Context/Earth

[[ Check out my Wordpress blog Context/Earth for environmental and energy topics tied together in a semantic web framework ]]


Saturday, January 19, 2013

Deleted comment

I responded indirectly to a post http://earlywarn.blogspot.co.nz/2013/01/bakken-well-stats.html and Bakken data as a comment on The Oil Drum. The comment showed up and then disappeared.

It was still in my cache when I discovered it was deleted, and reproduced here (click to enlarge)

This was nothing new, but a rephrasing of analysis work from last year: http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/05/bakken-growth.html

Both Rockman's and my comment was apparently deleted, with no reason why.  I have learned that one can't complain publicly about why a comment would get deleted on The Oil Drum, as that is grounds for a temporary banishment from posting any further comments.

But I can complain all I want here because this is my space. It sucks because I spend time doing the analysis and then it goes into a black hole.

BTW, Stuart Staniford does not seem to add anything as an analyst. He is no Kevin Drum,
who wrote this piece.  Interesting that one can use the convolution algorithms of the oil shock model to model the crime rate variation as it follows the gasoline lead content over the last century. Crime rate tracks the convolution of lead content over time with a delay function describing a distribution of adult maturation times (peaking around 20 years of age). I bet Drum is right in the correlation and cause.

From http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412012000566





Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Field Guide to Climate Clowns

The climate science blog known as Climate Etc is essentially infested with cranks, crackpots, and wackos, each with their own pet theory on why the consensus AGW science is wrong or an alternate view is preferred over the basic greenhouse-gas-based physics.

As someone mentioned, crackpot theories on global warming are almost fractal in nature -- in other words, wrong on almost every scale that you can interpret them.

I compiled the following "Field Guide" in response to my experiences commenting at that site.  The most unusual statistical anomaly concerns the relative abundance of crackpots from Down Under, who also seem to be the most rabid, a trait that one might trace to the Oz tradition of mocking authority, known as Larrikinism.

Whatever compelled me to keep track of these clowns (who are vaguely similar to the fossil fuel cornucopians on oil depletion blogs) I hope it provides some levity.

I want to add that that I have largely stopped commenting at Climate Etc because the editorial policies of the blog site's owner do not allow singling out of crackpots, but instead allow the crackpots themselves free reign (and the blog's proprietor never engages with the crackpot theorists themselves, therefore essentially condoning the pseudo-scientific ideas. Kind of counter-effective to advancing science, in my opinion).
curryja | January 16, 2013 at 5:42 am "Very large number of comments (approaching 10% of total CE comments) plus too many insults. I will take you off moderation if you can calm down the insults. Also, anyone that mentioned ‘BBD’ in their comment also went into moderation, so I could assess both sides of these exchanges."
The commenter BBD happens to be the most sensible commenter on the site. No wonder the site is such a magnet for Why People Believe Weird Things. It's not quite as bad and one-sided as the infamously insane "Best Scientific Blog" WUWT, but that's not saying much.

Edit:
This bit explains everything, and essentially provides a rationale for why my documentation of these climate clowns is needed.
It has nothing to do with their research and their views. I tolerate what I view to be scientific crackpottery. I tolerate people talking about Nazis and commies. I do not tolerate one person saying the same thing over again. I do not tolerate insults to other commenters.
 Why would anyone, let alone a scientist, tolerate scientific crackpottery? 

I don't tolerate it, and given the fact that I have no control over scientific discourse at most levels, my choice is to document the atrocities

Don't read the comments! Online communities shape risk perception
More people get science news from blogs, where commentary shapes opinions.

How Blog Comments, Google Autocomplete Reinforce Scientific Bias
A new journal article claims that blog comments and Google autocomplete influence the public on new scientific research.

Climate Etc does not help the situation  by condoning crackpot commentary. It gets indexed by Google just like everything else.
Someone recommended to try to avoid the filter bubble. Let's try out the filter-free https://duckduckgo.com/
 
wind "maximum entropy"
"dispersive transport"
"oil shock" model
"hyperbolic decline"

CO2 diffusion "adjustment time"
 
For each of these search phrases, which are kind of obscure but not that odd, the top hit goes to either my mobjectivist blog or this blog.