Steve McIntyre has had a series of posts at his site, entitled “Climategatekeeping”, 1, 2 and so on. The focus is various bits of evidence that the hockey team members were conspiring (in the truest sense of the word) to keep unfriendly papers from being published in the journals and in the IPCC reports. You can read them here, and here. For example, this one is pretty hard to spin:
Mike [Mann],
I’d rather you didn’t. I think it should be sufficient to forward the para from Andrew Conrie’s email that says the paper has been rejected by all 3 reviewers. You can say that the paper was an extended and updated version of that which appeared in CR. Obviously, under no circumstances should any of this get back to [Roger] Pielke.
Cheers
Phil [Jones]
‘Pielke’ is Roger Pielke Sr., of Colorado State. He’s a bad guy. He can’t be allowed to know what the “team” is up to. Yes, this qualifies as “conspiracy” under the legal definition.
The third in the series has a twist: it is about something that a lot of people have been aware of for quite a while, but still needs to be communicated to the public: that there has been a very active troll guarding the Wikipedia bridge, making sure that only hellfire-and-damnation interpretations of AGW make it into the text, and anything unfriendly is almost immediately pounced upon and airbrushed out by this troll. His name is William Connolley.
Lawrence Solomon at the Canadian National Post wrote this on the matter:
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.
Who does that remind us of?
We already knew that Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source for information on controversial issues, but rarely have we seen such naked gatekeeping as in this case. One can only conclude that the senior management supports this kind of one-sided editorializing masquerading as open information, and is willing to take a hit to their credibility for the cause. BTW, have you noticed, that just like another site that goes unnamed, their level of tip jar begging has increased dramatically lately? Hey guys, do you think maybe there’s a reason why people are hanging on to their change?
As an aside, sometimes we Americans get annoyed by some of the more obnoxious Canadians whom we have to deal with, but let me take this opportunity to salute McIntyre, Solomon, Levant, McKitrick, and many other of our neighbors to the North, for punching well above their weight on this issue, and showing leadership and true grit well beyond their numbers. If I had a hat, I’d take it off to these gentlemen (and ladies). Three cheers for Canada!
Tags: climategate, Wikipedia
