Bishop Hill Still deleting dissent at the Guardian
Nov 23, 2009 Climate It there nobody honest working at the Guardian? Nobody at all?
They have a post up there at the moment saying that there was no evidence of a conspiracy in the CRU emails, this based on the word of several of the perpetrators. I posted a response as follows:
Ah, so if Real Climate says there was no conspiracy, there was no conspiracy. The fact is, this is the same bunch of people implicated in the emails. Why should we accept their word?
There is clear evidence of conspiracy to remove from post journal editors who allowed publication of papers that questioned the "consensus". See http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=484&filename=1106322460.txt
I'm sorry, but this article is blatant disinformation. Truly shameful.
And now it's gone. Dissent is Deleted.
Reader Comments (29)
They deleted almost everything that dissented from the mainstream corporate view. What they did a while ago was to massively lower the tone of the debate by removing (almost) every commentator apart from Monbiot who behaved like a nasty little bully calling contributors deniers and oil company shills.
It is a classic tabloid tactic to lower the conflict to an emotional level. It drove most intelligent, informed opinion away.
Leopards and spots. Are you surprised?
I've had zero luck in the past getting letters printed in the Guardian on another scientific topic where my view differed from the scientific/medical mainstream (although had had success in the past getting letters on more general topics printed). Direct letters or emails to their various scientific correspondents were also ignored, with one honourable exception.
Needless to say my more recent letters on CC/AGW (and from an only mildly sceptical point of view) haven't made it either.
Regarding the recent leaked emails: The Guardian hid its report on about page 19 inside on Saturday, and hasn't covered it in today's (Monday's) printed issue. Nothing (that I saw) in the Observer (sister paper) on Sunday either.
Just posted this...
"Is it topical to ask whether the Guardian is planning to mark the 20th anniversary of the Romanian revolution in a few weeks time? Readers will of course remember that the hated Ceausescu regime went to extraordinary and ruthless lengths to eliminate any voice of decent against its corrupt authority. Even when its position became untenable in the face of growing public empowerment, the regime still refused to face the reality of its situation.
Just think... that was exactly twenty years ago! - thank goodness we have all learnt the lessons of those times."
Don't know how long it will stay up.
ooops - should have been 'Dissent' of course.
Do you remember when Radio One wouldn't play the Sex Pistols? And then, one day, they did. . . .
That's what it's like today at the Guardian. The Harry_Read_Me file is utterly devastating: it's a God Save the Queen moment. My guess is that before the week is out, they'll be begging you to write for them. When they do, make sure you charge them top dollar.
"but this article is blatant disinformation."
In Grauniad lala land that true statement is deemed an ad hominem attack on the author of the article, and authors are to be protected at all costs.
Grauniad has plenty of form for this behaviour. See for example
http://www.carboncommentary.com/2009/11/03/844#comments
The Guardian and its traditional readership have invested a lot of emotional capital in anthropogenic climate change, and many are hoping to treat it as a cash cow. I imagine that lot are gutted and fearful in equal amounts.
before the week is out, they'll be begging you to write for them.
Would that that were true. But I suspect not. In fact, I'll venture an entirely unadventurous, indeed tame, prediction; this scandal will not gain serious traction in the MSM and it will not stop, or even seriously slow, the AGW alarmist bandwagon.
Too many people in politics, science and the media have too much invested in this - not in the sinister sense of cash money, though of course that too, but more in the sense that they're all going to look like idiots if they start backpedalling now.
If - big if, of course - AGW is not actually occurring, it will be some time before the lack of warming becomes too obvious to ignore, because much of the alarmist rhetoric consists of claims which are basically unfalsifiable (and therefore bad science) - hurricanes, floods, droughts and heatwaves can all be adduced as evidence of climate change, but light drizzle and average temperatures are not front page news, and God knows these people don't seem to care that it's actually getting colder every year at the moment.
Slowly, these dupes in the media will melt away (unlike the glaciers) and quietly start writing about other things, leaving only the senile Lord Monbiot of Gaia-upon-Sealevel still sitting on the beach shouting about turning the waters back. And our children will still be shouldering the financial burden, long after the last climate alarmist has been strangled with the last hockey stick.
Mr Eugenides,
You know, I think you might be wrong this time. I just can't see how any self-respecting newspaper editor or journalist can willingly put himself in front of this train. The Harry-Read_Me file, is not just devastating, it's funny on an all-too-human level which we can all understand from Day One. I don't think they've really got a choice.
Please don’t be deterred your Grace, and others. The Guardian is an interesting place to comment because, though the paper is wholly committed to AGW, the readers, measured by number of comments and of recommends to comments, are sceptics by a large majority. Unless you’ve been premoderated, as I have, comments appear immediately, which allows one to joust in real time. If your comment is deleted, write politely to the moderator at
community.suggestions@guardian.co.uk
and they will reply eventually.
The rule on this thread is to not quote the e-mails directly. The sheer volume of critical comments must eventually have an effect. Note that so far the two articles on CiF about Climategate have been written by outsiders - Ward the PR man and Marshall the denialist psychoanalyst - expendable mercenaries sent out on suicide sorties, while Monbiot musters his forces for the main attack.
You guys are doing a fantastic job but....
FORGET THE GODDAMNED Guardian and the other Lefty publications. Go to FoxNews, the Washington Times, and start hammering every side publication you can find. The American Press and American Media overall will ignore this unless it becomes such an outcry from the people that they are forced to at least acknowledge a problem. Also, go to your elected officials AND the United Nations AND the universities and government offices who employ these crooks.
There’s now a Lynas article on CiF. Same overwhelming majority of sceptics in the comments, and no deletions for the moment. I’ve saved comments, so I can verify what gets deleted. I recommend others do the same. Information will get back to the Guardian, and it may cause them to rethink their policy.
I recently had a comment deleted, despite the fact that it had passed premoderation. But they left up the comment by a snide warmist who quoted my comment in full. A bit like airbrushing out Trotsky’s head, but leaving in his shoes and trousers.
Mr BH - the Guardian has been in lock-down for several days, I find this wagon-circling behaviour very peculiar. They out people and organisations every day or so - and yet they follow exactly the same pattern of behaviour when on the other end of it.
It's not like this doesn't happen regularly either given the bizarre logic/fact free arguments they use in their comment pieces.
*scratches head*
I posted this when I realised you'd been zapped - I thought they zapped me to as everytime I tried to post I got a blank screen until I visited as a guest...
PlatoSays
23 Nov 2009, 5:22PM
Am I reading this right - the mods are DELETING comments from a prominent published author and blogger who happens to be an AWG sceptic?
What sort of weird Orwellian value set is this?
Good grief.
Perhaps a little reminder would help.
Comment is free - but facts are sacred.
@Michael Taylor: I hope that you are right and I am wrong.
But we're now at D-Day plus 4 and the prevailing narrative seems to be: nothing to see here, move along, sure there's some embarrassing stuff in there but who'd want their private emails "hacked" etc. etc.
I agree that the data files in particular seem to be a gold mine but frankly much of this stuff is impenetrable to anyone who doesn't have a degree in computer science and/or statistics. We're talking about a media which in large part has given up on serious news reporting and which believes that the public do not have the attention span to read even 1000 words on a "juicy" topic, let alone wade through articles about email correspondence, mislabelled files, substituting one data set for another, let alone the arcane finer points of statistics.
I think this story may die a death in days. I hope this comment makes me look like a fool in a few weeks' time, I really do. But I doubt it.
Mr Eugenides, I'm no so pessimistic.
I feel that whilst we may be able to get our heads around the seismic nature of this story and anonymously go for broke, the MSM are scared sh*tless.
This makes Watergate look fairly tame - that was a spat about USA politics and taking money in a less than ethical way - it wasn't manipulating a scenario where the whole world had to change how it traded or lived.
As a scientist, I've become more sceptical the more vehement the AGW lobby became - I'm both very sad at what has come out as it hurts us all, but a bit of me is chuffed that we've got them bang to rights for what they have done to our reputation,
There are four types of posters on the Guardian re climate.
1) Lalalanders. Everyone disagreeing is rich big-oil funded and old, who do not care for anyone but their own self interest.
2) Googlers. They google knowledge but unfortunately not wisdom. They will reem off all the facts (memorised) to any "denier" showing their head. People who think George (the worlds first celeb activist?) is the next messiah.
3) The well behaved skeptics.
4) The agressive "you are all a bunch of alarmists!".
I would not worry too much about converting anyone. Getting 2) to waste their writing many hundred word comments at a time is fun to watch though :)
To be honest the Guardian choose its "end of the world" editorial policy and lost me.
Be of good cheer. Don't forget that much the same thing happened when the fraudulent Killian (Rathergate) documents came out in 2004. The initial media ridicule was followed by silence as all the organs of the Left prayed it would blow over.
It took a couple of weeks before the Democrats and their media handmaidens faced up to the shocking fact that their "silver bullet" was a forgery. There are still a few cranks with a tenuous grasp on logic who like to say the documents have "never been proved wrong", but most thinking people have long realized they were indefensible.
I think the HARRY_READ_ME document will go down in history with Charles Johnson's Rathergate GIF animation and Monica Lewinsky's stained blue dress.
Meh, I can understand the Grauniad mods on this one... wouldn't want a comment to link to illegally gotten material.
I'm not surprised that the Grauniad is deleting comments critical of its apparent news burying.
A large component of its readership and a significant chunk of its advertising revenue comes from the state sector.
At a time when many who would have bought newspapers get much better news from blogs, the mainstram media are not going to go upsetting their remaining client base.
Here in Ireland, I long ago stopped listening to RTE 1 (Ireland's equivalent of Radio 4), as it seemed to consist soley of the state sector broadcasting to the state sector.
Shame, in the late 1980s the grauniad and RTE1 were world class, now they're more like rotten borough rags.
Keith
(E Smith (first comment) I think your remark about corporatism is very much to the point - state corporatism)
"illegally obtained material"? Well if it was leaked from inside, rather than obtained by hacking from the outside, and is now in the public domain, I don't see how it can carry the taint of illegality.
If for example a minister or senior civil servant deliberately leaked a cabinet paper to the press (assuming of course it was not top-secret security classified stuff), then the Guardian and the rest would be all over it. Happens all the time.
And if bets were being taken, my money would definitely be on a leak. Unfortunately, it suits the powers that be to refer to it as a hacking (although I'll bet there is a hue and cry in progress for the leaker).
Posted this up at WUWT
Climate news story breaks on the front news page of the BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8375576.stm
pity it’s a story about how alarming the science is and that floods, extreme weather and thremaggedon are on the way if we don’t cut co2 now, it must be true the met office say so.
I’m sick.
The BBC “we are not biased” have gone to far, they forget they are a public body and this is breaking their charter.
The censorship policies at the Guardian are extreme.
Posted this there yesterday but it didn't last long.
No sense of humor these Warmists.
The Guardian is starting to keel over on November 23rd :
George Monbiot apologises ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/nov/23/global-warming-leaked-email-climate-scientists?showallcomments=true#CommentKey:ec106fea-3008-4b59-ba57-dbc1aaddeff4) for himself and asks for the resignation of Phil Jones of CRU.
Why the censorship? Because the world needs to remain convinced that this crap is true. This war is not over.
What this demonstrates is that the mainstream media is entirely happy to push a vast lie, no matter the criticism from us punters.
Voice of reason here: the Guardian and most other loony-left journos are not involved in a conspiracy, any more than Steve Mcintyre is funded by Shell; they're simply devoid of the critical faculties necessary to make sense of this issue. You can sum up pretty much everything wrong with the Guardian by saying that they generally mean well but fail to think things through and work out the logical conclusions.
Well the printed edition today (Thursday 26th November 2009) is exercising studied amnesia over this as far as its news pages are concerned, but at least carries 3 letters on the subject. Two sensible ones & one just mithering about the supposed illegality or immorality of the supposed "hack" (ignoring the possibility that it's an inside job).
There is also an interesting little item buried away on inside pages about icebergs ("Rare Iceberg Flotilla") in the south Pacific which finishes to the effect that it's nothing to do with global warming. That'd be why it's buried deep inside no doubt.
I wouldn't take it personal. They seem to be in a state of total panic, they probably deleted you solely because you run a 'denier' blog, not for anything you wrote.