Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
July 4, 2007
At Wired Science Fraser Cain reports on the latest research on global warming and cosmic rays. There is no link:
But T. Sloan from the University of Lancaster and A.W. Wolfendale from Durham University have looked carefully at the evidence and found it unconvincing. They published their results in…
July 2, 2007
Gus Dizerega reports
Rachel Carson has never been forgiven by the chemical industry or the right wing for her efforts to educate the public on the downside of trying to solve pest problems with DDT. When I was invited to attend a meeting of the right wing Mt. Pelerin Society a few years back I was…
July 2, 2007
Warning: This post concerns an inter-blog fight. Skip unless you find this stuff interesting.
Over at Catallaxy Jason Soon has accused me "of generating a climate of fear about" global warming and "claiming that emergency intervention measures were needed to address it immediately". Apparently I'm…
July 1, 2007
Law professor Glenn Reynolds calls Al Gore a fuddy-duddy:
How to be a 21st century fuddy-duddy.
Reynolds' source is novelist Roger L Simon, who writes:
What fascinates about Al Gore is not - as this article from the Chicago Sun-Times shows so clearly - that he is full of hooey when it comes to his…
June 29, 2007
Bug Girl has a post on setting the record straight on Rachel Carson, quoting US Fish and Wildlife Service, who, unlike Carson critics, know what Carson actually wrote about DDT and malaria, and another on a two-part article in the American Entomologist on Carson.
Ed Darrell has been checking the…
June 29, 2007
Kirsten Weir has an excellent article in Salon on DDT and Rachel Carson. Weir took the time to talk to actual scientists and found:
Socrates Litsios, a historian and former scientist for the World Health Organization (the agency that has headed global malaria control efforts since the 1960s), says…
June 26, 2007
Johann Hari reports on the National Review cruise:
The idea that Europe is being "taken over" is the unifying theme of this cruise. Some people go on singles' cruises, some on ballroom-dancing cruises. This is the Muslims Are Coming cruise. Everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. And the man most…
June 25, 2007
Via Eli Rabett, Rolling Stone has the story of the Bush administration's war on global warming science:
But a new investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the…
June 25, 2007
James Wimberly updates estimates of deaths in Iraq. If you extrapolate from Lancet 2, the death toll is now over a million. Which sort of explains why the coalition won't do counts of their own.
Elsewhere, David Kane has put an R package for the Lancet data and his own discussion of the data.…
June 21, 2007
Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine likes to import the ideas for her anti-environmentalist screeds from America. (For example, DDT ban kills millions, and hockey stick is broken.) Her latest import is the claim that low-flush toilets don't work.
Here it is in a 1998 column from a…
June 16, 2007
I've written before about the Australian's war on science (see Part I II III IV V VI VII VIII). According to the Australian global warming isn't happening and we're not causing it and stopping it would destroy the economy. Now, in a barking mad editorial (entitled, I kid you not, "Reality bites…
June 16, 2007
Remember E-G Beck's dodgy CO2 graph? Well, at RealClimate Stefan Rahmstorf finds Beck presenting another dodgy graph. Look at the perfectly regular temperature cycles in Beck's graph:
But they are only regular cycles because Beck changed the horizontal scale in the middle of the graph. Here's…
June 15, 2007
In the Chronicle of Higher Education David Glenn reports:
A federal judge has rejected John R. Lott Jr.'s request that a gag order be placed on any and all information that emerges in the pretrial discovery process in Mr. Lott's defamation suit against Steven D. Levitt, the best-selling University…
June 15, 2007
At DeSmogBlog, Richard Littlemore reports:
The self-styled Canadian climate change expert, Dr. Tim Ball, has abandoned his libel suit against University of Lethbridge Professor of Environmental Science Dan Johnson. Ball dropped the suit without conditions, but also without acknowledging that…
June 14, 2007
The record for the highest claimed death toll for the fictional DDT ban remains at 3 BILLION AND COUNTING, but Pajamas Media is up there with a claim that the number is "hundreds of millions, if not more". This is completely impossible, since its several times the total death toll from malaria. It…
June 13, 2007
Over at the denialism blog, Mark Hoofnagle catches the creationists at Uncommon Descent blaming Rachel Carson for millions of deaths. The funniest bit is in the comment at UD pointing out that they should blame God, not Carson:
All very pertinent to Michael Behe's new book 'The Edge of Evolution…
June 13, 2007
Bug girl has a pearl of a post on why folks like Steve Milloy and John Tierney are wrong to dismiss DDT resistance as a problem.
As well as knocking down their claims, she provides a handy introduction to the mechanisms for DDT resistance. Go read.
June 12, 2007
I think the employment contract at the CEI must include a clause requiring their hacks to write an article accusing Rachel Carson of killing millions of people. So far we've seen John Berlau, Angela Logomasni, Jeremy Lott and Erin Wildermuth, and Iain Murray.
The latest effort is from the CEI's…
June 12, 2007
Nexus 6 catches Andrew Bolt telling his readers about the latest crime of the evil climate scientists. From 1997.
Bolt said:
(Thanks to reader Michael.)
Well done, reader Michael!
June 11, 2007
Via GrrlScientist I find the latest story claiming:
What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument--whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between…
June 9, 2007
Keith Schneider (who used to work with Tierney at the NYT) comments
Now Tierney is after Rachel Carson, using as the basis of his critique a 1962 review of Silent Spring in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. Baldwin…
June 8, 2007
Bug girl has discovered the Carson-killed-millions claims by the likes of Steve Milloy, Angela Logomasini and John Tierney and decided to:
focus on the stuff that as an entomologist, I'm uniquely qualified to comment on. I know about bugs. I know about pesticides. I've taught parasitology for over…
June 6, 2007
David Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
In a motion filed last week in federal court, Mr. Lott's lawyers asked the judge to place a gag order on any information that might turn up in depositions or private documents as the lawyers on both sides prepare for the trial.
The motion asserts…
June 5, 2007
While the New York Times has some great reporting on science (eg Carl Zimmer and Andrew Revkin it also has some poor quality reporting (eg William Broad and Tina Rosenberg. John Tierney's latest column fits into the second category, with the usual ill-supported claims that Carson killed many many…
June 5, 2007
James Annan:
If "jumping the shark" refers to the point at which a TV series loses all credibility, perhaps "quoting a Motl" could be analogous in the context of coverage of climate science issues.
June 2, 2007
The CEI has gone all out in its attacks on Rachel Carson. As well as their Rachel eats babies site, there have been pieces by CEI operatives John Berlau, Angela Logomasni, Jeremy Lott and Erin Wildermuth, and Iain Murray, all singing the same song about how Carson killed lots of people.
Raw Story…
June 2, 2007
In Tim Blair's latest column he takes a swing at scientists:
I did, however, turn up an intriguing claim, in a non-specialist journal -- possibly an old encyclopaedia. There it was stated that cricket balls do not -- could not -- swing or swerve en route from bowler to batsman.
This did not tally…
June 2, 2007
MarkH has made a case study of Alexander Cockburn's crankish nonsense on global warming, but there is a bit left over for me to comment on. Cockburn's main scientific authority is some guy he met on a cruise who worked as a meteorologist for a whole three years, but he does quote on other person…
May 30, 2007
I've been doing a little research into how the Rachel-killed-millions hoax was spread. In The War Against the Greens (1st edition, published in 1994), the argument appears, but it is confined to the lunatic fringe:
"How many people have died as a result of environmental policies like the banning…