Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tony Sidaway (talk | contribs) at 13:58, 9 January 2010 (→Global warming: {{subst:uw-probation|Global warming|Misplaced Pages:General sanctions/Climate change probation}} --~~~~ (and clean up newcomer Malcolm's formatting)). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Hello - Historian of Science!

I'm finding the article at Global Warming disturbing. Every time I've visited there it's to answer specific points of "dissent" that I've seen in the popular press. The first was Dr Will Happer, a well-published scientist who was (so he claims) victimised in 1993 for skepticism and is still very un-convinced. Another example concerned "soot" which I saw was blamed for melting glaciers in the Himalayas. (Reference to soot was eventually added, but there seemed to be a totally unnecessary battle over it).

Then I saw a very popular and really very well regarded British presenter (Tony Robinson) do a documentary called "Catastrophe: Snowball Earth" in which he treats this theory (the earth more or less solidly iced c. 600 million years ago) as accepted and makes the rather startling hypothesis that this is what kicked off the Cambrian explosion (ie virtually every modern form of life). Without Snowball Earth, according to Robinson (on our Channel 4, also very well regarded, never known for conspiracy theories or other nonsense), life on earth would have been stuck at green slime. (I've double-checked this to confirm that the program does indeed say exactly what I thought I'd heard and made these edits to illustrate what I found).

On seeing this, I had to know more about it, so I dialed in trusty ol' Misplaced Pages. What do I find? Snowball Earth didn't happen geologically speaking and couldn't have happened, since there'd be no way out (albedo effect - this objection is dealt with by reference, I think, to the super-eruptions that formed enormous areas of lava we know about in, I think, India and Siberia).

These two examples strongly indicate serious editing problems over the whole topic, Global Warming "must" be true, no dissent allowed, while "Snowball Earth" is part of the detritus of failed theories that the world is littered with, despite the fact that the premier accessible source on it in the UK, anyway, says that it's true and not even contentious.

Then we discover that one of the encyclopedia's top AGW experts (I can personally vouch for him being an expert, at least on some topics) has been de-syssoped and named in the press as a POV-pusher. As are some of his acolytes, see my TalkPage - without the feedback I've had I might have abandoned this whole effort to improve articles.

I don't understand a lot of what's going on, but when I'm told that policy on Global Warming is different from what it is anywhere else, but I'm not allowed to know what it is (or even ask!), then, as BozMo might have said, it looks like a duck. MalcolmMcDonald (talk) 09:45, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

thanks _ I will be in touch no doubt! HistorianofScience (talk) 19:38, 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 13:58, 9 January 2010 (UTC)