Monday, February 22, 2016

My Shrill, Fire Breathing Rant to Andrew Revkin is in Moderation

From this post from the NCSE blog, I found a link to an article by Andrew Revkin. It's a long, rambling account of his personal journey through the climate issue. Now Revkin is more respected than most climate  writers by climate skeptics and lukewarmers and has even angered some people on the alarmist side such as Joe Romm. Still, I see him as part of the big government, academic and press climate establishment and I think he ignores a lot of legitimate concerns. So I wrote a rather long shrill comment in order to give him a  piece of my mind. It was immediately put into moderation.

(Update: I asked Revkin if he would allow or axe my comment in a tweet and he liked the tweet, but still left my comment in moderation. I just cleaned up the typos and resubmitted my comment. I also tweeted my question again.

https://twitter.com/DombroskiMike/status/703673534577565696
)

(Further Update: Made new hashtag. 
)

Here's my comment (as it appeared with all its typos):

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Part of Disappeared Parody Review Found

In this post some time ago I lamented the disappearance of a parody Amazon review of Michael Mann's book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.

Why Is My Two Star Amazon Review Ranked Last?

When Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's book, The Collapse of Western Civilizationcame out, I immediately purchased a Kindle copy of this short inexpensive book, because I wanted to write one of the first Amazon reviews of it. My review turned out to be the sixteenth one of the current total of 288. I gave it two stars, even though I really dislike their writing, because I felt it gave a concise look at their views. It has one comment by me where I included some non-Amazon links (Amazon does not allow them in a review). There are 31 two star reviews (11% of the total). The other day I thought I'd check how I was ranking and was surprised to find that my review was ranked dead last among two star reviews!

Now since I'm very critical of these two authors, I don't expect to get a very high ratio of helpful votes. But among the two star reviews, mine was clearly the longest. How did I end up dead last? So I made a table of the two star reviews that includes rank, helpful votes, total votes, the ratio of helpful to total votes and the number of lines of text that appear on my laptop screen, excluding blank lines between paragraphs.