The good news: there’s new and exciting opportunities opening themselves to us.The bad news; some people are hilariously unquestioning.
It has been an even more entertaining than usual couple of days in the alarmosphere. I’d been traveling the last week, doing TV station work and station surveys. While on the road I discovered through an email that I was the subject of a YouTube Video called “Climate Crock of the Week”.
The video was about my surfacestations.org project and was titled “What’s up with Watts?”. It was sad and funny at the same time, and as is typically the case with our old friends it was directed at me personally, far more than it tried substance. Equally typically, and sadly, what substance it tried turned out to be wrong. I continued on my travels, my friend Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. posted an opinion on it last week to address some of the issues.
Little did I know bizarro land awaited upon my return home.
Sitting down Saturday night, to watch the video again, detecting through its exquisite subtleties and nuance, I couldn’t help but laugh, because once again I noticed that everything reported in it was just wrong.
In fact, it probably was the worst job of fact-finding I had ever seen, which as WUWT readers know, is a bold assessment. I’ve been involved in broadcast TV news for 25 years, and have seen some really bad work from greenhorns fresh out of reporters school. This video reminded me of those. It was as if whoever put it together had never researched it, but just strung together a bunch of graphics, video, photos, and a monotone voice-over track with ad hominems liberally sprinkled for seasoning. I figured it was probably just an overzealous college student out to save the world and this was some college project. It had that air of radical burningman quality about it.
Curiosity piqued, I inquired into just who is this climate Solon? To my surprise, he turned out to be an “independent film producer” working out of his house in Midland, MI under the name “Greenman Studio”, one Peter Sinclair, a proud graduate of Al Gore’s Climate Camp. I still figured him to be a kid and imagined his mom was yelling down into the basement “Peter that’s too loud, turn it down!”.
I also wondered if it was the same “Green Man” that had once prompted surfacestations volunteer Gary Boden to create this nifty patch:
This came about because my now defunct local “Alternate Weekly” had a ghost writer named “green man” who penned an unintentionally (I think) hilarious editorial about me and the www.surfacestations.org project back in 2007 in which he wrote the famous line:
“The Reverend Anthony WTF Watts and his screeching mercury monkeys…”
…in response to our daring to survey the weather stations nationwide. The “mercury” is reference to thermometers.
What was funny is that in my original story, one of my commenters posted a silly comment about well, “green stuff” and the editor of the local “Alternate Weekly” went ballistic and demanded I remove it and gave me a stern lecture on libel. I was happy to comply not out of legal obligation but courtesy and deleted the comment.
Is this Green Man the same guy? Inquiring minds want to know.
OK back to the present. I checked my email for some correspondence from Mr. Sinclair for the past week and found none, and looked back even further to see if he had contacted me about the surfacestations project weeks before in email or in my letters pile. I found nothing and was surprised that he had made a video using my work without at least a basic request or notice. Normally when somebody wants to publish something in another media type (that is not a blog or webpage) from the surfacestations project or my blog, they contact me and ask permission to use the items. The word normal, however, upon scrutiny really doesn’t apply here.
I’ve gotten dozens of such requests from magazines, newsletters, book publishers, and TV stations. So far, I’ve never said no to any request for such materials or copyright waivers. I’ve filled out lots of forms granting my copyright waiver for the legally skittish that need more than an email or “sure, go ahead” over the phone.
But, in the video Mr. Sinclair produced and posted on YouTube, I noticed that he did in fact use photographs and graphics from my published book “Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?”. I hold the copyright on this book. The notice for copyright is in the inside front cover. © 2009 Surfacestations.org All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this report or portions thereof in any form. ISBN 13: 978-1-934791-29-5 and ISBN 10: 1-934791-26-6.
There was also a Warner Brothers video clip from the movie “Anchorman” with a segment about the incompetent TV weatherman which I assume was added to portray me in my chosen career, and amazingly (and most amusingly) there was another video clip from the movie “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” which is a campy sendup of “War of the Worlds”. Interestingly in the credits, and I know this because I happened to watch the movie about two weeks before on Showtime, there is a “John Van Vliet” listed in the credits. It made me wonder if it is the same John Van Vliet that created the “opentemp” program launched just a couple of months after I first started the surfacestations project in an attempt to derail it early on. He made the mistake of using incomplete data. More on incomplete data later.
I noted that neither clip was from the trailers you could find on YouTube and were of high quality, so maybe they were cribbed from a DVD or perhaps an Apple video download, since I recognized from the editing effects that Mr. Sinclair owns a Macintosh. WB has some pretty stringent clip licensing requirements, which I know from doing TV news and a reporter wanting once to use part of a film from WB in a special news report. WB wanted our TV station to pay, but the cost was sky high for our small TV station. They finally whittled it down to something we could afford.
Doing a little more research, I found that Mr. Sinclair does a series of animated online greeting cards, which you can see here: http://www.care2.com/ecards/bio/1023
I thought this one was funny: http://www.care2.com/send/card/0840
The description portrayed him as a pretty nice guy with an alternate minded view of the world like a lot of college students have. He is not a college student, though he has a son who is of college age, a nice Ron Paul supporter, I am told from someone who has met him. His rather conservative son, contrasts the rather left-wing eco-activist ad hominem and rhetorically unrestrained father(see here). It is almost humorous greeting card-worthy, this role reversal.
But since he had used that © symbol, Mr. Sinclair demonstrated awareness of copyright protections, having availed himself of them, e.g., here, right below his own artwork.
With knowledge of this and ad hominem attacks made on me personally, I reasonably presumed his copyright violation on my part was likely intentional. I also figured that this might be a teachable moment, as I was still thinking this is a kid just out of college since there seems to be no business website for Greenman studio in operation yet, it is still “under construction”.
http://www.greenmanstudio.com/
And, I mused, by bringing the copyright issue to his attention, I’d probably be doing him a favor, since I surmised he’d be at risk for using the film clips. I figured anybody working a business out of a house without an operating web page probably can’t afford licensing fees. No deep pockets there. I certainly have no personal beef with Mr. Sinclair, it is just the copyright issue.
But my copyright had been ignored, with evidence that Mr. Sinclair as a publisher himself using the © symbol understands copyrights, and WB’s copyright also looked like it also had been ignored. And well, lets face it, he got the facts wrong about the project and never contacted or interviewed me to get any facts from my side (more on that later). So it could hardly be defined as “journalism” and the protections that such enterprise affords for “fair use”. So I filled out the form for copyright issues on YouTube, and pressed enter.
What I expected to happen is that I’d get an angry email or blog comment from the guy, I’d suggest to him (privately) to make a couple of modifications, grant him a copyright for the factual graphics from the surfacestations project, and tell him to put his video back up on the web. End of story, lesson learned.
What I didn’t expect was the alarmosphere going into berserk overdrive.
After all, this was not yet a “weekday” which it increasingly seems to be what we call those periods when our friends lapse into said mode. It turns out that YouTube put my name and the surfacestations.org URL up on the video pane for the former video, made me a target for hatred by the “scream first, ask questions later” types.
The first hint of this started on Sunday when I got a comment on my blog. The commenter, who obviously didn’t know the difference between copyright law and constitutional law wanted to know why I had “denied free speech” to Mr. Sinclair. Of course, “free speech” protections involve state infringement and,as powerful as our friends do apparently believe I have become, neither am I the state nor was the state involved here, so the angst was yet again rather misplaced. Regardless, I also thought this a pretty odd comment. Since Mr. Sinclair still hadn’t contacted me, I paid no attention to it.
Then I began receiving more odd comments, and I’m thinking; “why are these people making a private copyright dispute their personal business?”
Here’s sampling of a few comments I got that never made WUWT:
“Watts you are a coward chickesh** no good dumba** weatherman hiding behind a law that you’ve irrationally applied”
“You can’t handle the TRUTH, if I were Jack Nicholson I’d kick your a**”
“Wattsup, you and your stupid picture book project are toast!”
I even got comments from “Omar” in Finland:
“Looks like your attempt to smother and censor information has fired back badly on you Mr Watts: Do you have – how you say – the cahones to explain yourself? I think not. You appear to be a child coward man.”
Censoring huh? And around the alarmosphere all sorts of curious accusations of censorship — again, with the long arm of the state nowhere to be found, this seemed to be a variant of the Tim Robbins (see also “paranoid” and “uncomprehending”) School of Crying “Censorship”. Even more bizarre, were the demands. On the “DeSmog Blog”, Kevin Grandia lambasted me for not knowing anything about law, and then demanded I email him and explain myself and my reasons for filing a copyright complaint. I’m no lawyer, but clearly giving details of a dispute to an angry third party not involved isn’t right up there with sound legal advice.
Still apparently confused that his dispute lay not with me but with YouTube or the concepts of intellectual property, when that didn’t get the required response, Mr. Grandia posted another angry column over on the Huffington Post, and made the same demand. He’s wondering why I haven’t responded directly to him.
Really.
But being that guardian of smoggy freedom, Mr. Grandia took it a step further, and, in a rather ironic follow-up to his seizing of the mantle of all that conforms to the laws, somehow located the original YouTube video and reposted it to YouTube under the “DeSmog Blog” label:
You can watch it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0-gX7aUKk
So much for my “censorship”, feel free to view it. You see, I’ve had lots of angry criticism in the last two years, this is nothing new, so I’m not really concerned about the criticisms.
When viewing, note the graph from NCDC in the video which “proves” my surfacestations project is (choose your own derogatory word). More on that momentarily.
The alarmosphere was reaching a tipping point. I knew it was only a matter of time before somebody would blog the coup de grace, and yet; I still haven’t heard from Mr. Sinclair so I could tell him about what I’d like changed.
OK. But if Mr. Sinclair had contacted me (like a journalist would) before he made his video, instead of simply reading the NCDC Talking points memo (revised version seen here, PDF) he could have found out a few things, such as:
- NCDC used an old outdated version of my data set (April 2008) they found on my website and assumed it was “current”. Big mistake on their part. Big admission of not overly concerning himself with first-hand knowledge, or even substance, on his part.
- NCDC did not contact me about use of the data. The data, BTW is not yet public domain, though I plan to make it so after I’ve published my paper. So like Mr. Sinclair, technically they are also in violation of copyright. Surfacestations is a private project, I emphasize, what with the public-private concept being one of the major precipitors of the alarmosphere’s angst.
- That data NCDC found had not been quality controlled, many of the ratings changed after quality control was applied, thus changing the outcome.
- When notified of this, they did nothing to deal with the issue, such as notifying readers.
- NCDC published no methodology, data or formula used, or show work of any kind that would normally be required in a scientific paper.
- The author is missing from the document thus it was published anonymously. Apparently nobody at NCDC would put his or her name on it.
- When notified of the fact that the author’s name Thomas C. Peterson (of NCDC) was embedded in the properties of the PDF document (which happens on registration of the Adobe Acrobat program, causing insertion in all output), NCDC’s only response was to remove the author’s name from the document and place it back online. It is odd behavior for a scientist to publish work but not put your name on it.
- NCDC got the number of USHCN stations wrong in their original document document graph, citing 1228 when it is actually 1218 I notified them of this and they eventually fixed it.
- That NCDC original document did not even cite my published work, or even use my name to credit me. I have the original which you can view here Note also the name in the document properties and the number of USHCN2 stations above the graph.
I’m regularly lambasted for publishing things here that are not “peer reviewed”. But, when NCDC does it, and does it unbelievably badly, not only is the “talking points memo” embraced by the alarmosphere as “truth” and “falsification”, but NOT ONE of those embracing it show the remotest interest in questioning why it fails to meet even the basic standards for a letter to the editor of a local newspaper.
My own local paper wouldn’t publish a letter or memo where the author is not identified. Yet an anonymous NCDC memo the author won’t even own up to is considered “climate truth”.
Students of the alarmists may have noticed some time ago, how the burden of proof and quality of publication shifts when the other side of the aisle is doing the talking. In fact, nobody who has jumped into the fray has asked me any questions, yet take as accurate our gift-card designer cum climate scientist Mr. Sinclair at his word, without asking me a single question.
I guess it doesn’t matter now, The Good Ship Teachable Moment has sailed, now that “Big Smog” has stepped in as the defender of freedom. I think Mr. Grandia is hoping that I’ll file a copyright complaint against him.
But here is the kicker. Once you sort through all the ad homs in the video, you find the nugget. It involves that graph that Mr. Sinclair cites from the NCDC Talking Points Memo. If he had asked, he would have found out that it has some pretty embarrassing flaws.
Figure 1. From the NCDC Talking Points Memo.
As referenced in the text of the NCDC Talking Points Memo, the Figure1 graph compares two homogenized data sets, and demonstrates an uncanny correlation. Here is what they say:
Two national time series were made using the same homogeneity adjusted data set and the same gridding and area averaging technique used by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center for its annual climate monitoring.
Seems reasonable, until you understand what “homgenization” really is.
What’s “homogenization” you say? Some kind of dairy product treatment?
Well no, not quite. It is data that has been put through a series of processes that render it so the end result is like comparing the temperature between several bowls of water that have been mixed together, then poured back into the original bowls and the temperature measured of each. What you get is an end temperature for each bowl that is a mixture of the other nearby bowl temperatures.
Here’s another way that is more visual. Think of it like measuring water pollution. Here’s a simple visual table of CRN station quality ratings (as used in my book) and what they might look like as water pollution turbidity levels, rated as 1 to 5 from best to worst turbidity:
In homgenization the data is weighted against the nearby neighbors within a radius. And so a station the might start out as a “1” data wise, might end up getting polluted with the data of nearby stations and end up as as new value, say weighted at “2.5”. Our contributing author John Goetz explains how even single stations can affect many many other stations in the GISS and NOAA data homogenization methods carried out on US surface temperature data here and here.
In the map above, applying a homogenization smoothing, weighting stations by distance nearby the stations with question marks, what would you imagine the values (of turbidity) of them would be? And, how close would these two values be for the east coast station in question and the west coast station in question? Each would be closer to a smoothed center average value based on the neighboring stations. Of course this isn’t the actual method, just a visual analogy.
So, essentially, NCDC’s graph is comparing homogenized data to homogenized data, and thus there would not likely be any large difference between “good” and “bad” stations. All the differences have been smoothed out by homogenization pollution from neighboring stations!
The best way to compare the effect of siting between groups of stations is to use the “raw” data, before it has passed through the multitude of adjustments that NCDC does. Admittedly, raw data can have its own problems, but there are ways my friends and I at the Pielke research team can make valid station trend comparisons without making numerical adjustments to the actual data raw data.
And finally for those who say “Watts doesn’t want you to see this video” or “he fears the science”, I direct you to this WUWT entry, dated June 26th, 2009:
NCDC writes ghost “talking points” rebuttal to surfacestations project
I was the first one to report on the NCDC Talking Points Memo. Fearing science, video and all that, I chose to publicly blog on a subject critical and even damaging to my own research, knowing full well others would pick it up, including those who would not treat this even-handedness kindly.
The document is an internal memo for NOAA. It didn’t get wide attention after it was first published on June 9th, in fact I don’t think it got any attention at all.
Without my pulling it out of internal memo obscurity and discussing it on WUWT, Dr. Pielke likely wouldn’t have commented on it, McIntyre wouldn’t have written about it, twice, and thus from all the pickups from those articles, Mr. Sinclair probably wouldn’t have ever seen it. Surely there would not be this delightfully entertaining, rather revealing, and grade school caliber commentary had I not sought to publish it to a wide audience.
But that’s OK. The result is not something I fear, even if my final analysis shows the USA trends are unaffected. There are other things we know and will learn that are of significance.
In fact I’ve had some very positive things come out of this, both on the media and scientific side. Some offers and ideas have been floated.
But that’s a story that will have to wait. Maybe Mr. Grandia will place an online demand for it. Stay tuned. They rarely disappoint.
Oh, and I got to “meet” Mr. Sinclair, the father of a college-age kid though not quite the young college kid I expected:
It has been an even more entertaining than usual couple of days in the alarmosphere. I’d been traveling the last week, doing TV station work and station surveys. While on the road I discovered through an email that I was the subject of a YouTube Video called “Climate Crock of the Week”.
The video was about my surfacestations.org project and was titled “What’s up with Watts?”. It was sad and funny at the same time, and as is typically the case with our old friends it was directed at me personally, far more than it tried substance. Equally typically, and sadly, what substance it tried turned out to be wrong. I continued on my travels, My friend Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. posted an opinion on it last week to address some of the issues.
Little did I know bizarro land awaited upon my return home.
Sitting down Saturday night, to watch the video again detecting through its exquisite subtleties and nuance. I couldn’t help but laugh, because once again I noticed that everything reported in it was just wrong.
In fact, it probably was the worst job of fact-finding I had ever seen, which as WUWT readers know, is a bold assessment. I’ve been involved in broadcast TV news for 25 years, and have seen some really bad work from greenhorns fresh out of reporters school. This video reminded me of those. It was if whoever put it together had never researched it, but just strung together a bunch of graphics, video, photos, and the most monotone Pat Paulsen narration I’d ever heard. I figured it was probably just an overzealous college student out to save the world and this was some college project. It had that air of radical burningman quality about it.
Curiosity piqued, I inquired into just who is this climate Solon? To my surprise, he turned out to be an “independent film producer” working out of his house in Midland, MI under the name “Greenman Studio”, one Peter Sinclair, a proud graduate of Al Gore’s Climate Camp. I still figured him to be a kid and imagined his mom was yelling down into the basement “Peter that’s too loud, turn it down!”.
I also wondered if it was the same “Green Man” that had once prompted surfacestations volunteer Gary Boden to create this nifty patch:
This came about because my now defunct local “Alternate Weekly” had a ghost writer named “green man” who penned and unintentionally (I think) editorial about me and the www.surfacestations.org project back in 2007 in which he wrote the famous line:
“The Reverend Anthony WTF Watts and his screeching mercury monkeys…”
…in response to our daring to survey the weather stations nationwide.
What was funny is that in my original story, one of my commenters posted a funny comment about well, “green stuff” and the editor of the local “Alternate Weekly” went ballistic and demanded I remove it and gave me a stern lecture on libel. I was happy to comply not out of legal obligation but courtesy and deleted the comment.
Is this Green Man the same guy? Inquiring minds want to know.
OK back to the present. I checked my email for some correspondence from Mr. Sinclair for the past week and found none, and looked back even further to see if he had contacted me about the surfacestations project weeks before in email or in my letters pile. I found nothing and was surprised that he had made a video using my work without at least a basic request or notice. Normally when somebody wants to publish something in another media type (that is not a blog or webpage) from the surfacestations project or my blog, they contact me and ask permission to use the items. The word normal, however, upon scrutiny really doesn’t apply here.
I’ve gotten dozens of such requests from magazines, newsletters, book publishers, and TV stations. So far, I’ve never said no to any request for such materials or copyright waivers. I’ve filled out lots of forms granting my copyright waiver for the legally skittish that need more than an email or “sure, go ahead” over the phone.
But, in the video Mr. Sinclair produced and posted on YouTube, I noticed that he did in fact use photographs and graphics from my published book “Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?”. I hold the copyright on this book. The notice for copyright is in the inside front cover. © 2009 Surfacestations.org All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this report or portions thereof in any form. ISBN 13: 978-1-934791-29-5 and ISBN 10: 1-934791-26-6.
There was also a Warner Brothers video clip from the movie “Anchorman” with a segment about the incompetent TV weatherman which I assume was added to portray me in my chosen career, and amazingly (and most amusingly) there was another video clip from the movie “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” which is a campy sendup of “War of the Worlds”. Interestingly in the credits, and I know this because I happened to watch the movie about two weeks before on Showtime, there is a “John Van Vliet” listed in the credits. It made me wonder if it is the same John Van Vliet that created the “opentemp” program launched just a couple of months after I first started the surfacestations project in an attempt to derail it early on. He made the mistake of using incomplete data. More on incomplete data later.
I noted that neither clip was from the trailers you could find on YouTube and were of high quality, so maybe they were cribbed from a DVD or perhaps an Apple video download, since I recognized from the editing effects that Mr. Sinclair owns a Macintosh. WB has some pretty stringent clip licensing requirements, which I know from doing TV news and a reporter wanting once to use part of a film from WB in a special news report. WB wanted our TV station to pay, but the cost was sky high for our small TV station. They finally whittled it down to something we could afford.
Doing a little more research, I found that Mr. Sinclair does a series of animated online greeting cards, which you can see here:
http://www.care2.com/ecards/bio/1023
I thought this one was pretty funny: http://www.care2.com/send/card/0840
The description portrayed him as a pretty nice guy with an alternate minded view of the world like a lot of college students have. He is not a college student, though he has a son who is of college age, a nice Ron Paul supporter, I am told from someone who has met him. His rather conservative son, contrasts the rather left-wing eco-activist ad hominem and rhetorically unrestrained father(see here). It is almost humorous greeting card-worthy, this role reversal.
But since he had used that © symbol, Mr. Sinclair demonstrated awareness of copyright protections, having availed himself of them, e.g., here, right below his own artwork. With knowledge of this and ad hominem attacks made on me personally, I reasonably presumed his copyright violation on my part was likely intentional. I also figured that this might be a teachable moment, as I was still thinking this is a kid just out of college since there seems to be no business website for Greenman studio in operation yet, it is still “under construction”.
http://www.greenmanstudio.com/
And, I mused, by bringing the copyright issue to his attention, I’d probably be doing him a favor, since I surmised he’d be at risk for using the film clips. I figured anybody working a business out of a house without an operating web page probably can’t afford licensing fees. No deep pockets there. I certainly have no personal beef with Mr. Sinclair, it is just the copyright issue.
But my copyright had been ignored, with evidence that Mr. Sinclair as a publisher himself using the © symbol understands copyrights, and WB’s copyright also looked like it also had been ignored. And well, lets face it, he got the facts wrong about the project and never contacted or interviewed me to get any facts from my side (more on that later). So it could hardly be defined as “journalism” and the protections that such enterprise affords for “fair use”. So I filled out the form for copyright issues on YouTube, and pressed enter.
What I expected to happen is that I’d get an angry email or blog comment from the guy, I’d suggest to him (privately) to make a couple of modifications, grant him a copyright for the factual graphics from the surfacestations project, and tell him to put his video back up on the web. End of story, lesson learned.
What I didn’t expect was the alarmosphere going into berserk overdrive. After all, this was not yet a “weekday” which it increasingly seems to be what we call those periods when our friends lapse into said mode. It turns out that YouTube put my name and the surfacestations.org URL up on the video pane for the former video, made me a target for hatred by the “scream first, ask questions later” types.
The first hint of this started on Sunday when I got a comment on my blog. The commenter, who obviously didn’t know the difference between copyright law and constitutional law wanted to know why I had “denied free speech” to Mr. Sinclair. Of course, “free speech” protections involve state infringement and,as powerful as our friends do apparently believe I have become, neither am I the state nor was the state involved here, so the angst was yet again rather misplaced. Regardless, I also thought it this a pretty odd comment, since Mr. Sinclair still hadn’t contacted me, and I paid no attention to it.
Then I began receiving more odd comments, and I’m thinking; “why are these people making a private copyright dispute their personal business?”
Here’s sampling of a few comments I got that never made WUWT:
“Watts you are a coward chickesh** no good dumba** weatherman hiding behind a law that you’ve irrationally applied”
“You can’t handle the TRUTH, if I were Jack Nicholson I’d kick your a**”
“Wattsup, you and your stupid picture book project are toast!”
I even got comments from “Omar” in Finland:
“Looks like your attempt to smother and censor information has fired back badly on you Mr Watts: Do you have – how you say – the cahones to explain yourself? I think not. You appear to be a child coward man.”
And around the alarmosphere all sorts of curious accusations of censorship — again, with the long arm of the state nowhere to be found, this seemed to be a variant of the Tim Robbins (see also “paranoid” and “uncomprehending”) School of Crying “Censorship”. Even more bizarre, were the demands. On the “DeSmog Blog”, Kevin Grandia lambasted me for not knowing anything about law, and then demanded I email him and explain myself and my reasons for filing a copyright complaint. I’m no lawyer, but clearly giving details of a dispute to an angry third party not involved isn’t right up there with sound legal advice.
Still apparently confused that his dispute lay not with me but with YouTube or the concepts of intellectual property, when that didn’t get the required response, Mr. Grandia posted another angry column over on the Huffington Post, and made the same demand. He’s wondering why I haven’t responded directly to him.
Really.
But being that guardian of smoggy freedom, Mr. Grandia took it a step further, and, in a rather ironic follow-up to his seizing of the mantle of all that conforms to the laws, somehow located the original YouTube video and reposted it to YouTube under the “DeSmog Blog” label:
You can watch it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0-gX7aUKk
Note the graph from NCDC in the video which “proves” my surfacestations project is (choose your own derogatory word). More on that momentarily.
The alarmosphere was reaching a tipping point. I knew it was only a matter of time before somebody would blog the coup de grace, and yet; I still haven’t heard from Mr. Sinclair so I could tell him about what I’d like changed.
OK Nut if Mr. Sinclair had contacted me (like a journalist would) before he made his video, instead of simply reading the NCDC Talking points memo (seen here, PDF) he could have found out a few things, such as:
- NCDC used an old outdated version of my data set (April 2008) they found on my website and assumed it was “current”. Big mistake on their part. Big admission of not overly concerning himself with first-hand knowledge, or even substance, on his part.
- NCDC did not contact me about use of the data. The data, BTW is not yet public domain, though I plan to make it so after I’ve published my paper. So like Mr. Sinclair, technically they are also in violation of copyright. Surfacestations is a private project, I emphasize, what with the public-private concept being one of the major precipitors of the alarmosphere’s angst.
- That data NCDC found had not been quality controlled, many of the ratings changed after quality control was applied, thus changing the outcome.
- When notified of this, they did nothing to deal with the issue, such as notifying readers.
- NCDC published no methodology, data or formula used, or show work of any kind that would normally be required in a scientific paper.
- The author is missing from the document thus it was published anonymously. Apparently nobody at NCDC would put his or her name on it.
- When notified of the fact that the author’s name Thomas C. Peterson (of NCDC) was embedded in the properties of the PDF document (which happens on registration of the Adobe Acrobat program, causing insertion in all output), NCDC’s only response was to remove the author’s name from the document.
- NCDC got the number of USHCN stations wrong in their original document document graph, citing 1228 when it is actually 1218 I notified them of this and they eventually fixed it.
- That NCDC original document did not even cite my published work, or even use my name to credit me. I have the original which you can view here Note also the name in the document properties and the number of USHCN2 stations above the graph.
I’m regularly lambasted for publishing things here that are not “peer reviewed”, but when NCDC does it, and does it unbelievably badly, not only is the “talking points memo” embraced by the alarmosphere as “truth” and “falsification”. Not ONE of those embracing it show the remotes interest in questioning why it fails to meet even the basic standards for a letter to the editor of a local newspaper. My own local paper wouldn’t publish a letter or memo where the author is not identified. Yet an anonymous memo the author won’t even own up to is considered climate truth.
Students of the alarmists may have noticed some time ago, how the burden of proof and quality of publication shifts when the other side of the aisle is doing the talking. In fact nobody who has jumped into the foray has asked me any questions, yet take our gift-card designer cum climate scientist Mr. Sinclair at his word that what he reported, without asking me a single question, is accurate.
I guess it doesn’t matter now, The Good Ship Teachable Moment has sailed, now that “Big Smog” has stepped in as the defender of freedom. I think Mr. Grandia is hoping that I’ll file a copyright complaint against him.
But here is the kicker. It involves that graph that Mr. Sinclair cites from the NCDC Talking Points Memo. If he had asked, he would have found this out.
Figure 1. From Talking Points Memo.
As referenced in the text of the Talking Points Memo, the NCDC graph compares two homogenized data sets. What’s that you say? Some kind of dairy product?
Well no, not quite. It is data that has been put through a series of processes that render it
such that end result is like comparing the temperature of several bowls of water
[need work here and diagram to explain homgenization of data]
And finally for those who say “Watts doesn’t want you to see this video” or “he fears the science”, I direct you to this WUWT entry, dated June 26th, 2009:
NCDC writes ghost “talking points” rebuttal to surfacestations project
I was the first one to report on the NCDC Talking Points Memo. Fearing science, video and all that, I chose to publicly blog on a subject critical and even damaging to my own research, knowing full well others would pick it up, including those who would not treat this even-handedness kindly.
The document is an internal memo for NOAA. It didn’t get wide attention after it was first published on June 9th, in fact I don’t think it got any attention at all.
Without my pulling it out of internal memo obscurity and discussing it on WUWT, Pielke likely wouldn’t have commented on it, McIntyre wouldn’t have written about it, twice, and thus from all the pickups from those articles, Mr. Sinclair probably wouldn’t have ever seen it. Surely there would not be this delightfully entertaining, rather revealing, and grade school caliber commentary had I not sought to publish it to a wide audience.
But that’s OK. The result is not something I fear, even if it shows the trends are unaffected. There’s other things we know and will learn.
In fact I’ve had some very positive things come out of this both on the media and scientific side. Some offer and ideas have been floated.
But that’s a story that will have to wait. Maybe Mr. Grandia will place an online demand for it. Stay tuned. They rarely disappoint.
Oh, and I got to “meet” Mr. Sinclair, the father of a college-age kid though not quite the young college kid I expected:
Anthony
He has issued a challenge to a debate – take him up on it. Send the invitation to others like Plimer. Bring it on.
Amazing. How can folks get so stampeded over so little. Sigh.
Pop a cold one and enjoy the soap opera!
Great post Anthony. I do like a bit of real journalism cutting through the alarmist BS now and then. He want’s to debate, why not go for it & post the video here.
I don’t believe they will ever debate in person. They want to sit in the weeds and snipe. They want the conversation to go in one direction.
Great story. I was wondering when and how you were going to address Peter Sinclair’s “Crock of the Week” video about you. Your attention to detail is appreciated. It would be great to see you debate him.
I am curious if you saw what George Monbiot of the Guardian UK thought about your endeavors with Mr. Sinclair’s video.
Mr. Monbiot says “ Anthony Watts, sceptic and scourge of climate change science, has used copyright laws to censor an opponent. Climate change deniers claim they’re censored. What hypocrites.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/jul/30/climate-change-deniers-monbiot
I was pointed to another of Sinclair’s ‘climate crock of the week’ vids by a warmist I was debating. It was of the various 7 year cooling trends it was possible to find in the temperature record, and was quoted to point up my ‘cherry picking’ of the data.
I pointed out that the video was careful to show temperatures only since 1975, and that Sinclair neglected to mention that the other two periods where a 7 year cooling trend was identified were both associated with major volcanos, whereas the current cooling is not.
Sinclair is a propagandist of the worst ilk, not a climate researcher.
New Scientist article (current Issue) admits that no one is interested in AGW anymore LOL
Anthony, your good humor and grace while subjected to execrable and actionable slander and libel by nincompoops is truly admirable. You have risen above the childish tantrum level exhibited by untalented fools.
You could have responded (reacted) differently. I know my own reactions when I watched the video and read the comments beneath it last week were more along the lines of shock and outrage.
But instead you have responded with maturity and wry wit, and made it all into a teaching moment. I salute you for that.
These are trying times. Catastrophes loom in science and politics, and I’m not talking about global warming. We face an uncertain future because our traditional institutions, fundamental rights and liberties, and even our culture and civilization are under attack by the most nefarious elements. It is difficult to see how best to defend ourselves from all that.
Your example of calm, good natured, intelligent, and ethical forbearance is a lesson in right behavior. The path with integrity is our best approach to the mountain of problems we face. We all could learn from your example. I know I have. Thank you for that.
I would definitely take him on, he’s asking for it. BTW It seems that there are fewer and fewer maybe he does not realize that the big wigs APS and even Nature maybe be having second thoughts. Even maybe the IPCC (the’ve told Kevin Rudd not to worry about passing the ETS now).
This story has got into the British press at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/jul/30/climate-change-deniers-monbiot?commentpage=4&commentposted=1
I tried to post a link to this article, but my comments to the Guardian are currently being “moderated” (i.e. censored). Would some reader here like to inform Guardian readers about this article?
PS Actually, it would be brilliant if Alan himself could comment on the Monbiot Guardian article. These articles by Monbiot in the Guardian are the principle outlet in the British Press for the warmist / sceptic debate, sometimes attracting 1000+ comments. If Alan posted a comment, Monbiot could hardly fail to reply, and the debate would be open.
Reply: Do you mean Anthony? ~ ctm
Sure, you laugh now, but what happens when “60 Minutes” exposes your underhanded scheme to discredit the work of thousands of bureaucrats and academics on the government
dolepayroll. Hah! You shall wilt under the withering cross-examination from the perky Katie Couric.Don’t let AMPAS know about this. Mr Sinclair has a sure Oscar™ contender in the “Documentary” (chuckle) category. Good to see someone from Michigan has found work.
We’ll have to see if this affects the old blog stats.
Well done Mr. Watts! I encounter (and demolish) these leftover hippies on a regular basis wherever I encounter them. Your dismemberment of these warmongers however is on the level of an art form! Well spoken sir!
I look forward to the coming attractions. I think I have figured some out, but will wait with joy for any new developments.
Cheers!
This is an unbelievable story.
How low can they go!
Anthony, you are handling it perfectly.
You keep concentrating on the science which is their weak spot and never cease to be the true gentleman that you are.
I admire you for your cool and detailed approach and I wish you all the best.
I can only agree with HarryG. Otherwise, are there no lawyers on this blog? The time has come to wipe the floor with someone.
Sinclair must believe copyright means he has the right to copy. Right?
Funny how he really can’t answer the question about solutions to the problem.
Not surprising.
The level of threats and abuse hurled at those who disagree with the orthodoxy is symptomatic of an awfully weak argument, which is encouraging, in a bizarre sort of way. Keep on keeping on, Mr Watts.
Also – has this guy really had his stuff peer reviewed? 😉
Monbiot at the Guardian has also jumped on the bandwagon.
But the guardians moderators are becoming like RCs. Anything
slightly against Monbiots opinions are removed immediately.
Mr Watts, you are NOT in a debate here.
You are in politics. That means, to the other side, you are DEFINED as wrong. There is no way of changing that. It is similar to the attitude which I understand that Americans have with respect to Communism – it MUST be wrong, and everything a communist does MUST be aimed at undermining the United States Constitution.
I am not a political person myself, but the game seems to involve each side shouting insults at the other, and then turning to their own supporters to measure the volume of cheering. The aim seems to be to be that of maintaining morale amongst your own troops by ‘scoring points’, and certainly nothing to do with examining the truth. Similar insults would be traded by the front lines of opposing armies in classical battles, and survive to this day in sporting encounters.
I suggest that, unless you want to move into the specialist world of media soundbites and spin-doctoring, you provide political opponents with as little material as possible to work on. They are likely to be better at lies and smearing than you. If you concentrate on the science you will build a sound foundation. If you ignore the political opposition, they are likely to make more and more extreme assertions in an effort to overtop their last insult, and these exaggerations will emphasis the hollowness of their position. I can see indications that this is already beginning to happen, and that it will be a winning strategy….
Anthony, I bet you were wearing your Playtex 24hr Girdle as I am sure your sides split with laughter with this fellow and his “6 minute” sound bites to get Gore’s “gospel” spread.
He he, I just knew someone wimped on the Kool-Aid. And so modest too! Sinclair’s site must be a hoot.
…and watch out out you don’t get crushed by the bite sized nuggets!
Yes I agree with you, ad hominems are the sign of desperate people with no ability to argue science.
Luckily there are no ad hominem attacks here at WUWT. A clear sign they are the real scientists unlike the world government AGW lackies.
Thank you Anthony.
I only came to learn as many did.
Wow, I never realized you had that kind of power, it must come with the “Arch Denier” throne. I’m sure they wonder why so few people take them seriously even while they make such a trivial and commonplace incident sound like they are being violently repressed by the Gestapo.
It would appear a deep panic is setting in with the AGW crowd.
I guess this is what passes for research for some people.
Thank you so much Anthony for keeping a level head through all this.
How much of what you’ve written about Peter Sinclair would you consider ad hominem?
Mr. Watts,
Please by all means enter into a debate with Peter Sinclair.
Anthony,
Isn’t it an idea to put a link to this site and page on You Tube, so all these screamers can get the whole picture, and as an by-effect, have a chance to visit some more blogs on this site. It might enlighten a few…
Keep up the good work! Greetings from the low countries.
You have given Mr. Sinclair far more webspace than he is worthy of, and far more of your time than he warrants, Anthony. Let his kind bray while you snatch free moments to play with your kids. Green Men will dig their own holes unassisted.
Anthony,
Hats off to you for your professionalism and perseverance through this long, strange trip.
The value you bring to the table with your endeavours is incalculable.
h/t to YOU.
JimB
That’s a lot of words, but I still don’t understand why you had the video taken down. If you would just have ignored it and then written this text you would’ve come out a lot stronger. Taking it down was a big mistake, tactically speaking, especially because this blog is always full of indignation regarding suppressed reports etc. When you fight fire with fire, you become the fire, Anthony.
But I’m looking forward to the results of the surfacestations-project and an explanation in the eventuality it diverges from satellite data.
I had missed that the NCDC data comparisons were BOTH “homogenized”.
Of course, that renders their comparison meaningless and their conclusion untrue. Are they liars or fools?
I have been down the same path with Youtube as well: having my name splashed across the top of a video while a copyright complaint was being dealt with, even though the thief carried on with delicious anonymity. While Youtube is many great things, there are some not so good things as well.
But, as they say in the ad business, there is no such thing as bad press. As a consequence of the video and of Grandia at Huff’n Puff, you will reach even more lay people, not all of whom are card carrying nutbars. And as the nutbars get increasingly juxtaposed against normalcy, their wackiness becomes even more apparent. Win-win, I’d say, even though the methodology may not be “ethical”…
The last refuge of those with no proof and failed arguments is abuse. The more they rant and insult, the more they show that they know that they are losing.
In the final analysis it’s only the truth that’s important. If it actually turns out that the software used does indeed correct for these station abnormalities then it’s a good 3rd party verification. The point of the homogenized plot was to show that a software procedure can remove bad station bias. That the graph is only plotted from 1950 because the 30’s were just as warm is the underhand part.
I’m sure your friend Steve McI said he expected the software would prove ok for the lower 48 and that the real issue is the correction, or lack of it, for the rest of the world. He even has an R script that did the comparison between 1+2 graded stations with the GISS plot (to show JohnV how to do easy gridding). Now that most of the stations are measured has anyone actually re-done it anywhere?
Excellent work Reverend Anthony.
I notiverd a broken link in your text – see below at “I have the original which you can view here”
“That NCDC original document did not even cite my published work, or even use my name to credit me. I have the original which you can view here Note also the name in the document properties and the number of USHCN2 stations above the graph.”
Reply: Fixed. Thanks ~ ctm
Here in Australia, the term “cult” is being used more and more in the last few months by even the man in the street to describe the AGW warmists and activists movement.
Increasingly, the AGW warmists are being classed as a “Mother Earth” worshipping “cult” that has no regard for facts or for human well being.
1 / As in all cults, this warmist “cult” has a hierarchical structure with a few very prominent and extremist leaders at the top that the cult acolytes coalesce around and base their beliefs on the teachings of that leadership.
2 / The “cult” members or acolytes do not accept any rational explanations for happenings, events or established facts that run contrary to their beliefs or the cult dictates.
3 / Strangely, it is often very intelligent and supposedly rational thinking and often quite highly qualified members of society who become the most fanatical of the cult’s membership and leadership.
4 / The cult members launch completely irrational ad hominen attacks, usually without any basis in fact, on anybody that dares to challenge their beliefs either in private or openly.
5 / No consideration is given to any human or animal suffering that may be imposed by following the dictates of the cult or it’s leadership.
6 / Facts are never needed for belief in the cult dictates, just a fanatical belief in the cult leadership and the dictates that leadership promulgates.
7 / Most of the more extreme cult members will remain believers for their entire lifetimes and nothing will shake them in those beliefs so the AGW cult now has a full generation to run before it’s final demise.
8 / The cult leadership will subtly change direction if the stars are moving against them and the acolytes will be told and will believe that is being done for the greater good of all or it has been dictated by the superior being.
All in all, the AGW warmist movement is now steadily deteriorating to the level of a western based Earth worshipping cult and that ultimately spells the end of it’s influence and power and it’s ability to influence the future.
As this realisation sinks in to many fringe dweller believers of the AGW movement, there will be a steady and increasing drift of former believers away from any avowed contact or belief in the teachings and dictates of the cult.
Like all new cults it still has and will have for some time yet, the means and ability to create a great deal of anguish, pain and harm before it’s run is ended.
to be honoust Anthony it wasnt the smartest thing to do. You know how the game is played (especially on youtube), you really didnt see this comming?
You should have responded with a more convincing video yourself .
That “debate” challenge is most likely an empty gesture. Not only are alarmists cowards, but they seem to know instinctively that their arguments are primarily emotional ones, not scientific, and they will be crushed like bugs.
Was the title an Alliterative Attempt to Analyse the Asenine Ambiguity of Amoral Appropriation of Atmospherics Aspects?
Sorry, couldn’t resist it.
My thanks for the work you are doing for showing that results cannot be accurate if the positioning of the instrumentation is not consistant.
You are dealing with RELIGION, Mr. Watts. “Do not question our God, Gaia, and our priests which include Al Gore and James Hansen!” All throughout history and even into present day, religion has made people do some really stupid things. And if you question … the true believes assail you at force. They are an organized religion and they are gaining more and more followers through coercion, fear, lies, and brainwashing. They try to brainwash our impressionable young. This is more than a cult. It is better organized. It is a religion.
Excellent stuff Anthony….. As they say.
….Any Publicity is good publicity.
Your blog traffic graph at the end of the month will be interesting.
I wonder who wrote this:
A couple of months ago I wrote about the upcoming release of Windows Vista, and how I was disappointed that this new release from Microsoft and all of its Digital Rights Management (DRM) nonsense made the operating system turn your PC into a version of George Orwell’s Big Brother
DRM is all about protecting copyright. How can this be “nonsense”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/01/21/ubuntu-an-amazing-alternative-to-windows/#more-62
I also like the screen capture of ubuntu with its prominent BitTorrent icon.
It has some legal uses just not many.
However it’s good to see you have other people’s interests at heart!
Hhhhhmmmmm!
This just goes to show that they are getting desperate, and that the tide is slowly turning.
have a feeling its not going to be quick enough though.
rtgr (04:07:22) :
to be honoust Anthony it wasnt the smartest thing to do. You know how the game is played (especially on youtube), you really didnt see this comming?
You should have responded with a more convincing video yourself .
No, Anthony has done this exactly right. Serving notice that he takes this seriously, as he has, is on target. He has no need to play the “game” on Youtube. Its not a game. There is a curious thing about Youtube: despite how viral certain videos go, most have no credible staying power at all (verbatim clip excerpts of newscasts are a bit of a different story).
A lot of the response is from people looking to see what the fuss is about. Anthony has spent about as many column-inches as he should. Challenging the videos on appropriate legal grounds is the the correct process. Eventually, it all comes to an end, unless Anthony keeps it in the spotlight. For Sinclair or Grandia to do so, leaves them open eventually to legal action, and ultimately makes them look (more) bizarre. Anyone who’s been involved in blogs (and Youtube is a blog, just like all the rest), knows you are wasting your energy chasing anonymous phantom commenters. You use the tools of deletion with effect.
Neven (03:33:51) : said
“…That’s a lot of words, but I still don’t understand why you had the video taken down. If you would just have ignored it and then written this text you would’ve come out a lot stronger. Taking it down was a big mistake, tactically speaking, especially because this blog is always full of indignation regarding suppressed reports etc. When you fight fire with fire, you become the fire, Anthony….”
This is why
Anthony said
“…But my copyright had been ignored, with evidence that Mr. Sinclair as a publisher himself using the © symbol understands copyrights, and WB’s copyright also looked like it also had been ignored. And well, lets face it, he got the facts wrong about the project and never contacted or interviewed me to get any facts from my side (more on that later). So it could hardly be defined as “journalism” and the protections that such enterprise affords for “fair use”. So I filled out the form for copyright issues on YouTube, and pressed enter….”
That was a pretty tame reaction since he could have brought the copyright violation to Warner Brothers notice and let THEM sue the pants off Mr. Sinclair and thereby stayed clear of the fecal hitting the rotating blade. Instead he has explain what he has done and why for all the world to pick apart. He did nothing to Mr Sinclair except point out to YouTube he did not have Anthony’s permission for copyright use and more important probably DID NOT have WB’s. YouTube was the final decider on whether to leave the Video up. If Anthony’s complaint was groundless they would ignore it.
On the whole Anthony came off looking like a gentleman willing to stand-up for himself against a bully without descending to his level. Please realize that failure to defend his copyright could put his “copyright protection” at risk so a response was required. Anthony used the lowest level response unlike Mr. Sinclair.
geoffchambers 01:11:46
Managed to post on the Grauniad Monbigot article directing readers to WUWT. Could be a case of pearls before swine, though.
Peter Sinclair = Supreme Goron Lite?
Thanks, Anthony, for standing up to these creeps. They’re losing when they lose confidence in their own information and instead start running smear pieces.
Obviously people who deal with weather wouldn’t know anything about it….
I never realised that they had Gore Climate Camps. I picture them like schools of certain religous persuasions in which the congregation gets indoctrinated while they sit banging their heads and chanting from The Gore-an.
I debated with this Greenman college boy on one of his videos and found that he had no unique insight or valuable self-research. He was just repeating whatever he read on the Guardian’s website. When I pressed him to answer and quantify the scientific questions I had asked he turned tail and ran, which prompted me to add a video reply to his Climate Crock of the Week (the reply was a debate with John Christy). I invited Greenman to a debate on the videos I uploaded but he didn’t take up the challenge and in his place came some rambling kid whose head was full of conspiracy theories about Exxon Mobil, etc who also was unable to take part in rational debate without throwing insults at others.
Dear Arch Denier Anthony Watts (it has a nice ring to it, “Arch”),
Anthony, it would be nice to see a graph of the raw unedited data that can in comparison show the statistical process that homogenization of the data has in distorting the data.
In fact I’m starting to see that one can’t trust any graphs unless one also sees the raw unaltered data and every step and process and computation along the way that went into making it. One almost needs to have these published as Mathematica or Speadsheets with the data in them as well as the graphs and if it’s not done that way it’s just not accepted as valid open peer – and reader – reviewable science.
I’m curious about the scientific justification for homogenization of the data? On what basis is that and other “smoothing” or “adjustments” done?
On the copyright issue it may be a moot point since he’s likely not making any money which is a factor, and he likely would claim “fair use” in a “critique” of your work which is permitted under copyright laws. In fact a “critique” can reference the entire original work as long as each piece has a corresponding critique of the critiquing author – if I’m not mistaken. I don’t know if that helps or not.
One point in the video, ~6:30min, he’s claiming that “29,000 sets of natural rhythms were collected”, what’s he talking about? That sure sounds impressive but what’s up with that?
He’s clearly a “believer” in “climate change is the most important issue” in his life and by the nature of his belief our lives too. Clearly he’s motivated by belief in the doomsday scenario. I wonder about the components of his particular belief, not to criticize him but, to illuminate the nature of belief taking over a mind rather than using the scientific method to obtain results and to alter ones views after consideration when the data indicate what is going on. Personally I find people motivated by belief rather than provable and re-provable (auditable) knowledge fascinating subjects to study in a clinical setting, not with an eye to emulating them but with an eye to understanding the human condition that has us be so fallible.
Belief in a “cause” is all well and good, but shouldn’t one make sure that the “cause” is actually a real problem? That’s why I support Open Source Science and Open Source Auditing of Science and it’s claims. Keep at it Anthony and Steve. The scientific method is one of our best defenses against the worst of “belief driven causes” as embodied in men such as Greenman Sinclair.
In summary the main point I took from your article above is that “statistical homogenization games” were being played with the data in the graph that our hero the Greenman Mr Sinclair presents in the video. It would be good to see an analysis of the raw data and comparison to the “fake mixed data”.
The graph presented as the “70 good stations” is really just the “70 good stations” since the data for the 70 stations was homogenized already! What if the data for the 70 stations was homogenized with just the 70 stations? What effect would that have?
Keep up the excellent work Anthony (oh and get on CNN and MSNBC and CBC for some balance),
All the best,
Darth PWL
rtgr (04:07:22) :
I’d rather Anthony play to his strength – text is searchable, easy to share, fast to read or skim. Perhaps you can explain why people like Peter Sinclair is so enamored with video. I haven’t seen this one yet, but I’ve seen others. It’s not like his voice add to the experience.
OOPS, wouldn’t you know it, a proof reading mistake caught after hitting submit. The correct version should have had the uppercase corrections in it for correctness and for clarity. Sorry about that. I’m a fallible human after all; at least I can admit a mistake and correct it. – pwl
“The graph presented as the “70 good stations” is NOT really just the “70 good stations” since the data for the 70 stations was homogenized WITH ALL THE OTHER STATIONS already! What if the data for the 70 stations was homogenized with just the 70 stations? What effect would that have?”
Dear Mr. Watts –
By and large, I do not agree with your politics – but I do agree with your methods. I believe that you are doing an invaluable service to the cause of scientific debate by demanding that climate data be as accurate as possible. Otherwise, any deductions drawn from flawed data will be flawed themselves.
With regards to the recent video that contained illegal use of copyrighted materials, George Monbiot at the Guardian published a column critical of you yesterday which contained a pirated version of the video and stated within the column that he was aware of your request that this video be halted. Since the Guardian is a major media outlet in Great Britain, since Great Britain is a signatory to international copyright law, and since Mr. Monbiot is an employee of the Guardian – – I believe that the Guardian is legally liable for intentional infringement.
I do not make this statement lightly. My politics are far more in line with the Guardian than with yours. But I cannot condone the intentional mocking of legitimate copyright protections by an organization that depends upon those same protections for its own works.
Here is a link to the Monbiot column –
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/jul/30/climate-change-deniers-monbiot
As of 6:50a on July 31st, the video is still up. Thus, it has been available for at least 24 hours at guardian.com and more than 48 hours after the request to cease and desist. It is a blatant violation of copyright law and should be treated as such.
Keep up the good work.
Kindest regards – John
Mr Watts – Chin up lad!
IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
…Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
by Rudyard Kipliing
Great response! A really concise and focused rebuttal. Mentioning ‘ad hominem’ four times really hammers home that point – although I didn’t notice any explanation of what exactly was ‘ad hominem’. Never mind – the sheer volume of words and incidental detail in this great piece was enough to convince me.
Especially liked the way you repeatedly compared Sinclair to a kid or a college student even though he’s not – genius! “Peter that’s too loud, turn it down!”. Hilarious!
Also, very good that you researched and brought Sinclair’s son in to this – that really strengthens your argument and credibility.
Of course! The data used by the NCDC was old and outdated – obvious! So the results will be completely different as a result of whatever has changed in the past 14 months? Look forward to seeing that – it’ll certainly wipe the smile off the face of all those climate scientists around the planet, eh?
But if the data used by the NCDC was old and outdated and therefore flawed, why the need to discuss their technique? Isn’t that ‘showing your hand’. Now they’ll know where they want wrong for next time! Do you think the NOAA are lying to discredit you or are they incompetent on this one? Inquiring minds want to know.
Keep up the good work – your output makes it easy to see where the truth lies in the climate debate.
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
~ John Adams (1735-1826), American politician and second President of the United States
Anthony,
Please note that the attack and the argument has been included in your page on Wikipedia, but (of course?) not your reply:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Watts_(blogger)
Somebody with better english that mine should add Anthony’s reply on the page.
Gail Combs wrote:
“That was a pretty tame reaction since he could have brought the copyright violation to Warner Brothers notice and let THEM sue the pants off Mr. Sinclair and thereby stayed clear of the fecal hitting the rotating blade”
That would’ve been even more childish, running to Warner Brothers to tell on Mr. Sinclair. Asking YouTube to take the film down was a big enough PR mistake as it is.
The point is: Why does Anthony care if someone makes some movie about him portraying the copyrighted (fair use, anyone?) cover of his book? He as a gentleman should be above that, right? Especially considering the fact that there is a blog post here on a weekly basis about something or other being suppressed. Anthony did exactly the same thing.
On a personal note: I was disappointed to see you appear on Fox, Anthony, especially in that Glenn Beck Show. The way the news is reported at that station scares the shit out of me as a European. It is very bad advertising for the American people, considering the fact that Fox is one of the most popular stations in the States. I would never ever want to be associated with that warmongering corporate propaganda outlet. But then again, I would never want to be associated with something like the Heartland Institute either (especially considering the fact that I know people who suffer and have suffered greatly from tobacco). It was also very shocking for me to see how closely you and your surface station project seem to be tied to that organisation. Couldn’t you have done it without them? It would have raised the credibility of your project a lot (in my view), but I’ll wait and see what comes out of the project before jumping to conclusions.
Facts might be stubborn things but the fact is that one persons facts might really be beliefs… that is why we have a wee little tool known as the scientific method… to route out these “fact-beliefs” and replace them with better, more accurate “facts that are facts with a statement of their accuracy”.
For example, in a graph that says “70 good or best sited stations” it should say that these 70 data points are homogenized with the FULL set of data and thus can’t be separated out for the purposes of the comparison that the author, Mr. Greenman Sinclair, is making.
Given Mr. Greenman Sinclair’s strong and clear statement of belief in his video about the doomsday scenario that AGW represents it’s clear that he’s not someone dedicated to the scientific method. Which is fine, not everyone is cut out to be a scientist or has had the benefit of a science oriented educational training. So maybe he doesn’t realize his mistake which makes his piece belief driven ignorant propaganda rather than outright fraud intended propaganda.
However, that doesn’t apply to the anonymous scientist, possibly Dr. Thomas C. Peterson as the digital forensic trail suggests, from NCDC that prepared the graph and seeded it with the public and one way or the other with Mr. Greenman Sinclair. Either it’s gross incompetence or outright scientific fraud on the part of the anonymous NCDC scientist. I don’t know which is worse! Either way NCDC is on the hook for fraudulent or bad science being passed on as propaganda in a political cause. Shame on NCDC and the anonymous scientist.
The scientific method is our tool for finding out those facts that are possible to find out. It is our last refuge from politics and the tyrany of belief driven activism and belief driven causes.
All the best, and keep up the auditing Anthony,
Darth PWL
Mr. Watts, you are a true journalist, a true scientist, and a true gentleman. Your investigative journalist reporting on CCCC, especially copyrights, deserves awards. You might want to take sspecial note of John Egan 5:52:
“With regards to the recent video that contained illegal use of copyrighted materials, George Monbiot at the Guardian published a column critical of you yesterday which contained a pirated version of the video and stated within the column that he was aware of your request that this video be halted. Since the Guardian is a major media outlet in Great Britain, since Great Britain is a signatory to international copyright law, and since Mr. Monbiot is an employee of the Guardian – – I believe that the Guardian is legally liable for intentional infringement.”
You are a hero for your careful, courageous work, generosity, and your tenacity.
Maybe you and this guy can have a beer at the White House and sort it out with Obama
This particular Sinclair is a personally repulsive creature. But the statement about the unimportance of the choice of 70 stations – with this huge accuracy – shows a complete lack of his statistical intuition.
When we look at different years, and I am just using a choice of 80 K*** stations in WeatherData[] of Mathematica, the annual mean temperature in each station oscillates plus minus 1 °C or so, between 1950 and 2008.
Now, about 1/2 of these fluctuations may be attributed to a shared U.S. (or regional) climate, while the remaining 1/2 is random, truly local noise. That’s still +-0.5 °C of local noise per station. By averaging over 70 “representative” stations, the noise decreases by sqrt(70), roughly 8 times, to +-0.06 °C. This 0.1 deg Fahrenheit is the estimate for the “unremovable” noise of the average of 70 stations.
The agreement of the two curves in his graph is already more accurate than that – a statistical impossibility, especially if one realizes that there is surely a correlation between the “class” of the station and characteristics of its graph (i.e. trend and variance).
The blue and red graph are only found matching because both of them are calculated from the same ensemble that is actually overwhelmingly dominated by the bad-class stations. None of these two curves is calculated from the reliable class 1,2 stations only.
I would love to draw the actual correct curve calculated exclusively from the 70 “good” stations but unfortunately most of them are not among the 17168 world station names offered by Mathematica.
I’ve been experimenting with trying to convince a true believer that there are troubling problems with the “science is settled” argument.
I’ll present a chart or story that would lead any thinking person to question what the truth really is or if it has even been discovered. You can see that for a few seconds it is working. There are doubts and concerns. But soon, there is a poll or opinion article that surfaces and all is well again in the climate doom and gloom world. Any concerns and doubts are forgotten and the true believers can return to their mindless devotion. Mr Sinclair’s video is serving its purpose. Getting the facts right is not one of them.
It is interesting. I can’t prove that God exists. I have faith.
They can’t prove AGW exists, they have faith and unfortunately AGW is their religion.
Faith has no part to play in settled science.
Hang in there Anthony!
Mr. Grandia has demonstrated that he’s not particularly attentive to copyright issues by proudly posting a copyright violation of a copyright violation. Mr. Watts was violated by the video creator, but his lawyer might have to figure out what kind of communication with Mr. Grandia would be proper. It’s messy enough dealing with one clear problem, but I don’t know what kind of legal issues might arise with third parties who entangle themselves in a copyright problem. Blog commentary about a publication is one thing, but reposting a copy of a publication is a different kind of behavior.
” considering the fact that Fox is one of the most popular stations in the States.” – Nevin
Do you have numbers to back that up? I call bull sh*t. Fox has half the viewers of any of the broadcast networks, and there are three of them. Figure it out. I see though that your state run (the govt does favors for supporters in the media, for example, the French govt getting a reporter a first rate apartment in a first class arondisment of Paris, which is common) media has done a fine job scaring you about Americans though.
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals explains how to do Real Climate science.
i.e. leave off the evidence and attack the unbelievers in what ever program you are trying to push. Where they went wrong is that they forgot:
RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
I discuss the book and its rules here:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2008/08/obama-be.html
The current attack on Anthony is a classic case of applying the rules.
And rule #7? Well the marks are wising up.
Thank the Maker science is so much simpler. No need for tactics. Just evidence.
There is only one Green Man.
http://www.thegreenmancostume.com/greenman.gif
Note copious arm waving.
“Managed to post on the Grauniad Monbigo”
Another of those who clearly deplore ad hominems 😉
This is soooooo much fun!
“On a personal note: I was disappointed to see you appear on Fox, Anthony, especially in that Glenn Beck Show. The way the news is reported at that station scares the shit out of me as a European. It is very bad advertising for the American people, considering the fact that Fox is one of the most popular stations in the States. I would never ever want to be associated with that warmongering corporate propaganda outlet. But then again, I would never want to be associated with something like the Heartland Institute either (especially considering the fact that I know people who suffer and have suffered greatly from tobacco). It was also very shocking for me to see how closely you and your surface station project seem to be tied to that organisation. Couldn’t you have done it without them? It would have raised the credibility of your project a lot (in my view), but I’ll wait and see what comes out of the project before jumping to conclusions.”
Are you for real?
It must be weird to run your life on other peoples’ opinions.
This sort “If you want my good opinion, you shouldn’t….” is a form of nagging that is somewhat demeaning.
Anthony: This can only do your reputation a power of good. The behaviour of the warmists shows them as being nothing but brainless hypocrites. Congratulations for your very moderate and sensible behaviour in the face of such provocation. Keep up the good work.
“Bizzaro land” indeed.
Thanks for sharing those little berserker gems. Makes me appreciative of the fact that this is a moderated blog where a certain degree of rationality and civility is maintained. Within that framework we can even see criticisms made of this blog and its posts. We’ve already seen or heard of how alarmist blogs & publications deal with criticism.
So, a special h/t and thanks to Anthony and volunteer mods for that little bit of extra work in maintaining this blog’s standards.
George Monbiot says that carbon [by which he means CO2, whether he knows it or not] sequestration is cheap and easy: click.
As the video shows, people like Monbiot live in their own echo chamber, a self-reinforcing bubble that encloses only like-thinking alarmists. They begin to believe even their wildest statements, because there are no opposing views allowed. As we have heard time after time from comments here, posts by skeptics are routinely censored from realclimate, Tamino, and the other alarmist sites.
This leads to ever more extreme views by the alarmist crowd — and they actually begin to believe crazy, easily debunked statement’s like Monbiot’s claim that it’s cheap and easy to sequester CO2. If it were cheap and easy, lots of companies would already be doing it, for public relations purposes if nothing else.
The great value of WUWT and other skeptic sites is the fact that real debate is encouraged, and opposing views are welcomed. But realclimate and its clones are clearly terrified of different points of view. Why? Because when true debate occurs, the truth begins to emerge. And the truth destroys the warmists’ argument.
If there is one thing that RC, Tamino, etc. are afraid of, it is the truth about their “CO2 causes runaway global warming” conjecture. That claim can not survive honest debate.
So the warmist sites bar skeptics’ comments, and become self-perpetuating echo chambers where people swallow their own propaganda, like Monbiot’s crazy assertion that burying billions of tons of CO2 is both cheap and easy.
ROM (04:06:58) :-the business of cults is to gather followers.The problem is they aren’t in the AGW cult. -The AGW cultists are screaming for windmills and solar in the Portland Or.area as of yesterday.Yet the East side of Oregon was merely warm.Cults die off when they lose followers.The AGW crowd is screaming because fewer people want to drink their Kool-Aid-so, now they are spiking it with MD 20-20 that,is attack
the person.Not the Data….
On a personal level,I endured something less extensive but nonetheless nasty, by writing a paper in support of the continued use of DDT-back in 1974-while in my fourth year of College.To this day there are still people that I knew then that will not talk to me.Not that I want to talk to them, either…
Hang in there,Anthony.It’s always darkest before the dawn…
Ah I see from this:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6370
that NOAA are being sneakier than I’d thought. Rather sneakier than GISS;
I assumed they their adjustment procedure adjusted the bad station data downwards, but apparently they have adjusted the good station data upwards, in the process adding 0.7 degrees F per century above that of the GISS record – and without making the raw data available. Shame. Every time I give someone the shadow of the doubt in this numbers game I’m disappointed.
bill (04:45:22) :
Posting up a screenshot of something copyrighted is an example of “fair use” under the copyright law. Not being a copyright lawyer, and not having nearly the experience Anthony does in the public use of copyrighted material, I will leave it to Anthony to distinguish his actions against Sinclair from Sinclair’s right to fair use of selected portions of Anthony’s copyrighted work. But it does seem clear to me, and ought to seem clear to any fair minded purpose, that Anthony’s objective was not to quash the video, but to see certain errors addressed or acknowledged. And that, in the war of ideas that has become the provenance of climate science and climate change, seems fair game to me.
This is confirmation that your work is making headway in the public.
Your letting the sun shine on the under handed tactics of those that don’t care if science supports AGW – they just want it to be true for their own benefit.
Now that you are making headway in the public, your scaring them and they attack you even more.
I take this as a good sign. Keep up the good work.
What I see is this:
Years ago, Anthony asked a question: Is there a problem with the siting of out land-based temperature stations? No one could give Anthony an answer validated with data. So Anthony set out to find the answer, validated with data. And here this guys is, mocking Anthony for seeking the scientific answer to a very valid question. Is that what we’ve become? Are you kidding me? Openly scorning those that seek the answers to scientific questions? In *this* country?!?!?
It’s childish, disgusting, and unprofessional. Mr. Sinclair should be ashamed of himself, but I’m sure he’s not….
You, sir, are a gentleman.
On a personal note: I was disappointed to see you appear on Fox, Anthony, especially in that Glenn Beck Show. The way the news is reported at that station scares the shit out of me as a European. It is very bad advertising for the American people,
If you don’t get Glenn Beck you don’t get a very large swath of American culture. We are not “used to be Europeans.” We (well many of us any way) are “don’t want to be Europeans.”
Anthony, rest assured that many people are backing away from AGW. Just about everyone in my circle of influence no longer buys into the nonsense. You are up against “the establishment,” so you can expect establishment fanboys to continue to attack you. These are people who do not have the strength to stand on their own.
I think the best thing about your blog is that I continually see crops of freedom oriented comments and statements. Many of the commenters here understand the trouble is governmental interference and intrusion. You yourself mentioned the “angst of the alarmosphere” over your work being private. Indeed, it is the entire reason the establishment hates blogs all together. They are private and outside the realm of government/corporate control. Or at least they started out being so. Regretfully these same antagonists are setting up their own blogs to try and capture the spirit of blogs such as WUWT (and others).
My expertise is not in the realm of weather or climate. I’m trained in the world of technology. But I must state that this is the best blog I know of. I check it regularly throughout the day and read just about every word written. Honestly I don’t know what I like better, the articles or the comments! You have certainly attracted a gaggle of interesting and intelligent thinkers (myself excluded, of course, for humility’s sake). This alone speaks to the content of your blog.
Your work is respected and appreciated. It is also of the utmost importance. Work on, my good man.
A debate with this ‘Greenman’ might be entertaining, and since he probably doesn’t have any hard-science chops, instructive to the ignorant camp-followers. Judging from the video clip above, Anthony would decimate him.
Anthony was right to point out to YouTube that this fellow was playing fast and loose with his copyrighted materials, and YouTube acted with appropriate caution by taking down the video. The usual cries of ‘censorship’ are laughable.
/Mr Lynn
First – they ignore you …
Next – they ridicule you …
Then they violently oppose you …
Then you win.
The first principle of sales says: “NEVER mention the competition´s name, because it will result 1st.in the arousal of curiosity and 2nd. in buying the “product”.
Well, this is it!, so, congratulations Anthony!
Nevin,
Looky how many people watch Fox News compared to the knob slobbering coverage of Obama on the major networks which have many times the viewers. Fox is the most popular *Cable* news network, which is like being the worlds tallest midget.
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/07/20/broadcast-and-cable-news-quarterly-ratings-through-june-2009/23107
Something less that 1% of the people in the US watch Fox News, yet somehow it is a major threat that Obama obsesses on.
This is so OT I don’t know if I should even go here. But I’ll give it a shot since it came up in a comment by some one who seems to understand the state of climate “science”.
Tobacco is an anti-depressant in which the dose can be finely titrated. It does cause cancer in those who smoke enough and who are genetically susceptible. There is another similar drug (an anti-depressant) out there which has anti-tumor properties. However, the US government made it illegal in 1937.
It is not just climate science which is ruled by propaganda and scare tactics. Another similarity of the situation of the drug I refer to with climate “science” is that alternative views are suppressed, shouted down, and research curtailed. That is slowly being rolled back.
The difficulty is that everyone doesn’t have enough time to research every claim of “science”. And at least for a time (sometimes a very long time) researchers can be bought.
The only way to go through the world is with a sceptics view. Or as journalist used to say: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
Smokey: If it were cheap and easy, lots of companies would already be doing it, for public relations purposes if nothing else.
You are right!…It is very, but very easy, for example, wash CO2 gases with milk of lime….but…in order to make milk of lime, burning milled lime rock (calcium carbonate) is needed, burning fossil fuels or carbon and (surprise!) decomposing calcium carbonate (CaCO3) into CO2 !!! and CaO (calcium oxide).
This is, of course, stupid, as stupid are those who imagine it is possible to warm their feet with a bottle filled of hot air, instead of hot water; as stupid as saying that CO2 is up there in the sky acting as a barrier for re-irradiated heat, being CO2 heavier than the air…
Of course, all these myths are being repeated by the most pure and absolute laymen….so “forgive them as they do not know what they are doing”…to themselves.
JimB (03:30:01) Anthony, Hats off to you for your professionalism and perseverance through this long, strange trip. The value you bring to the table with your endeavours is incalculable.
h/t to YOU
Thanks for the words JimB, couldn’t have stated it better.
Allen63 (03:44:48) Are they liars or fools? I think the answer is the former, as they must consider others as the latter, thus becoming both themselves.
Lists of facts are not copyrightable http://articles.directorym.com/Fact_list_copyrighting-a952224.html
So I doubt the collected and collated data can be prevented from being used by anyone. The way it’s presented can be copyrighted, however.
The Desmogblog crowd is in full swing: in the Vancouver Sun, PR Hoggan chairman of the Suzuki Foundation is attacking the Plimer book in usual fashion -big oil type- and now one of their journacolytes is playing disinformation with Anthony’s work. Obviously as self appointed guardian of the faith, they can’t handle the truth…
>Fox is one of the most popular stations in the States. I would never ever want
> to be associated with that warmongering corporate propaganda outlet.
Probably means – ‘most popular cable stations’.
Still it was the morning show, Fox and Friends, that pulled off this great bit of interviewing…
—————–
On Fox News Channel’s Fox and Friends, co-anchor Steve Doocy talked with Obama Administration Energy Czar Carol Browner:
STEVE DOOCY: “[I] know the bill is over 1,000 pages long. Have you have read it?”
CAROL BROWNER: “Oh, I’m very familiar with this bill.”
DOOCY: “Have you read it?”
BROWNER: “We have obviously been watching this for a very long time. I am very …”
DOOCY: “I’m sure you’ve got an idea of it, but you have read it?”
BROWNER: “I’ve read major portions of it, absolutely.”
DOOCY: “So the answer no you haven’t read it. But you’ve read a big chunk of it.”
BROWNER: “No, no, no that’s not fair. That’s absolutely not fair.”
DOOCY: “No, I’m just asking you if you read the thousand pages.”
BROWNER: “I’ve read vast portions of it.”
DOOCY: “Ok.”
— Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” 6/29/09
Here we see yet more evidence that fascism is more an irrational state of mind based on resentments than a coherent political philosophy. Extreme environmentalism has become a cult that is destroying scientific inquiry and earnest political debate in its pursuit of authoritarian power over the economic engines of the West.
The fact is that Anthony is publicly pursuing a line of research that could undermine the entire foundation of the theory of AGW. Therefore it is imperative he be destroyed before the research is completed.
If the Grandia-posted vid is allowed to stand, then I must assume the copyright issue is a lame duck and Watts reasons for taking down the Sinclair vid is something else.
If the good stations are compared against the raw data, then we will discover that there will be significant differences in the temp series. But that is already known, has long been known, and has been corrected (homogenised) to account for various biases.
The real test of the US temp record is the comparison of that adjusted time series to that of Watts’ good stations. If there is no difference, I think Anthony Watts still will have done a great service – of confirming the formal record. But I’m not sure why there has been all this snarky carry on all this time about siting and other problems when this has been known and accounted for for years and years – since well before surface stations started documenting weather stations (with dedicated helpers). So much of the posting here and there implies disrepute to the NCDC (and others), that one can hardly blame Sinclair for his approach – neither is good, but pots and kettles shouldn’t throw stones at each other (we have a knack for mangling metaphors where I live – it’s almost an art form 🙂 ).
Mr Watts. I’ve read that you promised an update to the good-station time series when 75% of the network has been assessed. We’re now over 80%. Will there be an update soon?
REPLY: Thanks for pointing that out. Actually the analysis started a couple of weeks back, and papers are being prepared. Unfortunately most journals require that the work not be previously published, so WUWT will be second to publication. – Anthony
geoffchambers (01:15:31) :
PS Actually, it would be brilliant if Alan ( Anthony) himself could comment on the Monbiot Guardian article.
I do not think so…let the dogs bark! .BTW: As The Quijote said: “Dogs are barking, it means we are going forward”
Well done Anthony,
I don’t know how you can handle that kind of attacks and not have your blood boil over.
Maintain the high ground, and keep up the great work
All the best,
Darth PWL
lol, I was thinking the same thing. How long before they photoshop Anthony’s picture in a Darth Vader helmet & call him Darth Watts? And the rest of us Storm Troopers?
I thought you handled this quite well, Anthony. Even if they foam at the mouth because they’re too far gone into the green and are beyond all reason, it wasn’t worth stooping to their level on this one.
Give them some more rope, Anthony. Stay on the high road, as I am sure you intend to do. What Sinclair is trained to do is to indoctrinate those who are weak minded enough to not ask the hard questions, as he has been. Mainly youth, who think that complex issues can be addressed with “sound bytes”. I have also noticed a lot more activity from the warmers on this site. Desperate times lead to desperate measures. Time wounds all heels.
M. SImon:
I always suspected that the CAGWers had a play book and Alinsky wrote it.
Alinsky certainly provides an insight into the tactics. As to the mind-set, I was recently reading up on the Alger Hiss story and came across this intriguing but disturbing quotation from American Communist Party Manual on Organization (circa 1930s):
” We do not question the theory of the necessity for the forceful overthrow of capitalism, We do not question the correctness of the revolutionary theory of class struggle laid down by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. We do not question the counter-revolutionary nature of Trotskyism.
We do not question the political correctness of the decisions, resolutions, etc., of the Executive Committee of the Communist International of the convention of the Party, or the Central Committee after they are ratified.” (emphasis added)
We do not question CAGW!!
Note the issue is not the object, but the mindset represented by the verb phrase.
The beauty of all of this is that the more the Warmists resort to defamation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
the more the general populace is becoming dismissive of them. Ad hominems are the shelter of the weak. When you can’t effectively argue the argument you argue the arguer.
Burch Seymour (08:25:32) : About climate and other zar/commisars:
http://mat-rodina.blogspot.com/2009/07/czar-you-mean-commissar.html
Here’s a farmers take on the carbon, AGW, etc. business: http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals
Partial excerpt:
“Norman Borlaug, founder of the green revolution, estimates that the amount of nitrogen available naturally would only support a worldwide population of 4 billion souls or so. He further remarks that we would need another 5 billion cows to produce enough manure to fertilize our present crops with “natural” fertilizer. That would play havoc with global warming. And cows do not produce nitrogen from the air, but only from the forages they eat, so to produce more manure we will have to plant more forages. Most of the critics of industrial farming maintain the contradictory positions that we should increase the use of manure as a fertilizer, and decrease our consumption of meat. Pollan would solve the problem with cover crops, planted after the corn crop is harvested, and with mandatory composting. Pollan should talk to some actual farmers before he presumes to advise a president.
Pollan tells of flying over the upper Midwest in the winter, and seeing the black, fallow soil. I suppose one sees what one wants to see, but we have not had the kind of tillage implement on our farm that would produce black soil in nearly 20 years. Pollan would provide our nitrogen by planting those black fields to nitrogen-producing cover crops after the cash crops are harvested. This is a fine plan, one that farmers have known about for generations. And sometimes it would even work. But not last year, as we finished harvest in November in a freezing rain. It is hard to think of a legume that would have done its thing between then and corn planting time. Plants do not grow very well in freezing weather, a fact that would evidently surprise Pollan.
And even if we could have gotten a legume established last fall, it would not have fixed any nitrogen before planting time. We used to plant corn in late May, plowing down our green manure and killing the first flush of weeds. But that meant the corn would enter its crucial growing period during the hottest, driest parts of the summer, and that soil erosion would be increased because the land was bare during drenching spring rains. Now we plant in early April, best utilizing our spring rains, and ensuring that pollination occurs before the dog days of August.
A few other problems come to mind. The last time I planted a cover crop, the clover provided a perfect habitat in early spring for bugs, bugs that I had to kill with an insecticide. We do not normally apply insecticides, but we did that year. Of course, you can provide nitrogen with legumes by using a longer crop rotation, growing clover one year and corn the next. But that uses twice as much water to produce a corn crop, and takes twice as much land to produce the same number of bushels. We are producing twice the food we did in 1960 on less land, and commercial nitrogen is one of the main reasons why. It may be that we decide we would rather spend land and water than energy, but Pollan never mentions that we are faced with that choice.
His other grand idea is mandatory household composting, with the compost delivered to farmers free of charge. Why not? Compost is a valuable soil amendment, and if somebody else is paying to deliver it to my farm, then bring it on. But it will not do much to solve the nitrogen problem. Household compost has somewhere between 1 and 5 percent nitrogen, and not all that nitrogen is available to crops the first year. Presently, we are applying about 150 pounds of nitrogen per acre to corn, and crediting about 40 pounds per acre from the preceding years soybean crop. Let’s assume a 5 percent nitrogen rate, or about 100 pounds of nitrogen per ton of compost. That would require 3,000 pounds of compost per acre. Or about 150,000 tons for the corn raised in our county. The average truck carries about 20 tons. Picture 7,500 trucks traveling from New York City to our small county here in the Midwest, delivering compost. Five million truckloads to fertilize the country’s corn crop. Now, that would be a carbon footprint!”
Anthony’s Surface Stations project will be out later this fall. We will then have a chance to see for ourselves what the study reveals.
SInclair and NCDC are simply preparing their people for the storm that will ensue if the data show their product is compromised by the bad stations.
It may not be an honorable mission for a public scientific body, but NCDC is made up of people with egos and personal beliefs they think are being attacked.
Sinclair is just a typical enviro whose worldview is set in stone – facts mean nothing to him.
I look forward to the release of the final Surface Stations report. Until then my mind is open.
It is clear from the video that this character wishes to see himself as a hero. His comment about big changes coming are part of his fantasy. As such, his entire belief system follows that track.
Clearly, if solar technology was ready to solve the world’s energy problems it would be adopted everywhere. So, it’s unlikely his fantasy world will come about in just a few years as he indicated. I see some great disappointments awaiting Mr. Sinclair.
Months and months ago I posted questions to Mr. Sinclairs videos asking fair but tough questions looking for his explanation to certain climate data that did not match up with his views. None of my questions ever showed in the comments so I emailed him direct and asked why that was and he blamed it on my browser. I told him I have never had a problem posting comments to any other videos and he could not give me an answer.
Yea, ok.
On the copyright issue:
I assume the copyright to the published book on the temperature record has been registered. If not, you still own the copyright, but acting on infringements would be expensive as you would be unable to recover legal costs and statutory damages would be unavailable to you. If it is not registered, do so NOW. It’s $40 and well worth it.
The next issue is parody. If the offender’s piece can be construed as parody, you have no copyright case. Parody is one of the most staunchly defended forms of free speech when it comes to copyrights. But it is a tricky area. Your work must be the subject of the parody (not using your work to parody something else) and your work must have been easily recognizable by the public to rise to the parody test.
The next issue is slander. There are times when the motivation of the infringer is to do damage to one’s reputation which rises to defamation and slander.
If you are clear on the copyright matters, a slap down of this clown may be in order.
Douglas DC (07:21:12) :
ROM (04:06:58) :-the business of cults is to gather followers.The problem is they aren’t in the AGW cult. –
Cult? The AGW cult, is this not all about whining about ad hominems, I thought this was supposed to be full of people above that
😉
When I first read the Surface stations document I was wholly skeptical. As should anyone who reads any document which proclaims, well, anything. Even if you agree with the conclusion.
You stance should always be “Ok, that’s your conclusion, demonstrate to me how you came to that conclusion”.
I found Anthonys document to be wholly reasonable, if not necessarily conclusive that the surface temparature measurements are completely useless (which is the straw man that some AGW proponents build), but is an unreliable indicator of surface temperature.
This is a prime example of an ignoramus simply attacking the writer of a document because it goes against their belief. The farcical thing is that a national organization attempted to refute the surfacestations.org result, and simply ended up saying that “The temperatures we measured are correct because we measured the temperatures”. Its not surprising no-one wanted to put their name to it.
Indeed, I believe that there are many people [within NOAA] who know of this issue, but the data and results have been used so extensively to make political and economic decisions, that to volunteer such knowledge is certainly ‘above their pay grade’.
All you need to know about George Monbiot is that he is the co-founder of Britain’s official Marxist-Islamist party (and they called it Respect!). It’s other co-founder was none other than George Galloway, who is so deceitful, authoritarian and treacherous he makes Satan look like God’s favourite girlfriend.
Personally, I’d take any and all action to defend my copy right if I were you. They either respect the law or they don’t.
Once they understand, should they persist, then they’re immoral lawbreakers.
But that’s just.
Sinclair’s offer to rent the room for the debate is an offer to pack the room with his supporters. Beware overconfidence. Being right scientifically is not enough.
Ultimately, history will judge and the bad behavior of the alarmists is being recorded in perfect detail. The more they cheat and insult and lie, the worse it will be for them in the long run.
Anthony writes like he’s taking the long view and knows that history is watching. There’s a word for that — professionalism.
You always stay above the fray.
Sylvia (07:36:05) :
You, sir, are a gentleman.
Ditto.
Burch Seymour (08:25:32) : “…. DOOCY: “Have you read it?”….”
Great find, ROTFL, it is just so typical.
Congressmen are paid by the tax payers to represent their interest but most do not even bother to read what they vote on despite that being their primary duty as representatives of the citizens. However the citizen is expected to read, understand and obey all the laws and regulations (billions of pages???) that are in effect since ignorance of the law is not considered an adequate excuse for breaking the law.
Isn’t it about time Congress and the states started taking laws off the books so citizens have at least a chance of understanding and obeying them. I am sure that most adults by the time they are 30 have broken many laws and regs. For example in MA it is illegal to place in your compose pile anything that did not originate on you land. Placing store bought carrot peelings in your compose pile is illegal! (As of 1993) Or in South Dakota “If there are more than 5 Native Americans on your property you may shoot them.” http://www.dumblaws.com/laws/united-states/south-dakota
Before you vote for a congress-critter in the next election find out if they have bothered to read ALL the laws they voted on. Just a Yes or No answer no spin allowed. That should be the first duty of every voter.
Fantastic post Anthony.
I wonder why the leftists fear surfacestations? What can possibly be so wrong about QC’ing thermometers. How is it possible that a QC check could be so dangerous that it is receiving these responses before it has published it’s findings?
I hope people realize just how astoundingly disengenuous the reply form the NCDC was to Anthony’s project. These guys know the homoginization insures that you’re comparing the same data with itself, ask yourselves why take the time to reply with blatantly false math!!!!! Again.
The other shoe, coming soon to a theater near you.
I’ve done a post on a similar topic which relates to RC’s censorship of comments. It’s been discussed a bit on Lucia’s thread recently and now on RC.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/rc-censors/
I’m surprised the Warmist Cult Priests all don’t walk around with a sign saying “The End is Nigh, Repent Carbon Sinners, Repent”
Few understand the idea of censorship and free speech in the manner Anthony expressed as these “protections involve state infringement.” When it is explained to them, they may listen awhile and then say “Yeah, but . . . ” There should be an award for well-meaning people who try to explain things to fools!
This has been a fascinating morning read. The thing worse than being noticed is not being noticed. I predict there will be a step-up in the hits to WUWT.
Also, comes the news that the “cash for clunkers” project has spiraled out of control. Hang your head if you didn’t see that coming.
The Sinclairs of Argyllshire call themselves Clann-na-Cearda or the Children of the craft or trade.
Unfortunately this one is not a good practitioner of his chosen trade.
News flash
On newsbusters video, the cause of global warming is the Democrats pants on fire
Patrik (02:05:39) :
Also – has this guy really had his stuff peer reviewed? 😉
I think that you have a typo there, a spurious “r” at the end of peer.
Anthony, your cautious and detailed account is a lesson in due diligence but for many people it seems that what we witness here and in so many places it the total abolition of what used to be known as Attention Span. The ability to engage and focus in on the actual detail has been supplanted with a surging need to ricochet off every possible nuance, closely related or otherwise and then proclaim in the negative in the misguided belief that this is where the debate actually is and not back at the science or whatever. Maybe I give them too much credit. 🙂
An OT example, I read the following account yesterday via drudge, a person going about their daily business was public spirited enough to respond to a request to call law enforcement, because the story itself became a cause celebre for many pointless angsters she has been vilified simply because of being there and doing what we would in such circumstance hope she would have done but in doing so becoming a coat hanger for the dross that passes as discourse these days in too many places.
Rant mode off for a few minutes. 🙂
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25592.html
There are new polls out that show ever greater numbers of Americans now view climate as more caused by natural forces than caused by man. The average Joe can see the obvious. The Sun, Oceans, Currents, Winds, Volcanoes, etc. and all of their complex interactions dwarf mankind. A huge percentage of the earth is essentially uninhabited by man.
The realization that they are losing is setting in, so they are flailing accordingly.
“Is this Green Man the same guy? Inquiring minds want to know.”
Some do, indeed, but this particular inquiring mind doesn’t give a flying owl hoot who he is.
Most posters here who are naysaying Anthony’s action in this matter on legal grounds are misinformed to some degree regarding copyright law. I’ve read up on it while investigating formal copyright of three diverse items, and it’s not as simple as they allege, nor is it entirely clear-cut. Lack of profit motive, for one thing, is not a safe detour around copyright.
And well, lets face it, he got the facts wrong about the project and never contacted or interviewed me to get any facts from my side (more on that later). So it could hardly be defined as “journalism”
No, this is what they want the definition of “journalism” to be. How many time have we heard some warmers, including Gavin and Mann BTW, complain that modern journalism is failing on this issue BECAUSE they sometimes include alternative POV’s that challenges theirs. George Monbiot has practically made a career as a journalist being completely one sided. I have no problem with it if that is where your passions lie, and that is the type of journalist you want to be. But they advocate that all journalism must be of one voice on this particular topic. FAIL.
This little documentary is propaganda pure and simple.
You cannot compare the “adjusted-to-the-average” good sites with the “adjusted-to-the-average” bad sites. Especially when the “average” is a poor overall rating of 4.2. I think Steve M. even showed that GISS lower 48 data is better than the NOAA’s (and GISS lower 48 temps have hardly increased at all – 2008 was even 0.41C lower than 1900).
Anyone who would have spent this amount of time making the documentary and checking into it would have known these facts (and so should have the NOAA). So, the documentary is clearly disingenious/___ .
[just noting there is a legit John V – I checked into it awhile ago.]
theduke (08:28:45) :
Yes. I agree. It will get much worse for Anthony I fear.
A Second Dear Mr. Watts –
You are far greater the gentleman than Mr. Grandia or Mr. Monbiot. Given their actions, you had every legal right to file suit – and it would have been a slam-dunk. But, instead you said this – which I missed on first reading.
“So much for my “censorship”, feel free to view it. You see, I’ve had lots of angry criticism in the last two years, this is nothing new, so I’m not really concerned about the criticisms.”
I am confident that your position and the manner in which you conduct yourself will prevail. I may disagree with you on the issues, but I could not agree with you more on how you have handled this.
Kudos!
J
All I can say is: “Please don’t poop on my copyright!”
pwl (05:52:41) : “OOPS…”
They teach you never to say that in medical school.
“…wouldn’t you know it, a proof reading mistake caught after hitting submit….”
Never look back, that’s my motto.
“…I’m a fallible human after all; at least I can admit a mistake and correct it. – pwl”
Hey, this is the Internerdt. You were close enuf the first time. We knew whatcha meant. Press on, irregardless (sic).
Anthony, I love your site and visit it daily, but I’m a bit skeptical in this matter. I simply can’t believe you thought this fellow was a college student. His video wasn’t at all bad by YouTube standards (presentation, not content), and his voice sounds nothing like a student’s. That and the condescending tone you put behind your purported noble intent comes across as a bit disingenuous and it undermines you. I don’t think for a moment you intended to help this guy out; my not very scientific, and too well-fed gut tells me you had an all-too-human moment of weak character and pulled the trigger prematurely on the DMCA claim before thinking of the political repercussions.
That said, Peter’s movie did lean typically hard on the tobacco association crutch I’ve seen so many times. It’s a fine example of an ad hominem, but I assume to those who rely on it, the point is to demonstrate a lack of credibility. In this case, I found myself wondering what the Heartland Institute’s position was regarding tobacco. Peter’s video made me think they’d asserted smoking wasn’t dangerous, but HI could just as easily have been promoting scientific data minimizing second-hand smoke dangers or supporting tobacco farmers.
Speaking of ad hominems, I find it disturbing how much effort the environmentalist/global warming crowd pours into collecting data on individuals opposed to their agenda. There’s an almost Stazi-esque obsession with assembling dossiers on their opponents — need to find something wrong with one argument that can then be used to smear every successive argument. Maybe the “deniers” do the same thing, but it’s the “warmers” who frequently fall back on the tired, “X said something supporting your view? Well, did you know X also said something wrong once, or is a known associate of the nefarious Y?”
Thanks for this great article, Anthony. Absolutely hilarious. You can’t make this stuff up!
Oh wait, they are… 🙂
I once had a contract cleaning & estimating missing temperature data for a regional network. To say it was a messy job would be a serious understatement.
I have looked into the details of the homogenization methods used in Canada. People may be trying their best to wrestle with a very difficult problem, but there is no escaping the fact that there are substantive issues with homogenized data. Without the raw data, any important log notes, and detailed information on processing there is no guarantee that a careful analyst can draw sensible conclusions in research based on homogenized data. This is tricky business.
It is a slippery slope towards data corruption.
Heh. It seems that the attacks on Anthony have been ratcheted up to the Sarah Palin level. Surely this is evidence that Anthony has struck a nerve, and threatened the implementation of the solutions to their imagined crisis. In other words, they believe that Anthony must be taken out by whatever means deemed necessary.
Here’s a new post on a blog that calls Anthony “scientifically illiterate”, and calls Surface Stations Project a “silly initiative”.
http://one-blue-marble.com/blog/2009/07/30/anthony-watts-wins-the-double-dumb-ass-award/
I think it is terrible that NCDC etc are not applauding your efforts to improve the integrity of their datasets, regardless of whether they feel that the quality of the records affects the outcome of their research. What downside could possibly exist to ensuring high quality data? The only answer I can come up with is that the issue is politicized, and/or they have something to hide.
I wonder, how long will it take for the words “Sinclair” and/or “Grandia” to become synonymous with “cheap hack”.
How do you know when you are opver the target hot zone?
Anthony, there was also a mention of you at Climateprogress.org on a July 29th posting.
Anthony
Any chance of an update on the database.
I started downloading all the data for your grade 1 and 2 stations, then realised that the list of checked station was not complete.
You can email or update your website
Thanks
Anthony, another great post! Love the detail posting of what you encountered and what you did! I too, feel you should debate this Mr. Sinclair! I would also like to see Joanne Nova with you. She is awesome, but there are many others also…I feel if he did something wrong in copyright infringement, go after him…maybe “other” people will take notice! Another thing, I can ONLY imagine the amount of “Negative” email you receive in one day! It’s got to be alot!
This week it became known that the Dutch heir to to throne together with his family went (this week) for a winters Holiday to a skiing resort in Argentina. Up to this there is nothing wrong with that, apart from the fact it is a bit peculiar because it is the summer season in his own personal royalty.
The silly thing is that last January he was on the Southpole together with his wife investigating the serious impact of GW. I can imagine he likes cooler weather, but hey let’s give this guy a break!
A list of measures (considered facts), such as you can get from many website download, is not copyrightable. If it is offered, you don’t need permission to use it. Once you have the list, the table you create, the graph you create, the article you create, the book you create that uses this data, is copyrightable. When Anthony publishes the raw data in list format, others can and should use it to replicate his study. The only way this can be altered is to keep it private and choose who to send it to. However, if the recipient then publishes the raw data list, it is out in the public domain for anyone to use without permission.
Just thought Anthony and the other folks here might want to know…
There is an editing war going on over at Wiki right now concerning Anthony.
In the last…oh, 45 mins I’ve seen the page change 5 times.
BTW, apparently anyone linking anthony’s rebuttal page in an editing is automatically reverted. I know, I tried.
Here’s the message I got:
“July 2009,
Your edit here was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove unwanted links and spam from Wikipedia. The external link you added or changed is on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn’t be included in Wikipedia. The external links I reverted were matching the following regex rule(s): \bwordpress\.com (links: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/ncdc_response-v2.pdf).”
Interesting.
Doc
Anyone who’s been involved in blogs (and Youtube is a blog, just like all the rest), knows you are wasting your energy chasing anonymous phantom commenters. You use the tools of deletion with effect.
Let me amplify on that.
I have two blogs (one I’m a co blogger). One gets about 500 eyeballs a day. The other about 4,000. Every now and then I check referrer logs. Roughly 1/2 the traffic for each comes from search engines.
Even if Anthony is doing much better than that (3/4 regular traffic) there will be replacement eye-balls to more than make up for any lost.
M.A.DeLuca said, “Speaking of ad hominems, I find it disturbing how much effort the environmentalist/global warming crowd pours into collecting data on individuals opposed to their agenda. There’s an almost Stazi-esque obsession with assembling dossiers on their opponents….”
Stazi-esque, indeed. If you are ever unsure what side to take, look for these tactics. Then oppose that side as the one that advocates increased State control and reduced individual freedom. I’ve found this approach to be quite reliable.
More comedy from Answers.com
http://fr.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080417084654AADbHc4
So to answer your question I think that Watts is an idiot to go along with the oil industry coverup. Hopefully people like him will eventually be tried in Neuremburg-style courts for their crimes against humanity. It will be too late by then of course, but the people responsible for misinforming everyone else and delaying world understanding and response are essentially committing genocide, and definitely should be held accountable for their actions.
The evidence against them will continue to pile up over the next few decades. It’s only a matter of time before they’re brought to justice.
I must protest. It’s one thing to go into the usual fanatic rant against thoughtcrime and alleged inevitable future genocide, coupled with entreaties to bring the miscreants to harsh but righteous international justice. (Ho-hum.)
But such blatant poor usage of the word “hopefully” is something up with which I shall not put!
evanmjones (13:00:49) :
people like him will eventually be tried in Neuremburg-style courts for their crimes against humanity
That court already exists: It is the INTERNATIONAL CRMINAL COURT
http://www.icc-cpi.int/Menus/ICC?lan=en-GB
See, also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_International_Criminal_Court
Doc_Navy,
That’ll be Connolly at work presumably.
Wikipedia could be one of the greatest potential sources of information on the internet provided it was dealt with honestly and objectively. I wonder if the AGW cultists realise just what damage they are damming up for their cause.
Anthony — Can I add my congratulations to all the others. At this rate we’ll soon have a consensus!
I thoroughly enjoyed your tale of Don Quixote environmental leftism and may God grant you mercy for the idiocy you must bear.
Gore Lied (11:00:59) :
http://one-blue-marble.com/blog/2009/07/30/anthony-watts-wins-the-double-dumb-ass-award/
The juxtaposition between “Richard’s” writing on One Blue Marble and Anthony’s writing above provides a perfect example of why the Warmists are losing in the battle of blogosphere. Unless one has drunk several pitchers of the Warmist’s Kool-Aid, the writing on One Blue Marble is obvious childish blather. Here’s smattering:
Double Dumb Ass, scientifically-illiterate, silly, a buffoon, no more credibility than a conspiracy buff who thinks the moon landing was faked, pleasure in belittling his lack of education, doesn’t even understand the science he’s attempting to refute, doesn’t even understand how ridiculous he sounds, a con man, a snake oil salesman.
I encourage Richard to continue sharing his pearls of wisdom. People like him are the reason that the momentum has swung to the skeptics’ side.
That previous post was by accident. I wish it were possible to delete it.
I enjoyed your article. The statement: “. . . but Not ONE of those embracing it show the remotes interest in questioning . . .” may have some errors. The word “remotes” doesn’t seem to fit, and I’m not sure you intended to capitalize “Not.”
Jim
Reply: Previous post deleted and corrections made. ~ charles the moderator
Lubos Motl your comment at (06:46:55) was very informative… and educational… I too would like to see such an analysis and any others that you or Anthony or others can come up with that are cogent.
Thanks for the full frank informative description of the background to this, I must admit to first hearing about from the Guardian CiF Monbiot article. He has a powerful polemical style which can inspire some people but to me he is a bit of a shrill one note voice, however I see how it has been spun and played out.
The Monbiot Guardian CiF article is pretty risible, making out Mr Watts was “using US law” to silence his critics, with all the obvious implications that construction poses to some of the regular readers there.
Maybe Mr Watts should ask to post a reply on CIF?
Sinclair will never debate — unless the debate is arranged so he has a big advantage [a True Believer audience, interruptions condoned, pro-AGW cheering section, etc.]
Anthony should accept the debate challenge, then set the parameters in order to claim the moral and ethical high ground:
Neutral venue such as a university, from an agreed list of venues, then chosen by lot. Debate moderator to be mutually agree upon; moderator must be experienced in moderating debates, and have an impeccable reputation for being impartial.
Anthony should respond to the challenge by issuing the specific debate question. The moderator should keep all comments on track. Points deducted for ad hominem, appeals to authority, red herring, argumentum ad ignorantiam, etc. Facts are what matter, not personalities.
Debate according to formal debate rules, with each side’s microphone(s) switched off while the other person is speaking. No camera shots of anyone who is not currently speaking [no making faces, etc.] Following the debate, no one may use portions of the debate without the other party’s concurrence. Use the full, unedited debate; don’t cherry pick the parts for partisan propaganda, unless the other side agrees in advance.
Strict time limits. Microphone cut off when speaker’s time is up.
Audience to be selected 50/50 by each side. Preferably in another room, watching by closed circuit TV. Seating to be assigned at random, to avoid one side packing the front rows. The Peanut Gallery should have no influence on the debate.
Propose that each side should have three debaters. This isn’t a personality competition targeting Anthony; the purpose of a debate is to debate a specific question. Each side to choose their own team. One side may not decide who their opponents will be allowed to field.
The debate rules should be as neutral as possible. No shenanigans. When one party was challenged to a duel in old timey days, the challenged party chose the weapons. Anthony has been challenged, therefore he should have the option of setting the venue, the debate rules and the question to be debated.
Accepting the challenge under the above conditions will surely cause Sinclair to chicken out. He knows that in past climate debates the alarmist side has always lost the debate.
By setting rules that everyone will understand are fair to both sides, Sinclair will be seen as chickening out when he objects to the rules specified. Fine. Let him chicken out [or better, let him debate under Anthony’s debate rules].
Sinclair’s video hit piece was the sneak attack of a coward. His attempt to game the process with a self-serving venue and lax rules will be no different. A coward is a coward. Call his bluff — on your terms, Anthony.
Appalling!
“to go along with the oil industry coverup”
Hehe, I believe environmentalists who oppose nuclear power are really coal company shills designed to force the building of more coal plants by preventing the building of nuclear plants.
/sarc
Smokey (13:58:01) :
This time I can not agree with your proposal.
The only one to debate is Al Gore and not one of his apparatchiks.
The scientific consensus is crumbling now and we don’t need to descend to their lowest levels.
“M.A.DeLuca (10:46:55) :
Anthony, I love your site and visit it daily, but I’m a bit skeptical in this matter. I simply can’t believe you thought this fellow was a college student.”
I always believed he was a college student and still refer to him as such because his videos come across with a similar style and narration as 9/11 conspiracy videos on youtube such as Loose Change. It only takes an impressionable young person with no knowledge of engineering, chemistry, etc (science in general) to watch those videos and believe what they see and hear. To learn that a mature adult is behind those videos is staggering.
Smokey, a couple points. First, do you really think a university would be a neutral setting for your proposed debate?
As to the censure of inductive fallacies, let me suggest a Gallagherian approach. The comedian Gallagher once suggested supplying drivers with suction cup guns to shot flags reading “STUPID” at the cars of other drivers who cut them off or otherwise drove dangerously. If a driver accumulated enough STUPID flags he could be given a ticket for being an a**hole.
In the debate scenario I suggest that if a debater uses an inductive fallacy or other disallowed debating technique, the moderator shoots a STUPID flag at the offender’s podium. Ideally it would stick for all to see, especially the offender. After a debater earns a previously-decided number of STUPID flags, the debate would be ended and the opponent declared the victor, on the grounds that only losers resort to such tactics.
Jeff Id (09:35:06) : said
“”Fantastic post Anthony. I wonder why the leftists fear surfacestations?”” Jeff, you know better. 😉 This is not leftists versus rightists or liberals versus conservatives. I understand the humor of Anthony’s post. It is humorous to indulge in a bit of hoisting an opponent on his own petard. But keep in mind several who are reacting negative to IPCC and to some of the stances taken by acknowledged climate scientists are self-proclaimed liberals.
I would claim that bad science, methodology, or argument is not limited to one particular ideology.
evanmjones (13:00:49) :
More comedy from Answers.com
Ugh. That’s not comedy, it’s a horror flick.
******************************
lulo (11:02:46) :
I think it is terrible that NCDC etc are not applauding your efforts to improve the integrity of their datasets, regardless of whether they feel that the quality of the records affects the outcome of their research. What downside could possibly exist to ensuring high quality data? The only answer I can come up with is that the issue is politicized, and/or they have something to hide.
****************************************
“Everybody” knows that they have a magic AlGore-ithm and some fairy dust besides, that adjusts the data even though they don’t have the slightest idea what biases might exist in the adjusted data or the “other” data used to adjust it. It should be called the Three Card Monty AlGore-ithm.
Basil is correct. One does not need to be a lawyer in order to know the law. I haven’t watched the video, and have no intention of wasting my time by doing so, but don’t have the least doubt that the use of Anthony’s copyright is covered by ‘”fair use”. I’m very surprised, and disappointed, that so many here do not understand such simple law.
Substance is what counts no dodgy legalism
dorlomin (07:06:51) :
“Managed to post on the Grauniad Monbigo”
Another of those who clearly deplore ad hominems 😉
This is soooooo much fun!
Except you don’t even know where & why the Grauniad tag came about.
I used to know who as well, but it came about in ‘Private Eye’ & why was when the printed paper was the Manchester Guardian, the well known anagram as all readers at the time were experts at solving anagrams because of the typos.
DaveE.
Smokey (07:21:11) :
George Monbiot says that carbon [by which he means CO2, whether he knows it or not] sequestration is cheap and easy: click.
Actually, he’s right…
It is cheap and easy in HIS terms! In my terms, the loss of human life consequent to, leaving it where it is is an unacceptable price!
DaveE.
M. Simon (07:36:57) :
If you don’t get Glenn Beck you don’t get a very large swath of American culture. We are not “used to be Europeans.” We (well many of us any way) are “don’t want to be Europeans.”
As a British ‘subject’ I don’t blame you!
DaveE.
Neven (06:22:01) : The Surface Stations project was and is an all volunteer effort. Heartland just published Anthony’s report.
There is also a whole lot of other depressingly unintelligent political trash in what you wrote but I thought I point out that this “smear” is totally wrong.
It is PURE DISTORTION at the end of the video when it is suggested that skeptics are suggesting climate change is “not real”.
As for trying to link WUWT to a right-wing organization that promotes free-markets & tobacco: I’ve never even seen these things discussed here (and I sure hope I never do (!) as these topics are NOT EVEN REMOTELY within my sphere of interest).
WUWT is a place where people are interested in discussing the NATURAL factors affecting climate. People here are passionate about looking under every stone. The challenge of investigating the full complexity of nature is embraced.
I am an ecologist with a background in parks, outdoor recreation, and research on the natural environment. I have a reverence for plants & trees and have fought to protect parks & wilderness. I walk in the mountains and kayak the coast, pausing to watch the abundant wildlife which I regularly encounter. I’ve only used 8 tanks of gas in the past 2 years for my small car and I don’t even cause buses to pollute because I walk or paddle 95% of the time when I travel.
Climate change is real – and it occurs naturally. In recent years I have grown VERY concerned about the damage some people are doing to the credibility of both science and the environmental movement.
Sincerely,
Paul Vaughan
Ecologist, Natural-Climate Researcher, Parks & Wilderness Advocate
Hmmm. If links to Anthony’s rebuttal are automatically reverted in wikipedia I wonder if a link to a blog entry somewhere else that prominently featured a link to the rebuttal would suffer the same fate. At least it might force someone to go in and manually update the list of censured sites.
Dear Sandy and Geezer:
I didn’t see any response to your blogs. Probably because that is what they deserve. Sandy, you should know better that in science there is no guilt (or innocence) by association. Your opinion of Heartland has nothing to do with the scientific research on station placement. You convict yourself by your own nonsense. For you Mr Geezer, it seems to me you should take your own advice and get out of the specialist world of blog bites and spin doctoring. Mr Watts is quite capable of deciding what his role should be.
Two statements from the talking points leapt out at me.
“These stations adhere to all of the Global Climate Monitoring Principles and are located are located in areas free local human influences and have excellent site location characteristics. They are closely monitored and are subject to rigorous calibration procedures”
and
“Managers of both of these networks work diligently to locate stations in pristine areas where the site characteristics are unlikely to change
very much over the coming decades.”
I don’t think these statements are true.
John Egan (10:11:52) :
Respect to you too sir. We. may disagree but you’re a gentleman!
DaveE.
Come on folks that link was tossed because the wiki system itself blocked the wordpress reference in the domain name.
The wiki article on Anthony containing direct references to the domain of this blog are there and functional (including to this very article).
Having operated a fairly large web property incuding a spam targeted forum system I used many such automated rules. While wiki has its share of issues the automatic blocking of generic blog hosting domains from appearing isn’t really an issue.
The method used is a bit drastic but not unheard of. I would rel=nofollow them to stop the search engines from passing any ranking relevence until a moderater could review them. All external links on websites need to be continually monitored.
I won’t go into issues caused by the existance of more than one name fot the same web page.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who predicted that as the climate wheel turns, the AGW bretheren and sisteren(?) are going to get meaner and meaner before they finally die, go into hiding, change their names or disguise themselves as natural warmingiters or neo iceage cultists. Strangely, the killing blow would appear to be that the science was settled. With it settled, only one side was doing science and this chipped away at the settled science leaving them nowhere to go but on the attack. It will get worse, rise to a crescendo and 10 years from now their cause will morph into the horrors of an anthropomorphic ice age. We’ve seen several cycles of this kind of hysteria since the 19th century.
Curiousgeorge (08:42:29) :
Here’s a farmers take on the carbon, AGW, etc. business: http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals
This is a bit of realism I can relate to and reaffirm.
1. The parties are each in a location with no “audience” and debate by webcam.
2. Two moderators are selected, they will be represented in the debates as sock puppets. The sock puppets will ask the questions.
Thats where I get stuck …
crosspatch (14:46:33) :
“to go along with the oil industry coverup”
Hehe, I believe environmentalists who oppose nuclear power are really coal company shills designed to force the building of more coal plants by preventing the building of nuclear plants.
/sarc
You may think it is sarcasm but it is not far from the truth. Various economic interests get hordes of useful idiots motivated to attack competing interests.
Thus you get “clean coal vs dirty nuclear”
and
“clean nuclear vs dirty coal”.
And ditto all that squared for solar and wind.
tarpon 11:15:33 “How do you know when you are over the target hot zone?”
Well done!
There is an old saying.. ” Never argue with an idiot, they will bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
Beyond the great articles, guest posts, and exceptional jury of commentors, one outstanding thing about his blog is the level of professionalism and civil decorum that is maintained. That is likewise being demonstrated as Anthony gets the Sara Palin treatment for trying to get more accurate data.
Staying above the fray and letting this go viral can only help the blog’s cause as people come, see, and like what goes on here.
I would claim that bad science, methodology, or argument is not limited to one particular ideology.
Absolutely. The left in America has its favored bad science and the right his its own. I’m not going to reprise arguments I made up thread as they are OT. But you can see that I’m an equal opportunity critic of bad science.
What bothers me is that there is so much.
If every person in America picked two or three areas where science intersected public policy and got into deep study of them we might eventually straighten some of this out. At least we would make doubt popular again.
The assiciation with Fox has caused some stir. As a former European I can understand this. I also always was under the impression that Fox was this rightwing biased and incorrect station. As far as I know however it doesn’t air anywhere in the EU. Anyway, yes, Beck is a noisy populist and frankly I hate populists regardless of their political side.
However when I actually moved to the US I kind of liked Fox. Yes, I’m rightwing myself, although not so much conservative, which helps, but I like e.g. O’Reilly. I know he’s rightwing too and it is one side of the story, but what’s wrong with that? If I want the leftwing side, I watch MSNBC. There they are for instance openly leftwing, ridiculling anything right.
Unlike Fox, MSNBC does air in several European countries. I never heard any complaints about objectivity on their broadcasting in Europe though. The reason is twofold. One, Europeans are on average much more leftwing then Americans. You whatch what you like to hear. Second, there are hardly any rightwing stations anywhere in Europe. And those that are named rightwing, are usually just kicking political correctness as a goal (which just happens to be leftwing there) unlike really being right or – as if often the case – are called rightwing simply because they focus on popular amusement-news instead of intellectual news.
Channels like Fox are simply something Europeans don’t have. And that’s sad, as in reality objective news doesn’t exists. News is always a presentation of facts, never the facts and every newsreporter will give his interpretation. That’s just how humans work. Ask 10 people about an event, and you’ll get 10 different stories. True objective news is being able to have right, left and anything else to all view and then make up your own mind.
So Watts association with Fox, is not so disturbing at all. More likely others won’t grant him an audience because they are biased against what he has to tell. Whether Fox is biased therefore doesn’t matter.
Anthony,
I do not, of course always agree with you, however, this is clearly a violation of copyright laws… it is also reprehensible when anyone from either “side,” misquotes, takes out of context, or utilizes older data as opposed to current. Good post here and you have every right to be upset here.
Anthony,
I believe the homogenization applied to the 70 CRN12 stations is to apply appropriate regional weightings rather than to somehow contaminate those records with stations outside those 70. E.g. if you have 10 stations on the West Coast and 60 stations on the East Coast, those 10 on the West Coast would have a stronger weighting, all things being equal, when calculating the temperature for the entire U.S. I recall a rather long discussion on the best way to handle this on CA back in the day when folks were looking at the initial results of Surface Stations. That said, I could be misinterpreting what NCDC means by homogenization in this case, so feel free to correct me if I am mistaken.
You do have a good point that the project is not finished, and that we should not draw conclusions too early (though whether the sample size is large enough to start analysis is open to debate). I look forward to seeing your version of the graphs comparing CRN12 stations to both CRN1-5 stations and GISS for the U.S.
REPLY: Thank you, work is in progress. – Anthony
We get Fox News here in on cable TV Thailand. I’m not a great fan of Glenn Beck’s style. I do like Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingram for example.
In fact, I’ve seen young Thai guys doing Bill’s thing a few times: “Caution! You are now entering THE no spin zone!”
If only the AGW scam penny would drop with Bill…
There is no point in arguing with a fool, particularly a nasty, fanatical fool, unless your audience is sufficiently informed and capable to be able to distinguish truth from fiction.
Better in my view to set out your counter arguments and refutations clearly and simply on your own site and refer or link any queries to your articles.
Anthony,
Good stuff as usual. I would not bother debating Mr. Sinclair, if I were you, I see no point.
Clearly you are willing to accept criticism, warranted or otherwise, since there are a number of negative comments in this thread. Al Gore et al seem much less willing to allow other opinions to be expressed. Historically, that has been a tactic employed by many different movements. However, in the end, those movements have always failed
Anthony
Looking back at this episode, I think that there are several conclusions that we can draw:
– You are starting to have a measurable impact, i.e. in July there were 15 Google News references including your name and the word climate:
http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=%22Anthony+Watts%22+climate
– The Warmists are very scared of the SurfaceStations study, which means that you are probably onto something big.
– The Warmists have no compunctions with using overt character assaults and defamation, but they are also so out of touch with reality that their assaults come across almost as comical, e.g. you’re a silly and ridiculous double crock buffoon who’s a mouthpiece for the tobacco industry. It seems almost cartoonish, like a South Park episode:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/103675
“I found myself wondering what the Heartland Institute’s position was regarding tobacco. Peter’s video made me think they’d asserted smoking wasn’t dangerous, but HI could just as easily have been promoting scientific data minimizing second-hand smoke dangers or supporting tobacco farmers.”
A few months ago I checked out Heartland’s website and it’s clear they are defending second-hand smoke. (I don’t know if they defended smoking itself in the past–I hope not.) I gather, from what I’ve read somewhere, that second-hand smoke is dangerous to persons who live with a smoker. It hasn’t been proven that it’s dangerous to persons with only intermittent contact with smokers, like fellow-patrons in bars and theaters.
The big political debate in recent years has been over laws that would outlaw smoking in such semi-public places on the basis of the dangers of second-hand smoke. When the advocates of such laws appeal to “the proven dangers of second-hand smoke” when all such studies show is the dangers to co-habitants of smokers, which I have read is the case, they’re equivocating. If all that Heartland is doing is pointing that out, then there’s nothing wrong with it, and Heartland’s critics are smearing it.
Amazing article
I believe the homogenization applied to the 70 CRN12 stations is to apply appropriate regional weightings rather than to somehow contaminate those records with stations outside those 70.
No. That’s just gridding.
Homogenization is indeed mixing in nearby stations. (Then the lot is pasteurized, but that’s a tale for another day.) Furthermore, the 70 stations have been carefully reviewed using newly available improved online maps. Some had to be reclassified. A large number of them (almost half) are located in airports, and must be excluded from the sample and treated as an entirely separate category.
And there have been many more stations rated since the the sample that NOAA is using.
There’s more, too, but all in good time. Much work in progress. Just be a little patient.
REPLY: When Evan says above that “some had to be reclassified” he means that we found the original rating to be in error as part of the quality control process. – Anthony
farmersteve (19:43:32), that was an excellent article.
The youtube video was so dull I have to admit I could not watch to the end but from the description above the attempted tobacco smear is somewhat ironic given that the Gores were/are(?) tobacco farmers.
Armin (20:22:21) : There seems to be some confusion among non-Americans as to what left/right means here. Beck is as far opposite the American definition of populist it isn’t even funny:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populist_Party_(United_States)
Note they are described as “Far Left”.
Bill O’Reilly is, if anything, the “noisy populist”-the only reason it looks otherwise is because for Beck, everything seems to be going against him these days. O’reilly is NOT “right-wing” at least by my definition, since he whines about “gouging” by oil companies (populist much?)-and last I checked he doesn’t question AGW and even sees it as a tool to screw “the Sheiks”…”Traditionalist” would be more accurate, but he cares not a lick about individual liberty, so hardly “right wing” in the American sense.
Roger Knights (21:46:41) : You miss the point-whether they have a position on Tobacco which people object to is irrelevant (and I personally believe my grandfather’s health suffered greatly from his cigar smoking-although he would have loved organizations like Heartland, because he loved his freedom to smoke and to due anything else and hated those dang “communists” running the government 😉 ) what matters are the facts. The fact is that the quality of the “climate monitoring network” that is supposed to be measuring AGW sucks royally. Does this effect the trends? I tend to think that in the US the effect will prove to be small, but outside the US the situation is extremely doubtful IMAO-if the US situation is any indication, the world’s network is going to be a huge mess. And we can see that the supposed warming is not 83 percent of the trend seen in the lower atmosphere by satellites, but is at least 100% if not more! Either models, theory, and El Ninos are all wrong about the relationship between temperature changes at the surface and at the atmosphere, or the surface data has too much warming due to various biases (If you are going to argue that satellites are wrong, well, why are they wrong? Without a physical reason, that’s arm-waving) It seems to me that Anthony is going to be vindicated, ultimately, in thinking that the surface data are biased. Heartland’s publishing his report has nothing to do with that.
In climatic timescales the whole thing is totally irrelevant. You can debate him until your hair turns purple. It won’t matter, most likely the earth will continue cooling for some time.. and then warm up and so on and on. These guys will just disappear. I would not bother. A valuable waste of your precious time and life
Aha Anthony, I think I’ve figured out your masterful plan.
This guy wants to debate. However let’s face it, currently he’s too small, too insignificant a fish to bother with. I mean, really why waste your time? Even if you did do a Moncton on him, you’d look like a bully.
So what you want to do is beef him up a bit. Put him in the news for a bit. Let him have the 15 minutes of fame he seems to grave. Make him a useful idiot for the Monbiot’s, and others who are too media smart to actually make a debate challenge themselves. Then after he’s got enough attention, and they’ve got the poor sap believing he’s some sort of champion of righteousness, accept his challenge, and finish him off.
Good plan.
Speaking of Monbiot and debates. Do you think a real world Monbiot versus Plimer could ever actually happen.
http://tinyurl.com/nf6hea
I’d love to see it.
Paul K, you may resubmit your comment as long as you do not use prohibited words.
They are striking out because their hockey stick model has been disproven. That should have been to AGW what warming was in the 70’s to the coming ice age. Let them flail about. We want to debate the big wigs like Gore et al, not some trench coat.
So you pulled his video for copyright because he challenged your pseudo science?
Face up to the challenge, your response is pathetic.
The weather stations you identified as good or best (i think that was your terminology) gave pretty much the same climate change graph. People like you, funded by conservative think tanks are not scientists. You are sell outs who have no respect for people, the planet, or objectivity in science.
The Monbiot article does allow Anthony the right to request a right of reply in the Guardian. I suggest that he pursues that.
On Corrupted data and Data Corrption by association
A couple of decades ago I was involved in assessing the “average state of the lower atmosphere” for the purposes of estimating its effects on the propagation of radio waves. I was paid by the US Taxpayer as the work was sponsored by the US Navy. However, as the climate data study was only incidental to a much larger issue — I think that I can be considered to have not been tainted.
My interest specifically concerned the oceans of the world. However, lacking enough pure ocean data I was forced to incorporate some data from islands (some are reasonably ocean-like) and even some coastal continental sites (I tried to restrict these to sharp narrow spits of land surrounded by ocean e.g. Cape Cod)
Moral of the story — the data varied in quality from OK (NOAA tethered buoys designed to collect the typesof data I was looking for — albeit with some systemaatic errotrs concerniong direct solar heating of the temperature and humidity sensor housing) to terrible (Urban Heat Island contaminated coastal data — (by definition if someone has bothered to collect a temperature record for a coastal location there has to be a fair-sized population near-by (e.g. Cape Cod)). The worst set of data was sea surface temperature collected by ships plying a limited number of well-worn sea-lanes. Whle some of this data wenty back to the time of Ben Franklin (he was a big sea-surface temperature-a-phile) most was from the late 1880’s and on. During this period shipping made the transition from sail to steam and temeprature collecting went from hauling a bucket on deck and sticking a thermometer in it — to looking at the guage in the engineroom for intake condeser water. All the while ships kept getting bigger and engine rooms kept moving lower — no-one bothered to note such details in the meta-data accompanying the temperature data sets however
Anyway as an overall observation — it was impossible to ascertain anything useful from the data unless a detailed investigation was made of the methadology associated with a particular data set — to do otherwise is to do BAD SCIENCE (honesty to yourself and to defraud your sponsor)
Mr. Watts — keep up your Good Work!
Some explanations and definitions of “good” weather here: http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/common/link.do?symbolicName=/ag/blogs/template1&blogHandle=editorsnotebook&blogEntryId=8a82c0bc22ad9a120122d1281b9601c7&showCommentsOverride=false
Mikey:
On James Delingpole’s blog at the Daily Telegraph – http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/authors/jamesdelingpole – the blog of a few days ago -“will Monbiot accept a debate?” posts a letter from GM and another from Prof. Plimer. They both accept but Monbiot will only debate in writing, while Plimer will only debate before an audience. (The blog is still up if you want to check it.) I somehow doubt that the debate will come off.
The You tube video is typical Gore-like linkage between climate change skeptics and the tobacco industry demons. Partly demolition of straw men and partly crude satire. Disclaimer: I don’t smoke, I am a physician. I don’t much care if Heartland is connected to the Tobacco industry. Let’s try to debate the scientific issues using facts, not innuendo about vast right wing conspiracies.
Mikey:
For some reason the link I gave you only gets you so far into the Telegraph system. Then you have to search “James Delingpole”, then click on his name again under “Search Results” then you’re on his page. The Monbiot blog is the second one down. Sorry about that, but I think you’ll find it’s worth it.
Jacob Mack (21:03:25) :
this is clearly a violation of copyright laws… it is also reprehensible when anyone from either “side,” misquotes, takes out of context, or utilizes older data as opposed to current.
1. Anthony published the book on the web some time ago. All data put on the web is in fact copyright. Most people ignore this. including Anthony.
2. There is no problem in copyright using small sections for critical review.
3. I requested some way back the updated database so I could independantly confirm Anthony’s criticism of the published graphs. He has not updated the database that has been created by members of the public on his behalf.
To mirror some of the comments against CRU. Is he hiding something?
Sadly, this person doesn’t get it either:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/34335_The_Video_Anthony_Watts_Doesnt_Want_You_to_See
Wind is going to be huge for Michigan?!? Now THATS funny! Hugely subsidized maybe. But in my opinion definitely not huge in terms of providing electricity. Not even remotely a far cry from being within shouting distance of somewhere you can see the edge of huge from off in the distance if you squint really, really hard.
Odd how people seem to think Anthony Watts is a federally funded Department.
“Climate change deniers claim they’re censored. What hypocrites”
A mention in the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/jul/30/climate-change-deniers-monbiot
“Anthony Watts, sceptic and scourge of climate change science, has used copyright laws to censor an opponent”
The key here is, notice in the posters’ comments that the ‘updings’ do not support Charles’ position (literally: ‘that person’ for some reason has an AGW hobby-horse to ride but the posters don’t seem to be supportive of that position)
Full disclosure: I have in the past and still do visit LGF (albeit irregularly).
.
.
.
_Jim (07:14:54)/Matthew W (06:31:07) :
A year ago most of those LGF comments would have been pro-AGW. Now at least half, and probably the majority, are skeptical of AGW.
And a word about censorship. Only the government can censor. A private individual is free to choose how to run a site, and if someone’s comment is deleted for any reason, it’s not censorship. [WUWT doesn’t delete alarmist comments. This post is simply to point out that when the government is involved, deleting good faith, opposing views is censorship.]
Realclimate censors. They use government money and assets to run their site. Deleting skeptics’ comments is therefore government supported censorship.
One of realclimate’s censors is Harald Korneliussen.
Korneliussen explains why RC censors skeptical comments:
Korneliussen is either ignorant or lying when he states that RC is not a political blog. It is heavily political with a Leftist slant, as anyone who regularly visits them understands. Korneliussen is being mendacious when he states that RC is not paid to promote an AGW agenda. In fact, RC is paid to advance the AGW hypothesis by outside interests: realclimate is funded by George Soros – as is James Hansen. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and those with an AGW agenda are calling the realclimate tune.
Korneliussen’s statements are dishonest. I’m not the only one to be censored by RC. Rarely a week goes by that someone doesn’t mention on WUWT that their polite, reasonable – but skeptical – comment was censored by realclimate.
Since the people running realclimate are all on the government payroll, what they are doing is censorship. Private blogs like WUWT, which are run by volunteers, can not be said to censor anything. Censorship is a government activity, and applies to government actions. Realclimate qualifies.
Maybe this will make it clear:
NASA/GISS Director: James Hansen
Hansen’s subordinate: Gavin Schmidt
NASA web site contributors: Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann
GISS Modeler: Gavin Schmidt
RealClimate is run by Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann; contributor: William Connolley
Wikipedia editor: William Connolley
Hansen has pocketed upwards of a million dollars [that we know of] from individuals and organizations with a heavy pro-AGW agenda. By accepting their outside cash, Hansen is deliberately cheating the taxpayers. He should work for one or the other; you cannot serve two masters. And from the crazy statements Hansen makes, it’s clear that he’s not impartially representing taxpayers. Instead, he is representing George Soros and others of that ilk. When you follow the money, you see that James Hansen is corrupt, and realclimate is a Soros-financed propaganda site.
TJA (06:57:11) :
” considering the fact that Fox is one of the most popular stations in the States.” – Nevin
Do you have numbers to back that up?
TJA (07:57:42) :
Nevin,
Looky how many people watch Fox News compared to the knob slobbering coverage of Obama on the major networks which have many times the viewers. Fox is the most popular *Cable* news network, which is like being the worlds tallest midget.
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/07/20/broadcast-and-cable-news-quarterly-ratings-through-june-2009/23107
Something less that 1% of the people in the US watch Fox News, yet somehow it is a major threat that Obama obsesses on.
—————————————————-
I’m not sure what the ratings numbers prove here. You should check out polls that examine where Americans get their news about politics or political issues. Polls show cable news networks overall consistently outperforming network TV news, and Fox doing better than any of the network TV news shows:
http://people-press.org/reports/images/467-3.gif
http://people-press.org/reports/images/384-1.gif
http://people-press.org/reports/images/444-18.gif
In the first link, note that Fox scores almost as high as the three TV networks combined. Obama isn’t obsessed with Fox without a reason. Among viewers with “high political knowledge” cable networks are favored two to one over network TV news:
http://people-press.org/reports/images/444-19.gif
Your attempt to marginalize cable news, and especially Fox news, is falling short.
Dear Mr Watts,
I sent this email to George Monbiot as I was incensed by his article in the Guardian (which I deliberately mis-spell as ‘Grauniad’ – it’s an old thing from ‘Private Eye’). On behalf of all normal, sensible Brits I would like to apologise for this truly nasty person who unfortunately shares my nationality.
Dear Mr Monbiot, I would like to thank you for your article exposing Anthony Watts for what he is, a ‘Denier’ of the true path. His pathetic excuse;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/30/on-climate-comedy-copyrights-and-cinematography/
which I don’t suppose you have the time or inclination to waste your time reading shows his true colours. Just because somebody published a bunch of lies about his so called research and tried to remain anonymous at the same time, and didn’t ask his permission to publish his data, he gets all hissy and upset. Amazing, isn’t it. Your article in The Grauniad made it all clear to me at last. You really are worried, aren’t you? Otherwise why publish ridiculous smears, it makes you look like New Labour at their best. Just because the theory of Global Warming being caused by CO2 emissions is being proved to be false you are busy throwing your toys out of your pram. Thanks to your article I now know, with absolute certainty that you are wrong and Mr Watts is right. Scientific fact will always triumph in the end, a theory is only a theory until it is disproved, no amount of concensus matters then. 500 years ago there was scientific concensus that the sun went round the earth, then it was disproved and that theory went in the bin. AGW and CO2 is now teetering on the edge of the bin and no amount of smears from you will stop it falling over the edge.
Yours sincerely,
Alan Haile.
REPLY: Thank you sir, most sincerely. – Anthony
Dear Mr Watts,
You’ve been pawned. Your first reaction was to try and silence them. I guess the Fox News methods are still ingrained in you. Since that didn’t work (ever heard of free speech?) you can try a different approach now.
Good luck.
Yuri.
Luke (03:11:32) : Anthony is not “funded” by anyone. Sheeh.
_Jim (07:14:54) : LGF hasn’t been worth reading in some time. I suspect that Charles (a saxophone player with, to my knowledge no academic credentials!) is a bitter atheist who likely associates any movement which questions “official” science with creationists, whom he absolutely can’t stand. He says that he feels compelled to take on the “far right” or anyone he deems “fascist” which includes people with a far less totalitarian impulse than he tends to have (like Judge Andrew Napolitano!!). He is a nasty nasty man. Back in the day many on the right figured “If the left calls him an Islamophobe and he calls them all Anti-Semites, he must be okay”-they were dead wrong and looking back again he never did anything but smear anyone anti-war as Anti-Semitic, and didn’t bother to deal with any real arguments they might have made (not that I think that makes them right!). Now he joins the media in sniffing Tea Parties for any cranks to discredit them…
It bothers me that anyone pays him any mind, honestly.
The contrast of the pseudo-macho, ass-kicking, he-man debater in the email response published in Michigan Liberal, and the thoughtful, earnest, well-intentioned activist in the video at the end couldn’t be more pronounced and is typical of the split-personality of most hardcore AGW activists.
I wouldn’t debate with any of them, since, as was pointed out, it can easily turn into an intellectual mugging by an unruly mob. I recommend that Anthony simply continue to do what he is doing, and yes, certainly move to protect his copyright. These people only respect the law when they can use it to their advantage. Combine that with their extreme resentment of opposing points of view and their authoritarian instincts, and it becomes clear who the fascists of our era are.
Anthony’s demeanor in facing this onslaught is admirable and this post was clearly one of his best ever; it was thoughtful, restrained, gently satirical and on point. I hope he is able to maintain his composure because things will certainly get worse as he nears completion of the surface station project.
How does the old saying go–if you’re making your opponents angry, you’re doing something right!
They’re resorting to some pretty foul measures. It’s more sad than funny when adults act like this, but I suppose that’s just how internet debating works when one has nothing to show for his side of the argument.
Anyone care to join me at littlegreenfootballs.com?
bill (05:53:02) : “1. . . . All data put on the web is in fact copyright.”
Not true. Ideas are not copyrightable, only the expression of ideas are. Data is not an expression of an idea. There was a famous copyright case a while back in which a telephone directory claimed that the numbers in their directory were copyright protected. A competing directory was the defendant and prevailed in the case, proving in the end that data, per se, is not copyrightable. Further, there are volumes of stuff out there that are in the public domain and hence not under a copyright.
Of the top of my head, an idea: if Mr. Sinclair wants to debate, let him come here to WUWT and debate Anthony on his website. Give him and Anthony 6 hours to comment and respond while allowing no one else to comment. Just the two of them.
There may be some reason why that would be a bad idea (for instance granting Mr. Sinclair undue legitimacy and credibility by extending such an invitation), and Anthony may not want to take time out for such a thing, but I’m throwing it out there anyway.
For all GWRs.:
It is a pity that CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere. 3.8 per TEN thousand.
It is a pity that CO2 is HEAVIER than air, so it can not go up. (Sorry!)
It is a pity that the volumetric heat capacity of the air (capacity of holding heat) is 3227 times less than water, so there is not any heat piggy bank in the atmosphere at all.!
It is a pity that “they”have cheated YOU!
NOAA accomplished what it wanted with its Talking Points post. The point was to flood cyberspace with the idea that the work of surfacestations.org is at best inconsequential, at worst partisan. People like Sinclair are just foot soldiers. They job is not only to disseminate NOAA’s Talking Points, but to color it with thier vitriol. Once the debate shifts to the personal, the Alarmists win. Now, the Alarmists can always point to the Talking Points nonsense to counter the work Anthony has done.
If people don’t think this is not important, just refer to the iconic Hockey Stick. It is still referenced in pop culture even though it suffers from a host of scientific and mathematical problems and errors.
It’s amazing how the alarmists and their minions misrepresent everything.
There’s not an angle of AGW and the broadening “discussion” they get right.
The rampant distorting and selective responding makes it impossible to have a genuine discussion.
It’s just unhinged BS. Like the rest of the planet, here in Oregon the lefty blogosphere and politicians are simply out of their minds with misunderstandings and blatant misrepresentations.
Walter Cronanty (09:21:15) : Given what a pain he makes it to sign up for the right to comment (hm, someone doesn’t care for dissent…) I’d rather not. But others may differ in their willingness to try…
timetochooseagain (10:12:38)
Yes, unless you are already registered, you must wait until Mr. Johnson opens registration to comment. I’ve found that Mr. Johnson generally allows criticism, as long as it is rational and civil. I am trying to keep on the original topic, as opposed to sinking into idealogical rant – which is my wont.
Comment Is Free if you agree.
Don’t worry about Monbiot he is a hypoctite. In one of his posts he stated that people were paid to post commments in the same post he said he never asked for people to be moderated.
Luke (03:11:32) :
People like you, funded by conservative think tanks are not scientists. You are sell outs who have no respect for people, the planet, or objectivity in science.
“objectivity in science.”
Aw cow farts; you caught us.
timetochooseagain wrote:
“Roger Knights (21:46:41) : You miss the point-whether they have a position on Tobacco which people object to is irrelevant …. what matters are the facts. The fact is that the quality of the “climate monitoring network” that is supposed to be measuring AGW sucks royally. … Heartland’s publishing his report has nothing to do with that.”
I’ve missed nothing. I of course recognized that Heartland’s position on tobacco has nothing to do with the validity of the surfacestation’s project. I only explored a tangent: whether Heartland is being smeared by its critics or not. That’s a matter that deserves exploration.