Have I been censored?

Richard Black, BBC online's environment bod, has posted an article about the silly Met Office climate model that is apparently going to be used for making policy decisions even though most scientists seem to think it's risibly bad.

In the comments thread someone raised the issue of the non-availability of the CRU's raw weather station data and was met with a deluge of green rant from someone calling themselves "yeah whatever", who provided a link to the gridded (i.e. "corrected") station data. When I pointed out that this was not what was asked for, I was met with the rather bizarre accusation that I was too lazy to look it up myself and a blunt assertion that the data was available. Surprisingly, this was deemed an acceptable response by the moderators.

In the circumstances, I thought my reply was a model of self-control. I pointed Yeah_Whatever to the notorious words of CRU scientist Phil Jones

We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

I also said that there was a public interest in the release of the data and that Richard Black had a duty to report the refusal of CRU to do so.

And do you know what, twelve hours later it's still in the moderation queue.

Funny that.

Update on June 20, 2009 by Bishop Hill

I've done some experimentation. It seems I'm not allowed to link to the evidence. The moderators have allowed me to say pretty much everything I said before, but without the link. I then tried to post to the Phil Jones quote where it appears in a submission David Holland made to the UK Treasury on the Stern report. It's gone for moderation again.

So get that - a document at HM Treasury's website is deemed too dubious to appear on the BBC website!

Update: Now it's even stranger. Another commenter has been allowed to link to a posting on Climate Audit telling the same story. What's different about me?

Comments

[Jonathan]

I said before that I thought "yeah_whatever" was impressively well-informed. Perhaps he's Gavin role-playing.

[James P]

He can't spell, though. On RC, he continuously spells 'desert' (the subject of some of his posts) as 'dessert' even after others have made fun of it. He's thoroughly hijacked Richard Black's blog comments, which is a shame, as RB seems reasonable enough.

I guess we should ignore him.

[Pogo]

Jonathan, I don't think that he's "well informed" - it's obvious that he doesn't understand what "empirical evidence" is and his risible efforts to fail to achieve a "hockey stick" by generating random numbers - without realising that they have to be processed with the MBH98 model shows that his understanding of the whole process is rudimentary in the extreme.

IMHO he's just a "shouty" "Wikipaedia Warrior".

[jonathan]

Pogo, You're right, it's the 241 posts out of 418 (as of 1:10am 28/6) that's impressive. As "Mark" he's also a serial poster at RC (has been for at least a year) and often makes a fool of himself there. For some reason they pander to him. One can't help wondering why.

[Pogo]

@jonathan "One can't help wondering why."

He preaches the party line... Or should I say "he PREACHES the party line"? :-)

He must have a lot of free time. Personally, though I've been tempted to "have a go back", I know it would be a complete waste of time, and, I "have a life". :-)

[James P]

I get the impression that he regularly complains to the moderators whenever anyone retaliates. He accused me of doing this (when I hadn't, of course) but I have now reminded the mods that unfounded accusations of lying are straightforward libel. If they remove every post of his with that in it, there will be a lot of empty comments!
It's hard to believe that he's doing it all in his own time with no remuneration, but OTOH, how would he keep a girlfriend?

[Wansbeck]

I placed a post yesterday and it was up long enough for Mark/YW to make some quotes and misinterpret them.
The post then disappeared: referred to moderators.
Now almost 24 hours later and still no response.
It seems that if you don't like a post you simply click on the complaint button and the post will be permanently removed. A very unsatisfactory situation especially for a public service.
Rob.

[Bishop Hill]

Rob

I think the moderators don't work at weekends. There is just an automatic system for picking up blacklisted words and so on. Anything referred at the weekends gets sorted on Monday.

[James P]

This might amuse you. Not knowing any sensible way to contact the BBC moderators directly, I posted the following comment on Richard Black's blog:

"Would a moderator care to explain (sorry, but there seems to be no other way of communicating with them) why YW is allowed to accuse everyone of lying, but when I point this out (and the legal ramifications), my post is spiked?

Is YW a moderator (or moderator's assistant) himself, I wonder? It would explain a lot... "

It didn't make it, of course, and the only reply I've had is the standard email from the moderators saying that they had to remove it. If only YW worked for the DCSF...

[Wansbeck]

I don't know if you're still interested as this topic is quite old now but just in case.
I finally received an email on Tuesday morning stating that my post had been removed as 'off-topic'. A bit harsh as it was a response to another poster and discussed problems with temperature reconstructions which are a major input into climate model certainty; the blog topic.
I had earlier seen a post where someone appeared to have deliberately altered a quote so for light amusement and to see how this moderation thing works I made the following complaint:
'I believe this post is defamatory or libellous for the following reason:
Dr. Lehr is misquoted. The phrase 'greenhouse gas envelope' has been replaced with 'total atmosphere'. The nature of the edit means that this is unlikely to be an accident and although this has been brought to the attention of the poster it has been ignored and he continues to use the misquote to question Dr. Lehr's work in further posts: 453, 454, 459, 463, and 464.
Although the apparently deliberate nature of the misquote says much more about the integrity of the poster than that of Dr. Lehr, I feel that this behaviour should not be tolerated.'
The post was left in place and some time later I received the following reply:
'Further to your complaint about some of the content on a BBC blog (reference number P25204925), we have decided that it does not contravene the House Rules and are going to leave it on site.'

Alleging a post to be off-topic appears to result in instant removal for some but wilful misrepresentation appears to be OK for others.
One guess who the other poster was!

[Bishop Hill]

I'm going to put a post up front on this.