Roy Spencer
gregladen | November 14, 2015Dr. Roy W. Spencer has a blog and a facebook page, is a famous climate science denier, and, it turns out, an unmitigated ass.
Peter Sinclair notes,
Roy Spencer is of course, most famous for consistently misreading his own data for some decade or more, insisting that the planet was cooling, even during some of the fastest warming trend of the last millennium.
He remains the “official climatologist of the Rush Limbaugh Show”.
Must be a good gig. The wronger you are, the more fans and funding you attract.
And now, following hard on the Paris attacks, he wrote this:
Why ISIS Should Support COP21…
tlambert | September 6, 2011Andrew Dessler's new paper (preprint here) makes it clear just how bad Spencer and Braswell (2011) is. Spencer and Braswell assumed that changes in clouds were a stronger influence on temperature changes than changes in ocean heat content. Dessler used observations to show that the ocean heat content is vastly more important. He summarizes his paper in the video below.
See also: Gavin Schmidt and Skeptical Science.
tlambert | September 2, 2011Wolfgang Wagner, Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing writes:
Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science. Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims. Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell [1] that was recently published in Remote Sensing is most likely problematic in both aspects and…
tlambert | March 2, 2011Barry Bickmore's three part review of Roy Spencer's Great Global Warming Blunder is well worth a read. In Part 1 he examines Spencer's model that supposedly shows that climate sensitivity is low. In Part 2 he looks at Spencer's claim that climate scientists ignore natural sourcs of climate variation. And Part 3 takes apaprt Spencer's claim that his climate model, which has four fitted parameters, shows that the PDO and not an increase in greenhouse gasses is the major cause of climate change since 1900.
I'm reminded of the quote from John von Neumann:
With four parameters I can fit an…
illconsidered | August 9, 2010Regular readers will recall a recent post pointing to Dr Roy Spencer being cannabalized cannibalized over his stubborn insistence that the Greenhouse Effect does not violate the laws of thermodynamics.
Well, he seems to be a glutton for punishment as he is taking another crack at it.
This time, I am only pointing it out because he has taken a high tech experimental approach to observe the actual atmospheric back radiation and an interesting post results (hi tech compared to his last hotplate device!).
I just skimmed the comments, like last time, and while the die-hards are still hard to…
tlambert | May 10, 2010 Deltoid can reveal that Roy Spencer has blundered by using a fake photo of an iceberg to help make his case that there is a massive conspiracy among climate scientists to conceal the truth about global warming. Enmeshed in Spencer's Photoshopgate scandal are Marc Morano, who prominently features Spencer's fake photo and Rush Limbaugh, who said "The cover of this book is just superb."
Of course, some of you may be thinking that the picture is just an illustration and it doesn't matter one bit to Spencer's thesis whether it is a photoshop or not and journalists would not take such a thing…
tlambert | January 14, 2010Possum Comitatus has noticed a very interesting change in Roy Spencer's presentation of his satelite temperature data.
This is the November version:
And this is the December version:
Spot the difference!
Update: Gavin reminds me that in April Spencer was using a ridiculous degree 4 fit to the data:
If he'd stuck with that, the current graph would look like this:
The polynomial is still decreasing at the end, but the divergence from the data is striking.
tlambert | March 16, 2009Allow me to shorten Heartland's 2009 International Conference on Climate Change for you.
Joseph L. Bast: Bray's survey shows that there is no consensus.
Vaclav Klaus: Environmentalists have a secret plan to "return mankind centuries back".
Richard Lindzen: It is an error to say "It's the sun!"
Tom McClintock: Al Gore is fat. And, it's the sun!
Lawrence Solomon: Environmental organizations are pawns of the foundations that fund them.
Tom Segalstad: Total human emissions of CO2 are twice the alleged increase in atmospheric CO2, therefore human emissions cannot be the cause of the increase.
Syun…
tlambert | August 1, 2008Tamino has written three posts explaining what is wrong with Roy Spencer's calculations of a low climate sensitivity. See Part 1, Part 2and Part 3.
Brief summary: 90 days of data is not enough to estimate climate sensitivity.
tlambert | May 30, 2008Sideshow Roy Spencer writes:
Our environmental protection practices have already caused the deaths of millions of people, mainly in poor African countries. By far the most humans -- mostly women and children -- have been sacrificed in the mistaken belief that the use of any amount of the pesticide DDT would harm the environment. As a result, the preventable disease malaria has continued to decimate Africa.
Only recently has this genocide disguised as environmentalism been partly reversed through the reinstituted practice of twice-yearly DDT treatments of the entryways to homes. While most…
tlambert | May 29, 2006Roy Spencer takes a break from his parody writing with a new column at Tech Central Station. He has some questions for Al Gore. I think he should have just used Google to find the answers, but what the hey, I'll do it for him.
1) Why did you make it look like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods, droughts, and ice calving off of glaciers and falling into the ocean, are only recent phenomena associated with global warming? You surely know that hurricane experts have been warning congress for many years that the natural cycle in hurricanes would return some day, and that our built-up…
tlambert | May 21, 2006The Washington Post reveals that Roy Spencer is the man behind environmentalist parody site ecoEnquirer.com:
Somewhere in an office about 600 miles southwest of here, former NASA scientist Roy W. Spencer is laughing. The 50-year-old, white-haired PhD dreamed up the spoof site -- sort of the Onion meets the Weather Channel -- because he thinks people are overreacting to the threat of climate change.
Now a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Spencer says human activities have "likely" contributed to climate change, but he argues that "since we do not…
tlambert | November 25, 2005In Tech Central Station (where else?) global warming skeptic Roy Spencer spreads the DDT hoax:
The whole DDT issue is a good example of stupid environmental policy. Insiders say the de facto ban on DDT was the result of politics, not of overriding human health and environmental concerns. Threats of trade bans on countries that dare to use DDT, one of the safest and most effective insecticides available, have contributed to over one million malaria-related deaths each year in Africa. Literally hundreds of millions of people contract the disease each year. While the knee-jerk hostility to DDT…
tlambert | August 8, 2005Long time readers will be aware of what I think of the appalling quality of the writing about science in Tech Central Station. (Examples: Statistics, Fumento, epidemiology
physics, economics, more statistics, and more epidemiology. )
Well, they've destroyed any remaining credibility they might have had with an article arguing for Intelligent Design Creationism. And it's a twofer because it was written by global warming skeptic Roy Spencer of Spencer and Christy fame.
Spencer starts with
Twenty years ago, as a PhD scientist, I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design…
tlambert | June 30, 2005For years now global warming skeptics have been using satellite measurements to argue that global warming isn't happening, For example (from 1998):
Surface-based temperature records are too few in number and too unevenly spaced to generate accurate global temperature maps. Only 30 percent of the world's surface is land, so land-based temperature stations measure less than one-third of the Earth's climate. Urban stations, which are influenced by city heat anomalies, are over-represented; deserts, mountains, and forests are under-represented.
The global temperature record produced from…