WUWT conspiracy theorists think Scott Pruitt can change physics

Greenhouse Effect. Credit/Source: NASA

The crazies at WUWT are still out in force. I'd say they've taken over Anthony Watts' blog, WUWT.

After EPA administrator Scott Pruitt admitted on television that global warming is happening, but all but rejected that it was caused by an increase in greenhouse gases, the crazies at WUWT went berserk (archived here). A chap who writes nonsense there from time to time, David Middleton, wrote how "of course" the EPA website still has science on it. His theory was that it was only because Pruitt hasn't yet got to it on his "to do" list. He thinks that soon enough Pruitt will replace any science on EPA's website with quackery.

Mind-boggling toxic hypocrisy at WUWT over Gold King Mine and EPA

You have to read it to believe it. Anthony Watts and Paul Driessen have an article at WUWT (archived here) in which they castigate the EPA for an accidental spill of toxic water from Gold King Mine into waterways in Colorado. Now who or what is to blame for that particular incident is a good question. But that's not what I am writing about.

The point of this article is that both Paul and Anthony are often posting articles where they don't want any environmental regulations. In which they want to send America back to the smog age. They don't give a damn that toxic waste from mining operations accumulated to such an extent that this accident occurred. All they care about is trashing the people who have come in to try to contain or clean up the mess that the grossly negligent miners left behind.

Nowhere in the WUWT article or the comments is there any finger pointing at the companies and people that caused the water to get so toxic in the first place. Nowhere is there a call for companies and people to be held responsible for toxic dumps.

No, it's all about how it's all the fault of the Environmental Protection Agency - the very agency that is trying to do something to clean up the mess left behind by the mates of the anti-environment brigade.

Such gross hypocrisy and double standards is mind-boggling, but is all too common at denier blogs and on anti-regulation websites.

You can read another version of what happened in an article by Alan Prendergast on westword.com.

Ice Ages, Witches and Magic from Marc Morano, Anthony Watts and Alan Carlin

I suppose I can understand the fixation that deniers have with religion, given the world view they hold. It goes some way to explaining their inability to distinguish scientific research from witchcraft and sorcery. Those who've had the benefit of any education in science, not so much.

Marc Morano - burning witches

Today Raw Story reported how Marc Morano, a professional disinformer, explained to a rapt audience of science deniers, how policies designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions are like blood sacrifices to the gods. He is reported as saying:

Aztec priests encouraged people to sacrifice blood to the gods to end severe drought...Today we are told we need a fundamental transformation of our lives in order to end bad weather, ...  We are told we need EPA regulations and UN treaties in order to spare us from more hurricanes and floods and droughts and all this bad weather.

Roy Spencer PhD and Steve "mad, mad, mad" Goreham on defying laws

Deniers are making hay while the sun beats down - or the little mice are playing while the boss is off doing something or the other.

As I've commented before, Anthony Watts has all but disappeared from WUWT recently. While he's gone AWOL, there are a lot of deniers using his blog to peddle their denial.

Yesterday it was David Middleton who seems to be a greenhouse effect denier. Today it's Steve "mad, mad mad" Goreham, who is employed to reject climate science. It's his job. I've just noticed that he is the Executive Director of one of those pretty well one-man bands that pretends to be a real organisation by giving itself a fancy name and building a website.

Denier weirdness: Jumping sharks? Deniers are inert today!

What a lot of fuss. Over nothing. All so WUWT can do some EPA-bashing. Over a de-regulation would you believe!

Anthony Watts is running out of climate things to write about so he's decided to jump some sharks. He's claiming that the EPA is banning the use of argon in pesticides. It's not.

Anthony didn't bother reading the documents to which he linked. He just took science denier Eric Worrall at his word (archived here). Eric Worrall took science denier "IceAgeNow" at his word. None of them bothered to read the EPA material.

In fact, the notice states (my emphasis):

EPA is proposing to remove certain chemical substances from the current listing of inert ingredients approved for use in pesticide products because the inert ingredients are no longer used in any registered pesticide product.

Yep. That's right. They were on a list of inert ingredients approved for use, but now they aren't used any more. They aren't banned. They aren't needed, so why keep them on the list. In common parlance you could call it tidying up regulations. Doing a bit of housekeeping.

Pollution advocate Rachel DeJong and her unsavoury smear campaign at WUWT

At WUWT today there's another good example of a right wing extremist misrepresenting facts. Anthony Watts was sent an email by Ashley Thorne, Executive Director, National Association of Scholars. This association promotes the work of another right wing, anti-science lobby group (dressed up as a "charity"), called the ITSSD or the "Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development". I've written about both these dubious entities before.

I guess the email was about an article by Rachel DeJong because that's what Anthony copied and pasted (archived here). The article was just more of the same faked up insinuations and allegations about the EPA. Rachel DeJong apparently favours dirty air and polluted water. She doesn't want pollution to be regulated.

I won't go through her entire spin. I'll pick out one point to illustrate her unsavoury smear tactics. It's typical of pro-pollution advocates everywhere.

Putting on an old EPA hat, WUWT revisits peer review

Anthony Watts has another copy and paste (archived here), this time from some right wing crowd that calls itself the National Association of Scholars, not to be confused with the National Academy of Sciences.

In short, the article is just another denier diatribe, long on insinuation and short on substance.

I checked out the National Association of Scholars at SourceWatch and they don't sound like the sort of crowd that any self-respecting person would want to be associated with. I'm surprised that Anthony Watts would promote them. Publicly at any rate, he frowns upon racist bigotry (not so much sexism). I guess beggars can't be choosers. This is from SourceWatch:

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is a non-profit organization in the United States that opposes multiculturalism and affirmative action and seeks to counter what it considers a "liberal bias" in academia.[1]

In 2010 and 2011, its president was espousing climate contrarianism under the group's auspices, with no evident expertise in the climate science field.[2]

The rest of the SourceWatch article makes interesting reading. It looks as if National Association of Scholars has an extremely large (unwieldy) board that rarely if ever meets. Is it just another organisation providing plum posts for a small number of ideologues?

This is another long article, because the WUWT article is about another article which is in turn about yet another article. This HW article features the National Association of Scholars, the ITSSD, and the EPA and its Office of Inspector General as well as some WUWT comments.  I don't want to dissuade you, but I'll warn you that apart from introducing organisations new to HotWhopper, it's simply more of the same old hat denier nonsense - largely about peer review.  Still, if you're interested and you're on the home page, click here to read on...

List of scientists "respected in their field" - only @wattsupwiththat - take on the EPA

This made me laugh.  Anthony Watts is all excited because a bunch of clowns have filed a brief supporting a whole mob of litigants to the US Supreme Court, who want to stop the EPA from regulating CO2 emissions.  This isn't the first time and probably won't be the last.

What caught my eye was this mob that Anthony Watts is promoting (archived here) are trying to pass themselves off as:

...highly regarded scientists and economists [who] have expertise in a wide array of fields implicated by this rulemaking, including climate research, weather modeling, physics, geology, statistical analysis, engineering, and economics. One or more of these scientists and economists has the relevant expertise to support every statement made in this brief. These scientists and economists all have publications in peer reviewed journals and are respected in their fields of expertise by their peers.

Look at the list, six of them have already graced the pages of HotWhopper, some several times.  I guess you could call that regarded, though not at all highly.  The list is below.  It reads like an excerpt from who's who of the extreme right wing of the denial machine.

• Joseph S. D’Aleo - who fails Meteorology 101 at WUWT and is one of Cato Institute's 100 deniers
• Dr. Harold H. Doiron is one of the 49 retired NASA science deniers (they couldn't even get to 50 out of all the thousands of retired NASA employees!)
• Dr. Don J. Easterbrook - AKA Denier Don who pretends that the ice sheet on the top of a summit in Greenland is a good proxy for global surface temperatures, but can't even get the chart of Greenland temperatures right!
• Dr. Theodore R. Eck - unknown, described as Fulbright Professor of International Economics, Former Chief Economist of Amoco Corp. and Exxon Venezuela Advisory Board of the Gas Technology Institute and Energy Intelligence Group
• Dr. Gordon J. Fulks is an ordinary run of the mill denier who writes crank opinion pieces for any newspaper dumb enough to print them and is also one of the infamous Cato Institute 100 science deniers
• Dr. William M. Gray - who thinks the water vapour feedback loop is "weakly negative" and that although global surface temperatures have already gone up by 0.8 degrees, a doubling of CO2 should be expected to cause a global warming of no more than about 0.2-0.4oC.  (I can't wait for global temperatures to drop by 0.4 to 0.6 degrees!).  William is also one of the Cato Institute 100 science deniers
• Dr. Craig D. Idso - co-author of the really dumb "CO2 is plant food" and "it's the sun" Not the IPCC report. Craig is also one of the Cato Institute 100 science deniers
• Dr. Anthony R. Lupo - according to DesmogBlog, Anthony is on the payroll of the Heartland Institute.  Despite his rejection of science, he seems to have managed to retain his job and even managed a Chair at the University of Missouri. Anthony is also one of the Cato Institute 100 science deniers
• Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt - who has a habit of anthropomorphising carbon dioxide
• Dr. Thomas P. Sheahen - whose name is spelt in myriad ways all over the internet and who is one of Cato Institute's 100 science deniers
• Dr. James P. Wallace III - unknown.  Described in the writ as an engineer.
• Dr. George T. Wolff - unknown.  He managed a reference in SourceWatch. He was Chair of the EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee for a period back in the 1990s.
   

EPA Endangerment Finding

What this motley lot are trying to argue in their writ is that greenhouse gases don't cause the greenhouse effect.  And they claim to be "respected"!  They take issue with the Endangerment Finding of the EPA and try to refute the lines of evidence described on page 66518 of the Rules and Regulations:

The attribution of observed climate change to anthropogenic activities is based on multiple lines of evidence. The first line of evidence arises from our basic physical understanding of the effects of changing concentrations of greenhouse gases, natural factors, and other human impacts on the climate system. The second line of evidence arises from indirect, historical estimates of past climate changes that suggest that the changes in global surface temperature over the last several decades are unusual. The third line of evidence arises from the use of computer-based climate models to simulate the likely patterns of response of the climate system to different forcing mechanisms (both natural and anthropogenic).

The tropospheric hotspot is a feature of warming from any forcing

First these fake sceptics go on and on about the tropospheric hot spot, which they wrongly characterise as evidence of greenhouse gas warming.  (It's not.  It's a feature of warming from any forcing, not just greenhouse gases, as explained at SkepticalScience and by Bart Verheggen).  Who knows why they pick on that and ignore the expanding oceans, the melting ice and all the other signs of global warming.  It's a strange point with which to lead off their argument.

Earth is heating up

Then they do make a switch to discussing surface temperature, arguing that because not everywhere on earth has heated up at the same rate it's not global warming.  Did I say they are nutters?  They get quite cheeky when they claim:

These data thus demonstrate that EPA’s second line of evidence—the claim that there has been unusual warming on a global, that is, worldwide, basis over the past several decades—is invalid.

Let's see about that:

Data sources: NASA GISTemp, NODC/NOAA Ocean Heat, U Colorado sea level, PIOMAS Arctic Ice

Observations are not inconsistent with climate model projections

They also try to argue that the models are "wrong".  In their writ they include a very weird chart describing it as:

Figure 5 contrasts the forecasts through 2025 with the actual trend line of global average surface temperature (GAST) data from the Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia (CRU) for 2000-2012 (identified as “HadCRUT4 Trend/Forecast” on the chart).:

Data source: the writ from the not respected

HadCRUT4 is observations not a forecast.  Maybe they meant with HadGEM or HadCM, in which case they couldn't argue that observations are out of kilter.  Either that or they are arguing that they've made observations of the future three years and this future they've already observed doesn't match their version of climate models.

Thing is, observations are within the range of modeled climate projections:

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

Here is a chart of a CMIP3 model run, showing that periods of hiatus do show up in some runs - from realclimate.org.

Source: realclimate.org

CO2 is a waste by-product of burning fossil fuels

This mob surely can't be serious when they claim that CO2 isn't an "unwanted by-product" by arguing that it is indeed a waste by-product.  They make it sound as if they want to add CO2 to the atmosphere:

CO2 is not in any sense an unwanted by-product of the production of useful energy. Rather, the combustion of carbon based fuels to produce CO2, and the capture of the energy released by that process, is the whole idea....

And they can't do their case any good by arguing that 82% of energy production still emits CO2!

While a modest portion of energy production in the United States (and other countries in general) comes from non-carbon sources (nuclear, wind, solar, hydro), the proportion that comes from fossil fuels in the U.S. is approximately 82 percent (sic).

From the WUWT comments

Not too many fake sceptics at WUWT are as excited as Anthony Watts about this silly writ.  (Archived here.)

Bloke down the pub says:

December 17, 2013 at 9:49 am
They won’t be allowed to win that.

GoneWithTheWind says:

December 17, 2013 at 9:49 am
I wish them luck but I have no faith in the Supreme court as it is now staffed.

LT confusingly or confusedly calls for more regulation, not less:

December 17, 2013 at 9:55 am
That is good news, the EPA is a burden to society they need tighter regulations placed on them than even a BP refinery.

AleaJactaEst says:

December 17, 2013 at 10:02 am
pi**ing in the wind, snowball in Hell’s, US winning the World Cup, not a prayer, the Arctic will be ice free in our lifetime. You get the message about how much chance this has of succeeding.

NeedleFactory says:

December 17, 2013 at 10:03 am
SCOTUS accepts for hearing only about 5% of the requests for Writ of Certiorari.
Don’t get your hopes up.

pokerguy says:

December 17, 2013 at 10:35 am
“snowballs chance etc.”
Negative defeatists many of you. There are people out there fighting your battles. What are you guys doing, except whining?

Roger Sowell puts the writ in perspective and says:

December 17, 2013 at 1:05 pm
This is one of at least eight briefs filed in this case. This amicus brief is only advisory to the Court. The Court will consider the question or questions raised in the petitioners’ briefs.
More later, hopefully tonight 12-17-13.