Tag Archives: Sneers

Bigger problems than global warming – NASA discovers 8 new dangerous near Earth asteroids

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“Bigger problems than global warming – NASA discovers 8 new dangerous near Earth asteroids“ (2015-01-19i). Red Alert! Anthony Watts wants us to know about Eric Worrall’s shocking discovery that there’s something we should all really be worried about! Meteors! Meteorites? NEOs? Stop worrying about so-called climate change (which is already affecting everyone on Earth and will steadily increase in impact) and start worrying about meteors, which may or may not strike the Earth and would have effectively no prolonged climate influence.

“[T]he risk of a damaging meteor impact is not a possibility which should be neglected” says Eric. Somehow Eric’s caution doesn’t extend to the undeniable (except by, you know, denialists) fact that man’s industrial activity is already measurably altering Earth’s climate in a negative way. That should be neglected as well as vigorously denied.

Riiiiight.

Eric also manages to throw in a heaping plate of sneering at NASA for the work they’ve done to study the risks posed by Near Earth Objects while being careful not to explain that low funding for the work is because of cost-cutting anti-science Republicans.

Eric’s apparent belief that satellites should be able to refuel as easily and often as the average family sedan is just cute.

 I’m mildly horrified that a project this important appears to be so far down the list of priorities, that the project was mothballed for a year while the survey satellite stood waiting for a refuel.

Buy why are political cranks like Eric and Anthony bothered with public safety? Surely all handsome, virile, brilliant, libertarians will have made their own personal arrangements to either leave the planet for an extended vacation or activated their bunker networks. Anyone unable to do the same surely deserves what they get!

P.S. Does Eric Worrall actually rely on The Register for breaking scientific news?

My Blog Spawn

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“My Blog Spawn”. Thanks, I guess, to What’s Up With Watts for pointing out how Anthony Watts privately obsesses over his critics, in all the completely irrelevant ways possible. What a painful example of projection, resentment, back-of-the-classroom goonery, and (hard for him to fight the compulsion) cherry-picking. If he doesn’t stop Googling he may go blind!

WottsUpWithThat.com

blog_child_wottsupwiththat

Proprietor: Ben Lawson of Toronto, Canada

Some of Ben’s skills: Male model, ladies man, marathon runner, cook, peach harvester,Bad Santa, snowfall collector, a Mac technology specialist and Noble Swan

Reason for creating the blog: he got kicked off WUWT for multiple policy violations, got mad, still trying to get even.

Anthony wants you to know that I frivolously run marathons, but not that I’m a geologist. His way of deflecting my exposure of his bankrupt arguments is troll flickr for photos of me that he thinks are embarrassing, not to point out any actual errors on my part (hey Tony, here’s a tip; I have funnier ones on Facebook). Naturally my motivation, according to him, is revenge over unspecified “multiple policy violations” in my comments on his blog. Not his endless lying and remorseless Nixonian suppression of opponents.

Hats off to fellow “skewered” garbage collectors, currently vvattsupwiththat.com, wottsupwiththatblog.wordpress.com, whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com and hotwhopper.com. These days you have a stronger stomach that I!

“Watching the Deniers” makes hilarious goof while accusing WUWT of “doctoring” NSIDC images

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“Watching the Deniers” makes hilarious goof while accusing WUWT of “doctoring” NSIDC images (2013-07-05). If Anthony ever happens to be right about something, which like a stopped clock is about once every 43,200 instances, you can be sure he’ll beat it to death (or is it more strut about like a rooster?). When Anthony’s Aussie ditto head Eric Worrall spotted an accusation at Watching the Deniers (WtD) that Anthony had doctored an Arctic Sea Ice Extent graph to conceal the fact that the decline in Arctic ice extent was more than 2 standard deviations away from Anthony went .

Silly Mike, Anthony only by pure chance used the option on the NSIDC charting web page that suppressed the display of statistical significance! That’s just misrepresentation, not dishonesty, the kind of thin line that Anthony spends his life dancing back and forth over.

Anthony Watts likes to use the version of this chart that excludes statistical context. Makes it easier to imply that every wiggle is “just natural”.

Anthony Watts likes to use the version of this chart that excludes statistical context. Makes it easier to imply that every wiggle is “just natural”. Click to see the difference.

After a short display of indignation Anthony runs quickly through the gamut of blogging postures.

  • Victim card: WtD is driven by “hatred”!
  • Anticipation of censorship: “I’ve left a comment explaining Mr. Marriott’s absurd misconception and asked for an apology. We’ll see if it passes moderation, and if he lives up to his “professional services” label.” Oh, it made it along with all the other denialist ditto head attacks. Mike ain’t you, Anthony.
  • Megalomania: The king of the interwebs commandeth and threatens – “Change it sir. I won’t ask again.”
  • Ad hominem digging.
  • Dog whistle: “In the meantime, you can leave comments here.“
  • An update to the whining: Anthony contentedly reports that WtD has been forced to change their post, retracting the “photoshop” claim. Funny I can’t recall Anthony ever doing the same, I guess he’s always been right.

Thus ending Global Warming. Which was natural anyway if it was happening. Which it wasn’t.

University of Graz Responds to Parncutt’s calls for death penalty for “deniers”

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University of Graz Responds to Parncutt’s calls for death penalty for “deniers” ()2012-12-27). Yeah! Denialist outrage has led the University of Graz to censor their music professor’s ill-advised ramblings about climate change! Freedom from speech is victorious! Nothing more satisfying than a bit of successful bullying, is there Anthony? Monckton, of course, also got his stick in there.

Also, Skeptical Science and DeSmogBlog haven’t explicitly disavowed Professor Parncutt’s essay suggesting the execution of denialists, so that clearly means they support it.

UPDATE2: 2:55:PM PST In an email received today from Skeptical Science contributor Dana Nuccitelli, he has flat out refused to distance himself or the SkS website publicly from the Parncutt essay. Readers may recall that Parncutt used SkS as a reference in his essay calling for the death penalty. No word yet on whether John Cook (owner of the website) agrees and no word yet from DeSmog blog. – Anthony

Funny, I happen to have Mr. Nuccitelli’s actual response here, which was also posted as a comment that was blocked by Anthony’s censors, which seems a bit more nuanced than Anthony’s “reporting”:

From: Dana Nuccitelli
To: Anthony <xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 2:47 PM
Subject: Re: still waiting…
We of course don’t agree with giving denialists the death penalty, but we’re also not going to waste our time commenting on what some German musicologist said just because he happens to (correctly) cite SkS as a factually accurate source on climate science.

Given than you frequently allow WUWT guest posts from people like Christopher Monckton, who aside from being a total nutjob (to put it as kindly as I can), says some pretty horrible things on a regular basis, I really don’t think you’re in a position to expect more than that.

-Dana

Climate Progress blog shuts down – disappears all previous comments

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“Climate Progress blog shuts down – disappears all previous comments“ (May 30, 2011). Nothing like a measured response, eh Anthony? The Think Progress website underwent a redesign over the weekend and Anthony Watts is eager to give a definitive assessment:

It appears the mendacious Joe Romm has been given new marching orders by Center for American Progress Big Brother Blog: “Think Progress”. From what I make of it, it seems the management realized that CP just wasn’t holding much readership, as it looks like the same 30 commenters or so frequent the place.  Sooo…the spin is on. Joe’s doing his best to make his forced merger under Think Progress look like a win.

So none of the cool kids read Climate Progress, Anthony’s blog is way better anyway, and Joe Romm took his ball home (“disappears all previous comments”) because of all the mean things the cool kids, who never go there, were saying.

Reality: It was a website redesign! Sometime comments take a while to reconnect. It’s not a nefarious tactic to suppress the vigorous triumph of denialist criticisms. Climate Progress and Think Progress have always been closely linked, if anything it seems that “Think” will be promoting “Climate” more, not absorbing it.

Christ! Anthony’s grasp of website management is even worse than of climate science. And that is truly saying something. Anthony sounds like a kid who can’t best his school-yard rival hoping their parent will do it for them.

Here are a few Climate Progress posts about the process:

2011-08-24 Update: It took a while, but the old comments are finally up again. So much for Anthony’s accusations.

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.

Wegman paper retraction by Journal

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“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”.

“Ant colony optimisation” for wind farms

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“Ant colony optimisation” for wind farms. (May 4, 2011) Anthony Watts makes another ‘thinking is stupid’ blog post and his free-thinking readers scramble to match his wit.

Anthony found a University of Adelaide press release about increasing wind farm productivity using evolutionary modeling. The researcher happens to mention ant colonies as natural example of achieving efficiency that we can emulate with incrementally optimized simulations.

Here’s the hilarious trigger for Anthony’s derision:

“Ant colony optimisation” uses the principle of ants finding the shortest way to a source of food from their nest.

“You can observe them in nature, they do it very efficiently communicating between each other using pheromone trails,” says Dr Neumann. “After a certain amount of time, they will have found the best route to the food – problem solved. We can also solve human problems using the same principles through computer algorithms.”

Isn’t improving a technology, any technology, a worthwhile thing? This kind of gleeful ignorance, and the vapid enthusiasm with Anthony’s readers join in, reveals a disheartening narrow-mindedness.

Environmentalist marries Gaia in E-ceremony

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“Environmentalist marries Gaia in E-ceremony“. As reported in the Huffington Post, someone has staged a mock “wedding” with the Earth. A perfect target for Anthony Watts’ searing scientific mind! “There’s no mention at HuffPo if Earth was a willing partner or if it was a shotgun wedding.”

Good one, Anthony!