Question:
What's your reaction to Monckton and Watts resorting to censorship?
Dana1981
2010-07-14 22:14:31 UTC
Dr. John Abraham put a presentation of a thorough debunking of one of Monckton's presentations on his university website. Monckton's response is to ask Anthony Watts' readers to harass the university president until he takes the presentation off their website (I'm not going to link the page because I don't condone this kind of behavior).

This isn't the first time Watts has promoted censorship either. Watts once demanded that YouTube take one of Peter Sinclair's 'Climate Crock of the Week' videos down, making a ridiculous claim about copyright laws violations. YouTube quickly reinstated the video after autoscrubbing it based on Watts' accusations.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/07/29/the-video-that-anthony-watts-does-not-want-you-to-see-the-sinclair-climate-denial-crock-of-the-week/

What's your reaction to Monckton and Watts resorting to censorship?
Fifteen answers:
Adrian B
2010-07-14 23:09:57 UTC
Im not surprised in the slightest. I sat through Abrahams presentation during a lunch break last week, at it is a conclusive debunking of Monktons talk, it paints him to be the fool he is. Same goes for the climate crock of the week, cracking set of videos.



Monktons response to Abrahams video was borderline embarrassing, amounting to nothing more than a personal attack. It clearly illustrates why one is a scientist and one is most certainly not!



Bottom line, when you run out of reasonable arguments i guess you try and silence your opponent. Better then admitting you are wrong i guess, but deplorable behavior for sure.
Ottawa Mike
2010-07-15 07:10:38 UTC
I am not a fan of censorship. That's one reason I do not trust the website RealClimate.org. It's also why I don't trust wikipedia (for climate information) because of the incessant work of William Connolly and his editing job there.



I have no idea about the Abraham presentation and his university being harrassed. I would not be in agreement with that kind of tactic. And I'm still not clear what Watts was getting on about that YouTube video.



BTW, you asked the same thing a year ago: https://answersrip.com/question/index?qid=20090801100833AA2IxO9



Didn't Michael Mann threaten to sue against the "Hide the Decline" video? I believe that threat was enough for those funny Minnesoteans to take the video down (for a while I guess?).



Edit: Eric c has the best answer. Read Abraham's slides, read Monckton's response and decide for yourself. And since when is asking somebody to take down falsehoods (or truths for that matter) considered censorship?
anonymous
2016-11-07 11:08:36 UTC
permit's see. a million. 'ninety 8 became into an surprisingly heat three hundred and sixty 5 days, and 15 years is extremely short in terms of climate. "No statistically important warming" =/= "No warming". The greater years you upload, the better the statistical importance. 2. international floor temperature is a lot from the only warming going on. The oceans carry so lots greater warmth than the ambience. 3. lots of the money being spent on "international warming learn" is somewhat learn into, properly, what our atmosphere is doing, how climate systems artwork, etc. learn we would desire to be doing *in spite of if or not* there became into international warming, because of the fact the greater all of us be attentive to approximately our climate, the greater we are able to assume issues, and consequently make sensible judgements re: climate. Assuming, of direction, which you're quoting that assertion properly, which... i don't unavoidably take as a given.
anonymous
2010-07-15 07:37:59 UTC
Not surprised. They're using the old tactic of "if you can't beat them with facts, try to intimidate them with litigation."



Monckton is quickly becoming synonymous with quackery. The fact that the GOP uses Monckton as a "climate expert" makes them look like complete buffoons.
bucket22
2010-07-15 11:14:55 UTC
Here is Abraham's presentation.



http://www.stthomas.edu/engineering/jpabraham/



Here is Monckton's shrill response:



http://www.webcitation.org/5rEP8Y4VI



Eric c's assertion is the polar opposite of reality. Abraham's presentation attacked the argument intellectually. Note Monckton's response:



1. "John Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at a Bible college in Minnesota"



Note the attempt to belittle his credentials.



2. "So unusual is this attempt actually to meet us in argument, and so venomously ad hominem are Abraham’s artful puerilities, delivered in a nasal and irritatingly matey tone (at least we are spared his face — he looks like an overcooked prawn), that climate-extremist bloggers everywhere have circulated them and praised them to the warming skies."



That's the most thick irony I've ever seen.



3. "As usual though, none of these silly bloggers make any attempt actually to verify whether what poor Abraham is saying actually has the slightest contact with reality.



One such is George Monbiot, a scribbler for the the Guardian, the British Marxist daily propaganda sheet. What is Monbiot’s qualification to write about climate science? Well, like Abraham, he’s a “scientist.” Trouble is, he’s a fourteenth-rate zoologist, so his specialty has even less to do with climate science than that of Abraham, who nevertheless presents himself as having scientific knowledge relevant “in the area.”"



Sorry, deniers. Monckton is a clown. That's not an ad hominen. That's a fact based on observation of his rhetoric.
Eric c
2010-07-15 05:08:40 UTC
Watts has posted links to both John Abraham's attack on Monckton and Monckton's reply and has asked people to decide for themselves who is right. Which is the fairest thing to do, and I urge people to read both articles to decided for themselves who is right.



http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/14/condensed-monckton/



The article that Abraham wrote is not worthy of to be up in an Academic institution's web site. In the academic world when you disagree with someone you respond to them intellectually. You do not trash the person who wrote the article. You do not misrepresent what someone said in an effort to tarnish a person's reputation.
BGS
2010-07-15 03:54:20 UTC
Monckton is well known for using tactics based on fear and intimidation (I'll get all my friends to harass your employer, threaten you with a law suit, claim that you owe me (or a charity of my choice) thousands of pounds, I'll send a complaint to the government regulator about you, and so on). Since not a single one of these threats have ever resulted in a significantly negative outcome for the object of his threat, I think we can safely label him as an alarmist, since he pursues his objectives by misusing inflated fears of unlikely outcomes.
Trevor
2010-07-14 22:45:56 UTC
Hi Dana,



My reaction – predictable and inevitable.



Monckton’s done it before with Wikipedia and probably other sites as well. He doesn’t like it when people make him look a fool but he’s more than happy to use selective editing of his own videos in an attempt to make others look stupid.



As for Watts, he’s nothing more than a zealot obsessed with distorting facts and using any number of underhand techniques for his own self-gratification. This has manifested itself time and time again in the increasingly bizarre lies and claims he and his supporters have made through his website.



The surface stations myth has been debunked countless times over and yet Watts can’t seem to drop the issue and admit he’s on a hiding to nothing.



I watched the video you linked to and it was interesting that, using Watts own findings, he has inadvertently confirmed the validity of the US surface station record and shot himself in the foot in the process.



I guess Watts is playing into the hands of the deniers. He knows they’ll ignore everything that doesn’t fit with their distorted view of reality and hence he completely forgets to mention that for the last 3 decades we have been using satellites to monitor temperatures or that the US record is consistent with all the others around the world.
Blown away
2010-07-15 07:16:12 UTC
Shocking! I always looked up to Monckton and Watts.
Rob
2010-07-15 07:33:43 UTC
That's rich. You're accusing Watts of trying to censor something that he actually links to, calls attention to, and drives traffic towards, while openly refusing to link to him?



Watts must really be an idiot to try to censor something that way. You should set him straight.
anonymous
2010-07-15 06:26:38 UTC
It is more open and honest behavior than we are used to.



And in a way they are trying to censor themselves - something all deniers could take a lesson from.
anonymous
2010-07-14 23:55:58 UTC
When emails that supposedly hinted that climatologists allegedly hid dada, all hell broke loose. Yet when Lard Mockery and Anthony Whatsit hide information, these same people are silent. Apparently, hiding data is OK as long as it leads to the air being filled with a big cloud of black smoke
andy
2010-07-15 04:04:24 UTC
It is no worse then the leading scientific journals doing their own censorship by selecting what gets published. The biggest thing for you though, is that it is the climate scientists that are getting attacked. It seems like you tend to be extremely one sided and very biased.
?
2010-07-15 02:58:58 UTC
Interesting that Dana is complaining of censorship when he is well known for blocking yahoo members that post views that he doesn't like. Typical AGW hypocrite.

But then I guess a professional AGW organization would do that.
Money
2010-07-15 04:34:39 UTC
ROBERT MUGABE IS THE MAN


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
Loading...