Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
December 16, 2008
Jim Prall has compiled a list of the authors of the IPCC Working Group 1 report for AR4. There are 618 WG1 authors, which is more than the 604 names on Inhofe's list. There are just three names on both lists, which is no surprise given the shortage of climate scientists on Inhofe's list.
First…
December 15, 2008
The quick way to see if the Australian government's CO2 emission targets are adequate is to check the reaction from The Australian. Since The Australian believes that it's not warming and we're not causing it and it will not be harmful and we can't do anything about it, they're not going to…
December 14, 2008
I'm afraid the very silly editorial in the Weekend Australian about how environmentalists hate the proletariat, already taken to pieces by Glenn Albrecht doesn't qualify as part of their War on Science because it doesn't include anything on the science, but they can't resist taking another shot at…
December 13, 2008
Inhofe's list of 650 scientists that supposedly dispute the consensus on AGW reminded me of another list: The Discovery Institute's list of scientists who dissent from Darwinism, so I thought I'd compare the two lists.
First, numbers. The Discovery Institute's list has 751 names, while Inhofe's…
December 12, 2008
Looks like our favourite fabulist (or someone who writes and thinks exactly like him) is busy editing the Wikipedia page on Christopher Monckton. William Connolley (or "failed Green Party candidate in the pay of a convicted internet-gaming fraudster and money-launderer") has the details.
December 11, 2008
Last year Inhofe released a list of 400 scientists who disputed mainstream climate science. But as Joe Romm and Andrew Dessler observed, the list was padded with TV weathermen, economists and so on and contained very few actual climate scientists. Now he's back with more of the same in a new list…
December 10, 2008
Michael, whose response to the graph showing the global average sea level going up was
There's no such thing as a global average sea level.
The awesome thing about this response is that it really is a corollary to McKitrick's Theorem that there is no such thing as a global average temperature…
December 9, 2008
How would you describe this graph of global sea level from the University of Colorado?
Well if you're Jennifer Marohasy, you call it a "dip in global sea level" and say that "since 2005 the steady upward trend has stumbled".
The most recent observation is right on the long term trend line.
You can…
December 9, 2008
The NEJM reports some extremely promising results on a vaccine against malaria:
In this trial, RTS,S was given along with other vaccines for children (a vaccine containing diphtheria and tetanus toxoids, whole-cell pertussis vaccine, and conjugated Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine), according…
December 6, 2008
The Sydney Morning Herald has printed another letter correcting Michael Duffy's wrongheaded column. Bob Beale writes
Accusing a scientist of falsifying data is a grave and professionally damaging charge, about the worst one can make. Michael Duffy was careless and wrong to allege that Rajendra…
December 5, 2008
Back in 1996 the Australian Press Council upheld a complaint against The Courier Mail under editor Chris Mitchell for printing a nutty story that historian Manning Clark was an agent of the Soviet Union who had been awarded the Order of Lenin for his services. The Press Council concluded:
The…
December 4, 2008
On Saturday the Australian published a story by John Stapleton offering as evidence against global warming the fact that "the Arctic ice is expanding". Something that happens every winter. Anyway, Stapleton's piece is about biased reporting on global warming. Stapleton is oblivious to the…
December 3, 2008
Gregg Easterbrook is an idiot who is a science expert at the Brookings Institute.
December 1, 2008
Last week Keith Windschuttle, editor of Quadrant declared:
People who are really confident [of their facts] relish debate.
It seems that Windschuttle has no confidence in the articles on climate science he has been publishing. Windschuttle rejected without even looking at it, an article by David…
November 29, 2008
On Tuesday the Australian had a piece by David Bellamy claimed to be victimized for his dissent:
The sad fact is that since I said I didn't believe human beings caused global warming, I've not been allowed to make a television program. ...
It was in 1996 that I criticised wind farms while appearing…
November 27, 2008
Miranda Devine, in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald brings us the sad story of how Ian Plimer is being shouted down and silenced:
Human-caused climate change is being "promoted with religious zeal ... there are fundamentalist organisations which will do anything to silence critics." ...
It is…
November 25, 2008
Erika Lovley, on the curious phenomenon that when Gore gives a speech, about half of the time the weather is colder than average:
While there's no scientific proof that The Gore Effect is anything more than a humorous coincidence, some climate skeptics say it may offer a snapshot of proof that the…
November 25, 2008
The Iraq Family Health Survey, conducted by the Iraqi government and the World Health Organization, found that there were about 400,000 excess deaths in Iraq up to June 2006 associated with the invasion. The second Lancet survey conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins and Al Mustansiriya…
November 24, 2008
I think it is worthwhile to update James Wimberly's comparison of surveys of deaths in Iraq. In the table below death tolls have been extrapolated to give a number of deaths due to the war up to Oct 08.
Survey
Violent deaths
Excess deaths
ILCS
160,000
Lancet 1
350,000
510,000
IFHS
310,000…
November 24, 2008
I've been remiss in not commenting on Obermeyer, Murray and Gakidou's paper in the BMJ, Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: analysis of data from the world health survey programme. OMG derive estimates of violent war deaths in thirteen countries from the World Health Survey…
November 21, 2008
Quadrant follows the fashion of much of the rest of the right in Australia in making war on science. It has promoted Creationism, HIV/AIDS denial, the DDT ban myth and, of course, global warming denial. But ever since new editor Keith Windschuttle took over earlier this year, Quadrant has cranked…
November 19, 2008
It seems that Christopher Booker as well as being a global warming denier, is also an asbestos-is-harmful denier. George Monbiot has the story (links added by me):
This week Richard Wilson's book Don't Get Fooled Again is published. It contains a fascinating chapter on Booker's claims about white…
November 16, 2008
It was entirely predictable that the denialists would hype up the glitch in the surface temperature record for last month. This opinion piece by Christopher Booker was picked up by Drudge, so the usual collection of global warming denialists have been fulminating about how this proves you can't…
November 13, 2008
The Australian has a daily column called Cut and Paste which is usually a collection of quotes from recent opinion columns in other papers. But like every other part of the paper, it has been used in their unending war on science. Look at the November 12 edition of "Cut and Paste":
ABC Radio's…
November 13, 2008
Robin Meija writes about the Lancet studies:
In any case, such problems are common in war zones, according to nearly a dozen leading survey statisticians and epidemiologists I spoke with. "Iraq is not an ideal condition in which to conduct a survey, so to expect them to do the same things that you…
November 11, 2008
Some more responses to Michael Duffy's wrongheaded column. Gavin Schmidt's letter in yesterday's SMH:
The opinion piece by Michael Duffy contains multiple errors of fact and plenty of errors of interpretation ("Truly inconvenient truths about climate change being ignored", November 8-9). ...…
November 11, 2008
Andrew Bolt, angered because I observed that he doesn't understand basic statistics, proceeds to prove my point, by referring to my bog standard Least Squares trend line as
a graph of temperatures over just the past nine months, with a line drawn kind-of through them:
So Bolt's been pontificating…
November 10, 2008
It's only been six months since his previous wrong-headed column claiming that global warming has ended, but Michael Duffy has decided to write another one:
Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was giving a talk at…