tlambert | January 19, 2009Today's Australian has a piece by Bob Carter predicting global cooling
Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's disproved projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why?
Well, look at this graph from my previous post. When you want to talk about climate trends, you need to use at a bare minimum ten years and not cherry pick your starting point.
Carter continues:
There are two…
tlambert | January 16, 2009When discussing Jon Jenkin's use of a ridiculous sixth-degree poynomial fit to temperatures to argue that they were steeply trending down, I suggested that local regression (loess) was a much better method for showing trends. I was going to get around to plotting one, but Tamino has saved me the trouble by producing a loess smooth on GISS temperatures.
See Tamino's post for more graphs, including one showing how Dennis Avery misrepresented temperature trends even worse than Jenkins did.
tlambert | January 15, 2009Today's Australian included a double feature in its war on science. And they were both news stories, not opinion pieces. First up is John Stapleton. Last month Stapleton wrote a story arguing that winter was evidence against global warming. So how does Stapleton write a story about a heat wave here in Australia. Well, it's evidence against global warming:
It's a scorcher, but 70-year record stands
Much of inland Australia sweltered as towns from Ivanhoe and Pooncarie in far-western NSW to Onslow in the Pilbara, Kerang in Victoria and Marree in South Australia hit 45C yesterday.
But even…
tlambert | January 14, 2009A few years ago, the National Research Council reviewed the evidence on firearms and crime and concluded:
There is no credible evidence that "right-to-carry" laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime.
Paul Cassell says that he finds plausible a new paper by Moody and Marvell that reanalyzes the data and finds carry laws associated with less crime.
I do not find Marvel and Moody's conclusions plausible and they are not supported
by the results of their regressions. The results are all over the
place. Some crimes are up, some…
tlambert | January 12, 2009John Quiggin suggests some reasons why the anti-science position on climate change has become an orthodoxy on the Right:
There are many explanations, perhaps so many that the outcome was overdetermined - powerful economic interests such as ExxonMobil, the hubris associated with victories in economic policy and in the Cold War, tribal dislike of environmentalists which translated easily to scientists as a group, and the immunisation to unwelcome evidence associated with the construction of the rightwing intellectual apparatus of thinktanks, talk-radio, Fox News, blogs and so on.
And…
tlambert | January 9, 2009ScienceBlogs is upgrading to Movable Type 4. During the upgrade process there will be no new posts or comments. Everything is supposed to be back to normal in 36 hours. What could possibly go rong?
Update: And we're back...
tlambert | January 9, 2009The identity of the person who hoaxed Keith Windschuttle has been revealed. Katherine Wilson had left many clues and several people figured that she was the hoaxer.
Meanwhile, Keith Windschuttle continues to deny that he was hoaxed, because:
A real hoax, like that of Alan Sokal and Ern Malley, is designed to expose editors who are pretentious, ignorant or at least over-enthusiastic about certain subjects.
Windschuttle says that the article was "only 10 to 15 per cent invented", and apparently this is not a high enough percentage to expose him as ignorant. He digs the hole a little deeper…
tlambert | January 7, 2009The Telegraph is hanging on to its lead over the Australian. After publishing a story by Richard Alleyne that misrepresented the work of Ian Fairchild, they have not corrected the story and not published Fairchild's letter of correction. But that's not all. Ben Goldacre reports:
Worse than that, Prof Fairchild has tried to post comments on the article which flatly misrepresents his own research, twice, but his comments have been rejected by the Telegraph's online comment moderators, while 23 other comments have appeared.
It's quite hard to understand both the intellectual and moral reasoning…
tlambert | January 7, 2009Ian Musgrave has written the post I was going to write on Jon Jenkins' article in the Australian, so I just want to emphasize that fitting a degree six (yes, degree six) to temperature data does not produce a meaningful trend line in any way shape or form. Go read.
Note that if the editors at the Australian had bothered to read their own paper just three days earlier they would have known that the Jenkins' claims about the Oregon petition and global cooling were rubbish.
News Limited blogger Grame Redfearn also pointed out the enormous holes in Jenkins' arguments and talked to Australia's…
tlambert | January 6, 2009Keith Windschuttle has just published a hoax article full of pseudo-science in Quadrant. And it wasn't this article by Tim Curtin which contains such gems as the claim that Arrhenius borrowed his formulation of the enhanced greenhouse effect from Malthus (he didn't), that the water vapour from burning fossil fuels is a more important greenhouse gas that CO2 (ignoring the fact that the CO2 stays in the atmosphere 10,000 times as long) and attributing all of the increase in food production in the last thirty years to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere (I swear that I am not making this up…
tlambert | January 2, 2009The Australian has fallen well behind in the race for the 2009 ward for most consistently wrong media outlet. They've published a piece by Mike Steketee that debunks common denialist arguments. He points out the difference between long and short term trends, that the Oregon petition is very light on climatologists and that climate models have got it right:
Neville Nicholls, of Monash University's School of Geography and Environmental Science, has been studying climate change and climate variability for 35 years and his advice has been drawn on by the IPCC. He says it is basic laboratory…
tlambert | December 31, 2008Congratulations to The Australian for winning the 2008 award for Most consistently wrong media outlet, coming in ahead of Drudge favourite the London Daily Telegraph.
Well, they're not resting on their laurels in 2009. John Stapleton has a new article out before most of the world even started 2009
WHILE the official figures are not yet in, 2008 is widely tipped to be declared the coolest year of the century.
Only if you don't count 2000, the previous La Niña year. 2008 was the warmest La Niña year ever recorded. There is no mention of La Niña in Stapleton's article.
Whether this is a…
tlambert | December 29, 2008Jeremy Jacquot has written a three part debunking of the claims in Joane Nova's "Skeptic's Handbook": Part 1: increasing CO2 won't make much difference, Part 2: warming has stopped and ice cores show that CO2 increases do not cause warming, and Part 3: the hot spot is missing. If all this seems familiar, it's because Nova's handbook is just a rehash of David Evans' wrong-headed column in the Australian. (Nova is Evan's partner and shares the same beliefs about global warming.)
The constant repetition of such discredited arguments has James Hrynyshyn wondering if there is any point:
For the…
tlambert | December 29, 2008I suppose it was inevitable that the Australian would reprint Christopher Booker's claim that winter disproves man-made global warming. It was a global warming denial piece, it was picked up Drudge and the arguments were pathetically weak. So here it is in today's paper.
tlambert | December 28, 2008You have to think that global warming denialist Matt Drudge must be getting desperate when he touts a column by Christopher "White asbestos is harmless" Booker arguing that winter has disproved man-made global warming:
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse.…
tlambert | December 26, 2008Over at The Poor Man Institute voting is underway for the 2008 Wingnut Awards. The nominees for The Creamy Baileys Nobel Peace Prize for Science, 2008 are Chad Myers, Camille Paglia, Charlie Daniels, Gregg Easterbrook and James Inhofe. Hmmm...
tlambert | December 24, 2008Josh Rosenau is collecting nominations for the top 5 anti-science think tanks in America. Clearly the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Discovery Institute have a lock on two of the places, but which ones should fill the other three places?
Here in Australia, the IPA is the easy winner as the top anti-science think tank, with staff including Alan Moran, Sinclair Davidson, Jennifer Marohasy and Tom Switzer (opinion editor at The Australian for much of their war on science).