Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
February 15, 2006
Pat Michaels is notorious for lying about the predictions that James Hansen made in testimony before Congress in 1988. In his paper Hansen showed the results of three possible scenarios, but in his testimony before congress Hansen only showed emphasised the results of the most likely one,…
February 14, 2006
Eli Rabett is working his way through Taken By Storm. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this work, it's a global warming denial book which contains some spectacularly Bad Physics, with the authors claiming that average temperature has no physical meaning. Anyway, Rabett is reading chapter…
February 13, 2006
Four Corners has aired a story "The Greenhouse Mafia". Guy Pearse relates how industry lobbyists boasted how they wrote ministerial briefings, costings and cabinet submissions for the government, even though this is an obvious conflict of interest. And several scientists told how they were…
February 10, 2006
We previously encountered Tom Giovenetti, president of the IPI think tank when he told me that IPI keeps its funders secret:
Second, regarding whether we take money from Microsoft, IPI has an absolute policy of protecting our donors' privacy. I'm sure if you donated money to IPI, you would…
February 9, 2006
Tim Blair reckons that Australian "leftoid" bloggers are losers. Why? Blair has discovered that those bloggers sometimes make mistakes!. For example, David Heidelberg mistook a spoof of Pajamas Media for the real thing, while Chris Sheil made a spelling mistake. But right-wing bloggers make…
February 7, 2006
In the comments to Lott's post where he failed to notice that the study on guns and road rage reported a multi-variate regression in table 1, someone asked him about my post pointing out his mistake. Lott's response:
I haven't bothered looking at Lambert's page, but he typically
doesn't have a…
February 5, 2006
In May, last year I summarized the good news about Iraqi reconstruction:
Due to lack of maintenance, electricity production fell from 9000 MW in 1991 to 4400 MW before the war. Since then, there have been many announcements of improved generating capacity and production has fallen further to 3560…
February 5, 2006
The pro-payola people have launched a lame counter attack on Javers. Before we begin, note that even if they could prove Javers guilty of some wrong-doing, it would not mean that Fumento was not guilty of unethical behaviour. Anyway, Fumento is really excited:
Well, there's now enough evidence…
February 5, 2006
New Scientist reports:
A survey of 2400 drivers carried out by David Hemenway and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health shows that motorists who carry guns in their cars are far more likely to indulge in road rage - driving aggressively or making obscene gestures - than motorists…
February 4, 2006
Iain Murray, comes out with an article in the American Spectator in favour of pundit payola:
An opinion piece -- whether an individual op-ed or a column -- exists to promote a point of view by argument. It does not seek to establish a fact, but to win people over to a particular viewpoint or…
February 2, 2006
Mike Hudson gets a whole column out of an exchange with Fumento:
I decided to e-mail Fumento and gloat about his descent into ignominy. I told him that, given his positions on Love Canal and Gulf War Syndrome, it wasn't surprising to hear that he was bought and paid for by a chemical company. What…
January 31, 2006
In 1987 Zhang JianDong published a study linking chromium-6 in
drinking water to cancer. In 1997 he published a new study retracting his findings ---
further analysis showed that chromium-6 wasn't to blame. All
part of the normal progress of science you would think. Except…
January 30, 2006
Fumento has written a reply to Cathy Seipp's article. Mostly he whines about how mean Seipp was. The only substantive bit is this:
Read the Business Week piece. It takes three whole minutes. Nowhere does it say I took money for any column or story. It says I solicited a grant from Monsanto for…
January 27, 2006
What could be more science bloggy than a place with a science in its name? So here's Silas and Justin in Botany Bay.
January 27, 2006
Jonathon Dursi details the spread of a bogus comparison between crime rate in US in Canada from John Lott to David Frum to Alan Gottlieb:
So here's the path of the lie as far as I can see it:
Aug 2005: Lott claims violent crime is twice as rampant in Canada as in the US; this is untrue, and comes…
January 27, 2006
It's long been public knowledge that Steve Milloy's junkscience site was funded by tobacco companies to attack the science linking cigarette smoke with lung cancer. Last year Mother Jones reported:
Industry defenders shelled [Arctic Climate Assessment] study, and, with a dearth of science to…
January 26, 2006
I've discovered another one of John Lott's attempts to rewrite history. Read on.
Lott has written a response to Kevin Drum's summary of Lott's model changing antics. Here's Drum:
1. Lott and two coauthors produced a statistical model ("Model 1") that showed significant crime decreases when…
January 25, 2006
Kevin Drum is is dismayed that theNew York Times has published an op-ed by John Lott:
I note that the New York Times has published a piece by John Lott today and I just have to ask: what is Lott doing writing op-eds for them? The man is a fraud and the Times demeans itself by allowing him space on…
January 20, 2006
I don't know about you, but I've been waiting with delicious anticipation to see what Fumento's defence would be after he got fired by Scripps-Howard. Fumento does not disappoint. Why did he not disclose that Monsanto had paid him $60,000 to write a book about biotechnology? Fumento says:
I had…
January 20, 2006
because then maybe it would have been mentioned in the New York Times:
Seed Media, which produces science publications in print and online, is seeking to broaden its audience - and its appeal to advertisers - by introducing on Monday a network of blogs, or Web journals, devoted to science and…
January 20, 2006
The Winter 2005 issue of the Nieman Reports has many articles about the news coverage of Evolution and Global Warming. Both topics, of course, are ill served by the tradition of "he said, she said" which gives undue prominence to advocates from the Discovery and Competitive Enterprise Institutes.…
January 19, 2006
Last year I posted about The Great DDT Hoax, the fake story of how DDT had all but eliminated malaria in Sri Lanka until evil enviros banned its use. Most of the people repeating this hoax were just part of the disinformation cycle and were merely guilty of lazy and sloppy research. But some of…
January 17, 2006
Pat Michaels says that Kyoto would destroy the US economy:
In a nutshell, that's why the European governments are so exercised about Bush's "no" to Kyoto. They see it as an international instrument that would destroy the economy of their major competitor, even as they know it doesn't do a thing…
January 17, 2006
Pat Michaels has responded
to my post pointing out several errors in his post about frog extinctions:
It has subsequently been pointed out to us that the points on our Figure 1 (Pounds et al. Figure 4c) are not actually amphibian populations but simply a sampling of weather stations in the regions…
January 16, 2006
I missed this when it first came out, but Carl Bialik has written excellent summary of the issues in the Wall Street Journal.
Researchers concluded that about 100,000 more Iraqis had died outside Fallujah since the invasion than would have died had the prewar death rate continued. Yet the study,…
January 15, 2006
Carl Zimmer has a useful summary of the recent Nature paper that links global warming with frog extinctions. Brian Schmidt comments:
I was curious about the fact that none of the climate-focused bloggers on my blog roll had written on the subject. Then it occurred to me - they're climatologists,…
January 14, 2006
When I criticised Michael Fumento's innumerate writing about the Lancet study he responded with this:
You can blog all you want, but my next column is also on this. It goes out to over 350 newspapers
Not any more:
Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS) announced
Friday that it severed its…
January 13, 2006
This is my last post ever here. My blog has moved to http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ where I will join some fantastic bloggers at ScienceBlogs. The new RSS feed is http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/index.xml. You can now read my first post at the new blog.
January 11, 2006
My blog turns three today. It started as a webpage that I updated daily on the John Lott affair. (To my mind, at least, this was different from a blog.) It's been through several changes of blogging software and host over this time and I'm celebrating the birthday with a move to ScienceBlogs.
The…
January 11, 2006
John Fleck discovers that Benny Peiser's ability to understand papers in climate research hasn't improved since last year:
So I wrote [the paper's author] and asked if he felt their work supported a solar explanation for the warming of the last 100 years. His response:
As you have noticed, because…