This has been a weird week with my appearance on PBS Newshour. As Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters documents, the alarmosphere has gone beserk over my appearance on PBS.
Watching it, it becomes clear they are in a panic. Even Ralph Nader says Washington is running away from the issue. So, like anyone who’s panicked, Nuccitelli makes an epic fail in his haste to discredit me. He’s upset that I was allowed to speak at PBS and I was just one of a balanced panel of people on that program. It must have been the horrible things I said like:
SPENCER MICHELS: His conclusion though is that basically global warming exists and that the scientists, no matter what the problems were, were pretty much right on.
ANTHONY WATTS: I agree with him that global warming exists. However, the ability to attribute the percentage of global warming to CO2 versus other man-made influences is still an open question.
or this:
ANTHONY WATTS: I’m saying that the data might be biased by these influences to a percentage. Yes, we have some global warming, it’s clear the temperature has gone up in the last 100 years. But what percentage of that is from carbon dioxide? And what percentage of that is from changes in the local and measurement environment?
So to counter those terrible opinions on percentages, Nuccitelli goes on the emotional offensive in a rant at Romm’s romper room, and in the process, makes an epic failure of the most basic rule of percentages:
A Deeper Look At False Balance On PBS News Hour | ThinkProgress
…the amount of warming caused by human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is known to a high degree of certainty, and these same studies have all found that GHGs are responsible for over 100% of the observed warming over this timeframe.
Gosh. GHG’s are responsible for over 100% of the observed warming? That’s an epic fail if I’ve ever seen one. Even Nuccitelli’s buddy, Stephan Lewadowsky’s statistical blundering on his “skeptics deny the moon landing” paper isn’t that bad. Tamino will not be impressed.
No wonder Noel Sheppard said “If you had any doubts about the level of zealotry involved in today’s global warming movement, they likely will be erased by the goings on at PBS the past few days.”
But when you see the sort of things the people at Skeptical Science write, you start to understand that this isn’t about science, but about pure unmitigated hate against people that have differing views about climate science. For example, this came from the SkS secret web forum where all of the moderators and authors (including Nuccitelli) get together to talk about what they are going to do about the climate skeptics.
Here is Glenn Tamblyn (Skeptical Science author/moderator) secretly conversing with his SkS pals on their off limits forum and saying “we need a conspiracy to save humanity”. The Viet Cong comparison is a nice touch too. There’s talk of convening a “war council” too.
And this isn’t about science or personal careers and reputations any more. This is a fight for survival. Our civilisations survival. .. We need our own anonymous (or not so anonymous) donors, our own think tanks…. Our Monckton’s … Our assassins.
Anyone got Bill Gates’ private number, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson? Our ‘side’ has got to get professional, ASAP. We don’t need to blog. We need to network. Every single blog, organisation, movement is like a platoon in an army. ..This has a lot of similarities to the Vietnam War….And the skeptics are the Viet Cong… Not fighting like ‘Gentlemen’ at all. And the mainstream guys like Gleick don’t know how to deal with this. Queensberry Rules rather than biting and gouging.
..So, either Mother Nature deigns to give the world a terrifying wake up call. Or people like us have to build the greatest guerilla force in human history. Now. Because time is up…Someone needs to convene a council of war of the major environmental movements, blogs, institutes etc. In a smoke filled room (OK, an incense filled room) we need a conspiracy to save humanity.
[As quoted by Geoff Chambers in this Bishop Hill thread. http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/3/26/opengate-josh-158.html?currentPage=2#comments ]
Yet climate skeptics are being painted as conspiracy theory nutters by the very same people who say “a conspiracy to save humanity” is needed.
More here. Dana Nuccitelli’s email response to me on 9/14/2012 when I asked him if he had any remorse about this?
“No.”
I have to wonder, does Dana put tinfoil under that helmet to protect him from skeptical climate thoughts of the general populace when he rides his scooter around in Sacramento?
One final note, Nuccitelli says this in his rant at Romm’s romper room:
Not only has the accuracy of the surface temperature record been confirmed by BEST and Watts’ own Fall et al. (2011), but also by a number of other peer-reviewed papers such as Peterson et al. (2003) and Menne et al. (2010). If Watts believes these studies are flawed, he should attempt to demonstrate it in a peer-reviewed paper. Until he has accomplished this, by his own standards his argument is invalid.
Apparently it was just too much for him to link to the Watts et al 2012 paper, even though he’s written about it before (or to mention that the BEST paper failed peer review).
Oh and for the record Dana, I have two peer reviewed papers in which I am an author, not one. See here, you might want to fix your article. And, there’s more to come, not that it matters to people like Dana whether it is peer reviewed or not, they’ll diss it just the same because we need a conspiracy to save humanity.
*He’s on a mission from clods.
Anthony: I told you SkepticalScience was a comedy website:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/climate-skeptics-forget-the-obvious-intent-of-the-website-skepticalscience/
Dana’s goofy statement still has me smiling. I had to check it. They haven’t corrected it yet.
Is that an electric scooter that Mr. Nuccitelli is riding? It doesn’t look like it to me. Maybe someone should tell Mr. Nuccitelli that tailpipe emissions from scooters are some of the worst on the roads. 2-stroke motors have never been known for their clean exhaust emissions.
Anthony, I would expect your clients from your “real” business will be targeted soon if they haven’t already. Since they cannot dispute with facts, I would imagine they will go after you in other cowardly ways. Keep up the great work, I’ll keep on reading.
“This has a lot of similarities to the Vietnam War….And the skeptics are the Viet Cong… Not fighting like ‘Gentlemen’ at all..”
I recall those of us who were dropping our influence on the thinking process of Hanoi to be more gentlemenly then one whose lacking in character is to make conspiracy a means to enforce a lie in a desperate effort to legitamize their belief. To cheat is not a value of which to promote. Being said, I wonder who is least of a gentleman; or is that too obvious.
“REPLY: WordPress has identified WUWT as a high traffic site, so they’ve added more advertising. I get a small percentage with each click. Hopefully when I get the site retooled soon we can make it less obtrusive – Anthony”
click, click, click, …
You’ve got a large bucket of water at room temperature.
Into it you dump a small amount of ice, and you pour in a small amount of boiling water.
You take the temperature of the water in the bucket again. It has risen.
What percentage of the warming is due to the ice?
Bonus points: What percentage of the warming is due to the boiling water?
Sheesh.
Also, see the radiative forcings diagrams from the IPCC AR4. It’s clear that GHG’s are responsible for > 100% of the total forcings.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/fig/figure-ts-5.jpeg
P.S. The top banner should go. Why be secondary?
Dana & the CSRRT?
Let’s take the CSRRT’s mission as rapid response to all things skeptic, but not credible response; which probably explains Dana’s incompetent rapid responses wrt PBS hosting Anthony.
John
rustneversleeps – I would agree; many of the posters here appear unaware of negative numbers, or their effect on sums.
davidmhoffer:
I rarely disagree with you except on matters of politics (where we are poles apart) but I write to dispute your post at September 19, 2012 at 10:10 am which begins saying
Sorry, the “poorly worded” excuse does not apply.
Nucciltelli is reported to have said
One can assume he believes the completely untrue assertion that “the amount of warming caused by human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is known to a high degree of certainty” and, therefore, he was speaking on the basis of that belief. In that case he was talking about “the observed warming over this timeframe”.
The “observed warming” cannot be “over 100%” of itself.
He may have meant
(a) the observed warming would have been greater if not mitigated by other factors
or he may have meant
(b) the observed warming is less than the understanding of “the amount of warming caused by human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions” so the understanding is wrong
or he may have meant
(c) the observed warming is a result of the moon being made of green cheese
or he may have meant
(d) etc.
But we can only reasonably assume he meant what he said. And what he said is nonsense.
Richard
Over 100% of climate scientists polled agree that global warming is caused by man. It would have been higher if it weren’t for all those skeptics who had a kind-of cooling response to the question.
This Nuccitelli guy seems to have it all wrong, but we see that more and more. His fellow travelers don’t discuss science because they have none outside of all the refuted papers of Mann, Sherwood, etc. Like Willis said, it’s models all the way down.
In one of Anthony’s posts, an AGW fanboy site called watchingthedeniers.com was mentioned, I checked it out. It seems to be a high school type society with the requisite tribal structure. That site is run by somebody that is afraid to engage in a reasonable discussion, and snips comments of those who intimate their little website is appropriate for the Looney Tunes set. Oh, the indignity of it all, being snipped by a high school mentality.
Then I took a look at SkepticalScience, and was astounded at the rank ignorance as represented by the content of their site. Under the menu tag, “Evidence”, is a collection of unrelated events and terms presented as evidence. For example, “last year was a hot year!” They have no clue how to discuss physical relationships instead of coincidences.
I was embarrassed for them.
Guys, we are up against an intractable foe. They don’t even know when they are right or wrong. Like little robots they will keep attacking people not because they disagree. They attack because that’s how they are programmed. Intelligence not required.
I’ve seen the claim that GHG are responsible for over 100% of the observed warming before. The idea is that the GHG levels should have made it even warmer than it is but other things like aerosols have prevented that warming.
If that’s the case then I’m REALLY glad we increased atmospheric GHG levels otherwise it would be really CHILLY around the world because the manmade cooling impact would push us lower than it was during the LIA.
Of course in his interview with Newsweek a few years back Al Gore stated that the latest science showed that increased CO2 was responsible for 49% of the observed warming and that other things such as black carbon, land use changes, etc. were responsible for the rest. So it’s still AGW even though it’s not all attributable to increased atmospheric GHGs.
Another glass of acid punch, Davos?
Quote “Not fighting like ‘Gentlemen’ at all. And the mainstream guys like Gleick don’t know how to deal with this. Queensberry Rules rather than biting and gouging.”
This is such a textbook example of ‘projection’, it’s almost funny
http://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Projection
They even cite Gleick as an example of gentlemanly naivety – Gleick, who has already been proven to have committed fraud in this context!
You couldn’t make this stuff up, it’s breathtaking
Well, to be fair, if we should have been cooling (without AGW, that is) then it is conceivable that CO2 could have lead to more than the observed warming, because it would have had to reverse the putative cooling and also lead to the actual observed warming. Whether he meant that is not clear to me!
Do you suppose all the Alarmist hoop-la is John Cook’s “Rapid Response Network” in action.? (At times a bit like the Keystone Cops.)
Here is Jon plotting about the idea up in his secret treehouse, (No SKePtiXs aLLowEd.)
“I’ve been waiting for a quieter moment to bring up the Rapid Response Network but now that I think about it, we probably never will have a quieter time. So I’m going to get the ball rolling on this and keep the development percolating away as we furiously pound away on other projects. At the start of the year, I considered this the most significant SkS project of 2011 and if it grows as I hope, it may still be (although so many things are in motion now, who knows where we’ll be in a few weeks time, let alone the end of the year).
The point of the Rapid Response Network is fairly simple – monitor skeptic articles in mainstream media and keep track of what responses have been made. So the system will list the latest mainstream articles (and other media, blogs, etc but the emphasis will be on mainstream). Users can log what responses they’ve made – letters to the editor, post an online comment, call the reporter, submit an opinion piece, etc. So we’ll keep track of what’s going on, support each other as we attempt responses and by seeing what everyone is doing, will give us ideas of what is possible and how to do it.”
See Bishop Hill “opengate” comments: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/3/26/opengate-josh-158.html?currentPage=2#comments
WillR says (September 19, 2012 at 9:52 am)
“Perhaps they should make the effort to organize such a conspiracy…”
—–
Even now they’re probably irreversibly splitting into the Climate Popular Front and the Popular Front for Climate.
Events will see who is right, Anthony. it would be erroneous to forget that….
There is not a single scientific proof, that 1975-2005 warming was any different from the 1910-1945 warming.
And what about this?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002
…disregard the request to illiminate the top banner. Turning of the cookies fixed my irritation of it. 🙂
KR
“I would agree; many of the posters here appear unaware of negative numbers, or their effect on sums.”
Gosh, you’re just so much cleverer than most people here. It must feel incredible to be that much cleverer than the stoopid eedyots who have been brainwashed by Big Whateveritisweareblamingtheconspsiracyonthisweek.
Of course, once you do the calculations you realise that the current global temperature can be very precisely attributed to Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Slytherin and Ravenclaw percentages. It’s the nasty Slytherin percentage of current temperature that we have to watch out for. Grrrrr. Blast those darend Slytherins!
Or this:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1900/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1912.33/to:1942.33/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1982.25/to:2013/trend
“Guys, we are up against an intractable foe. They don’t even know when they are right or wrong. Like little robots they will keep attacking people not because they disagree. They attack because that’s how they are programmed. Intelligence not required.”
Amen
I reckon Noel Sheppard has it about right. Any normal person. hearing there’s a spat and looking at what’s going on, is going to see AW sitting there being quietly reasonable and a load of nutters foaming at the mouth about him. Which is a pretty fair view, really.