Category Archives: Character Assassination

Flashback: U.S. Data Since 1895 Fail To Show Warming Trend

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“Flashback: U.S. Data Since 1895 Fail To Show Warming Trend“. Anthony Watts posts this report from the New York Times on Global Warming back in 1989. It’s an inadvertent admission that the “MSM” were once “skeptical” about climate change. Hmm, wonder what happened?

Anthony intent is to show that Climatologist Dr. James Hansen has changed his scientific opinion and is thus a slippery fellow. But isn’t that actually a sign of scientific integrity? When the data evolves so should your understanding. Anthony also can’t resist a bit of Gore-bashing and some dark hints about “world policy” (code for the unseen commie world gubmint). Anthony also fails to note that the article in question refers to the US temperature record, not the global one. This is a long-standing denialist “trick”.

Here’s an entertaining quote from the article: “One aspect of the study that Dr. Hanson said was interesting was the finding that the urbanization of the United States has apparently not had a statistically significant effect on average temperature readings.” Even twenty years ago Anthony’s big idea had been disproven!

Breaking News: IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri to face independent inquiry

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“Breaking News: IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri to face independent inquiry“. Anthony Watts reports a rumor from The Daily Telegraph, a chronically dishonest source on climate change. There’s no question that the denialist onslaught on Dr. Pachauri has created political pressure. Just not scientific pressure… Dr. Pachauri is approaching Al Gore in Anthony’s symbol-fixated mind.

It’s always entertaining to consider that Dr. Pachauri was installed as IPCC Chairman as a result of lobbying by the Republican administration of George W. Bush because they felt he was a tacit supporter of the denialist movement. Unfortunately he developed an “inconvenient” perspective when he started reading the incoming reports.

Pachauri’s TERI institute golf course – water hog in a city desperate for fresh water

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“Pachauri’s TERI institute golf course – water hog in a city desperate for fresh water“. Anthony Watts reports that there’s a golf course on the grounds of the TERI Institute in India. Clearly IPCC Chairman Rajenda Pachauri is personally corrupt and must be fired or resign in humiliation. Thus ending global warming for ever.

After two years of stonewalling, NASA GISS FOIA files are now online

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After two years of stonewalling, NASA GISS FOIA files are now online. Anthony thanks the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-wing lobbying operation, for “obtaining” correspondence from NASA’s GISS about temperature data sets after a “two-year battle”. This will predictably be quote-mined for spinnable snippets just as the stolen CRU e-mails were.

Daily Mail: The Jones U-turn

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Today’s installment starts with Anthony Watts worrying that some of his favorite “scientists” might have been killed at University of Alabama in Huntsville. Which would clearly be another desperate attempt of the secret world gubmint to prevent noble denialists from revealing the truth. Not to worry though, they were both busy elsewhere doing important research making a video with denialist weatherman John Coleman. Everything’s OK! By the way Anthony; three biologists died.

Next up is this gem from the some scientific geniuses were opposed by their contemporaries, therefore denialists are also geniuses file by half-assed geologist Steven Goddard: Are Scientists Always Smart? Steven discusses the long resistance to the idea of “continental drift” and manages to conclude that resisting evidence of AGW is just like defending evidence of continental drift! No Steven; you’re the one who is squeezing your eyes shut. Continental drift is actually a good case study of scientific progress, too bad it undermines the point you thought you were making…

Congenital Climate Abnormalities. Yet another statistically ignorant round of hand waving, this time by Willis Eschenbach, showing how climate trends in one place prove that there is no global warming trend. Except his example actually shows a… warming trend.

A yawner about 49 States with snow. One more time Anthony: warmer moist air produces higher snowfall, not colder dry air.

Scripps: Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse Possibly Triggered by Ocean Waves. Anthony takes the opportunity to prove his ignorance of ice physics. The original paper’s analysis is interesting, but Anthony’s just preparing the ground for a rearguard action on future reports of declining Antarctic ice volume.

Tisdale on the importance of El Nino’s little sister – recharging ocean heat content. Bob Tisdale loves distract the debate by talking about the El Niño and La Niña Pacific Ocean circulation patterns. Well they’re real and they’re actively studied, but they’re short-term… Regardless, look for Anthony to post about this again in another week or two.

Daily Mail: The Jones U-turn. Here’s this episode’s red meat. Anthony tells us that Conspiracist-in-Chief Dr. Phil Jones admits there has been no warming since 1995!!!!!!! Except the Daily Mail article is a lie. What Dr. Jones said was that, because of a variety of factors, the warming that has occurred over the time period of 1995 to 2009 doesn’t quite reach the desired statistical confidence. Dr. Jones was at pains to be honest and factual, but Anthony and his team jump in with both feet to do the opposite.

Phil Jones momentous Q&A with BBC reopens the “science is settled” issues. Right-wing economist Indur M. Goklany tries to dissect Dr. Jones’ scientific responses from a Q&A session sentence by sentence and merely confuses himself.

New paper on mathematical analysis of GHG. Israeli economists adamantly refute AGW with statistics in a submitted, but not yet accepted, paper! Well, that’s settled, another triumph for economics over the reality! [2010-03-06 Update: “Rabett” has turned his attention to this foolishness…]

Christy and McKittrick in the UK Times: doubts on station data. Anthony approves of discredited UK denialist journo Jonathan Leake trying to pump up Christy and McKittrick’s second (third? fourth?) kick at the we can’t trust any of those darn thermometers anyway thing. This is Anthony’s personal obsession after all.

The Snow Line is Moving South. Anthony got this wrong for the twentieth time just a day ago, Steve Goddard shows that he’s a faithful sidekick by going along for the intentionally simplistic ride.

Dalton Minimum Repeat goes mainstream. Anthony just loves the sunspot stuff. It shows… something, apparently. Well, actually it doesn’t.

Penn State report on Mann: new investigation to convene.

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Gotta love the way Anthony Watts makes lemonade out of lemons! Today Penn State issued a report on their investigation into denialist charges that Dr. Michael Mann was a no-good dirty rat. Three of the four allegations were dismissed as completely without substance and the fourth equally dodgy allegation has, on a technicality, been passed on to a new panel of knowledgeable faculty members. Anthony naturally presents this as Dr. Mann now being the “subject of [a new] upcoming investigation”. I guess he’s hoping for a Hail Mary play. Kind of like every other denialist end-game.

Love this post too: BBC asks WUWT for help. Apparently the Beeb was looking for “UK scientists in current academic posts who are sceptical about AGW”. None found, they have turned to a TV weatherman (and high school graduate) for advice.

NASA Still Spreading Antarctic Worries. This is a post by Anthony’s associate Steven Goddard, allegedly a geologist. In a classic example of linear thinking (literally), Steven says that it will take over 18,000 years for the Antarctic ice cap to melt at current rates, so why worry?

More solar mutterings in Solar Cycle 24 Update. Anthony likes to post irrelevant discussions about solar cycles in order keep the “maybe it’s all just the Sun” thing occupying the minds of suggestible denialists.

Anthony has posted ClimateGate Timeline: 30 years in the making, a nice big busy info-graphic by Mohib Ebrahim “an amateur astronomer” who has “always been an AGW skeptic because of synchronous warming on neighbouring planets” (not) and has also read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. You know what they say about idle hands.

This post is fun: Forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. It’s a dog-whistle for the idiotic idea that CO2 is good for plants, so the more we have the better! Some right-wing lobbyists actually aired TV commercials extolling this lunacy last year in the USA.

NWFS Winter Weather Wackiness

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Rule Number One with Anthony Watts: there are no days off. Eight posts since we last checked in. What do we have?

More complaints about the IPCC using information from sources that Anthony doesn’t like. Snap!

More “he said/she said” obsession with IPCC Chairman Dr. Pachauri.

All unusual weather, whether warmer or colder, most definitely proves once and for all that Climate Change is a lie. Ice in China (in the winter)! Snow in Colorado (in the winter)! Sea-level has naturally been rising for 20,000 years (um, there’s a difference between known natural patterns and the human activity that has overwhelmed them)! The GISS temperature dataset is not an exact duplicate of the hadCRUT temperature dataset! 1998 was warmer than 2005 (err, in a couple of places)! Anthony thinks that “devastating” is the same word as “deadly”! There’s no drought in the western US (except in the places where NOAA says there are) because there weren’t any Hummers in Arizona in 1400!

Anthony reports excitedly that Lord Lawson’s UK “Global Warming Policy Foundation” front group is still stirring around in the muck that the denialists have spread about the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. I guess they hope that 355th time’s the charm.

But no mention of the fact that Watts-approved journalist and truth-seeker David Rose has been shown to have falsely represented (here, here, and here) the scientists dragged into the puffed-up Himalayan glacier controversy.

Climategate: The CRUtape Papers

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Here’s our first coverage of a Watts Up With That? post!

Yesterday Anthony Watt promoted a friend’s breathless self-published analysis of the CRU e-mails, Climategate: The CRUtape Letters. (Some of the unguarded personal correspondence to and from climatologists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit was illegally obtained and released by unknown parties in November of 2009.) From published excerpts the authors seem to have added a layer of self-congratulatory “context” to guide willing readers toward their conclusions while studiously ignoring any credible explanations.

The trumpeted revelations of collusion and fraud purportedly in these e-mails were presented as a fatal indictment of the evidence for global warming as well as the reputations of the climatologists in question. When the shouting died down the e-mails proved to show no evidence of data tampering or scientific obstruction. The accusations were fabricated from out of context phrases, presented in deliberately misleading ways, or ignored common scientific usage in favour of disingenuously naïve interpretations. Much was also made over remarks about out-dated programming code fragments that were never in fact used in published research. See The Associated Press’s analysis, Nature’s Dec. 3rd 2009 editorial. If the data sets these attacked climatologists use are excluded from global temperature trend plots there is effectively no difference in the result.

Anthony also quotes their praise of his own surfacestations.org project, an ill-conceived Scout Troop-style project that failed in its attempt to prove that “bad” urban weather station data was giving a false impression of warming. (See here and here.)

The curious book title is presumably an allusion to The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis’ fictional correspondence between two demons about their failed attempts to corrupt a devout Christian. Denialists often try to paint conventional understanding of climate change as inflexible religious or political dogma, but in this particular instance the allusion suggests that the climatologist’s purported deceits have not “shaken the faith” of denialists.

2012-07-19 Update: Norfolk police have called off their investigation for procedural reasons, but state:

“However, as a result of our inquiries, we can say that the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU’s data files, carried out remotely via the internet. The offenders used methods common in unlawful internet activity to obstruct inquiries. There is no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved in the crime.”