Punch-drunk with warming, WUWT branches out to being wrong about Palestine

2014 was the warmest year on record. Until 2015. 2015 looks to hold the title until 2016 goes in the books. Massive coral bleaching, accelerated sea level rise. To paraphrase Cedric Coleman, it's hard out there for a denier.

Eric Worrall of the monkey house tries to paper over the gaping hole in the movement's foundation with a "jazz hands" routine about Mahmud Abbas, who took the opportunity presented by a UN signing ceremony for a climate accord to call out Israeli settlements in the occupied territories:

"The Israeli occupation is destroying the climate in Palestine and the Israeli settlements are destroying nature in Palestine," Abbas told the gathering of 175 countries signing a landmark climate deal.

Eric chooses to pretend that Abbas claimed Israeli settlements cause global warming:

 Regardless of your position on the Israel / Palestine situation, suggesting that Israeli settlements contribute significantly to global warming is utterly implausible.

Which of course is probably why he didn't say that. He said the occupation was damaging the environment in Palestine, which it most certainly is. Israelis have established over 200 illegal settlements in the West Bank alone. These communities establish themselves strategically to control resources or strategic points and to restrict the development of Palestinian communities. They are not established via any rational planning process, which would certainly not place hundreds of tiny towns, some just campers and trailers running off diesel generators, scattered over thousands of square kilometers. This is indeed destructive to the environment in the West Bank.

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.

BEST reports: News roundup & LOL

Should it be spiking upwards like that?

The BEST group's draft papers: here. From the press release:

COOLING THE WARMING DEBATE Berkeley Earth Releases Global Land Warming Analysis 20 October, 2011 Global warming is real according to a major study released today. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in average world land temperature of approximately 1˚C since the mid-1950s… On the basis of its analysis… the group concluded that earlier studies based on more limited data by teams in the United States and Britain had accurately estimated the extent of land surface warming.

News roundup:

WashPo -- A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data 

The Economist -- The heat is on

The New York Times -- Climate Skeptics Stay Unswayed

Peter Gleick at Forbes -- Breaking News: The Earth Still Goes Around the Sun, and It's Still Warming Up

Richard Mueller describes the BEST findings in the WSJ -- The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism

Science Daily -- Cooling the Warming Debate: Major New Analysis Confirms That Global Warming Is Real


The Independent is impressed by Dr. Mueller's about face -- Ex-climate sceptic now backs global warming

The Christian Science Monitor has my favorite headline so far -- Koch brothers accidentally fund study that proves global warming

Blogger reaction is going to be inescapable for the next few days, so for that, just galance at the blogroll.


The bottom line:

Ignoring Salby: An apology

A certain Professor Murry Salby has become the toast of the denialosphere after a talk in which he gives academic CPR to the long-flatlined myth that natural sources account for the recent rise in CO2 concentrations.

Along the way he revisits other "skeptical" golden oldies, arguing that CO2 has a short residence time, and slipping in the old non sequitur that human CO2 emissions are a small fraction of the "emissions" from natural sources.

Despite the fact that these points have been more or less done to death, despite the fact that there is no publication to refer to (one is promised soon) and no slides from the talk (an inexplicable and frankly dodgy omission) Salby has been everywhere. The Mothership. Jo Novo's virtual antiscience coffee klatsch (come to think, she's entertaining. Added to the denier blogroll.) Judith Curry, most bizarrely, gave it a quickly infamous "Wow."

Aside from the System Lords of Psuedoskepticism, the minor Goa'uld of denial are in full on dittohead mode: Bishop Hill, Andrew Bolt, and plenty of obscure bloggers you've probably never heard of (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Takedowns have quickly followed, including a bracing post from Open Mind, a takedown from Deltoid, and a typically devastating off-the-cuff analysis from Gavin Schmidt.

And so of course you must ask, why not me? Where is my enthusiastic, amateurish analysis upon which the true climate change news junkie has come to depend after they have read literally everything else on offer? Well, I'll confess: I haven't listened to the lecture, and I'm not going to. I'm not willing to waste an hour of my life on a lecture in which the lecturer spends much of their time explaining slides I can't see. It's one thing to spend precious hours of your life on repetitive, nonsensical, anti-intellectual, oft-refuted crap. That's what we do here; it's right on the masthead. But to waste time on an argument without being able to see any of the evidence or data -- no. That's a bridge to nowhere too far. Call me when he posts his slides.

Let's talk about the reaction for a minute, though. The reaction we can see. The reaction tells us a lot. The first thing it tells us is that good or bad, original or hackneyed retread, we're in for many, many repetitions of this argument. Once a piece of nonsense has circulated through Watts Curry Jo Novo et al, deniers will be repeating it endlessly, as fact, for years to come. Congressmen will endorse it. The bellignorant will throw it in the faces of their opponents and demand to know why the sublime Truth of Selby which overturns the entire Global Warming Conspiracy is being suppressed.

So Selby is going to be around. For a long -- long -- time. So once he produces his slides, there will be time to review his argument. In the meantime, note the way Selby has effortlessly breathed life into two or three hoary denier myths, despite being up against mountains of empirical evidence wielding nothing more than slides which he will not show us.

This is happening because for all their noise about the nobility of dissent from the consensus and the folly of appeals to authority, deniers recognize the tremendous importance of scientific credentials in determining credibility on scientific matters. And so when a professor who has published climate science arrives on the scene and says something "skeptical," it doesn't matter if his evidence is alien telepathic communications or Egyptian hieroglyphs he has discovered in his mash potatoes. He is instantly a star.

Which is fine -- we should be more interested in what climate scientists have to say about climate science than the ill-informed amateurs that form most of a "skeptic's" daily caloric requirement of misinformation. But the hypocrisy is thick. If they are so easily seduced by an argument with literally nothing to support it but the speaker's identity as a climate scientist, how can they justify ignoring the vast majority of climate scientists who are telling them AGW is real and dangerous?

Watts hugs Monckton -- by lying through his teeth.

Having been forced, in a humiliating climb-down, to admit that his hesitant foray into peer-reviewed research confirmed, rather than casting doubt on, global warming, Anthony Watts is back to his wheelhouse: dubious assertions and outright lies, spread widely by credulous followers.

It's times like this we miss Ben, whose heroic effort to catalog the logorrheic distortions of WUWT have led, understandably, to many long hiatuses from blogging:

"Lord Monckton wins National Press Club debate on climate"
Posted on July 20, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Love him or hate him, the man can win a debate. Andrew Bolt shares the results of the National Press Club Debate in Australia writing:

No wonder the warmists hate debate

The National Press Club debate’s results:

Lord Monckton – 10

Former Greens adviser Richard Denniss – 1

Journalists – 0.

Wow, sounds impressive. But I have a few questions. Who is voting? Who counted the votes? Why do all the references to Monckton "winning" this debate lead back to Bolt or Watts himself? Truth or fiction?

If you follow the link Watts provides, it leads to a post by the infamously inaccurate Andrew Bolt. Watts has thoughtfully reposted Bolt's entire post, except for the part that identifies the source of Bolt's information:

(Thanks to reader Adam.)

Yes, thank you "Adam." Now the picture is clearer. Somebody sent Andrew Bolt a claim that Monckton won the debate. The national press club hosts debates, but just like an American presidential debate, the host does not declare a winner. So "Adam" either polled random pseudoskeptics, or he just made numbers up. He passes it on to Andrew Bolt, who reports it as truth. Anthony Watts spreads the fiction, now concealing the dodgy unverifiable source. And the ultimate result is this: "monckton wins" and "national press club" gets you 3,550 hits on Google, including:

http://www.democracyforum.co.uk/environment-energy/97513-monckton-wins-press-debate-10-1-a.html

http://powerpointparadise.com/blog/2011/07/monckton-wins-national-press-club-debate-on-climate-and-boy-does-it-ever-clear-the-air/

http://truthiscontagious.com/2011/07/20/monckton-wins-national-press-club-debate-on-climate

These links are almost entirely* reposts of the same misleading assertions by Bolt as repeated and amplified by Watts. Yet one can see how these assertions, presented to "skeptics" on denier websites, play into an established narrative and are not likely to be questioned on examined critically, especially when they have passed through several sets of hands already. What we are seeing today is that with the help of gullible partisans, a lie can pass from rumor to a partisan conventional wisdom in a matter of hours, The internet has given new bite to the old saying that "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots."




* I did find one actual poll of 218 Australians who watched the debate. They found 49% thought Monckton won, 37% thought Denniss won, and the reminder were unsure. This is a far cry from the 91% - 9% claimed by Watts and Bolt.

Idiot post of the week

Normally I ignore Anthony Watt's whiny alternate universe, but this particular post is a gem of the genre:


Bizarre: NYT follows AAAS lead on “FOIA requests equate to death threats”

I'll say this for Anthony; he doesn't bury the lede. The two major lies are included in the title itself:

1. He uses quotation marks around this statement: “FOIA requests equate to death threats.” So he is claiming someone said exactly those words. That's what the quotation marks mean. If that's not so, he's lying (I know -- who woulda thought?) Did the American Association for the Advancement of Science say “FOIA requests equate to death threats”? Of course not. The press release Watts cites mentions the FOIA exactly once, to wit:

The sharing of research data is vastly different from unreasonable, excessive Freedom of Information Act requests for personal information and voluminous data that are then used to harass and intimidate scientists. The latter serve only as a distraction and make no constructive contribution to the public discourse.

Anthony's quote is fake. First lie.

Did the New York Times write “FOIA requests equate to death threats”? Of course not. It speaks to the bottomless gullibility of deniers that anyone would think that.

2. Did the New York Times "follow[] AAAS lead"(1) in criticizing the use of FOIA requests to harass scientists? Watts claims they did. It's ostensibly the subject of the post. So where's the quote from the New York Times endorsing the AAAS's criticism. There isn't one, because it never happened. Lie number two.

How did the New York Times get into the story? Watts relates a story told to him by Chris Horner (2):

Naturally this caught the eye of the New York Times, which had a young lady contact us for comment. Right off the bat it was clear she, too, had been rattled by the horrors of our outrageous efforts to …see certain records the taxpayer has paid for and which are expressly covered by transparency laws.

Her stance was sympathetic to AAS’s to the point of temper.

So what we have for evidence that "NYT follows AAAS lead on 'FOIA requests equate to death threats'" is a secondhand conversation in which a denier felt like a reporter didn't sympathize with his perspective and asked him questions that made him uncomfortable. The number of ways in which that fiction fails the test of reality is mind-boggling. It's heresay from an unreliable source; it's based on the fact that a reporter asked an uncomfortable question (presumably, that's her job); it equates the (speculated) views of one reporter with the entire New York Times organization despite the fact that nothing has been printed in the New York Times related to the press release by the AAAS.

So in summary, Watts uses a fake quote, based on a secondhand conversation as related by a sketchy right-wing extremist, in which he takes offense at questions asked by a reporter, to attribute to the New York Times an equivalence between FOIA requests and death threats, which he false attributes to an AAAS press release, even though his own link shows that to be another lie.

Just another day in the denier fantasyland, which more and more resembles a sweatshop of assembly-line lies, churning out fictional accounts of victimhood.



1. Note the brackets. Brackets inside quotation marks denote a minor change in a quote that should not change the meaning -- in this case, the omission of the "s" at the end of "follows," in order to make the grammar of the sentence correct. The brackets, like an ellipsis [. . .], alert the reader that a quote has been altered, even in a minor way, and if there is any question as the the meaning, you should refer to the original source. These are the rigid rules of direct quotations observed by people who are not lying sacks of shit.

2. The denier responsible for such sparkling analysis as "for decades, environmentalism has been the Left's best excuse for increasing government control over our actions in ways both large and small. It's for Mother Earth! It's for the children! It's for the whales! But until now, the doomsday-scenario environmental scares they've trumped up haven't been large enough to justify the lifestyle restrictions they want to impose. With global warming, however, greenhouse gasbags can argue that auto emissions in Ohio threaten people in Paris, and that only 'global governance' (Jacques Chirac's words) can tackle such problems."