Climate Actually Changes! Film at 11:00!

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“Climate Actually Changes! Film at 11:00!“. The USA’s EPA has done a masterful job of responding to denialist submissions about their finding that rising CO2 emissions constitute an environmental danger. Anthony Watts and Co. have, sensibly, been pretty quiet about this hoping that their readers will remain unaware of the smack-down.

Part of that effort was an educational report released in April, 2010 called Climate Change Indicators in the United States.

Willis Eschenbach's statistical analysis of the state of climate knowledge...

Willis Eschenbach tries to brave it out here, inventing a cute pie chart that apparently “shows” how little we know about climate. Other than that he simply waves his arms about indignantly about choices of words and other nit-picked irrelevancies. They don’t interpret the Heat Wave Index trend the way he thinks they should! A reference link doesn’t go to the data it’s supposed to! The Drought Monitor indicator is too new!

24 indicators, nit-picks with two of them.

Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget

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“Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget“. Sometimes denialists proclaim that there is NO GREENHOUSE EFFECT, sometimes they admit that it is REAL BUT SMALL. Dr. Roy Spencer takes the latter approach here. He’s been “slicing and dicing the [Earth’s radiation budget data] different ways” trying to find a value of CO2 sensitivity that lets him claim the climate impact is small. Guess what? He found one.

Dr. Spencer's usual blob of data without chronological context.

Spencer does it “without going into the detailed justification” by:

  • Ignoring data from polar areas, where most of the climate change has occurred.
  • Comparing global radiation data to ocean temperatures.
  • Pretending that 7 years of satellite data is a sufficient time span for climate analysis (try 30 years).
  • Restricting his plot to just month-to-month variation.
  • Using only monthly temperature changes that were greater than 0.03°C.
  • Ignoring decades of independent empirical studies that conclude that climate sensitivity must be somewhere between 2.3 to 4.1°C.
  • Sweeping away the 0.6°C warming over last 100 years as natural (therefore a similar estimated rise for this century must also be natural).
  • Ignoring the reality check that ice ages are impossible if CO2 sensitivity is as low as he declares.

What does Dr. Spencer end up with? I mean besides the WUWT comments declaring him a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize. He ends up with an artificial statistical correlation with no physical explanation to support it.

Drill spill kills bill?

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“Drill spill kills bill?“. Anthony Watts finds it delightfully ironic that BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is affecting the chances of passing an energy bill that addressed climate change issues. Why? Because it promoted deep-water drilling to win Republican support. So new political and public concern over a compromise to woo Republicans may kill the bill and accidentally prevent nasty climate regulations from impeding Anthony’s lifestyle…

I thought the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was, literally, an environmentalist conspiracy. Oh noes, it back-fired!

“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.

Marketing Advice For Mad Scientists

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“Marketing Advice For Mad Scientists“. Anthony Watts says that the 250 scientists (all members of the élite US National Academy of Sciences) who have signed a letter condemning the recent political and personal attacks on scientists, particularly prominent climatologists, are not exhibiting “good judgement”.

Anthony also says that “it has not gone over too well” because Andy Revkin, a journalist who is now courting page views from Denialists, says so. The letter even uses “the d-word”! And they’re not climate scientists. Oops, they are. Barely literate Anthony even calls it “poorly written”.

In fact it’s such a failure that Anthony has to resort to putting words in their mouths to assuage his resentment. His post reminds me of the class clown hunched down in the back row, snickering at his own ‘brilliance’.

Anthony’s also putting in a full court press delaying or editing the few comments that challenge his version of the truth, even though his commenters are working themselves into even more of a lather than usual. I particularly enjoyed the comments comparing the letter to the bogus “30,000 scientists” that “signed” the crack-pot Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine Petition.

Read the Science letter here.

Hotness is in the eye of the beholder

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“Hotness is in the eye of the beholder“. Anthony posts more nit-picking from Frank Lansner. He’s confused and angry because different representations of surface temperature anomalies use different colors. Specifically he’s comparing NOAA vs. UNISYS Sea Surface Temperature plots. Of course he has very little idea about the decisions behind the representation of either dataset…

He seems to be of the opinion that only ‘cool’ colors should be used so as not to upset anyone, and that there should only be one baseline value to plot from. Different plots are created for different purposes, Frank. No, “tricking” people is a valid scientific purpose.

At least Frank learned that the NESDIS dataset is gathered at night to eliminate variable solar heating of the sea surface and solar glare.

Hyperventilating on Venus

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“Hyperventilating on Venus“. More juicy idiocy from Steve Goddard! I’m starting to love this guy. Steve is pondering why Venus is so hot. First he tells us that Carl Sagan, who popularized the concept of the ‘runaway greenhouse effect’, smoked marijuana. Next he tells us that sunlight doesn’t reach the surface of Venus because of thick clouds. Then that Venus is twice as reflective as Earth. So why is Venus hot? “Because it has an extremely high atmospheric pressure“! Not because of the 96% CO2 atmosphere blocking re-radiation. Not because it receives twice the solar radiation as Earth. He must be right, because weirdo Lubos Motl agrees with him…

End of story. Well… not really. This is stupid on several levels but time is short so I’ll just point you to Tamino’s Open Mind blog for some quick insight.

I’ll note that Steve inadvertently admits that “Each doubling of CO2 increases temperatures by 2-3C.” Stay on message Steve!

Sensenbrenner Report Challenges EPA Greenhouse Finding

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“Sensenbrenner Report Challenges EPA Greenhouse Finding“. Anthony Watts gives us part of a post by the right-wing media outlet Pajamas Media about a “staff report” produced for Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner “on the scientific issues that tend to discredit the EPA’s endangerment finding for carbon dioxide as a pollutant.” (emphasis mine.)

This is pretty funny, as I’ve been reading selections of the EPA’s response to submissions opposing the recent finding that CO2 emissions have environmental consequences. They’re straight-faced but hilarious slap downs of denialist stupidity. You can find a bunch of them at Rabett Run.

They’re also excited to report that the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming will be hearing testimony from “noted skeptic (as well as a Pajamas Media contributor)” Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. This is called an “own goal” in soccer.

Pielke Sr. on Revkin’s question

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“Pielke Sr. on Revkin’s question“. In spite of abundant evidence to the contrary, Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. is more convinced than ever that NO! is his answer to a question posed in 2005 by journalist Andy Revkin: “Is most of the observed warming over the last 50 years likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations?”

He now says that Dr. Spencer’s assertion that it’s all because of a reduction in cloud cover, in a somehow on-going 50 year pattern, explains it. Especially since he still thinks the “missing heat” statement by Kevin Trenberth last month was an admission that the heat “wasn’t there” rather than that it can’t be identified by current instrumentation.

Dr. Pielke backs his assertion with a collection of references to debunked denialist fellow-travelers and right-wing “conferences”. Confirmation bias in three, two, one, now.

[Note: In the comments Dr. Pielke thanks the WUWT readers for editorial corrections. My god, sloppy typing as well as sloppy thinking!]

Gavin’s sensitive side

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“Gavin’s sensitive side“. Anthony Watts does a copy and paste of a NASA press release about research into climate sensitivity (Daniel J. Lunt et al., 2010. “Earth System Sensitivity Inferred from Pliocene Modelling and Data,” in Nature Geoscience, Vol. 3, No. 1), but turns the post title into a childish personal dig at leading NASA climatologist Dr. Gavin Schmidt…

The research attempts to infer ancient climate sensitivity to CO2. Current models don’t work well on geological timescales:

Earth’s climate is also influenced by other, much slower processes. These include changes in ice sheets, vegetation and aerosols, for example, that take place over hundreds and thousands of years. Because of their complexity and long timescales, these processes are almost impossible to integrate into today’s climate computer models.

This sounds like grist for the denialist mill. “We can’t trust no dang ‘puter models! Garbage in, garbage out!” Why would Lunt break the conspirator’s agreement to hide problems? Maybe, shockingly, they’re trying to learn and improve?

The team found that it took much lower concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide to recreate the Pliocene’s warm climate than current models — which consider only the relatively fast-adjusting components of the climate — predict. Pliocene carbon dioxide levels are estimated to have been around 400 parts per million by volume (ppmv), while according to current simulations it would take 500 to 600 ppmv of carbon dioxide to bring about the warm temperatures of the Pliocene. As a result, the researchers estimate that Earth’s response to elevated concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 30 to 50 percent greater than previously calculated. In other words, the climate is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than we thought.

Ooh, those sneaks! They learned something!