Category Archives: Character Assassination

Thanks to Michael Mann’s response, a newspaper censors a letter to the editor ex post facto

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Boom, sez Martin.

Boom, sez Martin.

“Thanks to Michael Mann’s response, a newspaper censors a letter to the editor ex post facto“ (2011-10-02). Anthony Watts tells us that Michael Mann, lead bully of “the Team”, has forced the proud Vail Daily to withdraw a Sept. 30th, 2011 Letter to the Editor from the skeptical mind of Martin Hertzberg, titled Vail Valley Voices: Researcher disputes evidence for global warming.

Could it be that Dr. Mann found Hertzberg’s analysis so embarrassingly accurate that he had to use his secret power connections to eradicate the hated thing? Hmm. No. Dr. Mann never made any such request.

What did he do? He wrote a response on Oct. 1st, 2011 that effectively started with this:

“It’s hard to imagine anyone packing more lies and distortions into a single commentary.”

Someone at the Vail Daily, whose brain cells happened to brush up against each other, had a look and realized that Dr. Mann was right. Really, really, right. The issue suddenly wasn’t about the noble rights of the upstanding Martin Hertzberg, self-identified “long-time denier of human-caused global warming”, to tell whopping great malicious lies. It was about whether the Vail Voice was legally exposed for carelessly spreading his false and defamatory statements. They chose to put as much distance as possible between themselves and what was clearly a piece of crap.

Anthony can’t even keep his indignation straight. He starts off implying that the Vail Daily is a noble vehicle for free speech, but turns on them with a series of nitpicking remarks intended to impugn their professionalism (does Dr. Mann live in Vail? I think not! Why the obsequious one day turnaround for Mann’s response? Why did the paper call Hertzberg a “denier”? Oh, that’s his self-description. Etc).

After all the howling it seems that the Vail Daily has re-posted the offending Letter to the Editor, apparently with some of the stupider things removed. What do we learn about Martin Hertzberg? He’s a big fan of the deceptive Oregon Petition. He knows that the greenhouse effect is “fear[ ]mongering hysteria… devoid of physical reality.” He considers anthropogenic CO2 emissions “about as significant as a few farts in a hurricane.” He’s heard of the Medieval Warm Period. He knows that diplomats and bureaucrats “have huge egos and a lust for power.” Finally, he’s a co-author of the idiotic Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, so he’s already had his ass kicked repeatedly on the same topics. I think Martin’s journey to the dustbin of history will be a short one.

In my opinion it’s better to leave these things “up” as originally posted and insert a correction at the start so they are in legitimate context and not left as unchallenged assertions. That way Anthony’s link to the Wikipedia entry for freedom of speech need not be indignantly displayed. I think he should have, uh, censored the sentence “In practice, the right to freedom of speech is not absolute in any country and the right is commonly subject to limitations, such as on libel, slander, obscenity, incitement to commit a crime, etc.” though, because that’s the exact issue here.

P.S. Anthony, I think your Latin’s a bit over-enthusiastic. Also the Sherlock Holmes-by-screen-capture schtick is wearing thin, especially in light of your coy pretense of ignorance about Martin Hertzberg’s denialist contributions. Don’t bury the lede.

2011-10-03 update: Some good coverage at caerbannog (Michael Mann opens a can of whupass on a global warming denier) and at Rabbet Run (It Must Be The Neighborhood).

ATI press release on the Mann UVA emails

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“ATI press release on the Mann UVA emails” (2011-08-27). Funny. You’d think that Anthony Watts would report the conclusions of the National Science Foundation Inspector General’s investigation into the accusation that climatologist, and denialist flash-point, Dr. Michael Mann falsified his data when he “created” the famous “hockey stick” historical temperature chart.

Instead Anthony offers the American Tradition Institute’s op-ed whining (italics mine).

The University of Virginia has joined a list of institutions claiming that there has been an actual inquiry into, and even ‘exoneration’ of, scientists exposed by the November 2009 “ClimateGate” leak, while simultaneously through its actions making a mockery of the idea.

Spoiler for you impatient types who can’t be bothered reading (or are trying to ignore) the National Tradition Science Foundation’s PDF:

We found no basis to conclude that the [Climategate] emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence.

Also,

There is no specific evidence that [Mann] falsified or fabricated any data and no evidence that his actions amounted to research misconduct.

Funny as in slapstick. Funny as in a bungled magician’s trick.

NASA’s Hansen asked to account for outside activities

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“NASA’s Hansen asked to account for outside activities“ (June 21st, 2011). Here’s another whopper from Christopher Horner of that home of scientific inquiry, the American Tradition Institute (an arm of the Competitive Enterprise Institute). Anthony Watts naturally jumps to endorse the accusation that “taxpayer-funded global warming activist” James Hansen receiving a “prize” is an ethical violation and that government scientists are clock-punching shift-workers…

Sez Anthony, “Gavin Schmidt’s time spent on editing realclimate.org during working hours apparently was the trigger for a broader investigation.”

Tip to Anthony: scientists are salaried employees, not hourly assembly line workers. The “broader investigation” Anthony tries to imply is simply think tank thug Christopher Horner speaking out of both sides of his mouth at once. Previously, Dr. Hansen’s involvement with the RealClimate website was decried as “advocacy” on government time, now it’s an “outside activity” that must be “accounted for”. Which is it? Do he really care?

ATI seeks to learn whether NASA approved Hansen’s outside employment, which public financial disclosures and other documents reveal to have brought him at least $1.2 million in the past four years. This money comes on top of and, more troubling from an ethics and legal perspective, is all “related to” and sometimes even expressly for his taxpayer-funded employment, all of which outside employment commenced when Hansen stepped up his “global warming” activism from his perch at NASA. – ATI press release.

I guess the attempts to undermine Hansen’s scientific claims are running out of steam; the harassment and personal attacks will continue though, they’re pretty much reflexive.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a more detailed look (who would have ever thought that Fox News would jump on a story like this?): Fox News Compares James Hansen’s Prizes for Truth Telling to Big Tobacco Paying a Doctor to Deny the Risks of Smoking.

Climate Progress blog shuts down – disappears all previous comments

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“Climate Progress blog shuts down – disappears all previous comments“ (May 30, 2011). Nothing like a measured response, eh Anthony? The Think Progress website underwent a redesign over the weekend and Anthony Watts is eager to give a definitive assessment:

It appears the mendacious Joe Romm has been given new marching orders by Center for American Progress Big Brother Blog: “Think Progress”. From what I make of it, it seems the management realized that CP just wasn’t holding much readership, as it looks like the same 30 commenters or so frequent the place.  Sooo…the spin is on. Joe’s doing his best to make his forced merger under Think Progress look like a win.

So none of the cool kids read Climate Progress, Anthony’s blog is way better anyway, and Joe Romm took his ball home (“disappears all previous comments”) because of all the mean things the cool kids, who never go there, were saying.

Reality: It was a website redesign! Sometime comments take a while to reconnect. It’s not a nefarious tactic to suppress the vigorous triumph of denialist criticisms. Climate Progress and Think Progress have always been closely linked, if anything it seems that “Think” will be promoting “Climate” more, not absorbing it.

Christ! Anthony’s grasp of website management is even worse than of climate science. And that is truly saying something. Anthony sounds like a kid who can’t best his school-yard rival hoping their parent will do it for them.

Here are a few Climate Progress posts about the process:

2011-08-24 Update: It took a while, but the old comments are finally up again. So much for Anthony’s accusations.

Scientific American’s interview with Dr. Richard Muller

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“Scientific American’s interview with Dr. Richard Muller“ (May 23, 2011). Anthony Watts has long resented Scientific American’s general scientific rationality. Just a few months ago they labelled his blog as a “well-known climate denier site” after-all. However, as we have seen across the popular press, the pretense of “balance” sometimes enables sloppy reporting of controversial topics to allow anti-scientific positions to gather support. Popular support fpr the disproven claim that the MMR vaccine triggers autism offers an excellent example.

Here we find Anthony practically wriggling like a puppy over his mention in Michael Lemonick’s lazy Sci Am interview of physicist Dr. Richard Muller about climate change science.

Both Steve McIntyre and I are mentioned prominently in the article, and once again Dr. Muller thanks us for our contributions to the debate.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress covers the Scientific American article at length, exposing Muller’s statements for their lack of both knowledge and integrity.

The otherwise inactive Dr. Muller injected himself into the Global Warming debate when he started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project. Denialists licked their chops at the thought of a temperature reconstruction that appeared impartial but came from a politically aligned source, but howled of betrayal when Dr. Muller’s first analysis reluctantly confirmed the existing science.

Still, Dr. Muller enthusiastically embraces the irrelevant nitpicking of citizen-scientists such as Steve McIntyre (contradicted in Scientific American itself back in 2009 “Novel Analysis Confirms Climate ‘Hockey Stick’ Graph“) and freely libels both long-standing climate experts such as Dr. Michael Mann and commentators such as Al Gore. Muller acknowledges the existence of “denialists” but fails to name any so it’s hard to know just how crazy you have to be for Muller to step back. You’re safe, Anthony!

Wegman paper retraction by Journal

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“Wegman paper retraction by Journal” (May 16, 2011). Anthony Watts tries to dismiss the retraction of the denialist’s beloved Wegman Report because of “the caterwaulings of the anonymous Canadian named Deep Climate and his accusations of plagiarism”. Anthony sneers: “congratulations to Deep Climate for being able to attack a man in another country without having having [sic] to put your name behind it. Such courage. You must be proud.”

I always get a chuckle when Anthony’s howls for blood flip to whimpers of pain. It’s purest irony when a victim-bully accuses someone of cowardice.

Unfortunately, Deep Climate’s accusations were true. Wegman’s Report to Congress in 2006 was a sloppy piece of work produced to meet the political needs of the denialist Republican Congressman Joe Barton. Although widely rebutted, denialists held the Report up as evidence of both faulty statistical underpinnings for Dr. Mann’s so-called global temperature “hockey-stick” and of corruption in the scientific publication process. That Report[‘s” social network” accusations were] hastily reworked as Said, Wegman, et. al. (2008) in the un-related journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis which has now, to their undoubted reluctant embarrassment, retracted it.

This is not a little technical “oops”, this is academic incompetence and ethical failure. Still, it’s an easy “spoonful of sugar” fix according to Anthony:

So, no problem from my view. I expect the report will be rewritten, with citations where needed, maybe even adding extra dictionary definitions of words and their origins to satisfy the imagined slights against our lexiconic ancestors envisioned by DC and Mashey man,  and they’ll resubmit it with the very same conclusions. That’s what I would do.

It sucks when something that denialists like yourself have been falsely clinging to for years is pulled down by a couple of intelligent observers, doesn’t it Anthony?

Extra irony: The Said, Wegman, et. al. (2008) paper was “personally reviewed” by CSDA chief editor Stanley Azen. Exactly the kind of cosy ‘social network’ peer-review manipulation they tried to accuse Dr. Mann and his co-authors of.

Update on May 18, 2011: Anthony has elaborated on his “no problem” plagiarism assessment, clarifying that he is in fact opposed to plagiarism. Also, Anthony has been the victim of it so he knows what he’s talking about. Anthony’s referring to the fact that someone (Dr. Menne) discourteously took his loud allegations of poor surface station data quality and proved him wrong using his own claims (this is now confirmed by Anthony’s own lame-duck paper). And then Menne failed to attribute a photo of a weather station to Anthony’s website!!!!!!!! Horrors. But that’s “attribution” not “plagiarism”.

Failing to make his case, James Hansen uses children as legal pawns

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“Failing to make his case, James Hansen uses children as legal pawns“(May 10, 2011). In case you’re wondering, Anthony Watts has no love for Dr. James Hansen. Hansen is a nasty man who shouldn’t be allowed to advocate for environmental protection. He’s also totally making all this CO2 stuff up and now he’s tricking children into being his “legal pawns”!

So what’s Anthony’s pretense for outrage (again) this time? Five of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit, which alleges that the US Federal government has failed in its duty to protect the atmosphere, are teenagers. How could teenagers ever get involved in the environmental movement without coercion? Clearly they are being exploited!

In other news, Anthony demands that kids get off his lawn.

As for the science bit of his griping, Anthony declares that the “Earth has had higher CO2 concentrations several times in its history [that would be a 600 million years] and it didn’t head to runaway roasting”, which will be little comfort to the species that were extinguished by those events. Anthony also claims that “there doesn’t seem to be” conclusive evidence of positive temperature feedback from increasing CO2 levels. This is the ‘cross our fingers and roll the dice’ argument.

I think the prescription for Anthony is more Hallmark Channel viewing.

The greens worst nightmare? A CO2 to Oil process

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“The greens worst nightmare? A CO2 to Oil process“. Anthony Watts projects his mental rigidity onto “the greens” when he posts a University of Minnesota press release titled U of M researchers close in on technology for making renewable “petroleum” using bacteria, sunlight and carbon dioxide.

Them greenies and climate scientists will be so mad when they can’t complain about oil companies! All that climate stuff is just an excuse I guess.

No thoughts about feasibility or production costs from our deep thinking Anthony, just misrepresentation in four words. The comments are an ocean of “greens hate everything”.

Craven Attention: The Sequel

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“Craven Attention: The Sequel“. Steven Mosher makes a funny joke about a name! Hee hee.

So Michael Oppenheimer delivered the American Geophysical Union’s 2010 Stephen Schneider Global Environmental Change Lecture on the topic of “Scientists, Expert Judgement and Public Policy” which, surprise, denialists twisted as encouraging scientists to lie if they felt it was justified.

In the panel discussion afterward, environmental activist Greg Craven, who had spoken passionately to the scientists earlier in the day, asked a lot of questions. Steven Mosher wrote a deprecating report of the discussion, characterizing Greg’s contribution as an even more emphatic urging of scientists to say whatever they felt would achieve their presumably noble goals.

Mosher’s “Craven Attention: The Sequel” post is attempt to turn a semi-apology for misrepresenting Greg’s statements into a new attack. It turns out Mosher was offering a “synopsis” of the “aftertaste” of Greg’s position, not his actual statements. Well no problem, right?

 

For those who haven’t seen it, Greg Craven’s “The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See” is on his website or YouTube.

 

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.