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In de voormalige Sovjet-Unie werd de geschiedenis voortdurend herschreven in het licht van wat de communistische partij op een gegeven moment noodzakelijk achtte. In het vrije westen verzuchtte men vaak: Wat zal de toekomst ons brengen? In de Sovjet-Unie vroeg men zich echter jaarlijks angstig af wat het verleden weer zou brengen. Partijleden die in ongenade waren geraakt werden routinematig op foto’s weggeretoucheerd (na al of niet te zijn geliquideerd).

stalin1Een vergelijkbare praktijk doet zich voor in de klimatologie, waar een klein, fanatiek groepje aanhangers van de menselijke broeikashypothese (AGW = ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’) heeft getracht de ‘consensus’ dat de aarde zou afkoelen, die er in rond de jaren zestig en zeventig onder klimatologen heerste, te verdoezelen.

Onlangs gaf Pierre Gosselin podium aan Kenneth Richard die de literatuur van die periode bestudeerde. Deze kwam tot de conclusie dat het grootste deel van de klimatologen van die tijd wel degelijk van mening was dat er sprake was van afkoeling.

Onder de titel, ‘Massive Cover-up Exposed: 285 Papers From 1960s-’80s Reveal Robust Global Cooling Scientific ‘Consensus’’, schreef hij onder meer:

Beginning in 2003, software engineer William Connolley [zie afbeelding, hier en hier] quietly removed the highly inconvenient references to the global cooling scare of the 1970s from Wikipedia, the world’s most influential and accessed informational source.

It had to be done.  Too many skeptics were (correctly) pointing out that the scientific “consensus” during the 1960s and 1970s was that the Earth had been cooling for decades, and that nascent theorizing regarding the potential for a CO2-induced global warming were still questionable and uncertain.

Not only did Connolley — a co-founder (along with Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt) of the realclimate.com blog — successfully remove (or rewrite) the history of the 1970s global cooling scare from the Wikipedia record, he also erased (or rewrote) references to the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age so as to help create the impression that the paleoclimate is shaped like Mann’s hockey stick graph, with unprecedented and dangerous 20th/21st century warmth.

A 2009 investigative report from UK’s Telegraph detailed the extent of dictatorial-like powers Connolley possessed at Wikipedia, allowing him to remove inconvenient scientific information that didn’t conform to his point of view.

“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.“

After eviscerating references to 1970s global cooling scare and the warmer-than-now Medieval Warm Period from Wikipedia, and after personally rewriting the Wikipedia commentaries on the greenhouse effect to impute a central, dominant role for CO2, Connolley went on to team up with two other authors to publish a “consensus” manifesto in 2008 that claimed to expose the 1970s global cooling scare as a myth, as something that never really happened.

Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck (2008, hereafter PCF08) published “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, hoping to quash once and for all  the perception that there were scientists in the 1960s and 1970s who agreed the Earth was cooling (and may continue to do so), or that CO2 did not play a dominant role in climate change. …

Na een beschrijving van de belangrijkste conclusies van PCF08, concludeerde Kenneth Richard dat deze het resultaat zijn van een tendentieuze methodiek, toegepast bij de indeling van de betrokken literatuur. Zijn eigen inventarisatie leidde tot een ander resultaat.

As will be shown here, the claim that there were only 7 publications from that era disagreeing with the presupposed CO2-warming “consensus” is preposterous. Because when including the papers from the 1960s and 1970s that indicated the globe had cooled (by -0.3° C between the 1940s and ’70s), that this cooling was concerning (leading to extreme weather, drought, depressed crop yields, etc.), and/or that CO2’s climate influence was questionable to negligible, a conservative estimate for the number of scientific publications that did not agree with the alleged CO2-warming “consensus” was 220 papers for the 1965-’79 period, not 7.  If including papers published between 1960 and 1989, the “non-consensus” or “cooling” papers reaches 285.

In links, die deel uitmaken van de ‘posting’ worden deze alle weergegeven. Daarnaast presenteert de auteur fragmenten uit een selectie van 35 van deze artikelen.

Lees verder hier.

En dan te bedenken dat Wikipedia voor velen de bron bij uitstek is om zich te oriënteren op het gebied van klimaat! De lezers zijn en worden door eenzijdige, misleidende informatie om de tuin geleid. Dat is een trieste zaak.

Voor mijn eerdere bijdragen over klimaat en aanverwante zaken zie hier, hier, hier, hier en hier.