Sunday 8 September 2013

There is a consensus

There is now consensus that the Sun has now entered a quiet period.
Those are the first words in David Archibald's piece at WUWT entitled The Climate-Grain Production Relationship Quantified.  Since it has long been WUWT policy that science does not proceed by consensus, to have allowed that sentence through suggests either it is now WUWT policy to accept that science produces a consensus when the evidence is sufficient, or that Anthony Watts (or someone else in the moderating team) didn't read what was being submitted.

I reckon it's the latter.

This is despite the following on the Submit A Story link on Watts's front page:

6. All submissions are reviewed. Generally 10% or less are accepted, so do your best! We give credit to the story submitter, and bonus points are given for people who post under their full names. Stories submitted may or may not be published at the discretion of the editorial stuff. Those that are published may be edited for size, accuracy, content etc. and become to property of WUWT.

Not my bold but Willard's.  Note that last sentence: "may be edited".  I think we can read that to mean rarely even read before being put up on line.

How do we know this?

Because there have been a number of totally preposterous stories put up by Watts and/or his team which don't appear to have had the slightest piece of editing, and that includes being read.  You want some examples, I got some examples (search for them yourself because I am not giving WUWT more traffic):

Monckton's "satire" The Bull And The Borg that I referred to the other day.
Chemtrails Or Contrails: Another Alarmist Issue Without Scientific Context by Dr Tim Ball that conveniently forgets that it is more science denial to believe in chemtrails and is not the normal "alarmist" story
Claim: Post-Glacial Rebound Is A Myth which was so bad even Willard was forced to recognise it.
Sticking It To The Mann, another of Monckton's optimistic but failed attempts to kill the evil monster that is...No, wait.  Failed to land a punch on Michael Mann because it is science that is the arbiter, not Monckton's miserable veiled ad hominems.

And that's just a sample of the last couple of weeks.  Perhaps Willard is so busy minding the WeatherShop (569 daily pages views) to mind the shop.  Or perhaps he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and can't really tell the difference between wheat and chaff. 

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