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.

Face palm: EPA bureaucrat tap dances during testimony

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“Face palm: EPA bureaucrat tap dances during testimony“. (Revised for clarity.) I’m back from the Boston Marathon and I found a note in my inbox from a website supporter. A new example of Anthony Watts’ enthusiasm for Republican politics has landed, this time as a post by Ryan Maue. Ryan, who must spend a lot of time learning science from Congressional hearings, thinks the Republicans ‘scored one’ by rattling an EPA witness with some political posturing over coal ash.

Ryan’s scientifically skeptical mind swallows the Republican rhetoric whole and sees only the “job-killing nature of the EPA’s regulations” and “how in-the-tank the media is for [Obama’s] ’12 re-election.” He thoroughly approves of the fact that “the GOP wants to eliminate the EPA’s current attempt/ability to regulate greenhouse gases (CO2) and, here, coal-ash”. Damn the torpedoes! Unleash the country’s economic engine! Science has no place in our economy!

So what happened at the Environment and Energy subcommittee hearing? Rep. Cory Gardner (R – Colorado) squawked Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! when questioning EPA Deputy Administrator Mathy Stanislaus after his testimony, which concerned the uses of coal ash. Coal ash, as noted approvingly by Republican organ The Daily Caller in EPA official says jobs don’t matter, is “used to make concrete stronger and longer lasting, make wallboard more durable and improve the quality of roofing shingles.” The EPA prepared testimony was that they were not concerned with such encapsulated uses.

Coal ash is also used in unencapsulated ways. That’s the stuff that can leach toxic metals such as arsenic, selenium, cadmium, lead, and mercury into drinking water and which, unsurprisingly, is an environmental concern that the EPA is obligated to address.

“EPA does not consider… sand and gravel pits, quarries, and other large fill operations to be beneficial use. EPA views this as disposal and would regulate”

“EPA believes that the great bulk of beneficial uses, particularly in an encapsulated form, like in concrete and wallboard, do not raise concerns and offer environmental benefits.  However, some questions have been raised about the use… in an unencapsulated form”

The idea of encouraging corporations to give away their coal ash waste for use in structural fill arose during George W. Bush’s administration with 70 million tons of predictable consequences.

Stanislaus did indeed seem “visibly dumbfounded” by Gardner’s apparent belief that coal ash somehow creates jobs, that the impact on employment is the only factor in a cost-benefit analysis, and that of course no-one should stand in the way of jobs. Ryan Maue declares that Stanislaus’ response is “cringe-inducing as he spun like a top attempting to deflect the very pointed, and basic yes-or-no questions” but it seems more like a polite attempt to gloss over the questioner’s ignorance. Like for instance that job creation would be a perfectly conventional benefit in a cost/benefit analysis and that job losses would be a cost. Could Rep. Gardner really think that the impact on employment is the only factor in a cost-benefit analysis, and that some weird EPA version of that process of analysis specifically excludes it? I suppose it’s easier to shout, regardless of actual consequences, about protecting American Jobs.

That is the “face palm” here.

It seems to me that Gardner’s posturing was designed to protect power company profits, not jobs. Proper disposal of coal ash would be an extra cost to the power companies, and any replacement for coal ash in structural uses would entail new extraction and processing jobs… But that’s just me getting sidetracked by the apparent subject of the exchange.

Ryan’s quotes from The Daily Caller end with the statement that the “EPA official’s testimony has generated negative reactions from pro-business advocates who say Stanislaus’s testimony shows the agency is out of touch with reality and is indifferent to job creation.” If you consider Superfund coal ash decontamination projects as instances of job creation then Rep. Gardner is right. The towns of Pines, Ind. and Chesapeake, Va are two such lucky recipients…

Traveling

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I’ll traveling for a few days, taking part in the Boston Marathon. See you soon!

I’ll be toward the front of the second wave, so don’t look for me on any podiums. Also because I don’t want to give nose-tweaking denialist comedians any opportunity to criticize me I will be minimizing my CO2 output by holding my breath for the entire race.

George Mason University “Climate Change Communicator of the Year” – where only one viewpoint is allowed

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“George Mason University “Climate Change Communicator of the Year” – where only one viewpoint is allowed“. George Mason University, reluctant home of the notoriously failed denialist statistician Edward J. Wegman, has a Center for Climate Change Communication. Anthony Watts is irked that their Center is running an internet poll for Climate Change Communicator of the Year and there isn’t a single denialist on the slate. They would be found over there on the Climate Change Deceiver of the Year poll (you’d have a solid shot at it, Anthony, although Lord Monckton is certainly more entertaining).

Anthony deflects his critics with this self-appraisal: “Lest some think this is some sort of sour grapes, it isn’t.” After all, who won the anything-goes 2011 Bloggies mob-athon, where responsible science communication was honored? Anthony did, that’s who.

The discredited 2006 Wegman Report is still clutched by denialists as some sort of proof of “warmist” fraud and collusion, but it is Wegman who is now under investigation for misconduct.

Yellowstone’s supervolcano – worse than we thought

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“Yellowstone’s supervolcano – worse than we thought“. This is how Anthony Watts smears a paper-thin crust of science on his blog: he pastes in a random general science press release. In this case, a University of Utah study has provided a more detailed geophysical image of the volcanic hotspot beneath Yellowstone National Park, which seems bigger and potentially more deadly than previously thought.

Quoth the press release:

University of Utah geophysicists made the first large-scale picture of the electrical conductivity of the gigantic underground plume of hot and partly molten rock that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano. The image suggests the plume is even bigger than it appears in earlier images made with earthquake waves.

The Yellowstone volcanic plume. New image on the left. Photo Credit: The University of Utah.

Hey, science! At the moment it’s effectively quiescent, but the theoretical consequences are no further away than a Discovery Channel dramatization. To further quote the University of Utah:

The hotspot finally reached Yellowstone about 2 million years ago, yielding three huge caldera eruptions about 2 million, 1.3 million and 642,000 years ago. Two of the eruptions blanketed half of North America with volcanic ash, producing 2,500 times and 1,000 times more ash, respectively, than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. Smaller eruptions occurred at Yellowstone in between the big blasts and as recently as 70,000 years ago.

This particular copy-and-paste implicitly stokes the denialist meme that humans are too puny to have any impact on our climate. If that volcano goes off then switching to wind power will have been a meaningless effort. All that fussing would seem pretty foolish if something like that happened, so why bother?

Just don’t consider the curious fact that the regular and ongoing impact humanity is having on our environment is probably on the same scale as these kinds of improbable freak catastrophes denialists tell us we should really be worrying about.

“Get Carter” campaign grows on Australia’s ABC radio & TV

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“Get Carter” campaign grows on Australia’s ABC radio & TV. Poor benighted Professor Bob Carter gets ardent supporter Bob Fernley-Jones to pass on to Ric Werme an article for Anthony Watts’ blog pointing out how badly he is being treated by (some of) the Australian media. Love those social networks.

Marine geologist Professor Carter has been “long vilified on radio in the Science Show“, where they talk to lots of real scientists but rarely to Bob. This is apparently the source of much resentment as he craves attention.

That was bad enough but now ABC TV’s Media Watch is, you know, watching the media and has taken brief note of Carter’s scientifically foolish book Climate: the Counter Consensus. It’s just too much. I mean, they’re almost communists, we shouldn’t have to listen to them! The program dealt primarily with commercial talk radio’s nurturing of denialist personalities and willful ignoring of more knowledgeable “mainstream” scientists. Poor Bob Carter was just a walk-on, but he’s certainly been cut to the quick.

Media Watch expressed their opinion of Professor Carter’s talk-radio credentials in part based on this villainous general observation about Climate: the Counter Consensus (“despite that it has had high acclaim”) by professional climatologist Dr. David Karoly:

“it has fewer gross errors than Ian Plimer’s book Heaven+Earth, it is a mixture of scientific facts with misinformation and misinterpretation, as well as outright errors, spun around a framework of personal opinion. Its conclusions are inconsistent with any scientific assessment of climate change prepared by any major national or international scientific body”

– e-mail excerpt from the March 21st 2011 Media Watch transcript.

But other cranks loved his book! Isn’t that proof that it’s sound? I guess not. Why are Dr. Karoly’s observations fairly general? It seems that neither he nor any other qualified scientists can work up the energy to catalog all the bunk Carter has packed into it.

Climate: the Counter Consensus was printed by Stacey International Publishers who brought us the “Independent Minds” series of publications including such titles as The Wind Farm Scam, The Hockey Stick Illusion – Climategate and the Corruption of Science, and Climate: the Great Delusion. Detect a theme?

Zeroed out: NOAA Climate Service funding axed in budget CR

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“Zeroed out: NOAA Climate Service funding axed in budget CR“. Anthony Watts and his readers gloat over successful Republican maneuvering to cut funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new Climate Service. Funny, until they managed to grasp the levers of power the denialists chorus sang constantly of the need for more and better information. This of course required prolonged waiting.

Suddenly, ignorance is again bliss.

Next up, those communists at the EPA. How dare they tell us what’s safe? If we want lead in our drinking water and gasoline, or prefer to chew our air, we’ll do it! It’s how we raise new Republican voters.

Climate models go cold

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Anthony illustrates Evans' science with cartoon of a CO2 molecule (or maybe deadmau5).

Climate models go cold. Hey, we’re golden! Anthony Watts assures us that “Carbon warming [is] too minor to be worth worrying about”! After-all, there’s a paranoid right-wing opinion piece by Australian crank David Evans in Canada’s Financial Post newspaper that proves it.

David Evans tells us that he’s “a scientist” (although not a climate scientist as he likes to imply) who used to be an “alarmist”. But he learned that the “whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s”? Wow! Did someone just hit the That Was Easy button?

Evans is mainly interested in muttering about political corruption, gravy trains and “the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome”. But here’s the core of Evans’ claim (note his inability to solve the equation 1 + 3 = x):

For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

So… if Evans can disprove the implied relative contributions to warming, which he has already got wrong, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down I guess. Evans sets to work. No tropospheric “hotspot”, as posited by climate science, was found in the upper atmosphere! [Except it was.] Evans says all that water vapor was turning into clouds that offset the warming. [Except it didn’t.] Those corrupt climate scientists never noticed the clouds, so they’re wrong! [Except clouds have always been part of climate modeling.]

With this very shaky underpinning, Evans proceeds to assure us that the reason climate scientists won’t admit their error now is because they want to keep their “well-paying jobs with lavish research grants” and are slavishly eager to offer “political power to their government masters.” Why, they “ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence” [nope], and they  are playing tricks with “the way they measure temperature” [a lame invocation of Anthony’s discredited science fair project], and they ignore the satellite record [you know, the ones they put up there].

Kind of confusing until you realise that this whole dissertation was made at an Anti-Carbon-Tax Rally, probably from Evan’s Perth, Australia front porch. The only science in his entire rant is Anthony’s addition of a Wikipedia CO2 molecule cartoon. There could be some nasty backlash over his inconvenient admission that CO2 has even a slight warming effect though…

2011-04-13 Update: Michael Tobis highlights Evans’ flim-flam at Only In It For The Gold.

Help asked for Dr. Tim Ball in legal battle with Dr. Mann

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Help asked for Dr. Tim Ball in legal battle with Dr. Mann. I’ve started dipping back into the putrid dung heap that is the archives of Anthony Watts’ blog and came across this recent plea by Sky Dragon Co-Slayer John O’Sullivan. Anthony Watts naturally professes to “have no dog in this fight.” Neither do all the other denialist blogs singing along in beautiful harmony.

Dr. Michael Mann has sued Dr. Tim Ball, “a 72-year-old pensioner”, for libel. He’s also suing the right-wing think tank Frontier Centre for Public Policy, which is probably also a 72-year-old pensioner. That’s not just mean, that’s double-mean!

After all, isn’t poor victimized Dr. Ball “widely recognized as one of Canada’s first qualified climate scientists”? [Not a chance. He’s a geography professor who left the University of Manitoba in 1996. Here’s his rap sheet.] Maybe he’s just a caught-out liar who readily turns to puffed up legal threats against his critics.

Judge for yourself of course but this is how the nut-jobs at the graphic arts crime scene called the Canada Free Press blog (who are curiously fixated on how much longer Barack Hussein Obama will be the President of the United States) recently defended him on a similar matter:

Retraction
Apology to Dr. Andrew Weaver
By Canada Free Press  Thursday, January 20, 2011

On January 10, 2011, Canada Free Press began publishing on this website an article by Dr. Tim Ball entitled “Corruption of Climate Change Has Created 30 Lost Years” which contained untrue and disparaging statements about Dr. Andrew Weaver, who is a professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

Contrary to what was stated in Dr. Ball’s article, Dr. Weaver: (1) never announced he will not participate in the next IPCC; (2) never said that the IPCC chairman should resign; (3) never called for the IPCC’s approach to science to be overhauled; and (4) did not begin withdrawing from the IPCC in January 2010.

As a result of a nomination process that began in January, 2010, Dr. Weaver became a Lead Author for Chapter 12: “Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility” of the Working Group I contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC.”  That work began in May, 2010.  Dr. Ball’s article failed to mention these facts although they are publicly-available.

Dr. Tim Ball also wrongly suggested that Dr. Weaver tried to interfere with his presentation at the University of Victoria by having his students deter people from attending and heckling him during the talk.  CFP accepts without reservation there is no basis for such allegations.

CFP also wishes to dissociate itself from any suggestion that Dr. Weaver “knows very little about climate science.”  We entirely accept that he has a well-deserved international reputation as a climate scientist and that Dr. Ball’s attack on his credentials is unjustified.

CFP sincerely apologizes to Dr. Weaver and expresses regret for the embarrassment and distress caused by the unfounded allegations in the article by Dr. Ball.

But reading John O’Sullivan’s spoon-fed “interview” one can’t help but conclude that a vicious liberal-environmentalist climate conspiracy is unquestionably trying to punish Dr. Ball, honorable truth-speaker, through the courts. Any money he received from oil companies was “accidental“. The only real error that he made, charmingly central to his accusations, was an “honest” one. And by gosh he’s terribly worried about “the credibility of science in general”.

I urge Dr. Ball’s courageous supporters to keep those donations rolling in. I sense that there’s so much more on-the-record entertainment ahead.

Rising From My Long Winter’s Nap

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Yawn… Hey, the sun came back! It warm again! (Note to self: the junk calories at Watts Up With That are no foundation whatsoever for a proper hibernation; Anthony gamed that stupid internet popularity poll! He is not the handsomest man in school.)

As I dozed off in January the global (i.e. my neighbourhood) temperature trends (for a few weeks at least) indicated the clear return of a new ice age. How I wept bitter tears as I shuffled into the den I share with Al Gore, knowing I had been fooled by those climate scientists and their greedy self-interest!

Yet I was already too sleepy to beseech forgiveness from the noble citizen-scientists who had so bravely rejected the alleged evidence and the so-called physical science. The warming had stopped, just like Henrik Svensmark had said it would. Snow was falling (somewhere), just as Anthony Watts was always pointing out. The Arctic sea ice was piling up anew just a Steve Goddard had promised. CO2 was plant food! I knew I was in for more than the usual number of hibernation dreams in which I found myself in public without my fur on.

…

So what’s happened during my nap? Let’s gather a list of Anthony’s winter whoppers in the comments. I hear that Anthony has been encouraging his readers to drown out scientist’s voices. And did Watts really try to wriggle into the spotlight and falsely pre-announce the results of Dr. Richard Muller’s Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project’s “skeptic” dream-team reexamination of global temperature trends, only to misrepresent their initial findings and declare that they were dead to him because it, err, matched the published scientific consensus?

Here are some entertaining (or infuriating if you are Anthony Watts) quotes from Dr. Muller’s 2011-03-31 Testimony to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who was brought in by the controlling tea-party Republicans as a dependable tame scientist:

“Many US stations have low quality rankings according to a study led by Anthony Watts. However, we find that the warming seen in the “poor” stations is virtually indistinguishable from that seen in the “good” stations.” and later, “Did such poor station quality exaggerate the estimates of global warming? We’ve studied this issue, and our preliminary answer is no.”

“In our preliminary analysis of these stations, we found a warming trend that is shown in the figure. It is very similar to that reported by the prior groups: a rise of about 0.7 degrees C since 1957.”

“The Berkeley Earth agreement with the prior analysis surprised us” [Must suck when your boasts of transparency prevent you from jigging things to match your personal biases, eh Dr. Muller? Don’t worry, your Republican pals will legislate the Earth’s temperature, along with the value of pi and that annoying evolution thing.]

Which brings us to this website… As much as I try to have fun with Anthony Watts’ malicious website, I can’t keep this up by myself. Getting inside Anthony’s head is not only time-consuming but corrosive and claustrophobic, and my Significant Other is much more fun to interact with. In the Fall I had some research help from a few readers, which I greatly appreciated. I need to find a way to facilitate this more directly and where appropriate recognize contributions. Put your thinking caps on and look for a post here discussing some options.

In the meantime, I’ve finally got e-mail working here and you can contact me privately at ben@wottsupwiththat.com.

WUWT Year End Report

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“WUWT Year End Report“. Anthony Watts says:

Thanks to everyone that continues to help make WUWT “…the world’s most viewed climate website”
– Fred Pearce The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth about Global Warming

Strangely, Anthony shows no interest in being the most informative climate website. I wonder if any of his readers will click-through to the Amazon link he included, where the Climategate “scandal” is summarized thus:

Although the scandal caused a media frenzy, the fact is that just about everything the public heard and read about the University of East Anglia emails is wrong. They are not, as some have claimed, the smoking gun for a great global warming hoax, nor do they reveal a sinister conspiracy by scientists to fabricate global warming data.

Watts Up With That visitor stats. Don't worry, the "decline" is just bad charting. Surprise!