Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
October 14, 2006
DeSmogBlog has Dan Johnson's statement of Defence against Tim Ball's lawsuit.
Johnson has uncovered more examples of Ball embellishing his academic record. For example, Ball claimed he was an Emeritus Professor when he wasn't. Part of his defence is that Ball had no reputation to be damaged:…
October 13, 2006
Jim Hoggan has the details on a brand new Canadian astroturf group, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project. The chairman is none another than Tim Ball, who is still puffing up his resume. The executive director is Tom Harris, whose other job is at a PR firm, High Park Group that works for the…
October 13, 2006
Zeyad:
One problem is that the people dismissing - or in some cases, rabidly attacking - the results of this study, including governmental officials who, arguably, have an interest in doing so, have offered no other alternative or not even a counter estimate. This is called denial. When you have no…
October 12, 2006
Daniel Davies:
This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one…
October 12, 2006
Democracy Now has an interview with Les Roberts. On the methodology:
I just want to say that what we did, this cluster survey approach, is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn't very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and…
October 12, 2006
Latest Tim Blair attempt to refute the Lancet study:
Lancet's number of documented deaths in Iraq, upon which the respected medical journal based its Iraqi mortality study, is but a mere 0.0835% of Lancet's estimated post-invasion death total.
The "estimate" part of Lancet's equation is 99.9%.…
October 12, 2006
It seems that war supporters with actual knowledge of statistics aren't willing to criticise the new Lancet study, leaving the field to folks who don't know what they are talking about.
John Howard:
Well, I don't believe that John Hopkins research, I don't. It's not plausible, it's not based on…
October 12, 2006
Karl Mogel put together a podcast of the 45th Skeptic's Circle. You can hear the voices of all your favourite skeptical bloggers introducing their posts.
October 11, 2006
If you followed the debate over the first Lancet study you know that it featured numerous attacks on the study from folks who manifestly did not have a clue about statistics. The new study gives us much more of the same.
First up is President Bush who said:
"I don't consider it a credible report.…
October 11, 2006
The Washington Post buried the story of 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq on page A12.
I don't know what inside page the story appeared on in the New York Times, but look what they had on their website (image to right). Three American deaths are much more important than 600,000 Iraqi ones. Gee, New…
October 11, 2006
The Lancet study on deaths in Iraq has been released. Get it here. Here's the summary:
Background An excess mortality of nearly 100 000 deaths was reported in Iraq for the period March, 2003-September, 2004, attributed to the invasion of Iraq. Our aim was to update this estimate.
Methods Between…
October 10, 2006
The Washington Post reports on a new Lancet study on excess deaths in Iraq. (Though it buries it on page A12.)
A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not…
October 6, 2006
Via Sarah Pullman, a handy guide to the history and practice of Canadian Astroturf.
October 6, 2006
Tina Rosenberg has an extremely misleading article in the New York Times touting DDT as a magic bullet against malaria. The give away in such articles is the way the author never mentions resistance to DDT. Here's the only mention of resistance:
Throughout Africa, until recently, countries were…
October 5, 2006
One of the things that gave Andrew Bolt 0 out of 10 on global warming was his misleading account of Severinghaus' research. Crikey reports:
Severinghaus told Crikey that he doesn't make a habit of Googling his own research, but Bolt appeared on his radar when a librarian in Brisbane wrote to him…
October 5, 2006
Last year I wrote:
The Australian Environmental Foundation is a brand new environmental organization. Unfortunately they have chosen a very similar name to the long established Australian Conservation Foundation, so similar that the ACF has sued for trademark infringement. Probably the best way to…
October 4, 2006
Warwick Hughes has a post claiming that there were high CO2 levels in the atmosphere in the 1940s "contrary to IPCC science" pointing to a something by E-G Beck. Here's Beck's graph:
Now, a normal person looking at that would conclude that chemical measurement of CO2 concentrations was not…
October 2, 2006
Jeff Dorchen comments on the DDT astroturf crew:
Of course, if you are psychotically averse to government policies, I suppose you might be deluded into thinking Rachel Carson, a zoologist who wrote a book on the environmental risks of chemical pesticides, was a mass murderer. But you would still be…
October 1, 2006
The examples of the Bush Administration muzzling scientists just keep coming.
The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports:
[Researchers Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory] say the press releases and the position paper detailed reports linking intensified hurricanes to global warming. The reports also…
October 1, 2006
Naadir has posted a couple of videos from BBC Newsnight on global warming denialists. Melanie Philips is revealed to be just as clueless as I suspected.
September 27, 2006
Martin has put together Skeptic's Circle 44. My pick: coturnix on denialist rhetoric, but check them all out.
September 26, 2006
I'm sure you can guess what the suppressed report says about the link between hurricanes and global warming.
Jim Giles at Nature reports (subscription only):
A statement on the science behind the politically sensitive issue of hurricane activity and climate change has been blocked by officials at…
September 26, 2006
Chris White who is the Malaria Programme Leader with the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref) responds to the new WHO malaria policy:
The World Health Organisation's new stance on DDT, yet again only goes to show how so many in the West throw out opinions without really understanding the…
September 25, 2006
It's almost cheating to play Global Warming Sceptic Bingo on an Inhofe speech. David Roberts takes it apart.
September 25, 2006
Gary Becker and Richard Posner have written a pair of posts about DDT and there is much wrong with what they have written.
Becker writes:
The world Trade Organization (WTO) declared in 1998 a "war on malaria" that aimed to cut malaria deaths in half by 2010. Instead, deaths from malaria have been…
September 24, 2006
Jessie Stone, who runs a malaria education, prevention and treatment program in Uganda, comments in the New York Times on the WHO's DDT pushing.
To many of us in the malaria-control business, it came as no great surprise last week when the World Health Organization recommended wider use of DDT in…
September 22, 2006
In June, the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine retracted a fraudulent paper because:
"financial and intellectual input to the paper by outside parties was not disclosed."
Paul Thacker has an interesting article on financial-disclosure policies in scientific journals. Most…
September 20, 2006
Paul Thacker has the story in Salon:
In February, there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and…
September 20, 2006
Five nurses and a doctor have been falsely accused of deliberately infecting their patients with HIV. They've been imprisoned and tortured in Libya since 1999 and may now be condemned to death. Declan Butler writes:
what is needed is an immediate and sustained mobilization of international…
September 20, 2006
The Guardian reports
In a letter earlier this month to Esso, the UK arm of ExxonMobil, the Royal Society cites its own survey which found that ExxonMobil last year distributed $2.9m to 39 groups that the society says misrepresent the science of climate change.
These include the International Policy…