Statistician Misconstrues Science While Trying to Destroy Papal Science Advisor

William Briggs is a statistician who was a co-author on that trashy Monckton et al paper published in a Chinese journal -- here's a thorough dissection of it, and this paper by Richardson et al strongly rebuts the whole miserable thing.

He wrote an article for something called The Stream complaining that Hans Schellnhuber -- you remember the death threat he received, captured on video -- is a "self-professed atheist and scientific advisor to the Vatican," and that in 1999 he wrote an essay for Nature

And because the Pope told the religious to start acting like they're religious instead of mouthing the words, and because Schellnhuber advised the Pope, Schellnhuber must also be destroyed. Briggs tries to hang him on (1) being a lousy smelly hippy atheist, together with (2) Schellnhuber's mentioning of the Gaia hypothesis.

In his essay, Schellnhuber made some fanciful comparisions and speculations about the Gaia concept -- along with the "forces" Shiva and Prometheus. As far as I can tell, that's about all the Gaia hypothesis is -- fanciful speculation, a very loose analogy to how the Earth works. Schellnhuber even expressed this, writing

"But is it really Gaia who commands the engine room of the Earth system? Palaeorecords do not provide a clear answer to this question. What we do know is that rather small and regular external perturbations, like faltering insolation, repeatedly provoked the ecosphere into alternative modes of operation; glaciations in the

Quaternary period seem to be a conspicuous example of such a self-amplifying response, although the precise mechanisms at work are not yet fully understood."

Remember, this is an essay, not a scientific paper. It's trying to explore different analogies to shed a little light on the "Earth system" in the Anthropocene. It does have plenty of scientific thought, like the Box to the right, but Briggs can't deal with that, let alone hang Schellnhuber on it.

So he takes a shot at Schellnhuber and, not knowing the science, completely misses. Mentioning a 2009 article Schellnhuber co-authored in PNAS about tipping points, Briggs wrote:

Tipping points are supposed moments when some doom which might have been avoided if some action had been taken, is no longer possible to avoid and will arrive no matter what. Tipping points have come and gone in climate forecasts for decades now. The promised dooms never arrive but the false prophets never quit.  Their intent is less to forecast than to induce something short of panic in order to plead for political intervention. When the old tipping point is past, theorists just change the date, issue new warnings and hope no one will notice.

One of the tipping points Schellnhuber asked about was the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, depending on what the temperature did. All of the selected experts (who answered the questions in 2004 and 2005) gave moderate (~15-25%) to quite high probabilities (50-80%) for this event to have occurred by 2015. The ice did not melt.

Of course, just 12 months ago scientists said the Amundsen sea sector in West Antarctica looks to have passed a tipping point -- it will inevitably slide into the sea, with a 3-foot rise in sea level. (This was predicted in 1978 by Ohio State University scientist J.H. Mercer.) So much for "supposed."

The other lies is Briggs' "the ice did not melt." Here's some actual data, to the right -- see any melt since 2009, Briggs?

In fact, ice loss in Greenland is accelerating, at 27 gigatons/year², according to Enderlin et al (2014). At its current melt rate -- assuming the acceleration itself doens't get any bigger -- the entire 2.85 Mkm³ of the Greenland ice sheet will be gone in just 420 years.

The only data Briggs linked to was for this year alone, and it (to the right) already shows strong melting in Greenland.

Schellnhuber was right. And Briggs completely mischaracterized his work and the situation in Greenland.

I'm getting tired of deniers lying about what scientists say, and then faulting them based on the lies they make up. It's dishonest, devious, and duplicitous. And it reeks of desperation, employed only because they've lost the science.

The Columbia River Would Exactly Replace All of California's Rainfall

Aerial view of the mouth of the Columbia River

I'm reading Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner's excellent book on water and the West, and it got me wondering if California would ever come to Oregon for its next water source.

William Shatner was recently reported to be looking for $30 billion on Kickstarter to fund such a pipeline, but I don't see it there now. But he does have a brainstorming site going, Shatner's Water.

Anyway, here's an interesting numerical coincidence. My first thought was that there couldn't possibly be enough water in Oregon to do much for California and its drought. But what if you diverted the entire Columbia River to California? I still guessed that wouldn't do much at all, but that's wrong.

At its mouth, the Columbia River discharges an average of 265,000 cubit feet a second, or 63 trillion gallons in a year.

California's surface area is 163,696 square miles. Surprisingly (to me), all of the Columbia River's water would cover that to a depth of 22 inches in a year. The entire state.

By coincidence, that's also the average rainfall for California in the 20th century: 22 inches a year.

So, in theory, all of California could go 100% permanent drought, and still be kept the same California by simply diverting the entire Columbia River there and spreading it around.

Don't forget the lawns

Of course, you wouldn't need to take all that water -- just enough for agriculture in the valleys and for swimming pools in LA and San Diego. (And the lawns.) So you could still let Oregon have some of its own water -- but let's face it, most of it is just draining out into the ocean, going to waste*. [Sarc.] It sounds preposterous, but reading Reisner's chapter on how Los Angeles and William Mulholland muscled away possession of the Owens River water makes you think anything is possible when it comes to water and California.

And -- I didn't make the connection until now -- he's where the name of the famous Mulholland Drive comes from.


* Reisner writes about a night at Mulholland's club when he angrily proposed to the Superintendent of Yosemite National Park that the entire Yosemite valley be flooded with a dam on the Merced River. He was probably a little drunk at the time, but also likely saw that water as being wasted.

Rain Follows the Plow

"Since the territory [of Colorado] has begun to be settled, towns and cities built up, farms cultivated, mines opened, and roads made and travelled, there has been a gradual increase in moisture.... I therefore give it as my firm conviction that this increase is of a permanent nature, and not periodical, and that it has commenced within eight years past, and that it is in some way connected to the settlement of the country, and that as population increases the miosture will increase."

-- Professor Cyrus Thomas, noted U.S. ethnologist and entomologist, circa 1870s  

"Rain Follows the Plow" was a pseudoscientific idea in the American west (and also South Australia), originating as a marketing campaign to entice Americans to move west.

Via "Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water" (1993) by Marc Reisner (highly recommended -- it was voted one of the 100 best nonfiction books written in English during the 20th century.)

Current Warming 30 Times Faster Than After Warming From Last Ice Age

I recently told someone that our current rate of warming is 30 times faster than when the Earth left its last ice age (viz. the last glacial period), and they didn't believe me. So here are the numbers.

Here is the temperature reconstruction over the last 22,000 years from Shaken et al Nature (2012). Global temperature is in blue, relative to the Holocene:

The time periods along the x-axis are the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), Oldest Dryas (OD), Bølling–Allerød (B–A), and Younger Dryas (YD).

From the chart:

• global temperature anomaly in year -18,000 before present is -3.4°C
• global temperature anomaly in year -11,000 before present is 0.0°C

so the average temperature change is 3.4°C in 7,000 years, or ~ 0.005°C/decade, compared to GISTEMP's current global 30-year trend of 0.16°C/decade

So that's a factor of 32 now compared to then -- rounds to 30 with uncertainties.

QED

And The 33rd Annual Hero Dog Award Goes To...

Really..... 

Comparing NOAA's Data Changes to UAH's Recent Data Changes

As I just posted, the difference between NOAA's new version of their surface dataset and their old version is, by month:

These changes are actually smaller, in absolute value, than the recent changes to UAH's dataset for the lower troposphere:

So if without any reasons you're going to whine about NOAA's changes -- let alone rudely berate a scientist for them -- you have to whine about UAH's changes even louder. Unless you're just an unthinking and inconsistent lout.

NOAA Now Shows No Pause at All

The Pause is nowhere apparent in NOAA's latest data release, as Karl et al wrote:

NOAA found this May to be the warmest May on record, and the 4th-warmest (compared to its baseline) of any month since 1880.

Some people like to say there's been no warming for "19 years." NOAA finds 0.24°C of surface warming in that time period. That's 0.43°F if you need it in English American.

According to my spreadsheet, from April to May there were changes throughout the NOAA dataset, some quite large:

NOAA's average monthly change was +0.002°C, with a standard deviation of 0.037°C.

However, there was no change in the long-term trend. The total trend with April's version of the dataset was +0.0657°C/decade; with the new May dataset, +0.0660°C/decade. So there was very little change in the overall trend, just +0.0003°C/decade, but they're the same within the statistical error bars of σ = 0.0011°C/decade.

I don't know how this squares with the Karl et al paper released two weeks. However, I do get essentially the same old and new trends as they gave in their paper (circles=old, squares=new):

A Little Girl Laughing

This has nothing to do with climate science. Nothing to do with physics. It's just a four-year old girl laughing, as her dad & aerobatic pilot takes her for a ride for the first time. And that's enough for me.


Via Kottke.

Comparing Recent El Ninos

Here's how 2015 is stacking up. Data here.

Today GISS gave their global anomaly for May: +0.71°C. That makes it the second-warmest May, after last year's +0.79°C. It also means my guess of +0.83°C was pretty far off.....

Based on the first half of June, my guess so far is it's a record for ANY month ever that's in the records (+0.93°C). But the global surface has cooled considerrably since early in the month, by about 0.4°C, and too I'm now a little leary about this simple method of using climate reanalysis data, and, even though I make adjustments when new data comes in, I'm not getting better with time....

and when I'm wrong I tend to be more wrong on the high side:

Jeb Doe and Hillary Who?

Do you get the impression some Presidential candiates would rather we don't think of them by their last names?

The Geniuses Advising the Pope on Science

The Heartland conference deniers seem worried about the forthcoming Papal Encyclical on Climate Change. The last thing they want is for the argument to move from environmental grounds, where they can make fun of greens and offer up claims about costs and benefits, to a moral plane, which is (to say the absolute least) hardly their strong suit. It's not so easy to dismiss the Pope with some -ist or -ism label.

So who's advising the Pope? Some of the best scientists on the planet, including Edward Witten, Stephen Hawking, Francis Collins, Mario Molina, Maxine Singer, and many more:

Who's advised Popes in the past? Many of the best scientists humanity has ever produced, including 44 Nobel Laureates, such as Rutherford, Planck, Bohr, Dirac, Schrodinger, both Yang and Lee, Salam, and many more:

Inhofe's saying “The pope ought to stay with his job, and let us stay with ours," displays a stunning lack of awareness of what religion is truly about. Inhofe might want to carry something besides the weekly Bulletin out of his pew this Sunday.

Heartland Conference vs AGU Conference

The difference:

American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, December 2013 and 2014: press pass granted to denier and blogger Anthony Watts.

versus

Heartland Institute Annual Conference, New York, June 2015: withdraws media credentials for Brendan Montague, editor of DeSmog UK and member of the UK's National Union of Journalists, and has hotel security throw him out, because, he was told, of negative reporting of the Heartland press conference in Rome

One complains about the liberal assault on "free speech." The other simply practices it.

More Bad Tricks from the NoTricks Zone

A while back Sou at Hotwhopper listed a bunch of bad predictions, about how the globe is going to start cooling any time now. (It's always just a couple of years in the future, ya know.) Here's one she highlights, from Pierre Gosselin of the NoTricks Zone:

Needless to say, nothing of the sort is happening, and won't unless the planet cools by a half degree a year for the next five years. (Only if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts.)

Think Gosselin's lousy prediction will make him rethink the soundness of his ideas?

Satellite View of India's Heat Wave

The recent heat wave in India saw more than 2,500 deaths, the fifth-deadliest heat wave on record. Here's the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) measured over Asia during that time (May 15-27), measured by CERES. (Note: lighter regions are hotter.)

OLR depends on more than just the temperature of the surface -- like humidity and cloud cover -- so you can't just convert the OLRs to temperatures via the Stefan-Boltzmann law. But these differences are much bigger than I would have expected.

NoTricks Zone Steps Into It Again

Pierre Gosselin at NoTricks Zone has again stepped into the doo-doo.

You'll recall that last week he was caught photoshopping the "before" pictures of wind turbines set in the German countryside. Today, trying to again assert manmade climate change is wrong by an end-around run, he quoted a doctor who lost his medical license several years ago. Oops.

Gosselin tries the silly tactic of a consensus was once wrong, so AGW's consensus is wrong. This is ridiculous, of course -- you can't disprove a scientific idea by pointing somewhere else and yelling "That consensus was wrong!" You have to instead do the hard work of actually gathering the evidence and countering the deas to disprove AGW (which at this point is not going to happen).

Often you hear this about ulcers. Gosselin tried it with the lipid hypothesis of coronary disease:

So it was with the lipid theory, where cholesterol from high fat diets was claimed to be a major killer. Today, after 6 decades, it is turning out to be strikingly false.

That lipid theory was propelled in the 1950s by Dr. Ancel Keyes and his infamous, phony 7-country chart, which purported to show a direct link between heart disease and fat intake. Six decades long western societies were led to adopting the low-fat high carb diet for healthy living as a result. Today, after tens of millions having died horrible deaths from diabetes, heart disease and cancer, the science is only now finally beginning to admit it had gravely erred. The consensus science had been wrong.

Gosselin cites this article, writing

and concluding, just to make sure you get his point

Except.... his Dr. Dwight Lundell lost his medical license in 2008 for several counts of professional misconduct and negligence, as well as failure to file income taxes. Quackwatch has more on Lundell, who, not surprisingly, is hawking a $50 book and memberships in his little club for up to $2,940 per year!

That's some trick indeed.

PS: Here's more on Dwight Lundell and his ideas, which are by no means universal.

PPS: Gosselin tries to scramble out of his mess by saying QuackWatch is working for "Big Pharma." In fact, they are independently funded.

PPPS: Gosselin is another denial blogger who censors comments that point out his errors. (Are there any left who don't?)

Patrick Moore: Staggeringly Uninformed

Good lord. Asked on Twitter what is causing modern warming, Patrick Moore's reply was

which is just ... (I'm sorry) ... dumb. Convection moves heat around, but it doesn't create it. In reply:

I don't know if anyone is paying Patrick Moore for public relations work, but if so they are seriously getting cheated out of their money.

Before Your Baby Teeth Come Out

I guess I never really thought about how children actually get their adult teeth, so this surprised me:

In my next lifetime, I think I'm going to study biology.

May's Sea Surface Temperature: Scorching

Hadley's sea surface temperature anomaly was the 2nd warmest of any month since their records began in 1850, after only last August.

Patrick Moore: "The Editor Put Words in My Mouth"

@EcoSenseNow

This is rich, very rich: asked about his 2006 WaPo op-ed that warned about "catastrophic climate change," Patrick Moore, who wasn't a co-founder of Greenpeace, says that "the editor put words in my mouth."

In that 2006 opinion piece, Moore wrote:

But now he says the editor "put words in my mouth," and

which, besides being unconvincing, is bad science, too (water vapor is a feedback on manmade warming, not a primary forcing.) I asked him if he made any attempt to get this corrected:

@EcoSenseNow - Did you complain to the WaPo editor, and was a correction issued? Link to it? @havenaar64

— David Appell (@davidappell) June 7, 2015

Moore's reply:

which also speaks poorly of his understanding of fluid mechanics. 

Moore also wrote in that opinion article:

and again we're supposed to this was also an "ambush" from an editor. Yet Moore seems to have made no attenpt at all to complain or correct the record. Sure. 

And in an 2009 interview by the Nuclear Energy Institute, Moore said much the same thing:

At the time Patrick Moore was co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CASEnergy), the public relations arm of the NEI. Did they too put words in his mouth? Was he ambushed by his own company? 

Anthony Watts Lashes Out Against Karl et al.

Anthony Watts wrote such as shockingly rude email to a scientist that I'm reproducting it from Sou's site, if only to slightly increase the chances this information will make it into the distant future, when people who never heard of blogs or HTML are looking back into history to understand who exactly it was misleading the world so badly, and how.

This is from Anthony Watts to Tom Peterson at NOAA, a co-author on this week's Karl et al Science paper on the claimed hiatus:

You can go to Sou's site to read Peterson's reply, which was far better than anything Watts deserved. And whose questions, of course, Watts will never try to answer.

This generates lots of thoughts, but maybe the best reply is a comment I read on Paul Krugman's blog today. His post was about why he is a Keynsian, but this particular comment is larger than that:

Watts and his blog are obviously not about countering the science with better science -- and, like any scientific ideas, the only thing that could ever replace the science of AGW is better science, unless we enter another Dark Age -- data and evidence and superior ideas -- but about a sinister denial that seeks to win the debate by other methods. Because they  haven't been able to defeat the science, or even come close. I see a lot of this lately, like this and this.  

Emails like that above show how they will stop at nothing -- because they aren't about science, they are about war. And in war you try to win by any means necessary.  

Ever since I started studying science as a teenager, its most attractive aspect to me was its intellectual honesty. There have been and are now rousing debates in science -- I've been in seminars where you could cut the heated arguments with a knife. But the differences are, with almost no exceptions, honest ones based on honestly held opinions based on evidence and science.   

So to me -- and, I suspect, Thomas Peterson, and to (100-epsilon)% of scientists and to the people who read this blog -- choosing some other value, some other strategy, is almost incomprehensible. So it's too easy to dismiss.

I think it's clear Watts et al are losing in the long-run (just one small piece of evidence to the right), but there's no question valuable time has been lost and is being lost -- at a rate of about 0.015 C of warming per year -- time the future will someday be wondering about. I expect they will be angry.