Tag Archives: Sweeping Statements

Is It Time To Stop The Insanity Of Wasting Time and Money On More Climate Models?

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“Is It Time To Stop The Insanity Of Wasting Time and Money On More Climate Models?” (2015-09-14). Wait a second. Hasn’t the only faintly credible denialist argument been that all the climate modelling and climate projections are too preliminary? We should keep waiting, twiddling our thumbs, until perfect data and projections are in hand? Then, presumably, the denialists will swing into righteous eco-warrior action. No, for Dr. Tim Ball it’s now about wasteful funding. Apparently ignorance is again bliss.

I still flick a bored eye over to Anthony Watts’ clown convention every now and then, and this post made me laugh enough to spend a moment scrolling through the “science.”

Today Anthony has loaned his dunce’s pulpit to Sky Dragon kook Dr. Tim Ball so he can mutter that climate projections aren’t as precise as he requires, that there aren’t enough “stations”, and that if you copy and paste carefully enough even the IPCC can be made to admit that the data is awful. Shut the whole thing down!

Hard to put much credence in Dr. Ball’s “career as a climatologist” (actually he’s a retired geographer and semi-pro Letter to the Editor writer) when he’s still trying to sell the out-of-context “hide the decline” source code quote from 2009. That dog won’t hunt. Also, does he really think that climatologists are trying to forecast climate? Ball seems to have a very rudimentary notion of how his alleged profession gathers climate data, or how it is used. Most of his gotcha quotes stop just before the actual meaning is explained, but this can possibly be put down to a short attention span.

Hell, Dr. Ball seems to have even forgotten that “stations” aren’t the only way we gather climate data. Maybe he should dust off those National Geographic magazines and look for articles about “satellites.” They’re brill. They go everywhere!

Actually, Dr. Ball seems to hold Australian garden-variety denialist and conspiracy enthusiast (ask her about the Rothschilds) Joanne Nova in high esteem, so perhaps he’s hidden an admission of poor judgement amongst his contemptuous bluster.

The End is Near for Faith in AGW

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“The End is Near for Faith in AGW“ (June 25th, 2011). Anthony Watts posts a prediction by ordinary citizen Russell Cook (“semi-retired graphic artist” and right-wing blogger for the climaterealist denialists). It’s over! The warmists have lost! Or are just about to lose. I love these over-the-shoulder declarations of victory from people as they flee the debate.

Apparently his “seventeen+ months of research” allows him to declare that Al Gore’s 2007 documentary film, the last word in climate science, is based on a lie. Perhaps even more than one! Also “the media” are all mean to denialists because they don’t give equal time (except Fox News, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Times, The Telegraph, National Post, The Australian, etc.).

Here’s the vile canard that started off all the skeptic-bullying:

Skeptic scientists are accused of being in a fossil fuel-funded conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact“…

Here’s the big problem I found:  That accusation is based on a 1991 memo no one was allowed to see, using an out-of-context sentence, promoted by a person who was not a Pulitzer winner despite accolades to the contrary, who was credited with finding the memo by Al Gore, but Gore had the memo collection in his own possession four years earlier.

Actually, I thought that “skeptic scientists” were being accused of misrepresenting physical science and climate evidence. My bad I guess. So an unseen 1991 memo, declared to be taken out-of-context, is the real smoking gun behind all this cruelty and dispute? Oh, the irony! Oh, the blinding faith!

I will agree that it would be great to see (the eternally constipated?) Richard Lindzen, a Republican “science” witness on any number of topics since 1991, scowling in front of a House Committee again. He didn’t do too well last time, except in the imagination of self-convinced denialists.

Anthony optimistically declares victory too while strangely turning away from the science:

“When the public learns about huge faults in the skeptic scientist accusation, combined with the faults in the IPCC, the result may send AGW into total collapse.”

You’re dancing on the head of a pin, Anthony.

Time Travel and Causation in the Climate Debate

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“Time Travel and Causation in the Climate Debate“  (May 16, 2011). Anthony Watts posts Craig Loehle’s petty irritation with the IPCC.

In the climate change debate, by contrast to physics, the force of GHGs and human evil is so great that it transcends time. Bad things happen BEFORE their cause. It is simply amazing.

He’s annoyed with the IPCC AR4 Report’s attribution chapter, in a general sort of way. Why doesn’t it restrict itself to the post-1950 era when man-made greenhouse gases (maybe) started to (maybe) influence climate? How dare they talk about glaciers in the 1850’s (um, see Skeptical Science), or that “impacts claimed by the IPCC to be likely in the distant future are claimed to be already evident.” After-all, changes predicted by the distant future must only happen in the distant future. All at once (or were they supposed to be a perfectly linear transition over time? I can never keep the story straight).

See, everything's fine! From Skeptical Science.

I guess he’s simply too worked-up to bother providing references or quotations for the IPCC’s implied scientific transgressions. It would help though.

Craig’s main peeve is that “Climate change will cause bad things, and climate change is happening. Therefore, if bad things happen it is due to climate change” is circular reasoning. Those lazy alarmists! QED, if that’s the way you choose to tell it. Strangely he has no problem with the denialist corollary that all climate change is natural, except in retrospect (Oops, too late).

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!

Greenhouse Thought Experiment

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“Greenhouse Thought Experiment“. A Guest Post from Jeff Condon. Denialists go to great lengths to misrepresent the “greenhouse” effect and direct our attention to partisan television commercials telling us that CO2 is “essential for life”. Mr. Dunning–Kruger Derek Alker, inspired by Tim Ball et. al.’s comic novel Slaying the Sky Dragon – Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, sent Jeff an Excel spreadsheet and a really ugly PDF that “ends the AGW scam” (again).

Apparently Derek received a geometric flash of insight into Earth’s shape. Them dumb physicists are ignoring the “back” half! Only they’re not of course…Science of Doom tries to turn the conversation back to reality on Jeff’s “No Consensus” website (sorry, I can’t write that without quotes around it).

But for us, this is Jeff’s launching point for a thought experiment about “the greenhouse”. He considers two Earths (specifically, a happy 1℃ warmer Republican Earth and a miserable colder Democratic Earth). Which will appear “warmer” to an external observer? After-all, a real greenhouse will appear warmer to an external observer. As any Physics 100 student will tell you, the answer is that the two Earths must exactly balance the radiative energy. In = out.

The interesting question is how could one Earth be 1℃ warmer than the other. Who wants to guess?

New peer reviewed study: global warming lowers death rates

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“New peer reviewed study: global warming lowers death rates“. Anthony tries the hoary old “Global Warming is good for us!” line once more. After all, the lobbyists at CO2 Science say so.

Check out this appallingly ignorant quote from CO2 Science:

Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.

So, when studying population statistics of a highly industrialized society in a temperate climate, and ignoring any possible future climate warming repercussions such as the arrival of new diseases or crop failures, these idiots think this passes for thoughtful science.

I guess the 4 billion humans in tropical climates can just suck it, eh?

For the record, the 2010 paper that CO2 Science and Anthony are misquoting, Causes for the recent changes in cold- and heat-related mortality in England and Wales, actually says the following in their abstract:

…adaptation has prevented a significant increase in heat-related mortality and considerably enhanced a significant decrease in cold-related mortality. Our analysis suggests that in the absence of adaptation, the human influence on climate would have been the main contributor to increases in heat-related mortality and decreases in cold-related mortality. (emphasis mine)

The 10:10 Splattergate goes “sploot” – a roundup

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The 10:10 Splattergate goes “sploot” – a roundup. We get it Anthony, the 10:10 video was a bad idea and various environmental groups are dissociating themselves from it.

But can you explain why failing to cling tenaciously to a dumb idea is a bad thing? I know that truculence is an admired quality in the denialist community, but those of us with more limber brains are actually quite likely to respond rationally to events like this.

By the way, I know you embrace the dumbed-down use of “-gate” on every accusation you can make up, but the stupid is starting to get a bit obvious. Leave it for political or business conspiracies or allegations of the same.

Wasted Opportunities

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“Wasted Opportunities“. Thomas Fuller steps up to the plate for Anthony Watts again. He thinks it’s a shame that so much effort has gone into renewable energy sources: solar, wind and biofuels (no love for hydro or tidal?). We should be using cogeneration! Ah, if only we all lived beside a power plant.

Oh, wait, we are using cogeneration! 7% of energy in the US, even more in some Scandinavian countries. So, Thomas’ point is what exactly? Use more somehow? He also claims cogeneration “gets little attention from environmentalists”, but doesn’t really put much effort into the accusation. This post is just Fuller filler.

Ocean cooling contributed to mid-20th century global warming hiatus (and so did the PDO)

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“Ocean cooling contributed to mid-20th century global warming hiatus (and so did the PDO)“. Poor Anthony Watts seems in a foul mood here. Muttering about news story that doesn’t give him access to all the data, references to “public money”, particularly asinine comments about press release photos (where on earth does “grinning like a banshee” come from?), etc. You’d think he’d be clutching at a report about oceanic cooling with both hands…

Maybe he’s irritated that Dr. Phil Jones, who the denialists tried to bring down with the false “Climategate” controversy is publishing science again? Or is it that the paper discusses cooling, which the lying climatologists supposedly never talk about and he has no idea how to react.

So the paper in question is being published as a Letter in Nature titled An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970 (here’s the abstract). It says that “the hiatus of global warming in the Northern Hemisphere during the mid-20th century may have been due to an abrupt cooling event centered over the North Atlantic around 1970, rather than the cooling effects of tropospheric pollution.” Don’t you just hate it when scientists observe things and try to understand them?

Anthony spots professor David W.J. Thompson "grinning like a banshee".

New “Our Climate” iPhone app released

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Man-made climate drivers needn't apply.

“New “Our Climate” iPhone app released“. Want a collection of cherry-picked, out of context climate facts in your pocket? How ’bout some falsified charts and incorrect scientific explanations? Want to vote on the climate? There’s an app for that! “Our Climate” is an iPhone app by Aeris Systems Pty Ltd. from Australia and it has “made it through Apple’s review process unscathed”. That must have been a surprise. Conspiracy theorists are buying it as fast as possible so they can get their copy before the secret world gubmint shuts it down.

Anthony Watts must love to see his favorite claims packaged neatly in a context that conceals all criticism. The developer promises that “if any material errors have slipped through, rest assured that such errata will be readily addressable.” I won’t hold my breath on that one.

Funny the “warmist” climate science equivilent, Skeptical Science’s iPhone app, shows denialist claims, the scientific responses, and the to-and-fro comments on their website. I guess they’re not quite as afraid of scrutiny.

Which “key climate blogs” are readers driven too in the “Our Climate” app I wonder.