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).

Cycling disinformers: A mini update of denier waffle at WUWT

I admit to being bored with the petty deniers and conspiracy theorists at WUWT. What's happening at the political level in the USA and Australia is much more fascinating in a grim way. Still, until I have a bit more time to focus on the blog, you'll have to make do with this mini-update about the goings on in deniersville - from Eric Worrall, Andy May, Willis Eschenbach and Ira Glickstein, PhD.

It's pretty much the blind leading the blind in the sense that there's none so blind...(nothing to do with vision-impairment).

Is there any difference between Willis Eschenbach's head and his feet?

Science deniers are running out of ideas with the climate change that's happening all about them. Massive floods all around the world these past few weeks. No big La Nina coming to rescue fake sceptics, and the world shows no sign of cooling down. Even the precious satellite record hasn't been doing it's bit to give conspiracy theorists hope of an ice age.

Willis Eschenbach has written how he's throwing in the towel and, instead of talking about science, he's going to ridicule it (archived here). Today at WUWT he wrote a topsy turvy article that shows that he can't make up his mind whether climate change is real or not. He seems to be shifting between two denier stages:

• Climate science is a hoax, and
• If it's not a hoax, there's nothing we can do about it.

Open thread, plus deniosphere update

I've been busy on a couple of things this week so am a bit behind in denier-oogling. There isn't a lot happening. Deniers are probably licking their wounds from all the record hots, and biding their time waiting until the El Niño dissipates. It's three weeks now since there was an ice age cometh article at WUWT :)

There is the usual irony. WUWT, a blog that specialises in climate disinformation, had an article about accuracy and trust in science (archived here).  On the same day, it published yet another grossly inaccurate article by Albert Parker aka Alberto Boretti about sea level (archived here). And it also had an article by Anthony Watts (archived here) about a dip in total solar irradiance - of around 1 W/m², out of 1360 W/m² - with Anthony writing: "If nothing else, this demonstrates that sunspots can have quite a large, if only temporary, forcing  on TSI and Earth’s received energy budget." Yeah, right. A huge temporary forcing, isn't it. About 0.074% large!

Look at the squirrell! Dull deluded deniers moan about a single unused weather station

Anthony Watts was sent a bunch of photos from a fan of his, Mark Albright (archived here). If you've been hanging around climate blogs for a few years you might recognise the name. Mark is listed as Research Meteorologist at the University of Washington, and hangs out with Cliff Mass, who flips and flops between acting like a full-on climate science denier and accepting that humans are changing the climate. Mark Albright got himself into the climate spotlight a few years ago, when he did something foolish with snow data. Given his preference for WUWT, and his past antics, I'd say he's just another science denier from the USA.

What Mark found was a poorly sited weather station in a park in Arizona: Picacho 8 SE. So he sent lots of photos to Anthony Watts. Anthony, in turn, for want of anything meaninful to write about, has filled his blog with the photos.

Spencer Weart and Physics Today tweak the noses of science deniers from the Heartland Institute

WUWT is shaping up to be the last bastion of climate science deniers. Anthony Watts will post almost any article, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it rejects science. Today he's got a whiny missive from a bunch of people from the Heartland Institute (archived here). They are complaining that the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), Physics Today, won't accept a comment they wrote.

Anthony posted the article under a misleading headline. His headline says that Physics Today wouldn't acknowledge their comment: "NIPCC’s reply to Physics Today (that they won’t even acknowledge)". However in the opening paragraph of the article, he admits that there was an email exchange and that their comment was acknowledged, but rejected.

The reason for the rejection is obvious. It wasn't a "rebuttal", it was a whine that Spencer Weart mentioned their denial efforts and dismissed them out of hand, as he should.

Paris is approaching, and deniers are on the back foot

In just two months, the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21) will commence, alongside a big shindig for business, the Sustainable Innovation Forum 2015. By this time you might have expected the deniers to be in full swing, stealing emails from scientists, or otherwise getting up to their usual dirty tricks. There's nothing. Worse than nothing. Deniers are merely recycling ancient memes, and if anything, are on the defensive.

Anthony Watts at WUWT briefly stepped out of his hidey hole with a couple of articles over the past week, but all he did was act the fool. First in icy cold Greenland and then in sunny Spain. He wasn't just mocked here at HW, he didn't get much applause from his own crowd, either. So he slunk back into his hole and handed over the reins to his resident uber conspiracy theorist, Tim Ball.

Boring denier memes recycled at WUWT. I blame Andrew Weaver!

Anthony Watts' blog has become tedious and boring and dull. When the most exciting article of the WUWT week is the sleep-inducing "Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #171" you know that WUWT is in the doldrums.

Here are some of Anthony's recent offerings:

• Umpteen articles bemoaning the fact that a few more people have found out what a loser is Willie Soon with his "it's the sun" fantasies - though few people would have heard of Willie Soon even now, and most people are well aware that it's not the sun that's causing this global warming. (Last I heard, Willie has run away to sulk in some dark corner of the Heartland Institute.)
• One article by some pseudo-religious anti-environmental nutter saying that global warming is not his fault and anyway it's not really happening (or not much) and there wasn't really much of a drought in Syria or if there was the resulting food shortages didn't exacerbate conflict in the region or if it did then it wasn't his fault
• An article by one of Anthony's "anonymous cowards" who went by the name of Megg, saying how he, she or it couldn't tell the difference between scientific facts and religious beliefs. The article was too primitive to warrant an "absurd" tag, let alone a whole article on HotWhopper.
• An article about a new Tsonis paper claiming to have found a pattern in the temperature records, and deciding it was all down to galactic cosmic rays. The stats in the paper is beyond me, but from what I read, I wonder if Leif Svalgaard is correct and the patterns they saw could be no more than the cyclical changes in incoming solar radiation. Whatever, they concluded that cosmic rays, or lack of, aren't causing global warming.
• An article with a video of some US Republican Senator miming "CO2 isn't a pollutant, it's plant food" - sheesh!

I don't think Anthony Watts has defamed a single scientist or climate hawk in, oh - it could be a week or more now. Josh has lost his touch. There's not even the usual UAH temperature report to liven things up. (Probably because last month was the third hottest February in the UAH lower troposphere record, after 1998 and 2010).

Has Anthony given up? Is this a lull before his next "big announcement" or dogwhistle to his lynch mob? 

I blame Andrew Weaver.