| Subject: |
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Re: Re: Big Oil funds a blog |
| Name: |
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Dave Gardner |
| Date Posted: |
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Jul 13, 08 - 1:07 PM |
| Email: |
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djgardner@btinternet.com |
| Message: |
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I don't really follow what's going on in the 'North American blog world' too much, but I would guess what you're talking about relates to Connolley's activities as a Wikipedia administrator. A Canadian journalist and author of a book called 'The Deniers', Lawrence Solomon, has written a few articles attacking Connolley in the past few months, including making what sounds like an over-the-top claim that Connolley is the world's second most powerful promoter of AGW after Al Gore. I think Wikipedia may be taken more seriously in the US and Canada than it is in the UK - I was watching a TV comedy show on Friday night where Angus Deayton cracked a joke about the accuracy of Wikipedia.
From occasional reading of Connolley's blog, 'Stoat', I would agree that he's more open-minded and reasonable than most Greenies and even Greeenie scientists on many topics. But when he writes blog posts every now and again about fairly prominent AGW sceptics, people that might affect his own livelihood or reputation, then the open-mindedness tends to go out of the window. The intolerance towards AGW sceptics also tends to manifest itself in his Wikipedia administrator role.
To give you an idea of what Connolley gets up to as a Wikipedia administrator and what may raise peoples' hackles, this is an incident from a few months ago where he inserted an edit into the entry for the prominent AGW sceptic Fred Singer:
link
The edit that Connolley put in is: "In 1960 Singer supported the suggestion of Russian astrophysicist Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky that the Martian moon Phobos was of artificial origin[10]."
Now it's fairly obvious that in the above factoid he's trying to hint that Singer could be a bit of a nutcase, that he has held Erich Von Daniken type beliefs. I was a small boy in the 1960s and I can remember before space probes visited Mars, people talking about the 'Canals of Mars' and dark patches on Mars being interpreted as vegetation areas, so the above doesn't sound all that bad to someone in my agegroup. But to a 'badscience zealot' in his twenties or thirties, one of their rallying points is to ridicule people for believing in the 'face of mars' (some rock outcrop on Mars that looks a bit like a face) and it sounds like Singer has believed in a similar sort of thing and may still do.
After checking the latest version of the Wikipedia entry, this factoid is still in but it's been moved to a more relevant position in the article and diluted a bit. |
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