(Above: evocative portrait of valiant climate science freedom fighter Andrew Bolt published by the HUN here).Now where were we before Optus pulled the plug?
Here will do:
No need to panic, everything normal here and there and everywhere.
Sea ice now isn’t melting, but spreading. The seas have not just stopped rising, but started to fall.
Andrew Bolt in April 2010: Climate change, happening before your eyes.
Stay calm, everything normal here, there in the Arctic, and on Mars.
Andrew Bolt in April 2011: Gore and his fellow alarmists are on thin ice.
Keep calm, put the bacon on, and carry on as usual, and put the thin ice in the kettle.
Andrew Bolt exceptionally indignant in July 2008: you cackhanded climate slimers you.
Stay calm, all is well, seven graphs solve the problem, as you can read in Column - Seven graphs to end the warming hype.
Stop the panic. How many times do you have to be told it's all okey-dokey? Keep calm and drink the kool-aid.
Andrew Bolt on 7th March 2012: No news for Fairfax: the Arctic ice is doing fine.
Everything's fine! Still fretting! Stop reading Fairfax publications! Has the thin ice boiled yet? Keep calm and make sure the coffee is decaf.
Andrew Bolt on 27th April 2012: Send Four Corners back to the Arctic to explain.
(More clean as a mountain stream pure cigarette advertisements here).
How many times do you have to be told, it's all under control! Sheesh. And while you're at it, take those bleeding heart cardigan wearers with you into the panic room. Stay calm and enjoy a nice cup of tea. Doesn't the melted ice have a clean pure taste, like a Chesterfield or an Alpine cigarette:
(More clean as a mountain stream pure cigarette advertisements here).And so on and on at exceptional and tedious length, as the Bolter contemplates the Arctic ice more times than the Bolter's navel, and boy, does that navel get a workout.
Now what's this, coming over the horizon, under the radar?
Shock horror news from the Pravda of London, aka The Guardian, engaged yet again in an international conspiracy to undermine the epic findings of internationally renowned climate scientist Andrew Bolt.
Yep, there it is, fresh from the digital conspiracy press on 11th August 2012: Rate of arctic summer sea ice loss is 50% higher than predicted.
It wasn't the only place where the story got picked up.
In the tabloid fashion the pond loves, the Daily Mail led with Arctic sea ice could disappear within 10 years as global warming increases speed of melting.
Naturally the moment the pond was back online, the first thing was to check out Andrew Bolt,
and see what the Bolter had to say about this news.
Would he spare a moment from the important business of shoving it to the Gillard government and boat people?
To date, nothing, zilch, nada, not a word has disturbed his calm scientific demeanour, though the story has now been out and about for days. It even turned up in blogs more interested in climate science than the Bolter is in his navel (Arctic sea ice minimum 2012).
Never mind, the pond is standing by, waiting for yet another denunciation of conspiracists by the Bolter, as he targets these complacent folk who use satellites for observation, along with measurements by plane, by data from underwater sonar stations, and by surface measurements, and claim accuracy in relation to ice thickness of 10 cm, with the results suggesting that maybe the Fairfax press and the ABC were actually on the money.
Outrageous. Shocking.
Stay calm! What would these conspiracists know, up against the seer of Melbourne, and his scientific acumen?
They need to start writing for a tabloid if they're to ever going to be properly peer reviewed by the readers of the HUN.
As an aside, the Bolter reminds the pond of the A. E. van Vogt theory of angry men who must always be right. Even when they're wrong, they're right. Not that the Bolter is ever wrong ... and no doubt he'll produce, in due course, another fine flurry of floozies explaining how everything is right in the world, or at least how he's always right about the world.
Of course he could join Fairfax and the ABC in a fact-finding expedition to the Arctic, but that might sound like alarmist activism.
Anyhoo, how would actual research leave time for his home-grown insights into climate science? And what of his navel?
(Below: even worse, the jury is now out on Santa Claus. Sign the pond's petition to shift Santa to the south pole! Just in case, better safe than sorry).
Hi DP, quite off topic (sorry about that) ...
ReplyDeletebut I remember that you had some of your blog's content stolen recently. I'm interested in finding out how you got the guy to give it back.
I've just realised that topsynews have stolen 120 of my blog posts to use as content for their news and entertainment advertising vehicle. What to do.
Not sure that it would work for you Sarah. First I published a couple of posts abusing the scraper. These posts were scraped by the robot scraper and not apparently noticed by the scraper. Then I dug out his personal details and threatened all-out online warfare, and suddenly I had his attention. The site featuring the worst of the automated scraping disappeared.
ReplyDeleteYou might not want to go to this level of abusive warfare, but you can put the infringers on notice, find out the details of the infringers - their company, if any, their addresses etc, and name and shame them for infringing. Details like this can sometimes be tricky to find, but if you know how to do a search, it's amazing what will turn up.
It's one thing to ask permission to recycle content, it's quite another just to scrape and recycle without reference to the original author, especially if they're using it to generate advertising revenue (the pond, for the moment, prefers to be advertising free).
At a minimum why not maintain the rage, and put them on notice, and if they have comments functions or facebook page or twitter, start requesting take downs. It's one thing to aggregate like Huffington Post, steal some comment and provide a comment to the rest, and quite another to lift a whole post and re-badge it. (And BTW any post at the pond is on topic unless it comes from a spammer or Optus).
Thanks for that DP.
DeleteTopsynews seem to be rather faceless. I've sent furious emails to them and their advertisers and - nothing. Names and addresses would be a nice find. I will follow up the FB and twitter advice.
They are still taking full text and images of my posts. The whole thing is starting to make me feel quite depressed. At the moment, I'm unsure whether to maintain the rage or fuck off to my bush block where I am offline and don't have to think about it!
Why not maintain the rage and fuck off to the bush block? The thing is, it would take time to penetrate the facade even if you had the skills of Anonymous, since looking at the site they're pretty shameless site scrapers and content farmers, with the contact routine just window dressing.
DeleteFrom a quick check, it seems that their DNS is private - through a reseller, and could be located anywhere. And their mail is hosted at https://inclust.com, a Hungarian hosting company located in Belgrade. Given the less than average English on the scraping site, this suggests you're in the hands of a bunch of east Europeans happy to collar a little advertising revenue for no work. This makes it a lot harder than my local Lorne scraper. The website was first registered 27th December 2011 via Internet.bs, which is located in the Bahamas and is akin to GoDaddy, which is to say it has a pretty poor reputation. It's been around since 2004, and facilitates a lot of "customers". (The registrar is currently being sued by a lot of drug companies in relation to infringement of trademarks)
They've taken a lot of precautions to hide themselves. The upside is that they wouldn't be taking much traffic away from you, it'd be more the principal of the thing.
You might have to treat it as a hobby and be quite bold - if you can get on to Facebook, make the point that they're robot-scraping thieves that don't answer legitimate take down notices, and make it over and over again. Ditto Twitter. It looks like they've allowed Twitter and Facebook to die - just part of the gloss - but you can still try to get their attention. Another way would be to send notices to their hosts. It might at least startle them.
Good luck with it, but don't lose any sleep over it while mellowing out at the block, the intertubes is full of thieves.
Thanks for that research! Well done. I'm a baby at that stuff.
DeleteAnyway, I've taken yours (and others') advice.
Not losing any more sleep.
I've given Google all the urls so they don't come up on their searches.
ASA notified.
Now I've got to stop whining because otherwise it will do me in.
Thanks again.
Don't ever expect a denialist to admit they were wrong. When it becomes obvious that one of their pet talking points is absolute bollocks they move on to the next one. If you do try and get them to answer a specific question about their previous discredited assertion the usual tactic is to use the "look there's a squirrel over there" tactic to evade answering.
ReplyDeleteThe denialists are so discredited and irrelevant that all they have left is a bunch of lunatic conspiracy theorists, absolute nutters like Monckton and ideological warriors like Bolt.