Desperate Deniers Part 8: Conman Anthony Watts goes for broke at WUWT

Anthony Watts is getting reckless again. No, not restless, but reckless. He's making a stand as a hard core wanna-be professional science disinformer who has become unhinged in his desperate denial.

Poor Anthony will never make it as a professional climate disinformer. The elite of the disinformation world see him as a useful idiot at best, but don't use him much these days. That's putting people like Pat Michaels in the "elite disinformer" category, with organisations like the George C Marshall Institute. They are followed by freelancers such as Marc Morano (I think he's landed a paid gig, but I class him as a freelancer), who'll say anything he's paid to say at double speed while wearing a cheesy grin. Then there are the "science" hacks for the GOP - Judith Curry, followed a long way behind (and dropping) by the unChristian duo from Alabama. Then there are all the faded jaded right wing lobby groups stacked with old white conservative men, getting older and probably fewer year by year. The pseudo-religious anti-environment groups don't count for much, but they do manage to wheedle funds from various vested interests. Way down the bottom of the disinformation totem pole are the climate conspiracy bloggers, Anthony Watts, Jo "Nova" and her rocket scientist from Luna Park and a straggle raggle taggle of other wanna-bes. Some of them are managing to stay a few inches ahead of "Steve Goddard"/Tony Heller and the twit, Tom Nelson.

Today Anthony Watts has a second article about something that former US Vice President, Al Gore may or may not have said back in 2006 (archived here). Anthony was delighted to see his previous version of the same thing all over various dumb blogs. He thinks he's on a winner but I'd guess he's despondent that it didn't hit the mainstream media. (In your dreams, Anthony.) He didn't write this all by himself (he rarely does). He says he pinched it from a blog on some financial website and added some embellishments of his own.

What could go wrong?

Drastic measures are needed

Now if Gore did say what Anthony claims he said, Gore was spot on. Below in bold italics is the paragraph that Anthony Watts went nuts over, with some of the surrounding text from an AP article on CBS News from 2006, which Anthony didn't include:

The former vice president came to town for the premiere of "An Inconvenient Truth," a documentary chronicling what has become his crusade since losing the 2000 presidential election: Educating the masses that global warming is about to toast our ecology and our way of life.

Gore has been saying it for decades, since a college class in the 1960s convinced him that greenhouse gases from oil, coal and other carbon emissions were trapping the sun's heat in the atmosphere, resulting in a glacial meltdown that could flood much of the planet.

Americans have been hearing it for decades, wavering between belief and skepticism that it all may just be a natural part of Earth's cyclical warming and cooling phases.

And politicians and corporations have been ignoring the issue for decades, to the point that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said.

He sees the situation as "a true planetary emergency."

"If you accept the truth of that, then nothing else really matters that much," Gore said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We have to organize quickly to come up with a coherent and really strong response, and that's what I'm devoting myself to."

You'll notice that the only words in quotation marks are the name of the climate film and the words "a true planetary emergency". The para that Anthony has picked out is not in quotation marks, suggesting it's not a direct quote.

Anthony's adopting a variation of the tactic known as quote-mining. One of his variations is that it doesn't appear to be a direct quote from Gore. The other is that Anthony has decided to misinterpret what was written. You might argue that the second part (misinterpretation) isn't a variation. Misrepresentation is the whole purpose of quote-mining after all. But in this case, Anthony has deliberately misinterpreted the section he quoted. He's written it all in black and white, so everyone can see he's misinterpreted it. He probably knows that most of his fans will applaud him for it.

What Anthony is doing is playing a silly word game with the "within the next 10 years" part. That is, Anthony is attaching the "point of no return" to imply Gore said that the world will collapse in ten years. That's not what was written nor, I expect, is what was meant. The way I read it is the way that scientific reports portray the situation. That drastic measures must be taken, within ten years, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or the world will reach a point of no return. And it has already passed tipping points in some areas, such as the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is likely unstoppable now, probably the slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, certainly sea level rise (though we may still have some control over how quickly it rises), ocean acidification and more.

The paragraph was apt then and is even more so today. Some action has been taken in the interim, most particularly the agreement reached at COP21. In addition, in many places renewables are on a sharp increase, coal is on the decline (being replaced by gas and renewables and nuclear). We've still got a long way to go though. And in some developing countries, coal use is rapidly rising.

As if Anthony's misinterpretation wasn't bad enough, he's headed full bore into a Gish gallop of denierisms. Here are some of the points he made, together with climate reality (I thought that term is appropriate, given the subject).

Yes, Anthony - 2015 was the hottest year on record, so far

2015 was the hottest year on record, following a previous hottest year on record - 2014. Anthony Watts tries to deny it. To do so he has to jump up into the cold sky a few kilometres to find a part of the planet where the temperature hasn't warmed as much, or not according to the satellite data. It's a wonder he didn't leap up into the stratosphere to claim "it's cooling"! He wrote:

Satellite data says that Earth hasn’t warmed in nearly 20 years. Yes, 2015 supposedly “smashed” the previous temperature record. But actually it was the third-warmest year on record according to satellites.

Not only does Anthony want people to ignore the warmer than ever oceans, and the warmer than ever sea and land surfaces, he expects everyone to look up into the sky, where only about one per cent of the heat is going. He also neglects to tell his readers that up in the lower troposphere, each of the past three months were the hottest ever for those respective months, and the hottest ever combined October to December,

What about his "nearly 20 years"? He's way off. I don't think he'd be able to say truthfully that "it hasn't warmed in nearly one month". This is what thermometer data shows is happening on the surface, which we share with Anthony Watts and his dismal band of deniers. Twenty years ago it was 0.41 °C (0.74 °F) colder than it is now:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature 1880 to 2015. Data source: GISS NASA

This is what the keepers of the upper air (lower troposphere) satellite records are reporting. Twenty years ago it was 0.2 °C (0.74 °F) colder than now:

Figure 2 | Global mean atmospheric temperature (lower troposphere) 1979 to 2015. Data sources: UAH and RSS

Anthony is devious and deceitful - so what's new? He wrote:

Claims of “hottest ever” in 2015 have been due in part to a strong El Niño in 2015 (which even climate scientist Dr. Richard Betts grudgingly admits to) and some statistical sleight of hand by NOAA to boost temperatures.

First of all, if warming was just from El Nino, then why were past El Nino years not as hot? Some of them were as strong or stronger than this one is.

Then there's his fraud allegation. Anthony has frequently accused NOAA scientists of fraud and he's not about to stop now. It's he who is guilty, not the scientists. NOAA updated its dataset. It updated ERSST to version 4, which wasn't all that different from ERSSTv3b in recent decades at least.

Deniers make any excuse to dispute the data, unless it's adjusted downward (like UAH). They don't care that there is very little difference between all the surface data sets. Look at where NOAA sits in terms of trend since the last time there was a trend change, around 1970. It's second lowest. Not that Anthony Watts would admit to that. He's a con man. A teller of tall tales. He doesn't want to spoil his fiction.

Table 1 | Trend per decade since 1970 for global mean surface temperature. Data sources: GISS NASA, UK Met Office, NOAA,Berkeley Earth: 

The trend for NOAA is below Berkeley Earth, which uses a totally different method from any of the others to calculate global surface temperature. They are all different from each other. Even NOAA and GISS, which use similar (not identical) data, process it differently, which you can tell because the trends are slighly different.

Initial claim lines up ... WTF?

Moving on - remember how the other day, Anthony made a spectacular mess of things? He wrote a very long article accusing NOAA of all sorts of shenanigans. He ended up striking lots of it out, so it's a real Kenji's breakfast. Anthony couldn't get it through his thick skull that at the turn of the century NOAA revised its estimate of actual temperature of the planet (from around 16.4 °C to 13.9 °C) in line with the newly published estimate in Jones et al (1999). Today he glosses over the fact that it was he, not the NOAA or Seth Borenstein, who was wrong the other day, and says some nonsense about the NOAA's "initial claim lining up with the satellite record".

Anthony wrote (I wonder did he finally figure it out by reading it here?):

They said in 1997, that the current absolute temperature of the Earth was warmer by several degrees that today, but they’ve since changed their methodology and say that’s no longer the case…however, their initial claim lines up with what we see in the satellite record above about 1997 and 1998 when the supersized El Niño happened.

No, they didn't "change their methodology". All they did was change the estimate of the actual temperature of the planet.

And what the heck is he trying to say about "initial claim lines up ... with the satellite record"? He's saying that the initial estimate of average global temperature (16.4 °C) "lines up" with the satellite record! The air temperature of the lower troposphere is many degrees lower than the surface. If it's 15 °C at the surface it could be approaching minus 5 °C at 3.000 metres. It gets mighty cold up there. (Has Anthony never been up in the mountains?) He's confusing the change in the estimate of actual temperature (16.4 °C to 13.9 °C) with the the impact of the 97/98 El Nino on the lower troposphere temperature. You can't do that. Sheesh he's a dimwit. To think he claims to know something about weather and climate.

What he should be comparing is the difference in temperatures from year to year. Like this:



Which looks like this:

Table 2 (upper) and Figure 3 (lower) | Global mean temperature anomaly from 1981-2010 mean. Years 1995 to 1999. Data sources: NOAA, UAH and RSS 

The surface and lower troposphere are not so different, except for the El Niño years. So it's no surprise that Anthony doesn't put up numbers or charts. I don't think Anthony "meteorologist (ret'd)" Watts even knows that highs and lows like El Niños, La Niñas and volcanic cooling are exaggerated in the lower troposphere. And maybe he doesn't know that El Niño shows up on the surface before it shows up in the lower troposphere. Look at 1997 across the three data sets.

Anthony complains that Republicans branded "global warming" as "climate change"

His next gripe is that Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant to George Bush, advised him to avoid the term "global warming" and use "climate change" instead. Of course Anthony won't admit that it was Republicans who insisted on using the term, even though he knows it to be the case. (He does read HotWhopper and other blogs.)

Both terms have been around forever in the scientific literature. Global warming is the rise in global temperature, climate change is what happens when there is global warming (or global cooling) - patterns of temperature, precipitation and other aspects of climate change as a result of global warming.

Anthony should know all that. I'd say he just pretends not to, to please his readers (he is aiming to attract the most ignorant of the ignorant). However with the big gaffes he's been making, I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't know what global warming or climate change means.

Anthony rehashes a lot of old denier lies

One of his lies, which he keeps repeating even though he must know it's not true, is a claim that global warming won't result in extreme weather events. He wrote:

Even the IPCC said that there is no link of climate to extreme weather, and the prestigious journal Nature said in 2012: "Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming."

No Anthony. The latest AR5 IPCC report points to floods, heavy precipitation, drought, fires, insect damage, heat waves and more. And wow - did you notice his about face? Suddenly Nature is "prestigious". That's a complete no-no in deniersville, particularly the "climate hoax" village called WUWT. Notice how he quote-mines a sentence from a paper from three years ago, and ignores all the work of the past three years, like the BAMS special supplements on extreme events.

Anthony tells fibs about Arctic sea ice

Anthony is going great guns. Lie after lie after fib after deception. This time he tells the lie that he's told so often before about Mr Gore "predicting" that sea ice would disappear by whenever. As Anthony well knows, these weren't Gore's predictions. They were references Gore made to the predictions of other people.  Here is the segment of his Nobel Peace Prize speech. He was reporting what others had said, mentioning 22 years as well as 7 years. From his 2007 Nobel Lecture:

Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is "falling off a cliff." One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

Seven years from now. 

And this from a newspaper report from 2009, when he is reported to have referred to "some of the models" and work of the US Naval Postgraduate School:

"Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years," Gore said.

Afterward his office clarified his statement, saying he meant nearly ice-free, because ice would be expected to survive in island channels and other locations.

Gore cited new scientific work at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. The Navy relies on its research to plan submarine voyages to the poles. The computer modeling there stresses the "volumetric" and looks at both the surface extent of ice and its thickness.

Gore may have been referring to work done by Wieslaw Maslowski, such as this presentation from NPS in June 2008, after the (then) record low of 2007.

In any case, it wasn't Gore's independent prediction either time. He was reporting the research of scientists.

There's more on the Arctic. Anthony put up a chart and slashed a red line across it, not caring that he was going through both winter and summer ice, and pronounced:

Even more inconvenient, it seems the Arctic ice has reached a new stable baseline, and has a “pause” of it’s own going on. In the University of Illinois Cryosphere today graph below, note the nearly flat trend line in recent years since 2007:

Nearly flat trend line? Oh boy. That's as bad as choosing the inordinately hot El Nino years of 1997/98 as the start year for plotting lower troposphere temperatures. In any case, it's wrong. In September 2012 there was a lot less ice than there was in 2007. Here is a chart of Arctic summer sea ice for the minimum month, September, with a linear trend line for the entire record:

Figure 4 | Arctic Sea Ice mean for September. 1979 to 2015. Data source: NSIDC

A zillion errors at WUWT

Anthony made much of the fact that a judge in the UK made some scientific "judgements" about the film An Inconvenient Truth, identifying nine errors (out of all the hundreds of facts discussed).  I don't think the judge was 100% correct either :)

The filthy black WUWT pot calls
the clean shiny Gore kettle "black"

Now go through this single article of Anthony's and count all the errors and include the lies. Then add all the errors and lies in the WUWT comments, then multiply that by the number of articles Anthony has published. That way you can put the "nine errors" in An Inconvenient Truth into perspective.

Hint: the ratio of errors + lies at WUWT to "errors" in An Inconvenient Truth would be about a zillion to one. Approximately. A rough estimate only. I wouldn't be surprised if some diligent person found it was two zillion to one. Or more.

Enough is enough

Have you read enough? Anthony Watts is both immensely stupid and couldn't tell the truth if his life depended on it. That's because his income from donations, subscriptions to his non-functioning secretive "Open Atmosphere Society", and ad revenue depends on him feeding lies to a wilfully ignorant audience. He'd be out on the street if he didn't weave conspiracy theories, libel scientists and politicians, and instead presented facts accurately.

As I said, enough is enough. Anthony's almost last paragraph was:

Simply put: Mr. Gore is a bald faced liar. Why does anybody still listen to him?

Let me fix that for him. Al Gore has worked tirelessly, selflessly and given generously for many, many years to help us shift to a clean, safe future. On the other hand:

Simply put: Anthony Watts is a bald faced liar. Why does anybody still listen to him? 

.

A wistful thought

When I see an appalling litany of lies like this one from Anthony Watts, I wistfully wish that someone would sue the pants off him.

I know, it's wishful thinking.

Perhaps he'll get his comeuppance in the Climate Trials. I can imagine Anthony old and saggy and grey and broken, crammed into a 6 x 10 cell (sticky and hot, no air-conditioning). Sharing his cell would be Marc Morano squealing nineteen to the dozen over the top of Roy Spencer's repetitive mumbling "nazis", and five bleeding heart pinko warmunist liberals (who got there by pure misfortune) chanting "Om" from dawn to midnight. By that stage a "cool" summer's day could be 54 °C (130 °F) in the shade and 99% humidity.

From the WUWT comments

The "thoughts" show that Anthony has firmly anchored himself in nutsville. I expect he's laid down foundations so deep that he won't be leaving the funny farm any time soon.

BTW, I almost always finish the article before I start reading the comments, as I did this time. I say that, because I found a denier whose thinking I concur with - or at least in part (I'll leave you to work out which part.)  Not that I imagine that Al Gore would want to waste his time with a half-baked climate conspiracy blogger. He's devoting his life to more worthwhile pursuits. Cassandra's thought was:

January 25, 2016 at 12:20 pm
I wonder why Gore hasn’t sued anybody, following so many articles such as this? Someone should push him into it, and then the truth will be massively aired, throughout the world. Then just think of all the counter-claims against Gore et al from individuals, companies and whole countries!!! 

I'm constantly amazed by the misinformation conspiracy theorists grab hold of and cling to as if their life depended on it. And for some of them it would, just not in the way they think. This is way off topic. ferdberple wrote:

January 25, 2016 at 2:13 pm (excerpt)
The bad science over saturated fat is the direct cause of the diabetes epidemic in the US today. Driven by politicians it has killed more people than global warming ever will.

Mohatdebos compares centuries of multiple scientific disciplines, built up by probably hundreds of thousands of people, and supported by zillions of gigabytes of observations and evidence, with the beliefs of a tiny and weird cult. Weird!

January 25, 2016 at 12:35 pm
MSM had a great time making fun of Harold Camping’s prediction based on Rapture Theory that the world would end in 2011, yet the high priests of Mann-made global warming are never challenged on their prophecies of impending doom. 

Leon Brozyna  asks a very good question, only about the wrong people:

January 25, 2016 at 12:37 pm (excerpt)
Why do con men succeed? 

Mumbles McGuirck thinks a winter snow storm means that global warming isn't happening:

January 25, 2016 at 1:27 pm
Can everyone in the Great White North (i.e. north of the FL/GA border) go out in a snow bank and take a photo of yourself holding a sign saying “Al Gore : Where the Hell is my Global Warming”. Then post it on FB, Twitter, etc. using #GoresBustedForecast ? Thank you.

RD is very grateful for having someone who'll feed him exactly what he wants to hear. As Tom Peterson remarked to a Stoat the other day (about the wilfully ignorant): As Neil deGrasse Tyson says, "If your Personal Beliefs deny what’s objectively true about the world, then they’re more accurately called Personal Delusions."

January 25, 2016 at 3:05 pm
AW is truly deserving of our gratitude for fighting back against these mendacious twits. I’m sure he could be doing other work for personal profit. 

I wonder if gallopingcamel would vote for Donald Trump?

January 25, 2016 at 8:17 pm
Why are people who lie about climate such as Al Gore and Bill Nye rich while I have to work my butt off to put food on the table?
It may have something to do with the elites who control both political parties so you can bet that I will vote for someone who run the USA for the benefit of “The People” rather than bankers. 

References and further reading

Memo exposes Bush's new green strategy - article by Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian, 2003

2006: Al Gore does Sundance - article on CBS news, January 2006

From the HotWhopper Archives

• The Desperate Denier series - January 2016 (links to all in the series)
• Anthony Watts does an "algoreisfat", making it too easy... - January 2016
• Anthony Watts spends hours denying reality at WUWT - article with references to AR5 IPCC segments on extreme weather - October 2013