tlambert | September 10, 2008If you haven't ever commented here, this open thread is a good opportunity to enter the millionth comment contest:
Plus, one lucky reader will win an all-out science adventure -- a trip for two to New York City and exclusive science adventures only ScienceBlogs could give you access to.
The trip includes airfare, four nights in a four-star hotel, behind-the-scenes tours of top museums and labs, and dinner with your favorite ScienceBlogger.
By submitting a comment with a valid email address, you'll be automatically entered to win.
tlambert | September 10, 2008
All readers of this and any other ScienceBlogs blog are invited to a party in Sydney on Wednesday 17th September from 7pm onwards. We'll be in the Attic Bar of the Arthouse hotel. Daniel MacArthur, who will also be there, has a map. Finding the Attic Bar once you're in the Arthouse hotel is a little tricky -- you have to go out the back door and up the stairs on the outside of the hotel. To help you recognize our group we will have a ScienceBlogs mug on the table. If you are on Facebook please RSVP here.
And if you're not in Sydney, there are lots more ScienceBlogs parties all around the…
tlambert | September 9, 2008The latest volley from the Australian is an article by John McLean. You might remember him as the guy who kept steering Andrew Bolt into brick walls. He's now styling himself as a "climate data analyst and a member of the Australian Climate Science Coalition", which might sound impressive if you didn't know that the only qualification he holds is a Bachelor of Architecture and that the Australian Climate Science Coalition doesn't contain any climate scientists.
Anyway, his article is just a rehash of his earlier one where he accused the IPCC of lying about the scientific support for his…
tlambert | September 7, 2008Well, everyone's doing it, so let's have a ScienceBlogs millionth comment party in Sydney. Daniel MacArthur of Genetic Future might be able to come, so there could be two bloggers from SceinceBlogs there. We're looking at some time between 14 and 21 September. If you have any suggestions or preferences for a time or place, leave a comment or drop me an email.
Update: We've decided on Wed 17th from 7pm at the Arthouse Hotel. RSVP here.
tlambert | September 6, 2008Naomi Oreskes and Jonathan Renouf have a fascinating article in the Sunday Times about the secret climate change war in the early 80s:
Even today few people have heard of Jason. It was established in 1960 at the height of the cold war when a group of physicists who had helped to develop the atomic bomb proposed a new organisation that would - to quote one of its founders - "inject new ideas into national defence".
So the Jasons (as they style themselves) were born; a self-selected group of brilliant minds free to think the unthinkable in the knowledge that their work was classified.…
tlambert | September 5, 2008The latest report from the NSIDC on Artic sea ice is out, and states:
Record ice loss in August
Following a record rate of ice loss through the month of August, Arctic sea ice extent already stands as the second-lowest on record, further reinforcing conclusions that the Arctic sea ice cover is in a long-term state of decline. With approximately two weeks left in the melt season, the possibility of setting a new record annual minimum in September remains open.
Extent is now within 370,000 square kilometers (140,000 square miles) of last year's value on the same date and is 2.08 million square…
tlambert | August 27, 2008The Register, an occasionally accurate online IT newspaper, has been running a series of warming denial pieces, by one Steven Goddard. Goddard has been trying to cast on temperature and ice data. Unfortunately, he does a whole lot of cherry picking. For example:
A second important issue with NASA's presentation is that they use the time period of 1951-1980 as their choice of baseline. This was a well known cold spell, as can be seen in the 1999 version of the NASA US temperature graph below.
Why use a graph of US temperatures instead of world temperatures? The "cold spell" is more…
tlambert | August 25, 2008On Saturday the Australian published an article by Jennifer Marohasy. It's the usual cherry-picked global-warming-ended-in-1998 nonsense, and Barry Brook has written a detailed refutation.
But I felt I should post this graph from Marohasy's piece where she tries to make global warming go away by changing the scale on the graph:
tlambert | August 23, 2008Richard Littlemore has posted an annotated transcript of his debate with Monckton, with corrections to Monckton's numerous false statements.
Andrew Bolt thinks the best argument that Monckton had in the debate with Littlemore was his defamation of one of the funders of Desmogblog, so he repeats it, falsely accusing John Lefebvre of being "a convicted Internet fraudster", when in fact Lefebvre has not been charged with fraud, let alone convicted of it. I don't know much about the law, but doesn't that make Bolt liable as well as Mockton if Lefebvre decides to sue?
Jacob Sullum comments on what…
tlambert | August 21, 2008Another post on John Mashey's virtual blog. Everything that follows is from comments posted here by Mashey, lightly edited.
This long essay grew from a dialog in this thread into something that may be a more general resource than just some answers to Mr Manny.
There are 3 parts so far:
Part 1 Motivation & Approach to Science
Part 2 Relevant Personal Background
Part 3 Answers to Questions, Sources
Part 1 Motivation & Approach to Science
1.1 Why This?
I'm always curious when people with decent-or-better educational backgrounds strongly espouse conclusions directly opposite that of…
tlambert | August 20, 2008Alicia Newton, an Associate Editor of Nature Geoscience, discovers the truth about CO2Science:
But rather than its promise of "separating reality from rhetoric in the emotionally-charged debate that swirls around the subject of carbon dioxide and global change", on the contrary CO2 Science twists the most recent science, ever so subtly, to suggest that there is no link between carbon dioxide levels and climate change.
I think she is rather understating it. My experience is that the usual twist angle at CO2 Science is 180 degrees.
Coby Beck decides to make lemonade out of Marohasy's lemons:…
tlambert | August 19, 2008Two from Nexus 6:
(Referring to this.)
From wadard
From Jon Snow:
From Gummo Trotsky:
From Stefan:
From Frank Bi
And see also the ones in comments to my earlier post.
tlambert | August 19, 2008It seems like extreme gullibility must be a job requirement for reporters at Channel Nine. You might recall how Adam Shand uncritically accepted everything he was told by global warming skeptics and aggressively disputed the mainstream science. Tara Brown has gone down the same path on Channel Nine's 60 minutes.
TARA BROWN: No doubt the ice is melting, but the big question is - are we to blame? The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change reports it is 90% certain we are. But other equally eminent scientists believe what were seeing is just part of Nature's great cycle.…
tlambert | August 17, 2008I think LOLdenialist macros deserve their own thread.
You can make your own with this convenient online tool.
You can't post images in comments, so email them to me at deltoidblog AT gmail.com.
It doesn't have to be AGW denial -- Lancet/Iraq, HIV/AIDS, evolution, DDT resistance are all worthy of a LOLdenialist macro.
(Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics came up with LOLdenialists.)
tlambert | August 16, 2008Via Gummo Trotsky, the latest argument posted by Jennifer Marohasy:
Radiative equilibrium is one of the foundation stones of radiative forcing theory. But it is not a law of physics, only a rather archaic and untested supposition found in climatology textbooks alone.
"For the Earth to neither warm or cool, the incoming radiation must balance the outgoing."
Not really.
It's best to regard radiant energy simply as a finite power source -- indeed, that power is expressed as watts per square meter. An object is said to "cool" by radiating, yet this would seem to imply that restricting its…
tlambert | August 14, 2008People have noticed that there was an advertisement for Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It! on ScienceBlogs. Seed's sales staff know not to accept ads for Creationists, psychics and pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, so how did Lomborg slip through?
Well, he's managed to present himself as being in the middle ground. Lomborg makes himself look reasonable by saying that he accepts the science, that AGW is occurring, but that it won't be that bad. But what Lomborg really does is cherry pick and systematically misrepresent the science. You don't have to take my word for this. See, for example, Kevin…
tlambert | August 12, 2008Barry Brooks, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide, has started a blog, Brave New Climate. Check it out.
Of particular interest to Deltoid readers is his post on David Evans. After his claims about a missing hot spot signature were refuted, it seems that Evans responded not with a correction, but by repeating them again.
tlambert | August 11, 2008Last year I wrote about Steve Milloy's latest scam -- a $100,000 if you prove the existence of harmful AGW. Of course, since Milloy judges whether your prove is good enough, you know he'll never pay up, just as you know that Kent Hovind will never pay his $250,000 for a proof of evolution.
The latest effort along these lines is Michael Duffy's offer of $1,000 for references to journal papers that:
1 examine the causal link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and warming, and
2 quantify the extent of the warming from anthropogenic carbon dioxide.
Now it's possible that this offer is made in…
tlambert | August 11, 2008John Mashey emails me a link to a video a Naomi Oreskes talk about the Western Fuels Association's PR campaign against the global warming science.
Mashey's summary of her talk:
Naomi is an award-winning geoscientist/science historian, a Professor at
UCSD and as of July, promoted to Provost of of the Sixth College there. She
is also a meticulous researcher, as seen from past books, and from having
reviewed a few chapters of the book she mentions in the talk. She unearthed
some fascinating memos, although of course, impossible to replicate the
exhaustive database of tobacco documents.
If you…