tlambert | February 14, 2010Realclimate covers the Journalismgate scandal, where a couple of dishonest reporters (Jonathan Leake and David Rose) have generated a blizzard of stories in British newspapers about alleged errors in the IPCC reports. Despite their best efforts to destroy the credibility of the IPCC reports, they've only managed to come up with two actual errors in three phone book size reports:
WG2 wrongly said that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035
WG2 said that the Netherlands was vulnerable sea level rise and river floodingbecause 55% of its area is bleow sea level when it should have said that 26%…
tlambert | February 14, 2010They have been some explosive new revelations in the Leakegate scandal. Remember how Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the IPCC statement about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake's query and informed him the claim was correct? Leake didn't report what Nepstad told him. Instead he claimed that the IPCC statement was "bogus", even though he knew it wasn't.
Deltoid can now reveal that Leake's reporting was far more dishonest than originally believed. This is how Leake quoted Simon Lewis:
Simon…
tlambert | February 14, 2010The Leakegate scandal keeps getting worse. Jonathan Leake, already in trouble for his habit of deliberately concealing facts that contradicted the story he wanted to spin is back with a story that reads like it was ghost written by Mark Morano. Leake wants to spin a tale that the world isn't really warming, so he trots out the usual collection of discredited papers.
Leake first cites John Christy:
"The story is the same for each one," he said. "The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations,…
tlambert | February 13, 2010Following the heels of the Rosegate scandal where journalist David Rose was exposed as a serial quote fabricator, the credibility of Rose's newspaper, the Daily Mail, has taken another body blow with the paper publishing a false story claiming that Phil Jones had admitted that there had been no global warming since 1995.
This is false (see graph below) and Jones made no such admission. Michael Tobis has the details on the Daily Mail's dishonesty.
Ever gullible Tim Blair, of course, swallowed the lie, hook, line and sinker. Andrew Bolt will do doubt follow if he gets his voice back.
Update…
tlambert | February 12, 2010A couple of blog posts from people who were there
Carmen Lambert (my totally unbiased coach).
Mercurius.
And lucia and co did a chat while watching the live feed.
Update: James Annan thought estimating sensitivity from the last Ice Age was a good idea. Not surprisingly since I got the idea from him.
And Andrew Bolt responds to the debate 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".
Update 2: There seems to be a shortage of…
tlambert | February 12, 2010Looks like they are going to show video of the debate at Saturday 11.22pm AEDT, and Sunday 3.39pm 10.01pm AEDT on A-PAC. You can watch here.
tlambert | February 12, 2010You know that famous scene in Annie Hall where a bore is going on and on about Marshall McLuhan's work and Allen produces McLuhan who tells the bore that he got McLuhan all wrong? Well, that's kind of what happened in my debate with Monckton. Based on what he had identified as his most important argument in previous talks I was pretty sure he would argue that climate sensitivity was low based on his misunderstanding of Pinker et al Do Satellites Detect Trends in Surface Solar Radiation?. And sure enough, he did.
If you read the title of Pinker's paper, you'll see that it's about changes in…
tlambert | February 10, 2010SMH Online plan to put up a live feed of the debate. I'll put up a link to the page if this happens.
The format is now settled: Monckton opens the batting with a 15 minute presentation. Then I go for 15 minutes. Then we put two questions to each other (alternating). Then its questions from the audience. And finally we each get five minutes each to close things.
Friday February 12th, 12:30 - 2:30 Grand Ballroom, Hilton Hotel, 488 George St Sydney
$30 at the door, preregister by emailing cool@exemail.com.au
tlambert | February 9, 2010Andrew Bolt has written a post where he pretends that comments made by Andrew Lacis about the first order draft of the summary of chapter 9 of AR4 WG1 are actually aboout the published report.
Andrew Revkin asked Lacis what he thought about the published report:
"The revised chapter was much improved," he said. "That's different than saying everything in there is nailed down, but I think it's a big improvement."
Overall, he said, "I commend the authors for doing as good a job as they did. That's the way the science process ought to work. You get inputs from everybody, find any bugs, crank…
tlambert | February 9, 2010As well as Monckton Media Watch also looked at the way Jamie Walker passed off his opinioin piece about the Great Barrier Reef as a straight news story. John Bruno dissects Walker's response.
tlambert | February 9, 2010Media Watch has examined some more of Monckton's outlandish claims.
It turns out that the graph he claimed came from the "Barrier Reef Authority" actually came from John McLean.
And if you actually look at the McLean graph, rather than showing no change it shows warming. You can see it here at Marohasy's. The very first comment is from Louis Hissink:
Eyeballing the above graph, (based on professional experience) suggests a slight increase in SST over the time period.
And the trends over a longer period can be seen here, showing plenty of warming on the GReat Barrier Reef.
Also on Media Watch…
tlambert | February 9, 2010At my suggestion the organisers of the debate have changed the format of the debate slightly. Instead of the moderator asking questions, we'll ask each other four questions, two on notice, two without. So you can suggest your questions for Monckton here. Monckton's slides can be seen here.
tlambert | February 6, 2010I will be debating Christopher Monckton this Friday.
John Smeed emails:
The Grand Ballroom at the Sydney Hilton Hotel is booked for 12.30pm to 2.30pm on Friday 12 February 2010 where it was planned that Alan Jones would MC a Lord Monckton lecture.
I have now rearranged this function to become a 'Presidential Style' debate (like the format used in the USA Presidential elections) on DOES ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING ENDANGER MANKIND ? with Alan Jones as the Moderator.
Each speaker will present a 10-15 minute Synopsis of his argument
The Moderator, Alan Jones, will ask a sequence of say four (4…
tlambert | February 6, 2010Andrew Bolt claims:
In fact, the seas have not risen for nearly four years
tlambert | February 5, 2010Gareth Renowden has uncovered the true story of Monckton's visit to Australia. (Note to Tim Blair: I'm using "true story" ironically.)
Tim Blair, who used to call fellow journalist Margo Kingston "the Margoyle", has gone all politically correct on us. He's outraged, outraged I tell you that the Age published a photo that emphasised Monckton's protruding eyes, a symptom of Graves' disease. How dare they mock his appearance? Why can't they treat him like the SMH treated Adam Hills and crop the evidence of his complaint out of the photo? I hope my photo of Monckton will be to Blair's…
tlambert | February 5, 2010Bidisha Banerjee and George Collins have written the definitive account of the error in the WG2 report about Himalayan glaciers:
Dozens of articles and analyses of this situation, whether dashed-off blog posts or New York Times coverage, exhibit a curious consistency. Not a single article or analysis appears to include all relevant issues without introducing at least one substantial error. It's as though the original documents contained a curse which has spread to infect every commentator and reporter. The curse seems to stem from not reading sources carefully (or at all), which, ironically,…