WUWT is the focus of a seminar at the University of Colorado

I am the first attendee to be seated in the 36 seat seminar room. I am 20 minutes early, so got a good seat. Will report at length later.

Thirteen people, including Franziska Hollender (Google +: https://plus.google.com/116446784794396843390/posts), attended a seminar on September 11, 2012 at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research on the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado.
Ms. Hollender recently completed her M.A. studies at the University of Vienna and is planning to pursue a PhD next spring. Her presentation centered around her M.A. thesis, which examined seven blog posts over six consecutive years by Anthony Watts on his blog, Watts Up With That.
Bobby, the woman who introduced Ms. Hollender as “Fran”, told us that Fran was taking an academic look at blogging, something few others have attempted. Bobby then asked Fran if she would take questions during her presentation, but Fran preferred to take questions at the end of her talk.
Fran started by talking about a “mediated society” that calls into question the integrity of science. One of the new media is the weblog, or blog. She noted that she also has a free blog about cooking, and mentioned that few blogs make money. She talked for some time about seven posts by Anthony Watts on WUWT. She noted that the comments to these posts operated as verification of the results contained in the posts and were an extended peer review. She added that the comments in the recent post at WUWT announcing her seminar verified her thesis.
Fran’s approach to Anthony’s posts was to use critical discourse analysis as put forward by Fairclough and Wodak. She was especially interested in analyzing the power structures that were evident in the seven posts and their comment sections.
Fran’s analysis showed three major ideas that ran through all the posts:
1. Normal (Kuhnian) science is the good above all else.
2. Climate scientists are not following the scientific method and are not honoring the people who pay their bills and wages.
3. Post normal science (the science that comes *AFTER* normal, Kuhnian science, according to Ravetz and Funtowitcz) is anti-scientific.
Fran said very little more about Anthony’s seven posts. Instead she began her discussion of the 476 comments that followed Anthony’s posting of the announcement of the seminar she was now conducting. First, she pointed out that Anthony claims to cull all posts that have ridicule, personal attacks, and name calling, as described in the “Policy” section of the blog. She said that this was clearly not being done for the posts commenting on the WUWT announcement of her seminar – or any other comments that use the terms warmist, alarmist, warmista, global warming fanatic etc. She especially took umbrage at being called a “dipshit.” She objected to the terms “warmist” and “alarmist” but noted that the term “believer”, which Simon Kuper used in an article at the Financial Times, is not an accurate description of “people who are of the opinion that climate change is at least in part anthropogenic and worthy of public action” but is at a loss herself for a good one-word term.
She then began a discussion about the authority and trustworthiness of science. “Has science ever been normal?” Fran believes that it has never been normal. Scientists cannot be totally objective and thus always have motives other than the mere search for knowledge and truth.
She thinks that most of the people who posted comments to the WUWT announcement missed the point of her “Science AS ideology” (my emphasis) comment.
Because data collection is never unbiased, not being objective with the collection of data isn’t a fault one can ascribe to scientists who biasedly interpret their data, according to Fran. She wants everybody to be aware that observational bias is unavoidable.
She notes that even blogs have biases due to gatekeeping. Nobody sees the comments that have been snipped by moderators, so there is no objective way to determine if they were snipped deservedly. Fran noted that in all her studies of WUWT, few dissenting comments remained after moderation.
There was a guest post on WUWT by Jerome Ravetz, in which he attempted to explain Post normal science and its enactment in the blogosphere. Fran felt that the response to Ravetz was almost entirely personal attack, and unfair personal attack at that, since clearly few of the attackers even understood what Ravetz was getting at.
Fran summed up her appreciation of WUWT and other blogs by saying that they are “Not that free. Not everyone is welcome.”
However, she noted that the interactivity of blogs is high: about 250 comments on each post on WUWT. The interactivity and lack of moderation mean that comments like “Offer her another Zoloft and put her by the window, she’ll enjoy the bright colours in the sunlight,” were “speech acts” that should be held accountable for their aggression.
“Holding science accountable is important.” People who comment on blogs that claim to be scientific should be held accountable for the speech acts that they have committed, according to Fran.
Then she noted that the vast majority of the comments that were appended to the seminar announcement descended into a discussion of Post normal science.
Fran’s appreciation of Post normal science is that it is a description of what happens after the science is done. It is not a prescription, but is a description of what people do after they understand what the normal science means in the real world. There are large issues at stake. What must we do with the knowledge we gain from science?
Thus, in Fran’s thinking Post normal science isn’t a different kind of science at all. It is the actions and words that occur *after* science is done with its objective data and replicated experiments – thus, POST (after) normal science.
Fran believes that, “blogs are underrated as media and need to be taken more seriously.” Blogs are good at noting that the role of science in society is a matter of ideology. Blogs are also good at extended peer review of the results of scientific inquiry. However, blog commentary as constructive discourse is impeded by personal attacks and ridicule, something she herself experienced in the comments to Anthony’s seminar announcement on WUWT.
Fran suggested that if blogs were willing to take out the arguing and attacks, they would become acceptable as academic and scientific discourse. She ended her presentation with the Heisenbergian statement that, “Observing a system changes the system.”
Then Fran opened the floor for questions.
One questioner mentioned that “open source” journals might be one solution to the problem of scientific peer review. Fran replied that unfortunately, scientific journals are usually put on paper, which costs money, and thus they will mostly remain read only within the scientific community, while blogs are open and are much better way to reach a wider public. Also, even though there are free journals, they are not very well promoted and thus reach fewer people from outside a discipline.
I asked Fran whether she could articulate the great divide, the thesis and antithesis of climate change.
She said that she was confused, and could not take a side. Her conviction is that humans do contribute to climate change and that it was worth it to make lifestyle changes like paying more for energy and recycling. She also mentioned that she believes in some version of the precautionary principle: we should do something if the stakes are so high that the entire planet might be affected. She said she would rather act sooner about such a situation rather than later. She added that her approach is very European. Europeans have a “give and get” tradition where they are willing to give more in taxes in order to get less poverty and environmental degradation.
Another questioner asked Fran about roles that commenters take on blogs, specifically the roles of policing the comments or the role of commenting productively. Fran noted that most people stick to some particular role, usually noting that they are stepping out of that role in a particular comment by saying something like, “I normally don’t do this, but now I will comment.” Unfortunately, the policing role generally degenerates into nothing but vicious comments, something that is “unproductive.”
Fran noted that she had to refrain from commenting on Anthony’s post about her seminar. “I wouldn’t be able to stop if I started commenting,” was the reason she gave for not participating in the commentary. Plus, the fact that doing so would have changed the object under study.
Another questioner asked if blogs could influence normal science. Fran noted that many of the guest posts on WUWT were by knowledgeable people, but people not usually publishable in normal peer reviewed journals. This might have some influence on normal science. However, some posts on WUWT were definitely not suitable for peer reviewed journals, most notably Anthony’s posts regarding Pachauri’s novel writings, an activity that has nothing to do whatsoever with Pachauri’s science or his believability as the head of the IPCC, at least in Fran’s opinion.
Thus, says Fran, “Ideas that don’t pass rigid scientific peer review get air.”
Another questioner mentioned Judy Curry’s blog and how it engages both believers and contrarians. Fran noted that Anthony has said that Judy Curry used to be a contrarian, but has “fallen off the bandwagon and retreated to warmist views.”
Fran noted that Jerome Ravetz had a guest post on WUWT, but the 500 comments on that post were almost uniformly “all bad.”
Fran said that she has “yet to find a blog where constructive discourse happens” where clashing views are hosted.
Another questioner asked whether blogs could be the new “agora” in the Greek philosophical sense. Fran found the comment interesting.
Fran wrapped the questioning up by noting that there is still a lack of constructive discourse in the blogosphere. Among contrarians, the role of humans in climate change is still discussed, while among those who are believers, they are “not concerned about whether climate change is happening.” Believers are only concerned about what to do about it.
Bobby thanked all the participants for coming, and most everybody but a few contrarians left for classes or other activities. To the remaining few, Fran opined that she ultimately preferred the European lifestyle to that of America, but appreciates the possibilities and chances in America, having lived in different states and cities herself. She was appalled at the poverty she saw in big parts of the country and was flabbergasted that Americans could allow such blatant inhumanity to stand. She also noted that even with the higher taxes and lack of economic freedom in Europe, the lifestyle there has not changed for the worse.