Gosh, according to Leftfootforward, we skeptics are just a step away from global media domination. I suppose it didn’t occur to the people that researched this and drew up the network diagram that both sides are about equal in the “networking”. Yet only one side is “bad”.
“A fascinating new study commissioned by Oxfam and produced by digital mapping agency Profero has shed new insights into the way climate sceptics’ networks operate. The study’s conclusions, as yet unpublished but seen by Left Foot Forward, were presented to a closed meeting of campaigners on Wednesday night.
Profero’s study analysed online coverage of the “Climategate” debacle that broke last November, tracking its progress from fringe blogs to mainstream media outlets over the ensuing weeks and months.”
…
Stuart Conway, the study’s co-author, declared simply that “there are no progressive networks” – just hubs of activity here and there, lacking interconnection.
I have to laugh at that, because when you look at the graph they prepared above, both sides look like “just hubs of activity here and there, lacking interconnection”
About the closest thing to an interconnection that exists is a blogroll link, seen on blogs worldwide. I have one, so does everybody else on that diagram above. Are blogrolls the new network hive mind? Does noting an interesting story on another blog peg me as being a climate community organizer?
Apparently they never considered that maybe, just maybe, the Climategate story spread from blogs to MSM because it was real news?
Of course, it’s all speculation on their part. Nobody at Oxfam or Profero contacted me to ask any basic questions (and I’m betting none of the others either) like:
Are you part of an organized effort? (No – I blog because I like it, it gives me a sense of satisfaction, and I think it is important. For me it is like my old broadcast TV job, but using a different medium to send words and pictures. I started blogging because I had an offer to do so from my local newspaper, who still maintains a blog link to WUWT on their Norcalblogs.com website.)
Are you funded by a central organization, like the Soros sponsored Think Progress/Climate progress blog, the DeSmog Blog’s Hoggan and Associates PR firm, or Realclimate whose servers are funded by Environmental Media Services ? (No – though Climate Depot is apparently funded by CFACT, there’s no central funding that I get or any of the others get as far as I know, but ask them. As I see it we are just a loose knit group of like minded people. The closest anyone could say is a central funding source would be Google Ads, for which the blogs that have them get a few cents for each click.)
Do you answer to or are you guided by climate denier overlords? (No – but my, employees, wife and kids raise holy heck with me for spending too much time in front of the computer reading and writing blogs.)
Did you time your blog post announcing the CRU email hack/leak to influence the Copenhagen Conference? (No – that’s just when the files were dropped in my lap, and I waited two days for confirmation before writing about it. Ask the hacker/whistleblower what his/her motives and timing considerations were.)
It’s funny how somebody can write a social networking study and not ask the subjects being studied any questions. Quality research funded by charitably given British pounds – surely they could do better. Or, maybe they didn’t want to.
Smokey (19:31:09) :
Erudite and succinctly to the point as always.
It’s a war plan,
and those circles on the left are targets. You are all about ready to get bombarded. They’ve been patiently planning and they are getting ready to gut you all out.
I wonder how many of you will be still lauging by the end of the year.
I really enjoy articles like this!
The British Met Office is not represented anywhere on the Supporters Network.
The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body (IPCC) relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment was the basis for the climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
When ex-WWF Robert Napier became chairman of the Met Office he started to steer it into the climate change arena. This is clear from his words in the first annual report after he became chairman.
In spite of the fact that it has resources second to none, its success rate at seasonal forecasting has been worse than coin tossing. So, it’s seasonal forecasting is rubbish, but it thinks it can do regional climate change projections on 25km grid out to the end of the century.
This announcement by the Met Office came on the same day they threw in the towel on seasonal forecasting: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8551416.stm
“Met Office seasonal forecasts to be scrapped: The Met Office is to stop publishing seasonal forecasts, after it came in for criticism for failing to predict extreme weather. It was berated for not foreseeing that the UK would suffer this cold winter or the last three wet summers in its seasonal forecasts.”
The other report about finding “the fingerprints of man-made global warming” (http://www.earthportal.org/news/?p=3174) is just the cover to bury the bad news that they are getting out of the seasonal forecast business.
Julia Slingo, Chief Scientist at the Met Office and President of the Royal Meteorological Society clearly said in the parliamentary committee that the Met office uses the same model for weather forecasting and climate projections. She claimed that the climate projections must be OK because the models are tested for robustness twice a day (doing the daily weather forecasts). She really did say that to the committee, and it wasn’t a ‘mis-speak’ on her part because she says the same in a written document as well:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/in-depth/ask/julia-slingo.pdf
“At the Met Office we use the same model to make weather forecasts as we do to make our climate predictions, so every day we are testing the model and saying, ‘how well did we do with the weather forecast?’ We know that on many occasions our weather forecasts are incredibly skilful and that’s increasingly giving us confidence that the science in our models is fit to do this ‘crystal ball gazing’ into the future to say what will happen to our climate as we go really into uncharted territory.”
That is unequivocal: the Chief Scientist says that they use the same model for weather forecasting and climate projections, and thus the accuracy of the weather forecast is ‘verification’ of the robustness of the same model for climate projection. No verification or test of robustness could be applied if they were different models. Both in the extract above and to the parliamentary committee she made the point that the climate models are OK because they are tested on a daily basis doing daily weather forecasting. Believe me, Slingo has spent years on the computing aspects of climate prediction, so if she’s wrong on this one she shouldn’t be in her job: she’d either be ignorant, deluded, or trying to hoodwink parliament and people.
Of course, what this shows without a shadow of a doubt is that since (if we can believe the Met’s Chief Scientist) the same model is used, then the climate projections must be factored into the weather forecasting because the same model is serving both – the weather is simply the diurnal, seasonal and annual variation on the inexorable climate trend determined by natural variation and anthropogenic forcing.
So it’s no wonder that climate has failed to march in step with the climate projection, that the Met’s seasonal forecasts are consistently wrong: they must by now have a warm bias in them by including the climate trend, which is factored into the model as increasing, but which in reality is flatlining. This is a divergence problem between the pre-suppositional data fed into the model (based on AGW dogma) and the reality.
The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails. The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.
But now it turns out that the British government is attempting to silence the Met Office…
The British government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be “seized upon by climate change sceptics”.
And you might have thought that they were only interested in science, not political hackery!
_________________
Before I end, let’s not forget James Hansen’s contribution to the global warming fraud. Neither James Hansen nor GISS appear here with any balls, so I’ll fill in the details…
The main U.S. data supplier is NASA’s GISS, and the principal involved at GISS is, of course, the notorious Hansen. He has simply refused to release the basic data behind NASA’s bungling, even in the face of perfectly lawful Requests for Information. That will soon change, but won’t affect Hansen’s dubious career as he is now 68, and has already been thoroughly denounced by his immediate superior. It may be recalled that it was GISS that made the claims that the hottest years on record were in the last 10 years, and then recently revised everything and said, “Oh! Wait a minute, the hottest years were actually in the 1930’s”. This was after their testimony to Congress that the hottest years were “during the last 10 years”.
The GISS charlatans have never officially corrected their Congressional testimony, but they did issue a very discrete and obscure announcement (probably, in the monthly West Iowa Farmers’ Almanac). What is GISS doing in meteorological studies you may ask? Because Hansen decided to become “involved”. This is the same bozo who lead the famous group in the 1970’s who were predicting that the Earth was “entering a new ice age”. Never forget thtat NASA has made a number of incredible errors in its day, even in its own field of expertise.
I just love the implied equivalence of the Beeb and Climate Audit, and WUWT and the Grauniad (although I think WUWT’s”readership” is probably higher than the Guardian’s) . It is also of interest how small the role of the Met Office is shown in this, considering that their discretions are the focus of the “study” (I am unhappy with the phrase study since this implies studious activity, whereas IMO it is an opinion piece).
I also think the Telegraph’s Louise Gray and Geoffrey Lean will be dismayed to see that newspaper shown on the sceptic side.
OXFAM???
I am truly on the verge of giving up giving to charities.
Nobody gets money from me now without a grilling of where the money goes and what projects they are involved in.
(Within my means I’m pretty generous by nature, having given £1000’s to charity).
Anthony,
Do you and Richard North feel you have a “Bulls Eye” on your backs?
In picking out the enemy sides picks out targets.
They still haven’t realized that one side is questioning the science of the other side. But the other side is attacking for even questioning them.
This is not about having an open science with clear figures to follow how the research came to their conclusions.
This is about “How Dare You Question Our Authority”.
Not sincere science gathering and sharing as it should be.
I run my own graphic design business in the UK and would be more than happy to re-create and publish (totally gratis) a more accurate two-sided ‘network’ than Oxfam’s example – except for three things . . . .
Firstly, the warmist have a ‘front line trench’ at the battle zone – known as the IPCC. I would insist that artistic licence allows me to ‘nudge’ the IPCC 2cm’s to the right of the neutral zone. Then, behind their line is not only the list of conglomerates and organisations mentioned, but (as we know) every government of the world, it’s quangos, carbon trusts, offsetters, and finally its mythical wizards and a small group of dendro-cracker-chinese cookie-ology-scientists, etc. Therefore to the right of the neutral zone, the enormous diagram would extend to about 350 x sheets of A4 paper printed landscape – which logistically will provide instant revenue for Epson’s global sales of ink cartridges because every ‘non-believer’ will want to print a copy and stick it on their wall!
Secondly, our side of the diagram does not have a front line ‘trench’ in the warzone. To balance the diagram, it would be nice if the United Nations gave us an IPTNCCUD (Intergoverment Panel on Totally Natural Climate Change either Up or Down), thereby supporting our cause and by publishing the real unmanipulated science on our behalf.
Thirdly, and lastly, the orientation of the final diagram is open to debate. Should it be top-down? Or, may be flipped horizontally with us on the right and the pressure of the left ‘same belief for all’ shown on the left. Even better, all the ‘warmists’ in the middle surrendering – surrounded by us winning our fight for the truth? Victory at last!
hro001 (01:55:55) :
Another of Profero’s entities is named the Social Media Lab. The business is organized to outsource public relations contracts to subcontractors.
P Gosselin (03:19:04),
Absolutely right. Now that the über expensive health care bill has passed, insuring tens of millions more at taxpayer expense, they must find a way to pay for it. The tried and true method is to scare the populace into opening their wallets to avert a ginned-up looming disaster.
Cap & Tax is their chosen method, and it’s already in the works. The enviro lobby now plays kissy-face with the people they so recently demonized, big business, so together they can make working people pay through the nose for their plans: click
Yesterday I commented elsewhere: “Not directly relevant to this item but I can’t get into Notes & Tips so I ask it here. My question is: If CO2 had a colour would we be able to see its presence in the air at its present or predicted concentrations? etc.”
A couple of people kindly responded with factual answers which showed me that I had not explained why I was asking. My purpose was that I would like to be able to say to those supporting AGW that if this gas of which they are so afraid was actually bright red, for instance, it would be so insignificant as to be invisible so how can it be so worrying? I am sure that many of the misinformed, especially the young, are completely unaware of the relative concentrations of gases around them and have no idea what a few hundred ppm actually means physically.
A bit like putting a pint of red fluid into a swimming pool and seeing it disappear in seconds, I think that some sort of visual demonstration would help to show how stupid all the fuss is. For instance if one had a bag of sand with a million yellow grains and 350 black ones in it I would expect the black ones to be impossible to see at a glance. Does this make sense or am I barmy?
[Reply: some folks have trouble seeing Tips & Notes. The problem can usually be fixed by re-sizing your screen size. ~dbs, mod.]
Some of the flaws with this anlaysis.
There needs to be a colour coding indicating the nature of the entities. BBC, Guardian on one side – large commercial media entities.
The bubbles should be scaled to reflect resources. The BBC should be a massive bubble, dwarfing WUWT (no disrespect Anthony!) and Cimateaudit etc.
Why aren’t the networked links between the IPCC and Realclimate, CRU etc. not highlighted. These are absolutley crucial.
Ditto, where is are the academic journals and links betwen those, lobby groups, acaedmic institutions and Bogosphere?
What on earth is this Climate Despot? Never heard of it until I read this story. It’s certainly not central to anyone I have discussed it with. What a heap of bollocks that diagram is.
Note that even the alarmists are admitting their network is heavily under the authority of government organisations (BBC, World Bank etc)
I note that 3 of the biggest propagandists there, the Guardian, BBC & Treehugger have barred me permanently & Realclimate has censored more than once. So some networks are more controlled than others.
I forgot to Thank You Anthony, for the science quest you requested.
I thought to start at the beginning of the Popular Science which showed some very facinating research being done back in the late 1800’s with their experiments and conclusions.
What I found was a confirmation to one of my very strong theories in print on the circulation cycle of the planet in 1875. This science was never brought forward and expanded upon. Definately would have changed our knowledge of climate today along with the advancements we should have had.
The other thing you have allowed is the interactions of thoughts, ideas, knowledge, etc. to be shared and bantered around. Now try talking to physicists who minds are so closed that if “It Ain’t In A Book, It Ain’t True”.
On a couple of occasions I’ve made them look stupid as some hard factual science they totally missed and thought the science was made up.
Like Salinity changes from oceanagraphers. Mind you, I’ve had a politican say that an oceanographer is not a scientist.
It is when you look at the definition in the dictionary.
When commenting on this it is difficult to know where to start, and when to stop!
It is good that they acknowledge and show the BBC bias – by it’s charter it should be on the centre line, as all mainstream media should be in an ideal world. While blogs are becoming more influential, people have to actively search them out, which is very different than simply watching TV.
One big omission is Wikipedia, which allows no non-AGW entries. It is interesting to read this man’s attempts to update it :
http://www.philosophical-investigations.org/Wikipedia_on_Climate_Change
I do like these forms of charts – I would like to charts showing the funding of organisations, one for research funding, one for businesses profiting from AGW, etc. Even the media chart above could be updated to be comprehensive, possibly by country.
Notes From Skull Island:
Brian Martin, in his wonderful online booklet Strip the Experts, wrote that if your opponents:
This is line of attack has been very successful for the warmists in the past, which is why they constantly recur to it. But the recent skeptical attack has been mostly an indignant blogger-led populist revolt against increased and unnecessary taxation and regulation (fewer barbecues, etc.) and elitist presumption.
If our side were well funded and well organized, it would have the following characteristics:
1. There’d be a slick umbrella site like HufPo under which all dissident bloggers could shelter, cutting their costs, increasing ad revenue, and simplifying and standardizing the process of surfing the deviationist blogosphere, especially for visiting journalists. The effect would be to considerably “amplify” the dissenters’ voices.
2. Failing that, there’d be enough $ for individual sites to ensure that, for instance, Climate Audit would have been able to handle to traffic-surge in the wake of Climategate, instead of being overwhelmed. (How’s that unpreparedness agree with “well organized”?)
3. There’d be a PR agency to “package” stories emerging from the blogosphere and articles in scientific journals or contrarian columnists and feed them to media sources in easy-to-read, pre-edited form. (Or at least an unincorporated online network of funded individuals performing a PR function.) This is a topic that is so complex and filled with jargon that it desperately needs such pre-chewing to get the MSM to swallow it. But what do we have? Only Climate Depot, which provides leads, but no packaging.
4. There’d be a centralized, regularly updated, annotated, topically divided, web-wide index of useful “ammo” skeptical or skeptic-supporting articles). If I, or anyone, were cat-herder in chief, this would be one of the top items on the agenda.
5. There’d be a repository for “quotes of the day” from blog commenters. (These get lost in the noise after a week or so otherwise.) Here’s an example, from Willis:
6. There’d be extensive book tours for every skeptical book published, to gain exposure in multiple markets via interviews in the local press, etc. Such tours could be extended for many months, well beyond any rational “payback” in book sales, if the real aim were to get media exposure – for instance by challenging local warmists to debates on the premises of the newspaper or broadcaster, etc. The funding for such a tour could easily be concealed.
7. Certain fringe or off-topic comments would be “moderated” out, because they step on people’s toes and don’t play well in Peoria. E.g., New World Order theorizing, bolshy bashing, boot-the-UN and tar-and-feather-‘em remarks, and most attribution-of-motives comments. Populist “venting” of all sorts would be toned down; instead the stress would be on sweet reasonableness and out-reaching to the average citizen and opinion-leader. Any media pro would advise that course, especially one with a big funder behind him (who wouldn’t want to be tarred by association with tin-hat opinions (if news of a link ever came out)). Such a “mainstream” tone and mindset would be the fingerprint of any top-down campaign on a scientific topic.
8. Not only would there be more stylistic similarity, but the content would be less idiosyncratic as well. There’d be evidence of a “script” or list of talking points that skeptic commenters were following, instead of the typical home-brew assemblage of arguments.
9. There’d be an astro-turfed tag-team of high-stamina commenters assigned to Win the War for Wikipedia by out-shouting and out-censoring Connolly and Co. They’d also go en masse to Amazon and give warmist books a thumbs-down and engage in comment-combats there as well. But the dissenters in such venues have been an outnumbered, disorganized rabble.
10. There’d be much more stress on arguments would move the masses and that don’t take a degree to understand. I.e., arguments about the costliness, technical impracticality, and political unenforceability of mitigation strategies, and about the ineffectiveness of massive CO2 emission-reduction in the atmosphere even if all those obstacles were of no account.
If skeptics were truly Machiavellian, or guided by political “pros” behind the scenes, they’d be hitting these popular hot buttons. They are where the warmists’ case is shakiest — and it’s always a good strategy to focus on the opponents’ weakest points and pound on them endlessly. Instead, these topics make up only 10% or so of the skeptical thrust. Most dissenters devote most of their energy to talking about weather events, dissing believers, and arguing about technical and scientific matters.
11. There’d be an extensive online collection of opposition research, such as warmist predictions waiting to be shot down by contrary events. Such opposition research is so valuable a tactic (as is now being shown) that no political or PR consultant would have failed to insist on it.
E.g., a score of warmist predictions of less snowfall would have been at hand to counter Gore’s claim that the models predicted more snowfall. Similarly, the IPCC’s Assessment Reports would have been scoured for flaws and nits long ago. Instead, it wasn’t until Glaciergate that we got on its case in any semi-organized fashion.
12. There’d be an online point-by-point rebuttal of all the “How to Talk to A Skeptic” talking points, not just scattered counterpoints to a few of them. And there’d be a Wikipedia discussing those points and more in fuller detail. Lucy Skywalker is trying to assemble these, but it’s obviously an unfunded effort.
Big Oil? Baby Oil is more like it. Ologeneous overlords? My companions and I on Skull Island laugh until we vomit.
What a helpful article.
It highlights blogs and sites that were unknown to me.
I hope WUWT has persmission to exist by purchasing carbon offsets for all this activity. At .10c a ton…we may have to have a contribution drive ‘share-a-thon’.
Here is a dynamic animation of the East Anglia emails between various scientists [including Michael Mann]. You can clearly see the escalation when they get excited about losing control of their journals and strategizing about how to keep skeptics and the hated Steve McIntyre out of the loop. Notice the dates as the emails ramp up. Compare this with the amateurish graphic in today’s article: click
Why is the discovery of a gas giant 1,500 light years away such a headline-grabber
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/18/new-planet-discovered/
when we have a whole galaxy of gas bags on the starboard* side of that graphic?
*with that bunch, I ain’t gonna type “right” in any context whatsoever…
Just trying to divert the attention from the few bankers families that drive all the business of world wide kool-aid manufacture and its facilities located in…:-)
Smokey (05:17:18) : It just doesn´t work, CRU is in FREE FALL around its Barycenter at East Anglia, according to Dr.S….angular momentum is evenly distributed among its satellites. 🙂
The stupid – it gets bigger every day. Any idiot looking at that bogus chart will see little blogs on the skeptic side and massive media organs and governmental agencies on the supporter side. And they can’t even get the data right. The Wall Street Journal is a “supporter?” Did anybody at Oxfam peer review this “study?” The WSJ editorials have been uniformly condemning the duplicity of the AGW crowd.
The IPCC certainly shouldn’t be in the middle, it should be way to the right, IMO.
I like how the IPCC is in the “middle”, like some sort of moderate organiaztion. That’s funny right there, I don’t care who you are…..