I posted this on the Daily Lew Issue 5 as an update, but I decided it was so telling of the state of mind for the SkS crowd that it needed its own separate post. This also happens to be post 7000 on WUWT.

I had pretty much ignored the SkS forum dump when it was happening, thinking that perhaps they were being treated unfairly, but since John Cook has gone a bridge too far now with this Lewandowsky “moon landing survey” mess and his association with it, I no longer feel the need to hold back on what is going on behind the scenes over there.

Here is Glenn Tamblyn (Skeptical Science author/moderator) secretly conversing with his SkS pals on their off limits forum and saying “we need a conspiracy to save humanity”. The Viet Cong comparison is a nice touch too. There’s talk of convening a “war council” too.

And this isn’t about science or personal careers and reputations any more. This is a fight for survival. Our civilisations survival. .. We need our own anonymous (or not so anonymous) donors, our own think tanks…. Our Monckton’s … Our assassins. Anyone got Bill Gates’ private number, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson? Our ‘side’ has got to get professional, ASAP. We don’t need to blog. We need to network. Every single blog, organisation, movement is like a platoon in an army. ..This has a lot of similarities to the Vietnam War….And the skeptics are the Viet Cong… Not fighting like ‘Gentlemen’ at all. And the mainstream guys like Gleick don’t know how to deal with this. Queensberry Rules rather than biting and gouging. ..So, either Mother Nature deigns to give the world a terrifying wake up call. Or people like us have to build the greatest guerilla force in human history. Now. Because time is up…Someone needs to convene a council of war of the major environmental movements, blogs, institutes etc. In a smoke filled room (OK, an incense filled room) we need a conspiracy to save humanity.

[As quoted by Geoff Chambers in this Bishop Hill thread. http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/3/26/opengate-josh-158.html?currentPage=2#comments ]

Yet climate skeptics are being painted as conspiracy theory nutters by the very same people who say “a conspiracy to save humanity” is needed.

Gleick was fighting with “Queensberry Rules” when he assumed a fake identity and stole documents from Heartland?

Riiiight.

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For the excitable people that get upset about such things as this post, it is worth pointing out that the SkS “secret” forum was left wide open, and Cook blames himself No hack or ‘Gleick Queensberryness’ was needed, also from BH by poster David who captured this SkS announcement on 23 February 2012 by Cook himself:

Got an email from Brian P this morning saying that the whole forum was publicly available to him, even when he wasn’t logged in. I checked and this was true.A little panicky, I investigated and worked out that all the permission levels of each forum had been set down to zero. Normally, they’re set so only authors can access most of them, except the translator forum is also accessible to translators. Strangely though, there is an admin forum that only admins can access and that wasn’t set to zero – it was still set so only admins can access it. I have no idea how this happened. Several possibilities come to mind. First, I did it by accident when I was screwing around with the database sometime. Someone with admin access (there are about half a dozen SkSers with this access) made the change. Or we were hacked in some way and the hacker changed the levels. None of the options seem likely to me but the most likely is human error on my part although the fact that the admin forum was still set at admin level belies some kind of blanket wiping of all levels. So I’m a little freaked out – it’s not knowing how this happened that has me most worried. Has anyone been looking at the forum and how long has this been available? But I’ve been procrastinating some of those security measures that have been suggested to me and as soon as I get to work this morning, am going to implement some of those measures.

UPDATE: It gets worse.

Steve McIntyre points out the wholesale deletion of over 50 of Tom Fuller’s comments at Lewandowsky’s blog today (after they had been in place for days) and made this comment:

Steve McIntyre: Posted Sep 15, 2012 at 1:43 PM

Re: Iain McQueen (Sep 15 13:28),

In the secret SkS forum, a member of the SkS squadron stated that “McIntyre must go down”. In another post, another SkS squadron member fantasized about ripping out Watts’ throat as follows:

Sometimes you just want to let loose and scream about how you want to take those motherfucking arseholes, those closed-minded bigotted genocidal pieces of regurgitated dog shit and do unspeakable violence to their bodies and souls for what they are doing to the safety of what and who we all hold dear. (Ain’t a lack of a moderation policy a cleansing and liberating thing?)… Work out what you are best suited too and do that. But be able to distance yourself enough from your personal reactions to also see the bigger picture of the entire war and contribute to framing that broad campaign – “We need to focus on this and this and this. But my personal contribution will be to ripe Anthony Watts’ throat out – metaphorically of course.”

Such nice people, those SkS authors, contributors, and moderators.