Curses! It's a conspiracy! The Fury is Back Thrice Over

I don't know if you saw the wonderful conspiracy theory from the sockpuppeting ex-mod at WUWT, dbstealey (who has also posted as Smokey, D Böehm, D Böehm Stealey, and 'dbs, mod').  Anthony's staunchest ally, fan and WUWT moderator and attack dog, dbstealey, wrote not long ago that the KGB inserted Pope Francis as the head of the Catholic Church:

June 15, 2015 at 7:23 pm
...After Pope John Paul II faced down the Soviet Union, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was targeted by the KGB/FSB. They have a lot of patience. The current Pope is the result. Now they have their puppet in the Vatican.

His notion that Pope Francis is a KGB sleeper agent is right up there with the best of the multitude of zany conspiracy theories that Anthony Watts promotes on his denier blog.

Alec Rawls uncovers an Eemian climate conspiracy @wattsupwiththat

An infrequent guest at Anthony Watts climate conspiracy blog is a bloke called Alec Rawls. He's a climate conspiracy theorist and, going by his articles, he's quite possibly a general conspiracy theorist too. He sees nefarious intent in every bit of science.

Muddled denier thinking

If you've ever visited a denier blog (like WUWT), one thing you may have noticed is that some science deniers call on science to prove that the science they call on is "wrong". Yes, if that's confusing so are deniers. Conspiracy theorising science deniers will often do the same thing. They'll say that the scientists are hiding something, then "prove" it by referring to science, showing that scientists do in fact say what they claim scientists do not say.

Still confused?

Why @wattsupwiththat has been so dull lately - it's the weather

At WUWT the mood is sombre and dull and boring. There has been nothing of note for a while. You'd never know that Anthony Watts claims he is a "former AMS certified (Seal 676 retired) television meteorologist who spent 25 years on the air". He doesn't blog about weather these days. Instead there's the usual from the resident conspiracy theorist, Tim Ball (of One World Guvmint/New World Order nonsense), and various articles about why the Pope is wrong to accept science. These latter are a bit mixed up, with some saying that the Catholic Church should do a Galileo and reject science, and others complaining that he wants to rob the poor, and others saying he is a marxist and wanting to make the poor people of the world better off (horrors of horrors!) and one comment even claiming Pope Francis is a KGB sleeper agent.

At one point recently, Anthony branched out into national security and went all alarmist. He warned his readers to watch out for terrorist attacks on the Independence Day weekend, so quite a few of them unholstered their guns. This was the result. (Only a couple of readers said his article was crap.)

I think I've figured out what the problem is. Every time Anthony puts on his weather announcer's hat he quickly takes it off again. This is some of what he doesn't want his readers to read:

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)?

More conspiracy theories from WUWT: It's a strong climate plot

WUWT is one of a multitude of conspiracy theory blogs on the internet. Anthony Watts, the blog owner, specialises in conspiracy theories of the climate kind. Today he's posted another article from one of his nuttier paranoid guests, whose name is Tim Ball (archived here). He's a frequent guest also on one of the even nuttier websites in Canada, which promotes "Freedom Water".

Tim is just writing about his normal (normal for him that is) theories that global warming is a plot hatched by a man called Maurice Strong. You can read an interview with Maurice Strong at the Guardian - by Leo Hickman, back in 2010.

Apparently Maurice Strong created global warming back in the 1980s. He must have had thousands of people in on the conspiracy, because he was able to alter scientific journals dating back to the beginning of the 19th century. That means he must have not only co-opted some of the world's leading scientific publishers and all their staff, he must have hauled in librarians all around the world to doctor old copies of scientific journals.

Job vacancy at WUWT: Wanted - a young charismatic conspiracy theorising scientist

There's a job going at WUWT for a charismatic young scientist. This charismatic young scientist needs the following attributes:

• Subscribes to the conspiracy theory that "climate science is a hoax"
• Is willing to deny that humans are causing global warming
• Doesn't vote Republican (it is assumed that the scientist will be from the USA)
• Appeals to US-style libertarians
• Isn't an anti-vaxxer
• Isn't a flat-earther
• Isn't a young earth creationist
• Doesn't (openly) subscribe to any other well-known conspiracy theory like "NASA faked the moon landing"; 911-truth; birtherism etc
• Knows how to spell "pause", and isn't shy about saying "pause, pause, pause" every time someone points to the rapid rise in surface temperature, ocean heat, melting ice etc
• Is willing to waffle and avoid mentioning any climate science
• Is able to figure out what he or she "stands for"
• "Believes" that CO2 is a greenhouse gas
• "Believes" that greenhouse gases don't work any more

Christopher Monckton's Latest Conspiracy Theory: World Guvmint caused by ENSO

This was sighted at Anthony Watts' conspiracy blog, WUWT, today, from Monckton of Brenchley (my emphasis):

May 4, 2015 at 10:23 am
In response to Aneipris, the problem is timing. The el Nino, if it endures to the end of this year, will shorten the Pause. Then the Paris conference will introduce a world government. Then the la Nina will continue the Pause, but it will be too late. In the current draft treaty, there is no secession clause.

Deniers complain when we point out their conspiracy nuttery. It doesn't stop them getting nuttier by the day.

Denier weirdness: Conspiracy theories get odder by the day at WUWT

Anthony Watts has come up with yet another conspiracy theory. It's full of holes, but what do science deniers care, those who can see the holes, that is. In fact it's got so many holes that it vanishes as soon as you touch it - it disintegrates into nothingness. Conspiracy theorists are willing to accept any nonsense. I haven't seen a sillier article or a sillier thread at WUWT in at least a few hours.

If you have a few minutes to waste, read on. Otherwise, wait for me to write about something vaguely sane.

More conspiracy theories: WUWT's Tim Ball plus Judith Curry

There is nothing much new at WUWT that I can see. The memes are being recycled.

Tim Ball is writing some of his usual nonsense, this time about a Nature paper from 1996, stolen emails and hockey sticks. He hasn't written anything that shows climate science is wrong, but he has repeated his paranoid conspiracy theories. (Every single one of the nine or so investigations, on two continents, relating to stolen emails was a "cover up", in Tim's paranoid mind.)

Judith Curry's "money, politics and consensus" conspiracy theory

Speaking of conspiracy theories, Judith Curry has come up with a beauty (archived here).

The Evolution of a 97% Conspiracy Theory - The Case of the Abstract IDs

Update: OMG! If you can believe it, even after all this, Richard Tol, in the comments below, is still indulging in a Recursive Fury of Gish gallops. He's taken the new (to him) facts and, instead of letting go of his wacky ideas as he should, he's gone and woven still more new conspiracy theories. (Has Richard not got any friends to have a quiet word in his ear? No-one who cares for him? How sad.)

[Sou 6:17 pm 31 March 2015 AEDT]

---

If you've been following this blog for the past few days, you'll have noticed the fine illustration of denier-weird in action, including a Gish gallop evolving live (here and here).

This article is more by way of a post-script. An extraordinarily long post-script. As you probably know, I don't normally repeat a theme over consecutive days. The reason I'm writing this up as a separate article is because it is a wonderful chance to see how a conspiratorial notion was developed over a few short hours, at the tail end of a Gish gallop.

It's a conspiracy. I just know it!

Another conspiracy theory at WUWT - birthers and more

Anthony's still pretty well AWOL. Meanwhile the conspiracy theorists are hard at it. This time it's Eric Worrall again - that is, Eric "eugenics" Worrall to those who aren't familiar with the name.

Someone started a rumour that President Obama had bought a beachfront property in Hawaii. Not just any property, it was the property used in Magnum PI - a television show from way back when starring Tom Selleck.

The rumour was quickly squashed, on both CNN and Fox News. However no-one bothered to correct the WUWT article itself (archived here). Why spoil a good rumour with facts?

As many people know, WUWT is a climate conspiracy website mainly, but it's not averse to a bit of birtherism and it most certainly panders to all those to the right of the extreme right. Given the USA has no leftist politics to speak of, the best WUWT can manage is to take a shot at centrist politicians like President Obama. And why not toss a bone to all the WUWT conspiracy nutters when the opportunity presents itself?

The World Domination Conspiracy Theory at WUWT

As if Viv Forbes paranoid conspiracy theory wasn't enough, Anthony Watts trots out David "funny sunny" Archibald, starting off an article (archived here) with (my emphasis):

“Everybody Wants To Rule The World” was a 1985 song by Tears For Fears. Now in 2015, a number of parties are doing their best to that end – ISIS in the Middle East, Russia chewing up the Ukraine, China in the East and South China Seas and the UN Climate Change Commission. A draft document out of Geneva gives details of the UN plan to rule the world.

Does conspiracy theorists' paradise, WUWT, beat Judith Curry's denier heaven?

Not wanting to be outdone by Judith Curry's recent demonstration of her blog as denier heaven, Anthony Watts decides to prove that his blog is conspiracy theorists' paradise. (A lot more fodder for Professor Lewandowsky.)

In a wonderful display of paranoia, Anthony Watts has posted another article (archived here) by Stanmore Coal director, Viv Forbes.

WUWT claims (again) that global warming is a giant conspiracy of mammoth proportions

Anthony Watts, who runs a wacky conspiracy theory blog, WUWT, has another article (archived here) claiming that global warming isn't happening and it's all a giant conspiracy. Anthony posted a "guest essay" by someone called Ralph Park, who is a conspiracy nutter.

WUWT attacks the Catholic Church

Not satisfied with attacking scientists and science, now WUWT has set its sights on the Catholic Church. According to Tim Ball (archived here), the Pontiff doesn't realise that mitigating climate change means "reducing and controlling population" and "contradicts Catholic doctrine". Tim says that Pope Francis is a socialist who is "easily persuaded". Oh, and according to Tim, one shouldn't approach scientists if one wants to learn about science.

It's odd for WUWT to come out with a full bore attack on the Catholic Church because Anthony Watts recently declared himself as Catholic. Most Catholics are very loyal to their Church though many would recognise its faults and past transgressions. So if Anthony Watts had posted an article praising cigarette smoking, given his history, this would be the equivalent. Remember, Anthony favours the Heartland Institute, which waged a pro-smoking campaign for years, so he is not being inconsistent in his inconsistency.

What all this goes to show is that Anthony Watts has one goal which is way more important to him than his religion and his anti-smoking stance. His goal is to prevent anyone doing anything to mitigate global warming. He'll drop all his principles (did he ever have any?) and grab hold of anything, even Tim Ball, to achieve that end. His underlying motivation like that of many at WUWT, is mundane - it's money.

WUWT wants your best paranoid conspiracy theory about the IPCC

WUWT has had three articles in the past 24 hours, protesting the latest reports from the IPCC. These IPCC reports are not new material. What they are is a Synthesis Report, combining the reports of the three working groups. And a Summary for Policymakers of that Synthesis Report.

You can download the reports from the IPCC website.

As well as a summary from the media reports (archived here), Anthony Watts has got utter nutters from the piddly and incestuous "climate science coalitions". He has a "press release" quoting Tom Harris (who gets his climate science from the Bible) and Bob Carter (who warns about an ice age comething) apparently claiming that the IPCC reports are "unscientific and immoral" (archived here).  Is that the best they can do? Seriously? I can't imagine the "press release" will be used anywhere except denier blogs that only pander to deniers and don't care how weird they look to the rest of the world.

Anthony Watts has also got "Bob Tisdale" calling for WUWT readers to post their best conspiracy theory about the IPCC (archived here).

About the IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). This was when conservative parties were in government. Ronald Reagan was US President and Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister in the UK. Bob Hawke was the Prime Minister of Australia, but I doubt he would have had much say in this matter compared to the United States and Britain.

The IPCC itself employs only a very small staff. It's reports are prepared through a collaboration of thousands of scientists throughout the world, who volunteer their time to do so. Mostly this is unpaid out-of-hours work, because most of them would have to continue in their main job at the same time. The authors of the IPCC reports are experts in their respective fields. They review the latest scientific research and report on it. They judge the relevance, importance and accuracy of the research that has been published in scientific journals. There are also authors who write about policies, technology and actions taken to adapt to and mitigate global warming. This is based on information from a variety of sources, including industry peak bodies, government agencies and other reputable sources from around the world. Everything in the IPCC reports is heavily referenced so readers can verify the information.

IPCC reports are arguably the most comprehensive reports of any produced in the world today - by a long way. And the most scrutinised.

The IPCC has a well-defined structure. It also has a small secretariat to assist in coordinating its activities.  It is subject to the members of the UN and WMO, which span the spectrum of government structures, ideologies and political persuasions. The WMO currently has 185 member states and 6 territories. The UN currently has 193 member states. If the majority of governments wanted to do so, they could disband the IPCC. They don't.

What deniers think the IPCC is...

WUWT does odd things from time to time as if it wants to show how nutty its readers are. You may recall the "Denialism Saved Me" thread from last year, which was featured at HotWhopper here and here and here.

Awww! Poor little Anthony Watts Ego Trips to Nonentity-Land. It's a conspiracy!

Update: Current count of editors resigning from Frontiers in protest at it caving in to intimidation from science deniers = 3 (three).  See Graham Readfearn's article at DeSmogBlog for details.

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Poor, sensitive little Anthony Watts is upset.  He wrote a letter and sent it to all and sundry and no-one took the slightest bit of notice.

Today he's complaining (archived here) that Professor Ugo Bardi, (former) Specialty Chief Editor of the journal Frontiers in Energy Research, has resigned from Frontiers.  He resigned because, as he wrote:

...my opinion is that, with their latest statement and their decision to retract the paper, Frontiers has shown no respect for authors nor for their own appointed referees and editors. But the main problem is that we have here another example of the climate of intimidation that is developing around the climate issue. ..

...The climate of intimidation which is developing nowadays risks to do great damage to climate science and to science in general. I believe that the situation risks to deteriorate further if we all don't take a strong stance on this issue. Hence, I am taking the strongest action I can take, that is I am resigning from "Chief Specialty Editor" of Frontiers in protest against the behavior of the journal in the "Recursive Fury" case. I sent to the editors a letter today, stating my intention to resign. 

You can read Professor Bardi's full explanation and commentary on his blog.

This is even longer than my usual fare, so to save bandwith for people not interested, I've split it.  Click here to read more. It might amuse you - if you're a closet watcher of the weird and wacky world of conspiracy-theorising climate science denial and the unfathomable thought processes of The One who regards himself as The Fearless Famous Leader :)

"Much more moral authority comes from the imprimatur of government" - David "funny sunny" Archibald at WUWT

He's back!

I was wondering what had happened to David "funny sunny" Archibald.  He hasn't been seen for a good while at WUWT.  David is one of the wackier deniers who thinks we are heading for an ice age "any day now".

Setting the scene by twisting the facts

His article is about Nebraska, or partly (archived here).  David says he is writing his third book, which I think is about the impending ice age that cometh.  He is a strange one for a WUWT conspiracy theorist.  He writes:

At the urging of State Senator Beau McCoy in late 2013, the Nebraska Department of Agriculture was tasked with commissioning a report on cyclical climate change. The budget for the exercise was $44,000. That right, for a mere $44,000 Nebraskans would be told what was going to happen to their climate. If the Sun was going to sleep with the consequence that cold air from the Canadians would come south faster and longer, Nebraskans would be forewarned and fore-armed. Alas, the effort was abandoned when promoters of global warming in the state offered to do it for free. 

People who keep up with the climate blog wars will recall that the situation wasn't quite like that.  What happened was this. A lawmaker in Nebraska who is a climate science denier was happy enough to support a bill for someone to prepare a report on climate in Nebraska.  However he didn't want them to take account of any human factors influencing the climate, so he proposed an amendment to the bill.

Given that human factors now dominate global warming (ie climate change not day to day weather), that seemed not just pointless but a waste of money.  And you'd have to offer a lot more than $44,000 to climate scientists to persuade any of them to forsake their science for money.  They might have gotten Marc Morano or Anthony Watts or one of the other denier bloggers to prepare the report.  They come cheap I hear.  I don't know why they didn't do that.  Alternatively they could have approached some of the Not the IPCC Report writers.

Perhaps  they were hoping for a credible name to attach to their shonky report.  Or maybe they just wanted to test the waters and see if there were any corruptible climate scientists around.  (Judith Curry put up her hand, but I don't think her blog offer was accepted.)

I wrote about this at the time, because Judith Curry was arguing that politicians should be able to put constraints on climate studies to suit their political agenda.  Her stance was reminiscent of the various attempts to prevent high school teachers from teaching students about biology, wanting to bring their weird religious beliefs into the classroom and ban science.

If only deniers could drum up a fake report that was credible

Back to David "funny sunny" Archibald. His next paragraph was this:

The danger to the promoters of global warming was that the stillborn Nebraskan climate report would have been the first government-sanctioned report on the planet to say that carbon dioxide and the burning of coal are nothing to worry about. A report on cyclical climate change would say that there is something far more serious coming that is going to smack our civilisation like a freight train. That serious thing is one of the cycles that the Nebraskans were going to be told about. One day the science of climate cycles might get out to Nebraska but in the meantime they will be wondering why their winters are getting colder and Spring seems to be delayed and how can they begin planting while their fields are still covered in snow. 

There you see it.  Climate science is a hoax and information is being kept from the poor little Nebraskans.  What's odd about this is that David is arguing that the government could be trusted.  This is despite the fact that in this case the politician who put up the amendment to the bill wanted scientists to exclude some of the main factors that will affect Nebraska's climate in coming years.

More moral authority from the imprimatur of government!

David even writes (my bold italics):

It is one thing for books to be published which warn of the severe, solar-driven cooling coming (I’m on my third) and for retired academics to voice concerns over the low standards of US Government-funded climate science, but much more moral authority comes from the imprimatur of government. 

I know you'll be scratching your head wondering how this article of David "funny sunny" Archibald got past the censor-in-chief at WUWT.  Anthony Watts spends a lot of time complaining about "political interference".  I saw a couple of tweets that he put out only a day ago where, in his conspiracy-addled brain, he is clearly of the view that IPCC reports can't be trusted because the IPCC is a "political body".  I guess he's never read an IPCC report or any of the scientific papers underpinning it.

Only some governments have moral authority

There's a catch to this moral authority and imprimatur business.  You knew there would be, didn't you.  Apparently "moral authority" only comes from governments that reject climate science.  For example, the government agency the EPA doesn't have any moral authority.  Neither does the President of the United States.  David writes:

As the climate reports come in, the vague, almost-impossible-to-believe notion that the Obama Administration’s war on coal through the EPA is a peculiar form of malicious self-loathing will be seen with crystal clarity. That there is no scientific basis for what the EPA is attempting to do whatsoever. That the degradation and disruption that the EPA is intent upon is a loathing for America as it is, pure and simple. Instead of the loftiest ideals of “thinking of the children” and so on, President Obama and the EPA are driven by the basest of motives – that their fellow Americans be poorer with reduced opportunities.

Now why didn't more than half the people in the USA realise that President Obama is driven by the basest of motives, to reduce all his "fellow Americans" to poverty.  And he's got a funny way of going about it, too. Look at how he impoverished American investors - not!

As for people's jobs and other economic measures, well the charts here at CNN show he's not doing a very good job at reducing everyone to a poverty below what George Bush managed.  Arguably his biggest coup was helping Americans get health care when they need it.  Oh, wait. That can hardly have been prompted by the "basest of motives" can it?

Another twist: David sez that one government's climate report is as good as another's

There's yet another twist.  According to David Archibald:

One government’s report on something like climate is as good as another’s. 

Oh, I do wish he'd make up his mind.  He's just been telling us that the US government is not to be trusted, now it is.  I have a sneaking suspicion that David doesn't really believe what he says.  I've yet to see him tout the IPCC report, which is accepted by 193 nation's governments, as being  "as good as another's".

Nebraska braces for an ice age

While we're waiting to see if David can figure out what he wants to say, let's shoot back to Nebraska and see how his Nebraskan ice age is faring:

Data source: NOAA

Hmmm.  I guess David "funny sunny" Archibald is prepared to wait for all that hot weather of the past forty years to go away so that the temperatures can drop back to those more common in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Nope. He won't be satisfied with that. Here is what David has predicted for the world:

Incidentally, it looks as if the Nebraskan government has successfully suppressed any information on climate change from its Department of Agriculture.  Despite it's claim of "Nebraska Agriculture at Work for You" there is not a peep about climate change.  Thankfully here in my home state the government is not so draconian.

Have David's coal shares plummeted?

By the way, David's article was mainly moaning about the fact that coal has no future.  Here's what the rest of the world thinks about coal:

Peabody, "the world’s largest private-sector coal company" share price drops sharply

Here's a short bio of David "funny sunny" Archibald.

From the WUWT comments

hunter says:

April 5, 2014 at 12:38 am
Interesting concept. Please explain further how the AGW promoters derailed the state effort. The story seems incomplete. We need to know more so that the push back against the hype can be more effective.

Jeff is one of those conspiracy nutters that the deniers say don't exist.  He talks about control of "every facet of life in America" and says (excerpt):

April 5, 2014 at 1:51 am
I think the poster above gives Obama way too much credit. I don’t believe Obama cares one bit for the environment, I think his motives are entirely an effort to support the efforts of an extreme faction of liberals. Not all supporters of AGW science are the same. He gives voice only to those scare mongers whose goal isn’t to clean the environment, but to control every facet of life in America.

Patrick "knows" that the CO2 is 3% of the atmosphere! He says:

April 5, 2014 at 3:51 am
I just spoke to a friend of mine who called me to talk about cars they want to buy, and then talked about electrically powered cars because the UK had “servos” littered about the country to re-powered electrically powered cars. Apparently it was cheaper than petrol. Well, maybe so in the UK, but CO2 is still emitted. I asked how the electricity that “re-powered” the batteries was generated. We eventually got to gas and coal fired power stations. Which in the bigger picture of the situation, is correct. Then I asked how much CO2 “pollution” was in the air, right now, in their opinion. The answer was 40% (I kid you not – And most people I know “believe” this is the sort of concentration in the air right now). We’d all be dead I said, if that were true. The actual figure, as we know here, is ~3%.

James Strom comes up with a bit of trivia and says:

April 5, 2014 at 6:32 am
In light of your political leanings, which I am sympathetic with, it is amusing that your choice of title, “What is to be done?”, is the same that Lenin used for a pamphlet he published in 1902. The phrase is somewhat famous, at least to someone with an interest in early communist arcana.

G. Karst says:

April 5, 2014 at 7:45 am
I would like to see coal miners and the mine owners perform a pre-emptive strike. A shut down of coal production for thirty days will have an alarming effect on those trying to shut down the industry. A shutdown until prices improve would be justifiable and a real sharp eye opener. GK

I suppose it would be noticed in some states, anyway.  Coal still makes up 37% of electricity production in the USA. It was 57% in 1985 but only 46% in 1950.

Not even wrong ...

Time is limited (again), so just a couple of short reports of the latest at WUWT.

Sleazy Tim Ball has an article (archived here) claiming that all weather forecasts are worse than they were 50 years ago.  He's wrong.  Weather forecasts 50 years ago were okay to a point - maybe two or three days ahead.  Now they are pretty good up to even seven days ahead.  The use of computers and satellites has made a huge difference.

Tim started with a quote from Richard Feynman.  Deniers love to quote Richard Feynman.  Tim mumbled something about blaming inaccuracy on a lack of weather stations downwind.  He jumped about between short term weather forecasts, medium term weather forecasts and long range climate projections. Tim doesn't understand the difference between weather and climate and doesn't have a clue about boundary conditions.  Oh, and did I say he's just another wacky conspiracy theorist and greenhouse effect denier?  (Given Anthony Watts touts himself as a one-time tv "meteorologist", I'm surprised he tolerates Tim slinging off at his profession.  As surprised as Anthony allowing Tim as a "slayer" author being on his blog because Anthony has banned other "slayers".  Tim Ball has some hold over Anthony but I can't figure out what it is.   Maybe there's a higher up in the denier hierarchy with lot of clout who is telling Anthony he's got to give the nutter Tim Ball space on his blog.)

Then there was another "not even wrong" article where a denier complained how a Reddit moderator didn't allow them to ask Michael Mann if he had stopped beating his wife "yes or no" - or the equivalent (archived here).  Honestly - these science deniers are just so.o..o...o.. dumb and gullible.  They'll lap up anything that people like grubby Tim Ball writes and not believe clear and credible science that is corroborated by dozens of different independent teams of real scientists.

From the WUWT comments

Not much worth writing about.  The usual "agenda21" conspiracy theories and "they can't predict weather so how can they predict climate":

Robertv says:

February 25, 2014 at 11:23 am
Agenda 21 Be afraid be very afraid. Humanity is in big problems but not because of the weather. Climate never was a problem.
If only the weather would be our biggest problem the world would be a better place to live.
They know who we are and they know where we live while we talk about the weather.

Lil Fella from OZ probably wakes up every morning not knowing whether the sun has risen or not and says:

February 25, 2014 at 12:30 pm
They can’t predict the weather. Therefore they cannot be accurate on climate. Simple!

And brown-nosing Anthony Watts fanboi dbstealey with his complete and utter disregard for facts.  Was I clear enough?  He's a mod at WUWT and knows full well that WUWT censors comments and Anthony Watts bans people and has done so for years.  Yet you'll often see him writing guff like this and worse without batting an eye:

dbstealey says:

February 25, 2014 at 9:13 am
The moderation here is light years ahead of blogs like Reddit. WUWT posts comments that conform to this site’s Policy, even when they are derogatory. That makes for heavy site traffic, because readers like to see a back-and-forth discussion with all sides presented.

Reddit needs to rein in it’s moderators. The questions Anthony asked were straightforward and pertinent. Readers would very much like to see Mann’s response. Running interference for Michael Mann only makes Reddit an enabler, like buying another drink for an alcoholic.

Scottish (Fake) Sceptic: A legend in his own lunchtime but no survey expert

Results are out - see below.

Anthony Watts has an article up by/about Mike Haseler (archived here), who going by uknowispeaksense is regarded as a "legend in his own lunchtime".  What he isn't is a true sceptic, though that's what he's called his blog, and I'm not even sure that he's Scottish.  (Then again he also calls himself a climate scientist though from his own blog, the closest he's got to anything remotely related to climate science is designing precision temperature controllers and who knows what they were used for!)

What is clear is that he is tied up with another shonky organisation that call themselves (or their blog at any rate) the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum.  Mike describes himself as "Chairman".  According to the blog there are six on the committee.  They had a bit of a natter one day and decided that with six people they could form a club, from the look of things.  (I mean, if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization.**)

Anyway, like the ScottishSceptic blog, the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum blog is just another dime a dozen anti-science blog.  (The third most recent article on the blog is promoting Murry Salby of all people!  You can see an archive of their home page here if you're curious about them.)

A month or so back Mike Haseler asked fellow fake sceptics to complete a survey.  According to UKISS, he did the rounds of various science denying blogs in the UK and the USA. A month later and he's got some preliminary results.

Mike reckons he got 5,000 responses, so he managed to get as far as reading the respondent count.  He also managed to process some of the questions, but he reckons it will take him a year to write a report.

It's pretty obvious that Mike Haselaar doesn't design or analyse surveys for a living.  Still, to take a year, even part time, to write up the result of a 21 question survey, of which most were just demographic questions and of which only two were open ended (including the last "any other comments" question) probably means he hasn't got a clue what to do with the responses.  Nevertheless, he's going to try to get some funds from the "guvmint" he so despises to tide him over while he tries to figure it out.  He wrote to Anthony Watts:

Given the huge number of responses and detail of questions a full assessment will take up to one year to complete. 

Do you reckon he's going to go through each response one by one?  Or what?  Weird that the number of responses is a factor in writing up the results.

What about the "detail of questions"?  Well, all but two were tick the box questions so that would take no time at all to analyse.  In fact he should by rights have prepared the analytic framework before he asked people to respond, as part of the survey design.  He should have already set up the crosstabs or whatever he was doing. Then all he needed to do was plonk the numbers in.  If he wanted to do any fancy analysis on the basis of the initial results he could still do that.  But a year? Sheesh!

Now normally if a person wanted someone to pay for something they'd write up a proposal and pitch it to the prospective funder.  You wouldn't write a mickey mouse survey that has no apparent design, is filled with loaded questions and pitched to the scientific illiterati and then say "it's all too hard to analyse and will take me a year, how about some dosh!"  But that's exactly what Mike Haselar is doing.  He wrote to Anthony Watts that he's:

... looking to rub shoulders with the politicians in the hope of scrounging more public money...

Oops - nope.  I accidentally (on purpose) got that from one of his articles when he was writing about something else.  I'll try again.  What he says about his twenty-one question quiz:

This is a huge commitment from an organisation that has no outside funding and is reliant on one full-time volunteer (Mike Haseler). We will therefore be approaching the Scottish and UK government with a view to obtaining funding to complete the analysis.

A huge commitment? Uknowispeaksense has the survey here.  See for yourself.  It's a short quiz with only one six-part question about climate.  (The rest are mainly demographic questions and voting preferences etc. although there is a strange question which I'll get to shortly)  The vaguely climate sciency question was simple in the extreme, or I should say simplistic.  Mike prefaced the survey asking people to "Please say if you agree or disagree with the following statements" and then proceeded to give them three more choices. So he couldn't even get the simplest question straight.

Anyway, here is the one and only climate question.  Feel free to complete it.  I'll let it run for a while and let you know the results FWIW :)

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Mike had one other question that was, well I don't know what he was trying for with this one.  I think he may have been trying to figure out the extent to which his respondents had a tendency for conspiracy ideation.  Maybe you can figure it out.

What he did was offer a number of statements about a flu epidemic and wanted people to put them in order from most trustworthy to least trustworthy.  In case people didn't understand what he wanted he put the question another way and told them their highest ranking should be at the top and the lowest ranked at the bottom.   Then, because he still wasn't sure his readers would understand what he wanted, he tried a third time, telling them the highest ranking should be at the top etc.

Here it is, thanks to UKISS. Click to enlarge it.

Source: scef via uknowispeaksense

All the statements except the top one provide a source for the information.  What do you reckon Wondering Willis Eschenbach would put up the top :)

Anyway.  That's it.  Just goes to show that despite their scorn of guvmint and guvmint-funded research, some fake sceptics have no hesitation in putting their hands up for taxpayer funding.  And it just goes to show why fake sceptics have such a hard time getting research published.  Some of them are so hopeless they can't even design and analyse a simple little survey on their lonesome.

As for Mike Haseler - given his history, I'm waiting for him to come running crying "copyright" and "libel" and "sue".

PS If you want to know Mike's preliminary results, you can read them in the WUWT archived article here.

PPS**

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Results - 97% agree

Okay - the survey has run long enough. The numbers are actually just survey respondents so they don't necessarily reflect the readership of this blog.  Having given that caveat, I'll extrapolate the results to HotWhopper readership anyway.  It makes life more interesting :)

• 3% of HotWhopper readers are science deniers of the "sky dragon slaying" type.
• 3% of HotWhopper readers aren't aware that burning hydrocarbons results in CO2 - or maybe they aren't aware that coal and oil are hydrocarbons or maybe they don't know how a lot of electricity is produced or maybe they don't know that most motor vehicles run by burning petrol or diesel.
• 3% of HotWhopper readers don't know that earth has warmed, rather a lot actually, and rather quickly.
• One HotWhopper reader says climate doesn't change naturally.
• 15% of HotWhopper readers don't agree that CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming, 68% agree that it will and 17% are "neutral", though I can't tell what proportion of that 17% took "neutral" to mean "don't know" vs "neither agree nor disagree" vs "I'm not saying".
• 97% of HotWhopper readers understand something about CO2 and greenhouse gases and climate.  Now that number seems awfully familiar.