Anthony Watts brings logical fallacies to ancient Peruvian climate migrants

It was only a couple of days ago that Anthony Watts asked for feedback and one of his readers leftturnandre wrote:

June 15, 2014 at 8:34 am
Got only a second now, but the very first thing that comes into mind: don’t allow fallacies. Don’t go down to the level of the opposition. Keep on the high grounds. 

Anthony Watts builds a straw man

Anthony didn't listen. Today he's built a strawman fallacy, writing:

One of the favorite boogeyman arguments used in climate alarmism is that climate has been stable for thousands of years, and that our recent industrialized era emissions will result in climate tipping point. However, this study in the Proceeding of the National Academies of Science suggest that climate disruption caused people in the Central Andes to migrate to find a better climate over a thousand years ago.

That's a strawman fallacy because he's misrepresenting the science just so he can tear it down. It's not that local climates haven't changed. It's that overall the world has, until now, had relatively little change since human civilisation began. Much less than what's to come. It's also quite silly because he's calling on that same science to show that climates have changed in different parts of the world at different times. So which does he believe? Climate science or climate science? His poor little brain must be doing cartwheels.

Is Anthony Watts now a greenhouse effect denier?

Anthony jumps to another logical fallacy in his second paragraph, writing:

This posited bout of climatic fluctuation occurred before anyone knew what carbon dioxide was. So what was the driver then? Surely it wasn’t CO2 levels, which according to James Hansen and Bill McKibben who say“safe” levels are below 350 parts per million, which according to this graph from CDIAC, was below 300ppm during the period of study. 

This time he's arguing that climate science attributes all climate change to a change in atmospheric carbon dioxide. He's implying that because droughts in what is now Peru in the relatively recent past (geologically speaking) weren't caused by a change in atmospheric CO2, then the current global warming can't be caused by increased CO2.

It looks as if Anthony Watts has become a greenhouse effect denier - which at other times he's denied.

Climate migrations in pre-Columbian southern Peru

Although the stray WUWT-er might think it, going by Anthony's silly lead in, the paper itself is not new climate science. These climate events have been known about for quite a long time. What it is presenting is evidence of human migration as a result of those climate changes. It's an anthropological study by a large team led by Lars Fehren-Schmitz of the University of California Santa Cruz.

Some of the paper is described at Phys.org:

To gain a clearer understanding of early Nasca, Wari and Tiwanaku peoples living in various parts of what is now Peru, the researchers collected DNA samples from 207 mummies found in both coastal and mountainous parts of the region. Mitochondrial analysis and Bayesian modeling indicated that people that had been living near the coast began migrating to the mountains sometime around 640 BC. They also found evidence of a reverse migration as people from the mountains migrated towards the coast around 1200 AD.

From the WUWT comments

Like Anthony Watts, many of the deniers at WUWT are not able to differentiate between local climate change and global climate change.

ferdberple says:

June 18, 2014 at 10:28 am
climate science 101. any climate change that can’t be attributed to humans must be due to volcanoes. we can tell how big the volcanoes must have been by how much climate change there was. In this case a big volcano must have started erupting in ∼640 AD and ended in ∼1200 AD. the cannot be connected to the medieval warm period, because this change in south America, as well as the change in Europe, even thought they were at similar times, were both only regional. global changes only occur when humans are involved.

Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 is very wrong when he says:

June 18, 2014 at 10:26 am
So maybe these were really the “first climate change refugees” ?

TAG demonstrates a brain that works some of the time at least, and says:

June 18, 2014 at 10:33 am
Since the Little Ice Age in Europe was coincident with the 30 Years War, these findings should not be unexpected. The 30 Years War ended with the Treaty of Westphalia. This treaty created the concept of the sovereign nation state which shapes our world today. So it is no surprise that climate change can have dramatic and long lasting political and societal effects.
One thing that we should all remember the CO2 or not, climate plays an important part in our history and that even relatively slight climate changes can have large effects. natural variability can drive the course of history fro centuries. Don’t let the hype from climate activists and third team activist scientists distract us from this fact.

Chris B is a good little WUWT denier and says:

June 18, 2014 at 10:59 am
I’d like a couple million and a super computer to find out where all the SUV’s and coal plants went.

Pathway is also scoring brownie points from Anthony Watts and says:

June 18, 2014 at 11:01 am
If it doesn’t fit the agenda it is irrelevant. 

---

Lars Fehren-Schmitz, Wolfgang Haak, Bertil Mächtle, Florian Masch, Bastien Llamas, Elsa Tomasto Cagigao, Volker Sossna, Karsten Schittek, Johny Isla Cuadrado, Bernhard Eitel, and Markus Reindel. "Climate change underlies global demographic, genetic, and cultural transitions in pre-Columbian southern Peru", doi: 10.1073/pnas.1403466111

The hottest May on record

This year is starting to warm up. According to the latest GISTemp data, May is the hottest on record.

Data source: GISTemp NASA

I see that Bob Tisdale has written another ponderous piece about global temperatures (archived here) but for some reason omitted to mention the May record. DavidR noticed. I guess Bob didn't. In any case taking the average of January to May only, 2014 is the fifth hottest on record for that period.

Data source: GISTemp NASA

Based on GISTemp, February was relatively cold at 0.43 degrees Celsius above the 1951 to 1980 mean. Even 1991 had a hotter February. January was warmish, being the fifth hottest on record. March was the 3rd hottest March on record. April was the second hottest April on record and May the hottest May on record.

WUWT wants feedback and asks the impossible of its readers

This article is a catchup on some of the goings on at WUWT while I was busy elsewhere. Anthony Watts wrote a surprisingly (for him) lucid article seeking feedback from his readers on how he could improve his blog (archived here). He got a lot of feedback - 243 comments. He also told his readers what he wanted:

What I’d like to see different about readers and commenters on WUWT:

1. Saying “off topic” and then posting an off topic comment doesn’t actually make it OK. We have Tips and Notes (see menu below the header) for that.
2. I’d like to see less cryptic comments (like from Mosher) and more in-depth comments.
3. I’d like less name calling. The temptation is great, and I myself sometimes fall victim to that temptation. I’ll do better to lead by example in any comments I make.
4. I’d like to see less trolling and more constructive commentary. One way to acheive that is to pay attention
5. I’d like to see more click-throughs on science articles. I note that articles that discuss papers sometimes don’t get as many click-throughs as articles that discuss the latest climate inanity. While such things can be entertaining, bear in mind it is important to keep up with the science too. So, tell me, what could we do better, do different, add, or remove from WUWT?

Please be thoughtful and respectful in such comments. Thanks for your consideration – Anthony

Asking the impossible

You'll notice that one thing that Anthony Watts asked was that people click through links to read the "science". He reckons very few people do that. Anthony's science articles are copies of press releases about new (and sometimes old) scientific papers. You can easily tell his science articles because Anthony almost invariably writes a headline starting with the word "claim". That's his signal to WUWT readers that the article is a press release about new science and that they are required to ridicule it rather than read about it.

But in asking readers to "click through" on science articles, he's pretty well asking the impossible. That's because more often than not Anthony doesn't provide any link to the underlying paper. Most of the time he doesn't even mention the paper itself. Nor does he usually provide a link to the press release he copied. Occasionally he'll provide a link to the home page of the organisation that he got the press release from and leave it up to readers to try to find their way to the actual article.

And while he'd like less name-calling, we've yet to see if he applies that to Christopher Monckton.

What's missing is any plea to cut down on conspiracy theorising. I guess that would alienate his mate Tim Ball, who is a Class A conspiracy theorist.

Anthony also wants less trolling. At WUWT anyone who posts about climate science is a troll and if they aren't banned within their first several posts they can consider themselves lucky.

Anthony also wants fewer cryptic comments. Perhaps any comment containing words of more than two syllables appears cryptic to his readers. WUWT is for the scientific illiterati not for science lovers. He would like more "in-depth" comments. Not so much of the typical "I don't understand it but it's brilliant" responses to Willis' wonderings.

Click the "read more" to see some of the requests that are unlikely to be fulfilled.

Viv Forbes is caught red handed again at WUWT.

Viv Forbes is a director of a coal company in Australia. He has been caught red-handed telling fibs at WUWT in the past and he's at it again.

This time he's making up stuff about sea levels. (Anthony Watts doesn't accept the fact that seas will rise as the ice melts so he often puts up articles protesting rising seas.)

Viv starts off with a classic denier-ism:

Sea levels have been rising and falling without any help from humans for as long as Earth’s oceans have existed.

That's a variation of "the climate is always changing".  He then comes out as a fully-fledged denier, writing:

Currently the world’s oceans are rising at about 1mm per year, which has not changed much with the great industrialisation since 1945. Amongst all the factors moving the restless sea, man’s production of carbon dioxide is obviously an insignificant player. 

That's more than denial - with his "obviously an insignificant player". It includes a lie. Seas are currently rising at 3.2 mm a year, not 1 mm a year. This is what is happening to sea level, from the CU Sea Level Research Group of the University of Colorado:

If seas continued to rise at 3.2 mm a year it would give many of us time to adjust.  They won't though, will they. Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheets are melting. They'll continue to melt and seas are going to rise a lot more in the future. In the not too distant future, probably while some people reading this are still alive, seas are going to rise much more quickly. By the end of this century seas could be anything from one to two metres higher than they are now. That's more than six feet for the metrically-challenged. And it won't happen evenly. Some decades could see a rapid rise in sea level, others not so much or none at all. It won't happen evenly everywhere at the same time either. Around the USA, for example, the melting of West Antarctica will cause a greater rise in sea level than in some other parts of the world.

From the WUWT comments

Some of the deniers aren't buying it. Greg Goodman, a regular at WUWT says:

June 17, 2014 at 10:30 pm
Viv Forbes “Currently the world’s oceans are rising at about 1mm per year, which has not changed much with the great industrialisation since 1945. Amongst all the factors moving the restless sea, man’s production of carbon dioxide is obviously an insignificant player.”

Well the accepted figure seems to be closer to 3mm/y so a bland assertion of “about 1mm per year” without any reference or uncertainty estimation is meaningless.

“not changed much” , “….obviously an insignificant player.”

Is that any better than an alarmists saying ” sea level has rise a lot, currently rising about 10mm/y. Man’s production of carbon dioxide is obviously a significant player.”

This is the sort of unfounded commentary that rightly draws criticism of being “anti-science” and justifies comments of being “in denial”.

” climate alarmists say we should be scared to death by the threat of seas rising gently at 1mm PER YEAR.”

Sorry that is an out and out lie. It is non factual and you know it is non factual. It is also totally unsubstantiated. Provide one quote from anyone to back that up. No one is saying we should “scared to death” about 1mm/y. Is anyone but Viv Forbes even suggesting such a figure? He appears to have just made it up.

Why Anthony chose to publish this I can not understand. It does nothing but justify those who would criticise WUWT and sceptics in general.

Hector Pascal says:

June 18, 2014 at 12:08 am
You have to be very cautious using historical examples of sea level change from tectonically active areas such as the Mediterranean. Vertical movements can be very large and rapid. I am familiar with and have visited the coast (mountainous/rias) in closest proximity to the Tohoku earthquake epicentre. Harbour quays that previously had about a metre of freeboard were awash. That’s just one event.

Also, areas responding to ice sheet melting are still going up, and areas peripheral to the ice sheets are still going down as the mantle material flows back to where it was displaced from. For example, in the UK, land north of a line going approximately from the Humber to the Severn is rising, and land south of that line is sinking. 

Denier weirdness: The US President is taunting Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts proclaims to the world that he rejects science (archived here). He doesn't like what he considers as being taunted. He wrote about a speech that President Obama made at the University of California Irvine.

Here is what Anthony refers to as taunting. The President was talking about people who don't want to mitigate climate change - as reported by Associated Press and abcnews (US) - Anthony's own bolding:

“They say, ‘Hey, look, I’m not a scientist.’ And I’ll translate that for you: what that really means is, ‘I know that manmade climate change really is happening but if I admit it, I’ll be run out of town by a radical fringe that thinks climate science is a liberal plot,’” he said.

“There’s going to be a stubborn status quo and people determined to stymie your efforts to bring about change. There are going to be people who say you can’t do something. There are going to be people who say you shouldn’t bother trying. I’ve got some experience with this myself,” Obama said.

“It’s pretty rare that you’ll encounter somebody who says the problem you’re trying to solve simply doesn’t exist. When President Kennedy set us on a course to the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn’t be worth it,” he continued.

"But nobody ignored the science. I don’t remember anybody saying the moon wasn’t there or that it was made of cheese,” Obama said.

Anthony spoke of logic, claiming that the President made a logical fallacy. Anthony didn't say what the fallacy was. (Anthony can't tell the difference between an analogy and a logical fallacy. He's not too bright at the best of times. He also thinks his article is satire. It isn't.) Given that Anthony views what the President said as taunting, the logical conclusions to be drawn from his blog article is that Anthony Watts is claiming:

1. he is part of the radical fringe that thinks climate science is a liberal plot and/or
2. he thinks climate change is real but you can't do something and shouldn't bother trying and/or
3. he is the rare person who says the problem simply doesn't exist and/or
4. he is ignoring the science.

Since Anthony is not ignoring the science, he's actively rejecting it, then that leaves 1 and 2 and 3. I'm betting that Anthony feels taunted because he sees himself as part of a radical fringe that thinks climate science is a liberal plot and feels uncomfortable to be so categorised. (Check the WattMeter in the side bar for evidence that his audience is the same.)

No comments at WUWT yet but expect more denier weirdness.

The Ugly Side of Denialism: Anthony Watts' level of comprehension hits a new low

Anthony Watts twists and turns wildly at time in an effort to find things that will appease the insatiable appetite of his readers for stuff with which to attack science.

This time he's written a short comment (archived here), picking up a headline but completely missing the point of the letter to which it related.

Research funding models and impact on science and scientists

The headline Anthony picked up on was: "Systemic addiction to research funding", which didn't really fit the letter itself.  It was over a letter written by Andrew Resnick from Cleveland State University, where he is Assistant Professor in the Physics Department, working in biophysics in the College of Sciences and Health Professions.

His letter was in response to an article in PNAS published in April this year by Bruce Alberts, Marc W. Kirschnerb, Shirley Tilghmanc and Harold Varmusd. The April article was about biomedical research in the USA and how the funding system can lead to people leaving scientific research for easier career paths.  The paper is available in full here.  Nothing to do with climate science, although the subject matter arguably applies to the model of research funding in many if not most disciplines - not just science either.

Most research academics have to compete for funding - in all areas, not just science. That's the way the funding bodies work. There have been changes over the decades trying to address the situation but research grants are highly competitive - maybe more so than ever.

I was closer to the issue a couple of decades ago and the article would have been as relevant back then as it is today in many areas.  We used to say that the first year of a three year project was setting up the research, the second year doing the research and the third year writing applications for the next project.  Somewhere in all that the research was completed and written up (mostly).

That's pretty much what Andrew Resnick was arguing in his letter - that what the April paper was about is nothing new. Some improvements have been made in some areas of science, such as longer term projects, a more structured approach, a greater focus on letting grant applicants know the priorities of the funding bodies and setting up cross-institutional and global programs on collaborative "mega-projects". On the downside (from the point of view of the researchers and funding bodies), it used to be that the employing bodies (universities, research institutions) would pick up the tab for corporate overheads. These days they are likely to insist that the research projects pay for these overheads.

Changes in research funding over the decades

There have been big changes in the system of funding over the decades, too. Many decades ago many scientists relied on patrons. Then governments and universities got serious about research and for a while were (relatively for the time) flush with funds. Then governments themselves took a more business-like approach to management as the voting public clamoured for more and more and the dollars had to stretch further and further. Then universities also became more managerial. It's all about producing measurable outputs these days, whether in teaching or research. The world is a lot more complicated than when there were only two billion people on the planet.

That's in Australia and I expect it's not that different in other countries.

Deniers don't want any research - full stop

Back to Anthony Watts. He clearly hasn't got a clue about research funding models. His own business model is much simpler. He earns some of his income from being an anti-science advocate and some of his income trading off the science that other people give him (weather forecasts).

Anthony Watts turned his misunderstanding of the letter into this:

President Eisenhower warned of this. In the world of climate science, we have come to know this simple equation as demonstrated by some of the most zealous proponents of climate change:
No Alarm =  No Funding + No Glory

I'm not aware of President Eisenhower saying anything about climate science. He was around before much of the world (and the US Presidency) was aware of the problems we are causing.  Anthony is appealing to the illiterati like him who don't understand or value science or knowledge. Not only was the article not about climate science, he is very wrong if he thinks that if there wasn't global warming there would be nothing to research. Scientists are quite clever people. They can turn their mind to anything they fancy. And most of them know that to keep their job they have to do work that the funding bodies will pay for. So if funding bodies decide that climate is no longer a priority, many scientists will shift their effort to researching what is a priority or make a career shift to something else that makes use of their talents.

The message I get from Anthony Watts is that he doesn't want any scientific research related to climate or earth sciences. He'd rather not know. But then, he targets the scientifically illiterate and people who are afraid of knowledge.

From the WUWT comments

The usual riff raff with the usual dumb comments mixed with a lot of ugliness (warning - I've included some of the ugly below). If not for places like WUWT I'd have no idea there were people like this in the world today. I do believe they are in the minority and it's only the internet that gives them a voice.


PaulH says:

June 14, 2014 at 3:35 pm
The surest way to solve CAGW is to stop funding it’s “research”.

M Seward says:

June 14, 2014 at 3:43 pm
We have a new monster in out midst. Forget the “military-industrial complex” we now have the “science-political complex” or the “ecoreligeous-science complex”. Call it what you will, its a Godzilla sized monster spreading destructive nonsense and drooling at the prospect of total power.

Dr K.A. Rodgers says:

June 14, 2014 at 5:28 pm
It ain’t so much the scientists who are addicted to funding but their lords and masters in admin who cream at least 15% off the top. That is where the drive comes from.
No funding, no tenure. No funding, no promotion. And so it goes. It is why those same lords and masters will protect a proven fund raiser no matter what codswallop they produce.

latecommer2014 says:

June 14, 2014 at 6:01 pm
It’s the oldest profession ….selling what you have for what you want to any buyer with the resources. Not much different than prostitution.

Nick Stokes isn't completely correct, funding for research can come from many sources other than governments. A lot of scientific and technical research done in universities and other research institutions is funded by industry - according to industry priorities. He says:

June 14, 2014 at 7:36 pm
“His words, not mine.”
Well, it’s the headline, which he probably didn’t write. The letter rather seems to be asking of Alberts et al – well, what do you want?

It’s a reasonable question. It is government that has decided that research will be grant funded. And so that is the research you hear about. You don’t hear from the people who didn’t get grants. They had to do other things. 

Jimbo says:

June 14, 2014 at 4:37 pm
Mortgages, kids, HOT TROPICAL holidays to the sinking Maldives, SUVs, flights, climate conferences to HOT TROPICAL JOINTS, multiple homes, hypocrisy et al all have to be paid for dontcha know. Government control, money and undeserved climastrological recognition is the key to the global warming alarm. 

---

Alberts, Bruce, Marc W. Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus. "Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 16 (2014): 5773-5777. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1404402111

Andrew Resnick - letter re above, Systemic addiction to research funding, PNAS 2014

WUWT wonders why no mention of the Eemian at the Guardian?

Eric "eugenics" Worrall has posted a "guest essay" at WUWT (archived here). Eric might be a guest at WUWT, but he didn't write any essay. What he did was copy and paste some extracts from an article at the Guardian. The article itself was a generalist piece about surface temperatures and climate models. Nothing new in it that I could see, but you may be interested. It's written by Stuart Clark and you can read it here.

Here is Eric's "guest essay", or guest question. He wrote:

The inconvenient fact that sea level was around 6 metres higher during the Eemian Interglacial, and around 2 metres higher during the Holocene Optimum, 5500 years ago, was not mentioned in the Guardian article.
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/ericg/kap_paper.pdf

Update: It turns out that Eric wrote the four paragraphs before his question as well (after the Guardian quote), but there was a formatting error that made it look as if it was part of the Guardian article. I still wouldn't call it an "essay". The updated/corrected archive is here. [Sou: 3:50 pm Sunday 15 June 2014]

The paper Eric linked to was published in Geology back in 1998. It looks as if Eric didn't read the paper. What it's about is a "detailed history of middle to late Holocene sea level" provided in part by an emerged coastal bench and associated fossil beach on Kapapa Island (Oahu), Hawaii. The authors are figuring out how much uplift there's been. Contrary to what Eric thought, global sea level was by no stretch of the imagination higher than it is now by two metres during the Holocene Optimum. It was higher relative to the land in Hawaii - but as discussed in the paper Eric mentioned, those islands have been rising rather than the sea falling by such a huge amount.

As to the first part of Eric's question - the Eemian, yes, seas were a lot higher than today way back then. In the northern hemisphere it got hotter, too. Globally by not that much if at all. I wonder if Eric understands the implications? That if seas were a lot higher back then, it means that it doesn't take much of a rise in global temperatures to melt ice at the poles. Seas are going to rise a lot more before the next few centuries are done.

It's kind of odd for Anthony to allow Eric's "guest question" through, given all his protests against rising seas. You can read the WUWT comments and a bit more by clicking the read more link.

Recycling solar cycles at WUWT

When Anthony Watts has nothing new to write about, he recycles the garbage.

Anthony Watts has a very bad memory, is not at all observant and doesn't understand what he writes about. Today he's got an article (archived here) about a paper published more than two years ago. Anthony didn't check the date of it and wrote:

New study suggests a temperature drop of up to 1°C by 2020 due to low solar activity
Posted on June 13, 2014 by Anthony Watts

From the HockeySchtick:  A paper published today in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics finds long solar cycles predict lower temperatures during the following solar cycle. ...

He linked to the paper, which is dated May 2012. Yep, that's the first thing he should have noticed. (Click the read more link to read on if you're on the home page.)

Hug a climate scientist today

Big Hugs to all the climate scientists. Today is hug a climate scientist day.  I'll have to send mine via cyberspace:

Credit: David Pope

This is how it's done - thanks to First Dog on the Moon. Click to make it larger.

There are lots of terrific tweets sending hugs.

Complete with hugging (!!) CSIRO climate scientists! ping @AMOSupdates MT @earthocean #Hugaclimatescientistday https://t.co/Iv1PW1M7Z5
— Tony Rafter (@tonyrafter) June 12, 2013

LOOK AT THEM ALL! RT @IAEUC: Group hug for climate scientists @UniCanberra! #hugaclimatescientistday @firstdogonmoon pic.twitter.com/WMZ3XZa1YU
— Mr Onthemoon (@firstdogonmoon) June 12, 2014

Found one! @UNSWScience's @ProfChrisTurney #HugAClimateScientistDay pic.twitter.com/03aTXhHW9w
— Emma L Johnston (@DrEmmaLJohnston) June 12, 2014

We have a live one: Steve Crimp gets a cuddle from Serena Henry #hugaclimatescientistday http://t.co/JX4uy7TK ping @firstdogonmoon ^CS

— CSIRO (@CSIROnews) June 12, 2012

FOR SCIENCE! RT @heidijsandstrom: For science! #hugaclimatescientistday @firstdogonmoon pic.twitter.com/SIi48NKBkc
— Mr Onthemoon (@firstdogonmoon) June 12, 2014

Today is #HugAClimateScientist day - you know what to do! http://t.co/ZGmF9gDmb2 pic.twitter.com/RN9K9z5Xeh
— Climate Council (@climatecouncil) June 12, 2014

Plenty more here on Twitter.

Pangaean nuttery by Anthony Watts at WUWT

Anthony Watts sometimes complains that he and his blog are the subject of ridicule yet he keeps coming up with the ridiculous. I think he's getting worse. He knows that his bread and butter is the bottom 8%. The hard-core "dismissives" and scientific illiterati. Some of the "doubtful" at WUWT are starting to dismiss the pseudo-science peddled by Anthony.

Today Anthony has written an introduction to another of his copy and paste press releases (archived here). He wrote:

How Earth avoided global warming before SUV’s
From the European Association of Geochemistry, a claim that looks to be little more than paleo-dowsing. Though, ya gotta love the silly claim that Earth would have hit a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus, had it not been for some mountains forming, sucking up all the CO2. Plus we’ve seen the Earth hit 5000PPM CO2 in the past, and it didn’t turn into Venus...

...Of course it all just more model output, there’s no real earth science going on -all guesswork, no actual measurements.

How ignorant is Anthony Watts? Let me count the ways...

How much can you find wrong with Anthony's headline and two paragraphs? I'll list a few things.

1. global warming before SUV's - that's pure denialism. The implied suggestion from idiotic deniers is that if the world warmed in the distant past it couldn't have been from human activity therefore it can't be from human activity now. Anthony fails logic 101.
2. Paleo-dowsing - Anthony tries to make out that the research isn't scientific. This coming from someone who doesn't even understand temperature anomalies from a baseline! You've also got to wonder if Anthony knows the meaning of the verb "to dowse".
3. ya gotta love the silly claim - another attempt by Anthony to mock actual science. Remember when Anthony tried to claim that global warming was caused by steampipes in Russia?
4. claim that Earth would have hit a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus - this is yet another illustration that Anthony Watts doesn't read what he copies and pastes. The press release states that even if the mountains hadn't formed and CO2 had risen sharply, it would NOT have led to a runaway greenhouse effect.
5. we’ve seen the Earth hit 5000PPM CO2 in the past, and it didn’t turn into Venus - Anthony again shows he didn't read the press release he posted. The article clearly says that there wouldn't have been a runaway greenhouse effect. Also, he seems to be oblivious to the fact that in the past when there was more than 5000 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, the sun was quite a bit fainter. And Earth has been hotter in the distant past than it is now, because there was more atmospheric CO2. Anthony has no concept of radiative forcing or the different factors that affect global surface temperatures.
6. just more model output...all guesswork...no actual measurements. Anthony Watts couldn't be more wrong. The measurements are there. That's why the scientists developed a model, to see if they could explain the actual measurements.  Of course it could be that Anthony thinks that because there weren't any people back then, then there couldn't be any measurements. He's scientifically illiterate so that explanation would fit. And it's his scientific illiteracy that would be behind his claim that sophisticated scientific modeling isn't science. Does he really think that funding organisations would fork out hundreds of thousands of dollars on supercomputers and scientists just for kicks? How does he think that other scientific disciplines work? How does he think he gets his weather forecasts? Anthony is behaving the same way as the most uneducated of his ignorant readers.

Once again, Anthony doesn't provide any link to the article he copied and pasted. I found the press release at ScienceDaily.com. It's not about a published paper. This time its about a presentation by Yves Goddéris and colleagues to a conference, the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Sacramento, California. I found an abstract on the conference website. While it makes good reading, it doesn't seem to be about quite the same thing as the press release, though it's not unrelated.

The CO2 paradox

The abstract focuses on the impact of vascular plants on past climates. The press release is about how the formation of a huge mountain range on Pangaea prevented a big rise in atmospheric CO2. The scientists looked for an explanation to a paradox. The paradox was that, because Pangea was so huge, its vast inland areas became very dry. That meant that rock weathering was greatly reduced. This in turn meant that CO2 should have risen. But it didn't.

Mountains could resolve the paradox

During that same period a gigantic mountain range was formed on Pangea, the Hercynian mountains, stretching from what is now the Appalachians, through Ireland, England France, the Alps in Germany and further east. This enormous mountain range was in the humid tropics. Their steep slopes eroded, which because of the heat and humidity, meant that there was rock weathering which removed CO2 from the air.

From sciencedaily.com:

[Team leader Dr Yves Goddéris said] "We believe that it is this which led to the dramatic drop in atmospheric levels of CO2. We estimate that if it hadn't been for the formation of the Hercynian mountains, the atmospheric CO2 levels would have reached around 25 times the pre-industrial level, meaning that CO2 levels would have reached around 7000 ppm (parts per million). Let me put that into a present-day context; the current atmospheric CO2 levels are around 400 ppm, so this means that we would have seen CO2 rise to a level around 17 times current levels. This would obviously have had severe effects on the environment of that time. But the formation of the mountains in fact contributed to the greatest fall in atmospheric CO2 in the last 500 million years."

The team believes that even if the mountains had not formed and CO2 levels rose sharply, this would not have led to a runaway greenhouse effect as happened on Venus, because the increasing temperatures would have led to rocks being ultimately weathered, heat compensating for the scarcity of water. Rock weathering would have removed CO2 from the atmosphere, thus stopping the rising temperatures.

"So it would eventually have been self-correcting" said Dr Godderis, "but there's no doubt that this would have stalled Earth's temperature at a high level for a long, long time. The world would look very different today if these mountains had not developed when they did.

This is a new model which explains some of the events in the 80 million years following the start of the Carboniferous period, and of course the ideas need to be confirmed before we can be sure that the model is completely accurate. The take-home message is that the factors affecting atmospheric CO2 over geological periods of time are complex, and our understanding is still evolving."

Fascinating, isn't it. I'll have to keep my eyes open for a published paper.  When you think about all the science that underpins these ideas it puts Anthony Watts ignorant idiocy into perspective.

From the WUWT comments

I can hear some groans at Bill Illis' comment which is effectively "scientists don't know nuffin'". Except it was Bill who didn't bother reading the article and says (excerpt):

June 11, 2014 at 9:22 pm
They got the timing completely backwards here.

ATheoK is another denier of the "scientists don't know nuffin'" kind but only demonstrates his own scientific illiteracy when he says (excerpt):

June 11, 2014 at 10:08 pm
Don’t you just love these new fangled computer models. They can take arid environments and turn them into humid equatorial environments just by growing some mountains. No mention of how tall the mountains were… I wonder how many mountain passes the computer modelers programmed in.

Steep slopes of the Hercynian mountains… Steep? I suppose the model required steep mountains for some reason? The odd thing about steep mountains is that above certain altitudes, they tend to keep moisture as perennial snowcaps. Steep mountains with heights under the snowcap level look sort of funny if they’re mesa shaped.

Mountains on Earth have difficulty retaining steep slopes because gravity wins. Weathering is a complex process where the more complex the mineralization, the quicker the weathering. There are exceptions where large resistant granitic massifs are elevated. But whole mountain chains composed of massifs are about as believable as funny models.

u.k.(us) says, somewhat irrelevantly:

June 11, 2014 at 10:38 pm
” Rock weathering would have removed CO2 from the atmosphere, thus stopping the rising temperatures.”
==============
Not a word in regards to salt water /heat capacity.

---

Yves Goddéris, Yannick Donnadieu and Sebastien Carretier. "Critical zone and carbon cycle in the deep time." Goldschmidt 2014.