tlambert

Mark Steyn relates a story told by Johnelle Bryant: Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea. The meeting got off to…

Under the title "Academics drag feet on giving out data" Lott quotes extensively from an article about the hockey stick by Steve Milloy. One part Lott doesn't quote is this: Well, a scientist's refusal to provide colleagues with his data and methodology is suspicious. Now, Milloy is being…

I wrote earlier about an extraordinarily biased survey conducted by Spiked where they asked scientists what they would teach the world about science if they could pick just one thing. I just noticed this gem of an answer by Stanley Feldman: I would also teach the world that energy used is…

In response to my post showing that DDT is not banned, David Adesnik suggests that there is a de facto ban on DDT There are two ways that this de facto ban is supposed to work: first, by aid agencies refusing to fund DDT use, and second by the EU banning imports from DDT-using countries. However,…

The Christian Science Monitor has published Fred Singer's acceptance speech after he won the 'Flat Earth Award'. This paragraph is interesting: What matters are facts based on actual observations. And as long as weather satellites show that the atmosphere is not warming, I cannot put much faith…

Keiran Healy observes that the U Chicago Federalist Society acted with integrity when Lott libeled Donohue. In the comments, Michael Maltz posts the letter that he sent with Dudley Duncan to the AEI about Lott and the reply they received: October 21, 2003 Christopher DeMuth President American…

Lott has a response to my post about his libel of John Donohue. He writes: 2) Unfortunately, the second planned debate was also cancelled. The debate was rescheduled for April 13th this year, and I made sure to reconfirm it because of the previous cancelation. The student at Chicago who set up the…

A beautiful sunny winter's day today so I took some pictures on a walk with my dog. Here is Silas. He's a great dane bull mastiff cross. Here he is looking dignified at Malabar Bay. Yes, that's walking distance from my house. And looking undignified at Malabar Bay. Can you spot the link to…

On his blog Lott has a sequence of postings telling a story of how the University of Chicago Federalist Society tried to organize a debate between himself and John Donohue, but Donohue kept backing out. What really happened bears little relation to the story Lott tells. In fact, Lott's account is…

To celebrate 125 years of publication, The Bulletin is posting historical pictures of Australia from its archives. In the latest set, one from 1946 has my father in it. If I was a better writer I could probably tell you what he meant to me, but I can link to this appreciation written by John…

In 1996 we were discussing Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" paper on the firearmsreg mailing list. I've posted my comments on my blog as entries for August 1996.

Last year an anonymous person from the American Enterprise Institute repeatedly tried and failed to remove all criticism of Lott from his wikipedia page. He eventually admitted to being Lott and claimed that the "posting contains a huge number of inaccuracies and outright lies". Over the past few…

RealClimate has some responses from scientists to Barton's letters, including the replies from the three scientists that Barton sent his letters to, Mann, Bradley and Hughes. Of note is that the fact that Mann has released the source code for his multiproxy reconstruction. I imagine that the…

Brian Schmidt tries to track down a source for the quote "People Are Pollution" that John Ray claims was the slogan of Zero Population Growth. Ray was unable to give a source for his quote, which would seem to be bogus. Schmidt concludes: I don't think Ray is intentionally dishonest (unlike Benny…

On June 7, the national science academies of the G8 nations and Brazil, China and India issued a joint statement saying: Increasing greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise; the Earth's surface warmed by approximately 0.6 centigrade degrees over the twentieth century. The Intergovernmental…

John A, one of the bloggers at Climate Audit writes: You should know that Lambert's scientific knowledge is *ahem* "challenged". Ask him if he's discovered what entropy is and how it applies to closed thermodynamic systems. What a guy. Following the link, we find an anonymous person defending…

It's now a quarter of a decade since I started this blog. Originally it was just a web page for my comments on John Lott's Mysterious Survey. I figured that the survey issue would be resolved in a few weeks and I could shut it down then, but that doesn't seem to have happened. Thanks to the…

Last year blogger Xrlq href="http://xrlq.com/2004/03/17/hat-of-the-day-stim-lamberts-xrlq/" rel="nofollow">dismissed my criticism of Lott as "paranoid rantings" and "gratuitous attacks on Lott personally", calling me "Dim", "Timwit", "Timbecile", "a jerk" and "Dim Lambert". This year I noted…

After three posts on a spelling mistake Chris Sheil made, and another one on a Sheil typo, it seems that Tim Blair couldn't find any more Sheil errors. Undaunted, he has a new post linking Sheil to spelling mistakes made by someone else: In other spelling news, Chris Sheil is selling his trailer…

By popular request, I've installed a comment preview plugin. I'd tried a live preview, but it didn't display Markdown. Now with a preview and a spell check you can avoid making a mistake in a comment and having Tim Blair write a whole series of posts about your mistake. I also highly recommend…

Oh, great. After getting his bogus claims about climate models into the Australian, Kininmonth now has them in the Age: The IPCC radiative forcing hypothesis ignores the atmospheric and ocean circulations that transport surplus solar energy from the tropics to polar regions. Nowhere are local…

William Connolley has been reading the House of Lords report on The Economics of Climate Change and he's not impressed: Because they decided to talk nonsense about the Great Hockey Stick debate. They manage to say: "We sought evidence that refuted the claims of McIntyre and McKitrick, but have not…

I'm in favour of this suggestion from Kevin Drum. If I could have one small wish for today, it would be for the blogosphere on both left and right to refrain from political point scoring over the London attacks. Just for a day. Isn't tomorrow soon enough to return to our usual arguments? Tim Blair…

Check out the 12th Skeptic's Circle.

If you are using WordPress you urgently need to upgrade to version 1.5.1.3 (released last week). This is why. Update: OK, apparently that hole had already been fixed, but there was another vulnerability. You should still upgrade.

The Jargon Dictionary says: spelling flame: n. [Usenet] A posting ostentatiously correcting a previous article's spelling as a way of casting scorn on the point the article was trying to make, instead of actually responding to that point (compare dictionary flame). Of course, people who are more…

Actually that's an undercount since some people read my blog via the RSS feed. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.

Blogwise have used the Google Maps API and GeoURL to get a map showing locations of blogs (If you follow the link you'll have to click on the satellite button to see anything). Those shadows don't look quite right. How could the sun be shining from the south?

For years now global warming skeptics have been using satellite measurements to argue that global warming isn't happening, For example (from 1998): Surface-based temperature records are too few in number and too unevenly spaced to generate accurate global temperature maps. Only 30 percent of the…

Kevin Drum is not pleased that the LA Times has yet again published a piece by John Lott. You generally expect some dodgy statistics from Lott and he duly delivers: Well, more than nine months have passed [since the assault weapons ban ended] and the first crime numbers are in. Last week, the FBI…