ClimateGate: Wikipedia’s Role

Nowadays, when you go to Wikipedia, you see an appeal from Jim Wales for money.  Here’s why you shouldn’t give them a dime.

One of the controversial issues with the AGW crowd is the Medieval Warm Period.  From approximately 1000-1400 AD (the exact years are open to debate), the Earth’s climate warmed considerably, perhaps even warmer than today.  Greenland actually earned it’s name during this time, and some of the best wine was made in what is today the UK (The grapes won’t grow there, even now).  Populations rose, crops were plentiful, and the life span increased.  The warm period was followed by what is known as the Little Ice Age, a period of great cold, including a “year without a summer, “ in 1816.

The Medieval Warm Period poses a problem for the AGW crowd.  There was radical warming, to perhaps a degree greater than (allegedly) seen now, but there were none of the following:

1. Coal or petroleum in any significant use.
2. Cars, or worse, SUVs
3. Power plants of any kind
4. Aircraft
5. Large, power-hungry flat screens
6. Raging droughts
7. Horrific hurricanes
8. Continents being swallowed by the seas
9. Mass hysteria, starvation, or other related death

Hence, since this does not at all go along with AGW theory that humans cause the earth to warm, and that the Earth being warmer is a tragedy, history must be re-written.  This is where the ClimateGate scientists come in.  Here are excerpts from a very comprehensive article on the subject.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”

Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating — they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma.

But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming.

Instead, the band members turned to their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website called RealClimate.org. “The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are doing the rounds” in aid of “combating dis-information,” one email explained, referring to criticisms of the hockey stick and anything else suggesting that temperatures today were not the hottest in recorded time. One person in the nine-member Realclimate.org team — U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley — would take on particularly crucial duties.

Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.

So, this is so typical of the left.  When history is inconvenient, they try to make it disappear down the memory hole.  It’s not so easy now, is it?  Especially since we are around to archive things and are able to write about them.  It’s just another example of the complete fraud that is AGW, and the unethical efforts of it’s supporters.

This is also a result of the blessing, and curse, that are the operations of Wikipedia. Since the MediaWiki software is available to anyone (I could create a wiki here in 20 minutes if I so wanted), and anyone can contribute,  it’s pretty simple to create an online encyclopedia.  As such, Wikipedia has grown to be the largest on-line encyclopedia.  There are articles on just about anything available, and millions of people use it on a regular basis.

But therein lies the curse.  Fraud can be rampant.  I could go on Wikipedia tomorrow, and make subtle changes to articles, or wholesale re-writes.  I wouldn’t even have to know anything about the topic at hand! I could re-write just about anything, but not on the Medieval Warm Period.  That article, at the time of this writing, is locked…by a man that is allied with the ClimateGate scientists.

I think I’m done using Wikipedia.