Those who deny that humans are responsible for today’s changing climate are admitting is that their cause has no scientific basis, because, if it were, they would not be last ditch defending the inclusion of fourth raters in the Wikipedia. There is nothing these clowns (and Eli uses the word with purpose) have beyond their ostrich act.
The Weasel brought one case to attention, a Marcel Leroux, a very minor French academic, who whose article was deleted in the Wikipedia and my, did that get the Willard Tony crowd excited,
but of course, everything gets them excited. The convoluted theory of why Leroux and similar deserve a Wikipedia page devolves to that they are contrarians, equivalent to praising those whose opinion differs that the Earth is a spherical object. Although bound up in Wikiadministrivia (Stoat is an expert practicioner ) the discussion of whether to relist captures the full flavor.
Now Eli observed with amusement the push starting four or five years ago to get actually denialist papers published here and there. Some of those attempts, have, of course not ended well. Others have simply vanished into the ether. Rumors abound about a coming reprise of the Oregon ISM, NIPCC type to appear under the auspices of the Cato Institute as a response to Climate Change Impacts in the United States . We shall all enjoy another attempt to put lipstick on a pig, dressing it up as something other than a press release from a think tank
Part of this push was to come up with enough losers to establish a beach head in the Wikipedia, which has become a de facto first stop in looking things up. No one is going to object if someone like Lindzen or Roy Spencer (a weaker case) has an entry but there really is some weak wood out there waiting to be cut out. The bench on the denialist side is full of splinters.
So, what does your average bunny, or the Rabett in Chief think of Garth Paltridge?
ReplyDeleteWhen James Lovelock jumped off into the blue, he was quoted in The Guardian saying this about Paltridge:
"There is one sceptic that everyone should read and that is Garth Paltridge. He's written a book called The Climate Caper. It is a devastating, critical book. It is so good. This impresses me a lot."
The Climate Caper book comes complete with an introduction by Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley a.k.a. Lord Monckton.
Paltridge asserts in this book that climate scientists such as those associated with the IPCC are the worst thing that has happened to the enterprise of science for the last several hundred years.
Garth Partridge seems to have had a distinguished career. His maximum rate of entropy production principle smells like a eccentricity brought on by dotage. Is it all enough to get him into Wikipedia? Don't know.
ReplyDeleteThe climate ferret.
Re "gone emeritus" types like Lovelock and Paltridge, it's unsurprising that they tend to support one another. For an illuminating discussion of an even more extreme example of the type, see here.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Kary Mullis is what Paul Krugman could have been if he dropped a ton of acid in his twenties.
ReplyDeleteOn a more serious note, if that's the academic hurdle a fair number of Eli's colleagues could jump it. What is interesting is how denial has become a path to Wikifame.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was more important that contributors to Wikipedia help ensure that what's on a particular page is accurate.
ReplyDeleteIf the clowns want to bulk up Wikipedia with pages and pages describing the lives and history of clowns, as long as non clowns can't be stopped from sliding in some facts, on balance, where is the harm?
Next: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gerhard_Kramm&curid=14996841&diff=517624379&oldid=517456669 ?
ReplyDeleteJohn Doe: part of the problem - indeed most of the problem in this case - is lack of reliable secondary sources. Both to establish notability, and the facts. There's not much point having an article if you can't find any reliable sources to put information in from.
Following on from that: articles on people who are notable only for blog-controversy are bound to be somewhat controversial and contested; and if there is a paucity of facts available then they are likely to become battlefields for competing viewpoints; essentially just cannon-fodder for other people's views. Which is exactly what this article was (it was only created for that reason). So its reasonable that there be some basic minimum criterion for a page to exist.
Here's another insignificant clown: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Marohasy
ReplyDeleteIts been interesting to learn a bit about Wikipedia. I had no idea they had a Deletion Policy, criteria for Notability, etc. "In the normal operations of Wikipedia, approximately five thousand pages are deleted each day..."
ReplyDeleteOne more, i.e. Gerhard Kramm's, can't hurt.
If enough fake skeptics get their Wikipedia pages deleted maybe they'll set up their own Wackypedia a la "Conservapedia: The Trustworthy Encyclopedia", which has "Commandments" one of which, i.e. the first one, is "everything you post must be true".
Just curious, what other authors and ideas are so threatening that they must be banned?
ReplyDeleteNothing to do with threatening, Anonymous, but everything to do with irrelevant people whose only claim to fame is that they deny basic physics and/or twist scientific facts to fit their ideology.
ReplyDeleteMarco
Marco, Just curious, could you provide an example where Leroux denied basic physics ?
ReplyDeleteFred
And Anon, the people Marco describes are usually bores.
ReplyDeleteFred, noticed the "and/or"?
ReplyDeleteThis is most obvious in his last book, in which he, rather than deny basic physics, twists basic physics, and make the false claim that the IPCC essentially ignores the role of water vapor.
Marco
Dr. Lumpus Spookytooth, phd.
ReplyDeleteI just think its funny you insist that you will debate skeptics..yet you make no effort to address this guy or his beliefs until he's dead. The bench on the denialist side is full of splinters. If that's the case, the road the alarmists drive on is full of potholes.
Dr. Lumpus Spookytooth, phd.
ReplyDeleteo ho ho ho! This is too good to be true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Leroux
"This page was deleted from Wikipedia, either because an administrator believed a consensus was reached among editors that it is unsuitable as an encyclopedia entry, or because an administrator felt it met one or more conditions for speedy deletion. "
You could not force feed the commy connolley propaganda anymore than that!
Fred,
ReplyDeleteNotability has nothing to do with what the person believes. My neighbor might or might not believe humans have something to do with global warming, but either way, that does not make him notable.
The only reason denialists want people like Laroux up on Wikipedia is so that they have someone to point to. And now if his page is deleted so that they can say "Why are you so threatened by his theories?" It's all irrelevant to the current state of science, but that's not the point, is it?