Santer's claws

Ben Santer is interviewed at the Climate Sight blog, and he remains something of a catfighter, aiming his claws at, among others, sceptical bloggers:

These fringe voices now have megaphones,” he continues, “and have means of amplifying their voices and trumpeting shoddy, incorrect science. We’ve seen the rise of the blogs, we’ve seen the rise of these “independent public auditors” who believe that they have carte blanche to investigate anyone who produces results they don’t agree with, and if that individual doesn’t comply with their every request, they indulge in this persecution campaign on their blogs and make your life very uncomfortable. I’ve had direct personal experience with that.

Does he sound slightly hysterical to you?

ClimateSight article

Update on Oct 26, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Commenters note that the Santer article has been taken down. I've retrieved it from Google cache and posted it at the bottom of the header post as a PDF.

Comments

[Latimer Alder]

@jiminy

'What you do not realise is that I am also Barry, Shub, Phillip, Atomic. Astroturfing is a difficult job being all these different personalities. I am actually Hunter as well'

Not true. I have been in the same room as both Atomic and Barry and I can vouch for the fact that their ectoplasms manifest in different organisms. As to Dung's ectoplasm I am sworn to secrecy............

[hunter]

Jiminy, I always felt an affinity for you. Now I understand why.

[Dung]

You keep my ectoplasm out of this Mr Alder -.-

[Dreadnought]

Shub

You forgot to mention Kaitlin has been published - in the newsletter of the Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions.

http://climatesight.org/2010/09/25/dont-listen-to-the-newspapers/#comments

[Dung]

Mr Santer and all who push the consensus stuff should be forced to watch George Carlin "Saving the Planet"
"The planet is fine....the people are f....d !

[Jiminy Cricket]

@Latimer Alder (really addressing myself of course)

We run a nationwide franchise: RentoShil. We have out of work actors on our books...

However, ZDB I cannot claim credit for, that is the black ops section... run by FO'D

[JohnOfEnfield]

Santer provides no citations to back-up his assertions.

The comments section is replete with redacted comments because they provide "no citations"!

If they want to transfer 100s of billions of dollars from "developed" countries to "developing" countries I want a cast iron case for it before I agree.

[Shub]

Dear Kate
I am a researcher starting off in an area of science that has been around for a while. We've seen our fair share of nastiness relating to research, public policy implementation and ethical questions. Indeed we have about x times more of that stuff going on, in the area where I work in, for a far longer period of time.

I read about your obvious achievements to date here and there, after I visited your site and I felt a twinge of happiness. I am not making this up. Sure, I am skeptical, I am a denier, in denial etc, etc but I was glad that you've put in so much work at this stage and I like your style of thinking.

But, ... and I am pretty sure of this - in contrast to the comment-deleting apparently closed-minded phenotype that is evident on your blog - you come across as an open-minded person in your writings and videos.

Give the skeptics and deniers a chance to say what they have to say. It might change your perspective. Why delete anything but outright abuse? Why play the game of "control the medium - control the message"? It goes so much against open enquiry and free discussion. Many of the skeptics have been examining the issue of global warming for years. They are not the simple-minded morons you might think them to be, although rhetoric in the global warming debate makes it difficult to see what people are like, on the 'other side'.

Alright, that's it from me to you. If even this comment will not make it through...I wouldn't know what to say.

This comment wont go through. :(

[stephen lewis]

http://climatesight.org/2010/10/11/what-ben-santer-has-to%c2%a0say/#comment-4238

The above link may still work

Steve

[Bernie]

Shub:
Nicely done. There is no way that Kate is applying the same criteria to proponents of CAGW as to those she considers skeptics. Her editing of comments is in line with many other pro-CAGW blogs - extraordinarily one-sided. She should take some lessons from Keith Kloor's Collide-a-scape.

[David Jay]

That's 'epistemologists' - and I believe I did already know that.

But John, HOW do you know that???

;)

[hro001]

Shub wrote:

This comment wont go through. :(

Aw ... Shub, how could you be so "inflammatory"?!

http://climatesight.org/2010/10/11/what-ben-santer-has-to%c2%a0say/comment-page-1/#comment-4225

As an amusing aside ... for whatever reason (knowing how Wordpress works) Ms. Kate would have had to make a deliberate choice to either to change the URL "slug" for her post, and/or to revert back to an earlier draft. Compare date above and date in her current version (October 11, 2010 at 4:10 pm) and in Bish's pdf (October 24, 2010 at 11:35 am)

(WP actually deplores a vacuum in post titles and always replaces a [ ] with [-]. One can change the title many times while a post is in draft, but not after a post has been "published".)

http://climatesight.org/2010/10/24/what-ben-santer-has-to-say/

Definitely worked yesterday. And the actual title hasn't changed.

Makes one wonder why she would have made such a choice, doesn't it. WP stats would have given her a pretty good indication of the source of her traffic ... you don't suppose that this "aspiring climatologist" was trying to, oh ... I dunno ... keep dissenting views from appearing?!

[James P]

"And the sanity clause joke was Chico"

Bloody internet. There's always someone on it who's better informed than you... (c) M.Mann

[Chris S]

Nice work retrieving this from google cache.

Unfortunately, Ben Santer's photo seems to have lost the caption "laughing all the way to the bank", which I'm sure must have accompanied it.

[TinyCO2]

Be fair, she's letting me post. I remodelled one comment to remove the sarky comments to Frank and it went through second try ok.

[MikeN]

I've posted off and on for a few months there, ever since she made a desperate call to Tamino to get help countering skeptic claims. Skeptical comments will get thru, but she liberally uses the inflammatory claim against them, and the calls for citations for any point with which she disagrees.

[Anonymous]

Article is still up - what are you guys talking about? Maybe it was down momentarily?

[HaroldW]

David Jay (Oct 26, 2010 at 7:50 PM)
Thanks for the literal laugh-out-loud!

[David Jay]

Harold:

I appreciate acquiring that knowledge...

[Bill]

That Santer does look a trifle thuggish. Not nearly as weird as Michael Mann though.

But I suppose I shouldnt judge a climatologist by it's cover.

[TinyCO2]

@ Anonymous, the location of the article has moved slightly so the original link doesn't link directly but as you point out, it is still there.

[Shub]

TinyCO2
Kate changed the post date to October 11th and the post dropped down from the top slot. Consequently all links leading to her post went dead. Why?

Now she's changed it back to 24th. All the comments start on the 24th, which looked funny for a while on a post that came online on the 11th.

I posted a comment pointing out Jones had as per media reports - "suicidal ideation" - the term for thinking of committing suicide. Kate had it as "suicidal idealization" in her post, which is obviously wrong and I pointed that out. The thing now has been changed to "suicidal idealation" which is even more wrong - there is no such word. But my post was deleted for inflammation or something like that.

It seems, at the root of her moderation policy lies a Tamino quote:

"Freedom of speech is the freedom to say what you want. It is not the freedom to say it in someone else’s house.”

[Harry Eagar]

Not only a bully but a crybaby.

Schneider's 'Science as a Contact Sport' has a report by a 'friend' about how Santer reacted when asked for his data. According to Schneider, Santer was so aggrieved he threatened to quit climate science.

Whatever the merits or demerits of his science, he seems to have some serious mental stability issues.

[Sunshine]

I tried to post a couple of quotes from Santer where he talks about assaulting his critics, and commented it was weird that a guy like that would turn around and complaining about intimidation. My post was deleted as "inflammatory."