Anthony Watts tries for one foot in the Hitler camp and one foot out

I've noticed a few people expressing shock and disbelief that Anthony Watts would put up the article that Tim Ball wrote the other day.

I don't know why they picked out that particular one.

Yes, it was shocking. Yes, it was not only one of the dumbest articles you'll ever read, it was horrible. Tim Ball was basically accusing climate scientists of being Hitlers. He quoted a passage from Hitler's writings to prove that climate science was one big con. (Yeah - weird!) He was accusing climate scientists of massive deception on a centuries-long world-wide scale, which is something that Anthony encourages his readers to believe quite often. So that's nothing new.


Thing is, Anthony Watts often posts articles by Tim Ball, some of which, to my reading, have been just as shocking as the one he posted the other day.

I won't go into the detail of the article itself.  I'll just point out that it took quite some time for Anthony to finally hint that he knows this time he's gone way too far. Well, he's gone too far on many occasions. However, this time he's decided he'd better try to distance himself from the article. He's belatedly added a tiny little post-script:

Disclaimer [added]: This post is entirely the opinion of Dr. Tim Ball, it does not neccessarily reflect the opinion of Anthony Watts or other authors who publish at WUWT. – Anthony Watts

Too little, too late. He doesn't actually dissociate himself from the article, you'll notice. He doesn't say - this is most definitely NOT my opinion. All he says is that it doesn't "necessarily" reflect his opinion. It might or might not. He's not saying. Most certainly he doesn't think it's necessary to remove the article. He'd only remove an article that made him look silly even to the dumbest fake sceptic reader - like the time he posted how Greenland was completely ice free 650 years ago, and then later after he was told what nonsense it was, took the article down. Anthony only seems to be concerned about what his fake sceptic readers will think of him. Which is probably why he's left this article up. His audience these days are more like Tim Ball than your average lukewarmer. Anthony can't afford to alienate them.

The fact that he included "or other authors" suggests that one of his "other authors" wanted to be dissociated and told Anthony so in no uncertain terms. That's pure speculation. There could be a clue in the comments. I haven't read them and don't intend to do so. There are limits.

The thing of course is that it's Anthony's blog. He chooses what ideas to promote and what to not. He chose to promote an article likening climate scientists to Hitler and claiming that climate scientists are engaged in some unbelievable (by any rational person) gigantic multi-decadal, global deception. He can't dissociate himself from the article by writing that he doesn't necessarily endorse it.

Cannily he didn't put a time or date when he wrote his disclaimer. However people have been archiving the article. I could have archived one of the first three, I can't remember. I did decide Tim's WUWT article was too gross for HotWhopper. There are limits to what you'll read here. However I've changed my mind. Not that the WUWT article isn't too disgusting, and I'm certainly not going to write any more on the subject than the brief description I've already given. What I figured was worth writing about was that Anthony Watts is not immune to social pressure. And the way he handles the pressure from two sides is to pretend to dissociate himself from this kind of extremism without actually dissociating himself from it. He keeps a foot in both camps. Or so he thinks. My bet is his supposed "disclaimer" comment will satisfy very few people.

It wouldn't satisfy me. Does it satisfy you, I wonder?

By the way, you can get some idea of how long it took Anthony to write his disclaimer by checking the archived versions. The only one that carries the disclaimer so far is the fourth one. The one with the time and date stamp: 25 Nov 2014 13:26:03. The first archive was at least 3 hours after Anthony Watts put up the article at WUWT. So it was somewhere between 24 Nov 2014 09:53 and 25 Nov 2014 13:26:03 when he wrote it. And he posted the article originally at around 23 Nov 2014 20:16.