I have mostly recused myself from the Climate pages due to the horrendous campaign to enforce a particular POV. It continues to be bizarre and troubling. Look at the article on 'Scientific Consensus', what it looked like when first added to WP [[1]] and what it eventually became. The notion that 'Scientific Consensus' should carry much weight in the discussion of things like Climategate is, of course, nonsense. The consensus article started out looking like this:
... science fiction novelist Michael Crichton said:
- I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
To paraphrase -- "Four legs good, two legs bad!"
It ended up looking like this:
...In public policy debates, the assertion that there exists a consensus of scientists in a particular field is often used as an argument for the validity of a theory and as support for a course of action. Similarly arguments for a lack of scientific consensus are often encouraged by sides who stand to gain from a more ambiguous policy.
For example, many people of various backgrounds (political, scientific, media, action groups, and so on) have argued that there is a scientific consensus on the causes of global warming.
Oops. -- Now it's "Four legs good, two legs better!"
It is gruesome to go through the various things that touch upon Global Warming and trace who said what. The same names come up a lot. A devoted group of people monitors Wikipedia for any challenge to a particular orthodoxy. They edit any article that might present evidence that contradicts their point of view. The spin in many (many, many) of the articles touched by these people is even worse than the above. It is very disheartening to see that this stain has existed and spread in Wikipedia going back many years now. Wikipedia is increasingly a 'go to' source for people starting to look at a topic. Anyone attempting to find out about Climategate and all the nasty stuff it revealed is met with what amounts to a very elaborate lie. Yuck.
DeepNorth (talk) 02:15, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Hey, dig this:
Request to stop Climategate from entering the title at all ]
Can't remember how I got there. I was looking for something else, but ended up on some dispute resolution page (or whatever) and found the above near the bottom. So ... It would seem that someone is getting tired of the unpleasant business of disappearing 'Climategate'. They would like to make it an official condition of the Climategate page to never let 'Climategate' enter the title. You can't make this stuff up. DeepNorth (talk) 21:41, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
[Please do not 'memory hole' this quite yet. It is here because all other form of expression such as this has been effectively halted by the WP thought police. I have looked around and similar text has been mercilessly deleted (the whole page and history -- you can't even tell what it was) even though it was just a placeholder for a WIP. Anyone attempting to counteract the obvious biases has been hounded into oblivion. Anyone that I can see who has attempted to use the proper resolution channels has simply had gangs of cronies jump in to waste their time and ultimately what they get for their trouble is humiliating blocks or bans. Some get banned long enough for it to be effectively permanent. To add insult to injury, most of the time (it seems) they have to show humility and contrition to their inquisitors. This was true even when it was the victim who was only seeking aid through the proper channels. They end up having to undertake to effectively cease their involvement or become a partial citizen, etc. One person had to apologize to his tormentors or be banned. I realize that I am guilty of 'thoughtcrime' here. Before you go all WP:SOAPBOX, WP:AGF or whatever on me, though, let me just say that I think the cardinal rules and governing philosophy of WP trump whatever trick you would like to use to stifle even this avenue of dissent. BTW -- here's a quote from AGF:"When doubt is cast on good faith, continue to assume good faith yourself where you can." -- notice the 'where you can'. How can you possibly assume good faith on the part of some of the editors in the Climate articles? This text is here because something truly dreadful has happened to Wikipedia. WP has been criticized in the past for similar imbalances, cronyism, etc. However, I think this 'Climategate' takes the cake. This silliness strikes right at the heart of the project. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of articles have been tainted by this scandal. Each day that passes without WP self-correcting the more it brings the entire project into disrepute. A few people have tried valiantly to get some sense to take hold, but they have been shouted down by the mob and aided and abetted by admins that either are part of the dispute (WTF?) or clearly have not read enough of the universe of text to understand what is going on. It is a sad fact of life that Wiki's strength is also its weakness. It builds communities and these communities self-police and develop bodies of social rules that they follow. Unfortunately, these rules tend to increasingly impinge upon freedoms at a cost that is too high. The rules ossify. The communities become intolerant. Certain users become entrenched. Cabals form. There is an antidote to this. All that evil needs to prosper is for good men to do nothing. Make it possible for good men to swing their arms. Go back to first principles and re-iterate that it is OK to speak.]
This is something of an interesting experiment. How much ability do current WP admins 'interested' in the Climategate controversy have to identify and 'correct' pages mentioning 'Climategage'? How bold are they in dropping them into the memory hole? Thus far, most suspect edits I have seen has been accompanied by elaborate rationale. Will this be another such case?
Hopefully, I will not be referred to one of their already discredited (at least for Climategate) dispute mechanisms.
Will they be so bold as to simply block my IP?
I will be amused whatever happens, even if nothing at all.
Oops! That was me DeepNorth (talk) 19:30, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
Cool. At least nobody is reaching into relatively anonymous user pages (yet). [Update:it seems that may not be true elsewhere. Unfortunately, what they do is delete the pages and pretty much any evidence of their contents (you can still see they existed though)].
I am wondering if it makes sense for people to simply 'incubate' their own versions of 'Climategate' and convince those with less of an axe to grind to come along and make one of them a high enough quality article to push as the official version until things get a little more realistic around here. I notice that a similar attempt was somewhat stillborn here Article_Incubator/Climate_Gate
I am still concerned that 'Climategate' and similar pages get redirected to Climatic_Research_Unit_hacking_incident, rather than going to a page that deals with the subject matter suggested by their page title. It seems to be a completely bogus attempt to steer people interested in the substance of 'Climategate' (treated as such under that moniker everywhere else) to a different discussion altogether. There should be a 'Climategate' page that explains what the fuss is about. It is fine if someone wants to make a page about the allegations of hacking and the fact that the police were called and the University is unhappy that the information was leaked. I don't think that it is notable on its own, but it is hardly going to be the death of Wikipedia if something obscure has its own page. However, there is something more than a little sinister that an important topic of much interest is replaced by something akin to a redirect to 'Crimethink'. Really, if somebody is looking for the meaning of 'Climategate', Wikipedia is not the place to go. That is a shame. Wikipedia is kind of a 'goto' place for lots of stuff. It is not authoritative, but will often give a nice overview of something, point you to good references, etc. What has happened to Climategate here is perverse in the extreme. Wikipedia denies its existence as such. It points you to something else.
Apologists would claim that they are just changing the article name to create a 'Neutral Point of View'. That is just nonsense. It is like changing the tile of the article on Watergate to 'Hotel Break and Enter Incident'. Complete nonsense. The only reason anyone knows about the hotel is because it gave its name to the scandal. The whole mess surrounding Climategate is positively Orwellian. They might as well just cut out the middle man and redirect all climate articles directly to Crimethink. That is, in essence, what they are doing. With any luck we will be hauling people off in shackles sometime in the next couple of years for perpetrating the CAGW hoax and eventually there will finally be a 'Climategate' article on Wikipedia. DeepNorth (talk) 18:02, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
Check it out: It really is like replacing 'Climategate' with 'Crimethink':
Note that some links above may be broken. There appears to be a two step program to send things to the memory hole. Step one is to disappear it and replace it with a redirect to something else. Step two is to remove the redirect. Voila! It never existed.
If you root around you will see that a considerable effort has been made by a relatively limited number of people to reverse changes by anyone who would dare to articulate anything beyond 'Crimethink'. At one point, there was a big argument over whether or not to include 'Climategate' in the opening paragraph of the article about ... errm ... Climategate.
This whole drama would be laughable if it were not so injurious to Wikipedia. The rest of the world is calling this 'Climategate'. They are addressing the substance of 'Climategate'. The notion that ground zero was (allegedly) a server at East Anglia University is irrelevant to the substantive debate. The 'gate' -- the controversy -- involves people from all over the Globe and actual criminal behavior on the part of people at the University].
Members of some climate 'spin' machine here at Wikipedia are trying to create a 'neutral point of view' that some evil hacker criminally broke into the servers at East Anglia as part of an ongoing campaign to harass scientists there. There is, of course, no evidence that it was either a hacker or even criminal. On the other hand, there is pretty clear evidence that there was criminal behavior on the part of some of the players exposed by Climategate. A file was released into the wild called 'FOIA.zip'. It contains evidence of a criminal conspiracy to defeat provisions of the FOIA. The evidence consists of Emails and data files selected from a variety of sources at East Anglia that seem to only involve evidence of unethical and sometimes illegal behavior on the part of a group of cronies. This group of cronies involves numerous individuals outside of East Anglia. The Emails discuss an organized and concerted effort to defeat FOI legistlation, the proper functioning of peer review, ordinary collegial relations, etc. To me, this seems to be clearly evidence of the exposure of criminal behavior by a whistle-blower.
So ... people who wish to discover what Climategate is all about and come to Wikipedia will find an article whose very title is a systematic denial of the substance of Climategate.
Climategate by itself encompasses:
- Evidence that CAGW is a scam perpetrated for personal aggrandizement on the part of minor players and purely for profit on the part of major players not even mentioned.
- Evidence that there is an international movement to promote the AGW scare.
- Evidence refuting AGW has been suppressed in various places in the world.
- Researchers disagreeing with CAGW have been marginalized, victimized, fired from jobs, denied funding, denied the right to publish and generally oppressed and bullied until they have left the fray.
- The above is well demonstrated right here on Wikipedia. There is at least one person actually named in the 'Climategate' Emails who has been repeatedly accused of promoting a point of view (to be polite). A number of editors (such as myself) have given up participating in the Climate articles due to a persistent negative (dare I say it) 'Climate'. Climategate extends right into the very bosom of Wikipedia. The scandal is so far reaching it appears to include Wikipedia going back years.
- Research data has been faked.
- Raw data has been illegally denied to scientists wishing to review/replicate the work of the AGW camp.
- A significant body of Raw data has been illegally destroyed.
- Key data that allegedly supports AGW papers either has been 'lost' or never existed.
- Evidence of a global conspiracy to pervert science to serve an AGW political agenda.
- Perpetrators have tried to morph the honorable word 'Skeptic' into something equivalent to 'Nazi' by equating skeptics with holocaust deniers.
- The supposedly objective IPCC reports are purely political documents that clearly promote a certain point of view that is at odds with the evidence. It suppresses and perverts contrary evidence. It overemphasizes evidence in favor of AGW (such as it is) and simply falsifies facts (Glaciers gone in 2035 anyone?) to create hysteria. New problems with the IPCC are now being reported almost daily.
One could go on. The point is that Climategate is a big scandal with very far reaching effects that could end up costing families in the first world thousands of dollars per year, halt the ascent of people in the second world and in all probability take the lives of unfortunate innocents in the third world.
There is the HUGE thing called Climategate involving directly thousands of people across the globe and affecting most of humanity. It has been replaced by 'Climatic_Research_Unit_hacking_incident'. Here are, amongst other things, things I find wrong with that article title:
1) It is called 'Climategate'. Wikipedia has crystal clear policies on this and there is no question that it should take its name properly. Instead, the real name has been hijacked to point to its 'thoughtcrime equivalent'. Climategate is simple, clear, unambiguous and is the proper name of this important article. This was supposedly 'debated', but the cards were completely stacked from the outset. Currently, there are ridiculous side-debates in an attempt to make this still-born monster into a proper article. It is as if Swift's ironic masterpiece 'A modest proposal' were to redirect to 'Recipe for preparing a yearling' and the debate kept getting pushed to revolve around picayune details as to the authenticity of proposed recipes while people mentioning that it was a satire and that one ought not to be really preparing babies for supper get banned for disruptive editing.
At the mutant article that Climategate redirects to, anyone attempting to return to the most salient fact that an article on 'Climategate' should be named 'Climategate' is chastised -- sometimes condescendingly, sometimes with a mean spirit and sometimes with warnings, blocks and bans -- that this has been essentially 'asked and answered' and that 'everyone agrees' that it is quite impossible to discuss this pig without its lipstick. It's an Orwellian attempt to insist that 'pig' sans lipstick is an absurdity. Repeated insistence that it is possible to have a pig without lipstick is treated as 'Crimethink' and suitably punished by banishment of various stripes -- sometimes to the point of making someone an 'unperson'. There is an appeal process, but from what I can see it is akin to being the defendant in a trial and arguing it to a Judge and jury composed entirely of plaintiffs. A fair hearing is not systemically impossible, but it is most unlikely in practice if it involves Climategate. Besides Swift and Orwell, Kafka comes to mind.
2) The 'Climatic_Research_Unit' portion of the name wrongfully implies that this is isolated to a single department of a University and hence has no importance in the grand scheme of things. Is it notable on that score? Of course not. We can hardly report on every alleged security breach at every University in the world. This is, to my mind, a very deliberate attempt to obscure the vast scale of this thing in terms of time and place and social, political and financial impact. That the alleged 'ground zero' happened at a department of a University is worth noting, but it might not even merit a mention in the opening paragraph, let alone be the thing that forms most of the title. This is especially problematic since 'Climategate' per se is about something else.
3) The 'Hacking' in the title offends me personally on a number of levels. Only someone who wishes to portray the true villains in this piece as innocent victims would bother to insist that this was the work of an evil 'hacker'. At the beginning, there was no evidence to suggest that this data was released pursuant to hacking the system. As someone with knowledge of this area, I find it highly doubtful that a 'white hat' would do it at all and a 'black hat' would not have been so scrupulous in excluding personal or irrelevant Email. It seems extremely unlikely that this information would have been sufficiently proximate to assemble like this unless it had already been assembled pursuant to an actual FOI. It seems all but certain that it was assembled by an insider. The only sensible explanations for this would be if it was to respond to an FOI request (as suggested by the title of the archive and the nature of its contents) and possibly it was assembled as such or at least released by a 'whistle-blower'. As far as I know, if it was assembled to respond to FOI requests and accidentally parked on a public ftp server, likely no crime was involved in disseminating this data. Similarly, if it was released by a whistle-blower then it also would not likely be illegal. There is no convincing evidence that this involved hacking. It seems unlikely on its face. It is certainly not germane in the grand scheme of 'Climategate' and has no place in the title, even if true. If one is moved to comment on it at all, the most likely explanation (the one I would bet on if I had to) is that the data was assembled to be responsive to FOI requests (not necessarily to give what was asked, but to give something) and then released by a whistle-blower. [As an aside, I am a 'computer guy' and the term 'hacker' itself was perverted at an earlier date to change its meaning from something honorable to something dishonorable. The term 'hacker' once meant a particular brand of devoted (and likely accomplished programmer) and it was a compliment. I have an intense dislike for Orwellian-style changes in language like this.]
4) 'Hacking_incident' to describe this as a 'hacking incident' minimizes this such that it obscures its essential nature. 'Climategate' is not 'an incident'. It is not a sole event or action such as a 'hacking incident'. It is not about a single moment in time. It is an enormous far-reaching scandal that involves years worth of concerted actions by thousands of nefarious interests, the largest attempted financial crime in the history of the world, the greatest hoax in the history of the world, potentially the largest loss of life ever seen and perhaps the only man-made thing ever to touch all of humanity at once and affect the biosphere upon which all life depends. Say, for instance, some huge organization involving thousands of people and a few hostile foreign governments all over the world had plotted for years to kill us all by poisoning water supplies with a potent poison. Say they had infiltrated suppliers to most water treatment plants so they could deliver the death-blow. Say further that the clear evidence of this was in the form of a database of communications and a sample of the poison. Say these things were to drop to the street due to a faulty clasp on the briefcase of one of the ring-leaders. Would we be likely to dub the entirety of that assault on humanity the 'poorly closed briefcase clasp incident'? Would the article concentrate on the mechanics of briefcase closures and discuss how one might better secure a briefcase in the future? I hope you can see where I am going here. The current name of the thing to which 'Climategate' redirects is absurd. It insults the intelligence of readers and injures the reputation of Wikipedia. The fact that it simply cannot seem to self-correct calls into question the entirety of the content on the system.
One of the things I find so irksome about this entire affair is how stupid it all is. AGW nutters have become so emboldened after years of success that they don't even try very sophisticated subterfuges. The ham-handed tampering with Wikipedia is pretty obvious to anyone reading much of the stuff with a critical eye. The 'hockey stick' is kind of stupid on its face. I don't know how much science and math you need to see its multiple faults, but it can't be much. Despite that, a variant of that nonsense persists (last I looked) on Wikipedia in more than one place. I have not seen one single bit of credible evidence that connects man-made CO2 to catastrophe. Nor have I seen a convincing chain of evidence yielding that conclusion. The evidence that man-made CO2 causes measurable warming at all is poorly supported. It makes sense in the light of other evidence we have (ice core samples, etc) that we have been in a small warming period. We may still be. Most with a background in the sciences looking into the matter seem to concede that warming at least *has* happened. However, the evidence used by the AGW theorists seems to be pretty much all tainted in one way or another. No reliable conclusion can be drawn from it one way or another. Furthermore, what evidence we have that seems good for the last decade shows that the sharp warming predicted in the (debunked) graphs did not come to pass, as far as we can tell from empirical evidence. The preponderance of evidence we have (untainted by the IPCC, GISS, UEA, etc) about increased CO2 and increasing temperatures shows that both would be beneficial within any realistic range that we could expect to happen. I just can't see how someone with even a modest background in Science could look at the current state of the CAGW 'science' and public policy and not conclude that it is all just a big scam. It makes me laugh when apologists say 'scam for what'? For the most part it boils right down to dollars.
The CAGW proponents all currently make money and stand to make even more money if we buy into the notion that CO2 is (quel suprise!) a pollutant. We are not talking about pocket change here, either. It's the biggest financial swindle in the history of the human race.
The boy (skeptic) shouting the Emperor has no clothes is not being paid. The tailor (CAGW theorist) *is* being paid, but only if people 'see' clothes. Sure, people want to see clothes there, but if they pay close attention they will see that the boy (with no particular axe to grind) is correct and the tailor (with a 'vested' interest, pun intended) is incorrect. Meantime, somewhere in the Emperor's government there are forces colluding with the tailor to claim that CO2 disfigures the magic clothe and everyone must pay to reduce this injurious gas. They even have experiments showing Lime Water/Carbon Dioxide Reactions and claim they infer that additional CO2 will cause not only more CO2 to turn into a nasty precipitate but that the nasty precipitate (through mechanisms unknown) actually attracts additional dirt.
AGW promoters like to trot out the uncontested finding that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. So what? A whole bunch of things are greenhouse gases. The biggest of the bunch is water vapor and there is plenty more of that. They don't go much farther than hand-waving beyond that because they know that CO2's effect as a greenhouse gas per se is negligible. If the 'greenhouse gasness' of CO2 were actually relevant, then we would have nothing to fear. To the extent that it can act to block outbound radiation, it is pretty much doing all it can already. They know that. It's 'greenhouse gasness', it turns out, is just a smokescreen. They depend upon some metaphysical thing like 'forcings' to cause an insignificant CO2 radiation effect to snowball into catastrophic global warming. I am honestly not sure if this line of reasoning would pass muster in my daughter's grade school, but I am quite sure it would not make it at my old High School. It would hardly be worth mentioning if someone was not trying to mangle the practice of science and extort money from me on the basis of it.
CAGW supporters seem to focus upon irrelevant things (CO2 absorption spectra?), the (insert presumably derogatory epithet) nature of critics and their affiliations, a (presumptive) 'consensus' that their position, 'in toto', is correct, that evidence was not presented in venues of which they approve. They also seem to focus on bombastic rhetoric. They say that objections to their claim that Glaciers will melt by 2035 is 'voodoo science'. They call people who disagree with them 'deniers' in an attempt to call up the specter of holocaust denial. They dismiss things that contradict them as 'fringe' science. They avoid sound argumentation by claiming their opponents are on the 'lunatic fringe' and therefore do not deserve a hearing. They actively suppress dissent of any kind. They manipulate public forums (Wikipedia is the most egregious example by far). They persist in making misleading and invalid arguments. They continue to use evidence that has been shown to be invalid. They insist on reusing falsified arguments. They 'cherry pick' in a most egregious way which signals and which portions of those signals they will present in a graph. They do terribly suspect nonsense such as grafting the end of one data series on to the start of another and presenting it as a single graph. They engage in any manner of 'bait and switch' arguments (really clumsy ones at that). For example, they will get you to agree that there has been warming and that there has been a rise in CO2. They get you to agree that people generate CO2. They then try to pass off the notion that people are the primary cause of warming. It is a completely bogus argument and they know it. They essentially (with a lot of hand-waving and misdirection) make appeals to emotion under the guise of logic. We would all like to leave a clean and safe environment for our children. They attempt to get you to agree that a belief that we should not pollute equates to a belief that we should cripple the world economy by forcing reductions in CO2. Neither the premises nor the argument are sound. However, with a nod and a wink we are expected to go along with the idea that 'the ends justifies the means'. That is, a forced regime to reduce CO2 will result in a cleaner environment, so what's the harm? The harm is in the fact that money spent removing CO2 from the atmosphere will reduce crop yields while at the same time be money that is not spent providing clean drinking water, critical medical aid, education, etc for our brethren in the third world.
Irrelevant truths do not make an argument. Asserting that the world is warming (agreed arguendo) plus the concentration of CO2 is rising due to human use of fossil fuels (agreed) does not entail the catastrophic end of the world unless we reduce our production of CO2. There are four 'non-sequitors' [man made CO2 is what creates warming, warming is net catastrophic, an ability to create CO2 is equivalent to an ability to destroy CO2, Reducing CO2 is cheaper than living with its effects].
Attacks against an opponent do not make an argument. An ad Hominum attack is a garden variety (albeit effective) logical fallacy. If I say 2 plus 2 equals four, it is not incorrect because I am 'bad'.
Consensus does not make an argument. The logical fallacy here is also a garden variety one and also effective. However, it is a false argument. The formal name for it is 'Argumentum ad Populum'. Empirical measurements are not swayed by voting.
Even consensus amongst people we respect (Steven Hawking comes to mind) does not make an argument. In this case, the logical breakdown is called 'argumentum ad verecundiam'
What seems wackiest of all to me, though, are the complete fabrications, the assertions of shaky (and invalid) conclusions as fact and the blithe apparent ignorance of basics such as the beneficial effects of CO2, the fact that CO2 *follows* temperature increases, the fact that 'its the SUN, duh!', the fact that we can't predict weather more than five days ahead with sophisticated models run on supercomputers, etc. The Himalayan glaciers will not be gone by 2035. They had to know it if we are to take them at all seriously. Yet as recently as the Copenhagen summit the IPCC was insisting it was true. Reams of raw data are missing entirely and the 'value added' data that replaces it (the addition of this 'value' is ongoing without announcement, BTW) is demonstrably in error. With the huge increases in funding for this critical Global Warming issue, we somehow use *less* temperature stations than before and a significant percentage have been improperly placed. They deny it, but it is easy enough to confirm yourself. Nearly all the data that supports the AGW hypothesis is compromised, poor, invalid or all three. Even if we admit (I do not) that their silly proxies that even they don't trust for the last few decades are useful enough for public policy decisions, they screw up the math. The 'hockey stick' is, in essence, just faulty arithmetic. It is meaningless, even if the underlying data had much value, it has been destroyed by the statistical treatment of it.
Perhaps the persons who memory-holed Climategate to Climatic_Research_Unit_hacking_incident will now vote to change it to Climatic_Research_Unit_FOIA_Crime. Don't hold your breath. Although, if it were a toss-up between that and something that shows the entire disastrous scope of this scandal under its proper name of Climategate you might see the same people swoop in with their wiki-lawyering and abuse of admin privileges to do exactly that.
It is indeed ironic that the objection to 'Climategate' is largely on the basis that the name 'Climategate' is not 'NPOV'. That is, the use of the moniker 'Climategate' would cause people to perceive its actual meaning. It is, after all, quite the scandal. It is, as far as I know, the biggest scandal in my lifetime of more than a half century. It is truly awesome in its scope and its audacity. It surely would, if they pull it all off, be the greatest financial crime (and possibly crime against humanity) in the history of the world. It takes a lot to top [Hitler], but this might actually do it if it goes all the way [Eventually all debates invoke Hitler]. This would, should it reach full bloom, result in the deaths of millions of people, reduce the biosphere's ability to support life and send a sizable portion of humanity nearly back to the stone age. All that for the sake of a few bucks on the part of the 'scientist' lackeys. You would think that a few of them would 'nut up' and stop this nonsense before it actually starts killing people.
Of course, god only knows what kind of money this would eventually funnel into the pockets of people pulling strings higher up. If the cap and trade boondoggle were to proceed like they tried to get it to proceed at Copenhagen, it would suck trillions of dollars out of the world economy and put it into the pockets of a few robber barons. Should a small group of people at the apex gain most of these dollars, it would render money at that level largely meaningless. They would dictate value and we would do as we are told.
Here is what we know:
For more than a decade, a small number of individuals dominated the debate on climate science. Ironically, they were not even very good climate scientists (if you could call them that). So it goes. These individuals engaged in various nefarious activities that perverted the public debate on climate, its effect on the world and man's role in it. They went so far as to commit criminal offences. Meantime, with a level of cynicism difficult to comprehend, some vested interests used this control over public debate to create a completely nonsensical world-view that CO2 was a pollutant and we needed a financial mechanism to control the emission of CO2. For those who missed that class in school, human beings exhale this forbidden CO2. We don't exhale much, but it is a couple of tons a year. At the height of the carbon market, that was about 14 bucks. That's not too bad, I guess, unless you live in a place like Ethiopia. Then, suddenly, food and water are not your biggest problem. I don't care what the price is, though. I want to go on record here and now to say that I oppose a tax on breathing, whatever the rate. It just strikes me as being wrong. I can't make a logical argument for it, but I just feel that breathing should be free. If it were up to me, I would say 'no charge'.
Pedants will argue that it is only a tax on exhaling and that inhaling is gratis. While that may be true in theory, in practice it is hard to get that breathing thing going very well if all you can do is inhale. I'm not sure how this work's in President Clinton's case. Since he doesn't even inhale. Maybe he would be OK.
When I was looking up how much CO2 people kicked out, I encountered this hilarious argument that it is a 'wash' since we only liberate CO2 from plants and they use up CO2. Circle of life, I suppose. If you think *really* hard about it, though, you will realize that human beings only liberate CO2 via breathing. They do not capture it. If no animal eats the plant in question, it will continue to hold the carbon in sequestration. There is no question that human beings take in carbohydrates and turn them into CO2. If you are around and breathing, you are pretty much just a net source of CO2 any way you slice it. More people, more CO2.
People should re-read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. In that dystopic vision, the state of Oceania is constantly at war. People have no privacy, no security of their person. They are in a constant state of privation. Doublethink and Newspeak rule the day. One day they are at war with Eurasia (just like, say, Global Cooling) and have always been so and the next they are at war with Eastasia (No, it's always been Global Warming) and have always been so. The 'ministry of truth' sees to it that records are changed to reflect this shifting reality and the populace is whipped into a mindless frenzy to support the prevailing truth (Uh, now it's Climate Change). Evidence of things said or written get dropped into the memory hole. People get 'disappeared' or become effectively invisible. Everything must be done for the good of the 'Party'. All thought and action are coerced. Books are essentially forbidden. People can never be alone with their thoughts or with one another. Everything is group-think and the individual is annihilated. Every thought that is not with the prevailing orthodoxy maps directly on to 'crimethink'. The prevailing orthodoxy changes constantly to things diametrically opposed and everyone *must* immediately switch their thinking as if the new orthodoxy had always been the prevailing orthodoxy. The intention of the language 'newspeak' is to ultimately make it impossible to form an unorthodox thought beyond the vague (repulsive and 'unthinkable') 'Crimethink'. If you are guilty of thoughtcrime yourself, you are done for -- "Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death."
You know what is wrong with this picture? Nineteen Eighty-Four was supposed to be a cautionary tale of a 'worst case' scenario. A 'what if' a totalitarian regime solely interested in power were to render the population relatively mindless, inarticulate, uneducated, complacent, obedient and utterly defeated. A scenario where everything that makes a person human was sacrificed to some imagined public good and the public good was not very good at all. It is a description of what to fight against, not what to allow, let alone embrace. Whatever your opinion of the prospects of a coming global catastrophe due to inclement weather, you should definitely make up your own mind and/or consult people close to home that you trust.
You do not have to allow yourself to be stampeded, bullied or otherwise coerced into needless sacrifices. You do not have to allow yourself to be rushed headlong into poverty. You do not have to give up a scrap of your privacy. You should vigorously oppose the constant redefinition of our language to make what should be impossible to accept somehow seem palatable for a while. You should not stand for the suspension of civil rights, especially not fundamental ones like habeas corpus. You should not allow, let alone aid and abet or otherwise support the 'ministry of love' style torture of other human beings. There, but for the grace of god go you.
Consider this: Current copyright legislation is mathematically equivalent to a perpetual copyright in terms of the present future value of cash-flow. The value of a 95 year cash-flow from a copyright is effectively identical (there is no dollar difference) from a financial instrument called a 'perpetuity' at the same rate of return. In current American (U.S.) society, your right to read a book will forever be constrained by your pocket-book, even though it is expressly in violation of the United States Constitution. See here for how that has started to play out in real life and savor the irony Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four. In theory, you will still be allowed to read. You just won't be allowed access to reading materials. So that's OK then.
Climategate shines a light on a broad and chilling landscape that is eerily similar to Orwell's vision of a world gone mad. The word 'skeptic' should be nearly synonymous with 'scientist'. How did this become a pejorative meaning exactly the opposite? Since when is 'consensus' such a great thing that we sacrifice independent thought and freedom to it? Orthodoxy for its own sake is primarily a negative thing, not a positive one. Scientists who uncritically follow the herd are useless to us as real scientists. To perform a useful function they have to be able to think for themselves. They have to be able to 'think outside the box' and challenge the status quo. In science, we are not looking to reproduce that which has been done (except to replicate as a reality check). We are looking to create the novel. Anyone who is a researcher in Climate science who keeps misdirecting the conversation to 'peer review', 'consensus view', to viewing others as 'outsiders', etc is no scientist worth their salt.
I have this notion that, best case, the people at the center of Climategate would rather save themselves embarrassment than save the world. They can't be so dumb that they believe the nonsense they are spouting. They have backed themseles into a corner and are now prepared to sacrifice millions of human beings in the third world so that people they likely don't even know can replace fiat dollars with the much more lucrative fiat carbon credits. Overnight, should we be stupid enough to let them, these monsters will create trillions of dollars of carbon credits out of thin air. That new wealth will not come *to* you and I. It will come *from* you and I. Worse, it is a negative sum (worse than zero-sum) game. The day the carbon markets are fueled with fiat carbon credits is the day that the wealth of the world is both reduced in the aggregate *AND* shifted from our pocketbooks to persons unknown. As with the tax on breathing (well, this is just another form of the same tax), I am against that.
It was ever thus. The populations of the world are constantly being led by the nose to their own destruction by one tyrant after another. We had a good run with a middle class that could afford to get an education, live in a house and even help our kids get an education. We at least had the illusion of some freedom and power and I (perhaps naively) thought we really did have a small measure of both. It appears that this time is drawing to a close, but I personally am inclined to fight it. The coming carbon taxes are an old-fashioned stick up. We are being held at gunpoint and told to hand over our wallets. We are getting off lucky. With no way to properly industrialize, the third world will slide even further into oblivion. They don't have a wallet to hand over, so they get shot. I find it particularly galling that during this debate on global warming the alarmists are asking the first world to spend money to stave off a rise in sea level -- money that *could* be spent saving lives by giving people in the third world clean water and basic medicine. For someone to have a silly green daydream, somebody's child has to die unnecessarily in another part of our global village. Shame.
Oh yes -- most of the people whom this *should* reach will be all over 'tl/dr' (too long, didn't read). Imagine that. If this is too long, I wonder how they held up reading books? From the looks of things, just about anything beyond 'the sky is falling' is tl/dr for some folks. Sigh.
Thank you for your contributions to the encyclopedia! In case you are not already aware, an article to which you have recently contributed, Climatic Research Unit hacking incident, is on article probation. A detailed description of the terms of article probation may be found at Wikipedia:General sanctions/Climate change probation. Also note that the terms of some article probations extend to related articles and their associated talk pages.
The above is a templated message. Please accept it as a routine friendly notice, not as a claim that there is any problem with your edits. Thank you. -- TS 00:44, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
Please remember to focus your talkpage comments on productive, constructive, concrete discussion of improvements to the associated article. In particular, please do not describe your fellow volunteer editors as a cabal rewriting history. Thank you, - 2/0 (cont.) 18:57, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
Unfortunate Edits
editThe above removes the tag from (what should be Climategate) that says the neutrality is in dispute. The person who did this added the following summary: "(Rm POV tag. There is no more neutral title than this and I don't see any disputed material.)"
It should be noted that the neutrality of that title *and* the content of that article is not only in dispute, it is POV by any definition on its face. The tag should never have been removed. This is the second time I have noticed this happen to this article. There are plenty of people with a less than neutral point of view who are watching this article constantly. I wonder how long it will take for the POV tag to go up and who will do it.
With respect to the Please remember to focus your talkpage comments on productive, constructive, concrete discussion of improvements to the associated article., I can think of no thing more constructive thing to improve that article than bringing wide attention to its flagrant manipulation and its grotesque title in defiance of clear Wikipedia guidelines to the contrary -- even as interpreted by Jimmy Wales. Merciful heavens. This drags on and on and seems to actually be getting worse rather than better. There is clearly a group that acts (whether by contract or common goals) in concert to vigorously push a POV in the climate articles and the (again, what should be Climategate) article is the most egregious of the bunch. Jimmy Wales *did* take a passing interest in this and seemed pretty convinced that things were not as they should be. However, I don't think he could quite bring himself to send out a posse to fix this and a few of the main players in the pro AGW camp argued with him and one even chastised him. They are a cheeky bunch, of that there is no doubt. WP guidelines say to assume good faith and it is my habit to do so. However, there is clearly bad faith in play here. The guidelines are clear that you assume good faith when you are able. I am not able and neither are a significant minority (or perhaps even a majority) of others who have looked at this.
Update: the 'Jimmy Wales *did* take a passing interest in this' turns out to be something of a backhanded compliment. In fact, he took much more than a passing interest in this. He took more than a little abuse for his troubles. Good on him! DeepNorth (talk) 17:30, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
Happy Holidays
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Thank you for continuing to make Wikipedia the greatest project in the world. I hope you have an excellent holiday season. Lightburst (talk) 00:00, 22 December 2019 (UTC) |