Judith Curry hides the decline . . . in her own self-respect

In hindsight, the way the Climategate emails was rolled out, after very careful scrutiny by the targeted bloggers, was handled pretty responsibly.  Lets face it – “Mike’s Nature trick to hide the decline” means . . . “Mike’s Nature trick to hide the decline.[1]”

Wow. Judith Curry, ladies and gentlemen and deniers. Former serious person. What a joke.

In hindsight, we can say the Climategate witch hunt failed utterly. Michael Mann is better-known and better-regarded than he would have been without the denier crusade. Deniers humiliated themselves trying to discredit a "hockey stick" that has now been reproduced dozens of times.

The criminals who stole the emails passed them to their denier allies who used them deceptively, using every variety of quote sniping and ridiculous double standards -- hateful vicious right-wing crusaders picking through thousands of pages of emails, looking for a few lines where responsible scientists, in the course of private communications with each other, said mean things about idiots.

This was used by right-wingers already in denial of the facts to craft a mythology for their gullible dittoheads. Said dittoheads went on to threaten working scientists with imprisonment, murder, the rape of their children, lynchings in the street -- such was the fruit of the handling of stolen emails, to morons by way of liars.

"Pretty responsibly" . . . keep telling yourselves that.

It's official: ENSO is fucking with us

We are now in the longest Nino-less period since NOAA record-keeping started:

Source

The last three-month period classified as El Nino was March-April-May of 2010. 51 months have passed since then (with more likely in the pipeline, given a 0.0 anomaly now.) This chart only goes back to 2002, but the full record shows what an anomaly this is. Fifty month gaps occur in 1959-1963 and again in 1978-1982. The present 51 months is longer than either.

So, how is this significant? Most simply, recent temperature trends are likely to under-estimate the long-term trends, unless a suppressed El Nino is a long-term consequence of AGW. That's possible, but most climate models predict El Nino will become more frequent and strong in a warmer world, rather than the converse.

Curry's Review

 Climate Etc.'s "Week in Review" function is getting more and more erratic, ignoring big stories, trumpeting horribly unprofessional and ill-thought-out editorials, and in general looking more and more like an archaeological record of the self-reinforcing power of cognitive dissonance.

I am trying to figure out what Mann is trying to accomplish with these lawsuits.  I guess he is hoping to intimidate people into not saying negative things about him?

The lack of common sense -- and lack of empathy -- expressed here is startling. Evidently tribal feelings in Dr. Curry have reached a point where she can't comprehend why a person would fight back against slander and defamation.

She highlights a truly God-awful article,  "The Moral Downside of Climate Change." Major parts (not the ones she chooses to quote) rehash a bundle of myths and lies:

It seems likely, after all, that what we are witnessing in the furor over climate change is a rerun of the wildly off-base population explosion announced in the 1960s, or the brief romance with a threatened ice age in the next decade, or the treatment of pregnancy as a disease, or the pressing need for safe sex, or the horrors of growing up in a world in which not everyone respects and affirms our every choice. . . . the actions taken at best waste time, energy and resources and at worst either make the problem worse or create new problems in their wake.

 One wonders if Curry believes condoms are "a waste of time and resources" or if she clings to the discredited myth that scientists in the 70s predicted a new ice age. And speaking of the ice, it's time to spin the free-fall up north:

Depending on which data set you look at, the Arctic sea ice extent is approaching or has surpassed the record minimum extent (for the period since 1979) in 2007.  There are even predictions of an ice free Arctic Ocean by the end of Sept.  I’ll do a post later in Sept on “what is going on and what does all this mean.”   But in the mean time, here is highly confident prediction:  the Arctic Ocean will NOT be ice free by the end of Sept.  In fact, nearly all of thin and loosely consolidated ice has already melted (helped along by the big cyclonic storm in early Aug).  The remaining ice is consolidated near Greenland and the Canadian archipelago, and is at high latitudes where the autumnal cooling is well underway.  So I would suspect that there will be an earlier than usual sea ice minimum this year, with the minimum not getting much lower.

Wow, desperate much? Where are the predictions of an ice-free Arctic Ocean this year to be found? In this one paragraph we have:

1. A straw man fallacy, trying to refocus our attention on the ridiculous idea that the ice will vanish this year, a position I can find no one endorsing.
2. A desperate stab at reassuring her readership that although the ice numbers are presently in free-fall, no doubt everything will be back to normal.

It's shocking (to me at least) that promising "an earlier than usual sea ice minimum this year" is not really substantially different than Goddard's supposed "early recovery" of the sea ice. And when a full professor is starting to echo Steve Goddard, it's time to pour the whiskey and vodka down the drain and take a serious hard look at yourself.

Do you know what this means?

Michael Mann on Richard Muller, in an observation with heady implications:

"Muller's announcement last year that the Earth is indeed warming brought him up to date w/ where the scientific community was in the 1980s. His announcement this week that the warming can only be explained by human influences, brings him up to date with where the science was in the mid 1990s."

Obviously Muller is a scientific genius -- his understanding has advanced by an entire decade in just under a year.

We should check back with him in 2016 when, by the iron laws of linear extrapolation, his science will be the equivalent of the consensus of the 2030s.

Cuccinelli’s mini-me McCarthyism quashed

The quick eyes and fingers of Joe Romm have the story.

Cuccinelli's bogus "investigation" was a particularly chilling piece of ideological thuggery, striking as it did at any notion of free inquiry in science. Attacking Michael Mann, one of the world's foremost climatologists, with fraud charges and the threat of an endless, Whitewater-style partisan witch hunt, represented a new and dangerous corruption of the public sphere. Even the creationists, the tobacco pushers and the "scientific" racists, while attacking scientists' results, never dared attack the scientists in this brazen, harassing, threatening way.

It seems like a bad dream, and thanks to Judge Peatross, we can hope against hope that that is all it was. I fear, though, that the loss today will only be temporary. Cuccinelli lost on the facts almost instantly. But the effectiveness of McCarthyism never depended on the ability to win in court. All it requires is a bald-faced liar in a position of authority, a complacent media, a fearful populace, and the willingness to accuse. As far as I can tell, all those factors still exist. Expect to see more scurrilous accusations, and more big lies, until and unless the consequence of such are not just to be defeated but to be discredited, disgraced and speedily dismissed.