Misplaced Pages

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William Michael Connolley (born April 12, 1964) is a software engineer in Cambridge, England. Connolley was, until December 2007, Senior Scientific Officer in the Physical Sciences Division in the Antarctic Climate and the Earth System project at the British Antarctic Survey, where he worked as a climate modeller.

Biography

Connolley holds a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford for his work on numerical analysis. Connolley has authored and co-authored many articles in the field of climatological research. It is his view that there is a consensus in the scientific community about climate change topics such as global warming, and that the various reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarise this consensus.

Connolley served as a parish councillor in the village of Coton (near Cambridge, England) until May 2007. He stood as a Green Party candidate for either South Cambridgeshire District Council or Cambridgeshire County Council every year from 2001 to 2005.

Scientific work

Connolley has worked on confronting the notion that "all scientists were predicting an ice age in the 1970s" (known as global cooling). He authored extensive literature reviews, concluding that a majority of scientific papers in the 1970s actually predicted warming, not cooling.

Connolley's main research work focused on sea ice measurement and modelling, and global climate models (GCM) such as HadCM3. Since direct observations of Antarctic sea ice are sparse, satellite Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSMI) based observations are used instead. Inconsistency in sea ice predictions from the various GCM algorithms in use makes verification of GCM output difficult. Connolley has worked on the validation of SSMI data against more direct upward looking sonar observations in the Weddell Sea area. His results indicated that Bootstrap data produced a better fit than data produced by NASA, prompting the conclusion that GCM predictions are more realistic than previously thought.

Misplaced Pages activity

In 2005, an article in the scientific journal Nature compared the reliability of Misplaced Pages and the Encyclopedia Britannica. It discussed Connolley as an example of an expert who regularly contributes to Misplaced Pages.

A July 2006 article in The New Yorker reported that Connolley briefly became "a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming", in which a skeptic repeatedly "watered down" the article's explanation of the greenhouse effect. The skeptic later brought the case before Misplaced Pages's arbitration committee, claiming that Connolley was pushing his own point of view in the article by removing material with opposing viewpoints. The arbitration committee imposed a "humiliating one-revert-a-day" editing restriction on Connolley. Misplaced Pages "gives no privilege to those who know what they’re talking about", Connolley told The New Yorker. The restriction was later revoked, and Connolley went on to become a Misplaced Pages administrator.

An October 2006 article in Nature contrasted the Citizendium online encyclopedia project, which makes a point of recruiting experts from academia, with Misplaced Pages. It quoted Connolley as saying that "some scientists have become frustrated with Misplaced Pages", but that "conflict can sometimes result in better articles".

Notes

1. W.M. Connolley, Preconditioning of iterative methods for linearised or linear systems (diss. Oxford, 1989).
2. "Just what is this Consensus anyway?", 22 December 2004 (Real Climate.org)
3. Internet Archive copy of Coton Parish Website
4. The Green Party South Cambs
5. The global cooling myth
6. William M. Connolley (2005). "Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No". Retrieved 2007-12-16.
7. Peterson, Thomas C. (2008). "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus". Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 89 (9): 1325–1337. doi:10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
8. Connolley, William M. "Sea ice concentrations in the Weddell Sea: A comparison of SSM/I, ULS, and GCM data", Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 32, 2 April, 2005
9. Giles, Jim (December 15, 2005). "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head". Nature. 438 (7070): 900–01. doi:10.1038/438900a. PMID 16355180.
10. ^ Schiff, Stacy (July 31, 2006). "Know It All: Can Misplaced Pages Conquer Expertise?". The New Yorker. Retrieved December 10, 2009.
11. Giles, Jim (October 5, 2006). "Misplaced Pages Rival Calls in the Experts". Nature. 443 (7111): 493. doi:10.1038/443493a. PMID 17024058.

External links

• William Connolley (Personal website)
• Connolley's webpage analysing papers relevant to a modern Ice Age
• "Stoat Taking science by the throat..." (Connolley's personal blog)
• RealClimate website RealClimate
• Connolley's British Antarctic Survey website

• 1964 births
• British bloggers
• Climatologists
• Green Party of England and Wales politicians
• Living people