Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post
April 12, 2008
The thought police at the supposedly independent site are fervently
enforcing the climate orthodoxy
http://www.nationalpost.com/related_links/story.html?id=440268
As I'm writing this column for the Financial Post, I am simultaneously
editing a page on Wikipedia. I am confident that just about everything I
write for my column will be available for you to read. I am equally
confident that you will be able to read just about nothing that I write
for the page on Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia page is entitled Naomi Oreskes, after a professor of
history and science studies at the University of California San Diego,
but the page offers only sketchy details about Oreskes. The page is
mostly devoted to a notorious 2004 paper that she wrote, and that
Science journal published, called "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The
Scientific Consensus on Climate Change." This paper analyzed articles in
peer-reviewed journals to see if any disagreed with the alarming
positions on global warming taken by the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Remarkably, none of the
papers disagreed with the consensus position," Oreskes concluded.
Oreskes's paper -- which claimed to comprehensively examine all articles
in a scientific database with the keywords "climate change" -- is
nonsense. As FP readers know, for the last 18 months I have been
profiling scientists who disagree with the UN panel's position. My
Deniers series, which now runs to some 40 columns, describes many of the
world's most prominent scientists. They include authors or reviewers for
the UN panel (before they quit in disgust). They even include the
scientist known as the father of scientific climatology, who is
recognized as being the most cited climatologist in the world. Yet
somehow Oreskes missed every last one of these exceptions to the
presumed consensus, and somehow so did the peer reviewers that Science
chose to evaluate Oreskes's work.
When Oreskes's paper came out, it was immediately challenged by science
writers and scientists alike, one of them being Benny Peiser, a
prominent U.K. scientist and publisher of CCNet, an electronic
newsletter to which I and thousands of others subscribe. CCNet daily
circulates articles disputing the conventional wisdom on climate change.
No publication better informs readers about climate-change
controversies, and no person is better placed to judge informed dissent
on climate change than Benny Peiser.
For this reason, when visiting Oreskes's page on Wikipedia several weeks
ago, I was surprised to read not only that Oreskes had been vindicated
but that Peiser had been discredited. More than that, the page ****trayed
Peiser himself as having grudgingly conceded Oreskes's correctness.
Upon checking with Peiser, I found he had done no such thing. The
Wikipedia page had misunderstood or distorted his comments. I then
exercised the right to edit Wikipedia that we all have, corrected the
Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.
Peiser wrote back saying he couldn't see my corrections on the Wikipedia
page. Had I neglected to save them after editing them, I wondered. I
made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had
been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again! I made other
changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made
Nonplused, I investigated. Wikipedia logs all changes. I found mine. And
then I found Tabletop's. Someone called Tabletop was undoing my edits,
and, following what I suppose is Wikietiquette, also explained why.
"Note that Peiser has retracted this critique and admits that he was
wrong!" Tabletop said.
I undid Tabletop's undoing of my edits, thinking I had an unassailable
response: "Tabletop's changes claim to represent Peiser's views. I have
checked with Peiser and he disputes Tabletop's version."
Tabletop undid my undid, claiming I could not speak for Peiser.
Why can Tabletop speak for Peiser but not I, who have his permission?, I
thought. I redid Tabletop's undid and protested: "Tabletop is distorting
Peiser. She does not speak for him. Peiser has approved my description
of events concerning him."
Tabletop parried: "We have a reliable source to this. What Peiser has
said to *you* is irrelevant."
Tabletop, it turns out, has another name: Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She
(or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia. What does she edit? Reams and reams
of global warming pages. I started checking them. In every instance I
checked, she defended those warning of catastrophe and deprecated those
who believe the science is not settled. I investigated further. Others
had tried to correct her interpretations and had the same experience as
I -- no sooner did they make their corrections than she pounced,
preventing Wikipedia readers from reading anyone's views but her own.
When they protested plaintively, she wore them down and snuffed them
out.
By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme
over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda
vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda,
its source is not self-evident. We don't suspend belief when we read
Wikipedia, as we do when we read literature from an organization with an
agenda, because Wikipedia benefits from the Internet's cachet of making
information free and democratic. This Big Brother enforces its views
with a mouse.
While I've been writing this column, the Naomi Oreskes page has changed
10 times. Since I first tried to correct the distortions on the page, it
has changed 28 times. If you have read a climate change article on
Wikipedia -- or on any controversial subject that may have its own Kim
Dabelstein Petersen -- beware. Wikipedia is in the hands of the zealots.
LawrenceSolomon@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of
Energy Probe and author of The Deniers (Richard Vigilante Books).
www.energyprobe.org
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
"There is no compelling evidence that carbon dioxide has any significant
control over the direction of global temperature and climate. The
processes that regulate the interannual to decadal fluctuations of
climate are poorly understood and, as yet, unpredictable" William
Kininmonth, Meteorologist, Former Head, National Climate Centre, Bureau
of Meteorology, 1986-1998
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