Neanderthal Anthony Watts joins the sky dragon slayers

Anthony Watts has joined the sky dragon slayers he used to ban from his blog at WUWT. Well, he used to ban some of them. He's joined forces with Rick "Neanderthal" Perry, the US Secretary of Energy, who rejects climate science outright.

The sky dragon slayers are among the dumbest of the dim deniers, who don't believe the science of climate change. Most of them have spent their retirement years trying in vain to disprove the greenhouse effect. Sky dragon slayers reject the notion that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and is causing global warming. They think our planet stays warm by magic, or from the warm breath of their god, or from pixie dust, or something.

In the past, Anthony Watts has disputed their nonsense, and still claims that his blog is a "slayer free zone". On the other hand, he is a HUGE fan of the lead author, Tim Ball, who is known not just for his rejection of science but for embracing dark conspiracy theories (and Hitler, and Osama bin Laden). Anthony frequently posts articles by Tim Ball.

Rick Perry admits to being a "Neanderthal"

Today Anthony Watts is sticking up for the US Energy Secretary, Rick Perry. Rick Perry was the chap who called a three day rain dance of prayer to try to end a drought in Texas a few years ago. (His god didn't listen to him.) More recently he said that he rejects climate science. This is from an interview on CNBC a few days ago:

CNBC Interviewer: Do you believe that CO2 is the primary control knob for the temperature of the earth and for climate?

Rick Perry: No, most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in.

First of all there's his rejection of 200 years of science. It's well known that CO2 is the control knob of climate. (For an explanation, watch this video from Richard Alley at the Bjerknes Lecture at the 2009 AGU Fall Meeting.) Then there's Rick Perry's "ocean waters and this environment we live in". What he heck is he waffling on about? Does he even know?

This chart shows how much CO2 has increased since the late 1950s:

Figure 1 | Monthly CO2 at Mauna Loa. Data source: NOAA

In that CNBC interview, Rick Perry whined that he was regarded as a Neanderthal, saying:

This idea that science is just absolutely settled and if you don't believe it's settled then somehow you're another neanderthal, that is so inappropriate from my perspective.

The only reason it's inappropriate is that comparing Rick Perry (and Anthony Watts) to Neanderthals is an insult to Neanderthals. I don't think Neanderthals would have wanted to knowingly destroy their world.

Remember, Rick Perry is the man that Donald Trump and the United States Congress has put in charge of the Department of Energy for the entire USA. This man is meant to develop and implement energy policies and he doesn't even "believe in" the greenhouse effect. It's because we are adding huge quantities of greenhouse gases to the air that we are suffering from global warming. Burning fossil fuels is the main contributor, and this means that energy policy is the main way we can combat this dangerous situation.

The greenhouse effect has been understood for a very, very long time. It was first postulated by Joseph Fourier back in the early 1800s. Then the radiative properties of CO2 were experimentally confirmed by John Tyndall, who, in 1861, wrote about his experiment.

Way back in 1884, even the people living in the small country town of Mount Gambier in far away South Australia, read about how:

...the presence of a few hundredths of carbonic acid gas in the atmosphere, while offering almost no obstacle to the passage of the solar rays, would suffice to prevent almost entirely the loss by radiation of obscure heat, so that the surface of the land beneath such an atmosphere would become like a vast orchid house, in which the conditions of climate necessary to a luxuriant vegetation would be extended even to the polar regions.

If Rick Perry had lived 150 years ago, he could perhaps have been forgiven for not knowing about the greenhouse effect, even if he was then a Secretary of Energy in the United States of America, with ready access to one of the best libraries in the world.

Denying the role of CO2 today, when he is running an agency responsible for energy, from the country that houses some of the world's top scientists (and city that houses the Library of Congress), is unforgiveable.

Anthony Watts disputes the greenhouse effect

Not to Anthony Watts.  Anthony is quite cross with the American Meteorological Society. The AMS drafted a letter to Rick Perry, chastising him for rejecting science. As they all but said, Rick Perry cannot hope to fulfil his responsibilities to the American people if he continues to refuse to accept climate science.

Anthony is not just making excuses for Rick Perry's appalling statement, he's claiming that it is perfectly acceptable to dismiss the greenhouse effect. Anthony wrote:

Yesterday, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) published a letter yesterday to U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, admonishing him for having the temerity to doubt that carbon dioxide is the “primary driver” of global warming.

Anthony is irate that a society of meteorologists, many of whom are climate scientists, would have the "temerity" to correct the misinformation put out by the top official in charge of energy policy in the USA.

If they don't, who will? Well, a lot of knowledgeable people have done the same. There's a cross post of an E&E article in Science, and about 24,800 other results from Google search on the subject.

The fact that Anthony Watts agrees that it's fine for someone in charge of energy policy to dispute important science that affects that policy, is a sign that deniers are going backwards.

Unusually, Anthony added quite few words of his own to his blog article. (Maybe he's got extra energy from the thousands he raised from his readers who couldn't wait for him to take a holiday.)

Virtueless Anthony disputed the AMS when they wrote:

 Skepticism that fails to account for evidence is no virtue.

Actually, Anthony didn't mention that part. What he was arguing was that it's fine for deniers and disinformers to dismiss all the evidence and "question" basic science, without providing any alternative, let alone any evidence to support their nonsense claims.

The fundamental problem of science disinformers

That is what disinformers like Anthony Watts do. They put up silly questions, but don't provide any answers. Here is more of Anthony's misinformation:

The fundamental problem of our knowledge boils down to the sample size. We only have about 100 or so years of temperature records that are worth anything and even the most recent records on all that good [sic] because they’re terribly polluted by the infrastructure of human existence itself. And further our understanding of atmospheric and oceanic cycles is even more limited in time than the case of global temperature data.

He's wrong of course. The fundamental problem of science disinformers like Anthony Watts is that they have nothing but logical fallacies, lies and straw man arguments. (What is the meaning of "the infrastructure of human existence itself" - or the pollution of it?)

There is a lot of information about climate of the past, going back millions of years. You'd think Anthony had never heard the word "paleoclimate". Anthony wants his readers to ignore everything known about climate before the industrial revolution.

The modern science of climate goes back to the early 1800s

He falsely claims that it was James Hansen who "first declared it a problem" in 1988. It wasn't. The potential for the problem was seen way back in the 1800s. Then there were people like Svante Arrhenius (1896), Guy Stuart Callendar (1938), Gilbert Plass (1956), Roger Revelle's report to President Johnson in 1965, Kellog and Schneider (1974), Manabe and Wetherald (1974), Wallace S. Broecker (1975), and many more. It's not just Americans, either. There was valuable work being done in Australia (I first heard of the problem of the greenhouse effect from a CSIRO scientist in the 1970s). And some of the most important work was being done in the UK, at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

In other words, contrary to what Anthony Watts and other science disinformers would have you believe, the science of climate goes back a very long way. It starts in the early 1800s with Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, and John Tyndall, whose experiment in the 1850s showed the greenhouse properties of CO2. It's older than many branches of science we rely on today, such as genetics and evolution. It pre-dates the work of Louis Pasteur.

Arguably the best source of information on the history of the discovery of global warming, is that written by Spencer Weart, on the website of the American Institute of Physics.

Trotting out worn out denier memes

Anthony Watts has moved deep into science denialism with his protests that the greenhouse effect might not exist. He even calls on the worn out denier memes. He referred to continental drift, which was not explained until the theory of plate tectonics was developed, by the way, and that wasn't until the middle of last century . He ludicrously compares climate science to stomach ulcers. That's the equivalent of comparing modern physics to the discovery that HIV virus causes AIDS (though arguably the discovery of H. pylori is not quite as important a discovery as the HIV virus).

It took less than forty years from the time of Wegener's notion to the accepted explanation of the movement of tectonic plates. No-one had bothered to explore the causes of stomach ulcers, of which H pylori is one, until Barry Marshall and Robin Warren decided to investigate it back in the 1980s. Contrary to what Anthony claimed, there was no cohesive scientific theory of a cause. It wasn't scientists who put stomach ulcers down to "stress". (That's just something that doctors say is the cause of any idiopathic condition.) Their work was a breakthrough because it showed that bacteria live in the hostile environment of the stomach.

What's in it for Anthony Watts?

Why doesn't Anthony come up with an alternative to known science? Well, he doesn't have one. The purpose of his article is a mystery. Here are some plausible explanations:

1. He wants to publicly declare his political commitment to anti-science ideology of the Republican party.
2. He wants to let his readers know that "Sky Dragon Slayers" are now welcome at WUWT.
3. He realises that if he's going to continue to get gobs of money sent his way, he has to welcome hard core deniers (and utter nutters) to his fray.
4. He wants to spread FUD about climate science, indulging in straw man arguments, a favourite technique of science disinformers.
5. He wants his readers not to trust the scientific knowledge on which the modern world depends.
6. He wants the world to continue to hurtle into global warming, and he wants more and far worse weather disasters than we've seen so far.
7. He no longer cares that he is regarded as a fool, a scientific illiterate, or a deliberate disinformer.

There are other explanations that you might come up with. Feel free to speculate.

From the WUWT comments

There are a lot of comments from greenhouse effect deniers, which I doubt would have been tolerated a few years ago at WUWT. Anthony Watts has found it necessary shift further into dismissive land if he's to keep up his blog hits and get enough suckers to pay off his mortgage for him. Looking through the comments, it appears there is almost no-one left at WUWT who isn't a 'bat-shit crazy' science denier.

This comment from 4kx3 is perplexing, but shows that Anthony is attracting the type of audience he dreams about:

June 22, 2017 at 12:21 pm
You gotta love it. The organization that once thought weather was caused by meteors now believes that climate is caused by CO2.

This one from Titan28 also shows that Anthony is attracting more greenhouse effect deniers:

June 22, 2017 at 12:11 pm
What is it Richard Lindzen says? That to believe CO2 is the climate control knob for planet earth is to come dangerously close to believing in magic? 

Hoyt Clagwell is probably wondering why after 200 years, nobody has been able to disprove the physics of climate or come up with a credible alternative reason for our planet being warm enough to support life.

June 22, 2017 at 12:07 pm
There seems to be an endless chain of people who believe that CO2 is the main driver of global warming solely because they heard it from someone with authority and assume that they applied due dilligence in coming to that conclusion. In my work there have been times where we have been repeatedly told by managers and execs that something can’t be done, then after following the chain to find out why, we eventually come to the lowly person who would do the actual work and are told yes, it can be done. It’s just that nobody ever asked because they all just assumed it can’t. 

Mike the Morlock seems to think that Rick Perry is the Secretary of Homeland Security, where FEMA is housed (that would be John F. Kelly), and thinks he's busy taking care of weather disasters exacerbated by global warming, rather than attending to the cause.

June 22, 2017 at 12:59 pm
“American Meteorological Society” Seems they have nothing better to do then lecture the head of the department of energy. Hmm, could any of you people who are member give them a ring and point out that it is very likely that Mr Perry is a bit busy. We just had a tropical storm plow into the gulf states, there is a old fashion heat wave in the southwest. Which is after a winter and spring that dumped record breaking snow in the Rockies and California. Ah, is all this heat, you know melting the snow, I have not heard a peep. That is a lot of water up there. I would expect flooding but then that is just me. Oh and Jellystone is acting up again.
Maybe they could see their way to concentrating on some important stuff.
michael

TA was responding to a comment from Dipchip (lol) when he wrote this bit of fantasy, which no-one at WUWT had the wit or guts to correct.

June 22, 2017 at 6:22 pm
Because the 1930’s was a lot hotter than today. The 1930’s was an extreme weather decade and its deleterious effects were felt around the world. Today is nothing like the 1930’s. Today is a walk in the park.

I've compiled maps from NASA showing what the temperature of the world looked like in 1934 (the hottest year for the USA in the 1930s), 1937 (the globally hottest year of the 1930s) and 2016 (h/t Brad Johnson). This first one compares 1934 with 2016. Slide the arrow on the left toward the right to reveal 2016 average temperatures:

Figure 2 | Global surface temperature anomaly 1934 and 2016. Anomaly is from the 1951-1980 mean. Slide the arrow back and forth to compare years. Data source: GISS NASA

The next one compares 2016 with 1937, the hottest year globally during the 1930s.

Figure 3 | Global surface temperature anomaly 1937 and 2016. Anomaly is from the 1951-1980 mean. Slide the arrow back and forth to compare years. Data source: GISS NASA

In the midst of the comments, Ryddegutt wistfully asks when Anthony is going to fulfil his commitment made five years ago, way back in July 2012. (No answer, came the stern reply.)

June 22, 2017 at 1:26 pm
Anthony, is there any updates on when your latest study will be published?

CD in Wisconsin supports plausible explanation No. 3 above, unwittingly providing a reason for Anthony Watts pushing disinformation.

June 22, 2017 at 2:06 pm
Does anyone know if the AMS gets any federal funding like the National Academy of Science does? A quick Google search did not yield any evidence to me that it does, but I could be wrong. If so, how much?
I think it would be interesting for Secretary Perry to mention any such funding to the AMS in a letter to them if AMS does not demonstrate any interest in acknowledging the scientific issues and problems with the CAGW issue. People sometimes can change their tune when their health of their pocketbook is at stake.

Chad Jessup accepts the science of the greenhouse effect, but doesn't understand it. Water vapour doesn't increase in the air unless the world gets hotter. The world is getting hotter because atmospheric CO2 is increasing.

June 22, 2017 at 3:10 pm
Well, they did get this part correct, “…carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the primary cause [of global warming].” They just conveniently did not mention that water vapor was the main driver.

Barry Brill wants the AMS to attach to the letter, all the IPCC reports and all the other mountains of evidence collected over the past 200 years. He doesn't know how to look it up himself.

June 22, 2017 at 3:57 pm
“Multiple lines of evidence” (unidentified) is the last refuge of a spinner who cannot cite even a single line of evidence, a scientific paper, an equation or other mathematical proof, or even a specified individual authority. It sounds like pure waffle.

Scott Scarborough wants the AMS to put up a pole (sic). Unusually, for a science denier, he believes in the value of determining scientific consensus by opinion polling.

June 22, 2017 at 5:04 pm
The AMS should pole their members on the question. If they don’t they have no business writing such categorical letters. Heads of such organizations are usually more adept at politics than they are adept at the central subject of their organization.

noaaprogrammer has a great idea. He can use the "thoughts" I've listed above, if he wants to. They just might provide a wake-up call to Rick Perry.

June 22, 2017 at 9:37 pm
Someone should compose a synopsis of some of the strongest, well-said points on this blog and actually send it to the AMS with a cc to Rick Perry. 

References and further reading

Position letter to Rick Perry from the American Meteorological Society - 21 June 2017

Rick Perry loses his cool when confronted by Sen. Franken on climate science - article by Joe Romm at Think Progress, 23 June 2017