tlambert | April 9, 2008The Australian front pages an article on "eminent historian" Don Aitkin who attacks the "quasi-religious" scientists of the IPCC for advocating that some action to combat global arming should be taken. Aitkin deploys the argument from incredulity
He says an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide over the past century is agreed, some of it due to fossil fuels, cement-making and agriculture. However, normal production of CO2 is not known, and it makes up only a tiny part of the atmosphere. "How does a small increase in a very small component have such a large apparent effect? The…
tlambert | April 8, 2008John Lott in his Fox news column claims:
During the 2000 election, with Bill Clinton as president, the economy was viewed through rose-colored glasses. According to polls, voters didn't realize that the country was in a recession.
Pgl has the graphs to show that the US was not in a recession in 2000.
Lott alos has:
Indeed, research has indicated that media bias is real. Kevin Hassett and I looked at 12,620 newspaper and wire service headlines from 1985 through 2004 for stories on the release of official government releasing numbers on the unemployment rate, number of people employed, gross…
tlambert | April 7, 2008John Mashey on the global warming deniers who reckon that AGW is a plot against capitalism:
What's really weird about this is that many of the people who do this (claim that AGW believers are attacking capitalism)
a) Have rarely, or never worked for an actual profit-making company that builds useful products or provides useful services.
b)A few work for PR/lobbying organizations that claim to speak for free-market capitalism. But, actually they generally lobby for that tiny subset of companies (of rich family foundations that own them) that make more money by imposing costs (negative…
tlambert | April 6, 2008Terence offers a definition of Gore's Law:
Gore's Law: As an online climate change debate grows longer, the probability that denier arguments will descend into attacks on Al Gore approaches one.
tlambert | April 2, 2008James has written an open letter to Kevin Rudd. Key paragraphs:
Global climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic with detrimental effects on wildlife, initiation of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland with progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise, shifting of climatic zones with extermination of many animal and plant species, reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but also heavier rains and floods, and…
tlambert | March 31, 2008z, in comments:
"CO2 is not causing global warming, in fact, CO2 is lagging temperature change in all reliable datasets. "
See also my forthcoming paper: "Chickens do not lay eggs, because they have been observed to hatch from them".
tlambert | March 29, 2008Julie Rehmeyer has a decent article about the Lancet studies in Science News. Unlike Neil Munro and Megan McArdle, she doesn't have an axe to grind. She talks to experts in the field like Jana Asher instead of non-experts like Michael Spagat:
The conflicting studies in Iraq show just how tricky it is to apply these methods in messy real-life situations. About the Lancet study, Asher says, "I don't think there was anything obvious in what they did that someone can point to and say this method is flawed. But the WHO study used appropriate methodology too."
The most suspect part of the Lancet…
tlambert | March 28, 2008Last year AP-IPSOS surveyed Americans and asked them to estimate how many Iraqi civilians had died in the war. They grossly underestimated the number, with the median estimate being just 9,890. The Atlantic has now published Megan McArdle's latest anti-Lancet screed, where she argues that it would be better if the Lancet studies had not been published at all because they make people more willing to accept higher estimates of Iraqi deaths. Yes, for war-advocate McArdle, the big problem is that people's estimates of Iraqi deaths are too high.
McArdle's piece reminds of me of Neil Munro's…
tlambert | March 27, 2008Desmogblog posted John Mashey's detailed examination of the spread of Monckton/Schulte's misinformation. For your amusement, Monckton's reply, in full:
"Dr." Mashey says Mr. Schulte plagiarized my research. He did no such thing. It was he, not I, who conducted the research. "Dr." Mashey was told this.
"Dr." Mashey submitted his over-long complaint formally to Mr. Schulte's academic institution, whose investigator rejected it on all counts.
"Dr." Mashey is now himself under investigation for circulating his complaint publicly, in a form in which which inter alia he breaches doctor-patient…
tlambert | March 25, 2008Thanks to Drudge and Instapundit another round of "global warming stopped in 1998" is making the rounds of the blogs.
It's only been a few months since the last time and yet you only have to look at a graph of GISS temperatures to see that warming hasn't stopped:
Falsehoods like this are able to survive and spread due to the efficiency of the disinformation cycle shown below. Notice that there is little chance of actual facts about the world getting in.
What is particularly disappointing about this particular case was that one of the nodes in the cycle, Counterpoint was produced by…
tlambert | March 22, 2008Was I being unfair to Energy and Environment when I described it as a forum for laundering pseudo-science? I mean, didn't they reject Schulte? According to Boehmer-Christiansen:
For your information, I have informed Dr.Schulte that I am happy to publish his own research findings on the effect on patients of climate alamism/'Angst'.
His survey of papers critical of the consensus was a bit patchy and nothing new, as you point out. it was not what was of interest to me; nothing has been published.
Nothing had been published when she wrote that, but now his patchy and nothing new survey of…
tlambert | March 22, 2008Remember EG Beck's dodgy CO2 graph?
You really didn't have to know anything at all about the history and practice of measuring CO2 to deduce that something was wrong with Beck's theory that there were wild fluctuations in CO2 concentration that suddenly ended when the most accurate measurements started. But Energy and Environment published his paper.
Eli Rabett has links to comments from experts Harro Meijer and Ralph Keeling (the son of Charles Keeling), who explain where Beck went wrong. Meijer concludes:
It is shocking that this paper has been able to pass the journal's referee system. "…
tlambert | March 18, 2008Les Roberts has a given a briefing to German parliamentarians on deaths in Iraq.
Hat tip: Media lens
tlambert | March 16, 2008Nexus 6 has opened a school to teach global warming deniers the tricks of the trade. Lesson 1 was on the straw man, while lesson 2 revealed the secret of making things up. Andrew Bolt then almost immediately demonstrated lesson 1 and lesson 2.
tlambert | March 13, 2008CEI, which brought us the ludicrous "CO2: We call it life" ads is trying again. This time they are resorting to ad hominem attacks on Al Gore, and claiming that a carbon tax would result in "death on a massive scale". Makes sense. If CO2 is life, then taxing it must be death.
tlambert | March 7, 2008Monckton tells Glenn Beck how he organised the lawsuit against An Inconvenient Truth:
What happened is that I looked at Al Gore's movie with mounting horror and I identified three dozen scientific errors in it. So I had a weather mate of mine who takes an interest in these matters and also had the money to pay for a court case and I said I thought this film was rubbish. Two weeks later he rang up and said he wanted to do something to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense, which is what global warming is really all about. And so I said, well, the best thing…
tlambert | March 6, 2008Good old Christopher Monckton speaking at the Global Warming Denial Conference
According to Monckton, the movement behind global warming alarmism can be traced to some ugly things, and being wrong about it could have a grave impact on humanity.
"I think the question you're asking is who's behind the scare," Monckton said. "There's been a long history of scares recently and scientific frauds of various kinds. It began, I suppose, with the eugenics movement in the 1930s which led to Hitler. It followed on with the Lysenko movement in Russia under Stalin. It went on with the great leap back…
tlambert | March 5, 2008The latest story doing the rounds of the global warming deniers (Drudge, Instapundit, Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair etc ), is this one Michael Asher:
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out.
Yes, they have repeated, yet again, that same misrepresentation of Tapping's views. I expect Drudge and co will do it yet again in a few more days.
Asher also claims:
All four major global temperature…
tlambert | March 1, 2008James Annan tells the story of how no-one seems to want to publish a survey of climate scientists done by Fergus Brown. The survey found that the IPCC report represents the middle ground of climate scientists with most of them agreeing with it. However about 15% felt that it was too optimistic and another 15% felt that it was too pessimistic.
I think the survey was much better than Bray's useless survey of climate scientists. I would have liked to have seen more than one question, so that the areas of agreement and disagreement with the IPCC could be measured. The response rate was very…