Tag Archives: Climate

Stoat – Tutelary Beast on the Loose Again-Wikipedia and humanity’s next great leap-What’s up with that?

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Stoat_and_chipmunks

A stoat surplus killing a family of chipmunks                                                      – Ernest T. Seton 1909

Anthony Watts over at WUWT.com, his community-service-as-science-blog, has a recent post up on the reinstatement of William Connolley to Wikipedia after having been banned as an editor back in: Wikipedia Climate Fiddler William Connolley in the News Again.  Since its very short I’ll reblog the article in its entirety:

Apparently Mr. Connolley has edited 5428 Wikipedia articles, most about climate. Die Kalte Sonne:

Unbelievable but true: The Wikipedia umpire on Climate Change was a member of the UK Green Party and openly sympathized with the views of the controversial IPCC. So it was not a referee, but the 12th Man of the IPCC team.

[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kaltesonne.de%2F%3Fp%3D7858]

I’m not sure how accurate the translation is, but it suggests he was somehow part of the IPCC “short list” team. See it here at Die Kalte Sonne via this Google Translate link:

With over 5000 articles he’s edited, it makes you wonder if Mr. Connolley was employed by someone or some organization specifically for the task.

The main thrust of most subsequent commenters was to harp on the wiki-depridations of Connolley specifically and Wikipedia’s problem with out-of-control editors, and the unreliability of Wikipedia generally.  Wikipedia, naturally, has a page even on this subject: Criticism of Wikipedia.

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A Froward Child Redux – some personal vindication, I may not be a complete dupe, and the inexorable advace of the Citizen Scientist

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A froward child                                                                                      [Ghost of a Flea-Wm. Blake-1820]

Some exciting news for me in the last few days, and some possible intellectual vindication.  I may not be a [complete] dupe of the fossil fuel industry after all! – and – some of my long standing intuitions about the true state of science are presently being fulfilled.

Last March I was presented a copy of Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway’s recent book, Merchants of Doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, by a family member due to concern over my lack of appropriate conviction in the predictions of immanent environmental disaster and grave peril to the Earth, its ecosystem and human inhabitants due to [apparent] increases in global average surface temperature resulting from anthropogenic carbon-dioxide being released into the atmosphere due to mankind’s the burning of fossil fuels.  [notice how carefully I define my ignorance]  I took this ‘gift’ as a kind of intellectual slap in the face – thanks.

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The Sixth Fallacy – Questions Never Asked Are Never Answered – a comment on McIntyre and a 6th fallacy for Curry

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The question never asked is a faint shadow of itself.  –  [© phi studios]

Steve McIntyre has a new post up at his blog Climate Audit, The Questions That Were Never Asked, detailing recent revelations in his ongoing examinations on the lack or proper investigations into the whole sordid Climategate Affair.  In this update we learn that Andrew Montford’s [aka Bishop Hill] FOI request for emails between the University of East Anglia and Outside Organisation has produced “A Trickle of Further Information”, in the form of a “remarkable” list of questions, questions that were prepared [or “collated”] by  Alan Preece of the UEA in February of 2010 for the purpose of preparing UEA Climate Research Unit professors Phil Jones and Edward Acton for a March 1, 2010 appearance before the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee formed to investigate the matter – and apparently never used.

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Pielke the Elder and Chris Colose-The Merits of Models

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Pielke the Elder, a climate scientist who’s blog I follow regularly has a new post E-mail Interaction with Chris Colose which revolves mostly around the issue the statistical skill of current and past generations of computer models as predictors of multi-decadal trends in climate.

Pielke the Elder is one of my go-to-guys for climate science because of his reasonableness and fairness in his dealing with critic, the general excellence of his work, and his demonstrated willingness to correct himself where necessary.   There is also an issue of his age and experience, he has been a workbench scientist long enough to have actually witnessed a couple of multi-decadal trends go by in his life and career, something I think is important in that it helps keep one’s work grounded in reality and not lost in the creode generated by your work.

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