Rewriting history: "treatment" of climate sceptics disappears from University of Oregon press statement

UPDATE: University of Oregon responds, see Update #3 below.

I’ve been purposely ignoring this ugly pronouncement related to “Planet Under Pressure“, because well, it was just so beyond ugly and it brought up visions of the Soviet politburo defining political opposition as a mental illness. As Andrew Bolt put it, Something is sick, and it’s not the sceptics.

But now there’s been a cover up, and I have the goods.

Apparently, the maelstrom of embarrassment and public ridicule created by Kari Marie Norgaard, professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon was too much for the University to bear. So, in the best Soviet style, they rewrote history, as if nobody would notice, without so much as an apology or update. I find it amazing in this day an age that University types still don’t understand the Internet and that disappearing things like this only makes it worse for you.

Now you see it:

Source: Google Cache which says: This is Google’s cache of http://uonews.uoregon.edu/archive/news-release/2012/3/simultaneous-action-needed-break-cultural-inertia-climate-change-respons. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Mar 29, 2012 21:42:11 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime

Now you don’t:

The words “and treated” have now been sanitized from the University’s press statement, which is located here:

http://uonews.uoregon.edu/archive/news-release/2012/3/simultaneous-action-needed-break-cultural-inertia-climate-change-respons

I hope that the University of Oregon Alumni are made aware of this.

h/t to Christopher Monckton

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UPDATE: It seems Norgaard herself has been “disappeared” from the University of Oregon web server. In the ORIGINAL press statement that I got from Google Cache, there’s a link to Norgaard’s faculty page, a portion of which I used in my third paragraph above.

Here’s the screencap, I put yellow highlight either side of the link to her page:

That link goes to: http://sociology.uoregon.edu/faculty/norgaard.php but that gives a 500 Internal Server error now:

Although she still appears of the sociology faculty page listing at:

http://sociology.uoregon.edu/faculty/index.php

…that link is dead as well, but other faculty members on the same page have working links.

And, further, the link from the original press release has also been removed in the revised one, note the missing link underline between the yellow highlights on Norgaard’s name:

Curiouser and curiouser.

Again, Google Cache is your friend:

What a bunch of rank amateurs. Maybe they’ll soon go from being called The Mighty Ducks to “The Mighty Schmucks”.

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UPDATE#2 – It gets worse. As pointed out in comments, apparently her official uoregon.edu email address has been replaced on the Sociology Faculty page. On the Google Cache for that page, as it appeared on Mar 28, 2012 19:55:22 GMT, the “send email” link for Norgaard goes to a uoregon.edu email address. On the current page, it goes to a yahoo.com email address. If they were trying to shield her from hateful email, why shift it to a private email account?

Something is going on behind the scenes that we aren’t privy to yet.

UPDATE#3  4/3/12  2PM PST

UO responds:

I asked Jim Barlow, director of science and research communications, University of Oregon when and why the sentence was changed. Here’s his response:

“I intended the original first sentence of the news release to function as a play-on-words on our researcher’s message about recognizing and addressing cultural inertia. Unfortunately, the word “treated” became the focus of the story, leading to inaccurate portrayals. In an effort to shift the focus back to the actual topic of the conference presentation, I chose at midday Monday to remove the word from the version of the news release that appears on our website.”

Source:

http://cnsnews.com/blog/craig-bannister/call-climate-skeptics-be-treated-removed-universitys-press-statement (h/t David L. Hagen)

No mention of why her faculty page disappeared.