Uncritical thinking about climate change, from Andy May and WUWT fans

As you probably know by now, climate science deniers are generally incapable of critical thinking. At WUWT yesterday, there was an example of this from Andy May (archived here). He wrote about an article in the Economist, and started with this:

I found a very annoying article in the October 1, 2016 issue. The title and link are “Notes from the undergrowth.” It starts out with a false assertion that is easily debunked, but often stated:

Media myth #1
“DESPITE deluges in the South, droughts in the West and fires throughout national forests this year, the words “climate” and “change” have seldom been uttered together on the campaign trail.”

Instead of putting up some evidence that the words "climate" and "change" have often been uttered together on the campaign trail (because they haven't), he wandered off into something quite different.

Anthony Watts and his critical thinking cherry blossom fail

Anthony Watts runs a climate conspiracy blog called WUWT. He dismisses most climate science as "claims" and thinks that global warming is caused by Russian steampipes. Anthony often suffers confirmation bias, meaning he doesn't understand what he reads because his mind, shaped by his personal view of the world, twists it into something else altogether.

Credit: Uberlemur 

Yesterday he decided to take on the National Parks Service and plant researchers, and disputed the main causes of trends in blossoming time of cherry trees in Washington DC. Incidentally, Anthony is still fighting World War II, though it took place before he was born. He wrote:

We can assume that because the Washington cherry trees are curated and budding times tracked by the National Park Service that they get plenty of water and nutrients, after all we can’t have dead and dying cherry trees on the mall. That would insult Japan, who made them a gift in 1912 before they decided to surprise bomb the crap out of us at Pearl Harbor.

Denier weirdness: Ari Halperin thinks the IPCC's climate change definition is too broad

The Stupid It Burns Credit: Plognark

There could be an entire field of study devoted to how the brain of a climate science denier is wired, or miswired. There is a very strange article at WUWT (archived here) that shows up the deep flaws in thinking processes of deniers. The best explanation I can come up with is that Ari Halperin doesn't understand what climate is and the people commenting at WUWT are not able to process logic.

Weather is not climate, but climate is weather

Update - see below for a comment at WUWT from the paper's author.


Deniers at WUWT are a bit miffed at a study that focused on their confusion about weather and climate (well, not exactly - but its conclusions are consistent with the confusion often seen at WUWT).  Anthony Watts posted two press releases about an analysis of how people look for information on climate change (archived here, latest update here). He prefaced the press releases with two short comments in addition to his headline:

Dueling “weather is not climate” press releases – see if you can spot the politically biased one

The two press releases are:

1. One is issued by the University of Rhode Island, where the researcher is based. Anthony's comment was "Results vary by political ideology, education levels".
2. The other is on Springer, the publisher of Climatic Change, the journal in which the paper was published. Anthony's comment was: "Political ideology, education levels affect when people search for climate information."

Anthony didn't tell his readers which press release he thought was politically biased or why.  All he did was put a short comment above each press release. It's probably just as well he didn't write more than that because Anthony's critical reading skills are not at all developed. He has failed critical thinking on occasions too numerous to mention.