Is Fossil Fuel CO2 Different From Volcanic CO2?

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“Is Fossil Fuel CO2 Different From Volcanic CO2?“. Steven Goddard is wearing his fingers to the bone this week, and must be getting facial spasms from all the sneering. Here he’s trying to pick on a Guardian article, Iceland volcano causes fall in carbon emissions as eruption grounds aircraft, that basically says the CO2 released by the Eyjafjallajokull volcano is less than the decline in CO2 emissions that has resulted from the temporary cessation of transatlantic flights.

This argument about “fossil fuel” vs “volcanic” CO2 is completely in Steven’s mind.

Royal Ash: Royal society jumps on magma driven worry express

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“Royal Ash: Royal society jumps on magma driven worry express“. Anthony Watts posts more idiocy from Steven Goddard, this time referencing dumb Hollywood disaster flicks to mischaracterize a collection of papers about geological responses (mainly seismic) to climate change. Steven seems to suggest that, over the weekend, the Royal Society whipped up a series of papers from the 2009 conference on Climate forcing of geological and geomorphological hazards (read the preface here) to capitalize on concern over the Icelandic eruptions. However it’s the denialists who specialize in insta-bunk.

Here’s one of the ‘outrageous’ statements in the Daily Telegraph (ugh) article that he links to:

And he warned: ”The rise you may need may be much smaller than we expect. Looking ahead at climate change, we may not need massive changes.

”One of the worries is that tiny environmental changes could have these effects.”

Earth (so to speak) to Steve and Anthony: the planet is in many ways quite delicately balanced. Some small changes can trigger large geologic events. That’s the gist of the Royal Society’s papers. Please don’t substitute your arrogance for rational thought processes.

Ash cloud models – overrated? A word on Post Normal Science by Dr. Jerome Ravetz

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“Ash cloud models – overrated? A word on Post Normal Science by Dr. Jerome Ravetz“. Post Normal Science, a rather odd theoretical description of how scientific research is supposedly manipulated by authorities, has become a short-hand at WUWT for two things:

  1. Scientists cheating to get the results that support their prejudices.
  2. Unaccountable government figures suppressing the rights of the individual for their own purposes.

The flight ban imposed because of the dangers posed by the Iceland ash cloud is proving a fertile topic for denialists obsessed with government activity…

Clean air, a problem?

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“Clean air, a problem?” Anthony complains that those do-good tree hugging environmentalists have made Global Warming worse by removing all that useful air pollution. Except that Global Warming isn’t happening, right?

The LA Times’, Why cleaner air could speed global warming, which Anthony helpfully pastes into his post, is what has set him off.

Anthony, I hope you’re readers don’t realise that our efforts at reducing air pollution are a pretty good example of how we could mitigate Global Warming if we were serious about it…

Volcanoes and Water

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“Volcanoes and Water“. Steven Goddard tells us that volcanic eruptions are mostly steam and ash. Because The Guardian was stupid enough to say in a caption that the cloud rising from the Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland contained smoke!

Correct but irrelevant, Steven. I’m not so sure about your theory that volcanic explosions are due to contact with water though. I think that depressurization of the magma and sudden release of contained gasses might be involved.

But that’s a nice collection of volcano photos.

New weekly feature: WUWT Sea Ice News

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“New weekly feature: WUWT Sea Ice News“. Anthony Watts give obsessive denialists a weekly destination for wild statements about current sea ice extents. There’s nothing Anthony likes better than to talk about the weather when the topic at hand is actually climate.

In the opening installment, Steven Goddard starts with juvenile remarks about Al Gore and then throws up the usual spray of Arctic sea ice maps. It’s almost “average”! No talk about sea ice volume of course because that’s not a helpful statistic.

Come Rain or Come Shine

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“Come Rain or Come Shine“. Willis Eschenbach tells us that Global Warming will be good because “a warmer world is a wetter world”. For the USA anyway. So far, anyway. That seems to be the entire argument.

GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought

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“GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought“. Anthony Watts thinks this ‘alarmist’ post “might also be one of the most important” ever because it explains how people “can wreck a whole month’s worth of climate data.” His commenters, of course, agree and praise his insight.

Surprise, it’s nothing but cherry-picked examples of human error in recording negative temperatures and how such entries are handled by automated aviation weather reports. As noted at The Whiteboard, none of the 12 aviation weather report errors Anthony found made it into data-sets used by climatologists. Much more satisfying to rage about alleged errors that to actually make the effort to prove they’re significant. Standard Operating Procedure at WUWT.

Anthony prefers satellite measurements, presumably because of the automated nature of their collection. But I think his real reason is that the satellite record is still too short to conclusively represent long-term climate patterns. Can’t act on Global Warming until then, can we?

But wait, what is the satellite global temperature trend? The same as the surface stations trend. Both are… up.

Amusingly, it seems that Anthony though better of this incidental defamatory accusation (italics mine):

Around 1990, NOAA began weeding out more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. They may have been working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It can be shown that they systematically and purposefully, country by country, removed higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.

The replacement text reads:

Around 1990, NOAA/NCDC’s GHCN dataset lost more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. It can be shown that country by country, they lost stations with a bias towards higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.

This is a long debunked meme of Anthony’s. Perhaps this new fabricated controversy serves to obscure the fact that he still hasn’t proven his charge against NOAA?

Volcanoes Cause Climate Change

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“Volcanoes Cause Climate Change“. Steven Goddard again getting it backward. Sea-level changes, which are a result of climate change, are what drive variability in volcanism. They do this by changing the over-pressure on the lithosphere. Yes, a particular volcano can have a pronounced temporary effect on the global climate, but that’s measured in months, not decades.

Thanks for the interesting copy-and-paste about particular volcanic explosions but as far as your argument goes, try again.

Which NASA climate data to believe?

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“Which NASA climate data to believe?” Anthony Watts makes a big deal over an accidental data error in the most recent GISS Global Temperature Anomaly (March 2010). The error was quickly corrected at the source, but the cries of “fraud!” are ringing out.

It’s a strange day when even Anthony has to pull in his horns and admit that the evil climatologists have simply made, and corrected, a trivial error.