The thought police at the supposedly independent site are fervently enforcing the climate orthodoxy
As I'm writing
this column for the Financial Post, I am simultaneously editing a page
on Wikipedia. I am confident that just about everything I write for my
column will be available for you to read. I am equally confident that
you will be able to read just about nothing that I write for the page
on Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia page is entitled Naomi Oreskes, after
a professor of history and science studies at the University of
California San Diego, but the page offers only sketchy details about
Oreskes. The page is mostly devoted to a notorious 2004 paper that she
wrote, and that Science journal published, called "Beyond the Ivory
Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change." This paper analyzed
articles in peer-reviewed journals to see if any disagreed with the
alarming positions on global warming taken by the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Remarkably, none of the
papers disagreed with the consensus position," Oreskes concluded.
Oreskes's
paper -- which claimed to comprehensively examine all articles in a
scientific database with the keywords "climate change" -- is nonsense.
As FP readers know, for the last 18 months I have been profiling
scientists who disagree with the UN panel's position. My Deniers
series, which now runs to some 40 columns, describes many of the
world's most prominent scientists. They include authors or reviewers
for the UN panel (before they quit in disgust). They even include the
scientist known as the father of scientific climatology, who is
recognized as being the most cited climatologist in the world. Yet
somehow Oreskes missed every last one of these exceptions to the
presumed consensus, and somehow so did the peer reviewers that Science
chose to evaluate Oreskes's work.
When Oreskes's paper came out,
it was immediately challenged by science writers and scientists alike,
one of them being Benny Peiser, a prominent U.K. scientist and
publisher of CCNet, an electronic newsletter to which I and thousands
of others subscribe. CCNet daily circulates articles disputing the
conventional wisdom on climate change. No publication better informs
readers about climate-change controversies, and no person is better
placed to judge informed dissent on climate change than Benny Peiser.
For
this reason, when visiting Oreskes's page on Wikipedia several weeks
ago, I was surprised to read not only that Oreskes had been vindicated
but that Peiser had been discredited. More than that, the page
portrayed Peiser himself as having grudgingly conceded Oreskes's
correctness.
Upon checking with Peiser, I found he had done no
such thing. The Wikipedia page had misunderstood or distorted his
comments. I then exercised the right to edit Wikipedia that we all
have, corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done
so.
Peiser wrote back saying he couldn't see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. Had I neglected to save them
after
editing them, I wondered. I made the changes again, and this time
confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they
were gone again! I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared
shortly after they were made.
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