Seriously deluded: wacky conspiracy theories at WUWT with more ozone hole denial

Denier blogs are in the doldrums and have been for quite some time. I wrote about Judith Curry, who actively agitates for no mitigation of global warming, complaining about scientists warning US Congress about the dangers of climate change. Seriously! Is that all she's got?

Jo Nova has been focused on politics. She likes One Nation's climate conspiracy theories and in one article she urged her readers to vote for a Senate candidate from an ultra-conservative populist party that stands on climate science denial, homophobia, islamophobia, and against almost all the values that decent Australians cherish. That is the Christian Democrat Party, which is the creature of Fred Nile. Joanne is a proud deluded conservative (DelCon) who regards centrist conservatives as socialist. She paints everyone to the left of Ghengis Kahn as subversive commies.

Anthony Watts has been posting a lot of political articles too. He hasn't been around much except to put up some very silly articles from his band of freeby contributors. His latest contribution is another wacky article by one of his favourite uber-conspiracy theorists Timothy Ball (archived here).

As the world heats up, Anthony Watts promotes Patrick Moore's conspiratorial ice age fear

Willis Eschenbach once wrote of his good friend and conspiracy blogger Anthony Watts that he can't tell good science from bad. He said:

... 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 illustrates this inability today, promoting an article by someone called Patrick Moore (archived here, latest here). He's usually touted as being a "co-founder of Greenpeace", which is meant to indicate that he's seen the error of his past and has now become a born-again science denier.

Anthony Watts favours this "Climate Hoax" conspiracy theory from Patrick Moore

The conspiracy theory that Anthony posted from Patrick goes like this:

A powerful convergence of interests among key elites supports and drives the climate catastrophe narrative. Environmentalists spread fear and raise donations; politicians appear to be saving the Earth from doom; the media has a field day with sensation and conflict; scientists and science institutions raise billions in public grants, create whole new institutions, and engage in a feeding frenzy of scary scenarios; businesses want to look green and receive huge public subsidies for projects that would otherwise be economic losers, such as large wind farms and solar arrays. Even the Pope of the Catholic Church has weighed in with a religious angle.

Yep, it's got all the ingredients of a good conspiracy worthy of the envy of any right wing authoritarian follower - money, key elites, environmentalists, politicians, the media, scientists and even the Pope of the Catholic Church. They are all part of the climate hoax.

Walt Cunningham's Conspiracy Theory: Climate Science is a Hoax

Strange what possesses a man after he retires and looks to retain purpose in life, any purpose, any friends. Even fake friends who'll foster his paranoia and shamelessly exploit it. This was plastered at WUWT the other day as part of the latest Heartland Institute's "climate hoax" conspiracy theory.

“The president obviously does not know that he is participating in one of the greatest scientific hoaxes in history.”

Walter Cunningham
Apollo 7 Astronaut and Author
Policy Advisor
The Heartland Institute

More BS from the unethical fraud Anthony Watts - 97% of climate science *IS* for real

Anthony Watts is continuing to work hard to appeal to the dregs of humanity. He has all but rid his blog, finally, of any normal-thinking human being. He thinks he has to keep up his fight against reason and ethics, and has another protest about the 97%. Anthony really doesn't like it that 97% of scientific papers that attribute a cause to warming have it caused by humans. It seems he'll go to any lengths. That's because more than 97% of his readers are climate conspiracy nutters who think climate science is a hoax, and he can't bear to lose a source of income (his blog). Anthony Watts is trying to corner the market of paranoid conspiracy theorists and other shady types. Surely no sane person who prides themselves on their rational ability would admit to being a fan of WUWT.

Biomass research is a dead giveaway of the politics at WUWT, with Agenda 21 conspiracy theories

Anthony Watts has an article (archived here) about a new paper in Nature. The paper was about how humans have altered the land surface so that the biomass is a net emitter of greenhouse gases, which was a surprise to them. The scientists looked at the net emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide from every region of land.

Source: Carnegie Science

Logical fallacies and conspiracy theories from Rick Wallace at WUWT

As you probably know, five telltale techniques of science deniers have been documented. These are: fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry-picking and conspiracy theorising. This article is about an example of logical fallacies and conspiracy theories.

Red herrings and non sequiturs - logical fallacies

A guest at WUWT today (archived here) has decided that climate science is a hoax because:

1. there are differences of opinion among biologists about the definition of species, and
2. Lubos Motl's blog suggests there are still things being learnt about quantum physics.

Now you might wonder what this has to do with climate science. It doesn't. I'd say it's both a red herring and a non sequitur. Fake sceptics might not be much chop at science, but they excel at logical fallacies. This one, who goes by the name of Rick Wallace has decided that:

...in real science any state of agreement is labile at best – and establishing a consensus is about the last thing on peoples’ minds. I would go so far as to say that under these conditions, as often as not, a leading idea is a target to take aim at rather than a flag to rally ‘round.

What he has decided in his wisdom is that climate science is a hoax because scientists agree that greenhouse gases are what keeps the Earth warm.

Conspiracy theorising Lamar Smith can't hack change

I see that Lamar Smith hasn't been able to find any evidence for his conspiracy theory yet, so he's asked NOAA for more emails. He complained that he "only" got 301 pages of emails. He figured the search terms were "unnecessarily narrow". If you want to get a feel for Lamar's conspiracy theory that climate change is a Presidential hoax, he now wants NOAA to send him all emails containing any of the following words:

• Karl
• buoy
• ship
• Night Marine Air Temperature
• temperature
• climate
• change
• Paris
• U.N.
• United Nations
• clean power plan
• regulations
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• President
• Obama
• White House
• Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)

He gave them seven whole days. In his next request, he'll no doubt separate words white from house, united from nations, clean from power and plan, Council from quality, and maybe boy as well as buoy,  etc. He might also widen temperature to temp, which would allow him to get any emails relating to temporary whatever.

I sincerely hope that he gets sent all emails that include stuff like:

• "there's been a change to my mobile phone number"
• "can you change the staff meeting to 2:00 pm"
• "Lamar Smith is spelt with an "i" not a "y". Change all versions of "Smyth" to "Smith""
• "please ship the staplers to our Seattle office"

If he does, then he'll probably spend years trying to work out the coded messages in the above.

This could go on forever. Will Lamar Smith call for NOAA's budget to be expanded to cover the cost of his private army of email searchers? As Gavin Schmidt tweeted:

More abuse of congressional authority for pointless fishing expeditions:
"All email containing the word 'change'" https://t.co/mCqJxKnF3n

— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) February 27, 2016

Nobody makes them like the Republican Party in the USA. Nutty as a fruit cake.

References

• Latest demand letter from Lamar Smith to NOAA
• Congressman demands more NOAA e-mails about climate study - article by Scott K Johnson at Ars Technica

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

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

Anthony Watts promotes Ari Halperin's climate conspiracy theories at WUWT

Anthony Watts is busy trying to divert attention from all the record hot temperatures. He has posted another article from Ari Halperin. He's the chap who created a Google search tool for deniers, which filters out science websites and only leaves in denier websites.

Here is what Anthony doesn't want to say too much about:

Figure 1 | January only - global mean surface temperature January 1880 to January 2016. Data source:GISS NASA

And below are six denier talking points, with full on conspiracy ideation, that he posted instead.

1. Scientific consensus on the greenhouse effect goes back to the 1800s

Ari's first point is, in typical denier fashion, non-specific:

1. The alarmists first declared “scientific consensus” in 1988, and have been digging their heels in, persecuting skeptics, and constantly suppressing scientific inquiry since then, just as Richard Lindzen reported in 1992. They have been repeating their mantras and persecuting all other viewpoints.

That point that he listed is very mixed up. Ari doesn't indicate what the consensus he's complaining about was. Nor does he cite any evidence, which might have given a clue. Is he referring to global warming? That was known way back when. Callendar made detailed calculations of how the increased CO2 would warm the planet way back in the 1930s. Gilbert Plass wrote an important paper after the war in the 1950s. Over subsequent decades there were more and more papers written on the subject. Why Ari has picked out 1988 as a year for a declaration of scientific consensus on who knows what, I don't know. Nor do I know who he thinks has been persecuted. Is that denier-speak for refuted, rebutted or debunked?

Who killed Justice Scalia? Anthony Watts sets some rules for crazy conspiracy theories at WUWT

As you know, most crazy conspiracy theories are encouraged at WUWT, however there is one at least that is not allowable. The rules for which conspiracy theories are permitted and which aren't only become evident after Anthony Watts has considered them. Very few conspiracy theories are barred from WUWT. Until now, the only ones that I've seen frowned upon are the "chemtrail" conspiracy theory and maybe the HAARP conspiracy theory. Everything else is fine at WUWT. Anthony actively promotes "New World Order" conspiracies of Tim Ball, and the related Agenda21 conspiracy theories. He promotes his own conspiracy theories that scientists are fudging and faking data. As long as a conspiracy is tied in some way to climate science, it's all systems go at WUWT.

Which might have been the problem for the person whose comment Anthony disallowed. It didn't link Justice Scalia's death with climate science.

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

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

An overview of storm Jonas

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

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

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

Anthony Watts heroically defends cool satellites

Not long ago I wrote about how the satellite lower troposphere data diverged from the surface temperature trends some time earlier this century. I put it around 2006, just going by the charts. Tamino took a different approach and compared satellite data with that from thermometers on balloons (which I missed at the time, I'm embarrassed to say). It used to be just RSS that was the outlier, now with the latest UAH beta, both are.

There have been recent papers on the subject as well (see below), but so far the satellite researchers have not identified what is the cause (or not to my knowledge, yet).

This is not cool

Now Yale Climate Connections has posted a YouTube video by Peter Sinclair of Climate Crocks, called as part of the "This is Not Cool" series. (H/t metzomagic)

Anthony Watts can't get enough conspiracy theories at WUWT

There's another article protesting the moon-landing paper - the initial reaction to which spawned a wealth of material for further research. Some right wing journalist in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote some nonsense about the paper that he either didn't read or didn't understand. It brought out some beaut conspiracy theories from Anthony Watts' conspiratorial "believers" (archived here).

Honestly, you'd think Anthony had learnt his lesson many times over by now. Every time he protests that academic research into conspiracy theories and climate science denial are linked, he brings out a heap more conspiracy theories from his clan. It's not just motivated rejection of climate science, WUWT has motivated rejection of cognitive science. (Perhaps Anthony just wanted his readers to post their conspiracy theories under an "on topic" article.)

OCO-2 baffles deniers at WUWT and prompts more conspiracy theories

The OCO-2 project at NASA has a video showing the changes in atmospheric CO2 over a year or so, as measured by the OCO-2 satellite, which was launched last year. NASA put out a press release a few days ago:

"We can already clearly see patterns of seasonal change and variations in carbon dioxide around the globe," said Annmarie Eldering, OCO-2 deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Far more subtle features are expected to emerge over time."...

...Through most of OCO-2's first year in space, the mission team was busy calibrating its science instrument, learning how to process its massive amount of data, and delivering data products to NASA's Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES-DISC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, for distribution to the world’s science community.

Scientists are comparing OCO-2 data to ground-based measurements to validate the satellite data and tie it to internationally accepted standards for accuracy and precision. 

CO2 is a well-mixed greenhouse gas. Notice the legend - it spans just 15 parts per million by volume, from 390 to 405 ppmv. And I don't think the colours hit the extremes at any point during the year (you can check for yourself). It gets drawn down into plants on land and in the ocean and then released again as the seasons change.

More of David Siegel's climate lies and conspiracy theories

Okay - now it's out there. I don't know why David Siegel tells lies. Whether it's because he's stupid and isn't capable of doing his own research, or whether he does it for reward (either tangible or for ideological purposes). But he does tell lies and, unless he falls into the stupid category, he must know it.

Backtrack: A few days ago I wrote about a science denier called David Siegel, who used WUWT to promote a screed he put up somewhere on the internet. That "somewhere" is, as Greg Laden described it: "big giant blog that anybody can go and blog their big giant thoughts on: like tumblr, but more bloggy".

I pretty much dismissed David Siegel's article as the sort of denier tripe that's a dime a dozen in the dark outer reaches of cyberspace. It was nothing more than a mosaic of WUWT or any other climate conspiracy blog. Still, having it all in one place was a good enough reason to write an article. So a few of us got together and that's just what we did. We posted it on the same website that the original article appeared on.

We were gentle with David Siegel in our Medium.com article. We were more interested in presenting the science than in portraying David Siegel as the utter nutter that he is. Here at HotWhopper there are no kid gloves. David Siegel's article was nothing more than a 9,000 word Gish gallop of denier memes. To address every single one in a blog post would have resulted in an article more like 80,000 words rather than the 8,000 or so that we wrote.

Another conspiracy theorist "comes out" at WUWT: David Siegel

Anthony Watts has announced a fan, who learnt all he needs to know about climate after reading WUWT for 400 hours (archived here). What have I learnt about climate science deniers after reading their nonsense for several hours a day over several years? Not a helluva lot. Then again, I'm not a cognitive scientist. I have discovered that they'll generally expend an awful lot of energy promoting their rejection of science. A whole lot more than investigating it.

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UPDATE: A group of us have now written a response to David Seigel's article. We posted it at the same website: Medium.com. Feel free to recommend, like, comment, tweet and generally spread it around, especially if you come across people touting the Siegel denialisms.

Sou - 29 October 2015

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I've also figured out that science deniers like to congregate with other science deniers. They don't find much joy in real life, so they get together in cyberspace. I expect they find it reassuring to find there are other people in the world who think the earth is flat, or that it was created by a god 6,000 years ago, or the equivalent for climate denial. Rather in the manner that Gabby so eloquently put it, in the cartoon on sexism:

The Google Conspiracy - and a Google search engine customised for science deniers

A guest blogger, Ari Halperin, at WUWT has decided to create a new search tool especially for science deniers (archived here).  Ari behaves like a full-blown conspiracy theorist, which is par for the course at WUWT. He has all the right words on his blog "CO2 is plant food" mixed in with some that I haven't seen before.

Musicologists impersonating climate scientists

Ari says that climate scientists are imposters. They aren't really scientists, they are instead "journalists, historians, musicologists, copywriters, and professional activists".

Bob Tisdale's latest conspiracy theory about ocean heat

Today Bob Tisdale has found a new conspiracy theory that he's promoting (archived here). It's much the same as all the others. From his ergonomic computer chair in his basement (is he that advanced?) Bob decided that another group of scientists must be fudging the data. Problem is, Bob doesn't understand the data or how to use it, let alone how the scientists analysed it.

A warning that this article is long. I enjoyed writing and researching it. The paper this article is based on is a great example of the sort of effort and thinking required to scope out and quantify the changes we're bringing about. Which is of critical importance IMO.

Progress in determining changes in ocean heat content

The paper Bob doesn't like this time is by Dr. Lijing Cheng  from the International Center for Climate and Environment Sciences in China, and co-authors Jiang Zhu and John Abraham. They have been looking to improve the record of heat content of the top 700 m of the ocean. The paper is called: "Global upper ocean heat content estimation: recent progress and the remaining challenges". As the title suggests, the paper describes recent progress in this regard, and the challenges that remain.

Galileo, fake authorities and adhominous cowards

Sorry for the pun. This is about an article at WUWT (archived here) which provides another lesson from Denial 101.

His article illustrates:

• double standards
• absence of fact checking (or ignorance of science and history)
• calling on fake experts and
• other logical fallacies.

There's some retired chap (from what I can gather) called Martin Fricke. Ph.D. (nuclear physics) who's now taken up a career as a climate science denier. He can't get published in the scientific literature so he does the next best thing. He writes for a climate conspiracy blog, wattsupwiththat.com.

Anthony Watts weakly protests Recurrent Fury

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

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

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