Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
August 12, 2007
Because of the corrections to the GISS data 1998 and 1934 went from being in a virtual tie, to being in a virtual tie.. This, of course, has not stopped global warming denialists from endlessly hyping it as a big change.
For example, Glenn Reynolds:
Ace wonders why nobody's talking about the NASA…
August 11, 2007
Guy Pearse's book, High and Dry has been reviewed by Tim Flannery:
The Prime Minister and several of his key ministers, Pearse asserts, have been captured by a group of industries and their lobbyists, known as the greenhouse mafia. They have infiltrated deep into the bureaucracy and they continue…
August 10, 2007
Steve McIntyre found an error in the GISS temperature data for the US. The GISTEMP page says:
USHCN station records up to 1999 were replaced by a version of USHCN data with further corrections after an adjustment computed by comparing the common 1990-1999 period of the two data sets. (We wish to…
August 10, 2007
Ed Darrell is working is way through the inaccuracies in junkscience.com's "100 things you should know about DDT". He's up to the claim that DDT prevented 500 million deaths:
First, the mathematics are simply impossible: At about 1 million deaths per year, if we assume DDT could have prevented all…
August 9, 2007
Remember Dennis Bray's useless survey of climate scientists? The URL and password were posted to the climatesceptics mail list, so the results were biased and included responses from people who were not climate scientists. Bray refused to concede that this meant that the survey was hopelessly…
August 9, 2007
Matthew Warren claims in the Australian:
The head of the world's leading climate change organisation has backed the Howard Government's decision to defer setting a long-term target for reducing greenhouse emissions until the full facts are known.
Despite widespread criticism of the Government's…
August 8, 2007
Kent Hovind has an offer of $250,000 for anyone who can give a scientific proof of evolution. Now Steve Milloy is following in Hovind's footsteps with the Ultimate Global Warming Challenge: $100,000 if you can provide a scientific proof of harmful man-made warming.
Believe it or not, Milloy's…
August 7, 2007
The AP's Paul Foy reports on the American Statistical Association meetings discussion on the Lancet studies:
Number crunchers this week quibbled with Roberts's survey methods and blasted his refusal to release all his raw data for scrutiny -- or any data to his worst critics. Some discounted him as…
August 6, 2007
Newsweek has a good story on the global warming denial industry:
Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and…
August 6, 2007
The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
Rises in sea levels caused by climate change are likely to be bigger than predicted and more dangerous, but scientists are reluctant to "stick their necks out" on the issue for fear of being labelled alarmist, a leading international expert is warning.
Stefan…
August 5, 2007
Surely Baghdad's electricity supply couldn't get worse than shown in the graph on the right?
Alas, it seems it can:
Iraq's power grid is on the brink of collapse because of insurgent sabotage, rising demand, fuel shortages and provinces that are unplugging local power stations from the national…
August 2, 2007
I must follow the fashion here at Scienceblogs, so there is now a group for Deltoid readers on Facebook.
August 1, 2007
When we last visited Lott's lawsuit against Levitt, Lott was asking the judge to reconsider the dismissal of his case against Freakonomics.
Well, the judge denied this, so now Lott wants to amend his complaint. The new complaint adds is now about another sentence in Freakonomics as well:
Then…
July 31, 2007
Tamino has the scoop on the latest attempt to revive the old UHIs-mean-it's-not-getting-warmer argument. Eli Rabett has more.
July 29, 2007
Long time readers will be familiar with the epic that is Michael Fumento's attempt to debunk the first Lancet survey. A summary can't really do it justice, but what basically happened is that Fumento dismissed the 100,000 number because he claimed that they included Falluja when they should have…
July 28, 2007
The good electricity news from Iraq has been lots of announcements of plans to improve things. Unfortunately, electricity production has not improved. To the left you can see how the electricity supply in Baghdad has gotten worse and worse. The graph ends in May. Why?:
As the Bush…
July 27, 2007
David Glenn, in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Lott-Levitt lawsuit has been provisionally settled:
The letter of clarification, which was included in today's filing, offers a doozy of a concession. In his 2005 message, Mr. Levitt told Mr. McCall that "it was not a peer-refereed…
July 27, 2007
Daniel Davies summarizes what is wrong with David Kane's criticism:
The mathematical guts of the paper is that under certain assumptions, the addition of the very violent cluster in Fallujah can add so much uncertainty to the estimate of the post-invasion death rate that it stretches the bottom end…
July 24, 2007
David Kane has asked me to post his argument that
Roberts et al. (2004) claim that the risk of death increased by
2.5-fold (95% CI 1.6-4.2) in Iraq after the US-led invasion. I provide
evidence that, given the other data presented in their paper, this confidence
interval must be wrong. Comments…
July 19, 2007
David Roberts shows Your media at work:
People magazine reports that Al Gore's daughter Sarah just got married, revealing in the course of the article that Chilean sea bass was served at the rehearsal dinner.
In the Daily Telegraph, Australian Humane Society Rebecca Keeble writes that "only one…
July 18, 2007
Nick Matzke finds that Michael Finkel in the National Geographic is guilty of some sloppy reporting:
The article, for once, actually sensitively discusses the issue of DDT use, and notes accurately (for once) that environmental groups and governmental agencies were not and are not opposed to…
July 17, 2007
DWE reports:
Dr. Lafta has now been allowed to visit Canada, where he is meeting with researchers from the University of Washington and Simon Fraser University. On Friday, he'll be participating in a live interactive webcast.
Dr. Riyadh Lafta
Al Mustansiriya University, Baghdad Iraq
"Death in Iraq…
July 17, 2007
John Quiggin details how the ABC made lemonade from the lemon that is the Great Global Warming Swindle. You can see the video of Tony Jones' questioning of Martin Durkin here, or read the transcript here. Durkin was unable to offer any defence of his misrepresentation of the science.
David Jones…
July 15, 2007
Jason Soon is very angry that I dared to criticize John Lott in this post. I wrote about Freedomnomics (where Lott claims that women's suffrage caused a massive increase in the size of the government):
Lott doesn't like women's suffrage
Soon writes:
His basic thesis is that the size of government…
July 15, 2007
Alan Dove writes about his grandfather's involvement in the history of DDT (my emphasis):
DDT owes its notoriety to American applied research during World War II. At the start of the war, chemists had known how to synthesize the compound for decades, and a few knew of its insecticidal properties,…
July 13, 2007
Eli Rabett has a post where he corrects Lubos Motl's blunders about the greenhouse effect, but he left a few crumbs for me. Motl writes (warning, link goes to Motl's blog, which has a design so ugly it makes most MySpace pages look pretty):
The Gentlemen at RealClimate.ORG have decided that my…
July 11, 2007
David Friedman examines John Lott's claims that safe storage laws were to blame for the deaths in the Merced pitchfork murders, and comes to similar conclusions to me:
Putting it all together, I conclude that the Merced murders provide evidence against gun control laws, but weaker evidence than…
July 8, 2007
The Lavoisier group has published the presentations from their 'Rehabilitating Carbon Dioxide' workshop. Allow me to shorten them for you.
David Archibald: I predict imminent global cooling based on the record from five US weather stations.
Tim Curtin: Nicholas Stern is in league with the Prophet…
July 6, 2007
Sadly, No has turned all the partisan right-wing commentary at Town Hall into haikus. An example:
Ann Coulter
Fact: Women are dumb.
Didja hear that, Time? Newsweek?
I want the cover!
And they weren't being unfair. Here it is from Coulter:
Women shouldn't vote: "What changed ... that explains…