Dear
Bob,
Today Lawrence Solomon, author of The
Deniers, has a great piece on National Review Online exposing how the editors of Wikipedia (supposedly the
"people's encyclopedia") have become part of the global warming propaganda machine.
And it's not just on Global Warming that Wikipedia pushes the left-wing line. As Larry says "Wikipedia is the
people's
encyclopedia only if the people are not conservatives."
We reprint Larry's NRO piece in full below.
Our
petition to urge John McCain not to get sucked into the
myth of Global Warming continues to gather steam. Next week we will do
our biggest mailing yet in our push to get 100,000 names by mid-July
and half
a million before the GOP convention.
Meanwhile GreenWatchAmerica will continue
to update you on what is now clearly the Left's favorite weapon for
pushing its
agenda: Environmentalism twisted into an excuse for seizing control of
more and more of the economy, and forcing Americans to live out the
Left's dream of the good life, even if it strikes us as a nightmare.
As some of you know, I got motivated on the global warming issue by the experience of editing and publishing
Larry
Solomon's book, which demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt, not only that "the science is not settled", but that the most
eminent climate scientists also tend to be the most skeptical of Global Warming hysteria.
As book publishers we can only do so much. GreenWatchAmerica gives us a vehicle to pitch into the fight in a
much more
timely way.
Richard Vigilante
Publisher
Wikipropaganda
By Lawrence Solomon
Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to
get away with their claim of a "scientific consensus" confirming their
doomsday
view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning
example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works.
As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia is now the most widely
used and influential reference source on the Internet and therefore in
the
world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month.
In theory Wikipedia is a "people's encyclopedia" written and edited by
the people who read it -- anyone with an Internet connection. So on
controversial topics, one might expect to see a broad range of opinion.
Not on global warming. On global warming we get consensus, Gore-style:
a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit.
I first noticed this when I entered a correction to a Wikipedia page on
the work of Naomi Oreskes, author of the now-infamous paper, published
in the
prestigious journal Science, claiming to have exhaustively reviewed the
scientific literature and found not one single article dissenting from
the
alarmist version of global warming.
Of course Oreskes's conclusions were absurd, and have been widely
ridiculed. I myself have profiled dozens of truly world-eminent
scientists whose
work casts doubt on the Gore-U.N. version of global warming. Following
the references in my book The Deniers, one can find hundreds of
refereed
papers
that cast doubt on some aspect of the Gore/U.N. case, and that only
scratches the surface.
Naturally I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes's work had
been vindicated and that, for instance, one of her most thorough
critics,
British scientist and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been
discredited but had grudgingly conceded Oreskes was right.
I checked with Peiser, who said he had done no such thing. I then
corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.
Peiser wrote back saying he couldn't see my corrections on the
Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that
the changes had
been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other
changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.
Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim
Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia "editor" who seems to devote a large
part
of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the
assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear
the
arguments of skeptics.
I soon found others who had the same experience: They would try to
squeeze in any dissent, or even correct an obvious slander against a
dissenter,
and Petersen or some other censor would immediately snuff them out.
Now Petersen is merely a Wikipedia "editor." Holding the far more
prestigious and powerful position of "administrator" is William
Connolley.
Connolley is a software engineer and sometime climatologist (he used to
hold a job in the British Antarctic Survey), as well as a serial (but
so far
unsuccessful) office seeker for England's Green party.
And yet by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless
enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world's most influential
person in
the global warming debate after Al Gore. Connolley routinely uses his
editorial clout to tear down scientists of great accomplishment such as
Fred
Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite
Service and a scientist with dazzling achievements. Under Connolley's
supervision,
Wikipedia relentlessly smears Singer as a kook who believes in Martians
and a hack in the pay of the oil industry.
Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, and it
has a code of civility. Those rules and codes don't apply to Connolley,
or to
those he favors.
"Peisers crap shouldn't be in here," Connolley wrote several weeks ago,
in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an "edit war," as they're
called.
Trumping Wikipedia's stated rules, Connelly used his authority to
ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see. Any
reference,
anywhere among Wikipedia's 2.5 million English-language pages, that
casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to
Connolley's
bidding.
Nor are Wikipedia's ideological biases limited to global warming. As an
environmentalist I find myself with allies and adversaries on both
sides of
the aisle, Left and Right. But there is no doubt where Wikipedia
stands: firmly on the Left. Try out Wikipedia's entries on say, Roe v.
Wade or
Intelligent Design, and you will see that Wikipedia is the people's
encyclopedia only if those people are not conservatives.
-- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.
If you are interested in Larry's book, The Deniers is available at
RichardVigilanteBooks.com, or at Amazon or Barnes and Noble online. Eventually we will have it up on the Green
Watch America site too.
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