Steven Goddard

http://www.real-science.com/the-hansen-hockey-stick

he does this:

But he didn't check this:

 I would write more but it's not even that surprising is it? 

Denier Lies and the Conspiracy Nuts Who Spread Them

The Chronology Of A Lie
The following serves as an example for fence-sitters out there of what me and others mean when we talk about a climate denier echo machine. Witness how step by step climate deniers turn a scientific result into misinformation and spread it around the dark corners of the Internet until it reaches the media and the public.

First a paper is published

"An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula" Earth and Planetary Science Letters

A Press Release is made
"Scientists use rare mineral to correlate past climate events in Europe, Antarctica"  Syracuse University Press Release (March 22nd)

In part these press releases are supposed to help the public understand the science better. However through no fault of the University this one will end up being used for the opposite effect. What follows makes a very good case for university media relations departments to preempt and cover possible climate denier distortions of papers.

The Machine Spins Up
"More evidence the Medieval Warm Period was global" Wattsupwiththat.com (March 22nd)

A Little More
"Medieval warming WAS global – new science contradicts IPCC" - www.theregister.co.uk (March 23rd)

We are now in full flow. See the hits you get if you google the Register headline "Medieval warming WAS global". LOTS of hits. This is the infamous echo chamber. Check the top hits:

1. www.theregister.co.uk
2. www.infowars.com
3. www.davidicke.com
   
4. www.prisonplanet.com
   
5. www.climatedepot.com
   
6. www.freerepublic.com

Is it really a coincidence that the top hits are all to extremist conspiracy theorist sites? No, it's a reflection of the true demographic of climate deniers. Some people wrongly think climate deniers are all paid shills for industry. No, very few of them are. The vast bulk of climate deniers are ideological crazies.

And Today The Story Reaches the Media

"Is this finally proof we're NOT causing global warming? The whole of the Earth heated up in medieval times without human CO2 emissions, says new study" www.dailymail.co.uk (March 26th)

Notice how with each step the misinformation gets exaggerated a little bit more. In the first iteration it's merely claimed that the paper is "evidence" that the medieval warm period was global. In the second iteration this becomes the medieval warm period "WAS" global. Finally the DailyMail article adds the suggestion "is this proof we're not causing global warming?". Each iteration of the story is spread around the internet. The next iteration will probably be performed by the moronic unpaid henchmen of the denialist machine - the readers and commenters of their blogs and media articles - who will exaggerate the misinformation even further to it's logical end. Shrill letters will pop up in local papers wide and far screaming "A recent paper proved man isn't causing global warming!".

And that's the climate denial echo machine in action. It's not a designed machine run by some nefarious entity, it's an emergent shitstorm of uninformed drones parroting misinformation at each other and eventually it bleeds out into the sane parts of the world.

Those who should know better (?)
The Global Warming Policy Foundation pushes it anyway.
http://thegwpf.org/science-news/5284-medieval-warming-was-global--new-study-contradicts-ipcc.html

Is Anthony Watts Helping Christopher Monckton Avoid Debate On Climate?

Have you heard the one about climate skeptics wanting a debate on climate?

Well they got their wish but it was a disaster for them. Draw this Josh: Monckton fleeing the country and Anthony Watts bolting down WUWT.

Will Monckton return to the debate? I hope not because then I can deploy my modified Brave Sir Robin song:
Brave Sir Monckton ran away.
Bravely ran away away.
When debate reared it's ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.

And I suspect he won't return to the debate because as mentioned earlier Watts has bolted the WUWT door to Hadfield/Potholer54:

REPLY: While I can’t hear what Hadfield is saying (he sounds like a British mumble to me) they seem totally infatuated with their manhunt, so much for Hadfield’s repeated claims of being “dispassionate and logical”. Thanks for posting this. When he starts colluding with that hateful “greenman”, all semblance of rational debate is destroyed.
This video then cements my decision not to provide any further space to Hadfield here. – Anthony
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/23/moncktons-slide-presentation-to-the-california-assembly/#comments

Of course we can't debate people who are infatuated with a mannhunt. Oops typo there. But really. Take a good look at that logic. All semblance of rational debate is destroyed. How? By hadfield being interviewed by greenman. What exactly is Anthony Watt's idea of "rational debate" that it could be destroyed in such a way.

Perhaps the debate simply isn't important enough. As Monckton puts it: "Many people like to engage in debates on inconsequentialities". What are these "inconsequentialities"? Only the underlying validity of the claims that Monckton goes on tour with to convince vast numbers of people that climate change is not a threat. Who cares whether those claims are valid? That's just inconsequential.

Two things I learned from Joanne Nova today

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/03/conspiracy-theorist-just-another-form-of-namecalling-from-the-class-who-want-to-be-global-rulers/

1. Joanne Nova really doesn't like being called a Conspiracy Theorist
2. Joanne Nova is a Conspiracy Theorist

That is all.

Anthony Watts Misleading His Readers About Surface Temperature Record

I want to continue documenting the misleading anti-scientific posts at WUWT  for anyone sitting on the fence so to speak. I want to make this very clear why Anthony Watts and his blog are a menace to the truth and to science and is more likely to mislead than educate. Surface Temperature Records are a topic that I bet Anthony Watts would like to think he is a master of. Yet as we shall see he makes shocking error after error - and all errors are conveniently in one direction: against science and scientists.

This concerns his recent hackjob about HadCRUT4.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/19/crus-new-hadcrut4-hiding-the-decline-yet-again-2/

Watts posts the following graph. Apart from this being a piss poor graph without dates or labels (good enough for WUWT it seems) there are some deeply disturbing points in its fabrication I'd like to raise.

Watts:  Data plotted by Joe D’Aleo. The new HadCRUT4 is in blue, old HadCRUT3 in red, note how the past is cooler, increasing the trend. Of course, this is just “business as usual” for the Phil Jones team.

What Watts means by the "past is cooler" is that over the period ~1975-2000 the blue line (HadCRUT4) in the graph is lower than the red line (HadCRUT3). But here's a proper comparison of HadCRUT4 and HadCRUT3 by the Hadley Centre. Notice that it's the period post-2000 that is warmer in HadCRUT4. The period 1975-2000 is about the same.

So why does the D'Aleo graph Watts has posted show the opposite? It's because D'Aleo for some reason (insert your theory here) shifted HadCRUT4 upwards so that the period post-2000 matched with HadCRUT3. What's disturbing about this are the following points:

• The Met Office graph above clearly shows the periods the adjustments affected which also shows Watts claim that the "past" was adjusted down is false. How has Watts not seen this graph? Did he not research HadCRUT4 before posting on HadCRUT4?
• Joe D'Aleo made a plot comparison of HadCRUT3 and HadCRUT4 even though such a graph by the Met Office above already existed. Why?
• Watts used D'Aleos plot rather than the Met Office one. Why?
• If Joe D'Aleo had plotted the entire HadCRUT3 and HadCRUT4 he would not have been able to offset them incorrectly. The error would be obvious.
• But Joe D'Aleo didn't plot the entire records. Why? He chose to start the plot in ~1975...
• Dates aren't labeled on the graph making it harder to spot this.

And Watts has the gal to write:  Of course, this is just “business as usual” for the Phil Jones team.
It Gets Worse

Watts: Here’s the older HadCRUT data set from 2001, compared to 2008 and 2010. The past got cooler then too.

Except the graph Watts posts for 2001 is Northern Hemisphere only. Not Global. Yes the graph Watts posts claims it's global - but its WRONG. The graph is from the following 2003 paper which updated HadCRUT to 2001:
http://www.ocgy.ubc.ca/~yzq/books/paper5_IPCC/Jones2003.pdf

In short Watts is comparing HadCRUT 2001 Northern Hemisphere with HadCRUT 2010 Global and claiming the difference is due to adjustments. Shouldn't he know better on this subject?

Watts: On the other side of the pond, here’s the NASA GISS 1980 data set compared with the 2010 version. More cooling of the past.
Bullshit again. He's made another mistake. why does anyone take him seriously at all?
Again notice the graph Watts posts has no sources. Is that because he doesn't want people to be able to check what the graphs show? Imagine the fuss Watts would make if scientists did this! Now either Watts doesn't know the sources of this graph and is pushing out unverified smears or he does know the sources and is deliberately misleading people. Because here is the source of the NASA GISS 1980 dataset in his graph (the lower plot):

It's from this paper: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1981/1981_Hansen_etal.pdf

Small problem with that graph: ITS LAND ONLY. And Watts is comparing it to GISS 2010 GLOBE LAND+SEA.
Seriously. How can he get away with making mistake after mistake? I hope fence sitters might finally wake up and realize just how misleading WUWT is after reading this catalog of errors. Just to drive the point home I've crudely overlaid GISTEMP 1980 on GISTEMP Met Stations only as of 2009 so we can see the huge adjustments Hansen has made to the past data that Watts alledges:





Ha that's the massive adjustments is it?
Folk over at WUWT just don't BOTHER going to the papers and comparing the datasets properly and finding out there are no massive changes. Instead year after year they happily push out the same junk graphs without checking them because it supports what they want to believe. They remain immune to any corrections. They just ignore them and post the same false graphs again another time.

Again: Why does anyone take these people seriously?
And finally lets witness the arrogance of Anthony Watts after he makes such a load of errors documented above:

Watts: In the private sector, doing what we see above would cost you your job, or at worst (if it were stock data monitored by the SEC) land you in jail for securities fraud. But hey, this is climate science. No worries.
It's ironic see? If anything it would be Watts who would be in jail after that stunt with the above graphs. Not scientists. 
Watts: And they wonder why we don’t trust them or their data.
Again more irony! Who has demonstrated a reason to distrust them and their presented data?
Here's the thing: In Watt's arrogance he puts forward a kind of authority. We don't see him questioning his own abilities when he pushes his "manipulations" claims. Instead people take it at face value that the graphs he is posting are genuine GISTEMP and HadCRUT comparisons when they are not. In other words people are misled in the most heinous way: they are misled to dismissing scientists as frauds.



Even if we assume ignorance, which we must, consider that Surface Temperature Records are supposed to be Watts bread and butter subject and yet he hasn't learnt a thing it seems. Over all these years he still hasn't figured out the actual story about adjustments made in the past and he is still pushing false claims about station dropoff (see the 2nd graph caption). He could probably continue on course for another 1000 years and not learn a damn thing about the subject. He seems quite literally stuck on stupid.

Willis Eschenbach's Volcanic Strawman

Over at WUWT Willis Eschenbach is trying to claim that a lack of eyeballable volcanic eruptions in the global temperature record is evidence against manmade global warming:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/16/volcanic-disruptions/.

No sooner does  Eschenbach say: "The idea that large volcanoes significantly cool the planet is widely accepted." I think ah shit here comes another contrarian "Not The IPCC" moment. The idea that large volcanoes significantly cool the planet is widely accepted because it's true. 

Eschenbach: Which means, of course, that according to my hypothesis, even very large volcanoes should a have very small effect on the global temperature. To see which hypothesis is true, mine or the standard AGW hypothesis, I devised a little game I call “Spot the Volcanoes”.

Eschenbach's rigged little game is to graph the derivative of monthly global temperature and ask where Pinatubo is. After doing this he admits the game may be rigged (really?) and goes instead for graphing actual monthly global temperature instead. Umm. So why did he even bother to post that derivative crap in the first place?

It occurs to me perhaps that the little "rigged" game does perform a convenient sideshow to hide the bigger error in his logic of his entire post. Namely: Does the "AGW hypothesis" even expect volcanic cooling events to be eyeballable in the global temperature record? Eschenbach's post is only possible because he ignores that question.

If he had addressed the question he'd have had to point out that El Ninos and La Ninas can provide jumps equivalent or even exceeding expected volcanic cooling events. Therefore you can't expect someone to just eyeball a graph and spot which dips are volcanic and which are La Ninas - and indeed you can't even guarantee there will be a dip when a large volcanic cooling event coincides with a sufficiently large El Nino. And what does any of this say about AGW? Nothing.

But this kind of sloppy, third-rate "analysis" to draw brazen conclusions on such an important topic is just what I've come to expect of climate "skeptics".

Extra curiosity: Eschenbach vs Steven Goddard - "Skeptic" inconsistency in action - or How Everything Conveniently Undermines AGW at WUWT


Eschenbach: Which means, of course, that according to my hypothesis, even very large volcanoes should a have very small effect on the global temperature. To see which hypothesis is true, mine or the standard AGW hypothesis, I devised a little game I call “Spot the Volcanoes”.

Steven Goddard: I’ve often wondered what the UAH global temperature record would look like if the cooling effects of the eruptions of El Chichón in April, 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in June, 1991 were removed. Large volcanic eruptions shoot fine ash up to very high altitudes, which makes the upper atmosphere less transparent, allowing less sunlight (SW radiation) to reach the lower atmosphere. This has a noticeable cooling effect on the lower atmosphere and the earth’s surface which can last for years, as can be seen in the figures below.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/13/how-did-the-el-chicon-and-pinatubo-volcanic-eruptions-affect-global-temperature/

Anthony Watts Alarmed By Human Meddling in Climate?

No he's not alarmed at that human meddling in climate!

He's alarmed about a different human meddling in climate. A geoengineering scheme to reflect sunlight away from the Earth:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/17/leaked-smoke-and-mirror-geoengineering-ideas-from-the-ipcc/

It's an old WUWT post talking about some geo-engineering solution. Watts hits the fan: "That, and the fact that it’s batshit crazy and a powder-keg for priming a global explosion of the law of unintended consequences."

This is rather hypocritical, but far more important, it is very revealing. This might be the most important sentence Watts has ever written. If anyone new to the climate issue came along and wanted to understand my problem with "climate skeptics" I would probably show them this example.

The quote reveals that Watts doesn't require sure-fire proof of disasters to become alarmed. In fact he doesn't require any evidence at all. There are no evidence based predictions of what would happen under the proposed geo-engineering scheme and yet Watts is hysterically alarmed by it anyway. Watts' appeal to the "law of unintended consequences" shows he doesn't have a specific disaster in mind let alone evidence for one.

Contrast that with how he handles the burden of evidence for anything CO2 related and how he responds to anyone who is alarmed at the CO2 rise at the top of this post. We never see Watts writing about "laws of unintended consequences" or "powerkegs" in terms of this CO2 rise (let alone "global explosions"!). Alarmist Watts is kept in check on the CO2 issue.

How to reconcile these two very different behaviors? I have seen similar behavior among young earth creationists. On subjects that don't intrude on their ideology they reason fine. But as soon as you touch on certain subjects, biology, geology, the filters and guards go up.  In this case I think Watts let his guard down and let slip an inconvenient truth. His guard was down because he wasn't talking about CO2.

Jo Nova's Skeptic Handbook Gets The Science Wrong

Joanne Nova, or Jo Nova, is an Australian climate skeptic. She maintains a site joannenova.com.au which resembles an Australian version of WUWT. Jo has written "The Skeptics Handbook" which is designed as a guide for climate skeptics: "Here are the strategies and tools you need to cut through the red-herrings and avoid the traps".
http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/

The handbook claims that there are "only 4 points that matter". I will address the first in this post. The handbook says:
1. The greenhouse signature is missing
Weather balloons have scanned the sky for years but can find no sign of the telltale "hot-spot" warming pattern that greenhouse gases would leave. There's not even a hint. Something else caused the warming.

But the reality is:
The hot-spot is NOT a signature of greenhouse warming.

Here's what temperature trends are expected to look like under solar warming. That big red/brown blob is a hotspot - something Jo Nova claims is unique to greenhouse warming, so what's it doing in solar induced warming?

Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/efficacy/

And below is what is expected from an increase in stratospheric aerosols. Cooling - that big purple blob is a coldspot. Which means the opposite effect - decreasing  stratospheric aerosols - would produce a hotspot.

A hotspot then is not a signature of greenhouse warming. A hotspot is pretty much a signature of warming itself rather than a signature of any particular cause of warming.

Now you might say "it doesn't matter! If the hotspot is not there the models are wrong irrespective of whether the hotspot is a signature or not of greenhouse warming". But actually this does matter a lot. More on this in Part 2.

Warming Trend

How would you describe the trend of the following graph?

I would say it was a fairly linear downward trend with a lot of noise. If I showed this to a climate skeptic, assuming they didn't spot the "trap", I think they would agree this is essentially an uninterrupted downward trend with a lot of noise.

So what's the trick? Let me flip it vertically and it now looks like a fairly linear upward trend.

Have you guessed what it is yet?

It's hadcrut3 from 1960, up to present and then I've copied some past data into the future. This is not a prediction, it is to make a point:

The much hyped post-2002 plateau to date could yet turn out to be a largely indistinguishable feature of the  longterm warming trend. People in 2040 might well look back at the surface record with bemusement that many people in 2012 (or even 2007) were declaring the warming had stopped (or had reversed!)

Why the plateau at all though?


My fairly worthless opinion is that the solar cycle and ENSO have a large part in biasing the post-2002 period cooler. If you were going to pick a 10 year period to test global warming the period 2002-2012 is possibly one of the worst. Not only does the period start with El Nino conditions, but it ends in largely La Nina conditions (the 2010 El Nino notwithstanding):

Additionally, solar output shows a large drop over this period:

In short:  There couldn't be a worse period to properly test whether global warming is continuing. 

As I said, my fairly worthless opinion is that the global warming signal from rising greenhouse gases has been largely, if not completely, masked since 2002 by both the fall in ENSO and the fall in the solar cycle. That masking can only continue if ENSO and solar output keep dropping. They can't. They are about as low as they can get. They are now as fully wound springs primed to unload the warming they "took away". Already solar output has stopped falling and is now increasing and we'll see what ENSO has hidden away when the next inevitable El Nino rears it's head. As a result I expect we'll see a jump in global temperature very soon - within two years. The only question is when the next El Nino happens (this year or next) and what the lag is on the solar cycle influence.

I'll come back to this subject of the post 2002 plateau in a later post as I want to document a significant climate "skeptic" inconsistency about all of this.

Anthony Watts Fails To Report Science Correctly

Warning. Link to WUWT follows.
New paper: A high-resolution surface mass balance map of Antarctica shows “no significant trend in the 1979–2010 ice sheet”

The paper says:
"The estimated SMB trend, integrated over the ice sheet, equals -3+-2 Gt y^-2."

Anthony Watts says:
"The estimated SMB trend, integrated over the ice sheet, equals 3+/-2 Gt/y^-2"

Can you spot the difference?

A trivial error you might say. He's just missed off the minus sign while pasting! But this is the kind of error Anthony would jump on if a scientist had done it. He would say something like: It's only a typo, but it does raise troublesome questions about the quality control in place before publication! And his commenters would no doubt nod their heads and wonder if the error was deliberate. Why do all these errors only happen in one direction?, they might ask.


Anyway this isn't actually the worse (let alone the only) error Watts makes in this post. He thinks this paper shows that the Antarctic ice sheet is not losing mass:

"Uh, oh. Another talking point bites the dust."


"While Gore, Hansen, Branson, and a gaggle of hangers on just finished a publicity stunt tour of Antarctica to tell us all how terrible the ice loss is there, the data says otherwise. No trend!"

Embarrassing for Watts (or at least it should be) the paper doesn't show this at all. It doesn't address the issue of whether Antarctic is losing ice, because it's about surface mass balance, not the mass balance of the entire ice sheet.

Now I didn't know that, I've never heard of surface mass balance before. The difference is though that I have a faint clue what is happening with Antarctic ice and a faint idea about how science generally works so I can kind of weigh up the right level of skepticism and belief to have at these kind of results. This is the kind of thing that is in my head about antarctic mass balance:

Credit: skepticalscience

The paper doesn't fit that. So I would be skeptical about the paper, or rather my interpretation of it. At that point I would spot the numbers in the paper and would like to think that would lead me to realizing the "surface" in "surface mass balance" was a game changer.

But where does Anthony go wrong then? Well I suspect he's been most successful in preventing inconvenient facts getting anywhere near his brain. He probably hasn't even seen that image above, or the similar one in AR4. He also probably thinks science is overturned on a whim by a new paper. You know, all those papers above showing the Antarctic is losing mass and Anthony is perhaps the kind of guy to think one paper showing otherwise overturns the lot - even if especially if it's published in something like Energy and Environment.

But wait there's more. Lets look at that title again.


I'll highlight the relevant parts:

"A new, high-resolution surface mass balance map of Antarctica (1979–2010) based on regional atmospheric climate modeling"


Wait what? Based on climate modeling..? Anthony citing climate models as evidence? Whats Up With That? Isn't he usually a stickler for observations, not models?  I am not certain but I even think there is an old WUWT post trying to pour doubt on the observational GRACE measurements of ice sheet mass balance.

This episode strongly suggests that Anthony judges results not on their evidence but on whether he likes the result. In this case he didn't even show a shred of doubt about the paper's results. It would have been very different if the same modeling paper had shown a large decline. I bet we'd have got a very different WUWT take on the paper in that case.

So we have in one WUWT post:

• Gross error interpreting a paper
• Quality control failure
• Massive confirmation bias.

 Now that alone is just incompetence. But it's the rest that makes me sick:

• Hypocrisy. Using evidence based on models to overturn observations.
• Hypocrisy. WUWT chastises others for lesser errors. If skepticalscience or realclimate, let alone a climate scientist, had made all these errors in one post WUWT would viciously attack them and the comments would be filled with suggestions that the error was deliberate.
• Arrogance. They attack people more competent at them for lesser errors, even while they make a bundle themselves. Then they spend half their time lecturing others on how to do it properly.
• No corrections made to the post despite all the errors being pointed out in the comments. More hypocrisy because WUWT regularly bemoans uncorrected errors.

It's worth ending with the first comment on the post just to highlight how Anthony's errors inevitably enter a canon of BS for certain folk:

"I look forward to the BBC giving this the same amount of hype that Steig et al 2009 received… I shall not hold my breath though."