1. Comments are moderated. If your comment does not appear immediately, it has been flagged by the moderation filters as potentially problematic. These comments are periodically reviewed, but especially at weekends, evenings and holidays, there may be some delay in approving otherwise non-contentious posts. Please be patient.
2. Questions, clarifications and serious rebuttals and discussions are welcomed.
3. Only comments that are germane to the post will be approved. Comments that contain links to inappropriate, irrelevant or commercial sites may be deleted.
4. As stated in the blog description, discussion of non-scientific subjects is not allowed.
5. No flames, profanity, ad hominen comments, or you said/he said type arguments are allowed. This includes comments that (explicitly or implicitly) impugn the motives of others, or which otherwise seek to personalize matters under discussion.
6. We reserve the right to make spelling corrections, correct text format problems, etc.
7. We use moderation to improve the “signal to noise” in the discussion. For this reason, we may choose to screen out comments that (a) simply repeat points made in previous comments, (b) make claims that we feel have already been validly refuted by us or others on the site, or (c) “muddy the water” by introducing erroneous, specious, or otherwise misleading assertions.
8. We reserve the right to either reject comments that do not meet the above criteria, or in certain cases to edit them in a manner that brings them into accordance with our comments policy (e.g. by simply deleting inflammatory or ad hominem language from an otherwise worthy comment).
9. Given that RealClimate represents a volunteer effort by about 10 different contributors, each of whom are free to participate in queue moderation, the items indicated above only constitute the basic ground rules. We cannot insure uniform application of the various considerations listed above from one individual comment to the next. We expect commenters to understand this.
10. Quick responses to questions that don’t merit a full post will be placed in-line (with credits).
11. All comments are assumed to be released into the public domain. You do not retain copyright. Comments which explicitly assert they retain copyright will be deleted.
12. Comments will close after a month, or earlier if necessary (e.g., if we feel that the comments have grown increasingly off topic, or the numbers of comments has become exceedingly large).
13. Repeat offenders of our comments policy (in particular, individuals demonstrating a pattern of “trolling”) may be barred from future access to the blog.

revised 11/04/05