Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
January 19, 2009
Today's Australian has a piece by Bob Carter predicting global cooling
Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's disproved projections of…
January 16, 2009
When discussing Jon Jenkin's use of a ridiculous sixth-degree poynomial fit to temperatures to argue that they were steeply trending down, I suggested that local regression (loess) was a much better method for showing trends. I was going to get around to plotting one, but Tamino has saved me the…
January 15, 2009
Today's Australian included a double feature in its war on science. And they were both news stories, not opinion pieces. First up is John Stapleton. Last month Stapleton wrote a story arguing that winter was evidence against global warming. So how does Stapleton write a story about a heat wave…
January 14, 2009
A few years ago, the National Research Council reviewed the evidence on firearms and crime and concluded:
There is no credible evidence that "right-to-carry" laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime.
Paul Cassell says that he finds…
January 12, 2009
John Quiggin suggests some reasons why the anti-science position on climate change has become an orthodoxy on the Right:
There are many explanations, perhaps so many that the outcome was overdetermined - powerful economic interests such as ExxonMobil, the hubris associated with victories in…
January 9, 2009
ScienceBlogs is upgrading to Movable Type 4. During the upgrade process there will be no new posts or comments. Everything is supposed to be back to normal in 36 hours. What could possibly go rong?
Update: And we're back...
January 9, 2009
The identity of the person who hoaxed Keith Windschuttle has been revealed. Katherine Wilson had left many clues and several people figured that she was the hoaxer.
Meanwhile, Keith Windschuttle continues to deny that he was hoaxed, because:
A real hoax, like that of Alan Sokal and Ern Malley, is…
January 7, 2009
The Telegraph is hanging on to its lead over the Australian. After publishing a story by Richard Alleyne that misrepresented the work of Ian Fairchild, they have not corrected the story and not published Fairchild's letter of correction. But that's not all. Ben Goldacre reports:
Worse than that,…
January 7, 2009
Ian Musgrave has written the post I was going to write on Jon Jenkins' article in the Australian, so I just want to emphasize that fitting a degree six (yes, degree six) to temperature data does not produce a meaningful trend line in any way shape or form. Go read.
Note that if the editors at the…
January 6, 2009
Keith Windschuttle has just published a hoax article full of pseudo-science in Quadrant. And it wasn't this article by Tim Curtin which contains such gems as the claim that Arrhenius borrowed his formulation of the enhanced greenhouse effect from Malthus (he didn't), that the water vapour from…
January 2, 2009
The Australian has fallen well behind in the race for the 2009 ward for most consistently wrong media outlet. They've published a piece by Mike Steketee that debunks common denialist arguments. He points out the difference between long and short term trends, that the Oregon petition is very light…
December 31, 2008
Congratulations to The Australian for winning the 2008 award for Most consistently wrong media outlet, coming in ahead of Drudge favourite the London Daily Telegraph.
Well, they're not resting on their laurels in 2009. John Stapleton has a new article out before most of the world even started 2009…
December 29, 2008
Jeremy Jacquot has written a three part debunking of the claims in Joane Nova's "Skeptic's Handbook": Part 1: increasing CO2 won't make much difference, Part 2: warming has stopped and ice cores show that CO2 increases do not cause warming, and Part 3: the hot spot is missing. If all this seems…
December 29, 2008
I suppose it was inevitable that the Australian would reprint Christopher Booker's claim that winter disproves man-made global warming. It was a global warming denial piece, it was picked up Drudge and the arguments were pathetically weak. So here it is in today's paper.
December 28, 2008
You have to think that global warming denialist Matt Drudge must be getting desperate when he touts a column by Christopher "White asbestos is harmless" Booker arguing that winter has disproved man-made global warming:
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly…
December 26, 2008
Over at The Poor Man Institute voting is underway for the 2008 Wingnut Awards. The nominees for The Creamy Baileys Nobel Peace Prize for Science, 2008 are Chad Myers, Camille Paglia, Charlie Daniels, Gregg Easterbrook and James Inhofe. Hmmm...
December 24, 2008
Josh Rosenau is collecting nominations for the top 5 anti-science think tanks in America. Clearly the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Discovery Institute have a lock on two of the places, but which ones should fill the other three places?
Here in Australia, the IPA is the easy winner as…
December 22, 2008
Today's salvo in the Australian is a quote from Christopher "White asbestos is harmless" Booker. Booker writes:
Last weekend, US meteorologist Anthony Watts noticed that something very odd had happened to the daily updated website that shows how much sea ice there is in the Arctic.
Without…
December 22, 2008
As well as his work on guns, John Lott has produced some bizarre claims about the Florida 2000 election. For example:
African-American Republicans who voted were 54 to 66 times more likely than the average African American to cast a non-voted ballot (either by not marking that race or voting for…
December 21, 2008
The down side of the link exchange between ScienceBlogs and the New York Times is that in the side bar there is now a link to John Tierney's attack on John Holdren, using such stellar authorities as Bjorn Lomborg, Roger Pileke Jr and the Competitiive Enterprise Institute.
Joe Romm has written an…
December 21, 2008
So, I after looking at who was on Inhofe's list of scientists that he claims dispute global warming and on the Discovery Institute's list of Darwin dissentors, I thought I should see who was Inhofe's list and this list of HIV/AIDS "rethinkers". The HIV/AIDS list seems to be even dodgier than Inhofe…
December 20, 2008
Back in July, David Evans had on opinion piece in the Australian claiming:
The greenhouse signature is missing. ... The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics.
This is wrong. The hot spot is not the signature, since you get a hot…
December 18, 2008
The Australian seems to have realized that their delight over Rudd's ETS was a giveaway and they are trying to provide some cover. Today we have a piece from Henry Ergas opposing the scheme:
As for the emissions trading scheme, if the main emitters are not reducing their emissions -- as the…
December 18, 2008
Gareth Renowden on the confused mess that is New Zealand's climate policy:
When the ETS was first launched, National supported it. Then they withdrew support for the legislation in the run-up to the election, but campaigned on keeping the basic ETS structure while tinkering with (also known as…
December 17, 2008
I haven't read David Archer's "The Long Thaw" yet, but it comes highly recommended. John Mashey:
This concise (180-page), clearly-written book is an excellent first book on climate science for the general audience, generally not requiring knowledge beyond that of high school. ...
Of the 50 or so…
December 17, 2008
Greenfyre has a nice roundup of corrections to Inhofe's list of 650 604 scientists that he claims dispute the consensus on global warming. Eli Rabett notes some resume inflation in the list, while Bob has a blog doing an entry on each name on the list
Reporters seem to have wised up to Inhofe's…