tlambert

Time for a new Open Thread, where you can spit on the floor and call the cat a bastard.

John Mashey's Amazon review of Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by James Hoggan. Anti-Science and Who Does It Anti-science (or agnotology), seeks to cover-up or obscure science considered inconvenient, or at least create doubt in the minds of public and decision-makers. It seeks…

The sky from my front yard this morning. More pictures.

Tim Blair disputes Charles Johnson's estimate of the size of the September 12 rally. Johnson wrote: Here's the Washington DC Metrorail service information for Saturday, September 12, 2009: September 12, 2009: Metrorail: 437,624 Comparable Metrorail Ridership 1 Year Ago: 362,773 The difference…

Chris Mooney seems somewhat bemused by Jennifer Marohasy's response to his interview on Lateline. Marohasy claimed: according to an interview Mr Mooney gave last night on Australian television if you don't believe in AGW you aren't even a scientist. Compare with what Mooney actually said: If you…

After Ian Plimer reneged on his agreement to answer Monbiot's questions, the folks at the Spectator have reacted just like Plimer does to criticism -- with name calling and nothing to address the criticism. Spectator columnist Rod Liddle Moonbat ... You pompous, monomaniacal, jackass. ... reminds…

Quark Expeditions is running a contest to become the official blogger on a an Antarctic voyage. ScienceBlog's GrrlScientist (Devorah Bennu) wants to go. I think her writing is better and more interesting than the other leading contenders, so I'm asking you to vote for her. (Voting requires you to…

Just as I thought, Ian Plimer's questions for Monbiot were a pretext to avoid answering Monbiot's questions. Monbiot writes: Creationists and climate change deniers have this in common: they don't answer their critics. They make what they say are definitive refutations of the science. When these…

The New York Times reports: The number of children dying before their fifth birthdays each year has fallen below nine million for the first time on record, a significant milestone in the global effort to improve children's chances of survival, particularly in the developing world, according to data…

I've been looking through old photos that belonged to my grandmother and I really liked this one. (Click to enlarge). This picture was unlabeled, but there is another picture of (I think) the same woman and it's labelled as Margaret Cascadden in Katoomba in 1927. I think she was a friend of my…

Way back in August 1988 on Usenet I wrote: Waste heat does not contribute significantly to global warming. It is all (if it's really happening - we probably won't be sure until its too late) caused by the greenhouse effect. I agree with Brad - burning fossil fuels could well be more harmful to…

Time for a new open thread.

George Monbiot has the details on Plimer's latest attempts to evade answering Monbiot's questions. Plimer wrote to him: There are seven versions of Heaven and Earth and only my Australian publisher and I know the differences in diagrams, references and text between the seven. It has taken some…

Carmen writes about a cult: It's adherents called themselves followers of the Way. It was lead by a charismatic leader who was a faith healer and miracle worker who claimed to be of divine origin and who said his words and actions were directed by God. He said he was chosen before the beginning of…

I think the purpose of Plimer's strange questions was to give himself a pretext to avoid answering Monbiot's questions, but Gavin Schmidt has countered this ploy by addressing Plimer's questions at RealClimate.

Read this passage (from a Greenpeace news story): A recent NASA study has shown that the ice cap is not only getting smaller, it's getting thinner and younger. Sea ice has dramatically thinned between 2004 and 2008. Old ice (over 2 years old) takes longer to melt, and is also much harder to replace…

Bob Ward reviews Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth in The Times: It is easy to see why this book has attracted attention, particularly from right-wing commentators who have long believed that man-made climate change is a conspiracy theory. But this book is so full of errors that readers who believe its…

Because Tim Blair gets political commentry about Australia from Taiwan, it comes as no surprise that he gets his commentry on the States from England, from one Gerald Warner who reckons that Obama's attempts to create a "Union of Soviet States of America" will fail and that he will be a one-term…

Matthew England will talk about climate models this Sunday 23rd August in the Powerhouse Museum as part of the Ultimo Science Festival. The press release says: Climate modeller challenges skeptics With the Government's emissions trading legislation now delayed, one of Australia's leading climate…

Ed Darrell comments on the latest attack on Rachel Carson in a war that has being going on since 1962: "Not Evil, Just Wrong" is slated for release sometime on October 18. This is the film that tried to intrude on the Rachel Carson film earlier this year, but managed to to get booked only at an…

Malcolm Colless, writing in The Australian declares that human-caused global warming is a beat-up, just like human-caused ozone depletion. I swear I'm not making this up. Look: Remember, it was not so long ago that we were confronted with the unnerving prospect of being fried like eggs on a…

The thing about a Roger Pielke Jr train wreck is that you just can't look away. Check this one out. Pielke claims that there were 1,264 times as many news stories about a Michael Mann study that suggests that hurricanes are at a 1,000 year high as about a Chris Landsea study that found no…

The ABC's quality control at Unleashed appears to have failed. They have published an article by Plimer that merely repeats many of the claims from his discredited book. Plimer has enlarged his claim from his book that volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities. Now it is: Over the past 250…

This is for off topic discussion. Oh, and Billy Bob Hall, since you don't seem to be able to stay on-topic, from now on you can only post to Open Threads. I will delete any comment you make to other threads.

Johann Hari on the alarming development of artemisinin resistance But then something began to change - at first imperceptibly - in the forgotten forests of Western Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge held their last stand-off. The drug that is most effective at treating malaria is called artemisinin:…

Instead of answering Monbiot's questions, Plimer has responded with his own set of questions. I suspect that this is a tactic so he can weasel out of answering Monbiot's questions. My favourite question from Plimer is this one (which isn't even a question): 6 From ocean current velocity,…

Piers Akerman is appearing on Q&A tomorrow night. One of the main topics will be climate change. You can post a question for him at the Q&A web site, or suggest a question in comments -- I know that at least one reader is going to be in the studio audience. You can read Akerman's strange…

May Berenbaum is an entomologist at UIUC and been correcting the Rachel-Carson-killed-millions hoax for a while now. Public Radio International has interviewed Berenbaum for a podcast on DDT and malaria. She is also answering questions on the forum there. Predictably Marjorie Mazel Hecht, editor…

It's only taken two weeks to go from the blog posts shredding McLean et al to a paper submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research. The authors are G. Foster, J. D. Annan, P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, B. Mullan, J. Renwick, J. Salinger, G. A. Schmidt, and K. E. Trenberth and the abstract says:…

Australia's CIS (Centre for Independent Studies) has been promoting greenhouse denial and delay for a decade. Last year their "Big Ideas" forum featured some classic denialism from Arthur Herman. This year, on Monday 10 August in Sydney we have: Enemies of Progress? Cute title. Maybe I should…