Insects and microbes and OCO-2 conspiracy theories at WUWT

Anthony Watts has done it again. Put up a really weird article that none but the scientifically illiterate could allow on their blog as a straight article. But as his friend Willis Eschebach pointed out so clearly, Anthony Watts is scientifically illiterate.

I can't say it's enjoyable making fun of the articles by Ronald D "OMG it's insects" Voisin, because I do believe he is one of the few genuine deniers at WUWT, and probably a very nice, if very eccentric, chap. It's just that he is a conspiracy theorist of the "climate science is a hoax" type, so much so that I'd not even rate his articles as pseudo-science. (Type Voisin into the search bar to learn more about how Ronald's mind works, or fails to work.)

Just the same, there are people commenting on his latest atrocity (archived here), which has prompted me to point out where he's gone wrong - which is just about everywhere. First, I'll put up the map of atmospheric CO₂ that Ronald was writing about. It's the one shown by the OCO-2 team at AGU14. Click to enlarge it.

Source: NASA/JPL

Look at the legend at the bottom - the scale goes from 387 ppmv to 402.5 ppmv, which shows that the satellite is detecting CO₂ at a very fine scale. Then look at the title up top. The map is of averaged carbon dioxide concentration over the few weeks from 1 October this year through to 11 November.

You can read more about the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 on its website here, and you can browse the data released so far here. I also wrote about it a few days ago.

In a nutshell

To summarise, Ronald thinks that the OCO-2 project is a scam. A scientific plot against him and his fellow deniers, with results that are fudged or worse. He misinterprets the above chart. He wrongly thinks that it's insects and microbes that are causing CO₂ to rise, not human activity.  His logic is a massive fail - he neglects to explain how insects and microbes have suddenly been able to add about 900 billion tonnes of carbon or two trillion tonnes of CO₂ to the air in a space of 150 years. Where is this explosive increase in microbes and insects, such that no-one noticed? Ronald doesn't say.

This article wanders a bit into soils and bugs and microbes and other things so it's a bit long. But read on if you are interested in such things.

Hitting rock bottom at WUWT: OMG it's insects - Ronald D Voisin is ba-a-a-a-ck!

WUWT this week has surely hit rock bottom. It's slithered from the dopey to the absurd.

What is wrong with Anthony Watts? Have his half-coherent fake sceptics deserted him? Has he taken Wondering Willis Eschenbach's words to heart? Has the reality of global warming become so apparent that he's decided to give up on the ideological deniers and target his blog at the wingnuts?

It probably started with the Rocket Scientist from Luna Park, David Evans, and his Force X and the notch. If you thought that was weird enough, since then WUWT's been on a slippery slope to utter nuttery, including Tim Ball and his paranoid fantasies, Wondering Willis Eschenbach and his dismal skirmishes with Economics 101, Willis again and his scathing attack on Anthony Watts and WUWT, Roy Spencer PhD admitting he knows virtually nothing at all about climate science, then Anthony Watts failing junior high school chemistry.

Now Anthony's resurrected Ronald D. Voisin, of OMG it's insects fame (archived here, latest update here). You may recall he suggested we kill off mammals to help reduce CO2. You might also recall his central core nuclear reactor "theory" of climate.

This time Ronald decides, quite arbitrarily, that the oceans are a net emitter of CO2. By implication he's rejecting the notion that burning fossil fuels produces CO2 (although he does list it in a table), that the pH of oceans is dropping. He reckons he's done his sums, but he's neglected to factor in the pluses and minuses. If not for human activities like burning fossil fuels and deforestation, the amount of CO2 absorbed by natural sources (CO2 sinks) would be balanced by the amount of CO2 emitted from CO2 sources.

"Insects are invincible!" sez the WUWT illiterati

Anthony Watts (archived here) has found another scientific paper to mock.  This time it's about a study of insects and weather extremes.  He wrote the following headline and lead-in, with his normal dog-whistle "claim".

Claim: Extreme weather decides distribution of insects
Another modeled result, extrapolated all the way from 10 common fruit fly species to everything else in the insect world.

The press release on ScienceDaily.com includes the following (excerpts):

Most terrestrial animals experience temperature variation on both daily and seasonal time scale, and they are adapted to these conditions. Thus, for a species to maintain its existence under varying temperature conditions there are two simple conditions that must be met. Firstly, the temperature should occasionally be such that the species can grow and reproduce, and secondly, the temperature must never be so extreme that the population's survival is threatened.

In temperate climate for example, there are many species which are adapted to endure low temperatures in the winter, and then grow and reproduce in the summer. In warmer climates, the challenge may be just the opposite. Here, the species might endure high temperatures during the dry hot summer, while growth and reproduction mainly occurs during the mild and wet winter period.

The result was discouraging for all 10 species.

"Climate change will result in fewer cold days and nights, and thus allow species to move toward higher latitudes. However climate change also leads to a higher incidence to extremely hot days and our model therefore predicts that the distribution of these species will be reduced to less than half their present distribution"says Johannes Overgaard.

"In fact, our predictions are that some species would disappear entirely in the next few decades, even when they have a fairly wide distribution that currently covers hundreds of kilometers," adds Ary Hoffmann.

"Although none of the 10 species studied are normally perceived as either harmful or beneficial organisms for human society, the results indicate that distribution of many insect species will be changed dramatically, and it will probably also apply to many of the species that have particular social or commercial importance ," ends Johannes Overgaard.

Read the full article here.


Anthony hasn't made it very clear as to why he is mocking the paper.  That he is mocking it is clear.  His headline leads in with the word "claim".  As in journalism, "claim" means that the reader isn't meant to "believe it".  Anthony doesn't believe any science that is related to climate change.  He prefaces almost every press release he reports with the word "claim".  It's his way of getting his scientific illiterati stirred up to reject science.  Any and all climate science for starters.  He gives a free pass to his articles about the sun.

Now the only clue for why he wants his readers to not "believe" this claim is his short opening line: "...extrapolated all the way from 10 common fruit fly species to everything else in the insect world."  Perhaps Anthony doesn't think Drosophila are suitable species for scientific research. Perhaps he thinks they don't share characteristics with other insects.  (One wonders if he thinks that when one conducts research on mammalian research on species other than humans, it is not legitimate to make inferences to humans.)

The thing is, I reckon it's not only legitimate to conclude that if some Drosophila species are sensitive to extremes of weather, then it's likely that many other insects are also sensitive to extremes of weather.  Not only that, it's likely that many plants and other animals will be sensitive to extremes of weather. It's even likely that human settlement will be curtailed by extremes of weather.

From the WUWT comments

Here are some examples that illustrate the limited imagination and cognition of Anthony Watts' band of scientific illiterati (archived here).  I think lots of people regard WUWT as a safe place where they can show off their ignorance and get praised for doing so.


The illiterati have it bad. A.D. Everard is so traumatised by scientific research that she screams when she reads about it:

February 20, 2014 at 9:58 pm
I’m just going to go away and scream now…

p.g.sharrow isn't aware of the previous five major extinctions and has probably never studied insect evolution:

February 20, 2014 at 10:01 pm
After surviving hundreds of millions of years, Environmental disasters of epoch dimensions, insects are going to be threatened by a little change in climate conditions?!? More BS. The level that passes as scientific research is disappointing. pg

Sharmishtha Basu sums up the attitude of the illiterati to scientific research in general and says:

February 20, 2014 at 10:16 pm
how many care?

dp doesn't understand the research and goes off on a wild tangent of weird nonsense about gene modification and funding and cranks and says:

February 20, 2014 at 10:16 pm
The argument appears to be genetic changes occur in insects as a result of random episodes of extreme weather, what ever that might be. So then it should present no problem at all to identify in the laboratory those genes that are modified by controlled environments pushed to +/- extreme conditions at carefully contrived intervals. The only other thing to determine is what is the rate and sign of weather extremes in a specific region is needed to genetically modify insect genes and then prove that the probability of that happening is reasonable and probable.

I’m thinking this is going to need a *lot* of funding and that is why the idea is being floated. No coulda/woulda/shoulda crank idea is worth discussing if there isn’t a funding bounty involved.

Tom Harley knows nothing about insect life cycles and didn't bother to read the article to learn anything about it. Tom also confuses diurnal temperature with seasonal extremes affecting the life cycle and says:

February 20, 2014 at 10:17 pm
So 1C or 2C rise in a hundred years is going to have a major impact on flies that live in a range in excess of 20C daily. Agreed PG Sharrow, it’s just nonsense.

martin brumby thinks that insects can "adapt", presumably by evolution, in a matter of years, no matter what the conditions.  He hasn't a clue about evolution and can't have heard about the past five major extinctions because he says:

February 20, 2014 at 10:21 pm
These psyentists are either breathtakingly incompetent or breathtakingly dishonest (or maybe both). So insects are no longer capable of adaptation? How many species went extinct during the warming period which ended in 1998. (No, REALLY extinct, not just according to some fraudulent X-Box ‘model’).

ntesdorf says "who cares about Drosophila or Lepidoptera or Hymenoptera, when Isoptera and Blattodea will survive".  Maybe one day he'll learn that insects don't procreate by snacking at picnics and that many insects don't enjoy extreme heat :

February 20, 2014 at 10:45 pm
Anyone who has been on a picnic in Australia knows that all sorts of flies can handle any weather and any temperature condition in the search for food. Anyone who has tried to eradicate cockroaches knows that they will be around millions of years longer than we will. Anyone who has battled with termites knows that the termites will just laugh at climate change as they have already installed air conditioning in their home mounds. This study was carried out by people who should get out more and acquaint themselves with how the Earth and its inhabitants are equipped and work.

george e. smith wonders why tropical butterflies aren't all over Antarctica and says (excerpt):

February 20, 2014 at 11:00 pm
Insects barely live long enough to experience weather, let alone climate. So how could they possibly react to climate change. 

Patrick says "we know" insects are invincible, immortal, the world's super-heros:

February 20, 2014 at 11:21 pm
10 species? 10 species???! Really? How many species of insects are there? We know flies can been drawn up into the upper atmosphere on currents, freeze, fall, unfreeze and start happily doing what they do. More utter rubbish from Autralian “scientists”. BAH!

---

Johannes Overgaard, Michael R. Kearney, Ary A. Hoffmann. Sensitivity to thermal extremes in Australian Drosophila implies similar impacts of climate change on the distribution of widespread and tropical species. Global Change Biology, 2014; DOI: 10.1111/gcb.12521

More denier wackiness from WUWT - OMG It's Insects! Part 2

You'd have thought Anthony Watts would have learnt by now that some WUWT contributors are just too wacky even for WUWT.  But no.  Here we have Part 2 from Ronald D "it's insects" Voisin.

For hilarity's sake (is such pathetic ignorance really funny?) here are some excerpts from his 'essay':

How an engineer thinks the role of CO2 in photosynthesis has just been discovered

Ronald is ignorant of the fact that the role of CO2 in photosynthesis has been known for more than 200 years!  He writes (my emphasis):

Here is an important fact: CO2 is a fundamental building block required by all life....All life on Earth is booming just now and it could not do so without elevated atmospheric CO2. Photosynthetic processes require three primary ingredients: sunlight, water and CO2. We have known for a very long time that the abundance of sunlight and water are critical to the growth of vegetation. But now, not so surprisingly, we have discovered that the abundance of CO2 is critical also. Vegetation on Earth is exploding just now due to elevated levels of atmospheric CO2.

Here are some pictures of Ronald's exploding vegetation.  Click images to enlarge:

Exploding banana plantations and trees on hills, flattened and stripped bare by Yasi.
Source: ABC

Exploding vegetation on burning hill.
Source: Me.

Exploding tree - debarked by a tornado Photo: Runningonbrains
Source: Wikipedia 

It's insects!

Ronald might be a very good engineer, I don't know.  But he knows little to nothing of physics, chemistry or biology, that's for sure.  Ronald isn't familiar with this reaction:

hydrocarbon + oxygen --> CO2 + water

After going on about exploding plants eating CO2 (why haven't they eaten it all up?), he then puts the cart before the horse.  Instead of recognising that the current warming is caused by all the extra CO2, he wonders about the other "natural spiking" that would "normally accompany the warming trend":

So if, as is so commonly assumed, the current spike in atmospheric CO2 is substantially or entirely anthropogenic, one then needs to ask what has inhibited the natural spiking that would normally accompany this 150 year long warming trend (actually 400 years of warming since the coldest depths of the Little Ice Age) such that our anthropogenic release could act as the sole (or primary) source of the current spike? A partial answer to this important question may be largely or at least substantially explained in my prior posting. i.e. We have inhibited insect and microbial emission and substituted a smaller quantity of our own. Then, is the current spike anthropogenic? Certainly it is not. The current atmospheric CO2 spike would be similar, most likely larger, if we were never here.

OMG - It's insects! 

Actually, he can't seem to decide if CO2 is increasing, if it's caused by humans burning fossil fuels or if it's caused by insects, and whether or not plants are using up all the extra CO2 and exploding.

Get another hobby, Ronald

What a nong!  And to think he claims to have made "a hobby of studying climate change for the last 7 years".  Given his inability to grasp basic physics, chemistry and biology, I'd suggest he take up another hobby.

WUWT: A crank blog for the deluded or a deluded blog for the cranks

What with the Anthony Watts relying on the potty peer to sing his praises, his own crazy ramblings on Antarctica and Ronald D Voisin and all the other cranks, WUWT is a nothing more than a crank blog for the weird and wacky; or a weird and wacky blog for the cranks.