Category Archives: Anti-Science

An over the top view of satellite sensor failure

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“An over the top view of satellite sensor failure“. You know someone’s gone “off the reservation” when even Anthony Watts can’t choke down a ‘warmist’ conspiracy theory about temperature records. Apparently his readers have clamored for him to spread the word.

Respected American physicist, Dr Charles R. Anderson has waded into the escalating Satellitegate controversy publishing a damning analysis on his blog. (from “co2 insanity”)

Dr. Anderson is an elderly materials scientist with a sudden interest in, and woefully limited understanding of, satellite temperature measurements. It’s not normal, expected and correctable instrument issues. No, it’s a deliberate conspiracy to falsify the readings! A classic of going emeritus.

I can’t help but admire in passing how Climate Change Dispatch describes Dr. Jones’ repeated exoneration by the many “Climategate” investigations: CRU’s Professor Phil Jones only escaped criminal prosecution by way of a technicality. Yeah, in that there wasn’t even a technicality that could be used against him.

NSF grants $700,000 for theater production on climate change

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“NSF grants $700,000 for theater production on climate change“. Tax money wasted on art? Outrageous. And on a topical subject that might accidentally trigger thinking? Art should distract, not stimulate, right Anthony? The New York Times has the whole awful story.

What was the National Science Foundation thinking? They’re “a federal agency that pays for science, engineering and mathematics research and education”! Oh. Education.

Anthony also reminds his readers that the IPCC Chair, Dr. Pachauri , wrote a novel. And he has long hair. Contemptible.

Delivering Messages Is Not Communicating

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“Delivering Messages Is Not Communicating“. Thomas Fuller rambles on in an “op ed” guest post about how “they” are losing the battle of “messages”. “They” need over-dramatize because:

there really isn’t enough data to make a definitive case for the type of climate change the establishment needs to command immediate and decisive action. (emphasis mine)

Andrew Montford’s book The Hockey Stick Illusion? Not defeated by a blog! Hah! Stephen Schneider’s paper about the credibility of climate change authors? Somehow, libelous! Environmental videos featuring exploding children? In poor taste! (I’ll give you that one.) Hair-splitting denialist scientists like Lindzen, Spencer, Christy? Still splitting hairs!

But what is the denialist messaging, Thomas? Climategate fraud accusations – proven to be fabricated. Political and legal attacks on scientists – proven to be unjustifiable. Statistical evidence disputing global warming – proven to be misreprentative.

Your ‘message’ is one of insinuation about their motives. “Their” message is that denialists are provably lying. Pick a side.

AMO+PDO= temperature variation – one graph says it all

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“AMO+PDO= temperature variation – one graph says it all“. If you’ve got a high-school science project, the “Science and Public Policy” Institute has a laser printer! Anthony Watts is eager to tell us about the latest final nail in the coffin of AGW from retired meteorologist Joe D’Aleo and geologist Don Easterbrook. Our hopeful contestants present Multidecadal Tendencies in ENSO and Global Temperatures Related to Multidecadal Oscillations. They’ve managed to force the US Mean Temperature to look like it’s a near-perfect match for ocean circulation patterns! Global Warming is dead! And it’s natural. Although they do admit that there is “some departure after around 2000.”

More wishful chart fiddling from denialists. After D’Aleo and Easterbrook.

How did they see what no-one else could? Well they chose their time period carefully so they could exclude the last ten years of warming that oppose the natural patterns. Then they smoothed the heck out of the data to artificially inflate the confidence of their results. Of course the AMO (detrended North Atlantic SST anomalies) and PDO (principal component analysis North Pacific SST anomalies, north of 20N) are incompatible values, so we have to wonder why they are combined. One graph does indeed say it all…

Of course, even if their claim withstood examination they still would have only found a correlation. Are the ocean circulation patterns driving air temperature, or vice versa, or is something else driving both? Joe and Don are silent on this interesting subject. Can you say anti-science?

Climatologists have no problem observing natural patterns in historical temperature data and proxies. They just also know that the recent global temperature increases do not follow any of these natural patterns.

Loehle: Vindication

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“Loehle: Vindication“. Craig Loehle uses Anthony Watts’ blog to declare “victory!” over criticisms of his 2008 temperature reconstruction, which claimed to overthrow Mann’s “hockey-stick” reconstruction, in the discredited journal Energy & Environment (A 2000 Year Global Temperature Reconstruction based on Non-Treering Proxy Data).

At the same time, I have been repeatedly insulted about it on the web. It is claimed that it has been debunked, is junk, that E&E is not a “real” journal, that I’m a hack, that I “only” used 18 series (though 2 were composites covering China & North America), etc. In the ClimateGate emails, Mann called it “awful” (which I’ll take as a compliment!). Lot’s of fun. In this post I demonstrate perhaps a little vindication.

Feel good to get that off your chest Craig?

Craig Loehle's misleading comparison of his discredited temperature reconstruction to a new one by Ljungqvist.

So was this victory achieved? Apparently through a new paper by Fredrik Ljungqvist called “A new reconstruction of temperature variability in the extra-tropical northern hemisphere during the last two millenia“, in Geografiska Annaler. And all Loehle has to do is cheat the charts a bit! Don’t align over the calibration period, center “on their respective long-term mean values”, ‘warm’ the new reconstruction a bit to get it closer to yours, use non-comparable baselines, and… victory!

An honest comparison of Loehle's proxy reconstruction. Loehle's is the red high one, Ljungqvist's is the green one in middle with the rest. By Zeke Hausfather

Funny that the Ljungqvist abstract ends with this, uh, inconvenient quote (underline mine):

Our temperature reconstruction agrees well with the reconstructions by Moberg et al. (2005) and Mann et al. (2008) with regard to the amplitude of the variability as well as the timing of warm and cold periods, except for the period c. ad 300–800, despite significant differences in both data coverage and methodology.

I guess Loehle and Anthony were too lazy to read the whole thing, even though they pasted it into their article. Is this what passes for “vindication” in denialist circles these days?

More follow up on the solar-neutrinos-radioactive decay story – experimental falsification

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“More follow up on the solar-neutrinos-radioactive decay story – experimental falsification“. A surprising report last month by physicists that claimed to have detected a variation in radioactive decay rates, which they attributed to solar neutrinos. The NIST has overturned this finding, concluding that the tiny variations arose from environmental conditions during the original study.

This means that you can never trust scientists. They’re sloppy and biased! Instead, trust the keen skepticism of Anthony Watts, he mumbled about this when the report first came out.

Where Consensus Fails – The Science Cannot Be Called ‘Settled’

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“Where Consensus Fails – The Science Cannot Be Called ‘Settled’“. Anthony Watts gives us another entertaining guest post by his Steven Goddard replacement, Thomas Fuller. Thomas tells us that back in 2008 Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch surveyed 379 “climate scientists” online. How would you answer a question like: “Some scientists present extreme accounts of catastrophic impacts related to climate change in a popular format with the claim that it is their task to alert the public. How much do you agree with this practice?” Well, you’re obviously a smart scientist who knows that AGW is all made-up!

To quote the report itself “The survey employed a non-probability convenience sample.” This is a sort of admission that the survey is completely untrustworthy. Just the kind of evidence Anthony Watts finds the most useful.

By the way, who is it that keeps claiming that believers in AGW say that “the science is settled”? Denialists do, that’s who, so they can claim imaginary victories over a straw-man. Informed participants know that we are constantly learning more about the historical evidence and mechanisms of Global Warming. It’s just that what we learn keeps agreeing with the AGW proposition…

NASA discovery: solar storms don’t always travel in straight lines

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“NASA discovery: solar storms don’t always travel in straight lines“. Anthony Watts posts another NASA news report, Solar Storms can Change Directions, Surprising Forecasters. A 2008 coronal mass ejection (CME) was observed by NASA’s STEREO-A and STEREO–B spacecraft. The researchers speculate that CME’s follow the sun’s curving magnetic field until they get swept up by the solar wind. The paper by Byrne et al, Propagation of an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection in three dimensions, is in the Sept. 21, 2010 issue of Nature Communications.

The Dec. 12, 2008 coronal mass ejection observed by STEREO. Source: NASA.

I guess Anthony thinks this report is helpful in suggesting that a) we don’t know anything about that big fiery ball in the sky, and b) them scientists are going to change their minds anyway, so don’t bother listening to them.

Ocean cooling contributed to mid-20th century global warming hiatus (and so did the PDO)

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“Ocean cooling contributed to mid-20th century global warming hiatus (and so did the PDO)“. Poor Anthony Watts seems in a foul mood here. Muttering about news story that doesn’t give him access to all the data, references to “public money”, particularly asinine comments about press release photos (where on earth does “grinning like a banshee” come from?), etc. You’d think he’d be clutching at a report about oceanic cooling with both hands…

Maybe he’s irritated that Dr. Phil Jones, who the denialists tried to bring down with the false “Climategate” controversy is publishing science again? Or is it that the paper discusses cooling, which the lying climatologists supposedly never talk about and he has no idea how to react.

So the paper in question is being published as a Letter in Nature titled An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970 (here’s the abstract). It says that “the hiatus of global warming in the Northern Hemisphere during the mid-20th century may have been due to an abrupt cooling event centered over the North Atlantic around 1970, rather than the cooling effects of tropospheric pollution.” Don’t you just hate it when scientists observe things and try to understand them?

Anthony spots professor David W.J. Thompson "grinning like a banshee".

Website News

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So I’m back again after another layoff… What was I up to? Well aside from returning to the algore secret world headquarters for new orders and getting my brain-washing topped up, I was enjoying a warm (too warm I tell myself ominously) month of summer training and racing in triathlons. I was also helping, in a small way, run the Toronto International Film Festival.

Of course Anthony Watts and friends have been busy without me. Unsurprisingly, they’ve said absolutely nothing new. The Arctic sea ice has continued to recede despite their daily protestations and crowing about momentary tiny reversals. They still darkly accuse reality-based scientists of being money-grubbing communist liars. They’re still finding phrases to work themselves into a lather over, with “global climate disruption” being the latest definitive evidence that “warmers” are slippery-tongued con artists. Apologies and retractions, as long after the fact as possible, as still trickling out of the deceived mainstream media. “Lord” Monckton is still threatening to sue anyone that criticizes him. Fox News cobbled together another collection of denialists to explain it all to their viewers.

What’s new? There have been some entertaining developments, randomly selected.

  • Judith Curry, the “climate scientist” who changed teams (err, tribes), has started blogging with the kind help of our friend Anthony Watts. The results are naturally mixed but perhaps the process will restore blood-flow to her brain.
  • Bjorn Lomsberg is now pretending that he never doubted global warming, he just wanted us to solve it with tech. Nice fig-leaf.
  • Anthony is trying to diversify into protecting Australian farmers from municipal gubmints. Good tie-in for the gubmint haters.
  • Steven Goddard has left his post (for “personal reasons”) at Watts’ Up With That’s Department of Arctic Sea Ice is Thicker Than Ever after he started snapping at his teammates again in his ferocious self-defense of factual ignorance. Never mind, Thomas Fuller is warming up in the bull(shit)-pen.
  • Anthony tells us once again that nothing man can do can have any impact, so why the fuss? Just ask any former professor, they’ll tell you that global warming is simply a “corrupt social phenomenon.”
  • Thomas Fuller tries to tell everyone that he’s just an open-minded guy who really does believe in global warming, just not that much. I guess Climategate slandering isn’t paying the bills after-all. The Way Things Break gives him a big hug.
  • Anthony gives some more support to right-wing think tank-er Indur Goklany’s kooky mantra that we should be fighting malaria with DDT (and Rachel Carson was a murderer) theory. This brought a snort of derision from Tim Lambert at Deltoid.

So much fun I’ve missed out on! Well time waits for no man.

I can make a small contribution here though. There were two films at Toronto International Film Festival that touched on climate change. Cool It was an uncritical documentary about Bjorn Lomberg and his ideas on climate change. I really wanted to catch a screening, but my schedule didn’t allow me to get to it. My contacts tell me that it was very poorly attended, but I would have loved the chance to see some of the local denialists bouncing around the 75 seat theater chosen to screen it in. The documentary Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, was also playing, it won the Cadillac People’s Choice Documentary Award. So much for the tide of public opinion turning against the “climate change alarmists”.