Friday, Dec. 18, 2009
How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles
By Lawrence Solomon
The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.
The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.
The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.
The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.
But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”
Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating — they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma.
The Climategate Emails showed, for example, that some members of the band were uncomfortable with aspects of their work, some even questioning the need to erase the existence of the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years earlier.
Said Briffa, one of their chief practitioners: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”
In the end, Briffa and other members of the band overcame their doubts and settled on their dogma. With the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the highest climate change authority of all, they published what became the icon of their movement — the hockey stick graph. This icon showed temperatures in the last 1,000 years to have been stable — no Medieval Warm Period, not even the Little Ice Age of a few centuries ago.
But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming.
Instead, the band members turned to their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website called RealClimate.org. “The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are doing the rounds” in aid of “combating dis-information,” one email explained, referring to criticisms of the hockey stick and anything else suggesting that temperatures today were not the hottest in recorded time. One person in the nine-member Realclimate.org team — U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley — would take on particularly crucial duties.
Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.
Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
http://www.nationalpost.com/m/blog.html?....octor&s=Opinion
Posted: May 03, 2008, 2:53 AM
by Lawrence Solomon
Next to Al Gore, William Connolley may be the world's most influential person in the global warming debate.
He has a PhD in mathematics and worked as a climate modeler but those accomplishments don't explain his influence – PhDs are not uncommon and, in any case, he comes from the mid-level ranks in the British Antarctic Survey, the agency for which he worked until recently.
He was the Parish Councillor for the village of Coton in the U.K., his website tells us, and a school governor there, too, but neither of those accomplishments are a claim to fame in the wider world. Neither are his five failed attempts to attain public office as a local candidate for South Cambridgeshire District Council and Cambridgeshire County Council as a representative for the Green Party.
But Connolley is a big shot on Wikipedia, which honours him with an extensive biography, an honour Wikipedia did not see fit to bestow on his boss at the British Antarctic Survey. Or on his boss's's boss, or on his boss's boss's boss, or on his boss's boss's boss's boss, none of whose opinions seemingly count for much, despite their impressive accomplishments. William Connolley's opinions, in contrast, count for a great deal at Wikipedia, even though some might not think them particularly worthy of note. "It is his view that there is a consensus in the scientific community about climate change topics such as global warming, and that the various reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarize this consensus," states his Wikipedia page, in the section called "Biography."
Connolley is not only a big shot on Wikipedia, he's a big shot at Wikipedia -- an Administrator with unusual editorial clout. Using that clout, this 40-something scientist of minor relevance gets to tear down scientists of great accomplishment. Because Wikipedia has become the single biggest reference source in the world, and global warming is one of the most sought after subjects, the ability to control information on Wikipedia by taking down authoritative scientists is no trifling matter.
One such scientist is Fred Singer, the First Director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service, the recipient of a White House commendation for his early design of space satellites; the recipient of a NASA commendation for research on particle clouds -- in short, a scientist with dazzling achievements who is everything Connolley is not. Under Connolley's supervision, Singer is relentlessly smeared, and has been for years, as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry. When a smear is inadequate, or when a fair-minded Wikipedian tries to correct a smear, Connolley and his cohorts are there to widen the smear or remove the correction, often rebuking the Wikipedian in the process.
Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, as well as a code of civility. Those rules and codes don't apply to Connolley, or to those he favours.
"Peisers crap shouldn't be in here," Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an "edit war," as they're called. In such a war, rival sides change the content of a Wikipedia page from one competing version to another, often with bewildering speed. (Two people, landing on the same page seconds apart, might obtain entirely different information.) In the Peiser case, a Wikipedian stopped a prolonged war by freezing a continually changing page, to prevent more alterations until the dispute was settled. As occurs on such occasions, readers are alerted that Wikipedians are warring over the page, and that Wikipedia was not endorsing the version of the page that had been frozen. To Connolley's chagrin, however, the version that was frozen cast doubt on claims of a consensus on climate change. Although this was done within Wikipedia rules, Connolley intervened to revert the page and ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see.
Peiser is Benny Peiser, a distinguished UK scientist who had convincingly refuted a study by Naomi Oreskes that claimed to have found no scientific papers at odds with the conventional wisdom on climate change. The Oreskes study -- cited by Al Gore in his film, An Inconvenient Truth -- is an article of faith to many global warming doomsayers and guarded from criticism by Connolley et al. Peiser and other critics of Oreskes's study, meanwhile, get demeaned.
Connolley and his cohorts don't just edit pages of scientists actively involved in the global warming debate. Scientists who work in unrelated fields, but who have findings that indirectly bolster a critique of climate change orthodoxy, will also get smeared. So will non-scientists and organizations that he disagrees with. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia's 2.5-million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley's bidding.
Connolley no longer works as a climate modeller – he now works as a software engineer for a company called Cambridge Silicon Radio. And as an engineer of opinion at Wikipedia.
by Lawrence Solomon
Next to Al Gore, William Connolley may be the world's most influential person in the global warming debate.
He has a PhD in mathematics and worked as a climate modeler but those accomplishments don't explain his influence – PhDs are not uncommon and, in any case, he comes from the mid-level ranks in the British Antarctic Survey, the agency for which he worked until recently.
He was the Parish Councillor for the village of Coton in the U.K., his website tells us, and a school governor there, too, but neither of those accomplishments are a claim to fame in the wider world. Neither are his five failed attempts to attain public office as a local candidate for South Cambridgeshire District Council and Cambridgeshire County Council as a representative for the Green Party.
But Connolley is a big shot on Wikipedia, which honours him with an extensive biography, an honour Wikipedia did not see fit to bestow on his boss at the British Antarctic Survey. Or on his boss's's boss, or on his boss's boss's boss, or on his boss's boss's boss's boss, none of whose opinions seemingly count for much, despite their impressive accomplishments. William Connolley's opinions, in contrast, count for a great deal at Wikipedia, even though some might not think them particularly worthy of note. "It is his view that there is a consensus in the scientific community about climate change topics such as global warming, and that the various reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarize this consensus," states his Wikipedia page, in the section called "Biography."
Connolley is not only a big shot on Wikipedia, he's a big shot at Wikipedia -- an Administrator with unusual editorial clout. Using that clout, this 40-something scientist of minor relevance gets to tear down scientists of great accomplishment. Because Wikipedia has become the single biggest reference source in the world, and global warming is one of the most sought after subjects, the ability to control information on Wikipedia by taking down authoritative scientists is no trifling matter.
One such scientist is Fred Singer, the First Director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service, the recipient of a White House commendation for his early design of space satellites; the recipient of a NASA commendation for research on particle clouds -- in short, a scientist with dazzling achievements who is everything Connolley is not. Under Connolley's supervision, Singer is relentlessly smeared, and has been for years, as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry. When a smear is inadequate, or when a fair-minded Wikipedian tries to correct a smear, Connolley and his cohorts are there to widen the smear or remove the correction, often rebuking the Wikipedian in the process.
Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, as well as a code of civility. Those rules and codes don't apply to Connolley, or to those he favours.
"Peisers crap shouldn't be in here," Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an "edit war," as they're called. In such a war, rival sides change the content of a Wikipedia page from one competing version to another, often with bewildering speed. (Two people, landing on the same page seconds apart, might obtain entirely different information.) In the Peiser case, a Wikipedian stopped a prolonged war by freezing a continually changing page, to prevent more alterations until the dispute was settled. As occurs on such occasions, readers are alerted that Wikipedians are warring over the page, and that Wikipedia was not endorsing the version of the page that had been frozen. To Connolley's chagrin, however, the version that was frozen cast doubt on claims of a consensus on climate change. Although this was done within Wikipedia rules, Connolley intervened to revert the page and ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see.
Peiser is Benny Peiser, a distinguished UK scientist who had convincingly refuted a study by Naomi Oreskes that claimed to have found no scientific papers at odds with the conventional wisdom on climate change. The Oreskes study -- cited by Al Gore in his film, An Inconvenient Truth -- is an article of faith to many global warming doomsayers and guarded from criticism by Connolley et al. Peiser and other critics of Oreskes's study, meanwhile, get demeaned.
Connolley and his cohorts don't just edit pages of scientists actively involved in the global warming debate. Scientists who work in unrelated fields, but who have findings that indirectly bolster a critique of climate change orthodoxy, will also get smeared. So will non-scientists and organizations that he disagrees with. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia's 2.5-million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley's bidding.
Connolley no longer works as a climate modeller – he now works as a software engineer for a company called Cambridge Silicon Radio. And as an engineer of opinion at Wikipedia.
Apparently he received the boot from his wiki admin post back in September for misbehaviour. See this para from a letter from Pierre Gres of wiki
"In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming. This has now been added to his article."
Presumably he and his henchman, Kim Dabelstein Petersen, another “editor” who devotes a large part of his life to editing reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics, will be under stricter supervision by their "peers" in future.
The problem is that so many people go to wiki first for info and then NO FURTHER. The specialpeople are in this category, I fear, as well as schoolchildren.
This corruption of a popular information source is bound to have a generational impact. But then the Society of Jesus knows that: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man".
"In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming. This has now been added to his article."
Presumably he and his henchman, Kim Dabelstein Petersen, another “editor” who devotes a large part of his life to editing reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics, will be under stricter supervision by their "peers" in future.
The problem is that so many people go to wiki first for info and then NO FURTHER. The specialpeople are in this category, I fear, as well as schoolchildren.
This corruption of a popular information source is bound to have a generational impact. But then the Society of Jesus knows that: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man".
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