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!
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Following the November volcanic eruption named climategate, there was a time when a lot of comments were posted. They wanted to pretend to be open. That was the last time i had a few non sensitive statements posted.
If your comment doesn’t stroke their egos, it is discarded. good old communism.
I very rarely visit RC, except if it is referenced in a post or comment at an open/uncensored site.
Epistemologically RC often comes through as a few dogmatic elements supported by a necessary host of devotees who act as guardians against the slightest perception of skeptic heresy.
John
I too was boreholed. I had a bet going with a warmist who said Schmidt does not censor reasonable comments. So I gave him an on topic skeptic comment to be posted under his name (I have been banned). The warmist tweaked my comment, watering it down and kissing up to Schmidt. And even so, it was still sent to the borehole, and labeled ‘off topic’. Yet another warmist schooled.
Baron von Monckhofen has asked me to thank you for the extra traffic resulting from citing his rock-solid example of RC censorship (number 3 above). Some unkind folk have been spreading the calumny that the Baron is a crude satire of an aristocratic, delusional ‘sceptic’, the recognition of a link from this flagship science site puts that one to bed for good.
After all if it was a spoof site, that might indicate a paucity of real examples, and nothing could be further from the truth!.
PS. (I’ve screencaptured this. Can’t be too careful!)
Again, the acceleration of change can be significant even if the actual change level isn’t significant.
A steep slope which flattens represents a significant change in acceleration. This concept is covered within the first 30 days of any calculus course.
Well of course RC has a well rehearsed censor department, they’er communists. Any type of socialist system, which always is based on a foundation of propaganda, will unequivocally censor all dissenters critical of the socialists elite preferred reality. And besides they know they can’t fool the people all the time, hence the censoring. :p
I’m confused, what is it called when a government funded department censors the publics comments on important issues?
As it’s goverment funded (Or is this site run in his spare time?) surely freedom of speech must be enforced?
Why is anyone surprised that RC deletes or modifies posts? They do that with data? Why should a blog be different?
On several occasions I posted comments about the topics posted on Real Climate as being a violation of Real Climate’s stated mission. The “About” section reads, in pertinent part:
“The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.”
The last time was a comment about “Steve Schneider’s Letter.” MOST of RV’s posts had been about political subjects and the site was about the political and economic implications with a little hard core science tossed in. (Could the “Warm Beer Chart” have been any less about science?)
I see that in the last month or so, RC has been pretty thin on new topics. I figured that intellectual honesty would require either hardcore science or changing the “About.” At least it seems as though they are moving away from the Joe Romm material recently, so I’ll hand them that.
Slight correction. While James Allison did post an incorrect statement, Gavin did not rebut it. He seemed to be rebutting the boreholed post of Ecotretas with his response, but instead of telling James he was flat our wrong, he merely explained the dip in the rate of increase over the past few years as due to La Nina.
A lot, but not all. As someone who runs several web sites, I know that captcha, re-captcha, all those, will usually keep out automated spam, but there are many spammers who do things manually.
I was not trying to imply that RC doesn’t just delete comments they don’t like, it’s happened to me a few years ago, never went back. Just saying that missing numbers aren’t indicative of any one thing. I’m sure there are also many useless comments that get posted, which add nothing to the argument, which also get culled. The problem is those replies which are reasoned and seemingly factual that are being deleted without public discourse on the topic.
I had the same experience with unrealclimate.org. My first comment went through although it was skeptical in nature. All subsequent comments for the immediate period following that first post however were deleted. Gavin and his sycophant followers are not scientists in my opinion, they have forsaken science in favor of political activism.
I visited RC one time awhile back after hearing about it on WUWT. Looking over that site I quickly realized I was much better off sticking to this site where honest articles and real discussions are presented and encouraged. Hats off to WUWT.
I haven’t seen a blog so ripped in a long time. I went over there to look and the tone sucks, the feedback from the site (for those comments that aren’t deleted) is disrespectful or condescending. In comment 20 of the sea level post there is a graph showing the very distinct upward trend, but the end data seem to have broken out of the trend line on the lower side. To me, that is an indication that theories should be put on hold pending a bit more data. Trends do not last forever. Am I interpreting it right? (I’ll risk sending traffic over there).
I was going to leave a comment, but the captcha thingy wiped my comment when I failed to put in an email and name (I forgot). I successfully ignored the temptation to leave a message to the effect of “thanks for sending wuwt traffic”. But I thought better of it and didn’t leave a comment. To my knowledge, I’ve never been censored here, and I’ve seen plenty of other people’s comments that were worthy of being censored but weren’t. The regulars here do a great job of taking apart dumb troll posts. Occasionally, I’ll notice the [snip] marker, but it is left in to let people know it was snipped rather than memory holed. Usually a brief reason for the snip is added as well, so people know what was wrong with it.
I really wish people wouldn’t be so certain about their positions when we really don’t know enough one way or the other. The guys at realclimate don’t seem to understand that 30 or 150 years isn’t enough time to make conclusions for this type of stuff. I’m skeptical of their conclusions because they had to cheat to make them and because they haven’t accounted for all the climate variables. I’ve also lived through the “ice age is coming” period of the 70s, so I know a bit about climate fads.
I am always concerned that Gavin seems to have time to push a political agenda on a website he maintains while on government time. Censoring opposing viewpoints is clearly agenda enforcement.
Eventually that will catch up with him. His defense that he was merely running an informational scientific website to inform the public evaporates completely once it can be established that he wielded censorship over opposing viewpoints.
He would be far better off not allowing any comments whatsoever than controlling which viewpoints can be expressed. He just isn’t smart enough to figure it out. It’s been a while since a public employee has been prosecuted for engaging out and out political advocacy using government resources. (Employee time is clearly a resource.)
That it hasn’t been prosecuted before is no defense at all.
I wonder if someone could just write a simple app (Greasemonkey plugin perhaps – not quite my speciality) that when posting to Real Climate also CC’s the posting to another site – (maybe a section one one of the popular blogs) to keep an archive of what actually gets censored from Real Climate and then be able to see the context of the censorship in the RC discussion.
Gavin’s logic? Oxymoron accusations aside, check his replies to Tilo Reber #45 and #47
I could recommend a therapist.
Is it conceivable that Gavin does not understand what a “rate” is (the slope of a line)? 😉
Gavin and the gang routinely delete messages that don’t support the AGW dogma? Would it surprise anyone that they would give observational data and modelling results that don’t support the dogma the exact same treatment?
Following the suggestions of others, I did an analysis of RC comments using PHP and cURL (source code available upon request). The script went through all the pages with URLs from http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=1 to …?comments_popup=8092 and extracted the comment IDs from the HTML source with the following Perl regular expression:
/id=”comment-(\d+)”/i
The results are as follows:
Total number of comment IDs: 131930
Number of unique comment IDs: 131930
Lowest published ID: 3
Highest published ID: 210541
Therefore, number of missing IDs between first and last IDs: 78609
Proportion of missing IDs as percentage of all published IDs from first to last: 37.3%
As noted previously, this takes no account of truly spammy comments that may have been deleted. I don’t know how long they’ve been using a CAPTCHA on the site.
WUWT is open to comments from both sides of the argument and (AFAIK) do not censor posts at all (except where they are abusive, rude or litigious perhaps). Why is it that those who post and/or run RC are so disinclined to put their opinions and counter-arguments on HERE? They would be more than welcome; they wouldn’t be ‘abused’; they could defend their position and argue their counterpoint to WUWT articles etc.
Perhaps an open invite directly from you (Anthony) could encourage them to participate?
Regular contributors to WUWT would more than welcoming I’m sure.
kellys_eye,
Anthony regularly solicits and posts articles from warmists. The owners and writers at RealClimate are welcome to submit articles to WUWT, where they would get a much wider readership — and get respect for taking a position outside their safe, censoring cloister.
But they don’t dare. Their pseudo-scientific claims would be debunked in short order. Instead, they maintain an echo chamber frequented by a small claque of true believers who are no different from Harold Camping’s true believers.
I double dog dare Schmidt or Mann to prove me wrong by submitting an article here. I don’t make predictions, but I’ll make an exception in this case and predict that they won’t submit an article to WUWT’s enormous readership. They are scientific charlatans who don’t have the stones to face true peer review here, where they can’t control the pal review process.
I keep reading that RC is being run on Government time.
It seems to me that if RC is NOT a government-sponsored blog, then Gavin is running a political propaganda site on the taxpayer’s dime. Not good, and probably not legal. On the other hand, if RC IS government-sponsored, then the government is engaging in censorship in violation of the First Amendment.
Surely there is some enterprising attorney out there who could file a class-action suit based on 1A violations – let’s force someone to take one of these positions, and once they have, knock it down.
Why do skeptics seem to want to play nice? Believers don’t.
Well, I did manage to get my post on RealClimate. It looks like this – with Gavin’s response.
“I took the satellite data from the University of Colorado sea level site and spit it into two equal halves. I charted the data and ran trend lines through it. The rate in sea level rise for the first half was 3.4 mm/year. The rate of rise of the second half was 2.1 mm/year. For the satellite era at least, the rate of sea level rise is falling. The rate that is shown by the second half of the satellite record would give us 8.3 inches of sea level rise in 100 years.
[Response: Is it conceivable that linear extrapolation is not the optimum way to assess risk? – gavin]”
So, my response to Gavin’s response was:
“Yes, it is very conceivable. However, basing risk on assumed acceleration of sea level rise when there is actually deceleration would seem to be even less predictive than linear extrapolation. And while there may have been acceleration going from the pre-satellite era into the satellite era, that acceleration has now ceased and changed to deceleration.
[Response: Is it conceivable that any kind of statistical extrapolation is not the optimal way to assess risk? – gavin]”
In any case, NikFromNYC managed to post a great link on RealClimate, here:
http://i.min.us/idFxzI.jpg
Anthony might want to think about using this one.
gallopingcamel said: “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.
That’s actually just the month in which they got tired of you tearing through various threads for a year or more with a menagerie of off-topic arguments (some of which you started, some you didn’t, not that it matters, YOU are not allowed to do that). Face that fact that if you go there as a skeptic, you have to set yourself a high bar, higher than everyone else, and live up to it 24×7.
One actual difference at Skeptical Science IMO is that one is no longer allowed to argue with the moderators. Those comments now get deleted (mine did even though it contained other on-topic material) and Dikran even said he does so on a recent thread. Moderators there do not always leave their personal opinions at the door (often will argue in a moderator comment instead of giving a link, correcting an actual mistake, etc) thus giving themselves an unfair advantage. But generally I find that they adhere to their moderation policy: no ad homs or personal attacks of any sort, no off-topic even if “someone else started it”, etc.
I think their policy works for that style site, which exists to provide links to rebut common skeptic arguments while allowing a discussion that ultimately improves their own arguments. Some of the arguments they rebut (e.g. volcanoes blah blah…) are pure junk and good riddance to them. Some are fringe science (e.g. CO2 causes more cooling than warming) and need to be discussed at tiny little forums outside of public view. The rest of their posts are similar to those found elsewhere (e.g. climate progress) with the addition of relatively open comments. I don’t find those particularly valuable for either side.
They key targets for them are natural causes for warming, ice melt, extreme weather, etc and there they take a divide and conquer approach. For example positive ENSO contributed to some of the 80’s and 90’s warming. But their “rebuttal” shows that ENSO does not correlate well to all warming and cooling since 1900 or some arbitrary old date. Therefore, they say, it cannot be a cause of 80’s and 90’s warming. To contradict this rebuttal is possible, but it will be buried on that thread and ignored by anyone except a regular or interested skeptic. The rest of the world, 99.99% of the population, will see the head post and nothing much else. Obviously their policy that restricts off-topic comments works to their advantage since the argument against CO2 influences involve many types of natural factors, not just one.