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Thursday, October 1, 2015

Paris is approaching, and deniers are on the back foot

Sou | 2:50 AM Go to the first of 25 comments. Add a comment
In just two months, the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21) will commence, alongside a big shindig for business, the Sustainable Innovation Forum 2015. By this time you might have expected the deniers to be in full swing, stealing emails from scientists, or otherwise getting up to their usual dirty tricks. There's nothing. Worse than nothing. Deniers are merely recycling ancient memes, and if anything, are on the defensive.

Anthony Watts at WUWT briefly stepped out of his hidey hole with a couple of articles over the past week, but all he did was act the fool. First in icy cold Greenland and then in sunny Spain. He wasn't just mocked here at HW, he didn't get much applause from his own crowd, either. So he slunk back into his hole and handed over the reins to his resident uber conspiracy theorist, Tim Ball.

Tim didn't have anything new to say either (does he ever?). All he managed to come up with was some quote-mining from decades-old stolen emails between climate scientists. One frustrated reader wanted to read the other 220,000 emails and pleaded for the password to unlock the files. I expect he was suffering insomnia and was looking for a cure. Gone are the days when an email from a climate scientist generates 900 plus comments at WUWT. These days an article about them only generates a measly 110 "thoughts", and most of them are empty.


Anthony is running out of people to write for him too. He's had to rely on substance-less articles by people like Eric Worrall, and reposts from right wing lobbyists. And various versions of the same thing over and over and over again. Boring. Unlike most at WUWT, Eric Worrall wants the government to subsidise everything. Well, not everything. What he's wanting in his latest article is for the Australian government to spend billions and billions building nuclear power plants in Australia. He's got some support. Not all WUWT deniers are free marketers. One staunch fan at WUWT wrote: "Governments should be mandated with producing energy for their citizens as cheaply and reliably as possible. It should be abundant and passed onto the customer at cost." Eric also wants to exterminate sharks, and probably every other species that can cause some inconvenience to people on occasion. Then there's the old reliable Bob Tisdale, who thinks global warming is caused by blobs.

Slipping across to other denier blogs. Judith Curry is getting a bit worried that she might get caught up in a RICO investigation. I can't say I blame her. Who wouldn't wonder what motivated her to give up science for denial? In fact that's got a lot of deniers a bit anxious, thinking that they are about to be put in gaol. Judith's only one of the mob pretending that she thinks RICO investigations would go after two-bit denier bloggers rather than major corporations. I don't think she's that ignorant, but I could be wrong.

And further afield, Jo Nova is all excited that her partner isn't so partial to derivatives. He's promising to develop a general circulation model free of them. He wrote:
It would be nice to avoid partials where possible, and in particular to avoid the heavy reliance on the Planck sensitivity. Our alternative model, later in the series, achieves this.
I have my doubts that the rocket scientist from Luna Park really is going to come up with a general circulation model. My guess is he'll put up one of his tortuous Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with sufficient variables to wiggle an elephant's trunk.

So between the shark extinctioners, the blob-warmers, the RICO-fearers, the quote miners, and the partial derivative avoiders, there's not a lot going on.

Oh, except for a few deniers like Richard Lindzen, Richard Tol, Roy Spencer and others hawking their wares to Peabody and co, and being mercilessly taken down by Drs John Abraham and Andrew Dessler.

25 comments:

  1. I believe that David Evans, Ms Nova's pet rocket scientist, is to be seen in this particular clip:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hottest year on record two years running, coal companies running out of cash and lives, oil companies squeezed and most asking for carbon pricing, fewer AGW-denying politicians on the world stage, and yet another year of recycling the same old guff with even fewer contrarian 'experts' to rely on for smokescreens to hide behind. Even the Vatican has their number. No wonder they're feeling downhearted.

    "All right. We'll call it a draw."
    King Arthur vs. the Black Knight

    ReplyDelete
  3. "It would be nice to avoid partials where possible"

    Well I guess Navier-Stokes is out then. I wonder how David Evans thinks planes fly?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. All of us try to avoid oafish, potty-mouthed, party poopers wherever they turn up.

      Of course, nobody knows whether Napier-Stokes or any other equations are so rude and unmannerly but DE is obviously a cautious person.

      Delete
  4. There seems to be a move away from all talk of climate change from some public commentators. Notably for me here in the UK, BBC weather and climate blogger Paul Hudson is very quiet these days.

    Paul gained notoriety and the attention of a good few 'doubters', when he posted what is possibly the earliest manifestation of the 'no warming since 1998' meme on his blog a few years back: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2009/10/whatever-happened-to-global-wa.shtml

    It's interesting to note that of all the predictions reported in that 2009 article only one has proved to be correct; that being the UK Met Office's, which stated that at least half the years from 2010 to 2015 would be hotter than 1998. 2010, 2014 and 2015 have all been hotter.

    To my best knowledge, there's been no public acknowledgement of this by Paul, which seems a little churlish. No one is expecting him to appear publicly in sackcloth and ashes, repenting of his digressions; but a simple acknowledgement that the Met Office got this one right, while the 'doubters' (including Don Easterbrook) were flay-out wrong would be nice.

    But no: it looks like at best we will get a stony silence on the subject, if not an outright disappearing act.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I feel like the "no warming" meme started circa 2007/8, a mere decade after the 98 record.

      Delete
    2. Google "no warming since 1998" and you can find hits in the Telegraph (and debunked in Grist) in mid to late 2006.

      The earliest I can find is Media Matters from April 2006 debunking a Washington Times article. That's kind of like debunking the Onion but hey.
      http://mediamatters.org/research/2006/04/20/echoing-hume-wash-times-cited-skeptics-misleadi/135456

      Delete
    3. I first saw "no warming since 1998" on a forum in 2005 so it was already out there then.

      Delete
  5. I have noticed a recycling of old denier articles.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There was an article on WUWT recently suggesting Climategate should be resurrected.

      Delete
    2. They may be stock-piling new material for a shock-and-awe campaign during Paris. Or they've got nothing and are hoping for a squirrel to pop its head up. One way or another their response is going to be hysterical.

      Delete
    3. I suspect we might see the 3rd, and final, tranche of Climategate e-mails released in the next 2 months... unless the originators have already picked through the rest of the e-mails that didn't make the first 2 cuts, and found nothing there that can be misconstrued by taking it out of context ;-)

      Delete
  6. Other news that might cause amusement:

    Lord Lawson to lead Conservative movement to leave EU

    Judging from the comments that went with the article, this news is a massive boost to the pro EU campaign.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And even more fun on the UK scene, with BTI's Mikey S. lobbing F-bombs.

      Delete
  7. More articles like this - wonderful...

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/30/massive_global_cooling_factor_discovered_ahead_of_paris_climate_talks/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So isoprene at a production rate of between 1.5 and 3.5 megatons per annum has more of an effect than 36 gigatons of CO2.
      The production of isoprene is about a thousandth of the human induced CO2 emissions and at a molecular weight of about 82 g/mol would just sit on the surface of the sea. See denier meme about heavier than 'air' molecules.
      It would just fall with the rain anyway.
      It must be a crap meme from Lewis as Brietbart is pushing it as well. Bert

      Delete
    2. The paper doesn't say what the register claims it does. It's just about details of some organic substance, and its impact on the mechanics of cloud formation. Deniers are getting desperate. Paris is nearly here and they've got nothing.

      Deniers think that clouds only cause cooling. They don't. The net effect of clouds is as likely to add to warming as not (or more likely).

      Delete
  8. There's a new article up at LOLWUT, updating the length of the pause. Interestingly some of the time periods seem to be much longer than in previous versions of the article. e.g. UAH is now 22 years and 4 months.

    I think this extension means that their previous periods of "pause" (e.g. 16 years) and their previous "pause" start points (e.g. 1997) now give statistically significant results. So they've had to go further back in time to find the highest possible pre-1997 data points.

    So as I predicted here before, I think they have now backed themselves into a corner: no statisticlaly significant warming for 22 years, but significant warming for 21 years, 20 years, 19 years, 18 years ...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't think so, CF. Still, it doesn't mean what a lot of deniers think it means. I've written a bit about that now:

      http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2015/10/no-evidence-at-wuwt-duke-global-surface.html#statistics

      Delete
    2. I am hoping for a big El Nino spike so their cherry-pick trick no longer works.

      Delete
    3. "I am hoping for a big El Nino spike so their cherry-pick trick no longer works."

      Won't they just start again with the El Nino year as the start year of "no warming since ..."

      Delete
  9. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  10. It seems the whole RICO thing is back-firing.
    Lot's about on WUWT but silence here.

    I can't imagine why? :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Probably the old echo chamber again.

      Delete
    2. Non-event. WUWT harassing people on Twitter is kind of old.

      Delete

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