Anthony Watts promotes Denier Don Easterbrook's bad "science" and conspiracy ideation

I see that Anthony Watts has hauled out Denier Don Easterbrook to dust the cobwebs off his flawed Greenland ice core charts and make more allegations of nefarious intent against real scientists.

If you're wondering what Don's latest idiocy is all about, it's the recent Miller et al paper.  Although I was sent a copy of the paper by a reader (many thanks!), Richard Telford tells it better than I could.  There are two three short articles at Richard Telford's excellent blog, Musings on Quantitative Palaeoecology, which cover the Miller paper very well and are easy to read (and have nice pictures!):

• “Unprecedented” – skeptic flypaper
• More on Mosses (Miller et al 2013)
• Man with one graph declares war on mosses (more on Miller et al 2013)

Denier Don dismisses on-site observations from his armchair arguing if what happened in far eastern Canada didn't happen on the summit of the ice sheet in Central Greenland then it can't have happened at all (or some such nonsense).  He also writes:

Even if the conclusions in the paper were correct, they wouldn’t prove anything about CO2 as the cause of climatic warming, so this statement suggests that the real purpose of the paper was to push CO2 at the expense of objective science.

Denier Don assumes nefarious intent - a classic hallmark of the conspiracy theorist.

If you read the archived WUWT article, you'll see that Denier Don Easterbrook is claiming that ice can move over artic moss that's 120,000 years old without harming the moss at all and without even disturbing the roots of the moss.  He's not strong on logical thinking is Denier Don.

I notice Anthony Watts is still letting Don put up his flawed charts of GISP2, claiming that a temperature series that actually starts in 1855 began in 1945.   This is after lots of his readers over the years have told him it's wrong.  Even justthefactswuwt agrees it's wrong.  But what do Anthony Watts or Denier Don care?  Anything goes at WUWT as long as it denies the science.

You'll also note with relief that Anthony Watts finds nothing wrong with the weather station labelled "Clyde NWT", though I don't think it is one of these new ones.  One problem with the record Anthony and Don used, which neither of them will tell you, is that the GISTemp records for that location only go up to November 2010. And there are lots of gaps in what records there are.  Also, it's a bit of a distance from the research site.

The scientists themselves have given an indication in their report of how the local weather has changed.  The ice cap is melting and mosses emerging after 120,000 years under ice, so that says something!

From the WUWT comments

Most of the WUWT readers aren't crash hot on logic and subsribe to Denier Don's conspiracy theory (archived here).

Ron House talks about the "recent few 1,000 years' warming" (is he a closet warmist?):

November 2, 2013 at 10:48 pm
This isn’t the end of the nonsense. They tell us the moss is quickly destroyed when it thaws, which is why they know it hadn’t thawed before. Okay, but what if we had done their survey 50 ya, 100ya, during the LIA, the MWP, the dark ages? Would we have found freshly exposed moss then? By logical deduction from their own claims, we cannot now know what would have been found. Perhaps old moss would have been found at all these times? Or at least the warmer ones? And that would prove that the recent few 1,000 years’ warming had nothing to do with AGW. Since by their own claims the disproving experiment cannot be done, their uniqueness claims are not scientific, just guesswork.

Pippen Kool is on the ball, though and replies to Ron:

November 2, 2013 at 11:06 pm
perhaps. but it wouldn’t be the moss was found in this study …that moss was buried then.

jorgekafkazar doesn't bother with the study itself, he agrees with Denier Don that it must be part of the "CAGW" conspiracy and says:

November 2, 2013 at 10:31 pm
” One wonders how this bad logic got past peer review. ”
This one doesn’t wonder. The process has been corrupted for political reasons and financial gain.
Nice post, Don.

 George McFly.....I'm your density is another conspiracy theorist and says:

November 2, 2013 at 11:07 pm
The last line says it all: “the real purpose of the paper was to push CO2 at the expense of objective science”

phlogiston says - Hey, I'm a conspiracy crank too - don't forget me!:

November 2, 2013 at 11:57 pm
This is a perfect example of politically driven pseudo-science: to jump from a single small, flawed study to a political concluding message, totally ignoring the existing body of scientific data on the subject. The paper is aimed straight at the media and politicians, over the heads of the scientific community.
Mann, Marcott, Miller … who will be the next mendacious machiavellian?