tlambert | July 23, 2008Earlier, I predicted:
You can bet that Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Bolt etc will be falsely claiming that Ofcom ruled that Swindle was not misleading.
And, sure enough, here's Andrew Bolt with a thoroughgoing misrepresentation of the findings:
Great Global Warming Swindle cleared ...
Yes, there was one error, fixed before the documentary showed in Australia: ...
And how shoddy is the case for global warming theory than 37 professors between them cannot convince Ofcom of a single uncorrected error in The Great Global Warming Swindle? ...
In all, this witchhunt against The Great Global Warming…
tlambert | July 22, 2008David Rado emails:
although the accuracy sections of our complaint were considered under section 2.2 of the broadcasting code, that was not the section that we had complained under. We complained primarily under section 5.7, but Ofcom decided section 5.7 only related to news programmes. We don't think the code makes it at all clear that it the requirement for accuracy only applies to news programmes (which is why we complained under that section) - and if it's really true that science documentaries are not expected to be accurate, that is a serious indictment of the broadcasting code.
Hmmm,…
tlambert | July 21, 2008(Via William Connolley). Ofcom, the UK media regulator has ruled that The Great Global Warming Swindle was unfair to the IPCC, David King, and Carl Wunsch and breached a requirement of impartiality about global warming policy. The full report is here. The complaint is a thorough demolition of all the falsehoods in the Swindle, and you can read it here. Also of interest is Dave Rado's story of how he came to put the complaint together -- it all started as a comment over at Stoat. [Insert some blog triumphalism here.]
A few quick comments. To get an idea of how deceitful Channel 4 and Martin…
tlambert | July 20, 2008Duae Quartunciae has been more patient than me, and found even more problems with Monckton's paper.
Monckton has struck back at the APS. Check out this press release from the SPPI
Said, Monckton elsewhere, "Trying to duck the usual process of scientific discourse by arguments about peer-review procedures is an ad-hominem approach which is not worthy of the name of science. What has happened is that the usual suspects, instead of ploughing through the (not particularly difficult) math and saying what I got wrong and why (which is what Popper calls the EE or "error-elimination" step in the…
tlambert | July 19, 2008Thanks to Drudge, all the right-wing blogs have been touting a story alleging the American Physical Society has reversed its stance on global warming. Joe Romm has the sordid details. The basis for the story is an article published in an APS newsletter (not jornal) by our old friend Christoper Monckton. Monckton's article now carries a disclaimer saying:
The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article…
tlambert | July 18, 2008The Australian continues to display its contempt for science, scientists and the scientific method. They've published this piece of AGW denial by David Evans. Last time I looked at Evans he was saying that new evidence since 1999 had changed his mind about global warming, with this new evidence including the fact that the world had cooled from 1940 to 1975. Apparently this was too silly even for the Australian, so he now offers us four alleged facts.
1 The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
Each possible cause of global warming…
tlambert | July 15, 2008There seems to have been an outbreak of poetry about me from Right Wing Death Poets (RWDPs). Tim Blair:
He was a hero to the blogosphere
Across this wide brown land
Tim Lambert of Scienceblogs.com
With his clue stick in his hand
The mighty throbbing clue stick!
Tim gripped it like a lance
And stroked and loved and cared for it
He housed it in his pants
Then the clue stick ceased to function
Its mojo all was spent
Tim whipped it out and waved it 'round
But what had been had ... went
Tim needed inspiration
It came one day in class
"Hey, fatso!" yelled a student
"Shove your clue stick up…
tlambert | July 15, 2008Sizzle is a comedy about the making of a documentary about global warming. Randy Olson plays an inept director who interviews a collection of scientists and skeptics and is repeatedly interrupted by his cameraman, who is a skeptic. The people they interview are real, and all of the skeptics have featured on this blog: George Chilingar, whose argument was so obviously wrong that it discredits anyone who cites him, Bill Gray, who reckons that Al Gore is like Hitler, Pat Michaels, he of the fraudulent testimony to Congress, S Fred Singer, who cherrypicked the data to turn warming into cooling…
tlambert | July 14, 2008Last week Drudge hyped a story about how the manufacture of flat screen TVs was causing global warming. Naturally this was seized by denialists to argue that if everything causes global warming there is no point in doing anything about CO2. The story struck me as a beat up -- 4,000 tons of NF3 isn't much compared with 30 billion tons of CO2, but it's much worse than I expected. Eli Rabett has the details on why NF3 emissions are basically non-existent.
tlambert | July 12, 2008Glenn Reynolds can't seem to learn that if he links to JF Beck he will get burnt. He links to Beck because Beck claims to prove that:
Self-proclaimed DDT expert Tim Lambert was wrong, of course, to claim Europeans did not threaten trade sanctions against DDT users.
But all the story that Beck links to says is that a company that sells organic cotton (ie produced without the use of pesticides) rejected cotton after DDT spraying in the area.
Reynolds should have paid attention to what the EU ambassador wrote:
The European Union has no objection to the safe spraying of houses with DDT for…
tlambert | July 6, 2008The Australian welcomes the draft Garnaut report by reprinting an error-filled article from the Wall Street Journal. Their editorial even repeats one of the most glaring errors:
In proceeding with caution, governments need to be alert to all the facts, including arguments such as those noted by the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens reprinted in Inquirer today. NASA, he points out, confirms that the hottest year on record was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954.
And their columnist Janet Albrechtsen repeats it a third…
tlambert | July 2, 2008Adam Shand's claim that it is just an assumption that summer is warmer than winter has achieved international fame.
Shand removed any remaining doubt about where he stood with the classic move of copying a long list of papers that he reckoned questioned global warming from a AGW denial website. However, it seems he hadn't read any of them since he included Annan and Hargreaves "Can we believe in high climate sensitivity?, which supports the consensus that climate sensitivity is 3K per doubling of CO2.
But no matter how ridiculous a claim is, you can always find someone in blogspace to defend…
tlambert | June 30, 2008In my previous post I noted in his story promoting AGW denial Adam Shand disputed even the most uncontroversial statements (eg "Summer is warmer than winter") from supporters of mainstream science he uncritically accepted everything from the AGW deniers. For example, he agrees with Jennifer Marohasy, who claims:
Global temperatures over the past ten years have stalled.
This is, of course, not true.
And he repeats this whopper:
The IPA has no policy on global warming
There are hundreds of items at the IPA website on global warming and they all argue directly or indirectly against taking…
tlambert | June 29, 2008You only have to look at the delight exhibited by Andrew Bolt ("Warming priests defocked [sic] on Sunday") in this story on Channel Nine's Sunday to know that they are promoting AGW denial. The reporter, Adam Shand, makes a pretence of objectivity by having three people from each side. But he blindly accepts everything that the three AGW deniers (William Kinninmonth, Jennifer Marohasy and Don Aitkin) say and even repeats some of their arguments himself ("We can't predict the weather, so how can we predict the climate?"). He undercuts the three on the other side. Randall Pearce is…
tlambert | June 28, 2008Jim Lindgren believes that a post by Carl Bogus on the DC handgun ban is uninformed. Bogus wrote:
A careful study that compared the nine year period before the ban was enacted with the nine years following enactment, and then compared what happened in D.C. with the immediately surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia, found that the handgun ban reduced gun-related homicides by 25% and gun-related suicides by 23 percent. Colin Loftin, Ph.D., et al., "Effects of Restrictive Licensing of Handguns of Homicide and Suicide in the District of Columbia," 325 New Eng. J. Med. 1615 (Dec. 5, 1991).…
tlambert | June 26, 2008Olive Heffernan on Nigel Lawson's new book:
Like many of those who saw the Channel 4 documentary, readers of Lawson's offering on climate change 'An Appeal to Reason' are probably unaware it has been scientifically discredited in almost every review, including one on Nature Reports Climate Change by Sir John Houghton, Honorary Scientist at the UK's Hadley Centre.
As Sir Houghton writes:
Promised as a "rare breath of intellectual rigour" and a "hard headed examination of the realities" of climate change, this offering is neither cool nor rational....and is largely one of misleading messages.