The unfunny at WUWT and Australia's hottest spring on record

Bob Tisdale, who is known more for his rejection of the greenhouse effect and his tedious, long-winded articles about sea surface temperature, has been trying his hand at comedy lately. Today he's got an article that tries to be funny (archived here). It shows what deniers have been reduced to, now that 2014 is shaping up as one of the hottest years on record. Bob doesn't go so far as trying for an original comedy routine. He's gone around some denier blogs and picked what I presume is the best of the best. Which is not a glowing tribute to the denialati.

This is a fairly boring non-article about a fairly boring WUWT non-article. If you're on the home page and click "Read more", don't say I didn't warn you. As a taster - one thing Bob did was highlight the fact that Australia has just had its hottest spring and hottest November on record.

Australia's hottest spring on record

One thing Bob makes a very big deal out of is a mistake by the BBC, since corrected. Apparently it was grasped at by Jo Nova, who must have nothing better to write about. All that happened was that an editor added "a year" in brackets in a quote from Dr Braganza of the Bureau of Meteorology about Australia's hottest spring on record. Here's an excerpt from the article at the BBC:

November was the hottest month and ended the hottest spring on record for Australia, meteorologists say.

The soaring temperatures could make 2014 Australia's hottest year on record.
Maximum temperatures were warmer than average across nearly the entire continent, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).

Nine of the warmest springs on record occurred since 2002, said BoM Manager of Climate Monitoring Karl Braganza.

"Australia has been warming up, by about 0.9C since 1910," Dr Braganza told the BBC.

Australian temperature records go back to 1910.

"There were two really significant heat waves on the east [of Australia] and there were a couple of [heatwave] duration records," he said.

A 13-day stretch of above-40C weather ended on 25 November in Longreach in north-west Queensland. It was some of the hottest weather in living memory for the Queensland town.

"In the past couple of years, we have seen heatwaves starting earlier in the season," said Dr Braganza.

Someone added "a year" in the quote, making it fairly obviously wrong: ""Australia has been warming up by about 0.9C [a year] since 1910," Dr Braganza told the BBC." The addition has now been removed.

By pointing to the mistake, Bob Tisdale and Jo have highlighted the fact that Australia's getting "bloody hot" these days.

Appeal to extremes

Bob went to another denier blog, that took a jibe at some article in a German newspaper. The article was about how older men and women are driving cars more than previously, which is making it harder to get a drop in CO2 emissions. Nothing much in that, except that apparently that denier has decided to go all out and commit the logical fallacy of the "appeal to extremes", writing:

Not only do the hysterical global warming bedwetters want us to do it with the lights off in unheated room with all our clothes on, now they are poised to request senior citizens to leave their cars in the garage and get around in the rain and snow by foot with their Rollators.

Pretty pathetic. Is a crude and vulgar logical fallacy all they can come up with these days? Well, no. It's not.

Climate change and health, oranges and apples

Bob then points to another article on yet another denier blog. This time it's about climate change and health. The problem there is that whoever wrote it is comparing apples and oranges. They are claiming that a 2009 article about climate change being the biggest global threat to human health in the twenty-first century is contradicted by another article saying that there are other big challenges in human health over the next 30 years, in addition to climate change.

Spot the difference? One is about the whole of this century. The other is about the coming three decades. Both articles can be correct without one contradicting the other.

Is that the best deniers can come up with?

It's a struggle to keep denying the evidence

WUWT has been really struggling lately. There was the multiple fiasco with Tim Ball's wacky (and nasty) conspiracy theories. Then a short hiatus, with almost no articles for a few days. Now WUWT is back in swing again, but with no new material except for this. Mostly the rest is repeats - of Christopher Monckton's RSS charts that he wheels out every few weeks. Roy Spencer's UAH update. Bob Tisdale's tedious charts (and his 21st ENSO article on the El Nino that hasn't happened yet).

I know some of you are bored with reading the rubbish from WUWT. Sadly there haven't been any OMG it's insects or Russian steampipes for a while that would put a smile on your face or make you groan or otherwise entertain. Just a series of boring (and silly) denier protests and mind-numbingly wrong articles about how the greenhouse effect isn't real, mixed in with a wacky conspiracy theory or two, and now some unfunny attempts to be "funny".

Deniers will have to put on their thinking caps and try to come up with something more original. Or quit.

From the WUWT comments

None worth repeating. You can read them here.