Beyond satire

"He's still pushing the same old stuff...and a persecution complex to make up for his lack of transparency."

You couldn't make such irony up but Willard Anthony Watts says it with straight face and bristling Freddie Mercury moustache.  This is the self-same Watts who doesn't say exactly how the Heartland Institute put him in contact with a sponsor or who the sponsor is. And the self-same Watts who whinges later that the AGU didn't give him time to get his repetitive act together and put together a fake science presentation. Didums.

Well, Willard, a piece of advice. Look in the mirror and say to yourself, am I pushing the same old stuff, the wonders of Willis, Tisdale's ice, Spencer's latest invented constant designed the make the model do what he wants it to do, and the endless Monckton scribblings?

Watts is paranoid about Michael Mann, a real Nobel laureate and not a fake one like Monckton. Always in the back of his mind must be the thought that actually the Hockey stick graph is true, what then? Too entrenched, too deep in the political mess of Heartland and the denialist subculture, he cannot back down. So he acts hurt, gets hissy and is (please excuse me) like one of my cats, fur up, claws out but no real danger. It must be a hard life being a denier.

Watts is paranoid about so much.  One of my points in the last few weeks has been how the little pinpricks of the deniers don't actually add up to much. A hill of beans. The real scientists who do climate for their day job know what reality looks like. They don't put their fingers in their ears and say "I'm not listening" as the deniers do, they get on with the real job of understanding a fiendishly difficult thing. And as they learn more, they get closer to be able to understanding. Deniers, on the other hand, pick on uncertainty and tell us scientists don't know. They do. They just tell us how well we know it.

If the law of diminishing returns is correct, the dribblings at WUWT will fade away, especially when the main players get too old, too tired, too bored or too dead to contribute any longer.  Let's hope they have lengthy lives but see the error of their ways.  It is not what they think that matters but what the evidence says and that says the planet is being warmed and it is happening in an unnatural manner.

Climate denialism has some adherents at the moment because the warming is not so fast as it was twenty years ago.  What will be Watts position when the graph starts trending upwards at a bigger gradient as it almost inevitably will?  Could be fun to watch if the consequences were it not so serious. 

So Watts's latest rant is beyond parody because it is so self-unaware. As some one talented than I once sang:

With your humourless smile so easy to see through, can you tell me what's wrong from what's right?

 If you wish to know what Watts was getting so hot under the collar about, here is Mann's presentation to the AGU: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x2afzvRbeg