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Friday, May 30, 2014

The peers at WUWT give a guest the thumbs down

Sou | 10:21 PM Go to the first of 2 comments. Add a comment

Sheesh, Anthony's gone into book publishing at WUWT. He's posted up a Frankenstein of an article by William McClenney (archived here). It starts with an abstract unlike any you'll read in a scientific journal, but fits with the mould of denier blogs:
Abstract: I used to think there was only one known substitute for intelligence – stupidity. I have since realized that I left out evil (see Hitler et al). I have also come to the conclusion that the difference between confidence and arrogance is competence. Keep those thoughts in mind as we take a tour de force through the peer-reviewed literature regarding the climatic “madhouse” also known as glacial inception. It would be one thing if we were to become concerned about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), say in the middle of an interglacial. It’s quite another altogether to get all worked-up over it at a probable end extreme interglacial.

William follows this with an "author's note" in which he tells his readers that before they ask any questions relating to his latest monstrosity, they need to read three other WUWT monstrosities he's written, dating back over four years or so (to 2010).

William punishes WUWT readers with 16,457 words interspersed with multiple unreadable jpeg files of other documents each having lots more words and a few charts, plus he treats WUWT with a zillion hyperlinks, bold italics and underlines.

The number of words above this paragraph is 224, so William's "guest essay" is more than 73 times longer than the above. It's equivalent to more than 30 pages of a Microsoft Word document in Times Roman font size 12. And that's without all his jpeg files and hyperlinked articles. Add in the other three articles that William mandates as pre-reading and you've got 52 pages and 25,585 words plus multiple jpeg files with lots more words and charts. That would make William's required reading in total well over 100 times longer than this article. Not a bad effort for Anthony's pseudo-science blog.


It's only another "ice age" article


Did I read William's four articles? Good lord no. It was much more illuminating to do a word count:) I agree with Alan Robertson (see below).  I barely skimmed one or two sentences. I got more from the comments. I gather that William took an inordinate amount of words to speculate something quite simple and quite wrong, namely that CO2 emissions are staving off an imminent ice age. (The world isn't due to ice up for around 50,000 years even without global warming.)


Thumbs down!


A lot of WUWT readers gave William's abomination the thumbs down. What it goes to show is that some WUWT deniers are a bit smarter than some of the guest essayists at WUWT.  Which is not really something worth boasting about.


From the WUWT comments


Gary says:
May 29, 2014 at 11:59 am
The “abstract” is not one. This could use a real summary of the main points and conclusions right up front that encourages me to read this mile long piece.

Alan Robertson says:
May 29, 2014 at 12:16 pm
Life’s too short… 

lsvalgaard says:
May 29, 2014 at 12:49 pm
The piece fails the ‘elevator test’. What is the bottom line? [you have 10 seconds to explain it]

milodonharlani says:
May 29, 2014 at 1:08 pm
I too would welcome a brief summary of the points the author hopes to make & support by his citations. 

Bob says:
May 29, 2014 at 1:17 pm
I have a headache. Maybe I will read this another day. 

Henry Bowman says:
May 29, 2014 at 2:50 pm
It is a real travesty that the author goes to the trouble to write this essay, but chooses to use absolutely horrible and virtually unreadable graphic illustrations, all due to the use of the of (low-quality) jpeg image format. Why bother postig the images at all if they are unreadable? Please learn to use PNG format for images that are not continuous-tone. jpeg format is designed for photographs are works nicely for such. The use of jpeg format for line drawings seems to be a particular problem with WUWT, for whatever reason. 

Jimbo says:
May 29, 2014 at 2:51 pm
Loooong pieces like this need a proper
Abstract
Conclusion 

M Simon says:
May 29, 2014 at 4:10 pm
Too long? Well, I got about half way through it. 

Michael Moon says (excerpt):
May 29, 2014 at 4:31 pm
Anthony,
When did you become a book publisher?
[REPLY: No idea what you are talking about -A

 u.k.(us) says:
May 29, 2014 at 5:13 pm
Maybe it’s just me, but when Godwin’s law is proven in the second sentence……
……..I only scrolled through the rest, looking for the conclusion.
All I got was a bunch of quotes.
Stupid is a strong word, use it sparingly.

RoHa says:
May 29, 2014 at 6:07 pm
Gah!
My brain hurts, Brian. Lots of wriggly lines. Lots of hard words. Lots of sciencey stuff.
But no answer to the key question.
Are we doomed from fire or ice? 

John Andrews says:
May 29, 2014 at 8:50 pm
Too long. 

A few people made an attempt to wade through. Mark and two Cats got as far as the "abstract" and, quoting some passages, says:
May 29, 2014 at 12:18 pm
“I used to think there was only one known substitute for intelligence – stupidity. I have since realized that left out evil (see Hitler et al).”
————
Evil is a substitute for intelligence? Does that mean that morality is too?
Also, it seems to me that evil does not preclude intelligence. Lotsa evil-cum-intelligent people throughout history.
“I have also come to the conclusion that the difference between confidence and arrogance is competence. ”
————
I have know people who are both competent and arrogant. Competence does not automatically confer humility. 

2 comments:

  1. I have an abstract they might use:

    The ridiculous notion that CO2 emissions are somehow staving off another ice age suits the fossil fuel execs just fine.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anthony sees what happens when the "crackpot" dial is forced past its stop: an ominous snapping sound as a gear strips, followed by an uncontrollable torrent of over-heated verbiage.

    ReplyDelete

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