tlambert | December 27, 2007Some time ago, Steve McIntyre insinuated that Gavin Schmidt was dishonest after one of McIntyre's comments was held up in moderation. In his latest post (at 9:20 am on December 26) McIntyre complains that:
realclimate censored my post, which pointed out an incident of realclimate fallability, as opposed to admitting and correcting that part of their post which was in error.
After all, he'd posted his comment at 5:00 pm on December 24, and they'd had all of December 25 to approve it. What other explanation could there be for the fact that it was not through moderation by 9:20 am on December…
tlambert | December 25, 2007This was taken on Christmas Eve at the local seafood store. They were very busy inside.
Hope you all had a nice time!
tlambert | December 23, 2007I didn't write this. It is a guest post from Mrs Lambert, so be nice.
Everyone knows the Christmas story. Mary and Joseph go to Bethlehem, the Inn is full so Mary has to give birth in a stable. The story sounds sweet, emphasizing the humble circumstances of Jesus' birth.
But that's not the message people got from the story two thousand years ago. Here's the way they would have seen it:
Mary is pregnant, but Joseph, the man she is engaged to, is not the father and everyone knows it. Mary would have been labeled a whore.
Joseph didn't reject her despite the huge social pressure on him to do…
tlambert | December 23, 2007This is your thread to discuss anything. Like, say, why the US government spends a greater fraction of its GDP on health care than Australia without providing universal care.
tlambert | December 20, 2007Hey, remember John McLean? The guy who kept steering Andrew Bolt into brick walls? Well he's teamed up with Tom Harris of the NRSP to accuse the IPCC of lying about the scientific support for its reports:
In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this statement appears, the critical chapter 9, "Understanding and Attributing Climate Change". Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60% of them were rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert…
tlambert | December 18, 2007Andrew Dessler tried again to get a debate. He was going to debate Tim Ball on BlogTakRadio, but alas, Ball couldn't get through.
He did get to talk to various callers. My favourite was one Robert Colmes who ordered Dessler to stop saying that there was a consensus because he (Colmes) didn't agree. Oh and Colmes denied that there was such a thing as global climate.
Update: Dessler posts on it.
tlambert | December 17, 2007Christopher Monckton has responded to my Monckton Watch post. In a long and rambling post he writes:
If the science behind the scare is as certain as the zombies say, why are they so terrified of a few doubters? Google me and you'll find hundreds of enviro-loony websites, such as Wikipedia, now an international music-hall joke for inaccuracy, that call me a fraud (for writing about climate science when I'm not a climate scientist), a plagiarist (for citing learned papers rather than making up scare stories), and a liar (for saying I'm a member of the House of Lords when - er - I'm a member…
tlambert | December 13, 2007Bob Carter has managed to get a whole bunch of people to sign a letter touting his warming ended in in 1998 claim. Here's what they signed:
there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.
I bet that they didn't include a graph of global temperatures:
You know, even the CEI admits that this "warming ended in 1998" claim is disingenuous, but look at all the people who signed Carter's disingenuous letter.
And look…
tlambert | December 12, 2007I don't think I've ever seen a more dishonest piece of reporting than this whoppper from Simon Caldwell at the Daily Mail:
Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.
The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.
Needless to say, this story was linked by Drudge and all the other denialists…
tlambert | December 10, 2007In the olden days to become a distinguished climate scientist you had to work hard, do lots of research and publish it in good journals. Now there's a quicker method. Put out a press release.
The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) has been denied the opportunity to present at panel discussions, side events, and exhibits; its members were denied press credentials. The group consists of distinguished scientists from Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The scientists, citing pivotal evidence on climate change published in peer-reviewed…
tlambert | December 9, 2007John Mashey has written an account of Monckton and Schulte vs Oreskes affair. Schulte seems to be guilty of professional misconduct.
tlambert | December 8, 2007Ben Thurley encounters a global warming denier at the Bali conference:
I just had my first conversation with a climate change sceptic/denier here at the UN Climate Change talks. I was at the Hadley Centre stand (it's a research unit associated with the UK Meteorological Office). Everything he said sounded strangely familiar, but it was funny to have a fairly posh Englishman telling me that "The southern hemisphere is cooling overall. " Sorry, I'm from the southern hemisphere, and believe me, Australia, like the rest of the hemisphere, is warming.
Yep, it was Monckton. So what's Monckton on…
tlambert | November 27, 2007After Matt Drudge linked this Christopher Booker column in London's Daily Telegraph, the usual dupes are declaring global warming a myth. Booker claims:
the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.
A quick look at a graph of the satellite-measured temperatures exposes Booker's cherry picking:…
tlambert | November 25, 2007John Quiggin writes about the culture warmongers:
Third, and most importantly, the factoid-based, point-scoring, style of argument that goes with the culture wars eventually leads to complete insulation from factual reality. Any proposition, no matter how ridiculous, can be defended in this way, long after the average person has seen through it. This has been most obvious in relation to climate change and Iraq, but there are a whole string of issues where the culture warriors have imprisoned themselves in an orthodoxy every bit as constricting as the largely imaginary monolithic leftism they…
tlambert | November 25, 2007Caroline Overington has topped her previous effort with this:
Top journalist Caroline Overington has denied hitting George Newhouse, the Labor candidate for the Sydney seat of Wentworth - but he insists he was slapped, and it hurt. ...
A Labor campaigner, who witnessed the alleged slap, said Overington had her children with her.
"She came over and slapped him on the right side of the face as he was on the phone. It was really strong. It forced his head back. She then walked past him to vote."
And:
It was parental concern that inspired the exchange. A witness said Overington was upset that…
tlambert | November 23, 2007I don't know whether it's that the Australian just hires journalists with really thin skins or that the water there contains some skin thinning chemical, but they always seem to overreact to criticism. The latest is from Caroline please preference Malcolm Overington.
You see, Gam blogged about Overington's "only joking" endorsement of Malcolm Turnbull with this comment:
How did she manage to type that with the Member for Wentworth's member in her mouth?
Overington didn't seem to get the joke because she phoned Gam and tried to bully him into removing the statement and even threatened to sue…
tlambert | November 22, 2007Andrew Dessler contacted Steve Milloy's demanddebate.com to see if they could provide a global warming skeptic for debate. Alas, Milloy could not come up with one.
tlambert | November 21, 2007Discover has a good article on Rachel Carson, DDT and malaria. Unlike many other recently published articles (e.g. the New York Times) it gets the science right:
But elsewhere, the picture is murkier. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 500 million cases of malaria occur each year, resulting in an estimated 1 million deaths. Most of these cases of illness and mortality occur in sub-Saharan Africa. But no one can say whether malaria rates have increased or declined in Africa as a whole in recent decades because of difficulties in collecting data, says Valentina Buj, public-…
tlambert | November 18, 2007Ray Pierrehumbert takes apart two French global warming skeptics, Claude Allègre and Vincent Courtillot. My favourite bit:
This flub is nothing compared to the trouble Courtillot's collaborator Le Mouël got into during the debates, when he was trying to show that the 1 Watt per square meter variation in the Solar irradiance over the solar cycle is fully half the greenhouse gas forcing. Well, there is the little matter that Le Mouël forgot to take into account the sphericity of the Earth (which means divide the solar irradiance by 4) or its reflectivity (which means take 70% of the result…