We should keep their existence in mind and be aware that they suddenly come out of nowhere to derail discussions. damorbel comes to mind, but he's just the latest example.

Here's Mombiot take plus other things.

Damorbel seems incapable of becoming bored.  Boring, yes; bored, no.

Has anyone looked into this hfranzen guy?

Based on just 2 posts thus far, I'd say TheCaz is a troll, waiting to hatch from his denialist origins. Sigh. Hope he proves me wrong.

Yep, that'll be a fun one.  He may know his pchem, but he's treating the environment like its purely a lab experiment.  There doesn't seem to be any reality checking in his work. 

I backed off when he postulated that rivers must be carrying dissolved carbonates to the ocean.   

The pattern I have seen is to engage as many regular commenters and contributors for as long as possible, both tying up resources (people's time) and contributing to commenter burnout and frustration.  Then denier A exits, stage left, and denier B starts up.  Shake, repeat as necessary.  Guerrilla tactics by an organized group?  You decide.

The result is making the threads a mess to follow for the lurkers.

One guideline is:

• No copying and pasting from earlier comments. If you wish to refer to earlier comments, you can hyperlink directly to them. To make this easier, note that with each comment, the date/time is a hyperlink. If you link to this URL, clicking on the link will take you directly to that part of the page.

If you like, I can make it more general to give moderators some more flexibility to filter out noise. Eg - instead of "No copying and pasting from earlier comments", I could have "no repeating arguments from earlier comments"

John, I used that in an "ad-hoc" way (meaning, I didn't ask your permission first!) last month, in the thread on Naomi Oreskes's Australian tour.  There was a huge fight (starring Poptech, naturally) over the nature of Fred Seitz's relationship to the tobacco industry.  It got very repetitive, so I made this intervention (and another, a little later).  I deleted a lot of posts at the same time, from both Poptech and his opponents.  I did let through longer comments that had "new" information, so the discussion wasn't completely killed.

I felt OK doing that, because I hadn't been involved in the thread at all, was not particularly emotionally invested in either side of the argument, and felt confident that I could be a more or less even-handed moderator.  Hope that was OK.

I'm guilty of cut-an-paste, but I find it an effective means of responding to specific points. I keep the cuts to mere 'snips' and respond point by point.  Someone said it was worthwhile using the skeptic's own words against them; I agree completely with that.

 I'm referring to the way threads degenerate into a cycle of A: The world is flat; B: Do you have any data to support that? C: That's incorrect because ___ ; D: Here are some examples of why its incorrect; A: The world is flat.  It doesn't feel right to 'make a ruling' as a participant-moderator.  Other blogs have agree/disagree buttons or such on each comment, but that can turn nasty; is it possible to have just an 'I agree' button, so that comments can be seconded, but not dissed, without the need to add more text?

Is it high time that the nonsense on Lindzen and Choi be moderated?  It seems to be driving away more people each day it goes on.  Especially now that a new voice, co2isnotevil, has arrived; RW1 will be starting over from the beginning.

I hesitate to step in, as I have been an active contributor.  I've suggested a number of different ways for a graceful exit, but he's not interested.

Seems convenient that as the former is getting TKO'D

How many readers would come to that conclusion?. The whole point of their pseudo-scientific twaddle is to create confusion in the mind of an uninformed lurker.  Seems to me like they are probably succeeding. 

I see e has waded into the fray in inimitable Paul Bunyan-esque idiom, laying about with Gimli's axe in true Lizzie Borden fashion... (to mix a metaphor or three).

Google finds co2isnotevil = George White = palisad.com; although he denied it, I still think RW is the author of the climate doubling paper linked on the original climate sensitivity page.  It reads almost verbatim with his basic premise, whatever that is or was.

I had to object to their taking the discussion to how White came up with ideas on his page.  So now they're whining about moderation.  Thanks to our Jedi e and Chris for taking on this particular Dark Lord and his minions with their twin light-sabers 'Reason' and 'Logic' (take that metaphor, Yooper), although it bothers me that so many others seem to have checked out (although some may be on holiday).

I think its clear that the ultimate goal of this charade is to drive off any fence-sitting lurkers who don't understand their minutiae and get bored by it.  400 comments in a week is making me long for the days of good-old-damorbel.

Seeing a few Star Wars and LOTR metaphors appearing here and elsewhere on the forum. Good to see I'm not the only genre geek here :-)

(channeling Olόrin) "Which Dark Lord?  Sauron or Melkor?"

Namárië

Time to haul out the Monty Python epithets...

For what it is worth, co2isnotevil is someone who has posted regularly over at Jo Nova. He also has his own website pushing his theories here http://www.palisad.com/co2/eb/eb.html

If you're a nerd who is fascinated with data and graphs (let's be honest with ourselves, everyone in this forum fits that description and the eagerness with which we all embrace Tolkien metaphors provides additional confirmation), you'll probably be as interested as I am in the stats on skeptic activity on SkS. I tag users as Skeptic or Warmist which then allows me to track the # of skeptic and warmist comments. All the raw data, up-to-date to the second, is available here:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/stats.php 

One of these days, I'll plot a graph of the # of skeptic comments as a percentage of the total # of comments.

The problem is I just enjoy plotting these graphs too much so as soon as I mentioned it, I couldn't resist seeing the result. And while its a noisy signal, the result is the percentage of skeptic comments at SkS is increasing and now over 20%.

The increasing density (in both graphs) is because the increasing number of blog posts. Back in 2007 to 2009 when it was mostly me writing the blog posts, they were few and far between. That huge spike in mid-2008 in the first graph is presumably (I haven't checked) because there was a big gap between blog posts so everyone just had to post comments in that latest post.

I got more active in 2010 but things really exploded when we started the basic rebuttals in the middle of 2010. That's when things really liven up, both the # of comments and the skeptic activity.

Looking at the second graph, it's a bit of a worry that the percentage of skeptic comments approaches 60% a couple of times.

Means we're making headway when the deniers feel threatened enough to accost us here en masse.

The average reader should have little difficulty parsing between the well-intentioned-but-uninformed and the intentionally-obtuse.

We do seem to be attracting the attention of the boss level/overlord deniaratti and not just their usual minion-scum (yes, I am positioning us as the Rebel Alliance vs the Evil Empire; hafta find a more unique analogy)...

It seems like they have also become more organized as we can see from the clustering. I'd say that skeptics problably have a central office somewhere in Texas, along the Bible Belt or something.. :-)