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Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Denier weirdness: Quote of the Day from Anthony Watts at WUWT

Sou | 7:47 AM Go to the first of 28 comments. Add a comment

This isn't from the WUWT comments, it's in an article from blog-owner Anthony Watts himself.

It isn't good enough for Anthony that NASA and 97% of climate scientists accept the science of climate change because the science says so.  Anthony says: "Really? That's the best you've got?"

Obama’s OFA (not actually Obama but they play him on Twitter) says
“because the science says so”.

Really? That’s the best you’ve got?

28 comments:

  1. I like your blog. Pity the bigotry, It spoils an otherwise good read. I won't be coming back.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My snark is certainly not everyone's taste and is bound to offend more sensitive folk at times. For more civil discussions on WUWT Wotts' blog is very good. For civil discussions on climate science by climate scientists realclimate.org is the must read blog and for non-scientists skepticalscience.com.

      I have to say, though, if anonymous is a WUWT fan, then the comment goes more to confirmation bias or world view than anything else. For some every day examples: here and here and here and here - just for starters.

      Delete
    2. Non sequitur AND tone-trolling. My Troll Bingo card is filling fast.

      Delete
  2. Thomas, I find both science and sarcasm here on HotWhopper. Look back at some of the past posts and you will find some dissection of Watts poor science and highlighting his hypocrisy. If the insult is that Anthony Watts isn't very good at science, which I think is what Sou has shown time and time again, then I am happy to support that insult. If it is insults you want, however, just have a look at any post at WUWT with Michael Mann's name mentioned in it.

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    1. I've speculated a few times that the reason some people claim to be "skeptics" and flock to places like WUWT is because it calms their fear. This one was a classic if overdone example by the good lord:

      http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2013/03/hotwhoppers-monckton-and-his-scaredy.html

      PS Al Gore isn't really fat, is he?

      Delete
    2. Thomas Murphy, why should I care what Al Gore thinks and does? The preponderance of evidence in climate science has led to the consensus that continued CO2 emissions without any means of removing them again in a short time frame will lead to significant disruptions in our way of life. Those disruptions cover areas as divergent as sea levels, extreme weather, and various known and unknown impacts on the biosphere (and hardly ever positive).

      The claim that "skeptics" have no particular lifestyle to defend or justify is true in the sense that most have an *ideology* to defend or justify. That their own lifestyle frequently is in contradiction to that ideology doesn't matter, they'll find a way to explain that cognitive dissonance. The most frequent complaints are that AGW is just a hoax to create more taxes and that any measures to reduce CO2 emissions will destroy the economy. Wait, what? Did they just announce disaster, creating fear? Why yes, pseudoskeptics do that, too, but Thomas Murphy won't see that as creating fear.

      Marco

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    3. "science is about preponderance of evidence and NOT consensus - period"

      Another strawman argument from Murphy who then wanders off into the usual "Al Gore is fat" logical fallacy.

      Below is what SKS and the consensus project actually say.

      http://theconsensusproject.com/#evidence
      "Consensus doesn’t prove human-caused global warming. Instead, the body of evidence supporting human-caused global warming has led to a scientific consensus."


      "As to the hypocrisy, both sides - skeptics and alarmists - are guilty of that."

      LOL. Murphy tries to position himself in the middle but his shrine to WUWT and his regurgitation of denier talking points is hard to hide.

      Delete
    4. Getting back to the article. Anthony Watts reckons that if solid scientific evidence is all the scientists have got, well...that's all, he asks? Really?

      Who knows what else Anthony wants besides a humungous amount of solid scientific evidence. He isn't saying.

      Delete
  3. I means, hell, Watts has masseurs... ;-)

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  4. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  5. Thanks for sharing Thomas. A little bit too much information but whatever. Perhaps *you* can point us to your comments at WUWT where you objected to the abuse (not Sou style sarc but abuse) directed at climate scientists.

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  6. "Mr. Murphy shares prolifically to an audience of one - himself (check the circles - no one is there)!"

    More irony from Murphy. Murphy defends his WUWT shrine by claiming that he does not share it with anyone.

    This is the same person who whined that SKS are guilty of something because a hacker who used the FTP protocol, poked around until he found an unsecured directory which contained some graphics.

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  7. Zero progress. I should have not checked back. But thank you for listing the other sites. I am familiar with some of them and it is the same "insults as arguments" approach. I'll check the others. This sucks though. You guys might be able to win an argument by saying about all scientist agree in a joyful chorus of consensus while one single, lone, clueless loser is a ridiculous denier but I'm being totally destroyed at the dinner table. And to make matters worse, some of you almost accused ME of being a denier. What the heck, honestly, what the heck.

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    Replies
    1. I don't buy your yarn, Anonymous. If you have a specific question, ask it and you might convince me otherwise.

      (To do a Miss Marple, your behaviour reminds me of someone who played games at HotCopper.)

      Delete
  8. Murphy, you surely have a degree in journalism. Regardless, apply your 'life rule of 97 per cent consensus indicates likely untrue' to your oncologist's recommended regimen of treatment should the occasion arise.
    WUWT may be iconic to you but it's 97 per cent rubbish in the phlogiston genre and an echo chamber for a disparate group of individuals, with mutually exclusive climate hypotheses, made one by the commonality of their anti-AGW beliefs. Being a contrarian doesn't magically confer them or you, Murphy, with an Eisteinian status let alone intellect. It's time you put your Ecology minor to good and sorted the nektonics from the benthics as personified by Anthony Watts.

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  9. TM

    65Ma of paleoclimate behaviour suggest that ECS/2xCO2 is not less than 2C and probably closer to 3C.

    See the recent detailed reanalysis by Rohling et al. (2012)

    Many palaeoclimate studies have quantified pre-anthropogenic climate change to calculate climate sensitivity (equilibrium temperature change in response to radiative forcing change), but a lack of consistent methodologies produces a wide range of estimates and hinders comparability of results. Here we present a stricter approach, to improve intercomparison of palaeoclimate sensitivity estimates in a manner compatible with equilibrium projections for future climate change. Over the past 65 million years, this reveals a climate sensitivity (in K W−1 m2) of 0.3–1.9 or 0.6–1.3 at 95% or 68% probability, respectively. The latter implies a warming of 2.2–4.8 K per doubling of atmospheric CO2, which agrees with IPCC estimates.

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  10. ECS/2xCO2 cannot be much below ~2C or we would be stuck in a glacial. Just *think* about it.

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  11. Okay, I thought about it, and... you're assuming symmetric climate sensitivity between glacial maximum and the present, which I don't believe has been established.

    No, I'm not. See Rohling et al. linked above and Hansen et el. (2013).

    S/2xCO2 over the *Cenozoic* seems to be ~3C.

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  12. That's what happens when you rely on disinformers for information. They highlight mostly Bayesian studies with some of the newer ones coming in at the lower end of the scale. Deniers pick up on that and ignore all the other studies, of which there are quite a few. Eg what BBD wrote and from a recent article I posted.

    I would be surprised if the next IPCC report was markedly different from the previous ones in regard to climate sensitivity. Perhaps the top end will be constrained a bit more but the lower end - I doubt it will be below what has been indicated in the past.

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  13. Ah, yes, the joys of a Gish Gallop.

    Mr. Murphys post can be seen as a collection of the various arguments at http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php - a sequence of unrelated rhetorical myths lacking any scientific value. Rather sad, actually.

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  14. Oh dear. Thomas Murphy really, really is confused. Although others have already pointed out the Gish gallop, I'll take on the last part:

    "As another general rule I try to live by, if a group is reporting 97% acceptance, then it’s likely untrue. The only time you see 95% or greater acceptance/approval/consensus by a reviewing group on speculated cause and effect is when a dictator is running the show and controls the voting. The human condition – even amongst credentialed, climate scientists – dictates a varied minority of more than 3%. There’s always a healthy spread of people who can find different degrees of madness in a McDonald’s jingle. Limiting it to 3% is gauche - quippy but gauche."

    So you are saying you can find more than 3% of credentialed physicists who deny gravity? I'd love to see that.

    Marco

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  15. Yes, if one went by Thomas Murphy's golden rule he'd reject practically all scientific knowledge.

    For example: it can't be true the earth is a spheroid or that the moon orbits the earth and the planets in our solar system orbit the sun.

    Equally it can't be true that atoms exist or that DNA carries genetic code.

    It can't be true that some bacteria cause disease or that viruses exist.

    There is no such thing as plate tectonics; solids won't melt if heated enough; as for the periodic table - it's rubbish.

    Let's toss out all the learnings of the past two centuries and go back to the dark ages. None of it can be true if 97% of respective experts in numerous scientific disciplines have found it to be so.

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  16. I wonder if Thomas is deliberately avoiding the facts. For example I posted a link to an earlier article mine, saying how it listed a number of other studies about climate sensitivity. Thomas avoided those studies, instead referring to other things I wrote about - and even there he doesn't get it quite right.

    I'm thinking he just likes to be mischievous. He apparently rejects all known science for some unfathomable reason (according to him anyway) and wants everyone else to do the same.

    There is an alternative hypothesis that could be argued.

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  17. Well, Thomas probably just doesn't think about things very much when they start colliding with his ideology. I sometimes like to ask these pseudoskeptics what they think of mass extinctions: good or bad? They all agree it is bad. I then point out that four out of five of the biggest mass extinctions the earth has seen are all linked to global warming (one to major cooling). This usually causes either silence or moving of the goalposts, especially when I point out that even half the IPCC projected rate is much faster than the warming rate observed when those mass extinctions occurred. Stuff like "see, the earth can warm all by itself, it's not us" also comes up, but those people are really really lost for reason.

    Of course there are studies that show a significant contribution to *current* extinctions by the *current* climate change (yes, Thomas, that little bit of T increase and altered precipitation patterns), but those studies usually involve a few species that people don't care too much about (some butterflies, for example).

    Marco

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  18. Otto is just another example of the recent vogue for underestimating TCR/ECS by "observationally-derived" estimates. It is uninformative. They all are.

    The results are excessively sensitive to the estimated aerosol negative forcing and the decadal variability in ocean heat uptake/vertical mixing.

    Fake sceptics miss two things:

    - The unreliability of the result
    - The lack of policy relevance even if accurate

    All they see is a low number. The usual uncomprehending and uncritical yammering follows. It's tedious.

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  19. ironically, the computer Thomas has been using to comment here works using quantum mechanical principles accepted by >>97% of physicists.

    ReplyDelete

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