tlambert | October 19, 2007Correction: My post a few days ago implied implied that the Washington Post celebrated Gore's Nobel by publishing four items repeating the falsehood that a judge found nine errors in the movie. This was wrong. I missed their editorial on the Nobel Prize where they also took a swipe at Gore:
His movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," about the effects of climate change, was a box-office hit and an Oscar winner. That achievement is impressive and important, notwithstanding factual misstatements and exaggerations such as the "nine significant errors" in the film cited by a British judge Wednesday.
No…
tlambert | October 18, 2007Several climate scientists have now examined the alleged errors in An Inconvenient Truth. At RealClimate Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) and Michael Mann (director Penn State Earth System Science Center) write:
First of all, "An Inconvenient Truth" was a movie and people expecting the same depth from a movie as from a scientific paper are setting an impossible standard. Secondly, the judge's characterisation of the 9 points is substantially flawed. He appears to have put words in Gore's mouth that would indeed have been wrong had they been said (but they weren't).…
tlambert | October 16, 2007David Appell tells of his correspondence with Tim Ball
The other day I challenged Tim Ball's assertion that "the world is cooling." I showed temperatures plots for the last several years, and of course it depends on how you want to define "climate" -- do you consider it the last one year of temperatures, the last five years, the last ten years, etc.? Of course, none is inherently correct -- there is no fundamental definition -- but all are meaningful to consider.
As I noted, all moving averages over the last 25 years are increasing, though there is perhaps a small flattening in the last few…
tlambert | October 16, 2007John Mashey offered some good advice in a comment on my post on the War on Gore. I'm following Michael Tobis' example and boosting it from comments.
Editorial and News
Editorial and news really are often quite separate, with the Wall Street Journal as an extreme case. I get it for the numerous excellent articles and rarely look at the Op-ed section, except that every once in a while, they actually say something rational. I once discussed the separation with a Wall Street Journal reporter, who started by saying the Editorial gang were "evil neocon dinosaurs," then moved to less-unrepeatable…
tlambert | October 15, 2007Paul Krugman offers an explanation of Gore Derangement Syndrome
So if science says that we have a big problem that can't be solved with tax cuts or bombs -- well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor's Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of -- who else? -- George Soros.
Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He's taken…
tlambert | October 14, 2007When last we heard from Christopher Monckton he was too gravely ill to answers questions about how someone claiming to be him and using his ISP had altered his own wikipedia entry and added on obvious fabrication, to wit,
The Guardian "is reported to have paid Monckton £50,000 in damages.". Monckton seems to have made a rapid recovery, because within a week or two he was speechifying at Cambridge University:
He challenged Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, describing it as the "Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror" film of the year, and claimed to have found serious and deliberate scientific errors…
tlambert | October 13, 2007In my post on the decision by Justice Burton to allow the showing of An Inconvenient Truth because it was "broadly accurate" I listed some of the reporters who wrongly claimed that the judge decided that AIT had nine errors. Mary Jordan's story was particularly bad. Most of the reporters eventually got around to telling their readers that the judge found AIT "broadly accurate", but Jordan only mentioned the negative parts of the decision. And Bob Somerby has more:
"Al Gore's Film Has 9 Errors, British Judge Rules in Suit." That's the headline on page one, promoting this news report, filed…
tlambert | October 13, 2007ScienceBlogger Shelley Batts is competing for a $10,000 college blogging scholarship. She has a great blog called Retrospectacle. The scholarship winner is decided by votes, so go here and vote for Shelley!.
tlambert | October 12, 2007For this post I didn't go trawling through freeper or blog comments or look at obscure blogs. I just went to memeorandum.
William Teach
The Nobel Prize committee has basically surrendered to hysterics, mass exaggerators, and liars, most of who are not even climatologists or even any type of scientist.
Scott Johnson:
Today's award to Al Gore and the IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" fits in with a subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers,…
tlambert | October 11, 2007Joint winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.
Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds.…
tlambert | October 11, 2007A UK High Court judge has rejected a lawsuit by political activist Stuart Dimmock to stop the distribution of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to British schools. Justice Burton agreed that
"Al Gore's presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate."
There were nine points where Burton decided that AIT differed from the IPCC and that this should be addressed in the Guidance Notes for teachers to be sent out with the movie.
Unfortunately a gaggle of useless journalists have misreported this decision as one that AIT contained nine scientific…
tlambert | October 11, 2007A news.com.au story asserts
"Australians would re-elect Prime Minister John Howard in a landslide if votes were cast purely on policy - not personality or party loyalty - according to the first results from a "blind voting" tool developed by NEWS.com.au."
Almost 35,200 of the 72,300 participants who have completed the Vote-a-matic were matched with the Coalition, compared with 28,700 participants who were identified as a fit with Kevin Rudd's Labor Party.
A further 6700 participants have been matched with the Democrats, while around 1700 went to the Greens and 175 to Family First.
The trends…
tlambert | October 10, 2007RealClimate reports that the notorious Oregon Petition is back. This time the mailings are using the new JPANDS version of the Robinson's dodgy paper. RealClimate are doing an open source debunking, so head over there and join in the fun.
tlambert | October 10, 2007Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts have an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun:
Not wanting to think about civilian deaths in Iraq has become almost universal. But ignorance of the Iraqi death toll is no longer an option.
An Associated Press poll in February found that the average American believed about 9,900 Iraqis had been killed since the end of major combat operations in 2003. Recent evidence suggests that things in Iraq may be 100 times worse than Americans realize.
News report tallies suggest that about 75,000 Iraqis have died since the U.S.-led invasion. But a study of 13 war-affected countries…
tlambert | October 6, 2007Tim Ball and Tom Harris tell us:
The world is cooling. Global temperatures have declined since 1998 and a growing number of climate experts expect this trend to continue until at least 2030.
Do you think that Ball or Harris or any of these "growing number" of climate experts would be willing to bet on cooling?
tlambert | October 6, 2007The latest issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPANDS) has attracted the attention of Eli Rabett and Lauredhel. Rabett notices that JPANDS has published an updated version of the paper used to mislead folks into signing the Oregon Petition, while Lauredhel looks at a dodgy study they published arguing for an abortion breast cancer link. (It just looks at aggregate data and is obviously trumped by studies that use individual data.) This issue even has a favourable review of Tom Bethell's Creationist tract.
Kathleen Seidel has the definitive examination of all the…
tlambert | October 4, 2007Revere reports on a new paper that found that women with the highest DDT exposure had a five-fold elevated breast cancer risk:
This is one study, albeit a well conducted one by experienced investigators. It is also relatively small, limited by the number of historical stored serum samples. But the effect is large, which makes it less likely we are seeing the consequences of some hidden bias (an unmeasured variable related to breast cancer risk that differs dramatically in the high DDT group versus its comparison). It is possible for such differences to exist, but for such a large effect the…
tlambert | October 3, 2007On June 6, someone with IP address 81.77.248.148 added this passage to Christopher Monckton's wikipedia page (emphasis mine):
Monckton has been published in academic journals on the subject of climate change and his principal calculations have been reviewed and found accurate by one of the IPCC's expert reviewers. Monckton is currently studying higher mathematics at university level. The Guardian was compelled to publish a correction the day after one of its columnists had criticized Monckton's climate-change analysis as scientifically inaccurate, and is reported to have paid Monckton £50,…
tlambert | October 1, 2007This is an open thread (and your last chance to get into the 500,000th comment contest).
tlambert | September 30, 2007
There was a sales person at my front door. The conversation went like this:
SP: Are you interested in getting Foxtel?
Me: No.
SP: Well, [he's about to launch into his sales pitch, but then he notices Silas] That's a really big dog.
Me: Yes.
SP: OK, bye.