Why do people link to RealClimate.org as if it was a reliable source of information?

Question

Don't people realize RealClimate.org is owned by a public relations firm?

Check this out.
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=realclimate.org

Environmental Media Services is listed as the "registrant organization" which means they own it. Arlie Schardt is the man behind EMS and he is the former communications director (PR guy) for Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000.

EMS is closely allied with Fenton Communications, a large for profit PR firm. They share the same address.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Media_Services

Plus RealClimate still publishes the writings of Michael Mann, the pseudoscientist who was responsible for the Hockey Stick.
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/Climate_L.pdf

So why do people still link to RealClimate? Don't they realize how discredited they are?

Bob, yes RealClimate has been discredited as have most of their authors (like Mann, Ammann and Bradley) who refused to abide by the standards of science like archiving and sharing their data with other researchers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_data_archiving
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_sharing

Also, try asking a question or making a comment they are uncomfortable with. The censors are there to push the party line. You cannot really debate with them because when you point out their errors, your comments do not show up on the website.

Trevor, if you go to my websites, I am the registrant. Try asking yourself why a PR firm would be the registrant? What is the connection between the two? Based on the censorship that goes on at RealClimate, it is obvious they are pushing an agenda and not debating science.

Vlado, peer review is not perfect. It is kind of like asking a fellow student to read over a paper before turning it in. He may be able to spot some problems or tell you that you need to go into more depth on certain points but his help is limited. Peer review is designed to spot glaring errors and improve the quality of papers but it is not designed to spot small errors of reproduce the study so it cannot find fabrications and scientific fraud. The two disciplines with the worst reputations for fabrications and failure to archive data are medical and climate science. The European Science Foundation recently held a "World Conference on Research Integrity" and those were the two disciplines with the most problems.
http://www.esf.org/ext-ceo-news-singleview/article/world-conference-on-research-integrity-to-foster-responsible-research-318.html

Dr. Blob, the skeptics understand the science very well. I keep posting links to peer-reviewed science by skeptics. Have you bothered to read any of it? Or do you just read RealClimate to find out what to think about it? You need to realize that RealClimate does not accurately represent the views of skeptics and they will not allow skeptics to voice their objections on the website. Read ClimateAudit.org if you want to know both sides of the issue. Or if you want to continue to be deceived, just stick with RealClimate.

Dr. Jello, I understand what you are saying. I just want people to know that RealClimate is run by political communications professionals. They do not accurately portray the positions of skeptics and then censor out any comments to correct the misinformation. This is not a site where people can expect to get a full debate on the scientific issues.

Dr. Blob, it does not sound like you are really open to the possibility RealClimate is not telling you the truth. But if you are willing to look into the issue, read the NAS panel report about the Hockey Stick.
http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676

Mann claimed 20th century temps were the warmest in 2,000 years. What does the NAS report say?

Mann claimed his proxies were valid and provided a robust result. What does the NAS panel say about the strip bark bristlecone pine series?

RealClimate will tell you the NAS panel sided with Mann over McIntyre. Not true. Gerald North who led the NAS panel said his panel "roughly agreed" with the findings of The Wegman Report.
http://www.groupsrv.com/science/post-2452668.html

Here is the Fact Sheet and Report by Wegman.
http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/pdfs/0607/07142006_Wegman_fact_sheet.pdf
http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/pdfs/0607/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf

After reading this, how can you ever trust anything RealClimate says?

Answer 1

It doesn't matter who's the source as long as it gives people a link to information they want so they can make people think they're smart.

It's not the truth that believers are after, it's about control. So many believers desire people pay more for energy. This is their way of making the poor population slowly starve and freeze to death.

Answer 2

RealClimate is discredited?

"Peer Review is an undisputed cornerstone of modern science. Central to the competitive clash of ideas that moves knowledge forward, peer review enjoys so much renown in the scientific community that studies lacking its imprimatur meet with automatic skepticism. Academic reputations hinge on an ability to get work through peer review and into leading journals; university presses employ peer review to decide which books they're willing to publish; and federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health use peer review to weigh the merits of applications for federal research grants. "

Peer review is an independent, non-political, non-economic process that cannot be easily circumvented. To have your work discredited because of sloppy data, poor methodology, or outright fraud is a crushing repudiation from which you and your lab will likely never recover. See “cold fusion” and “human cloning”. Reputable scientists don’t do these things and when disreputable ones try they get caught.

As stated in previous q&a's, the underlying problem is that the skeptics don't understand science (not just the technical science and math, but the the institutional structure as well) and when a conclusion is reached that doesn't fit with their preconceived idea of truth they think they can just ignore it and continue with the same flawed argument.

The trouble with science is you can't pick and choose which parts to believe. If you think you can then you don't understand it.

Every time you post like this your credibility goes down a notch.

edit:
I've read some. It will take me a while to get through them, catalog them and make a response to each.

Answer 3

You gotta be kidding. Realclimate's content comes from some of the most distinguished climatologists (ones with actual degrees and a long list of publications) in the country. It's the best website for truly the latest climatology research. Their stuff has an enormous backup from the peer reviewed literature.

The only issue I have with it is that it's not all that well organized and it can be hard to find what you're looking for.

Who cares who registered the website? The content is what counts, and it's superb.

And Mann is acknowledged as an excellent scientist. The National Academy of Sciences said his conclusions were basically correct.

His work has been replicated many times, with more precise statistical methods. The bottom line is still the same. Ten peer reviewed studies here:

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison_png

Criticizing Realclimate and posting a biased article by a Dutch journalist as authoritative shows a lack of judgment about quality of sources. He doesn't even mention the NAS review, possibly because it would conflict with his bias.

EDIT - eric c The British judge found nine minor details to have inadequate proof (he explicitly didn't decide whether they were true or false). He also said emphatically (the plaintiff suing the movie lost) that it was settled science that global warming was real, mostly caused by us, a serious problem, and capable of being solved by our actions. Since you cite him, I guess you agree with those four points? His decision matches exactly the view of the movie on Realclimate, which is not surprising, they're both authoritative sources of the truth.

Trevor has it right. This is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Also Dr. Blob. It's not Realclimates credibility that is being exposed here.

Answer 4

You have got to be kidding me. And I thought Jello's arguments were bad.

Many different climate scientists contribute to RealClimate. They do a great job analyzing the quality of scientific papers. They even allow the authors of those papers to comment on the page in order to present a rebuttal to the RealClimate analysis. You can see an example of this here with Nicola Scafetta rebutting some of the criticism of the Scafetta&West paper:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/how-not-to-attribute-climate-change/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/03/solar-variability-statistics-vs-physics-2nd-round/

Your attempts to discredit the best climate science analysis website out there are ridiculous.

Answer 5

Of course it pushes the writings of Micheal Mann. If you look at the list of contributors, he is one of them.

This is also what they had to say about Al Gore's movie: "There are a few scientific errors that are important in the film." A British Judge found nine. Again, this an another example of the bias in their reporting. So the real question is, are they interested in telling the truth, or in pushing an agenda?

Answer 6

Real Climate isn't owned by a PR firm - they're the domain registrant. I have several websites, if you look them up on the Whois database you'll see that in most cases Yahoo are the registrants - but they have absolutely no control at all over the content of my sites and I am the owner of them.

If you look up Yahoo.com you'll find that the registrant is Markmonitor.com (a domain management and internet security firm), they don't own Yahoo or have any say in it.

Your argument really is scraping the barrel.

Answer 7

Because it supports their beliefs. The global warming enthusiasts don't want accurate information. They want to hear distorted data and outright lies that support their position.
They don't care that the evidence doesn't support their position. The important thing is that they are blindly following the ideology of the far left eco-freaks and are being politically correct.
If you don't believe the same way they do then you are "being paid off by corporate America" or are a "stooge for the oil companies. They don't have any facts to support their agenda so their only recourse is to insult you and promise future punishment. Just like the preachers. If you don't share their particular brand of religion then you are a pagan, heretic, sinner, etc who will burn in hell at some unspecified future date.

Answer 8

The site is obviously pro-AGW, but it's not a bad source of information as the authors tend to be knowlegable about the science. Being a sceptic, I don't agree with most of their conclusions.

Just about every source on the internet is trying to make a case either for or against AGW. You should look at pro AGW and pro sceptic sites and draw your own conclusions. Whatever you read anywhere should be taked with a grain of salt.

Answer 9

Thanks for putting me on to Arlie, he told Algore he exaggerates too much back in the 2000 election as an adviser.LOL. Apparently Algore went right on exaggerating despite the advise.

Just another link in the Eco elite cabal to scam a fortune out of GW hysteria and leave real environmentalists and structure standing on the corner with their hands out.

Dont buy PEER REVIEW its bogus,
"But peer review is not simply synonymous with quality. Many landmark scientific papers (like that of Watson and Crick, published just five decades ago) were never subjected to peer review, and as David Shatz has pointed out, “many heavily cited papers, including some describing work which won a Nobel Prize, were originally rejected by peer review.” Shatz, a Yeshiva University philosophy professor, outlines some of the charges made against the referee process in his 2004 book Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. In a word, reviewers are often not really “conversant with the published literature”; they are “biased toward papers that affirm their prior convictions”; and they “are biased against innovation and/or are poor judges of quality.” Reviewers also seem biased in favor of authors from prestigious institutions. Shatz describes a study in which “papers that had been published in journals by authors from prestigious institutions were retyped and resubmitted with a non-prestigious affiliation indicated for the author. Not only did referees mostly fail to recognize these previously published papers in their field, they recommended rejection.”