Saturday 16 May 2015

The bitter irony of Paul Homewood

Who's Paul Homewood? It doesn't really matter, he's just another tedious climate change denialist, but the irony of this amused me.

This Homewood chap has a blog, called Not a Lot of People Know That, and via some route I stumbled upon his post claiming to reveal "What The BBC Does Not Want You To Know About Arctic Ice". Don't worry, I have 'no followed' both of those links, I don't want to add the pollution of Google.

Considering that Homewood wasn't seeing the full picture, and was being rather simplistic, I posted a comment. I don't normally bother with denialists, but sometimes I get bored. Anyway, I screen grabbed the comment posting, just in case.


It is now 48 hours after that was posted, and it still hasn't been let through moderation. Yet, since I posted the comment he has published three blog posts and published about 35 comments. He may come out with the bloggers equivalent of 'the dog ate my homework', and claim the comment was lost, but the comment was posted through to his moderation queue, as the above image shows. Occams Razor suggests he didn't like someone calling out his rather selective interpretation of the evidence and binned the comment. Which makes him guilty of what he falsely accuses the BBC; refusing to admit evidence that doesn't support his prejudice. It is interesting how people readily read their own behaviours into others...

Lest it be thought that it is only denialists that play such dishonest games, the alarmists do it too. Back in 2012 I posted a comment at the Arctic Methane Emergency Group's blog. I'm with Stoat in considering them the AMEG Bozos. I started off by attacking the use of volume loss trend extrapolation, that was as far as I got, I posted the further reply three times but those replies were not published: Thus giving the impression I had been awed by Sam Carana's piss poor reply and had desisted.

There is a connection between these two extremes in the debate over anthropogenic global warming: People who think their cause is so important that it over-rides the evidence. Denialist, Alarmist, they are both wrong, no cause is above being subjected to critical analysis.

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Note: In view of the fact that I have recently asked someone not to post on this blog it may appear I am operating a double standard. But I have let that person have their say before explaining why they are not welcome (trolling) and asking them to leave (to their credit I only had to delete one further comment from them - the first comment I have deleted for some time).

6 comments:

Chris Reynolds said...

Jim,

Thanks, the errant L has been removed. The only Homewood I've ever known was a Holmewood.

I don't normally bother, if someone doesn't post reasonable and polite comments at a blog where I comment for the first time - so what! But the irony here gave me a chuckle and kept me checking up on it.

Twitter? Sorry I don't do it. I don't get the attraction and haven't even looked at Twitter or Facebook.

Jim Hunt said...

Chris,

Twitter can be used as a way of receiving news hotter off the presses than via more usual channels.

Getting into "TwitStorms" is not generally a productive use of one's time. However in this case (once again!) I couldn't resist the temptation. An article by Richard Betts at WUWT!

I'll let you know when my blog post(s) are published.

Kevin O'Neill said...

Homewood wrote a piece of drivel titled "GWPF Set Up Inquiry Into Temperature Adjustments" back on 25 April. I commented on it and it sat in moderation for a few hours then disappeared completely (surprise). As I wrote over at Nick Stoke's moyhu at the time, "Ironic that the name of the blog is "Not A Lot of People Know That" When it comes to accuracy in describing the global temperature record Homewood wants to keep it that way - at least for his readers :)"

Chris Reynolds said...

Stoat's report of comment fakery at WUWT prompted me to check:
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2015/05/29/comment-fakery-at-wuwt/

So on checking, my blog post seems to have prompted Homewood to let the comment through, after he's buried his post under a lot more blog activity...

tinsol said...

Maybe people just think your comments are the equivialent of graffiti and dont add anything relevant to the discission.

Chris Reynolds said...

Tinsol. Yawn.