Tag Archives: WUWT

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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Cognative Dissonance – Halloween Postponed Due to Snow

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Every once in a while Nature and the local children co-inspire to hand you an illustration for a concept that would otherwise be hard to illustrate.

 

Halloween 2011

From Wikipedia, Cognitive Dissonance:

Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions.[2] Dissonance is also reduced by justifying, blaming, and denying. The phrase was coined by Leon Festinger in his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, which chronicled the followers of a UFO cult as reality clashed with their fervent beliefs.[3][4] It is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology. A closely related term, cognitive disequilibrium, was coined by Jean Piaget to refer to the experience of a discrepancy between something new and something already known or believed.

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