Today I came across a post by Anthony Watts who some readers know from his blog, WUWT.
The Part about Anthony's Dog
Anthony's apparently been surreptitiously supporting the Union of Concerned Scientists by pretending he's a dog (if I've got that right). Anyway, he used his dog's name to subscribe, maybe thinking he needed to hide his true identity in case UCS didn't accept fake skeptics as members.That's right, Anthony pretended to be his dog! He thinks it's hilarious that UCS accepted his subscription in his dog's name (Kenji). Others will no doubt be bemused by the lengths to which he felt he had to go in order to 'spy' on the highly secretive (not!) UCS.
(Some of you may even call to mind Anthony's ongoing outrage at Dr Gleick pretending to be a human being with Heartland Institute. Dog impersonations are okay but human impersonations are not. The other difference being that the UCS is completely open, while the Heartland Institute is a very secretive organisation.)
And Now the Curious Tale
Anthony claims something the UCS wrote isn't true, while in the same article posting more than ample evidence showing that what the UCS wrote was spot on. (Yes, if you thought Anthony was a bit odd for pretending to be his dog, what follows is even more odd.)Enter The Union of Concerned Scientists
Watts claims this statement from the Union of Concerned Scientists is 'completely false'. He underlined said statement in red so his readers would understand to what he is referring:So, let's see. Did Fox News lead in with the headline: "New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming" or not?
Enter Fox Nation
We don't have to go to Fox News to find out, but you can if you like by clicking here. Anthony kindly posts a screenshot of their article:Let's examine these two statements more closely. Maybe Watts found a letter changed somewhere:
UCS: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming
FOX: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming
Seriously? Identical. Even to the capitalization.
Enter Reuters
Now so far, Anthony seems oblivious to what it was that so amused/amazed/appalled The Union of Concerned Scientists. He attempts to shift the blame, saying it wasn't Fox's fault, it was Reuters fault.Watts is saying that all Fox did was publish an article by Reuters.
Two questions immediately arise:
- Does Fox publish anything no matter how silly just because it arrived from one of their syndicated news providers?
- Did the Reuters article say: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming.
I don't know the answer to the first question. But it sure doesn't seem very responsible for a major international news media network to publish whatever anyone sends them no matter how absurd.
The answer to the second question meant going across to the Reuters website. Here is their article, which has the following headline:
UCS: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming
FOX: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming
Reuters: Wind Farms may have warming effect: research
UCS accurately quoted the ridiculous headline from Fox. Reuters had a completely different headline.
Just in case you are wondering if Reuters changed their headline at some stage, here is a link to their article using Wayback Machine. (Watts also provides the headline from The Telegraph, which was equally misleading but different from that of Fox: "Wind farms can cause climate change, finds new study".)
What did Watts not Spot?
For starters, Anthony did not point out that Fox made up their own headline. But as you'll have figured out already, Watts missed a much more fundamental point.Why is the Union of Concerned Scientists amazed, amused and appalled?
Well, the research did NOT find that wind farms 'cause global warming'. The research found that wind farms have a local warming effect.
Anthony even posts the abstract of the research paper in question, but still hasn't twigged why the Union of Concerned Scientists scoffed at the Fox News headline.
Here is the relevant part of the abstract as shown on WUWT. Anthony even bolded the sentence about local (not global) warming "over wind farms relative to nearby non-wind-farm regions":
The World's Most Visited Anti-Science Website and Winner of the Bloggies Lifetime Achievement Award
Give the dog a bone...
Update:
As of now the blog article referred to above attracted 74 comments, of which I read only one that may possibly have alerted Anthony to his error, but Anthony deleted it mysteriously saying (in reference to this? Surely he doesn't want to draw attention to one of his other deficiencies):
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Summarising for people who are unfamiliar with the context, what this example illustrates quite neatly is:
1) Double standards
In Watts world, he can fake his own identity (posing as a dog!), but if someone else does so much as use an on-line identity (eg Sou), Watts calls them "anonymous cowards" at best or effectively calls for them to be flogged drawn and quartered.
What is even more ridiculous is that Watts felt he needed to fake his identity at all - as if he thinks there is a 4,000 strong inner UCS sanctum that operates in secrecy. (The Union of Concerned Scientists doesn't set criteria for membership AFAIK. Anyone can join, even a someone posing as a dog! I don't know if they boot people out for any reason. Most organisations have some base criteria.)
Makes you wonder what sort of circles Watts usually inhabits? (Such weird thinking is consistent with the notion that almost ALL the scientists, journalists, politicians and the majority of the general public are part of a decades long conspiracy to deceive the few remaining science deniers, and that climate science is a 'hoax'.)
2) Cognitive difficulties - critical reading and arithmetic in particular
Watts didn't pick up on 'global' vs 'local'. Watts may not even know that there is a difference between a local effect and a global effect. That would go some way to explaining his ongoing obsession with individual surface stations long after it's been proven time and time again that individual stations being out balances out once they are aggregated. (This includes a paper that listed Watts himself as one of the authors. Seems that comprehending the findings of a paper is not a pre-requisite for being listed as an author.)