This morning I received a comment from Laymen Lurker calling my attention to a conversation about moderation on RC. He indicated this post by Steve Fish discussing the non-response to Ryan’s post tAV to REALCLIMATE: YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE. A significant number of questions and attempts to post on RC were deleted from the current thread at the time regarding this post. It didn’t go unnoticed by those who regularly peruse blogland and is still being questioned by alert readers.
Steve Fish wrote:
Steve Reynolds #218. I checked out the Rank Exploits Blackboard link (same one I tried previously) and found your posts regarding censorship. You referred to a discussion on the Air Vent (tAV) as a worst case example entitled- “tAV to RealClimate, you can’t get there from here.” Several posters complained that posts on RC didn’t get through. These folks claimed that their posts were relatively simple and polite, and the discussion there was relatively low key so I have no reason to doubt them. On the other hand, some of their posts did get through and they, and examples of what didn’t, were so innocuous that I don’t see any reason to think RC would care, much less prevent them from appearing on their site.
What the whole issue was about was the RC article by Eric Steig, “On Overfitting,” and the following posts there by RyanO regarding his amateure (I didn’t see any credentials) reanalysis of Eric’s data that he presented on tAV. This was also a polite discussion and Eric gave RyanO a lot of help, encouragement, and advice regarding his desire to publish his version of the analysis. Eric’s inline responses were as comprehensive as many research article reviewers comments I have seen, so the actual topic under discussion was not controversial and comments were not heated. One of the posters complained in an Overfitting post about not getting through and Eric said he didn’t know why. Would this happen if there was censorship?
I have had one post to RC not make it and it was just a simple comment and question. I didn’t take this as censorship and just assumed that some of the glitchy behavior of the RC site (changes, spam filter, CAPTCHA) was responsible. When making a claim that information is being suppressed, one should consider what the information is and ask the question – to what aim? We all think that our own ideas are important and I suspect that some of the Air Vent guys were just hyperventilating a little. Steve Reynolds, like RyanO, post what you think is important and see what you get. Be persistent.
My bold.
Since I cannot respond to Steve’s post on RC with any degree of certainty, I chose to do it here. Let’s start with the ‘credentials’ issue. The math of this paper isn’t the simplest thing in the world but it isn’t that severely complex. I’ve run into worse and typically do more complex math for my own job in optics. Ryan’s background is in physics and he’s also been exposed to very complex forms of math which likely exceed the detail of this paper. However, he, myself, SteveM, Ross M and Lucia are not climatologists so that may make us laypeople, however amateur is an unfair characterization of the level of work Ryan put forth. I understand that non-technical individuals cannot tell the difference in work quality of technical folk so it’s no offense for myself or I suspect Ryan, it just needs to be said.