Watts Up With Watts? Error!
BPSDB Kevin Grandia recently profiled Peter Sinclair’s Climate Crock video “Watts up with Watts?” that I shared in Mixed Media; Kevin gave you a choice of Debunking Another Climate Change Crock: What’s Up with Anthony Watts? or [flame war edition].
The Watts Up With That readers are an “emotional” little gang of online trolls … the massive flame war that the video has provoked.
Trivial aside, I got a link to a repost that had obviously been babble fished such that the above read:
The Watts Up With That readers are an “emotional” lowercase association of online trolls that pay artefact likewise such instance on their safekeeping …. to wager the large burning struggle that the recording has provoked.
“Flame war” as “the large burning struggle”, I liked that.
The latest development: Global warming denier uses the DMCA to silence a critic
Well, the video must have been really on target — it stung Anthony Watts so badly that he initiated a DMCA “takedown” action and got the “Watts Up With Watts” video removed from youtube.com!
Apropos of this commenter Hank Roberts offers:
“Best summary on DMCA, takedown, copyright, and how to respond to a takedown. Clip and save for reference. Make sure to follow the links provided: Daily Kos :: Comments Global warming denier uses the DMCA to silence a critic”
Climate Change in Their Own Village
Depending on your audience I think many people will find this simple first hand account by high school kids much more compelling than all of the reports and studies combined:
Thanks to Twilight Earth and the post Alaskan High School Kids Document Climate Change in Their Own Village (Video) for the find.
Goldilocks and the Greenhouse:
A good little video on anthropogenic climate change. Pretty standard up to the 3 minute point, but then we get a nice little discussion of the Venus and Mars comparison and just how precarious our climate regime is.
Goldilocks and the Greenhouse: Science and Climate Change | LiveScience.com also at Space.com. Unfortunately there is no way to embed it that I was able to find. Not perfect, but useful.
Parodies?
Scientists underestimate insanity of climate change “Skeptics”
This from an Onionesque spoof site:
The latest output from the “Institute of a Stable climate” that suggests “invisible plasma comets” are responsible for Australia’s record high temperatures and drought, has sealed the reputation for climate change deniers as…differently-abled in the sanity sphere.
A spokesloon for the Institute, under conditions of strong sedation, ranted “I have ice cubes in my refrigerator, this proves that global warming is a myth, where’s your precious greenie, leftie, god now Al Gore, huh?, huh?, It’s all a conspiracy by money hungry hippies and greedy anarchists” Proceeding paused here as more sedation was administered, and the spokesloon removed some foam from his mouth.
Scientists underestimate insanity of climate change “Skeptics”
and then this one
“an introductory four week course in the art of climate change denial featuring a new prayer topic every week, presented for the objective fundamentalist in an unbiased, socially conservative dominionist setting. Upon completing CCD 101, students should be able to defend the fossil fuel industry, willfully ignore and wildly mis-interpret data, and reconstruct their own apologetic to the secular consensus held by climate researchers.”
Clearly meant to be humour, but frankly hard to distinguish from comments on climate blogs and news sites. I suspect they are slamming up against Poe’s Law
“Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.
Poe’s Law makes the clear point that it is hard to tell parodies of fundamentalism from the real thing, since they both seem equally insane. Poe’s Law – RationalWiki
Seriously. Compare those parodies to this allegedly serious post:
Climate ‘Science’ Caught Lying « the Air Vent
The author pretends to critique a scientific paper, but:
- has quite clearly never read it (like that’s new);
- quotes sections of a media piece, but doesn’t actually say anything specific about it;
- offers no facts or evidence of any kind;
- just makes repeated rejections (denials?) based on absolutely nothing.
Well, it’s the internet … you get all kinds of loonies posting the most idiotic things. Fair enough, except I have seen this drivel actually posted to news sharing sites as a “refutation” of the paper, and the Dumbosphere “votes it up” as a legitimate story!
So who is parodying whom?
Censoring science:
No doubt most folks caught some version of this news story 
Government releases spy satellite images of Arctic ice – Science Fair – USATODAY.com which led to:
- Revealed: the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide | Environment | The Observer
- Think Progress » Obama administration reveals evidence of global warming kept secret under Bush.
Just another chapter in the ongoing Republican War on Science, but you may have missed this back in April:
In “The Denial Machine,” Climate Science Watch director Rick Piltz reviews eight years of the climate change disinformation campaign in the Bush administration for a special end-of-2008 issue of Index on Censorship devoted to examining the Bush legacy on human rights, secrecy, and censorship
Some Updates:
McLean, de Freitas and Carter
Only In It For The Gold has this update + expansion on the AGU/JGR debacle
“The denial group is behaving in a very revealing way.
The denialists are now trumpeting a very silly argument that El Nino (a quasiperiodic oscillation with energy in the 2-10 year band) is dominating secular trends in global temperature by an argument that I summarized in seven steps recently.
I would like to start the day with a shorter summary:
- 1) El Nino dominates interannual variability.
- 2) Frantic armwaving, accompanied by sciencey-looking charts and graphs.
- 3) Therefore, warming is predominantly due to El Nino.
- 4) Therefore, very not the IPCC.”
Pretty good summary of the paper actually. Much more accurate than the abstract.
Meanwhile, at The Blackboard
“As you can see, the best estimate for the change in temperature at d_SOI=0 is positive (m=3.4 C/century). This means the best estimate for the trend based on this analysis says that the SOI does not explain away the warming trend. This is true even if, as MdF&C argue, part of some recent uptick in temperatures is due to an trend in the SOI over the same period.
In any case, my current assessment of the paper is this: The authors have not shown that warming over the past 30 to 50 years can be explained as a result natural variations in the SOI. Certainly, they haven’t shown this for warming during the satelitte record. ”
That SOI paper: Climate change worse than we thought?
and
Tamino, to his credit, did high light an important flaw. Oddly, I thought he didn’t take it far enough. In reality, if we go through the correlation, and stick in numbers for the value of the rate of change in SOI, the numbers support the argument “Climate change: Worse than we thought” (Comment#16700)
Missed an important one 😦
“…this suppresses long term variation, and enhances short term variation. They assert that this removes noise, while, in fact, it amplifies noise (high frequency/short period components of the record). Alternately, they are defining ‘noise’ to be the long period part of the records — the climate portion of the record.”
Added to: Is our whole dissembly appeared?
Meanwhile, S2 draws our attention to:
John McLean (or someone pretending to be him) posted a defence of the paper at Open Mind.
I imagine that he now wishes that he hadn’t.
Tamino’s response concludes with
Let’s “duke it out” in the peer-reviewed literature, shall we? Expect a comment on your paper to appear soon in JGR. I can hardly wait to see how you’ll respond there.
Inhofe’s Folly
No surprises here:
“Senator James Inhofe (R-Exxon) has misused the power of his chairmanship and, now, Ranking Minority status on the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) committee to expend taxpayer resources on distorting, misleading, and outright deceiving when it comes to scientific issues, most notably in relation to questions of Global Warming.”
- Scientific Inquiry concludes: Inhofe List “Not credible …” (and at Daily Kos)
- Senate Minority Report on global warming not credible, says Center for Inquiry
- Ranking Member’s Senate Minority Report on Global Warming Not Credible, says Center for Inquiry
and more folly:
Added to: NOT Sparta – Inhofe and the 400
Willy Nilly
Joseph Romm pretty much summarizes it:
There are lies, damn lies, Breakthrough Institute statistics, and then — at the very bottom, where you find the crap that is really hard to scrape off – George Will columns.
It’s reached the point where I find I can’t care what George Will actually said anymore. If Will said it, it’s pretty much a given that it’s not only false, but moronically so. More on Will:
- Memo to Post: If George Will quotes a lie, it’s still a lie « Climate Progress
- Climate denialists George Will, Mark Steyn and school children « The Way Things Break
- Latest George Will atrocity : Deltoid
- Sarah Palin, George Will, and Potemkin debates | Grist
- George Will and WattsUpWithThat embrace a proud former shill for a man convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges « Climate Progress
- Fred Hiatt and George Will think Washington Post readers are morons « The Way Things Break
From April and before
- One Blue Marble Blog » Blog Archive » Double Dumb Ass Award: George Will
- George Will misrepresents WMO data again : Deltoid
- Matthew Yglesias » Eugene Robinson: George Will “Crossed the Line”
- Wonk Room » The WonkLine: July 14, 2009
- Things Break takes down George Will’s latest : A Few Things Ill Considered
- Matthew Yglesias » Tom Toles Hits George Will
- Wonk Room » George Will’s Latest Denier Column Links To Global Boiling Document
- Think Progress » In article on new climate change data, Washington Post takes a shot at its own columnist.
- In search of George Will’s climate-denial sources : The Island of Doubt
Added to: George F. Will goes platinum
Carlin and the bogus EPA censorship story:
“[Update, July 8: In another astonishing twist, I have just discovered that Marlo Lewis, the National Review columnist whose piece Carlin lifted as discussed below, is – wait for it – a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which just happens to be the right-wing think tank that has been touting the so-called “suppression” of Alan Carlin’s report. I’ll have more on this soon.]”
Probably the most complete account of the whole debacle. “Denialist attack on EPA handling of Carlin global warming contrarian document:
Of course like all Urban Legends, jsut because it’s been shown beyond all doubt to be idiotic nonsense doesn’t actually stop the mainstream media from reporting it as fact:
Added to: Carlin Lives! Funnier than ever
Over the last 50 years, the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) warmed at a rate 4.8 times the global average. Earth Gauge
We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 272 … still no evidence.
Comment Policy
Comments that are not relevant to the post that they appear under or the evolving discussion will simply be deleted, as will links to Denier spam known to be scientific gibberish
- The “Mostly” Open Thread is for general climate discussion that is not relevant to a particular post. Spam and abuse rules still apply;
- The “Challenging the Core Science” Comment Thread is for comments that purport to challenge the core science of anthropogenic climate change.
Greenfyre's 
I’ll shamelessly mention my own run through on the McLean, de Freitas, and Carter paper, posted this morning (27th).
As you note, El Nino is taken as a periodic feature in the 3-7 year time range (your 2-10 is a new one on me, but makes no difference to conclusions). What the authors did was apply a poor-quality bandpass filter that emphasizes (response function greater than 1) what is happening in the 1.5-7 year window. I show the response function, along with a number of illustrations of what is going on for those who are not already familiar with response functions.
This might have been ok, except the authors go on to ignore the fact that they had performed a biased filtering process and claim, anyhow, that they’ve explained nearly all variance. Even if they had done their filtering properly, that is a false statement. Such explanations as they have, apply only to their filtered series.
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That was a great video. Sad to see Watts couldn’t have his followers shown the truth about his pointless attempts to invalidate the NOAA data. All the while ignoring the data from the rest of the world.
Wow, a lot of comments at once (might be be too many in one thread for sensible followups). [1]
But, regarding Jeff Id’s comments at tAV, for context it may be instructive to view his recent article there, especially the end, which says:
“No global warming again but that won’t stop the media onslought. The media won’t let the data slow them from continuing our march toward world-wide socialist governance. You may find that statement extreme, in which case my opinion is – you aren’t paying attention.”
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When you don’t have facts, evidence and science on your side, silencing your critics is the next best thing. *Now* I’m certain I cannot feel more contempt for Watts.
It’s going to be interesting watching Watts cherry pick, distort and dissemble if new predictions of much faster warming over the next five years come true.
P.S. Almost forgot, if you haven’t heard – the games up, folks. McIntyre has got himself a ‘mole’ “deep within Hadley CRU”. He’s now in possession of some obsolete data. The whole ACC scam is about to be blown out of the water. Again.
And he’s got (at least) 127 responses!
Thanks, DavidCOG. I haven’t laughed so much in ages. 🙂
But wait – weren’t the CRU supposed to be the good guys, since they still have 1998 as the warmest year on record and don’t employ Jim Hansen?
This is Watts waxing-lryical on supposed censorship of the crock-science he defends;
This reminds me of Galileo and his fight with the Roman Catholic Church in 1632. Galileo wanted to publish a book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems which totally revised the earth centric view of the universe favored by scientists, scholars, and clergy of the time and built on the work of the earlier astronomer Copernicus. Galilieo was tried and imprisoned for daring to speak out against the “consensus” of the time for what he saw as a scientific truth.I think we would all do well to follow this maxim: “People who live in greenhouses shouldn’t throw stones”.
Yes Mr Watt’s, People who live in greenhouses shouldn’t throw stones – so why are you hefting a breezeblock? Sacred of debate? It seems the answer is yes.
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Yes – the “Galileo Defense” is a real laugher; it is the fall back position in the flow chart of AGW denialism.
“This reminds me of Galileo…” link is here. Its a reaction to a 2007 Weather Channel blog post – not to anything current.
Also, does anyone know what specific material of the Climate Crock video infringed on Watts & Surfacestations? They can’t possibly remove a video for simply mentioning Watts, can they? There must have been actual web-content incorporated into the video. I really hope Sinclair hits back hard with a follow up video on this.
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An update to Watt’s mole story:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/28/hadley-cru-discovers-the-mole/
Also, what kind of person would post on a regular visited denialist blog that they had a “mole” at the Hadley center. He had to have known that somebody would read it and alert the hadley center. Which probably was the plan all along to bring more hits to his blog.
Most points on your list are neither new nor a threat to the theory of anthropogenic global warming. ,