(Dec. 23, 2009) Since my Saturday column described how Wikipedia editors have been feverishly rewriting climate history over much of the decade, fair-minded Wikipedians have been doing their best to correct the record. Continue reading
Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
December 23, 2009
Since my Saturday column described how Wikipedia editors have been feverishly rewriting climate history over much of the decade, fair-minded Wikipedians have been doing their best to correct the record. No sooner than they remove gross distortions, however, than the distortions are replaced. William Connolley, a Climategate member and Wikipedia’s chief climate change propagandist, remains as active as ever.
How does Wikipedia work and how do Connolley and his co-conspirators exercise control? Take Wikipedia’s page for Medieval Warm Period, as an example. In the three days following my column’s appearance, this page alone was changed some 50 times in battles between Connolley’s crew and those who want a fair presentation of history.
One of the battles concerns the so-called hockey stick graphs, which purport to show that temperatures over the last 2000 years were fairly stable until the last century, when temperatures rose rapidly to today’s supposedly dangerous and unprecedented levels. In these graphs, the Medieval Warm Period – a period of several centuries around the year 1000 – appears to be a modest bump along the way. Before the hockey stick graphs began to be published about a decade ago, scientists everywhere – including those associated with the UN itself – viewed the Medieval Warm Period as much hotter than today. Rather than appearing as a modest bump compared to today’s high temperatures, the Medieval Warm Period looked more like a mountain next to the molehill that is today’s temperature increase.
The hockey stick graphs led to an upheaval in scientific understanding when the UN reversed itself and declared them bona fide. Soon after, the hockey stick graphs were shown to be bogus by a blue-chip panel of experts assembled by the U.S. Congress. The Climategate Emails confirm the blue-chip panel’s assessment – we now know that Climategate scientists themselves doubted the reliability of the hockey stick graphs.
With the hockey stick graphs so thoroughly discredited, you’d think they would become a footnote to a discussion of the Medieval Warm Period, or an object of amusement and curiosity. But no, on the Wikipedia page for the Medieval Warm Period, the hockey stick graph appears prominently at the top, as if it is settled science.
Because the hockey stick graph has become an icon of deceit and in no way an authority worthy of being cited, fair-minded Wikipedians tried to remove the graph from the page, as can be seen here. Exactly two minutes later, one of Connelley’s associates replaced the graph, restoring the page to Connelley’s original version, as seen here.
Battles like this occurred on numerous fronts, until just after midnight on Dec. 22, when Connolley reimposed his version of events and, for good measure, froze the page to prevent others from making changes — and to prevent the public, even in two-minute windows, from realizing that today’s temperatures look modest in comparison to those in the past. In the World of Wikipedia, as seen here, the hockey stick graph, and Connolley’s version of history, still rules.
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
(Dec. 22, 2009) If you want to know the truth about Climategate, definitely don’t use Wikipedia. Continue reading
James Delingpole
Telegraph.co.uk
December 22, 2009
If you want to know the truth about Climategate, definitely don’t use Wikipedia. “Climatic Research Unit e-mail controversy”, is its preferred, mealy-mouthed euphemism to describe the greatest scientific scandal of the modern age. Not that you’d ever guess it was a scandal from the accompanying article. It reads more like a damage-limitation press release put out by concerned friends and sympathisers of the lying, cheating, data-rigging scientists.
Which funnily enough, is pretty much what it is. Even Wikipedia’s own moderators acknowledge that the entry has been hijacked, as this commentary by an “uninvolved editor” makes clear.
Unfortunately, this naked bias and corruption has infected the supposedly neutral Wikipedia’s entire coverage of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory. And much of this, as Lawrence Solomon reports in the National Post, is the work of one man, a Cambridge-based scientist and Green Party activist named William Connolley.
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.
Connolley has supposedly been defrocked as a Wikipedia administrator. Or so Wikipedia claimed in its feeble, there’s-really-not-much-we-can-do response to anxious questions from one of Watts Up With That’s readers.
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.
If this is true, it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to his creative input on the Wikipedia’s entries. Here he is – unless its just someone with an identical name – busily sticking his oar in to entries on the Medieval Warm Period (again) and the deeply compromised, soon-to-be-leaving (let’s hope) IPCC head Dr Rajendra Pachauri. And here he is again just three days ago, removing a mention of Climategate from Michael Mann’s entry. And here is an example of one of his Wikipedia chums – name of Stephan Schulz – helping to cover up for him by ensuring that no mention of that embarrassing Lawrence Solomon article appears on Connolley’s Wikipedia entry. And here he is deleting criticism of himself.
Connolley, it should also be noted, was one of the founder members of Real Climate – the friends-of-Michael-Mann propaganda outfit (aka “The Hockey Team”) which, in the guise of disinterested science, pumps out climate-fear-promoting hysteria on AGW and tries to discredit anyone who disagrees with the ManBearPig “consensus”.
Here he is, for example, being bigged up in a 2006 email from Michael Mann:
>> I’ve attached the piece in word format. Hyperlinks are still there,
>> but not clickable in word format. I’ve already given it a good
>> go-over w/ Gavin, Stefan, and William Connelley (our internal “peer
>> review” process at RC), so I think its in pretty good shape. Let me
>> know if any comments…
>>
and here are some of his associates:
From: Phil Jones
To: William M Connolley ,Caspar Ammann
Subject: Figure 7.1c from the 1990 IPCC Report
Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2007 13:38:40 +0000
Cc: Tom Crowley ,”Michael E. Mann” , “raymond s. bradley” , Stefan Rahmstorf , Eric Steig ,gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov, rasmus.benestad@physics.org,garidel@marine.rutgers.edu, David Archer , “Raymond P.” ,k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, t.osborn@uea.ac.uk, “Mitchell, John FB \(Chief Scientist\)” , “Jenkins, Geoff” , “Warrilow, David \(GA\)” , Tom Wigley ,mafb5@sussex.ac.uk, “Folland, Chris”
Get that? The guy who has been writing Wikipedia’s entry on Climategate (plus 5,000 others relating to “Climate Change”) is the bosom buddy of the Climategate scientists.
Nope, this isn’t a problem that is going to go away. Wikipedia may well be beyond redemption – as this useful resource site for Wiki-inaccuracies would seem to suggest. Like so many hippyish notions, Jimmy Wales’s idea of a free encyclopedia for everyone was a noble intention which has been cruelly and horribly abused by some very ugly people.
Do you want to know just how ugly? I’ve been saving the worst till last. Here it is: William Connelley’s Wikipedia photograph.
UPDATE: (thanks, wondrous Thomas 33 for your delving). Et Tu, Jimmy Wales? It seems that the dread Connolley once earned the approbation of the Wiki-King himself, as he boasts here on an old blog:
I have talked to EPA officials, staff in bill-drafting senators and house members’ offices and two presidential advisors on this matter on a number of occasions, including in the last week.
Every time I ask about the role of tax measures in any North American continental carbon/energy market design, they respond that these are revenues, not emission reduction measures. Obviously, if emission taxes are generating revenues then, by definition, they are not resulting in emission reductions.
The US representatives, like most other governments, are keen on securing any new revenues they can, especially through taxes that are indirect, spread out and which are not going to be specifically itemized on taxpayer invoices. But when it comes to cross border considerations in US climate change law, the US is not willing to assign a "credit" against the standard carbon tariff for any Canadian exports that have been "taxed" in Canada or internationally.
Again, this gets back to the fact that a tax can either be revenue generating or drive emissions down, but not both.
Governments can elect to price the tax sub-optimally (as BC and Quebec have done) to generate revenues or max out the tax to change behavior.
The US decision-influencers tell me they don’t want to get into trade disputes centering on the question of whether taxes are high enough to be legitimate emission control measures or are just revenue tools. So they are all agreed that when it comes to establishing GHG factors to determine the volume of US GHGs, US importers of Canadian products shall be required to buy, or any direct carbon-based tariffs on Canadian exports, the US authorities will ignore any and all taxes that might be paid by those exporters in Canada or to international agencies. And they expect Canada to treat US exports the same way.
If Canada’s tax regime proves an effective mechanism to change behavior, they say, then Canadian GHGs will decline and the US trans-border charges on our exports will decline accordingly. Though the US rules in development do not leave room for gaming between exports and domestic consumption of GHG-intensive goods and services.
Please also note the aid/international tax game that the US is now playing and Japan initiated in 2002.
UN treaty language insists that all CDM CER (developing credit) spending and any new international taxes that might be agreed have to be paid over and above national commitments to Official Development Assistance (ODA, aid). The UN envisions that the UN will collect all of the new international taxes and use the revenues to fund new UN assistance projects in developing nations.
But between 1999 and 2002, directly preparing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, Japan cut its ODA budget by a full US$4 billion, and put $2 billion in a CDM CER account. They put $1 billion in an account to fund new UN Human Resource initiatives. Then, they said, the last $1 billion would offset Japanese corporations’ CER purchases. They put a domestic tax credit in place to offset Japanese corporations’ costs of buying CERs.
The Japanese government was open and transparent that they were cutting ODA to finance their Kyoto Protocol commitments.
While this was an obvious breach of the Kyoto Protocol, the UN did not call Japan on it. I find members of the Obama administration now pretty open about their intention to let the UN find new sources of revenues, but then to cut back the US’s continuing direct support for the UN proportionately. The big difference between the Bill Clinton and Obama administrations is there appears to be little love lost for the UN in the current White House.
What is A Better Path Forward?
The question of whether the UN/World Bank and other supra-national institutions should be able to tax certain international activities to raise revenues should be considered in isolation, and should be recognized, formally, as a strategy to replace funding that the UN is likely to lose over the next few years.
Any final international climate change treaty should oblige:
Rather than fighting over whether spending on developing nation credits (over 80% of which are "hot air") is incremental to our existing aid budgets, we should subject our aid budgets to the same GHG accounting and reduction targets that we adopt for all other national activities.
(Dec. 21, 2009) A new report reveals a British scientist and Wikipedia administrator rewrote climate history, editing more than 5,000 unique articles in the online encyclopedia to cover traces of a medieval warming period Continue reading
University of Waterloo
December 21, 2009
WATERLOO, Ont. (Monday, Dec. 21, 2009) – Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth’s ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.
In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs – compounds once widely used as refrigerants – and cosmic rays – energy particles originating in outer space – are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.
“My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century,” Lu said. “Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming.”
His conclusions are based on observations that from 1950 up to now, the climate in the Arctic and Antarctic atmospheres has been completely controlled by CFCs and cosmic rays, with no CO2 impact.
“Most remarkably, the total amount of CFCs, ozone-depleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases, has decreased around 2000,” Lu said. “Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped. In striking contrast, the CO2 level has kept rising since 1850 and now is at its largest growth rate.”
In his research, Lu discovers that while there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, there has been global cooling since 2002. The cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years, according to his new research observations.
As well, there is no solid evidence that the global warming from 1950 to 2000 was due to CO2. Instead, Lu notes, it was probably due to CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays. And from 1850 to 1950, the recorded CO2 level increased significantly because of the industrial revolution, while the global temperature kept nearly constant or only rose by about 0.1 C.
In previously published work, Lu demonstrated that an observed cyclic hole in the ozone layer provided proof of a new ozone depletion theory involving cosmic rays, which was developed by Lu and his former co-workers at Rutgers University and the Université de Sherbrooke. In the past, it was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth’s ozone layer is depleted due to the sun’s ultraviolet light-induced destruction of CFCs in the atmosphere.
The depletion theory says cosmic rays, rather than the sun’s UV light, play the dominant role in breaking down ozone-depleting molecules and then ozone. In his study, published in Physical Review Letters, Lu analyzed reliable cosmic ray and ozone data in the period of 1980-2007, which cover two full 11-year solar cycles.
In his latest paper, Lu further proves the cosmic-ray-driven ozone depletion theory by showing a large number of data from laboratory and satellite observations. One reviewer wrote: “These are very strong facts and it appears that they have largely been ignored in the past when modelling the Antarctic ozone loss.”
New observations of the effects of CFCs and cosmic rays on ozone loss and global warming/cooling could be important to the Earth and humans in the 21st century. “It certainly deserves close attention,” Lu wrote in his paper, entitled Cosmic-Ray-Driven Electron-Induced Reactions of Halogenated Molecules Adsorbed on Ice Surfaces: Implications for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change.
In his interview on "The House", John Drexhage erred, importantly, in his description of current national GHG discharges arising from energy use. This is quite understandable, as I am sure John is very tired after two weeks in Copenhagen.
John said that developed nations are currently responsible for 80% of global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) discharges to the atmosphere. In fact, in 2007—the last year for which we have complete information—developed nations accounted for only 40% of global GHG discharges. Developing nations accounted for 51% and "economies in transition" (nations that were part of the USSR before 1990) accounted for 11%.
It may also be important to note that by the end of 2007, developing nations accounted for 95% of the reported increase in global GHGs between 1990 and 2007. Developed nations accounted for 21% of the global increase. GHGs dropped in "economies in transition" by 16%.
If you want to consider relative national contributions to the current concentrations in the upper atmosphere—reflecting GHG discharges over the last 100 to 150 years—we only have nation-specific discharges estimates going back to 1980. However, most analysts agree that the relative national GHG contributions for 1980 through 2007 are likely fairly representative of national shares for the longer time frame. On that basis:
The largest historical contributors of GHGs to the earth’s atmosphere are, in the following order:
United States, 23%
China, 13%
Russia, 11%
Japan, 5%
Germany, 4%
India, 3%
United Kingdom, 3%
Canada, 2%
Italy, 2%
France, 2%
Poland, 2%
South Africa, 2%
Mexico, 1%
South Korea, 1%
Australia, 1%
Brazil, 1%
Spain, 1%
Iran, 1%
Saudi Arabia, 1%
Netherlands, 1%
Ukraine, 1%
Indonesia, 1%
Taiwan, 1%
Turkey, 1%
The first 5 listed countries account for 55% of the total. We are far more certain of the emission estimates for developed than developing nations and economies in transition. It is most likely, therefore, that our estimates for developing and transitioning economies would increase, relative to the developed nation estimates, if we had access to better data.
You can look up the official estimates of national CO2 emissions from energy use here.
I have also made this spreadsheet using data located at this URL, for your information.
Chelsea Schilling
WorldNetDaily
December 21, 2009
A new report reveals a British scientist and Wikipedia administrator rewrote climate history, editing more than 5,000 unique articles in the online encyclopedia to cover traces of a medieval warming period – something Climategate scientists saw as a major roadblock in the effort to spread the global warming message.
Recently hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit expose a plot to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period, a 400-year era that began around A.D. 1000, the Financial Post’s Lawrence Solomon reports.
The warming period is said to have improved agriculture and increased life spans, but scientists at the center of the Climategate e-mail scandal believed the era undermined their goal of spreading concern about global warming as it pertains to today’s climate.
Solomon noted the warming period presented a dilemma long before the Climategate e-mail scandal.
A 1995 e-mail predating the recent Climate Research Unit scandal was sent to geophysicist David Deming. A major climate-change researcher told Deming, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”
Some scientists later expressed concern about erasing the period.
One chief practitioner identified as Keith Briffa, said in a Sept. 22, 1999, e-mail, “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.”
Briffa and other scientists, with the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published a well-known symbol of their movement: the hockey stick chart, an illustration reproduced in textbooks, media reports and the pages of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report.
However, the graph showed stable temperatures over the last 1,000 years and omitted any indication of the warming period.
“But the U.N.’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,” Solomon wrote. “Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming.”
Instead, the group created a website called RealClimate.org. One e-mail addressed criticism of the hockey stick graph and any suggestions that today’s temperatures were not the hottest on record.
“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,” a Dec. 10, 2004, e-mail to the Climate Research Unit from Gavin Schmidt explained.
The RealClimate.org team consisted of Schmidt, Mike Mann, Eric Steig, William Connolley, Stefan Rahmstorf, Ray Bradley, Amy Clement, Rasmus Benestad and Caspar Ammann.
Solomon revealed that Connolley, one man in the nine-member team who is a U.K. scientist, a software engineer and Green Party activist, took control of Wikipedia’s entries to see that any trace of the true climate history would be erased.
Beginning in February 2003, Connolley rewrote Wikipedia entries on global warming, the greenhouse effect, the instrumental temperature record, the urban heat island, on climate models and on global cooling, according to the report. In February, he began editing the Little Ice Age. By August, he began to rewrite history without the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned to the hockey-stick chart.
“He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band,” Solomon explains. “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.”
Through his role as a Wikipedia administrator, Connolley is said to have created or rewritten 5,428 unique Wikipedia entries.
“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,” Solomon wrote. “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.”
Meanwhile, followers who adhered to Connolley’s climate views “were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings,” Solomon contends.
Through his control of the Wikipedia pages, Connolley is said to have “turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.”
Facts about the Medieval Warm Period and criticism of global warming doctrine were purportedly scrubbed from Wikipedia’s pages.
“With the release of the Climategate e-mails, the disappearing trick has been exposed,” Solomon declared. “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.”
A Wikipedia arbitration committee has stated in the past: “William M. Connolley has, on a number of occasions, misused his administrator tools by acting while involved.”
A July 31, 2006, article in the New Yorker described Connolley as a “victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed.”
“After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went into arbitration,” the report states.
“User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV [point of view] with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own,” his accuser charged in a written deposition. “His views on climate science are singular and narrow.”
Connolley said Wikipedia “gives no privilege to those who know what they’re talking about.”
Just today, Connolley has made edits in numerous Wikipedia entries, including articles titled, “Public opinion on climate change,” “Climate,” “Scientific opinion on climate change,” “RealClimate,” ” Global cooling,” “Climate change” and the biography of scientist William M. Gray, writing that Gray’s “views on global warming are controversial.”
(Dec. 20, 2009) In the religion of AGW, Human Caused Global Warming, if facts don’t fit the theology, the facts must change, not the theology. Continue reading
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