As WUWT closes in on a million comments…
…I thought this is worth reading at The Lukewarmer’s way run by Tom Fuller:
Maybe Michael Tobis might finally be persuaded to approve Mr. Fuller’s comment, now in moderation for 3 days.
The Worst Thing About Censorship
h/t to Skiphil
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Quantity vs Quality?
chris y says:
January 26, 2013 at 6:51 pm
…
However, software engineer Tobis has extensive experience and expertise in developing government policy to exterminate 80% of the global population?
God help us.
Tch tch tch! Where are our manners?
No, after you, Mr Tobis!
I am going to answer this in full because we have new readers joining WUWT all the time so it is a good idea to help bring them up to speed. That is the reason I always try to answer such questions.
………………..
Mk Urbo says: @ur momisugly January 26, 2013 at 9:01 pm
I posted comment …
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rebuttal:
CAGW is not rocket science and is easily understood by chemists, physicists and engineers. People from other disciplines often have very good insights. For example, as an undergrad in chemistry I made a significant contribution to karst geology just because my training was so different. What is really laughable about that statement is ‘ climatologists’ such as Mike Mann do NOT HAVE DEGREES IN CLIMATOLOGY. It is too new a science.
Scientists who dissent:
Art Robinson Reponds to Petition Slander The petition includes about 500 meteorologists and climate scientists. The Global Warming Petition has been signed by over 31,000 American scientists.
Astronauts and Scientists Condemn NASA Participation in Global Warming Hoax “Seven Astronauts and 42 former NASA scientists sent a pointed letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden condemning NASA for giving support to the idea that carbon dioxide released by the burning of fossil fuels is somehow causing Earth to warm unnaturally. “
NASA Astronauts Announce Second Letter to NASA at Heartland Conference
And then these former NASA scientists really get serious:
……………
Rebuttal:
Others have addressed this but here are the WUWT links.
About that overwhelming 97-98% number of scientists that say there is a climate consensus…
What else did the ’97% of scientists’ say?
………………
Rebuttal:
The surface temperature record can no longer be trusted because it has been so mangled. For example the realignment of temperature record by Hansen in 1980, 1987, 2007 three graphs That is just the tip of the iceberg. See: my Comment on the accuracy of the temperature record and the Raw temperature graph.
There is a lot more but that will give you an idea of the problem.
Rebuttal:
Jo Nova has Skeptics Handbooks I and II
Also checkout
Questioning the CO2 Ice Hockey Stick
THE ACQUITTAL OF CARBON DIOXIDE by Jeffrey A. Glassman, PhD
The ‘CO2 Well mixed in the Atmosphere’ conjecture, one of the three legs that CAGW rests upon is invalid. ON WHY CO2 IS KNOWN NOT TO HAVE ACCUMULATED IN THE ATMOSPHERE & WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH CO2 IN THE MODERN ERA by Jeffrey A. Glassman, PhD
by Jeffrey A. Glassman, PhD
Japanese Satellites say 3rd World Owes CO2 Reparations to The West and the most recent Japanese satellite data: chart
The changes in the C12 / C13 ratios are used to implicate CO2 of human origin as the cause for the ‘increase’ in CO2. That falls apart too upon a closer look. The Trouble With C12 C13 Ratios
Rebuttal:
GRAPHS: Global Sea Ice, Arctic and Antarctic
GRAPH: Antarctic Sea Ice Average for 1979-200 vs 2011-3012 and 2012-2013 Note that the sea ice is increasing in the Antarctic and decreasing in the Arctic. This is called the bipolar seesaw.
So what does a bipolar seesaw actually indicate? There is a new paper out discussing that.
OOPS! The End Holocene, or How to Make Out Like a ‘Madoff’ Climate Change Insurer and a MOST Annoying Lead Time Graph also support that instead of CAGW we are looking at the tail end of an interglacial.
More information:
Antarctic Warming? Part 2 – A letter from a meteorologist on the ground in Antarctica
Surprise! There’s an active volcano under Antarctic ice
New paper: A high-resolution surface mass balance map of Antarctica shows “no significant trend in the 1979–2010 ice sheet”
Skeptic paper on Antarctica accepted – rebuts Steig et al Melting is only in the one area
technical explanation of data analysis
Undersea volcanoes might be more common than previously thought
Rebuttal:
As usual they ignore history and change the data. WORSE, the ignore the real cause of the fires.
In Australia if you try to clear a firebreak on your land you could go to gaol
Extreme heat in 1896: Panic stricken people fled the outback on special trains as hundreds die.
Australian Temperatures in cities adjusted up by 70%!?
Is there any unmassaged data out there?
The Smoking Gun at Dawin Zero
Smoking guns across Australia: Where’s the warming? Looking at 16 other locations
No it is not valid it is projection.
@ur momisugly Gail Combs
Thank you so very much for your time and effort in writing a response. For the record, your assumptions are correct in that many of us WUWT visitors are not “knee deep” in this info on weekly or monthly basis.
I myself have been fighting the good fight for over ten years in just trying to 1) counter misinformation on the web, and 2) expose the underlining agenda for those with an open mind. I’ve always run back to WUWT to make sure that positions I’m defending are correct and many persons on WUWT have been very kind in support of such efforts.
Again, thanks for your help. :o)
Latimer Alder says:
January 27, 2013 at 1:57 am
They are collectivist, like participants at, for instance, a Labor Union rally they try to scream down the opposition. That’s why they always argue with the “97%”, the “consensus”, general argumentum ad populum over and over and over again, and never actually argument scientifically.
I have asked warmists dozens of time to bring evidence for the claimed positive water vapor feedback – I never even got an evasive answer let alone a factual one. The question makes them run away because they don’t understand the tenets of the CO2AGW theory themselves and are probably baffled that someone asks about WATER.
kashua says:
“I must say that having moderator’s opinion added to my comment can be also pretty irritating. If a moderator has something to say to my opinion, he should do it the same way as any other person here.”
Exactly right. If I have one quibble, that is it. Mods should never insert their personal opinions into someone else’s comment, unless it is to point out why a post is being snipped or deleted. They don’t do it very often, and only one or two moderators are guilty of that breach of the Moderator’s Rules. Moderators have their own separate screen names, and they should post their opinions using those separate identities.
That said, WUWT has gone from zero to 1 million reader comments, and ~138 million unique views, in only six years! That is an astonishing accomplishment by Anthony Watts. Clearly, he is doing something right, and he is filling a need that is not being met by other blogs.
@Gail Coombs:
I reckon the kind of “catechism” you’ve provided is valuable. (Wouldn’t others agree?) I’ve often wondered if there’s a “permalink” (preferably a whole site) with that myth/mythbusting format, cheesy as it might at first appear.
Given that we’re, you know, skeptics and that we’re on the side of science, why don’t we have our own SkepticalScience? (Minus the stalinist comment disappearances, obviously.)
Or do we?
Mk Urbo says
‘
Your argument would have more substance if you could show that there is something absolutely uniquely different about the new science of ‘climatology’ that sets it completely apart from the established disciplines of physics and chemistry and biology and geology and statistics and all the rest. And that there is a widely accepted qualification in the subject that can differentiate a true ‘climatologist’ from the common herd.
Can you do either of those things? If not, there is little force to this oft-quoted, but rarely justified position.
Footnote: I note en passant that few of the critics of the idea of homeopathy are practicing in that field either. But I don’t take that observation as reason to believe in the homeopathic theory. A decent theory has to prove itself against criticism from wherever and whoever it comes. Not just from its self-declared adherents.
@Latimer
Its not me Latimer – I was bringing a discussion over from another website in hopes of gaining some rebuttals to such comments. I agree with your point and G Combs makes other rebukes as well. I understand that many points have been beat to death amongst those of you that spend significant time in debate of the subject, but there are always recent starting points of discussion and new people wrapping their hands around the subject.
In this case, there have been many new stories generated off Obama’s inauguration speech which contained some pro-AGW/warming content. The alarmists are out [semi] fresh trying to generate some momentum from this event and IMHO, its worth re-defending.
Another reason skeptic sites get more traffic is that they all seem to have a sense of humour. The warmist sites seem to be populated by sour ranters whose idea of a merry quip is to call someone who disagrees with them a cockroach.
And yes, to have one’s post edited in such a way that it amounts to a misquote is most unsettling. Although, in my case, it is even worse if they quote me accurately.
If the science and consensus is on their side, why the need to censor??? Sceptical comments could easily be trashed and shown to be nonsense???
I think I have one reason why. A couple of years back a Warmist at the Guardian was convinced that c02 by itself could cause dangerous warming. She challenged sceptics to produce peer reviewed evidence. I pointed her to the peer reviewed evidence as well as the IPCC stating that water vapour was a bigger greenhouse gas. She had made lots of comments prior to my comments but nothing after. Was she converted? Maybe not but she wasn’t so damned sure after that.
Palm, face. 🙂 I replied to her here and here and here.
After this she stopped commenting. I wonder why?
Oh and she also said
to which I replied
This place may not be as bad as some others, but it is no paragon of free expression.
A moderator squashed a comment I made because it demeaned, as he claimed, the subject of the comment.
When I sent him an almost verbatim copy of the remark, which was perfectly innocuous, he claimed that what I sent him was substantially different from the original, which was not true; and since it was a one-line comment, it would have been hard to mis-remember.
Very disappointing, and it makes this article look hypocritical.
Climate science is an emerging discipline, very much as Geology was at the end of the 18th Century, with its battle between the Catastrophists and Uniformitarians. There is a similar tension today between the Climate Catastrophists, basing their beliefs on an all controlling deity (CO2) and the Climate Realists (Uniformitarians), albeit with a reversal of the arrow of time. Catastrophists seem to believe that measurements over the short term in the present is the key to catastrophe in the future whilst realists see the past as the key to the present and the future.
Riiight. How many comments are deleted after the fact on this site? LOADS.
REPLY: Well, you are certainly welcome to define that with facts. Yes some commenters are not approved, once we discover that the poster is using fake email addresses. We get a few of those. The policy is that commenters must have a functioning email address, if they don’t they don’t get posting privilege, simple as that.
You are welcome to compare our site use and moderation policy here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/about-wuwt/policy/
With some others, for example the policy at Greg Laden’s “science” blog here: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/about/
Let’s hope you don’t live in Texas – Anthony
This comment is a comment in a million.
And thanks for the opportunity to read the more interesting ones.
At Taminos blog, the amusingly named ‘Open Mind’, they have a thread running claiming that the recent hot temperatures in Australia were proof positive of CAGW,
I just posted links to the actual Governments BOM figures showing nothing unusual in temperatures there over the last 3 and 12 months.
I also posted a BOM link to show that the much touted (on certain blogs) ‘permanent drought’ situation of a few years ago had completely disappeared.
He just eliminated the post, so I sent him this comment which I knew he would censor.
“Ho Ho Ho
Can’t stand someone just posting the facts ehh Tamino?
Kind of interferes with yours and the ‘Teams’ attempts to retain control of the agenda and story.
Unfortunately for you and the rest of your ‘crew’, you can only censor your own pathetically small (and getting smaller) area.
Very little traffic and comments on RC now. Just the faithfull remain!)
Well you lost control of the agenda sometime ago and now reality has caught up with you. You are now starting to see some scientists raising their heads up and suggesting possible other things than CO2 for the short term warming.
The unspoken or implied threats from the climate clique are starting to lose their power and potency a la Lance Armstrong and his clique.
It’s only going to get worse. There is no warming on the horizon and the models will fall out of their error bands and be falsified. New ones could be constructed but what the heck can they show that will put the C in CAGW and yet still match the data?
Nope, you had better start edging towards the life rafts. I see Hansen has been forced out of his bunker and agreed there is a pause in GW.
Who will be the first amongst the clique to declare against CAGW and throw the rest under the bus? It is the right play after all.
Well continue to talk to your acolytes and true believers, you can ignore reality for a while in your little bunker especially if you don’t let anyone but people of true faith in.
Remind you of anything around about 1945? That worked out well didn’t it?
Alan
Richard Tol (@RichardTol) says:
January 26, 2013 at 11:13 pm
“A lot of the projected impacts of climate change can be adequately dealt with by adaptation. Just think about it: Humans thrive from the equator to the poles. People survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Killing Fields of Cambodia. We can have a few degrees of warming.”
Absolutely right you are. And I am sure you will agree on the following;
It is much easier to adapt to, say, 1.5 degrees of warming, than adapting to trying to do all transportation services in your society without using fossile fuels.
If everyone in Norway started to charge all their government sponsored electric car batteries at night, where would the energy come from? Probalbly imported from a “foreign” coal power-plant.
@ur momisugly Latimer Alder
The other ‘dirty little secret’ that Mr Gore neglects is that his hero, in fact, a good portion of the pro-AGW crowd of Scientists, are not ‘climatologists’ either. Dr Mann, for instance, is not a ‘climatologist’. I’m not sure why an Atmospheric Physicist’s opinion on the matter would be less ‘valid’ (or subject to immediate dismissal). Physics is a very broad subject and is a discipline that, once trained in, the ‘physicist’ can apply his training to the ‘climate’ pretty easily,just like a ‘physicist’ can apply his training to ‘rocket science’, or things as mundane as golf or baseball.
Kasuha:
Your post at January 27, 2013 at 12:51 am says
I speak as a person who has had comments ‘snipped’ on WUWT and who was given a ’24 hour time out’ from WUWT during the past week.
I strongly disagree with your post.
During my ‘punishment’ of a ‘time out’ a post appeared which I (mis)understood to be an attempt to lever wider any rift between me and the owner of this blog. This is an extract from my reply to that.
That variety would not and could not exist without the superb moderation on WUWT.
Richard
In regard to moderation, WUWT is still much better than any green activist site I have ever seen. This goes without saying. But this doesn’t mean that WUWT is free of any problems. There is an obviously disproportional amount of free play allowed to a couple of pet posters (Leif and Willis). They are given a license to insult, while their opponents’ answers are snipped, even if they are no more than mildly ironic. When Anthony Watts talks about “being out of line,” he draws very different lines for his personal favorites and for others. This is censorship.
REPLY: Your concerns are noted, but also not fully aware. Both Leif and Willis have have comments removed. Willis also has had some posting privileges revoked, and he can no longer post new stories at will, but they must be approved by me. You have a long history here of not liking these two people, who sometimes don’t suffer fools gladly and occasionally aggravate other commenters. I’m just as guilty of that. That said, if you can find a better place with the level of discourse we have, you are certainly welcome to go there. – Anthony
“Skeptical” blogs are more popular because because there is no need to be consistent, correct, informed or coherent. Try posting a comment at Real Climate. You feel like a dill, because you know that comment will be read by people who actually understand stuff. Meanwhile at WUWT you can watch an endless succession of wrong arguments paraded endlessly.
So it is good that there are “skeptical” blogs where everyone can feel comfortable in their ignorance, and happily push their prejudices.
REPLY: You certainly do a good job of that too. – Anthony
I was thinking it might be fun (if difficult to moderate, I suspect) to organise a sweepstake for charity on who gets to post the 1,000,000th comment.
Thank you Anthony and all other contributors to this site. I have learnt much over the years coming here.
Spare a thought for Mr Watts, he has had to read a million comments. A million comments x lets say average 30 secs. My maths is hopeless but I make that one year of continual reading 24hrs a day!
Thanks Anthony, for continuing the tradition of first, John Daly, then Steve McIntyre. You then expanded that to new heights, and now there are quite a few excellent blogs — all without feeding off the public trough. That’s the definition of true “grass-roots”.
The warmers are amazed, angry, resentful and in full denial mode (ironic, eh?).
The AGW blogs dare not allow open discussion. Their whole theory would be refuted in detail on their own propaganda sites, and the cause would suffer. It bears repeating: their fundamental purpose is not science, but ideological. They seek to make science serve their beliefs.