Please put down your coffee before reading any further. You wouldn’t want to spritz your keyboard and screen. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I have a confession to make. I am one of the very few remaining people around the globe who continue to regularly visit the blog RealClimate. It’s a curiosity thing mostly, kind of like watching the Titanic sink in slow motion.
I stop by to see what the alarmist wing of the climate science community feels is important enough to spend time blogging about. Much to my amazement a few days ago, there, sitting at the top of the RealClimate main page, was a blog post about…
Ready?
…a widget.
A widget? you ask.
Yup, a widget. Not just any widget, the WattsUpWithThat widget.
The RealClimate post by Stefan Rahmstorf here begins (their boldface):
The “World Climate Widget” from Tony Watts’ blog is probably the most popular deceptive image among climate “skeptics”. We’ll take it under the microscope and show what it would look like when done properly.
See, I told you…a widget.
Imagine you’re a climate scientist; you’re one of the founding members of the website RealClimate; but more importantly, you’re Professor of Physics of the Oceans at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research of Potsdam University.
Got that? Now, imagine at the top of your high-priority daily to-do list you do NOT find something like help fix climate models, which double the warming rate of the global ocean surfaces over the past 33 years. See Figure 1. Nope. You don’t find that topping the priority list.
Figure 1 (from the blog post here)
And you do NOT find something like help fix the spatial patterns of ocean-surface warming in climate models so the models might be useful at simulating future climate patterns (temperature and precipitation) on land. See Figure 2.
Figure 2 (from the blog post here)
Imagine…what you do find at the top of your high-priority daily to-do list is Write a Blog Post about the WUWT Widget.
It’s mind boggling.
Have I written a blog post about a widget? Of course. It’s here. And if you click on that link, you’ll find I even produced a video about a widget. And there’s a reason I wrote an article and produced a video about a widget. My role in the climate-science debate is that of a science reporter for WattsUpWithThat, the World’s Most-Visited Website on Global Warming and Climate Change. I’m not a climate scientist, like Stefan Rahmstorf. Climate scientists are entrusted with providing scientific support for what has been called the greatest threat facing the world. Must not be too high a priority if one of the faithful spends time writing a blog post about a widget…and others take time out of their day to comment about that widget on the thread at RealClimate.
A few other thoughts about Stefan’s post, before you happily take over:
Stefan writes in his paragraph 1 (his boldface):
It is better to plot the surface air temperature. That is what is relevant for us humans: we do not live up in the troposphere, nor do natural ecosystems, nor do we grow our food up there…
I suspect Stefan Rahmstorf will regret that statement, because he’s likely to be reminded of it every time he wants to claim ocean heat content is important. (Stefan, we don’t live to the depths of 2000 meters in the oceans. Remember what you said…)
He ends the same paragraph:
… Let us thus use the GISTEMP global annual temperature record from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science (all surface data sets agree to better than 0.1 °C, see comparison graph).
Unfortunately for Stefan, the GISS LOTI data is made up mostly of sea surface temperature data, not the “surface air temperature” data for the oceans, the latter of which is known as Marine Air Temperature. And most of us don’t live on the surface of the oceans…though I wish I did from time to time.
You’ll also note that Rahmstorf spent a lot of time adding notes to an older version of the WUWT widget. See Figure 3. It ends in 2009.
Figure 3
Why didn’t he use a more up-to-date widget, shown in Figure 4? I’ll let you speculate about that.
Figure 4
And now for the truly bizarre:
The RealClimate post includes a link to the October 2009 WUWT post New WUWT feature: World Climate Widget. That introductory post at WUWT was a short time before ClimateGate, when the popularity of WUWT began to soar. Anthony had to put the widget on the back burner, never really promoting it. You can run through the comments on the WUWT widget thread here or use the search feature of WUWT to see if he made an effort to promote the widget. Anthony updated it a while back. But when he changed the WordPress theme at WUWT back around the first of September to “The Expound Theme”, the widget seems to have disappeared from the sidebar. (An oversight by Stefan?) So, Anthony’s never really promoted the widget, and it might’ve disappeared from the sidebar about 3 months ago, but Stefan Rahmstorf calls it “The most popular deceptive graph”, resurrecting it. I think Stefan Rahmstorf is about to discover that the WUWT widget will now become a whole lot more popular in the wake of his blog post. I suspect Anthony will be promoting it—and I’ve got a few good reasons to believe that.
Google Trends reveals that the number of searches for the blog “RealClimate” continues to drop, while those wanting links to the blog “Watts Up With That?” continues to rise. How bad has it gotten for RealClimate? See Figure 5. Occasionally, the blog Hot Whopper, run by the former WUWT troll Sou (Miriam O’Brien), nearly catches up with RealClimate.
Figure 5
If they continue to write blog posts at RealClimate about WUWT widgets, mimicking what Sou does at HotWhopper, who knows how far that decline in interest for RealClimate will go!
CLOSING
I’m sure you’ll have a fun time discussing the rest of Rahmstorf’s post at RealClimate about a widget. Afterwards, if you would, please consider adding the WUWT widget to your blog. It only takes a few minutes. Anthony has instructions for doing so here. I’ve added the WUWT widget to the sidebar at my blog ClimateObservations. It makes me feel good knowing that it’s there—knowing that it tweaks certain members of the alarmist wing of the climate science community.
Stefan Rahmstorf (and the others at RealClimate), on the other hand, must not have been too impressed with the widget he suggested using. As of this writing, it has not been added to the sidebar at RealClimate.
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This is uncanny. Figure 5 looks like temperature curves…both spiking i 2009 (COP15+Climategate), equivalent to the 1998 Ninjo, but the RC graph looks like real temp., sinking, whereas the WUWT graph looks like an IPCC model….
Flashback to 4 years ago:
“Renown climate scientist and German government advisor Stefan Rahmstorf was found guilty of a blog attack against a journalist. According to the opinion of a state court, he made untruthful assertions.”
In solidarity with global temperature – Prof Rahmstorf doesn’t change either.
What a mendacious and motley crew they have over at RC.
http://notrickszone.com/2011/12/02/der-spiegel-slams-ipcc-lead-author-rahmstorf-with-piece-titles-scandal-surrounding-german-government-climate-advisor/#sthash.MgcbZ2ZP.dpuf
I just posted the following on the RC page we are discussing: “Given that CO2 continues to rise, and given the hiatus since 1998, could it be that CO2 is not a major driver of global warming?” (5:35PM in their time zone).
Will that simple question survive “moderation”? (It is, after all, a moderate question.)
With their moderation habits, your comment may appear in a form that implies you whole-heartedly endorse their warmist position and ridicule any skepticism!
“I am one of the very few remaining people around the globe who continue to regularly visit the blog RealClimate.”
Glutton for punishment, are we?
/grin
Yes, we are. At one point there was speculation I was more than one person. I try to maintain that image by using phrases like “We discussed” or “We illustrated” in my blog posts.
Sounds like (all of) you are ‘beside yourself’ with Rahmstorf’s blogging, Bob!
Rahmstorf doesn’t like referring to the troposphere. I wonder why not?
He also says that sunspot numbers don’t correlate with temperature.
They do on Planet Earth, Stefan.
Stefan sounds like an idiot when he says the only important thing is surface temperature. It is true that the most important thing to most people is surface temperature better known to most humans as LOCAL WEATHER. However climate scientists are supposed to be concerned with how climate works, in which case considering only surface temperatures is an infantile approach.
I’d never looked at the widget before he mentioned it. Not really interested. How does he know how popular it is? Does it get Alexa rankings or something?
Still, if it keeps him busy then it probably means that he’s not doing something more harmful elsewhere…
German government apparatschiks have all the time and money in the world.
Rahmstorf’s wife produced silver medaillons, in stick shape, with the number of a CO2 certificate on it, when you buy one the certificate gets retired. So I asked Rahmstorf how much CO2 the production of the silver costs, he couldn’t answer it so I, well, didn’t want to buy one anyway.
Other guys at the PIK tried to sell a Global Warming board game. I found it somewhere on a wikipedia list of Global Warming related games. That died as well of course.
I occasionally comment there, most of my past comments took permanent residence in the Bore Hole, but surprisingly they are far more tolerant of the late.
Science should not ignore the value of disagreement, discord and difference of views or opinions..
“The most popular deceptive graph”… ahhhmmmm that would be Mann’s Hockey Schtick.
Oh, but you’re talking truth, Kiwi. They’re talking grant applications.
ladylifegrows, I wish you weren’t right.
But I fear that, yes, truth is considered subjective by the RealClimate crowd.
“The “World Climate Widget” from Tony Watts’ blog is probably the most popular deceptive image among climate “skeptics””
Never even looked at it, let alone used it. Maybe he should ask skeptics if they use it? I’ve been on many skeptic resource sites and I never ever see it referred to. (Sorry Anthony)
As for his complaints, he’s complaining about scales and presentation, not the data. Seriously?
If he really cared about deceptive presentation, he should look at Mike’s Nature Trick™, not a widget that nobody really ever uses.
[the sun] “has almost nothing to do with global temperature”. What does Stefan think is providing the heat to keep the World warm? Perhaps he thinks that CO2 provides “spontaneous” heat…..rather like a giant compost heap?
I used to link to the widget on my weather web page then it went kind of awol as noted. It was a nice device. As a side note will the Red line eat a Blue dot this year yet? Getting close….
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_ext.png
A very interesting graph.
The blue dots represent the average ice extent from 1979 to 2006. This seems to be a rather arbitrary period in that it is not the normal 30 year baseline nor a baseline up to the current day.
It can be seen that all the years after 2006 show ice extent below this average. If, therefore, those years were to be included in the average, this would have the effect of bringing the average down.
It is likely we could then say that the arctic sea ice extent was ‘above the average since records began’.
Looking at the hits on the two websites (graphed above) it’s pretty clear to me that they tracked each other pretty well until climategate. They started to diverge a lot after that
If I wanted to be mean, I would liken that event to shining a light on the cockroaches at RC
RealClimate got the leaked/hacked data first.
But RC didn’t trust the hoi polloi with the facts; only their opinions are sacred.
So WUWT got the scoop.
RC got left with the poop.
Do you know what ?
I just went back and spent some time thinking about that graph.
I think it’s a proxy.
I am not a big fan of proxies, but that is a damn fine, bona fida , goddam proxy
it’s a proxy for Mann, Lew, Gleik and any other charlatan you care to mention.
That graph can not be weighted, homogenised, smudged or infilled by the climate alarmists
they can not put their thumb on the scales here.
why do they not spin it ? come on guys. lets hear it
Stefan is a tool with a dodgy history and shouldn’t be talking about graphs when he is famous for graphs better as deception than information. A fine example is a graph that implied global temperature was an unchanging constant prior to 1880. My guess is that even the uneducated masses are smart enough not to buy that whopper.
Can’t attack the science then attack the scientist… Same principle.
Robert of Texas, you need to be a little more specific. Are you referring to Rahmstorf’s post about Anthony Watts’s widget or my post about Rahmstorf’s focus on the widget?
Yes.
“It is better to plot the surface air temperature. That is what is relevant for us humans: we do not live up in the troposphere, nor do natural ecosystems, nor do we grow our food up there…”
We don’t live in the troposphere?!?!?!?! We may not live ‘up’ in the troposphere, but we sure do live ‘down’ in the troposphere. Denver, Co. is 5280 ft into the troposphere (compared to sea level) & there is a whole lot of farming just west of there.
That really puzzled me about his comment as well. Aren’t the satellites measuring the average of the troposphere? I cannot recall the number put on the “depth” of the measurement, but the troposphere starts at the surface, so it’s the average temp from the surface to a height. This average will include the surface air temps, no?
JKrob. A nice but wholly specious argument.
Two irrefutable grounds for that counter statement.
1. The trends are presented as anomalies from some baseline. Satellites do not measure meters above land surface, true. So they will infer colder absolute temps due to the well known altitude lapse rate. Of no matter when converted to trend anomalies to wash out the altitude lapse rate. And it is the over time trends that form the core of CAGW theory, since CO2 warms…by some amount.
2. Climate model hindcasts of surface temps differ by up to 3C. See CMIP5 archive or my book Blowing Smoke. That huge discrepancy in dew points, freeze points, … Is also washed out using anomalies. Erroneously for models purporting to describe physical processes Iike snow, rain, clouds, or ice melt. See essay Models all the way Down in ebook Blowing Smoke for more detail with footnotes.
Let’s just say the widget didn’t bring me here.
The reason they want “air temperature” is because that is where the Urban Heat Island effect is. That is where all the actual warming is, hence all their funding. It is also possible to fiddle with that record, which we have caught them doing several times.
I object to calling alarmists “climate scientists.” I learned in HS physics that science is what makes successful predictions. The hard kind–about the future. The climate models so far have about a 90-98% fail rate, depending on how strict you are. That makes them unscientific, and indeed, antiscientific.
WE are the scientists. We need to say so more often.
btw, I like to look at the climate widget now and again.
I would like to have a WUWT widget but the long term temp and CO2 tread are not the data that I want updated frequently. The data pages I visit frequently are the sea ice page, solar page, and extreme weather (tropical cyclone page during hurricane season). A widget built around these would be good. Maybe analysis of most visited data page would help build a more relevant widget.
A lot of words but what exactly are you trying to tell us? You seem to have copied Soubangers rhetorical style. Yuk
This graphic would have worked well for The previous Titanic-iceberg story, Bob.
It gives one the impression that solar activity sinks ships. But as climategate demonstrated, that only requires loose lips.
Thank you, Anthony, for NOT having a “stupid” website graphic.
…Oh wow, what’s with the giant mountain of views (for RealClimate as well as WUWT) in 2010?
Forgive me, but I only started following this about 6 months ago. What happened then that inspired so much sudden (if short-lived) interest in climate change?
LordCaledus, that spike started in late November 2009. The occasion was ClimateGate.
LordCaledus, PS: The y-axis is interest in the search terms, as a percentage of the interest, where the greatest month equals 100%. Because Watts Up With That had the highest number of search requests, it set the 100% reference point.
Cheers.
Lord, you are joking, right?
If not, google climategate. That was in late 2009. The battle started about 1988. See essays Fire and Ice, and Climatastrosophistry, in Blowing Smoke if still unenlightened by documented history.
LordCaledus
You ask
Several people have rightly answered that ‘climategate’ is a reason and to some extent they are right. But it was not the only reason and I don’t think it was the main one.
In December 2009 there was a Conference of Parties (CoP) at Copenhagen that was intended to provide a successor Treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. Thanks mainly to the Chinese, that horrific intention was defeated. But all the ‘great and good’ flocked to Copenhagen while proclaiming e.g. “There are only 10 days to save the world!”.
But the mass media around the world promoted and reported the lead up to the event reported the event event which failed. In my opinion, it was that immense world-wide publicity which fired the interest of people so they had the “sudden (if short-lived) interest in climate change”. Many then learned about ‘climategate’ and that held their interest for a while, but few would have heard about ‘climategate’ were it not for the publicity about the failed 2009 CoP.
Richard
Welcome to the real world. Please feel free to follow some of the links to the right of the pages.
Correct question though. The graph in figure 5 does show the popular interest in Climate Science AKA the end of the world.
And after the Millennium interest didn’t keep rising.
Yes, Climategate and Copenhagen caused a spike but the overall numbers aren’t sky-rocketing.
This is probably an effect of the pause. If the end of the world was happening then people would be interested. They aren’t.
So it can be seen that the people know (even if they don’t say) that climate science isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Now, when will the BBC and other mainstream media realise that they have lost the audience?
Judging from the constant blather on the subject this morning on BBC radio I think they already have . Hence the need to bombard us with the message to herd people back into line.
Back in the day (when dinosaurs roamed the earth), a “widget” was a theoretical object used in micro economics examples. Or so my professor thought. Someone came to class one day to show an ad for a “widget” (it was a razor blade in a plastic handle used for scraping paint off windows).
Alas that company did not copyright the name (could it have?) so a Widget is now everywhere. At least it sounds better than “app” that smart phones have.
philjourdan, hello.Haramph, I always thought that “widget” was a machining idustrial term. Example “we make widgets!”
Hmm we can’t measure this, we need to make a widget! (not a fixture, 10 min of machining rather then 30 hours) You can call anything a widget but there is one thing. At the time they are vitally important, and after that… disposable.
michael
Among computer graphics developers, at least on Unix and Linux, widgets are the pieces of software that make graphical programs, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets
Given the proliferation of what is called a widget – that statement of yours is the most correct.
Heard on the flight line: Lad, go get me 5 gallons of prop wash, 100 feet of flight line and a widget.
RobRoy,
We had some experimental materials on a C-130’s propeller for one project that came with a solution to clean them after a mission. They didn’t call it “prop wash”, but I can guarantee that the technicians always called it that.
The old hands tried that with me when I first hit the shop (minus the widget), and I went for a long walk on a nice spring day and came back with a bucket with an asphalt rock in it. When they asked me what I had there, I told them the bucket contained the prop wash and the flight line, but that as I didn’t think they wanted me to rip up the whole parking apron, a single rock would have to do. The old Vietnam Vet Master Sergeant that ran the shop could be heard laughing his head off in his office at hearing my response. It was a good day to come from a long line of aviation enthusiasts.
After Judy Curry recently posted about the 5th anniversary of ClimateGate, I went over to RealClimate to reread some of the heroic contortions that followed the original leak. It’s very interesting to be see, in retrospect, how some people could foresee the ongoing impact of the leaked information on their credibility, and to see the knee-jerk minimizing and apologia. I’m gratified to see the site withering away. The Bore Hole and the one-sided gate keeping has made the site a pointless and frustrating echo chamber, fit for nothing more than climate scientology.
Bob, I beg to differ, but there is a huge difference for us humans between “somewhere up in the troposphere” and 2000 meters deep in the oceans. It’s called heat capacity. For the oceans to warm even a small amount, that means there’s been a huge input of excess heat, which can cycle back to the atmosphere and make our land surface MUCH warmer. This heat input could not be offset by slightly lower temps. up in the troposphere, where the air is thin, and heat capacity relatively miniscule.
Dead wrong.
If the oceans – ALL of the ocean surface waters – warmed by 1 degree, 1/10 of one degree, 1/100 of one degree or 1/1000 of one degree, by the MOST they could increase air temperature by is that same 1, 1/10, 1/100 or 1/1000 of one degree … minus losses.
Heat energy can ONLY move from a hot body to a cold body, and – without additional application of energy – can NEVER get hotter than the hot body. (Actually, the cold body will only asymptotically approach the hot body’s temperature even given an infinite period of time.) No, you are wrong. The heat, once stored below in the oceans, cannot reheat the atmosphere.
What was your degree in by the way? How much thermodynamics, fluid flow, or physics have you learned? Perhaps you can tell us what the mechanism is that you believe will increase the atmospheric temperature?
Barry, heat capacity, if you hadn’t noticed wasn’t mentioned by Steffy. Let’s quote him again, “It is better to plot the surface air temperature. That is what is relevant for us humans: we do not live up in the troposphere…” nor do we live 2000 meters below the surface of the ocean, where the temperatures from surface to that depth have only warmed at a rate of 0.03 deg C/decade since 2005
“It is better to plot the air surface temperature. That is what is relevant for us humans: we do not live up in the troposphere…” However, it is in the troposphere where the additional carbon dioxide is supposed to absorb more outward long-wave radiation. If there is no warming in the troposphere but surface temperatures continue to rise, the cause could hardly be carbon dioxide.
Bob,
So in other words … you agree with Stefan; what goes on at or near the surface matters most here. Thanks for clearing that up.
By the way, I note the barest hint of a slope in the blue line at the bottom of the graph. Try using 10^21 Joules instead, it will really flatten out that temperature curve. Plus zettajoules rolls off the tongue so much more nicely than “ten to the twenty-second power Joules”. Two birds with one stone, hey!
Ross,
Funny, I can’t seem to find anywhere Stefan said that there is no warming in the troposphere. Perhaps you could help by finding the actual quote?
Brandon Gates says: “So in other words … you agree with Stefan; what goes on at or near the surface matters most here. Thanks for clearing that up.”
I believe I’ve stated that, or something to that effect, on numerous occasions. I’ve cleared up nothing. You’ve simply missed it or misunderstood–both of which are not unusual for you.
Brandon Gates says: “By the way, I note the barest hint of a slope in the blue line at the bottom of the graph. Try using 10^21 Joules instead, it will really flatten out that temperature curve. Plus zettajoules rolls off the tongue so much more nicely than “ten to the twenty-second power Joules”. Two birds with one stone, hey!”
Not two birds, Brandon, two datasets from the same source data: one showing a metric that few people understand or care about (10^22 Joules) and the other a metric that people understand, the latter of which shows how insignificant the ocean warming is. And why would I use 10^21 Joules when the intent was to show the data as presented by the NODC?
Maybe you should go back to Sou and whine about my data presentation? What’s that? You already have? How remarkable!!!
Nice chatting with you, troll. Why don’t you come back to WUWT when you can contribute something useful?
Adios.
Bob Tisdale is smarter than I but to me it’s a proven experiment, a known fact that one cannot warm water from the surface with warm air. dut to the cooling effect of evaporation.
That said, When the climate science facilitators(prevaricators) suddenly had a light bulb moment and realised all this “missing heat” is in the oceans. This is a RED HERRING . The only response I think reasonable is to ask by what mechanism do warm CO2 molecules warm the ocean. How does it work?
Air warming the ocean? what’s up with that?
Bob Tisdale,
Brandon Gates says: “So in other words … you agree with Stefan; what goes on at or near the surface matters most here. Thanks for clearing that up.”
Fantastic. How about a comparison of 2000m to 100m?
I must’ve missed the lecture in high school physics which said Joules and Kelvins are comparable units appropriate for plotting on the same scale.
You do realize that orders of magnitude in this context are arbitrary don’t you? Just multiply by 10, easy! It will flatten out that temperature curve faster than a steam roller running over a bag of marshmallows.
It’s rare that I get to use the word “execrable” in sentence. It’s so much less pedestrian than “bullcrap”.
Thanks, Bob. Always a pleasure.