He's cleaned up his act some - even actually providing source material for his more outrageous claims. But the arrogance, obsession with fossil fuels as necessary for economic survival and most notably his use of a single : as a text separator made me suspect this guy a couple of weeks ago. But I think his recent posts on the 451 thread read like the good old G-man.

IP's for Skeptic.fr (most recent to first, in order):

Note that only the very first, initial comment immediately above failed to block the City/State/Region

Gilles was from Grenoble.  The other IP's for Skeptic.fr all come from the Paris area (but that could be a default location)

Its only 240 klicks from Dijon to Grenoble; maybe the U of G is out for the holidays.  Maybe its not him, but they walk alike, talk alike, are two of a kind.

Muoncounter-- I too had wondered that.  Interesting, maybe he has a twin.  Or maybe he just moved for some reason?

"maybe he just moved for some reason?"

Gilles is still listed at his employer's website, but the link to his individual webpage there returns a 404 Not Found message:

Not Found

The requested URL /public/henri/index.html was not found on this server.

Hmm,

So maybe he did get a job closer to Paris and they haven't updated their page yet?

The use of space before a colon is standard in French. Indeed, the French version of Word automatically enters a space followed by a colon when you hit the colonkey on the keyboard.

So, this usage is diagnostic of a Frenchman, not a certain individual. You can see the same usage on this person's website

http://ipag.osug.fr/spip.php?page=identite&id=henri&lang=fr

On my IEA article found skept.fr's comments to be fairly constructive, if argumentative, but he did drone on a lot. I agree that on the 451 thread, skept.fr hijacked the discussion and sounded an awful lot like Gilles. His main point is that he's smarter than us.

If it is Gilles, he'll have to be banned eventually. He has found a way to monopolize internet discussions and the only way to prevent the discusion from being overwhelmed by him is to ban him. It's a pity, because not everything he says is wrong or uninteresting.

Maybe he should be given a thread of his own (Tim Lambert tried this) or we could even invite him to write a guest post; we could all debate him in the comments and then any future attempts by him to disrupt other threads could be diverted to his own post's disussion thread.

Banning would be simpler.

I like the guest post idea, provided it is well focussed.  Specifically a post by him indicating what he considers the best strategy for mitigating global warming, and why, would be interesting.  We would need to make it clear that it would face normal editorial vetting, primarilly to ensure it does not feed any denier memes.  I do not think this would be a problem, because I do not think he is a denier.  Any suggestion to this effect should be phrased in terms of our considering accepting a post by him on that topic, rather than stating that we will and then facing an embarassing back down if he does try to fill the essay with denier memes (obviously).