Category Archives: Whining

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

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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).

Getting GRLed

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“Getting GRLed” (2011-09-27). Did you know that Geophysical Research Letters editor Noah Diffenbaugh is a thug? According to Anthony Watts it’s true! You see the denialist’s favorite economist Roger Pielke Jr. submitted a paper on tropical cyclones (they’re not worse!) and it was rejected (it the sense of being told to resubmit), simply because the two reviewers wanted revisions! This is clearly more bullying by “the Team”. And also a conspiracy.

Summarizes Anthony, who knows scientific oppression when he sees it (emphasis mine):

It came back with two reviews, both with some corrections, one reviewer suggesting publication without major caveats [originally spelt “caeats”], the other grudgingly [originally spelt “grudingly”]suggesting publication to the editor, Noah Diffenbaugh, and asking for revisions. So far so good (you’d think).

The ever-stringent Anthony opines that the paper “seems straigh[t]forward enough”, but you’d think that Roger Jr.’s claim that “increasing damage around the world over the period(s) of record can be explained entirely by increasing wealth in locations prone to TC landfalls” might need some supporting analysis and not simply rest on what seems a mere assertion.

Perhaps Richard Tol’s comment on Anthony’s post gets to the real heart of the matter:

The decision for major revision was justified as the original paper oversold its results.
Instead of revising the paper, Pielke Jr decided to pick a fight and was told to FO.

Turns out this is all normal boilerplate editorial communication but the thin-skinned Roger Jr. will not revise (ie improve) his paper. He’s chosen to stomp away in a huff shouting about bad faith. The JGR is dead to him! Seems the bad faith lies with Roger Jr. unless you listen to Anthony’s followers. In which case Roger Jr.’s taking a noble stand against a fifth-rate “Team” journal’s bullying. Considering the years of complaining about scientific journals, both Anthony and his reader’s ignorance of how journal submissions work is quite stunning.

Tip to Anthony: look before you leap and pause long enough before posting to run spellcheck. Otherwise your posts look hasty and ill-considered. What? They’re supposed to be?

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

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“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 End is Near for Faith in AGW

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“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.

Wegman paper retraction by Journal

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“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”.

Failing to make his case, James Hansen uses children as legal pawns

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“Failing to make his case, James Hansen uses children as legal pawns“(May 10, 2011). In case you’re wondering, Anthony Watts has no love for Dr. James Hansen. Hansen is a nasty man who shouldn’t be allowed to advocate for environmental protection. He’s also totally making all this CO2 stuff up and now he’s tricking children into being his “legal pawns”!

So what’s Anthony’s pretense for outrage (again) this time? Five of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit, which alleges that the US Federal government has failed in its duty to protect the atmosphere, are teenagers. How could teenagers ever get involved in the environmental movement without coercion? Clearly they are being exploited!

In other news, Anthony demands that kids get off his lawn.

As for the science bit of his griping, Anthony declares that the “Earth has had higher CO2 concentrations several times in its history [that would be a 600 million years] and it didn’t head to runaway roasting”, which will be little comfort to the species that were extinguished by those events. Anthony also claims that “there doesn’t seem to be” conclusive evidence of positive temperature feedback from increasing CO2 levels. This is the ‘cross our fingers and roll the dice’ argument.

I think the prescription for Anthony is more Hallmark Channel viewing.

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.

Northeast US blizzard proves global warming, or something

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“Northeast US blizzard proves global warming, or something“. Ryan Maue is puzzled. All weather is proof that there is no Global Warming. How could the media get it so wrong and say that snowfall is evidence for Global Warming?

Maybe because increased precipitation, in this case in the form of snow, is an expected consequence of Global Warming?

But please, whining about media reports is irrelevant to the scientific debate over Global Warming. Oh, that’s all you’ve got? Well, work it then.

The Dessler Cloud Feedback Paper in Science: A Step Backward for Climate Research

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“The Dessler Cloud Feedback Paper in Science: A Step Backward for Climate Research“. Anthony Watts is tickled with his teammate Dr. Roy Spencer (Ph. D.)’s attack on a new climate paper by Dr. Andrew Dessler:

How’s this for “rapid response“? This rebuttal comes out at exactly the same time the press embargo lifts in Science. We were able to obtain advance copies of the Dessler paper

“Rapid response” in the sense of knee-jerk… Spencer’s critique of Dessler’s paper on cloud feedback, which uses the same data as an earlier paper of Spencer’s, is basically a determined effort to tear down a superior paper published in a superior journal and crow about his own obstinate analysis (phase space!). Accusations by the highly fallible Dr. Spencer of “flawed logic” should be greeted with skepticism, the real kind, and in this case someone has a serious chip on their shoulder…

Dessler concludes that cloud climate feedbacks are positive, and generally agree with what Spencer incorrectly calls “the IPCC computerized climate models.” (The IPCC only consolidates climate research, it has never performed it. Spencer knows this.) Spencer says that clouds stabilize the climate and prevent climate change from occurring (i.e. a negative feedback) and claims that in particular cloud formation triggers the Pacific Ocean’s El Niño circulation pattern.

Unfortunately Spencer’s theory is pure wish-fulfillment, he has neither a theoretical mechanism for the proposed process nor evidence of its occurrence. Dessler’s theory, which predicts that the El Niño circulation pattern instead drives cloud formation, has both.

This blog isn’t the place for detailed scientific discussion, so I suggest readers follow the conversation at Real Climate, and perhaps follow Dr. Dessler’s comments in the Watts Up With That post.

Tip for Dr. Spencer, Ph. D.: Avoid muttering about conspiracies and censorship if you hope to be taken seriously, and stay away from meaningless analogies about x-rays vs. MRI’s to “prove” that your superior methodology unless your purpose is simply to distract your readers.

“Zombie” satellite shuts down critical NOAA NWS systems overnight

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“Zombie” satellite shuts down critical NOAA NWS systems overnight. A satellite malfunction triggered a temporary loss of satellite weather forecasting data, but a work-round is in place. Now weather forecasting is something Anthony Watts actually knows a little about!

Too bad, but not surprising, that his contribution is just to whine about how his inquiries weren’t answered fast enough.