“Quote of the week #31: Bubba disses the Goreacle“. This is a two-fer for Anthony Watts. He gets to malign Al Gore and Former President Bill Clinton all at once. How is an off-the-cuff joke by Clinton during a light-hearted speech a scientific critique of global warming or Al Gore?
Only in Anthony’s “tea party” mind.
“Find the weather station in this photo“. Australians can photograph weather stations too. Renowned newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt is on to it! Oh no, the international conspiracy will really collapse now.
Climate craziness of the week: global warming “leads to more violence”. Even psychologists are talking about global warming. Anthony Watts tells us that uninformed people (except himself) should stick to their own areas of expertise. They certainly shouldn’t try to postulate implications of expected climate changes in those areas.
“Icelandic fissure eruption triggers worries“. Volcanoes are unpredictable and violent. So why worry about something as slow and dull as global warming?
Volcano erupts near Eyjafjallajoekull in Iceland.
“McKitrick: Toronto smog models exaggerate health issues – where are the bodies?” Anthony Watts reports that discredited researcher Ross McKitrick has found an off-beat journal, Environmental Modelling & Software, to publish his paper about the health impacts of smog based on 16 year-old air pollution data. He’s also cemented his research with a newspaper editorial in the National Post newspaper.
His conclusion? Hardly any impact on health, even though all the earlier studies find impacts. Could it be because McKitrick only looked at hospital admissions and not at, you know, deaths? He’s proven very good at intentionally looking past evidence.
Oh yeah, Anthony’s contribution has been the usual vigorous application of the “copy” and “paste” commands.
“North and Booker on Amazongate: A billion dollar cash cow“. Anthony Watts’ helpfully copy-and-pastes his friends explanation of a “new revelation” about how the IPCC is helping the World Wildlife Federation keep themselves well-supplied with new Ferraris by buying tropical forests and not chopping them down. Cunning, but they’re on to you, WWF! Leave the exploitation to the oil companies.
The denialist conspiracy theory about the purpose of the IPCC’s “Amazongate” lies (also known as substantiated scientific analyses: see here and here), which popped up recently but have already been shown to be groundless denialist misrepresentations, is that the WWF plans to pocket $60 billion from rain forest carbon credits. After all, it’s in Heartland Institute associate Christopher Booker’s Telegraph column (evidence of expertise here and here) and another denialist crank’s blog! I guess they’re hoping to get some traction amongst people who haven’t been paying attention.
“The current El Niño: still hanging on“. Ah, yes; El Niño. Invoked as often as possible as the cause of natural, temporary global warming by Anthony Watts and his fellow “thinkers”. Anthony copies-and-pastes a NASA press release or two (El Niño’s Last Hurrah and NASA’s Aura Sees El Niño’s Effects on the Atmosphere) on the subject to keep the natural, temporary idea bouncing around in people’s heads.
A satellite image of the Pacific Ocean's surface temperature. Now that's sciencey Anthony! Image credit: NASA/JPL.
Trouble is this El Niño has been too weak to account for the atmospheric warming we’ve recently experienced. What will Anthony talk about when this El Niño finally fades and the upward climate trend continues or accelerates? He’ll find something.
’science’s dirtiest secret: The “scientific method” of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation.’ Anthony Watts starts learning about statistics! Will he be shocked to learn that failing the 95% confidence interval doesn’t mean that something is false? (See the whole “no warming since 1995” tomfoolery.)
[Note that an excellent analysis of this can also be found at Open Mind. Tamino makes the point that the author’s main concern is with medical studies and with understanding the implications of the null hypothesis.]
P value = probability of an observed result arising only from chance.
Anthony has copy-and-pasted science journalist Tom Siegfried’s ScienceNews article “Odds Are, It’s Wrong“. This rather loose discussion of the flaws of statistical analysis serves as a jumping-off point for more of Anthony’s misplaced accusations. Short version: poor statistical analysis can obscure correct scientific interpretations. Here’s the “dirty secret” part:
Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted.
Ouch! I think he’s talking to you Anthony! Here’s another good quote from the article (italics mine), especially in light of Anthony endless insinuations about the “Mann’s tree ring proxy hockey stick” (he can’t even get six words in a row right):
Replicating a result helps establish its validity more securely, but the common tactic of combining numerous studies into one analysis, while sound in principle, is seldom conducted properly in practice.
Guess what Mann’s climate analysis was? A combination of numerous studies. Not just tree ring proxies. This is why is stands up so well, and why the denialists are so desperate to tear it down.
“Gore: Making it personal“. Anthony Watts is on Al Gore’s mailing list and he doesn’t like it one bit (although he may consider himself a cunning spy). Repower America is encouraging Americans to write to their Senator in support of a clean energy bill. And by write, they mean handwritten. With a pen! How can they harness the idle rage of the blogosphere that way?
If you want to look ‘big’ you’ve got to use Anthony’s method of encouraging readers to flood electronic in-boxes with easy copy-and-pasted spin, probably under as many names as possible. Kind of like the swarms of incoherent comments on media climate news web pages, or fake Freedom of Information requests Steven McIntyre orchestrated.
Although in this particular case, Anthony says “I’m only pointing out an opportunity, don’t feel obligated.“
“New GOES-15 weather sat reaches orbit“. Anthony Watts copies-and-pastes another innocuous news release to thin out the relentless denialist bunk. NASA and the NOAA have launched GOES-P, a spare geostationary weather satellite, using a Delta IV launch vehicle. Hooray!
From Anthony’s blog we know that Federal institutions, especially NASA and NOAA, are corrupt. How could they carry out this task without fudging the numbers? Perhaps they’ve been caught trying to “hide an ascent.”
Click on the image to see the night launch on NASA's website.
Wott's Up With That? 