Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
August 15, 2006
Kevin Lynch has interesting pair of posts investigating Pat Michaels. First, it looks like Michaels isn't really Virginia's State Climatologist. Second, Michaels has serious conflict of interest, not just because the State of Virginia and fossil fuel companies have conflicting interests, but…
August 14, 2006
I've stated before that folks who peddle the DDT ban myth tend to be those who don't believe in evolution and hence don't believe that mosquitoes can evolve resistance to DDT. One or two commenters felt that I was trying to tar those folks with the creationist brush.
Jonathan Sarfati was Andrew…
August 12, 2006
Charles Montgomery has a detailed expose in the Globe and Mail on the activities of Tim Ball and the Friends of Science. It turns out that the University of Calgary has been used to launder oil company money to fund the Friends of Science:
There was plenty of money for the anti-Kyoto cause in the…
August 12, 2006
Via Eli Rabett I find a long article by James L. Meriner in Chicago magazine on the Lott-Levitt lawsuit. There's some new information on the history of Lott and Levitt such as this:
Just when and how the Lott-Levitt feud started is not clear -- neither man would directly comment on the lawsuit…
August 11, 2006
Chad's put up a dog blogging post, so here's Silas in Centennial Park with a bunch of other dogs. (Silas is the one whose butt is closest to us.)
The pavilion in the background marks the site where the six colonies joined together and created the Commonwealth of Australia.
Just so you know that…
August 10, 2006
Science-hating Miranda Devine reviews An Inconvenient Truth. Not surprisingly, she hated it. Apparently it is stodgy and full of hyperbole. Despite the fact that climate researchers say that Gore got the science right, Devine trots out geologist Bob Carter to say "Gore's circumstantial arguments…
August 10, 2006
Richard Lempert comments on why he found Lott's results implausible when they first came out:
To give another example, long before other research called their results into question, it was common sense that made me suspicious of John Lott and David Mustard's claim in the Journal of Legal Studies…
August 9, 2006
Jake Young reports that bedbugs are back.
Andrew Bolt naturally blames greens: "Being green can make you itchy", because:
Before World War II, bedbug infestations were common in the U.S., but they were virtually eradicated through improvements in hygiene and the widespread use of DDT in the 1940s…
August 8, 2006
MarkCC has a post about quaternions and the fact that they can be used for rotation, so I thought I'd chime in with exactly how they represent rotations.
A 2D rotation by an angle θ can be represented by the complex number on the unit circle
cos θ + i sin θ
Then multiplying complex numbers is the…
August 7, 2006
In January Chris Mitchell, editor in chief of The Australian, was named one of the "dirty dozen", the twelve people who have done the most to mislead Australians about climate change:
As an illustration of how news values now take second place to ideology, The Australian in January ran an anonymous…
August 6, 2006
John Quiggin reports on a new book containing scholarly articles on blogging.
One use I've found in teaching is to ditch my old clunky content management system and just use Wordpress to manage all the web content for my courses. Here's an example.
August 6, 2006
Teresa Nielsen Hayden explains what is happening in the video of Total Eclipse of the Heart. Watch the video before you read the explanation. (Video is below the fold.)
Plus, the Hurra Torpedo version is something else.
Update: Chad Orzel explores YouTubehttp://scienceblogs.com/principles/2006/08…
August 4, 2006
DCI Group, a PR company that specializes in astroturf operations has been revealed by the WSJ as the group behind a youtube video mocking Al Gore:
Everyone knows Al Gore stars in the global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." But who created "Al Gore's Penguin Army," a two-minute video now…
August 4, 2006
Yes, it's out. Get all your sceptical blogging over at Daylight Atheism.
August 2, 2006
Notorious fraud Pat Michaels is in the news some more.
First, Coby Beck reports that California as part of discovery in lawsuit involving automobile companies and global warming wants:
All DOCUMENTS relating to both GLOBAL WARMING and to any of the following individuals: S. Fred Singer, James…
August 2, 2006
My one millionth visitor came from Vrije Universiteit in Belgium and was here for 38 minutes. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.
August 1, 2006
Yes, the DDT ban myth is back, this time in "DDT Returns" by Apoorva Mandavilli that reads like a press release by DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria. It's in Nature Medicine of all places and is subscription only, but because I'll be quoting the bits that are wrong or misleading you'll see…
August 1, 2006
Over at TownHall, Mike Adams writes:
The God-inspired writers of the Bible have always been well ahead of the scientists -- a scenario that hasn't changed from the days of Moses to the days of Darwin, or even now in the 21st century.
Here is one of his examples where he reckons the bible was right…
July 31, 2006
Andrew Dessler sent me a copy of his book The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change. So far I've read a couple of chapters and they've given a pretty good summary of the issues.
Dessler has also started a blog on Climate Change. In the latest entry we learn that the AEI is offering $10,…
July 30, 2006
When John Lott was caught using a sock puppet, Glenn Reynolds declared that he wasn't going to mention it on his blog because it wasn't "actual news". Later he chastised Greg Beato for doing a photoshop of Lott as Mary Rosh and downplayed the sock puppetry as "weird", rather than wrong:
Greg Beato…
July 28, 2006
A leaked memo from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA) gives us inside view of how some of the Global Warming disinformation campaign is financed. There's this:
We decided to support Dr. Patrick Michaels. ... In February of this year, IREA alone contributed $100,000 to Dr.…
July 26, 2006
After repeatedly make the same "up is down" blunder Tim Blair has at last switched from talking about An Inconvenient Truth's average take per theatre to the total take:
Nathan Goulding discovers an inconvenient fact: "You may not have heard, but the film WordPlay is the only movie on this…
July 25, 2006
William Ford has Levitt's reply to Lott. I think this part sums it up:
Plaintiff's construction is so strained and based on faulty assumptions that it is inconceivable that his construction is the exclusive, reasonable interpretation of the Excerpt. The Excerpt is not about Plaintiff's…
July 24, 2006
Judd Legum at Think Progress reports some outrageous claims by Inhofe:
Yesterday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) attacked Al Gore and global warming science, claiming that Gore was "full of crap" on global warming.
Appearing on Glenn Beck's radio show and CNN television program, Inhofe said that the…
July 23, 2006
January 2006:
In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."
Guess what happened in February? Coby Beck has the…
July 20, 2006
Back in April Patterico caught Michael Hiltzik using sock puppets to defend himself. He's back with a post implying that Glenn Greenwald has sock puppets called Ellison, Sam Mathews, Wilson, Ryan and Thomas Ellers who all post from the same IP address and defend Greenwald. Patterico believes that…
July 20, 2006
PZ Myers writes
Time's former "Blog of the Year," the execrable PowerLine blog with which I share a state, has done it again: said something so stupid and so palpably false that I'm feeling a bit embarrassed about ragging on Oklahoma in my previous post--I should feel ashamed by association at…
July 19, 2006
Last month the National Research Council report on climate reconstructions released its report and basically vindicated the hockey stick. This was widely reported in the media. But not in The Australian. I did a search through the archives of The Australian to see what they had published about…