Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
This is the second in a series of posts about the blog HotWhopper, specifically about the misunderstandings about climate-science basics displayed by its author and proprietor Miriam O’Brien (a.k.a Sou from Bundangawoolarangeera). The first in the series was Open Letter to Miriam O’Brien of HotWhopper (a.k.a. Sou), which was cross posted at WattsUpWithThat here. In this post, we’ll discuss her misunderstandings about a very basic climate metric—one called sea surface temperature.
Keep in mind that Miriam O’Brien’s blog Hot Whopper found a new focus after Miriam, blogging as “Sou”, was permanently banned from WattsUpWithThat for her troll behavior. See Anthony Watts’s post My Blog Spawn. Since her departure from there, Miriam’s new focus has been, of course, the blog posts at WattsUpWithThat. Seemingly, Miriam O’Brien opposes anything and everything presented at WattsUpWithThat.
THE TOPIC OF THIS POST
The paper Kuffner et al. (2014) A Century of Ocean Warming on Florida Keys Coral Reefs: Historic In Situ Observations was getting a good amount of press a month or so ago. See the USGS press release here. For much of the paper, Kuffner et al. focused on two sets of sea surface temperature records for two coral reefs that are part of the Florida Keys. Kuffner et al. used sea surface temperature measurements made by lighthouse keepers back in the late 19th Century to early 20th Century and compared them to the buoy-based samples of sea surface temperatures that started in the late 20th Century. The more-recent buoy-based readings were warmer than the early lighthouse-keeper observations, so Kuffner et al. (2014) concluded (This quote is from their abstract):
Results indicate that the warming observed in the records between 1878 and 2012 can be fully accounted for by the warming observed in recent decades (from 1975 to 2007), documented using in situ thermographs on a mid-shore patch reef. The magnitude of warming revealed here is similar to that found in other SST datasets from the region and to that observed in global mean surface temperature.
As a visual reference, my Figure 1 is Figure 3 from Kuffner et el. 2014.
Figure 1
That paper raised a number of very obvious questions:
- What happened to the sea surface temperatures in that region between the turns of the 20th and 21st Centuries?
- Did they remain flat, increasing slowly until the 1970s, when they skyrocketed? The abstract might lead some people to think that was the case, or,
- Did they cycle, consistent with the variability of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation? or,
- Did they warm early in the 20th Century and cycle since then.
- Long-term data, covering the periods examined by Kuffner et al. and running continuously between them, are available. Kuffner et al. even refer to them in their abstract with, “The magnitude of warming revealed here is similar to that found in other SST datasets from the region…” Why didn’t Kuffner et al. (2014) present that basic background data?
I presented long-term data in my post Data Reveal Florida Keys Sea Surface Temperatures Haven’t Warmed in 80+ Years* to answer those questions. I selected a very small region of the Florida Keys that encompassed the two reefs focused on by Kuffner et al. Using a sea surface temperature dataset with a high resolution (HADISST), I presented the long-term data in raw form here, and then smoothed them with a 121-month filter to highlight the underlying variability. See Figure 2 (which was Figure 3 from my earlier post). The greatest warming in the region took place from around 1910 to the early 1940s, which undermined the claim by Kuffner et al. that “the warming observed in the records between 1878 and 2012 can be fully accounted for by the warming observed in recent decades (from 1975 to 2007)”.
Figure 2
The recent downturn in the data also doesn’t help their cause.
I also examined how far back in time we could go with the long-term sea surface temperature data for that part of the Florida Keys while not showing any warming (based on the linear trend). See Figure 3 (which was Figure 4 from my earlier post). Based on the linear trend, the sea surfaces for that part of the Florida Keys haven’t warmed since 1930, more than 80 years. And as I wrote in my earlier post, Yet, somehow, we’re supposed to believe manmade greenhouse gases are causing harm to the coral in recent years.
Figure 3
Kuffner et al. also set their eyes on August sea surface temperatures, because they are seasonally warmest and would do most harm to the coral reefs. I then presented the August sea surface temperatures for that region, based on the HADISST data. Refer to my Figure 4 (which was Figure 5 from the earlier post). The long-term August data confirmed that coral have had to deal with sea surface temperatures that are said to be “stressful” almost every year, and that sea surface temperatures regularly reached and exceeded levels that are said to be “very stressful” in the 1940s, 50s and 60s…and, if the early data are believable, on occasion, they were above very stressful levels in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In fact, many of the peak August temperatures in the 1940s, 50s and 60s were higher than they have been recently.
Figure 4
Kuffner et al. show similar excursions into “very stressful” temperatures in the late-19th and early-20th centuries in their Figure 2. They even provided dashed lines to highlight those temperatures, but they failed to point them out. Those “very stressful” temperatures disappeared when Kuffner et al. used multidecadal averages for their Figure 3 (shown above as my Figure 1).
Bottom line, Kuffner et al. referred to local long-term sea surface temperature datasets in their abstract—“The magnitude of warming revealed here is similar to that found in other SST datasets from the region…”—but failed to present that data. The basic reason they did not present it appears to be that it does not support their claim that “the warming observed in the records between 1878 and 2012 can be fully accounted for by the warming observed in recent decades (from 1975 to 2007)”.
For some reason, Miriam O’Brien of HotWhopper was displeased with my post and published Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale surfs the surface at Florida Keys. (An archived version is attached to link. My thanks to blogger 7DaBrooklynKnight7 for the archived version.) Her post is quite humorous. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Unsuccessfully, Miriam O’Brien tried a number of different tactics to counter my data presentations, without ever addressing the fact that my data presentations were correct.
Miriam’s Misdirection 1 – Miriam claimed that the region I selected was too large. But, of course, she failed to show that there was any difference between the sea surface temperature data I presented and the sea surface temperature data presented by Kuffner et al.
A blogger called 7DaBrooklynKnight7 noted in a comment:
i checked that knmi website and the average august sst from the fowey rocks and carysfort reef buoys (for 1991 to 2012) is the same (29.9 deg c) as the august sst from the hadisst for the coordinates used by tisdale. please check my work.
That wasn’t well received by Miriam.
I did confirm 7DaBrooklynKnight7’s statement. For the period of 1991 to 2012, the average of the August sea surface temperatures for the Fowey Rocks and Carysfort Reef buoys (29.9 deg C) is the same as HADISST for the coordinates of 24N-25N, 81W-80W that I used in my post. The data for the Fowey Rocks and Carysfort Reef buoys were provided by Kuffner et al. through the webpage here. The Excel spreadsheet with the Carysfort Reef buoys data are here, and the Fowey Rocks data are in the spreadsheet here. And, of course, the HADISST data are available at the KNMI Climate Explorer.
Miriam’s Erroneous Claim 1 – After stating correctly that I had presented “gridded data estimated from combining observations from ships, from buoys, from satellites, with data gaps filled by interpolation”, Miriam then incorrectly claimed that I was “only interested in the temperature of the thin skin of the sea surface”. She repeated that claim of “skin” temperature in the post and in her comments on the thread.
It turns out, the only “thin skin” is Miriam’s, who responded with insults when a blogger point out her errors. More on that later.
HADISST is a sea surface temperature dataset, not a sea skin temperature dataset as Miriam claims. The metric presented by Kuffner et al. (2014) in their Figures 2 and 3 was sea surface temperature—same metric I presented. Miriam is correct that HADISST includes the skin temperature observations from satellites, but she fails to acknowledge:
- that satellite data only extend back in time to the early 1980s,
- that there are also “surface temperature” measurements from buoys and ship inlets in that time, and,
- more importantly, that adjustments have been made to account for satellite biases. The make-up and corrections applied to the HADISST dataset were discussed in the paper Rayner et al. (2003) Global analyses of sea surface temperature, sea ice, and night marine air temperature since the late nineteenth century.
Miriam even provided a link to Rayner et al. at the end of her blog post. She either failed to comprehend the paper or she missed the part of the paper where Rayner et al. state:
We adjusted the satellite SSTs to be unbiased relative to the in situ data (Appendix C).
This was pointed out to Miriam by blogger 7DaBrooklynKnight7:
according to the rayner paper you provided they also adjust the satellite data with data from ship inlets and buoys, like the buoys at the reefs, to take care any biases from the satellites sensing the skin.
That also was not well received by Miriam.
Miriam’s Misdirection 2 – Miriam wrote:
But in this case, because deniers want to pretend that coral bleaching doesn’t happen, the world isn’t warming etc etc, they decide to ignore the careful measurements taken on site over the years. Data that is much more appropriate when considering the actual reef. Deniers decide that this time around they prefer data that’s been “tampered with”. Data from multiple sources, with gaps interpolated.
I never claimed that coral wasn’t stressed by high sea surface temperatures. That’s an outright fabrication. In fact, I presented a graph that showed that sea surface temperatures in that region reached levels that are said to be “stressful” to coral almost each and every year, and that sea surface temperatures regularly reached and exceeded levels that are said to be “very stressful” in 1990s and 2000s….and in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, too. Her post is riddled with off-the-cuff remarks that have no basis in fact. I present data, Miriam fabricates.
Miriam apparently wants to dismiss decades of research into the adjustments required to correct for different methods used for sampling sea surface temperatures. Granted, many persons are concerned about the adjustments, especially when, globally, they suppressed the warming during the late-1930s and early-1940s that existed in the source ICOADS data, which impacts the amount of warming during the early warming period of the 20th Century. See Figure 5, which is Figure 15 from the post Multidecadal Variations and Sea Surface Temperature Reconstructions.
Figure 5
The best part: Miriam obviously forgot that Kuffner et al. presented sea surface temperature data from “multiple sources”. Kuffner et al. presented thermometer readings taken by lighthouse keepers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, using one technology with biases. And they presented temperature measurements taken from buoys in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Miriam’s Misdirection 3 – Miriam wrote (my boldface):
He was only interested in the temperature of the thin skin of the sea surface – averaged over a wide area well beyond the corals the scientists were researching. Yet leaving out some of the area that the researchers did cover.
The long-term sea surface temperature data that I presented was for coordinates that included the two reefs presented in Figures 2 and 3 of Kuffner et al. (Fowey Rocks and Carysfort Reef). The only other temperature data presented by Kuffner et al. in a time-series graph was the sporadic late 20th century subsurface temperatures for the Hen and Chickens Reef. (See their Figure 4.) It wasn’t a long-term sea surface temperature comparison, like those at Fowey Rocks and Carysfort Reef, and was not applicable to my post.
A Few More Comments by A Blogger on the HotWhopper Thread – Blogger 7DaBrooklynKnight7 presented many of the realities I’ve discussed in this post. But he also made a couple of other observations. 7DaBrooklynKnight7 wrote:
one last thing. i also checked that knmi website and they have more sst data. there’s one from noaa that does not use satellites in recent years. the noaa ersstv3b, for the florida keys, the sea surfaces have cooled sinse 1930.
Cooled, he wrote? From a dataset that excludes satellite data? It turns out that the negative trend is so slight that it’s basically flat.
Keep in mind that the minimum grid size of the NOAA ERSST.v3b data is 2-deg latitude by 2-deg longitude. So this is a larger area than what was presented in my first post about Kuffner et al. ERSST.v3b also extends further back in time, and the further back one goes, the less realistic the data become. (The hump that peaks in the 1880s looks suspicious.) With that in mind, Figure 6 presents the sea surface temperature anomalies for the coordinates of 23N-25N, 81W-79W. Also shown is the linear trend for the period of January 1930 to September 2014. A cooling rate of -0.008 deg C/decade is essentially flat. Sorry, 7DaBrooklynKnight7, you got a little carried away with “cooled” since 1930.
Figure 6
But, along with the similarities in the buoy temperatures and the HADISST-based readings discussed above, the ERSST.v3b dataset (which does not use satellite data) do help to dismiss Miriam’s complaints about satellite “skin” temperatures. (NOAA actually removed the satellite data from their ERSST data.)
Blogger 7DaBrooklynKnight7 also asked a very basic question of Miriam:
something else you’ve overlooked. are the data from the lighthouses and from the buoys included in the hadisst data?
Miriam ignored the question.
And that’s a question that I cannot answer with any certainty. The buoy data should be included (key word “should”) in the ICOADS sea surface temperature dataset, which is the source data for the NOAA and UKMO datasets. The lighthouse data might be, key phase “might be”.
Miriam’s Response When Confronted with Data-Based Questions – First Miriam insulted blogger 7DaBrooklynKnight7. Then when he responded to her incivility and exposed more problems with her post, she deleted his comment. The exchanges between Miriam (who poses as blogger “Sou”), 7DaBrooklynKnight7, and the HotWhooper denizens are worth a read. They start with 7DaBrooklynKnight7’s initial question at September 13, 2014 at 1:33 AM. They extend down to his response to her insults at September 15, 2014 at 8:07 PM. (Miriam deleted his final comment, as visible at a direct link to where that comment once existed.) After 7DaBrooklynKnight7 was obviously banned, bloggers continued to insult him at HotWhopper.
Blogger 7DaBrooklynKnight7 then wound up at my blog, alerting me to the exchange at HotWhopper.
Thanks, 7DaBrooklynKnight7. Sorry it took so long for me to respond to Miriam’s post.
CLOSING
I really do enjoy reading Miriam’s posts at HotWhopper. She is willing and able to expose her misunderstandings about the topics she addresses, along with her want and need to misinform her readers. I also enjoy replying to her posts. You can look forward to more of my posts about Miriam O’Brien and her escapades at HotWhopper.
Mr. Tisdale, as Ron White is fond of saying “you can’t fix stupid”. Some people are just going to go to any lengths to keep the CAGW meme going. Keep up the good work.
It is not a matter of Slandering Sou “misunderstanding.” She purposively distorts and fabricates for the sole purpose of denigrating not just all skeptics, but everyone she disagrees with.
Miriam is a living illustration of what is wrong with the Alarmist side of the debate – if the discussion goes against her and her friends, she edits the thread to present her view in a better light.
As Mann once said, “this isn’t about truth at all…” 🙂
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=1256735067.txt
Yes, another website used to do that, ‘Hot Topic’ – a New Zealand-based website, I think. The website owner would alter your post (edit), and then decide not to even let it be posted if it went against the nonsense he had posted. There should be an international law about deleting posts!
So called Scientific American deleted years of posts & banned any posters who criticised their climate related claims. Where some debates used to exceed a hundred comments, now three is a good result for them & they have become even more irrelevant. For old timers like me who used to read that magazine starting in the 1950s, the bastardization of that once fine scientific publication is a tragedy.
Does that apply to WUWT moderators?
Carlyle,
You are exactly right. SciAm is irrelevant now.
Simon:
What do you mean?
Eric…is this the truth? Baroness (ugh) Verma at HoL UK
UK Government Claims Its Green Policy May Have Caused Warming Pause
http://www.thegwpf.com/uk-government-claims-its-green-policy-caused-warming-pause
may have, might have, could, maybe…WTF
Paul Homewood has a good post on this:
“What has she been smoking to imagine that the UK’s reduction of 16 million tonnes can have had the slightest effect on climate, when the Rest of the World has increased their emissions by 68 times as much?
And, God forbid, this ludicrous woman is actually an Energy Minister! Heaven help us all.”
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/image_thumb98.png?w=780&h=446
Dana’s 97% blog on the Guardian does that.
Although Carrington’s is fairer; still stupid but it doesn’t distort the comments.
Why waste your time with this (snip) No one reads her blog anyway.
If you are busy, replying is a waste of time, but if you have a few moments to spare I think replying is a good exercise. It hones your debating skills, develops your civil procedures, and teaches you to keep your cool when dealing with a rave.
There is also the added satisfaction of knowing it likely irks the heck out of some Alarmists when their ranting is met with calm, logic, and facts.
Lastly, there may be a few naive readers of their blog who have their eyes opened, before your comments are snipped.
I think it’s unlikely that your description of her is helping as it seems unnecessarily harsh.
Peter:
The moderator [snipped] you for threats in your 1st comment, not what you list as “evidence” in your 2nd comment.
I’ll stipulate Malcolm’s comment was over the line. Grade-school ad hominem (sexual or otherwise) is hardly ever worth the effort. Due to WUWT’s high volumes, not every comment gets moderated. However, congratulations are in order – you’ve just demonstrated that explicit threats do indeed get moderated.
Just wondering, Peter: when you send your petty email to Dr. Curry (et al), are you going to man up and include your threats?
Over the top. Especially the bit about the sand.
Agreed and I apologise for doing what I despise seeing others do. No excuse other than a poor connection between my medulla, prefrontal cortex and finger tips. Sorry to all unconditionally.
Refer such to Yik Yak where everyone can post anything anonymously.
Man up and include his threats? “Mann” up is likely..
Apologies to everyone for my unnecessary and offensive ad hom.
That’s OK. Here’s some words of encouragement:
Hey Pete!
Yr: Oct 28, 1:03 am comment
Let’s see now, Pete, ol’ sport, I’ve got from you, with your last comment:
-a pseudo-exorcist, incantation of “Alex Jones” x 3
-a Freudian-slip “red-flag” for “false-flag” (help me out here, Pete, will yah?–didn’t the Anarchist bomb-throwers of yore and their cheka-and-gulag Bolshevik-contemporaries push their proto-Gaia, cull-crazy hustles under the “Red Bannner”? (see what I mean, Pete?)).
-and you in a riled-up, gibbering-weenie tantrum-mode over some “sexist nastiness” that–and here I emphasize that I’m quoting you, Pete, ol’ buddy, –“went unmolested”. “WENT UNMOLESTED”?!!! So, Pete, let me get this straight–you demand that “sexist nastiness” be MOLESTED!!! or you’re gonna be all p. o.’d, if it isn’t, right? Jeez, Pete, what are you doin’? I mean, like, that molestation-business of yours seems to me to be kinda, you know, like, really creepy and weirdo and maybe a little sicko, even. Can you see what I’m talkin’ about, Pete?
C’mon, Pete, I mean, like, the way you’ve been runnin’ your mouth here lately, people might mistake you for some sort of ivory-tower, tenured-parasite Professor-type. You don’t want anyone to be thinkin’ that about you, do you?
P. S. Almost forgot! Remember, Pete, my comment in that last HotWhopper blog-post by Bob Tisdale where I asked you to Goggle: “democratic underground Ann Coulter” and then, maybe, if you’d be so kind, I mean, share with us your misogyny-expert conclusions on what you found there? Remember that? So how’s that little project comin’ along, Pete?
P. P. S. Another “Almost forgot!”–you cite Malcolm’s “comment-history” as proof of his “denier” bona fides. But what does that “comment-history” really demonstrate, Pete? Perhaps, it merely demonstrates that the hive salts this blog and others with “agent-provocateurs” and takes care to create “comment-history” legends for them? You know, that sort of thing, Pete? “Wilderness of mirrors”, and all that sort of good stuff, when you’re dealin’ with the hive’s ever-morphing duplicities and flim-flam, right guy?
It is always facinating to see a person (for example Peter) attempt to solve the problem of digging a hole they can’t climb out of by continuing to dig the hole deeper.
I didn’t see the word that was snipped, so do not know offensive it was. Human nature being what it is, blurting out an insult at a person exhibiting judgemental/arrogant/dishonest behaviour can be an emotionally satisfying release against the offender. However, it don’t make it right. I agree, simply describing the poor behaviour as you have done, is a much better path than calling names.
However to be clear, there is no indication deletions or edits occur on this site in order in order to stifle opposing views as evidence shows Miriam does. Mirium practices what I call tabloid blogging, manipulating content and comments for maximum exploitation of that minority of people who truly believe the world is going to end due to CO2.
HotWhopper is certainly full of Whoppers, but it sure ain’t hot. Waste of time.
The typical discussion at HotWhopper is: “I’m right and you are a poo head”.
“Shut up” she explained.
Well done Bob. I enjoy reading your slightly restrained rebuttals to this woman. Very effective. I rarely give her site oxygen by visiting it, as it tends to suck the life out of me. Your posts are enlightened and we’ll reasoned; Hers are suffocating.
Sorry… dammed auto complete.
we’ll = well
NZpete, good advice , I did give her some O2 as well , you have to at times just to keep up where the BS comes from. But I agree with you, she is suffocating, there is not one iota of normal discussion anywhere on that site and that includes her sycophants.
The problem with this post is that curious people may go to her blog, inflating the fool’s ego. Perusing her blog may be amusing, but its a waste of valuable time as anyone who frequents her blog is to far gone to convince with science.
I disagree. The internet encourages us to live in our own little bubbles interacting only with people who think as we do. This is not constructive when it comes to resolving any kind of discussion or debate. It is healthy and helpful to go and read the perspective from the other side from time to time, if for no other reason than to marvel at how silly they all are.
We one needs a good laugh one goes to such sites as Hot Whopper for a few minutes. If you go there for science, you are then just a delusional as the hostess!
Hot WHOPPER,.. a very true description of that particular site.
Whopper, after whopper after whopper !
The truth ???… No thanks, say Sou. !. !!
Hot whopper => local colloquialism for bad smell 😉
She doesn’t misunderstand. She’s willfully ignorant. Why bother?
The whole incident is reminiscent of an old saying involving a silk purse.
Unfortunately I voluntarily clicked Bob’s link to Miriam’s site. I realized this (my first visit) was not going to be a day at the beach, but HotWopper ends up being a pretty intense stream of toxic ad hominem slime with a tiny amount of technical discussion (aka: distortion).
Even if Miriam’s technical opinion were correct, her dysfunctional personal & professional immaturity so taints her communication that only a true believer could wallow thru this material.
It’s amazing she expends this level of energy to simply howl at the moon. Who’s mind is she going to change? Oh yea, and good luck hurting Bob’s feelings.
She’s a hater, so she lays down her hate on anyone who doesn’t suck up to her. You can see it in all her comments. There is no middle ground. Either you’re her pal or you get hated. ☹
Why is it, when I meet women like that (and you see them in every government institution, and in every life-wrecking activist organization), I always have a picture of an execution squad before my eyes?
Peter:
Alexander did not say he pictured Miriam in front of a firing squad (you, however, appear to have assumed that, so maybe you have a problem with women).
But I digress.
Miriam and her ilk frequently are quoted in main-stream media as suggesting people who don’t buy their CAGW crap (they call us deniers) should be put in prison, fired, sent to re-education camps, etc. Not too much of a stretch to see them wanting to put us in front of a firing squad.
…and another thing, Peter:
You will have problems communicating your message on this site if you can’t understand some issues have two sides, fail to cite supporting data, resort to threats, and tattle to mommy when you get your butt kicked.
Geeze! Get a pair of big boy pants and invest some intelligence when discussing issues. The WUWT audience generally respects well-documented arguments (even ones at odds with the general opinion) focusing on science & data, not personalities.
If you don’t behave like an adult here, you will be marginalized.
That’s a Disgrace, Peter.
I don’t know about “women” in plural but I’ve been happily married for 33 years.
How about you?
Peter:
In response to your request I document my “denies should go to jail” comments: http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/17/u-s-college-professor-demands-imprisonment-for-climate-change-deniers/. Here’s on for “academic fired for climate opinion”: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/21/professor-nicholas-drapela-fired_n_1615947.html
Note this took 7.5 seconds for me to do – there’s a wide variety of examples to choose from.
Oh, and, with women like that — yes, I have a problem.
The problem is, they have a problem with men.
Peter:
Please note I did not explicitly say Miriam made those comments (she may have, I just won’t take the time to Google it).
Like I said, if you don’t behave like an adult, you’ll be quickly marginalized.
Reprising your behavior on this thread:
(1) I doubt you have an informed background or experience with data-based scientific climate discussions (you’ve offered no technical insights);
(2) You didn’t appear to be aware of the general political environment in which CAGW conversations take place (ie: academic firings over climate dissent or MSM calls for “deniers” to be put in jail);
(3) You easily resort to snarky ad hominem, even when you’re right on the issue;
(4) Frankly, you seem out of your depth. Like I said previously, this is an adult site (lots with heavy-duty science PhDs…). Emotional, ill-informed prattle simply won’t cut it.
I said “Miriam and her ilk” meaning the foaming at the mouth CAGW crowd.
It’s interesting that Miriam seems to be an expert on almost every post at WUWT and able to individually refute almost each and every one of them, no matter that the posts are by a diverse group of individuals and specialists. It must be nice to be omniscient!
In my first (and I hope only) visit to Miriam’s site today, I had the same opinion.
You can get away with a reasonable amount of this behavior if you run a low-traffic site that secretly (this is the trick) copies & pastes comments without telling the authors you’re hijacking their material – almost nobody gets a chance to rebut…except Tisdale.
I presume this plays well to her intended audience.
Phyllograptus says: “It’s interesting that Miriam seems to be an expert on almost every post at WUWT…”
Bingo. She seems to latch onto key words or phrases, without comprehending them.
It would have been better to let the technical refutation speak for itself, leaving all else alone.
But since HotWopper stoops frequently to ad homs, I reckon stooping to her low level is fair.
So at that level, Bob, you win. But not a level where civil society wins in the end.
Saddest is that Miriam O’Brian (now fully outted) should have known that from the beginning. Miriam, you want to play internet hard ball, prepare to get beaned. You just were. Now go away.
Mr. Tisdale, you give this individual Way, WAY too much of your time and energy – she is not worth an iota of your efforts ! As others suggest, let it go. Why give her ANY promotion ?
I have to say this is also my view. Bob and others here have oodles more actual real-life credibility than this person. I mean, you can’t stop people from expressing themselves on their own blog – and you can’t stop other people from reading those blogs (never been there though). She is no threat to Bob’s work or the real science shown on these pages and is never likely to be so. As such, I tend to believe in the ‘Give ’em enough rope’ attitude, and think it best to leave her to construct her own gallows. The only thing it may be worth checking, is her blog for libel and copyright or other such legal stuff? regards Kev
Reading her blog I found DaBrooklynknight’s questions to be pertinent. Sou apparently wasn’t interested in answering them. Today she goes on to insult Willis in a critique of his latest post. I find this woman angry, dismissive, her arguments filled with nasty personal attacks, and her followers worse than she.
I don’t think Willis will be able to counter her argument on her blog today criticizing his latest post, just as BrooklynKnight was not allowed. You don’t like polite but difficult questions? Just label him/her a troll and a denier and ban their posts. Problem solved. Anyway, from going over the comments she apparently has a close knit group of sycophants there to support her. Although, Not many at that.
It demonstrates that in this polarized climate discussion that the truth is often not the goal.
I hope some of you who disagree with some of the posts on WUWT will continue to offer arguments and corrections to mistakes made here, it’s what makes the discussion informative and fun and educates us all.
Good work, Bob. Play the data not the troll.
Well, one thing Sou does a nice job of is dealling with differing opinions, and I would say that the discourse is for the most part science based. She bans people, but they haf to try. Here at watts, opposing voices don’t last long before being “moderated” as “trolls”, so the discourse becomes rather vanilla to the point of boring.
trafamadore, the quickest way to get a banned at HotWhopper is to prove Sou wrong with facts, go try it.
Not sure how DaBrooklynNight ‘tried’ to get banned other than defending Bob’s data and graphs. Maybe you could point out his offenses.
trafamadore:
Can you give a SINGLE example of “… Here at watts, opposing voices don’t last long before being “moderated” as “trolls”, so the discourse becomes rather vanilla to the point of boring…”?
Just one?
Sou for a starter.
Which makes the Tisdale rant asymmetric to the Sou rant, since he can comment on Sou’s site but she can’t comment here.
[Reply: Like you, Sou is welcome to comment here if she abides by site Policy. Unfortunately, that has not been the case in the past. ~mod.]
I rest my case.
trafamadore says: “Which makes the Tisdale rant asymmetric to the Sou rant…”
Tisdale rant? What Tisdale rant?
Here at watts, opposing voices don’t last long before being “moderated” as “trolls”, so the discourse becomes rather vanilla to the point of boring.
And yet, here you are! As a long time denizen of this blog, my observation is that most “trolls” rush in thumping their chests and blaring their knowledge of the science…. and promptly get crushed. That’s the real reason they leave. The number who have been “moderated” out of existence is pretty low compared to those who left of their own accord. The few (very few) that were banned were ones that lashed out after being thumped on the science with over the top (WAY over) language.
I welcome the trolls. They make me defend my belief system. I’ve been wrong on a few things over the years, sometimes embarrassingly so. But as to the big picture…. I welcome the “troll” that puts up an actual argument that can be debated and potentially change my belief system. That’s how we learn. But trolls such as that have been far and few between for a long time.
I agree. We need dissenting voices putting over well reasoned arguments or we risk becoming an echo chamber.
tonyb
Yup. Moderations here are rare, and richly deserved. Look at the thread-bombing that is often tolerated here without moderation. I think Anth*ny & the mods tow a difficult line regarding how much to moderate & succeed about as well as possible.
Sorry guy. Only 50% of my posts make it, depending on the mood of the mod.
[Reply: That is flat untrue. ~mod.]
trafamadore “Sorry guy. Only 50% of my posts make it, depending on the mood of the mod.”
[Reply: That is flat untrue. ~mod.]
so there you go, I am obviously wrong.
(sarc)
Well ,that will come as a huge surprise to Mr Mosher. I wonnder why he still posts here seeing as how he disagrees with Anthiny & Tisdale & others quite a bit and must have been ‘moderated’ or ‘banned’ long ago.
Steven seems to do quite well on WUWT – his comments get noticed and frequently inspire intense discussion – nothing wrong with that.
Your statement “…seeing as how [Mosher] disagrees with Anthiny & Tisdale & others quite a bit and must have been ‘moderated’ or ‘banned’ long ago…” is confusing on 2 points:
(1) Mosher is not banned; like some others, he does get moderated from time to time for being off-topic.
(2) I doubt “Anthony & Tisdale” care if you disagree with them; what they do seem to care about is the quality (defined by clear house rules) of the debate.
You are totally wrong about the moderation here. I have seen debates rage on for days and as long as the site rules have been obeyed I am sure no one was modded out. Perhaps you have personal experience that you could point to.
trafamadore,
What planet are you posting from?
The question should be, “trafamadore, as an outsider, what do you think of the human race?”
trafamadore \,
You sound more like Slandering Sou’s alternate ego.
Sou has fabricated things I never have said and then attacked her fabrications as if I had actually uttered her nonsense. When I tried to have a reasonable discussion, without responding to her insults, and referenced with peer review papers, she simply deleted my posts because she does not know how to debate science. Based on my experience she is a total fraud!
Based on my experience she is a total fraud!
In more ways than one I think Jim. Have a look at her very first comment in the thread. GSR says:
“That was fast Sou. Well done to you and all your research staff.”
Her reply is very interesting to say the least:
“I’m a bit miffed with my research staffer. She got 3/4 of the way through the article and then the lazy sod went to bed. Claimed she was “tired”. Pffft.
She didn’t finish writing till she got up today.”
Now reading this, Sou didn’t even research or write the above article. It was written for her. Sou loves to call us ‘fake sceptics’, ‘fake d*niers’, ‘fake scientists’, etc, etc. It appears to me, Sou is a ‘fake blogger’. If I was the person who researched and wrote that article, and then seeing the comment made by Sou above, I would tell Sou to stick her research and writing where the sun don’t shine.
Ha ha Bruce. I think Miriam’s point may be that SHE (Miriam herself) is the ‘research staffer’! 🙂
That’s how I read it anyway!
Well, I haven’t seen you at HW, but have seen your insult filled submission to Keats site. He _did_ deal with your references, patiently, point by point, and they did not support your claims.
http://dialoguesonglobalwarming.blogspot.com/search?q=jim+steele
So he is a total fraud too?
trafamadore,
Keating is a clown. He’s the same guy who makes those bogus offers to pay skeptics if they show he is wrong. It’s easy to prove Keating is wrong. But try to pry a dime out of that dishonest skinflint.
Speaking of a frauds, Keating has been shown to be flat wrong many times. But like any devious propagandist, he will never pay anyone a dime. Why? Because he is a fraud. In addition, Keating constantly labels those with a different point of view as “contrarians”, “denialists”, and worse.
So it is not surprising that you would side with that fraud. Keating would never DARE to get into a fair debate with a scientific skeptic in a neutral venue, where the moderator is mutually agreed. He would be slaughtered in short order.
Keating does not have an honest bone in his body, and he knows he would lose any such debate, fast and decisively. So he hides behind his fake ‘rewards’, and calls people names. Could he — or you — be any less credible?
trafamadore:
Ok; so I read your link regarding Steele’s comments & Keating’s response. My observations:
(1) Steele’s comment ran 528 words (i.e. it was long);
(2) Steele’s argument was well organized, well stated and well documented (i.e.: definitely not a simple emotional rant);
(3) Steele did say “…Mr Keating you are a joke…”, which is not exactly polite, but on the Richter Scale of insults, it rates about a 0.9;
(4) It is obvious Jim does not agree with Keating’s opinions, but he makes his points with scientific logic, not ad hominem.
It was impossible for me to read your example as “…[an] insult filled submission…”. You appear to be having difficulty with heated adult-level heated conversations.
Keating’s response to Steele’s documented arguments (in which Keating claimed not to hurl insults) started with his rant:
“…So, let me see, your submission consists of making personal attacks. Not very scientific. Nor, are they very well informed, just like your misguided opinions on global warming. I don’t really hurl insults, I just point out the truth about deniers. It isn’t my fault that the characteristics of deniers are not complimentary. You are a perfect example. What part of science includes all of your personal attacks? Since you have no science to support your claims, you act like a jerk as if that will make you seem more credible. You really are denier. You not only deny global warming, science and the rights of other people to make up their minds without your lies, but you deny any kind of civility in a discussion on an open forum. Tell me, do you make this kind of example for your children? Do you act this way in front of your parents? What an ass. And, your argument reflect that in you.”
After reading Keating’s insult-filled rants attacking “deniers”, I would put him in the same category as Sou. They are both pretty despicable characters, IMHO. Two peas in a pod. Birds of a feather.
To see if you agree you can start here.
Keating is still preposterously blaming his problems on Bush! Keating is the one who claims he will pay $30,000 to anyone who can falisify his beliefs — but only he gets to decide if there is ever a payout.
What do you think? Do you believe him? Check out some of the comments under his payoff links.
“Mr Keating you are a joke and obviously lack any scientific understanding of the dynamics of climate change. ”
“Your misdirection via another sophomoric attack on “deniers” is only an attempt to obscure your total lack of knowledge and critical thinking skills.”
and that is how Steele begins.
and
“Speaking of a frauds, Keating has been shown to be flat wrong many times.”
Document pls. Wrong? I don’t think so.
But both you and chipJ miss the main pt, that Keating demolished Steele’s referenced articles, showing that they did not say what Steele claimed them to say. And Keating did it in a calm logical manner, laying out the paper and explaining it.
trafamadore,
When I read Keating’s nonsense I have a hard time wondering if you and he are not the same.
Keating made a bogus proposal, in which he ‘offered’ fake money for skeptics to… wait for it… prove a negative.
He wants skeptics to prove that AGW does not exist! That is like ‘proving’ that a black swan doesn’t exist. How could you prove it? You can prove a black swan does exist. But if you’ve never found one, how could you prove it doesn’t exist?! That is Keating’s disreputable tactic.
Further, just to make sure he never has to pay out a dime, Keating himself is the final arbiter! His ‘ethics’ are no different than Peter Gleick’s.
Now, if he was honest, Keating would abide by the Scientific Method and offer a prize if anyone can falsify the ‘carbon’ scare. That wouldn’t be too hard.
I would turn around the award around, and offer $1,000 to anyone who can post a verifiable, testable, empirical measurement quantifying the percentage of global warming attributable to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
But that would be nothing like Keating’s bogus propaganda ‘offer’. That would be a testable hypothesis, where a true measurement = easy money.
Finally, I have to laugh at your preposterous nonsense claiming that people are “insulting” Keating. Just look at his rants: there isn’t one where he does not label folks who simply have a different scientific opinion than his as “deniers” or “denialists” or “contrarians” or “anti-science”, etc.
Keating is the King of the Insulters, and he is also the King of Projection: when he whines about having his feet held to the fire of science, he blames skeptics for his own faults — and if you cannot see that, you are either blind, or you are Keating.
“I have a hard time wondering if you and he are not the same.”
Such an honor. But I am an a developmental geneticist not a climate person.
“He wants skeptics to prove that AGW does not exist! That is like ‘proving’ that a black swan doesn’t exist. How could you prove it? You can prove a black swan does exist. But if you’ve never found one, how could you prove it doesn’t exist?! That is Keating’s disreputable tactic.”
Hmmm. So clueless. Logic is not your strong point. If I was to “prove” AGW wrong I would show that natural processes are causing warming. Done deal. That would prove the “negative”. But all indications are that things should be cooling. So you really are clueless I guess.
@ trafamadore or keating or what ever your real persona is.
You, trafamadore/keating, had repeatedly called all skeptics deniers and other insulting terms in serveral posts and long before I ever posted. trafamadore/keating seem to be copying Slanderng Sou’s abrasive style.The replies to my posts on your/Keating website came later and only after you/keating had deleted several of my posts in order to control the debate and prevent contradictory evidence from being fairly viewed. I never returned to your/Keating’s site after you prevented me from posting further
Indeed I harshly criticized trafamadore/keating’s suggestion that sea ice was growing because continental ice melting was melting and I still see and climate ignorance not supported by any of the literature. But your archive took our discussion out of context as well as failing to post the whole discussion.
Stammerjohn’s 2008 paper which I referenced in a post you deleted said “Large perturbations in the seasonality of the marine habitat occur in association with ENSO and Southern Annular Mode (SAM) variability. The local atmospheric response to these climate modes is largely a strengthening of the meridional winds during spring-to-autumn, which in turn affect the timing of the sea-ice retreat and subsequent advance.”
My argument was the stronger winds minimized sea ice extent around the peninsula and that allowed more heat to be ventilated from the exposed ocean. Stammerjohn’s mention of “warming in winter of almost 6 1C since 1950” makes no definitive connection to CO2 warming. I also mentioned that during the summer there was no such warming trend because the ocean is realatively ice free and in the summer changes in heat ventilation are no longer an issue. CO2 does not cause a dramatic warming trend in the winter and then stop working in the summer.
Your reply under “What are they saying?” further shows how you badly you misinterpreted Stammerjohn’s paper “you wrote Antarctica peninsuala has lost 87% of its land ice” But that is not what the paper said. They said “the retreat of 87% of the marine glaciers”. That is a very big difference.
Lastly I am not sure if trafamadore/keating deleted my post or it was never posted after I could no longer access the web site, but I tried to post a reference to Fan (2014)” Recent Antarctic sea ice trends in the context of Southern Ocean surface climate variations since 1950. “
They showed that where sea ice was growing sea surface temperatures were cooling writing “, sea surface temperatures and surface air temperatures decreased during 1979–2011, consistent with the expansion of Antarctic sea ice” So much for your ridiculous arguments that global warming causing more sea ice.
Their abstract states, “This study compares the distribution of surface climate trends over the Southern Ocean in austral summer between 1979–2011 and 1950–1978, using a wide variety of data sets including uninterpolated gridded marine archives, land station data, reanalysis, and satellite products. Apart from the Antarctic Peninsula and adjacent regions, sea surface temperatures and surface air temperatures decreased during 1979–2011, consistent with the expansion of Antarctic sea ice. In contrast, the Southern Ocean and coastal Antarctica warmed during 1950–1978. Sea level pressure (SLP) and zonal wind trends provide additional evidence for a sign reversal between the two periods, with cooling (warming) accompanied by stronger (weaker) westerlies and lower (higher) SLP at polar latitudes in the early (late) period. Such physically consistent trends across a range of independently measured parameters provide robust evidence for multidecadal climate variability over the Southern Ocean and place the recent Antarctic sea ice trends into a broader context. “
You, trafamadore/keating, repeatedly insult all skeptics before and after my visit and then you manipulate the debate by deleting posts just like Slandering Sou has done. You both are just alarmist frauds.
You link to a page that takes the discussion out of context and after Keating deleted some of my posts and banned me fro further replies. To read the whole discussion starting with Keating insulting “deniers” from the start and before Keating began manipulating posts and the disscussion go http://dialoguesonglobalwarming.blogspot.com/2014/06/misconceptions-on-antartica-ice.html
@trafamadore:
Anyone reading Keating’s blog should click on the links and see his dishonesty, especially on his links offering “$1,000” or “$30,000”. He offers those fake payouts — if skeptics will only prove a negative! — and Keating alone is the arbiter of who will or will not get paid.
Of course, no skeptic has been paid and none will ever get paid. Keating is a despicable propagandist who uses a fake reward as his form of alarmist propaganda. That is Keating’s schtick.
Read some of the threads in Keating’s links. When he comments, he cannot say anything without hurling constant insults. I’d love to have a dollar for every time he calls someone a “denier”. Name-calling is his argument; no credible scientific facts are used.
You say you are “honored” to be considerd Keating. You have no idea what honor is.
I have to say, being taken for Keats is a real honor.
But Steele, I don’t have time to go to Keat’s site and see what he exactly wrote, I need to write a lecture tonight.
But so what if the antarctic is cooling? It doesn’t balance the rest of the world warming. It’s weird, we can’t explain it, people have hypotheses on it, so what? We have one of the highest temp years and there is no El Niño (yet).
trafamadore says of Keating:
So he is a total fraud too?
Yes.
And:
…being taken for Keats is a real honor.
Tell ya what, tafamadore, why don’t you invite your alter ego to write an article here? Or, at least post a comment or two? Is he a chicken?
You, and Keating, and the rest of us here know Keating is a scientific illiterate who can’t hold his own in a real science debate. Keating is even more lame than you are, if anyone can imagine that.
You post pseudo-science like this:
…so what if the antarctic is cooling? It doesn’t balance the rest of the world warming. It’s weird, we can’t explain it…
The continent of Antarctica has 10X the volume of ice that the Arctic has, so you’d better believe that matters. And the planet is not ‘warming’, no matter how many times you assert that fact-free nonsense. Both satellite records, plus other databases show conclusively that global warming has stopped. So your baseless assertions mean nothing.
You and Keating are alike. Both of you are science illiterates who have made ‘global warming’ your religion. If you dispute that, have your pal/alter ego Keating post here. Personally, I think Keating is a little chicken. Because he would get a well deserved licken by knowledgeable folks here who have forgotten more than either of you have ever learned.
Well mr db…
“The continent of Antarctica has 10X the volume of ice that the Arctic has, so you’d better believe that matters.”
Right. But the total ice is less now, right? So that matters, right? So what is your point?
“You and Keating are alike. Both of you are science illiterates who have made ‘global warming’ your religion.”
I am an atheist in that “religion”. Only believe data. Data says this should be cooler than the 1960s.
It’s not. It’s getting hotter than an El Niño year with no El Niño.
Religion means believing in illogical ideas, and you are doing a good job of that. I am guessing, the religion of de Nile?
trafamadore, you are so lame. You say:
…the total ice is less now, right? So that matters, right? So what is your point?
You stated that the Antarctic has been getting cooler. But now you claim that Antarctic ice is declining [wrong. And don’t cite Grace, it was not made for that].
Only in the mind of a deluded climate alarmist will we see contradictory statements like those.
And it is not “getting hotter”. You wish it was, so you could salvage some credibility. But sorry, that isn’t happening.
No, you are wrong. Dead wrong.
On today’s date (29 October) no part of the arctic sea ice is exposed to the sun’s rays. At the latitude of the increasing Arctic sea ice, the sun remains below the horizon the entire day, and the entire night. To [ut it in terms you may understand, it doesn’t matter how much Arctic sea ice there is today, the sun doesn’t shine on and cannot be reflected from it.
Now, the ABSENCE of Arctic sea ice from past normals on today’s date DOES increase heat losses from the open Arctic ocean: Longwave radiation losses to the sky are higher 24 hours of the day and night, evaporation losses of latent heat are higher 24 hours of the day and night, convection and conduction losses to colder Arctic air are higher 24 hours of the day and night.
But that 1/2 million square kilometers of “excess” Antarctic sea ice down south at latitude 58 and 59 south? THAT IS reflecting tremendous amounts of the sun’s energy back into space. And, every day, it is reflecting even more energy as the sun moves towards its peak on January 5. Which, by the way, is just a little ahead of the Antarctic sea ice peak in mid-late February.
RACookPE1978, when I used to work in Cambridge Bay the sun would “set” about mid-December and “rise” about mid-January. There is still Arctic sea ice exposed to the sun’s rays at this time of year, but declining fast.
PS. There was always a big party for “sunrise”, it was good fun.
Hi Robert and Jason,
I am far from being very knowledgeable regarding polar ice dynamics, so maybe you could help educate me. As I understand it, at 80º N [let’s just use North so I don’t get too confused], the sun dips below the horizon for the year on about December 21 – 22 [or is it in September?], and then reappears around the vernal equinox. Or is it in January?
There is so much misinformation out there that the real facts get buried in the noise. The only thing I’m fairly sure about is that the heat engine takes in energy at the equator and emits it at the poles. Polar ice cover matters, but how, exactly? And how much? Does less polar ice raise or lower global T? The North Pole was very likely ice-free [at least during the summer] around 6,000 years ago. Did that have any noticeable effect on global T at the time?
The only thing I clearly hear the planet telling us is that human emissions either don’t matter at all, or they matter so little [a “third order forcing” according to Willis] that human CO2 emissions can be completely disregarded, since second– and first-order forcings swamp their putative effects. So where is polar ice in all this? Does it really matter, and if so, how, and how much?
Thanks in advance, you both know a lot about polar ice and its effects. The alarmist crowd makes a big deal about ice [probably due to the fact that every other alarming prediction they ever made has turned out wrong]. But from the looks of things, there are a lot of other effects that matter more. If polar ice declined by say, half, would that cause higher or lower global temperatures? Or would it even really matter?
Seems to me that the existence of trafamadore and Sou strongly support belief in parallel universes. Thus, they may not be from Earth, but could be from Earthe’.
I’ve never been to HotWhopper, don’t want to.
Anytime in my life I’ve have tried to engage a hard-core Liberal with facts and data, usually all I get is blank stares, and then… with a few, I get a response that is something like “well you’re entitled to your opinion.” Then I say well your entitled to your own “made-up facts” I guess. Opinions are opinions, facts are facts. I tell them they can make up facts in whatever universe it is they are living in. Liberals don’t like arguing with well-informed scientists-engineers, I promise you that.
Bottom line, true Liberals don’t want the truth, can’t handle the truth. Their lives are surrounded by lies and half-truths. The “end” of whatever they believe justifies whatever “means” necessary.
If it is about Obama and his incompetence, I usually just get something back about Bush blah blah blah. To which I respond, “Curious, I don’t ever recall ever having seen Bush and Obama on the same ballot.” That usually shuts them up. and they walk off.
AW blogged: Today is epic. I got my life back. I can hear nearly normally for the first time in decades.
Congratulations. Awesome.
Great news! More info please if available.
Yes AW, let’s us know i may need the same solution this is great news and good health, (make sure you turn down the volume on the comp.)
WOOHOOT!
Great to hear!
I am sure AW feels just like that 🙂
Anthony,
. . . .the hills are alive with sound of music . . . enjoy . . .
John
Why waste your time on such a puerile hate-filled women in her sixties who’s old enough to know better?
Why devote all this attention to a fringe Warmer blog’s errors? All that’s being done is driving site traffic up for them – a website-sized analog of feeding a comment troll.
The primary link to her post was an archived version, and HotWhopper gets no traffic from that. Though there is a link directly to her website later in my post, so few people are using it that they’re not showing up on the top ten clicks for WUWT, yesterday or today.
Some of us went there for a quick look by editing the URL in the archive link.
One reason for the attention is simple pleasure at being able to laugh at an individual who has essentially made a public career of egregious behavior in the climate debate. When she throws up softballs like this, it’s hard not to enjoy watching her get so effectively skewered by Tisdale.
Regarding WUWT inadvertently driving volume to her web site: Alexa Analytics shows her site is tiny (over 300,000 sites have higher traffic), any volume bump will be temporary.
Bob, the thing Miriam appears to crave is any attention from WUWT that she can get. Don’t lend her any legitimacy by putting an effort into refuting her and feeding her disease. Some people are beyond reason, she is one of them. I went to her blog.
This was a marvellously measured (heh! In more ways than one) article by Bob Tisdale.
Anthony Watts October 27, 2014 at 9:07 pm
What I did today
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Wow Anthony, congrats, that must be wonderful!
I second that thought GREAT NEWS.
I have at times wanted to be like one of the guys I work with who wears hearing aids, during boring meetings and presentations he will get out the remote for his aids and turn them down and sit there with a smile on his face as we all suffer the waffle. But I also know some of the trouble he has gone through and so I am happy that you can now hear.
Please tell us the story when you are able.
God Bless
James Bull
Yes, great news, Anthony. Here’s (and HEARS) to you and yours!
Do you mean that bloggers at Hot Whopper and Skeptical Science are adults? They always have come across as juveniles to me.
Especially juvenile is their habit of spamming perfectly reasonable questions when they get too hard to answer.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
How could you not trust her. She looks the ideal mother. And that tilt of the head and the caring Madonna half smile. I would buy cookies from her.
I would too, for bait.
Great post, Bob. Some commenters think that responding to “Sou” is a waste of time, but it’s worth considering that she’s a darling of Mann, he retweets all her tweets about her posts, so she gets quite a large audience. (Or at least he used to, don’t know about the last few months since he blocked me…)
Ticks cannot survive without a host. Let me guess.. she’s never thanked Anthony for the success of her blog?
If I lived in Mt Beauty, which is beautiful BTW sitting just below Falls Creek (another beautiful place) and just across the gap from Bright (a really beautiful town) which sits below Mt Hotham ( A truly beautiful mountain), I probably wouldn’t be as angry as Miriam appears to be. I’d probably focus on all the good and beautiful things in life.
Best
Michael
Thoroughly mystified Miriam’s in-depth, out of depth, comprehension … huh, huh… huh…Yep that shows she’s onto it.
In my youth, ‘telling a wopper’ meant you were either telling a lie and/or grossly exaggerating something.
My life experience also and as Peter Miller says “Hot Whopper” in the older Australian lingo translates to an excessive and deliberate lie told to try and stay out of serious trouble or to grossly and deliberately exaggerate something knowing it was a lie and wrong, both in reality and morally.
Generally applying to just out of nappies and short pants juveniles who indulged in “whoppers” when they were caught at something they shouldn’t have been involved in.
Seems the choice of the blog title “Hot Whopper” also indicates a complete ignorance of past historical Australian semantics and linguistics amongst other wide ranging and demonstrated ignorance’s by Sou..
It must be galling for Ms O’Brien that Googling her name yields links to Watt’s Up With That before that for her consulting business. Bob Tisdale’s blog appears on page 2 of the results and I gave up looking for a reference to HotWhopper (other than in Bob’s entry) after page 3!
I’m not looking forward to more of your posts about Miriam O’Brien and her escapades at HotWhopper – it more of that personality and ego stuff which is the becoming a bit of a blight.
Why not invite her to that pizza place you like in New York it could be the start of something………….
AW Congratulation !
looking at Sou’s picture and thinking on her choice of blog names leads to some disturbing impressions.
AW, congratulations on your milestone. Welcome back to the land of the hearing. That is the sort of thing that real progress is about.
“I can hear nearly normally for the first time in decades.”
Fantastic, extraordinary news. Congratulations!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/23/hearing-restoration-with-gene-therapy-i-knew-this-day-would-come/
?
Who the hell is she ?
What’s this about your hearing Anthony ? I find aids useless and uncomfortable.
As useless and uncomfortable as they may be Anthony says he can hear almost normally for the first time in over a decade. That is liberation to my mind.
“Elle n’est pas maligne pour un sou”
in french means in english
“She does not to have a scrap of sense”.
A sou is a five-centime-piece. Allusion, coincidence or just the lack of a reasonable command of the french language?
“Sou” – pronounced as in “south”?
“: Hotwhopper”. Must be an adult education site.
Sorry, nothing(?) to do with pun intended “sus scrofa domestica”. It’s pronounced as in “Sioux”. **GG**
What I find most surprising is the disonance between Miriam’s directorship of a very worthy charity helping the disabled and the mental heath themed vituperation on her blog.
Oops, ‘mental heath’, well images of Lear on the blasted heath perhaps represent whats going on at WH. Health of course, sorry.
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
About the subject;
Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter’d by base sale of chapmen’s tongues:
I am less proud to hear you tell my worth
Than you much willing to be counted wise
In spending your wit in the praise of mine.
We are not often wrong using Shakespeare’s words.
“I can hear nearly normally for the first time in decades.”
That is wonderful, wonderful, news. Godspeed.
Wonderful news indeed Anthony. Your health related hints had us fearing the worst. To find that it is instead the best is indeed fantastic.
Miriam cannot be beaten by you guys with your evidence based science, she has the concerned head tilt down pat. Give up while you still can or face the wrath of her compassion.
Luckily, Miriam resides on the other side of the world from many of us who publish here. Regardless, it’s the zealots like her who force me to remain as anonymous as I can.
I don’t think she ever sleeps. She infests blogs on the UK Daily Telegraph, particularly when Geoffrey Lean is getting another much needed education from the reality based community.
Very good! Best viewed as a reflection in one’s shield perhaps.
It is great to see that workers at burger shops try to get involved in the climate debate.
yes indeed, such ad homs always reflects on the issuer of such invectives.
this sites commenter’s are filled with engineering, math and sciences degrees. It is probably unattainable, but a survey between this site’s commenters’ degrees and professions and those at HW would be quite illuminating no doubt.
site’s commenters
Alexa Traffic Rank:
WUWT
Global 11,053
United States Flag 7,678
HotWhopper
Global 318,314
United States Flag 275,362
and for comparison, two “leading” alarmist sites
SkepticalScience
Global 84,420
United States Flag 33,369
RealClimate
Global 266,015
United States Flag 99,457
HW is a completely marginal site.
FYI for casual reader: Alexa numbers are rankings (higher ranking is more visited).
Alexa numbers ARE NOT number of visits.
I don’t know what the numbers are but Sou’s blog seems to be focussed on this blog so at the least it will send people over to take a look at reality.
Unfortunately, her visitors are so blinded by their beliefs that reality never comes into play.
I`m convinced her arguments are a deflection and denial.I showed my `better half` Hot whopper and this thread.
She is convinced Ms O`Brien has the hots for Anthony Watts our esteemed blogmeister.
It`s not scientific debate…it`s stalking 😉
Now that is an interesting conjecture.
tabloid headline: “Hot Whopper Blogress has Hots for well-known Climate Sceptic.”
now if someone would just photoshop her face onto a page Gal….
I’ve speculated on this apparent paradox before. She hangs on his every word, follows his every move, and once posted a photograph showing him “not asking a question at a conference”. Hero-worship in the extreme.
I finally found our host’s personal note. As the parent of an adult with childhood hearing difficulties, I may know some of the relief. Fortunately my daughter turned her difficulty into an advantage in her professional education by using it to eliminate distractions.
As an aging senior, I anticipate the opportunity to ostentatiously turn-off or remove hearing-aids.
Best wishes.
Mr. Tisdale,
You write: “What happened to the sea surface temperatures in that region between the turns of the 20th and 21st Centuries?”
They don’t exist. From the paper, p. 2: “Data exist for 1878 to 1899 for Carysfort Reef and 1879 to 1912 for Fowey Rocks.”
Pp. 3-4: “Hudson and colleagues established four permanent sites for monitoring underwater temperature in the upper Florida Keys (Hudson et al. 1991), including three sites along an on- to offshore transect from Snake Creek tidal channel in Islamorada, FL, to the outer-shelf reef at Crocker Reef. From 1975 to 1990, data (Online Resource 2) were gathered using this method, including regular calibration at intervals of 120 days or less (Hudson et al. 1991). Starting in 1990, Ryan Industries, Inc., thermographs were deployed at those sites and at additional strategic locations along the Florida reef tract.”
You write: “‘The magnitude of warming revealed here is similar to that found in other SST datasets from the region…’ Why didn’t Kuffner et al. (2014) present that basic background data?”
Publication space constraints perhaps? See the first paragraph on page 6, just under Table 1 for the citations.
You write: “The recent downturn in the [HADISST] data also doesn’t help their cause … Yet, somehow, we’re supposed to believe manmade greenhouse gases are causing harm to the coral in recent years.”
Looking at GHCN atmospheric temperature trends for August in an appropriate grid (25-26N, 81-80W) might shed some light: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1C2T0pQeiaSTUp4X2VhbkdWTG8
Note the similar slope of the linear trends between the in situ underwater temperature series and the GHCN trends … and that they’re increasing faster than the HADISST curves for the same region. Kind of a classic chicken or egg problem until one ponders how shallow bays and lagoons bounded by coral reefs might respond to climate inputs differently than deeper open ocean.
Your question about how the in situ data tracks to AMO is a good one. Just eyeballing the chart I posted and knowing roughly where the AMO cycles live, I’d say fairly well.
Brandon Gates, in response to my question, “What happened to the sea surface temperatures in that region between the turns of the 20th and 21st Centuries?”, you replied, “They don’t exist…” and then proceeded to quote from the Kuffner et al. paper
Actually, for the region, they do exist. Apparently you missed the word “region” in my statement. I did not say reefs. I said region, which is the same word used by Kuffner et al. in their abstract. And if you had bothered to read my post, you would have found their use of the word region served as the foundation for the question you quoted.
If you’re not aware, with the exception of one month in 1946, there are continuous monthly observations of sea surface temperature in the ICOADS data base for that region of the Florida Keys from about 1905 to present. As a result, the UKMO and NOAA include that region in their HADISST and ERSST.v3b datasets, both of which I presented in this post.
Brandon Gates, additionally, which 5-deg latitude by 5-deg longitude grid are you using for reference GHCN land surface air temperatures? The one that includes all of Florida? Or the one that includes western Cuba? Or did you combine the two? And do really think land surface air temperatures for Florida and/or Cuba are representative of the sea surface temperatures of the grid I presented?
BTW, Brandon, I suspect your GHCN data is for the grid that includes all of Florida. But get back to me when you know for sure. I’m surprised I haven’t seen you commenting during the renewed discussions on that HotWhopper thread:
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/09/perennially-puzzled-bob-tisdale-surfs.html
Brandon Gates wrote, “Note the similar slope of the linear trends between the in situ underwater temperature series…”
What underwater series? You’re mistaken just like your hero Miriam. The data provided by Kuffner et al for the two periods at those two reefs was sea surface temperature data.
You have a good day, Brandon.
Bob,
You write: “I said region, which is the same word used by Kuffner et al. in their abstract. And if you had bothered to read my post, you would have found their use of the word region served as the foundation for the question you quoted.”
I did read your entire post, as well as the entire paper wherein we find on p. 2:
“Caution is advised, however, when attempting to de-
rive local, absolute patterns in SST from regionally and glob-
ally synthesized satellite data products, especially in nearshore
waters typical of coral reef ecosystems. Satellites that measure
the temperature of the ‘skin’ of the ocean are unable to
measure ambient temperature at depth and thus cannot fully
represent the subsurface environs inhabited by reef organisms
(Castillo and Lima 2010). Moreover, coral reefs are exposed
to significant thermal variability across a range of temporal
and spatial scales (Leichter et al. 2006). The shallowness of
nearshore waters makes them responsive to heat exchange
across the air–water interface (Pitts and Smith 1995) and, in
the case of the Florida reefs, to the tidally driven effects of
unusually hot or cold, very shallow (2–3-m deep), inland-bay
waters (Roberts et al. 1982).”
You write: “If you’re not aware, with the exception of one month in 1946, there are continuous monthly observations of sea surface temperature in the ICOADS data base for that region of the Florida Keys from about 1905 to present.”
ICOADS is a gridded product. I don’t see anything per se incorrect with looking at it as a smell test; in fact, good on you for doing so. But corals aren’t sensitive to averaged temperature smeared across a grid, they’re sensitive to temperatures in the local waters in which they live … among many other things also mentioned in the paper. One of the authors’ main points here is that homogenized, gridded SST products probably do not have sufficient spatial resolution for their liking in this particular application.
You write: “I suspect your GHCN data is for the grid that includes all of Florida.”
Nope, the August mean absolute temps for the four individual stations in that 1×1 grid:
StationId Lat Lon Alt StationName
42500087020 25.58 -80.44 3 PERRINE 4W
42572202000 25.82 -80.28 4 MIAMI, FL.
42572202001 25.48 -80.38 5 HOMESTEAD/AFB
42572202003 25.72 -80.28 4 MIAMI/WSO CITY
You write: “What underwater series?”
Back to the paper, pp. 2-3:
“Ironically, it was the recognition of cold water stress as a
major driver of coral mortality and sub-lethal reductions in
coral growth (Hudson et al. 1976) that motivated the initiation
of underwater temperature monitoring in the Florida Keys.
Hudson (1981a) conducted a coral transplantation study in
1975 that included one of the first deployments of underwater
‘temperature loggers.’ These loggers (General Oceanics mod-
el #3011) consisted of 8-mm cameras in housings that were set
to take hourly photographs of a wristwatch and a dial read-out
Fahrenheit thermometer. Hudson and colleagues established
four permanent sites for monitoring underwater temperature in
the upper Florida Keys (Hudson et al. 1991), including three
sites along an on- to offshore transect from Snake Creek tidal
channel in Islamorada, FL, to the outer-shelf reef at Crocker
Reef.”
You write: “I’m surprised I haven’t seen you commenting during the renewed discussions on that HotWhopper thread.”
I had my fun yesterday, different thread. Got some egg on my face … I confused you with Eschenbach. Silly mistake since you always put your name on your graphs.
Brandon Gates, thanks for your reply. I believe you’re missing a few things.
My post illustrated the regional sea surface temperature anomalies for the Northeast Florida Keys, which encompass the Fowey Rocks and Carysfort Reef, using two sea surface temperature datasets, both of which I have acknowledged as having been adjusted. The adjustments were designed to account for the differences in measurement technologies. Unless you can point to specific problems with the datasets, there is nothing wrong with my posts.
Are there biases in the lighthouse keeper and buoy datasets presented by Kuffner et al.? Of course there are.
Maybe if you looked at my posts in a different light it would help. My graphs presented a what-if scenario: If there was continuous supply of sea surface temperature data from the two reefs presented in Figures 2 and 3 of Kuffner et al., and if the sea surface temperature data from those two reefs were corrected for the differences in measurement methods, what would the long-term curve look like? Both the HADISST and ERSST.v3b datasets showed that the primary warming took place in the early 20th century after the lighthouse-keeper data ended, not during the later warming period of the 20th Century.
If you’re not aware of this, that’s consistent with sea surface temperatures of the waters off the east coast of the United States, from Florida to New Jersey. Do you recall my posts after hurricane Sandy?
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/sea-surface-temperature-anomalies-along-sandys-track-havent-warmed-in-70-years/
Good on you for using local GHCN data. But your introduction of GHCN data into the discussion is a distraction from the topic at hand, which is the sea surface temperature of the region that encompasses the two reefs in question. A clear case of misdirection. Do land surface air temperature data represent sea surface temperatures? No. Do land surface temperature data have different biases than sea surface temperature data? Of course they do.
Stay on-topic, please.
Your other use of misdirection (like Miriam) relates to the topic of the “underwater series”. You provided quotes from the study about reefs other than Fowey Rocks and Carysfort Reef. Are you aware that the average depth of Fowey Rocks is 5 feet? Are you aware that the average depth of Carysfort Reef is 5 feet? Are you aware that the two lighthouses in question are built on stilts above those two reefs? Are you aware that sea surface temperature data come from multiple technologies with different depths that range from the satellites (skin) to buckets (about a meter) to buoys (about 3 meters) to ship inlets (which vary). There’s nothing deep or “underwater” about those two reefs, Brandon, which is why Kuffner et al. presented the data from those two reefs as sea surface temperature data!
Once again, stay on-topic, please.
You can try to justify your and Miriam’s misdirections, but they aren’t going to work. Maybe at Hot Whopper. Not here. The topic of discussion is sea surface temperature data for the region that encompasses Fowey Rocks and Carysfort Reef.
Last: Yes, I enjoyed the irony of your comments on that thread at HotWhopper.
Brandon, I hope your taking note that you can discuss this freely without being called a troll or your comments being moderated.
Indeed I am.
Bob,
I cannot point to specific issues with any of the data you have used other than the standard caveats you’ve already mentioned. I simply don’t have the expertise to speak to them in a way that would be interesting, novel or instructive. In short, I’m content for the both of us to accept them as is, knowing that they’re imperfect.
You have pointed to something you consider a deficiency in the paper, namely that the in situ data is not continuous and that the authors have not adequately substantiated their claim that the majority of the ocean warming near those reefs is a result of anthropogenic 20th century warming. Guess what, I don’t find it in their paper either and so that statement came off reading like an obligatory CO2-diddit even to my consensus-following warmist eyes. Look, I’ll go so far as to bet you that there are coral reefs somewhere on this orb with in situ sea temperature records which show a cooling trend since 1975. I don’t expect you to bet against me.
So, your sailent question is: what really happened to sea temps in those reefs during the gap in the in situ record? HADISST for that grid shows a divergence, so we’ve gone from no explanation to what now looks like a glaring discrepancy. Please tell me if I’ve missed something.
I am interested in attempting to figure out — on my lonesome if need be — what local sea temperatures at those reefs actually looked like. Kuffner & Co. didn’t satisfy either of us, but hey, that’s science. So let’s do some. I propose an experiment. We both independently attempt to do such a reconstruction of sea temps at those reefs using any data we like. Multiple reconstructions using different data to compare and contrast/what-if/whatever would be excellent, but not a condition. If Anthony is willing to “referee”, it might be interesting for us to mutually agree on a submission deadline. We send him our final output and supporting material for him to publish simultaneously, and the public peer review process can commence. What do you say?
I didn’t read your Hurricane Sandy SST post, it’s now in my queue.
In an open debate I consider it paramount to consider as much data as possible. Again, I think that your instinct to look at other data outside what was presented by Kuffner, et al. is a good one, in the best tradition of skeptical scientific investigation. True, I and others have publicly and not too kindly … questioned … the relevance of HADISST and other gridded data as you have used it. I’ve told you specifically why I think the in situ data are most relevant Kuffner, et al. and why I think SSTs in the open ocean miss the central point of the paper. I see that as different from dictating to you that gridded SSTs are OT, such was not my intent.
I’d appreciate the same consideration when I bring in additional data to develop my own argument … by all means tell me why you don’t think little green men from Mars are relevant to corals in the Fla. Keys, but I really don’t appreciate this sort of rhetoric any more than you do: “You can try to justify your and Miriam’s misdirections, but they aren’t going to work. Maybe at Hot Whopper. Not here. The topic of discussion is sea surface temperature data for the region that encompasses Fowey Rocks and Carysfort Reef.”
I came here to challenge your arguments on their merits because I think you’ve raised interesting questions, some of which I have myself. I’d appreciate it if you’d leave Miriam out of this. I didn’t bring it up, you did, and if anything is detracting from the scientific debate between us, it’s you continually roping me into your mudfest with her. I’m more than happy to leave HW out of it in this forum, are you?
If you think atmospheric temperatures and SSTs aren’t coupled, especially when they’re in close proximity to each other, this would be the time and place for you to explain why because thus far I ain’t seeing it.
[threading got wonky on me, so this reply is somewhat out of sequence]
Brandon, I commend you on your efforts to look further into the subject. Personally, I have little interest in the matter, so you’ll be on your own.
Regards
I tend to disagree, Forrest.
While the kerfuffle is annoying, the science is on display, and topics have been illuminated that I hadn’t considered before.
And I believe that goes for a large segment of the audience here.
OT (maybe)
It occurs to me that the IPCC and scientists advocating human produced CO2 as the primary cause of “global warming” are following the example of Ptolmey in that they proceed from a predetermined answer and create ever more complicated ‘epicycles’ in order to prove it. Ptolemy and those that supported his earth centric view had to continually ‘tweak’ his model to force it to conform to new observations. Seems to me that is exactly what the GCM modellers are doing.
Agreed. All those papers arguing that their models can show global warming causes more bitter winters, more snow, more sea ice and more cold waves are prefect examples of creating epicycles to hide numerous contradictions of a failed model. The trouble is those epicycles created a powerful illusion. Even today nearly every planetarium uses the epicycle models to pattern the gears that move the lights across the ceiling to imitate the night sky.
Perhaps Miriams brain is affected with ECObola? Symtoms include having delusions of having superior knowledge in all areas, and of needing to correct all who disagree with her, in order to save the world….or is it ECHObola…?
Eco-bola… good one, Bob.
I went over to check out Miriam’s blog to see what all the hub-bub was about, got engaged in one topic, came to the conclusion it’s an angry-grandma-has-opinions-and-you’d-better-damn-well-like-them blog.
She is good at rhetoric, but not much else.
Bob. Don’t waste your time. Facts won’t change her mind.
jeremyp99, Miriam is not my intended audience.
Wolfram Alpha metrics:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wattsupwiththat.com+vs+hotwhopper.com
Sounds like group therapy, Bob. Have you considered, as Anders says, that you might be wrong.
Margaret,
That’s the great thing about Science, it seeks out falsification EXPLICITLY in the method.
Belief on the other hand…relies on faith, and faith is unfalsifiable. Which is where adherents to man-made Global warming , or Climate Change (CC) if you prefer, now mostly reside.
-The fact that the GCM outputs, that the IPCC’s own conclusion rely so heavily upon, due to the temperature hiatus can now be rejected in favor of the null hypothesis means little to the adherents of the CC faith.
-The fact that the observed temp rise of 1976-1998 is NOT exceptional in the context of temps changes over the last 1000 years means little to the adherents of the CC faith.
-The fact that by every measure of extreme weather events, there is no upward change in frequency or severity in context to the historical records means little to the adherents of the CC faith.
-The fact that Northern and Southern polar ice measures remain within (or even exceed) historical norms means little to the adherents of the CC faith.
-The fact that human societies have had to deal with extremes of Climate Change cold and warm periods for at least the last 4000 years means little to the adherents of the CC faith.
-The fact that more CO2 in the atmosphere actually promotes a greening of the biosphere, which also provides some buffer against the inevitable and eventual climate cooling periods, means little to the CC faithful.
-The fact that wealthier human societies are much better positioned to afford and use technology to reduce harmful impacts (deforestation of forests for charcoal production for ex) of mankind on the environment, and that wealth requires energy utilization, means little to the CC faithful.
-The fact that we are blessed to currently reside during a 12,000 year long (so far) interglacial warm period, with a certain glacial returning, means little to the CC faithful.
-The fact that mankind should be embracing and running with next generation safe thorium reactors to survive the next glacial era descent means little to the CC faithfull.
No Margaret, your belief in the correctness of CC is based on an un-scientific faith in those who have other social-political motives that necessitate being less than truthful to the human population.
Margaret Hardman, thanks for your comment. My reply, I presented data, Miriam presented misinformation.
As an operational meteorologist observing the global atmosphere for over 3 decades, there have been many new things to learn about weather and climate. However, the biggest surprise has been the continuing opportunities to learn about the human psche.
This particular dynamic is just one of countless examples, that at times, rather than being an exception, are the rule in climate science today.
Tisdale prefers interpolated and infilled data. In situ measurements stinks.
Thanks.
I’m sure Bob can speak for himself on what he prefers. Hurling “stink bombs” , both real and rhetorical, has long been a tactic of radical anarchists.
wollie:
You are, of course, entitled to your observations & opinion.
However, your snarky little aside would have more intellectual credibility if you were to engage and defend your opinion. Bob does invite discussion, but asks you clearly state your position and quote his exact words you disagree with.
Be careful what you ask for, woollie
wollie, did you read the post? Based on your statement, we’re left to believe you didn’t understand it.
I understood Tisdale. You don’t trust thermometer readings from Florida Keys. You prefer interpolated and infilled data for HadISST.
No. You didn’t understand my posts, wollie, if that’s your conclusion.
Please quote me chapter and verse where I stated or implied that I “don’t trust thermometer readings from Florida Keys.”
As I noted in a comment above, my graphs presented a what-if scenario: What would the long-term curve look like (1) if there was continuous supply of sea surface temperature data from the two reefs presented in Figures 2 and 3 of Kuffner et al., and (2) if the sea surface temperature data from those two reefs were corrected for the differences in measurement methods? Both the HADISST and ERSST.v3b datasets showed that the primary warming took place in the early 20th century after the lighthouse-keeper data ended, not during the later warming period of the 20th Century.
If you’re not aware of this, that’s consistent with sea surface temperatures of the waters off the east coast of the United States, from Florida to New Jersey. Do you recall my posts after hurricane Sandy?
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/sea-surface-temperature-anomalies-along-sandys-track-havent-warmed-in-70-years/
Tisdale: Expand your grid to 5×5 and see what happens.
You will not make an addendum to your post with that. I know you won’t.
wollie says: “Tisdale: Expand your grid to 5×5 and see what happens. You will not make an addendum to your post with that. I know you won’t.”
Why would I want to do amend my post with a graph that basically shows the same thing as the 1-deg x 1-deg grid, wollie? Expanding the coordinates to 22N-27N, 83W-78W provides a remarkably similar graph:
Compare it to Figure 3 in my post, wollie.
And here’s the data you requested smoothed with 121-month filter:
Compare it to Figure 2 in the post, wollie.
If you’re getting different results, wollie, then YOU, wollie, have entered the coordinates incorrectly.
You’ve wasted a half hour of my time, wollie. You owe me a half hour of my life back. Or I take donations here:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&business=C6Y5VHZNFB9QL&lc=US&item_name=Bob%20Tisdale¤cy_code=USD&bn=PP%2dDonationsBF%3abtn_donateCC_LG%2egif%3aNonHosted
Have a good day.
Bob,
Pretty sure this is wollie.
LOL.
Like I said, woolly, be careful what you ask for.
wollie = Wolly
Bob,
It’s expected that SSTs change temperature more slowly than air temperatures over land. In a 5×5 grid containing both land and ocean, we’d expect combined land/sea temperature trends to fall in the middle of timeseries masked for either land or ocean:
Not so surprisingly, SSTs for the entire N. Hemisphere show an upward trend from 1930 because, well, the entire planet has absorbed more energy than it’s dissipated.
WordPress didn’t like my embedded image link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1C2T0pQeiaSaFktaEVYdTFsdzQ/view
Hi Bob, Been away for a few days and came across all of the above. This is purely anecdotal; when I was studying for my Meteorology degree I used to dive nearly every two weeks at Carysfort reef. Beautiful conditions. The ‘lighthouse’ is on stilts, no dry land/reef. The drop off was at about 50 feet, with a wall down to 100 or so feet. The coral was in good shape. This was in 1962 to 1966. Much later around 1995 I revisited the area and dove on the reef. I was astounded. The coral was in even better shape than I ever remembered it to be. I talked to Walter Stark who did pioneer photo work for the Univ of Miami and wrote a pretty good book on marine life in the keys, agreed with me. All of this is just to say sometimes folks just don’t know what they’re talking about. And maybe data is misunderstood. Floating buoys would not be close to the lighthouse platform; there are certainly currents about. Gulfstream eddies abound. So it doesn’t surprise me the SSTs would be different, very different, as distance from the platform increases.
Thanks, Weather Dave. Welcome back.
[Snip. Good to see this persona non grata adding to the site traffic. ~mod.]
Miriam is uninformed that coral bleaching may be caused by both warming and cooling water. Since the climate is always changing, either warming or cooling, coral bleaching is a natural phenomenon, not something unusual.
“The results of this study suggest that corals and coral reefs may also be impacted by exposure to cold as well as warm temperature extremes as climate change occurs.”
http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v248/p85-97/
not only the cold but pollution.
The main culprit for destruction of coral has certainly not been the climate. In the pacific in the 1970’s and 80s it was usage for building.
But many varied reasons.
http://www.unep.ch/regionalseas/main/persga/pilcher.html
http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2013/nov/large-study-shows-pollution-impact-coral-reefs-%E2%80%93-and-offers-solution
CORVALLIS, Ore. – One of the largest and longest experiments ever done to test the impact of nutrient loading on coral reefs today confirmed what scientists have long suspected – that this type of pollution from sewage, agricultural practices or other sources can lead to coral disease and bleaching.
————–
On hot whopper this comment would have been removed,
Not only cold, warmth and pollution, I can’t imagine the corals were pleased to have the pilings for the lighthouses at Fowey Rocks and Carysfort Reef driven into them, or having those lighthouses provide shade.
Fowey Rocks lighthouse:
http://www.divespots.com/scuba-diving-spots/florida/miami/spots/fowey-lighthouse-fowey-rocks
Carysfort Reef lighthouse:
http://www.divespots.com/scuba-diving-spots/florida/florida-keys/key-largo/spots/carysfort-lighthouse
Pilings- phah,thats nothing! , I’ll take your pilings and raise you 50,000 degrees,
http://www.livescience.com/2438-bikini-atoll-corals-recovering-atomic-blast.html
Thanks, Richard. I enjoyed that. Laughed out loud…just as one of my neighbors passed by my open patio door, looking at me oddly.
Bob, you may find this interesting. Coral and the Maldives. They were always banging on about how AGW was effecting the coral and the islands were in danger of flooding.
“Mined areas of the reef were simply wiped out”
http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5623e/x5623e0o.htm
————–
Bearing in mind that Coral probably takes 20 to recover, using coral for building was banned in the early 1990s.
So 20 years later-
BBC News – Low-lying Pacific islands ‘growing not sinking’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10222679
3 Jun 2010 – A new geological study finds that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking. … featured in the magazine the New Scientist, predicts that the islands will … that most have remained stable, while some have actually grown. …. current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience.
If warm water is very bad for corals, how come 500 species of corals thrive in the Coral Triangle? Its temperature is 28-30 C. Off the coast of Florida it’s 26-27 C. It seems corals love warm water.
I don”t think they do, based on all the above links it would seem that pollution is the key problem. With the El Nino back in 1982/ 83-
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/gcg/RTN/rtnt.html
“Within the next few weeks, the ocean began to react to the changes in wind speed and direction. Sea level at Christmas Island in the mid-Pacific (see map) rose several inches. By October, sea-level rises of up to a foot had spread 6000 miles eastward to Ecuador. As sea level rose in the east, it simultaneously dropped in the western Pacific, exposing and destroying the upper layers of the fragile coral reefs surrounding many islands. Sea-surface temperatures at the Galapagos Islands and along the coast of Ecuador rose from typical levels in the low 70s (degrees Fahrenheit) well up into the 80s”
and the 1997/98 El Nino caused the same problem.
sorry mean to say i don”t think warm water is a problem.
It seems ridiculous … realists forever having to expose the lies, deception, misinformation, pseudo-sclence and propaganda of climate change alarmists. But it just has to be done.
Realists are having to combat the absurdity of climate change charlatans who claim, as an example, that global warming is causing global cooling in Antarctica.
Where`s Wollie?
Probably feels bad that he wasted a 1/2 hour of my limited time on this lovely planet. Mmmmm, probably not.
Tisdale: There is still time for you to explain why in situ measurements must be wrong because interpolated and infilled data is different. Also different from measurements from land stations.
You prefer interpolated and infilled data. Based on much fewer measurements. Daily in situ measurements suck.
Perhaps Tisdale also would comment on the discrepancy between HadISST and HadSST3?
Tisdale won’t do that. Inconvenient.
Since ‘beckleybud’ [“wollie”] was outed, he skedaddled.
I’m just now learning about Miriam O’Brien. She wrote a cute essay on her blog about my guest essay on WUWT back in August:
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/08/james-mccown-and-wuwt-reject-co2.html
I’m tempted to write a rebuttal, but that poor woman is too far gone to even try reasoning with. She doesn’t have the slightest what I was saying in my post, so she can’t respond to my main thesis. Instead, she writes a load of fabrications “How James McCown disputes basic chemistry” and non sequiturs.
Amazing the lengths the warmists will go to.
James, let me guess. The fabrications, misdirections and redirections from Miriam gave you a remarkably strong feeling of frustration. The trick is to read her posts without getting frustrated. They can actually be very entertaining then.
You’re right, Bob. I should try to laugh about it.
The problem is I feel such a deep sense of pity for poor Miriam. When they were handing out brains that woman went AWOL.
I should be used to such dysfunctional mental processes by now, after all my years in academia. But it still troubles me. How can people like Miriam deal with everyday life? How do they manage?
The mind boggles.
Bob,
i already read more then 3 years without really commenting your amazing posts about the sea surface temperatures and ENSO,…
sadly on the topic the comments are closed so i put it here as it also handles aout that “blob”
Without having the in-depths knowledge as you do nor any connection to do a reasonable research on it i do have a question that may be interesting to look into:
what struck me is the start of this years El nino and the similarity with the super el nino of 1998 and 2010, to then suddenly “vanish”, to then make that famous area in the eastern north pacific nicknamed as “the blob” grow stronger on the timing the el nino should occur… so maybe a stupid question (at least then i learned something by the answer) but is there a possibility that the nino kelvin wave could be diverted to the area where that blob resides during it’s travel along the equator? (the idea is could a warm water mass from an el nino be captured by the north pacific counter current and be dispersed/diverted to the north pacific gyre and then be blown eastwards by the opposite trade winds, if it was able to cross the subtropical jet)
Of course i can be completely wrong i’m not a scientist so i for sure can live with the answer that it is just coincidal because of the north pacific current being to cold/strong for any warm water to cross it or be dispersed…
Frederik Michiels, thank you for your observations about this El Nino and the blob. If we look at the sea surface temperature anomalies in the area of the blob (the purple curve)…
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/figure-42.png
…we can see that 2014 is actually the second year of high temperatures. The unusual warming began in 2013.
There was a recent paper that linked the blob to the warming in the western (not eastern) tropical Pacific. I didn’t read or study that paper to see if it made sense and don’t have a link available right at the moment.
As a side note, if you ever have a question on a post that’s more than a few days old, feel free to ask it at my blog.
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/
I moderate comments there and reply to all questions. Sometimes due to the high traffic here at WUWT, I miss questions.
Cheers
[On your website, I do not see a thread, link, or “Continuing Post” (like WUWT “Notes and Tips” where a new reader can ask such a question though. How do you want them to contact you? .mod]
Good question, moderator. They can ask the question on any thread.
Dear Sou**
My premise is that, given your easily observed fanatical devotion to every word of every post at WUWT that is well evidenced by your long term behavior on your blog Hotwhopper, you need us for your deepest raison d’être .
We’ll be around for you out of our benevolent compassion.
**a.k.a.: Miriam O’Brien; a.k.a. Sou from Bundangawoolarangeera; a.k.a. Madame de HotWhopper
John
Hi John,
Yes, Miriam is fixated on WUWT, and on Anthony, and on the folks writing guest articles here. She obviously reads every one of them voraciously, ratcheting up her wild-eyed, spittle flecked emo-response all the while, and then she runs back to her little blog to vent.
Miriam clearly has major psychological issues; it doesn’t take a trained professional to see that. I feel sort of sorry for her. She was no doubt badly mistreated in some way when she was very young, and this is the result. But I would feel a lot more sympathy for her if she would try to control herself.
A common tactic among climate alarmists is to demonize anyone who simply has a different scientific view than they do. That is why they constantly label skeptics as ‘denialists’, ‘contrarians’, and worse. The common motivation seems to be their irrational hatred, which they lay on thick.
It amazes me that Miriam O’Brien has any readers at all. But then, she isn’t the only one with severe psychological problems…
dbstealey on October 30, 2014 at 1:23 am
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dbstealey,
Pleasure to get a comment from you.
I cannot go down the road of some commenters who I see assigning psychological issues or mental problems to people with whom, in general, we have fundamental disagreement with, sorry. I know the Lewandowsky’s and Oreskes’ of the world irrationally and unethically try ineptly to play the psychological / mental card against people like us who criticize their activist / ideologically inspired climate position; but I will not be a mirror image of them.
To me it is expected to see contrary positions held by humans as they voluntarily make their own individual intellectual decisions on how to reason and what ideas to act on. That is the human condition and it does not intrinsically hold that people who I profoundly differ intellectually with have psychological or mental problems; quite the contrary.
John