Grotesque Malevolent Koala

So, an article was published in the Independent yesterday concerning the anti-global warming pseudo-documentary that recently aired in Britain, titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle". The article demonstrates the fact that much of the "data" cited by the documentary is either already established as false or was simply made up by the film's creators.

As an example:

The programme-makers labelled the source of the world temperature data as "Nasa" but when we inquired about where we could find this information, we received an email through Wag TV's PR consultant saying that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate sceptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank.

However, there are no diagrams in the paper that accurately compare with the C4 graph. The nearest comparison is a diagram of "terrestrial northern hemisphere" temperatures - which refers only to data gathered by weather stations in the top one third of the globe.

However, further inquiries revealed that the C4 graph was based on a diagram in another paper produced as part of a "petition project" by the same group of climate sceptics. This diagram was itself based on long out-of-date information on terrestrial temperatures compiled by Nasa scientists.

However, crucially, the axis along the bottom of the graph has been distorted in the C4 version of the graph, which made it look like the information was up-to-date when in fact the data ended in the early 1980s.

Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000. "There was a fluff there," he said.

The full article can be found at: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355956.ece

I came across the article on the front page of digg.com, which I often visit as a check on what people online are actually reading about (as opposed to what the MSM is pushing).

At the time that I saw the item, it had about 70 diggs. I read the article and added my own digg, and I noticed with interest that the article was rapidly accumulating diggs and marching towards the top of the chart. However, about an hour later, having hit around 200 diggs, the item mysteriously disappeared.

I couldn't understand what had happened, and searched the site in vain for the item to see if it had simply fallen off the list. It wasn't on the first few pages and wasn't even in the environmental news section, where a 200 score should have placed it easily at the top. It appeared to have simply vanished.

I tracked down the URL in my browser's history and discovered that item is still there. It's just not appearing on any of the charts.

Interested, I contacted Digg support to discover what happened to the piece, and was told that the item had been "buried" automatically due to user reports that it was "lame" and/or "inaccurate".

I don't know how many users would have had to do this, but I highly doubt that it was 200 or more. Digg's response states:

Remember, Digg is a community and, as such, is subject to democratic process of that community.

How is it democratic to make a story disappear like that -- automatically -- based on reports of a few users?

This absolutely smacks of deliberate manipulation to me, and I am surprised that digg has made it so easy to suppress important news like this. I sent a further inquiry to find out if they would be doing any investigation into this case of apparent abuse, but there's no response yet.