More wordpress.com troubles for WUWT: post thread closure comments

simple-touriste says:
There is no such thing as neutrality in science.
That’s a fact that many here lose sight of. All the great turning points in scientific history were caused by those who went down their own path against a headwind of criticism.
Criticism is a valuable function. It identifies errors and helps refine a new theory. But when the basic idea is sound, it drives through criticism. That’s happening in this great debate between scientific skeptics and climate alarmists (AKA: warmists).
There are always nay-sayers. But they don’t matter in the long run. Their parochial views are the basis for their comfortable position. An immense tax-funded industry has built up around the CO2=CAGW narrative. In the U.S. alone, more than $1 billion is handed out in grants every year. That much money buys not only scientists and universities, but media stories that inevitably sound the man-made global warming alarm. It also buys silence: even when scientists disagree, their peers and university employers make sure they don’t rock the boat.
But in the long run facts overwhelm belief and propaganda. We see that happening now in the mainstream media. A few years ago most comments under articles about ‘climate change’ were posted by individuals still concerned about human-caused warming.
But no more. Now most comments from the general public openly ridicule the ‘carbon’ scare. The truth is percolating through the public’s consciousness, and at some inflection point the hoax will collapse. If not for the piles of grant money supporting it, the hoax would have already collapsed.
So science is not neutral, and never has been. Progress occurs via the tension between opposing points of view. Truth is the arbiter, and facts, evidence, and observations are the weapons that decide the contest. And skepticism is absolutely essential to the Scientific Method.
Skeptics are clearly winning the public’s hearts and minds because the other side lacks credible evidence and observations. All they have are their conjectures, their beliefs, and their endless assertions. That’s why their modus operandi is to ask endless questions, while avoiding answering questions, and to cherry-pick only those factoids that fit their confirmation bias. And they constantly try to silence effective opposing views, eg: ‘Saul from Montreal’.
When readers are given both sides of the debate, they make good decisions based on all available information. That process is no different than a jury that is swayed at first by the prosecution’s argument. But when the jury hears the defense’s counter-argument, they begin to change their minds. They’ve been given new facts, which alters their understanding and thus their conclusion. When people are given both sides of an argument, they almost arrive at the correct conclusion. That explains why the alarmist side constantly tries to silence opposing views.
simple-tourist also wrote:
A man who is a moderator can post, but a moderator shouldn’t ever reject a comment because he doesn’t share the conclusion or arguments presented.
The small group of alarmists commenting here does not like the fact that moderators can express an opinion. They would prefer to silence the most effective voices. To Anthony’s credit, he usually disregards that unrepresentative clique. And up to now, moderators have always been free to comment under their own names.
And as s-t says, a moderator should never censor a different point of view. That doesn’t happen here. I’ve never censored anyone’s comments, and I know of no other moderator who has done that, either.
The cause of this article, ‘Saul of Montreal’, had been cherry-picking limited areas as examples of global warming. In each instance I replied that a local region is not representative of the ‘man-made global warming’ scare. Those back and forth comments have since been deleted because comments had been closed overnight; which I didn’t know when I replied.
The end result was that the censors won this round. I’m not complaining, and I trust that after this tempest in a teapot blows over Anthony will do the right thing. In the mean time, it’s worth pointing out once more that skeptics have nothing to prove; the onus is on the ‘warmist’ claim that human emissions are the main cause of global warming. But assertions are not enough. They must provide — if not proof — then at least credible, data-based, and observation-based evidence that supports their conjecture. But any such evidence is flimsy at best, while real world observations support the skeptics’ argument.
The alarmist claim is opposed by scientific (Popper/Feynman-type) skeptics, and neither side is neutral. There is no neutrality in science. There are correct conjectures (which can then become hypotheses, and then theories). But in the long run, most scientific conjectures and hypotheses turn out to be wrong. They must either be altered, or discarded.
In this debate, either climate alarmists are right, or skeptics are right.
But they cannot both be right, because their conclusions are diametrically opposed. One side is right, and the other side is wrong. Time (and Planet Earth) will decide which one is correct.

simple-touriste says:
A man who is moderator can post, but a moderator shouldn’t ever reject a comment because he doesn’t share the conclusion or arguments presented.
Agree completely. That’s something neither I nor any other mod (to the best of my knowledge) has ever done. It would defeat the purpose of this “Best Science” site, where viewers come here to read all sides of the issues.
If comments were deleted because a moderator didn’t share their conclusion or arguments, this site would become just another echo chamber, catering to only one point of view — just like most warmist blogs do. Many of us here have been banned from those blogs for nothing more than posting facts that contradict their alarming narrative.
WUWT has never been an echo chamber because Anthony wisely decided from the beginning on a ‘no-censorship’ policy. (That policy applies to science based arguments, not to fringe subjects like chemtrails, astrology, etc.) That healthy give-and-take of debate has contributed to the astonishing traffic numbers — numbers that alarmist blogs would sell their mothers into Turkish slavery to get. Except for one thing…
The choice that alarmist blogs face is between allowing the hated skeptics to freely comment — or censoring them, thus limiting what the public sees to only the alarmist version. So they give up site traffic so they can emit their one-sided propaganda; they can’t have both. Tamino, realclimate, and others like them are struggling to survive on their dwindling clique of like-minded regulars, while WUWT steadily approaches 2 million reader comments due to giving both sides an equal chance to argue their case.
Following both sides of a debate makes it easy for readers to separate the good arguments from the weak ones. Readers can then make up their own minds, based on the information presented by both sides. When someone makes up his/her mind that way, instead of being told what to believe by ‘authorities’, that conclusion is much more likely to stay with them.
Another good reason that no moderator would ever reject a comment he doesn’t agree with is because the climate alarmist faction has such weak arguments, which lack credible supporting observations, data, and evidence. Skeptics enjoy repeatedly deconstructing what amounts to an eco-religious belief system that is covered over with a thin veneer of science factoids and constant appeals to authorities. Alarmist arguments have always been very easy for skeptics to deconstruct.
What skeptic worth his salt would delete those weak conclusions, and thus give up the schadenfreude that comes from running rings around the warmists’ unconvincing arguments? ☺