Leo Goldstein has an oddly paranoid poke at the IPCC

Some of articles at WUWT are indistinguishable from gibberish. In the past few months, Anthony Watts has taken to publishing articles by a very strange man. He now calls himself Leo Goldstein. When he first wrote articles for WUWT, he wrote as Ari Halperin. He's the chap who came up with the Google conspiracy, and developed a tool to combat it, made by Google :D.

Here's one bit of gobbledegook from Leo today (archived here, latest here). He wrote about equilibrium climate sensitivity and quoted the IPCC's AR5 Working Group 1 report:

The equilibrium climate sensitivity quantifies the response of the climate system to constant radiative forcing on multicentury time scales. It is defined as the change in global mean surface temperature at equilibrium that is caused by a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration.” (p. 16)

That's fine. Thing is, I don't understand what Leo's difficulty is.

Lamar Smith and denier scientists were outwitted and outperformed by Michael Mann

I'll keep this short - and it's sweet :)

Anthony Watts' pet uber-conspiracy theorists both thought Michael Mann performed best at the recent committee hearing that Lamar Smith and his cronies orchestrated.

Tim Ball, who promotes the nuttiest climate conspiracy theories, wrote (emphasis mine):

My challenge to skeptics is to view the hearing as an uninformed citizen. From that perspective, I would argue that Mann was the most effective and persuasive. He was assertive, apparently provided hard evidence, had the backing of most scientists and scientific societies. He turned the minority status role the organizers gave him into the base for his victimization role. It wasn’t a debate, but he turned it into one and clearly believed, as would most uninformed observers, that he won.

Leo Goldstein (aka Ari Halperin), who is also as nutty as they come, (see here in particular) wrote (emphasis Leo's):

If it had been my first time hearing about this subject I would have concluded that the climate alarmists were right.

Good for you, Professor Mann.

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.

Ari Halperin falsely claims forgery by AAAS, with a whopper of a conspiracy theory @wattsupwiththat

Today Ari Halperin wrote an article that was posted at Anthony Watts' WUWT. It was about the recent letter to the US policymakers signed by the AAAS and 30 other leaders of science societies. Ari Halperin wrote to scientific societies to see if they supported the recent letter to the US Congress. All the replies that he got confirmed support.

Ari didn't get any reply from most of the 30 societies (he said nine of the 30 replied to him confirming their support for the letter), which prompted him to falsely allege in his headline that "Ooops! Not all 31 scientific societies actually signed the AAAS ‘consensus’ letter". In other words, his evidence is absent. Non-existent. He just made that up.

Why wouldn't they support the letter? It was clear and simple and non-controversial. Here's an excerpt:

Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research concludes that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver. This conclusion is based on multiple independent lines of evidence and the vast body of peer-reviewed science.

Denier weirdness: Ari Halperin thinks the IPCC's climate change definition is too broad

The Stupid It Burns Credit: Plognark

There could be an entire field of study devoted to how the brain of a climate science denier is wired, or miswired. There is a very strange article at WUWT (archived here) that shows up the deep flaws in thinking processes of deniers. The best explanation I can come up with is that Ari Halperin doesn't understand what climate is and the people commenting at WUWT are not able to process logic.

Anthony Watts promotes Ari Halperin's climate conspiracy theories at WUWT

Anthony Watts is busy trying to divert attention from all the record hot temperatures. He has posted another article from Ari Halperin. He's the chap who created a Google search tool for deniers, which filters out science websites and only leaves in denier websites.

Here is what Anthony doesn't want to say too much about:

Figure 1 | January only - global mean surface temperature January 1880 to January 2016. Data source:GISS NASA

And below are six denier talking points, with full on conspiracy ideation, that he posted instead.

1. Scientific consensus on the greenhouse effect goes back to the 1800s

Ari's first point is, in typical denier fashion, non-specific:

1. The alarmists first declared “scientific consensus” in 1988, and have been digging their heels in, persecuting skeptics, and constantly suppressing scientific inquiry since then, just as Richard Lindzen reported in 1992. They have been repeating their mantras and persecuting all other viewpoints.

That point that he listed is very mixed up. Ari doesn't indicate what the consensus he's complaining about was. Nor does he cite any evidence, which might have given a clue. Is he referring to global warming? That was known way back when. Callendar made detailed calculations of how the increased CO2 would warm the planet way back in the 1930s. Gilbert Plass wrote an important paper after the war in the 1950s. Over subsequent decades there were more and more papers written on the subject. Why Ari has picked out 1988 as a year for a declaration of scientific consensus on who knows what, I don't know. Nor do I know who he thinks has been persecuted. Is that denier-speak for refuted, rebutted or debunked?

The Google Conspiracy - and a Google search engine customised for science deniers

A guest blogger, Ari Halperin, at WUWT has decided to create a new search tool especially for science deniers (archived here).  Ari behaves like a full-blown conspiracy theorist, which is par for the course at WUWT. He has all the right words on his blog "CO2 is plant food" mixed in with some that I haven't seen before.

Musicologists impersonating climate scientists

Ari says that climate scientists are imposters. They aren't really scientists, they are instead "journalists, historians, musicologists, copywriters, and professional activists".