Category Archives: Self-Pity

Help asked for Dr. Tim Ball in legal battle with Dr. Mann

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Help asked for Dr. Tim Ball in legal battle with Dr. Mann. I’ve started dipping back into the putrid dung heap that is the archives of Anthony Watts’ blog and came across this recent plea by Sky Dragon Co-Slayer John O’Sullivan. Anthony Watts naturally professes to “have no dog in this fight.” Neither do all the other denialist blogs singing along in beautiful harmony.

Dr. Michael Mann has sued Dr. Tim Ball, “a 72-year-old pensioner”, for libel. He’s also suing the right-wing think tank Frontier Centre for Public Policy, which is probably also a 72-year-old pensioner. That’s not just mean, that’s double-mean!

After all, isn’t poor victimized Dr. Ball “widely recognized as one of Canada’s first qualified climate scientists”? [Not a chance. He’s a geography professor who left the University of Manitoba in 1996. Here’s his rap sheet.] Maybe he’s just a caught-out liar who readily turns to puffed up legal threats against his critics.

Judge for yourself of course but this is how the nut-jobs at the graphic arts crime scene called the Canada Free Press blog (who are curiously fixated on how much longer Barack Hussein Obama will be the President of the United States) recently defended him on a similar matter:

Retraction
Apology to Dr. Andrew Weaver
By Canada Free Press  Thursday, January 20, 2011

On January 10, 2011, Canada Free Press began publishing on this website an article by Dr. Tim Ball entitled “Corruption of Climate Change Has Created 30 Lost Years” which contained untrue and disparaging statements about Dr. Andrew Weaver, who is a professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

Contrary to what was stated in Dr. Ball’s article, Dr. Weaver: (1) never announced he will not participate in the next IPCC; (2) never said that the IPCC chairman should resign; (3) never called for the IPCC’s approach to science to be overhauled; and (4) did not begin withdrawing from the IPCC in January 2010.

As a result of a nomination process that began in January, 2010, Dr. Weaver became a Lead Author for Chapter 12: “Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility” of the Working Group I contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC.”  That work began in May, 2010.  Dr. Ball’s article failed to mention these facts although they are publicly-available.

Dr. Tim Ball also wrongly suggested that Dr. Weaver tried to interfere with his presentation at the University of Victoria by having his students deter people from attending and heckling him during the talk.  CFP accepts without reservation there is no basis for such allegations.

CFP also wishes to dissociate itself from any suggestion that Dr. Weaver “knows very little about climate science.”  We entirely accept that he has a well-deserved international reputation as a climate scientist and that Dr. Ball’s attack on his credentials is unjustified.

CFP sincerely apologizes to Dr. Weaver and expresses regret for the embarrassment and distress caused by the unfounded allegations in the article by Dr. Ball.

But reading John O’Sullivan’s spoon-fed “interview” one can’t help but conclude that a vicious liberal-environmentalist climate conspiracy is unquestionably trying to punish Dr. Ball, honorable truth-speaker, through the courts. Any money he received from oil companies was “accidental“. The only real error that he made, charmingly central to his accusations, was an “honest” one. And by gosh he’s terribly worried about “the credibility of science in general”.

I urge Dr. Ball’s courageous supporters to keep those donations rolling in. I sense that there’s so much more on-the-record entertainment ahead.

Rising From My Long Winter’s Nap

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Yawn… Hey, the sun came back! It warm again! (Note to self: the junk calories at Watts Up With That are no foundation whatsoever for a proper hibernation; Anthony gamed that stupid internet popularity poll! He is not the handsomest man in school.)

As I dozed off in January the global (i.e. my neighbourhood) temperature trends (for a few weeks at least) indicated the clear return of a new ice age. How I wept bitter tears as I shuffled into the den I share with Al Gore, knowing I had been fooled by those climate scientists and their greedy self-interest!

Yet I was already too sleepy to beseech forgiveness from the noble citizen-scientists who had so bravely rejected the alleged evidence and the so-called physical science. The warming had stopped, just like Henrik Svensmark had said it would. Snow was falling (somewhere), just as Anthony Watts was always pointing out. The Arctic sea ice was piling up anew just a Steve Goddard had promised. CO2 was plant food! I knew I was in for more than the usual number of hibernation dreams in which I found myself in public without my fur on.

…

So what’s happened during my nap? Let’s gather a list of Anthony’s winter whoppers in the comments. I hear that Anthony has been encouraging his readers to drown out scientist’s voices. And did Watts really try to wriggle into the spotlight and falsely pre-announce the results of Dr. Richard Muller’s Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project’s “skeptic” dream-team reexamination of global temperature trends, only to misrepresent their initial findings and declare that they were dead to him because it, err, matched the published scientific consensus?

Here are some entertaining (or infuriating if you are Anthony Watts) quotes from Dr. Muller’s 2011-03-31 Testimony to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who was brought in by the controlling tea-party Republicans as a dependable tame scientist:

“Many US stations have low quality rankings according to a study led by Anthony Watts. However, we find that the warming seen in the “poor” stations is virtually indistinguishable from that seen in the “good” stations.” and later, “Did such poor station quality exaggerate the estimates of global warming? We’ve studied this issue, and our preliminary answer is no.”

“In our preliminary analysis of these stations, we found a warming trend that is shown in the figure. It is very similar to that reported by the prior groups: a rise of about 0.7 degrees C since 1957.”

“The Berkeley Earth agreement with the prior analysis surprised us” [Must suck when your boasts of transparency prevent you from jigging things to match your personal biases, eh Dr. Muller? Don’t worry, your Republican pals will legislate the Earth’s temperature, along with the value of pi and that annoying evolution thing.]

Which brings us to this website… As much as I try to have fun with Anthony Watts’ malicious website, I can’t keep this up by myself. Getting inside Anthony’s head is not only time-consuming but corrosive and claustrophobic, and my Significant Other is much more fun to interact with. In the Fall I had some research help from a few readers, which I greatly appreciated. I need to find a way to facilitate this more directly and where appropriate recognize contributions. Put your thinking caps on and look for a post here discussing some options.

In the meantime, I’ve finally got e-mail working here and you can contact me privately at ben@wottsupwiththat.com.

Naked bodies and a new Messiah

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“Naked bodies and a new Messiah“. Robert Zimmerman posts a guest entry on the Spiegel Online article Green Groups Try to Sex Up Climate Change. Apparently, environmentalists are trying to capture the public’s attention.

From the Spiegel Online article:

A survey of 13,000 people in 18 countries, presented by German international public broadcaster Deutsche Welle at the Global Media Forum in Bonn in June, suggests that ordinary citizens are less interested in climate change than was previously thought. The survey showed, for example, that only one in three Dutch people are concerned about climate change — even though the Netherlands is considered especially at risk from rising sea levels.

From Zimmerman’s comment:

Every tactic outlined in the article above is either a superficial public relations stunt or an effort to spin facts so emotionally that the general public will be mesmerized into doing whatever the global warming activists want.

Such denialist self-pity! It has been precisely the success of the denialist and conservative punditry’s shouting and deception that drove me to create this website. They have done an excellent job of confusing, distracting and fatiguing the public.

Denialists taken those primitive efforts of the tobacco, acid rain and ozone apologists and perfected them. Congratulations, you’ve sown ignorance moved the debate backwards.

It’s hard not to conclude that well-organized high-profile climate change deniers such as Watts, sundry conservative pundits and think tanks and even Tea Party Republicans understand that we are seeing the early signs of global warming – rising temperatures, increased snowfall, extreme weather, etc. They’re just more interested in holding back public opinion to protect their political interests.

The environmentalist campaigns highlighted in the Spiegel Online article show a far lower level of organization for the battle of public opinion. What happened to the global conspiracy taking orders from Maurice Strong and Al Gore?

The planet may not be so easily manipulated.

Sea Ice News #32 – Southern Comfort

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“Sea Ice News #32 – Southern Comfort“. Anthony Watts tries to explain why he’s been avoiding the topic of Arctic Sea Ice. Apparently because the precipitous drop in Arctic Sea Ice, which Anthony is careful not to display until the end of his post, isn’t nearly as interesting as the statistically insignificant rise in Antarctic Sea Ice. Even though Arctic conditions are primarily affected temperature and Antarctic conditions are primarily affected by ocean currents.

Cue bold-faced muttering about “healthy skepticism”, hidden data (oops! it was there all along) and wounded references to nasty scientists making accusations of breathtaking denialist ignorance. Oh, and apparently Tamino’s takedown amuses Anthony.

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.”

Various WUWT Articles About the “10:10” Video

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O…M…G – Video explodes skeptical kids in bloodbath. Anthony Watts joins in the “astonishment” and “outrage” over this poorly conceived video. I have to point out that the blowin’ up kids bit is only the first of the four scenes. No compassion for white-collar workers, footballers or hard-working narrators?

10:10 exploding skeptical children video “disappears”. Anthony wants to know where the video has gone. Did Dr. Phil Jones e-mail everyone to delete it? Wait he’s found it again! Those wishing to refresh their outrage should click-through.

A message to 10:10 -”sorry”, just doesn’t cut it. Why, oh why would Anthony accept the video author’s apologies when he can continue to use it to malign all environmentalists?

WUWT’s story on 10:10 – 3rd most popular on WordPress globally – even in New Zealand. Anthony boasts about his web statistics. That was a given, wasn’t it?

Blow Me Up, Blow Me Down. Thomas Fuller continues to represent this video as proof that environmentalists think that “it’s okay to ostracize, bully and dismiss those who don’t agree that climate change”. Apparently their intent “is to legitimize the cruelty of children towards each other”. Go get ’em, Junior! Thomas knows he’s gone off the deep end though, because he spends a lot of time trying to preëmpt charges of Nazi allusions (while accusing environmentalists of doing it first).

Lower Than This They Cannot Stoop

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“Lower Than This They Cannot Stoop“. Thomas Fuller tells us that an edgy British video called No Pressure that uses shock-value images in campaign to persuade people to lower their own emissions by 10 percent has destroyed any chance of discussion about global warming.

I will say that it’s a pretty strange one-off video. I understand that it was never aired and has been yanked from the 1010global.org/uk website. Is blowing up people (“even children!” note the scandalized denialists) who can’t be bothered to participate in conservation efforts a helpful image? Not really. I suppose someone decided the shock-value would draw publicity and that maybe the more prosaic intended message would get an exposure.

Thomas tries to insinuate that the exploding people represent the noble, independent “skeptics” being punished for their resistance, but the victims are clearly some kind of unsuccessful representation of ‘laziness’ or ‘thoughtlessness’. [Update: maybe ‘complacency’ is the best description.]

Thrash away, Thomas. Every day must have its own scandal. You’ll be considering something else “the lowest ever” before the week’s out. Last week it was the tide of public opinion is turning towards us! This week its we’re a threatened minority!

The comments at WUWT are naturally full of Nazi references, argumentative denialists ache to make them. Ironically, in the midst of the expressions of outrage over the paranoid conclusion that the “alarmists” want to identify and eliminate their opponents, Anthony Watts demonstrates that he actually engages in researching and intimidating his opponents with this little item about a commenter (David Gould) who dares to suggest that the video was an over-blown dramatic device:

Silly Anthony, don’t demonstrate the thing you’re complaining about while you’re complaining about it! That’s the dumbest kind of hypocrisy.

Admission of unfair dealings by DEC to the Thompsons

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“Admission of unfair dealings by DEC to the Thompsons“. The “tragic” Thompson family feed-lot saga in Australia continues; the Department of Environment and Conservation heavies may have blinked! But is it “governmental abuse”, or are the Thompsons being held up as martyrs because they expressed denialist sentiments and drew the wrath of intolerant environmentalists?

Maybe that’s why Anthony Watts is taking such an interest, it’s a two-fer! Oppressive government (by the way Australia’s “Liberal” parties are an analog for America’s Republicans, so you might want to re-think some of the invective) and fascist environmentalists! Delicious.

Well, they’re both the final nail in the coffin for AGW, right?

The season of disinvitation continues

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“The season of disinvitation continues“. Oh the high school cruelty that Anthony Watts and his friends endure! The esteemed Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. has had his Letter to Nature rejected! They asked him to write it!!

Why there’s only one possible response to this; Anthony must post an unflattering photo of Nature’s nasty Chief Commissioning Editor, Sara Abdulla. Done and done.

Enviro and Media Agenda on Extreme Weather – State Climatologist Invited, then Uninvited to Rally

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“Enviro and Media Agenda on Extreme Weather – State Climatologist Invited, then Uninvited to Rally“. Anthony Watts wants us to know that the State Climatologist for Delaware, “David R. Legates, Ph.D., C.C.M” was invited by Environment America to speak at a press conference about “Extreme Weather in Delaware.” He was cruelly uninvited when they learned that he was loose cannon looking for opportunities to misrepresent climate science in support of the posturing of the politicians who appointed him.

How dare Environment America state that “we do not suggest that these [particular] extreme weather events were caused by global warming” and then say that “the point of examining the recent extreme weather events – and the economic losses and other negative impacts they caused – is to document why we need to take action to protect against them, including by reducing emissions of pollutants that are changing our climate.” That’s a total contradiction, unless you can comprehend the English language!

It’s ironic to see Anthony decrying censorship when his blog comment policy personifies it (and the mob justice he encourages).