
'Climategate' scientist attacks bloggers - limist
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/02/climategate-scientist-attacks-bloggers.html
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patio11
Jones wants criticism delivered within the comfortable confines of the peer
review process because he is skilled at how the game is played and knows who
to talk to to get papers he does not like killed. Seriously, this is a man who
should be sentenced to having his words quoted in every mention of him for the
rest of his life.

Example: Professor Jones, who once wrote to a colleague "I will keep them out
if I have to redefine what the peer reviewed literature is", criticized
bloggers for "hijacking the peer review process."

~~~
pingswept
What is the antecedent of "them" in your quote of Jones?

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jgrahamc
<http://eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419>

_The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke
is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well -
frequently as I see it. I can't see either of these papers being in the next
IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to
redefine what the peer-review literature is !_

~~~
pingswept
Yeah, that's pretty bad.

~~~
alextp
I'm not so sure---I mean, I've sure read some papers that I'd love never to
have been published, even if that means tweaking peer review a bit.

EDIT: in a sense that the results are obviously false and come from either
some ideological stand by the author or from some crude conceptual mistake
that is hard to respond to.

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CWuestefeld
_Why don't they do their own [temperature] reconstructions? If they want to
criticise, they should write their own papers_

Didn't Jon Graham-Cummings just publish an article about having done just
this, and finding an error in the data?

Of course, people like JGC couldn't do so before, because Jones and his
colleagues kept the raw data secret.

Edit: here's JGC's posting about his article:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128782>

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tkeller
Climategate 'scientist' attacks bloggers

~~~
nollidge
Climategate scientist "attacks" bloggers

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crux_
Fun thought experiment: What if this was an epidemiologist criticising the
blogosphere for spreading non-peer-reviewed doubts about vaccine safety? Or an
evolutionary biologist attacking intelligent design bloggers?

I'm guessing that most people on hacker news have pre-existing opinions on
both of those issues in favour of the scientist; while for climate science
it's significantly more split. However, if you leave aside personal judgements
about the underlying truth, the situations are quite analogous.

~~~
vannevar
<quote>I'm guessing that most people on hacker news have pre-existing opinions
on both of those issues in favour of the scientist; while for climate science
it's significantly more split.</quote>

I'm not sure this is true. There is currently an energetic astro-turfing
campaign under way on HN and other social media sites that makes the denier
community look larger than it really is, certainly among the more educated
population that you expect to find on HN.

If creationists start taking a similar interest in HN, you'll come to think
that there are a lot of creationists here too.

~~~
tdoggette
What evidence is there of widespread astroturfing on climate change,
specifically on HN?

~~~
vannevar
If you look at the recent rash of posts on climate change, you see some
patterns:

\- The posts tend to focus on the idea of conspiracy rather than on climate
science.

\- The articles posted tend to be from fringe sources, or popular news sources
that skim the technical details

\- The postings tend to cluster, with frequent posts that are nearly
duplicate.

People posting out of honest interest on HN tend to focus on the technical and
scientific; not always, of course, but you'd expect to see more technical
posts than conspiracy posts on climate change, and that's not what we're
seeing. They also generally post articles from scientific or technical
sources: after all, if we just wanted to read nontechnical news, we'd look
elsewhere. Finally, bona fide posters generally avoid posting duplicates---
again, not always, but astroturfed posts naturally tend toward duplication
because the whole point is to keep the topic in view at all times.

Given the sustained presence of all of these warning signs, I think it's safe
to say there's some astroturfing going on here.

