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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.

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What do you get when you cross a retired weatherman with a wannabe British aristocrat?

No wait, that’s not it.

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.

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Another climate change denier myth - this one a favorite of Anthony Watts and his “Watts Up With That” blog - has just bit the dust.

Many skeptics for years have sought to explain away decades of climate research by showing slides of weather station thermometers sited next to heating vents or surrounded by asphalt.

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 Research looked 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.

According to the authors,

“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.”

Oops.

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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 a temporary 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.