Denier weirdness: Very strange WUWT article on President Obama in Alaska

Before I write about the article at WUWT (archived here), here is the weekly address from President Obama, which he made just before his recent visit to Alaska. Susan Gardner has already written about this at Daily Kos.

The President discusses the rapid warming, shoreline erosion, storm surges and even the approval of Shell exploration. There is nothing in his speech that pops out as being "wrong", except for his decision to allow Arctic exploration.

At WUWT, there is a very strange article about Obama's Alaskan visit. It's as if the author doesn't understand what he's written.

Anthony Watts' conspiracy blog and distorted representation at Spiegel Online

Several days after the article appeared in Der Spiegel, Anthony Watts found out about it (archived here). After months of drought, he finally got another mention in mainstream media. In an article by Axel Bojanowski in Der Spiegel - or more correctly, in Spiegel Online. That's as big a deal as getting a mention in one of Rupert Murdoch's papers, like the Australian. Or a mention in the Herald-Sun on the blog of Australia's Andrew Bolt. Der Spiegel has not got an unblemished reputation when it comes to climate science.

WUWT is accused of distorted representation

Still, Anthony thinks he's got reason to celebrate, writing a headline: "German newspaper Spiegel names WUWT the most prominent climate skeptic blog".  He didn't seem to notice that Axel Bojanowski wrote about the distorted representations from denier blogs:

Sogenannte Skeptiker (siehe Grafik) sorgen besonders in den USA mit verzerrten Darstellungen von Forschungsergebnissen dafür, dass Warnungen aus der Klimaforschung als übertrieben gebrandmarkt werden. 

Which Google translated as:

So-called skeptics (see chart) provide particularly in the US with distorted representations of research results that warnings of climate change research are branded as exaggerated.

Faint praise indeed.

Conspiracies, volcanoes, and two thousand years of ocean cooling and warming

Deniers at WUWT are (belatedly) trying to shoot down a paper published in Nature GeoScience last month. It's from authors who are part of the Ocean2k project, the ocean component of the PAGES 2K international consortium. The lead author is Helen McGregor from the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Anthony Watts was first to protest (archived here). In a bout of denial at WUWT, he claimed that just because there were a lot of volcanic eruptions on earth from somewhere around 1200 AD to 1800 AD, it doesn't mean they caused the observed cooling. He wrote a headline: "The new poster child for ‘correlation is not causation’: industrial revolution ended 1800 years of volcanic induced cooling".

In that one headline he rejected both greenhouse and volcanic forcing. Naturally, he didn't say what he thinks caused the earth to cool over time, or what is causing the current warming. More of the WUWT magic?

The Google Conspiracy - and a Google search engine customised for science deniers

A guest blogger, Ari Halperin, at WUWT has decided to create a new search tool especially for science deniers (archived here).  Ari behaves like a full-blown conspiracy theorist, which is par for the course at WUWT. He has all the right words on his blog "CO2 is plant food" mixed in with some that I haven't seen before.

Musicologists impersonating climate scientists

Ari says that climate scientists are imposters. They aren't really scientists, they are instead "journalists, historians, musicologists, copywriters, and professional activists".

Why Christopher Monckton is getting nervous about global temperature

Christopher Monckton has been showing signs of nervousness in his latest "it hasn't warmed since xyz" article at WUWT (archived here). He has started emphasising statements like this one: "As ever, a warning about the current el Niño. It is becoming ever more likely that the temperature increase that usually accompanies an el Niño will begin to shorten the Pause somewhat, just in time for the Paris climate summit ....". Here are some charts to explain his caution.

What the charts below show are the monthly global temperatures of the lower troposphere (UAH and RSS) and the surface (GISTemp) for the months surrounding the latest strongest El Niños - 1997-1998, 2009-2010 and the year to date 2015. The rectangle on the charts is the period of the El Nino - usually from around April of the first year to March of the second year. I've left the baseline years as reported. It's the shape of the charts that are of interest.

Only at WUWT is acceptance of science "denial"

Tim Ball has another climate conspiracy article at WUWT. This time he defined who has been taken in by the climate hoax. It now include arguably the majority of the world.  That's right. Everyone except extremist right wing ideologues and conspiracy theorists. Tim claims that it includes:

• Pope Francis
• The President of the USA and his Cabinet
• Most world leaders, 
• A majority of the world’s politicians, 
• All environmental groups and their followers, and
• Most with a left political leaning. 

That's a lot of people. How do they keep this climate conspiracy secret? Given how Tim Ball and other extreme right-wingers define "left political leaning", it arguably includes about 80% or more of the 7.3 billion people in the world today.

Which means that by now he should be asking himself if there's a possibility that he is wrong and the rest of the world might be on to something.

The scientific illiterati rise up at WUWT

Illiterati: Definition from the Urban Dictionary

The opposite of the Illuminati, who take pride in their high level of knowledge and learning. An Illiterati takes pride in the fact that they are ignorant and refuse to learn (adjust their paradigm) often to the severe detriment of those around them.

Sometimes science deniers are quite unabashed about their desire to suppress all knowledge and particularly scientific knowledge and education. Anthony Watts has a "guest essay" by Eric Worrall (archived here), in which he claims that:

• Earth and Space Science is only about climate
• Earth and Space Science is "dogma" and "politically convenient pseudoscience".

Hmm. That sums up WUWT rather well, don't you think?

Problems with comments?

Two people now have told me they have had difficulty posting a comment. My apologies - there's not a lot I can do.

One solution has been to be to try a different browser.

Failing that, feel free to send me a comment by email to sou at hotwhopper.com (and let me know that it's a blog comment and the article you're commenting on) and I'll post it for you.

Google is in the middle of making changes, some of which seem to be have been causing a few bugs in the system over the past few days.

On the recurrent fury of unethical bloggers and how Anthony Watts issues a correction

Anthony Watts issues a correction? Surprised? Yes, you should be. Anthony Watts makes too many mistakes and publishes too many more. If he corrected all the wrongs on his blog WUWT would be one long correction. He didn't issue a correction for the following that have appeared on his blog in the past few days:

• We are about to enter an ice age (we're not. 2015 will almost certainly be another hottest year on record. Hotter than the current hottest, 2014.)
• UHI caused last year to be the hottest on record (it didn't)
• Sea levels physically can't rise by a metre this century (they can and quite possibly will.)

Nor did he issue a correction to his article that claimed that global warming is caused by steampipes in Russia, or that it's insects that are causing global warming.

And has Anthony published an apology and correction to his false allegations that NOAA researchers committed fraud - here and here and here? No, not at all.

But today, he's published an article (archived here) that complains that authors have issued a correction to a paper. That's right. Not only does Anthony Watts almost never issue a correction for the errors on his blog that are made multiple times every day - he has posted an article complaining that some authors did issue a correction!

Stretching credulity or the limits of knowledge at WUWT: An ice age cometh

There still isn't much happening in deniersville. The hottest year ever has flummoxed them, leaving them flailing ahead of Paris - so far. Anthony Watts is so stuck for contributions to pin on his blog noticeboard that he's scraping the bottom of the barrel with a very dumb "ice age cometh" article by petroleum geologist Dr. Norman Page (archived here). I wonder if this is the sort of thing that Anthony will publish in the first edition of his OAS journal?

Norman is a science-denying ice age comether from way back who by now should have learnt a few things. He hasn't. What he claims to have done is written an article for an eight year old child. From what he's written, an eight-year-old would run rings around Norman when it comes to climate science.

Norman starts off badly, when he can't even get the name of a well-known publisher of dictionaries right. I mean it's cute, but ...:

Miriam (sic) – Webster defines Epistemology as
“the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity “