“News bites: The Green Energy Collapse“. Anthony Watts helpfully re=posts the denialist Global Warming Policy Foundation’s curiously one-sided summary of climate “news”, starting with Canada’s own denialist retread Lawrence Solomon.
Apparently government policies aren’t always perfect. Therefore there is no Global Warming. And the UN’s climate conference in Cancun is going to be a failure (it wasn’t).
Poor Anthony. Struggling to claim the mantle of “skeptic” and yet so unskeptical…
“Antarctic Ozone Hole smallest in five years“. A blind copy-and-paste from Anthony Watts from the scientific journal MSNBC. A smaller ozone hole is indicative of success in altering human emissions (chlorofluorocarbons), but a short-term trend is probably not statistically significant.
Doesn’t fit the narrative, does it, Anthony? Slapping on a bit more cover for the anti-science?
Quote of the Week – “weather is not climate”, flaming edition. Is a book about weather really about weather? Anthony Watts decides to showcase a climatologist’s response to a tangential question about Mike Smith’s book Warnings – The true story of how science tamed the weather, which recounts the history and technology of weather prediction (well, in the USA anyway). Professor Eric Steig responds that he hadn’t read the book but noticed a link on the author’s web page to a classic denialist misdirection about “weather” and “climate”.
Ooh! He’s jumping to hostile conclusions! That’s enough for Anthony to declare war.
But why is Anthony taking such an interest? Well, the author’s website does disparage “consensus” and has collected blurbs from a typical assortment of denialists (Pielke Sr. and Jr, Thomas Fuller). How unfortunate though that the book author leaps into the fray at a review of his book with a pretty straight-forward attempt to misrepresent climate predictions as “weather forecasts”:
Mr. Steig says, “No one is claiming they are predicting *weather* 100 years from now (or even 10 years from now!).” I suggest, he read p. 118 of the 2009 National Climate Change Assessment. It makes a WEATHER forecast for the number of heat waves to occur in Chicago during the period 2070-2099.
So, a weather forecast would be about particular weather events in a particular place and time. A climate prediction may include an estimate of the frequency of particular weather events without making a forecasts. Let’s repeat that in the form of an example for Anthony’s ditto-heads: a weather prediction is “there will be a 35°C heat wave tomorrow in Chicago” (or even “next April 20th”). A climate prediction is “in fifty years Chicago springs will probably endure twice as many heat waves.” Is there a difference between those statements? Yes.
So… Anthony’s Quote of the Week reveals a denialist eager to misconstrue weather and climate. Good one!
P.S. Anthony, repeating that Eric Steig must be “angry” because his Antarctica paper has been “effectively rebutted” doesn’t make either claim true. Dr. Steig has an amusing take on the matter over at Real Climate.
“Zombie” satellite shuts down critical NOAA NWS systems overnight. A satellite malfunction triggered a temporary loss of satellite weather forecasting data, but a work-round is in place. Now weather forecasting is something Anthony Watts actually knows a little about!
Too bad, but not surprising, that his contribution is just to whine about how his inquiries weren’t answered fast enough.
CFACT’s “Kook of the week” at Cancun. Christopher Monckton actually thinks that there was someone at the UN’s Cancun climate conference that was a bigger kook than him! And Anthony Watts agrees with him!
So old bug-eyes thinks its clever to bushwhack a random un-prepared attendee and record his off-the-cuff remarks for later dissection? I guess he has to stack the deck pretty hard if he wants to look good in comparison…
So Anthony… where’s the science here? This is desperate political dirty tricks, and you’re all for it.
“Visualizing the entire 2010 Atlantic hurricane season in one image“. Anthony Watts copy and pastes a NOAA visualization of all of 2010’s North Atlantic hurricanes to feed his reader’s need to complain about them durn scientists. And Al Gore.
The hurricane visualization Al Gore should have used?
BBC “disappears” headline “Coldest December Day on record for some sites”. Oh. My. Dog. (Sorry, reading Anthony Watts’ blog makes me dyslexic sometimes.) A website changed an article headline! It is a climate conspiracy!
Anthony follows this revelation with some nit-picking over whether 2010 really will be a “dead heat” with 1998 for the hottest year on record. This requires ignoring the running averages that have always been used for comparison, mumbling about where the real “finish line” is, breaking out a magnifying glass and of course not discussing at all the fact that 1998 was hot because of a very strong El Niño effect while there is no comparable influence contributing to 2010’s results.
Ooh, an Emily Litella moment! After all that whining about the word “dead heat”, it turns out that the denialist’s favorite scientist Dr. Roy Spencer is the one that used it. Quoth Anthony; never mind.
“Monckton’s Mexican Missive“. Anthony Watts shows his blind devotion to denialist blowhards by posting some rambling bluster about the UN’s Cancun climate conference by the inimitable Christopher Monckton from his laughably misnamed Science and Public Policy Institute.
Monckton was down at the Cancun conference, “making himself available” to anyone needing enlightenment. It’s all about the Left trying to trick everyone into giving a totalitarian atheist World Government control of everything, don’t you know? They’re all kooks too. End of story.
Actually, his post is quite entertaining. I encourage you to read it, but avoid hot drinks while doing so because it’s not the intellectual “missile” Anthony’s readers claim…
“Warmest year ever? – 2010: An Unexceptional El Nino Year“. Anthony Watts kindly re-posts ‘Global Warming Policy Foundation’ lobbyist David Whitehouse’s comical cherry-picking of evidence that 2010 wasn’t so warm after-all. Surprisingly, The Daily Mail is naturally taking our pet right-wing lobbyist at face value.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the lack of warming seen in the global average annual temperatures seen in the last decade has changed.
Hmmm. If you play the usual bogus denialist statistical mis-representation and ignore all the natural contributions that have been tending towards cooling. And then add in a comparison of individual months to cherry-picked years. This is eye-rollingly stupid/dishonest.
“No, no” say the commenters, “we’re on the cusp of an ice-age!” They also declare, standing with a dripping brush in their hand, that them durn climatologisters have painted themselves into a corner. Somehow.
“New peer reviewed paper shows just how bad the climate models really are“. Ah yes, when I look for compelling climate science, I always turn to the civil engineers at Hydrological Sciences Journal. Just like Anthony Watts. Hey, it’s peer-reviewed! The author’s conclusion? Computer models suck.
So is anyone claiming that global climate models are perfect? Is anyone claiming that they are useful on a local or regional scale? Nope and nope.
Were the models really never compared against the past record? Of course they were! It’s how they were frickin’ developed.
So, what’s better? Still waiting for a credible devastating analysis of “the consensus”.
P.S. I’m just eyeballing things here, but don’t the paper’s temperature charts show an upward trend?
Various temperature time series spatially integrated over the USA. Figure 12 from Anagnostopoulos et. al., 2010.
Wott's Up With That? 