RC’s response to McShane and Wyner: a case of orange cones

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“RC’s response to McShane and Wyner: a case of orange cones“. This is a classic whine from Anthony Watts about “the Team” and their “egos”. Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Scott Rutherford (apparently representing the Team) have written a scathing comment letter to the Annals of Applied Statistics about the recent allegedly “hockey-stick busting” paper by the naïve statisticians McShane and Wyner entitled A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable? [PDF].

Update: I just noticed that the URL for Anthony’s blog post is “http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/23/rcs-response-to-mcshane-and-wyner-the-teams-steaming-pile-of-snip”! Now that’s critical analysis.

The paper has been debunked as wishful thinking and statistical failures (particularly embarrassing if you’re trying to overturn statistical evidence) that rely heavily and uncritically on biased sources and is coated with an irrelevant layer of political posturing. Read the coverage at Deep Climate, or Deltoid, then have a chuckle over Anthony’s first coverage of this “new and important study“. It has proven to be the latest superficially useful denialist effort, so it is being blindly praised in the usual quarters and stubbornly defended by the ignorant (this is Anthony’s cue).

I’d summarize it as an attempt to claim that the weak results of their poor statistical analysis means that the better techniques used to successfully identify the “hockey-stick” temperature trend are invalid. Sort of like saying “we get crappy results, so you must have done a crappy job just like us.”

Anthony jumps in with both feet sputtering about the nerve of those climatologists pointing out improper “data quality control” in McShane and Wyner’s paper. It’s one thing for denialists to fabricate quality control criticisms and splash them about freely, but apparently poor sportsmanship for scientists to point out real data flaws. Even if M&W tried to preëmptively claim that they’re “not interested at this stage in engaging the issues of data quality.” (Except they are.)

M&W are also called out for adding “poor quality proxies [that have] a material effect on the reconstructions, inflating the level of peak apparent Medieval warmth”. Why can’t they spin the climate record for the benefit of their desired conclusions? It’s standard practice for denialist papers! Sorry Anthony, M&W have to play by the big kid’s rules. What M&W did was to throw back in all garbage data they could to try to cherry-pick their way to an inconclusive trend.

And all this adds up in Anthony’s mind as mere wounded egos on the part of some pesky climatologists…

Ocean cooling contributed to mid-20th century global warming hiatus (and so did the PDO)

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“Ocean cooling contributed to mid-20th century global warming hiatus (and so did the PDO)“. Poor Anthony Watts seems in a foul mood here. Muttering about news story that doesn’t give him access to all the data, references to “public money”, particularly asinine comments about press release photos (where on earth does “grinning like a banshee” come from?), etc. You’d think he’d be clutching at a report about oceanic cooling with both hands…

Maybe he’s irritated that Dr. Phil Jones, who the denialists tried to bring down with the false “Climategate” controversy is publishing science again? Or is it that the paper discusses cooling, which the lying climatologists supposedly never talk about and he has no idea how to react.

So the paper in question is being published as a Letter in Nature titled An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970 (here’s the abstract). It says that “the hiatus of global warming in the Northern Hemisphere during the mid-20th century may have been due to an abrupt cooling event centered over the North Atlantic around 1970, rather than the cooling effects of tropospheric pollution.” Don’t you just hate it when scientists observe things and try to understand them?

Anthony spots professor David W.J. Thompson "grinning like a banshee".

The planet Mercury has a comet like tail

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“The planet Mercury has a comet like tail“. Anthony Watts posts a random Eurekalert press release, a Boston University Center for Space Physics paper about Mercury, to prove that he’s a well-rounded lover of knowledge. His value-added insight? Not a single word. Aside from dropping the dash from “comet-like”.

Hey, monkeys have tails too! Compare and contrast.

Nice tail, Mercury! Source - NASA/STEREO.

Boom-de-ah-da, Boom-de-ah-da.

Arctic isolated versus “urban” stations show differing trends

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Arctic isolated versus “urban” stations show differing trends. Anthony Watts has a serious man-crush on anyone who shares his obsession with weather station micro-analysis. Today’s candidate is mechanical engineer Pierre Gosselin, who loves the “gate” suffix and knows that “climate change” is a religion. He sets us all straight on how them dang climate scientists have it all wrong.

Correction: the analysis is by Pierre Gosselin’s “guest author” Ed Caryl, whose credentials seem limited to being a balding white male who likes to parrot that Antarctic ice is expanding. But that’s better than most of Anthony’s esteemed sources.

Apparently any collection of more than two people constitutes an urban setting and hence all that Arctic warming must be discounted as the product of the notorious Urban Heat Island effect! Except there isn’t an Urban Heat Island bias in the weather station records…

All the usual cherry-picking and statistical ignorance (“Looks like an awfully good fit”) are present. Arbitrary selection of “useful” weather stations, comparing carefully chosen “peak to peak” comparison points, reams of amateur photos and charts, uninformed mutterings about station histories, invoking long-duration natural cycles that we should wait out for better understanding.

Noise and dishonesty. Amusingly, Gosselin’s own website is called No Tricks Zone.

And the Lord said: “Go forth and model Moses”

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And the Lord said: “Go forth and model Moses”. A creationist gets some grant money for a paper on how a fictional event (Moses parting the Red Sea) could have, maybe, happened. He uses the computers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research to model how topographic configurations could interact with unusual wind patterns to expose the floor of a shallow lagoon (pretty lousy “miracle” if you ask me).

For Anthony Watts, this is a chance to rant about goofy computer models while simultaneously complaining about the wasteful use of said goofy computer models. Whatever.

Careful with the George Monbiot links though Anthony! Are the climate change deniers with no evidence just naturally gullible?

A non-miracle occurs! Figure from NCAR.

NOAA/NCDC – USHCN is broken please send 100 million dollars

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“NOAA/NCDC – USHCN is broken please send 100 million dollars“. Anthony Watts has gone on for years about how “awful” the US weather stations are at WUWT and his surfacestations.org websites, even though statistical analysis conclusively proves that for climate analysis purposes they’re just fine. You’d think that he would be pleased to hear about a proposal from NOAA to upgrade a core set of UHSCN stations ($100 million over ten years).

Nope. All Anthony has is a rant about gubmint spending and mockup of a “Dr. Evil” million dollar bill. But don’t get him wrong!

Hell, I’ll do it for 10K a piece and do a better job than NOAA ever could.

Anthony shows his keen understanding of the economy.

Anthony, I wouldn’t trust you with a ballpoint pen.

Website News

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So I’m back again after another layoff… What was I up to? Well aside from returning to the algore secret world headquarters for new orders and getting my brain-washing topped up, I was enjoying a warm (too warm I tell myself ominously) month of summer training and racing in triathlons. I was also helping, in a small way, run the Toronto International Film Festival.

Of course Anthony Watts and friends have been busy without me. Unsurprisingly, they’ve said absolutely nothing new. The Arctic sea ice has continued to recede despite their daily protestations and crowing about momentary tiny reversals. They still darkly accuse reality-based scientists of being money-grubbing communist liars. They’re still finding phrases to work themselves into a lather over, with “global climate disruption” being the latest definitive evidence that “warmers” are slippery-tongued con artists. Apologies and retractions, as long after the fact as possible, as still trickling out of the deceived mainstream media. “Lord” Monckton is still threatening to sue anyone that criticizes him. Fox News cobbled together another collection of denialists to explain it all to their viewers.

What’s new? There have been some entertaining developments, randomly selected.

  • Judith Curry, the “climate scientist” who changed teams (err, tribes), has started blogging with the kind help of our friend Anthony Watts. The results are naturally mixed but perhaps the process will restore blood-flow to her brain.
  • Bjorn Lomsberg is now pretending that he never doubted global warming, he just wanted us to solve it with tech. Nice fig-leaf.
  • Anthony is trying to diversify into protecting Australian farmers from municipal gubmints. Good tie-in for the gubmint haters.
  • Steven Goddard has left his post (for “personal reasons”) at Watts’ Up With That’s Department of Arctic Sea Ice is Thicker Than Ever after he started snapping at his teammates again in his ferocious self-defense of factual ignorance. Never mind, Thomas Fuller is warming up in the bull(shit)-pen.
  • Anthony tells us once again that nothing man can do can have any impact, so why the fuss? Just ask any former professor, they’ll tell you that global warming is simply a “corrupt social phenomenon.”
  • Thomas Fuller tries to tell everyone that he’s just an open-minded guy who really does believe in global warming, just not that much. I guess Climategate slandering isn’t paying the bills after-all. The Way Things Break gives him a big hug.
  • Anthony gives some more support to right-wing think tank-er Indur Goklany’s kooky mantra that we should be fighting malaria with DDT (and Rachel Carson was a murderer) theory. This brought a snort of derision from Tim Lambert at Deltoid.

So much fun I’ve missed out on! Well time waits for no man.

I can make a small contribution here though. There were two films at Toronto International Film Festival that touched on climate change. Cool It was an uncritical documentary about Bjorn Lomberg and his ideas on climate change. I really wanted to catch a screening, but my schedule didn’t allow me to get to it. My contacts tell me that it was very poorly attended, but I would have loved the chance to see some of the local denialists bouncing around the 75 seat theater chosen to screen it in. The documentary Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, was also playing, it won the Cadillac People’s Choice Documentary Award. So much for the tide of public opinion turning against the “climate change alarmists”.

Oh no! Greenland glacier calves island 4 times the size of Manhattan

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“Oh no! Greenland glacier calves island 4 times the size of Manhattan“. Anthony Watts returns to a favorite dishonest pastime – mocking environmental reports. The Petermann Glacier in Greenland has calved an “ice island” four times the size of Manhattan into the Nares Strait.

Petermann Glacier calves an ice island! Source: U. of Delaware.

The last time something similar happened was in 1962. If something has ever happened before it can’t be happening now because of Global Warming. Is that the message Anthony? After all, there were no SUV’s back then, right?

A reply to Vonk: Radiative Physics Simplified II

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“A reply to Vonk: Radiative Physics Simplified II“. Denialist Jeff Id from “the Air Vent” tries to explain to the more enthusiastic followers of Anthony Watts’ blog why they shouldn’t make themselves look foolish defending Tom Vonk’s recent imaginative foray into radiative physics.

My statement is – CO2 does create a warming effect in the lower atmosphere.

Horrors! But the usual escape hatch is attached:

Before that makes you scream at the monitor, I’ve not said anything about the magnitude or danger or even measurability of the effect. I only assert that the effect is real, is provable, it’s basic physics and it does exist.

Lasers and canisters of CO2 explain it all. Source: WUWT figure 7.

After some simple-minded talk about lasers and canisters of gases Jeff declares that “NONE of this should create any alarm” and says that perhaps “CO2 then, can be considered nothing but plant food”. And of course we all must be reminded why the “true and high quality results from Anthony’s surfacestations project [is] so critically important.”

Climate Craziness of the Week: NW Passage open “first time in history” and all that…

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Climate Craziness of the Week: NW Passage open “first time in history” and all that… Anthony Watts fires before aiming yet again. Apparently the archaeologists finding the British naval ship HMS Investigator proves that the Northwest Passage was navigable back in the 1850’s. Therefore, there has been no Global Warming. Or, it’s all natural. Both are good.

HMS Investigator sailing the open Northwest Passage? Source: Wikimedia

Years ago I visited the site where the ships the Griper and Hecla spent the winter of 1820 ice-bound off Melville Island, within sight of the western end of the Northwest Passage. Here are two reading comprehension pointers for Anthony’s.

  • The HMS Investigator was stuck in the ice for two years before the crew abandoned it.
  • The wreckage was easily discovered this year because the sea ice has melted away from the search area.

So how is this “Climate Craziness”? Oh, by the way, the claim that this “shows Arctic Sea Ice conditions similar to 1853″ is just another denialist blogger making things up.