Tag Archives: Nit-picking

Newsbytes: New Research Reveals IPCC In Bed With Green Lobbies

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“Newsbytes: New Research Reveals IPCC In Bed With Green Lobbies“ (2011-11-03). Oh my gosh, a carefully fact-checked newswire story proves that the IPCC are incompetent commie eco-facists! It’s a “scathing new expose“!

Oh, wait. It’s just another wild one-sided press release rehash from the denialist Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Benny Peiser. He’s uncovered a Fox News screed that trumpets how young some of the IPCC report authors are, and has found a few other semi-random news links. Also Donna Laframboise is a feminist, so we should have complete faith in her 43 recruits and their “audit” of the IPCC 2007 report. Go buy her book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert! It’s sciencey.

The “green lobbies” accusation is somehow implicit, but of course everything is a “green lobby” to paranoid libertarians because it’s all part of the secret communist world government.

Thanks madcap paranoid libertarians, I knew you’d clear everything up!

It does seem a bit odd though that there’s no mention of atmospheric physics.

The long[-]awaited surfacestations paper

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“The long awaited surfacestations paper“ (May 11, 2011). Hosannah! The great day has arrive-ened! Anthony Watts’ paper, Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends, is in press at the Journal of Geophysical Research. The global warming house of cards has fallen-ed!

Just look at some of these definitely-no-global-warming quotes in what Anthony has pasted in from co-author lead-author Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog (emphasis mine):

Q: So is the United States getting warmer?
A: Yes…

Q: Has the warming rate been overestimated?
A: The minimum temperature rise appears to have been overestimated, but the maximum temperature rise appears to have been underestimated.

Q: What about mean temperature trends?
A: In the United States the biases in maximum and minimum temperature trends are about the same size, so they cancel each other and the mean trends are not much different from siting class to siting class.

Yowza! Game over? Oops.

What a lame exercise in irrelevant nit-picking. After years of just you wait squawking, even Anthony and company’s best spin boils down to whining about bluntly negligible data quality issues. This isn’t even backyard fireworks level excitement. Shame on you, Anthony.

Still, you have to feel a bit sorry for him. He’s not lead author on ‘his’ paper because he doesn’t have the statistical chops for even this damp squib. Dr. Pielke tries to give him a libertarian head-pat though:

The Surface Stations project is truly an outstanding citizen scientist project under the leadership of Anthony Watts!  The project did not involve federal funding. Indeed, these citizen scientists paid for the page charges for our article.

Of course we have to remember what the big picture is here. After all this scientific-paper-of-the-century is just about US temperature data and global warming is, um, global. Dr. Pielke has to come clean (emphasis mine):

Does this uncertainty extend to the worldwide surface temperature record? In our paper… …we found that the global average surface temperature may be higher than what has been reported by NCDC and others as a result in the bias in the landscape area where the observing sites are situated. However, we were not able to look at the local siting issue that we have been able to study for the USA in our new paper.

Anthony seems quite pleased with himself, but frankly this own-goal would be embarrassing even as a high school science fair poster. Why Dr. Pielke’s name is attached to this says something about the power of conviction over that of intellect. Sad, because sometimes he has something relevant to offer.

I guess those page charges were just too juicy for the JGR to let slip away.

Update: Anthony’s wounded howls of mistreatment pepper the comment editing. Wait until the scientists respond!

My Thanks and Comments for Dr. Walt Meier

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“My Thanks and Comments for Dr. Walt Meier“. Now it’s Willis Eschenbach’s turn to pick at Dr. Walt Meier’s response to Willis’ “questionnaire”. This is just the trap that Willis hoped to spring on Dr. Meier. After some self-congratulatory remarks about civil discussion and the like, he can now nit-pick, throw out cherry-picked counter examples, argue over word choices, casually repeat denialist memes, and generally posture and enjoy the superficial connection to a “real scientist”.

Dr. Meier finds the denialist welcome depicted in this stock photo used at WUWT contains a surprise.

This goes on for about 7300 words. Two points from his “conclusions” bear comment:

1. Reading Dr. Meier’s answers to the questions has been very interesting and very productive for me. It has helped to identify where the discussion goes off the rails. [Implying that it’s Dr. Meier that :”goes off the rails”, not Willis. The departure is in Willis’ head, refusal to accept basic science is why the denialists fail to understand the evidence of Global Warming.]

7. Since the null hypothesis that the climate variations are natural has not been falsified, the AGW hypothesis is still a solution in search of a problem. [This chance to make this unsupported claim is the entire point of Willis’ extended debating exercise. In fact, no scientifically honest climate models can’t match historical climate trends without human factors.]

It feels like Anthony and his associates are chasing their own tails in ever-tightening circles.