Tag Archives: Quote mining

ABC interview wrongly torches skeptic position

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“ABC interview wrongly torches skeptic position“. Does Anthony Watts really think that denialists fighting in “the cause of climate skepticism” accept that “both CO2 and CH4 are “greenhouse gases”, and yes they do have a warming effect by backscattered long wave infra red“? Guess he doesn’t read his blog’s comments. Wait he does, compulsively and passive-aggressively. Anthony’s only other contribution here is to helpfully provide e-mail addresses that can be bombarded.

The reposted ‘concern troll’ complaint by Canadian denialist Tom Harris maintains that Australia’s ABC Radio Science Show interview with Bob Ward from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment was too soft by half. (Funny how these guys manage to be on top of such distant matters and have their posts pop up in so many places at once.)

Harris thinks the interviewer should have asked a juicy leading question like “which is more important – the health and welfare of people suffering today, or those not yet born who might suffer someday due to climate change that even you admit is highly uncertain?” I think what he really wants to say is “why should I have to do anything I don’t want to when the effects will only be felt after I’m dead”. I’d be surprised to see a libertarian or Republican tenaciously fighting to improve the lives of anyone other than themselves.

The rest of the post is mere high-school rhetoric and deliberate misrepresentation (try to find the “vilification [of] Professors Carter, Lindzen and Plimer” that Harris claims). There’s something about denialists that compels them to recreate public debates in their minds and explain to themselves how they were really won them.

I love Harris’ embrace of eyeballed temperature trends “showing” negative temperature trends since 2002 though. What happened to “1998 was the hottest year”? Keep the cups moving Tom, keep ’em moving.

Maybe they’ve found Trenberth’s missing heat

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“Maybe they’ve found Trenberth’s missing heat“. Anthony Watts notes another climate press release with a class-clown giggle so he can side-step the fact that Kevin Trenberth’s honest concern about deep-ocean temperature records is being resolved. His confederacy of dunces sings along in the comments. Once again Anthony’s entire contribution is his choice of blog post title. It’s a reference to a cherry-picked statement by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Kevin Trenberth back in the Spring:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

Trenberth used the word “travesty” to describe the lack of well-distributed temperature measurements from places like the deep ocean, he was not talking about a failure of climate theory. However the denialists grabbed that useful sentence fragment with both hands and tried to paint him as agreeing with them that climatology was corrupt, fraudulent, and never visits its mother. This malicious denialist meme is still widely circulating.

NOAA has a press release called Scientists Find 20 Years of Deep Water Warming Leading to Sea Level Rise. It covers a paper on this subject in the Journal of Climate titled Warming of Global Abyssal and Deep Southern Ocean Waters Between the 1990s and 2000s: Contributions to Global Heat and Sea Level Rise Budgets (abstract here, PDF here):

This study shows that the deep ocean – below about 3,300 feet – is taking up about 16 percent of what the upper ocean is absorbing. The authors note that there are several possible causes for this deep warming: a shift in Southern Ocean winds, a change in the density of what is called Antarctic Bottom Water, or how quickly that bottom water is formed near the Antarctic, where it sinks to fill the deepest, coldest portions of the ocean around much of the globe.

Anthony’s last kick at this cat is to now suggest that Trenberth is a sloppy scientist. He lost the heat! So careless.

Abyssal Heat Fluxes in the Southern Ocean. From Purkey and Johnson, 2010.

What’s really happening? Climate scientists are improving our understanding of the Earth’s climate. Uncertainties are being reduced. The honest overall picture remains the same: AGW is real. Anthony’s readers aren’t having any of that though.

The IPCC consensus on climate change was phoney, says IPCC insider

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“The IPCC consensus on climate change was phoney, says IPCC insider“. My god, Steven Mosher is easy to spoon-feed! He jumps right in on the blatantly false report by Canada’s National Post denier-in-chief Lawrence Solomon, who claims that climatology professor Mike Hulme has admitted a “phony UN IPCC consensus” “reached by only a few dozen experts“. Of course Solomon has to build his claim with bits of sentences, as the whole sentences are effectively state the opposite.

Solomon has published deliberate lies, explicitly denied by Dr Hulme here and again here. It’s unusual for denialist lies to unravel so quickly, but no doubt most of Anthony Watts readers are clinging to the initial “revelation.”

Mosher’s claim to journalistic integrity takes yet another hit.

Then and now, Europe, US to see snowy, cold winters: expert

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“Then and now, Europe, US to see snowy, cold winters: expert“. Charles Rotter thinks that Dr. James Overland re-evaluating predictions in a story on physorg.com means that he’s just making it up as he goes along. So Charles does some making it up of his own with some pretend quotes.

Who said this? Not Dr. Overland.

We used to think that a warming Arctic with melting ice would be part of a warming trend, but instead, we got a lot of snow and cold weather, so the warming Arctic kinda messed with all those, you know, patterns and stuff like that we expected like.

But is the Arctic warming? Yes. Don’t give up the day job, Charles.

Quote of the week #34: NASA doubts climate model certainty

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“Quote of the week #34: NASA doubts climate model certainty“. Anthony Watts wants you to believe that because a NASA pamphlet from 1998 is not “completely certain” about Global Warming, they must now be taking orders from the secret Al Gore gubmint. It’s called science, Anthony. Better data, better understanding, better conclusions. Is that a difficult concept?

It’s the denialist mind that is frozen in time and unable to process new information. That’s why they’re called denialists.

Anthony’s also jumping onto this month’s denialist theme that “historic temperatures can be modeled with a constant linear trend + a 60 year cycle.” Too bad they can’t actually explain the correlation, too bad the correlation doesn’t persist, too bad the “constant linear trend” is up (what’s behind that I wonder).

Mann 2008 a Victim of Sudden Oak Death?

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“Mann 2008 a Victim of Sudden Oak Death?” Anthony Watts is eager to join the new round of uninformed nit-picking over tree ring chronologies. He posts some comments from Canadian sourpuss Steve McIntyre on the subject, quote-mining various news reports. Otherwise, his contribution is a Star Trek and Peanuts graphic and a link to a whack-a-mole copy of the Dr. Mann “spoof” video.

Dr. Mike Baillie of Queen’s University in Belfast has stated that the oak tree ring data he is being forced to release is not useful for temperature proxies, but the infamous Dr. Mann uses some oak ring data in his hated “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction. This clearly proves that the “hockey stick” is a lie! Or something. If you ignore all the other data.

Wait, do Anthony or McIntyre have any idea why Dr. Mann included this data in his reconstruction? Um, no. Doesn’t seem to stop them from complaining though, does it?

Climate Craziness of the Week – Greenpeace posts threats

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“Climate Craziness of the Week – Greenpeace posts threats“. Greenpeace can talk tough, but Anthony Watts can talk tough right back. He throws opinion polls at ’em. Hard.

Actually, the Greenpeace post is about Micronesia challenging expansion of the Czech Republic’s most polluting coal power plant. When Environment Minister Dusik’s intention to reject the expansion plans was countermanded he resigned, apparently citing pressure from lobby groups and big business.

That part is inconsequential to Anthony.