Tag Archives: Misrepresentation

Examining Trenberth’s: ‘The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later’ statement

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“Examining Trenberth’s: ‘The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later’ statement“. Anthony Watts tries to take another kick at the subject of “Trenberth’s missing heat”. It’s all human error apparently, and there’s nothing to worry about!

Here’s what Kevin Trenberth was really concerned about: “It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.” Doesn’t seem so controversial.

Because the ARGO float measurements suit Anthony’s purpose he doesn’t question them at all, but I wonder why he also swallows a chart that seems to include outrageous changes in solar irradiance.

Trenberth's Missing Heat is all down to massive changes in solar irradiance?

Skeptical Science? John Cook – embarrassing himself

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“Skeptical Science? John Cook – embarrassing himself“. Somehow John Cook calling Anthony Watts a “denier” is an embarrassment. Anthony’s in full thin-skinned rant mode here, and it seems that poor John is now dead to Anthony. It’s Anthony’s tantrum that seems embarrassing.

Anthony’s so incoherent about this that he seems to have manufactured a quote from Cook’s Skeptical Science website claiming that “the usual suspects in natural climate change – solar variations, volcanoes, Milankovitch cycles – are all conspicuous in their absence over the past three decades of warming.” He then thinks he has refuted them with a series “oh yeahs?”. I’m sure that John would actually say that the natural variations simply don’t correlate to the warming we’ve experienced.

John’s also apparently “smug” for restricting himself to peer-reviewed scientific literature and using “the ugly word denier”, and his associate Dr. John Bruno gets taken to task for being nice to Anthony once but only once. This is just a train wreck of a post.

Maybe they’ve found Trenberth’s missing heat

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“Maybe they’ve found Trenberth’s missing heat“. Anthony Watts notes another climate press release with a class-clown giggle so he can side-step the fact that Kevin Trenberth’s honest concern about deep-ocean temperature records is being resolved. His confederacy of dunces sings along in the comments. Once again Anthony’s entire contribution is his choice of blog post title. It’s a reference to a cherry-picked statement by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Kevin Trenberth back in the Spring:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

Trenberth used the word “travesty” to describe the lack of well-distributed temperature measurements from places like the deep ocean, he was not talking about a failure of climate theory. However the denialists grabbed that useful sentence fragment with both hands and tried to paint him as agreeing with them that climatology was corrupt, fraudulent, and never visits its mother. This malicious denialist meme is still widely circulating.

NOAA has a press release called Scientists Find 20 Years of Deep Water Warming Leading to Sea Level Rise. It covers a paper on this subject in the Journal of Climate titled Warming of Global Abyssal and Deep Southern Ocean Waters Between the 1990s and 2000s: Contributions to Global Heat and Sea Level Rise Budgets (abstract here, PDF here):

This study shows that the deep ocean – below about 3,300 feet – is taking up about 16 percent of what the upper ocean is absorbing. The authors note that there are several possible causes for this deep warming: a shift in Southern Ocean winds, a change in the density of what is called Antarctic Bottom Water, or how quickly that bottom water is formed near the Antarctic, where it sinks to fill the deepest, coldest portions of the ocean around much of the globe.

Anthony’s last kick at this cat is to now suggest that Trenberth is a sloppy scientist. He lost the heat! So careless.

Abyssal Heat Fluxes in the Southern Ocean. From Purkey and Johnson, 2010.

What’s really happening? Climate scientists are improving our understanding of the Earth’s climate. Uncertainties are being reduced. The honest overall picture remains the same: AGW is real. Anthony’s readers aren’t having any of that though.

Enviro and Media Agenda on Extreme Weather – State Climatologist Invited, then Uninvited to Rally

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“Enviro and Media Agenda on Extreme Weather – State Climatologist Invited, then Uninvited to Rally“. Anthony Watts wants us to know that the State Climatologist for Delaware, “David R. Legates, Ph.D., C.C.M” was invited by Environment America to speak at a press conference about “Extreme Weather in Delaware.” He was cruelly uninvited when they learned that he was loose cannon looking for opportunities to misrepresent climate science in support of the posturing of the politicians who appointed him.

How dare Environment America state that “we do not suggest that these [particular] extreme weather events were caused by global warming” and then say that “the point of examining the recent extreme weather events – and the economic losses and other negative impacts they caused – is to document why we need to take action to protect against them, including by reducing emissions of pollutants that are changing our climate.” That’s a total contradiction, unless you can comprehend the English language!

It’s ironic to see Anthony decrying censorship when his blog comment policy personifies it (and the mob justice he encourages).

New paper in Nature on ocean cycles finally causes recognition in media

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“New paper in Nature on ocean cycles finally causes recognition in media“. Anthony Watts’ “European friend” Pierre Gosselin has discovered some important science in Der Spiegel. Apparently the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) controls our entire climate, which no-one except denialists knew about until just now!

It’s all explained by a Der Spiegel article about a Nature paper  titled An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970 that is completely demonstrated by a denialist blogger’s bulls**t fake chart. Dr. Phil Jones is one of the authors! He’s starting to admit all the lies!!!! The denialists have won!

Who doesn't like crayons?

Oops, someone didn’t read the article that Der Spiegel tried to summarize. The AMO has been well described for many years, oceanic circulation patterns are a well-known factor in climate change (remember last year when Anthony spent all his time posting bunk about El Niño?), the AMO cycles don’t correlate with the recorded global temperature changes (neither did the El Niño ones). In fact, the paper is a perfectly good investigation of historical circulation patterns in the Atlantic Ocean.

Too bad it’s not useful for the purpose that Anthony tries to squeeze out of it. Why is Anthony promoting a blog post that so clearly misrepresents the paper it is ostensibly about? Oh, and once again we see Anthony likes suddenly computer models when he thinks they are saying what he wants to hear…

Surprise: Peer reviewed study says current Arctic sea ice is more extensive than most of the past 9000 years

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“Surprise: Peer reviewed study says current Arctic sea ice is more extensive than most of the past 9000 years“. A blogger discovers a paleoclimate paper by McKay, et.al. in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences from 2008 and Anthony Watts is on it like white on rice. “Peer reviewed!” “More ice now than ever!” “Natural!!!!”

Oh, it’s only referring to a bit of the western Arctic. Oh, they’re only comparing to Arctic Sea Ice extent of a decade ago, when there was in fact rather more sea ice. Oh, they aren’t suggesting that such low ice extents were common. Oh, dinocyst proxies are a bit dodgy. Oh, the paper is merely titled Holocene fluctuations in Arctic sea-ice cover: dinocyst-based reconstructions for the eastern Chukchi Sea, not “there’s more ice than ever now!”

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…

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.

A new must read paper: McKitrick on GHCN and the quality of climate data

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“A new must read paper: McKitrick on GHCN and the quality of climate data“. Economics professor Dr. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph has performed a comprehensive review of the GHCN surface and sea temperature data set! It’s published in… Oh, it’s a vanity publication by his denialist friends at The Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Anthony Watts’ associates keep trying to repackage the accusation that the temperature data sets are untrustworthy and hence there is no Global Warming, but they can never make it stick. This time McKitrick even tries to slide in a few “Climategate” e-mails for support. Let’s look at the two excerpts that Anthony posts:

1.2.3. Growing bias toward lower latitudes – This actually biases against warming. McKitrick tries to float the idea that “this implies less and less data are drawn from remote, cold regions and more from inhabited, warmer regions.” In fact it’s well established that the warming anomaly is more pronounced at higher latitudes. Either McKitrick is uninformed or he’s trying to mislead readers.

2.4. Conclusion re. dependence on GHCN – Another canard from Ross, claiming that “All three major gridded global temperature anomaly products rely exclusively or nearly exclusively on the GHCN archive”. Guess what? There aren’t large overlapping collections of weather stations around the world. What climatologists interested in historical temperature trends do is select stations from the larger group that meet their analytical requirements. Good morning Rip Van Winkle.

Climatologists consensus on global warming: poll sample size 79

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“Climatologists consensus on global warming: poll sample size 79“.  A blog called “The Hockey Schtick” has discovered a nearly two year-old report, Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change in the American Geophysical Union’s weekly newspaper EOS. Apparently only 76 out of 79 climatologists (96.2%) surveyed thought that global warming is ‘significantly’ due to human activity! The total number of responding scientists was 3146, of which a mere 90% agreed with the survey question.

Reading the self-descriptions of commenters at Watts Up With That may lead you to the conclusion that there are hundreds of ‘skeptical’ but anonymous climatology PhD’s out there. The reality is that the sample size of “active climatologists” in any poll will be small.

Also, only 58% of the general public though the same thing. The denialists are almost winning! Global Warming is nearly over!

The less people educated people are about climate, the more inclined they are to discount it. That's Anthony Watts' sweet spot. Survey results from EOS, Jan. 2009.