Roy Spencer feels he is being attacked. It's all because he wrote an ebook in two weeks and put it up for sale on Amazon. Anthony Watts promoted his conspiracy theory at WUWT (archived here). His headline and opening sentence were:After publishing new book critical of Al Gore, climate scientist has website shut down by attacks
This is the equivalent of a modem day book burning.Is poor little Roy Spencer being singled out by Al Gore for attack or has Roy found a novel way to get people to buy his little ebook?
I'm sceptical. However, let's look at his claim that was echoed and amplified by climate conspiracy theorist Anthony Watts. I've mixed up the facts with Roy and Anthony's hypothesis, which demonstrates (again) the foolishness of deniers. It also demonstrates their delusions of grandeur and their paranoia.
- Roy wrote a silly book that nobody except deniers took any notice of. His book was picking nits with Al Gore's book accompanying his new film "An Inconvenient Sequel"
- Roy's website went down for a couple of hours.
- Al Gore is a director of Apple, Inc.
- Roy Spencer's website is hosted on Dreamhost.com - nothing to do with Apple as far as I know.
- Dreamhost.com was down for a couple of hours. It suffered a distributed denial of service attack, as reported on ZDNet. (This was not reported by Anthony Watts or Roy Spencer.)
- Al Gore must have arranged the recent shutdown of Dreamhost.com and all its customers, all to get back at one single website, that of Roy Spencer. (This is the WUWT conspiracy theory.)
Yep, it takes a special kind of person to build a conspiracy out of those unconnected facts. The kind of special person who might be referred to a specialist :)
There's more. Anthony Watts implies that Al Gore stopped Wordpress advertisements back in 2009. He reckons it happened because Anthony wrote about some stolen emails. He claimed, wrongly, that Al Gore was a director of Google. He wasn't. In 2001 he was appointed a Senior Advisor to Google, before it incorporated. I don't think he still is and I don't know if he was still in the role in 2009. Regardless, I doubt he had such a huge amount of influence over Adwords (if any) that he'd get someone to stop a revenue stream. What's interesting is the idea that Anthony Watts is paying for Adwords. Who knew. (I doubt this. I think it's more likely that Anthony doesn't understand Google and/or Wordpress advertising. He's not too clued up when it comes to the internet.)
I'm still not in a position to write in-depth articles and I've not bothered to read Roy's book to pull it apart. Just thought you might like to know that nothing has changed in deniersville. They continue to conspiracy theorise like crazy, are stuck in the "algore is fat" mode, and bend over backwards to play the persecuted victim/hero.
From the WUWT comments
You know that deniers are nuts, right. Here's a sample of comments showing that most of them are only too eager to buy into the ridiculous conspiracy theories of Roy Spencer and Anthony Watts, even after they've been debunked in the WUWT comments.
andrewpattullo buys the stupid conspiracy theory holus bolus. What a nong.
August 24, 2017 at 9:42 amGeologyJim is fearful of Jeff Bezos plotting to take away his freedom. Now why didn't Roy Spencer and Anthony Watts think of this. (Sasha must be horrified that WUWT is supporting Amazon. He wrote a comment at WUWT how he was appalled that it doesn't sell a book by Jim Fetzer, with the disgusting title "No One Died at Sandy Hook".)
1984 all over again! Algoricle could be Big Brother, if only he had didn’t emanate weakness and cowardice.
August 24, 2017 at 6:57 pm
Please do NOT buy this book through Amazon!
Jeff Bezos is lock-step with the international-globalist cabal and is a big-time promoter of government control of energy, speech, and commerce.
Find a way to compensate Dr.Spencer directly, even if the sale does not show up on Google/NYTimes/blahblahblah metrics.
The current War for Independence in the USA these days is about corporate/government exploitation of personal information, including your private selections of reading material
Squash the Amazon Bug!!
Not everyone buys into Anthony's conspiracy theory about Al Gore blocking his Adwords. Donald L. Klipstein went so far as to check:
August 24, 2017 at 2:16 pmLots of people bought into Roy's delusions of grandeur. John wrote:
I just tried some fact checking on Gore being on Google’s board of directors, and came up with:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/google/advisors
I saw 19 directors and advisors, none of them Gore.
August 24, 2017 at 9:43 am
Well, that explains why I can’t get to his site.
Anyone that tries to pull back the curtain has to be silenced it seems.
george e. smith regards it as terrorism.
August 24, 2017 at 11:03 am
It’s time to declare ANY sort of information access denial on public or private media to be Terrorism.
G
TheLastDemocrat knows that Roy Spencer is the victim of an evil plot by Al Gore:
August 24, 2017 at 9:56 pm
they don’t have many tools at their disposal, when it comes down to it.
slander, bullying, suppression, and changing the topic are about the extent of it.
Max Hugoson assumes that Roy's blog is run by the University.
August 24, 2017 at 9:43 amBob boder thinks that devious Roy Spencer is honest. Goodness knows how he came up with that strange idea.
Hopefully, Dr. Spencer has GOOD web and IT people at Huntsville, not second rate by any means. This now becomes an “intelligence battle” on the battle ground of technology. ERGO the “religious fanatics” (AKA, Gorebull Warming crowd) go into the battle, UNARMED.
August 24, 2017 at 9:50 amIt took more than one and a half hours before anyone investigated why Roy's site was down. Finally, Bart Tali came to Al Gore's rescue and wrote:
Total disgrace, Dr Roy Spencer is one of the most even handed, mindful scientist out there. He lets the evidence shape his theories not ideology. If the evidence strongly supported CAGW he would most assuredly back that view, it doesn’t so he doesn’t end of story.
August 24, 2017 at 11:12 amAnonymoose added:
I’m not getting that. And the NS record for drrroyspencer.com points to dreamhost.com, which is currently down.
https://www.dreamhoststatus.com/
August 24, 2017 9:20AM PDT[Investigating] Our Operations teams are currently investigating connectivity issues which indicate an issue related to our name servers. We will provide updated information as it becomes available.
August 24, 2017 10:20AM PDT[Identified] Our engineers have identified the cause of the DNS degradation as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. We are beginning to mitigate the attack and will update this post as new information becomes available.
August 24, 2017 at 9:15 pm
Actually, many people suspect that the Dreamhost DDoS attack was due to Dreamhost having had a “white power” web site on it. Many other sites got brought down by the attack.
None of the evidence mattered to some of the conspiracy theorists at WUWT. tce wanted to make a fool of Roy Spencer on Tucker Carlson's show:
August 24, 2017 at 11:54 am
Can anyone get this story to FOX News? Tucker Carlson would like to see it.
Joel Snider couldn't manage anything more original than calling progressives "fascist", which shows how far to the right of centre he must be. His comment also implies that he thinks all conservatives are scientific illiterates.
August 24, 2017 at 12:08 pm
Progressives are more openly fascist every day.
Carl Friis-Hansen isn't ashamed to boast he is a Putin fan.
August 24, 2017 at 12:37 pm
I have just sent an email to RT (Russia Today) and referred to this article.
Crosstalk at RT has been skeptical in the past, but we will see.
Bill Taylor went way off topic to downplay Hurricane Harvey. Seems like a dangerous conspiracy theory to me. (My thoughts are with everyone in Texas and nearby areas.)
August 24, 2017 at 12:55 pmmickeldoo's immediate thought was pithy:
i want to go on record here saying no matter what harvey does and is at landfall the media IS going to call this a major hurricane………similar to the one that hit the east coast where NO hurricane force winds were found on land but it was still hyped as a category 2 at landfall.
August 24, 2017 at 8:55 pm
Assholes!!
And Dr Spencer had already survived Earth Day...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/04/shots-fired-into-the-christyspencer-building-at-uah/
Yep, Roy will take any opportunity to bignote himself and imply his scientific colleagues are very bad people, including a random shooting.
Deletehttp://whnt.com/2017/04/24/multiple-shots-fired-into-uah-building-over-the-weekend/
He's not just a paranoid conspiracy theorist, he behaves in a vile manner at times.
Bob boder ... He lets the evidence shape his theories not ideology.
ReplyDeleteI am so grateful for that insight: I had erroneously thought that Spencer lets the money he gets from the established interests shape his theories.
And in other news, still no WUWT coverage of the hurricane hitting Texas.
ReplyDeleteThere's a post up there now. More of the usual, except that Watts is taking a risk of losing a chunk of his remaining diehards if Harvey turns out to be as disastrous as the more extreme forecasts predict.
DeleteHe's not taking much of a chance, because the extremes are forecasted even if only a small chance. It's human life we are dealing with here, not victory in an internet forum.
DeleteWe don't deal with human life here: this isn't a hospital, this is an internet forum.
DeleteThey seem to have their own sources for windspeed and are not even calling it a hurricane.
ReplyDeletegeorge e. smith: "It’s time to declare ANY sort of information access denial on public or private media to be Terrorism."
ReplyDeleteDoes that include the WUWT administration in Washington deleting all these webpages with information on climate change and just the other day forcing a scientist to remove the term climate change from a research proposal?
I came to the conclusion Dr Roy Spencer is dishonest some time ago.
ReplyDeleteSlightly OT: due to personal considerations my presence lately has been a bit erratic. But I wanted to thank you for your Twitter support of strong women, in particular Rachel Maddow. I leave the Spencer nonsense to those who can be bothered, but note that Harvey is likely to be a game changer, and not before time. Such nonsense arguing with reality.
ReplyDeleteDon't give ammo to the opposition by hating on Texans. That is just wrong. Here, from my favorite fine literature:
Deletehttp://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/americas-future-is-texas
"America’s Future Is Texas: With right-wing zealots taking over the legislature even as the state’s demographics shift leftward, Texas has become the nation’s bellwether."
(I'm not trying to do HTML: please copy/paste the link)
Predicting that this hurricane will be as much a dud as Sandy is indicative of their grip on reality.
ReplyDeleteAnd all you sad people here at this blog kept hoping Harvey would be devastating to fit your AGW narrative (and by the way putting a lot of people in misery then, but who cares? As long as the AGW propaganda can be supported).
ReplyDeleteNow it is clear that Harvey is nothing special, just an average hurricane, fitting in the pattern of still further declining of hurricane frequencies and strength over the last decades.
You are insane.
DeleteThe craziness from Bojangles is twofold.
DeleteFirst, people who want to slow climate change want to do so to save people from weather disasters. It's deniers who are causing worse extreme weather because they work to prevent mitigation. By their actions, its obvious that deniers want weather disasters to happen.
Secondly, Harvey is something special. It is causing record rain and flooding.
The craziness from Bojangles is at the very least threefold because he is getting his information from people who lie to him time and time again.
DeleteMillicent, I think Bojangles does not even need others to come up with this kind of craziness. He's been around for long enough.
DeleteBojie...
DeleteWhen one sees a drunk speed away from a bar one does not "hope" that the driver will kill or maim someone. But one can predict that such an event is likely.
Does this help your understanding? (I doubt it.)
I note that Anthony does provide an update:
ReplyDelete"UPDATE: about two hours after this post was published, service was restored. – Anthony"
But did he ever provide the more important update - that his interpretation of events was conspiratorial nonsense?