“The End is Near for Faith in AGW“ (June 25th, 2011). Anthony Watts posts a prediction by ordinary citizen Russell Cook (“semi-retired graphic artist” and right-wing blogger for the climaterealist denialists). It’s over! The warmists have lost! Or are just about to lose. I love these over-the-shoulder declarations of victory from people as they flee the debate.
Apparently his “seventeen+ months of research” allows him to declare that Al Gore’s 2007 documentary film, the last word in climate science, is based on a lie. Perhaps even more than one! Also “the media” are all mean to denialists because they don’t give equal time (except Fox News, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Times, The Telegraph, National Post, The Australian, etc.).
Here’s the vile canard that started off all the skeptic-bullying:
Skeptic scientists are accused of being in a fossil fuel-funded conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact“…
Here’s the big problem I found: That accusation is based on a 1991 memo no one was allowed to see, using an out-of-context sentence, promoted by a person who was not a Pulitzer winner despite accolades to the contrary, who was credited with finding the memo by Al Gore, but Gore had the memo collection in his own possession four years earlier.
Actually, I thought that “skeptic scientists” were being accused of misrepresenting physical science and climate evidence. My bad I guess. So an unseen 1991 memo, declared to be taken out-of-context, is the real smoking gun behind all this cruelty and dispute? Oh, the irony! Oh, the blinding faith!
I will agree that it would be great to see (the eternally constipated?) Richard Lindzen, a Republican “science” witness on any number of topics since 1991, scowling in front of a House Committee again. He didn’t do too well last time, except in the imagination of self-convinced denialists.
Anthony optimistically declares victory too while strangely turning away from the science:
“When the public learns about huge faults in the skeptic scientist accusation, combined with the faults in the IPCC, the result may send AGW into total collapse.”
You’re dancing on the head of a pin, Anthony.
Wott's Up With That? 
Which begs the question: how many pinheads can dance on the head of a pin? – Regards, Tom Gray, Wind Energy Communications Consultant
[Apparently, enough to justify an “International Conference”! – Ben]
Similar predictions were (and still are made) about the immanent death of evolution, a theory in crisis since 1859. It’s deja vu all over again.
[And always with such assurance too. – Ben]
To borrow a line from CBS News’ Bob Schieffer, “Is that the best you can do?” [You think you deserve more?]
The accusation is that skeptic scientists were paid under the table, as anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan is famous for saying, by fossil fuel industries to misrepresent the science. [Yep. Ever been to Source Watch?]
You aren’t the least bit concerned that Al Gore’s latest Rolling Stone article seems to be purposely avoiding the person most famous for promoting that phrase? Look on page 263 of your “An Inconvenient Truth” book and tell me what you see there. And you show no concern whatsoever that this famous bit of ‘smoking gun’ evidence is literally never seen in any accusers’ books, magazine articles, PPT presentations, or web sites that rely on it as proof for their accusation that skeptic scientists are untrustworthy? [Why are you obsessed with Al Gore?]
And you actually have some kind of proof that I’m a right-wing blogger? Do you actually have proof of my personal politics to make that statement? [Hmmm… American “Thinker”, Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, Watts Up, the Goreophobia. There’s a pattern, isn’t there?]
Myself, I am amazed the entire environmentalist community isn’t furious with its leaders for placing everyone in such a vulnerable spot for criticism, when they rely on such a backwards half-tactic. Try using such guilt-by-association as your foremost defense in an actual court of law and you’d be wiped out. You have to demand Gore and other leaders to stand behind their accusation with evidence that should be plastered on billboards across the country for all to see. But first you have to explain how the skeptics’ fabricated climate assessments are clearly unsupported by science facts. [In your “seventeen+ months of research” you never encountered the see the last ten years of public climate debate? Or did you look straight past it.]
For the love of the planet, demand Gore to wipe out his critics with very public debates using everything he’s got, otherwise it will look like he has no way to defend either the underlying science or his accusation which is what basically everyone relies on when they ‘ignore the skeptics’.
Why don’t you understand how important this is? Why do you not demand to see the 1991 memo in order to say with confidence that it is in context? And why undermine your own position by saying I’m a right-winger when you literally cannot prove that? [So… if the memo doesn’t exist, then neither does global warming? You’re just trying to whip up another baseless faux controversy. This will be a useful litmus test though, it will help identify the weak-minded. As for your right-wingedness, perhaps you should read some of the things you write. You’re like a cat burping up canary feathers.]
Sorry for being away for a while, gents, been busy with other things. Thought I’d “troll” on in here again to see wotts happening. Ironic if you think about it, but some people might term what you are doing right here as a roundabout “troll” of my guest post at WUWT. They might wonder why you hide over here, rather than post your opinions at the comment section of my guest post.
[I don’t comment there because Anthony and his Team interfere with their critic’s remarks. Also it’s a firestorm of paranoia and stupidity. – Ben]
But I digress. To answer Ben’s bracketed comments above:
[You think you deserve more?]
When you completely dance around what I say and utterly fail to refute a single bit of it, while steering the discussion into an unrelated tangents, we have to wonder if that’s the best you can do. Playing shell-games here doesn’t exactly bolster your side of the issue. I’d think it’s your entire reading audience deserves more and you undermine any credibility you have by delivering less.
[You’re a footnote that thinks its the cover. Next. – Ben]
[Yep. Ever been to Source Watch?]
I sure have, and already dealt with SourceWatch’s Sheldon Rampton in two of my articles, something you’d know if you had bothered to read them. Of course, you can try again with Oreskes/Conway, Hoggan/Littlemore, Mooney, Romm, Jeff Goodell, Sharon Begley, exxonsecrets.org…. but try putting a little elbow grease into figuring out who their source for the fossil fuel funding accusation is, though.
[Why are you obsessed with Al Gore?]
You have no answer why Gore contradicts himself in my paragraph, do you? This prompts another question: why do you all try so hard to steer attention away from Gore?
[Because denialist obsession with Al Gore is a deliberate, intellectually bankrupt, distraction. Do you really think pinning down Al Gore over a trivial misstatement means something? – Ben]
[Hmmm… American “Thinker”, Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, Watts Up, the Goreophobia. There’s a pattern, isn’t there?]
So if I get articles in at Grist, HuffPo, ClimateProgress AND DailyKos, that would tip me into being somewhat left-leaning in your book? Fail to prove what my position is on gun control, abortion, immigration policy, or show who I vote for or which campaigns I contribute to, and your readers are left wondering “is that the best Ben can do?”
[In your “seventeen+ months of research” you never encountered the see the last ten years of public climate debate? Or did you look straight past it.]
Kinda goofy wording there, but I still understand your gripe, and ironically I’m not the one who has looked straight past one entire side of it. I’ve seen both two sides of the climate debate, and in case you haven’t noticed, one side contradicts the other on very complicated science details. I have no expertise to tell which side is right, so I expect the media to professionally analyze this….. except as I’ve pointed out in several of my writings, the mainstream media seems bent on marginalizing skeptics, and one particular news outlet can’t explain why.
[So… if the memo doesn’t exist, then neither does global warming? You’re just trying to whip up another baseless faux controversy. This will be a useful litmus test though, it will help identify the weak-minded. As for your right-wingedness, perhaps you should read some of the things you write. You’re like a cat burping up canary feathers.]
I L*O*V*E this response best of all, it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that guys like you superficially skim through my articles with your own pre-set conclusions. By making exactly that kind of remark, you walk directly into your own credibility shredder, you create your own noose to hang yourself with.
…… I never said the memo doesn’t exist …….
Call it “another baseless faux controversy” if it makes you feel better, but if you want maintain a healthy level of confident about that, I’d suggest you try refuting the specific details I point out in my writings. Indeed, this will help identify the weak-minded, namely those who take your word about what I say versus those who check it out for themselves. As for my alleged right-wingedness, you could certainly bolster your own case if you actually read my writings and could specifically point out what proves your assertion.
[We know that you really, really, want us to carefully read everything you write but there’s not even a hint that the result will be worth the effort. – Ben]
Russell’s spin cycle mathturbations are truly mind bending !
(face palm)
“The End is Near for Faith in AGW”
*Here Anthony Watts acknowledges the fact that AGW has nothing to do with faith, but is true and tried science that should be the guideline for future, as physics and engineering both point to the fact that once a system that tries to reach an equilibrium according to QM (approximated by Newtonian mechanics) is disturbed enough it will change towards a new equilibrium state with potentially catastrophic and chaotic alterations in the system, which will present problems for the subsystems functioning within this system, in the AGW case this could be the human cultural system, though Watts doesn’t mention it in the lead. It’s a very concise beginning and I’ll have to ponder this somewhat more before proceeding.
Somehow I think that is the last that will be seen of Russell Cook in the world of facts, back to the ‘multiverse’ for him.
He presents a shiny coated spawn of concern trolling.. “For the love of the planet” now that is hilarious.
“Somehow I think that is the last that will be seen of Russell Cook in the world of facts….”
Glad to provide a laugh for you. But for the love of the planet, you seem to see no urgency in debunking any of the facts I provide. Does that mean you can’t?
No need to trust me on this, look among any of the sites you rely on for narratives about the skeptic scientists’ corruption: RealClimate, David Suzuki, The New Yorker’s big article about the Kochs last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists, George Monbiot, SourceWatch, DeSmogBlog, Hoggan & Littlemore, Naomi Oreskes, Chris Mooney, Mark Hertsgaard, on and on and on — they all point to Ross Gelbspan as the source of that memo I refer to……. and not one of them shows it in its full context when they quote it, including Gelbspan. If I was Gelbspan, I’d use my mega-book profits to plaster the complete memo on billboards across the country.
This is a tip handed to you on a silver platter. The public isn’t being confused by skeptic scientists, more and more of them now are becoming aware of those guys’ peer-reviewed science journal-published assessments contradicting the IPCC’s. When nobody can put anything on them beyond some vague guilt-by-association charge that could never hold up in a court of law, it then becomes obvious why this global warming crisis begins to look like it may fall apart.
[“For the love of the planet?” Sheesh. Methinks thou dost protest too much. Thanks for the tip, it’s worth what we paid for it. – Ben]
Obsession with Al Gore shows the quality of his work. Easy indicator.
And Watts thinks reality adheres to voting. Postmodern stance. Enjoy Science wars. And call it what it is: war.
[That whole attack on “Post-Normal Science” over the last year was such a battle with their own reflection. – Ben]
I couldn’t get what the author was on about and from the comments, no-one else knew what Russell Cook was rabbiting on about either.
Did anyone here understand his article? Something about a memo someone mislaid in 1991 proves global warming isn’t happening?
No mention of the thousands of scientific papers on the subject, the rise in global temperatures, the acidification of the oceans or the rapidly increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. Nor the droughts and heat waves in the USA or the melting ice in the arctic. Nor all the floods and fires and droughts all over the world this decade and the fact that there are many more heat extremes than cold extremes. Nor the warmer nights and longer summers.
Let alone mention of rising sea levels, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the undermining of Pine Island glacier.
Very strange.
[And yet Anthony was (desperately?) sure that Russell had the final proof. – Ben]
“….Something about a memo someone mislaid in 1991 proves global warming isn’t happening?…”
Helps if you don’t merely skim through the article, but instead read it carefully and follow the links. The memo’s most ‘damaging’ phrase is prominently mentioned in Al Gore’s movie, yet none of you can read it in its full context in any accuser’s book, web site, magazine article in order to prove this central bit of evidence isn’t taken out of context.
I’m fully aware of the IPCC side, and I’ve seen the skeptic side, and if you haven’t figured it out yet, the only thing I ask is how the contradictions are to be resolved. The AGW believers’ side does not seek to explain the contradictions, it only seeks to portray skeptic scientists as corrupt and untrustworthy based on a single bit of evidence no one is allowed to see.
And you have no problem with this situation ultimately having the potential to undermine all that you believe in? You have no problem with Al Gore seeming to undercut Ross Gelbspan in that big Rolling Stone article? Gelbspan has been the hero of the whole movement, Greenpeace director Phil Radford says has been the lone voice on this issue – but Gore now suddenly credits an NY Times article writer, and Gore himself had the so-called smoking gun memos in his Senate office around the same time in 1991? Nobody wonders why the Sierra Club does not mention a thing about leaking the memo collection to the NY Times??? What’s up with that?
If those guys can’t keep their accusation narratives straight, and something weird is happening in the way Gore is handling this, I’d think you guys would be more worried about how the public is being confused by the AGW promoters, not skeptic scientists and demand that this situation get straightened out before it gets out of hand.
[Would it surprise you to be told that we don’t “believe in Al Gore”? Or that a single memo can’t “undermine” the physical evidence? – Ben]
AIT has already been to the UK High Court and found to be based on sound science.
The Lorry Driver who tried to get AIT banned from British Schools lost.
Global Warming and the Green House Gas contribution have also been to the Supreme Court of the USA, which had no trouble concluding that the EPA is required by law to get involved.
The recent court case involved reconfirming the USA EPA as the appropriate body to regulate USA Greenhouse Gas emissions. Deniers have tried to spin that into claims that the EPA has a legal way to ignore GHG emissions.
[But there were nits! They were picked! This means the hoax is about to collapse! – Ben]
Had my laugh at Watts today, here: Cleaner Air May Result in Increased Solar Insolation and Therefore Warming.
Interesting. Anthony Watts never read the Fourth Assessment Report by IPCC in which this topic is covered extensively. That stagnation or slight cooling in the 70’s is entirely due to aerosols, both volcanic and industrial. IPCC explicitly attributes up to 20% of total warming since 1975 to cleaner air.
Made the same comment at WUWT, but The Cardinal of AGW (I was so christened by Sir Watts couple of years ago) might not have free speech at Enlightened WUWT.
[Anthony’s allusion to global cooling fears in the Seventies is equally ill-researched. – Ben]
An Inconvenient Truth was not on the shelf in my local library. As inconspicuously as possible, I wrote down the page 263 quote at the local Barnes & Noble bookstore.
Which explains why Russell Cook didn’t do the obvious, and provide the actual AIT quote himself. The actual quote contradicts his assertions.
@ WUWT…………………….”…it becomes abundantly obvious that Lindzen’s level of expertise is not something that would be paid for and pre-scripted in an Exxon conference room.”
With real skepticism it is even more obvious that Lindzen:
And that more generally (and trivially, if Russell Cook weren’t complaining about the quoting process) this is an act by a group that includes Exxon Mobil, not by Exxon Mobil itself.
Also, it is abundantly obvious that the AIT quote wouldn’t apply to any other elsewhere-employed skeptical scientist.
Be serious. I bet most of those many people who saw the movie, like me, never read the book.
For starters, AIT was copyrighted in 2006, so the science was vintage 2004-2005. As I scanned it on that hard bookstore bench, I thought it still stood up as a very good introduction to climate change. But personally there are more recent popular books that I wouldn’t read because they’re too old in this fast moving field.
Most obviously, however, It should be noted that skeptic scientists earn their reputation based on their personal body of work.
To suggest that they’re comunally tainted with an orginal sin from an Al Gore citation is, like one of Garrison Keillor’s Norwegian dinners, ludicrous.
“Which explains why Russell Cook didn’t do the obvious, and provide the actual AIT quote himself. The actual quote contradicts his assertions.”
How? Gore said Gelbspan discovered the memos on that same page, something you inconveniently leave out. His June 22 Rolling Stone article points to an earlier reporter having the memos. What’s up with that? Worse, I prove using Gore’s own words out of his Earth in the Balance book that he had the memo collection in his Senate office around the same time frame as when the NY Times reporter first mentioned them. I assert these guys can’t keep their narratives straight, in case you missed it. [So depending on who found the memos, and on what they contained, our climate will be cooler or hotter? – Ben]
Ross Gelbspan ties Lindzen in with the memo via the coal industry PR campaign’s infamous video, on page 36 of his 1997 The Heat is On book. Or did you not know that? However, my point applies not only to Lindzen, but also to any skeptic scientists who might appear in debate with scientists on the AGW side – Idso, Balling, Spencer, Soon, or any others accused of industry-directed corruption. You see how the public would not believe those scientists’ assessments were scripted by industry executives in ‘a group that includes Exxon Mobil’ now? [So now if there’s even a comma’s difference between their statements they’re all independent thinkers, huh? – Ben]
“…Be serious….” Are attempts at hair-splitting and missing sections of quotes the best you can do? Whether you read Gore’s movie companion book or not is irrelevant, his contradiction exists nonetheless, and all others making the accusation ultimately rely on Gebspan as the source.
Astute readers will see that all of my writings are about why skeptic scientists’ assessments should not be compared side-by-side with AGW scientists. If they aren’t corrupt, what is the fallback position for saying we should still ignore them? [Because they’ve been yabbering away with the same bogus claims for years? – Ben]
*Here Anthony Watts uses the word ‘may’ indicating there is uncertainty in the sentence or in the two kinds of faults he has observed. 1) in the sceptic scientist accusation (huge) 2) in the IPCC (plural). He also makes a prediction to the future (this is may be where the uncertainty lies) in which he connects public learning of the aforementioned faults to an unspecified result, with an eventual total collapse of AGW. How ever he does not specify what he means by AGW, so one cannot be certain of the meaning of the sentence.
To further analyse this sentence one would have to know what is meant by ‘skeptic scientist accusation’ (since science is by nature skeptical, this sounds like an oxymoron and redundant but one cannot be sure.) and the IPCC (this is probably the Intertropical Pantheistic Christian Communion, a religious sect well known for their faults in organizing at all, since Pantheism and Christianity don’t go together)
I should probably stop here.
[Trying to unravel Anthony’s logic is like being caught in a Chinese finger trap. Trying just makes it worse! – Ben]
Again, it helps to read my article carefully, not skim lightly through it. The “skeptic scientist accusation” is what I consistently refer to in all of my writings as the idea that their climate assessments are fabricated under a top-down directive by fossil fuel industry executives.
For those of you in Rio Linda, it means that the public will not believe human activity causes global warming if they learn about problems the IPCC can’t explain, and if Gore’s big accusation that skeptic scientists are corrupt can’t be proven.
If you take the time to read my other articles, you’ll soon see the barrier preventing the public from learning about these problems is the mainstream media. Place all your trust in the MSM to not say a word about skeptic scientists if you must, but you know how fickle they are, and if they smell blood in the water about Gore or the IPCC, you might guess what happens next….
[Can you honestly say, with a straight face, that the “MSM” will “not say a word about skeptic scientists”? I suggest you crack open the Wall Street Journal or The Times, or tune in to Fox News. Your premise is blatantly, transparently, stupidly, false. As for the IPCC’s reports, please give me a count of their false statements as a ratio to their correct statements. What’s your threshold for IPCC failure – 0.001%? – Ben]
I see Willis E wants us to believe that Ramsdorf et al published a paper with a sea level model already 3Omm out at the time of publication! Sheesh! Don’t these guys know you have to fudge the models to fit the data?
He also “aligned the Colorado observational results so that their trend line is zero in 1990, in order that they can be compared directly with the V&R2009 results.”
So I asked him “Why not just zero everything in 1992, the first year both datasets have in common? An easy process as the model numbers are in whole cm. The observations are available from 1992, with a trend of c3.1mm / year. So an offset of 6-7mm might be expected, the graph here looks to have been shifted more like 10mm. Please explain.”
I await an answer ….
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I have been reading “skeptics” proclaiming the “collapse” of AGW at least 5 years, maybe longer.
It reminds that Creationists have been proclaiming the imminent “collapse” of Darwinism for a lot longer.
So it’s “Ignore all that data, it is all about 1992 memo”? The mind boggles.
[Anthony will, of course, earnestly report the increasingly wild declarations of imminent “collapse”. – Ben]
“So it’s ‘Ignore all that data, it is all about 1992 memo’? The mind boggles.”
Notice how I never said that? It is the AGW believers’ side that says ‘ignore the skeptic scientists’ data and assessments because they are all corrupted by fossil fuel industry corruption. Problem is, the source for this accusation is a single unsupportable source.
My mind boggles on how that is the only fallback defense position AGW believers ever had. If that accusation falls apart, the public will demand to know why they should not listen to skeptics’ viewpoints.
If this all exposes myriad faults in IPCC assessments and the lack of any actual ‘scientific consensus’, then the whole thing could unravel. If I’m dead wrong and skeptic scientists will be exposed as pushing industry-fabricated drivel, then you should not be shunning such public debate, you’d be demanding it in order to put the situation permanently six feet under. And you’d be asking why your leaders seem to be critically undermining their case with inconsistent narratives about the accusation.
[Hard to have a factual debate when the skeptics never accept facts. It’s all conspiracies, fake physics and communism. This issue did start as a debate, which fell apart under skeptic dishonesty and accusations. At this point “debate” simply hands clowns like Monckton a bigger megaphone. – Ben]
Only fallback defense position? Interesting choice of words with interesting implications. Oh… and “believers.” Another interesting choice of words. So Willie Soon didn’t receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel groups? Fred Singer and other contrarian scientists didn’t do work for fossil-fuel funded think tanks? I would recommend reading Merchants of Doubt as well.
Of course..contrarian scientists don’t have to be corrupt to be wrong (see Merchants also). I think the reason those who, rather than being “believers”, accept the massive, overwhelming amount of evidence behind man-made global warming, say to “ignore the skeptic scientists” is because those scientists have been debunked and proven wrong over and over and over and over and over.
It’s also funny you would write about an “AGW blogger” deleting comments when numerous posters can recall their own experiences trying to bring facts to the crowd at WattsUpWithThat.
My thanks to go out to Ben for allowing my additional rebuttal comments above.
If you haven’t seen it, advice from another AGW blogger is that when anyone receives such comments from a person like myself asking tough questions, you’re supposed to delete them – do a screen search for the words “just delete their blaterhing” here: Why is Anthropogenic Global Warming Denialism Important?.
Funny thing about the internet, what has been seen there cannot be unseen. Delete mindless flame posts, folks will understand. Delete straight up questions, and it looks like mighty suspicious.
[Tough questions are good. Sweeping statements and refusal to understand the answers, not so much. You’re effectively the topic here so you get some latitude, but the points you are trying to make are irrelevant ‘he said, she said’. At the core you’re trying to use a possibly overstated characterization of “skeptic scientist” motivations to overturn the scientific conclusions of climate science. That is no argument at all. – Ben]
1. Greg Laden is not an “AGW blogger”, unless you consider everyone who has a blog and who accepts the position of the vast majority of climate scientists as an “AGW blogger”
2. He specifically refers to deleting “blathering” as one example you could do as a blogger. He does not refer to “tough questions”.
Of course, as we all know quite well, quite a few of the “tough questions” are just boring repetitions of long debunked claims, and/or contain language that makes it clear the commenter has already made up his mind and cannot be reasoned with (the questions are then often also not “tough”, but loaded, or nonsense).
I wonder how many Watts articles have proclaimed the death of AGW or the final nail in the coffin? It might be fun to do a search for “death” or “nail”.
[I wonder if a JavaScript could do it… – Ben]