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 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:
What the Cook et al. paper did was examine 11,944 abstracts from papers that were published from 1991 to 2011 that included the words “global climate change” or “global warming” in their abstract. What they found after analysing these abstracts is that among those that expressed a position on global warming, 97% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
They also contacted 8,547 authors to ask if they could rate their own papers and got 1,200 responses, which meant that 2,142 papers were also rated by their authors on their endorsement level. The results for this again found that 97% of the selected papers stated that humans are causing global warming. This was done to determine that there wasn’t any sort of inherent problem in the rating system used and this seems to indicate that.
Continue reading 97% Climate consensus ‘denial’: the debunkers again not debunked
The term chemtrail comes from the chemtrail conspiracy theory where the claim is made that some of the contrails left by aircraft are chemical or biological agents. According to this conspiracy theory these are deliberately sprayed at high altitudes as ordered by governments. The more commonly stated reasons that I’ve heard for doing this is for mind control or population reduction.
I don’t think that I have to spend much time on telling you that this is complete and utter nonsense that’s not supported by any evidence. Just the logistics involved and the amount of people who need to be in on this make it impossible to do.
The reason I’m now talking about this is that Watts published a guest blog post by Tim Ball (archived here) in which Ball talks about the nonsense of chemtrails. With Watts saying this about it in a note he attached at the beginning:
Like with the essay Saturday about isotasy/glacial rebound being a myth, I don’t think the chemtrails idea has any merit whatsoever. Dr. Tim Ball points out more bad science – chemtrails, which are really just contrails, and which has a cult-like following much like some of the worst theories of global warming zealots – Anthony
The guest blog post in question is written by Richard Guy who argues in it that Post Glacial rebound is a myth (also known as isostatic rebound). According to him it’s a “false concept” and says that it’s part of “Geological theology”. This last one is apparently his way of referring to the scientific field of geology.
The evidence he uses to argue for this is ‘interesting’ to say the least:
Several months ago Cook et al released a paper in which they analysed the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
What they did in that study is examine 11,944 abstracts from 1991 to 2011 that included the words “global climate change” or “global warming” in their abstract. What they found after analysing these abstracts is that among those that expressed a position on global warming, 97% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
When they asked the authors of those papers to rate their own papers they again found that 97% stated that humans are causing global warming. They also contacted 8,547 authors to ask if they could rate their own papers and got 1,200 responses. The results for this again found that 97% of the selected papers stated that humans are causing global warming. They did this to determine that there wasn’t any sort of inherent problem in their rating system and this seems to indicate that.
For anyone who is aware of other studies that did something similar these results weren’t a surprise. As studies like Oreskes 2004, Doran 2009 and Anderegg 2010 showed similar results. It’s the very reason I just shrugged at these results and mostly watched everything play out from a distance. To me they just didn’t seem that interesting, or that they would generate a lot of controversy.
Continue reading Cook’s 97% Climate Consensus Paper Doesn’t Crumble Upon Examination
Watts is known for using Alexa web traffic statistics to show how well his website is doing compared to other blogs. Often to boast he’s doing far better than for example Skeptical Science or Real Climate.
It was just me giving an opinion on how inaccurate the Alexa data is and that you shouldn’t use it. Watts did respond to my remark, and before I address his response to me I’ll explain why I think Alexa data is unreliable.
Continue reading Why You Shouldn’t Use Alexa Traffic Statistics
Q. Why do a couple of guest essays have nom de plum names? Aren’t you adamant about people putting their names behind their words?
A. Anyone who publishes on WUWT must be known to the proprietor, and they are all known to me. This requirement is mainly for legal reasons. When running a large enterprise such as this, there may be a legal challenges to writing, and the writer must be held accountable for his/her own words in that case. For the few occasions where somebody wants to publish on WUWT using a nom de plume, the first requirement is full disclosure before publication, and that communications is recorded should there ever be an issue in the furture. Of the nearly 10,000 posts on WUWT, there are just a few that were given the opportunity to publish this way. For good reason, some of those authors fear things like this from activists such as Greenpeace: We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work. And we be many, but you be few.
Publishing on WUWT under a nom de plume known to the proprietor is different from anonymous commenters or some of my doppleganger blog children who use the cloak of anonymity to launch personal attacks against me or contributors to WUWT. For example, in a U.S. court of law, the accused is given the right to openly face the accuser(s). WUWT’s author policy of allows for that if need be. With external attackers who claim self righteousness under the cloak of anonymity, not so much.
No, allowing nom de plum names – also known as pseudonyms – for authors of content on your website is not different from anonymous users criticising Watts.
Continue reading Responding To Watts About Anonymous Opinions
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.
Yesterday Bob Tisdale published the blog post titled ‘
On Watts Up With That (WUWT) another attempt at discrediting the 
Well, according to Watts that is.
Anthony Watts published 
Several months ago 
Watts is known for using Alexa web traffic statistics to show how well his website is doing compared to other blogs. Often to boast he’s doing far better than for example Skeptical Science or Real Climate.