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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Maybe next week Stefan will take on the ENSO meter that I slave over every week.
http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/elninometer-current.gif
Actually, it updates automatically pretty reliably, currently with data from Australia. Every so often things act up and have to wrestle it back under control.
Ric,
You do a damn fine job with it. I check the ENSO meter all the time.
Many thanks for your diligent ‘subservient’ efforts for this blog. Invaluable. No enterprise runs for long without many dedicated ‘worker bees’ to keep their ‘hive’ going and thrifty.
Meant as very sincere complement. Nothing else.
Highest regards.
‘Thrifty’ doesn’t mean what you think it means, Rud.
Meant as a compliment (note the spelling),
Warmest regards.
I’ve lived in New Hampshire long enough to appreciate thrifty. I break out in hives when I go to Washington DC. Oh. different sort of hive. 🙂
no error bars… so misleading..
No trend, either!
The RealClimate site is moribund. Sometimes they go weeks between posts. That’s no way to gain a faithful following.
rabbit,
Or, like Bob suggests, their day job keeps them busy. You know, doing research and writing papers. There’s certainly been no pause in published literature. But if all one reads is blogs, I can see how such a trivial matter might get overlooked.
Brandon, you have a bad habit of reading between the lines and presenting your opinions as if they were others. It’s nice to see a troll like you at work.
Not only is Brandon a troll, but an ignorant troll who claims that latent heat is returned to the surface with precipitation. One of those types.
Bob Tisdale,
First ‘sploded irony meter of the day goes up in smoke in your honor. It died a worthy death. And I quote:
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.
But then, it’s my opinion that self-awareness is not amongst your copious list of talents. So again you’ve got me dead to rights on my unwarranted assumptions.
mpainter,
https://www.nc-climate.ncsu.edu/edu/k12/.lsheat
Climate Education for K-12 […] Latent and Sensible Heat […] When the water vapor condenses to form clouds, it releases latent heat into the atmosphere. The latent heat then warms the surrounding air around the new cloud droplet causing instability.
http://www.theweatherprediction.com/habyhints/19/
3. Condensation releases latent heat. This causes the temperature of a cloud to be warmer than it otherwise would have been if it did not release latent heat. Anytime a cloud is warmer than the surrounding environmental air, it will continue to rise and develop. The more moisture a cloud contains, the more potential it has to release latent heat.
4. The amount of cooling experienced during melting or evaporation is a function of the dewpoint depression. If the air is saturated, evaporation will be minimized. Evaporational cooling can not take place once dew forms on the ground but can start to take place when the sun begins to warm the surface (dewpoint depression becomes greater than 0).
5. Dry climates tend to have a larger diurnal range in temperature than moist climates. The primary reason is because of latent heat. In a dry climate, evaporational cooling is at a minimum and there is little water vapor to trap longwave radiation at night. Therefore, in a dry climate the highs will be higher and the lows lower as compared to a moist climate at the same altitude and latitude (all else being equal). [2]
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~dargan/587/587_3.pdf
* Water vapor
** Most important greenhouse gas
* Clouds
** Albedo effect & greenhouse effect
* Exponential function of temperature
** Warmer air can hold much more moisture
* Temperatures decrease with height in the troposphere
** This means most water vapor is confined in the lower levels in the atmosphere as well
* We’re all familiar with the idea that evaporation causes cooling [1]
** Evaporation of sweat cools you off
** Getting out of a pool on a windy day – cold!
* Similarly, condensation – heating of the atmosphere
** Condensation of water vapor is associated with a release of latent heat
More to it than just this, of course. It gets very interesting on page 39 of the .pdf:
What if…
Upper tropospheric warming is significantly outpaced by lower tropospheric warming, and that this continues
* Claim: Global warming would be much more severe
* First, lapse rate feedback is main negative feedback to global warming
** So surface warming would be expected to be more intense without this
* Second, convective instability would be greater in the warmed atmosphere
** Would expect much more severe storms, hurricanes, etc.
* Lapse rate feedback is a safety valve for climate!
For the numerate amongst us, I suggest reading this entire chapter: http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/djj/book/bookchap4.html#pgfId=998206
Finally it bears reinforcement that considering only one part of a complex system is scientific folly: http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/images/ClimaticCauseEffect.html
Effects, are additive and subtractive (see esp. positive AND negative feedbacks) and need to be considered systemically in net. Heat carried away from the surface by evaporation does not magically exit stage left. Energy retained inside the atmosphere which otherwise woudn’t be there can and will be distributed elsewhere by radiative and non-radiative transfers alike until it escapes radiatively at TOA.
——————————
[1] Some of us are fixated on it to the exclusion of all else.
[2] This should sound familiar, starting ’round about here-ish: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/25/a-first-look-at-surfrad/#comment-1801337 Also see: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/02/many-thanks-to-kevin-trenberth-for-being-open-minded/#comment-1806291
Bob Tisdale suggests: “Afterwards, if you would, please consider adding the WUWT widget to your blog.”
That’s a fine idea in the context of the concluding sentence in the RealClimate post:
“Watts’ widget is quite a useful indicator though: whenever you see it on a website, you know they are trying to fool rather than inform you there.”
could you be specific? Oh.. that would imply you understand something.
Gosh, I too went to realclimate the other day. During a brief period of détente on of my comments was actually accepted there. The thread was about statistical analysis of inflection points in the surface temperature record. A commenter asked why the satellite record was not used. Gavin jumped in with an editorial response that the satellites measured something else with different signal to noise.
I tried to post the comment, ” “Gavin says the satellites measure something else”. Quite so. They measure the entire troposphere and the entire globe without the need for massive data interpolation.”
Comment deleted. Gosh, I was agreeing with him. So much for détente.
Talking about double standard here are we? If non scientists such as yourself can crap on about science, why not the other way around? How about Judith Curry?
yeah right December 10, 2014 at 7:14 pm
Talking about double standard here are we? If non scientists such as yourself can crap on about science, why not the other way around? How about Judith Curry?
+++++++++++
Just what are you trying to say? Form a cogent thought, and then write it. Imagine if you wrote the above on the other site… You’d have no voice of course. Back at you regarding your scatalogical comment. Looks like the mindless trolls are checking out a place where they’re free to show us how little they know.
If my comment was hard to digest, what I tried to say was simply Bob should stick with blogging about widgets, rahmstorf with science. If that’s still hard to discern, then stop complaining and let everyone do their own work.
yeah right,
You tried to say simply; ” Bob should stick with blogging about widgets, rahmstorf with science.”
Well, I guess Bob has heard your opinion and is giving it the consideration he deems fit, now, are you going to go and tell Rahmstorf to stick with science?
He obviously is inclined to stop by WUWT from time to time but that’s probably just to check the widget.
It would be great if he did take in more than that; he might be interested to read that surface temperatures are no longer the metric in vogue, and he might just see your suggestion that he “stick with science” instead of trivial political stuff.
Funnily enough, many of us here would probably agree with you on that score.
@mebbe, Yes stefan really should stick with science. He’s probably trying to attract traffic to their site by complaining, whingeing, that kind of stuff attracts more interest than boring science. well superficial controversial twisted science does seem to attract more response as well.
yeah right,
I’m sorry you think science is boring. Not to worry, though, you can get plenty of complaining and whining at RC.
Mebbe, what I tried to say was real science tends to bore the typical bunch of folks like you. Sorry, if my comments were not straight forward. I just wanted to be more polite.
If non scientists such as
There was a climate scientist who once frequented this site who claimed that we, because we were not climate scientists, could not understand Briffa’s most recent paper. I asked him, other than being able to collect the data itself, what about the paper was beyond the ken of someone with first year stats under their belt. He refused to answer the question.
The “non scientist” argument is as hollow as one can get.
Hollow and blatantly ad hominem.
yeah right, Sir or Mam, if you would read Carl Sagan you could learn that science is as much about critical thought as it is about facts and figures. Research to prove a fore-drawn conclusion is only a product of religious zeal for that hypothesis and is a trap for the unwise. You must reconcile a given argument with critical analysis such as his Baloney Detector before presenting or accepting it as constructive. Statements from zeal or emotion are invalid to higher thinking (not to be confused with higher education).
You dont have to be a scientist to “do” science.
Additionally, one labelled a scientist doesnt automatically “do” science.
It is worth getting to grips with those two concepts before putting your foot in it again.
It all becomes readily apparent in their effort to regain some sense of control after getting booted off of WUWT by coming up with a new blog mocking the name of WUWT. If they truly felt confident with their, um, “scientific” approaches regarding GW as “facts” they wouldn’t feel the need to do a blog. Their own insecurity and ego betray them. Mockery is their last form of retaliatory defense that ultimately goes nowhere.
I spent some time at Real Climate asking a few questions. I must say, it is quite like poking a hornets nest. This is a cult, pure and simple. One of two things needs to happen. If the government is going to fund climate research, it needs to equally fund both sides of this debate. Or else it needs to fund neither. I have heard tales of how people blindly followed soothsayers of old with their entrail-based predictions. I would have never believed I would witness such an event in our present day had I not seen it myself. This is very disturbing. Thank you to all of you who are fighting this menace.
average joe says: “If the government is going to fund climate research, it needs to equally fund both sides of this debate. Or else it needs to fund neither…”
Unfortunately, since the founding of the IPCC, government-funded global warming research around the world has been directed at proving manmade global warming exists and that it will lead to bad things…all in an effort to meet underlying political agendas.
@Average joe – the government is not “funding” anything. They are buying a no-bid product. Until people realize that, they will not understand why Obama can be so stupid about the issue.
Actually the biggest tall tale that both sides use is the myth of a global average temperature. Any post which seeks to compare trends of such or other are pure fantasy.
Couldn’t agree more, Jeff. I wish this (very significant) issue would receive more air time.
Bob, not sure if you or anyone else noticed this, but dear old Steffy Rahmstorf’s post is actually a translation of a post he did in German more than two years ago!
It’s here: http://www.scilogs.de/klimalounge/die-populaerste-trickgrafik-der-klimaskeptiker-vahrenholt/
So I guess professor Steffy thought his widget post was important and relevant enough to warrant translation and re-publishing to reach a wider audience.
Ausgezeichnet, Herr Professor!
Hi Grammar Guy. Thanks. I saw that he had discussed it at his other blog but missed that it was two years old. Maybe Stefan should’ve checked to see if it was still appearing here at WUWT before reposting it at RealClimate.
Cheers.
Had some real fun last night at RC by asking “at what altitude does the troposphere begin?” The response and my riposte seemed to end the discussion.
Passing moderation was a real problem, fortunately it really past bedtime.
I’m wrong…the discussion continued.
Bob
My admiration for your courage and fortitude have massively increased today. You ACTUALLY visit RC. WOW.
Went there once. The assole was ignorant and incompetent with his reply so I never went back.
Just in case I have archived the following HERE. Stefan Rahmstorf was also one of the lead authors of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report.
I thought alarmists generally claimed recent global warming was 0.7C. 0.16 x 3 = 0.48 C. Must be travesty somewhere.
“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 we live in a closed box at an airport two meters above the surface. Measuring temperature on surface leads to hugely different results if we measure the weather as we feel it on the skin.
I read WUWT almost every day, and until I read this article, I can’t recall ever seeing this widget. Can someone point it out to me? Even now, I can’t find it.
Update: Oh, now I get it. It’s under a menu selection, and it’s something you can add to your own website. Not something I’ve ever come across, however, not even here. I guess I owe some thanks to Rahmstorf for bringing it to my attention.
Bill2:
For the record, climate is oceanic-atmospheric driven weather systems interacting with a given topographical area of the globe to produce wind, precipitation and cloud cover averages and extremes, which result in temperature and cloud/precip ups and downs. If you want to study climate change you must study weather patterns and what drives them. Topographical location (latitude, longitude, altitude, and large land/water features and location) does not change unless we are speaking on paleoclimate time scales.
Thus it makes sense to study weather pattern variations, but not climate or temperature. Studying climate, and even endlessly studying temperature is silly. Daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, yearly, decadal, and multi-decadal weather patterns and systems variation are all important to the study of whether or not humans are causing changes in weather patterns that would lead to changes in cloud cover, precipitation, wind, etc. Again, because oceanic-atmospheric driven weather patterns change temperature. Therefore we must determine if CO2, and only the amount added by human industry, is powerful enough to march out into weather pattern systems and change them.
So here is the rub with that. There is a bold-faced reason why climatologists, especially the catastrophic kind wanting easy press will not touch weather system data. I know the reason. Do you?
Caveat: There are spots on the globe that also have manmade structures and copious amounts of pollution that affect local weather pattern systems. But this footprint is extremely tiny compared to global natural settings and weather systems
” I know the reason. Do you?”
Don’t be coy.
Weather systems, so far, do not show trends. Precip hasn’t gotten worse. We are not covered with layers of water vapor increases. Tornadoes, hurricanes, drought, all demonstrate patterns that link to natural weather pattern variations. Weather systems, semi-permanent large pressure systems, and even small temporary pressure systems seem unaffected by human additions of CO2 to the atmosphere.
Could it be that by looking at temperature with too fine a lense we have inadvertently gotten our panties in a twist over nothing? If temperature naturally varies in large-ish sloping ups and downs over many decades while weather patterns do their thing, these temperature trends up and down, when looked at too closely, may have scared the easily frightened.
Well Put, Pamela Gray. Your little secret; could it be that the truth hurts? If one is living in the penthouse of a house of cards all atop the gravy train, the truth can hurt too much.
How true that we mustn’t forget that human’s do indeed affect local climates. We should add to the list: de-forestation, agricultural burning and mass irrigation.
CO2 climate change? Sorry no EVIDENCE for that.
Congratulations that your widget got this much attention. I also wrote a text explaining why I disagree with all Rahmstorf’s points:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2014/12/realclimates-opinion-on-wuwt-widget.html?m=0
Thanks, Lubos.
The Climate Widget Wars!
Complete with one side using truncated graphs and out-of-date versions.
Marvelous!
I think the trend divergence of ‘hits’ since 2011 could be partly due to the way folks are not censored here as much as RC and treated with more respect as a rule. That would also explain why so many people ignore sites like Hotwhopper after one visit, like an agnostic at a Pentecostal revival.
I added your widget to my blog, Roberts Projects http://www.robertsprojects.blogspot.com/
It is a very non-controversial DYI site, please check it out!
Robert
They are kidding me, right? The whole theory of AGW says that CO2 in in places like the troposphere is WHERE the green house effect takes place. The problem is we NOT seeing warming according due to CO2 occurring in that troposphere. We THEN should see surface temperatures follow that increase.
The WHOLE theory of AGW is based on this idea, and now they suggesting they don’t look where the heat supposed to be trapped by CO2? So now look at surface temperatures? The surface temps are all messed up by urban heat effects and simple site changes. And surface temperatures are supposed to FOLLOW the increasing heat in the troposphere!
So they saying don’t look where their theory of global warming supposed to case warming! Gasp!
Regards,
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
(in a loud, echoing voice) “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
“Watts’ widget is quite a useful indicator though: whenever you see it on a website, you know they are trying to fool rather than inform you there.”
LOL, quite the contrary! Watt’s widget provides more context than the RC version. Omitting CONTEXT is exactly what these advocates do to fool people into believing increasing the GHE heat flux by 1% could cause a 10% increase in GHE temperature gain.