Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

I thought I’d take a more detailed look at the claims of the recent paper entitled “Discrepancies in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians.”. The paper is discussed here on WUWT. I’m number 148 out of 386 on their list of contrarians, based on how many times I got mentioned in the media. But there are some bizarre oddities in their reckoning of media visibility.

One of their “media mentions” in my list is a hit piece on me over at PopTech. The guy who wrote it obviously hates me. I won’t link to it, it’s ugly and untrue. But this counts on their planet as media visibility. (Fools like PopTech don’t seem to realize that when they write such hit pieces, the reader naturally wants to know what the fuss is about, so they go read my work … but I digress.)

And this, of course, means that their lists are meaningless. People are always rubbishing climate skeptics by name, and since they are counting those as media mentions, their results will be wildly skewed.

Also, it seems that they do not cite most things that anyone has actually written for the web. I’ve written some 700 posts or so here on WUWT. Not one is mentioned. However, they did list three WUWT posts among my mentions … in one because I’m mentioned in the comments. Really? Only once was I ever mentioned by name in the WUWT comments???

For the other two, there’s a WUWT “Categories” aggregation page, which doesn’t mention me at all, and a “Tag” aggregation page where I’m listed as the author of one of the pieces listed … totally bizarre. I have the same visibility on literally dozens and dozens of WUWT aggregation pages.

However, it seems that if someone is mentioned in a comment to a post, it counts. So for example, Steve McIntyre wrote a post called “Willis Eschenbach on GISS Model E“. That appears on Judith Curry’s list of media publications, and she’s only mentioned in a comment.

Even more bizarrely, that same post got onto Steve McIntyre’s list of publications, but not onto my list … go figure.

And it’s stranger than that. On Steve McIntyre’s list, some 22 posts on his own blog (out of hundreds he’s written) are included, and the rest are not. Say what?

Weirder yet. On Judith Curry’s list of media mentions, there are no less than 82 citations to the Laguna Beach Independent, a local California newspaper, with headlines like “Volleyball Open Returns” and “Student Musical Rolls The Dice”. At least upon a cursory inspection, not one of the eighty-two mentions Dr. Curry.

Next oddity. Judith Curry gets two mentions for the same piece in Reason … and not only that, but she’s not mentioned in the Reason article at all. Nor would we expect her to be mentioned, it’s a piece about Ron Paul and Charlie Hebdo.

And out of all of the posts she’s written for her own blog, they list thirteen of them on her media mentions and not the others. Why not?

Since I was having so much fun, I thought I’d look at Anthony Watt’s “media visibility”. No less than seven of the mentions are by Slandering Sue over at hotwhopper … seriously, guys, that’s hardly “media visibility”. And how come I didn’t get any hotwhopper counts, she’s as vile to me as she is to Anthony …

Anthony also got two mentions over at Climate Audit … I greatly doubt that that is as many times as he is mentioned. Hang on, let me take a look … OK, a Google search for “site:climateaudit.org ‘anthony watts’” brings up no less than 813 hits …

He also gets three and only three hits over at Judith Curry’s blog … why only three? You tell me.

Next, Anthony gets exactly eight hits here at Watts Up With That … why eight? No idea. Why those eight? Not a clue.

He did, however, get eleven hits at Amazon Japan, Italy, Netherlands, UK, Australia, Spain, and France for being listed as the lead author on “Climate Change: The Facts 2017”.

And he got twelve hits at DeSmogBlog … no comment.

Then there are 51 links to examiner.com, all of which simply bounce you to axs.com … all the links are dead.

As you might imagine, with the thousands of claimed media links for the 386 “contrarians”, I’ve only had the time (and the stomach) to look at a few of them … and in that few, the errors and bizarre choices are legion.

My conclusion? Like far too much climate “science”, this is lousy, sloppy, extremely poor scholarship … no wonder they’re trying to silence their scientific opposition.

In closing, let me note three tweets from Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. regarding the piece of bumpf in question. In the first one, he objects strongly and reasonably to being lumped in with the “contrarians”

In the second one, he points out that the purpose of the paper is simple censorship:

And in the final one, he tells us what happened when he protested to Nature about the matter:

You’ve got to love the irony … in response to a reasonable, professional, valid, and 100% true complaint about the study, rather than deal with the actual issue, they just erase the entire Supplementary Information file, which contains (contained) a host of things showing that they are totally incompetent.

Good thing I downloaded the Supplementary Information file containing the links I referred to above before these latest scientific Stalinists simply disappeared the offending facts …

And so we end with the most outré situation of all—they’re so far into censorship that they’re even censoring themselves … 

Ouroborous would be proud. The rest of us … not so much.

Best to all,

w.