After some thought I’ve decided the project would be better described as a  dictionary than a wiki (with collaboration if  there are people interested) so I’ve started a new page: http://scottishsceptic.uk/dictionary/
I happened across a page in Wikipedia last night on the global warming pause (or as Wikipedia always bastardises things on climate the “Hiaitus”). As I’ve been saying for a while I invented the term “The Pause” in order to try to get a section on the Wikipedia global warming page so that there was a place to discuss the failures of the predicted warming. (For obvious reasons that proposal was rudely rejected by the eco-academics who dominate Wikipedia). So, I was more than a little amused that the same people who denied the original request were now being forced by the more or less general acceptance of the existence of the pause to to find ways to simultaneously admit and deny the pause. (And I will leave them squirming as I’ve no wish to help them out of that dilemma!)
However, let me be honest, we sceptics owe a great deal to these guys, because their overt bias and  vindictive arrogant behaviour did more than anything else to galvanise the online sceptic community. Each time some professional engineer or scientist honestly tried to contribute to Wikipedia by correcting the obvious bias – and got a bloody nose – those eco-academics thought it was a great victory. But the reality was that they were upsetting very intelligent people, usually retired, with plenty of time, with a high social standing and a lifetime of dealing with such idiots in their own working lives.
And of course, they looked elsewhere, found places like Wikipedia, and the constant attacks on the various online forums galvanised this sceptic community into one of the most effective fighting forces for scientific truth and integrity which the world has ever seen and now we more or less dominate the internet in this area.
So, for obvious reasons, Wikipedia has been a gift to us sceptics! Because whilst it might have been influential a long time ago, the reality is that Wikipedia lost its credibility because of their obvious bias and now it is very much a backwater on climate (I bet only visited by school kids) and blogs like WUWT are now probably the world’s most read sites on climate (and I’ve seen people at the top of the Met Office reading WUWT !)

Wiki-Climate

But to be frank, I miss having a decent wiki on climate. Yes I do occaisionally find myself going there but I’m always disappointed, because even on totally neutral topics or even looking for data supporting the CO2 “warming”, I’ve found that Wikipedia just doesn’t have the facts to support sensible debate. It’s written by climate propagandists as fact-lite propaganda and as such it is pretty useless when writing technical articles – even when the data is uncontentious.
So, I was wondering how we could get a decent wiki on climate. The first option, would be to “storm the gates of wikipedia”. Sceptics certainly have the numbers now and climate extremists don’t have either the numbers or enthusiasm. However, whilst it would be personally satisfying to delete all the articles on climate and start afresh, in the same way Wikipedia galvanised the sceptic community it would be stupid at this late stage to do something which might just rejuvenate the climate extremists and delay the end a bit longer.
But then I started thinking. All we need do, is to write a proper summary of the key climate articles, sensibly summarising the current status of knowledge, and then … we could “storm the gates” and delete the old and replace it with the new. But why do anything to boost the rock bottom credibility of Wikipedia? It would be far better to leave the old in place and let the internet laugh at it.
However, whilst an alternative wiki remains a possible idea, I’ve learnt from past experience that such a venture requires an awful lot of work and realistically I would need to get a core group of people of a high expertise and a lot of interest. And I don’t think many sceptics will see the point in spending time on a wiki when the current strategy has been so successful.
But it did get me wondering what I would put in an article on “Global warming”. So, I promised myself this morning that I would force myself to write just the intro. So … here goes… (and I’m not going to cross the ts, and not is on this … I want to do this quickly and see what comes out)

Wiki-Climate Global warming

Global warming

Global warming refers to a belief that arose after a rise of global temperature at the end of the 20th century, that this temperature rise was mainly caused by man-made emissions of “greenhouse gases” particularly CO2 and that increasing use of fossil fuel would cause a continuation of that warming with likely catastrophic effects.
This belief was in part based on scientific evidence regarding the infra-red properties of gases, but the majority of the predicted warming was based on the belief that large “positive feedback effects” must have increased the effect of CO2 and the belief that the warming was not caused by normal natural variation. The area of feedbacks is still highly controversial, but even so, by the mid 2000s, many in the media were talking of a “scientific consensus” amongst academics that action was necessary. As a result many governments passed legislation with the intention of reducing fossil fuel use by either raising the price of fossil fuels or providing government subsidies to alternative energy sources which were believed to reduce fossil fuel use.
However, whilst a majority of academics supported the view that action was necessary due to the possibility of catastrophic warming, many professional people with engineering and science qualifications were sceptical. They argued that the evidence did not justify the predictions of catastrophic warming, that therefore it was likely the warming may well be small enough so that e.g. the benefits of CO2 fertilisation were greater than any harm and that the actions being taken to reduce fossil fuel use were disproportionate, were not cost effective or indeed in some cases were likely to increase fossil fuel use.
As a result of those who became known as sceptics (us: skeptics) an intense and often vitreolic debate started online. Sceptic academics were prevented from publishing, numerous attacks were made on sceptics such as false assertions of being “in the pay of BIG OIL” or being “conspiracy theorists”. However, eventually the lack of predicted warming gave the sceptics credibility.
The global warming pause was first identified by sceptics such as Mike Haseler (aka Scottish Sceptic) as early as 2005 but is first recorded in the climategate submissions of 2009. The pause was used to refer to the lack of predicted warming in the available temperature datasets. For example, by mid 2015, the satellite record showed no warming in 18 years and none of the available datasets showed even the lowest predicted warming of the IPCC report in 2001 (0.14/decade). The pause was hugely important because it showed that the temperature predictions were not coming true. This, together with the failure of predictions of increasing severe weather, flooding droughts and the refreezing of global sea ice leaving no overall trend in the period of available data, suggested that either the predictions were wrong, or that large amounts of long term variation were present in the real atmosphere and not included in the models, or both.
Whilst various attempts were made to explain the lack of predicted warming and assert the models were correct, there was no consensus as to why the predictions had failed. This led to widespread mistrust of these predictions. Despite continued high profile support from many academics as a result by 2015, many governments had started dismantling their climate legislation and reducing subsidies to alternative energy sources.

Addendum – why the propaganda at Wikipedia failed

The simple fact is this. By preventing sceptics contributing, the climate extremist academics who edit wikipedia on climate caused sceptics to congregate elsewhere. And because Wikipedia was just single articles, it could not compete at all with places like WUWT that kept printing new material so Wikipedia quickly lost its readership to places like WUWT.
And very soone WUWT became an alternative and very credible source of information on climate (as I said read by top people in the UK Met Office)
Wikipedia stopped being the place to go for those interested in climate (like me) and that left the climate extremists who seemed to believe that anyone who disagreed with them was part of some big conspiracy against them. As such they rejected all critique however well intentioned. That turned away all those who would otherwise have toned down the propaganda and fact checked their limp assertions. In short, they turned away anyone who could have helped improve their propaganda to the point where it had credibility.