tlambert | October 20, 2009If you haven't got enough Superfreakonomics blogging Brian D has collected links to, well, everything.
The response from the authors to the criticism has been underwhelming. Dubner ignores most of the criticism and blames Caldeira for the fact that they misrepresented him. Your must read story on this comes from Eric Pooley, who says that Dubner is an old friend, but none the less reports:
One of the injured parties is Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at Stanford University who is quoted (accurately) as saying that "we are being incredibly foolish emitting carbon dioxide." Then Dubner and…
tlambert | October 19, 2009When Kurt Lambeck criticized Ian Plimer on Ockhams Razor, he gaves specific examples of Plimer's errros of omission and commission. I gazed into my crystal ball and wrote:
I predict that Plimer will respond to this by denying that his science has been criticised, claiming that Lambeck's criticism was merely an ad hominem attack, and by making personal attacks on Lambeck.
Yesterday on Ockham's Razor we had Professor Ian Plimer replies to his critics:
Polemical criticism of my book Heaven and Earth has been savage because there are a large number of career climate comrades who frighten us…
tlambert | October 16, 2009I reviewed Freakonomics when it first came out and really liked it. So I was looking forward to the sequel Superfreakonomics. Unfortunately, Levitt and Dubner decided to write about global warming and have made a dreadful hash of it. The result is so wrong that it has even Joe Romm and William Connolley in agreement.
So what went wrong? One possibility is that Freakonomics was superficially plausible but also rubbish, and it was only when they wrote about an area where I was knowledgeable that I noticed. But I don't think this is the correct explanation. I've read the journal papers on…
tlambert | October 15, 2009
Today is blog action day where bloggers are writing something about climate change. The post I was going to do isn't finished yet, but fortunately there is lots of interesting posts you can read.
I recommend Jim Prall on how to engage with those sceptical of taking action and Kate of ClimateSight on how to judge the credibility of information sources.
tlambert | October 10, 2009Seriously. And then a gullible journalist named Michael Coren wrote it down and put it in the Winnipeg Sun. Ed Darrell has the details.
tlambert | October 9, 2009As part of its ongoing war on science, Quadrant Online as published a piece by J.F. Beck accusing Rachel Carson of constructing an elaborate tissue of exaggerations and lies.
In his piece Beck is only able to come up with two alleged lies by Carson. First, Beck claims that Carson said that DDT was the product of World War II weapons research:
Carson's suggestion notwithstanding, DDT was not a product of World War II weapons research, having been first synthesised in 1874.
But Beck is lying. Here is what Carson actually wrote about the development of DDT:
DDT (short for dichloro-diphenyl-…
tlambert | October 7, 2009One of McIntyre's repeated complaints about Briffa was that he refused to release his data. For example, in his post Fresh Data on Briffa's Yamal #1:
A few days ago, I became aware that the long-sought Yamal measurement data url had materialized at Briffa's website - after many years of effort on my part and nearly 10 years after its original use in Briffa (2000).
I am very grateful to the editors of Phil Trans B (Roy Soc) - at long last, a journal editor stood up to CRU, requiring Briffa to archive supporting data.
This got turned into statements like this one, from Tom Fuller:
The data,…
tlambert | October 3, 2009Over the past few days we have had another outbreak of stories of how global warming has been totally disproved. For example, James Delingpole: the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie
When finally McIntyre plotted in a much larger and more representative range of samples than used those used by Briffa - though from exactly the same area - the results he got were startlingly different.
The scary red line shooting upwards is the one Al Gore, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa and their climate-fear-promotion chums would like you to believe in. The black one, heading downwards,…
tlambert | September 26, 2009Ove Hoegh-Guldberg sends birthday greetings to Andrew Bolt.
If you don't know why there are seven graphs, see here.
tlambert | September 24, 2009Time for a new Open Thread, where you can spit on the floor and call the cat a bastard.
tlambert | September 22, 2009John Mashey's Amazon review of Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by James Hoggan.
Anti-Science and Who Does It
Anti-science (or agnotology), seeks to cover-up or obscure science considered inconvenient, or at least create doubt in the minds of public and decision-makers. It seeks to replace knowledge with ignorance, and has no resemblance to normal arguments within science, by scientists.
Modern anti-science is most skilfully executed by a relatively small subset of lobbyists and PR agencies. Some of the most effective are actually "think tanks". They have public identities…
tlambert | September 21, 2009Tim Blair disputes Charles Johnson's estimate of the size of the September 12 rally. Johnson wrote:
Here's the Washington DC Metrorail service information for Saturday, September 12, 2009:
September 12, 2009: Metrorail: 437,624
Comparable Metrorail Ridership 1 Year Ago: 362,773
The difference between these two figures is -- 74,851.
Oddly enough, this almost exactly matches the unofficial estimate given by a Washington DC Fire Department spokesman, who estimated the crowd at 60,000 to 70,000 people.
Blair writes
comparing September 12, 2008, to September 12, 2009, won't yield reliable…
tlambert | September 20, 2009Chris Mooney seems somewhat bemused by Jennifer Marohasy's response to his interview on Lateline. Marohasy claimed:
according to an interview Mr Mooney gave last night on Australian television if you don't believe in AGW you aren't even a scientist.
Compare with what Mooney actually said:
If you're talking about the basic question of: is global warming happening, due to human greenhouse gas emissions? Then the scientists who dispute that, seriously, are very small. And if you look through the scientific literature you will not find that argument being prominently made.
And if you think…
tlambert | September 19, 2009After Ian Plimer reneged on his agreement to answer Monbiot's questions, the folks at the Spectator have reacted just like Plimer does to criticism -- with name calling and nothing to address the criticism.
Spectator columnist Rod Liddle
Moonbat ... You pompous, monomaniacal, jackass. ... reminds me a little of the hardline creationists you find jabbering in the backwoods of the Appalachian Mountains
Novelist James Delingpole, the man that the Spectator decided was best qualified to review Plimer's book:
ineffable barkingness of George Moonbat .... if anyone ever chooses to take any of the…
tlambert | September 17, 2009Quark Expeditions is running a contest to become the official blogger on a an Antarctic voyage. ScienceBlog's GrrlScientist (Devorah Bennu) wants to go. I think her writing is better and more interesting than the other leading contenders, so I'm asking you to vote for her. (Voting requires you to register an email address. I did this a while ago and they did not spam me.)
Many other people think she's the best choice as well.
tlambert | September 15, 2009Just as I thought, Ian Plimer's questions for Monbiot were a pretext to avoid answering Monbiot's questions. Monbiot writes:
Creationists and climate change deniers have this in common: they don't answer their critics. They make what they say are definitive refutations of the science. When these refutations are shown to be nonsense, they do not seek to defend them. They simply switch to another line of attack. They never retract, never apologise, never explain, just raise the volume, keep moving and hope that people won't notice the trail of broken claims in their wake. ...
Having put up…
tlambert | September 12, 2009The New York Times reports:
The number of children dying before their fifth birthdays each year has fallen below nine million for the first time on record, a significant milestone in the global effort to improve children's chances of survival, particularly in the developing world, according to data that Unicef will release on Thursday.
The child mortality rate has declined by more than a quarter in the last two decades -- to 65 per 1,000 live births last year from 90 in 1990 -- in large part because of the widening distribution of relatively inexpensive technologies, like measles vaccines and…
tlambert | September 11, 2009I've been looking through old photos that belonged to my grandmother and I really liked this one. (Click to enlarge).
This picture was unlabeled, but there is another picture of (I think) the same woman and it's labelled as Margaret Cascadden in Katoomba in 1927. I think she was a friend of my grandmother. I believe the car is an Austin 12 a 1927 Buick coach.
Update: I flipped the image so it is no longer reversed.
Update 2: The Buick club of NSW tells me:
The Buick is clearly very new when the photo was taken, perhaps not even yet registered as there are no labels or front number plate…