Media "Censorship"

One of the great advantages of the Web is that readers can comment on what they read and even help keep the article up to date.  That feature is rapidly slipping away. Too many web sites delete comments that they don't want others to read, not because they are rude, but because they disagree with some part of the article.

Media Matters for America is arguably one of the worst. They say:

"Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."

They accept comments, but rational rebuttal is not permitted. You can test this for yourself or simply check the number of comments on an article for a few days in a row. The number often goes down - dramatically.

It's one thing to chose articles that prove your point. Censorship is quite another.  However, many media outlets do not accept comments at all, notably the NYT.  KTRK TV (ABC 13 in Houston) never accepted comments and just recently stopped accepting "contact us" notes.

I find these trends unsettling and I cannot accept any argument that says it costs too much to maintain those features.

A Quote Worth Requoting

Nothing like cutting to the chase. Doug Badgero, in a comment on WUWT, wrote:

I don’t want scientists stating normative arguments about policy as scientifically based. I want scientists explaining a hypothesis, providing me with ALL of the data that supports or refutes that hypothesis, and the uncertainties involved in that data. Their opinion on the normative arguments about what, if anything, to do about their hypothesis is no more important than mine.

I don't know who Mr. Badgero is, but I suspect he is a retired horticulturist in Michigan.

Watt's Up With That?

My favorite web site has become Watt's Up With That, a place that skewers the anthropomorphic global warming crowd several times a day.  One of today's follies is a forecast by the UK National Trust that England will be tropical within 90 years with palm trees and tropical fruit.  The Arctic will see temperature increases of 16 degrees Centigrade!

Never mind that the temperature of England has increased only 0.5 degrees C in the last 80 years and that is likely be the effect of Urban Heat Island encroachment on existing weather stations.  We have no idea about the arctic trend because there are no weather stations north of 80 degrees north latitude.  The Goddard estimates of arctic temperatures are based on measurements up to 1200 kilometers (750 miles) away.

Al Gore should be proud.  And rich.

Yet another web annoyance

It was bad enough when pop-ups began to dominate web advertising, but at least we had a counter weapon in the browsers themselves, as well as add-ins like Ad-Block. Pop-unders seem to remain unaffected, but they are no annoyance until you close the browser.

And then there are those annoying roll-over JavaScript pop-ups.  I haven't found a solution to that except to disable JavaScript and hope to be properly notified where it needs to be re-enabled.  But it's not, in the case of this blog's editing software.  I'm sure it causes other problems.

The best solution seems to be to use Readibility.  It's free and cleans up 99% of the garbage by reformatting the entire page, presenting only the text portion.   It's especially useful to get rid of flashing advertisements.  However, it also tends to ignore the comments on an article, if any.

Now a new, insidious menace is creeping in. Even major web sites like Time Magazine are including third-party ads to which they link by way of including them in their own web site. But those third-party servers are frequently down or perhaps overloaded.   Either way, well after the web page is loaded you get an error pop-up saying they cannot contact junksite.com (or whatever.) Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

What a bunch of amateurs!

Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels

A paper by Henry H. Bauer back in 2004 is worth reposting.  For that matter, people with a serious interest in what's going on in science should be aware of the Society for Scientific Exploration and their quarterly periodical Fringe Science where they now publish scientific mysteries and the more speculative articles that previously appeared in their main journal.  For example, there is some scientific evidence that the rate of natural radioactive decay varies cyclically ever so slightly on an annual basis. The speculation is that solar-generated neutrinos may be the source of the phenomenon. There's some really weird stuff in that journal!

Anyway, back to the paper titled Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels.

Abstract—Minority views on technical issues are largely absent from the public arena. Increasingly corporate organization of science has led to knowledge monopolies, which, with the unwitting help of uncritical mass media, effect a kind of censorship. Since corporate scientific organizations also control the funding of research, by denying funds for unorthodox work they function as research cartels as well as knowledge monopolies. A related aspect of contemporary science is commercialization.
Science is now altogether different from the traditional disinterested search, by self-motivated individuals, to understand the world. What national and international organizations publicly proclaim as scientific information is not safeguarded by the traditional process of peer review. Society needs new arrangements to ensure that public information about matters of science will be trustworthy.
Actions to curb the power of the monopolies and cartels can be conceived: mandatory funding of contrarian research, mandatory presence of contrarian opinion on advisory panels, a Science Court to adjudicate technical controversies, ombudsman offices at a variety of organizations. Most sorely needed is vigorously investigative science journalism.

His comments are especially relevant today when huge, untethered intergovernmental monopolies like the IPCC seem to be able to say what they please in order to influence public policy and there is no investigative scientific journalism in the main-stream media.  If it were not for the newly emerging "blogosphere," few would have any reason to doubt Al Gore.

Solar Activity

The folks who think that the sun is the principle determinant of climate have an interesting forecast based on the number of sunspots in each solar cycle. This chart shows the historic pattern, and based on the duration of past cycles, they predict ahead a few years. Basically they are saying that the average solar cycle is 10.7 years, but those preceding and during the Dalton Minimum were about 13 years. The current cycle (24) should have started in 2007, but is just now getting under way.

A low number of sun spots correlates well with lower than average global temperatures. The Year Without a Summer, in 1816, occurred during the Dalton Minimum.

The chart runs from 1700 to 2025 in 20-year tick marks. "Projected" starts in 2007, the date of the report in May, 2007, when they said the next cycle was at least one year away. In fact, we now know it was more than two years away. The original reference is

http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/pastandfuture2.pdf.

About a year ago, a NASA solar scientist agreed that we may be in for another Dalton Minimum. However, the current sun-spot cycle has started out aggressively and we initially went to 75 spots which was considered the peak for a minimum cycle. It later subsided to 17 spots. (see current number in gadget in the upper right corner of this page)

The Wikipedia article on Solar Variation is a bit more conservative. There are several different superimposed cycle lengths in the "solar cycle."  Quoting Damon and Scott (1989)*, the following forecasts are possibilities:

Cycle length	Cycle name	Last positive 14C anomaly	Next "warming"
2241	Landscheidt	AD 1400 (cool)	AD 2520
232	--?--	AD 1922 (cool)	AD 2038
208	Suess	AD 1898 (cool)	AD 2002
88	Gleisberg	AD 1986 (cool)	AD 2030

* "Solar Variability: climatic change resulting from changes in the amount of solar energy reaching the upper atmosphere.". Introduction to Quaternary Ecology http://www.geo.arizona.edu/palynology/geos462/20climsolar.html

The 2002 "warming" wasn't detectable or ran late.  Maybe 2030 will be another major upswing.  Meanwhile, we should have some warming, then cooler weather in the usual (approximately) 13-year cycles.

Who dat say who dat?

The current controversy over who "owns" the phrase is so much malarkey.

I am old enough to remember the joke "Who dat say who dat when I say who dat?" about 65 years ago. It was a parody on black (in those days aka negro) phobias of the dark.  Sadly, Google does not easily come up with this conclusion after all these years.

To say that anyone owns that phrase is absurd. It's in the public domain.