“New commenting features on WUWT” (June 12th, 2011). Comment posting at Anthony Watts’ WordPress blog has changed and people are pissed off, but it’s not his fault:
“I have no control over this, wordpress.com implemented it across the board.”
Funny how Anthony didn’t cut Joe Romm at Climate Progress any slack over his website back-end changes a week ago. Luckily for Anthony, existing comments haven’t been affected. That would have been ironic…
“UVA to supply Mann emails/documents but you can’t look (yet)“ (May 25th, 2011). Anthony Watts’s friends at scientific cornerstone the American Tradition Institute have won their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) legal battle against Dr. Mann and the University of Virginia! They’re going to get everything Dr. Mann, or anyone that even knew him, ever wrote while at the University of Virginia! It will be full of instructions on how to fake global warming evidence! Also Anthony now knows what in camera means.
Chris Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (American Tradition Institute is just one of many sock-puppets) gloats about his FOIA demands:
“In short, the University was forced to part ways from supporting the PFAW/ACLU/AAAS/AAUP demands [damn commie libruls all of them!] and Mann’s interests, and start working to make itself look less bad to a court.” and “we get it all“. (emphasis mine)
Actually, no. But I suppose this is as close to scientific victory as the denialists will ever get.
The material in question is sealed and the only documents that will be unsealed is the fraction that is confirmed to contain correspondence relevant to specific research supported by public grant money. The unrelated material that Horner wanted to sweep up and snoop through will presumably remain excluded.
Chris Horner’s maneuverings are a partisan continuation of the frankly outrageous legal assault on Dr. Mann by the Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, built on the flimsy excuse that state funds may have somehow been misused. The University of Virginia’s position on these sweeping FOIA demands has always been that correspondence not directly connected to a legitimate FOIA would not be provided.
Funny how denialists and libertarians consider anything to do with themselves inviolably private but anything to do with their targets unquestionably public domain. People who receive work for government are apparently right-less slaves.
When this tactic first came up many denialists were uncomfortable with the invasion of privacy aspects, but they seem fine with it now. Steve McIntyre, the Great Auditor, was against it, but now he’s for it. Even Anthony himself was once merely tepid on this tactic. I guess principle is failing to overrule expediency.
“The SmartMeter backfiring privacy issue“ (May 12, 2011). Hmm. Is revealing details of an individual’s utility bill a privacy issue? Apparently not when Anthony could delight in partisan intrusions into Al Gore’s private life back in 2007 and 2009 (Gore snubs Earth Hour). Now of course it’s about institutional intrusion, which makes it a bad thing.
Here’s Anthony’s take on “smart meters”:
The promise was to help you control your electricity bill by becoming more aware of your energy use. The downside is that with the data gathered, other people and businesses can also become more aware of your habits, like when you go to work, go on vacation, etc. Is the potential energy savings worth the invasion of privacy trade-off? I sure don’t think so. I really don’t want PG&E or anyone else for that matter knowing how I live my life inside my own home.
Well, here’s something I agree with Anthony, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on: commercial entities have a responsibility to protect the personal information of their customers. That means securing the data transmissions and protecting the gathered information.
But what about the intended purpose of smart meters, enabling consumers to save money by identifying their most significant energy usages and by better aligning their usage with low-demand periods? After-all even Anthony drives a hybrid car and has a wind turbine; efficiency and self-sufficiency are positive characteristics in themselves.
“Wegman paper retraction by Journal” (May 16, 2011). Anthony Watts tries to dismiss the retraction of the denialist’s beloved Wegman Report because of “the caterwaulings of the anonymous Canadian named Deep Climate and his accusations of plagiarism”. Anthony sneers: “congratulations to Deep Climate for being able to attack a man in another country without having having [sic] to put your name behind it. Such courage. You must be proud.”
I always get a chuckle when Anthony’s howls for blood flip to whimpers of pain. It’s purest irony when a victim-bully accuses someone of cowardice.
Unfortunately, Deep Climate’s accusations were true. Wegman’s Report to Congress in 2006 was a sloppy piece of work produced to meet the political needs of the denialist Republican Congressman Joe Barton. Although widely rebutted, denialists held the Report up as evidence of both faulty statistical underpinnings for Dr. Mann’s so-called global temperature “hockey-stick” and of corruption in the scientific publication process. That Report[‘s” social network” accusations were] hastily reworked as Said, Wegman, et. al. (2008) in the un-related journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis which has now, to their undoubted reluctant embarrassment, retracted it.
This is not a little technical “oops”, this is academic incompetence and ethical failure. Still, it’s an easy “spoonful of sugar” fix according to Anthony:
So, no problem from my view. I expect the report will be rewritten, with citations where needed, maybe even adding extra dictionary definitions of words and their origins to satisfy the imagined slights against our lexiconic ancestors envisioned by DC and Mashey man, and they’ll resubmit it with the very same conclusions. That’s what I would do.
It sucks when something that denialists like yourself have been falsely clinging to for years is pulled down by a couple of intelligent observers, doesn’t it Anthony?
Extra irony: The Said, Wegman, et. al. (2008) paper was “personally reviewed” by CSDA chief editor Stanley Azen. Exactly the kind of cosy ‘social network’ peer-review manipulation they tried to accuse Dr. Mann and his co-authors of.
Update on May 18, 2011: Anthony has elaborated on his “no problem” plagiarism assessment, clarifying that he is in fact opposed to plagiarism. Also, Anthony has been the victim of it so he knows what he’s talking about. Anthony’s referring to the fact that someone (Dr. Menne) discourteously took his loud allegations of poor surface station data quality and proved him wrong using his own claims (this is now confirmed by Anthony’s own lame-duck paper). And then Menne failed to attribute a photo of a weather station to Anthony’s website!!!!!!!! Horrors. But that’s “attribution” not “plagiarism”.
“New solar reconstruction paper suggests 6x greater solar forcing change than cited by the IPCC“ (May 10, 2011). Could a paper brought to Anthony Watts’ attention by a hockey stick-obsessed denialist be right? Has it really all just been the Sun’s natural variation? We’re making such a fuss over nothing! Damn those stupid lying climate scientists.
Unfortunately, no. Anthony and his eager associates are conflating, either willfully or through ignorance, amounts of change with rates of change.
Shapiro et. al. (2011) reconstructed “the total and spectral solar irradiance covering 130 nm–10 μm from 1610 to the present” and presented a new model that suggests that TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) may have been “substantially lower during the Maunder minimum than observed today.” But being an actual scientist he also acknowledged that “there is general agreement on how solar forcing varied during the last several hundred years“. Which, surprise, is when man-made global warming happened. Once again, Anthony has toppled the global warming house of cards (not).
Stepping out of Anthony’s narrative for a minute what do the scientists, including Dr. Shapiro, agree upon about Total Solar Irradiance? That global temperatures increased with TSI from 1880 until about 1950. After about 1975 TSI flattens while global temperatures resume their increase. This renewed global warming (without any help from TSI) is what climate scientists attribute to greenhouse gases (see below, link to Skeptical Science).
Actual TSI vs global temperature. Not a great correlation once greenhouse gases kicked in, huh? Source: Skeptical Science.
Back to Anthony’s narrative: Funny how reconstructions, proxies, and computer models are A-OK with Anthony if he thinks they support the conclusion he wants. Otherwise, the anti-scientific howling is continuous. Hypocrisy much?
Funny how uncertain pre-instrumental records are A-OK with Anthony if he thinks they support the conclusion he wants. Otherwise, the anti-scientific howling is… you can fill in the blanks.
So, perhaps six times as much increase in TSI since 1850? Six times as much sounds huge. The historical TSI fluctuation is around 0.1%, which suggests that the fluctuation may have been up to about 0.6%. However this says nothing about the actual levels of TSI. Those values are neither changed or contested by the paper. If you compare the Figure 2 in Shapiro (2011) with that of Solanki (2004), shown above, you’ll see that in 1900 Shapiro’s TSI value is 3.9 lower in 1900, and 1.4 higher in 1960. The post-1960 peaks on both the Shapiro (2011) graph and Solanki (2004) TSI graph are the same: 1366 W/m2.
The unfortunate paper authors seem to have done some good refining work on historical Total Solar Irradiance that has minimal impact on the climate change debate but now find themselves falsely held aloft by denialists. I suppose bad publicity is better than no publicity…
“What climate science has come to: a rap music video with expletives“(May 11, 2011). Anthony Watts thinks an Australian TV show’s rap music put-down of the pontificating of unqualified denialists, I’m A Climate Scientist, is an “ugly insulting profanity“.
Whereas Anthony’s endless lies and misrepresentation are presumably high-minded discourse… [Funny, he was happy to link to the dunce-cap astro-turfer Minnesotans For Global Warming video “spoof” a while back. They took it down because some kill-joy pointed out that of they’d infringed copyright and content was just a tiny bit libelous.]
Perhaps he just wants his readers to swarm in and drown out supportive commenters and “dislike” it?
“Himalayan Sherpas as climate proxy“. (May 1, 2011) Anthony Watts reposts a “Bishop Hill” (Andrew Montford’s pseudonym) blog item mocking researchers for asking Himalayan Sherpas about changes in their environment (Biology Letters, April 2011). Anthony ‘piles on’ with a link to a twenty year-old anthropology book.
As reported by Richard Black of the BBC, apparently only about half of the villagers questioned reported that summers were starting earlier than they did ten years ago. This means the other half couldn’t be bribed to lie by the corrupt researchers I guess.
Their top line conclusions are that villagers are noticing signals suggestive of climate change.
Warmer weather, drying water sources, the advance of summer and the monsoon, new insect pests, earlier flowering of plants… all consistent with the basic idea of a warming world.
Anecdotal evidence is a favorite denialists talking point, but only when it goes their way. They like to report one person recalling that the beach height is exactly the same as when they were kid, but not when 250 people report about when flowers bloomed. Just a few days ago Anthony and his teammates were touting an opinion poll.
Selective as always, Anthony tells us about an imprecise research method but fails to mention that ways of successfully using it exist. Weak “remembered data” is better than a lack of data. Social anthropologists and social scientists live in that sphere and know how to use it with caution.
“Yes, Virginia, you do have to produce those ‘Global Warming’ documents“. Anthony Watts the citizen-scientist provides a sneering headline to his reprint of a partisan Washington Examiner op-ed.
Right-wing “think tank” the American Tradition Institute says that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s legal campaign against climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, who worked at the University of Virginia from 1999 t0 2005, is somehow principled and that the University of Virginia is somehow wasting taxpayer’s money by resisting Cuccinelli’s groundless legal actions.
Cuccinelli have been widely condemned over this in the press and by academic and legal bodies. We covered the fall-out from “Kook’s” first kick at this cat back in October. In a nutshell, Kook is not engaged in an effort to prove that Mann defrauded Virginia taxpayers, and has not demonstrated any reason to believe that the University has information relevant to such an accustion. He just wants to root around and see if he can find anything that can be twisted into an accusation after the fact. It is the near definition of a witch-hunt.
Funny how libertarians rail against government oppression unless they manage to grasp the levers of power. Anthony’s readers salivate over the persecution righteous smiting of Dr. Mann by Tea Party supporter “Kook” Cuccinelli, but they’ll return to howling about their own persecution soon enough.
There’s a useful timeline at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Washington Post has a recent report on this.
“Gore effect” strikes Cancun Climate Conference 3 days in a row. Anthony Watts thinks a dumb political remark by the “skeptical” Dr. Roy Spencer, in Cancun on a political mission for a lobbying group (CFACT), is worth noting. Does Dr. Spencer really think that the possible secret presence of Al Gore is triggering a cold spell in Cancun?
I thought that “skeptics” were adamant that scientists should keep out of politics, but apparently the goose and the gander get different sauces after-all.
“Telegraph blunders, assumes Wikileaks was responsible for Climategate emails being made available to the public“. Funny, Anthony Watts loved the Telegraph until they were forced to retract denialist climate change statements.
Of course the question that begs asking is why Anthony so concerned about the “damaging impacts” of WikiLeaks but so quick to embrace the Climategate leaks. The answer, surprisingly, is that Anthony is a partisan hypocrite.
Wott's Up With That? 