Tag Archives: Numbers are Tricky

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?

Where Consensus Fails – The Science Cannot Be Called ‘Settled’

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“Where Consensus Fails – The Science Cannot Be Called ‘Settled’“. Anthony Watts gives us another entertaining guest post by his Steven Goddard replacement, Thomas Fuller. Thomas tells us that back in 2008 Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch surveyed 379 “climate scientists” online. How would you answer a question like: “Some scientists present extreme accounts of catastrophic impacts related to climate change in a popular format with the claim that it is their task to alert the public. How much do you agree with this practice?” Well, you’re obviously a smart scientist who knows that AGW is all made-up!

To quote the report itself “The survey employed a non-probability convenience sample.” This is a sort of admission that the survey is completely untrustworthy. Just the kind of evidence Anthony Watts finds the most useful.

By the way, who is it that keeps claiming that believers in AGW say that “the science is settled”? Denialists do, that’s who, so they can claim imaginary victories over a straw-man. Informed participants know that we are constantly learning more about the historical evidence and mechanisms of Global Warming. It’s just that what we learn keeps agreeing with the AGW proposition…

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…

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…

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.

Discrepancies In Sea Ice Measurements

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“Discrepancies In Sea Ice Measurements“. Steven Goddard returns for the second time today to prove, via Photoshop, that climatologists are tricking us. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) Arctic Sea Ice Extent plots aren’t identical!!!!!

Because they use different modeling techniques that have different break points for ice/not ice. So what?

Of course Steven is really trying to avoid talking about Arctic Sea Ice Volume, which is much less useful for sowing denialist confusion. We’ll stick with extent though and post this image for Steven to chew on:

Average monthly Arctic Sea Ice Extent trend since 1979. Source: NSIDC.

UAH Global Temperature – still in a holding pattern

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“UAH Global Temperature – still in a holding pattern“. Thanks for the weather observation from Roy Spencer, Anthony. I wonder if Anthony will ever stop pretending not to understand that good old natural climate variation, such as the eastern Pacific Ocean El Niño circulation pattern, will continue while the progressive human impacts express themselves. It’s not either/or.

It’s well understood that natural “cooling” climate variations can suppress the man-made rise, but when they swing back to “warming” they will magnify it. All Anthony is doing is pretending that these pauses are significant. “Expect drops in the months ahead” says Anthony. So what? But it will be interesting to watch him squirm out of his meaningless prediction if it fails to come to pass.

UAH Global Temperature, 1979 - present

Interesting admission from Dr. Spencer:

As of Julian Day 212 (end of July), the race for warmest year in the 32-year satellite period of record is still too close to call with 1998 continuing its lead by only 0.07 C.

Doesn’t sound like cooling to me. Spencer and sundry denialists are still clinging to that crazy 1998 El Niño as the answer to the painfully obvious warming trends.

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.

Walking the Plank-ton

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“Walking the Plank-ton“. More awesome marine biology insight from Willis Eschenbach. He waited until he had a chance to read the entire Global phytoplankton decline over the past century paper in Nature because he didn’t want to get it wrong. The paper’s claim is that our marine phytoplankton population has been cut in half since 1900 because of warming of the global oceans.

So what did Willis come up with to reject the paper’s conclusions? This:

The short answer is that I don’t know … but I don’t believe their results.

New “Our Climate” iPhone app released

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Man-made climate drivers needn't apply.

“New “Our Climate” iPhone app released“. Want a collection of cherry-picked, out of context climate facts in your pocket? How ’bout some falsified charts and incorrect scientific explanations? Want to vote on the climate? There’s an app for that! “Our Climate” is an iPhone app by Aeris Systems Pty Ltd. from Australia and it has “made it through Apple’s review process unscathed”. That must have been a surprise. Conspiracy theorists are buying it as fast as possible so they can get their copy before the secret world gubmint shuts it down.

Anthony Watts must love to see his favorite claims packaged neatly in a context that conceals all criticism. The developer promises that “if any material errors have slipped through, rest assured that such errata will be readily addressable.” I won’t hold my breath on that one.

Funny the “warmist” climate science equivilent, Skeptical Science’s iPhone app, shows denialist claims, the scientific responses, and the to-and-fro comments on their website. I guess they’re not quite as afraid of scrutiny.

Which “key climate blogs” are readers driven too in the “Our Climate” app I wonder.