tlambert | April 28, 2008frankbi has the latest on the Listener against free speech. Pamela Stirling, after using dubious legal threats to shut up a critic says:
So that, we're not into censorship of any kind. As we discussed with Brian Leyland, the Voltaire quote, you know: "I disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it."
Also worth checking out at the link is an interview with BBC journalist Alex Kirby on "balance" in reporting on climate change.
tlambert | April 27, 2008ABC's normally excellent Ockham's razor has taken a refreshing change from presenting the thoughts of scientists on science based on peer-reviewed research to presenting the opinion of a political scientist on global warming based on stuff he found on denialist web sites. Yes, they had Don Aitkin on. Now just because Aitkin isn't a scientist and his sources weren't scientists either it doesn't necessarily follow that he would get his facts wrong, but that would be the way to bet. And if you had bet that way you would have won. Look:
It warmed again from 1975 to 1998, and then it stopped…
tlambert | April 26, 2008The Australian wasn't content to publish Phil Chapman's silly ice-age article, but also published a news story that treated it like a legitimate scientific paper. Now, instead of publishing a correction to Chapman's falsehoods from a climate scientist they have an article by Christopher Pearson. Even though it was the Australian which published Chapman's piece a few days earlier, almost half of Pearson's article was a quote or paraphrase of Chapman.
Pearson also gives the view of climate science you get from the Australian's bunker:
What a difference the intervening 15 months has made. In…
tlambert | April 25, 2008Ted Frank has the latest on Lott's appeal of the dismissal of his case:
Lott is now claiming that the case should have been decided under the allegedly more friendly Virginia libel law than the Illinois law under which his claim fails, but that is generally an argument for (at best) a claim of legal malpractice, rather than for a do-over for an expressly waived argument in federal court. Lott has posted the briefs; David Glenn blogs about the 2-year mark in the case. Not that I think Lott has a valid legal malpractice claim, either, unless his attorneys told him he had a good shot at winning…
tlambert | April 25, 2008Robert Lichter reports on a survey of American climate scientists commissioned by STATS at GMU. Some of the findings:
In 1991 the Gallup organization conducted a telephone survey on global climate change among 400 scientists drawn from membership lists of the American Meteorological Association and the American Geophysical Union.
We repeated several of their questions verbatim, in order to measure changes in scientific opinion over time. On a variety of questions, opinion has consistently shifted toward increased belief in and concern about global warming. Among the changes:
In 1991 only 60…
tlambert | April 23, 2008As well as Chapman's silly ice-age article, the Australian published a news story about it, treating it as if it was a legitimate paper and failing to get comments from climate scientists. The ABC acted like a real news organization it its report:
DAVID KAROLY: This is not science.
EMILY BOURKE: David Karoly from Melbourne University's School of Earth Sciences is outraged.
DAVID KAROLY: This is misinterpretation or misrepresentation and miscommunication of the factors that influence global temperature.
It appears to be an opinion of Phil Chapman and he's welcome to his opinion, but in terms…
tlambert | April 23, 2008Here we go again. Phil Chapman, in the Australian:
All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.
and
it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was…
tlambert | April 22, 2008From the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre
CLIMATE CHANGE: Show me the money?
Michael Molitor
6:45pm for 7pm start, Wednesday 23rd April, 2008
Science Theatre, UNSW .
In order to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at safe levels by 2050 we will need to avoid more than 600 billion tonnes in expected carbon emissions over the next 42 years. There is both a massive potential cost and opportunity associated with achieving this ambitious global target. Leading companies have already recognised the scale of the opportunity and are investing in low carbon solutions. Is…
tlambert | April 22, 2008Robert Fawcett and David Jones of the National Climate Centre, Australian Bureau of Meteorology have written a short paper debunking the global-warming-has-ended myth:
There is very little justification for asserting that global warming
has gone away over the past ten years, not least because the linear
trend in globally-averaged annual mean temperatures (the standard
yardstick) over the period 1998-2007 remains upward. While 1998 was
the world's warmest year in the surface-based instrumental record up
to that point in time, 2005 was equally warm and in some data sets
surpassed 1998. A…
tlambert | April 21, 2008The latest editorial from the Australian on the science of global warming cites a cardinal and a historian and no climate scientists:
We can trust that Catholic cardinal George Pell has not had to resort to inside knowledge to play the devil's advocate on global warming. Like historian and political scientist Don Aitkin, Dr Pell has studied the data and rejected the claim that scientific consensus exists.
It's like they are not even trying any more. Nexus 6 goes through the editorial and corrects the numerous errors it makes.
But that was this week. There was another war-on-science piece in…
tlambert | April 20, 2008Lawyer Steven Price, who specialises in media law, comments on the Listener's use of legal threats to silence a blogger:
In the comments section of the correction and apology, someone has helpfully posted a link to a copy of HotTopic's original post. Don't you just love the internet? On the off-chance that the link is removed in the near future, let me take the liberty of reproducing it here. By all means, pay a visit, and encourage others to do likewise. I hope that the post receives exponentially greater attention as a result of this legal threat.
I don't say that because I'm a free speech…
tlambert | April 18, 2008Daniel Engber's Slate article The Paranoid Style in American Science is well worth a read. He explains how the Creationists, AGW and HIV/AIDS skeptics go well past skepticism into conspiracy theries about science.
Hat tip: Mark Hoofnagle.
tlambert | April 18, 2008Earlier, I wrote how the environmental writer for the New Zealand Listener was fired after Heartland demanded he be silenced, and:
Gareth Renowden has the full story.
Well not any more. The Listener hired a lawyer to threaten him and the post has been taken down and an apology put up, which includes this statement:
In fact Mr Hansford was not sacked by The Listener, and nor did The Listener seek to censor or suppress Mr Hansford's views.
When you use lawyers to suppress people's views it kind of undercuts your claims that you didn't suppress Hansford's views.
Dave Hansford commented on the…
tlambert | April 17, 2008Another news story about scientists being shown up by a teen also proves to be completely wrong
First the story appeared on April 4 in Germany's 'leading' tabloid ("I have calculated the end of the world ... and NASA says, I'm right"), later in more serious papers ("Nico and the end of the world") - and today, thanks apparently to an AFP story where the writer hadn't found it necessary to check anything, it has taken off around the world. Alas: it's absolute nonsense! The claim is that a 13-year old German schoolboy "discovered" - while working on an entry for a major German science…
tlambert | April 16, 2008A few weeks ago Dave Hansford, the environmental writer for the New Zealand Listener, wrote an article on how global warming deniers create an illusion of dissent:
In November, three members of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition - Bryan Leyland, Owen McShane and Vincent Gray - spoke at UN climate talks in Denpasar in support of a US-based conservative group, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). They told delegates "climate change is a non-problem" and that they should "have the courage to do nothing".
Leyland says CFACT did not pay him to attend the Bali talks, but…
tlambert | April 15, 2008NPR has run a puff piece on Kristen Byrnes. Byrnes stuff is full of errors, but the reporter seems uninterested in whether Byrnes' science is accurate or not.
James Hrynyshyn notes that Byrnes has libelled James Hansen, while Janet Stemwedel is doesn't like the lack of analysis in the NPR story.
Update: More comments from PZ Myers and Orac.
tlambert | April 15, 2008I don't like banning people from commenting here. To make sure this is transparent I keep a list here of everyone who is banned. Inspired by the example of John Quiggin, I've added a third name to the list, the poster who calls himself "Reality Check".
Incidently, if you've missed the writings of JC (Joe Cambria) who I banned in January, he's obsessively commenting on postings here over at Catallaxy. Most recent rant:
Another day, another smear attempt at the little fellas site. This time Tim Worstall gets a smearing because he dared not to accept Lambert's line which is that we must re-…
tlambert | April 14, 2008Instead of correcting his erroneous post Tim Worstall has put up another post coming out against corrections. This time it's about an inaccurate textbook. Can you pass the test at the book's online study centre? Question 16. True or False?
Worstall claims that book is accurate, offering this interesting argument:
But many other problems are much less clear-cut. Science doesn't know how bad the green-house effect is."
Indeed this is so. Climate sensitivity (how much warming from a doubling of atmospheric CO2) is the most important unknown at present. The IPCC thinks somewhere from 2…
tlambert | April 12, 2008About a week ago, the World Meteorological Organization put out a statement to correct the erroneous claims in the media that global warming had stopped (emphasis theirs):
GENEVA, 4 April 2008 (WMO) - The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century.
The current La Niña event, characterized by a…