20 false representations in one 10-minute video

I don’t know why but I expect Dr. Mann to end his speech with “Bdee, bdee, bdee… that’s all folks!”

That is why they are getting so desperate, they know their time is running out and they may be facing prosecution if a Republican takes the White House..Considering who the Demoncraps have running, I think that is very likely !!

Hmm… let me see – we can’t call it fraud and we can’t call it a conspiracy and we can’t call it a hoax, but even if “we” can’t, it appears the evidence can.

Good essay/presentation. Maybe better to describe it as a good demolition or rebuttal of yet another desperate attempt to deflect attention from the failed models and failures in the CAGW scheme.
The ‘Conclusion’ is especially interesting.
Keep up the good work. You have delivered another torpedo into the sinking of the CAGW. It’s got a tough hull but it’s so full of holes that it’s hard to believe it’s still afloat. Another salvo or two and it may go down quite rapidly and carry with it it’s crew into the depths of dark history.

Reading these posts clearly denotes the intelligence and scientific approach of actual scientists. Most is outside my area of study, so I am swimming a bit. Nevertheless, I have confidence that the truth will eventually prevail. Nobody can escape reality regardless of our wants, desires, wishes, head-burrying, etc… My sincere gratitude to all you who help educate the likes of me. Thank you.

Christopher Monckton,

1. (without qualification) that 2015 was the warmest year since reliable records began, though the satellite records do not show it as the warmest year (see the above graph);

Plot above shows monthly mean values, not annual. Annualized from here: http://data.remss.com/msu/graphics/TLT/time_series/RSS_TS_channel_TLT_Global_Land_And_Sea_v03_3.txt
Year TLT Rank
—- —- —-
1998 0.55 1
2010 0.47 2
2015 0.36 3
Note 1997:
Year TLT Rank
—- —- —-
1997 0.10 18
Add 0.45 to 0.36
Year TLT Rank
—- —- —-
1998 0.55 2
2010 0.47 3
2015 0.36 4
2016 0.81 1
Or you could note that 0.55-0.36 = 0.19, so 2016 only needs to be 0.20 warmer to take the top slot in RSS. There is little scientific value in any of these calculations, but they might be useful for wagering odds.
With qualification, 2015 was the warmest on record since reliable records began at the surface.

2. that satellite datasets have historically proven biased to show too little warming, though the UAH dataset showed too much warming until its 2015 correction:

Mind the pea. It’s a matter of record that prior to the switch from v5.6 to v6.0beta, the majority of UAH TLT adjustments were warming adjustments.

3. (twice) that the satellite data, and in particular the UAH data, wrongly showed cooling in the 1990s, though they showed warming, and in the 2000s, though the terrestrial data agreed and after adjustments still agree with the satellites that there was cooling:

Not finding the falsehood here.

4. that Drs John Christy and Roy Spencer, keepers of the UAH dataset, had been “chastened by their repeated mistakes and failures”, though all datasets, not only theirs, have undergone adjustments;

Wow. The main reason for adjusting either the satellite or surface records is mainly not to correct mistakes, but to correct for trend bias. That numerous corrections have been done to surface data does not mean that mistakes had necessarily been made. The UAH team did in fact make mistakes to some of their corrections.

5. (twice) that all the UAH adjustments had left the warming rate understated, though until the most recent adjustment the UAH dataset had for much of the previous decade shown a warming rate greater than most other datasets;

Isn’t this really just a repeat of 3? It’s a bit unhelpful that this list does not include direct quotes and/or timestamps to the video.

6. that satellites were unique in not measuring temperature directly, though no method of measurement measures temperature directly, and the satellite temperature datasets are unique in being independently calibrated both by balloon radiosonde datasets and by platinum resistance thermometers themselves calibrated against the known temperature of the cosmic background radiation;

“…though no method of measurement measures temperature directly…” is chopping the parsely rather finely. It really should beyond dispute that ground-based thermometers and radiosondes carried by balloons are a form of in situ measurement, whereas the aptly named Remote Sensing Systems data products (and their UAH siblings) are not.
Even though radiosonde instruments are calibrated, they still suffer problems with inhomogeneities like any other product, including surface-based and (A)MSU-based products. And they do not all “agree” with each other, and therefore they don’t all agree with UAH/RSS products. Contrast the surface products from four different teams derived from different mixes of source data.

7. that satellite datasets had been shown to contain errors, with the implication that the terrestrial datasets had not undergone repeated adjustment, though all global temperature datasets are prone to adjustment and have been repeatedly adjusted;

My turn to parse. The title of this article is “20 false representations in one 10-minute video”, not “20 false implications in one 10-minute video”.

8. that Dr Judith Curry and Senator Cruz accept the satellite data uncritically, though their statements that the satellite global temperature data are the best we have do not imply that those datasets should be accepted uncritically;

Ibid., with the added note that Dr. Judith Curry’s endorsement of the satellite products as the “best” available does not hold up well when one considers that the stated trend uncertainties of the satellite products may be greater than the trend uncertainties of the land record: http://skepticalscience.com/surface_temperature_or_satellite_brightness.html

9. that Senator Cruz likes to focus on the portion of the RSS temperature dataset that begins after the El-Niño-driven spike in global temperature that peaked in 1998, though the graph displayed by Senator Cruz, on which Dr Mears was commenting, visibly began in May 1997, before the spike commenced:

RSS linear trends for some selected periods (K/decade):

0.123	full record
0.001	1997-2015
-0.002	1998-2015

Note that we have to go to three decimal places to see the difference in trends beginning in 1997 vs. 1998. We only need to go to one decimal place to see the difference between those two starting points and the full record.

10. (twice) that the spike in temperatures in 1998 entailed a downhill trend thereafter, though the graph had begun before the spike and, in any event any effect of the spike on the trend had been offset by a trough in 1999-2000 caused by the countervailing La Niña cooling that followed the 1998 El Niño, so that the trend in the RSS data for the 15 full years from January 2001 to December 2015, after the el Niño and la Niña, is if anything somewhat negative:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/clip_image012_thumb3.jpg

I’m not even going to bother responding to the text because that plot is so woefully misleading. Here’s what a proper regression of CO2 against RSS TLT looks like for the entire interval:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fKyeOSi9fM0/VOewnbi9GQI/AAAAAAAAAWg/VHF9fk038dc/s1600/CO2%2Bregression%2Bvs%2BRSS.png
For a longer-term view, here’s what it looks like over the entire Mauna Loa CO2 record against HADCRUT4
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qrF0UrUv_yI/VOezpNNzcxI/AAAAAAAAAWs/AEVB4Sw7EzU/s1600/CO2%2Bregression%2Bvs%2BHADCRUT4.png

11. that the zero-trend “18-year dataset” displayed by Senator Cruz (actually 18 years 9 months) would produce a markedly different trend from the data over 10, 15 or 20 years, though the 10-year dataset after removing the distorting effect of the 2015-2016 El Niño shows a trend of little more than 0.5 Celsius degrees per century, the 15-year dataset shows a zero trend and the 20-year dataset shows a trend of little more than one-third of a degree per century, and all trends are within natural variability.

The two plots posted just above should suffice to illustrate that looking at more data than just the past 18 years and 9 months tell quite a different story from the longer-term view.

12. that a trend-line starting after the 1998 El Niño temperature spike and ending before the 2011-2012 La Niña trough would show an uptrend, though the trend-line is falsely positioned on the graph displayed in the video so as to steepen the true (green) trend:

See my response to #9. You are quibbling here about 0.001ths K/decade here. For the record, the stated trend uncertainty for the entire RSS TLT product is 0.044 K/decade:
http://images.remss.com/papers/rsspubs/Mears_JGR_2011_MSU_AMSU_Uncertainty.pdf
See Table 2 bottom right of page 14.

13. that period chosen by Admiral Titley, the “Democrats’” witness at the hearing, showed an uptrend (which he then misrepresented so as to steepen it), though the period he chose was unduly short and, if he had not excluded an el Niño at the outset and a La Niña at the end, there would have been a downtrend:

Irony meter #5 of the year gives up the ghost to Christopher Monckton for complaining about “unduly short” trends.

14. that the video deploys a device used by the IPCC and by the Met Office, displaying global temperature in decadal blocks, though the decadal blocks were calculated to conceal the absence of global warming over much of the past two decades, while the full HadCRUT4 dataset clearly shows the recent slowdown in global warming:

That HADCRUT4 decadal mean plot also shows that prior “pauses” …. ended.

15. that Arctic sea ice is declining, though Antarctic sea ice has been on a rising trend and reached a satellite-era record in early 2015, and though the decline in Arctic sea ice is chiefly only in a few late-summer weeks and is a small fraction of the seasonal variation in sea-ice extent, so that neither the extent nor the trend of global sea ice (from the University of Illinois) shows much change throughout the satellite era:

Landed ice is the tiebreaker.

16. that column water vapor is increasing, though not all records show an increase and at least one, ISCCP, shows a decline:

Mind the pea again. The decline there is between 610-310 mb pressure, and ISCCP data only go back to 1983. A longer-term view from NCEP shows a steady increase in specific humidity at the surface …
http://www.climate4you.com/images/NOAA%20ESRL%20AtmospericSpecificHumidity%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1948%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
… which dwarfs the declines at higher altitudes.

17. that sea level is changing, though it has always changed and much of the increase in recent years is attributable to a “glacial isostatic adjustment” that, whether justifiable or not, is not an actual sea-level rise:

Sea levels change for a reason, namely, that temperatures change for a reason, namely that external forcings are not constant on geological time scales. Planet gets warmer, glaciers and ice caps diminish. Planet gets cooler, glaciers and ice caps grow. On long enough geological time scales, configuration of the continents change, affecting internal variability, solar absorption and the carbon cycle. It’s complex, but not magical or mysterious.
The more relevant point is that we are seeing changes to the system which normally occur on geological time scales of thousands of years happening within human lifetimes … which is the thing that should be giving you pause.

18. that the heat content of the global ocean is increasing, though the increase is calculated from ARGO bathythermograph temperature measurements that show warming of the top mile and a quarter of the ocean over the entire 11 full years of the record at a rate equivalent to only 1 Celsius degree every 430 years:

Ocean water has 4 times the specific heat capacity of atmosphere, and the oceans themselves are absorbing 93% of the total additional energy into the system. A thinking truth-seeker would realize that such a staggering amount of energy is probably the best evidence that an 18-year “pause” in lower tropospheric temps isn’t telling on the order of 95% of the story.

19. that the Earth’s allegedly rising temperature may be deduced from moisture, rainfall, water vapor, surface humidity, snow and ice, though no definitive conclusions about global temperature can be drawn from any of these indicators

I put the tray of water in the freezer. Several hours later, I pull out ice cubes.
We can’t deduce anything from first principles of known physics. You read it here first.

20. (throughout) that, by implication, the terrestrial temperature records are in reasonable agreement with the predictions by IPCC on which the official concern about global warming is based, though on all datasets, the warming is so far below what IPCC had originally predicted that IPCC has itself had to reduce drastically its interval of near-term warming predictions:

And we end on another “by implication”, this time harping on things like “reasonable agreement”, which is an inherently subjective determination.
I get it, Mr Monckton, you hold differing opinions from what was presented in the video. That does not make their views “false representations”.
I have given your note way more than its due in my opinion. Cheers.