tlambert | September 29, 2007Mark Steyn on the trouble he has with facts:
Incidentally, I stopped writing for the [New York] Times a few years ago because their fanatical "fact-checking" copy-editors edited my copy into unreadable sludge.
I think it's some sort of chemical reaction -- add facts to a Mark Steyn column and it curdles into sludge. Macleans doesn't seem to bother with fact checkers because check this Sten column out:
The other day, an admiring profile of Cate Blanchett ("Green before it was hip, she cites Al Gore and David de Rothschild as heroes and believes that leaf blowers 'sum up everything that is…
tlambert | September 29, 2007Robert McClure reports:
Now the Society of Environmental Journalists' Watchdog Tipsheet has just revealed that Michaels withdrew as an expert witness in a recently decided landmark court case in which automakers sought to turn back state efforts to rein in cars' production of greenhouse gasses.
Michaels said he would testify only if his funders' identities could be kept secret, court documents show. Later, when Greenpeace intervened in the case specifically to pry loose that list, Michaels complained that his consulting firm, New Hope Environmental Services Inc. would suffer.
Because fossil…
tlambert | September 28, 2007James Hansen replies to the deceitful IBD editorial:
The latest swift-boating (unless there is a new one among seven
unanswered calls on my cell) is the whacko claim that I received
$720,000.00 from George Soros. Here is the real deal, with the order
of things as well as I can remember without wasting even more time
digging into papers and records.
Sometime after giving a potentially provocative interview to Sixty
Minutes, but before it aired, I tried to get legal advice on my rights
of free speech. I made two or three attempts to contact people at
Freedom Forum, who I had given permission to…
tlambert | September 27, 2007Via RealClimate, James Hansen refutes the Investor's Business Daily's claim that he endorsed global cooling in 1971:
Mr. McCaslin reported that Rasool and Hansen were colleagues at NASA
and "Mr. Rasool came to his chilling conclusions by resorting in
part to a new computer program developed by Mr. Hansen that studied
clouds above Venus."
What was that program? It was a 'Mie scattering' code I had written
to calculate light scattering by spherical particles. Indeed, it was
useful for Venus studies, as it helped determine the size and
refractive index of the particles in the clouds that veil…
tlambert | September 26, 2007Last year I wrote about the inaccurate claims that the World Health Organization had reversed its policy on DDT when it had in fact supported its use all along.
A recent paper in Lancet Infectious Diseases 2007; 7:632-633 also concludes that there has been little real change. Authors Hans J Overgaarda and Michael G Angstreicha write:
In September, 2006, WHO alarmed many of us working toward a reduction in the use of toxic chemicals such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). In a press release, the organisation announced the promotion of DDT for indoor spraying against malaria mosquitoes…
tlambert | September 24, 2007William Connolley provides an example of Christopher Monckton telling a fib. I have another example. In Monckton's letter to Senators Snowe and Rockefeller, he writes:
Finally, you may wonder why it is that a member of the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature, wholly unconnected with and unpaid by the corporation that is the victim of your lamentable letter, should take the unusual step of calling upon you as members of the Upper House of the United States legislature either to withdraw what you have written or resign your sinecures.
But Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is not a…
tlambert | September 24, 2007Say hello to two new to ScienceBlogs bloggers, Coby Beck, of How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic fame, and Science Woman who writes about balancing family and an academic career.
tlambert | September 23, 2007Eli Rabbett coined the usage "to Rasool", to refer to the practice of attributing papers to just one of the authors in order to target the only author mentioned:
A very famous paper by S. Ichtiaque Rasool and Steven Schneider in the early 70s modeled the effects of aerosols on global temperature. For years it has been used by denialists to attack Schneider and by claiming that global cooling was predicted in the 70s to attack the fact that global temperatures are warming rapidly. As part of their strategy, Rasool often disappears, much as has happened with Michael Mann, whose first papers on…
tlambert | September 21, 2007Aaron Swartz has written a nice article giving the story of the anti-environmentalist war on Rachel Carson.
tlambert | September 21, 2007Will McLean found an error in the detailed tables for the ORB survey. The tables indicated that 60% of the Baghdad sample was Christian, which doesn't seem plausible. They've now released corrected tables. It looks like the religion of some of those surveyed was entered incorrectly. Also at the ORB link is a short video interview with Dr Munqeth Daghir, ORB's Iraqi pollster. And ORB is conducting additional interviews in rural Iraq to see if that makes a difference to their estimate.
tlambert | September 21, 2007Jim Giles, who broke the story of how for-profit publishers had hired Eric Dezenhall to run a PR campaign against Open Access, has a post at the New Scientist Science News blog, where he posts a copy of Dezenhall's proposal. It always nice to see more of the inner workings of the astroturf industry:
4 Enlist Think Tank Support
Seek studies, white papers and public commentary from think tanks that may quantify the risks, the societal price tag of public access. Groups that may be considered include the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings, Cato, Competitive Enterpise Institute and…
tlambert | September 20, 2007
Study this cartoon by Nexus 6.
Read this post by Richard Littlemore.
Update: Nexus 6 rubs it in.
tlambert | September 20, 2007The McIntyre factor is the amount that you have to multiply the size of an adjustment in the GISS US temperatures by to get the number of words in the resulting Steve McIntyre post. Empirical evidence puts the McIntyre factor at 125,000. You see, on Sep 10 GISS made some small changes:
We switched to the current version of USHCN data set which includes data through 2005. The effect of this change is shown by the following graphs. Also see tables of comparisons for globe and US-only.
In the US, 1998 and 1934 each changed by just 0.01 degrees C. So naturally Steve McIntyre wrote a 2,500…
tlambert | September 17, 2007Ed Darrell writes about the fools promoting DDT as a solution to West Nile virus. It's as if these people think that there are no other insecticides in the world. And he has more examples in a later post: Steve Milloy and Henry Miller.
tlambert | September 17, 2007James Wimberly adds the new ORB survey to his chart that extrapolates the various surveys of Iraqi deaths. He comments:
The ORB estimate of 1.22 million is very close to Lancet 2 updated according to the IBC body count timeline - 1.16 million. So they reinforce each other.
We now have four survey estimates from three independent teams of professionals using two different good-practice methods. They all say that the excess deaths in Iraq are hugely greater than the IBC body count, let alone the numbers from the MNF or the Iraqi government.
Les Roberts comments:
"The poll is 14 months later…
tlambert | September 16, 2007Earlier I suggested that surfacestations.org was cherry picking by showing a station with warming as an example of a "bad" station, and a station with no warming as an example of a "good" station. Of course, it could have turned out that I was wrong, and those were the temperature trends of typical "bad" and "good" stations. But now they've classified one third of the stations and you can see that the cherry picking has been confirmed -- the trends are the same for "good" stations (in red) and "bad" stations (in green).
BigCityLib has more.
tlambert | September 14, 2007A new survey puts the Iraqi death toll at over one one million:
These findings come from a poll released today by O.R.B., the British polling agency that have been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a representative sample of 1,461 adults aged 18+ answered the following question:-
Q How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.
None 78%…
tlambert | September 13, 2007There has been more discussion at Crooked Timber on David Kane's criticism of the Lancet study. In response to Tim Burke's comment:
Good faith skepticism starts with, "Ok, I want to look at why you're making this claim, and your evidence for it. I don't want to take anything on faith." Not, "I'm sure you're wrong, because the results you're reporting aren't convenient for my political views and for my common sense understanding of things."--e.g., refusing to take seriously someone else's findings because of a particular conviction or faith in an opposite finding.
Kane replied with:
I think…
tlambert | September 8, 2007Schulte has published a reply to Oreskes' response. While Schulte claims not to be a contrarian, Kevin Grandia has been looking at his links with Christopher Monckton. Meanwhile, John Lynch posts on Shulte's reply and commenter "Chris" (who is, I suspect, Christopher Monckton) threatens lawsuits against Oreskes and Lynch:
By making the allegations his own and endorsing them with such lamentably unscientific enthusiasm, however, he has exposed himself to the legal action which may well follow if Oreskes does not come forward quickly with an unreserved apology to Schulte.
Also posting is…
tlambert | September 8, 2007One of Climate Care's carbon offset schemes involves replacing diesel pumps for irrigation with treadle pumps. They say that the benefits include:
Allows 2 or 3 harvests a year, instead of 1
Prevents farmers having to leave their families to work in the city during 'off season'
Farmers' income increases, often between two and five-fold
So as a result of trade both parties are better off. Someone in a rich country gets to offset their CO2 emissions, while poor farmers save the money they would have had to have spent hiring diesel pumps and increase their income.
Sounds good, who could…