A few days ago we posted an article about the recent surge in the amount of disinformation being published about Arctic sea ice. Eventually one of our long list of usual suspects, Anthony Watts, published a copy of an erroneous Arctic article by Paul Homewood.
Now the Watts Up With That Arctic porky pie production line is going into overdrive, so here’s an already long list of its output in the run up to the COP26 conference in Glasgow in a month or so. First up is the aforementioned clone from NALOPKT. Allegedly:
It is very easy to show that Arctic sea ice has stabilised. As their graph itself shows, there have only been three years since 2007 with lower ice extent than that year, and eleven have had higher extents. Also the average of the last ten years is higher than 2007’s extent.
In itself, this is too short a period to make any meaningful judgements. But that is no excuse for the Met Office to publish such a manifest falsehood.
This comment of mine on that article remains invisible at WUWT:
Who would have thunk it?
Not a lot of people know that @wattsupwiththat has just repeated Paul Homewood's allegations that @MetOffice has been economical with the truth about #Arctic#SeaIce.
Neither Paul nor Anthony have seen fit to publish my response yet:
By way of a change we start this month’s look at all things Arctic with some sea ice statistical analysis. Anthony Watts’ Arctic porky pie production line has been speeding up recently, and I am not the only one who has noticed. As part of his takedown of the latest “skeptical” allegations against the United Kingdom Met Office Tamino has been looking at trends in Arctic sea ice extent over at his “Open Mind” blog:
First and foremost, the yearly minimum is only one day out of the year. We have sea ice extent data throughout the year, and what happens during the rest of the year counts. Instead of using the annual minimum, let’s use the annual average. To avoid losing the most recent data, I’ll compute the yearly average for October through the following September rather than the usual (but arbitrary) January through December. I’ll also omit October 1978 through September 1979 because that year is incomplete. I get this:
The annual averages show much less fluctuation than the annual minima, so we can estimate things like rates of change with greater precision. I find that there is statistical evidence that the rate changed over time. One model of such changes uses three straight-line segments with their changes chosen to best-fit the data, like this:
There isn’t a million more square kilometers of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year. Or is there?
For our younger readers perhaps I should point out that is a reference to the genesis of the Great White Con blog way back in the mists of time in September 2013, when a Daily Mail headline proudly, but erroneously, declared that:
And now it’s global COOLING! Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year.
With the COP26 conference due to start in Glasgow on October 31st UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had this to say to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, amongst other things:
In the words of the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord “we are just old enough to get ourselves into serious trouble”…
It is time for humanity to grow up.
It is time for us to listen to the warnings of the scientists – and look at Covid, if you want an example of gloomy scientists being proved right – and to understand who we are and what we are doing.
The world – this precious blue sphere with its eggshell crust and wisp of an atmosphere – is not some indestructible toy, some bouncy plastic romper room against which we can hurl ourselves to our heart’s content.
Daily, weekly, we are doing such irreversible damage that long before a million years are up, we will have made this beautiful planet effectively uninhabitable – not just for us but for many other species.
And that is why the Glasgow COP26 summit is the turning point for humanity.
If all that sounds unlikely, then take a look:
https://youtu.be/Z_YPE7vy_wQ?t=27
As we surmised at the time of the recent G7 Summit in Cornwall:
In our latest astonishing disclosure concerning David Rose’s optimistically named “Climategate 2” campaign in the Mail on Sunday in February we can now reveal the Mail’s botched attempt to cover up another “inadvertent” error in Mr. Rose’s February 19th article entitled “US Congress launches a probe into climate data that duped world leaders over global warming“.
In actual fact it’s the US Congress that’s being duped. Perhaps Lamar Smith, Chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, would like to play “spot the difference” with us? Here’s an extract from the original article:
and here’s the same section of the allegedly “corrected” article.
One of Mr. Rose’s “porky pies” concerning a statement supposedly made last month by Peter Stott from the UK Met Office has gone missing. There’s no apology or explanation in either the online or print version of the apology for a “correction” issued by the Mail on Sunday at the weekend.
Not only that, but an entire paragraph concerning the alleged “pause” has evaporated into thin air.
Not only that, but the alleged “correction” included below the offending article is different to the “official” version published in print at the weekend. Take another look:
Something is rotten in the state of MayBeLand. And in the state of TrumpLand too.
David is a bit slow on the uptake, since we reported on the “US Congress probe” several days ago. He also seems not to have taken on board any of the copious quantities of evidence that his “climate data that duped world leaders over global warming” allegations are the purest fantasy. This time around Mr. Rose claims, amongst other things:
Last week Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office, admitted that notwithstanding the Pausebuster, it was clear ‘the slowdown hasn’t gone away’.
The ‘pause’ is clearly visible in the Met Office’s ‘HadCRUT 4’ climate dataset, calculated independently of NOAA.
Let’s see if we can discover if Peter Stott has any recollection of being interviewed last week by the Mail on Sunday and/or The Mail’s leading fantasy fiction writer shall we?
The online version of the Mail on Sunday have just published a “correction” to the most egregious of their long list of recent errors and inaccuracies. It reads as follows:
On February 19 we reported a Met Office official’s announcement that the average global temperature in January 2017 was about the same as in January 1998. In fact, this was incorrect, and the temperature was 0.25C higher.
So there you have it. This buck doesn’t stop on David Rose’s desk, or Benny Peiser’s desk, or John Wellington’s desk, or Geordie Greig’s desk. We’re expected to believe it stops on an unidentified desk of an unknown official somewhere inside the UK Met Office.
“Post-truth” is the the Oxford Dictionaries word of the year for 2016. The definition reads as follows:
post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
and according to Oxford Dictionaries:
The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase post-truth politics.
Post-truth has gone from being a peripheral term to being a mainstay in political commentary, now often being used by major publications without the need for clarification or definition in their headlines.
Our old friend David Rose has been remarkably quiet on the topic of Arctic sea ice recently. Presumably the objective facts from the Arctic are impossible to spin to his satisfaction even for a man of David’s talents? However that didn’t stop him from penning an article for The Mail on Sunday at the end of November on the topic of the recent “record highs in global temperatures“:
Global average temperatures over land have plummeted by more than 1C since the middle of this year – their biggest and steepest fall on record.
The news comes amid mounting evidence that the recent run of world record high temperatures is about to end. The fall, revealed by Nasa satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere, has been caused by the end of El Niño – the warming of surface waters in a vast area of the Pacific west of Central America.
The Mail article helpfully included this one year old video from the World Meteorological Organization, explaining the basics of the El Niño phenomenon:
According to the commentary:
This phenomenon affects weather conditions across the equatorial Pacific, with potential knock on effects in other parts of the world.
We’ll get on to the “potential knock on effects” in the Arctic eventually, but let’s start with a snippet of Mr. Rose’s “post-truth politics”:
Some scientists, including Dr Gavin Schmidt, head of Nasa’s climate division, have claimed that the recent highs were mainly the result of long-term global warming.
Last year, Dr Schmidt said 2015 would have been a record hot year even without El Nino. ‘The reason why this is such a warm record year is because of the long-term underlying trend, the cumulative effect of the long-term warming trend of our Earth,’ he said. This was ‘mainly caused’ by the emission of greenhouse gases by humans.
Other experts have also disputed Dr Schmidt’s claims. Professor Judith Curry, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, said yesterday: ‘I disagree with Gavin. The record warm years of 2015 and 2016 were primarily caused by the super El Nino.’ The slowdown in warming was, she added, real, and all the evidence suggested that since 1998, the rate of global warming has been much slower than predicted by computer models – about 1C per century.
David Whitehouse, a scientist who works with Lord Lawson’s sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the massive fall in temperatures following the end of El Nino meant the warming hiatus or slowdown may be coming back. ‘According to the satellites, the late 2016 temperatures are returning to the levels they were at after the 1998 El Nino. The data clearly shows El Nino for what it was – a short-term weather event,’ he said.
In case you’re wondering where the politics is in all of this, you need look no further than here:
The last three years may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare. Thanks [sic] what’s now recognised as an unusually strong El Nino, global temperatures were driven to sufficiently high levels to revive the alarmist narrative – after an unhelpful pause period of nearly 20 years – that the world had got hotter than ever before.
In case you’re also wondering about the objective facts of the matter David Rose quotes with approval “the authoritative Met Office ‘Hadcrut4’ surface record” in his latest article in the Mail on Sunday this very morning:
New official data issued by the Met Office confirms that world average temperatures have plummeted since the middle of the year at a faster and steeper rate than at any time in the recent past.
The huge fall follows a report by this newspaper that temperatures had cooled after a record spike. Our story showed that these record high temperatures were triggered by naturally occurring but freak conditions caused by El Nino – and not, as had been previously suggested, by the cumulative effects of man-made global warming.
The Mail on Sunday’s report was picked up around the world and widely attacked by green propagandists as being ‘cherry-picked’ and based on ‘misinformation’. The report was, in fact, based on Nasa satellite measurements of temperatures in the lower atmosphere over land – which tend to show worldwide changes first, because the sea retains heat for longer.
There were claims – now exploded by the Met Office data shown here – that our report was ‘misleading’ and ‘cherry-picked’.
Yet bizarrely, the fiercest criticism was reserved for claims we never made – that there isn’t a long-term warming trend, mainly caused by human emissions.
This just wasn’t in our report – which presumably, critics hadn’t even read.
We’ve explained all this to David before, yet bizzarely we obviously need to do so again. Here’s the Mail’s version of the latest HADCRUT 4 data from the Met Office:
Can you spot any “cumulative effects of man-made global warming”?
Messrs Smith, Rose, Delingpole, Whitehouse et al. may well be unaware of the fact that the satellite temperature data they’re so fond of cherry picking doesn’t include data from the lower troposphere between 80 degrees North and the North Pole. Just in case they fancy spinning the latest objective facts from the Arctic in the near future, here’s the long term autumnal temperature trend:
As our regular reader(s) will be aware, Anthony Watts has been plagiarising our content and republishing it on his “Watts Up With That” blog. In a perplexing perversity he has also been refusing to publish content that we have happily contributed to the self same blog. Hence we have taken the liberty of basing our title for today on a recent WUWT guest post by Willis Eschenbach entitled:
Here’s what Willis had to say at the end of his article:
My Usual Request: Misunderstandings are the curse of the internet. If you disagree with me or anyone, please quote the exact words you disagree with, so we can all understand the exact nature of your objections. I can defend my own words. I cannot defend someone else’s interpretation of some unidentified words of mine.
My Other Request: If you believe that e.g. I’m using a method wrong or using the wrong dataset, please educate me and others by demonstrating the proper use of the method or the right dataset. Simply claiming I’m wrong about methods doesn’t advance the discussion unless you can point us to the right way to do it.
Data: The Hadley HadISST ice (and sea surface temperature) data is available here. I used the NetCDF file HadISST_ice.nc.gz (~15Mb) at the bottom of the page.
and here’s a copy of our still invisible comment:
Epitomising the indomitable spirit of scientific skepticism we set out to duplicate the results obtained by Mr. Eschenbach and answer our own question as well as his. Here is what we’ve discovered. Firstly global sea ice area since 1974:
and then Arctic sea ice area since 1974:
Now as our very own learned guest poster Bill The Frog all too briefly pointed out to Willis Eschenbach on April 7th:
Ignoring Bill’s helpful hint Willis concluded that:
We’re pretty sure that the global average surface temperature increased from the mid-1970s to about 1998. However, we see no sign of this in the global sea ice area data. Instead, ice area remained stable throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, while temperatures climbed:
Next, we’re also pretty sure that there was no significant change in the global average temperature from about 1998 to 2015, the end of the ice data. Despite that, starting in 2000 the ice area first dipped to a low in about 2007, and since then has been climbing rapidly.
This supports a curious conclusion, which is that in modern times at least, the global sea ice area is not particularly a function of the global average surface temperature. Go figure…
Now that we’re in possession of all this newly revealed data about historical sea ice area and censorship in the cryospheric blogosphere what should we “go figure”? Firstly one feels compelled to ask why Willis’s global average temperature graph neglects to mention 2015 when he implies that it does?
Should you figure anything else please free to answer our query on a virtual postcard, in the space provided for that purpose below. You may additionally like to vent your feelings concerning this controversial cover-up of our changing climate over on Twitter using the #SnipGate hashtag.
Commenter Henry P over on “Steve Goddard’s” (un)Real Science blog poses the following question:
Unfortunately, we do not have any record of ice around 1929. But there was an eyewitness report of the melting of ice around 1923. Noting that Antarctic ice is currently increasing, my question to you Jim is simply this: why do you think that Arctic melt now is more than 87 years ago?
By way of a partial answer to that question, the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office (Met Office or UKMO for short) maintains the Hadley Centre Sea Ice and Sea Surface Temperature data set (HadISST for short). Unfortunately Henry P is obviously sadly misinformed, since according to the Met Office:
HadISST is a unique combination of monthly globally-complete fields of SST and sea ice concentration on a 1 degree latitude-longitude grid from 1870 to date.
Here is what the HadISST data set reveals for September 1929:
compared to September 2015:
Surely a working pair of Mark 1 eyeballs should be sufficient to allow even a dyed in the wool denizen of (un)Real Science to spot the difference?
Our regular reader(s) may recall that this time last year we took umbrage at an article by David Rose in the Mail on Sunday about the joint NASA/NOAA press briefing outlining their findings about global surface temperatures in 2014.
We’ve been discussing Mr. Rose’s recent misleading “Tweets” about the Arctic with him:
As a consequence we also found ourselves in conversation with Gavin Schmidt of NASA about this year’s NASA/NOAA press briefing about global surface temperatures in 2015, which takes place on January 20th. Pencil it into your diary:
Climate experts from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will discuss the release of new data on 2015 global temperatures, and the most important weather and climate events of the year, during a media teleconference at 11 a.m. EST Wednesday, Jan. 20.
The teleconference panelists are:
Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York
Thomas R. Karl, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina, and chair of the Subcommittee on Global Change Research for the U.S. Global Change Research Program in Washington
Media can participate in the teleconference by calling 888-790-1804 (toll-free in the United States and Canada) or 415-228-4885 (international) and use the passcode “climate.”
Audio of the briefing, as well as supporting graphics, will stream live.
Whilst we wait with bated breath for the NASA/NOAA announcement, here’s how the Gavin, David & Snow show has been going over on Twitter:
You will note from the exchange on Twitter that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project are one of the organisations that have already declared 2015 “The Warmest Year in the Modern Record”, which brings me to the Arctic connection. Tamino explains over at “Open Mind”, in an article entitled “Hottest Year On Record“:
When it comes to global temperature over land and sea, Berkeley produces two versions, different in the way they treat areas covered with sea ice. Version 1 uses air temperature estimates for sea-ice covered regions, version 2 uses ocean temperature estimates.
and quotes BEST as follows:
For most of the ocean, sea-surface temperatures are similar to near-surface air temperatures; however, air temperatures above sea ice can differ substantially from the water below the sea ice. The air temperature version of this average shows larger changes in the recent period, in part this is because water temperature changes are limited by the freezing point of ocean water. We believe that the use of air temperatures above sea ice provides a more natural means of describing changes in Earth’s surface temperature.
As Tamino puts it:
Let’s not keep you in suspense any longer. Here are annual averages through 2015 (which is now complete) according to version 1:
Here it is according to version 2:
Any way you look at it, 2015 is the hottest. Any way you look at it, there was no “pause” in global temperature.
[Edit – 17:30 UTC on January 20th 2016]
The joint NASA/NOAA media briefing on 2015 global average surface temperatures has just finished. The recording of the event is due to go online “in 2 hours” or so from:
I waited patiently in the NASA/NOAA queue to ask some Arctic related questions, but never received the call. I’ll let you know when I receive the promised answers by email.
Much like yesterday I was idly browsing my Twitter feed this morning whilst simultaneously consuming my habitual Sunday coffee + BLT when news reached me that David Rose had published yet another article in the Mail on Sunday that purports to investigate “climate science”:
Perhaps due to all our sterling work here at the Great White Con extracting the Michael, it doesn’t seem to fall under the Mail’s “Great Green Con” banner anymore. The general drift is the same though, apart from that lurid title of course!
I think current ‘renewable’ sources such as wind and ‘biomass’ are ruinously expensive and totally futile. They will never be able to achieve their stated goal of slowing the rate of warming and are not worth the billions being paid by UK consumers to subsidise them.
Skipping over all the (merely rhetorical?) self-pity, let’s move on to the climate science, such as it is!
Last Monday… a Met Office press release stated: ‘2014 one of the warmest years on record globally’.
The previous week, almost every broadcaster and newspaper in the world had screamed that 2014 was emphatically The Hottest Year Ever. They did so because NASA told them so. Its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the custodian of one of the main American temperature datasets, had announced: ‘The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880.’ If you’d bothered to click on the sixth of a series of internet links listed at the end of the press release, you could have found deep within it the startling fact that GISS was only ’38 per confident’ that 2014 really did set a record.
In other words, it was 62 per cent confident that it wasn’t. Another detail was that the ‘record’ was set by just two hundredths of a degree. The margin of error was five times bigger. These boring details were ignored. The ‘2014 was a record’ claim went to the very top. President Obama cited it in his State of the Union address. Like the news outlets, it’s unlikely he will issue a correction or clarification any time soon.
Al Gore repeatedly suggested that the Arctic would likely be ice-free in summer by 2014. In fact Arctic ice has recovered in the past two years, and while the long term trend is down, it looks likely to last several more decades.
Unfortunately that is misleading and/or inaccurate, apart from the bit about the long term trend in Arctic sea ice. Hence I’ve just popped yet another Dear John (and Poppy) virtual letter to Mr. Rose’s managing editor (+PA) at the Mail on Sunday, and I’ll have yet another long chat with IPSO tomorrow:
Us:
Dear John/Poppy,
Would you believe that David Rose is at it again? Not only is he “interviewing” himself in your esteemed organ today, he is misrepresenting the underlying science yet again.
I really must insist that whoever owns the desk on which the buck currently stops for the following article starts communicating with me yesterday if not sooner:
I am away from the office until Tuesday, February 10. I will be checking emails occasionally but if your message is urgent, please contact my assistant Poppy Swann.
Ultimately followed by:
Dear Jim
If you have a complaint about last Sunday’s article, you should set out exactly what it is. If you disagree with any opinions expressed you are welcome to write a letter that we will consider for publication.
You mention that you have sent us a number of inquiries recently. The only other, to my knowledge is that you wanted to know the source of some data that David Rose mentioned in an article some months ago. David Rose told me it came from the official website. Perhaps my colleague Poppy Hall can find it for you since David is probably unwilling to help after your insult.
Best regards
John
Us:
Dear Poppy (and John)
Please would you ask David to let me know where exactly, and on which “official website”, he obtained the DMI extent numbers he quoted in his article last Summer?
FYI John, at Poppy’s suggestion I have also emailed the editorial team @MailOnline. They have yet to even acknowledge receipt of my email of January 26th.
Best wishes,
Jim Hunt
Them:
We’ll keep you posted!
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