tlambert | May 18, 2009Sydney Writers' Festival 2009: Stories from the Climate Change Front: A Forum and Launch of Overland 195 Saturday, May 23 2009 15:00 - 16:00
David Spratt, co-author of Climate Code Red, Dr Sharon Beder, author of Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism, and Deltoid science blogger Tim Lambert discuss the state of the climate change debate today with Overland editor Jeff Sparrow.
Are the big polluters changing their ways or simply greening their public image? Who are the main climate denialists? What kind of action do we need, and how close are we to achieving it?
tlambert | May 14, 2009Remember how Ian Plimer claimed that he could not recall where his dodgy figure 3? Well now he has resorting to lying about the source. In a talkback radio debate (about 4 minutes from the end) with Steven Sherwood, Plimer claimed that the graph came from page 21 of Klimafakten, a book published by the German government in 2001. That's a straight-up lie.
The graph came from Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle. I've overlaid the graphs below so that you can see that they are identical. Just put your mouse on the graph to change it to the Swindle one. Notice that he copied the labels on…
tlambert | May 13, 2009Ian Enting has been checking the claims Ian Plimer makes in his error-filled book. His list of errors and other problematic claims is here. [Link updated to version 1.7]. He's found plenty that I missed. For example:
p 409: New Orleans sunk rapidly by about 1 metre in the three years before Katrina struck. This time (unlike p 303, item18) a reference is cited: by Dixon and others Nature, 441, 587-588 (2006) from radar satellite altimetry. They report a three-year average of -5.6±2.5 mm/year, with a maximum of -29mm/year (negative values indicating subsidence). They note that if the motion…
tlambert | May 10, 2009Ben McNeil investigates Andrew Bolts claim that Ian Plimer's error-filled Heaven and Earth has 25,000 copies sold or ordered:
Indeed, if a non-fiction book has 25 000 copies sold in Australia it is a massive blockbuster. I was suspicious when reading through the SMH book section the last couple of weeks and 'Heaven and Earth' not being listed in their top-seller list for non-fiction. Being a little more rigorous, Bookscan, which track book sales in Australia doesn't list it in the top 10 for non-fiction for the month as of the time of this blog entry . Seem a little odd to you?
Further…
tlambert | May 9, 2009Harry Clarke
It is not wrong to challenge orthodoxy anywhere but the work of Plimer is unscientific and both irresponsible and dangerous - he has provided a social diservice. The extensive publicity he has received has had an entirely undeserved impact.
Forget Plimer, read the science.
John Quiggin
In the Oz of all places, a demolition of Ian Plimer so scathing, and so convincing, that it's hard to imagine how he can salvage any kind of academic reputation, other than by a full retraction (which would be a pretty impressive move, admittedly). ...
If there are any genuine sceptics left…
tlambert | May 8, 2009One of Ian Plimer's claims is that the IPCC ignores astronomy, so it's interesting to see what an astronomer thinks of his book. In today's Australian, the blue moon continues with a review of Heaven and Earth by Michael Ashley:
Plimer probably didn't expect an astronomer to review his book. I couldn't help noticing on page120 an almost word-for-word reproduction of the abstract from a well-known loony paper entitled "The Sun is a plasma diffuser that sorts atoms by mass". This paper argues that the sun isn't composed of 98 per cent hydrogen and helium, as astronomers have confirmed through…
tlambert | May 7, 2009Wednesday was an unusual day at the Australian, with two pro-science pieces published. First, Leigh Dayton, their science writer, raises some scientific objections to Ian Plimer's book. Plimer will, no doubt, continued to deny the existence of these problems:
Plimer also repeats the inaccurate "fact" that the global warming peaked in 1998. Yes, it was a global scorcher, thanks to a heat-inducing El Nino. But after a dip in 1999, data collected by US and British climate centres shows an upward trend, despite year-to-year variations.
She also corrects Greg Roberts' misleading stories:…
tlambert | May 4, 2009Gavin Schmidt has caught Christopher Monckton in yet another fabrication. Monckton published graphs that purport to show that temperatures and CO2 concentrations haven't followed IPCC projections, but the IPCC projections Monckton plots are fictional. Schmidt graphs the actual projections, and surprise, surprise they give a very different picture.
And in comments there, Igor Samoylenko writes
With his latest shenanigans in the US, Monkton managed to catch the attention of Private Eye (a satirical current affairs magazine in the UK).
In the latest issue 1235, they noted several things (quite…
tlambert | May 4, 2009The Australian has a printed a response by Plimer to some of the criticism he has received. Plimer opens with:
In Heaven and Earth - Global Warming: The Missing Science, I predicted that the critics would play the man and not discuss the science.
Then he proceeds to play the man and not the ball, calling his critics "arrogant pompous scientists", saying that they lack "common sense" and the scientists who criticised him on Lateline were merely "an expert on gravity, a biologist and one who produces computer models".
And how does he respond to the numerous specific criticisms of all the…
tlambert | May 3, 2009One of the favourite tactics employed by the Australian in its war on science is quote mining. See, for example, Kininmonth's effort this week. Not surprisingly the Australian's Cut and Paste column is a big on quote mining. For example
Environment Minister Peter Garrett, on ABC1's Lateline on Monday, forecasts sea level rises of 6m:
TONY Jones: The report of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research will be released today.
It says that in west Antarctica the attribution of ice lost to human-driven warming is now strong, and it warns that a number of climate influences could amplify…
tlambert | May 1, 2009A recent peer-reviewed scientific paper in Malaria Journal by Yukich, Lengeler, Tediosi, Brown, Mulligan, Chavasse, Stevens, Justino, Conteh, Maharaj, Erskine, Mueller, Wiseman, Ghebremeskel, Zerom, Goodman, McGuire, Urrutia, Sakho, Hanson and Sharp compared several large vector control programs to prevent malaria, including both insecticide-treated nets (ITN) and indoor residual spraying (IRS). The results:
Method
cost per child death averted
Conventional ITNs
$438-$2199
Long-lasting ITNs
$502-$692
IRS
$3933-$4357
Even using IRS, DDT was not the most cost effective…
tlambert | May 1, 2009Adam Morton asked Ian Plimer where his dodgy Figure 3 came from (my emphasis):
Some of his critics say they are surprised that a former head of the University of Melbourne geology department, with more than 120 published papers to his name, would include unsourced graphs in his book. Asked where he found one graph showing temperatures across the 20th century differing markedly to the data used by the IPCC or the world's leading climate centres, Plimer says he can not recall.
Gee, imagine what Plimer would have said if some climate scientist had been caught out unable to provide a source for…
tlambert | April 29, 2009On his column in the Financial Review last week, John Quiggin wrote about those who think global warming is some sort of hoax:
While most media outlets give at least some space to these conspiracy theorists, the central role has been played by The Australian. Not only its opinion columnists (with a handful of honorable exceptions) and its editorials, but even its news reporting is dominated by the idea that mainstream science is on the verge of being overturned by the efforts of a group of dedicated amateurs, publishing their findings not in the peer-reviewed literature but through blogs,…
tlambert | April 27, 2009Looks like it was Pilmer night on the ABC. First, he was on Counterpoint, ABC's anti-Science show, as you would expect from his previous appearance, everything he said, no matter how outrageous was uncritically accepted. This time he blamed the Antarctic ozone hole on CFCs coming from Erebus. (Not so)
But his performance on Lateline was astonishing. Rather than let himself get pinned down into to defending the claims in his book, he continually shifted ground. When Tony Jones, questioned about his claim that temperatures had been cooling since 1998, Plimer said that this was not an…
tlambert | April 24, 2009It is fire scientists for talking to the media:
Leading Government scientist Jim Salinger, an international pioneer in climate change research, has been sacked for what he says is talking out of turn to news organisations.
Looks like the denialists in ACT are running the show.
More discussion at Hot Topic.
tlambert | April 24, 2009On page 19 of Heaven and Earth we find Plimer making this remarkable claim about one of the authors of the IPCC's 2nd Assessment Report's chapter on the impacts of global warming on health:
Other authors were environmental activists, one of whom had written on the health effects of mercury poisoning from land mines. If a land mine explodes, the last thing one thinks about is the health effects of mercury poisoning.
Yes, that's just crazy. Let's see what Plimer's source, Paul Reiter's submission to a House of Lords committee says:
One of these activists has published "professional" articles…
tlambert | April 23, 2009I agree with Barry Brook that Ian Plimer's approach to climate science in Heaven Earth is unscientific. He starts with his conclusion that there is no "evidential basis" that humans have caused recent warming and that the theory that humans can create global warming
is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archeology and geology.
He accepts any factoid that supports his conclusion and rejects any evidence that contradicts his conclusion. For example, he blindly accepts EG Beck's CO2 graph. And remember Khilyuk and Chilingar? The guys who compared human…
tlambert | April 17, 2009Today was the day of the Big Push in the Australian's war on science. They published two news stories that distorted scientists' views on Antarctic ice, a long piece promoting "silenced" Ian Plimer's denialist book, an absurdly over the top piece from Christopher Pearson about how Plimer's book is the turning point that leads to global warming being recognized as a mass delusion as well as an editorial touting Plimer's views.
The debunking of this rubbish is outsourced to Harry Clarke.