We’ve all pretty much had it up to our keesters with the brusque and dismissive treatment that commenters who don’t agree with the RC world view get over there. This is why many of us have simply given up trying, there’s no point in attempting to have a relevant and open discussion there anymore.
It should be foremost on the minds of many that the RealClimate.org webserver domain is funded by Fenton Communications, an eco media group. Further, our tax dollars pay the salaries of people like Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS who has been (according to several post and comment times noted) using his taxpayer paid time at work to participate in that blog.
One of the missions of RC (Actually most of the mission, as it was setup as a response to the McIntyre and McKitrick paper in E&E, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT VOLUME 14 NUMBER 6, November 1st 2003) is to counter skeptical arguments. One of the ways they do this in to provide a list of people they disagree with, with links to rebuttals.
Long before RC went online, we have this 10/31/2003 email from Michael Mann, excerpt:
Lets let our supporters in higher places use our scientific response to push the broader case against MM. So I look forward to peoples attempts to revise the first part in particular.
Steve McIntyre started ClimateAudit on 10/26/2004. Here is his very first blog post.
RealClimate.org was registered November 19th, 2004 – see the WHOIS screencap.
Today, while searching for something else, I found myself looking at this list. It reads like a who’s who of climate skeptics, but for one telling and glaring omission…
Here’s the list at RCWiki done as a screencap below and to a PDF file , so that Gavin or Mike or some other team member can’t fix it fast and then claim I “simply didn’t see it”.
Steve McIntyre is missing. Ross McKitrick is missing.
Why?
Because Gavin and Mike and the other Team members know that M&M is right, and they don’t want to draw any attention to it themselves, particularly now. They don’t want RC to have a discussion on the faulty dendro and dubious statistical issues that are fairly presented in peer review by M&M, even though there has been a concerted effort by Team members and associates to stifle publication of dissenting views.
RC and in particular Mann, don’t want to focus on the data, statistical failures, or process, but instead on the “stolen emails” and how they “don’t change the conclusion”. It’s spin cycle science.
A way RC might try to spin this omission would be to say that they don’t consider the argument of M&M valid or prominent, but that won’t fly because they have dismissals listed there of arguments many lesser known skeptics, who have not published a peer reviewed paper, such as Lucy Skywalker. That’s nothing against you Lucy, just an example.
Inarguably, McIntyre and McKitrick are now the two most well known skeptics on the planet, and they are about to become even more well known with a Fox News special tonight.
Yet RC’s world view of Climategate and M&M’s vindication in the emails revealed is to say “it doesn’t matter”, it doesn’t change the conclusions of climate science.” Yeah right, just keep singing that tune.
What Climategate shows more than anything is that the climate science process has been corrupted by a few people with influence, and RC is the centerpiece for showcasing the Team consensus of that corruption.
UPDATE: I made chronology typo in the original posting, fixed within minutes thanks to many commenters who pointed it out. – Anthony
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It’s interesting, isn’t it? I noticed just a few days ago that Steve M was missing from that list. And Lucy: Did you see they use Tamino’s lame response (with the airport in Barrow as “proof”…) to your Arctic post against you?
Inspired by this article, I just went over to RC, clicked on the first link that caught my interest and found this:
“Skeptic Argument”: “Models are unreliable”
“What the Science Says”: “While there are uncertainties with climate models, they successfully reproduce the past and have successfully predicted future climate change.” (my emphasis)
I think everyone here will agree with me when I say: [snip]?
PaulH (11:19:57) :
It is not just Fenton Communications – The Tide Foundation and Tide Corporation are also involved in “leveraging” the PR budget …
http://extrinsic.blog.com/2009/12/03/climategate-behind-the-screen/
My first post on the timing error evidently got dumped as redundant after the correction, which is fine, but the point I made in the later part of my comment still needs to be raised. The Mann email went out the day BEFORE M&M’s paper first appeared in print which indicates to me that, despite all the efforts to derogate it over the years, Mann realized how significant and dangerous the paper was to his work and how urgent the necessity of countering it quickly was.
Soon after ClimateGate appeared, when RC opened up their commenting to just about everyone (for a very short time). I was finally able to post a few comments over there and began asking a few questions. Someone had made mention about the Fenton Communications link to RC, and another mentioned the George Soros connection. Gavin Schmidt submitted a directly pointed comment completely denouncing any ties to George Soros. I then tried to take advantage of their new, but short-lived, “open door policy”. I compiled a rather lengthy and very comprehensive comment illustrating all of the ties of RC to Fenton, others, and finally Soros. Funny, their “open door policy” sure slammed closed on me quite suddenly. My comment was not allowed, and I was thenceforth summarily dismissed and ignored. No further comments from me were considered.
I found it quite telling.
Lubos Motl and Lucia Liljegren are not there either.
“and RC is the centerpiece for showcasing the Team consensus of that corruption.”
Most everyone who visits here knows of RC’s role in the Team’s advocacy of AGW and their participation in the greater fraud displayed by CRU-Leak.
What’s happening now is as bad as any malfeasance to date.
RC, soon after the CRU-leak, became the source and distribution point for the misrepresentation of the scandal and it’s meaning.
Along with flat out misrepresentation by RC contributors and hosts is a primary method of delivering it. Call it value added disinformation. Long used by RC and particularly useful in misrepresenting the fallout over CRU-Leak.
I have followed, read and engaged RC for a long time. Long after most would get disgusted and stop bothering.
This value added disinformation, fraud, is a process where RC moderators, Gavin and Eric not only make sure they deliver the disinformation but they shape and censor the discussion to create a false appearance and impression of heavily lopsided substance.
They rig conversations to appear open and frank.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The premiere example is the skeptic’s post which asks a reasonable question. One or more of the RC thugs such as Ray Ladbury would respond with a critique of the motivation behind the question while including a refutation of a supposed premise. In follow up the skeptic gets specific, provides a basis and asks again. The RC thug or thugs then pile on more mistreatment, dispute the premise they earlier created, and avoid the growing substance from the skeptic. This is where the value added moderator’s role (Gavin or Eric) comes in.
Gavin or Eric will allow the discussion to grow to this point only.
When the skeptic attempts to rebut the RC thugs, his more substantive post is blocked by Gavin or Eric.
The entire discussion is then truncated by the thugs declaring that the skeptic left in defeat with nothing more to add.
Gavin, having severed the skeptic’s participation, lets this stand.
The exchange becomes a contrived demonstration for readers to be impressed with how little the skeptics have and how overwhelming the Team’s science is.
The reason virtually all of the more damning substance is no where to be found on RC is it is prohibited. It’s been blocked, censored and distorted in cold blooded propagandizing by the Team.
Again, this deceit has long been used by RC. It is particularly useful in misrepresenting the fallout over CRU-Leak and for providing the rank and file (and journalists) with fodder for dimissing the scandal.
The most caustic RC contributor, Ray Ladbury works for NASA-GISS.
http://radhome.gsfc.nasa.gov/radhome/us/Ray.htm
It’s interesting that realclimate, being run on taxpayer time by a taxpayer funded organization, engages in routine censorship of views simply because they disagree with those views.
Niels A Nielsen (12:28:22) :
“Lubos Motl and Lucia Liljegren are not there either.”
It looks like it’s great to be on the list but even better not to be! If you are not on the list you are clearly a threat…
Shakespeare said it first…
After Climategate, RC also rushed to add a list of data sources. They omit to list the data whose release has been refused.
Fenton Communications has mastered the art of “Astroturfing”. Astroturfing is where you create artificial “grass roots” movements (Astroturf is artificial grass). It began with the Alar apple scare. They called a meeting of “activists” from around the country and got together a plan where instead of creating a single large organization, it would be better to create several small organizations with different names. It would make it appear more like a spontaneous appearance of people in different places opposed to the same thing. Rather than having a list of one organization, they would have a list of dozens of smaller organizations they could point to in order to make that brand of activism appear more popular than it actually is.
Fenton then acts as trainer and coordinator. The coach people on how to get interviews, how to control the interview, they keep the various organizations “on message” and take a catchy phrase, e.g. “speak truth to power” , and spread it across the various groups. They prevent the groups from making cross-invalidating statements, keep them “on message” and working toward their goals.
Fenton Communications was the PR agent for Larry Johnson who heckled Donald Rumsfeld in a press conference and was within 48 hours on all the talking head shows getting out the anti-Iraq war message.
Fenton creates press packages for issues. They manage a journalists experience at a protest. A journalist can simply write the article from the press package provided by Fenton and Fenton makes a big deal of having “friendly” journalists at many major media outlets eager to get out the “progressive” message.
Win Without Wars, Veterans for Peace, Code Pink, Larry Johnson, Cindy Sheehan … all clients of Fenton Communications and there are dozens more. When they decide to get involved in an issue, the first thing they do is go out and create a bunch of “grass roots” organiztions that they manage.
Funding for these groups often comes from the Tides Foundation. Tides Foundation is interesting because it is designed to hide an individual donor’s contribution to any specific group. You can donate to Tides and earmark your donation to a specific group. Tides then takes your donation, mixes it with others also earmarking donations to that group, and makes one bulk donation to the target organization. The organization shows “Tides” as a donor. Tides shows the individuals as donors to Tides but is not required to keep track of who donated to what. It is “donation laundering”. That way donors can be kept distanced from the organizations they donate to and their backing can be kept secret.
Whenever I see Fenton connected to something, I know it is bogus and politically oriented. Fenton’s mission is to advance the “progressive” movement. They don’t give a rat’s pair of hips about tne environment beyond how they can leverage it to advance their political cause.
The Team thinks of themselves as omnipotent. The reality is that they a just a bunch of naive college professors who are waaaay out of their league. Fenton hoodwinked them into believing that they could control information through a modified Saul Alinsky PR strategy. I think the team is now realizing that this strategy has destroyed their careers might send some of them to jail. Mann has got to be in a full blown panic right now. In an attempt to save himself, he’s going to start throwing everyone under the bus including the good Doctor Schmidt.
As for Fenton, they will simply move on and find a new set of convenient idiots.
Consider it a life lesson Dr Mann.
Anthony
Climate Audit was setup in late February 2005, but the posts start in late 2004 because Steve had started climate2003.com (using his own knowledge of html) and I transferred those posts over to the new weblog Climate Audit, backdating them to 2004 when they were originally published.
CA was setup (at my urgent prompting) because of the very slick presentation of falsehoods on RealClimate, which was getting prebuttal of MM05 in the blogosphere while Steve and Ross waited silently for publication in Geophysical Research Letters (remember when people did that?) and because climate2003.com looked so bad I feared people would confuse Steve’s html presentation skills for his statistical and scientific skills.
Back then, the mere fact that McIntyre and McKitrick were even being published in GRL was itself big news because of the stranglehold on the literature being attempted by the Hockey Team (and now revealed in the Climategate letters)
Certainly RealClimate was setup by Mann, Schmidt and Connelley to try and trash McIntyre and McKitrick and defend the “consensus” that we know was confabulated through smear and intimidation as the ClimateGate emails show.
Up until very recently, Mann wouldn’t even mention the dread words “Steve McIntyre” and even resorted to citing the New York Times’ Antonio Regalado rather than cite “McIntyre and McKitrick (GRL, 2005)”, a classic fear response from someone who believed he could control reality.
Realclimate was setup, as you say, by Fenton Communications but funding comes from the Environmental Defense Fund.
It all feels like a long time ago. A lot has changed and the Climate of Fear isn’t what it was, but the wounded Beast that is Climate Alarmism won’t lie down quietly and die until governments, agencies and NGOs stop feeding it.
Neither do RC mention the online East Anglia emails website – as strong a skeptic’s voice as any!
If you’re interested in raw GHCN land data(15Gb) and straight-forward analyses, drop by http://justdata.wordpress.com I’m still trying to find a warming trend, other than the 30-year PDO cycle. Anyone with ideas on where the trend is hiding, feel free to post a comment/suggestion. I have downloaded the raw ocean data(45Gb), and hope to plow through it over the holiday.
I am having problems getting on to RC.
Can someone please tell me what the Fox News Special about Climate change is called. I want to record it but cannot find it. I should be at 3pm Monday NZ time but my TV planner says that is a Hannity time slot.
Thanks in advance
RC has taken the wiki down…hmmm
Espen (12:23:22) : Lucy: Did you see they use Tamino’s lame response (with the airport in Barrow as “proof”…) to your Arctic post against you?
No, I’m not even going to look until I need to!
Also not mentioned: Ken Gregory, Alan Cheetham, Ole Humlum, Tom Segalstad, Jeff Id, RomanM,
H*** no theyv’e just taken that page down! Just as I was gonna use it!
They’ve ripped the whole website down!
Looks like RC is having server trouble. Right now, I’m getting 404s on everything except http://www.realclimate.org/, which gives “It works!” on an otherwise blank screen, as if they’re reinstalling the server.
Your Tax Dollars At Work:
By giving to Tides Foundation, EPA can send US tax dollars to various radical enviro/political organizations and keep the exact targeting of their donations a secret.
When someone originally told me about this site I was immediately suspicious just because of the NAME of the site. I’ve found that anyone who has to name their site “real truth” or “legitimate legal stuff” generally does so because there’s something illegitimate about it and they somehow think that using terms like “real” in the name will convince people that “hey, we’re the REAL people you should listen to.”
The bits of one or two posts they read seemed to read something like “well some people say blabla, but every real scientist knows xyz. And it’s really complex so we can’t explain it all here but blablabla.” Somehow that qualifies as “debunking” sort of like constantly repeating stuff about “massive evidence” and “scientific consensus” without offering any hard proof at all.
Oh cool – it looks like RealClimate is down. Their home page simply says It works and others return 404 (not found) errors.
Rampant speculation time, but not from me.
I wonder if this is significant?
http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/2b2355cd73.jpg
Real Climate is reporting ‘It Works’ on their main page.
Whats up with RC? It just says “It works”