Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
December 6, 2006
William Connolley has the latest on Monckton. It seems that he's throwing around threats to sue for libel.
Also Eli Rabett describes yet another Monckton error.
December 5, 2006
The latest issue of the Walkley Magazine has an article I wrote about the media coverage of the Lancet study. They haven't made it available on line, so I've put a copy below the fold.
Imagine an alternate Earth. Let's call it Earth 2. On Earth 2, just like our planet, there was a Boxing Day…
December 2, 2006
Tim Blair tells us:
Think on this awhile: if a vengeful Gaia were to smite both Canada AND Australia out of existence, that would reduce by only 3.4 per cent of these warming gases some believe are killing the planet.
We're talking about a combined total of 53 million people, millions of houses,…
December 1, 2006
Too much has been made of the claims about main street bias in the new Lancet study -- if you do a few calculations you'll find that even if it exists, it doesn't make much difference. As Jon Pedersen said:
Pedersen did NOT think that there was anything to the "Main Street Bias" issue. He agreed, I…
November 30, 2006
Stephen Soldz has posted his discussion with Jon Pedersen about the new Lancet study:
[Pedersen thinks that the] prewar mortality is too low. This would be due to recall issues. ...
Pedersen thought that people were likely reporting nonviolent deaths as violent ones.
These two have to go together…
November 30, 2006
Bjorn Lomborg interviewed by TCS Daily says:
The use of DDT is probably the best example of this and its use in the third world was badly mismanaged. DDT is not dangerous to humans, but it is dangerous to some animals. So if you're in a rich country where you have malaria under control, clearly you…
November 28, 2006
Laurie David, one of the producers of An Inconvenient Truth writes about what happened when she tried to donate copies of the movie to schools:
So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in…
November 26, 2006
Science has Burnham and Roberts' reply (subscription required) to the criticisms that Science published on Lancet 2:
Bohannon fails to appreciate that cluster sampling is a random
sampling method. Sampling for our study was designed to give all
households an equal chance of being included. In this…
November 23, 2006
Monckton responding to an email about how volcanoes cause ozone depletion:
I'm not familiar enough with the inner workings of the
general-circulation models, so I'm not sure how it is that the ozone
hole appears only over the Antarctic. One possibility is that the
circumpolar circulation (which…
November 21, 2006
Glenn Reynolds, Nov 21:
IRAQ: "So far this month, the civilian casualty count is well below the casualty count in October and below the six-month average. The security force casualties reduced 21 percent over the past four weeks, and are at the lowest level in 25 weeks, he said."
Associated Press…
November 21, 2006
Christopher Monckton and George Monbiot have an exchange in the Guardian and William Connolley is not impressed.
Today's grauniad has a piece by Monckton, "This wasn't gibberish. I got my facts right on global warming". Its in the "response" column, where people get a chance to reply. Sadly its all…
November 20, 2006
Slate has published a response from Burnham and Roberts to Kaplan's botched criticism of Lancet 2.
Kaplan's latest article focused on two baseless criticisms of our 2006 study. First, he claimed that our measured base line rate, the rate of natural deaths for the year before the invasion, was too…
November 19, 2006
The Daily Telegraph has published a piece by Al Gore that corrects Monckton's numerous errors. An extract:
Monckton goes on to level a serious accusation at the scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claiming that they have "repealed a fundamental physical law" and,…
November 18, 2006
Sheldon Rampton has a nice summary of the reactions to the new Lancet study. He concludes:
Even so, the results of the Lancet study, combined with what we know about the limitations of other attempts to count the dead, suggest that the war in Iraq has already claimed hundreds of thousands rather…
November 18, 2006
The CBC's Fifth Estate has produced a documentary on the global warming denial industry:
The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences. It…
November 11, 2006
Christopher Monckton's attempt to debunk anthropogenic global warming was full
of
errors.
In a follow-up article he only corrects three of them, and even makes another error in his correction.
Last week I said that James Hansen had told the United States Congress that sea level would rise several…
November 10, 2006
John Quiggin catches Andrew Bolt pointing to stratospheric cooling as evidence against global warming. Stratospheric cooling is one of the pieces of evidence that suggest that the warming at the Earth's surface (where people other than Andrew Bolt live) is caused by greenhouse gasses rather than…
November 9, 2006
CBS news reports
Iraq's Health Minister Ali al-Shemari said about 150,000 Iraqis have been killed by insurgents since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
For every person killed about three have been wounded in violence since the war started in March 2003, al-Shemari told reporters during a visit to…
November 9, 2006
Gavin Schmidt explains where Monckton went wrong in his calculations of climate sensitivity. John Quiggin collects some of the nutty ideas the global warming denialists have latched onto.
I exchanged a few emails with Monckton. He conceded that
the 1421 claim was rubbish
that the graph in his…
November 8, 2006
PZ Myers is being a bit "the glass is half empty", but Joe Barton will no longer chair the Committee on Energy and Commerce and James Inhofe will no longer chair the Environment and Public Works Committee. That's good news for science.
And I can't resist sharing John Lott's predictions:
The…
November 7, 2006
Tim Dunlop has a new blog called Blogocracy at News Limited's news.com.au site. Any thoughts that this might make him go easy on News Limited's John Howard brown-nose squad have been dispelled by this post.
In other blogging news Andrew Dessler and Coby Beck have joined Gristmill.
November 7, 2006
Kevin Grandia writes:
Canada's latest and greatest climate change denial group, the Natural Resource Stewardship Project, has come up with a laughable reason for hiding it's funding sources. According to a recent CanWest News Service article, the NRSP's executive director, Tom Harris, states that "…
November 6, 2006
This American Life have a show on Lancet 1 and Lancet 2. Much of it is a repeat of their story on Lancet 1, which is well worth listening to if you haven't already. Their comments on Lancet 2 are in the last ten minutes.
The National Interest has an interview with Les Roberts where he answers all…
November 5, 2006
Christopher Monckton has a lengthy article in the Daily Telegraph where he attempts to debunk the notion that there is significant anthropogenic global warming. The main problem with his article is that he doesn't know what he's writing about it. He offers up an untidy pile of factoids, some of…
November 2, 2006
Today's Australian has a Bob Carter opinion piece attacking the Stern report. Carter lets fly with his usual over-the-top rhetoric:
the Stern review is destined to join Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and think tank the Club of Rome's manifesto, Limits to Growth, in the pantheon of big banana…
November 2, 2006
In Andrew Bolt's latest column he sort of admits that Peiser was wrong, but still misleads his readers.
As Attard reported, I'd cited research by British academic Benny Peiser, who claimed to have disproved a survey that concluded none of a sample of scientific papers doubted the theory of man-made…
October 31, 2006
Tim Blair writes:
Consider the tragic environmental cost:
I had a strange experience on Monday. I went to see Al Gore's slide show, as he affectionately refers to An Inconvenient Truth, his exposé on global warming.
For the first time in my life, I was the only person in the cinema. I sat there…
October 31, 2006
The BBC did not publish all of Les Roberts' answers. Here are the rest:
It seems the Lancet has been overrun by left-wing sixth formers.
The report has a flawed methodology and deceit is shown in the counting process. What is your reaction to that? --Ian, Whitwick, UK
Almost every researcher who…
October 30, 2006
In 2004, Naomi Oreskes looked at a sample of 928
papers in
refereed scientific journals and found that not one disagreed with the
scientific consensus: that humans are responsible for most of the
warming in the last few decades. Benny Peiser disputed this, claiming that 34 of them rejected or…