AGW alarmists: slow learners damning selves with own words

A New Year’s update on the state of the climate wars! First of all, if you’ve been following my posting trials and tribulations at cbc.ca, when I went back yesterday, there were a few new posts (although mine was not among them) and I found that comments had been (conveniently?!) closed. Anyway ….

No doubt much to the distress of the likes of Michael “Hide the decline” Mann – and despite the best efforts of CBC “science” mavens and moderators (not to mention magazines and the benificence of Obama, the Great Green Hope and almighty stopper of “climate change”) – Climategate has opened a lot of formerly innocent eyes to the dark, distasteful underbelly of the enterprise known as “The Church of Settled Science”.

On Dec. 29, I was alerted to a Facebook “discussion” entitled: “Please remove anti-science blogs from the Best Science Blog category”

The primary targets identified by the person who initiated this discussion are the 2007 and 2008 Weblog Awards “Best Science Blog” winners, Climate Audit and Watts Up With That, respectively.

If there is any doubt in your mind regarding the utter intellectual dishonesty of those who promote AGW alarmism, be sure to follow that discussion link! If you’ve ever encountered a “debate” with Holocaust deniers, you will instantly recognize all their favourite “debating” techniques: No matter how often they are told, “he who asserts must prove”, it just never seems to register. Another favourite is the “you do my homework for me” tactic, and the closely aligned “my claim, prove me wrong”. Not to mention their very liberal usage of ad hominem, constantly moving goalposts and repetition of unsubstantiated assertions. The bright side, of course, is that they invariably succeed in damning themselves with their very own words.

I did take (a minor!) part in this discussion, and the alarmist evangelists tried desperately to convert me to their “cause” – although more likely they were targeting any “lurkers”! However, Willis Eschenbach’s posts put them in their place. Some excerpts from Mr. Eschenbach’s posts:

[Post #52:]
So, to to review the bidding and sum up. Steve McIntyre’s blog, ClimateAudit, won best science blog in 2007. Anthony Watt’s blog, Watts Up With That, won best science blog in 2008.

Sensing impending loss in 2009, in the best AGW supporters tradition James Galasyn is trying to do what Phil Jones did – deny access to the people who disagree with him. If you can’t beat them, shut them out of the game. Or to use Phil Jones memorable words, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Hey, AGW science at its finest …

To achieve this underhanded aim, James made unsupported and unpleasant claims to try to discredit the two blogs. When I asked him for evidence that his claims were true, he once again reacted in the best time-tested AGW supporters’ fashion … by attacking me. When his attack failed, he simply moved the goalposts.

Now he wants me to do his work for him, asking me to undertake his research […]

[Post #63]

David: “Do I really need to consider both sides to this controversy?”

No, David, there’s no reason to consider both sides, if you do that you might actually have to think about the issues. You can just keep considering one side, that’s the scientific way to act. After all, you have convinced yourself that consensus = scientific proof, what more do you need?

Besides, Dr. Richard Lindzen and Dr. John Christy and Dr. Ivar Giaever and Dr. Joanne Simpson and Dr. Pat Michaels and Dr. Sallie Baliunas and Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. Stanley Goldenberg and Dr. William Briggs and Dr. Will Happer and Dr. James Peden and Dr. Art Douglas and Dr. Leblanc Smith and Dr. Richard Keen and Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu and a host of other people with PhDs are all idiots whose opinions you can safely disregard because … because … well, because their opinions disagree with yours, so they must be “anti-science” …

And yes, Mann came back one year after his publication passed peer-review with the upside-down Korttajarvi (Tiljander) series to hand-wave it away. One year later, and he still didn’t say anything about the series being upside down … gosh, I wonder why. Then, incredibly, he continued to use the proxy in his next study (Mann 2009), and more incredibly, he used it upside-down once again. Golly, he must be one of them brilliant scientist fellers …

[Eschenbach then shows all the problems with Mann’s papers … and concludes:]

So you are at least on the right track, you have started to look beneath the surface, but you still are far, far too credulous. Once you learn that if Michael Mann’s lips are moving there’s a pretty good chance that he is lying, once you learn to look past the pretty lines on the page and check the data underneath and see if the lines are based on fact or fantasy, once you start to think critically about the tests that he didn’t run and the results that he didn’t show, once you remember the fact that temperatures peaked in 1998 and he shows them going through the roof after that, then you’ll be getting near to the reality.

But heck, you figure you don’t need to do any of that, you’ve given up on the scientific method and now think you can ignore opposing views, you actually believe that Michael Mann is telling the truth because he, like you, is “Dr.”, you’ve decided to ignore all the other Drs. who say something different, and with enough plaster you don’t even notice the cracks in that edifice … go back to sleep, David, you can continue to believe that your dreams are actually reality, I promise I won’t wake you up again …

End of the story? You haven’t come up with a damn scrap of evidence to back up your pernicious claim that we should censor Watts Up With That and ClimateAudit because they are “anti-science”. Not one shred. You haven’t even tried.

And yet you claim you are a scientist? You should be ashamed to claim the title. Put up or shut up, either come up with some evidence or retract your cowardly attempt to blacken the names and reputations of good men. You say you’re a scientist? Start acting like one, and someday we might believe it. Because up until now, you been acting like a common thug, willing to hang someone without evidence just because they disagree with your holy opinion which even you acknowledge is based on only listening to one side of the story. Should you listen to both sides? Don’t do that for gods sake, it’s “anti-science”

Meanwhile, Michael Mann – whose self-serving OpEd in the Washington Post circa Dec. 18, resulted in a torrential downpour of 651 comments – has sent a plea to the Wall Street Journal, in which he freely engages in the same intellectually dishonest smear tactics. As one commenter observed:

I thank the editors of the WSJ for printing Mann’s letter. His own words condemn him more effectively than any critic could.

So, it would seem that – while they might make “excellent” Holocaust deniers – some “climate scientists” and their cyber-apostles are, evidently, very slow learners!