Lying Willis Eschenbach defames a prominent scientist and spreads fake news @wattsupwiththat

Willis Eschenbach is one of the sleazier climate disinformers who tells lies quite freely at WUWT (and is a shameless misogynist). Most of the time he pretends to be a "scientist" who is "just wondering" about something or other. He seems to think he was the first to discover the mechanisms of thunderstorms, for example, which is pretty weird. I mean this has probably been part of Meteorology 101 going way back before Willis was a twinkle in his father's eye.

Sleazy pseudo-scientist - Willis Eschenbach
Credit: unknown

Other times (and often at the same time) he loses his cool and lashes out and all and sundry. That's when he brazenly outs himself as a committed liar. Willis has a very short fuse.

Today he ventured beyond the pale, even for a creep like him. He was complaining about an article in Scientific American: The 9 Best Reactions to the House Science Committee’s Breitbart Tweet. He effectively said he no longer reads SciAm much because it isn't anti-science.

But that's not what I want to write about. That's the norm at the fake science blog, WUWT.

Disgusting untrue defamation

What I was much more disgusted with were the lies he told about the renowned scientist Peter Gleick. Willis told several big whoppers. He falsely claimed that Peter Gleick "was forced to quit his job in disgrace". Which is an outright lie. This is what he was referring to - a transition, four years after the incident with the Heartland Institute and completely unrelated. Willis might as well claim that Obama is resigning from the Presidency because he failed the American people.

Then Willis claimed that Dr Gleick "never did say one word of contrition for his actions". Another huge lie. Here is part of what Peter Gleick wrote after he helped expose the extent Heartland Institute's funding of science disinformation. It includes his apology:

I will not comment on the substance or implications of the materials; others have and are doing so. I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

Peter Gleick

Why is it that despicable people like Willis Eschenbach tell such outrageous lies about scientists? Is it because they think it makes them look big and important?

Pat Michaels is full of crap (again)

Dr Patrick J Michaels, the chief science disinformer from the Cato Institute, tells WUWT-ers what climate hawks already knew, that during the Eemian, it's likely that Greenland ice sheet only contributed maybe a couple of meters of the large sea level rise.

The good news...?

From ScienceDaily back in January this year:

Jan. 23, 2013 — A new study provides surprising details on changes in Earth's climate during the last warm period (120,000-128,000 years ago). Even though temperatures in Northern Greenland were 5-8 degrees Celsius higher than today, the thickness of the ice sheet was only a few hundred meters lower. And this despite the fact that sea level was 4-8 metres higher than today.

This indicates that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet may have contributed less than half of the total sea level rise at the time. This interglacial period (the so called "Eemian") may be a good analogue for where the Greenland ice sheet is heading today in the face of increasing greenhouse gases and warming temperatures.

But then Michaels writes a load of crap that he's tried on before:

Whew! Thus does one revolutionary paper shoot pretty much the entire global warming sea-level catastrophe—the one worth being concerned about—through the heart. Antarctica is so cold that it is projected to gain ice in the coming century, as slightly increased precipitation—which may have recently been detected—falls as more snow, which compacts into more ice.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

The bad news!

Back to ScienceDaily (my bold):

"A thick Greenland ice sheet connected to much warmer conditions in Greenland is astounding but no reason to relax and watch what the future of human-made warming has in store for us," says Prof. Hubertus Fischer, ice core scientist at the University of Bern. "Fact is that the warming was accompanied by a sea level rise of 4-8 metres. Such a sea-level rise would be a disaster for the more than 7 billion people living on this planet today, even if it takes a couple thousand years to be reached."

The apparent good news from this study is that the Greenland ice sheet may not be as sensitive to temperature increases as previously thought. However, the bad news is that if Greenland did not disgorge larger parts of its ice into the ocean during the Eemian, then Antarctica and here especially the more climate sensitive West Antarctic Ice Sheet must be responsible for a significant part of the 4-8-metre sea level rise and may be even more sensitive to climate warming than previously thought.

D. Dahl-Jensen et al. Eemian interglacial reconstructed from a Greenland folded ice core. Nature, 2013; 493 (7433): 489 DOI: 10.1038/nature11789

About Antarctica

Yes, there were some heavy snowfalls in East Antarctica for a couple of seasons last decade.  But that's more than offset (times over) by West Antarctica and the Peninsula, which have always been regarded as where the first sea level rise will come from in Antarctica.  And the way we're going it will probably start in earnest before this century is done.

You can read some recent papers on Pine Island glacier here courtesy Google Scholar.

I wrote recently about a new paper on Antarctica that studies the pattern of melting ice shelves around the entire continent. Ice shelves slow the flow of the rivers of ice. (Click for larger version.)