tlambert | November 25, 2009The latest story exciting the denialosphere is this one by Carol Driver in the Daily Mail. Driver claims:
Climate change scandal deepens as BBC expert claims he was sent 'cover-up' emails a month before they went public
The controversy surrounding the global warming scandal today deepened after a BBC correspondent admitted he was sent the leaked emails more than a month before they were made public.
No, he didn't.
In his BBC blog two days ago, Hudson said: 'I was forwarded the chain of emails on the 12th October, which are comments from some of the world's leading climate scientists written…
tlambert | November 25, 2009The Copenhagen Diagnosis is an update to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report to cover research published since then.
This is the science that the cracker who stole the emails from CRU wants to distract you from.
Via RealClimate.
tlambert | November 24, 2009Gavin Schmidt has done a wonderful job at RealClimate patiently explaining the context of the stolen emails. He's made it perfectly clear that the claims of scientific malpractice are without foundation. He must be doing a really good job, because the Competitive Enterprise Institute intends to sue him.
[CEI seeks documents] relating to the content, importance, or propriety of workday-hour posts or entries by GISS/NASA employee Gavin A. Schmidt on the weblog or "blog" RealClimate, which is owned by the advocacy Environmental Media Services and was started as an effort to defend the debunked…
tlambert | November 23, 2009Andrew Freedman interviewed Spencer Weart about the stolen emails:
SW: Back around 2000 leading climate scientists talked to each other mostly about their science--debating one another's data and analysis and negotiating travel, collaboration and other administration--and a little bit about policy. As time passed they have had to spend more and more of their time answering criticism of the scientific results already established, criticism mostly based on ignorance, fallacious reasoning, and even deliberately deceptive claims. Still more recently they have had to spend far too much of their…
tlambert | November 22, 2009The global warming denialists have predictably gotten very excited about the emails that were stolen from CRU, declaring that they prove that there's a big climate scientist conspiracy (presumably to install a COMMUNIST WORLD GOVERNMENT). We don't know whether or not the thief altered the emails, but since there isn't really anything incriminating it's likely that they are all genuine.
Most of the fuss has been generated by taking emails out of context and bad faith interpretations of what was written. If you're interested in the gory details the RealClimate comment thread addresses most of…
tlambert | November 18, 2009This story from the Australian Associated Press contains the usual scare-mongering from Ian Plimer:
AAP November 19, 2009 01:36pm
Australia will go broke and become the laughing stock of the world if politicians ignore basic science on climate change, a leading global warming sceptic says.
But there is one intriguing detail:
Prof Plimer's comments came as he delivered the annual Essington Lewis Memorial Lecture in honour of a former chief executive and chairman of BHP.
And that lecture won't be delivered until 6pm today (Nov 19).
I think it is awesome that the AAP can report from the future…
tlambert | November 12, 2009Ian Plimer responds to criticism with by calling his critics names and failing to address their arguments. In an interview on BBC Radio 4, Plimer spouts his usual outrageous falsehoods:
"We cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes."
Not true -- even Martin Durkin's Swindle retracted this one.
And when the interviewer brought up Michael Ashley's devastating review of Heaven and Earth, we got this:
Plimer: "When you look at my critics -- they are people who are rent seekers. They have everything to gain by continuing the process of frightening people witless, by…
tlambert | November 11, 2009Fred Singer and co petitioned the American Physical Society to replace its statement on Climate Change. Instead, it got reaffirmed
The Council of the American Physical Society has overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to replace the Society's 2007 Statement on Climate Change with a version that raised doubts about global warming. The Council's vote came after it received a report from a committee of eminent scientists who reviewed the existing statement in response to a petition submitted by a group of APS members.
Eli Rabett has more details, while John Mashey has investigated the petitioner'…
tlambert | November 8, 2009Despite her training in law, Janet Albrechtsen was not able to figure out that the Copenhagen treaty wasn't going to impose a COMMUNIST WORLD GOVERNMENT, so you just know that she has no chance in hell of understanding a scientific question. Albrechtsen claims that it is a "fact" that "Sea levels have remained constant for the past 30 years". Study the graph below from the CSIRO to see that measurements from tide gauges and satellites contradict this claim.
So how did Albrechtsen get it so completely wrong? Well, her authority, Nils Axel-Morner, completely ignored all direct measurements…
tlambert | November 7, 2009Back in 2006 it was revealed that scientists at the CSIRO had been forbidden from commenting on some impacts of climate change:
JANINE COHEN: Kevin Hennessy is the coordinator of the CSIRO's Climate Impact Group. One of his jobs is to talk about the potential impacts of climate change. But there are some likely impacts of climate change that are clearly a no-go zone. Some scientists believe that there'll be more environmental refugees. Is that a possibility?
KEVIN HENNESSY, CSIRO IMPACT GROUP: I can't really comment on that.
JANINE COHEN: Why can't you comment on that?
KEVIN HENNESSY, CSIRO…
tlambert | November 1, 2009I recently left a comment on Tom Fuller's blog objecting to Fuller's claim to be on the middle ground.
If Fuller is in the middle ground, then so is Inhofe -- they both think that climate scientists are a bunch of frauds.
Fuller objected in a completely unrelated comment thread and derailed the discussion. I'm starting a new thread here for discussion with Fuller.
Here, in his own words, are Fuller's beliefs about climate scientists:
I believe that a generation of climate scientists have tried to make global warming a political football, and have exaggerated or distorted the truth to push…
tlambert | October 29, 2009Thingsbreak has been documenting the way Levitt and Dubner keeping digging the hole deeper, and Dubner has kept on digging with this whopper:
we believe that anyone who reads our chapter without an agenda wouldn't even find it particularly controversial. They will see that we routinely address the concerns that critics accuse us of ignoring (the problem of ocean acidification, e.g., and the "excuse to pollute" that geoengineering solutions might afford), and that we neither "misrepresent" climate scientists nor flub the facts.
Here is everything they say in chapter 5 about ocean…
tlambert | October 29, 2009Levitt and Dubner still haven't engaged with their critics' arguments and continue to respond with nothing more than name calling. Their latest piece in USA Today likens climate scientists to flat earthers:
Devoted environmentalists, meanwhile, as well as some members of the tight-knit climate-science community, find this sort of idea repugnant. Using sulfur dioxide to solve an environmental problem? It just doesn't feel right to them. Of course, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun didn't initially feel right either. Nor did the assertion that the Earth might in fact be round and…
tlambert | October 29, 2009Steve Levitt has followed in Dubner's footsteps with a response to his critics that fails to respond to their arguments. Levitt first restates his argument and then asserts that their conclusions are different because:
We are answering a different question than our critics.
Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth. Like every question we tackle in Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, we approach the question like economists, using data and logic to conclude that the answer to that question is geo-engineering. ...
But that is not the question…
tlambert | October 27, 2009I've noticed ads for Bidrivals appearing here. This is an auction site that is basically a Swoopo clone and seems to be just as efficient at separating bidders from their money. Read Jonah Lehrer if you haven't heard of Swoopo.
tlambert | October 27, 2009Janet Albrechtsen (writing in The Australian, of course) is asked a question by her teenage daughters:
Emails started arriving telling me about a speech given by Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, at Bethel University in St Paul, Minnesota, on October 14. Monckton talked about something that no one has talked about in the lead-up to Copenhagen: the text of the draft Copenhagen treaty.
You can read a transcript of Monckton's claims here. Monckton reckons that the environmentalists "are about to impose a communist world government on the world". (As opposed to…
tlambert | October 25, 2009Eli Rabett has been investigating Ian Plimer's claim that climate scientists were cooking the books on the CO2 record. Plimer wrote:
The raw data from Mauna Loa is 'edited' by an operator who deletes what is considered poor data. Some 82% of the raw data is "edited" leaving just 18% of the raw data measurements for statistical analysis [2902,2903]. With such savage editing of raw data, whatever trend one wants can be shown. [p 416 of Heaven and Earth]
The raw data is an average of 4 samples from hour to hour. In 2004 there were a possible 8784 measurements. Due to instrumental error 1102…
tlambert | October 23, 2009Well, they are shown next to each other in Dave Weigel's story Climate Change Skeptics Embrace 'Freakonomics' Sequel, but that's not the answer I'm thinking of. Weigel writes:
The final chapter deals with global warming, characterizing the beliefs of pessimistic environmentalists as "religious fervor," and arguing that the climate change solutions proposed by Al Gore and many Democrats are ineffective and unworkable. It repeats claims that environmental journalists have debated or debunked for years. As a result, the authors are getting some early support from climate change skeptics who feel…
tlambert | October 22, 2009Esteemed Pielkeologist, Eli Rabett points me to a post from Roger Pielke Jr complaining that he is being persecuted by the "liberal blogosphere".
Apparently what prompted this was a comment from Brad DeLong on why he considers Pielke Jr to be dishonest:
I do remember that what knocked my view of your work over the edge was one of your attacks on Hansen.
Ah. "[Pielke] claims that [Hanson's] scenario B was off by a factor of 2 on CO2. This sounds like a lot until you discover that means that emissions grew by 0.5% per year instead of 1% a year. And that works out to scenario B having the…