What got me snipped from wattsupwiththat.com - 6

This time a comment of mine, which I had submitted on January, 24, 2013, in reply to the posting "Burt Rutan: 'This says it all and clear'" got vanished or never appeared at Anthony Watts's blog "Watts Up With That?". My reply listed some major flaws of the posting. It is one of the many examples how fake skeptics lie using cherry picked data and flawed statistics. I addressed this pseudo-scientific approach also in the post "How to create a false 'global warming standstill'".

Here is the comment:

----- snip -----

Three major flaws in the post:

1. Cherry picking of data intervals and the data set to support the desired message.

2. Drawing scientifically invalid conclusions from changes in limited data, which are not statistically significant.

3. Straw man argumentation, where something is being "refuted" that is not being stated (as if any climate scientist has claimed that CO2 was the only factor influencing the global atmospheric or surface temperature record, and that there was a linear relationship between CO2 emission or CO2 mixing ratio in the atmosphere and observed temperature record).

But the crowd here is generally applauding. So much for the skepticism of "skeptics".

I don't know for what purpose Mr. Watts posted this. But if the purpose has been to expose what I am seeing here, it is a full success.

----- snip -----

How to create a false "global warming standstill"

1. One choose a data set of global tropospheric (e.g., UAH, RSS) or surface temperature estimates (e.g., NASA/GISS, NOAA/NCDC, HadCRU), preferably one that has the strongest bias to the cool side.
2. One finds a time interval in the data set, which is sufficiently short enough so that a statistical trend estimate does not provide any statistically significant warming trend. The large variability within the data on the short time interval makes sure of this. Even better, if the statistical estimate of the trend is close to Zero or negative. In latter case, one can claim "global cooling!" Statistical significance does not matter in this case. It only matters, if it comes to denying a global warming trend.

I have done this exercise for the RSS data of the lower troposphere temperature. And voila! There has not been just one global warming "standstill". There has been even two over the last 34 years, I have discovered using the woodfortrees tool.

According to this, the first "global warming standstill" occurred from 1979 to 1993 (inclusive). The statistical estimate (using this neat trend calculator at the Skeptical Science blog, which is based on [1]) of the trend is 0.012 Kelvin/Decade. The 2-sigma (about 95%) confidence interval is +/-0.229 Kelvin/Decade. As one can see, it is quite large. Then there is the recent "global cooling" from 1997 to today with a trend of (-0.003+/-0.229) Kelvin/Decade. No statistically significant cooling, but what "skeptic" is going to care about that, as long as "cooling" can be claimed.

What about the small interval between the "global warming standstills"? The positive trend estimate in this small time interval is not statistically significantly different from a Zero-trend either: (0.164+/-1.689) Kelvin/Decade. Therefore, since none of the separate time intervals shows any statistically significant global warming, the brave "skeptic" concludes, there has not been any global warming for 34 years at all! It is all a lie, a big global warming hoax! Invented by sinister forces for their own mean purposes.

What now? Now we repeat the statistical trend estimate for the whole time interval from 1979 to today:

The statistical estimate for the trend over the whole time interval is (0.133+/-0.073) Kelvin/Decade. There is a clear global warming trend, which is statistically significantly different from a Zero-trend by more than 3-sigma, which means that the probability to have a false positive signal relative to the noise in the data within the time interval is less than three out of a thousand.

No global warming and presence of global warming cannot be both true at the same time. A statement and its negation cannot be true at the same time. One of the two approaches must be wrong. And it is not the second one.

What does this teach us?

1. One can get easily fooled by noise, if one chooses too short time intervals of the data in time series analysis. In any time series, once always can find a time interval short enough, for which the noise becomes so large it masks any trend in the data series.
2. A failure to find a statistically significant trend in a time series does not refute the hypothesis of the presence of such a trend, since one cannot logically exclude the possibility that the lack of statistical significance is only due to a too small sampling size of the data.
3. Empirical, statistical evidence for a true global warming "standstill" or at least for a trend change could be provided by showing that the trend over the recent shorter time interval is statistically significantly different from the statistically significant warming trend that has been observed over the whole of the recent decades. This is not the case for the RSS data set above (and neither for any of the other mentioned ones). The 2-sigma interval for the RSS temperature data since 1997 is +/-0.229 Kelvin/Decade. The multi-decadal trend from 1979 to today lies well within its boundaries. Therefore, claims about a "global warming standstill", using too short time intervals from these data sets and flawed conclusions from statistical trend analysis, do not have any scientific validity.

[1] Foster, G. and Rahmstorf. S, 2011, Global temperature evolution 1979–2010, Environ. Res. Lett. 6(4), 044022, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022

What got me snipped from wattsupwiththat.com - 5

Anthony Watts, host of wattsupwiththat.com has launched an outrageous attack against the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) by publishing an article, "NASA GISS caught changing past data again - violates Data Quality Act", in which scientists working at the institute are accused of forging the data that are used for the GISS surface temperature analysis, and of violating federal law. These are serious accusations of scientific misconduct, and if they were true, this wouldn't not just destroy the reputation of the scientists, it would lead to the end of their scientific careers with high probability. The scientists could even face criminal prosecution. In a world of reason, logic, and law one does a thorough research of the facts first before stating these kind of accusations, since those would require hard evidence that could stand up in court. Not so in the fake skeptic universe where Anthony Watts and his friends reside. There, the bar is much lower. Some assertions and conjecture based on insufficient information due to lack of proper research of the facts, are considered as sufficient to make severe accusations and for his followers to believe them to be true, as one can see in the comment section.

There are some voices of reason among the commenters, but they are being ignored or ridiculed. My replies to these accusations got vanished by Anthony Watts, one can say as usual now. After they got vanished some funny guy under the name Louis Hooffstetter had the nerve to call me personally out to reply to the accusations, although he should have seen that my replies get snipped.

I didn't save the first one of my censored replies, which is mentioned in the second one. The first one was shorter and contained the question whether the author had checked with the scientist who maintains the GISS surface temperature analysis and who got praised not long ago on Mr. Watts's blog for promptly responding and correcting a mistake when it was detected. So, now the same scientist is being accused of being a big fraudster? He is still the same with the same high integrity as before. The accusations against him are baseless. I also asked whether accusations are posted first, before thorough fact checking was done. And I wondered whether this has been the purpose from the beginning.

Here is the second one:

----- snip -----
Anthony Watts wrote in
(http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/26/nasa-giss-caught-changing-past-data-again-violates-data-quality-act/#comment-1089990)

[snip - Sorry, I'm just not interested in your smear and accusations. As a NASA scientist who works with Hansen, you are in a position to demonstrate why/why not the charge of post facto data change if true. Instead you whine, and I'm just not interested in that. Do something substantive other than whining. - Anthony]

What a rubbish. Not every scientists working at GISS is involved in the temperature analysis. Why is every scientist at GISS supposed to be responsible for it? By mere association? Who is involved can be found at the website or taken from the author list of the related scientific papers. These are the people to be asked, if one wants to know specifics about the analysis. As for the alleged smear and accusations in my comment. Well, no one of the readers can check now what those outrageous "smear and accusations" and "whining" were, allegedly, right? However, the real smear and accusations are to be found in above article posted on Mr. Watts' attack web site. Accusations of evil manipulations and violations of the law allegedly done by GISS scientists are made without proper fact checking first, e.g., whether there is just some innocent explanation for it, if it is really true that data have changed.

Here I offer an explanation without the need to resort to accusations of sinister and fraudulent manipulation against the scientists at GISS who do the analysis.

Graphs and tables are updated around the middle of every month using the current adjusted GHCN-v3 and SCAR files. The new files incorporate reports for the previous month and late reports and corrections for earlier months.
(http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/)

The source data which are going into the analysis are not produced at GISS. They are coming from somewhere else. Always the current version of those data is used, and the data are updated every month. When something changes in the source data it has a ripple effect on the analysis done at GISS.

The "Updates to the Analysis" on the website refer to changes in the methodology of the analysis done at GISS, not to changes in data points of the source data sets.

-----  snip -----

Update, 10/28/2012: On the Updates to Analysis page of GISS, the conundrum about the changed results from the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis is being has been solved now. NOAA/NCDC the institution where the data used for the GISS analysis come from have switched to a new version of the data set, from GHCN v3.1 to GHCN v3.2. This has the according ripple effect on the GISS analysis. The change is explained by NOAA/NCDC here.

This confirms that once more Anthony Watts posted assertions and accusations on his blog against GISS scientists without doing proper research first whether those assertions and accusations were correct.

What got me snipped from wattsupwiththat.com - 4

I suppose I have waited long enough now since the other day to see whether publishing my comment to an article on the fake skeptic opinion blog wattsupwiththat.com has only been delayed, or whether it has been vanished again. To clarify, I do not claim censoring away my comments was a violation of my rights to freely express my opinion or similar. There aren't any such rights on private blogs. It is fully up to the discretion of a blog owner, in this case Anthony Watts, or the moderators who do this on his/her behalf, to decide what is allowed to be posted and what isn't for what reason ever. I document here the censored comments for two reasons:

1. It exposes the claims made by Anthony Watts or his moderators as falsehoods, according to which comments expressing views contrary to the ones of the blog host or his followers were not censored by them on his blog as they please, and it exposes Anthony Watt's hypocrisy, since he complains that his comments or other fake skeptic's comments were censored on blogs of climate realists (e.g., here), allegedly unlike what he practices with comments by climate realists on his blog. He exactly practices the same of what he accuses others. Different sites have different biases. This would be all fine, if Watts and Co. weren't lying about what they do.

2. I do not want to have written the comments for nothing. If they are not published where I submitted them I publish them here.

Following comment written by me to the article "NASA on Arctic sea ice record low - storm 'wreaked havoc on the Arctic sea ice cover" was not published:

----- snip -----
Anthony Watts wrote:

NASA finally admits it Arctic cyclone in August ‘broke up’ and ‘wreaked havoc’ on sea ice — Reuters reports Arctic storm played ‘key role’ in this season’s sea ice reduction.

"NASA finally admits" == Loaded language. I suspect this choice of words is supposed to suggest that something had been hidden from the public before, the knowledge of which would change any of the conclusions. As if the fact that some individual weather event like this cyclone additionally contributed to the sea ice minimum in the Arctic this year, would negate that 1.) Arctic sea ice was already lower than 2007 at the same time of the year before this storm occurred and the record probably would have been broken anyway, or 2) that there has been a multi-decadal trend of Arctic sea ice decline, for which there is evidence that it has been unprecedented for at least 1,450 years (Kinnard et al., 2011, doi: 10.1038/nature10581). The Arctic sea ice decline is empirical evidence that global warming is really happening. Therefore the need to downplay it in this opinion blog. I observe how hard you and your friends try to do this.

I predict this won't have been the last time that the Arctic sea ice extend has broken its record minimum. The Arctic sea ice extend (and volume) will break record minimums over and over again in the years and decades ahead, since greenhouse gas mixing ratios in the atmosphere continue to increase and therefore global warming continues.  "Global cooling" that is announced here as allegedly happening or being right around the corner quite frequently is a figment of the imagination of the ones who assert it.

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Note to Readers

I am in the process of syncing the blog with Disqus. Comments not visible currently have not been deleted. They are off only temporarily and going to hopefully reappear once the import into the Disqus system has been carried out.

What got me snipped from wattsupwiththat.com - 3

"The reason is that WUWT does not censor comments like alarmist blogs do. It allows true freedom of speech, thus the grain of truth is winnowed from the chaff of propaganda; readers can make up their own minds, and arrive at reasonable conclusions based on the facts presented."
(Smokey aka David B. Stealey, moderator of the blog wattsupwiththat.com, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/28/comment-of-the-week-2/#comment-754850)

I continue my series that documents comments that are apparently not liked, and therefore vanished at the opinion blog wattsupwiththat.com, which is presented by blog host Anthony Watts as "The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change" and which promotes denial of anthropogenically caused global warming. The comment was in reply to the claim by regular guest author Bob Tisdale, made in his posting "Tisdale asks: Hey, Where'd The El Niño Go?". Mr. Tisdale asserts global warming was caused by the natural phenomenon El Niño.  The El Niño/La Niña pattern (or ENSO - El Niño/Southern Oscillation) is a major mode of ocean variability in the tropical Pacific. It influences the weather in many parts of the world through so called teleconnections. Here is my comment to this claim. The comment also included a couple of questions for Mr. Tisdale:

----- snip -----
How is El Nino supposed to cause global warming? El Nino/La Nina is a major mode of natural variability with warm and cold phases, but global warming is a long-term trend. And the temperature of the upper ocean layers is not an independent climate driver. It's a dependent variable, so it can be the first cause that explains global warming. Claiming a warming of the upper ocean layers was the cause of global warming is just circular reasoning, since warming of the upper ocean layers is part of global warming.

Here are the annually and globally averaged anomalies of the surface temperature according to the GISS analysis relative to the average of the reference period 1951-1980:

For the decade of 1991 to 2000:
0.36, 0.14, 0.15, 0.25, 0.4, 0.3, 0.42, 0.59, 0.34, 0.36; mean+/-std = 0.331+/-0.133
For the decade of 2001 to 2010:
0.49, 0.58, 0.57, 0.49, 0.62, 0.56, 0.59, 0.44, 0.57, 0.63; mean+/-std = 0.554+/-0.061
(http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.txt)

What El Nino events are supposed to have caused and how are they supposed to have caused it that the 10 year average of the global temperature anomaly of the period 2001 to 2010 was 0.22 K higher than the 10-year average of the period 1991 to 2000? How does El Nino cause the long-term increase in the ocean heat content?

----- snip -----

Update 09/25/2012, at 9:27 AM:  The statement above, "It's a dependent variable, so it can be the first cause that explains global warming", was supposed to say "It's a dependent variable, so it can't be the first cause that explains global warming" (h/t Al. Thank you for spotting this and notifying me). Comments still don't work.

Update 09/25/2012, at 9:32 AM: Posting new comments actually works. Old comments have not been imported yet.

Is Soon To Be Hurricane Isaac Making Landfall At New Orleans?

Hurricane warnings have been issued for the gulf coast. According to the National Hurricane Center, current tropical storm Isaac is predicted to not become a major hurricane, unlike Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in 2005 with catastrophic consequences for the city. Nevertheless, anyone in a path of a hurricane should be properly prepared (see here).