Unbalanced Antagonism: The UWA Vice-Chancellor stands up to a "vexatious" blogger

Update (9 April 2014)

Professor Ugo Bardi resigns in protest :

"I am taking the strongest action I can take, that is I am resigning from "Chief Specialty Editor" of Frontiers in protest against the behavior of the journal in the "Recursive Fury" case. I sent to the editors a letter today, stating my intention to resign."

---

Addendum - I've added an addendum on "psychological disorders".

---

...or "Go Jump", Stephen McIntyre!

At WUWT Anthony Watts posted a teaser at WUWT (archived here), which was the first bit of an article by Steve McIntyre from ClimateAudit (archived here, updated here).  Steve's nose is out of joint because he couldn't get personal details (ie IP addresses) of people who responded to the "moon landing" survey conducted by Stephan Lewandowsky of UWA and colleagues.

Steve McIntyre is a Canadian blogger who is or used to be involved in mining companies. He spends a lot of time trying to prove all the scientists are wrong.  His main tools are rhetoric, hyperbole, MS Excel, R and a perpetual sense of aggrievement that few outside of the denier blogosphere will give him the time of day.  He has no scientific expertise in climate or any relevant qualifications - and it shows. His personal qualities of obsessive compulsiveness, innate paranoia, general ungraciousness, tendency to deceive when it suits him, a reputation for shifting from request to harassment, and generally unlikeable cyber-personality fit him well for the role he's chosen at this late stage in his life.

Steve got a response from UWA, which he isn't shy about sharing, so I see no need to be reluctant to post the letter either.

Here it is.  It's from the Vice-Chancellor himself as posted by Steve McIntyre (archived here).

Dear Mr McIntyre,

I refer to your series of emails to University officers including Professor Maybery and myself (which you have copied to other recipients including the Australian Research Council) in which you request access to Professor Lewandowsky’s data.

I am aware that you have made inflammatory statements on your weblog “Climate Audit” under the heading “Lewandowsky Ghost-wrote Conclusions of UWA Ethics Investigation into “Hoax”” including attacks on the character and professionalism of University staff. It is apparent that your antagonism towards Professor Lewandowsky’s research is so unbalanced that there is no useful purpose to be served in corresponding with you further. I regard your continued correspondence to be vexatious and there will be no further response to your requests for data.

Yours faithfully,
Professor Paul Johnson,
Vice-Chancellor

About bloody time, is all I can say.  No, I don't mean that Professor Johnson should have replied sooner.  I mean it's about bloody time someone other than the harassed researchers themselves told Steve McIntyre where to go.  And I'm proud to say it was the Vice-Chancellor of an Australian university that told him to go jump in no uncertain terms.

Of course I don't know if the Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia has ever put him straight or any of the other Vice-Chancellors or Rectors or whoever is the Person-in-Charge of different universities in the world.  Whether they have or they haven't, Steve has now made public a letter than I hope will be produced and waved in front of every single one of them if one of their academic or general staff ever gets approached by The Auditor or one of his followers doing his bidding.

If you think that the Vice-Chancellor's response was a bit over-the-top, it's not.  Just have a gander at this. Steve is obsessed, frustrated because he isn't able to understand the stats. He accuses Professor Lewandowsky of fraud and fakery in multiple articles.  He even dreams up conspiracy theories of his own.  And while you read through his litany of articles note that he doesn't put up multiple dumb articles every day like Anthony Watts.  He posts maybe two or three a week on average - and that's in a prolific month.

Notice how Steve focuses almost solely on Professor Lewandowsky and ignores the fact that the moon landing paper had two other authors, including Prof. Dr Klaus Oberauer and A/Prof Gilles Gignac.  I expect that Stephan Lewandowsky and Klaus Oberauer are more than sufficiently able to apply statistical analysis to their research.  Still, they brought Gilles Gignac on board.  Gilles is an expert in psychometric analysis.  He's worked for commercial organisations as well as his academic research.

Here are just a few of the articles by Steve McIntyre:

Anatomy of the Lewandowsky Scam (a large part of this article was a long complaint about how people use the word "deniers" when referring to people who deny science, as in "climate science deniers".)

Trying (Unsuccessfully) to Replicate Lewandowsky - where he confesses that the statistics used by the researchers (and common in cognitive science) is beyond him.  He can't treat the data like he does core tops.  In this one he even says "My guess is that SEM either does not permit “robust” techniques or that Lewandowsky didnt know how to use them."  But there is more to statistics than Steve knows or understands.  Steve is trying to learn some new statistics but doesn't have what it takes and as far as I can tell, he's never bothered to learn in all the time he's had since. (See here and  here for discussions of the stats. And here's a short introduction to Exploratory Factor Analysis if you're interested.)

I did a search for "exploratory factor analysis" on climate audit and didn't see anywhere that Steve McIntyre used the term, though I found a page where some other people drew it to his attention (which he seems to have ignored). Which leads into where Steve accuses Professor Lewandowsky of being a conspiracy theorist:

Conspiracy-Theorist Lewandowsky Tries to Manufacture Doubt

Lewandowsky’s Fake Correlation - another article in which Steve accuses fakery and shows his incompetence at stats.

More Deception in the Lewandowsky Data As well as the title, this article is significant for being the only mention of a "replicate" survey conducted at WUWT, which Steve didn't analyse properly and which was subsequently buried.  AFAIK it never ever saw the light of day from that point onward.

Oh, that's just a small number of the multiple articles by Steve McIntyre accusing Professor Lewandowsky of all sorts of nefarious actions (refer to "Recursive Furies" to see subscribing nefarious intent can be a marker of conspiracy ideation :D)  And how Steve liberally spatters his headlines and articles with words such as "scam", "fake", "deception" and "fraudulent".  There are loads more where that came from - and more and still more and there's even a fourth page of them.


The letter from the University of Western Australia Vice-Chancellor will not help Steve McIntyre next time he decides to host and foster a harassment campaign against climate scientists (or cognitive scientists or climate philosophers).


PS Steve has said he's trying to get someone else to surreptitiously get data for him to misconstrue.  Guess who else put up his hand. None other than Eric "eugenics" Worrall!

Addendum on psychological disorders

I noticed in his email to the Head of the School of Psychology at UWA (which Steve signed with "regards"!), that Steve McIntyre states that in the Recursive Fury paper, the authors, or to be precise, that one of the authors (Stephan Lewandowsky - not sure how Steve figured which author wrote what):

"purported to diagnose that I have psychological disorders".  

I looked for any mention of Steve in that paper and I didn't see anywhere that alleged he had "psychological disorders".  All I found was one reference in the text (to McI) and his name in Table 3, listing four separate hypotheses on his blog, which between them could be classified as NI=nefarious intent; NS=nihilistic skepticism; PV=persecuted victim; MbW=must be wrong; NoA=no accident; and UCT=unreflexive counterfactual thinking.

I didn't see anything in the paper that states that evidence of conspiracy ideation means a person has "psychological disorders".  The words "psychological disorder" were not used in the paper. There was this sentence that could indicate where conspiracist ideation rates in terms of "psychological disorder"

We suggest that conspiracist ideation, like most other psychological constructs (e.g., extraversion), represents a continuum that finds expression to varying extents in theories of varying scope.

Does this mean that Steve thinks all extraverts have a psychological disorder?

Perhaps Steve's comment is more evidence of PV=persecuted victim with a hint of MbW=must be wrong.     Then again I CbW=could be wrong, because I'm not an expert in cognitive science.

Added by Sou 30 March 2014.

From the WUWT comments

The usual moans and lies from WUWT.

Lil Fella from OZ says ... er what?:

March 28, 2014 at 5:45 pm
Let’s close ranks!

Velcro tells a big fat lie and says:

March 28, 2014 at 6:25 pm
Never expect a university with ivy on the walls to ever change or admit its errors. No wonder UWA is now the last ranked university in WA

No it's not ranked last. It's ranked first.  There are five universities in Western Australia - Curtin, Edith Cowan, Murdoch, University of Notre Dame and the University of Western Australia.  Of these, only one is ranked among the top 200 universities in the world and that's the University of Western Australia, on The Times Higher Education World University Rankings.  It ranks 7th in Australia on this world ranking.


Ric Werme says "I'll show you, Professor Lewandowsky" - ha ha ha ha ha

March 28, 2014 at 6:17 pm
That does it, I’m voting for Lewandowsky as ‘Climate Duplicitist of the Year’ award. Perhaps there should be a team category too.

hunter is a master orator - not! and says:

March 28, 2014 at 6:16 pm
That is how guilty arrogant babies respond after being called out.

bushbunny points out that UWA is not all bad :) - except he's wrong AFAIK, and says:

March 28, 2014 at 6:35 pm
Didn’t Tim Flannery also work there once? Why don’t you check that out.

Science deniers use a flawed discarded IPCC chart, but accept Cowtan and Way (for the most part)

Science deniers have resorted to once again using a flawed discarded chart from an earlier draft of the AR5 IPCC report.  This time to consider the new paper by Cowtan and Way, which I've already written about here.

The denialati didn't have to use a flawed, discarded chart.  Though it's kind of cute that they've finally found something produced by the IPCC which they like.  Most of the time science deniers reject everything from the IPCC but when it comes to something the IPCC has rejected, they suddenly decide they'll embrace it.

Which discarded IPCC chart do science deniers hang onto so tenaciously? No, it's not the discarded chart showing short term projections (to 2015) for "Estimated changes in the observed globally and annually averaged surface temperature (in °C) since 1990 compared with the range of projections from the previous IPCC assessments".  It's the discarded IPCC chart showing short term projections (to 2015) for which "the focus is now on the range of selected scenario projections from AR4".

Not only do the deniers want to use a discarded chart, they want to use a discarded chart that uses older AR4 CMIP3 models (see below), not the discarded chart using CMIP5 models used by AR5.

One thing though, it looks as if some of the deniers have accepted some actual climate science.  Anthony Watts and Stephen McIntyre seem to have accepted Cowtan and Way.

Deniers refuse to see the envelope

It not all roses though.  Some of the science deniers reject what their chosen discarded chart purports to represent.  (I hope you're still able to follow the denier trail heading down their convoluted topsy turvey denier pathway.)The chart itself has grey shading (see below) that depicts the "90% uncertainty estimate due to observational uncertainty and internal variability based on the HadCRUT4 temperature data for 1951-1980".

Anthony Watts, probably because it's beyond him, writes a headline: simply copies and pastes a teeny bit from The Auditor's blog (CA archived here), writing (WUWT archived here):

In the context of IPCC SOD FIgure 1.5 (or similar comparison of models and observations), CW13 is slightly warmer than HadCRUT4 but the difference is small relative to the discrepancy between models and observations; the CW13 variation is also outside the Figure 1.5 envelope.

Well, first of all the fake sceptics are using a flawed chart to misrepresent the data.  Secondly, it's not "outside" the 90% envelope even on the flawed chart.

Oh boy! They really are a sad desperate bunch of scallywags, aren't they.

Just so you can see why science deniers use a rejected and flawed chart, this is the chart rejected by the IPCC but which the Auditor chose to depict:

Below is the closest chart in the final AR5 draft of the IPCC WG1 report, showing AR4 and CMIP3 projections out to a more realistic 2035.  Observations are within the range depicted by the models:

Source: IPCC AR5 TFE.3 Figure 1 page TS-96

And here, for comparison are temperature projections using the latest AR5 CMIP5 projections:

Source: IPCC AR5 TFE.3 Figure 1 page TS-96

Science denier's cannot help themselves...

I went to The Auditor's blog and read this (archived here):

That there are continuing defects in HadCRU methodology should hardly come as a surprise to CA readers. 

It reads like a denier interpretation, emphasising the words "continuing defects".  It's true that HadCRUT still doesn't provide for the Arctic properly.  Cowtan and Way call it a "bias" in their abstract. It's acknowledged by scientists that HadCRUT is biased because of the way HadCRUT is constructed.  Because of the gaps in the coverage particularly in the Arctic.  The fact that Cowtan and Way used a hybrid of different temperature sources shows that their method is not straightforward and I don't expect it would be easy to incorporate all the measures they used into a monthly update of HadCRUT.  Hopefully a reader will shed more light on that.

The Auditor then wrote this, which Anthony Watts omitted:

Attempts to reconcile and/or explain discrepancies between HadCRU and GISS also seem worthwhile to me.

I would not accept any praise coming from The Auditor.  It's not worth a brass razoo.  I'd only accept praise from scientists who specialise in studying the global surface temperature anomaly.  And there's plenty of praise to go around for Cowtan and Way from scientific sources without having to take any notice of the denialati.

Filling gaps in global surface temperature coverage

In any case, Cowtan and Way didn't do the work to reconcile or explain discrepancies between HadCRUT and GISTemp.  The reason they did the work was to fill in the gaps in global surface temperature coverage.  The results are what they are.

Here again is the video explaining the research and showing where the gaps are, the before and after Cowtan and Way:

The following is an excerpt from an article co-authored by Kevin Cowtan, Robert Way and Dana Nuccitelli at SkepticalScience.com (my bold italics):

The study, authored by Kevin Cowtan from the University of York and Robert Way from the University of Ottawa (who both also contribute to Skeptical Science), notes that the Met Office data set only covers about 84 percent of the Earth's surface. There are large gaps in its coverage, mainly in the Arctic, Antarctica, and Africa, where temperature monitoring stations are relatively scarce. ...

...Dr. Cowtan is an interdisciplinary computational scientist who recognized some potential solutions to this temperature coverage gap problem.

"Like many scientists, I'm an obsessive problem solver. Sometimes you see a problem and think 'That's mine, I can make a contribution here'"

The article goes on to describe how Cowtan and Way filled the gaps in coverage:

In their paper, Cowtan & Way apply a kriging approach to fill in the gaps between surface measurements, but they do so for both land and oceans. In a second approach, they also take advantage of the near-global coverage of satellite observations, combining the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) satellite temperature measurements with the available surface data to fill in the gaps with a 'hybrid' temperature data set. They found that the kriging method works best to estimate temperatures over the oceans, while the hybrid method works best over land and most importantly sea ice, which accounts for much of the unobserved region.
Both of their new surface temperature data sets show significantly more warming over the past 16 years than HadCRUT4. This is mainly due to HadCRUT4 missing accelerated Arctic warming, especially since 1997.

It's been warming!

And the result was that the rate of increase in surface temperature between 1997 and 2012 turns out to be greater than that depicted by both HadCRUT4 and GISTemp.

Cowtan & Way investigate the claim of a global surface warming 'pause' over the past 16 years by examining the trends from 1997 through 2012. While HadCRUT4 only estimates the surface warming trend at 0.046°C per decade during that time, and NASA puts it at 0.080°C per decade, the new kriging and hybrid data sets estimate the trend during this time at 0.11 and 0.12°C per decade, respectively.

From the WUWT comments

Below are a few of the comments from Anthony Watts WUWT article (archived here).  Although Stephen McIntyre seems to accept the findings, most of Anthony Watts' WUWT rabble can't bring themselves to do so.

R Taylor gets what is "supposed to be" backwards.  I guess R Taylor hasn't heard of Arctic amplification and says:

November 18, 2013 at 2:15 pm
Pity the polar data, tortured into an inadequate confession. After all, greenhouse theory says the tropical troposphere is supposed to warm first and fastest.

catweazle666 is plain weird and thinks that if the surface heats up it must mean the oceans don't, and says:

November 18, 2013 at 2:30 pm
What happened to all the heat that was hiding deep in the oceans?
How did it suddenly migrate to the Arctic – retrospectively too, apparently.
Clearly this is groundbreaking new scientific theory!

prjindigo cannot cope with any new scientific findings and decides that knowledge is a "fake religion" and says:

November 18, 2013 at 2:36 pm
So one man’s BS doesn’t match another’s? Its starting to look like the data sets are all fake religions.

Ugh! Tedious Bob Tisdale promises another lengthy impenetrable boring cut and paste from his endless wrong diatribes and says:

November 18, 2013 at 3:00 pm
Darn, Steve M beat me to the apparent 2005 breakpoint in the difference between the HADCRUT and Cowart and Ray (2013) data. My versions are here:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/figure-44.png
My post will hopefully be finished tomorrow and I’ll explain why that’s odd…among other things the warmistas have overlooked.

ROM says he's gone and made a fool of himself at Lucia's blog, apparently not realising that the Cowtan and Way analysis is from 1979 to 2012.  Nor does he understand that the purpose of the study was not to come to a predefined outcome.  It was done to fill in the gaps in the coverage.  The findings were what they were.  You'll see that ROM equates discovering new knowledge with being raped.  What a nutter!

November 18, 2013 at 3:12 pm
I have just posted this on Lucia’s “The Blackboard”

As a humble member of the public who is expected to pay for most of this climate science research guff and who as a member of that low life uninformed public who are expected to lay down and be data raped by every passing wannabe climate scientist, it seems to me that the finangling [ I could use some quite unprintable language to describe this ] of the data where no data exists to get a result that ensures that what is seen to be happening in the climate, isn’t according to the non existent data.

In this case attempting to dispel the idea that there is a “Pause” in the warming using some fancy and argued about statistical techniques applied to that non existent data taken from a region where there are almost no records to justify the claim there isn’t a Pause of over 16 years running in the climb in global temperatures.

So why is it that this particular statistical lash-up couldn’t also be applied to those 20 years of supposed increasing temperatures from 1978 to 2007, a period which is only 4 years longer than the Pause and on which 20 years the entire global warming meme / ideology is based.
Using Cowtan & Way’s statistical techniques and the same identical data base of temperatures it could probably be proven that there was no increase in global temperatures during that 20 years of supposed warming.

milodonharlani is a purist denier.  He doesn't "believe" the science (excerpt):

November 18, 2013 at 5:53 pm
The models aren’t based upon either physics or observations. They’re based upon GIGO assumptions not in evidence, indeed contrary to all actual observations & physical evidence.

Dumb Scientist does a terrific job of informing the denialati and responding to their questions at WUWT, copping a fair bit of flak in the process (archived here).

---

Kevin Cowtan and Robert G. Way (2013), Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/qj.2297

Deniers are running out of puff

Update - see below for comments from the WUWT illiterati.

Anthony Watts, who doesn't even have bachelor degree, has promoted the silliest blurb from McIntyre (a wannabe climate scientist - failed) about "most" climate scientists being "high school teachers, if they were lucky".

By "climate scientist" one presumes he includes people with multiple qualifications from Yale, Oxford, U Cal. Berkeley, University College London, Wheaton College, MIT, Columbia and so on and so forth.

Climate scientists who have published widely in all the leading science journals including Science, Nature, Journal of Climate, PNAS etc etc.

And people who hold posts at leading universities and scientific research institutions.

The deniers really are running out of puff, aren't they.  Do they realise how truly dumb and ignorant that misplaced jibe makes them seem?  They probably think it makes them sound "clever".  Life members of the scientific illiterati.

Oh, I should have mentioned too, that most of Anthony's readers aren't familiar with Callendar's work.  He's running a poll on it.

Comments from the Illiterati

As if to underline the point that WUWT is purely for the illiterati, here are some comments (so you don't have to wade through them all yourself).

Luther Wu says - yes, really, this is a straight copy and paste:

August 4, 2013 at 8:59 am  Steve McIntyre made what appears to be a simple statement of the obvious, but is really a stinging indictment of the nature of political power in the free world.

Bill H says you don't need climate scientists or even high school teachers when you can have "any Jr High School kid":

August 4, 2013 at 9:30 am  Most do not understand the majority of the warming has already happened with regard to CO2. Above about 800ppm the effect is severely diminished and is the reason the earth survived bouts of 4,000 ppm while having both heat and glaciation at that level. This simple observation takes CO2 out of the running as the major driver of climate. And any Jr High School kid with basic science can figure this one out..

Who needs climate scientists when you have Richard111.  Is he arguing for global cooling by battery?

August 4, 2013 at 9:51 am  Basic logic from a layman. Every CO2 molecule in the atmosphere is on its own and being battered by some 2,499 plus other molecules. This battering is termed conduction and the CO2 molecule will be at whatever the local air temperature is, somewhere between say +15 to -50C depending on altitude up the air column. This means the CO2 molecule is too warm to readily absorb radiation in the 15 micron band from any source. But in that temperature range the CO2 will happily emit photons in the15 micron band. Just assume the molecule is at an altitude such that the earth horizon is 10 degrees below the molecule’s horizontal plane. Thus if the photon is emitted above the horizon the photon is probably lost to space and if below the horizon it could reach the surface. What are the number of upward directions as opposed to the downward directions? I make it 200 x 360 = 72,000 possible directions up and opposed to 160 x 360 = 57,600 downwards directions. Therefore there is a 25% better chance of the photon escaping to space than reaching the surface and that chance improves with the altitude. Once the molecule has emitted that photon that particular molecule will be at a temperature of -79C, not for long with all the battering but this is a cooling effect in the atmosphere.

All this clearly implies 15 micron radiation from CO2 in the atmosphere is certainly reaching the surface but it is not ‘back radiation’ and certainly less than claimed by CAGW adherents.

Well, tear my logic apart, I need to learn.

Or maybe milodonharlani's "homeostatic science" is your preference today:

August 4, 2013 at 10:15 am  Callendar’s graph shows a climate sensitivity of about 1.5 degree C for the doubling of CO2 concentration from three to six molecules per 10,000 air molecules. Sounds about right for water vapor pressure of 7.5mm of Hg, but I’ve never experimentally measured it myself. His finding is probably close to the actual that would be observed, since IMO positive & negative feedbacks tend to cancel each other out on the homeostatic earth.

Of course, if you try to make a comment that doesn't suit Anthony's denier meme, you're told off in no uncertain terms.  Ah no.  Did some more checking.  It looks as if Greg House is a slayer and Anthony doesn't like slayers:

August 4, 2013 at 10:31 am
[snip - sorry Greg, you've hijacked too many threads here at WUWT, and I already know what you have to say. Feel free to be as upset as you wish. - Anthony]

Greg House is surprised, he shouldn't be. Anthony doesn't permit dragon slayers at WUWT, except for some favoured people:

August 4, 2013 at 10:39 am  Really, comment deleted? Unbelievable.

REPLY: Like I said above, when snipping your comment, I’m not going to allow you to threadjack. Feel free to be as upset as you wish – Anthony

Not that Anthony doesn't allow/encourage people who argue for global cooling, like Bruce Cobb:

August 4, 2013 at 10:56 am  The rather close correlation is interesting, and one that Alarmists in particular should make note of. However, with cooling likely in coming decades, I would expect to see the correlation break down, with C02 continuing up.

Denier weirdness: Nature article and the UK Met Office

I admit to finding this a tad weird even for WUWT.  Anthony posts an excerpt from a complaint by Stephen McIntyre.

Jeff Tollefson wrote a feature article in Nature about an experimental approach to modelling of near term climate projections (decadal forecasts).  McIntyre is complaining that he didn't write about something else instead.  I think, but I'm not entirely sure, that he wanted him to write about the difference in actual Met Office near term forecasts.  That is, to compare the current one to previous ones.  Even had Tollefson been able to read McIntyre's crazy mind in advance of McIntyre himself, I'm not sure that he would have obeyed his command.

I don't know why McIntyre wanted Tollefson to write about the Met Office near term predictions instead of the these experiments.  The Met Office itself has a number of articles on the topic, which McIntyre could read if he felt inclined to learn about it.  McIntyre's articles are so full of smear and innuendo that it is often difficult to understand what his actual gripe is so I'm guessing.  This is what McIntyre wrote:

In yesterday’s post, I observed that Nature’s recent news article on Met Office decadal forecasts failed to show the most recent Met Office decadal forecast ...

Well, Steve.  For starters, the article wasn't about Met Office decadal forecasts per se.  It was about an experimental approach to making near term climate forecasts, including the differing opinions held by various modelling experts on the usefulness of the approach.  I'd say there was quite a lot the article failed to show.  I noticed it didn't show any flying elephants, or sharknadoes or star-spangled ballet shoes.  But unlike you, I'm not complaining.

The article was about recent experiments with a different approach to modelling near term forecasts.  Here is how they describe it:

To make its climate prediction, Smith's team used its standard climate model, but broke the mould by borrowing ideas from the way meteorologists forecast the weekly weather. 

Typical climate projections start some way back in the past, often well before the industrial era, in a bid to capture the average climate well enough to forecast broad patterns over the long term. Weekly weather forecasts, however, begin with the present. They make multiple simulations with slightly different initial meteorological conditions to give an array of outcomes that has some statistical validity despite the weather's inherent chaos.

Steve wasn't happy with the scope of the article.  He wanted to talk about something different.

So somehow both McIntyre and Anthony Watts have managed to morph a complaint that the journal Nature chose to publish a topic different to what McIntyre wanted into: "the UK Met Office is hypocritical" and "the Met Office hides the decline".

Talk about denier weirdness!

Somewhere in all the kerfuffle, Richard Betts responded to a question from Anthony.  Neither Anthony nor Steve liked his answer and said so.  Which gave a person for the deniers to target. The name of an individual.  Deniers find it much more satisfying to attack a named person than a faceless agency like the UK Met Office.

Here are some comments from WUWT - bear in mind, the original complaint seems to be that McIntyre didn't like the topic chosen by Nature.  It's got nothing to do with the Met Office or with Nature - it's all about Steve McIntyre.

Goodness only knows what Fred thought he was was commenting on when he says:

July 17, 2013 at 7:40 pm This just astounding. The temp records around the world are being manipulated, and climate science says nothing. Don’t they realize the risk? If the temp is dropping and they are hiding the decline the world is unprepared for the right change!

Bill H doesn't care about the subject matter, he just wants to air his fantastic conspiracy theory:

July 17, 2013 at 8:00 pm  You must realize the IPCC is part of the UN. Their primary objective is world depopulation.. (UN agenda 21) .. The lie in hiding the decline is purposeful..

A prize to anyone who ever figured out Joseph Bastardi's denierisms - he is suitably outraged at someone or something but heaven only knows what:

July 17, 2013 at 8:09 pm This is flabbergasting. Is he really serious?

Solar Cycles gets caught up in the mood and like the others, doesn't have the first clue about what the Nature article is about, what Anthony is going on about or what McIntyre is raving about:

July 18, 2013 at 12:43 am  I’m surprised that others are surprised, temp manipulation has been part and parcel of climate science for over thirty years. The real shocker is are our governments aware?

Resourceguy seems to be talking about something else altogether when he says:

July 18, 2013 at 6:42 am  This is how dictatorships and monopolies work in day to day practice.

Huh?

As for McIntyre and Watts.  They can sit back and feel smug.  They have rallied the idiots despite having said nothing that makes any sense.  All they had to do was make up a yarn out of thin air, toss out some smears and innuendos and everyone chimes in that climate science is a hoax.  It's a giant conspiracy involving the UN, the British Government, the US Government, every climate scientist in the world, every weather bureau in the world and probably every person in the world except the tin foil hat brigade on weird and wacky denier websites like McIntyre's place and WUWT.

No, Mr McIntyre, you can't take any credit for scientific research on tree rings

I don't imagine for one second that Anthony Watts or his troops have the slightest clue about tree ring reconstructions.  They probably don't even know where Yamal is located.  It doesn't stop Anthony Watts from making a post about them a 'sticky'.  He thinks he's gloating about something that McIntyre is supposed to have done.  But the real story is a sorry saga and McIntyre as usual comes out looking like a belligerent, dishonest fool.

To read some about it I'll direct you to these two articles on RealClimate.org.

• This first one is the most recent.  It's about a new paper by Briffa et al and it includes some discussion of where McIntyre is wrong.
• This second one was written a year or so ago and documents more of the deceptions and wrong-headedness of Stephen McIntyre.

There is a third link, this time to dismissal of an appeal, showing the lengths McIntyre is prepared to go to harass scientists in a vexatious manner.

If you want to read more about that odious character (who shows signs of paranoia, conspiracy ideation and obsessiveness - and they are the more endearing of his attributes), there is a whole heap of stuff to read.  You can start here or here to get the idea.

PS In case anyone is in doubt, during one of the peaks of the attacks on scientists over the years, here is what McI orchestrated and took part in from his own website.  Vexatious in the extreme.  From SkepticalScience.com:

Then came the storm. Between 24 July and 28 July, CRU received no less than 60 FoI requests, and 10 more between 31 July and 14 August.

To compare, most scientists would never in their entire career get even one FOI request.

A very predictable pattern...

Anthony Watts of WUWT has posted a quote from a Canadian denialist called McIntyre, referring to a new paper by Briffa et al, writing in part: "unsurprisingly there is issue after issue" - but then as far as I can see, doesn't list a single one of his "issues". (McIntyre is not a climate scientist but likes to pretend.)

Watts is a real card sometimes!

Anthony seems to think it will destroy the hockey stick - ROTFL.

McIntyre does make snide comments and suggests the scientists are deceitful and incompetent - but that's par for the course with that dreadful man. He's like the town gossip who has to make up stuff to retain an audience.



I don't normally bother with the Auditor.  He's a very nasty piece of work but is a bit too weird for most people to bother with.  He's also a very good example of the Dunning Kruger Effect.

A very predictable pattern...

If anyone is interested in his latest mud-slinging attempt, referred to by Anthony Watts on WUWT, I suggest you read this 2009 article from Tim Lambert at Deltoid and substitute today's date.  Nothing's changed.  Note especially this quote from realclimate.org referring to yet another example of McIntyre's attempts to discredit science and scientists - back in 2007:

What is clear however, is that there is a very predictable pattern to the reaction to these blog posts that has been discussed many times. As we said last time there was such a kerfuffle:

However, there is clearly a latent and deeply felt wish in some sectors for the whole problem of global warming to be reduced to a statistical quirk or a mistake. This led to some truly death-defying leaping to conclusions when this issue hit the blogosphere.

Plus ça change… 

And then read this article in realclimate.org about the new paper by Briffa et al, in which is detailed some of the appalling behaviour of McIntyre.  The Briffa paper and supplementary material can be accessed here (no paywall).

No matter how many times McIntyre gets it wrong he continues to try to tear down the reputations of some of the world's best scientists.  It's like a game to him and is all part of his disinformation campaign.  Luckily no one understands him.  Unfortunately, because they don't understand him, imbeciles like Watts just make up stuff like "all the scientists are wrong and don't no nuffin'".

I'm not wasting any more space on that despicable little man.

Dismissives Still Furious with Marcott et al

Update: Admiration owed the Young Researchers

Good research brings out the best in good people and the worst in bad people.  I applaud Drs Marcott and Shakun and their supervisors for impeccable behaviour in the face of the vicious onslaught of lies and defamation from the usual crowd of science deniers, including some science-denying scientists.

If climate science continues to attract people having such a high calibre of research and such wonderfully strong character as Drs Marcott and Shakun, there is still hope for the world.

---

Marcott for Dummies is out.  However, Anthony Watts (in his seventeenth protest article) and the Auditor demonstrate that even after all this time and all their protests they still haven't even read the paper, claiming that Marcott et al "finally concede" something that was stated at the outset in the paper itself (page 1198). (Update: Not so, McIntyre knew about the research paper's caution that the little uptick was "probably not robust" from the outset, as evidenced in the comment section of his first blog article on the subject.  Showing yet again how The Auditor is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill denier liar.)

Disinformation merchants lie to the 8% Dismissives, and pretend they don't know that the comparison of the Holocene temperature history was with the modern instrumental record and has nothing to do with the 'uptick'. The Auditor and his devious cronies pull out all stops to play the denier's nasty game. (I don't know why the disinformation merchants bother to lie - it's not as if the 8% Dismissives are ever going to accept reality.)

 Missing the core

The Auditor and his brigade are not at all grateful for the extra effort made by the researchers to explain their work to the layperson, and appear to be still trying to claim we are in the middle of the Little Ice Age and focusing on core tops instead of the core!  

(Standardising the age of core tops is sensible science. The flailing Auditor can't find anything to support his unwarranted war on science so he picks this at random, safe in the knowledge that his target audience wouldn't know a core top from a speleotherm.)

Deniers apparently refuse to understand the connect between the modern record and the paleo record, even after years of nit-picking climate research.  

Greenland anyone?

And I wonder will the 8% Dismissives repent their earlier ludicrous mistake and heed this part of the FAQ:

Just as it would not be reasonable to use the recent instrumental temperature history from Greenland (for example) as being representative of the planet as a whole...

Their fury knows no bounds

The Auditor's cronies continue to make wild unfounded accusations. Conspiracy ideation most definitely (no wonder they don't like Lewandowsky and others showing them up in their true colours).

Meanwhile, Roger Pielke Jr goes one step further into the most vicious (and arguably libellous) rant.  (I won't link to his blog article.)  Pielke Jr writes a long blog article where he makes false allegations and misrepresents the findings, deliberately or otherwise confusing the (not robust) uptick in the proxy data with the instrumental record.  It looks as if he, too, must think we are still stuck in the Little Ice Age.

In my view, the astounding and disgusting reaction from deniers like Pielke Jr and others is because they cannot fault the science so they set out to misrepresent it, either deliberately or because they don't have the wit or will to digest it.  The Marcott et al paper and the supplementary material is eloquently written and easy to read.  The FAQ is perhaps even clearer so that most laypeople should understand it easily.  

The fact deniers can't fault the science means they can do nothing but misrepresent the research or flop back to their fallback position - climate science  is a hoax being perpetrated by scientists all around the world, governments of all political persuasions everywhere, the mainstream media and the informed public - and can be traced back nearly two centuries, from modern climatology back through Plass and Reveille and Broecker and Callendar and Arrhenius all the way back to Fourier and Tyndall (if not to Aristotle).

Update: Despicable Curry

Judith Curry sits herself even more firmly in the denier bandwagon with arguably libellous insinuations.  No surprises there.  Because of her past abominable behaviour she'd have no friends left in science so has nowhere else to go but down. She has the hide to talk of ethics while her own behaviour is not just unethical, it's immoral IMO. I'm disgusted.

Update: Admiration owed the Young Researchers

One thing - good research brings out the best in good people and the worst in bad people.  I applaud Drs Marcott and Shakun and their supervisors for impeccable behaviour in the face of the vicious onslaught of lies and defamation from the usual crowd of science deniers, including some science-denying scientists.

If climate science continues to attract people having such a high calibre of research and such wonderfully strong character as Drs Marcott and Shakun, there is still hope for the world.

Where to get it

The Marcott et al (2013) paper and supplementary material is available at Science and the FAQ is available on RealClimate.

Addendum

Above all the noise of denialists, there is this one small post on realclimate.org, which gives high praise to Shaun Marcott and Jeremy Shakun et al. (I took the liberty of adding a link to Wikipedia.)

1. Susan Anderson says:

   1 Apr 2013 at 7:24 PM

   I was venting about this to my father (PW Anderson), and he mentioned that he had read the article in Science and I could quote him, and even found the issue for me. Since he will be 90 soon and prefers to stay out of this donnybrook, this is quite a compliment, and I hope Marcott will see it!
   
   

   He said he was impressed; the article was “very clean” and “well put together”.

The above is an expanded version of my latest comment on Watts is Whopping Mad (Crazy) after Marcott et al - Must be the Heat!

Still more denier weirdness from WUWT on Marcott et al 2013

Anyone who's ever written a paper or used academic journals for research (any research, not just scientific research) will realise that Willis Eschenbach has done neither or he's deliberately targeting the Dunning Kruger set.  (Going by the rest of his article probably both.)

Courtesy Willis E in Protest No. 7 from WUWT re the Marcott et al Holocene temperature reconstruction, recently published in Science:

Nowhere in the paper do they show you the raw data...

... although it’s available in their Supplement. I hate it when people don’t show me their starting point.

Is it any wonder that, as Willis Anthony says:

Steve McIntyre is also quite baffled ... 

(Come on, who could resist that :D)

Another revelation about fake skeptics - many don't understand how earth managed to maintain a relatively stable global climate during the Holocene

A lack of familiarity with academic publications isn't sufficient to explain why Willis E (and most of those commenting on his article) thinks that every location on earth should warm and cool in synchrony.  Especially not during the Holocene, when the global average temperature changed very little.  Most people would deduce that in a relatively stable global climate like that of the past 10,000 years or so, when one part of the earth warmed another part must have cooled.  After all, the average global temperature for the past 10,000 years or so has probably only varied by less than one degree celsius (plus and minus approx 0.4 degrees Celsius around the zero line).

Even now when the world as a whole is warming up so quickly, there are places cooling or not getting hotter.  In fact WUWT, when it's not protesting the science, arguably focuses as much if not more on the (few) locations that are cooling or not getting as warm as it does on all the places that are warming.

A Lesson in the Art of Science

Since they can't follow the science, let's give Steve and Willis a hand by showing them the Art (of the Anthropocene), courtesy Tom Yulsman, Discover, Shaun Marcott and Jeremy Shakun.

Update: Option 3: Marcott et al for Dummies

The researchers are being a lot more courteous than The Auditor.  One of the authors, Prof Peter Clarke has written that they are preparing a "Marcott el al for Dummies" (like McIntyre) -

After further discussion, we’ve decided that the best tack to take now is to prepare a FAQ document that will explain, in some detail but at a level that should be understandable by most, how we derived our conclusions. Once we complete this, we will let you know where it can be accessed, and you (and others) can refer to this in any further discussion. We appreciate your taking the time and interest to try to clarify what has happened in our correspondence with McIntyre.

Looks as if the research team has come up with an option 3!

NOTE: The FAQ is now available on RealClimate.

The paper and supplementary material already elegantly describes in immense detail how the data was handled.  So it will be interesting to see if McIntyre will understand it better after he's read the FAQ.

(It's no surprise that McIntyre hops straight to mathturbating™ the data in the spreadsheet before digesting the description of data handling (or even reading it?). Nor is it any surprise that he isn't the least bit interested in the discussion of climate variations and possible influences, which to my mind give most food for thought.)