Mail Online Moderation Policy

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Over recent months I have made a wide variety of comments on some of David Rose’s articles published on The Mail Online. Around half of them never saw the light of day.

Here is some recent correspondence about this controversial issue:

Them:

Thank you for your email, and my apologies for the delay in the reply. I have looked into your account to see why your comments are not being published. Out of the 12 comments that you have submitted six have been published. The other comments were not published because they contain a URL to an external website/ blog, which breaks our house rules.

Rule 9: No linking or copyright infringement – You must not insert links to websites (URLs) or submit content which would be an infringement of copyright.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/house_rules.html

I hope that this answers your question on the publication of your comments. If you have any further questions please feel free to contact me directly and I will be able to help you.

Regards

Me:

Thanks for your admittedly belated reply.

Please explain to me how linking to an article I myself wrote is in any way an infringement of anyone’s copyright.

Please also explain to me how a comment of mine that contained no links somehow never managed to make it out of your moderation queue.

http://econnexus.org/the-strange-tale-of-the-mail-and-the-snow-dragon/

Thanks in advance.

Them:

Thanks for your email. The house rules state that you must not insert any links, of any sort. The reason that your other comment was rejected was because it was directing our readers to your website, albeit by not adding the link, but still advertising your website by trying to get round our filters.

I hope this answers your questions.

Regards

Me:

Thanks for that additional information, but it doesn’t answer all my questions. In fact it raises some more.

“The house rules state that you must not insert any links, of any sort”

In that case I suggest you clarify your house rules. Your rule 9 currently states that:

“You must not insert links to websites (URLs) or submit content which would be an infringement of copyright.”

Which reads to me like “You must not insert links to websites which would be an infringement of copyright.” Maybe an extra comma would be sufficient?

“The reason that your other comment was rejected was because it was directing our readers to your website, albeit by not adding the link, but still advertising your website by trying to get round our filters.”

Your rule 7 states that:

“You must not use our Site for the promotion of any products or services or for any other commercial purpose”

As the URL suggests, econnexus.org is not for profit and has no commercial purpose. It does indirectly “advertise” the likes of charities such as ShelterBox however. Your house rules don’t forbid people from searching the web for further information on the topic(s) of an article do they? I can therefore see no reason why my comment on David Rose’s “Great Green Con #1” was in violation of your house rules. As I explained in my associated blog post, I was in fact endeavouring to find a way to bring to the attention of your readers the content of this URL

http://portal.inter-map.com/#mapID=49&groupID=297&z=1.0&up=-310610.7&left=2001105.4

which seemed to me to be perfectly fair comment on David Rose’s article. It’s not possible to post images in comments on The Mail Online either is it? How do you suggest I go about putting such relevant information in front of your readers in future, short of building my own authoritative web site full of relevant images on a controversial topic and then contacting the Press Complaints Commission about it?

GreatWhiteCon.info is also not for profit, and carries no advertising of any sort, direct or indirect. Since it seems a direct link is forbidden by your ambiguously worded house rules, how about the phrase “Great White Con dot info” in a comment on The Mail Online for example? For your information the following comment of mine on there doesn’t seem to have fallen foul of your eagle eyed moderators yet, and has even received a certain amount of approbation from your loyal readership:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html?offset=0&max=100#comment-37694863

Can I take it that using that form of words is acceptable to The Mail? I would appreciate a prompt response, since based on past performance I anticipate that you will be closing the comments section below David Rose’s most recent “economical” article in the near future.

Best wishes

Them:

Thanks for your email. I have no suggestions as to how you can get our readers to your site. I can advise you also that your comment:

“Whatever the David and Judy show may proclaim today, the facts of the matter are that the increase in Arctic sea ice extent compared to “this time last year” was just HALF of what David Rose said in The Mail on Sunday this time last week. For more information please visit:

Great White Con dot Info”

Was rejected and is not live on our site, so no, in answer to your question, it is not possible to try and get around advertising by writing a link out in words.

There isn’t really much more that I can add to what I have already said. I do hope that if nothing else, I have been able to give you some clarity on why your comments have been rejected.

Regards

Me:

I’m still confused I’m afraid. Just to try and clarify matters, something along the lines of:

“For more info try googling: david rose economical with the truth”

is OK with the Mail’s moderators, but:

“For more information please visit: Great White Con dot Info”

is not, even though GreatWhiteCon.info is an authority about the topic under discussion, and is in no way commercial? Have I got that straight now?

Best wishes

Them:

I would allow neither of those comments.

Regards

Me:

But why not? As far as I can see neither of them contradict the letter of your house rules, and both conform to both the letter and spirit of your rule 1, which states:

“We welcome your opinions. We want our readers to see and understand different points of view. Try to contribute to the thread, rather than just stating if you agree or disagree…. Please explain why you hold your opinion.”

Best wishes

Them:

What you are asking our readers to do is to go to your  website which essentially calls our journalist a “liar”. If you want readership for your website I can only suggest thinking up other ways of getting it.

Regards

Me:

You totally fail to understand the point I am attempting to make. After less than a week GreatWhiteCon.info already has a considerable readership. Check out the comments.

The point is that none of them (or certainly very few) found out about it via the Mail Online, despite your rule 1.

Best wishes

Them:

I have received no further reply. I can only assume that comments must now be closed on this topic.

An Unbroken Ice Sheet?

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David Rose has now had another article published in the Mail on Sunday. The new one refers back to his previous words of wisdom about the Arctic, imparting this piece of information:

The Mail on Sunday’s report last week that Arctic ice has had a massive rebound this year from its 2012 record low was followed up around the world – and recorded 174,200 Facebook ‘shares’, by some distance a record for an article on the MailOnline website.

That’s a lot of people repeating a load of old nonsense! Here at GreatWhiteCon.info we also have a Facebook presence, so if you would like to share our alternative interpretation of what’s really going on in the Arctic please take a good look at:

https://www.facebook.com/GreatWhiteCon

and share that information with your friends, as long as it makes more sense to you than David Rose’s record breaking article.  Meanwhile here in at Great Ivory Towers we’ve still only progressed as far as the third sentence in David’s article the weekend before last, which reads as follows:

Them:

Days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.

As you’ll discover below we’ve been experimenting with YouTube recently, where we stumbled upon a NASA video which led us to a page on NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center web site where you can download a high resolution version of the same video. We did that, and then much like the Mail, we took a screenshot from the video to reveal an image remarkably like the one they published just over a week ago. Here it is:

NASA visualization of the Arctic on August 15th 2013
NASA visualization of the Arctic on August 15th 2013

Us:

We also found that NASA’s Scientific Visualization Center had another similar video available for download, covering the period from August 1st to September 13th 2012. Here’s a screenshot we took from that video, for August 15th 2012:

NASA visualization of the Arctic on August 15th 2012
NASA visualization of the Arctic on August 15th 2012

For some reason a similar image cannot however be found in David Rose’s Mail on Sunday article of September 8th 2013. Instead that contains an image labelled “August 27th 2012”. Whilst you ponder why the Mail was avoiding comparing like with like visually 9 days ago, here’s a little animation we’ve put together using alternative visualizations of Arctic sea ice, this time of ice concentration and generated by the University of Bremen. It shows how the sea ice cover has been changing from August 15th through to September 13th 2013, which may ultimately prove to be day of  the minimum extent  in 2013, using the NSIDC’s methodology at least. Note that it lingers for a while on August 27th, and we hope you like the sound track!

Verdict:

For reasons known only to themselves the Mail certainly weren’t comparing like with like  visually on September 8th 2013. They evidently weren’t comparing like with like numerically either, since however hard we try comparing numbers from “the same time last year” we can’t come up with the Mail’s magic “60% increase”. Comparing NSIDC extent for  August 15th 2013 with August 27th 2012 did however lead us to perform this bit of elementary arithmetic:

6.16 / 3.94 = 1.56 – A 56% increase.

However hard we try we still can’t get close to the Mail’s “nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent”.  We also challenge all and sundry to watch our video and then loudly proclaim, with a straight face, that “an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores”.

Shock News! Why Isn’t the Arctic Ice Free?

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Today we move on to the second sentence in David Rose’s article “this time last week”.

Them:

The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.

Us:

As you can see, the Mail article includes no references. Surely in this day and age an online article about such a controversial subject should at the very least include a few links?  Hayley Dixon’s article for The Telegraph did at least manage to do that! I’ve asked David Rose via a number of different avenues where he got his information, and how he did his sums. I know he got at least one of the messages because he was browsing my profile on LinkedIn last week, but I have yet to receive any answer from him.

Groping in the dark I’ve tried to speculate about which BBC report in 2007 David is referring to. Perhaps it’s  this one  by Jonathan Amos entitled “Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013′”. Please note the quotation marks around the date. According to this article:

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

[His] latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Instead of relying on what David Rose says Jonathan Amos says Wieslaw Maslowski said, why don’t we instead take a look at what Prof. Maslowski actually said. Here’s an extract from the slides he used when giving a presentation in Japan in the summer of 2008, when he’d had plenty of time to learn the lessons of the astonishing Arctic sea ice melt in the summer of 2007:

Wieslaw Maslowski says "if" and "about" in 2008
Wieslaw Maslowski says “if” and “around” in 2008

Note that he didn’t say words to the effect that “The Arctic will be ice-free in summer by 2013” as claimed by David Rose. What he actually said, and converting the mathematical symbol into plain English, was:

IF this trend persists the Arctic Ocean will become ice-free by AROUND 2013!

which is a very different thing.  For those of you that would prefer to actually hear Prof. Maslowski convey that message himself, here’s a podcast from December 2007:

 

The interview lasts for about half an hour, and a full transcript is also available courtesy of Beyond Zero Emissions. You will note that what Wieslaw actually said was:

If we project this trend ongoing for the last 10 – 15 years, we probably will reach zero in summer some time mid next decade.

Verdict:

The evidence suggests that David Rose doesn’t research his sources properly, doesn’t understand English and doesn’t understand common mathematical symbols.  Alternatively he understands all of that perfectly well, but chooses to misrepresent all of that to his loyal readership instead of educating them about the facts of the matter.

60 Per Cent of Nothing?

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Our title today is an allusion to Bill Bruford’s “Five Percent For Nothing”, from the 1971 album “Fragile” by Yes. Here’s what the cover looks like:

Fragile cover art, by Roger Dean (image Wikipedia)

Them:

A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.

Us:

According to the NSIDC once again the numbers look like this:

NSIDC daily Arctic sea ice extent chart, highlighting September 7th 2013
NSIDC daily Arctic sea ice extent chart, highlighting September 7th 2013

The sums are obviously rather tricky, so we’ve enlisted the aid of a spreadsheet. Here’s what it reveals to us:

Metric Date 2012 2013 Increase
NSIDC Daily Extent (million km²) Day 249 3.558 5.236 47.2%
NSIDC Daily Extent (million km²) Sep 8th 3.523 5.179 47.0%
NSIDC Daily Extent (million km²) Aug 27th 3.94 5.632 42.9%
NSIDC Daily Extent (million km²) Aug 15th 4.845 6.159 27.1%
NSIDC Monthly Extent (million km²) August 4.71 6.09 29.3%

Verdict:

Whichever way you look at things, on a “same time last year” basis at least, the magic number of 60% seems to be out of reach. Whatever the arithmetic David Rose actually performed, whether mentally or on his pocket calculator, it would appear not to involve comparing like with like. We have asked David and the Mail on a number of occasions what numbers he started from and what calculations he performed. We have received no answers as yet.

Getting back to our title, when you start to look at Arctic sea ice volume instead of extent, 160% of almost nothing is still almost nothing:

Video courtesy of Andy Lee Robinson

Small print: We have yet to double check all the numbers in our simple spreadsheet. The NSIDC web site is still down today.

A Million Square Miles?

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Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start!

Them:

A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.

Us:

NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice News report for August 2012
NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice News report for August 2013

Verdict:

The Mail et. al. say “Nearly a million square miles”. When the floods in Boulder have receded the NSIDC will once again say “Just over half a million square miles”. Is that discrepancy sufficient to satisfy the Press Complaints Commission’s definition of “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information”?

Hello, Good Evening and Welcome!

Satire, , , , ,

David Frost died last week . So it goes.

According to the BBC:

Politicians regularly complained to BBC management that they were being ridiculed by David Frost and his team. But the programme gained a massive following and soon achieved cult status.

We hope to achieve something similar!

By way of brief introduction, the name of our humble organ is an ironic play on the title of David Rose’s series of “Great Green Con” articles in The Mail on Sunday.