tlambert | August 12, 2007Because of the corrections to the GISS data 1998 and 1934 went from being in a virtual tie, to being in a virtual tie.. This, of course, has not stopped global warming denialists from endlessly hyping it as a big change.
For example, Glenn Reynolds:
Ace wonders why nobody's talking about the NASA climate data revision.
Because the change is trivial. Duh.
UPDATE: Well, here's a bit of notice.
The link goes to James Taranto, who gets his facts wrong, confusing the US temperature with the global temperature. Reynolds doesn't notice.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: "Will the mainstream media…
tlambert | August 11, 2007Guy Pearse's book, High and Dry has been reviewed by Tim Flannery:
The Prime Minister and several of his key ministers, Pearse asserts, have been captured by a group of industries and their lobbyists, known as the greenhouse mafia. They have infiltrated deep into the bureaucracy and they continue to make sure the Prime Minister and his ministers hear nothing by way of advice but what they want them to hear. There is consequently, Pearse says, no debate whatsoever in cabinet on climate change. The Prime Minister simply elucidates his policy and the party follows.
Pearse describes the think…
tlambert | August 10, 2007Steve McIntyre found an error in the GISS temperature data for the US. The GISTEMP page says:
USHCN station records up to 1999 were replaced by a version of USHCN data with further corrections after an adjustment computed by comparing the common 1990-1999 period of the two data sets. (We wish to thank Stephen McIntyre for bringing to our attention that such an adjustment is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000.)
How much difference did the adjustment make to the US temperature series? Well, it changed this:
to this:
Not much difference. The right hand end of the…
tlambert | August 10, 2007Ed Darrell is working is way through the inaccuracies in junkscience.com's "100 things you should know about DDT". He's up to the claim that DDT prevented 500 million deaths:
First, the mathematics are simply impossible: At about 1 million deaths per year, if we assume DDT could have prevented all of the deaths (which is not so), and had we assumed usage started in 1939 instead of 1946 (a spot of 7 years and 7 million deaths), we would have 69 million deaths prevented by 2008. As best I can determine, the 500 million death figure is a misreading from an early WHO report that noted about 500…
tlambert | August 9, 2007Remember Dennis Bray's useless survey of climate scientists? The URL and password were posted to the climatesceptics mail list, so the results were biased and included responses from people who were not climate scientists. Bray refused to concede that this meant that the survey was hopelessly flawed. Now in a post on Nature's Climate Feedback blog: von Storch and Bray say that the survey has now been published. I was somewhat surprised by this. What journal would publish something so obviously flawed? But it seems to be just published as a GKSS technical report. Not that that will stop…
tlambert | August 9, 2007Matthew Warren claims in the Australian:
The head of the world's leading climate change organisation has backed the Howard Government's decision to defer setting a long-term target for reducing greenhouse emissions until the full facts are known.
Despite widespread criticism of the Government's decision last month to defer its decision on cutting emissions until next year, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said yesterday he agreed with the approach. ...
The Coalition and Labor have committed to the introduction of emissions trading from about 2011, based on a long-…
tlambert | August 8, 2007Kent Hovind has an offer of $250,000 for anyone who can give a scientific proof of evolution. Now Steve Milloy is following in Hovind's footsteps with the Ultimate Global Warming Challenge: $100,000 if you can provide a scientific proof of harmful man-made warming.
Believe it or not, Milloy's version is even dodgier than Hovind's. At least Hovind says that a committee of trained scientists will evaluate any evidence offered. (Though there are doubts on this) Milloy isn't even pretending that the judging will be objective -- his own junkscience.com will decide whether they have to pay out…
tlambert | August 7, 2007The AP's Paul Foy reports on the American Statistical Association meetings discussion on the Lancet studies:
Number crunchers this week quibbled with Roberts's survey methods and blasted his refusal to release all his raw data for scrutiny -- or any data to his worst critics. Some discounted him as an advocate for world peace, although none could find a major flaw in his surveys or analysis.
"Most of the criticism I heard was carping," said Stephen Fienberg, a professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "I thought the surveys were pretty good for non-statisticians…
tlambert | August 6, 2007Newsweek has a good story on the global warming denial industry:
Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be…
tlambert | August 6, 2007The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
Rises in sea levels caused by climate change are likely to be bigger than predicted and more dangerous, but scientists are reluctant to "stick their necks out" on the issue for fear of being labelled alarmist, a leading international expert is warning.
Stefan Rahmstorf, a lead scientific author of the recent United Nations report on climate change, has just published a new way of projecting sea-level rises caused by global warming. His method suggests much higher rises than those published by the UN panel this year, adding to concerns that the panel was too…
tlambert | August 5, 2007
Surely Baghdad's electricity supply couldn't get worse than shown in the graph on the right?
Alas, it seems it can:
Iraq's power grid is on the brink of collapse because of insurgent sabotage, rising demand, fuel shortages and provinces that are unplugging local power stations from the national grid, officials said Saturday.
Electricity Ministry spokesman Aziz al-Shimari said power generation nationally is only meeting half the demand, and there had been four nationwide blackouts over the past two days. The shortages across the country are the worst since the summer of 2003, shortly after…
tlambert | August 2, 2007I must follow the fashion here at Scienceblogs, so there is now a group for Deltoid readers on Facebook.
tlambert | August 1, 2007When we last visited Lott's lawsuit against Levitt, Lott was asking the judge to reconsider the dismissal of his case against Freakonomics.
Well, the judge denied this, so now Lott wants to amend his complaint. The new complaint adds is now about another sentence in Freakonomics as well:
Then there was the troubling allegation that Lott actually invented
some of the survey data that supports his more-guns/less-crime theory.
Regardless of whether the data were faked, Lott's admittedly
intriguing hypothesis doesn't seem to be true. When other scholars
have tried to replicate his results, they…
tlambert | July 31, 2007Tamino has the scoop on the latest attempt to revive the old UHIs-mean-it's-not-getting-warmer argument. Eli Rabett has more.
tlambert | July 29, 2007Long time readers will be familiar with the epic that is Michael Fumento's attempt to debunk the first Lancet survey. A summary can't really do it justice, but what basically happened is that Fumento dismissed the 100,000 number because he claimed that they included Falluja when they should have left it out. When I explained that they had left Falluja out, rather than admit to making a mistake, Fumento repeatedly and loudly insisted that the 100,000 number came from including Falluja. Now he's claiming to be vindicated by David Kane's critique. Kane, of course, is arguing that the Lancet…
tlambert | July 28, 2007
The good electricity news from Iraq has been lots of announcements of plans to improve things. Unfortunately, electricity production has not improved. To the left you can see how the electricity supply in Baghdad has gotten worse and worse. The graph ends in May. Why?:
As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad…
tlambert | July 27, 2007David Glenn, in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Lott-Levitt lawsuit has been provisionally settled:
The letter of clarification, which was included in today's filing, offers a doozy of a concession. In his 2005 message, Mr. Levitt told Mr. McCall that "it was not a peer-refereed edition of the Journal." But in his letter of clarification, Mr. Levitt writes: "I acknowledge that the articles that were published in the conference issue were reviewed by referees engaged by the editors of the JLE. In fact, I was one of the peer referees."
Mr. Levitt's letter also concedes that…
tlambert | July 27, 2007Daniel Davies summarizes what is wrong with David Kane's criticism:
The mathematical guts of the paper is that under certain assumptions, the addition of the very violent cluster in Fallujah can add so much uncertainty to the estimate of the post-invasion death rate that it stretches the bottom end of the 95% confidence interval for the risk rate below 1. From this, David Kane concludes that the paper was wrong to reject the hypothesis that the Iraq War had not made things worse.
Let's back up and look at that again. Under David Kane's assumptions, the discovery of the Fallujah cluster was a…
tlambert | July 24, 2007David Kane has asked me to post his argument that
Roberts et al. (2004) claim that the risk of death increased by
2.5-fold (95% CI 1.6-4.2) in Iraq after the US-led invasion. I provide
evidence that, given the other data presented in their paper, this confidence
interval must be wrong. Comments and corrections are welcome.
Let me kick things off with my comment:
His argument turns on the CI for the post-invasion mortality rate (including Falluja) of 1.4-23.2. I would suggest that he has proven that this CI is wrong (as it obviously is, since there is no way the mortality rate could be…