Shackling national security – and renewable energy

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!)

The other embarrassing AGW story this week

The other embarrassing AGW story this week. Osama bin Laden is against climate change, because he apparently mentions the recent Pakistan floods in his latest audio release. This, according to Anthony Watts, makes him an ally of those commie ‘warmists’ because like them he’s “a man who kills people for having a differing view than him”.

I think I’ll just let this sit there and let you can draw your own conclusions about the workings of Anthony’s mind.

GISS on: How Warm Was This Summer?

GISS on: How Warm Was This Summer?. It was weather, not climate in Russia this summer! NOAA and NASA agree! Thanks Anthony.

It's like a heat wave!

Sure Russian’s hot summer can linked to particular weather patterns. But what about the global climate? Hmmm.

“Though calendar year 2010 may or may not turn out to be the warmest on record, the warmest 12-month period in the GISS analysis was reached in mid-2010.” – GISS director, James Hansen.

Oh, I see. Nothing more than Anthony Watts’ regular cherry-picking.

Watching lightning jets hit the ionosphere

Watching lightning jets hit the ionosphere. Like all of Anthony Watts’ “informative” posts, all he did here was copy and paste a SpaceWeather.com item about lightning jets.

Perhaps Anthony sees these massive and only recently recognized upward electrical discharges as evidence that nature is powerful enough to explain all the warming, which isn’t happening, that we have seen? If so, then guess what we nearly agree! Natural climate processes are very powerful. Too bad they can’t actually be shown to cause the modern global warming we have recorded.

Now it’s 2°C climate change target ‘not safe’

Now it’s 2°C climate change target ‘not safe’. Sorry, Anthony, who said that a 2°C rise in mean global temperature was “safe”? Not the climatologists. This is a political target reflecting the industrial inertia that must be overcome. Any artificial increase will have an impact. So a press release from the University of Exeter, based on a paper in the Journal of Quarternary Science saying as much, is hardly a shock.

But I guess it lets Anthony imply that the environmentalists are trying to shift the target so they can be even meaner.

The real message is not that “greenies” want to lower the target and make us live in caves, it’s that the targeted limit will have consequences more severe than has been anticipated:

Professor Turney said: “The results here are quite startling and, importantly, they suggest sea levels will rise significantly higher than anticipated and that stabilizing global average temperatures at 2˚C above pre-industrial levels may not be considered a ‘safe’ target as envisaged by the European Union and others. The inevitable conclusion is emission targets will have to be lowered further still.”

The Royal Society: Still Embarrassing Science

The Royal Society: Still Embarrassing Science. Indur Goklany tries to gets some digs in at the Royal Society’s new publication about Climate Change. It’s an embarrassment to science! Anthony Watts, of course, agrees. His argument seems to devolve into a series of nit-picking over particular word choices and hostile semantic interpretations. That’s it?

He gets his big whopper in right off the top, for attention-challenged readers. Is it true that, as he tries to suggest, the Royal Society “now acknowledges that climate science may not be as settled as it previously implied”? Nope, that’s just a standard denialist straw-man. Like most science-based organizations the Royal Society has always made reference to statistical and historical uncertainties in the evidence of AGW.

Play on.

AMO+PDO= temperature variation – one graph says it all

AMO+PDO= temperature variation – one graph says it all. If you’ve got a high-school science project, the “Science and Public Policy” Institute has a laser printer! Anthony Watts is eager to tell us about the latest final nail in the coffin of AGW from retired meteorologist Joe D’Aleo and geologist Don Easterbrook. Our hopeful contestants present Multidecadal Tendencies in ENSO and Global Temperatures Related to Multidecadal Oscillations. They’ve managed to force the US Mean Temperature to look like it’s a near-perfect match for ocean circulation patterns! Global Warming is dead! And it’s natural. Although they do admit that there is “some departure after around 2000.”

More wishful chart fiddling from denialists. After D’Aleo and Easterbrook.

How did they see what no-one else could? Well they chose their time period carefully so they could exclude the last ten years of warming that oppose the natural patterns. Then they smoothed the heck out of the data to artificially inflate the confidence of their results. Of course the AMO (detrended North Atlantic SST anomalies) and PDO (principal component analysis North Pacific SST anomalies, north of 20N) are incompatible values, so we have to wonder why they are combined. One graph does indeed say it all…

Of course, even if their claim withstood examination they still would have only found a correlation. Are the ocean circulation patterns driving air temperature, or vice versa, or is something else driving both? Joe and Don are silent on this interesting subject. Can you say anti-science?

Climatologists have no problem observing natural patterns in historical temperature data and proxies. They just also know that the recent global temperature increases do not follow any of these natural patterns.

Various WUWT Articles About the “10:10” Video

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

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.

Global Work Party Day on 10/10/2010: come up with your own event

Global Work Party Day on 10/10/2010: come up with your own event. Anthony Watts can’t out-argue climate scientists, so he tries to find easier pickings criticizing actor Ellen Page’s video in support of  350.org’s “Global Work Party Day”. And he still loses!

http://www.youtube.com/v/5gkldRVR54Y?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0

Anthony sneers at the idea that “sumo wrestlers in Japan will be biking” and seems to suggest that his supporters contribute facetious ideas for community environmental projects. I guess he’s sticking to “the high road.”