Fake Skeptic Criticism of “Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures”

Now that I’ve had the chance to study some of the other papers from the Berkeley team, I’d like to offer my thoughts on Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures (Muller et al. 2011). But first, I’ll comment on another comment about that paper. It has already come under attack from the WUWT crowd, specifically from Doug Keenan. His criticisms are neither valid nor objective, in fact in my opinion his comment amounts to ignorant sniping of the worst kind.

Berkeley Team Says Global Warming NOT Due to Urban Heating

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team has reported the results of their first studies of surface temperature records. They have submitted four papers for publication, you can get copies of them here.

Ironically, Anthony Watts has already posted about one of the papers, roundly criticizing their efforts. In a textbook example of “sour grapes,” he complains that they’re making results public before acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal, and about their use of trends over a 60-year period rather than a 30-year period which would match the analysis in Fall et al. Neither objection has any merit. The choice of a 60-year period has only one drawback: it gives Anthony Watts an excuse to whine. The pre-acceptance release is actually rather standard practice in the physics community (that’s one of the things the ArXiv is for).

In my opinion it’s clear what Watts is really upset about — the results from the Berkeley team have confirmed that the other main global temperature estimates (NASA GISS, NOAA/NCDC, and HadCRU) got it right, and that station siting/urban heat island effects are not responsible for any of the observed temperature increase. The real reason all these analyses (including Berkeley’s) show temperature rise is: the globe is warming.

A Stitch in Time

RealClimate has given us one of their most important posts ever.

The theme is that even a brief period of inaction — a mere 7 years — costs a lot. In makes the task much harder, and even then we can expect a sizeable amount more CO₂ in the atmosphere when all the dust clears. It really drives home the point that although the distastrous phase of global warming may be decades away, every year counts, every ounce of prevention is worth a gigatonne of cure, and even a single more decade of inaction makes things dramatically worse.

I fully expect that soon — by the end of this decade — things will be so clear that even the Inhofes of this world will no longer have any political traction, the need for action will be so obvious. But as this RC post makes clear, we simply can’t afford to waste another decade.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother to point out an RC post because most readers here also regularly read RC. Even if I did, I’d just link to the post. But this is so important, I’d like to reproduce the post in its entirety. I’m confident that the RC authors are OK with this (it’s reproduced with fidelity), but if they request that I don’t then of course I’ll retract this re-posting.

Opportunity Knocks?

I happened on a blog post which denies the reality of man-made global warming. Unlike most such posts, it actually presents reasons for this opinion.

Truth or Consequences

Paul Hudson has written a blog piece for the BBC in which he claims

For as long as I have been a meteorologist, the mere suggestion that solar activity could influence climate patterns has been greeted with near derision.

This claim is just plain false. Absolutely, positively, totally, utterly false.

It’s also ironic, since his article is supposed to be about new research on the influence of the sun on climate, from the U.K. Met office no less! But Paul Hudson uses it as an excuse to push an agenda using falsehoods. Does Paul Hudson really not know how false he is? Did he not bother to check his “facts”?

Perhaps one of the reasons that the fake skeptics are so persuasive to so may people is that they can get away with saying anything at all, no matter whether it has even the tiniest grain of truth in it, and they don’t have to suffer the consequences.

Unfortunately, they contribute to delaying action on global warming, so the rest of us do have to suffer the conseqeuences.

Survey Says…

Not too long ago, the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication in association with George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication released the results of a survey of Americans’ opinions on global warming. The survey focuses on the breakdown of opinions by political affiliation. It divides the respondents into four categories: Democrat, Independent, Republican, and Tea Party. All respondents were first asked their party affiliation. Then they were asked whether or not they consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, and those who said “yes” were classified as Tea Party members regardless of political party affiliation. Hence those classified Democrat, Independent, and Republican include only those who selected that political party affiliation and did not consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement.

Seasons Change

In the last post we looked at data from the NCAR/NCEP reanalysis, with particular attention to the difference in the seasonal cycle — and its changes — between the two hemispheres. That data indicated that in the southern hemisphere, winter has recently warmed much faster than summer (so the annual cycle has decreased) while for the northern hemisphere the change in the annual cycle has been very slight.

NCEP

Anthony Watts has published one of his most foolish posts ever, courtesy of Erl Happ. If this is the level of “science” from fake skeptics, then God help us all. But rather than rip the arguments to shreds (taking candy from a baby), I’d like to examine some of the data used, which mostly come from the NCAR/NCEP reanalysis data set.

Arctic Sea Ice 2011, 2012

The numbers are in from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) for Arctic sea ice extent and area in September 2011. The average September extent came in at 4.61 million square kilometers. It was back in October of 2010 that I predicted this year’s September extent would be 4.63 million square kilometers. That prediction turned out to be right on the money.

Unnatural variation

The oldest sea ice in the Arctic is thousands of years old, and in places it’s a hundred meters (330 feet) thick, locked in ice shelves which cling to the farthest northern coasts. The most extensive Arctic ice shelves are in Canada along the coast of Ellesmere Island. In fact they define the coastline there, forming part of the permanent geography of that land.

At least, they used to.

The coastline of the Canadian Arctic is changing as Arctic ice shelves disappear — also reported here.