The conservative family values of Christian man Anthony Watts

[UPDATE II: Anthony Watts responds. With intimidation.]

[UPDATE: WUWT Moderator dbstealey feels that William M. Connolley is evil; see below]

Anthony Watts has a reposted an ugly article by Pointman about William M. Connolley, in which I have a cameo appearance as collateral damage. The comments below the post are below any level. Williams name inspires these good Christians to toilet puns. My last name reminds these Republicans of the last time they had anal sex. I guess it would be of no use to explain these man of the world that the Dutch name Venema does not rhyme to the English word enema.

Maybe Anthony Watts did not notice these comments, he is so busy searching for the truth after all. Thus I asked him:

Dear Anthony, I am saddened that you would repost something like this. I had expected better of you. While I understand it would be pointless to ask Pointman to do so, could you at least remove the pun on my name by ATheoK and the various hilarious puns on William Connolley's name, please?

This comment was not published, but replaced by [noted]. The comment by ATheoK was not changed. And I even asked politely, last time the enema appeared on WUWT, Anthony Watts was only willing to remove it if I repeated the request with the magic word please.

My next comment:

Victor Venema says: [noted]

Dear Anthony Watts, it is regretful that you approve of the horrible language used in these comments. This ugliness is not something I had expected to see at WUWT, if only on opportunistic grounds. Don't you want WUWT to be a broadly read somewhat respectable mainstream anti-CAGW blog? The comments on this post do not sound like conservative or Christian family values to me, but more like atheist übermensch extremist thinking.

If you have to resort to this kind of language, you have lost the rational debate. Kudos for making this official.

While we now know that you condone abusive language, I am wondering if you also officially support misinformation. You know that this statement by NikFromNYC is wrong: "Here is the hockey stick you [Connolley] helped create, the WUWT site rating that just tripled in 2013: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wattsupwiththat.com"

Surely, having "the world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change", the number of readers is important to you and you know your blog statistics. Any other blogger knows, surely you do. You know this is wrong, you need no scientific knowledge or skills to see this. You also publish the Wordpress summary results at the end of the year and everyone else knows it is wrong. Don't you think that the right thing to do would be to correct this misinformation? What would Jesus do?

In the hope of getting this one published, I had not added the link with the evidence that Watts has no respect for reality whatever the topic.

Fortunately not all conservative Christians are like Watts and his ilk. Maybe it helped that I had just had a long detailed and mainly pleasant discussion with Evan Jones on the Watts et al. (2012) manuscript. If people want to honestly discuss science, I am happy to talk to them if I have some expertise. Jones writes:

Over the last year-plus, I have had oddly reasonable exchanges with both Connolley and Victor Venema concerning the surfacestations paper. We explored their three main objections and have addressed them. That was actually quite valuable, as it turns out.

I do understand that they are controversial figures, and many have crossed swords with them, but I have made out okay. They found out we are for real — which they needed to know. I found out what their criticisms are and where how they will be arguing against the paper, down the road — which I needed to know.

REPLY: he seems to have a different persona when not in public view. In my case here and at his own blog, he wears his contempt on his sleeve – Anthony

I will be so modest and assume that Watts is speaking about Connolley. That does not resolve the difficulty of understanding how commenting at WUWT and writing on your blog would be outside of the public view. But then, that doesn't really matter, I have given up trying to understand these fake sceptics, the only reason to debate them is to show the lurkers the way back to reality.

The more important question is why the American evangelical Christians are sacrificing their place next to Jesus with their support of such a dishonest and uncivilised political movement. Christians in the rest of the world seem to read another bible and would never condone such unchristian behaviour. In the USA, the people of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) have already realised this.

While I understand that conservatives do not like some of the proposals for policies to combat climate change put forward by progressives and greens, I am disappointed by them tolerating this kind of language in their ranks. Weren't the conservatives once the people that wanted to conserve civilised manners, that claimed to have the moral and Christian values on their side? What happened to these conservatives? How could the rude behaviour of Anthony Watts and Rush Limbaugh become the conservative life style?

If you would explain a Martian the original conservative ideology, these Martians would expect conservatives to respond to climate change the way Newt Gingrich proposed, instead of betraying their own values in comments at WUWT and Co.

[UPDATE: It has gotten even worse, after all the vitriol there were two sane comments.

None of which excuses the reference to him [@wmconnolley] in the original article as “creature” or the comment reference “sub-human”.

I agree with The Other Phil. It doesn’t help to simply throw names at anyone,especially not terms with such an unpleasant history

So much humanity broke WUWT "moderator" dbstealey's back. He quoted from a piece about Elliot Rodger, Osama bin Laden, Anders Behring Breivik and Christopher Dorner:

Evil is not limited to the occasional spree killer. In the last century Hitler and Stalin oversaw cults of personality built on this same model under which millions died. Stalin’s Communism and Hitler’s National Socialism were messy and contradictory ideologies. They ultimately existed so that one man could exercise his power fantasies and destroy as much of the world as he could. And here in our own country, there is an ideology that is obsessed with controlling and shaping all of human behavior. We call that ideology by many names such as liberalism or progressivism, but it’s more accurately a diseased narcissism whose followers strive to stamp out anyone who doesn’t think like them, and to control the lives of everyone else.

And commented that quote with:

It’s from another blog, but guess who it applies to here [my bold].

That also applies to Michael Mann. Anyone reading his tweets and other comments knows what a warped person he is. Personally, I could understand pretending to have won the Nobel Prize. Lots of insecure folks self-aggrandize with fictitious accomplishments. But Mann constantly flings out insults at anyone and everyone who doesn’t toe his line, and he cowers from any fair debate [I suspect that connolley would tuck tail and run from any fair, moderated debate, too, since the science flatly contradicts his bogus narrative].

We are dealing with people who would be rejected by any normal society. But this is life in the new millennium. We just have to keep plugging away. And so far, it’s working.

On other blogs the moderators have the responsibility to keep the discussion somewhat civilised. Anthony Watts' guard dog, sock puppeteer and favoured mod, dbstealey aka Smokey aka dbs aka D Boehm aka who knows what else sees this differently.

No idea why Michael Mann suddenly makes an appearance.

Creature, sub-human, "the WC needed cleaning", "WC flushed", odious toads, evil, Hitler, Stalin and diseased narcissism. Those are the words of extremists, I would not want to get my science information from.

The idea that William M. Connolley would run away from any debate is almost funny. Given that he was commenting below this ugly post, which is an unfair and badly moderated debate, especially when dbstealey comments using one of his many sock-puppets and simultaneously moderates his opponents. Previously Connolley has offered to debate Lord Monckton, but the Lord did not take up the offer.

The often used term narcissistic to describe Connolley is probably the most ironic part. It is pure projection: it are the extremists at WUWT that think that William M. Connolley single handedly kept Wikipedia's climate articles clean of their nonsense. They are the ones that do not recognise the swarm intelligence of Wikipedia and how Connolley could never have kept Wikipedia clean without the other Wikipedia editors and the scientific literature.]


[UPDATE II Now also Anthony Watts chipped in. His response below my second comment, the published one, is rather long and content free. You can read it in this archive if you want to check my paraphrases.

I found it because William M. Connolley tweeted: AW invents new version of Godwin: "Oh puhleeze, invoke Jesus? Nope that’s when YOU lose".

The key sentence may be: "I know your university stoked ego can’t assimilate criticism from us mere peasants, so I don’t bother."

It would be nice if he would not bother and would stop the misinformation campaign, he calls "criticism" and I call WUWT.

The term "university stoked ego" probably tells more about Watt's inferiority complex than about me. My last name, which the ugly crowd at WUWT likes to make fun of, actually means peat bog worker in Dutch. I am the first in my family to obtain a PhD. Coming from a relatively poor background I am extremely thankful for the enormous support and trust society has given me for my studies and now to be allowed to do the job I love.

A job I love because of the culture of curiosity, reason, civility and truth. The anti-thesis of WUWT and Co. If Watts feels like a peasant, he might think about why scholars, scientists and cultured people no longer feel welcome in the Republican party where only two generations ago they could still be proud to be a Republican. These groups have the same range of political preferences as everyone else. Thus my guess would be that they are disgusted by the anti-intellectual and coarse political culture and by people putting ideology above values. WUWT is a mere symptom of this larger problem.

Watts may also feel inferior because people so often find that the posts at WUWT are completely wrong. This is documented daily on HotWhopper. However, Watts should not take this personally. If I had to publish five posts a day, my quality would also go down. Especially, if those posts would have to follow an ideological story line and I could thus not orient myself by the scientific literature. Given those difficult circumstances, Watts is doing a great job and I have often praised him as a great PR expert.

The next complaint is that I would "whip up comments here [at WUWT] then go write a post [at Variable Variability] about how terrible we are here [at WUWT]." I don't know. I thought this was called decency. To first alert Anthony Watts that there is a problem and to give him the possibility to correct it. I find that more decent as immediately writing a post about an over-the-top comment, the way Anthony Watts did about a comment someone made at AndThenTheresPhysics that was removed when people complained. But maybe those are just my exotic moral values.

Is it necessary to state that the comments below that WUWT post on AndThenTheresPhysics were similarly hateful. But were not removed?

Next Anthony Watts sends a mixed message. Climate "sceptics" often complain that scientists are not willing to debate them, like dbstealey above, but when scientists show up they are bullied.

Watts published my comment email address; the good Christian regularly intimidates people by publishing private information when he feels cornered. He "calls me out" for using my university email privately and threatens to write a blog post about Victor Venema and the University of Bonn to flesh this out. Nice chap, isn't he? That will stimulate civilised debate.

(Dear readers, do not worry, private use of the internet is allowed in Bonn and Germany has freedom of research in its constitution, thus I do not have to fear harassment by the fake sceptics. I am happy to life in a country where scientists cannot be bullied by political pressure groups that do not like the inconvenient results.) ]

Christians on the climate consensus

Dan Kahan thinks that John Cook and colleagues should shut up about the climate consensus; the consensus among climatologists that the Earth is warming and human action is the main cause. Kahan claims that research shows that talking about consensus is:

a style of advocacy that is more likely to intensify opposition ... then [to] ameliorate it

It sounds as if his main argument is that Cook efforts are counter productive because Cook is not an American Republican, which is hard to fix.

Katryn Hayhoe

As an example of how you communicate climate science the right way, Kahan mentions Katryn Hayhoe as an example. Hayhoe is an evangelical climate change researcher and stars in three beautifully made videos where Hayhoe talks about God and climate change.

Except that she also talks about her religion, I personally see no difference with any other message for the general public on climate change. She also openly speaks about the disinformation campaign by the climate ostriches.

The most frustrating thing about her position, she says, is the amount of disinformation which is targeted at her very own Christian community.

Maybe naively, but I was surprised that the Christian community is a special target. While I am not a Christian myself, my mother was a wise environmentally concious woman and a devout Christian. Also when in comes to organized religion, I remember mainly expressions of concern about climate change. Thus I thought that Christians are a positive, maybe even activist, force with respect to climate change.

Thus let's have look what the Christian Churches think about climate change.