Desperate Deniers head for the clouds at WUWT
Sou | 3:23 PM
My last article was a report of the latest surface temperature, from NASA. This one is about the lower troposphere changes - and denier dross from WUWT.
I've not spent much time at WUWT in recent months (or here at HotWhopper). The articles there have changed a bit since Anthony Watts took time off. There are a lot more political articles and fewer science articles. Charles the Moderator is in charge but doesn't have a lot of people to write - it's mainly childish Eric Worrall and a petrol-head called David Middleton. Most of the regular WUWT contributors from days gone by have disappeared (justthefacts, Bob Tisdale, Tim Ball etc., and Anthony Watts himself.)
These days, when Charles copies and pastes a press release about a scientific publication, he doesn't have to add the dog-whistling word "claim" at the front of the headline. WUWT readers are now very well trained and understand that if there's a scientific press release it means they are expected to add comments along the lines of "climate science is a hoax" (repeated 100 times or they are put in detention).
To bring you up to date, Anthony Watts has got himself a gig at The Heartland Institute (so he can sit around and do pretty well nothing and get paid for it, as far as I can tell. The pay can't be all that good. He's still begging money from his readers.)
Hottest month on the surface, but look at the clouds, sez Kip Hansen
I headed over to WUWT today and, sure enough, deniers still occasionally move off pro-Trump articles to deny science. Kip Hansen is protesting the fact that last month was the equal hottest month on record and hottest July on record. He's saying - don't look at the surface, look up at the sky. If he looks up far enough, into the stratosphere, he'll be able to say "it's cooling" with some justification :D. (The stratosphere cools while the troposphere warms.)
Below shows why deniers stick to UAH lower troposphere data and reject any and all other temperature records, including surface and RSS lower troposphere. It's a plot of GISTEMP surface data, RSS lower troposphere and UAH lower troposphere. Note that the last data point (2019) obviously is an average of January to July 2019, so it's not a full year of data.
Looking at the linear trend, UAH is 1.3 C a century, RSS is 2 C a century and GISTEMP is 1.8 C a century (since 1979). Which is the odd one out?
There are hints as to why there is a divergence between the latest versions of UAH and RSS in this article I wrote some time back: 101 conspiracy theories about troposphere temperature: the RSS love affair is over. There is more here: The mid-troposphere has been warming faster than you thought. It's mainly to do with ageing satellites.
There's one more point worth thinking about. The troposphere tends to accentuate bursts of warming, such as El Nino spikes. In addition, temperature is just one indicator of climate change and doesn't mean a lot on its own except when it exacerbates heat waves, wildfires and droughts. Other effects include rising seas, stronger storms and bigger floods (a more vigorous hydrological cycle) and melting ice. Then there are flow on effects, like migration (humans and other animals), food production and so on.
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