Shock News! In an astonishing revelation over on “Steven Goddard’s” (un)Real Science blog a commenter has revealed exactly how David Rose pulled the wool over the eyes of millions of Mail on Sunday readers last September.
I was eagerly engaged in a “debate” about “The Arctic Catastrophe” with Steve/Tony and his band of merry (mostly) men when the conversation took an unexpectedly enlightening turn:
Them:
If you have eleven minutes to spare, there is a movie made of all last summer’s pictures taken by O-Buoy 7. It gives you something to compare this summer with. It is a little annoying because the ice got slushy and the camera gradually tilted. You may get a crick in your neck, if your head tilts as you watch. Finally you spend around four minutes basically looking at your feet, but the redeeming thing is that the ice cracks up and you are looking at the edge of the water. Then you fall in. You are blown south and bob about in ice-free waters briefly, before the refreeze swallows you up in advancing ice, and you get to see winter set in:
Caleb – Here’s an O-Buoy 7 movie I hurriedly put together in October last year, that also shows winter setting in. Since you’re evidently an “Arctic sea ice nutter” too I’d be very interested to hear your comments:
In that particular case you apparently did catch a reporter making a mistake. He likely took a quick glance at an extent map, and didn’t dig deeper. Some of those maps show all “extent”, even down to 15% ice and 85% water, as solid white. (For example, this map: )
NSIDC high resolution Arctic sea ice extent visualisation on August 16th 2014
Because the map shows pure white, the reporter likely jumped to the wrong conclusion that the ice was “Unbroken.” Then it is likely a week passed between when he researched and the piece was printed, and further ice melted during that week.
It is not hard to catch the MSM making such mistakes about sea-ice. Either they are in too much of a hurry, or are lazy, or perhaps have an agenda. The best thing to do is to gently and politely educate them to what the actual facts are. In some cases they really do not know that what is solid white on the map can be as much as 85% open water in reality. Some actually appreciate you doing the research they don’t have the time (or are too lazy) to do.
But make sure you educate them with actual facts. If you feed them bull, and they catch you at it, they never forget it and very rarely forgive it, even if you confess and apologize.
Us:
I have made it my mission in life to educate all and sundry with actual facts!
If David Rose appreciates me doing all this research on his behalf he has been remarkably backward in coming forward to convey his eternal gratitude 😥
No sooner had I pointed out on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum that:
My project consists of learning a bit of Gimp whilst now being able to swiftly debunk “Goddard” et al. when they match a typical “Shock News!” headline with an apparently random graphic.
than “Steve Goddard” (AKA Tony Heller) published the headline above accompanied by the following:
Them:
Over the past two years there has been a large increase in 1.5+ meter thick ice in the Arctic, and the thick ice has shifted nearly 1,000 miles to the west – making it safe from winter winds pushing it out into the Atlantic. Both of these facts spell complete disaster for Arctic death spiral alarmists.
Us:
You realise I’m gonna have to quibble with you on this one Tony?! What exactly are you comparing there, and why is it 1.5 m this time when it was 1.0 m last time?
Is that supposed to be August 14th 2012 versus August 14th 2014?
Them:
Uh, Jim –
The legends from 2012 and 2014 are identical. It is everything over 1.5m (i.e. teal, green, yellow, orange, red, maroon taken together). The area covered by those colors is much larger in today than 2 years ago, and it has expanded westward.
Is this really that hard???
Us:
Uh, you tell me David.
The dates are missing from Tony’s animation, unlike on this visualisation which I prepared earlier today. Wanna play “spot the difference” with me?
Jim, why did you change the color code from the one used at the site? Why do you color all ice below roughly nine feet thick white? Why doesn’t your map include a key, so that people can see that what is blue in your map is green in our hosts map?
I would say you are the one who is generating a false impression. To insinuate our host is doing so generates a second false impression. You need to stop doing this. It is bad for you.
Us:
Caleb – I didn’t do any of those things that you accuse me of. If you don’t believe me here’s my visualisation with the color key included. Where are our gracious host’s equivalents?
I left the “Self styled” bit out of today’s title, which would have otherwise have been too long for comfort! With all due modesty I do in fact have lots of hard evidence to back my claim. By way of example, here’s a copy of a recent conversation over at “Steve Goddard’s” (un)Real Science blog, but with all the expletives and (most of the) ad homs deleted:
I’m afraid this by now iconic “photoshopped” image of a surfing polar bear culled from Geoffrey Lean’s blog at the Daily Telegraph strikes all Arctic surfing experts, yours truly included, as nothing more that a piss poor piss take (or PPPT for short)!
Us:
As the current “silver” surfer in residence here, perhaps I should point out that this subject is very dear to my heart. The surfing not the bears!
For a photoshopless video of things to come see Red Bull’s “Surfing in Alaska”:
Them:
Hats off to you guys (and beautiful girl)! I got cold just watching it!
Us:
Hats off to Maya certainly. Far more balls than most men, and (conventionally) beautiful with it.
Numpty alert! [Etymology: Numpty first surfaced on the terraces of west of Scotland football grounds, many, many years ago. A player who couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a shovel would be a f***ing numpty. “Awww Jimmy you f************ing numpty!! You couldnae score wi’ ma’ sister!”]
Three numpties on one thread; is this a record? Could it be due to global warming?
Us:
Cotty tames the waves that almost killed Maya. Paxo interviews him about the experience!
Numpty alert?
Time passes…..
Another surf vid. This one is much more low key. It captures the mellow vibe of a midwinter session somewhere on the North Devon coast:
http://econnexus.org – In which Ralph Freeman, bassist for the Universe Inspectors and British big wave surfer extraordinaire, catches a short ride at Putsborough Beach 18 months after suffering a broken neck whilst surfing low tide Croyde.
It’s great to see a local legend apparently back to full fitness after his injuries.
That was the first time I ever saw Ralph Freeman in action on his trademark bright yellow board, but it wasn’t the last!
Finally, for today at least, here’s a video that Tony Heller and his band of merry (mostly) men have not thus far been privy too. The Red Bull record of the day Maya Gabeira drowned and then Carlos Burle brought her back to life:
In conclusion, here’s the conclusion of the University of Washington paper, that for some strange reason neither Tony or Geoffrey mentioned:
“It is possible that the increased wave activity will be the feedback mechanism which drives the Arctic system toward an ice-free summer. This would be a remarkable departure from historical conditions in the Arctic, with potentially wide-ranging implications for the air-water-ice system and the humans attempting to operate there.”
The “Shock News” about Arctic sea ice is coming thick and fast as the 2014 melting season reaches its peak. I’ve been debating the meaning all of the various metrics with none other than my old sparring partner “Steve Goddard” AKA Tony Heller. The theory which is mine (in brief!) is that the ice is actually getting thinner and hence travelling faster. As regular Great White Con readers may well suspect by now, Steve/Tony has other ideas. Here are the edited highlights:
Them:
Steve/Tony’s latest Arctic sea ice prophecy is entitled “My Arctic Forecast“, although it’s actually his fourth of the season. Here’s his take:
Arctic ice extent will continue to decline for a couple of days, then a cyclone near the North Pole will begin spreading the ice, and the extent curve will turn back towards the median.
The minimum this summer will likely be close to the 2006 minimum, which was the highest minimum of the past decade.
Us:
My latest Arctic forecast is more short term than yours Tony, and rather more precise too.
“CT area decline of around 180 k over the next two days”. I guess that equates to “CT Arctic sea ice area will reverse and then decline for a couple of days”?
Them:
Gutsy to go with a forecast, but then the great ones risk it to gain the glory.
Us:
Many thanks for your kind words Phil.
Time passes……
CT Area has just come in at 44,288 square kilometers below yesterday. The “turn on the proverbial dime” has come to pass, and there is only another 135,712 to go!
Them:
CT doesn’t measure extent. This post is about extent. Stop being a moron and wasting my time.
Time passes……
I do appreciate you demonstrating so graphically the dissonance and dishonesty of climate alarmists.
Us:
The pleasure is all mine Tony.
I’ve asked this before without receiving an answer, but is there any way for commenters on here to include an image?
Failing that is there any way you might be willing and able to display the graph at my JAXA link here?
You do have a working knowledge of English. Congratulation!
Us:
Thanks for your kind words DedaEda, once again.
A new month means some masks have changed, so the GWC patent pending crystal ball is cloudier than usual. Undaunted the CT oracle hoarsely whispers “Expect a couple more 100 k declines next. Around 225 k in total”
I also have been forecasting for the past three years that the amount of multi-year ice in the Arctic will increase, during a time when Arctic experts were predicting an ice-free Arctic
The difference between my approach and that of Arctic experts, is that I use the scientific method. They rely on superstition about a harmless trace gas. Real Science always beats superstition.
Steve/Tony was good enough to provide me with a link to his new post immediately following its publication, so I was lucky enough to be able to post the very first comment:
Us:
Them:
Jim, thank you demonstrating once again that you and your ilk are complete morons.
Us:
My pleasure Steve/Tony.
Them:
Take a good long look through the archive footage linked to at the top. Try not to inadvertently end up on (un)Real Science!
I wandered over to Twitter a couple of days ago to see if I could persuade Steve/Tony to dig a pertinent comment of mine about Arctic sea ice extent out of the “Real Science” spam folder. Whilst over there I couldn’t help but notice that Andrew Neil had been passing comment on recent events in the Arctic too! According to his Twitter page Andrew is:
Chairman Spectator Magazines (London); ITP Magazines (Dubai); World Media Rights (New York). BBC presenter.
According to his C.V. on the BBC web site Andrew is:
Presenter of the Daily Politics on BBC Two and the Sunday Politics on BBC One.
In a long career in publishing and broadcasting Andrew has been UK editor of The Economist, editor of The Sunday Times, executive chairman of Sky Television and publisher of The Scotsman Group of newspapers.
Fresh from his controversial BBC interview with Ed Davey, the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Andrew was “tweeting” things like:
@ret_ward Yip. Thought so. You have zero qualifications in climate scientist. But you are an indefatigable propagandist. Take a bow.
In some recent shock news over at the “Real Science” blog “Steven Goddard” asked “Who is Steven Goddard” and then answered himself as follows:
My name is Tony Heller. I am a whistle blower. I am an independent thinker who is considered a heretic by the orthodoxy on both sides of the climate debate.
I’m highly unorthodox, so I’ll consider him as a schizoidal cherry picking pseudo-skeptic instead. Steve/Tony finishes his “coming out” article as follows:
I am more than happy to debate anyone who feels up to the challenge, including the President of The United States. Science works through research and debate – not censorship, propaganda, faith, or intimidation.
Steve/Tony has been blogging about Arctic sea ice again recently. His most recent post is entitled “Does The Arctic Need To Be Prosecuted?“, but it seems he’s unwilling to engage in debate about that topic with me.
Them:
Some climate experts want to make skepticism of junk science a felony, and every day it becomes more clear that the Arctic has no respect for climate models or eminent government scientists. This is shocking, and it is time for the Arctic to be prosecuted. The Arctic is aiding and abetting climate deniers, as well as making obscene gestures towards the world’s leading academics.
NSIDC interactive Arctic sea ice extent graph on July 26th 2014
As far as I am aware there is no law against being a schizoidal cherry picking pseudo-skeptic in the United States of America, or anywhere else for that matter. Please feel free to comment below if you know otherwise and/or think that there should be!
Them:
After a protracted exchange on Twitter a copy of my comment eventually saw the light of day:
Regular readers may recall that on September 8th 2013 the Mail on Sunday published an article by David Rose claiming that the Arctic “Ice Sheet Grew 920,000 Square Miles in a Year“. That was not true, and after we complained to the UK Press Complaints Commission The Mail eventually published a “correction” of sorts.
On September 15th 2013 the Mail on Sunday published another article by David Rose entitled “Global warming is just HALF what we thought: World’s top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong”, which proudly displayed their erroneous headline from the previous week. The article contained many more errors, some of which the United Kingdom’s Met Office highlighted on their official blog later the same day:
The article states that the Met Office’s ‘flagship’ model (referring to our Earth System Model known as HadGEM2-ES) is too sensitive to greenhouse gases and therefore overestimates the possible temperature changes we may see by 2100.
There is no scientific evidence to support this claim.
The Mail eventually “corrected” the article in their usual half hearted fashion, whilst simultaneously updating the title to read “Global warming is just QUARTER what we thought“, which doesn’t strike me as being an accurate use of the English language let alone scientifically accurate.
Meanwhile on September 16th 2013 on the other side of the planet Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian published an article written by Graham Lloyd entitled “We got it wrong on warming, says IPCC“, saying things like:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest assessment reportedly admits its computer drastically overestimated rising temperatures, and over the past 60 years the world has in fact been warming at half the rate claimed in the previous IPCC report in 2007. More importantly, according to reports in British and US media, the draft report appears to suggest global temperatures were less sensitive to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide than was previously thought. The 2007 assessment report said the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade, but according to Britain’s The Daily Mail the draft update report says the true figure since 1951 has been 0.12C.
After a long drawn out enquiry the Australian Press Council has finally announced that in its view The Australian cannot justify publishing inaccurate scientific information by blaming David Rose and The Mail on Sunday. They state that:
The Press Council has considered a complaint about a number of items published in The Australian in September 2013, a week before the release of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The Council has considered the complaint by reference to the following parts of its General Principles: “Publications should take reasonable steps to ensure reports are accurate, fair and balanced”; “relevant facts should not be misrepresented or suppressed”; and “Where it is established that a serious inaccuracy has been published, a publication should promptly correct the error, giving the correction due prominence.”
The Council has concluded that the erroneous claim about the revised warming rate was very serious, given the importance of the issue and of the need for accuracy (both of which were emphasised in the editorial that repeated the claim without qualification). Although based on another publication’s report, the claim was unequivocally asserted in The Australian headline, “We got it wrong on warming, says IPCC”, which also implied the IPCC had acknowledged the alleged error. The impression that the claim was correct was reinforced by The Australian saying the IPCC had been “forced to deny” that it was in crisis talks.
The Council considers rigorous steps should have been taken before giving such forceful and prominent credence to The Mail on Sunday’s claim. Accordingly, the complaint on that ground is upheld.
The Council welcomes the acknowledgements of error and expressions of regret which the publication eventually made to it. But they should have been made very much earlier, and made directly to the publication’s readers in a frank and specific manner. It is a matter of considerable concern that this approach was not adopted.
To summarise, don’t believe everything you read in The Daily Mail or The Australian, particularly if the words in question are written by or plagiarised from David Rose:
On June 17th 2014 the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI for short) published a news article which said amongst other things (and translated from the original Danish) that:
On Tuesday, June 17, 2014 daily mean temperature of the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel rose above the melting point. Thus, the summer melting season in the central part of the Arctic Ocean has begun.
DMI daily mean temperature and climatology north of the 80th northern parallel, on June 22nd 2014
The DMI’s news article continues:
This year’s onset of melting is 7 days later than usual and 2 weeks later than in 2012, when later in the season – in September – the sea ice shrank to the smallest area ever measured.
According to Rasmus Tonboe, one of the DMI’s sea ice experts from their Centre for Ocean and Ice:
There is a clear correlation between the start date of the melt season in June and the area of the same year’s minimum ice coverage in September. When the season starts later than the year before, then extent in September is more than the year before – and vice versa. This applies in 4 out of 5 cases since 1972.
As you might expect the usual suspects have greeted this news item with unconcealed glee. According to Steven Goddard on his so called “Real Science” blog the news is the “Alarmists’ Worst Nightmare – They Have Already Lost 15% Of The Arctic Melt Season”:
Them:
The Sun has begun its descent towards winter, and the high Arctic melt season hasn’t started yet.
Us:
As is usual these days, Steve has neglected to publish my comment on his article, which reads as follows:
By way of an explanation for my cryptic comment, Steve seems happy to ignore that fact that the graph shown above reveals that the metric under consideration was way above “average” for the entire 2013/14 Arctic sea ice freezing season, as we ourselves pointed out not so very long ago. 2014’s numbers have only been lagging behind “normal” since around day 130. Perhaps this will prove to be enough of a difference from Rasmus’s historical records such that the 2014 melting season will be one of the exceptions that proves his “4 out of 5 rule”?
As some sort of support for this theory we suggest you take a good long look at our regional Arctic sea ice extent breakdown and our ice mass balance buoy overview. The sea ice extent in the Central Arctic Basin is currently much the same as last year, with barely any visible reduction in extent as yet. However in important areas for the overall Arctic sea ice extent in September, such as the Laptev and Beaufort Seas, the melt in 2014 is way ahead of 2013. In the former case the melt is even ahead of 2012 at the same time of year.
Do you suppose that Steve will be able to spot the difference between these two satellite images, taken one year apart?
NASA Worldview “true-color” image of the Beaufort Sea on June 21st 2014, derived from bands 1, 4 and 3 of the MODIS sensor on the Aqua satelliteNASA Worldview “true-color” image of the Beaufort Sea on June 21st 2013, derived from bands 1, 4 and 3 of the MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite
My title today refers to the fact that the summer Arctic sea ice forecasting season is with us once again. The ARCUS Sea Ice Outlook (SIO for short) started in 2008, with the aim of gathering together and publishing “community predictions of the September sea ice extent”. The SIO is now part of the recently created Sea Ice Prediction Network, and the deadline for submission for the first set of forecasts of 2014 was June 10th.
I have a professional interest in UK and international energy policy, and as a consequence I have been commenting on the recent attempts of Professor Richard Tol to debunk the so called “97% climate change consensus” elsewhere in the blogosphere. As luck would have it I allowed myself to become engaged in what was supposedly a conversation about that very topic on the What’s Up With That blog. Feel free to read all about it if you’d like to see a pseudo-skeptical gish gallop in full swing:
Whilst over there I couldn’t help but notice that Anthony Watts had left things until the eleventh hour before asking his faithful followers to contribute to the Sea Ice Outlook June survey. I also couldn’t help but notice that despite assurances to the contrary a few short weeks ago (and even after my recent “extra heads up“!) the WUWT “Sea Ice Reference Page” is still sadly lacking in a wide range of information about Arctic sea ice thickness and volume. Consequently I figured I would be performing a valuable public service by bringing this to the attention of Anthony and his readers. Here’s what happened after that:
Us:
Them:
June 10, 2014 at 8:55 am
[snip no, we are not going to have you thread-jack again by pushing your own website and own views – Anthony]
Us:
June 10, 2014 at 9:32 am
Re: @Anthony says: June 10, 2014 at 8:55 am
It’s not my “own views” Anthony. In fact it’s a long list of useful facts and figures for anybody attempting to forecast the future of Arctic sea ice. A long list of useful information still noticeable only by its absence from the WUWT sea ice reference page.
Them:
REPLY: We aren’t forecasting volume, we are forecasting extent, so again, your views that we should pay attention to volume graphs on your website (your favorite hobby horse) in this extent forecasting exercise are irrelevant. Don’t clutter up this thread further – Anthony.
Them & Us:
@wattsupwiththat What’s up with my “commenting style”? What’s up with my “own self” for that matter?
In the absence of a wide range of scientific information concerning the current thickness distribution of sea ice in the Arctic, and after due deliberation about the likely value of the NSIDC Arctic sea ice extent metric in September 2014, Anthony concluded:
A value of 6.12 million sq km will be sent to ARCUS.
Us:
We’ll keep you posted!
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