Category Archives: Whining

Expert Embarrassment in Climate Change

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“Expert Embarrassment in Climate Change“. Thomas Fuller, first to publish rash “Climategate” accusations, lets us know that the recent PNAS paper, ‘Expert Credibility in Climate Change’, is somehow a nasty and unethical blacklist.

Sorry Tom, the determination of denier/agree-er was based on freely given public statements and the assessment of expertise was the same for all subjects. Claiming sneakiness, privacy infringement, or violation of confidentiality is bull. Read the author’s defense, several days before Fuller’s repetition, over at Real Climate.

Your denialist victims have been “outing” themselves without any help, and your post is merely an exercise in victim bullying. However your howls do remind me of the frequent calls by denialists for the dismissal of “warmist” scientists or public officials, cuts to their funding, calls for boycotts, etc, etc. What’s that smell? Oh yes, hypocrisy.

Analysis of NSIDC August 4 News

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“Analysis of NSIDC August 4 News“. Steven Goddard still thinks that he can use Photoshop to disprove Global Warming! Friendly advice for Anthony Watts: I know Steven helps fill your blog with denialist arguments of varying quality, but his premises are invariably based on either stubborn ignorance or deliberate analytical flaws. Although perhaps you don’t care?

So what’s Steven’s “analysis” this time? He claims that the NSIDC’s (National Snow and Ice Data Center) Sea Ice News has a deceptive chart of Arctic Sea Ice Extent because his pixel counting from an NSIDC map shows 10% more ice now that in 2007. That’s not what the chart shows! Although it goes right over Steven’s head, Dr. Walt Meier of the NSIDC charitably explains;

Our sea ice maps are not an equal area projection. Thus one cannot compare extents by counting grid cells – this is probably the reason for the 7.5% vs. 3% discrepancy. Steve has been alerted to this issue in the past, but seems to have forgotten it.

Photoshop also proves that Arctic multi-year ice is doing just fine, sort of, even though the NSIDC says that it is melting in the southern Beaufort Sea. So there.

Finally, Steven lets us know that Sea Ice Extent is increasing in the Antarctic, naturally disproving Global Warming. Too bad Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is driven by ocean current patterns and glacial outflow and not temperature.

Goddard notes grandly that he has “alerted Dr. Meier to most of these issues by E-mail.” Another trophy for the lunch-room bulletin board I suppose.

We enter the age of “…or else”

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We enter the age of “…or else”. Nothing makes a libertarian madder than governments acting on something. Anthony Watts  copies-and-pastes excerpts from a Washington Post report that the death of a Senate Climate bill means that the White House will use its power to act on Global Warming via the EPA’s clean-air regulations.

Obama is such a bully! And a Nigerian communist.

Walking the Plank-ton

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“Walking the Plank-ton“. More awesome marine biology insight from Willis Eschenbach. He waited until he had a chance to read the entire Global phytoplankton decline over the past century paper in Nature because he didn’t want to get it wrong. The paper’s claim is that our marine phytoplankton population has been cut in half since 1900 because of warming of the global oceans.

So what did Willis come up with to reject the paper’s conclusions? This:

The short answer is that I don’t know … but I don’t believe their results.

A cool 50 million

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“A cool 50 million“. Anthony Watts is very pleased with his web statistics. He wants you to think that “hits” mean something. In fact “hits” are a widely discredited, much like everything else Anthony shouts as proof against Global Warming. Hint: each time a web page loads every image, as well as many other items, counts as a hit. Anthony’s pages typically have at least 30 graphics each.

Wikipedia says that hits are “an inaccurate measure of a website’s popularity or web traffic.”

About.com says “Don’t use the term hits unless you want people to know you don’t know much about Web analytics or Web measurement.”

We touched on this a few days ago when denialist/internet genius Mike Lorrey tried to explain that feverish clicking meant the world was beating a path to Anthony’s door. Physicist Joe Romm, whom Anthony considers a deadly rival with his Climate Progress website, schools Anthony on the subject (again) better than I can, so just drop over for an enlightening chuckle. Anthony claims he’s “beating” Joe, but somehow Joe has 50 million hits in 2010 alone.

As usual when Anthony is trying to boast he likes to interrupt his character assassination and general polemics to make grand statements like “I’m really growing tired of the vociferous and voluminous name calling and people bashing, on both sides. It’s palpable.” Oh. My. God. You know what’s “palpable” Anthony? Your hypocrisy. You both encourage and participate in the ugliness.

Heidi Cullen doomcasts in new stemwinding sci-fi thriller

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“Heidi Cullen doomcasts in new stemwinding sci-fi thriller“. How dare a weather girl write a speculative book about Global Warming? How dare ABC News or the New York Times review it? Only Anthony Watts knows the truth about the lies!

Dr. Heidi Cullen, previously at the Weather Channel and now CEO of Climate Central has a book out called The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet.

Oh, wait. Dr. Cullen has a doctorate in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics. Anthony… doesn’t.

I’m honored…I think

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“I’m honored…I think“. Here’s another funny one from Anthony Watts. Virginia Heffernan has naïvely written in the New York Times about a controversy over disguised advertising on ScienceBlogs, which she claims “has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd”. Sounds like a someone’s got a nice fact-free agenda… She also makes a rather loose suggestion about some ‘sensible’ science websites:

For science that’s accessible but credible, steer clear of polarizing hatefests like atheist or eco-apocalypse blogs. Instead, check out scientificamerican.com, discovermagazine.com and Anthony Watts’s blog, Watts Up With That?

Anthony loves the credibility bump, even though Scientific America is ‘dead to him’ for it’s awful, corrupt, lying support of the Global Warming orthodoxy (so are most natural history museums). Too bad Heffernan makes a very explicit retraction of her endorsement of Watts Up With That?:

One regret: the Watts blog. Virtually everyone who emailed me pointed out that it’s as axe-grinding as anything out there. I linked to it because has a lively voice; it’s detail-oriented and seemingly not snide; and, above all, it has some beautiful images I’d never seen before. I’m a stranger to the debates on science blogs, so I frankly didn’t recognize the weatherspeak on the blog as “denialist”; I didn’t even know about denialism. I’m don’t endorse the views on the Watts blog, and I’m extremely sorry the recommendation seemed ideological.

Anthony of course considers this proof that Heffernan succumbed to intellectual bullying from those nasty, hateful, lying scientists. Or is he just disappointed that a gullible newcomer with the correct political perspective has slipped through his fingers?

Tim Lambert over at Deltoid has a good overview: Post-modernism rides again at the New York Times.

McIntyre on Stephen Schneider

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“McIntyre on Stephen Schneider“. Anthony Watts copies-and-pastes a post by the thin-skinned curmudgeon Stephen McIntyre, who complains that Climatologist Stephen Schneider, the editor of the journal Climatic Change who recently passed away, didn’t regard his extended pestering as “genial”. Well, that’s an illuminating complaint, isn’t it? Too bad McIntyre didn’t raise the issue a year ago when Schneider was alive and able to respond.

Here’s a quote from Schneider last year that McIntyre objects to:

A serial abuser of legalistic attacks was Stephen McIntyre a statistician who had worked in Canada for a mining company.

McIntyre’s post starts as a half-hearted remembrance before devolving into another in an endless series of complaint about perceived ill-treatment. C for effort but E for execution, Stephen.

Climatic collision on the National/Financial Post website

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“Climatic collision on the National/Financial Post website“. Anthony Watts is busy deleting contacts from his Rolodex and trying to frame the sudden and unwelcome media scrutiny of global warming denialism as part of the Climategate “whitewash” and the alleged “blacklist” of denialists.

Canada’s National Post newspaper, a long-time source and also re-distributor of climate science misinformation, has for the first time printed an intelligent and skeptical assessment of the global warming denial position. Jonathan Kay’s article Bad Science: Global Warming Deniers are a Liability to the Conservative Cause is an entertaining exposé of many of the smug deceptions that the Post’s own doctrinaire columnists, such as Terrence Corcoran, have been regurgitating for years. Quite a startling development. Kay’s telling quote is this:

How has this tiny 2-3% sliver of fringe opinion been reinvented as a perpetually “growing” share of the scientific community?

Columnist Terrence Corcoran naturally has taken exception to having the plug pulled on his cozy bubble-bath. Bad politics The politicization of climate science reaches new low with the development of a deniers blacklist is his response. Strangely, he starts with a reference to the “first principles of good science” before blustering at length about a “scientific mop-and-pail crew”, talking about the astrological signs of the paper’s authors and trying to imply that compiling the alleged “denialist blacklist” was a stealthy librul operation. Actually, the list of denialist scientists was collected from documents published and distributed by denialist lobbyists. But bluster on, Terrence.

Anthony declares that of the two columns “One in my opinion, [is] ugly, the other matter of fact.” No prize for guessing which one Anthony likes.

Peer reviewed science: Polar bears of the past survived warmth

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“Peer reviewed science: Polar bears of the past survived warmth“: A University of Alaska article about a fossilized polar bear jawbone, called “Polar bears of the past survived warmth“, lets Anthony Watts show his sensitive tree-hugger side:

So next time you have somebody sniffling and tearing up over polar bears and sea ice, show them this research and hand them a Kleenex. Now, they can worry about the polar bears eating hippos in the future.

I guess he didn’t bother reading the article he’s waving around as surly proof:

“Refugia” are places that polar bears may survive without ice. The Svalbard Archipelago may have been one of those places. Biologists today think polar bears would have a difficult time living on land, because other species like the grizzly bear could outcompete them.

The warm period of the Eemian might have come at a time when the polar bear wasn’t such an ice specialist, Talbot says.

Is this what a denialist slam-dunk looks like? Anthony should stick to snickering over inaccurate polar bear illustrations created by graphic artists.