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Tim Lambert's weblog
Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
February 9, 2010
Category: Monckton
At my suggestion the organisers of the debate have changed the format of the debate slightly. Instead of the moderator asking questions, we'll ask each other four questions, two on notice, two without. So you can suggest your questions for Monckton here. Monckton's slides can be seen here.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:15 AM • 0 Comments
Category: Open Thread
Time for a new open thread
Posted by Tim Lambert at 6:39 AM • 4 Comments
February 6, 2010
Category: Monckton
I will be debating Christopher Monckton this Friday.
John Smeed emails:
The Grand Ballroom at the Sydney Hilton Hotel is booked for 12.30pm to 2.30pm on Friday 12 February 2010 where it was planned that Alan Jones would MC a Lord Monckton lecture.
I have now rearranged this function to become a 'Presidential Style' debate (like the format used in the USA Presidential elections) on DOES ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING ENDANGER MANKIND ? with Alan Jones as the Moderator.
Each speaker will present a 10-15 minute Synopsis of his argument
The Moderator, Alan Jones, will ask a sequence of say four (4) relevant questions with the order of speaking being reversed each question.
Questions will be received from the floor, again with the order of speaking being reversed each question.
Each speaker will be given a five (5) minute summary time at the end of the question time
Moderator will close the debate
Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:40 PM • 295 Comments
Category: Bolt
Andrew Bolt claims:
In fact, the seas have not risen for nearly four years
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:06 PM • 86 Comments
Category: Monckton
Gareth Renowden has uncovered the true story of Monckton's visit to Australia. (Note to Tim Blair: I'm using "true story" ironically.)
Tim Blair, who used to call fellow journalist Margo Kingston "the Margoyle", has gone all politically correct on us. He's outraged, outraged I tell you that the Age published a photo that emphasised Monckton's protruding eyes, a symptom of Graves' disease. How dare they mock his appearance? Why can't they treat him like the SMH treated Adam Hills and crop the evidence of his complaint out of the photo? I hope my photo of Monckton will be to Blair's satisfaction.
I expect Blair will also be outraged by the cartoon accompanying this Mike Carlton column, which emphasises Monckton's extremely long nose, a symptom of Pinocchio's disease. Carlton's column is worth a read, since he points out that Monckton has adopted the Larouchites nutty notions about a world government and DDT.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 12:17 AM • 64 Comments
February 5, 2010
Category: Global Warming
Bidisha Banerjee and George Collins have written the definitive account of the error in the WG2 report about Himalayan glaciers:
Dozens of articles and analyses of this situation, whether dashed-off blog posts or New York Times coverage, exhibit a curious consistency. Not a single article or analysis appears to include all relevant issues without introducing at least one substantial error. It's as though the original documents contained a curse which has spread to infect every commentator and reporter. The curse seems to stem from not reading sources carefully (or at all), which, ironically, was the IPCC Working Group II's central failing, and also a major issue in the documents that were the basis of the defective paragraph.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 6:24 AM • 4 Comments
February 4, 2010
Category: Global Warming
There have been new developments in Leakegate, the scandal swirling about reporter Jonathan Leake, who deliberately concealed facts that contradicted the story he wanted to spin. Deltoid can reveal that Leake was up to the same tricks in his story that claims that the IPCC "wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters". Bryan Walker has the detailed dissection, but the short version is that Leake took one part of the discussion of one paper in the IPCC WG2 report and pretended that this was all it said, entirely ignoring the WG1 report and the discussion of other papers in the WG2 report. Leake writes:
Pielke has also told the IPCC that citing one section of Muir-Wood's paper in preference to the rest of his work, and all the other peer-reviewed literature, was wrong.
and
Muir-Wood was, however, careful to point out that almost all this increase could be accounted for by the exceptionally strong hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005. There were also other more technical factors that could cause bias, such as exchange rates which meant that disasters hitting the US would appear to cost proportionately more in insurance payouts.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 1:16 PM • 24 Comments
Category: meta
If they are going to include my blog on their list of the top 30 science blogs, I can't help but link to them. There are some good blogs on their list which is only marred by the inclusion of Anthony Watts' anti-science blog.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 4:35 AM • 38 Comments
Category: Global Warming
Jonathan Leake recently wrote a story alleging that the statement in the IPCC AR4 WG2 that up to 40% of the Amazon forest could vanish due to climate change was "bogus". Deltoid can now reveal that Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the claim about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake's query and informed him the claim was basically correct:
At the time of the IPCC [report], there was ample evidence that a large portion of the Amazon forest is very close to the lower limit of rainfall that is necessary to sustain dense forest. We published an article in 1994 in Nature in which we estimated that approximately half of the forests of the Brazilian Amazon were periodically exposed to severe drought and soil moisture depletion, especially during El Nino events.
Nepstad told me the same thing in response to my query after Leake's story was published. He included copies of his relevant papers which confirmed what he told me. Nepstad goes into more detail here:
The IPCC statement on the Amazon is correct, but the citations listed in the Rowell and Moore report were incomplete. (The authors of this report interviewed several researchers, including the author of this note, and had originally cited the IPAM website where the statement was made that 30 to 40% of the forests of the Amazon were susceptible to small changes in rainfall). Our 1999 article (Nepstad et al. 1999) estimated that 630,000 km2 of forests were severely drought stressed in 1998, as Rowell and Moore correctly state, but this forest area is only 15% of the total area of forest in the Brazilian Amazon. In another article published in Nature, in 1994, we used less conservative assumptions to estimate that approximately half of the forests of the Amazon depleted large portions of their available soil moisture during seasonal or episodic drought (Nepstad et al. 1994). After the Rowell and Moore report was released in 2000, and prior to the publication of the IPCC AR4, new evidence of the full extent of severe drought in the Amazon was available. In 2004, we estimated that half of the forest area of the Amazon Basin had either fallen below, or was very close to, the critical level of soil moisture below which trees begin to die in 1998. This estimate incorporated new rainfall data and results from an experimental reduction of rainfall in an Amazon forest that we had conducted with funding from the US National Science Foundation (Nepstad et al. 2004). Field evidence of the soil moisture critical threshold is presented in Nepstad et al. 2007.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 12:14 AM • 28 Comments
February 3, 2010
Category: The War on Science
The Australian seems to have an endless supply of journalists who, with no background in science, write stories about how the scientists have it all wrong on global warming. The latest effort, by one Jamie Walker, is dealt with by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 12:23 PM • 56 Comments
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