Category Archives: Anti-Science

New Aussie skeptic movement

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“New Aussie skeptic movement“ (May 16, 2011). Anthony Watts promotes the comical Galileo Movement, founded by Australian “retirees Case Smit and John Smeed”.

Although once “they simply accepted politicians’ claims of global warming”, they were so “incensed” to discover that “climate claims by some scientists and politicians contradict observed facts” that they felt they had to “[risk] their personal finances” and bring Lord Monckton, “famous for explaining the scientific data, the statistics and the UN bureaucracy’s political fabrication of global warming alarm”, to tour Australia. Their background page is a sea of ad hominem claims, straw-men arguments and libertarian paranoia.

The purpose of “Case’s and John’s apolitical public campaign”?

  • Protect freedom – personal choice [the hell with everyone else] and national sovereignty [because no country’s climate is related to another’s];
  • Protect the environment [by doing nothing];
  • Protect science and restore scientific integrity [two words – Lord. Monckton.];
  • Protect our economic security [by impeding rational preparation for climate impacts on same];
  • Protect people’s emotional health by ending Government and activists’ constant destructive bombardment of fear and guilt on our kids and communities [instead bombarding them with right-wing conspiracy theories].

Famous climate denialist. From Wikipedia.

Why invoke Galileo Galilei? Well, apparently he “stood up publicly… to ensure [that] objective science replaced superstition, ideology, ignorance and state control.” Just like them, bravely espousing the radical new idea that CO2 has no climate consequences! Except of course that they are really defending an old idea that has been progressively replaced by new knowledge (gosh, CO2 increases do have climate consequences). Um guys, this analogy makes you the Catholic Church not the courageous scientist... You’re resisting change in your own short-sighted self-interest.

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

Get a load of the Galileo Movement’s collection of “independent advisers”, which apparently “includes diverse opinions”. It’s a Who’s Who of denialists and their apologists: Professor Tim Ball, Warwick Hughes, Professor Fred Singer, Professor Dick Lindzen, Professor Bill Kininmonth, Professor Bob Carter, Professor Ian Plimer, David Archibald, Professor Peter Ridd, Professor Garth Paltridge, Dr Vincent Gray, Dr Jennifer Marohasy, Jo Nova, Des Moore, John Nicol, David Flint, Andrew Bolt, John McLean, David Evans and Viscount Monckton. Don’t forget to include Alan Jones, whose “innate[?] expertise straddles the fields of politics, sport and the media.”

2011-08-15 Update: Scientific American has take notice of these bozos, posting Why Carbon Dioxide is a Greenhouse Gas.

In making a case against CO2 as a greenhouse gas, the Galileo Movement relies on irrelevant facts while omitting pertinent ones.

Pat Frank: The New Science of Climate Change

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“Pat Frank: The New Science of Climate Change“ (May 14, 2011). Anthony Watts’ blog buddy “John A” wants us to read chemistry PhD Pat Frank’s May 6th post on Jeff Id’s blog (ah, “social networking”). It proves that Global Warming is all just fiddling by them dang lyin’ climate scientists. They adjusted the early 20th century surface temperatures upwards to create the appearance of a late-century warming trend! What sneaks.

This increase in rate wasn’t due to an accelerating late 20th century trend. It’s mostly due to modifications of the 1880-1920 record.

Wait, haven’t the denialists been claiming that early instrument records were adjusted downwards to maximize apparent warming? Could it be that they’re adjusting in both directions at once? It staggers the mind.

Pat Frank’s rigorous scientific technique is to scan the published graphics and convert them to numerical values. How this is supposed to inspire confidence in his conclusions remains unknown because Frank offers no discussion of the reasons for changing the data selection that produced the plots. I suppose that would take both knowledge of the details as well as scientific insight.

His accusation is that the earliest instrument data was ‘adjusted upwards’ by GISS  from earlier presentations to fraudulently lower the slope of early century warming and make post-1975 AGW warming look comparatively steeper. So Frank adjusts the values in the direction that suits him by cherry-picking some starting points (What’s special about 1950? Nothing.), adds in some x-axis squashing for more visual minimization, and declares victory. Now that’s post-normal.

This all boils down to more accusations of “Post-Normal Science”, which denialists like to sling about when ever climate scientists refine their theories or improve historical analyses. Any change in “the record” is malicious don’t you know.

I wonder why Frank doesn’t discuss Total Solar Irradiance, which was increasing during the early part of the century and level later in the century when all the Global Warming happened? After-all he does make a half-hearted stab at blaming the warming on “solar variation”.

“Ant colony optimisation” for wind farms

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“Ant colony optimisation” for wind farms. (May 4, 2011) Anthony Watts makes another ‘thinking is stupid’ blog post and his free-thinking readers scramble to match his wit.

Anthony found a University of Adelaide press release about increasing wind farm productivity using evolutionary modeling. The researcher happens to mention ant colonies as natural example of achieving efficiency that we can emulate with incrementally optimized simulations.

Here’s the hilarious trigger for Anthony’s derision:

“Ant colony optimisation” uses the principle of ants finding the shortest way to a source of food from their nest.

“You can observe them in nature, they do it very efficiently communicating between each other using pheromone trails,” says Dr Neumann. “After a certain amount of time, they will have found the best route to the food – problem solved. We can also solve human problems using the same principles through computer algorithms.”

Isn’t improving a technology, any technology, a worthwhile thing? This kind of gleeful ignorance, and the vapid enthusiasm with Anthony’s readers join in, reveals a disheartening narrow-mindedness.

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.

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.

Demented thinking: Copenhagen didn’t work – but taxes will

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“Demented thinking: Copenhagen didn’t work – but taxes will“. Climate economist William Nordhaus says in the January 2011 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that carbon taxes are the best approach to achieve significant emissions reductions. Anthony Watts says “no way! Taxes are always bad!” and then posts the press release. Thus disproving Global Warming. Anthony’s readers supply the elaborate economic and political insights.

From the press release:

[William Nordhaus] says that it is necessary to raise the price of carbon to implement carbon policies so that they will have an impact on everyday human decisions, and on decision makers at every level in every nation and sector. At present, incentives and levels of involvement vary, and where some countries have implemented strong emission control measures, they only cover a limited part of national emissions. – Eureka Alert Press Release, Jan 5, 2011.

I really don’t know what the best political solution is for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, but I’m willing to try anything that seems effective.

Funny, Anthony didn’t draw attention to this article from the same issue – Global warming: How skepticism became denial. Here’s the abstract:

The conversation on global warming started in 1896, when a physical chemist estimated that the mean global temperature would rise several degrees if the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was doubled. The topic eventually became one of the most passionate in the history of science. The author points out that climate experts were initially strongly skeptical of the theory of global warming; it took a variety of evidence to gradually convince them that warming due to human emissions was likely. The public, however, was guided away from this conclusion by a professional public relations effort, motivated by industrial and ideological concerns. Deniers of the scientific consensus avoided normal scientific discourse and resorted to ad hominem attacks that cast doubt on the entire scientific community—while disrupting the lives of some researchers. The author points out that scientists have failed to mount a concerted public relations campaign to defend their position. When trust is lost, he asserts, a determined effort is needed to restore it.

The Met Office Bullhockey

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“The Met Office Bullhockey“. Anthony Watts joins the Met Office criticism that is suddenly, but purely by chance, reappearing across the denialist blogosphere. Anthony says (I think he’s talking about the Met Office, not the denialist assault):

The spin you are about to witness is Maytag quality spin. It is shameless, stupid, and beyond anything I’ve ever seen.  Both James Delingpole and Autonomous Mind take the Met Office out for a spin cycle that ends up in a full stop. The propaganda is shameless, the smell odious, and the public relations disaster is even worse than before. They apparently just don’t know when to stop talking.

So what are the charges? Apparently the Met Office was incompetent because they were making long-term predictions, and now they’re incompetent because they’re not making long-term predictions. Their long-term predictions were bad because they were wrong, but now they’re bad because they are right. Pavlovian conservative pundit James Delingpole at the Telegraph says so, and he’s alway on the up-and-up.

You know what this means, don’t you? There’s a conspiracy afoot! Can’t win for losing…

It’s such a cold December: 2010 ends on a chilly note where people live

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“It’s such a cold December: 2010 ends on a chilly note where people live“. Another Guest Post for Anthony Watts, by Ryan Maue, once again proving that there is no Global Warming. Did you know that December 2010 was cold in some places? It’s the final nail in the coffin the Global Warming myth!

However Ryan’s not going to talk about the inconvenient fact that the full year was actually rather hot until the “government temperature keepers” release their analyses. Nice side-stepping!

Instead we get a simplistic series of excuses:

  1. Mutterings about weather fluctuations.
  2. Invocation of “regional variation”.
  3. Casual dismissal of the places where there happens to be the most warmth (Ryan actually says, with an apparently straight face, that “You’ll hear a lot about the historically warm Arctic, but who cares at this point, no one lives there and it is still plenty cold.”).
  4. Allusions to governmental conspiracies (“It’s a foregone conclusion that the official government data from whatever nation or agency will show that 2010 was the hottest year ever.  It just has to be that way“).
  5. An attempt to minimize the factual record 2010 temperature by suggesting that it’s only slightly record-breaking.

So for Global Warming to be true the evidence has to be homogenous, continuous, and in large steps? How scientific.

The Antithesis

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“The Antithesis”. Christmas Guest pudding from William McClenney, of a particularly turgid variety. If you can trudge through it all, let me know if I got this wrong…

William joins the long list of denialists who think they can argue that slow geological events in the past are equivalent to today’s rapid climate change. Not particularly original, nor particularly interesting.

His entertaining version of the “precautionary principle” is a take on an old denialist delaying tactic. What if, instead of trying to stabilize CO2 at what we think are natural levels, we should be raising it? The fatalist version of denialist “precaution” saves effort at the expense of everything else.

This paragraph particularly annoyed me for its fundamental anti-science:

“An astute reader might have gleaned that even on things which have happened, the science is not that particularly well settled. Which makes consideration of the science being settled on things which have not yet happened dubious at best.”

So every time we are able to improve accuracy of for example, an age estimate, we are in fact proving that science isn’t useful? Dumb.

Terence Kealey: What Does Climategate Say About Science?

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“Terence Kealey: What Does Climategate Say About Science?“ “John A” offers a copy and paste of an anti-science rant from The Global Warming Policy Foundation. Dr. Terence Kealey says that scientists have always been secretive and untrustworthy. After-all, Pythagoras had Hippasus drowned for refusing to retract a mathematical discovery!

The Climategate stuff, the Hockey Stick (ignoring all the independent validations) and the IPCC’s editing error about Himalayan glacier retreat are apparently all just modern examples of the same venality. Keep a close eye on them bastards.

But surely we can trust “citizen-scientists” and Dr. Kealey himself.

Amusingly, most of Anthony’s commenters assume that Kealey’s science philosophy essay is an excuse for the supposedly awful things that Climategate supposedly revealed. In fact, he’s condemning all scientists. Talk about poor reading comprehension… I think his preference is for some kind of libertarian free-for-all.

Here are Kealey’s conclusions (italics mine):

To conclude, therefore, scientists are not disinterested, they are interested, and as a consequence science is not dispassionate or fully transparent, rather it is human and partially arcane. As I argue elsewhere, science is not the public good of modern myth, it is a collegiate and quasi-private or invisible college [sic] good.4 That means, by the way, that it requires no public subsidies. More relevantly, it means that individual scientist’f [sic] pronouncements should be seen more as advertisements than as definitive.

Peer review, too, is merely a mechanism by which scientists keep a collective control over access to their quasi-private enterprise. One the e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia included this from Professor Phil Jones, referring to two papers that apparently falsified his work:- ”I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

So what? Climategate tells us no more than the philosophers of science have long told us about research, and the public should be less naive.

Here’s my conclusion: No rational person would maintain that “scientists” are completely impervious to human emotions and self-interest. However the system of public scrutiny that has been in place for centuries has done a good job of assessing and validating scientific claims. Dr. Kealey’s essay is nothing more than libertarian posturing.

Where, maybe, do Dr. Kealy’s criticisms apply? Perhaps to the secretive corporate research typically conducted in the pharmaceutical industry. But then that’s exactly what he seems to be holding up as a model!