A CLIMATE sceptic blogger Alec Rawls has taken it upon himself to leak the current draft of an entire major Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which is not due for publication until September next year.
For those not au fait with the machinations of the IPCC (I mean, what do you lot do all day?) historically this United Nations organisation has produced reports every five years or so which pull together and summarise all the scientific research into climate change.
The next one - Assessment Report 5 - will begin to be published next year. They're undeniably important reports because practically every government on the face of the earth has used them to help inform their policies and their position domestically and internationally on climate change.
The AR5 comes via three working groups. WG1 looks at the physical science on climate change and its report will be first out of the traps in September 2013. WG2 looks at climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability and comes out in March 2014. WG3 looks at ways to mitigate climate change and comes out in October 2014.
PBS – the network that conservatives have regularly attacked for “liberal bias” for more than 40 years – finally put that myth to rest tonight by airing a one-sided interview with climate change denier Anthony Watts. The former weatherman-turned business owner and blogger Watts, was given close to ten minutes of uncontested airtime to spout his disinformation about climate change, without any retorts from actual climate scientists.
Watts freely admitted in the interview that he is not a climate scientist, but said that he has a problem with climate scientists because, as Watts says, they are using “faulty data.”
Recently, I’ve become aware that the prominent climate science skeptic blogger Anthony Watts has been challenging a number of my posts. Maybe it's because in my most recent book Unscientific America, I made a big deal about a site that attacks climate science, like his, winning a “Best Science Blog” award.
Anyways, Watts has gotten me back. Based upon my photo, he has taken to calling me a “kid blogger” (see here and here). And it's true: I’m 33, obviously too young to be fooling around on the Internet.
The attention is flattering—but I've also grown intrigued by what happens on Watts’ blog when he criticizes something or someone and his many commenters then follow suit. Because it does indeed show what a dangerous place the Internet is for kids like me.
A retired weatherman and a former political hack for Margaret Thatcher walk into a bar and the bartender tells them both that if they want a drink they have to stop pretending they're experts in climate science.
Oh, and they should stop calling people (like me) a scumbag, it just makes them less attractive to the ladies at the bar than they already are.
Enough with the joke metaphors.
Someone sent along a post written by the puzzling Christopher Monckton - the guy with a penchant for high-brow verbiage and accusations of Nazi-facist activities. The post was on Anthony Watts' blog - the retired weatherman and equally unqualified as a our Monckton when it comes to the science of climate change.
This much-touted “urban heat island effect” was supposed to trump all those fancy graphs and equations that egghead scientists were fixated on. Except it’s not true.
A recent peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Geophysical Researchlooked at data from 114 weather stations from across the US over the last twenty years and compared measurements from locations that were well sited and those that weren’t.
They did find an overall bias, but it was towards cooling rather warming.
“the bias is counter intuitive to photographic documentation of poor exposure because associated instrument changes have led to an artificial negative (“cool”) bias in maximum temperatures and only a slight positive (“warm”) bias in minimum temperatures.”
The denier web has been alive with excitement over the past week about a presentation by the German meteorologist Dr. Mojib Latif, who told a recent scientific meeting in Geneva that he expects atemporary lull in global warming.
One of the National Post's most vigorous climate change deniers, Lorne Gunter, grabbed onto this story in a celebratory column titled: Global Warming Takes a Break. But Gunter has not suddenly decided to take science seriously. He dismissed as somehow unknowable Latif's ultimate conclusion: that climate change is a real and pressing problem and that even if global temperature increases stall, they will inevitably resume.
Nope. Gunter doesn't want to listen to a whole scientific sentence: but he's willing to bet our lives on a fragment that bolsters his own agenda.
Peter Sinclair producer of the well-known "Climate Crock of the Week" video series, posted a video debunking weatherman Anthony Watts who runs a Climate Denier Den also known as his Watt's Up With That blog.
The video was auto-scrubbed by YouTube after Watts claimed the video broke YouTube's copyright rules. The video has since been reviewed by a number of US copyright experts and (big surprise) there appears to be nothing that could be construed as anything but fair use.
This whole situation has raised the ire of even some of the more ardent commenters on DeSmogBlog who normally disagree with pretty much everything we say on this site. One such commenter, Rick James wrote:
"I have to admit it doesn't look good for the skeptic side when something gets scrubbed like this. Watts loses some stature here unless he can post something convincing about why he did it on his blog. Silence won't get it done."
One could speculate that Watts had a problem with the clips Sinclair used of Watts being interviewed by Glenn Beck on Fox News (Watts formerly worked as a weatherman for a Fox News affiliate), but that would be pretty weak given that Watts has no problem excerpting large swaths of print articles like this one posted tonight from the BBC on his own website.
As I have asked on two posts here on DeSmog and on Huffington Post: tell me Mr. Watts, what part of this video is it that gives you the right to have it removed from the public discourse on climate change? You can email me at desmogblog [at] gmail [dot] com.
Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.
There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.
