Remember 1998?

You might recall 1998 was once the hottest year on record.  

This is literally what it was like in 1998.  I was there. 
Now EVERYTHING is on fire, all the time.

It held this distinction for several years.  Climate change deniers would point to it (starting in 1999) and say that, yeah, maybe there had been some warming but it had clearly stopped and now the world was cooling because, otherwise, why weren't the years after 1998 hotter?

They managed to keep this nonsense up until about 2005, which was either just marginally hotter or in a dead heat (pun intentional) with 1998.  then, they started it again with 2005 as the reference point.  Though the game became a bit repetitive and dull as every three or four years after than there was a new record.

Yeah, I used it in yesterday's post as well.  Fucking sue me.

With the (unsurprising) news just in that 2023 is the hottest year on record, it is worth taking a moment to reflect that every single one of the years in the Top 10 hottest years is one of the last ten years.  

I imagine it has been like this for a while, but I haven't been paying too much attention.  But every year from 2014 onwards is in the current Top Ten:

Ponder that for a moment.  The last ten years, every last one of them, have been hotter than every other year on the instrumental record.

2014 is, handily, and Number 10 and 2023, helpfully, at number 1 (with a very hot bullet); in between those two chronologically neat bookends, they are a bit jumbled up.  But the point is, every single one of the last ten years is there.  

Even the relatively chilly 2014 was hotter than every other year in that record.

There are sane conservatives

It's just that their political representatives are ideological fanatics, in thrall to the Fox News / News Max / Breitbart demographic, bought by big business or just willing to say and do anything to advance their careers.

They wouldn't be allowed to write it if it wasn't true.

From the Guardian's coverage of the less-than-thrilling debate between De Santis and Haley:

A question about climate change, and what each candidate is willing to do about it, has – as expected – yielded little useful information. 

DeSantis promised to tear up the “Biden’s green new deal” while Haley said she opposed “extremes” in policy and transitioned the conversation over to the topic of crime. 

Last summer, during the first Republican presidential debate, a pointed question from a young activist elicited slightly more interesting results. Alexander Diaz, a young conservative who is part of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), a youth conservative group that pushes for action on the climate crisis, asked candidates what they would do to improve the party’s standing on climate policy. None of the candidates at that time raised their hands to affirm that climate change was real.

So, there you go.  Even though 2023 was just declared the hottest year on the instrumental record AND all the top ten years are the last ten years, one candidate wants to nix climate action just because a Democrat did it, and the other can't actually talk about it at all.  And neither is actually willing to say they think it is happening.

And the terrifying thing is they are both infinitely better options than the goon who (unless the courts save the Republican Party from its membership's atavistic urges) is back to his favourite trick of implying people he doesn't like aren't proper Americans.

We're screwed

 ... The only question is, how badly.

2023 was the hottest year on record, 1.48C above the pre-Industrial Revolution average.

The planet was 1.48C hotter in 2023 compared with the period before the mass burning of fossil fuels ignited the climate crisis. The figure is very close to the 1.5C temperature target set by countries in Paris in 2015, although the global temperature would need to be consistently above 1.5C for the target to be considered broken.

Scientists at the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) said it was likely the 1.5C mark will be passed for the first time in the next 12 months.

So, very roughly, 0.1C pre decade for the last 150 years.

The Guardian also reproduces this nice graph:

Obviously, those still banging the denialist drum will claim 'natural variation' - but note the period from the 80s to the 90s.  Then there were several exceptional years (so many you might wonder if the term 'exceptional' is the right one).  Fast forward to 2000-2010 period - every year of that decade was as hot or hotter than the 'exceptional' years of the 80s.  

If the trend holds, it takes a decade for the exception to become the norm.  So when the Guardian points out "the global temperature would need to be consistently above 1.5C for the target to be considered broken" that will be 'achieved' by 2034.

We've got a rapidly diminishing opportunity to limit the disaster engulfing us.  But it is diminishing very, very rapidly.

This seems to be a real thing that is real

If Twitter existed in the 1980s, when climate change was just creeping into public consciousness, this degree of cluelessness might - MIGHT - have been forgivable.  In 2018, however ...

DeFazio on climate: "This is the existential threat to the future of the planet."

Insanity.

For comparison, the atmosphere Venus is 96.5% CO2 -- and the planet is still there.

In contrast, Earth's atmosphere is only ~0.04% CO2. https://t.co/SvScU32iZG via @politico

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) 15 December 2018

It is genuine. The source is a climate obsessive who posts things like, "Funny... millennial climate bedwetting trolls have spent all weekend trying to 'ratio' me because of this tweet. They should instead spend their time learning why CO2 is good and communism is bad."

Striking

From the Guardian. I'm sure someone can explain how this is nothing to worry about and nothing to do with us.

Good Grief (Global Warming Edition)

So, Michael Bastach deigns to Share His Branes with the rest of us, gravely informing us that without el Nino's help, 2015 wuld not have been the warmest year on record:

Last year would not have definitely been the warmest on record without an incredibly strong El Niño warming the Pacific Ocean, according to analyses done by two climate scientists.

Government scientists declared 2015 to be the warmest on record in early January, reaching 0.87 degrees Celsius above the 20th Century average. But scientists admit some of that warmth would not have been possible without El Niño — a naturally-occurring warming event.

From here, Mr Bastach argues that, perhaps - because of margins of error and so forth - 2015 wasn't really the warmest year on record, really, not properly, because even though discounting el Nino, it might not have been the hottest year, because he doesn't want it to be.

This leads him to say all sorts of silly things, like "NASA and NOAA were heavily criticized for claiming 2014 as the warmest on record when they were so unsure."

A proper commentator would have taken the opportunity to explain why, in fact, the criticism was not justified, and how margins of error work, and why it doesn't really matter when almost all of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred in the 21st century, because it is the trend that matters.

Of course, he doesn't do that because his goal is to make people think, "Hmmmmm ... maybe it wasn't so hot last year after all."

Probably, we'll see people suggesting that climate peaked in 2014 and 2015 was really cooler, inspite of being hotter, and marks the start of a new cooling trend.  Only, because scientists were only 38% sure 2014 was the warmest year at the time, it probably wasn't, and so on, so forth.  All the way back to 1998.

Which was also a massive el Nino year, of course, but I think that fact might be conveniently overlooked.

If George Orwell lived today, he'd be penning a novel called 199, in which Hot = Cold.

Oh, really?

Someone tried to draw my attention to an article purporting to reveal how climate data has been systematically manipulated to increase the warming trend in recent decades.  They failed, largely because the article was in the Telegraph behind a firewall, but I did glimpse enough to see that it was penned by Christopher Booker, of whom I have spoken before.

Christopher 'bullshit' Booker? Really?

Sorry to respond in such a predictable and Pavlovian vein, but the author is a serial crap-merchant.

For that reason if no other, I feel inclined not to bother reading it.  The Telegraph should be ashamed that it is giving space to a man who propounds biased and disingenuous nonsense masquerading as scientific criticism.  That said, the telegraph seems to know no shame these days.

In the extract from the article that was sent to me, I saw mention - positive - of John Christie's satellite temperature record at the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH).  No mention, though, of how the UAH figures are constantly being manipulated and adjusted as well; the ItsNotCausedByPeopleEvenIfItIsHappeningWhichIsNotToSayItIsHappeningButItIsHappeningOnMarsAndTheDinosaursDidn'tDriveSUVsDidThey crowd (deniers, for short) don't see bothered about that. Because UAH continually undercuts the surface temperature and allwos them to claim there is no warming because blahblahblah. Even though, I think, the UAH figures are continually being revised UPWARDS for the reasons indicated above.

I was, of course, completely right

According to a new book by Naomi Klein, described in the Guardian, it turns out that Richard Branson's much publicised attempts to green his humungeous planet wrecking fleet of aircraft was just hot air.

(See what I did there?)

I, of course, predicted just such a possibility back in 2008 when Branson announced his conversion to unrelenting self publicity saving the planet.

The British entrepreneur famously promised to divert a share of the profits from his Virgin airlines empire to find a cleaner fuel, after a 2006 private meeting with Al Gore. 

Branson went on to found a $25m Earth prize for a technology that could safely suck 1bn tons of carbon a year from the atmosphere. In 2009, he set up the Carbon War Room, an NGO which works on business solutions for climate change. 

But by Klein’s estimate, Branson’s “firm commitment” of $3bn failed to materialise. 

“So the sceptics might be right: Branson’s various climate adventures may indeed prove to have all been a spectacle, a Virgin production, with everyone’s favourite bearded billionaire playing the part of planetary saviour to build his brand, land on late night TV, fend off regulators, and feel good about doing bad,” Klein writes in This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs The Climate.

The Horrors of Climate change Made Clear

This is awful:

An underweight hedgehog found wandering around a garden during the daytime is a sign that the animals are being lured out of hibernation too early, says a wildlife charity. Care for the Wild, in Brighton Road, Horsham, have taken in the little hog after he was found in a Crawley garden, then taken to Harvest Vets in Maidenbower. Care for the Wild’s wildlife carer Tarnya Knight said: “This little fella is just 300 grams so he definitely wouldn’t have made it through the winter, and if a cold snap comes that would have finished him off. But we’ll feed him up and he should be okay to be released in the spring. “The mild weather we’ve had is leading to hedgehogs coming out of hibernation too early. Most of them will be the right weight, but there isn’t much natural food for them around at the moment. So if you get hedgehogs in your garden please leave out some food and water to see if they’re around. And of course, if you see one during the daytime, please either contact us or take it to the vet.”

Increasing warming, decreasing hedgehogs. Will Britain be Britain without the humble hedgepig snuffling about? One is vaguely - very vaguely - reminded of George Orwell's Some Thoughts On The Common Toad:

At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can't stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

Having failed to control the simple delights of watching little figments of nature going about their business, and not being able to tax it efficiently, the dictator and bureaucrats, it seems, have decided to drive everything endearing and untamed to extinction.

Or maybe not.  But there is a smidgeon of a serious point here - climate change is not The Day After Tommorrow dramatic nonsense.  Climate change is British hedgehogs dying out because the conditions that let them thrive no longer apply.  And if the loveable hedgehog is being challenged by climate change, what else will struggle to adapt?

 Doubtless this is one of the benefits Owen Paterson discerns in a warming world.  He has pointed out that human beings are great adaptors - failing to add that adaption is usually accompanied by significant unpleasantness (the Saxons adapted to climate change 1500 years ago by sailing to Britain and killing lots of people).  Hedgehogs, probably, are less capable of adapting to a changing world.

Fiddling while Britain drowns

The 'Greenest government ever' has slashed spending on climate change mitigation:

Figures released under freedom of information rules show annual spending falling from £29.1m in 2012-13 to £17.2m in 2013-14. The drop in funding follows a previous slashing of staff working on the issue from 38 to six in May 2013. The adaptation funding at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is spent on finding ways to cope with the increased floods, droughts and heatwaves expected in the UK due to global warming. It had risen by almost 20% under Paterson's predecessor, Caroline Spelman, but fell 41% after Paterson replaced her in September 2012. Some was also spent on cutting greenhouse gas emissions but the Department of Energy and Climate Change takes the lead on that issue.

The only good news here is that one does not have to blame Environment Secretary Owen Paterson for this, as cuts inevitably lead back to Gideon 'Call me George' Osborne in Number 11. So we get to Boo! and Hiss! two for the price of one. Meanwhile, Cameron - who campaigned hard on his green credentials - has just gleefully announced that the few bits of Britain not underwater will be concreted over by cut price, unregulated developers, following his 'Bonfire of the Green regulations':

Addressing the Federation of Small Businesses conference, Cameron will argue that the new rules will make it "vastly cheaper" for businesses to comply with their environmental obligations. The government also plans to scrap many building standards relating to things such as the size of windows and demands for renewable energy sources, saving builders about £500 for each new home.

The Conservatives, of course, complained about too much regulation in the financial markets, right up to the moment that they collapsed in 2008. Good to see they, in Cameron's own words, "have learned absolutely nothing" from that notable experiment in deregulation, and how it does not always work as intended. Small minded, stupid men. In charge of one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. With nuclear missiles.

Dodgy Cliff and Randy Mann

Someone cited two alleged climate experts, messrs Cliff Harris and Randy Mann in an I had argument recently.

The graph below was referred to.  It was meant to  prove something or other - though they were coy about telling me exactly what it was I was supposed to be seeing.

It's something about temperature, right?  I know that, because it says Temperature in big red letters in the top left corner.

And volcanoes, yes, I can see that.  There are lots of volcanic eruptions given.  Volcanoes pop off every now and again, and the global temperature changes.

Presumably, from this, I am supposed to see how It Is Not All Not Our Fault, as if it hadn't been pointed out a million times at least, that past temperature misbehaviour doesn't really tell us much about current temperature misbehaviour, because Things Were Different Then.  You know, just like Things Are Different on Mars.

In fact, now that my mind has almost caught up with my consumption of Milcrest Estate 2010 Pinot Noir (Bloody Hell it is good - and my wife was using it for cooking!) I recall I even made something of a Lurgee's Paradigm of this sort of nonsense.

Ah!  The folly of youth!  When I actually had time to blog and subscribed to the foolish belief that - if I just repeated the bleedin' obvious one more time - I might succeed in changing someone's mind.

But, anyway, back to the graph and what it is supposed to be telling us. Something, I think, about temperature variation and a correlation with volcanoes?

Only, there isn't much of a correlation, really.

There are some points where there are cold spells with no or few notable eruptions; and 'sudden' cooling taking 400-500 years, and instances where multiple eruptions don't seem to have had any discernible impact on rising temperatures - 35 recorded immediately prior to BC/AD switch over, for example, just as a warming spell kicked off.

The impact of volcanoes on global temperatures is a Known Thing We Know About, not some Ghastly Secret Concealed In The Climategate Emails.  And even though the short term cooling impact of Old Vulcan's  particulate emissions - and the insignificance of volcanic CO2 compared to humanity's -  is generally Not Secret, why is it no medium scale act of Vulcanism can occur without a chain email sweeping the world claiming all humanity's efforts to stem climate change have just been undone?

What might be a bit more interesting is what causes the warm / cold spells recorded (the chart seems to be missing a Y axis scale, or is it just the booze blurring my vision?) and whether it might have any influence on the current trend.

On that, of course, the graph has nothing to say.

Being a thoroughly nasty piece of work and not at all ashamed of playing them man rather than the ball, I cyber-stalked the creators of the graph, Mr Cliff Harris - a climatologist, apparently - and Mr Randy Mann, who is described as a meteorologist.

(I concentrated on Mr Harris rather than Mr Mann, mostly because I'm not so foolish as to run 'Randy Mann' through a search engine.  Oh, no.  That can only lead to perdition.)

What I discovered was that Messrs Harris and Mann run a website (which puts them on a par with yours truly) and occasionally get mentioned in their local newspaper, a degree of fame to which I can only aspire.

Other than that, it all becomes very vague.

We are assured they have been providing media and public bodies with weather forecasts for decades, and that may well be true, but it is remarkably short on detailing any actual credentials the two may hold.

In a profile (again in what appears to be his local newspaper) of Mr Harris, we are told:

Harris estimates he has earned more than 300 college credits from seven different colleges and university.

That's nice, Cliff, but do you actually have a degree of any sort in anything?  Because at the moment you are looking even less credentialed than the 31000.  And that ain't good!

Frighteningly, on their website, Harris doesn't even seem to know what the initials IPCC stand for, naming it the International Panel on Climate Control. Maybe it was meant to be a joke, but you know, the thing about jokes is they are meant to be funny ... I get the feeling Harris and Mann really believe this stuff; and true believers don't often joke about their faith.

They also claim (I am not making this up) their weather forecasts are based on secret information that was divulged to them by an organisation called the Weather Science Foundation, which once employed "over 60 people to gather world wide data."  Sixty people, gathering world wide data?  They must have been pretty busy.

Only, those 60 people were rudely dumped on the dole queue and (oddly) don't seem to have thought their stupendously important information might have been of use to the people studying the impact of human activity on climate.  Instead - I kid you not - they decided to gift the information to Mr Harris but made him promise not to use the information for 30 years.

It gets worse, though.

Further probing lead me to a name I know well ... Marc Morano.  A-ha, I thought, here be bullshit, for the name of Morano is always found where crap about climate change has been posted.  And verily, it was so.

Seeking out the source article, I discovered Mr Harris holding forth in - inevitably - the columns of his local newspaper, to this effect:

Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that sea levels will rise 100 cm by the year 2100, actual measurements do not bear out that conclusion.

This is simply and obviously incorrect. The IPCC made no such prediction. It is simply not true.

The actual projections in AR4 can be viewed right here - about half a metre, +/- 10cm.  He was writing in 2012, before you ask, and the projections in the TAR - while a bit wider - were not so spectacularly extreme as to justify the claim that the IPCC predicted sea levels will rise by a metre.

Bluntly, it is a lie.  Not an exaggeration or a bit of hyperbolic rounding, but a lie.  He must have known it was so, but he went ahead and published it anyway.

(But at least he got the name of the IPCC right, this time.)

Perhaps I am too good for this world but I still find it slightly shocking to actually discover someone calling themselves a climatologist simply telling lies.

Not the sort of vaguely-almost-might-be-kinda-sorta-true-if-you-look-at it-this-way-I'm-buying-the-drinks-ain't-I-so-don't-tell-me-it's-bullshit stuff that is denier stock in trade, but an outright Thing That Is Not True And Which Must Have Been Known To Be Untrue.

If if it was the IPCC putting out some similarly shonky claims, you know how it would be treated, right? Think Himalayan glaciers!

So I feel Messrs Harris and Mann can be ignored, henceforth.

P.S. Bellamy, you are a bell end

Back in my naive, youthful days, I wrote some comments about David Bellamy - British naturalist turned Climate Change Denier turned incompetent typist - that implied that I thought he was a decent chap.  Inspite of his occasional forays into talking patent bullshit about climate change, I took pains to emphasis that I did not think Bellamy was a knob and a liar and a turd with a beard.  Instead, I emphasised he was

a splendid chap, a wonderful TV personality and, for years a great campaigner for the protection of the natural world ... I wouldn't count Bellamy as an evil lying bastard, he got it wrong and did the sensible, honourable thing, which is to admit as much and shut up.

One unintended consquence of the Daily Mail's latest incontinence-presented-as-journalism is to make me look a fool for being so generous. For who should we see, quoted in the Mail, but one David Bellamy, now holding forth about how he was a wronged man, a very wronged man, a man who was put to silence by the dread forces of Political Correctness and the IPCC.

No Dave, that was not true.  You opted to 'draw back from the debate on Global warming' because you were exposed as a blustering fool who couldn't type straight.

So, David, I'd just like to say I wish I had not said you were a decent man, capable of sense and honour.  You've made me look a bit foolish, and continued to add to the fug of confusion, deceit and disinformation that emanates from Climate Change Deniers.  Previously you were the sort of person one could laugh with and learn from; now you're a thoroughly nasty little man who sets no store by his word of honour.

Daily Mail + Climate Change = Bullshit

So, the Daily Mail has gotten itself all excited because it has, in its hot little rightwing compulsively dishonest and hypocritical hands a pretty little graph which it claims PROVES Climate change = Bullshit and the entire science community are dirty liars who lie and have been trying to savaGELY TRICK us into selling all our cars and replacing them with bicycles made out of mung beans, or something like that.

The source of this information is a secretive clique of fearless sceptics who boldly challenge the myths and lies spread about Global Warming.  They call themselves the IPCC.

Right, so I'm smelling a rat.

Here is the Mail story.  And here is the pretty little graph that they claim proves that we've actually been living inside a gigantic ice-cube all this time, and would have frozen to death a long time ago if it hadn't been for all that hot air emitted by the IPCC.

(Have you - like me - just realised that IPCC includes the letters P and C - as in Political Correctness?  Think on, brothers!)

Sorry, I promised you that graph:

So, um, right.

First of all, the wording of the graph is disingenuous.  It claims the '95% certain estimates of the Earth heating up' were wrong.  Well, not really.  Phrased like that, you might be forgiven for thinking the graph was revealing that the Earth has not been heating at all.  Which is, of course, complete bullshit. But the Mail gleefully grabs great handfuls of the bullshit and smears it all over its body, claiming in the first line of the accompanying story (as in fiction): "No, the world ISN'T getting warmer (as you may have noticed). Now we reveal the official data that's making scientists suddenly change their minds about climate doom."

Right, yes, well.

 The Earth certainly has been heating up, this is not in serious dispute, and the graph reproduced here has nothing to do with that. The claim that the graph discredits the "95% certain claims of the Earth heating up" is bollocks. The IPCC never made that claim. The previous report stated there was of 90% certainty of human activity causing observed change; but the graph illustrates statistical certainty about the amount of warming predicted by models. Nothing to do with causation, and even less to do with whether or not there has been heating. There has been. That's why the little black line is wiggling upwards.

What the graph does show is the spread of model estimates of how much temperature increase we can anticipate over time, as CO2 concentrations continue to rise. Estimates are based on how sensitive climate is to CO2 forcing - how big an increase we can expect if we double the amount of CO2 out there. This is not a known factor, so scientists estimate within the reasonable band - usually between 2c and 4c. The difference between the predictions and actuality suggests that maybe the correct estimate is at the lower end of the range, which is a conclusion reached by many climate scientists some time ago. 

Claims in the article that the graph shows "a world stubbornly refusing to warm" is horseshit. Any fool can see the line wiggling upwards. The only question is the rate of wiggle.

And of course, for all the fulminations of the Mail, the actual data is following the lower border of the 95% certainty bracket rather nicely. Correspondence between models and reality is usually taken as bearing out the climate models, not discrediting them.

 Only in the loopy universe of the Daily Mail is being right somehow being wrong.

First Bad Science Award of 2013

Goes to The Telegraph for this 'error':

A new scientific model has revised previous figures for the next five years downwards by around a fifth. 

The forecast compares how much higher average world temperatures are likely to be than the “long-term average” from 1971-2000. 

It had been thought that this would be 0.54C during the period 2012 -2016 but new data puts the figure for the 2013-2017 period at 0.43C. 

This figure is little higher than the 0.40C recorded in 1998, the warmest year in the Met Office Hadley Centre’s 160-year record – suggesting global warming will have stalled in the intervening two-decade period. 

The fact that the average temperature for several years is only marginally warmer than 1998 does not suggest global warming has 'stalled'.

First, because 1998 was an outlier, a freak year driven up to record (according to some data sets) highs by a combination of factors. Matching that freak is evidence that overall temperatures have increased. 

Second, because some of these years will be cooler than the 0.43 baseline - and some hotter. Perhaps significantly, if the factors that conspired to heat up 1998 are in play.

Ha-ha!

Excellent stuff:

The New Zealand Climate Education Trust - a branch of the NZ Climate Science Coalition - challenged NIWA figures, in the High Court at Auckland earlier this year, which showed a rise in temperatures in New Zealand of 1degC over the past 100 years. 

The group said the temperature increase of 1degC was significantly higher than global warming figures around the world and almost 50 per cent above the global average. 

In the High Court judgement, released today, Justice Geoffrey Venning ruled that the New Zealand Climate Science Education Trust had not been successful in any of the challenges they brought against NIWA. 

Justice Venning also decided that NIWA's cost should be paid by the trust and he said that if an agreement on the costs could not be reached he would make another ruling at a later stage.

Obviously, the courts are all controlled by the liberal-elite-PC-space lizard-Jews. That was sarcasm, for the terminallt stupid.

Denier response to Lovelock: tiresome, predictable

So, James Lovelock has admitted that he was wildly exaggerating the the effects of climate change.  Tell us something we didn't know.  This announcement has been presented as an admission that all claims about global warming are equally alarmist and exaggerated.  Why doesn't this surprise?

Most scientists regarded Lovelock's position as extreme, anti-scientific and fanciful. Comments like, "Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable" are obviously silly, and alarmist, and plenty of people said so at the time. Lovelock didn't reflect mainstream opinion then or now, but his retraction indicates he is moving in the right direction - from the freakish extremes towards the reasonable middleground. When he says "We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now", he isn't describing the scientific opinion of 20 years ago, but his own perception of what would happen happening. Look at Hansen's modelling from the mid 80s - it didn't suggest we would be anywhere close to a "frying world" by now.

Of course, for those of the distant anti-AGW extreme, both Lovelock's own extremism and mainstream AGW opinion seem so far removed as to be indistinguishable.

New AGW denier meme?

I'm wondering if - having lost the scientific battle, and failed to sneak a victory through Climategate releases - AGW deniers are attempting to win the war using semantics.

I've noticed a trend in the last couple of weeks - okay, a couple of references, nothing more - toward dismissing climate change as a fad which which has run its course.

Exhibit One, m'lud. Here's Christopher Booker in the Telegraph:

Since the fading belief that the world is in the grip of runaway man-made global warming still threatens us with the biggest bill in history ...

And from rather closer to home, the cringe inducing Mathew Hooton made a similar claim on Nine To Noon the other day - that interest in Climate Change was dying away as exaggerated scare stories faded to be realised.

Sounds like a meme that denier propagandists are trying to plant in people's minds, hoping it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think we'll hear a lot more of this "old story, last years problem" in the future, as Climategate2 failed so miserably.

Twit

Just stumbled upon an article by the BBC's science correspondent, Richard Black, which mulls the continuing stream of letters from (usually the same) scientists claiming to see cracks in the 'consensus' around global warming. He cites a recent example spotted in the Wall Street Journal, and yup, some of our old friends - Messers Allegre, Lindzen and Shaviv are there, among others.

So much as usual. Black identified a localish name (for him) in the list and got in touch to quizz the 'denier' - a Mr Michael Kelly - about his motivation, which was moderately interesting. I'm not too interested in that, though, apart from one point, raised by Mr Kelly, which was this ...

"I look back 300 years and I find that the temperature went up by more than it's gone up recently - in Central England from about 1699 to 1729 it went up by nearly 2C - and nobody said that was carbon dioxide."

The BBC kindly links the relevant temperature data, reproduced below:

Note the beautiful cherry picking of data. 1699 must be just about the bottom of the lowest trough, and 1729 round about the peak of the subsequent increase.

These guys just can't seem to help themselves ...

Lurgee's paradigm XI: Hansen says the oceans will boil!

You've got to love Anthony Watts, the denier's denier, the gift that keeps of giving.

The latest nugget of excrement to be deposited on his website is a claim that 'unhinged' James Hansen is saying AGW will cause the oceans to boil!!!!!! Like on Venus!!!!! Even though the 'AGW friendly' Wikipedia has a page where John Houghton says, "[there] is NO POSSIBILITY of [Venus's] runaway greenhouse conditions occurring on the Earth"!!!! OMG!!!! Madness!!!!

Or bullshit.

First of all, a minor point - the interview with Hansen is from 2009, if not earlier. It has always been available on the interwebnet. Why is it only now being honoured by Watts? Is he, perchance, finding very little at the bottle of that barrell he is vigorously scraping?

If you actually read what Hansen said, he did not claim Earth's oceans are going to boil as a result of human activity. The crucial passage:

A runaway greenhouse effect means once the planet gets warmer and warmer, then the oceans begin to evaporate. And water vapor is a very strong greenhouse gas, even more powerful than carbon dioxide. So you can get to a situation where it just -- the oceans will begin to boil, and the planet becomes so hot that the ocean ends up in the atmosphere. And that happened to Venus.

He's describing, in response to a direct question asking him to explain what the runaway greenhouse effect was, what a runaway green effect is. he is not saying this will happen on Earth. He cites Venus as an example. He is not saying this is what will happen on Earth, and he is not at odds with Houghton.

Watts tries to shore up his shonky argument with a bit of misdirection, bringing up the very tired, CO2-levels--were-higher-in-the-past-and-the-oceans-didn't-boil-then-did-they non-argument. Yes, Anthony, and the atmosphere was very different then, full of all sorts of particulate crap from volcanoes, and probably unbreathable. That balanced out the CO2. But I don't think we want to go there, since our lungs aren't adapted to breathing in that sort of gunk. Anyway, it is a strawman. Hansen is not claiming Human CO2 will cause oceans to boil. He says massive increase in atmospheric water vapour, from melting icesheets, will cause the oceans to boil. The question is, whether the temperature increase from CO2 released from human activity, will be enough to start the processes.

Still, this seems to be a popular meme -of-the-moment. But at least we can be assured anyone referring to it is a hard core, braindead denier.

Ha-Ha!

Seasonal good cheer, courtesy of Anthony Watts:

"The fact that they are trying to keep people from replicating their studies -- that's the issue," Watts noted. "Replication is the most important tenet of science."

Obviously, he's already dropped the BEST study, which successfully replicated the work of climate scientists from publically available data, down the Memory Hole.