Anthony Watts publishes another recklessly defamatory article about NOAA scientists, by Tim Ball

Anthony Watts has published another defamatory article on his blog (archived here). I use the term without it being proven in the courts, but if one of the retired scientists mentioned wanted to take him and Tim Ball to court, he'd surely be able to make a case to be heard. Tim Ball started his false claims in the very first sentence.

Some key points about the NOAA temperature reconstruction paper, Karl15

Before going into the despicable actions of Tim Ball and his publisher Anthony Watts, let me remind you about the NOAA work that they don't understand, but dislike so much they'll risk being sued (yet again, in the case of Tim Ball).

The work was built from two main pieces of research. One was an updating of a sea surface temperature record, which was in turn built from zillions of records from different sources, carefully analysed in great detail. The scientists re-aligned the data from different sources so that it provided a more accurate account of how the temperature of the sea surface has changed over time. As an example of this, the authors of Karl15 wrote:

Dangerous Times: We don't want climate science but we want to know about weather @wattsupwiththat

After all the articles at WUWT where they clearly wanted to stop climate research at NOAA, I was struck by the contradiction in the juxtaposition of the two most recent articles (here and here). In one, Anthony Watts' rabble were calling for NASA to stop all climate research. The more recent article was about the massive storms that have been and will be affecting California.

David Rose uncovers January 2017 HadCRUT temperature, beating the UK Met Office

David Rose took a short vacation after writing his second article full of false allegations about the NOAA paper published a couple of years ago. Now he's published a third monstrosity. He's digging himself into a deeper hole, aiming to totally sever any slim connection he might have had with science.

His first article was rubbish, his second article was an extrapolation of the first with nothing much to add. Today he's posted yet another "no new news" article, despite this tweet he sent to Bob Ward:

@ret_ward I already used this info last week. Let me explain. A news story, in general, is meant to contain something new.

— David Rose (@DavidRoseUK) February 10, 2017

David Rose's latest, like his previous, was full of fakery: fake news, fake horror, fake allegations, fake umbrage. He even seems to have faked the January 2017 temperature from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, writing:

Since record highs caused last year by an ‘el Nino’ sea-warming event in the Pacific, HadCRUT 4 has fallen by more than half a degree Celsius, and its value for the world average temperature in January 2017 was about the same as January 1998.

"Fake science" promoter, Anthony Watts, doesn't like a "how to respond" article. Who'd have guessed...

Anthony Watts, who is known (by those who've heard of him) for promoting lies and disinformation, explained why he didn't like a press release (archived here). The article was about a talk at the AAAS annual meeting held in Boston last week.  The talk was by Dominique Brossard from University of Wisconsin, Madison. She was one of three speakers on a panel discussing: "Fake News and Social Media: Impacts on Science Communication and Education". The other speakers were Julie Coiro, University of Rhode Island and Dan Kahan, Yale Law School. The panel was moderated by Seth Borenstein of Associated Press, who is also listed as organiser.

Needless to say I got this information myself. As usual, Anthony Watts, fake news expert, didn't provide any links to his copy and pasted article, or any context information. In fact he didn't have anything much to say about the content of the press release. He probably didn't read it properly. Instead he wrote what he wanted his readers to think:

Going cool on cool futures or one last, desperate effort?

Earlier today Andy Skuce asked how things were going with the Cool Futures Fund, set up by a bunch of skallywags associated with the dubious and little known Lord Monckton Foundation. Things are not going very well, from the look of things. In 15 months the backers have managed to raise  $57,605 of the $375,000 it wants to pay for the costs of setting up the fund. None of that money is going into the fund itself, it's just to pay the setup or launch costs, or so they say. (They say different things in different places.)

James Delingpole claimed to have contributed, but I couldn't find his donation on the GoFundMe list of 285 donors. (Yes, I looked through the whole list. Maybe he was so humble, for a change, that he donated anonymously.)

If you don't know what the Lord Monckton Foundation is, it's based in Melbourne Australia. A chap by the name of Chris Dawson is the CEO. An article on the Lord Monckton Foundation website said the fund was set up by "friends" of the foundation, including some board members. Not that the foundation seems willing to admit who is on its board.

The Cool Futures Fund isn't based in Melbourne. It says it's being set up in the Cayman Islands, which is where Australia's Prime Minister and other people like to put their extra cash. The project has a number of people associated with it:

Third hottest January on record - global surface temperature report from NASA GISTemp

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for January was 0.92 °C, which is 0.21 °C lower than the hottest January in 2016 and the third hottest January in the record (after 2016 and 2007).

Here is a chart of the average of 12 months to January each year. The 12 months to January 2017 averaged 0.96 °C above the 1951-1980 mean and was 0.07 °C hotter than the 12 months to January 2016, which with the latest data had an anomaly of 0.89 °C:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly for the 12 months to January each year. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

Why Silicon Valley accepts science, with an utter nutter - Leo Goldstein at WUWT

Anthony Watts has embraced a very dotty conspiracy theorist called Leonid Goldstein, now known as Leo Goldstein at WUWT. Leo used to write under the name of Ari Halperin. He's been featured here before a few times. One of these days I'll write more about him. He's seriously delusional, more so than most of Anthony's freeby writers, which explains why he features on Anthony's blog, wattsupwiththat. (Anthony has been shifting further to the nutty end of nuttery lately.)

So you don't think I'm going overboard, here is the first sentence on the home page of Leonid's blog. You can see why Anthony Watts values his input at WUWT:

Climate alarmism is a gigantic fraud: it only survives by suppressing dissent and by spending tens of billions of dollars of public money every year on pseudo-scientific propaganda. 

Mentally underdeveloped and emotionally unstable

Leo's the chap who is suing umpteen zillion organisations under RICO, for the crime of promoting mainstream science and urging action to protect humanity from dangerous global warming. Here's a link to the Civil Docket containing the wacky conspiracies floating around in Leo's brain. As an example of his delusion, he alleges of the defendants that "Notably, many of the Defendants' websites are intended for audiences with a large percentage of mentally underdeveloped and emotionally unstable persons." and he thinks that urging companies to stop donating to disinformers is a crime (note the emotive language): "Defendants ran a perfectly orchestrated public campaign, that falsely accused ALEC of"climate change denial", threatened its corporate members and donors, and caused many of them to leave or to stop donating to the organization". One day I'll write more about this. The case hasn't got very far yet.

Leo Goldstein goes to Silicon Valley to learn about climate science (not really)

Today I'm writing about one of Leo's saner contributions, if you can believe that. (I didn't say it was sane. It's relative.) Leo has decided to list 14 reasons for people in Silicon Valley accepting climate science (archived here). Do they? I expect most of them do since most educated, rational people accept it. Leo broadened his definition of Silicon Valley to Silicon Valley Insiders. No, I don't think that's a narrowing of the definition - wait for it. This is what he wrote;

Silicon Valley insiders are smart and successful people. By “Silicon Valley insiders,” I mean the founders, owners, venture capitalists, executives, and software professionals of the so-called tech companies located not only in the Silicon Valley, but elsewhere in the U.S.

I think he means everyone but the cleaning staff and front desk personnel, who work at tech companies anywhere in the USA.

David Rose doubles down on #climate disinformation about NOAA. Let's get some perspective

I've had a post in train for a week now, after last week's ridiculously wrong article from David Rose in the Mail on Sunday. He based it on another ridiculous article, that one from John Bates on Judith Curry's climate disinformation blog. David Rose has followed it up with another ridiculously wrong article, which says nothing new and in which he's just trying to justify all the mistakes and lies in his first article.

John Bates is a meteorologist turned computer data person whose nose was out of joint because he didn't always get his way when he used to work at NOAA. It was a sour grapes whine from someone who wanted attention. That's all. However his attention-seeking moan had major repercussions through the deniosphere.

Dirty coal, heat waves and floods - and the last straw for Clive Hamilton

Earlier this week, in an embarrassing childish display, some of Australia's elected representatives pushed to increase carbon emissions more quickly than we already are. This wasn't juvenile backbenchers behaving in an unseemly fashion. This was our Federal Treasurer, Scott Morrison, and the Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, Barnaby Joyce.

Coal plant-ed question

In the video below, Scott Morrison responds to the Dorothy Dixer (planted question) from his backbench colleague, Andrew Hastie, the Member for Canning in Western Australia. Morrison was keen to play the fool in Parliament. He embarrassed Australia in the eyes of the world by portraying everyone who accepts science as idiots or worse.

The world gets crazier - Judith Curry goes Lizard Men

Did you know that Judith Curry recently appeared on an internet alternative television show, with a chap called Richie Allen. Now I've not heard of Richie Allen before, but I have heard of his colleague, David Icke. Richie works for or with David Icke.

I'm serious. I'm not kidding. It's all over WUWT - right here. Judith did a Tim Ball and Christopher Monckton. Nah - I think she surpassed even those two this time. It's called Rock Bottom.

Not the hottest January in the troposphere, but way hotter than normal in the Arctic

The troposphere temperatures for January 2017 were released earlier this month. The lower troposphere is recorded in UAH v6 and RSS TLT v3.3. This report also covers RSS TTT for the troposphere (without the "lower") and follows pretty much the same format as previous monthly updates.

For RSS TTT (troposphere), the 12 months to January 2017 remain the hottest 12 months in the record (comparing similar Feb-Jan periods). January itself was the just the fifth hottest January, with January 2016 the hottest.

The lower troposphere (UAH v6) also showed the 12 months to January as the hottest on record. However, January was only the seventh hottest January on record, with January 2016 the hottest.

In his efforts to promote fake #climate news, Anthony Watts censors Nick Stokes

While you're waiting for more in-depth articles, here's something you don't see every day at WUWT. Anthony Watts has put Nick Stokes on moderation (again).

Another big week in climate and politics, and an apology

There has been so much happening this week, particularly in the USA, but elsewhere as well. The reason for the apology is because, although I have some articles in the pipeline partly written, I won't have time to finish them for another day or two.

So - if you're able to continue helping out in that regard, like you've been doing in the comments on earlier articles, that would be terrific. Whether it's keeping the blog updated with any or all of these:

• The latest developments from Lamar Smith and his Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and its attempts to intimidate scientists and shut down climate research.
• Any insight into why a scientist called John J. Bates would resign from NOAA only to join the climate conspiracy nutters at Judith Curry's place, and then tell big fat lies to a tabloid science-denying writer, David Rose, from a smutty UK rag, the Mail on Sunday. Why he would suddenly turn on his colleagues who supported him when he needed it, and make up stuff to try to discredit them and their work. Why he would ruin any chance of developing trusting relationships with other professionals and businesses he wants to work with in his new career.
• Whether the bill to shut down the US EPA will get anywhere, what costs that will add to US states, and what damage it will do to the air, water, soil and other natural resources Americans rely on. (See Greg Laden's article and the comments.)
• Whether the Australian government will be able to get anyone to buy the coal they want to burn, in their effort to bring on global warming.
• How much cooler this year will be than last year, given the incredible temperatures in the Arctic and elsewhere.
• Whether Donald Trump will succeed in his attempt to shut down the judicial arm of the US government and install Steve Bannon as the USA's tyrannical dictator.
• Whether Donald Trump's war ambitions will involve China, Australia, the UK, the Middle East, Germany, Europe, or the world as a whole.
• Or whatever.

I will be writing more about some of the above, and more, over the next few days, but won't be able to get back to writing for at least another 24 hours. 

So again - if you can help out, please do so in the comments. If you've got a lot to say and would like to post an article here - let me know.

No honesty or diligence about #climate change or coral reef science from Bob Fernley-Jones at WUWT

As you know very well by now, science disinformers abound at Anthony Watts' blog wattsupwiththat.com. It's one of the reasons his blog exists.  It's not so that Anthony can write stuff. He doesn't do that much any more. It's so that disinformers and science deniers can comfort science deniers that their false opinions are promoted by other people. (Other reasons include making money, panhandling for jaunts, and trying to convince his readers that he's cleverer than the really clever people.)

Dead coral, Lizard Is. GBR. Credit: Greg Torda

Another case in point today, when a dud ex-engineer (so he says) called Bob Fernley-Jones (Mechanical engineer retired, Melbourne Australia) made up a whole bunch of stuff about coral reefs (archived here). I'd say it was so that he could try to portray himself as being cleverer than climate scientists and coral reef experts. Instead he's a Dunning Kruger case, and a whiner.

As well as that, Bob's article shows:

• disinformers will make up stuff that they think their readers want to read
• disinformers don't think much of the intellectual capability of their readers, with good cause
• disinformers are fairly confident that their readers won't bother to do any fact-checking, again with good cause.
• Bob is sloppy and careless, with missing links and missing diagrams. Actually, it's Anthony Watts who was sloppy in this case (he also got Bob's name wrong). Bob complained in the comments about some of the missing links and diagrams.
• Bob is a messy thinker, with a summary at the end that is meaningless, incomprehensible nonsense.

Eric Worrall is deeply offended by the New York Times *and* wants to trash the world

Climate disinformer Eric Worrall took a short quiz at the New York Times (on WUWT archived here). The quiz was a few simple questions about what decisions Donald Trump should take in regard to oil, gas and protecting the planet Earth and the people who live on it.

Eric chose to tell Donald Trump to trash the planet, and then pretended to be deeply offended when he was told by the New York Times in response to his choices:

You did a very bad job protecting the environment and may have made many of the worst effects of climate change more likely. It could hardly have been worse.

On the upside for President Trump, Republicans in Congress and many of the people who voted for him will support most of your decisions. We guess it’s true what they say about dark clouds (something about silver linings?).

What does he expect? That anyone but his fellow planet wreckers would thank him for more floods, more drought, more heat waves, poorer crops, more wildfires, more skin cancer and faster global warming?