Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
September 21, 2007
Jim Giles, who broke the story of how for-profit publishers had hired Eric Dezenhall to run a PR campaign against Open Access, has a post at the New Scientist Science News blog, where he posts a copy of Dezenhall's proposal. It always nice to see more of the inner workings of the astroturf…
September 20, 2007
Study this cartoon by Nexus 6.
Read this post by Richard Littlemore.
Update: Nexus 6 rubs it in.
September 20, 2007
The McIntyre factor is the amount that you have to multiply the size of an adjustment in the GISS US temperatures by to get the number of words in the resulting Steve McIntyre post. Empirical evidence puts the McIntyre factor at 125,000. You see, on Sep 10 GISS made some small changes:
We…
September 17, 2007
Ed Darrell writes about the fools promoting DDT as a solution to West Nile virus. It's as if these people think that there are no other insecticides in the world. And he has more examples in a later post: Steve Milloy and Henry Miller.
September 17, 2007
James Wimberly adds the new ORB survey to his chart that extrapolates the various surveys of Iraqi deaths. He comments:
The ORB estimate of 1.22 million is very close to Lancet 2 updated according to the IBC body count timeline - 1.16 million. So they reinforce each other.
We now have four survey…
September 16, 2007
Earlier I suggested that surfacestations.org was cherry picking by showing a station with warming as an example of a "bad" station, and a station with no warming as an example of a "good" station. Of course, it could have turned out that I was wrong, and those were the temperature trends of…
September 14, 2007
A new survey puts the Iraqi death toll at over one one million:
These findings come from a poll released today by O.R.B., the British polling agency that have been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a representative sample of 1,461 adults…
September 13, 2007
There has been more discussion at Crooked Timber on David Kane's criticism of the Lancet study. In response to Tim Burke's comment:
Good faith skepticism starts with, "Ok, I want to look at why you're making this claim, and your evidence for it. I don't want to take anything on faith." Not, "I'm…
September 8, 2007
Schulte has published a reply to Oreskes' response. While Schulte claims not to be a contrarian, Kevin Grandia has been looking at his links with Christopher Monckton. Meanwhile, John Lynch posts on Shulte's reply and commenter "Chris" (who is, I suspect, Christopher Monckton) threatens lawsuits…
September 8, 2007
One of Climate Care's carbon offset schemes involves replacing diesel pumps for irrigation with treadle pumps. They say that the benefits include:
Allows 2 or 3 harvests a year, instead of 1
Prevents farmers having to leave their families to work in the city during 'off season'
Farmers' income…
September 7, 2007
A 2003 paper in the British Food Journal by Powell et al described an experiment that found that, given a choice between genetically modified sweet corn and the regular kind, consumers preferred to buy the GM corn by a factor of 3 to 2. However, Stuart Laidlaw reported that the experiment was…
September 5, 2007
John Lynch has posted Naomi Oreskes response to Schulte and the claims that there is no consensus:
3) The piece misrepresents the results we obtained. In the original AAAS talk on which the paper was based, and in various interviews and conversations after, I repeated pointed out that very few…
August 30, 2007
Via William Connolley I find another attempt to claim that there is no consensus in the scientific literature:
In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to…
August 30, 2007
Boosted from comments. Robert Chung writes:
David Kane wrote:
Anyway, it seems clear to me now that you are bluffing
Me, bluffing about knowing how calculate a CMR? Ouch, that hurts.
David, what a fascinating example of hubris. You do not know how to do something, so you conclude that no one else…
August 29, 2007
Scienceblogs is running a contest where you can win a five-day trip for two to one of the world's greatest science cities. All you have to do to enter is post a comment one of the blogs here. So if you just read my blog without commenting, this post is your chance to delurk and maybe win a pretty…
August 28, 2007
It's often claimed by DDT advocates that the 1972 ban on the agricultural use of DDT was made in spite of a report that cleared DDT from harm. Jim Easter has found and posted a copy of the report. It turns out that things aren't exactly as DDT advocates present them.
August 27, 2007
No really! That's the argument. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
In January I wrote how for-profit publishers had hired an infamous PR firm to run a campaign against open access publishing. They've now produced an organization called PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science &…
August 26, 2007
Last Tuesday Matthew Warren [reported] in the Australian:
Labor plans to rid Australian homes of off-peak electric hot water systems, in a move it claims will cut Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 7.5million tonnes each year. ...
Labor will keep existing rebates to encourage take-up of…
August 24, 2007
I really don't know where to begin with this anti-Lancet piece by Michael Fumento. Should I start with the way Fumento describes Kane's paper as "so complex" that it "may cause your head to explode" while being utterly certain that Kane has demolished the Lancet study? Or with his assertion that…
August 23, 2007
Last month the Australian mounted an over-the-top defence of one of their pundits after blogs criticised him for spinning as favourable to the government an opinion poll that showed the opposition way ahead and no change in its lead. So how do you think they reacted to Media Watch's criticism?
With…
August 22, 2007
Here are the top 5 lists of the top Australian blogs:
Rank
From
Method
1
Janette Toral
Blog Juice
2
Ratified.org
Technorati + Feedburner + Google Rank
3
Craig Harper
Technorati
4
Meg Tsiamis
Technorati + Alexa
5
Australianblogs.com.au
links counted by Yahoo
Ranking…
August 21, 2007
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote how the Australian had misrepresented Rajendra Pachauri (IPCC head), falsely claiming that he supported the Australian government's policy of delay. Media Watch has the latest developments. Pachauri wrote to the Australian:
I am writing to convey my deep…
August 20, 2007
The Washington Post reports:
Long-lasting, insecticide-treated mosquito nets should be distributed free, rapidly and widely in malaria-endemic areas, World Health Organization officials said here Thursday, setting new guidelines for fighting the mosquito-borne disease around the globe.
For years, a…
August 19, 2007
Four of the six government members on a committee examining geosequestration put out a dissent denying the existence of anthropogenic global warming. I was going to write a post on what they got wrong, but I realised that since they rely on Bob Carter so much, I'd already done it. John Quiggin…
August 18, 2007
Members of the "we hate Rachel Carson" club have been touting a new study on indoor residual spraying as showing that DDT remains effective against malaria even when the mosquitoes are resistant. For examples, see Angela Logomasini and Ron Bailey. The study found that DDT-resistant mosquitoes…
August 17, 2007
If I summarized Glenn Reynold's response to my post on his hyping of a small correction to GISS data, you would not believe me, so I'm quoting the whole thing:
Lamberted! But no Instalanche.
Later: In an update: "Matthew Yglesias links to Tim Lambert, obviously deeming him a reputable source. Hey,…
August 16, 2007
Nexus 6 has a new cartoon making fun of global warming denialists.
August 16, 2007
DDT hoax spreader Walter E Williams has a new anti-environmentalist column where he writes:
In one long-term study, volunteers ate 32 ounces of DDT for a year and a half, and 16 years later, they suffered no increased risk of adverse health effects.
You know, two pounds of DDT is a lot of DDT. It…
August 13, 2007
In comments to my post on a review of Guy Pearse's High and Dry, JC pointed to a dispute between Andrew Norton and Pearse on whether the CIS had promoted denial and delay on greenhouse gasses. Pearse makes his case here (scroll to 25 July 2007), while Norton responds here. Now I think it is a bit…