Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
April 28, 2008
frankbi has the latest on the Listener against free speech. Pamela Stirling, after using dubious legal threats to shut up a critic says:
So that, we're not into censorship of any kind. As we discussed with Brian Leyland, the Voltaire quote, you know: "I disagree with what you say, but I would…
April 27, 2008
ABC's normally excellent Ockham's razor has taken a refreshing change from presenting the thoughts of scientists on science based on peer-reviewed research to presenting the opinion of a political scientist on global warming based on stuff he found on denialist web sites. Yes, they had Don Aitkin…
April 26, 2008
The Australian wasn't content to publish Phil Chapman's silly ice-age article, but also published a news story that treated it like a legitimate scientific paper. Now, instead of publishing a correction to Chapman's falsehoods from a climate scientist they have an article by Christopher Pearson.…
April 25, 2008
Ted Frank has the latest on Lott's appeal of the dismissal of his case:
Lott is now claiming that the case should have been decided under the allegedly more friendly Virginia libel law than the Illinois law under which his claim fails, but that is generally an argument for (at best) a claim of…
April 25, 2008
Robert Lichter reports on a survey of American climate scientists commissioned by STATS at GMU. Some of the findings:
In 1991 the Gallup organization conducted a telephone survey on global climate change among 400 scientists drawn from membership lists of the American Meteorological Association and…
April 23, 2008
As well as Chapman's silly ice-age article, the Australian published a news story about it, treating it as if it was a legitimate paper and failing to get comments from climate scientists. The ABC acted like a real news organization it its report:
DAVID KAROLY: This is not science.
EMILY BOURKE:…
April 23, 2008
Here we go again. Phil Chapman, in the Australian:
All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California)…
April 22, 2008
From the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre
CLIMATE CHANGE: Show me the money?
Michael Molitor
6:45pm for 7pm start, Wednesday 23rd April, 2008
Science Theatre, UNSW .
In order to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at safe levels by 2050 we will need to avoid more than…
April 22, 2008
Robert Fawcett and David Jones of the National Climate Centre, Australian Bureau of Meteorology have written a short paper debunking the global-warming-has-ended myth:
There is very little justification for asserting that global warming
has gone away over the past ten years, not least because the…
April 21, 2008
The latest editorial from the Australian on the science of global warming cites a cardinal and a historian and no climate scientists:
We can trust that Catholic cardinal George Pell has not had to resort to inside knowledge to play the devil's advocate on global warming. Like historian and…
April 20, 2008
Lawyer Steven Price, who specialises in media law, comments on the Listener's use of legal threats to silence a blogger:
In the comments section of the correction and apology, someone has helpfully posted a link to a copy of HotTopic's original post. Don't you just love the internet? On the off-…
April 18, 2008
Daniel Engber's Slate article The Paranoid Style in American Science is well worth a read. He explains how the Creationists, AGW and HIV/AIDS skeptics go well past skepticism into conspiracy theries about science.
Hat tip: Mark Hoofnagle.
April 18, 2008
Earlier, I wrote how the environmental writer for the New Zealand Listener was fired after Heartland demanded he be silenced, and:
Gareth Renowden has the full story.
Well not any more. The Listener hired a lawyer to threaten him and the post has been taken down and an apology put up, which…
April 17, 2008
Another news story about scientists being shown up by a teen also proves to be completely wrong
First the story appeared on April 4 in Germany's 'leading' tabloid ("I have calculated the end of the world ... and NASA says, I'm right"), later in more serious papers ("Nico and the end of the world…
April 16, 2008
A few weeks ago Dave Hansford, the environmental writer for the New Zealand Listener, wrote an article on how global warming deniers create an illusion of dissent:
In November, three members of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition - Bryan Leyland, Owen McShane and Vincent Gray - spoke at UN…
April 15, 2008
NPR has run a puff piece on Kristen Byrnes. Byrnes stuff is full of errors, but the reporter seems uninterested in whether Byrnes' science is accurate or not.
James Hrynyshyn notes that Byrnes has libelled James Hansen, while Janet Stemwedel is doesn't like the lack of analysis in the NPR story.…
April 15, 2008
I don't like banning people from commenting here. To make sure this is transparent I keep a list here of everyone who is banned. Inspired by the example of John Quiggin, I've added a third name to the list, the poster who calls himself "Reality Check".
Incidently, if you've missed the writings of…
April 14, 2008
Instead of correcting his erroneous post Tim Worstall has put up another post coming out against corrections. This time it's about an inaccurate textbook. Can you pass the test at the book's online study centre? Question 16. True or False?
Worstall claims that book is accurate, offering this…
April 12, 2008
About a week ago, the World Meteorological Organization put out a statement to correct the erroneous claims in the media that global warming had stopped (emphasis theirs):
GENEVA, 4 April 2008 (WMO) - The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is…
April 9, 2008
The Australian front pages an article on "eminent historian" Don Aitkin who attacks the "quasi-religious" scientists of the IPCC for advocating that some action to combat global arming should be taken. Aitkin deploys the argument from incredulity
He says an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon…
April 8, 2008
John Lott in his Fox news column claims:
During the 2000 election, with Bill Clinton as president, the economy was viewed through rose-colored glasses. According to polls, voters didn't realize that the country was in a recession.
Pgl has the graphs to show that the US was not in a recession in…
April 7, 2008
John Mashey on the global warming deniers who reckon that AGW is a plot against capitalism:
What's really weird about this is that many of the people who do this (claim that AGW believers are attacking capitalism)
a) Have rarely, or never worked for an actual profit-making company that builds…
April 6, 2008
Terence offers a definition of Gore's Law:
Gore's Law: As an online climate change debate grows longer, the probability that denier arguments will descend into attacks on Al Gore approaches one.
April 2, 2008
James has written an open letter to Kevin Rudd. Key paragraphs:
Global climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic with detrimental effects on wildlife, initiation of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland with progressive…
March 31, 2008
z, in comments:
"CO2 is not causing global warming, in fact, CO2 is lagging temperature change in all reliable datasets. "
See also my forthcoming paper: "Chickens do not lay eggs, because they have been observed to hatch from them".
March 29, 2008
Julie Rehmeyer has a decent article about the Lancet studies in Science News. Unlike Neil Munro and Megan McArdle, she doesn't have an axe to grind. She talks to experts in the field like Jana Asher instead of non-experts like Michael Spagat:
The conflicting studies in Iraq show just how tricky it…
March 28, 2008
Last year AP-IPSOS surveyed Americans and asked them to estimate how many Iraqi civilians had died in the war. They grossly underestimated the number, with the median estimate being just 9,890. The Atlantic has now published Megan McArdle's latest anti-Lancet screed, where she argues that it…
March 27, 2008
Desmogblog posted John Mashey's detailed examination of the spread of Monckton/Schulte's misinformation. For your amusement, Monckton's reply, in full:
"Dr." Mashey says Mr. Schulte plagiarized my research. He did no such thing. It was he, not I, who conducted the research. "Dr." Mashey was told…