tlambert | July 7, 2012Nick Ross writes:
The Australian's technology coverage (in print) is a mixed bag in that it has some of the very best technology writers in the country but their section's reputation gets tainted by almost-incessant, poisonous beat-ups of the National Broadband Network coming from elsewhere on the masthead. These have done it few favours in the regards of Australia's technology community.
In other words, it's just like their coverage of climate science and renewable energy.
tlambert | May 27, 2012Triggered by the Heartland Billboard debacle Michael Fumento has written an article explaining why he has broken with the "hysterical right". (Hat tip: hardinr).
John Quiggin comments on the rarity of such moves, while Mark Hoofnagle draws a parallel with Stephen Sumpter leaving the UK Greens over their opposition to scientific experiments on GM crops.
tlambert | May 21, 2012Even when we have video of a death threat there are those who try to deny that scientists have been threatened. Like, oh, The Australian. Media Watch reports on media coverage of death threats on climate scientists:
One news outlet comes out of it, in our opinion, almost unscathed: Fairfax Media's The Canberra Times. The ABC doesn't look so great, and The Australian looks worst of all.
What The Australian did in several stories was pretend that a lack of death threats in emails over just six months at the ANU showed that there had been no death threats. For example: (Google "Police not…
tlambert | May 16, 2012Tim Curtin's incompetence with basic statistics is the stuff of legend. Curtin has now demonstrated incompetence at a fairly new journal called The Scientific World Journal. Consider his very first "result" (emphasis mine):
I first regress the global mean temperature (GMT) anomalies against the global annual values of the main climate variable evaluated by the IPCC Hegerl et al. [17] and Forster et al. [28] based on Myhre et al. [29], namely, the total radiative forcing of all the noncondensing greenhouse gases [RF]
Annual(Tmean) = a + b[RF] + u(x)
The results appear to confirm the findings…
tlambert | May 10, 2012Michael Asten continues The Australian's war on science. In his latest piece (Google "Science hijacked at school level") Asten complains that secondary science education is not paying attention to the views of Ian Plimer on climate change.
Perusal of the resources for secondary school physics students provided by the Australian Institute of Physics (Vic) Education Committee suggests some of our science educators have indeed lost the ability to teach objective and open-minded scientific inquiry.
Web resources relating to climate science provided by this committee contain at least three…
tlambert | February 26, 2012John Mashey, in comments writes:
It has been a busy week or so, with more to come.
1) See Fakery, p.3 and p.12.
In ~2009, Heartland+SEPP+CSCDGC got ~$8M.
The other 9 on p.3 got ~$39M.The additional 36 501(c)(3) on p.12 added another $283M.
Now, only some of that is for climate disinformation, but some of it is for tobacco advocacy and other science disinformation, such as on environmental issues. In addition, these entities cross-support each other in various ways. One often finds them cross-quoting, cross-writing articles, signing petitions, together.
It is far cheaper to create confusion…
tlambert | February 8, 2012Over at the Monthly, Robert Manne writes about Monckton's plan for a super-rich person to establish a Fox News for Australia. I thought we already had that in the Australian.
tlambert | January 16, 2012Pat Michaels is infamous for his fraudulent graph presented to Congress in 1998. Dana Nuccitelli at Skeptical Science details some more fraudulent graphs from Michaels.
tlambert | January 13, 2012Whenever we had bean salad, my Dad would always ask "What's that?" When told what it was, he would say "Don't tell me what it's been, tell me what it is now!" That's a Dad joke. The defining properties of a Dad joke are that it is not funny and that Dad keeps repeating it. In their ongoing war on science The Australian is now committing war crimes by deploying Dad jokes (which I recall were banned by the Geneva Convention in 1949).
Imre Salusinszky, who declared global warming to be dead in January of last year has repeated the same unfunny joke this January:
Last year, other parts of the…
tlambert | January 1, 2012The Australian finally publishes Mike Sandiford's correction of the false claims from Plimer that The Australian published two weeks earlier:
Deliberately misrepresenting data or making it up is just not on.
Here's an example. In a section from his new book, How To Get Expelled from School, as reprinted in The Weekend Australian recently, Plimer claims: "Antarctic ice core (Siple) shows that there were 330 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air in 1900; Mauna Loa Hawaiian measurements in 1960 show that the air then had 260ppm carbon dioxide."
Plimer goes on to say: "Either the ice…
tlambert | December 24, 2011Best wishes to all my readers. A more successful gingerbread house than last time.
... we cheated by buying a flat pack gingerbread house from Ikea.
tlambert | December 22, 2011Keith Kloor says that this "concisely expressed" his thinking on climate change:
I categorise myself as somebody who recognises that additional CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of man's activities (fossil fuel burning and land use change) will have an effect on the balance of radiation coming into and leaving our atmosphere.
I do not have a confirmed view as to exactly what the impact of the CO2 will have (feedbacks etc being uncertain) but I know that it must have an effect - that's physics.
Monckton would not disagree with any of this. This seems to be an example of The View from Nowhere…