Energy Probe

Tom Bethell
American Spectator
December 30, 2009

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, had an   article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal drawing attention to the rise of “online hostility” and the “degeneration of online civility.” He (and coauthor Andrea Weckerle) suggested ways in which we can “prevent the worst among us from silencing the best among us.”

I agree with just about everything that they say. But there is one problem that Mr. Wales does not go near. That is the use of Wikipedia itself to inflame the political debate by permitting activists to rewrite the contributions of others. All by itself, that surely is a contributor to online incivility.

The issue that I am particularly thinking about is “climate change” — or global warming as it was once called (until the globe stopped warming, about a decade ago). Recently the Financial Post in Canada published an article by Lawrence Solomon, with this remarkable headline:

How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles.

Solomon draws attention to the online labors of one William M. Connolley, a Green Party activist and software engineer in Britain. Starting in February 2003, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site.  I continue with a two-paragraph direct quote from Mr. Solomon’s article:

[Connolley] 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 [of climatologist activists]. 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 [of activists] 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.

Online replies to this article included the following, appearing about 24 hours after Solomon’s article went on line:

Recently, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee determined that “William M. Connolley has, on a number of occasions misused his administrator tools by acting while involved” and, as a consequence, “William M. Connolley’s administrative privileges are revoked.”

[Link: en.wikipedia.org/…/Abd-William_M._Connolley]

But three days later, on December 23, a follow-up article by Solomon said this:

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.

So he is still at it, apparently. Connolley has for years been involved with a website called RealClimate.org. It broadcasts the views of a group of warmist ideologues, otherwise known as “working climate scientists.”  (Among them is Penn State’s Michael Mann, the inventor of the “hockey stick.”) My guess is that even if Connolley’s Wiki privileges have been revoked, his RealClimate allies continue to labor on his behalf.

The interesting paragraph below comes from Connolley’s own Wiki entry, and I suppose was written by him:

His work was also the subject of hearings by Wikipedia’s arbitration committee after a complaint was filed claiming that Connolley was pushing his own point of view in an article by removing material with opposing viewpoints. A “humiliating one-revert-a-day” editing restriction was imposed on Connolley, and he told The New Yorker that Wikipedia “gives no privilege to those who know what they’re talking about.” The restriction was later revoked, and Connolley served as a Wikipedia administrator from January 2006. [The New Yorker article was by Stacy Schiff, July 31, 2006]

It is not surprising that Connolley should think that he knows what he is talking about and that he should be “privileged.” The question is: How does Wikipedia decide between him and his allies and those who say that Connolley et al. do not know what they are talking about?

One is tempted to reply: By looking at the science. But here is an important and little-noted point. The scientific problem posed by measuring manmade global warming, if such warming really exists, is huge. There is no more complex field of science. That is because so many areas of expertise are involved — everything from the temperature effects of oceans and of cloud cover, to the study of ice cores, to the spacing of tree rings, to the proper placement of thermometers. (How many should there be in Siberia, how close should they be to New York City? and so on.)

Faced with the complexity of the way these variables interact — and I could have mentioned half a dozen more — the true scientist, at least initially, finds it difficult to be certain about the outcome. Politicians, or politicized scientists, then seized their opportunity.  Ideologues like Connolley and politicians like Al Gore filled the vacuum. Armed with world-saving missionary zeal, they milked the prestige of science to suit their own political advantage.

In so complex a field, the skeptics needed time to recover their more detached sense of what is really going on with the weather. So the warmists enjoyed a head start thanks to their political zeal and their lack of scrupulosity. Now they have come close to persuading politicians all over the Western world that we must change the way we live or sink beneath the waves.

But with the leaked emails known as Climategate more people are beginning to see that deception, not science, has been their principal weapon. And we see also that Wikipedia has lent itself to that deception.

The political exploitation of science has gone on for some time — discrediting nuclear power in addition to the use of oil and coal has been just one of its several goals. One unintended consequence, as Fred Singer said recently, is that the public may begin to disbelieve everything that begins “science says.” In the present climate, that might be healthy, but in the long run it would not work to America’s or the world’s advantage.

A footnote: Mr. Wales may be interested to know that the responses to Solomon’s article were quite civil, surprisingly so given the shocking nature of his charges. Here are two. I particularly commend the second:

[From an academic] “I will not accept any references from Wikipedia in any paper I review from here on out until this is resolved.”

“I see that a banner ad is appearing on most Wikipedia pages asking for ‘donations’…. I think I’ll contribute to more worthwhile charities.”

For myself, I shall continue to investigate this issue over the next few days, and I hope to post a follow-up next week.

Read the full article here.

Tulsa Beacon

December 24, 2009

While the United Nations, President Obama and former Vice President Al Gore look for billions of dollars to fight “global warming,” scientists all over the world are debunking the theory as “bad science” and political manipulation.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week in a United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen that America should lead the way in spending $100 billion to fight climate change (or global warming).

Lawrence Solomon has written a book, “The Deniers: The World Renown Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming, Hysteria, Political Persecution and Fraud.” (Buy the book here).

In the book, Solomon chronicles the opposition to global warming and the science that contradicts the views of Obama, Gore and the United Nations.

Dr. Edward J. Wegman is director of the Center for Computational Statistics at George Mason University, chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics and a board member of the American Statistical Association.

The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee asked him to assess the “hockey stick graph,” a key global warming tool created by Michael Mann of The University of Massachusetts.

The hockey stick graph shows that for most of the past one thousand years, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were cooling – until 1900. Then temperatures began to rise through the 1990s as mankind began to industrialize and use more hydrocarbons for energy. Mann claimed that the 20th Century was the warmest of the past millennium, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 was the warmest year.

In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a graph that showed a warming period in the Middle Ages (14th Century) that led to the “Little Ice Age,” from which we have been emerging since the early 1700s.

Mann’s hockey stick graph eliminated the Medieval Warming Period, which made the 20th Century warming look more dramatic.

According to Solomon, “More than any other single piece of evidence, (the hockey stick) made global warming a serious popular and political issue.”

The United Nations IPCC 2001 report on global warming made the hockey stick graph the centerpiece on its report to international policymakers.

A Canadian mining scientist named Stephen McIntire examined the hockey stick data and found that the 1600s, not the 1900s, were the hottest century. That didn’t necessarily disprove global warming but it showed that Mann’s graph was an enormously effective prop. Professor Ross McKitrick, an economist at The University of Guelph, has joined McIntire in calling the hockey stick graph a “phony.”

The United Nations decided that Mann’s credentials were more impressive than McIntire’s.

Then, at the request of Congress, Wegman assembled a panel of expert statisticians, including the board of the American Statistical Association.

They agreed to repudiate Mann’s hockey stick graph and vindicate McIntire and McKitrick.

“Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported,” Wegman wrote.

When measuring temperature for one thousand years, statistics become important. Only recently did the world have accurate thermometers scattered all across the globe continuously measuring temperature.

Global warming theorists have to rely on sporadic and discontinous data such as tree rings, ice cores, lake and ocean sediment and other less reliable sources.

Wegman’s report showed that tree rings are not reliable to support the hockey stick graph.

So, why did so many rush to accept Mann’s graph?

Wegman said the peer process doesn’t work because there is “too much consensus.” Mann’s reviewers all came from a very tight-knit paleoclimate community that highly respected Mann.

Solomon writes that “the hockey stick experience has convinced Wegman that much of climate science should be taken with a grain of salt, since so many studies have been peer reviewed by reviewers unqualified in statistics.”

The IPCC dropped the hockey stick graph from its 2007 report – an indication of its lack of credibility.

Is the Earth warmer?

That is the key question for those who hold to global warming.

Dr. Vincent Gray, has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from The University of Cambridge. He has published more than 100 scientific papers and wrote The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of Climate Change 2001.

He has called the IPCC (United Nations) process a “swindle.”

Gray is one of the “2,500 top scientists” from around the world that the IPCC cites as backing their reports. He wrote 1,900 comments on the final draft on a recent IPCC’s report.

“Right from the beginning, I have had difficulty with this procedure,” Gray wrote. “Penetrating questions often ended without any answer. Comments on the IPCC drafts were rejected without explanation and attempts to pursue the matter were frustrated indefinitely.”

His conclusion was that the information in the IPCC reports were “unsound.”

For example, Gray says that temperature stations are not properly stationed. Ninety percent are on the land while 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by the oceans. Temperature stations are disproportionately located near cities, which are heat sources.

Geophysicist Syun-Ichi Akasofu, a founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of The University of Alaska in 1964 discovered the origin of storms in the aurora borealis. He has published more than 550 professional journal articles.

Akasofu says the Earth slowly warmed about one half of one degree Celcius during the 20th Century. That also happened over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. The rate of warming has been fairly consistent since the Little Ice Age, which ended in 1900.

“The Earth may still be recovering from the Little Ice Age,” Akasofu said. If that is true, there is no need to blame greenhouse gases for warming in the 20th Century.

In other words, if there has been slight (one half degree) global warming, it is part of a cycle and not man made. The Norwegian Sea has been continuously receding since 1800 due to the North Atlantic Oscillation – a natural phenomenon.

Many glaciers advanced during the Little Ice Age and have been receding ever since, Akasofu states.

What is the impact of CO2 (carbon dioxide)?

The warmists believe that human activity and industrialization have increased the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to the point of raising the Earth’s temperature – and thus leading to eventual climactic catastrophe.

Most scientists agree that carbon dioxide absorbs space-bound infrared radiation and leads to warming and increased evaporation at the Earth’s surface.

The question is how much of an impact it truly has.

Former Vice President Al Gore in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, states that a rise in CO2 always brings about a rise in temperature.

But arctic data show a large rise and fall in temperature between 1920 and the early 1970s while the global average shows little change. A second major fluctuation happened in 1975. These correlate with changes in CO2 levels.

In other words, these normal fluctuations show a natural cycle that diminishes the greenhouse effect.

“Indeed, there is so far no definitive proof that most of the present warming is due to the greenhouse effect,” Akasofu said.

Arctic temperature had a cooling effect from 1940 to 1975 even though CO2 levels began to rise in 1940.

Akasofu said you cannot know the exact effect of CO2 without subtracting natural causes that are hard to measure.

The IPCC’s own climate change models show carbon dioxide to be irrelevant.

Dr. Tom Segalstad is head of the Geological Museum at The University of Oslo and was a former expert reviewer for the IPCC.

Cars are a source of CO2 emissions and so are people (as they exhale). The oceans absorb and release CO2. In fact, most scientists believe that CO2 can’t stay in the atmosphere for more than five years because it is absorbed in the oceans.

CO2 in the atmosphere and the oceans reach a stable balance when the oceans contain about 50 times more than the atmosphere.

Segalstad said that based on isotope mass balance calculations, if CO2 in the atmosphere had a lifetime of 50 to 200 years (as claimed by the United Nations), the atmosphere would have half of its current CO2 mass. That’s nonsense. The IPCC counters with a “missing sink” model that claims half of the CO2 is “hiding somewhere.”

Looking for the missing sink in the biosphere, carbon cycle modeling shows deforestation must have added a lot of CO2 to the atmosphere. Instead of finding a missing sink, the models find another CO2 source.

An error of “about three giga-tonnes of carbon annually not explained by a model would normally lead to complete rejection of the model and its hypotheses,” Segalstad said.

“It is all a fiction.”

Astrophysicist Nir Shaviv of Israel had logically concluded that increases in carbon dioxide and other gases led to the greenhouse effect. He thought greenhouse gases increased in the 20th Century due to human activity. Nothing else explained it, he thought.

Shaviv has changed his mind.

“…after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media,” Shaviv said.

Shaviv believes that CO2 plays only a subordinate role – a circumstantial one at best.

Man’s role is so uncertain that the Earth may have been cooling, Shaviv said. We understand the role of CO2 but we don’t understand other factors.

It’s like the man who lost his keys in the dark but looks for them a block away under a street light because the light there is better, Shaviv said.

“Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th Century global warming,” Shaviv said. He thinks natural solar processes account for 80 percent of the warming.

He favors curbing the use of fossil fuels – not to prevent global warming but to lessen pollution.

Lawrence Solomon is the author of The Deniers. He is a columnist with National Post (Toronto), Executive Director at Energy Probe and a self-described environmentalist. The book is published by Richard Vigilante Books (www.richardvigilantebooks.com).

Read the original story here. 

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

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:

Read the original story here.