Category Archives: Anti-Science

New tool for climate change prediction – broken glass

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“New tool for climate change prediction – broken glass“. What are those crazy scientists up to now? Broken glass predicts climate change? I’m totally with Anthony Watts on this one, those climatologists have gone ’round the bend!

Oh. They’re just making a comparison between how dust and glass fractures, with new implications for the amount of dust in the atmosphere. What the hell was Anthony’s point?

From the article:

Physicists have long known that certain brittle objects, such as glass, rocks, or even atomic nuclei, fracture in predictable patterns. The resulting fragments follow a certain range of sizes, with a predictable distribution of small, medium, and large pieces.

Scientists refer to this type of pattern as scale invariance or self-similarity.

Physicists have devised mathematical formulas for the process by which cracks propagate in predictable ways as a brittle object breaks.

Kok theorized that it would be possible to use these formulas to estimate the range of dust particle sizes. By applying the formulas for fracture patterns of brittle objects to soil measurements, Kok determined the size distribution of emitted dust particles.

To his surprise, the formulas described measurements of dust particle sizes almost exactly.

Anthony finds an example of the thoughtful application of physical theory, and his response is derisive mockery. Now there’s an insight!

Prediction is hard, especially of the future.

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“Prediction is hard, especially of the future.“ Willis Eschenbach tries to convince us that “problems” with 20 year-old computer models mean that we can’t trust the new ones.

Did Hansen, et. al.’s 1992 prediction Potential climate impact of Mount Pinatubo eruption really “miss the mark”? After all, they did predict a “3 sigma” event and the result was only a “2.1 sigma” event… It seems that they correctly predicted the temperature drop duration but over-estimated the scale. Not too shabby for 20 year-old model run with 20 year-old computer horsepower.

Of course Willis doesn’t give any hard numbers for his suggestion that their prediction “failed”. Couldn’t find an Excel formula for that, Willis?

And how did the much more relevant climate model prediction, 20 more years of increasing global temperatures, work out? Oh yeah, that’s what we’ve had. Willis’ insights are no better that Yogi Berra’s.

This is all just an attempt to prop up denialist obstructionism by suggesting that since we can’t predict the future perfectly we should never take any kind of preventative action at all.

Simple Physics – In reality my feather blew up into a tree

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“Simple Physics – In reality my feather blew up into a tree“. Christmas Guest pudding from Barry Woods. Do you know that climatology theories are only correct under ideal laboratory conditions? After all, the cannonball and the feather only fall at the same rate if there is no wind (hence odd reference to feathers in the post title). This means that in the real world climatology theories can’t possibly be right! Actually, I think “simple physics” says that’s true if they are in a vacuum.

Barry’s hopeful and yet flawed logic lets him grudgingly admit that yes, CO2 can produce a greenhouse effect in glass tube, but continue to stoutly deny that it operates out here in “the real world.”

Too bad climatology principles are actually well-supported by empirical results.

Climate Change and the Corruption of Science: Where did it all go wrong?

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“Climate Change and the Corruption of Science: Where did it all go wrong?“. Christmas Guest pudding from Bernie Lewin. Apparently Global Warming is just a way to use apocalyptic scenarios to generate social panic and maintain political power. And the scientists all jumped onboard because they like the attention.

So all the denialist rants about conspiracies, lying scientists, and impending secret world governments is just a rational response?

That’s funny, cause I thought the fundamental basis for Global Warming denialism was right-wing interests exploiting paranoia over perceived threats to autonomy to protect their own power.

Do We Care if 2010 is the Warmist Year in History?

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“Do We Care if 2010 is the Warmist Year in History?“. The new denialist talking point emerges! Who cares if 2010 was the warmest year ever? Ira Glickstein says (well, suggests) that it’s all because of lying corrupt climatologists making malicious adjustments anyway!

Keep talking about that, but remember to add a caveat like:

“What does this all mean? Is this evidence of wrongdoing? Incompetence? Not necessarily.”

A few years ago there was debate about whether 1998 or 1934 was the hottest year ever, but the climatologists made 1998 the hottest year with their evil adjustments! They’re probably doing it again.

Next problem.

Australia’s white summer, Monbiot’s red fury

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“Australia’s white summer, Monbiot’s red fury“. Watt a surprise, Anthony Watts drawing our attention to a freak weather event in Australia. This must surely prove that there’s no Global Warming! Anthony also stretches his mental capacity to compare the size of Australia to America and to Europe. Anthony is mad that environmental reporter George Monbiot consulted “the kids at the Climate Rapid Response Team“, aka professional climate scientists, to understand this Australian weather. How dare he!

Don’t you know that if you cherry-pick a small enough smoothing radius you can make big holes appear in the global temperature data maps? I’m surprised that Anthony doesn’t try to claim that all smoothing is false and present a temperature data map with 99.9% “no data”.

Changing your color scheme to assign ‘bluer’ colors to warm temperatures also helps make things look ‘cooler’. Presumably Anthony thinks that every year those corrupt mainstream climatologists have been slightly changing their color schemes to look make the same temperatures look ‘redder’.

 

Hmmm... Dr. Spencer's map is pretty red. He must be in on the plot now too.

 

Anthony has to come up with something to distract from the fact that 2010 has proven the hottest year in the instrument record even with only a moderate El Niño influence. (Note: who cares about one year? That’s a denialist distraction. It’s the long-term trend that matters.)

Further more, we learn that the weather stations in remote Greenland communities are clearly affected by the urban heat island effect. Anthony’s speculation proves it! (Maybe this particular rant was a bit of nostalgia for the old days when Anthony regularly tried to get away with this UHI b.s.)

Monckton’s Mexican Missive #4

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“Monckton’s Mexican Missive #4“. The majestic Lord Monckton pontificates from the UN’s Cancun climate conference. After an extended round of ponderous word-play spiced with outdated slang and dime-store novel-writing (“a shapely sigh”?) that reveal Monckton’s true calling as a cocktail party clown we get a sudden, shocking, blast of pure realization.

The Lord has finally whipped out a cocktail napkin to produce “the very first serious calculations” that prove Global Warming (which isn’t happening) is too expensive to fight! It will cost $34 trillion to prevent 1°C of warming! Plus or minus a dollar.

My eyes are starting to ache from all the rolling.

A helpful note to Dr. Eric Steig

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“A helpful note to Dr. Eric Steig“. Anthony Watts casts about for something critical to say about “perfesser” Eric Steig, whose 2009 paper on Antarctic warming trends was supposedly refuted by Anthony’s team-mates, O’Donnell, Lewis, and McIntyre. In this case “refuted” means that they packaged the data slightly differently and got slightly different warming trends. Thus revealing once and for all (the denialists shouted) that Global Warming isn’t happening.

Here’s the response to a comment by “MapleLeaf” at Real Climate that has Anthony foolishly yelling “gotcha!”

And why did WUWT show an image that appears to have less warming than the one shown here by Eric? Sorry but I have to fault you both there..the figures should show for what season they are valid, or if they are for annual temperatures.

[The figure here shows O’Donnell’s et al.s reconstruction for the same time period as our Nature cover image. These are annual mean estimates. I cannot speak to WTF WUWT has done.–eric]

So what is Anthony’s “gotcha” advice to Dr. Steig? It wasn’t Anthony who used temperature color bands that visually minimized warming in the Antarctic temperature anomaly map shown on Watts Up With That, it was someone else! Ooh, snap! Anthony just blindly copied and pasted it, like the alert “skeptic” he is, so you can’t blame him for any graphics shenanigans. Take that “perfesser”, you were impugning the wrong website!

There was much denialist lip-licking when this paper was in preparation. Finally the virtuous scientist-citizens were going to show the corrupt climatologists how to do science… Too bad that in the end the authors had to conform to reality and found themselves the proud owners of a dud. From O’Donnell’s closing comments:

In my opinion, the Steig reconstruction was quite clever, and the general concept was sound.

Poor  Anthony’s looking for a way to pretend the denialist firecracker didn’t fizzle.

Knobs

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“Knobs“. Anthony Watts gives us another example of Willis Eschenbach grappling with the English language, along with more of his goofy charts. In this case he’s directing his “scientific scrutiny” at Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature, a paper that appeared back in the October 15th 2010 volume of Science. There’s some useful coverage of it at Climate Progress.

So many words for so little value. Willis’ concern about the paper’s “theoretical claim” that “global net advective energy transports must equal zero” boils down to intentional obtuseness about basic physics. His complaint about computer modeling (which of course can never be trusted and are never useful) of an atmosphere without CO2 is another example of simplistic misrepresentation and trying to recycle unsupported denialist theories about cloud feedback.

Anthony brought this report to his readers ‘critical attention’ back in October with nothing more than an allusion to “last ditch effort” to fight “falling public opinion” (keep saying it Anthony, keep saying it). The comments were, as always, a sea of enthusiastic ignorance.

Interestingly, the corresponding author is Andrew Lacis, whom denialists tried to claim earlier this year as a dissenting climatologist by misrepresenting his remarks from back in 2005 about a draft of the IPCC’s AR4 report. Guess he’s back on the naughty list.

Arsenic and post-haste: another example of the broken peer review process turned “science by press release”

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Arsenic and post-haste: another example of the broken peer review process turned “science by press release”. A NASA news report made an eye-opening announcement about “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Arsenic-based bacterium were found by astrobiologists in Mono Lake, suggesting that we should widen our search criteria for extraterrestrial life. Turns out that the scientist’s conclusions may be flawed. They’re probably just a regular phosphate-based bacterium that can tolerate high arsenic concentrations. Interesting though.

Anthony Watts’ take on this? Maybe that the scientific publication process catches these kinds of problems? No. Maybe that results that aren’t approved by the existing, and oppressive, “consensus” can be published? No.

Anthony’s conclusion is that scientists are defensive egotists. And that “peer review” failed, somehow. Therefore scientific criticism of denialism must also be flawed.

Guess what, Anthony. That was science in action, not blog-blather. Scientists reported their discovery, other scientists examined it skeptically, knowledge was advanced. One “tribe” didn’t defeat the other. Publication of results isn’t the finish line, it’s the first lap.

Can Anthony really say that “NASA again has egg of [sic] their faces”? No. He’s just trying to opportunistically smear this minor controversy over to the field he’s trying to discredit NASA in.