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Friday, July 17, 2015

Out in time. Anthony Watts thinks it's 2050!

Sou | 7:30 PM Go to the first of 29 comments. Add a comment
I don't know what's got into Anthony Watts. Yesterday he thought it was June instead of July, and wrote about an upcoming release of May data from NOAA, when that report had already been released a month ago.

Today Anthony seems to think that 2050 is behind us (archived here). That it's been and gone. That we're already past the middle of this century. He wrote about a "failed prediction" from Joe Romm of Climate Progress, quoting him as writing (my emphasis):
In 2007, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California.  Last year, a comprehensive literature review, “Drought under global warming: a review,” by NCAR found that we risk multiple, devastating global droughts worse than the Dust Bowl even on moderate emissions path.  Another study found the U.S. southwest could see a 60-year drought this century.

So Anthony thinks it's 2050 already**. Is this a known condition? To lose all sense of time? This isn't a once off, it's happened to him before you know.  Maybe it's a permanent condition. One time he put up a list of what he called failed predictions that he said were "predicted by scientists and activists 25 years ago that would be a result of global warming". I went through his list at the time. He must have thought at the time that the year was 2039 or later, instead of 2014. Maybe he thought then that it was already 2050, because this is what I wrote about what I found:
Thing is, I only counted fifteen of his 107 predictions that were made 25 years or more ago.  All the rest were more recent.  And of those fifteen, only eight were about global warming.  In fact quite a few of them were about global cooling and some weren't about either warming or cooling but something completely different.  So not only does Anthony fail arithmetic but he can't even stick to the subject he himself chose. 

While we're on the subject of predictions - care to guess how all the alarmist predictions from deniers are doing? You know, all their predictions about the ice age that's comething? I put together a collection of them a while back.

And back to his original subject, drought. I wonder if Anthony has heard that there has been a drought in California for quite some time? He doesn't mention it at WUWT, so maybe not.

Source: US Drought Monitor


** Anthony might have just been talking about the headline: "Dust Storm Marks Beginning of Southwest's "Permanent Drought"" - but the headline didn't reflect the article itself.




From the WUWT comments


Most of the deniers seem to think there have been a lot of wrong predictions. Maybe like scientists predicting it will get hotter as time goes by:



Joe Ford wants me to compile all the alarmist ice age predictions again. Maybe I will.
July 16, 2015 at 3:58 pm
This needs to compiled over time into a searchable database. In the future all predictions of doom must be put in the context of past predictions. Credibility matters.

I wonder if Jtom knows how long a decade is? Or if he can point to a prediction made decades ago that there'd have already been droughts lasting decades -:
July 16, 2015 at 7:10 pm
For completion, and to show the true depths of their lack of understanding the climate, the index list of predictions should indicate whether the prediction was/is true, or proven false.
There have been so many predictions, it should be of no great surprise that many have proven wrong. I think the real eye-opener is how few any have come close to being realized. There seems to be fewer correct predictions than random chance based on history would dictate. The climate has become remarkably unremarkable wrt consistent trends (e.g, long-term pattern change, like droughts lasting for decades) or number of extreme events.

Steve Reilly needs his memory checked. Or maybe it's just that there are lots of deniers who are temporally-challenged:
July 16, 2015 at 4:30 pm
Back in the 80s and 90s the goal posts were set at 2010. That was the “game over” year if we didn’t do something urgent to cut emissions. There would be temperature rises around the 2 or 3 degree mark, endless drought with massive crop failures causing food riots (even in places like the United States and Australia), extreme weather with increases in cyclones, massive sea levels rises generating 50 million climate refugees, plagues of tropical diseases invading the temperate zones and some children born in snowy areas who would never see snow in their lifetime. Well, we’ve had not one climate refugee, cyclones and hurricanes have actually decreased, crop yields have increased, we’ve seen record snow falls, sea levels rises have been to the order of a few millimetres a year as they’ve been centuries, and … well, need I go on? Now the goal posts have been shifted to 2030, 2050 and 2100, depending on what they happen to be raving on about at the time.

It must be a feature of denialism - none of them know what year it is. So far no-one has pointed out to Anthony that this year is 2015, not 2050 or beyond.

References and further reading from the HotWhopper Archives


29 comments:

  1. Annphony is phonetically challenged. 2015 sounds like 2050, just like temporally sounds like temporarily and skeptic sounds like septic but not as close as pause sounds like paws. Or some fink like that.

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  3. To be fair to Anthony, I can see why he'd like to pretend he isn't living in California right now.

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  4. I don't think Tony is phontically challenged. It's perceptual reversal It is easy to write 2051 rather than 2015. I just hope his bank doesn't mind the postdated cheques and deposits.

    It appears Tony has missed the drought in Alaska and Western Canada. Mind, it's brand new, only this year and there are probably no more than 3 or 4 hundred fires still burning.

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    1. I really didn't know... He doesn't have enough phonticles? Sounds like a terrible way to go through life.

      stogy

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    2. I think it is phonetic rather than frenetic or pathetic. It is one thing to teach a class of five year olds to do better. What he does is keep his class of numpties at his level by pandering to their hopes and desires.
      It is all very sad really.
      We struggle with the science they struggle with the little fiddly bits on their anatomy. It is the Fiords of Slartybartfarst all over again! Bert

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  5. There's something wrong. Clearly.

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  6. On the one hand, if Watts is from the future, then maybe he's actually right and has been all the long. On the other hand, those claiming they're from the future don't tend to be right about much at all.

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    1. The wonderful thing about the future is that it is whatever your imagination makes it. So for the Wutters in 2050 the earth is narrowly avoiding an ice age, primarily because of all that lovely CO2 in the atmosphere: the CO2 they did their best to make sure got there. The Wutters are heroes in their imaginary 2050. Meanwhile, the IPCC will have been 'found out' and its elderly remnants will have been dealt with severely by a special tribunal.

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    2. The amount of data and analysis confirming the vast changes to our planet is not only huge it's daily.
      JC, Anthony, Ridley et al will now incrementally accommodate fact so when Russia sends its summertime shipping via the Arctic (and that could be as early as next August) people will not remember how very bad they have been as humans.

      In support of my view I offer up the new study on polar bears
      It's been out for 3 days and yet no sign of Susan Crockford at WUWT. The deniers are correct. Things are cooling down.

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    3. Clarification: next August as in August 2016.

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  7. Clearly a man ahead of his time.

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  8. Willard Tony is a sad case. He started this gig because his physical intuition, informed by his personal experience of climate, a minimal education in short-range meteorology, and the fossil fuel propaganda circling through the RWNJ circles in which he travels, gave him confidence that any time now things would stop heating up and he'd be a hero. Now, all he's got left is what even he realizes is a forlorn hope, but since his credibility has no other chance for survival he continues to perfunctorily keep the ball in the air for as long as he can even as his following shrinks down to an equally sad band of retired dittoheads.

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    1. +1

      For any such dittohead reading this; history is going to see you as forlorn, sad, mean-spirited little people at best. Many, understandably, will simply despise you...

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    2. I believe he is in it for the money.

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    3. Very probably, Harry, although to what extent is hard to know. But when he first started, when he probably wasn't being paid, and IIRC his much more intermittent blog lacked the anti-climate science emphasis it acquired later, I think his poor physical intuition (along with that RWNJ milieu) is what led him to start down the crusading denialist path.

      Also, except for a few obvious psychopaths like Morano, I think most denier activists retain a degree of care for whether they'll come out of all this with any credibility or even self-respect. But for the likes of Willard Tony, recanting must seem like a worse prospect than sticking with it and just hoping for the best.

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    4. I doubt it's money which motivates Watts, welcome though it might be. I think it's the attention and ego-buffing that's so addictive to such an insecure and remarkably stupid person. (So stupid that he must actually realise it - at such densities normal D-K rules break down.)

      In the light of that opinion you can probably work out my take on Judith Curry.

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    5. Steve Bloom.

      It's interesting that you mention recanting. Over the last few days I've been mulling on who in the cheer squad for the last decade has actually stepped to the plate and said they were wrong, and none of the obvious candidates come to mind. Richard Muller is the best I can come up with, and he doesn't really count because he started from (probably ill-advised/informed) scepticism and actually looked at the data to decide for himself, and changed his mind when he did. But Muller didn't really involve himself in the politics of denial, delay, and defamation.

      If anyone can point to a well-known Denialatus whose actually jumped that ship I'd be interested to hear.

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    6. Muller went on to blame scientists for public distrust because of their shifty behaviour so he gains no points, even when he concedes the untenable. Over-egoed and way over-exposed (but never enough for his own satisfaction).

      Just to be clear, I have a very low opinion of the type.

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    7. Muller is on video defaming other climate scientists.

      So pot kettle black I think.

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    8. I wouldn't say Muller *defamed* climate scientists, strictly speaking. Without justification he casually insulted their competence and public behavior, but that ill-manneredness doesn't meet the legal threshold of defamation.

      Hopefully the ongoing libel suits brought by Michael Mann and Andrew Weaver against various of their attackers will show where that line has been crossed.

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    9. No, he really did defame them. I have seen the video of his presentation. He claims they intentionally mislead by fabricating. He claims they refused to release the data. He claims they refused to honour FOI requests.

      Muller knew the facts, yet he made his claims anyway - this is "malice".

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  9. People might want to look up the location of Chico, CA on that map...

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    1. Sorry John, I looked it up on Google Maps but the significance is not totally apparent. It's between two national forests that might burn easily and take out Chico or it's far enough north that the drought is just another news item on TV? My two guesses anyway.

      I'm in another country and more or less on the other side of the continent and really don't know much about the state except we get a lot of veggies from there.

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    2. While Chico's municipal water supply is in no danger since it's from an aquifer that's in good shape, its citizens are having to comply with recently-imposed statewide urban use reduction requirements, and agriculture in the surrounding area will have already taken major hits (although not as badly as areas farther south due to their ability under California's batshit crazy water laws to pump as much groundwater as they can manage from that same relatively healthy aquifer). So yeah, Willard Tony's noticing the drought.

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  10. Integrate the location of Chico with the map shown in this post. It is solidly in the worst drought category.

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  11. There is something weird about the monthly state of the climate report, though. It doesn't give any data for June that I can see, just State of the Climate in 2014. I downloaded the PDF here.

    http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/briefings

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    2. Sorry about that, your comment fully sank in after I posted mine. It seems you're right, the link isn't pointing to what it probably should be pointing to.

      Delete

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