Tag Archives: Conspiracies

I’m honored…I think

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“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.

BP says Gulf oil spill has been stopped in test

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“BP says Gulf oil spill has been stopped in test“: Anthony Watts posts a link to a Reuters report about an apparently successful capping of the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, every-thing’s OK now I guess. Drill, baby, drill!

Commenters are talking darkly about how a successful cap of the wellhead “will remove a useful ‘crisis’ from the progressive agenda” and that the “catastrophe has largely been one of the Federal Gov’t screwing over us much worse than what BP did.” Of course the claim that “Obama wanted a monumental disaster with maximum damage, in order to advance his agenda” is in the mix too. Mustn’t forget the sullen claim that oil spills are natural and harmless…

Website News

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Yes, I’ve been a bad boy lately, focusing on my own activities and generally letting the WUWT howlers fade into the background. There have certainly been a few doosies though!

I’ve made use of the break to do some jigging of the intertubes and now wotsupwiththat.com and wottsupwiththat.com both redirect to this WordPress site. That’s something, isn’t it?

Here are a few recent entertaining links.

NOAA GOES weather satellite communications at risk due to proposed FCC spectrum auction

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“NOAA GOES weather satellite communications at risk due to proposed FCC spectrum auction“. Anthony Watts is up in arms over a plan by the FAA to redistribute (lease) frequencies used by several weather satellite systems. Ominous conspiracy theories abound in the comments.

NIWA’s Kiwi Kaper

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“NIWA’s Kiwi Kaper“. Anthony Watts gravely informs us of an uncovered climate conspiracy in New Zealand. But fear not, a “skeptical” (right-wing) New Zealand politician is calling for the replacement the existing New Zealand NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) climate record of a 0.92°C twentieth-century warming trend with something more ‘suitable’. Namely that it should be depicted as “remarkably steady at 12.6°C“.

A former politician named Barry Brill tries to fake it up with a “substantial essay” on a right-wing Australian website called Quadrant Online. Barry is also Chairman of the fraudulent denialist “New Zealand Climate Science Coalition”, caught in 2009 telling flat-out lies about NZ weather records.

The claims are all about “smuggled data” from Dr. Jim Salinger that doesn’t gibe with denialist’s anecdotal recollections, cherry-picked counter-examples and imputed political motivation. Somehow a conspiracy to manipulate climate data was initiated in 1994 in order to support a left-wing political agenda created in 2007.

Here’s the response from the NIWA to the denialist games. The above chart illustrates the dishonesty of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition’s claim that temperatures have been “remarkably steady“. There’s a “kaper” alright, Anthony. You’re part of it.

IPCC’s Chairman Pachauri Conflicted

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“IPCC’s Chairman Pachauri Conflicted“. Nothing seems to be sticking lately for Anthony Watts, so he’s casting about for more personal attacks on Dr. Pachauri. The denialist Science and Public Policy Institute has produced a so-called report (more of a rant really) titled “Dr Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC – No Fossil Fool”. Author Dennis Ambler claims that Dr. Pachauri “has previous or present connections, demonstrating a very clear conflict of interest” with energy companies in India.

All these secret connections! That Pachauri’s a tricky one. Wait, they’ve been public knowledge all along? Still, how dare he make intelligent, maybe even profitable, business decisions! Wait, isn’t that good capitalism?

Of course it’s all part of a “long-term UN agenda of wealth transfer from rich nations to poor nations.” Those cunning commies! Maybe someone needs to go back on their meds.

Global warming: The Oxburgh Inquiry was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

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“Global warming: The Oxburgh Inquiry was an offer he couldn’t refuse.” A criminal conspiracy theory from Thomas Fuller, a denialist political commentator at the San Francisco Examiner, who asks a number of ominous leading questions about the Oxburgh Inquiry into the claimed scientific criticisms that arose from the Climategate e-mails.

Do I believe the ‘mob directed the investigation?’ Of course not. Do I believe that Lord Oxburgh had additional reasons to weight the findings of his investigation in favor of the status quo? It’s certainly possible. Do I think that having an underworld connection to renewable energy subsidies prejudices almost every decision made about renewable energy? Definitely.

Eeek! Sounds like a job for Steven Seagal.

Note that Fuller was a very early actor in the effort to leverage the inconsequential stolen Climate Research Unit e-mails into a scientific and political scandal.

GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought

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“GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought“. Anthony Watts thinks this ‘alarmist’ post “might also be one of the most important” ever because it explains how people “can wreck a whole month’s worth of climate data.” His commenters, of course, agree and praise his insight.

Surprise, it’s nothing but cherry-picked examples of human error in recording negative temperatures and how such entries are handled by automated aviation weather reports. As noted at The Whiteboard, none of the 12 aviation weather report errors Anthony found made it into data-sets used by climatologists. Much more satisfying to rage about alleged errors that to actually make the effort to prove they’re significant. Standard Operating Procedure at WUWT.

Anthony prefers satellite measurements, presumably because of the automated nature of their collection. But I think his real reason is that the satellite record is still too short to conclusively represent long-term climate patterns. Can’t act on Global Warming until then, can we?

But wait, what is the satellite global temperature trend? The same as the surface stations trend. Both are… up.

Amusingly, it seems that Anthony though better of this incidental defamatory accusation (italics mine):

Around 1990, NOAA began weeding out more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. They may have been working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It can be shown that they systematically and purposefully, country by country, removed higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.

The replacement text reads:

Around 1990, NOAA/NCDC’s GHCN dataset lost more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. It can be shown that country by country, they lost stations with a bias towards higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.

This is a long debunked meme of Anthony’s. Perhaps this new fabricated controversy serves to obscure the fact that he still hasn’t proven his charge against NOAA?