"Up yours!" sez Anthony Watts with another Tim Ball "Climate Hoax" conspiracy theory

See hypotheses - added below.


There had only been two three WUWT articles since the Tim Ball fiasco of the other day. Now there's a third fourth. Who'd a thought it - it's by the man himself, Tim Ball (archived here). Anthony is bowing to his conspiracy theorising readers and reassuring them that he hasn't thrown their favourite number one climate conspiracist to the dogs. (Edit: I missed one article. There was one talking about some chap who said something or other about the new health care system in the USA, therefore climate science is a hoax. Or something like that.)

This is also Anthony getting back at all those nasty science types, who objected to Tim Ball claiming that climate science is a giant hoax. This is Anthony thumbing his nose at Richard Betts and Tamsin Edwards and telling them - go jump. He figures he'll probably never be invited to dine with them again anyway.

Some snippets just to show what Anthony Watts thinks of you all. Climate science is a hoax, a deception, a fraud - according to WUWT and Tim Ball. Notice his constant repetition of the words "deception" and "fraud" mixed in with his allusion to the old-style conspiracy theory  about "transfer of wealth" and "political control" and "global taxation". He stops just short of writing "New World Order" and "One World Government":

In my recent article about the motive behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deception on global warming, I challenged people to offer an alternative suggestion to my proposition that it was about political power and control....(link)

...However, money was not the reason for the cabal who orchestrated the entire deception.  (link)

...The global warming deception may be the last great fraud perpetrated on the people and promoted by the mainstream media. (link)

...Release date of the emails in November 2009 was to block further political action by the Conference of the Parties scheduled for Copenhagen. At that meeting, the plan was to introduce global taxation and transfer of wealth with political control that transcended national boundaries. (link)

Yep, Anthony Watts has given up. He's fully retracted his previous "not really a" disclaimer and decided it's full steam ahead. Fulfilling expectations theory. If people think he's a nutter anyway, why not behave like one? (As well as that, Anthony seems to have run out of people to write for his blog. All he's got right now are Wondering Willis Eschenbach and Tedious Tisdale. He uses others sparingly, like the CATO duo, who sometimes admit they accept global warming is real and we're causing it, so they aren't all that popular at WUWT.)

Here's a link that explains the origins of Tim's conspiracy nuttery, that he's woven into his grand climate conspiracy. It's nothing new. It can be linked in with various anti-semitic conspiracy theories, like Tim Ball did in his previous WUWT article. It's origins can be traced way back in time, to the nineteenth century. Well before climate change was widely recognised as an important issue. As described in Wikipedia (with references):

The common theme in conspiracy theories about a New World Order is that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government—which will replace sovereign nation-states—and an all-encompassing propaganda that makes the establishment of the New World Order the culmination of history's progress and an ideology. Significant occurrences in politics and finance are speculated to be orchestrated by an unduly influential cabal that operates through many front organizations. Numerous historical and current events are seen as steps in an ongoing plot to achieve world domination through secret political gatherings and decision-making processes.

You can read more here. There is also an archived web page here, describing the One World Government conspiracy espoused by WUWT. Hard to tell if it's a parody or for real. It includes the expected anti-semitic conspiracy and tosses in some anti-Catholicism and anti-education (the Jesuits are known for their scholarly works). It also points to free trade and privatisation being the mechanism by which it works, which must confuse the right wing extremists no end. Although conspiracy theorists can twist anything to fit their nutty ideas. (That last bit added by Sou a short while after this article went up on the blog. 30 November 2014)

Speculative hypotheses 

I've been tossing around some ideas to try to figure out why Anthony Watts gives Tim Ball a platform for his crazy conspiracy theories. Tim Ball is, after all, a sky dragon author of the greenhouse effect denial book. Anthony bans other sky dragon slayer proponents from even commenting, let alone writing blog articles. But not Tim. I'm wondering why Anthony is so willing to be associated with a conspiracy theorist who plays in the same ballpark as lizard men believers and HAARP conspiracy nutters. I've come up with some hypotheses. Feel free to add your own.

1. Anthony has some sort of contract that specifies he must post Tim Ball's dumb articles, though he can choose to reject any individual item (which he has on at least one occasion).
2. Anthony is a closet conspiracy freak himself.
3. Someone somewhere has suggested that if Tim Ball's articles get onto a blog like WUWT, it will support an insanity defense by Tim Ball in his defamation cases. Anthony agrees (or doesn't know about this).
4. Anthony relies on a very small stable of writers. Tim Ball makes dumb articles by Christopher Monckton, Bob Tisdale and Willis Eschenbach seem more "normal". 
5. Anthony has decided to shift his focus away from science and aims to mimic other conspiracy blogs, like Prison Planet, InfoWars etc. He's dipping his toe in the water to see if he can bring his readers along with him. He can.
6. Anthony is trying to send the message that WUWT is a send up. A fake pseudo-science blog, not a real pseudo-science blog. A parody of a denier blog. He's not yet convinced his readers of that no matter how weird his articles are. Which only goes to show...

Number 4 only works if there are many more articles by Christopher, Willis and Bob, compared to Tim Ball's fantasies. So it's not that likely.

(Added by Sou, shortly after publication of the main article on 30 November 2014.)

From the WUWT comments

ferdberple paints himself as one of Bob Altemeyer's RWA's:

November 29, 2014 at 1:04 pm
no conspiracy is required to make this happen. the rich and powerful, acting individually out of self-interest, want the rest of us to take less of the pie so there will be more left over for the rich and powerful.
since the rich and powerful own the media, as well as the politicians through campaign contributions, it is in their best interests to promote media stories and politicians that tell the rest of us to get by with less. that we need to be “sustainable”. that we need to cut back on CO2, since fossil fuel is running out. and pay more taxes to help us cut back on CO2. and if we don’t, CO2 will kill us.

ferdberple continues and contradicts himself. Conspiracy nutters are known for being able to entertain two opposing notions at the same time. He writes:

November 29, 2014 at 1:30 pm
and of course the rich and powerful also control the education system through the politicians, the scientists through grants and funding and the universities though alumni bequests.
and though all this people remain skeptical of global warming.

Just Steve says it's all this teaching and learning that's the problem. Public education isn't a feature of advanced democratic nations, it's a communist plot:

November 29, 2014 at 1:53 pm
Progressives control education, for a simple reason.
Where did the concept of compulsory public funded education come from? Not Locke, Jefferson, or any of our founding documents….it is pillar #10 of the 10 pillars of communism, found in the Communist Manifesto. 

Just in case you thought that MCourtney isn't one of the nutters, just because he can be polite when he wants to be, and because he agreed that Tim Ball was over the top in his previous article. Well, he's just as big a wacko as the best of them. He probably became concerned that he'd be mistaken for a rational human being, based on him getting a mention here. So he decides to dispel such fantastic notions and declares his utter nuttery, mixing modern day themes into his own weird theory proving climate science is a "hoax", writing:

November 29, 2014 at 12:37 pm
My own thought on how this all came about is just a coincidence of mutual corrupting influences.
1 Some form of science was bound to be corrupted. The use of a small group with common interests, mutually peer reviewing each other, in order to create a body of work that will sustain their careers – that is how academia works. Dominate a new field and then become the experts – guaranteed tenure.
2 Choosing a new field as a stick to influence people with – is obvious. Adverts use people in white coats to sell washing powder and makeup. Why not also policies?
3 Maggie Thatcher needed to justify destroying the UK coal industry. She did that for political reasons based on the history of UK trade unionism in the 1970s.
4 Everyone else in power worldwide needed an excuse for raising taxes or (geopolitics) weakening the economic superpower (at the time, the USA).
5 These processes led to new institutions that became self-perpetuating. They generated more assumptions, biased more data and trained more recruits.
6 This small group of institutions with common interests repeated point 1 on a larger scale… and the cycle began to repeat on a global, governmental scale.
7 And the mirror happened in the media. What is the point of a Science Journalist and an Environmental Journalist in the same organisation? Not a lot if cAGW turns out to be a crock, in my opinion.

No conspiracy. No simple corruption. Just people following their careers, rationally.

One of Judith Curry's protégés, Rud Istvan, joins in the fray, with an incomprehensible bit of pure twaddle:

November 29, 2014 at 4:31 pm
Dr. Ball, in my humble opinion a very worthy post.
As background, Media ‘truth’ in the internet era was explored somewhat rigorously in The Arts of Truth. Media complicity in AGW was exposed multiple times in Blowing Smoke, most graphically in the eponymous essay.
Part of the media issue is a lack of minimal due diligence–something Monbiot is apparently incapable of. Thatnmakes them mere amplifiers for whatever smoke,themsupposed experts are blowing to keep,their research grant gravy trains going. Blowing Smoke essays Shell Games (corals and oysters and ‘ocean acidification), Greenhouse Effects (poleward spread of pests), and Snows of Kilimanjaro (Al Gore and Inconvenient Truth) make this clear by example.

Doug Allen is very brave and dares to suggest that maybe, just maybe, something that didn't come across as, frankly, complete and utter nuttery, might be needed if he is to persuade everyone that 200 years of climate science, physics and chemistry is no more than a giant hoax perpetrated by Maurice Strong. Well, he didn't use those exact words. And he did admit that he's a fan of Tim's utter nuttery even though he finds it a tad unbelievable. He wrote:

November 29, 2014 at 5:56 pm
I’m always impressed by Dr. Tim Ball’s extensive learning and writing style and usually agree with
most everything he writes. I do think that he often skates pretty close the conspiracy and self-congratulatory edge. I wish we had more critical thinking about Ball’s question, “an alternative suggestion to my proposition that it was about political power and control” because the answer is very important and so is the way we frame the answer if we want to convince others.

Oh, there's heaps more in that discussion. All sorts of people are implicated in this unbelievable world-wide, multi-century hoax being played on the poor little gullible folk at WUWT. You can read them here.

Warning: Limit the time you spend delving into the WUWT cesspit, if you want to your brain to keep functioning as it should.