Monthly Archives: November 2011

An Open Letter to Dr. Phil Jones of the UEA CRU

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“An Open Letter to Dr. Phil Jones of the UEA CRU” (2011-11-27). Just like Anthony Watts, the first thing darling Willis Eschenbach did with the “new” batch of (years-old) Climategate e-mails was search for his own name. And he found it! Hardly surprising, after-all he was one of people who “mail bombed” the Climate Research Unit with “freedom of information” requests.

Again just like Anthony’s response, this “new” batch of old messages is merely an opportunity to serve up warmed-over self-righteous fury. Did you know that Dr. Phil Jones didn’t instantly respond to Willis’ meandering nit-picking accusatory e-mails? Indentured servants, err… university professors, must jump to attention when a taxpayer speaks! Did you also know that Dr. Jones failed to respond in the way Willis instructed him to? Such petty defiance!

Also, Dr. Jones no longer has his high school term papers available for public dissection. He’s hiding something!

As noted in comments here, Willis’ open letter to “Dear Dr. Jones” about his “polite, scientific request” uses the word ‘lie’ at least twenty times and the word ‘liar’ at least twice.

The intention of the “mail bombs” was to obstruct the scientist’s activities and to sift through their responses for anything that could be twisted to the denialist’s purpose. That game continues.

P.S. All the highlighting of disputes and arguments between the real climate scientists “revealed” in the latest batch of old stolen e-mails kind of undermines the whole conspiracy thing. Bit of a mixed message, Willis.

Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!

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“Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!” (2011-11-22). Remember Climategate? The stolen climate scientist e-mails that denialists tried to cherry-pick and twist into… something? Happened just before the Copenhagen climate conference. Anthony Watts and his team remember and they’re still sullenly licking their wounds over that misfire (but putting on such a brave face…).

Now we have new stolen e-mails with “new revelations!” Coincidentally, just before the Durban climate conference.

Oh. It’s just a second batch of even tamer messages from the first theft. Still, plenty of opportunities to make a fuss, tut and titter, and infer darkly. That’ll do, right Anthony? Especially since the first thing Anthony seems to have done is search for his own name. (Could vanity be the motivation behind everything Anthony’s done?)

Here are a few links on Climategate 2.0, I doubt I’ll cover what will undoubtably be a flood of outraged irrelevant posts on Anthony’s blog:

Look for Fox News, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and similar news organizations to credulously report the new “revelations.”

Don’t mock the Monck

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“Don’t mock the Monck” (2011-11-20). Anthony Watts “don’t have a dog in this fight” but wants us to think that at least one of the comical Lord Monckton’s denialist claims are true. Apparently unable to out-argue Monckton’s denialism his opponents can only make up slanderous personal criticisms.

So… Anthony Watt’s continuous coverage of Monckton’s scientific activities (hereafter referred to as “antics”) and Monckton’s frequent appearance as a WUWT guest writer are to be taken as indifference to Monckton’s credentials? Pull the other one, Anthony.

Who would have thought that the blowhard Monckton would respond to scrutiny of the single credential he can even vaguely lay claim to by running off at the mouth even more? The real House of Lords has repeatedly told Monckton to stop using an invented portcullis crest that looks almost the same as the House of Lords’ and to stop representing himself as one of their Members. The indignant Monckton responds with “soi-disant”! “criminous”! “misfeasance!” “defalcating”! And trots out the paid opinion of lawyer Hugh O’Donoghue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Since Anthony stands in rapt admiration of Monckton’s sparkling verbiage, here’s a word for him to look up: logorrhea.

So when Monckton defended his claim of being a Member of the House of Lords, maybe his answer of “Yes, but without the right to sit or vote” was correct? Why yes, in the sense of not appointed and completely without authority, rights, or (dare I say it) qualification.

I guess since the only response possible to Monckton’s searing global warming arguments are these ‘personal attacks’, he automatically wins every climate debate from now on. That’s so galling to us global warming alarmists.

Oh, wait. The is he/isn’t he issue is completely beside the point, 99% of the criticism of Monckton’s claims are about his repeated bold-faced scientific lies. See here, here, here (this is a good one), here, here and here. For the visually oriented, start here. Hell, just fire up Google and type “Monckton debunked“.

So this whole tempest is just ineffectual misdirection, perhaps intended to keep their follower’s emotions running high. Monckton, like our own Anthony Watts, has a long history of taking self-important offense to imagined slights.

When the dust settles we again find ourselves just where we started: Monckton is a vainglorious, paranoid, reactionary right-wing politician and journalist with no scientific credibility whatsoever. Everything Monckton does is in the interest of his own self-admiration. You can make your own connection between portcullises, lipstick and pigs here, while Anthony might want to ponder fleas and dogs and perhaps also own brushes and tar.

Note: Monckton is keeping quiet about his claim to have won the Nobel Prize.

IBD picks up my article on the US cooling trend

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“IBD picks up my article on the US cooling trend” (2011-11-11). Wow, the mainstream media gets it! Anthony Watts has made it to the big time!

Oh, the “IBD” is the Investors Business Daily. Seems they love them some stupid, which makes their Watts-miration quite understandable.

Here’s some tidbits from their deeply scientific editorial Don’t Stop Doubting, mixing Muller-spin with garden-variety denialist chart pumping (an old standby in investor circles too).

The alarmists, of course, leveraged Muller’s statements to suit their agenda.

But Muller’s [conclusion] is not the “consensus” position of the team.

Now comes meteorologist Anthony Watts armed with data showing the continental U.S. has not warmed in the last 10 years

Granted, the Lower 48 aren’t the entire world, [but] “heat islands” — big cities — [] should be skewing temperature data upward.

we remain skeptics and would be even if [Muller] were right.

Seems oddly emphatic for a subject so far out of their area of expertise. I guess it’s unsurprising that it’s so short on substance too. Still “don’t stop doubting” is good advice even if the IBD editors swallow Anthony’s line in a single gulp (they even think he’s a meteorologist). I know I won’t be taking scientific advice from a stock-picking website.

Anthony Watts Defeats Himself

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“Hump day hilarity: Chris Mooney’s abby-normal post modern science” (2011-11-09) and “Mooney pulls a Muller” (2011-11-10). After years of announcing how he was going to prove Global Warming was a lie (but utterly failing to do so), Anthony decides to castigate anyone else who talks about their conclusions before formal publication. Only the targets of his hypocrisy have simply released drafts of submitted papers (the previously beloved Dr. Muller) or described a book they are still writing (Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain). Anthony, you may recall, loudly and repeatedly announced that he was going to prove that the temperature record was both inaccurate and tampered with, and that climate scientists were corrupt socialists. You may also recall that he was 99 44/100%  wrong.

So what has twisted Anthony’s shorts this time? You’re going to love this: He’s attacking a book that hasn’t been finished yet, claiming that it portrays conservatives as idiots who jump to conclusions! Nice stick-work there, Anthony.

Seems like finishing your book is kind of redundant now, Chris! You can read his take on the response is here: Conservatives Attack and Misunderstand A Book They Haven’t Read… A Book About Flawed Conservative Reasoning.

Why is 20 years statistically significant when 10 years is not?

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“Why is 20 years statistically significant when 10 years is not?” (2011-11-05). Anthony Watts loves a long-winded sneering crank who can slap together reams of irrelevant charts (see Willis Eschenbach). Here he gives us James Padgett, ironically also known as WUWT commenter “Just the Facts”, who asks if PhD climatologists “are smarter than a 5th grader” after implying that climate scientists are only vaguely aware of the sun.

Padgett has a “simple vision” that beats the pants off of all those chrome-domes and their complicated ‘takin’ everything into account’. It’s just the sun, don’t you know! Thus ending Global Warming forever.

The statistical question posed in the post title is, unsurprisingly, never answered. When all is said and done James Padgett has simply gone to great lengths to prove that he’s not “smarter than a 5th grader.” Naturally Anthony’s commenters declare Padgett’s assertions to be “Very, very interesting and important” and rail about the arrogance of them scientists and their studyin’.

You know you’re reading the theories of an utter idiot when Padgett’s opening paragraph is this:

Many of you are aware that the concept of continental drift, proposed by Alfred Wegener, was widely ridiculed by his contemporaries. This reaction was in spite of the very clear visual evidence that the continents could be fit together like a giant puzzle.

Wegener’s theory is a perfect example of that pinnacle of denialist scientific method known as “eyeballing”. Wegener’s theory always had its supporters but wasn’t accepted for 40 years until evidence emerged that explained how the continents had actually moved (although he almost had it right). Just like no-one takes denialist Global Warming “science” seriously because it is utterly unable to explain the observed climate trends with only natural influences.

You do have to admire Padgett’s determined arm-waving though. It’s eye-wateringly hard work pawing through reams of charts, squinting as hard as possible to ignore everything that doesn’t suit his pre-determined conclusion.

Why do denialists make so many contradictory arguments at once? None of them stand up, they’re all merely efforts to distract:

  • The temperature records are wrong / OK, maybe they’re pretty good.
  • It’s not warming / OK, maybe it is warming.
  • The warming has stopped / OK, maybe it hasn’t stopped.
  • It’s not us / OK, maybe it is us.
  • It’s not harmful / OK, maybe it is harmful.
  • It’s not unfixable / OK, maybe “fixing” it would be really difficult.

Sharpen those eyeballs, James, if you want to be more than noise.

Trenberth: null and void

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“Trenberth: null and void“ (2011-11-03). Anthony Watts finds an excuse to make insulting references to a climate scientist. Will wonders never cease? Seems hard to reconcile with his regular calls for niceness.

This time Anthony’s decided that the scientific insights of a British publicist named Ben Norman will be his means of unraveling the global warming fraud. Anthony throws in references to Eurekalert and Wiley-Blackwell to give the appearance of scientific legitimacy, but I think he’s hoping no-one actually reads past his misleading headline.

Norman simply grouped together three recent papers, Ken Trenberth’s provocative “null hypothesis” paper and responses by Dr. Judith Curry (you know, the sciencey wiz who’s decided that eyeballing trends and muttering vaguely about uncertainty is as hard as anyone should have to work) and Dr. Myles Allen (who thinks that Trenberth’s idea is too radical but “Curry’s counter proposal to abandon hypothesis tests is worse”).

I know that Anthony’s mainly trying to smear Dr. Trenberth, but it seems odd that he’s mocking the idea that the default scientific presumption should be that humans are affecting our environment. That’s what underpins his juvenile “surface stations” project! Yeah we’re warming the Earth, but only in a few tiny spots and only in a way that hides the real climate trend (anything other than warming).

His readers comments are the usual assortment of ignorant profundities and jealous paranoia.

Newsbytes: New Research Reveals IPCC In Bed With Green Lobbies

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“Newsbytes: New Research Reveals IPCC In Bed With Green Lobbies“ (2011-11-03). Oh my gosh, a carefully fact-checked newswire story proves that the IPCC are incompetent commie eco-facists! It’s a “scathing new expose“!

Oh, wait. It’s just another wild one-sided press release rehash from the denialist Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Benny Peiser. He’s uncovered a Fox News screed that trumpets how young some of the IPCC report authors are, and has found a few other semi-random news links. Also Donna Laframboise is a feminist, so we should have complete faith in her 43 recruits and their “audit” of the IPCC 2007 report. Go buy her book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert! It’s sciencey.

The “green lobbies” accusation is somehow implicit, but of course everything is a “green lobby” to paranoid libertarians because it’s all part of the secret communist world government.

Thanks madcap paranoid libertarians, I knew you’d clear everything up!

It does seem a bit odd though that there’s no mention of atmospheric physics.

Michael Mann wades into the UVA thicket as intervenor

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“Michael Mann wades into the UVA thicket as intervenor” (2011-11-02). I’ve sat back a bit lately, enjoying the sight of Anthony and his Team imploding over the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) study, but this post cries out for a “WTF?”

Anthony Watts sympathetically re-posts Chris Horner’s whining about how Dr. Michael Mann has been allowed to intervene in the American Tradition Institute’s lawsuit over… Dr. Michael Mann’s correspondence during his time at the University of Virginia.

Why on god’s green earth should Dr. Mann be permitted to intervene in a lawsuit over his own correspondence? What could he possibly know? What insight could he possibly offer? What interest is it of his?

Whereas the ATI’s lawyers, who are also the ATI petitioners, assert that they are pure as driven snow (ideologically at least). They’re highly qualified, as attorneys, to confidentially assess the documents in question without revealing then to the petitioners (that would be themselves). Too bad they were widely broadcasting their intention to widely distribute the material they had tentatively been given permission to inspect under a protective order.

Smooth move, Chris.

Chris does however quite rightly assert that there is no “vast right-wing conspiracy”. It’s actually quite tiny and close-knit.