tlambert | March 12, 2010Such shameless fishing for links by Ataraxia Theatre will not go unrewarded.
tlambert | March 9, 2010An anonymous person at The Australian writes:
In serious debates, nothing demolishes credibility as readily as inconsistency and exaggeration.
Indeed, which is why The Australian has no credibility on science.
Many Australians, therefore, will find it baffling that six state governments are working off four different sets of figures for the sea-level rises they expect to be caused by climate change. The projected rises vary from 38cm in Western Australia to 80cm in Queensland and Victoria and 90cm in NSW, creating confusion for councils and developers. Fortunately, all fall far short of the…
tlambert | March 8, 2010JAMA/Archives has issued a special notice:
SPECIAL NOTICE: The embargo on the Archives of Internal Medicine paper (see below) was broken by Jonathan Leake of The Sunday Times of London. In response to this violation, reporters and editors at The Sunday Times will no longer have pre- or post-embargo access to any JAMA/Archives materials.
I think, perhaps, that other journals should preemptively ban The Sunday Times. I'm not going to link to Leake's story -- the BBC story on the study is here.
tlambert | March 7, 2010Randy Olson (maker of Sizzle) has an interview with Mark Morano.
RO: Are you an anti-evolutionist?
MM: Haha, not at all. In fact, you know it's not an issue. The implication of your question is that somehow the skeptics are aligned with creationists. In all my years of dealing with Senator Inhofe the subject of creationism and evolution never even came up. Someone even did an analysis of it in our scientists report, and I think they may have only found one or two creationists out of 700-some names.
Wait, that was my analysis. I looked at the people who were on the Discovery Institute's…
tlambert | March 5, 2010Tamino writes
It has now been independently confirmed, by multiple persons, that my results regarding the impact of station dropout on global temperature are correct. Your claims, in your document with Joe D'Aleo for the SPPI, are just plain wrong. ...
If you have any honor at all, you'll set the record straight. You owe it to everyone, and especially to NOAA, to admit that you were wrong. And you certainly owe it to NOAA to apologize. You need to make a highly visible, highly public admission of error, and apology, for using falsehoods to accuse others of fraud.
My post from way back in…
tlambert | March 5, 2010You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.
-- Humbert Wolfe
tlambert | March 5, 2010BigCityLib catches the IOP using the memory hole.
William Connolley is not impressed:
What a bunch of slimy little toads: they pretend to believe in openness, they won't tell us who wrote their statements, then they silently airbrush out embarassing words afterwards.
tlambert | March 5, 2010Via Resilience Science, a talk by Naomi Oreskes on her new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
tlambert | March 4, 2010Institute of Physics refuses to say who wrote submission calling for more openness.
tlambert | March 2, 2010Last week I got an email from Amy Turner of the Sunday Times:
Dear Tim,
I'm writing a piece about Science bloggers and would love to talk to you about yours. Are you free to talk to me today or tomorrow? Hope to hear from you.
Turner usually writes celebrity puff pieces rather than about science, so it was pretty obvious that Jonathan Leake was organizing some payback because I had dared to criticize him. I agreed to the interview and, sure enough, it wasn't long before Turner was threatening me (How would I react if Jonathan Leake sued me for libel?) She complained that I had been unfair…
tlambert | March 1, 2010A story on climate change by Jonathan Leake that is reprinted in the Australian is pretty well guaranteed to misrepresent the science. And it does -- you only have to compare the headline for Leake's story "Cyclone climate link rejected" with Nature Geosciences headline "Tropical cyclone projection: Fewer but stronger" for the new paper and with what the IPCC report says:
Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of…
tlambert | March 1, 2010This Jonathan Leake story on the evolution of Polar Bears broke the embargo on this PNAS paper. Ivan Oransky quotes PNAS media and communications manager Jonathan Lifland:
The majority of our infrequent embargo violations are accidental and typically the result of mislabeled copy that does not properly list the 3 p.m. EST Monday embargo expiration. We have a separate situation with the Sunday Times of London. With EurekAlert, we have prevented their editors and reporters from accessing the embargoed news section of EurekAlert, which is where pre-print copies of our articles are accessible…
tlambert | March 1, 2010Via Skeptical Science, Peter Sinclair's video on the evidence for man-made global warming.
tlambert | February 28, 2010Andrew Bolt responded to my debate with Monckton by defaming me, calling me "vituperative, deceptive, a cherrypicker, an ideologue, a misrepresenter and a Manichean conspiracist only too keen to smear a sceptic as a crook who lies for Exxon's dollars". You'll be glad to hear that Bolt now says I take back my nice words about Lambert. Even though he admitted that "Many of these issues are over my head" he is now utterly convinced by a dishonest post from Joanne Nova that I somehow tricked Monckton.
Nova quote mines Pinker's explanation for this phrase:
if we give Christopher Monckton the…
tlambert | February 26, 2010Satoshi Kanazawa has an interesting post about how British Newspapers Make Things Up:
I hope American and British readers (and readers throughout the world) will finally wake up to the reality of British journalism: You just cannot believe what you read in British newspapers. I'd further call on my academic colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic never to speak to British reporters. You have absolutely no control over what they say about you and your scientific research.
Unfortunately, however, this does not always work. A reporter from the Sunday Times has recently requested an…
tlambert | February 26, 2010The IPCC fourth assessment report did not give any upper bound to sea level rise this century. But in a spectacularly bad piece of science communication they gave a range of 18 to 59cm excluding effects from accelerating ice sheet flows. Which are potentially the biggest contributors to sea level rise this century. However, a study last year by Siddal et al did come up with an upper bound of 82 cm. But now their study has been retracted, so sea level rise this century may well be more than 82 cm.
In the topsy-turvy world that is the denialists' planet, where up is down and black is white,…
tlambert | February 26, 2010The Economist tells it like it is
This led to a Daily Mail headline reading: "Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995."
Since I've advocated a more explicit use of the word "lie", I'll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie. Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; he said the opposite. He said the world had been warming at 0.12°C per decade since 1995. However, over that time frame, he could not quite rule out at the traditional 95% confidence level that the warming since…
tlambert | February 25, 2010Ron Bailey reflexively jumps to the defence of Bjorn Lomborg:
Begley cites three examples from Friel about Lomborg's errors, e.g., polar bear population trends and climate change, human deaths from heat versus cold, and the implications of Antarctic ice shelf disintegration. You can read Begley's reporting and judge for yourself. (With regard to polar bears, let's assume that Begley's reporting of Friel's analysis is accurate and that Lomborg's sourcing is, how should one put it, thin and misleading. However, I do note in passing that a 2009 review article in the journal Environmental Reviews…
tlambert | February 25, 2010Clive Hamilton has written a five part series on the attacks on climate science in Australia:
Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial. I already mentioned this one
Who is orchestrating the cyber-bullying?. Andrew Bolt gets a special mention for his hate mongering.
Think tanks, oil money and black ops. The think tanks in Australia promoting denial and delay are Lavoisier, the IPA, the CIS and now the Brisbane Institute.
Manufacturing a scientific scandal. Jonathan Leake's concoctions are well covered.
Who's defending science?. The Australian's War on Science and how the…