There’s been some wild claims out there the past few days since BEST released their results in a media blitzkrieg on October 20th prior to peer review. But this one from Grist writer Jess Zimmerman has to rank up there as the most bizarre – ever.
She writes: (emphasis mine)
This raises the question: What will it take to convince deniers? What if they burned up in their shoes, would that do it? What if God came down and drew a hockey stick graph on the wall? What if Dumbledore explained it using his Pensieve? Look, if science doesn’t work, it’s going to have to be God, magic, or spontaneous combustion; that’s just a fact of nature.
Umm… news flash Jess. The BEST data shows that the world had been warming since 1800, long before we even had Tyndall and Arrhenius looking at CO2, long before the industrial revolution, and long before SUV’s, Exxon, modern living and the many other things attributed to causing warming appeared on the scene.
So far I have not seen any correlation with increased spontaneous human combustion.
Perhaps Jess missed the things that I agree with. I’m sure she’ll take the time to read my Agreements and Disagreements Essay and append her article.
Have a look at some of the other work from Jess by clicking on her Grist image, it’s a real eye opener. So is her “she writes” page.
h/t to Tom Nelson
=======================================================
UPDATE: Reader Keith points out this blatant lie from Jess Zimmerman in another recent story:
Sorry Jess, I call bullshit on you: From NASA Earth Observatory:
In September 2011, sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean declined to the second-lowest extent on record. Satellite data from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) showed that the summertime ice cover narrowly avoided a new record low.
How do people like this get to be writers?
I’ve emailed Dr. Walt Meier at NSIDC to ask him to ask Grist to make a correction. We’ll see how interested either are in truth.
==============================================================
UPDATE2: Within 15 minutes of emailing him, Dr. Walt Meier of NSIDC posted this on the Grist article:
The statement “The Arctic now has ice-free summers, 90 years in advance of predictions.” is most definitely flat-out wrong. The Arctic has not had less than 4 million square kilometers, in our data and any other source one cares to look at, even at the summer minimum.While extent and thickness are decreasing and ice-free summers are certainly possible, even probable, in much less than 90 years, we are not there yet. Not even close.
Walt Meier
Research Scientist
National Snow and Ice Data Center
University of Colorado
Good for him. Thank you Dr. Meier. Now we just need to alert the Grist editors, WUWT readers let ’em know please! http://www.grist.org/contact/contact-us
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
March 20th?
REPLY: Typo, fixed, thanks – Anthony
Maybe it’s a trial balloon: “deniers need to be exterminated.”
Is Jess Mike Roddy’s long-lost child?
Good lord – these people really do have soup for brains.
Seems to me Ms. Zimmermans’ head is about to explode – spontaneously. Does that count, and would it prove her thesis? Nah. It would make a mess in the kitchen tho.
Oh dear. Another one.
“What if God came down and drew a hockey stick graph on the wall?”
Yup. That would do it. But until then try claiming the graph referenced in this post proves the globe is warming.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/10/22/first-thoughts-on-best/#comment-307402
To me it says: Some stations are warming, some aren’t and it would be really interesting if we knew why CO2 was so damn selective!
From Jess’ website ( http://www.shewrites.com/profile/JessZimmerman )
Who I am:
I make words into sentences for people who will pay me.
Ideally I would write for Hitchhiker’s Guide Trivia, Songs I Like, Defunct TV Shows, Futile Rage, Hair Color Tips, Weird Comic Books, and Strong Opinions About Adventure Games Monthly.
Failing that I prefer to write about science, nerd things, and ladybusiness.
I wonder what long-time Gristophile Daniel Coffey is thinking about this?
There is a lot invested in AGW, a great deal of need on the part of Warmists to participate in the remaking of the world. Hence a bit of hysteria upon rejection.
What would it take? Well, REAL science would do it, but there’s precious little of that in climate science these days.
I take it some are praying to the great co2 god that deniers are taken first. That co2 must be really rather smart and selective as well as being powerful. Oh oh, I feel a warm spot on the back of my head, whew! It was only the sun shine coming through the hatch. It does get hot down here in the tropics! TG for jets, so one can jet back and forth between the tropics and the land of the delusion up North where it is not so warm.
I wonder if people like Jess ever consider the fact that there are those who know more about things than she does. I wonder if she ever wondered why there are some scientists who say one thing, and others who disagree. I wonder… but does she?
Just because someone is an “expert” doesn’t even remotely make them correct about anything. I wonder how someone can be a “journalist” and never consider the other side of any given story. The whole concept of a “climate scientist” is new, it’s invented, it’s recent, and it would be insane to believe that they are all getting it right, all the time.
I wonder if people like Jess ever consider that practically everyone on one side of an issue have certain political leanings, while those on the other side have opposing political leanings… What would it take to have her consider that AGW believers want to take money from the first world and give it to the third world, while “deniers” think the third world should be encouraged to develop themselves using inexpensive, abundant energy… I wonder what it would take to make people like Jess stop repeating everything they’re told and actually start investigating facts…
And finally, I wonder what it would be like to live in a black and white, wrong and right, “truth” vs. “denier” reality, where you can write stuff like that, completely secure in the knowledge that “deniers” are uneducated dolts, while believers are enlightened, compassionate, intelligent evolved beings.
It may already have started:
” A man who burned to death in his home died as a result of spontaneous combustion, an Irish coroner has ruled. “
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15032614
Grist, which I’m shocked to still find in “print”, is about as serious and reputable as The Onion… only they don’t intend it to be so. Really, this is journalism akin to Creem and Tiger Beat in gravitas. Next Week: Scott Baio reveals his Eco-Turn Offs and the Fonz goes vegan for his next jacket.
Spontaneous human combustion has long since be debunked. Yes, with enough body fat, you can get a human being to burn at low temperatures. A little heat from a per-existing fire liquifies the fat and catches fire which will liquify more fat, etc. There are films of burning human corpses that are not being burned by the use of gasoline or other accelerator from reputable sources like police departments. Good grief, what is next. Ghosts, dakini, or other spirits. I though Keynes said they only effect the stock market, not the weather.
Since every visit by Gore and every international meeting trying to control CO2 is accompanied by unseasonally cold weather, it would seem that the Almighty has already given us some indication as to what’s going on!
Jess Zimmerman doesn’t seem to have any type of science background at all. Her “science” pieces seem purely political.
And she doesn’t seem to have much of a following. She seems to get 0 – 6 comments per post. Her post about Anthony Watts has 4 comments and 3 of them are defending Anthony.
Invoking God, now, are they? Well, it had to happen, sooner or later. Climatology has always been one part Science, two parts Religion, and three parts Ultra-Left Politics. Think Marx in a mitre wearing a lab coat.
/straight line
That’s hard to reconcile with Watts’ past statements. In a document he prepared for a think tank, Watts had written, “Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant ‘global warming’ in the 20th century.”
i think she’s invented a new logical fallacy- the ad dumbledore.
good to see she has a deep well of worldly experience from which to draw her metaphors.
profound.
“What if God came down and drew a hockey stick graph on the wall?”
As far as I know, the only time God wrote on a wall was to pronounce doom on the Chaldeans on the night that the Persians conquered the city of Babylon. And he didn’t draw, he wrote a message. This is where we get the expression “the writing on the wall”. Maybe Jess sees the writing on the wall and knows that the jig is up. In fact, maybe Jess Zimmerman should read the Bible book of Daniel, the meaning of the writing on the wall can apply to the global warming empire.
thanks Jess, for opening your mouth and removing all doubt….
“Dozens of people spontaneously combust each year. It’s just not really widely reported.”
Spoken by David St. Hubbins, in the documentary This Is Spinal Tap.
So there you have it, stated on the record, by someone who has witnessed it happening first-hand. As Zimmerman rightly states: it’s a fact of nature. And that’s a fact.
I’m not worried about spontaneous human combustion. I have Blue Cross.
But I do keep a bucket of water nearby.