I am filing this under humor, specifically ‘inanity defense'. The explanation Anthony Watts has invented for his attempt to yank Peter Sinclair's video off YouTube is the funniest thing you're ever going to read - assuming of course you don't read the laughable stuff that passes for "analysis" on WattsUpWithThat every day [see "Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)"]. ClimateProgress also has an exclusive interview from Sinclair on Watts and his wildly inappropriate attack on Sinclair's family.

When we last left the former TV meteorologist and top anti-scientific blogger, his nonexistent knowledge of copyright laws had failed to stop the world from seeing Sinclair's video (see The video that Anthony Watts does not want you to see: The Climate Denial "Crock of the Week"). Thursday, Watts offered what might be called the "I have no friggin' clue what I'm talking about but I am the world's biggest hypocrite" defense for his failed censorship in a post with the unintentionally accurate headline, "On Climate, Comedy, Copyrights, and Cinematography."

To understand the inanity defense, first take a moment to watch the video Watts is afraid of:

Yes, Watts actually claims that Sinclair has committed copyright infringement because "in the video Mr. Sinclair produced and posted on YouTube, I noticed that he did in fact use photographs and graphics from my published book "Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?"." If Watts wants to claim authorship of a ‘book' on his resume that is in fact a 31-page PDF ‘published' by that world-class publishing house The Heartland Institute (!) and posted for free, well, heck, this is the age of resume padding and vanity presses.

But Watts is going to have a hard time convincing any judge that the reproduction of a small amount of material from a PDF given away for free on the Internet hurts the "the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work," one of the four factors considered in lawsuits over the fair use doctrine, "codified by the Copyright Act of 1976 as 17 U.S.C. § 107," which "permits some copying and distribution without permission of the copyright holder or payment to same." Given how little material Sinclair used and the "transformative" nature of the work - he used it as part of a critical analysis - the whole notion that there was any copyright infringement here would lead any court to the simple summary judgment "ROTFLMAO."

Watts would know that if he spent as much time on Wikipedia researching copyright law as he did investigating Sinclair and his family. Since Watts' ignorance of copyright laws rivals his ignorance of climate science, he actually and seriously and literally posted this must-read explanation on WattsUpWithThat without a trace of irony:

But since he had used that © symbol, Mr. Sinclair demonstrated awareness of copyright protections, having availed himself of them, e.g., here, right below his own artwork.

With knowledge of this and ad hominem attacks made on me personally, I reasonably presumed his copyright violation on my part was likely intentional. I also figured that this might be a teachable moment, as I was still thinking this is a kid just out of college since there seems to be no business website for Greenman studio in operation yet, it is still "under construction".

http://www.greenmanstudio.com/

And, I mused, by bringing the copyright issue to his attention, I'd probably be doing him a favor, since I surmised he'd be at risk for using the film clips. I figured anybody working a business out of a house without an operating web page probably can't afford licensing fees. No deep pockets there. I certainly have no personal beef with Mr. Sinclair, it is just the copyright issue.

But my copyright had been ignored, with evidence that Mr. Sinclair as a publisher himself using the © symbol understands copyrights, and WB's copyright also looked like it also had been ignored. And well, lets face it, he got the facts wrong about the project and never contacted or interviewed me to get any facts from my side (more on that later). So it could hardly be defined as "journalism" and the protections that such enterprise affords for "fair use". So I filled out the form for copyright issues on YouTube, and pressed enter.

"I throw myself on the mercy of the court. I'm inane, I tell you. Pathologically, clinically, inane. I've been diagnosed by dozens of experts and they all come to the same conclusion: You must find me not guilty of attempted censorship by reason of inanity." [Note: Any resemblance between that quote and the writing of any person living or dead is purely coincidental.]

Yes, a man who knows less about copyright laws than your average sidewalk vendor of fake Rolexes thinks he can teach Sinclair about copyright law. Apparently, in Watts' view of the law, if you don't contact or interview the copyright holder - and if you get the facts wrong from the perspective of the copyright holder - the "fair use" doctine is null and void.

Seriously. And people actually go to WattsUpWithThat for any reason other than laughs???

Memo to Watts: The fair use doctrine extends well beyond "journalism." And while I know this is going to come to a shock as someone as scrupulously wrong as you, but journalists sometimes get their facts wrong, they sometimes don't contact or interview subjects, and they are still afforded fair use protection.

Here is Peter Sinclair's reponse to Watts in an email interview with CP:

I set out in the video quite deliberately to puncture Mr. Watt's pomposity and sense of self importance, hoping, frankly, that I might get a rise out of him. His reaction pretty much confirmed that my psychological profiling was dead on.

Readers have sent myriad examples of Watts' hypocrisy when it comes to copyright laws and standard journalistic practice. Two seem worth mentioning.

First, Watts has repeatedly reprinted and defended TVMOB (aka The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley - a famous anti-scientific denier who is most certainly not depicted in the figure on the right). Yet TVMOB is guilty of the most extreme copyright infringement - posting an unpublished article without permission of the author (see Rabett Run).

Second, WattsUpWithThat reposted part of a Chicago Tribune article here - see Pachauri: "Skeptics are flat earthers." Notice that the title of the Tribune piece is "Blunt answers about risks of global warming" by Michael Hawthorne. But apparently Watts thinks it is totally fine to take a copyrighted story and repost it with a completely different headline, "PERSON OF INTEREST RAJENDRA PACHAURI" - a fake headline that he ascribes directly to the original author!

This is standard operating procedure for Watts, who has no regard whatsoever for the integrity of the written or spoken word. Consider that Pachauri did NOT say what Watts claims he said in the headline, as the excerpted interview shows:

Q: What do you think about the small but vocal group of doubters still out there

Pachauri: There is, even today, a Flat Earth Society that meets every year to say the Earth is flat. The science about climate change is very clear. There really is no room for doubt at this point.

Does Watts believe it is legitimate to ascribe a direct quote to somebody that they never said?

Watts is the last person in the blogosphere who should be offering anybody a "teachable moment" on copyright laws. The teachable moment is for you, Anthony.

Finally, in the department of "making things up egregiously and inappropriately," let's go back to Watts' inanity defense:

He [Sinclair] is not a college student, though he has a son who is of college age, a nice Ron Paul supporter, I am told from someone who has met him. His rather conservative son, contrasts the rather left-wing eco-activist ad hominem and rhetorically unrestrained father (see here). It is almost humorous greeting card-worthy, this role reversal.

So now Watts has stooped to investigating the children of people he has disputes with? Scary stuff. And not just investigating them but publishing untrue hearsay attacks on them. Sure, relatives who are public figures and who are in at least a somewhat related field can be fair game (see "Like father, like son: Roger Pielke Sr. also doesn't understand the science of global warming - or just chooses to willfully misrepresent it"). But what does Sinclair's son have to do with anything Sinclair has done?

While trying to protect as much as possible the privacy of Sinclair's son, after a back-and-forth with his father, here is what Sinclair says about his son:

He's an Obama-voting organic farmer who has worked on mucking out Katrina-blasted towns.

He and I are are both deeply "conservative" in the sense that we both feel since there's only one planet, maybe we should err on the side of caution in caring for it.

So much for Watt's skill as a detective.

Perhaps in addition to brushing up on copyright laws, Watts should study the libel laws or at least the minimal standards of blogging etiquette.

In any case, I think Watts can safely count on a winning verdict with his inanity defense - as long as he gets a jury of his peers or, rather British peers.

UPDATE: Watts is still whining today in the first sentence of a new post that Sinclair "infringed on my copyright." Waaaah!

Related Links:

Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The big mist take

2009 polar melt season: The stats are in

Climate Denial Crock of the Week/Birth of a Crock

Denial makes strange bedfellows.

Two of the leading sources of anti-scientific disinformation on global warming - George Will and Anthony Watts' blog WattsUpWithThat - have embraced a man, Robert Bradley, who proudly shilled for Enron CEO Ken Lay, who was convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges in 2006.

Watts and I, you may recall, got into a tiny dustup a couple weeks ago (see Exclusive: New NSIDC director Serreze explains the "death spiral" of Arctic ice, brushes off the "breathtaking ignorance" of blogs like WattsUpWithThat and here).   Since then, Watts has been throwing everything at me including the kitchen stink, with four full posts attacking me this month.  I was planning to ignore him, until two things happened.

First, Watts ran a truly nonsensical piece (here) by Bradley, who is now President of the Institute for Energy Research, which "has received $307,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998."  Bradley is one of the Denier-Industrial-Complex Kooks (DICKs) - see, for instance, "Mysterious industry front-group affiliated with Ken Lay's former speechwriter launches anti-Waxman-Markey ads with phony MIT cost figures."

Second, George Will published a piece, "Tilting at Green Windmills" in which he uses a discredited Spanish "study" to claim clean energy investments don't create jobs (for debunking by CP and the Regional Minister of Innovation, Enterprise and Employment for the Government of Navarre, see here and here and here).  Will's piece is noteworthy for this remarkable admission:

[This] study was supported by a like-minded U.S. think tank (the Institute for Energy Research, for which this columnist has given a paid speech.

That's right, George Will published an entire piece based on disinformation bought and paid for by a think tank that is bought and paid for by ExxonMobil and run by Ken Lay's former top shill - and Will also took money from that think tank. At least editorial page editor Fred Hiatt required that much in return for letting Will publish his umpteenth article full of misleading and inaccurate statements.

Now you may say, wait a minute, Joe, sure Bradley served as Director of Public Policy Analysis at Enron, where he was a speechwriter for CEO Kenneth Lay," who was "convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges on May 25, 2006″ - but how can you say he proudly shilled for Lay when he has wiped any trace of his connection to Enron from his IER bio here?

Well, I have had the misfortune of knowing Bradley for a long time, since Enron Energy Services (EES) reached out to many leading experts on energy efficiency, and they really liked by book, Cool Companies.  Certainly none of the energy efficiency folks were aware of what Enron was doing or they would have quit immediately.  I don't even know if anyone in EES management knew what Ken Lay and his buddies in top management were doing to fraudulently rip-off the public.

And I have no idea whether Bradley knew of the fraudulent activity, but he certainly knew what kind of company he was working for.  Over the past several months, Bradley has bombarded me with requests to publish articles about the disinformation he and his IER buddies have written.  Just last month he wrote to me and James Hansen:

I wish you (and him) could have been in the Enron government affairs meetings on CO2 trading-we were going to game it to death and make money coming and going. And no one was quaking about the future of global climate.

and before that he wrote to us:

We were going to laugh all the way to the bank with our CO2 trading until the banks said no more laughing-you're broke.  Keep trying Joe-Enron Lives!

As the Biblical Proverb says, "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."

Enron does live in on the likes of people like Bradley.  That's why Waxman-Markey has put in many safeguards to protect the public from fraud in the CO2 trading.

Does that mean the system will be free from fraud?  Of course not.  You can write all the laws you want against fraud and robbery and other crimes, and greedy people who think they are smarter than everyone else will still break the law.  The same is true of the tax code - people try to cheat it all the time and some succeed.

But one thing you can certainly say about CO2 trading:  The overwhelming majority of CO2 emissions come from the combustion of fossil fuels, and flows of natural gas, oil, and coal are very closely tracked in this country, both sales and purchases.  So it would be quite hard to engage in significant fraud of the kind that would lead to, say, much higher actual emissions than were being measured and regulated.  And as for cornering the market and running up the price of a tradable commodity, an Enron specialty, again, W-M has multiple safeguards to prevent that outcome.

I am not going to waste time here debunking the latest Bradley-Watts attack on me since I have dealt with almost every point in previous posts.  It is 100% nonsense, which is it no surprise since it is largely an excerpt from something Roger Pielke, Jr. wrote.  But it does contain one unintentionally humorous attack I will address in a later post.

The point is that one shouldn't have to debunk anything Bradley writes - or anything the Institute for Energy Research has published or supported, including George Will.  You just need to consider the source.

Related Links:

The Climate Post: Where there’s a Will there’s a fray

Memo to WashPost, George Will: Cassandra was right

Exclusive interview with Dr. Mojib Latif

I interviewed by email Dr. Mark Serreze, recently named director of The National Snow and Ice Data Center. Partly I wanted him to explain his “death spiral” metaphor for Arctic ice (see NSIDC: Arctic melt passes the point of no return, “We hate to say we told you so, but we did”).

And partly I wanted his reaction to the blog, WattsUpWithThat, the quintessential victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS), who called his appointment “Bad News.”

But first, let’s look at where the Arctic sea ice extent stands as of June 3 [click for update]:

Note: The satellites only measure ice area. Since Arctic ice has been thinning sharply in the past two years, we might be at record low volume for early June — see North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: “It’s like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely.”

NSIDC reported Wednesday, the “Melt season gains momentum“:

After a slow start to the melt season, ice extent declined quickly in May. Scientists are monitoring the ice pack for signs of what will come this summer. The thinness of the ice pack makes it likely that the minimum ice extent will again fall below normal, but how far below normal will depend on atmospheric conditions through the summer….

Because the 2009 melt season started out with a thin ice pack, September ice extent will likely be below average yet again. The thinning ice pack, discussed in our April post, has played a major role in the strong decline of September ice extent. Thinner ice requires less energy to melt. It also tends to be fractured, with more areas of open water. Since water absorbs more solar energy than ice, heat from the sun warms up areas of open ocean and promotes even more melt.

Back to Serreze. I’ve been a fan of his since I attended the American Meteorological Society talk he gave in November 2007. He is an impressive cryosphere scientist, who is also a climate science expert:

He studies Arctic climate, and the causes and global implications of climate change in the Arctic. Serreze is well known for his research on the declining sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean.

Serreze has authored over 90 scientific publications, including an award-winning textbook, The Arctic Climate System, which he co-wrote with former NSIDC director Roger Barry. He has also served on numerous advisory boards and science steering committees. In 2004, he testified before the U.S. Congress on changes in Arctic sea ice cover.

But Anthony Watts is one of the hard-core deniers. Not content to simply dispute the science with disinformation, he attacks climate scientists. Watts said ealier this year that NASA’s James Hansen is “no longer a scientist.” But then Watts routinely smears all climate scientists, approvingly reprinting denier manifestos that claim global warming “is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind” — see here.

So perhaps it isn’t a surprise that he would attack and misrepresent Serreze, writing:

Last year we had the forecast from NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze of an “ice free north pole”. As we know, that didn’t even come close to being true. Summer 2008 had more arctic ice than summer 2007, and summer 2007 was not “ice free” by any measure.

Yes, Serreze said we might have “an ice free north pole,” but had Watts bothered to read the original story, he’d know that Serreze was simply talking about the physical North Pole — and not using “north pole” to refer to the entire Arctic being ice free!

Climate Progress: The global warming denier site WattsUpWithThat has attacked your appointment, in particular criticizing you for your prediction last year that the North Pole could be ice free in 2008. I’m wondering if you have any comments on that prediction.

Serreze: I have yet to lose any sleep over what is talked about in WattsUpWithThat or any other similar blog that insists on arguing from a viewpoint of breathaking ignorance.

To set the record straight, I never made a “prediction”. I said the north pole might melt out and I was not alone in making such speculation. It did not melt out and I got some flack for this. So be it. As for the “great recovery” of ice extent in 2008 heard in some circles, it was a recovery from lowest (2007) to second lowest (2008).

I find little room for optimism here.

Duh!

How anti-scientific is Watts? He puts up this poster of a Serreze talk:

Pretty innocuous stuff, no? Humans are cranking up the Arctic heat by pouring steadily increasing amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which in turn cranks up warming in the Arctic, a very well documented phenomenon (see “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?“).

But for Watts, who is apparently in the tinfoil-hat and black helicopter club, that poster reveals dark purposes:

Does anybody live in Maryland that can attend this talk? I’d just love to see what sort of “heat” he’s talking about “cranking up”.

Seriously.

Back to the interview:

CP: You have used the term “death spiral” to describe the loss of Arctic ice — I’d be interested if you had any further comments or elaboration on what is happening in the Arctic and what you think its implications are for humankind.

Serreze: The downward trend in September sea ice extent seems to be accerating. That reflects the combination of three things:

Serreze is it taking a somewhat conservative line here, I think, since we are probably looking at very close to ice-free summers by 2020 — but then again, just two or three years ago, this prediction that would have been quite alarmist, given that essentially every climate model the IPCC had been predicting the Arctic would not go ice free until about 2100. Such is the rate of change of our understanding of how dire the climate situation is.

CP: I was hoping you might say in a sentence or two what you hope to accomplish as Director.

Serreze: My vision is for NSIDC to become an indispensable asset through providing the U.S. and global research communities, the public and decision makers the data, products and information needed to understand and prepare for the consequences of the earth’s changing cryosphere. My job is to achieve this vision.

The NSIDC is in very good hands.

The cryosphere, however, is not. If we stay on our current emissions path, if we keep listening to the science deniers of WattsUpWithThat, the planet is headed toward an ice free state. Future generations will wonder how there ever could have been such a thing as a “cryosphere scientist” or a National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Related Posts:

Related Links:

Disappearing slave history

Arctic ice reaches historic seasonal low

Arctic sea ice is refreezing quite slowly. Go figure!