tlambert | December 5, 2008Back in 1996 the Australian Press Council upheld a complaint against The Courier Mail under editor Chris Mitchell for printing a nutty story that historian Manning Clark was an agent of the Soviet Union who had been awarded the Order of Lenin for his services. The Press Council concluded:
The newspaper had too little evidence to assert that Prof Clark was awarded the Order of Lenin - rather there is much evidence to the contrary.
That being so, the Press Council finds that The Courier-Mail was not justified in publishing its key assertion and the conclusions which so strongly flowed from it…
tlambert | December 4, 2008On Saturday the Australian published a story by John Stapleton offering as evidence against global warming the fact that "the Arctic ice is expanding". Something that happens every winter. Anyway, Stapleton's piece is about biased reporting on global warming. Stapleton is oblivious to the extraordinary bias displayed by the Australian -- he's alleging that it is the ABC and Fairfax who are biased.
The sole piece of evidence that Stapleton offers for this is their reporting on the question of whether global warming is reducing the Southern Ocean's ability to soak up carbon dioxide. Last year…
tlambert | December 3, 2008Gregg Easterbrook is an idiot who is a science expert at the Brookings Institute.
tlambert | December 1, 2008Last week Keith Windschuttle, editor of Quadrant declared:
People who are really confident [of their facts] relish debate.
It seems that Windschuttle has no confidence in the articles on climate science he has been publishing. Windschuttle rejected without even looking at it, an article by David Karoly correcting the errors and misinformation in those articles. His reply to Karoly (quoted with permission):
Thanks for your offer but at the moment Quadrant is focusing on offering a platform for the sceptical position on this issue. We find that the pro-IPCC position is very well represented…
tlambert | November 29, 2008On Tuesday the Australian had a piece by David Bellamy claimed to be victimized for his dissent:
The sad fact is that since I said I didn't believe human beings caused global warming, I've not been allowed to make a television program. ...
It was in 1996 that I criticised wind farms while appearing on children's program Blue Peter, and I also had an article published in which I described global warming as poppycock. ...
At that point, I was still making loads of TV programs and I was enjoying it greatly. Then I suddenly found I was sending in ideas for TV shows and they weren't getting taken…
tlambert | November 27, 2008Miranda Devine, in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald brings us the sad story of how Ian Plimer is being shouted down and silenced:
Human-caused climate change is being "promoted with religious zeal ... there are fundamentalist organisations which will do anything to silence critics." ...
It is difficult for non-scientists to engage in the debate over what causes climate change and whether or not it can be stopped by new taxes and slower growth, because dissenting voices are shouted down by true believers in the scientific community who claim they alone have the authority to speak.
The same…
tlambert | November 25, 2008Erika Lovley, on the curious phenomenon that when Gore gives a speech, about half of the time the weather is colder than average:
While there's no scientific proof that The Gore Effect is anything more than a humorous coincidence, some climate skeptics say it may offer a snapshot of proof that the planet isn't warming as quickly as some climate change advocates say.
See David Roberts and Joe Romm for more details on Lovley's stenography.
tlambert | November 25, 2008The Iraq Family Health Survey, conducted by the Iraqi government and the World Health Organization, found that there were about 400,000 excess deaths in Iraq up to June 2006 associated with the invasion. The second Lancet survey conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins and Al Mustansiriya University found that there were about 650,000 over the same time period. Both surveys missed the most violent period in Iraq -- if we project forward to the current day I estimate that the net cost of the war so far has been between 750,000 (using IFHS) and 1,250,000 (using Lancet2) deaths.
So how on…
tlambert | November 24, 2008I think it is worthwhile to update James Wimberly's comparison of surveys of deaths in Iraq. In the table below death tolls have been extrapolated to give a number of deaths due to the war up to Oct 08.
Survey
Violent deaths
Excess deaths
ILCS
160,000
Lancet 1
350,000
510,000
IFHS
310,000
740,000
Lancet 2
1,200,000
1,300,000
ORB
1,200,000
It is interesting to see that the IFHS ends up right in the middle, between the two Lancet studies. If you think that the IFHS study is reasonable then you must conclude that Lancet 1 has been confirmed and the critics of Lancet 1 were…
tlambert | November 24, 2008
I've been remiss in not commenting on Obermeyer, Murray and Gakidou's paper in the BMJ, Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: analysis of data from the world health survey programme. OMG derive estimates of violent war deaths in thirteen countries from the World Health Survey and compare them with counts from passive surveillance (like the Iraq Body Count). Here's my graph of their results, showing 95% confidence intervals for the ratio between the survey estimate (WHS) and the passive count (Uppsala/PRIO). The green line is the weighted average of the ratios (2.6).
As…
tlambert | November 21, 2008Quadrant follows the fashion of much of the rest of the right in Australia in making war on science. It has promoted Creationism, HIV/AIDS denial, the DDT ban myth and, of course, global warming denial. But ever since new editor Keith Windschuttle took over earlier this year, Quadrant has cranked the attacks on climate science up to 11. Harry Clarke reports:
Recent issues of Quadrant contain a number of 'denialist' views on climate change issues that will leave those concerned with the implications of climate change troubled. Quadrant could analogously act as an outlet for the flat earth…
tlambert | November 19, 2008It seems that Christopher Booker as well as being a global warming denier, is also an asbestos-is-harmful denier. George Monbiot has the story (links added by me):
This week Richard Wilson's book Don't Get Fooled Again is published. It contains a fascinating chapter on Booker's claims about white asbestos. Since 2002, he has published 38 articles on this topic, and every one of them is wrong. He champions the work of John Bridle, who has described himself as "the world's foremost authority on asbestos science". Bridle has claimed to possess an honorary professorship from the Russian Academy…
tlambert | November 16, 2008It was entirely predictable that the denialists would hype up the glitch in the surface temperature record for last month. This opinion piece by Christopher Booker was picked up by Drudge, so the usual collection of global warming denialists have been fulminating about how this proves you can't trust the science. For example, at the Discovery Institute
But computer modeling is not pure science and at its best it is only as good as the information programed into it. That is true for wild claims made for computer models of evolution and it is true of climate modeling.
While all of this was…
tlambert | November 13, 2008The Australian has a daily column called Cut and Paste which is usually a collection of quotes from recent opinion columns in other papers. But like every other part of the paper, it has been used in their unending war on science. Look at the November 12 edition of "Cut and Paste":
ABC Radio's Peter Cave reports the IPCC claim the island nation is in imminent danger of climate-induced flooding
Mohamed Nasheed (the new Maldives President) has named battling the effects of rising sea levels as a key priority. He's hatched an audacious plan to buy his people a new homeland and one of the…
tlambert | November 13, 2008Robin Meija writes about the Lancet studies:
In any case, such problems are common in war zones, according to nearly a dozen leading survey statisticians and epidemiologists I spoke with. "Iraq is not an ideal condition in which to conduct a survey, so to expect them to do the same things that you would do in a survey in the United States is really not reasonable," says David Marker, a senior statistician with the research corporation Westat. Even if the outdated population data led the researchers to a 20 percent overestimate, Marker explains, the revised death toll would still be at least a…
tlambert | November 11, 2008Some more responses to Michael Duffy's wrongheaded column. Gavin Schmidt's letter in yesterday's SMH:
The opinion piece by Michael Duffy contains multiple errors of fact and plenty of errors of interpretation ("Truly inconvenient truths about climate change being ignored", November 8-9). ...
Realclimate is not "alarmist". Posts frequently debunk overheated claims in the media as well as criticising disinformation efforts. Acknowledging that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that its concentration is rising rapidly due to human activities may be alarming, but it is not alarmist.
Rajendra…
tlambert | November 11, 2008Andrew Bolt, angered because I observed that he doesn't understand basic statistics, proceeds to prove my point, by referring to my bog standard Least Squares trend line as
a graph of temperatures over just the past nine months, with a line drawn kind-of through them:
So Bolt's been pontificating about temperature trends for years now, and posted lots of graphs with linear trends without a clue as to what they are.
Now that's just clueless, but the next thing that Bolt does is spectacularly dishonest.
In my post I was responding to Duffy's claim that:
For the past year, there's been a sharp…
tlambert | November 10, 2008It's only been six months since his previous wrong-headed column claiming that global warming has ended, but Michael Duffy has decided to write another one:
Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was giving a talk at the University of NSW. The talk was accompanied by a slide presentation, and the most important graph showed average global temperatures. For the past decade it represented temperatures climbing sharply.
As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his large audience: "We're at a stage where…