“Paging David Appell and Nick Stokes again: time to fess up and apologize” (2012-05-28). Those “alarmists” are always exaggerating, as Anthony Watts loves to imply remind us. Even about things as mundane as so-called death-threats!
I mean, it’s not as if they’ve had to escape from the trunk of a kidnapper’s car, is it? Or that they were threatened with having their children “brutally gang-raped”. (What, that one’s true? Never mind.) And as anyone who’s up-to-date knows “You will be chased down the street with burning stakes and hung from your f*** neck, until you are dead, dead, dead!” is what all the cool kids say when they’re chillin’. Heck even (apparently actual) scientist Judith Curry thinks saying that “AGW fraudsters” should be dealt with thus – “Knock them down. Kick them until they quit moving. Check for breathing. Repeat.” – is simply a cute turn of phrase.
So when Rupert Murdock’s The Australian declares “no death threats in emails [to climate scientists]” because an Australian’s freedom of information request for a specific institution, specific short period of time, and specific small number of individuals doesn’t turn up much, when that pretty much settles the question for Anthony. Forget all the stuff that happens outside that tiny slice of space/time! Doesn’t count.
This means that Anthony can justify swaggering across the internet spouting self-serving nonsense like this about comments deploring aggression and threats towards climate scientists by the aforementioned David Appell and Nick Stokes amongst others:
They can be men, apologize for their errant and childish behavior towards me and other skeptics on this matter, and move on. I’ll be happy to accept their sincere apologies posted here or on their own blogs and put the matter behind us. Ball’s in your court fellas.
By the way Anthony’s completely unable to control any of the vicious stream of denialist comments that his readers, without his explicit encouragement, make. It takes all his effort just to censor his critics! No time left over at all for that other stuff, which is purely for theatrical effect anyway.
As always, Anthony offers himself as exemplar. He get’s angry e-mails, but he’s strong enough to laugh them off. Man up, warmists, Anthony-style! He’d never overreact to the purely hypothetical situation of angry people trying to confront climate scientists at their offices or wave hangman’s nooses at conferences.
Oh, wait. He did overreact, didn’t he? When little Anna Haynes showed up (uninvited!!!!) at his offices seeking to speak with him, he freaked. But that, of course, is different.
One thing for sure, Anthony won’t mention the ABC News program Media Watch’s investigation into the coverage of threats against climate scientists. Nothing gets in the way of bluster like a factual dissection.
But what the emails don’t prove is what The Australian splashed on its front page on May the third… “Climate scientists’ claims of email death threats go up in smoke”
He’ll stick with the pull-quote from Rupert Murdock’s The Australian, thank you.
Update from the comments: Vicious denialist threats are pretty much routine and they are explained away by people like Anthony Watts, who do everything in they can to encourage them.
Wott's Up With That? 
The Guardian’s ridiculous claim of 75% Arctic sea ice loss in 30 years – patently false
Anthony reposts ‘HauntingtheLibrary’ on a Guardian report on musician Jarvis Cocker’s moving into environmental activism, especially on the Arctic ice. At the end of the post the G posts a list of ‘chilling facts about the Arctic’, starting with:
and giving Greenpeace as its source.
Well we can’t have that kind of talk echoing round the blogosphere can we? So Tony tries to shut it down as ‘patently false’ because the extent of Arctic sea ice is very close to the average for the last three decades. Apparently Five minutes or less of checking would have prevented this blunder.
So where did Greenpeace/The Guardian get 75% from?
Well, rather less than five minutes turned up this on the Greenpeace site
Nope. Not good enough.
I then posted an extract from Schweiger et al 2011 which details the validation of PIOMAs against observations and so forth, also an extract from the testimony to Parliament of distinguished Professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge, Peter Wadhams who came to the same number using submarine and satellite observations (he being the guy who rode the subs and colelcted the data. I thought they’d love this guy at WUWT, a real hands on scientist collecting real data). He wrote
The same number from the model and the data. As I wrote So a guy who has actually been there, collected and published data says the 75% figure is correct …... In answer to a query from a poster, I posted an excerpt from a RealClimate post on PIOMAS, including that same number again
The claim of the guardian being patently false is surely ripe for an update now, no?
Erm, no
(Anthony frequently accuses me of being paid to post, as a distraction. I just ignore him. The cryosat/overfly stuff was based on a factually wrong post by Bill Illis accepted without a trace of scepticism)
So I laid out (again) my reasons for believing that the 75% number referred to volume, not extent and quoting Prof Wadhams again. This drew a blustery response:-
including the remarkable assertion that Wadham makes no citation of submarine data, other than an appeal to authority
So I pointed Anthony to the list of references at the end of his article, the first of which is:-
This drew more bluster about Wadhams’ testimony, ending with I call bullshit on the man, and his testimony. That goes for you too Mr. Clarke.
So in summary, the Guardian was incorrect in its 75% claim which was about ice extent, the respected PIOMAS model is wrong, citing a paper based on data is the same thing as erm, not citing the data and Ocean Physicist and submariner Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University is full of it.
Hope thats clear. LOL!
[It’s comical how readily Anthony discards facts that undermine his beliefs and how he clings to any nonsense that sounds like it supports his beliefs. Such a “skeptic”. Attacking the messenger’s always a useful distraction too. – Ben]
Ben, Eli Rabett has an interesting posting on June 13th, “Carrick finds a mirror“, it truly shows the very ugly side of the threats routinely sent to Phil Jones.
[Thanks for the tip! I’ve added it to my coverage of the same contemptible post. = Ben]