Just plain evil: Anthony Watts and PopTech sink to a new low

I'm not surprised that the despicable denier, PopTech would sink this low, but I must admit that I'm surprised at Anthony Watts, despite all the slime that has come from him over the years. They are both effectively arguing that no descendant of any of the tens of millions of people conscripted to the German armed forces early last century, no matter where they live now, and no matter what their or their forebears' personal beliefs or politics are or were, has any credibility when it comes to climate science. Why? Because they or their ancestors "fought for the Nazis".

It is probably the most abhorrent use of Godwin's Law you can imagine.

Note: See the upshot below in the update.

Jim Steele's "yellow journalism" at WUWT, and coastal erosion

Jim Steele is one of those science deniers who can't get his stuff published anywhere except climate conspiracy blogs like WUWT and in his own vanity-published denier book. Today, he wrote an article (archived here) about the collapse of cliffs in his home town Pacifica, in California. Jim could have just written a straight piece about what is contributing to coastal erosion and it might have been an informative article. However, as is usual for Jim Steele, he spoilt his article and further reduced his credibility by using it as a platform to tout his climate science denial. His article was a good example of the techniques of climate science denial. It was peppered with disinformation, twisting and misprepresenting others.

Jim Steele's yellow "journalism"

Jim's article seems to have been little more than a pretext so he could once again imply that climate science is a hoax. He accused two leading science journalists of being "yellow journalists". (Yellow journalism is where facts take a back seat to sensationalism.) Jim  wrote:

Desperate deniers Part 9: Patrick J Michael's pathetic, unconvincing WSJ report could have come from WUWT

Pat Michaels has written an article for his employer, the Cato Institute and Rupert Murdoch dutifully published it in the Wall St Journal. I was given a copy and thought you might like to see what he wrote. In my view he didn't earn his pay packet with this one. His article and arguments are pathetic. It's barely above the conspiratorial disinformation you read at WUWT.

Pat does have a bigger vocabulary and a better grasp of the English language than does Anthony Watts. And he does agree the world is warming. Maybe. But it's nothing to worry about.  His article must still be a big disappointment. The arguments are weak, wrong, unoriginal and boring, especially for someone who claims to have some scientific expertise. I'd give him the sack if I was running the Cato Institute. Wouldn't you? :)

Don't forget, Pat's had several months to figure out how to deny the hottest year on record after the hottest year on record. It's not as if he had no warning. Plus he's got a sidekick to bounce ideas off or tell what to do. Yet he couldn't come up with anything but the sort of wishy-washy Gish gallop you'll read any day on any old third-rate denier blog. This is what he should have been preparing for over the past 12 months:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature 1880 to 2015. Data source: GISS NASA

Let me tell you some of what is in his article and you can tell me what you think of it.

Desperate Deniers Part 8: Conman Anthony Watts goes for broke at WUWT

Anthony Watts is getting reckless again. No, not restless, but reckless. He's making a stand as a hard core wanna-be professional science disinformer who has become unhinged in his desperate denial.

Poor Anthony will never make it as a professional climate disinformer. The elite of the disinformation world see him as a useful idiot at best, but don't use him much these days. That's putting people like Pat Michaels in the "elite disinformer" category, with organisations like the George C Marshall Institute. They are followed by freelancers such as Marc Morano (I think he's landed a paid gig, but I class him as a freelancer), who'll say anything he's paid to say at double speed while wearing a cheesy grin. Then there are the "science" hacks for the GOP - Judith Curry, followed a long way behind (and dropping) by the unChristian duo from Alabama. Then there are all the faded jaded right wing lobby groups stacked with old white conservative men, getting older and probably fewer year by year. The pseudo-religious anti-environment groups don't count for much, but they do manage to wheedle funds from various vested interests. Way down the bottom of the disinformation totem pole are the climate conspiracy bloggers, Anthony Watts, Jo "Nova" and her rocket scientist from Luna Park and a straggle raggle taggle of other wanna-bes. Some of them are managing to stay a few inches ahead of "Steve Goddard"/Tony Heller and the twit, Tom Nelson.

Today Anthony Watts has a second article about something that former US Vice President, Al Gore may or may not have said back in 2006 (archived here). Anthony was delighted to see his previous version of the same thing all over various dumb blogs. He thinks he's on a winner but I'd guess he's despondent that it didn't hit the mainstream media. (In your dreams, Anthony.) He didn't write this all by himself (he rarely does). He says he pinched it from a blog on some financial website and added some embellishments of his own.

What could go wrong?

It's the snow not the cold, Eric Worrall

Eric Worrall takes over the reins of WUWT when Anthony is away, which has been a lot lately. Today he's shown that he doesn't understand the first thing about climate change. He wrote a short article with the headline: "If it is Hot, it is Climate, if it is Cold, its Climate".

What he's talking about is the stormy weather that hit the USA in the past few days, with crippling dumps of snow. As I speculated earlier, this was most probably fueled by the anomalously warm sea as seen in this image from NOAA. :

Anthony Watts gets into a dither with global weather

From some comments here at HW I discovered that there was a strange exchange at WUWT the other day. I say it was strange, because Anthony said he disagreed with a person while at the same time saying he agreed with him  - on the exact same point. Although it was strange, it was not uncommon as far as Anthony Watts is concerned. He doesn't understand what he reads, and doesn't seem to understand what he writes. He also demonstrates one of the telltale signs of a denier (and conspiracy theorist) - simultaneously adopting two mutually exclusive positions.

It started with the headline to the article from David Whitehouse (archived here - see Hotwhopper's Desperate Deniers Part 6): "2015 Global Temp, Or How Some Scientists Deliberately Mistook Weather For Climate"

The headline was over a graphic of Bart Simpson writing "climate and weather are not the same", which David Whitehouse and Anthony Watts should take to heart:

Desperate Deniers Part 7: Roy Spencer PhD tells fibs and flips and flops

Roy Spencer is a rather nasty little man who has said some horrible things about his fellow scientists as well as leaders of nations all over the world. He has made vile racist posts, called fellow scientists "nazis" and wished that the people attending COP21 were shot at by terrorists.

Roy is an "intelligent design" believer who doesn't "believe in" evolution. Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly) he doesn't espouse Christian ethics or teaching or moral code. Instead he belongs to a pseudo-religious cult called the Cornwall Alliance, which believes that it's every man's (probably not woman's) right if not duty to pillage and plunder the planet. His particular cult expects their god will clean up the mess afterwards. His god is not all powerful, however. His powers  (Roy's particular god is undoubtedly of the male gender) don't extend to cleaning up economic messes, as Victor Venema has pointed out.

I don't bother with Roy's blog very much. It's ugly and uninteresting and mostly wrong. I go there about once a month to pick up the latest satellite data. I was told that Roy had posted a scatty article about the hottest year on record (thanks, D). So I figured I'd include it in the current "Desperate Denier" series, which is devoted to the multiplicity of imaginary reasons deniers and conspiracy theorists are inventing to try to dispute the fact that 2015 really is the hottest year on record.

Desperate Deniers Part 6: David Whitehouse sez it's just a blob and ENSO

Deniers are still trickling in excuses for why they deny the world is warming, trying to dispute or downplay the latest "hottest year" - 2015. Today Anthony Watts put up an article by David Whitehouse of the denier lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, sorry, Forum (it was from the anti-science lobbying arm of the GWPF) (archived here, latest here). David chose to mimic Bob Tisdale and claim it's only got hotter because it got hotter - pointing to hot blobs and hot El Niños.

What he doesn't explain, and what no denier at WUWT has the brains to ask him, are the following:

1. What made the blob and El Niño so hot?
2. How did the blob and El Niño make the entire earth so hot when they've never done it before?
3. What about all the other hot blobs that appeared last year, didn't they make any difference?

How on earth could a blob and El Niño make the entire global mean temperature so high? The fact is that the earth was the hottest it's ever been in the last 150 years at least, and possibly in the entire time since civilisation began.

Desperate Deniers Part 5 - Anthony "surface station" Watts flunks NOAA temperature chart 101

Just when you think that Anthony Watts couldn't make a bigger fool of himself, you find out that he can. This is more properly an update to the previous article, but given the crazy reaction to the hottest year on record, it's worth a separate article. In that article I groaned at Anthony saying it couldn't be the hottest year ever globally because in the USA it was "only" the third hottest year ever.

I should know by now that with Anthony Watts you have to check every little thing. Thanks to Mark in the comments, I've discovered that Anthony "surface station" Watts can't even read a temperature anomaly chart.  Harbouring all sorts of paranoid conspiracy theories, he wrote:

When you look at temperature that isn’t biased by continuous adjustments, such as NOAA’s highly questionable fiddling with sea surface temperature data this year, you find that 2015 was not the hottest record at all according to the U.S> Climate Reference Network data, which is a state of the art system designed to need no “corrections” of any kind. 2015 comes in third for the USA:

Let's not dwell on Anthony not wanting sea surface temperatures to contaminate the US land surface data (come again? Are there ships and buoys on land now?).  Let's look at his evidence...

Desperate Deniers Part 4: Anthony Watts is shame-proof despite all his bloopers about NOAA

I would have missed this example of sad desperation, except that Anthony Watts himself highlighted it in a dumb cartoon. One is almost tempted to pity him, except that the real wonder is that he seems to be unable to feel shame or embarrassment. Any normal person would have deleted the article (archived here) after discovering they'd made so many bloopers, hoping that no-one would notice. Not Anthony. Even after he discovered almost everything he wrote was wrong, he kept on lashing out at all and sundry, flinging empty accusations left right and centre. Yet all the while it was Anthony himself who kept making mistake after mistake after mistake. I think he still doesn't realise that his whole article is nothing but one giant bungled mess from beginning to end.

It started with a dumb tweet from a twit called Tom Nelson

What seems to have happened is that Anthony saw a silly and wrong tweet from a rather dim conspiracy freak who denies under the name "Tom Nelson",  I'm a bit surprised that Anthony fell for it. He ought to know that "Tom Nelson" is a raving ratbag when it comes to anything climate.

It looks to me that Anthony has probably permanently tipped over the edge, and will grab hold of anything, not matter how wrong and stupid, in his effort to stop anyone from taking action to slow the warming. His original headline was:

Failed math: In 1997, NOAA claimed that the Earth was 5.63 degrees warmer than today

After someone pointed out one of his errors in the comments, he changed it to:

Failed Math: In 1997, NOAA claimed that the Earth was 3.83 degrees warmer than today

Both his headlines are way wrong. For one thing, in 1997 NOAA said nothing about what the temperature was today in 2016 - or not on the pages Anthony linked to. NOAA most certainly didn't say in 1997 that 1997 was 5.63 degrees or 3.83 degrees hotter than it was or would be in 2016. I doubt there were too many people employed by NOAA back in 1997 who thought at the time that the planet would cool at all, let alone cool by 5.63 degrees or 3.83 degrees between 1997 and 2016. I strongly doubt that any scientists who collated, analysed and reported global temperature changes would have thought the Earth was about to cool down suddenly.

[At this point, if you are going to read on, I suggest getting yourself a mug of hot coffee or a glass of wine or whatever you usually sup on at this hour, and settle down. Careful with it, though. You don't want coffee (or wine) splurted all over your keyboard.]