Graphing Lesson Part 2 – “Crest to Crest”. Steven Goddard tries yet again to explain why his cherry-picked charting tricks are perfectly A-OK. The time span that shows that there is no statistical Global Warming is always the correct one to use!
“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.
Man-made climate drivers needn't apply.
“New “Our Climate” iPhone app released“. Want a collection of cherry-picked, out of context climate facts in your pocket? How ’bout some falsified charts and incorrect scientific explanations? Want to vote on the climate? There’s an app for that! “Our Climate” is an iPhone app by Aeris Systems Pty Ltd. from Australia and it has “made it through Apple’s review process unscathed”. That must have been a surprise. Conspiracy theorists are buying it as fast as possible so they can get their copy before the secret world gubmint shuts it down.
Anthony Watts must love to see his favorite claims packaged neatly in a context that conceals all criticism. The developer promises that “if any material errors have slipped through, rest assured that such errata will be readily addressable.” I won’t hold my breath on that one.
Funny the “warmist” climate science equivilent, Skeptical Science’s iPhone app, shows denialist claims, the scientific responses, and the to-and-fro comments on their website. I guess they’re not quite as afraid of scrutiny.
Which “key climate blogs” are readers driven too in the “Our Climate” app I wonder.
“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.
“Gore cleared in masseuse case“. Is Anthony Watts clearing the air on yet another attempt to besmirch politician and environmentalist Al Gore, or is he taking the opportunity to remind his readers that ‘the alGore’ is evil, evil, EVIL?
This kind of post is just another sign that Anthony Watts’ blog is propelled by partisan right-wing anger and not by objective scientific interest.
“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.
“GISS Polar Interpolation“. Like the Wandering Albatross, Steven Goddard returns once more to complaining that because the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) doesn’t have 5000 weather stations on the Arctic sea ice their global temperature analysis is a lie composed of “incorrect, fabricated data”. James Hansen even admits that !
Steven cherry-picks June 2010 from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) model for comparison because it’s the only month he can use to “prove” that the Arctic is colder than GISS reports. Steven loathes any kind of “modeling” because they let scientists ‘manipulate the truth’, but the DMI model suits his purpose today so its OK I guess. The DMI model uses a different set of records and different assumptions, in particular with a cold bias due to inclusion of Arctic buoy readings, so naturally it gives a slightly different result. This is useful to Steven.
Daily mean temperature north of 80th northern parallel. Steven likes June 2010 here. It's the only month he can play games with. Source: DMI.
It’s always fun to work yourself up into a nice lather, but if data isn’t available scientists will try to find ways to compensate. It’s called research and it doesn’t involve playing games with Photoshop. Just because it suits Steven’s purpose doesn’t mean that, for example, rejecting the interpolation of temperature beyond 250 km is legitimate. GISS explains their choice clearly:
The correlation of temperature anomaly time series for neighboring stations was illustrated by Hansen and Lebedeff [1987] as a function of station separation for different latitude bands. The average correlation coefficient was shown to remain above 50 percent to distances of about 1200 km at most latitudes, but in the tropics the correlation falls to about 35 percent at station separation of 1200 km. The GISS analysis specifies the temperature anomaly at a given location as the weighted average of the anomalies for all stations located within 1200 km of that point, with the weight decreasing linearly from unity for a station located at that point to zero for stations located 1200 km or further from the point in question.
So what if there was a fatal flaw in the GISS temperature analysis? Well there are several different estimates of global temperature trends, based on different sets of temperature records and different assumptions. They all show a similar pattern of warming, so howling about the specific flaws of one or the other of these analyses is really just meaningless noise.
I can’t let Goddard’s final statement that “GISS Arctic anomalies are high by as much as 4 degrees, and yet he claims a global record measured in hundredths of a degree” go unchallenged. This is plain scientific ignorance (or the pretense of it). The significant digits of a result can be much higher than the accuracy of the individual measured values if the sample size is large. Guess what? In this case, it is.
“Step Changes in Science Blog Climate“. This is an amusing exercise in boasting and wish-fulfillment from Watts Up With That “moderator” Mike Lorrey. Apparently the dubious web statistics generated by Alexa prove that WUWT is the best place on the internet for “science”. Why? Because obsessive denialists click madly on Anthony’s posts, shouting over each other and at people who don’t share their views. Also WUWT’s website is designed to amplify “clicks”.
WUWT attracts clicks like flies are attracted to... honey.
Mike compares WUWT’s “traffic” to RealClimate.org (boo! hiss! “always the least popular, indicating the general public got that this was an astroturfing site by climate alarmists who tolerated no dissent”), Climate Progress (boo! hiss! “talk[s] down to the average bloke”) and Climateaudit.org (yea!). According to Mike, WUWT was the place where “Commentary from all directions was encouraged, with postings by non-skeptic scientists to provide a balanced view”.
He first notes a jump in WUWT’s traffic with the election of Nigerian crypto-communist Barack Obama and ascribes this to an instantaneous public hunger for information about climate policy and not libertarian conspiracy theorists needing a place to vent. Yeah, right.
Next he points out the jump when ClimateGate broke, which in his mind shows that WUWT “won the narrative with the public”. Funny, to me it looked like a frenzied attempt by the usual small group of denialists to talk themselves into believing that the molehill was a MOUNTAIN!!!!!!! They’re still at it, but with less enthusiasm now that every single outrage has been disproved.
A recent modest blip in traffic is apparently “due in part to Anthony’s speaking tour, where he has spoken to packed and enthusiastic crowds”. Nothing to do with a wash of half-hearted denialist mutterings in response to the final dismissal of the false Climategate allegations, right? By the way, my understanding is that the Grand Tour was more like this.
Mike, WUWT is the talk-radio version of science. A fire-hose of bullshit, lapped up by people seeking confirmation of their prejudices. You’ve got an audience alright, but I wouldn’t want to sit beside them on a long flight.
“Desperately seeking swelter“. Anthony Watts has found a Telegraph column by denialist pontificator Christopher Booker that pulls the old “black is white” trick. Somehow the record hot weather across the northern hemisphere is “risibly desperate” effort by “believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion”. Sure it’s hot now, but apparently any hot weather at any time in the past is unshakeable proof that hot weather now can’t be due to Global Warming. You’ll have to talk me through that one, Chris.
What does Booker offer in support of his shifty argument? Well he does mention “expert analysis on Watts Up With That, the US science blog”.
ROTFLMAO (for libertarian retirees hunched over their 286’s, that’s txt for “rolling on the floor laughing my ass off”).
Oh, by the way Booker in the past has been delighted to claim that cold winter weather is proof that there’s no Global Warming…
“Sea Ice News #15“. Steven Goddard returns to his weekly “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” exercise in trying to explain away the Arctic Sea Ice trends. In this “report” he decides to talk about data coverage and not the data itself and about Arctic air temperature and not sea ice. Oh, he has some webcam photos as evidence too.
In passing, he mentions that “ice loss accelerated during the past week over the East Siberian Sea due to above normal temperatures.” But pay no heed to that!
Wott's Up With That? 