At Wikipedia, one man engineers the debate on global warming, and shapes it to his views
Next to Al Gore,
William Connolley may be the world's most influential person in the
global warming debate. He has a PhD in mathematics and worked as a
climate modeller, but those accomplishments don't explain his influence
-- PhDs are not uncommon and, in any case, he comes from the mid-level
ranks in the British Antarctic Survey, the agency for which he worked
until recently.
He was the Parish Councillor for the village of
Coton in the U.K., his Web site tells us, and a school governor there,
too, but neither of those accomplishments are a claim to fame in the
wider world. Neither are his five failed attempts to attain public
office as a local candidate for South Cambridgeshire District Council
and Cambridgeshire County Council as a representative for the Green
Party.
But Connolley is a big shot on Wikipedia, which honours
him with an extensive biography, an honour Wikipedia did not see fit to
bestow on his boss at the British Antarctic Survey. Or on his boss's's
boss, or on his boss's boss's boss, or on his boss's boss's boss's
boss, none of whose opinions seemingly count for much, despite their
impressive accomplishments. William Connolley's opinions, in contrast,
count for a great deal at Wikipedia, even though some might not think
them particularly worthy of note. "It is his view that there is a
consensus in the scientific community about climate change topics such
as global warming, and that the various reports from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarize this
consensus," states his Wikipedia page, in the section called
"Biography."
Connolley is not only a big shot on Wikipedia, he's
a big shot at Wikipedia -- an administrator with unusual editorial
clout. Using that clout, this 40-something scientist of minor relevance
gets to tear down scientists of great accomplishment. Because Wikipedia
has become the single biggest reference source in the world, and global
warming is one of the most sought-after subjects, the ability to
control information on Wikipedia by taking down authoritative
scientists is no trifling matter.
One such scientist is Fred
Singer, the First Director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite
Service, the recipient of a White House commendation for his early
design of space satellites; the recipient of a NASA commendation for
research on particle clouds -- in short, a scientist with dazzling
achievements who is everything Connolley is not. Under Connolley's
supervision,
Singer is relentlessly smeared, and has been for years, as a kook who
believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry. When a
smear is inadequate, or when a fair-minded Wikipedian tries to correct
a smear, Connolley and his cohorts are there to widen the smear or
remove the correction, often rebuking the Wikipedian in the process.
Wikipedia
is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, as well as a code
of civility. Those rules and codes don't apply to Connolley, or to
those he favours.
"Peiser's crap shouldn't be in here," Connolley
wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an
"edit war," as they're called. In such a war, rival sides change the
content of a Wikipedia page from one competing version to another,
often with bewildering speed. (Two people, landing on the same page
seconds apart, might obtain entirely different information.) In the
Peiser case, a Wikipedian stopped a prolonged war by freezing a
continually changing page, to prevent more alterations until the
dispute was settled. As occurs on such occasions, readers are alerted
that Wikipedians are warring over the page, and that Wikipedia was not
endorsing the version of the page that had been frozen. To Connolley's
chagrin, however, the version that was frozen cast doubt on claims of a
consensus on climate change. Although this was done within Wikipedia
rules, Connolley intervened to revert the page and ensure Wikipedia
readers saw only what he wanted them to see.
Peiser is Benny Peiser, a distinguished U.K. scientist who had
convincingly refuted a study by Naomi Oreskes that claimed to have
found no scientific papers at odds with the conventional wisdom on
climate change. The Oreskes study -- cited by Al Gore in his film, An
Inconvenient Truth-- is an article of faith to many global warming
doomsayers and guarded from criticism by Connolley et al. Peiser and
other critics of Oreskes's study, meanwhile, get demeaned.
Connolley
and his cohorts don't just edit pages of scientists actively involved
in the global warming debate. Scientists who work in unrelated fields,
but who have findings that indirectly bolster a critique of climate
change orthodoxy, will also get smeared. So will non-scientists and
organizations that he disagrees with. Any reference, anywhere among
Wikipedia's 2.5-million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the
consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley's bidding.
Connolley
no longer works as a climate modeller -- he now works as a software
engineer for a company called Cambridge Silicon Radio. And as an
engineer of opinion at Wikipedia. Source
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