"Fallacy" Article Gets Wider "Viewing"

On April 22nd, I received my typical weekly blog activity report from Sitemeter™ and was a bit surprised to see a lot of activity for that particular day (April 22nd). Considering that the previous six days were pretty normal (read: "slow"), I was intrigued to find out the cause of the sudden spike in activity.

Having written an article entitled The Fallacy of "Climate Change" only two days earlier, I decided to Google the title, and was surprised to find several links to my latest offering. At first I was bit confused. The first link I went to was a blog called War In Iraq where a poster named "atheo" appeared to have lifted my entire article and reproduced it verbatim without giving me any credit...


(The blog indicated that there had been 266 reads of the article.)

I was becoming a bit annoyed at the thought of someone stealing my article, but I soon noticed a link at the end of "MY" article, and decided to check it out. The link took me to a website called Signs of the Times (or SOTT.net) where I again found a complete reprint of my original article.


This time however, I was gratified to see that my article was attributed to "Hawkeye" at "View From Above Blog" and included a link to my article. I was also pleased to see a note below the article that as of April 26th, "659 people have viewed this page since Mon, 21 Apr 2008". I had never visited this website before, and was somewhat amused to read the tag line: "the World for People who Think". (Ahhh, I thought! Good idea! Writing for thinkers, I thought to myself. A very thoughtful... thought.) I also noticed that my article had a rating of "10 lightbulbs", whatever that meant. Other articles had similar ratings, but none of the icons was ever the same from article to article.

Returning to Google, I also found my article reprinted in full at...

The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized. The "View From Above" was credited, but no mention of Hawkeye®, and no direct link to my article. Apparently they found the article at SOTT.net and used that as their source.



I also found references to my article at...

Above Top Secret, where somebody named JanusFIN posted the entire first paragraph, again with a link to SOTT.net and said, "Great article!"



Interestingly enough, I found a link to my article at a website called "What REALLY Happened", which appears to be a website for conspiracy theorists. Click on the link above and scroll down to April 21, 2008. I guess my article led one such theorist to conclude that the fallacy of climate change is being used by "politicians" to create "a 'crisis' requiring more taxes and control".

I was not overly-impressed by a reference to my article at The Fall Of Humanity Blog which seems to be nothing more than a listing of hundreds of articles in dozens of categories with no apparent point.



The website Skeptical Science referred to my article (along with many others) in an effort to refute it. Scroll down to see bullet #3 under "Articles Using This Argument". Better to be refuted than ignored I guess. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)



Someone at a Discussion Forum called "Australian Opinion" referred to my article without any further comment.


I found the link to my article at Rantburg.com particularly amusing. First of all, the tag line at this website is: "Civil, Well-Reasoned Discourse", which is accompanied by a woodcut of two men using fisticuffs. Secondly, they used a great pic entitled: "The benefits of global-warming" which shows Alaskan Huskies sitting in beach chairs. Rantburg reports 209 views of the page.



Finally, I found a reference to my article at what appears to be a French blog called IFTBQP ~ Social living. The blog introduced my article with only these words: "À lire absolument". A literal translation from Google says "To read absolutely", which I interpret as: "A must read".


Considering that only a handful of readers visit my humble blog during an average week, this was a pretty big deal for me. I hope you will share my momentary excitement, because I'm sure this event won't often be repeated. Special thanks to those dedicated few who regularly stop in to "View" and, well... still keep coming back!



[UPDATE: After posting this article, I did another search and found additional links to my article HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE. Page views of the article at SOTT.net is up to 872. I also learned that Skeptical Science created a dedicated page for my article HERE.]