New Lows: Sea Ice and “Steven Goddard” credibility

This post first appeared on Climate Rocks and is reproduced with permission.

“Steven Goddard” is a pseudonym used by an anonymous climate denialist crank, so incredibly sloppy that he even embarrassed arch climate denier Anthony Watts, as shown in this link, and as I showed in one of last year’s “sea ice wrap-up” videos.
At least Chris Monckton has a medical condition that explains his break with reality.  As for this “Goddard” character, well, I have to let you see this headline to believe it.

Which he chose to illustrate with the graph below -

What’s really refreshing and amusing is how “Goddard” was immediately taken to task by none other than Julienne Stroeve, National Snow and Ice Data Center researcher whose iconic graph of accelerated sea ice loss I recently featured in a post. See here:

“Steve chose a graph that shows what he wants to portray while ignoring all the other institutions that show either a record low for 2011 or a “tie” with 2007. University of Bremen already announced it is a new record low. In my opinion, given the error margin of the measurement and algorithms, 2007 and 2011 basically tied in their extent this year. NSIDC will likely show 2011 as the second lowest, but again it’s within the error margin (which is about 50,000 sq-km).”

The arm waving we’ll be seeing this year, if NSIDC does not declare a new record, and U. Bremen does, will all be over a distinction without a difference, which is further evidence for my theory that climate denial is a form of autism -deliberately losing itself in a maze of details and completely unable to grasp a gestalt.

Stroeve tagged an addendum to her post, with an assessment of current ice conditions (as of Sept 12)

Remember last September though it looked like the minimum had been reached and then it went down further again. So best to be patient a few more days… 

For now, a look at one of the most telling of ice graphs, the ice volume picture from the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington.

I’ll be featuring more examples of off-the-reality-rails rants from climate deniers in my sea ice update, which I’ll post as soon after the minimum as I can crank it out.

For more from Stroeve, see the video here: