Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 15:44, 9 January 2010

QQ

Ref please explain what issues have you tried to resolve on the talk page of global warming and failed to? I had a quick look at your previous edits after you made this statement. I can see you voted once in May 2009 and were on the page April 2009 and before, but where did you raise an unresolved issue? --BozMo talk 20:13, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

You'll have to excuse me not fully understanding how policy is operated - but at Global Warming I was told they make it up on the hoof, and I'm not entitled to know what's been decided. That strikes me as WP:OWNER on a grand scale, with commensurate breaking of WP:NPOV and WP:UNDUE. Is that a start? The specific improvements I want to make are a decent section on "dissent", perhaps a quick breakdown of the various rather different kinds of dissent with links to fuller discussions. It might end up as 10% of the article or a bit more. Not overpowering the message, but not leaving an impression of great bias, which is what I'm getting now. MalcolmMcDonald (talk) 21:46, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Not really. I am looking at the history of the talk page at Global Warming failing to recognise any of what you say. Who said they "make it up on the hoof", and when did they say that (a diff would be nice)? Who said you are "not entitled to know what's been decided" (a diff would be nice too)? Your own talkpage contributions there have been rather limited and been a bit along the lines of "there's a bad smell" but I don't see specific things things you have raised and had unanswered. If you wander around Misplaced Pages making complaints up to a point people will listen and try to investigate but if there isn't any substance then it is hard to keep taking the complaints seriously. --BozMo talk 18:22, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for expanding on your reasoning at Talk:Global warming. - 2/0 (cont.) 18:31, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I support you

I strongly support the principle you have been arguing for on the pages of Global warming. I too would like to understand why sceptics hold their point of view, for the same reasons I am also interested why creationists hold their views, even though I regard creationism as absurd. If there is anything I can do to help, let me know. My specialism is in the history of science, as my username suggests. HistorianofScience (talk) 09:52, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

PS see the discussion here . Even the most fervent adherents of the AGW hypothesis at Misplaced Pages are saying that the scientific view is 'it's more likely than not'. That places AGW scepticism in a different light than deniers of Cantor's Theorem, or of the Holocaust. No one would say of Cantor's Theorem, or the existence of the Holocaust, that they are 'more likely than not'. HistorianofScience (talk) 12:02, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

GWCT

is fine by me - but do you really think its just a conspiracy theory? William M. Connolley (talk) 16:46, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

I think reference to the stealing of the e-mails belongs in there. I don't know whether it was carried out on behalf of a malign super-corporation controlled by the neo-cons or whether it was a student prank kind of thing. (The longer the mystery goes on, the more likely it is that oil-companies had a hand). Separately, I hear that it was China who torpedoed Copenhagen - but nobody could have bribed the Chinese leadership, and it's not very likely that Exxon has more pull than the White House. MalcolmMcDonald (talk) 17:55, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Global warming

Thank you for your contributions to the encyclopedia! In case you are not already aware, an article to which you have recently contributed, Global warming, is on article probation. A detailed description of the terms of article probation may be found at Misplaced Pages:General sanctions/Climate change probation. Also note that the terms of some article probations extend to related articles and their associated talk pages.

The above is a templated message. Please accept it as a routine friendly notice, not as a claim that there is any problem with your edits. Thank you. --TS 13:59, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Snowball Earth

Hi, I noticed that you referred to the Snowball Earth article and said you were puzzled that a Channel 4 documentary narrated by Tony Robinson, Catastrophe:Snowball Earth, treated the Snowball Earth as settled science, the Misplaced Pages article was much more circumspect and listed some of the stumbling blocks to acceptance of the hypothesis. You apparently believe this is evidence that Misplaced Pages is biased on the science.

Please note that Britannica's entry on the Snowball Earth also calls it a hypothesis. This recent article in New Scientist also shows how scientists are still working on reconciling the problems in this hypothesis.

I've just watched the first ten minutes of the program you refer to, which is here on the Channel Four website. I agree that Tony Robinson uses declarative language and presents the Snowball Earth hypothesis as settled science. In doing so, Robinson and the producers of the program misrepresent our state of knowledge about the climate in deep time. Neither Misplaced Pages nor Britannica is to blame for this discrepancy between what Tony Robinson says and what you read in encyclopedias. Channel 4 tries to inform, but sometimes it settles for entertaining. --TS 15:44, 9 January 2010 (UTC)