Polar bears, sexism and climate science denial

Adult polar bear on the look-out.
Source: Ian Sterling

When a science paper about polar bears generates multiple articles on denier blogs you can see it has hit a nerve. This happened recently when a paper was published, with a classic illustration of how deniers reference each other to make out there is dispute about climate change impacts.

The paper was by Jeffrey A Harvey and a bunch of other leading scientists. When I say a bunch, there were fourteen scientists listed as authors, comprising rising stars and heavyweights in the climate science world.

It's fortunate I wasn't able to write about this paper when it was first released because it allowed time to see the numerous articles about it on denier blogs. However, before looking at deniers' various reactions, how about a quick summary of the paper. It's open access and is easy to read. It may help if you understand the analytical techniques used, though that's not essential.

Disinformers are Disgusting: Anthony Watts makes up stuff and arguably moves into libelous polar bear territory

Update - see below for a comment from an unlikely and dubious ally, Christopher Monckton.

Update 2 - here is the summary of the complaint that I believe was the subject of the settlement.

---

Today Anthony Watts moves right into libelous territory in my opinion (archived here and updated here).  He is known for skirting close to the edge when he picks on individual scientists.  This time IMO he goes over the edge.

Today Anthony Watts falsely impugns the integrity of Charles Monnett, who suffered appalling treatment from his employer, BOEM, and from the Office of the Inspector General after he published a paper about sightings of dead polar bears.  Eli Rabett has written quite a few articles keeping people appraised of the saga.  Michael Tobis wrote about it too. It was suggested that the investigation, which focused on other matters - not polar bear sightings, was a payback witchhunt for Monnett writing a paper about the dead polar bears he saw, presumed drowned.  This article in Nature News describes some of the fiasco and there is a followup article here in Nature News.

The news item that Anthony Watts referred to describes the outcome of a complaint brought by Monnett against his employer.  As described in the news report, Monnett brought the complaint after Monnett's employer BOEM found no evidence of scientific misconduct but issued a reprimand for something else they reckoned he'd done.  This and the whole horrible saga prompted Monnett to lodge the complaint against his employer.  The complaint that Monnett brought against his employer was settled and as close to a win for Monnett as you'd be likely get outside of court, with BOEM paying a sum to Monnett:

Under the settlement, signed in October but released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on Wednesday, Monnett will receive $100,000 but cannot seek Interior Department work for five years. His retirement was effective Nov. 15, at which point the agency agreed to withdraw the letter of reprimand and issue Monnett a certificate for his work on the tracking project.

The settlement makes clear that it does not constitute any admission of liability, including any admission that federal employees "treated Monnett in a discriminatory or retaliatory manner." A BOEM spokeswoman reached by email Wednesday said she would offer a reply later.

Despite the fact that Monnett was exonerated and vindicated, and that this was a settlement in a case Monnett took against the agency, not the other way around, Anthony Watts twisted the situation and with an implied big fat lie wrote:

So the message is: be a dimwit, make stuff up, and get paid for it. 

Charles Monnett didn't make up stuff.  Anthony is the one making stuff up.  But that's par for the course at WUWT.  This time he's making up stuff about a scientist who's devoted his career to the pursuit of knowledge.  His main "sin" seems to have been that Al Gore apparently referred to his paper in An Inconvenient Truth.

I'm utterly disgusted.  If Anthony Watts lived in Canada he wouldn't have dared write that.  Anthony has shown that he himself is ready to run to the courts on the flimsiest of pretexts, such as someone having a go at him about his scientific illiteracy, when Anthony Watts posts nonsense pseudoscience again and again.

Anthony Watts is intent on hastening climate change.  He's not satisfied with feeding his ignoramuses nonsense about science, he attacks scientists themselves, even to the extent of falsely accuses individual scientists of wrong doing.  What a dismal, pitiful, pathetic little man.

From the WUWT comments

Lots of people are telling Anthony Watts that he's barking up the wrong tree (or surfing the wrong Arctic wave): - archived here.

brians356 says (replaced link with headline):

December 4, 2013 at 1:47 pm
The story I just read on Anchorage Daily News says he gets $100,000 plus his fully-vested federal retirement. He cannot seek Interior Department work for five years.

Alaska polar bear scientist reprimanded over emails settles with feds

“Frankie, when they give you the money, it means you won.”

NevenA says:

December 4, 2013 at 1:54 pm
Either this, or it was a failed witch hunt. Google is your friend.

Steve from Rockwood says:

December 4, 2013 at 2:56 pm
That’s as close to a win as you’re ever going to see.

But even though the newspaper reports were quite clear, Anthony lets his commenters continue with the scientist-bashing.

Mark and two Cats says:

December 4, 2013 at 2:51 pm
Comrade, you have served the Warmunist Party well and shall receive political rehabilitation. Take a five year vacation – here’s $100k spending money.

Peter Miller is a crazy nutter who thinks all the thousands of scientists in the world are making up stuff and says:

December 4, 2013 at 4:07 pm
As this proves and we all know, when it comes to anything esoteric and intangible, nobody can waste money like governments can.

So along came supposed global warming and the B2 and C3 scientists were falling over each other to get into the troughs of overflowing research funds. As there was almost nothing real in the global warming scare, stuff had to be made up, or there was a threat the troughs might dry up.

And so the scare stories started: polar bears dying out, surging sea levels, polar ice disappearing and ocean acidification to name but a few. Each, on a local basis, may contain a small whisper of truth, but on a global basis they are a grand distortion and a distortion that appeals to the weepy side of far too many, otherwise reasonable people. As for the politicians, they are only interested in new tax raising gimmicks, so they can be seen to be ‘saving the works’.

At least Layman doesn't dispute the sighting of the dead polar bears in the water and says:

December 4, 2013 at 5:00 pm
With ice sheet coverage increasing and thickening Polar bears would be hard pressed to survive this winter. Come next melt we might see a new height in body count and then talented scientists could claim evidence of unprecedented drowning …from empty bellies……

My question is that polar bears are mortal too so when one sees a dead bear in the water in summer how could we tell which is fresh and which is freshly defrosted? And which was drowned through hunger and exhaustion?

Anthony Watts might be malevolent and dishonest, but he isn't quite as crazy as his utter nutter fans.  Take fobdangerclose who says:

December 4, 2013 at 5:12 pm
Anthony,
You and your group need to be on high alert. Pres. Obama and his crew now seem to be betting their farm on the EPA/Climate Change re-distribution of wealth.
As you can see he is not handleing this fail of the Obama Care re-dristribution operation.
All of you have been in the real world enough to see how poorly some handle not being able to do the job and or being caught in real bad lies on the job. Take attorneys who get disbarred, or real estate title officers who go south with the loan funds in escrow. When confronted they throw things, cuss, rant, even worse. You stand in his way, you block his access to power. He will not take it lightly that your correct, he will not go easy into the night. You will be a target.
Be Prepared.

REPLY: I doubt Obama even knows my name – Anthony

Update

Monnett has found a dubious ally by the name of Christopher Monckton, who writes:

Monckton of Brenchley says (extract - you can read his full comment here, in which he sticks the boot into Al Gore):

December 4, 2013 at 4:41 pm
I’m uneasy at the tone of some of the comments here. The Monnett & Gleason paper described its methods with respectable precision, and made it very clear where it was reporting results, where it was extrapolating from those results, and where it was speculating. One might regard the extrapolations as being insufficiently justifiable in statistical terms, and the speculations as rather far-fetched (though they were actually quite cautiously expressed).

I can’t see anything that could possibly constitute serious enough scientific misconduct to justify three years’ hounding of Dr. Monnett by the Inspectorate-General. Two things stand out from the transcript: first, that Dr. Monnett had not been clearly told at the outset exactly what scientific misconduct he was being accused of, contrary to the audiatur et altera pars principle of natural justice; and that he was exhausted and terrified.

orion sums it up nicely and says, quoting Anthony Watts (archived here):

December 4, 2013 at 7:32 pm
“……So the message is: be a dimwit, make stuff up, and get paid for it……”

It’s a lesson you have appeared to have learned well Anthony.

Murry Salby, plus Middleton Recycling memes at WUWT

Murry Salby and his strange ideas

There is nothing much on Anthony Watts' blog, WUWT to write about.  There was some initial swooning over Murry Salby (whose name Anthony got wrong).

According to Pierre Gosselin whose article Anthony Watts quoted: If anyone ever demolished the dubious CO2 AGW science, it’s Salby!  

If that's the best the fake skeptics can come up with then they'll be disappointed.



The presentation drew the usual gaggle of insightful comments such as:

• June 10, 2013 at 9:56 am  Go Murry!
• June 10, 2013 at 10:13 am Couldn’t have put it better myself :-)
• June 10, 2013 at 11:02 am A Man of science without a doubt.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:05 am Strong words of wisdom.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:10 am Great speaker, and impressive finale.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:24 am Brilliant.

I was a bit mystified by this question from Solomon Green.  I wonder what he's getting at here:

June 11, 2013 at 4:54 am ...why do so many commentators equate AGW with human release of CO2? Surely humans can increase temperatures, both locally and globally, without necessarily increasing CO2 levels? ...

Further down in the thread people started finding flaws in Salby's ideas.  I'm not going to waste any more space on Salby.  If you are curious about Salby and his odd notions, there is this article and more on SkepticalScience.com.

David Middleton resurrecting old Time magazine articles

And there was David Middleton, recycling the myth that "they said it was cooling in the 70s".  Which as far as I can gather may be another case of "the USA is the world world, nowhere else exists".

Here's the result of a 2008 study of the scientific literature, demonstrating the building up of the consensus on global warming and the fact that out of 71 scientific papers written between 1965 and 1979, there were only seven that "predicted, implied or provided supporting evidence" for global cooling compared to 44 for warming.

Source: Peterson et al (2008)

An Australian Perspective on Warming and Cooling

I've been looking at old newspaper clippings from Australia and have posted a few showing real concern about the possibility of global warming in the 1940s.  So much so that the first international collaboration of scientific experts was sent to Antarctica in 1949 to see if the warming trend seen in the Arctic was evident down there.

As for articles from Australia in the 1970s, there are a few.  They were a mixed bag.  Here is an excerpt from a much longer article in The Canberra Times on Tuesday 8 May 1973, right in the middle of the so-called cooling scare.  The main article was about the widespread droughts in Africa, India, Central America, Asia and Cyprus.  At the end of the article was some discussion of global temperature and climate.  Here is an excerpt (my bold):

Scientists agree that the droughts and freakish weather over many parts of the world might signal global changes in climate and some experts are even wondering if another ice age is on its way. 

The climatic situation is complicated by the largely unknown effects of man made pollution and there are contradictory theories. 

Heat pollution, as energy is consumed at an increasing rate, is sure to effect the weather to some extent by warming the upper atmosphere. But more dust in the atmosphere could balance this by reflecting the sun's rays back into space. 

Temperature 
Some American researchers have noted that in a five-year period the mean temperature of the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere fell by more than half a degree Celsius, but were careful to say that this was likely to be a short-term fluctuation. 

Some Soviet meteorologists maintain that the climate of Northern Europe, Asia and America will get "markedly warmer" by the year 2000 and link this with the known recession of the polar ice. 

In Australia during the 1970s there was very infrequent speculation in newspaper and magazine articles mentioning the possibility of an ice age but not much.  It looks as if the spate of articles that WUWT-ers remember were probably mostly in the USA.  I don't know about Europe.

Australian newspaper articles on global warming - 1957 and 1972

Of more interest are articles like this one from 1957 on global warming from CO2 emissions associated with industry.  That's a couple of years before Keeling started to measure atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa.  And this one from 1972 on fears about melting of the Arctic sea ice.