Category Archives: Self-Pity

Don’t mock the Monck

Posted on by
12

“Don’t mock the Monck” (2011-11-20). Anthony Watts “don’t have a dog in this fight” but wants us to think that at least one of the comical Lord Monckton’s denialist claims are true. Apparently unable to out-argue Monckton’s denialism his opponents can only make up slanderous personal criticisms.

So… Anthony Watt’s continuous coverage of Monckton’s scientific activities (hereafter referred to as “antics”) and Monckton’s frequent appearance as a WUWT guest writer are to be taken as indifference to Monckton’s credentials? Pull the other one, Anthony.

Who would have thought that the blowhard Monckton would respond to scrutiny of the single credential he can even vaguely lay claim to by running off at the mouth even more? The real House of Lords has repeatedly told Monckton to stop using an invented portcullis crest that looks almost the same as the House of Lords’ and to stop representing himself as one of their Members. The indignant Monckton responds with “soi-disant”! “criminous”! “misfeasance!” “defalcating”! And trots out the paid opinion of lawyer Hugh O’Donoghue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Since Anthony stands in rapt admiration of Monckton’s sparkling verbiage, here’s a word for him to look up: logorrhea.

So when Monckton defended his claim of being a Member of the House of Lords, maybe his answer of “Yes, but without the right to sit or vote” was correct? Why yes, in the sense of not appointed and completely without authority, rights, or (dare I say it) qualification.

I guess since the only response possible to Monckton’s searing global warming arguments are these ‘personal attacks’, he automatically wins every climate debate from now on. That’s so galling to us global warming alarmists.

Oh, wait. The is he/isn’t he issue is completely beside the point, 99% of the criticism of Monckton’s claims are about his repeated bold-faced scientific lies. See here, here, here (this is a good one), here, here and here. For the visually oriented, start here. Hell, just fire up Google and type “Monckton debunked“.

So this whole tempest is just ineffectual misdirection, perhaps intended to keep their follower’s emotions running high. Monckton, like our own Anthony Watts, has a long history of taking self-important offense to imagined slights.

When the dust settles we again find ourselves just where we started: Monckton is a vainglorious, paranoid, reactionary right-wing politician and journalist with no scientific credibility whatsoever. Everything Monckton does is in the interest of his own self-admiration. You can make your own connection between portcullises, lipstick and pigs here, while Anthony might want to ponder fleas and dogs and perhaps also own brushes and tar.

Note: Monckton is keeping quiet about his claim to have won the Nobel Prize.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project puts PR before peer review

Posted on by
34

“The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project puts PR before peer review” (2011-10-20). Remember the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) study begun by the “reliable” Dr. Richard Muller? Their results are in and it seems Anthony Watts has been run over by reality and taken away by the wahhhhhambulance.

Back in March Anthony seemed sure that the BEST study would be free of the corruption, manipulation and deception, unlike everything the thousands of other climate scientists had produced. He declared that he was “prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.”

Suddenly, for some reason, Anthony’s tune has changed. Now Anthony is disgusted by Dr. Muller’s “media blitz” of his results. Results that, inconveniently, confirm all the conventional analyses of modern temperature trends and completely gut Anthony’s years of false criticisms.

Did you know that “Not one of the BEST papers have completed peer review“? It’s sort of true! Never mind that Anthony spent literally years falsely pre-announcing that his own amateur surface-stations “study” would prove that the rising temperature trend in the USA was the product of biased weather station choice and changing urban environments. Never mind that releasing pre-publication versions of scientific papers is a widespread practice, and never mind that the paper that Anthony was eventually able to help produce couldn’t support his own claims.

Did you know that “a basic procedural error that has been discovered in the methodology that will likely require a rework of the data and calculations, and thus the conclusions may also change“? Eagle-eyed Anthony has discovered that Dr. Muller used too much data! The first rule of cherry picking is to ignore as much data as possible, don’t you know.

Also, despite of Anthony’s habit of continuously posting articles noting localized cold or snow, Anthony wants you to know that “the issue of ‘the world is warming’ is not one that climate skeptics question, it is the magnitude and causes.” Even he’s given up on that. Technically.

Addition: Here’s the BEST’s global temperature trend compared to the three historical temperature trends created by evil, cheating, communist, climatologists. Break out your magnifying glasses and you’ll see that the differences are enormous!

The BEST Temperature Reconstruction matches previous results

BEST Study temperature reconstruction matches previous results! Shocking.

Whether or not the world is really warming, Anthony’s certainly feeling the burn. From Open Mind:

In my opinion it’s clear what Watts is really upset about — the results from the Berkeley team have confirmed that the other main global temperature estimates (NASA GISS, NOAA/NCDC, and HadCRU) got it right, and that station siting/urban heat island effects are not responsible for any of the observed temperature increase. The real reason all these analyses (including Berkeley’s) show temperature rise is: the globe is warming.

I’ll add links to other websites covering this entertaining development as I find them.

Thanks to Michael Mann’s response, a newspaper censors a letter to the editor ex post facto

Posted on by
9
Boom, sez Martin.

Boom, sez Martin.

“Thanks to Michael Mann’s response, a newspaper censors a letter to the editor ex post facto“ (2011-10-02). Anthony Watts tells us that Michael Mann, lead bully of “the Team”, has forced the proud Vail Daily to withdraw a Sept. 30th, 2011 Letter to the Editor from the skeptical mind of Martin Hertzberg, titled Vail Valley Voices: Researcher disputes evidence for global warming.

Could it be that Dr. Mann found Hertzberg’s analysis so embarrassingly accurate that he had to use his secret power connections to eradicate the hated thing? Hmm. No. Dr. Mann never made any such request.

What did he do? He wrote a response on Oct. 1st, 2011 that effectively started with this:

“It’s hard to imagine anyone packing more lies and distortions into a single commentary.”

Someone at the Vail Daily, whose brain cells happened to brush up against each other, had a look and realized that Dr. Mann was right. Really, really, right. The issue suddenly wasn’t about the noble rights of the upstanding Martin Hertzberg, self-identified “long-time denier of human-caused global warming”, to tell whopping great malicious lies. It was about whether the Vail Voice was legally exposed for carelessly spreading his false and defamatory statements. They chose to put as much distance as possible between themselves and what was clearly a piece of crap.

Anthony can’t even keep his indignation straight. He starts off implying that the Vail Daily is a noble vehicle for free speech, but turns on them with a series of nitpicking remarks intended to impugn their professionalism (does Dr. Mann live in Vail? I think not! Why the obsequious one day turnaround for Mann’s response? Why did the paper call Hertzberg a “denier”? Oh, that’s his self-description. Etc).

After all the howling it seems that the Vail Daily has re-posted the offending Letter to the Editor, apparently with some of the stupider things removed. What do we learn about Martin Hertzberg? He’s a big fan of the deceptive Oregon Petition. He knows that the greenhouse effect is “fear[ ]mongering hysteria… devoid of physical reality.” He considers anthropogenic CO2 emissions “about as significant as a few farts in a hurricane.” He’s heard of the Medieval Warm Period. He knows that diplomats and bureaucrats “have huge egos and a lust for power.” Finally, he’s a co-author of the idiotic Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, so he’s already had his ass kicked repeatedly on the same topics. I think Martin’s journey to the dustbin of history will be a short one.

In my opinion it’s better to leave these things “up” as originally posted and insert a correction at the start so they are in legitimate context and not left as unchallenged assertions. That way Anthony’s link to the Wikipedia entry for freedom of speech need not be indignantly displayed. I think he should have, uh, censored the sentence “In practice, the right to freedom of speech is not absolute in any country and the right is commonly subject to limitations, such as on libel, slander, obscenity, incitement to commit a crime, etc.” though, because that’s the exact issue here.

P.S. Anthony, I think your Latin’s a bit over-enthusiastic. Also the Sherlock Holmes-by-screen-capture schtick is wearing thin, especially in light of your coy pretense of ignorance about Martin Hertzberg’s denialist contributions. Don’t bury the lede.

2011-10-03 update: Some good coverage at caerbannog (Michael Mann opens a can of whupass on a global warming denier) and at Rabbet Run (It Must Be The Neighborhood).

The science is scuttled: Abraham, Gleick, and Trenberth resort to libeling Spencer and Christy

Posted on by
16

“The science is scuttled: Abraham, Gleick, and Trenberth resort to libeling Spencer and Christy“ (2011-09-07). Did you know that pointing out the repetitively flawed science of denialist scientists like Roy Spencer and John Christy is “libelous”? Anthony thinks so, and so does Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.

Opinion: The damaging impact of Roy Spencer’s science, recently published in The Daily Climate, is apparently a nasty example of this criminal. How dare they point out that “Over the years, Spencer and Christy developed a reputation for making serial mistakes that other scientists have been forced to uncover”? Well, maybe it’s not actually libelous because it’s kind of true. But surely it’s mean! That alone is proof that AGW is a lie.

The reliable Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. has consulted his friends and they all think Roy and John are swell, so there.

It seems that the denialist defenses have fallen all the way back to complaining about “tone”? Maybe Anthony’s cartoon sinking ship is falsely labeled just like the false science he touts.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: My Initial Comments on the New Dessler 2011 Study

Posted on by
3

“The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: My Initial Comments on the New Dessler 2011 Study” (2011-09-07). Anthony Watts says that Dr. Spencer’s continued whining about the treatment of his ill-conceived paper is “important”. So important that it must be accompanied by a pirated YouTube video of the theme music from a Clint Eastwood western.

Science! The Watts and Spencer way.

Does anything else really need to be said about ?

The End is Near for Faith in AGW

Posted on by
25

“The End is Near for Faith in AGW“ (June 25th, 2011). Anthony Watts posts a prediction by ordinary citizen Russell Cook (“semi-retired graphic artist” and right-wing blogger for the climaterealist denialists). It’s over! The warmists have lost! Or are just about to lose. I love these over-the-shoulder declarations of victory from people as they flee the debate.

Apparently his “seventeen+ months of research” allows him to declare that Al Gore’s 2007 documentary film, the last word in climate science, is based on a lie. Perhaps even more than one! Also “the media” are all mean to denialists because they don’t give equal time (except Fox News, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Times, The Telegraph, National Post, The Australian, etc.).

Here’s the vile canard that started off all the skeptic-bullying:

Skeptic scientists are accused of being in a fossil fuel-funded conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact“…

Here’s the big problem I found:  That accusation is based on a 1991 memo no one was allowed to see, using an out-of-context sentence, promoted by a person who was not a Pulitzer winner despite accolades to the contrary, who was credited with finding the memo by Al Gore, but Gore had the memo collection in his own possession four years earlier.

Actually, I thought that “skeptic scientists” were being accused of misrepresenting physical science and climate evidence. My bad I guess. So an unseen 1991 memo, declared to be taken out-of-context, is the real smoking gun behind all this cruelty and dispute? Oh, the irony! Oh, the blinding faith!

I will agree that it would be great to see (the eternally constipated?) Richard Lindzen, a Republican “science” witness on any number of topics since 1991, scowling in front of a House Committee again. He didn’t do too well last time, except in the imagination of self-convinced denialists.

Anthony optimistically declares victory too while strangely turning away from the science:

“When the public learns about huge faults in the skeptic scientist accusation, combined with the faults in the IPCC, the result may send AGW into total collapse.”

You’re dancing on the head of a pin, Anthony.

NCDC cites “controversy” with the UAH temperature record, and the search for a “true climate signal”

Posted on by
1

NCDC cites “controversy” with the UAH temperature record, and the search for a “true climate signal” (May 13, 2011). Anthony Watts still thinks the NCDC is after him because of their “ghost authored attack on me and the surfacestations project” back in 2009. I guess it’s easier for him than admitting that their scientific evaluation of his claims found no support whatsoever for his bellowed accusations.

Even the paper that poor Anthony was recently involved with came to the same conclusion, although much more quietly and with a healthy dose of self-congratulation. There was, and is, no warming bias in the US average temperature record. There is no warming bias associated with urbanization of temperature recording station locations. The warming trends are real and the product of human environmental impacts.

What reminded the thin-skinned Anthony of this past insult? A new article by NCDC scientists titled Tropospheric temperature trends: history of an ongoing controversy (full pdf here). They conclude:

The state of the observational and model science has progressed considerably since 1990. The uncertainty of both models and observations is currently wide enough, and the agreement in trends close enough, to support a finding of no fundamental discrepancy between the observations and model estimates throughout the tropospheric column.

Anthony tries to make hay of the bland ‘admission’ that researchers need to “calibrate the data and unambiguously extract the true climate signal from the inevitable nonclimatic influences inherent in the routine observations.” What? “Inevitable nonclimatic influences?” The use of these words mean that Anthony’s accusations were right all along!!!!

Not. It’s quite bold-faced of Anthony to claim that climate scientists have, until now, discounted “noise and uncertainty”. In fact this has been a core concern for decades. He also throws in a snide reference to “observational uncertainty” to insinuate yet again that climate scientists are manipulating the temperature record for their own purposes.

Noise. Something Anthony’s quite familiar with generating in order to obscure facts.

Wegman paper retraction by Journal

Posted on by
10

“Wegman paper retraction by Journal” (May 16, 2011). Anthony Watts tries to dismiss the retraction of the denialist’s beloved Wegman Report because of “the caterwaulings of the anonymous Canadian named Deep Climate and his accusations of plagiarism”. Anthony sneers: “congratulations to Deep Climate for being able to attack a man in another country without having having [sic] to put your name behind it. Such courage. You must be proud.”

I always get a chuckle when Anthony’s howls for blood flip to whimpers of pain. It’s purest irony when a victim-bully accuses someone of cowardice.

Unfortunately, Deep Climate’s accusations were true. Wegman’s Report to Congress in 2006 was a sloppy piece of work produced to meet the political needs of the denialist Republican Congressman Joe Barton. Although widely rebutted, denialists held the Report up as evidence of both faulty statistical underpinnings for Dr. Mann’s so-called global temperature “hockey-stick” and of corruption in the scientific publication process. That Report[‘s” social network” accusations were] hastily reworked as Said, Wegman, et. al. (2008) in the un-related journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis which has now, to their undoubted reluctant embarrassment, retracted it.

This is not a little technical “oops”, this is academic incompetence and ethical failure. Still, it’s an easy “spoonful of sugar” fix according to Anthony:

So, no problem from my view. I expect the report will be rewritten, with citations where needed, maybe even adding extra dictionary definitions of words and their origins to satisfy the imagined slights against our lexiconic ancestors envisioned by DC and Mashey man,  and they’ll resubmit it with the very same conclusions. That’s what I would do.

It sucks when something that denialists like yourself have been falsely clinging to for years is pulled down by a couple of intelligent observers, doesn’t it Anthony?

Extra irony: The Said, Wegman, et. al. (2008) paper was “personally reviewed” by CSDA chief editor Stanley Azen. Exactly the kind of cosy ‘social network’ peer-review manipulation they tried to accuse Dr. Mann and his co-authors of.

Update on May 18, 2011: Anthony has elaborated on his “no problem” plagiarism assessment, clarifying that he is in fact opposed to plagiarism. Also, Anthony has been the victim of it so he knows what he’s talking about. Anthony’s referring to the fact that someone (Dr. Menne) discourteously took his loud allegations of poor surface station data quality and proved him wrong using his own claims (this is now confirmed by Anthony’s own lame-duck paper). And then Menne failed to attribute a photo of a weather station to Anthony’s website!!!!!!!! Horrors. But that’s “attribution” not “plagiarism”.

George Mason University “Climate Change Communicator of the Year” – where only one viewpoint is allowed

Posted on by
2

“George Mason University “Climate Change Communicator of the Year” – where only one viewpoint is allowed“. George Mason University, reluctant home of the notoriously failed denialist statistician Edward J. Wegman, has a Center for Climate Change Communication. Anthony Watts is irked that their Center is running an internet poll for Climate Change Communicator of the Year and there isn’t a single denialist on the slate. They would be found over there on the Climate Change Deceiver of the Year poll (you’d have a solid shot at it, Anthony, although Lord Monckton is certainly more entertaining).

Anthony deflects his critics with this self-appraisal: “Lest some think this is some sort of sour grapes, it isn’t.” After all, who won the anything-goes 2011 Bloggies mob-athon, where responsible science communication was honored? Anthony did, that’s who.

The discredited 2006 Wegman Report is still clutched by denialists as some sort of proof of “warmist” fraud and collusion, but it is Wegman who is now under investigation for misconduct.

“Get Carter” campaign grows on Australia’s ABC radio & TV

Posted on by
5

“Get Carter” campaign grows on Australia’s ABC radio & TV. Poor benighted Professor Bob Carter gets ardent supporter Bob Fernley-Jones to pass on to Ric Werme an article for Anthony Watts’ blog pointing out how badly he is being treated by (some of) the Australian media. Love those social networks.

Marine geologist Professor Carter has been “long vilified on radio in the Science Show“, where they talk to lots of real scientists but rarely to Bob. This is apparently the source of much resentment as he craves attention.

That was bad enough but now ABC TV’s Media Watch is, you know, watching the media and has taken brief note of Carter’s scientifically foolish book Climate: the Counter Consensus. It’s just too much. I mean, they’re almost communists, we shouldn’t have to listen to them! The program dealt primarily with commercial talk radio’s nurturing of denialist personalities and willful ignoring of more knowledgeable “mainstream” scientists. Poor Bob Carter was just a walk-on, but he’s certainly been cut to the quick.

Media Watch expressed their opinion of Professor Carter’s talk-radio credentials in part based on this villainous general observation about Climate: the Counter Consensus (“despite that it has had high acclaim”) by professional climatologist Dr. David Karoly:

“it has fewer gross errors than Ian Plimer’s book Heaven+Earth, it is a mixture of scientific facts with misinformation and misinterpretation, as well as outright errors, spun around a framework of personal opinion. Its conclusions are inconsistent with any scientific assessment of climate change prepared by any major national or international scientific body”

– e-mail excerpt from the March 21st 2011 Media Watch transcript.

But other cranks loved his book! Isn’t that proof that it’s sound? I guess not. Why are Dr. Karoly’s observations fairly general? It seems that neither he nor any other qualified scientists can work up the energy to catalog all the bunk Carter has packed into it.

Climate: the Counter Consensus was printed by Stacey International Publishers who brought us the “Independent Minds” series of publications including such titles as The Wind Farm Scam, The Hockey Stick Illusion – Climategate and the Corruption of Science, and Climate: the Great Delusion. Detect a theme?