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.

Friday Funny: Dr. Michael Mann keeps interesting company

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“Friday Funny: Dr. Michael Mann keeps interesting company” (2012-07-13). What are the chances that Anthony Watts, after years of alternately wailing about imagined personal attacks and launching them himself will be correct when he “accuses” his regular critic “caerbannog666” of being… a Goth!!!!!!!! The only things Anthony manages to “out” are his own scientific hypocrisy and his pathetic inability to see past his own prejudices.

But, you say, every single occurrence of “caerbannog666” in a Google search can only be related to the target of his mini-McCarthyist rummaging!

 I wondered who is this guy? A well known climate blog regular, he’s been bloviating all over the climate blogs for years. After finding him though about a minute’s worth of Googling public information, I wish I could unsee what I found. Meet [name of Brazilian bystander redacted] (Caerbannog)

That 31 year-old Brazilian goth’s MySpace page is clearly proof of the identity of a 57 year-old American who’s a critic of Anthony’s denialism. And everyone knows that Goths are creepy and dumb, so “caerbannog666” is a creep and dumb! Therefore no Global Warming. Also, every “citizen-scientist” should go to that MySpace page and post insults.

Turns out the chances of Anthony correcting his foolish error are pretty low. In fact about as low as the chances of him even admitting it (you really owe it to yourself to watch Anthony flounder stiffly in the comments, preserved here as a PDF for posterity):

I’m not the least bit interested in what a few anonymous cowards think I should do/not do. ‘Caerbannog666′ has to make the request and he’s the only one whose opinion matters. He can use the contact form, or he can leave a comment on tips and notes. So far he’s done nothing. And since I’m tiring of the usual anonymous people who think that their opinion matters more on this issue, I’m closing comments. As stated, if ‘Caerbannog666′ wants a correction, he can ask for one and show why, and if he can demonstrate why he’s not the same person, I’ll gladly make a correction.

It’s pretty comical that Anthony thinks his inaccurate (and irrelevant) “outing” would be a legitimate way to diminish his scientific critics. Anthony tries to walk that back a bit in an update, mumbling about his proclaimed acceptance of people who choose to dress “in the dark style”. This post really boils down to impotent, frustrated, lashing out by A. Watts.

This self-congratulatory comment by David Ball sums up the Watts Up WIth That hypocrisy best: “Tolerance is one of the magic ingredients of WUWT IMHO.” I think that last bit of tech lingo is “In My Horse-shit Opinion”.

A wave of heated peer pressure results in shrinking integrity

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“A wave of heated peer pressure results in shrinking integrity” (2012-07-08). More enthusiastic broadcasting of baseless aspersions by our dear Anthony Watts. Gail Combs (not, apparently, a scientist unless she’s one of Anthony’s “anonymous cowards”) says:

“As a scientist, I KNOW other scientists will lie through their teeth when it comes to money or their career.”

Trust the “citizen auditors”, who have no agenda whatsoever! They are actually blind-folded (well, blinkered) as they operate the Ouija Board of Truth.

Tamino makes an excellent point about Anthony’s intellectual and ethical bankruptcy: What is “ad hominem”? It really says something when denialists like Anthony and “Gail” are so willing to categorize such a diverse group of people as uniformly corrupt just to suit their partisan biases.

Meanwhile Anthony & Co. mime shivering during a blistering hot summer and pretend to puzzle over why “the media” keeps talking about heat waves…

P.S. Another interesting example of Anthony’s resentful sneering and intimidation (the link in his reply gives his foot soldiers the commenter’s contact details) in the comments:

REPLY: “Not by bloggers…” yeah sure. There’s that holier than thou academic side of you again. I’ll bet you think internists and patent clerks can’t contribute anything either. Your wrongness about who can contribute is exceeded only by your condescension. If this is all a waste of time to you, then take a hike rather than lecture down to us, if it isn’t kindly shut the hell up and let’s compare publications later – Anthony

Seems Anthony’s critics are either “hit and run anonymous cowards” or politically motivated “trolls” that must be carefully labeled so readers discount them, until it’s finally necessary to not-censor them: “[SNIP: You are not funny. You are done. Get lost. -REP]“

Detecting regime shifts in climate data – the modern warming regime ended in 1997

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“Detecting regime shifts in climate data – the modern warming regime ended in 1997“ (2012-07-03). Anthony Watts blindly publishes another piece of scientific nonsense. Sam Outcalt, Emeritus (naturally) Professor of Physical Geography (naturally) has screwed around with Excel and discovered you can turn pretty much any data trend into a parabola that suits your goals if you just rescale things and only plot cumulative sums of deviations from average.

“This short analysis indicates that an alternate model of climate change based on serial regime transitions rather than anthropogenic global warming is consistent with the results of the Hurst Re Scaling analysis.”

It’s so simple! Um, too simple:

“Cumulative sums can show very interesting behavior. They can also be extremelytricky to deal with statistically. That’s not a problem for Outcalt, his post doesn’t seem to have any statistics.” – Open Mind

This is what fake linear temperature trends look like when plotted along side real temperature the the way Outcalt did:

Looks like Dr. Outcalt’s dunce-cap methodology turns any linear trend into a parabola that can be presented as proof that the trend has reversed…

955 words and four references (do “personal communications” really count?) are all Outcalt needs to underpin his argument. I think Anthony’s denialist blog is the pinnacle of this “paper’s” trajectory. Outcalt is a retired permafrost guy, his last paper seems to have been in 1994.

‘Ads by Google’ helpfully suggests that “If you use a spreadsheet to manage work, you should watch this helpful 1 minute video.” Maybe the good Perfessor should take Google’s inscrutable advice?

Update: Here’s a real temperature trend, from 1800 to 2010. Notice the lack of “regime change” in 1997? This data is from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, in which Anthony placed great faith until it didn’t give the result he wanted.

“So what?” you say, another emeritus academic outside of his area of expertise who thinks he’s “proved” everyone else is wrong. Dime a dozen at Watts Up With That. Well… true. But every now and then (meaning several times a week) a classic example of Anthony’s tactics comes along and gives us a useful way to deconstruct Anthony’s method:

  1. He will publish literally anything with a “conclusion” that suits his agenda, even if he has no ability whatsoever to understand it. Perhaps especially if he doesn’t understand it.
  2. He will imply that any forthcoming criticism will be malicious so that his readers will think that Anthony has the intelligence to anticipate and dismiss factual scientific criticism:

    “Great paper. Thanks for re-posting this Anthony. Hurst makes perfect sense and it is well defended in the paper. I think Tamino is over his head with a paper like this.
    REPLY: Oh, he’ll try to shoot it down anyway. – Anthony”

  3. He posts new stuff so fast that by the time anyone intelligent can respond his mesmerized audience has forgotten about it other than a few unshakable rearguard commenters. Although they will all keep a vague memory of another perfect proof, probably contradicting earlier perfect proofs, that there is no global warming, which stopped in 1997 anyway.
  4. He counts on his denialist ditto heads to repost WUWT posts so that if any intelligent analysis infects the comments of his own posts and disrupts the head-nodding the copies will remain uncorrected and continue to deceive. (Of course he’ll never correct his own post either, so that readers that don’t mine the comments will remain unaware.)
  5. His censors “moderators” will always invoke (im)plausible deniability when Anthony’s caught and will pretend his readers are up-to-date in all the physical sciences anyway:

[REPLY: Anthony publishes lots of stuff, not all of which he agrees with. It is simply “interesting”. WUWT commenters are fully capable of critiqueing the work and have done so. Anthony is not a co-author on this article and is not required to justify or explain anything, especially to anonymous individuals using anonymous proxy servers. Check site policy regarding that. -REP]

Not particularly clever, but effective if you lack peripheral vision.

Update: Anthony re-applied his denialist french kiss to Outcalt’s fake technique one day later when Outcalt sends him some rigged solar data: “Another regime change indication – this time in solar data“. One day the climate switch flipped in 1997, the next day the switch flipped in 2005. Just pick one and stick with! This time Anthony gets called on it too fast to slip away and pulls an “as I expected”:

UPDATE: As I expected he would, Dr. Leif Svalgaard takes exception to this characterization of the identification of October 2005 being a regime changepoint, saying:

While I agree that the sun is going quiet, the ‘step change’ is spurious. It is mainly due to a sporadic, single magnetic storm in September 2005: http://hirweb.nict.go.jp/sedoss/solact3/do?d=2005%2c09%2c04 and here is the next rotation: http://hirweb.nict.go.jp/sedoss/solact3/do?d=2005%2c10%2c01 You can find many such steps.

Such step changes happens all the time: http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-1844-now.png They are just weather, not climate.

Of course Anthony takes as “skeptical” view of the opinions of actual solar experts as he thinks can get away with:

While I defer to Dr. Svalgaard’s overall superior knowledge on the dynamics of sun, and agree there are many sharp transitions in the Ap record, this looks to me to be a step change event of merit based on the factors listed above. I’ve yet to see a fully convincing explanation that this was a spurious event rather than a regime changepoint. But, I remain open to seeing such an explanation.

A refreshing change on sea level policy – use historical data rather than model projections

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“A refreshing change on sea level policy – use historical data rather than model projections“ (2012-03-13). Anthony Watts approves of a North Carolina environmental bill that mandates that scientific evidence be ignored. Only the politically appointed North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission is permitted to declare how much sea-level will rise (or, err, not rise), so there!

Anthony is, naturally, dead set agin gubmint reg’lation unless he happens to be fer it. Especially if it orders the smart people to shut up. Naturally the “science” behind the bill was a single misinterpreted paper.

Maybe Anthony should look a bit further back before cuddling up to using only historical records to decide what will happen in the future. The King Canute of old commanded the tide to halt to prove that the natural world pays no attention to politics, not to allow his buddies to build condos on beaches.

Then the king leapt backwards, saying: ‘Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.’

God of course doesn’t exist, but the “eternal laws” are not ours to set.

This brainless bill died in the House. Sorry Anthony! I guess no-one wanted to displace legislating the value of pi from the top podium of ignorance. I’ve heard you’ve made a few visits though, how’s the view from up there?

Another skeptical university professor fired – related to CARB’s PM2.5 air pollution regulation scandal

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“Another skeptical university professor fired – related to CARB’s PM2.5 air pollution regulation scandal“ (2012-06-16). In case you were wondering, every time a prickly right-winger gets fired from a university it’s because of persecution by the oppressive liberal intelligentsia. Anthony Watts wants to make sure you learn what he discovered on the always-reliable WingNut Daily (fyi, it’s all driven by intellectuals resentful over the failure of Communism). The Los Angeles Times has some coverage too.

Seems the John Galt wannabes at the American Center for Law and Justice are fightin’ the good fight for James Enstrom, a UCLA researcher fired after 35 years for daring to expose fraudulent research that was used to “justify draconian diesel vehicle regulations” as well as fake credentials at the “vile” (that’s Anthony’s description) California Air Resources Board. I guess the wheels of liberal oppression grind slowly.

Diesel exhaust is good for you and should not be regulated (pay no mind to the 750,000 annual Chinese deaths from particulate pollution). So is second-hand smoke.

Dr. Enstrom was defending his conclusions about the pish-poshedness of secondhand smoke years ago. Back in 2005 he was already invoking the right-wing’s favorite boogeyman Lysenko in defense of his tobacco epidemiology research. His Scientific Integrity Institute, solely concerned with the integrity of one J.E. Enstrom, Ph.D., came into existence at around the same time.

I suppose I have to say it: there’s no question that academic freedom needs protection and that legitimate examination of any scientific consensus is deeply important. Too bad that hypocritical partisan zealots like Anthony are so busy poisoning the debate. By the way Anthony, which is it? Close all universities because they’re dens of communism leeching off the noble taxpayer, or don’t touch the freedom of academics? ‘Cause if you only howl about the plight of right-wing allies you’re not really operating on principle, are you? What we actually get from you are incessant calls to fire academics that you don’t like and to strip funding from programs that don’t support your politics.

It’s YOU that academic freedom needs protection from, not Enstrom or Drapela.

Climate skeptic instructor fired from Oregon State University

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“Climate skeptic instructor fired from Oregon State University“ (2012-06-10). Much like The White Queen, Anthony Watts can swallow any contradiction without a hiccup. Here he does his bit to fan the flames outrage over the persecution “firing” of climate skeptic Nickolas Drapela, an exalted Senior Instructor in chemistry at Oregon State University. It’s dang witch hunt!

First of all, setting aside any question of Nick’s scientific “persecution” (it’s farcical, but we’ll get there), those of us with functioning brains will recall Anthony’s resentful fantasies about how James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies should be fired for their views on climate change (i.e. they describe how it’s happening). He’s even run dumbass polls on the topic, and ‘fire ’em/throw them in jail’ is a steady somnambulistic undercurrent in the comments.

But that’s… different.

OK, let’s turn to the persecution. If we are to believe Nick’s champion Gordon Fulks, OSU is a place where:

“Transgressors who dare to be different are eventually weeded out so that the campus maintains its ideological purity.”

Stalin, Lysenko, politically correct, “Anthropogenic Global Warming, the official religion of the State of Oregon”, hot button, hot button. The on-going reductions in OSU’s funding has nothing to do with it. Nor does the fact that Nick’s basically wandered from university to university for the last fifteen years. It’s definitely malicious persecution.

Next checkmark: Is Nick a fiercely insightful scientist whose careful analysis has disproven AGW and who must be silenced at any cost? Just look at his publication record! Case closed. Well honestly the case never opened because his entire published scientific output is third author on this metabolic chemistry paper from 2000. Gee, I wonder if that contributed to his termination?

Still, there are plenty of laughs in “Global Warming Cracked Open”, a paranoid cut-and-paste “sociopolitical” slide show rant about AGW. Slide 78 of 80 introduces the only science, a pathetic cherry-picked and debunked chart of solar activity from that bastion of scientific integrity, the deceptive “documentary” The Great Global Warming Swindle. He also assures us that “they regularly read all my email communications.”

Now I get it! Anthony Watts and other denialists look at this delusional no-hope nutter and see… themselves. Is this really the donkey you want to hitch your persecution wagon to, Anthony?

Thanks to Tamino’s post The Light of Day for doing the heavy lifting on this one,

Heartland Institute Responds to Pacific Institute’s Reinstatement of Gleick – cites Federal criminal prosecution

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“Heartland Institute Responds to Pacific Institute’s Reinstatement of Gleick – cites Federal criminal prosecution“ (2012-06-07). Anthony Watts loves the thrill of leaping to a conclusion. Here, he regurgitates a Heartland Institute press release muttering sourly about the Pacific Institute’s announcement that they had reinstated Dr. Peter Gleick after investigating his “stealing” Heartland Fakegate documents. Documents that were so sensitive that staff e-mailed them to pretty much anyone that asked.

The Heartland Institute also mutters that they wish the Feds would charge Dr. Gleick with… something. In other words, “just you wait until your father gets home!”

But what really gets under the Anthony and Heartland’s skin is that “the Pacific Institute has refused to identify who conducted its investigation” This is total conspiracy stuff! There. Was. No. Investigation. You can put money on that, pal.

Anthony adds an admission a few hours later:

Note: shortly before I received this statement from Heartland, I got an email identifying the investigating organization.

So Anthony knew the Heartland statement was inaccurate and still he chose to post it uncorrected.

Way more satisfying to slap your mouth to the megaphone and start bellowing, isn’t it Anthony?

Species Extinction is Nothing New

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“Species Extinction is Nothing New“ (2012-06-04). Anthony Watts thinks that Australian denialist Viv Forbes’ reviewed scientific paper unposted Letter to (no particular) Editor deserves a wide audience, so he makes it a “Top Post”. “Steam engines” didn’t kill the mammoths, so why would a few puffing coal plants? This is pure stupidity being given a gold star.

DId you know that them “professional alarmists” are trying to replace the “deflating” “global warming bubble” with a crazy new scam called “species extinction”? Anything to force us back into caves with the commies, I guess.

Humans (well a few of them at least) will be able to use their “freedom” to innovate out of any theoretical environmental crisis, so them animals should stop complaining and start innovating too. Otherwise tough luck and rightly so.

Anthony with his usual acumen uses a Dodo (unequivocally hunted to extinction by humans) to mis-illustrate Viv’s deep environmental insight, but I think he just forgot about the Ostrich.

Anthony’s proudly ignorant commenters are near universal in espousing libertarian tough love for the critters…

Paging David Appell and Nick Stokes again: time to fess up and apologize

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“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.

The “well funded” climate business – follow the money

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“The “well funded” climate business – follow the money” (2012-05-19). Anthony Watts tries to re-stir a cold pot: See how climate scientists are eagerly shoveling mistresses into the Ferrari’s they bought with their free gubmint money?

Joanne Nova (Australian holder of a Graduate Certificate in Science Communications and Rothschild obsessive) pulled out her sharpest crayons three years ago and laid it all out for the boffins at the Science and Public Policy Institute. Anthony remembered just now.

According to Jo-No the US government is giving seven billion dollars a year to those smug climate scientists! No wonder they’re all so happy to lie about global warming.

Wait, you mean they don’t get to stuff the cash into their pockets? It all goes to actual research costs? Surely all that gear just pops up from the ground. The scientists keep none of it? Oh.

What’s that you say? Most of the money on that chart is really for biofuel subsidies, solar power costs and the like? Actual energy? Oh.

Still, I bet plenty goes to campaigning against the rich. (Eat them, they’re delicious.) If the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation spend all their money on partisan warfare then surely scientists do too. Oh.

Also, leading Senate intellectual Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe is fightin’ back against President Obama’s “war on affordable energy”. What’s putting our troops at risk? Not having big enough gas tanks.

The banner ads suggest that Google’s figured out what Anthony and his readers need. It’s hard to argue with ’em.
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