Some wonder why I’m tired and grumpy about climate blogging. Wikipedia is a great example. No matter the evidence, they will publish whatever revisionist truth compliments the leftist message. I will never contribute to that group although it could have been a wonderful source, it has become a biased propaganda engine of massive size. They are regularly asking people for contributions at a time when other websites of that size are rife with cash. Gee, does that sound like any newspapers you know? Media groups never seem to recognize that it is the message that is not selling, they always blame something else. Wiki claims that they don’t want adds to influence their content, but a few minutes of review by an unbiased individual reveals that the plain ain’t working. Today at WUWT, James Padgett has a nice post on the Wikirevisionist article on the Soon and Baliunas incident. The same SB paper which led to some insane behavior by the paleoclimatologist community which didn’t like the critique of their blatantly unreasonable methodologies.
I’ve been so frustrated with the constant untruths in media and climate science that it is hard to post anything. Last night I spent a few hours quietly looking back at Ljungqvist 2010 proxies and will likely have a post in the next day or two on that. It seems somewhat removed from the out-of-control political idiocy disguised as science. Numbers are calming.
Anyway, check this out. It is worth a read.
The Wonderful World of Wikipedia
Posted on January 10, 2012 by James PadgettGuest post by James Padgett
As many readers are aware, the culture surrounding the climate change topic area of Wikipedia has been a microcosm of climate science for nearly a full decade.
This is not a compliment.
When you read the Climategate emails and see discussions of finding people to investigate and discredit your ideological opponents – that is Wikipedia. When you read about the IPCC’s usage of the WWF and students in composing their Climate Bible (KJV) – that is Wikipedia. When you read about “climate scientists” conspiring to get other scientists fired for challenging the orthodoxy – that is Wikipedia.
In short, Wikipedia does not care about truth, and certainly not doubts, it cares about message.
the Air Vent 
One thing you can guarantee is that leftists cannot handle the truth and they hate freedom, especially the freedom of speech.
Last night I made a series of posts on SKS. All that remains is the first one.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=53&&n=1207#71503
The moderators would not allow these two links:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/astronomical_harmonics_testing.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/02/foia-is-not-enough-why-not-legally-mandate-transparency-in-climate-research-a-modest-proposal/
I also called for volunteers to join the “Project Balance” team that plans to review the IPCC’s AR5 ZODs. Deleted!
http://www.gallopingcamel.info/IPCC.htm
GC,
I would like to run a post on your letters back and forth from the IPCC. I think it is worthwhile to point out what has been going on. Would you be interested in writing something on that?
Wikipedia has actually gotten better in this regard. Someone ran the gauntlet of procedures they have and got William Connolley kicked off as a global warming editor. The Richard Lindzen page is a bit better. It used to say that Lindzen made a claim that scientists alone did not do something, but NAS disagreed as the panel was made up of scientists and X. I pointed out that it is not a disagreement, and kept getting my changes deleted, by someone named Watson I think. Now the page doesn’t have that.
Jeff;
memorize and sing to yourself:
Historical note: Stan died in 1983 trying to save other passengers from a burning jetliner.
Novic;
You’re behind the curve. Connolley’s suspension was temporary. He’s back on the Editorial Board, and making up for lost time.
I too will not donate anything to wikipedia because of their biased climate coverage
Even when Wiki has it’s facts correct it often suffers from what I call “presentation bias,” shuttling important facts off to the sides or word scumbling around them.
Gee whiz, I haven’t listened to Stan in a long time – I’ll have to pull out all my old CD’s.
To succeed in this battle we must align ourselves with truth and humility and dogmatically avoid egotism, as Mahatma Gandhi so cleverly did in defeating the British Empire.
Sounds like you need Conservapedia 🙂
Promote factual truths, like these:
A. Earth is a tiny speck of fly ash orbiting the nuclear furnace that made our elements.
B. The furnace is 1,000,000 times bigger and 300,000 more massive than Earth.
C. The core of the furnace is a pulsar [1-3] heated by neutron repulsion [4].
D. World leaders are powerless bullies hiding behind bluff and bluster.
1. Nature 240, 99-101 (1972)
2. Science 195, 208-209 (1977)
3. Nature 270, 159-160 (1977)
4. APEIRON, in press: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.1499v1
Nick @ 9.
Truth is not owned by right-wing conservatives nor left-wing liberals.
Dogmatic religionists and scientists are identical twins.
Individually we can align ourselves with truth, and
Trust that truth will be emerge victorious.
What is, . . . is.
@Nick Stokes – nice dodge. Sounds like you should stick to math.
Nick,
At least conservapedia admits its bias. I don’t need anything except honesty in information though. Too many liberals are willing to give the bs on climategate, climate science, 501c’s and the media a pass every time they lie. The goal for liberals outweighs the truth. Not that there aren’t conservatives who believe the same way, but the left is by far the dominant group. I think it is due to their nearly universal belief in their own superior intellect and enlightenment. We probably won’t agree on this but like I’ve written, I’m sick to death of the attitude. Why is the NYT losing popularity? Endless liberal bias which people ain’t buyin’. It is so bad that people are forced to go to blogs for the truth.
JeffID the wiki post has been updated and corrected:
Dave Souza made the correction.
“Truth is not owned by right-wing conservatives nor left-wing liberals.”
Good lord – something from Oliver K. Manuel that I agreee with!
It appears Dave Souza’s correction may have been prompted by Jimbo Wales pointing out the stupidity of the original – he ignored all other reasonable appeals.
They still call the paper fundamentally flawed. I think that is a matter of opinion stated as though it were fact.
Thanks, Steveta_uk, for your comment. Nature is usually than our models.
I study data and observations and make up my own mind. For example, we identified the energy that sustains the Sun, Earth’s habitable climate and our lives because:
1. Einstein showed potential energy (E) is rest mass (m) [E = mc^2], and
2. Other studies showed every atom is a mix of two forms of one fundamental particle:
a) The high pressure form: Neutron (n), and
b.) The low-pressure form: H-atom (p+ and e-)
The “Cradle of the Nuclides” shows how potential energies (E) vary
http://www.omatumr.com/Data/2000Data.htm
If interactions between fundamental particles are:
i.) Attractive, then rest mass is reduced, or
ii.) Repulsive, then rest mass increases.
Correction: Nature is usually more simple than our models.
JeffID:
Not quite far there: They list reasons, though a bit incoherently. For example, von Storch:
He’s absolutely right on this point. This conclusion has zero support within the body of the paper, which merely focuses on the question of whether the MWP was a world-wide phenomenon and the paper in fact does absolutely nothing that would lend support to this conclusion.
It doesn’t help Soon that this paper challenging the hockey stick came out right at the peak of Mann’s power. It very quickly became a toxic issue for all involved, and the choice was left, end your career in climate science or wash your hands of the paper.
****** aside
As you know, the review process is often cursory in nature, and it’s even worse when it comes to grant applications (which I’m involved in reviewing right now). If you right a grant review, the author has absolutely no chance to rebut anything you say, your word is gold.
It’s also typically the case that nobody on the main committee actually reads the applications themselves, they rely exclusively on the recommendations of the reviewers—except when one of their buddies needs a little bling of course, and then they’re all over it (shoving off the review comments if necessary to get the application accepted, seen it happen. I’ve seen a review chairperson shove an application down everybody else’s throats because the applicant was a former student for example).
This makes writing reviews of exceptionally good applications difficult, because the applications have a page limit, and tend to be very dense on detail. (And that isn’t a good combination with a causal 30 minute reading by a reviewer,who’ll end up missing 90% of the application contents). What you end up having to do is not only write a review of the grant proposal, you have to include enough context to trip up poorly founded criticisms by other reviewers. And if you take too much space writing your review, there’s a danger the committee members won’t even read it front to back.
It’s actually much easier to review poor applications than it is good ones, especially if your goal is to make sure the good ones get proper consideration. (But there’s nothing you can do if a committee member is an enemy of one of the collaborators on the grant. Some people are just unfundable under the current system, regardless of how good their ideas are.)
Wikipedia: right wing bias is typically more owned up to by the speaker, though he asserts he is right. Left wing bias is never admitted because they are merely speaking the “truth” –that is, not truth as they see it but absolute truth. Thus to the left-wing, opponents can not have a valid point of view, but must necessarily be evil or stupid [quote Mann’s well-funded oil lobby meme] see Thomas Sowell’s book The Vision of the Anointed from 10+ yrs ago
Re: flawed work aka Soon & Baliunas: hundreds of flawed papers are given the thumbs up because they help “the cause” which is a lousy reason to ok them. [that is, even if one were to admit S&B were flawed] If one that is counter makes a splash the Team goes nuts. Not quite objective.
Craig:
We all know what made The Team go nuts: The statement that the MWP was real and worldwide. And as far as I can tell this is well supported in their paper. The claim that they erroneously used precipitation proxies is just one of many errors in the criticisms that were drummed up afterwords.
And of course at some point the paper became toxic enough that everybody involved had to wash their hands of it to keep their climate-science related jobs, which is the real story, not the obvious flaws in S&B.
Yep. tried to update some ice core info today. Nothing too controversial and 100% official, with cites from reputable sources. It got deleted twice. So, we now have a situation where Wikipedia has to be intentionally kept OUT of date if new findings dare to transgress the Magisterium’s line.
As it is no longer an accurate source of inforation, maybe an approach to Google to have Wikipedia’s ranking demoted would be in order.
It looks like you have pulled together a pretty good following
now! I’m pleased for you!
Climategate was a wake-up call to the public in late November 2009:
A tyrannical government had taken control of information and society on schedule, perhaps in “1984” [1] as George Orwell warned, but government scientists were too busy counting grant dollars for confirming the SSM (standard solar model of hydrogen filled stars) to question the motives of their benefactors.
Almost eight years earlier at a new conference in the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel in Washington, D.C, I warned the public something is seriously wrong with government science. The SSM was obsolete, at best, and perhaps outright deception [“Why the Model of a Hydrogen-filled Sun is Obsolete,” 7 Jan 2002] http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0410569v1.pdf
Four years earlier, on 7 Jan 1998, a CSPAN News video captured NASA belatedly releasing xenon isotope data from the 1995 Galileo probe of Jupiter:
The xenon isotope data from Jupiter confirmed a prediction made fifteen years earlier, in 1983, that iron (Fe – element #26) is the most abundant element in the interior of the Sun [“Solar abundances of the elements”, Meteoritics 18, 209-222 (1983)].
Since Climategate I have gone back and examined closely historical events [http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-2204] at the end of Second World War (1945-1946) when George Orwell was dying of tuberculosis and frantically writing “1984”, [1] while Fred Hoyle was writing two papers [2] that became the foundation of the SSM.
Fred Hoyle himself later admitted that:
_ a.) Fred Hoyle, Sir Arthur Eddington, and all other astronomers/astrophysicists in their circle of acquaintances at Cambridge University believed the the interior of the Sun was mostly iron (Fe) during WWII
_ b.) Fred Hoyle’s two 1946 papers were adopted without debate or discussion and later became the foundation of the SSM (standard solar model of hydrogen-filled stars).
Today I seek help [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/Request_Assistance.pdf] finding a different interpretation for those historical events other than the emergence of a tyrannical world government in 1945 that purposely hid the source of energy in Atomic bombs, nuclear reactors, stars and AGN (active galactic nuclei) by promoting the illusion of hydrogen-filled stars.
With deep regrets,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
[1] George Owrell (Eric Arthur Blair), “Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)” Secker and Warburg, 1949:
[2] Fred Hoyle, “The chemical composition of the stars,”
Monthly Notices Royal Astronomical Society 106, 255-259 (1946);
“The synthesis of elements from hydrogen,” ibid., 343-383 (1946)
Sorry, there is no better explanation for the pseudoscientific Climate Crisis
This empirical fact is explained succinctly at Power to the People
http://tinyurl.com/a2ocxtq
Details and references for the history of the climate crisis are here:
http://tinyurl.com/atf8w63
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
Former student of
Dr. Kazuo Kuroda
Nuclear Geochemist
Imperial University Tokyo
Hi! This is my 1st comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout
out and say I genuinely enjoy reading through your posts.
Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that go
over the same topics? Thanks for your time!