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.
The wannabe ‘Team boy’ genius continues his peerless cruise thro’ the Major League of World Misanthropes, and given recent sustained form who’d bet against him reaching at least the semi-finals? Still, the competition nowadays for that much-coveted title and a deserved place for all time in the Annals of Shame can’t be easy. Must be real tough being a front-running elitist like Peter. And Mikey. And Gav. And Stephen. And…
Here’s Gleick’s award he has deserved.
http://umweltluege.de/images/h/award.jpg
“Someone should calculate how much atmospheric CO2 it would require to melt traffic lights. My extensive research on Wikipedia using the example of Venus yields a figure of 965,000ppm.
The atmospheric pressure of the CO2 laden atmosphere of Venus at the planet’s surface is the same as the water pressure on Earth at a depth of 10 miles!. When CAGW was first put forward, the “believers” stated in all seriousness that if mankind continued putting CO2 into the atmosphere, then our planet would become a second Venus. This was the turning point for my attitude to CAGW or even AGW, because it is nonsensical, there is not anywhere near enough C + O2, HCO3 or CO3 to cause this to happen. They have kept quiet about this since because they realised it just demonstrated their own stupidity. However people, however intelligent they are, or think they are, look for things that back up their pet theories. Tongue and fingers engage Drive but the brain is still in Neutral! They want AGW to be true; so much so, that they disregard anything that demonstrates it isn’t and latch on to anything no matter how tenuous that demonstrates it is
This is why AGW is a belief, NOT a science and it will never be anything else!
All time record cool for July in parts of Texas. Ask the genius if the coolest so early ( or late..which one is it) is part of the warming. Bet he says hes
All time record cool for July in parts of Texas. Ask the genius if the coolest so early ( or late..which one is it) is part of the warming. Bet he says yes. ( hes is not a word as in above..see I’m a genius)
Joseph Bastardi says: July 4, 2013 at 5:39 am
All time record cool for July in parts of Texas. …
Not these parts, Joe.
Mike in Houston
“metaphor” – heh. Wile E. Coyote is the best metaphor of all, congrats!
It occurred to me recently, having always had older relatives around for much of my life (and who II loved and helped take care of) that sooner or later all of them get to where they love to sit in a rocker and complain about the weather, on and on and on. It’s NEVER as good as it used to be, and even if it happens to be good at the moment, it won’t be for long, don’t cha know!!
So this is “global warming” in a nutshell – the baby boomer generation is sliding into their geriatric stage, and all they have left is to sit out on the porch and gripe about how bad the weather was and how much better it all used to be, and what they’ve added is how this of course is everyone else’s faults.
Shadddup and go to bed, grandpa!
I’ll just wait until they complain the tarmac is melting! Never did that before.
No Gleick’s listed in the Merit Scholar database. Probably an oversight, since they missed Hillary and Barack, too.
p.s. – I’m in East Texas and we’ve had magnificently cool mornings for 3 days in a row now! That don’t happen much in July, sonny boy! Now let me go get my shawl…
As a member of Mensa I find the term “genius award” a bit odd. What the MacArthur Foundation really awards are “Fellowships” for people who “show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work” (from Wikipedia). Over 700 Fellowships have been awarded. I don’t know about Gleick’s merit but he has clearly shown that he can be creative.
BTW, Janice Moore, thank you for your patriotic comment (11:14PM). I hope it does not get you on the Homeland Security watch list.
Gleick will reject all the data provided by Anthony and insist that it doesn’t disprove that global warming wasn’t a contributing factor to the melting of that traffic light. The dice are loaded for more traffic light melting and there are models that show that the traffic lights will melt completely by the year 2150. Anthony is just a traffic light melting from global warming denier! 😉
THat’s it! Another proxy record. If we can just figure out what pressure caused the tire track depresions and on what day we have a proxy record ot temperature stretching make to when tarmac roads were introduced. Need ones that haven’t been resurfaced thouugh! And we need to measure the load/temperature deformation strcuture.
The Gleick affair is further proof of the warmists’ endless credulity, This is FRAUD
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/greenpolitics/9105330/The-Gleick-affair-is-further-proof-of-the-warmists-endless-credulity.html
Just another example of what happens when the liberal mind attempts to do science.
Genius awards aren’t handed out by geniuses and in this day and age it is his ideology that has been rewarded. This is true nowadays for the Nobel Prize – look at recipients for the last 20-30 years. Obama got one as an inducement to enlist in the fun at Copenhagen 2009 and Gore, Pachauri….the committee is boosting the new world order and geniuses need not apply. It is a shame that this erstwhile honor, now a Crackerjack^TM prize, taints the great ones who received it for great things done. I noted my children and all their friends began to get awards at school for no apparent reason. I now realize that it is used as a leveler to haul the brights ones down and make a thin gruel of achievement.
Maybe he didn’t reply because he had already explained that it was probably from a fire, and not just air temps…
“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.”
It’s only dishonest if Anthony actually knows about the other tweet. As we’ve seen multiple times, he doesn’t really have a handle on how twitter works.
Add another tactic to the warmista battle plan:
When propaganda is exposed as lies, it becomes: ” a metaphor”
Let us not be too hard on Peter Gleick.
He is useful to the sceptic cause.
The more he talks, the less people are likely to take him and his fellow travelers seriously.
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Peter Gleick IS that mistake.
Has been unusally cool on top of the Ozarks, lack of rain though, we’re turning into dust. We had pretty good rain this spring and even first snow in May, then it sure turned dry. Looks like maybe a little more than half the trees that turned brown last summer died and didn’t emerge this spring. So many trees were lost or severely mangled during the January, 2009 ice storm and these droughts are thinning them way out even more. We’ll begin to start to look like southern Arizona & New Mexico if this keeps up long.
People have been getting a lot of work repairing house foundations. Your house needs a thick foundation to withstand see sawing ground moisture.
It’s just hilarious that these geniuses so easily forget what the melting points of basic metals and glasses are. Just about the only common construction material that humans use that could possibly melt in surface temperatures is plastic. I’ve never seen plastic street signals.
My B.S. detector went off when I looked at the post holding the traffic lights up. It looks like nothing more than a 1×2 WOOD post. They don’t put traffic lights up on wood post because they rot over time and their is no place to run the power wires. Also look at how the back panels on the lights overlap. If they were real, the contractor who installed the lights should never get a public job again!
Pity the poor Warmunists this time of year. Spontaneously-combusting pants and hot weather don’t seem to be a good combination.
Dena says: “My B.S. detector went off when I looked at the post holding the traffic lights up. It looks like nothing more than a 1×2 WOOD post. They don’t put traffic lights up on wood post because they rot over time and their is no place to run the power wires. Also look at how the back panels on the lights overlap. If they were real, the contractor who installed the lights should never get a public job again!”
Look again, with your glasses on. It’s very clearly a standard octagonal tapered (“swaged”) traffic light pole, approx. 3″ x 3″ at the base. Probably steel, judging from the rust where the yellow coating is abraded.
A larger size, possibly aluminum, can be seen here:
http://sell.pakuya.com/upload/20111214/Street_light_pole.jpg