tlambert | May 22, 2008Oh look, it's Glenn Reynolds:
Cracks in the Consensus? Hey, science advances by changing its mind in response to new data. The worrisome thing would be if people didn't.
And from his link:
Professor Oleg Sorokhtin of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences is advising people "to stock up on fur coats" because he expects an extended period of global cooling, an assessment that is echoed by Kenneth Tapping of the U.S. National Academy of Science's National Research Council. Both scientists contend solar activity explains most of the temperature variation in the Earth's atmosphere.
We know…
tlambert | May 20, 2008Last year RealClimate reported that there had been another mass mailing to get more signatures on the notorious Oregon Petition. They are now announcing that they've increased the number of signatures from 19,000 to 31,000. The original objections to the Oregon Petition still apply -- most of the signers do not have PhDs and are not practising scientists. Just 40 of the signers claim to be climatologists, and since they don't tell you their names, it's impossible to check whether they are, in fact, climatologists.
Bigcitylib decided to test their quality control by signing using a fake…
tlambert | May 19, 2008Last year Graham Young, accused me of being blatantly dishonest for writing that Peiser had admitted to making multiple errors, even though Peiser had confirmed this in an email to Young. He ended up writing 20 comments denying Peiser's admission.
Now Young has lashed out at me in a post at On Line Opinion. He calls me a "bully" and a "tick" and claims I use "brown-shirt tactics". (If you don't know what brown-shirt tactics are, see Sturmabteilung.) My crime?
Lambert, through his blog Deltoid promulgates whatever the current orthodoxy happens to be, but he does not restrict himself to his…
tlambert | May 19, 2008More carriages have come off the rails in the Roger Pielke Jr train wreck. Pielke finally does a hypothesis test. Trouble is, it's an unpaired t-test, which would only make sense if GISS and HADCRU were independent of each other, i.e. temperature measurements of different planets. Which, uh, they're not.
James Annan explains it here.
And another Pielke carriage comes off the rails here.
tlambert | May 17, 2008In the second part of his Ockham's razor talk Aitkin said:
I gave a public address on this subject a few weeks ago, which was picked up in the daily newspapers, the text of the address was put on one newspaper's website, and a vigorous correspondence developed. In all, I received, well, 150 or so communications. The majority of them were positive. The negative ones fell mostly into one or other of two groups: either I was trespassing on someone else's patch, that is, only scientists are allowed to talk about these issues, and I am not a scientist; or I was a 'denier', someone who, in spite of…
tlambert | May 16, 2008If you haven't been watching the Roger Pielke Jr train come off the rails and the carriages smashing into each other and exploding, I suggest you look at this post from James Annan:
Roger Pielke has been saying some truly bizarre and nonsensical things recently. The pick of the bunch IMO is this post. The underlying question is: Are the models consistent with the observations over the last 8 years?
Hey, hypothesis testing. First year stats stuff. So Annan carefully explains how it's done.
Marvel at Pielke Jr's response:
All he does is draw some graphs and wave his hands around. Does he…
tlambert | May 13, 2008What Mark Kleiman says
John Tierney, demoted from the NYT op-ed page and now continuing his libertarian propagandizing in the guise of "science writing," points out that flying around to climate-change conferences creates a large carbon footprint for high-profile environmental activists. That allows Tierney to claim the sort of faux-populist gotcha! so beloved among glibertarians and greedhead conservatives. (The theocrat, nativist, and imperialist wings of conservatism prefer their faux-populist gotcha!s on different topics.)
If you travel frequently by air, even on commercial flights, you…
tlambert | May 12, 2008I think this article in Prospect on Rachel Carson and DDT is quite good.
Update: John Quiggin has posted the director's cut.
tlambert | May 12, 2008Jeff Poor of Business & Media Institute spliced the audio of an Al Gore interview to turn a statement that Arctic melting was a consequence of global warming:
And we're seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming. The entire north polar ice cap, normally the size the lower 48 states, give or take an Arizona, is melting before our eyes. 40 percent melted in the last twenty years. And in the summer months, it could be completely gone, in one scientific estimate, in as little as five years.
into a claim that Gore never made,…
tlambert | May 10, 2008
Tim Blair declares:
Global cooling is now a flight-safety hazard.
The post he links speculates on a cause of the crash of BA flight 38:
But it would appear that the major contributory factor could have been the extreme cold. In other words, global cooling can kill.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Al!
and
After the aircraft crossed the Ural mountain range in Russia it climbed further to 38,000 where the ambient temperature dropped to as low as minus 76°C.
But 38,000 feet is in the stratosphere. And while greenhouse gases warm the surface of the Earth, they cool the stratosphere.
In…
tlambert | May 8, 2008Via Gareth Renowden:
Q: How many climate sceptics does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. It's too early to say if the light bulb needs changing.
Though I think the answer should be: None. The light bulb isn't broken and it will recover by itself and sitting in the dark is better than in the light.
tlambert | May 7, 2008The first four words in this Wednesday's article in the Australian :
In 1633 Galileo Galilei
There is no point in reading further.
tlambert | May 5, 2008A week ago I wrote
I predict that Avery will maintain that all the scientists are wrong about their own work and refuse to remove any names from the list.
And look what they wrote:
In response to the complaints, The Heartland Institute has changed the headlines that its PR department had chosen for some of the documents related to the lists, from "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares" to "500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares." ...
We plan to make no further changes to the articles or to the lists. ...
Many of the…
tlambert | May 5, 2008A handy tip from Bug Girl
Also, a tip: if you walk into your new workplace brandishing a container of putative pubic lice and sand, you may want to provide a more detailed back story than "I bought them on the internet." Just some advice.
tlambert | May 4, 2008There really is no excuse for this, from Michael Duffy:
Global warming stopped six years ago. It might start again tomorrow, but from 2002 until now, average global temperatures have remained fairly constant. This is in contrast to the previous period when, as everyone knows, the temperature trend was upwards.
Look at the graph below, showing 8-year trends for each 8-year period in the data. (Graph is from RealClimate.) Notice that the eight year trend is sometimes negative. That's because an eight year trend can be greatly affected by an unusually warm or cold year or two. But Duffy…
tlambert | May 1, 2008Arnold Kling decides to spread the DDT ban myth:
According to Iain Murray's new book, the worst disasters come from environmental policy. It is remarkable the magnitude of the harm caused by government relative to the harm caused by the private sector from which it protects us. ...
The total death and illness caused by all of the chemical pollution ever created vs. the death and illness caused by the ban on DDT.
After he was corrected by commenters he added an update, but did not correct his false claim. To justify this he just made more more false claims:
The term "banned" may not be…
tlambert | April 30, 2008Via Sadly No!, we find out the latest from the SF authors who helped bring us Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative
Now a fixture at Department of Homeland Security science and technology conferences, SIGMA is a loosely affiliated group of science fiction writers who are offering pro bono advice to anyone in government who want their thoughts on how to protect the nation.
The group has the ear of Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Jay Cohen, head of the science and technology directorate, who has said he likes their unconventional thinking. Members of the group recently offered a…
tlambert | April 29, 2008Richard Littlemore reports:
Dozens of scientists are demanding that their names be removed from a widely distributed Heartland Institute article entitled 500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares. ...
DeSmogBlog manager Kevin Grandia emailed 122 of the scientists yesterday afternoon, calling their attention to the list. So far - in less than 24 hours - three dozen of those scientists had responded in outrage, denying that their research supports Avery's conclusions and demanding that their names be removed.
Click on the link to see some of the responses.
I…
tlambert | April 28, 2008Here's a cool video of my first year class in Engineering Design. One of their projects is to build and program a Lego robot to compete in robot sumo...