Who the heck knows what the best posts are?  But I do have two quantitative measures of the hottest posts “” most comments and most views (Part II).

The most-discussed post this year received 390 comments, which doesn’t beat my record of 525 (see “Most discussed posts of 2008“), a figure I may never match again because of my comments policy, which is best described as anti anti-science.  The disinformers and the quacks make their living by repeating false statements that have long been debunked in the scientific literature.  In the real scientific community, anyone who did that would quickly be seen as a quack or a charlatan.

Those who have been duped by the disinformers endeavor to take over the comments section of every major climate website.  Where they are allowed to do so, like Dot Earth, they ruin it for everyone else.  Climate Progress has a long-standing policy of (generally) not allowing people to repeat long-debunked disinformation, since it requires me or my tireless readers to waste valuable time debunking it.  The other choice, ignoring it, is not really an option because on any given day, a large number of people are visiting for the first time and if there is disinformation that is not debunked, they might assume the author and readers are accepting it as true.  But sometimes I think it worthwhile to let the anti-science crowd have at it, just so everyone else can see what we are up against — and that leads to posts with lots of comments.

This list of most-commented-on posts is, I think, an okay introduction to Climate Progress (though I’d still recommend starting with the articles on the right hand column) — but it’s an even better introduction to the terrific set of readers that make CP’s comments section so lively and informative:

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And give him your feedback

UPDATE:  Gelbspan is responding to comments, so please keep them coming!  And enjoy this rare dialogue with a true legend of climate reporting.

Investigative journalist Ross Gelbspan has a new video out — and is very much interested in your feedback on it.

While I’ve been writing about climate and clean energy for two decades, Gelbspan is one of the main reasons I’ve focused so much attention on both the anti-science disinformation campaign and the flawed media coverage of global warming — two areas he has done pioneering work for more than a decade (see his website, The Heat is Online).

But what I didn’t realize until a recent e-mail is that I met him more than three decades ago.

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