Friday, January 19, 2007

reading between the comments

This is somewhat interesting. The Weather Channel has a blog. Recently, the host stirred up some controversy about global warming. (Unfortunately, I didn't spot an RSS or Atom feed, so it's not going to make the list of blogs I track regularly.) The interesting part is to read the comments section of the blog, looking for patterns.

Much of the analysis is shallow. OK, nothing new there. You see that on the larger blogs all over the Internet, both in content and comments.

The slant of the comments is strongly negative, almost uniformly, and the number is quite a bit larger than that of the surrounding articles. This tidbit from someone named "JM" jumped out at me: "Your right. This issue isn't going away. Why didn't your site accept the hundreds of comments submitted today. It stopped at 306 out of 700+ submitted. Most of which were today." I couldn't find a count of "submitted" (as opposed to posted) comments, making me wonder how JM knew. As a test, I've posted that question to the comments section--we'll see if the e-mail I get back from TWC contains any indication. If not, then I have to wonder if the comments were some sort of organized effort, a sort of "comment writing" campaign. In which case, who organized it, and why?

Follow up: nothing in the confirmation e-mail about the number of comments submitted but not yet published.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey no one asked me to join some Jihad against the climate Nazi Culler. I read her statement that suggested stripping AMS credentals from Scientists that disagreed with the Global Warming dogma. She is the one that dropped the shoe. I looked at her site. I saw a video about polar bear populations declining. The cause Global Warming. guess what I did a search on polar bear populations and came across this:

Interestingly, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an international organization that has worked for 50 years to protect endangered species, has also written on the threats posed to polar bears from global warming. However, their own research seems to undermine their fears. According to the WWF, about 20 distinct polar bear populations exist, accounting for approximately 22,000 polar bears worldwide. As the figure shows, population patterns do not show a temperature-linked decline:

Only two of the distinct population groups, accounting for about 16.4 percent of the total population, are decreasing.
Ten populations, approximately 45.4 percent of the total number, are stable.
Another two populations — about 13.6 percent of the total number of polar bears — are increasing. Are human activities causing a warming in the Arctic, affecting the sea ice extent, longevity and thickness? Contradictory data exists. What seems clear is that polar bears have survived for 10's of thousands of years, including both colder and warmer periods. There may be threats to the future survival of the polar bear, but global warming is not primary among them.