Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Over at Lucia Liljegren’s most interesting site, “Rank Exploits”, she has another fascinating post, as is often the case. I busted out laughing at the post title, which is “HotWhopper Sou Doesn’t Read WUWT”. Given how often the lady in the Batcave over at Hotwhopper writes about Watts Up With That (WUWT) in general, and how much time she wastes trying to bite my ankles, I found this ludicrous. Lucia’s post was in reference to a curious network analysis by Paige Jarreau, which purports to show that Watts Up With That is hardly read by anyone in the field, and that the most-read climate blog is RealClimate. This is Ms. Jarreau’s description of her work:
What would it look like if you asked 600+ science bloggers to list up to three science blogs, other than their own, that they read on a regular basis, and then visually mapped the resulting data?
And here are the Jarreau results:
Figure 1. The section of the Jarreau results covering climate blogs. Lines show links, people who blog at one site and say that they read another site. Size of the names indicates the numbers of people listing that blog among the three that they read most. Click to enlarge.
Now, you can see WUWT in yellow over on the left, almost totally isolated from the other groups of blogs, in tiny type, with only a few links to it. This raises an interesting question, which is—how could Ms. Jarreau’s results be so far from reality? I say “far from reality” because by just about any measure, Watts Up With That is at the center of the climate blogosphere. Whether you look at total page views, “bounce rate”, page views per visitor, daily time on site, Alexa rating, you name the metric, WUWT comes out an order of magnitude ahead of any other climate blog. For example, Alexa rates WUWT as the 20,839th most popular blog worldwide … while RealClimate is an order of magnitude lower down, at 217,939th among all blogs.
Not only that, but WUWT is read by people on both sides of the climate divide, as evidenced by the number of AGW-supporting individuals and sites who comment on the WUWT posts, both at their blogs, on Twitter, and to their co-workers. The AGW supporters may only read it to see what the opposition is up to … but given their steady rate of responses, HotWhopper Sou and others read it regularly. Now to be fair, the results of Ms. Jarreau are preliminary … but still, how did her analysis get it so wrong? I’d say three things contributed to the skewed results. First, people don’t always tell the truth. Ms. HotWhopper is the obvious poster child for this. From the topics of her posts it’s obvious that she spends a whole lot of time reading WUWT … but she didn’t list it. I suspect that for some people, it’s a guilty pleasure, but that if asked, they’d say the equivalent of “I only read Playboy for the articles” …
The second reason for the skewed results is the way that news of the survey was passed around. It doesn’t appear that there was sufficient effort given to ensuring that the questionnaire was widely distributed. A better method might have been to write up a description and invitation to participate in the study, and to ask the various blogs to use it as a guest post. In any case, more thought about how to select participants is definitely indicated. Third, and in my opinion most important, there appears to have been no definition of terms, particularly as to what constitutes a “science site”. A large number of people in Lucias thread said well, HotWhopper Sou didn’t list WUWT because it’s not a science site … and according to them, the evidence for their claim that WUWT is not a science site is that often WUWT publishes studies which later turn out to be incorrect in some way, and sometimes are totally mistaken and wrong. To me, this reflects a profound misunderstanding of what makes a science site. The problem is that there are different kinds of “science sites”.
I’ll use mostly climate science sites as examples, as I’m familiar with them. One kind of science site is just a news aggregation site. The best example of this kind is Climate Depot. It just puts up links to stories about the climate with little commentary. Another kind of science site generally restricts itself to discussions of peer-reviewed science, but gives some commentary on each link. “It’s Not Rocket Science” or the Scientific American blog are examples of this category. Another kind of science site mostly deals with the original work of an individual author. Climate Audit and Isaac Held’s blog are examples of this kind of site. Then we have sites such as Lucia Liljegren’s site, or Judith Curry’s site, which reflect the individual interests of the author but which range widely over a number of subjects. Finally, we have Watts Up With That (WUWT). What makes WUWT unusual is that it is not a site that publicly discusses peer-reviewed science documents. Instead, it is a site for the public peer-review of science documents, including original work done by guest authors such as myself, and also studies which have been peer-reviewed by one of the journals.
This is a very different animal. To start with, just as happens with the secret peer review which is the usual format for the journals, not all of the papers that are reviewed will pass muster. Of course the journals don’t publish anything that doesn’t pass peer-review, they are hidden from view. But for public peer review such as goes on at WUWT, everything is visible, good, bad, and ugly. So when people complain that there are misguided or incorrect scientific claims posted at WUWT … well, doh. That’s an unavoidable part of the public peer-review game. Some of the pieces won’t make the cut. Not only that, but it is an extremely important part of the game. Knowing not only which scientific claims are wrong, but exactly why they are wrong, is perhaps more important than knowing which scientific claims are right. So yes, there is some very sketchy science that sometimes gets published and publicly peer-reviewed at WUWT … and almost invariably, it gets shot full of holes in short order. This makes WUWT more of a scientific site, not less of one. You don’t see that kind of thing happening at say RealClimate (RC) for a simple reason—such comments are invisibly and ruthlessly censored.
And that is why the Jarreau claim that RC is at the center of anything scientific is a joke. Science doesn’t censor scientific comments, and RC does censor scientific comments. You do the math. (Of course, all sites censor comments that violate blog policy, such as those that are vulgar or insulting, or wildly off-topic … but RC censors polite, on-topic, clearly scientific objections to their posts. No bueno.) As a frequent guest author, to me this pointing out of bad science is one of the most important aspects of WUWT—any mistake that I make will be identified in very short order. This has saved me immense amounts of wasted effort following blind trails … but some foolish folks think that my occasionally publishing claims that eventually turn out to be erroneous reduces the scientific value or nature of WUWT.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Identifying errors and falsifying claims is central to science, and the only way to do so is to first publish the claims that later turn out to be wrong. As a result, Anthony has to undertake a continuous delicate balancing act. He doesn’t want to publish things that are obviously pseudo-science, but then he doesn’t want to exclude things that might be right … plus sometimes he wants to publish things that he knows are wrong simply so that their errors can be publicly identified. Does he make mistakes in the choices at times? Of course. It’s a tough job, and it is a job that no one individual could possibly be qualified to do, for a simple reason—nobody is as smart as the collective wisdom of the crowd. There’s no way to guess what errors a thousand readers might find in a piece that you or I might think is flawless. And there’s also no way to identify the odd and curious scientific claim that in a few years might be “settled science”.
So Anthony has to pick and choose, and not every choice is right … so what? Since the public falsification of bad science is essential to scientific progress, I find the idea that WUWT is not a science site because it sometimes posts shaky claims to be very parochial and short-sited. Private secret peer-review has obviously failed. In fact, many of the ridiculously bad “science” claims discussed at WUWT are peer-reviewed studies published in the most prestigious journals … but nobody can get that kind of nonsense past the kind of public peer review which is exemplified by WUWT. There are too many smart, insightful, capable people commenting on the posts for much to slip by …
So yes, WUWT does publish some obviously bad science, including obviously bad peer-reviewed science. But what some people fail to understand is, public falsification is the heart of science … and the only way to do that is to start by publishing and discussing that science, whether it is “good” or “bad”, and whether or not it’s already been peer-reviewed. In any case, those three reasons are why I think that the Jarreau results are so out of touch with reality.
My best to all, my great appreciation to Anthony for his tireless work, and my thanks to Lucia. On my planet her posts are almost always fascinating, as are the comments that they engender. And finally, my thanks to all the readers, lurkers, and commenters for your continued efforts to move the game forwards. w.
PS—The usual request: if you disagree with someone, please QUOTE THEIR EXACT WORDS THAT YOU THINK ARE WRONG. This allows everyone to be clear about exactly what it is that you are objecting to.
Addendum by Anthony:
I thank Willis for his analysis and for his kind words. It should be noted that as far as I know, I have never been contacted by Jarreau to ask to participate in the survey. Shades of Cook and Lewandowsky’s methodology where you get your desired result by selecting your sample beforehand. (i.e. only ask the people that are in your circle) – Anthony
I read WUWT daily and frequently follow posted identifiable links and follow my nose from there. The comments are often more substantial than the articles but you gotta start somewhere.
WUWT readers are phenomenal.
Yes we all are phenomenal, aren’t we Crispin. Our daily obsession to discover the truth. You, I (and thousands of others) would be lost if WUWT went down.
Speaking of the truth, it’s interesting to see that ‘Hot Whopper’ (mentioned by Willis above) thinks that 30% (Yes 30 percent!) of all atmospheric CO2 is completely man-made. Mmmmm. So, maybe that above chart attempts to isolate those ‘Climate Rationalist’ science sites who know darn well that naturally occurring CO2 is around 388 ppm (96.775%) and anthropogenic CO2 is only around 12 ppm (3.225%).
I wonder if any of the other ‘Climate Sophist’ sites think HALF of all the atmospheric CO2 is our fault!
Rationalist/Sophist = new term for Skeptic/Warmist. See link.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/15/status-and-last-chance-for-josh-2015-climate-skeptic-calendars/#comment-1837072
I am not a scientist, I wilt when I see an equation. I love reading this site because it is always courteous, never condescending to non scientist readers and is obviously truthful and interested in truth. WUWT is obviously independent and the product of passion (I like Bishops Hill too).
To my eyes the theory behind peer review is unconvincing; a self regulating narrowly defined panel of experts (whether they be in politics, industrial design, the arts or science) will always produce a bias towards current orthodoxy. Perhaps before the age of the internet it was the best option, but now we have something much better; crowd review from people who come from every aspect of life, every discipline and every culture. Crowd review comes from people who do their work for free because they are interested. They often have no drum to beat, no reputation to defend and insights from life experiences that are very different from those of the authors.
Crowd review also works from gut instinct, and gut instinct is often faster to smell the truth than long winded rationalism. Gut instinct is plastic, like evolution, and central to the success of good decision making. Gut instinct is the base principle of human thought. Rationalism is slow, dependent on a skeleton of facts (often called objective truth) that are always subject to drift and group blindness. A small error in the objective truth on which rational thought depends will magnify itself up the chain and produce a wrong result. Rationalism is the regulator of our thought processes, it sits on top of gut instinct and represses excessive emotionalism. In this role it works brilliantly in this role, it works brilliantly in WUWT.
Let’s see. I usually hit:
WUWT, Bishop Hill, NotALotOfPeopleKnowThat, NoTricksZone, RealScience, JunkScience, Judith Curry, Susan Crockford and JoNova. And then gentleman (and gentleladies) such as Donna Laframboise, Jennifer Mahrosey (sorry about the spelling!), William Briggs, Chiefio, Tallbloke…. and at least a dozen others, probably twice that (but not evvvvvery day).
I’ve never heard of most of the sites this….. lady?… refers to.
Ditto, though Warwick Hughes gets my first pick, for local reports.
“The Simpsons” is more popular, that does not mean it is more scientific> If you want to read another blog about climate science, I just pick Climate Audit. If I want to know which science blog is more popular I just look the Alexa rankings. Different things.
In Willis’s article, he wrote:
“As a result, Anthony has to undertake a continuous delicate balancing act. He doesn’t want to publish things that are obviously pseudo-science, but then he doesn’t want to exclude things that might be right … plus sometimes he wants to publish things that he knows are wrong simply so that their errors can be publicly identified.”
The question is “What is pseudo-science?” I would argue that ‘pseudo-science’ is what appears to be wrong according to the accepted dogma, but is either based on fantasy or willful distortion of fact. If it is wrong according to the accepted dogma, but based on the known facts at the time of publication, it may be anathema to the cognoscenti, but it is still science till proved wrong in essence. Such would be Galileo’s theory as to the simultaneous dropping of large and small balls, or the satellites of Jupiter, or Alfred Wegener on Continental drift/
On occasion I have commented on a post, and have mentioned Immanuel Velikovsky. These posts of mine appear to have been all suppressed, presumably on the grounds that his work is ‘pseudo-science’ and references to it are therefore not fit for WUWT. I would disagree, some of his details are wrong, others are still open to question, and in other cases the evidence appears to be more on his side than on those who try to suppress his views. But even if Anthony “knows” his views are wrong, publication of references to his views should be acceptable.
And here is an interesting study on that issue. It concerns peer review and rejections.
It is an example of how poor practices can become institutionalized. And when an institution is behind something it must be right, right?
It’s unfortunate, and it is interesting, but I am not surprised by that result. The best stuff is the new and interesting stuff, and if reviewers were even capable of recognizing such quality they would be publishing it themselves. But they are typically incapable of producing the best research, and for the same reasons they are also incapable of recognizing the best research when they see it. Only the few with similar capabilities as the authors would be capable of reviewing fairly.
the above statistics, if true, demonstrate unequivocally that the ‘scientific method’ has a huge subjectivity quotient despite all protestations to the contrary. There are some deep, serious flaws in the whole set-up which generally go unaddressed in any substantive fashion. This is true in many fields these days. Culturally, we are losing the plot and this is just one more sign. Disturbing, but hardly all that surprising any more.
I don’t think they are afraid of unconventional work, but they seem to lack the resources to identify it. The editors may be only mediocre scientists, there are such people, or perhaps are utterly out of their element or have been out of the practice of science for a very long time. The same is true of reviewers.
Might I, respectfully, add a further problem to the 3 you have identified.
According to the quote box, people were invited to name UP TO THREE blogs.
I don’t know about other people, but I regularly read far more than three “science” blogs – based on my definition of science which includes other aspects of earth science such as volcanology, USGS, local geological society sites (which often contain interesting scientific articles). To say nothing of other sciences such as chemistry and science supporting sites such as maths and statistics.
Further more, how does one define “regular” – twice a day to catch breaking news, daily, weekly …
From all of those varied sites I would have had to chose “up to 3” blogs.
Sorry. Bad specification leads to bad data leads to bad (biased) science.
just like that 97% – good survey results require good survey methods and questions
Kevin Kilty re Nature Science ect.Problem is that it does NOT get sorted out..Mann is still cited as well as Steig’s Junk Science from both and many others. In climate science anyway, it DOES NOT get sorted out by these journals
Observes Mr. Eschenbach:
[Emphasis added.]
In fact, the problem in climatology has been that those materials promulgated by “the consensus” in alarmist pseudoscience have not been subjected to dispassionately objective editorial scrutiny and scrupulously blinded peer review, but have instead been the products of collusive activities which include the foreclosure of editorial independence, including deliberately breaking blinding to turn peer review into “pal review,” the willful evasion of the error-checking mechanism that had been supposed to make the expression “peer-reviewed literature” an indicator of methodological reliability.
This is a violation of trust, so pervasive and egregious in what the warming catastrophists have made of the periodicals and conferences in climatology and allied disciplines that open review mechanisms like WUWT and similar properly skeptical Web logs became NECESSARY.
Think of the established channels as “push” media. These have been insidiously co-opted by the corrupt, self-dealing, politically motivated quacks who have managed an elaborate and extremely expensive masquerade for a bit more than three decades now.
Think “How to boil a live frog,” if you will.
Genuine editorial discretion (including honestly-conducted blinded peer review) was supposed to provide “filters for folly” in those necessarily narrow conduits, the better to ensure that readers could treat that which was published therein as trustworthy. As long as this seeming was preserved, journals like Nature and Science could be turned into vehicles for mendacity and progtard propaganda, until the point was reached at which it became obvious that they were no longer viable as mechanisms for the dissemination of investigatory results and the discussion of objective reality examined by such investigations.
The first Climategate tranche (fulfilling the U.K. Freedom of Information Act demands which had been criminally evaded by the administrators of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit) on 17 November 2009 simply confirmed the suspicions of corruption, “back-stabbing, cork-screwing, and dirty dealing” long inferred.
Which is why those F.O.I.A. demands had been uttered.
Because the “push” media had so obviously been ruinously degraded, “pull” media – by way of the Internet generally and the World Wide Web particularly – were brought into service by professionals like Mr. Watts and Dr. Curry as well as “sniff test” scientifically educated, trained and experienced amateurs (too numerous to mention) looking to openly dissect the bafflegab and to winnow out and evaluate that material which reflects reality as opposed to the hysteria and horsesh!t being employed by the alarmists to diddle the botched and the gullible.
And – to the surprise and horror of the “climate consensus” charlatans – the engagement a guerrilla resistance by way of Web fora like WUWT has proven effective in pantsing their prevarications.
In order to peddle their confabulations of half-truths, outright lies, and suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, the “climate consensus” have made of the peer review pretense a no-longer-sustainable camouflage, and except for the “useful idiots” upon whom the socialist left have always relied for the illusion of popular ratification, only open review – in which process plain goddam common sense trumps academic credentialing – is treated as a mechanism of verification.
It ain’t neat, it ain’t tidy, and it requires reasoned thought on the part of those engaged thereby, but it’s obviously beating the hell out of the catastrophists.
Listen to them howl.
@Jimbo
…“The shocking thing to me was that the top 14 papers had all been rejected, one of them twice,” says Kyle Siler…
“Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr Epstein. The Beatles have no future in show business.”
(Unnamed Decca Records executive, turning down the group in 1962)
I think just a little look at the WUWT awards would illustrate how read and enjoyed the site is.
jimbo:
Great link. Many thanks. Science is a human enterprise and human foibles get in the way of science. See, for example, http://www.amazon.com/Newtons-Tyranny-Suppressed-Scientific-Discoveries/dp/0716742152/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421497130&sr=8-1&keywords=Newton%27s+Tyranny&pebp=1421497121677&peasin=716742152
Maybe Lucia should use this this graphic to expand her research into the area of groupthink.
As a funny side note, based on the the size of the type “ALL MODELS ARE WRONG” is the third largest read site by “science bloggers” (another vague undefined term using vague parameters to add to the bottomless pit of vague terms in climate science).
Unfortunately the only thing the site has correctly is the title, from the content I have read it is more of a apologist site for climate modelers. Articles with themes like “do not fear the climate sceptics” or comparing predicting world population based on fertility rates with CO2 predicting the climate. How they can be clueless that population is a fixed number where climate is a vague term without meaningful definition is beyond me. If there is more to that site than I have seen, please correct me.
Meanwhile I suggest modelers begin work on predicting how many bananas are sold in New Jersey based on a combination of fertility rates and CO2.
Thank you Willis for the interesting post and your support viewpoint for Anthony’s very valued site.
Like others, I tracked off to read this curious ‘survey’ elsewhere and try to understand it’s extremely curious results. Of course, I visited Lucia’s, but didn’t stay long as while I’m very interested in Lucia’s comments/commentary/analysis, I am more repulsed by many of her commenters.
From Lucia’s I went trawling:
First for Paige Brown’s chart’s background article; “Brown, Paige (2014): MySciBlog Survey – Top Read SciBlogs by SciBloggers. figshare.”
Which while amusing in a weird way brought me to Paige Brown’s abstract?
All of which, while also amusing was very unsatisfying. Paige Brown Jarreau’s own comments mentions pulling the data down into Excel to “clean up the data”; a rather horrifying statement.
Returning to Yahoo for further trawling I followed Paige Brown Jarreau’s references to Science Blog Network and her “Something is wrong on the Internet! What does the Science Blogger do?” project.
Ahh! A KickStarter type of effort and one that sounds familiar.
I believe I read, followed and quite likely participated in earlier chapters of Paige’s project(s).
I don’t remember the original entry point, but I believe it was a small Wall Street Journal piece about important KickStarter types of science that needed support…
Yes, I believe I answered Paige Brown Jarrau questionnaire. Using Paige’s handy dandy bubble chart I then looked to see if the top three websites I read along with their path of reading were included in the links.
Nope! Odd that.
Here is another one of Paige Brown Jarreau’s updates for “Something is wrong on the Internet! What does the Science Blogger do?
My memory, possibly faulty, is that I followed a link from JoNova’s site, either posted by JoNova or one of her commenters, to this survey.
Well, it could have been a similar survey, but the choices look identical.
But this is digressing. Back to a beginning part of Paige Brown Jarreau’s sciblogger questionnaire project.
Now, this particular statement I did not see before;
I must’ve come around later when she asked for money, not paid it; $1,400 in rewards huh? That must’ve attracted some real quality participants…
After all of my snide remarks from my suspicious side, this still looks like a project I would support if I have spare cash.
Just what is Paige Brown Jarreau’s collecting and how is she taking care of it? I have a very suspicious idea that there is part of the problem.
A) Paige is selecting “…participants were asked to list up to the top three science blogs, other than their own, that they read on a regular basis…”.
B) Paige then uses third party software to map the nodes, “Nodes and node labels are sized according to in-degree (how many times the blog was listed by other bloggers as regularly read).”
1)Paige’s arbitrary selection of “requesting only up to three science blogs”, limits analysis depth. Appearing to map the brain’s neural net by sampling only three neurons per entry, would be my analogy.
–1a) Lack of depth and a lack of participants drives the initial results which are severely slanted towards user bias; i.e. users share only within their knit communities and perhaps discuss their desired choices along with the self image that represents. This is where more users claim reading a site than actually do.
2) This idealized misrepresentation separation from actual web traffic looks great but fails to track actual use.
3) Paige does not indicate how user input is verified nor how users are kept honest. In the climate web follies we’ve observed in the past, there are a number of users who love to skew survey results with multiple submissions and web-bots.
–3a) Looking at WUWT’s stats on Paige’s projects; WUWT was visited five times?
–3b) Are these five connections what you would expect; well possibly two of the five are?
–anonymous29, Climate Lab Book and Mark Lynas links to WUWT are puzzling. None of them have links to or from WUWT.
–3c) Linkages that are hard to resolve in a science blogger preferred visits world.
Paige Brown Jarreau may have a good idea, but from this perspective she desperately needs to add depth in how many websites users prefer, visit, read in depth; along with real traffic stats and verified users.
It would be nice if she posted the actual data, not just the graphics.
One of the things I find most interesting about this site is the sometimes wide differences in definitions and explanations about subjects from people with the same interest in those subjects. Often we read a comment on a subject that seems to confirm our personal understanding only to then have another comment from an equally qualified person challenge it. A discussion then follows with each defending their understanding of the subject. It has made me do further research on a lot of subjects I would not normally even think about . So this is also a learning site. Where else can you get so many qualified posters on such a wide variety of subjects providing easy to understand information to which we would not otherwise be exposed? I even like Mosher’s drive by shots, they make me think. I also like that I am allowed to post my often dumbass, smartalec comments. Venting is good for the blood pressure.
Tom, me too. exactly!
WUWT++;
No one reads WUWT anymore, it’s too crowded.
/Yogi B., sorta.
Yeah, that’s why I stay away, too!
/sarc
I only come here to look at the pictures 😉
Referring back to the post on the Pope and his forthcoming Encyclical, Catholics with a sense of humour might enjoy reading this:
http://ecclesandbosco.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/the-popes-encyclical-on-climate-change.html
Non-Catholics might enjoy reading the bits about Michael Mann and Al Gore but may find some of the references a bit puzzling (eg. Pelagianism, Cardinal Nichols)
You’ve just converted another to belief in Pelagianism. Nicholsism, not so much.
I learn a lot here, much more than any other site
Interestingly the comments section in the article linked to supports Tisdales thoughts on the skewed results.
This one on the construction of the survey questions.
“I had a LOT of difficulty when answering this particular question on your survey. I don’t just check “3 blogs” – I would regularly check far more! As a result, I was tempted not to answer it (I gather that Judith Curry at Climate Etc decided not to answer it for the same reason: http://judithcurry.com/2014/12/28/climate-blogosphere-discussion-ii/)”
This exchange on what is science and what is not from Sou is comedic.
“A correction to Lucia’s comment: HW is quite a bit more than a running commentary on my reactions… It “demolishes the disinformation” on denier blogs, and replaces it with science.”
And this response knocks Sou off of the imaginary horse he believes to be riding.
Sou,
I realize your view of what you do at your blog might differ from mine. That doesn’t mean your view of what you do is the ‘correct’ one.
If I cut and pasted correctly, the front page of your blog currently shows 10 entries. Eight of the ten posts comments on WUWT, one is a holiday greeting. One is on something else. I’ve seen your blog before– this proportion of 80% reacting to WUWT seems fairly typical. I think this data strongly suggests HW is little more than a running commentary on your reactions to WUWT.
Of course you are free to think it is something else. But I’d also note that for all your commentary expressing your reactions to WUWT, it has hardly been “demolished”.”
Now this is what I find weird: writing about which sites are read by whom etc. ISN’T SCIENCE! Just as trying to prove that skeptics are crazy conspiracy nuts ISN’T SCIENCE. Nor is establishing that 87% of someone believes something, nor is calling for the execution of skeptics, nor is making movies about blowing up children you disagree with… etc. etc. ETC.!
Why do these alarmists spend SO VERY MUCH of their time NOT doing science? And why is so much of what they do do dishonest, misleading, violent, ad hominem, or just plain nasty?
Good questions, Ron.
I think at least part of the answer is that the alarmists have run out of credible arguments.
The alarmist crowd simply cannot admit that they were wrong about catastrophic global warming. So they fall back on their ad hominem attacks, and their ever-present projection. I was even criticized yesterday for using a word incorrectly [I don’t agree, BTW]. But that’s the level of alarmist discourse these days. They lost the science argument, so they play the man, not the ball.
The planet itself is showing the alarmists’ predictions were wrong. That is admittedly hard on their egos, after they’ve been explaining their beliefs in detail to anyone who would listen. Unfortunately for their egos, they were wrong.
Planet Earth has the final say, as always — and skeptics as usual agree with what the planet is telling us: that the climate scares are baseless. All of them. There is no evidence to the contrary.
Willis,
You wrote, “Lucia’s post was in reference to a curious network analysis by Paige Jarreau, which purports to show that Watts Up With That is hardly read by anyone in the field, and that the most-read climate blog is RealClimate.”
Paige Brown Jarreau made no such claim about her data. The opening paragraph on the page you linked states,
“With this data, I’m looking to explore potential communities of practice and relationships between science bloggers that may lead to shared content decision rules or blogging approaches. For example, do communities of bloggers that regularly read each other’s blogs begin to share rules of format, topic choice, tone, etc?”
Ms. Jarreau reiterated this intent over at Lucia’s(1). Her comment appears before yours in the thread. She added,
“This question was never meant to provide a full map of the science blogosphere, or to show that some blogs are isolated or disconnected from others….I would still call this data exploratory, and I don’t think it should or can be interpreted on its own. At best, it could be used to guide interviews of bloggers in different communities, or used as a guide to analyzing the rest of my survey data on science blogging practices.
What is very interesting is that there does seem to be some division/controversy between blogs within the climate sphere, that my visualization has at least led to the discussion of.”
On the main page of the survey she concludes,
“Modularity [indicated by the colors] measures the strength of division of a network into clusters, or communities. Networks with high modularity (with a maximum modularity score of 1) have dense connections or edges between the nodes within communities but sparse connections or edges between nodes in different communities…This structure is often visually apparent, as in the climate blogs and ‘geo’ blogs visible as distinct clusters in purple at the bottom of my network map above. I’ve isolated this community in the image below.”
Uhh, yeah we knew that about the climateblogsphere.
So how could Venema(2) , Stoat(3) and Willis Eschenbach “get it so wrong?”
1 http://rankexploits.com/musings/2014/hotwhoppers-sou-doesnt-read-wuwt/#comment-133738
2 http://variable-variability.blogspot.com/2014/12/blog-network-analysis-wuwt-isolated-science.html
3 http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/12/28/tee-hee/
You’ve missed two points
A The map was acknowledged to be preliminary.
B The map is still completely wrong. Look at it closely. Do you see how the nodes are different sizes? RealClimate is the biggest as it is the most significant. But no-one reads RealClimate compared to WUWT. The presented data is wrong. And the lack of connection between HotWhopper and WUWT is also a clear error. HotWhopper spends most if its time anti-fangirling WUWT.
OK, perhaps the data is still too raw to be meaningful. But in that case, pointing out that the research is going badly awry is useful.
“Exploratory” is apparently a synonym for “kudu doodoo,” in this context.
I also check in on Dr. Roy Spencer – he is of course accurate and he has sacrificed greatly for his honesty and the case that science is not popularity or politics.
I refer a lot of people here who have read my “contentious” letters in local rag – scientists, non, school kids in the don’t take my word for it, read, find out for yourself. WUWT is really good for education.
I haven’t been here very long and many of you seem to know each other. I think an interesting metric to understand who comes here (and perhaps why) would be to identify ourselves – perhaps privately – so that Willis and Anthony could do the data crunching.
Ah, the Joy of Sampling! Whether people here like it or not, the survey is valid for the subset of blog writers sampled, and therein lies the rub. Blogs, regardless of how “balanced” the authors try to make them, are inherently op-ed columns. Items or notes presented may have factual neutrality, but the blog writer does not – items are included in limited space by choice, hence a bias exists. The survey is a statement about science bloggers (however defined), and not about what the general population reads. As a survey, its a canary about the state of science belief amongst opinionated, self-described individuals, rather than about the general opinion in the population. The results suggest it reflects the interpretation that “science bloggers” are less about science than about some other dynamic.
This map is mislabeled. It is clearly a map of warmest Troll behavior, and as such might be scientifically ( assuming sociology still qualifies as a science) valuable. /sarc off
Taylor
This piqued my interest because it is something anyone can verify. I took 4 of the largest sites listed on that graphic and did a site-specific search of each to find the number of pages where the name of the other sites (and WUWT) occur. Here are the results:
http://www.realclimate.org
WUWT 1,610
Watts Up With That 243
SkepticalScience 3060
HotWhopper 21
andthentheresphysics 0
http://www.skepticalscience.com
WUWT 10300
Watts Up With That 5360
RealClimate 12100
HotWhopper 476
andthentheresphysics 4
blog.hotwhopper.com
WUWT 1210
Watts Up With That 56
SkepticalScience 1200
RealClimate 826
andthentheresphysics 34
andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com
WUWT 897
Watts Up With That 2880
RealClimate 395
HotWhopper 373
SkepticalScience 151
So the authors and/or readership (the searches included occurences within comments) of these blogs refer to WUWT more than to each other. Which seems to be at odds with the claim (implicit in the above graphic) that they don’t read WUWT much.
HotWhopper, whose banner proclaims “Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers”, is dedicated to writing about other sites it doesn’t like, especially WUWT. So it is hardly surprising that it refers to WUWT more than ‘warmist’ blogs.
However, it is interesting to note that both RealClimate and SkepticalScience contain more references to HotWhopper than to andthentheresphysics, which is shown on the graphic as the second most-read blog.
So not only do these ‘warmist’ blogs refer to WUWT more than to each other, it appears they refer to other blogs talking about WUWT more than they refer to some other (supposedly well-read, non-deniosphere-eavesdropping-specific) ‘warmist’ blogs. And that very same blog –andthentheresphysics– refers to WUWT 25 times more than it does SkepticalScience.
Which does seem odd, unless, of course, they talk more about things they haven’t read or studied.
Deja vu, anyone?
I have the inclination but not the time to run with this. It would be interesting to see the results from a larger sample.
Oh and I’ve been away from climate blogs for a while, so Hi everyone.
David Ross,
Hi, and good work. Any blog labeling skeptical scientists and their followers as the “deniosphere” is about as unscientific as can be. They are just propaganda blogs, promoting the man-made global warming narrative. They have no credible science to support their views, so they attack instead.
Kudos to Willis, too. His pleasing articles are always interesting and very informative. I look forward to every one. And of course Anthony’s tireless work in posting 4 – 10 or more articles every day. When someone clicks on WUWT, they know there will be some new and interesting articles. I’ve learned a lot here in the past 7 – 8 years, and I know I’m not alone.
Alarmist blogs could ramp up their site traffic with two simple changes: first, they should stop the incessant censorship of views they disagree with. And, they could post a half-dozen new articles a day. But without those changes — especially the first one — they will remain low-traffic echo chambers, populated by a dwindling group of head-nodders who agree only with each other.
David,
Thanks for adding a little reality to the discussion. While there have been many, many comments discussing the ins and outs of the survey, your quick-look pretty much says it all.
Hilarious! You’ve certainly driven home the deeper irrelevance of Jarreau’s network. It’s truly “worse than we thought!”
Social “science” at the high school level.