Realclimate censorship by Ecotretas
Realclimate.org is notoriously known for censoring comments. Examples are everywhere on the Internet, and in a couple of minutes you get a handful of them: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5). I knew this when I went there today, for the “Is Sea-Level Rise Accelerating?” post.
I bet they know that the sea level rise rate is going down, and fast. But that’s not what you get when you read the article. And they don’t want their readers to know. So I kept the printscreen, because I was pretty certain I would be censored. I was. But as can be seen below, the message is of no harm, except for the Global Warming religious priests, and one more clear example of “hiding the decline”:
Now, what is more surprising is that you can track the amount of comment rejection at RC. My comment has id 210412; when I did this post, these were the ids available in the top right, in the Recent Comments section:
- 210407
- 210411
- 210414
- 210415
- 210417
- 210418
- 210421
- 210422
- 210423
- 210424
I was not alone in the rejection! Almost half of the comments are censored! But hey, I did manage to get to the bore hole, where not all of the censored comments are allowed to go!
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Well… I must be special then. Submitted a similar comment to Ecotretas’s posted comment and reference the same webpage AND it got accepted AND Gavin favoured me with a response.
Beat that!
========================================================
So why have sea levels been going down the last few years?
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2011/05/rate-of-sea-level-rise-going-down.html
[Response: See above. You can cling to La Niña-related dips if it makes you feel better, but the long term trend is up. – gavin]
Comment by JimA — 12 Jul 2011 @ur momisugly 9:25 PM
RC has not only removed and blocked posts, Gavin has doctored posts and discussions to make them bend his way. On one occasion he removed part of my post, changed the emphasis and meaning then blocked any rebutal. His regulars then assumed I had ran away in defeat and Gavin let them continue commenting while claiming I had left in defeat.
& Ray Ladbury is probably the worst kind of alarmist posting anywhere.
I, like others, first got interested in the CAGW and looked around the internet for information.
Visited sites like RC, OpenMind, and Eli Rabbet’s site.
Several things chased me away:
The replies when I asked simple questions (“read the papers”, “we’re not going to do your homework for you”, etc).
The censoring of posts that, according to their moderators, were not appropriate to the discussion.
And a constant tearing down of ClimateAudit and WUWT. Made me wonder – if these sites get under their skin so much, what are they saying?
After a year of trying to engage the CAGW folks on their own sites I have done more harm than good.
Sites like Joe Romm’s “Climate Progress” apply total censorship so there never was a possibility of any kind of debate.
Sites like Tim Lambert’s “Deltoid” allow dissenting comments but expect the faithful to heap scorn and derision on dissenters. That gets old in a hurry.
In contrast, John Cook’s “Skeptical Science” and Barry Brook’s “Brave New Climate” allowed an open exchange of views while discouraging ad hominem attacks. For a while dissenters like me were well treated but as time went on things gradually deteriorated. I suspect that our arguments were causing discomfort to frequenters of those sites whose belief in “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” is based more on faith than on reason.
“Skeptical Science” began implementing a heavy handed “Moderation” policy in March 2011 and “Brave New Climate” followed suit in July. It will be interesting to see how that works out for them.
In contrast, I notice that blogs challenging the “Consensus” view on climate change are generally quite tolerant even to trolls from the other side. I think that says a great deal about who is going to prevail in the climate debate.
OMG!!! I’d like to report a rise of almost 2 feet overnight!! Oh wait it’s going back down now…
My comments which I attempted to post on Real Climate all of which were specifically on topic to the thread in question – Including but not limited to observational evidence and analysis that predicted solar cycle 24 was a Dalton or Maunder minimum, Tinsley’s analysis and data that shows solar wind bursts modulate planetary cloud cover via the mechanism electroscavenging, data and analysis that shows there is correlation of 20th century temperature changes and solar wind bursts, data and analysis that shows there is correlation of changes in planetary cloud cover with 20th century temperature changes presented in a series of papers by Enric Palle, paleoclimate analysis showing correlation of cosmogenic isotopes and planetary temperature in a series of papers by Shiva and Gerald Bond and Svensmark, deep paleoclimatic analysis showing correlation of large changes in GCR caused as the solar system moved through the spiral arms of the Milky Way and the Ice Epochs including this one by Shiva, Svensmark’s observational data and analysis that explained the polar see-saw and the long term cyclic planetary climate changes in terms of a detailed mechanism and so on – with links to the specific papers and with quotes from the linked paper that specifically supported the statement I made were deleted.
When I persisted, I has finally kindly sent a note that I was banned from Real Climate as my comments and the papers and observational data I linked to were “Off Message”.
The difference between Science and propaganda is the observational data and analysis that does not support a theory is discussed and is interesting. There is no special “Message theory” in science that necessitates manipulation of data and banning of scientific discussion. Scientific theories or hypotheses that are incorrect are rejected. That is the scientific process.
Perhaps you could have a page here (or someone have one, somewhere) where people can post their censored RC posts, and see how far the borehole really goes..
I remember the first, ( and one of the few) times I wasted bandwidth going to RC.
It was just after Climategate occured, and RC instantly let loose with a strawman argument that directed blame towards the hackers, while ignoring the damning evidence itself. ( Apparently its ok to dodge and delete FOI requests, and hide abnormalities in your work, but when someone brings said shenanigans to public attention, they’re the bad ones.)
RC decided to take the ” We’re not sorry we screwed up, we’re sorry we got caught” routine.
Remind me of the old Scooby Doo cartoons, I can just picture Gavin and co. saying ” And I would have got away with it if it weren’t for you meddiling kids…”
Not to single out @wucash but articles and commenters frequently confuse absolute change in sea level with of acceleration.
Disastrous scenarios rely on a significant acceleration. This is not evident.
I know it’s important to try and discuss the science – but honestly, why do any of you bother trying to comment at RC when you know that any contrary view (and certainly one to which they have no direct response/rebuttal) will be expelled? It’s a pointless exercise! I see no merit in trying to help the ‘Fawning Few’ that post there! Just leave them to fawn and masterbate each others egos! Look at it logically – if those that run the site and those that adhere to the site are so insecure that they need such intensive censorship to ‘protect’ them – you are simply wasting your valuable time. They are not operating in a scientific debate but a religious one! Religious style ‘Beliefs’ in many walks of life are illustrative of ‘the sheepish mind’ but in science, it’s a definate no no.
In the couple of times I went there over 2 years ago now – I felt they were like kids with their fingers in their ears going ‘la,la,la!’, or worse, a kind of aloof, ‘it’s OUR ball (the AGW meme) and we’ll not let you play with it!’. Just my view guys.
@Mike sphar
You got him, you keep him.
We’ve got Bill Bryson from you – erudite, witty, all round good guy, housetrained, earns his own living, brings his own hair…..and you got Schmidt from us. Guess who got the better deal?
Jantar says:
July 12, 2011 at 8:28 pm
Jeff Alberts says:
July 12, 2011 at 6:48 pm
…..
But it is possible that RC does get more spam than average, and that the deletion of comments is a mistake.
But not probable.
As soon as I saw RC I became a sceptic.
Real Climate is a waste of time and bandwidth, except for their faithful and the resident illuminati who run the thing. Like nettles and Poison Ivy – best avoided.,
Gavin’s job these days is to run PR for the ‘Team’ , so its not surprise to find he acts like a spinner rather than a scientist . RC allows him to act like god , complete with acolytes and the ability to control all that is seen , which is clearly something he enjoys . But he still comes across as little more than a school bully happy to run to mother when someone hits back.
James Allison:
Your post at July 12, 2011 at 9:43 pm is very mistaken. It says (in full);
“Well… I must be special then. Submitted a similar comment to Ecotretas’s posted comment and reference the same webpage AND it got accepted AND Gavin favoured me with a response.
Beat that!
========================================================
So why have sea levels been going down the last few years?
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2011/05/rate-of-sea-level-rise-going-down.html
[Response: See above. You can cling to La Niña-related dips if it makes you feel better, but the long term trend is up. – gavin]
Comment by JimA — 12 Jul 2011 @ur momisugly 9:25 PM”
NO! You did NOT submit “a similar comment to Ecotretas’s posted comment”. You posted a very different comment, and your comment was wrong so “gavin” could easilly rebut it (which he did).
Ecoteras rightly said;
“Rate of rise of of global sea levels, measured by satelite, have been going down for at least 4 years”.
That is right (if you ignore his trivial grammatical error): the rate of rise in sea level has fallen over recent years.
The recent fall in the rate of rise in global sea level is important because
(a) global sea level has been rising since the last ice age,
and
(b) the fact that the rate of global sea level rise has recently declined proves AGW is not accelerating the natural rise in sea level.
But you said the sea level has fallen in recent years: that is wrong. Sea level has been rising since the last ice age.
RC censored the correct post from Ecoteras but posted your incorrect post and rebutted it. And it seems this tactic misled you so it may have also misled others. Simply, your error was a Godsend to RC because it deflected attention from the important point that Ecoteras (and possibly others) attempted to post on RC.
Richard
July 12, 2011 at 7:56 pm
“I bet they know that the sea level rise rate is going down, and fast”
Just how do you define fast? From what I’ve seen so far the sea level rise seems to be leveling off. (pardon the pun there) Looking back decades, I can’t see much much of a decrease at all,
just a stagnation to the significant increase from earlier.
If function = sea level then:
rate is the first derivative
and “rate going down fast”
implies a negative second derivative, ie a deceleration.
Just Calculus 101 really and it is not worse than we thought.
Dave N says:
July 12, 2011 at 11:06 pm
Perhaps you could have a page here (or someone have one, somewhere) where people can post their censored RC posts, and see how far the borehole really goes..
How difficult and how legal would it be to duplicate the Real Climate postings here so that we could have the opportunity of commenting in an unfettered way? My guess would be that most people would use this site only and leave RC to the zealots.
Steve
It’s significant when compared with the afforementioned sea-level rise rate decrease.
Smoking Frog
Looking at the whole of sea level change over the recent past, you cannot say that the last 4 years is significant. That’s the kind of feeling I sometimes get reading these articles, a certain amount of clutching at straws. There is no real reason as of yet to believe that the sea level won’t continue to rise, the change in increase rate also doesn’t matter if you look at the long term.
For you Americans that surely must be an infringment of your freedom of speech, first amendment. I mean if you let them post here without censorship and they do not there, especially if ‘there’ is funded in any way by tax dollars, for example if the person doing the censoring is a public employee.
Particulary in an election year, couldn’t that use of government money in supporting a particular stance and censoring others come under the areas of soft money in campaigns or be a breach of the Federal Election Campaign Act?
Just wondering.
Left a comment there a while back about using sediments as a proxy for sea level change pointing out that the proxy was 50% out hindcasting just 100years back so couldn’t be relied upon to hindcast back 2000years. Gavin let it stand but put up a comment in reply that made a mathematically unsound assumption that a high school student would have spotted (he assumed that both proxy and instrumental record were linear). I replied again, this time with my real name and my qualifications shown pointing out the glaring error in his thinking. The comment didn’t get posted. It didn’t get put in the bore hole either. Since then they have posted enough new threads such that the sediment proxy thread is no longer on the first screen – I don’t know if that was a deliberate attempt to bury it before more questions were asked about this dubious proxy.
Fact is that Real Climate is a blog promoting climate propaganda. Its low comment count is a symptom of people’s frsutration with it. Gaving probably thinks he’s being clever by screening out comments that challenge AGW theories, but he is just adding fuel to the fire as people with perfectly reasonable questions or issues with given threads find themselves consored.
It follows from this that we could give RealClimate a big headache if Mr Watts created a page entitled “Difficult questions to ask the people at Real Climate”. Anybody with the smallest doubt about AGW theory can then be prompted to ask pertinent but reasonable questions of the folks at Real Climate and see what happens to them. When they get censored too they will be left in no doubt about the games being played by the likes of Hansen et al.
Haven’t been to RC in a while. Didn’t like it. The entries were too authoritative, not admitting of any uncertainty. Replies to skeptical comments were too condescending. Most pro- comments read like high school kids taking their teacher an apple.
I like to think of blogs having an atmosphere, somewhat like a bar. WUWT would work as a bar. RC – I’m not sure about that. The image that comes to mind is not Cheers, let’s put it that way. Maybe a Soviet era canteen with lukewarm tea piped straight out of a tap in the wall, non-flushing loos and a hard-looking bouncer at the door.
The only problem with WUWT is that some commenters here have a violent response hard-wired in their brains, such that any research article advancing AGW is met with an automatic nay. Personally I’ve always been interested in the facts – and I think I’m more likely to find them here than at RC, despite the hifalutin’ authors there.
For all those discussing the proportion of comments that may or may not be spam – in the Borehole, if you mouse over the date stamp on the comments you get the post’s original index number (on Firefox anyway – other browsers might require more effort to get the target URL). If anyone wants to pursue this exercise, I’d be mildly curious to see the results. Not curious enough to undertake this endeavor myself, mind you, but curious nonetheless.
“Caleb says:
July 12, 2011 at 8:31 pm
Gavin reminds me of a certain sort of psycho-therapist that came into fashion in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s.”
You of course remember when the consensus amongst the psychiatrists and physiotherapists was that erectile dysfunction was a mental problem, typically caused by a childhood/adolescent sexual longing for ones mother? The shrinks made a fortune from impotence, until 1991. Alas, all their psycho-babble was bollocks and erectile dysfunction in middle age results from a change in nitric oxide formation in the endothelial cells.
Wucash:
At July 13, 2011 at 2:57 am you assert:
“… There is no real reason as of yet to believe that the sea level won’t continue to rise, the change in increase rate also doesn’t matter if you look at the long term.”
Nobody has suggested that “sea level won’t continue to rise” and there is NO “increase rate” to sea level rise. And the fact that the rate of sea level rise is NOT increasing is important.
The rate of sea level rise has been consistent for about 4,000 years (following a period of rapid rise that started about ~20,000 years ago); see
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_intro.html
But the IPCC ‘projects’ large increase to the rate of sea level rise as a result of AGW.
Figure 5.13 in Section 5.5.2.1 of the most recent IPCC Report (AR5) shows sea level indicated by the Church&White reconstruction, tide gauges and altimetry from satellites.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch5s5-5-2.html#5-5-2-1
FAQ Figure 1 from the same report shows the acceleration to sea level rise that the IPCC ‘projects’ and can be seen at
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-5-1.html
The satellite data (cited by Ecotretas) shows a strong reduction in the rate of sea level rise since about 2003 and the start of that is shown by the IPCC as Figure 5.14 in Section 5.5.2.2 at
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch5s5-5-2-2.html
A more clear graph of the TOPEX, Poseidon1 and Poseidon2 data sets is at
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
So, the facts are that
(a)
the IPCC ‘projects’ significant increase to the rate of sea level rise,
(b)
there is an observed decline in sea level rate of rise over the last decade
and
(c)
the very most that can be said in support of the IPCC ‘projections’ is that there is no evidence of any recent increase to rate of sea level rise over the last millennium, the last century or the last decade.
Richard