Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
June 23, 2006
The Christian Science Monitor reports on a plan to effectively do away with the electoral college:
Picture it: On election day in some future year, a presidential candidate ends up with the most popular votes but not enough electoral votes to win.
It's a repeat of the 2000 election in which one…
June 22, 2006
The NAS NRC panel on temperature reconstructions has released its report.
The press release states
There is sufficient evidence from tree rings, boreholes, retreating glaciers, and other "proxies" of past surface temperatures to say with a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the…
June 22, 2006
Autism Diva has compiled the 37th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. It's set in the Bermuda Triangle (Elvis needs boats!).
June 21, 2006
The Australian's Higher Education supplement has a couple of articles on academic blogging. Andrew Leigh says that you should try it (and plugs this blog), while Bernard Lane tells us that the University of Sydney now provides blog hosting for all staff and students.
June 20, 2006
Stephen Soldz posts an exchange of letters between the IBC's John Sloboda and Les Roberts. Sloboda accused Roberts of spreading misinformation about a NEJM study. Roberts said:
In a very prestigious journal called the New England Journal of Medicine there was an article published on 1 July 2004.…
June 19, 2006
Last year Steve McIntyre insinuated that Gavin Schmidt was dishonest after one of McIntyre's comments was held up in moderation: (link in quote is mine)
Posting at realclimate is a little thing. I was once involved in trying to detect a business fraud many years ago. A friend told me that to look…
June 16, 2006
Tom Bethell's discussion with Chris Mooney is here. I agree with PZ Myers: Flatow let Bethell ramble on far too much. Bethell was allowed to burn up the first ten minutes of the show to make his first point -- his claim that government agencies promote problems like global warming and bird flu to…
June 16, 2006
Tim Blair responds to Mieszkowski's conclusion that "climate scientists say that, basically, Gore got it right" with a link to an article by Tom Harris who writes:
Albert Einstein once said, "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of…
June 15, 2006
Matt Drudge recently linked to a web site claiming that climate experts disagreed with Al Gore about global warming. Hundreds of blogs uncritically swallowed the claim.
One of the few skeptics was Bruce Perens who wrote
We ran a pointer to a global-warming-doubter story this morning. Here's the…
June 13, 2006
Jim Lindgren has two posts about John Lott. First, on Lott's lawsuit against Levitt he concludes:
I think that Freakonomics is misleading in its juxtaposition of different studies, a juxtaposition that might bring one to conclude that the reason that the main More Guns, Less Crime research was not…
June 13, 2006
The latest from the NZ Climate Science recommended Ken Ring:
Basic science:
Scattered here and there, ozone is individual molecules, not some kind of sheet metal covering the whole sky. How much? 3 parts in 100,000 of the atmosphere. Even CO2 is 35 parts in 100,000, yes 10x as much per volume and…
June 12, 2006
Over at Salon Katharine Mieszkowski asks "Did Al get the science right?"
The usual oil industry flacks and dogmatic skeptics have surfaced to denounce Al Gore's global warming movie. But climate scientists say that, basically, he got it right.
June 11, 2006
Christopher Pearson foolishly relies on Ian Plimer for an article claiming that the link between global warming and sea level rises is "bad science":
Plimer notes that "the tidal measuring station at Port Adelaide is sinking, thereby recording a sea level rise". The same is true of many other areas…
June 10, 2006
Brad Delong:
And Iain Murray makes me sorry I named John Derbyshire the Stupidest Man Alive:
The Corner on National Review Online: A meteorite hit a remote area of northern Norway yesterday. The explosive force of the impact was equivalent to that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I wonder if…
June 10, 2006
Julian Sanchez speculates:
Given the choice between an ultimately misguided but thoughtful post, for which the aforementioned piss-taking might require some research or careful grappling with facially plausible arguments, and some hack's latest howler, a lot of us are going to find it tempting to…
June 9, 2006
The ScienceBlogs empire has expanded, with twenty-odd blogs joining us here. There is a new look home page which has channels like "Planet Earth" to help organise all the posts across all the blogs. The "Last 24 hours" channel is the equivalent of the old home page with all the posts in all blogs…
June 8, 2006
The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition go for a variation of the global warming ended in 1998 cherry pick:
"The NIWA record tells us that the current pother on global warming was caused by the sudden temperature increase in New Zealand of 1.8ºC from 1993 to 1998, caused by the El Niño-Southern…
June 7, 2006
In this post I stated:
The New York Post found someone [Kyle Smith] with less knowledge of science than Tim Blair to review An Inconvenient Truth.
I was wrong. Tim Blair has less knowledge of science than does Kyle Smith.
Smith made a correction:
"Correction: an earlier version of this review…
June 5, 2006
In Paul Krugman's May 29 column he wrote about Pat Michael's "fraud, pure and simple" that James Hansen's 1988 prediction of global warming was too high by 300%. (Michael's fraud was described earlier by Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, Hansen again and me.)
Michaels has posted a denial, so I'm going to go…
June 5, 2006
The New York Post found someone with less knowledge of science than Tim Blair to review An Inconvenient Truth. David Roberts takes the review to pieces.
Henry Farrell writes about Dave Kopel's claim that global warming skeptics don't get enough coverage in the media.
Judd at Think Progress writes…
June 3, 2006
William Ford has the latest news on Lott's lawsuit against Levitt: Levitt and HarperCollins have filed motions to dismiss the case. Some new snippets of information(from the Joint Initial Status Report):
Lott wrote Levitt on January 11, 2006 requesting that he correct his claims that Lott
invented…
June 2, 2006
I wrote earlier about how consultants for PG&E published a fraudulent article exonerating chromium-6. The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine is now publishing a retraction of the paper. From the EWG press release:
The July issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental…
June 2, 2006
From the Onion: Critics Blast Al Gore's Documentary As 'Realistic'
Not from the Onion: Republicans gave out free snow cones to students for an event they called "Global Cooling Day."
From Ringworld:
Gareth: You may care to reflect on another category of best-seller - the astrological predictions…
June 1, 2006
Hansen's 1988 paper that Pat Michaels misrepresented in testimony is not available online. I've put some extracts here.
Hansen, J., I. Fung, A. Lacis, D. Rind, Lebedeff, R. Ruedy, G. Russell, and P. Stone 1988. Global climate changes as forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies three-…
June 1, 2006
I'm with John Quiggin in the debate about Joel Achenbach's story on the global warming skeptics: he's hung them out to dry. Bill Gray looks crazy when he likens Gore to Hitler, and Achenbach even gets a CEI shill to admit to being dishonest:
Horner talks about baselines used in climate trends. Why…
May 31, 2006
The LA Times publishes Jon Wiener on Lott's lawsuit:
But Lott is not suing those who have said some of his pro-gun research was "invented," "faked" or "cooked." The lawsuit turns on the definition of "replicate," from the "Freakonomics" sentence about how other scholars have tried and failed to "…
May 31, 2006
Iain Murray, one of the masterminds who made the CEI ad that claimed that Al Gore produced as much CO2 as the state of Kentucky, discovers that Gore, on net, produces no CO2:
Al Gore justifies his enjoyment of a carbon-intensive lifestyle in a speech in the UK:
He said he was "carbon neutral"…
May 30, 2006
One trouble with cherry picking is that you have to be very careful not to change anything or the whole thing falls apart.
Dennis Avery picks up Bob Carter's "Global Warming stopped in 1998" cherry but fluffs it
The official thermometers at the U.S. National Climate Data Center show a slight global…
May 29, 2006
Roy Spencer takes a break from his parody writing with a new column at Tech Central Station. He has some questions for Al Gore. I think he should have just used Google to find the answers, but what the hey, I'll do it for him.
1) Why did you make it look like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires,…