§1. Thesis. Hard to tell when Climateball scuffles kick off. Players often seem surprised to get caught in the middle of them. In one comment they exchange ideas, in the next they trade insults. This common dynamic repels some and drives otters. Both reactions create a feedback loop that explains comment sections in particular and social media in general:
§2. Antithesis. The following episode started at Roy’s, with an invitation to go debate the Arctic at Tony’s. I asked how much was on the line; my counteroffer was declined; with no incentive on either side, it stalled. Until I drop a note to put a laudatio from our favorite Lord into perspective. A flying monkey (Mr. Nice !) throws food at me, a plain skirmish springs, and Pat interposes himself to lure me with his pet bait.
Pat keeps poking me. I let it slide, until he turns to outrage porn. After that, I have enough:
Here’s the deal. Suppose I only reply to you using phrases you yourself used on that page:
https://pubpeer.com/publications/391B1C150212A84C6051D7A2A7F119
Will that suffice to be civil to you?
Cheers.
Then reality turns into art. Pat tries to land more jabs; I counter as promised. All of my responses to him after that point are his own uppercuts from that PubPeer page. A sample of Pat vs Pat*:
(PAT) You undermine any respect for your intellectual integrity by displaying an adamantine ignorance.
(PAT*) Your resistance to grasping any of this is understandable in a pragmatic sense.
(PAT) Willard scores another vacuous goal.
(PAT*) Never have I ever encountered such incompetence so often repeated.
(PAT) Dodge as you might, falsification hurts doesn’t it Willard. Tough.
(PAT*) You provided no objective criticism.
(PAT) How would you know?
(PAT*) Your entire attack was baseless.
(PAT) The attacks on my paper are base. Your comments are vacuous.
(PAT*) That’s your logic, Pat. It produces utter nonsense.
(PAT) Oracular dismissal. The only stick in the alarmist armamentum.
(PAT*) Insistent repetition of fatuous criticisms does not make them correct, Pat.
You get the idea. If not, the Argument Clinic does not end there: Pat is still arguing with himself as we speak. I still have enough ammunition for a while, but I might stop after this report {1}. Confer to Pat’s interactions at PubPeer’s for more, especially with Dikran.
* * *
§3. Synthesis. Cranks cavil because it helps them. Take Pat: when he insults, either he gets ignored or he gets a response. Stonewalling him proves him right; responding in kind galvanizes him. Something like perpetual motion powers his eristic machine.
Which is why commenters like bdgwx or Nick are Pat’s kryptonite: they follow his shadowboxing while remaining impervious to his chest beating. Only with the ad nauseam can he save face. Since there are diminishing returns in trying to make him mind his units, he will eventually declare victory. How could he lose? Just like other contrarians, he can’t.
So why cavil with contrarians? I see only two good reasons: intellectual curiosity, and artistic beauty. Our host may have reached his own limit as to what he can get out of contrarians. Unless cranks they step up their game, I might soon reach mine too.
{1} I did not.
...and Then There's Physics 
I can’t argue with that.
They’re always kvelling at their caviling.
Kvell: To experience profound pride in someone else or their accomplishments. This is one of those words that just doesn’t have an english equivalent to convey the same emotion. Example #: My Mom just left her job to become a life coach, and I’m absolutely kvelling!
Some footnotes:
Our Viscount Discount deplores the scrimmage, and blames climate Communists for having started it. Drink!
Pat indeed kvells, as he should. That kid got some Climateball talent! He also epilogues and gloats, which he should not. For some reason he seems persuaded that his personal attacks are pure descriptions of reality. I suppose we should expect that he declaims his fallacy-talk the same way he does for his metrology.
Speaking of which, this is not the thread for relitigating it another time. Enough threads have been invested on it. No need to propagate nonsense furthermore. That Pat did not go at Nick’s to discuss things with him tells me all I need to know.
The topic here is caviling. The title is inspired by a comment Pat made at PubPeer’s, which I returned to him already the following way:
The original can be found here: https://pubpeer.com/publications/391B1C150212A84C6051D7A2A7F119#244
If you are up to a Laconia Notch border crossing, there is still time to write in Roy in the New Hampshire primary .
Iowa proved that there’s plenty of room on the Presidential ticket:
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2024/01/iowa-caucus-grows-climatically-raucus.html
Just to be clear, I wasn’t suggesting that the topic wasn’t caviling. I just was making a Jewish kinda joke, and thought others might not know what kvell means, and so provided a definition for the Yiddish term.
BTW, I love that Yiddish expressions are so often said to not be directly translatable.
My warning is meant to ward off any kind of “but what about Pat’s points” by the usual suspects. And also the unusual ones. But not you, J.
I perused Christopher Moncton’s WUWT panegyric, and replied to it . Here’s a copy should Watts censor it as usual.:
His hubris and digression certainly makes it difficult having genuine discussions. But at the end of the day I’m more focused on the technical merits of his arguments which continue to be weak at best and absurd at worst. Using the wrong formulas for propagating uncertainty is bad enough, but defending their use for nearly 15 years is absurd. And, of course, arbitrarily changing the units of the 4 W.m-2 figure from Lauer & Hamilton 2013 to W.m-2.year-1 so that you can then accumulate it over many years just is absurd right out of the gate. I don’t know…maybe its absurd for me to reason with him? Maybe its absurd for me to expect Energy & Environment, Frontiers, and MDPI to take these mistakes seriously and compel him to fix the mistakes and resubmit for review?
Thanks for stopping by, bdgwx.
If everything you told Pat does not work, most of which supported by the same authorities he himself invoked and more, then there’s little evidence that would ever change his mind. Locking horns with him may still help clarify your own understanding of the issues or perfect your pitch.
You could also expect to reach his cohort at Tony’s. As you already know, it can be quite resistant. Still, I rather liked your ALGEBRA MISTAKES series you did with the Gorman bros, e.g.:
Source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/01/03/unknown-uncertain-or-both/#comment-3660131
Your allusion to a “computer algebra system” may very well hint at a way out of Climateball. If contrarians and cranks had access to something like a ChatGPT but with a repository of all the climate knowledge they need, perhaps including a toy GCM, that’d reduce Team Science’s workload a lot.
In any event, this post’s for you!
Cheers,
W
Quick update. There was no reply from Pat yesterday. But now he reports:
Source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/09/in-memoriam-professor-ray-bates/#comment-3849922
When will he realize that he has been fighting Pat* all along?
I still have 10 pages of silly one-liners from him. Yes – from the PubPeer comment thread alone. And I only skimmed: I’m sure there are many more!
“So why cavil with contrarians? I see only two good reasons: intellectual curiosity, and artistic beauty. ”
Very well put.
In the real world, Gavin is interestingly not alarmist on the arguably alarming temperature records of ’23.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2024/01/not-just-another-dot-on-the-graph-part-ii/
Thanks Very Tall. In return, 481.
The best discussion I have seen about the record temperatures in 2023 is from Dr. Robert Rohde at Berkeley Earth, https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2023/ .
“We believe that natural variability in the North Atlantic and other regions is largely responsible for the surge in global mean temperatures in the middle of the year, well before the 2023 El Niño event had gathered strength.”
Still going strong:
[PAT*] I wonder who Mr. Nice is. Whoever it is has a problem with negligent superficiality, which Pat apparently found inspiring.
[PAT] Pure whataboutism.The behavior of others doesn’t absolve you, Ken.
[PAT*] I have consulted your comments, Pat. I have read your explanations. They appear to make no sense whatsoever
[PAT] Given the poor quality of your thought, that’s no surprise, Ken.
[PAT*] Pat, your comments have descended into accusatory nonsense, showing no evidence of actually following the logic of the conversation.
Pat has what abouted his paper at least a dozen time, now.
I linked to this post at least five times.
Is it possible he still does not get it?
5 times Willard? I think it’s been what, at least 5 *years* since Pat’s mistakes were first described to him, and he shows zero sign of getting that. You’re only just getting started.
Willard:
Is Canada following the live D.C. Court Tee Vee feed from Mann v. Steyn?
I signed in at the start only to find that the only other person in the virtual room was Steve Miilloy !
There are more important things in life, Russell:
https://www.nhl.com/standings
Hockey sticks did come into play in Davos yesterday
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2024/01/come-for-chainsaw-stay-for-hockeystick.html
A quick update:
Pat does not mince words about Pat*!
Still 8 pages of script to go.
Brilliant W.
fwiw
Here could be a TL:DW –
https://www.quantamagazine.org/will-computers-redefine-the-roots-of-math-20150519/
JR might be looking for something similar, but for argumentation in general.
some more detail, on the mistake found in 1999
Looks like Tony decided to close down the thread.
Some of my favorite lines Pat* still had left include:
Insistently making the same mistake over and over does not rectify it, Pat.
You shifted your ground, Pat.
A distinction without a difference, Pat.
Glad to straighten that out for you, Pat.
The nonsense is yours, Pat.
And you accuse me of pedantry. Pretty rich irony, Pat.
Just you arguing by unfounded accusation, Pat.
You have become self-contradictory, Pat. And in your confusion, you blame me. And supposing confusion is the most charitable explanation of your incoherence.
You folks are not doing science, Pat.
An equivocation fallacy does not substantiate a case, Pat.
Your understanding is entirely wrong Pat. I’ve explained it every which way, and the meaning still eludes you.
Are you really a Climateball player, Pat? You seem to miss so much.
You have no idea, Pat. Most people would have figured it out by now. You and Mr. Nice, apparently not.
Brave words, Pat, no substance.
Shouting doesn’t improve an argument, Pat.
Maybe you should figure out, Pat, that P
You’re too funny, Pat.
Rather, Pat, the evidence is that you force your preferred conclusion using specious argumentation.
You show a complete misunderstanding of Climateball, Pat.
We’ve had oracular pronouncements from Pat, but no critical content. Mr. Nice has retreated his argument all the way to crickets. That’s what all you folks are defending.
Wrong is wrong, Pat.
You know what that rejectionism means, don’t you? It means you’re science deniers. It’s too funny, really.
You monger oracular conclusions empty of any substance, Pat.
Executive summary: wrong throughout, yet again. That’s the summary conclusion — data in evidence throughout this thread, Pat.
***
Res ipsa loquitur.
As surely as field sports can be played with different balls, some unspherical, but similar scoring algorithms , tribal games like climateball may impose similar cultural constraints on all who play them.
New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka has a book on the subject:
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
that avers that algorithmic recommendations have transformed web users and commentariats from autonomous individuals into automata “fed culture like foie-gras ducks.”
It’s odd how a hipster cultural manifesto front loaded with bias & inherent privilege critspeak about interrogating our preferences and “boundary-breaking.” can overlook the problem of hegemonic thinking , and the lack introspection on all sides of the climate wars.
The supply of “Pat” answers appears to be endless.
Depends to whom Pat speaks, I suppose:
But I’m sure Billy’s very cuddly.
Mr bnice has a long history on climate blogs under various names, many of which are banned for abuse. Sad to say he is Australian.