Many readers have commented about their experiences at Real Climate with posts being deleted and being run over roughshod by hostile comments there. I was sent this YouTube link by a WUWT web affiliate, and as I was watching it, it occurred to me that the phrase “tightly controlled” really describes the Real Climate methodology.
Watch Helen Thomas at the end. For those of you who don’t know Helen Thomas, may I suggest reading up on her. She’s a fixture with the White House Press Corp and her statements to Robert Gibbs are simply stunning. Helen mentioned “openness and transparency”, from my view she could have just as easily been talking about Michael Mann and his famous “censored” FTP folder discovered by McIntyre.
Now if we can just get Andy Revkin to ask questions like Chip Reid and Helen Thomas, we might get somewhere.
Now every time I think of Chip Reid, I’ll think of Real Climate’s “tightly controlled” environment.
I should add that I’ve experienced the same thing at RC, valid questions I have posed have been wholesale deleted personally by Gavin Schmidt. I’ve kept a record and screencaps of such things, I would suggest that you all do the same.
Deleting rude comments or comments that are badly OT or inflaming is one thing, but when you start deleting valid scientific questions posed by people in your circle of interest, it doesn’t take long for all of those individually affected to start comparing notes.
RC seems to have a small following of the same people that make up a core group, but when you examine the web statistics, it seems obvious that such a strategy is failing their primary mission of reaching out to people:
My blue stats start in October of last year because that is when I started the full domain name. Prior to that they are in the olive green color plot. In both reach and traffic, WUWT grows and RC declines.
Here is the URL to see for yourself:
http://alexa.com/siteinfo/wattsupwiththat.com+realclimate.org+%20wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com
Of course, these are unadjusted numbers so any conclusion drawn from them may be premature. Best to wait for the adjusted data set.
UPDATE: Since there is some confusion in comments, I’m adding this. That first graph is a “top sites” graph, with sites like Google and iTunes and Amazon being at the very top. It shows where WUWT and RC exist in the “top sites” pecking order. WUWT is now somewhere around the top 30,000 web sites while RC has fallen below the top 100,000 mark. – Anthony
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I still want to nominate Gary Strand to debate Lord Monckton if Jim Hansen isn’t available.
P.S.: I’m 49 and I remember the global cooling scare from the 1970’s very well.
Gary Strand (19:34:33) :
I’ve never presented myself as a climate scientist.
wattsupwiththat (19:52:51) :
REPLY: to Gary 7:34 I can vouch for Gary on that – Anthony
Sorry, I never accused Gary of being a climate scientist (sheesh, can you picture it? “There’s a climate scientist among us! Get out the tar! Get the Feathers!”) I think Gary does what he does very well – and he can correct our misconceptions on the models when we go off the deep end. But I’m just not going to defend the conclusions of the warehouse manager when he claims that X kilos of lemon oil were “consumed” when my analysis showed that only X-y were consumed in production. Even when I wrote the program that the manager cites in his defense.
“You handed me the spec, bozo.”
My point here is, don’t blame Gary for the model; Gary, don’t feel obliged to defend the model. If any of our complaints and criticisms are good enough, maybe you can suggest to the guys who design the models that something should be changed or incorporated. Or, you can tell a critic, “this code segment was designed to handle just the exception you were complaining about…”
I can recall taking flack from a certain VP of Operations who wanted to know why a certain inventory report was giving misleading results. The answer, of course, was “you supplied the parameters, Dufus. I told you early on that the data was not collected that way.” Uh, I finally met the same fate as EcoChemist. When the results don’t match the projection, fire the programmer.
Jimmy Haigh (20:10:30) :
I still want to nominate Gary Strand to debate Lord Monckton if Jim Hansen isn’t available.
Hah! Keep the debate focussed on models and how they are implemented, my money is on Gary. Talk about the validity of forcings…. I like Monckton, but he sometimes goes off the deep end (Lucia had several threads on his analysis of IPCC parameters).
Re EcoChemist and Ann’s new friend,
Great story / moral / present reality check.
However the animal backed into a corner is about to destroy most all of what we have achieved so far.
Offering a soft landing may well be like trying to pacify a great white shark by hand feeding it with a mackeral held at arms length, whilst swimming in the same murky water as the shark..
I believe we HAVE to have more definate action before the unfolding disaster that Copenhagen WILL BE otherwise.
rephelan (22:06:45) :
My reason for nominating Gary Strand to debate Lord Monckton is from the following comment he made on another thread:
” – citing Monckton? Give me a break. He’s a joke.”
Anyway who would want to debate climate models? (I wonder what they’ll do with them once AGW is finally put to rest once and for all?) This is a scientific issue and the (hypothetical) debate would be about AGW. Monckton would wipe the floor with Strand. I reckon he’d wipe the floor with Hansen too.
But the debate won’t happen. The AGW side don’t do debates. They don’t need to. The ‘science’ is settled.
Why is there such an insistence on some kind of face-to-face debate between one side and the other? I don’t understand that.
Gary I think it has to do with Al Gore’s refusal to take interview questions at any of his 100,000 dollar lectures, (its in his speaking contract, section 9C) to allow members of the press there (its in his speaking contract, section 9A) or to address the science errors in his movie, such as the Mount Kilimanjaro melting which is really all about sublimation due to lack of evapotranspiration related to deforestation around the mountain. Gore needs a reality check, badly, but he knows he’ll lose any such challenge, and thus his lucrative gravy train of speaking engagements, so he hides from the challenge.
Gore’s bad example of one-sided soapboxing calls for a debate, and much of that gets transferred to other potential dustups I think. Add to that Alan Carlin’s treatment by the EPA and it gets amplified. Gore won’t debate, since he’d lose and he knows it, so Hansen is the next logical candidate, and it spreads from there.
You see Gary, there’s a lot of people that think computer modeling just isn’t a reliable way of divining the future, and much of the current global warming hysteria is from Hansen and “model zero” et al. plus Michael Mann and his ridiculous hockey stick. Mann’s obtuse math is falsified. He won’t debate anyone either, again he knows he’d lose once the work of McIntyre and McKittrick was raised in the debate. Mann won’t even bring himself to say McIntyre’s name in some instances. Mann fouled up lat/lot in data but can’t bring himself to correct it. My notes above are a tip of the iceberg on Mann’s mistakes, yet he has yet to correct a single one. This is not science. He also goes on record saying that Professor McKittrick and Steve McIntyre are “not scientists” even though they published a paper clearly mathematically refuting Mann’s math and statistical analysis. That’s how badly he fears the questions, he has to denigrate the people asking questions rather than address them. It is a common tactic we’ve seen. You yourself have employed it here.
Hansen offered to debate last month, but only on the subject of coal mining/ mountaintop removal. He has refused calls for debate about GISS, his modeling, or anything else.
Here’s why skeptics want debate. Science is supposed embrace challenges to hypothesis. That’s how it advances. Einstein said it only took one person to prove him wrong. These three won’t embrace debate, they won’t take questions, and they have a disdain for those who ask questions in spite of their isolation.
Jim Hansen referred to people like Steve McIntyre and myself as “court jesters” when we pointed out an error in GISTEMP. Einstein would have never done that, he would have said thank you and fixed it. Einstein was a man of integrity. James Hansen is not. Michael Mann is not, Gore most certainly is not.
All these men conduct their science in the public eye, but is goes beyond that, they seek out and embrace the public media to get their word out. Yet when the public wants to question them, they duck the questions, citing them as irrelevant, or in most case, don’t allow the questions to be publicly asked of them at all in their presence.
Science, especially popular public science that cannot be challenged, isn’t really science at all. People like myself and the thousands of WUWT regular readers see this, I hope that you are capable of seeing it also. Based on your own refusal to answer even the simplest of questions here, citing them as “irrelevant, my guess is that you won’t, but would prefer to enhance the fortifications of castle NCAR against the public horde.
Maybe you can call out over the castle walls and say “come to the gate and we’ll talk” rather than release buckets of hot lead. Bring Caspar Amman with you if you come to the gate. – Anthony Watts
Gary Strand,
You’ve got it backward. The question is: Why do the AGW purveyors absolutely run and hide from a debate?
If they honestly believed what they’re selling, they would be anxious to debate. Instead, they’re afraid. The fact that they hide out from any moderated debate in a neutral venue shows that they know they’re trying to sell a pig in a poke.
Gary Strand (08:22:10) :
Gordon Bennett!!!!! He’s back.
The debate is being done in the journals, guys. That may not be as emotionally satisfying, but that’s the way it’s done. So, submit your work for publication and let it be peer-reviewed. Science isn’t done on blogs, sorry.
PS – This isn’t high school debate class, you know.
REPLY: Exactly the response I expected from you. I gave you a chance to bridge the divide, and you chose to denigrate me by comparing it to high school debate class. You had to get that last dig in rather than leaving it alone. See here’s the problem with peer review, its an old boys club, which is why M&M ended up in E&E rather than BAMS or Journal of Climate. They sent it around. Nobody wanted to challenge Mann, because to do so challenges their own place in the system.
You aren’t any more capable of embracing debate or answering questions than the three men I named. From my view that makes you bereft of integrity. Build up those walls at NCAR Gary. Fortify your cubicle. But if you don’t want to take questions head on (so far you haven’t, you dance with deflection) maybe you should frequent another blog. Seriously. You do nothing but denigrate me and others here at every opportunity.
“science isn’t done on blogs” Yet, here you are. And that outdated notion will be disproven soon. Science is not done on the Gutenberg press and its derivatives, its is done by communication of ideas and challenges to ideas. The paper journal medium isn’t exclusive any longer. – Anthony
The questions to which you wanted answers, Anthony, were completely irrelevant. You might as well have asked what color my eyes are. That I didn’t answer speaks nothing of my integrity – and that you pin my integrity on something so silly speaks far more of your own.
Is the peer-reviewed system perfect? Of course not – but that’s not an excuse to attempt to short-circuit it and post a ridiculously short and cursory analysis and call it “science”. You can call it an “old boys network”, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. If you want to have some credibility, you gotta go where the real scientists do, and meet their standards. If your ideas are truly good and correct, then they will out. Whining about the procedure gets you absolutely nowhere, and won’t make anyone take you seriously.
And, what I do here isn’t science. Neither is what you do.
I’ve not seen much here that would meet even the most minimal standards of even the most forgiving genuine journal.
REPLY: Ah the old “irrelevant therefore I won’t answer defense” Find a new one, that’s worn out. It’s relevant because I’m writing on perceptions of people who haven’t experienced things first hand. First hand experience has weight. In a court of law first hand experience has more weight than researched opinion. Petersen et al and Oreskes take the issue of 1970’s global cooling into the courts of public opinion.
As you pointed out (and I backed you up on) you never claimed you were a climate scientist.
I never claimed WUWT to be a “genuine journal”, that’s your claim, and again made only so that you can use it as a tool to denigrate. Look at the mast head. In the near future, online journals with online peer review will likely exceed that of paper journals. Blogs, in their infancy now, may very well evolve to fill that gap. Right now peer review is being practiced online whether you embrace the idea or not.
The problem of climate debate is tribal in nature. Closed minds like yours that refuse to consider others questions or ideas “seriously” seem to be the norm in the climate community. It is an example of an “us against them” tribal protectionism.
As for people taking me and/or WUWT seriously, they have and do. For example, NCDC would not have invited me to speak and visit for two days last year if they thought I was irrelevant. Without this blog and the support of its readers that would never have happened. There are many more examples you don’t know about because I’ve chosen not to publicize them. You are making an assumption from an outsider view.
There has been some excellent science done here. For example Ryan O’s analysis of the flawed Steig et al paper, which is another Michael Mann statistical math mess. But feel free to ignore it, as you have everything else.
Unfortunately your dogma refuses to allow any admission or agreement with the criticism of Steig et al.
I worry not what your opinion is, since the success of this blog, its reach, and subsequent projects, don’t rely upon it. As for my suggestion that you find another blog, I think that’s a good idea. Your whole purpose here seems to be denigration. – Anthony
BTW regarding Gary, I would ad that I’m not “whining about procedure” I’m only pointing out that M&M went down the path, and the path was rigged to guide them to a scholarly dead end. Politics is a part of peer review.
– Anthony
The host should show a little more courtesy to his guests as well.
Mod, feel free to snip this comment. That will just prove my point.
Oh dear. Is that our Gary resorting to the ad hominems then? What a surprise.
Come on Gary – you can do better than that! Don’t deprive us of our weekend entertainment!
Why is there such an insistence on some kind of face-to-face debate between one side and the other? I don’t understand that.
Well . . .
–There isn’t a lot of balance on the news.
–There’s a lot of money at stake.
–“Our side” thinks it can win.
“Who is Caspar Amman?” I asked myself. So I Googled myself an answer. This is from his homepage – his Rersearch overview.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/ResearchOverview.html
“Methinks tis very like a hockey stick!”
How do they get away with it?
Anthony still wants to play the man, not the ball. Why?
What “Ryan O” needs to do is publish his work in Nature – because CA, and WUWT, and so on, aren’t credible. Anthony’s endless personal attacks on me are one reason why, plus the needless and silly “piling on” from anonymous posters that’s actively encouraged.
It’s unfortunate that any criticism of WUWT is viewed as “denigration” – because to do real science, you have to have a pretty thick skin, as one’s ideas have to meet the meatgrinder of the views of others. If I, not a scientist, can easily see the flaws in the blogs-as-science model that Anthony wants, then the idea will get no traction in the real science world.
BTW, WUWT will gain credibility when/if Anthony publishes the result of his “surfacestations” project in a reputable journal.
REPLY: Thick skin? Oh crimony Gary. Do a search on my name and any number of foul words. I had one person who thinks my surfacestations project was so bad that she wrote a letter to the editor of my local paper saying that “I should conduct an experiment on CO2 with my obviously large SUV (she doesn’t know what I drive) in my garage with the door closed” (not knowing CO/CO2 difference). She was a member of the local “Peace and Justice Center” who had to write a public apology.
Your denigrations are piddling compared to what’s been thrown at me. I’m just trying to get you to drop the ad homs and snark and deal with questions posed to you. You refuse. You say this blog is irrelevant, yet you persist here.
As for the paper, we’ll see if my theory of the “old boys” network rings true. – Anthony
Jimmy, you’re not doing WUWT any favors with your posts.
REPLY: nor does yours Gary – A
Assignment for Gary Strand.
Read this and write a book report for us:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
If you really are interested in how science is conducted at the peer review level, then this a must read. If you dismiss it with the wave of a hand as irrelevant, you’ll be proving my case. I expect you to be able to argue this issue if you don’t agree with it. – Anthony
Jimmy Haigh (10:56:19) :
This is a great exposé of Caspar Amman: click
Smokey (11:09:02) :
Thanks for this link to Amman’s ‘work’.
As I’ve said before, I’m a newcomer on WUWT so I have missed a lot of the machinations which have gone one before. I’ve had a quick look through the link you gave but will need to spend some time on it to really get to grips with it all.
It beggars belief. But, then again, seeing as it’s “climate science”, it doesn’t.
It certainly isn’t science, as I practice it.
Complaining about letters to the editor (!) while at the same time claiming that Hansen (and others, including myself) have no integrity (because, in my case, I wouldn’t tell you how old I was [!]) just indicates a double standard on your part, Anthony.
This blog is indeed irrelevant – in terms of the advancement of the science, unless and until the equivalent work is published in a peer-reviewed journal of suitable relevance and stature. You should know that tossing out a few graphs and a few ill-tempered comments about specific individuals doesn’t meet reputable journal standards, and for good reasons.
REPLY: Gary you are entertaining for sure. You said I needed a “thick skin”, I cite examples far worse than your denigrations to show that indeed I’ve endured much criticism, and you go off on an illogical tangent.
So here’s the deal. Read the posting I just cited as an assignment. No more comments from you until after you’ve read it.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
Feel free to cite this blog as being irrelevant, but don’t comment again until your assignment is finished and you write a report for us. – Anthony
Gary Strand (11:05:11) :
Jimmy, you’re not doing WUWT any favors with your posts.
Hi Gary!
I’ve got more important things to do than to waste precious CO2 arguing with you – I’m off to bed.
Why don’t you go to Ammann directly?
I realize that the “hockey stick” is the alpha and omega of skeptics.
REPLY: Because like you, Amman dismisses this “irrelevant” blog and the McIntyre’s CA blog with the wave of the hand. Elitism has its perks. – Anthony
The complaint that Ammann et.al. dismiss you because they’re “elitist” when you “assign homework” is rather silly.
You’re certainly free to run your blog however you want, but to have that sort of behavior and then claim that the “right people” don’t take it seriously, well, the problem isn’t them, it’s you and how you run your blog.
Gary Strand (11:04:47) :
“What “Ryan O” needs to do is publish his work in Nature – because CA, and WUWT, and so on, aren’t credible. Anthony’s endless personal attacks on me are one reason why, plus the needless and silly “piling on” from anonymous posters that’s actively encouraged.”
Guilt by association is not a good tactic, son, and easy to identify. You haven’t been at your game long enough. Fallacies such as you regularly practice require skill and practice to be effective. Someday you might get good enough at it to be an editor at Nature though.
REPLY: No more on Gary, we await his report on “Caspar and the Jesus paper”. We’ll pickup this thread after he posts a report on it. – Anthony
I’m not going to respond to “Bishop Hill”‘s blog post, so I guess I’m done here.
Oh, and “GlennB”, you’re part of the problem – an anonymous poster making unfounded accusations, and being hypocritical to boot.
I’ll let you figure out how.
REPLY: Well Gary, it is your loss. But I do give you one thing. Your willingness to put your name to your opinion is something I respect.
Unfortunately, by not looking at the “Caspar Amman and the Jesus Paper” you not only reveal your own biases, but do the taxpayers of the United States (you know, your employers) a disservice by not even bothering to determine if the failures of the federally funded organization you work in have any merit.
Another dismissal by wave of the hand from the NCAR castle. I suppose then we’ll have take another tack. – Anthony
I should say though Gary, you are welcome to comment again if you change your mind.
Refusal to read and report on an essay that is germane to the organization you represent here (NCAR) seems exceptionally closed minded. But then we’ve seen this already from Caspar Amman and others in climate science.
“Irrelevance” is a choice you make. I’ll be visiting NCAR soon, I’ll be sure to drop by with a copy for you. – Anthony
So I ask you all this: What venue are we giving Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and even Al Gore to come clean? We are as much to blame because these people are like cornered rats. We, in the community, offer little to no option of admitting fault. We like to act like we are seekers of truth, but in the end we come off as arrogant intellectuals trying to “one up” each other quite often. I’m sure many will take issue with this statement by arguing that “pride has nothing to do with facts” or some such thing. However, at the end of the day we all care about how others look at us and don’t want to suffer humiliation.
I have seen Stephen Hawkins discuss in length his errors….and there are some pretty good stories about Einstein and his admission of being dead wrong about quantum physics “God does not play dice with universe” a statement he later admitted was wrong.
With climatologists the lack of humility is interfering with the scientific method.
Being able to admit error is a hallmark of a good scientist. The inability to admit error is the mark of a bad one.