William Connolley

Last updated

William Connolley
Our hero in the window (cropped).jpg
Connolley in May 2022
Born
William Michael Conolley

(1964-04-12) 12 April 1964 (age 60)
NationalityBritish
Alma mater University of Oxford
Occupations
Years active2003–present
Known forBlog activity about climate change
Political party Green Party of England and Wales
Children2
Website www.wmconnolley.org.uk OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

William Michael Connolley (born 12 April 1964) is a British software engineer, writer, and blogger on climatology. Until December 2007 he was 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. After that he became a software engineer for Cambridge Silicon Radio.

Contents

Connolley received national press attention over several years for his involvement in editing Wikipedia articles relating to climate change. Connolley was a member of the RealClimate website until 2007 and now operates a website and blog that discuss climate issues. He has also been active in local politics as a member of the Green Party.

Background

Connolley holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a DPhil from St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford for his work on numerical analysis. [1] He works as a software engineer for Cambridge Silicon Radio, designing embedded firmware. [2]

Until December 2007, Connolley was Senior Scientific Officer in the Physical Sciences Division in the Antarctic Climate and the Earth System project at the British Antarctic Survey. His research focused on sea ice measurement and modelling, including the HadCM3 global climate model (GCM). Connolley also worked on the validation of satellite data against more direct upward looking sonar observations in the Weddell Sea area. [3] [4] He concluded that Bootstrap data produced a better fit than data produced by NASA and that GCM predictions are more realistic than previously thought. [4]

Connolley served as a parish councillor in the village of Coton (near Cambridge, England) until May 2007. [5] He was also a Green Party candidate for South Cambridgeshire District Council and Cambridgeshire County Council. [6]

Writing and editing

Connolley has authored and co-authored articles and literature reviews in the field of climatological research, with an emphasis on the climate of the Antarctic and the study of sea ice. [7] Connolley was a member of the RealClimate website until 2007, [8] [9] and he operates a website and blog that discuss climate issues. [10] [11] His blogs and one of his papers conclude that a majority of scientific papers in the 1970s predicted warming, not global cooling. [12] [13] [14] The Christian Science Monitor noted in 2007 that on Connolley's "personal website, and as a contributor to RealClimate.org (a website written and edited by working climate scientists), he's authored a number of articles that try to clarify the place of global cooling in the history of science" and commented, "Connolley and Schneider say that if the public had looked directly at the peer-reviewed scientific papers, and not at the popular media coverage, they would not have found any basis for a global-cooling scare." [15]

Wikipedia editing

Connolley began editing Wikipedia in 2003 [16] and served as a Wikipedia administrator from 2006 until 2009. [17] He has been cited and quoted in the media regarding these activities, especially with respect to his editing in the area of climate change. He was cited by Nature magazine, in their December 2005 review of the reliability of Wikipedia, as an example of an expert who edits Wikipedia. [18] Nature quoted Connolley, in 2006, as saying that "some scientists have become frustrated with Wikipedia" but that "conflict can sometimes result in better articles". [19]

No weight given to subject matter experts

In July 2006, a New Yorker article described him as briefly becoming "a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming", in which a sceptic repeatedly "watered down" the article's explanation of the greenhouse effect. [20] Connolley told the magazine that Wikipedia "gives no privilege to those who know what they're talking about". [20] Various books have cited Connolley as an example of how expert editors on Wikipedia are given "no more credence" than anonymous editors of the site. [21] [22] [23] In 2007, The Sunday Times of London ran an interview of author Andrew Keen that discussed Connolley and his Wikipedia editing. It identified Connolley as "an expert on global warming", stating: "After trying to correct inaccuracies Connolley was accused of trying to remove 'any point of view which does not match his own'. Eventually he was limited to making just one edit a day." The article stated that Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee "gave no weight to [Connolley's] expertise, and treated him with the same credibility as his anonymous opponent." [24] [25] [26]

Alleged abuse of administrative privileges

Two internal disputes at Wikipedia in which Connolley was involved received additional attention. A 2005 Wikipedia climate change dispute involving breaches of etiquette, rather than content bias, was cited by a paper in the Journal of Science Communication as an example that "resonated deeply as it highlighted what can befall respected experts who wade into controversial wiki-waters". The paper stated that Connolley did "not suffer...fools gladly". [27] The same paper noted a 2009 Wikipedia arbitration in which it was concluded that Connolley had used administrator privileges to his own advantage in content disputes, [28] [ circular reference ] and these privileges were removed. [27] Other academic papers have discussed Connolley's editing activities on Wikipedia and the dispute resolution process as it has been applied to him. [29]

Personal life

Connolley has two children. [30]

Selected publications

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antarctic Circumpolar Current</span> Ocean current that flows clockwise from west to east around Antarctica

Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is an ocean current that flows clockwise from west to east around Antarctica. An alternative name for the ACC is the West Wind Drift. The ACC is the dominant circulation feature of the Southern Ocean and has a mean transport estimated at 100–150 Sverdrups, or possibly even higher, making it the largest ocean current. The current is circumpolar due to the lack of any landmass connecting with Antarctica and this keeps warm ocean waters away from Antarctica, enabling that continent to maintain its huge ice sheet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryosphere</span> Earths surface where water is frozen

The cryosphere is an umbrella term for those portions of Earth's surface where water is in solid form. This includes sea ice, ice on lakes or rivers, snow, glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, and frozen ground. Thus, there is a overlap with the hydrosphere. The cryosphere is an integral part of the global climate system. It also has important feedbacks on the climate system. These feedbacks come from the cryosphere's influence on surface energy and moisture fluxes, clouds, the water cycle, atmospheric and oceanic circulation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ross Sea</span> Deep bay of the Southern Ocean in Antarctica

The Ross Sea is a deep bay of the Southern Ocean in Antarctica, between Victoria Land and Marie Byrd Land and within the Ross Embayment, and is the southernmost sea on Earth. It derives its name from the British explorer James Clark Ross who visited this area in 1841. To the west of the sea lies Ross Island and Victoria Land, to the east Roosevelt Island and Edward VII Peninsula in Marie Byrd Land, while the southernmost part is covered by the Ross Ice Shelf, and is about 200 miles (320 km) from the South Pole. Its boundaries and area have been defined by the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research as having an area of 637,000 square kilometres (246,000 sq mi).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate of Antarctica</span>

The climate of Antarctica is the coldest on Earth. The continent is also extremely dry, averaging 166 mm (6.5 in) of precipitation per year. Snow rarely melts on most parts of the continent, and, after being compressed, becomes the glacier ice that makes up the ice sheet. Weather fronts rarely penetrate far into the continent, because of the katabatic winds. Most of Antarctica has an ice-cap climate with extremely cold and dry weather.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Wave (ACW) is a coupled ocean/atmosphere wave that circles the Southern Ocean in approximately eight years at 6–8 cm/s (2.4–3.1 in/s). Since it is a wave-2 phenomenon at each fixed point in space a signal with a period of four years is seen. The wave moves eastward with the prevailing currents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ice sheet</span> Large mass of glacial ice

In glaciology, an ice sheet, also known as a continental glacier, is a mass of glacial ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 km2 (19,000 sq mi). The only current ice sheets are the Antarctic ice sheet and the Greenland ice sheet. Ice sheets are bigger than ice shelves or alpine glaciers. Masses of ice covering less than 50,000 km2 are termed an ice cap. An ice cap will typically feed a series of glaciers around its periphery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dansgaard–Oeschger event</span> Rapid climate fluctuation in the last glacial period

Dansgaard–Oeschger events, named after palaeoclimatologists Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger, are rapid climate fluctuations that occurred 25 times during the last glacial period. Some scientists say that the events occur quasi-periodically with a recurrence time being a multiple of 1,470 years, but this is debated. The comparable climate cyclicity during the Holocene is referred to as Bond events.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">West Antarctic Ice Sheet</span> Segment of Antarctic ice sheet

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is the segment of the continental ice sheet that covers West Antarctica, the portion of Antarctica on the side of the Transantarctic Mountains that lies in the Western Hemisphere. It is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into floating ice shelves. The WAIS is bounded by the Ross Ice Shelf, the Ronne Ice Shelf, and outlet glaciers that drain into the Amundsen Sea.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antarctic ice sheet</span> Earths southern polar ice cap

The Antarctic ice sheet is a continental glacier covering 98% of the Antarctic continent, with an area of 14 million square kilometres and an average thickness of over 2 kilometres (1.2 mi). It is the largest of Earth's two current ice sheets, containing 26.5 million cubic kilometres of ice, which is equivalent to 61% of all fresh water on Earth. Its surface is nearly continuous, and the only ice-free areas on the continent are the dry valleys, nunataks of the Antarctic mountain ranges, and sparse coastal bedrock. However, it is often subdivided into East Antarctic ice sheet (EAIS), West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS), and Antarctic Peninsula (AP), due to the large differences in topography, ice flow, and glacier mass balance between the three regions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan M. Gregory</span>

Jonathan Michael Gregory is a climate modeller working on mechanisms of global and large-scale change in climate and sea level on multidecadal and longer timescales at the Met Office and the University of Reading.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heinrich event</span> Large groups of icebergs traverse the North Atlantic.

A Heinrich event is a natural phenomenon in which large groups of icebergs break off from the Laurentide ice sheet and traverse the Hudson Strait into the North Atlantic. First described by marine geologist Hartmut Heinrich, they occurred during five of the last seven glacial periods over the past 640,000 years. Heinrich events are particularly well documented for the last glacial period but notably absent from the penultimate glaciation. The icebergs contained rock mass that had been eroded by the glaciers, and as they melted, this material was dropped to the sea floor as ice rafted debris forming deposits called Heinrich layers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Alley</span> American geologist and academic (born 1957)

Richard Blane Alley is an American geologist and Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. He has authored more than 240 refereed scientific publications about the relationships between Earth's cryosphere and global climate change, and is recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information as a Highly Cited Researcher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Polar amplification</span>

Polar amplification is the phenomenon that any change in the net radiation balance tends to produce a larger change in temperature near the poles than in the planetary average. This is commonly referred to as the ratio of polar warming to tropical warming. On a planet with an atmosphere that can restrict emission of longwave radiation to space, surface temperatures will be warmer than a simple planetary equilibrium temperature calculation would predict. Where the atmosphere or an extensive ocean is able to transport heat polewards, the poles will be warmer and equatorial regions cooler than their local net radiation balances would predict. The poles will experience the most cooling when the global-mean temperature is lower relative to a reference climate; alternatively, the poles will experience the greatest warming when the global-mean temperature is higher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">East Antarctic Ice Sheet</span> Segment of the continental ice sheet that covers East Antarctica

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) lies between 45° west and 168° east longitudinally. It was first formed around 34 million years ago, and it is the largest ice sheet on the entire planet, with far greater volume than the Greenland ice sheet or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), from which it is separated by the Transantarctic Mountains. The ice sheet is around 2.2 km (1.4 mi) thick on average and is 4,897 m (16,066 ft) at its thickest point. It is also home to the geographic South Pole, South Magnetic Pole and the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station.

ECHAM is a general circulation model (GCM) developed by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the research organisations of the Max Planck Society. It was created by modifying global forecast models developed by ECMWF to be used for climate research. The model was given its name as a combination of its origin and the place of development of its parameterisation package, Hamburg. The default configuration of the model resolves the atmosphere up to 10 hPa, but it can be reconfigured to 0.01 hPa for use in studying the stratosphere and lower mesosphere.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate change feedbacks</span> Feedback related to climate change

Climate change feedbacks are natural processes which impact how much global temperatures will increase for a given amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Positive feedbacks amplify global warming while negative feedbacks diminish it. Feedbacks influence both the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the amount of temperature change that happens in response. While emissions are the forcing that causes climate change, feedbacks combine to control climate sensitivity to that forcing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate change in Antarctica</span> Impacts of climate change on Antarctica

Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities occurs everywhere on Earth, and while Antarctica is less vulnerable to it than any other continent, climate change in Antarctica has already been observed. There has been an average temperature increase of >0.05 °C/decade since 1957 across the continent, although it had been uneven. While West Antarctica warmed by over 0.1 °C/decade from the 1950s to the 2000s and the exposed Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by 3 °C (5.4 °F) since the mid-20th century, the colder and more stable East Antarctica had been experiencing cooling until the 2000s. Around Antarctica, the Southern Ocean has absorbed more heat than any other ocean, with particularly strong warming at depths below 2,000 m (6,600 ft) and around the West Antarctic, which has warmed by 1 °C (1.8 °F) since 1955.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ross Embayment</span> Region of Antarctica

The Ross Embayment is a large region of Antarctica, comprising the Ross Ice Shelf and the Ross Sea, that lies between East and West Antarctica.

CICE is a computer model that simulates the growth, melt and movement of sea ice. It has been integrated into many coupled climate system models as well as global ocean and weather forecasting models and is often used as a tool in Arctic and Southern Ocean research. CICE development began in the mid-1990s by the United States Department of Energy (DOE), and it is currently maintained and developed by a group of institutions in North America and Europe known as the CICE Consortium. Its widespread use in Earth system science in part owes to the importance of sea ice in determining Earth's planetary albedo, the strength of the global thermohaline circulation in the world's oceans, and in providing surface boundary conditions for atmospheric circulation models, since sea ice occupies a significant proportion (4-6%) of Earth's surface. CICE is a type of cryospheric model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amelia E. Shevenell</span> American marine geologist

Amelia E. Shevenell is an American marine geologist who specializes in high-latitude paleoclimatology and paleoceanography. She is currently a Professor in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. She has made notable contributions to understanding the history of the Antarctic ice sheets and published in high-impact journals and, as a result, was awarded full membership of Sigma Xi. She has a long record of participation in international ocean drilling programs and has served in leadership positions of these organizations. Shevenell served as the elected Geological Oceanography Council Member for The Oceanography Society (2019-2021).

References

  1. Connolley, W. M. (1989). Preconditioning of iterative methods for linearized or linear systems (D. Phil. thesis). Oxford: Oxford University Numerical Analysis Group. p. 208. OCLC   49766487.
  2. Connolley, William. About Page Stoat Blog
  3. "Dr William Connolley / Senior Scientific Officer / Climate Modeller / Physical Sciences Division". British Antarctic Survey. Retrieved 24 October 2010.
  4. 1 2 Connolley, W. M. "Sea ice concentrations in the Weddell Sea: A comparison of SSM/I, ULS, and GCM data" (PDF). Retrieved 26 October 2010.
  5. Internet Archive copy of Coton Parish Website
  6. The Green Party South Cambs Archived 1 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  7. See for example, Vaughan, D. G.; Marshall, G. J.; Connolley, W. M.; King, J. C.; Mulvaney, R. (2001). "CLIMATE CHANGE: Devil in the Detail". Science. 293 (5536): 1777–9. doi:10.1126/science.1065116. PMID   11546858. S2CID   129175116.
  8. Connolley, W. M. (6 December 2004). "William M. Connolley Filed under: * Contributor Bio's — william @ 6 December 2004". RealClimate. Archived from the original on 16 August 2007. Retrieved 9 February 2010.
  9. Connolley, William (1 December 2007). "Goodbye to all that" – announcement of departure from RealClimate. RealClimate. Retrieved 26 October 2010.
  10. Stoat Taking science by the throat... Connolley's personal blog
  11. "Connolley's webpage analysing papers relevant to a modern Ice Age". Wmconnolley.org.uk. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
  12. Peterson, T.C.; Connolley, W. M.; Fleck, J. (2008). "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus" (PDF). Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 89 (9): 1325–1337. Bibcode:2008BAMS...89.1325P. doi:10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1. S2CID   123635044.
  13. William Connolley (24 January 2005). "The global cooling myth". RealClimate. Retrieved 30 December 2009.
  14. William M. Connolley (2005). "Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No" . Retrieved 16 December 2007.
  15. Azios, Tony. "Global-warming skeptics: Is it only the news media who need to chill?" The Christian Science Monitor, 11 October 2007, accessed 24 May 2011
  16. "I am all powerful (part 2)". Scienceblogs.com. 19 December 2009. Archived from the original on 23 December 2009. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
  17. "A child's garden of wikipedia, part I". Scienceblogs.com. 4 January 2010. Retrieved 26 October 2010.
  18. Giles, J. (15 December 2005). "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head". Nature. 438 (7070): 900–01. Bibcode:2005Natur.438..900G. doi: 10.1038/438900a . PMID   16355180.
  19. Giles, J. (5 October 2006). "Wikipedia Rival Calls in the Experts". Nature. 443 (7111): 493. Bibcode:2006Natur.443..493G. doi: 10.1038/443493a . PMID   17024058.
  20. 1 2 Schiff, S. (31 July 2006). "Know It All: Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise?". The New Yorker . Retrieved 26 October 2010.
  21. Rosen, Larry D., Mark Carrier and Nancy A. Cheever. Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn, p. 120, Macmillan (2010) ISBN   0-230-61478-7
  22. Tammet, Daniel. Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind, p. 206, Simon and Schuster (2009) ISBN   1-4165-7618-5
  23. Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture , p. 43, New York: Doubleday (2007) ISBN   0-385-52080-8
  24. Flintoff, John-Paul. "According to Wikipedia I'm the Mona Lisa", The Sunday Times, 3 June 2007, News Review p. 3
  25. Flintoff, John-Paul. "Thinking is so over". The Times . ISSN   0140-0460 . Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  26. "End of expertise". John-Paul Flintoff. 3 June 2007. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  27. 1 2 Mathieu O'Neil: "Shirky and Sanger, or the costs of crowdsourcing". Journal of Science Communication, Vol. 9, Issue 1, March 2010, International School for Advanced Studies
  28. "Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Cold fusion 2". 13 September 2009. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  29. See, e.g., Forte, A.; Bruckman, A. (2008). "Scaling Consensus: Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance". Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008). p. 157. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.84.8022 . doi:10.1109/HICSS.2008.383. ISBN   978-0-7695-3075-8. S2CID   7961848. and the papers cited therein
  30. "William Michael Connolley" website. wmconnolley.org, accessed 14 May 2011
  31. "William M. Connolley's page about Fourier 1827: MEMOIRE sur les temperatures du globe terrestre et des espaces planetaires". wmconnolley.org.uk. William M. Connolley. Retrieved 22 July 2010.