Tuesday, March 17, 2015

"Freedom Water" plus: Anthony Watts at WUWT promotes a whole mob of conspiracy nutters



Anthony Watts, owner of anti-science website WUWT, has done it again. You know how he sponsors weird conspiracy nutters. Well today he's promoting an entire paranoid conspiracy group (archived here). I don't mean just climate conspiracy - this mob have the lot. They call themselves "We are Change Victoria" and they even have their own television show called, wait for it:

Freedom for All TV


Here are some of the conspiracy theories that they indulge in. It's like a list of the weirdest and wackiest:
  • Smart meters cause harmful radiation - not only that but "Corix and BC Hydro use fear, lies and scare tactics to make you comply"
  • Freedom water is apparently "safe" and "common water" not - for some reason I didn't bother trying to find out. 
  • Anti-vax - yep, if freedom water isn't enough, this group are anti-vaxxers who talk about "Vaccine propaganda produced by the collusion of the state and the pharmaceutical companies in order to control profits and public opinion".
  • The "climate hoax" plus the 911 "conspiracy" and the evil UN!

There's more - all on one television episode:
  • Agenda 21 - that wicked plot to care for the environment, 
  • CIGIonline.org the public non-partisan Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is an independent think tank focused on international governance - must be bad
  • ICLEI - nefarious "brutal" Local Governments for Sustainability - the world’s leading network of over 1,000 cities, towns and metropolises committed​ to building​ a sustainable future
  • Chemtrails - what conspiracy theorist worth their salt would not have a theory about chemtrails, 
  • War - ISIS isn't real don't you know: "weaponized mainstream media feeding the public regurgitated, CIA-scripted talking points to provoke a series of wars in the middle east in light of it’s financing of faux terror group ISIS", 
  • 9/11 was orchestrated by President Bush?

Has Anthony Watts gone AWOL and left WUWT in the hands of the inmates? Or has he turned into a full-on conspiracy nutter himself?


The article was supposedly just to announce a "debate" between conspiracy nutter Tim Ball and leader of the Green Party in Canada, Elizabeth May MP.  Tim's association with a group like the above wouldn't surprise anyone who has ever come across him. He's a full on conspiracy theorist of the anti-semitic kind.

And no, the debate wasn't held on Freedom for All TV. Her judgement may be questionable (in "debating" Tim Ball) but Ms May is not that much of a fruit cake. The "debate" is, or was apparently on Ian Jessop's segment on C-FAX 1070 on 16 March (yesterday). The WUWT article, though, was mainly to promote that conspiracy group.

If you want to listen to the debate, it's available here on YouTube. Tim starts badly - I didn't listen much beyond him claiming, wrongly, that the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers is different from the main IPCC reports. And then claiming that "if you don't get the weather right you can't get the climate right". And some people try to claim he's a "climatologist"!

(H/t to a reader for alerting me to the conspiracy group.)


From the WUWT comments


Strangely, I didn't see any comments about Freedom for All's other nutty conspiracy theories. Most people had "thoughts" about the Green Party, or Ms May or Tim Ball or climate conspiracies.


Paul Westhaver, like many people at WUWT, has an emotional aversion to anyone but utter nutters:
March 16, 2015 at 11:47 am
Elizabeth May is an American leftist, who lives in Canada, and fits in with a small community of wackos rather well.
She is a pseudo-fact, clakitty, clak, mechanized, flood of noise, and eco sound effects.
Tim Ball, despite a minor defect, is rational, scientific, and reasonable.
These two kinds of people cannot debate. She is a great big ROUND MOUND of SOUND. He is a pure facts. Spaghetti and meatballs.
Even though I am happy Dr Ball is debating, and that the greens are crippled necessitating engaging in debate, the stress of listening to the fat disgusting picket fence gob puts me off. I will put on Tchaikovsky’s “Hymm of the Cherubims” in protest of her vocal cords.
Dr Ball, better you than me sir!


JPeden is under some illusion (delusion?) that 2014 wasn't the hottest year on record. It was - so far.
March 16, 2015 at 1:53 pm
May hasn’t even caught up with the Warmist’s retraction of their “2014 is the warmist year evah!”


pmhinsc points out where Tim Ball thinks that global warming is caused by magnetism!
March 16, 2015 at 2:02 pm
Re the debate between Dr. Ball and Green MP Elizabeth May:
In response to a question about whether magnetism is a factor in global warming (around 1:40-45), Dr. Ball said “magnetism is an important source.” He did mention the sun’s magnetic field but the question (and I understand the answer) was about the earth’s magnetic field. Can anyone comment on any relationship between the earth’s magnetic field and “global warming?”
Overall a good debate with most listener questions being “skeptical.”


heysuess doesn't know much about CO2 levels going back in time: 
March 16, 2015 at 2:07 pm
As I understand it, CO2 levels have been much MUCH higher in the past, yet May twice cited a figure of 280ppm, unchanged for the last 800,000 years, only to be topped up by humans of late to 400ppm. Ball never challenged this. Comments?

Heysuess should watch this to the very end to see the whole 800,000 years of CO2 levels.




BCBill found it fascinating and scary that a politician would discuss climate science, unlike Tim Ball with his crazy conspiracy theories:
 March 16, 2015 at 3:29 pm
Quite fascinating to see how somebody (Elizabeth May) without any technical expertise on the subject has the unmitigated gall to parrot the party line in opposition to sincere discussion. It is a scary peak into one kind of political mind.

Walt D. summed up the situation nicely:
March 16, 2015 at 11:33 am
It all depends who the audience is. You could debate Duane Gish on Creationism vs Evolution at a Southern Baptist Church. I don’t care how good your arguments are or how good your counterexamples to Dr. Gish’s examples. Chances are you will not change any minds in the audience.
Same here – unless you have an audience where people have not made up their minds who are prepared to change their minds, nothing will change.
WUWT listeners will think that Tim Ball demolished Elizabeth May, and Green listeners will think that Elizabeth May won hands down.
When all is said and done, scientific facts are not determined by debate.

8 comments:

  1. I am surprised she agreed to this. I get her newsletter, and much of the time she's very sensible (I receive newsletters from all the parties). When our government rammed through their first omnibus bill, she actually read the whole thing herself, and then challenged all the Conservative MPs to take a test on it. That was because she said none of them knew what was in this huge "job" bill (large portions of it removed environmental protections for 90+% waterbodies so pipelines could be built with fewer assessments), but they were all going to vote for it regardless.

    May and other opposition MPs submitted well over 700 amendments to the bill, and every single one of those amendments were voted against, one by one, by every single Conservative MP. And again, none of them had a clue what was in the bill they voted for--the PM told them to vote for it and like little puppets they all lined up and voted for it. Guess it makes your job a lot easier when you don't have to think, but it also means we don't have any representation in Parliament.

    Our local MP is an opportunistic Conservative (won by 18 votes because the NDP came on strong that year--the leader, Jack Layton, had died and was lionized in the media, which siphoned votes from the Liberals). I wish more people had turned out for the town hall debate because they would have seen him "warn" (i.e. threaten) us if we voted Liberal and PM Harper (Conservative) had a majority. More than a few heads turned as people wondered, "Did we just hear that right?".

    But he won, and now the PM's hand is so far up our MPs backside that the PM gets a manicure every time our MP brushes his teeth.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One nit: Layton died after the election. He was opposition leader for a while, though he didn't live long enough to sit in parliament as such. The media did not lionize him for being dead; it lionized him in the last week or so of the election for managing to surge in the polls.

      Delete
  2. Poor lickle JPeden was getting ahead of himself. 2014 won't be 'the warmist year evah' for very long. But 'retraction' won't be the why.

    ReplyDelete
  3. BCBill said, "Quite fascinating to see how somebody (Elizabeth May) without any technical expertise on the subject has the unmitigated gall to parrot the party line in opposition to sincere discussion. It is a scary peak into one kind of political mind."

    And not a trace of irony to be found, as most of WUWT posts (and nearly all the comments) are from people without any technical expertise on the subject.

    Also have to wonder what Paul thinks Ball's "minor defect" is--inflated resume, out-and-out falsehoods, paranoid conspiracy theorist?

    MP May, incidentally, is quite science-based. She's not an expert, but she listens to the experts and brings their voices forward. She's been vocal about the muzzling of scientists, the dismantling of research units and firing of whole departments of scientists, and the government's war on any science that may inconvenience them (including Stats Canada--they're been slashed and muzzled too, probably because they keep producing numbers about jobs, families, wages, economy that contradict the government's versions).

    I wish more politicians were like her. Another good one is Dr. Kennedy Stewart in BC and the NDP critic for Science and Technology. He speaks out quite a bit on science-based issues, and confronts the government on their science policies (or lack thereof), introduces bills in favour of science-based initiatives (like obtaining and using the best evidence available for policies); and is working to restore the position of Parliamentary Science Officer.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Quite appropriate to have a debate between politicians and political activists.

    ReplyDelete
  5. TIL: Tim Ball is a Canadian nutter. We seem to have an awful lot given our not particularly huge population to draw from.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Captain FlashheartMarch 18, 2015 at 2:02 PM

    Pretty funny comment from BCBill. Has that commenter paused to consider what would happen in politics if politicians only made decisions about things that they had technical expertise in? What an idiot.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I watched the Tim Ball vs Elizabeth May video. It wasn't too bad Elizabeth May slam dunks him at the end.

    Tim Ball makes a fool of himself by referring to Piers Corbyn as some sort of authority on the effects of the earth's magnetic field on climate change (I kid you not).

    The viewer questions were terrible, they usually are.

    The video appeared to be edited at one point, towards the end of the show they both referred to something that I didn't hear earlier - something about the ClimateGate emails. I notice the youtube channel you linked to was biased against Elizabeth May, refer to the channel's comments at the top.

    ReplyDelete

Instead of commenting as "Anonymous", please comment using "Name/URL" and your name, initials or pseudonym or whatever. You can leave the "URL" box blank. This isn't mandatory. You can also sign in using your Google ID, Wordpress ID etc as indicated. NOTE: Some Wordpress users are having trouble signing in. If that's you, try signing in using Name/URL. Details here.

Click here to read the HotWhopper comment policy.