Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
May 9, 2006
In the olden days to become a leading climate scientist you had to work hard, do lots of research and publish it in good journals. Now there's a quicker method. Put out a press release.
A group of leading climate scientists has announced the formation of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition,…
May 7, 2006
Folks are still having fun with Glenn Reynolds' "Let's invade Saudi Arabia and Iran and steal their oil" post. Sean Carroll reckons that the wrongness might be enough to form a singularity. But that can't be right, because the wrongness has escaped to form this post by Lubos Motl:
Prices would…
May 7, 2006
The LA Times has cancelled
Michael Hiltzik's column because of his use of sock puppets. Cathy Seipp comments:
No matter what you think of the mainstream media, journalists generally try to be honest and Hiltzik's fundamental dishonesty meant he was lucky he wasn't fired. Not as punishment, but…
May 6, 2006
A while ago I wrote about Steve Milloys Free Enterprise Action Fund and its dismal performance:
"From inception on March 1 of last year through Dec. 31, Free Enterprise Action returned 2.32 percent; the S&P 500 returned 4.72 percent. That's ugly."
Actually it's worse than ugly. Daniel Gross…
May 4, 2006
Glenn Reynolds has kept adding updates to his "seize the oilfields" post, including a response to my post that managed to entirely miss my point. (Invading Iraq has reduced its oil production.) The resulting post is rather confused. Fortunately Jim Henley has decoded it and connected it to the…
May 3, 2006
Last Sunday, about a hundred zombies lurched through downtown Sydney. In an interesting coincidence some zombie facts have lurched through a column by Ruth Lea:
And, interestingly, global average air temperatures, which are regarded as more reliable by climate scientists, have not changed over the…
May 3, 2006
Glenn Reynolds:
Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy.
Yeah, because that's pretty much the way it worked out in Iraq.
Update: Rob Sama on the same…
May 3, 2006
Lisa Payola is OK! de Pasqaule writes:
In the spirit of Conservative Shopping Day and celebrating conservative ingenuity, JunkScience.com has just released "the world's first pro-DDT, anti-malaria t-shirt." The t-shirt launch is part of an educational program to help debunk the myths surrounding…
May 2, 2006
H347h3r p1ck w4rn5 0f t3h d4ng3rz 0f 1337:
The language is morphing into a dangerous dialect that's completely foreign to parents.
"It gives criminals, kids, whomever, another way to communicate covertly with one another without maybe parents catching on to what the kids are saying," Westerville…
May 2, 2006
One favourite tactic of creationists is that of "quote-mining", using out-of-context quotes from scientists that appear to support the creationists' position. Global warming skeptics play this game as well and a recent Calgary Herald column Tim Ball is a good example of the practice. He quotes…
May 1, 2006
In an earlier post on the IBC I wrote:
Sloboda says:
We've always said our work is an undercount, you can't possibly expect that a media-based analysis will get all the deaths. Our best estimate is that we've got about half the deaths that are out there.
OK, then why does the IBC page say "Iraq…
April 29, 2006
Iraq Body Count has published a defence against some of the criticism they have been receiving. The Lancet study implies that there are about five times as many Iraqi deaths as the IBC number. They do not accept this and so are arguing that Lancet estimate is to high and is not corroborated by…
April 28, 2006
The BBC has a report on the dispute between the IBC and Media Lens about Iraqi casualties. (My previous post on this is here.) IBC's John Sloboda trots out Kaplan's fallacy:
Some critics of the Lancet study have said it's like a drunk throwing a dart at a dartboard. It's going to go somewhere, but…
April 27, 2006
Your 33rd Skeptics Circle has been compiled by coturnix. Now with added abstract!
April 26, 2006
Here is Colby Cosh's response to the UN foundation's appeal to buy insecticide-treated nets to fight malaria:
Africans aren't helpless animals--they know what works against malaria. Unfortunately, what works against malaria is DDT. But any country that proposes a program of household DDT…
April 23, 2006
Cyclone Monica is heading for Darwin (which was devastated by Cyclone Tracy in 1974. Ken Parish is getting out of town. Fingers crossed for Darwin and Darwinites.
Update: It was category 5 at landfall, but fortunately it was down to category 1 when it reached Darwin.
April 23, 2006
James Annan writes about two programmes on the BBC. First, a good one on overselling climate change. I think that what gave the programme credibility was that they didn't talk to any of the global warming skeptics. RealClimate also has an interesting discussion.
Second, a crappy one where Bob…
April 23, 2006
Alicia Colon has written the usual rubbish about how Rachel Carson killed millions of people (see DDT ban myth bingo for corrections to the stuff she gets wrong). After claiming that DDT is banned she writes:
Within two years of starting DDT programs, South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Madagascar,…
April 22, 2006
Remember the letter from the 60 scientists denying that "climate change is real" meant anything? Now 90 scientists have written another letter stating:
There is increasingly unambiguous evidence of changing climate in Canada and around the world.
There will be increasing impacts of climate change…
April 21, 2006
Via Patterico I find that Howard Kurtz has reported on Hiltzik's use of a sock puppet:
The Los Angeles Times suspended the blog of one of its top columnists last night, saying he violated the paper's policy by posting derogatory comments under an assumed name.
It's good to see the paper taking…
April 20, 2006
David Glenn's article get discussed by Henry Farrell (lots of comments there), Ted Frank and King.
Lott finally mentions the lawsuit on his blog. No comments there, so far.
April 20, 2006
Patterico catches LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik using a couple of sock puppets. Hiltzik admitted making the posts but denied that they were deceptive. I disagree. It is not deceptive to use a pseudonym, but it is deceitful to have two identities pretend to be different people and support…
April 20, 2006
David Glenn has a stellar article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Lott's lawsuit. (Free access only for five days.) Glenn writes:
The passage concludes with these 60 words:
Then there is the troubling allegation that Lott actually invented some of the survey data that support his more-…
April 20, 2006
More interesting analysis of Lott's lawsuit from Ted Frank. First, after looking at the examples of the use of "replicate" he concludes:
I appear to have been too generous to Lott's complaint when I first criticized it.
Then Ben Zycher, who once mounted a defence of Lott consisting of nothing…
April 19, 2006
Since everyone else here was putting up banners, I created a banner for my blog. The text and figure come from Chapter 8 (The Deltoid) of EH Lockwood's A Book of Curves (1961). It was on sale for $1 at a book sale, so I snapped it up.
A deltoid is the concave triangular curve formed when a…
April 18, 2006
William Ford has two interesting posts analysing the key premise of Lott's lawsuit: that "replicate" can only mean to analyse exactly the same data in exactly the same way.
He looks at the scientific literature on the meaning of replicate and finds that it is used in several different ways. He…
April 18, 2006
Science has published an article urging more environmental scientists to take up blogging. Nick Anthis has a summary.
The article gives examples of "excellent, informative sites":
Mark Lynas,
RealClimate,
Climate Science,
James' Empty Blog,
DeSmogBlog,
Prometheus,
Science At Stake,…
April 17, 2006
Mark Hertsgaard has an excellent article in Vanity Fair
exposing the war on climate science. For instance:
Call him the $45 million man. That's how much money Dr. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, helped R. J. Reynolds Industries, Inc., give away to fund…
April 17, 2006
About a hundred Internet years ago in 1988 I posted this comment on Usenet:
Waste heat does not contribute significantly to global warming. It is all
(if it's really happening - we probably won't be sure until it's too late)
caused by the greenhouse effect. I agree with Brad - burning fossil…
April 16, 2006
Bob Carter's fraudulent claim that global warming ended in 1998 seems to have been swallowed uncritically by lots of gullible global warming skeptics. Jim at Our Word is our Weapon plays whack a mole with a couple of them, Madsen Pirie and Scott Burgess. Coby Beck has more comments on Carter's…