NASA’s Josh Willis Destroys Whatever Credibility He Had Left

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
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By Paul Homewood

Dave Burton has written a very good retort to a rather ridiculous new video by NASA’s Josh Willis:

Notice that “catastrophic” is apparently not scary enough, these days. Global warming is now “the Apocalypse.”

The video starts out with two guys crawling along the parched ground under the blazing desert sun. One of them says to the other, “We’re gonna die out here, man. If only society had done more to fight climate change.” And it goes downhill from there.

There’s really nothing new in his video, nor in this article debunking it. So if you’re a “regular” at WUWT, and you’re hoping to learn something new, you needn’t bother reading the rest.

I counted eight claims in Josh Willis’s video. Let’s look at them, one by one:

Claim #1. “Record high global temperatures may have exacerbated our current situation.”

Wrong. “Global warming” mostly just warms higher latitudes. It makes harsh, cold climates milder. The warming effect at low latitudes is slight, and mostly increases nighttime lows, not daytime highs.

If those fellows are dying in the hot desert, they obviously are not at higher latitudes. Where they are, global warming is slight.
In fact, higher CO2 levels make plants more drought-resistant. So, thanks to anthropogenic CO2, deserts and near-deserts are shrinking and greening, most strikingly in the Sahel & Sahara. Even the severely politicized National Geographic admits that it is happening, though they don’t mention CO2:

The full essay is worth reading here.

But Josh Willis has form, which Greg commented over at WUWT:

What Greg is referring to is the ARGO data.

NASA take up the story:

CORRECTING OCEAN COOLING

On a Thursday evening in February 2007, Josh Willis stood in front of his laptop, his wife cajoling him to get ready to go out to dinner. He looked with a sinking feeling at the map he had just made. Willis, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, specializes in making estimates of how much heat the ocean stores from year to year.

Josh Willis is an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who specializes in sea level trends and the response of the oceans to global warming. (Photograph courtesy Josh Willis.)

“The oceans are absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat from global warming,” he says. “If you aren’t measuring heat content in the upper ocean, you aren’t measuring global warming.”

In 2004, Willis published a time series of ocean heat content showing that the temperature of the upper layers of ocean increased between 1993-2003. In 2006, he co-piloted a follow-up study led by John Lyman at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle that updated the time series for 2003-2005. Surprisingly, the ocean seemed to have cooled.

Not surprisingly, says Willis wryly, that paper got a lot of attention, not all of it the kind a scientist would appreciate. In speaking to reporters and the public, Willis described the results as a “speed bump” on the way to global warming, evidence that even as the climate warmed due to greenhouse gases, it would still have variation. The message didn’t get through to everyone, though. On blogs and radio talk shows, global warming deniers cited the results as proof that global warming wasn’t real and that climate scientists didn’t know what they were doing.

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What follows is a quite shameless account of how the ARGO data was tampered with.

Greg is spot on with his criticism.