Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
September 20, 2006
Jeffrey Sachs writes in the Scientific American about the Wall Street Journal's editorial page:
Another summer of record-breaking temperatures brought power failures, heat waves, droughts and tropical storms throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Only one place seemed to remain cool: the air-…
September 19, 2006
The New York Times reports:
Dr. Kochi said the most substantive change in the W.H.O.'s guidelines on the use of insecticides would extend the reach of the strategy. Until now, the agency had recommended indoor spraying of insecticides in areas of seasonal or episodic transmission of malaria, but it…
September 18, 2006
Richard Littlemore has posted Ball's Statement of Claim. Here is the heart of it with my commments:
8 The letter to the editor contains the follow statements which contain inaccuracies and are defamatory of Ball:
"...newspapers ought to report factual summaries of authors' credentials. You note…
September 17, 2006
Tim Ball's letter to Paul Martin starts:
I was one of the first climatology PhDs in the world.
He got his PhD in 1983.
Ball signs his letter with:
Dr. Tim Ball, Environmental Consultant
Victoria, British Columbia
28 Years Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg
Eli Rabbett has…
September 15, 2006
Andrew Bolt welcomes Al Gore to Australia with a column that accuses Gore of being "one of the worst of the fact-fiddling Green evangelicals". Bolt writes:
Well, here are just 10 of my own "minor quibbles" with Gore's film. These are my own "inconvenient truths", and judge from them the…
September 14, 2006
The Globe and Mail reports
CALGARY -- The skeptic at the centre of the heated debate about climate change that has been taking place in Canadian newspapers is moving the dispute to the courts, where Tim Ball is seeking $325,000 in damages for a letter to the editor that he says amounted to a "…
September 14, 2006
Last night I saw went to the 2006 UNSW CSE Revue: The teXt Files: Close Encounters of the Nerd Kind. An awesome show, especially if you are a nerd, with sketches on the X files, Stargate, role-playing games, computer games, Numb3rs, making fun of Arts students, an audience paricipation where they…
September 13, 2006
Janet D. Stemwedel, fresh from organizing the great nerd-off, has put together the sad puppy edition of the Skeptic's Circle.
September 11, 2006
Over at Climate Audit, Willis Eschenbach responded to my comment about CA's censorship of comments with this denial:
Tim, you're posting here, free to blather on about nothing scientific at all ... meanwhile I'm totally censored from asking scientific questions at RealClimate.
Unfortunately for…
September 11, 2006
In 2004 Chris Mooney wrote on Op-Ed Seductions:
Two of the most striking recent incidents involve the same author: James Glassman of Tech Central Station and the American Enterprise Institute. Some essential background on Glassman's operation comes from this article by Nicholas Confessore in The…
September 9, 2006
According to Clive Hamilton, Alan Moran is one of Australia's greenhouse Dirty dozen:
As the head of the Regulatory Unit at the Institute for Public
Affairs, a right-wing think tank with close ties to greenhouse
sceptics, Moran's role has been to support the Government and the
fossil fuel…
September 8, 2006
Shelley does the call as the nerds strut their stuff... And declares a winner:
Although, without further ado, Mark Chu-Carrol hands-down wins the nerd-off (in my humble opinion of course). For one, his CURRENT picture trumps PZ's old one, and he reads programming language books for fun and has 30…
September 7, 2006
Janet declared a nerd-off, so I must join the throng.
Here is a colour-coded table of SciBloggers results in the
Nerd test.
Nerd Score
SciBlogger
99 Nerd God
Mark C. Chu-Carroll
99 Nerd God
Tim Lambert
99 Nerd God
Shelley Batts
99 Nerd God
PZ Myers
99 Nerd God
afarensis, FCD
99 Nerd…
September 6, 2006
William Connolley has a few comments on the Chronicle of Higher Education's article on the hockey stick wars.
There is also a question and answer session with Gerald North of the NRC panel. I liked this question, from one Patrick Frank:
The original hockey stick has been shown not just flawed but…
September 5, 2006
This week's "Ask a Science Blogger" question is:
I read this article in the NRO, and the author actually made some interesting arguments. 'Basically,' he said, 'I am questioning the premise that [global warming] is a problem rather than an opportunity.' Does he have a point?...
No. Robbins'…
September 5, 2006
So, what happens when you hire a coal industry PR guy as your environment writer? You get stories like this, by Matthew Warren:
Science tempers fears on climate change
The world's top climate scientists have cut their worst-case forecast for global warming over the next 100 years.
For the first…
September 3, 2006
The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition posted a Bob Carter article repeating his bogus claim that
global warming ended in 1998. When folks left comments pointing out the flaws in Carter's arguments, the NZ CSC responded by deleting all the critical comments.
Meanwhile, over at Climate Audit,…
August 31, 2006
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports.
When Mayla Hernandez saw news of a double homicide Friday night, the circumstances seemed too familiar.
She told the Sheriff's Office her boyfriend John Dorsey called her to pick him up around 12:30 a.m. Saturday on Sycamore Drive. He had blood on his…
August 31, 2006
The answer is the 42nd Skeptic's Circle. My favourite post from the circle: Jon Swift says Science is Dead.
August 30, 2006
Maria Farell asks about ipod alternatives. I have an Iriver H120 which I'm very fond of. The only drawback to Iriver is that while their hardware is better than Apple's, their firmware leaves something to be desired. But you can use Rockbox, an open source replacement which is much better.
August 29, 2006
The graph below shows the predictions of James Hansen's 1988 climate model overlaid (in blue) with observed temperatures. Hansen's scenarios B and C have turned out to be very good predictions of what actually happened.
Of course, it is an article of faith amongst the global warming skeptics that…
August 28, 2006
Robyn Williams has written a book debunking Intelligent Design.
Tim Blair's reaction (endorsed by Glenn Reynolds): He doesn't see anything wrong with Intelligent Design, but why didn't Williams write a book on the flaws in Fundamentalist Islam?.
Similarly Blair thinks people shouldn't write about…
August 27, 2006
John Holbo finds this piece of stupidity from Mark Steyn:
Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a rollicking read very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with. After all, the progressive mind regards it as backward and primitive to let religion determine every aspect of your…
August 24, 2006
Charles Montgomery's excellent expose of the so-called "Friends of Science" group must have really hit a nerve, because it has drawn an over-the-top response from Terence Corcoran in the National Post. It appears that Corcoran was so incensed by it that he didn't bother to check whether anything…
August 22, 2006
The buck passing continues in the case of Pat Michaels and the office of Virginia State Climatologist. The State of Virginia has passed it back to UVa. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:
Katherine K. Hanley, the secretary of the commonwealth, wrote University of Virginia President John T. Casteen…
August 22, 2006
There is the "Anti (this) War (now)" position. And there is the "Anti-Most Wars Most of the Time" position. And there is Tim Blair's "Pro War All the Time" position:
now right-wing monks are launching themselves at Sri Lankan peaceniks:
A scuffle broke out Thursday between saffron-robed monks…
August 21, 2006
Michael Shermer's September column in Scientific American is on Lott's lawsuit. He got some comments from both Lott and Levitt:
I asked Levitt what he meant by "replicate." He replied: "I used the term in the same way that most scientists do--substantiate results." Substantiate, not duplicate. Did…
August 18, 2006
William Connolley writes about a dodgy-sounding conference on global warming. (Jaworowski is presenting, for example.)
In comments the organizer, Peter Stilbs, explained:
I do not really understand your arrogance against Jaworowski - I have seen that elsewhere on the web too. Reading what he has…
August 16, 2006
Don Boudreaux says that we shouldn't try to prevent global warming because
Capitalism produces so much food that we are never malnourished; it produces ample clothing and sturdy homes to protect us from the elements; it produces the soaps, shampoos, toothpastes and detergents that we use every day…