And most regulars will recall William Connolley. Connolley’s likely best known for his hijinks as a former editor at Wikipedia. (See the WattsUpWithThat posts here, here, here, here, here, here here….and here.) But Connolley is also a former climate modeler with the British Antarctic Survey…plus a co-founder of, and former contributor to, the blog RealClimate, where he authored or co-authored a grand total of 14 blog posts from December, 2004 to March, 2008. Connolley now blogs at ScienceBlogs/Stoat.
WattsUpWithThat regulars will remember “Sou”, a.k.a. Miriam O’Brien. As Anthony Watts notes in his post My Blog Spawn:
Proprietor: “Sou from Bundangawoolarangeera” aka Miriam O’Brien of Mt. Beauty, VC, Australia
Some of Miriam’s skills: being a “a sixties-something woman with an interest in climate science“, sniping at WUWT, snark, Twitter snark, photography, business consulting, being on a board of directors.
Anthony continued:
Given her daily rants, she has now qualified for “Internet stalker” levels of infatuation and invective. Assigned to the permanent troll bin.
How do those two bloggers form the basis for an article?
More background: Connolley was the first troll to appear on the thread of my post I’m Retiring from Full-Time Climate Change Blogging. See his January 3, 2014 at 3:11 pm comment. But that’s not the subject of this post. This post is about Connolley’s first link in his blog post, one that serves as his reference for my work on the processes and aftereffects of El Niño and La Niña events—a body of work that includes more than 150 well-illustrated, data-based blog posts about El Niño and La Niña processes and one book solely about ENSO. Connolley writes. [I’ve removed his hyperlink attached to my name so that readers don’t get ahead of me]:
I hasten to add that RP Sr is not speaking of me, no, he is talking of renowned blogger Bob Tisdale.
Where would you have expected the hyperlink to lead? My blog? Maybe WattsUpWithThat? Maybe the exchange I had last year at SkepticalScience about the long-term effects of ENSO?
Give up? The hyperlink was to a post by Miriam O’Brien from HotWhopper. (I’m glad I hadn’t been drinking coffee when I clicked on that link.)
As a reference for his understanding of my work, Connolley linked Miriam O’Brien’s post Bob Tisdale is Perennially Puzzled about ENSO [Miriam hyperlinks to archives, not the original blog posts, so I’ve done the same here]. Miriam’s post is her response to my post titled SkepticalScience Still Misunderstands or Misrepresents the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). (The WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.) In that post, I provided graphs of a number of datasets broken down into logical subsets that contradicted the SkepticalScience representation of ENSO, and I challenged SkepticalScience to provide links to climate model-based, peer-reviewed papers that explained why those variables for specific parts of the globe responded as they did to El Niño and La Niña events.
Of course, Miriam O’Brien did not address the content of my post. She did not discuss the datasets I presented, as I had presented them. And Miriam quoted me out of context—nothing surprising there. Miriam could have saved herself a lot of time by simply noting that she agreed with Nuccitelli’s post and disagreed with mine–but she didn’t. Miriam O’Brien wasted her time creating a couple of illustrations so that she could restate Dana Nuccitelli’s misunderstandings and misinformation.
Miriam O’Brien fancies herself an expert on just about every climate-related subject. Yet she is only capable of using the Monty Python contradiction approach to argument, which is why I find her blog so amusing…and, at the same time, I find her blogging style pitiable because she doesn’t realize she’s become an embodiment of a Python caricature.
CLOSING
It’s quite telling that William Connolley, a co-founder of RealClimate, used Miriam O’Brien’s HotWhopper post as a reference for his knowledge of ENSO. It indicates his understandings of the complex coupled ocean-atmosphere processes and aftereffects of El Niño and La Niña events are as limited as Miriam’s. And if Miriam O’Brien serves as one of his scientific or technical experts, it also suggests Connolley’s arguments about human-induced global warming have grown as laughable as hers.
I must confess that I also have problems with ‘complex’ subjects. The deal with those is to try to strip away complexity [hoping that some essential thing did not get stripped off] until the subject becomes simple enough that I can understand it. I.e. to find out what are the important aspects.
Bob,
If you’re not taking flak, you’re not over the target.
But don’t let light arms fire deter you from the main target!
Do what you do best, Bob: Keep bombing the main target.
Mac
On your blog at http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/im-retiring-from-full-time-climate-change-blogging/#comment-14483 :
> William Connolley says:
> January 3, 2014 at 3:11 pm
William links to his FaceBook page at https://www.facebook.com/malaysianhoneybadger
It’s worth one visit.
lsvalgaard says: “I must confess that I also have problems with ‘complex’ subjects. The I deal with those is to try to strip away complexity [hoping that some essential thing did not get stripped off] until the subject becomes simple enough that I can understand it. I.e. to find out what are the important aspects.”
Then you’ll appreciate my stripped-down description of ENSO:
ENSO acts as a chaotic, naturally occurring, sunlight-fueled, recharge-discharge oscillator, where the La Niña phase acts as the recharge phase and El Niño acts as the discharge phase.
@ur momisugly Bob I’ve always thought the Earth’s climate could be far better modeled by an analog circuit than a digital construct. Most of Nature is analog.
Perhaps, as time has passed, he has experienced a gradual reduction in intellectual capability in ‘length, breadth and scope’; no longer capable of elastic expansion to encompass new ideas and learn new concepts owing to a rigorous, enforced, and/or compelled intellectual ‘confinement’ to an ideology which does not allow for a ‘fuller’, more dynamic environment or world …
. . “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
. . – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Sad, really. Intellectually handicapped by his own belief system and ‘practice’ thereof.
.
Snark…Whoppers…Models…GIGO…
Will they ever realise how bad they look? Nah,kennel blindness.
Keep up the great work Bob!
lsvalgaard says: “I must confess that I also have problems with ‘complex’ subjects. The [way] I deal with those is to try to strip away complexity [hoping that some essential thing did not get stripped off] until the subject becomes simple enough that I can understand it. I.e. to find out what are the important aspects.”
Thanks, Leif. Still a tricky process–some factors aren’t easily “strippable.” Some scientists resort to a false analogy, ignoring all the complexities and hoping that will carry the day. Models, on the other hand, often boil down to just a computational false analogy, with myriad opportunities for coding errors. But your method works in the long run, through testing and iteration.
Operations/housekeeping note: 2nd try on post.
Perhaps, as time has passed, he has experienced a gradual reduction in intellectual capability in ‘length, breadth and scope’; no longer capable of elastic expansion to encompass new ideas and learn new concepts owing to a rigorous, enforced, and/or compelled intellectual ‘confinement’ to an ideology which does not allow for a ‘fuller’, more dynamic environment or world …
. . “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
. . – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Sad, really. Intellectually handicapped by his own belief system and ‘practice’ thereof.
.
Bob Tisdale says:
January 11, 2014 at 11:23 am
Then you’ll appreciate my stripped-down description of ENSO
I did , indeed.
AW – I think nature at our scale is nearly 100% analog. Tiny things like time and thus distance, red shift, electron “orbitals”, et al are quantized.
Bob Tisdale says “Then you’ll appreciate my stripped-down description of ENSO:
ENSO acts as a chaotic, naturally occurring, sunlight-fueled, recharge-discharge oscillator, where the La Niña phase acts as the recharge phase and El Niño acts as the discharge phase.”
+++++++++
And the ENSO process has shown over the latter half of the 20th century that the discharge has been a net positive as reflected by the global temperature anomalies. It will be interesting to see if this process reverses on the net output. That is, will El Niños be weaker, with less energy being charged during La Niña events.
I look forward to seeing more of your work over the rest of this decade.
lsvalgaard says:
January 11, 2014 at 11:13 am
I must confess that I also have problems with ‘complex’ subjects…
+++++++++++
It’s humbling to us to see you make such a claim. It strengthens your unwavering positions!
Thanks, Bob. I’ve been wanting the elevator version of ENSO for a long time. Now, where’s the same for climate sensitivity?
Bob, I read something very close to that a long time ago and it was probably from you. Very good definition.
The entire weather machine that is Earth’s climate is sunlight-fueled and moderated greatly by the planet having so much water. CO2 means nothing in the greater scheme of things, it is solar output and that is reacted to by all the H2O. We are “Water World”.
Enjoyed the post very much by the way.
Upon posting a question to connolley on another site, concerning his, errrr, ‘constructive criticisms’ of people who posted non-AGW climate articles to Wiki, I got a response which suggested memory problems (‘ I did no such thing’). So I have to wonder: did he just forget which link he was linking to which article, in regards to Bob?
Several years ago here on WUWT someone had a link to one of William’s rants. I took that path and regretted it. This time, I’ll take a different route. You have told me enough. Thanks.
> If you’re not taking flak, you’re not over the target.
You people really aren’t thinking.
As demonstrated above, the problem with Mr. Connolley’s ability to communicate is condescension. He wears it like a body glove.
Ric Werme says:
January 11, 2014 at 11:23 am
William links to his FaceBook page at https://www.facebook.com/malaysianhoneybadger
It’s worth one visit.
___________________________________________________________________________
Worth one VERY short visit.
Was that the real William Connolley?
Surely an educated man could put up a better defence than that?
Can anyone confirm that we don’t have an imposter trying to humiliate William Connolley?
Bob, you’ve done an excellent job of simplifying the complex for me. I’m not sure I’d worry too much about the snarky types.
When a debating opponent is in the process of self destructing as here (Connelly was kicked out of Wikepedia editorship yet denied that fact) it suffices to sit back, relax, and enjoy the spectacle.
Appreciate all your work on ocean cycles. BTW, chaotic systems have strange attractors in N-1 Poincare space. ENSO appears to be just that, with two strange attractor lobes, one called La Nina and the other El Niño.
Anthony Watts says:
January 11, 2014 at 11:31 am
“@ur momisugly Bob I’ve always thought the Earth’s climate could be far better modeled by an analog circuit than a digital construct. Most of Nature is analog.”
I modeled complex biochemical kinetic reactions with an analog computer available at NIH. Digital computers were not reliable after the large number of iterations necessary. Always wondered why climate modeling was done with digital computers. (By the way, when the data didn’t fit the model; we changed the model.)
> Connelly [sic] was kicked out of Wikepedia editorship yet denied that fact
Errm, since I wasn’t, it wasn’t a fact, so it seems entirely reasonable to deny it.
Perhaps you have your own reality?