tlambert | December 31, 2009Greetings from 2010. Here is a picture I just took of Sydney's fireworks.
Looking through the Sydney Morning Herald's gallery, I find a picture of one of my sons! With a million people out to watch the fireworks, what are the odds?
tlambert | December 28, 2009Andrew Mack emails me to draw attention to his paper ("Estimating War Deaths: An Arena of Contestation" by Spagat, Mack, Cooper and Kreutz), which criticizes Obermeyer et al's paper Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia. I commented on Obermeyer et al in this post.
I agree with some of their criticism. The regression that used for correcting PRIO estimates of war deaths is wrong and the conclusion that they drew using this correction -- that there is no evidence that war deaths have decreased is unfounded.
I'm not persuaded by their general criticisms of survey…
tlambert | December 24, 2009Here at Deltoid world headquarters we built a gingerbread ruin. Pictures below the fold.
The house.
Decorated. Note gummi bear heads on roof.
The final step to acheiving a fashionable ruin is to let it stand for half an hour while it collapses under the weight of the decorations.
Best wishes to all my readers!
tlambert | December 18, 2009Eric Raymond (the one responsible for the botched analysis of the stolen CRU code) responds to my post on Essex and McKitrick's error in treating missing values as zeroes in a spreadsheet:
The error described is so stupid that I have trouble believing a statistician actually made it. Whether McKittrick understood thermodynamics or not is red herring; even somebody with my non-specialist knowledge of statistics alone would have known better, let alone a pro like him. The most plausible theory I can think of is that the spreadsheet was expressing temperatures as deviation from mean, that the "…
tlambert | December 17, 2009The latest story exciting the denialosphere is being put about by novelist James Delingpole and is based on an analysis (translated here) by a right-wing Russian think tank. Delingpole quotes from a news story:
On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming…
tlambert | December 15, 2009Ian Plimer's performance in his debate with Monbiot has to be seen to be believed. Rather than admit to making any error at all, Plimer ducks, weaves, obfuscates, recites his favourite catch phrase, tries to change the subject and fabricates some more. When confronted with the fact that the USGS says (backed with scientific papers) that human activities emit 130 times as much CO2 as volcanoes, Plimer claims that the USGS doesn't count underwater volcanoes. When told that the USGS specifically said that they do count undersea volcanoes, Plimer invented a story about how the nature of the…
tlambert | December 15, 2009Gareth Renowden's latest post on Monckton is pretty funny, but how can anyone compete with this?
Monckton said he had "never believed heterosexual HIV is a myth," but insisted that the correct policy at start of any epidemic is to "isolate all carriers immediately," a position he advocated in the 1980s on HIV/AIDS. Unprompted, Monckton told us he is now "working on what may prove to be a cure for HIV," but provided no further explanation or comment.
(Via Brendan Demelle, who notes that Monckton is lying about calling some protesters "Hitler Youth" despite video proof that he did.)
tlambert | December 11, 2009The phrase "hide the decline" from the stolen CRU emails has been taken out of context and construed to refer to a decline in temperatures this century when in fact it was a reference to a decline in tree-ring density since 1961. Steve McIntyre knows this, but instead of a correction, he offers another misrepesentation of its meaning, quote mining the stolen emails to argue that the IPCC was hiding stuff:
IPCC Lead Authors met in Arusha, Tanzania from September 1 to 3, 1999 ... at which the final version of the "zero-order" draft of the Third Assessment Report was presented and discussed…
tlambert | December 9, 2009Remember how the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition made the warming trend in New Zealand go away by treating measurements from different sites as if they came from the same site? Well, Willis Eschenbach has followed in their foot steps by using the same scam on Australian data. He claims that for Darwin "the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling". Here's his graph:
That blue line for raw temperature in his graph combines different records without any adjustment, even though Eschenbach could see that there was a step change…
tlambert | December 8, 2009Not content with publishing George Will's fabrications about the stolen emails (for which, see Carl Zimmer), they now have a piece by climate expert Sarah Palin. The Washington Post simply does not care about the accuracy of the columns it publishes. Let's look at just one paragraph:
The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even…
tlambert | December 7, 2009Josh Nelson has set up Swifthack.com as a clearing house to correct disinformation about those emails stolen from CRU.
Peter Sinclair's Climate Denial Crock of the Week is on the stolen emails.
It certainly seems true that the quote miners almost always misrepresent what "hide the decline" refers to be explicitly or implicitly saying that it refers to temperature.
tlambert | December 6, 2009My review of Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming is up at the Firedoglake book salon. It begins:
Question: What's the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman?
You'll have to click through to find out the answer.
tlambert | December 3, 2009Andrew Bolt claims that "new research" "once more shows Al Gore faked his findings in An Inconvenient Truth". He offers his own translation of something which he attributes to "Elsevier": (Yes, the company that publishes The Lancet.)
Frormer [sic] American vice president and Nobel Prize winner Gore has for years used the melting snow on Africa's highest mountain (5892 metres) for his climate propaganda. The snow cover is shrinking and that is caused by man and his greenhouse gases!
The Dutch scientist Jaap Sinninghe Damsté debunks this story of climate guru Gore in the leading periodical…
tlambert | December 1, 2009David Kane asks me to look at two of the strongest arguments made by the "other side" following the break in and theft of data from CRU. OK, once he sees how weak the strongest arguments are, we can all agree that the affair is a beat up.
Today I'll look at Eric Raymond's alleged "siege cannon with the barrel still hot":
From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25…
tlambert | November 30, 2009Gareth Renowden has uncovered the shocking story behind Christopher Monckton's screed at Pajamas Media.
tlambert | November 27, 2009Yesterday, I wrote:
I wonder how many of the folks accusing NIWA of cooking their data will correct their posts?
Of course, the answer was none of them. Instead, Drudge decided that my post was supporting the trumped out charges against NIWA and linked it. As a result, the comments were overrun by nutty denialists. I added a link to the Copenhagen Diagnosis to the top of my post and it would seem that this to Drudge what sunlight is to vampires, because he deleted the link. In the meantime someone blindly following Drudge put a link on Digg that presented my post as saying the opposite…
tlambert | November 26, 2009Update: A special message to visitors from Drudge: you are being lied to. Global warming is happening and we're causing it, but to avoid dealing with the problem folks are shooting the messenger, attacking the scientists who discovered and reported on the problem. The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition isn't made up of climate scientists, but is just a group of global warming skeptics who gave themselves a fancy title. And they just got caught combining temperature data from different places to get rid of the inconvenient warming trend in New Zealand. If you want to know what the…