Assaulting Reason: The Climate Inquisition and silencing science - with Tim Ball and Chuck Wiese

Be afraid. Be very afraid...Climate science deniers are running scared. Tim Ball has donned his sandwich board and picked up his megaphone. He is broadcasting to the little conspiracy theorists at WUWT that they are all at risk of being hung, drawn and quartered. He warns them of the coming Climate Inquisition, which is apparently like the Spanish Inquisition only worse. The headline for Tim's latest meandering diatribe is: "Use of Fear to Silence Climate Skeptics Is An Assault On Reason" (archived here).

The dim deniers are putting on a brave front, faking bravado in the face of imminent peril. They are proud of their allegiance to the war against knowledge. They refuse to be cowed by the scary thought that they will soon become martyrs for the cause or sent to FEMA camps in chains.

I wondered what it could be that so made the WUWT-ers so fearful (this time around). (Conspiracy theorists are a weird bunch who thrive on paranoia.) Tim Ball mentioned the US Attorney General, so I did a Google search. It turns out that it's not just the dim deniers at WUWT who are shaking in their boots. Science deniers in other dark corners of the Internet are panicking. The rumour has gone around that there are to be RICO prosecutions of climate science deniers.

The facts are different, of course. Deniers have a narcissistic streak. When Senator Whitehouse and A-G Lynch were discussing investigations they were referring to fossil fuel companies, in the wake of the Exxon scandal exposed by journalists at InsideClimateNews. The investigation is to see if there is sufficient evidence of orchestration and funding of climate science disinformation campaigns to prosecute.

There were a couple of other things curious about Tim's article. He was very down on George Bush's response to the 911 attacks and seemed to be arguing he was too draconian. He also stuck up for the Quebec separatist terrorist organisation, that engaged in bombings, kidnapings and murder. Tim thought the response of the then Prime Minister was over the top.

On the other hand a quote-mine digs up some things in Tim's article that many normal people would agree with:

• "Fear is aided and abetted by exaggeration, distortion, and falsehoods" (link). Tim apparently does excel at aiding fear among deniers. In Australia ex-PM Tony Abbott used fear as the basis of his election campaign, in the style of the US Tea Party, relying on exaggeration, distortion and falsehoods.
• "If that doesn’t work, you manufacture the material and hire spin doctors to spread the lies and misinformation more effectively. The truth doesn’t need spin doctors." (link) Think Marc Morano, who I'm told earns even more than the lesser spin doctors - Pat'n Chip. I don't know if Tim has been hired by anyone lately. Maybe some extreme conspiracy groups pay him for his efforts, but I doubt he'd be hired by any "mainstream" anti-science lobby groups.

Then there are some that are a big stretch. For example, Tim starts with President Bush's National Security Directive after the 911 attacks, which Tim paints as a suspension of the US Constitution, and suggests that the White House might use the directive in respect of climate change:

At what point would the White House decide that the threat of climate change and the subversion of “big oil” and their skeptical lackeys justify suspending the Constitution? After the 911 attack

President Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD 51). This, for the sixth time, extended for one year the emergency proclaimed on September 14, 2001. It empowered the President to personally ensure “continuity of government” in the event of any “catastrophic emergency.”

And from there to his conclusion, suggesting that the White House has designed a website purposely so that it can declare a state of emergency and, by implication from Tim's earlier comments, suspend the US Constitution:

The White House web page is pure propaganda deliberately designed to strike fear so they can come to the rescue of people and the planet by declaring a state of emergency. 

If you're wondering why Tim thinks the climate science on the White House website is "pure propaganda", it's because Tim is an climate science denier. He's more than a global warming denier, he's a greenhouse effect denier and wrote the first chapter of the Skydragon Slayer book (rejecting the greenhouse effect).

Silencing science

The main thrust of Tim Ball's article is not clear as usual. He wanders all over the place. Going by the headline he is complaining about being silenced. I dread to think what he'd be like if he wasn't being silenced.

That's in contrast with the next article at WUWT (archived here), in which the author wants to silence science. That article is by a science-denier from way back called Chuck Wiese, Meteorologist, Weatherwise, Inc. The closest to Weatherwise Inc that I found on the Internet was an air-conditioning business in Florida, but I doubt that's him. Chuck is an anti-science activist who campaigns mostly in Oregon. He was writing a WUWT rebuttal to two papers by Jennifer Francis and Stephen Vavrus about links between Arctic amplification and extreme weather in mid-latitudes. The first paper was published in GRL in 2012 and got a lot of attention. The second was published last year in ERL and doesn't seem to have got the same amount of attention, or not in the mainstream media.

You might be aware of the debate about the Francis hypothesis regarding effect of Arctic warming on the jet stream and mid-latitude weather. I won't go into it in detail here except to say there are arguments for and against. The argument against centres around the fact that Elizabeth Barnes and colleagues couldn't find evidence supporting the hypothesis. The argument for counters that Arctic warming has been sudden and there may not have been enough time for the data to show up with statistical confidence (but the data suggests the trend favours the hypothesis). There's an article at Scientific American, and another in Nature, which discuss the scientific arguments for and against.

All I really wanted to point out are two things:

1. Some deniers complain of intimidation preventing them from speaking out (with no evidence to support it, and no sign that the complainants have stopped "speaking out")
2. Chuck Wiese calls for one or both scientific papers to be withdrawn, on the grounds that he doesn't agree with it (or them). 

Chuck wrote:

FV (2012) cited in the introduction of this article is fatally flawed, incorrect and should be withdrawn by the authors. 

I suppose Chuck can be forgiven for not understanding that this is not how science works. After all, from what I can tell he's never had a research paper published in his life. Thing is, if he wants to dispute findings then what he needs to do is avoid publishing his rebuttal on denier blogs and instead submit it to a journal. He could try ERL or GRL.  That's what Jennifer Francis and Stephen Vavrus did. That's what Elizabeth Barnes and her colleagues did. That's what Judah Cohen and his colleagues did.

This Arctic / mid-latitude link is a current example of how scientific differences are explored and eventually, I expect, a clear picture of what is happening and why will emerge.

Rather than learn from real scientists, Chuck wants to silence the people he doesn't agree with, stop any debate and prevent the science from unfolding. Chuck didn't mention the Barnes work or the Cohen work or any other recent work that I could see, so it seems to me he wasn't interested in the scientific debate. He's a denier and the purpose of his article is encapsulated in his headline: "A Warming Arctic Would Not Cause Increased Severe Weather or Temperature Extremes". He attempted this through lots of equations, some diagrams, and what look like extrapolating to illogical conclusions. His article might be cited by deniers a whole lot more if he'd kept it simple, in keeping with WUWT. As it is, He could have just said "Francis is wrong", and that would have been enough for deniers all over to say that the work of Jennifer Francis has been disproved. But he didn't. So I don't think it will be much use, except for the occasional link by Anthony if he is able to figure out the general topic that Chuck is writing about.

If you're curious about Chuck's own hypothesis, I don't know that I'd call it that, but anyway you can read it here. For me, I'll wait until he publishes. (Chuck's arguing that the research scientists have got 1940s meteorology wrong. I wouldn't bet on it.)

From the WUWT comments

Here are some comments under Chuck's equations:

Wayne Delbeke appreciated the coloured pictures:

March 13, 2016 at 5:16 pm
Wow! That’s going to take a bit to digest. Nice graphics and in line with what we see from the satellites. I imagine the comments thread on this one will bring in lots of good discussion. Thank you.

Marcus has a headache:

March 13, 2016 at 5:28 pm
.Well , that’s gonna take at least 4 Tylenol to ease the pain in my wittle bwain !!! These kind of posts should come with warning labels !! LOL 

Paul767

March 13, 2016 at 6:14 pm
I just skipped to the money quote at the end!

Donald L. Klipstein

March 13, 2016 at 7:07 pm
It will take me some time to digest the math here to see if amplitude of a Rossby wave of a period being a specific fraction of around_the_world changes as jet stream winds slow due to arctic amplification (which is for real even according to one’s choice of of any major dataset for either surface or lower troposphere global temperature anomaly, any version existing in 2008 or later).

My expectation: Arctic amplification merely slightly slows Rossby waves and other weather patterns in the northern hemisphere, without change of wave amplitude. I think the wave speed will scale downward with the westerly wind speed to keep everything constant, except speeds slowing proportionately with the square root of the ratio of temperatures (absolute, in Kelvin) at appropriate latitudes and pressure level.

Also to note: The 600 mb level is not near 18,000 feet above sea level, which is the usual figure for typical of the 500 mb level. The 600 mb level is typically around 14,000 feet above sea level. 

Luc Ozade (@Luc_Ozade) seems to think that Chuck's work is not worth anything to anyone:

March 13, 2016 at 7:33 pm
Thank heavens for people such as Chuck Wiese who have the knowledge, the time and the energy to refute claims such as those made by the warmists in their pal-reviewed paper: FV (2012).
One thing we can be certain of is that Mr Wiese did not receive funding such as the authors of the paper would have done to push their warmist agenda. 

WTF is not very subtle:

March 13, 2016 at 8:43 pm
With its presixties references, why doesn’t Chuck just submit this slam dunk essay to the real scientific community ? 

Well I've found out why Chuck didn't mention the work of Barnes or Cohen. It appears that Chuck Wiese is unaware of the scientific debate on the subject, because he replied:

March 13, 2016 at 8:47 pm
WTF: That’s probably a good idea. It seems they have forgotten the founding principles and never refuted any of them before publishing what they do today.

JohnKnight makes a modest suggestion to avoid defining a word with the same word:

March 13, 2016 at 9:25 pm
Thank you, Mr. Wiese . . Very well done it seems to me.
(“Two terms come into the discussion which are important to define. They are the amplitude and length of a wave, called amplitude and wavelength respectively.”

I suggest instead;
*Two terms come into the discussion which are important to define. They are the height and length of a wave, called amplitude and wavelength respectively.*)

I was tempted to leave to your imagination how the conspiracy theorists lapped up Tim Ball's paranoid mush. (They did.) The temptation has been overcome, but I'll just leave you with five "thoughts", including comments that reek of right wing authoritarianism. With some deniers you've got to wonder if the amygdala is the only part of their brain that is active:

A few people like Saul from Montreal took Tim Ball to task for sticking up for terrorists in Quebec:

March 13, 2016 at 10:15 am
It appears that once again Dr Ball in his zeal to help Anthony Watts, has in his haste to publish neglected to perform due diligence and we have another post that is chuck full of irony that make clear eyed skeptics groan. There is no way the FLQ was anything other than a dangerous terrorist organisation that performing bombings, kidnapping and eventually murdered a hostage.

Paul Westhaver also has a dig at Tim Ball abusing facts (like Velikovsky):

March 13, 2016 at 3:01 pm
Do facts ever really matter? Ghosts of Immanuel Velikovsky haunts us still.
“When the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) sought separation of Quebec from Canada, Pierre Trudeau used the kidnapping and death of an ambassador to act. ”

Pierre Laporte, a provincial cabinet minister of Quebec (Labour), was kidnapped and murdered.
Jame Cross, the British diplomat, was kidnapped and released.
Where is Sturgis Hooper?

It's a conspiracy, sez Pat Paulsen

March 13, 2016 at 6:46 am
This has all be orchestrated. Obama & Trudeau. (sheesh) A community activist and part time drama teacher. They are both experts on the climate? I think not. Who is whispering in their ear, telling them what to say, as they pull the puppet strings?

G. Karst is totally freaked out by those dangerous people who want to do such evil as protecting the planet from harm:

March 13, 2016 at 10:24 am
This should be repeated on every thread. People think I am exaggerating when I tell them what greenies really want and say. No power on earth are resisting these dangerous ideas. Scares the bejesus out of me. GK

John Robertson sees nothing but scary stuff:

March 13, 2016 at 11:00 am
When your pampered existence depends on the “Big Lie”.
“Silence I kill you” is never far behind.
Fear is a great tool.
Until those you need to be fearful, decide they have nothing left to lose.
Great short term tool that gets old fast, breeding resentment, anger and vengeance.
The fools and bandits who attempt to install fear into those they seek to rob and control, always seem so surprised when they become the target of the mobs they incite.
Blind worms, gnawing on the foundations of civilization .
Rule of law is under open attack, when the person appointed to uphold national laws is as shallow as this Attorney General.
No wisdom to be found in Obamanation.

References and further reading

Exxon the road not taken - exposé by journalists Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer at Inside Climate News

Climate Change and President Obama's Action Plan - from the White House website

Anthropogenic (Human Caused) Global Warming - Is This The Greatest Scientific Myth of our Generation? - January 25th, 2012, Meeting minutes of the Oregon Chapter of the American Meteorological Society, where Chuck Wiese and other deniers strutted their stuff

US cold snap fuels climate debate - article by Jeff Tollefson at Nature

How to Prove a Link Between a Warmer Arctic and Wacky Weather - article by By Stephanie Paige Ogburn, ClimateWire on September 4, 2013 in Scientific American

Francis, Jennifer A., and Stephen J. Vavrus. "Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid‐latitudes." Geophysical Research Letters 39, no. 6 (2012). DOI: 10.1029/2012GL051000 (pdf here)

Francis, Jennifer A., and Stephen J. Vavrus. "Evidence for a wavier jet stream in response to rapid Arctic warming." Environmental Research Letters 10, no. 1 (2015): 014005. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/10/1/014005 (open access)

Barnes, Elizabeth A. "Revisiting the evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in midlatitudes." Geophysical Research Letters 40, no. 17 (2013): 4734-4739. DOI: 10.1002/grl.50880 (pdf here)

Barnes, Elizabeth A., Etienne Dunn‐Sigouin, Giacomo Masato, and Tim Woollings. "Exploring recent trends in Northern Hemisphere blocking." Geophysical Research Letters 41, no. 2 (2014): 638-644. DOI: 10.1002/2013GL058745 (pdf here)

Cohen, Judah, James A. Screen, Jason C. Furtado, Mathew Barlow, David Whittleston, Dim Coumou, Jennifer Francis et al. "Recent Arctic amplification and extreme mid-latitude weather." Nature Geoscience 7, no. 9 (2014): 627-637. doi:10.1038/ngeo2234 (pdf here)

Cohen, Judah, Justin Jones, Jason C. Furtado, and Eli Tziperman. "Warm Arctic, Cold Continents A Common Pattern Related to Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Snow Advance, and Extreme Winter Weather." Oceanography 26, no. 4 (2013): 152-160. (pdf here)