HotWhopper

The last 10 years are the hottest ever, yet deniers are still in denial

2023-01-17T22:52:00.048+11:00

Summary: Despite three years of La Nina, 2022 was the sixth hottest year on record. The last decade was the hottest decade on record.

As you all know by now, we're causing the world to heat up. We've not got to a stage where we've stabilised the global temperature. In fact, we seem to be nowhere near stabilisation. Yet strangely there are still a few global warming deniers floating about. These deniers are arguing once again that an ice age is coming, or it's started cooling, or global warming has stopped, or "CO2 warming is a hoax" or some such nonsense. It's prompted me to write another article about how global temperature has been changing.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for 2022 was 0.89 °C. This is 0.13°C below the hottest year so far. The hottest was 2020 at 1.02°C above the 1951 to 1980 average.

Below is a chart of the average of 12 months to December each year.

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly for the 12 months to December each year. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

As you may know, each of the five decades since 1972-1981 has been hotter than the previous one. The chart below shows how the world has been heating up since early last century. The chart includes a dotted line showing the mean annual temperature for the 20th century. Let's see what next year brings, especially if there is another El Nino.

Figure 2 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly in ten year blocks. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

I've also included a chart grouped by averages over 20 year periods showing how the rate of warming increased quite a bit over the latest 20 year period.

Figure 3 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly by 20 year periods. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

It's the increase in greenhouse gas that's causing warming!

Climate disinformers still exist, would you believe. Even after all the weather disasters of the past twenty years or so, there are still people who spread lies for various reasons.

Peter Sinclair has talked about this on Climate Denial Crock of the Week. Apparently one of the "paid to disinform" brigade is running about shouting "CO2 warming is a hoax". It's no longer hard to believe that even Elon Musk has been spreading denial on Twitter, which he seems to have bought (for $44bn, mind you) mainly to promote the spread of harmful lies and neo-fascist propaganda. (It's changed from being social media to becoming his personal anti-social blog).

Anyway, about that junk science claim. To support his latest greenhouse gas denial, Milloy claims there has been cooling for the last eight years, since 2015. He wrote: "Per NOAA data, we have emitted ~450 billion tons of CO2 since 2015 (14% of total manmade atmospheric CO2) yet the planet has cooled."

The claim of cooling from 2015 is obviously nonsensical cherry-picking, which plenty of other people have pointed out. The average temperature for the past 8 years from 2015 to 2022 inclusive is 0.93°C above the 1951 to 1980 mean. The last 8 years has seen the biggest single increase of all, a whopping 0.27C. Before that, the biggest 8 year increase was 0.17C in the period 1999 to 2006 inclusive.

Here's a chart showing the rise in global temperatures to 2022, in eight year blocks.

Figure 4 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly in 8 year blocks. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

That's not all. Milloy, who tweets as @junkscience (which is what it is), wimped out on a prediction. He obviously couldn't bring himself to make an ice age cometh claim. That would be too silly, even for him. Instead he predicted that if there was an El Nino this year the global temperature would rise. Duh! He added that when it finished the temperature would "steady/slightly decline (again) as El Nino ebbs". That's not as certain, but the odds are that will happen, too.

However! Notice that Milloy doesn't mention the last three years of La Nina, which has a cooling effect on temperature - if all else is equal, which it isn't!

To show his cherry pick more clearly. The first chart shows the period Milloy is using for his false claim that greenhouse gases don't keep the earth warm. As you can see, Milloy used the old, tired denier ploy of starting with two years of El Nino (hot years), and finishing in the third year of La Nina (slighly less hot years).

Figure 5 | Mean surface temperature anomalies from 2015 to 2022 from the 1951-1980 mean. Blue columns are La Nina years and orange columns and El Nino years. Data sources: GISS NASA and Bureau of Meteorology, Australia.

The second chart shows it in context of 50 years of warming. Each

Figure 6 | Mean surface temperature anomalies from 1973 to 2022 from the 1951-1980 mean. Blue columns are La Nina years and orange columns and El Nino years. Data sources: GISS NASA and Bureau of Meteorology, Australia.

Now what the sharp-eyed and even the less eagle-eyed among you may notice is the El Nino years are getting hotter and the La Nina years are also getting hotter. It's not ENSO that's causing global warming. It's the greenhouse gas we're putting into the atmosphere, a large portion of which are all the waste products from the fossil fuels we're burning.

Incidentally, instead of starting at the two hottest El Nino years (2015 and 2016), if Milloy had included just one more year (2014) let alone any other previous years, his very slight decline in trend would have been an increase!

Cold blasts of hot air from the past

Here's a reminder of denier desperation and how disinformers have been feeding the deluded with false claims of "it hasn't warmed since" since, well, certainly since I've been blogging. In June 2013 I pointed out the absurdity when Anthony Watts' denier blog, WattsUpWithThat claimed it hadn't warmed since 1980, which was ridiculously wrong at the time, and it's warmed a lot more since then. Moving from the absurd to the more absurd, in October 2017 denier Anthony Watts crowed "it hasn't warmed since 2016". (2016 was a very hot El Nino year, yet 2020 was even hotter and there wasn't an El Nino that year.)

Where was it hot in 2022?

Last year was again hot almost everywhere. On the charts below as the legend shows, blue is for below the 1951-1980 average, and yellow/orange/red is above. Move the arrow at the left to the right to compare 2022 with 2020, which was the hottest year on record (so far). The cooler Pacific region of La Nina is clearly visible on the 2022 map.

Figure 7 | Maps showing mean surface temperature anomalies for 2022 and 2020 from the 1951-1980 mean. Data source: GISS NASA

Victor Venema, climate scientist, valued friend to many

2022-12-26T16:56:00.006+11:00

Victor Venema died earlier this month. His friends, colleagues and everyone who knew of him were shocked and felt an immense sadness when his friend and colleague, Frank Sonntag, let us know.

Victor Venema was a climate scientist in the Meteorological Institute, University of Bonn, Germany. His main scientific interest was in the variability of data in complex systems. In particular, the study of variability in weather data and homogenization. In his own words (archived):

"At the moment most of my work and this blog is about the removal of non-climatic changes (variability) from historical stations data, which is called homogenization."

Dr Venema contributed to climate science on many fronts beyond the university. He was an advocate for open science, inclusivity in science, scientific communication and bringing science to the general public. He did not merely advocate for change, he helped make change. He was active in various roles with the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) over many years. He was Chair of the Parallel Observations Science Team (POST) of the International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) and a member of the ISTI Benchmarking and Assessment working group. He was also prolific online, including with Climate Feedback and Hypothesis, a web tool that enabled experts and others to comment on articles published on the web. He was very keen to overcome language and other barriers including through GrassRoots Journals and the Translate Science initiative. (I've probably left out many of his contributions and achievements.)

Victor was a keen observer of behaviour on social media. On occasion he referred to some aspects as "toxic", particularly on Twitter and on climate science denial blogs. Once again, he wasn't just talk. Together with Frank Sonntag, he set up an instance for scientists at Mastodon, FediScience.org.

Victor was a wonderful science communicator. He was able to explain otherwise difficult concepts in ways that everyone, scientist or not, could understand. It was Eli Rabbet on RabbetRun who first introduced me to his blog. It was hard to resist his wit, perspicacity and disdain of efforts from deniers to claim that climate science is a hoax. Back in 2012, Victor wrote an article "Blog review of the Watts et al. (2012) manuscript on surface temperature trends". He also wrote a blog article on one of the points science deniers seemed unable to understand with weather data, "A short introduction to the time of observation bias and its correction." (Watts later promised a rebuttal to his own paper, which has yet to see the light of day.)

Victor was a regular commenter at HotWhopper almost from its beginning. He supported my efforts publicly and in private over many years. We shared the same sense of humour. Victor was a valued friend to me and to many, many people. (See also the tribute at ATTP - ...and Then There's Physics.) His death is a great loss to me personally, to climate science, to science in general, and to the world at large.

In his most recent blog post, Victor wrote: "Dying is naturally not nice for the ones you leave behind." It is not nice at all, particularly with someone young who gave so much to so many. His work doing and explaining science and making science open and more inclusive will endure.

Post script: Tributes to Victor Venema may be posted to a condolence website set up by his family.

Email went down, now it's back

2021-08-13T09:47:00.002+10:00

I've been with the same hosting company for many years. Yesterday (Australian time), first time ever, their email servers went down for several hours. It's back again now.

If anyone tried to send an email during that time, particularly anyone who is wanting to subscribe to email alerts, please try again. I'm referring to the article I posted a couple of days ago.

We've got to get serious about climate, we've wasted too much time

2021-08-09T20:27:00.001+10:00

The IPCC Summary for Policymakers WG1 report has just been released. You can download it here.

I will be going through it and the technical report ~~(when it comes out)~~ over the next few days. You can download the full report here. Warning: it's 3949 pages long! An initial glance shows that we need to do more to reduce emissions. A whole lot more.

The press conference is on YouTube:

This report will have a lot more space devoted to regional changes. There is a fabulous interactive atlas which allows you to drill down and across in all sorts of ways.

There is so much to work through. Here are some initial points that might interest you:

It's still possible to keep global warming to <2C if we get to zero emissions by 2050. If we keep the same rate, we'll prob hit 2C by mid-century.
"Climate change is already affecting every inhabited region across the globe with human influence contributing to many observed changes in weather and climate extremes"
There has been an increase in the lower bound of climate sensitivity, which is now more confidently estimated at between 2C and 5C, with a "likely range of 2.5°C to 4°C (high confidence), compared to 1.5°C to 4.5°C in AR5, which did not provide a best estimate."
"Global warming of 1.5°C relative to 1850-1900 would be exceeded during the 21st century under the intermediate, high and very high scenarios considered in this report"
"It is virtually certain that the Arctic will continue to warm more than global surface temperature, with high confidence above two times the rate of global warming."
Of particular interest to Australia & USA, it is very likely droughts and floods will worsen, amplified by ENSO: "It is very likely that rainfall variability related to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation is projected to be amplified by the second half of the 21st century in the SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios."
As I've long expected, the oceans and surface won't keep absorbing CO2 at the current rate: "under the intermediate scenario that stabilizes atmospheric CO2 concentrations this century (SSP2-4.5), the rates of CO2 taken up by the land and oceans are projected to decrease in the second half of the 21st century".

The current pledges aren't enough for safety. We need to do more.

Andrew Dessler summed it up well, if a little crudely, on Twitter:

Alert for HotWhopper email subscribers to resubscribe

2021-08-09T15:54:00.006+10:00

Sorry for not following up my last post sooner. There'll be another climate post shortly.

My excuse is being consumed by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2. Not me personally, I hasten to add. It's a big problem in the state next door, NSW, and has slipped from there into my home state, Victoria, a couple of times (and other parts of Australia). That's meant lockdowns to get us back to zero COVID-19. Having a slightly obsessive tendency, I've been spending too much time on the endless press conferences, news articles and tweets about the subject. This has been at the expense of writing blog articles about climate change, I'm sorry to say.

While I'm preparing the next article (or procrastinating on its writing) I want to alert people who signed up for email alerts to new articles here on HotWhopper. The normal emails will stop because Feedburner is being shut down this month. Here's the notice:

Recently, the Feedburner team released a system update announcement , that the email subscription service will be discontinued in August 2021.
After August 2021, your feed will still continue to work, but the automated emails to your subscribers will no longer be supported. If you’d like to continue sending emails, you can download your subscriber contacts.

If you'd like to continue to receive email alerts, please let me know directly, using the email address to which you want them sent. You can do the same if you no longer want alerts, although the subs will be opt-in, not opt-out. That is, if you don't let me know you want to continue, you will no longer receive email updates.

You can let me know either way by sending an email to subscribeHW at HotWhopper.com (replacing the "at" with @). If you're already a subscriber, you should be receiving this article as an email already, but the emailed articles will only continue if I set it up. I'll probably use mailchimp, which AFAIK is reliable and secure.

Beware of internal conflicts, rivalries and toxic behaviour polluting climate action

2021-07-02T13:29:00.007+10:00

Today I'm going to tackle a difficult but important topic - internal conflict. Given the number of people involved, the number and complexity of the issues, and the decades over which the climate movement is likely to be needed, it's a pipe dream to think there will always be harmony. At the same time, if the sort of problems mentioned here aren't acknowledged and, preferably, dealt with well, they can spread and become very destructive. Sweeping things under the carpet, pretending conflict doesn't exist, only allows it to fester and grow.

When a large number of people are working toward a common purpose, it is inevitable there will be internal politics. (If you prefer "virtually inevitable" or "almost inevitable", I'd love you to point out an instance that's been free of this.)

In this article, I'll use the word "movement". I don't like to apply that term to mitigating and adapting to climate change (which is bigger than any movement); however, in the context of this article it's the best word I've been able to come up with.

Everyone who works in an organisation for even a short time, understands internal politics have an influence on decisions, behaviour, alliances, staff promotions and so on. The same goes for any movement, whether it's related to broad social justice, climate change, anti-litter, health, equal opportunity, local politics or anything where a dozen or more people come together around a common purpose.

Conflicts can arise for any number of reasons, some that could be regarded as fundamental, and some are confusingly petty and vindictive. Here are several to watch out for:

"Means and methods" camps - opposing camps can emerge having fundamentally different and, perhaps, opposing views on how to achieve the common purpose (nuclear vs anti-nuclear; all adaptation no mitigation vs mitigation plus adaptation etc.)
Personalities and personal ambition - with camps emerging based on individuals within the overall movement (personality cults). These can arise if it's thought there will be personal reward for the personality or the follower (such as fame, career progression, book contracts, committee posts, awards, or other personal recognition). I'm not having a dig at our climate champions. We need them and most leaders in the climate movement are above petty politics. It's wannabes and people scrambling to position themselves where this can become a problem.
Ideology and political leanings - dismissing and therefore alienating large segments of society based on their politics or ideology (hard left vs left vs centre vs right vs extreme right).
Position on other causes - dismissing and alienating individuals or segments of society based on their opinions or actions or perceived level of support for other causes - e.g. do they give equal or better attention to social causes (feminist, BLM, gender issues, voting rights etc) and if it's not seen as good enough, if they're seen to be mainly focused on climate, they must be bad people.
Personal attributes - dismissing or alienating people on the basis of attributes such as sex, gender, skin colour, ethnic origin, cultural background, religion or lack of, sexual preference, education level, political allegiance, age, friends, colleagues, profession, or opinions expressed on matters unrelated to that common purpose. E.g. all men are bastards, particularly if they are white baby boomers.

The most toxic behaviours I see are related to points 1 and 2 above, and to a lesser extent points 4 and 5. These can (usually by intent) elicit emotive rather than rational responses - anger, hurt feelings, public naming and shaming of individuals whether deserved or not (i.e. straight up defamation). All of this leads to a weakening of the movement making it less able to focus on the common purpose. It can result in fragmentation, a muddying of the waters. It can cause hard-working, committed people to be disillusioned and give up. It can confuse the general public if it spills over into the mass media, reducing their understanding of the important issues.

I'm no mediator. That's not my training or talent. I think I am able to see most things clearly but when it comes to helping people work through personal differences, I defer to people who are expert in that area. I'm not a political animal either, normally being more of an onlooker than a participant. At the same time, as you know, I'm not likely to do nothing when I see good people being unfairly maligned. (Mostly I've addressed maligning by climate science deniers, yet this sort of ugliness has been happening within the climate movement too.)

I don't really want to say much more on this topic. These matters need to be dealt with internally by the more responsible and able members of the movement, rather than airing all the gory details in public (which can in turn cause a lot of harm). I know I've sometimes been a bit intemperate myself, dashing off an angry tweet or two and maybe going a bit overboard in articles here from time to time. I'll keep trying to do better, though I still won't hesitate to call out and ridicule climate science denial.

This article is more by way of reminder and a caution. If you're tempted to join a camp or become a groupie to a personality - just take care you're doing it with your eyes wide open and with good reason. Avoid taking at face value everything someone you might admire says. Do what you can to keep the movement healthy. Stay focused on the common purpose.

Then all the usual things - be prepared to change your mind if the information changes. Forgive individuals if they make what you regard as a mistake now and then. At the same time, watch out for people who exhibit ongoing patterns of toxic behaviour, who may not be as trustworthy or authentic as all that (to use another word I very much dislike), who might be using you and/or abusing others for their own purposes. Remember, you might very well become their next target.

In the end, people come and go, but the issues remain. Harnessing yourself to a particular individual without viewing the broader picture may not be the most productive path in the long term. In the same vein, tying yourself to a particular and very narrow means of achieving the goal could limit our chances of getting there.

Welcome - and please help the world address the problems of climate change

The climate movement must remain broad and diverse, welcoming people from all over, with all our flaws, with all our brilliant ideas including conflicting ones, and with all our efforts - if it is to achieve the results we must.

-------------------------

We've had a tough few months with more and worse fires, drought, floods, heat waves, disappearing glaciers, water supply problems, rising seas and a global pandemic.

There's much more to be done.

It's nice to be back, and quite lovely to read your words of welcome here and on Twitter. Thank you.

Where to from here?

2021-07-01T00:37:00.006+10:00

I spent a lot of time in western Canada in the early 1970s. That's 50 years ago for all you young ones. The world was very different then. Edmonton was experiencing it's longest winter since, almost, forever. It was a long cold winter. In the summer in British Columbia they kidnapped whoever happened to be in the local pubs to fight the annual forest fires, but the temperatures rarely exceeded 80F. It was what people thought of as a bit unusual but not completely abnormal.

Today the world is different. Hard to believe this week, but this is what we should have expected.

#Canada just had a temperature of nearly 50°C (Lytton, 49.6°C)
"Without human-induced climate change, it would have been almost impossible ...as the chances of natural occurrence is once every tens of thousands of years," says @metoffice scientist
Details https://t.co/fb1nIF8wny pic.twitter.com/rxKGmQqZZM
— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) June 30, 2021

Western Canada is wondering if it has been relocated to Death Valley.

There was famine somewhere in the world back then as there is now, but today, all of a sudden we need to find food for three times as many people.

We're trying to get on top of a global pandemic that everyone says was anticipated but that no-one prepared for.

We've accepted and supported and elected leaders who aren't game to read the writing on the wall, aren't able to act, and keep pointing the finger at someone else for their inadequacies - anyone else will do.

Alright - it's not all gloom and doom. There are some elected leaders in various countries around the world who are realists and who are keen to make sure the human race survives until at least 2100.

There are journos and communicators who are still quite sure, or at least hopeful, the message coming from the harbingers of knowledge and science will make its way through to political leaders, if not the general population. And that we'll act on it.

For even more good news - I'm coming back, soon, with some analysis and information about where we are today and what's in store. It won't be pretty.

Are you up for it?

Everything climate disinformation from the climate conspiracy-theorists at WattsUpWithThat

2021-01-27T14:19:00.008+11:00

Anthony Watts has set up a new website for climate disinformers and wilful deniers. (H/t CJ in the comments here at HotWhopper.)

His disinformation website is called Everything Climate. Translating its stated aim from denier-speak, it is to hook people who aren't yet knowledgeable about climate to recruit them as conspiracy theorists for the climate disinformation cult.

Questionable claims from the outset

Anthony Watts is known in climate science denier circles as a climate science disinformer and conspiracy theorist. True to form, he made a number of questionable claims in his introductory article. He wrote "We have four categories at the moment, and a few dozen sub-titles covering specific claims/arguments that are commonly in the news and are contentious." The bit about "a few dozen sub-titles" is weird, because I can only see 23 articles. I've no idea what the "few dozen sub-titles" relate to. As for the topics he claims are all contentious, some of them are so well-established they are indisputable, some are the topic of active scientific research, and some are strawmen (i.e. the Everything Climate topic is not a claim or argument in scientific circles).

Anthony claimed he "wanted a site that was entirely a factual website", and has failed badly right from the word go. Apparently it took himself and (probably mostly) Charles Rotter "months" to get it up and running. I guess they must have had too many other things going on over the past year because that's a helluva long time to get such a piddly little website up and running.

Driven by jealousy? Competing with his employer, the Heartland Institute?

His decision months ago was probably because he was peeved at how a teenage denier from Germany stole his thunder at the Heartland Institute. (She reportedly only lasted there around 3 months before disappearing, deciding to not renew her three month contract with Heartland.)

Anthony is going head to head in competition with his recent employer, the Heartland Institute. His new disinformation website is modeled on that teenage deniers website, which was ostensibly set up by her in the short time she was employed by Heartland. It's a lookalike. WUWT's Everything Climate doesn't cover anything near the amount of science denial put up on the Heartland website, though. It's a pale imitation.

WUWT is taking tips from Skeptical Science. Will it backfire?

His Everything Climate website has also taken tips from Skeptical Science. To wit: the "familiarity backfire effect" is when people hear a falsehood so often they accept it as fact. This is from from Skeptical Science, on how to overcome that effect:

There are several simple techniques to avoid the familiarity backfire effect. First, put the emphasis on the facts rather than the myth. Lead with the science you wish to communicate rather than the myth. Unfortunately, most debunking articles take the worst possible approach: repeat the myth in the headline.

Second, provide an explicit warning before mentioning the myth. This puts people cognitively on guard so they’re less likely to be influenced by the myth. An explicit warning can be as simple as “A common myth is…”.

Third, explain the fallacy that the myth uses to distort the facts. This gives people the ability to reconcile the facts with the myth. A useful framework for identifying fallacies is the five characteristics of science denial (which includes a number of characteristics, particularly under logical fallacies):

Pulling this all together, if you debunk misinformation with an article, presentation or even in casual conversation, try to lead with a sticky fact. Before you mention the myth, warn people that you’re about to mention a myth. Then explain the fallacy that the myth uses to distort the facts.

What Anthony has picked up from Skeptical Science is to emphasise the false claim right up front to try to get it embedded in readers' minds. He does this through sub-headings. For example, everyone knows by now (or should know) that it's the greenhouse effect that keeps our planet at a liveable temperature. By increasing greenhouse gases at an alarming rate, we're making the planet much, much hotter.

Anthony Watts and Charles Rotter don't want you to believe this well-known fact, so to try to get readers to wrongly think the greenhouse effect isn't real, they wrote "Most Observed Warming is Natural" as a sub-heading. It's ridiculous and hardly pushed by even the most ardent of deniers anymore. Their myth barely rates at Skeptical Science these days. The popularity among deniers of their "it's natural" argument is now way down the scale at number 56. No-one but a Climate Disinformer would make that false claim and no-one except a Wilful Denier would "believe" them.

On the other hand, if you go to the topic detail, he puts what he terms the "pro" case first, which he took from science sources, followed by the big Con (ha ha) which is the conspiracy theorist version. So maybe he wasn't paying attention after all.

Everything climate disinformation has already been debunked

His new website doesn't allow comments or discussion on the site itself, so you'll need to go elsewhere to find out the real situation. I won't bother going through each bit of disinformation for now. If you haven't come across a topic at "Everything Climate" before I suggest you look at denier myths at Skeptical Science.

You can also use the search bar here at HotWhopper (up on the right in the sidebar). Although I've not published much these past few months, from what I can see, Anthony Watts' Everything Climate disinformation website is just a rehash of tired old debunked memes so the chances are, if you look up a topic, you'll find I've written something about it.

References and further reading

Global Warming & Climate Change Myths - the most used climate science denier myths with links to articles at SkepticalScience.com
Busting myths: a practical guide to countering science denial - an article on how to counter climate disinformation at SkepticalScience.com
Debunking Handbook 2020 - a new version of the Debunking Handbook, written in collaboration with numerous experts - from the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University
Article about the not-so-sensational sensation adopted by the Heartland Institute, which was shortly thereafter rejected by that same "sensation" - from DeSmogBlog
Climate Change: How Do We Know? - the Number One website returned in a Google search of "climate change", which Anthony Watts is laughingly trying to displace - from NASA

Rating climate science deniers to decide how/if to engage

2021-01-26T22:41:00.011+11:00

Climate science deniers can be grouped in different ways. Having observed them for more than a decade now, this is how I see them:

The uninformed - ignorant about climate, doesn't read articles on climate. Strictly speaking the uninformed are not science deniers. They just don't know anything about climate.
The misinformed - previously uninformed who've read & unwittingly accepted climate disinformation.
Wilful deniers (aka wilfully ignorant) - previously misinformed but have since been exposed to climate science findings and rejected them (usually for ideological or other reasons). All of this category by definition are conspiracy theorists.
Climate disinformers - know the facts but are in the business of spreading lies to feed the previous categories (usually for monetary gain and/or ideological reasons). All of this category are by definition weavers of conspiracy theories.

I'd be interested to read how other people might categorise climate science deniers.

Why categorise deniers?

It can be useful to categorise climate science deniers. You may be having a discussion with a stranger you thought was uninformed or misinformed, so you go full on with the facts. If it turns out they are Wilful Deniers or Climate Disinformers, your efforts will be in vain, at least as far as helping out the person with whom you're conversing. You can then decide whether to stop talking with them and block them or whatever is the equivalent on whatever platform, continue the discussion to hone your own knowledge or benefit lurkers, or change tactics and use another form of persuasion. (Facts make no difference to Wilful Deniers and Climate Disinformers. Appealing to decency or "values" usually doesn't work either.)

If the climate science denier is a friend or family member, that's a whole different matter. One-on-one personal engagements are very different to talking with some random person on the internet. You'll need to decide for yourself whether to try to influence their notions and, if so, how (and why). I will say you've a much higher chance of influencing someone you know than of influencing some random science denier in cyberspace :)

I've written a bit more about each category. Most climate hawks will be familiar with all these types, but it might be useful to someone, perhaps as a social research topic. For example, I expect that there's a scale of Covidiots that's somewhat similar.

1. The uninformed

I don't regard the uninformed as science deniers. Having said that, it's hard for anyone to remain in this category these days. News articles on climate change and global warming are appearing more and more. With each new and more extreme weather event, it is very difficult for responsible journalists to address the question "why and how did this happen" without referring to climate change.

What this means is if you come across someone you'd like to think is merely uninformed, the chances are that's not the case any more. They are much more likely to be in category 3 (wilful deniers) or category 4 (a disinformer).

How to pick the uninformed?

If a person is only uninformed, they will either demonstrate their willingness to learn about climate or they will quickly lose interest in the topic.

They won't make a huge effort to try to persuade you that scientists of the past two centuries are wrong, that physics and chemistry is a hoax, that their false understanding of the second law of thermodynamics is right and all modern thermodynamics is wrong. They won't spend endless tweets and blog comments trying to dissuade you from the evidence that ice is melting, heat waves are getting worse, seas are rising, average global temperature is going up and up and up. They won't chant "CO₂ is plant food".

If a person appears uninformed but brings up denier arguments then you know they are one of:

misinformed,
wilfully ignorant or
a disinformer.

2. The misinformed

As with the uninformed, these days the chances of one being able to remain merely "misinformed" is very low. There is a vast amount of information available and many people willing to point a misinformed person toward good information. There's ample information written for all levels of science education as well as no level of science education.

If you come across someone who you think may be merely misinformed, it won't take many interactions with them to find out. They'll demonstrate fairly quickly if they are wilfully ignorant or a disinformer.

How to pick the misinformed?

If they are misinformed, they will not keep coming up with denier arguments (see above). If they won't check their information sources and show no willingness to verify their (mis)information they are not unintentionally spreading misinformation, they are doing so deliberately.

If a person appears misinformed but refuses to check facts, and/or counters any point you make with a tired denialist meme, pulls up unsourced "charts", silly pictures and spurious quotes from climate disinformation blogs, and/or starts ranting and raving incoherently (not uncommon), then you know they are one of:

wilful deniers (including the wilfully ignorant) or
a disinformer.

3. Wilful deniers (including wilfully ignorant)

This category has the largest number of climate science deniers. They are the group the disinformers want to expand, to apply group pressure. Most of these people entered as misinformed and (rarely) as open-minded uninformed. They were looking for arguments to bolster their belief that science is a hoax.

It's not uncommon to read comments like "I knew there was something wrong with climate science. I'm so glad I found this [name of disinformation blog] blog." (There "must be something wrong" vaguely and inappropriately applied is one of the markers of a conspiracy theorist.)

These people are inclined toward conspiratorial thinking in realms beyond climate science. Some of them are evolution deniers. Many of them were Trump supporters and QAnon followers, or adherents to the previous versions of the conspiracy theories QAnon adapted and adopted as their own. You'll still today hear "Agenda21 [sic]", "HAARP", "chemtrails", "child trafficking", "Rothschilds", "Pope", "Prince Philip", "Hillary", "UN"; and more.

The wilful deniers tend to band together in cult-like groups on climate disinformation blogs, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and (for a short time) Parler. They'll put up unsourced, uncaptioned and usually wrong charts they can't explain, which they got from one of the disinformers. They'll make false and defamatory claims against climate scientists and others as if to say "this woman/man is a bad person therefore science is a hoax". Most of them demonstrate ignorance and often downright stupidity.

These people could be called gullible. I don't see that as their defining trait, though. I see them primarily as conspiracy theorists, scared people afraid of the world and particularly scared ot knowledge, epitomised in Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians.

How to pick a wilful denier

Wilful deniers are the people who've commented on or lurked at climate denial blogs and discussion boards for years or even decades, so they've no excuse for not checking the facts. Even on the most rabid science denial blogs they can see actual science in one form or another. That is, they have seen the evidence, the facts of what's happenig to the world and why, but have chosen to not "believe" them. They are pointed to articles about science and to scientific papers.

It's not that they are ignorant. They have no valid excuse for rejecting science. It's that they choose to embrace nonsense and gobbledegook. They choose to reject science despite all they've read or been given the opportunity to read. Science denial is a wilful, deliberate action on their part.

If a person appears to be a wilful denier but you discover their job (whether paid or unpaid) is to spread climate science denial, then you can bet they are a climate disinformer. Climate science denying blogs are run by climate disinformers. Almost all the guest posts there will be written by climate disinformers.

4. Climate disinformers

Climate disinformers are the worst. These people knowingly spread disinformation for benefit. They may be any or all of the following:

It's their job. They work for a right wing lobby group or think tank in a paid or unpaid capacity.
They run a climate science disinformation blog or write guest articles or share cross-posts between blogs. Many of these blogs are a source of income for the disinformer, and the owners are continually pleading for donations to keep it going, often with false promises (e.g. will be publishing a paper that never appears, will be getting arrested for being a disinformer which never happens, will be starting a journal/society of deniers that never gets off the ground, etc.)
They claim to be a contrarian scientist but actually speak to and promote climate science disinformers (usually running a disinformation blog). In the US, some of these are easily identified because they're called by denier politicians to testify on record for House and Senate committee hearings; and, more recently, were appointed by the Trump administration to key positions in science agencies in an attempt to misdirect climate science.
They are often quoted by other climate science deniers and disinformers. (Note: disinformers will also misquote legitimate scientists. It's important to check sources.)
They will write chapters and books to spread climate science disinformation. Even though hardly anyone will read these books, they are seen as useful to pepper blogs with denier quotes.
They will go on speaking tours (usually paid) to spread nonsense about climate.
They have written no or few scientific papers on the topic of their disinformation, or not in reputable journals.

Many amateur disinformers run blogs that gives them an income stream. These disinformers have become stuck in the anti-science camp (and some have dropped by the wayside). They'll often seek donations under false pretences, such as:

Promising to publish science denying papers in scientific journals (then it doesn't happen) - e.g. Anthony Watts and Jo Nova;
Claiming they'll be persecuted for being a denier (persecuted victim/hero complex),
Promising to start a journal/society of deniers to get large donations, and it never gets to first base
Cadging donations to go on an overseas jaunt to attend a scientific meeting overseas to "ask questions" of scientists. Then squibbing on the questions - asking none.

Many if not most wilful deniers are only too happy to forgive, forget or ignore the broken promises made by disinformers. They need a place to congregate with other conspiracy theorists and they're willing to pay for it, sometimes large sums.

By their actions, climate disinformers aim to stop the world from taking action to keep the planet habitable and aim to stop the world from adapting to climate change. (Some of them are so far into denial they will even try to deny this most obvious of conclusions.)

Without hard and fast evidence, I'll speculate climate disinformation is mostly spread by social media and the tabloid press. It doesn't have many other avenues. There's the occasional denier conference (gabfest) but these get little or no publicity outside of climate denier circles and are often poorly attended. It's social media where most of the recruitment is done, and the tabloid press is used to spread ignorance to the already ignorant.

And then there's the Murdoch empire

The US (and to a lesser extent Australia) has been a special case. The Murdoch-owned news media has been waging a war against the world for decades now, and continues to this day. Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch have a huge platform for recruiting climate science deniers, and is a whole other story.

References and Further Reading

Some sciency questions, plus a note on etiquette - HotWhopper article about Anthony Watts squibbing on his promise to question scientists
On Plain Denial: Watts Dismisses His Own Evidence That is Counter to His Viewpoint - HotWhopper article about Anthony Watts' promising a paper still hasn't seen the light of day - nine years later!
How Anthony Watts, persecuted victim and hero, valiantly thwarts imaginary roadblock throwers - an article about the much vaunted Open Atmospheric Society, which Anthony Watts used to cadge costly donations ($500 a pop) but has still never appeared - even the website seems to have disappeared now (here's the archived version).
Table showing the various predictions made by David Evans (on Jo Nova's blog), which led to his promised papers, none of which never eventuated including his promised papers.
Curses! It's a conspiracy! The Fury is Back Thrice Over - a long HotWhopper article about a research paper on conspiracy theories (Stephan Lewandowsky et al 2015).
Confessions of deniers at Judith Curry's blog - HotWhopper article about the audience of the blog of a so-called "contrarian" scientist (aka climate disinformer).
Marginalised, alienated and put upon: climate science deniers are not innocent - more on wilful deniers

Greetings of the season, happy hols, stay safe

2020-12-24T20:39:00.003+11:00

As we approach the end of this unbelievably horrid year, my greetings are more muted.

I wish all of you a happy time, whether you're with friends, family or on your lonesome. There are better times to come (and undoubtedly worse times, too). Make the most of what you have and be careful. Stay safe.

This day last year (Christmas Eve in south eastern Australia) it was hot and smoky:

This year there's no smoke, just clear skies and a gentle summer breeze blowing. Lovely.

In closing, here's a pic of one of the friends I made this year.

Hottest November in Australia - during a La Niña!

2020-12-01T17:45:00.001+11:00

What can I say? This is climate change.

Figure 1 | November mean temperature anomaly Australia. Source: Bureau of Meteorology

We're in the midst of a La Niña so it's not meant to be hot like this, let alone the hottest November in the record.

Okay, for the purists and deniers instead of saying this *is* climate change let me say this is *expected* with climate change. No, it's really not expected. It's just what's happening.

How about this is *consistent with* climate change. Is it really? Is this really expected this year, in 2020, when emissions are lower because of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there's a La Niña?

I must ask you, what the heck will be "consistent with" or "expected" for the rest of this decade?

Election denial, epidemiology denial and climate science denial

2020-11-08T23:56:00.008+11:00

Congratulations to the people of the USA, who turned out in record numbers and finally got rid of Donald Trump, his family and the various remaining hangers on who've occupied the White House for the last (almost) four years.

There has been much celebration in the media, dancing in the streets, hope on Twitter and mockery on SNL. It seems surreal to celebrate a return to sanity. What this to-ing and fro-ing shows is both the fragility and the strength of democracy.

March toward reality or away from it?

Now I hate to be a wet blanket but I have to say while this was a terrific result, the march away from reality isn't over. There are populists rearing their heads all over the world, some of whom, like Trump, express views reminiscent of the worst leaders of the twentieth century.

We've seen how easy it is for a wannabe dictator to be elected leader and wreak havoc, including in what is arguably still the most powerful nation in the world today. This week's drawn out US elections demonstrated the fragility. Can you imagine any other country where a person like Donald Trump had 71 million people voting for him as President? If the answer is "yes", you see what I mean. Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison might not behave quite as badly as Donald Trump; however, if the UK and Australian governments were not parliamentary systems and were structured in the same way as the US, perhaps they would be every bit as bad. (Scott Morrison is an evangelical tongue-talker and has fairly close links to Qanon. His government is as inept and corrupt as we've seen for a while. I'll leave it to UK readers to comment on Boris' shortcomings.)

What I fear is similar to the concerns I have in Australia when it comes to COVID19. If you let your guard down you may end up with the world dropping into the agnotological abyss. Not just Dunning Kruger land but deep conspiracy nuttery. More on that in a minute.

So many pandemic experts, and boomer bashers

Here in Australia after a scary community outbreak and too many deaths, we've all but got rid of the corona virus - COVID-19. About the only place it's still showing up is in people arriving here from other countries. Those people are already in quarantine and will remain isolated until they get a clean bill of health. Yet as we've seen here in my home state of Victoria, it takes but one transmission beyond quarantine and the virus can run rampant in the community. The more doughnut days we have, the greater the risk we'll become complacent. (A doughnut day is a day with no new cases. A double doughnut day is a day with no deaths and no new cases.)

On the topic of COVID-19, I've been surprised at the number of people who accept (and research or write about) climate science who have bought into epidemiology and public health discussions. I should be more specific. Naturally COVID19 is on everyone's mind so of course it's normal to talk about it. No, what I really mean is how quite a number of people appear to be putting themselves forward as experts and analysts, jumping from climate science to epidemiology and virology. The temptation to do so is undeniable. The risk is that one ends up taking a position without being privy to sufficient facts, without having the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience.

The hottest arguments are around models and lockdowns. Models, well that's understandable. Pretty well all sciences use models. Lockdowns not so much. That's getting into a complicated mix of virology, epidemiology, public health, behavioural science, other social sciences, history, economics and ideology.

Some people have very strong views about what they're prepared to do to stop the virus spreading. I've come across a few people on the internet who would readily trade all boomers, in fact anyone older than 50, for their daily latte, mocha, espresso or flat white from their favourite barista. They'd rather see their parents dead than wear a mask.

I was a bit dismayed to be blackballed by a popular cartoonist, First Dog on the Moon, for a response I made to a Covidiot the other day (shades of Scott Adams). The person I was replying to (not the cartoonist) was of the view they'd rather risk another outbreak of the virus than wait just one more day to hear about loosening of our four months of restrictions. The cartoonist, who up till then followed me and whose cartoons are often terrific (if condescending), jumped into the exchange and told me not to be so patronising to the covidiot, then promptly blocked me for my surprised but restrained reply. It reminded me that one must be cautious about applying the halo effect. Just because someone agrees with climate scientists it doesn't mean they will agree with experts in other fields such as virology, epidemiology, public health, disease control, behavioural science or economics.

Our civilisation is fragile

Lots of little signs such as the Trump phenomenon and unexpected reactions to the pandemic, have made me more acutely aware of how fragile is civilisation. It's dawned on me that when it comes to the sort of changes we'll need to make to cope with climate change, we'll not just have to deal with normal deniers, we'll have to deal with people who might accept the science but who who cannot tolerate any constraints, however short-lived and temporary, on their individual freedoms. This will include not only libertarians, it will also include some progressives. It's one thing to talk the talk, we must be aware that not everyone can walk the walk.

Election denial is the same as climate science denial

While rational people can argue the best response to a pandemic (live with it, eradicate it, try to control it, have lockdowns in fits and starts, let the oldies die, wait for a vaccine, let everyone get it and the fittest survive, hope for eventual and magical herd immunity etc), there will probably always be deniers around. I haven't been to deniersville much this year. I did pop over before writing this article. What I found was election denial is as rampant and idiotic as climate science denial. The little conspiracy theorists at WUWT are convinced the US election results will be overturned as soon as the fraud is discovered. It reminds me how global warming will stop as soon as someone discovers how everyone around the world who recorded weather for the past 150 years or so managed to fiddle the numbers.

Well, that was a bit of a ramble, wasn't it. If it's disjointed that's because I'm out of practice, or that's my excuse for now. If it sounds like a whinge, then parts of it are and it feels good to get things off my chest. If you're keen for me to get back to climate science, I plan to. So much has happened this past year with ENSO, the Arctic and Antarctica, coral reefs, record-breaking temperatures, hurricanes and typhoons, wildfires and floods, and so much more, including deniers being paid far too much for jobs they can't do at NOAA.

Watch this space!

From the thoughts at WUWT

Before you go, do you want to see what's up at WUWT? Nothing much has changed. Charles Rotter, who I think has taken over from Anthony Watts (I could be wrong), is one of the election deniers and has opened an open thread on the US elections with these words:

Most of our readers realize that today’s media pronouncements are meaningless and we are in for a month or more of lawfare.

His invitation to conspiracy nutters was quite fruitful, yielding comments such as:

Mario Lento November 7, 2020 at 2:36 pm

Well a recount of fraudulent ballots might not be enough. We need to also figure out which ballots are bogus, and that will be more difficult.

John Galt III November 7, 2020 at 6:36 pm

I’m a chief election judge and Joe’s Party committed fraud on a pre-planned, systematic and industrial scale.

Timothy R Robinson November 7, 2020 at 3:49 pm

With Biden’s declining health, we don’t need to worry about him reaching the white house. Kamala will be sure he isn’t sworn in.
Many other things I could say, but the electorate will have final say in December.

Curious George November 7, 2020 at 3:16 pm

Biden decided to take an initiative and declared himself President without waiting for courts. Welcome to Banana Republic USA.

MarkG November 7, 2020 at 5:15 pm

Why are you so desperate to push Biden into the White House right this minute?
Is it because you know that there’s no way to hold the fraud together until January?
All it takes is for a few fraudsters to get arrested, and the others will start turning each other in to avoid jail time.

Apologies

2020-08-05T07:45:00.001+10:00

I woke up this morning to find that something has changed at Google and broke this blog.

I've reverted it to a standard theme so you'll find some things missing (like the menu).

It might be a while before I work this out, along with working out where to take blogging from here on in.

Till then, take care of yourself.

Update

As you can see, I've found out what Google broke. It was probably unintentional. In any case, I was able to use a workaround and get the blog back to normal.

Sou - 7 August 3:03 pm AEST

Anthony Watts' Russian steampipes move around the world - amazing!

2020-03-01T17:51:00.003+11:00

Every three or four years Anthony Watts (who owns a conspiracy blog called Watts Up with That, or WUWT) claims steam pipes in vast empty spaces in remote and largely unpopulated areas of Russia are what's causing global warming. This year he's at it again (archived here).

I don't need to write much about this, you can see it in pictures. In fact, Anthony himself put up a photo of steam pipes in a small town called Omyakon (population ~500), one of the coldest permanently inhabited places on earth.

The map below shows where the tiny settlement of Omyakon is located on the GISTEMP January temperature map . It's not in the middle of where the highest temperature anomalies were recorded.

Figure 1 | Temperature anomalies for January 2020 from the 1951-1980 mean, showing the location of Omyakon and its steampipes that conspiracy nutters blame for global warming. Data source: NASA GISTEMP

In fact, most of the huge hot area over Russia and parts of Europe has very low population density as you can see when you move the arrow to the right over the images below. (I've lined up the maps but it's a bit rough.)

Figure 2 | Maps showing mean surface temperature anomalies for January 2020 from the 1951-1980 mean; and population density. Data sources: GISS NASA and SEDAC, NASA

Anthony Watts decided there's a Russian conspiracy at NOAA, and wrote:

In a report generating substantial media attention this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) claimed January 2020 was the hottest January on record. In reality, the claim relies on substantial speculation, dubious reporting methods, and a large, very suspicious, extremely warm reported heat patch covering most of Russia.

How (and why) does Russia keep moving its steampipes?

Anthony doesn't explain how or why Russia moves its steampipes around the world each January - from sparsely populated regions of Russia to North America and further, then back again. I'll let you try to figure out for yourself how and why they do this.

In January 2019 Russia turned its steampipes down a bit and shifted their Russian steampipes they'd installed in the USA and Canada a bit west. (Move the arrow to the right to compare January 2020 with January 2019).

Figure 3 | Maps showing mean surface temperature anomalies for January 2020 and January 2019 from the 1951-1980 mean. Data source: GISS NASA

In 2018, Russia turned of quite a few of its steampipes, leaving any residents to suffer the freeziing cold. There were quite a few more Russian steampipes in North America in 2018.

Figure 4 | Maps showing mean surface temperature anomalies for January 2020 and January 2018 from the 1951-1980 mean. Data source: GISS NASA

In 2017 Russia had cut down its steampipe operations, but it didn't turn them off altogether. That was probably so it could vastly expand its steampipes in North America.

Figure 5 | Maps showing mean surface temperature anomalies for January 2020 and January 2017 from the 1951-1980 mean. Data source: GISS NASA

In 2016, when there was a big El Nino and the temperature anomaly was just a smidgen below that of this January (with no El Nino), Russia got rid of most of its steampipes, moving them from Russia to North America.

Figure 6 | Maps showing mean surface temperature anomalies for January 2020 and January 2016 from the 1951-1980 mean. Data source: GISS NASA

The WUWT waste heat conspiracy

Anthony finished his article with this, and no, he didn't tag it as satire:

It appears that the “warmest ever” January might simply have been influenced by Russian temperature data warmed up by waste heat. Maybe the U.S. House of Representatives will start an inquiry into Russian collusion to interfere with global temperature data and climate change legislation – but don’t hold your breath.

That reminds me of his "waste heat from the little warm pockets of humanity" he found in a tent in a remote and isolated part of the remote continent of Antarctica.

Warmest winter in Moscow

I meant to add a comment about some news items remarking that this past winter has been the warmest ever recorded in Moscow. I don't know if that was because of something going wrong with the steampipes or not /s.

In Moscow, people adjust to a winter without snow: 'It's like we're at a resort'

This is it. The average winter temperature in Moscow is positive for the first time in history, at +0.2°C, an anomaly of +6.3°C compared to the 1981-2010 average (-6.1°C), beating the previous record by 3°C (-2.8 ° C in 1961). @GeraldKutney https://t.co/IShtUXSe3c
— Markets vs. Climate🔻 (@FabreJrme1) February 29, 2020

From the HotWhopper archives

Denier weirdness: Russian steam pipes are causing global warming, sez Anthony Watts @wattsupwiththat - December 2013
Those Russian steampipes are back at WUWT - February 2016
Tectonic Anthony Watts moves continents using waste heat from little pockets of humanity! - September 2014

Hot enough for you? The faster it warms the hotter it gets

2020-02-19T15:25:00.001+11:00

An interesting if ominous paper was recently published in Nature Climate Change. It came out just before Christmas, at the height of the holiday season here in Australia while fires were raging. For some weeks I've been meaning to write about it. That moment has finally arrived.

The authors of the Nature Climate Change paper, Andrew D. King, Todd P. Lane, Benjamin J. Henley and Josephine R. Brown (from The University of Melbourne) tell us that it's up to us to a large degree (excuse the word play). We know that already, and we also know that recent history and current weather-related events in Australia, the UK, Africa and elsewhere demonstrate we've not yet been willing to take enough action.

However the authors weren't writing about our reluctance to do enough to save ourselves. They were in effect exploring what will happen if we can slow down global warming compared to if we let it continue to warm as quickly as it is. It probably won't surprise HotWhopper readers that the rate of warming makes quite a difference.

You may have seen the excellent series of articles in the Washington Post late last year: 2°C: Beyond the Limit: Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world. These articles were describing the impact of global warming in different parts of the world, where warming has already exceeded 2°C. On average, the world has warmed maybe a bit more than 1.1 °C above pre-industrial temperatures; however, some places are warming faster than others. This includes some ocean areas as well as land areas. Most of us live on land, so what happens on land is of particular interest.

As you may know, when the world is heating up, the land heats up faster than the ocean. This is because very large bodies of water have to absorb a huge amount of energy (heat) for the temperature to rise much whereas it doesn't take much energy to warm up the land surface. Specific heat capacity is a measure of a substances capacity to absorb energy compared to how hot it gets. It is defined as the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of a substance 1 degree Celsius (°C). Water needs a lot of heat to raise its temperature. Land doesn't need nearly as much.

The faster it warms the hotter we get

The authors of King19 decided to look at the different effects around the world when the climate is warming compared to when it's more or less stable. It's clear that the rate of warming makes a big difference. Their results indicate that as it warms it gets hotter on land compared to how hot it would be on land at the same global average temperature when the climate is in equilibrium. In other words, the land gets hotter the faster it warms. (I'm putting words into the authors' mouths here. It's fair IMO.)

A difference between 1.5 °C warmer at equilibrium and 2 °C warmer at equilibrium would certainly be noticed. However, it's the difference between how hot it gets during the transition to equilibrium that we'd notice a whole lot more.

As described in the abstract:

...more than 90% of the world’s population experiencing a warmer local climate under transient global warming than equilibrium global warming. Relative to differences between the 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming limits, the differences between transient and quasi-equilibrium states are substantial. For many land regions, the probability of very warm seasons is at least two times greater in a transient climate than in a quasi-equilibrium equivalent. In developing regions, there are sizable differences between transient and quasi-equilibrium climates that underline the importance of explicitly framing projections.

Transient vs quasi-equilibrium

The transient state refers to the state while change is happening, while the world is getting hotter. The quasi-equilibrium state is, as you can probably work out, a state where the climate is unchanging, is more or less steady.

Say the world is on average 2 °C hotter than in pre-industrial times. Now if it's come from 1 °C hotter (like now) and just hit 2 °C hotter on its way to 3 °C hotter, it's in a transient state. If it's been sitting at around 2 °C above and not varying much over time (no major forcings, just some internal variability) it's in a state of equilibrium. [The term "quasi-equilibrium" is used because that state is based on CMIP5 models for 2300 (mid-range greenhouse gas emissions - ECP4.5). The climate of the 2300s is not in full equilibrium, but getting close, hence "quasi-equilibrium".]

The land gets hotter faster until we reach equilibrium, then it cools a bit

What does this all mean? It means much of where we live will get a lot hotter until we stop warming the planet, then the land will cool down a bit as it reaches equilibrium with the ocean. That is, even while global surface temperature is steady, after warming stops, the hotter areas of land will cool a bit and the cooler parts of the oceans will keep warming a bit until equilibrium is reached.

The lead author, Andrew King, put it simply in an email, saying:

"For a given level of global warming, in a transient climate most land areas are warmer and experience more heatwaves than in an equivalent equilibrium climate with the same global temperature. So, if we were to hold the global temperature constant then most land areas would cool over time."

Land vs oceans

Consider what happens at 1.5 °C and 2 °C while the world is heating up, compared to the situation if the global surface temperature is more or less steady. While the world is heating up, land warms quickly and is out of sync with the oceans. In the transient 1.5 °C world, the continental land regions are warmer than they would be in a quasi-equilibrium 2 °C world. It's different for the slow warming oceans. With slow-warming ocean areas, the transient 2 °C world is cooler than the quasi-equilibrium 1.5 °C world.

The impact is illustrated below. The maps show the difference in temperature between transient warming and how warm it would be in a stable climate. Some of the oceans are cooler while most of the land is warmer in the transient climate compared to a climate at equilibrium.

Move the arrow to the right to see what happens in June to August and in the December to February period.

Figure 1 | Transient minus quasi-equilibrium difference. In a transient climate, where the world is rapidly warming, land areas are warmer and ocean areas cooler than in a stabilised climate. These two figures shows the pattern of temperature difference between a transient scenario relative to an equilibrium climate for both the June-August period (l) and December-February period (r). Source: Article by Dr Andrew King in Pursuit (The University of Melbourne)

More heat waves and hot seasons as the world warms

The research also indicates that there'll be a lot more severe heat events while the world is heating up than there will be after some sort of steady state temperature is reached. Where a hot season may be a one-in-ten year event in a quasi-equilibrium climate, in a transient climate this could be a one-in-five year event.

From the paper (my para break):

This is particularly true in boreal summer where, for almost all land regions of the world, the likelihood of a hot season is significantly higher in a transient climate compared with the equivalent quasi-equilibrium state. Regions with at least a doubling in the probability of hot summers in a transient climate compared with a quasi-equilibrium world of equivalent global warming encompass major cities including New York City, Istanbul, Baghdad, Seoul and Tokyo.

Although this is a global-scale analysis, one could infer that for these densely populated locations, the heat-related impacts of human-induced climate change would be lessened in a stabilized climate compared with a rapidly warming climate at the same level of global warming.

It's the coming generations who'll be hardest hit

Think what that means while global heating continues. If it keeps warming as it has, then the land will warm up faster, there will be more and worse heat waves, more severe fires, worse droughts etc. After the new climate approaches equilibrium, things should settle down a bit. The biggest upheaval will be during the transition. If society can survive that, generations far into the future will have a fighting chance.

This is an important piece of work because policy and planning people need to think about what's going to happen in their region over coming decades. If they merely focus on the likely scenario should the global temperature stabilise at 1.5 °C, 2 °C, 3 °C and hotter, they'll not be prepared for what happens along the way. Like the Australian Government this year, countries could be woefully unprepared for the changes to come during the transition to a new climate equilibrium.

The only comment I'll add is that the researchers discussed 1.5 °C and 2 °C. The world has not yet taken sufficient action to limit warming to 2 °C. We are still heading for 3 °C and hotter over the coming decades. It's time to take action and slow things down to limit the number and frequency of worse disasters than the ones we're now experiencing.

I'll leave you with this quote from the Pursuit article by Andrew King, which to my way of thinking really drives the point home about the importance of stabilising the climate:

In fact for some areas of the world, if we were to achieve the Paris Agreement goal of stabilising the climate at 1.5°C global warming, we would experience cooler average summer temperatures and fewer hot summers than we do in our current rapidly warming world after 1.1°C of human-induced global warming.

References and further reading

King, Andrew D., Todd P. Lane, Benjamin J. Henley, and Josephine R. Brown. "Global and regional impacts differ between transient and equilibrium warmer worlds." Nature Climate Change 10, no. 1 (2020): 42-47. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0658-7

How fast the planet warms will be crucial for liveability - article by the lead author, Andrew King, about the paper in Pursuit (The University of Melbourne)

2°C: BEYOND THE LIMIT: Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world - a series of articles at The Washington Post, September to December 2019

Judith Curry's temperature predictions - charted

2020-02-14T07:27:00.006+11:00

It's been brought to my attention that there's another set of ~~projections~~ guesses about global surface temperature floating about, this time from Judith Curry.

I don't have time to go into her "arguments" in detail. Suffice to say she seems to be hanging on to the failed "stadium wave" theory and has maybe tossed in a few other ideas as well such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation flavoured with a smidgen of "it's the sun".

Judith has put up three options for the temperature change over the next 30 years: warmest +0.7C, moderate +0.11C and coldest -0.5C.

What I will do is what she hasn't (for reasons that seem obvious to me). I'll put up some charts showing her guesses. I can't tell from her post what she's used as a baseline, so I've taken it as the average global surface temperature for 2019. I've also made the assumption her predicted change relates to the last year of the prediction. That is, her prediction of 0.5 cooling is that in 2050 the average global surface temperature will be 0.5C colder than it was last year.

I've simplified the predictions by assuming a steady change from 2019 to the final temperature predicted, based on the above.

The charts are below. Not up to my usual standard with captions and labels, as I've not got time for that. Each chart shows the actual mean global surface temperature to 2019 based on NASA GISTEMP and is in Celsius.

First, the annual temperatures, with Judith's predictions. This chart also shows the linear trend line from mid-1970s to 2019 i.e. from the most recent change in trend to the present (0.19 C per decade).

Next her "warmest" prediction, as a decadal chart:

The "moderate" prediction as a decadal chart:

And the "coldest" prediction as a decadal chart:

If you're wondering why the next decade in all of them is warmer than the previous actual, it's because of averaging over the decades and the fact I've assumed a steady change with Judith's predictions.

Feel free to add your two bobs worth in the comments.

Willis Eschenbach radiates more nonsense at WUWT

2020-01-21T03:31:00.003+11:00

I sometimes wonder at the shameless way deniers boast about their ignorance, particularly their lack of understanding of basic science. Willis Eschenbach is a prime example. He doesn't understand science and doesn't make any real effort to understand it. He balks at reading a basic textbook and I doubt he could bring himself to read a science website let alone scientific papers. Yet every now and then he'll decide he's come up with some brand spanking new notion that none of the hundreds of thousands of people who've studied a subject in depth have ever thought of.

Some time ago he figured out what every student (and interested layperson) knew long ago, that storms carry heat from the surface upwards into the atmosphere, thereby cooling the surface; his thunderstorm theory.

This week he's decided there are three what he calls "theories" to the greenhouse effect, demonstrating that he doesn't understand that radiation is the emission or transmission of energy. He was trying to attack a tweet thread by Gavin Schmidt and his attack was laughable (and very very longwinded).

After 1,149 words of what is presumably meant to be an introduction, Willis finally gets down to business and "starts", writing:

Let me start by saying he is badly conflating three very separate and distinct theories.

Theory 1) Increasing CO2 increases atmospheric absorption, which affects the overall temperature of the various layers of the atmosphere, and increases downwelling so-called “greenhouse” radiation.

Theory 2) In the short term, large changes in downwelling radiation change the surface temperature.

Theory 3) In the long term, small continuing increases in downwelling radiation lead to corresponding small continuing increases in global surface temperature.

Here the spoiler alert: I think that the first two of these are true (with caveats), but we have virtually no evidence that the third one is either true or untrue.

The "he" is Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Dr Schmidt understands more about climate than Willis could ever hope to learn. As you can tell, Willis doesn't even understand what radiation is or he'd never have split the above into "very separate and distinct theories".

In Theory 1, I wonder what Willis thinks is being absorbed by the atmosphere. Whatever it is, he decides it's "affecting" the overall temperature but he doesn't say how. Is it raising the temperature or lowering it? The words he uses are odd: "and increases downwelling so-called "greenhouse" radiation". Does he know what that means? I'd say not because he says that his Theory 2 is quite "separate and distinct" from his Theory 1.

His Theory 2 is that if radiation is transmitted downward it changes the surface temperature. Yet that's a corollary of his Theory 1, not a separate notion. He's already said that Theory 1 includes downwelling of radiation, so how can Theory 1 be separate and distinct from Theory 2. I can only conclude that Willis doesn't know what radiation is.

Going on to his Theory 3, the only difference between that and his Theory 2 is time. What he's saying is that after whatever his "short term" time has elapsed, physics stops working. That is, increases in downwelling radiation no longer warm the surface.

Being of a curious nature, I held my nose and dived into the article further, to see where his self-acclaimed brilliance led him. Well, after a lot more verbiage, Willis finally grandly announces his own notion. He claims the climate is stable. He goes even further and writes:

My theory, on the other hand, arose from my being interested in a totally different question about climate—why is the temperature so stable? For example, over the 20th Century, the temperature only varied by ± 0.3°C.

It's clear that Willis hasn't ever looked at what's been happening on this planet. Here's a chart of temperature change over the twentieth century, and I've included the temperature change for the entire record from NASA GISS, right up to the end of last year:

Data source: NASA GISS

Anyone who tries to portray that as "stable" is pulling your leg, making a joke. Anyone who portrays an increase of 0.7 C as varying "by ± 0.3°C" is misleading you. (I can imagine the yarn he tells to his "gorgeous ex-fiancee" when she asks where $20,000 disappeared to. He'll just say - oh, no problem. Our savings just varied by ± $10,000 in the last year. Happens all the time.)

Willis says the climate is stable (huh? No ice ages, no hothouses?) because of what he calls "emergent phenomena". Basically, he's claiming that the planet can't get hot even if less energy leaves the system. He doesn't "believe in" physics. Instead he boasts how he's invented "how the climate works", and points to his "40 or so posts" at the self-same climate conspiracy blog WUWT. I've commented on quite a number of those 40.

The last 670 words could have a heading "ode to Willis", where he argues for why he's a genius, despite being a college dropout, and why he's God's gift to climate science. He ends up with these gems:

I have great confidence in what I’ve written about my theory, for a simple reason. Watts Up With That is the premier spot on the web for public peer-review of scientific theories and ideas about climate. This doesn’t mean that it only publishes things known to be valid and true. Instead, it is a place to find out if what is published actually is valid and true. There are a lot of wicked-smart folks reading what I write, and plenty of them would love to find errors in my work.

So when those smart folks can’t find errors in what I’ve written, I know that I have a theory that at least stands a chance of becoming a mainstream view.

Ha ha ha - "the premier spot on the web for public peer-review" - oh my! It's a damn conspiracy theory blog, Willis. It's got nothing to do with peer review or science. The fans are scientifically illiterate. Most of them regard WUWT as nothing but their personal notice board on which to randomly pin their various crazed ideas, and which have no relevance to the article above their pinned notion.

Despite their illiteracy, in the past there were quite a few WUWT fans who didn't like Willis much. They might have left by now. Lots of people, even at WUWT, have pointed to flaws in his "40 or so posts" and all he does is spit the dummy. Very rarely he'll acknowledge an error, but mostly he just gets irate.

From the WUWT comments

I decided to see how deniers react to him effectively saying the climate never changes, when one of their favourite rallying cries is "the climate is always changing". I was disappointed. Nobody picked him up on that one. I have only scanned the comments and, as some of you have noticed, the quality is declining. (Yes, what you thought was impossible is in fact possible.) There was little discussion of Willis' article. Mostly it was used as an excuse to post various conspiracy theories, silly attacks on scientists and the usual denier nonsense.

There was one chap who calls him or herself Burl Henry, who wrote a novel notion (at least I've not come across it before). Instead of "it's the sun" he reckons "it's SO2":

I have yet to find any large change, either increase or decrease, which is not related to changing levels of SO2 in the atmosphere, and this is documented in the reference cited.

Nick Stokes found another problem with Willis' article (here) and politely pointed it out. Willis didn't take kindly to that and went off the rails in his usual style. Willis didn't and couldn't deny they were a problem for him. I doubt he understood.

Paul Driessen at WUWT suggests Australia remove its forests

2020-01-20T22:57:00.003+11:00

Wildflowers & snowgum

The weird get weirder. A bloke called Paul Driessen, whose job includes telling lies about climate change and bringing back smog to the USA, has come up with a wild idea and it's been posted at WUWT. This time he's really gone bananas. What he's saying is that Australia should get rid of all its trees, or those of the eucalypt species which is pretty much the same thing, and that would stop fires. In other words, he's suggesting we get rid of almost all our forests. That's one solution to stopping fires, though not original.

Don't believe me? Here's what he wrote:

In both California and Australia, people bemoan the loss of eucalyptus trees in fires. But many don’t want them removed or even thinned out.

Many don't want them removed? Really? How about almost no-one wants them removed. It's only a few shock jocks in Australia, and Paul Driessen, and probably Rupert Murdoch, who want to chop down all our forests. I can understand that people in California would regard the Australian blue gum as a pest - in California. (That's probably the only eucalypt they know.) What I don't understand is why anyone would want to remove all the eucalypts in Australia. All 894 varieties, coast to coast? (What about the koalas?)

In case anyone is thinking, well, Australia has forests dominated by other species, you'd be right. However, most of our forests are eucalypt forests. Here's a map showing the different types, courtesy the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES):

Many of the other species: acacia, melaleuca etc also burn quite readily. Should we chop them down as well? And what about the rainforests that have burnt for the first time in thousands of years? How about the rivers, firebreaks, cleared areas, areas burnt several times already? Maybe we should just cover the country in tar and cement!

Paul Driessen is really and truly suggesting we strip bare our continent of the tree species that defines us and our forests, the eucalypt, destroying the homes of birds, kangaroos, koalas, possums, gliders and protects so many species of other flora.

Deniers want us to chop down millions of hectares of forests and become a treeless nation.

No-one but a dastardly climate criminal could even consider chopping down these beautiful snow gums.

Deniers really are most peculiar.

BTW, I've been watching out for this and Paul is the first denier I've come across who says "CO2 is plant food" is one reason Australia's fires were so bad (those weren't his exact words).

Oh, and ignore the rest of his article, it's complete and utter nonsense. Paul got most of it from various wacko websites in the USA and people who know nothing about Australia (like himself). It's a mix of lies, conspiracy theories and nut-job politics that WUWT is known for (i.e. to anyone who has the misfortune to know it). Paul is pushing the crazy line that scores of people spent days hiking and climbing for miles deep into inaccessible parts of the Great Dividing Range, waited till they were caught in the middle of electrical storms, then set the forest alight. These people, he must assume, were highly coordinated and set off fires all over NSW and Victoria at the same time as lightning was shooting about. These arsonists who want to get rid of Australia's forests are very cunning, aren't they.

Next he'll be recommending we blow away all the clouds to stop the hailstones.

WUWT is not recommended for the sane.

More than 10 years on, Anthony Watts at WUWT is still befuddled by temperature anomalies

2020-01-17T23:05:00.002+11:00

It's hard to believe but poor Anthony Watts, despite all the help offered him over the years, is still totally befuddled, perplexed and bamboozled by the notion of temperature anomalies. You know he's not the brightest spark in deniersville yet you'd have thought that by now even he might have learnt something about temperature charts. But no.

The oddest thing is that he's unashamed of being numerically illiterate. He might even regard it as a strength. It means his readers have found someone, somewhere, who's dimmer than they are, and that could be why they keep coming back for more.

Today Anthony wrote about the global average surface temperature for 2019, saying at least in the USA it wasn't another "hottest year". That's a classic conspiratorial diversion tactic, by the way: focus on a detail and try to dispute the big picture.

Back to his troubles with temperature anomalies. Anthony complained he still can't figure them out, even after all these years of running the world's biggest baddest saddest climate conspiracy blog. He wrote:

In my opinion, the NOAA/NASA press release (and slideshow) is inconsistently presented. For example, they can’t even agree on a common base period for comparisons. Some graphs use 1951-1980 while others compare to 1981-2010 averages to create anomaly plots. NOAA and NASA owe it to the public to present climate data with a consistent climate period for comparison, otherwise it’s just sloppy science. NASA GISS has consistently resisted updating the 1951-1980 NASA GISS baseline period to the one NOAA and other datasets use, which is 1981-2010. GISS stubbornly refuses to change even though they have been repeatedly excoriated for keeping it.

As you know, Anthony's opinion isn't worth (I'm trying to think of an alternative to this saying), and his hoity toi (I meant to write "hoity toity") attitude makes him look like a fool. Different agencies use different baselines for different reasons. Once a baseline is chosen it's best to keep it. That makes it easier for researchers and others to compare data over time. Otherwise you'd have to keep checking the baseline used each time you went to use the data. It's really not that hard to understand and work with anomalies.

Edit: I neglected to comment on the last but one sentence in the above quote from Anthony Watts, where he made another blue. NOAA uses the twentieth century average as the baseline for its global time series, not the 1981-2010 average. It does use the period 1981-2010 for maps, but states:

The global maps show temperature anomalies relative to the 1981–2010 base period. This period is used in order to comply with a recommended World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Policy, which suggests using the latest decade for the 30-year average. For the global-scale averages (global land and ocean, land-only, ocean-only, and hemispheric time series), the reference period is adjusted to the 20th Century average for conceptual simplicity (the period is more familiar to more people, and establishes a longer-term average). The adjustment does not change the shape of the time series or affect the trends within it.

It's odd that Anthony didn't know that because he put up a map from NOAA that has the following written in big bold letters up the top: "0.95°C/1.71 ° F above 1901-2000 average".

Another big fat lie about temperature

Then comes the lie. Everyone familiar with global surface temperature changes knows that the coldest periods last century were in the first half of the century, yet Anthony wrote something wildly wrong and I don't know that anyone picked him up on it (dimwitted deniers that they are):

That 1951-1980 period just so happens to be the coolest period in the 20th century

Nope. Wrong! That 1951-1980 period was nothing like the coolest. In fact it was around 0.03 C warmer than the average of the 20th century.

Fig 1 | Global surface temperature for thirty year periods from 1880 to 2019. Data source: GISS NASA

Remember this is from someone who ridiculously pretends to know something about global surface temperatures. He doesn't know the first thing, does he.

Anthony goes on to explain why he doesn't understand anomalies. Or tries to. I think it might be something to do with different colours being used on different maps (NASA and NOAA). He shows one that goes from aqua to reddish brown and one that goes from a deeper blue through to brighter red. The first one has an anomaly scale from -4 K to plus 4 K, the next one from -5C to plus 5C, so maybe Anthony's not just confused by colours, he's confused by Celsius and Kelvin.

Anthony finally realises there's not much difference at all, even if you don't allow for different baselines. Since 1951-1980 average (used by NASA) is 0.03 C higher than the 20th century mean (used by NOAA), you'd expect NOAA's anomaly from the 20th century mean to be around 0.03 C lower than NASA's anomaly from 1951-80 average. And it is, as Anthony points out. He helpfully (or reluctantly) wrote:

The difference between the two analyses is NOAA @ 0.95°C/1.71 ° F and NASA GISS at 0.98 ° C/1.8 ° F

Just as expected.

Not daring to compare, So There!

There was little more Anthony could try to milk out of complaining the baselines are different, apart from saying the relentless rise in temperature is "trivial" (with some quote-mining games to show he doesn't understand the American language any more than he understands anomalies and trends). So he moved to the USA, which he said was cooler. So there!

Anthony Watts did a song and dance about the Climate Reference Network in the USA. He loves it it's so "pure" (even though it's subject to being homogenised as much as records from any other network, if warranted). He wrote, rather Trumpishly:

NOAA’s U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) has the best quality climate data on the planet, yet it never gets mentioned in the NOAA/NASA press releases. Commissioned in 2005, it has the most accurate, unbiased, and un-adjusted data of any climate dataset.

Well, of course it wouldn't get a mention when reporting global temperatures, or even when reporting historical temperature changes for the USA. CRN temperature analysis only begins in 2005, whereas other analysis dates back to 1895.

Another thing Anthony couldn't bring himself to do was show any chart comparing the analysis of these 114 or so weather stations to that for the hundreds of weather stations in the nClimDiv, which NOAA uses for historical data to the present. That's because they are almost identical. So, let me do it for him. (Note, the 2019 data for nClimDiv hasn't been added yet.)

Fig 2 | NOAA temperature anomalies for USA with CRN, nClimDiv and USHCN, from 2005 to 2019. Data source: NOAA

Almost no difference at all! I guess that means the historical data is fine as well.
So let's take a peep at that:

Fig 3 | NOAA temperature anomalies for USA with CRN, nClimDiv and USHCN, from 1895 to 2019. Data source: NOAA

I'm not going to spend time plotting the actual trend. If you want to do that the data is on the NOAA website. It's fairly clear there were some ups and downs but overall not much change until the 1970s. The hottest year for the USA was 2012 and the coldest year was 1917.

Now for the conspiracy theory

Not content to avoid plotting historical temperature data for the USA, and not content to avoid showing there's little difference between his "pristine" data set and the larger ones, Anthony proceed to set out his conspiracy theory and wrote:

While the U.S. isn’t the world, and the dataset is shorter than the requisite 30 year period for climate data, the lack of warming in the contiguous United States since 2005 shown in the graph above suggests that the data NOAA and NASA use from the antiquated Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) reflects warmer biases due to urbanization and adjustments to the data.

He then highlighted a poster he got someone to prepare for him back in 2015. It's now seven and a half years since he promised a paper on the topic, and it's not yet surfaced (do you like the wordplay?). Anthony promises a lot of things that he can't deliver. Remember the Open Atmospheric Society?

He's wrong and he must know it. Lots of people have told him so. Urbanisation makes no difference to the global or the USA temperature data once it's been processed. There have been studies of the US record (e.g. here) that demonstrate this, including one by Anthony Watts himself!

If you're scared by global heating, just change the scale

I'm fairly sure this comment from Anthony wasn't meant as a joke but it sure looks like one:

But here’s also something interesting. All of the temperature plots used to represent climate change are highly magnified. This is so variations of one degree or less are highly visible. Unfortunately, these huge variation often scare the public since they perceive them as “massive” temperature increases.

Fortunately, the NOAA online plotter allows adjustment of the vertical axis, and when the vertical axis of the climate data is adjusted to fit the scale of human temperature experience, they look less alarming.

Right. I'll bet that's what deep sea explorers do when contemplating going deep into the Mariana Trench. No biggie!

He added:

“Climate change” certainly looks a lot less scary when the temperature change is presented in the scale of human experience.

This is from the person who was close to the Camp Fire in California. And surely he's read about what's been happening in Australia - the deniers are all over those (they aren't real, they've happened before, it's arson, it's rained up north etc etc)

Seriously, these climate deniers will go to their grave swearing global warming is no big deal. They hate being scared so much they'd rather deny wildfires, floods, rising seas, melting ice, food price rises, climate migration and more rather than admit they are wrong.

CRN vs nClimDiv

By the way, you can compare the number of stations in CRN vs nClimDiv by moving the arrow across the image below. I haven't lined them up perfectly, it's just to give you the idea.

Figure 4 | Maps showing weather stations used by NOAA in nClimDiv and CRN. Data sources: NOAA - CRN and NOAA - nClimDiv

From the WUWT comments

I'm still getting back into the swing of blogging and don't have the energy or inclination to go through the comments. In any case, I'd best keep an eye on the local fire situation. A favourite spot of mine seems to be in the path of the fire. You may peruse them yourself. What I did see showed WUWT is getting worse the more the world warms.

From HotWhopper archives

Some of the links to images in some the older articles are broken. They still have gems in the text :D

Anthony Watts has discovered pristine US temperature (and MS Excel) - June 2015
On Plain Denial: Watts Dismisses His Own Evidence That is Counter to His Viewpoint - March 2013
Desperate Deniers Part 5 - Anthony "surface station" Watts flunks NOAA temperature chart 101 - January 2016
Improving the temperature record vs conspiracy theories at WUWT - September 2015
Desperate Deniers Part 4: Anthony Watts is shame-proof despite all his bloopers about NOAA - January 2016
Anthony Watts is foxed yet again by temperature anomalies - June 2017
Update: Anthony Watts Classic: those baffling temperature anomalies - May 2013
Confirmation bias and anomalous anomalies at WUWT - June 2013
On GISTemp, baselines and anomalies - June 2013

2019 was the second hottest year on record despite no El Nino

2020-01-17T16:38:00.001+11:00

Summary: 2019 was the second hottest year on record. December 2019 was the second hottest December on record. The last decade was the hottest decade on record.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for 2019 was 0.98 °C, which is just 0.04 °C cooler than the previous hottest - 2016.

Below is a chart of the average of 12 months to December each year. 2019 was 0.06 °C hotter than the 12 months to December 2017, which is the third hottest year.

Figure 1 | Annual global mean surface temperature anomaly - 12 months to December each year. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

Next is a chart of the month of December only. This December was 1.11 °C above the 1951-1980 average and was the second hottest December on record. It was 0.05 °C hotter in December 2015 which, unlike this past year, was in the middle of a strong El Nino:

Figure 2 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly for the the month of December only. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

The decades are getting hotter

As you would know, each decade is getting hotter and hotter. Each of the five decades since 1971-1980 has been hotter than the previous one. The chart below shows what's happening. It includes a line showing the mean for the 20th century. Note the last column only includes nine years - to 2019. Let's see what next year brings.

Figure 3 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly by decade. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

Where was it hot?

Last year was hot almost everywhere. The only year that was hotter was 2016, but that year there was more contrast. In 2016 there were hotter parts and colder regions compared to last year. The hot Arctic helped drive the average temperature in 2016.

Move the arrow at the left to the right to compare this year with 2016. Check out Australia, too, where 2019 was the hottest year on record.

Figure 4 | Maps showing mean surface temperature, anomalies for 2019 and 2016, from the 1951-1980 mean. Data source: GISS NASA

July 2019 was the hottest month on record

The chart below confirms July this year was the hottest month on record, hotter than August 2016. The chart indicates the changes in monthly temperatures and shows the hottest months of the year are in July and August. (Sometimes it's July that's the hottest month and sometimes it's August.) I added a dotted line to the chart to make it easier to see. As I said previously, that's especially notable because there was no El Nino this year, unlike back in 2016.

Figure 5 | Seasonal cycle of global surface temperature anomaly. The chart shows the temperature anomaly with respect to the 1980-2015 (°C) mean. It is derived from the MERRA2 reanalysis over 1980-2015 and shows how much warmer is each month of the GISTEMP data than the annual global mean. Source: GISS NASA

Year to date chart

Below is the final year to date progressive chart for 2019. What it shows is the average temperature for the year at each point on each separate line on the chart. The topmost line is 2016. The fat black line with dots is 2019.

For each year at January, the point is just the anomaly for January. At February, the point is the average anomaly for January and February. At July, it's the average of January to July inclusive - all the way to December, which is the average for the whole year.

Back in July I wrote:

It's not out of the question that 2019 will end up the second warmest year on record, ahead of 2017. (The temperature anomaly for the rest of the year would have to average 0.87 C for 2019 to equal 2017.)

The temperature anomaly for the rest of the year, from August to December, averaged 1 °C, so it easily beat 2017 for second place.

The 2019 line shows that the average for the year is 0.98 °C (the last big dot on the 2019 line). This is just 0.04 °C lower than the 2016 (1.02 °C). Unlike 2015/16, there was no El Nino this past year, at least not using Australia's BOM criteria.

Figure 6 | Progressive year to date global mean surface temperature anomaly. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

It's climate change on top of drought, heat and wind, not arson, that's behind Australia's fires

2020-01-08T12:43:00.000+11:00

Know what? If I see another know-nothing denier try to claim "it's not climate change it's arson" or "backburning" or "not enough prescribed burns" or "it's not happening", I'll scream.

I was going to deal quickly with "it's arson", then move onto prescribed or controlled burns. However, I'll now devote this article just to the arson furphy, because the false meme is appearing all over the place, even being insinuated in mainstream media. Some people are suggesting it's an organised disinformation campaign. I don't know about that, but it is being fanned by the usual crowd of deniers, including many from the USA and other places outside Australia. [Edit: I've added a tweet below, which expresses my disdain for the people spreading this meme.]

The people spreading lies about arson are dangerous, arguably worse than any arsonist.

The "it's arson" disinformers are downplaying the extreme hazard of fire and the huge risks of going into fire-prone areas when fire conditions are extreme or catastrophic (Code Red).
— Sou at HotWhopper (@Sou_HotWhopper) January 9, 2020

Let me be clear. Arson is not the reason for the catastrophic fires this summer. There has always been arson but never a fire season as bad as this one. These major fires are there because the bush is so dry and because it's been so hot. Fires need ample fuel, wind and an ignition. The fuel is ample, because even though there's not been much growth in vegetation because of the drought, what's there is dry and easily ignited. There've been enough windy days to fan the flames and spread the fires further. And there's been ignition, obviously. Mostly (in the case of the major fires), the ignition has been lightning.

Most major bushfires in Australia are started by lightning

Most major bushfires (forest fires) in Australia are ignited by lightning. They typically start in bushland that is difficult to access.

At a recent community meeting we were told the fires around here in north eastern Victoria were ignited by lightning. I saw some of the lightning.

The fire in Mallacoota was also reportedly started by lightning.

The huge Gospers Mountain fire in Wollemi National Park in NSW was started by lightning.

---------------
Update - there's more:

SA Police Crime Scene Investigators release pics of the likely point of origin of the Keilira fire last week, thought started by dry lightning strikes across the South East on Monday December 30.#FIVEaaNews pic.twitter.com/h2p95VlMwS
— Matthew Pantelis 🎙 (@MatthewPantelis) January 8, 2020

-------------

On 8 January 2003 there were 87 fires ignited by lightning, eight of which persisted and led to the with huge Alpine fires that year.

Lightning fires are a risk in summer in south eastern Australia. We can get lightning at any time of the year. In winter, which is our wet season, fires don't normally take hold. In winter, lightning is usually accompanied by rain and, in any case, the temperature is low and the bush is not as dry so fires don't spread far.

Summer is our dry season. Lightning storms can pass through with very little or no rain. Not every lightning strike will cause a fire. It depends on what's been struck. However, it only takes one tree catching fire and it will spread quickly if conditions are right.

This summer has seen the hottest weather ever and much of south eastern Australia is very dry, with large parts having been in drought for some years. Conditions for wildfires have been almost perfect. This has resulted in a huge increase in the number of fires in NSW. There has also been an enormous area burnt in eastern Victoria though the chart (see below) from GFED to 3 January 2020 doesn't reflect this. (It shows number of fires not area burnt.)

The area burnt in Victoria in 2003 (>1.3 million ha or 3.2m acres) can be seen here, and the area burnt in 2006 (~1.2 million ha or 3m acres) is shown here. So far this year, it's estimated the fires in Victoria have burnt more than 1.2 million hectares. The fires in Australia this season are estimated to have burnt at least 8.4 million hectares including 4.9 million ha in NSW.

Bushfires also create their own weather, and can even make lightning as described in an article by the Bureau of Meteorology:

Let me stress again, most of these large fires this summer were ignited by lightning. They have been exacerbated by climate change. Regardless, no matter what the source of ignition, whether natural, accidental, careless, reckless or deliberate, if conditions (dryness, heat and wind) had not been what they are, there would not have been anything like the catastrophe the world has seen unfolding in Australia.

Another thing worth considering is that sources of ignition are unlikely to have changed much over time. On the other hand, fire response has improved out of sight over the years, with huge advances in communications, fire-fighting technology and equipment, training and response management. If not for climate change making bad conditions worse, these fires would not have been anything like they are.

Why the deflection from deniers?

I don't know why some people are promoting the "it's arson" meme. Is it they can cope with the idea that people are capable of burning Australia by lighting a match but can't cope with the idea that people are capable of changing the climate by burning fossil fuels? Who knows.

I'm not saying there are not people who deliberately light fires. There are. There are also people who accidentally cause fires. When caught, all such people are subject to heavy penalties. In my home state, a person who intentionally or recklessly causes a bushfire can be locked away for up to 15 years (in NSW it's up to 21 years). A person caught lighting a fire that causes death can be sent to jail for up to 25 years.

Human activity can cause fires. Every year there could be hundreds of fires ignited by people, whether deliberately or inadvertently. Arsonists, people who deliberately light fires for whatever reason, exist and have probably always existed. They might want to collect insurance on a failed business or because they've overstretched their mortgage. They might be after revenge against someone so set their home or car alight. A few people just like fire, and set them in urban, peri-urban or, occasionally, rural areas. There have been homes burnt after arsonists lit fires.

There are fires caused accidentally by human activity. There were scores of lives lost in the East Kilmore fires after powerlines sparked a fire in strong winds on a catastrophic fire danger day. A recent fire that burnt Binna Burra Lodge in a precious area in Lamington National Park in Queensland has been attributed to a cigarette butt dropped by teenagers. The powerline fire and the cigarette fire wouldn't have taken hold or caused so much damage if conditions had not been so extreme.

Most fires lit deliberately or accidentally by people are quickly contained

Few people would hike into virtually inaccessible areas to deliberately start a major bushfire. They'd have to be suicidal as well as pyromaniacal. Most people who deliberately light fires do so near areas of population, and they are generally grass fires that are extinguished fairly quickly. Not always, but mostly. A 2006 report states (my emphasis):

Human action - most deliberate bushfires occur within or near the most densely populated regions of Australia. Consequently, the majority of deliberate fires occur along the coastal fringe, where climatic conditions are generally milder, and the period of adverse bushfire weather is shorter. Although they have the potential to burn out of control and cause immense damage, overall, the majority of deliberately lit fires are small in area (less than one to two hectares).

Analysis of a number of different data sources indicates that the highest rates of recorded deliberately lit fires during adverse bushfire weather occur in areas, regions or jurisdictions with highest rates of recorded deliberate fires generally.

A key question for bushfire arson prevention is whether there is a greater risk of deliberate fire lighting during periods of extreme weather conditions. This is a difficult question to answer with any degree of accuracy, as many fires are suspicious but not confirmed as arson incidents, and the intention of those who light fires is rarely known. A range of data shows that as the fire danger rating increases, recorded deliberate fires account for a smaller proportion of all bushfires. The increased risk of accidental and natural fires under more adverse conditions and the absence of definitive data on causal factors means that there is a lack of conclusive evidence to indicate a systematic increase in deliberate firesetting during these peak periods of risk.

Use and abuse of statistics

Although by far the majority of "it's arson" claims are unsubstantiated (and nonsense), I've seen people quote and misquote statistics from various sources, including some people who should know better. Let's have a look.

---------------------------------
Update - Here is information on the latest stats from Victoria, after enquiries made by Josh Butler:

hello I'm back. Update from Victoria Police - some media reported VIC charged 43 people for bushfires in 2019 - BUT not true!

Cops say 43 *offences* - BUT only 21 charges and *12 people* - and those stats are only for the year to Sept 2019!

(full story soon, stay tuned) pic.twitter.com/D1bbsfBxTR
— Josh Butler (@JoshButler) January 9, 2020

---------------------
Below is a chart showing arson offenses recorded, from the Crime Statistics Agency (Victorian Government). The bushfire arson is the bottom line (light grey). It peaks in the summer season, but that would probably be in part because fires lit in summer attract attention whereas fires lit at other times of the year go out quickly and/or don't spread. (As always, click to enlarge.)

In the year ending 30 September 2016, "there were 46 unique offenders apprehended by police for bushfire offences. Of these offenders, more than half (n=26) were known to police for prior offending before committing their bushfire offence, and 16 had previously committed an arson or criminal damage offence before causing a bushfire. Bushfire offenders were predominantly male, making up 91.3 per cent (n=42) of all offenders, and 56.5 per cent (n=26) were aged between 10 and 19, with the mean age of 23.6."

This number represents around 0.0074% of the population of Victoria at the time (6.2 million). There would also have been suspicious incidents where no-one was charged with an offense.

In NSW it's been reported that 24 people have been charged with deliberately lighting bushfires this fire season. In addition, action has been taken against 53 people "for failing to comply with a total fire ban and against 47 people for discarding a lighted cigarette or match on land."

There are suggestions a fire at Jindabyne last Friday may have been deliberately lit.

The report said that none of the fires currently on the south coast of NSW were related to those charges.

Although it was 24 people who've been charged with lighting fires, that SMH report said a total of 183 people had legal action taken against them, which might be the source of the mysterious "200 arsonists" that keep popping up. I don't know what the missing numbers relate to (24+53+47=124), it could be that some people were charged with more than one offense. Edit: It's been pointed out my speculation makes no sense and it doesn't. I'll try again. This report says "legal action" includes cautions, not just charges, so the missing numbers could be people cautioned not charged.

Another point worth making is to reiterate that most fires lit by people occur near populated areas, unlike the major fires currently in Victoria and NSW, which started in remote bushland. The word "bushfire" is often applied to mean any fire, including grass fires. I prefer to reserve the term bushfire to a fire in the bush (a forest). Grass fires are quite different. They travel much faster than bushfires but can also be contained more easily. (In remote areas of the outback, grassfires and desert scrub fires will usually be left to burn themselves out.)

More to come

There is a lot more that could be and is being written about this year's fire season. There will be inquiries and maybe a Royal Commission or two. I'll possibly write more myself. (I'm thinking about an article to dispel another lie that's being pushed. Some deniers are blaming hazard reduction so as to avoid confronting how badly we're changing the climate. Maybe I'll get to that later.)

Note: Where I live there's a Watch and Act in effect. That's one step up from Advice and one step down from Evacuate Now. Our town, which should be full of tourists, feels strangely quiet. Visitors have left and so have a lot of residents. It's not just the fire risk, it's also the smoke which has prompted people to leave. We can avoid the fire risk by driving to a safe town 90 km or more distant. It's not as easy to avoid the smoke because those same towns are also affected by smoke.

References and further reading

Arson in NSW - an article from January 1990 from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (Arson is nothing new!)

Spotlight: Arson Offences - Crime Statistics Agency, Victoria, 2016

Bushfire weather - Bureau of Meteorology, Australia

When bushfires make their own weather - Bureau of Meteorology, Australia, January 2018

Bots and trolls spread false arson claims in Australian fires ‘disinformation campaign’ - article by Christopher Knaus at The Guardian, 7 January 2020

Fires misinformation being spread through social media - ABC News, 8 January 2020

Debunked Australian Bushfire Conspiracy Theories Were Pushed by Alex Jones, Murdoch Media - By Justin Mikulka at DeSmogBlog, Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Ducat, Lauren, Troy McEwan, and James RP Ogloff. "Comparing the characteristics of firesetting and non-firesetting offenders: are firesetters a special case?." The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology 24, no. 5 (2013): 549-569. https://doi.org/10.1080/14789949.2013.821514 (pdf here)

2019-20 Australian bushfire season - MODIS data on the recent fires with historical comparisons, from the Global Fire Emissions Database. (h/t Graham Readfearn)

Record-breaking 4.9m hectares of land burned in NSW this bushfire season - article by Naaman Zhou at The Guardian, 7 January 2009

Fires in Victoria destroy estimated 300 homes, former police chief to lead Bushfire Recovery Victoria - By Kevin Nguyen and Ariel Bogle at ABC News, 7 January 2019

Bushfires lit deliberately during adverse bushfire weather - Bushfire Arson Bulletin, Australian Institute of Criminology, December 2006

Patterns in bushfire arson - Bushfire Arson Bulletin, Australian Institute of Criminology, November 2009

Past bushfires - A chronology of major bushfires in Victoria from 2013 back to 1851 - Forest Fire Management, Victoria

Bushfire - Alpine Region and north-eastern Victoria - Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, January 2003

Fire Scars in Australia’s Simpson Desert - NASA Earth Observatory, November 2002

120 years of Australian rainfall - Bureau of Meteorology interactive poster online

HotWhopper

2019 goes out with many bangs - Australia's hottest year and hottest decade on record

2020-01-02T09:22:00.000+11:00

Australia has just had another "hottest year" on record beating the last by quite a way. The average mean annual temperature was a huge 1.52 C above the 1961-1990 mean. The average maximum was a whopping 2.09 C above and the average minimum (not a record) was 0.95 C above the 1961-1990 mean.

I've plotted all these on the same vertical axis for comparison. Scroll over the charts to see the data labels:

Figure 1 | All Australia annual maximum surface temperature anomaly. The base period is 1961-1990. Data source: Bureau of Meteorology, Australia

Figure 2 | All Australia annual mean surface temperature anomaly. The base period is 1961-1990. Data source: Bureau of Meteorology, Australia

Figure 3 | All Australia annual minimum surface temperature anomaly. The base period is 1961-1990. Data source: Bureau of Meteorology, Australia

The trend in the maximum temperature since 1951 is 2.2 C / century, in the mean is 2.0 C/century and in the minimum is 1.8 C/century. I figure that means our days are heating more quickly than the nights and heat waves are getting hotter. Well, we know heat waves are getting hotter. We've just had the record broken twice in one week, and by a long way. It could also reflect seasonal changes. I'll see if I can find out more from the good people at the Bureau or do some more digging myself.

The chart below shows the change in the decadal temperature for maximum, mean and minimum. Notice how the position of the maximum shifts - it's now rising fastest of the lot. Not good.

Figure 4 | All Australia decadal temperature anomalies. The base period is 1961-1990. Data source: Bureau of Meteorology, Australia

The "bangs" in the title is a reference to the horrific fires here. People in seaside towns along the coast in eastern Victoria and south-eastern NSW could hear the LPG gas bottles exploding along with houses and trees, as the fires tore through the townships. (In places where there's no natural gas piped in, people usually have gas cylinders next to the house.)

Australia is burning

2020-01-02T00:47:00.000+11:00

Fires in East and Far East Gippsland and the high country exploded on Monday. We were warned.

Some people who I thought would have known better were sceptical of the warning from Emergency Services to leave Far East Gippsland. After all, it's a huge area, was jam-packed with holiday-makers, and it's on the coast (water puts out fire, right?). They may have neglected to factor in a number of things:

First, the fire services know what they are doing. If they tell people to leave they have good reason for doing so. Their worst nightmares became real, as you've probably heard by now.

Second, there is only one major road through that whole area, the Princes Highway. It's around 250 km from Bairnsdale (the Victorian town just outside the evacuation zone) to Mallacoota, the easternmost town in Victoria. Much of the road is through national and state forest and densely wooded. The road has some sections where there are three lanes (two going, one coming) but it's mostly just two lanes. Towns are small and far apart. The road is mostly winding and hilly. You'd normally need to allow at least three hours to traverse it, then it's another three and a half hours to Melbourne. (The nearest town to the north from Mallacoota is Pambula, about 1 1/2 hours drive but the roads north are also closed.)

Thirdly, and this is related to the second point, it's common to get stuck behind a large vehicle that slows down going uphill, or a car towing a caravan that travels below the speed limit (100 kph except through towns). The number of people in this picturesque coastal region swells by tenfold or more over the school summer holidays. Imagine having ten thousand visitors leaving Mallacoota to head to Melbourne, plus more from all the other small towns on the way, and getting trapped by fire on the highway.

Right now, the tiny town of Club Terrace on the main highway has been burnt out. Cann River on the main highway remains inaccessible and the people trapped there have run out of food and have no power or communications. Mallacoota is almost 30 km off the main highway, and the road has just been cleared for emergency vehicles only. Normal traffic can't get through and even if it could, people would not be able to get down the highway. The only other route would be north, but that road is also closed. You can see how people are trapped where they are on the VicRoads map below, with the red dots being road closures (click to enlarge it).

In the map above I've shown the direction of Melbourne and Sydney, but this is the scenic route, not the normal route between those two cities. Most people driving from Melbourne to Sydney or vice versa would take the more direct inland route up the Hume Freeway, which bypasses towns and is a four lane divided highway once you leave either city (could be six or eight lanes in Melbourne and Sydney).

On top of the terror of raging fires, a lot of power is out as well, which affects phones, refrigerators, air con etc. It could be out for days yet and longer in some areas. The backup batteries on some mobile towers also ran out or maybe the towers got burned. Until it's safe to go in and assess the situation, the telcos and electrical distributors won't be able to begin repairs.

Because these fires are mostly in bushland they will go on for weeks, like the ones in NSW that are smoking up Canberra and Sydney. It's dangerous and difficult to get into the forests. Firefighters focus on protecting lives and property, but can't protect all property (or lives). These areas are sparsely populated normally so there wouldn't be a lot of local volunteers compared to the need. That means there'll be volunteers from distant areas and heaven help their own local communities if fires break out there.

That's not to say people will be stuck away from home for weeks. There are ships going to pick up people trapped in Mallacoota, for example, and maybe some other towns; and there's talk of helicopter rescues. A top priority will be to open the roads again and hope there are not too many more days like Monday this summer. (This Saturday isn't looking too promising and there's a lot of summer to go, so no guarantees). For residents who've lost their homes and farms and businesses, it will be a long road to recovery. Hopefully there will be tradespeople willing to relocate temporarily to help rebuild. The forests will take even longer to recover. Some might not.

I've not yet mentioned the awfulness of the fires in our own region. The Walwa fire not far to the northeast of here has caused a huge amount of destruction in Corryong and the news is just starting to trickle in. [Apart from a very smoky summer, we're fine here in the Kiewa Valley. There have been a few fires this summer, but nothing too dramatic and they are either "contained" (i.e. not spreading), "controlled" (i.e. whole perimeter is secured and no breakouts expected) or extinguished.]

There's a good article by Nerilie Abram in Scientific American about climate change and fires. The tweet about it showed there are still a few deniers floating about. Few firefighters would doubt the world is warming and fire behaviour is changing. (WUWT hasn't mentioned the fires. Whoever's writing for and running the blog these days probably wants to avoid any clear evidence that would upset climate conspiracy theorists.)

Most deniers know next to nothing about wildfire. Some make up stuff about "lack of backburning", confusing it with prescribed burns for hazard reduction. (Backburning is where firefighters fight fire with fire, setting the forest alight ahead of the main fire when conditions allow it, to "burn back" into the fire.) Some blame it on the "greens" (who don't run any government in Australia so can't be blamed for anything, let alone a non-existent "crime"). I believe the allegation is along the lines of "greens won't let us beer-swilling or more likely cocoa-drinking deniers chop down all the trees and cover the entire country with concrete". As if these cocoa-drinking deniers would know what to do with a chainsaw or have a clue about mixing concrete anyway. Some deniers say "we've always had fires", which is like being in the middle of the worst cyclone on record saying "but we've always had rain and wind". There are probably some deniers who doubt there are any areas burning in Australia.

I've dug out some old images of fires from past years. 2013 was known as "the angry summer". 2020 will be the angrier summer, with worse heatwaves and worse fires. The big difference this year is not just the number of fires, but the location and the ferocity. The east coast of Australia is heavily populated.

Here is a video of a terrifying experience of firefighters in NSW. Warning - avoid if you're prone to nightmares about wildfire:

The crew from Fire and Rescue NSW Station 509 Wyoming recorded this video showing the moment their truck was overrun by the bushfire burning South of Nowra. The crew was forced to shelter in their truck as the fire front passed through. #NSWFires #ProtectTheIrreplaceable pic.twitter.com/Hb0yVrefi9
— Fire and Rescue NSW (@FRNSW) December 31, 2019

There is a lot more that could and will be written about this summer, including the abysmal non-reaction from the Australian government. Scott Morrison is the Prime Minister who trotted off for a holiday in Hawaii while his home state was burning to a crisp. He came back, got some photo ops with a few firefighters then, having figured he'd done enough on that score, threw a new year's eve party and went to the cricket. He is adamant he's not going to do anything more to reduce carbon emissions. (Some speculate it's on religious grounds. He's a member of a fairly small and suspect "religious" congregation.)

On that unpromising note, let me change the subject and wish you all a Happy New Year, or at least a fulfilling and satisfying year.

References and further reading

Australia’s Angry Summer: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like - article by Nerilie Abram, Scientific American, December 31, 2019

Australia's Angry Summer - HotWhopper, March 2013

Corryong fires - via Australia's national broadcaster, the ABC

NSW fires - via the Sydney Morning Herald

'Not like other bushfires' - from The Age

Thousands forced to take refuge on Australian beach as deadly wildfires close in - from Washington Post

Why the Fires in Australia Are So Bad - from the New York Times

Australia fires: nine dead and hundreds of properties destroyed, with worse to come - The Guardian

Australia fires: Death toll rises as blazes destroy 200 homes - BBC

Season's greetings to all

2019-12-24T13:31:00.000+11:00

A short, sweet and old-fashioned greeting to everyone.

I'm sorry I've not been blogging much this past couple of years, but fear not (or fear, depending who you are), I shall return in 2020.

Here is a picture of my most Christmas-y plant - Little John Callistemon, which keeps getting better and better each year and thrives on very light pruning and general neglect.

And another, this time a snapshot of the next door neighbours' decorations. They have been entertaining the local children (large and small) and raising money for local charities for decades and continue to do so despite the fact that Santa suffered a stroke some time ago, which has been quite debilitating for him. The photo doesn't do justice to the lights, which look amazing. Santa's daughter made the kangaroos :)

Happy holidays wherever and whoever you are, especially to all the courageous men and women fighting fires around the country and not forgetting all the people supporting them.

Stay safe.

Fires - follow your plan but expect the unexpected

2019-12-21T01:50:00.004+11:00

From Mount Beauty Dec 2006

The fires across Australia this year are horrific. Because the smoke is inundating the biggest capital city (not good), people are taking notice (which is good). The fires this season are probably vying for the worst ever experienced in this country. There will be worse to come with more global warming, so it's important to be prepared.

I expect there are a lot of people who've never had an up close and personal experience with fires or smoke, so I figured I'd put some thoughts down from my own experience. I'm not a fire expert but I've been through a few huge fires in my time, including three big ones this century. (If you've got better or different advice, based on your knowledge and experience, don't hesitate to say in the comments below.)

Unlike the current fires, the big ones that threatened our town were large and slow burning in the main, with some exceptions. Like most of the current fires, two were started by lightning. More on that in a bit.

Smoke hazard: One thing with fires in the bush that seem to go on forever (weeks not days), is the smoke. This causes problems for communities - you can't see flames if you can't see, which adds to anxiety. Visibility can get to a few metres some days. You can't breathe properly, your lungs hurt and your eyes suffer. Community meetings can be frustrating when you're told - well we can't see the fire front so we can't say how far it is from anywhere.

Smoke from a local fire.

Smoke also causes problems for firefighters. Planes and helicopters have trouble with visibility and might not be able to be used. Everyone, especially firefighters, suffer smoke inhalation. Firefighters might not know where to best target their efforts.

Smoke cloud - Mount Beauty 2006

I'd advise wearing a P2 mask, which filters out the worst smoke contaminants. Don't worry about looking uncool - you might even set a trend and make mask-wearing the latest and greatest fashion. It beats damaging your lungs and worse.

Embers: Especially when it's windy, embers can be carried kilometers from the fire. On a (relatively) clear day, you can see the spot fires starting up ahead of the main fire. If you're trying to protect your home and there's an ember storm, it will be almost impossible to keep up.

Dropping fire retardant on a fire
on a hill behind our house.

Water: It can be tempting to stay to protect your home. You've got hoses out and bins and buckets filled with water, and lots of towels or hessian bags or blankets. You've filled every bath and basin. You've blocked and filled all the gutters with water. You think you'll be fine if you stay. The problem comes if you're relying on town water coming out of the tap, and everyone else in town does the same. Then, because everyone's pouring out gallons of water at the same time, the town's water pressure drops or dries up altogether.

Or maybe you're in a region where there's drought (much of Australia), and there's little to no water available. Helicopters and planes use water from local dams, but in a drought the dams might all be empty. Or maybe you're relying on water in a tank - except it's so hot the tank has melted. Or it could be you're using a pump to get water, but the pump stops working.

After the fire passes, the town water supply might be contaminated, especially after the next rain that washes everything that burnt into the water supply. Be prepared to get bottled water or, if you're lucky and there's still tap water, to boil it for the next few weeks.

Heat: I'm not talking about hot weather. Yes, indeed, hot weather can be deadly. Some places here are seeing maximum temperatures approaching 50C (122F). What I'm talking about is heat from the fire. If you've ever been near a bonfire you'll understand what I mean.

Whatever you do, make sure you wear protective clothing. (Look at what the firies wear even in unbelievable heat.) Don't wear thongs (flip flops), or shorts and singlet. Don't wear clothes made of flammable material. Go for wool or some other fire-resistant material with some insulating property. Wear long sleeves, long pants, gloves, boots and socks, and a mask. You'll get hot but you'll be less likely to get radiation burns. (If you've got a working hose then, as a last resort, spray the water to form a barrier between you and the flames.)

Wind: There is the normal wind that comes from changes in air pressure. A shift in that wind will change the direction of fire. It could change a fire front from being 200 m wide and heading east (fanned by a westerly wind) to a fire front 5 km wide and heading north (fanned by a strong southerly change).

There is also the wind created by the fire itself. When the fire is vigorous or fast moving, it can create its own weather. This makes an already unpredictable fire extremely unpredictable and dangerous.

Roads: You've finally decided enough is enough and it's too dangerous to remain, so you jump in the car or sturdy ute and head for anywhere but the fire. Problems you might encounter are that you can't see where you're going because of the smoke; or worse, you can't get through the road because of fallen trees. This is a huge problem if there are only one or two roads, which is the case in many areas.

The moral is, don't wait. Leave early.

Communications & electricity: We're used to picking up the phone, getting on the internet, watching television or tuning into the radio. In a big fire, communications towers can be destroyed and there can be power outages. You've been warned.

Edit - take cash: I should have added, make sure you've enough cash for food and petrol (gas). If you're trapped and the power is out, the ATMs and EFTPOS and credit card machines probably won't work. You might not be able to buy petrol or food but you'll give yourself a better chance of doing so. [Sou - 2 Jan 2020]

Firefighters: In much of Australia, fires on properties outside of the major cities are fought by organised volunteers, except for government land, where they are fought by government workers. Volunteer firefighters, like Victoria's CFA and NSW RFS are mostly men and women who live and work in country towns and on farms. It used to be they'd go out and put out a haystack fire, or a grass fire that might burn for a day or so. Now they can be giving up their work and income for weeks on end, fighting fires in their own district or traveling far from home and helping protect private property from megafires elsewhere. Not only are they giving up income, their employers (if they aren't fighting fires) are having to do without staff. Families have to make do on less income and with less support.

Some of our local fire fighters looking after us while there's a fire up the hill. Thank you.

Then there's a problem that probably occurs too often. The local fire crew is off fighting a fire in the next valley (or another one 500 km away), and a fire breaks out in their home district, but there aren't enough people or equipment to fight it because they're all off fighting a fire elsewhere.

You rarely hear firefighters complain. Firefighting and emergency services are what they volunteer to do, and they are committed to it. In my view the system will need to change long term, and we should be compensating them. Until then (and after then), just bear in mind that firefighters (whether volunteers or government) will probably be tackling the fires with the following priorities: save lives first, then save property, then save bushland and, occasionally, wildlife.

Most people are aware and responsible when it comes to bushfires. Sometimes people can be unthinking, however. People who put themselves in harm's way, resulting in firefighters coming to their rescue, might be not just risking their own lives, they might be preventing the firefighters from saving lives elsewhere.

On that note, don't go gawking. You'll not just be risking your own life, you'll be cluttering up the road and endangering emergency responders as well as people who may be fleeing for their lives.

Managing emotions: Unless you've got no emotional capacity, you'll most likely be affected in one way or another if you've been through a fire or know people who are. Long drawn out fires take their toll. You're woken in the night by the loud cracking of exploding trees, or you can't get a decent night's sleep for weeks on end because you never know if the fire is far enough away or if it's working it's way down the hill behind you. You'll probably also find yourself becoming addicted to the radio. (You'll have dug out that old transistor radio and picked up some spare batteries, to tune into the emergency broadcast service on the local ABC.)

While long drawn out fires can heighten anxiety, immediate fire danger can elicit panic, or maybe a deceiving calm. You might think you're behaving rationally and with a clear head. Unless you're trained and have experience with disasters (and maybe even then), despite feeling calm and rational you risk making poor decisions.

If you've already got a plan (and you know you should) then follow it. Don't change things at the last minute.

Weeks, months, even years after living through a disaster, people can be affected. It might be post-traumatic stress or it might be a shadow of PTSD (not full blown). (Be prepared the following autumn to get a rush of adrenalin when you see leaves fall from trees, before you realise they are just autumn leaves not embers.)

Eerie colours - 2006 fires.

Implement your fire plan: If you're advised to get the hell out, do so. Grab your pre-packed bag that has water, masks, survival gear, protective clothing. Round up your family and put all your pets in their cages and into the car. Check you've got your wallet and phone and car keys. Jump in the car (which you've kept charged or full of fuel), do a final head count, and head for the nearest safe place. (You have looked up the designated safe places, haven't you. You know where they are.)

Whatever you do, don't go back home until the all clear has been given. That could kill you (and has killed people).

Before finishing, a word about deniers. They are dangerous (as well as all their other flaws). I've seen deniers claim "this is nothing new". That's wrong. Fires today are worsened by climate change. Each decade brings worse fires. The fires this season could well be the worst in Australia's history. The more prepared we are, the better the chance that while they might be the worst by many measures, they won't be the deadliest.

Another thing I've seen is deniers still trying to argue there's some sort of scientific conspiracy and that Australia isn't really that hot, or the records have been altered to make out it's got hotter than it really has - which is as ridiculous a notion as it sounds.

Then there are people claiming the fires were lit by people. Maybe some were, but the biggest and worst fires were caused by lightning. In any case, in catastrophic fire conditions it doesn't matter where the spark comes from. When weather conditions are not conducive to fires, whether they are started by lightning, a train, a power line, an angle grinder or an arsonist, they cause a lot less harm.

Final word: Lives are worth a lot more than houses, or art works, or photographs, or jazz collections, or whatever might cause you to delay or hesitate to leave. Too many people have lost their lives by remaining. Few people lose their lives by leaving early when a fire threatens.

Final final word: I hesitated a bit before writing this up. I'm not an expert on fire or disaster management. However, I've been through some major fires in recent years and I've not seen anything much like this on the web, despite the fires raging. It might be food for thought to someone.

HotWhopper

The last 10 years are the hottest ever, yet deniers are still in denial

It's the increase in greenhouse gas that's causing warming!

Cold blasts of hot air from the past

Where was it hot in 2022?

Victor Venema, climate scientist, valued friend to many

Email went down, now it's back

We've got to get serious about climate, we've wasted too much time

Further reading

Alert for HotWhopper email subscribers to resubscribe

Beware of internal conflicts, rivalries and toxic behaviour polluting climate action

Welcome - and please help the world address the problems of climate change

Further reading

Where to from here?

Everything climate disinformation from the climate conspiracy-theorists at WattsUpWithThat

Questionable claims from the outset

Driven by jealousy? Competing with his employer, the Heartland Institute?

WUWT is taking tips from Skeptical Science. Will it backfire?

Everything climate disinformation has already been debunked

References and further reading

Rating climate science deniers to decide how/if to engage

Why categorise deniers?

1. The uninformed

2. The misinformed

3. Wilful deniers (including wilfully ignorant)

4. Climate disinformers

And then there's the Murdoch empire

References and Further Reading

Greetings of the season, happy hols, stay safe

Hottest November in Australia - during a La Niña!

Election denial, epidemiology denial and climate science denial

March toward reality or away from it?

So many pandemic experts, and boomer bashers

Our civilisation is fragile

Election denial is the same as climate science denial

From the thoughts at WUWT

Apologies

Update

Anthony Watts' Russian steampipes move around the world - amazing!

How (and why) does Russia keep moving its steampipes?

The WUWT waste heat conspiracy

Warmest winter in Moscow

From the HotWhopper archives

Hot enough for you? The faster it warms the hotter it gets

The faster it warms the hotter we get

Transient vs quasi-equilibrium

The land gets hotter faster until we reach equilibrium, then it cools a bit

Land vs oceans

More heat waves and hot seasons as the world warms

It's the coming generations who'll be hardest hit

References and further reading

Judith Curry's temperature predictions - charted

Willis Eschenbach radiates more nonsense at WUWT

From the WUWT comments

Further reading from the HotWhopper archives

Paul Driessen at WUWT suggests Australia remove its forests

More than 10 years on, Anthony Watts at WUWT is still befuddled by temperature anomalies

Another big fat lie about temperature

Not daring to compare, So There!

Now for the conspiracy theory

If you're scared by global heating, just change the scale

CRN vs nClimDiv

From the WUWT comments

From HotWhopper archives

2019 was the second hottest year on record despite no El Nino

The decades are getting hotter

Where was it hot?

July 2019 was the hottest month on record

Year to date chart

It's climate change on top of drought, heat and wind, not arson, that's behind Australia's fires

Most major bushfires in Australia are started by lightning

Why the deflection from deniers?

Most fires lit deliberately or accidentally by people are quickly contained

Use and abuse of statistics

More to come

References and further reading

2019 goes out with many bangs - Australia's hottest year and hottest decade on record

Australia is burning

References and further reading

Season's greetings to all