Wining The Battle, Losing The War

This blog had been pretty inactive as well as the usual reason of being busy with work I also got re-married in that I have now been married for 25 years and decided to do it all again but this time In Las Vegas,  with Elvis of course,  which took a lot of organisation.

I also treated myself to a Nexus 7 tablet which I am slowly writing this on, using an app.  The irony is that I am now probably on the internet more but in less convenient position to knock up a post.

But during my sabbatical I have been thinking that the battle to get the problem of climate change raised and publicly accepted has been won. Unfortunately not purely by the science but the ever increasing record number of weather events now being called Global Weirding or the New Normal. Even before Tropical Storm Sandy caused so much loss in the climate denial stronghold of the US, polls show that concern about climate change was high and most believed that anthropogenic causes do have some responsibility. With Sandy that level of acceptance has only increased and unless we enter into an unlikely prolonged period of climate stability, what the weather will most likely have in store for us will only harden those views. That battle is effectively won.

But the cynic in me worries that the war is being lost or may even already be lost. Even the re-election of Obama,  the only choice if anything can be done to tackle climate change globally,  is little comfort as there seems little appetite with politicians to do anything.  We are in the same position we were in decades ago.  Adaption rather than any attempts at mitigation seems to be favoured and Sandy shows just what we can expect with adaption.

People like me don't need to be alarmist, the conclusions of the science are alarming enough. What to do? We can keep on raising awareness,  keep on confronting denial,  keep on tackling ignorance in the best way we know, but in the end all that effort will pale beside what people are going to experience first hand with floods, droughts, storms and other extremes that are lining up to convince people where sound science has failed for decades. By then the door to mitigating solutions will have closed and adaption will mainly be one of repairing after the damage and the pain has occurred.

Am I wrong to feel that I am looking at the horse bolting?  

Record-High Antarctic Sea Ice Levels Don't Disprove Global Warming

The region's ice has weathered global warming better than Arctic ice

Steve Goddard must be feeling shell shocked. Only a few months ago at the winters peak, the Arctic Sea Ice extent (not volume) was almost normal which he touted loudly on his blog, only to see the fastest melt on record to a new low. With the Battle lost he turns his attention to the Antarctic winter and the growing ice there.

This is a repost from SKYE at weather.aol.com

(Credit: Jeremy Potter NOAA/OAR/OER)

Distracting from the news that Arctic sea-ice extent reached a record low on Sept. 16 is a widely circulating blog article claiming that at the opposite end of the Earth, Antarctic sea ice is more than making up for the losses.

In the post, climate change skeptic and blogger Steven Goddard states that Antarctic sea ice reached its highest level ever recorded for the 256th day of the calendar year on Sept. 12. He reasons that the Southern Hemisphere must be balancing the warming of the Northern Hemisphere by becoming colder (and thus, net global warming is zero).

The National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC), which tracks sea ice using satellite data, explains on its website why Antarctic ice has weathered global warming more robustly than Arctic ice. Goddard dismisses the explanation, concluding instead, "Antarctic and Arctic ice move opposite each other. NSIDC's dissonance about this is astonishing."

Despite its lack of scientific support, Goddard's post has garnered attention around the Web. In a Forbes.com column about the record high Antarctic sea ice, skeptic James Taylor writes, "Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data."

But if anyone had asked an actual scientist, they would have learned that a good year for sea ice in the Antarctic in no way nullifies the precipitous drop in Arctic sea-ice levels year after year - or the mounds of other evidence indicating global warming is really happening.

"Antarctic sea ice hasn't seen these big reductions we've seen in the Arctic. This is not a surprise to us," said climate scientist Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC. "Some of the skeptics say 'Well, everything is OK because the big changes in the Arctic are essentially balanced by what's happening in the Antarctic.' This is simply not true." [Former Global Warming Skeptic Makes a 'Total Turnaround']

Projections made from climate models all predict that global warming should impact Arctic sea ice first and most intensely, Serreze said. "We have known for many years that as the Earth started to warm up, the effects would be seen first in the Arctic and not the Antarctic. The physical geography of the two hemispheres is very different. Largely as a result of that, they behave very differently."

The Arctic, an ocean surrounded by land, responds much more directly to changes in air and sea-surface temperatures than Antarctica, Serreze explained. The climate of Antarctica, land surrounded by ocean, is governed much more by wind and ocean currents. Some studies indicate climate change has strengthened westerly winds in the Southern Hemisphere, and because wind has a cooling effect, scientists say this partly accounts for the marginal increase in sea ice levels that have been observed in the Antarctic in recent decades.

"Another reason why the sea-ice extent in the Antarctic is remaining fairly high is, interestingly, the ozone hole," Serreze told Life's Little Mysteries. This hole was carved out over time by chlorofluorocarbons, toxic chemicals formerly that were used in air conditioners and solvents before being banned. "The ozone hole affects the circulation of the atmosphere down there. Because of the ozone hole, the stratosphere above Antarctica is quite cold. Ozone in the stratosphere absorbs UV light, and less absorption [by] ozone makes the stratosphere really cold. This cold air propagates down to the surface by influencing the atmospheric circulation in the Antarctic, and that keeps the sea ice extensive."

But these effects are very small, and Antarctic sea-ice levels have increased only marginally. In the coming decades, climate models suggest rising global temperatures will overwhelm the other influences and cause Antarctic sea ice to scale back, too.

The extent of Arctic sea ice at its summertime low point has dropped 40 percent in the past three decades. The idea that a tiny Antarctic ice expansion makes up for this - that heat is merely shifting from the the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern and therefore global warming must not be happening - is "just nonsense," Serreze said.

Steven Goddard And His Sea Ice Recovery!

Way too funny not to post!

Arctic Sea Ice Downfall

Idiotic Denier Of The Day

Some awards come easily to some people and this one for Idiotic mis-interpretation of the evidence is well deserved by Steve Goddard and awarded to him over at uknowispeaksense, full repost below;

Idiotic denier graph of the day, August 26,2012

Yep, something a little different. I got my 3-year-old niece to draw on a piece of paper with a fat blue crayon and this is what she drew.

Conrats Steve Goddard! You have graduated from preschool.

Yes, ok. You got me, my niece would never use such a fat crayon to draw a graph, unless she wanted it to be fuzzy. This masterpiece is the work of Steve Goddard who, at his woefully misnamed blog, “Real Science” is trying to debunk a strawman. According to Steve, in 2007 AGW proponents, “went hysterical and told us that the Arctic would be ice free by 2008, 2010, 2012 or 2013″ and then provided this……..graph to debunk it. Of course, Steve ‘I just graduated preschool’ Goddard, didn’t provide a reference to these statements. So some mythical scientists have been debunked. Well done Steve, well done. You really showed…….them. Of course, my mate Geoffrey Brown faithfully cut and paste the same graph over at my favourite denier den, the official blog of the Climate Sceptics Party and included an admission to being a conspiracy theorist of the highest order, but that’s for another day.
So what of this….graph? Well, Steve supplied a link to the data he has used for his blue crayon special and it seems it goes all the way back to 1979. It’s no wonder he cherrypicked the last few years. Here’s a graph or two from the same website. First, what Steve’s magic blue crayon graph would have looked like if he used all the data.


Next, let’s take it back a little further and look at the longer term trend broken down into seasons.
So, there you have it. “Real Science” and real science. Which are you going to accept? Personally, I think I’ll go with the latter. I’m not really into crayons.

Losing Your Own Argument With Your Own Argument

It takes someone really special to achieve this. And we have someone very special indeed - Suyts.

He recently had a moan about Prof. Mann's threat to sue the National Review for libellous comments in an article, but even though Mann has every right to use the courts to protect his reputation, Suyts believes that to stoop to saying “I’ll sue!!!!” "is what happens when you lose the intellectual argument".


Problem is that if this is true then Suyts along with Lord Monckton have already lost the intellectual argument because we all know how keen the Lord is in threatening litigation and Suyts fully supports it.

Yep, it takes a special person to lose an argument with yourself.

Steve Goddard Calls It Right!

Having been censored and banned - though intermittently I have got a post through - from the Orwellian named Real Science, I decided to look at what if anything the not so good Mr Goddard had to say about such things and to my surprise he calls the practice  of censorship correct;

Refusal To Debate : Symptom Of A Liar

 He apparently believes in defending free speech, (but only when it is him who is speaking), and bitterly complains about blogs he believes have a policy of censorship, here and here.

So now we can all agree that not only is the person going by the name of Steve Goddard and Liar but a hypocrite .

Scraping A Barrel

"The forecast high for Rock Rapids, Iowa tomorrow is 84 degrees. It was 109 degrees on the same date in 1936. Experts tell us that 2012 is hotter than 1936."

This is what passes for a credible post on Real Science. I seriously hope that anyone capable of reading it has enough critical facilities to see the desperate cherry pick that it is.

CENSORED and BANNED! Well It Had To Happen

It appears that any comments I make to Real Science do not now appear - I suspect I have been banned for talking sense but maybe there is a technical issue let me just check....

Nope, my comments are no longer appearing and some have disappeared.

It seems to have occurred while commenting on this post which I covered in my own post here. In his comments I compared Steve Goddard's cherry picking of record high temps to claim that summers were actually cooling to measuring the time of a journey by only the fasted speed.

One of his acolytes, miked1947, was not happy with my analogy. He then went on to say some really strange things like,

“If we have more days below 90 degrees now than we did then, it is getting cooler” 

Suggesting if we had 1 day above 90 and 99 at 60 then that would be warmer than 100 days at 89 and,

“If I wanted to know whether it was warmer or cooler I would want the average temperature for all the Summers. Because they only provide MAX, MIN and MEAN,”

Clearly he had not quite grasped the definition of MEAN!

After a little polite back and forth miked1947 basically, if unintentionally agreed with me about Goddard's graph by claiming that MAX and MIX were not suitable measures to determine anything significant about temperature trends - while I might not completely agree with what he said he had painted himself into a position where like me he must surely disagree with Goddard's use of maximum temperatures to make his cooling claim.

So I replied asking him why he was explaining this to me and not to Steve Goddard. My comment appeared, the the next day it was gone. I posted the comment again in case there was a technical issue the first time but nothing appeared at all. A test post on another thread of Real Science had the same result - the comment I typed did not appear - I had been banned!

 NOTE: The actual publishing of this post has been delayed for a while because when I double checked to see if my posts would appear some then did including the response to miked1947 mentioned above - which has not been replied to. But currently nothing is appearing. I can't actually ask Goddard if it is now his policy to restrict my comments, as I currently can't comment. If I get some sort of response I will update this post and apologise if it is simply a technical with the Wordpress site.

However it does seem a rather innocuous comment to get quietly banned without ceremony from a site considering I have had Steve Goddard in full name calling mode at me only to have him realise I was right and he was wrong, and issue a retraction.

So perhaps getting one of his minions logic turned around where he had to agree with me was just a final straw, or perhaps it was what I said about his 'birther' beliefs in another thread as I noticed my comment has also vanished from there as well. Actually Steve Goddard has been very sly about this because he has not deleted any of my comments that were replied too, only ones that had no reply giving the impression that I either had no interest in the subject or that I could not think of anything reply.

I wonder what Goddard has said in his own blog on the subject of censorship and banning debate? Well that may make another post.

Steve Goddard BS – Worse Than It Seems

In what must be the strangest and most desperate post on Real Science about Arctic Sea Ice, (Currently at a record low extent), Steve Goddard posts a part picture of the Arctic from arctic.io, rephotographs it off the monitor with his phone, which apparently 'does some color/gamma correction automatically', to make the claim that there is more ice in that region than is apparently obvious in the picture!

Well that it seems is all the evidence this right wing-nut needs to dismiss all the evidence of ice melt this year. Forget this graph of declining see ice extent;

From http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/is-climate-really-changing/

 Forget about these from NSIDC;

Forget about all the actual evidence, because Steve Goddard of Real Science has got a camera phone! I wonder what sort of App? Seriously, I thought I would find using real science to debunk skeptical arguments on blogs like Real Science at least a bit of a challenge but then you get idiot posts from Goddard like this.

He Could Have Been Born Yesterday

I may have mentioned on here before that Steve Goddard is a 'Birther' in that he believes Americas first non-white president wasn't born in the US so can't really be the President.

In a recent post he provides 'evidence' from a paper that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Straight away a commenter pointed out that was was an old hoax and documented in snopes, other facts were added including evidence that his father was in Hawaii at the time he was born and unlikely to send his pregnant wife to a third world country to give birth. No record of any such journey exists for there and back in any case. There does exist a birth certificate form a Hospital in Honolulu and confirmed as authentic. We also have Kenyan official denying that Obama was born there. This is in comments by people who are normally very supportive of Goddard's climate denial posts but obviously are unwilling to stoop to this whole new level of crazy.

Steve Goddard is having none of it. The link he has is all the proof that is needed.

So we have multiple lines of evidence all pointing to one conclusion and a single piece of discredited evidence pointing to another. Which does Goddard support? The one that tells him what he want to hear of course.

Remind you of anything?