tlambert | January 8, 2011Congratulations to the UNSW students in the Sunswift team who have broken the Guinness World Record for fastest Solar-Powered vehicle.
tlambert | January 8, 2011Via BigCityLib (whose post title I stole), the story of Richard Tol's approach to science:
For the 2008 project, Tol co-wrote a paper along with Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University and two researchers from the Electric Power Research Institute, a US trade association. The two climate change proposals were ranked against numerous development and human welfare issues and came in 29th and 30th out of 30.
Long-term Lomborg critic KÃ¥re Fog took Tol, whose FUND computer-model was the basis for the simulation, to task about the study. Tol admitted that the study used a discount rate that fell…
tlambert | January 8, 2011John Mashey has updated his report on the investigation into Wegman's misconduct. Deep Climate has some comments.
tlambert | January 6, 2011Hey, remember how Don Easterbrook deliberately falsified a baseline to make it look like past temperatures were warmer than current ones? Well, he's at it again. He has taken a graph of temperature proxies for Greenland and used the value for 1855 as the "present". Gareth Renowden comments
1855 â Easterbrookâs âpresentâ â was not warmer than 1934, 1998 or 2010 in Greenland, let alone around the world. His claim that 9,100 out of the last 10,500 years were warmer than recent peak years is â to put it bluntly â pure bullshit, based on a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of…
tlambert | January 6, 2011You may recall Ken Ring, who gave us this gem:
CO2 is also nearly twice as heavy as air (molecular weight 44, that of air 29) so it cannot rise anywhere beyond haze level of a couple of hundred feet.
Now Channel Seven's Sunrise has done its viewers a disservice by having Ken Ring on to argue that global warming is not happenning. Graeme Readfearn investigated Ring's background and found that Ring had written a book on how to read cat's paws:
Ken Ring is a mathematician and a long-time magician, mind-reader and public speaker with a passion for the ancient discipline of palmistry. Ken…
tlambert | January 5, 2011The detailed examination of the Wakefiled fraud is by Brian Deer: How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed. The British Medical Journal editorial summarises:
Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children's cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was…
tlambert | December 23, 2010Merry Christmas to all my readers. Enjoy this 1946 ad for DDT -- you can put it everywhere!
tlambert | December 23, 2010Deep Climate details how GMU has failed to follow its own policies in its investigation of Wegman:
Perhaps, then, it's time to take the obvious next step - a formal complaint to the Office of Research Integrity. And not against Wegman and Said, but against George Mason University itself. In fact, it is high time to recognize the obvious: GMU is simply not up to administering their own misconduct policy. Isn't it time to hand the job over to an organization that can?
tlambert | December 21, 2010You know, we used to be able to laugh at the Poms for electing a gullible fool like Boris Johnson Lord Mayor of London, but then The Sydney Morning Herald goes and republishes Johnson's stupidity:
Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.
Well, nohe doesn't. Corbyn…
tlambert | December 20, 2010Michael Asten has sent me a response to my comments on his opinion piece (See also John Quiggin on that piece). My reply is at the end of this post.
I thank Tim Lambert for his interest in my commentary article, and for the opportunity to provide a response.
First the title, "The Australian's War on Science". Eye catching but a little harsh. I don't compile stats but I note that two days before my Commentary last Friday the Oz ran a post-Cancun Commentary from Julian Hunt carrying a pro-AGW perspective. And when the Oz published a Commentary of mine last April on significance of medieval…
tlambert | December 19, 2010S. Fred Singer isn't pleased with Merchants of Doubt, so tries to play gotcha!:
Oreskes' and Conway's science is as poor as their historical expertise. To cite just one example, their book blames lung cancer from cigarette smoking on the radioactive oxygen-15 isotope. They cannot explain, of course, how O-15 gets into cigarettes, or how it is created. They seem to be unaware that its half-life is only 122 seconds. In other words, they have no clue about the science, and apparently, they assume that the burning of tobacco creates isotopes -- a remarkable discovery worthy of alchemists.…
tlambert | December 18, 2010The Australian takes another one of its shots against science with apiece by Michael Asten who claims:
A recent peer-reviewed paper by Svetlana Jevrejeva from Britain's National Oceanography Centre, Liverpool, provides a calculation of 0.6m-1.6m by 2100 using a range of climate models. However, these models also show predicted sea-level change rates of 4.2mm-5.4mm a year for the first decade of the 21st century.
I contrast these predictions with just published observations by Riccardo Riva from Delft in The Netherlands and international colleagues who use satellite technology to measure…
tlambert | December 11, 2010To their credit The Australian has published an article by David McKnight:
On climate issues The Australian still gives voice to a global PR campaign largely originated by the oil and coal companies of the US. On this score genuinely sceptical journalism is missing in action. Instead, an ideological sympathy with climate sceptics has been concealed behind a fig leaf of supposed balance.
But what shines through in the attitude of the newspaper is its lack of intellectual and moral seriousness in dealing with the consequences of climate change.
To their discredit they simultaneously published…
tlambert | December 11, 2010By popular request sunspot has his/her own thread. This is the only thread that sunspot can post to, and all replies to any comment to sunspot should go here.
tlambert | December 8, 2010David Rose is notorious for fabricating quotes to misrepresent scientists. Now he's doing the same thing to climate data. The UK Met Office recently reported that 2010 is "on track to become first or second warmest in the instrumental record". Rose sprung into action, wrting a news story denying that global warming is happening. Rose claims:
Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.
Who to believe, David Rose or your lying eyes?
(…
tlambert | December 5, 2010Chris Mitchell, defending against the charge that The Australian's coverage of climate change is biased, said:
What people do not like is that I publish people such as Bjorn Lomborg. I will continue to do so, but would suggest my environment writer, Graham Lloyd, who is a passionate environmentalist, gets a very good run in the paper."
Does Lloyd's reporting provide a counterpoint to Lomborg in The Australian? He's only just become the environment writer, so there aren't many stories to go on, but on those his record is similar to that of a predecessor, Matthew Warren.
For example Graham…
tlambert | December 1, 2010Chris Mitchell's spokesperson says:
Editor in chief Editor In Chief of The Australian newspaper Chris Mitchell has invited Canberra academic Julie Posetti to visit the offices of The Australian newspaper to observe news conference, and see operations for herself.
Mitchell's offer is contained in a legal letter send to Posetti yesterday, as part of the defamation proceedings that have become known as #twitdef.
Mitchell also seeks a written apology, denying allegations that he had ever ``conducted himself in a manner that was coercive, debilitating, excruciating or tortuous.''
Mitchell…