In my previous interactions with Anthony Watts it really showed that he doesn’t have the necessary knowledge and experience to comment on IT related subjects. A subject I’m far more knowledgeable about as I’m a software engineer.
This was obvious with his blog post ‘Obama’s “for the children” climate change video announcement – only a few hundred views so far’ where he didn’t know that the view count for a YouTube video isn’t updated in real time. He ignored my criticism about it and the video that had just “a few hundred views so far” is now at 450,000 views. Which means this video has done very well compared to other videos that often don’t exceed 10,000 views.
Sometimes I get email from visitors to my site in which they ask my opinion on something or sent me something interesting to watch/read. And sometimes I get an email that’s critical about something that I wrote. Most of the time I react to those message privately, but the email I received this time I found interesting enough to write a public response for.
The email in question is a response to my blog post ‘Piers Corbyn: The UN IPCC And All It Stands For Must Be Destroyed‘ and the email is quite critical towards what I said in my blog post. I’ve lifted the text as is from the email and you’ll find my responses below the quoted segments:
Continue reading Mail Call: A Corbyn Supporter Speaks Up
In that particular blog post he mangled the latest IPCC report and the science that it is based on. Most of what he said was simply not an accurate representation of what IPCC does and the science used for the latest report. I expected better from someone who does climate research.
This week there was again a distinct lack of updates on my website. Partly because I was sick for a couple of days the previous week, and partly because I had a busy week at work. But mostly because I was spending my time working on an update for the theme I use for this website.
Like the last time that I announced a theme update it means that something significant has changed. With the 2.0.7 update it was about the changes I made to the available pages and their impact on this website. For my visitors this was an important update as those pages contain for example the rules of conduct for this website. Versions 2.0.8 through 2.0.12 didn’t get a mention as they were small point releases that either fixed a small issue or changed something minor.
However, with version 2.1 a few things have changed significantly. Most of it you won’t notice but there are three big changes that influence how you interact with this website.
Sometimes I truly wonder if the so-called sceptics ever take the effort to do the bare minimum of research before they attack the IPCC. This time I wondered this thanks to the guest blog post “What would the IPCC have written if there had been 12 years of rapid warming?” (archived here) that Anthony Watts deemed worthy to be published on his blog.
In this particular blog post Stephane Rogeau proposes two situations. One situation where the IPCC readily admits that the rapid warming is in part due to natural variability. And one where the IPCC uses this as evidence for the dire impact we humans are having on the climate.
This is the text that Rogeau says could be written by the IPCC if they would honestly write about it in their report:
Continue reading What The IPCC Would Write If There Had Been 12 Years Of Rapid Warming
My opinion of that letter from Tisdale is that it doesn’t accurately represent the IPCC and their latest release. There are a lot of reasons of why I hold that position and what I wrote for ‘No, Global Warming Hasn’t Stopped‘ gives a good introduction about his mistakes about climate models. I can also recommend the article ‘The new IPCC climate change report makes deniers overheat‘ by Michael Mann for a better understanding of how the latest IPCC report often is misrepresented.
When I started on my open letter to Tisdale I knew we would never reach any sort of agreement on his points about climate research or the IPCC. That’s why I focussed on the following in his letter:
Continue reading This Is Why You Can’t Reason With ‘Climate Sceptics’
My opinion is that you’re not accurately representing the IPCC and their latest release. The reasons for that are numerous, and if you want to get a better understanding of what I mean by that I can recommend reading ‘No, Global Warming Hasn’t Stopped‘.
But we will probably never reach agreement on that point so I’m not going to focus on it. However, what I am going to focus on is the following that you said in your letter:
On YouTube I found a couple of videos about the new IPCC report that I found interesting. Especially since in 3 of the 4 videos we have the scientists that worked on the report explain what is in it.
In the first video we have several scientists explaining the context and meaning of the slow down in surface temperature increases. It’s a good and short rundown on what is happening, why, and what this all means.
For me Dr. Seuss wasn’t a big part of my childhood. Not that strange considering I grew up in The Netherlands and English is a foreign language for us. Which means that his materials aren’t as widely spread here as they are in the United States.
You do come across Dutch translations of his books and of course the odd movie from the United States. But that’s just noise compared to Dik Trom, Puk van de Petteflet or Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek. Now those are big and recognizable parts of my childhood (yeah I’m old, shush).
Ever since I’ve been aware of Piers Corbyn I’ve found him extremely confusing. Simply because what he says is so at odds with what we know in science, and because he’s very secretive about how arrives at his conclusions.
What I’m referring to are the weather predictions he makes via his company WeatherAction. What his company does is make long-term weather forecasts based on solar activity, the earth’s magnetic field, and the moon’s orbit. He calls it the Solar-Lunar-Action-Technique, or SLAT for short. He claims he gets a high rate of success with this technique and can predict the weather up to a year in advance; but I’m not convinced.
The problem is that what he uses for his predictions, like the sun, has at best a minor effect on weather and our climate. This is well known in the scientific community, yet he claims it has a big effect. But it’s also Corbyn that claims this high accuracy, there’s actually very little out there that hints at there being any skill to his predictions.
Continue reading Piers Corbyn: The UN IPCC And All It Stands For Must Be Destroyed
In my previous interactions with Anthony Watts it really showed that he doesn’t have the necessary knowledge and experience to comment on IT related subjects. A subject I’m far more knowledgeable about as I’m a software engineer.
Sometimes I get email from visitors to my site in which they ask my opinion on something or sent me something interesting to watch/read. And sometimes I get an email that’s critical about something that I wrote. Most of the time I react to those message privately, but the email I received this time I found interesting enough to write a public response for.
Yesterday Bob Tisdale published the blog post titled ‘
Ever since I’ve been aware of Piers Corbyn I’ve found him extremely confusing. Simply because what he says is so at odds with what we know in science, and because he’s very secretive about how arrives at his conclusions.