Worried by facts, quote-mining tides Anthony Watts over at WUWT
Sou | 8:56 PM
Anthony Watts is worried, because WUWT won't pass the fact test
In the comments, Chase Stoudt pointed out that Anthony Watts is worried about Google. In a paper in arXiv, a team of people from Google write how in future it might be possible to list results from Google search according to their factual content, putting disinformation sites (like WUWT) way down low:
The quality of web sources has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous signals such as the hyperlink structure of the graph. We propose a new approach that relies on endogenous signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source. A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy.
Anthony told Fox News how this worried him a lot. He said: "“I worry about this issue greatly… My site gets a significant portion of its daily traffic from Google,”.
Right-wingers are worried too. One of them, Rich Noyes, let the cat out of the bag when he reported that fact-checking sites find a lot more mistakes from the right wing ideologues than from liberals and progressives in the USA. Which won't surprise too many people. As Fox News reported:
He cited a 2013 study by George Mason University researchers, which found that fact-checking site Politifact declared 52% of Republican claims it looked at to be false, but did the same to just 24% of Democratic claims.
Anthony has every right to be worried if Google implements a fact-based approach to its search engine rankings. Even now, WUWT hasn't got a very high page rank on Google. A higher number means it appears closer to the top of Google search results. Wattsupwiththat.com is only ranked at 3. Even humble blog.hotwhopper.com has a page rank of 5. SkepticalScience.com has a page rank of 7, while the Australian national broadcaster has a page rank of 8. (There are a few sites that check Google page ranks, such as this one.)
WUWT's blatant deception about changing tides
Anthony Watts can sometimes be so blatantly deceiving that you've got to wonder whether he's really, really dumb or if he regards his readers as really, really dumb. Or both.
Today he copied and pasted a press release from the University of Southampton, about a new paper in Earth's Future (an open access journal of AGU). That's nothing new. Every so often Anthony will copy and paste a press release, slap the word "claim" in front of his headline, and sit back and watch his denier audience moan how climate science is a hoax.
This time Anthony Watts' headline completely contradicted the press release he copied and pasted. Here's Anthony's headline (archived here):
Study: ‘average sea levels rising; but tide levels, have undergone little change’Anthony helpfully bolded the words in the press release, so you could see how he quote-mined. Here is the full sentence and paragraph:
It is well documented that global average sea levels are rising; but tide levels, have generally been considered to have undergone little change on decadal time scales. It is also often presumed that tides will not change much over the next century. As such, long-term changes in tides are not accounted for in many practical applications and scenarios affected by rising sea levels.Notice what Anthony has done? He's plucked half from the "well-documented" clause, which refers to it being well-documented that global average sea levels are rising. He's put it together with part of the subsequent clause - referring to what is not documented, what has "generally been considered". The rest of the press release is about how what has "generally been considered" is not what is observed to be happening. For example, Anthony's article has the following as the next but one paragraph:
Lead author Robert Mawdsley, postgraduate research student in Ocean and Earth Science, says: “We find that at many sites around the world significant changes in tidal levels have already occurred, and at some sites the magnitude of the changes are comparable with the increase in global mean sea level through the 20th century.See that? "...significant changes in tidal levels have already occurred,"
Here are some other headlines that relate to the exact same article:
Perhaps you can put Anthony's headline down to confirmation bias, or maybe you could argue that the sentence Anthony Watts picked out was ambiguous. If Anthony had read the title of the press release, or the body of the press release he'd copied, he'd have known his headline contradicted the article. But reading and understanding is not Anthony's style. Nor is properly representing science.
As usual, Anthony didn't link to the paper itself (nor to the press release). He'd no excuse for getting his headline wrong. The press release said the opposite. The title of the press release said the opposite. The paper said the opposite. The title of the paper said the opposite:
Global secular changes in different tidal high water, low water and range levelsThe first sentence of the Results section of the paper states:
Results from our analysis show that significant (95% confidence) secular changes have occurred in all tidal levels, and at sites on every continent and around every ocean basin, over the time span of the observations.
How could Anthony have got it so wrong? Did he simply misunderstand the article? Was he being mischievous? Was he testing the comprehension of his readers?
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