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of Greenland ice cover, (3) Publicity for the Atlas hyped a non-existent 15% meltdown in Greenland, (4) The Atlas has withdrawn the bogus claim, and (5) They will create a corrective insert for the Atlas and make it available online.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.
Ira,
You haven’t slipped anything past them over at RC. You aren’t addressing the actual science just some amateur’s goof, and they know where they are vulnerable as well as we do. Try getting them to address the model accuracy needed to attribute and project an energy imbalance of less than 1W/m^2, or to address the implications of the diagnostic literature for the error range of their climate projections, or to address the implications of the model diagnostic literature for the magnitude and even the sign of their fearmongering scenerios, e.g., droughts in light of Wentz (2007), etc. H*@k, even try getting a straight answer on where some of the figures in the published papers came from. They’ll toy with you until you start hitting too close to the mark, and the final word is always theirs, because yours never appears.
Secularanalcyst is a vicious, mendacious, frothing at the mouth mad dog that routinely has its posts deleted over at Mother Jones Blue Marble blog in response to my knowledgeable, topical and well received comments there.
I quit trying to post at RC when my responses to the attack dogs’ nonsense were held up in moderation while they continued to pile on about how I was too cowardly to respond to them.
I respond and am blocked. Their conclusion is that I am a paid denialist.
I think that is the essence of the point Dr Judith Curry is trying to make about the Team with her free for all blog, like her style or not.
H Dahlsveen says:
November 13, 2011 at 10:40 pm
–OK, so I’ll go along with the fact that the “water cycle” is helping to keep the warmth in, but if the Earth was orbiting the Sun in the same manner that our moon orbits the Earth, then by how much would CO2 and the rest of the GHGs warm the Earth? –Well, I don’t know, but I doubt there would be anybody here to work it out.
You don’t have to go along with it – AGWScience Fiction Inc has actually taken the water cycle out, the water cycle primarily cools the planet. With our fluid gaseous atmosphere but without the water cycle the temps would be 67°C, think deserts.
Every claim made by those perpetuating the global warming memes is science fiction, describing a different world, imagined not real. All the basic premises are ridiculous as the exclusion of the water cycle shows – and that’s absent because there is no convection in this imaginary world they tax us to hell already for its imaginary problems we’re blamed for creating – based on Arrhenius’ misreading of Fourier.
http://greenhouse.geologist-1011.net/
And don’t expect any honesty from these science fiction meme pushers, they exclude Arrhenius’ 1906 correction to his 1896 paper and everything else from real world physics which shows up their fictional world for what it is, which lies and cheats by manipulating data in support of their fictional existence as the norm, that’s been proved over and over.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/11/without-energy-life-is-brutal-and-short/#comment-795859
Chuck L says:
November 13, 2011 at 2:30 pm
“I agree with James. I almost never go to RC, Romm, or Tamino; the acolytes are nasty and the “Team” at RC, Romm, and Tamino are arrogant and censor almost any post that disagrees with their dogma. I also don’t want to count as a “hit” on their websites.”
I agree with most of the comments, it is simply a waste of time. After trying to engage in conversation one realises fast they are not interested in dialogue, so why lose time? One needs track each comment, check if and what has been changed, play by their rules, let them insult yourself, let them twist every word, etc etc and why? If somebody wants to be informed they have the possibility to come and check for information. I do not see science advancing in the pro-CAGW camp and the main reason is that scientist have to be skeptical to have science advancing. Would there have been the CERN experiments with only pro-CAGW thinking? How about the variations inside the solar radiation (UV) and its implications? Further solar influence? How about studies of the MWP and past climate? Holocene optimum? What advance in climate study has come from the pro-CAGW camp? Which valuable hypothesis? Here some I found let me know if you know any better: farting mamals ending the glaciation, their killing by humans causing the Younger Dryas? Genghis Khan killings causing the greening of the woods and the end of inexistent MWP? LIA caused by the conquistadores? Any other? Oh yes, our SUVs causing waterworld and aliens going to kill us for not behaving.
So I appreciate your trying to communicate on their sites but I do not plan to retry it.
Keep on the good communication, the good dialogue about science here and the people interested to read about it will come here.
“…seemingly mislead RC reader…” should be “…seemingly misled RC reader…”
Ira, I guess the reason why they say that there is significative warming lately is that Phil Jones, a few months after the BBC interview, came back and told that there was significant warming after all. I suppose it has to do with growing sample size.
Barry let me help you to understand. Please see below your comment moderated as you seem to like it:
“barry says:
November 13, 2011 at 2:57 pm
I’m NOT a fan of realclimate because they DO NOT explain the science well, are experts in PR the field they write in (usually) and are not as prone as some other blogs to pile on the rhetoric – though they’re hardly perfect.
For instance, they gave a link in the post mentioned here to an explanation of where the Times likely got their map from. They do not talk about political motivations for the error, do not suggest it was deliberate, and note that it was the SKEPTIC scientific community that pointed it out.”
Thank you barry for your post, great to see we are aligned.
EFS_Junior says:
November 13, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Most of my posts show up over here, minus the snarky ones.
I actually come here more often than RC, as RC is just too boring, what with all their factual climate science talk and what all.
Why not just shout out “I’m a warmist troll!” It says the same as what you said, but in fewer words.
Alex says:
” I never managed to get a post passed at RC. Tried at 3 different occasions. No nastiness from my side. They are censoring like they were a part of the old eastern european press.”
I have never tried posting at RC but have made three attempts at Tamino, all brief, on-thread and polite, without success and in sceptical terms I am an agnostic not an atheist. It would be an interesting piece of research to compare the percentages of “warmist” posts featured on sites such Anthony’s and Climate Audit with “skeptic” posts permitted on sites such Real Climate.
What I find astonishing is the zeal with which RealClimate sycophants justify their censoring. Barry, do you realize you are not helping them out at all? You are being an enabler, rationalizing everything. When you have kids you are going to learn a few lessons yourself about putting your foot down, drawing bright lines, and speaking up when someone does something wrong. Re-wording the commenter’s post is not acceptable. If another commenter does it in jest or parody, that’s one thing because at least the original source comment is still there and visible. Moderators doing something in jest or parody? What? One other thing that others have mentioned, you say that the comment is still there, but as other’s have pointed out, how the heck can you say that with no evidence? Perhaps because jumping to conclusions despite lack of evidence is Climatology’s modus operandi.
Now about that point that the ‘original comment is still there’. Well what a mess I see. The moderator Eric says that “[Response: edits in italics 😉 –eric]”. Hmmmm, looking at Ira Glickstein’s post above I see lots of italics. Does Eric mean he used <I> Italics tags? What if Ira Glickstein also used <I> Italics tags. That would result in a mess. Real Climate Moderator fail.
Perhaps Ira Glickstein enclosed the entire post (from RC source code) here in <BLOCKQUOTE> tags as is normal procedure. Well that is even trickier because most often that results in toggling any existing <I> Italics tags (vanquishing Eric’s moderation footprints). So RC posts become non-transferable without extraordinary measures. Whoops. Real Climate Moderator fail.
Now, looking at the source code to the above, it looks to me that moderator Eric may actually have used <EM> Emphasis tags. Well, that may or may not mean Italics because any tag, particularly these, can be redefined by a CSS style sheet anyway. To see any possible variations in these tags when affected by a site’s style sheet, we’ll have to perform a test …
Here is … Emphasis and Italics … shown normally.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Mixing these tags perhaps? For example, Commenters using Italics and Eric the Moderator using Emphasis within the same text! Yeah, that’ll work. Brilliant idea!. Way to get clarity and precision. BTW is that Eric Steig? I would hate to think that an allegedly careful scientist on the cutting edge of Climatology would be this incompetent as a blog moderator. How many levels of bad judgment calls and enabling does it require for this practice to still be in occurring today after years in the spotlight?
One more comment about this practice of using Italics tags ONLY for assigning attribution. Unless someone is browsing the web using Microsoft Word (or similar), naturally all formatting is lost when doing copy/paste operations. The paste destination will result in one heck of a mess of tangled words with no clear path back to the original authorship. Most importantly here are <STRIKE> tags. Example: Climate
ScientistAlarmist, becomes: Climate Scientist Alarmist. And just what do you think Google will spider and index? Yep, the plain text of course. What do you think Google will display in its search results. Yep, the plain text of course. Whoops. Real Climate Moderator fail.To Ira Glickstein … you should consider editing the top post and remove the <BLOCKQUOTE> tags (sacrificing the indentation) and add <EM>Emphasis</EM> tags to the final line from Eric in order to recreate the RC original formatting.
Here is my guess as to how your quoted comment from RC should appear in the top post above (but I am not sure because I refuse to visit that place). Between the following dashed lines …
(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]
I just noticed that the CSS style sheet here at WUWT treats <P> Paragraph tags as a single CRLF (at least here in the comment section). Therefore here is that same re-creation with extra <BR> tags for each paragraph …
(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]
barry said:
“…In a neutral world, the “direction” of the error doesn’t matter – just that there was one. As soon as you start speculating otherwise, you bring politics to the table, and thus you got the response you did…”
However, in the “alarmist” world, the direction of the “error” does matter (i.e, Tiljander proxies).
If the data supports CAGW, it’s ok. If the data doesn’t support CAGW, it’s either flopped till it does, or left out completely.
Myrrh says
While you’re over there, Ira, ask them to explain what happens to the 95% thermal infrared from an incandescent bulb when what you say you feel as heat comes from the 5% visible emitted? Does it get trapped in the bulb or what?
————
What you feel as heat on your hand is the proportion of the lamp’s radiation output absorbed by your hand. It does not matter if the light absorbed is infrared or visible light. So
Thanks for your opinion, RJ, but I get the impression that most “real skeptics” do accept the fact that Atmospheric water vapor, CO2 and other so-called “greenhouse gases” are responsible for the Earth being ~33º C warmer than it would be if the Atmosphere was pure N2 and O2. So you can put yourself down as what I call a “disbeliever”.
Please read my series here at WUWT by Googling WUWT Visualizing the Greehouse effect.
Sorry to confuse you guys with some counter examples, but some of my posts didn’t make it past moderation at Real Climate either.
I think the reason is simple enough, they are picky about the quality of the post.
And all the moral outrage is overblown. The edit to Ira’s post was just a joke and a tease. But you guys don’t have a sense of humour and take yourselves far to seriously.
Like, are we supposed to CARE what “RC” says about anything…I think not. I sure don’t. They are NOT the last word or final authority on anything.
Besides, I’m sure none of the moderators use any fossil fuels or energy derived from fossil fuels, because I’m sure they wouldn’t want to be seen as hypocrites…
Perhaps I am a masochist :^). No, actually I believe it is better to light one little candle than to curse the darkness.
AND, by showing the actual extent of the censorship and editing at RC here at WUWT, a very popular public forum, I am documenting specifics. My posting here garnered more comments -both pro and con- in a few hours yesterday than the RC Times Atlas topic that has been up since 8 Nov. As I mentioned, my discussion was shunted over to the RC “open thread” sidelines, and I went over there and am attempting to continue. I plan to post updates in this WUWT topic so the “world” will know how things go. Stay tuned.
Thanks, Louis. The Hansen quote may be found at: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2009/WaysAndMeans_20090225.pdf
My views on a revenue-neutral carbon tax may be found at: http://tvpclub.blogspot.com/2009/03/carbon-tax-yes-cap-no.html
Even a stopped clock is exactly right twice a day :^ Hansen criticizes the Cap & Trade scam, which is a politician’s delight and will not work. He and I (and conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer and the WSJ) favor the alternative. I use it as a counter to Cap & Trade because you can’t fight something with nothing. I also think it will help make us less dependent on oil from unstable foreign sources, and save us blood and treasure we’d have to spend to maintain that access.
Sorry to Ira, and a few of the other posters here, but RC is complete and utter BS. For those of you who believe editing comments is ok, or even “not such a big deal” .. are you freaking kidding me? OMG, WTF, what are you people smoking? Any alteration, and I mean ANY alteration of a comment, whether strike-through or not, whether or not the original comment was retained, ANY alteration within the original content alters the context and the message. Hello? .. are there not any behavioral scientists or psychologists in the room? I feel like I am back in 1940’s Germany…. sheeesh… give me a break. I don’t care if you simply add a comma, or remove a period. In doing so, it is no longer MY comment. It is either left perfectly in tact and complete, or it is no longer my words! … period! …
I can’t even believe some of the comments I am reading here … unreal … no wonder we have so many problems in this world … sheeesh…
It is fundamentally dishonest for any site to insert words into your posting to change the meaning. It speaks volumes to the character and morals of the scientists that run the RC site. Honesty and integrity is not a requirement of a PhD.
From my experience and observations with RC they are a cult indoctrination site, following the same techniques used by other cults applied to an Internet Blog.
What RC is looking for is personality traits as revealed by their treatment of your postings, to judge how susceptible you are to indoctrination. If you are not susceptible, you will be quickly weeded out lest you infect the other cult members with your views.
RC is definitely science. It is a skilled application of mass psychology to achieve cult indoctrination on a large scale to generate political support for continued funding for the benefit of those scientists involved. What you are seeing is not accidental.
Ira,
Successfully posting at RC is like successfully visiting a house of ill repute and counting it a success because you did not get a STD.
I am impressed you are able to be posted there, but I would rather blog at a more reputable place.
My bet is that after the post this thread has grown from your career at RC will come to an early end.
I think Fred has it in a nutshell, if a genuine – according to the rules – comment is edited, removed or otherwise tampered with (censored) and it is common for posts to go through a censorship ‘panel’ then the entire website must be based on the same principal. This would make it a website that offers a single viewpoint of the subject, or in other words a ‘Public Relations’ website – definately not a ‘scientific’ one.
Deletion or rephrasing a post to suit an agenda? ok, remove blasphemy or anything that may cause someone distress, e.g. like calling them a denier, etc. But I am gobsmacked that posts are being edited to say something different to what was intended.
What next from these people that claim to be scientists ?
Thanks for your well reasoned comment, O H Dahlsveen. “AGW” is Anthropogenic (human caused) Global Warming, which has three aspects:
1) The Atmospheric “greenhouse effect”: Due to water vapor, CO2 and other so-called “green house” gases in the Atmosphere the Earth is ~33ºC warmer than it would be with pure N2 and O2.
2) Natural cycles and variations: The ice core data proves that mean temperatures and CO2 levels have varied way above and below current levels over the past (pre-human) several hundred thousand years. Thus, some (perhaps most) of the measured increase in temperature and CO2 since the late 1880’s is not under control or influence of humans.
2) Additional warming due to human activities: Any decrease in albedo (reflectiveness) and/or increase in CO2 will tend to increase mean temperatures above what they would be absent those human activities (ALL ELSE BEING EQUAL, and they are not equal according to my point #2)
Virtually all of my posts here http://wattsupwiththat.com/author/iraglickstein/ provide evidence for one or the other, or all, of these aspects of AGW. My posts also provide evidence that :
1) The Official Climate Team has systematically diddled the data to exagerate the amount of warming since the late 1880’s, perhaps by up to a factor of two,
2) That they have exaggerated the amount human-caused warming due to human activities by their overblown estimates of CO2 sensitivity (how much temperature rise is expected due to a doubling of CO2) by a factor of two and perhaps up to eight.
3) That they have attempted to induce our political leadership and media, who are mostly naive when it comes to science, to adopt so-called “green” policies, such as subsidizing biomass (ethanol) and solar (Solyndra), pushing the Cap & Trade scam, and otherwise “picking winners” based on political connections and influence. These “solutions” are counter-productive and will further wreck our economy.
ALL of the aspects you mention are included in the estimates of blackbody temperature and the effect of the Atmospheric “greenhouse” effect. They even consider the contribution of the heat generated by the molten hot, radioactively heated, core of the Earth. IMHO, a scientifically astute skeptic should accept the basic science and reserve his or her skepticism for the amount of warming, the portion of that due to human activities, whether or not additional warming is any real threat to human civilization (or perhaps a net benefit), and whether or not any of the proposed “solutions” will be worth the cost (or even work at all).
1) The Official Climate Team has systematically diddled the data to exagerate the amount of warming since the late 1880′s
==============================================
You think?…………………….
http://www.real-science.com/paper-trail-mikes-nature-trick
What hasn’t been mentioned about RC is the despicable practice, of revealing confidential information, provided during sign-up, should someone actually start effectively make skeptical points. This tactic, against skeptics, violates all common decency and is intimidation at it’s worst. This has happened to me and I will not abide. Beware! GK