictions. Their long-term predictions were bad because they were wrong, but now they’re bad because they are right. Pavlovian conservative pundit James Delingpole at the Telegraph says so, and he’s alway on the up-and-up.

You know what this means, don’t you? There’s a conspiracy afoot! Can’t win for losing…

Naked bodies and a new Messiah

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“Naked bodies and a new Messiah“. Robert Zimmerman posts a guest entry on the Spiegel Online article Green Groups Try to Sex Up Climate Change. Apparently, environmentalists are trying to capture the public’s attention.

From the Spiegel Online article:

A survey of 13,000 people in 18 countries, presented by German international public broadcaster Deutsche Welle at the Global Media Forum in Bonn in June, suggests that ordinary citizens are less interested in climate change than was previously thought. The survey showed, for example, that only one in three Dutch people are concerned about climate change — even though the Netherlands is considered especially at risk from rising sea levels.

From Zimmerman’s comment:

Every tactic outlined in the article above is either a superficial public relations stunt or an effort to spin facts so emotionally that the general public will be mesmerized into doing whatever the global warming activists want.

Such denialist self-pity! It has been precisely the success of the denialist and conservative punditry’s shouting and deception that drove me to create this website. They have done an excellent job of confusing, distracting and fatiguing the public.

Denialists taken those primitive efforts of the tobacco, acid rain and ozone apologists and perfected them. Congratulations, you’ve sown ignorance moved the debate backwards.

It’s hard not to conclude that well-organized high-profile climate change deniers such as Watts, sundry conservative pundits and think tanks and even Tea Party Republicans understand that we are seeing the early signs of global warming – rising temperatures, increased snowfall, extreme weather, etc. They’re just more interested in holding back public opinion to protect their political interests.

The environmentalist campaigns highlighted in the Spiegel Online article show a far lower level of organization for the battle of public opinion. What happened to the global conspiracy taking orders from Maurice Strong and Al Gore?

The planet may not be so easily manipulated.

Lawrence Solomon on consensus statistics

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“Lawrence Solomon on consensus statistics“. Lawrence Solomon, a famously stubborn Canadian conservative pundit, tries to reinvent the science of conducting surveys so he can claim the statement that “97% of the world’s climate scientists accept the consensus” is an embarrassing lie. Read his Comment at the Financial Post. Doran and Zimmerman (2009) surveyed 10,257 “earth scientists” but only reported the opinions of 77 of them! What a cheat!

Hmmm. That would be the most expert group: actively publishing climatologists. Anderegg et. al. (2010) also found 97% support based on publicly signed declarations, while a few years back Oreskes (2004) found no relevant papers rejecting the consensus, with 25% not taking a position. Read impartial coverage of Doran and Zimmerman’s findings on ScienceDaily, and perhaps ponder for a moment how any voluntary survey is conducted.

Solomon’s research seems to come straight out of a denialist think tank “original paper” by the Science and Public Policy Institute back in December, Harold Ambler’s Climate “Consensus” Opiate, The 97% Solution. These are the same guys who proudly published Anthony Watts’ own lame high-school project, the results of his surfacestations.org survey. Solomon’s argument was recycled a few days later by his Australian doppleganger, Andrew Bolt. Deltoid link does a good job of dismantling the arguments in both newspapers.

Coincidental? Solomon’s opinion piece turned up a day after a press release from the fake “National Association of Scholars” announced Fred Singer’s similar claim that an “Estimated 40 Percent of Scientists Doubt Manmade Global Warming“.

So what is scientific opinion on climate change? Well you could try Wikipedia (Scientific opinion on climate change and Climate change consensus) or Skeptical Science.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup

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“Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup“. Anthony Watts helpfully posts the denialist “think tank” Science and Environmental Policy Project’s spin on recent news. The government is trying to grab power! Only Conservative blogs tell the truth! Government waste! Smoking is good for you!

I love the editorial by the unshakeable Fred Singer, which has the brass to try using a quote from Dr. James Hansen to support the tired old claim that “models cannot be used to predict future global temperatures reliably”. LOL.

Spin, spin, spin.

An Unexpected Limit to Climate Sensitivity

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“An Unexpected Limit to Climate Sensitivity“. Climate scientists have struggled for decades to accurately determine the sensitivity of Earth’s climate to changes in atmospheric CO2. Citizen-scientist Willis Eschenbach thinks he’s figured it out. It’s not 3℃, if the cartoon version atmospheric model he’s using is right the sensitivity should be 9℃! Clearly those scientists don’t have a clue (this is what we call “foreshadowing”).

Oops. He was measuring the wrong system, and he forgot about “conservation of energy”.

The Northeast snowstorm of 2010 by satellite view

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“The Northeast snowstorm of 2010 by satellite view“. Gosh, a December 28th satellite photo of the snowstorm in the Northeastern US, the “Image of the Day” at the NASA Earth Observatory website, must mean that Global Warming is a fraud! Just ask Anthony Watts.

Jeff Masters includes it with his top US weather events of 2010 and makes this insightful comment (italics mine):

The Northeast has seen an inordinate number of top-ten snowstorms in the past ten years, raising the question of whether this is due to random chance or a change in the climate. A study by Houston and Changnon (2009) on the top ten heaviest snows on record for each of 121 major U.S. cities showed no upward or downward trend in these very heaviest snowstorms during the period 1948 – 2001. It would be interesting to see if they repeated their study using data from the past decade if the answer would change. As I stated in my blog post, The United States of Snow in February, bigger snowstorms are not an indication that global warming is not occurring. The old adage, “it’s too cold to snow”, has some truth to it, and there is research supporting the idea that the average climate in the U.S. is colder than optimal to support the heaviest snowstorms. For example, Changnon et al. (2006) found that for the contiguous U.S. between 1900 – 2001, 61% – 80% of all heavy snowstorms of 6+ inches occurred during winters with above normal temperatures. The authors also found that 61% – 85% of all heavy snowstorms of 6+ inches occurred during winters that were wetter than average. The authors conclude, “a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more heavy snowstorms of 6+ inches than in 1901 – 2000.” The authors found that over the U.S. as a whole, there had been a slight but significant increase in heavy snowstorms of 6+ inches than in 1901 – 2000. If the climate continues to warm, we should expect an increase in heavy snow events for a few decades, until the climate grows so warm that we pass the point where winter temperatures are at the optimum for heavy snow events.

Global Sea Surface Temperature continues to drop

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“Global Sea Surface Temperature continues to drop“. Dr. Roy Spencer returns to say that temperatures are dropping. In one particular short-term satellite dataset (the AQUA satellite’s eight years of AMSR-E sea surface temperature readings). Thus disproving Global Warming.

UAH Global Temperature anomaly published, 1998 still warmest year in the UAH satellite record

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“UAH Global Temperature anomaly published, 1998 still warmest year in the UAH satellite record“. Dr. Roy Spencer declares 2010 and 1998 to be a tie for “warmest year” in the UAH satellite record. So stop talking about the GISS surface temperature records.

Also, Dr. Spencer changes his comparison “base period”:

we have just switched from a 20 year base period (1979 – 1998) to a more traditional 30 year base period (1981-2010) like that NOAA uses for climate “normals”.

An entirely accidental effect will be that “because the most recent decade averaged somewhat warmer than the previous two decades, the anomaly values will be about 0.1 deg. C lower than they used to be.”

California’s remarkable December weather

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“California’s remarkable December weather“. Anthony Watts directly observes cold weather, thus proving that Global Warming is a fraud.

Anthony quotes a meteorologist friend (certified, unlike Anthony), but I don’t think he realized the admission he let slip though:

On a number of fronts, the December weather across California was quite remarkable.  Not only was it very wet (duh!), but temperatures were generally quite mild.

I thought all snow anywhere meant record Global Warming-disproving cold?

RSS data: 2010 not the warmest year in satellite record, but a close second

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“RSS data: 2010 not the warmest year in satellite record, but a close second“. Anthony Watts discovers that 2010 was merely the second warmest year on the satellite record, although his first version of the chart “proving” this was just a tiny bit exaggerated. Thus disproving Global Warming. Of course the declaration that 2010 is now warmest year was based on surface temperature records, not satellite observations.

Funny how a few days ago denialists were poo-pooing the slightness of 2010’s new record but are now hailing the slightness of their claim that 1998 is still the warmest.

So what was “the warmest year” in Anthony’s preferred dataset? Yes, 1998, the outlier year with a massive El Niño boost which has been the denialist “trick” for several years because it throws off short-term statistical significance. Look for this talking point to be quietly dropped over the year as moment

Pick your story from the satellite temperature observations.