New Year's Resolution - I've been told to lift my game

Update - see below.

I've had a strong message to lift my game from none other than Lucia Liljegren, who runs a blog somewhere in deniersville. The science I reported these past few days has not persuaded her of the following:

• That the Greenland ice sheets are quite unlikely to make a speedy "recovery" any time soon
• That CO2 really doesn't lag temperature by 800 years therefore climate science is not a hoax
• That NASA's OCO-2 team isn't really playing a giant hoax on the world
• That it really isn't insects and germs which are causing global warming
• That ocean pH really is dropping
• That temperatures in Finland really are rising
• That the warming in the UK really isn't being caused by sunshine
• That holidays really should be happy times
• That humans really can't be exonerated of the rise in atmospheric CO2
• That there really are such things as grassfires
• That Pat'n Chip really didn't do a good job with their poster at AGU
• That it really does get quite dark in the Arctic in the northern hemisphere winter
• That clouds are quite fascinating (I must add the second installment to that article)

Until now I'd thought of Lucia, when I thought of her at all, which was rarely, I'd imagined her to be a denier of the lukewarmish variety. If science doesn't persuade a lukewarmish denier and they remain convinced that the pseudo-scientific crap at WUWT is undemolished, then I really have to lift my game. (Of course it could just be that she's feeling a bit left out, not rating a mention here very often - though a search up top shows she's been featured here on more than one occasion.)

Any ideas, people? Simpler? Shorter? Less science? More science? 

And no, don't tell me less snark :)

BTW - This is a serious question. Here's a chance for you to have your say.

PS - Go have a look at Paige Brown Jarreau's research project on science blogs. She's got a clever interactive graphic to go with it. Victor Venema alerted me to it. Stoat was suitably impressed as well :) (While Lucia was trying her best to score points for sadly-isolated Anthony Watts of WUWT.)

Update: Lucia has kindly responded on Twitter, but was unable to think of (or put into words) any suggestions for making it easier for her and other deniers to understand science. It may be that the problem isn't me after all. Or it could be that the blog format isn't suitable for some people. If I had the talent, I'd try comic strips. I remember one denier at HotCopper complaining that a science paper had too many words and not enough pictures - really and truly. They did.

Update2: Lucia has added two ideas - to pace myself - good tip. To not make snide remarks about Jim Steele's ongoing nasty baseless personal one-way vendetta with Camille Parmesan. I'll pass. She also said that writing ideas on Twitter is difficult. She hasn't yet twigged that she could write more than 140 characters here at HW. Which is a sort of tip - to try to factor in the intellectual capability and limited imagination of deniers when I write.

BUSTED: How Ridiculous Richard Tol makes myriad bloopers and a big fool of himself and proves the 97% consensus

Update - see below.


Anthony Watts is all excited (archived here, latest here) because economist Richard Tol finally found a journal to publish a paper he's been trying to get someone to publish for nearly a year.  Anthony wrote, mischievously and wrongly a headline and opening comment:

BUSTED: Tol takes on Cook’s ’97% consensus’ claim with a re-analysis, showing the claim is ‘unfounded’

A new paper by Dr. Richard Tol published today in ScienceDirect, journal of Energy Policy, shows that the Cook et al. paper claiming that there is a 97% consensus among scientists is not just impossible to reproduce (since Cook is withholding data) but a veritable statistical train wreck rife with bias, classification errors, poor data quality, and inconsistency in the ratings process. The full paper is available below.

Anthony Watts is wrong, and wrong and wrong again - he's busted!

Firstly, Richard Tol didn't do any reanalysis. He didn't categorise all the abstracts himself. He just did some wonky sums and got the wrong answer, based on flawed assumptions and more. And he threw in a large number of unfounded speculative statements. Not only did Richard not show the claim was "unfounded", he wrote that he accepts the main finding of Cook13.

Secondly, thirdly and fourthly etc, John Cook isn't withholding any data. He provided more than just all the data anyone would need to repeat the analysis (here and here), he even provided a web tool to help people who wanted to to categorise abstracts for themselves. John Cook provided all the data needed to reproduce the analysis. Richard Tol didn't even try to do so. As for the quality of the data - it's a complete set of around 12,000 abstracts returned using a Web of Science search of key terms. So I don't know if Anthony is trying to say that Web of Science isn't any good.  Anthony probably doesn't know either. He just likes blowing hot air.

Anthony's wrong on another point, too. The full paper isn't available at the site Anthony linked to unless you're a paid up subscriber or are willing to pay for the privilege.  (You can read one of Richard's earlier rejected versions here, which I got from Richard's own blog. It's not much different to the final paper.)

This is a very long article, although it barely scratches the surface in the myriad flaws in Ridiculous Richard's paper. If you're on the home page, click here for more.

Curry and Watts - dejected, rejected

The deniers really are running out of stuff to complain about.  Judith Curry is getting nuttier by the day (archived here) and now anti-science blogger Anthony Watts has joined in the fray at WUWT (archived here).

Three out of five GRL papers get rejected

Three years ago a paper got rejected by Geophysical Research Letters.  GRL is quite a prestigious publication and according to a paper in BAMS by David M Schultz, it rejects 59.2% of submissions.  That's not counting author withdrawals or submissions transferred to other journals.  That means that just going by odds, if you submit a paper to GRL it's more likely to be rejected than published.

A motley lot of deniers

The paper purported to be a comparison of climate models with observations.  The authors of the paper are a who's who of deniers - Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. Knappenberger (Pat 'n Chip), John R. Christy (who tells fibs to US Congress), Chad S. Herman (who I don't know) and Lucia M. Liljegren (a nitpicking blogger who is a science denier of the "lukewarmer" variety).

After the first rejection, this motley lot called in James D. Annan to try to resurrect the paper and package it in way that would be acceptable to the journal.  This didn't succeed either.  I've no idea why James decided to throw in his lot with that lot.  According to Judith Curry he was one of the reviewers for the first draft.  Maybe he thought he could turn it into something useful.  But again according to Judith Curry, the next draft was reviewed by four people, all of whom recommended it not be published.

An excuse for Judith Curry to unfairly wail "not fair"

Judith Curry, who converted to denialism some time ago, has decided to make a big deal out of this, acting as if the journal is 'gatekeeping' against sceptics.  She won't entertain the notion that the paper didn't meet the requirements of GRL, which it obviously didn't.  Although she says she "couldn’t see why it was rejected", she's not a climate modeler nor is she a statistician, so what would she know?  And even if there were "nothing wrong with it" that doesn't automatically mean that GRL would have accepted it.  Journals reject papers for many reasons other than being "wrong".

Anthony Watts has picked up the story too.  (Archived here.)  He's always keen to promote the "gatekeeper" myth that papers get rejected because they are written by fake sceptics rather than because they don't meet the standard or other criteria of the journal.  He's also probably preparing his readers that his own still pending paper won't meet the criteria of any decent journal.

Remember, this all happened three years ago.  James Annan wrote about it on his blog back in May 2010. Why they didn't bother to try another journal is anyone's guess.  Maybe the feedback from reviewers discouraged them from doing so.  Or maybe they just wanted an excuse to cry "gatekeepers".

An excuse for Judith Curry to sing the praises of disinformers

The reason for Judith bringing all this up seems to be so that she can once again sing her praises of disinformation peddlers - David Rose and John Christy.

Judith Curry "came out" as a science denier quite a while ago.  She no longer pretends to be "building bridges".  She's pitched her tent with the disinformers and is now a disinformer in her own right.  Anthony Watts, needless to say, welcomes her with open arms.

If you want to read the paper itself you can do so here to save you having to wade through the nonsense on Curry's blog.  James Annan's blog includes some discussion of the analysis if anyone is interested in the unpublished work.

Just another nutter

I'll leave you with what is probably the denier quote of the day, from Judith Curry this time:

And we see where ‘pause denial’ has led the IPCC, potentially to a crisis point in the AR5.  It will be very interesting to see how this plays out in Stockholm next week.

Crisis point?  Judith Curry really is just another nutter of the David Rose  and Heartland Institute variety.

Approaching crisis point

There is no 'crisis point' yet - although we are rapidly approaching it.  The sooner we act the less it will cost and the greater the likelihood that human civilisation will survive. The latest cost estimate is one per cent of GDP but the cost will rise the longer we leave it.

From the WUWT comments

Just a couple, because they typify WUWT denier weirdness and paranoid conspiracy (archived here):

gopal panicker says:

September 20, 2013 at 10:05 am
cooling started three years ago…have fun

GunnyGene says:

September 20, 2013 at 10:16 am
It was obviously rejected because it doesn’t support the political agenda of global domination by Progressives,etc. You are familiar with Agenda 21, I presume?