The secretive Open Atmospheric Society shows tentative signs of life @wattsupwiththat

Unnoticed by almost everyone, Anthony Watts announced earlier this month that US taxpayers will be subsidising his secret open society, the OAS. He's managed to get 501c3 tax exempt status in the USA. I only found out because he's snuck in another tiny promo at the bottom of an article today. He has also finally provided a name associated with the OAS, announcing himself as "acting executive director" of what now appears to be a one man show, so far. Until now the society didn't have a single person associated with it in any official capacity. It's not announced any Board of Directors yet, despite its Charter mandating it be established by 1 January this year. Not publicly anyway. Maybe its board of directors is a secret.

Anthony has extended the time to be able to call yourself a "founding member" of his society. It's been extended from December last year until the end of December this year.

Does this mean the OAS is not quite brain dead and will awake from it's slumber? Time will tell. At this rate, a lot more time will probably be needed.

Moderation change - no more Smokey

In other news, I was given a tip the other day that long time sock-puppet and lapdog of Anthony Watts, dbstealey aka Smokey plus other aliases has been dropped as moderator. It happened sometime between 10 April this year and June. I didn't see any public announcement or public word of thanks for all the efforts dbstealey has made to rid WUWT of any presence of science commenters, since at least 1 November 2010. Ungrateful is what I call it :(

Related articles

• OAS - The No-Name Society Hides its Light - September 2014
• Verum in obscuro no more: Is OAS, WUWT's secretive open society about to reveal itself to the world? - January 2015
• Another fail at WUWT? Where is the Open Atmospheric Society? - March 2015

WUWT Quote of the Day: Smokey On Cherry-Picking

On the topic of atmospheric CO2 and the fact that it's concentration hasn't been as high in at least 800,000 years, one wonders what Smokey has been smoking.

dbstealey  April 4, 2015 at 2:37 pm (extract)

...I’m not sure myself. But I am pretty sure that CO2 has been up to twenty times higher in the past. Selecting a time frame like ‘800,000 years’ reeks of cherry-picking....

Here's what's been happening with atmospheric CO2. Go towards the end of the video to see the levels over the last 800,000 years.

BTW - put your head in a vice before you read the article by Ronald D "it's insects" Voisin.

Related HotWhopper Articles

• Hitting rock bottom at WUWT: OMG it's insects - Ronald D Voisin is ba-a-a-a-ck!
• It's the Sun, An Ice Age Cometh - Wait! OMG - It's the Insects! ... and more farce from WUWT
• Insects and microbes and OCO-2 conspiracy theories at WUWT
• And more...

Denier Weirdness: Wildely Wrong (behaviour) at WUWT

There's an update below.

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This is an article that goes to the character of Anthony Watts, or his lack of.  He has posted an article by one of his faithful fans, Stephen Wilde.  I'll be kind and suggest that Anthony didn't read it before he put it up.  That happens quite a lot.

Here is a link to the archived original version, courtesy of one who joined in the general guffawing that went on in Twitter.  I've taken a snapshot of the original then the attempt at face-saving.  Spot the difference.

Anthony belatedly tried to save face by adding some time later:

Note: I’m glad to see a number of people pointing out how flawed the argument is. Every once in awhile we need to take a look at the ‘Slayer’ mentality of thinking about radiative balance, just to keep sharp on the topic. At first I thought this should go straight into the hopper, and then I thought it might make some good target practice, so I published it without any caveat.
Readers did not disappoint.

You may have spotted something else.  Not only is Anthony happy to expose his faithful fan to public ridicule, he didn't even have the courtesy to spell Stephen's name correctly as you'll see below.  And there's more in the comments, where Anthony tries to wriggle out of his lack of judgement:

REPLY: the journey to a right or wrong answer is just as important. This was good practice in seeing how well people can sort out the answer. -A 

 And in response to dp, Anthony talks about using Stephen Wilde for target practice:

April 8, 2014 at 9:05 am
This post comes 7 days too late. It is a joke, right?

REPLY: yep, just some fun target practice – Anthony

Stephen Wilde has good reason to object. Not only did Anthony spell his name wrongly, Stephen has learnt a hard lesson in how Anthony treats his "friends". He says (excerpt):

April 8, 2014 at 9:09 am
...Anthony,
All posts here are good target practice for someone.

If you thought it was only good for the hopper then I would have preferred you had said so and not bothered to use it....

REPLY: My opinion on the backradiation and lapse rate silliness is well known, you should have known better than to submit it. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Hopefully you’ll learn something from the comments. – Anthony

Just like he did with Nicola Scafetta recently, Anthony tossed his faithful fan, Stephen Wilde, to the dogs. Anthony acts as if he's caught between a rock and a hard place. He can't accept the science or he'll lose all his fans. Yet he wants to appear to be knowledgeable. His character is such that he'll sacrifice the odd loyal follower when it suits him.

Which is the worse indictment on Anthony? That he might not have realised that the article was dumb when he posted it? Or he did know it was dumb but was happy to ridicule a fan rather than shelve the article.  I think the latter is worse, but Anthony doesn't agree or he would have acted differently.  It goes to character.


I guess this article is more about bad blog behaviour than about the article.  But since you're probably curious - Stephen decided that Kevin Trenberth's energy balance diagram is wrong. What's wrong with Stephen Wilde's article?  Practically everything.  Even the diagram he used is 17 years old.  It's from Kiehl and Trenberth (1997). There have been lots of updates since then.

I don't have the time or the inclination to go through the article itself.  Much of what was wrong was picked up in the WUWT comments.  Stephen Wilde makes a lot of comments trying to justify his stance.  Another comment that you might like is this one, from Anthony Watts' guard dog, sock puppeteer and favoured mod, dbstealey aka Smokey aka dbs aka D Boehm aka who knows what else.  dbstealey admits that he's a greenhouse effect denier and says:

April 8, 2014 at 10:30 am
Duster says: … the inward or down-welling LIR is never 50% of the reradiated IR…

That has been my understanding for a long time now. Greenhouse gases radiate in all directions, therefore a CO2 molecule at, for example, a 20 km altitude would re-radiate an IR photon that it absorbed from the surface in all directions, therefore far less than 50% of the re-radiated photons would return to heat the earth. Most would proceed into outer space. It is only at the surface that a photon has a 50% chance of warming the planet. The rest of the photons radiate into space, cooling the planet.

That is just one of several arguments falsifying the greenhouse gas conjecture.

That's enough from me. I've a busy day ahead.  I'll just let you enjoy the reaction on Twitter.

Its the return of the Killer Slayers of Death! Get it now, before it gets taken down in shame: http://t.co/u1lOlbz8dM
— William Connolley (@wmconnolley) April 8, 2014

@capital_climate No. It's definitely wrong. ;-) @VariabilityBlog @wmconnolley @MobyT9
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) April 8, 2014

.@wmconnolley @ClimateOfGavin @capital_climate @MobyT9 If Watts realised it,that would be worse. Exposing a fellow sceptic to mass ridicule.
— Victor Venema (@VariabilityBlog) April 8, 2014 

 .

Update

After writing this article there were quite a few more comments plus Anthony added more to his note at the bottom of his article (latest archive) In his note he wrote:

Update: Let me add that the author assuredly should have included a link to the underlying document, Earth’s Global Energy Budget by Kiehl and Trenberth 

Go on, try out his link.  It's dead. Not only that but going by the doi (and date) in the link, Anthony meant the link to go to this 2009 paper.

Trenberth, Kevin E., John T. Fasullo, and Jeffrey Kiehl. "Earth's global energy budget." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 90, no. 3 (2009): 311-323.

But the diagram Stephen used was from this 1997 paper:

Kiehl, J. T., and Kevin E. Trenberth. "Earth's annual global mean energy budget." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 78, no. 2 (1997): 197-208.

First stone-caster Anthony Watts:- put up a dead link to the wrong paper. He mixed up the right authors with the wrong title (and paper and year of publication). 

In the more recent comments you'll come across a few people who are feeling uncomfortable about WUWT turning on one of their own and chastising Anthony Watts, as if they accept his line that he knew the article was wrong when he put it up. They also know it could have been any one of them to be humiliated.  There are also more comments from people who are busy claiming that the energy diagram is all wrong because their particular brand of pseudophysics "proves" it.

Smoked by Wretched Baselines or Panic is in the Eye of the Beholder!

I haven't devoted an article to dbstealey before.  He's arguably the biggest fanboi of Anthony Watts.  He is guard dog, moderator, flamer and scientific illiteratum extraordinaire.  Here is a comment which is rare, because in it he doesn't ad hom anyone.  In fact he praises another person who made a comment.

On WUWT yesterday, dbstealey said:

July 14, 2013 at 3:26 am Nik, I love that chart! It clearly shows that when a non-zero baseline chart is used, the long term rising temperature trend shows no acceleration, despite the 40% rise in CO2. A zero baseline chart, OTOH, falsely shows accelerating temperatures. Your trend chart corrects that misconception.

The chart he loves is shown below. Click to enlarge it.

 I'm guessing, but what I think Smokey is saying is the chart second from the bottom with the words "Don't Panic" written on it appears to him to correct a false impression that warming is accelerating.

That chart itself is identical to the one immediately above it in every respect bar one.  Despite what Smokey says, both have a zero baseline.  It's set at the twentieth century mean.  Both show identical data.  The only differences are that there is a linear trend line drawn on the bottom chart and the base line is shown by a horizontal line on the upper charts; plus they have instructions written on them - one warns the reader that one "deceives the eye" while another tells the reader "Don't Panic".

As for acceleration, where the chart rises from below to above the trendline it suggests the temperature is rising faster than the long term trend.  It's the slope that indicates how fast the temperature is rising.  Where the slope is steeper the rise is more rapid.

Since Smokey likes charts, I've put together some other charts of the same data (NCDC/NOAA) for him to ponder.  Click any to see the larger versions.

This first one is the "no need to panic" chart.  There's only a little bit of warming right up the top and Smokey will find it harder to see the zero baseline.

He might not like this next one because it shows the zero baseline more clearly.  Still, he can be comforted by the fact that there is not much warming above the baseline:

This second one is "maybe a smidgen of alarm is in order", showing more warming.  This one is animated with a bar chart and a line chart:

Here is the "time to panic if it's not already too late" chart. This one is also animated with a bar chart and a line chart:

I should add that the linear trend line in all of them is not from the beginning (1880), it's from cold 1911 to the present.  Not that that should make any difference to Smokey, who will undoubtedly think that all the charts are very different from each other!

All this goes to show that science deniers are a weird mob. You'd have thought that in the years spent denying climate science, Smokey (and Anthony Watts) would have learnt how to read a temperature chart and what an anomaly from a baseline means.  But no!

More WUWT Denier Weirdness: Long Time Passing...

Or...Where have all the "warmists" gone? 

justthefactswuwt says:

April 26, 2013 at 8:41 pm
dbstealey says: April 26, 2013 at 8:15 pm  I would save that excellent and fun question to sandbag the next presumptuous Warmist commenter pretending to pass himself off as a climate expert....It would be even better asked in person! ☺

I can’t even get a Warmist to comment on my threads these days, there has to be someone out there who can explain how this all ties back to anthropogenic CO2 emissions… I wonder if the Warmist blog troll funding is drying up…

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Sandbagging? Warmist blog troll funding? Paranoid conspiracy theorising much?

jtfw only needs to ask Smokey/dbstealey or Anthony Watts.

Everyone who has the temerity to make a sensible, knowledgeable comment about climate science is automatically banned from WUWT.  If not immediately, then eventually.  Usually with the most scathing comment Anthony's little mind can come up with, viz: "Anonymous Coward".  But the Anonymous Coward tag is a last resort when, despite his best googling efforts, Anthony can't find and post their name, current employment and personal contact details as he bans them.

Congrats to WUWT and Poptech

I've been poking fun at all the pseudo-science, conspiracy nuttery and fake scepticism that goes on at WUWT.  Now I'll give some credit where credit is due:

Congratulations!

Congratulations to WUWT for garnering 1 million 'I don't understand it but it's brilliant ... that proves we are heading for an ice age ... climate science is a hoax' comments from the tin foil hat brigade.

And special congrats to Poptech, who arch-denier and moderator DB Stealey (aka Smokey aka D Boehm aka dbs) selected as posting the one millionth comment.

The dubious honour couldn't have gone to a more suitable person.  Poptech typifies what WUWT is all about.

Poptech's winning comment didn't include the word 'scam' or 'hoax'.  However it was  in the conspiracy ideation ballpark (linking 'fiat money' and government 'threat' and 'coercion') and it was one of the 800+ comments on the "someone stole some emails therefore climate science is a hoax" thread, so close enough.


Update: 20/6/13 Poptech in the comments has kindly provided a link to a link to another take down of his list at the Carbon Brief - Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 and a link to his rebuttal of the rebuttals in the comments.