tlambert | November 17, 2007US delegates tried to water down the latest IPCC report:
US delegates in particular said references to "irreversible" climate change and impacts were imprecise.
They argued, for example, that the melting of glaciers or ice sheets -- which could raise ocean levels by several meters (a dozen feet) -- was not "irreversible" as ice could eventually reform.
And also the loss of species was not irreversible because new ones would evolve in a few million years.
And instead of saying that half of all species becoming extinct, the report should say that half of all species will be "just fine".
Via…
tlambert | November 17, 2007The IPCC Forth Assessment Synthesis Report has been released. The Summary for Policy Makers is in Microsft Word format, so I've made a PDF version for easier reading.
A few extracts:
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level (Figure SPM.1).
Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the…
tlambert | November 16, 2007Via James Hrynyshyn, Nature has a good summary of the state of climate politics in the lead up to Bali. There's even a decent summary of the state of play in Austrlia.
Any campaign veteran will tell you that voters are fickle, switching from candidate to candidate and issue to issue as the whim takes them. But in Australia, voters may have changed their minds once and for all on the issue of climate change. In mid-2006, something seemed to shift climate from an 'issue of concern' to the top of the list of people's most serious considerations. ...
Blame any number of factors for the switch:…
tlambert | November 15, 2007Gareth Renowden reports:
On Thursday morning, TVNZ's Breakfast Business programme included an interview with Baron Lawson of Blaby. It's available here. Nigel's opening statement is a shocker:
"There's no global warming happening at the present time. That's clear, accepted on all sides of the argument."
...
I'm particularly disappointed with the TV interviewer, who gave him an incredibly soft ride. You'd think even TV NZ business journalists might be expected know enough to spot blatant rubbish when it's being spouted.
Meanwhile, the Herald (via NZPA) reports him as saying: "We appear to…
tlambert | November 14, 2007Richard Black continues his excellent series on climate scepticism with a look at the question of whether science journals are biased against warming skeptics. It turns out that they are not.
And he also examines the claims that the sun is the cause of current warming. Nope..
Hat tip: Vagueofgodalming.
tlambert | November 14, 2007Andrew Revkin is normally a great reporter, so it is particularly disappointing when he turns in a shocker. He's fallen again for the attraction of a middle ground (see Middle Muddle for the previous occasion). If the IPCC says 2+2=4 and the CEI says 2+2=6, well Revkin reckons that Lomborg saying 2+2=5 sounds nice and sensible. But just because Lomborg is in the centre between the scientists and the think-tankers, doesn't mean that he is right. To see if Lomborg is right, you need to look at the scientific evidence, and Lomborg always cherry picks and misrepresents the science. For…
tlambert | November 13, 2007It's always good value when Media Watch criticizes The Australian because journalists there react with foaming-at-the-mouth outrage. For example, when Media Watch nailed them for misrepresenting Rajenda Pachauri they reacted with 4672 words blasting Media Watch, including the entire editorial, stories from Caroline Overington and Matthew Warren and an opinion piece from David Salter.
So I looked forward with anticipation to Caroline Overington's response to this story on Media Watch:
Wentworth is held by Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull.
But it's tight, as a News Limited commissioned…
tlambert | November 12, 2007Back in August I wrote how Lott tried to amend his complaint against Levitt. Unfortunately for Lott, the judge rejected his proposed amendments as "futile and unduly delayed". So now Lott is appealing the decision. William Ford has the update.
tlambert | November 12, 2007The BBC has a nice piece listing and refuting the top 10 arguments used by global warming skeptics, while Richard Black has surveyed the 61 "scientists" who signed a letter opposing action to prevent warming.
tlambert | November 11, 2007Daniel Cressey summarizes the story of the spoof paper that pretended to prove that global warming was caused by benthic bacteria rather than humans. He also has an interview with the author of the spoof. David Thorpe, who helped set it up, explains why he did it on his blog.
Fooled were such folks as Benny Peiser, Ron Bailey and Rush Limbaugh.
Global warming skeptics have offered excuses for those fooled. Roy Spencer said:
Even though the hoax was quite elaborate, and the paper looked genuine, a little digging revealed that the authors, research center, and even the scientific journal the…
tlambert | November 9, 2007Ed Darrell has been working his way through Steve Milloy's 100 things about DDT. See if you can spot what Milloy did in number 10. Here's Milloy:
[Rachel Carson wrote] "Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched." DeWitt's 1956 article (in Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry) actually yielded a very different conclusion. Quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season. DeWitt reports that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared…
tlambert | November 8, 2007Steve Milloy's Junk Science has now endorsed Climate Audit in the Weblog Awards, telling readers to vote for Climate Audit instead of JunkScience. I know that the we shouldn't take the awards seriously, but other people will. Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy is a much better science blog and the best chance for beating them. Please vote for Bad Astronomy. You can vote once every 24 hours.
In other Weblog award news, Sadly No! has an unbeatable lead for Funniest Blog, so vote for the always reasonable Jon Swift.
And since he was desperate enough to ask for votes in my comments, vote for Hot Topic…
tlambert | November 5, 2007I don't like the way the Weblog awards are decided. Because you can vote once per day per computer you have access to, to win bloggers need to post every day and shamelessly exhort their readers to vote. This felt wrong to me, so when I was a finalist in 2005 and 2006 I ignored the whole thing. But this year I'm not a finalist, so I'm asking you to vote for a couple of blogs.
In the Funniest Blog category, a truly vile blog called DUmmie FUnnies must not win. There was an on-line appeal to raise money to pay for medical care for someone called Andy Stephenson, who was suffering from…
tlambert | November 2, 2007
I'm with Silas down at Coogee Beach. There's an alcohol ban in the
park behind the beach so the rummies hang out at the bus shelter next
to the park. There's a bench seat around the side of the shelter
where they can sit without getting in the way of the people waiting for
the bus. I'm walking by with Silas when one of them comes over to me
and she asks me a surprise question:
"How many pounds is six and a half kilos?"
I mentally divide 6.5 by 0.453 and answer:
"Ummm ... about fourteen pounds."
She's not happy with this answer. It seems she'd told the others that
she had a six and half…
tlambert | November 2, 2007Michael Dobbs continues to disappoint as the Washington Post's Fact Checker. In his new column he refuses to correct the mistake he made when he wrongly said that the judge had found "nine significant errors" in An Inconvenient Truth. Instead, Dobbs writes:
Contrary to Kreider's assertion, the judge did talk about "errors" in the Gore movie, and did not always put quotation marks around the word error, as some readers maintained. See points 18 and 19 in his judgment available in full here.
This is misleading. The judge put quotes around "error" 19 times. If he considered all nine of the…
tlambert | October 26, 2007The Lancet provides a brief history of the attempt to eradicate malaria.
In 1955, WHO set out to rid the world of malaria. The campaign, called the Global Malaria Eradication Programme, focused on vector control. The plan was to interrupt malaria transmission primarily by attacking the malaria's mosquito vector with the potent, new insecticide dicholoro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT). It was thought that if the parasite's cycle of transmission from human to mosquito and back again could be blocked for 3 years, the parasite, and with it the disease, would disappear.
Scores of nations joined…
tlambert | October 24, 2007John Stossel is his usual misleading self with a piece denying anthropogenic warming. Video here and summarized here. Tamino details the way Stossel deceives his viewers:
Probably the most irritating aspect of Stossel's "report" is a brief clip from An Inconvenient Truth of Al Gore saying, "... sea levels will rise 20 feet." What's irritating is that I've seen AIT often enough to know that this quote is taken out of context -- so much so that Stossel doesn't even have the honesty to play Al Gore's entire sentence. What Gore says is that IF the Greenland ice sheet, or the West Antarctic ice…
tlambert | October 22, 2007Yose Widjaja, one of my students, has written a cool graph visualization system. The easiest way to get a feel for the way it works is to look at a video:
We're looking for comments, new graphs to visualize and so on. He has a blog for the project here, where you can download a demo and learn more about it.
tlambert | October 22, 2007Pinko Punko visited DC and took some pictures, including a couple for us. The American Enterprise Institute:
And the Completely Evil Institute: