Silly season at the Daily Mail and WUWT: wishfully reversing the Arctic decline

Update: David Rose of the Daily Mail attempts to deny his own article. See below.

Oh my. This is about as good as when deniers claimed that the Arctic sea ice was recovering at the fastest rate in years. When they were referring to the winter growth of ice after the record low ice extent in 2012. Remember DenialDepot? - here and here and particularly here.

Anthony Watts made a headline (archived here) from a quote from Judith Curry in an article by David Rose in the Daily Mail (archived here). His headline:

‘The Arctic sea ice spiral of death seems to have reversed’

Did Judith really make such a wild claim? Seriously? It is there in black and white. Not that you can believe anything in the Daily Mail. Then again, you can't take anything that Judith Curry says as credible without checking, either.

Irony alert! More conspiracy plots discovered at WUWT and elsewhere...

Irony meter blows up.

The irony meter is overheating today.

Anthony Watts decided to whistle up all his conspiracy theorists today (archived here). He's found some grad student blogger called José Duarte who's been ranting and raving against Cook13 on any denier blog he can find (to uncritical acclaim by Judith Curry and critical derision by others). On his blog, after deciding that scientists (citizen or otherwise) aren't competent to read scientific abstracts, he wrote (archived here):

There's a much better method for finding out what scientists think — ask them. Not just about their abstracts, which you already rated – you're still adding unnecessary layers of complexity and bias there. Direct surveys of scientists, with more useful questions, is a much more valid method than having ragtag teams of unqualified political activists divine the meanings of thousands of abstracts. 

Ha ha. Guess what, those nefarious plotting "unqualified political activists" did ask them. But that's not what José wants. He doesn't want to confuse the results of a study looking at what the science says by examining what the science says. That would add unnecessary layers of complexity. Say that again? (Best not.)

José's also been writing nonsense about Lewandowsky13, the "moon landing" paper, about how people who think climate science is a hoax don't necessarily think that HIV causes AIDS - or do think that, or something or the other. He's a bit of a nutter. Full of conspiracy ideation himself. And very emotional about it too. He's flinging all the usual accusations using words like fraud and scam. Which is funny, because Anthony Watts has just written two articles bemoaning the fact that climate change tugs at the emotions. After flinging around wild accusations, claiming that the paper was a scam and a lie, José himself tells a lie of his own by implication. He wrote (archived here):

Why would anyone participate in our research if our goal is to marginalize them in public life, to lie about them, to say that they think the moon landing was a hoax, to say they don't think HIV causes AIDS, to say they don't believe smoking causes lung cancer – when none of those things are true. Do we hate our participants?

Thing is that the paper didn't find that every science denier thinks all those things. Not every conspiracy theorist thinks those things. Not every right winger thinks those things. What the paper found was the thinking those things was a predictor of science denial. This is what the paper found, from the abstract:

Paralleling previous work, we find that endorsement of a laissez-faire conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science (r≈.80 between latent constructs). Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientific findings, above and beyond endorsement of laissez-faire free markets. This provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science.

José fits the bill. He is obviously prone to conspiracist ideation, which he dresses up using words like "scam" and "fraud". (In much the same way as Steve McIntyre did.) He clearly places himself at the extreme end of the right wing ideology spectrum. And I'm guessing from his strong reaction to Cook13 that he also rejects climate science. I wonder what other science he rejects. I wonder what other conspiracy theories he subscribes to?

On the topic of conspiracy theories, sometimes I check out who's been discussing HotWhopper. Guess what I found. John Reece wrote: :

"...The AGW scam is the greatest hoax in the history of the world. What could be more fascinating as a focus for one's attention?..."

Followed shortly afterwards with this. John Reece wrote:

"...Anyone who sees (in what I post) evidence of a conspiracy theory mindset is projecting in the psychological sense ― a phenomenon with which I am quite familiar, having worked for an entire career as a professional colleague of psychiatrists and psychologists in a community mental health center..."

Similarly at WUWT, in response to Anthony's call for all his readers to come up with their best conspiracy theories.

ossqss thinks there is deception in the climate science community and says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:26 am
It is amazing the extent of deception in the climate science community. Data tampering, rigged review, outright lies, refusal to share code or data, policy implementation without representation, agenda driven study results, funding impropriety, and on and on. We need a reset button as everyone is paying the price for this abhorrent behavior.
Incarceration is the only button that can bring this systemic fraud to an end.

Alec Rawls is a long time conspiracy theorist who I've written about before. He claims scientists deploy "scurrilous strategems" and goes further. He's doing what John Reece did above. He's projecting (excerpts):

August 6, 2014 at 9:13 am
As any real scientist should be, Duarte is flabbergasted to witness the scurrilous stratagems deployed by the relentlessly dishonest Lewandowski, Cook et al.. Those of us who have for years been the targets of eco-alarmist slander cannot muster the same surprise, but our years of familiarity can help to answer the questions Mr. Duarte has about the etiology of this perversion.

...These leftists always assume that the correlation between right-left ideology and skeptic-believer views on climate are because people on the right compromise scientific thinking in favor of politically preferred conclusions. The reason they jump to that conclusion is because they are always projecting. Leftists think that everyone engages in “motivated cognition” because that is what THEY do.  ...

...The leftist mind is a truly foul and perverted thing....

Alan Robertson speaks about nefarious plots and says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:05 am
It was only a matter of time until someone within the social sciences community spoke against the farcical works of Lewandowsky. Now that Oreskes has inextricably linked her name to Lewandowsky, the scions of Harvard are surely plotting their next move… 

MattN decides that at least two scientists are charlatans and says:

August 6, 2014 at 9:42 am
Lewandowsky and Cook are just two more in a long line of charlatans bleating out the party line, albeit with unusual attitude and arrogance. 

john robertson reckons that science is dangerous to personal liberty and destructive to civil society and says:

August 6, 2014 at 8:44 am
Possibly too little too late.
Climatology is drowning in Lew Paper and the byproducts associated with it.
Social Science is about to get lumped in with “Climate Science”.
As dangerous pseudo sciencey rubbish that is dangerous to personal liberty and destructive to civil society.
Just another front, a cover for the statist do-gooder power hungry people haters. 

There's a bonus, too. I've often noticed that most deniers at WUWT don't click links. It took more than two hours and 32 comments before someone remarked that the main link to the origins of Anthony Watts' copy and paste was broken! MattS finally says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:38 am
The link in the main post to the José Duarte blog is broken.

And they don't bother reading the papers they complain about, either. If arthur4563 had bothered to read Cook13's scientific consensus paper he'd have known that asking the scientists was exactly what the researchers did. And guess what. 97% of them said their papers endorsed the fact that humans are causing global warming. But arthur4563 is a science denier and science deniers as a general rule don't bother with papers in scientific journals. He says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:42 am
To me the major problem with Cook’s sudy was the fact that it was so stupidly designed and
obsolete. The study was supposedly to determine the opinion of climate scientists about global warming. That implies it should canvas their “current” beliefs, not beliefs they may have held in the past, in some paper they may have been involved with (perhaps before the “pause”).

And the strategy Cook chose almost looks as if it was designed to introduce human bias into the results. If you want to know a scientist’s beliefs about an issue, you do what everyone else (except Cook) would do : YOU ASK THEM. You don’t dig thru a bunch of published papers trying to read tea leaves and infer the answer to a question that the papers probably never even addressed. In court, such a claim as Cook’s study makes would be tossed out as “not best evidence” as well as “including answers likely to be obsolete.” 

The other problem with arthur4563's comment was that the Cook13 study wasn't about personal opinions. It was about the science.


Perhaps the most irony-filled comment comes from Anthony Watts himself, smearer extraordinaire, morally bankrupt blogger, who wrote:

It is heartening to see somebody outside of climate science finally call these spades a spade. Now if we can just instill some sense of moral responsibility to people in climate science who really should be speaking out about using science as a smear tactic, we’ll be gettin somewhere.

---

Cook, John, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A. Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce. "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature." Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 2 (2013): 024024. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

Lewandowsky, Stephan, Klaus Oberauer, and Gilles E. Gignac. "NASA faked the moon landing—therefore,(climate) science is a hoax an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science." Psychological science 24, no. 5 (2013): 622-633. doi: 10.1177/0956797612457686

Eric Eugenics Worrall makes a glacially silly blunder down under at WUWT

There wasn't much of note at WUWT over the weekend. There was another Christopher Monckton piece on the lower troposphere temperature. In two separate articles in almost as many days, Christopher has jumped from a "pause" of 13 years and 4 months to a "pause" of 17 years and 10 months. He doesn't know if he's coming or going, does he.

Anyway, I knew it wouldn't take long before more really stupid appeared. Sure enough it has.

Eric "eugenics" Worrall** is a science denier from Australia. When Anthony Watts runs out of guests to write his essays, he resorts to ning nongs like Eric "eugenics" to fill his daily quota.

This time Eric doesn't disappoint. He wrote a short piece about a new paper in PNAS by a group of researchers from around the world, led by Henrick Rother of the University of Greifswald in Germany. The press release was from the University of Queensland, where another author is located, Professor Jamie Shulmeister.

The paper is about how the climate in the southern hemisphere can behave differently to that in the Northern Hemisphere and how New Zealand glaciers melted and grew at times different to glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, including during times of global climate change. They are strongly influenced by the Southern Ocean.

Eric "eugenics" got a lot wrong for such a short "essay". First he confused the Pacific Ocean and Southern Ocean. Next he decided that since glacial change is slow and happens over millenia, then that means that all climate change will be slow.

He doesn't seem to appreciate that the whole earth isn't covered in glaciers. Or that ice sheets in places like West Antarctica will probably disappear over centuries, not thousands of years. Or that the fact that because some processes are slow doesn't mean that all processes are slow. Eric wrote:

The study described in the press release, in my opinion, has interesting implications for modern climate change. Even if alarmists are right about climate sensitivity to CO2, if the Pacific Ocean has the capacity to retard major climate shifts,  for thousands of years, then we have thousands of years to solve any problems we might be causing – which kind of takes the urgency out of the issue.

Eric, it's the Southern Ocean, not the Pacific Ocean. The Southern Ocean is the one around Antarctica. The one that's influencing the climate of Australia and New Zealand as well as Antarctica.

Secondly, it's not retarding climate change. Climate change is happening everywhere. From the press release:

Scientists are calling for a better understanding of regional climates, after research into New Zealand's glaciers has revealed climate change in the Northern Hemisphere does not directly affect the climate in the Southern Hemisphere.

The University of Queensland study showed that future climate changes may impact differently in the two hemispheres, meaning a generalised global approach isn’t the solution to climate issues.

UQ School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management Head Professor Jamie Shulmeister said the study provided evidence for the late survival of significant glaciers in the mountains of New Zealand at the end of the last ice age – a time when other ice areas were retreating.

“This study reverses previous findings which suggested that New Zealand's glaciers disappeared at the same time as ice in the Northern Hemisphere,” he said.

“We showed that when the Northern Hemisphere started to warm at the end of the last ice age, New Zealand glaciers were unaffected.

“These glaciers began to retreat several thousand years later, when changes in the Southern Ocean led to increased carbon dioxide emissions and warming.

”This indicates that future climate change may impact differently in the two hemispheres and that changes in the Southern Ocean are likely to be critical for Australia and New Zealand.” 

Other studies show that the Southern Ocean is important and affects climate not just in our part of the world. Changes in the Southern Ocean also affects climate globally through the large scale ocean currents. Those are the slow climate changes. The deep currents in the ocean (the global conveyor belt) take about a thousand years for one cycle. What we're doing now will affect Earth for thousands of years.

I don't think the fact that the two hemispheres can behave differently is news. Apparently it is news that New Zealand glaciers didn't change in synchrony with those in the Northern Hemisphere. The supplementary information is interesting. It's available to all and gives some detail about how the researchers worked out what happened in the past with regard to New Zealand glaciers.

As for what is happening right now, well at least some of the glaciers in New Zealand have been retreating quite a lot. Others not so quickly.

If Eric thinks that climate change won't affect him in Australia in his lifetime, then he's wrong. Australia and New Zealand are already feeling the effect of climate change.

From the WUWT comments

cnxtim lives up to his/her reputation as a greenhouse effect denier and says:

August 4, 2014 at 12:17 am
It seems to me you cant discuss the climate without chucking in a reference to CO2
I mean, whatever happened to the Ozone layer? Once upon a time it was ‘flavour of the month’ I know these days, methane is making bid for a mention – we shall see…

simple-touriste says:

August 4, 2014 at 1:11 am
So we are doomed (as always), but not synchronously? 

Alan the Brit must be another greenhouse effect denier because he says:

August 4, 2014 at 1:50 am
“when changes in the Southern Ocean led to increased carbon dioxide emissions and warming.”
Always stick to the meme! Why not say “when changes in the Southern Ocean led to increased warming and carbon dioxide emissions!” Sure fits the Ice-Core data, warming first, emissions next! Ho hum! Keep the rent money flowing guys & gals, keep it coming, the taxpayers knows nothing! 

They are all coming out to play. Bruce Cobb says:

August 4, 2014 at 4:11 am
They are keeping the “CO2-caused warming” meme alive. Mix good science with garbage science and you get garbage science. 

Bill H. makes an observation about denier inconsistency and says:

August 4, 2014 at 5:02 am
Interesting that this paper is being so well received on WUWT. The recent paper by Neukom, Gergis et al. also discussed the marked divergence of temperature trends in the two hemispheres prior to the 20th century and was more or less universally excoriated. Maybe the fact that it provided evidence that the mediaeval climate anomaly was a N. hemisphere phenomenon, with the S. hemisphere showing distinct cooling at this time, has something to do with that.

Perhaps it isn’t just the “warmist” side of the the debate that clings to certain sacred truths. 

njsnowfan is an ice age comether and says (excerpt):

August 4, 2014 at 5:11 am
It looks like the opposite may already be starting to happen Now, S hem will enter a little ice age first then N hem with low solar.

This has to do with S. Hemisphere current sea ice. Many say that increases or decreases in solar do not directly effect earths climate. I have been seeing many connections with solar cycle #24 since it is a quiet cycle and Static of strong cycles is not blocking the True Data. 

**Eric Worrall earned the nickname "eugenics" because he made a habit of likening climate science to the study of eugenics in the 1930s, particularly when he commented at Watching the Deniers. It's his version of Godwin's Law.

---

Rother, Henrik, David Fink, James Shulmeister, Charles Mifsud, Michael Evans, and Jeremy Pugh. "The early rise and late demise of New Zealand’s last glacial maximum." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2014): 201401547. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1401547111

400ppm CO2 and Oh Dear! Another humungous blunderous blunder by Anthony Watts

Update: see below for how Anthony shifts the blame!

---

A short while ago Wondering Willis Eschenbach wrote about Anthony Watts at WUWT:

So it is not Anthony’s job to determine whether or not the work of the guest authors will stand the harsh light of public exposure. That’s the job of the peer reviewers, who are you and I and everyone making defensible supported scientific comments. Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece, he couldn’t do that job.

Anthony Watts seems to agree that it's not his job to see if articles have any merit or not. And Willis is on the ball when he says that Anthony couldn't tell anyway.

Anthony Watts - big, huge, spectacular fail in climate 101

There's another example of that today (archived here). Anthony copied and pasted an article from another blog, which was itself taken from yet a third blog. (Deniers are into recycling in a big way.)  His claim this time is encapsulated in his headline:

EPA document supports ~3% of atmospheric carbon dioxide is attributable to human sources

Three per cent? 3%? WRONG - it's 30%!

Remember, Anthony Watts has been blogging about climate science or weather for more than seven years now. To not know that human activity has added more than 40% to atmospheric CO2 is amazing, even for someone as blockheaded as Anthony Watts. It makes you realise that Willis Eschenbach has hit the nail on the head. Anthony Watts doesn't know the first thing about climate. [Corrected phrasing/arithmetic, thanks Robert.]

Food and climate change and hypersensitive deniers at WUWT

In my experience, prolonged exposure to severe sharp pain can make a person hypersensitive to pain, at least temporarily.  Well I'm seeing the same effect with Anthony Watts at WUWT when it comes to fear.

Studies have suggested that some people process information via the amygdala more and they are hypersensitive to fear. That goes a long way to explaining the following. In fact it explains a lot about deniers. Deniers (ie the plebs as opposed to the disinformers) do appear to react strongly against anything that causes them to be scared. Their brain gets overloaded so they claim "it can't be true". I see it time and time again at WUWT. The words "scare" and "fear" come up a lot whenever climate science is discussed, with claims like "they are just trying to scare us".

Christopher Monckton knows very well that the threshold of fear among the denialati is much lower than average. He drafted an email which traded heavily on the scaredy cat tendency, you may recall (email here, which I discussed here). Any normal person would laugh or groan or tsk upon getting an email like that. I don't know how most deniers reacted. What I do know is that he managed to attract people to his events, so it's likely there were some people who didn't consign his email to the spam or trash folder.

Two days in a row Anthony's picked on perfectly normal headlines and claimed they are "hype".

Now hype happens all the time. Editors want to attract readers so they pick a headline that will scream for attention. Yet that wasn't the case in these two situations.  Here are the two cases (click read more if you are on the home page).

Anthony Watts and WUWT move into UFO territory with the Daily Mail

Source: Daily Mail as promoted by WUWT

You may have noticed that Anthony Watts blog is getting more Jesse Ventura-like every day. (I'd not heard of Jesse Ventura before coming across the conspiracy crowd.)

Today is no exception. Anthony's written about an article in the Daily Mail about a mysterious hole that appeared in northern Russia - on the Yamal peninsula (archived here).

The Daily Mail (archived here) speculates that it could be any number of things. In the headline it suggests it was a UFO landing site, presumably aliens from outer space, or a meteorite crater.

UFO landing site? Meteorite crater? Scientists baffled by gigantic 262ft hole that has appeared at Siberia's 'End of The World'

The Daily Mail writes: "There has been web speculation about the crater indicating 'the arrival of a UFO craft'."

Does Anthony scoff at the thought it could be a UFO? Oh, no. He elevates that notion to the same category as dendrochronology and paleoclimatology.

Does he reject the notion it could be a meteorite crater? Not at all.

But when it comes to speculation from a research scientist who specialises in permafrost research - that's what Anthony calls "climate craziness of the week".

Now getting science from the Daily Mail is weird enough, but what's weirder still is thinking that a "UFO landing site" is more plausible than an underground gas explosion. Well, I call that really weird.

The Siberian Times reports that scientist, Dr Anna Kurchatova from Sub-Arctic Scientific Research Centre (Tyumen State Oil and Gas University) speculates that the crater may have been formed:

...by a water, salt and gas mixture igniting an underground explosion, the result of global warming. She postulates that gas accumulated in ice mixed with sand beneath the surface, and that this was mixed with salt - some 10,000 years ago this area was a sea.

Global warming, causing an 'alarming' melt in the permafrost, released gas causing an effect like the popping of a Champagne bottle cork, she suggests.

Given the gas pipelines in this region such a happening is potentially dangerous.

Anthony Watts isn't kidding. He refers to scientific speculation as unprecedented craziness, writing:

I kid you not. The level of stupid here is unprecedented. 

Whatever caused the hole to appear, I guess the investigators will figure it out. The Siberian Times reported that soil was thrown out of the hole, which could suggest an explosion under the surface.

The Daily Mail article was a beat up for its tabloid audience, suitable fodder for gullible readers, with it's UFO landing site speculation. While the Daily Mail wrote of "Teams of scientists are rushing east...", and "An urgent expedition will leaves tomorrow...", the Siberian Times instead wrote that the hole has probably been there for a couple of years:

Initial reports and images were suspected to be fakes, but the hole is a real phenomenon and it is believed to have been formed around two years ago.

Engineer Konstantin Nikolaev from Yugra is one of those to have filmed it from a helicopter.  

From the WUWT comments

Not everyone at WUWT agreed with Anthony Watts that it was more likely to be a UFO landing site and the scientist was "crazy". philjourdan, although tipping his hat to global warming denial, says that "methane explosions happen all the time":

July 15, 2014 at 1:53 pm
I did not read the entire article, but what the Russians said did not seem to be so crazy:
But one Russian expert says the cause is more likely to be global warming releasing gases under the surface

Global warming releasing to me (and I am no expert at how the Russians phrase things) means that the gasses released by the crater are a part of the global warming cadre. Which is not unheard of. Methane explosions happen all the time.

And then on second thought, it could be they are saying that global warming released the gas. I guess you have to read it a couple of times. in that case, we do not have to worry about fracking. Global warming is now skynet and is self sustaining.

Curious George says:

July 15, 2014 at 2:03 pm
If this is not caused by global warming – what is?

Elmer approves of the wacky direction WUWT is taking and says:

July 15, 2014 at 2:34 pm
The good news is global warming is now being lumped in with things like UFOs.

GeologyJim says that permafrost can't melt below the surface:

July 15, 2014 at 2:50 pm
Impact crater? – most certainly not. Search “Gene Shoemaker USGS”
Gaseous vent? Possible. The venting velocity appears quite gentle, as nothing is thrown far from the throat. No ejecta rays indicating high velocity exhaust.

Jumbled appearance of ejecta may indicate permafrost blocks that subsequently sublimed.
But global warming? Anyone who has worked in shallow underground shafts, caves, or (even) basements knows that the temperature is nearly static below about 10 feet, regardless of outside air temperature.
Sheesh!

Jim Clarke analyses the situation carefully from his ergonomic chair in his lounge room and sagely says:

July 15, 2014 at 2:56 pm
Here’s my theory. There was no explosion. It’s a sinkhole. Based on the evidence in the video there’s not enough material around the hole to indicate an explosion. Instead it looks like a deposit of debris from water flowing into the hole. I think the sink hole formed under a large shallow lake and the water flowing into the whole washed it clean. It looks like a natural cavern in the bottom of the sinkhole. It is difficult to tell the size, but there could be a massive underground cavern complex there. If we knew the exact coordinates of the hole we could google earth it and see if there was a lake there before. 

Matt isn't so keen on Anthony Watts going to the Daily Mail for "science" and likens the WUWT audience to the target audience of the Daily Mail, and presumably other UFO websites, and says:

July 15, 2014 at 3:02 pm
Why crazy? After all, the Corvette museum also disappeared in a hole due to climate change only recently :)

The comments are also true to Daily Mail’s form: somebody asking where the millions of tons of soil have gone to… WTF.

Let’s see… It is 80m wide, so the area is 3*40*40, and 80meters deep gives 400.000 cubic Meters. That’s 400K tons, not millions. As a side note, of course there wasn’t that much soil in the first place, or else where was the exploding gas hiding? Other Daily Mailers like to see the result of a nuclear explosion. Please stop posting DM “news “… 

Denier weirdness: Christopher Monckton and his 100% consensus

There was a good display of inconsistency of science deniers today when Christopher Monckton wrote an article for Anthony Watts' anti-science blog WUWT (archived here). What he was trying to show, I think, is that the clear scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming isn't clear. He's wrong, as anyone who has read the literature would know very well.

The article demonstrates something else that all "denier watchers" would know. Deniers are deluded when it comes to their understanding of what their fellow deniers think. Many of them assume that all fake sceptics think the same way as they do. They are wrong. The two characteristic of deniers en masse are:

1. They reject mainstream science
2. They embody a myriad of conflicting and contradictory opinions about climate and rarely agree with each other, except on point 1.

The Christopher Monckton deception

This is what he did.

Christopher showed that 64 abstracts from scientific papers from the Cook13 study "Explicitly states that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming" with quantification.

This is what he left out.

Christopher didn't mention the number of abstracts that "Explicitly states humans are causing global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a known fact" without quantification or that "Implies humans are causing global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gas emissions cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause".

Nor did Christopher mention how few abstracts either implicitly or explicitly disputed the fact that humans cause global warming  (fewer than 2% over twenty years). That would have spoiled his story completely.

If you're not familiar with the paper, I've written about it a few times, for example here and here and here. For a more in-depth discussion there is a very good article at And Then There's Physics which explores the importance and implications of the 97% consensus paper of John Cook and his colleagues.

97% agree, humans are causing global warming

If he had included all the information instead of cherry picking to suit his deception, Christopher would have come up with a total of 4014 papers that attribute a cause to current global warming as follows: 3896 papers or 97.1% explicitly or implicitly endorsed human-caused global warming, 78 or 1.9% disputed it and 40 or 1.0% indicated the cause was 'uncertain'.

Incompetent or deceitful? Anthony Watts is lost for words so substitutes pictures...

Update - see below. Judith Curry has decided to join forces with the loony camp. [Sou: 5:30 pm 2 July 14 AESDT]


This is a follow-up to Anthony Watts idiocy with regard to the US temperature record. You can read about his lead up tantrums here and here.

After all his mistakes of the past few days, topped off by this latest gaffe, Anthony Watts' reputation as far as the US temperature records go should be in tatters. Except he has no reputation with anyone who counts for anything. He's just another denialist blogger.

Lost for words

Today Anthony Watts is lost for words. So lost that when he found out that NCDC/NOAA had responded to a query from Politifact, he just posted the response "without comment" (archived here). The response from NCDC was, unsurprisingly, that their algorithms are working as intended.  You can read it in full in the archived WUWT article. It is just as Nick Stokes and others wrote.

Anthony peevishly wrote "The NCDC has not responded to me personally, I only got this by asking around." Yeah, you'd think that after Anthony's lunatic rantings at all and sundry and misrepresenting the NCDC they'd at least have paid him the courtesy of writing to him, the "bigger than Ben Hur" denier blogger, "personally"!

He stomped about for at least three hours trying to figure out how to get back at the NCDC/NOAA for ignoring him and his anti-science blog. "How could they do that?" He fumed. "I just put in a huge amount of effort telling my readers how bad and unscrupulous and wrong and positively evil the NOAA is and they ignore me."

The fact that it was Anthony who was so dreadfully wrong in almost everything he wrote about the US temperature record would have been beside the point. He wanted to stir up a hornets' nest, but the hornets flew off over his head. He wasn't worth even a little sting.

Anthony Watts takes a swipe at his engineering buddies

After three hours Anthony was still lost for words, but he came up with a sneaky way around this. He decided to say it with pictures. So he put up lots of big photos (archived here). Most of them were of engineering disasters. Given a huge (dis)proportion of Anthony's denier fans are engineers this may not go over well.

Anthony took particular aim at his fellow deniers, the Gang of 49 who are retired space engineers and astronauts. This motley lot pride themselves on rejecting climate science, though they can't do simple arithmetic and know nothing about climate. Anthony doesn't care if he shoots them down. He's prepared to drop a few allies in his quest to prove that all climate science is wrong. Here's a list of his pictures that PROVE the US temperature record is wrong.

• some early NASA rockets - would these have been NASA rockets designed by some of the Gang of 49 who Anthony promotes from time to time?
• the Mariner - that surely would have involved some of the Gang of 49 deniers
• the Mars Climate Orbiter - again, were any of those dismissed engineers close to the Gang of 49?
• the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse - which wouldn't endear him to his engineering buddies, 
• the de Havilland Comet, that's a bit risky. Some of Anthony's engineering fans would be old enough to have played a part in that one.
• the Titanic - that's probably safe enough. The people who designed the Titanic wouldn't be around any more. And I don't know that he has any admirers from the ship-building industry.

Anthony Watts - incompetent or deceitful?

Having listed a few engineering disasters that were not remotely connected to NOAA or NCDC, Anthony finally gets down to brass tacks. He's dug up the fact that on the "Climate at a Glance" website, the record displayed for the month of May for Dallas Texas, between 1970 and 2000, doesn't show a difference between the maximum and minimum temperature and average monthly temperature. Anthony reckons that's a travesty!  Anthony wrote:

While being told that “all is well” and and that “our algorithm is working as designed”, it is easy to discover that if one tries to plot the temperature data for any city in the United States like Dallas Texas for example you get plots for high temperature, low temperature, and average temperature that are identical:

Max/Min data to come at NCDC

So let's look into that, shall we? This is what NCDC had to say about version 1 of the US Climate Division Dataset (my emphasis):

Weaknesses of the U.S. Climate Division Dataset: The U.S. Climate Division Dataset does not contain monthly maximum or minimum temperature or any variables/indices derivable from daily data. Temperature data is adjusted for time of observation bias, however no other adjustments are made for inhomogeneities. These inhomogeneities include changes in instrumentation, observer, and observation practices, station and instrumentation moves, and changes in station composition resulting from stations closing and opening over time within a division.

Does the above apply to what Anthony found? I don't know, perhaps not directly anyway, because Version 1 has been superseded. However it does provide a clue.  A much bigger clue can be found right up the top of the webpage that Anthony himself linked to, where the NCDC has written (my emphasis):

NCDC transitioned to the nClimDiv dataset on Thursday, March 13, 2014. This was coincident with the release of the February 2014 monthly monitoring report. For details on this transition, please visit our public FTP site and our U.S. Climate Divisional Database site.

If you click on the "our public FTP site" link you'll find this, in black and white (my emphasis):

May 13, 2014

NCDC is planning to provide access to nClimDiv maximum and minimum temperature data coincident with the release of the May 2014 climate summary in mid-June.  

These data will be accessible from several of NCDC's products, including Climate at a Glance, and will also reside on our CIRS ftp site:

This isn't clear if it refers to monthly data or annual. On the NCDC charting web page annual data definitely has monthly max and min as well as average. So it may be that monthly data still is not available - or it's two weeks late. In any case, is it worth all the aggro that Anthony dished out? Does Anthony even know that it's ClimDiv data that he's looking at? What's he planning to do with monthly max and min data for Dallas between 1970 and 2000 - which is the chart he got all hot and bothered over? I'd say he could probably use USHCN data if he wanted to. [Para amended slightly a few minutes after posting.]

Shall we put Anthony's flap down to incompetence or is he deliberately leading his readers astray?

I'd say if you want any specialist advice on the US temperature record, avoid WUWT and Anthony Watts!

From the WUWT comments

Rhoda R doesn't know anything about US surface temperature but wants to join in the chorus and says:

July 1, 2014 at 8:19 pm
Did anyone ask what the design goal was that these algorithms were designed to meet?

editstet has nothing to add but adds it anyway and says:

July 1, 2014 at 8:19 pm
Ah, well, that certainly simplifies things.

editstet follows it up with another meaningless one-liner says:

July 1, 2014 at 8:23 pm
Or maybe NOAA scientists took the song Night and Day too literally.

pokerguy has nothing to say but says it anyway:

July 1, 2014 at 8:28 pm
“…working as designed.”
Well that’s a relief.

Rud Istvan is a fake sceptic who says:

July 1, 2014 at 9:08 pm
Anthony, call them on the max min avg mistake. They might respond since obviously and embarassingly wrong.

You just called them on much bigger climate temp issues, and were ‘blown off’. Time to escalate. And not just here. “algorithm does what we intended” is going to be one of those salient moments all round. What a lovely intent statement in any court of law able to convict.

davidmhoffer mistakenly thinks the NCDC has something to do with the Hubble telescope. Either that or he wants Anthony to stick the boot into the Gang of 49 some more, and says:

July 1, 2014 at 9:30 pm
Aw, you left out the Hubble Telescope. I think it a most appropriate example for no other reason that every single component and sub-assembly worked exactly as designed. It was only the fully assembled device that failed to work properly.

i sense the same mind numbing denial of the obvious in this case. The algorithm no doubt did work exactly as designed. That by no means proves that the design achieved an output commensurate with actual results, and, as the trends above show, it is quite possible to have an algorithm that works as designed yet, as part of a larger system, like the Hubble Telescope, produces incorrect information that is wildly and completely obviously wrong. Sadly, a quick look at the original photo from Hubble was enough to convince a rank layman that something was wrong. I don’t think a quick look by the MSM will have the same effect.

Update: Curried potatoes anyone?

Judith Curry has decided to pitch her tent alongside the unsavoury "Steve Goddard" and ignorant Anthony Watts (archived here). As every year passes (and as she herself admits), she shifts further and further into loony land. She's trying to portray absolutely nothing as a "political hot potato", based solely on the ignorant ravings of petulant, thwarted deniers.

Denier Weirdness: Magical mysterious Force X and the Notch

Note: You can read a step by step account of the Big News here. In more recent news, it has been announced that The Notch has passed away, peacefully, in the presence of family and close friends. RIP. [Sou 1 August 2014]

---

If you ever wondered just how much a fake sceptic is willing to be duped, here's an example.

Until today there was only been one minor mention of the scam at WUWT that I noticed. Anthony Watts chastised Wondering Willis for not giving Jo Nova a plug, in another of his "it's not the sun" articles. Today it's being promoted by Anthony Watts in an article by David "funny sunny" Archibald (archived here, latest here, and very latest here, with 532 comments. Some of the stouches (battles) are hilarious).

I mean, you've got to wonder at how deniers can be so darned gullible.

If you're wondering what this is all about, apparently Jo Nova and her partner David Evans have found a Notch. What this Notch does is delay solar energy reaching the earth by eleven years, or something like that. That's a long time for light to wait in the queue. Einstein would be amused.

There's more. There is also a mysterious Force X that is affecting the climate. This Force X comes from the sun. It's just that no-one's noticed except David Evans and Jo Nova.

This is a long account. If you're on the home page click read more for the rest.

A curious finding from WUWT in Korean speleothems

Here's one for the shrinks out there. Anthony Watts isn't scoffing at a new scientific paper and the question is, why not? (Archived here).

There's a new paper in Nature about climate (hydrologic) patterns in the mid-latitudes and how there appear to be opposite swings in part of the northern and southern hemisphere mid-latitudes in relation to moisture. (Anthony has finally taken notice of the gripe that he doesn't link to sources, because this time he did link to the press release, though not to the paper itself.)

The researchers were studying climate patterns over the past 550,000 years. They analysed samples from limestone caves in Korea. In glacial periods when it is cold and dry the limestone growth stagnates and in interglacials when it is warm and moist they grow (I'd say it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it). Having established climatic patterns in those locations they looked at a range of climate data from elsewhere - solar insolation, glaciers, and deep sea sediments, and found that the same climate change patterns for the same periods.

So then they examined other limestone formations in the southern and northern hemisphere and found a see-saw pattern for the hydrology of the mid-latitudes. More moisture meant a bit warmer and less moisture meant colder and the hemispheres had an opposite pattern, or a see-saw pattern during glacials and interglacials.  From the press release:

In particular, he and colleagues revealed the fact that climate changes in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres showed opposite tendencies by analyzing the fact that stalagmites and flowstones in the temperate zones of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres had opposite growth periods. This suggests for the first time that the so-called phenomenon of the interhemispheric hydrological seesaw that the precipitation changes in the tropical regions show opposing tendencies between Northern and Southern Hemispheres had been spread to the temperate region in which the Korean peninsula was located at least for the last 550,000 years.

Due to the interhemispheric hydrological seesaw, when it rains frequently in a region that belongs to the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), it accelerates the growth of plants and increases the temperature, whereas other areas exhibit cold dry weather. This theory has been applied only to the tropical region and had not been significance in global climate change. However, if it is expanded to the temperate regions by the study of Doctor Jo, the seesaw phenomenon may be regarded as another key factor besides the insolation change which has been regarded as the most powerful factor in the glacial and interglacial cycles.

Put simplistically, as I understand it, when it's warm and moist somewhere it's cold and dry somewhere else - and this has been observed as a see-saw hemispherical pattern in some areas of the tropics and now, with this research, in part of the mid-latitudes. The pattern is purported to be a climatic response to orbital forcing. So it looks as if we're talking about gross patterns over millenia on a geological time scale, not annual, decadal or even centennial patterns.

I found the abstract easier to follow than the press release, so here it is (my paras):

An interhemispheric hydrologic seesaw—in which latitudinal migrations of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) produce simultaneous wetting (increased precipitation) in one hemisphere and drying in the other—has been discovered in some tropical and subtropical regions1, 2, 3. For instance, Chinese and Brazilian subtropical speleothem (cave formations such as stalactites and stalagmites) records show opposite trends in time series of oxygen isotopes (a proxy for precipitation variability) at millennial to orbital timescales2, 3, suggesting that hydrologic cycles were antiphased in the northerly versus southerly subtropics.

This tropical to subtropical hydrologic phenomenon is likely to be an initial and important climatic response to orbital forcing3. The impacts of such an interhemispheric hydrologic seesaw on higher-latitude regions and the global climate system, however, are unknown. Here we show that the antiphasing seen in the tropical records is also present in both hemispheres of the mid-latitude western Pacific Ocean.

Our results are based on a new 550,000-year record of the growth frequency of speleothems from the Korean peninsula, which we compare to Southern Hemisphere equivalents4. The Korean data are discontinuous and derived from 24 separate speleothems, but still allow the identification of periods of peak speleothem growth and, thus, precipitation.

The clear hemispheric antiphasing indicates that the sphere of influence of the interhemispheric hydrologic seesaw over the past 550,000 years extended at least to the mid-latitudes, such as northeast Asia, and that orbital-timescale ITCZ shifts can have serious effects on temperate climate systems. Furthermore, our result implies that insolation-driven ITCZ dynamics may provoke water vapour and vegetation feedbacks in northern mid-latitude regions and could have regulated global climate conditions throughout the late Quaternary ice age cycles.

The curiosity at WUWT

The research is interesting in and of itself. What I also found interesting from a denier-watch perspective was that it was presented at WUWT without any "claim" in the headline and as if it were solid science, not something to be mocked. Anthony wrote the following headline and lead-in (archived here):

Study finds climate of the past behaved as hemispherical opposites

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Anthony Watts

This is from a press release from the Korean Institute of Geoscience and Mineral resources (KIGAM) The English in the PR is not the best, but is does have an interesting finding.

The question in my mind is:

• Is this a new resolution of Anthony's in response to a small number of people requesting less scoffing at science and more of the "here it is, you decide" approach - or
• Is it that Korean science is more acceptable to science deniers than science from the USA, Oceania and Europe? (Two of the authors are from the University of Minnesota, but Anthony probably doesn't know that.)

The research itself relies on fairly sparse data from few locations - "24 separate speleothems from 15 limestone caves" in Korea combined with what I understand to have been existing analyses from selected locations elsewhere in the world.  The southern hemisphere data is only from a few locations - described in the research as the western Pacific, though it includes caves in Naracoorte in South Australia.

The supplementary information includes the following images (click to enlarge):

Background image is from NASA Eclipse Web Site (http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/transit/TV2004.html). a, Peak interglacial periods are characterized by large geographic variations in the seasonal ITCZ and strong atmospheric meridional overturning circulations. b, Stadial periods show intermediate climatic conditions between those of peak interglacial and full glacial periods. c, Interstadial periods show intermediate climatic conditions between those of peak interglacial and full glacial periods. d, Full glacial periods are characterized by small geographic variations in the seasonal ITCZ and weak atmospheric meridional overturning circulations. Conceptual geographic ranges of estimated permafrost and ice sheets during stadial periods are shown by grey- and white-coloured areas, respectively48. Also shown are the cave locations of active speleothem growth during each time period (red dots)4, 15, 21, 42, 49, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59. See Methods for a detailed description of the scenario.

I'm not questioning the research itself.  It looks quite interesting and the scientists themselves as well as reviewers from Nature think so too.

What I'm curious about is why, when science deniers reject global temperature reconstructions of the past one or two millenia, which are based on many, many more proxies of many many more different types from many, many more locations all around the world - why they would embrace a study of climate patterns over five hundred and fifty millenia based on a very small number of proxies from a much smaller number of locations? (You may recall the vehement protests from the denialati at Marcott13.)

From the WUWT comments

Anthony Watts had better watch out. Some of his readers respond as if the paper has merit - heaven forbid! For example, a couple of people picked up on the orbital linkage (Milankovitch cycles), though they didn't seem aware that the research findings were that this was likely a "climatic response to orbital forcing". JimS says:

June 18, 2014 at 6:33 pm
Perhaps this phenomenon can be explained by the Milankovitch precession cycle?

Frank Lee responds to JimS and says:

June 18, 2014 at 7:58 pm
JimS suggested this may have something to do with Milankovitch’s precession cycle, but I believe it is the eccentricity of the elliptical orbit that would better explain the differences between the northern and southern hemispheres. As I understand them, both the tilt and precession cycles would move both hemispheres toward or away from a glaciation at the same time, but the eccentricity cycle would have opposite effects on the hemispheres. 

PeteP adds some information from a sciencedaily.com article about  a 2009 paper about oceanic patterns and says:

June 18, 2014 at 8:50 pm
Is this perhaps related to, and builds on, this study of the Atlantic Ocean currents?
Cardiff University. “Oceanic Seesaw Links Northern And Southern Hemisphere During Abrupt Climate Change During Last Ice Age.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 3 March 2009. .
The new study suggests that abrupt changes in the north were accompanied by equally abrupt but opposite changes in the south. It provides the first concrete evidence of an immediate seesaw connection between the North and South Atlantic. The data shows, for example, that an abrupt cooling in the north would be accompanied by a rapid southerly shift of ocean fronts in the Southern Ocean, followed by more gradual warming across the south.
Dr Barker explains: “The most intuitive way to explain these changes is by varying the strength of ocean circulation in the Atlantic. By weakening the circulation, the heat transported northwards would be retained in the south.” 

Greg Goodman starts off well but spoils it a bit at the end when he says (excerpts):

June 18, 2014 at 11:39 pm
There have been several lines of evidence that the hemispheres do not run in sync.
A lot of warmist claims that LIA was predominantly a NH phenomenon. Opposite tendancies of polar trends as we are currently seeing, often refered to as “polar see-saw” and differences of timing in the changes that marked the end of last glacial period.

...There are clearly large scale changes that produce opposing effects in each hemisphere. Since the NH has more land and thus less heat capacity at the surface it’s temperatures will vary more than SH. Thus the usual obsession with metrics like “global mean surface temperature” could suggest “global warming” even if the global heat content did not change. 

Then come the less knowledgeable WUWT-ers. Gunga Din confuses weather and climate and says:

June 18, 2014 at 6:56 pm
Perhaps I missed something (wouldn’t the first time), but might not the fact that the seasons are opposite in the NH and SH have something to do it?

Santa Baby says irrelevantly and wrongly (the sun has a polarity flip every 11 years or so):

June 18, 2014 at 8:31 pm
The Sun changes magnetic polarity after aprox 22 years and Earth does not? 

philjourdan says:

June 18, 2014 at 5:37 pm
That seems to jive with the fact that almost all the warming during the 90s was in the NH. And why Antarctica ice is growing.

Finally the hard core WUWT illiterati bash away at their keyboards, as they do with every science article. Eustace Cranch says:

June 18, 2014 at 6:14 pm
“…in relation to glacial and interglacial cycles which have been puzzled for the past 60 years.”
The cycles have been puzzled? Dang, climate science confuses everything :)

And illiterati member Aphan says:

June 18, 2014 at 7:30 pm
Wait..what? They are just now figuring out that they are opposites??? Woah

cnxtim says:

June 18, 2014 at 5:16 pm
So, I guess now the new “scare-em” headline will be CHAGW?

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Kyoung-nam Jo, Kyung Sik Woo, Sangheon Yi, Dong Yoon Yang, Hyoun Soo Lim, Yongjin Wang, Hai Cheng, R. Lawrence Edwards. "Mid-latitude interhemispheric hydrologic seesaw over the past 550,000 years". Nature, 2014; 508 (7496): 378 DOI: 10.1038/nature13076

Barker, Stephen, Paula Diz, Maryline J. Vautravers, Jennifer Pike, Gregor Knorr, Ian R. Hall, and Wallace S. Broecker. "Interhemispheric Atlantic seesaw response during the last deglaciation." Nature 457, no. 7233 (2009): 1097-1102. doi:10.1038/nature07770

WUWT wants feedback and asks the impossible of its readers

This article is a catchup on some of the goings on at WUWT while I was busy elsewhere. Anthony Watts wrote a surprisingly (for him) lucid article seeking feedback from his readers on how he could improve his blog (archived here). He got a lot of feedback - 243 comments. He also told his readers what he wanted:

What I’d like to see different about readers and commenters on WUWT:

1. Saying “off topic” and then posting an off topic comment doesn’t actually make it OK. We have Tips and Notes (see menu below the header) for that.
2. I’d like to see less cryptic comments (like from Mosher) and more in-depth comments.
3. I’d like less name calling. The temptation is great, and I myself sometimes fall victim to that temptation. I’ll do better to lead by example in any comments I make.
4. I’d like to see less trolling and more constructive commentary. One way to acheive that is to pay attention
5. I’d like to see more click-throughs on science articles. I note that articles that discuss papers sometimes don’t get as many click-throughs as articles that discuss the latest climate inanity. While such things can be entertaining, bear in mind it is important to keep up with the science too. So, tell me, what could we do better, do different, add, or remove from WUWT?

Please be thoughtful and respectful in such comments. Thanks for your consideration – Anthony

Asking the impossible

You'll notice that one thing that Anthony Watts asked was that people click through links to read the "science". He reckons very few people do that. Anthony's science articles are copies of press releases about new (and sometimes old) scientific papers. You can easily tell his science articles because Anthony almost invariably writes a headline starting with the word "claim". That's his signal to WUWT readers that the article is a press release about new science and that they are required to ridicule it rather than read about it.

But in asking readers to "click through" on science articles, he's pretty well asking the impossible. That's because more often than not Anthony doesn't provide any link to the underlying paper. Most of the time he doesn't even mention the paper itself. Nor does he usually provide a link to the press release he copied. Occasionally he'll provide a link to the home page of the organisation that he got the press release from and leave it up to readers to try to find their way to the actual article.

And while he'd like less name-calling, we've yet to see if he applies that to Christopher Monckton.

What's missing is any plea to cut down on conspiracy theorising. I guess that would alienate his mate Tim Ball, who is a Class A conspiracy theorist.

Anthony also wants less trolling. At WUWT anyone who posts about climate science is a troll and if they aren't banned within their first several posts they can consider themselves lucky.

Anthony also wants fewer cryptic comments. Perhaps any comment containing words of more than two syllables appears cryptic to his readers. WUWT is for the scientific illiterati not for science lovers. He would like more "in-depth" comments. Not so much of the typical "I don't understand it but it's brilliant" responses to Willis' wonderings.

Click the "read more" to see some of the requests that are unlikely to be fulfilled.

The Ugly Side of Denialism: Anthony Watts' level of comprehension hits a new low

Anthony Watts twists and turns wildly at time in an effort to find things that will appease the insatiable appetite of his readers for stuff with which to attack science.

This time he's written a short comment (archived here), picking up a headline but completely missing the point of the letter to which it related.

Research funding models and impact on science and scientists

The headline Anthony picked up on was: "Systemic addiction to research funding", which didn't really fit the letter itself.  It was over a letter written by Andrew Resnick from Cleveland State University, where he is Assistant Professor in the Physics Department, working in biophysics in the College of Sciences and Health Professions.

His letter was in response to an article in PNAS published in April this year by Bruce Alberts, Marc W. Kirschnerb, Shirley Tilghmanc and Harold Varmusd. The April article was about biomedical research in the USA and how the funding system can lead to people leaving scientific research for easier career paths.  The paper is available in full here.  Nothing to do with climate science, although the subject matter arguably applies to the model of research funding in many if not most disciplines - not just science either.

Most research academics have to compete for funding - in all areas, not just science. That's the way the funding bodies work. There have been changes over the decades trying to address the situation but research grants are highly competitive - maybe more so than ever.

I was closer to the issue a couple of decades ago and the article would have been as relevant back then as it is today in many areas.  We used to say that the first year of a three year project was setting up the research, the second year doing the research and the third year writing applications for the next project.  Somewhere in all that the research was completed and written up (mostly).

That's pretty much what Andrew Resnick was arguing in his letter - that what the April paper was about is nothing new. Some improvements have been made in some areas of science, such as longer term projects, a more structured approach, a greater focus on letting grant applicants know the priorities of the funding bodies and setting up cross-institutional and global programs on collaborative "mega-projects". On the downside (from the point of view of the researchers and funding bodies), it used to be that the employing bodies (universities, research institutions) would pick up the tab for corporate overheads. These days they are likely to insist that the research projects pay for these overheads.

Changes in research funding over the decades

There have been big changes in the system of funding over the decades, too. Many decades ago many scientists relied on patrons. Then governments and universities got serious about research and for a while were (relatively for the time) flush with funds. Then governments themselves took a more business-like approach to management as the voting public clamoured for more and more and the dollars had to stretch further and further. Then universities also became more managerial. It's all about producing measurable outputs these days, whether in teaching or research. The world is a lot more complicated than when there were only two billion people on the planet.

That's in Australia and I expect it's not that different in other countries.

Deniers don't want any research - full stop

Back to Anthony Watts. He clearly hasn't got a clue about research funding models. His own business model is much simpler. He earns some of his income from being an anti-science advocate and some of his income trading off the science that other people give him (weather forecasts).

Anthony Watts turned his misunderstanding of the letter into this:

President Eisenhower warned of this. In the world of climate science, we have come to know this simple equation as demonstrated by some of the most zealous proponents of climate change:
No Alarm =  No Funding + No Glory

I'm not aware of President Eisenhower saying anything about climate science. He was around before much of the world (and the US Presidency) was aware of the problems we are causing.  Anthony is appealing to the illiterati like him who don't understand or value science or knowledge. Not only was the article not about climate science, he is very wrong if he thinks that if there wasn't global warming there would be nothing to research. Scientists are quite clever people. They can turn their mind to anything they fancy. And most of them know that to keep their job they have to do work that the funding bodies will pay for. So if funding bodies decide that climate is no longer a priority, many scientists will shift their effort to researching what is a priority or make a career shift to something else that makes use of their talents.

The message I get from Anthony Watts is that he doesn't want any scientific research related to climate or earth sciences. He'd rather not know. But then, he targets the scientifically illiterate and people who are afraid of knowledge.

From the WUWT comments

The usual riff raff with the usual dumb comments mixed with a lot of ugliness (warning - I've included some of the ugly below). If not for places like WUWT I'd have no idea there were people like this in the world today. I do believe they are in the minority and it's only the internet that gives them a voice.


PaulH says:

June 14, 2014 at 3:35 pm
The surest way to solve CAGW is to stop funding it’s “research”.

M Seward says:

June 14, 2014 at 3:43 pm
We have a new monster in out midst. Forget the “military-industrial complex” we now have the “science-political complex” or the “ecoreligeous-science complex”. Call it what you will, its a Godzilla sized monster spreading destructive nonsense and drooling at the prospect of total power.

Dr K.A. Rodgers says:

June 14, 2014 at 5:28 pm
It ain’t so much the scientists who are addicted to funding but their lords and masters in admin who cream at least 15% off the top. That is where the drive comes from.
No funding, no tenure. No funding, no promotion. And so it goes. It is why those same lords and masters will protect a proven fund raiser no matter what codswallop they produce.

latecommer2014 says:

June 14, 2014 at 6:01 pm
It’s the oldest profession ….selling what you have for what you want to any buyer with the resources. Not much different than prostitution.

Nick Stokes isn't completely correct, funding for research can come from many sources other than governments. A lot of scientific and technical research done in universities and other research institutions is funded by industry - according to industry priorities. He says:

June 14, 2014 at 7:36 pm
“His words, not mine.”
Well, it’s the headline, which he probably didn’t write. The letter rather seems to be asking of Alberts et al – well, what do you want?

It’s a reasonable question. It is government that has decided that research will be grant funded. And so that is the research you hear about. You don’t hear from the people who didn’t get grants. They had to do other things. 

Jimbo says:

June 14, 2014 at 4:37 pm
Mortgages, kids, HOT TROPICAL holidays to the sinking Maldives, SUVs, flights, climate conferences to HOT TROPICAL JOINTS, multiple homes, hypocrisy et al all have to be paid for dontcha know. Government control, money and undeserved climastrological recognition is the key to the global warming alarm. 

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Alberts, Bruce, Marc W. Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus. "Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 16 (2014): 5773-5777. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1404402111

Andrew Resnick - letter re above, Systemic addiction to research funding, PNAS 2014

Recycling solar cycles at WUWT

When Anthony Watts has nothing new to write about, he recycles the garbage.

Anthony Watts has a very bad memory, is not at all observant and doesn't understand what he writes about. Today he's got an article (archived here) about a paper published more than two years ago. Anthony didn't check the date of it and wrote:

New study suggests a temperature drop of up to 1°C by 2020 due to low solar activity
Posted on June 13, 2014 by Anthony Watts

From the HockeySchtick:  A paper published today in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics finds long solar cycles predict lower temperatures during the following solar cycle. ...

He linked to the paper, which is dated May 2012. Yep, that's the first thing he should have noticed. (Click the read more link to read on if you're on the home page.)

Pangaean nuttery by Anthony Watts at WUWT

Anthony Watts sometimes complains that he and his blog are the subject of ridicule yet he keeps coming up with the ridiculous. I think he's getting worse. He knows that his bread and butter is the bottom 8%. The hard-core "dismissives" and scientific illiterati. Some of the "doubtful" at WUWT are starting to dismiss the pseudo-science peddled by Anthony.

Today Anthony has written an introduction to another of his copy and paste press releases (archived here). He wrote:

How Earth avoided global warming before SUV’s
From the European Association of Geochemistry, a claim that looks to be little more than paleo-dowsing. Though, ya gotta love the silly claim that Earth would have hit a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus, had it not been for some mountains forming, sucking up all the CO2. Plus we’ve seen the Earth hit 5000PPM CO2 in the past, and it didn’t turn into Venus...

...Of course it all just more model output, there’s no real earth science going on -all guesswork, no actual measurements.

How ignorant is Anthony Watts? Let me count the ways...

How much can you find wrong with Anthony's headline and two paragraphs? I'll list a few things.

1. global warming before SUV's - that's pure denialism. The implied suggestion from idiotic deniers is that if the world warmed in the distant past it couldn't have been from human activity therefore it can't be from human activity now. Anthony fails logic 101.
2. Paleo-dowsing - Anthony tries to make out that the research isn't scientific. This coming from someone who doesn't even understand temperature anomalies from a baseline! You've also got to wonder if Anthony knows the meaning of the verb "to dowse".
3. ya gotta love the silly claim - another attempt by Anthony to mock actual science. Remember when Anthony tried to claim that global warming was caused by steampipes in Russia?
4. claim that Earth would have hit a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus - this is yet another illustration that Anthony Watts doesn't read what he copies and pastes. The press release states that even if the mountains hadn't formed and CO2 had risen sharply, it would NOT have led to a runaway greenhouse effect.
5. we’ve seen the Earth hit 5000PPM CO2 in the past, and it didn’t turn into Venus - Anthony again shows he didn't read the press release he posted. The article clearly says that there wouldn't have been a runaway greenhouse effect. Also, he seems to be oblivious to the fact that in the past when there was more than 5000 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, the sun was quite a bit fainter. And Earth has been hotter in the distant past than it is now, because there was more atmospheric CO2. Anthony has no concept of radiative forcing or the different factors that affect global surface temperatures.
6. just more model output...all guesswork...no actual measurements. Anthony Watts couldn't be more wrong. The measurements are there. That's why the scientists developed a model, to see if they could explain the actual measurements.  Of course it could be that Anthony thinks that because there weren't any people back then, then there couldn't be any measurements. He's scientifically illiterate so that explanation would fit. And it's his scientific illiteracy that would be behind his claim that sophisticated scientific modeling isn't science. Does he really think that funding organisations would fork out hundreds of thousands of dollars on supercomputers and scientists just for kicks? How does he think that other scientific disciplines work? How does he think he gets his weather forecasts? Anthony is behaving the same way as the most uneducated of his ignorant readers.

Once again, Anthony doesn't provide any link to the article he copied and pasted. I found the press release at ScienceDaily.com. It's not about a published paper. This time its about a presentation by Yves Goddéris and colleagues to a conference, the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Sacramento, California. I found an abstract on the conference website. While it makes good reading, it doesn't seem to be about quite the same thing as the press release, though it's not unrelated.

The CO2 paradox

The abstract focuses on the impact of vascular plants on past climates. The press release is about how the formation of a huge mountain range on Pangaea prevented a big rise in atmospheric CO2. The scientists looked for an explanation to a paradox. The paradox was that, because Pangea was so huge, its vast inland areas became very dry. That meant that rock weathering was greatly reduced. This in turn meant that CO2 should have risen. But it didn't.

Mountains could resolve the paradox

During that same period a gigantic mountain range was formed on Pangea, the Hercynian mountains, stretching from what is now the Appalachians, through Ireland, England France, the Alps in Germany and further east. This enormous mountain range was in the humid tropics. Their steep slopes eroded, which because of the heat and humidity, meant that there was rock weathering which removed CO2 from the air.

From sciencedaily.com:

[Team leader Dr Yves Goddéris said] "We believe that it is this which led to the dramatic drop in atmospheric levels of CO2. We estimate that if it hadn't been for the formation of the Hercynian mountains, the atmospheric CO2 levels would have reached around 25 times the pre-industrial level, meaning that CO2 levels would have reached around 7000 ppm (parts per million). Let me put that into a present-day context; the current atmospheric CO2 levels are around 400 ppm, so this means that we would have seen CO2 rise to a level around 17 times current levels. This would obviously have had severe effects on the environment of that time. But the formation of the mountains in fact contributed to the greatest fall in atmospheric CO2 in the last 500 million years."

The team believes that even if the mountains had not formed and CO2 levels rose sharply, this would not have led to a runaway greenhouse effect as happened on Venus, because the increasing temperatures would have led to rocks being ultimately weathered, heat compensating for the scarcity of water. Rock weathering would have removed CO2 from the atmosphere, thus stopping the rising temperatures.

"So it would eventually have been self-correcting" said Dr Godderis, "but there's no doubt that this would have stalled Earth's temperature at a high level for a long, long time. The world would look very different today if these mountains had not developed when they did.

This is a new model which explains some of the events in the 80 million years following the start of the Carboniferous period, and of course the ideas need to be confirmed before we can be sure that the model is completely accurate. The take-home message is that the factors affecting atmospheric CO2 over geological periods of time are complex, and our understanding is still evolving."

Fascinating, isn't it. I'll have to keep my eyes open for a published paper.  When you think about all the science that underpins these ideas it puts Anthony Watts ignorant idiocy into perspective.

From the WUWT comments

I can hear some groans at Bill Illis' comment which is effectively "scientists don't know nuffin'". Except it was Bill who didn't bother reading the article and says (excerpt):

June 11, 2014 at 9:22 pm
They got the timing completely backwards here.

ATheoK is another denier of the "scientists don't know nuffin'" kind but only demonstrates his own scientific illiteracy when he says (excerpt):

June 11, 2014 at 10:08 pm
Don’t you just love these new fangled computer models. They can take arid environments and turn them into humid equatorial environments just by growing some mountains. No mention of how tall the mountains were… I wonder how many mountain passes the computer modelers programmed in.

Steep slopes of the Hercynian mountains… Steep? I suppose the model required steep mountains for some reason? The odd thing about steep mountains is that above certain altitudes, they tend to keep moisture as perennial snowcaps. Steep mountains with heights under the snowcap level look sort of funny if they’re mesa shaped.

Mountains on Earth have difficulty retaining steep slopes because gravity wins. Weathering is a complex process where the more complex the mineralization, the quicker the weathering. There are exceptions where large resistant granitic massifs are elevated. But whole mountain chains composed of massifs are about as believable as funny models.

u.k.(us) says, somewhat irrelevantly:

June 11, 2014 at 10:38 pm
” Rock weathering would have removed CO2 from the atmosphere, thus stopping the rising temperatures.”
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Not a word in regards to salt water /heat capacity.

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Yves Goddéris, Yannick Donnadieu and Sebastien Carretier. "Critical zone and carbon cycle in the deep time." Goldschmidt 2014.