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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Eliza says:
January 27, 2013 at 8:33 am
Agree with “Imdying” above….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Actually I think, if handle correctly, you might see WUWT hanging around as a place where new science is discussed. WUWT is not just about CAGW but other interesting stuff.
I just quit trying to engage in debate at Open Mind and RC. I was polite in my posts, but offered counter arguments to the discussions. These comments usually just disappeared while the “faithful” continued to fawn over the hosts and bask in their own self righteousness and pompousness. I do not go to those sites any more. At least here I can express my thoughts and engage in civil discussion of the facts.
Did you mean “criticism by specialists”, because there’s plenty of criticism of specialists in related fields. Meaning criticism directed at the specialists. Just didn’t want to misunderstand what you were saying.
james griffin says: January 27, 2013 at 6:36 am
As stated on Bishop Hill a few weeks ago it is the blogosphere that is destroying AGW
=================================
That is why they do not allow open discussion at the warmer blogs; it threatens their cause.
WUWT will live on in one form or another after the Climatology Farce fades away, the old main stream media, the science journals and TV shows have blown their cover.
Now exposed as willing to mislead for their cause, they are doomed to fade into obscurity, their leaping onto the CAGW bandwagon is now evident to all, whether thro incompetence or agenda does not matter.They can not be trusted to do the job they promised.
People have withdrawn payment, hence the collapsing subscription rates.
So a medium like this blog will thrive, wether thro subscription or the voluntary donations of participants.
In what other medium can you leap right in and argue that a subject is wrong, idiotic or plain nuts and then have smarter people point out the error of your conceptions?
Sure beats screaming at the TV or wanting your money back after buying a magazine.
Trust but verify, is more than an empty motto.
So save science; make a donation to encourage WUWT to continue.
John Brookes says: January 27, 2013 at 5:42 am
==============================
This is known as a drive-by spitball. You don’t seem capable of much else, or at least that is the impression you give.
Far as the traffic question, where do I go the see how much Ladens traffic spiked when WUWT posted the “Should Anthony Sue?” question?
As I suspect these types of blogs will launch uglier and more personal attacks on Anthony, merely to boost their minuscule traffic in the near future.
For unlike WUWT they do have pay Masters, who are seeing a diminishing rate of return on their dollar.
I don’t object to the concept of censorship per se. Who hasn’t tried to read comments at a mainstream site like CNN, WP, WSJ and thought, this is a total waste of my time? It’s like a teenage flame war between Windows/Mac iOS/Android. Not very interesting.
However the execution of censoring is always what causes the problems. I have no doubt that most people enter this with an “even hand” mentality, but it just never seems to work out. Outright bias eventually flows from subconscious bias, and it never seems to recover.
RC is always a case in point. They were posting all my first newbie stuff, and over time my pass rate fell below 50%, I felt unwelcome, and now post infrequently, although I have learned how to properly phrase posts so that 2/3 get through the randomized emotional filter employed there.
You can make a judgment from what they allow through, and what they reject, and it is certainly biased. It’s their right to run the site as they wish. People who respond with some pretty abusive stuff are given effective real time posting access, while I have to wait hours for moderated responses to get through. So be it.
My WTF moment over there occurred when the Himalaya 2035 melt tiff was going on. There was an “it was an innocent mistake” RC post up, and I posted links to Google cached pages showing the NASA website had an attribution page up, and NASA had just disappeared it the previous day, saying the Himalaya glaciers would melt by 2030, 5 years earlier! I even reposted it twice because I thought they had accidentally not let it through. I didn’t even know Gavin worked for NASA at the time.
Naive. That kind of censorship stick with you. And I have no doubt they think they are winning hearts and minds over there.
Thank you, Mr. Watts, for leaving my comment intact.
As to your answer… Surely, it is your site, and you are entitled to prefer some people to others, for whatever reasons, right or wrong. If you really think that musings about drinking with prostitutes in seedy Manila bars or peremptory judgements about ours being the only existing civilization in the Universe pertain to the most visited scientific blog in the world, the choice is yours. What else can I do but smile?
REPLY: The story Mr. Feht objects to is here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/13/we-have-met-the-1-and-he-is-us/
I urge readers to have a look and get your own take-away. Clearly, Mr. Feht’s take-away misses the point of the article entirely, and my position is that he’s welcome to be as upset as he wishes about it, because while Mr. Feht has historically contributed little more than complaining here, essentially a feht accompli now, Mr. Eschenbach has opened his experiences and more than a few eyes with that story, along with many others. – Anthony
Thank you Anthony , you and a host of others have significantly changed the face of the climate debate for the better . I have recieved a free education and am appreciative of it . You and your moderators and contributing posters have much to be proud of .
It is not just left-wing climatology blogs that do this, so too do left-wing political blogs, the left-wing media blogs and especially the left-wing educational blogs.
If you post on these sites, especially the educationalists, and you challenge the established group-think, they will throw hate and bile at you by the bucket-load.
These criticisms are often infantile and easily shot down in flames. But as the bile and fury mounts over the weeks or months, you finally let go with an articulate, reasoned but caustic put-down of your own – and booof – you are instantly banned from the site.
There is nothing quite so intolerant and fascist, as a left wing liberal.
.
I don’t see too many pro-AGW sites that post all comments. At real climate, they posted a portion of my comment that made it seem like I was saying something completely different. My replies were all ignored. From what I’ve seen, even comment from pro-AGW commenters get ignored if they question the orthodoxy.
Mr Watts/Moderators
Apr-po nothing you may feel that the treatment of one David Bellamy is worthy of a wider audience. Together with David Attenborough he was one of the heroes of my youth in his heyday as a conservationist and TV personality in the Eighties and Nineties working with the BBC. But in 2004 he dismissed AGW as ‘poppycock’. He never worked for the BBC again and was dropped from The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts where he was president without being informed having worked with them for 52 years.
Below is a link to the London Mail on Line and an article dated 22 January 2013 entitled ‘The BBC froze me out because I don’t believe in global warming: Outspoken as ever, David Bellamy reveals why you don’t see him on TV any more’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2266188/David-Bellamy-The-BBC-froze-I-dont-believe-global-warming.html#ixzz2JCxjXhwc
It is not the message, that is at fault, it is its communication.
By any means necessary.
@Parthlan
Thanks for that article.
I have always been a fan of Bellamy and was wondering if he had retired.
This also explains why we now see so much of Richard Attenborough, the self absorbed global warming crusader, on television.
It seems it pays to adhere to the BBC dogma.
Heretics get burned at the stake.
“That said, if you can find a better place with the level of discourse we have, you are certainly welcome to go there. – Anthony”
The only other place I have found is smalldeadanimals.com. While not a scientific blog,Kate covers everything and anything,and allows any dissenting opinions without snipping,as long as they are to the point,and backed up with facts and/or links, and no ad hominems. A breath of fresh air,like WUWT, compared to most so called sites that call themselves neutral.
Oh. And full disclosure. I do not know Kate,and do not post articles to her site. Just a good read.
“..and received this recant by Al:
Well…did you happen to notice that those prominent scientists who dissent on AGW–most of them are NOT climatologists, but tend to be ohhhh, physicists, biologists, chemists, people who are NOT climatologists. There are a few, to be sure. But not many.
”
“Climatology” isn’t a science in the way that Physics is a Science, in the way that Chemistry is a Science, or Biology is a science. “Climatology” is a mishmash of a number of different observational “natural sciences” that see something, record it, and try to tell a story to explain it. it makes no predictions that can be falsified, because as soon as a prediction is wrong they tweak an unknown parameter and claim it works again.
While observing and putting together a story that explains it can be useful, there can be hundreds of stories that may explain the same observations. Plotting some pts on a graph and extrapolating a line doesn’t make someone a scientist. Giving more weight to storytellers than people that actually understand how the natural world and science WORKS is a travesty. I trust the chemists and physicists more than I do someone that counts tree rings and makes grand pronouncements of truth, that are really speculation at best.
Jimbo says:
January 27, 2013 at 8:39 am
“Need I go on???”
Well, you might explain Al Gore, Maurice Strong, Charles – Prince of Wales, Rajendra Pachauri, Cate Blanchett, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and that well known climatologist in the White House. Likely I missed one or twol
I claim special status !
SkepticalScience not only de-registered my comment privileges they blocked my IP address from accessing their site !!!!!
I can only read their BS by using anonymous proxy.
Can you believe it ??
They are so sure they are right they have to block access to non-believers !!
Even the most dogmatic religions do not use these tactics.
They lose !
Holy moly, Steve Oregon, It’s Sunday, think of the moderators. But quite an exhaustive history on the Connelly thing. He alone should tell us their whole case is bunk.
Tucci78 says:
“Well, it’s certainly encouraged me – ”
Tucci, that you commented on my comment is something of a consummation of a man-crush for me. Or woman-crush? 2nd-declension-masculine-plural crush.
I have no idea who you are when you’re at home, but when you’re online you’re one of the best writers ever (along with an old doc called Matarese). The bizarre thing is that you’re not just one of the best climate-debate writers since the invention of the climate in 1988 or whenever. That’s not what I meant. You and Dr Matarese have the best voices I’ve heard online on any topic in any period period. The fact that you happen to use your powers in service of this particular good cause is a telling and up-moralising coincidence.
Anyway, what I wanted to say was that [snip], I forgot what it was. Oh well.
PS I presume you’re two years younger than me—and you already write with the pen of a mean old angel. You suck, sirs!
At 1:58 PM on 27 January, in response to a post of mine in which I’d screwed up the hypertext mark-up, iskoob takes note of my inadvertent online multiple personality posting disorder as the result of a chronic I.D. Ten-T malfunction in my system’s wetware (yeah, I’m Rich Matarese; so what could I tell you?) and then praises my voice anent the great “We’re All Gonna Die!” man-made global greasing-and-grafting crusade.
Actually, I began to monitor this suppurating abscess on the collective tochus of the sciences in 1981, courtesy of old-fashioned snailmail correspondence with Petr Beckmann, then emeritus professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, chiefly on the basis of his book The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear (1976) and his delightfully acerbic newsletter Access to Energy.
You know what newsletters used to be, right? Kind of a Web log but printed on paper and you got it in an envelope once a month or so.
Dr. Beckmann knew my background and forwarded to me a boatload of reprints and commentary (his own included) with a “What the hell do you think of this nonsense?” invitation to offer opinion.
It can surprise no one familiar with my online rantings that I’m a science fiction fan, and that I consider mundanes – non-SF readers – not much more than stagnant eddies in the gene pool.
One of the regular elements on the programs of science fiction conventions back in the ’80s – particularly on the east coast – were the presentations of writer and professional science teacher Harry Stubbs (pen name Hal Clement) on “world building,” the speculative application of the principles of planetary astronomy to create the extraterrestrial (and interstellar) settings of “hard” science fiction stories.
As Hal Clement, he’d produced the novel Mission of Gravity (1954), one of the most notably successful efforts to present a story in a setting so outré as to make it impossible for human beings to function as protagonists, and the reader is obliged to identify with a centipede sea captain about twenty inches long, commanding a merchant vessel on an oblate planet where the acceleration field “varies between 700 g at the poles and 3 g at the equator.”
And his other planetological Gedankenexperimenten went on to get really strange after that. Mr. Stubbs was one of the best speakers and panelists to present at those conventions, and was so scrupulous in his recognition of fact-supported argument that in one manuscript reading he accepted my suggestion from the audience to correct that novel in galley to accommodate the phenomenon of cardiac tamponade in cases of traumatic ventricular perforation.
In “hard” science fiction, failure to acknowledge that which is known in the sciences – and to be aware of the “wriggle room” allowed by conjecture, hypothesis, and theory – will get a writer hammered. The general levels of scientific literacy among “hard” SF readers hits nosebleed-inducing altitudes, and both in reviews and at conventions, the critique has always been both fierce and sustained.
Its fair to contend that “hard” science fiction fen tend reliably to consider the “man-made global warming” hokum simply sucker bait for the mundanes. Trufen quit buying that felgercarb well before the IPCC first anacronymonated, and the few “squishy” SF writers who’d succumbed to it – like Ben Bova – are figures of considerable contempt.
But having been desultorily but for decades persistently interested in “world-building” and the reasons why and how conjectural planets might present challenges for the characters in scientifictional stories, I horsebacked a diagnosis for Dr. Beckmann to the effect that “These clowns have overstated the greenhouse gas effects of any possible man-made increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide by at least three orders of magnitude.”
Which is to say that their contentions were purest crap, and could never be anything other.
Subsequent attention paid since getting on the grand and glorious Intertubes in the late ’90s has given me absolutely no reason to revise that initial assessment of this concept’s flaming bogosity. Heck, in estimating their error at only three orders of magnitude west of “hysterical” I was actually cutting those climate charlatans a helluva lot more slack than they’ll ever deserve.
But enough of my experiences in the merry kiester-kicking of the catastrophists. So how far past your own sell-by date do you happen to be?
Whenever I bring up info on WUWT in a discussion with warmists, they go ballistic about the site but they never address the meat of the issue on factual terms.
Anyone who disagrees with their viewpoint on any topic is an ‘extremist.’
And hey, I’m happy to move you closer to 1 Million comments, Anthony.
At 2:36 PM on 17 January, parentofed had observed:
Moreover, these Warmerbruder types are never willing to specify why or how the content of Mr. Watts’ Web log is (or should ever be considered) objectionable, much less “extremist.”
If WUWT is ever and anon unreliable and/or deliberately duplicitous, you’d think that these climate catastrophe caterwaulers would have specific page and comment URLs memorized for ready recapitulation, quotations drawn and set for hot-button insertion from their FAQ files, wouldn’tcha?
And yet if you ask these guys for page, paragraph, and line, you either get “[chirping crickets]” or the banhammer. Not uncommonly both.
Hrm. Or are they still alleging that Mr. Watts and his cadre of contributors are all in the pocket of Big Oil, or members of the Kochtopus’ vast retinue of think-tankers, PR flacks, and scandalously paid-by-the-post Internet trolls?
“Liberal” fascisti never give up on the Big Lie, y’know.
@Tucci78
When I link or reference WUWT I’m getting more replies with “thanks for the link” or “appreciate you directing me to that website” than in years past. The AGW alarmists are still trolling in good numbers and they always decry WUWT as propaganda, but the tide has turned in my observations.
Sometimes these ‘posts’ look straight off MJ mag or Huff Post even … you do realize who owns a majority of stocks (issued by corporations and held by private individuals, who vote said stock) do you no not? You do realize also how elective offices work in this country?
One would not like to think that comprehending the actual functioning of ‘the market’ or government as being forever slightly beyond Gail’s level or reach … the answer then lies in education, awareness; verily, a better educated and voting public (and market!)
.
What a great read this thread has been. Congrautlations on reaching a million. (presumptive, I know) Keep up the good work!
Tom