In a hilarious claim, Gleick proves once again his genius label is eclipsed by his own dogma.
A couple of days ago I got pulled into the Twitter feed of Dr. Peter Gleick, we’ll get to that shortly. You know him, he’s the guy from the Pacific Institute who posed as a board member for Heartland so he could steal documents. The plan was so badly conceived that it quickly unraveled, partly because of a ridiculous fake document that many say Gleick authored to get the media interested in the story of what he found. But, it was laughably transparent, and Gleick’s tendentious forgery was characterized by Megan McArdle of the Atlantic as reading “like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.”
One of the things I dislike about Dr. Peter Gleick (besides the fact that he’s a thief) is his condescending attitude towards others that he considers intellectually inferior. Part of this has to do with him being labeled a ‘genius’ with a MacArthur Fellow “Genius Award” in 2003. One of the problems of being labeled a genius is the ego boost that it conveys, and that ego boost tends to set the stage for epic cartoon like failures much like we used to see in the classic Warner Brothers cartoon where Wile. E. Coyote presents his card:
![Wile-E-Coyotes-card1[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/wile-e-coyotes-card11.jpg?quality=83)
This week, we had another episode where Peter H. Gleick, GENIUS was on display in full public view. This is what got it started:
The picture linked in his tweet is from this Mother Nature News article:
I took one look at that photo and the 110°F temperature, and my bullshit detector alarm went off. My next thought was “how could Gleick be so dumb as to fall for this?”. I mean GMAFB, if it was air temperature doing it, all parts of the stoplight would show a nearly equal melting effect, and not be lopsided. Surely geniuses like Gleick understand the basic of thermodynamics enough to get this? Apparently not.
I immediately replied to Gleick and explained how this just wasn’t possible:
And after waiting, I got no reply from Gleick…
I suppose that’s normal, after all, we can’t have a ‘stupid denier’ schooling a ‘genius’ on how the physical world works, can we?
This isn’t the first time a global warming activist has fallen for a photo of something melting in the street, and immediately pouncing on “global warming” as the cause. Last year it was Al Gore and Bill McKibben:
Note the street lamps are only melted on one side. Why? Because it was a dumpster fire that did the work, not the natural air temperature.
From: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/02/alarmist-fact-checking-street-lights-dont-melt-at-115f/
Picture provided by KFOR-TV via Inhofe’s Press Office you can see the street lamp next to the burning dumpster:
Senator Inhofe had a field day with this witless assertion by Gore and McKibben, and you can read it about it here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/02/inhofe-exposes-another-epic-fail-by-global-warming-alarmists-thursday/
So when I saw Gleick was pushing a similar photo from Kuwait, it was deja vu all over again.
I noted in my tweets back to Gleick that either solar reflection or fire might be at work due to the lopsidedness of the melting. That explanation apparently flew right over Gleck’s head, and I wasn’t going to waste any more time with him waiting for him to acknowledge me.
Sure enough, later I learned it was just as I posited. Barry Woods found a news article on the incident and left a comment on the MNN story, the only comment, and a comment that apparently they have not heeded since the ridiculous story is still there.
Barry Woods wrote:
Here’s the story from 248AM.com
Jo Nova found this photo:
Yep, just like last year with Gore and McKibben, a fire, not global warming, melted a street fixture. We can forgive Al and Bill, because they’ve demonstrated time and again that they are dumber than lampposts when it comes to understanding how the physical world actually works.
But a McArthur “genius” like Gleick should know better. He should have been able to pick up on the same physical clues us “stupid deniers” did.
But alas, just like our Wile E. Coyote, Genius, his intellect is eclipsed by his dogma, and he gets run over by physical reality.
Lil Fella from OZ says:
July 3, 2013 at 9:51 pm
Earlier this year it was 47c in NSW, Australia, and the bitumen was going liquid. One day only!
All the plastic I encountered that day hadn’t melted. I am amazed how well cars perform in this heat.
*
Where and when was it 47C in NSW? I must have missed that, are you sure it was reported right (not just a MSM claim)? I live in NSW and I don’t remember it. And, no, I wasn’t in air conditioning at the time, we don’t have it.
I DO remember bitumen melting when I was a kid in the ’70s in Perth, Western Australia, so I know it happens. 🙂 I remember sand at the beach getting so hot it would burn your feet before you got into the ocean, too, that was in the same era. Ah, you’ve brought on some memories…
As for this story and Gleick being labelled a genius – Anthony, are you sure he didn’t steal it? /sarc.
Should I say, What’s up with the melting traffic light? 😀 Well, Mr. Gleick is really genius of creating that.
I wonder what happened to all the other traffic lights in the city.
First one tree, then one street lamp now one traffic light = proof of AGW? Got it!
It appears he banned me from his Twitter feed for commenting on this. Never replied though, which is in itself telling.
Beep Beep now you B…….D
The problem that Peter H. Gleick, ‘genius’, is having is that he lives in a fantasy world all the time. He stopped being a rational scientist long ago (if he ever was one) and became an activist for a religious cause. I wonder if Gleick can really look at a historical chart of temperatures like those posted here often and see the utter failure of his beliefs. I figure that even if he saw New York under 5 km of ice he would yell “see, more evidence of Global Warming!”.
I fear most, if not all of the “team” are exactly like Gleick.
I am so happy that I’m not the only one using Wile E. Coyote, SuperGenius to make my point, well into my 40’s. 🙂
The only genius that crook Gleick displays is the genius of self-destruction.
For all remaining NatGeo fans, NatGeo hosts Gleick as a science blogger.
http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/
here he pontificates about droughts as cause of the Syria conflict.
http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/index.php/2013/06/10/syria-water-climate-change-and-violent-conflict/
and blames Co2 emissions:
“If we want to reduce the risks of local and international political conflicts and violence over water, we must recognize these risks and improve the tools needed to reduce them. And we need to stop assuming that our political stability is independent of what we do to our atmosphere or our water. It isn’t.”
Stay classy. Warmunist dancing on graves.
I lived a few miles from Kuwait for a few years in the 70s. It wouldn’t cool down to 110 degrees until it was too dark to take a picture like that.
BTW I think the Genius calling card is justified. Gleick provides no service, produces no goods except for books full of conjecture, yet manages to live high on the hog. He’s one of the more successfull criminals I heard of and runs his scheme for years now. Not quite a Paul Ehrlich or a Lester R. Brown but he’ll get there; he knows how to play the media. So, a genius.
See how dangerous the carbon is, it burns cars and melts traffic lights!
I am reminded of a cartoon from Larsen – The Far Side.
“Midvale School for the gifted”
I found it at:
http://slightlychristopher.com/2010/11/03/navels-justice-a-stripper-named-coco/
I’m not gifted enough to insert photographs Sorry
What would Feynman say of Gleick? Or of the state of climate “research” for that matter?
Does anyone really expect a response when he gets caught in something pretty silly?
Genii non sunt quid erant.
But, surely the frequency and intensity of car fires has increased?
It’s obvious, and has been since “An Inconvenient Truth” , that global warmists are
making their pitch to a very intellectually mediocre crowd. To those with an IQ larger than their
belt size, claims of global warming require examination of global temperatures, not pictures
of something melting.
Gleick is an expert. Someone who knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing!
The Climatist religion thrives on symbols. What matters is the emotive force behind those symbols, not the truth behind them. Thievery and lies are all just SOP for Gleick and his brethren, since it’s for the Cause. Gleick’s problem isn’t with intelligence, although one could debate what that word even means. It is with morality. Note the absolute lie in his tweet: “getting hotter every year”. His statement that it’s “hotter than it used to be” is also dishonest, since it means absolutely nothing, but it implies that our temps today are somehow unprecedented.
Gleick is oddly useful in his role as AGW advocate and compulsive liar.
I hope he never shuts up.
The funny thing about the streetlight is… only one is melted. The other looks just a bit bashed. If the reason for it was climate change, wouldn’t both have melted? Nope, that was another accident, or some loonies set fire to something. Happens all the time.
PS, you can see the fire damage on the plastic. That bubbling it shows, classic for fire meeting plastic. Seen it often enough.
Isn’t this article a little dishonest. As Gleick immediately followed up the tweet with “No doubt from some fire…But you get the idea” before anyone else responded.