As we all know, Wikipedia has one major flaw in it’s design: it allows gang warfare.
We see this in many political entries, such as the Wikipedia entries for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which are revised hourly, only to be be revised again by “gatekeepers”. See more here: The-ClintonObama-War-The-Battle-of-Wikipedia
This illustrates the most basic problem with the reliability of Wikipedia in any entry where human opinion is involved. There are roving gangs (and sometimes individuals who appear gang-like due to their output level, such as disgraced Wikipedia editor William Connolley, who will no doubt wail about this note, and then proceed to post the usual denigrating things on his “Stoat, taking science by the throat” blog) and individuals who act as gatekeepers of their own vision of “truth”, regardless of whether that truth is correct or not. Some of these people may simply be paid political operatives, others may be zealots who have a belief that they are part of a “righteous cause”, something we know from Climatetgate as “noble cause corruption“. Many of the people involved don’t even use their real names, so of course hide behind that anonymity. In my opinion, it’s truly an irresponsible and cowardly way to define “truth” with no responsibility for your actions attached.
Right now, there is a war going on over WUWT’s entry on Wikipedia, with a clear intent to apply a smear. I’ve been getting a fair amount of email about it. Here are some examples:
Just a heads-up that there’s a concerted effort in progress to label both you and WUWT as “a blog dedicated to climate change denial” (first line in lede, WUWT article) and “described by climatologist Michael E. Mann in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars as having “overtaken Climate Audit as the leading climate change denial blog”. (last line in your Wikibio). A twofer! Sigh.
It’s a determined group, and things (as you may recall) get decided by head-counts there. “They” have more heads than we do….
From another concerned reader:
I just tried fixing it and got shut down. Those people really care more about “gate-keeping” public information then just reporting the facts. It’s creepy and a little scary. Kind of like double-speak. The game seems to be finding a “source” which sides with their own viewpoint, and then bestowing high “credibility” on those sources, while denigrating anything else. I’m actually ambivalent on climate change and fall somewhere in the middle as to whether it’s a major problem. So much is unknowable when it comes to the natural sciences. But when I see the above described behavior it really, really makes me sick, regardless of which side is doing. Anyways I just wanted to bring this to your attention in case you were not already aware of it.
And this one:
Anthony,
Don’t know if you’re aware that when searching for WUWT on Bing a profile pops up on the right margin, the first sentence of which is;
“Watts Up With That? is a blog dedicated to climate change denial created in 2006 by Anthony Watts”
I used their feedback form to object but it will no doubt be ignored. No need to respond to this.
Of course, I’m not allowed to make any changes myself, because the Wikipedia rules prevent such things due to potential “bias”. (added: In some cases, even the Wikipedia administration won’t even attempt to correct falsehoods, requiring a public appeal such as this Open Letter to Wikipedia h/t to Bob in comments). But, oddly, people who have a willful bias against me and WUWT are fair game for such changes. The citations list on the WUWT Wikipedia page reads like a “who’s-who” of haters.
For the record:
I don’t “deny” climate change or global warming, it is clear to me that the Earth has warmed slightly in the last century, this is indisputable. I also believe that increasing amounts of CO2 in Earths atmosphere are a component of that warming, but that CO2 is not the only driver of climate as some would have us believe. However, what is in dispute (and being addressed by mainstream climate science) is climate sensitivity to CO2 as well as the hiatus in global warming, also known as “the pause”. Since I embrace the idea of warming and that CO2 is a factor, along with other drivers including natural variability, the label “denier” is being applied purely for the denigration value, and does not accurately reflect my position on climate.
That paragraph above should serve as it’s own entry in the Wikipedia citations for WUWT.
So, since this is a numbers game, and because anyone can edit Wikipedia articles, I ask WUWT readers to help out in this matter. Here’s some instructions on how to do so, including the official Wikipedia instructions. You can make edits after you create an account.
If you do participate, please stick to facts, not opinions. Thanks for your consideration.
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The refreshing thing about Anthony’s Blog is that there is open discussion. Trolls are allowed to put their two bits in and are only excluded from the discussion when they become repetitive or nasty. As such I think it more readily reflects what the actual discussion is with respect not only to climate but the state of science and politics in general. Taken all together it sort of acts like that bearded guy strolling the streets of Athens with a lamp in the daytime looking for an honest man. Good job Anthony
If you properly edit Anthony’s wiki page, you will get accused of vandalism anyway, so you are vandals!. Also, wiki is libeling Anthony. If that is the way wiki wants to have it then I would find it rather amusing to see obscure pages that hosted currency exchange factors or physical constants, spellings, names, etc altered randomly, unendingly, and voluminously. Since wiki is an unreliable mosh pit anyway, I think that this weakness should be magnified. The dumb editors usually don’t really know much of what is being entered. It would be interesting to see if the continuous random editing of every single article, thereby delegitimizing wiki would serve to force them into being civil and creating a new policy wrt biased populism….speaking as the advocate of the devil so to speak. I would never actually alter the decimal point of a critical physical constant or chemical equation etc. Just saying… people in glass houses (jimmy wales), should not allow their house guests to throw stones.
> Where is YOUR paper
My papers are plural, and available to anyone capable of using google scholar or any similar search tool:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=william+connolley&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=
higley7> Little Ice Age… I added a couple of moderate sentences, my changes were quickly removed and I was threatened by William Connolley several times
Your contributions were undistinguished; this one was good for a brief laff, but can hardly be described as “moderate”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medieval_Warm_Period&diff=prev&oldid=334628958
Others were reverted by quite a few people, for reasons that were explained but that you didn’t seem to understand:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Little_Ice_Age&diff=next&oldid=416422857
Anyway, as to the WUWT or the AW articles: wiki is actually pretty biased in favour of the article subject, per WP:BLP, unless there are good sources otherwise. The references for the use of the D-word at the WUWT article are extensive.
Incidentally, I added a note to the article, pointing out that “Watts’s Surface Stations project, an analysis of terrestrial US weather stations, was often discussed on WUWT, but became dormant in 2012”. I do hope that was correct; let me know if I’m wrong.
ToP> violation of the one-revert rule
There is no such rule. But you’re right about the semi. People new to wiki should make sure to read the talk page, in particular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Watts_Up_With_That%3F#For_new_editors:_good_sources_needed
After scanning Connolley’s list of papers and reading a couple of them, they seem to fall into one of two (overlapping) categories:
Those that have been totally falsified by the real world, and
Those that speculate on the future, as if he knows what will happen
The first can be completely disregarded as being wrong from the get-go, and as for the second, anyone can make future predictions. Since Connolley has been 100.0% wrong on the subject of man-made global warming up to now, it’s a safe bet that he will continue down the same path.
Just read this….
Anthony is unlikely to erase any of it, but this guy like all the socialist/green/software/athiest/wikihaters (haters that populate wiki) are simply nutzo. This is why the wiki brand is trash.
Software engineers, try to cram all ideas into a text format, then a wiki layout, and edit it as if they understand the subject. Well, you may know how to code, but the breadth of knowledge claimed by the wiki editors is vast compared to their actual knowledge.
Listen to the circle logic (like while-do loops) and cross referrals (like case statements) and lists OMG lists…(like …lists), and trap doors (like parity checks). Now we know what an AI Kuzweillian world would be like. Like this robot volume babble blather yakker. Like listening to a Aspergers machine. Creepy and tiresome.
Frantically and sweatily he processes, computes,
Calculates and numerates, frequently refutes,
the stream of data that offends his machine,
and compels the switching, clicking, and flicking,
behind dead soulless eyes.
Hate is hunger, the fuel to the twitching fingertips,
animating two dimensional images in a one dimensional string,
of fury and conflict, and pleasure, and self love,
as children grow, in the shadow of a hunched statue,
with dead eyes that don’t see them.
“The references for the use of the D-word at the WUWT article are extensive.”
I don’t think anyone here would dispute that many on the AGW side use the word “denier” to describe those they disagree with. For you to cite that fact as sufficient justification for continued malice is interesting.
Don’t you think that truth a better choice than “lots of us AGW types think that way”.
What does it say about an individual if he is involuntarily removed from a position with Wikipedia because of large-scale misconduct and then feels that it’s appropriate to comment on Wikipedia-related issues?
Also, enough childish games. “Climate Change Denier” literally means “someone who denies that the climate changes.” Calling other people “Climate Change Deniers” or “deniers” is deliberate lying.
What does it say about an individual if he is involuntarily removed from a position with Wikipedia because of large-scale misconduct and then feels that it’s appropriate to comment on Wikipedia-related issues?
Insane.
Paul, this is way over the top. William Connolley was an editor, then both an editor and admin, then had his admin bit removed, but remains an editor. There was absolutely nothing in the admin removal which prohibited him from opining on Wikipedia-related issues.
Sounds Like the linear thinking of a programmer. Note: I quoted a previous comment. My attribution of insanity was my only addition to that comment. Wacky sequential/linear/Procrustean thinkers will always refer you to policies and rules and flabble-gab inside the wiki-universe of specialness. I am not interested in the mountain of BS that the twisted minds of wiki editor/admins put between their endless abuse of people, facts, and reality and their disturbing behavior.
What is over the top is WC’s clearly obsessive and personal focus on A Watts.
Talk about over the top! Reasonable people can disagree. I judge WC’s behavior as downright…insane.
@William Howard Connolley
Incidentally, I added a note to the article, pointing out that “Watts’s Surface Stations project, an analysis of terrestrial US weather stations, was often discussed on WUWT, but became dormant in 2012″. I do hope that was correct; let me know if I’m wrong.
I believe it to be wrong. Not only the extract above, but the entire paragraph is badly supported point of view. The article is wrong in what it does NOT say. NOAA admitted that its surface station siting was indefensible and it needed improvement. The topic of bad surface station siting became “dormant”, if that is the right word, because it had been proven and no longer contentious. Accepted as fact.
You reference one paper of Watts, but fail to mention another: An area and distance weighted analysis of the impacts of station 1 exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and 2 temperature trends with Press Release in which
This paper’s link is the pre-submittal draft. You could hold that any source not published in a peer reviewed scientific journal is not worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, but is that consistent with all of Wikipedia’s citations?
As for the discussion of the topic going dormant…. it generated over 2000 comments in draft (better peer review than most papers) and has been in journal peer-review purgatory ever since. It is a paper that needs to see publication — today! But the Climaterati needs the Watts et al paper buried, never to see the light of day. That is the real reason Wikipedia doesn’t even mention it’s existence.
> As for the discussion of the topic going dormant…
The note I added to the wiki page was about the project going dormant. Which is does seem to have done – try following its pages. Or read http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2015/05/04/is-surfacestations-org-dead/
> but fail to mention another: An area and distance
That’s the poor dead stillborn thing, isn’t it? See http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/08/18/happy-second-birthday-to-watts-paper/
> and has been in journal peer-review
No. It was never submitted. Its still in undead draft, as far as anyone knows. So can’t possibly be ref’d on wiki.
@William Howard Connolley 11:31 pm
Citing yourself isn’t a persuasive argument.
But it does persuade me that your point of view is such that it should disqualify you from editing anything related with WUWT.
Quoting David Suzuki as a reliable reviewer of climate issues is a very poor choice. Dr. Suzuki is one of the more rabid anthropomorphic climate change personalities in the world, or certainly Canada.
Anthropogenic.
Unless you mean to imply that Dr. Suzuki is only shaped like a human.
“…only shaped like a human.”
You mean a homunculus? 🙂
IMO homunculi are too cute for Dr. Suzuki to qualify as same.
Well that explains it! I had a hard time believing that Anthony actually smells like a diseased llama, despite what Wikipedia said.
Wholeheartedly agree with earlier commenters who describe wikipedia as an officially sanctioned version of everything; the official story, the official narrative – what big brother says. It’s good for pop and sport trivia, though, if that’s your thing.
The last functioning redoubts of truth in the media are independent, non-corporate websites such as this (and many others covering equally important subject areas). Without these websites/blogs one would seriously struggle to know what the *** is going on in the world, let alone be able to make any sense of it.
The cleansing of ‘inconvenient’ information from wikipedia makes me think of Winston altering past news reports in the novel 1984. The cleansing of inconvenient information in the MSM is taken care of by the corporate structure (top-down message), with wikipedia they have to work harder and employ sad, brainwashed, obsessed, intellectual midgets (who think they’re super clever, but are really thick as sh*t) to ‘edit’ articles in support of the ‘official story’. I’m trying to think of the name of one such individual but I’m hearing the call of nature so I’m away to the WC.
Kitefreak,
The reasons for ‘net neutrality’ are not what is officially claimed. It is intended to eventually shut down sites like this, and any others that don’t toe the official line.
As for your Orwell comment, I’m reminded that in the novel 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith wonders if the State might declare “two plus two equals five” as a fact; he ponders whether, if everybody believes in it, does that make it true?
So if enough people believe that the completely harmless trace gas CO2 is bad, and must be demonized as “carbon”, does that make it true?
Certainly, the EPA thinks so. Mr. Smith would probably agree.
“It is intended to eventually shut down sites like this”.
Absolutely. The current US administration is going in that direction with the current or proposed bill to change internet regulation, I believe. The TPP and TTIP secretly negotiated trade deals will guaratee it on a more-or-less global basis, in the not to distant future.
Here in the UK, our own prime minister said very shortly after winning the recent election:
“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone”.
He was introducing a new anti-terror bill which would provide for the following (to people who have broken no laws but are deemed to be a ‘threat’ by the powers that be):
“include a ban on broadcasting and a requirement to submit to the police in advance any proposed publication on the web and social media or in print. The bill will also contain plans for banning orders for extremist organisations which seek to undermine democracy or use hate speech in public places, but it will fall short of banning on the grounds of provoking hatred.”
Here’s our own home secretary trying to justify this BS. The interviewer tries to get her to define what “extremism” is and she will not do it.
All I’m trying to say is that free speech is very much under threat in our western countries at this time.
However well intentioned they may start out the very success of ventures such as Wiki eventually makes them targets for rewriters of history with an agenda according to their own selection. The open way in which it is set up does leave Wiki vulnerable to marauding bands of internet hooligans, who in their day jobs may well be bank managers or perhaps more likely even academics, who allude to academic procedure to dignify their dubious on-line partiality.
The problem is in the very design of WikiPedia. It has a flawed design that encourages gang action.
One is the demand for NPOV. All the editors think that their view is neutral, when all too often it is biased in a way they neither recognize nor understand.
A second problem is their “no original research” policy, which effectively rules out corrections and posts by those most involved in development of ideas.
I tried being an editor on WikiPedia years ago. But I left after trying to correct a review of a book where I found obvious errors. My response, “Go look at the book for yourself. That’s wrong.” met hostile pushback and that such an action was original research, not allowed on WikiPedia. Crazy!
What is needed is a design more like the late Wikinfo site, unfortunately no longer around, that addressed those failings of WikiPedia.
There original research was allowed.
That site addressed the NPOV problem by allowing pro- and con- articles to be linked so that people could get both sides of an issue. The people in the pro- side couldn’t edit the con- articles, and visa versa. Because both sides, or multiple sides, of an issue could be posted, it also had the effect of keeping the postings more honest.
It wasn’t perfect, but far better than WikiPedia.
Ubikwit, the principle devil harassing A Watts wiki and talk page, conspicuously has no references to Anthony Watts on “its” talk page. I think Ubikwit is deeply concerned about a personal lawsuit for libel. When a person shows a behavior showing anticipation of a lawsuit, it can be used as evidence of forethought to the libel, which could enable greater damages. Ubikwit may be digging a very deep legal grave. Anthony, hopefully has been copying the dialogue on the talk pages. Seems to me that the obsessive attention this one user is given A Watts, betrays a deliberate and specific evidence of intending harm to A Watts, person and profession.
Watts should also sue Desmogblog and Sourcewatch for repeating as fact the libel in Gleik’s discredited Strategy document that he is funded by Heartland. Many people believe that libel and have faith in those two sites.
yup.. would love to see their faces when the sheriff drains their bank accounts from behind their aliases.
Confirmation that WUWT is exceedingly relevant. The more alarmists target you, the more effective you are.
Pilots used to say: “you get the most flack when you’re above the target”.
While my comment was tongue-in-cheek, it contained a serious proposal. Rather than defend the entry legitimately, it might well be more effective to completely discredit the attacks through parody. The entry itself is irrelevant in the large scheme of things, so why not have fun with the “editors”.
Why not start a “IP Address Shaming” section? Just like publishing hate mail, this would show the extent at which haters hate. Plus, if ever there’s a way to know about it, you should also publish other edits the IPs make to inquire about their willingness to bend the truth
Why , if I might ask, does Wikipedia report :- The tagline of the blog is “News and commentary on puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change, technology, and recent news.”[2] , when clearly the tag line rightly says something more like :- ” it’s the best blog on the World ” OWTTE ?
I’ve been a Wikipedia editor for many years. I tried to fix a number of known inaccuracies on climate and renewables related pages. In doing so I restricted my activities to items that were well known and proven to be in error, so there could be no accusation of ‘denialism.’ The edits were immediately reverted, sometimes before I could even check my work. Which suggests that some organisation is paying people like Connelly to sit watching for changes to such pages and immediately revert them. After all, who would do that for free?
Notably if you correct errors in pages unrelated to climate, the same does not happen. In some cases you may even be thanked for correcting errors.
It is also notable that a very high proportion of the references on climate/renewables pages are direct or indirect self-references. Wikipedia rules actually forbid this kind of self-referencing , and normally you’d get your knuckles rapped for putting up a page extolling your own product whose references are all to your own product website, or to press releases written by your own company. Yet, the renewables guys get away with it all the time.
For example, you may legitimately write, “The supplier CLAIMS that just three of these turbines will replace the National Grid” and support that with a reference to the supplier’s website, but you may not write, “Just three of these turbines will replace the National Grid” and reference this to the turbine supplier’s ads. In that case, the claim must be referenced to an independent and reliable authority on the matter.
If anyone’s prepared to put the work in, and it would be a fair amount of work, then it might be worth flagging such dubious self-referencing links with the appropriate wiki tags. I daresay they’ll try to remove the tags without correcting the self-references, but it’s worth a try.
An example of the type of header added to self-referencing pages with no independent support of content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufkin_Industries
There are also various flags which can be attached to unreferenced or improperly referenced claims in the body of the article. The keyword here is referencing; nothing on Wikipedia should be original content, it should all be traceable back to verifiable sources OTHER than the author of the article.
Early and comprehensive reversion, heh, such assiduous attention is evidence of a guilty conscience scared to death. Guilty of what, you may ask. Scared of what is obvious.
============
Why not start a wikipedia page that is a growing list all the climate related facts that keep being reverted? Does wikipedia have a log system of changes made so a log summary of such topics could itself become a wikipedia entry that can’t be changed only extended as more and more re-revisions are entered?
Wiki could fund themselves if they charged a bitcoin for each edit.
No one should ever do serious research via Wankerpedia. Who wants to rely on an “encyclopedia” whose facts can be sent down the memory hole and replaced with lies at any time? The last time I checked, the Wanki article on Jamestown had no mention of the colony’s early experiment with communism and its eventual replacement with private ownership. The famous quotation, “Let he who does not work, not eat” has been stricken from their Jamestown history.
This is tampering with a vital fact, the impracticality of communism in society. Are we doomed to repeat this experiment over and over again?
OK.
So the fanatics are trying to censor WUWT by influencing search engines through lying on Wikipedia.
It happens.
But why now?
They must be really worried about how Paris is going to go.
Hee, hee, hee.
Anthony and commenters
Someone may be using my name to comment on WUWT. Philip is a pretty common name however Finck is quite unusual unless you are in Germany. I only know of one other Philip Finck and he is a nuclear physicist in the US. I wanted to throw that out there as I have occasionally commented but as a government geologist want to ensure that comments are appropriately attributed.
Ian Macdonald> The edits were immediately reverted
{{cn}}
> some organisation is paying people
Wrong.
> It is also notable that a very high proportion of the references on climate/renewables pages are direct or indirect self-references
On pages like GW, and all the others I’m familiar with, this is false. Do you have any examples?
> “Let he who does not work, not eat” has been stricken from their Jamestown history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_shall_he_eat
Ian MacDonald says:
some organisation is paying people
Connolley asserts:
Wrong.
That is the usual Connolley misinformation; how the hell would he know?
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus
Connolley is falsus in omnibus. The truth is not in him.
Ian has an important insight. Immediate reversion is pathognomonic for a mortally ill narrative.
Not so much the thoughtful ferret, more the wounded viper striking at every hot spot.
==========================
William, you make a tarentellic extravaganza with your neediness. Like the constant interrupter in a conversation, which stifles dialogue, constant immediate reversions are not a natural development for any narrative. You sadly risk complete irrelevance as the conversation finds its inevitable course. You are already burdened with a scandalous reputation. None of this should surprise you.
===================
Really envious of your word play… If you ever write a book I’ll buy it.
Kim is just the best….
I quote Anthony: “…I don’t “deny” climate change or global warming, it is clear to me that the Earth has warmed slightly in the last century, this is indisputable. I also believe that increasing amounts of CO2 in Earths atmosphere are a component of that warming, but that CO2 is not the only driver of climate as some would have us believe…”
Sorry about your believing all that. I do deny the reality of global warming caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide gas. The other warmings they cite are irrelevant. No other conclusion about carbon dioxide can be derived. The existence of the present day hiatus/pause and the existence of previous hiatuses that you have not even heard of demand this conclusion. Miskolczi greenhouse theory, MGT, explains precisely why this is so. Foremost of these historical hiatuses I refer to is the one in the eighties and nineties. It lasted from 1979 till the beginning of the super El Nino in 1997. That is 18 years, the same as the current hiatus has lasted. The reason you have not heard of this is a cover-up by the global climate temperature monopoly of GISS-HadCRUT-NCDC. They have cooperated to show this timeline as a rising temperature region, part of the so-called “late twentieth century warming.” They used computer processing to bring their differing data sets into accord but unbeknownst to them the computer left traces of its presence in all three, supposedly independent, data sets. These comprise sharp upward spikes near ends of years, in exactly the same locations in all three publicly available data-sets. I discovered it while doing research for my book [1] n 2008 and even put a warning about into its preface. It was totally ignored. ENSO was active at that time and produced a wave train of five El Nino peaks, with La Nina valleys in between. The center point between an El Nino peak and the bottom of the adjacent La Nina valley marks the location of the global mean temperature when the oscillation occurred. If you mark these points for all of the ENSO waves shown they form a horizontal straight line, showing complete absence of warming. Figure 15 in my book shows the result. This way the existence of that hiatus is self-calibrated for anyone who knows what to do with temperature curves. The hiatus is then followed by the super El Nino of 1998 which is not part of ENSO. That El Nino is in turn followed by a step warming in 1999. In only three years it raises global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius and then stops. This is a substantial part of the 0.8 degrees that Hansen allows for the entire twentieth century. Thanks to it all 21st century temperatures from that point on are warmer than the twentieth century was (except for 1998). It is also the only warming during the entire satellite era. It’s start-stop behavior rules out greenhouse warming as its cause and demands an oceanic origin for it. Hansen did not understand this and thought that twenty-first century warming was greenhouse warming. Because of this step warming the two horizontal straight lines belonging to the hiatus of the eighties and nineties and to the current hiatus do not line up. The history of global temperature in the satellite era since 1979 is then comprised of two hiatuses, separated by the super El Nino of 1998 and the step warming that follows it. This leaves no space over for any greenhouse warming in the satellite era. Any attempt to use a straight line approximation that includes these two regions is just plain stupidity, a demonstration of pseudo-science by the so-called climate “scientists” who are allowed to jiggle the data they don’t understand. Or maybe not. It could also be a deliberate attempt to create an imaginary warming where none exists.
[1] Arno Arrak. “What Warming? Satellite view of global temperature change” (CreateSpace 2010)
.
Connolley, and his sock puppets went no where , they still carpet bomb the area to keep it in-line.
There are good reasons why salt should always be taken with Wiki
The problem with climate science is that the science has become indistinguishable from the politics. We end up with Science + politics = stupid.
Yeah physics can predict where Mercury will be in its orbit 100 years from now, it cannot predict the state of earths Eco-system any more than evolution can predict the next transitional species. Politics bless its soul is quite happy to predict the state of all of Earths Ecology or anything else it feels like predicting.
The problem with Wikipedia is it is inept at dealing with politicized subjects, which climate certainly has become.
Just facts? But I so want to say that Michael Mann is a no good dumbo nothing. Wait that is a fact! Oh goody.
How is this helpful? Unless your goal is to make skeptics look like mouth-breathing idiots?
Anthony and his colleagues do seem to accept that CO2 causes additional warmth at a planetary surface that would not be present for a non GHG atmosphere.
However, I think they are wrong for reasons I have set out in other threads.
Quite simply, the Earth’s surface is radiating photons from the surface at a rate commensurate with 255K and not 288K because the other 33k is locked into collisional activity at the surface which allows for the holding of the weight of the atmosphere off the surface in hydrostatic balance.
If the surface were to radiate more photons upward then the atmosphere would fall to the surface.
Only 255K is exiting the surface by way of radiation to space and CO2’s blocking of certain wavelengths doesn’t have any effect because 255K is what exits to space.
Convective adjustments deal with it so that there is zero radiative greenhouse effect. It is all mass induced.
I agree with what you are saying. It is just that the AGW conjecture provides a very simplistic, even though incorrect, explanation of how the Earth radiates to space. I have always had problems with the AGW conjecture because so much is wrong and so much is left out but apparently the simplicity of it has been sold to many. What is needed is a simplistic but correct explanation of how the Earth radiates to space showing how changes in so called greenhouse gases and in particular CO2 do not affect climate.
GHGs absorb radiation from the ground and fail to radiate the 15u wavelength to space. Due to the resistance to downward IR caused by increasing density beneath ( declining ptobability of photon emission as one descends) their downward IR is absorbed into additional collisional activity in the vertical column which distorts the lapse rate slope to the warm side INSTEAD OF warming the surface.
That decrease in probability of upward photon emission as one descends into greater density puts a stop to any surface thermal effect from back radiation.
Every photon sent downwards by one GHG molecule is absorbed by the next GHG molecule beneath it and there is a reduced probability of re-emission.
The result is that as one moves downward any back radiation is steadily reabsorbed molecule by molecule and integrated into additional convective overturning which converts that back radiation to potential energy within enhanced convective uplift.
In due course that potential energy returns to the surface as kinetic energy beneath the mearest descending convective column (in descent the lapse rate slope is distorted to the cool side to an equal extent as it was distorted to the warm side in the ascent) and is promptly radiated to space by the surface via the full range of wavelengths thereby by passing the blocked wavelength for the GHG that caused it in the first place.
The distortion to the cool side in descent is a result of the simple fact that adiabatic descent preserves the initial temperature differential through the descending column so that if the previous ascent pushes higher to a colder higher then the entire descending column becomes as much colder as the ascending column was warmer.
That is an aspect of convection that seems unknown nowadays but was once common knowledge.
The surface temperature never changes because the enhanced convective uplift cools the surface beneath it exactly as much as the extra potential energy in the descending column warms it.
But it is too little to measure in any event because the entire process is mass based and GHGs have very little mass as a proportion of the entire atmosphere.
One sees far greater changes from solar and oceanic variability.
That is the simple but correct explanation of how changes in GHGs do not affect climate.
Please pass it on and it would be nice if you could mention the concept as coming from me.
Typo correction:
The distortion to the cool side in descent is a result of the simple fact that adiabatic descent preserves the initial temperature differential through the descending column so that if the previous ascent pushes higher to a colder, higher LOCATION then the entire descending column becomes as much colder as the ascending column was warmer.
What you are saying sounds great to me but it is still going to be difficult to sell, as is, to those who have learned by roat that CO2 causes global warming I will have to play with the ideas that you have presented and see what I can do to add to my narrative. Many do not understand how the convective greenhouse effect works so I often have to argue in terms of the really mythical radiative greenhouse effect just because it seems simpler and that is what people have been taught. Many statements about the radiative greenhouse effect are significantly wrong but people believe them. For example, there is the statement that greenhouse gases absorb IR radiation and then re radiate the IR radiation in all directions and that all directions is either up or down and that the downward re radiation warms the Earth. Some statements of the greenhouse effect claim that CO2 acts as a 90% reflector reflecting IR radiation back to Earth and in doing so causes the Earth to warm. The AGW conjecture ignores any other form of energy transport other than IR radiation and it ignores that our atmosphere is in a gravitational field.