Your Climate Change - Sign This Petition

How about supporting this and passing it along to others.  Sign the petition:

https://yourclimatechange.org/

From RealClimate.org:

Folks,

This is Ranga Myneni, Professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University. My research focus is on evaluating climate change impacts to vegetation using satellite data. I have been active in this science for over 25 years. A link to my professional web site is below near my signature.

There is now sufficient evidence that our way of living is causing unnatural changes in climate. Collectively, we own this damage and therefore we need to solve it together. It is YOUR CLIMATE CHANGE also. Twenty five years have passed since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been advising the policy makers regarding the hazards of climate change. Yet, there has been little meaningful action to solve this global problem affecting all life on Earth.

The solution lies in convincing policy makers that this is a priority for all citizens of the World. Therefore, I started an online project to collect one billion signatures by Earth Day 2014 for a petition addressed to the Secretary-General of the United Nations to act judiciously and expeditiously on anthropogenic climate change.

You can support by:

1. reading and signing the petition at http://www.yourclimatechange.org/
2. spreading the word to your (a) family, (b) friends, (c) colleagues and (d) acquaintances through the links on that page, and
3. composing an email to your trusted circle of family and friends, with the subject “Your Climate Change: http://www.yourclimatechange.org/“, add a short sentence at the beginning of this email (e.g. “I think this may be of interest of you.”) and copy-paste the text of my email

We can easily reach our goal. If I can motivate at least 10 of you to sign the petition, and you in turn can motivate 10 more to sign the petition and they in turn can motivate 10 others … All it takes is 9 such steps, provided that each signee is unique.

Thank You!

Prof. Ranga Myneni (http://cliveg.bu.edu)

CO2 at 396.8 ppm heading for 400 ppm?

The latest data from Mauna Loa shows CO2 hit 396.8 for February.

Last year it rose by 3.24 ppm between February and May.  Maybe this is the year we hit 400 ppm just as WTD suggested last month!

WUWT HotWhoppers of the Day

How does this work?  From WUWT today (parents, be reassured, that geography teacher turned denier no longer teaches geography or anything else):

There is also the transfer of heat from the relatively warmer water through the ice to heat the cold air.

And what do you think phlogiston means by this?

Some have argued for atmospheric heat energy to be used as a better and more meaningful metric than a supposed global mean temperature. Heat is a product of temp and water content. Viewed this way, decreasing water vapour could mean that increasing temperatures have not reflected increasing heat.

Update 1:

Another new factoid, which "simple physics" probably also goes a long way to explaining why an extra cold winter follows an extra hot summer - not! (courtesy John Kehr's guest post):

In January the anomaly in the Arctic was well above average. By simple physics that meant the Arctic was losing energy to space at a much higher rate than average. Normally the Arctic is losing energy at a rate of 163 W/m^2. In January of 2013 it was losing energy at a rate of 173 W/m^2. That 6% increase in rate of energy loss meant that the Arctic ended up with a negative anomaly in February.

Update 2: Fake WUWT skeptics and those darned confusing anomalies (a thermometer is not a human contrivance):

Theo Goodwin says:
March 6, 2013 at 8:58 pm Yep, use of anomalies causes confusion. That is reason enough to get rid of them. But there is another important reason. Use of anomalies hides the actual data – thermometer readings. Taking a thermometer reading is an act of reaching into the environment and withdrawing a fact from it. To convert a thermometer reading to an anomaly you have to compare the thermometer reading to an average reading – you have to hide the fact behind a human contrivance. So much for empirical science.

Update 3: Sure to boggle even the WUWT mind.

How earth heating up means earth is getting colder as explained by dp:

If you are an alarmist you should be happy to know that warm air is a good thing because that heat heads to space. Double good if that heat has come from the ocean. negative balance of energy. Yet we can expect endless complaints of a warming planet. N0 – that is a cooling planet! Hot air – radiant energy to space.

HotWhoppers: More Denier Weirdness

Talking about right-wing authoritarians: muddled thinking, double standards and compartmentalised brains, from WUWT today:

Middleton's Muddled Thinking

David Middleton accuses Dr Hansen of "electioneering" because he sent an email to a NY Times columnist and speaks out publicly about the impacts of CO2 emissions. Dr Hansen correctly warns us that human actions (burning fossil fuels) are leading to dangerous global warming, a topic that is the subject of Dr Hansens' decades of scientific research.

Middleton doesn't know what electioneering means.  (I expect Middleton believes that he and Watts are entitled to continue to try to deceive the public about climate science for the very reason that it is not a subject in which they can claim expertise.)

Willis' Double Standards

Willis Eschenbach is still absolutely furious (five weeks down the track) that Bora Zivkovic won't allow anti-science trolls, deliberate derailing of threads or spam adverts (eg Viagra) on his blog, which he hosts on Scientific American.

Meanwhile, Anthony continues to moderate comments on WUWT, eventually banning people who challenge his anti-science articles.  But that's okay, isn't it.

Prediction

If there is merit to the "authoritarian" framing then, as I understand# it, the high RWAs who frequent WUWT won't see the inconsistencies or double standards.  We'll see.

Update 1

So far there have been 42 comments on Willis' complaint about moderation, most of which are of the type '"they" are censoring science deniers so that proves climate science is a hoax'.

There are a small number of comments that point out that WUWT is moderated, eliciting four in-line responses from Watts justifying his own WUWT moderation.  Watts even says he uses what Willis complains most about: "Automatic Computer-model-based Censorship" (sic) and none of his acolytes bats an eye.

Update 2

From Willis E, who didn't mean it in the way almost everyone else would take it (ie anyone but a right wing authoritarian climate science denier):

...Perhaps you could explain to us exactly how they are similar, and how your post is anything but a lame attempt to assert a false and repugnant moral equivalence between WUWT and ScAm.

I can't think of a soul who would assert any equivalence between the morally repugnant blog WUWT and Scientific American. (Scientific American might not be perfect, but fair suck o' the sauce bottle.)

#My understanding is based on one speed-read of Altemeyer's book, The Authoritarians.  Don't take my understanding as gospel!

HotWhoppers, Monckton and His Scaredy Cat Prey

Today an email was circulated inviting the recipient, as a "concerned and productive citizen of Western Australia", to attend one (or more) sessions with Lord Monckton.  

The Professional Clown Down Under

If you haven't heard of Monckton before, he is probably the only Viscount from England who earns his living as a professional clown (with apologies to honest clowns).  He appears in front of audiences in Australia and the USA promoting disinformation about climate and threatening to sue any scientist who crosses his path, particularly but not necessarily if they are a climate scientist.  

Most people regard Monckton as a rather unsavoury idiot or worse.  However, to a small (and shrinking) minority, he has been raised to God-like status.  

I present the email here so you can see for yourself the type of person Monckton and his promoters deliberately, and quite possibly with malice, prey upon and what that says about the 'leaders' of this anti-science movement.

Monckton targets people who are naturally inclined to be scared shitless about nearly everything in the world, under-educated, extremely gullible, willing to believe anything even completely contradictory ideas as long as it fits their world view, prone to conspiracy theories, believing 'they' are out to get them, and looking for a new 'saviour'.

Scared shitless

The first sentence in the body of the email is:

The end is NOT nigh.

From this attempt at reassurance and comfort, we can deduce that Monckton's prey is by nature very scared (about almost everything in the world outside its own tiny habitat).   It fears the "end", the object of which the writer leaves to the imagination of the reader.  It could be the end of the world, its own death (with or without the end of the world) or the end of a way of life.

Whatever the "end" refers to, it is undoubtedly ominous.

Gullible and lacking education

The next sentence indicates Monckton's prey is extremely gullible.  It will accept any statement, no matter how big the lie, as long as it comforts them and fits with what they want to believe.

It’s official; according to the Head of the UN Climate Change Panel (UN IPCC) there has been NO GLOBAL WARMING for 17 YEARS.

Conspiracy theorists

Monckton's prey is also susceptible to trigger words evoking evil conspiracies. "UN" and "IPCC" feature prominently in the paranoid conspiracy that climate scientists and governments all around the world have been secretly engaged in a gigantic hoax with the aim of taking over the world.

Scared, gullible, under-educated conspiracy theorists

The next two sentences (plus the overall email) show Monckton's prey is of limited intelligence and low education.  There is a lot of repetition, large typeface, capitalization, bolding and exclamation points.

When people hear this wonderful news there will be dancing in the streets.

The climate models were wrong and THE WORLD IS NOT GOING TO END!

According to official UN IPCC global temperature datasets, the length of time WITHOUT ANY MEASURABLE WARMING has been 16 Years, 18 Years, 19 Years or in the case of the most accurate satellite dataset, 23 Years (depending which official UN IPCC dataset is used).

The imagery of 'dancing in the streets' to the tune of a potty peer would seem way over the top to all but a very few.  The following sentence, presented in bold font and using capital letters, is to make sure that, despite the reader's limited cognitive ability, the prey gets the message that they are not about to die/see the world end/lose their way of life tomorrow.  It aims once again to comfort them.

The third sentence suggests that the writer accepts that the dreaded "UN/IPCC" is accurate about global warming and that his prey is gullible enough to accept the lies about 'measurable warming'.

Here is a chart of global surface temperatures from the Bureau of Meteorology, with arrows marking the surface temperature between 16 and 23 years ago.  Which cherry picked date will Monckton end up settling upon to decide his 'measurable warming'? (Click image to enlarge.)

Monckton's mob can have a free lesson from Tamino on how to cherry pick dates to show the trend you want.  Then they might be able to pick a date and stick to it.  The easiest one is "it's been cooling since 2010!" which was the most recent 'hottest year on record' according to NASA, as illustrated here - with arrows pointing to when Monckton apparently thinks it stopped warming.

Then more paranoid conspiracy ideation - the government is hiding the real facts, "economic shackles", "loss of property and other rights", "Climate Scam" and "UN Agenda 21 program", more "economic costs" and "loss of rights".

Fear not, I am your Saviour

Lord Monckton comes riding in to rescue us from our evil governments (especially the UN):

Lord Monckton will present the Due Diligence on Global Warming for the people of Perth because our governments won’t.

Learn how the latest Climate Commission report was produced, and why.

He is here to inform the people of Perth on the economic shackles and loss of property and other rights occurring under the Carbon Tax; the Climate Scam and the UN Agenda 21 program and how it is so much less in terms of economic costs and loss of rights, to adapt than to try to stop any global warming.

Immune to inconsistencies

A quick diversion to point out the inconsistency, to which Monckton's prey will be completely oblivious (see attributes of the 'prey' below).

First, the false claim that warming has stopped.  The (evil UN/IPCC) climate models were wrong but the evil UN/IPCC is right (that warming has stopped).  It's not warming and it is better to adapt to the warming that is happening at the same time as it is not happening than try to stop the warming that both is and is not happening.

Scum-bucket to the Rescue

Seems a classic example of a "dirt-bag" (see below) preying on the gullible and fearful.  Unlikeable and rather ugly prey to be sure.  IMO the bigger crooks are the "scum-buckets" who deliberately set out to get the gullible 'riled up' enough to arm themselves with their walking frames and form a mindless lynch mob.

Monckton's Prey

I've been reading Dr Altemeyer's The Authoritarians.  A simplified description of attributes of 'right wing authoritarians' (high RWAs) is: under-educated, extremely fearful, gullible, bigoted,  largely incapable of using logic and dogmatic (their is nothing, no amount of facts, that will shake their 'belief' and they will often say so out loud).   Their minds are highly compartmentalised ("authoritarians can stupify you with the inconsistency of their ideas").  They rarely move beyond their tiny zone of comfort.  They are completely blind to themselves and any of their failings.  Despite being only a small minority of the general population, they believe the majority of people think and acts as they do.

Looks just like the target audience of that email, don't you think?

The Scum-buckets

Thinking about who is behind the email, seems like a text book case of figures of authority (a Viscount, almost Royalty, from Mother England, no less) deliberately setting out to scam the 'right wing authoritarians' (high RWA's as defined by Bob Altemeyer in his book).  Of the scammers, Altemeyer writes (on page 90):

...suppose you are a completely unethical, dishonest, power-hungry, dirt-bag, scum-bucket politician entertainer who will say whatever he has to say to get elected get people to his gigs. Whom are you going to try to lead, high RWAs or low RWAs? Isn’t it obvious? The easy-sell high RWAs will open up their arms and wallets to you if you just sing their song, however poor your credibility.

I substituted "entertainer" for politician and "get people to his gigs" for "get elected".

Is Monckton a deliberate "scum-bucket" or just a right wing nutter who has found his niche?  I honestly don't know.  I wonder if Monckton himself even knows.

Note: If you are a high RWA or are otherwise uninformed about the state of the climate, welcome.  (I'd love to know how you happened to stray here.)

Be aware that all evidence shows the earth is warming, and dangerously so.

Monckton is telling big fibs.

[Added links to email. Sou 28 July 2014]

Australia's Angry Summer

The Climate on Steroids

From Ten News (of all places!)

The report from the Climate Commission

Here is a link to the Climate Commission report, "The Angry Summer".

Key facts: 

1. The Australian summer over 2012 and 2013 has been defined by extreme weather events across much of the continent, including record-breaking heat, severe bushfires, extreme rainfall and damaging flooding. Extreme heatwaves and catastrophic bushfire conditions during the Angry Summer were made worse by climate change. 
2. All weather, including extreme weather events is influenced by climate change. All extreme weather events are now occurring in a climate system that is warmer and moister than it was 50 years ago. This influences the nature, impact and intensity of extreme weather events. 
3. Australia’s Angry Summer shows that climate change is already adversely affecting Australians. The significant impacts of extreme weather on people, property, communities and the environment highlight the serious consequences of failing to adequately address climate change. 
4. It is highly likely that extreme hot weather will become even more frequent and severe in Australia and around the globe, over the coming decades. The decisions we make this decade will largely determine the severity of climate change and its influence on extreme events for our grandchildren. 
5. It is critical that we are aware of the influence of climate change on many types of extreme weather so that communities, emergency services and governments prepare for the risk of increasingly severe and frequent extreme weather.

Let's repeat one critical sentence:

The decisions we make this decade will largely determine the severity of climate change and its influence on extreme events for our grandchildren. 

This is The Critical Decade!

I believe it's fair to say that this decade has seen more record-breaking  and more extreme heat, fires, drought and floods than any similar length period in the past century in Australia, with accompanying loss of life, property, distress and chaos.  If we combine all this century's events, it would come close to the devastation wreaked by weather in the whole of the last century combined.  The Canberra fires; the Black Saturday fires; the Lockyer Valley floods; many places experienced two or more 100 year floods in a single year; the big drought and more.  And this is just the beginning.

The reaction by some people is dismissive.  Some will even point to a single event 70 years ago.  "What about the 1939 heatwave?", asks Ronsterm on HotCopper.  The answer is that the 39 heatwave wasn't part of the overall hotter temperatures we're seeing today.  These days we keep seeing records tumble year after year.  Look at a temperature chart for Australia over time - the answer's in the mean temperature for Australia from the Bureau (click here for other trends, such as the trend in maximums) (click image for larger version)

Here again is an animation of part of the Big Aussie Heatwave (click image for larger version):

Others like HotCopper's Watso make inane comments like: "it's colder in the northern hemisphere".  Does he think the arctic ice is melting so dramatically because it is colder? Did the USA just have its hottest year on record because it's colder?  Did upwards of 50,000 people die in the 2003 European heat wave, or 15,000 or more in the recent Russian heatwave because it was so cold?  (Watso could be simply referring to the fact that it's winter in the northern hemisphere while it's summer in Australia - now that would be inane!)

A Shift in the Climate

No - what's happening is that climates are shifting and we are experiencing the effects in day to day weather.

Deniers resort to picking random one-off weather events going back decades to match any one of the destructive weather events that have become more and more frequent in the past thirty years so and are commonplace this century.  

Disaster Fatigue

It's not just that we are experiencing heat, fires, floods and droughts it's that they are no longer one off events.  They are becoming so common that they no longer get the news coverage they used to get in times gone by eg the latest massive floods in Queensland and NSW.  The news outlets figure people down south are suffering flood fatigue.  Imagine what the poor people living in places like Gympie feel.

“I don’t think any other place in Queensland has had five floods in two years, four in 12 months, and two of those back-to-back in the last four weeks,” 

WUWT Recipe: Baked Denier on Toast

Update: See Tamino's take down here.

---

OMG - now Anthony Watts is posting "CO2 is plant food" articles on his blog.  I suspect he's trying to prove @bloggies really are, as is generally accepted, a farce that no reputable science blogger would touch with a ten foot pole.

Let's all be "reasonable" deniers

Let's have a look at what his guest blogger, John Coleman* writes because it's a good example of a 'let's be reasonable, all the world's scientists are committing fraud' approach to denying science (as opposed to a more aggressive "CAGW Lysenko commie-socialist-fascist all the world's scientists are committing fraud" approach):

We'll say it's warming but try to prove it isn't

First he presents what he says are recent USA land temperatures, choosing a cherry-picked start date and with random green line drawn underneath the chart, purporting to be a 'trend':

Compare this to a real chart showing USA temperature trends from the EPA website:

And the global land-ocean surface temperatures from NASA (with my arrow pointing to temperatures of a century ago):

Then we'll cook up a nice little conspiracy theory

Next the conspiracy theories:

" if the temperatures and the means of processing the data had not been “adjusted”

Here is a paper by Hansen et al (2010) Global Surface Temperature Change, that includes a good description of how and why adjustments are made to account for differences such as time of observation (US particularly), changes to weather stations, UHI effect and other events (such as moving or altering weather stations) to ensure the record is accurate. Or see here, for an NOAA summary of adjustments to the US temperature record.

Add a cup of strawman

Then the strawman (assumption that evidence for global warming rests solely on the US temperature record of the past 15 years!):

...while the recent hot, dry weather is clearly out of the ordinary, as it stands for now, it is not the sort of extreme event that might prove global warming. 

SkepticalScience has short summaries of the multiple lines of evidence for global warming.  Much more detail can be found in the IPCC reports.

Add a pinch of doubt, a tablespoon of lies and mix well

Then the bold and confused lie:

any connection between the hot, dry weather and warming caused by the activities of mankind remains totally unproven

Evidence is mounting as discussed by Hansen, Sato and Ruedy (2010) Perception of Climate Change and RealClimate discussing a paper on the Russian heat wave (among other papers).

And another bold lie (what hole do these people crawl out of?):

Global warming is about a predicted dramatic increase in the temperature year after year leading to the melting of the polar ice caps resulting in a dramatic rise in ocean water levels producing coastal flooding. It also predicts non-stop droughts, massive world-wide, killer heat waves and super storms.

For what is actually expected to happen if we don't cut greenhouse gas emissions, the most comprehensive discussion is in the IPCC reports.

If you prefer youtube, the BBC has produced a video showing what might happen if we don't act, looking at temperature rises of one, two and three degrees. It also discusses what we can do about it.

(Tip o' the hat to Watching the Deniers)

Stir briskly with emotions and add another cup of lies

Then, for good measure, having warmed up the denialist crowd, Coleman throws in Al Gore and the IPCC, which can be guaranteed to make every true blue denier see red.

Then another bold lie as a segue into 'computer models' (just in case "Al Gore" and "IPCC" weren't sufficient to upset denialists, "computer models" are guaranteed to stir up an absolute frenzy of angry emotions):

The runaway heating predicted by the global warming advocates computer models...

No, Mr Coleman, 'computer models' do not predict 'runaway heating'.   Earth is not Venus.  Climate scientists model projections of temperature, sea levels and other effects, based on different scenarios such as different amounts of CO2 we choose to pour into the air.

Then Coleman makes a statement with a rather odd adjective (extraordinary!):

The theory is that carbon dioxide (CO2) in the exhaust from burning fossil fuels is an extraordinary greenhouse gas that amplifies the greenhouse effect in our atmosphere.

There is nothing extraordinary about either CO2 or greenhouse gases.  What is extraordinary is that despite knowing very well what we are heading towards, the world is not clamouring more loudly and acting more quickly to stop adding emissions of CO2.

Bake in a hot oven fuelled by more lies

Then he says that "Even if the predicted warming of the climate occurs, that does not prove the CO2 causative theory".   

Scientists theorised and proved by experiment that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, decades before anyone knew of genetics or molecular physics, which no-one questions these days. Coleman needs a history lesson.  He couldn't do much better than physicist and science historian Spencer Weart's "The Discovery of Global Warming".

More lies here - playing Merchant of Doubt:

There is no consensus on what they show and why, just prolonged and spirited debate among the scientists. In the end, I fear, neither side is going to “win” this argument.

There are no 'sides' nor 'spirited debate'.  The evidence is clear and has been for a very long time, which you'll know already because you read Spencer Weart.

Geoscientist and science historian Dr Naomi Oreskes writes about the Merchants of Doubt.  Presumably Coleman thinks there is 'spirited debate' about the shape of earth (the earth is flat!) and ponders when "lizard men" first arrived on earth, birther-ism, 911-troofs and thinks smoking is good for your health.  

Click here for weird denierisms of all sorts of science.  Or read what Lewandowsky found in his "NASA faked the moon landing" paper, followed up by "Recursive Fury" based on the 'coming out' of dozens of conspiracy theorists.

While still hot, decorate with classic "golden oldie" denier memes

Then, after "proving" that "we" don't know if it's warming or not, he then rolls out one denier meme after another, "yes it's warming but it's natural", "CO2 is not a 'major' greenhouse gas", "no tipping point", "CO2 has been higher in the past" and penultimately the classic "CO2 is plant food" finishing up with "I don't know therefore no-one 'knows'".

Denialist defined

A classic piece of denialism - compare it with RationalWiki:

In scientific denialism, the denialist can deny a cause (carbon dioxide does not cause global warming), an effect (global warming does not occur), the association between the two (the earth is warming, but not because of carbon dioxide), the direction of the cause-and-effect relationship (carbon dioxide concentrations are increased because the earth is warming) or the identification of the cause-and-effect relationship (other factors than greenhouse gases cause the earth to warm). Often denialists will practice minimization (the earth is warming, but it's not harmful) and will use misplaced skepticism in the veneer of being a scientist when it is unwarranted..

* I couldn't find John Coleman easily doing a plain google search, so refined the search adding KUSI-TV.  Coleman has both a wikipedia entry (a television weather presenter and science denier) and a DeSmog Blog entry.  Coleman was a co-founder of the Weather Channel, since forced out.  His main claim to 'fame' these days seems to be as a minor player in the science denying fraternity promoted here by denialist  Anthony Watts.

Has Anthony Watts Become a Leftist-Warmist?

Has Anthony Watts* done an about face?  Is he now advocating for regulations to cut emissions of waste CO2?

Judge for yourself.  Anthony has put up an article in which he mocks the right wing fear campaign against environmental regulations and the global cooling 'scare', that some newspapers in the USA were engaged in during the 1970s.

1. Anthony Watts mocks anti-regulation rant from the 1970s

Right up the top of the article, Anthony Watts has posted an old clipping from the early 1970s.  The clipping illustrates the extremist right wing 'fear campaign' against the environmental regulations (Eg President Nixon's Clean Air Act), which were introduced back then to control smog and other pollutants that were becoming a huge problem in the industrialised world.  It includes fear-mongering statements like this:

pollution, or the effort to control it, could be fatal to our concept of a free society

and he even highlighted this bit:

"We will be forced to sacrifice democracy by the laws that will protect us from further pollution."

Watts says the article "reads almost like some of the manifestos we get from warmists today", but that was probably a typo.  More accurately, it "reads almost like some of the manifestos we get from right wing shock jocks today".

It's extreme right wingers who are scared stiff of regulation.  These people are mostly deniers (it's the reason many people deny reality), but may include some 'warmists'.

Watts himself has said the reason he backed off from viewing global warming as a threat was because he feared that policies to address the problem might involve a rise in taxation.  (See about 58 seconds into this video interview.)

2. Anthony Watts mocks 'global cooling scare'

In his article, Anthony included a list of US newspapers (courtesy poptech) that speculated about global cooling back in the early 1970s during a couple of long snowy winters in the USA.  Watts is mocking them.

Logical conclusion?

One can only conclude that:

• Anthony Watts now fully accepts the popular press was way out in the 1970s and that, as we know now, the world is warming dangerously.
• Anthony no longer fears regulation designed to reduce CO2 emissions, (agreeing that the environmental regulations of the 1970s weren't 'fatal to our concept of a free society' and definitely preferable to suffering a perpetual asian-style smog).

Will Watts stop posting articles speculating that the world is about to enter an ice age?

Will he now start strongly advocating for regulations to cut CO2 emissions?

(Will he talk to his his dog and ask Kenji what the science says?)

Time will tell.

* Anthony Watts is blogger and a (former?) denialist of global warming.

Dumbest Post Comp on HotCopper

Is there a competition among deniers on HotCopper to see who can win the dumbest post award?

Two examples from a single thread in the HotCopper science and medicine S&M club.

There's astrayalien (he already has one dumbest post award plus a dishonourable mention) who, in response to a post reporting the BoM announcement of Australia's record hot summer, asks:

Why is the Bureau of Meteorology changing past data?

Astrayalien thinks a day somewhere = summer all over Australia

Apparently astrayalien has Watt's disorder and doesn't know the difference between the Australian national aggregate for an entire summer season and a local daily maximum at a single site.

The 'evidence' he submits, presumably originating from BoM itself, is a list of places and the date they set a high temperature record.  His point apparently being that not every single individual location in Australia had its temperature record (for the hottest day or longest heat wave) broken this past summer.

Going by astrayalien's comment, he thinks a single day is equivalent to a summer.  And he thinks a single site is equivalent to a nationwide aggregate of sites.

Here's a gif animation of the record-smashing January heat wave that covered the continent:

Ronsterm compares a denier blogger with some of the world's leading experts in a miscellany of fields

Ronsterm tries to compete for the worst denier, by asking why Jo Nova (a holder of nasty conspiracy theories and science denier blogger) should not be considered as 'credible' as this assortment of renowned and highly respected leading academics, political leaders and government advisers (most of whom do not have any relationship with the Bureau of Meteorology).

• Algore (sic) (I think Ron might have meant Al Gore, past vice-President of the USA, who advocates for action to reduce global warming; rather than algor or algorithm)
• Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK and one of the world's leading experts on the historical surface temperature record and paleoclimate.
• Professor Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Director, Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, and one of the world's leading paleoclimatologists.
• Sir Nicholas Stern is a leading economist who has held a number of posts in government and academia.  He is also a Member of the House of Lords in the UK. Prof Stern led the Stern Review, an examination of economic implications of global warming.
• Dr Rajendra K Pachauri is Chief Executive of TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) and holds numerous other academic and directorial positions internationally, including Chairing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 
• Professor Tim Flannery is Chief Commissioner of the Australian Government Climate Commission, Chair of Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University and has held numerous other positions nationally and internationally.  In 2007 he was honoured by the then Prime Minister of Australia, Mr John Howard, as Australian of the Year.
• Jo Nova is the pseudonym of a climate science denier and paranoid conspiracy theorist.

None of the above work for the Bureau of Meteorology. Professor Tim Flannery would have close dealings with the Bureau, particularly in his role as Chief Commissioner of the Australian Government Climate Commission.

The Curious Tale of Anthony Watts and His Dog

UPDATED: Update added at the end of this article.

Today I came across a post by Anthony Watts who some readers know from his blog, WUWT.

The Part about Anthony's Dog

Anthony's apparently been surreptitiously supporting the Union of Concerned Scientists by pretending he's a dog (if I've got that right).  Anyway, he used his dog's name to subscribe, maybe thinking he needed to hide his true identity in case UCS didn't accept fake skeptics as members.

That's right, Anthony pretended to be his dog! He thinks it's hilarious that UCS accepted his subscription in his dog's name (Kenji).  Others will no doubt be bemused by the lengths to which he felt he had to go in order to 'spy' on the highly secretive (not!) UCS.

(Some of you may even call to mind Anthony's ongoing outrage at Dr Gleick pretending to be a human being with Heartland Institute.  Dog impersonations are okay but human impersonations are not.  The other difference being that the UCS is completely open, while the Heartland Institute is a very secretive organisation.)

And Now the Curious Tale

Anthony claims something the UCS wrote isn't true, while in the same article posting more than ample evidence showing that what the UCS wrote was spot on.  (Yes, if you thought Anthony was a bit odd for pretending to be his dog, what follows is even more odd.)

Enter The Union of Concerned Scientists

Watts claims this statement from the Union of Concerned Scientists is 'completely false'.  He underlined said statement in red so his readers would understand to what he is referring:

So, let's see.  Did Fox News lead in with the headline: "New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming" or not?

Enter Fox Nation

We don't have to go to Fox News to find out, but you can if you like by clicking here.  Anthony kindly posts a screenshot of their article:

Let's examine these two statements more closely.  Maybe Watts found a letter changed somewhere:

UCS: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming
FOX: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming

Seriously?  Identical.  Even to the capitalization.

Enter Reuters

Now so far, Anthony seems oblivious to what it was that so amused/amazed/appalled The Union of Concerned Scientists.  He attempts to shift the blame, saying it wasn't Fox's fault, it was Reuters fault.

Watts is saying that all Fox did was publish an article by Reuters.

Two questions immediately arise:

1. Does Fox publish anything no matter how silly just because it arrived from one of their syndicated news providers?
2. Did the Reuters article say: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming.

I don't know the answer to the first question.  But it sure doesn't seem very responsible for a major international news media network to publish whatever anyone sends them no matter how absurd.

The answer to the second question meant going across to the Reuters website.  Here is their article, which has the following headline:

Okay, let's line them up again just to make sure we're not seeing things:

UCS: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming
FOX: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming
Reuters: Wind Farms may have warming effect: research

UCS accurately quoted the ridiculous headline from Fox.  Reuters had a completely different headline.

Just in case you are wondering if Reuters changed their headline at some stage, here is a link to their article using Wayback Machine.  (Watts also provides the headline from The Telegraph, which was equally misleading but different from that of Fox: "Wind farms can cause climate change, finds new study".)

What did Watts not Spot?

For starters, Anthony did not point out that Fox made up their own headline.  But as you'll have figured out already, Watts missed a much more fundamental point.

Why is the Union of Concerned Scientists amazed, amused and appalled?

Well, the research did NOT find that wind farms 'cause global warming'.  The research found that wind farms have a local warming effect.

Anthony even posts the abstract of the research paper in question, but still hasn't twigged why the Union of Concerned Scientists scoffed at the Fox News headline.

Here is the relevant part of the abstract as shown on WUWT.  Anthony even bolded the sentence about local (not global) warming "over wind farms relative to nearby non-wind-farm regions":

The World's Most Visited Anti-Science Website and Winner of the Bloggies Lifetime Achievement Award

And @bloggies wonders why science blogs have no interest in sharing a platform with their 'lifetime achievement winner' WUWT?

Give the dog a bone...

Update:

As of now the blog article referred to above attracted 74 comments, of which I read only one that may possibly have alerted Anthony to his error, but Anthony deleted it mysteriously saying (in reference to this? Surely he doesn't want to draw attention to one of his other deficiencies):

----------------

Greg Laden says:February 27, 2013 at 8:10 am[snip - no comments from you - re pending issues - Anthony]

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Summarising for people who are unfamiliar with the context, what this example illustrates quite neatly is:

1) Double standards

In Watts world, he can fake his own identity (posing as a dog!), but if someone else does so much as use an on-line identity (eg Sou), Watts calls them "anonymous cowards" at best or effectively calls for them to be flogged drawn and quartered.

What is even more ridiculous is that Watts felt he needed to fake his identity at all - as if he thinks there is a 4,000 strong inner UCS sanctum that operates in secrecy. (The Union of Concerned Scientists doesn't set criteria for membership AFAIK. Anyone can join, even a someone posing as a dog! I don't know if they boot people out for any reason.  Most organisations have some base criteria.)

Makes you wonder what sort of circles Watts usually inhabits?  (Such weird thinking is consistent with the notion that almost ALL the scientists, journalists, politicians and the majority of the general public are part of a decades long conspiracy to deceive the few remaining science deniers, and that climate science is a 'hoax'.)  

2) Cognitive difficulties - critical reading and arithmetic in particular

Watts didn't pick up on 'global' vs 'local'. Watts may not even know that there is a difference between a local effect and a global effect. That would go some way to explaining his ongoing obsession with individual surface stations long after it's been proven time and time again that individual stations being out balances out once they are aggregated.  (This includes a paper that listed Watts himself as one of the authors.  Seems that comprehending the findings of a paper is not a pre-requisite for being listed as an author.)