tlambert | March 12, 2009Gareth Renowden notices that Monckton has corrected the misattribution on his graph. Unfortunately, Monckton has preserved the number of errors in his graph by replacing that error with another one. (And yes this graph appeared in his presentation to the Heartland conference.
I also see that Monckton has now written an 18 page document on the commie plot against him.
The villain in Monckton's fantasy is Lawrence Krauss. I imagine that Monckton thinks Krauss looks like the picture on the right. Some highlights:
First, [Krauss] approached The Guardian, which reliably supports every Leftist…
tlambert | March 8, 2009Heartland's International Conference on Climate Change is on again. I can't help but be impressed by the number of Australian organizations co-sponsoring the conference. Sponsors don't pay any money -- instead they get free admission to all meals and sessions for up to 20 people. And with 58 sponsors and 800 people registered to attend, that means they are giving away more admissions than people registered to attend. It's likely that almost everyone attending got free admission.
There are seven Australian organizations signed up as sponsors. As well as the obvious ones like Lavoisier and…
tlambert | March 7, 2009George Will has in an interview in the Pittsburgh Tribune where he repeats the whoppers from his column:
A: The critics completely ignored -- as again, understandably -- the evidence I gave of the global cooling hysteria of 30 years ago.
Q: They like to pretend that there really wasn't any hysteria back then.
A: Since I quoted the hysteria, it's a little hard for them to deny it.
More like took quotes out of context, as John Fleck explained:
If you read the full 1975 Science News article, rather than Will's hand-picked quote, you get a different picture. "The cooling trend observed since…
tlambert | March 6, 2009As promised, the Lancet has published a correction to the 2nd Lancet study:
Burnham G, Lafta R, Doocy S, Roberts L. Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey. Lancet 2006; 368: 1421--28--The Methods section of this Article (Oct 21, 2006) stated that "Participants were assured that no unique identifiers would be gathered." Upon review, it was determined that a significant number of the surveys contained names of respondents and household inhabitants. This was a lapse in the authors' obligations to protect participants. However, to the authors' knowledge…
tlambert | February 28, 2009In Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander's column on George Will he notes that he received thousands of emails demanding corrections to Will's column, and eventually concedes that Will's sea ice claim was false and should have caught by the fact checkers,
The editors who checked the Arctic Research Climate Center Web site believe it did not, on balance, run counter to Will's assertion that global sea ice levels "now equal those of 1979." I reviewed the same Web citation and reached a different conclusion.
It said that while global sea ice areas are "near or slightly lower than those…
tlambert | February 27, 2009Carl Zimmer tells the whole story of how the Washington Post declared that George Will was entitled to his own facts. The latest development since my previous post is that instead of a correction, Will has produced a new column with more misrepresentations of the science. Joe Romm has already critiqued it, but I want to pick out one particular egregious bit of dishonesty.
Will writes
Citing data from the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news blog, the column said that since September "the increase in sea…
tlambert | February 26, 2009This post contains some more notes on a reply to the badly flawed "Main Street Bias" paper.
In my previous post I showed that the MSB papers was wrong to claim that it was plausible that the unsampled regions was 10 times as large as the sampled region. In this post I look at their model. Their model is wrong because it assumes that there is no main street bias in the sampled region and because of this they massively overestimate any bias in the Lancet sampling.
Let's start with a correct model of the situation. I've adopted their terminology where possible.
We have a population of size N…
tlambert | February 23, 2009The Johns Hopkins press release states:
Data Collection
An examination was conducted of all the original data collection forms, numbering over 1,800 forms, which included review by a translator. The original forms have the appearance of authenticity in variation of handwriting, language and manner of completion. The information contained on the forms was validated against the two numerical databases used in the study analyses. These numerical databases have been available to outside researchers and provided to them upon request since April 2007.
Some minor, ordinary errors in transcription…
tlambert | February 20, 2009I didn't write about George Will's recent global warming denial piece, because his numerous errors have been well documented. Even Nate Silver joined in.
But I can't let the latest development pass. The Washington Post has refused to make any corrections to his column. Why not?:
Alan Shearer, the Washington Post Writers Group editorial director, told the Wonk Room that he looked into the accuracy of Will's claim that "According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979":
We have plenty of references that support what George…
tlambert | February 19, 2009This post is some more notes on a reply to the badly flawed "Main Street Bias" paper.
The authors claim that it is plausible that the Lancet paper's sampling scheme could have missed 91% of the houses in Iraq. (That is, their parameter n, the number of households in the unsampled area divided by the the number in the sampled area could plausibly be 10 or more.) The only support they offer for this is a reference to this analysis of Iraqi maps.
To the right is a detail from their map. The red lines are main streets and the yellow are secondary streets. They assert that the blue areas are…
tlambert | February 18, 2009This is a guest post from John Mashey.
If there isn't some hidden gotcha (there might be, I'm no expert), it's one
of the best single things I've heard.
It's especially good for places with a lot of coal, who use concrete, who
are near the ocean, and might have use for softer water for desalination.
1) Calera is a just-barely-out-of-stealth, but very impressive startup ...
It already has 65 people and a pilot plant at Moss Landing, CA just South of
the Dynergy gas plant there. [CA doesn't have any coal plants handy, they'd
be better for this, actually.]
GooglelEarth: 36deg48'10.29"N,…
tlambert | February 18, 2009Pure Poison is a new blog covering the intellectual dishonesty of Australia's punditocrats. Tobias Ziegler covers Marohasy's response to Bond University's categorical denial of her claim that Jon Jenkins had been fired for his opinions:
But her most disingenuous statement was the following:
My original blog piece included both fact and opinion. You may disagree with my opinion (based on the facts and my world view), but the facts stand. Mr Lambert queried the facts unsuccessfully. His opinion (based on his world view), though, has not changed.
Marohasy claimed that "[f]or his opinion,"…
tlambert | February 17, 2009Frank Tipler tells us:
Last year, Reid Bryson, the "father of climatology," and a leading AGW skeptic, passed away. Bryson's actual achievements are the hallmark of a genuine scientist as opposed to the work done by AGW advocates.
A true scientist demonstrates his knowledge by using it to make predictions which can be confirmed or refuted. Bryson successfully predicted, in December 1944, that the so-called "Caine Mutiny Typhoon" would hit Adm. William Halsey's Third Fleet.
And:
What counter-intuitive predictions have the Global Warmers ever made? I invite you to look. I myself could not find…
tlambert | February 12, 2009Eric Pooley writes about the consensus amongst economists on global warming. While they disagree on exactly what we should do, they agree on two things: the cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of action, and the cost of action is only about 1% of GDP. He concludes:
Journalists have missed the economic consensus partly because economists are such a querulous bunch--they argue bitterly among themselves even when they agree. When I asked Stavins about the Stern Review, for example, he criticized Stern's methodology and didn't mention that he concurs with most of Stern's broad…
tlambert | February 12, 2009Despiting having no supporting data, Lott claimed over and over and over again that merely brandishing a gun was sufficient to scare off a criminal 98% of the time. In 2002, he conducted a survey that he claims gave a very similar number -- 95%. But nobody can replicate this result. And by "replicate" I mean using exactly his data and the methods he said he used. You can read about my attempt to replicate here and also download a spreadsheet with my calculations. (You have to get the data from Lott because he doesn't allow redistribution of his data.)
And I'm not the only one. In
a peer…
tlambert | February 12, 2009After Lott's lawsuit against Freakonomics was thrown out of court, he tried for a doever by amending his complaint. The judge said no, so Lott appealed. And now he's lost the appeal as well.
More discussion at Volokh.
tlambert | February 12, 2009John Quiggin is running an appeal for donations to help the survivors of the terrible fires in Victoria. I've donated there.
tlambert | February 10, 2009Hey, remember Joanne Nova? Well she recently emailed Skeptico:
I recently received an email from Joanne Nova, who writes a blog where she claims global warming isnât caused by human created greenhouse gas emissions. In her first email to me she wrote âthere is no empirical evidence left that supports the theory that man made CO2 makes much difference to the climate.â Note, âno empirical evidenceâ, not âI disagree with the evidenceâ, or âthere is contrary evidenceâ â but there is no evidence. None! She emailed me to ask why I had come to a different conclusion from her…
tlambert | February 10, 2009Zachary Roth was intrigued by this passage from a Fred Barnes column in the Weakly Standard:
Democrats couldn't hide their self-consciousness about the excesses of their own bill. Supporters made few TV appearances to defend it and rarely talked about specific spending items. Obama sounded like Al Gore on global warming. The more the case for man-made warming falls apart, the more hysterical Gore gets about an imminent catastrophe. The more public support his bill loses, the more Obama embraces fear-mongering.
So he asked Barnes to provide details on how the case for AGW was falling apart:…