Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
There’s an old saying that “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see either one being made” … and I fear the same is true for far too much of what passes for climate “science” these days.
However, ignoring such wise advice, I’ve taken another look under the hood at the data from the abysmal Nature Communications paper entitled “Discrepancies in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians.” My previous analysis of the paper is here on WUWT.
In that article, it says that the “Source Data files” for the article are located here. That seemed hopeful, so I looked at that page. There, they say:
We document the media visibility and climate change research achievements of two groups of individuals representing some of the most prominent figures in their respective domains: 386 climate change contrarians (CCC) juxtaposed with 386 expert climate change scientists (CCS). These data were collected from the Media Cloud project (MC), an open data project hosted by the MIT Center for Civic Media and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Enclosed are raw MC data and parsed media article data files obtained from two types of MC database queries:
(i) ~105,000 media articles derived from the MC search query ”climate AND change AND global AND warming”;
(ii) 772 individual data files, for each member of the CCC and CCS groups, each derived from a single MC search query ”MemberFullName AND climate”.
Well hooray, that sounded great, that the raw data was “enclosed”. I was even happier to see that they’d provided the computer code they’d used, viz:
Source code: provided in a Mathematica (v11.1) notebook (MediaSource_Annotated_ALL_2256.nb using MediaSource_Annotated_ALL_2256.txt) reproduces the subpanels for Fig. 5 in the following research article
Outstanding, I thought, I have everything I need to replicate the study—the full code and data as used to do the calculations! That hardly ever happens … but then I noticed the caveat at the top of the page:
Data Files: This dataset is private for peer review and will be released on January 1, 2020.
Grrr … these jokers write a “scientific” paper and then they don’t release the code or the data for six months after publication? That’s not science, that a buncha guys engaged in what we used to call “hitchhiking to Chicago” accompanied by the appropriate obscene one-handed gesture with the thumb extended…
Undeterred, I went to take a look at the “Mediacloud” that they referred to. It’s an interesting dataset of hundreds of thousands of articles, and I’ll likely make use of it in the future. But it turns out that there was a huge problem … you can’t just enter e.g. “Willis Eschenbach” AND climate as their web page fatuously claims. You also need to specify just which sources you are searching, as well as the date range you’re interested in … and their information page says nothing about either one.
Now, in my list of media mentions in the Supplementary Information from their paper, there are only 40 results … but when I searched the entire Mediacloud dataset from 2001-01-01 to the present for my name plus “climate” as they say that they did, I got over 500 results … say what?
I’ve written to the corresponding author listed on that web page for clarification on this matter, but I’m not optimistic about the speed of his response … he may have other things on his mind at the moment.
Frustrated at Mediacloud, I returned to the paper’s data. In total there are over 60,000 media mentions between all of the 386 of us who are identified as “contrarians”. I decided to see which websites got the most mentions. Here are the top twenty, along with the number of times they were referenced:
- lagunabeachindy.com: 6279
- climatedepot.com: 4877
- feedproxy.google.com: 3908
- huffingtonpost.com: 2543
- adsabs.harvard.edu: 1442
- blogs.discovermagazine.com: 1115
- thinkprogress.org: 871
- desmogblog.com: 827
- freerepublic.com: 709
- dallasnews.com: 650
- en.wikipedia.org: 641
- theguardian.com: 609
- democracynow.org: 515
- examiner.com: 426
- jonjayray.comuv.com: 411
- salon.com: 398
- web.archive.org: 384
- nhinsider.com: 379
- wattsupwiththat.com: 355
- news.yahoo.com: 334
There are some real howlers in just these top twenty. First, as near as I can tell the most referenced site, the local California newspaper “Laguna Beach Independent” with 6,279 mentions, doesn’t contain any of the 386 listed names. Totally bogus, useless, and distorts the results in every direction.
Next, DeSmogBlog has 827 mentions … all of which will probably be strongly negative. After all, that’s their schtick, negative reviews of “contrarians”. I’ll return to this question of negative and positive mentions in a moment.
Then there’s “jonjayray.comuv.com” with 411 mentions, which is a dead link. Nobody home, the website is not “pining for the fjords” as they say.
And “feedproxy.google.com” seems to be an aggregator which often references a study or news article more than once. Here’s an example of such double-counting, from one person’s list of media mentions:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/8KMa0w83rPo/,en,Firedoglake,809,247540225,CNBC Caught Soliciting Op-Ed Calling Climate Change A ‘Hoax’,2014-6-30
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/8KMa0w83rPo/,en,pamshouseblend.com,58791,247551206,CNBC Caught Soliciting Op-Ed Calling Climate Change A ‘Hoax’,2014-6-30″
Note that both of these links reference the same underlying document, “CNBC Caught Soliciting Op-Ed Calling Climate Change A ‘Hoax’”, but the document is located on two different websites. I didn’t have the heart or the time to find out how often that occurred … but the example above was from the very first person I looked at who had feedproxy.google.com in their list of mentions.
(I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the abysmal lack of quality control on their list of websites, because after all these authors are obviously devout Thermageddians … but still, those egregious errors were a real shock to me. My high school science teacher would have had a fit if we’d done that.)
Next, as I mentioned above, looking at that list I was struck by the fact that there is a huge difference between being mentioned on say DeSmogBlog, which will almost assuredly be a negative review, and being mentioned on ClimateDepot, which is much more likely to be positive in nature. But how could I quantify that?
To answer the question, I went back to Mediacloud. They have about a thousand websites which they have categorized as either Left, Center Left, Center, Center Right, or Right. So I decided to see how many times each category of websites was mentioned in the 60,000 media mentions for contrarians … here are those numbers.
- Left: 6628
- Center Left: 4051
- Center: 2241
- Center Right: 2056
- Right: 4582
- Total Left: 10679
- Total Right: 6638
As you can see, there are about 50% more mentions on left-leaning websites than on right-leaning … so it appears quite possible that, rather than “contrarians” getting more good publicity than mainstream climate scientists as the paper claims, per their calculations “contrarians” are getting more bad publicity than mainstream climentarians.
Finally, before I left the subject and the website behind, I used Mediacloud to see how a couple of other people fared. Recall that all 386 of us “contrarians” garnered about 60,000 media mentions between us.
I first took a look at the media mentions of St. Greta of Thunberg, the Patron Saint of the Easily Led. Since she burst on the scene a few months ago, she has gotten no less than 36,517 mentions in the media, about 60% of the total of all the “contrarians” listed in their study.
I then looked at the man who has made more money out of climate hysteria than any living human being, the multimillionaire Climate Goracle, Mr. Al Gore himself. A search of Mediacloud for ‘”Al Gore” AND climate’ returned a total of 92,718 hits.
So while the clueless authors of this paper are so concerned about how much air time we “contrarians” get, between them just Al Gore and Greta Thunberg alone got twice the number of media mentions as all of us climate “contrarians” combined …
Gotta say, every time I look at this heap of steaming bovine waste products it gets worse … but hopefully, this will be the last time I have to look at how this particular sausage was made.
w.
Thanks Willis
Good stuff, much needed, thank you and take care. Down here in the southern parts of Africa, we are being devoured by a wind energy boondoggle worth millions of dollars to our benefactors in Germany and Denmark that will surely kill our economic prospects, never mind the birds and the bats. Only two South Africans are on this infamous list of ‘contrarians’. We will surely have to work a lot harder to get more of us up to this standard.
My pig learned karate.Now he’s doing pork chops.
I do pork chops and I don’t even know karate.
(Snipped, stop complaining about them!) SUNMOD
Do you get the impression they’re getting favoritism, TonyL?
So…you are saying…they lied?
(personally, I would only be shocked if you had found they had represented the truth accurately)
So it looks like the person who got the most hits on the scientific journals detailed study turns out to be Al Gore a politician not a scientist and a man with no scientific credentials at all.
Kind of says it all really.
The climate change movement, it’s political not scientific. Who ever would have guessed….?
Al Gore has become rich pushing CAGW hysteria. link
The Al Gore computer virus -causes your computer to keep counting,recounting,recounting…ad nauseam.
The real “hockey stick”.
Technically Albert Arnold Gore Jr. Wouldn’t want to confuse him with his father Albert Arnold Gore Sr. who was also a former Tennessee congressman and senator (though not a U.S. vice president), and legally represented Occidental Petroleum where he would become a vice president, a member of the board of directors, and even (gulp) chairman of their Island Creek Coal Company. Thus sonny has through decades-long family connections amassed his’n, but he don’t cotton to you gather’n your’n.
I seem to recall that Al Gore once took a class in meteorology…
That’s what passes as the basis for his profound personal expertise
on climate and such changes we’ve seen across the centuries.
Rudy Giuliani was on the list of “contrarians” that I saw…
The article in question is more akin to what’s left on the floor AFTER the sausage is made. In other words, not even good enough for sausage.
And there we have proof positive that the sausage is pure propaganda. Absolutely, positively nothing to do with science. Good job Willis!
> My high school science teacher would have had a fit if we’d done that.
Willis, that’s an unreasonably high standard to apply to a product from University of California Merced.
And of Nature Communications…
Thanks for the additional insights into this mockery of science, Willis.
Clearly, their ‘paper’ pumped personal invective, using pseudoscience to attempt to veil their hate speech.
It just gets better and better (i.e., worse and worse).
So, I guess to say that they messed up bad would be an understatement.
I have to say that I was totally astounded at the lack of care taken with the research in this paper. Even the most superficial examination of their selected media mentions raises huge red flags.
w.
“Even the most superficial examination of their selected media mentions raises huge red flags.”
Only for those with integrity.
Not to mention the quality of the Peer Review.
I assume it is not possible to find out who did the peer review.
You mean pal review….
Needless to say, I appreciate your tenacity on this one, Willis E, even though we have considerable differences in other areas.
Do they thank Cook and Lewandowski in the acknowledgements for research advice?
I think the more important thing is what this has to say about “Nature”
How did this really, really bad paper get through?
And what does that say about the quality of Nature now?
It says more about the purpose of Nature than the quality.
UC Merced is the newest campus of the University of California system. This is a window to the future. “University” goes the way of “marriage” and “free speech”.
As you did I looked at MediaCloud and did a search for a) cementafriend climate and got about 200 articles per day over the last week, then b) cementafriend over last 5 years and got about 2000 hits and c) cementafriend methane which was interesting as the hits were about 5 per day plus peak of about 40 a few days ago.
I say the search is rubbish except the last one. As you might recall Willis I wrote an article show that the proposition at methane is an important greenhouse gas is a lie. Methane actually absorbs about one tenth of the radiation in comparison to CO2. The article is the first one Oct 2011 on my humble website. So it is possible that a few people recently looked at it when I commented on this appalling paper.
Well done for you analyses.
cementafriend, I suspect that what’s happened is you searched for “cementafriend climate”. The Mediacloud search engine, unlike almost all others, assumes that the default connection between terms is OR … which is why you got so many hits.
You need to search for “cementafriend AND climate”, with “AND” in all caps.
w.
I may be wrong as its been a bit since I looked but I think the feedproxy url was related to feeds google used to allow users to customize and populate personal home “news” pages.
since they have done away with that setup earlier in 2018 I cannot verify now.
as an article got shared etc it could appear in multiple categories of feeds.
take that with grain of salt though.
I believe they restricted their analysis to media/blog posts that occurred before Trump winning the election. He is too much of noise generator. Could explain some of the number count differences that you found.
You mean, he’s too much of an inconvenient truth generator for the authors to include.
nitpick:
“Recall that all 396 of us “contrarians” garnered about 60,000 media mentions between us.”
386.
Comment:
The abysmal lack of scholarship by the authors of this fish wrapper paper should be embarrassment enough for Nature Communications to retract the paper and possibly fire the editor(s) involved in its referee process and approval.
Thanks, fixed. I hate typos.
w.
Me to
Oh, now that’s funny …
w.
So Willis, this appears to be another example of the “Texas Sharpshooter Syndrome”, which is a plague in all of (lazy) contemporary Report research/writing. I mentioned this to the editor of Shooting Times magazine, and he said while this technique had some appeal, it was not the thing to do to a barn. So, while this technique you reveal has some temptation to the rightous, who are only trying to save the planet, it is inherently dishonest and they should desist. Do you think the usual suspects will weigh in on this topic in an attempt to rationalize and/ legitimize the process?
After I opened and examined the Open Access paper yesterday, today I got several advertisements to buy Nature. Of course there are others of comparable quality. For years I had a class where students evaluated a scientific paper of their choosing in the fields of ecology and evolution. Never got one, including the evaluation, even close to this bad, but this was before the Anthropocene was discovered.
It’s all junk advertisement, this one largely at taxpayer expense. The 14 August 2019, WSJ Review (A 11) “A Shallow Treatment of Time” about the new Smithsonian Fossil Hall exhibit. ($110 million) “There are ‘realistic’ dioramas here, but they have the size and impact of doll houses…. Evolution becomes incomprehensible.” They use the Anthropocene to “herald catastrophe,” but climate change is “largely unexplored.”
The review clearly gives the impression that the story told uses past catastrophes to compare to future hypothetical ones due to humans producing the usual causal suspects. Review by Edward Rothstein, WSJ Critic at Large.
This whole imbroglio is getting to be more fun than anything on regular TV……
The “University of California Merced.” is 136th 2019 edition of Best Colleges in National Universities. Ranked about 500, globally, and apparently soared 300 places since 2017. I think that surmises the quality of the academic work produced by its students & their lecturers.
Those rankings have large bogus factors in them. Where I work we jumped about 50 places in ranking in one year, despite being led at that moment into an abyss of ignorance by a terrible president and administrators, simply because the state economy had improve enough for our graduates to again receive good starting salaries.
Even in the WSJ ranking there is a big positive factor for “diversity”.
UC Merced is a new campus of the UC system. Probably explains the jump in rankings.
I do not see how Nature avoids civil, let alone potential criminal liability, from their publishing of this article/paper.. The fraud that has passed for “peer reviewed” work, published in Nature, astounds me. As I understand it, they pay their reviewers so they are liable for it’s content.
This is going to get interesting… Good thing I stocked up on popcorn…
I would guess that any number of U.S. universities, even top tier schools have a large collection of really biased, poorly executed work, and outright fraud, but have buried it to the degree possible. Forty-five years ago anything to do with the “energy crisis” of the time could obtain funding. Lots of bad work resulted. Nowadays anything to do with climate change plays the same role. Lots of bad work results.
I am stunned that an institutional review board (IRB), which manages to interfere with any reasonable research at most universities, didn’t throw a fit about this. It fits their mission exactly. I guess anything to do with climate change paralyzes all human good sense.
Those 3 Stooges actually received a grant from UC-Merced to produce this excrement.
And they claim the Right is filled with Echo Chambers. They are inmates that live in a large one, unaware bubble, just like a Living “Truman Show”, of synthetic reality that is just always on the verge of being “exposed” to inmates.
The journal editors also acknowledge the review of the paper by a one “James Painter.”
“Journal peer review information: Nature Communications thanks James Painter and other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Here is Dr Painter’s professional description:
“James Painter (james.painter@politics.ox.ac.uk) is a Research Associate at the Reuters Institute.”
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-james-painter
And Dr Painter’s “current projects” and other affliations:
If you really want an eye-opening (a belly-laugh if they weren’t serious) look at what the Left thinks is happening by coordinated action “on the right” to the destruction of the Climate Scam, go to the CEFORCED web link above. This I would call “behavioral projection.” That is, doing what they accuse the other side of doing, aka hypocrisy.
All of this is simply more evidence this paper from UC-Merced Climate Communications Center was a back-and-forth coordinated “hit-piece” across two continents to coordinate a black listing of their perceived “climate denying” enemies.
Writings on the CEFORCED site are a lot like those of Karl Marx, and we know how well that turned out.
Thanks for the web links!
I wonder if this paper- “The Circulation of Climate Change Denial Online: Rhetorical and Networking Strategies on Facebook: Environmental Communication: Vol 13, No 1”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17524032.2018.1527378?src=recsys
ABSTRACT
“This study uses a topical, rhetorical approach to analyze how climate change denial circulates online through the 25 most popular posts on the Watts Up With That and the Global Warming Policy Forum Facebook pages. These groups adopt the appearance of credibility through reposting and hyperlinking, thus establishing a supportive, networked space among other skeptical sites, while distancing readers from original sources of scientific information. Visitors use a variety of rhetorical strategies to echo posts’ main themes and to discredit alternative viewpoints. Differences between the topoi and rhetorical strategies of WUWT and the GWPF show that the climate change denial community is multifaceted and makes use of social media affordances to craft the appearance of legitimacy. This project contributes to our knowledge of how scientific information is co-opted, manipulated, and circulated in online spaces and how online features shape environmental discourse practices.”
will be updated to see how WUWT and GWPF are adding to or subtracting from how scientific information in evaluated etc. in regards to the new Nature work.
As of my posting this, the full-length version of that article is here:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emma_Frances_Bloomfield/publication/329485682_The_Circulation_of_Climate_Change_Denial_Online_Rhetorical_and_Networking_Strategies_on_Facebook/links/5c7d6f5b92851c695054bbed/The-Circulation-of-Climate-Change-Denial-Online-Rhetorical-and-Networking-Strategies-on-Facebook.pdf
Naming and shaming with contemptuous labels, Part II — a class-action lawsuit for all WUWT commentators?
That paper is a joke. 42 mentions of “denial”, 8 of “denier”, get real.
w.
Willis,
By my count:
38 mentions of “denial”
3 mentions of “denialist”
1 mention of “denialism”
Okay, that adds up to 42 with the letters “d-e-n-i-a-l”. We are in agreement on the count and on what a joke it is.
I think these two authors deserve some emails. Here’s some basic info:
_____________________________________________________________________________________
THE ARTICLE:
Emma Frances Bloomfield & Denise Tillery (2019) The Circulation of Climate Change Denial Online: Rhetorical and Networking Strategies on Facebook, Environmental Communication, 13:1, 23-34, DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2018.1527378
THE AUTHORS
emma.bloomfield@unlv.edu
Emma Frances Bloomfield
Communications Studies University of Nevada, Las Vegas
https://www.unlv.edu/people/emma-bloomfield
https://www.unlv.edu/news/article/new-faces-emma-frances-bloomfield
denise.tillery@unlv.edu
Denise Tillery
English Department University of Nevada, Las Vegas
https://www.unlv.edu/people/denise-tillery-phd
A FEW JUICY PHRASES FROM THEIR ARTICLE
“… how climate change denial circulates online through the 25 most popular posts on
the Watts Up With That.”
“adopt the appearance of credibility through reposting and hyperlinking”
“distancing readers from original sources of scientific information”
“discredit alternative viewpoints”
“craft the appearance of legitimacy”
“platforms for the dissemination of climate change denial and for the construction of virtual denialist identities”
“We selected two prominent Facebook denial groups to analyze the rhetorical and networking strategies of digital climate denial communication. The Watts Up With That (WUWT) Facebook page is based on the blog by the same name run by Anthony Watts and has, at the time of this writing, 11,846 likes and 11,323 followers.
“One of the most significant findings in this research is the repeated misrepresentations of peer reviewed scientific research enabled through hyperlinks and blogging.”
__________________________________________________________________________________________
My question to these two: Misrepresent much?
Thanks Joel, and I’ll alert the funding agency behind that candidate mastermind-behind centre, CEFORCED: the Swedish Energy Agency, through the agency’s handy online whistle-blowing form. I wrote them also last year as their centre started about what it is and in what way wrong.
Sorry, that CCC# is 363
Thanks Willis for confirming what I posted on the initial thread about this topic …… that being that the media mentions for all of you so called “contrarians “ was likely all negative. Your dive into it all proved just that.
The research design of this paper looks almost as good as that of the John Cook “97%” paper. Cherry picking 101?
I would call John Cooks paper far superior to this one. It’s as though John expected the results to be to his liking, but they turned out not so, so he was forced to be inventive. Cook’s paper hides what they did far better than this paper, this one is so poor anybody should be able to see straight through it.
“I’ve written to the corresponding author listed on that web page for clarification on this matter, but I’m not optimistic about the speed of his response … he may have other things on his mind at the moment.”
It occurred to me this morning that publication of this “study” and its aftermath is a lot like a bunch of mean little kids kicking over an ant hill, but instead of bunch of inoffensive little black ants emerging from the ant hill for them to laugh at, a bunch of big red fire ants emerged from the ant hill, swarmed over them and started biting them leaving them confused and wondering why this was happening to them.
Over a thousand posts on WUWT, been quoted by Fox, the NY Times, Breibart, and even quoted in Mann’s book and I still didn’t make the list.
Sigh.
and Kenji didn’t get a mention either….
+ woof
And Kenji is an actual scientist.
CTM
You are a bad boy! Go to your room for time out!
Sarc off
Macusn
Last week a rant in our local paper flung poo in the general direction of around five names on the contrarians list. “David’s Diatribe” was probably carried quite widely because it was authored by one of Canada’s most accomplished and charitable PhD’s in the study of a subject unrelated to Climate Science. Here’s one of many links:
https://theportagecitizen.ca/2019/08/08/deniers-deflated-as-climate-reality-hits-home/
When I saw the WUWT post about this new study, I wondered whether its authors thought to add the word “denier” to their searches, to distinguish whether a media reference to one of their designated contrarians is favourable or unfavourable, before interpreting their results.
And I noticed that the authors included non-scientists like James Delingpole and Mark Steyn on the contrarians list, but [presumably] omit counterparts like Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio etc. from the other list. Today a google [category News] search of ‘Judith Curry climate’ yielded 9,470 results; for ‘Greta Thunberg climate’ there were 947,000. The implication is that the study authors’ conclusions may be off by about two orders of magnitude, and in the wrong direction.
But I don’t think the issue is so much that rat tails, pigeon heads, shoe tongues, and raccoon masks are able to make their way into analytical sausage. The real issue is that, in the ever-expanding field of academic groupies of actual climate science, there is an appetite for this type of sausage at journals, and enough peer reviewers willing to stamp it Grade A. And after peer review, journalists will garnish this stuff with parsley and serve on a platter to a gullible public.
charles the moderator
Unless you want the gang to think you are
https://www.presbyterianireland.org/News/2018-News-Archive/June-2018/Meet-the-next-Moderator-–-Charles-McMullen.aspx
a bit more linkage is needed.
My real name has been used once on this blog, once in the press, once in Mann’s book, and once at Redpilled America. I had lunch with a reporter and Rud last week who found me and called me from those four times. If he could do it, others can.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/01/06/eat-chocolate-save-the-planet/
..
Rotter…..change the trailing “r” to an “n” ?
Forgot that post! Ok twice.
I think you may have been trying to insult me. If you were, boy I never heard that one before.
Eh?? They are listing the Grauniad (Guardian) as “contrarian”…???
The Grauniad is the most rabbidly pro-greeeney newspaper in Britain. If they are listing them as contrarian, this paper is flawed from the get-go.
PS – the Guardian became so famous for its spelling mistakes, they even bought the URL….!
https://www.grauniad.com
R
On Mediacloud, the Guardian is listed as “Center-Left” out of the five categories Left, Center Left, Center, Center Right, Right,
w.
Willis,
If you have the time, would you mind checking the media mentions for my listing? #181
Given my broad zoological background, it would be interesting to know if the mentions included are exclusively related to climate change.
For example, I wrote a book about evolution based on my Ph.D. and was also in a Nature documentary about dog evolution, both of which got some media attention in 2007. I guess it depends on how far back they went (I know they stopped in 2016). Does a mention that relates to polar bear ecololgy count as a “climate change” mention?
In other words, am I being defamed and maligned for ANY media attention I garnered over the years?
Dr. Susan, I’ve put your data file here in my public Dropbox …
And my profound thanks to you for all of your good work exposing the polar bear mania. One of the good changes in the new ESA is that (theoretically) they’ll stop putting species on the endangered list just because someone’s computer program says THEY’RE DOOMED! as they did with the polar bears.
w.
Thanks SO much Willis. I appreciate it. I’ll have to take some time and check this out but there are some flags.
There is a mention for 2005, long before I was involved in any way on this topic.
And that Google search is very weird. And a mention for only ONE of my blog posts? Very weird as well.
I still think it very odd that this paper did not cite the Harvey et al. paper, given the overlap in subject mattter and the people under discussion.
There seem to be a good number of people in fear that the ESA changes will be used to delist the polar bear. I have no info to suggest this is the case but wouldn’t that be karma?
all the best,
What Willis says about Dr. Crockford Plus 10,000!
And I really appreciate the support through all the trying times and the great successes: ATheoK, Willis, and so many others.
Dr. Susan, I went to Mediacloud and did a search for all of your mentions (“Susan Crockford” AND climate). There were 739 web pages listed … go figure. I’ve put the download of those 739 here for your further amusement and amazement.
w.
Wow, thanks for that! Amazing indeed. Partly that’s the “Harvey et al. BioScience effect” of my rise to (relative) media prominence *since* the 2016 cutoff used by the authors of the Petersen paper. So many international (non-English) mentions really surprise me.
Curious, I found this:
211 EZRA LEVANT
Levant is a Canadian media personality and political commentator. As far as I know, he has no particular interest in the Climate Wars. To me his inclusion is inexplicable.
Closer to home:
146 WILLIS ESCHENBACH
181 SUSAN CROCKFORD
Willis beats Susan?????? Anyway, congratulations Willis
Ezra Levant wrote a book : Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands. That probably helped him get on the list.
Ezra Levant has a dedicated page at Desmogblog, so that’s probably the origin.
TonyL, Dr. Susan and I are on different lists. She’s on the scientists list, and me, I’m on the list of lowlifes who don’t follow marching orders …
Her media mentions are … curious … including three of them for the same artice … plus one google search.
A google search? Say what?
w.
?????????
There must be separate lists floating around then. You are both on the same list that I have.
One might say “The Plot Thickens” if anybody cared enough.
“Your name will also go on the list what is it!?
“Don’t tell him Pike”….!
Sadly we are seeing the classic mistake of thinking that by critical reviewing the ‘science ‘ behind a claim .
It is possible to take on the ‘impact ‘ of this claim .
In reality its ‘impact’ has nothing to do with the quality of its science in the first place, this after all climate ‘science.
Like much in this area the authors understand that ‘quality ‘ is measured by factors such has news coverage , or how it helps the author establish their ‘climate doom ‘ credentials and hence career prospects .
In the former we are in the world of ‘chip paper wrapper ‘ that is to say today’s news is tomorrow’s ‘who cares and in this most ‘settled ‘ of science once something as entered the dogma of ‘the cause ‘ no matter of critical review will make any difference to its validity .
‘
something like “A lie travels half-way ’round the world before the truth even gets its boots on.” (is what they are hoping for.)
– quote from Mark Twain (that Clements guy) me thinks after 2 beers.
“St. Greta of Thunberg, the Patron Saint of the Easily Led.” . . . this is gold! Had me smiling for a good 20 minutes. : )
St Greta of Thunberg???? Oh dear, doesn’t one have to be deceased to be canonised???? 😉
This is disturbing.
Eating a fine sausage is one of the simple delights in life, even knowing the contents, provided it is prepared from a healthy animal under sanitary conditions. Other posts have demonstrated the distastefulness of this particular batch. Willis appears to have uncovered spongiform encephalopathy contamination.
If I were the editor of Nature Communications, I would make dead sure the investigation is not a whitewash.
jonjayray.comuv.com was the mirror site for Greenie Watch. The site may be hosted elsewhere now.
Thanks, Sheri, I didn’t know that.
w.
I have found that “journalism” examples like the new “article” in Nature Communications and the commentary on same at WUWT (such as this essay) are an excellent way to get other non-scientists like myself to think a second time about the Climate Change headlines they read/hear from the usual mass media sources. I don’t try to convince anyone of anything but that they can’t trust most of what they read and hear from such superficial and agenda-driven sources, and should do their own reading. I tell them it is not at all hard to find real scientists debating all things “climate change,” which should abuse them of the “consensus” notion, and then I point to my favorite simple example, one Monckton mentions in his demand letter re the Nature Communications article: Even the IPCC says there is no evidence connecting man made climate change to more severe weather (even if we assume the false claim that weather has gotten more severe), and yet no natural disaster is ever described in mass media without the usual global warming blame. I then ask them if their local paper ever gets it right when reporting on something they know a lot about, and they all say, “No.” Even fervent believers usually connect those few dots themselves and become more receptive to the idea that maybe all they have been hearing is wrong. WUWT isually becomes their next stop, happy to say.
Does such a vile dishonest [bum] ‘paper’ in such bent ‘Journals’ alter what I understand about the topic of green-house theory? Does it remove the reality of the ‘hiatus’ as CO2 continues to rise? Does such over-ride the relative proxie trends of the past 15,000 years? Or does it make irrelevant the obvious fact that industrial-age meteorology data is being repeatedly corrupted via deliberate systematic artificial ‘cooling’ of the past by BOM and others? Does it change one iota the fact that BOM’s “dataset” is demonstrably strongly dominated by recent decades of urban-heat-Island effect around their temperature sensors? Taht they are completely negligent about that fact? Does it change the fact that BOM is full of quacks who have knowingly set up a mechanism to systematically lie to the public about “record” temperatures becoming more common? Does it change the fact that the green-house warming ‘science’ claims have been falsified by the [Dis]-United Nations IPCC models in the most embarrassing of ways?
Does it also change the fact that the Anthropogenic-global-warming [AGW] craze has repeatedly revealed itself to be nothing more than a cynical, criminal and dangerous attempt to impose mass draconian political control on human civilization, while simultaneously turning the whole thing into a massive parasitic scam that steals public money from actual working tax-payers, with a secondary bonus aim of impoverishing and crushing their lives and economic prospects as well?
Are a bunch of personal-attacks and lies within a dishonest degenerate ‘Journal’ ever going to change known facts? Au-contraire! Dream-on slime!
But it may help to sell ad-space for the quackery at “Nature”.
You would not eat sausages if you knew what went in to them, esp the cheap ones. I have made sausages when I was about 11 and it was one of the funniest things I ever had to do because I was totally useless at it.
But the article sums up climate science, it’s BS!
“You would not eat sausages if you knew what went in to them, esp the cheap ones.”
The wurst ones?
As I recall Albert Arnold Gore Jr. failed the class in religion. He could not remember to say “I Believe” when presented with the truth.
It seems that jonjayray.com and uv.com are two separate websites. Perhaps they were run together in the formatting.
As I posted elsewhere, I am fairly sure that the authors filtered out Laguna Beach before analysis, as well as some other spurious search results such as google search and wikipedia. So there was some quality control on the raw data files before analysis. It’s also important to note that the paper’s cutoff is 10/2016 even though the dataset contains later articles. The authors also attempted to remove duplicates.
Evidence for the filtering is (1) there is a filter list is in the SI which contains Laguna Beach among other search terms. In the data description document this file is described as: “MediaCloud media name FilterList.txt (Size = 0.5 KB): List of sna [media sources] not included in our analysis, as they are correspond to aggregator sites rather than content producers.” And second, Laguna Beach does not appear in Fig 2b – if it was included in the analysis, that source should be right at the bottom of the graph having the most hits.
Nevertheless, the authors have not filtered out all the spurious hits. Figs 2b and 2d show that ‘Bad Astronomy’ (the Discover Magazine blog) is the second most prolific source for CCC and the most prolific for CCS. However, most (though not all) of the hits for that site are irrelevant and there seem to be 229 identical articles for several individuals on each list.
Thanks, Ruth. As I said … shabby work …
w.
“There’s an old saying that “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see either one being made” ”
IIRC, Bismark said, “If you like sausages or laws, don’t watch either being made.”