Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 15:50, 24 May 2011

William Connolley
Connolley in May 2008
Born	(1964-04-12) 12 April 1964 (age 60)
Nationality	British
Education	M.A. (Oxon.), D.Phil. (Oxon.)
Alma mater	University of Oxford
Occupation	Software engineer
Known for	Blog activity about climate change
Political party	Green Party of England and Wales

William Michael Connolley (born 12 April 1964) is a British software engineer, writer, and blogger on climatology. Until December 2007 he was Senior Scientific Officer in the Physical Sciences Division in the Antarctic Climate and the Earth System project at the British Antarctic Survey, where he worked as a climate modeller. After this he became a software engineer for Cambridge Silicon Radio.

Connolley received national press attention over several years for his involvement in editing Misplaced Pages articles relating to climate change. Connolley was a member of the RealClimate website until 2007 and now operates a website and blog that discuss climate issues. He has also been active in local politics as a member of the Green Party.

Background

Connolley holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a DPhil from St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford for his work on numerical analysis. He works as a software engineer for Cambridge Silicon Radio, designing embedded firmware. Connolley has two children.

Until December 2007, Connolley was Senior Scientific Officer in the Physical Sciences Division in the Antarctic Climate and the Earth System project at the British Antarctic Survey. His research focused on sea ice measurement and modelling, including the HadCM3 global climate model. Connolley also worked on the validation of satellite data against more direct upward looking sonar observations in the Weddell Sea area. He concluded that Bootstrap data produced a better fit than data produced by NASA and that GCM predictions are more realistic than previously thought.</ref>

Connolley served as a parish councillor in the village of Coton (near Cambridge, England) until May 2007. He was also a Green Party candidate for South Cambridgeshire District Council or Cambridgeshire County Council every year from 2001 to 2005.

Writing and editing

Connolley has authored and co-authored articles and literature reviews in the field of climatological research, with an emphasis on the climate of the Antarctic and the study of sea ice. Connolley was a member of the RealClimate website until 2007, and he operates a website and blog that discuss climate issues. His blogs and one of his papers conclude that a majority of scientific papers in the 1970s predicted warming, not global cooling.

Connolley began editing Misplaced Pages in 2003 and served as a Misplaced Pages administrator from 2006 until 2009. He has been cited and quoted in the media regarding these activities, especially with respect to his editing in the area of climate change. He was cited by Nature magazine, in their December 2005 review of the reliability of Misplaced Pages, as an example of an expert who edits Misplaced Pages. Nature quoted Connolley, in 2006, as saying that "some scientists have become frustrated with Misplaced Pages" but that "conflict can sometimes result in better articles". In July 2006, a New Yorker article described him as briefly becoming "a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming", in which a sceptic repeatedly "watered down" the article's explanation of the greenhouse effect. Connolley told the magazine that Misplaced Pages "gives no privilege to those who know what they’re talking about". Various books have cited Connolley as an example of how expert editors on Misplaced Pages are given "no more credence" than anonymous editors of the site.

Two internal disputes at Misplaced Pages in which Connolley was involved also received attention. A 2005 Misplaced Pages climate change dispute involving breaches of etiquette, rather than content bias, was cited by a paper in the Journal of Science Communication as an example that "resonated deeply as it highlighted what can befall respected experts who wade into controversial wiki-waters". The paper stated that Connolley did "not suffer...fools gladly". The same paper noted a 2009 Misplaced Pages arbitration in which it was concluded that Connolley had used administrator privileges to his own advantage in content disputes, and these privileges were removed. Other academic papers have discussed Connolley's editing activities on Misplaced Pages and the dispute resolution process as it has been applied to him.

Selected publications

• W. M. Connolley and S. A. Harangozo (2001) A comparison of five numerical weather prediction analysis climatologies in southern high latitudes, J. Climate, 14: 30–44.
• Turner, J, W Connolley, D Cresswell and S A Harangozo (2001). The simulation of Antarctic sea ice in the Hadley Centre climate model (HadCM3). Ann. Glaciol., 33: 585–591.
• Vaughan, D. G., G. J. Marshall, W. M. Connolley, J. C. King and R. Mulvaney (2001) Climate change — devil in the detail. Science, 293: 1777–1779.
• Tom A. Lachlan-Cope, William M. Connolley, and John Turner (2001) The Role of the Non-Axisymmetric Antarctic Orography in Forcing the Observed Pattern of Variability of the Antarctic Climate, Geophysical Research Letters, 28(21): 4111–4114.
• Connolley, W. M. (2002) Long-term variation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave. J. Geophys. Res., 107 (8076).
• J. Turner, S. A. Harangozo, J. C. King, W. Connolley, T. Lachlan-Cope, and G. J. Marshall (2003) An exceptional winter sea ice retreat/advance in the Bellingshausen Sea, Antarctica. Atmos. Ocean 41(2): 171–185.
• D. G. Vaughan, G. J. Marshall, W. M. Connolley, C. L. Parkinson, R. Mulvaney, D. A. Hodgson, J. C. King, C. J. Pudsey, and J. Turner. Recent rapid regional climate warming on the Antarctic Peninsula. Climatic Change, 60 (3): 243–274 October 2003
• Translation of Fourier 1827: Mémoire sur les temperatures du globe terrestre et des espaces planetaires
• Connolley, W. M., J. M. Gregory, E. Hunke and A. J. Mclaren (2004), On The Consistent Scaling Of Terms In The Sea — Ice Dynamics Equation, J . Phys . Oceangr. 34 (7): 1776–1780 July 2004
• Marshall, G. J., P. A. Stott, J. Turner, W. M. Connolley, J. C. King and T. A. Lachlancope (2004), Causes Of Exceptional Atmospheric Circulation Changes In The Southern Hemisphere, Geophys. Res. Lett. 31(14): Art . No. L14205 July 30, 2004
• J. C. King, J. Turner, G. J. Marshall, W. M. Connolley, and T. A. Lachlan-Cope. Antarctic Peninsula climate variability and its causes as revealed by instrumental records. Antarctic Research Series v79, pp17–30.
• Connolley, W. M. Sea ice concentrations in the Weddell Sea: A comparison of SSM/I, ULS, and GCM data. GRL 32 (7): art. no. L07501 2 April 2005; see also Sea ice: What I do in my spare time for a popular exposition
• Peterson, T. C., W. M. Connolley, and J. Fleck (2008) The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 89(9): 1325–1337

References

1. Connolley, William M. (1989). "Preconditioning of iterative methods for linearized or linear systems. — D. Phil Thesis" (Document). Oxford: Oxford University Numerical Analysis Group. p. 208. {{cite document}}: Unknown parameter |url= ignored (help)
2. Connolley, William. Profile of Connolley at his blog Stoat, accessed 8 December 2010
3. "Dr William Connolley / Senior Scientific Officer / Climate Modeller / Physical Sciences Division". British Antarctic Survey. Retrieved 24 October 2010.
4. ^ Connolley, William M. "Sea ice concentrations in the Weddell Sea: A comparison of SSM/I, ULS, and GCM data" (PDF). Retrieved 26 October 2010.
5. Internet Archive copy of Coton Parish Website
6. The Green Party South Cambs
7. Connolley, William M. (6 December 2004). "William M. Connolley Filed under: * Contributor Bio's — william @ 6 December 2004". RealClimate. Archived from the original on 2007-08-16. Retrieved 2010-02-09.
8. Connolley, William (1 December 2007). "Goodbye to all that" – announcement of departure from RealClimate. RealClimate. Retrieved 26 October 2010.
9. Stoat Taking science by the throat... Connolley's personal blog
10. "Connolley's webpage analysing papers relevant to a modern Ice Age". Wmconnolley.org.uk. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
11. Peterson, Thomas C. (2008). "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus". Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 89 (9): 1325–1337. doi:10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
12. William Connolley (24 January 2005). "The global cooling myth". RealClimate. Retrieved 30 December 2009.
13. William M. Connolley (2005). "Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No". Retrieved 2007-12-16.
14. "I am all powerful (part 2)". Scienceblogs.com. 19 December 2009. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
15. "A child's garden of wikipedia, part I". Scienceblogs.com. 4 January 2010. Retrieved 26 October 2010.
16. Giles, Jim (15 December 2005). "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head". Nature. 438 (7070): 900–01. doi:10.1038/438900a. PMID 16355180.
17. Giles, Jim (October 5, 2006). "Misplaced Pages Rival Calls in the Experts". Nature. 443 (7111): 493. doi:10.1038/443493a. PMID 17024058.
18. ^ Schiff, Stacy (31 July 2006). "Know It All: Can Misplaced Pages Conquer Expertise?". The New Yorker. Retrieved 26 October 2010.
19. See Rosen, Larry D., Mark Carrier and Nancy A. Cheever. Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn, p. 120, Macmillan (2010) ISBN 0230614787; and Tammet, Daniel. Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind, p. 206, Simon and Schuster (2009) ISBN 1416576185; and Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, p. 43, New York: Doubleday (2007) ISBN 0385520808
20. ^ Mathieu O'Neil: "Shirky and Sanger, or the costs of crowdsourcing". Journal of Science Communication, Vol. 9, Issue 1, March 2010, International School for Advanced Studies
21. See, e.g., Forte, Andrea; Bruckman, Amy (2008). "Scaling Consensus: Increasing Decentralization in Misplaced Pages Governance". Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008): 157–157. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2008.383. and the papers cited therein
22. "William M. Connolley's page about Fourier 1827: MEMOIRE sur les temperatures du globe terrestre et des espaces planetaires". Wmconnolley.org.uk. Retrieved 2010-07-22.

External links

• Connolley's page at the British Antarctic Survey website
• Connolley's personal website

Template:Persondata

• 1964 births
• British bloggers
• Climatologists
• Living people
• People from Berkhamsted
• Alumni of St Edmund Hall, Oxford