Sad to say, but if there’s creepy energy think-tank money to be had and fragile denier egos to be stroked, one former weatherman turned anti-science crusader has proven himself ready and able to do both:
HotWhopper — He started his first protest article with:
Prepare yourselves for the second coming of Katrina, because you can bet that this storm will be hyped as an indicator of “global warming”. This article was all about pre-empting any link between weather disasters and global warming. The tragedy was just unfolding and all Anthony Watts was worried about was whether or not it would be viewed as a sign of things to come as the world warms. In that first post he was also having a go at Heidi Cullen for goodness knows what. All she did was tweet a link to a NASA article, which seemed to have escaped Anthony’s attention at the time.
After which Watts reportedly goes into a few flip-flopping tirades against selected science bloggers including Greg Laden. Simply because over time, Greg and many others have had the audacity to note that hurricanes are heat engines and therefore could arguably become more common or more powerful or both as the biosphere warms. Greg sure documented Watts’ preemptive flurries of denial and he was dead on balls accurate about it.
You can’t use that graph – it doesn’t account for a century of inflation & Reaganomics and their effects on numbers.
Busterggi, the graph clearly shows how Reaganomics and Bushanomics put a halt to globular warnings. See how the graph is mostly flat in the ’80s and ’00s? Most of the warnings happened during the Carter, Clinton, and Obama years. };-)
No, you both are wrong. Notice how warming was leveling out? Then BAM! transistor radios in the 50s. Now transistors are everywhere, and the temperature just keeps climbing and climbing!
No, no, no. We all know that global warming stopped in 1997, because since then only 3 years have been hotter. See, on the graph. Only 3 years hotter. Plateau. Definitely.
I’m telling you, all we need to do to end global warming is stop fighting pirates in Somalia. His Noodliness has decreed it.
Y”know its kind of apt to see the deniers of Global Overheating going into meltdown like this. Pity they haven’t all done a Frosty the Snowman and melted away entirely by now given the evidence against them and the terrible harm they’ve been doing.
@4. Suido : I assume you are joking right?
But in fact of course this “no more overheating” claim is false and has been repeatedly and very well debunked such as here :
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/11/05/climate_pause_nope.html
by Phil Plait for instance.
See also :
http://www.sciencealert.com.au/features/20130810-24880.html
(Although more Aussie focussed) & here :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbn1rCZz1ow&list=PL82yk73N8eoX-Xobr_TfHsWPfAIyI7VAP&index=26
By Potholer54 and showing the source of this canard.
Oh & the BA blog also has a good piece on the latest super-typhoon’s climate connection here :
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/11/12/supertyphoon_haiyan_a_glimpse_of_the_future_now.html
too.
As I have noted on several other blogs, the apparent slowdown in global warming is due to the outlier 1998 which was due to an unusually strong El Nino that year. Remove 1998 from the graph and it is evident that any slowing is quite inconsequential. Of course, that won’t stop clowns like Anthony Watts from shilling for the Koch brothers.
Unfortunately, weather is such a vast phenomenon that there is always something for the deniers to seize upon.
One that I’m sure we’ll be hearing a LOT about, once the foaming-at-the-mouth over Haiyan dies down, is the mildness of the hurricane season for 2013 in the US. OK, OK, the season isn’t *quite* over yet, it’s only mid-November. The fact remains that the models all said that this would be a fairly active Atlantic hurricane season, and it turned out to be anything but. (I haven’t looked into whether this was also true for the Pacific or Indian oceans.) I’m sure it has the modelers scratching their heads, but the denialists are bound to be all over it as “proof” that global warming, which of course isn’t real, also doesn’t cause more hurricanes.
I was going to make a note about how this graph utterly failed to note the inversely proportional decrease in the overall number of pirates, but I see #5 got there first. Carry on.
@Dave #10 – Which actually helps to illustrate the difference between science and religion. Science is showing that global warming will increase the intensity of tropical storms, but not necessarily increase the number. So, being science, the models are being redone and forecasts are being recalculated.
Religion, on the other hand, continues to deny the mountain of evidence before them, choosing instead to point at the changing models and screech about how Truth never changes.
@StevoR #6
Yes, I’m joking. It’s the easiest denialist canard to refute, which I did with my own words while parodying their position.