tlambert | May 9, 2010The most damning thing about Christopher Monckton's testimony to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming on global warming science (video here), is the fact that the Republicans could not or would not get a single scientist to testify.
His main argument is based on the same confusion that I dealt with in my debate with him -- the idea that Pinker (2005) which found an increase in short wave radiation at the surface, actually found an increase in radiative forcing. Rachel Pinker herself explained the difference: (my emphasis)
The CO2 "radiative forcing" value that…
tlambert | May 7, 2010255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences including 11 Nobel Laureates have signed an open letter in opposition to the attacks on science and scientists from global warming deniers:
We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking…
tlambert | May 5, 2010John Quiggin uses the Oregon Petition to illustrate the way the right insulates itself from knowledge about the world:
This kind of thinking is by no means unique to the contemporary right. But it is ubiquitous, and the staying power of the Oregon petition indicates way. Even the silliest claim, once made part of the canon must be defended to the last. In extreme cases, there is the option of dropping an utterly discredited talking point and then saying "we never said that". This is one thing the Internet has made much harder, with the perverse result that obstinacy in error has become more…
tlambert | May 4, 2010The volcanic eruption in Iceland produced a net reduction in emissions because the decrease in emissions from all the grounded flights was more than the total CO2 from the volcano. So naturally Ian Plimer has been repeating his discredited claims that volcanoes produce more emissions than humans. Media Watch busts him for it.
tlambert | May 3, 2010Lifted from comments. John Mashey writes:
The saga continues... inspired by Deep Climate, I've been examining the Wegman Report in detail. Plodding patience pays off... but the latest is an example of breathtakingly-bizarre incompetence.
Many WR references were sourced through Barton staffer Peter Spencer, according to
Yasmin Said p.5. I've been studying them, and I find BAD, WORSE, and AWFUL.
BAD
Of the ~80 references in the Bibliography, only ~30 are actually referenced in the body. Some are totally irrelevant, a 1.5 page review of Wunsch(2006). That is about Dansgaard-Oscher events,…
tlambert | May 2, 2010Over at the Drum Stephan Lewandowsky notes the similarities between global warming skeptics and other conspiracy theorists:
This attribute of conspiracy theorising also applies in full force to the actions of some climate "sceptics":
When leading climate scientists are repeatedly exonerated after the "climategate" pseudo-scandal, then to climate "sceptics" this simply means that the relevant enquiries were pre-programmed to find nothing wrong. Thus, the U.K. Parliament conspired to produce a whitewash of Professor Jones a few weeks ago, as did Lord Oxburgh when his panel, constituted with the…
tlambert | May 1, 2010The Hook reports:
In papers sent to UVA April 23, [Virginia Attorney General] Cuccinelli's office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann's receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann-- now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State-- was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
Cuccinelli isn't just asking for documents relating to his research grants but all correspondence Mann had with Caspar Ammann, Raymond Bradley, Keith Briffa, John Christy, Edward Cook, Thomas Crowley, Roseanne D'…
tlambert | April 29, 2010Over at The Australian Cheryl Jones seems to be immune to the group think there, writing a straight news story on the debunking of a paper by by Stewart Franks et al, which purported to prove that global warming had no effect on the drought in the Murray-Darling Basin:
In winter, the days are shorter the farther south you go. The Franks team's dataset started with stations in the southern basin, including ones near Canberra and Melbourne, and ended with stations as far north as Moree, near the NSW-Queensland border. By adding data from more northern stations later in the period, the analysis…
tlambert | April 27, 2010Stefan Rahmstorf reports that the Frankfurter Rundschau has withdrawn a storybased on Jonathan Leake's fabricated Africagate story.
Rahmstorf has also read Rajendra Pachauri's novel, which The Times calls a raunchy environmentalnovel and states:
For a country where sex is rarely discussed in public the book mingles lectures on climate change with descriptions of Sanjay's sexual encounters, including frequent references to "voluptuous breasts".
Rahmstorf comments:
After I have read it, I find this a bizarre summary of the novel, apparently aimed to discredit Pachauri.
There is not a single "…
tlambert | April 26, 2010Hey, remember the Tim Curtin thread? It's now a live show:
Rsearch [sic] Seminar - Let them not eat: CO2, food and climate.
Presented by: Tim Curtin
Hosted by: Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program
12:30-1:30 Thu Apr 29 Seminar Room B (Arndt Room), Coombs Bldg, ANU
(Via Marco)
tlambert | April 24, 2010This is a picture of Amy Ingram, my grandmother's sister in 1918 wearing an AIF uniform. Presumably it belongs to their brother Robert who served on the Western Front.
tlambert | April 24, 2010The Australian renews its war on science by printing an opinion piece by Richard Lindzen. Arthur Smith comments:
From his latest piece one can only conclude that either Lindzen has descended into the epistemic closure of paranoia and conspiracy theories that has become far too prevalent among some Americans lately or, worse, that he is consciously participating in the malicious disinformation campaign on climate that has recently been extensively documented by Greenpeace and elsewhere
Smith gives a detailed analysis of how he came to this conclusion.
Marc Ambinder also weighs in:
"Climate…
tlambert | April 21, 2010The National Post has been conducting it's own war on science. Now Andrew Weaver, one of the scientists they have attacked, is fighting back and suing them for defamation. The press release from Weaver's lawyer says:
University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis, launched a lawsuit today in BC Supreme Court against three writers at the National Post (and the newspaper as a whole), over a series of unjustified libels based on grossly irresponsible falsehoods that have gone viral on the Internet.
In a statement released at the…
tlambert | April 19, 2010Johann Hari has written an excellent article in The Nation on the scandalously poor reporting in the main stream media on climate science and scientists:
Yet when it comes to coverage of global warming, we are trapped in the logic of a guerrilla insurgency. The climate scientists have to be right 100 percent of the time, or their 0.01 percent error becomes Glaciergate, and they are frauds. By contrast, the deniers only have to be right 0.01 percent of the time for their narrative--See! The global warming story is falling apart!--to be reinforced by the media. It doesn't matter that their…
tlambert | April 18, 2010Andrew Bolt comes up a killer argument to refute the findings of Oxburgh's committee: Oxburgh's "choice of transport to the press conference". You see, Oxburgh drove there in an enormous SUV, so obviously he doesn't really believe that the CRU scientists' work is sound, else he would have come on a bicycle or something. Oh wait, Oxburgh did arrive on a bicycle, so Bolt deploys a slightly different argument:
Surely Oxburgh's choice of transport to the press conference on his Climategate findings should have made some journalists there wonder about his impartiality: ... You see ...
Lord…
tlambert | April 16, 2010Peter Sinclair's latest video continues on with Christopher Monckton. I'm in this one!
tlambert | April 14, 2010The International Panel set up to examine the work of the Climate Research Unit has cleared the CRU of all charges of misconduct:
We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work
of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely
that we would have detected it.
They also point the finger at who is to blame for the failure to release all the weather station data. The UK government:
It was not the immediate concern of the Panel, but we observed that there were
important and unresolved questions that related to the availability of…