Nova vs Nova

The IPCC reports present science that shows the climate is warming and that amongst the numerous forces that affect climate, man-made greenhouse  gas (GHG) emissions have been a major contributor in recent times.

By contrast, Joanne Nova offers confusion. In her “merchant of doubt” role, she has no qualm about presenting contradicting theories. Her posts blame anything but CO2 for the warming.

Nova’s “science” posts discussing whether or not it’s warming and the cause, are summarised below. In chronological order we start with …

Sep 2008, Nova releases her handbook and prematurely announces that there’s no more warming.

Oct 2008, The heat is missing!! – and forgets to mention surface temps or ocean heat content data.

Apr 2009, It’s warming, but it’s oscillations – Nova now accepts that it is warming, but her oscillation explanation doesn’t give any physical reason or provide any relation to the sun, aerosols or temperature prior to 1700.

May 2009, It’s the Postal Service – And chooses not to inform her readers that the theory of GHG is based upon physics, not just coincidental data correlation.

May 2009, It’s not really warming that much – and continues to cherry pick a few years of surface temperature, a small subset of ocean heat content data and completely forgot about the northern hemisphere when calculating sea ice extent.

Jun 2009, It’s NOT warming, it IS warming! – Nova Cherry Picks Argo data again to suggest we are not warming (Strangely Nova links to an internet shopping website for proof – see “ocean temperature data is sufficient to prove” ), then in the very next paragraph of the same article she refers to her Oscillations post and agrees that it is warming. SERIOUSLY!!

Jul 2009, It’s NOT warming, it IS warming! – Again the contradicting arguments resurface and she thinks climate scientists share her cherry picking technique – wrong! Climate scientists use all kinds of data to come to the conclusion that the planet is warming, and they certainly don’t limit themselves to using just a small section of the data. For instance, both surface temperatures and ocean heat content show warming. Nova’s “cooling”, only occurs over short timeframes, something she knows but continues to promote to her naive audience.

Jul 2009, Some Guy on the Internet says the numbers don’t add up – then had to admit his “back of the envelope” math was wrong.

Jul 2009, Wishes the warming away – by suggesting that cherry picking is ok and in doing so confirms the warming is occurring.

Jul 2009, Suggests again that the world hasn’t warmed since 2001. See above graph and stop cherry picking Nova!!

Jul, 2009, The planet is warming and CO2 is to blame – but not that much. Nova agrees with Lindzen and thus now disagrees with her previous support for Akasofu’s cycles theory.

Aug 2009, Ditches Lindzen and CO2, now back to Akasofu’s non-physical based theory. Simultaneously trying to suggest analysis is poor practice, then offering up some analysis of her own based upon a theory not connected to physics but more about looking for patterns in data.

Sep 2009, Accuses others of Cherry Picking – oh the irony.

Oct 2009, It is warming, but it’s air conditioners – fails to notice studies on UHIE showing the effect to be negligible nor does Nova notice that the difference between trends of various temperature measures is minuscule compared to the amount of warming in that time.

Nov 2009 – It’s warming but it’s not CO2 – disagrees with her earlier Lindzen post, abandons air conditioners, back to Akasofu’s non-physical based theory, a theory which can’t go back to match up with Nova’s temperature reconstruction graph showing the MWP.

Nov 2009, It might not be warming. And again fails to look at all the evidence.

Dec 2009, Yes CO2 causes warming!!! – and fails to provide science to contradict physics behind water feedback.

Dec 2009, It could be clouds or cosmic rays – Nova finds a new possible culprit to throw into the mix. But offers no peer-reviewed science to back it up.

Jan 2010, It’s warming, but it’s not CO2 – although Nova offers no rebuttal against the explanation of why greenhouse gases cause warming. And she confuses model hindcasting with “error bars”.

Feb 2010, It’s warming, but not as much as they said it would. And somehow thinks linear extrapolation is akin to acceleration.

Feb, 2010, It’s warming and it’s cosmic rays & clouds – and ignores the mountain of evidence suggesting otherwise.

Feb 2010, CO2 can’t have much warming effect – presents non-peer-reviewed science and later contradicts herself on two occasions by agreeing CO2 produces a direct warming of around 1 degree per doubling.

Apr, 2010, It’s warming but it could be anything. Followed by a gish gallop of reasons CO2 is not to be feared – despite the abundance of science telling us otherwise.

Jun 2010, It’s the deep oceans. But this is an attempt to explain ENSO, not a long term climate trend.

Aug 2010, Global Warming is about to end – but it didn’t.

Aug 2010, It’s everything except CO2 – and failed to spot the numerous contradictions.

Aug 2010, CO2 produces a direct warming of around 1 degree per doubling – and disagrees with herself.

Aug 2010, CO2 produces not much warming – and misunderstands the lag once more.

Sep 2010, It may not be warming. Another unsubstantiated promotion of doubt.

Oct 2010, It may not be warming. Again doubts warming is occurring – fails to recognise science that has studied the Urban Heat Island Effect upon temperature records and found it to be negligible.

Oct 2010, It may not be warming much – and forgets there are many sources of temperature, all of them showing upward trends.

Oct 2010, It’s cooling – but cherry picks data again.

Oct 2010, It’s cooling in some places – but overstates the impact.

Oct 2010, It’s warming but it’s natural – and fails to show why natural forces causing previous warming are the same forces acting today.

Oct 2010, It’s warming and it’s not CO2 – Nova forgets about aerosols, land use, solar changes, natural cycles and fluctuation of heat through our system and wrongly suggests that real scientists think CO2 should be the only factor controlling surface temperatures.

Oct 2010, It’s not warming – Nova again plays the old hotspot card, again disregarding evidence suggesting it does exist and ignoring the multiple lines of evidence showing warming.

Oct 2010, It might not be warming – again more “merchant of doubt” talk regarding surface temperature trends.

Nov 2010, It still might not be warming – yet more “merchant of doubt” talk regarding surface temperature trends.

Nov 2010, THERE IS NO HOTSPOT!! – Nova has a fit when new data shows more evidence of a hotspot.

Jan 2011, Predicted Temps will remain cool for the next 6 months – and failed.

Jan 2011, CO2 only warms half as much – Nova’s “expert” repeats his mistake in many blogs despite being repeatedly corrected. Little wonder he fails to bother trying to get his theory peer-reviewed.

Jan 2011, It’s warming – Nova invents a “force” called “recovery from the little ice age” to replace CO2.

Feb 2011, It’s warming – because of oceans, clouds and cosmic rays – and cites another set of slides instead of peer-reviewed science.

Feb 2011, It may not be warming – Yet another UHIE post.

Mar 2011, Yes it is warming – and the long term trend tracks CO2 rise. But the important message Nova wants to impart is that 2010 may not have been the hottest year on record.

Mar 2011, It’s cosmic rays – another geophysics professor gives us his views on climatology.

Apr 2011, It’s warming – but not as much as a model from the 1980’s said it would. Are models that bad?

Apr 2011, It’s warming a bit, but it’s natural – and fails to describe what’s causing it.

May 2011, It’s actually cold and natural – as predicted in 1979, “Warming trend until year 2000, then very cold” – Reality, we’re still waiting for the very cold part.

Jun 2011, It’s warming and it’s the sun. – although the cited study does have some problems. Another problem for Nova supporting this theory is that it disagrees with her husband, David Evans. The authors of the study say half of the warming is due to the sun, the other half is due to water vapor feedback. But Evans says the water vapor is not a large feedback because it turns into clouds. I doubt this contradiction is ever discussed by Nova and Evans over the dinner table; probably through ignorance rather than avoidance.

Jul 2011, It’s cooling – for no particular reason.

Aug 2011, It’s warming. In her eagerness to prove that man is not responsible for increasing atmospheric CO2 (she’s wrong), Nova accepts that the planet is warming. Salby’s idea suffers from serious problems too as discussed.

Aug 2011, It’s cooling – the oceans are cooling – unless you look at the data.

Sep 2011, It’s going to get cold. Nova says “Major Drop in Solar Activity Predicted: Little Ice Age” and failed to read her own reference that says,

“We are NOT predicting a mini-ice age. We are predicting the behavior of the solar cycle. In my opinion, it is a huge leap from that to an abrupt global cooling, since the connections between solar activity and climate are still very poorly understood. My understanding is that current calculations suggest only a 0.3 degree C decrease from a Maunder-like minimum, too small for an ice age. It is unfortunate that the global warming/cooling studies have become so politically polarizing.”

Nov 2011, It’s not warming much! – please take the word of Nova’s “guy on the internet” rather than five independent sources.

Dec 2012, It’s warming but it’s natural cycles – Chinese Tree Rings say so. And Nova says it’s going to get cold real soon, unless you listen to the April 2009 Nova who says it’s natural and it’s continuing to warm.

Jan 2012, It’s warming, but not as much as they thought – and ignores the unpredictability of forecasting solar & aerosol change.

Jan 2012, It’s warming but it’s the PDO. – but is fooled by their own equation.

Jan 2012, It’s warmed, but it’s about to cool – honestly!

On topics of warming, feedbacks & attribution, Nova flips back and forth. Sometimes Nova agrees that it is warming, other times she casts doubt on the thermometer record, occasionally declaring the warming has stopped. Most times Nova disputes the water vapor feedback mechanism, sometimes she unwittingly supports science that says it accounts for half of the observed warming.

On occasions when Nova does conceded that it’s warming, she flip the blame back and forth between the popular, already debunked myths of solar, natural cycles, oceans and cosmic rays. It’s difficult to have any confidence in Nova when she changes her mind on such a regular basis.