On Suzuki: “celebrity and integrity seem to be mutually exclusive”. Stop the presses! An environmentalist (Canadian biologist David Suzuki) might have been rude to someone! The proof is in a letter to the editor in a minor Canadian newspaper! Those climatologists are such bastards.
I think Anthony Watts is now posting his blog items from a turkey-induce coma.
“America’s Thanksgiving – the historical foundation“. Anthony Watts admires the religious devotion of George Washington. I wonder what he makes of potential Energy and Commerce Chairman Republican Representative John Shimkus. Shimkus opposes climate legislation because “The Earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over.” And the Word of God is as good as it gets, right?
“Apropos today – Turkey weather station“. Yawn. Anthony Watts posts a goofy picture of a weather station instrumentation in Turkey. Get it? Oh, don’t forget that all weather stations are wrong.
“Something to be thankful for! At last: Cosmic rays linked to rapid mid-latitude cloud changes“. Anthony Watts has once again found a natural cause for Global Warming (which isn’t happening). Now it’s cosmic rays! Anthony finds the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics paper Cosmic rays linked to rapid mid-latitude cloud changes “compelling”, especially when combined with denialist Jo Nova’s amateur illustrations (apparently the solar magnetic field absorbs cosmic rays).
The theory, which Henrik Svensmark has been relentlessly but unsuccessfully promoting for years, is that the sun’s magnetic field deflects Galactic Cosmic Rays, which seed cloud formation as they pass through the atmosphere. Hence a weaker solar magnetic field will trigger cooling by increased Earth’s albedo.
Do you think Anthony realized that the effects observed in the paper are only on the order of several days in duration? Naw. Or that Anthony noticed the authors’ admission that this effect is swamped by the anthropogenic impact? Naw.
Anthony’s quote-mining is always fun to watch. He highlights this sentence in the paper’s abstract: “These results provide perhaps the most compelling evidence presented thus far of a GCR-climate relationship.” but conveniently ignores the one immediately in front of it: “However, the results of the GCM experiment are found to be somewhat limited by the ability of the model to successfully reproduce observed cloud cover.”
Update: Here’s Jo Nova’s entertaining cosmological depict of the theory (purple annotation mine):
Jo Nova's concept of Cosmic Rays being eaten by... space dragons?
“A regional approach to the medieval warm period and the little ice age“. Anthony Watts jabbers about the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age again, using a paper by Dr. Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist by a history grad student at Stockholm University titled “A regional approach to the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age“. Has it been submitted? Reviewed? Published? Who knows.
Funny how denialists are always pointing out regional evidence to try to challenge global climate trends. Well, it’s not really funny, it’s kind of boring and a predictable intellectual bankruptcy. Strange that there’s no whining about Urban Heat Islands and sneaky “corrections” to proxies or mutterings about the failings of computer models, etc. when the denialists think the result suits them.
The paper, using only use northern hemisphere locations, claims that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were global although they seem to have somehow happened a different times in different regions. Hmmm. But this is the first sentence of Dr. Ljungqvist’s concluding remarks:
The presently available palaeotemperature proxy data records do not support the assumption that late 20th century temperatures exceeded those of the MWP in most regions, although it is clear that the temperatures of the last few decades exceed those of any multi-decadal period in the last 700–800 years. (Emphasis mine)
Anthony seems to find the Greenland reconstruction fascinating, as it plays in to his meme that “it’s been warmer in the past, so why worry about this warmth (which isn’t happening).”
Greenland and China temperature reconstructions from Ljungqvist, 2010. Anthony apparently sees a global MWP and LIA in both, I see two regions responding differently.
“Joe Bastardi’s 2011 Arctic Sea Ice Prediction“. Joe Bastardi says “the ice is coming back”. But it will be a warm summer too. Whatever.
“GHCN V3 temperature data errors spotted within a day of release“. Anthony Watts leaps on a claim that newly released data from Global Historical Climatological Network has quality control problems. Someone has plotted the difference between the old analysis software version and the new version, and they aren’t identical!
Perhaps it’s because there’s a problem with the beta release of their website’s charting software? Geez, it’s a beta. Let them finish it before you start howling.
Anthony, why can’t you just savor one conspiracy theory at a time? Well, at least we get to enjoy the bizarre spectacle in the comments of Steven Mosher defending climate data.
“New peer reviewed study: global warming lowers death rates“. Anthony tries the hoary old “Global Warming is good for us!” line once more. After all, the lobbyists at CO2 Science say so.
Check out this appallingly ignorant quote from CO2 Science:
Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.
So, when studying population statistics of a highly industrialized society in a temperate climate, and ignoring any possible future climate warming repercussions such as the arrival of new diseases or crop failures, these idiots think this passes for thoughtful science.
I guess the 4 billion humans in tropical climates can just suck it, eh?
For the record, the 2010 paper that CO2 Science and Anthony are misquoting, Causes for the recent changes in cold- and heat-related mortality in England and Wales, actually says the following in their abstract:
…adaptation has prevented a significant increase in heat-related mortality and considerably enhanced a significant decrease in cold-related mortality. Our analysis suggests that in the absence of adaptation, the human influence on climate would have been the main contributor to increases in heat-related mortality and decreases in cold-related mortality. (emphasis mine)
“Dr. Ray Bradley’s amazing photo“. Anthony Watts presents us with chilling evidence of scientific fraud: Professor Ray Bradley’s faculty website photo! Got him! And thus the grand conspiracy unravels.
Dr. Ray Bradley's Faculty photo, showing 'evidence of deception'.
So…
Is a staff photo scientific evidence? No.
Does Anthony realise that this informal photo doesn’t even show the entire chart? That, cunningly, Dr. Bradley’s body is concealing some of the details? No. (That’s the clue that Anthony missed.)
1200 words about nothing at all, with even more in the comments praising Anthony’s revelation… Just another day at WUWT.
By the way, why is Dr. Bradley earning denialist attention? He’s the climate scientist that Dr. Wegman plagiarized and misrepresented in his 2006 Report and had the nerve to complain about it. Anthony and crew are looking for ways to make him uncomfortable.
“Wegman responds to USA Today“. Another hollow denialist trophy – the politically driven, unqualified, lazy, plagiarized, misrepresentative, incompetent, padded, 2006 Wegman Report crumbles but Anthony Watts clings to it tighter than ever.
Recent, and damning, attention to it on the Deep Climate website and by John Mashey has dragged a defense from Dr. Wegman, four years after he promised to show how he “confirmed” the errors in Dr. Mann’s famous 1999 paper Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: Inferences, uncertainties, and limitations (PDF here). That defense? Apparently it’s all just “conspiracy theory”. And he had to “work faster than [he] might like”. And he “never intended… …to take intellectual credit.” Yeah, that’ll stick. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, Anthony.
So how did Dr. Edward Wegman get himself into so much trouble? In 2006 he produced a report for Congress at the request of Republican Congressman Joe Barton that supported Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre’s criticism of Dr. Mann’s global temperature reconstruction “Hockey Stick”. If Dr. Wegman used the same carefully selected starting points as McKitrick and McIntyre and the same un-released but evidently biased code he could, surprise, produce precisely the same “damning” trends they did. He also announced that there was evidence of cozy scientific relationships among “mainstream” climate scientists. This “social network analysis” was off-the-cuff conjecture ginned up to support resentful denialist claims of conspiracies. Attention-getting claims though, if he could make it stick.
Dr. Wegman’s report was widely criticized by knowledgeable people at the time and largely contradicted by a concurrent impartial analysis produced by the National Research Council. It nevertheless became a favorite denialist talking point as they could pretend that the report was peer-reviewed, that it ‘must be true because it was congressional testimony’, and the author was a real scientist (albeit a statistician without climatology expertise).
Unfortunately the Wegman Report has been shown to be a massive exercise in plagiarism, performed with such ham-fisted incompetence that it also revealed the author’s ignorance of the subject. It also contained crude attempts to twist the record to support his desired conclusion and frankly demonstrated a deep ethical lapse. Oh, and the “social network analysis”? Well if applied to Wegman, it shows that in direct contradiction to his statements, he was taking orders pretty much directly from Congressman Joe Barton’s staff.
What did Dr. Wegman’s Report say about man-made Climate Change? Nothing. How could it? He knows nothing about the subject and has proven it.
Here’s a comparison of the IPCC’s temperature reconstructions from their 2001 and 2007 Reports. Did the complaints of McKitrick and McIntyre or Wegman make any difference to the scientific reality? Nope. If anything the new reconstructions amplify the trend.
IPCC temperature reconstructions from AR3 and AR4 on the same time scale. AR3's chart is Mann, et. al. 1999, AR4 adds newer reconstructions, based on new data and techniques. Click to see (slightly) larger version.
You’ve hitched your wagon to a bolting nag, Anthony and you’re going to be dragged all over town.
Wott's Up With That? 