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.

----- snip -----

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).

Fake Skeptics Versus True Skeptics

Since I have previously used the term Fake Skeptics, perhaps some explanation is required what is meant with this term. I am distinguishing between fake skeptics and true skeptics regarding scientific debates, based on the form of the arguments and the motivation behind the arguments. The phenomenon of a, if not necessarily large, but the more noisy group of people who act as fake skeptics is for instance particularly present regarding the findings in the field of climate science, since those findings have become highly politicized due to their implications for the human civilization and economics and politics all over the planet.

Fake Skeptics do not argue on the grounds of science, they mostly use non-scientific arguments to attack the findings of science. They misrepresent the science, use logical fallacies, acknowledge and interpret empirical data only very selectively, e.g., by cherry picking those, insofar those appear to be in support of their views. The thinking is governed by cognitive biases too a large degree. The driving force is not primarily scientific curiosity, and the motivation for arguing against findings of science is mostly not just some scientific disagreement. Findings from scientific research are rejected, because those findings are in contradiction to preconceived economical, political, ideological, or religious views. Consequently, since the scientific arguments are lacking, fake skeptics often resort to attacks not just against the results from research, but also against the scientists who have presented those results. Scientists who are presenting results from research which are not liked are being defamed and smeared. Accusations, insinuation, or the use of innuendo against those scientists, asserting or suggesting fraud and malicious manipulation of data and results from scientific studies are common. Resort to conspiracy theories fantasies is common too, which is explainable. How else can the worldview be made whole, if most scientists who work and publish in the field say something else? The ones who act as fake skeptics are mostly people who are not directly involved in the area of research the findings of which are being rejected. Since scientific arguments and rigorousness are lacking, fake skeptic arguments are usually not presented in scientific publications in specialist journals of the field due to the filter mechanism of the peer review process. Instead, they are mostly found in other venues, nowadays especially in Internet opinion blogs, since it is not mandatory in those to uphold strong scientific standards.

True Skeptics are, in contrast, driven by scientific curiosity and they wish to acquire knowledge about the cause-effect relationships that govern the workings of the object or system that is being studied and debated. They argue based on science. If they do not agree with findings presented by scientists, they do this using scientific arguments. They embrace the scientific method and test alternative explanations, if they hypothesize those, against empirical data. True skeptics present their alternative hypotheses and theories, once they have been worked out sufficiently, in the peer reviewed specialist journals of the field, i.e., they uphold for themselves high scientific standards. Personal attacks against scientists who are presenting alternative, competing hypotheses and theories are not being considered as legit arguments against those hypotheses and theories. Professional scientists need to be true skeptics in their daily work. It is part of their professional profile.

Has global warming stopped? - An examination of a fake skeptic's argument

I'm documenting here my reply I gave somewhere else to a couple of talking points that are frequently used in the fake skeptic universe. One talking point is that global warming had allegedly stopped, based on the fact that statistical significance of the temperature trend on some short time scales like 10 years has been missing. The second one is the assertion that the observed temperature trend was in contradiction to the carbon dioxide change over time. Both are common straw man arguments applied to create doubt toward the results from research in climate science that there was a global warming trend which can be distinguished from noise due to natural variability, and that an increase in the mass of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere causes global warming.

Fake skeptic statements are in italic.

----- snip -----

A clear example of this falsehood has been debated in this thread. It is a fact that there has been no statistically discernible rise in global temperature over the last 10 years. However, there was statistically discernible rise in global temperature over each of the three previous 10-year periods. Clearly, the statistically discernible rise in global temperature in each decade from 1970 to 2000 has stopped while, importantly, the rise in atmospheric CO2 has not stopped.

So, we have had arguments on this thread concerning whether a 10-year period is – or is not – meaningful. Clearly, in this case it is meaningful: i.e. it means the observable global warming since 1970 has stopped. This is an incontrovertible conclusion.

Let me repeat with my own words. The speaker asserts that each 10-year period from 1970 to 2000 showed a statistically significant warming. He also asserts, the absence of a statistically significant warming in the decade after 2000 implies the conclusion there hadn't been any global warming after the year 2000, in contrast to the previous 10-year periods. This conclusion was incontrovertible.

Now let's check the facts and then let's examine the conclusion.

First the trends for each 10-period with their 2-sigma significance threshold. I use the trend calculator at the Skeptical Science Blog: http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php

I split the 10-year periods as follows: 1971-1980, 1981-1990, 1991-2000, 2001-2010

Trends in K/decade.

1971-1980:

GISTEMP:   0.144+/-0.330
NOAA:      0.152+/-0.333
HADCRUT3v: 0.134+/-0.389
HADCRUT4:  0.16+/-0.359

None of the trends in the four data sets is statistically significant at 95% probability or above over the 10-year period 1971-1980.

1981-1990:

GISTEMP:   0.091+/-0.345
NOAA:      0.100+/-0.290
HADCRUT3v: 0.084+/-0.301
HADCRUT4:  0.082+/-0.291
RSS:       0.046+/-0.502
UAH:       0.058+/-0.531

None of the trends in the six data sets is statistically significant at 95% probability or above over the 10-year period 1981-1990.

1991-2000:

GISTEMP:   0.298+/-0.381
NOAA:      0.314+/-0.338
HADCRUT3v: 0.356+/-0.382
HADCRUT4:   0.301+/-0.356
RSS:        0.447+/-0.594
UAH:        0.367+/-0.640

None of the trends in the six data sets is statistically significant at 95% probability or above over the 10-year period 1991-2000.

2001-2010:

GISTEMP:   0.019+/-0.277
NOAA:      -0.021+/-0.244
HADCRUT3v: -0.069+/-0.234
HADCRUT4:   -0.012+/-0.249
RSS:        -0.161+/-0.376
UAH:         -0.065+/-0.410

None of the trends in the six data sets is statistically significant at 95% probability or above over the 10-year period 2001-2010.

So, in none of the consecutive decades 1971-1980, 1981-1990, 1991-2000, 2001-2010 had there been a statistically significant warming trend with a probability of 95% or above. According to the "logic" of the speaker, the absence of a statistically discernible warming trend implies that global warming "has stopped". Thus, no global warming at all for four decades.

Now let's do the trend analysis for all 4 decades together:

1971-2010:

GISTEMP:   0.169+/-0.038
NOAA:      0.168+/-0.035
HADCRUT3v: 0.165+/-0.038
HADCRUT4:  0.177+/-0.036

Now we get a statistically significant trend with a probability of at least 95% for all four data sets from 1971 to 2010, although, according to the "logic" of the speaker, the absence of global warming in each of the four decades was "incontrovertible" due to the absence of a statistically discernible trend in each of the four decades.

Global warming present and global warming absent. Both can't be true at the same time. It appears to be a conundrum. But it is none. the speaker has just applied the same logically fallacious argument again, which had been applied by him before. The logical fallacy is to draw the conclusion that a trend was absent in a data set from the fact that a trend was not detectable in the data set on a given time scale. This conclusion is logically fallacious, since the non-detectability of a trend in a data set does not logically exclude the possibility that the trend is only masked by noise on the time range of the analysis and only detectable when the time range is increased.

The speaker's asserted conclusion, it was incontrovertible that global warming "has stopped" after the year 2000 is scientifically not valid, since it is based on a methodologically flawed analysis.

And that conclusion is important. More than 80% of anthropogenic GHG emissions were after 1940. There was no discernible rise in global temperature from 1940 until ~1970. And the rise from 1910 to 1940 is the same as the rise from 1970 to 2000 when it stopped. This indicates that there is no discernible effect of the anthropogenic GHG emissions on global temperature.

The speaker's repeated assertion the global temperature increase before 1940 despite the fact that most of the CO2 emission has occurred after 1940, and the absence of a discernible temperature increase between 1940 to 1970 despite increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere were in contradiction to the explanation that increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere causes global warming is also false. There is no contradiction here between empirical data and physical explanation given by mainstream climate science. There would be a contradiction, if a linear relationship between CO2 and observed temperature was claimed, and if it was claimed CO2 was the only climate driver that could cause changes in the temperature. No serious climate scientist says such a thing. The temperature record is the result of a combination of forcings from various climate drivers, e.g., greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar activity, land use, plus internal variability in the system. Thus, the speaker's argument is just a straw man argument, which he has repeatedly applied.