tlambert | December 21, 2011The Wegman scandal has made The Scientist's list of the top 5 science scandals of 2011:
A controversial climate change paper was retracted when it was found to contain passages lifted from other sources, including Wikipedia. The paper, published by climate change skeptic Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis in 2008, showed that climatology is an inbred field where most researchers collaborate with and review each otherâs work. But a resourceful blogger uncovered evidence of plagiarism, and the journal retracted the paper, which was cited 8…
tlambert | December 21, 2011The Australian has continued its war on science by printing an extract from Ian Plimer's new book, How to Get Expelled from School. The extract is largely plagiarised from this press release on a recent paper in Science by Funder et al finding large fluctuations in Arctic sea ice over the last 10,000 years. Plimer did change this passage in the press release
In order to reach their surprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the team organised several expeditions to Peary Land in northern Greenland.
to this:
In order to reach their unsurprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the…
tlambert | December 15, 2011Crank magnetism is the tendency of someone attracted to one crank idea to be attracted to more. Ian Plimer, already notable for his acceptance of the iron Sun theory and the volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans theory has now been revealed as believing (like Christopher Booker) that white asbestos is harmless. But Plimer has gone beyond that to denying that white asbestos (chrysotile) is even asbestos:
MATT PEACOCK: Well can I ask you a simple question about your expertise, rocks? A few years ago you told me chrysotile was not asbestos, is that right?
IAN PLIMER: Chrysotile's a serpentine…
tlambert | December 11, 2011Peter Hadfield dissects Monckton's response to Hadfield's demolition of Monckton's claims about climate science. Hadfield coins the term "Monckton maneuver" to describe Monckton's tactic of changing his position when shown to be wrong and pretending that his position hasn't changed.
In other Monckton news, he is still claiming to be a member of the House of Lords, despite what the courts and the House of Lords say. This time he's got a lawyer to argue the case for him. If we assume that Monckton's lawyer is competent, this would be the best case that can be made for Monckton, so it is…
tlambert | November 29, 2011Deep Climate dissects Ross McKitrick's deceptive quoting from the emails stolen from CRU in 2009:
In one particularly outrageous and error-filled passage, McKitrick accuses IPCC AR4 co-ordinating lead authors Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth of selecting their team of contributing authors solely on the basis of whether they agree with the pair's scientific views. He even goes so far as to accuse Jones of "dismissing" (i.e. rejecting as a contributing author) one qualified expert who, supposedly in Jones's own words, "has done a lot, but I don't trust him."
But the record clearly shows that it…
tlambert | November 27, 2011Peter Hadfield (potholer54) talks on the deceitful quoting of the emails stolen from CRU in 2009
Juliette Jowit in The Guardian puts some more of them in context.
tlambert | November 24, 2011The IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and
Disasters to Advance Climate Change
Adaptation (SREX) found:
Regarding the future, the assessment concludes that it is virtually certain that on a global scale hot
days become even hotter and occur more often. "For the high emissions scenario, it is likely that
the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world", said Thomas
Stocker the other Co-chair of Working Group I. "Likewise, heavy precipitation will occur more often,
and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their…
tlambert | November 22, 2011Some more of the emails stolen from the Climate Research Centre in 2009 have been released. This time they are accompanied by a readme with out-of-context quotes that asserts the purpose of the release is information transparency, but that's an obvious lie, since they've sat on them for two years and released them just before Durban conference. The timing suggests that the people behind the theft and release have a financial interest in preventing mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. It is most unlikely that there is anything incriminating in these emails -- if there was, it would…
tlambert | November 9, 2011In an interview in The Australian (behind The Australian's paywall, search for "Gadfly Geoffrey Blainey") historian Geoffrey Blainey gets his history wrong:
In 1970 the overwhelming majority of scientists believed that there was not going to be global warming over the next 40 years.
That's not true, as Ian Musgrave explains.
tlambert | November 8, 2011Australia's carbon tax has been passed by the Senate. Be entertained as Piers Akerman goes barking mad:
This is the day the Western tradition of science-backed advancement of the human condition was rejected in favour of paganism. ...
We are witnessing the beginning of the end game for Australia as we know it. ...
The rest of the globe's population is wondering why we ever permitted ourselves to be lied and deceived back into the Dark Ages.
Oddly enough, despite Australia's return to the Dark Ages, New Limited's server was still able to serve up Akerman's rant.
tlambert | November 7, 2011In a piece ironically titled "Be prudent with climate claims" (behind The Australian's paywall, search for the title if you want to read it) George Pell declares that, unlike him,
"many politicians have never investigated the primary evidence."
However, if you look at the sources he cites, you'll find that by "primary evidence" he means claims made by Monckton and Plimer, not peer-reviewed work by climate scientists. He only manages one cite to the IPCC reports and that is just to quote an out of context sentence to make it look like the IPCC as saying that climate is no more predictable…
tlambert | November 1, 2011David Rose is notorious for fabricating data to claim that global warming isn't happening as well as for fabricating quotes, so this story in the Daily Mail comes as no surprise. Rose presents a graph of temperatures from BEST that purports to prove that global warming has stopped and then quotes Judith Curry
"As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: 'This is "hide the decline" stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline.
At Skeptical Science Dana Nuccitelli presents a graph showing Rose's cherry pick:
As well as the cherry…
tlambert | October 22, 2011The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature algorithm seems to work quite well, with coverage by the Economist, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the London Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Los Angeles Times, US News and World Report, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Independent and CNN.
Here is the BEST algorithm:
State that "reported global warming may be biased by poor station quality".
Collect funding from Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.
Make the utterly predictable finding that warming is not a product of poor measurement.
Brief reporters.
If only I had used…
tlambert | October 19, 2011Here it is -- the interview that Monckton declared showed that the ABC supported fascism.
tlambert | October 19, 2011Alan Shore is making a complaint to ACMA about Andrew Bolt's July 10 editorial on the Bolt report and is seeking feedback on the draft below. His original complaint to Network Ten is here and their response is here.
The text that follows is by Alan Shore.
It is contended that Mr Andrew Bolt's opening editorial comment aired during the Sunday July 10, 2011 broadcast of The Bolt Report breached clause 4.3.1 of the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice.
Specifically, Mr Bolt's statement that "for at least a decade the planet has not warmed even though emissions have soared". This…
tlambert | October 18, 2011Stop me if you've heard this before -- The Australian has published a story with a picture of a bloke standing on a beach to prove that sea levels aren't rising. Mitchell Nadin tells us:
At 73, former CSIRO engineer Denis Whitnall has seen many things -- but rising sea levels isn't one of them.
Looking out over the Pacific Ocean from the back of his waterfront property at Avoca, on the NSW central coast, Mr Whitnall shakes his head as he talks about a grim report commissioned by his local council in 1995 that predicted some houses along the beachfront, including his own, would be subject to…
tlambert | October 15, 2011Andrew Gelman on The most clueless political column ever--I think this Easterbrook dude has the journalistic equivalent of "tenure":
P.P.P.P.S. When I attack someone too hard in a blog post, commenters often have the natural reaction to defend the poor guy. So for strategic reasons I probably should've been super-polite to Easterbrook here and then let the commenters rip him to shreds. But I just don't have the patience right now. This guy's column is just so abysmally bad, it has nothing to offer.
Seems like Easterbrook has that effect on everybody.