A note about boundaries

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“A note about boundaries“. I said I’d start covering Anthony Watts posts on WUWT again tomorrow, but this post by Anthony was too ironic to pass over. Anthony is complaining that a critic intruded into his personal life! Oh, the hypocrisy.

I certainly support the principle that people’s personal lives are private. I am without question a very small fish in a large pond, but already in the short life of this website I’ve experienced intrusive activity by denialists that could be characterized as attempts to intimidate or discredit me (OMG, I have a facebook account! With friends!). Unless the topic is religion, for example, a person’s religious convictions are irrelevant. Does it really matter how big Al Gore’s house is?

If Anthony’s description of this particular person’s behavior is accurate (a big if) then they’ve definitely crossed the line. Challenging a denialist in a public forum, whether online or at a relevant public event, is legitimate (that if fact is the purpose of this website) but accosting them outside of that context is not.

Unfortunately Anthony Watts has made a habit of prying into the lives of his opponents and “researching” people making critical comments on his blog. He’s also been quick to publish e-mail and postal addresses of scientists or journalists he doesn’t like to enable his followers to harass them. It seems to me that Anthony’s own comfort with skipping over the line when it suits him diminishes the legitimacy of his protestations about privacy.

Back from “vacation”

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Like a Dad trying to complete a cross-country family trip, I’ve ignored the squabbling pre-teens in the backseat for as long as possible. (That would be the repetitive deceptions of Anthony Watts and his co-bloggers.) It’s been quietly entertaining to glance in the rearview mirror and observe the juvenile shenanigans, but now it’s time to restore order.

The Heartland Institute’s grandiose public relations exercise back in May (I can barely say “4th International Conference on Climate Change” without snorting) is now just an amusing memory exposed so well by other observers. The embarrassed scramble for obscure new arctic sea ice metrics to replace the “unhelpful” conventional ones is continuing. Dr. Spencer is still submitting blog articles that contain boneheaded numerical errors. Steven Goddard is still pawing through data looking for ever-tinier oddities that he can try to pass off as thunderous disproof. Anthony himself is still declaring that his blog is the ultimate source of truth, that his page loads are proof that there is no climate change, and he’s still scouring the web for newspaper articles to get indignant about.

And now and then the denialists realise that it’s time to cut their losses on an unsupportable argument that their dumber followers are looking foolish parroting. Just last week Willis Eschenbach tried to convince denialists to stop disputing the CO2 measurements from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer…

Nice to know that things don’t change that much. Tomorrow I’ll be back on the case…

Update: I forgot to mention the delicious reaction of the Heartland Institute conference attendees when their knight in shining armor, Steve McIntyre, failed to fall in line with the baseless and out-of-jurisdiction legal assault by Virginia’s dumb/partisan ideologue/McCarthyist (take your pick) Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on former UVA climate scientist Michael Mann. Golf clap.

Dr. Richard Lindzen’s Heartland 2010 keynote address

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“Dr. Richard Lindzen’s Heartland 2010 keynote address“. In a room full of balding libertarians, Dr. Richard Lindzen tells it like he wishes it was. No doubt his actual remarks will be discussed shortly.

GISTEMP -vs- HadCRUT

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“GISTEMP -vs- HadCRUT“. Steven Goddard continues his voyage of discovery. Gosh, the GISTEMP data-set uses a somewhat different Arctic data than HadCRUT3 and has a different interpolation process! Gosh, the GISTEMP trend is rising faster than the HadCRUT3 trend! Gosh, GISTEMP is a lying trick!

Gosh, maybe there has been an amplified response to Global Warming in the Arctic? More nit-picking idiocy from Steven, who can barely recognize his own hand in front of his face.

Most idiotic global warming headline ever

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“Most idiotic global warming headline ever“. Anthony Watts should look in a mirror I think. He’s found a “what-if” newspaper article in a new-to-me paper called The Canadian about methane hydrates from 2007 to get steamed over. He recommends not reading. Instead, send an angry letter to the editors.

GISTEMP is High

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“GISTEMP is High“. Steven Goddard discovers that temperatures measured at ground-level are not the same as temperatures measured in the troposphere. Well, learning is a good thing I suppose.

He also discovers that different data-sets have a different geographic basis! The GISS data-set attempts to include high Arctic value, while the HadCRUT3 data-set (which Steven calls “Had-Crut”) excludes those values. Shocking.

The dastardly GISS data-set estimates 2010 to be the “warmest ever“, while HadCRUT3 expects 2010 to be the “fifth warmest ever“. It seems that Steven has been reduced to trying to cherry-pick the data-set that shows the least warming. Whatever happened to the claims of cooling? An inconvenient memory apparently.

ICCC Conference day 1 – Chicken of the Sea and BBC

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“ICCC Conference day 1 – Chicken of the Sea and BBC“. Anthony Watts is sharing witticisms with his fellow Denialists at the Heartland Institute’s mock conference.

He does however have a complaint about a disorganized TV interview conducted by a BBC crew. He refused to sign their waiver when he noticed as clause affirming that his statements were made with “honesty and factual accuracy”.

Anthony’s not that stupid!

Volcano Update

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“Volcano Update“. Steven Goddard tells us that Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano is still erupting. He seems to have quietly  stopped trying to argue that volcanic CO2 output is more important that human CO2 output.

WUWT Arctic Sea Ice News #5

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“WUWT Arctic Sea Ice News #5“. Steven Goddard tries to explain that “not much has changed during the last two weeks.” Well, other than the fact that Arctic Sea Ice Extent continues to track well below “normal”. But as we learned a few days ago, Steven has decided that the conventional climatologists were right and Sea Ice Extent doesn’t mean much. Mainly because the evidence isn’t proving useful to him. He’s also very quiet about Arctic Sea Ice Volume.

Still there’s always the Catlin Arctic Survey to mock. They’ve finally arrived at the North Pole, those wimps.

Steven tries to change the subject and talk about some cherry-picked trends from the first half of the 20th Century. Suddenly 1938 is the magical date. Good luck.

Kerry Emanuel and Richard Lindzen: the climatic odd couple

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“Kerry Emanuel and Richard Lindzen: the climatic odd couple“. Anthony Watts says that Richard Lindzen is “easy to talk to and easy to like” (to me, he always looks painfully constipated). Anthony offers no direct opinion on Lindzen’s MIT colleague, fellow conservative and apparent ex-friend, Kerry Emanuel. Instead he pastes in a Boston Globe article.

Apparently Kerry Emanuel has abandoned climate change ‘skepticism’ and now says “I don’t see how a climate scientist can look at the evidence and not see risk“! He also says Lindzen’s recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece was”irresponsible and misleading”! Gosh.

I love the standard defeatist quote from Roger Pielke Jr.: “If these two guys can’t agree on the basic conclusions of the social significance of [climate change science], how can we expect 6.5 billion people to?” Always looking for the silver lining, eh Roger?