tlambert | September 8, 2009Way back in August 1988 on Usenet I wrote:
Waste heat does not contribute significantly to global warming. It is all
(if it's really happening - we probably won't be sure until its too late)
caused by the greenhouse effect. I agree with Brad - burning fossil fuels
could well be more harmful to the environment than nuclear power.
The evidence I've seen since then has convinced me that it is almost certain that greenhouse gases are causing warming and that burning fossil fuels is more harmful than nuclear power.
Fran Barlow kicked off a discussion on nuclear power in the open thread with…
tlambert | September 2, 2009George Monbiot has the details on Plimer's latest attempts to evade answering Monbiot's questions. Plimer wrote to him:
There are seven versions of Heaven and Earth and only my Australian publisher and I know the differences in diagrams, references and text between the seven. It has taken some time to look at your questions and determine which version was used for compilation of the questions. Can you please confirm that you have actually read Heaven and Earth and that your questions derive from that reading.
As Monbiot notes:
This was odd because, judging by the notes made from Heaven and…
tlambert | August 27, 2009Carmen writes about a cult:
It's adherents called themselves followers of the Way. It was lead by a charismatic leader who was a faith healer and miracle worker who claimed to be of divine origin and who said his words and actions were directed by God. He said he was chosen before the beginning of creation to warn everyone of that generation that the world was about to end. He warned that only those who belonged to his elite group would be saved.
You'll have to click through to find out which cult it is.
tlambert | August 25, 2009I think the purpose of Plimer's strange questions was to give himself a pretext to avoid answering Monbiot's questions, but Gavin Schmidt has countered this ploy by addressing Plimer's questions at RealClimate.
tlambert | August 23, 2009Read this passage (from a Greenpeace news story):
A recent NASA study has shown that the ice cap is not only getting smaller, it's getting thinner and younger. Sea ice has dramatically thinned between 2004 and 2008. Old ice (over 2 years old) takes longer to melt, and is also much harder to replace. As permanent ice decreases, we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030.
They say you can't be too thin or too young, but this unfortunately doesn't apply to the Arctic sea ice. Polar bears are the first to suffer from it, but many other species could be affected as well.
Is…
tlambert | August 21, 2009Bob Ward reviews Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth in The Times:
It is easy to see why this book has attracted attention, particularly from right-wing commentators who have long believed that man-made climate change is a conspiracy theory. But this book is so full of errors that readers who believe its content could be seriously misled about the causes and consequences of climate change. ...
Possibly the funniest howler in the book also occurs in the first chapter. It is a graph that is supposed to show the global temperature record since 1880, with a marked and highly exaggerated phase of…
tlambert | August 20, 2009
Because Tim Blair gets political commentry about Australia from Taiwan, it comes as no surprise that he gets his commentry on the States from England, from one Gerald Warner who reckons that Obama's attempts to create a "Union of Soviet States of America" will fail and that he will be a one-term president. I think it is more likely that Warner has his fingers on a gin and tonic than on the pulse of the American people, but this claim intrigued me:
The one glimmer of realism [Obama] displayed was when he recently told an audience in Montana that, with regard to health care, he was "not in…
tlambert | August 19, 2009Matthew England will talk about climate models this Sunday 23rd August in the Powerhouse Museum as part of the Ultimo Science Festival. The press release says:
Climate modeller challenges skeptics
With the Government's emissions trading legislation now delayed, one of Australia's leading climate scientists, UNSW Professor Matthew England has thrown down the gauntlet to climate skeptics to update their thinking.
"Those that deny basic climate science question climate modelling and fundamental climate physics. But each of their arguments is wrong, outdated, or irrelevant. Most of their…
tlambert | August 19, 2009Ed Darrell comments on the latest attack on Rachel Carson in a war that has being going on since 1962:
"Not Evil, Just Wrong" is slated for release sometime on October 18. This is the film that tried to intrude on the Rachel Carson film earlier this year, but managed to to get booked only at an elementary school in Seattle, Washington -- Rachel Carson Elementary, a green school where the kids showed more sense than the film makers by voting to name the school after the famous scientist-author.
The film is both evil and wrong. ...
That's a whopper about every 15 seconds in the trailer -- the…
tlambert | August 17, 2009Malcolm Colless, writing in The Australian declares that human-caused global warming is a beat-up, just like human-caused ozone depletion. I swear I'm not making this up. Look:
Remember, it was not so long ago that we were confronted with the unnerving prospect of being fried like eggs on a hotplate as a result of a widening hole in the ozone layer of the atmosphere.
The hole is apparently still there, although it has stopped expanding and has, in fact, started shrinking. Coincidentally, it is now playing second fiddle to global warming in the climate change debate.
Apparently Colless is…
tlambert | August 15, 2009The thing about a Roger Pielke Jr train wreck is that you just can't look away. Check this one out. Pielke claims that there were 1,264 times as many news stories about a Michael Mann study that suggests that hurricanes are at a 1,000 year high as about a Chris Landsea study that found no increase in hurricanes over the past century. (Mark Morano , of course, links to Pielke's post.)
The fun is in the comments as folks try to explain to Pielke that there is a film director called Michael Mann and that maybe Pielke shouldn't count those stories. Pielke comes back with the claim that…
tlambert | August 14, 2009The ABC's quality control at Unleashed appears to have failed. They have published an article by Plimer that merely repeats many of the claims from his discredited book. Plimer has enlarged his claim from his book that volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities. Now it is:
Over the past 250 years, humans have added just one part of CO2 in 10,000 to the atmosphere. One volcanic cough can do this in a day.
Tamino proves him wrong even if you count supervolcanoes. And note that it is dishonest for Plimer to use supervolcanoes to argue that humn emissions don't matter, since supervolcanoes…
tlambert | August 14, 2009This is for off topic discussion. Oh, and Billy Bob Hall, since you don't seem to be able to stay on-topic, from now on you can only post to Open Threads. I will delete any comment you make to other threads.
tlambert | August 13, 2009Johann Hari on the alarming development of artemisinin resistance
But then something began to change - at first imperceptibly - in the forgotten forests of Western Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge held their last stand-off. The drug that is most effective at treating malaria is called artemisinin: it shocks the parasite out of your system and saves your life. But in south-east Asia, horrified doctors have discovered that the malaria parasite is becoming resistant to it. In a Darwinian arms race, it has begun to evolve a way to beat the treatment. It is taking twice as long to work - and soon…
tlambert | August 12, 2009Instead of answering Monbiot's questions, Plimer has responded with his own set of questions. I suspect that this is a tactic so he can weasel out of answering Monbiot's questions. My favourite question from Plimer is this one (which isn't even a question):
6 From ocean current velocity, palaeotemperature and atmosphere measurements of ice cores and stable and radiogenic isotopes of seawater, atmospheric CO2 and fluid inclusions in ice and using atmospheric CO2 residence times of 4, 12, 50 and 400 years, numerically demonstrate that the modern increase in atmospheric CO2 could not derive…
tlambert | August 11, 2009Piers Akerman is appearing on Q&A tomorrow night. One of the main topics will be climate change. You can post a question for him at the Q&A web site, or suggest a question in comments -- I know that at least one reader is going to be in the studio audience.
You can read Akerman's strange notions about climate science here.
tlambert | August 10, 2009May Berenbaum is an entomologist at UIUC and been correcting the Rachel-Carson-killed-millions hoax for a while now. Public Radio International has interviewed Berenbaum for a podcast on DDT and malaria. She is also answering questions on the forum there. Predictably Marjorie Mazel Hecht, editor of Larouche's 21st Century Science & Technology has shown up to push the line that all that you have to do is spray DDT to solve the malaria problem.
tlambert | August 6, 2009It's only taken two weeks to go from the blog posts shredding McLean et al to a paper submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research. The authors are G. Foster, J. D. Annan, P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, B. Mullan, J. Renwick, J. Salinger, G. A. Schmidt, and K. E. Trenberth and the abstract says:
McLean et al. [2009] (henceforth MFC09) claim that the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as represented by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), accounts for as much as 72% of the global tropospheric temperature anomaly (GTTA) and an even higher 81% of this anomaly in the tropics. They conclude…
tlambert | August 5, 2009Australia's CIS (Centre for Independent Studies) has been promoting greenhouse denial and delay for a decade. Last year their "Big Ideas" forum featured some classic denialism from Arthur Herman. This year, on Monday 10 August in Sydney we have:
Enemies of Progress?
Cute title. Maybe I should have used "Enemies of Science?" as the title of this post.
Where humanity once solved the world's problems, we are now viewed as the source. We no longer take pride in dynamic progress to benefit mankind; we bemoan the so-called carbon footprint that this progress will leave.
What? "so-called carbon…