2005-10-22

Your comment was denied for questionable content...

...so I'll post it here. The blog in question is RP Jr, the post this which he entitled "Tag Team Hit Job".

My comment was:

Roger, you complain too much. Curry says you say "Let's not worry about *why* we have climate change" and you don't defend yourself against that, but against something else.


and his software says... "Your comment was denied for questionable content. If you believe a legitimate comment was blocked, you may contact the administrator of this site. This site actively blocks or moderates messages with questionable content. If you feel your message is being blocked unfairly, please contact us. Moderated comments will generally be reviewed within 6 hours."

In fact I will contact him too, but I'm putting it here because (a) it was a good excuse for a post and (b) it illustrates the problems with fragmented conversations in the blogosphere. Mind you, RC also filters for content, but AFAIK doesn't tell you that you comment has been sent for moderation.

21 comments:

  1. William- Should you wish to discuss anything subtantive about the important issues here, like climate impacts or policy, I'd be happy to engage. If you'd like to pick nits about my blog posts, its probably not worth either of our time. Of course it matters why we have climate change. I have a paper on this subject that goes into gory detail about the importantce of how we define the term:

    http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-479-2004.10.pdf

    And our filtering software does all sorts of unexpected things, including rejecting my our comments sometimes. We'll look into it.

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  2. William, do you really think that your comment was so terribly valuable that you should initiate an international investigation?

    Roger Pielke's note was about a more important topic - namely ad hominem attacks of desperate attackers.

    It does not take too much work to see that the scientific impact of Roger Pielke exceeds Judy Curry's roughly by two orders of magnitude.

    But Judy Curry probably measures progress in science differently, according to the prophecies of Mother Earthism, does not she?

    Best wishes
    Lubos

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  3. Nah, Roger has just decided to put in a hit list. He has been having trouble holding his own, mostly because like Humpty Dumpty he is trying to make us believe two impossible things before breakfast.

    I rather suspect that only the obsequeous or the devious can post over there at this point. I am not quite sure where the software is looking, probably at the name and at the poster's blog.

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  4. I should have added that you should simply remove his blog from your list. Lots of people go there from here. None in the other direction. Most of the value of the site was watching people take his sophism apart, so, if he is blocking the discussion why should you contribute to his traffic?

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  5. I favor, and try to practice, only deleting the automatic spam type comments, but I guess I would delete grossly offensive or clearly libelous comments. I think I have always preserved those that are merely insulting or rude.

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  6. My fairly innocuous comment (mostly in support, in fact) was also blocked by the spam filter, but I'm not going to get paranoid about it.....yet.

    I wonder if lumo realises in his comparison that there are two RPs, one who is not an atmospheric physicist and one who doesn't believe in the conservation of momentum :-) Oh, "Judy" may be more commonly (or formally) referred to as Judith, too.

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  7. FYI just posted on my site to set the record straight:

    Two people have contacted me about our spam filter rejecting their comments. We are looking into it. Let me say for the record that we do not filter comments on this site for content, just spam and profanity. All perspectives are welcome. We are (so far!) extremely pleased to have for the most part thoughtful, non-anonymous, substantive comments on our site and want this to continue. If you have a comment that you would like posted and it is mistakenly rejected, simply email me at pielke@colorado.edu.

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  8. Dear James,

    I admit a small error. With "Judith", Roger Pielke's impact has only been greater by one order of magnitude.

    I've enjoyed the new scientific results about the ice here:

    It is an animation

    I guess that this is how you imagine the real world and the animation will appear in the new summary of IPCC. ;-) Thanks to WS for this link.

    William, Elirabett has an excellent idea to remove links to R. Pielke and burn his books since he is a new heretic.

    All the best
    Lubos

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  9. Dear James,

    I assure you that all the works found by scholar.google.com about RP are atmospheric physics. So are there two atmospheric physicists RP? ;-)

    Best
    Lubos

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  10. Thanks William.

    To say as I have that policy action (both mitigation and adaptation) can proceed without fully resolving precise details about why we have climate change (we know the big picture pretty well, I'd assert), is not the same as not caring about why we have climate change. In the op-ed we make the case that hurricane policy and climate mitigation are two separate problems. Again, that is not the same as saying that we need not worry about why we have climate change. Indeed, this perspective depends crucially upon understandings of the relationships of future greenhouse gases and hurricane behavior. If you care to offer any specific comments about the op-ed, the paper I provided, or anthing else please let me know. It is pretty hard to respond to vague (mis)generalizations;-)

    And just FYI, Judy Curry agreed that her comments were taken out of context and mischaracterized:

    http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/000613response_from_judy_c.html

    Thanks.

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  11. Even if I explicitly look for "Roger A Pielke Jr" only, I get pretty good results - certainly not results that Ms. Judy should humiliate. ;-) Moreover, the lady should also have a certain respect to the name of Roger Pielke in general.

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  12. Lubos, should we infer yet another order of magnitude drop from that last comment? I assume you must be getting your figures from googling, which would tend to give RP Jr. a considerable leg up since he produces a lot more popular press articles than Judith Curry does, so it might be useful to look at her CV as posted on the AMS site:

    Dr. Judith Curry is Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Curry received a Ph.D. in atmospheric science from the University of Chicago in 1982. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, she has held faculty positions at the University of Colorado, Penn State University and Purdue University. Dr. Curry’s research interests span a variety of topics in climate; current interests include air/sea interactions, climate feedback processes associated with clouds and sea ice, and applications of satellite data to interpreting recent variations in the climate data record. Dr. Curry currently serves on the National Academies Climate Research Committee and the Space Studies Board, and the NOAA Climate Working Group. Dr. Curry is author of the book Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans and is editor for the Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences. She has published over 130 refereed journal articles. Dr. Curry is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. In 1992, she received the Henry Houghton Award from the American Meteorological Society.

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  13. Roger - thanks for the link and the update from Judith, which as you say does rather clarify her position. I wonder though: you take the journo to task for not contacting you, yet you post about JC before giving her the chance to reply... wouldn't this all have been rather better had you published your first post with JC's reply about out-of-context?

    Lumo, Steve - its now obvious that Lumo's first attempts to compare RP/JC were wrong. By refining his searches he has got a bit better, but fundamnetally his approach is misconstrued, as Steve has pointed out: different fields have different article-production rates and simply comparing article numbers is wrong. A better approach is citation counts BUT thats not perfect either AND this is not the place to do it! Its pointless and distasteful and further comments on it WILL BE DELETED. So there.

    Lumo - respect - good point. But people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. You have repeatedly made clear your contempt for climate researchers in general, and both RP's have made it clear that they hold views on CO2-forced climate change that you regard as obvious nonsense.

    BUT if you want to debate RPs views, do it on his blog, or on sci.env - not here.

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  14. Hi,

    I am rather curious about exactly what the filter was blocking, but not motivated enough to go further and accept what Roger Pielke Jr. said about it. OTOH, I am trying to figure out what to do about a student who claims I lost his exam.

    Still, the role of blogs in establishing public intellectuals is, I think, an underground issue. Webs of links build communities. If someone links to A, and A does not reciprocate, then the benefit is all to A. If they mutually link, then there is mutual benefit. Given that Roger is a policy wonk, I think he is very aware of this issue.

    People like Chris Mooney have used their bloglists and cross posting to build a constituency, make publicity for their articles, publish a book and establish a reputation. It is interesting to watch these networks evolve.

    One of the issues is that bloglists tend to be limited to those on the same side of the argument and links to contrary opinions tend to be to people on your side of the argument who are quoting *usually derisively* the other side.

    If nothing else, the back and for between wmc, and James and the Pielkes has been useful.

    Believe me, people do think about this stuff. Even write theses (coming soon to a university near you). What it reminds me most of is the pampleteers of the 18th century, when printing became cheap, and you could write and distribute your own opinions.

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  15. Well, FWIW, RP sez that the spamblock thing was flagged by "blogspot" in our URLs which seems fair enough (there _are_ a lot of blogspot spamblogs).

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  16. It seems likely and I have no reason to doubt RP on it.

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  17. Except that I tried it with and without the URL, just using my yahoo address. Somewhat in the range of implausible deniability. Then again, I have been kind of argy bargy

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  18. Eli - hmmm, curious. In that case, I'd recommend mailing RP (unless your comment really was intemperate...). He is always ready to talk.

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  19. I think I like this blog.

    Eli, wrt your point. Is Steve giving RC something by unilaterally linking to RC while RC does not return the favor and deletes any post (try an experiment if you want) that contains a link to Steve's site.

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  20. If you want to ask about no-linking, you could try the Pielkes first...

    As for post deleting... there is a moderation queue.

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  21. I know about the moderation queue. I'm not a newbie. Try posting Steve's (3 para, completely science-based) argument regarding the comments on his paper in the post on those papers (so must be topical). I don't think it will get in.

    It doesn't surprise me that RP or whatever deletes posts or censors. I don't like that either. Is he the dude who doesn't beleive in conservation of momentum? ;-)

    But are you saying that it's ok for RC to stop Steve from posting because RP does that to you? If you really feel that way then you should stop letting lumo or I post here. No wait! ;-)

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