Bob Tisdale protests Years of Living Dangerously, with another crank letter @wattsupwiththat

Bob Tisdale is one of the denialati who Anthony Watts tolerates at his anti-science blog WUWT.  This is despite his overly long, tedious articles which bore the pants off everyone. His articles are almost always copies and pastes of every other article he's written.  He might top and tail them differently for variation. But that's all.  Mostly they are about ENSO.  Here's a summary.

Of late, Bob's tried to liven things up with videos, but they didn't go down all that well, generating comments like this one from Snotrocket:

I gave up on the video because the voice-over was so amateur and of such a depressing tone [sigh].

He's also tried to get in the swing of things by writing open letters.  I don't know if he sends the letters anywhere, or how.  So far he's written open letters to the US Secretary of State, George Clooney and Lewis Black and now to a whole raft of Hollywood producers and actors.  He's even made carbon copies.  Yes, Bob's old school.  (Can you even buy carbon paper still?)

I can imagine him sitting over his Olivetti typewriter, grumbling at the fact that all the world bar him and some other somewhat deluded individuals in the world, who throng to places like WUWT, accepts climate science.

Years of Living Dangerously is a new documentary to be released next year.  It's telling stories about how climate change has affected people in different parts of the world.  It has some big names.  Poor old Bob Tisdale doesn't rate a mention.  But he can write crank letters in protest.  Here's a sample - addressed to all the Hollywood celebrities involved in the documentary (archived here):

December 15, 2013

Subject: Concerns about Upcoming Series Years of Living Dangerously

From: Bob Tisdale

To: James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Daniel Abbasi, Joel Bach, David Gelber, Solly Granatstein, Maria Wilhelm

CC: Jessica Alba, Mark Bittman, Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, America Ferrera, Harrison Ford, Thomas Friedman, Michael C. Hall, Chris Hayes, Olivia Munn, M. Sanjayan, Ian Somerhalder, Lesley Stahl

Dear Executive Producers of Years of Living Dangerously:

I am writing to you as the executive producers of the upcoming ShowTime series Years of Living Dangerously to express a few concerns. I have also carbon copied the persons you currently list as starring in the shows.

Ha ha.  I'm not kidding.  Bob has really addressed his "open letter" to eight people and sent "carbon copies" to another thirteen.  I hope he got all their addresses correct.  It would be such a shame if his letter went astray - not!

From there on what passes for originality in Bob's world stops.  He reverts to form with his endless charts of goodness knows what and his references to science deniers of one flavour or another. Bob wrote:

When data do not support your thoughts, it’s time to change your thoughts. 

Yet Bob refuses to change his thoughts despite all the evidence of human-caused global warming.  Bob doesn't understand climate science.

At one stage in his long letter, he complains that the documentary has a segment on the Texas drought, writing:

It’s blatantly obvious that most of last year’s drought conditions in the Midwest are now gone and that the drought conditions in the Southwest have lessened.

I'm not sure why he thinks that's an important point to make.  Texas is still in drought and even if it wasn't, the one they've been having has been a doozy of a drought with towns running out of water.  And on top of all that, Governor Perry has swallowed his pride and has gone to President Obama seeking flood relief after the record-breaking Halloween floods.  That's the sort of thing that is expected as the world warms.  More intense rain, with flash floods hitting drought-stricken areas - like in Brazil.  In any case, most of Texas is still in drought and some parts are suffering exceptional drought.  Below is the latest chart dated 10 December 2013:

Source: United States Drought Monitor

Bob puts up a chart of the drought, which also shows the intense abnormal precipitation in the north east of the USA over this past year alongside the extreme drought in the west and southwest.  He seems to think it means that global warming isn't happening or some such nonsense.

Bob goes on to write a few paragraphs about someone called Daniel Abbasi.  He's not listed in the credits on the main website, but earlier press releases listed him as an executive producer. Bob wrote:

Now, I’ve been studying global warming and climate change for a couple of decades—first as a true-blue believer in human-induced global warming, then as a skeptic. Many of the persons you’ve listed as science advisors to Years of Living Dangerously at your website are easily recognized eco-celebrities: Robert Corell, Heidi Cullen, Charles H. Greene, James Hansen, Katherine [sic] Hayhoe, Radley Horton, Michael Mann, Michael Oppenheimer, and Joseph Romm. But, sorry to say, Daniel Abbasi was not familiar to me as a “climate-change expert”.

Bob wants to put himself forward as being more expert than the real climate experts.  He says he's been studying global warming and climate change for a couple of decades.  Yet Bob's name would not be familiar to anyone in the field as a "climate-change expert".  I imagine there are rather a lot of climate change experts that Bob isn't familiar with.  After all, he inhabits anti-science blogs, not the world of science.  Also, he's not very good at research.  For example, he only got as far as Daniel Abbasi's current role, writing:

“Climate expert Daniel Abbasi” is actually “venture capitalist Daniel Abbasi”. That will obviously be exploited by those who have different opinions than you about climate change.

He didn't get as far as finding out that before he went into the private sector, Daniel Abbasi was an academic at Yale and associate Dean in the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Bob could probably learn a thing or two from Daniel's book on climate change if he wanted to.

Bob writes even longer sentences than I do, and I have a tendency to the garrulous.  Take this one:

Then again, if you as individuals or as a group are not profiting from Years of Living Dangerously, many persons will view it simply as a small group of very fortunate people attempting to influence politics by exploiting the pain and suffering of people here in the U.S. and around the globe, without the basic consideration that your proposals, for example, will likely cause millions of people less fortunate than you to be driven into fuel poverty—with no justifiable reason for doing so, since data do not support your assumptions

Ah, the old denier alarmism rearing its ugly head.  Bob reckons that shifting to clean energy is going to hurt the poor.  He'd rather have the poor hurt by climate change than by changing to a cleaner world that won't heat up as quickly.

I suppose that's a bit unfair of me.  Bob really doesn't believe that the world is heating up because of all the CO2 we've been throwing away.  He doesn't accept that carbon dioxide and water vapour are greenhouse gases.  He puts in a phrase now and then to pretend he accepts it a little bit, so he can still use WUWT for advertising his dreadful "books".  (Anthony doesn't accept "slayers" ie greenhouse effect deniers, except for Tim Ball. Anthony favours grubby little Tim Ball for some unknown reason.) But if you can wade through the dross you will soon see Bob Tisdale doesn't accept one of the most fundamental aspects of climate science.  Even in this article he writes:

Whether or not we curtail greenhouse gas emissions (assuming they significantly affect climate at all) ...

Bob got near the end and decided his letter wasn't long enough.  So he copied and pasted huge slabs of text from one of his other open letters.  That one was to George Clooney and Lewis Black.  Bob's been a bit star struck lately.

"Great", he says to himself.  "Just over 4,000 words.  Now that should shake up Hollywood to its very foundations."

I reckon this 1,300 or so words is enough space to waste on Bob Tisdale, denier resident at WUWT, and writer of crank letters to the rich and famous.

PS Catmando of Ingenious Pursuits has another take on tedious Tisdale's latest tome.

From the WUWT Comments

After posting this article I read some of the comments.  Here are a few that show how little climate science deniers know about each other - my bold italics. (Archived here.)

Dr Colin Walsh says (excerpt):
December 16, 2013 at 5:13 am

Global warming is as well established as any other physical science. ...

Henry Galt. says (excerpt):

December 16, 2013 at 6:50 am
Dr Colin Walsh says: December 16, 2013 at 5:13 am

Please stick to fixing broken limbs and coughs and colds Doc.
Your utter ignorance of climate science is not becoming of an MD....

Nylo says (excerpt):
December 16, 2013 at 6:57 am

Thanks Dr Colin Walsh, but FYI nearly nobody here negates the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that having more of it is probably contributing in some ammount to the warming that we experienced during the XX century.   ...

Bob Tisdale says (excerpt):
December 16, 2013 at 7:20 am

Dr Colin Walsh says: “Global warming is as well established as any other physical science.”

In reality, it’s not. Human-induced global warming is government-sponsored eco-marketing masquerading as science.

And some fake sceptics feel the same as me about Bob's verbosity:

Greg Goodman says (excerpt):

December 16, 2013 at 4:53 am
Bob, who is your target audience for this opus?...

...Seriously, even I got bored by about 1/4 of the way through and I’m interested in the subject....