It’s Time to Play “Refute a Denier,” with Dr. Roy Spencer

I’m Tony Heller, aka Steve Goddard, a climate denier blowing the whistle on myself. If you’re not familiar with me, see here.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for the several dozen climate deniers who gather together to reinforce their stupidity and swap boner pill tips at the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change. This year’s conference was held at the Trump International Hotel, because there’s no better place to signal that you’re science has absolutely nothing to do with politics.

One of today’s speakers at the conference was Dr. Roy Spencer, who helps lead the satellite temperature measurement project at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Spencer has spent a large part of his career desperately trying to prove his peers couldn’t possibly be right about climate change because God. We could rattle off bunches of other links showing your what a fraud he is but you can Google that just as well as we can.

Our main purpose today is to introduce a new feature, “Refute a Denier,” where we crowd source the collective intelligence of people who know what they’re talking about to refute the claims of climate deniers. In the hot seat is, of course, Dr. Roy Spencer, and the presentation he gave today at Heartland’s conference. During his talk, he claimed that most climate models ran much hotter for the troposphere (which is not the same as surface temperature data) than the satellite record.

To make it super convenient, we created a video of his presentation along with the entire transcript and screenshots of the slides he showed during his talk. Feel free to post your comments on Twitter, in the comments below, on YouTube, or on your own blog post. We’ll collect them all when we do a roundup.

Please have at it!

Good morning. Isn’t this a great venue? Several of us were talking that this is
the nicest hotel we’ve ever stayed in, ever. Which is probably out of the
people I talked to, that’s a cumulative 1000 people years of traveling.

Screenshot 2019-07-25 14.04.52

Um, you’re gonna hear some differences of opinion on the details here. I’ve
noticed already based on the talks during breakfast, but I think we’re the
people here that will be speaking or unified in one basic message. And that is
there is no climate crisis. There is no climate emergency. Okay, that we’re in
agreement on that, but we can argue about the details.

Um, sometimes it’s hard to get your hands around the climate subject. You know,
global warming, climate change, what we should do about energy policy. There’s
a lot of weeds you can get into. Okay? And so a lot of people just threw up
their hands and they go along with whatever the scientific consensus is or with
the policy consensus is or whatever Al Gore says.

So I’d like to give you some advice to help hopefully make things a little
easier. Try to think of all of the talks that are given today, as something
that’s in one of three categories. There’s sort of three categories of issues
that that we’re gonna be speaking on.

The first category I’m going to briefly address is “Is climate changing?” Okay?
Is there a changing climate, whether it’s warming or increasing storminess? And
related to that, you know, you could have changed that’s positive as well as
negative. For instance, a lot of people don’t know that damaging tornadoes are
down 50% since we started monitoring them in the 1950s. Okay, that’s the long
term trend, down 50%. You wouldn’t know that from listening to the media every
time a tornado hits a town. Right? Okay, so this is number one. How much is
climate changing? And is it good or bad?

Uh, number two. To the extent that climate is changing, how much is due to
humans? That’s something that, uh, Nir Shaviv will talk in the second talk.
He’ll talk about alternative explanations other than CO2, okay, for causing
climate change.

And then number three is the policy issue which will be addressed a lot today.
Uh, how much can we affect climate by changing energy policy? And if we do
that, what is the cost for his benefit? You know, a lot of people say, well,
you know, we just shouldn’t be affecting the climate system at all and so just
as a matter of insurance policy, you know, we need to invest the extra money
into into not producing CO2 emissions, right? Well, the trouble is, it’s so
expensive and impractical that the insurance policy…you wouldn’t have an
insurance policy on $100,000 house, let’s say a house that cost $100,000. You
wouldn’t pay $200,000 a year on an insurance policy in case your house burns
down, right? I mean, the costs outweigh the benefits.

So those are the three categories. Is the climate…how much is the climate
changing? Okay, number two: How much of that changes due to humans? Number
three: What can we do about it? And what of the costs versus the benefits of
doing something about it? So now I get into my talk.

I have relatively few slides, they asked me, Heartland asked me to cover
global temperature monitoring with satellites. We don’t monitor surface
temperatures, which is where people live. We monitor the troposphere. The
troposphere is the lowest part of the atmosphere. If you look at that little
red bracket there, it’s down…it’s where all of the weather occurs. It’s where
80% of the atmospheric mass resides outside of the tropics. 90% of the mass in
the tropics is in the troposphere.

Screenshot 2019-07-25 14.05.10

And why do we monitor that? Well, for one thing, it’s easy to do from
satellites. Surface temperatures are much harder, okay. But also there’s a good
reason for understanding how the climate system works and whether CO2 is
causing warming. And that’s because the whole CO2 two theory of global warming
involves infrared radiation. Okay, that’s the energy given off by the Earth to
outer space. It’s how the earth naturally cools itself. Okay, and as we add CO2,
the theory says, we’ve reduced the ability of the Earth to cool itself by
about 1%. That’s according to theory, not measurements. None of our satellite
measurements of any kind are good enough to measure that. It’s a theoretical
expectation.

So anyway, that infrared radiation, it mostly comes from the troposphere so it
makes sense that we monitor the temperature of the troposphere. Also, it’s a
more robust signal. The climate models that they run all around the world
claim that warming should be greater up in the troposphere. Uh, then down here
at the surface. So it’s a more robust signature that we should be able to see.

Screenshot 2019-07-25 14.05.25

So let’s get to what we do with the satellites. For over 25 years now, John
Christie and I have been producing a temperature data set–we update it every
month–of the lower tropospheric temperature and basically the whole tropospheric
temperature. They’re two different products. And this is a plot. Since 1979
it’s ah, now over 40 year satellite record that shows how temperatures have
changed over that 40 years. There has been basically a linear trend upward with
a lot of year to your variability. But the trend is only 0.13C per decade.
Okay, that’s pretty small, you know, that’s 1/100th of a degree per year,
average warming. Okay.

Screenshot 2019-07-25 14.05.37

Now, this is the money slide. That spaghetti plot shows yearly temperatures
from 102 different climate model runs which represent about two dozen different
climate models because you can do different runs, different experiments, in the
same climate model and get a different answer. This has a total of 102 on it.
That black line is the average of all the 102 model runs, and this is again,
this is the global average, lower tropospheric temperature. This is what we
monitor, and which I showed previously here. Okay, this is the monthly stuff
from the satellites, global average, lower tropospheric temperature variations.
Here it’s now average to yearly. Okay? And so that previous slide that’s the
blue line, our UAH satellite data, shows the least amount of warming. At least
it looks like it on this plot. There’s another group called Remote Sensing
Systems, RSS, that has there now revised estimate from the satellites, which
shows somewhat more warming than we do. That black line is the average of all
102 model runs. That black line represents what energy policy is based on,
energy policy changes. It’s based on those climate models being correct. Okay?

Now also showed on here is the average of four reanalyses. Reanalyses are
global data sets where they’ve thrown in all the observations they can find.
Surface temperatures, weather balloons, commercial aircraft, ships, buoys, a
variety of satellites, measuring all different kinds of things and then using
physics to sort of estimate based on all that information, their best guess of
what’s going on in the climate system. And you can see that those reanalysis
data sets agree with the satellites: that the climate models are producing too
much warming. Compared to our data set, the UAH satellite data set, it’s about
twice as much warming of the lower troposphere in the climate models compared
to the observations. And again, those climate models is what proposed energy
policy changes are based upon.

Screenshot 2019-07-25 14.05.51

Now, if we look at the trends for each one of those curves, there’s a linear
trend that each one of those curves will have in terms of a warming rate per
decade. And I rank them, if I rank them from the warmest on the left to the
coolest on the right, this is what we see. Um, the model with the most warming
is the NOAA GFDL model. That’s the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of
NOAA. It’s got about 4/10 of a degree see warming per decade. That’s at the far
left. Then there’s four Canadian models having lived on the border of Canada
for many years, I would say that’s probably wishful thinking on their part. Um,
the rest of the great bars or all the other 102 models. That black bar
in the middle. That’s the average of all the models. And then over
there on the right, you see this rapid fall off in warming trends all the way
over at the right. The one model that has the least amount of warming and is
actually closest to UAH, to our data set, is the Russian model, uh, and then
comes up the Japanese model, the MRI. The four reanalyses there next in the
green remote sensing systems has the red there. But you see that the reanalyses again agrees more with satellites than with all of these models. You
know, it makes you wonder, what are these modelers thinking?

And since I will be accused of this anyway, since I’m accused of everything
else, I want to point out how well our collusion between Vladimir Putin and UAH
worked out here. Notice that we got very close to the Russian model as
intended.

Screenshot 2019-07-25 14.06.03

Okay, now we can do this whole thing again just for the tropics. It turns out
the tropics is where you really see the supposed effect of global warming.
Okay, you might have heard of the tropical hot spot. The tropical upper
troposphere is supposed to warm more than just about anywhere based on the
climate models. And we see even a bigger discrepancy between the observations
and the climate models in the tropics. In our case, 2.4 times as fast. That’s
how much faster the average climate model is warming compared to the UAH
satellite. And you see the reanalyses, that’s a another observational data set,
the analyses, agree with the satellites. It’s not warming as much as the
climate models say it should be.

Screenshot 2019-07-25 14.06.20

And we can do this same ranking the warming trends from all of those curves.
Here we see UAH all the way at the right there. The least amount of warming is
our data set, and the four reanalyses and the Russian model all basically agree
on tropical warming on being about half or even less than half of the average
climate model.

Screenshot 2019-07-25 14.06.29

This is what our satellite data set looks like for the regional trends. This is
sort of, at least qualitatively, if not quantitatively, agrees with the surface
data that there’s virtually no warming at the South Pole. And as you proceed
northward, you get more and more warming with the greatest warming at the
highest northern latitudes. And this is what you’d expect for any kind of
warming whether it’s human caused or natural. Because as you proceed north from
the South Pole to the North Pole, generally, you have more and more land. You
know, the Southern Hemisphere is mostly ocean, the Northern Hemisphere is
mostly land, land warms faster than ocean. So no matter no matter what’s
causing warming, you expect this kind of pattern. You also expect there to be
somewhat more warming over the land masses than the ocean masses, um, for the
same reason.

So I’m actually going to finish early, give near Nir some extra time on his
talk, um, because he needs it. I saw all how many slides he had.

Screenshot 2019-07-25 14.06.43

So, um, okay, conclusions. Satellite monitoring of tropospheric temperatures
provides an essential check on climate model forecast. I could tell you a lot
more about the reasons why there’s a disagreement. We’re funded, UAH is funded,
by the Department of Energy to examine the reasons between for the discrepancy
between models and observations in the tropics. And we have some answers on
that but that’s not what I was asked to talk about today. Uh, clearly, the
main conclusion here, it’s really important for policy, is that these models
that policy is based on have problems. Okay. Uh, they’re warming too much. Not
as much at the surface, that wasn’t part of what I was asked, and I hope
somebody else will discuss that today. There’s more agreement at the surface
between models and observations, but if you look closely a data sets, you’ll
find that there’s an increasing divergence now between the models and the
observations in the last 10 or 15 years. Plus, there’s some questions about
service data sets and that will be addressed by someone today. Whether we can
even believe the surface temperature data sets. Every time they do new
adjustments to them, they come up with more and more warming, as if they’re all
competing with each other to see who can get the most warming out of their
surface data set.

Okay. Now, just because the observations show half as much warming as the
models doesn’t mean the models were half right. Okay? Because the models only
produce warming from increasing CO2 and that’s the way they were designed. The
temperature change in anything–whether it’s the climate system, a pot of water
on a stove, your body, your car engine, anything–a temperature change is a
result of an imbalance between energy coming in and energy going out. All
right. Well, for the Earth, we don’t know the energy flows in and out of the
climate system to the accuracy needed to know whether the climate system is
naturally in energy balance. So what the climate modelers do is they program
the models with the assumption that there’s a balance in other words, the
assumption of no natural climate change. Then they add CO2 and the model warms
and they see, say, “See, we proved so two causes warming.” Well, duh. It’s what
you assumed to begin with. Okay.

Alright. Early indications they’re now doing, CMIP6 climate models what I
showed you was everything was from CMIP5 climate model runs earlier,
Indications are that the semen six models are have even more warming, then the
CMIP5 models. I don’t know why they’re just ignoring the observations.

And finally, what I started out with there is no climate crisis. There is no
climate emergency. Even if all of the warming we’ve seen in any observational
data set, is due to see increasing CO2, which I don’t believe it is, uh, it’s
probably too small for any person to feel in their lifetime, and I’ll leave it
at that. Thank you.

Climate Change Journalist and Activist Pours Heart Out About Concerns Over Climate Change, Unleashes Asshole Feeding Frenzy

My name is Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard). I’m a professional climate change denier and I use this blog to blow the whistle on myself and others, too.

If you are searching for evidence about how sick, twisted and dysfunctional segments of our society are, look no further than the replies to a series of tweets by journalist/meteorologist and climate change activist Eric Holthaus.

In the tweets, Holtahaus talks about his deep despair and anxiety over the threat of climate change. Then, in typical bully fashion, his tweets were featured on the front page of a right-wing propaganda site, mrcNewsBusters, which flies “Exposing & Combating Liberal Media Bias” on its masthead. While the NewsBuster piece, written by Tom Blumer, ostensibly suggests its readers “pity” Mr. Holthaus, I’m sure Mr. Blumer was well aware of the psychopathic mob that would rush to Mr. Holthaus’ Twitter feed in a gushing, orgiastic display of the very worst aspects of human nature. And that, of course, is precisely what happened. Here’s a small sample from some of the assholes who demonstrate precisely how deplorable they are:

There’s only one thing to do in the face of such extreme assholes: Don’t remain silent about assholes like me and keep calling us out for who we are.

And you can also show your solidarity for Mr. Holthaus on his new fundraising project to help him make a living blogging about climate change.

How to Turn a Nice, Jewish, Climate-Change-Denying Dentist Into An Active Fascist with Just a Few Emails, (Part 1)

 

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Is it safe?

This blog is a parody of Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard), a climate change denier who has managed to make a name for himself equipped only with a blog and a Twitter account.

This is the first in a series of posts (read Part 2 and Part 3) that tell the story of how a fan of the real Tony Heller mistook me for the real Tony Heller and how I was subsequently able to get him to agree with and cheer on ridiculously fascist statements in emails I sent to him. I also persuaded him to actively contribute financially to support a fictional covert persecution of climate scientists by the Trump administration. This is not a parody post and the account I give below actually transpired. As this post is not meant to out the person I corresponded with, I have redacted information in the emails that might be used to identify this person. His first name has also been changed.

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Dumb Shaming TV Meteorologists about Global Warming

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Is a tornado about to strike your home? More details at 11!

You would think by now, with a weather forecast just a couple of taps away on your phone, we no longer would have to suffer through watching people in cheap suits on our local news channel desperately trying to keep our attention with lame jokes as they tell us about tomorrow’s weather. But apparently, the ad market for boner pills and adult diapers for people who still use flip phones is large enough to keep TV meteorologists employed for the foreseeable future.

That’s unfortunate because a lot of these 20th century holdovers don’t have a fucking clue about man-made climate change and still continue to deny it. And that’s a shame because as trusted members of the community, they could probably help educate the public about the urgency of climate change. As a vocal climate change denier myself, I acknowledge my role in helping to create these monsters.

There’s an entire list of TV meteorologists who went public with their doubts about global warming about 10 years ago which you can see here under the “Meteorologists” section of the page. The good news is that there have been a few recent instances of weather personalities who came clean and renounced their skepticism. And we want to encourage more of this behavior. So, as a public service, we think it’s high time to track down and call these other green screen masters to the carpet to see if they have come to their senses yet:

We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

Climate Deniers Matter

DTC-ODTRH-RD-2
Poe’s Law now in full effect.

The time has come, my fellow climate deniers, for us to take a stand. We, the dedicated dozens toiling day in and day out on Twitter and various free blogging services to save the world from the global warming alarmists, can no longer afford to stand by idly while we are ostracized by the scientific community. Yes, we must work hard to Make Science Great Again.

First, we need to tear down the walls and barriers denying us access to publication to scientific journals. Science should be open to anyone who is interested in participating, just like it was 400 years ago when anyone who could figure out how to grind glass could help further the triumph of Western Civilization over our dominion.

Next, we are going to drive out all the elitists at NASA and NOAA and any other organizations around the globe who have invaded and perverted science with concepts like “corrected data,” “peer review” and “models.” We will flush them out and restore a common sense, back-to-basics approach to science by implementing a “raw data only” policy.

Once that’s done, we will assemble a great team of the sharpest thinkers like Anthony Watts, Tim Ball and Marc Morano to help us figure out what that hell is going on with climate science today. And it’ll be a diverse group that embraces all points of view, including ones from very good looking girls like Joanne Nova and Judith Curry (eh, maybe not so much).*

Then we start winning. We are going to make science so great you aren’t going to be able to stand it. That will allow us to discover so many new ways to find so many new reserves oil will be flooding the streets and you’ll be choking on the natural gas fumes filling the air. Soon, you’ll be begging us to stop, “please, no more science!” But we are going to just keep drilling, folks.

So join me and let the world know now that #ClimateDeniersMatter. Together, we can Make Science Great Again.

 

* Anyone offended by this politically incorrect joke needs to lighten up and get a grasp on parody.

View the Comments Judith Curry Didn’t Want You See on Her Blog

Climate Change News, Washington, DC — Our hard hitting reporters have uncovered a trove of deleted comments from Judith Curry’s recent blog post. The comments, from climate denier “Tony Heller Exposed,” shed light on Curry’s shocking hypocrisy. Apparently, the comments hit a nerve with the climatologist—who pretends to value open discussion from all sides of the climate debate—and were wiped from the public record.

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Absolving Judith Curry from Her Political Sins

Danger! Head exploding hypocrisy ahead.
Danger! Head exploding hypocrisy ahead.

My name is Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard). I’m a professional climate change denier and I use this blog to blow the whistle on myself and sometimes others, too.

If you get a moment, check out Judith Curry’s latest blog post, “Ins and Outs of the Ivory Tower.” In it, Curry relies on her same tired trick of copying and pasting large swathes of text from others and then “reflecting” on how she thinks said person’s thoughts might have important implications for the larger climate debate. It’s a cheap way for her to sound profound without actually needing to be profound. Continue reading

Connecting the Dots Between Michael Mann’s Alleged Misogyny and Mark Steyn’s Rumored Homosexuality

Just connect the dots to find out!
Just connect the dots to reveal it all!

Like me, Mark Steyn is a man who understands the critical importance of an attention-grabbing title. In his 2012 C-SPAN interview about his book, “America Alone,” Steyn credits his editor, Harry Crocker, for rescuing his book from a fate in bookstore bargain bins and onto the New York Times bestseller list by coming up with a great title. Steyn says his original name for the book was “far more artful and elusive title that [Crocker] thought was for losers and would guarantee we sold, you know, 2,800 copies.”

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In Latest Blog Post, Judith Curry Continues to Beat the “Hiding the Decline” Drum

My name is Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard). I’m a professional climate change denier and I use this blog to blow the whistle on myself and sometimes others, too.

I know some of you thought I went too far calling Judith Curry a “Climate Junkie,” but if you aren’t convinced that’s exactly what she is, then go take a quick look at her latest blog post. You can skip past whatever point she’s trying to make in her long-winded and lazy, copy-and-paste essay about transparency in research and go right to the last line where she finally gets around to delivering her payload:

“Lets face it – ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ to ‘hide the decline’ means . . . ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ to ‘hide the decline.'”

That this quote has anything sinister behind it has been debunked so many times now that only true hard-core denialists believe it. And yet here Curry is repeating it once again reporting on it as if it were fact. And as usual, she doesn’t directly attack the science behind the hockey stick graph. Why? Because she can’t. Instead she just drops this mined quote at the end of her rambling post as a dog whistle to her devoted followers that she’s on their side.

This excellent five minute video from a couple of Mother Jones reporters clearly and efficiently explains the real story behind the “hide the decline” quote.

And for a fuller exploration about the controversy about the hockey stick graph which was put to bed long ago, take a look at The Hockey Stick: The Most Controversial Chart in Science, Explained which had this to say:

Climate deniers threw everything they had at the hockey stick. They focused immense resources on what they thought was the Achilles Heel of global warming research–and even then, they couldn’t hobble it. (Though they certainly sowed plenty of doubt in the mind of the public.)

Sorry, Judith, but you need the equivalent of methadone for your rhetoric. Stop relying on the Climategate smack to give you a lift.

As the World Burns, Episode I: Judith Curry & Mark Steyn, Partners in Slime

Science just wouldn't be science without a lot of drama.
Who said science had to be drama free?

My name is Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard). I’m a professional climate change denier and I use this blog to blow the whistle on myself and sometimes others, too.

In my blog post yesterday, I introduced a new character into the climate change debate soap opera, Judith Curry. As I mentioned in the post, Curry, on her blog, gave a glowing review of the latest round of swiftboating against climatologist Michael Mann, a book titled “A Disgrace to the Profession.” Today, we are going to begin our exploration into Curry’s review of this masterwork of non-scientific rubbish she insists on injecting into the climate debate in order to uncover just how desperate and petty Curry has become in her attempt to undermine the reputation of her self-appointed nemesis, Michael Mann. Continue reading