Climate Deniers Banned from Reddit

Looks like Reddit was having trouble controlling the Climate Science discussions. The link is a long message, justifying the action, from one of the moderators.

Reddit?s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don?t all newspapers do the same? | Grist
Instead of the reasoned and civil conversations that arise in most threads, when it came to climate change the comment sections became a battleground. Rather than making thoughtful arguments based on peer-reviewed science to refute man-made climate change, contrarians immediately resorted to aggressive behaviors. On one side, deniers accused any of the hard-working scientists whose research supported and furthered our understanding of man-made climate change of being bought by “Big Green.” On the other side, deniers were frequently insulted and accused of being paid to comment on reddit by “Big Oil.”

After some time interacting with the regular denier posters, it became clear that they could not or would not improve their demeanor. These problematic users were not the common “internet trolls” looking to have a little fun upsetting people. Such users are practically the norm on reddit. These people were true believers, blind to the fact that their arguments were hopelessly flawed, the result of cherry-picked data and conspiratorial thinking. They had no idea that the smart-sounding talking points from their preferred climate blog were, even to a casual climate science observer, plainly wrong. They were completely enamored by the emotionally charged and rhetoric-based arguments of pundits on talk radio and Fox News.

Media_Truth said:

Looks like Reddit was having trouble controlling the Climate Science discussions. The link is a long message, justifying the action, from one of the moderators.

Reddit?s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don?t all newspapers do the same? | Grist
Instead of the reasoned and civil conversations that arise in most threads, when it came to climate change the comment sections became a battleground. Rather than making thoughtful arguments based on peer-reviewed science to refute man-made climate change, contrarians immediately resorted to aggressive behaviors. On one side, deniers accused any of the hard-working scientists whose research supported and furthered our understanding of man-made climate change of being bought by “Big Green.” On the other side, deniers were frequently insulted and accused of being paid to comment on reddit by “Big Oil.”

After some time interacting with the regular denier posters, it became clear that they could not or would not improve their demeanor. These problematic users were not the common “internet trolls” looking to have a little fun upsetting people. Such users are practically the norm on reddit. These people were true believers, blind to the fact that their arguments were hopelessly flawed, the result of cherry-picked data and conspiratorial thinking. They had no idea that the smart-sounding talking points from their preferred climate blog were, even to a casual climate science observer, plainly wrong. They were completely enamored by the emotionally charged and rhetoric-based arguments of pundits on talk radio and Fox News.

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The fact that REDDIT uses the term "Deniers" speaks volumes

Steve Case said:

The fact that REDDIT uses the term "Deniers" speaks volumes

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I've had some of my comments deleted on Reddit after some in the forum began calling me names. Lost argument = name calling and deleted posts.

Media_Truth said:

Looks like Reddit was having trouble controlling the Climate Science discussions. The link is a long message, justifying the action, from one of the moderators.

Reddit?s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don?t all newspapers do the same? | Grist
Instead of the reasoned and civil conversations that arise in most threads, when it came to climate change the comment sections became a battleground. Rather than making thoughtful arguments based on peer-reviewed science to refute man-made climate change, contrarians immediately resorted to aggressive behaviors. On one side, deniers accused any of the hard-working scientists whose research supported and furthered our understanding of man-made climate change of being bought by “Big Green.” On the other side, deniers were frequently insulted and accused of being paid to comment on reddit by “Big Oil.”

After some time interacting with the regular denier posters, it became clear that they could not or would not improve their demeanor. These problematic users were not the common “internet trolls” looking to have a little fun upsetting people. Such users are practically the norm on reddit. These people were true believers, blind to the fact that their arguments were hopelessly flawed, the result of cherry-picked data and conspiratorial thinking. They had no idea that the smart-sounding talking points from their preferred climate blog were, even to a casual climate science observer, plainly wrong. They were completely enamored by the emotionally charged and rhetoric-based arguments of pundits on talk radio and Fox News.

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Well, that shows their bias.

I don't use Reddit. I am also an environmentalist, having grown up in the era of "tree huggers" and even supported purchasing land in Brazil to prevent mass deforestation.

I've lived long enough, and traveled far enough to note the seasons have undergone some serious changes, and I am not a climate denier.

But I found this excerpt interesting:

After some time interacting with the regular denier posters, it became clear that they could not or would not improve their demeanor. These problematic users were not the common “internet trolls” looking to have a little fun upsetting people. Such users are practically the norm on reddit. These people were true believers, blind to the fact that their arguments were hopelessly flawed, the result of cherry-picked data and conspiratorial thinking.*They had no idea that the smart-sounding talking points from their preferred climate blog were, even to a casual climate science observer, plainly wrong. They were completely enamored by the emotionally charged and rhetoric-based arguments of pundits on talk radio and Fox News.

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Switch the argument to the Trump election and current Presidency, change Talk Radio to NYT/WaPo and Fox News to CNN...and you have a description of half the people who cry for collusion, impeachment, etc. in this Forum.

I am not surprised at this effort at censorship. Leftist's support free expression; as long as it is expression they agree with. They simply label any expression they don't agree with as "hate speech," which justifies censorship.

IMO, if the Pro-Change arguments are sound, then there should be no need to ban people who disagree. Simply destroy their arguments with logic and evidence, then ignore them if they don't respond in the same fashion.

I'd ban the flat-Earthers, too.

A privately run sub-reddit doesn't have to cater to nonsensical reality deniers.

I'm always against freedom of speech, and not being a reddit user I'd have to see that subforum and the related actions for myself.

But after reading the article, the article title seems hyperbolic. It seems 6 users were banned due to their own hyperbolic and disruptive actions, since the science forum runs under special actions due to it being a peer review community.

It's hard to judge what I have not seen, but in a peer review community the mods would have leeway to moderate those repeatedly not working within the forum parameters. And regardless, mods have the right to moderate disruptive behaviour.

While I'm tentatively siding more-so with the mods if forced to pick a side, as difficult as that is with so little information available to me, I am very concerned with those times when science takes a paradigmatic shift. Times like the jump from Newton's classic mechanics to quantum mechanics, and Einsteins jump to relativity and curved space and time.

We need to have a space within the scientific community to discuss ideas that cause paradigm shifts in thinking, because they do indeed occur and the blow-out the prevailing paradigm despite its previous peer reviewed data.

Captain Adverse said:

I don't use Reddit. I am also an environmentalist, having grown up in the era of "tree huggers" and even supported purchasing land in Brazil to prevent mass deforestation.

I've lived long enough, and traveled far enough to note the seasons have undergone some serious changes, and I am not a climate denier.

But I found this excerpt interesting:



Switch the argument to the Trump election and current Presidency, change Talk Radio to NYT/WaPo and Fox News to CNN...and you have a description of half the people who cry for collusion, impeachment, etc. in this Forum.

I am not surprised at this effort at censorship. Leftist's support free expression; as long as it is expression they agree with. They simply label any expression they don't agree with as "hate speech," which justifies censorship.

IMO, if the Pro-Change arguments are sound, then there should be no need to ban people who disagree. Simply destroy their arguments with logic and evidence, then ignore them if they don't respond in the same fashion.

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I agree with the bolded.

Unless of course those posters are disruptive. but then that would seem to be a general moderation issue. Which may indeed be what occurred here. We don't know, but the article title strikes me as a bit hyperbolic, compared to the article content.

Mr Person said:

I'd ban the flat-Earthers, too.

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It is actually the man-made climate change crowd, at least the extremists in their ranks, who are the flat earthers. They simply do not want to hear opposing views or face honest peer review.

ObamacareFail said:

It is actually the man-made climate change crowd, at least the extremists in their ranks, who are the flat earthers. They simply do not want to hear opposing views or face honest peer review.

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My cousin is an obnoxious Flat-Earther. Sometimes that's all he'll talk about, unless you bring up Climate Change. And then he is an adamant denier (scientific collusion, perpetual energy, etc).

ObamacareFail said:

It is actually the man-made climate change crowd, at least the extremists in their ranks, who are the flat earthers. ...

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You may be literally correct. A Google search on "Are climate
models run on a flat map?" turns up this page
https://scied.ucar.edu/longcontent/climate-modeling
with this illustration:



Sure looks like a flat map to me and a search of the site for
"global, globe or curved" didn't find much and a quick read
through didn't lead me to believe the model is working off a
virtual globe. Well maybe it is, and it should be, but it sure
didn't say so and one does wonder about these things.

Media_Truth said:

My cousin is an obnoxious Flat-Earther. Sometimes that's all he'll talk about, unless you bring up Climate Change. And then he is an adamant denier (scientific collusion, perpetual energy, etc).

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So you have a cousin who actually believes the earth is flat?

Steve Case said:

The fact that REDDIT uses the term "Deniers" speaks volumes

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They were supporters?

Steve Case said:

So you have a cousin who actually believes the earth is flat?

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Cousin, lover, whatever.

Media_Truth said:

My cousin is an obnoxious Flat-Earther. Sometimes that's all he'll talk about, unless you bring up Climate Change. And then he is an adamant denier (scientific collusion, perpetual energy, etc).

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I think everyone should have a healthy dose of skepticism in regards to man-made climate change. It is just unproven theory. It is not objective to refer to anyone as a denier. I personally do not buy into man-made climate change without positive proof which I have not yet seen. and we learned from the IPCC email leaks that the claimed peer review on the side advocating man-made climate change is a joke. Any objective advocate of the theory that climate change is brought on by man should not fear opposing views or honest peer review. If one has to resort to calling anyone who does not believe in the concept of man-made climate change a "flat earther, then one has no real confidence in his or her own argument. Most of the actual testing involved in the man-made theory involves very small scale experiments and dubious computer models. Similar computer models predicted a nuclear winter scenario in the middle east when Saddam Hussein had the Kuwaiti oil wells torched. That nuclear winter scenario failed to materialize.

Steve Case said:

So you have a cousin who actually believes the earth is flat?

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Big time. He just returned a flat-earthers convention in North Carolina. I'll give you his phone number, if you want to talk about it for hours and hours and hours...

ObamacareFail said:

I think everyone should have a healthy dose of skepticism in regards to man-made climate change. It is just unproven theory. It is not objective to refer to anyone as a denier. I personally do not buy into man-made climate change without positive proof which I have not yet seen. and we learned from the IPCC email leaks that the claimed peer review on the side advocating man-made climate change is a joke. Any objective advocate of the theory that climate change is brought on by man should not fear opposing views or honest peer review. If one has to resort to calling anyone who does not believe in the concept of man-made climate change a "flat earther, then one has no real confidence in his or her own argument. Most of the actual testing involved in the man-made theory involves very small scale experiments and dubious computer models. Similar computer models predicted a nuclear winter scenario in the middle east when Saddam Hussein had the Kuwaiti oil wells torched. That nuclear winter scenario failed to materialize.

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I merely responded to somebody else's post that stated that flat-earthers are AGW advocates. I guess my question to you is three-fold.
1. Is the earth warming?
2. What is causing it?
3. You mentioned IPCC. What about all the other scientific organizations, including the National Academy of Science, NOAA, NASA, the Royal Academy in Great Britain, and many others? Can you cite one reputable scientific that is anti-AGW?

ObamacareFail said:

It is actually the man-made climate change crowd, at least the extremists in their ranks, who are the flat earthers. They simply do not want to hear opposing views or face honest peer review.

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One of the many facets of the extreme stupidity of denierism is the extremely stupid (and incredibly arrogant, I might add) notion that any random person who makes up a personal opinion thereby somehow creates a scientific debate.

The "opposing view" of someone who is not a scientist in the field is worthless, especially if they didn't even publish that view in a peer-reviewed journal.

:shrug:

(Oh, right, and don't worry about copy/pasting the same old denier conspiracy theory that you don't try to get published because the journals are all conspiring against deniers. I've seen it a million times over. It, too, is an extremely stupid and worthless "opposing view").




And of course, it's all politically motivated. That's why you people don't try to argue with your heart surgeons about the best way to place a stent, or pop onto a physics forum to pontificate on how Calabi-Yau manifolds work, or any other such science-related question. Your ONLY focus is on AGW and your ONLY motivation is to *get* liberals. You have no idea whether you can *get* a liberal by verbally urinating on Calabi-Yau manifolds, so you don't bother. But you would if the subject of Calabi-Yau manifolds was the point of contention between Republicans and Democrats, instead of AGW.

Your opposing view is worth nothing, and your motivation for claiming to have that "view" is transparent.





Besides, what's all the fuss about a sub-reddit banning deniers? Isn't that kind of whining the sort of thing that so-called "snowflakes" engage in?

Media_Truth said:

Big time. He just returned a flat-earthers convention in North Carolina. I'll give you his phone number, if you want to talk about it for hours and hours and hours...

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Well that really is hilarious. A Google search of "flat-earthers convention in North Carolina"
turned it right up. Um I'll pass on his phone number.

You got any comment on Climate Models being run on what appears to be a flat map?
That illustration I put up sure looks like Greenland has some Mercator distortion.

Steve Case said:

You may be literally correct. A Google search on "Are climate
models run on a flat map?" turns up this page
https://scied.ucar.edu/longcontent/climate-modeling
with this illustration:

Sure looks like a flat map to me and a search of the site for
"global, globe or curved" didn't find much and a quick read
through didn't lead me to believe the model is working off a
virtual globe. Well maybe it is, and it should be, but it sure
didn't say so and one does wonder about these things.

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And that post is a perfect example of one of the many reasons deniers were banned from the sub-reddit. You don't have the slightest clue what you copy/pasted even is supposed to be......

Your post was just an extremely stupid and extremely dishonest diversionary tactic. If I ran the sub-reddit, I'd ban you for that one post.

Media_Truth said:

I merely responded to somebody else's post that stated that flat-earthers are AGW advocates. I guess my question to you is three-fold.
1. Is the earth warming?

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Supposedly not for about the last 18 years. prior to then, we were obviously in a warming cycle.

2. What is causing it?

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When it does occur, the causes are pretty much the same as all of the previous warming cycles that have occurred on this planet. And they are all natural and in many cases cosmic. Ever heard of Solar storms on the sun? Sun spots? Changes in the earths orbit? Volcanos?

3. You mentioned IPCC. What about all the other scientific organizations, including the National Academy of Science, NOAA, NASA, the Royal Academy in Great Britain, and many others?

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When the science becomes politicized, it's junk science no matter what scientific organizations are on the bandwagon. They all know that going against the tide on man-made warming is not going to get them government research grants.

Can you cite one reputable scientific that is anti-AGW?

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S. Fred Singer for one.

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Mr Person said:

One of the many facets of the extreme stupidity of denierism is the extremely stupid (and incredibly arrogant, I might add) notion that any random person who makes up a personal opinion thereby somehow creates a scientific debate.

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That line of debating make you look like a flat earther yourself. Referring to anyone who does not buy into man-made climate change as "stupid" is just a childish method of debate. And that is whether or not the person with opposing views is an expert on the science or not.

The "opposing view" of someone who is not a scientist in the field is worthless, especially if they didn't even publish that view in a peer-reviewed journal.

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Obviously on this forum, not everyone is a scientist who has published peer reviewed journals. And not everyone who is educated on the science has published peer reviewed journals. In this forum, we are expressing opinions. You can call those opinions worthless if you like, but I don't think any objective poster will take you seriously.

(Oh, right, and don't worry about copy/pasting the same old denier conspiracy theory that you don't try to get published because the journals are all conspiring against deniers. I've seen it a million times over. It, too, is an extremely stupid and worthless "opposing view").

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Yawn...

And of course, it's all politically motivated. That's why you people don't try to argue with your heart surgeons about the best way to place a stent, or pop onto a physics forum to pontificate on how Calabi-Yau manifolds work, or any other such science-related question. Your ONLY focus is on AGW and your ONLY motivation is to *get* liberals. You have no idea whether you can *get* a liberal by verbally urinating on Calabi-Yau manifolds, so you don't bother. But you would if the subject of Calabi-Yau manifolds was the point of contention between Republicans and Democrats, instead of AGW.

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You are projecting. And you are not very good at it. Heart surgeons, or for that matter, pretty much all of the scientists and doctors in the medical field, they seek out peer review and opposing opinions. Medical science overall is not politicized. They want what is best for the patients. Not the same in regards to climate science, which has been politicized from the top down. Your fear of opposing opinions on the issue illustrate that quite well.

Your opposing view is worth nothing, and your motivation for claiming to have that "view" is transparent.

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Again, you are projecting. I am not a republican or a democrat. I just maintain a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to unproven science....and even in some cases medical science when at times grant funded research leads to some pretty silly announcements and in some cases bogus health scares. One example I recall from many years ago was a sudden warning against using certain brands of shampoo because after they fed mega doses of it to rats, they developed cancer. back to climate science. I am still waiting for the global cooling that we were promised in the 1970s.

ObamacareFail said:

Supposedly not for about the last 18 years. prior to then, we were obviously in a warming cycle.

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Wrong, the last 3 years (2015-2017) have been the warmest on record. Out of the top 10 warmest years ever, 9 of them have been after 2000, the other being 1998. Don't take my word - look it up.

ObamacareFail said:

When it does occur, the causes are pretty much the same as all of the previous warming cycles that have occurred on this planet. And they are all natural and in many cases cosmic. Ever heard of Solar storms on the sun? Sun spots? Changes in the earths orbit? Volcanos?

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Yes, one has to look at what is different. The sun and water vapor have the largest effect on the earth's climate. No doubt about it. However those factors have always been present.

ObamacareFail said:

When the science becomes politicized, it's junk science no matter what scientific organizations are on the bandwagon. They all know that going against the tide on man-made warming is not going to get them government research grants.

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Hundreds of thousands of scientists living a lie?

ObamacareFail said:

S. Fred Singer for one.

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And this is your response for a request for a major scientific organization?

Media_Truth said:

Looks like Reddit was having trouble controlling the Climate Science discussions. The link is a long message, justifying the action, from one of the moderators.

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CONTROL is the objective of socialism, not science