Rating climate science deniers to decide how/if to engage

Climate science deniers can be grouped in different ways. Having observed them for more than a decade now, this is how I see them:

1. The uninformed - ignorant about climate, doesn't read articles on climate. Strictly speaking the uninformed are not science deniers. They just don't know anything about climate.
2. The misinformed - previously uninformed who've read & unwittingly accepted climate disinformation.
3. Wilful deniers (aka wilfully ignorant) - previously misinformed but have since been exposed to climate science findings and rejected them (usually for ideological or other reasons). All of this category by definition are conspiracy theorists.
4. Climate disinformers - know the facts but are in the business of spreading lies to feed the previous categories (usually for monetary gain and/or ideological reasons). All of this category are by definition weavers of conspiracy theories.

I'd be interested to read how other people might categorise climate science deniers.

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.

Taunting the World: Anthony Watts brazenly boasts about climate disinformers getting away with theft and lies

Anthony Watts at WUWT has decided to go back five years (archived here), and boast about how he and other deniers escaped the wrath of the law and got away with the crime of receiving stolen property, protecting thieves and worse. They've not got much else to boast about these days. But it's in character for him and his band of deniers to be proud of the fact that deniers managed to defeat the British constabulary, steal thousands of emails from a university, and then misrepresent the contents to the world at large.  How they hounded the world's leading climate scientists and tried to destroy their professional reputations, in their effort to put the entire world at risk.

What science disinformers like Anthony Watts won't admit to his dismal audience is that there was nothing, nothing at all in the emails. Zero. Zilch. Not one teeny tiny little bit of an email, that put the smallest dent in the vast body of climate science knowledge.  All the incident showed was how low science disinformers will sink to try to preserve the interests of those they are shielding. The crooked politicians. The greedy fossil fuel company owners.

That was a dark episode, and is probably the best example of the lengths to which these climate vandals will go in their ongoing efforts to make the next several generations suffer misery, drought, hunger, thirst, floods, dislocation, social upheaval and war. They will break the law. They will steal, lie and defame - and continue to do so. Some of them will get away with it. Others won't - or that's my climate prediction. Many of them will pay for their crimes eventually - either by being brought before a court of law, or by suffering the effects of climate change first hand themselves.

Some of these people are sociopaths who get a kick out of damaging humanity. Some are just petty criminals, lowlife scoundrels who are in it for the money. Their target audience is the wilfully ignorant. The dumb deniers. The uneducated ultra-conservative voter who is afraid of anything and everything outside their immediate tiny bigoted social circle.  The disenfranchised and fearful, who think they are powerless. It's the dumb deniers who make up the chorus and help spread the lies of the professional disinformers. It doesn't take much to play on the fears of the fearful. All it takes is to pretend to be anti-authority. To be against learning and knowledge and all the good things that humanity represents.

These people think they are above the law. They will libel, steal and lie and do whatever it takes to make sure the world gets hotter as quickly as possible. Oh, those same people will call on the law when it suits them. If someone stole from them they'd be the first to call the local police force. However they think they themselves are immune. Well, they are getting away with their criminal acts for a while, but it will backfire on them.

Look at Anthony Watts. His own home state has been burning up, suffering one of the worst droughts in recorded history. It's improved only a smidgen since the worst of three months ago. How is he coping? He doesn't say. Anthony Watts, supposed weather person, has barely mentioned what's happening in his own backyard. He doesn't have the courage to admit to his readers that he and they are part of the problem. That they are bringing this on themselves.

Source: US Drought Monitor

Yes, this is a bit different to the mild ridicule I normally heap on the denialati. Ridicule is good, but not all these people are simple buffoons and well-meaning idiots. Some of them are quite simply immoral and have shown they are willing to break the law to protect their own personal interests. Calling disinformers out for their crimes from time to time, is also good.

Jim Steele at WUWT pushes for pseudo-science, not science, in schools

Update: See below for comment from Michael C Singer, husband of Camille Parmesan, who Jim Steele referred to in his article and the comments.

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Jim Steele is a climate science denier who's popped up in the last year or so at WUWT, trying to flog his book protesting climate change. He is known for denying practically anything to do with global warming and more (eg ocean acidification), but most of all he will use any excuse to take a shot at scientist Camille Parmesan (see here).

Jim Steele's Serengeti Strategy

I don't know what is really at the heart of Jim Steele's vendetta against Camille Parmesan. He hasn't said except that he disputes something about her 1996 publication on butterflies. But his ongoing personalised campaign goes way beyond that. If it was merely a scientific dispute he'd argue scientifically, in the literature. He doesn't. He just rants and raves to science deniers, and contradicts himself, and misrepresents Dr Parmesan's work. This leaves one to wonder - did she snub him at a party? Did she forget who he was one time? Does she not know who he is? Whatever the reason, if Jim Steele can bring Dr Parmesan into a discussion he will. Even if there's no reason to do so, he will.

It's Jim Steele's application of the Serengeti strategy.

Today he's arguing (archived here) that Dr Parmesan and the AAAS are wrong about teaching science to children in Texas. To demonstrate how he applied the Serengeti strategy, the article that Jim used as his launching pad was written by Camille Parmesan and Alan I. Leshner. But Jim doesn't once mention Alan Leshner by name, only by his organisation, the AAAS.

Camille Parmesan is a world-renowned biologist. Last year, she was named the 2013 Distinguished Texas Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is one of the most highly regarded scientific organisations in the world. Alan I. Leshner is the CEO of AAAS.

By way of comparison, Jim Steele is not a scientific researcher. He has never done scientific research that I could find. Or none that he's published in the academic literature. I believe this would be the closest. He was a part time teacher at different places, and ran a field station part-time. He also says he ran a bird counting program that got funding from the US Forest Service. You can read the chips he's lugging around on his shoulder in his own bio.

Draft science textbooks have wrong information

The first paragraph of the Statesman article Jim quote-mined was this:

Some proposed Texas textbooks would badly misinform K-12 students by falsely suggesting that scientists do not agree on what is causing climate change and by incorrectly suggesting a future cooling trend. Two draft textbooks — astoundingly — even confuse climate change with the ozone hole, which is a completely separate concern and driven by different human actions.

So now you can see the context of the article. Apparently some ideologues in Texas got some people to write some dodgy science denying books and want to flog them in schools. It's the same as the religion vs science vs politics battle that's been waged before in the USA - for example, creationism vs science. Jim is on the side of the ideologues and against science. Jim Steele seems to be arguing that textbooks that confuse climate change and the ozone hole should be used in K-12 schools.

You can read the Parmesan and Leshner article here. It lists a few awful examples of pseudoscience that the politicians want taught to the children of Texas. (It also says that Professor Parmesan is a geology professor. She's not. Her field is biology.)

Debating pseudo-science in schools

Jim Steele reckons that children should be fed all manner of denialist nonsense and allowed to "debate". He cites climate science denial as an example, but it looks as if he means it to apply to any scientific topic, writing:

Science textbooks should not be instruments to teach one-sided propaganda. Textbooks should encourage debate....

A bit later he writes:

...It is Parmesan and the AAAS that are using politics to pressure school boards to force feed school children that CO2-caused global warming is now some sort of scientific law, when in fact both Parmesan’s research and the CO2 hypothesis are increasingly not supported by the evidence. 

So Jim Steele is a greenhouse effect denier, with his "CO2 hypothesis". Well, I already knew that.

By all means let's debate science in the classroom. Except it's clear from what Jim wrote that he wants to control the debate and argue that all the science is wrong. Anyway, I've had a shot at chapter headings for debates to be included in Jim Steele's revised science textbooks:

• Debate the moon: Is the moon made of cheese and is there really a man living there?
• Debate the shape of the Earth: If the Earth is flat, have all the missing persons simply fallen off the edge?
• Debate evolution: Is Jim Steele evidence that humans evolved from the same ancestor as our (very) distant relative, the gibbon?
• Debate extinction: Which species will survive the sixth major extinction and how.
• Debate water vs beer. Which is better. Do a taste test.
• Debate atoms. Are they no more than imaginary models?
• Debate models. Miranda Kerr vs Fernando Cabral vs Henrik Fallenius vs Kate Moss vs Tyra Banks vs Gryphon O'Shea.
• Debate the atmosphere. Would wacky pseudo-scientists like Jim Steele have evolved if there were no atmospheric CO2 and Earth was a snowball?
• Debate the ice age that cometh: Are rising sea levels evidence that an ice age cometh?
• Debate science itself. Should paranoid conspiracy theories be given equal weight with science in the classroom. The pros and cons.
• Debate science hoaxes: Is climate science the biggest hoax perpetrated on dumb deniers? List all the people and organisations that must be in on the hoax and explain how the scam has been kept secret from the other 8% of the world's population.

Here are some debating tips from Huffington Post for all the deniers at WUWT, as if they need them.

And if Jim Steele doesn't want his children and grandchildren to learn about science, he can always send them to a charter school that is anti-science.

Update: Comment from Michael C Singer

The following was sent to me via email. It was too long to be posted as a comment. 

Sou 12 November 2014

I am Parmesan's husband, referenced by Jim Steele.  I have, indeed, advised him against replicating Parmesan's work.  However, I didn't say that the original study was "not important," I said that it would not be important to replicate it NOW.  And I gave Jim an explanation of my opinion.

Parmesan's work was done between 1992 and 1996.  As a grad student she spent 2-3 months in the field each summer, driving her pickup from Baja California to Alberta and back, examining previously-reported populations of Edith's checkerspot and reporting which still existed and which were, at that time, extinct.  Her published study reported presence or absence of the butterflies in sites that she judged to be still suitable habitat.  She concluded that the average location of an existing population in good habitat was both significantly further north and at significantly higher elevation than prior records.

Edith's checkerspot is not migratory, it lives in small habitat patches susceptible to natural extinctions.  However, usually when natural extinctions occur, not all the populations in an area go extinct and if the habitat is OK the extinct site can be naturally recolonized.  I've observed this several times; I've seen extinct sites recolonized after just 3 or 4 years or after 20-25 years, and I've seen them stay extinct to the present day.  Ilkka Hanski in Finland, working with a related butterfly, has shown that every population has a high risk of natural extinction. The species persists in Finland only through an approximate balance between rates of extinction and colonization.  What Parmesan showed was that in Edith's checkerspot the extinction process had recently involved an elevational and latitudinal bias. For me to observe, as I have informed Jim, that some populations reported by Parmesan as extinct have since been recolonized, is entirely unsurprising and does not refute the conclusion that she drew.  Jim accuses me of scientific dishonesty by not publishing these observations, because he believes that they refute Parmesan's conclusions.  He is wrong. They do not.  If they did, I WOULD have published them.

It would be possible to repeat Parmesan's study now and to ask whether Edith's checkerspot has shifted its range in the opposite direction to that reported by Parmesan, but to do that you'd need to examine the entire species' range again, from Baja to Alberta. This would be an enormous amount of work, and it did not seem to be what Jim proposed to do.  Instead, he felt that, if he could show that some of the populations reported as extinct by Parmesan were no longer extinct, this would refute her conclusion. It would not. 

Unfortunately it's not possible now to ask whether Parmesan was wrong back in 1996, you'd need to be a time-traveler.  This study was important in 1996 as a pioneering effort to ask what was happening to an entire species’ range.  But this study was just a single species, and the bias that Parmesan showed, while consistent with warming climate, could have been caused by other factors.   For this reason the study is no longer an important part of the evidence that biologists use to conclude that species’ ranges are shifting upwards and polewards in a GENERAL sense.  This comes from aggregate studies, called meta-analyses.  For example, Vincent DeVictor and 20 other authors (not including myself or Parmesan) published a paper in Nature Climate Change in 2012 in which they summarized data from 9,490 bird communities and 2,130 butterfly communities and found an average poleward shift of 37 km in the birds and 114km in the butterflies.  In this study some species were shifting towards the equator, some towards the pole and some were not shifting at all, but there was an overall significant trend for poleward range shifts.  This is the type of evidence used to conclude that a general trend for range shifts is under way.

Suppose that Jim Steele were to replicate Parmesan’s study and find that Edith’s checkerspot has now shifted its range towards the equator.  Suppose that Jim’s conclusion were incorporated into a summary like the one by DeVictor et al.  In the context of such a large study it would be a drop in the ocean and would make no difference to their overall conclusion.  The average poleward range shift of butterflies might change from 114km to 113km.  This is the sense in which I have advised Jim Steele that he would make little scientific impact if he were to replicate Parmesan’s study of a single species and get a different result.  The original study was important at the time.  However, to replicate it now in the context of the very large amount of knowledge on other species that has accumulated since 1996, would not be important, no matter what the result.   

Parmesan’s affiliation is correct: in Texas she is now in Geology; in the UK she is a Professor of Oceans and human health in a Marine Biology dept.

From the WUWT comments

The extremists come out in favour of Jim Steele. A very large number of comments were about what a nasty awful person Dr Parmesan is, and how people should write to her university (email address was provided) and anyway, climate science is a hoax.

SasjaL is an illiterati who argues science shouldn't be taught in school and likens science to extreme religious indoctrination.

November 8, 2014 at 2:58 pm
Parmesan is a nice cheese (like all other Italian food), but this both smell and taste bad!
This type of indoctrination are found in countries where extreme forms of Islam exists.
– Wait … We already have these (climate) changes in Swedish schoolbooks 

M Courtney says that one can use pseudoscience to teach children how to distinguish it from real science. Perhaps he's just wanting to up the traffic to WUWT.

 November 8, 2014 at 11:38 am
Surely science is a process not a catechism?
Why doesn’t she call for the “wrong” science to be presented and then debunked with numerous validated models of how the climate works, graphs of the correlation of GHG emissions with Global temperatures and, of course, the obvious methods of distinguishing anthropogenic from natural effects?
Wouldn’t that teach the young Texans how to spot pseudoscience and confront it thorough out the lives?

J. Philip Peterson thinks there are only two "sides" to climate science. He knows nothing about it.

November 8, 2014 at 1:58 pm
I wish more would speak out. You really can’t teach both sides of the CAGW science?? (without getting fired)?? You have to teach it as settled science??

mpainter does get one thing right:

November 8, 2014 at 11:46 am
This report dismays. Camile Parmesan seems to be an evil antithesis of science. That there are so many in science who are like her is sickening.

It bears repeating: the CAGW crowd represent a setback for science.

One person posted Dr Parmesan's email address, with obvious bad intentions. Another said they've already written to her University - something about the IPCC's Nobel Prize award.


jim Steele says populations of Edith’s checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha) haven't moved north, only the statistical centre has moved north. Huh? He's not that good at arithmetic. (extract)

November 8, 2014 at 2:48 pm
What I find most disgusting and dishonest in this 2013 video is that she still repeats her old story that her butterfly (Edith Checkerspot) had moved upwards and northwards when 1) No such thing ever happened. Only the statistical center moved because more the butterflies had been extirpated due to urban sprawl mostly in southern California and 2) she has known for at least 5 years now that populations that she reported as extinct have now returned. Thats why she refused to let me replicate her study. So she still refers to her zombie data, instead of telling the world she was wrong the butterflies returned and never died due to global or local warming! 

He makes up weird stuff, implying butterflies "died" rather than shifted, due to global or local warming. Is he an utter nutter or a disinformer, or both? He's not very bright but is he at some level conscious of his absurdities?

Another thing. Jim Steele claims that the butterfly populations reported as extinct have now returned. But he also claims he doesn't know where those populations are, so how does he know they've returned? jim Steele claimed:

November 8, 2014 at 3:21 pm
Although good science requires a methods section to allow independent replication her paper in Nature never had a Methods section. I needed the coordinates of each location and her determination of present or absent, to check both her statistical conclusions as well as to examine the surrounding habitat to assess the effects of landscape change. Instead of providing me that data, her husband and colleague Dr. Michael Singer kept trying to dissuade me from replicating her work saying it was “too much work” or that original study was “not important” any more. Curiouser and Curiouser she still touts that original story in every press release as a “beautiful example” global warming. (Makes me gag)

Note: See update above for response by Michael Singer.

The thing is that Camille Parmesan doesn't ignore landscape changes. (Also, unlike Jim, she knows the name of the butterfly in question.) Click here to read a short overview of the work of Dr Parmesan on Edith’s checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha). Click here for the original paper that Jim Steele is still stewing over nearly twenty years later.   Click here to see what I discovered when I looked into Jim Steele's various claims some time ago. Jim Steele has not published one scrap of scientific research to support his own claims about it. Not in the scientific literature. It's all hot air denier style - full of fudgery, misrepresentation and self-promotion.

If Jim Steele represented the work of others properly, he'd never be invited to write at WUWT or be a guest speaker at science denier shingdigs, and his pseudo-science book sales would plummet.

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Parmesan, Camille. "Climate and species'range." Nature 382, no. 6594 (2009): 765-766. doi:10.1038/382765a0

Judith Curry, the hero of deniers at WUWT, complains about facts

Judith Curry is being hailed as a hero by all the climate science deniers at wattsupwiththat (archived here).  What has she done now to deserve their accolades?  Well, according to Larry Hamlin, she's written to plead not to let facts get in the way of a good yarn.  He loves it that she wrote:

With regards to climate science, the biggest concern that I have is the insistence on ‘the facts.’ 

Facts, what facts? We don't need no stinkin' facts!

Was Judith claiming that we shouldn't insist on the facts?  No.  Writing "the facts" in quotation marks is her way of raising her uncertainty demon again.  Judith trades on people not understanding what uncertainty means to scientists.  It is measured. Judith knows that, to her target blog audience (and that of Anthony Watts), uncertainty equates to "scientists don't know nuffin'". Whereas in reality it means scientists know the range. It's a way of defining limits. Judith trades on ignorance.

Judith continues:

This came up during my recent ‘debate’ with Kevin Trenberth. I argued that there are very few facts in all this, and that most of what passes for facts in the public debate on climate change is: inference from incomplete, inadequate and ambiguous observations; climate models that have been demonstrated not to be useful for most of the applications that they are used for; and theories and hypotheses that are competing with alternative theories and hypotheses.

Unfortunately Judith doesn't elaborate on this at all. She leaves it hanging.  She doesn't point out that the hypothesis that the greenhouse effect doesn't happen is fatally flawed. She doesn't describe any "alternative theories and hypotheses".  I wonder why? We can only surmise whether she is trying to say argue against any or all of the following facts:

• FACT: CO2 is a greenhouse gas and more of it causes global warming
• FACT: CO2 is already at a level never before experienced by Homo sapiens
• FACT: When CO2 rose rapidly and a lot in the past it precipitated a major extinction event
• FACT: Earth is warming very rapidly in a sustained manner, with no sign of let-up
• FACT: Arctic sea ice is melting at a very rapid pace, faster than was predicted
• FACT: The oceans continue to build up heat, as does the surface
• FACT: Unless we curb CO2 emissions, Earth could warm by more than six degrees in a very short time, much shorter than it has warmed in tens of millions of years
• FACT: Going by past earth history, this would result in a major extinction event
• FACT: If we let surface temperature rise by ten or twelve degrees, large areas of earth would be intolerable to humans

Which of these facts does Judith dispute, if any? She doesn't say (her full article is archived here).

Here are some facts in chart form:

From the WUWT comments

As you'd expect, WUWT-ers aren't interested in facts. Not one of them asks which facts Judith is referring to. They just applaud her for implying that the facts are wrong.

philjourdan says, without a hint that he's joking:

April 22, 2014 at 5:10 pm
I read them all on her blog. I sense a lot of frustration on her part. She sees her chosen profession being destroyed in the name of expediency. And even then, the alarmists are trying to parrot Mann and tar he for the simple reason she is for good science. She remains a warmist. But more than that, she is an ethical scientist, and that goes against the grain of “the team”.

Vaughan Pratt points out that Judith displays a lack of professional ethics and contempt for her chosen profession (excerpt):

April 22, 2014 at 5:21 pm
Of the thousands of department chairmen in the US, which of them have expressed an even lower opinion of their colleagues’ understanding of their field? 

Niff says that scientists don't always say what's on their mind - he may have a point with some people, but they are probably wise to not lose their temper too often with disinformers like Judith.  Just keep informing the public about the real facts and what it means for the future.  (If Judith is being muzzled, she's doing a good job of hiding the FACT):

April 22, 2014 at 5:31 pm
..and we sceptics are accused of denying the science…? What Dr Curry demonstrates is that the alarmists not only deny the science, they obfuscate it, muzzle alternative perspectives and castigate those who would speak out. Utterly despicable. 

tancred hopes to wake up one morning and find that the sun hasn't risen, or that the earth hasn't warmed and says:

April 22, 2014 at 5:50 pm
The term “scientific consensus” should be anathema to anyone with an appreciation of the methods of science — and aware of the long history of wise certainties widely agreed among the learned which eventually were debunked as complete nonsense.

Steve in SC doesn't think much of Judith's intellect, but frames his opinion carefully and says:

April 22, 2014 at 6:50 pm
Judy is smarter than the average bear.

garymount boasts that he's an extremist fake sceptic and doesn't let his mind get polluted by half truths let alone mainstream science and says:

April 22, 2014 at 8:01 pm
I do not read Luke warmer websites. 

Larry Hamlin argues that Judith's disinformation campaign is very important and shouldn't be trivialised. That's one reason why I've written about it:

April 22, 2014 at 8:47 pm
Dr. Curry’s rational and comprehensive assessment of the flawed and distorted climate alarmist positions addressed in her essay’s is an extraordinary example of leadership and openness to objective scientific analysis free from the the political ideology which drives much of the alarmist agenda. Those who chose to try and divert her powerful message with misleading and trivial comments that completely fail to comprehend the major emphasis of her posts appear to be merely attempts at creating unwarranted distractions from her primary and completely justified message.

Roy Spencer's latest deceit and deception

Update: Today Roy Spencer responded below. I've now written another article explaining his deception a slightly different way.

Sou 21 May 2014

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Sheesh! How's this for unadulterated chart fudging. Roy Spencer has put up a chart and proclaimed (archived here):

...the climate models that governments base policy decisions on have failed miserably.

I’ve updated our comparison of 90 climate models versus observations for global average surface temperatures through 2013, and we still see that >95% of the models have over-forecast the warming trend since 1979, whether we use their own surface temperature dataset (HadCRUT4), or our satellite dataset of lower tropospheric temperatures (UAH):

Let's look at how he's conned his denier fans.  Below I've plotted the CMIP5 composite mean against UAH and GISTemp using a 1981-2010 baseline, which is what UAH normally uses, and then I'll discuss what Roy Spencer has effectively done:

Data Sources: NASA, UAH and KNMI Climate Explorer

What he's effectively done is shifted the CMIP5 charts up by around 0.3 degrees.  In case you find it hard to credit that even a contrarian scientist would stoop so low, here is Roy Spencer's chart, with my annotations:

Adapted from Source: Roy Spencer

Not only did Roy effectively shift up the CMIP5 data, Roy Spencer effectively shifted down the UAH data in comparison with HadCRUT4.  This is the chart of UAH and HadCRUT4 using the 1981-2010 30 year baseline - compare that to Roy Spencer's deceptive fudge:

Data sources: UAH and Met Office Hadley Centre

How did he fudge?  What Roy Spencer has done is he's used a five year average - 1979-1983 to plot his data instead of the normal 30 year baseline.  Why did he pick 1979 to 1983 as the baseline?  The answer can only be that he wanted to deceive his readers.  Here is a comparison of UAH and HadCRUT4 using his shonky five year baseline compared to his normal 30-year 1981-2010 baseline.

That's not all that he's done.  If you compare the five year baseline chart I plotted with Roy's chart - his chart shows UAH lower than HadCRUT4 in every year.  That's not what my chart above shows, even using his shonky 5-year baseline.  Roy said he's using "running five year means" - which only shows the elaborate lengths he felt he had to go to in order to deceive people.

Anyway, to further illustrate Roy's shonkiness, here is the longer term CMIP5 and CMIP3 means vs GISTemp using the normal 30 year baseline:

Data Sources: NASA and KNMI Climate Explorer

The divergence only becomes apparent from around 2005.  Going by Roy's past behaviour, I shouldn't be surprised at him fudging the data to this extent, but I am.

From the comments

Mostly fake sceptics who are all too keen to buy into Roy Spencer's deception (archived here).

david dohbro says:

February 7, 2014 at 11:03 AM
unfortunately most of our decisions are emotionally based; very few factual. These decisions range from the simplest thing of “what to put on my sandwich today” to those on a much grander scale “let’s declare war to a nation”…

benpal says:

February 7, 2014 at 11:34 AM
Thanks for this update on the State of the Planet.

Jan says:

February 7, 2014 at 11:59 AM
Regardsless of who is right or wrong we must all be glad that the worst predictions seems to have failed.
I sometimes wonder if the alarmist share this relief, somehow I have the feeling that many of them want the temperatures to increase just to prove themselves right.

Denier Don Easterbrook says:

February 7, 2014 at 12:10 PM
Roy
In 2000, I downloaded the IPCC temp prediction to 2100 from the official IPCC website showing a 1 F warming from 2000 to 2010. That curve has long since disappeared from the IPCC website (surprise, surprise!) and the deviations of their projections from measured temps from 2000 are much, much smaller. My question is–how much of the deviation of the modeled curves from 2000 has been back-casted, i.e., their original predictions changed to match what actually happened. If that is the case, then their prediction record is actually considerably more miserable than your curves show.

Don

David A. says:

February 7, 2014 at 3:04 PM
Don, what document was the IPCC data from? Because all 5 ARs are available here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml#.UvVKDPldWa8
I wrote to you twice about two weeks ago, asking for the data source for one of your charts. You never replied. What happened to data sharing?

Pablo says:

February 7, 2014 at 1:09 PM
So 97.8% of climate models are wrong, somehow thats quite poetic. :)

Salvatore Del Prete says:

February 7, 2014 at 1:38 PM
Exactly, and as each month goes by they are more and more off.

Salvatore Del Prete is probably referring to this "not even wrong" prediction when he says:

February 7, 2014 at 1:39 PM
Don, if you read this I have been and continue to be in complete agreement with your climate assessment.

What a difference 19 years makes...

One of HotWhopper's visitors, Greig, referred us  to an article written back in 1995.  The article was written by someone called Thomas Gale Moore, who was at the time writing as Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. I googled Thomas Gale Moore and found that he was also associated with the pro-tobacco lobby.  It seems he has a history of disinformation.

Greig was citing the article to support his claim that "there is plenty of scientific and practical reason to question the pessimism" (around global warming).  So I thought it might be worth checking to see how Greig's chosen article fares nineteen years later.

Temperature prediction: Fail

One thing Thomas Gale Moore writes is that "Should the world warm -- and there is little evidence or theory to support such a prognostication ..."

Maybe Thomas hadn't seen any surface temperature charts back in 1995, though they were available back then (refer page 213 in Chapter 7 of the IPCC First Assessment Report).  Anyway, this is what's happened to global surface temperatures:

Data Source: NASA

In 1995 the global surface temperature was 0.33 above the 1951-1980 mean.  Since then it's gone up around the same again - rising to 0.67 above the mean in 2010 and 2013 was 0.61C above the 1951-1980 mean. One "prediction" down.

Food price prediction: Fail

What else did Thomas get wrong?  He mentioned food prices and cited a study by Kane et al (1991) (which I couldn't trace), which he said indicated "...a decline in commodity prices under moderate climate change conditions".  Let's see what has happened to food prices with the climate change over the past nineteen years.  Here is a chart of the Food Index from the FAO (click to enlarge).

Well, the food index in real terms is 50% higher than it was in 1995.  Two "predictions" down.

Rainfall prediction: Fail

Another thing Thomas suggested was that in the USA, "the Southwest would likely become wetter and better for crops".  Let's have a look at what's happening in the southwest portion of the USA according to the US Drought Monitor:

The southwestern USA is experiencing what could be the worst drought in 500 years.  And the prognosis isn't crash hot, either.

That should be sufficient to demonstrate that Thomas Gale Moore, while he may be good at some things, has not got any skill in climate predictions.

Most of the rest of his article is yearning for the "good old days" when dinosaurs roamed the earth and other nostalgia in a similar vein.  I can understand why Thomas feels comfortable with dinosaurs and other old fossils.

Are climate disinformers like Anthony Watts more likely to tell lies?

Anthony Watts, climate disinformer, writes about a study of students and nurses in India to question the academic integrity of climate scientists throughout the world. (Archived here.)  His headline reads:

Could this study on honesty and government service explain the EPA climateer fraud and ‘Climategate’ ?

Anthony doesn't mention Enron or any of the other huge scandals in the private sector.  He prefers to suggest that dishonesty is rampant among climate scientists.

This is the same Anthony Watts who:

• lied about the 97% consensus, most blatantly
• sought $$$ from his readers to pay for his recent trip to AGU13 San Francisco, without revealing how much money he was given, how it was spent, or the fact that he most probably didn't have to pay for attending the AGU conference
• promotes fantastic paranoid conspiracy theories to pretend that the greenhouse effect isn't real
• is a pathetic hypocrite, pretending to be a hero, while wrongly accusing scientists of lying about their research.

etc etc

What a dismal excuse for a human being is Anthony Watts.  He goes to the extreme of inventing rapid onset UHI disease and global warming by Russian steampipes and when that doesn't work, he resurrects old wrong interpretations of stolen emails to "prove" something nefarious.  Is it the thief who was wrong? Not according to Anthony Watts. Stealing isn't a crime.  To him it's a crime to want to do good science.  I don't believe Anthony ever wrote about the real facts of the matter. His honesty doesn't stretch that far.  He either lies outright or is dishonest by innuendo or omission.

It doesn't take a research scientist to demonstrate the truism that climate disinformers have a tendency to be dishonest and unethical.

It doesn't take a giant intellect to figure out that if multiple lines of evidence from a wide variety of independent sources point to the same result, then that result is most likely to be correct.


PS The study that Anthony referred to is about students and nurses in India.  It is not reported in a very clear manner, for example there is no quantitative indication in the conclusion, merely a statement that "college students who cheat on a simple task are more likely to prefer to enter government service after graduation" without indicating how much more likely.  At one point it points to a small percentage:

Students who scored higher on the dice task (i.e. are more dishonest in this task) prefer government jobs. A one standard deviation increase in dice points reported corresponds to a 4.2 percent increase in the probability of preferring a government job.

Elsewhere it reports that:

Students who believed that networks are necessary for success were 5.6 percent more likely to prefer public service positions. However, students who believed bribes are necessary to operate a business in India were 4.5 percent less likely to prefer government work. Thus, it seems that reporting that corruption is pervasive or necessary in standard attitudinal questions about corruption do not consistently predict preferences.

Which tells us what exactly? That students who believe bribes are necessary in India are more likely to prefer to pay bribes rather than receive them?

Tim Ball and his audience at WUWT complain about naming and shaming!

Anthony Watts insists on giving voice to favoured sky dragon slayers who dispute the greenhouse effect, in particular Tim Ball who co-authored that silly book.

I picked up this from Tim's latest effort  (archived here, and updated here and here and here), which is nothing but a long complaint that normal people see him for what he is.  Was Anthony Watts having a shot at Tim Ball's history of deliberately deceiving the public about global warming when he came up with the title?

Public Relations (Spin Doctors) Deliberately Deceived Public About Global Warming and Climate Change

I guess not - going by the comments and Anthony's frenzy of comment deletion (see below).  Anyway, Tim Ball writes (archived here, and updated here and here and here) - my bold italics:

Recently, I gave a three hour presentation with question and answers. The audience was educated people who distrust government and were sympathetic to my information. I decided to illustrate my point and concern by asking a few basic questions. Nobody could tell me the difference between weather and climate. Nobody could name the three major so-called greenhouse gases, let alone explain the mechanics of the greenhouse theory. My goal was not to embarrass, but to illustrate how little they knew and how easily PR can deceive and misdirect.

I can't imagine anyone but the sort of conspiracy theorists he describes, sitting through three hours of Tim Ball's nonsense.

Further in his article, Tim fakes surprise that it's not expected that anyone would query the credentials of people who accept science - for their acceptance of science.  And he wonders why people who reject science wouldn't be treated in the same fashion.

The answer is simple.  There is no reason to query someone's reasons for accepting mainstream science.  All you have to do is look at the science.  Do you query a person's expertise if they say that day follows night?  Do you look at them askance and ask them what qualifications they have for making such a statement?

If a person disputes mainstream science then one is entitled to ask why they dispute it. Do they have solid grounds for disputing accepted science?  Does their work experience or credentials give them special insight that isn't shared by experts? If a person claims that day never follows night, it would be understandable that you'd query their grounds for making such a claim. Maybe they live in the Arctic or Antarctic.  Otherwise, there is ample evidence to prove them wrong.  In the case of climate science I've yet to meet a scientist or non-scientist who has solid scientific grounds for rejecting science.  Least of all Tim Ball or any of the other denizens at WUWT.

Tim writes:

The epithet “global warming skeptic” was applied to me years ago and was used in questions from the media. When I explained I accepted global warming the media was surprised. They didn’t understand when I explained my skepticism was about the cause – the claim it was due to human CO2. Some labeled me a contrarian, but it wasn’t effective because few know what it means.

Tim isn't a global warming skeptic so I can't imagine anyone referring to him as such these days.  He's a denier of climate science.  He rejects physics.  He rejects the greenhouse effect.  He rejects the notion that burning fossil fuels and clearing land has resulted in a massive rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases, which are causing the world to warm faster than it has in at least tens of millions of years if not hundreds.

Tim calls it "smearing".  I say it's calling it what it is.  Since Tim is so open about rejecting mainstream science, why is he so offended when it's pointed out that he does?

Aptly, Tim Ball calls on a writer of fiction, Michael Crichton, to support his stance.  That is fitting!

Oh, and he wants respect for his disagreement?  He writes:

“A danger sign of the lapse from true skepticism in to dogmatism is an inability to respect those who disagree” – Dr. Leonard George.

This after Tim Ball tries to lampoon prominent climate scientists, after he calls realclimate.org a "PR" site instead of recognising it one if not the best climate science website on the internet, run by some of the world's leading climate scientists.

I don't care if he wants to tell fibs or whether he's willing to be truthful and call himself a fake sceptic, a science denier, a person who rejects physics or whatever.  Just don't go complaining when other people tell it like it is.

From the WUWT comments

Anthony is busy deleting lots of comments.  One comment that Anthony deleted referred to this Statement of Defense by the Calgary Herald when Tim Ball tried to sue them (he subsequently dropped the case AFAIK).  It gives some insight into the mind of Tim Ball and Anthony Watts for promoting him so often. And it makes this article of his even more ridiculous than it already is.  (I've a copy of the page but didn't get it archived in time.  The Statement of Defence amply covers the points raised.)

Anthony didn't delete comments from other science deniers as far as I can tell. Here's a sample from people who also reject mainstream science.  It's no surprise that they congregate together with other science rejectors.  It's ironic and a great demonstration of double standards.  There are lots of ad hom responses to an article complaining about the lack of respect the general public has for prominent people like Tim Ball, who make a living out of spreading disinformation (and arguably libeling climate scientists).

A.D. Everard says:

November 6, 2013 at 4:49 pm
Well said. It is an extra pity that our schooling systems (everywhere) seem to have devoted the last few decades to dumbing down their students. It’s harder than ever to get many thinking critically or clearly for themselves. They’ve been taught it’s easier to trust the pop-stars and priests and computer models of climate religion. It’s changing, largely thanks to nature and the non-arrival of the promised doom, but it’s changing slowly. They believe so deeply, some of them.

john piccirilli says (my hyperlink):

November 6, 2013 at 5:15 pm
Great post. Thanks, I don’t feel so stupid now for almost believing this bs
Thanks to Christopher Booker and wuwt I have seen the light.

Txomin says:

November 6, 2013 at 5:28 pm
It’s an interesting post that I’ve enjoyed reading. Thank you
However,I must have to confess that, in my experience, people deceiving others are far fewer in number (and significantly less effective) than those deceiving themselves.

wayne says:

November 6, 2013 at 5:31 pm
Such an article has been needed for so long! It is very welcomed.

RockyRoad says:

November 6, 2013 at 6:56 pm
Warmistas are like a bunch of squawking geese–you avoid them because they’re so doggone annoying. They don’t realize their only value is to be roasted–for dinner or otherwise.

 R. de Haan says:

November 6, 2013 at 7:12 pm
And the worst aspect of all, the bastards breed like rabbits. They have infested virtually every corner of society. Wait until they show their true colors and start marching….(LOL)
Great article. Thanks

albertalad is impressed by Tim Ball's lack of credentials and paucity of publications and says:

November 6, 2013 at 7:40 pm
The Calgary Herald could perhaps explain the climate science degrees of all the activists the IPCC are using as documented. Then in this case – Dr Ball is indeed a step up from that group of morons the IPCC uses themselves. Or the IPCC lead – a railroad engineer – Dr. Ball is a genius to that fake.

Gunga Din says:

November 6, 2013 at 8:23 pm
The “site” is the web site Realclimate, named by Gavin (Schmidt). But science doesn’t need PR, so why do climate scientists use it?
=====================================================================
Shouldn’t that be “ReelClimate” as in “reel ‘em in”?

And a comment from Dumb Scientist, who manages to sneak one by without being deleted (so far) and says:

November 6, 2013 at 9:22 pm

Jim Clarke says:
November 6, 2013 at 8:33 pm
“The propagandists portray CAGW skeptics as people who don’t believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, so they can compare them to flat-earthers. This is one of the tactics that Tim Ball is talking about.”

Isn’t Dr. Tim Ball an author of Slaying the Sky Dragon… the book which denies the existence of the greenhouse effect?

RockyRoad says Tim Ball has been "besmirched by association".  He doesn't yet realise that Tim Ball denies the greenhouse effect:

November 6, 2013 at 9:51 pm

Dumb Scientist says:
November 6, 2013 at 9:22 pm
….
Isn’t Dr. Tim Ball an author of Slaying the Sky Dragon… the book which denies the existence of the greenhouse effect?

Well, I jumped into Amazon, looked up the book, found the authors include a Tim Ball.
However, Tim Ball is responsible for two chapters in the book that describe how climate research became politicized and how the IPCC came into existence as an organization whose mission was to convince governments that they needed to introduce policies based on the danger of man-made global warming.

Ten more chapters were written by six other authors, and some experts have taken exception to the concepts of climate physics they present–persumably the denial of the existence of the greenhouse effect being one of them.

So, being the devious fellow you are, you’ve tried to besmirch Dr. Ball by association. And that, dear sir, is typical of this very thread’s subject–Deliberately Deceiving the Public!
You have a nice day, now. 

And here - Dumb Scientist says:

November 6, 2013 at 9:57 pm
RockyRoad, “CO2 is not a Greenhouse Gas that Raises Global temperature. Period!”
http://drtimball.com/2012/co2-is-not-a-greenhouse-gas-that-raises-global-temperature-period/ (archived here - Sou)

Konrad pulls no punches and says:

November 6, 2013 at 10:08 pm
@David Appell
As you can see some here may be critical because your actions have contributed to -
- Trashing of the scientific method and respect for science
- Damage to democracy
- Blighting of the landscape with subsidy farms
- Slaughter of wildlife by subsidy farms
- Radioactive pollution of the Chinese landscape producing subsidy farm magnets
- Driving manufacturing from countries with environmental protections to those without
- Corruption and crime fuelled by carbon ponzi schemes
- Transferring wealth from poor to rich through subsidy farming
- and the endless list of snivelling stupidity goes on…

However your actions have also contributed greatly to creating a better future -
- UN kleptocracy discredited and permanently compromised
- All hope of a “bio-crisis” with bio-debt collected and redistributed under a frame work of UN global governance destroyed
- EUSSR parliament discredited and permanently compromised
- Every activist, journalist, politician or party of the left permanently compromised
- Lame stream media no longer the gatekeepers of opinion
- The rise of New Media and global grass-roots movements that can never be controlled or influenced by the regulating class

Thanks David ;-)

PS. David, if you have any further post election wailing and gnashing of teeth to get through, please take it to the outer darkness. That’s what it’s there for.

RockyRoad, now that he's discovered Tim Ball does indeed deny the greenhouse effect, admits that he, RockyRoad, denies it too (what a wanker):

November 6, 2013 at 10:23 pm

Dumb Scientist says:
November 6, 2013 at 9:57 pm
RockyRoad, “CO2 is not a Greenhouse Gas that Raises Global temperature. Period!”
http://drtimball.com/2012/co2-is-not-a-greenhouse-gas-that-raises-global-temperature-period/ (Sou: I've archived the page here).

Then you’ve learned something today, Dumb–But that still doesn’t mean you can drop the “Dumb” and claim to be a “Scientist”.
Or do you have incontrovertible proof that CO2 DOES INDEED raise global temperature?
If so, please post it. (And no, somebody’s “assumptions” or “guesses” or “SWAG” simply won’t do.)
(Oh, this ought to be good.)

Dumb Scientist replies to RockyRoad and says:

November 6, 2013 at 10:33 pm
Aside from the end-Permian, the PETM, and the thawing of Snowball Earth?

Konrad has closed his eyes to comments like those listed here and says:

November 6, 2013 at 10:41 pm
Chad Wozniak says:
November 6, 2013 at 10:16 pm
——————————————–
Yes and no. Those with no escape such Mann, Karoly and Flannery have jammed the throttles to Full Stupid Ahead. However some of the Professional Left in Australia seem to be aware that things are about to end badly. They can be seen test driving exit strategies on the political blogs including -

“we were giving the planet the benefit of the doubt” ie: Noble cause
“but, but but, the conservatives believed too!” ie: It wasn’t just us

The good news is that none of this is going to work. The conservatives didn’t vilify sceptics and those that vilified cannot use the Noble Cause excuse. The bitterness of some of the posts is revealing. Some of the Professional Left are starting to realise what they have done. They have used all the tactics Tim Ball has listed, and they have done so in the Age of the Internet. The Internet is a game changer. None of the old lame stream media techniques such as “walkback”, “snowstorming”, or “issue fade and replace” work any more.

The thing both Tim ball and Michael Crichton did not consider about the Internet is memory. The lame stream media’s memory is selective but the Internet remembers everything forever, and is instantly accessible by billions at the tap of a keyboard or click of a mouse. The Professional left have not shot themselves in the foot. They have not even shot themselves in both feet. They have been tap-dancing on an anti-tank mine. For the Professional Left it’s pink mist time.

M Courtney sometimes tries to present himself as a slightly more rational fake sceptic, perhaps to prove he is not like his dad.  Not this time when he voices his conspiracy theory (pal review) and wishful thinking - that WUWT has become the main forum for internet climate debate (he jests, surely, and is apparently oblivious to the fact that Anthony has censored a whole heap of comments in the thread):

November 7, 2013 at 12:18 am
One of the problems with spin is that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
The website RealClimate was set up to dominate the internet discussion just like the gatekeepers in the mainstream media were spun (thanks to Roger Harribin who is still at the BBC).

Yet the debate was beyond the feeble hand-waving of the self-proclaimed Climate Experts at RealClimate.

Now WUWT has become the main forum for internet climate debate. SkS tries hard but has far less reach.

That’s why the self-proclaiemd Climate Scientists (authenticated by Pal Review) have to come here to push their agenda.

The spin is out of control. And that is more of a problem for the doom-mongers than the lack of warming this century.

The persecution complex is rife at WUWT - other paranoid conspiracy theorists can't hold a candle to dyed in the wool science deniers.  Some of them really and truly think that all the world's scientists plus all the scientific publishing houses and their staff plus all the world's governments plus most of the world's media plus 80% or more of the population on earth is part of some amazing conspiracy.  kretchetov says:

November 7, 2013 at 1:12 am
Great post.

It is wonderful to see posts exploring the idea that Global Warming scare is nothing to do with science, but with PR, politics, money and influence. 

And what a brilliant idea that is, if 80% of population can be scared stiff to hand over their money and freedom as they cannot tell basic scientific truth from a lie, and 20% intimidated and called names if they dissented.

The question I would like to ask – is there ANY reputable scientific institution that stood the ground and survived the assault? Russian Academy of Science, maybe?

Well, well, well - who have we here? Is it the real thing or a copy cat?   Jeff Id says:

November 7, 2013 at 3:25 am
Well written sir!

Since Anthony is so busy deleting comments, I might pop back with updates of the archives.  In fact, it looks like Anthony is so busy he isn't taking the time to distinguish his denier friends from his scientific foes :) (Search a page for davidmhoffer).

Archive here.

Archive updated here (do a search for David Appell.  If there's one thing Anthony Watts cannot abide, almost as much as he cannot abide climate scientists, it's a journalist who understands climate science.)

Further update here and here and here.

Anthony Watts pushes more crazy paranoid conspiracy theories at WUWT

Updated - see below for new comment and NASA video on depletion of groundwater.

---

Anthony Watts hates it that his blog WUWT has a reputation for zany conspiracy theories but doesn't do anything to dispel the notion.

On the contrary.  And today seems the day for more crazy conspiracy theories.

Anthony himself indulges in conspiracy ideation as you'll have read in my last blog article.  Now he's got "sky dragon slayer"** Tim Ball indulging likewise.  In an article today (archived here and updated here), Tim writes:

UNEP, the agency that brought you Agenda 21 and the IPCC established...

What he's saying is that Agenda 21 and the IPCC are conspiracies of the wicked UN.  Implied in those few words are all the weird and wonderful theories that the cranks and crazies can come up with, like all the various conspiracy theories based on the "new world order" theme.

Tim Ball is trying to suggest there is something malevolent in these quotes from the UN Secretary General.

“Water holds the key to sustainable development,” “We must work together to protect and carefully manage this fragile finite resource.” 

And what about this - Tim reckons the IPCC is in on the plot writing:

Environment Canada (EC) produced the map information, but their credibility is close to zero because of involvement in the IPCC from the start. 

If you think I'm reading too much into what Tim wrote, think again.  Here is a direct quote from today's WUWT article:

Environmentalism was a necessary new paradigm hijacked by a few for a political agenda. The goal was political control with subjugation of individuals and their rights to a world government through the UN. Elaine Dewar, author of The Cloak of Green explained,

And there's more:

Strong appeared to achieve his goal with CO2 through the UN, particularly the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that gave the IPCC effective control of national weather agencies and therefore national policy. Global warming seemed like an easy control agenda until nature took over. Instead of acknowledging their science was wrong the UNEP, IPCC and national environment agencies simply moved the goalposts to climate change and more recently to climate crisis. Now that is failing a move to a new goalpost, water, is underway to pursue the real objective – total control. As always it is cloaked in righteousness (green). Who could oppose a desire for clean air or water?

Notice all the references to the UN, Maurice Strong, the IPCC, Agenda 21.  They are dog whistles to the paranoid conspiracy mob of the "new world order" kind.

Anthony Watts complains about research that shows conspiracy ideation is a predictor of climate science denial, albeit a weak predictor.  But all the while he happily pushes and promotes such paranoid conspiracy theories by cranks like Tim Ball and Christopher Monckton on his very own blog!

PS Remember this water article Anthony put up not that long ago?

---

**Tim Ball is a co-author of the book: Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory which tries and fails to prove all atmospheric physics is wrong!  They "don't believe" in the greenhouse effect.

---

From the WUWT comments

Here is a sample of the comments to Anthony Watts' latest conspiracy article by Tim Ball (archived here - updated here).


Txomin says green policies kill lots of people:

November 1, 2013 at 2:43 pm
Experience says that this “green” nonsense will slow down (but not stop) progress. To be sure, many will die because of “green” policies, policies that will enrich a new breed of charlatans. However, humanity will work around them all and will be better off tomorrow than it is today.

Robin says it's a Marxist plot (excerpt):

November 1, 2013 at 3:01 pm
We need to remember that the West, especially the US, is where the Marxian criteria of reaching a stage of technological development that would supposedly allow redistribution was met. Rather than admit the Governed/Governors/Redistribution to Latin America and Africa gambit, the bureaucrats just keep coming up with excuses of why administration via the OECD and the UN is necessary. And the rationales need to extend beyond nation-stat borders and thus require international administration by bureaucrats who can tout their links to local (ICLEI), state (eco devt schemes with China usually), and national.

nigelf says "it's all a scam":

November 1, 2013 at 3:03 pm
Countries far and wide need to start electing Libertarian types as their leaders who won’t be afraid to pull the plug completely on these ongoing scams. They also won’t be afraid to turf the UN and order them all out of their countries so that real prosperity can take place and freedoms restored.
The Republicans have to move considerably to the right or the TEA Party message is really going to start to resonate among regular people in the coming years.

Brian H is under the illusion that Tim Ball has any climate science credentials (Tim Ball used to teach geography many years ago. His publication record is very sparse.):

November 1, 2013 at 3:07 pm
For those inclined to demand credentials, it should be noted that Dr. Ball’s in this subject, as with Climate Science in general, clearly exceed and trump those of the UN sock puppets.

sanaerchi says it's not just water that the one world government wants to control:

November 1, 2013 at 3:34 pm
You could also include food as an item of control because there is a global attempt to improve people’s behavior towards food waste

Bryan Johnson is something of an extremist and says:

November 1, 2013 at 3:49 pm
“Demodernising” is exactly the goal. Not to sound too much of a conspiracy-minded observer (although I’m often enough accused of that), but aren’t the people who want *any* human influence on the earth to be banned — reversed — following a goal of the return of humans to a paleolithic level of hunter-gatherer civilization? It seems so, to me.

A.D. Everard agrees the UN is one giant evil conspiracy says:

November 1, 2013 at 3:53 pm
It is vital, then, for all countries to disconnect from the UN, ignore its directives, cut off its funding and let it die a death. It is the UN and its agencies which are the true enemy of mankind and civilization.

Rhys Jaggar says just wait for the big one:

November 1, 2013 at 4:03 pm
The problem with all these crying wolf scare stories is that, one day, there actually will be an existential threat to mankind and the chances are that no-one will believe the messenger.

Bill Illis seems to think that water was only once created and remains unchanged, ignoring such inconvenient things as metabolic pathways (and not distinguishing potable water from the rest) saying:

November 1, 2013 at 5:42 pm
All the water that was here 4.4 billion years ago, is still here.

Hydrogen loves its oxygen.

Jer0me says, wrongly and irrelevantly:

November 1, 2013 at 6:40 pm
I really wish people would stop stating that tempos have stopped rising for ’15 years’. This makes it look as if it is starting from a cherry-picked 1998. This is easy for warmists to refute.
As I understand it, it has been 17 years, and is not from 1998.

humanati tosses everything into his conspiracy theorising and says (my bold italics):

November 1, 2013 at 10:40 pm
Good to see so many people joining the dots. MMGW wasn’t a mistake or an isolated example of the UN’s war on humanity. It is part of an organised, sustained, orchestrated campaign to extend it’s control & simultaneously destroy truth, science & reason. It’s going on in many, many other areas of science. Fluoride, vaccines, GMO’s, cancer causes & treatments… Someone has declared a war on our minds & bodies. The MMGW myth is just one aspect of this obscenity. I urge others to seek the truth & go wherever it takes you, regardless of how uncomfortable that is…Our lives & our liberty depends on it.

I've got to update the archived article to let you read this comment by Dodgy Geezer who says (excerpts - my bold italics and links):

November 2, 2013 at 4:10 am
I repeat again: There can NEVER be a shortage of water

There are many places in the world where you cannot get fresh, clean water when you want it. But this is NOT because WATER is short. It is because the Infrastructure is short. That means it is NOT a natural resources problem. It is an economic one.

The green trick is to point out places where people are short of water, and then treat this as a resource problem. It is not. If we wanted to, we could run a string of fresh-water swimming pools across the Sahara in case another ‘Phoenix’ crashed, and we wouldn’t waste any water at all. We would have wasted a large amount of money. Unless, of course, this created a new tourist attraction… :)

... What this means is that the appropriate response when told that you are ‘short of water’ is to consider how to address the problem, and the two available ways will always be:

1 – limiting local population
2 – providing more water

In practice, for a typical town, item 2) above will be the answer, and the discussion will centre on how best to pay for that. The one thing that is NOT an answer is to get everyone to cut back on consumption so as to service more people with the same infrastructure. All that does is lower people’s standard of living and ensure that when the problem arises again it will be more dangerous, because everyone will be living that much closer to the critical point where they cannot survive…

Dodgy Geezer might have never heard of this thing called "evaporation".  He (dodgy geezers are always a "he" aren't they?) might learn something about the futility of putting swimming pools across the Sahara if he read about Lake Eyre.

And he might recognise the water resource problem if he knew a bit more about water and its sources, such as:

-

Serial disinformer Vincent Gray flounders in rising seas at WUWT

Anthony Watts, denialist blogger at wattsupwiththat.com has copied and pasted another disinformation article, this time by Vincent Gray from New Zealand (archived here).  Vincent Gray is writing at WUWT about sea level and gets lots and lots wrong.  Which is to be expected.  Vincent Gray has devoted the past few years to his new career of climate science disinformer.

Anthony Watts seems to think he should be shown respect because he's getting very old.  Vincent Gray is a climate science denier going back a few years now.  He founded the science-disinformation organisation "New Zealand Climate Science Coalition" back in April 2006 back when he was a sprightly 84 year old. Here is a bit of background on him from Wikipedia:

Credit: Vincent Gray
Source: Wikipedia

Vincent R. Gray (born 1922, London) is a New Zealand-based chemist, and a founder of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.

Gray has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Cambridge University after studies on incendiary bomb fluids made from aluminium soaps. He has had a long scientific career in the UK, France, Canada and China working on petroleum, plastics, gelatin, timber, paint, adhesives and adhesion, coal, and building materials with well over 100 scientific and technical articles, patents and chapters in books. In New Zealand, he was the first Director of Building Research and later, Chief Chemist of the Coal Research Association.[1][2] He has also published many articles and reports, seven in peer-reviewed journals. 

Some bits Vincent Gray got right...

What does Vincent say that's wrong?  It would take a lot less space to write about what he said that was right.  Here's an example of what he got right:

Chapter 13 of the IPCC 5th WGI Report claims that sea level will rise by an amount between 0.26 to 0.97 metres by 2100 according to which of their new scenarios actually happens

Vincent has given numbers from bottom of the "likely" range of the highest mitigation scenario, RCP2.6, to the top of the "likely" range of the no mitigation scenario, RCP8.5.  This is discussed on page 13-47 of the AR5 WG1 report.  The "likely" ranges are given as 0.4 metres for RCP2.6 and 0.73m for RCP8.5.  So even if we manage to reverse global warming this century (RCP2.6), seas will continue to rise as the earth system moves towards a new equilibrium.

Vincent goes through a few basics by way of introduction.  He is correct that for most of us land-dwelling organisms, it's the height of the sea relative to the land that's of most interest.  But that's about as far as "correct" goes in Vincent's article.

Vincent refers to the rather nice map from the UK's Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL).  You can click on the map to see the local sea level changes for different coastal locations as measured by tide gauges.  PSMSL recommends only using RLR (Revised Local Reference) data for time series.

So Vincent Gray got a couple of things right...but it's not long before he gets it horribly wrong.

Sea level is rising around the world

I won't go through everything that Vincent Gray wrote.  I'll just select a few of his "wrongs".  Vincent put up Figure 13.23 from page 13-117 of the IPCC report.  I took my own snapshot as below.  Click to see the larger version:

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 page 13-117

Figure 13.23: Observed and projected relative net sea level change (compare Figure 13.20) near nine representative coastal locations for which long tide-gauge measurements are available. The observed in situ relative sea level records from tide gauges (since 1970) are plotted in yellow, and the satellite record (since 1993) is provided as purple lines. The projected range from 21 CMIP5 RCP4.5 scenario runs (90% uncertainty) is shown by the shaded region for the period 2006–2100, with the bold line showing the ensemble mean. Colored lines represent three individual climate model realizations drawn randomly from three different climate models used in the ensemble. Station locations of tide gauges are: (a) San Francisco: 37.8°N, 122.5°W; (b) New York: 40.7°N, 74.0°W; (c) Ijmuiden: 52.5°N, 4.6°E; (d) Haldia: 22.0°N, 88.1°E; (e) Kanmen, China: 28.1°N, 121.3°E; (f) Brest: 48.4°N, 4.5°W; (g) Mar del Plata, Argentina: 38.0°S, 57.5°W; (h) Fremantle: 32.1°S, 115.7°E; (i) Pago Pago: 14.3°S, 170.7°W. Vertical bars at the right sides of each panel represent the ensemble mean and ensemble spread (5–95%) of the likely (medium confidence) sea level change at each respective location at the year 2100 inferred from the four RCPs 2.6 (dark blue), 4.5 (light blue), 6.0 (yellow), and 8.5 (red).

Vincent makes the claim in relation to the above that:

Every one of these actual measured sea levels have shown no sign of change for at least ten years, yet all the projections claim that this settled behaviour will suddenly change to an upwards level of around half a metre by the end of the century.

No sign of change for at least ten years, he claims.  He's wrong!

Being naturally skeptical of people who have a history of lying, I checked.

Here are charts from the source that Vincent seems to have recommended, PSMSL.  I've managed to plot all but one of the locations he referred to when he said that seas weren't rising.  I couldn't find a recent series for "Bay of Bengal".  I'll leave it to you to decide just how many of the "every one" Vincent got woefully wrong.  As always, you can click the animated image for a larger view.

Data Source: PSMSL

Why Vincent decides on ten years to make a judgement is anyone's guess.  But even looking at a mere ten years of data there are only three of the above charts that Vincent chose for which it could be argued there is no perceptible rise since 2002.  For some of them the recent rise is very large.  And in all of them the seas are rising inexorably over time.

The temperature rise will be greatest in the Arctic

Vincent writes the contrary:

All the models assume that any temperature rise will be least at the poles and greatest at the tropics because the water vapour feedback is lower at the poles..They do not mention Antarctica where the ice is currently increasing

He's got this one back to front.  Models don't "assume", they project.  Models don't indicate that the temperature rise will be greatest at the tropics, they indicate that the temperature will rise most in the Arctic, which is what has been happening.  Here is how the IPCC projects temperature to change in different parts of the world as the world heats up.

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Chapter 14 page 14-144

FAQ 14.1, Figure 1: Projected 21st century changes in annual mean and annual extremes (over land) of surface air temperature and precipitation: a) mean surface temperature per °C of global mean change

The chart above indicates that most of the Arctic region will heat up by two degrees or more for every one degree increase in global average surface temperature - except for an area just south of Greenland. The land will heat up more quickly than the oceans.  The Antarctic will rise just a tad more quickly than the average surface temperature - and land areas in the tropics will heat up more than average, but not as much as the Arctic.

You'll have noticed that he got it wrong  about the Antarctic, too.  Sea ice in the Antarctic hit a record high this winter but sea ice doesn't affect sea level.  And on the continent ice is melting.  There is a net loss. Melting ice in Antarctica is estimated to be adding 0.59 ± 0.20 millimeter a year to global sea level. Any accumulation in the east is more than offset by the melting in the west and on the peninsula.

No measurements?

Vincent writes:

There are no measurements of temperatures on ice anywhere, on ice caps, oceans or glaciers. In all cases there are other influences.on their behaviour. In the Arctic it is the temperature of the ocean and the behaviour of the ocean oscillations.

I don't know what he's going on about here.  What does he mean by saying there are no temperature readings or records on ice or in the oceans.  Of course there are.  Denier Don Easterbrook will be very upset with him for telling that lie!

The temperature of the ocean influences temperatures on land in lots of places.  Extra hot oceans are being blamed for Australia's run of broken heat records over the past year.  Thing is, what's causing the oceans to get warmer?  It's all those extra greenhouse gases!

The ice in the Arctic is "growing" because it's winter, dummy!

Vincent writes:

The ice in the Arctic is beginning to grow now

Of course it is.  The Arctic is heading for winter.  But ice in the Arctic is on a death spiral.  Even science deniers should know that:

Getting back to sea level projections

Sea level projections rely on estimates of how quickly the ice sheets in Antarctica and the Arctic will melt.  And how quickly glaciers all around the world will melt.  But particularly the ice sheets on Greenland and in Western Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula.  If the ice sheets melt faster than expected then seas will rise more quickly, needless to say.  As it is, the ice will melt no matter what we do and the sea is going to rise a lot more than half a metre in the next few centuries.  What we can control is how much hotter the earth will get, which will determine to some extent how fast these ice sheets melt and probably how much of them melt.

The IPCC report states on page 13-108 that:

The total sea level commitment after 2000 years is quasi-linear with a slope of 2.3m °C^–1.

So over millenia, seas are expected to rise more than ten metres if the global surface temperature rises by 4.5°C.  And that sort of temperature rise is definitely on the cards the way we're going.

If all the ice were to melt, seas would rise about 70 meters - but that's over thousands of years, not decades. However seas may well rise by more than a couple of meters sometime in the next couple of hundred years - if not sooner then later.  This will spell a lot of trouble.  Not just for people who live on the coast but for the world as a whole.

From the WUWT comments

The comments are archived here with the main article.

Go Home is a lateral thinker and says:

October 30, 2013 at 8:00 pm
Once the seas get too high, we just need to start sequestering water in the antarctic. Problem solved. Probably cheaper than trying to slow the oceans rise by cutting co2.

Mike Smith is not at all sceptical about what Vincent writes and says:

October 30, 2013 at 7:05 pm
The models say the sea levels are rising. So, where’s the missing water? Hiding in the deep ocean?

Lyle's comment could be a Poe:

October 30, 2013 at 6:31 pm
Seems to me that measuring sea level a lot like measuring your altitude while jumping on a trampoline. A host of factors come into play in addition to those mentioned such as volcanoes on land, volcanoes at sea, erosion and kids skipping rocks

Hockey Schtick is a conspiracy theorist (as if you couldn't tell from the cyber-name) and writes (excerpt):

October 30, 2013 at 6:14 pm
No problem, just “upjust” the data:
Satellite sea level data has been “adjusted” upward by 34% over past 9 years alone

Mike is battling to sublimate his scepticism, but merely "thinks" without checking so his scepticism loses.  He says he "agrees with the overall thrust":

October 30, 2013 at 9:29 pm
The author appears to be making the case that we should only look at recent tide data (the last ten years) as this is the most accurate and coincidentally agrees with his point that CAGW is overblown. Since global temperatures have been static for 17 years it would be expected that thermal expansion of the ocean would also tend to become static over the last 17 years (with some lag). This seems to be a somewhat circular argument not withstanding the overarching difficulties of obtaining accurate data in the first place. I agree with the overall thrust of the piece but the evidence as presented doesn’t really support it one way or the other.