COALS FROM NEWCASTLE

One cannot fault Matt Ridley's sense of place-  at risk of enlisting on the losing side in the war against cliche' he has become an equally staunch defender of the Northumbrian landscape and the coal mining that re-arranges it - a paradox of affection reflecting how many of the Ridley estate's broad acres are underlain by coal measures.

But what ever can the ex-Economist writer make of the coterie he's spent the last week responding to in WUWT, where Watts has headlined his recent WSJ Op-ed? Have any of them kept up with what the ever-skeptical Economist has been so eloquently saying about the realities of the science in question? 

PSEUDS' CORNER

Watching a zombie journal like Pattern Recognition in Physics rise from the grave of climate denier captivity, one wonders why the cranks attempting its resurrection didn't hoist their editorial jolly roger aboard some less creaky journal ?

You may not see them at your corner newsstand, but at $4,000 and up per institutional subscription, there is no sub-sub-discipline too obscure to command its own journal. Pergamon's late great Captain Bob was the first to grow rich inflating the list. At its high water mark, Harvard had 35,800 journal subscriptions to pay. 

Why fool around with old vanity presses or Pseudojournals like E&E and PRP, when publishers launch new ones with sciency titles and pristine reputations almost weekly? With application, pseuds like Viscount Monckton, and deferential operators like Benny Peiser and Fred Singer could sell space in the latest to every energy flack and PR hack on K-Street: 

The Journal of Pseudo-Differential 

Operators and Applications 

No anchorman dare challenge a title of such magisterial opacity!

'TIS A GIFT TO BE SIMPLE

A hare-brained visitor to lagomorphland  thinks this dish of spagetti proof so positive of Michael Mann's statistical guilt that any kindergarten worth its crayons would convict him: 

Looks hairy, but here from Science is what Marcott et al's spagetti tastes like without the special sauce- 

A MAMMOTH HEADACHE

The measure of a great crank magnet is the force with which it attracts weird science from afar, like this offering from one of Watts more prestigeous academic fans, Jim Steele, Director emeritus of the Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University, which in the Wattsian calculus of credential inflation means a former campground manager and lecturer on 'Bird Identification by Song'. Spreading his wings, Mr. Steele has introduced WUWT readers to the remarkable hypothesis set forth in William Thompson's blog:

The gist of the theory is that a comet killed off North America's Ice Age megafauna, and flattened the Clovis culture. Undaunted by the failure of further field studies to confirm his ideas, Thompson has upstaged Edward Cayce with a 159 page bibliography of signs in the heavens and stratigraphic layers containing nanodiamonds so small that only the catastrophically pure of heart can see them.

I confess I was utterly charmed by Thompson's colleague Allen West's 2007 claim that the mammoths were shot dead by a meteor shower, a bar magnet having revealed birdshot sized bits of rust embedded in the upper surfaces of  fossil tusks.

Alas for Editor Watts, this wondrous blast from the past did not survive for long. The particles of purported shrapnel seen seven years ago burned up in the heated atmosphere of peer review, the cosmic tuskers having overlooked the geological ubiquity of iron. 

With so much magnetite underfoot, the late great  mammoths rooted about at far greater risk of getting bits  stuck in their ivories than being whacked by a meteorite.

YOUR SHARE OF THE AIR

There is a corollary to Yogi Berra's momentous observation that:

'You can see a lot just by observing.'

The surest way to make people 

think about things 

is to show them to them. 

So forget 'framing'. If you want the idea of atmospheric change to hit people like a ton of bricks, turn their share of the air into a ton of bricks right in front of their eyes.

   This may be easier than it sounds, because your share of the air weighs three quarters of a million tonnes.
   
   Every year each American adds twenty tonnes of CO2 to the air, so translated into blocks of solidified gas, your share of the CO2 problem can be piled into something easy to see and mighty hard to ignore:

A PYRAMID OF DRY ICE TEN FEET TALL

In some circles this is known as reification, but members of the conceptual art commisioning classes are invited to contact the author about installations

THE CLIMATE STOATSMANSHIP OF WILLARD WATTS

As Secretary of State Kerry fires up the Foreign Service for the Climate Wars,  Mr. Willard A. Watts, former Cisco TV weatherman and self appointed climate diplomacy doyen of Placer County, California, confronts the great two-hookah problem of the day: 
 Who's suing whom in Mann v. Steyn?   

The learned firm of Sue, Grabbit & Runne, libel solicitors to the stars, is preparing an amicus brief, as some fear Watts' paralegal skills may provoke Jane Fonda and William Connolley to join the list of plaintifs

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE WATTS

Just as there is no political hypothesis so absurd that two Nobel laureates cannot be found to endorse it, there is no geophysics news so irrelevant to climate policy as to avoid a blog post by those two past masters of distraction, Messrs. Watts & Eschenbach of WUWT. 

To test this axiom, readers should note how long it takes them to declare peace in the water wars of our times by invoking newly discovered oceans of the stuff lying underfoot just a few hundred miles down, and a few thousand degrees up the thermocline. The clock started Saturday, with an Anonymous coolista hailing Time magazine's account of the discovery of hydrated silicate phases in the Earth's upper mantle:

BUT WILLARD, WE THOUGHT YOU LIKED THE LITTLE ICE AGE?

Climate Craziness of the Week: ‘warming causing lobster cannibalism’

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Anthony Watts

Most idiotic climate claim ever?

I’m pretty sure some people lay awake at night trying to come up with new ways to demonstrate that planet is going to hell in a handbasket. As I pointed out in Why climate change communications is like ‘Shaka, when the walls fell’, it’s all about imagery, not facts.What better imagery then than turning lobsters into B-movie crustacean cannibals by making a lame-assed “experiment” that you put up on YouTube, complete with movie titles. Of course the non-thinkers are eating this right up, and they don’t even need drawn butter. Watch:

AS WATTS VIDEO IS TOO GRUESOME FOR GENTEEL VIEWING, WE OFFER INSTEAD THIS VIEW OF  Homarus americanus  TAKING REVENGE FOR OCEAN ACIDIFICATION

             SEBASTIAN MUNSTER COSMOGRAPHIA [1545]