Tag Archives: Cherry-picking

Of Hawks and Handsaws

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“Of Hawks and Handsaws“. Willis Eschenbach, citizen-scientist, has more pretty pictures with data stuck on top of them. He’s figured out that if you slap a bunch of thick lines representing cyclic annual trends on top of each other and obscure their order, you can hide the incline pretty handily.

His expert eyeballing tells him that there’s an Urban Heat Island effect at work in Scandinavia! You betcha. And there’s nothing like a quote from Shakespeare to give an intellectual air to an empty argument. (The cheesy clip-art kind of undermines that though.)

Who needs to bother with statistical analysis when you can pull a powerful ‘intuitive’ conclusion like this from thin air? Italics mine:

At least part of the warming in the US and the NORDKLIM datasets is the result of UHI distortion of the records. An unknown but likely significant amount of this UHI heating is due to direct energy consumption in the cities.

You know what would give this claim some credibility? Credible statistics.

Another indication of MWP and LIA being global

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“Another indication of MWP and LIA being global“. Suddenly Anthony Watts likes temperature proxies because here they seem to go his way… In this case he’s been pointed toward a juicy Letter in Nature back in August of 2009 that proves that the Medieval Warm Period was global. At least in one place. OK then, what do we really have?

The denialist CO2 Science website (aka “Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change”, founded by a Peabody Energy operative) posted their own summary and “adapted” figure from the Nature Letter “2,000-year-long temperature and hydrology reconstructions from the Indo-Pacific warm pool.” It used Oxygen18 isotopes from planktonic foraminifera to estimate historical temperatures.

Strangely neither Anthony or CO2 Science provide a quick link to the claimed proof, but you can read the abstract here. Perhaps their coyness was triggered by the last sentence of the real abstract (emphasis mine)?

A companion reconstruction of delta18O of sea water—a sea surface salinity and hydrology indicator—indicates a tight coupling with the East Asian monsoon system and remote control of IPWP [Indo-Pacific warm pool] hydrology on centennial–millennial timescales, rather than a dominant influence from local SST variation.

Although the authors also state that “Reconstructed SST was, however, within error of modern values” that doesn’t stop Anthony’s buddies from slapping a ruler on the “adapted” figure and declaring “we calculate that the Medieval Warm Period was about 0.4°C warmer than the Current Warm Period.“

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?

My Thanks and Comments for Dr. Walt Meier

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“My Thanks and Comments for Dr. Walt Meier“. Now it’s Willis Eschenbach’s turn to pick at Dr. Walt Meier’s response to Willis’ “questionnaire”. This is just the trap that Willis hoped to spring on Dr. Meier. After some self-congratulatory remarks about civil discussion and the like, he can now nit-pick, throw out cherry-picked counter examples, argue over word choices, casually repeat denialist memes, and generally posture and enjoy the superficial connection to a “real scientist”.

Dr. Meier finds the denialist welcome depicted in this stock photo used at WUWT contains a surprise.

This goes on for about 7300 words. Two points from his “conclusions” bear comment:

1. Reading Dr. Meier’s answers to the questions has been very interesting and very productive for me. It has helped to identify where the discussion goes off the rails. [Implying that it’s Dr. Meier that :”goes off the rails”, not Willis. The departure is in Willis’ head, refusal to accept basic science is why the denialists fail to understand the evidence of Global Warming.]

7. Since the null hypothesis that the climate variations are natural has not been falsified, the AGW hypothesis is still a solution in search of a problem. [This chance to make this unsupported claim is the entire point of Willis’ extended debating exercise. In fact, no scientifically honest climate models can’t match historical climate trends without human factors.]

It feels like Anthony and his associates are chasing their own tails in ever-tightening circles.

Arctic Sea Ice Reports: who to believe?

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“Arctic Sea Ice Reports: who to believe?” Anthony Watts implies deception about Arctic sea ice extent because different organizations (the EU’s “Arctic ROOS” and The National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado), using different comparison periods and different methodologies, have slightly different ice extent graphs.

Anthony actually discusses the differences between two methods of calculation, which you’d think would be a starting point for realising that they’re different. But he prefers to lazily imply ulterior motives with statements such as this: “Of course we know that NSIDC director Mark Serreze is very active with the press.”

You know that when Steven Goddard comes in to offer expert commentary the argument is profoundly flawed but he pops up here to declare that the chart below, to which I have added a 27-year  trend line, is good news for denialists! Go to the NSIDC link and compare the maps of the >2 yr. sea ice extent, shown as green pixels, for Sept. 2009 and Mar. 2010 and tell me what you think of Steven’s claim…

Ignore the 27-year trend, look at that blip in 2009!

Anthony finishes by trying to turn around criticism of his own earlier statements:

Don’t be fooled though. “Decreasing ice is climate. Increasing ice is weather.”

Anthony’s the one who tried to use a short-term increase in sea ice as a global warming disproof. Nothing that happens over a day, a month, a year, even a few years is “climate”, the denialists are the only ones who try to claim otherwise.

March Modeling Madness

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“March Modeling Madness“. Steven Goddard cherry-picks his way around Climate Central’s new interactive depiction of average US March temperatures.

He does this by picking a location that is not predicted to rise above freezing and then claiming that charts confirming this are proof that the models are wrong. He also picks a juicy starting point and uses a scale that obscures any trends that aren’t blindingly large to assist denialists in looking past them.

Next, Steven will prove that water is wet.