Tag Archives: Conspiracies

ERL rejects Richard Tol’s comment on Cook et al 2013, but won’t say who rejected it

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“ERL rejects Richard Tol’s comment on Cook et al 2013, but won’t say who rejected it” (2013-06-16). A little while ago Anthony Watts was greatly irritated by an Environmental Research Letters paper by John Cook, et al. which quantified the widely stated consensus that 98% of qualified climatologists agree that human industrial activity is having an undeniable warming influence on our climate. Much unsuccessful wailing and nit-picking by Anthony and Co. ensued.

Now we have word that Dr. Richard Tol, a denialist economist, submitted a killer Comment on the resented article. Sadly, declaring that he’s angry and doesn’t like Cook fails meet the threshold for scientific publication. For that he has to actually find something significantly wrong with the original paper.

Sez the ERL reviewer, “It reads more like a blog post than a scientific comment.” Swing! And a miss. But cue Anthony and his blog of disgruntlement, the natural home for things that don’t offer “a real contribution to the development of the subject, raising important issues about errors, controversial points or misleading results”.

Anthony Watts says that the editorial board of ERL contains thieves and suggests that right-thinking people “query” the journal’s editor-in-chief, offering a helpful link to their e-mail address. “Citizen science” becomes thug science in one easy step.

2013-06-18 Update: Richard Tol is flailing about trying the “he said, she said” defense over at Wotts Up With That Blog, a new website that shares my disgust with Anthony Watts’ antics.

Pielke Jr. appears to get booted from a journal for giving an unfavorable peer review to some shoddy science

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“Pielke Jr. appears to get booted from a journal for giving an unfavorable peer review to some shoddy science“ (2013-02-21). So much truculent stupidity at Watts Up With That recently! All just background noise here in the world of reality. This one’s entertaining though, especially as once again it illuminates Anthony Watts’ habit of blindly piling on any complaint of persecution of fellow denialists.

What happened? Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. wrote another of his “everyone’s mean to me” blog posts because he was dropped from the editorial board of Global Environmental Change. Why? Because they hate him and only ever pretended to like him. The reality however is hilariously different.

First though, Anthony’s contribution. He insta-pasted a snide accusation from Mark Steyn, a notoriously inflammatory right-wing flunky, who after the obligatory self-referential muttering about the evil Dr. Michael Mann declared that “…Professor Pielke, expelled by the palace guard of climate conformism, appears to have been felled by the very pathology he identified.”

Our un-inquisitive and hasty Anthony was forced to walk it back a bit though as you will notice when carefully examining his post’s slug; “pielke-jr-gets-booted-from-journal-for-giving-an-unfavorable-peer-review-to-some-shoddy-science”. It’s missing the ass-covering “appears to get” which was added to the post title later. The post now starts with a non-correction by Roger. It seems he still considers himself rudely dumped, but not for the reason he howled about. I can still hear the wahhhh-mbulance though.

So what really happened? The thin-skinned drama queen thought he was kicked to the curb as payback for his blog criticism (Science is the Shortcut) of a paper, Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?, published in Global Environmental Change. Sadly, it turns out that none of the journal’s other board members were even aware of Roger’s devastating blast, making it hard to sustain the accusation.

In fact, Roger had reached the end of his term and had clearly been coasting. Expected to review up to five papers a year, as many as 30 in his six years, he had been requested to review 18 papers. He’d only actually reviewed six and hadn’t submitted a review since August 2010. His replacement coincided with that of five others, who presumably all simultaneously pissed off the secret editorial board leaders…

2013-02-23 Update: “Rabett” calls it: victim bullying.

Another skeptical university professor fired – related to CARB’s PM2.5 air pollution regulation scandal

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“Another skeptical university professor fired – related to CARB’s PM2.5 air pollution regulation scandal“ (2012-06-16). In case you were wondering, every time a prickly right-winger gets fired from a university it’s because of persecution by the oppressive liberal intelligentsia. Anthony Watts wants to make sure you learn what he discovered on the always-reliable WingNut Daily (fyi, it’s all driven by intellectuals resentful over the failure of Communism). The Los Angeles Times has some coverage too.

Seems the John Galt wannabes at the American Center for Law and Justice are fightin’ the good fight for James Enstrom, a UCLA researcher fired after 35 years for daring to expose fraudulent research that was used to “justify draconian diesel vehicle regulations” as well as fake credentials at the “vile” (that’s Anthony’s description) California Air Resources Board. I guess the wheels of liberal oppression grind slowly.

Diesel exhaust is good for you and should not be regulated (pay no mind to the 750,000 annual Chinese deaths from particulate pollution). So is second-hand smoke.

Dr. Enstrom was defending his conclusions about the pish-poshedness of secondhand smoke years ago. Back in 2005 he was already invoking the right-wing’s favorite boogeyman Lysenko in defense of his tobacco epidemiology research. His Scientific Integrity Institute, solely concerned with the integrity of one J.E. Enstrom, Ph.D., came into existence at around the same time.

I suppose I have to say it: there’s no question that academic freedom needs protection and that legitimate examination of any scientific consensus is deeply important. Too bad that hypocritical partisan zealots like Anthony are so busy poisoning the debate. By the way Anthony, which is it? Close all universities because they’re dens of communism leeching off the noble taxpayer, or don’t touch the freedom of academics? ‘Cause if you only howl about the plight of right-wing allies you’re not really operating on principle, are you? What we actually get from you are incessant calls to fire academics that you don’t like and to strip funding from programs that don’t support your politics.

It’s YOU that academic freedom needs protection from, not Enstrom or Drapela.

The Anatomy of a Global Warming Smear

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“The Anatomy of a Global Warming Smear” (2012-02-18). ¡Ay, caramba! Anthony Watts desperately posts fellow Heartland Institute funding recipient Alan Caruba’s full-on rant about climate science, apparently triggered by the Heartland Institute document leak. Also, he hates the New York Times.

Here’s some nuance for ya:

Suffice to say, the “climate science” served up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been a pack of lies from the day it first convened.

Sing it brother! What next?

Next to oxygen, CO2 is vital to all life on Earth as it sustains all vegetation which in turn sustains every creature that depends on it as a source of food.

I guess as a good environmentalist I should rush outside and pant on some shrubs.

Thousands of scientists have signed petitions denouncing global warming as a hoax.

If you’re gonna stay stupid things like that someone should tell you about the internet. Your wannabe petitions were all fake petitions packed with unqualified names.

There’s a reason the theme of Heartland’s sixth conference in 2011 was “Restoring the Scientific Method.”

Cute misspelling of “undermining”.

2012-05-22 update: After much caterwauling by the Heartland Institute about forgeries and the shameful behavior of nasty warmists, the true conclusion can be drawn: “Peter Gleick cleared of forging documents in Heartland expose“

A little security help for my friends

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“A little security help for my friends” (2011-12-16). Anthony Watts, that paragon of transparency and objectivity, passes on a b-grade security tip to his fellow sneaks now that British denialist Roger Tattersall (aka “Tallbloke”) has had his computers seized as part of the criminal investigation into the second release of old “Climategate” e-mails.

Keep everything important on a USB thumb drive and be ready to smother it with mayonnaise and swallow same on a moment’s notice. This includes your chemtrail studies and skynet preparations.

Because everything you’re doing is totally on the up-and-up.

The End is Near for Faith in AGW

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“The End is Near for Faith in AGW“ (June 25th, 2011). Anthony Watts posts a prediction by ordinary citizen Russell Cook (“semi-retired graphic artist” and right-wing blogger for the climaterealist denialists). It’s over! The warmists have lost! Or are just about to lose. I love these over-the-shoulder declarations of victory from people as they flee the debate.

Apparently his “seventeen+ months of research” allows him to declare that Al Gore’s 2007 documentary film, the last word in climate science, is based on a lie. Perhaps even more than one! Also “the media” are all mean to denialists because they don’t give equal time (except Fox News, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Times, The Telegraph, National Post, The Australian, etc.).

Here’s the vile canard that started off all the skeptic-bullying:

Skeptic scientists are accused of being in a fossil fuel-funded conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact“…

Here’s the big problem I found:  That accusation is based on a 1991 memo no one was allowed to see, using an out-of-context sentence, promoted by a person who was not a Pulitzer winner despite accolades to the contrary, who was credited with finding the memo by Al Gore, but Gore had the memo collection in his own possession four years earlier.

Actually, I thought that “skeptic scientists” were being accused of misrepresenting physical science and climate evidence. My bad I guess. So an unseen 1991 memo, declared to be taken out-of-context, is the real smoking gun behind all this cruelty and dispute? Oh, the irony! Oh, the blinding faith!

I will agree that it would be great to see (the eternally constipated?) Richard Lindzen, a Republican “science” witness on any number of topics since 1991, scowling in front of a House Committee again. He didn’t do too well last time, except in the imagination of self-convinced denialists.

Anthony optimistically declares victory too while strangely turning away from the science:

“When the public learns about huge faults in the skeptic scientist accusation, combined with the faults in the IPCC, the result may send AGW into total collapse.”

You’re dancing on the head of a pin, Anthony.

NCDC cites “controversy” with the UAH temperature record, and the search for a “true climate signal”

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NCDC cites “controversy” with the UAH temperature record, and the search for a “true climate signal” (May 13, 2011). Anthony Watts still thinks the NCDC is after him because of their “ghost authored attack on me and the surfacestations project” back in 2009. I guess it’s easier for him than admitting that their scientific evaluation of his claims found no support whatsoever for his bellowed accusations.

Even the paper that poor Anthony was recently involved with came to the same conclusion, although much more quietly and with a healthy dose of self-congratulation. There was, and is, no warming bias in the US average temperature record. There is no warming bias associated with urbanization of temperature recording station locations. The warming trends are real and the product of human environmental impacts.

What reminded the thin-skinned Anthony of this past insult? A new article by NCDC scientists titled Tropospheric temperature trends: history of an ongoing controversy (full pdf here). They conclude:

The state of the observational and model science has progressed considerably since 1990. The uncertainty of both models and observations is currently wide enough, and the agreement in trends close enough, to support a finding of no fundamental discrepancy between the observations and model estimates throughout the tropospheric column.

Anthony tries to make hay of the bland ‘admission’ that researchers need to “calibrate the data and unambiguously extract the true climate signal from the inevitable nonclimatic influences inherent in the routine observations.” What? “Inevitable nonclimatic influences?” The use of these words mean that Anthony’s accusations were right all along!!!!

Not. It’s quite bold-faced of Anthony to claim that climate scientists have, until now, discounted “noise and uncertainty”. In fact this has been a core concern for decades. He also throws in a snide reference to “observational uncertainty” to insinuate yet again that climate scientists are manipulating the temperature record for their own purposes.

Noise. Something Anthony’s quite familiar with generating in order to obscure facts.

Real Climate on Spencer – Bad timing or just bad judgment?

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“Real Climate on Spencer – Bad timing or just bad judgment?” Anthony Watts decides to read nefarious purpose into the timing of a RealClimate review of denialist scientist Roy Spencer’s book “The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists”. They seem to have posted it on the same day that a series of massive tornadoes (nothing to do whatsoever with global warming!!!!!) took out power in Spencer’s hometown of Huntsville, Alabama.

Did they deliberately release their review when they thought they would be safe from Spencer’s devastating intellectual rebuttal? Those cunning, corrupt, dishonest communist climate scientists! But the always high-minded Anthony Watts sorted it out with an e-mail offering ethics advice. Anthony’s readers start the libeling by themselves.

So what of Spencer’s book? Could he be right? Would it really take “only one research study to cause the global warming house of cards to collapse”?

Well unless you embrace Spencer’s astonishing belief that decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world could actually flip into untold thousands of admissions of “my bad”, no.

Instead Spencer accuses “the IPCC researchers” of “fundamental mistakes” that only he has discovered, but never identifies the dumb scientists or references their alleged mistakes. He waves away detailed paleo data with “we don’t have a clue”. (I suppose as a creationist he is uncomfortable with any date before 4004 BC.) He’s so intellectually flexible that he’s already contradicted his own book in later papers. Is it true that “short-term fluctuations in the energy balance and surface temperature are consistent with a low climate sensitivity” (the whatever-he-can-get-away-with book, April 2010), or  that “the climate system is never in equilibrium” ( the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research, August 2010)? I guess the ice ages are impossible.

Perhaps next Spencer will be confidently asserting that toothpicks are made when beavers sneeze? He should stick to remote sensing, where he actually has some expertise.

Read some other critiques at Climate Progress and Barry Bickmore. Anthony Watts and right-wing blogs such as “The American [un]Thinker” offer gullible high praise of course.

Climate models go cold

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Anthony illustrates Evans' science with cartoon of a CO2 molecule (or maybe deadmau5).

Climate models go cold. Hey, we’re golden! Anthony Watts assures us that “Carbon warming [is] too minor to be worth worrying about”! After-all, there’s a paranoid right-wing opinion piece by Australian crank David Evans in Canada’s Financial Post newspaper that proves it.

David Evans tells us that he’s “a scientist” (although not a climate scientist as he likes to imply) who used to be an “alarmist”. But he learned that the “whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s”? Wow! Did someone just hit the That Was Easy button?

Evans is mainly interested in muttering about political corruption, gravy trains and “the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome”. But here’s the core of Evans’ claim (note his inability to solve the equation 1 + 3 = x):

For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

So… if Evans can disprove the implied relative contributions to warming, which he has already got wrong, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down I guess. Evans sets to work. No tropospheric “hotspot”, as posited by climate science, was found in the upper atmosphere! [Except it was.] Evans says all that water vapor was turning into clouds that offset the warming. [Except it didn’t.] Those corrupt climate scientists never noticed the clouds, so they’re wrong! [Except clouds have always been part of climate modeling.]

With this very shaky underpinning, Evans proceeds to assure us that the reason climate scientists won’t admit their error now is because they want to keep their “well-paying jobs with lavish research grants” and are slavishly eager to offer “political power to their government masters.” Why, they “ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence” [nope], and they  are playing tricks with “the way they measure temperature” [a lame invocation of Anthony’s discredited science fair project], and they ignore the satellite record [you know, the ones they put up there].

Kind of confusing until you realise that this whole dissertation was made at an Anti-Carbon-Tax Rally, probably from Evan’s Perth, Australia front porch. The only science in his entire rant is Anthony’s addition of a Wikipedia CO2 molecule cartoon. There could be some nasty backlash over his inconvenient admission that CO2 has even a slight warming effect though…

2011-04-13 Update: Michael Tobis highlights Evans’ flim-flam at Only In It For The Gold.

Help asked for Dr. Tim Ball in legal battle with Dr. Mann

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Help asked for Dr. Tim Ball in legal battle with Dr. Mann. I’ve started dipping back into the putrid dung heap that is the archives of Anthony Watts’ blog and came across this recent plea by Sky Dragon Co-Slayer John O’Sullivan. Anthony Watts naturally professes to “have no dog in this fight.” Neither do all the other denialist blogs singing along in beautiful harmony.

Dr. Michael Mann has sued Dr. Tim Ball, “a 72-year-old pensioner”, for libel. He’s also suing the right-wing think tank Frontier Centre for Public Policy, which is probably also a 72-year-old pensioner. That’s not just mean, that’s double-mean!

After all, isn’t poor victimized Dr. Ball “widely recognized as one of Canada’s first qualified climate scientists”? [Not a chance. He’s a geography professor who left the University of Manitoba in 1996. Here’s his rap sheet.] Maybe he’s just a caught-out liar who readily turns to puffed up legal threats against his critics.

Judge for yourself of course but this is how the nut-jobs at the graphic arts crime scene called the Canada Free Press blog (who are curiously fixated on how much longer Barack Hussein Obama will be the President of the United States) recently defended him on a similar matter:

Retraction
Apology to Dr. Andrew Weaver
By Canada Free Press  Thursday, January 20, 2011

On January 10, 2011, Canada Free Press began publishing on this website an article by Dr. Tim Ball entitled “Corruption of Climate Change Has Created 30 Lost Years” which contained untrue and disparaging statements about Dr. Andrew Weaver, who is a professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

Contrary to what was stated in Dr. Ball’s article, Dr. Weaver: (1) never announced he will not participate in the next IPCC; (2) never said that the IPCC chairman should resign; (3) never called for the IPCC’s approach to science to be overhauled; and (4) did not begin withdrawing from the IPCC in January 2010.

As a result of a nomination process that began in January, 2010, Dr. Weaver became a Lead Author for Chapter 12: “Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility” of the Working Group I contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC.”  That work began in May, 2010.  Dr. Ball’s article failed to mention these facts although they are publicly-available.

Dr. Tim Ball also wrongly suggested that Dr. Weaver tried to interfere with his presentation at the University of Victoria by having his students deter people from attending and heckling him during the talk.  CFP accepts without reservation there is no basis for such allegations.

CFP also wishes to dissociate itself from any suggestion that Dr. Weaver “knows very little about climate science.”  We entirely accept that he has a well-deserved international reputation as a climate scientist and that Dr. Ball’s attack on his credentials is unjustified.

CFP sincerely apologizes to Dr. Weaver and expresses regret for the embarrassment and distress caused by the unfounded allegations in the article by Dr. Ball.

But reading John O’Sullivan’s spoon-fed “interview” one can’t help but conclude that a vicious liberal-environmentalist climate conspiracy is unquestionably trying to punish Dr. Ball, honorable truth-speaker, through the courts. Any money he received from oil companies was “accidental“. The only real error that he made, charmingly central to his accusations, was an “honest” one. And by gosh he’s terribly worried about “the credibility of science in general”.

I urge Dr. Ball’s courageous supporters to keep those donations rolling in. I sense that there’s so much more on-the-record entertainment ahead.