Category Archives: "Political" Science

Dr. Roy Spencer & Lord Christopher Monckton to Challenge Climate Orthodoxy at Cancun UN Conference

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“Dr. Roy Spencer & Lord Christopher Monckton to Challenge Climate Orthodoxy at Cancun UN Conference“. Surprise, surprise. The industry lobby group with the Orwellian name of “Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow” is sending prominent experts Dr. Roy Spencer (real but obstructionist climate scientist) and Lord Christopher Monckton (loudmouth climate buffoon) to the UN Climate Conference in Cancun next month. They’ll be “available to answer questions”! *

First question: why do you like the sound of your own voices so much?

* Integrity of answers not guaranteed.

Pielke Jr. on Trenberth’s Book Review

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“Pielke Jr. on Trenberth’s Book Review“. Thin-skinned economics professor Roger Pielke Jr. is annoyed that his book about climate change, The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming, has been poorly reviewed by a real climatologist (Dr. Kevin Trenberth). Anthony Watts, like dozens of denialist websites, encouragingly reposts Roger’s complaints. It’s kind of creepy reading Roger talk about himself in the third person.

Roger Pielke Jr., who likes to style himself an “Honest Broker” is the kind of opponent of action on Global Warming that claims to “accept the evidence” but never seems to run out of reasons why we shouldn’t do anything about… yet.

Dr. Trenberth’s review, which incidentally also discusses Hack the Planet Science’s Best Hope – or Worst Nightmare – for Averting Climate Catastrophe, is in the November 2010 issue of Science.

America’s Thanksgiving – the historical foundation

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“America’s Thanksgiving – the historical foundation“. Anthony Watts admires the religious devotion of George Washington. I wonder what he makes of potential Energy and Commerce Chairman Republican Representative John Shimkus. Shimkus opposes climate legislation because “The Earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over.” And the Word of God is as good as it gets, right?

Wegman responds to USA Today

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“Wegman responds to USA Today“. Another hollow denialist trophy – the politically driven, unqualified, lazy, plagiarized, misrepresentative, incompetent, padded, 2006 Wegman Report crumbles but Anthony Watts clings to it tighter than ever.

Recent, and damning, attention to it on the Deep Climate website and by John Mashey has dragged a defense from Dr. Wegman, four years after he promised to show how he “confirmed” the errors in Dr. Mann’s famous 1999 paper Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: Inferences, uncertainties, and limitations (PDF here). That defense? Apparently it’s all just “conspiracy theory”. And he had to “work faster than [he] might like”. And he “never intended… …to take intellectual credit.” Yeah, that’ll stick. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, Anthony.

So how did Dr. Edward Wegman get himself into so much trouble? In 2006 he produced a report for Congress at the request of Republican Congressman Joe Barton that supported Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre’s criticism of Dr. Mann’s global temperature reconstruction “Hockey Stick”. If Dr. Wegman used the same carefully selected starting points as McKitrick and McIntyre and the same un-released but evidently biased code he could, surprise, produce precisely the same “damning” trends they did. He also announced that there was evidence of cozy scientific relationships among “mainstream” climate scientists. This “social network analysis” was off-the-cuff conjecture ginned up to support resentful denialist claims of conspiracies. Attention-getting claims though, if he could make it stick.

Dr. Wegman’s report was widely criticized by knowledgeable people at the time and largely contradicted by a concurrent impartial analysis produced by the National Research Council. It nevertheless became a favorite denialist talking point as they could pretend that the report was peer-reviewed, that it ‘must be true because it was congressional testimony’, and the author was a real scientist (albeit a statistician without climatology expertise).

Unfortunately the Wegman Report has been shown to be a massive exercise in plagiarism, performed with such ham-fisted incompetence that it also revealed the author’s ignorance of the subject. It also contained crude attempts to twist the record to support his desired conclusion and frankly demonstrated a deep ethical lapse. Oh, and the “social network analysis”? Well if applied to Wegman, it shows that in direct contradiction to his statements, he was taking orders pretty much directly from Congressman Joe Barton’s staff.

What did Dr. Wegman’s Report say about man-made Climate Change? Nothing. How could it? He knows nothing about the subject and has proven it.

Here’s a comparison of the IPCC’s temperature reconstructions from their 2001 and 2007 Reports. Did the complaints of McKitrick and McIntyre or Wegman make any difference to the scientific reality? Nope. If anything the new reconstructions amplify the trend.

IPCC temperature reconstructions from AR3 and AR4 on the same time scale. AR3's chart is Mann, et. al. 1999, AR4 adds newer reconstructions, based on new data and techniques. Click to see (slightly) larger version.

You’ve hitched your wagon to a bolting nag, Anthony and you’re going to be dragged all over town.

Climategate?

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I’ve hesitated to dip my toes back in the swamp water that Anthony Watts tries to pass off as a science blog, because road-kill skunks are more pleasant than the mental stench he generates. It lingers longer too. But the recent anniversary of “Climategate” and the denialist response to it has brought a smile to my face.

Slightly more than a year ago Anthony and his pals where foaming at the mouth about corrupt, evil, lying climate scientists and proclaiming the death of the Global Warming Scam (which it must be said they pretty much do weekly). Cooler heads, the kind that think objectively, found the “evidence” of stolen, out of context e-mails and the claims made from them far-fetched to say the least. The denialist crowd thought they were having their long-deserved moment in the sun.

Where do we stand today?

  • A series of investigations in the UK and USA showed that the denialist accusations of exclusion, conspiracy and falsification were baseless misrepresentations.
  • It’s widely recognised that Climategate has no implications whatsoever for the evidence and magnitude of man-made Climate Change. It was simply used to orchestrate an unwarranted attack on particular people.
  • Denialist blogs have turned to disgruntled “he said-she said” complaints about the independent investigations of the accusations, while sea ice and Al Gore are once again favorite topics at WUWT.
  • Self-important denialist Steve McIntyre, who was in many ways central to the furor, now says “I planned to write a one-year anniversary piece on Climategate, but have found it difficult to capture the right tone.” That’s code for “I’m tired of pretending that I’m outraged about inconsequential private e-mails, but I can’t think of a way to change the subject without embarrassing myself.”

Anthony’s recent post Climategate – still the issue tries to repeat the original accusations, with as little correction or legitimate context as he can get away with. It’s an entertaining read from an informed perspective. I can easily imagine Anthony’s irritation at having to couch so many of the “fatal” accusations in such half-hearted ways.

Update: I came across this excellent overview of the whole “scandal” over at ClimateSight, a new blog by a student climatologist before writing this post, but it slipped my mind until now (the following day).

Thanks for playing!

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.”

ABC interview wrongly torches skeptic position

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“ABC interview wrongly torches skeptic position“. Does Anthony Watts really think that denialists fighting in “the cause of climate skepticism” accept that “both CO2 and CH4 are “greenhouse gases”, and yes they do have a warming effect by backscattered long wave infra red“? Guess he doesn’t read his blog’s comments. Wait he does, compulsively and passive-aggressively. Anthony’s only other contribution here is to helpfully provide e-mail addresses that can be bombarded.

The reposted ‘concern troll’ complaint by Canadian denialist Tom Harris maintains that Australia’s ABC Radio Science Show interview with Bob Ward from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment was too soft by half. (Funny how these guys manage to be on top of such distant matters and have their posts pop up in so many places at once.)

Harris thinks the interviewer should have asked a juicy leading question like “which is more important – the health and welfare of people suffering today, or those not yet born who might suffer someday due to climate change that even you admit is highly uncertain?” I think what he really wants to say is “why should I have to do anything I don’t want to when the effects will only be felt after I’m dead”. I’d be surprised to see a libertarian or Republican tenaciously fighting to improve the lives of anyone other than themselves.

The rest of the post is mere high-school rhetoric and deliberate misrepresentation (try to find the “vilification [of] Professors Carter, Lindzen and Plimer” that Harris claims). There’s something about denialists that compels them to recreate public debates in their minds and explain to themselves how they were really won them.

I love Harris’ embrace of eyeballed temperature trends “showing” negative temperature trends since 2002 though. What happened to “1998 was the hottest year”? Keep the cups moving Tom, keep ’em moving.

Mann’s old University gets another subpoena

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“Mann’s old University gets another subpoena“. Anthony Watts is a bit muted on the topic of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s attempt to restart his deeply ill-advised “investigation” of Professor Michael Mann over some of the grants he received while at the University of Virginia. On the one hand, he loves to see climate scientists being harassed. On the other, Cuccinelli’s clearly way out of his depth and jurisdiction.

But Anthony does have the energy to repost what the denialist lobbyists at the Science and Public Policy Institute are saying about it, and his commenters have no problem waxing ignorant, rattling on about “taxpayer’s money”, “hiding evidence”, etc.

The ethics, politics and legality of Cuccinelli’s maneuverings have all been covered before, both on this website and at other important places such as Real Climate, Andrew Revkin at the New York Times, the Washington Post (1, 2), even USA Today.

Short version? This is morally and intellectually bankrupt Tea Party harassment.

New Scientist’s Fred Pearce calls for Pachauri to resign

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“New Scientist’s Fred Pearce calls for Pachauri to resign“. More trenchant scientific insight from Anthony Watts. Fred Pearce has written in the enthusiastically right-wing Mail that “amiable, bearded, vegetarian railway engineer and cricket fanatic” Dr. Pachauri should resign from his position as Chairman of the IPCC.

Anthony wants us to infer that Pachauri is a corrupt, dishonest and unqualified politician, but the source article seems more focussed on the toll that fabricated denialist assaults have had on the IPCC’s reputation and that Pachauri’s departure might take some of that baggage with him.

Funny how when Fred Pearce says something that suits Anthony’s agenda he’s happy to take it at face value instead of railing against it like his has done in past coverage. Not the mark of an objective mind…

This all proves, of course, that there is no Global Warming.

Booker: “anomalies” in Pachauri’s accounting

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“Booker: “anomalies” in Pachauri’s accounting“. ‘Honest broker’ and denialist Christopher Booker’s latest fabricated attack of Dr. Pachauri in The Telegraph is an attempt to blow irrelevant accounting irregularities at a research institute into a new “-gate” crisis. Anthony Watts is naturally breathless with excitement, but restricts his intellectual contribution to a quick copy-and-paste.

No mention of the apology that The Telegraph had to issue over earlier fabrications about Dr. Pachauri by Booker.

Naturally, this all proves that there is no Global Warming.

Shackling national security – and renewable energy

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“Shackling national security – and renewable energy“. Because conservationists didn’t enthusiastically embrace consuming mineral resources as fast as possible, talking about their strategic value now is in Anthony Watts’ view hypocritical.

Just read Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise lobbyist Paul Driessen’s guest post. All you need to do is vote Republican and the problem is solved. No more energy technologies using up rare earth minerals that we need for military purposes, just drill, baby, drill!  America will once again be strong and free!

Oh, and by the way, oil is magically created deep in the Earth now, so don’t worry ’bout dat any more neither. (Boy, do the commenters love that idea!)