The very debunked Curry went crazy when the denial team she was on at Berkeley Earth proved warming was real.
Judith Curry doesn’t want anyone to believe that modern warming is due to man-made greenhouse gases (or anything else man-made). Therefore she uses the early 20th century warming, about which we know but little, to make the case that “if we can’t understand then, how can we understand now?” To get this case to work, she has to portray the early 20th century warming as being comparable to modern warming, so that’s what she says (her exact words: “almost as large”), with no evidence to back it up. God forbid she should actually have to calculate some numbers! It’s not her strong suit.
Seems to me, this is just like saying “Look! There was a spike in lung cancer deaths in this region, before the introduction of tobacco. Until we can explain the early lung cancer outburst, I have little confidence in WHO and CDC attribution statements regarding the cause of the recent elevated lung cancer rates.
Yes, folks. That’s really what Curry and her ilk are doing. They do it a lot. There’s something we don’t understand, so we don’t understand anything! If they have to exaggerate to make their case look plausible, they will. At least, that’s my opinion.
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Heat-addled brains and a competition: Judith Curry vs Phil Plait
Sou | 4:56 PM
It shouldn't surprise anyone. It happens every time there's a hottest year on record. Deniers go barmy. Crazy, Round the twist. Barking mad. The heat addles their brains.
One person that may surprise, though, is Judith Curry. It won't be news to you that she's been behaving more and more like a science disinformer/denier. You know that already. No what is surprising is just how far into denial she's sunk and how far she's moved away from science of late.
You may have noticed Judith's decline over the years. It hasn't happened smoothly. It coincided with her all but ceasing scientific research. Apart from adding her name to the papers from other people, she's published almost no scientific papers as lead author. There have only been one or two - except for what she might describe as philosophical papers. (Others would more accurately describe her ramblings as pseudo-philosophy.)
Judith's decline has been in fits and starts. She'll have a sudden burst of frenzied denial (like endorsing the Wegman atrocity, at Keith Kloor's place) then wander around on a steady plateau for a bit. Then she'll take another sharp drop down further into the denial abyss. Even admitting it, saying she's a 7/10 on a scale of denialism. (Actually, she said she'd dropped to a 3/10 on a scale of "sceptical" science IIRC, which on a bipolar scale is the same thing.)
Judith's decline has been a bit like surface temperature in that way, but in the opposite direction. A hiatus followed by a sharp drop into denialism.
After her incomprehensible foray a couple of days ago, claiming that falsely alleging fraud isn't defamatory, and touting her commitment to free speech, she has now gone back to selective censoring on her blog. Which is fine with me. The more pro-science types she gets rid of, the nuttier her blog appears.
Today she's parroting denialist memes of the day. I mean she can't even think for herself any longer.
Models, models...
First, here is what she allowed to be published by Jason Samenow of the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang. It stands out like a sore thumb among the comments from other people, many of whom are still practicing science. She said:
“With 2014 essentially tied with 2005 and 2010 for hottest year, this implies that there has been essentially no trend in warming over the past decade. This ‘almost’ record year does not help the growing discrepancy between the climate model projections and the surface temperature observations.”
Judith fails arithmetic with that one, doesn't she. At least this time ( for a change) she's not claiming "it's cooling". I wonder how much it would have helped her discrepancy if last year had been the coldest on record?
You might be interested to compare Judith's denial with what has actually happened to global surface temperatures over Judith's "past decade". It sure doesn't look like "no trend in warming" to me!
B..b..but it was almost an El Niño year
Here's another one from Judith's own blog, this time (archived here). It's a strawman. She wrote, after saying there was an almost El Niño:
So, is it El Niño? Not quite, according to some conventional indices, but a broader physical definition might be needed to capture the different flavors of El Nino. A number of scientists are calling for modernizing the ENSO identification system. So I’m not sure how this event might eventually be identified, but for many practical purposes (i.e. weather forecasting), this event is behaving in many ways like an El Nino. What does this mean for interpreting the ‘almost warmest year’? Well not much; I think it is erroneous to infer that ‘it must be AGW since 2014 wasn’t even an El Nino year’ is useful reasoning here.
Two things. It wasn't an "almost warmest year", it was the warmest year. No almost about it. Secondly, even had there been a full blown El Niño, if not for global warming then there's no reason to think it would have been a "warmest year". She's wrong if she thinks El Niños are causing global warming. ENSO and other internal variations happen on top of global warming. Here, let me show you what I mean with a chart I did a while ago. The El Nino years are red and the La Nina years are blue. You can see that each ENSO event of the same type is hotter than the one before, with the exception of the year after Pinatubo (which caused temporary cooling). That's because ENSO events are happening against the backdrop of increasing temperatures - not because they are causing global warming.
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