Tag Archives: Willis Eschenbach

An Open Letter to Dr. Marcia McNutt, new Editor-In-Chief, Science Magazine

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“An Open Letter to Dr. Marcia McNutt, new Editor-In-Chief, Science Magazine“ (2013-08-04). This is awesome for Anthony Watts. One his best buddies, Willis Eschenbach, has just been published in Science!

Oh wait, it’s just an astoundingly condescending and sexist, as well as painfully long,”Open Letter” containing the usual Gish Gallop of denialist rants written for Willis’ private wish-fulfillment. Probably a frustrated response to the Science special issue, A Once and Future Climate two days earlier (hint: no one thinks the planet is turning into a tropical paradise). Also, Al Gore.

Is Willis the only man with the intellectual strength to tell Dr. McNutt the TRUTH rather than stutter sycophantically?

Is Willis the only man with the intellectual strength to tell Dr. McNutt the TRUTH instead of stutter sycophantically?

Summary: Yer good lookin’, so pandering limp-wristed climatologist men have fed yer hippie inclinations. Listen to someone rugged like me copying and pasting denialist crap, not your own 30 years of real active scientific work!

So Willis Eschenbach, a trained masseuse, blowhard blogger and unpublished 1975 psych major, tells Dr. McNutt, a PhD geophysicist with direct research credentials in environmental topics, that “people laugh at the bumf that passes for climate science in your pages”? There’s laughter take place Willis, you got that right.

Anthony’s readers naturally salute Willis’ courage in speaking truth to power, albeit with about 30 grammatical suggestions and a certain amount of wincing.

Quote of the Week – what Durban is really about

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“Quote of the Week – what Durban is really about” (2011-12-11). Anthony Watts thinks that esteemed climate scientist “Cal65” (aka random anonymous commenter) has managed to get to the core truth about the purpose of the Durban climate conference which has, infuriatingly, achieved positive results:

The UN plan will shift wealth from the first world’s poor to the third world’s rich without making any difference in climate control.

That was a real stretch, huh? The invisible hand of the secret commie world government revealed again!

Those “whiny grifters known as the Maldives” are building airports, which clearly means they know that the sea-level won’t actually change for at least eleventy hundred years. Therefore:

“Anything coming out of the mouths of Maldives officials related to climate, CO2, or sea level is pure bullshit.”

I love the nuance of Anthony’s usual noisy arguments:

  1. “Tuvalu and many other South Pacific Islands are not sinking, claims they are due to global warming driven sea level rise are opportunistic.” Good lead! This is as close as Anthony can get to a verifiable claim. Too bad the authors of the paper he’s trying to misconstrue have been summarized thus: “Webb and Kench warn that while the islands are coping for now, any acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise could overtake the sediment build up. Calculating how fast sea levels will rise over the coming decades is uncertain science, and no one knows how fast the islands can grow.“
  2.  “The Maldives can’t take a joke.” Yeah, that’s it! Anthony’s spittle is a joke! Roll with it, dudes.
  3. Willis Eschenbach are smart and he says islands FLOAT! Really Anthony? You’re trying to show that the reaction of the Maldives government to rising sea-levels is “FAIL” and you cite Willis? You should have saved him for last and hoped that your readers wandered away before reading this bit.
  4. “The sea level is actually dropping.” It’s called statistics, Anthony. You’re not using them right. (But you know that.)
  5. Lorne Gunther (a virulent right-wing columnist) says that kooky Nils-Axel Mörner can prove that sea-level ”hasn’t risen in 50 years.” Yes, ignore the sea-level charts you shoved in our faces in point 4, Anthony.
  6. The Maldives government is building things! So is Iceland, and they gots volcanoes. Not everything is intended to last eleventy hundred years.
  7. Airports too! So is the US military in Afghanistan.
  8. The Maldives tricked the USA into giving them $30 billion! Maybe you should change the battery in your Casio.

Anthony, you’re experiencing a panic attack. Frankly we were all a bit surprised that the Durban conference managed to achieve something. Please breathe into a paper bag for the rest of the day, OK?

An Open Letter to Dr. Phil Jones of the UEA CRU

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“An Open Letter to Dr. Phil Jones of the UEA CRU” (2011-11-27). Just like Anthony Watts, the first thing darling Willis Eschenbach did with the “new” batch of (years-old) Climategate e-mails was search for his own name. And he found it! Hardly surprising, after-all he was one of people who “mail bombed” the Climate Research Unit with “freedom of information” requests.

Again just like Anthony’s response, this “new” batch of old messages is merely an opportunity to serve up warmed-over self-righteous fury. Did you know that Dr. Phil Jones didn’t instantly respond to Willis’ meandering nit-picking accusatory e-mails? Indentured servants, err… university professors, must jump to attention when a taxpayer speaks! Did you also know that Dr. Jones failed to respond in the way Willis instructed him to? Such petty defiance!

Also, Dr. Jones no longer has his high school term papers available for public dissection. He’s hiding something!

As noted in comments here, Willis’ open letter to “Dear Dr. Jones” about his “polite, scientific request” uses the word ‘lie’ at least twenty times and the word ‘liar’ at least twice.

The intention of the “mail bombs” was to obstruct the scientist’s activities and to sift through their responses for anything that could be twisted to the denialist’s purpose. That game continues.

P.S. All the highlighting of disputes and arguments between the real climate scientists “revealed” in the latest batch of old stolen e-mails kind of undermines the whole conspiracy thing. Bit of a mixed message, Willis.

NASA notes sea level is falling in press release – but calls it a “Pothole on Road to Higher Seas”

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NASA notes sea level is falling in press release – but calls it a “Pothole on Road to Higher Seas” (2011-08-24). Anthony Watts reminds his readers that if an increase doesn’t happen every single year then it’s not happening. And a NASA press release admits that sea-level didn’t rise in 2010! You’d think after all the denialist accusations them gubmint scientists would be better at falsifying observations to prove whatever they wanted.

So the slight reversal of sea-level increase (which was not happening anyway) means that sea-level rise has stopped (even though it wasn’t happening anyway). Therefore humanity’s CO2 emissions, which don’t cause warming, are not causing climate change (which isn’t happening anyway). Got it?

So we have years of Anthony and his pals claiming that rising temperatures and sea-level are all down to various vague and supposedly cyclic natural causes and definitely not man-made causes. Of course actual scientists have always factored in natural influences and have studied them in great depth to determine their contributions. But here the natural causes are suddenly discounted by the denialist arm-chair critics.

Willis Eschenbach adds a deep scientific insight by noting that Greenland received more precipitation than usual in 2010, so it’s glaciers are apparently not in danger after-all, thus disproving global warming once and for all. Willis somehow didn’t notice that the satellite precipitation data is considered incorrect for that region… And his analysis of NASA’s discussion of the causes of the dip in sea-level dispenses with even a cocktail napkin this time around. Sounds like he’s talking about himself when he pontificates:

When people make claims like that, with no numbers attached, my Urban Legend Detector™ goes off like crazy … and in this case, it was right.

Oh noes! Sea level rising three times faster than expected (again)

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“Oh noes! Sea level rising three times faster than expected (again)“. (May 2, 2011) Anthony Watts tells us that a Danish newspaper article about sea-level rise is another crazy warmist exaggeration. How can expected sea-level rise suddenly be three times higher than earlier predictions? Also, the article photo has a funny-looking foreigner wearing a beret in it. Chuckle with superiority and don’t think about it too much I guess.

The Danish newspaper article (Anthony apparently follows Azerbaijan news closely, as that’s what he links to) says:

Sea levels were estimated to rise between 0.9 and 1.6 metres by the year 2100 according to the findings by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), cited by Danish daily Politiken, DPA reported.

These are not new numbers. When a newspaper covers this topic these estimates will be present as even Anthony’s 2009 Google search screen capture shows. The IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) estimate of 0.3m to 0.9m has long been considered too cautious. Perhaps Anthony thinks that newspapers should only write about something once? He’s free to repeat his misinformation ad nauseam though I guess, because he digs straight in and sticks to a favorite theme.

Anthony’s rebuttal is to talk about the rate of current sea-level rise (what, it’s rising? Oops) while pretending to disprove predicted sea-level rise by 2100. Just one of the many dull-witted misdirections he’s been performing for years. Unfortunately it only works for heads already bouncing up and down in agreement.

Anthony turns to his sea-level citizen-scientist, Willis Eschenbach, for what passes for confirmation (yes, my eyes roll too when I see that name). OMG it’s true, sea-level rise probably isn’t accelerating at the moment! In fact if you cross your eyes and decide that two years is a meaningful period of time, you can even pretend it’s sort of slowing down. Global warming, which wasn’t happening, is over! Stock up on blankets and woolly socks!

A plot of sea-level rise anomaly, not sea-level.

Of course sea-level is still, you know, rising.

It’s probably nothing*

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“It’s probably nothing*“. Anthony Watts tries to slide another stupid “Snow! Somewhere!” post by as just a little “humor“. Apparently busy denialist copy-and-paster Tom Nelson noted that there was lots (41 inches) of ice in Nenana, Alaska (which is in the Arctic you know) on April 21st this year. But the ice was all gone by that date in 1940! Therefore global cooling.

Nenana has held an annual draw to guess the date of spring breakup on the Tanana River for a century now, and this is Anthony’s new gold standard for global climate data.

Like most northern rivers, the Tanana’s spring ice breakup is almost entirely dependent on flow volume during the spring run-off. The ice broke up, at a thickness of 39″, just four days after this astonishing climate evidence was presented. Also at 64°N Nenana is below the Arctic Circle.

Willis Eschenbach accidentally undermines Anthony's "humor".

Anthony’s teammate Willis Eschenbach creates the real punchline by inserting a chart (above) that shows that ice break up on the Tanana River is clearly trending to earlier dates. Or maybe he just can’t understand his own work.

I guess Anthony’s readers aren’t subtle enough to follow Anthony’s attempt at humor; they’re reacting with stolid earnestness.

Not Whether, but How to Do The Math

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“Not Whether, but How to Do The Math“. A Willis Eschenbach “citizen-scientist” post on Anthony Watts’ blog is always entertaining.In this one he’s taking on the denialist’s former BFF, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project. Apparently any kind of quality control or “homogenization” is bad science, but since BEST may still swing back into the denialist camp Willis couches his attack as constructive advice.

Willis invokes the “Zipf Distribution” as the best test for outliers but, predictably, he may be the only person who has ever suggested using an empirical linguistics law for temperature data. Cutting-edge thinking from the make-the-data-look-as-bad-as-possible school of thought.

Willis’ preferred approach is plotting the raw data and let the public figure it out themselves. Let a thousand uninformed opinions bloom!

If only BEST, and those other secretive climate scientists would stop hiding their raw temperature data we might be able to believe them. Oh that’s right, it’s been publicly available for years. Funny how you don’t hear that much in the denialist blogosphere.

An Unexpected Limit to Climate Sensitivity

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“An Unexpected Limit to Climate Sensitivity“. Climate scientists have struggled for decades to accurately determine the sensitivity of Earth’s climate to changes in atmospheric CO2. Citizen-scientist Willis Eschenbach thinks he’s figured it out. It’s not 3℃, if the cartoon version atmospheric model he’s using is right the sensitivity should be 9℃! Clearly those scientists don’t have a clue (this is what we call “foreshadowing”).

Oops. He was measuring the wrong system, and he forgot about “conservation of energy”.

Prediction is hard, especially of the future.

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“Prediction is hard, especially of the future.“ Willis Eschenbach tries to convince us that “problems” with 20 year-old computer models mean that we can’t trust the new ones.

Did Hansen, et. al.’s 1992 prediction Potential climate impact of Mount Pinatubo eruption really “miss the mark”? After all, they did predict a “3 sigma” event and the result was only a “2.1 sigma” event… It seems that they correctly predicted the temperature drop duration but over-estimated the scale. Not too shabby for 20 year-old model run with 20 year-old computer horsepower.

Of course Willis doesn’t give any hard numbers for his suggestion that their prediction “failed”. Couldn’t find an Excel formula for that, Willis?

And how did the much more relevant climate model prediction, 20 more years of increasing global temperatures, work out? Oh yeah, that’s what we’ve had. Willis’ insights are no better that Yogi Berra’s.

This is all just an attempt to prop up denialist obstructionism by suggesting that since we can’t predict the future perfectly we should never take any kind of preventative action at all.

Some of the Missing Energy

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“Some of the Missing Energy“. Willis Eschenbach keeps trying to use Excel to disprove the Earth’s accepted energy balance. He’s suddenly learned about evaporation and now the counter-proof is “thunderstorms!” Apparently they make CO2 irrelevant. He also introduces the new preferred energy unit, the “tiny bit”.

Try again.