Did you ever wonder about the hordes of angry comments that appear after any major online story breaks about climate change? The ones that angrily attack the very idea that climate is changing, or that man could cause it, or that attack the integrity of the science and the climate scientists? Sometimes you might wonder if such feeding frenzies are organized.
Wonder no more. We now have a convincing demonstration of exactly how its done.
About a week ago, Amazon posted a page for the kindle version of Michael Mann’s new book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars”. A few individuals who had the chance to read the book have been posting reviews, generally favorable.
On February 8, Anthony Watts over at the denialist Wattsupwiththat blog posted that the book was available, and added coyly, “I hope some climate realists eventually review the book as well.”
Wonder of wonders, within hours, a horde of denialists had apparently bought and read the 400 page book, and were furiously posting indignant denunciations of the book, science, and the scientist. Apparently climate denialism is correlated with speed reading abilities, albeit with low comprehension.
An example of the level of Watts-inspired attacks – “This book is exactly like a turd. It’s small, it stinks, and it’s disgusting. Just like Mann.”
It’s not the first time that Watts and others in the denial community have organized this kind of attack. It’s a template.
The beauty of this pure example is that it shows how the relatively small constituency of rabid deniers exhibit swarming behavior so as to inflate one’s idea of their numbers. We’ve recently seen evidence of how PR firms like HP Gary provide “persona management” software, so as to create exactly this effect thru a manufactured army of sock-puppet social media posters.
Now we see that climate deniers have an even better way. Why use sock-puppets when you can deploy real puppets?
UPDATE: In the video below, see how a Koch Brother funded Tea Party activists teaches a workshop on how to specifically game the “review” system as a “guerrilla” tactic to promote “our ideals”. The speaker helpfully admits that “80 percent of the books I put a star on – I don’t read!”
Below, my review of the book.
When future historians seek to piece together the complex and byzantine tale of how humanity dithered on the edge of climate catastrophe – Mike Mann’s book will be the most logical starting point to put the big picture together.
Because Dr. Mann has been directly or indirectly involved at so many key moments, and with so many key players – and because he has pulled together a lucid narrative with a comprehensively annotated, highly detailed chronology – anyone that wants to understand the back story of an enormous and painful paradigm shift will be extremely well advised to consult this volume.
There is enough material in the footnotes to jump-start dozens of master’s theses in, among other topics -the unfolding of our understanding of global climate – but also, the history of science, the rights of privacy under constitutional law, abuses of corporate power, and the modern distortion of media by powerful vested interests.
There have been a number of valuable contributions to the popular accounts of climate change science, but this one jumps immediately to the top of the list for anyone that wants to get the broadest historical context and overview of where we are, and how we got here.
The world is full of corporations who pay a lot of money for this sort activity. Spamming is spamming whether it’s for penis enlargement or ego enlargement. It’s an activity that’s almost as old as PR. Your denial of that fact alone makes your argument suspect.
As for your mind-bending statement “there’s no evidence any of that would have elicited a different response here”
There’s no evidence for a negative? No shit Sherlock. I. Am. Surprised.
Forgot to mention how easy it is to disprove Watts’ “dropped/deleted stations” claim — it is *very* easy. Once you have a basic gridding/averaging app up and running, you need to add only a few lines of code to sort out stations that have been “dropped” from stations reporting data — just a couple of iterator loops and an if() statement. Then you generate results with all stations vs. only the stations that haven’t been “dropped”. Compare the results and see that they are nearly identical. That’s it.
But apparently, that’s still too much for Watts and Co to handle…. They haven’t been able to figure out how to do that in … (how many years have they been making that “dropped stations” claim, now???)
Otter17 – how are those different from the people ready to do anything because they want to save the world from impending Thermageddon?
It’d be also interesting to hear from Amazon about “linking to/mentioning their reviews pages” having become something to avoid.
Well, we can’t speak for Amazon, but I would imagine they provided the review space with the intention that people would review the books in good faith after having read them. Now, if the proprietor of a website has issues with his/her denizens misusing the Amazon review space, one would think it would be wise just to mention the book in question and be done with it. One can potentially give Anthony the benefit of the doubt in this case since he specifically asked the mob not to go mobbing, but there have been instances in the past where this type of behavior has been specifically encouraged. In any case, this particular event isn’t a huge deal, really. These folks have the right to mob Amazon until reprimanded, and we have the right to comment that the practice is a bit kooky and not exactly morally upstanding.
Eheheh…if I were in charge of ANY site opened to comments and reviews, I would keep all colors of the climate crowd away. Wikipedia is useless, now Amazon is useless, any climate forum is useless.
For whomever has read Lem’s Fiasko, in the climate discourse humanity has already reached the same noise-war levels as Quinta.
Wikipedia is useless? They seem to provide references to the major studies (such as IPCC and nat. academies) and peer review literature.
This particular article is quite well done and useful. Puts all the major scientific body conclusions in one place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
I haven’t seen all of Wikipedia’s treatment on climate change, but it seems reasonable.
The discourse is quite solid and noise-free if we listen to the national academies of science and the practicing climate scientists themselves.
No, really, it is useless. I have tried to change Joe Romm’s description according to Joe Romm’s own description of himself, twice with little success. As a matter of fact, pretty much any change to any climate page ends up like that.
Wikipedia is currently showing what some determined people with too much time in their hands think the climate change consensus to be.
Uh, the Wiki article seems to be more specific than his website’s description of him.
>>>
“Joseph J. Romm (born June 27, 1960) is an American author, blogger, physicist[1] and climate expert[2] who concentrates on methods of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming and increasing energy security through energy efficiency, green energy technologies and green transportation technologies.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Romm
And I don’t see how the Wiki page on “Scientific Opinion on Climate Change” varies from the peer reviewed studies on the climate change consensus.
what would we know…my contribution has been airbrushed from the Talk page even. All that for pointing our IIRC that Romm is a self-styled “climate change and energy expert” and not a “climate expert” (something I doubt he’s ever claimed to be).
Now, you ask how these climate in-activists are different from those that would do anything to save the world from a “thermageddon”. From a skin-depth glance, there isn’t any difference; both groups are activists after all. Logical people with their ears listening to the science would be wise to ignore those that claim that we need to begin drastic geo-engineering schemes now or threaten war against the USA (or any country with high emissions) unless they stop all emissions within 5 years. Those ideas would be insane, immoral disasters, and the output of the scientific process indicates that we do not need to resort to such measures. Of course, we must be vigilant to ensure that we pursue action that is useful, morally sound, and scientifically sound.
But in a nutshell, I summarize climate activists as:
** Climate activists are in agreement with national academies of science and other scientific bodies that some form of emissions reductions plan is required in order to maintain a global climate that is similar to what our Earth’s biome and human society are adapted to, reducing the risk of substantial hardship.
** Climate activists are in agreement with some economic studies that indicate that following an emissions reduction plan may actually be beneficial to human society overall, but concede that some risk does exist, though manageable.
** Climate activists are in agreement with nearly all practicing climate scientists that continuing on our current emissions path involves some high risks to the planet’s capability to provide services for humans and other forms of life. These risks have no known means for reversal.
Climate inactivists:
** Are in disagreement with nearly every major scientific body that has weighed in on climate change, and they provide no coherent alternative explanation that has withstood peer review in large numbers.
** Climate in-activists fear even a minor risk to the economy, and fear the United Nations. Generally, they fear what may affect themselves today.
** Climate in-activists do not provide any alternative method for reducing emissions that is acceptable to them. Cognitive dissonance seems to lead them to attack the major conclusions of climate science and climate scientists themselves.
Dougal – I say there’s no evidence of Watts and Nelson being Dr No or his minions and you accuse me of denying the existence of organized spamming. Oh please…
Maurizio Morabito- You explained Fascism to me? You explained nothing to me-
AGAIN- ‘FASCISM’ or Post WW 2 ‘Neo Fascism’
is a part of fascist dogma. Political philosophy and movement that arose in Europe and USA in the decades following World War II. Like earlier fascist movements, neofascism advocated extreme nationalism, opposed liberal individualism, attacked Marxist and other left-wing ideologies, indulged in racist and xenophobic scapegoating, and promoted populist right-wing economic programs.
) and elsewhere. A variation of fascism was the so-called clerico-fascist system set up in Austria under Engelbert Dollfuss
. This purported to be based on the social and economic doctrines enunciated by Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI, which, however, were never put into operation.
See totalitarianism
.
I made the point about Bakunin but it was obviously too much for some of my readers. Too bad.
@Mauzarito
The evidence for spamming (by definition there is no such thing as disorganised spamming) is in front of your eyes. Ignoring it is proof that you and your ilk are fanatics. And that one thing alone, to paraphrase George Smiley, means you will lose the argument. Have in fact already lost the argument.
Dougal – the only evidence we have is about your hectoring. Go find yourself a balcony and tell the world how it should run!
Thought I’d follow up to prove that I wasn’t kidding about being able to get very good global average temperature results from just a few dozen GHCN temperature stations. The plot below shows results from just 45 rural stations scattered roughly evenly around the globe.
The station selection process involved dividing up the globe into very large grid-squares and picking the rural station with the longest temperature record in each grid-square — I didn’t look at any of the station data beforehand — just ran with the stations that my simple selection process chose for me.
I ended up with 45 stations, most of which did not report data for every year. So each individual year’s results were computed from as few as 12 (but no more than 44) stations.
The plot shows the “45 stations” results, along with the NASA/GISS global land-temperature index (copy/pasted directly from the NASA/GISS web-site) for comparison purposes.
http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/771/results45ruralstationsv.jpg
No “cherry-picking” or “trial and error” runs involved. The above results are from my very first attempt at using so few stations.
The only place where my results diverged significantly from NASA’s is the 1880-1885 period. But only 12 of my selected stations reported data prior to 1900, so the divergence should not be surprising. From the early 1900′s to the present, 25-44 stations reported data in any given year (with the average being 35-ish — eyeball estimate from the program’s diagnostic dump).
The procedure used to compute global-average temperatures from the raw station data is surprisingly straightforward — basically, it boils down to a somewhat fancy averaging process. It could be broken down into a series of reasonable homework assignments for first-year programming students. Keep that in mind the next time you hear some denier huffing and puffing about how Anthony Watts has supposedly proved that the NASA/NOAA/CRU global-temperature results are the product of “data manipulation”
Nicely done. Maybe show the results and code to someone at WUWT?
I thought about going over to WUWT, but I figured that if the crowd over there hasn’t been able to figure out how to compute straightforward area-weighted averages yet, then it would just be a waste of my time.
It’s rather remarkable that in all the years that they’ve been complaining about UHI, dropped stations, etc. etc. that none of the WUWT folks (especially those who have bragged about their technical/analytical expertise) have ever bothered to write their own code and crunch the temperature data themselves.
Anyway, I did put up a post here with links to code/data — but it’s stuck in the “moderation hopper” (http links must trigger the spam alarm).
Yeah, methinks Peter has to approve comments with links.
I might whip up a MATLAB script that does much the same thing if I am bored some weekend.
I remember when I was unsure of the possibility of peak oil, until I downloaded all the Energy Information Administration production numbers and plotted it all out in Excel, along with official expected projections. I find it fun to do data crunching… until I realize how dependent my country’s livelihood is dependent upon cheap oil.
I think I did approve it
Would you care to share the code and data, please?
Code here: http://www.4shared.com/archive/ISDviHFb/ghcntar.html
Data here: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/
The raw station data can be found in v2.mean. Station metadata (required for area-weighted averaging) can be found in v2.inv.
The code computes global-average estimates from the full set of GHCN stations. You will have to go in and hack the source a bit to reproduce the “45 stations” results.
Modify ReadGhcnMetadataFile() to read in only rural station data from the v2.inv metadata file.
Then modify the appropriate methods in the GHCN class to process a single station for each lat/long grid-cell — iterate through the nested station data map to select the station with the longest data record.
Compilation/usage info can be found in the .hpp header file
These links will be helpful if you are going to modify the code: http://cplusplus.com/reference/stl/map/, http://cplusplus.com/reference/stl/set/, http://cplusplus.com/reference/stl/vector/
Thanks!
I don’t find v2.inf or v2.mean there, however. Did you get it from some other source?
Also, would you care to share your already-modified code, please?
Also, what OS & compiler did you use?
Looks like the v2 GHCN data-stream has been discontinued.
Data are now released only in v3 format (ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/). You will need to consult the v3 documentation (i.e. the README file) for details.
You will probably will have to modify the code to read the new v3 file format.
The new file format is thoroughly documented in the REAME file. The code mods shouldn’t be too difficult — it looks like you will have to change only a very few lines of code (possibly as few as 1) in the file read/parse routine.
I’d be tempted to suggest that you consult some of the WUWT folks for assistance, but IFACT, none of them have done a lick of real work with any of the GHCN data. So you are probably on your own there.
As for compiler/OS — g++ on Linux/*BSD/OSX/Win-Cygwin.
Could you please just zip up all the code and data that you used?
When I do sea level work, that’s what I do. I just bundle it all together into a .zip file, and put a link on the web, like I did here:
http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/whatif.html
If you don’t have a server that you can put it on, I’d be happy to put it on mine. (Caveat: my server uses a 1 mbps Internet connection, so it’s pretty slow for large files.)
Here’s my email address:
http://www.burtonsys.com/email/
Curiosity is a good thing.
@Maurizio. Your having those delusions of competence again. TIme for your next dose of meds.