Tweaking the wackos

Via Eli I saw that there was some odd stuff at WUWT (nothing new there you might say). The weirdness is the ATI vs Mann case, or whatever it is called, and the ATI are complaining that Mann is allowed to be a party to a case about his own emails. Or something; the legalese is dull, obviously. The ATI counsel appear to have been doing some very dodgy things, like running the case whilst working for the EPA.

Anyway, I thought it would be entertaining to tweak them a bit, and did so for a while. What is funny (apart from their inability to count to 4) is the way they are happy to leap upon complete misrepresentations by their opponents of what people have said, and then attack those words. And the weird assertion that IPCC AR4 didn’t use MBH. And their apparent belief in complete openness for all emails… except their own. And their friends.

It was fun for a bit, but got rather repetitive after a while.

This is more fun!

Richard Black winds up the wackos

Further proof of the polarisation in this “debate” comes from Climate: Cherries are not the only fruit by Richard Black. This all stems from Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008 by Robert K. Kaufmann et al., who come to the not-desperately-exciting conclusion that things are pretty much as we thought they were: recent global temperature records are consistent with the existing understanding of the relationship among global surface temperature, internal variability, and radiative forcing, which includes anthropogenic factors with well known warming and cooling effects.

The GWPF cherry-picked Kaufmann et al. using their favourite “all records start from 1998” trick, so were a bit narked when Black called them out. And they seem to have a guest posts at Watt’s which basically says “yes we did cherry pick, but now we’re going to shout loudly and hope you don’t notice”.

That wasn’t very interesting.

[Update: by happy chance, Tamino has a nice post about cherry-picking by Steve Goddard.]