What got me snipped from wattsupwiththat.com - 8

And yet another thread where a comment by me got vanished at wattsupwiththat.com. The topic to which I replied are accusations against late climate scientist Stephen Schneider to have promoted lying to the public. The accusations have been stated by fake skeptics for years, mostly based on a falsified quote from an interview Stephen Schneider gave to the magazine Discover in 1989.

In my comment I replied to comments by four other participants. This is the comment that was seemingly disliked:

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Mark Bofill wrote on February 11, 2013 at 10:27 am in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/09/another-billboard-about-bogus-climate-claims/#comment-1222361

something.

Bofill, you just have crossed the line. You don't need to further pretend that you were seriously interested in a discussion with me.

richardscourtney wrote on February 11, 2013 at 7:41 am in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/09/another-billboard-about-bogus-climate-claims/#comment-1222238

something.

Every time when Courtney is exposed to have spread falsehoods or supporting falsehoods, like when he is exposed to make false claims about the NOAA Report from 2008, or here, he is shouting "Liar!" over and over again. He behaves like the thief who is loudly shouting, "Stop the thief!" to deflect the attention from himself.

D.B. Stealey, on February 11, 2013 at 10:44 am in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/09/another-billboard-about-bogus-climate-claims/#comment-1222375

requests that I apologize to Gail Combs. Ridiculous. What for? I should apologize, because she posted a falsified quote? Anthony Watts may have tried to display this here as an innocent mistake, because the falsified quote had been spread before by some newspapers (and in the fake skeptic blogosphere). Only, this explanation is not believable to me, since Gail Combs provided a link together with the quote, which pointed to a correct version of the quote. Thus, she must have known about the not falsified version. Nevertheless, she presented the falsified one.

Bruce Cobb, on February 11, 2013 at 8:10 am in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/09/another-billboard-about-bogus-climate-claims/#comment-1222268

expressed his regret that Stephen Schneider wasn't around anymore to tell climate scientists what he really meant.

However, that is not a problem, since he had done that already when he was still alive.

For instance in here:
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199608/upload/aug96.pdf

Go to page 5, Stephen Schneider writes there:

"Vested interests have repeatedly claimed I advocate exaggerating threats. Their “evidence” comes from partially quoting my Discover interview, almost always -like Simon - omitting the last line and the phrase “double ethical bind.” They also omit my solutions to the double ethical bind: (1) use metaphors that succinctly convey both urgency and uncertainty (pg. xi of Ref. 3) and (2) produce an inventory of written products from editorials to articles to books, so that those who want to know more about an author’s views on both the caveats and the risks have a hierarchy of detailed written sources to which they can turn.3,4,5 What I was telling the Discover interviewer, of course, was my disdain for a soundbite communications process that imposes the double ethical bind on all who venture into the popular media. To twist my openly stated and serious objections to the soundbite process into some kind of advocacy of exaggeration is a clear distortion. Moreover, not only do I disapprove of the “ends justify the means” philosophy of which I am accused, but, in fact have actively campaigned against it in myriad speeches and writings. Instead, I repeatedly advocate that scientists explicitly warn their audiences that “what to do” is a value choice as opposed to “what can happen” and “what are the odds,” which are scientific issues (e.g. p. 213 of Ref. 3). I also urge that scientists, when they offer probabilities, work hard to distinguish which are objective which are subjective, as well as what is the scientific basis for any probability offered. For such reasons I was honored to receive, in 1991, the AAAS/Westinghouse Award for the Public Understanding of Science."
(Stephen Schneider, Don’t Bet All Environmental Changes Will Be Beneficial, APS News, 1996, 5(8), p. 5, http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199608/upload/aug96.pdf)

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What got me snipped from wattsupwiththat.com - 5

Anthony Watts, host of wattsupwiththat.com has launched an outrageous attack against the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) by publishing an article, "NASA GISS caught changing past data again - violates Data Quality Act", in which scientists working at the institute are accused of forging the data that are used for the GISS surface temperature analysis, and of violating federal law. These are serious accusations of scientific misconduct, and if they were true, this wouldn't not just destroy the reputation of the scientists, it would lead to the end of their scientific careers with high probability. The scientists could even face criminal prosecution. In a world of reason, logic, and law one does a thorough research of the facts first before stating these kind of accusations, since those would require hard evidence that could stand up in court. Not so in the fake skeptic universe where Anthony Watts and his friends reside. There, the bar is much lower. Some assertions and conjecture based on insufficient information due to lack of proper research of the facts, are considered as sufficient to make severe accusations and for his followers to believe them to be true, as one can see in the comment section.

There are some voices of reason among the commenters, but they are being ignored or ridiculed. My replies to these accusations got vanished by Anthony Watts, one can say as usual now. After they got vanished some funny guy under the name Louis Hooffstetter had the nerve to call me personally out to reply to the accusations, although he should have seen that my replies get snipped.

I didn't save the first one of my censored replies, which is mentioned in the second one. The first one was shorter and contained the question whether the author had checked with the scientist who maintains the GISS surface temperature analysis and who got praised not long ago on Mr. Watts's blog for promptly responding and correcting a mistake when it was detected. So, now the same scientist is being accused of being a big fraudster? He is still the same with the same high integrity as before. The accusations against him are baseless. I also asked whether accusations are posted first, before thorough fact checking was done. And I wondered whether this has been the purpose from the beginning.

Here is the second one:

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Anthony Watts wrote in
(http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/26/nasa-giss-caught-changing-past-data-again-violates-data-quality-act/#comment-1089990)

[snip - Sorry, I'm just not interested in your smear and accusations. As a NASA scientist who works with Hansen, you are in a position to demonstrate why/why not the charge of post facto data change if true. Instead you whine, and I'm just not interested in that. Do something substantive other than whining. - Anthony]

What a rubbish. Not every scientists working at GISS is involved in the temperature analysis. Why is every scientist at GISS supposed to be responsible for it? By mere association? Who is involved can be found at the website or taken from the author list of the related scientific papers. These are the people to be asked, if one wants to know specifics about the analysis. As for the alleged smear and accusations in my comment. Well, no one of the readers can check now what those outrageous "smear and accusations" and "whining" were, allegedly, right? However, the real smear and accusations are to be found in above article posted on Mr. Watts' attack web site. Accusations of evil manipulations and violations of the law allegedly done by GISS scientists are made without proper fact checking first, e.g., whether there is just some innocent explanation for it, if it is really true that data have changed.

Here I offer an explanation without the need to resort to accusations of sinister and fraudulent manipulation against the scientists at GISS who do the analysis.

Graphs and tables are updated around the middle of every month using the current adjusted GHCN-v3 and SCAR files. The new files incorporate reports for the previous month and late reports and corrections for earlier months.
(http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/)

The source data which are going into the analysis are not produced at GISS. They are coming from somewhere else. Always the current version of those data is used, and the data are updated every month. When something changes in the source data it has a ripple effect on the analysis done at GISS.

The "Updates to the Analysis" on the website refer to changes in the methodology of the analysis done at GISS, not to changes in data points of the source data sets.

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Update, 10/28/2012: On the Updates to Analysis page of GISS, the conundrum about the changed results from the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis is being has been solved now. NOAA/NCDC the institution where the data used for the GISS analysis come from have switched to a new version of the data set, from GHCN v3.1 to GHCN v3.2. This has the according ripple effect on the GISS analysis. The change is explained by NOAA/NCDC here.

This confirms that once more Anthony Watts posted assertions and accusations on his blog against GISS scientists without doing proper research first whether those assertions and accusations were correct.