Guest Post by Ira Glickstein
Seinfeld fans will remember how proud Kramer was when he thought he had slipped one past the goalie. Well, I’ve managed to slip a few comments onto RealClimate’s discusion of the Times Atlas “Greenland Meltdown” fiasco.
Those of us who have followed the story here on WUWT (1, 2, 3, 4) know the basic facts. (1) The 13th edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World was published this past September, (2) The Atlas includes a misleading map of Greenland ice cover, (3) Publicity for the Atlas hyped a non-existent 15% meltdown in Greenland, (4) The Atlas has withdrawn the bogus claim, and (5) They will create a corrective insert for the Atlas and make it available online.
RC’s 08 November 2011 post on this issue Times Atlas map of Greenland to be corrected, said the original claims were “rather bizarre” but -amazingly to me- they did not not mention that the error was in the direction of excessive warming. Comment #1, by a seemingly misled RC reader, blames the error on the fact that “Harper Collins is owned by Rupert Murdoch.” The RC moderator cautions against personal attacks, and notes that such a claim wouldn’t make any sense, but he does not acknowledge why – because the error was in the Warmist direction!
To be fair, RC did include a link to another posting that, after a bunch of Warmist hype, is pretty clear on the direction of the original error. However, that link was misleadingly titled “Greenland Meltdown” (since changed to “reported earlier”).
So I posted my first-ever comment to RC, and they published it, in an edited manner that partly reverses my point, as follows:
(Comment #7) Ira Glickstein says: 8 Nov 2011 at 4:54 PM
Thanks for reporting “… the first edition was completely in error, and led to some rather bizarre claims about the amount of ice loss in Greenland.”
However, you do not
acknowledgereiterate the direction of the error, which was to report an impossible, way overstated 15% ice loss.An interested reader would have to follow your link to the
misleadinglybrilliantly, amusingly and accurately titled Greenland Meltdown to learn that: “…, the large exaggeration of that loss rate by Harper Collins in the press release for the 2011 edition of the Times Atlas was of course completely wrong. … the confusion came most likely from a confusion in definitions of what is the permanent ice sheet, and what are glaciers, with the ‘glaciers’ being either dropped from the Atlas entirely or colored brown (instead of white) … there is simply no measure — neither thickness nor areal extent — by which Greenland can be said to have lost 15 % of its ice.[Response: edits in italics 😉 –eric]
Well, an attentive RC commenter followed the link from my name to my personal blog, and from there learned I am a “guest contributor to the denialist disinformation blog WUWT”. I thought that might end my new career as a commenter at RC, but the Moderator passed my second comment (# 12), unedited, even though I challenged the use of “denialist” with respect to WUWT, and included five WUWT links to my “Visualizing the ‘Greenhouse’ Effect” series to prove that we skeptics accept the basic science. Perhaps the comment was passed because I also approvingly quoted James Hansen on the Carbon Tax.
My third comment (# 22) was also passed unedited, but the Moderator said my claim that “despite the steady rise in CO2 over the past decade, there has been no statistically significant mean warming” was “simply false”.
My fourth comment (#31) explained what “statistically significant” means (less than a 5% chance it is wrong), and noted that Phil Jones, head of the Climategate Research Unit said as much in his well-publicized BBC interview. The RC Moderator cut my Climategate jibe, but passed the rest unedited. Further discussion has been shunted over to RC’s Open Thread sidelines, where I am attempting to continue it.
The point of this posting is that, whatever the difficulties, it is possible for skeptics to post over at RC, so long as we are not too blatant about it, and if we are not too sensitive about our words being edited.
The WUWT links in my comments have generated some traffic back here, which is evidence some RC readers are open to reasonable discussion. I urge my fellow skeptics to open-handedly accept this opportunity.
It has long been well known tha RC censors, edits, alters and manipulates discussions.
That is a trait common to left wing blogs of every type.
They are always the ones with the most restrictive rules, hyper-sensitive moderators and thoroughly unethical methods.
That’s what control freaks do.
barry says:
November 13, 2011 at 3:18 pm
“Your words can be snipped, your post deleted here (at WUWT)”
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Huge difference… [ snip ] does not put YOUR words in my Comment – neither does deleting my comment. I’m sorry you don’t see the difference.
“[…] and if we are not too sensitive about our words being edited.”
You post a comment to see what Gavin and his thugs turn it into? Not my cup of tea. It’s much more fun to dissect the drivel Stefan Rahmstorf posts there on other, honest forums.
This article prompted me to visit the RC website for the first time in many months.
I read the article on the tar sands pipeline and while I disagreed with most of it, it was reasonably argued.
Then I read the comments which followed; that’s the really scary part. In my ignorance, I had not realised the mind set of the average member of the AGW cult. Economic reality is not even a consideration – while dubious, unsupported theories are everything. I had the distinct impression that at least 95% of the commentators are dependent on government largesse, either directly or indirectly.
It is kind of like watching a replay of Greek economics and the Euro: “Don’t worry, we can carry on forever like this, someone else will always pay for us, we don’t have to be responsible for our actions.”
Well that someone is the taxpayer (or the Germans in the case of Greece) – mostly in the private sector – who are becoming increasingly fed up with financing goofy policies of ‘progressive’ politicians.
It really is an eye opener to see how the other half think and how they generate and justify their alarmist doctrine on the world’s climate.
Steve from Rockwood
Would that be the 2 year-old WSJ article, before BEST had done its work, he had crunched the numbers and learned differently?
In his more recent WSJ op-ed, he writes,
Regarding decadal trends, this from the BEST website:
I’m relatively new to the world of blogs and had no idea RC or any other site alters your posts, naive I am. I agree that if my comment is not posted that’s far better than having it changed thereby possibly reversing the meaning. Now that I know I don’t see any point in posting at RC.
RJ says:
November 13, 2011 at 2:26 pm
I agree, CO2 is not a magical molecule, in fact, its big and lazy in comparison to other molecules in our atmosphere.
The degree of warming is a joke. I looked up the average mean temperatures of the earth by randomly going to different sites and here’s what I found 1851:14.9C, 1930:13.9C, 1960-1990:14C, 2011:15C. So in 160 years the temperature has increased by 0.1C. What warming?
The idea that “Murdoch is a conservative” is one of those bizarre shared myths that both sides use for their own purposes. Not only his British properties but the “news” people at Fox are firmly on the Green side of the debate.
Fox’s commentators are Republican, not conservative, and they take that side because it gets ratings. Remember that Fox’s so-called “conservative” commentators were firmly for John McCain, who was the Greenest of the two candidates in 2008. They supported him because he had the R on his flag, not because of any ideology at all.
A couple of points:
1 Given that RC is run by members of the “Team” and acolytes, I can rest assured that whatever is posted there is either AGW propaganda or is based on such things like Mann’s Hockey Stick and the like. There is no practical value in reading anything there simply because you never know what is fact or fiction.
2. Before I realized that it was a “Team” site, I attempted to join in the discussion a couple of times some years ago. It took only two posts to experience editing of one and deletion of the other. It was immediately clear that what goes on there bears little resemblance to scientific discourse. Half a discourse at best. Again there is no practical value in attempting to have a scientific discussion when there actually isn’t one going on.
3. However, there is some real solid scientific value there for practitioners in psychology. If one wishes to spend the time dissecting post numbers, and perhaps place a few sheep into the mix to post alternative opinions just to see what happens, then a “haul” may await the psychoanalytically inclined.
4. RC is perhaps a classic proof of Xie, et al, “Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities”, PHYSICAL REVIEW E 84, 011130 (2011). From the abstract and summary we have:
“We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value pc ≈ 10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time Tc taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion.
In closing, we have demonstrated here the existence of a tipping point at which the initial majority opinion of a network switches quickly to that of a consistent and inflexible minority.”
5. The final problem with RC has apparently been with it, and us, since the beginning of sentience. RC really isn’t about discourse, and therefore not about the science of climate, at all. It seems more about a phenomena many of us wish we had seen the end of.
It would seem appropriate to take one Alfred Lohar Wegener as the example. A meteorologist, he first published the Theory of Continental Drift in 1912. It wasn’t long before the established authorities closed ranks against Wegener’s concept as if they were stamping out a plague. He never understood the depth of resistance to his thinking. Continental drift was received not merely as a mistaken idea but as an evil that jeopardized the credibility of geology as a science and the professional reputation of anyone who espoused it.
In November,1930 Ernst Sorge, of Wegener’s Greenland meteorological expedition, discovered the records of paleoclimate preserved in the ice. Glaciologists at the time thought of the ice sheets almost exclusively as geological features whose movement across the landscape chronicled the slow waltz of a changing climate. Wegener died that Greenland winter of 1930 trying to reach their low altitude base camp in a blizzard. His Continental Drift theory of 1912 would not be proven until the 1960’s, revolutionizing geology as the Theory of Plate Tectonics. It would take until the 1990s before the scientific contributions of Ernst Sorge were fully recognized as another revolutionary concept: Abrupt Climate Change.
In light of this, it is difficult to not perceive the behavior of RC et al as commensurate with the sort of denialism which seems to take something like half a century, still, to work out of the system. In other words regardless of what we have learned about this behavioral complex, it is apparently very much still with us. This is literally as far as we can claim to have come in just the last century.
You realise that you can read the original comment in full? The words are not deleted, they are struck through, and the mod indicates what has been added by italicising. Whereas completely snipping words can change the context of a post, and readers will not know the original.
kim, are you Ira? You keep saying, “my words.” But it appears you haven’t gone to RC and read the comment and seen for yourself that Ira’s words are all there.
On the very rare occasions I take a peek at RC I always feel a little bit “icky”. It’s pretty wierd over there.
polistra,
It’s some world where a person’s political persuasion is completely defined by their take on global warming. You imply that no true conservative could possibly have a Green streak.
An RC commenter said: “…the denialist disinformation blog WUWT…”
If it were not for psychological projection, folks like that wouldn’t have much to say.
The alarmist crowd believed Michael Mann’s false claim that there was very little temperature variation prior to the industrial revolution. Mann has since been thoroughly debunked on that score, but his true believer acolytes still accuse scientific skeptics of being “denialists” regarding “climate change”. Many of them just cannot accept the fact that the MWP and the LIA were global events. Of course, skeptics have always known that the climate changes constantly; always has, always will. Only the alarmist contingent believes otherwise. Therefore: projection.
And all the “disinformation” is necessarily on the side of censoring blogs like RC, making that comment just more psychological projection [imputing your faults onto others]. WUWT allows and encourages open debate with input from both sides, and it moderates with a light touch. The truth emerges via free discussion, like wheat sifted from chaff.
But RC cannot allow uncensored commentary, because they can’t make a valid case for climate disruption caused by CO2. That’s why Mann is so afraid to debate; he can’t control the discussion.
The planet is proving alarmists more wrong every day. Far from WUWT being a “disinformation” site, anyone can post here – unlike at true disinformation blogs RC, tamino, the rommulan’s ultimate disinformation blog, etc. Psychological projection rules the alarmist mind as a function of cognitive dissonance. Orwell called it “doublethink”: they simply cannot accept what the planet is telling us.
“The trouble with quotes on the Internet is you never know if they are genuine.” —Abraham Lincoln
[THANKS, Latitude, made me laugh, and a bit of wholesome humor raises spirits. -Ira]
Good job, Ira. You just quadrupled RC’s page views for the day. At least.
Really, we should be doing something to help get RC’s readership up before it’s too late. How could we claim to be a credible member of the opposition after there is no one left opposing us?
Ira, If this were in Australia, RC would arguably have committed a criminal offence. In addition to copyright, all authors have moral rights, which, unlike copyright, cannot be waivered or transferred. In brief, if someone uses your material in a manner that casts aspersions upon you or brings you into disrepute (e.g. using Mickey Mouse in a porn flick would do so to Walt Disney), then they have violated your moral rights. Changing your “misleadingly” to “brilliantly, amusingly and accurately” arguably mis-portrays your opinions and creates a false impression of you in the uninformed reader’s mind – exactly what moral rights are designed to prevent.
But legalities or not, it is disgraceful to reverse the meaning of a comment and pretend that it is the original opinion of the commenter. It is not a question about sensitivity to being edited – all newspapers edit letters for brevity etc. This is about lying to the reader about your true opinion.
And to any genuine enquirer who happens to be wandering by right now: Please compare the treatment of comments on the “Climate science by climate scientists” blog to the practically unrestricted comments on WUWT. The side with something to hide is the side that worries about what critics have to say about them.
RC made me feel physically sick after about two minutes on all my previous visits except those done for scientific purposes – to record the full extent of their anti-skeptical articles and see their wiki where I note I’ve got a mention, crikey wot me? but I have no desire to read it.
So if RC can organize a wiki why can’t we?? They call it RC wiki but the page title actually reads RC “deniers”… Anyone interested in picking up the skeptics climate wiki I only started but have virtually no time for for another 6 months – email me!
barry says:
November 13, 2011 at 3:50 pm
“You realise that you can read the original comment in full? The words are not deleted, they are struck through, and the mod indicates what has been added by italicising. Whereas completely snipping words can change the context of a post, and readers will not know the original.”
………………………….
Nice try 🙂
When someone like RC or SkS edits my comment – it changes the content.
If [ snipped ] or deleted…I can resubmit my comment – changing MY WORDING to adhere to blog policy…Or forget it. Either way – Someone else hasn’t written my comment, using their wording.
………………………………
“kim, are you Ira?”
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Try to follow along 🙂 Did you read my first post?
…………………………….
“You keep saying, “my words.” But it appears you haven’t gone to RC and read the comment and seen for yourself that Ira’s words are all there.”
…………………………………
Assumptions are dangerous in debates 🙂
Yes, all there…. and struck out.
Look… If you need, or think “parental guidance” is needed to reword your comments……….mama or papa, should be your first choice.
I, on the other-hand, get pretty darned defensive of people who set themselves up as authoritarian figures who tell me what to think…not allowing me – to think!
I choose my mentors – very carefully.
RC and Company are a sheer waste of time. I have better things to do like wash my hair….
Ira, I don’t post there, and I will not do so. The appearance of any serious skeptics there gives them credibility. They are playing you, my friend, and playing you hard. Be assured that the amount of your posts that get through is in direct proportion to how unthreatening they are perceived to be.
I totally disagree with your urging of reasonable skeptics to associate themselves with RC in any manner, even as opponents. If you do then they can say see, we let comments through … we’re not anti-science. And they can say see, our visitor figures are going up …
Because Ira, I assure you, if you start asking hard questions, they will
. And other than your complaining about it elsewhere, the regulars at that site will never even know that you have been made a temporary un-person.
So let me go on record as saying I won’t be a useful idiot and participate in the RealClimate farce. Let them die from lack of visitors, let them get bored with the echo chamber effect of their gang of dittoheads, but I will not give them whatever small legitimacy my participation there might offer.
Ira, you’re getting suckered … the place reeks of Noble Cause Corruption, it’s James Hansen’s bumboy. Why on earth would you want to be associated with them in any fashion?
w.
[Thanks for the warning and advice, Willis. I have the highest respect for you and I love your topics and comments here at WUWT. I am sure RC will censor my future, more substantive comments, and I will eventually tire and retreat from my adventure over ther. But, for now, I am enjoying it. -Ira]
But the editor used a smilicon, so it’s ok, apparently.
barry says:
November 13, 2011 at 3:50 pm
”
“Huge difference… [ snip ] does not put YOUR words in my Comment – neither does deleting my comment. I’m sorry you don’t see the difference.”
You realise that you can read the original comment in full? ”
Barry, there is not enough evidence to be sure about that. Obviously the moderators at RC feel free to make changes to posted comments. The one who edited Ira’s comments used strike-through. Maybe others take other freedoms. This one had fun replacing “misleading” with “brilliant”, negating the meaning of the sentence, and adding a smiley face in the end; obviously he had quite a lot of fun negating the meaning of a comment. How do you know that that’s all they do? They obviously feel free to play any kind of game with the material they get – they treat it like they treat temperature data, in other words.
I note that your friend (SecularAnimist) was quick to suggest that you be consigned to the “borehole” at #27. As far as I can gather, to post at RC you must be willing to remain extremely polite while having unmoderated, warmist abuse piled on you by the rabid locals. As with most posters here I would rather find less painful things to do with my spare time. As for Eric the mod:
“[Response: ]Please don’t give fodder to the idiots that think they get called ‘deniers’ because of some relationship to Holocaust denial. That’s inflammatory and in any case ridiculous. People get called deniers because they are denying something, plain and simple. It’s a word, that’s it.–eric”
Um, what exactly is it that we are denying en masse? Your friend SecularAnimist went on a patently ludicrous rant (#16) which not only survives moderation at RC, but also the endorsement of the words denier/denialist despite the claims being entirely baseless in describing WUWT. A web site is not a person and can therefore not be a “denier” any more than the Cirque du Soleil can be such…
The contributors here have a range of views on AGW/CAGW and can not be collectively referred to as “denialists” either. So either way you look at it the comments were completely nonsensical and should have been moderated. But, as is so often the case with RC, baseless insults supporting their side sail through censorship, ooops I mean moderation, while the reverse is rarely the case.
RC allows Ira’s (edited) posts because he is not a skeptic. While perhaps not an alarmist like the usual RC posters, his views, at least those he has written about here, track better with the IPCC than they do with most folks here.
Barry;
You realise that you can read the original comment in full?>>>
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A comment that makes a strong point against the warmist claims either never appears at all, or is edited heavily so as to make the point weak, and then it is ridiculed. Follow up comments protesting the behaviour never see the light of day. I learned that the hard way, and have not been back since.
Ira;
They’ll let your comments through as long as your comments are useful to THEM. Since your comments scored no major points, they let them through, but even then, felt the need for subtle editing. They get to say they let you post, and the moment you make a valid point of any importance, they’ll either disappear it entirely, or, more likely based on my experience, edit it in such a fashion as to make you look foolish. Don’t feed the beast, you’ll only get bitten.
Ironic …the use of the word “Climategate” is not allowed – tis a sore spot?
Yet “denier” is rampantly used.
[Right on, kim2ooo! I guess that makes them Climategate deniers :^) – Ira]