Now on ScienceBlogs: The Festival Recognizes Our First "Featured Fan"!
Tim Lambert's weblog
Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
February 8, 2012
Category: Monckton
Over at the Monthly, Robert Manne writes about Monckton's plan for a super-rich person to establish a Fox News for Australia. I thought we already had that in the Australian.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:52 PM • 54 Comments
February 1, 2012
January 16, 2012
Category: patmichaels
Pat Michaels is infamous for his fraudulent graph presented to Congress in 1998. Dana Nuccitelli at Skeptical Science details some more fraudulent graphs from Michaels.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:40 AM • 103 Comments
January 13, 2012
Category: The War on Science
Whenever we had bean salad, my Dad would always ask "What's that?" When told what it was, he would say "Don't tell me what it's been, tell me what it is now!" That's a Dad joke. The defining properties of a Dad joke are that it is not funny and that Dad keeps repeating it. In their ongoing war on science The Australian is now committing war crimes by deploying Dad jokes (which I recall were banned by the Geneva Convention in 1949).
Imre Salusinszky, who declared global warming to be dead in January of last year has repeated the same unfunny joke this January:
Last year, other parts of the globe followed suit. According to the World Meteorological Organisation: "The most significant area of below-normal temperatures in 2011 was in northern and central Australia, where temperatures were up to 1C below average in places . . . Other regions to experience below-normal temperatures in 2011 included the western United States and southwestern Canada, and parts of east Asia."
Posted by Tim Lambert at 9:58 AM • 58 Comments
January 2, 2012
Category: Plimer
The Australian finally publishes Mike Sandiford's correction of the false claims from Plimer that The Australian published two weeks earlier:
Deliberately misrepresenting data or making it up is just not on.
Here's an example. In a section from his new book, How To Get Expelled from School, as reprinted in The Weekend Australian recently, Plimer claims: "Antarctic ice core (Siple) shows that there were 330 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air in 1900; Mauna Loa Hawaiian measurements in 1960 show that the air then had 260ppm carbon dioxide."
Plimer goes on to say: "Either the ice core data is wrong, the Hawaiian carbon dioxide measurements are wrong, or the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was decreasing during a period of industrialisation."
Posted by Tim Lambert at 12:08 AM • 50 Comments
December 24, 2011
Category:
Best wishes to all my readers. A more successful gingerbread house than last time.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 8:14 AM • 30 Comments
December 23, 2011
Category: Global Warming
Keith Kloor says that this "concisely expressed" his thinking on climate change:
I categorise myself as somebody who recognises that additional CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of man's activities (fossil fuel burning and land use change) will have an effect on the balance of radiation coming into and leaving our atmosphere.
I do not have a confirmed view as to exactly what the impact of the CO2 will have (feedbacks etc being uncertain) but I know that it must have an effect - that's physics.
Monckton would not disagree with any of this. This seems to be an example of The View from Nowhere.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 5:10 AM • 130 Comments
December 22, 2011
Category: Wegman
The Wegman scandal has made The Scientist's list of the top 5 science scandals of 2011:
A controversial climate change paper was retracted when it was found to contain passages lifted from other sources, including Wikipedia. The paper, published by climate change skeptic Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis in 2008, showed that climatology is an inbred field where most researchers collaborate with and review each other’s work. But a resourceful blogger uncovered evidence of plagiarism, and the journal retracted the paper, which was cited 8 times, in May.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:46 AM • 36 Comments
December 21, 2011
Category: Plimer • The War on Science
The Australian has continued its war on science by printing an extract from Ian Plimer's new book, How to Get Expelled from School. The extract is largely plagiarised from this press release on a recent paper in Science by Funder et al finding large fluctuations in Arctic sea ice over the last 10,000 years. Plimer did change this passage in the press release
In order to reach their surprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the team organised several expeditions to Peary Land in northern Greenland.
to this:
In order to reach their unsurprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the team organised several expeditions to Peary Land in northern Greenland.
Plimer contradicts his alteration of the plagiarised text in his next paragraph:
What is interesting about this study is that the new understanding came from getting away from computer modelling and doing fieldwork in pretty inhospitable areas.
Is it a "new understanding" or is it "unsurprising"? And while this sentence is original, it's also wrong -- the study's estimate that Arctic ice was 50% less 7000 years ago came from computer modelling. Plimer would have known this if he read the paper instead of just the press release. He perhaps would also have noticed that the paper begins with this:
Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:05 AM • 18 Comments
dynamics of cats 02.10.2012
greg laden's blog 02.09.2012
the pump handle 02.09.2012
dean's corner 02.09.2012
erv 02.09.2012
