Anthony Watts has a post about how Grover Cleveland caused 23 more hurricanes than has President Obama. I think he also thinks that the Whitehouse knows of and cares very deeply about what some idiot who goes by the name of Steve Goddard tweets.
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| This WUWT article will go down as an Anthony Watts classic! |
Are all deniers barking mad or what?
Interesting too that Anthony's palling up with Steve Goddard again after giving up on his silliness, making up stuff about sea ice. He's running out of allies and must be turning to whoever he thinks he has left. Even idiots like Steve Goddard. (Not his real name, but as long as he's a climate science denier he's not an anonymous coward as far as Anthony is concerned.)
Interesting to see Andy Revkin apparently consorting with and promoting the idiot Goddard, too. And even Andy seems to think the White House cares two hoots about a dumb denier blogger and that it is all powerful and can just pick up a phone or something to Jack Dorsey and he'll hack the system and delete a tweet for them.
Whatever your views on #AGW, disturbing to see @WhiteHouse delete factual tweet on hurricane history: http://t.co/NWakXMz9Om Open society?
— Andy Revkin (@Revkin) June 24, 2013
Even if the White House had ever heard of or cared about some crazy blogger, even it can't just get into Twitter and delete someone else's tweets. Here's a live link to the tweet that all the climate science deniers (except Steve Goddard probably) thinks the White House cared enough about to use the Patriot Act or whatever to delete. (Does the USA still have a Patriot Act?):
@whitehouse During Grover Cleveland's tenure as president, the US was hit by 26 hurricanes, compared to only 3 under Obama. #EndSuperstition
— Steve Goddard (@SteveSGoddard) June 24, 2013
The world sometimes seems to be a madhouse. Deniers are nuts and getting nuttier day by day. You'd think they'd limit themselves to just one conspiracy theory a day, wouldn't you. A case of one is never enough I suppose.
PS My readers know already that Twitter is too complex for Anthony Watts. Looks like Andy Revkin is flummoxed by it as well.
PPS Comedy gold! I was wrong about Steve Goddard knowing his tweet wasn't deleted. Apparently he doesn't know how to check his own timeline. Now he's trying to claim that not only did the White House delete his tweet, the White House put it back again! Face palm, as they say in the USA :D
Weird to see inside the mind of a conspiracy theorist. Does the word megalomania spring to mind? Do they think the White House is running Twitter now? Deniers are bloody barmy, as we say down under :D
@dana1981 @wottsupwiththat @SouBundanga @Revkin Andrew Holland already admitted that they took it down. Perhaps they put it back up?
— Steve Goddard (@SteveSGoddard) June 24, 2013
Courtesy of Anonymous in the comments and conscious of the fact that someone will cry "Godwin's Law" but this one is funny :D
PPPS More comedy. Now Anthony Watts in another fit of conspiracy ideation has decided to test the power of the White House. I'm not kidding!
Apparently he wants to be as important as he thinks Steve Goddard is (and John Cook). You'd think after making such an idiot of himself with his ignorance of Twitter he wouldn't be so willing to do it again. But Anthony never learns...He seems to really and truly think that the White House is trying to hide the history of the weather in the USA.. Not only that but he thinks the White House cares enough about a dumb denier blogger to notice his tweet. Not only that, he thinks/hopes they'll take so much notice they'll remove it. Not only that, he thinks that the White House can remove a silly tweet just by snapping its fingers. (Does the White House have fingers?) Look!
@whitehouse confirmed by NOAA huricane data, Grover Cleveland had 9 times more hurricanes than Barack Obama: http://t.co/YNOd4LjER1
— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) June 24, 2013
Sheesh. And to think there are still a few people who take these idiots seriously.
It's not the White House it's the NSA
Crikey, they aren't finished yet. Now they reckon the NSA has got involved.
And they really do not understand Twitter and think the White House not only can alter Twitter but that it takes any notice of a tweet from a complete nonentity. Does anyone else think that some people must have a really, really hard time surviving the real world?
"Steve Goddard" thinks that his megalomania has something to do with first amendment rights. He still seems to think the White House did something with his tweet. Nutty as...
_Jim says:
June 24, 2013 at 1:59 pm Are we sure that wasn’t actually an “NSA pull”, for, you know, possible ‘national security’ reasons?
And they really do not understand Twitter and think the White House not only can alter Twitter but that it takes any notice of a tweet from a complete nonentity. Does anyone else think that some people must have a really, really hard time surviving the real world?
Snake Oil Baron says:No, Snake Oil, that's not how Twitter works. You can't delete a tweet from any 'site'. More than conspiracy ideation, these people have real delusions of grandeur.
June 24, 2013 at 2:55 pm
It seems they deleted it from their White House site tweets which is possible but it still existed on Twitter. I was confused about that at first. It is still a sissy thing to do but not a sinister thing to do.
PPPlosingcountS
"Steve Goddard" thinks that his megalomania has something to do with first amendment rights. He still seems to think the White House did something with his tweet. Nutty as...
@SouBundanga @dana1981 @wottsupwiththat @Revkin I see, so First Amendment rights don't apply to little people. Thanks for clearing that up.
— Steve Goddard (@SteveSGoddard) June 24, 2013
Yes.
ReplyDeleteNext question...
You're not supposed to answer rhetorical questions
DeleteDamn.
DeleteAnd now I see I am not allowed to mention the war.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfl6Lu3xQW0
The short answer is: YES. All the deniers ARE barking mad... And VERY annoying to those of us who do NOT enjoy starvation.
ReplyDelete(Apologies to those who have already seen the video referenced below -- it's becoming an "oldie" but is still very much a "goodie".)
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Steve Goddard and Anthony Watts, there's a hilarious "Downfall" parody video that just nails those two: You can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ARJK0MWAITM
Caveats: Hitler theme, plus some salty language in the subtitles.
The video is packed with "beverage through the nose" hilarity.
My favorite line: "It's not true, your post on climate elves was excellent".
I have to agree, twitter is too difficult to understand and I don't want to drink from the firehose. Maybe if you are using one of the apps, but I don't want to spend that much time on it. Mostly, if you click on the OT (original twit) the replies to that twit don't seem to show. Hashtags work better for showing the course of a conversation, but most people don't start them.
ReplyDeleteConversations don't always show every comment and the 'threads' can easily get broken up anyway. But all you have to do if you're looking for a tweet from someone is go to their timeline. For your own timeline basic twitter has a direct link and all the other apps do as well. Steve Goddard doesn't know how to check his own tweets :(
Deletehttps://twitter.com/SteveSGoddard
(I use basic twitter on the computer, but Ocell for the phone.)
Twitter isn't that hard to understand. Anthony insists on thinking people can delete other people's tweets but of course they can't. You can only delete your own tweets. In the past couple of years, Anthony's accused Michael Mann, Bill McKibben and now the White House of deleting other people's tweets. Every time he does this people chime in and tell him he's wrong and it can't be done. It still hasn't got through hit thick head.
John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky write about the stickiness of wrong information. Maybe Anthony could ask them for help:D
The problem I have is following conversations. Plus the firehose aspect.
DeleteYep, hard to have deep and meaningful discussions on Twitter. But it provides good training for long-winded people like me to sharpen their thoughts and express them succinctly.
DeleteIt's also great for gish gallopers, as you can imagine. (Is that what you mean by fire hose? I'm not familiar with that term.)
What is really good for people who are feeling a bit left out of life, is that you can talk with Very Famous People. Or I should say - talk *to* Very Famous People. And you can also imagine you've made such a big impression with them that they've deleted your tweets :D
" Does anyone else think that some people must have a really, really hard time surviving the real world?"
ReplyDeleteWell there's the rub. The real world for most of the leading lights is the one of complete obscurity they rose without trace from. If not denying AGW, what will they be?
After the euphoria of the early years as the movement got going the movement stalled and is now clearly falling away - clear even to the deniers themselves, and that's pretty damn' clear. Hence the rising hysteria, paranoid megalomania, and falling-out over who's to blame.
The message is not to blame, of course. Heaven forfend. It's the way some other deniers are muddying the waters with errors and bad graphs rather than sticking to the clear script as written by each individual denier. Faction results. Mutual accusations of error and heresy. Then treason.
The same process can often be seen in religious revivals and radical political movements. The resulting splinters can last indefinitely, as can the fracturing.
The conspiracy theorizing is getting a bit heavy-handed isn't it? Did you see the thread on Obama's climate plan? That thread is very heavy with black helicopter/Kenyan muslim/NSA is coming for my kids theories. If they want to get outraged about Lewandowsky's work, I think they're going to have to pay a bit more attention to the company they keep ...
ReplyDeleteI think the problem is as Cugel put it. Many of the saner "skeptics" are starting to realise something is amiss. Free market ideology can probably only blind some people for so long. The floods in Canada and Europe and India and Australia and the UK and elsewhere after the big floods a short time ago, the record heat waves and droughts, the ferocity of the fires, Alaska's weird weather - it's being noticed.
DeleteSo while only a few of the people who now realise its not "all a hoax" are starting to speak up, they aren't as vocal on denier boards. That means the crazies are more obvious. They were always there but now that the crowd is thinning the conspiracy nutters are now a bigger proportion of the fake skeptics.
And Anthony Watts has to woo them (eg Monckton) or his blog has no purpose at all. Though these days he's coming across as big a conspiracy theorist as the nuttiest of them.
Watts chose a really bad time to loosen up his moderation policies, didn't he? There's a whole rash of people saying "WTFUWT" now.
DeleteI think he's going to give up by the end of this year, and so will McIntyre. The September sea ice minimum will do the trick, I think.
"The September sea ice minimum will do the trick, I think." - Not really, they will go on for half a year about the record rebound of the sea ice after that minimum...
DeletecRR Kampen, I'm going to go out on a limb here with an unpopular and counter-intuitive theory ... Watts's mind can be changed by evidence. He is a kind of "useful idiot" for Heartland and McIntyre: providing propaganda and rabble-rousing for the former, and making the latter look smart. But I think he really believes the planet is not warming and that science has been corrupted, and that denialists can stop change. But he's suffered a series of body blows this year: Obama's climate plan, CHina introducing emissions schemes, Marcotte being accepted uncritically, etc. In a post a few months ago he complained about being out of energy and wanting someone to take over; he has obviously given up editorial effort and is just basically phoning it in now. I think he is dispirited by a series of political defeats, and he wants to believe that the theory is wrong but the evidence is piling up. Last year he had Sandy, drought in the USA, massive sea ice collapse, agricultural failure - the cognitive dissonance must be eating him alive.
DeleteMcIntyre and Heartland, on the other hand- they are absolutely evil. They know the planet is warming and they don't care, or they actively care about resisting change. Their economic and political worldview (and in McIntyre's case, personal income) depend on environmentalist ideas being marginalized and discredited, and they are fighting to delay action and prevent these views being given the credit they deserve. McIntyre knows the planet is warming but he is poisoning the well, intimidating scientists, interfering with their work, and stalking them, with the sole goal of preventing them from making headway. Heartland are the same.
Remember, for all his supposed mathematical nous (pfft!) McIntyre has never done any real science. The only one amongst them who has done any real science is ... Watts, with his surface station project. That was a quixotic effort, but it was real research and it got published in a real journal without any dodgy pal review (like McIntyre got). He really believes this stuff, and as the evidence turns against him he is going to cave. Mark my words, he will chuck it in. At the next record sea ice melt, or at the latest when an international agreement is brokered. I think the next record sea ice melt will be this year (though some dispute it) and it will leave open water at the pole. Sure, Watts will faff around with claims that it happened before etc. but he is going to chuck it in after that, because he won't be able to believe his own propaganda anymore.
I don't think so... my impression of McIntyre is someone who insists on winning the argument, no matter what. I have met such people. I doubt that his retirement income depends in any way on what happens to climate policy.
DeleteAs for Watts, he's getting on in years and he has had health problems. And before you think that his retirement from blogging will be a good thing, think again. As Einstein said, two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity (and he wasn't sure about the universe). An infinite supply of successors, and if you can deny the current state of the science, there is no limit to what you can deny.
BTW Actually McIntyre also got one paper through presumably real peer review into a real journal: this.
McIntyre put up a post a few months ago saying he's losing energy for it and will be posting less. He had the brass balls to say that he was getting tired of the harrassment and abuse he suffers, but he made it pretty clear he's losing energy. His mission has been successful in delaying action to a certain extent I suppose but he's obviously losing every battle that counts. I guess you're right though, he did publish once in 2005, though his paper is highly flawed.
DeleteWatts's retirement from blogging will be a good thing because a) it can't help but be presented as a loss for denialists and b) it takes years for someone to develop the following and impact of someone like that. There are no successors, and by the time someone with the same mix of propaganda and science interest turns up, the debate will be over.
Incidentally, try reading some of his earliest posts. They're remarkably different in tone and style to his later stuff. I really do think he loves science and thinks it has been corrupted and gone wrong - he's a kind of "glory days of NASA" type guy, and the years of trying to prove his cause is right have driven him crazy. No such risk with McIntyre- he started mean and he is still mean.
Hmmm ... I really need to use my humor closing tag (/humor) more often for the humor-impaired on hot whopper ...
ReplyDeleteThe throw-away comment 'NSA pull' really set you guys (and gals) off.
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So, do we practice hard-handed, tight-fisted censorship on this website or no?
ReplyDeleteMy previous comment disappeared into the ether.
_Jim
You guys don't know HOW HARD I laughed when I wrote that 'NSA pull' comment; some things are so tongue in cheek and outlandish they should be recognized for the humor they are meant to be ... that you would latch onto it as a genuine concern is 'telling' (literally: it is a 'tell' on your mental state) on your part, not mine.
ReplyDelete_Jim
So ... we're *not* going to publish my comments ... because, you would have
ReplyDelete1) egg on your face and
2) it would not suit your agenda, which is very important to you.
Also, 'leftists' do not like being made fun of ... which has been done.
_Jim