Like a Dad trying to complete a cross-country family trip, I’ve ignored the squabbling pre-teens in the backseat for as long as possible. (That would be the repetitive deceptions of Anthony Watts and his co-bloggers.) It’s been quietly entertaining to glance in the rearview mirror and observe the juvenile shenanigans, but now it’s time to restore order.
The Heartland Institute’s grandiose public relations exercise back in May (I can barely say “4th International Conference on Climate Change” without snorting) is now just an amusing memory exposed so well by other observers. The embarrassed scramble for obscure new arctic sea ice metrics to replace the “unhelpful” conventional ones is continuing. Dr. Spencer is still submitting blog articles that contain boneheaded numerical errors. Steven Goddard is still pawing through data looking for ever-tinier oddities that he can try to pass off as thunderous disproof. Anthony himself is still declaring that his blog is the ultimate source of truth, that his page loads are proof that there is no climate change, and he’s still scouring the web for newspaper articles to get indignant about.
And now and then the denialists realise that it’s time to cut their losses on an unsupportable argument that their dumber followers are looking foolish parroting. Just last week Willis Eschenbach tried to convince denialists to stop disputing the CO2 measurements from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer…
Nice to know that things don’t change that much. Tomorrow I’ll be back on the case…
Update: I forgot to mention the delicious reaction of the Heartland Institute conference attendees when their knight in shining armor, Steve McIntyre, failed to fall in line with the baseless and out-of-jurisdiction legal assault by Virginia’s dumb/partisan ideologue/McCarthyist (take your pick) Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on former UVA climate scientist Michael Mann. Golf clap.
Wott's Up With That? 
Welcome back!
Ben:
Nice to have you back. I’ve missed your commentary.
Welcome back. You run an invaluable service.
A bit of unsolicited advice: if time becomes a hassle (as it does for all of us), don’t feel the need to reply to every WUWT posting. I’d rather see quality than quantity, with the knowledge that you’re doing your best in the time available to focus on the most serious of Anthony’s anti-science lies.
[Thanks for the kind words. Your advice is an option I’ve been pondering but I still favor a short response to every dumb thing Anthony says… – Ben]
It’s amusing, in the link you give, to see Willis Eschenbach getting a paranoid nitpicky kicking from the denizens of WUWT. He even accuses some of the commenters of clutching at straws – how funny is that?
[Even as the denialists are desperately declaring intellectual victory they are turning on each other. It reminds me in so many ways of the ‘revolutionaries’ in the film Monty Python’s Life of Brian. – Ben]
Mosher gets heat too.
search for “Wrong. I’ve told you this before.”
I’m guessing Heartland wasn’t the morale boosting event it was hoped to be, especially given events in the Gulf of Mexico (thinking of corporate sponsors). It’ll be interesting to see if there is any mellowing in the denialsphere over the coming year. It’s all getting very grownup, especially with Cuccinelli doing what he does with relish.
By the way, there was another BP spill in Alaska, in case you weren’t aware.
http://www.gregpalast.com/smart-pig-bps-other-spill-this-week/
(Palast is a highly respected reporter who has uncovered some very high profile scandals)