Jeff Id was trying to defend his paper on Antarctica (O’Donnell et al) at Real Climate. This is what he got for his trouble. Red lines mine.
Meanwhile the dhogazas of the world run free in the same thread:
Clearly, in the eyes of the RC moderators, skiing on Mt. Bachelor and discussions of mass delusion from a friendly but obnoxious regular are far more important than discussing the actual science and the analysis issues with a co-author of the paper being critiqued.
This sciencey entertainment is from a new feature at RC called The “Bore Hole” which is a place they put “undesirable” comments.
Bad move fellas. I predict this feature will become the most popular fixture at RC as people compete to have their comments boreholed. It’s like a sport now.
In case you have not read it yet, this story shows what our government funded employees do while on the clock:
RC’s duplicity prods Jeff Id out of retirement
While I fully understand the need to keep unruly posters from taking over threads, you guys at RC really owe Jeff and Ryan O’Donnell an apology.
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I am puzzled.
Anthony,
Here is the exchange between Jeff Id and Eric Steig, comment number 18:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/02/west-antarctica-still-warming-2/#comment-199265
Eric Stieg’s reply to Jeff Id’s comment said nothing about boreholes. It was a polite scientific sounding reply.
[Response: It is a bit strange that your coauthors have spent so much time talking about the differences in the Ross Sea region, as if this somehow ‘refutes’ our work, and now you are saying that the methods simply can’t resolve such small areas. Whichizzit?
I think that one of the things that many readers will take away from your work is that these methods are simply too sensitive to parameter choices to be able to say anything. That’s Kevin Trenberth’s unhelpful comment when my paper came out: “It’s hard to obtain data where none exist” or something like that.” The problem with that — besides being demonstrably untrue — is that without these sorts of analyses, all that’s left is ‘interpolation by eye’, which is what everyone was doing for West Antarctica prior to our work. And to be clear again, a main point of my post is that you have *not* optimized the results properly. Our results can certainly be improved on, but unfortunately I don’t think you have been successful in doing that. As for the distance-weighting calculations, I agree that’s a reasonable thing to do, but the point of our paper was to use the *additional* information about spatial relationships that the satellite data provides. I think this is useful, and I think that your paper — with its very good agreement during the satellite era with weather forecast reanalysis products (NCEP2, etc.) demonstrates this very nicely. Cheers — eric]
The borehole comment was in reference to a post which linked Jennifer Marohasy’s web site, in comment number 10.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/02/west-antarctica-still-warming-2/#comment-199235
Can you explain how you made this error? These comments are far apart.
REPLY:
eadler wrote: “Eric Stieg’s reply to Jeff Id’s comment said nothing about boreholes. It was a polite scientific sounding reply. ”
There’s no error here, you just can’t comprehend what’s going on. You’ve missed it completely, and it’s hilarious. Either that or you are being purposely disingenuous just to troll the thread. If it’s the latter, you’ve earned yourself a 24 hour time out. – Anthony
Now one of the RC geniuses thinks that:
“Response: Sigh…. I’d put this in the “Bore Hole”, but perhaps one of our readers wants to explain something about the difference between watts/m^2 and milliwatts/m^2? [hint: I frequently ski on volcanoes; how the heck does the snow stay up there?] It might provide an object lesson, not to mention show why ‘jeffifermarohasy.com’ is not a credible source for anything.–eric]”
is the same as the quote listed in the article:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/jeff_boreholed1.png
The poor lads can’t even read. He then uses his own confusion to dismiss the entire thing.
“
Now one of the RC geniuses thinks that:
“Response: Sigh…. I’d put this in the “Bore Hole”, but perhaps one of our readers wants to explain something about the difference between watts/m^2 and milliwatts/m^2? [hint: I frequently ski on volcanoes; how the heck does the snow stay up there?] It might provide an object lesson, not to mention show why ‘jeffifermarohasy.com’ is not a credible source for anything.–eric]”
is the same as the quote listed in the article:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/jeff_boreholed1.png
The poor lads can’t even read. He then uses his own confusion to dismiss the entire thing.
RC is unscientific and irrelevant. Let them vent and contrive to change statements so that their authors can be better vilified. We want nothing to do with them. They are irrelevant, and we should so regard them. If they post something outrageous, raise it on WUPT and discuss it there. Who cares about their Bore Hole, they are the Rathole.
Umm – Anthony, have you seen the original unedited comment? The clue is in this part:
> [edit – ….
According to subsequent comments in the thread, there was some snark about Mann in there that was edited out at the same time as the comment got binned to the borehole. So what’s left looks perfectly reasonable, but that’s because the *reason* the post was binned has been excised.
That’s my understanding – unless Jeff wants to come forward and say the post was not edited, that is.
Anthony wrote:
“REPLY:
eadler wrote: “Eric Stieg’s reply to Jeff Id’s comment said nothing about boreholes. It was a polite scientific sounding reply. ”
There’s no error here, you just can’t comprehend what’s going on. You’ve missed it completely, and it’s hilarious. Either that or you are being purposely disingenuous just to troll the thread. If it’s the latter, you’ve earned yourself a 24 hour time out. – Anthony
I realize that I wasn’t looking in the right place for the exchange. It was put in the borehole, and I was looking in the Antarctica thread. So you might say that I missed it.
This whole controversy is quite arcane. I am not well enough versed in the controversy to know why Steig saw the comment he boreholed as snarky.
I have had comments that I considered perfectly valid and to the point snipped on WUWT . That’s the way the world is. I take it, move on and don’t complain about it.
As I pointed out, Jeff’s comments on Antarctica have appeared on the RC Antarctica, thread and the replies have been serious and scientific. Why this particular one was boreholed, is beyond my understanding. I think the right thing to do is to indicate that a poster made a post, and refer the reader to the borehole if he wants to go there.
I was wondering if you could have permanent link to “the bore hole” from realclimate.org on this site. If you make it a URL on this site and just copy/paste from RC, then I could read great critical review on climate science without paying the realclimate.org site a visit. Not sure if this is possible, but I feel bad giving RC many hits when I so strongly disagree with their censorship policy.
Could this be done?
Eadler wrote:
I have had comments that I considered perfectly valid and to the point snipped on WUWT . That’s the way the world is. I take it, move on and don’t complain about it.
———–
You can not be serious. This is a false and disingenuous comparison. This very comment would have been boreholed immediatly at rc. I once wrote that there was a lack of open dialogue about uncertainties at rc. Guess what, it didn’t even get boreholed. There is an obvious reason why wuwt is regarded AS open and rc…. Not so much: it’s bc it’s true and bc Stalin is moderating at rc.
Magnus says:
February 9, 2011 at 10:14 am
Eadler wrote:
I have had comments that I considered perfectly valid and to the point snipped on WUWT . That’s the way the world is. I take it, move on and don’t complain about it.
———–
You can not be serious. This is a false and disingenuous comparison. This very comment would have been boreholed immediatly at rc. I once wrote that there was a lack of open dialogue about uncertainties at rc. Guess what, it didn’t even get boreholed. There is an obvious reason why wuwt is regarded AS open and rc…. Not so much: it’s bc it’s true and bc Stalin is moderating at rc.
You can disagree with me, but I was speaking seriously, and out of my own experience. In my opinion a lot of the comments here at WUWT are nonsense, but because the comments side with Anthony’s point of view, and the dominant majority of posters here, they go unchallenged, including the most outrageous ad hominem remarks. This is the same thing that goes on at RC, even though the manner of enforcement of rules is different. As a “warmer” I have to be careful not to make remarks that are gratuitously insulting, because I know they will not be permitted.
I am not claiming exact equivalence, because I haven’t done statistics. It is my impression that at a maximum, about 5% of the posts here are by “warmers”. I suspect a similar statistic would be found for “skeptics” at RC, maybe even a larger percentage.
People who run web sites are only human, so it doesn’t make sense to me to protest.
Gavin’s picture remined me of this ass hole.
eadler. Ur missing the point. This is not a matter of “all moderators are human”. The censorship policy at rc is extreme. There Are hardly ever any discussions there bc no skeptical view is allowed. At wuwt you’ve actually had warmists saying they enjoy the openness. But, I do of course agree there is much bs too: freedom is a helluva thing.
If you think getting a constructive comment posted at RC is a problem, try Climate Progress. It’s virtually impossible.