Anthony Watts' bombshell goes pear-shaped. 82% of WUWT-ers aren't interested!

In a burst of unfettered excitement, Anthony Watts has uncovered yet another bombshell (archived here,  latest update here). He wrote his shocking headline:

John Cook’s 97% consensus claim is about to go ‘pear-shaped’

About the shape of a pear

Anthony began by spending some time explaining to his readers the meaning and origin of the term "pear-shaped". Or one supposed origin - a military one. There are several other possible origins.

The top-ranked ERL paper of 2013

Most readers will be familiar with Cook13, the 97% consensus paper, which got deniers in such a tizz without them even reading the paper. Many of you will remember how Anthony Watts blew a gasket at the Presidential tweet.

What you may not know is that the 97% consensus paper was the most read of all the papers published in Environment Research Letters last year. And not just last year - it's the most read paper in ERL for all time. In fact it's the most-read paper in all (80+) Institute of Physics Journals - of all time, ever. Or that it was awarded the "Best Article of 2013" by the Editorial Board of ERL.

Is it any wonder that some devious deniers will not stop at anything - not just lying but also stealing - to try to discredit this solid piece of research.

Pears or nuts, anyone?

Anyway, once Anthony got his "pear-shaped" explanation out of the way, he copied part of a blog article by Richard Tol. Richard has been going nuts (acting nuts?) for months trying to find a flaw in the paper he accepts as having correct results, writing in one of his silly and wrong protest drafts (trying to prove the researchers got tired. Yes, really!):

There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct.

Despite his certainty that there is an overwhelming consensus, Richard said he's finally got someone to publish his "comment" of protest at Cook13.  This is after almost 12 months and four failed attempts with three different journals. And that's somehow going to prove - just what exactly neither Anthony nor Richard say! (Most likely that Richard doesn't know what he's talking about, going by his early attempts at knocking the paper.)

Anthony also quotes Brandon Shollenberger, who apparently lacks ethics (like Anthony) and has no sense of proportion. Brandon, remember, is the same person who buries his long nose in trivia looking for misquotes and tiny glitches and then yells for weeks about it, long after his alleged errors, where they exist, have been corrected or at least acknowledged (where correction is either not possible or seen as too trivial to matter in the slightest). Brandon, being a true blue science denier, bypasses the very real and grievous frauds and deceptions. Disinformation about climate science itself doesn't bother Brandon, the "denier".

According to this latest WUWT article there must have been nefarious activity afoot, or ahand or asomething-or-other. This as yet un-identified nefarious activity is based, not on any analysis of scientific papers, but on a hack of a private forum (where apparently SkS authors discuss blog posts to make sure they are correct and readable before posting them to the main SkepticalScience blog, or whatever).

It's quite possible that Brandon himself hacked his way into the SkS private forum, which is what his tweets suggest, when he writes - "I just made a really cool discovery" and "Too bad there's no way to sell it. That'd be cool" and "I've posted a teaser of my recent discovery. I wonder how many people can figure out what the image is".

On the other hand, Brandon might have just been the willing receiver of stolen property from the thief who hacked the SkS forum in 2012.

Upstaged! (What a shame shambles)

Poor old Richard Tol, having finally attained his moment (half second?) of glory in deniersville, he's been upstaged by Brandon Shollenberger, of all people! With Anthony Watts doing his best to get in on the action, of course.  And all of them completely missing the fact that if they wanted to do their own analysis of scientific papers on climate change they could have done so ten times over in the past twelve months, or at any time.

The deniers could have done their own Web of Science search. If that was too much like hard work (after all, they might get tired), they could have used the data all packaged up for them by the hard (tiring) work of John Cook and his co-authors.  The Cook13 researchers have already provided them with all the data they need in the form of 11,944 papers written by 29,083 authors and published in 1,980 journals from the past 20 years! SkepticalScience even has a tool with which you can rate the abstracts yourself. And anyone interested can download the details and see the researchers ratings as well as download the ratings of the papers' authors by year and rating.

The mugger politely asks his victim for more ...

So who has the nefarious intent?  Brandon Shollenberger, Anthony Watts and Richard Tol are sorely lacking in the ethics department. Anthony Watts quotes Brandon writing quite openly and without a hint of the shame any decent person would feel if they were tempted to steal:

I’ve sent John Cook an e-mail alerting him to what material I have, offering him an opportunity to give me reasons I should refrain from releasing it or particular parts of it. I figure a day or two to address any potential privacy concerns should be enough.

His response will determine how much information I provide. No obligations were placed upon me regarding any of the material I have, but I don’t see any compelling reason to provide information about how I got it either. I’d need a better reason than just satisfying people’s curiosity.

That's a bit like a mugger asking their victim if there is any good reason why the mugger should give her back her wallet. And then graciously offering to not publish her love letters immediately, giving the victim time to dwell on the privacy implications.

Maybe if Brandon got a sharp knock on his door from someone in blue waving a badge, they should be able to give him a very good reason for "providing information" about how he "got it".  Being a thief or a receiver of stolen property is a much better reason than simply "satisfying people's curiosity", don't you think?

What is the startling new information?

There is no new information that would change the results of Cook13.  Brandon says he has information that will show which people rated which papers and how - or at least that's what I think he's saying. This information is going beyond "need to know" and I don't know of any scientific publication that would provide that amount of detail. The most that climate science papers normally show is who did the data collection, who did the analysis and who wrote the paper or similar, not normally the details of who collected which precise tiny bits of information.

In any case, to demonstrate the accuracy or otherwise of the Cook13 findings, you'd have to either categorise scientific papers the Cook13 team used or do another study from scratch. At a pinch, you could ask the authors of the papers to categorise their own papers though I think an independent categorisation is preferable. To my knowledge, no denier has bothered doing any of these options, or if they have they haven't come up with any different results.  (The Cook13 researchers categorised the abstracts and validated their findings by asking authors to categorise their own papers.)

Laughably, Richard Tol, in his befuddled brain apparently thinks that "only" twelve people completing the ratings is somehow or other something or other (archived here). Never mind that it's eleven more people than did the ratings in Naomi Oreske's study published in Science several years ago. And eleven more people than did James Powell's unpublished works, the most recent of which came up with only one out of 2,258 recent articles, written by a total of 9,136 authors, which rejects the human influence of global warming.

Richard Tol's cause clause

What's even sillier (if possible) and shows just how far into conspiracy thinking Richard has gone, is the second part of the sentence where he wrote:

There were only 12 raters (24 at first, but half dropped out), picked for their believe (sic) in the cause. 

Seriously? He thinks that the ratings were skewed by a belief in "the cause"! What "cause" that would be Richard doesn't say. Remember, he is already on record, as writing that he accepts the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming. Not only that, but the Cook13 study showed that the researchers were slightly more conservative than were the scientists who rated their own papers!

From the WUWT comments - how Anthony's bombshell goes pear-shaped

This one is classic. Anthony was in such a rush to print his bombshell (devoid of any bomb) that he spelt Brandon Shollenberger's name three different ways: Brandon Schollenberger, Schollenberg and only writing it correctly in his pastes from Richard Tol as Brandon Shollenberger. At least Brandon now knows how he's regarded (or not regarded) by Anthony. Brandon Shollenberger says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:42 am
My last name was spelled three different ways in this post. I don’t think that’s enough. We should see how many different ways we can spell it.

REPLY: Apologies, fixed. – Anthony

Many people were more interested in colloquial expressions than they were in the boring topic of scientific consensus. Latimer Alder was first cab off the rank and says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:13 am
A rather more lively Brit expression is ‘tits up’. Means the same

Pamela Gray says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:34 am
That would be of USA, not British origin. It is either a vulgar version of “belly up” (most likely), known in the US and first captured in print in 1920, or a reference to WW2 (unlikely) aeroplanes and one of their dials, which when broken, turns upside down. The upside down lettering looks like breasts, and usually means enough damage to the cockpit that you had better bail if you still can.

 And then decides that breasts is a dirty word at WUWT, and corrects it to:

Oops. I should have said tits instead of br***ts.

There were several more comments about colloquialisms, such as from The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley who says:

May 10, 2014 at 10:17 am
I don’t mean to start a pond war, but why do so many Americans think everything was started there? It reminds me of a conversation I heard a few years back. An American woman was talking to an English woman, and remarked on the Peter Rabbit books. “Do you have Beatrix Potter in England?” asked the American lady. The English woman just groaned.

One of the few comments that started off on topic, quickly went off topic and diverted to cricket or soccer or whatever the world cup is for at the moment. Auto says:

May 10, 2014 at 10:50 am
I would agree with Dr. Tol, and our host, that – as many here suspected – John Cook’s number resemble a crock of r*t s**t [no, not suet].
I continue to be disappointed in the media – the BBC today is pushing
“Scorching El Nino event could scupper England’s World Cup ”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27343057

Absolutely nothing about England not having enough players who are good enough, unhappily – it might be a degree or three warmer when we play our matches than the long-term average.
I guess that means weather . . . . .

Auto

In fact, out of all the comments there were only a few that had anything to do with the 97% consensus.  Yep, I've even just refreshed the page and updated the archive. So far, after around four hours of prime time, there are only 38 comments. Of those:

• 58% (22 out of 38 comments) were about pear-shaped or tits up or similar
• 8% (3 comments) were about the spelling of Brandon's name
• 24% (6 comments) were random off topic comments protesting climate science in general or other meaningless waffle of an unrelated nature
• 18% (7 comments) were vaguely related to the consensus discussion

Here are six of the seven comments that were more or less on the consensus topic, some at a stretch. The other one, which devoted more words to sport than science, is already listed above. Very deep and incisive commentary as you can see :)

Matthew R Marler says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:39 am
My applause and thanks to Brandon Schollenberger. This should be interesting.

Jimmy Haigh says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:49 am
More proof – were it even needed – that, basically, Warm-mongers are pretty thick.

michael hart says, quoting Richard's meaningless comment:

May 10, 2014 at 10:51 am
Theirs was not a survey of the literature. Rather, it was a survey of the raters.

And they found that they agreed with themselves. It doesn’t usually require a survey.

Mike Maguire talks about the "known law of photosynthesis" and says:

May 10, 2014 at 11:01 am
In a world that gives Al Gore a Nobel Peace Prize and an Emmy for his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and brainwashes the known law of photosynthesis out of people, while brainwashing in a theory on paper that has busted in the real world for 15 years……………..the 97% consensus of climate scientists paper fits right in.

John Whitman advocates forgetting ethics and petty things like the law of the land, and going for broke, and says:

May 10, 2014 at 11:13 am
{all bold emphasis mine – JW}
Shollenberger writes in comments at his blog:,
His [Cook's] response will determine how much information I provide. No obligations were placed upon me regarding any of the material I have, but I don’t see any compelling reason to provide information about how I got it either. I’d need a better reason than just satisfying people’s curiosity
- – - – - – - -
Brandon Shollenberger,
That turn of phrasing implies fairly reasonably that you got from a person(s) the “part of the missing data [from Cook’s consensus paper]“. It implies you didn’t just find the data.
After you duly consider any potential harm to the raters by making their names and IDs public, I do think it would be valuable in assessing bias if the names and IDs of the raters in the data you have were made public.
John

John F. Hultquist starts off with 97% and then launches into some unintelligible ramble about US history and says:

May 10, 2014 at 11:18 am
The 97% story just keeps going on and on and ….
… and speaking of rabbits, Ghost @ 10:17 asks why so many Americans think everything started there.
Many groups of people that become organized (a tribe?) and name themselves use a word or phrase that translates as “the people” and their beginning or origin story starts the history or timeline of what they know. For example, when Gouverneur Morris wrote the words “We the People … do ordain … the United States of America” – history began. It is that simple.

Anthony's big boast that a denier hacker stole private property from SkepticalScience went down like a lead balloon.  His bombshell went pear-shaped!

Cooked Goose: Brandon Shollenberger has a severe case of logic fail (and cherry picking) at WUWT

Brandon Shollenberger wrote at WUWT:

Mandatory limits/restrictions on carbon emissions are known as cap and trade. 

Brandon's got that back to front.  Cap and trade is an incentives-based market mechanism to encourage carbon polluters to limit carbon emissions.  It is one form of "mandatory limits/restrictions".  However mandatory limits means a mandatory limit.  In the context of greenhouse gases, it means that a polluter can only emit so much pollution before being penalised.  There are a number of ways to achieve that.  One could give a polluter that exceeded those limits the option of shutting down or dropping below those limits.  There could be a straight tax on carbon emissions above a certain "mandatory limit" to encourage polluters to restrict emissions.  No cap and trade necessary.

Anthony Watts has posted an article by Brandon Shollenberger at WUWT (archived here).  Brandon Shollenberger has graced HotWhopper in the past - here and here, for example.  He's a loose cannon and misses the mark more often than he hits it, when it comes to climate discussions.

Today Brandon Shollenberger has decided, through faulty logic, that James Hansen can be called a "denier".  Why? Well, because Brandon has argued by a chain of logical fallacies, which as far as I can ascertain goes something like this.  The square brackets are what Brandon has implied rather than stated, but are necessary to follow Brandon's "logic" - I've written my comment in bold italics:

1. [Cap and trade is a form of mandatory limit/restriction] - arguably one form
2. Therefore all forms of mandatory limit/restriction are cap and trade - Does not follow
3. Therefore cap and trade is the only form of mandatory limit/restriction - Does not follow
4. [People who accept the need for restrictions accept climate science] - Not necessarily
5. [Anyone who opposes restrictions on carbon pollution is a climate science denier]  - Not necessarily plus does not follow
6. [Only mandatory restrictions on carbon pollution are restrictions] - Not true
7. [Therefore only cap and trade restrictions are restrictions]  - Does not follow and priors do not follow
8. [Therefore anyone who opposes cap and trade restrictions is a denier]  - Does not follow
9. [Therefore anyone who suggests cap and trade is not efficacious is a denier]  - Does not follow and priors do not follow
10. James Hansen once said that "cap and trade...does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels"
11. Therefore James Hansen is a "denier"  - Does not follow and multiple priors do not follow

Anyway, Brandon got all excited using words like "flabbergasted".

What he was writing about was Robert Brulle's recent paper that examined funding to oppose limits on carbon emissions.  As well as deciding that Dr Hansen is a "denier", Brandon got all hot and bothered because Dr Brulle apparently listed the Global Carbon Coalition as opposing restrictions on carbon pollution.  He found a sentence for which he doesn't cite a source, but it's probably Wikipedia or SourceWatch, that the now defunct Global Carbon Coalition declared:

the development of new technologies to reduce greenhouse emissions [is] a concept strongly supported by the GCC

which is a cherry-picked segment of this, in Wikipedia:

"The industry voice on climate change has served its purpose by contributing to a new national approach to global warming... The Bush administration will soon announce a climate policy that is expected to rely on the development of new technologies to reduce greenhouse emissions, a concept strongly supported by the GCC.

Notice how Brandon has altered the meaning by omitting the words "to rely on"?  Not only that but Brandon omitted the fact that, according to Wikipedia sources, the Global Carbon Coalition was opposed to "immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions".

Not only that, but the bigger logic fail is his premise that opposition to action to restrict carbon emissions necessarily means rejection of climate science.  There are people who understand very well the seriousness of carbon pollution but who nevertheless argue against limiting fossil fuel burning and/or argue against government intervention.

Not only that, but Robert Brulle doesn't himself use the word "denier".  That word only appears in his paper once, in the list of references.  Dr Brulle's paper is an analysis of funding.  It's not an analysis of climate science denial.  Many if not most of the people financing opposition to mitigation of carbon emissions would probably accept the science.  It's just that their other "wants" (eg current personal wealth, no government intervention except for tax breaks and subsidies for their favourite investments etc) outweigh any latent desires they may have for future prosperity and the well-being of society.

This paper conducts an analysis of the financial resource mobilization of the organizations that make up the climate change counter-movement (CCCM) in the United States.

Now Brandon makes the claim that:

Brulle argues anyone who opposes cap and trade is a denier.

Not at all.  The Brulle study wasn't an examination of opinions on climate science.  It was an analysis of the  "financial resource mobilisation of the organisations that make up the climate change counter-movement".   Dr Brulle defines:

The first question is: What is the climate change counter-movement? Here I argue that an efficacious approach to defining this movement is to view it as a cultural contestation between a social movement advocating restrictions on carbon emissions and a countermovement opposed to such action. Using this perspective, the key organizations of the U.S. CCCM are identified.

There is no suggestion that those funding the countermovement reject the science.  It is clear that many of them foster doubt about the science as one of their tactics, but that does not mean the funders of the counter-movement reject science, nor that rejection of science is a necessary pre-requisite to opposing restrictions on carbon emissions.  After all, look at Anthony Watts himself.  He has said on many occasions that he knows that carbon emissions are causing the world to heat up.  Yet the whole reason for his blog is to get his readers to doubt the science and, more particularly, to oppose government action aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

The gift-wrapped goose,
ready for cooking at HotWhopper.

Brandon makes a habit of getting it all wrong and working up a lather over all the wrong things.  This time it's no different.  All wrapped up in a pretty bow and delivered by by Anthony Watts, ready to be cooked and served up here at HotWhopper.  What a delicious cooked goose.

Of course Anthony Watts wouldn't know a logical fallacy if he tripped over one - he who thinks airports can suddenly catch UHI disease, that global warming is caused by Russian steampipes and who promotes paranoid conspiracy theories of the OneWorldGovernment/NewWorldOrder/Agenda21 kind.

---

Brulle, Robert J. "Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of US climate change counter-movement organizations." Climatic Change (2013): 1-14.
You can also get the 120 page supplement here. Click here for the related article in Nature News.

---

From the WUWT comments

There are a lot of vacuous comments like this one from tango who says:

January 6, 2014 at 5:29 pm
don,t worry the gooses are digging them selves a bigger hole the quicker they complete we can all go back to being normal

And utter nutter comments drawing on religion like this one from Ju;lian in Wales who says:

January 6, 2014 at 5:02 pm
An Inquisition against those who question the authority of the self acclaimed high priests of Climate Change. But where is their power to hold the trials and punish the “deniers”? If we do not fear them why should we take any notice of their peculiar court?

This will backfire because having deliberated on who they hate and who they want to crucify to their Gods they will be seen to have no power or authority to carry their divine justice further. They will look like feeble fools who live in a irrelevant bubble world of unreality.

Some of the denialati might have a smidgen of sense, like Steve from Rockwood who says:

January 6, 2014 at 4:52 pm
I need to smarten up because I just don’t get it. Read it twice too.

Someone with more than a smidgen of sense managed to sneak in a comment.  PJF says:

January 6, 2014 at 3:54 pm
This (Brandon Schollenberger’s) piece is a cheap strawman based upon his invention that “mandatory limits/restrictions on carbon emissions are known as cap and trade”. It will be burnt to shreds like all strawmen should. The author may feel it “bullish”, I would suggest a small addition would describe it down to a t.

A WUWT own goal.

Rob Dawg opts for nefarious intent and says:

January 6, 2014 at 3:42 pm
The word denier was specifically chosen to conjure up associations with the holocaust. The acronym CCCM was carefully crafted to harken back to the days of the CCCP soviet era.

Madman2001 doesn't understand the meaning of ad hominem and says:

January 6, 2014 at 2:55 pm
It seems more and more that the alarmists are talking less and less about the science — maybe they think they’ve lost that battles — and are instead choosing to directly attack skeptics in an ad hominem manner. It means that the skeptics are winning.

Followed shortly after by this comment from M Seward who illustrated the meaning of ad hominem by writing:

January 6, 2014 at 3:21 pm
From Brulle’s page at Drexel

Education
BS, Marine Biology, U.S. Coast Guard Academy *
MA, Sociology, New School for Social Research
MS, Natural Resources, University of Michigan
PhD, Sociology, George Washington University, 1995
(* although down the page it says a BS in Marine Engineering )
Research and Teaching Interests
Critical Theory
Social Movements
Social Change
Environmental Sociology

I think the “Research and Teaching Interests ” say it all. Sounds like a man who was not cut out for the real world and scuttled back underground. Must have been tough at the US CG Academy.

And WTF ! He isn’t even a climate scientist!!

LOL

That's probably enough to give you an idea of the size and scope of the pool of intellect at WUWT.

Anthony Watts @wattsupwiththat must thank his lucky stars that Brandon Shollenberger is a science denier

Update: See below for typical denier double standards. Brandon Shollenberger says his own misquoting is merely "awkward" and "embarrassing" and "understandable" whereas he calls John Cook's "mind-boggling" and "fabricated".

---

I expect everyone who visits WUWT today, except the utter nutters, will be bemused by what they read.

Today at WUWT, Anthony Watts allows Brandon Shollenberger to post an obsessive pedantic and vitriolic venting of spleen at John Cook of skepticalscience.com - over nothing at all as it turns out - archived here.  I bet Anthony is thanking his lucky stars that Brandon is one of the bad guys like him and isn't an editor at HotWhopper:)

How Brandon Shollenberger gets a quote wrong while accusing John Cook of doing the same

The gist of Brandon's wailing and gnashing of teeth is that John Cook had these words in a small box in a diagram of one of his papers, attributing it to Western Fuels Association as guiding their $510,000 climate science obfuscation campaign:

"reposition fact as theory"

Which Brandon himself messes up and misquotes, writing:

“This quote is apparently a bastardization of an actual quote which suggested people "reposition global warming as theory (rather than fact).” ”

Would you believe it.  For all his ranting and raving about "mind-boggling" and "fabrication" and "bastardization" - Brandon himself has bastardised the actual quote, which in the actual source document, as presented by Naomi Oreskes, the words were:

1. Reposition global warming as theory (not fact). 

Here is what I understand to be the original document in context.

Source: Naomi Oreskes' Presentation

Here is the source of the above, which is on the left hand side of Naomi Oreskes' MS PowerPoint slide below. Click the image to enlarge it.

Source: Naomi Oreskes' PowerPoint Presentation

 Here's the diagram from John Cook's paper, which Brandon is mindlessly obsessing over:

Yes, you have to look hard to find the bit that so enraged Brandon Shollenberger.  Its on the left hand side second from the bottom just above the mention of the faked Oregon Petition and just below the mention of the deniers' false SEPP statement.  If it didn't have quotation marks, Brandon would have nothing to complain about.  What an obsessive Brandon must be.  Poring over every word ever written by John and some John didn't write himself.  Picking each phrase to pieces and cross-checking.

The diagram is Figure 2 in a three page paper entitled "Combating a two-decade campaign attacking the scientific consensus on climate change".

Brandon finds John Cook's misquote "mind-boggling".  I find Brandon's over-reaction mind-boggling.  Brandon has put his own spin on his own misquote.  He reckons what Western Fuels Association meant was:

And this isn’t a trivial matter like Cook claimed his last misquotation was. The difference between the quotes is enormous. Many people don’t believe global warming is a fact (by definition, it isn’t one). If they’re right, repositioning global warming as a theory rather than fact is a good thing because its true. Even if one doesn’t agree with those people, their behavior is still honest and well-intentioned.

John Cook’s quote requires the opposite. A person cannot seek to “reposition fact as theory” without seeking to intentionally mislead people. That means Cook accuses those people of being lying bastards by making **** up.

Well, as you can see, Western Fuels Association can chalk up at least one success from their disinformation campaign :) (Does Brandon really think it's possible that the world isn't warming?)

Brandon's entitled to his interpretation but neither his interpretation, nor his over-reaction make me think Brandon is "honest or well-intentioned".  The fact that Brandon himself misquoted the line doesn't give me any confidence either.

Naomi Oreskes interprets the line differently, based on her power point slide (see above), which puts it into some context. I'm with her when she interpreted it as intending that global warming be downplayed as "just a theory".  Take particular note of the word "reposition".  In other words, the campaign recognises it as fact but their PR strategy is to "reposition" it in the mind of the general public, to shift the perception away from "global warming is real and happening now" to that of being a "theory".  Most people don't understand that a scientific theory is as good as fact.  I find John's misquote a lot closer to that interpretation than Brandon's interpretation of Brandon's misquote. (I hope you're following all that.  I don't blame you if you're getting tangled in quotes, misquotes and meanings :D)


Added for clarification for people like Brandon Shollenberger, who thinks global warming is "just a theory". You can nitpick and say that RSS and UAH aren't completely global and aren't strictly comparable to GISTemp and HadCRUT, but you've got to admit, all the data series - all surface and lower tropospheric temperatures, they all show the globe is warming. [Sou: 8:02 am 19 Dec 2013 AEDST]

Data Sources: NASA, RSS, Hadley Centre, UAH

There's more misplaced vitriol from Brandon

What else is Brandon obsessing over?  Well, he's really got his knickers in a twist. So much so that some of his links are broken.  As far as I can tell, he's foaming at the mouth because John Cook, in a short article on a website, quoted John Howard.  John Cook wrote:

Last week, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard gave a speech on climate change for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a conservative think-tank opposed to policies that mitigate climate change. Howard characterised scientists who accept the evidence that humans are disrupting climate as “religious zealots”. Consequently, he is not so convinced of the scientific evidence. On what does he base his views? Howard states that “…I instinctively feel that some of the claims are exaggerated.”

Brandon wasn't happy.  He was most upset that John didn't link to the source of the last quote in the paragraph.   The bit where John Howard said: "...I instinctively feel that some of the claims are exaggerated".

Brandon went further than that.  He has accused John Cook of "of lying about evidence....and fabricating a quote".  This is after John Cook responded to a query from Brandon in the comments to that very same article, linking to the source of his quote in The Australian - which I've archived here.  Here is the quote in context:

"I've always been agnostic about it (climate change)," Mr Howard told reporters in London before his address.

"I don't completely dismiss the more dire warnings but I instinctively feel that some of the claims are exaggerated.

"I don't accept all of the alarmist conclusions."

But Brandon is like a denier with a bone to pick.  He doesn't care for explanations or rectification.  He insists that John Cook is making "fabrications".  He's not.

Sheesh.  John Cook may be human after all and not always dot all his i's and cross all his t's when he's blogging.  He might even miss verifying the exact words of a quote in a diagram someone else made for him. Nevertheless, he doesn't make a habit of making stuff up.  His quote was real.  John Cook didn't claim the quote was from the speech itself, he provided it as evidence of what Howard bases his view upon.  Something John Howard said immediately before making his silly speech to the silly disinformation lobby group, the GWPF.

The fact is that while he didn't put a link to the Australian in the blog article, or if he did it fell off when climasphere.org posted it, John Cook was quick to provide it when Brandon asked about it.  Was Brandon polite and appreciative? Not on your nelly. Brandon wrote about another quote that got him riled up:

To this day, that fabricated quote remains in the piece. John cook has made no indication he thinks it needs to be changed (though he has fixed the quote elsewhere). 

Brandon is telling fibs.  In fact, John Cook replied to Brandon explaining that he did change the quote where he was able to do so but that he isn't able to edit the climasphere blog article:

Finally, I have made one change to the version of the article hosted at skepticalscience.com (that I have the ability to edit, unlike this blog) 

John's polite reply is still there for all the world to see what sort of a drongo Brandon Shollenberger is.  In fact I've archived the blog and comments for posterity.  It shows remarkable restraint on the part of John Cook, plus the fact that while he didn't have access to the climasphere post, he did amend the skepticalscience.com version of his article in line with Brandon's nit-pickery - or the part that made sense at any rate.

But that's not good enough for Brandon Shollenberger.  Brandon has his own private vendetta against John Cook.  Vendetta is not quite the right word, because a vendetta implies that John Cook did something to Brandon and as far as I'm aware, John Cook has never done Brandon any harm.  That doesn't stop an obsessive denier who doesn't need any excuse to rant and rave at imagined wrong-doings.  Brandon ventures further into la la land than does your typical denier.

I know what you're thinking :)

Now I bet you are thinking along the lines I was, when I read Brandon's "mind-boggling" hyperbole and false accusations.

You'll be asking:

• Why does Brandon Shollenberger focus on (mis)correcting that snippet in the diagram above, when there are much more glaring issues in the article that are worthy of comment.  Even in the diagram there are more glaring issues, like the fake Oregon Petition.  Why isn't Brandon Shollenberger foaming at the mouth in protest at someone "fabricating" a petition - deliberately setting out to deceive people that it came from the National Academy of Sciences.  Why isn't Brandon Shollenberger up in arms at all the disinformation in the NIPCC "report"? 

• Why does Brandon Shollenberger go bananas because a quote in a blog article didn't have a link to the source, even though John Cook provided the link as soon as he was asked for it?  Why instead isn't he doing something as a result of what John Cook wrote about.  Why isn't Brandon Shollenberger urging everyone to write to ex-PM Howard telling him to read science?  Why isn't Brandon Shollenberger strongly criticising Tony Abbott and John Howard for misleading the Australian public about global warming?  Why isn't he irate at the government for absconding their responsibilities to Australians and the world at large, and steering Australia towards a four degree plus future?

• Why does Brandon Shollenberger nitpick and misrepresent John Cook and not rant and rave at all the misleading articles, the pseudo-science and disinformation peddled at anti-science websites like WUWT?  

Well, I won't claim to understand disturbed minds.  I don't believe there is any rational explanation. However he could be encouraged by the reaction of some WUWT readers, although it's a tepid reaction overall to a WUWT rant. Especially for a rant directed at John Cook, who deniers love to hate.  I guess it'll heat up when North Americans wake up. (Archived here.)


gopal panicker says:

December 18, 2013 at 12:13 am
best way to deal with Cook is to ignore him…..very few people read his blog

Henry Galt. who is convinced that all the science is wrong and all the world is conspiring against him or some such nonsense and says:

December 18, 2013 at 2:45 am
Must agree with Brandon and most comments so far (esp CtM).
This very much needs to be done because the web is polluted beyond imagining by links to the SS idiots and their idiocy. Quoted by every activist, deluded dramagreen and vested interest as gospel. 

“It’s on SS … it must be true … those guys wouldn’t lie to us … would they?”
It appears they have and do. They will continue to do so for many non-scientific, psychological reasons.

PS Why the asterisks in the headline?

Does anyone know why Brandon wrote the headline as:

"Skeptical Science’s John Cook – Making **** Up" 

...which I took to mean "Skeptical Science’s John Cook – Making Stuff Up"? although it's missing an asterisk.  Brandon explains it as:

David, UK, I did that because I don’t feel comfortable cursing. When I use that phrase out loud, I censor the word as well. (December 18, 2013 at 12:28 am)

If he means "stuff" is a curse then he's really nuts.  Stuff is a perfectly acceptable word in that context.  It's a synonym for "things" or "matter" or "substance".

If he is hiding the F-word then it doesn't make sense.  It's got the right number of asterisks but the word usage is wrong.  At least it's not in any context I've ever heard it. I've heard of "F*** all", but not "making f*** up".  I'd have thought he would have had to write something like  "Skeptical Science’s John Cook – Making a **** Up", adding an "a".  Or maybe "Skeptical Science’s John Cook – ****s Up".

Am I missing something?  Maybe it's another swear word that I'm too ladylike to have ever heard?  It's possible I guess, but I doubt it.  Or maybe it's a common expression in some countries or social circles unfamiliar to me.

Update

1. Apparently **** means shit.  Well, no shit! Isn't Brandon quaint.

2. Brandon may have come here already.  He maintains that his misquote is merely "awkward" and "embarrassing" and "understandable", whereas John Cook's misquote is "mind-boggling" and "fabrication".  See the comments below that point out that when Anthony Watts misquotes it's called "acceptable paraphrasing" even though Anthony changed the meaning in his misquote. John Cook didn't.  Brandon Shollenberger invented his own unique and wrong meaning to his quote and his misquote and it's perfectly fine or merely awkward and embarassing.  Deniers are nothing if not inconsistent.  From Brandon:

Brandon Shollenberger says:

December 18, 2013 at 7:12 am
Welp, this is awkward. It turns out while criticizing Cook for getting the quotation wrong, I got it wrong too. The parenthetical should say “not fact” instead of “rather than fact.” A little time with Google shows this is a common mistake, and it’s even made in Al Gore’s, An Inconvenient Truth. I saw the phrasing I used on Wikipedia (which has had that phrasing for six years), used Google to search for it, found dozens of sources using it (including Al Gore’s), and copied and pasted.

This doesn’t change anything I said, and it is certainly understandable how I made the mistake. Still, it’s embarrassing.

3. At WUWT, Izen points out that to say global warming is a theory not a fact shows complete blindness to all the world's temperature records. Well, that's par for the course with some deniers.

4. Click here for the latest updated archive of the WUWT article and comments.

Sou 7:10 am Thursday 19 December 2013 (AEDST)


Update:

Almost six weeks have elapsed and misguided Brandon Shollengberger is still stewing over this.  Given his obsession over a couple of misplaced quotation marks (though the meaning was intact), how the hell he copes with all the mistakes in the daily newspaper or the zillions of misquotes and fabrications at WUWT and Bishop Hill and every other denier blog we may never know.  They don't seem to bother him in the slightest, which suggests, maybe, a pathology? Sou 30 January 2014.

How SkepticalScience didn't demand the impeachment of the President of the USA and the complete shut down of Twitter

Brandon Schollenberger is up in arms.  What is it about this time?  Well, apparently two and a half months ago, the good folk at SkepticalScience.com didn't storm the White House  and demand that a tweet from the President of the United States of America be retracted.

It's a travesty.  If every contributor to SkepticalScience.com isn't hanging their collective heads in shame then the world is in a very sorry state.

This is the appallingly offensive tweet:

Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: http://t.co/4lEEBYtVqf
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 16, 2013

What is wrong with the tweet?  Well, the tweet wasn't peer reviewed for one thing.  Unless you call 35 million or so followers 'peers'.  But then are they peers of the President of the United States of America?

Peer review is important.  For example it was only by diligent peer blog review that it was discovered with shock and horror that the above tweet wasn't sent by the President's own thumbs on the President's personal Blackberry.  It didn't have the Presidential "-bo".

What is the world coming to!  Not only did SkepticalScience.com not demand the immediate impeachment of the President of the United States of America for not getting his tweet peer reviewed before tweeting it.  It turns out the President of the United States of America didn't even tweet the non-peer reviewed tweet.  If that's not a case for impeachment then what is, I ask you.

Brandon Shollenberger is rallying his peers at WUWT to storm the White House and demand they shut down SkepticalScience.com for not storming the White House and demanding that the White House retract a tweet that wasn't peer reviewed before being not tweeted by the President of the United States of America.

Let the President and SkepticalScience get away with not tweeting a tweet that was tweeted without said tweet being peer reviewed by the peers at WUWT and next thing you'll find is that bloggers will be claiming that there's an ice age coming with no peer review whatsoever and alarming people all over the world.

(Have you heard that Anthony Watts and Brandon Shollenberger are planning a survey of the scientific literature to determine if anyone was ever put in danger by drought, wildfire, flood, storm surges.  Silly duffers - as if anything but total annihilation of all life on the planet could be dangerous.  Well, excepting for ice ages - they are dangerous.  Oh and shifting to clean energy is dangerous.  It'll kill all the birds, don't you know.)

Who's lying now? It's Brandon Shollenberger on WUWT

Deniers are really upset that climate scientists are aware that humans are causing global warming.  It's not something magical or difficult to figure out.  By our actions of burning fossil fuel, deforestation etc, we have added an additional 40% or more of CO2 to the atmosphere.  About half of what we've emitted has gone into the oceans.  If it hadn't we'd have almost doubled the CO2 in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution.  The fact it has is causing the oceans to get more acidic.  So we're not only causing global warming we're causing acidification of the oceans.

Yet deniers like Anthony Watts tell lies about a recent study that demonstrated that scientists are aware of this fact.  Now a chap called Brandon Shollenberger is also trying to make out that a recent survey is misleading.  But it's Brandon who is the one who's misleading.

It's quite simple.  Researchers examined the abstracts of around 12,000 scientific papers on the topic of climate change and global warming.  Of those abstracts, around 4,000 attributed a cause to global warming.  97% of these that attributed a cause, indicated that humans have caused most (50% or more) of the warming.  Less than 3% indicated otherwise.  The other 8,000 papers don't overtly attribute a cause.  It's such a well known fact and self-evident.  Just as most of you don't explain every day that it's the earth's rotation that causes the sun to come up every morning, as if it's a surprise, most scientists don't repeat obvious facts in every paper they prepare.

In reality, we're probably causing more than 100% of the warming, which is offset to some extent by aerosols.

Are deniers part of the 97%?

Brandon Shollenberger is trying to imply that Cook et al 97% included abstracts that suggest it's just a little bit of warming that we're causing.  That's a lie.  He's building on recent statements by some of the denialiati that they are part of the 97% who think humans cause at least some global warming.  But unless those deniers accept that humans cause most (at least 50%) of global warming, then they are part of the 3% deniers not the 97%.

All similar studies point to the same thing.  It's not as if the Cook et al study came up with a different result.  Every single study looking at the subject have found that around 97% of papers and/or scientists who research this topic agree that humans are now causing most of the global warming. It's only deniers (not scientists) like those who frequent WUWT who disagree.

There's an unpublished study from last year, that only found 24 out of almost 14,000 papers on climate change rejected global warming.

Deniers like Anthony Watts and Brandon Shollenberger specialise in disinformation and lies.  In this article, Brandon doesn't concede that Cook et al is one of many that found the same thing.

Why do they lie?  I don't know, but they certainly get very emotional about it.  Here's two examples from Brandon:

1. They’ve always managed to say “humans cause global warming” with the implicit qualifier of “some” (that they knew nobody would pay attention to).

2. They say things like, “Humans cause global warming” knowing most people won’t realize they’re meaning “some amount of global warming.”

No, Brandon - Cook et al did not restrict its qualification to "some amount".  Their cut-off was at least 50% of global warming.  Humans are causing not just some but most of the global warming and likely all of the global warming. And going by the studies and policy statements from professional scientific organisations, most scientists would agree with that.

Here is a chart showing estimates of how much humans have contributed to global warming.  Estimates range from more than 160% to just under 100%.  The caption includes links to the relevant papers.

Figure 1: Net human and natural percent contributions to the observed global surface warming over the past 50-65 years according to Tett et al. 2000 (T00, dark blue), Meehl et al. 2004 (M04, red), Stone et al. 2007 (S07, green), Lean and Rind 2008 (LR08, purple),Huber and Knutti 2011 (HK11, light blue), and Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange). .
Source: SkepticalScience.com

Humans are probably causing more than 100% of global warming these days.

You'd have to be a complete idiot or a liar to try to argue otherwise.  This blog has provided numerous examples of lying, disinforming and ridiculous claims made on WUWT.  Anthony Watts' blog specialises in anti-science and disinformation - sometimes it's from Anthony himself and other times it's from people like Brandon Shollenberger.

Don't trust WUWT or deniers.  They lie.

BTW Brandon is the one who got most upset with Professor Lewandowsky et al about the Recursive Fury paper, moaning that they got one of the conspiracy theories wrong - it was apparently another conspiracy theory.  He's a bit weird all up.

Cook et al Paper Confirms 97% Scientific Consensus - Prompting Silly Conspiracy Theories from Anthony Watts and WUWT

AGW Scientific Consensus: 97% and rising

Visit TheConsensusProject.com

A new peer-reviewed study in the open access journal, Environmental Research Letters** (ERL) confirms (again) the 97% scientific consensus on the causes of the current global warming.  Scientists have looked at the evidence and come to a conclusion. The evidence is so overwhelming now that the consensus has grown - from 90% in the literature twenty-two years ago in 1991 to 97% for the twenty year period to 2011.  Today 98.4% of scientists publishing papers relating to climate science and its impacts, agree that humans are causing global warming.

The finding (for anyone who's been sleeping under a cool rock for the past forty years or so) -  97% of published scientific papers taking a position on global warming all agree: 

We humans are causing global warming and climate change.

The paper is by Cook et al** and titled: Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature.  It is by far the largest of its kind in the peer-reviewed literature.  The authors analysed abstracts from 11,944 papers mentioning global warming or global climate change over the twenty year period between 1991 and 2011.  Of the nearly 12,000 papers only 0.7% disputed the fact that humans are causing global warming.  The papers represented the work of scientists from at least 91 countries throughout the world.

These findings are consistent with those of Naomi Oreskes - published in Science in 2004, and those of the recent unpublished work by James Lawrence Powell and other studies.  In the 928 peer-reviewed papers she examined spanning ten years (1993-2003), Oreskes did not find a single paper disputing the consensus that humans are causing global warming. Out of 13,950 peer-reviewed articles on global warming in the past twenty-one years, Powell found that only 24 rejected global warming.  There's more (click image to enlarge):

Cook et al (2013) and two other similar studies all show at least 97% scientific consensus.

In this latest study, abstracts of the 11,944 papers were analysed by 24 volunteers led by John Cook of the University of Queensland and owner of the award-winning website SkepticalScience.com. They cross-checked their work by having at least two people independently rate each paper's abstract.  The people rating the abstracts didn't see the names of the papers' authors.  They further cross-checked by asking the papers' authors.

The research team was just a teeny bit (0.1%)  more conservative in their categorisations than the authors of the scientific papers themselves, showing the paper's findings to be rock solid.  Here's John Cook describing the study and its findings.

Spread the word - visit the new website: TheConsensusProject.com

To find out how to help the public become aware of the consensus, visit this new website: The Consensus Project.

You can also read reports of the study in this article on SkepticalScience.  It's also getting good mainstream and niche press coverage - click here for a multitude of choices:

• UK Guardian
• Australia's ABC News
• Australia's ABC - Environment
• Huffington Post
• The Australian
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Reuters
• RenewEconomy
• The Conversation
• Phys.Org news
•  and probably elsewhere.

And on various high profile blogs:

• ClimateProgress
• Scholars and Rogues
• David Appell's Quark Soup
• Rabett Run
• DeSmogBlog
• Watching the Deniers

As I said up front, the paper was published in the open access journal ERL.  Instead of reader pays, the journal requires an up front payment.  To their credit, SkepticalScience raised the fee from its readers in less than half a day - so it's all there for you to read.  No paywall.  Lots of other good papers from top scientists there as well.

That's about all from me on the research itself for now.  The rest of this article is mainly for denier watchers.  If you want to skip the bulk of it (it's fairly standard denier weirdness, some of it funny) but consider yourself WUWT-literate, you might enjoy the little bonus at the end :D

The paranoid conspiracy theory of Anthony Watts and his motley crew of science deniers

Despite all these confirmations of consensus or more likely because of them, Anthony Watts (reckons he) has uncovered yet another giant conspiracy.  According to him, umpteen editors from one thousand nine hundred and eighty (1,980) journals colluded in one of the biggest scientific scams of two centuries - not!.  (Just how gullible does Tony think his readers are?  See below to find out.)

Let's say for argument's sake that on average there are two editors per journal with 3% a year retiring or quitting editing. (Some journals might only have one editor, others ten or more and the bigger journals have dozens.)  Even using that very conservative estimate, it would mean in aggregate there were more than 6,000 people from all around the world who have been secretly colluding for more than twenty years.  And no-one's found out or provided a single skerrick of evidence for this imaginary collusion. What an achievement!  If you believe that then I've got a bridge to sell you.

I wish someone would ask Anthony: where are all the tens of thousands of "skeptics" whingeing that their paper got rejected?  Not Watts himself - even he managed to get a paper published.

Denier Anthony breaks embargo to feebly protest the 97% consensus

Yesterday Anthony leaked the embargoed press release after Steve Milloy (yeah, another science denier) first broke it.  About time Milloy was dropped from all news distribution lists since he can't be trusted to keep to embargoes.  Anthony thought he'd get in early and try to frame the finding his way - dork!

Anthony can't face the fact that from 11,944 papers mentioning global warming or global climate change since 1991 only 0.7 per cent rejected AGW.  Of all the papers from this 12,000 or so that attribute a cause to the recent warming, 97 per cent of these endorsed the consensus that we are seeing man-made, or anthropogenic, global warming.  Anthony splutters:

And from that (97%) he gets a consensus?

From 97% he gets a consensus?  Wouldn't you?  Not Anthony, though.  He feebly tries to tell his readers to "Ignore the 97%.  Just look at the 1.9%!!!"  I wonder how he'd go if 97 doctors examined his rash and fever, analysed a blood sample and then told him he had measles, while two drongos said it was just mosquito bites.

How many science deniers like Anthony Watts can fit in the teeny weeny denier pit?

From the paper, of the 11,944 papers published between 1991 and 2011 there were 4014 that expressed a position on global warming.  Of these 4014, 3896 papers or 97.1% endorsed human-caused global warming, 78 or 1.9% disputed it and 40 or 1.0% indicated the cause was 'uncertain'. The remaining 7,930 took no position on current anthropogenic climate change. (I expect this proportion to rise dramatically over time.  After all, how many  papers on atomic physics today would explicitly state "we believe atoms exist"?)

Anyway, thought it was worth showing Anthony's position in a chart and compare it to reality:

How Anthony disproves his conspiracy theory

A stubby short of a six pack

Anthony tries hard to find something to support his paranoid conspiracy theory.  His attempt brings to mind 'roos loose in the top paddock, two bob watches, thick planks and stubbies...

Anthony decides to quote a snippet from a stolen email, in which a couple of scientists are arguing that wrong papers should be kept out of the IPCC report.  Trouble is, Anthony's quote doesn't support his argument at all.  On the contrary, it flat out contradicts it.  Not only were those papers published in scientific journals (obviously, or there'd have been no argument), they were also included in the IPCC report!

From the USC:

Yet, the papers in question made it into the IPCC report, indicating that no restrictions on their incorporation were made. The IPCC process contains hundreds of authors and reviewers, with an exacting and transparent review process.

How Brandon Shollenberger Defends Consensus

Here's a tidbit of denier weirdness from a site called "The Blackboard".  Most deniers are weakly protesting that although thousands of experts all agree on AGW, it doesn't matter squat.  'Consensus is for the birds', they mumble.  Brandon Shollenberger (yes, that one) is taking a different tack, probably doing an Anthony Watts (see above) when he writes:

How many people currently believe Columbus set off to prove the Earth is round even though it is completely untrue? I’d say there’s even a consensus on it

One can only conclude that Brandon believes consensus is only of value if it's a consensus among experts, like scientists in the case of science.  Consensus among a motley mob of ideologically-driven deniers, conspiracy theorists and scientific illiterati from WUWT or The Blackboard is not only rare but meaningless. About the only thing deniers ever agree on is that it must be a giant conspiracy.  They can't even agree on what the conspiracy is.

More denier weirdness

Here are some choice excerpts from the comments to Anthony's article - so you can spend your valuable time on the paper itself and not have to wallow in the mud at WUWT:

Ron House ignores any findings from the 11,994 papers proffered by the authors, the numerous IPCC reports, the millions of papers to date mentioning climate change, and says that's not enough.  Instead he puts his two hands over his ears and shuts his eyes as he shouts that he wants not scientific evidence, but just evidence:

May 14, 2013 at 8:56 pm  I am sick of being told “97% agree…”  I want to be told THE EVIDENCE (yes, I am SHOUTING because no warmist ever, anywhere, any time, answers this question) – WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE. 

davidmhoffer says confidently, at least seventeen hours before he can possible have seen the paper itself:

May 14, 2013 at 9:49 pm  This paper is so bad that mocking it may improve its credibility.

And later, davidmhoffer gives some insight into the way his mind works.  He brings up a completely unrelated thought held by a Greek philospher two and a half thousand years ago.  (Empedocles was pretty close to the mark, he just got it back to front.)

May 14, 2013 at 10:59 pm  In 5th century BC, the Greek philosopher Empedocles postulated we could see things due to rays coming out of our eyes.

Has David created a paradox for himself? Does that mean all the thousands of scientists creating knowledge today are wrong?  If so, how does David know that Empedocles was wrong?

A.D. Everard apparently prefers to listen to people who don't know and says:

May 14, 2013 at 10:01 pm  So, they are trying to herd the population back into fear by reinforcing the idea of consensus amongst “scientists” who “know”. 

RockyRoad is a back-to-front arithmetician.  He thinks that a rise from 90% in 1991 to 97% over the whole twenty years is a decline, saying:

May 14, 2013 at 10:37 pm  Hmmmm…..It appears their “concensus” (sic) is declining…. significantly….(and as a reminder to himself, adds) ...Never let a touch of reality ruin your cause, right?

Peter Ward not only can't understand math, he can't read, looks as if he misread 12,000 as 2,000 - and says:

May 14, 2013 at 10:51 pm  So 97% of 4000 papers endorsed AGW but of the “over 2000″ papers surveyed only 32.6% did? I don’t understand that math.

Manfred, after two centuries of science and thousands of papers confirming the consensus, is still waiting hopefully  for his "one" paper, writing (with a touch of historical liberty and shades of the fake Oregon petition <--worth reading):

May 15, 2013 at 1:37 am  How tiresomely ignorant and devoid of science. If I recall correctly, after Einstein had fled from Germany and the Nazis, he was informed that a hundred ‘Nazi’ scientists had come forward to debunk his eminent work on relativity. His comment: “they only needed one paper.”

While poor old Fred would never believe the findings of any collection of experts.  He probably gets up every day wondering if this is the day when the sun doesn't rise or the day he'll float off earth and into space.  He says:

May 14, 2013 at 8:34 pm  And “consensus” is exactly what part of the scientific method? I wonder if Galileo was aware of this concept.

Sheesh.  What a weird, contradictory, conspiratorial world deniers inhabit.

An almost final word: Independent.  If a denier should stray here from WUWT or The Blackboard, maybe they will be kind to the folk there, and whisper to Anthony and Brandon (and Lucia) what Riki tried to tell them: "I do not think that word means what you think it means…."  Similar applies to words taken out of context.  You might also mention that stealing is not only immoral, in most places it's illegal. As is receiving stolen property.

A bonus for faithful readers

Here's a little bonus for everyone who's made it all the way to the end of this article.  A comment that slipped right by the eagle eyes of Watts and the WUWT moderators censors - so far (Please do Kevin and the world a favour.  If you follow the link to WUWT, don't just click from here - copy and paste it into a new browser tab.) (My formatting and inline hyperlink)

Kevin MacDonald says:
May 15, 2013 at 1:12 am  Fuzzy math: In a new soon to be published paper.  I thought you might be referring to that one that simply ignored the TOB’s adjustments, but then I realised that piece of junk is never getting published.

Now, time to shift back to the real world:

This is the Critical Decade.

---

**John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs and Andrew Skuce 2013 Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024