tlambert | February 4, 2010There have been new developments in Leakegate, the scandal swirling about reporter Jonathan Leake, who deliberately concealed facts that contradicted the story he wanted to spin. Deltoid can reveal that Leake was up to the same tricks in his story that claims that the IPCC "wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters". Bryan Walker has the detailed dissection, but the short version is that Leake took one part of the discussion of one paper in the IPCC WG2 report and pretended that this was all it said, entirely ignoring the WG1 report and the discussion of other papers in the WG2…
tlambert | February 3, 2010If they are going to include my blog on their list of the top 30 science blogs, I can't help but link to them. There are some good blogs on their list which is only marred by the inclusion of Anthony Watts' anti-science blog.
tlambert | February 3, 2010Jonathan Leake recently wrote a story alleging that the statement in the IPCC AR4 WG2 that up to 40% of the Amazon forest could vanish due to climate change was "bogus". Deltoid can now reveal that Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the claim about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake's query and informed him the claim was basically correct:
At the time of the IPCC [report], there was ample evidence that a large portion of the Amazon forest is very close to the lower limit of rainfall that is…
tlambert | February 3, 2010The Australian seems to have an endless supply of journalists who, with no background in science, write stories about how the scientists have it all wrong on global warming. The latest effort, by one Jamie Walker, is dealt with by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.
tlambert | February 2, 2010After discovering the cure for the common cold Christopher Monckton has taken up constitutional law.
"If by some miss chance the ETS scheme proceeds any further and actually gets passed into law, the next thing that will happen is that the courts will call it in and it will be declared unconstitutional and that would bring the Government down,'' Lord Monckton said.
I think his argument must go something like this:
tlambert | January 31, 2010Paul "Magic Water" Sheehan offers a "counter perspective" to Monckton's big lie that environmentalists killed 40 million people by banning DDT:
The claim that millions have lost their lives as a result of the withdrawal of DDT is hotly contested among scientists. Speculation over the number of deaths caused by the withdrawal of DDT ranges from thousands to tens of millions.
Yes, his counter perspective is just a smaller lie. Anyone interested in the truth can easily discover that the anti-malarial use of DDT has never been banned, and that by slowing the evolution of resistance, the ban on…
tlambert | January 29, 2010You can add the George Kaser to the list that includes Pielke Jr, Latif and Lal. It's like he can't help himself.
Rose claimed that he was told by Kaser that he wrote to Lal:
I'm not the only person in disagreement with Dr Lal. Georg Kaser, the Austrian glaciologist, insists (indeed, he told me last week) he wrote to Lal, warning him not to include the 2035 glacier melting date in AR4. Lal says he got no such letter.
But Kaser says that he didn't write to Lal:
Dr. Kaser, who has been a report author and has also studied the retreating snows around Mount Kilimanjaro, said Monday in a…
tlambert | January 29, 2010There have been two shock new developments in the Rosegate scandal. First, Deltoid can reveal that as well as misrepresenting Murari Lal and Mojib Latif, David Rose did the same thing to Roger Pielke Jr. Just as with Lal and Latif, no correction has been made.
Second, in a comment left here David Rose has admitted that he has no credibility, conceding that "nothing I write here will make a scrap of difference". While it's certainly true that Rose lacks credibility, it's worth reflecting on why. I imagine you've noticed that when a reporter writes about something that you are expert on,…
tlambert | January 27, 2010There have been new developments in the Rosegate, the scandal about the way David Rose sexed up his story about the IPCC and the Himalayan glaciers. Andrew Revkin has posted an email from Murari Lal, the scientist that Rose verballed:
I am not a Glaciologist but a Climatologist and the statement attributed to me in "Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified" By David Rose in UK Daily Mail on 24th January 2010 has been wrongly placed. I never said this story at any time and strongly condemn the writer for attributing this to me.
More specifically, I never said during my conversation…
tlambert | January 26, 2010Imagine, if you will, that the emails stolen from CRU had included fawning comments from an MSM journalist to a climate scientist like this:
As a veteran member of the MSM (Vanity Fair and the UK's Mail on Sunday) may I state for the record: Sir, I salute you. Bravo!
or this:
without Steve's brilliant work and this magnificent website, it could not have been written.
What do you think the denialists would have said? Since a perfectly innocuous query from Seth Borenstein in the stolen emails lead to Anthony Watts calling for "AP to remove Seth Borenstein as 'science reporter'", you can bet…
tlambert | January 25, 2010It's been over two years since John V, used the surfacestations.org data to show that the warming trends were the same for "good" and "bad" weather stations. Since then they've collected data on more stations, but still have not published their own comparison. It would be cynical of me to suggest that the reason is that the data doesn't show what they want, but now Menne et al have published a peer reviewed paper analysing a more extensive set of stations, and surprise, surprise the "bad" stations have a cooling bias. John Cook has the details.
tlambert | January 24, 2010The Tyee has published an extract from a book by Donald Gutstein on corporate propaganda in Canada:
In the years since the Stockholm Treaty was signed, readers of Canadian newspapers have not had an opportunity for Greenpeace's position on DDT to be explained to them by Greenpeace itself. The only information they received about this environmental organization's position on DDT was conveyed by the organization's foes.
National Post readers learned, for instance, courtesy of then columnist Elizabeth Nickson, that "groups like Greenpeace... serve their own ideological agenda, and want to keep…
tlambert | January 23, 2010After embracing Monckton's theory that Copenhagen was going to introduce a COMMUNIST WORLD GOVERMENT, Jane Albrechtsen seems to backing away from Monckton's conspiracy theories:
Unfortunately, while Monckton has mastered the best arts of persuasion, he also succumbs to the worst of them when he engages in his made-for-the-stage histrionics. In Copenhagen, when a group of young activists interrupted a meeting, he berated them as Nazis and Hitler Youth. Elsewhere he has called on people to rise up and fight off a "bureaucratic communistic world government monster". This extremist language…
tlambert | January 19, 2010Newspapers such as the London Times are reporting that the IPCC is about to retract something from the AR4 WG2 report:
A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
The claim was indeed wrong. John Nielsen-Gammon has written a detailed analysis of the error with an update here. I've discovered a bit more about it, which I will get to presently, but first I want to look at the Times statement that it was a "central claim" and the New York Times statement that it was a "much-publicized estimate".
Actually, the estimate does…
tlambert | January 17, 2010Christopher Monckton's visit gets covered in the Sydney Morning Herald. On Monckton's argument that climate sensitivity us just one-sixth of the generally accepted value:
The argument Lord Monckton mounted has been painstakingly picked apart by several eminent climate-change researchers, but it was an Australian computer scientist, Tim Lambert, who helped collate many of the flaws on his website.
"A lot of the equations used to cover it up were right, but the argument was complete gibberish," Mr Lambert said.
The hypothesis took the lowest possible range of carbon dioxide's known warming…
tlambert | January 16, 2010Via Ed Darrell I learn that Patrick T. O'Shaughnessy will give a talk Jan 19 at the University of Iowa on the history of DDT and malaria and the myth about them.
O'Shaughnessy has written the definitive account of Operation Cat Drop. Worth a look!
tlambert | January 14, 2010Possum Comitatus has noticed a very interesting change in Roy Spencer's presentation of his satelite temperature data.
This is the November version:
And this is the December version:
Spot the difference!
Update: Gavin reminds me that in April Spencer was using a ridiculous degree 4 fit to the data:
If he'd stuck with that, the current graph would look like this:
The polynomial is still decreasing at the end, but the divergence from the data is striking.
tlambert | January 11, 2010Christopher Monckton will trouser $20,000 for an Australian Tour with Ian Plimer on backing vocals. To celebrate both The Australian and The Daily Telegraph printed extracts from Monckton's letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd generously offering to brief Rudd about climate science. Monckton always makes lots of errors when he writes about science, but this letter may have broken his previous record for quickest mistake with one in the very first word:
His Excellency Mr Kevin Rudd
Rudd's correct title is
The Hon. Kevin Rudd, MP
The editor at The Daily Telegraph didn't notice the mistake…