I am a red hot climate change denialist?

Strange - you might think - but not so bizarre that some people don't think it. Here is the quote

William, given the article's clearly supposedly-sceptical viewpoint, I did not expect my edit to survive but, 8 minutes! Wow, you are red hot! I note your track record of getting into trouble with Moderators over edit-warring issues, so will not be so foolish as to do the same with you myself. However, is there anything you would care to say in your defence that will prevent me from writing you off as a climate change denier?

Why does he call me "William"? I don't know him, he doesn't know me. Is he a foreigner? No, he is British - or so he claims. But clearly not a well-bred one. I delicately suggested that he might get a clue (as the hip doodz say) from Conservapedia, but he doesn't seem to have done so.

What has him so hot under the collar? The runaway greenhouse effect article. This has always been rather poor: largely because, as the article says, A runaway greenhouse effect is not a clearly defined term; and because it was edited by Andrewjlockley, who is part of the AMEG crowd. And because people keep confusing it with positive feedback. Our man wanted something less ambiguous, and there is a not-very-exciting talk page thread.

All this has odd echoes of last week's tempest but Martin Charles Lack is not Andrew Judd - he seems to know when to back off, for one thing.

Largely irrelevant refs

* [[List of Viz comic strips]]. Check for "Captain Oats" - I still remember that one. I personally rescued Mickey's Monkey Spunk Moped from redirection.
* No lessons learned from Climategate ? Fred Pearce and the New Scientist attack anti-nuclear book - this is a guest post at WUWT by Martin Cohe[n]. It contains refs to "Climategate", therefore by WUWT standards it is publishable; but it is so laughably incoherent that even the regulars think it should be pulled. My comment.
* The Fireplace Delusion - meant to be about religion, but would fit the denialists, too. h/t Paul.

More like this

Poor Harris!

Remind me to send him a carton of Chesterfields, a recording of Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire for Christmas.

there are a lot of good reasons to be quite skeptical about current use of civil nuclear power - especially with french surgeneration. But this guy is lost into conspiracy land ...

Martin Lack is someone I've recently noticed quite a lot in the comments of certain blogs (e.g. climatesight.org/2012/03/17/an-open-letter-to-the-future/ and climatecrocks.com/2012/03/29/dear-daily-mail/)

His website is http://lackofenvironment.wordpress.com/ which "is a blog on 'the politics & psychology underlying the denial of all environmental problems'".

I think his denier detector needs tuning - it's a bit oversensitive at the moment...

By Quiet Waters (not verified) on 03 Apr 2012 #permalink

The problem is, as usual, that there are multiple definitions of a runaway greenhouse effect, each one useful depending on the planet you are commuting from.

To Eli, the issue is not so much the feedback as the stopping point, none of which, of course, are very pleasant.

[The best thing is if competent people who care edit the article to make sense of it. Be aware of the "tipping points" article too -W]

Dr Connolley,

(I don't know you.)

[:-). But WMC is good too. I even wrote this on wiki when I got tired of people over there. We're all friends here, though -W]

I just had to follow the link to the Conservapedia article about you and it was as funny as I expected (did you write it yourself?). I especially liked this

Connolley claims to have a DPhil from the University of Oxford, as stated in his Wikipedia article. When an editor asked for evidence for these claims, Connolley could not provide them and requested Jimmy Wales' intervention. Wales closed down the debate and threated the editor that he "be blocked if he does this again".[44] This directed contravenes Wikipedia's own policies, which state "All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source".[45]

What is that all about?

[I couldn't have written the Conservapedia stuff. As to the D Phil... that was on my article talk page, not my talk page, and I wasn't watching there (deliberate policy; watching an article about yourself is a bad idea, I discovered painfully). That looks like it was just trolling from User:Weakopedia and User:SlimVirgin.

Since there is (as that page says) a copy of my doctorate on flickr I'm a bit baffled as to how a reliable source like Conservapedia could have missed it -W]

By TrueSceptic (not verified) on 03 Apr 2012 #permalink

So, if I didn't know you were a Dr, and didn't know you well enough to use your first name, would "Mr" be rude? ;)

Of course, I was joking about the Conservapedia article: everything there reads like a Poe, doesn't? Do you know STR BTW?

[No, and it looks like I'm best staying that way -W]

By TrueSceptic (not verified) on 03 Apr 2012 #permalink

OK, I give up. Inquiring Minds Want to Know: what's with the naked guys with socks over their junks? What is their relevance to the post?

By Mal Adapted (not verified) on 07 Apr 2012 #permalink

Mal Adapted -- that's another group of Red Hots.