tlambert | April 6, 2010Saturday's Science Show was on the AAAS Symposium on climate change scepticism. Speakers are Riley Dunlap, William Freudenburg, Naomi Oreskes and Stephen Schneider.
Hat tip Bernard J.
tlambert | April 6, 2010I don't think I need to add much to Deep Climate's dissection of McKitrick's claims that one of his papers has been unfairly rejected, so I'll just make three quick points. McKitrick claims:
There was some excitement when a blogger found a minor error in our computer code (we had released the code at the time of publication), but we sent a correction to the journal right away and showed that the results hardly changed.
The "minor" error was confusing degrees with radians. As I wrote at the time:
correcting the error halves the size of the economic signal in the warming trend, reducing it…
tlambert | April 3, 2010John Mclean has a reply to Lewandowsky at the Drum where he proves once and for all that he has no clue, with comments like:
If the SOI accounts for short-term variation then logically it also accounts for long-term variation.
and
We show a relationship going back to the 1950s. Isn't that long enough for your "long-term" ?
Despite being challenged to post the reviewers comments on his Reply declining publication, Mclean hides the declines. Where's the transparency?
Below I plot UAH temperature data and the differenced UAH data to show that taking differences removes any long-term trend.…
tlambert | April 1, 2010The House of Commons report on the emails stolen from CRU has vindicated Phil Jones -- he has "no case to answer":
The focus on Professor Jones and CRU has been largely misplaced. On the accusations relating to Professor Jones's refusal to share raw data and computer codes, we consider that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community. We have suggested that the community consider becoming more transparent by publishing raw data and detailed methodologies. On accusations relating to Freedom of Information, we consider that much of the responsibility should…
tlambert | March 28, 2010Well, now we know why McLean's Reply to the demolition of their paper was rejected. In a response being published by SPPI (was it rejected by even Energy and Environment?), they claim this was because of a vast conspiracy against them. But they make the mistake of including the rejected Reply, so anyone can see that they admit that their analysis was "based on differentials between 12 month averages", which removes any long term trend. That they don't find a long term trend after removing does not show that there is no long term trend. No doubt the referee's reports made this point as…
tlambert | March 27, 2010I have uploaded my debate with Monckton to youtube. I had to cut it up into 15 parts which I've put in a playlist.
My presentation is part 3 and 4, embedded below.
tlambert | March 25, 2010BusinessGreen reports:
The renewable energy industry is this morning considering lodging a complaint with the Press Complaint Commission (PCC) over reports in the Sunday Times yesterday accusing "feeble" wind farms of failing to deliver as much power as expected.
A misleading story in The Sunday Times? You can guess who is responsible. Leake tries to make a case that wind farms are a "feeble" source of electricity by cherry picking the ones that perform the worst:
The analysis reveals that more than 20 wind farms produce less than a fifth of their potential maximum power output.
Nowhere…
tlambert | March 24, 2010Simon Lewis has made an official complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about Jonathan Leake's dishonest reporting on the Amazon rainforests. David Adam reports:
Lewis said: "There is currently a war of disinformation about climate change-related science, and my complaint can hopefully let journalists in the front line of this war know that there are potential repercussions if they publish misleading stories. The public deserve careful and accurate science reporting." ...
Lewis also complains that the Sunday Times used several quotes from him in the piece to support the assertion that…
tlambert | March 23, 2010I imagine that by now almost everyone on the planet with an email address has received at least one email from Nigeria offering you a handsome fee to help retrieve millions of dollars that have been tied up somehow, so the returns from this scam are likely declining. The scammers are now turning to romance scams, where they pretend to fall in love with their victim before defrauding them. Carmen has the details.
tlambert | March 22, 2010Bill Brown, who was a District Commissioner in pre-independence Papua New Guinea reviews a memoir from Michael O'Connor who was a patrol officer then:
OâConnor rails against the âclever people ⦠those academics, bureaucrats and others drawn from their experience of a sophisticated metropolitan societyâ.
The clever people âdecided that DDT should not be used because birds might die. So the program was abandoned, malaria returned in full force and people died as a result ... the malarial control program that involved spraying every hut and house with DDTâ.
In fact, the program…
tlambert | March 21, 2010James Annan writes that their paper debunking McLean, De Freitas and Carter has been published and:
Amusingly, the comment will be published alone, without the customary Reply. Why? Because...McLean et al couldn't muster a reply that was publishable (and not for want of trying, either - it was simply rejected).
I'm sure Energy and Environment will publish it quick smart.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is less kind:
1) Will McLean et al. retract the paper (and will Bob Carter admit fault or even discuss the errors publicly)?
2) Will the denial0sphere and the MSM give this story (a climate change scandal…
tlambert | March 21, 2010There have been lots of new developments in the scandal surrounding the paper by Samanta et al misrepresented by a Boston University press release.
Simon Lewis, in a guest post at RealClimate, explains how the paper strengthens the IPCC conclusions about the Amazon, rather than weakening them as the press release claims.
Scott Saleska, in a guest post at RealClimate, argues that the Samanta paper is wrong as well -- Samanta's own data shows just as much greening in 2005 as the Saleska paper that Samanta claims to be disproving.
Michael Tobis finds Richard Taffe, who wrote the misleading…
tlambert | March 20, 2010Deep Climate covers the latest in the IOPgate scandal
The controversy over the Institute of Physics biased submission to the U.K. Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee's investigation of the stolen emails from East Anglia's Climate Research Unit is about to get a whole lot hotter.
Of particular interest to Deltoid readers might be the Monckton connection (quoting Donald Oats on 8 Mar):
Monckton was touring Australia - perhaps still is - and during that tour he made some allusions to Climate Scientists being about to face criminal charges, and also to peak academic bodies having…
tlambert | March 18, 2010Maurice Newman, the chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has come out as a global warming denier in a speech to the ABC.
Michael Ashley replies here:
Scientists are fairly measured in their public statements. Years of training instils a care with words, and avoidance of value judgements. Well, sod that, I'm angry.
What has me fuming is your speech last week to ABC staff in which you accuse your senior journalists of "group-think" in favouring the scientific consensus on climate change. You refer to "a growing number of distinguished scientists [that are] challenging the…
tlambert | March 17, 2010Peter Sinclair's latest video, debunking the "no global warming for 15 years" and "sea levels are not rising" memes:
tlambert | March 15, 2010The Australian has been conducting an uncompromising and unrelenting war on science, scientists and the scientific method, but if anyone criticises them for it, they react like scalded cats. So you could predict that they would whine when John Quiggin, in his column in the Australian Financial Review, wrote:
The Australian newspaper has campaigned against science and scientists so consistently that picking a single example would be misleading. Blogger Tim Lambert, who maintains a running series on The Australian's War on Science is now up to installment 46.
And sure enough their editorial…
tlambert | March 14, 2010Two contradictory stories describing the same adjudication: The Sunday Times
Ed Miliband's adverts banned for overstating climate change
vs The Guardian
Climate change adverts draw mild rebuke from advertising watchdog
One way to determine which story is more accurate is to do what anarchist does and carefully read the adjudication. But the shortcut to the truth is to note that the first story was written by Jonathan Leake.
Further coverage of the Leakegate scandal is at John Quiggin's.
tlambert | March 13, 2010Back in 2007 a paper, Amazon Forests Green-Up During 2005 Drought, was published in Science:
Coupled climate-carbon cycle models suggest that Amazon forests are vulnerable to both long- and short-term droughts, but satellite observations showed a large-scale photosynthetic green-up in intact evergreen forests of the Amazon in response to a short, intense drought in 2005. These findings suggest that Amazon forests, although threatened by human-caused deforestation and fire and possibly by more severe long-term droughts, may be more resilient to climate changes than ecosystem models assume.…