“Pachauri’s TERI institute golf course – water hog in a city desperate for fresh water“. Anthony Watts reports that there’s a golf course on the grounds of the TERI Institute in India. Clearly IPCC Chairman Rajenda Pachauri is personally corrupt and must be fired or resign in humiliation. Thus ending global warming for ever.
“Must see: John Coleman’s Global Warming Special #2 – now online at YouTube“. Ah YouTube, the place where science happens, and local cable programming can go global. Same old same old from Anthony Watts’ friend John Coleman, although even Anthony distances himself a little bit by saying I should note that I don’t agree with the broad statement made in the video that “CO2 has no effect”. It does, but the magnitude of the direct effect and the feedback effects is disputed. Even Anthony steps back from that whopper! Global Warming: The Other Side is in fact the same side of disproved denialist bunk as the first “special.”
The part I like best is where Anthony again claims that the dog ate his homework on the usefulness of surface weather station records. He says that the “end part where I refute NCDC didn’t make the final cut, perhaps the producer thought it too technical due to the graph of TOBS, FILNET, and RAW data that I used to show that NCDC’s claims about a cooling trend in poorly sited station doesn’t hold up.” Anthony’s surfacestations.org project has been thoroughly spanked as useless; he keeps promising proof that his belief is correct but never delivers.
“Quote of the week #29“. Anthony Watts draws attention to perceived disrespect in a quote from Dr. Gavin Schmidt that points out that Steven McIntyre could have made a real contribution to climate research instead of spending five years whining about being ill-treated. This is a signal to Anthony’s followers to drown out any rational comments with a flood of denialist noise.
The article in question, Climategate’s guerrilla warriors: pesky foes or careful watchdogs, from Steven McIntyre’s hometown paper The Globe & Mail and brought to Anthony Watts’ attention by the thin-skinned one himself is actually a fairly insightful. Here’s a telling quote from it that I like better than Anthony’s (emphasis mine):
The key objection to the work of bloggers such as Mr. McIntyre is that they are engaged in an epic game of nitpicking: zeroing in on minor technical issues while ignoring the massive and converging lines of evidence that are coming in from many disciplines. To read their online work is to enter a dank, claustrophobic universe where obsessive personalities talk endlessly about small building blocks – Yamal Peninsula trees, bristlecones, weather stations – the removal of which will somehow topple the entire edifice of climate science. Lost in the blogging world is any sense of proportion, or the idea that science is built on cumulative work in many fields, the scientists say.
Amen.
“Setting the Record Straight on the IPCC WG II Fourth Assessment Report“. Right-wing partisan economist Indur M. Goklany is annoyed with Professor Martin Parry’s interview in Nature for failing to talk about what Indur M. Goklany wants him to talk about.
Goklany has yet to meet a nit that he can resist picking. The gist of his complaint seems to be the misdirection of we must solve every other human problem before we do anything about climate change.
“Spencer: developing a new satellite based surface temperature set“. A denialist scientist links to “scientific criticism” on Anthony Watts’ blog and charts from right-wing political activists. I guess it’s easier than formulating a factual criticism.
Dr. Spencer thinks that fewer surface station temperatures are used for climate analysis now, and that they’ve been chosen to magnify global warming (which isn’t happening anyway). Dr. Spencer assures us that his satellite corrections (which, annoyingly, almost perfectly match the positive trend of the nasty surface stations) will be better, even though he’s still developing his “product.” He also mutters about that classic denialist misdirection, Urban Heat Islands.
"Bad" surface stations and "good" satellites: annoyingly identical trends.
Spencer says that although he’s still refining his product, “December 2009 was, indeed, a cool month in my analysis.” Nothing like stating your conclusions before doing the work!
Dr. Spencer is the guy who regularly fails basic mathematical and statistical standards in his published papers. Here are a couple links for those interested: Hide the Increase and Spencer’s Folly. He’s also the author of the book Climate Confusion, which perfectly describes his activities…
“JPL: Missing ice in 2007 drained out the Nares strait – pushed south by wind where it melted far away from the Arctic“. Anthony presents a JPL news release that concludes that Arctic Ocean ice loss in 2007 was partly because ice arches in Nares Strait failed to form. This allowed more ice than usual to flow out of the Arctic Ocean and melt in the North Atlantic.
Anthony’s implicit conclusion is see, this means there is no global warming! An inquiring mind might go a step further and ponder why the ice arches failed to form. Too bad he didn’t draw his reader’s attention to these paragraphs a bit further down the report:
“We don’t completely understand the conditions conducive to the formation of these arches,” Kwok said. “We do know that they are temperature-dependent because they only form in winter. So there’s concern that if climate warms, the arches could stop forming.”
and
“If indeed these arches are less likely to form in the future, we have to account for the annual ice loss through this narrow passage. Potentially, this could lead to an even more rapid decline in the summer ice extent of the Arctic Ocean”
I guess Anthony’s readers aren’t expected to look past his bullet points.
Lindzen on climate science advocacy and modeling – “at this point, the models seem to be failing”. Ah, science by letter-to-the-editor. Climate change is “natural”, who knows if this latest bit means anything? The head of the Climatic Research Unit is “deservedly maligned”. Climate scientists lack “courage” because they’re brainwashed by “a generation of environmental propaganda” and are simply chasing grant money. Just the facts, eh Dr. Lindzen?
The best bit of his letter is this classic tidbit of double-standard denialist-speak: Lindzen says that not being able to offer something better than current models is OK because the models aren’t perfect anyway. He brazenly calls this “the normal scientific approach.” Um, Dr. L; the “normal scientific approach” is to formulate a theory that better describes the evidence. Until then you’ve got bupkis. In twenty years of blather no denialist has met this basic and obvious threshold.
Dr. Richard Lindzen was actually lead author of Chapter 7, ‘Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,’ of the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report. This chapter was the bit that doesn’t say anything about whether climate change is happening or what is causing it… He’s also a regular on the right-wing foundation grouch-for-hire lecture circuit.
“North America snow models miss the mark“. Steven Goddard is like a moth to a flame when it comes to claiming that short-term weather factors are proof of climate trends. This post is yet another spin on the theme of there’s still snow, so how can there be global warming? Steven gets more truculent every time he gets shot down on this. There’s also a replay of the old argument that some of the “climate models” didn’t exactly predict today’s weather, so all climate models are wrong!
Surely even Anthony Watts is embarrassed by these posts? No, he’s standing by him. Perhaps he feels that Steven’s nonsense is usefully occupying the minds of suggestible denialists.
“Caveats Regarding Dr. Phil Jones’ Phenological Arguments for Global Warming“. Right-wing economist Indur M. Goklany tries to show that he knows more about climatology than an actual climatologist does. By saying “maybe this, maybe that“, “I wonder if this could be it?” and “did anyone think it could be this other thing instead?” Thus ending global warming forever.
“Former KNMI director and skeptic Henk Tennekes gets vindication from Netherlands De Telegraaf“. A newspaper article proves that disgruntled Dutch denialist Henk Tennekes was right! Thus ending global warming once and for all. We covered non-climatologist Henk Tennekes a week ago.
Wott's Up With That? 