Guest post by Steven Goddard
Suzanne Goldenberg recently
complained in the UK Guardian about the
ICCC (International Conference on Climate Change) global warming “deniers” :
The 600 attendees (by the organisers’ count) are almost entirely white males, and many, if not most, are past retirement age. Only two women and one African-American man figure on the programme of more than 70 speakers.
In the UK, profiling like that might be considered a hate crime if it were about any other group other than the one she described. But that isn’t the point. Below is a
photo of the vaunted
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change) taken at their last meeting. The spitting image of her description of the I
CCC. No doubt Ms. Goldenberg considers the adult white men in the I
PCC to be great visionaries, leading the noble fight against climate Armageddon.
Here are some other scientists active in climate change:
Jim Hansen:
Hansen at a climate conference in Denmark 2009.
Left to Right: Dr. Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Dr. Paul Knappenberger (President of the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum), Dr. Wally Broecker (Columbia University), and Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert (University of Chicago) pose for a photo after the first of the Global Climate Change forum. Forum I was held at the Adler Planetarium.
Is it a big surprise that most
senior scientists are adult white males? And what criteria did she use to choose the expertise of one group of prestigious scientists to the exclusion of another? Does she consider her personal climate expertise to be superior to
Dr. Richard Lindzen, to the point where she can choose to simply ignore his opinion?
Richard Siegmund Lindzen, Ph.D., (born February 8, 1940) is a Harvard trained atmospheric physicist and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen is known for his research in dynamic meteorology, especially planetary waves. He has published over 200 books and scientific papers. He was the lead author of Chapter 7 (physical processes) of the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC on global warming (2001). He has been a critic of some anthropogenic global warming theories and the political pressures surrounding climate scientists.
It is one thing to question the scientific conclusions of an organisation, and a completely different matter to make an ad hominem attack against an entire group – based on such witless criteria.
H/T to Aron for finding the article
Lucy: “I used to be daunted by the notion of a wiki being a “huge and contentious project” but have had a lot more thoughts about starting it simple.”
A major initial hurdle for an AGW sceptic wiki would be gaining agreement on some fundamental aspects of climate, such as the greenhouse effect, the present state of the climate and the reasons for warming/cooling.
In this respect, I notice that at the recent sceptic’s conference Richard Lindzen dismisses the notion of the sun as the primary driver of the current climate. As I understand it, he adopts the null hypothesis for the recent global warming, although he accepts an anthropogenic contribution to CO2 levels and agrees that increased atmospheric CO2 has had some minor warming effect.
However, the sun as primary driver seems to be a favoured position among sceptics, while a small faction seems to dispute the greenhouse effect as a whole, and the cosmic ray notion has the support of others.
Gaining a coherent foundation statement, much less a consistent scientific line from the varieties of AGW scepticism would be a major achievement.
Brendan H:
An independent inquiry has already been done.
The Wegman Report to Congress has described much of the same internal corruption within the climate peer-review and funding process that Prof. Lindzen recounts.
As expected, the AGW crowd attacked the internationally esteemed Prof. Wegman, an acknowledged expert in statistical analysis. Prof. Wegman responded to the critics in detail: click.
The first recommendation of the Wegman Report states:
But as Wegman et al. reported in great detail, the same small clique that writes the endless succession of peer-reviewed papers is the same clique that acts as the gatekeepers.
In other words, the clique approves each others’ submissions, and bars publication by others. The payoff is grant money and status, which is funnelled primarily to members of the clique.
The downside is that it ends up being propaganda; only one side gets published, and the other side is effectively silenced. That’s why outside submissions on climate studies are forced to go to geology journals and the like. They are deliberately barred from being published in climate and mainstream science journals, just as posters here are barred from being published on sites like Realclimate.
The climate science system of peer-review and publication has been gamed, and the losers are the taxpaying public and scientific truth. Honest science results from the transparent application of the Scientific Method. But there is no transparency when the gatekeepers have an agenda and control the peer-review and publication system.
I would think that anyone interested in honest science, and in a fiduciary duty to taxpayers, would welcome the exposing of these corrupt shenanigans which are endemic especially in the climate sciences. The corruption is out of control. When big public money is at stake, the taxpaying public should have more reporting of this nature, not less. Or do you think otherwise?
Brendan H (16:09:57) :
Lucy: “I used to be daunted by the notion of a wiki being a “huge and contentious project” but have had a lot more thoughts about starting it simple.”
Gaining a coherent foundation statement, much less a consistent scientific line from the varieties of AGW scepticism would be a major achievement.
Thank you Brendan. I agree it will be a major achievement, which I suspect is why although it seems like a natural idea, it has taken so long to mature and surface. The interesting thing is, it’s folk like Giles, whose endless spamming drivel that claims to be reasonable, who make me say “publish and be damned” or rather, “I’m damn well going to make the thing work” so that the Gileses can easily be pointed to agreed default statements of skeptics science and skeptical scientists in ways they cannot refute or ignore or keep denying or slandering.
I suspect a lot of us feel like that.
Jeff Alberts, I’ll visit as soon as I can manage, thanks.
Lucy Skywalker, more power to you re the wiki. I have signed up with your forum, but it/they will not send me the notification that I can join — perhaps it is my internet name. Anyway, the reason I was trying to contact you is that, in addition to recommending WUWT, I have sent your primer to a number of people. I am interested in the citations about updates to the primer. We should know when and how the basic-information-new-debates info changes. Perhaps you do this and I have not been a careful reader. Is there any reasonable way to separate your wiki from the Green World Trust? Thanks.
TonyB 12:39:00 3/15, You just gave an inspired lecture. I think you have shown Giles how hopeless is his pursuit of pseudo-science/propaganda. He obviously is paid to troll. Imagine his success — how many times was his name mentioned? Nevertheless, his scientific assertions were proven worthless over and over again — a great education for those new to WUWT. It can be irritating, but I think Anthony has figured out how to deal with trolls; few other blogs have done so this ingeniously.
Smokey: “The Wegman Report to Congress has described much of the same internal corruption within the climate peer-review and funding process that Prof. Lindzen recounts.”
No it doesn’t. The Wegman report simply traces professional relationships among a section of climate researchers, those involved in paleoclimate reconstructions. The paleoclimate scientific community is small so there’s a high likelihood that practitioners will have some professional interaction.
The Wegman Report does not establish anything like “corruption”, and in a Congressional hearing in 2006 Wegman admitted that the social relationships claim was a hypothesis and should be taken with a “grain of salt”.
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_house_hearings&docid=f:31362.wais
Importantly, the general shape of the hockey stick has been replicated in a number of studies since the original reconstruction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
Lucy: “I agree it will be a major achievement, which I suspect is why although it seems like a natural idea, it has taken so long to mature and surface.”
Well, best of luck. If you’re going to get the science right and give the wiki some authoritative credibility, you will need the backing of sceptical climate scientists, or at least their peer review. Have you approached any and, if so, what are their thoughts?
pyromancer76,
I completely agree with you re: TonyB’s excellent post @12:39:00.
Giles is almost certainly a troll. But I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt — if he will provide a complete and detailed response to TonyB’s points. All of Tony’s points.
As the saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The ball is in Giles’ court now. It’s time for Giles to put up or shut up.
Giles
I have been patient with you, but I increasingly believe that you don’t read your own links, let alone anyone elses
You said in reply to me.
“Interesting list of resources…. But you might want to check how many would be considered college (or HS) level acceptable. As well as the trotting out of typical tropes.”
* First quote in my post was from Al Gore, so I am happy to discount that.
* The next one re the Vikings were from 900 academics in history, so shall we leave that one?
* The next one was from the editors of the ecologist so lets get rid of that one.
* Perhaps you’d better tell Prof Morner to his face that his renowned work is only college level work according to Giles.
* So sea level info from NOAA is nonsense
* The comments by Kevin Trenberth of the IPCC is nonsense
* The report by the Dutch govt nonsense
* The variation of global weather stations compiled by Nasa is nonsense.
Then you said
“Given that, all I can assume is that anecdotal comments on 2 or 3 scientists is the best that can be done.”
To which I replied
“Giles, this must be the first time in the history of the English language that a comment made by the actual person concerned is considered anecdotal.”
To which you posted this link giving the meaning;
“2: based on or consisting of reports or observations of usually unscientific observers http://www.merriam-webster.com my bold”
If you want to classify Callendar and Keeling as unscientific observers I move that we strike all their works from the record.
So we’ve disposed of three major pillars of AGW (Callendar, Keeling and Gore) plus Noaa, Nasa, the IPCC, Kevin Trenberth AND you still haven’t told me how to get to a 4.5c increase through a doubling of co2 OR what period in our history had a normal climate.
It seems to me Giles that you have very nicely brought the entire edifice of ‘scientific’ AGW crashing to the ground.
Smokey, Pyromancer 76, Brenda H, Lucy, in fact ANYONE. Now Giles has done our job for us – and in the process demonstrated that some people will believe what they want to believe – including disputing all the evidence they have been claiming is from a ‘consensus’ of scientists working on a ‘settled’ science- what on earth shall we talk about now on this blog?
Smokey what did you do at the weekend?
TonyB
pyromancer76 you should now be enabled. Some of the forum’s quirks are mysterious. If you still have problems, email me via the website 🙂
TonyB,
If you’re not quoting those genius peer-reviewed IPCC scientists George Monbiot, Fed Pearce and Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian then all that science you posted is a waste of time 😉
You see, these days the youth have it so easy that any small thing like CO2 which rocks their popcorn buckets is a threat to their way of life. They’re willing to surrender their liberty and all reason for any socialist paradise that promises them that the popcorn bucket will be green and sustainable forever. Then they can sit and eat popcorn all day long without worry because the government is looking after them…and at them!
And to think that within living memory there was a generation that worried about threats like Stalin’s tanks and Hitler’s bombs. These people died on the beaches of Normandy for what? What idiots they were. A trace gas is so much more threatening!!!
Smokey what did you do at the weekend?
Reminds me of bees and wasps here. Young wasps provide older wasps with sweet food. Yes! But at the end of summer, when bees have stored their honey for the coming cold winter, wasps have no more young to feed sugar to the older ones, so they come raiding. I’ve finally banned a poster on our forum who displayed similar characteristics to Giles here. Not before he’d posted 189 times. And he did sharpen my wits for a while.
Brendan H wrote:
“AGW sceptic science as practised by the current crop has no future because it’s not attracting young, vital minds.”
But:
“Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly”
–Oscar Wilde
Brendan H wrote:
“A major initial hurdle for an AGW sceptic wiki would be gaining agreement on some fundamental aspects of climate, such as the greenhouse effect, the present state of the climate and the reasons for warming/cooling.
…………………
“Gaining a coherent foundation statement, much less a consistent scientific line from the varieties of AGW scepticism would be a major achievement.”
On the contrary, skeptics don’t need to present a unified face in order to attack CAGW theory–they only need to poke holes in it and weaken it enough so that the case for immediate mitigation is unpersuasive. I.e., so that it would prudent to wait for another five or ten years while more data is gathered and the issue is more fully debated. If the global temperature continues to plateau or to decline slightly, as it has since at least 2002, that would falsify the AGW hypothesis. (Or at least would require such severe contortions to “save the case” that its proponents would reveal themselves to have been “crying wolf” with their prior predictions. And, given their alarmist bias, would likely be continuing to do so.)
Smokey has often said that the skeptic’s side has nothing to prove–it’s the believers who must prove that the 30-year warming that’s been observed falls outside the range of natural variation, and that the upward trend culminating in about 1998-2001 will continue, rather than pause or reverse. (The burden on “catastrophic” believers, who predict an accelerating warming based on a tipping-point effect, and claim that huge taxes are needed for mitigation, is much greater.)
Decadal periods of natural variation have been observed earlier in the 20th century (warming from 1900 to 1940, cooling from 1940 to 1970). And of course there were century-long periods of natural variation earlier in the past millennium: the Medieval Warm Period, followed by the Little Ice Age. It’s not necessary for skeptics to have a well-founded theory about the cause(s) of such variations. Rather, the burden is on warmers to explain why the current upward “zig” differs from those in the past, which were followed by downward “zags,” and which were not caused by AGW.
The IPCC attributed the current warming trend to CO2 by a process of elimination. I.e., it could think of no natural cause for the trend other than CO2. But that method of reasoning also fails to account for the earlier upward “zigs” by anything other than man-made CO2, which is absurd. So the Insisters are in the same pickle as the Resisters: they can’t explain natural variation either. Therefore, it’s not incumbent upon us skeptics to do so. Getting to the bottom of climate change is apparently something that will take centuries to get a handle on. It would be presumptuous to do more than throw out a few hypotheses at this point.
Indeed, it seems to me that there needn’t be any external cause for the variation–variation might be generated internally as the means by which a system’s stability is attained. A tight-rope walker maintains his balance because he constantly counterbalances himself back-and-forth against his balance-pole. If he were forced to eliminate his wobbling and walk steadily, he would fall. (I owe this insight to an essay by a Hungarian author in a book of his odd-ball essays published within the last ten years whose title I’ve forgotten.) Similarly, in a dynamical system with long-term feedback loops and natural counter-balances and counter-counter-balances, multi-decadal zigs and zags are probably (IMO) part of an overall equilibrium. When they were not–when the zigs were extensive and multi-century extremes ensued–they were anyway not due to man-made CO2, so there’s no need for cap-and-trade.
FWIW, I think the skeptics can plausibly account for the recent warming trend as a combination of the following, in order of importance:
1. A rebound from the Little Ice Age. (See the paper by the University of Alaska professor on this topic.)
2. Oceanic oscillation cycles that were mostly set to Warm for the latter third of the 20th century. (See Roy Spencer’s paper.)
3. Urban Heat Island effects, which increased the slope of the apparent warming in the 20th century in the industrialized world beyond the reality of what actually occurred.
4. Bias, largely unconscious, in collecting, adjusting, and correcting temperature data by the data’s guardians. (For instance, mistakes on the warm side might not get “corrected” as readily as mistakes on the cold side, because the former sort of mistakes wouldn’t seem suspicious.)
Lucy Skywalker: Thanks to the link to your site. I particularly like point C of your proposal for your site’s structure, which reads:
“deconstructing the common “straw man” arguments that scientists use to discredit and discount skeptics’ issues. Possibly, this section could be the way to start to organize the whole project – a kind of FAQ to “answer the answers””
I wish I had the energy and time and expertise to contribute more to your project than making suggestions from the sidelines. I sure hope you get the help you deserve. (Here’s the link to her site again: http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Wiki.htm )
I’m going to close out my participation on this thread with a quote from Al Gore:
“The denial of global warming is persistent. After all, the denial of evolution is still common, probably more in my country than here [in the UK]. It’s fed by garden-variety denial: it’s unpleasant, people don’t want to think about it. It’s fed by a huge amount of funding from carbon special interests who have been financing these phoney, pseudo-scientific reports and they have a self-interest in sowing doubt. Doubt is their product. It’s also fed by an ideological opposition and, coming out of the 20th century, the battle against excess statism in various forms became a deeply held view – and I share that view if it’s stated properly – but some take it such an extreme that anything which implies a new regulation, or a new role for government, is automatically attacked with great veracity. And all these streams have come together to keep the denialism going, but they’re becoming less and less relevant.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/mar/16/climate-change-al-gore
Good Luck in your wiki endeavor. I’m off to teach Science classes.
Aron
“H.L.Mencken wrote:The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
I think we have lost touch with our history and believe that everything is unprecedeted if WE weren’t there to experience it, have an over reliance on theoretical science as a substitute for real knowledge, have forgotten we are a part of a natural and chaotic world because of our ability to control our immediate climate in home, car and office through precisely regulated heating and cooling, and have become more credulous as H L Mencken realised
Tonyb
TonyB,
You’ll see from Giles’ last comment that he looks to be abandoning this site. Like most from the pro-AGW point of view, he has learnt his arguments (by rote) reasonably well. He parrots IPCC and RealClimate mantra, and sounds quite convincing. He demands responses from the peer-reviewed literature (a good way of limiting the argument given the pro-AGW bias in the lit).
But as soon as you ask him to respond to some actual difficult questions – questions which aren’t on the standard list and don’t have a standard reply – questions that need some understanding to respond to – he dodges the questions, makes his excuses and leaves. Suddenly his demands for a constructive argument ring rather hollow.
Back on the original topic and Steve G’s follow up (which were very interesting), I note the wiki page (citing 32 of 34 lead authors) is not complete, but a sub sample. (There are actually a lot of lead authors of the IPCC report!) To verify these stats weren’t biased through the grey wiki process, I selected the co-ordinating lead authors (which should represent the most senior) of IPCC AR4, link here. Of 22 CLAs, I managed to confirm the gender of 21 of them through googling their CVs and photos. 1/21 are female (Hegerl). (The last unknown is Prof. Jiawen Ren from China, who I could not locate on the web – if anyone can positively confirm M/F I’d be grateful). This yields 4.8% female, as compared to 5.9% estimated from the wiki page, suggesting the wiki page seems reasonably unbiased.
I’ll use Steve’s 5.9% assumption (and round it up to 6% to give the pro-AGW folks the best chance), and see what the probability of finding 2 or less presenters in a group of 70, assuming they are from the same group. I use the binomial distribution and assume each sample is independent. I’ll set a p-value of 5% suggesting the population from which they are drawn is different.
The results are:
P(no females in 70) = 1.32%
P(one female in 70) = 5.88%
P(two females in 70) = 12.9%
So the probability of seeing 2 or fewer female speakers of 70, assuming the ICCC conference speakers are sampled from the same distribution as the IPCC co-ordinating lead authors for IPCC AR4 WG1, is 20.1%. This fails the statistical test, meaning the null hypothesis (they are from the same distribution) is accepted for this small sample.
(Of course, I have not taken into account the uncertainty in the estimates of the underlying distribution, which would widen the confidence intervals even further, and make rejection of the null even less likely).
There are other compelling explanations for the demographic of the ICCC conference; unlike the IPCC conference, the taxpayer will not be footing the bill for travel etc. to the ICCC conference, so the worldwide travel (and curiously carbon footprint) of the ICCC conference will be much less, with many more “locals”. Retired people are more likely because they don’t have to worry about their career being destroyed by calculated smears from environmental activists (and mainstream media outlets).
In summary, Suzanne Goldenberg’s analysis shows her very weak grasp at statistics, and a strong tendency to smear anything that disagrees with her narrow worldview.
Giles 06 01 38
So it is OK to quote Al Gore as an oracle when you agree with his warm words, but to ignore them when you don’t agree with his factual message of previous warm periods as quoted verbatim in my long post?
I am from the UK. Have you actually ever looked at the unsmoothed Hadley CET data back to 1660? Even in the LIA there were periods around as warm as now. If co2 is a driver it is an extremely weak one.
I note you haven’t answered my two questions. Can we assume you don’t know the answer? Can we also assume you haven’t been able to find it on any of the irrationalist blogs?
Personally I welcome your involvement here and hope you stay around, but if you pose questions you must also be willing to answer them or we will draw our own conclusions from your silence.
Hope to come across you elsewhere on this blog.
tonyb
Giles is off to teach “Science” class (as in reading a Guardian column on the bog) so moving on…
In George Monbiot’s error filled rebuttal of David Bellamy today, he makes the claim that Michael Mann’s hockey stick has been vindicated time and time again…..and then shockingly claims….that manmade global warming ended the Little Ice Age
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/mar/16/monbiot-bellamy-climate-change-denier
Here are some excerpts of Monbiot’s great scientific learning.
The most likely explanation is that the Little Ice Age came to an end as a result of manmade climate change. (no citation given, seems unaware of dates, and seems unaware of solar activity)
The first hockey-stick paper, produced by Michael Mann et al has been vindicated by several subsequent studies
But you cannot deduce from this that CO2 is not the driver of global warming today. The evidence shows comprehensively that it is. (no citation given)
Time for everyone to leave a few comments on that page to teach Monbiot a few lessons.
Thanks for the kind words from various people.
I suspect Giles was an English Teacher out of his depth, rather than a science teacher. Recalling my English lessons I remembered he was a character from Thomas Hardy ‘The Woodlanders’ where Giles was the ‘personification of a wood god’ and I seem to recall my English teacher telling me he was also some sort of puritan. So rather a good name (or perhaps his mother just liked Hardy!)
I think the episode shows that there are three areas where blind faith can take over objective reasoning (whereby you arrive at a position after having thought about it). Those include religion, politics and philospohical life style choices.
However, those who have such blind faith in the AGW story are every bit as irrational as those on ‘our’ side who just don’t believe the AGW saga because they don’t like rules, the govt, Al Gore, or haven’t thought about it much, but are just sure ‘THEY’ are wrong.
It is useful to distance ourselves from this grouping as they tar everyone with the same brush with their off the cuff comments. I am sure Giles came over here thinking we were all knuckle dragging neanderthals who just hadnt ‘thought’ what we were doing and could be ‘saved’ if things were explained slowly to us.
We should be aware that those such as Mary Hinge and Joel Shore are of much sterner mettle and believe in the science, and personally I always welcome their posts here, but find them often unwilling to engage on history.
Their mantra is that ‘this time its different’ in order to minimise the increasingly obvious reality that todays climate is not ‘unprecedented’.
However, historical precedent is obviously important or Dr Mann and others wouldn’t be trying so hard to to subvert it. 🙂
Tonyb
Buncha ancient Boomers. Why am I not surprised? Yeah I know, wisdom supposedly comes with age and all that. But Xers are now in our 40s and late 30s. So it’ not like we’re still kids. Some of my brethren are already grand parents.
Roger Knight: “On the contrary, skeptics don’t need to present a unified face in order to attack CAGW theory…”
That sounds like an argument for natural variation without specifying any particular cause. That position would probably be the best bet for sceptics, but the devil is always in the details.
For example, some supporters of natural variation, such as Richard Lindzen, also accept that recent increases in atmospheric CO2 are man-made and have caused some warming. However, others like Roy Spencer seem more doubtful about the composition of the increase, while Tim Ball argues that pre-industrial levels of CO2 may have been higher than today.
So it might be difficult to gain agreement on some fundamental aspects of climate science.
The sceptic wiki proposal also includes the possibility of an evaluation of “current theories both inside and outside the official position”, and a “space for original research…”. These are very ambitious aims.
I like your tight-rope walker analogy, though, except that if the balance pole were to become, well, unbalanced, the tight-rope walker could find himself at an unwelcome tipping point.
I have been visiting and appreciating your blog for some time and your contributors almost always provide solid scientific fact to counter the propaganda spewed out by the AGW alarmists.
It is possible however that some may be overlooking a most important point. AGW is not a science based debate, it is a religion. In some ways we are fortunate to be around to observe the birth of a new global religion; it hasn’t happened since Islam was founded more than 1400 years ago.
Just like the believers in any religion, the believers in AGW do not need or care for scientific debate. Their belief is faith based and, as such, is threatened when the bright light of scientific inquiry is shone on it.
So when genuine scientists offer evidence that contradicts their views, they’re not listening.
Think of the case of the Shroud of Turin. For centuries the faithful were convinced that the Shroud was indeed the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. When carbon dating proved that it was a medieval construction, it did not stop a significant number of the faithful continuing to revere the Shroud as they always had done.
The same is true of many of the adherents to the belief in AGW. It doesn’t really matter if their claims are proven wrong either by science or experience, (note the failure of the earth to continue warming since 1998) their faith is unshakeable.
The only way to combat these folks is on religious grounds by, for example, pointing out to them that their beliefs are anti-human and anti-social. Ultimately, their argument leads to the conclusion that there are just too many people in the world, the corollary of which is that the solution to the problem must be genocide.
When they understand that they are intellectually the equivalent of Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, say, they might become more inclined to listen to science and abandon the whole AGW circus.
“I am sure Giles came over here thinking we were all knuckle dragging neanderthals (sic)who just hadnt (sic) ‘thought’ what we were doing and could be ’saved’ if things were explained slowly to us.”
Actually, not so much. The major point of curiosity and research was what science would be cited. My classes later analyzed comments from several sites; science, newspaper, and those of this genre for resource quality and logical fallacies.
I think you misread the character analysis on GW, or misremembered your Lit teacher. By a long shot.