Stefan Rahmstorf wins the AGU Climate Communication Prize, so WUWT compares him to Hitler

Is it the horrors of Hurricane Harvey that have unhinged deniers at WUWT? I don't know, but something has.

There have been two articles bashing Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the world's leading ocean scientists. He is Professor of Physics of the Oceans at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). The AGU is awarding him the Climate Communication Prize, which he richly deserves. As some sort of payback, deniers are using the Serengeti Strategy to defame Dr Rahmstorf in two (so far) ugly and ridiculous articles at WUWT.

In the first WUWT article, Charles the Moderator has copied and pasted an unhinged article by someone called Duane Thresher, who has a huge chip on his shoulder against climate scientists. Charles the Moderator included a photo of Hitler because that's what deniers do when they want to smear and defame. It's a Law of Deniers. That article is a nasty denier take on how Dr Rahmstorf took a newspaper to task way back in April 2010, after it published false information about an IPCC report. You can read about this on Dr. Rahmstorf's blog (if you don't read German you'll need to translate).

See the update below for more context.

Next Willis Eschenbach had a shot, with a wrong article about something that also happened seven years ago, even earlier than the first. This one was back in February 2010. In this case, Dr Rahmstorf was one of the scientists who pointed out errors in a paper in Nature Geoscience. The paper was subsequently retracted, with the authors thanking Drs Rahmstorf and Vermeer for finding the errors.

The really weird thing about Willis' article, and why I've speculated on the unhinging of deniers, is that in his article he links to an article in the UK Guardian, which points out that it wasn't Stefan Rahmstorf and Martin Vermeer who made the errors, it was they who found errors in the Nature Geoscience paper (by different authors). Yet Willis misinterpreted this as if it was a Rahmstorf paper that was retracted. He wrote (referring to Dr Rahmstorf):

Now, however, he’s had to retract one of his usual BS claims due to errors that he is unwilling to specify … details here.

The "now" is February 2010 - seven years ago. The "details here" show that it wasn't Stefan Rahmstorf who retracted any claims. It was he who discovered errors in a paper by different authors, that caused it to be retracted, way back in 2010. (The NatGeo authors included some of the biggest names in climate science, by the way.) Willis Eschenbach is nuts.


If you need more evidence that deniers are sleazy nut cases who have totally lost the plot, visit any denier blog of your choice.

Update

After I published this article, Stefan Rahmstorf wrote to me to tell me about his correspondence with a bloke called Klaus Kaiser who writes for denier and right wing publications. (I didn't cover that part of Duane Thresher's article up top, but this is a story in itself.)

If you check you'll see that Duane Thresher has a habit of linking people who write about climate science with Nazis, including the Washington Post journalist, Chris Mooney, and Stefan Rahmstorf. In his WUWT article, Duane Thresher wrote:

After I posted the Heil KlimaFuehrer Rahmstorf! article I got an email from a Dr. Klaus Kaiser recalling his run-in with Rahmstorf. Kaiser had posted some climate articles on websites that had nothing to do with Rahmstorf (not even in the same country). Rahmstorf disagreed with the articles and “threatened to sue me [Kaiser] into financial ruin”....

Anyway, Kaiser just ridiculed Rahmstorf and left his posts up. I doubt PIK, where Rahmstorf holes up, even has lawyers and if they do, they and Rahmstorf should read Real Climatologists’ Legal page. 

Rahmstorf, with his Gestapo tactics, is using the Nazi-like fear that climate change warriorism has produced. ... 

Well, there were no "Gestapo tactics", and while some copies of Kaiser's uncorrected articles were left up as originally published, one of them was removed by the publisher and another was altered by the publisher (but not by Klaus Kaiser).

To see what Duane Thresher regards as "Gestapo tactics", this is what Professor Rahmstorf had written to Kaiser on 10 August 2015. (I've substituted the link in the email with a link to the archived article):

Dear Dr. Kaiser,

in the article http://www.principia-scientific.org/do-you-believe-in-climate-change/ you claim:

If I remember correctly, in 2008 one of PIK’s finest climate-warmists, Prof. S. Rahmstorf, claimed that by 2015 the last bit of sea-ice in the Arctic summer would disappear.

This is a false statement: I have never claimed such a thing, neither in 2008 nor any other time.

If the Gestapo had been as polite as Dr Rahmstorf, the world might not have suffered WWII.

In response Kaiser wrote that Dr Rahmstorf's request for correction "is falling on deaf ears all around" and that "you have repeatedly made claims as to the rapid disappearance of sea-ice in the Arctic with false or misleading information as to the actual facts." Rahmstorf responded with a straightforward and polite request:

Please provide the source of such a statement - if I have made a statement that has turned out to be incorrect, I will be very happy to correct it.
Stefan Rahmstorf

Needless to say, Kaiser was unable to provide any evidence that either Rahmstorf or anyone from his institute, PIK, had claimed anything like summer sea ice in the Arctic disappearing by 2015. In contrast, Rahmstorf had written in his popular 2006 book on climate change:

Older model scenarios still assumed that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer towards the end of the century. In the meantime it looks more likely that this will already be the case before the middle of the century.

Kaiser himself refused to correct the false statement so Dr Rahmstorf contacted the website hosting Kaiser's article, Principia Scientific, which removed his name from the false claim. However they retained the equally false claim that "...in 2008 PIK appeared to support the alarmist view that by 2015 the last bit of sea-ice in the Arctic summer would disappear. ", arguing that this wording "is not pertaining to you personally but to PIK and as such you have no legal standing under UK law to make demands concerning removal".

That paragraph looks odd now, because the editors left in this sentence, which after removing the previous reference to Professor Rahmstorf, has no context: "I wonder if Rahmstorf has ever been to the Arctic—in winter of course." Incidentally, Dr Rahmstorf has been to the Arctic in summer and in winter!

Photo: Stefan Rahmstorf in the Arctic.

Professor Rahmstorf told me that another website which had also published the Kaiser article, Canada Free Press (Kaiser's a regular author there), removed the offensive and wrong article altogether after Dr Rahmstorf complained, so he let the matter rest.

This all goes to show that science deniers are not merely dishonest, they are not at all interested in getting the facts right or in correcting false information.  (Some do comply with Godwin's Law, if not that of civilised society.)

Sou 4 September 2017

From the WUWT comments

I won't repeat the disgusting comments at WUWT.  There were at least a couple of comments from people who thought the Hitler photo was over the top. However I don't give them any praise because those same people weren't honest enough to point out that Stefan Rahmstorf was correct to call out the lies about the IPCC that were published in the media all those years ago.