Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
Jeff Sparrow has some pictures of the climate panel at the Sydney Writer's Festival. It was very popular and many people were turned away when the room filled. I'm afraid that there doesn't seem to be a recording available. David Spratt and Sharon Beder's talks were based on their articles in the latest issue of Overland, but I talked about something different.
I read out this blurb from Quadrant (link added by me)
Debate censored
When the Sydney [Left] Writers' Festival hold a phoney "forum" on climate change they ensure dissent is silenced by excluding Ian Plimer - writer of the best selling Australian book on climate change.
And to illustrate what it's like debating a Plimer or a Bolt, I showed this graph, which Andrew Bolt says shows that sea levels are not rising:
We all had a good laugh at Bolt (if you are wondering how he can look at the graph and make that claim, he's cherry picking a couple of points from the end that have equal sea levels), but the problem with a debate is that a Plimer or a Bolt can toss out a dozen similar bogus claims in a minute or two and even if you are prepared with the data to refute them, it will take much longer to take care of them all.
I also presented John Quiggin's categorisation of denialists: Emeritus (eg Plimer), Tribalist (eg Bolt), Hack (eg IPA) and Ideologues (eg most libertarians).
That left half an hour for questions from the audience. We kept our answers short and were able to answer lots of questions. I thought there might have been a statement dressed up as a question from a denialist but no-one was game. Perhaps my mockery of Andrew Bolt cowed them into silence, sorry I mean CRUSHED THEIR DISSENT.
Comments
Tim,
I'm guessing your audience was mostly non science and non technical types so taking them through the graph was a very good idea. It would've given the audience an insight into the reality of using data as the basis of an argument and so show up the arguments of the denialists. Also this would've perhaps given the non scientific members of the audience the means and perhaps confidence to approach data and I'm sorry but that definitely means you will no longer be on Bolt's christmas card list.
Posted by: Jeremy C | May 26, 2009 2:15 AM
Has everyone actually heard the 'cast of the Sherwood vs. Plimer debate? I didn't think much of the "moderator" Chris Smith, but at least it drew out Plimer. He has to be heard to be believed.
Posted by: Marion Delgado | May 26, 2009 3:22 AM
"Emiritus"? Shouldn't that be "Emeritus"? (unless he's from the University of Kuwait... Sorry. Feel free to delete this post.)
Posted by: GC | May 26, 2009 8:06 AM
While we're correcting the Latin, might as well fix "he's cherry picking a couple of points from the end that =are have= equal sea levels" too.
I'm saddened there were no Libertarians in the audience. Presumably, this was because the meeting was overfull, and all the Libertarians showed up late to show how they eschew Authority.
Posted by: Ken Houghton | May 26, 2009 4:05 PM
so why does the University of Colorado present this chart on their main page as their indication of sea level change?
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/slnoibglobal_sm.jpg
and surely if you were honest you would have shown your audience the Annual change in global Sea level that shows the rate of rise is contrary to computer predictions.
http://users.tpg.com.au/johnsay1/Stuff/sea_level.jpg
like I said - a warmers love fest!
Posted by: janama | May 26, 2009 5:48 PM
so why does the University of Colorado present this chart on their main page as their indication of sea level change?
your graph is basically the same, just with the seasonal signal removed. (same rate =3.2+-0.4)
and surely if you were honest you would have shown your audience the Annual change in global Sea level that shows the rate of rise is contrary to computer predictions.
that rate is nearly always positive. and 1998 still was a very hot year. what did you expect in those 13 years? a constant increase, exactly parallel to CO2 numbers?
Posted by: sod | May 26, 2009 8:11 PM
Just to re-iterate Sod's point janama ; what exactly is the difference between the graph you present and Lambert's ? At this stage I would think you would retreat to the standard denialist technique of stating that it is all measurement error or faulty statistics ala climateaudit. Also which computer models are you writing about ?
Posted by: Bill O'Slatter | May 26, 2009 11:29 PM
pajama sam:
If you were honest you would realize that climate predictions do not forecast weather.
Posted by: Chris O'Neill | May 27, 2009 1:21 AM
Janama: How does your second graph show that the rate of sea level rise doesn't match computer models? Which computer models? How would you expect the graph to look if it did match computer models?
Posted by: naught101 | May 27, 2009 7:50 AM
Unfortunately, this is always on-topic for Deltoid:
If you've moved to the Firefox 3.5 Beta, and you want Greasemonkey back for your killfile script, You have to install The Mr Tech Toolkit - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/421
then restart firefox, right-click greasemonkey, make it compatible, say yes, restart firefox again.
Posted by: Marion Delgado | May 27, 2009 2:27 PM
BTW the trolls posting on the Andrew Bolt thread here are Rhodes scholars compared to the crowd actually commenting on his post at his site, I have to say.
Posted by: Marion Delgado | May 27, 2009 6:06 PM
I have one of Beder's books, and I recommend her arty that Tim mentioned.
Best,
D
Posted by: Dano | June 2, 2009 5:16 PM