As we all know, Wikipedia has one major flaw in it’s design: it allows gang warfare.
We see this in many political entries, such as the Wikipedia entries for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which are revised hourly, only to be be revised again by “gatekeepers”. See more here: The-ClintonObama-War-The-Battle-of-Wikipedia
This illustrates the most basic problem with the reliability of Wikipedia in any entry where human opinion is involved. There are roving gangs (and sometimes individuals who appear gang-like due to their output level, such as disgraced Wikipedia editor William Connolley, who will no doubt wail about this note, and then proceed to post the usual denigrating things on his “Stoat, taking science by the throat” blog) and individuals who act as gatekeepers of their own vision of “truth”, regardless of whether that truth is correct or not. Some of these people may simply be paid political operatives, others may be zealots who have a belief that they are part of a “righteous cause”, something we know from Climatetgate as “noble cause corruption“. Many of the people involved don’t even use their real names, so of course hide behind that anonymity. In my opinion, it’s truly an irresponsible and cowardly way to define “truth” with no responsibility for your actions attached.
Right now, there is a war going on over WUWT’s entry on Wikipedia, with a clear intent to apply a smear. I’ve been getting a fair amount of email about it. Here are some examples:
Just a heads-up that there’s a concerted effort in progress to label both you and WUWT as “a blog dedicated to climate change denial” (first line in lede, WUWT article) and “described by climatologist Michael E. Mann in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars as having “overtaken Climate Audit as the leading climate change denial blog”. (last line in your Wikibio). A twofer! Sigh.
It’s a determined group, and things (as you may recall) get decided by head-counts there. “They” have more heads than we do….
From another concerned reader:
I just tried fixing it and got shut down. Those people really care more about “gate-keeping” public information then just reporting the facts. It’s creepy and a little scary. Kind of like double-speak. The game seems to be finding a “source” which sides with their own viewpoint, and then bestowing high “credibility” on those sources, while denigrating anything else. I’m actually ambivalent on climate change and fall somewhere in the middle as to whether it’s a major problem. So much is unknowable when it comes to the natural sciences. But when I see the above described behavior it really, really makes me sick, regardless of which side is doing. Anyways I just wanted to bring this to your attention in case you were not already aware of it.
And this one:
Anthony,
Don’t know if you’re aware that when searching for WUWT on Bing a profile pops up on the right margin, the first sentence of which is;
“Watts Up With That? is a blog dedicated to climate change denial created in 2006 by Anthony Watts”
I used their feedback form to object but it will no doubt be ignored. No need to respond to this.
Of course, I’m not allowed to make any changes myself, because the Wikipedia rules prevent such things due to potential “bias”. (added: In some cases, even the Wikipedia administration won’t even attempt to correct falsehoods, requiring a public appeal such as this Open Letter to Wikipedia h/t to Bob in comments). But, oddly, people who have a willful bias against me and WUWT are fair game for such changes. The citations list on the WUWT Wikipedia page reads like a “who’s-who” of haters.
For the record:
I don’t “deny” climate change or global warming, it is clear to me that the Earth has warmed slightly in the last century, this is indisputable. I also believe that increasing amounts of CO2 in Earths atmosphere are a component of that warming, but that CO2 is not the only driver of climate as some would have us believe. However, what is in dispute (and being addressed by mainstream climate science) is climate sensitivity to CO2 as well as the hiatus in global warming, also known as “the pause”. Since I embrace the idea of warming and that CO2 is a factor, along with other drivers including natural variability, the label “denier” is being applied purely for the denigration value, and does not accurately reflect my position on climate.
That paragraph above should serve as it’s own entry in the Wikipedia citations for WUWT.
So, since this is a numbers game, and because anyone can edit Wikipedia articles, I ask WUWT readers to help out in this matter. Here’s some instructions on how to do so, including the official Wikipedia instructions. You can make edits after you create an account.
If you do participate, please stick to facts, not opinions. Thanks for your consideration.
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I had the unfortunate duty of telling Ken Rice that he lived in a world without consensus enforcers.
==============
I wonder if Ken Rice aka ATTP “And Then There’s Physics” needs a Wikipedia entry to highlight his own failings of professionalism?
After having engaged him once or twice, and seen how he responds to others, I suspect the entry would consist of one word, which starts with @ur momisugly$$………..
And Then There’s Ken Rice.
Sigh…
Heh!
Wikapedia political? I never noticed..
I gave up on them a long, long, long time ago. The amount of errors is, at times, catastrophic.
Me too. I tried to add a piece on the IRA?Sin Feinn page noting how they were mass murdering, child killer who cover up sex crimes, but was shut down very quickly…….
Wikipedia has been deemed unacceptable at reference source at most top level universities in North America for a decade or more. I must have been one of the first to do so when I was an Adjunct Professor [Faculty of Applied Sciences] 15 years ago and told my students their papers would fail if based on Wikipedia references. Things have only got worse since.
“Wikipedia has been deemed unacceptable at reference source at most top level universities in North America for a decade or more.”
That should be true of Encyclopedia Britannica as well. I mean … come on! A university student who attempts to use Wikipedia or any traditional encyclopedia as a primary reference source deserves to be slapped. You may as well write a paper with a crayon.
But I think it’s unfair to suggest Wikipedia is without value. I find it’s a great resource, provided one is willing to follow up by going to the cited references for further information, and provided one understands that the Wiki entry itself may be biased.
This isn’t just a Wikipedia problem. Read any number of encyclopedia entries from fifty or so years ago and the current entries and you’ll find that they change as biases come and go with the changing times.
Its not just political.
I am a bit of an aircraft nut, and was researching the horsepower of WWII aircraft. Horsepower is usually quotes as bhp by UK /US sources and kW by European sources often with both being quoted. One bhp is ~745kW so its easy to cross-check
In one case I was astounded to see that the figures did not match. It was fairly obvious that two digits had got transposed somewhere in some reference, and the actual kW figure was a typo.
So I corrected it and explained why.
Within a day my correction was reversed by the original author!
I assumed he had some reference in which the mistake appeared and considered it ‘authoritative’
Its an interesting take on ‘appeals to authority’ and ‘chinese whispera’
Another interst is nuclear power. I have a friend who was for a time an advisor to the CND on nuclear power. SA good guardian reading technically minded bloke who is not given to hysteria and mistakes, oddly enough.
Several times O have challenged him on aspects of nuclear safety and been rebuffed with ‘there was a study done back the the 60/70s/80s showing that…’
Googling that, reveals no such studies. What WAS happening then, was that articles – the New Scientist, the Guardian or by the BBC, featured the subject under discussion with such phrases as ‘scientists say that (the subject) COULD give rise to (unpleasant effect mentioned).
Never that any real study had been carried out to ascertain if it had.
It is all pure propaganda. I remember 20 years ago my (German living) sister claiming that ‘Germany had no nuclear power stations’ despite the fact that at that time it had more nuclear capacity than the UK.
People dont deal in facts: They deal in impressions, and those on the lobbying and ’cause’ front are skilled at giving impressions.
UK wind-power has killed more people than Fukushima. No one describes it as a ‘disaster’ though.
Angel Merkel for example was a former agitprop executive in East Germany… In that game the truth is irrelevant: What counts is what people believe and who they trust to tell them.
In fact the Left by and large is of the (faux) postmodern opinion that truth is in fact what people believe it is.
The problem is that whilst the game of thrones is OK, there is at some level a game of life going on as well.
Underlying all the posturing and claims there is a real world that doesn’t care what people believe, only what people do, and if they do stupid things, they will in the end suffer.
Its lonely being an engineer, and machines may not make the best conversationalists, but at least they are not inherently clouded by belief.
> One bhp is ~745kW
Er…
1 bhp= 0.745 kw
1 bhp = 746 W (745.699871357…)
Perhaps I’m naïve, but it seems to me Wikipedia is libel for publishing known false information. I should think you could contact them and they would fix it. Just as Youtube removes improper postings. Once notified of a bad posting, Wikipedia owns it.
Need Lord Monkton on this straight away!! He is Thunderbirds.
First, I assume you mean “liable”. “Libel” is an issue, but not what you meant.
Second it is more complicated than many realize. At the risk of sounding pedantic, you cannot sue Wikipedia, there’s no such entity. You might mean Wikimedia, (note the “m”) which is a legal corporation. However, Wikimedia plays no direct part in creating, or changing content. Wikimedia pays for servers to host content, and pays developers and other staff to dream up and develop new projects. Wikipedia content (and you probably mean the English Wikipedia, one of many) is edited by individual editors, who remain responsible for their respective content.
There are some small exceptions. Wikimedia legal staff will intervene if there are legal issues, such as libel, and other issues that are not promptly resolved by ordinary Wikipedia editors.
Of course, you can sue Wikimedia, in the same sense you can sue anyone, if you can talk a lawyer into filing the suit, but you are unlikely to prevail. However, returning to your opening point, you are unlikely to prevail if you try to sue Wikimedia for “publishing known false information”, because Wikimedia publishes nothing. If you find knowingly false information, you’ll have to track down the specific editor who placed it. Wikimedia will help you identify their real name if you have a legitimate issue.
The shorter version of what Phil just ably laid out is that there is not necessarily an effective legal remedy for every wrong. My kids were always crushed when that was my response to their “Let’s sue” but adulthood seems to be going better for them that their “it’s not fair” friends.
Anthony does have a remedy though as he is asserting by using the platform of this widely circulated blog to create search results that will prevent Wikipedia from having the last or exclusive say on this. This blog simply has more subscribers and daily hits than any particular section of wikipedia for the most part.
Congrats on utilizing both a more effective and less costly remedy for an attempt to defame as well as a recognition of how search engines actually work. Now what will come up as WUWT and wikipedia are combined?
Bingo.
The other Phil,
Are you saying the Wikipedia site can have anything on it, with no legal recourse? Sounds like it.
Suppose someone posts: “Mr. X is a known child molester”? Are you saying that Mr. X can’t sue?
If that’s an exception, then where do you draw the line?
It says right at the top of the WUWT wiki page,
Disabled by who? The answer to that question is the guy who is financially liable for Wikipedia content.
No matter what is said on the page by whoever, the guy who blocked amendments to the record gives his explicit consent to the libel.
dbstealy, wow, how could you possibly get that from what I worte? On the chance that my words were unclear, absolutely not. If someone writes ” “Mr. X is a known child molester”, the first thing that will happen is that it is likely to removed in seconds. Literally seconds. In rare cases, it may take minutes. But let’s assume it lasts long enough for someone to see it. This is one of those rare case where Wikimedia satff will get involved, first, removing the entry, then helping Mr. X isf there is a desire to press charges. I wasn;t trying to suggest that one couldn’t sue, but the recourse is not against the deep pockets of Wikimedia, it is against the editor who added the statement.
As an amusing aside, I just did a search for the term “child molester”, and I briefly panicked when I saw a link to an article with the phrase “Kevin Bacon as a convicted child molester”. I misread “as” to be “is”, but after I read it, I realized it was fine.
Whoever owns the server that wikipedia is hosted on, is ultimately responsible.
Given that the founder was a former Pornographer, no surprises that pinning them down might prove difficult 🙂
The other Phil,
I was only making an analogy. My question was: where do you draw the line?
No offense intended.
Interesting point wrt libel. Since they have final say about editing, the “safe harbor” provisions don’t apply. I’d also go long with Richard’s suggestion as a libel suit is much more likely to prevail in the UK than the US.
OTOH, being criticized by Mikey Mann is a badge of honor in my book.
The other Phil:
I meant libel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
Gawd, I loved doing that.
“Wikimedia pays for servers to host content,”
Wikiwhover is legally responsible for content. Dispersion is no defense.
Oh, crap! I reread what I wrote, and I see you are correct about libel. Liable for libel is more better.
Ok, you meant “libel” My point still holds. A good lawyer (IANAL) will tell you that Wikimedia’s defense isn’t ironclad, if they are cavalier about what is included in the content, someone is likely to prevail in a lawsuit. But editors, admins, and the legal staff are very aggressive in removing libel or even potential libel. Do you have any counter-examples?
he, no problem.
This happens all the time. But although you can’t know the person’s name you can retrace their URL.
For example the NYPD HQ was used to edit information against the police by downplaying their role in Michael Brown’s death
It is highly likely that the NYPD played no role in Michael Brown’s death as that happened outside their jurisdiction.
i probably got the name wrong. I was talking about the man that died of choke hold for selling “contraband” cigarettes.
There was no chokehold. He died from heart failure due to exertion. He didn’t go into cardiac arrest until he was in the ambulance already on the way to the hospital.
It now transpires that prior to the recent UK election, parliament hosted pcs were used to edit wikipedia entries about corrupt politicians.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11574217/Expenses-and-sex-scandal-deleted-from-MPs-Wikipedia-pages-by-computers-inside-Parliament.html
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2015/04/22/wikipedia-grant-shapps/
Don’t forget this:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia
He could’ve made that up.
I’ve had the same problem with some of my own work. Since it is academic, there was no problem supplying abundant references. It made no difference. The article author/gatekeeper (captaincrunch21?) refused to read any of the source material cited in his/her own article or the additional bibliography provided by me. Years later, the wikipedia articles are still hopelessly wrong.
I spent some time trying to fix the junk history that can be found regarding the Little Ice Age, which ascribed the ceasing of human activities caused by the Black Plague and the resulting increased forest lowered CO2 and brought on the cold. There simply were not that many humans to do this, let alone impossible for CO2 to drive the climate like that.
When I added a couple of moderate sentences, my changes were quickly removed and I was threatened by William Connolley several times. He is a piece of work, a troll sitting on Wikipedia back then, canceling all rational input. It took a long time for hime to be disgraced for his activities and I am sure others have taken his place.
When the preaching persecution reaches high office the rot has well and truly set in. http://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938
People like Willy have done so much damage to Wiki’s reputation, most quality institutions of higher learning now proscribe its being used as a source reference of any sort.
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/the-scorning-of-william-connolley/
Pointman
Amazing what trouble a little willy can cause !!!
To be fair, this is a site where “deniers” like myself also come to get a fair hearing and meet like minded thinkers. That you, Anthony, are personally a “Luke warmer” who believes there is something called a ‘greenhouse effect’ when many on here don’t, is by the by.
I personally embrace the term “denier”, regardless of attempted Nazi connotations. It’s a badge of honour. Yes, I deny there is a Greenhouse Effect. Yes, I deny rising CO2 has any measurable effect on temperature of this planet or any other. Now prove me wrong!
Physics proved you wrong decades ago. Do you want to take a run at Evolution as well?
How?
HS physics will tell us what will happen to a thermometer in the mouth of a bronze statue of you stuck knee deep in a tub of boiling water but not if it’s similarly in the mouth of the real you. You want me to prove that to you?
Warren lb could write that down for us. We may have missed it. I
Wow warrenlb, even the warmists have had real trouble showing the ‘real signal’ of C02’s effect on the temps. I am quite sure that the only sources you can find are weak correlations over short time periods. They may cite models and that is just a massive ensemble of guesses. Perhaps reasonable but not any kind of proof.
warrenlb my close (“minded?”) personal friend,
All on here understand that you believe this. We also know that you cannot document any such proof. What kind of an engineer must you have been…
Warren,he asked to be proved wrong, your reply failed to do that.
Carry on.
Water vapour yes. CO2 immeasurable at the current conc.
And physics also proves that a Greenhouse Effect is almost identical to a Thermos Bottle Effect.
Given said, does anyone want to claim that the “warming”, …. partial or otherwise, …. of the earth’s atmosphere is a direct result of a Thermos Bottle Effect?
If not, ….. why not, ……. both terms infer a “heat trapping effect”?
If you are offered a “cup of coffee” out of a Thermos Bottle ……. you “just assume” it is going to be a “HOT” cup of coffee, ……….. right?
@warrenlb:
You were asked: “How?”
This is your credibility test.
GHE:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0477%281996%29077%3C1967%3ATSREPD%3E2.0.CO%3B2
A couple observable consequences of the GHE:
A cloudy winter night staying generally warmer than a clear winter night.
Drastic temperature drops in desert regions at night.
Engineers have to account for the GHE when estimating cooling rates:
http://www.asterism.org/tutorials/tut37%20Radiative%20Cooling.pdf
Now that would be for sure …. a Thermos Bottle Effect (TBE), ……. right.
You are dead wrong, warrenlb, and you are way out of line with that Evolution remark. That wickedwenchfan, whoever it may be, is right that rising SO2 has no measurable effect on temperature. Where have you been hiding for the last 18 years when carbon dioxide kept rising but was unable to to cause any temperature rise whatsoever? The Arrhenius greenhouse theory kept predicting warming at the same time and likewise got nothing. A scientific theory that makes verifiably wrong predictions is invalid and has to be disposed of in the waste basket of history. With the Arrhenius theory gone all the predictions of greenhouse warming it it has made become false science and must be discarded as well. Since the fairy tale of AGW was built up upon these wrong predictions it follows that there is no such thing as AGW. The only greenhouse theory that works now is the Miskolczi greenhouse theory, MGT. Its predictions are straightforward: addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere does not warm the atmosphere. To learn how this works read my comment to Pamela Gray below. You need to learn some real climate science for which you can’t find a better source than my book “What Warming?” Get it from Amazon and educate yourself.
As a sceptic of catastrophic human caused green warming I find you to be completely uneducated. No one with a western grade 6 education should Deny basic science I.E. the green house effect is known and quantifiable. Most of the people on this blog are arguing the source,inputs and ultimate outcomes If any.
I think you left the ‘un-‘ off of ‘quantifiable’.
Bench test seldom translates directly to full scale operations. The greenhouse effect of CO2 dispersed in the atmosphere is far less quantifiable than a controlled laboratory experiment and is yet to be proven.
@chris Hagan
Unfortunately, there are all too many that fit your description, including the two posts directly below yours. Indeed, it is about ultimate outcomes, will such outcomes ultimately be catastrophic, can Man adapt, should he attempt to mitigate, what tools are available for mitigation, and what are the effects of using those tools —-both on the outcomes and on the economy. Rejecting 6th Grade Science is not the way to convince anyone of anything.
@chris Hagan
You could have just as easily stated … “a western grade 1 education” …. because most every US Public School System is now brainwashing their student body into believing the “junk science” of CO2 causing global warming climate change (CAGW).
Any “warming” effect of near-surface temperatures attributable to “radiative gases” is not cumulative from one (1) month to the next, …. let alone one (1) year to the next, ….. therefore it matters not a twit what atmospheric CO2 ppm quantities were in respect to what the “fuzzy math” calculated Average Yearly Temperatures were last year, 50 years ago or 130 years ago.
In actuality, it is not so much that the earth’s climate is “getting warmer” or “getting hotter” that is causing the calculated Average Yearly Temperatures to increase during the past 200 years …… as it is the fact that the earth’s surface has not been “cooling off” or “cooling down” as much during the yearly seasonal “cool” or ”cold” periods.
If CO2 is the actual culprit that is causing the increase in Average Yearly Temperatures …. then Summertime temperatures would be increasing at the same rate as the Wintertime temperatures, ……. but they are not.
And do not forget the discrepancy between anthropogenic CO2 production and global CO2 levels rise. Some people also doubt that the main cause of the increment of atmospheric CO2 levels is not because we burn fossil fuels.
No, you are wrong, it is not “by the by”. The wikipedia is saying that WUWT “is a blog dedicated to climate change denial”. The fact that “deniers” like you get a hearing and are laughted at from time to time doesn’t make it “a blog dedicated to climate change denial”. If anything, it is a blog dedicated to open discussion about climate change.
And about there being “many” who are deniers and just Anthony as a Luke Warmer… well, that is pretty laughable. Just have a look at the rest of the responses that your comment has received. I would rather say that the number of regular commenters here denying the Greenhouse Effect could perhaps, being generous, be considered to barely reach 1%.
The problem with the whole Wikipedia entry is that it is written from the perspective of the MSM, the political left and the alarmist blogs and papers. There are loads of entries from the Guardian and references to “denial”, “denialism” and “denialist” (what is the difference between a “denier” and a “denialist” I wonder?). The only way to make this entry even slightly truthful would be to delete it all and start from scratch.
I think it is quite fair that the entry should include a reference to the fact that much of the MSM sees you as a “denier”, but the way it is presented is that it is a “fact” that you are a denier. Clearly this is opinion and not fact and should be stated as such.
Rather than changing the text I think it should be edited to flag up those parts of the entry which are clearly opinion and politics not fact.
‘Denialist’ is Slithertongue for ‘Denier’.
=============
I almost resemble that remark Kim!
Listen, pal, it’s hard to top your name. I grin every time I see it.
==========
As I’ve note here before, there is no entry or mention of the words denialism or denialist in either of my two older local dictionaries, each dating from the early 1990s. At the very least, these terms are neologisms.
There however a valid word which may be useful – deniable, as an adjective, and the related noun deniability, as in plausible deniability, where some may claim to be “out of the loop.”
If something is deniable, then it should be disputed.
Wikipedia is valuable but flawed. I think contentious issues should be flagged at a system level when many edits are being made, and then the opposing viewpoints might all be included in some fashion so the Wiki user may read it all. ‘Else it’s just running censorship.
What a great idea.
Good idea. Rather than claiming to be unbiassed (there is no such thing), they should have a pro section and a con section. Let the reader deside what they want to believe.
For some reason, they’ve deleted my corrected version of this post, which was here for awhile, and began
“As I’ve noted here before…”
2nd paragraph should begin:
“There however is a valid word which may be useful…”
“I don’t “deny” climate change or global warming, it is clear to me that the Earth has warmed slightly in the last century, this is indisputable. I also believe that increasing amounts of CO2 in Earths atmosphere are a component of that warming, but that CO2 is not the only driver of climate as some would have us believe. …” ~ A. W.
I can attest that after reading this blog for some time, that the position of Mr. Watts and that of the current “consensus” on climate is the same. Both he and the warmists do believe in CO2 warming the planet but they disagree on the matter of “how much?”. They agree that the planet has warmed over the last 100 years but may disagree on “how much?” and, also, if the surface record is reliable.
From my viewpoint, it is hard to see why those people have attacked Mr. Watts and WUWT on wikipedia since both groups are on the same side in most respects. The main difference is a matter of degree.
I personally am not certain that we can really say what the average global temperature is now and certainly don’t think we know what it was in the past to the degree of certainty needed to claim warming. I also don’t think the “average temperature” of the atmosphere, if we could calculate it, is the best metric of the energy stored in the earth system. I also don’t think that CO2 plays any part at all in warming the planet on a net basis. I also think that the net effect of CO2 is so darn small it makes no difference if it cools or warms on net.
Since I am not “on the side” of either party in the dispute, I feel I can say without any bias that this smear job is totally unwarranted. (but not unexpected)
~ Mark
To suggest that the Blog denies Climate Change is patent falsehood, as attested by the many excellent articles attempting to characterise accurately the causes & extent of climate change.
The repeated attempts to justify such pejorative use of language on a basis that others have published in the same manner is more worthy of trashy red topped tabloids than of any aspiring tome of knowledge.
Use of the term denial in this context is clearly unbefitting. Attempts to dignify such abuse by academicians using the term else is a specialised area for discussion elsewhere and do not justify such clearly derogatory use here.
The standing of the whole WikiPedia project is sadly diminished much more by this than the reputation of one Blog, whose enduring popularity by the way speaks for itself.
Psychologically, the mindset of the Wiki gatekeepers seems far closer to that of prosecutors in a heresy trial, than to anything remotely recognizable as science.
Catastrophic warming is denied; what’s affirmed is that present mistaken policy is already catastrophic and worsening.
==================
You’re not allowed a difference from the received wisdom, even by as much as one degree.
Look what happened to Lomborg and he’s more of a warmist than Anthony.
“He who is not with us 100%, no ifs, no buts, no arguments, is against us 100% and is and evil denier”.
All black and white in the world of climate “science”.
markstoval,
You say you don’t understand why Anthony Watts is being attacked. You say:
Both he and the warmists do believe in CO2 warming the planet but they disagree on the matter of “how much?”. They agree that the planet has warmed over the last 100 years but may disagree on “how much?” and, also, if the surface record is reliable.
Anthony agrees with the generally accepted science. That is not the source of the Wikipedia propagandists’ hatred of Anthony and his site. What they hate is the fact that Anthony allows all points of view, and that many well known scientists post articles and comment here. This site also has a much higher number of readers educated in the hard sciences. If the public wants to understand the ‘climate’ debate, this is their best source. They can read both sides, and make up their own minds. And of course, WUWT is very widely read, and influential.
When a site allows all sides to contribute, the truth (as far as we know scientific truth) emerges. And the fact is that the original premise: that human CO2 emissions will cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe, has been falsified by events. That derails the carbon tax politics that is at the root of the ‘climate change’ narrative.
Not only is there no runaway global warming, but there has been no global warming at all for a very long time. Believers in the original conjecture could hardly have been more wrong. They hate that, and they direct their hatred onto those who turned out to be correct: CO2 is a very minor, 3rd-order forcing that simply does not matter. Its effect is too small to measure.
What they want is to turn WUWT into another Wikipedia, so they can censor out all comments by skeptics of the ‘dangerous man-made global warming’ narrative. Because they cannot stand the thought that the public has access to any point of view but their own.
dbstealey,
I understand your comment, and agree that they can’t stand the wholesale disputing of the ‘dangerous man-made global warming’ narrative.
But I would point out that we don’t tolerate all points of view concerning CO2 and global warming here. As a moderator you know the site policy against getting too close to the position of zero climate sensitivity to CO2 or in posting links to certain groups that dispute warming by back radiation. (notice I tip-toed around using the s-word there) I do not agree 100% with any group, but I do see value in listening to all sides.
I do wish that we could pleasantly discuss these matters here, but alas, that is against site policy. I find the J. T. Kiehl and Kevin E. Trenberth, 1997 energy budget to be a cartoon and not science, yet my main complaint is not a topic welcome here. Since I freely admit that I might be wrong, it would be nice to see debate on that topic here at times.
In an odd way, Mr. Watts and WUWT are being wrongly accused of holding my position while the reality is that Mr. Watts disputes the size of the CO2 contribution of warming. (as well as feedbacks of course)
Philip Finck
You say
NO! You are absolutely wrong.
Science has no ‘sides’: it has an infinite number of possibilities and assesses available evidence to determine which possibility is least wrong.
Science could not progress if there were not an infinite number of possibilities; your “one side” would exclude a theory (e.g. phlogiston) being displaced by another possibility (e.g. oxidation).
You are guilty of the warmunist error of talking about THE science: acceptance of ‘the science’ is a denial of science.
Richard
Philip Finck,
Richard Courtney is right, science doesn’t have sides. But if science had only one side, you would surely be on the wrong side. You also say that this site doesn’t publish current research. I am confident in saying that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
markstoval,
I’ve often written that I personally think that CO2 has a negligible effect, but that others such as Dr. Miskolczi state that it has no warming effect at all.
Saying you think CO2 has no warming effect is a legitimate position. The site policy states that certain subjects are not allowed (chemtrails, etc.). But if you want to argue that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming, have at it.
dbstealey,
” But if you want to argue that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming, have at it.”
That is good to hear. I will do so in the future on a thread where it is on topic. I will avoid linking to the forbidden site that Mr. Watts as asked us never to link to, but there are many others that also good links. Especially a certain mathematician. (no, not Dr. Mann!)
Nice to have a talk with you today.
Bingo!
Actual and honest science is not advanced by attempting to censor/silence those who present and can backup “inconvenient views”.
Such views can be voiced and read here. Often the comments debunk, fine tune and/or sharpen the views expressed.
Those who stand to lose something (money, power, prestige etc.) are those who hate any who hold or allow those “inconvenient views” to be heard.
Mr. Finck:
I would say that if you paid attention that you would find that this site actually has better research than the pal reviewed hoar grant papers published by the mainstream.
WUWT readers and contributors are a bit older, therefore more experienced, better informed and therefore conduct better analyses than the average believer in CAGW.
Can anyone cite a reference? Skepticism of CAGW should be a prerequisite for anyone considered for a scientific editorial post. Other wise everything will dissolve into churches of thought instead of schools of thought.
Wikipedia is pretty good for straight technical stuff like chemistry. Politics and climate, not so much. The New Scientist also lost its citability some years ago. Ah, how great it used to be before The Warming.
P. Finck:
“Could you please provide us with the impact ratio for citation counts on this blog?”
I am sure that will not agree, but I consider these just as relevant to your rigged “pitch” and there are of course many others just as educational. But then one has to of course be capable of having an open mind.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/24/are-climate-modelers-scientists/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/11/the-pnas-old-boys-club-nas-members-can-choose-who-will-review-their-paper/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/10/peer-review-ring-busted/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/17/peer-review-pal-review-and-broccoli/
I’ve seen several posters make the claim that thermodynamics proves that CO2 can’t warm the earth.
I’ve even argued with several of them.
Their posts aren’t removed and the posters themselves haven’t been banned.
” Both he and the warmists do believe in CO2 warming the planet but they disagree on the matter of “how much?”.”
Not to speak for our host, but many of us also disagree on the matter of “what else?”. Land use changes — in particular over-grazing pastureland and clear-cutting forest — are known to affect albedo, dust-formation, water-retention, and other elements of the local weather that in turn affect the global climate. The soot that accompanies some, but not all, fossil fuel consumption has an effect, and that effect is poorly differentiated from the effect of CO2. And of course some of us worry about solar and asteroid impacts on the climate. (Yes the latter use of “impact” is a deliberate pun.)
Those of us who assume there may be other causes of climate change besides CO2 concentrations then want our governments’ spending to be generalized enough to deal with a range of threats, rather than focusing on one, potentially wrong or mis-prioritized, threat.
pouncer,
I certainly agree that mankind’s many activities, especially desertification, has effected the climate, as well as the sun and even possibly impacts by celestial bodies. Good points you made. All this single minded focus on just anthropogenic CO2 emissions is wildly misguided, as you point out.
Pouncer while I agree with the part about man having some affect on the environment, I disagree strongly that our government needs to spend even one penny trying to stop climate change. There is absolutely NO evidence that the climate is changing catastrophically or that man has done anything significant at this point with respect to causing climate change… so NO… generalized government spending to stop climate change is 100% wasted money.
they will lock the whole article down now, since they can no longer successfully gatekeep it
My grandson is in high school and many of his teachers won’t let the students use Wikipedia as a reference because they don’t consider it reliable information.
Good! I tell my kids the same thing.
Tell that to the Open University!
Of course you shouldn’t use Wikipedia as a reference, in high school, college, middle school or elsewhere. Is there anyone who disputes this? Even Wikipedia disallows Wikipedia as a reference. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful place to start researching, just make sure to go to the sources.
It’s a good place to get the officially maintained position about anything. What they call their NPOV, which is the regime opinion about anything.
As a university professor, I only use Wikipedia as a source to initially compile some references. If the subject matter is of a controversial nature and Wikipedia’s list of references is biased, it doesn’t take long to find references on the other side of the issue in published sources as even some of the biased published articles will reference opposing sources.
That’s funny! A knowledge base that doesn’t let us use its own knowledge base as a source of knowledge.
Sorry about the Wiki entries, Anthony. The corruption of search engines will surely follow. I believe that persistent objections – everyone take a minute per day – will overcome this. It eventually got Connelley dumped out of his chair.
That’s because it’s true.
It seems that wiki has an unfortunate tendency to allow distortions to accumulate and get built upon quite quickly so they become lies. This story reminds me of recently when I was offered from a CiF commenter the following quote from the wiki page of Roger Pielke Sr as evidence that Pielke Jr* was a climate change denier:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/apr/23/playing-the-ball-not-the-man#comment-51001269
It turns out this is of course a crude fabrication, there literally is no example of Pielke Sr saying “remains no” to Revkins question. But it took a while to drill down to the source of the claim and I found the initial creator of this meme was KimDabelsteinPetersen here
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roger_A._Pielke&type=revision&diff=360548280&oldid=360533958
I believe KimDabelsteinPetersen at one time was almost as diligent at maintaining the climate narrative as William Connolley was, I’m not sure if he/she’s still active.
Although KDP initially just creates a dogmatic assertion that Pielke said ‘remains NO’ without quotes, wrongly implying it originated on his blog with a link, It seems somewhere along the line those two words eventually picked up quotes and became perfectly adequate ‘factual’ ammunition for the CiF climate concerned hard of thinking.
I wonder how, or if, wiki checks for possible accumulations like this? If people of the same ideological bent get to edit these pages it seems inevitable, even assuming the best will in the world, that their biases will obviously just lead to the site being full of plain lies like this.
* Yes, he was that dumb. He didn’t know which was which 🙂
That is known as Wikipedia fact laundering. The lie gets put in wiki then it I’d picked up by some mainstream media then that mainstream media source is now used as the credible source.
Update: Apologies to KimDabelsteinPetersen. After I edited the page and corrected the mistaken URL which, I then removed the reference to the “remains No” quote thinking it was wrongly credited to be in that URL, however someone subsequently edited it, putting back the quote, pointing out that quote *does* appear in a later URL I had overlooked. It seem Wiki can work fine sometimes
The problem with this devious information manipulation is that student’s perceptions are shaped early on and it takes years to clear their cloudy minds.
It beckons to the images of North Korean youth who believe the absurd state sponsored lies about their leader. It is so difficult to beak the bonds of manipulated ignorance…
Anfhony I went on Wikipedia website to edit WUWT and this message displayed:
Note!
This page is under a 1 revert rule restriction due to the climate change topic community probation. Do not make any edit to the article that reverses the edit of another user in whole or in part more than once in any 24 hour period. Avoid edit warring and seek consensus
for any contentious edits at Talk:Watts Up With That?. Editors who fail to adhere to these standards may be blocked from editing for a short period.
Any ideas?
“seek consensus.” UGH!
“And seek consensus”, oh that’s rich. Good luck with that. And when did truth get defined by consensus?
The thing that people don’t like about Truth is it doesn’t care about consensus. In fact, Truth doesn’t care who likes it. If Truth were on Facebook, it wouldn’t have many friends, nor followers on Twitter. But it is, as they say, out there, for those who seek it.
I’ve seen several references to “truth”.
This is an unofficial essay, but it may be helpful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Truth
Short version – the goal of Wikipedia is verifiability. (One hopes that verifiability and truth are closely related, but unfortunately, there may be exceptions. “Truth” is an unattainable goal for a crowd-sourced wiki, but verifiability, while challenging, is at least in principle, attainable.
“Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.
In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
-Michael Crichton, Aliens Cause Global Warming: A Caltech Lecture ”
Wikipedia can be used as a fair proxy for what passes as the politically dominant themes in society. It’s kind of depressing.
What do you mean by “any ideas”? A one revert rule does not prohibit you from editing. The usual rule in most places is that three reverts in 24 hours is deemed edit warring (although it can be fewer). It is unlikely you need to make more than one edit in any 24 hour period. If you do, let me know, I may be able to help.
Thanks Phil, I was not sure if a revert was only counted for one or multiple reverters or for total number of reversions. Anyway here goes!
Editing of this article by new or unregistered users is currently disabled.
See the protection policy and protection log for more details. If you cannot edit this article and you wish to make a change, you can submit an edit request, discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or create an account.
Watts Up With That?
Watts Up logo.jpg
Web address http://wattsupwiththat.com
Slogan Commentary on puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change, technology, and recent news by Anthony Watts
Type of site
Blog
Created by Anthony Watts
Launched November 17, 2006
Alexa rank
22,823 (on 2015-05-25)
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The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (May 2015)
Looks like they are ganging up on us
Honestly, I stopped reading/using Wikipedia for anything about 10 years ago. It is absolutely riddled with rubbish, lies and propaganda. Look up Fascism, which was a grass roots, left wing, socialist movement that got ugly. Yet Wikipedia label Fascism as an historically right wing movement…
Well it is the right wing of the socialist spectrum. Also they do have Mussolini’s original party program – which reads a lot like the communist manifesto. Mussolini BTW learned his trade in the socialist party, which the wikipedia admitted when I last looked at it.
Not sure where you get your right/left wing info. My understanding is left wing equals big government and right wing equals small government. There is a continuum moving from the extreme left which is a totalitarian dictatorship or monarchy to the extreme right which is lack of government, or anarchy. The larger and more powerful govt. is left, smaller and distributed and more free is right.
I’ve also been told that this is how the US looks at the right left paradigm, and in other parts of the world they use different definitions.
Fascism is ‘socialism for one ethnic/tribal group’ while denying even simple civil rights for other tribes/religions.
This makes it both far right wing and far left wing at the same time and it is a very noxious belief system and a number of countries (ahem) practice this form or fascism.
emsnews: Are you actually trying to claim that racism is a right wing phenomena?
Mark Cooper
This thread is about how wicki misrepresents about climate change and WUWT in particular.
Many other things also get misrepresented on wicki especially – as the above article says by way of illustration – US politics. But this thread is not about them.
You provide a red herring by posting nonsense about fascism.
Fascism is the extreme right wing. That is reality, so live with it.
And please don’t try waving any other red herrings
Richard
Well, maybe we’ve got to redefine “wing”. Problem is that “wing” relates to bird which only has two wings. To me, fascism is obviously left wing. Think dragonfly, perhaps.
Socialist have been trying desperately to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazi Germany for over half a century but you always fail. It’s sort of comical the way you start acting like a CAGW activist whenever the evils of Socialism come up.
richardscourtney,
How many beers have you had? No idea why you focused on the reference to Fascism- I used that as an example only – That entry was the target of a ‘left wing” / “right wing” “gang-war” a few years ago. It is a waste of everyone’s time and resources to try and fix corrupted entries in Wikipedia, there is always one more nutter out there willing to spend 1/2 their life re-editing your re-edits.
Mark Cooper
I have had no beers becxause I am medically allergic to beer (it’s the hops).
You raised a disruptive ‘red herring’. I objected to it.
There are many examples of wicki being mob ruled on controversial subjects. An assertion that ‘black is white/ or that ‘the political ultra-right is left-wing’ are NOT examples of it.
Anybody who follows WUWT knows that at every opportunity the nonsense of “fascism is left wing” is promoted on WUWT by the far-right. Subsequent comments to yours show that your daft assertion was – as always happens – grasped by others who also want to promote your ludicrous assertion.
I again ask that you don’t promote red herrings. And I add that it would be good if you were to let go of the stinking fish you have waived.
Richard
National socialism is an extreme right wing position?
Fascism is the govt control of private business, that’s socialism, and that is of the left.
You can whine all you want, but reality lives on.
I looked up a comparison of open-source wireless drivers last week;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_wireless_drivers
I found it very helpful.
Are those left or right wing wireless drivers??
One of Webster’s definitions of ‘liberal’ is broad minded. Facism is not broad minded in the least so your assertion of where it came from is completely wrong and easily proven false.
MarkW
I again ask you to stop waving your red herring.
All governments of all kinds control businesses to some degree; e.g. by insisting on provision of independently audited annual accounts.
The OED provides this definition of Facism
This thread is about activists corrupting wicki by replacing information with falsehoods.
You are trying to corrupt WUWT by replacing information with falsehoods.
Stop. Just stop.
Richard
William Connolley may be disgraced but he still plays a role and always finds a carrier for his deed. See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/09/death-by-stoat/#more-72186
Don’t say Voldemort.
Naw, he’s merely a Dementor.
==============
Correction to my last post at May 25, 2015 at 7:13 am,
it wasn’t KimDabelsteinPetersen who initiated the ‘remains NO’ words without quotes, that was from an anonymous editor. No it was *KimDabelsteinPetersen* who later added the quotation marks to make it seem like a direct factual quote here!
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roger_A._Pielke&diff=next&oldid=360548280
Hello dahlings. How’s the paper coming along?
Where is YOUR paper, Billy?
By the way you are still able to comment here,despite that you offer so little credibility to your ravings.
Are you still wasting your life promoting the BS science of warmunism, Willy? Why?
He like so many other AGW believers, fail to notice it has not averaged at least the MINIMUM of .20C per decade warming, as the AGW conjecture and the IPCC says it supposed to do.
Now that the warming has not showed up this century, they have to explain why their many modeling scenarios never accounted for the lengthening no warming trend:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/to:2015.3/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/to:2015.3/trend/plot/rss/from:2001/to:2015.3/plot/rss/from:2001/to:2015.3/trend
Willie the Weasel runs through the pixels
Trimming the truth with his red pencil fix-all.
Pity his fix
When Nature sticks
And trims this eraserhead who thinks he’s the schitzel.
=================
Name-calling is helpful – how?
A stoat is a weasel. You could look it up.
sometimes you gotta get a little bit dirty when you’re wrestling pigs
Hee, hee, ToP, the name-calling was the least of it. Sorry you missed the worst.
=======
Somebody here doesn’t recognize art when he sees it.
Ah Mr. Connolley, it’s so good to hear from you again.
(This is proof that WUWT is not always the gospel truth.)
@William Howard Connolley
Not one of the blokes on this forum rejecting AGW has the temerity to publish their ‘findings’ in a peer-reviewed Science Journal or anywhere their work might be held up to the scrutiny of Scientists. You’d think they’d feel a sense of guilt for not attempting to do so, but they prefer to cite ‘global conspiracy, fraud, or incompetence’ among Climate Scientists without attempting to put forth their own coherent analysis of the Climate’s behavior.
An outside observer might conclude ‘they protest FAR too much.’
‘Blokes’ – are you a relic of the 20th century? We talk about ‘people’ or ‘men and women’. It’s terribly archaic to talk about ‘blokes’.
An outside observer might conclude ‘you are a misogynist’.
Connolley & warrenlb all dressed up:
warrenlb, “Not one of the blokes on this forum rejecting AGW has the temerity to publish their ‘findings’ in a peer-reviewed Science Journal or anywhere their work might be held up to the scrutiny of Scientists.”
Climate models have no predictive value: A Climate of Belief: http://www.skeptic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/v14n01resources/climate_of_belief.pdf (528 KB)
ACoB SI: http://www.skeptic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/v14n01resources/climate_belief_supporting_info.pdf (892 KB)
Poster at AGU Fall Meeting 2013: http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Frank/propagation_of_error_poster_AGU2013.pdf (2.9 MB)
The air temperature record is unreliable due to neglect of systematic sensor measurement error:
Paper 1: http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Frank/uncertainty_in%20global_average_temperature_2010.pdf (869.8 KB)
Paper 2: http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/t8x847248t411126/fulltext.pdf (1 MB)
Pervasive negligence and a descent into pseudo-science in consensus so-called climate science:
http://multi-science.atypon.com/doi/abs/10.1260/0958-305X.26.3.391
Every paper was peer-reviewed, some by different sets of reviewers before and after submission. The poster withstood critical contemplation by meeting participants.
Those analyses stand unrefuted, warrenlb. More to come, presuming reviewer competence.
@Patrick Guinness Frank
Sorry, your posts are nothing but amateur musings, not peer-reviewed sources. Got anything from ‘Nature’ ,’ Science’, the IPCC Assessments? Or NASA, NOAA?
Sea Level Rise slowing
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n5/full/nclimate2159.html
Droughts and Floods
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/drought/wetdry/bar-svr-110-00/190001-201104.gif
No Warming
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525
Earth Greening
http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/Deserts-greening-from-rising-CO2.aspx
Insubstantial, mindless, and factually incorrect dismissal warrenlb. You can’t refute those published analyses either; nor any of my posts. Fail.
I also object to “blokes” for gender reasons.
@Patrick Guinness Frank
You posted nothing but blogs and pseudo-science advocacy, but no peer-reviewed journal papers. Those that call themselves Scientists should understand the difference.
I love the way warren actually believes that science is defined by “being published in a journal that he agrees with”.
You’re wrong again warrenlb. Every single one of the papers linked were peer-reviewed by bona-fide PhD-level academic climate scientists.
The poster was examined by, and discussed with, a serial assembly of climate scientists attending the 2013 Fall AGU meeting. The papers and the poster all remain unrefuted.
The papers and the poster are all about physical error analysis; part of my normal professional competence as an experimental physical methods chemist.
Your dismissal is again groundless, insubstantial, mindless, and without any analytical merit. Fail.
Pat Frank,
You have to understand: warrenlb only recognizes his authorities. Any authorities he disagrees with are “nothing but amateur musings and pseudo-science advocacy”.
warrenlb’s reaction to anything outside of his belief in dangerous MMGW:
http://www.moonbattery.com/kathleen-backus.jpg
[In fact, I think that’s probably him! ☺]
@Patrick Guinness Frank
Your criteria for ‘peer-reviewed journal paper’ seems wanting:
1) “Skeptic.com” is a website where skeptics hang out, not a peer -reviewed journal.
2) A POSTER at a conference? Even an AGU conference? That hardly qualifies.
3) Multi-Science: The editor of one of its journals, ‘Energy and Environment’ , Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, says she sometimes publishes scientific papers challenging the view that global warming is a problem, because that position is often stifled in other outlets. “I’m following my political agenda” she says. At other times she states that E&E is not a science journal.
Most importantly, as far as I can determine, none of the examples — Multi-Science or the others– appear on the ISI Master Journal List.
None of this says anything about the quality of your papers, one way or another. But they do not seem to qualify as peer-reviewed papers, and as such, will struggle to have much impact.
It would be hard to find anyone more deluded than warrenlb. Only his “authorities” are legitimate; no one else’s count. In warrenlb’s words, any other authorities are “nothing but amateur musings and pseudo-science advocacy”. That is warrenlb’s verbatim argument.
What a sorry excuse for a human being.
By warrenlb’s criteria, Albert Einstein would be rejected.
Sometimes it’s just sad the raw troops who get flung, or fling themselves, into battle.
=====================
Bill Con,
Give up bee keeping.
Your quote on your site for May 25th 2015,
“Fortunately today’s bees, though provoked, were kind.”
What do you expect,bees like it HOT HOT HOT,not a 12C temperature,keep pedaling your bike and your hysteria about ‘Global Warming’.
Maybe you should wrap your body around the Hive to give them the warmth that ‘Global Warming’ is denying them.
Yes. I have known for a very long time that information on wiki was unreliable. So I make sure everyone knows that it unreliable. I read stuff and sometimes link to it if the particular subject is accurate at that time.
I have tried to fix wiki articles but the storm of resistance make it unworthy of my time. So I enjoy watching wiki become as the internet as a whole has become, a pool of aggressive ignorance. I put my efforts in other places.
wikipedia is mindbogglingly hell bent on conformity.
Who writes on wiki? Nope not everyone as hoped for.
1) Who knows how to use the coding feature in electronic media? (web page programmers)
2) Who knows to to run an IRC/ chat to like minded people? (programmers)
3) Who spend their days sitting at a web terminal? (programmers)
4) Who have the time to accumulate “credentials” enough to bully brilliant nubees? (programmers)
I contend that wiki is maintained by a narrow minded assembly of people, mostly overweight, gamer male programmers who know a little bit about a lot of subjects and consequently think that they are polyhistors. They want all wiki pages to look the same, regardless of the subject, They all have the same brand of politics also as a consequence and do not mind asserting those politics regardless of the harm to the article.
I have run experiments on wiki. It is possible to alter entire sections of wiki without being noticed. I suspect that the entire wiki database is at risk of complete corruption by a gentle fog of continuous, subtle, insertion of erroneous information and faux maintenance.
Because programmer type people are responsible for creating most of the content o wiki, they are missing out on the majority of brilliant expert thinkers who are not interested in asserting “consensus.” Consensus is for idiots. A majority vote by ignoramuses often constitutes a wiki fact. Voting.. seriously… voting…
So rather than use wiki, I use search engines to find sites that are operated by individuals and I use traditional academic resources.
Sometime wiki has a useful link, but most often wiki articles are blatant political propaganda. You can tell on the talk pages,… well until the editors started erasing talk subjects as well.
I submit that wki is dying a death of 1 billion cuts. it is so unreliable that no serious scholar would refer to it alone.
Things that you will never get reliable facts about on wiki (correlates to programmer/gamer/male/atheist/homosexual/socialist/greener…you get the drift)
-Nietzsche (they just love this guy)
-Anthony Watts (they just hate this guy)
-Jesus Christ (they just hate this guy)
-Alan Turing (they just love this guy)
-Voltaire (they just love this guy)
-Paschal (they just hate this guy)
-Green energy
-The United Nations
My advice, write your own web pages on a subject, and do a good job of it. It will be found and respected and read. Don’t waste your time with wiki.
Anthony, This site (WUWT) is the best answer to the BS wiki community. Your site is bigger than wiki when it come to reliable information.
That’s not what everyone told me.
Heh
I smell the miasma of the incompleteness theorem, or the liar’s paradox.
Concerning Westhaver’s indictment of wikipedia:
My father was a pioneer in the computer industry. His first system had 2,000 BITS of memory. There were two shifts of mechanics who repaired/replaced the mechanical relays performing operations. Yes, he was right at the source of “bugs.”
He said that every result was analyzed for “reasonableness.” As mechanical faults could cause errors in results, no result was trusted.
I see wikipedia that way. It has vast amounts of valuable information. But one must contemplate everything it says, to decide whether what is says is reasonable.
Anyone that takes the ‘middle ground’ on the CAGW controversy (I wanted to use debate, but that is not evidenced by reality, on purpose) should take a step back (mentally) and ask themselves – why do I even consider the side that denigrates, obfuscates, uses purposeful deception, changes data, refuses FOIA requests, etc.
There is no middle ground on a right and wrong. The middle ground is for the uniformed. (the ignorant) The political person who doesn’t want to offend. This is wiki… facts by popular vote. Consensus is a toilet word.
“There is no middle ground on a right and wrong. The middle ground is for the uniformed. (the ignorant) The political person who doesn’t want to offend. This is wiki… facts by popular vote. Consensus is a toilet word”
*******************************************************************************************************************
Why do people wearing uniforms have their own space reserved in the middle ground? 🙂 teh
SteveT
.
Why? Because the same admonition applies to every “side” in a debate. The MESSAGE, not the messenger is the only thing that matters. There are loons on every side (four of them have commented on this very post).
What should be considered is the evidence presented. Period.
Be better than the targets of your criticism.
“It’s a determined group, and things (as you may recall) get decided by head-counts there. “They” have more heads than we do….”
No.
We have more heads,
they have more (and larger) anal orifices in which to insert their heads.
(Note: my correction to the above quoted text may not be approved by the appropriate authorities.)
/grin
I wouldn’t worry. Any half thinking person will spot the massive inconsistencies that call such nonsense into questions.
In fact, if you read down the page, you get to the following citation, which is of course used to try and discredit WUWT, but unfortunately, contradicts the earlier claims that it, or Anthony is a “denier”. According to Leo Hickman, Anthony and WUWT’s skepticism is “legitimate”.
Leo Hickman, at The Guardian’s Environment Blog, also criticized Watts’s blog, stating that Watts risks polluting his legitimate scepticism about the scientific processes and methodologies underpinning climate science with his accompanying politicised commentary.”
Feynman used the term cult to designate groups of people that continue to push a specific scientific belief that is no longer supported by observations and analysis. The cult of CAGW cannot defend the cult’s belief that the increase in CO2 will cause catastrophic warming with observations and analysis.
If it is a fact that if there is no CAGW problem to solve that is a good thing not a bad thing. All of the developed countries are deeply in debt. The green scams are very, very, expensive and do not work. There are more than billion people on the planet that lack access to electricity. Access to reliable, low cost electricity is one of the most important steps in reducing poverty and increasing people’s standard of life.
Curious the cult of CAGW does not discuss the unintentional consequences of policies connected with CAGW.
CO2 is not a poison. Life on this planet exists because of CO2, not in spite of CO2. Plants thrive when CO2 increases. Commercial greenhouses injected CO2 into their greenhouses to increase yield and reduce growing time. The optimum level of CO2 for plant life is around 1200 ppm.
Calling people who discuss peer reviewed papers and observations that disprove CAGW ‘deniers’ is a necessary cop out as the Cult of CAGW cannot defend CAGW.
The regions of the planet that warmed in the last 30 years (high latitude regions) is the same regions of the planet that warmed when solar activity was high. There has been an abrupt change to the solar cycle. There is observational evidence now of high latitude cooling. There are periods of millions of years in the paleo record when temperature is high and CO2 is low and periods when CO2 is low and the planet is warm. The planet cyclically warms and cools with the cycles of warming and cooling correlating with solar cycle changes. The past warming is not unusual based on previous warming cycles and correlates with a period of very high solar activity.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/25/yet-another-study-shows-lower-climate-sensitivity/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/17/temperature-models-vs-temperature-reality-in-the-lower-troposphere/
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-hans-von-storch-on-problems-with-climate-change-models-a-906721.html
Roy Spencer: Ocean surface temperature is not warming in the tropics.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/TMI-SST-MEI-adj-vs-CMIP5-20N-20S-thru-2015.png
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/02/tropical-ssts-since-1998-latest-climate-models-warm-3x-too-fast/
I notice Connelly does not in his blog discuss the dozens and dozens of observations that disprove CAGW. For example 1) the sudden increase in sea ice both poles, 2) the fact that there has been no warming for more than 18 years, 3) the fact that top of the atmosphere radiation analysis vs short term temperature changes shows the planet resists temperature changes rather than amplifies temperature changes, 4) the fact that there has been almost no warming in the tropical regions when the general circulation models predict that the most amount of warming due to CO2 should be in the tropics, and so on.
Actually, he was much more specific. A Cargo cult was a specific type of cult that would go though the motions of technology without any understanding of it, and be frustrated that it wouldn’t work.