Lying Willis Eschenbach defames a prominent scientist and spreads fake news @wattsupwiththat

Willis Eschenbach is one of the sleazier climate disinformers who tells lies quite freely at WUWT (and is a shameless misogynist). Most of the time he pretends to be a "scientist" who is "just wondering" about something or other. He seems to think he was the first to discover the mechanisms of thunderstorms, for example, which is pretty weird. I mean this has probably been part of Meteorology 101 going way back before Willis was a twinkle in his father's eye.

Sleazy pseudo-scientist - Willis Eschenbach
Credit: unknown

Other times (and often at the same time) he loses his cool and lashes out and all and sundry. That's when he brazenly outs himself as a committed liar. Willis has a very short fuse.

Today he ventured beyond the pale, even for a creep like him. He was complaining about an article in Scientific American: The 9 Best Reactions to the House Science Committee’s Breitbart Tweet. He effectively said he no longer reads SciAm much because it isn't anti-science.

But that's not what I want to write about. That's the norm at the fake science blog, WUWT.

Disgusting untrue defamation

What I was much more disgusted with were the lies he told about the renowned scientist Peter Gleick. Willis told several big whoppers. He falsely claimed that Peter Gleick "was forced to quit his job in disgrace". Which is an outright lie. This is what he was referring to - a transition, four years after the incident with the Heartland Institute and completely unrelated. Willis might as well claim that Obama is resigning from the Presidency because he failed the American people.

Then Willis claimed that Dr Gleick "never did say one word of contrition for his actions". Another huge lie. Here is part of what Peter Gleick wrote after he helped expose the extent Heartland Institute's funding of science disinformation. It includes his apology:

I will not comment on the substance or implications of the materials; others have and are doing so. I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

Peter Gleick

Why is it that despicable people like Willis Eschenbach tell such outrageous lies about scientists? Is it because they think it makes them look big and important?

Around the climate blogs: addiction to global mean temperature; and the electricity cost of California's drought

HotWhopper exists to replace deniers' disinformation with science, which means that it's easy to forget there is real work going on out in the world. A couple of items from the Blog Roll are worth reading when you want a break from the conspiracy-theorising nuttery that goes on in the deniosphere.

Addiction to global mean temperature: Isaac Held

First of all, Isaac Held has written about the addiction to global mean temperature and the dangers in considering it in isolation. Isaac Held is a modeler with the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Research Laboratory at Princeton University, although the views expressed are his own, not any official position. He talks about what can happen if you use simple globally averaged box models, without taking account of spatial structure of the response to forcing. His articles are for the advanced climate hawk, usually. But I dare say that most HotWhopper readers wouldn't find this latest article of his difficult.

The energy cost of the Californian drought: Peter Gleick

Moving away from the theoretical to the practical, Peter Gleick has written about the impact of the Californian drought on the cost of its electricity supply. Peter Gleick is President of the Pacific Institute in Oakland. He reports that California has had to replace cheap hydro electricity with more expensive power from natural gas. (Can you take out drought insurance against higher electricity prices?) Drought has been a big problem for electricity supply in Brazil, too.

It's not my fault, sez E. Calvin Beisner, on Syrian drought and conflict

Is Anthony Watts trying to send a message? Was I was off track when I wrote yesterday that "I'm not suggesting that Anthony Watts is part of the Cornwall Alliance or CFACT. "? He's followed up his article from CFACT with an article from the pseudo-religious political group the Cornwall Alliance.

Drought implicated in the Syrian conflict

There is a new paper in PNAS, which is getting a bit of publicity. Anthony Watts has already had a protest article by Pat'n Chip of the CATO Institute, and now has another.

The paper, was by Colin P. Kelley of the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-authors from Columbia University NY. It reports research that suggests that the 2007-2010 drought in the greater Fertile Crescent, which was the most severe in the instrumental record, was made 2 to 3 times more likely with CO2 warming than by natural variability alone. The authors conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.

The supplementary information shows a timeline of events. As always, click to enlarge it:

Fig. S1. Timeline of events leading up to the civil uprising that began in March 2011, along with a graph depicting the net urban influx (in millions) of Syrian IDPs and Iraqi refugees since 2005. Source: Kelley15 SI.

Last year an article on the Red Cross website stated in part:

Between 2006 and 2013, 60% of the Syrian territory experienced the worst long-term drought and the bigger reduction of agricultural crops since thousands of years. The drought in Syria this year is expected to cause an 18% reduction in wheat and 65% decrease in barley production. 

The PNAS paper isn't the first to report on the impact of the drought in Syria. Last year there was a paper by Peter Gleick in the AMS journal "Weather, Climate and Society", which discussed how water shortage was one of the factors contributing to conflict in the region.

"Big F*&ing Deal" says Anthony Watts to the record dry in California

Weather Whiplash - California driest on record, other states wettest on record

I found this on twitter - the source of information, protests at information and disinformation.

California is having its driest year in 119, so far. WI, MI, IO, IL having wettest. http://t.co/cDd2myADpW. Weather whiplash. #Climate
— Peter Gleick (@PeterGleick) July 15, 2013

Big F*&ing Deal says Anthony Watts

Anthony doesn't care about a record drought in California and tweets Big F*&ing Deal -"it's happened before - one thousand, one hundred years ago"!

BFD, about 1,100 years ago, what is now California baked in two droughts, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years.

Right! Similar could be said if a pandemic wiped out 1.4 billion people or 20% of the world's population - it's happened before, BFD!

A few people pointed out that record dry and record wet is a BFD this time around.  Apart from the fact that it's affecting millions of people who are alive now, in AnthonyWatts' own home state, here are some reasons why a record dry is a BFD for California:

• California population: 38 million
• California GDP: approx. $1.95 trillion
• Number of farms in California: approx 82,000 employing approx 36% of farm workers in the USA.

Not to mention all the water required to generate the power to all those farms, homes, factories and services supporting those 38 million residents, as well as the millions of people who rely on food and other goods exported from California.

Dr Gleick says California has water in storage, but drought is still a concern.

Finally Anthony backs off, tweeting that yes, it is a big deal but he angrily protests at the term "weather whiplash" to describe record wet on one side and record dry on the other side of the continent.

Oh it is, but your pointing it out as if it is "weather whiplash" is total unmitigated bullshit Peter. But, it is what you do.

Anthony gets angry when any climate scientist writes about weather or climate.  Especially adverse weather - because it makes people think about global warming.  Anthony is in the business of promulgating disinformation about global warming and he doesn't want any facts to get in his way, let alone actual weather events.

The Weather Whiplash

Peter Gleick linked to a map of the USA showing California with its driest January to June on record and several states having the wettest:

Source: NCDC/NOAA

Ooh! Isn't Anthony Watts a Clever Little Pup...

...such a shame he can't understand Twitter

Anthony Watts is crowing that he put one over Peter Gleick, who he really doesn't like.  The reason he's so jealous of Dr Gleick is that Anthony, despite pretending(?) to be a Dog and paying the annual subscription, didn't find anything worth exposing at the Union of Concerned Scientists, while Peter Gleick didn't even have to pay the subs to expose the Heartland Institute. (Though one could argue that he had to pretend to be a dog.)

Anthony thinks he is victorious because he saw Dr Gleick tweeting this photo of melted traffic lights:

Note the time: 9:25 am

About half an hour later , in his very next tweet, Dr Gleick tweeted that it was "no doubt from some fire..."

Note the time: 10:04 am

Anthony says in his gotcha article (my bold italics):

I took one look at that photo and the 110°F temperature, and my bullshit detector alarm went off. My next thought was “how could Gleick be so dumb as to fall for this?”. I mean GMAFB, if it was air temperature doing it, all parts of the stoplight would show a nearly equal melting effect, and not be lopsided. Surely geniuses like Gleick understand the basic of thermodynamics enough to get this? Apparently not.

I immediately replied to Gleick and explained how this just wasn’t possible:

Now be advised, dear reader.  Don't ever count on Anthony for punctuality, will you.

Note the time of Anthony's first tweet: 10:22 am, Anthony's "immediate" was almost one whole hour after Dr Gleick's first tweet and twenty minutes after he qualified it with "No doubt some fire...." (which was at 10:04 am).

Dr Gleick very sensibly didn't reply to Anthony.  Which probably put Anthony's nose out of joint. But Anthony had up a head of steam and undeterred he immediately tweeted again:

...and caught up in the heat of the moment, Anthony excitedly shot off more in quick succession:

...and then, the pièce de résistance. 

Finally Anthony had it all figured out.  It was a dog water bowl what melted them traffic lights!  Well waddaya know!

Anthony really has a thing for dogs.  He sends his own dog off to become a scientist, now he's blaming poor Fido for burning down a set of traffic lights in Kuwait.

As for the fire in Northern California - not too many Huff Post readers were impressed.

Q 1: Could the authorities be correct and a dog dish start a verandah smouldering?  I'll leave that to the physicists and fire experts out there.  This report suggests they could be.  Living in a fire prone area as I do, stranger things have happened.

Q 2:  The more pertinent question is: could a doggie dish have melted traffic lights in Kuwait as Anthony suggested?  Well that's about as plausible as direct sunlight being able to melt them :D

You will marvel at Anthony Watts' humility

Funny thing is, Anthony proudly posted all his clever tweets to @PeterGleick on WUWT - except the really, really clever inspiration that it was the doggy dish wot dun it. (Scratches head in wonder at how someone of such genius as Anthony can show such humility.)

Post Script

Sorry Peter, I couldn't resist.  The burning traffic lights by doggy dish was just too good to pass up.

Testing WUWT Moderation

Update: Test 2 Fail! See below.


Apparently Anthony Watts has a new system of moderation for his blog, WUWT.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this:

@petergleick @michaelemann Funny, if its blacklisting how come we let you comment there? Entire system is far more open now, less moderation
— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) May 5, 2013

I think Anthony is saying that if he was going to blacklist people, Professors Mann and Gleick would be at the top of his list.

Why, you may ask?  If Anthony wanted to run a science blog with a focus on climate science, wouldn't he want to attract the top scientists in the field?  No?

Update:  It's obviously Wattsonian doublespeak.  Anthony means that Dr Gleick at least is still banned (click here to read then scroll down) and I seriously doubt that Dr Mann would be welcomed there.

WUWT Moderation Test

Since Anthony has blocked me from his twitter feed and told me I'm not welcome to post on WUWT, I thought I'd test out the new WUWT moderation system and see if he really has opened it to all and sundry.  I'm posing a question that's occurred to me every time Dr Spencer posts his UAH charts.  I don't know why WUWT-ers aren't calling for the data, or even the 'raw data', if any of them knew what to do with raw data from satellites.  (WUWT commenters seem to call for 'links to data' a lot but give Dr Spencer a free pass for some reason.)

Test Result 1: Pass

Indeed Anthony has opened up moderation.  My post didn't disappear without trace as in the past.  It didn't even go to a moderation queue.  It looks as if Anthony's now allowing any ratbag scum to make a comment!

Test result 2: Fail!

This next comment lasted a whole hour before Tony got things back in order...

...and decided his new "open policy" is not quite all it was cracked up to be after all.

Click here to see what my comment was all about.

Attention-seeker banned from WUWT

There's more, way down the bottom after Anthony's ad hom dogwhistle got all his lynch mob piling on.  Any excuse to trash a real scientist (Peter Gleick):

Skiphil says:
May 7, 2013 at 4:08 pm  Sou, you must be a special kind of ignorant if you imagine that the “Union of Concerned Scientists” is a “scientific organisation.” No qualifications for membership, specializes in bleating and whining for political activism…. obviously, a renowned “scientific organisation” to be sure. Sou, are you mendacious or merely ignorant?

[note: don't engage this person - she's a persona non grata attention seeker - mod]

It's not that attention seekers aren't welcome at WUWT.  The blog wouldn't have survived this long but for attention seekers.  After all, look at Anthony himself and who he promotes.  There's 'Wondering' Willis E who throws a hissy fit if he senses the least bit of criticism.  And Backward Bob who cannot tolerate anyone disagreeing.  Anyway freedom of speech is considered sacred on WUWT, provided you say what Anthony and his mob want to hear.

It's just that attention seekers must be of the right ideological persuasion and fully paid up members of the scientific illiterati.  Anthony and his mods don't want any competition for him or his plebs <:o

Who is Sou?

Wait, there's still more (and we haven't got to the free steak knives yet).  How's this for conspiracy ideation.  Apologies to Dr Gleick. (But I have to say I'm deeply flattered)...

Jimbo says:
May 7, 2013 at 5:51 pm  Is Sou Peter Gleick?

[Reply: Not sure. But he/she also posts as "A. Crowe". — mod.]

You'll notice that the mod's response puts the lie to this!