Friday, April 19, 2013

WUWT denounces innumeracy, demonstrates illiteracy


Where have all the flowers gone?

Innumeracy is terrible, don't you know (and I suppose they would know):
For any rational discussion of the effects of CO2 on climate, numbers are important.
OK, so far so good, when you mention "rational discussion" in the first sentence the phrase "protesting too much" comes to mind, but numbers are indeed important, so so far, so sane.
 An average temperature increase of 1 C will be a benefit to the planet, as every past warming has been in human history.
 . . . and here comes the crazy. What?
 And the added CO2 will certainly increase agricultural yields substantially and make crops more resistant to drought.
 Evidently the author missed the part where the added CO2 causes warming, droughts, and extreme weather, leading to an estimated 200 million additional food insecure people and 24 million addition malnourished children by 2050.
 But in articles like “Scant Gains Made on CO2 Emissions, Energy Agency Says” by Sarah Kent in the Wall Street Journal on April 18, 2013, we see a graph with a 6 C temperature rise by 2050 – if we don’t reduce “carbon intensity.” Indeed, a 6 C temperature rise may well be cause for concern. But anyone with a little background in mathematics and physics should be able to understand how ridiculous a number like 6 C is.
The article is paywalled, but they also attribute the assertion of 6C by 2050 to Joe Romm, and that we can check:
This is one of the most enlightening calculations I’ve seen in awhile, and it is worth your time to understand it because it speaks clearly to debunk many of the claims of temperature rise in the next 100 years made by activists, such as the 6c by 2050 Joe Romm claims,
Emphasis in the original. But if we follow the link, we discover the headline is the result of a reading comprehension problem:
 “When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius [11°F], which would have devastating consequences for the planet.”
2050 is not mentioned. There is a rather obvious error in a Reuters article cited in the post (they've corrected it), but as Romm did not repeat the error, to attribute it to him is simply a lie, and to build a post around "refuting" the red herring is  . . . well, it's what they do. Somewhat more surprisingly, David Appeal made the same obvious mistake. Rabbit is on the case.
Grandpa's favorite climate blog
WUWT, of course, uses this flimsy excuse to launch into a bunch of cargo-cult math, embarking on a "greatest hits" of basic scientific mistakes, including:

  • The warming caused by CO2 is instantaneous! (So the warming caused by 280ppm --> 400ppm is only the warming seen so far.)
  • Never mind, because climate sensitivity is only 1C per doubling! (No evidence for that; it seems to have become an article of faith.)
  • CO2 increases, like any other trend, are completely linear and can be extrapolated infinitely! (If CO2 is rising by 2ppm/year now, that is the rate of change expected for the next 12,000 years.)
WUWT, grandfather of the denialosphere, continues to demonstrate an effortless command of the three Is of full-spectrum ignorance: innumerate, illiterate, and ill-mannered.



9 comments:

  1. Going by your chart up top, it looks as if WUWT is suffering the same fate as the sea ice in the Arctic. The quality of discussion is most likely the main forcing.

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  2. It is interesting to speculate on the causes of the 'spikes' in the top graph during the latter half of 2012. The drought and Frankenstorm Sandy? Or the surface station paper...

    Using the Wattsian GEE (graph eyeball estimation) tool it looks like summer Arctic sea ice will vanish before the visitors at WUWT.

    izen

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  3. Looks more like the curve for stratospheric cooling to me ;-)

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  4. Izen, yes the peak in October 2012 is due to Sandy, which had nothing to do with climate change. The peak in middle 2012 is the Watts et al. manuscript, that the temperature increase is only half of what those lying scientists say. The last peak of 2011 is the second batch of stolen CRU mails. There is a lot of sad history in this curve.

    And WUWT is not the only blog going down. All blogs of climate ostriches are losing readers.

    ReplyDelete
  5. It's funny how you run into the same kind of people time and time again throughout life. In this case, the author of this site, is representative of the stupid geek kid who went around telling everyone how dumb they were when in reality, they could barely count and had zero social skills.

    How desperate for attention do you have to be to create a website devoted to calling others "idiots"? Did you not get enough hugs as a child? Do you not have a girl friend? (I can understand why not)

    One of the other things these geeks did was to pretend that they know about things they cannot possibly fathom. To disagree even in the slightest is to suffer a deluge of insults and derision, followed by tedious, inaccurate and largely made up lectures.

    Unless you are one very board scientist, I doubt you could stand before a class of freshmen students and adequately explain any of the charts and graphs you have on your site, let alone the models behind them. It's out of the question that you would be able to defend them.

    So while I've been slightly amused by your quaint little site in the same way one is when driving through a slum. I'll just chalk this place up as another pedantic pretender site.

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  6. On this page you link to WUWT without a NoFollow tag. And on every page via your blog roll you link to WUWT and Co.

    This way you tell Google that these are popular pages and should be ranked high. In gather that is not your intend. For more information see my post.

    http://variable-variability.blogspot.de/2013/09/nofollow-WUWT-unintentional-link-love.html

    ReplyDelete
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