tlambert | November 5, 2008On July 16, Andrew Bolt gave us this:
What consensus? The American Physical Society reports:
There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.
However, this wasn't the opion of the American Physical Society, but rather that of Jeffrey Marque, one editor of an APS newsletter. In the next issue Marque retracted:
Our editorial comments in the July 2008 issue include the…
tlambert | November 3, 2008Jennifer Marohasy has posted a list of the "ten worst blog posts". Tamino and Eli Rabett are crowing are crowing because they got number one and two and the best I could do was number six. Cohenite, the guy who compiled the list, had earlier compiled a list of the "ten best climate research papers" that, no fooling, included Chilingar. So you can imagine that his new list is of similar quality and it does not disappoint.
Cohenite says these posts are the ten worst because:
they reveal that at least part of this debate about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not about science, but its…
tlambert | November 1, 2008Journalist Andrew Bolt reckons that the "green sickness" is "spreading". He quotes from a story by journalist Bryony Gordon:
Psychiatrists in America have identified a new mental illness that threatens the very fabric of society: an obsession with saving the planet. Some people are so addicted to cutting their carbon emissions that they seem to have gone quite mad.
Take, for example, Sharon Astyk, who makes her four children sleep in a huddle so she doesn't have to turn on the heating (if she was that concerned about the planet, perhaps she could have stopped reproducing after baby number two…
tlambert | October 29, 2008Leading climate scientist has a new theory
Environmentalism is just the latest attempt to find a substitute for the theory of evolution and it is paradoxical that it can be so widespread when next year (2009) is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his major work "The Origin of Species as the Result of Natural Selection".
Except that it's the Global Warming Skeptics who tend to be Creationists. And he got the title of Darwin's book wrong.
Gareth Renowden has more.
tlambert | October 25, 2008
Back in 2006, Tim Blair declared
I'd lean towards the official police figures myself (although jerked-around crime counting methods make comparisons problematic), mainly because they're, you know, official police figures. The British Crime Survey is just a survey.
Alas, he backed the wrong horse, as this story from the BBC proves:
Police miscount serious violence
A number of police forces in England and Wales have been undercounting some of the most serious violent crimes, the government has admitted.
It means figures for serious violent crimes rose by 22% compared to last year - rather…
tlambert | October 24, 2008William Ford reports on the oral arguments in Lott's appeal of the dismissal of his lawsuit against Levitt:
Evans and Sykes asked all the questions. Ripple remained silent. I have only glanced at the briefs, but based on the questions and comments during the oral argument, Lott's chances do not look very good. ... An mp3 of the oral argument is now available here.
I listened to the mp3, and I was rather struck by an "up is down" argument offered by Jeffrey Parker, who was arguing for Lott.
Here's the relevant bit of the district court's ruling:
By claiming that other scholars have tried to "…
tlambert | October 22, 2008I think the funniest part of Monckton's open letter to John McCain is his description of himself at the beginning:
His contribution to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 - the correction of a table
inserted by IPCC bureaucrats that had overstated tenfold the observed contribution of the
Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise - earned him the status of Nobel Peace
Laureate. His Nobel prize pin, made of gold recovered from a physics experiment, was presented
to him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, New York, USA. He
has lectured at…
tlambert | October 20, 20082008 Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture:
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will deliver the 2008 Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture in UNSW's John Niland Scientia Building on Thursday 23 October at 7:30pm.
Dr Pachaui's lecture is entitled Our Vulnerable Earth - Climate Change, the IPCC and the role of Generation Green. He will also receive an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the University in recognition of his eminent service to the community. ...
The lecture series is named after Wallace Charles Wurth, the University's first Chancellor.…
tlambert | October 19, 2008This column in the Australian from Frank Devine is mainly about how the latest Disney cartoon is "pernicious and propagandistic" and threatens our freedom, but he also includes some war-on-science stuff:
An alternative view of good coming out of the financial crash is that, with another global threat to worry about, we may be less attentive to assertions as axiomatic that we are guilty of causing catastrophic climate change.
It is a gross misrepresentation to pretend that anthropogenic global warming and its impacts are just axioms. See the various IPCC reports.
In fact, hundreds of…
tlambert | October 16, 2008Monckton continues to entertain:
Dear Professor Serene - A Fellow of the APS has drawn my attention to a new policy apparently adopted by the Executive Board of the American Physical Society, to the effect that every paper published in any APS journal must in future carry a disclaimer to the effect that it has not been peer-reviewed. The Executive Board appears to have acted thus because Lawrence Krauss, a notorious, Marxist political activist who found uncongenial the conclusions of a paper by me that appeared in the July 2008 issue of Physics and Society, came under pressure from his…
tlambert | October 15, 2008The latest salvo from the Australian in their war on science is a column from Bjorn Lomborg. Lomborg tells us:
Have you noticed how environmental campaigners almost inevitably say that not only is global warming happening and bad, but also that what we are seeing is even worse than expected?
This is odd, because any reasonable understanding of how science proceeds would expect that, as we refine our knowledge, we find that things are sometimes worse and sometimes better than we expected, and that the most likely distribution would be about 50-50. Environmental campaigners, however, almost…
tlambert | October 14, 2008Remember Dennis Bray's useless survey of climate scientists? The URL and password were posted to the climatesceptics mail list, so the results were biased and included responses from people who were not climate scientists. Bray refused to concede that this meant that the survey was hopelessly flawed. Now he has conducted another survey. Bray has avoided the problems of his previous survey by surveying a list of climate scientists he compiled from journal publications and scientific institutions, and only allowing one response per invitation. However, Gavin Schmidt finds that some of the…
tlambert | October 7, 2008This is the long-awaited part 2 of my response to Roger Bate's reply to the article on DDT in Prospect by John Quiggin and me. (Part 1 is here.) In this part I look at Bate's false history of DDT and malaria.
Here's Bate's history:
But while there were serious concerns about the bioaccumulation of DDT up the food chain, and it was rightly phased out for use in agriculture, it still had a valid role in combating public health menaces, notably disease-bearing mosquitos. Not satisfied with having DDT outlawed for agriculture, environmentalists increased pressure for a total ban in the late…
tlambert | October 5, 2008This piece by Brendan O'Neill in the Australian combines two of the Australian's favourite things: making war on science and supporting Republicans. Here's O'Neill:
In May this year, Palin, as Governor of Alaska, said she would sue the federal Government for labelling polar bears as officially threatened. She argued that giving special protection to polar bear habitats would cripple oil and gas development off Alaska's northern and northwestern coasts. She also said there was not enough evidence to support the listing of polar bears.
That's what she said, but she appears to have been lying…
tlambert | September 30, 2008
Monckton should have SPPI investigated for making him look like a "potty peer", because they've published a wrongheaded piece of his about the hockey stick, where he calls for Mann, Bradley and Hughes to be put on trial for genocide. Yes, really.
"The environmental extremists, who have already killed 50 million
children through malaria by their now-canceled ban on the use of DDT,
the only effective agent against the anopheles mosquito that spreads
the infective parasite, are already eagerly killing millions more
through their latest scientifically-baseless scare -- the "global
warming"…
tlambert | September 28, 2008So the latest headline on Drudge is this:
BBC investigated for 'deliberately misrepresenting' global warming skeptics...
Which sounds serious, but if you read the linked article in the Daily Mail, all that has happened is that Monckton complained to Ofcom that the BBC Climate Wars documentary was unfair to him.
How was it unfair? It seems they didn't give enough screen time:
'The BBC very gravely misrepresented me and several others, as well as the science behind our argument. It is a breach of its code of conduct.
'I was interviewed for 90 minutes and all my views were backed up by sound…
tlambert | September 26, 2008Monckton has written to the New Scientist in response to Lawrence Krauss' article:
I have not been a "journalist" for 15 years. Until I retired two years ago I directed a leading technical consultancy. I have made a fortune from probabilistic combinatorics.
I think that means he made money from his jigsaw puzzle.
My paper contained much unpublished material, including several new equations, each of which the editor asked me to justify before publication. My conclusions have not been "debunked".
They most definitely have.
I have never said my paper "had been accepted by a peer-reviewed…
tlambert | September 18, 2008Well, we didn't have a fancy sign, on account of being on the other side of the world from Seed High Command, but people were able to find us by spotting the Scienceblogs mug. My brilliant plan to have the party in the Attic Bar because it would be fairly empty on a Wednesday night was foiled by the hotel having a movie night there because it was so empty on a week night. We ended up outside in the courtyard on a pleasant spring evening. Daniel had to go home and pack because he's heading off to the UK on Monday, but the rest of us were there till the place closed at midnight.
More…
tlambert | September 15, 2008The saga of Monckton's Physics and Society article continues (previous posts: 1 2 3 4
5). Via Eli Rabett, here is Arthur Smith's list of 125 errors in Monckton's piece.
Also, a few more snippets on how Monckton's article ended up in Physics and Society. Lawrence Krauss (outgoing chair of the American Physical Society's Forum on Physics and Society (FPS)) wrote:
Earlier this year, the editors ran a piece submitted by Gerald Marsh, a frequent contributor to FPS, in which he questioned the accuracy of climate change predictions and estimations of anthropogenic contributions to it. The article…