Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
March 9, 2006
The way the "Rachel Carson was worse than Hitler" folks tell the story, the all-powerful environmentalists were poised to ban DDT at the end of the 90s. For example, here's Tren and Bate's
version of the negotiations leading to the Stockholm Treaty:
Five Inter-governmental Negotiating Committee (…
March 7, 2006
Because if you don't you might end up like Tim Blair:
Big call from Tim Lambert: "Crime and violent crime in Britain peaked in the early 90s and [have] since plummeted." His source? The British Crime Survey, an annual affair which asks some 40,000 Brits if they've been encrimed during the…
March 6, 2006
When I wrote about David Frum's voodoo criminology in support of the death penalty, I didn't mention any of the recent research that purports to find a deterrent effect for the death penalty because Frum didn't cite it. That research has always seemed suspect to me -- since a very small fraction…
March 6, 2006
Voting has started for the Koufax awards. I've been nominated for a Koufax award for Best Single Issue Blog and for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition.
March 5, 2006
In her latest rant, Miranda Devine warns about the imminent threat of a take over by scientists:
It used to be men in purple robes who controlled us. Soon it will be men in white lab coats. The geeks shall inherit the earth.
I suppose you are wondering how they are going to take over. Could…
March 3, 2006
Miranda Devine tells her readers what GIGO means:
The outputs are totally dependent on the quality and accuracy of the inputs. At university we had a name for what often happens: GIGO - garbage in garbage out.
And then perfectly illustrates it:
Yet a paper published last week by the Lavoisier…
March 3, 2006
Dr Free-Ride may have Friday sprog blogging and PZ Myers may have his Friday cephalopod, but only here at Deltoid do combine them both! Here's an old picture of one of my kids with a cuttlefish he found on the beach. He dismantled it with the help of his brother and discovered that they contain…
March 3, 2006
After Fumento had been worked over by yours truly, Chris Mooney and PZ Myers, you'd think there would be nothing left, but Steve Reuland has taken just one paragraph from Fumento's column and found as many mistakes as I found in the whole thing. Fumento's columns aren't just wrong, they're…
March 2, 2006
Chris Mooney and PZ Myers complete the demolition of Fumento's article that I started here. Sir Oolius also got stuck in and managed to get one of Fumento's characteristically lame comebacks.
Inspired by my post mentioning co-authorship chains with the "Hockey Team", John Fleck and William…
March 1, 2006
Tim Blair links to some interesting articles in this week's Bulletin. First up is a page on John Howard with the intriguing title "The hosue of Howard". It's a fearless, hard hitting complete suck up to Howard. Apparently, after a decade of power and privilege as prime minister, Howard hasn't…
February 28, 2006
In Fumento's latest article he accuses the leading science journals of delivering "Political Science". His examples are a mixture of genuine problems discovered by others (like the Korean stem cell fraud) and bogus problems "discovered" by Fumento. Like this:
Fast forward to September 2005,…
February 27, 2006
I wrote earlier about McIntyre's attack on the NAS Panel on temperature reconstructions. McIntyre objected to two panelists because they were co-authors of co-authors of Mann, but not to the panelist who was a co-author of a co-author of McKitrick. In another post he also objects to another…
February 26, 2006
Welcome William Connolley's Stoat to the ScienceBlogs federation. He's not in the combined feed yet, but I imagine that will be fixed soon.
February 24, 2006
I've been nominated for a Koufax award for Best Single Issue Blog and for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. Voting hasn't started yet, but there all kinds of interesting blogs on those lists, so here's a chance to find an interesting blog that you haven't seen before.
February 23, 2006
Cathy Young disagrees with the Iain Murray/Tom Giovenetti line on cash for comment:
Sadly, some conservatives are now defending the practice of opinion writers serving as hired guns (hired quills?) for business and lobbying interests. Among others, Iain Murray in The American Spectator and…
February 23, 2006
Since 99% of the trackbacks I have been getting were spam, I have turned them off. If you link to one of my posts, just leave a comment linking back to your post. Sorry for the inconvenience.
February 22, 2006
Terence is justifiably annoyed that his tax dollars are being spent on having John Lott give a keynote speech on firearms safety at a conference in New Zealand. Lott is going to claim that safe storage laws increase crime. I don't know if he will continue to misrepresent the research that…
February 22, 2006
Last week I wrote about how the Australian government was gagging scientists from expressing mainstream science views on global warming. Garth Paltridge has responded with a claim that global warming skeptics get gagged as well. From the Feb 22 Australian Financial Review:
Graeme Pearman (in…
February 22, 2006
Here's Silas standing in front of one of the ports that have been sold to Dubai Port World. Don't worry, he'll protect us from the terrorists! Unless they gave him food or something. See Dennis the Peasant or Kevin Drum for a more serious treatment of this matter.
February 21, 2006
Last week I wrote about the greenhouse mafia in Australia. This week, Clive Hamilton has named the "dirty dozen", the twelve people who have worked together to mislead Australians about climate change. The Age reports:
Speaking at the Australia-New Zealand Climate Change and Business Conference…
February 21, 2006
I've turned on the requirement that you have to provide an email address when leaving a comment. If that stops you from commenting the fix is to delete the cookies you have from scienceblogs. PZ Meyers has more on this and other bugs.
If you have any other bug reports or suggestions for…
February 21, 2006
Last year I wrote how John Brignell repeatedly tried to add untrue claims to the Sourcewatch article on Brignell because it was critical of him. Now he is complaining about his Wikipedia article:
Anyway, reading hostile critiques of one's efforts is very much like being in that hall of mirrors…
February 21, 2006
Tim Worstall reports that James Lovelock (who I criticised earlier for his global warming alarmism) has fallen for the myth that the use of DDT against malaria is banned. In his new book Lovelock writes:
"insecticides badly needed controlling, but the indiscriminate banning of DDT and other…
February 20, 2006
Steve Forbes writes:
There is a simple, time-proven way to virtually eradicate malaria: the judicious use of DDT. Extremist environmentalists have cowed health officials into never even considering the use of DDT. We are not talking about the large-scale, indiscriminate spraying of the stuff that…
February 19, 2006
On Saturday, I showed to a bloggers meet up organized by Suki and Susoz. Also attending were weez, Flashman, Morgan and tigtog. We decided that a bloggers' picnic would be fun, so, if you're in Sydney on Saturday April 1st, come to the Royal Botanical Gardens from 1pm. We're spreading the picnic…
February 18, 2006
Good old Mike Fumento has another go at Javers:
In the one instance we know of, the DC firm Patton Boggs and others invited Javers to play on the highly exclusive Bretton Woods golf course. I would guess that the value of this gift would be in excess of $10,000. This could be considered unsavory…
February 16, 2006
Hockey stick wars, the story so far: McIntyre and McKitrick (M&M) first claimed that the hockey stick graph was the product of "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal…
February 16, 2006
The 28th Skeptic's Circle is your one source for skeptical blogging.
February 15, 2006
Test yourself: can you detect what is dishonest about this argument in a Mirada Devine column about RU486 published in the Sydney Morning Herald today:
And, despite the hype about a gender divide in the Senate last week, about the same number of men (21) and women (24) voted in favour of removing…