13 thoughts on “High Traffic Haiku”

  2. Hey,

    I am banned from tamino again! Now this is a real achievement. Many have been banned once, but to be banned twice! I wish I knew how I did it, there is a long explanation below, but it leaves me not much wiser….

    Have to get a t-shirt made for the members of this club. He starts out snipping my very reasonable and moderate comment…
    ————————————-
    [edit]

    [Response: You have an opportunity here to recognize how wrong you are (assuming you’re not just baiting us); this statement proves your astounding ignorance and your willingness to parrot stupidity.

    Nobody in his right mind says CO2 is the only significant driver of climate. Mainstream climate science demonstrates the importance of sulfates as a cooling agent, solar as a warming/cooling agent, orbital changes which are strong enough to trigger ice age cycles, volcanic eruptions and their very powerful (albeit usually short-lived) effect. In fact it emphasizes the critical function of energy balance and the need to account for all changes to that balance.

    But denialists insist on the dishonest claim that climate scientists don’t do this. Not just misguided, dishonest.

    They endlessly repeat that solar influences aren’t accounted for, that natural variation is ignored, that urban heat islands are ignored, just so they can make climate scientists seem like willfully misleading fools. Ironically, when it comes to sulfates it’s the denialists who refuse to acknowledge the strength of the influence so they can uphold the lie that mid-20th-century temperature stability is unexplained and therefore climate scientists don’t know what they’re doing.

    Wrong on all counts. It’s mainstream climate scientists who have — for a long time and in great detail — investigated all these issues. Of all the factors that *might* be responsible for modern warming, none of them fits the bill: solar hasn’t increased in 60 years, UHI is well accounted for and the warming is still present even in urban sites.

    And none of those in denial have ever managed to explain how it’s *possible* that greenhouse gases could *not* cause warming.

    Denialists are so hell-bent on denying human causation they’ll even invent ridiculous schemes like galactic cosmic rays, which, when investigated, are found to be a failure. But they cling to their delusions regardless of real evidence. So do you.

    Since this is a democracy you’re free to believe,and to spout, whatever crap you choose — and we’re free to have a blog without you.]

  5. There may be a timeout on banning. TCO was banned for a while and then allowed back. Tamino’s is amazing and illuminating. It really is AGW as religion or party based ideoiolgy. If you want to know what life was like as a covert refusenik member of the nomenklatura, just look in there. You will see exactly the same parroting of the party line, exactly the same excoriations of dissenters, exactly the same unnerving ability to smell a dissenter a mile away. If there was power vested, you’d find exactly the same transport to the gulag in the middle of the night. They really have a concept of thought crime. Its a strange and tragic spectacle.

    In the present case, the Met Office and half the environmental movement are making concessions which tamino’s guys would never tolerate. The funny thing is, they are more hard line than the hard liners. Its like, Perestroika is under way, and they are the old hard line Party guys who just have not woken up yet.

  6. Michel–
    Tamino has the luxury of being more hardline than CRU because CRU risks a lot by being seen as unreasonable by the general public. While those at CRU (and Real Climate and Tamino) may not understand why the general public sees things the way John Stewart’s comedy sketch suggests, the fact is, that no amount of spin on their part is going to really convince people that the behavior evidenced in those emails are… how shall we put this… straightforward?

    As the story unfolds, I’m sure that those at CRU realize that their ability to obtain tax payer funding will be impaired if they don’t at least appear to investigate the issue.

    In contrast, Tamino can be has hardline as he likes. It’s not going to affect his climate research funding.

  7. Yes, this is probably right about the lack of any restraints on Tamino from funding. But the amazing thing is the level of anger which is common to both him and his correspondents, and how it seems to be directed to any dissent at all on any detail.

    And the way in which any questioning of any detail is turned into some idiotic point of view that one never expressed, and then trashed. You find people saying that the request for publication of raw data and code, just the stuff that the Met Office seems to be going to start publishing next week, is an unprecedented assault on science. This is simply mad.

    My puzzlement is that this sort of obsessive rage is not confined to Tamino, its all over the AGW movement. You find it, for instance, in the Nature editorial, you cannot get much more mainstream than that. Joe Romm is full of it. Monbiot, even after his awakening to the implications of Climategate, is full of it. Its all over the RC comments. The request to see Mann’s algorithm from MBH98, is treated as if it were part of a terrorist conspiracy. You find people accusing you, when you question any of the canon, of accusing you of everything from bad parenting to being funded by Big Oil.

    The irrationaility of it – these are guys who don’t even know your gender, let alone your parental status!

    Richard Hofstadter years ago had a quite nice book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. The defect was that it focussed on that style solely in the right – particularly Goldwater as I recall. But the Paranoid Style he wrote about is alive and well on both extremes of the political spectrum, and I guess Tamino’s lot are a locus classicus for it.

    One would, if I can repay the insult, have an extraordinary childhood with any of these guys as father. And an extraordinary marriage, with any of them as husband. Tiptoe around the house, agree with every disordered rant immediately, read forbidden literature only in libraries without taking it out on loan and leaving a record. Obfuscate one’s internet access. Get out as soon as one can. Gone is the idea that one of the duties of parenthood is to send thinking intellectually independent young adults into the world. Gone is the idea that marriage and friendship demands some intellectual free space, not instant unquestioning agreement.

    They seem to have, what is common in the movement, a total intolerance for any individual thought, even the idea of it gets up their noses. This is the spirit that ran the Soviet Bloc into the ground. Its not so much that they may be wrong, its that when they are they will never find it out and admit it, so the progression can only be down.

  8. In Tamino’s defense, sometimes he bans people who have it coming. I remember last year he banned some idiot who later complained about it here. The guy believed that if temperatures are variable across regions then a global average would be meaningless. The guy just kept at it and I could almost sense Tamino getting increasingly aggravated by this guy’s stupid comments. It was quite funny actually. Then you have Tim Lambert who doesn’t ban denialists, he gives them their own thread (Tilo Reber).

  10. Chad–
    I think bloggers can ban people for any reason they want. And yes, sometimes Tamino attracts the blog equivalent of hecklers. I sort of suspect those hecklers are attracted by Tamino’s “style”!

    Anyway, I did write a plugin I use to auto-moderate people if they become obnoxious. The moderation is usually temporary. Then either they leave, or the realize that I’m serious about the behavior and they stop. ( I’m probably the only blogger who moderates for excessive use of “The Socrative Method” on a blog. Otherwise known as “Try to argue by rhetorical questions that you think must have an obvious answer to all”. The Greeks put Socrates to death for a reason. I suspect the got aggravated by his stupid Socratic Method.)

  11. michel,

    Do you not recognise the same equal but opposite tendencies on, er, some other blogs? I think it’s regrettable, but fundamentalism thrives on both sides of this. I happen to think that the comment of Tamino’s you quote is pretty sound from “Nobody…” onwards, but I’d agree with you that posting contrary views on blogs of a particular tendency either way is not a positive one. I could take your posts, substitute the word ‘Tamino’s’ for one of several alternatives, and they would then describe my own experience pretty well!

    I’d guess that the effect of ‘Climategate’ will be to polarise the tribes still further.

  12. Lucia – when Open Mind first started it was primarily focused on technical matters. I remember Steve McIntyre being quite complimentary about a post on boreholes and many of the early posts were ok. Initially the site looked promising and there were none of the tantrums we have seen since.

    A while later there was an announcement made about an alliance between Tamino and a couple of other blogs. I think one of them was the Bunny and possibly the other was Michael Tobis though I cant locate it now to confirm. At that point the nature of the posts changed to be confrontational and so did the nature of comments allowed and although the blog increased in popularity the quality fell away really badly. I find the comments at places like Tamino’s, Rabett Run and Deltoid to be so poor now that I rarely bother reading them.

    He went into a Deltoid style attack mode and I gave up visiting when he made an inept post on the Surface Stations initiative where he was so badly wrong that I no longer felt I could place any reliance in what he was writing. I will only visit now if someone draws my attention to something and I am almost always disappointed with the level of garbage I find there. In many respects the tone of a blog will take on the posting characteristics and preferences of its owner

    I am hoping that one of the results of Climategate eventually will be to open the dialogue and level of positive engagement across the blogs at least on the technical level. At the moment there is not enough of it. In the short term it may continue the polarising of opinion but I have an expectation that unless various climatic indicators significantly change direction then the warmers side would need to engage more in the future anyway.

    The only places I feel there is a reasonable level of technical interaction from different viewpoints is here and at John Cooks Skeptical Science site. They do try to encourage engagement at Accuweather but the discussion is usually superficial with debating tactics being more important than substance.

    Elsewhere there is some engagement at CA which Steve tries hard to encourage but it is often patchy and one sided. William Connolley does fire missiles at targets on both sides of the debate at Stoat which can get a level of discussion going. However his commentators are largely from one side and William has his blind spots where he just turns rude. RPjr and Ben Hale get into useful discussion on policy but not so much on the technical. Niche Modelling and the CA forum did get some discussion going in the past but level of people posting is now quite low.

    I dont find the discussion at WUWT and RC these days to be very informative with a high noise level. There are exceptions but it can be hard work to find the good stuff so I normally just read the headline articles.

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