WUWT hits a new low - of the mundane denier weird kind

I'd say that WUWT is the inverse of global surface temperature. It's hit a new low of extreme denialism - of the mundane kind. I took a snapshot of the home page as it is now. (The archived page is formatted differently.)

Have a look! Anthony Watts is trying everything he can think of, no matter how silly, to see if something sticks in his deniers' brains.

Has WUWT hit a new low of denialism? (Of the mundane kind.)

Denier weirdness: Plant food and ice ages at WUWT

WUWT is stuck for ideas so is working its way through the denier memes listed at SkepticalScience. That's good, because I have a lot to do and I can let SkS respond. I've written a bit about the two recycled memes current at WUWT, provided a plot to ponder, and linked to SkS explanations.

The last few days WUWT has had:

• CO2 is plant food, and
• An ice age cometh.

Another list of 142 cranks at WUWT

You can tell a person's character from the company they keep. There's a list of 137 people who keep company with Tim Ball and E. Calvin Beisner and Joe Bastardi and Joseph D’Aleo and David Legates at WUWT.

Just in case you ever need to check denier "credentials".

Related, with some overlap

• List of scientists "respected in their field" - only @wattsupwiththat - take on the EPA
• Las Vegas Denier Fest: Awards for best con artists, denial propagandists and plodders for hire
• The Wrong Climate Stuff

More Weedz Pleeze, pleads WUWT - but where is Anthony Watts?

Anthony Watts is having trouble getting anyone to write his blog articles these days. Today he's put up a "CO2 is plant food" article by that fan of mass murderers, the conspiracy theorising Tim Ball (archived here). What CO2 will most probably bring is an abundance of weeds, and floods and droughts and wildfires and intense storms seriously affecting food production.

Thing is, Anthony seems to have all but given up on his blog. These past few weeks he's handed the WUWT keys to Eric "eugenics" Worrall mainly. But Anthony's been pretty well absent for longer than a few weeks.

I noticed some time ago that Anthony had all but stopped contributing to WUWT, so I thought I'd look at the evidence. Below is a run down of what Anthony Watts has written all by himself since the beginning of February. I don't count copies and pastes of press releases or newspaper articles, or copies and pastes from other denier blogs, but am still erring on the side of leniency.

February to May inclusive - only 21 out of 414 articles are "originals" by Anthony Watts, being generous

Out of 414 WUWT articles since the beginning of February, Anthony has only contributed 21 of his own "original" thoughts. And most of those are a very poor effort - and few have anything to do with weather or climate. Here's his contribution since the beginning of February:

Eric Worrall mocks the small island states that will go under

Eric "eugenics" Worrall has taken over Anthony Watts' blog WUWT from the look of things. I say that because he's no longer a "guest", he's now a WUWT fixture. Anyway, Eric doesn't like the Carribean. That's a surprise because he's indicated that he moved to the subtropics, north of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, to get away from the cold UK.

As you know we promote heavily ecotourism, and if action is not taken by the international community to halt greenhouse gas emissions we’re going to have a serious challenge.

Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, Dominica

Today Eric's decided to mock a meeting of Caribbean leaders, who were preparing their submission for COP21, the UNFCCC meeting to be held in Paris later this year (archived here).

These leaders aren't from places no-one's heard of.  They are from the playground of the rich and famous and their countries are home to the rich as well as the poor. These are islands like the Bahamas, Belize, Barbados, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago; and Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts-Nevis, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

There's a short report of the meeting by the Inter Press Service News Agency, which Eric didn't link to. He's not interested in such details. As I said, his mockery demonstrates that he couldn't give a damn about small island nations disappearing, as many will in a few short decades.

The Joke's on Bob Tisdale! His papal mockery falls flat in a sea of solar panels in The Vatican, World's Greenest State.

Bob Tisdale had a shot at mocking Pope Francis by putting up a recent photo of him with the Harlem Globetrotters (archived here).

The photo made headlines last week, when Pope Francis was made an honorary globetrotter. He was only the ninth person (and the second Pope) to be so awarded, according to Latino Fox.

This got under Bob's skin - is he a globetrotter fan? He's not a fan of Anthony Watts' religious leader, that's for sure.

Bob wrote:

Stunning Photo Reveals How Vatican Learned to Spin Global Warming
...Will the Vatican be adding solar panels atop the Sistine Chapel and a windmill at the peak of the obelisk in Saint Peter’s square?  They should lead by example.

A little Google would have gone a long way.

2,000 photovoltaic panels on top of Nervi Hall, Vatican. Photo: Reuters

The Vatican has installed panels to power all of its 40,000 households, making it arguably the greenest state in the world. Some are installed on top of the building shown in the photo above - that happened seven years ago in 2008. There is also a solar plant installed on 740 acres near the medieval village of Santa Maria di Galeria.

Note: It looks as if the 40,000 homes / 740 acre solar farm hasn't happened. I don't know if it is still on the drawing board or not. See comment by Lotharsson below.

Sou 21 June 2015

Oh, and Renault gave the previous Pope an electric vehicle.

This isn't the first time Bob Tisdale failed the Google test.

Around the climate blogs: addiction to global mean temperature; and the electricity cost of California's drought

HotWhopper exists to replace deniers' disinformation with science, which means that it's easy to forget there is real work going on out in the world. A couple of items from the Blog Roll are worth reading when you want a break from the conspiracy-theorising nuttery that goes on in the deniosphere.

Addiction to global mean temperature: Isaac Held

First of all, Isaac Held has written about the addiction to global mean temperature and the dangers in considering it in isolation. Isaac Held is a modeler with the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Research Laboratory at Princeton University, although the views expressed are his own, not any official position. He talks about what can happen if you use simple globally averaged box models, without taking account of spatial structure of the response to forcing. His articles are for the advanced climate hawk, usually. But I dare say that most HotWhopper readers wouldn't find this latest article of his difficult.

The energy cost of the Californian drought: Peter Gleick

Moving away from the theoretical to the practical, Peter Gleick has written about the impact of the Californian drought on the cost of its electricity supply. Peter Gleick is President of the Pacific Institute in Oakland. He reports that California has had to replace cheap hydro electricity with more expensive power from natural gas. (Can you take out drought insurance against higher electricity prices?) Drought has been a big problem for electricity supply in Brazil, too.

Denier quote of the day: Humans are Quite Amazingly Heading to North Korea

This comment was written under a WUWT article that had nothing to do with climate science. It was about a larger than normal solar flare that was observed by sun watchers at NASA (archived here).

kokoda  May 8, 2015 at 8:10 pm
Humans are quite amazing – on the negative side. They will lie or say nothing just to keep their job. Not hard to believe, as humans will kill tens of thousands just with orders from above. Propaganda works well as it is usually aimed to trigger as emotional influence. Indoctrination via the educational system on the young is extremely effective.

If the AGW religion isn’t trashed within a few years, a full generation is going to be inculcated as believers. Then, we will be similar to N. Korea. You can believe this when the gov’t exercises its authority on the Internet and shuts down sites opposing gov’t policies. It is possible.

WUWT's tin foil hat wearers cannot help themselves.

Denier reaction to cancellation of Bjorn Lomborg's post at UWA

There’s nothing “smart” about spending $4 million of taxpayer cash on a highly questionable methodology that by design downgrades climate change.

Graham Readfearn

You may have seen in the comments or news that the University of Western Australia has thought better of its decision to provide a much-needed home for the wandering Bjorn Lomborg. The Vice Chancellor, Paul Johnson, has written a convoluted article explaining his reasons, mixed up with various excuses for appointing him in the first place.

Maurice Newman, the Australian Prime Minister's business adviser and favoured conspiracy nutter

Did you know that our Prime Minister gets his science advice from a science-denying cleric, and his business advice from a "black helicopter"-style conspiracy theorising nutter.