Everything climate disinformation from the climate conspiracy-theorists at WattsUpWithThat

Anthony Watts has set up a new website for climate disinformers and wilful deniers. (H/t CJ in the comments here at HotWhopper.)

His disinformation website is called Everything Climate. Translating its stated aim from denier-speak, it is to hook people who aren't yet knowledgeable about climate to recruit them as conspiracy theorists for the climate disinformation cult.

Questionable claims from the outset

Anthony Watts is known in climate science denier circles as a climate science disinformer and conspiracy theorist. True to form, he made a number of questionable claims in his introductory article. He wrote "We have four categories at the moment, and a few dozen sub-titles covering specific claims/arguments that are commonly in the news and are contentious."  The bit about "a few dozen sub-titles" is weird, because I can only see 23 articles. I've no idea what the "few dozen sub-titles" relate to. As for the topics he claims are all contentious, some of them are so well-established they are indisputable, some are the topic of active scientific research, and some are strawmen (i.e. the Everything Climate topic is not a claim or argument in scientific circles).

Desperate Deniers head for the clouds at WUWT

My last article was a report of the latest surface temperature, from NASA. This one is about the lower troposphere changes - and denier dross from WUWT.

I've not spent much time at WUWT in recent months (or here at HotWhopper). The articles there have changed a bit since Anthony Watts took time off. There are a lot more political articles and fewer science articles. Charles the Moderator is in charge but doesn't have a lot of people to write - it's mainly childish Eric Worrall and a petrol-head called David Middleton. Most of the regular WUWT contributors from days gone by have disappeared (justthefacts, Bob Tisdale, Tim Ball etc., and Anthony Watts himself.)

These days, when Charles copies and pastes a press release about a scientific publication, he doesn't have to add the dog-whistling word "claim" at the front of the headline. WUWT readers are now very well trained and understand that if there's a scientific press release it means they are expected to add comments along the lines of "climate science is a hoax" (repeated 100 times or they are put in detention).

Roger Pielke Jr's weather disaster essay is too simplistic, and befuddles deniers at WUWT

It's a short article. Short in length and short on substance. I'm referring to a paper written by Roger Pielke Jr. where he attempts to report on whether and how much progress there has been in a small part of one of the seventeen United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

The paper attracted the attention of Anthony Watts, a science denier who runs a blog known as WUWT. Anthony, not being the brightest spark, not even in the dark deniosphere where the bar for brightness is low, got the paper upside down and inside out. More on that later.

Sustainable Development Goals

The UN's SDG has 17 goals aimed at improving societies, the well-being of people, and the sustainability of the planet. Each goal has several parts and, at present, 232 unique indicators. The indicators are for measuring progress toward achieving the goals.

Watts up with that vs Google vs Climate Change

There's consternation at the climate conspiracy blog WattsUpWithThat.com (WUWT). Kip Hansen, a random denier dude, is ropeable. He's most upset because, in June this year, WUWT had a big drop in click-throughs from Google. A 30% drop, according to Kip (Google cache here :D).

Now this isn't about paid-for click-throughs (via Google AdWords). It's just about the freebie service that everyone gets. Here's his evidence that the Google algorithm is working better. Feel free to celebrate or commiserate.

Chart source: Wattsupwiththat.com

You probably noticed that, as climate science deniers tend to do with temperature charts, Kip's 30% measurement started at an unusually high point. (He may not have been able to get much earlier data because WUWT moved to a new server at the end of May this year and Anthony Watts might not have kept stats the same way on the old server. Who knows?)

Reaction to Trump taunting "Drop Dead, World!" from @wattsupwiththat

Over at WUWT, eight of the nine most recent articles are celebrating Trump's decision to abdicate his responsibilities to people in the USA (see here). As you'll have heard, he has declared his intention to isolate the USA even further than he has already. In particular, at WUWT they are celebrating Trump declaring that he refuses to fulfil US obligations to mitigate global warming.

Let America and the world go jump, is the cry at WUWT. We live for the moment. If tomorrow we drown, starve or burn, at least we'll have shown those libtards what we think of them. We don't give a damn about people in far flung places, or the fact that the USA is responsible for more global warming to date than any other country on Earth.

(The picture shows how Trump's recklessness is viewed elsewhere in the world, by Der Spiegel. H/t Brian L Kahn.)

Sides - to fry or not to fry, or covfefe? WUWT is a haven of climate science denial

Anthony Watts is running another poll on his blog wattsupwiththat, to see how many of his readers accept science and want to mitigate global warming. He's done this before. A few years ago he found that 98.1% of his readers declared themselves as "skeptics", meaning they are conspiracy theorising climate science deniers. Today he wants to test his readership again, to make sure he's still got what it takes among the dimwit dismissives. He wrote about "sides":

Since WUWT is read by both sides of the issue, I thought I’d run a poll to ask, so here goes.

WUWT sez let Africans starve, and implies Trump has single-handedly stopped climate change

I don't know if it's the Trump effect or if something else is causing denier blogs to be weirder and nastier than their normal weird and nasty. As you may have figured out, science deniers seem to think that global warming will stop now that Donald Trump has been elected (archived here). There's no rationale for this.

For years many science deniers have been arguing that "man" is too puny to have any discernible effect on the vast forces dominating Earth's climate. All of a sudden they've changed their tune, and many of them think that just one puny little man can change the direction of climate change and has stopped global warming dead in its tracks.

Weird, huh?

Anthony Watts pushes anti-semitic conspiracy theories wrapped up as a climate hoax

There is not much happening on the denier front. They are either licking their wounds from two hottest years in a row, or hunkering down pretending that "it's not happening". For example, I don't know if Jo Nova believes what she writes (as archived here) or if she is really as deluded as she appears. She is says she is convinced that global warming "paused" and that it's about to get very cold. She claims to be also convinced that despite the world getting much, much hotter, more people are turning into science deniers. She's an oddball. I suspect having hooked up with her husband who has been bludging off her for quite some years now, by all accounts, she's finding it hard to admit she took the wrong turn. (Jo used to accept science, some years ago, though she was always a bit odd being a goldbug.)

An unreasonable sample of a resident WUWT conspiracy theorist Tim Ball

Climate conspiracy theorist Anthony Watts is widely regarded for his ongoing services to climate disinformers. He's also well known for not knowing anything about climate. He can't read a temperature chart, not even for the USA, he fails at arithmetic and logic, and is willing to promote any notion, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it fits his view that climate science is a hoax dreamt up by scientists cemturies ago.

Today he's decided to give up on satellite data, and give up on his precious surface stations, and throw his lot in with uber-conspiracy nutter Tim Ball. (Yes, that Tim Ball. Defamer, "sky dragon slayer", and fan of Hitler and Osama bin Laden.) Anthony posted an article with the headline: Long -Term Climate Change: What Is A Reasonable Sample Size? ... Except that wasn't the question.

Sheldon Walker came to HotWhopper to get help for his WUWT article

As OSweetMrMath noticed, Sheldon Walker came here the other day looking for help with a question he had. It turns out he was wanting our advice on an article he was putting together for WUWT (archived here). I think that's really funny. Do you think Anthony Watts appreciates our assistance? :)

Sheldon wanted to know:

How much of the 2015 temperature increase do you think is due to el Niño, and how much do you think is due to AGW?

He got a lot of help, including from OSweetMrMath but didn't know what to do with it. I sent him over to The Carbon Brief at one point, to where a number of different scientists explained how they estimated the contribution of El Niño to last year's record heat. So over he trotted. Rather than come back to HotWhopper, his next port of call was WUWT where he repeated the errors he made here at HW. Anthony Watts posted the following extremely dumb, extremely wrong claim as his headline to Sheldon's error-ridden article:

Hottest year ever update: El Niño effect in 2015 was 20 times larger than the global warming signal

Tim Ball is conspiratorially lost in the blizzards of 2015 and 2016

Not content with denying climate change, now WUWT is denying the weather. I noticed this claim about storm Jonas at WUWT today, which the meteorologist (ret'd) missed. Tim Ball is claiming that Jonas forecasts failed (archived here). In his article he weaves a conspiracy theory of mammoth proportions, ticking the boxes of six of the seven criteria for conspiracy ideation. This includes twisting the facts to fit his conspiracy theory. It also requires Tim to refer to a 12 month old article about last year's blizzard as proof that the this year's blizzard didn't happen - or something. Wrong storm, wrong year - Tim got his blizzards mixed up.

An overview of storm Jonas

Before beginning on Tim's wildly imaginative conspiracy theorising, here's a short recap of storm Jonas.

Storm Jonas was the fourth most severe storm in the region in at least the past 66 years. Early warnings began more than a week before the storm was forecast to hit, giving people plenty of time to prepare. All the weather models were in general agreement, unusually for a storm like this. The forecasts were remarkably accurate. The dump of snow on New York city was a bigger than expected but otherwise the weather forecasts were pretty well spot on. The storm killed 55 people, caused a storm surge as big or maybe bigger than Hurricane Sandy, dumped record snow in some built up areas, shut down activity in some of the busiest parts of the USA, and resulted in more than $2 billion damage.

I've added more detail below, as well as in the references at the bottom of this article.

I publish in Nature, sez Bartleby @wattsupwiththat...Oh yeah? Pull the other one!

You know how deniers at WUWT like to make out they know it all? Well, here's a comment you'll appreciate. It's from a pseudo-scientist who calls themselves Bartleby, who was protesting a Letter in Nature Climate Change. He or she wrote that the article was a mere letter, not a refereed article (or so Bartleby thinks)!

January 20, 2016 at 5:47 pm (my emphasis)
That was my first criticism Gary, but then I noticed the article was published in Nature.

I publish in Nature. Members of my family also publish there. I have to express strong disappointment with Nature’s editorial staff. In their defense, I’ll make note of the fact this was a “letter” rather than a refereed article. I suppose that should carry some weight, but I’ve also noticed an editorial bias towards publishing absurd psuedo-scientific flapdoodle like this.

Personally? I’m disgusted and will never submit a paper to Nature again.

Bartleby has clearly never even looked at the table of contents in a Nature journal, much less submitted a manuscript.

PS There's nothing wrong with not knowing that to have a Letter published in Nature is something that many budding scientists hope they can achieve once in their career. It's his woeful attempt to bignote himself with the illiterati by pretending familiarity with a journal he's never looked at, that makes Bartleby the fool.

Deniersville: in the spirit of Christmas, the gift that keeps on giving

Over the past few days I've begun but not finished several articles - guiltily enjoying time spent on other worthwhile activities (such as making jam from nectarines fresh from the tree; and roasting coffee beans; and finding pretty jars; and wrapping them up for the family for Christmas). On Monday Sunday I drove to Albury, through weird stormy weather, watching the smoke from a scary bushfire in the next valley over. (I was reminded that the danger from bushfires isn't just the fire itself, sometimes the roads are impassable because of fallen trees. The wind was fierce and wild and the day was another scorcher - 42 °C, 107.6 °F)

In a fit of rationalisation, I figured this is as good a time as any to take a short break. HotWhopper turned 3 earlier this month, and over those 36 months, it has averaged almost one and a half articles a day. That seems like a good target for the next three years.

Credit: John Cook

Denialism doesn't take breaks

If you are missing your daily dose of denial, it marches on relentlessly.

At first, the fake sceptics didn't know how to react to the COP21 agreement in Paris this month. Some tried to argue that the leaders of 195 nations are deluded, along with their advisers, most of the world's media, 97% of climate scientists and almost all professional associations of scientists throughout the world.

Maybe they realised that wouldn't fly because that effort didn't last. It's old news, or maybe they are pretending it didn't happen.

Eric Worrall's WUWT: Stop educating children

On Anthony Watts' Eric Worrall's blog WUWT**, he is complaining that Australian children are being prepared to face climate change (archived here, cached here).  Eric calls climate education "green indoctrination". If you didn't know, Eric is not in favour of natural resource conservation or science education. I deduce from his article that Eric is not in favour of education at all. I'm guessing, but I'd say that like many people at WUWT he thinks that children should not learn how to learn, instead they should be taught how to read, write and do sums. And that's about all. (Oh, teaching children to be Islamaphobic would go down well with Eric, too.)

No doubt about it: AP's new euphemism for science denying conspiracy theorists is not politically correct

Seems that AP has succumbed to the poor sensitive little science deniers who call for jail time for climate scientists. It's more than political correctness - it's political correctness gone haywire. Usually it's the extreme right wing ideologues who moan about people who conform to "political correctness" - except when they want a euphemism for their own behaviour. Instead of calling climate science denial denial of climate science, AP wants to pretend that rampant deniers only doubt climate science. Which is nonsense. Deniers don't doubt. They just "know" that all the science of the past 200 years is wrong. Deniers reject science. They prefer to think that for the past 200 years there has been a giant hoax perpetrated on the illiterati (that is, deniers).

From denial to doubt? No, it's still denial

Paul Colford wrote at AP about a change to the AP Style Guide:

Our guidance is to use climate change doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science and to avoid the use of skeptics or deniers.

WUWT goes from denying the ozone hole to blaming it for global warming!

You'd hardly credit it. There are umpteen articles in which Anthony Watts and his crew denied the ozone hole (it's existence and that human activity caused it - yep! Probably both at the same time.). Now he's now posted an article where it's real and blamed for global warming (archived here, latest here). Some new bloke called Steven Capozzola has written an article in which he says: "The evidence is compelling, and the subject deserves further scrutiny."

The evidence for what exactly? Well, that's not so easy to figure out. I'll see if I can step past the waffly bits to the nuts and bolts of his hypothesis. It goes something like this:

Is it Parody or Dunning Kruger by Mike Jonas at WUWT?

Mike Jonas recently wrote a four part series of articles for Anthony Watts denier blog WUWT. I don't think it's meant as a parody of deniers, but that's how it reads. It's like a caricature of classic denialism. I'm almost surprised Anthony Watts decided to host it - it was that bad. Mike brought up all the denial oldies, which he might as well have got from the list of most used climate myths at SkepticalScience.com:- medieval warm period (myth 27), little ice age (myth 47), CO2 lags temperature (myth 12), climate models and equilibrium climate sensitivity. If Mike was trying to demonstrate that Dunning and Kruger were right, then he did a great job of it. His series was in four parts:

1. His first article (archived here) was a lot of arithmetic around climate sensitivity and attribution, which I won't bother with. 
2. It wasn't CO2 before therefore... - in his second in the series (archived here) he resurrected the ancient denier meme about the medieval warm period (or medieval climate anomaly) and the little ice age. This calls on the logical fallacy that if CO2 wasn't the cause of warming in the past then it can't be causing warming now. Which is a non sequitur (it doesn't follow).
3. CO2 doesn't lag temperature as much as deniers think - the third article (archived here) was the denier meme "CO2 lags temperature".
4. Equilibrium climate sensitivity - in his fourth article (archived here), Mike sets out to demonstrate how little he knows about ECS, climate models and climate science in general.

Anthony Watts weakly protests Recurrent Fury

The reaction from WUWT deniers to Recurrent Fury so far is fairly ordinary, though chock full of conspiracy ideation (archived here). It's not clear whether any denier has actually read the paper. Evidence suggests most haven't - they are too busy complaining about it. There is only one article at WUWT and it's dominated by Barry Woods. Barry has spent the past few years scouring the internet for any mention of Professor Lewandowsky and writing endless overly-long, over-hyped complaints mixed with general disinformation. That's because a comment from him was included (buried deep) in the data for the original paper, and Barry maybe regretted making his public comment publicly, and so he took it out on Professor Lewandowsky. (Barry found a paper written by a couple of deniers that he thinks refutes the moon-landing paper. It didn't.)

Many deniers might be nutters, but that's not what Recurrent Fury is about

Anthony Watts himself insists that Recurrent Fury demonstrates that "“people who question the veracity of global warming/climate change are nutters”. It doesn't. That's just what Anthony Watts wants you to think but it's not what the paper shows. Recurrent Fury is about the way that conspiracy theories evolve when facts emerge that force changes to the original conspiracy theory. It isn't a psychological diagnosis of individuals and never was. In any case, as Dr. Katharine Blackwell wrote: "believing in a conspiracy theory is not a psychological disorder, any more than a religious belief is."

Matt Ridley spins Lysenko conspiracy theories and more in a classic denial of science

Was it Pope Francis who pushed deniers over the edge? Is it the climate negotiations taking place this year? Matt Ridley, a science denier from the UK who claims to be a "lukewarmer", has written a Gish gallop worthy of Tim Ball. It's as if he collected up all the worst WUWT conspiracy theories and rolled them into Quadrant.

Quadrant is a right wing outlet for the extremists. It publishes dumb articles from deniers fairly often. Today Matt Ridley, a denier turned defamer has written an article (archived here). Anthony Watts has published bits of it on his blog, too (archived here).

Matt Ridley's Lysenkoism conspiracy theory

Matt lurched from one conspiracy theory to another. To illustrate how far he's gone he starts out with the Lysenko conspiracy theory that deniers call upon when they run out of ideas. The conspiracy goes something like this. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was an agricultural official who rose to prominence under Joseph Stalin. He denied genetic inheritance in plants (as described by Gregor Mendel in his famous experiments with peas in the 1800s). He even managed to outlaw research in genetics. It set plant breeding back a lot in the Soviet Union. Well, the climate conspiracy theorists claim that Lysenkoism is alive and well throughout the entire world, and has been for the past couple of hundred years. I've never seen anyone name a person who is supposedly filling the role of Lysenko and banning climate science research of any kind. Nor have I ever seen anyone say just what aspect of climate science is forbidden.

I wonder if Matt will be calling upon Hitler and Osama bin Laden next (like Tim Ball has done)?

From Lewandowsky with love: climate conspiracies from WUWT

This week, Anthony Watts and his followers at wattsupwiththat (WUWT) are competing among themselves to see who can come up with the best climate conspiracy. Anthony Watts himself hasn't got a lot of imagination. All he could come up with was accusing the NOAA of fraud and lying. His fans know that the climate conspiracy goes way beyond NOAA. It goes way beyond the whole of the USA (at least for the WUWT-ers who've begun to realise that the USA is not the entire world).

The Catholic Church is in on the climate conspiracy too. And it's all because it was infiltrated by the KGB, who planted Pope Francis as its leader.