Bizarro world 'Bloggies' finalist for Best Science Blog is … anti-science website WattsUpWithThat

[bananas]

http://climateprogress.org/2011/02/18/bizarro-world-bloggies-finalist-for-best-science-blog-is-anti-science-website-wattsupwiththat/

Bizarro world ‘Bloggies’ finalist for Best Science Blog is … anti-science website WattsUpWithThat
February 18, 2011

<snip>

Anthony Watts does more than any person in the blogosphere to spread anti-scientific disinformation and smear climate scientists. Giving WUWT a best science blog award would be like giving the Edward R. Murrow award to Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.

Watts spent most of 2010 twisting scientific data to persuade people that Arctic sea ice was going to recover sharply — #FAIL — and then he spent the couple of months absurdly asserting that he did no such thing (see Arctic Death Spiral 2010: Navy’s oceanographer tells Congress, “the volume of ice as of last September has never been lower…in the last several thousand years” Disinformers get it very wrong AND see Tamino eviscerate their laughable November revisionism here).

Watts has, perhaps more than any other leading anti-science blogger, viciously smeared climate scientists and others. On Memorial Day, for instance, Watts directly questioned the patriotism of both Tamino and Rabett (see “Peak readership for anti-science blogs?“) leading Tamino to write, “This just might be the most loathsome thing Watts has yet done with his blog.” But it wasn’t.

<snip>

So vote for the real “Best Science Blog” but don’t be surprised if an unscientific process leads to an anti-science winner.

[FSogol]

1. That just shows the fallacy of online polls. Next time they should allow the public to nominate

candidates and then have a committee chose the finalists. Then, the general public can vote on the winner.

[Posteritatis]

2. Not that a general public vote would ever produce a "best science site" result that wasn't a joke nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Watts skewed an online poll, and the results were misleadingly given in congressional evidence

Patrick Michaels, a well-known paid liar for the Cato Institute, was invited to give evidence to Congress. He claimed:

Visitors to the website of Scientific American have been invited to participate in an ongoing survey on global warming. This survey finds—despite the general environmentalist bent of its readership—that only a tiny minority (16%) agree that the IPCC is ―an effective group of government representatives, scientists, and other experts‖. 84% agree, however, that it is ―a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda‖ (Figure 9). The concordance between the IPCC and the bizarre one-sidedness of the CCSP Synthesis would compel the respondents to say the same about it, if asked.

But, of course, the 'visitors to the site' were sent there largely by Watts:

Rather, the big problem was that the poll was skewed by visitors who clicked over from the well-known climate denier site, Watts Up With That? Run by Anthony Watts, the site created a web page urging users to take the poll.

It sure worked. Our traffic statistics from October 25, when the poll went live, to November 1 (the latest for which we have data on referrals) indicate that 30.5 percent of page views (about 4,000) of the poll came from Watts Up. The next highest referrer at 16 percent was a Canadian blog site smalldeadanimals.com; it consists of an eclectic mix of posts and comments, and if I had to guess, I would say its users leaned toward the climate denier side based on a few comments I saw. Meanwhile, on the other side of the climate debate, Joe Romm’s Climate Progress drove just 2.9 percent and was the third highest referrer.

http://climateprogress.org/2010/11/18/scientific-american-science-deniers-patrick-michaels-george-gilder-unscientific-online-poll/

But it's now in the congressional record that, thanks to the sneaky wording of Michaels, that it appears that people with a "general environmentalist bent" think the IPCC is "a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda". And Watts was instrumental in setting that up. He is pure scum.