Tag Archives: Whining

Aussie Chief Scientist: Renewable Energy Push Hurts the Poor

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Aussie Chief Scientist: Renewable Energy Push Hurts the Poor (2017-01-02). In which a mendacious idiot, Anthony Watts’ fellow-traveller Eric Worrall, falsely claims that Australia’s Chief Scientist is against renewable energy because it, somehow, hurts the poor. Rugged denialist free-marketers like Anthony and Eric spend their nights worrying about the poors, don’t you know?

Sez Eric the half-brain (that’s a Monty Python reference):

“Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel has strongly criticised the impact of renewable energy policies on the poor, working class people and migrants.”

etc.

Shorter Eric: The poors want coal, haven’t you read Dickens? Also, a water desalination plant somewhere didn’t work very well, so neither will renewables. I read it in a newspaper!

Sez Dr. Alan Finkel:

“It will be important to address the barriers to active engagement in the [renewable energy] transition underway, as experienced by vulnerable groups.”

I’ll summarize Dr. Finkel’s real position as this: renewables are the immediate future and Australia must ensure that renewables are integrated into the national grid so that everyone benefits, not just the wealthy who can, and are, taking care of themselves.

If you buy Eric’s crocodile sympathy, clean out your ears. Hotwhopper is the expert at unpacking Anthony Watts’ whoppers, you can read her more detailed response at her excellent website.

Aside: Sorry for the long absence here, I still roll my eyes at Anthony’s rabid stupidity but rarely have time to post about it.

An open letter challenging the EPA on CO2 regulation

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“An open letter challenging the EPA on CO2 regulation“ (2012-12-28). A line has been drawn in the sand! The environmental gauntlet has been thrown! A fist has been clenched! A steely gaze has been directed! The GIANTS of climatology have been aroused! (Maybe we could have phrased that last one better.) Anthony Watts has added his name to a newspaper opinion piece!!!

So, preeminent 21st century climatologist (Not really. In fact, not even a bit), Joe D’Aleo has written a damning critique (not) of the EPA’s conclusion three years ago that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations will have harmful environmental consequences. And an important newspaper, the Washington Post has printed it! (Err.. the “Examiner”.) The usual denialist travelers like Fred Singer, Tim Ball, Don Easterbrook and Anthony Watts have signed on along with others we will leave unmentioned out of pity.

Here’s the laser-sharp money quote fired, like a diamond bullet, at the very core of the EPA, that Anthony urges his readers to “consider widely republishing”:

“In summary, it is not incorrect to argue that further study of the role GHGs play in climate is in order.”

My mind is spinning! From trying to decipher the meaning. I guess they want the EPA to stop trying to “P” our “E”?

What are Joe & Co. steamed about? Well mainly they hate government regulation on principle. Also they think that the EPA should have spent ten years replicating all the findings of modern climatology instead of just pulling out the relevant peer-reviewed journals. By the way, did you know that some of those journals aren’t American?

In what alternate reality is this proud “Open Letter” anything other than a kick me sign? Have D’Aleo, Watts and pals forgotten that their grade-school assertions were all shot down three years ago? Maybe they’re hoping that we’ve forgotten.

Rabett Run has an amusing sampling of the EPA’s responses to various inept denialist complaints. I wish there was an index to them, but here’s a useful Google search string. Plenty of chuckles in there.

Anthony Watts Defeats Himself

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“Hump day hilarity: Chris Mooney’s abby-normal post modern science” (2011-11-09) and “Mooney pulls a Muller” (2011-11-10). After years of announcing how he was going to prove Global Warming was a lie (but utterly failing to do so), Anthony decides to castigate anyone else who talks about their conclusions before formal publication. Only the targets of his hypocrisy have simply released drafts of submitted papers (the previously beloved Dr. Muller) or described a book they are still writing (Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain). Anthony, you may recall, loudly and repeatedly announced that he was going to prove that the temperature record was both inaccurate and tampered with, and that climate scientists were corrupt socialists. You may also recall that he was 99 44/100%  wrong.

So what has twisted Anthony’s shorts this time? You’re going to love this: He’s attacking a book that hasn’t been finished yet, claiming that it portrays conservatives as idiots who jump to conclusions! Nice stick-work there, Anthony.

Seems like finishing your book is kind of redundant now, Chris! You can read his take on the response is here: Conservatives Attack and Misunderstand A Book They Haven’t Read… A Book About Flawed Conservative Reasoning.

ATI press release on the Mann UVA emails

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“ATI press release on the Mann UVA emails” (2011-08-27). Funny. You’d think that Anthony Watts would report the conclusions of the National Science Foundation Inspector General’s investigation into the accusation that climatologist, and denialist flash-point, Dr. Michael Mann falsified his data when he “created” the famous “hockey stick” historical temperature chart.

Instead Anthony offers the American Tradition Institute’s op-ed whining (italics mine).

The University of Virginia has joined a list of institutions claiming that there has been an actual inquiry into, and even ‘exoneration’ of, scientists exposed by the November 2009 “ClimateGate” leak, while simultaneously through its actions making a mockery of the idea.

Spoiler for you impatient types who can’t be bothered reading (or are trying to ignore) the National Tradition Science Foundation’s PDF:

We found no basis to conclude that the [Climategate] emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence.

Also,

There is no specific evidence that [Mann] falsified or fabricated any data and no evidence that his actions amounted to research misconduct.

Funny as in slapstick. Funny as in a bungled magician’s trick.

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”.

Real Climate on Spencer – Bad timing or just bad judgment?

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“Real Climate on Spencer – Bad timing or just bad judgment?” Anthony Watts decides to read nefarious purpose into the timing of a RealClimate review of denialist scientist Roy Spencer’s book “The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists”. They seem to have posted it on the same day that a series of massive tornadoes (nothing to do whatsoever with global warming!!!!!) took out power in Spencer’s hometown of Huntsville, Alabama.

Did they deliberately release their review when they thought they would be safe from Spencer’s devastating intellectual rebuttal? Those cunning, corrupt, dishonest communist climate scientists! But the always high-minded Anthony Watts sorted it out with an e-mail offering ethics advice. Anthony’s readers start the libeling by themselves.

So what of Spencer’s book? Could he be right? Would it really take “only one research study to cause the global warming house of cards to collapse”?

Well unless you embrace Spencer’s astonishing belief that decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world could actually flip into untold thousands of admissions of “my bad”, no.

Instead Spencer accuses “the IPCC researchers” of “fundamental mistakes” that only he has discovered, but never identifies the dumb scientists or references their alleged mistakes. He waves away detailed paleo data with “we don’t have a clue”. (I suppose as a creationist he is uncomfortable with any date before 4004 BC.) He’s so intellectually flexible that he’s already contradicted his own book in later papers. Is it true that “short-term fluctuations in the energy balance and surface temperature are consistent with a low climate sensitivity” (the whatever-he-can-get-away-with book, April 2010), or  that “the climate system is never in equilibrium” ( the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research, August 2010)? I guess the ice ages are impossible.

Perhaps next Spencer will be confidently asserting that toothpicks are made when beavers sneeze? He should stick to remote sensing, where he actually has some expertise.

Read some other critiques at Climate Progress and Barry Bickmore. Anthony Watts and right-wing blogs such as “The American [un]Thinker” offer gullible high praise of course.

George Mason University “Climate Change Communicator of the Year” – where only one viewpoint is allowed

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“George Mason University “Climate Change Communicator of the Year” – where only one viewpoint is allowed“. George Mason University, reluctant home of the notoriously failed denialist statistician Edward J. Wegman, has a Center for Climate Change Communication. Anthony Watts is irked that their Center is running an internet poll for Climate Change Communicator of the Year and there isn’t a single denialist on the slate. They would be found over there on the Climate Change Deceiver of the Year poll (you’d have a solid shot at it, Anthony, although Lord Monckton is certainly more entertaining).

Anthony deflects his critics with this self-appraisal: “Lest some think this is some sort of sour grapes, it isn’t.” After all, who won the anything-goes 2011 Bloggies mob-athon, where responsible science communication was honored? Anthony did, that’s who.

The discredited 2006 Wegman Report is still clutched by denialists as some sort of proof of “warmist” fraud and collusion, but it is Wegman who is now under investigation for misconduct.

“Get Carter” campaign grows on Australia’s ABC radio & TV

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“Get Carter” campaign grows on Australia’s ABC radio & TV. Poor benighted Professor Bob Carter gets ardent supporter Bob Fernley-Jones to pass on to Ric Werme an article for Anthony Watts’ blog pointing out how badly he is being treated by (some of) the Australian media. Love those social networks.

Marine geologist Professor Carter has been “long vilified on radio in the Science Show“, where they talk to lots of real scientists but rarely to Bob. This is apparently the source of much resentment as he craves attention.

That was bad enough but now ABC TV’s Media Watch is, you know, watching the media and has taken brief note of Carter’s scientifically foolish book Climate: the Counter Consensus. It’s just too much. I mean, they’re almost communists, we shouldn’t have to listen to them! The program dealt primarily with commercial talk radio’s nurturing of denialist personalities and willful ignoring of more knowledgeable “mainstream” scientists. Poor Bob Carter was just a walk-on, but he’s certainly been cut to the quick.

Media Watch expressed their opinion of Professor Carter’s talk-radio credentials in part based on this villainous general observation about Climate: the Counter Consensus (“despite that it has had high acclaim”) by professional climatologist Dr. David Karoly:

“it has fewer gross errors than Ian Plimer’s book Heaven+Earth, it is a mixture of scientific facts with misinformation and misinterpretation, as well as outright errors, spun around a framework of personal opinion. Its conclusions are inconsistent with any scientific assessment of climate change prepared by any major national or international scientific body”

– e-mail excerpt from the March 21st 2011 Media Watch transcript.

But other cranks loved his book! Isn’t that proof that it’s sound? I guess not. Why are Dr. Karoly’s observations fairly general? It seems that neither he nor any other qualified scientists can work up the energy to catalog all the bunk Carter has packed into it.

Climate: the Counter Consensus was printed by Stacey International Publishers who brought us the “Independent Minds” series of publications including such titles as The Wind Farm Scam, The Hockey Stick Illusion – Climategate and the Corruption of Science, and Climate: the Great Delusion. Detect a theme?

Help asked for Dr. Tim Ball in legal battle with Dr. Mann

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Help asked for Dr. Tim Ball in legal battle with Dr. Mann. I’ve started dipping back into the putrid dung heap that is the archives of Anthony Watts’ blog and came across this recent plea by Sky Dragon Co-Slayer John O’Sullivan. Anthony Watts naturally professes to “have no dog in this fight.” Neither do all the other denialist blogs singing along in beautiful harmony.

Dr. Michael Mann has sued Dr. Tim Ball, “a 72-year-old pensioner”, for libel. He’s also suing the right-wing think tank Frontier Centre for Public Policy, which is probably also a 72-year-old pensioner. That’s not just mean, that’s double-mean!

After all, isn’t poor victimized Dr. Ball “widely recognized as one of Canada’s first qualified climate scientists”? [Not a chance. He’s a geography professor who left the University of Manitoba in 1996. Here’s his rap sheet.] Maybe he’s just a caught-out liar who readily turns to puffed up legal threats against his critics.

Judge for yourself of course but this is how the nut-jobs at the graphic arts crime scene called the Canada Free Press blog (who are curiously fixated on how much longer Barack Hussein Obama will be the President of the United States) recently defended him on a similar matter:

Retraction
Apology to Dr. Andrew Weaver
By Canada Free Press  Thursday, January 20, 2011

On January 10, 2011, Canada Free Press began publishing on this website an article by Dr. Tim Ball entitled “Corruption of Climate Change Has Created 30 Lost Years” which contained untrue and disparaging statements about Dr. Andrew Weaver, who is a professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

Contrary to what was stated in Dr. Ball’s article, Dr. Weaver: (1) never announced he will not participate in the next IPCC; (2) never said that the IPCC chairman should resign; (3) never called for the IPCC’s approach to science to be overhauled; and (4) did not begin withdrawing from the IPCC in January 2010.

As a result of a nomination process that began in January, 2010, Dr. Weaver became a Lead Author for Chapter 12: “Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility” of the Working Group I contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC.”  That work began in May, 2010.  Dr. Ball’s article failed to mention these facts although they are publicly-available.

Dr. Tim Ball also wrongly suggested that Dr. Weaver tried to interfere with his presentation at the University of Victoria by having his students deter people from attending and heckling him during the talk.  CFP accepts without reservation there is no basis for such allegations.

CFP also wishes to dissociate itself from any suggestion that Dr. Weaver “knows very little about climate science.”  We entirely accept that he has a well-deserved international reputation as a climate scientist and that Dr. Ball’s attack on his credentials is unjustified.

CFP sincerely apologizes to Dr. Weaver and expresses regret for the embarrassment and distress caused by the unfounded allegations in the article by Dr. Ball.

But reading John O’Sullivan’s spoon-fed “interview” one can’t help but conclude that a vicious liberal-environmentalist climate conspiracy is unquestionably trying to punish Dr. Ball, honorable truth-speaker, through the courts. Any money he received from oil companies was “accidental“. The only real error that he made, charmingly central to his accusations, was an “honest” one. And by gosh he’s terribly worried about “the credibility of science in general”.

I urge Dr. Ball’s courageous supporters to keep those donations rolling in. I sense that there’s so much more on-the-record entertainment ahead.