Please put down your coffee before reading any further. You wouldn’t want to spritz your keyboard and screen. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I have a confession to make. I am one of the very few remaining people around the globe who continue to regularly visit the blog RealClimate. It’s a curiosity thing mostly, kind of like watching the Titanic sink in slow motion.
I stop by to see what the alarmist wing of the climate science community feels is important enough to spend time blogging about. Much to my amazement a few days ago, there, sitting at the top of the RealClimate main page, was a blog post about…
Ready?
…a widget.
A widget? you ask.
Yup, a widget. Not just any widget, the WattsUpWithThat widget.
The RealClimate post by Stefan Rahmstorf here begins (their boldface):
The “World Climate Widget” from Tony Watts’ blog is probably the most popular deceptive image among climate “skeptics”. We’ll take it under the microscope and show what it would look like when done properly.
See, I told you…a widget.
Imagine you’re a climate scientist; you’re one of the founding members of the website RealClimate; but more importantly, you’re Professor of Physics of the Oceans at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research of Potsdam University.
Got that? Now, imagine at the top of your high-priority daily to-do list you do NOT find something like help fix climate models, which double the warming rate of the global ocean surfaces over the past 33 years. See Figure 1. Nope. You don’t find that topping the priority list.
Figure 1 (from the blog post here)
And you do NOT find something like help fix the spatial patterns of ocean-surface warming in climate models so the models might be useful at simulating future climate patterns (temperature and precipitation) on land. See Figure 2.
Figure 2 (from the blog post here)
Imagine…what you do find at the top of your high-priority daily to-do list is Write a Blog Post about the WUWT Widget.
It’s mind boggling.
Have I written a blog post about a widget? Of course. It’s here. And if you click on that link, you’ll find I even produced a video about a widget. And there’s a reason I wrote an article and produced a video about a widget. My role in the climate-science debate is that of a science reporter for WattsUpWithThat, the World’s Most-Visited Website on Global Warming and Climate Change. I’m not a climate scientist, like Stefan Rahmstorf. Climate scientists are entrusted with providing scientific support for what has been called the greatest threat facing the world. Must not be too high a priority if one of the faithful spends time writing a blog post about a widget…and others take time out of their day to comment about that widget on the thread at RealClimate.
A few other thoughts about Stefan’s post, before you happily take over:
Stefan writes in his paragraph 1 (his boldface):
It is better to plot the surface air temperature. That is what is relevant for us humans: we do not live up in the troposphere, nor do natural ecosystems, nor do we grow our food up there…
I suspect Stefan Rahmstorf will regret that statement, because he’s likely to be reminded of it every time he wants to claim ocean heat content is important. (Stefan, we don’t live to the depths of 2000 meters in the oceans. Remember what you said…)
He ends the same paragraph:
… Let us thus use the GISTEMP global annual temperature record from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science (all surface data sets agree to better than 0.1 °C, see comparison graph).
Unfortunately for Stefan, the GISS LOTI data is made up mostly of sea surface temperature data, not the “surface air temperature” data for the oceans, the latter of which is known as Marine Air Temperature. And most of us don’t live on the surface of the oceans…though I wish I did from time to time.
You’ll also note that Rahmstorf spent a lot of time adding notes to an older version of the WUWT widget. See Figure 3. It ends in 2009.
Figure 3
Why didn’t he use a more up-to-date widget, shown in Figure 4? I’ll let you speculate about that.
Figure 4
And now for the truly bizarre:
The RealClimate post includes a link to the October 2009 WUWT post New WUWT feature: World Climate Widget. That introductory post at WUWT was a short time before ClimateGate, when the popularity of WUWT began to soar. Anthony had to put the widget on the back burner, never really promoting it. You can run through the comments on the WUWT widget thread here or use the search feature of WUWT to see if he made an effort to promote the widget. Anthony updated it a while back. But when he changed the WordPress theme at WUWT back around the first of September to “The Expound Theme”, the widget seems to have disappeared from the sidebar. (An oversight by Stefan?) So, Anthony’s never really promoted the widget, and it might’ve disappeared from the sidebar about 3 months ago, but Stefan Rahmstorf calls it “The most popular deceptive graph”, resurrecting it. I think Stefan Rahmstorf is about to discover that the WUWT widget will now become a whole lot more popular in the wake of his blog post. I suspect Anthony will be promoting it—and I’ve got a few good reasons to believe that.
Google Trends reveals that the number of searches for the blog “RealClimate” continues to drop, while those wanting links to the blog “Watts Up With That?” continues to rise. How bad has it gotten for RealClimate? See Figure 5. Occasionally, the blog Hot Whopper, run by the former WUWT troll Sou (Miriam O’Brien), nearly catches up with RealClimate.
Figure 5
If they continue to write blog posts at RealClimate about WUWT widgets, mimicking what Sou does at HotWhopper, who knows how far that decline in interest for RealClimate will go!
CLOSING
I’m sure you’ll have a fun time discussing the rest of Rahmstorf’s post at RealClimate about a widget. Afterwards, if you would, please consider adding the WUWT widget to your blog. It only takes a few minutes. Anthony has instructions for doing so here. I’ve added the WUWT widget to the sidebar at my blog ClimateObservations. It makes me feel good knowing that it’s there—knowing that it tweaks certain members of the alarmist wing of the climate science community.
Stefan Rahmstorf (and the others at RealClimate), on the other hand, must not have been too impressed with the widget he suggested using. As of this writing, it has not been added to the sidebar at RealClimate.
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They’ve got to write about something since they’ve exhausted their globull warming tales.
Brilliant. Thanks for keeping in touch on our behalf with the fast-vanishing RealClimate. And keep up the good work.
Yes, and I wonder how many looks RC gets from skeptics curious about what the gang will come up next to deceive the world.
I’ve always been the under the assumption this describes most if their traffic.
You make a good point – I only looked there to see what Bob was on about. Otherwise I have no interest in the RealClimate propaganda… pretty much a waste of time for anything useful.
[the sun] “has almost nothing to do with global temperature”. He’ll probably regret that one too.
Something I’ve long-time wondered about. If the Sun has almost nothing to do with global temperature, what energy source does the heavy lifting from background radiation temperature of about 3K to the 286K or thereabouts we know and love?
Yup. If it wasn’t for the sun we’d be travelling in a straight line. The earth would be very rocky, icy and dead. and as you say at a few degrees Kelvin. Thanks goodness for the sun.
Well, to be fair, he meant not simply “the sun” but “the variation of the sun activity measured by sun spots” of course.
Nevertheless, he will probably regret that remark in due time after the next 20 years of a gradually decline of the suns activity and its climatic consequences…
fair enough, but the implication is the sun is a constant that does not affect climate change.
If he thinks the sun is a constant, it’s probably because he correlates that with the strength of his sunscreen, which doesn’t change.
So maybe his ideas are more “sunscreen related” 🙂
To mock Stefan I could say he is proposing that you could throw the sun out of the models and the climate would not change at all. More likely (with 51% certainty) he is saying that the sun is either a constant or in complete equilibrium with everything else on Earth and in our solar system except for CO2.
Stefan is convinced like an evangelist seeing the face of Jesus in tree bark, that CO2 is the only significant variable in climate. Now, as a scientist that is something to mock him about.
,,, he is proposing that you could throw the sun out of the models and the climate would not change at all.
That is a very interesting phrasing the question. Keep the Sun constant. What then is causing the variability? The “natural variability”?
With the Sun constant and CO2 rising, what then causes the ups AND downs of “global” temperature?
He didn’t say that. He said that the time series of the number of sun spots has almost nothing to do with global temperature.
which is a claim that the sun is a constant and therefore does not cause changes in our climate.
RealClimate getting fidgety about a widget? That’s almost as sad as them getting fidgety about CO2 and broken hockey sticks.
When will they “Get real, Mann!”.
Just eyeballing figure 5, I’d say the RC trend is less than the WUWT trend. It could be coincidence, but it reminds me of some other trend comparisons.
To borrow a tune from M4GW, maybe RC is trying to “hide the decline”?
Rahmstorf makes some good points.
Good points? Presenting monthly data is some sort of “ploy”? That’s laughable.
If we are concerned about measuring the change in the climate and by definition, climate acts on yearly/decadal scales, then it doesn’t make sense to me show the progression of monthly/daily averages as those are more influenced by weather.
Bill 2, you’re missing the obvious. If monthly data isn’t important, why do we keep seeing reports of record high monthly temperatures from the big-3 data suppliers?
Bill 2,
Please explain why Rahmstorf would use a pick from 2009, when he could have used the 2014 widget.
Bob Tisdale
December 10, 2014 at 2:21 pm
“Bill 2, you’re missing the obvious. If monthly data isn’t important, why do we keep seeing reports of record high monthly temperatures from the big-3 data suppliers?”
Also, why keep Global Warmists talking about Extreme Weather? (That their models never predicted)
Bob/Dirk – I just presented a statement about what I believe. My statement speaks for itself. You are asking me questions about why other people do things. I cannot answer those.
db – I’m not Rahmstorf, so I cannot answer that question. Maybe drop a comment for him at RC?
Bill 2 says:
db – I’m not Rahmstorf, so I cannot answer that question. Maybe drop a comment for him at RC?
I used to try and post comments at RealClimate. I was especially careful to be polite, and I would generally just post a graph, along with a few words of commentary.
But a funny thing happened: not one of my comments was ever posted. They just disappeared.
So no, I won’t ‘drop a comment’ there any more. RC selects what they want readers to see, and if it doesn’t fit their narrative, it isn’t published. If your comments are posted by RC, that means you fit the narrative.
aka: useful idiot. Just sayin’
(Another wasted effort posted by a banned sockpuppet. Comment now DELETED. Cheers. -mod)
Bill 2
December 10, 2014 at 3:51 pm
“Bob/Dirk – I just presented a statement about what I believe. My statement speaks for itself. You are asking me questions about why other people do things. I cannot answer those. ”
Now that’s just too bad, Bill. I just presented a question which you might want to ponder. I do not expect you to be able to answer it.
Like about the temperature of the troposphere not mattering? I have always assumed that he and the other alarmists lived underground. Are they crab people? That part is at least debatable.
It appears that Bill2 has been trumpe d with no answers to the most simplest of questions. It is no wonder they are scared of debate.
Well, isn’t the down-welling long range coming from the troposphere? (In which we live). The warmer the troposphere, the more DLW radiation there is.
The sign of an incorrect theory is ad hoc explanations and modifications (epicycles anyone?) and intellectual hand-waving (might, could, may etc.)
ya, ploy #4. plotting a picture of the sun.
see when you leave data out like the whole time series that is deceptive!
Oh.. Now I understand.. If you hide a decline, if you leave off the divergence, thats ok.
But if you plot a picture of the sun you have implied that the sun runs the show.
yup.
never plot a picture of the sun.
+1 mosh
+1 Mosh-man
Anthony now that eric has detailed what counts as a PLOY, you
ought to build a reference page for each ploy..
I bet readers could find charts from Mann that fit every ploy.
I wonder if Rahmstorf has any problem with a widget that shows the number of Hiroshima atomic bombs the Earth is gaining in heat?
http://4hiroshimas.com/
Burn! 🙂
Agreed. I especially think the trend line complaint should be handled. Such dialogue is part of why actual SCIENTISTS–persons on a search for truth–appreciate criticism, unlike the IPeCaC clowns.
Bill 2
Welcome to WUWT. This will be an interesting evening for all concerned.
Bill 2 December 10, 2014 at 1:33 pm
you wrote “Rahmstorf makes some good points.”
Then you wrote: at 3:51 pm
“db – I’m not Rahmstorf, so I cannot answer that question. Maybe drop a comment for him at RC?”
++++++++++++
Why don’t you tell us what the good points are?
Good point, Mario. ☺
@ur momisugly dbstealey December 10, 2014 at 7:04 pm
I just cannot believe the hollowness of Bill 2’s contribution… his statements are nothing more than a drive by without merit.
The monthly data is more visually interesting. And allows you to compare month to month. I guess you could add an annual average smoothed line on top in red.
(Another wasted effort posted by a banned sockpuppet. Comment now DELETED. Cheers. -mod)
@ur momisugly icouldnthelpit
Your annualized temperature anomalies after the midpoint on the timeline seem to be about .4 deg. higher than those I eyeball from the WUWT chart.
I don’t get it. Is this chart sarcasm, or does your data come from a different source?
(Another wasted effort posted by a banned sockpuppet. Comment now DELETED. Cheers. -mod)
@ur momisugly icouldnthelpit
Then to summarize, your chart shows the temperature anomaly between about 2002 and 2014 bouncing about between +.4 and +.6 deg.C, while the WUWT widget chart (http://wattsupwiththat.com/widget/) shows the 13-month running average anomaly in the same period bouncing about between +.1 and +.3 deg.C. — a rather large descrepancy.
SO: Is the reason for the discrepancy that (1) your chart is based on the GISS data which is a “Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index” (with various adjustments) and the anomaly is relative to a base beriod of 1951-1980, while the (2) WUWT chart is based on UAH Lower Troposphere Data and the Anomaly is relative to a base period of 1979-2010?
If so, then I gather that this exercize is the graphical version of the two talking points: (1) The current decade is the warmest in the previous 100 (or 50)years, versus (2) There has been no significant increase in warming in the past decade.
Is that about it? Or does one chart actually reflect the reality that interests us (our fate as humans) better than the other?
@ur momisugly icouldnthelpit
Have some fun and change the width of the graph at http://herdsoft.com/climate/widget/config.php?width=640&height=480&start_year=1979&title=World+climate+Widget&temp_axis=Temperature+Anomaly+%28C%29&co2_axis=CO2+Concentration+%28ppm%29&temp_rgb=b2b2b2&co2_rgb=1786ec&alias=2 .
The trend will look flatter and flatter.
And those would be?
My [pencil] sharpener makes better points.
I don’t go to RealClimate, don’t want them to get the hits.
I must I look at RC about once a month just to see Watts going on. Unfortunately,every time I look the heading is nearly,well 97% of the time,it is “unforced variations”. Nothing to see there folks.
I do not visit RealClimate 97% of the time.. The other 3% was when I started following this argument on the web, many years ago, when John Daley was still alive.
I go there a few times to check the number of postings. Is it about one per week now?
Here’s a link that allows you to read with out bumping their stats.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141210233841/http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/12/the-most-popular-deceptive-climate-graph/
Quote:
“Got that? Now, imagine at the top of your high-priority daily to-do list you do NOT find something like help fix climate models …”
Quite so.
Climate Change and ENSO: Take 2
Author: Mat Collins
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
“So, the picture of changes in ENSO, when viewed in terms rainfall response patterns, may be limited by errors and biases that have been long-term features in climate models. Research is required to test the potential impact of SST biases on the change in average precipitation in the tropics. We must improve models, but we must also to better understand the processes whereby biases in present-day simulations link to future projections.”
http://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/climate-change-and-enso-take-2
Regular wuwt poster, Bob Tisdale, will be along shortly.
handjive, you are correct. It will be a very short post…tomorrow morning at my blog and at WUWT. I’m still working on the title.
Cheers
Hello Bob, so from figure “5” I take it that warmest blogs do not experience increased growth rates from CO2 as my garden did. I had a real good year here in OR.
michael
Well that is a novel idea, to better understand processes before predicting behavior, but the issue is understanding biases in models? Hopefully that means better understanding climate processes in order to remove faulty assumptions in the models and not taking more wild-ass guesses at the correct “bias”.
Overall still missing the boat however, processes are just discreet components of climate, understanding processes is only a first step, a more significant step is understanding the relationships between all climate processes or actors. Yes it is all about the relationships. The final step is to understand that like actors in juicy roles, climate actors can have a character arc and change their roles in the climate drama over time and how do you predict that?
Since all the climate models are currently producing 100% erroneous results, in a true engineering methodology for prototyping, they should adopt a feedback loop from actual temperature readings into every model in order to achieve a measure of reliable accuracy into their current erroneous coding.
So, since the cornerstone of their time base theory is multiple decades or or often centurion periods, might i suggest they use these feedback loops for say 200 or so years?
If it follows the feedback loops have added sufficient accuracy in their models they can then (and only then) publish them and request some kind of funding?
Wake us up when they actually work!
They cannot do as you suggest because such a process would not result in a crisis. Such a process would definitely make the models more accurate, but would give results that would be clearly beneficial to humans and the biosphere as a whole.
Believe me…they know how to make the models better, but that would mean the abandonment of the whole disaster meme and their source of income. They have no intention of doing that.
You nailed it, Jim
Hi Jim,
( I saw your last drive at Warwick Farm) 🙂
I see their ploy, put so much guff in every report, that they know damn well no one but another disciple would ever read it thoroughly OR an equally qualified critic. The question is, how much longer must those on the expense side of the ledger endure this nonsense?
with their firm belief in high sea temperatures, it is unthinkable that their Titanic was hit by an iceberg (or vice versa). Some of their models may already predict that icebergs are things from the past anyway. So hitting it must be impossible. Better to keep their heads in the hot sand until they are fully cooked.
The other surprising thing when I looked at RC a few months ago was the paucity of posts. It only had a few news post per month … hang on … OK. thirteen new posts since October 1st.
And here on WUWT? Sixteen new posts since two days ago …
w.
In fairness, they could argue for Quality over Quantity.
Some recent posts here have been right Balls Ups.
In fairness, you’re right about their ten-year anniversary post, MCourtney. I don’t think anyone would question their stats.
Their 10 year anniversary post includes this quote.
That is very perceptive of them. It is their opinion that is essential to the site’s debate.
Well maybe the thinking is when you argue with yourself it is hard to be wrong. Even though a committed scientist I believe would manage to do so often. A scientist who finds nothing to be skeptical about in their field is practicing religion.
Well put, Alx.
M Courtney says:
In fairness, they could argue for Quality over Quantity.
Yes. They could argue that. My response: they censor what doesn’t fit their narrative.
And:
In our opinion this remains essential for curating an interesting and substantive conversation.
Well, they can’t win ’em all. When a blog is so one-sided, it is no longer interesting or substantive.
LOL dbstealey: And based on observation, you are correct!!!
And how can you carry on a debate if you cut out (censor) contrarian comments?
So now we know an “echo chamber” can also be called a “curated conversation”.
Both being paradise for the “tautologist”.
Does that bother you, MCourtney?
Evidently, cultivation of a good crop of group-think requires assiduous elimination of unwanted alien growths.
” ‘ A scale is chosen where the CO2 rise appears much too steep. ‘ ”
It’s not possible to plot the CO2 rise too steep compared to the temperature rise . Here they both are on 0 based scales : http://cosy.com/Science/CO2vTkelvin.jpg . dT%dCO2 is at most less than 0.01 .
” ‘ A scale is chosen where the CO2 rise appears much too steep. ‘ ”
Yes, so a much larger range chart should be used for CO2? in that case why not for temperature too ?
Because the difference in slope between the two variables is a 100 to 1 .
So, the site we look at for amusement (HotWhopper) might soon be more popular than RC.
VicV, maybe they’ll both disappear.
There is no point in RealClimate now we have Nature Climate Change and the Guardian Environment pages.
The former publicises speculative hypotheses without any critical peer review.
The latter hectors anyone who doubts the authority of the great and the good of scientists.
What else has RealClimate ever done?
Well I believe that John Christy et al published in Jan 2001 a paper that showed that sea water Temp does not equal sea air temp (why the hell would they be equal) and moreover they aren’t even correlated. That was based on about 20 years of simultaneous +3 m and -1 m air and water temps respectively.
Ergo, ALL of the pre 1980 ish water data going back to 1850 or whatever is total rubbish to mix in with the land air data.
So I don’t believe any global Temperature data before about 1980, which about matches the satellite valid data era.
Yes, I recall that the climate scientists have had to do “bucket adjustments” to past sea surface temperatures because the nautical climate scientists of yore (aka sailors) used highly precise buckets of sea water to measure and log the sea surface temperature. With these highly accurate adjustments, the climate scientists can make comparisons of sea surface temperatures of today with those from 1905… (LOL!)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/25/historical-sea-surface-temperature-adjustmentscorrections-aka-the-bucket-model/
I think RC will be gone in a year or two,and the way the climate is going,that may be conservative.
Maybe I should have said “melted away in a year or two”.
In the end, I think they will disappear quite suddenly!
Well Bob, I hope Gavin at least thanks you privately for giving his site a brief kerfluffle of extra hits.
Mike M, Gavin’s got his hands full trying to get the GISTEMP data for Dec 2013 to Nov 2014 to be greater than 2010 for his quasi annual report.
Also, I don’t believe any of the founding members of RealClimate would be thanking me for anything. I haven’t been very kind to them in recent years…but they deserve it for their not-too-subtle alarmism.
Which site is more popular?
Sounds a lot like ‘sour grapes’ to me.
But WUWT is obviously the more popular. That fable doesn’t apply.
But it’s worth remembering that there is wisdom in Aesop’s Fables.
I recommend them.
Maybe Anthony could put the widget on the WUWT home page. i didn’t know about it, until I read this post.
Michael, we have Stefan Rahmstorf to thank for resurrecting the widget. Wasn’t that thoughtful of him?
Thank you, Stefan.
Stefan who?
I think he plays soccer for Potsdam. I may be wrong,
I thought it was ironic that Rahmstorf would write a blog post accusing someone of producing a misleading graph…
https://ipccreport.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/realclimates-deceptive-graphs/
OK. OK. We finally have proof. Studying rising CO2 levels is adversely impacting the IQs of climatologists. Saw Ramsdorf’s Tweet the other day. Nearly died laughing. Hmm, come to think of it, maybe that’s the whole idea. Kill us with laughter.
Can I suggest that you somehow integrate the Google website trends graph into the widget. That should cause them to pop an artery!
Bob, thanks. Regarding figure 5, that’s one hell of a divergence problem.
Thanks, Anthony. That made me laugh.
BTW, who calls you Tony Watts? I was gonna respond about a post at RC by Steffy Rafmstorf.
It’s a Mikey Mann thing, Steffy is just playing follow the leader.
Oh goodness, would that make the divergent “hits” chart a Steffy graph?
Looks more like a good inverse correlation, with the exception of Climategate.