Category Archives: Look Over There!

Smear campaign: “His judgment cometh and that right soon”

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Smear campaign: “His judgment cometh and that right soon” (2015-02-23). Dr. Willie Soon is an aerospace engineer affiliated (part-time) with the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics who publishes weak climate papers (always, always, with the same unsubstantiated “it’s all just natural solar variation” chant). He’s now been caught out by communists Greenpeace researchers. Seems Dr. Soon rarely discloses his fossil fuel industry backing in his publications, but boasts of his “deliverables” to the same buddies. Research to order, on the Q.T.

Dr. Willie Soon, rehydrating.

Anthony Watts has often snuggled up to Dr. Soon. Hand-waving about solar climate influences has been a great side-show for denialists, but it’s been hard for them to find a reliable figurehead for their obstruction. Being able to whisper “HArvard! SmithSONian!” must have been just irresistible. Dr. Soon’s work, while widely discredited, had a “sciencey” look and he made a great tame Republican witness in kangaroo court Senate Hearings.

The best Anthony can do is suggest that the benighted Dr. Soon is the victim of a smear campaign because, well, facts are smears. Then the usual Morris Dance ensues: invoke the malevolent “compliant media” and immediately talk about something else.

Did you know that “climate science is a huge money machine”? So what if Willie wanted a taste! Anthony tries to play the herd mentality card (I guess that makes Dr. Soon our latest Galileo, funny how he’s always reincarnated as a denialist these days) but doesn’t notice that each ‘overturned consensus’ came about through considering new evidence, not through pig-headed repetition of the same crap.

Butter wouldn’t melt in Anthony’s mouth though when he brazenly tries to invoke the e-mails of mainstream climate scientists targeted in the false “Climategate” uproar. They solicited funds from the energy industry too, although without the flirtatious promises, Willie’s just the latest nose in the trough! What were once vices are now virtues, the denialist outrage during Climategate is so yesterday.

Remember the whole “97% of climate scientists accept the evidence of global warming” thing? Guys like Willie Soon are the 3%.

“Follow the money” Anthony sagely advises, but he really wants to lead us down the garden path.

Bigger problems than global warming – NASA discovers 8 new dangerous near Earth asteroids

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“Bigger problems than global warming – NASA discovers 8 new dangerous near Earth asteroids“ (2015-01-19i). Red Alert! Anthony Watts wants us to know about Eric Worrall’s shocking discovery that there’s something we should all really be worried about! Meteors! Meteorites? NEOs? Stop worrying about so-called climate change (which is already affecting everyone on Earth and will steadily increase in impact) and start worrying about meteors, which may or may not strike the Earth and would have effectively no prolonged climate influence.

“[T]he risk of a damaging meteor impact is not a possibility which should be neglected” says Eric. Somehow Eric’s caution doesn’t extend to the undeniable (except by, you know, denialists) fact that man’s industrial activity is already measurably altering Earth’s climate in a negative way. That should be neglected as well as vigorously denied.

Riiiiight.

Eric also manages to throw in a heaping plate of sneering at NASA for the work they’ve done to study the risks posed by Near Earth Objects while being careful not to explain that low funding for the work is because of cost-cutting anti-science Republicans.

Eric’s apparent belief that satellites should be able to refuel as easily and often as the average family sedan is just cute.

 I’m mildly horrified that a project this important appears to be so far down the list of priorities, that the project was mothballed for a year while the survey satellite stood waiting for a refuel.

Buy why are political cranks like Eric and Anthony bothered with public safety? Surely all handsome, virile, brilliant, libertarians will have made their own personal arrangements to either leave the planet for an extended vacation or activated their bunker networks. Anyone unable to do the same surely deserves what they get!

P.S. Does Eric Worrall actually rely on The Register for breaking scientific news?

Antarctica Has Sea Ice Rabbit Ears, a V for Victory or Maybe It’s a Peace Sign?…

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“Antarctica Has Sea Ice Rabbit Ears, a V for Victory or Maybe It’s a Peace Sign?…” (2014-01-19). Anthony Watts’ friend “Just The Facts”, better known as “Just the Ignorance” has a keen scientific eye, based on no education whatsoever, and has noticed that Antarctica has bunny ears. Ice, anywhere, means cooling everywhere!

Funny how “Just The Facts” manages to ignore so many of them. Maybe he meant just a fact, not the relevant ones. Do glaciers float when the reach the sea, for instance? Do they become thinner? Something for JTF to ponder.

Antarctic Ice Extent 14-01-19

Sea Ice bunnies have ears, but not toes. Great science,”Just The Facts”! Image Credit: NSIDC

Apparently Governor Brown, you’ve never visited the weather station at Lake Tahoe

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“Apparently Governor Brown, you’ve never visited the weather station at Lake Tahoe” (2012-08-13). Anthony Watts gets his shorts in a knot because the Governor of California, whom he derisively refers to as “moonbeam” says that “Global warming’s impact on Lake Tahoe is well documented.”

Now if there’s one thing Anthony likes it’s a tasty cherry-pick. His (unqualified) buddy Russ Steele has done the ‘sciencey analysis’ for him too! It’s all laid out on Russ’ website, concerned with “AGW Defeat” as well as security, liberty and property.

First Russ/Anthony decides that the Governor is referring to a particular Lake Tahoe weather station, one that they can spin to their own benefit.

Then he declares that the rise is all “Urban Heat Island” effect – a tennis court was built nearby in 1980! Actually, as Anthony knew, the courts were built in 1973 and can’t be honestly linked to the alleged artificial 1980 change in temperature trend. Which kinda happened globally, so that’s one heck of a tennis court.

Next, it’s also all bad weather station siting. There’s a fire barrel nearby, it must burn constantly! Anthony, of course, has no evidence about how long the fire barrel has been there, how often it was used, or at what time of day it was lit in comparison to the times of measurement. Still, fire barrel!

Next, he selects some other stations that show a different temperature trend (still up though, unless you squint… which Anthony does). This is the one thing that could be a legitimate argument, but of course he restricts himself to selected weather stations that suit his argument, not a scientifically legitimate regional comparison. Doing that might not make his case…

Finally, he declares that the scientists involved are “political hacks”. Surely if this was likely to stick he’d start and finish with this. And maybe demonstrate it clearly.

Well! Done and dusted for Anthony. A disused fire barrel and tennis courts in place long before a disputed temperature trend started have proven, once and for all, that there is no Global Warming. Never mind that his argument never rises above vague, un-verified supposition.

Note: This post was written so that comments made in a recent but unrelated post could be associated with the correct topic. It’s just run-of-the-mill denialist noise on Anthony’s part.

P.S. Love Anthony’s ominous reference to a critical commenter’s personal details, gleaned from IP address snooping. Classic passive-aggression and misdirection!

New paper blames about half of global warming on weather station data homogenization

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“New paper blames about half of global warming on weather station data homogenization” (2012-07-17). Anthony Watts eagerly embraces a “peer-reviewed paper” conference abstract that uses some garden-variety data diddling. Sez Anthony:

Authors Steirou and Koutsoyiannis, after taking homogenization errors into account find global warming over the past century was only about one-half [0.42°C] of that claimed by the IPCC [0.7-0.8°C].

Them climate scientists are manipulat’n data for their Commie bosses! Not Steirou and Koutsoyiannis…

Strange how Anthony forgets that even denialist Roy Spencer’s satellite temperature records show a 0.46°C rise in 33 years. One might think a bit of caution is in order when someone claims that only there’s been 0.42°C of warming over the last century.

Anthony Watts just types “told ya so” as fast as he can work his trembling fingers. Where’s the skepticism? Up his ass of course. He, like the paper’s authors, doesn’t seem to understand data homogenization. Here’s Dutch scientist Victor Venema on Anthony’s intentional ignorance:

A student can make an error and conferences are there to talk about preliminary results, much more worrying is that Anthony Watts keeps on getting his facts wrong. An EGU abstract is simply not a peer reviewed paper. Of the three sentences Watts cited from the “peer reviewed paper”, two can only be found in the slides of the talk, which are not reviewed. Every post on Watts up with that?that is on a topic I am knowledgeable about, contains serious factual errors and clear misrepresentations. I am not talking about having another opinion, but facts. If clear facts are already wrong, I start doubting the rest. One wonders why the readers of Watts up with that? keep on reading that stuff. There seems to be little interest in the truth among these self-proclaimed skeptics.

We’ll leave the final insight to one of Anthony’s squad of censors “moderators” who is proud of how enthusiastically and regularly wrong WUWT is:

[REPLY – What it means is that WUWT, unlike nearly all alarmist blogs, does not censor contrary points of view. Science is a very back-and-forth kind of thing. Anyone can be wrong. Anything can be wrong. Consider that. ~ Evan]

Some notes on the Heartland Leak

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Some notes on the Heartland Leak (2012-02-15). Anthony Watts urges us, as others have noted, to ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!’ The revelation that he co-ordinates with and has received money from the Heartland Institute does not mean that he’s just an unscrupulous mouthpiece. He’s definitely not panicked by the exposure either.

James Hansen! Algore! The e-mails were stolen! Some of them are fake!

Anthony’s just collateral damage here though. The real story here is that the notoriously partisan Heartland Institute, a “free-market think tank” theoretically ‘providing information to inform policy debate’ but long regarded as the political home of climate denial, tobacco enthusiasm and government hating, has suffered an embarrassing “leak” of documents. Nothing like a little sunshine to make the bugs skitter.

Read about it at:

Of course this is totally different from the “Climategate” e-mails, which revealed that in private conversation some climate scientists didn’t hold high opinions of global warming deniers. The fact that the Heartland Institute spends most of its time and money scheming to confuse the public and to undermine objective scientific advice (i.e. funding Anthony Watts) is an irrelevance in comparison! Thus ending Global Warming forever.

Anthony’s personal defense boils down to noting that the Heartland Institute and an “Anonymous Donor” have (to our knowledge) only given him $44,000 for one particular project. Dr. James Hansen has received way more dough, therefore Anthony is less of a hypocrite. Now that’s what I call claiming the high ground.

However, Anthony’s concealed “scientific” funding came from a biased political organization. That’s a tough one to skate away from, huh?

Note to Anthony: you just look stupid when you try to contrast all money spent in support of any environmental cause to just the political funding for opposition to CO2 regulation. Unless of course the Heartland Institute and their ilk are also busy arguing on behalf of, for example, killing more endangered species or putting more mercury in fish.

2012-02-20 update: Peter Gleick, at the Huffington Post, is the source of the Heartland Institute leak and asserts their authenticity.

2012-05-22 update: After much caterwauling by the Heartland Institute about forgeries and the shameful behavior of nasty warmists, the true conclusion can be drawn: “Peter Gleick cleared of forging documents in Heartland expose“

Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!

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“Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!” (2011-11-22). Remember Climategate? The stolen climate scientist e-mails that denialists tried to cherry-pick and twist into… something? Happened just before the Copenhagen climate conference. Anthony Watts and his team remember and they’re still sullenly licking their wounds over that misfire (but putting on such a brave face…).

Now we have new stolen e-mails with “new revelations!” Coincidentally, just before the Durban climate conference.

Oh. It’s just a second batch of even tamer messages from the first theft. Still, plenty of opportunities to make a fuss, tut and titter, and infer darkly. That’ll do, right Anthony? Especially since the first thing Anthony seems to have done is search for his own name. (Could vanity be the motivation behind everything Anthony’s done?)

Here are a few links on Climategate 2.0, I doubt I’ll cover what will undoubtably be a flood of outraged irrelevant posts on Anthony’s blog:

Look for Fox News, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and similar news organizations to credulously report the new “revelations.”

Pielke Sr. on the quality of global surface stations

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“Pielke Sr. on the quality of global surface stations” (2011-08-14). The Stupid that won’t die! Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., an actual denialist climate scientist, reminds us of Anthony Watts’ “outstanding report” on the siting quality surface temperature stations used in the US Historical Climate Network, Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?. (Oops, “Page Not Found”. Are the Heartland Institute lobbyists shuffling that embarrassment off to the side?) The “scientific” follow-up was Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

You remember the “outstanding report” that Anthony kept promising would prove how dishonest conventional climate scientists were except… it didn’t? And the ground-breaking paper that… confirmed the conventional scientific conclusions about global warming. But he sure did a good job collecting amateur photos of weather stations.

So Dr. Pielke is going to do a home slide show too! Prepare for an onslaught of “random” photos of weather stations. Maybe he and Anthony can obscure the failure of their shared project with a new flood of irrelevant amateur photos? Sounds like a great way to keep heads bobbing in time.

Earth’s Climate System Is Ridiculously Complex – With Draft Link Tutorial

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“Earth’s Climate System Is Ridiculously Complex – With Draft Link Tutorial“ (June 30th, 2011). I’m waaay behind commenting on Anthony Watts’ anti-science, but this post recently came to my attention. Gosh, if the Earth’s climate is so “ridiculously complex” how could we possibly really know anything? We might hurt our thinkin’ muscles trying to figger it out.

The Earth rotates! It orbits the Sun! There’s gravity! The Sun shines! Volcanoes and hot springs are hot! Cosmic rays rain down, as do comets! Funny, I didn’t notice any references to the much-discussed greenhouse effect.

Most importantly; even though the Earth’s climate is “ridiculously complex” it is absolutely clear that all changes are completely natural.

WUWT reader and obsessive googler “Just The Facts” has assembled a collection of mainly Wikipedia entries to prove this point, but it seems to me that he’s unintentionally shown the exact opposite. Climate scientists are well aware of our climate’s complexity, and are able to integrate the processes quite well. Thanks, Facts.

Of course denialists are waging a fighting retreat using the “complexity” and “imperfection” arguments, so a huge list of anything is useful for waving in the air. I think Winnie-the-Pooh said it best:

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

Climate scientist Michael Tobis tries to inject a little reality to the comments, but faces a determined onslaught of ignorance as well as the usual  passive-aggressive moderation by Anthony and his staff. Eventually solar scientist Leif Svalgaard gets chokes on the ignorance and starts correcting them.

The comment by “Thomas S”, third one in, wins today’s booby prize: “Holy….!! This post will go down in history as the post that killed the AGW debate once in for all.” I wouldn’t put money on that, Thomas.

Himalayan Sherpas as climate proxy

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“Himalayan Sherpas as climate proxy“. (May 1, 2011) Anthony Watts reposts a “Bishop Hill” (Andrew Montford’s pseudonym) blog item mocking researchers for asking Himalayan Sherpas about changes in their environment (Biology Letters, April 2011). Anthony ‘piles on’ with a link to a twenty year-old anthropology book.

As reported by Richard Black of the BBC, apparently only about half of the villagers questioned reported that summers were starting earlier than they did ten years ago. This means the other half couldn’t be bribed to lie by the corrupt researchers I guess.

Their top line conclusions are that villagers are noticing signals suggestive of climate change.

Warmer weather, drying water sources, the advance of summer and the monsoon, new insect pests, earlier flowering of plants… all consistent with the basic idea of a warming world.

Anecdotal evidence is a favorite denialists talking point, but only when it goes their way. They like to report one person recalling that the beach height is exactly the same as when they were kid, but not when 250 people report about when flowers bloomed. Just a few days ago Anthony and his teammates were touting an opinion poll.

Selective as always, Anthony tells us about an imprecise research method but fails to mention that ways of successfully using it exist. Weak “remembered data” is better than a lack of data. Social anthropologists and social scientists live in that sphere and know how to use it with caution.