“Congressional Tipping Point: Not an April Fools Joke“. Anthony Watts pokes fun at a Democratic Congressman who has cognitive damage from hepatitis and then initially deletes comments that point this out.
It’s way more fun to indulge in some partisan mockery of poorly expressed environmental questions about Guam. Now that’s science!
“If Global Warming Kills Us, Blame the Weatherman?” Anthony Watts tries to spin a copy-and-pasted BNET article about George Mason University’s recent study of TV Weathercasters with his own newly-minted ‘maxim’: “Climate doesn’t kill people, weather does.”
Just six words, but he still manages to get it wrong. I’d like to hear Anthony actually explain that one.
Science at work?
The gist of the article is that TV Weathercasters are the most visible and (sadly) trusted “scientific” information source for most Americans, but they are poorly qualified and predisposed to resist evidence of Global Warming. 27% of TV Weathercasters actually think Global Warming is “a scam”! The credentials and actions of dear Anthony Watts make him a poster boy for this assessment…
“Chico’s new sustainable firefighting idea“. Anthony Watts has a bug in his ear about fire hydrants in particular and municipal politics in general. The fact that local “Chico State University has a large sustainability group that tries to impose all sorts of experimental ideas on local citizens” undoubtably gets under his skin. These hydrants have a “sustainable” rationale, so they must be another experimental idea being imposed on the local citizens…
Naturally Anthony misrepresents the issue by posting a photo of a ‘low-flow’ hydrant with a garden hose attached by what is obviously an adapter for a standard fire-hose connection. Shades of the goofy surfacestations.org project?
Why does the "low-flow" hydrant have a garden hose?
I feel sorry for the Council Members, newspaper editors and Rotary Club members that he’s apparently been pestering.
“Trust and Mistrust“. Willis Eschenbach claims he’s “weary of the vague statements that characterise many of the discussions about climate change”, but he has no problem making them himself…
This post is 14 questions Willis poses to himself so he can plant his flag on a series of unsupported, and in many cases conclusively debunked, statements. Thanks for going ‘on record’ with your intellectual manifesto Willis, this will make great ‘claim-chowder’ in the future.
“New paper – AGW sooners, stake your “drill baby drill” ice free claims now!” Anthony Watts pastes the abstract of a presumptuous paper that shows policy analysts are thinking about the territorial implications of climate change in the Arctic: After the Ice Melts: Conflict Resolution and the International Scramble for Natural Resources in the Arctic Circle.
They aren’t as scientifically careful as climatologists because they aren’t climatologists. I bet statements like this get under Anthony’s skin: “It is a well-known fact that global warming is melting the Arctic ice cap.” I urge Anthony to send a strongly worded letter to the author.
“Arctic Sea Ice about to hit ‘normal’ – what will the news say?” “Hah!” says Anthony Watts. The Arctic sea ice is about to recover all the way to “normal”. That’ll show those Catlin Arctic Survey folks with their tents and sleds!
Arctic sea ice extent on March 29, 2010. Anthony ignores that the variability is mostly in summer. Arctic Regional Ocean Observing System.
Actually it appears that Arctic sea ice is about to reach average extent, which has quite a different meaning. There is little mention of the fact that the meaningful changes are in the summer ice extent. They do bury this quote from Dr. Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center deep in their post though and then wave it away:
This has very little implication for what will happen this summer, or for the long-term trends, since the Bering Sea ice is thin and will melt completely well before the peak summer season.
“Carbon Emissionaries“. Willis Eschenbach has another stab at discrediting carbon trading.
Can you believe that the trading value for carbon credits has fluctuated? Actually, I believe that’s how commodities markets naturally work.
Carbon credits are really low right now, so the whole thing’s a failure! So traders are waiting out some regulatory issues that will affect the future value of carbon credits. Big deal.
Do you realise that per capita carbon emissions in the EU, where they have a few carbon credit markets in operation, have risen while in the US, where they don’t have carbon credit markets, they have fallen? If you actually look at Willis’ charts you’ll see that the EU’s per capita fuel use has climbed substantially, but the carbon emissions? Not so much. So in effect they’re getting more industry out of each tonne of CO2 (increasing efficiency) but because they seem to have higher industrial activity the CO2 has actually increased a bit too.
I’m not going to embrace this because the “intensity-based” way of setting CO2 targets is really just a dodge (see my own Canadian government’s position for example), but it looks like the EU is managing to moderate the effect of industrial activity. Two steps forward but one step back is better than standing still.
“Send in the toads to test for quakes“. Note: This is apparently not an April Fools joke. Anthony Watts’ latest copy-and-paste shows that when it comes to scientific enlightenment, he turns to right-wing political pundits. In this case, Andrew Breitbart.
A surface station!
This post is about an apparently anecdotal report of animal behavior, toads in this case, acting as an indicator of impending seismic activity. Goofy.
“NASA Data Worse Than Climate-Gate Data, GISS Admits“. The latest scientific analysis Anthony Watts has copied-and-pasted is… a Fox News article! This is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Blake Snow of FOXNews.com reports as an admission of inferiority a NASA scientist’s assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the different global surface temperature analyses. He also presents as definitive the opinion of Christopher Horner, a ‘senior fellow’ from the right-wing Competitive Enterprise Institute, that “three out of the four temperature data sets stink”. When another ‘senior fellow’ this time at the right-wing Heartland Institute, James M. Taylor, is quoted next and the article ends with our own Anthony’s unchallenged arm-waving about the “quality” of surface stations, you know the fix is in. “Fair & Balanced”, eh?
The only hint of reality comes from Dr. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground: “It would be nice if we had more global stations to enable the groups to do independent estimates using completely different raw data, but we don’t have that luxury”.
The real story? Climatologists have a limited number of long-duration surface temperature stations available to them. They use as many of those stations as possible. It’s a fundamental logical fact that they will all start with the same raw data. The differences will be in how they select representative stations from the entire data set and how they extrapolate from those stations.
As a final thought, I have to draw attention to the use of “accuracy” as the sole valid assessment of a temperature data set. Data can be accurate (very close to a true reading) but not as useful (doesn’t reflect the actual conditions over a wider area). The fundamental difference between the interpreted surface temperature data sets is that some are optimized for accuracy, some for global representativeness. There are good reasons for each approach. There are also good reasons why denialists try to define the argument on such narrow and misleading points.
“Results of the Climategate Paliamentary Inquiry in the UK“. (Yes, Anthony Watts can’t spell “Parliamentary”) Looks like Climategate isn’t the “final nail in the coffin of Global Warming” after all. Sorry Anthony, you’re going to have to keep bellowing. But perhaps the next few days are good ones for keeping a low profile.
The House of Commons press release is here. Click here to read the full report, The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. [Update: Volume II, the oral and written evidence is also available. There is some entertaining denialist posturing contained within!]
About “sharing data.” (all italics mine)
On the accusations relating to Professor Jones’s refusal to share raw data and computer codes, the Committee considers that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community but that those practices need to change.
About the “trick”:
On the much cited phrases in the leaked e-mails-”trick” and “hiding the decline”-the Committee considers that they were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead.
About accusations of “dishonesty” against Dr. Phil Jones (this was particularly nasty and unfounded):
Insofar as the Committee was able to consider accusations of dishonesty against CRU, the Committee considers that there is no case to answer.
About the FOI requests:
On the mishandling of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests, the Committee considers that much of the responsibility should lie with the University, not CRU.
No doubt Anthony or Steve McIntyre will find something to get outraged about, but this looks like a clean sweep for Dr. Phil Jones and the Climate Research Unit. This is a good day for science.
Wott's Up With That? 