About This Blog

This forum was created to provide a clearing house for all the reasonable and respectful commentary out there that's been drafted and submitted to online climate blogs, or to online climate-related articles, only to be deleted, or pulled from moderation, in contradiction to the blog or website's stated comment guidelines, or due to what the commenter believes are unreasonable and unfair restrictions for an open forum.

AIC respects any blogger's right to moderate the discussions on their forum however they see fit, but is troubled by the descrepancy between some forums' claims of openness and even-handedness versus the reality of their moderation practices.

For general discussion of questionable moderation practices on climate blogs, RC Rejects is probably a more appropriate forum for than AIC.

This forum was created with two primary goals:

Through the publication of rejected comments,

1) To provide a more open and diverse extension of ongoing discussions at climate blogs where people have had difficulties in having their comments published. While this forum requests that initial comments on a mirrored post are copies of comments that were rejected at the source, responses to and discussions arising from those rejected comments are encouraged. This forum is not intended as an echo chamber; people of all viewpoints on any issues are very welcome to join the discussions in a respectful manner.

2) To encourage those who may have given up on contributing (or attempting to contribute) to discussions at blogs that rarely or never publish their comments to begin again, in hopes that what comments do go through contribute to a better discussion on those forums.

Since this forum's creation, the initiative of Roger Pielke, Jr., on his own blog, has suggested a third goal which might supplant the need for the first two:

3) For climate-related blogs to create a "Rejected Comments" thread where people are free to post comments rejected from the main threads, in the interests of transparency.

It can be a real sting when one spends time drafting polite and relevant commentary only to have disappear into a black hole because it doesn't support a specific scientific or policy perspective.

By providing a fallback outlet for such speech, this forum hopes to provide a directly related space for those unheard voices, and to encourage more meaningful discussion between differing viewpoints.