Not political activism III: watch out, it’s Wealth Transfer!!!

cite as: F. Bi. 2009. Not political activism III: watch out, it’s Wealth Transfer!!! Intl. J. Inact., 2:89–90

Meteorologist and global warming ‘skeptic’ Anthony Watts once more shows how he’s opposed to the theory of man-made global warming for purely scientific reasons, and how extremely willing he is to focus on the climate science and keep politics out of it: [cached]

The Copenhagen Climate Change Treaty Draft – wealth transfer defined, now with new and improved “dignity” penalty

Wealth transfer! Goodness gracious! Now that is a purely scientific reason to deny global warming if I ever saw one. And the blog commenters helpfully elaborate on this by offering up their nuggets of total science:

This is vewwwy vewwwy sewwwious

cite as: F. Bi. 2009. This is vewwwy vewwwy sewwwious. Intl. J. Inact., 2:78

Question: Out of the following events, which is the most serious of them all?

1. The Heartland Institute, a think-tank which opposes global warming regulation (among other things), was found to move its ‘conference’ audios around on its web server, causing some hyperlinks to the audios to become broken for a short while.
2. Global warming ‘skeptic’ Anthony Watts reports that another ‘skeptic’, Steve McIntyre, suddenly finds that some files originally on a climate research center’s web server are now missing. The files might have been purged, they might have been moved; who knows. But let’s just assume that there’s something really big and really sinister going on. [cached]
3. A think-tank was found to send anti-climate-regulation letters with forged letterheads to a US Senator. (A brave act of civil disobedience, I suppose.) [cached]
4. Watts slaps a bogus DMCA complaint onto a YouTuber for reproducing the cover page for one of his ‘reports’. [cached]
5. I need a drink.

Answer: According to Watts, the correct answer is 2. But I beg to differ: the answer should be 5.

Not political activism II

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. Not political activism II. Intl. J. Inact., 1:201–203

Anthony Watts is a meteorologist who’s merely skeptical of the global warming theory for non-political reasons, and totally hates it when supposedly unbiased ‘climate scientists’ engage in political activism. Therefore, we can reasonably expect that Watts is not engaging in political activism.

And indeed, he’s not engaging in political activism. I repeat, he’s not engaging in political activism. Dang, do I really need to repeat that? Anthony Watts is not engaging in political activism! Did you hear me? Anthony Watts Is Not Engaging In Political Activism! Anthony Watts Is Not Engaging In Political Activism! Not Engaging In Political Activism!

EPA screw-up turns into… another worldwide conspiracy?

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. EPA screw-up turns into… another worldwide conspiracy? Intl. J. Inact., 1:199–200

"EPA owes it to the American public to reopen the comment period and let the people speak."

Maureen Martin, senior fellow for legal affairs at the Heartland Institute, is unhappy about something:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from about 1.2 million new or expanded structures [...]. The regulation would create a bureaucratic nightmare beyond imagination. The mere proposal of such regulation already has.

The formal comment period on the regulations proposed in the name of controlling global warming [...] closed last Friday (11/28). [...] EPA publicized out the wrong e-mail address, to which about 140,000 e-mails were sent. Untold thousands of them may still be floating around in cyberspace — EPA can’t say which ones have been received.

The alternative system for on-line submissions — EPA’s Web site — didn’t work. No one knows how many people tried to comment but couldn’t.

A sad, sad story of government incompetence, but there’s one problem: I can’t find anything corroborating this story. Even Anthony Watts’s inactivist blog is completely silent about it (Watts did write about the EPA’s request for comments back in July). Surely if there was such a huge blunder by the EPA that affected 140,000 Americans, we’d have heard something about it in the past few weeks?¹ What’s going on here?

Footnotes

1. While the article refers to 28 Nov as “last Friday”, it was published only on 22 Dec.

Sponsorship is in the air

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. Sponsorship is in the air. Intl. J. Inact., 1:160

While the Heartland Institute is looking for people to “sponsor” (ahem) certain stuff at its upcoming inactivist “2009 International Conference on Climate Change”, Anthony Watts is apparently looking for people who can sponsor him (as in money) to attend the conference. A plea for help from Chuck Norris Dee Norris:

Just an afterthought: As many of you know, Anthony does not receive funding for his work at www.surfacestations.org or here at WUWT [Watts Up With That?].  The funds to attend this conference will most likely come out of his pocket.  Look to your right and you will see at little yellow Donate button under the SHAMELESS PLUG heading.  WUWT gets over 10,000 views a day and if just 0.5% of this traffic contributes ten dollars apiece, we can entirely fund Anthony’s conference expenses.   How about it?   Do we walk the walk or just talk?

Norris says she also plans on attending. I wonder where she’s getting her conference funds from.

Not political activism

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. Not political activism. Intl. J. Inact., 1:159

Anthony Watts is not engaging in political activism:

In my opinion, this is lunacy – Obama’s thinking is completely off the rails now. He cites a new energy plan in August, then cripples it from the start with this sort of thinking. – Anthony

---

From Bloomberg News: Obama to Declare Carbon Dioxide Dangerous Pollutant

In contrast, James Hansen, by discussing global warming without reference to specific politicians, is actually guilty of political activism!

Also, the front page of Watts’s blog is a cornucopia of articles cut-and-pasted wholesale, mixed in with a bit of commentary that goes ‘Me too! The end.’ or ‘This is nuts! The end.’ (Well, there’s one exception.) But hey, he’s a meteorologist, so who am I to criticize him? :)

* * *

In other non-news, it occurred to me that Barack “completely off the rails” Obama, while deflecting the righteous Swiftboat-style attacks aimed at him, has discovered a way to defeat the Gish Gallop: simply talk about it.

Web 2.0 → Web 2.1 → Galileo 3.0

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. Web 2.0 → Web 2.1 → Galileo 3.0. Intl. J. Inact., 1:150–152

Yeah, I know the debate between Obama the Muslimist and McCain the Maverist just ended. But I’m not going to talk about that, because I just read something from Anthony Watts the, um, Galileist:

As readers of this blog and others such as Climate Audit know, reviewing new ideas, essays, and papers can often progress very quickly with the help of a widely varied readership. But we still wait for traditional methods somethimes, and for the fast pace of venues like this, it can be excruciatingly slow.

[...] That 8 weeks [of waiting for a scientific paper regarding AIRS] was long by electronic media standards, but pretty quick by traditional science journal standards. But that may be about to change. [...]

---

From the Economist, September 20th, 2008 (h/t to Dave Stealy)

[...] Peer-review possesses other merits, the foremost being the ability to filter out dross. But alacrity is not its strong suit. With luck a paper will be published several months after being submitted; many languish for over a year because of bans on multiple submissions. This hampers scientific progress, [...]

Now change is afoot. Earlier this month Seed Media Group, a firm based in New York, launched the latest version of Research Blogging, a website which acts as a hub for scientists to discuss peer-reviewed science. [...]

[...] According to Adam Bly, Seed’s founder, internet-aided interdisciplinarity and globalisation, coupled with a generational shift, portend a great revolution. His optimism stems in large part from the fact that the new technologies are no mere newfangled gimmicks, but spring from a desire for timely peer review.

Well, this is what the Research Blogging front page looks like:

In insulâ conspiramus

cite as: F. Bi. In insulâ conspiramus. Intl. J. Inact., 1:141–142

Announcement: Sign the “Sue Us” Petition and urge Monckton and others
to sue Gore and Hansen as repeatedly threatened! 60 signatures so far!

Estne caput novum cabali?

My trusty invisible ninja informant has just notified me of an interesting news item on one Providence Journal : the University of Rhode Island will be hosting an online chat about global warming, at Tuesday 1:30pm EDT! Also, at 7:30pm the URI will be doing a presentation to debunk a video sponsored by the inactivist Heartland Institute, but this one isn’t an online event.

(Note that this is Rhode Island we’re talking about — a place where inactivists fear to tread. Clearly the all-powerful Bavarian Climatati have a very strong presence there — perhaps the Climatati have shifted their HQ from Bavaria to Providence?)

Atque interim…

In other news, commenter Steve Bloom pointed me to a blog post (cached) by Chuck Norris Dee Norris which extols the virtues of global warming “skepticism”.

Surface stations redux

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. Surface stations redux. Intl. J. Inact., 1:122–125

Hmm, so Anthony Watts and John Goetz are still blowing smoke over the US surface temperature station records. As before, their overall claim is that many surface stations are “not-so-well maintained or well sited”, causing their temperature measurements to be biased towards a warming trend. And as of writing Watts, is still showing Orland, CA, and Marysville, CA, as examples of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stations respectively — the ‘good’ station shows cooling, while the ‘bad’ station shows warming, or so the claim goes.

Now, if this were true, then if we take the differences between successive temperature measurements from the two stations, the differences should form an upward trend with time — that is, they should become bigger and bigger as time goes by. To see if this is true, I wrote a little C++ program to calculate the differences and perform linear regression to find the least squares trend.¹ Here’s the result:

Surge, groupthink, petition

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. Surge, groupthink, petition. Intl. J. Inact., 1:112–114

Primo

On Monday, my blog got a plug from Mark Hoofnagle of Denialism… and this has caused a huge surge in hits on this blog as shown here. :) Thanks, Mark!

Secundo

So, I’d like to use this great opportunity to float a new idea of mine (while the attention mojo coming from Mark hasn’t yet run out…).