Yesterday we had an enlightening guest post by Ian Rons titled Further Down the “Bore Hole” which presented some comment data and graphs, along with some observations about that nature of RealClimate.org and the way they treat visitors and commenters. Ian pointed out something I didn’t know, and that is this:
“The Bore Hole”, which started on 6th January 2011 (the date being evident from the post_id of 6013 and the moderator’s response to the first comment, although they have since re-dated it 6th December 2004 for some reason)
So I decided to have a look myself to see if this was true or not. Here is what I found. Note the yellow highlights:
…and here is the first comment, actually labeled first by the inline response of the moderator:
Using the search feature on RealClimate for “Borehole” yields this:
So, it seems clear that RC set the starting date for the Borehole thread back to 6 December, 2004, which incidentally is close to the Dec 1 2004 start date for the RC blog. Why? One could speculate that maybe they were trying to give the impression of it always have been a feature to use as tool to ward off the stinging criticism of the way they treat any member of the public who might disagree with them. Or, maybe they planned to put older comments in there. But, since there are no comments in “The Borehole” prior to 6 Jan 2011, it can’t be about them trying to put older, previously approved comments they don’t like from years past in there. They’ve had six months to do that and none have appeared. It is as they say, a curiosity.
Dr. Gavin Schmidt, in his recent inline comment in Unforced Variations 2, says we here at WUWT want to make this a “giant ad hom argument” all about “personalities”. Well no, the post was about data analysis of comment ID’s and why so many just “disappear” at RC. It isn’t anecdotal (though scads of first hand accounts exist) RC’s own comments ID database suggests a systemic removal.
If Dr. Schmidt wants to focus on it being personal, then I say it is about whether we should be trusting scientists that have no reason whatsover to alter the start date of a feature, but actually did so for reasons that are unexplainable.
And I’ll point out that whether Gavin likes it or not, science has always been coupled to personalities; Aristotle, Pythagoras, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Volta, Rutherford, Curie, Mendel, Darwin, Hertz, Pasteur, Bohr, Planck, Hawking, and Einstein, who had one of the most interesting personalities ever. Science doesn’t make itself known by suddenly appearing in the Ether. It makes itself known through the curious personalities of people. For us here at WUWT, we often wonder if curiosity is dead at NASA GISS and their web-portal, Real Climate, and has been replaced with dogma.
Sure, changing the date on “The Borehole” is a small thing of and by itself, but it reminds me of this well known saying:
He who is true in a little, is true in much; he who is false in small things, is false in great.
Dr. Schmidt is of course, welcome to present his blog comment ID data for evaluation here and explain why RC does the things we are curious about.
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Pete in Cumbria UK I think the people behind RC may well be the worlds biggest produces of monumental arrogance and that lead them to presume either you support them or your worthless with nothing in between. Lets remember that few years ago climate science was a nothing subject , low on anyone’s wish list and any universities selling point. The quality of its it people was poor , and so would say still is , and they would be mostly rejects from other areas .
Part of the problem is that its old day this small club which could do what its liked and no knew or even cared , that meant they developed a lot of bad habits, such as review which did not actual do much in the way of data checking .
Now thanks to adoration from the press, the politicians interest and grant money , they come to see themselves as gods amongst men . The down side of that is now people do care and are interested so are now actual checking the work and asking for the data , and that’s where it all goes wrong for them ., they simply cannot change their old habits to deal with a new reality .
I have a clear memory of RC “Bore Hole” thread when it started six months or so ago and, yes, when it started it already had 2004 as the date-stamp. The reason I have a clear memory of it is precisely because 2004 seemed rather curious for a thread that began only recently.
But Anthony does have a point. If there are no technical reasons, then the choice of 2004 could only be intended to leave the impression of longevity to the new policy of ‘bore-holing’ contrarian comments in RC.
sHx said on July 24, 2011 at 3.30 pm:
A clear memory is better than a vague one, and I wouldn’t dispute your recollection.
heh – they aren’t scientists, they are politicians
Back in 2007, I too tried to join to conversation at Real Climate but not a single one of my comments ever made it through the moderation process, even though my comments were respectfully polite and on topic, if offering an alternative POV.
I’ve experienced similar levels of massaging the feedback to create an illusion of consensus at other pro-alarmist blogs. In fact, the more insightful and spot-on your critique, the more likely your comment will take a ride down the memory hole. Weak or uninformed critical comments are often allowed to stand at alarmist blogs (I suspect a bit of Mobying goes on too) for the Faithful to target practice on.
Meanwhile, at WUWT, CA, Jennifer Marohasy’s and various other skeptical blogs I found the comment debate was robust and wide open to all points of view, even if alarmist comments are often quickly refuted by other commenters.
As a rule skeptical blogs only snip comments that violate community standards for foul language, violence or madly off-topic rants, while Alarmist blogs tend to tailor their comment streams to comfortably reinforce the host’s climate orthodoxy. Alarmist blogs, IMO, are Potemkin villages, while skeptical blogs tend to be just that – skeptical. And skeptical is the way I like science presented.
I joined the online climate debate in 2006 leaning towards the AGW (if not the CAGW) theory. But the lack of transparent, fair or open debate at RC, Tamino’s ironically named blog, The Open Mind, etc, fatally damaged Alarmist credibility at what was a formative moment for me when I didn’t really know enough about climate to evaluate the arguments on the facts either way. However, I did know enough about human nature to understand that arguments so fragile that they must be protected from the scrutiny of a fair debate are likely to be unsound, or worse, morbidly driven by ulterior, even unconscious, motivations.
re posts by:
Regardless of whether/when the date was put as 2004, it certainly wasn’t at the same url addy. I tried the wayback machine, and there are zero cached pages for the bore hole at it’s current url. It’s also interesting that using the wayback machine’s suggested alternative search (partial url, tag end w/ bore hole no longer in the search) returns something like 660 varieties. Using the search to try to refine that to “bore hole” or “bore-hole” still gave me zero returns – even when I used just the main RC page for the initial search. That doesn’t mean that someone else willing to spend a bit more time playing with the wayback machine wouldn’t be able to find something – the pages were there, and so the wayback machine ought to have a number of cached versions since they first created the page. That’s the only way I know of to check just what the date was over time, at several different points of the time spectrum.
But you see, I feel sorry for him so I go back once in a while to give him something to delete. He appears to be a person who is that obsessed with filtering out any nuance of commentary contrary to his position so he is probably delighted hitting the delete button, “AH HA! I got another one! They thought they could get it by me but I’m so much smarter than them. ”
It’s just like feeling sorry for Queeg and his geometric logic at the end of the Caine Mutiny but .. there’s no boat.
Ian Rons,
A clear memory is better than a vague one, and I wouldn’t dispute your recollection.
Indeed. But even a ‘clear’ memory can be wrong. 🙂
Schmidt simply knows his name is inseparably connected to the largest scam in scientific history and that there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to PUT THAT LEGACY BACK IN THE BOTTLE.
He’s a SCIENCE SCAM ARTIST as are his government employee cohorts.
Not maybe not sorta not “well, if only” –
He’s branded and that’s his ENTIRE LIFE’S LEGACY.
How would you feel if you had been the personal mouthpiece for the largest scam ever uncovered?
You’d feel like G. Schmidt.