Category Archives: Dog-whistle

Under the “Weather”

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So I’ve been knocked out for a few days by a bad bout of the flu and while I’ve been “under the weather” Anthony Watts has been busy once again talking about weather as if it was climate. (It’s not.) Let’s see what we’ve got.

The Guardian hounds CRU with new reports. Anthony got into a tizzy when he thought that The Guardian might be swallowing the “skeptical” science, but decided it was actually a set-up for some “MSM” “consensus” rebuttals.

LBNL on Himalayas: “greenhouse gases alone are not nearly enough to be responsible for the snow melt”. The Himalayan glaciers are declining because of black carbon aerosols, not CO2 warming! Them scientists are hiding the truth from us. Except they quote a paper by someone named James Hansen talking about exactly this factor…

Lord Monckton wows Melbourne. Do I even have to comment on this one?

Telegraph: India to ‘pull out of IPCC’. Politics, apparently, disproves science.

WSJ op ed – IPCC “Omitted: The bright side of Global Warming”. Ah yes, the bright side. Plants grow faster with more CO2, just ask any greenhouse operator, so keep it coming! Some drought-stricken areas might get more rain (and some will get less…)! Why do denialists happily trumpet any vague suggestion of climate change benefits, but demand absolute certainty about the risks?

UAH global temperature posts warmest January. Dr. Roy Spencer grudgingly blogs that January 2010 has been the warmest on record, but defends his use of deceptive running averages.

Major snowstorm headed for eastern US. Snow in winter! This disproves Climate Change.

Israeli study shows variable sea level in past 2500 years. Sea level goes up and down all the time. Who knows why?

More on Ocean Heat Content and recent revisions to the data: Another “look! they changed the data!” reminder post. Actually, they corrected it modestly. But nothing like suggesting that the data is bad even when it isn’t.

Spencer: Record January warmth is mostly sea. Dr. Spencer blogs that the record warmth is mostly as sea and uses a head-scratching scatter-plot of the anomalies between two different satellite instruments to suggest that everything is OK for denialists. Dr. Spencer’s problems with meaningful data presentation is well-known.

Flashback to 2007 – SST to plunge again? A post by Steven Goddard (geologist?) hoping that Dr. Roy Spencer’s admission that January 2010 as warmest ever is just a blip, because gosh it’s winter now, and it sure isn’t as warm as it was last summer. And El Niño. Entertainingly, Steven calls Dr. Spencer “one of the most trustworthy players in climate science”. Here’s an example of  Dr. Spencer’s woeful track record.

NOAA: All time record snowfall for DC and Baltimore? Another post about the approaching big storm in the northeastern USA bringing heavy snowfalls. Surely Anthony, as an ex-weatherman, knows that cold air doesn’t hold as much moisture as warm air and hence produces less snow? Of course he does, but mentioning it doesn’t serve his purpose.

Inconvenient truth in Britain – scepticism on the rise: A British poll showing that belief in Man-made climate change is declining. This indicates, sadly, increased confusion among the public and not a disproof of the scientific facts. A rise in real skeptical thinking would be great news.

Blizzard Warning for DC, NYT: “Capital Is Crippled as Blizzard Continues”. One more kick at implying that snowstorms prove that Climate Change is a lie.

Well, that’s it. Looks like Dr. Spencer came in for a bit of a whipping in this session.

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.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography cheapens itself by using the “D” word

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Today Watts Up With That? commented about a statement by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography titled A Response to Climate Change Denialism. The statement is actually a pretty clear “executive level” defense of the conclusions of mainstream climatolgists. The Watts Up post primarily objects to the use of the word “denialist”, which denialists are very sensitive about, and accuses Scripps of name-calling and politicization. But that’s the tag you get stuck with when you have a pattern of ignoring or proposing repeatedly debunked alternatives to every logical scientific theory or pattern of historical facts about Climate Change that you don’t like.

Coleman's CornerAccording to the post, somehow the Scripps statement is a same-day response to elderly weatherman John Coleman’s denialist “Special Report” Global Warming: The Other Side that aired exclusively on San Diego’s independent station KUSI (also San Diego’s source for The Jerry Springer Show and Judge Judy). You can track it down on YouTube as well. Pretty quick work if true, and it’s comforting to think that an internationally renowned research centre is keeping such a close watch on community news.

So why is this statement being mentioned on Watts Up? It’s called a dog-whistle. The post encourages readers to bombard the Scripps Institution’s administrators and staff with e-mails. Going forward, Anthony’s audience will be able to “know” that anything the Scripps Institution says “is biased” and can safely ignore research from Scripps that challenges their disbelief in AGW.