Climate change and “The Birds”. Anthony Watts mocks the Canadian Wildlife Service for reporting erratic bird behaviors in the Arctic. Apparently “only MSNBC could be relied upon to report such scary science news”. MSNBC link here. Sober reportage about Obama’s crypto-muslim background comes, of course, from Fox.
Not sure what drew out this latest juvenilia, other than resentment of MSNBC. Whatever.
“Conservamentalism“. Anthony Watts thinks that Willis Eschenbach dime-store ethics demonstrates a commendably virile approach to the environment.
It is not often that I turn a comment into a complete post, but this comment from Willis Eschenbach on the Trust and Mistrust article today, merits such a promotion. – Anthony
It seems Willis caught some flak in the comments from the “Tea Party” battalion for daring to express some “environmental” perspectives. How un-American.
Willis is quick to reassure every one of his manly credentials and propose a suitably red-blooded name for is perspective. No namby-pamby crying over sea pups for him. Kill what you eat, and eat your kill! He just wants to use resources efficiently.
Does Conservamentalism combine conservative with fundamentalism? No, conservation and environmentalism.
“A New And Effective Climate Model“. A 5,699 word guest post by Stephen Wilde, who has falsely identified himself as a meteorologist, states that existing climate models have “no predictive skill whatever despite huge advances in processing power and the application of millions or even billions of man hours from reputable and experienced scientists over many decades“. That’ll surprise the climatologists who have been predicting things pretty well for some time now.
But he’s here to set it all right. He’s got a “serious hypothesis”! It involves talking about “Solar surface turbulence”, boiling pots and sandwiches. Backed up by newspaper article references. Groan. Looks like textbook example of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
Why is Anthony posting this goof-ball rubbish? Oh I see. This line, buried 3/4 of the way down – “The contribution of the Greenhouse effect is miniscule.”
In spite of the generally credulous welcome given to this nonsense in the WUWT comments, Solar Physicist Leif Svalgaard makes this authoritative and entertaining comment, taking two sentences to address Wilde’s 5,699 words:
I think the first two points:
1: Solar surface turbulence increases causing an expansion of the Earth’s atmosphere.
2: Resistance to outgoing longwave radiation reduces, energy is lost to space faster.
are wrong, and hence the rest.
The part of the atmosphere [the thermosphere] that expands and contracts is 1 centimeter thick [if at same pressure as at the surface] and contains 1/1000,000 the number of molecules, so has no measurable effect on point 2.
“Chico’s new sustainable firefighting idea“. Anthony Watts has a bug in his ear about fire hydrants in particular and municipal politics in general. The fact that local “Chico State University has a large sustainability group that tries to impose all sorts of experimental ideas on local citizens” undoubtably gets under his skin. These hydrants have a “sustainable” rationale, so they must be another experimental idea being imposed on the local citizens…
Naturally Anthony misrepresents the issue by posting a photo of a ‘low-flow’ hydrant with a garden hose attached by what is obviously an adapter for a standard fire-hose connection. Shades of the goofy surfacestations.org project?
Why does the "low-flow" hydrant have a garden hose?
I feel sorry for the Council Members, newspaper editors and Rotary Club members that he’s apparently been pestering.
“Send in the toads to test for quakes“. Note: This is apparently not an April Fools joke. Anthony Watts’ latest copy-and-paste shows that when it comes to scientific enlightenment, he turns to right-wing political pundits. In this case, Andrew Breitbart.
A surface station!
This post is about an apparently anecdotal report of animal behavior, toads in this case, acting as an indicator of impending seismic activity. Goofy.
Wott's Up With That? 