Defamation tricks: "Slur and Slurp"
Sou | 2:27 AM
WUWT is one of the main disseminators of lies about scientists in the climate blogosphere. Anthony Watts has, at times, tried the defense that he doesn't read what goes up on his blog. As publisher, I doubt would hold up in court. In any case, he also is a source of some of the lies about science and scientists.
Today he provides another illustration of how climate disinformers try to cement a lie as "fact" in the minds of their readers. Anthony Watts published an article by Tim Ball ( archived here). In it he tells so many lies and misrepresents so many people I reckon it could almost form the basis of a class action suit, if scientists decided to do so.
Tim Ball can't even get his lies right!
Let me add, that Tim Ball can't even keep his lies straight. His opening sentence is:
The most recent aberration of climate science is the apparent cherry picking of ocean temperature data by government scientists, Richard Feely and Christopher Sabine. Except the lie about Drs Feely and Sabine related to pH not temperature.
"Slur and Slurp" strategy
This article isn't about ocean acidification. It's about how climate disinformers spread lies. In particular, the use of the "slur and slurp" strategy, which is quite simple:
- The slur: Plant the seed of the lie in enough places
- Eventually someone will water the seed and it will grow and bear fruit
- Sit back smugly and slurp the fruits of your sins.
1. The slur: plant the seed of the lie
The way it works is an old strategy, well known to gossip-mongers and share market traders. First you "seed" a false story. The fake story in this case was that two scientists "hid" data. It's a blatant lie of course. It is a complete fabrication. The reverse is true. The scientists have been instrumental in collecting and collating data, not hiding it.
Intelligent share traders are well aware of this strategy. There are unscrupulous people who "hype and dump" or "pump and dump" or "slur and slurp" (see here for an explanation). They will plant a rumour on a share trading discussion board, for example. The rumour is spread around discussion boards and the unwary start buying (or selling) the stock. It takes a little while for the stock market people to query the company in question about the unusual change in price and get a response and publish it. In the meantime, the person who planted the initial seed has bought low and sold high (or shorted the stock and sold low) and made a packet. Sometimes they get caught and end up in prison.
Gossip-mongers rely on people believing the saying "no smoke without fire".
This is how climate disinformers work. They seed a lie and watch it spread all around the deniosphere. If they are "lucky", the lie will get picked up by the mainstream media, as happened with the stolen CRU emails. (The media having been bitten badly. is a bit more cautious with climate denier scams these days.)
How Mike Wallace planted the seedThe seed for the first targets of this new libel was planted by someone named Mike Wallace, a year or so back as I understand it. He planted a false allegation about two of the world's leading scientists in ocean acidification - Drs Christopher Sabine and Richard Feely.
It looks as if Mike Wallace tried to plant the seed of the story with Steve McIntyre. It died before sprouting. Steve didn't do anything with it as far as I'm aware.
Mike was successful in planting the seed with a writer called Marita Noon. Marita Noon said that it was Mike Wallace who came to her (with his false allegations). You can read about Marita Noon on SourceWatch and the Heartland Institute. Among other things she is Executive Director for what looks like a pro-fossil fuel organisation (of one person?), Energy Makes America Great Inc.
2. Watch the seed grow and bear fruit
Having planted the seed, all that Mike Wallace needed to do was sit back and watch it grow. His job was done. (Planting the seed successfully has not been sufficient for Mike Wallace. He has also spread the lie by petition. Yes - he really has.)
Ms Noon was a good choice for Mike Wallace. (That is, unless the one or other or both scientists decide to take advantage of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund and take him and CFACT and Marita Noon and WUWT and Tim Ball all the other scoundrels to court.) She elaborated on Mike Wallace's lie in an article for CFACT.
When Marita Noon first got hold of the story is unclear. When CFACT published the lie is clear. It was on 22 December 2014, just a few days ago. The story spread around the deniosphere to Marc Morano's disinformation clearing house, ClimateDepot and to WUWT and elsewhere.
3. Mike Wallace and CFACT slurp up the fruits of their sin
Now that the lie has taken hold in the deniosphere, Mike Wallace, CFACT and the disinformation propagandists like Marc Morano and Anthony Watts, can all sit back at least partly satisfied. They won't really be happy unless the lie is picked up in the mainstream media, but I doubt that will happen.
The big lie
In the CFACT article, Marita Noon falsely claimed that the two scientists deliberately withheld data. She wrote:
Feely’s work is based on computer models that don’t line up with real-world data—which Feely acknowledged in e-mail communications with Wallace (which I have read). And, as Wallace determined, there are real world data. Feely and his coauthor Dr. Christopher L. Sabine, PMEL Director, omitted 80 years of data, which incorporate more than 2 million records of ocean pH levels. Feely’s chart, first mentioned, begins in 1988—which is surprising, as instrumental ocean pH data have been measured for more than 100 years — since the invention of the glass electrode pH (GEPH) meter.
Now that's a contradiction straight off. Marita claimed that Dr Feely's work is based on computer models (and I expect a lot of it is supported by scientific modeling studies), but then goes on to talk about a chart that is of actual observations - from Hawaii since 1998. There are pH readings going back a long way, but they are sparse and of limited value when considering global changes (as I've discussed previously).
She then ludicrously writes:
Wallace was then able to extract the instrumental records he sought and turned the GEPH data into a meaningful time series chart, which reveals that the oceans are not acidifying.
I've already discussed ( here and here) how "meaningful" Mike Wallace's ridiculous effort was. He hasn't the first clue about ocean pH.
Oh, and would you believe, Marita slips in the stock standard denying politician's get out clause: "I am not a scientist, but ..."
Why I wrote this article
This article was mainly to show how lies get propagated in the deniosphere. I'll point out that Tim Ball didn't quote Hitler this time around. But don't heave a sigh of relief just yet. Instead he quoted Osama bin Laden! (Tim Ball has strange heroes.)
After repeating the faked up rumours about Drs Feely and Sabine, Tim went on and talked about a number of other prominent scientists, trying to make out they were dishonest. He has a real problem, which I hope will get partly addressed in the defamation cases against him - or future ones. He asks for it.
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