Author Archives: Ben

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About Ben

I trained as a sedimentary geologist at a Canadian University, but have worked in the I.T. field as a programmer and manager for many years.

Pielke Sr. on new Spencer and Braswell paper

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“Pielke Sr. on new Spencer and Braswell paper” (2011/07/26). Who’d ‘a thunk that Roger Pielke (the dad who’s a grumpy scientist, not the son who’s just a grumpy economist) would, again, sing the praises of Dr. Roy Spencer’s latest paper proving, again, sort of, that there is no global warming? Anthony Watts is excited enough by this startling development to copy and paste Pielke Sr.’s insights.

Dr. Pielke Sr. intones that Dr. Spencer’s paper, On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance in Remote Sensing, “raises further questions on the robustness of multi-decadal global climate predictions”. Yes, it’s the final nail in the coffin of global warming alarmism! Again! This time, for real! Oh, they have to be smart questions? Oops. Remote Sensing, for their part, is a new journal that seems more interested in publication fees than ensuring the scientific credibility of their papers.

Not yet referenced by Anthony, there’s also an enthusiastic “so there!” article in Forbes magazine. Right-wing climate change denying Heartland Institute lobbyist James Taylor sings the praises of right-wing climate change denying scientist Dr. Spencer, also tightly associated with Heartland Institute, in a right-wing climate change denying magazine! It stirs the soul to see all the pistons firing together so smoothly but using “alarmist” in 15 times, in practically every sentence, shines the spotlight in a presumably unintended direction.

So, what about Dr. Spencer’s science? Do clouds really cause climate like Spencer keeps saying? Is the Earth really failing to warm up quite as much as alarmist scientists say it is?  This is just a laugh-at-Anthony-Watts’-lies blog, so today I’ll simply point out some of the criticisms from around the web.

Synchronized shouting seems the only tactic left to the denialists.

2011-08-01 Update: Climate Progress weighs in on Spencer’s science that Pielke Sr. likes so much. Climate Scientists Debunk Latest Bunk by Denier Roy Spencer.

2011-08-10 Update: John Timmer covers Spencer’s paper in the larger context at Ars Technica – Climate change: cloudy, with a chance of competing realities.

2011-09-02 Update: More embarrassing fallout for Spencer covered at Ars Technica – Editor who published controversial climate paper resigns, blasts media.

2011-09-07 Update: Well this hasn’t taken long. Spencer’s ‘final nail in the coffin of AGW’  has completely unravelled. Turns out his crayon version of atmospheric physics has in fact proven the validity of current “alarmist” climate theories and models! Thanks Roy. That’s what happens when you work backwards from a baseless conclusion and ignore logic. Thanks for wading through the stupid, Dr. Dessler (preprint here, watch a video summary here).

 

 

 

Fly your flag

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“Fly your flag“ (July 4th, 2011). Sez Anthony Watts, hand on his steadfast heart, in his endearing mangled way; “As always, I always put up a reminder for Americans to fly your flag on national holidays that are honoring our nation and those who served.”

Sez I and Samuel Johnson; patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. If something isn’t worth doing for its own merit, why is it worth doing at all? “Patriotism” that rejects fellow citizens or bolsters a political position is self-serving and destructive.

At least this year Anthony didn’t infer that climate scientists are traitors.

Anthony also reveals a vulnerable side. He has the cutest little electric car and that he hasn’t the heart to dislodge a barn swallow nest. Bullies always want you to know that they’re really misunderstood softies.

Earth’s Climate System Is Ridiculously Complex – With Draft Link Tutorial

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“Earth’s Climate System Is Ridiculously Complex – With Draft Link Tutorial“ (June 30th, 2011). I’m waaay behind commenting on Anthony Watts’ anti-science, but this post recently came to my attention. Gosh, if the Earth’s climate is so “ridiculously complex” how could we possibly really know anything? We might hurt our thinkin’ muscles trying to figger it out.

The Earth rotates! It orbits the Sun! There’s gravity! The Sun shines! Volcanoes and hot springs are hot! Cosmic rays rain down, as do comets! Funny, I didn’t notice any references to the much-discussed greenhouse effect.

Most importantly; even though the Earth’s climate is “ridiculously complex” it is absolutely clear that all changes are completely natural.

WUWT reader and obsessive googler “Just The Facts” has assembled a collection of mainly Wikipedia entries to prove this point, but it seems to me that he’s unintentionally shown the exact opposite. Climate scientists are well aware of our climate’s complexity, and are able to integrate the processes quite well. Thanks, Facts.

Of course denialists are waging a fighting retreat using the “complexity” and “imperfection” arguments, so a huge list of anything is useful for waving in the air. I think Winnie-the-Pooh said it best:

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

Climate scientist Michael Tobis tries to inject a little reality to the comments, but faces a determined onslaught of ignorance as well as the usual  passive-aggressive moderation by Anthony and his staff. Eventually solar scientist Leif Svalgaard gets chokes on the ignorance and starts correcting them.

The comment by “Thomas S”, third one in, wins today’s booby prize: “Holy….!! This post will go down in history as the post that killed the AGW debate once in for all.” I wouldn’t put money on that, Thomas.

The End is Near for Faith in AGW

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“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.

NASA’s Hansen asked to account for outside activities

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“NASA’s Hansen asked to account for outside activities“ (June 21st, 2011). Here’s another whopper from Christopher Horner of that home of scientific inquiry, the American Tradition Institute (an arm of the Competitive Enterprise Institute). Anthony Watts naturally jumps to endorse the accusation that “taxpayer-funded global warming activist” James Hansen receiving a “prize” is an ethical violation and that government scientists are clock-punching shift-workers…

Sez Anthony, “Gavin Schmidt’s time spent on editing realclimate.org during working hours apparently was the trigger for a broader investigation.”

Tip to Anthony: scientists are salaried employees, not hourly assembly line workers. The “broader investigation” Anthony tries to imply is simply think tank thug Christopher Horner speaking out of both sides of his mouth at once. Previously, Dr. Hansen’s involvement with the RealClimate website was decried as “advocacy” on government time, now it’s an “outside activity” that must be “accounted for”. Which is it? Do he really care?

ATI seeks to learn whether NASA approved Hansen’s outside employment, which public financial disclosures and other documents reveal to have brought him at least $1.2 million in the past four years. This money comes on top of and, more troubling from an ethics and legal perspective, is all “related to” and sometimes even expressly for his taxpayer-funded employment, all of which outside employment commenced when Hansen stepped up his “global warming” activism from his perch at NASA. – ATI press release.

I guess the attempts to undermine Hansen’s scientific claims are running out of steam; the harassment and personal attacks will continue though, they’re pretty much reflexive.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a more detailed look (who would have ever thought that Fox News would jump on a story like this?): Fox News Compares James Hansen’s Prizes for Truth Telling to Big Tobacco Paying a Doctor to Deny the Risks of Smoking.

New commenting features on WUWT

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“New commenting features on WUWT” (June 12th, 2011). Comment posting at Anthony Watts’ WordPress blog has changed and people are pissed off, but it’s not his fault:

“I have no control over this, wordpress.com implemented it across the board.”

Funny how Anthony didn’t cut Joe Romm at Climate Progress any slack over his website back-end changes a week ago. Luckily for Anthony, existing comments haven’t been affected. That would have been ironic…

Alarmists refuse to take on skeptical geologists

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“Alarmists refuse to take on skeptical geologists” (June 8th, 2011). Anthony Watts agrees with the assertions of Canadian right-wing lobbyist Tom Harris in the reliably denialist Financial Post newspaper (No Climate Debate). Funny how fast Anthony was to copy-and-paste this one. Harris says that if “alarmists” won’t be caught dead presenting at the same symposium last month in Ottawa, “Earth climate: past, present, future“, as debunked denialists (make that “leading geoscientists”) like Bob Carter, Ian Plimer, Henrik Svensmark and “Friends of Science” director Norm Kalmanovitch, they’re chicken. (They couldn’t squeeze Lord Monckton in there?) Friends of Gin and Tonic ask some interesting questions about this.

Unlike medical researchers, who are rushing to embrace discredited and debunked anti-vax fraud Andrew Wakefield in debate.

According to Harris, “climate skepticism was widespread” at the recent industrial GAC-MAC conference (Joint Annual Meeting of the Geological Association of Canada, the Mineralogical Association of Canada, the Society of Economic Geologists and the Society for Geology Applied to Mineral Deposits), but we’ll have to take his word on that. It doesn’t seem to show up in any of the 26 other Symposia or Special Sessions though.

Here’s Professor Andrew Miall’s Symposium preface, with a few editorial remarks:

Earth climate: past, present, future
Andrew Miall
The scientific debate about climate change is far from over [not contested]. Some of the projections of climate change and its consequences contained in the 2007 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been called into question [successfully?].. This symposium will address some of these issues and present a geological perspective on the scientific debate. For example, what is the relative importance of water vapour versus carbon dioxide as a medium of heat retention in the atmosphere? How important have variations in solar output and in sunspot levels been in determining energy input to the Earth’s atmosphere? Is the current global temperature regime now warmer than the Medieval Warm Period or the Holocene Hypsithermal? [Gosh, no-one’s ever thought of studying those things before! Someone should get on that.] This is a significant question, given that many damaging ecological, faunal and weather changes have been predicted based on such warming. Yet Earth and its assemblage of life forms clearly survived these and even earlier exceptionally warm periods [not so good for some species of course, but perhaps we should roll the dice anyway]. Is it possibile [sp] that other causes, such as the density and ubiquity of the human presence on Earth, rather than climate change, may be the cause of the observed deterioration in many environmental indicators? [Of course they are factors! This is not an either/or situation.]

“The scientific debate about climate change is far from over.” Ooh, that stings. Could this prove that the alleged alarmist chorus of “the science is settled” is a despicable alarmist tactic? No, that evergreen denialist straw-man argument that has never been true. Climate scientists don’t make that claim. Just like plate tectonics, we’re continually refining our understanding. This doesn’t mean the core principles are teetering on the brink of rejection. Funny how often questions like “is it possible that” show up in these ‘criticisms’. Plenty of things are possible, but showing them to be more likely is the tricky part.

To repeat the words of  George Bernard Shaw; “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig, you get dirty; and besides, the pig likes it.” Credible scientists apparently understand this and stay out of the pig pen.

On a personal note, I once studied under Dr. Miall. It’s sad to see him in his late sixties endorsing such sloppy discredited arguments. While geologists know that huge environmental changes have affected the Earth in the past, some of them seem incapable of connecting the dots that the extinctions that resulted from those changes could have any bearing on this species, or that the evidence shows that these environmental changes are occurring at rates never recorded before.

“Earth itself is telling us there’s nothing to worry about in doubled, or even quadrupled, atmospheric CO2″

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“Earth itself is telling us there’s nothing to worry about in doubled, or even quadrupled, atmospheric CO2″ (June 2, 2011). According to Anthony Watts, Pat Frank writes excellent essays on climate science. The beaming Anthony helpfully offers a new example of his excellence, copy-and-pasted from his echo chamber partners at The Air Vent: “Future Perfect“, which asserts this comforting “fact”:

Spread the word: the Earth[‘s] climate sensitivity is 0.090 C/W-m^-2. [This of course begs the question: how did the Earth ever enter or leave an Ice Age in the geological past?]

Anthony Watts and his readers embrace Frank’s dim-witted numerology wish-fulfillment with surprisingly open arms. Frank’s conclusion (based on his intuitive grasp of climatology?) is that all this alleged warming is somehow merely the recovery from the Little Ice Age and that we can pump out as much CO2 as we like.

Once again Excel is put to good use, disproving those dang climatologists and their thinkin’. Nothing like invoking from thin air a “combined cosine function plus a linear trend” to explain everything, without the bother of actually explain anything. If Frank could actually explain why his magic squiggle occurred, he’d actually have something. Sadly, it’s clear that he simply pecked away at Excel until he stumbled across an equation that sort-of matched the historical record.

More of a citizen-scientist’s mind at work: “The rest of the analysis automatically follows.”

Pat Frank discovers that Excel can draw flat lines.

My “technical analysis”: Frank has discovered that if you subtract a bunch of numbers from themselves you get zeros!  You’ll aways get a flat line when you plot a squiggle that’s a pretty close fit to the data and then remove the squiggle.

Tamino at Open Mind lays out how a sentient person might respond to such nonsense, first with the quick double-take post Circle Jerk and in more detail with Frankly, Not.

Some nuggets from the keenly skeptical comments at Anthony’s blog:

  • Andy G55 – “This is the sort of REAL analysis I love to see. propa science !!! well done, mate !!”
  • Shaun D – “I agree. This is real science. But I have no idea what it means.”
  • Alan the Brit – “Sound, common sense, well thought through, & logially applied, so it won’t be published in the MSM then!”
  • Ryan – “Fantastic post Mr Frank, very plausible and difficult to refute.”

Climate Progress blog shuts down – disappears all previous comments

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“Climate Progress blog shuts down – disappears all previous comments“ (May 30, 2011). Nothing like a measured response, eh Anthony? The Think Progress website underwent a redesign over the weekend and Anthony Watts is eager to give a definitive assessment:

It appears the mendacious Joe Romm has been given new marching orders by Center for American Progress Big Brother Blog: “Think Progress”. From what I make of it, it seems the management realized that CP just wasn’t holding much readership, as it looks like the same 30 commenters or so frequent the place.  Sooo…the spin is on. Joe’s doing his best to make his forced merger under Think Progress look like a win.

So none of the cool kids read Climate Progress, Anthony’s blog is way better anyway, and Joe Romm took his ball home (“disappears all previous comments”) because of all the mean things the cool kids, who never go there, were saying.

Reality: It was a website redesign! Sometime comments take a while to reconnect. It’s not a nefarious tactic to suppress the vigorous triumph of denialist criticisms. Climate Progress and Think Progress have always been closely linked, if anything it seems that “Think” will be promoting “Climate” more, not absorbing it.

Christ! Anthony’s grasp of website management is even worse than of climate science. And that is truly saying something. Anthony sounds like a kid who can’t best his school-yard rival hoping their parent will do it for them.

Here are a few Climate Progress posts about the process:

2011-08-24 Update: It took a while, but the old comments are finally up again. So much for Anthony’s accusations.

“Snowball Earth” ended by methane – now an impossible theory

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““Snowball Earth” ended by methane – now an impossible theory“ (May 26, 2011). It seems that, like the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, Anthony Watts tries to believe six impossible things before breakfast. We see how hard he tries pretty much daily, but his apparent copy and paste delight here over a Caltech paper in Nature is just routine self-delusional over-interpretation.

“A hydrothermal origin for isotopically anomalous cap dolostone cements from south China” is about cap dolostone sediments overlying 600 million year-old glacial deposits and controversially thought to be associated with microbial consumption of abundant methane. The paper concludes that the cap dolostone was deposited after the abrupt end of a prolonged glacial period (aka Snowball Earth), not as it ended. Also, those rocks seem to have been formed under abiotic high-temperature hydrothermal conditions.

Thus, in Anthony’s fixated mind, it is impossible for greenhouse gases to cause abrupt ancient warming. Some other unspecified thing did.

Strangely the primary theory of how Snowball Earth ended doesn’t revolve around ocean sediment methane discharge, which this research seems to disprove. The primary theory is based on evidence of increased volcanic CO2 and methane emissions (greenhouse gases!) which this research can be inferred to support. Hydrothermal environments are associated with volcanism.

Note to Anthony: arguing over “abrupt” ancient natural climate change, taking place over millions of years, is a weak criticism of evidence for man-made climate change taking place thousands of times faster.