Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Origin of the Popular Technology.net Peer-Reviewed List


There are various myths floating around online about where the Popular Technology.net peer-reviewed paper list originated, falsely giving credit to people who copied earlier versions of my list and published it as their own. The following is a brief history,

Back in February 2007 I began compiling 'The Anti "Man-Made" Global Warming Resource'. The resource originally had a section dedicated to "peer-reviewed papers" where I would add various papers as I found them. Some basic categories existed and by the end of the year it had just less than 200 papers on the list. However it was effectively a rough draft that was not ready for publication. There were various reasons for this including that not all the journals were confirmed to be peer-reviewed. For instance, papers only published at arXiv.org are not peer-reviewed.

In April of 2008 the list was copied verbatim from the Popular Technology.net forums without my permission to Pete's Place in an article titled, 'Peer-Reviewed Articles Skeptical Of Man-Caused Global Warming'. At first I assumed he would give proper credit to myself and this site but when it quickly began showing up around the Internet as his I briefly commented asking for recognition as the source. I received no reply and his post was not updated to correctly recognize the source. Instead Peter apparently lied to and fooled the Heartland Institute into posting my list as "Compiled by Peter Risdon",

Scores of Peer-Reviewed Studies Contradict Global Warming Alarmism (The Heartland Institute, July 1, 2008)
More Peer-Reviewed Studies Contradict Global Warming Alarmism (The Heartland Institute, August 1, 2008)
Still More Peer-Reviewed Studies Contradict Global Warming Alarmism (The Heartland Institute, September 1, 2008)

I could not believe it and thus set out to compile a larger more inclusive list for publication at Popular Technology.net. When the paper count reached over 450 it was published in October of 2009. The irony here is I was quickly attacked by some as copying the Heartland Institute's list (this false claim is still being repeated to this day). Thanks to the dishonesty of Peter Risdon ripping off my own work, I was now being falsely accused of the same thing. To this day Peter has never updated his plagiarized post.

The only main third party sources initially used to compile the Popular Technology.net list were,

1. Dr. Khandekar's Bibliography of Peer-Reviewed Papers
2. CO2Science's Subject Archive

While I have received some submissions from scientists and skeptics, the bulk of the papers came from hundreds of hours of independent research searching online databases, websites and books.

When you spend enough time on a project you would like the proper credit for doing so.


Update: Using the Wayback Machine it is irrefutable that the list originated in the Popular Technology.net forums. Unfortunately the December 2007 capture is the closest available to Ridley's April 2008 post leaving a four month gap which misses some later additions such as the Cosmic Ray section but the exact formatting style including the categories and quotes cannot be denied.

1 comment:

frederick said...

Peter Risdon's history as a pathological liar, fantasist, petty criminal and police informer has been well-documented.

See, for example:

http://www.nobodylikesagrass.com

Your post is yet further evidence that corroborates Risdon's deep unpleasantness.

But don't worry too much - it's not as if the man has any credibility. Nobody believes a word he says in any case.

Good luck.