Hey! It’s me, your old friend, the climate change denying crackpot you love to hate, Tony Heller. It’s been a while since I’ve written, I know. Maniacally rehashing the same bogus climate change talking points on social media is all-consuming. But I’m pleased to report everything is going swimmingly despite hitting a few bumps in the road from time to time. More on this in a bit.

So people always come up to me and ask, “Hey Tony, what’s it’s like fighting in the trenches against the evil liberal scientists seeking to destroy our way of life?” If I’m honest (just pretend), I tell them that while my lifestyle may look glamorous, it isn’t without its hazards. People are always trying to expose me for the intellectual fraud that I am. Usually it’s not a problem. When adversaries start embarrassing me with solid science, I call them a moron and immediately block their Twitter account. And even if they land a few hard blows, it doesn’t matter. Like Trump, my loyal followers are blind to my sociopathy because they share my hatred for progressives and liberals. Always remember that irrational thinking beats logic every time with the morons. It’s been one of the keys to my success.

Recently, however, I screwed up. It started late last year when a once-famous cartoonist issued a challenge to his Twitter followers and asked them to provide a link to the most persuasive links “arguing that CO2 is raising temperatures at a dangerous pace.” One of the responses linked to a video called “Climate Change — the scientific debate,” by a YouTuber named “potholer54” (aka Peter Hadfield).

Always looking for opportunities to expand my audience and get exposure, I produced a rebuttal video to potholer54 entitled, “Debunking the Debunker” (so clever!). True to form, I acted like an asshole, saying stuff like, “He speaks very quickly and sounds very convincing like he knows what he’s talking about. Now I’m going to show you, that he doesn’t.” I also lied about what was in his video by saying he made claims that he didn’t and that he didn’t say things he actually did. As you’ll see, making the rebuttal video is a decision I would soon come to regret.

It turns out potholer54 has over 176,000 subscribers on YouTube alone, which is 3.5x more than my Twitter and YouTube followers combined. And, just like me, he has a science degree in geology. He also has decades of experience as a science journalist and does work for the BBC which means he knows how to research and cite legitimate scientific papers. And so unfortunately for me, some of his followers saw my video and encouraged him to respond to my “Debunkers” video. Dammit!

Now usually, a knowledgeable person with better things to do would take a look at my body of work and immediately write me off as someone not worth his or her time. But no, not potholer54. The guy makes science explainer videos as a hobby. He’s almost as maniacal as me except he actually knows climate science and isn’t a dishonest schmuck. Plus he’s on YouTube, so there’s no way for me to block him. Godammit!

Sure enough, potholer54 eviscerated me with a video response. My whiny, annoying nasal tone was no match for his polished, British accent that made it possible for him to sound condescending without actually being condescending. Even worse, he was polite in the face of my obvious misrepresentations of his video. I couldn’t just yell at him and call him a moron or I’d look like a total dick. Shit!

Unfortunately, I had to respond or else I’d lose serious face. I immediately released a second video, “Potholer Vs. Real Science”. At this point, my strategy was to basically ignore the lies of mine he uncovered and distract everyone by starting with a basic lesson on Milankovitch Cycles. This makes me look like a good guy for teaching people what they might not know (even though it’s climate science 101) and it reinforces the idea I’m a knowledgeable person, even though I’m not. After that segment, I attack potholer54 as a charlatan by claiming he uses “appeals to authority” to deceive viewers. I know my audience hates authority figures so this is my ace in the hole. No matter what potholer54 comes back with, painting him as a liberal sheep blindly eating up whatever scientists tell him to believe will discredit him with my followers. In the video, I lay it on thick by saying the phrase “professional researcher” with dripping sarcasm. I also get super condescending, saying things like, “I’m going to explain this again very simply and hopefully this time even potholer will be able to understand.” Finally, I do lots of hand waving and dismiss his claims as “junk science.” These kinds of techniques work with my followers because they are not interested in a legitimate scientific debate. They are looking for a political boxing match. They want to see me smash this smug Brit in the face.

I knew potholer54 probably wasn’t going away and I was right. He came back with another strong point-by-point rebuttal to my attacks. Once again, he was impeccably British and thorough while I came across as a dismissive, American asshat. Even worse, he didn’t take my suggestion that we should stop making videos. So I was stuck making another video. Fuck!

Not being able to defeat him with facts, I repeated my bogus claim that potholer54 relied on appeals to authority by naming my video “Science Vs. Appeal To Authority.” I then ate up some time with a useless lesson about amplifier feedback and related it back to Milankovitch Cycles. It was total bullshit, but my audience wouldn’t know any better. I wrapped things up with another attack on his “appeals to authority” and threw in some quotes from Feynman and Galileo to sound like I was in the rational thinking camp. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Finally, I told my viewers that he wimped out of a real-time debate with me. I knew that would make me look like the fearless one even though I desperately wanted the YouTube debate to a close. A careful, thoughtful exchange was clearly not giving me an advantage over someone who actually had their shit together as one of the commenters rightly pointed out:

“You believe you can point out potholers fallacies in real time in a live debate but you’ve repeatedly demonstrated you are unable to effectively counter his arguments when you have all the time in the world to research your videos. You want a live debate because you are more interested in winning a rhetoric battle than a genuinely intellectual one.”

 

Ouch! Unfortunately, it didn’t end there.

As I expected, potholer54 finished me off with a knockout blow that punched a gaping hole in my “appeals to authority” attack by carefully pointing out that citing research papers isn’t an appeal to authority but is, in fact, the very basis for conducting modern science. He also shot my feedback analogy in an audio amplification system full of holes and explained why it was relevant. And so there I was, completely, utterly flattened by potholer.

The YouTube stats give the blow-by-blow account:



Heller Rebuttal Video #1 stats:
45,122 Views, 2.2K Likes, 901 Dislikes

potholer54 Rebuttal Video #1 stats
69,397 View, 4.9K Likes, 177 Dislikes



Heller Rebuttal Video #2 stats:
34,033 Views, 1.7K Likes, 755 Dislikes

potholer54 Rebuttal Video #2 stats:
49,859 Views, 3.8K Likes, 72 Dislikes

Heller Rebuttal Video #3 stats:
15,718 Views, 1K Likes, 407 Dislikes

potholer54 Rebuttal Video #3 stats:
44,278 Views, 3.1K Likes, 91 Dislikes

As you can see, his videos enjoyed more viewers and his like/dislike ratio is far better than mine.

And so I learned by my lesson. It was dumb mistake to challenge someone who is a clearer thinker, a better researcher, and far more knowledgeable. But that’s OK. I have lived to fight another day.

My name is Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard). I’m a professional climate change denier and I use this blog to blow the whistle on myself and others, too.

As we all know, deniers like me love to cherry pick data to bolster our argument. For example, if Arctic sea ice cover is way down we emphasize Antarctic sea ice cover. If ice coverage at both poles is at record lows, as they are now, we talk about something else entirely, like this recent blog post about snow coverage.  It’s an endless shell game for us.

That’s why it was good to see a well known climate change statistician, Tamino, call me out on my cherry picking about snow coverage.

But stand by for some humiliation that I have vowed to send Tamino’s way:

 

Apparently unaware I’m a completely discredited climate denying nut–so much so that I even got laughed off of Anthony Watts’ nonsense climate change blog–Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts has seen fit to enlist me as an expert to help bolster his position that NASA and other agencies are fudging climate records. Here I am pictured with this sucker at a press conference today along with another fellow denier loon, Tim Ball.

Some people still have trouble wrapping their heads around what makes climate-change deniers like me tick. I’ll cut right to the chase:

We are all familiar with assholes. Driven by their own fears and insecurity, assholes posture themselves to look superior to others. By tearing others down, assholes attempt to build themselves up. Once you understand that we are nothing but assholes, our behavior is explainable.

Now assholes have been around since the beginning of time and they can actually do us some good. For example, sometimes assholes benefit us by attacking and exposing other assholes. And fights between assholes can be fun to watch.

Even emotionally-developed adults are sometimes forced to act like an asshole to defend against other assholes who are too broken to handle any other way. Sometimes reasonable people screw up and act like an asshole to people who don’t deserve it. And some people feel like they have to act like an asshole to get stuff done for the greater good. They’re usually wrong and we much prefer and admire people who aren’t assholes and who still accomplish quite a lot precisely because they aren’t an asshole.

But as people like Donald Trump and climate-change deniers like me demonstrate, a new super strain of asshole is in ascendancy. Today’s media environment provides a stage for us to mainline our juvenile stupidity and venom directly to our audience and bypass existing societal defenses that used to thwart us. It’s now possible for assholes like me to take big, fat, public shits on others and their work with our own bullshit to sate our badly dysfunctional egos. Not only that, we are rewarded for our anti-social behavior with lots of attention and adulation from other idiots and assholes. They, in turn, mimic our behavior. As a result, our culture thrives and spreads like a cancer.

The best pathological assholes do a good job of presenting themselves as normal people to other assholes. We can be polite, gracious and even self-effacing to the other assholes that agree with us but we behave like assholes toward just about everybody else if we can get away with it. That’s how we build community and solidarity with each other. The biggest assholes love other assholes like us who take their side of an argument even if our ideas have no basis in reality. Because it’s not our logical thought they embrace; they like us because we are assholes, just like them.

So there you go. You can now stop pretending we are logical, rational people and can be reasoned with like normal people. The best offense against us is to call us what we are: straight-up assholes. I hope this profound insight helps clear shit up for you.

 

February 29, 2017

Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump announced his choice, Steven Goddard, to head up the new commission overseeing what he calls the “War for Scientific Truth and Integrity,” an effort he introduced in a speech from the Oval Office last week.

“I was on Twitter and saw Steven has been saying lots of nice things about me and people respect him; he has over 13,000 Twitter followers. I also like that his name is ‘Steve,’” President Trump said from the steps of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “He’s also white. He’s very, very, very white. Very white,” he continued.

Goddard, whose birth name is Tony Heller, is an unknown in established scientific circles and a controversial choice for Trump. Best known for his accusations that NOAA and NASA have tampered with temperature records, he is a popular figure in the climate change skeptic community. His claims have been publicized by many conservative and alt-right news outlets including Fox News, Breitbart (newly acquired by The Trump Organization, LLC) and Drudge Report. His work has also been cited by prominent political figures such as US Senator Ted Cruz and Australian Senator-elect Malcolm Roberts. Goddard has not published his work in any peer-reviewed scientific papers to date, choosing instead to use his blog to publish the evidence which he claims debunks climate change as a scientific hoax.

At last week’s press conference, President Trump outlined the goals of his aggressive initiative to “get to the bottom of why America is not winning at science” and “drain the swamp of elites running our science.” President Trump also expressed frustration by what he saw as a lack of progress by the scientific community, stating that “We’re not winning in science any more. We used to put men on the moon. Now China is going to go there. What the hell is going on? It’s time we made science great again.”

It’s unclear, however, exactly how President Trump plans to execute his desire to reshape how scientific work is undertaken in the United States. Many presume the so-called “War for Science” commission, that Goddard now heads, will be tasked with making policy recommendations to the President and Congress.

Reaction to President Trump’s murky proposals by some established scientists has been swift and harsh. Moments after his announcement of Goddard, Michael E. Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania, tweeted, “Our worst nightmares are coming true. Idiocracy is upon us,” referencing the 2006 Hollywood comedy movie where scientific advances are stunted as a result of the decline in the intelligence quotients of the American people. Many other scientists, however, would not go on the record citing their concerns of retaliation by President Trump’s administration officials.

Goddard was unavailable for comment but tweeted, “Thank you President Trump! Can’t wait to share a cold Brawndo with you in the oval office. You’ll love it!”

My name is Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard). I’m a professional climate change denier and I use this blog to blow the whistle on myself and sometimes others, too.

This is a quick update to my post yesterday wherein I exposed my massive incompetence at interpreting satellite images and proceeded to call the Washington Post fraudsters based on my embarrassingly wrong analysis.

I just want to go on the record as saying that I’ve deleted the post now. I haven’t offered any retraction because I care not a whit about scientific integrity because I have none. The good news is I have screen captures of the article so anyone wishing to learn more about how to be a good climate denier can learn from a pro. Enjoy!

Update #1, Aug. 20, 8:48 am: I have deleted my embarrassing post from my blog with no retraction. Screenshots of the original post available here.

My name is Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard). I’m a professional climate change denier and I use this blog to blow the whistle on myself and sometimes others, too. Today, we’re going to demonstrate once again just how embarrassingly unqualified I am to discuss anything to do with climate change.

Our story begins on the western coast of Greenland, 220 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 40 miles east of a coastal village called Ilulissat. There, the Jakobshavn Glacier drains massive shards of ice flowing off the land into a narrow channel of water about five miles wide known as the Ilulissat Icefjord. From there, the ice slowly dissolves as it gets funneled 40 miles westward into the Disko Bay and then ultimately into its watery grave in the Arctic Ocean. Continue reading →

For those who aren’t regular readers of this award-winning* blog dedicated to documenting my batshit crazy climate denialism, let’s get you caught up on my track record of failures covered by this outstanding publication to date:

• I insinuated that scientists at NSIDC faked data. Despite others who made it clear to me that I was wrong, I insisted I was right. Finally, I ended up having to retract my accusation. FAIL!
• I created a completely bogus graphic on my “Real Science” blog. After it was pointed out to me that my graphic was clearly wrong, I insisted I was right and spewed all kinds of childish invective against the commentor that identified the error. When I finally came to my senses and realized how amateurish my mistake was, I didn’t even offer an apology. FAIL!
• I made the preposterous claim that CO2 literally freezes out of the air in Antarctica. Despite all my denier buddies pointing out how stupid this was, I still insist I’m right to this day. FAIL!
• I have such a long history of getting basic science wrong and being a stubborn dick when presented with information that refutes my nutty claims, famous
  client denier Anthony Watts had to kick me off his blog. FAIL!

OK, I think you see the pattern here. So let us now build upon my stunning achievements in scientific buffoonery:

Continue reading →

I cut this video together, called “Big Oil Paycheck,” to encapsulate my riveting talk before the Heartland Institute’s 9th Annual International Conference on Climate Change this past July. As a climate denying communicator, I think it’s so very important to try to relate to the youth using the language and culture they understand so they can receive the message about how Barack Obama and his minion of scientists seek to fool us into joining their plot fora global socialist revolution.

Anyway, I’ll cut this short. I have a lot more to do. Hope you kids like it and will be “gettin’ jiggy wit it.”

By the way, you can watch my entire presentation here.