Flanagan (22:54:27) :

Smokey: things would be MUCH easier if you actually read the link I gave to the conference proceedings. Things are pretty clear: we’re above IPCC projections for sea levels that’s it. And there’s no real importance if it pleases you or not…

Unfortunately we don’t have the ability to measure this nebulous thing you call “sea levels” with anything close to millimeter precision. It’s a total fantasy.

This really seems like a hijack at this point…but I will just note that

(1) I couldn’t find the retraction you speak of. I’d be curious to see it. Could you tell me where I can get a look at it?

(2) You seem very interested in who is paying for DesmogBlog and the Suzuki Foundation. But, have you ever wondered who the funders of “Friends of Science” are? It seems difficult to find out for sure, as discussed here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Friends_of_Science

(3) According to this website http://www.science.ca/scientists/scientistprofile.php?pID=168 , Kenneth Hare “joined McGill University as a geography professor, meanwhile earning his PhD as an arctic climatologist.” (This was somewhere between 1945 and 1959.)

(4) I had no idea what Hudson Bay records had to do with what we were talking about, which is why I ignored your references to it. I now see from a web search that it was the subject of your father’s thesis, which doesn’t seem to be at all in contradiction with Dan Johnson’s statement that “Ball received a PhD in Geography in the UK in 1982, on a topic in historical climatology. “

“The surface temperature and heat content of oceans is now even above the most pessimistic IPCC projections, and Greenland is melting rapidly.”

That sounds very alarming. Good thing none of it is true.

With his quote above, Flanagan has officially gone off the deep end. He’s lost it, folks. Next thing you know, he’ll be saying: “…and down is up, white is black, evil is good, and global warming causes global cooling.”

…Oh, wait. He’s already said that last part.

http://media01.smartcom.no/Microsite/dss_01.aspx?eventid=4090

The guy in the very beginning of the video is King Harald.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/23/archibald-the-ap-index-says-there-will-be-no-sunspots/

The guy in the very beginning of the video is King Harald.

http://is.gd/19sD7

REPLY: That’s revealing of you. Why not simply just label me “denier” and be done with it? Why even presume to ask a question when you load the question with what you already believe to be the answer? i.e. “deny” .

The real answer is because you really aren’t interested. You just want to play “label, label”. Its what you do. Label first, ask questions later.

But I’ll indulge your labeling, because if I don’t then it will be followed by the inevitable “a-ha!” and the glee that comes with it, because again you see, you really aren’t interested in asking the question, you really aren’t interested in the answer, you just want to play a game.

So #1, and lets be clear, I’m not a “denier” to fit your childish labeling. Yes the temperature has gone up in the past 100 years. The causes and contributions are the items in question. CO2 has a component, so does natural variation, solar variance, aersols, ENSO, and yes, station siting. Which one is the dominant one? That remains to be proven.

I suppose Mr. Appel, you assume that knowledge is static, and that I’ve learned nothing of GISS since then. You also fail to note that in the entry you cite, during that Feb 08 period I cited all four global temperature metrics, not just GISS, see here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/02/19/january-2008-4-sources-say-globally-cooler-in-the-past-12-months/

and some detailed looks on the other datasets:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/02/04/rss-satellite-data-for-jan08-2nd-coldest-january-for-the-planet-in-15-years/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/02/06/uah-satellite-data-for-jan08-in-agreement-with-rss-data/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/02/19/another-global-temp-index-dives-in-jan08-this-time-hadcrut/

Just a few days later, I started to get a bit wary of what GISS was doing when I discovered they adjusted a rural station to look warmer, as in Cedarville, CA. There’s no justifiable reason for it.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/02/17/cedarville-and-giss-adjustments/

And on the same day, I discovered a station in Miami, AZ where GISS makes a warming trend brought on by horribly bad siting even worse by adjusting the past cooler. Again, not justifiable. If GISS was in the stock trading business, the SEC would toss their butts in jail.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/02/17/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-52-another-ufa-sighted-in-arizona/

A few months later, we get a handle on some of the bizarre data torturing that GISS did to Cedarville. The outcome wasn’t pretty:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/07/18/cedarville-sausage/

And then we have this mistake discovered in November 2008, where GISS can’t even properly track temperatures from month to month and bloggers have to point it out to them:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/10/giss-releases-october-2008-data/

So yes, I no longer cite GISS. As I said, knowledge is not static. I don’t trust GISS anymore, I think the quality control is terrible, and as of today, the dataset has an activist curator with an arrest record, so I don’t trust the gatekeeper to be impartial. But at one time, yes I thought that GISS was a scientifically derived dataset. No longer do I think so.

So label me all you want, I’ll stick with the hard earned knowledge of GISS problems as reason not to take the dataset as being credible anymore. – Anthony

Joel Shore, then tell me who was first?

Well, here is a discussion of Dan Johnson’s letter to the editor in which he notes the names of others in the field who got their PhD’s earlier: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/06/dear_tim_ball_sue_me.php I don’t know if the folks listed actually got their PhD’s specifically in climatology, although according to Johnson, your father’s was technically in Geography although his thesis was on a topic in historical climatology. Whatever.

Many have stood up to speak the truth because people like my father were brave enough not to fall for the party line. I wonder what you would do if your research in theoretical physics told you the exact opposite of what being spouted in the main stream media on the subject? Would you have the courage to stand up and say “wait a second”? Somehow I doubt it.

On a MUCH smaller scale, my PhD dissertation was actually coming into a small subfield and claiming that a hypothesis that one could argue seemed to be at least the rough consensus in this small subfield was wrong. (It certainly was not a big enough issue that the mainstream media were involved though!) However, we actually presented compelling evidence to support our claim.

Your father is entitled to his opinions but we don’t all find his arguments to be all that compelling.

Speaking of disparaging credentials…

Let’s look at what’s happening to Richard Lindzen. He is probably the most prestigious professor of meteorology, and atmospheric physicist in the world. Is he treated that way?

bio :

http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen.htm

Well, I am skeptical that he is “the most prestigious professor of meteorology, and atmospheric physicist in the world” but I do agree that he is a very distinguished atmospheric scientist. And, at a thread on Real Climate one time when someone in the comments section did disparage Lindzen’s credentials, Mike Mann responded by defending Lindzen’s credentials (while still saying that some of his statements about climate change have been very wrong-headed).

David Ball said:

Joel Shore, what about all the LIES told about my father over on DesmogBlog. I suppose that is ok. The CBC has continually LIED about my father and his being a shill for “big oil”. The LIES about his Climatology degree supposedly being honorary.

Well, I haven’t followed all of the controversies involving your father in full detail but I thought that I recall that he made some claims (such as being the first to receive a PhD in climatology in Canada or something like that) which may not have been correct. And, with all due respect to your father, I don’t think he is in the same league in terms of his stature or accomplishments in the fields of either climate science or atmospheric science as Jim Hansen or Richard Lindzen are. That is not meant as any sort of insult of him; I am not in the same league as Ed Witten, Bob Laughlin, or hundreds (if not thousands) of other theoretical physicists. That’s just the way it is.