An article by Andy West on the topic of “Public ClimateBall” has now been posted on both Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. and WUWT. Here’s a brief extract from the introduction:
Climate blogger ‘Willard’ has put significant efforts into a large taxonomy of skeptical challenges (the ‘Bingo Matrix’ or ‘Contrarian Matrix’) and brief rejoinders to same. Along with the very useful characterization of especially the rhetoric aspects of the conflicted skeptic / mainstream climate-change blogosphere, as an engagement not based primarily upon rational argument leading where it will, but one with different rules, a kind of ritual or game: ClimateBall™. Everything herein is my own view of ClimateBall, and what it points to.
Which got me thinking about my own experience of playing “the great game”. Checking Twitter for my assorted “plays” over the years, most of them seem to be missing! Hence my Agatha Christie inspired title for today.
They’re not actually “missing” of course, if you know the URLs in advance. However for some strange reason many of them do seem to be missing from Twitter search results. Since Christmas is already less than a month away let’s have a little festive fun shall we? How many “tweets” of mine tagged with the #ClimateBall hashtag can you find that were posted between January 1st 2021 and November 28th 2021? To give you the vaguest of red herring style clues, here’s the most recent one at the time of writing:
Answers on a virtual postcard please, in the space provided for that purpose below. Please also include a brief description of your search methodology.
It’s not very often that we discuss an article from Watts Up With That with even the vaguest hint of approval in the smoke filled editorial offices at the Great White Con, but here’s the exception that proves the rule! No doubt the fact that allegedly I inspired the article in question is also relevant? Here’s the start of a guest post at WUWT entitled “Polariced Mysteries“, written by our old friend Willis Eschenbach:
I got into a discussion about polar sea ice in the comments to my post Where Is The Climate Emergency?. In the process I noticed some mysteries.
To start with, here’s the Arctic sea ice area record.
The mystery for me in this record is the decade from about 1998 to 2008. There’s very little month-to-month variation in the record over that period, and the ice area is dropping steadily … followed by ~ thirteen years of very large month-to-month variations with little overall change in ice area. Is this real? Is it an artifact? Unknown.
Then we have the Antarctic ice area record …
Here, the obvious mystery is, just what the heck happened around 2015-2017 to cause the Antarctic ice area to drop so precipitously?
And finally, putting both poles together, we get the following:
etc. etc…
At the North Pole, there is an ocean covered with sea ice. At the South Pole, there’s a high rocky plateau covered with land ice and surrounded by sea ice. Yet despite these totally different situations, the area of sea ice is almost exactly the same at both poles … say what?
I will say that I am overjoyed that the world of climate contains far more mysteries than answers …
“When nothing is for sure, we remain alert, perennially on our toes. It is more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as though we knew everything.” —Carlos Castaneda, in The Teachings of Don Juan
My best to all adventurers in this most marvelous universe,
Thanks for your good wishes Willis, but there is a big black fly in the marvellous universal ointment. No sooner had a potentially enlightening discussion begun than darkness descended from on high:
At the risk of repeating myself:
What do you suppose the effect of ice-albedo feedback will prove to be over the next 10 years or so? Or if you prefer over the last 10 years or so?
And why “remove the seasonality”. As you correctly pointed out over there, “When the ice is mostly there the sun mostly isn’t”.
Senator Malcolm Roberts is live streaming “a public forum in Parliament House tonight where we will be deconstructing climate data from over 250 data sets” via his Facebook page. Allegedly:
You can listen in and see the empirical evidence for yourself which disproves the AGW hypothesis.
An invitation has also been extended to the Chief Scientist, CSIRO Chief Executive and staff, and the Director of the Bureau of Meteorology to attend and engage in these discussions.
Malcolm asked:
QUESTIONS?
so I obliged with a few. They all seem to have disappeared:
Aren’t “One Nation” advocates of “free speech”? A prime prize of a packet of peanuts to the first person to spot one or more of the above in the wild on Facebook.
[Edit – March 30th]
Additional news on this story arrives via Twitter:
Yes same deleted mine but comments from one of his charming supporters about a rope around my neck remained
Has drawn on official sources.. to uncover what is actually happening [in the Arctic]
Have we got news for you Christopher? That’s not how it works in the cryodenialosphere! Mr. Homewood’s article about Mr. Booker’s article about Mr. Homewood’s previous article(s) is littered with factual errors. This is what happens should you be foolish enough to attempt to correct such errors.
Here is what we typed into the comment section of Mr. Homewood’s blog:
Of course if Mr. Booker were to have considered Arctic sea ice volume he might have thought twice about his “there is even more of it today than in February 2006, and it is also significantly thicker.” remark?
Or so Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley claims in answer to the question I recently put to him and his fellow authors in a comment below an article on the Watts Up With That blog entitled “The Profiteers of Climate Doom” and bylined “Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, Willie Soon and David R. Legates”. As I put it in my initial comment:
A “killer question” for you Christopher.
Were you previously aware that global sea ice area has recently reached its lowest ever level (since the Cryosphere Today satellite records began)?
The thing is, although Chris’s riposte to my gentle probing has just been published, my third explanatory comment has not. Here it is:
and here is the good Viscount’s answer, quoted in full:
Mr Hunt, in his desperation to promote the purely political but now collapsing cause of shutting down fossil-fuel corporations that were once the major donors to his hated Republican opponents, displays a shameful disregard for, or ignorance of, elementary statistical method. He founds his case on a single data point, and one that is little different from similar data points in 2006 and 2011.
However, as he will learn when he attends his first Statistics 101 course, to place undue weight on a single data point is to err. Grown-ups determine trends on multiple data points. As Mr Hunt will learn from the graph helpfully posted by Mr Stealey, to whom he is as churlishly ungrateful as most of his sort are, the trend on the daily observations of global sea-ice extent by the satellites since 1979 is remarkably close to zero.
There has, of course, been some global warming since 1979, though only one-third of what the IPCC predicted in 1990. Naturally, one consequence of the little warming that has occurred might be a very small loss of global sea ice.
For life on Earth, of course, ice is not generally a good thing. The less of it the better.
Messrs Soon and Legates are currently keeping any thoughts they may have on the matter close to their respective chests.
[Edit – 23:30 UTC on Saturday February 13th 2016]
Intriguingly my 4th comment @WUWT is now plain for all to see, whereas despite my plaintive calls on Twitter the third shown above is not! Time for a brief flashback. On January 13th 2016 Yale Climate Connections published this video:
You will note that at around 6 minutes 30 seconds Carl Mears of Remote Sensing systems says that:
Senator Cruz focusses on one data set, mine, from one type of instrument, satellites, and he ignores all the other evidence. For example the surface temperature record, things like the Arctic sea ice declining….
On January 19th 2016 the Watts Up With That blog published an article by one “Christopher Monckton of Brenchley” entitled “20 false representations in one 10-minute video“. The 15th “false representation” read as follows:
That Arctic sea ice is declining, though Antarctic sea ice has been on a rising trend and reached a satellite-era record in early 2015, and though the decline in Arctic sea ice is chiefly only in a few late-summer weeks and is a small fraction of the seasonal variation in sea-ice extent, so that neither the extent nor the trend of global sea ice (from the University of Illinois) shows much change throughout the satellite era:
Does that graph look at all familiar?
[Edit – 16:45 UTC on Tuesday February 16th 2016]
I have posted two comments on the Watts Up With That blog today, but at present neither of them is visible. In the most recent one I endeavoured to inform Monckton et al. about the news that today the Cryosphere Today global sea ice area metric posted a new “*all time low” value. Here’s my comment:
We’ll keep you posted about if and when it appears over there as well.
Our headline for today is only partially plagiarised from today’s “Arctic Shipping Update” article on “Steven Goddard’s” (un)Real Science blog. This morning Tony Heller posted the following ACNFS Arctic sea ice concentration visualisation:
Them:
Climate experts say that Northeast and Northwest Passages are open for business, but neither will open up this year.
One of them is the Hapag-Lloyd cruise ship MS Hanseatic, which is currently wending its way through the New Siberian Islands:
The Hanseatic also carries a webcam. Here’s what it reveals at the moment:
It’s currently pretty plain sailing on that section of the Northern Sea Route by the look of things!
Us:
By the morning of Sunday August 24th (UTC) my dissenting comment had been released from limbo, although it had remained there the previous evening. Them:
Somebody is telling a story aren’t they? Perhaps you’d like to tell us where the ship is. On the one hand I see a ship with the name Silver Explorer stuck in the ice, and then on the other I see your picture with green ice free waters. Everybody is going to be looking for this vessel now. Anybody with a satellite phone? Maybe they will wait it out till the ice thaws, like they did at the other pole. I will be saving that pretty picture of green, just in case you told us so.
Us:
Are you aware of the difference between the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route, which is sometimes referred to as “the Northeast Passage”? That “pretty picture of green” is of the latter. Here’s the current position of the cruise ship MS Hanseatic in the Laptev Sea, coloured green on the map above:
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.
After having a brush with the “Real Science” censor last month I’ve really gone and done it now. Steven Goddard’s blog has been badmouthing Al Gore recently. I’m afraid I couldn’t let that slight on Al’s predictive abilities go unchallenged. Steve evidently didn’t care for my suggestion that he “is fond of poetic license”, so my alter ego is “now spam” there too:
I’ve cut out much of the gratuitous abuse in the ensuing conversation, but you can peruse an archived version if you so desire. Note amongst other things that Al Gore never mentioned “16 foot thick ice in the Beaufort Sea”. Here are the expurgated highlights:
Them:
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Al Gore says that the 16 foot thick ice in the Beaufort Sea will all melt in the next few weeks.
“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore said in 2009.
There’s still plenty of time left for some of the models to be proved 75% correct!
Them:
“Some models suggest.” I love that – so very scientific. Some do, others don’t.
Us:
I realise Steve is fond of poetic license, but my point is that in the article Steve references Al Gore did not “predict an ice free Arctic in 2014″. He didn’t even “predict an ice free Arctic by 2016 at the latest”
Steve – My Gore quote from April 15, 2014 at 10:41 am is cut/pasted from the article you just linked to. Here’s another quote from the same article, presumably a journalist’s interpretation of Gore’s words:
“Today at the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Al Gore said there is new computer modeling that suggests the Arctic Ocean may be nearly ice-free in the summertime as early as 2014.”
Them:
“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore said.
Attack Gore for being an idiot. Not me for reporting on it.
Us:
Unpublished comment on the “Real Science” blog from Wednesday April 16th at 12:55 UTC
Them:
They have so far neglected to publish the above comment.
The percentage of the Arctic Ocean consisting of ice at least five years or older remains at only 7%, half of what it was in February 2007. Moreover, a large area of the multiyear ice has drifted to the southern Beaufort Sea and East Siberian Sea (north of Alaska and the Lena River delta), where warm conditions are likely to exist later in the year.
We thought we’d point out to any interested WUWTers that actually warm conditions have existed in the southern Beaufort Sea and East Siberian Sea for quite some time now. However it appears as if the powers that be in WattsLand had other ideas:
Them:
Caleb says:
April 3, 2014 at 7:06 pm
RE: Tom in Denver says:
April 3, 2014 at 9:12 am
I think we need to pay less attention to 2 meter surface temperatures, and more attention to the temperature of the sea. Any time a polynya forms the sea is getting severely cooled by churning winds. Also the ice that has been moved south is going somewhere. In the case of Baffin Bay it was surging south right along the coast of Labrador and out into the Atlantic, creating above-average ice-extents in an area adjacent to the Gulf Stream.
Us:
Surface air temperature anomaly plot for January to March 2014
There’s accusations flying around the blogosphere in all directions at the moment on the currently very hot topic of “Recursive Fury”, also referred to as “Conspiracist Ideation” in the literature.
By way of a little background, this time last year the learned journal Frontiers in Psychology published a paper called “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation”. The lead author is Stephan Lewandowsky who is now Chair in Cognitive Psychology at Bristol University just up the M5 motorway from here. If you click that first link you will note that rather than being able to read the paper you will instead find a note from the editors that reads as follows:
In the light of a small number of complaints received following publication of the original research article cited above, Frontiers carried out a detailed investigation of the academic, ethical and legal aspects of the work. This investigation did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study. It did, however, determine that the legal context is insufficiently clear and therefore Frontiers wishes to retract the published article. The authors understand this decision, while they stand by their article and regret the limitations on academic freedom which can be caused by legal factors.
That form of words has changed recently, because for last twelve months or so it has said instead:
This article, first published by Frontiers on 18 March 2013, has been the subject of complaints. Given the nature of some of these complaints, Frontiers has provisionally removed the link to the article while these issues are investigated, which is being done as swiftly as possible and which Frontiers management considers the most responsible course of action. The article has not been retracted or withdrawn. Further information will be provided as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
Contrarians bully journal into retracting a climate psychology paper. After threats of frivolous libel and defamation lawsuits, a journal will retract an academically sound paper.
Nobody likes being called a conspiracy theorist, and thus climate contrarians really didn’t appreciate Recursive Fury. Very soon after its publication, the journal Frontiers was receiving letters from contrarians threatening libel lawsuits. In late March 2013, the journal decided to “provisionally remove the link to the article while these issues are investigated.” The paper was in limbo for nearly a full year until Frontiers finally caved to these threats.
The University of Western Australia (UWA: Lewandowsky’s university when Recursive Fury was published – he later moved to the University of Bristol) also investigated the matter and found no academic, ethical, or legal problems with the paper. In fact, UWA is so confident in the validity of the paper that they’re hosting it on their own servers.
Click that link if you want read the paper and discover what all the fuss is about. In addition to all the virtual newsprint Stephan Lewandowsky has also released a video telling his side of the story. Here it is:
At this point you may possibly be wondering what all this has to do with The Great White Con? Well, we’re obviously concerned at the apparent threat to academic freedom posed by “contrarian bullying”, as are lots of other people. However there’s more to it than that from our perspective. Take a look at the section of the video starting at about 2 minutes 40 seconds. In it you will spot a headline we are extremely familiar with here at GWC Ivory Towers, from the very same Mail on Sunday article by David Rose that persuaded us to launch this humble site last September! As Stephan puts it (at 3:20):
The bottom’s falling out of the Arctic, so we have a serious problem. We have a problem with the planet, but we also have a problem with the fact that in my opinion the public’s right to be informed accurately is being violated through the injection of disinformation at a time when the clock is ticking and the planet is accumulating energy.
We felt sure Mr. Rose would have some comment to make on such a controversial topic, and we were not disappointed. Over on Twitter once more the following conversation ensued:
Them:
@hockeyschtick1@ClimateDepot The Soviets medicalised dissent by jailing opponents in mental hospitals. Lewandosky is not so different.
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