tlambert | July 19, 2007David Roberts shows Your media at work:
People magazine reports that Al Gore's daughter Sarah just got married, revealing in the course of the article that Chilean sea bass was served at the rehearsal dinner.
In the Daily Telegraph, Australian Humane Society Rebecca Keeble writes that "only one week after Live Earth, Al Gore's green credentials slipped." Why? Because Chilean sea bass is endangered.
ABC politics columnist Jake Tapper, smelling the kind of vapid, gimmicky story upon which his profession thrives, asks, "could this be seen as the environmentalist version of Sen. David Vitter's…
tlambert | July 18, 2007Nick Matzke finds that Michael Finkel in the National Geographic is guilty of some sloppy reporting:
The article, for once, actually sensitively discusses the issue of DDT use, and notes accurately (for once) that environmental groups and governmental agencies were not and are not opposed to intelligent use of DDT for malaria control. However, it still has one scientist repeating the anti-environmentalist propaganda that a (mythical) DDT ban killed tens of millions of children in malarious countries. This extremely serious claim is completely unsupported by any study as far as I know. See DDT…
tlambert | July 17, 2007DWE reports:
Dr. Lafta has now been allowed to visit Canada, where he is meeting with researchers from the University of Washington and Simon Fraser University. On Friday, he'll be participating in a live interactive webcast.
Dr. Riyadh Lafta
Al Mustansiriya University, Baghdad Iraq
"Death in Iraq"
Friday, July 20, 2007, 7:00 pm
Live interactive Webcast in Seattle:
UW School of Social Work, Room 305, 4101 15th Ave NE
In Person:
Wosk Center for Dialogue, 518 W. Hastings St. Vancouver BC, CANADA
tlambert | July 17, 2007John Quiggin details how the ABC made lemonade from the lemon that is the Great Global Warming Swindle. You can see the video of Tony Jones' questioning of Martin Durkin here, or read the transcript here. Durkin was unable to offer any defence of his misrepresentation of the science.
David Jones, Andrew Watkins, Karl Braganza and Michael Coughlan have a paper in the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society on the Swindle:
In summary the documentary is not scientifically sound and presents a flawed and very misleading interpretation of the science. While giving the…
tlambert | July 15, 2007Jason Soon is very angry that I dared to criticize John Lott in this post. I wrote about Freedomnomics (where Lott claims that women's suffrage caused a massive increase in the size of the government):
Lott doesn't like women's suffrage
Soon writes:
His basic thesis is that the size of government expanded after women's suffrage. It's an interesting thesis. It may be right or wrong. But it does not follow from it that Lott is advocating that women be deprived of the vote since there are far more systemic and less illiberal views of checking the growth of government than arbitrarily limiting…
tlambert | July 15, 2007Alan Dove writes about his grandfather's involvement in the history of DDT (my emphasis):
DDT owes its notoriety to American applied research during World War II. At the start of the war, chemists had known how to synthesize the compound for decades, and a few knew of its insecticidal properties, but nobody had tested it rigorously or turned it into a practical product. It seems unlikely that anybody would have, if it hadn't fallen into the hands of an obscure group of entomologists at the US Department of Agriculture in 1942.
The USDA scientists had recently been drafted into a critical…
tlambert | July 13, 2007Eli Rabett has a post where he corrects Lubos Motl's blunders about the greenhouse effect, but he left a few crumbs for me. Motl writes (warning, link goes to Motl's blog, which has a design so ugly it makes most MySpace pages look pretty):
The Gentlemen at RealClimate.ORG have decided that my article about climate sensitivity and similar articles by others are too dangerous because they show that every new molecule of CO2 causes smaller greenhouse effect than the previous molecule: the absorption rate gradually approaches saturation. ...
So what do these eleven climate scientists think…
tlambert | July 11, 2007David Friedman examines John Lott's claims that safe storage laws were to blame for the deaths in the Merced pitchfork murders, and comes to similar conclusions to me:
Putting it all together, I conclude that the Merced murders provide evidence against gun control laws, but weaker evidence than John Lott (and Vin Suprynowicz, from whom I think John got the original story) claim. Even without safe storage laws, the parents of small children--one of them was nine, I don't know if she was the youngest--would be likely to keep firearms unloaded and on a high shelf or otherwise out of easy reach.…
tlambert | July 8, 2007The Lavoisier group has published the presentations from their 'Rehabilitating Carbon Dioxide' workshop. Allow me to shorten them for you.
David Archibald: I predict imminent global cooling based on the record from five US weather stations.
Tim Curtin: Nicholas Stern is in league with the Prophet Mohammed.
David Evans: In 1999, we didn't know that the world had cooled from 1940 to 1975. The recent discovery of this fact has changed my mind about AGW.
Michael Hammer: According to my calculations, the IPCC has got the climate sensitivity too high by a factor of 20.
Bob Carter: E-G Beck shows…
tlambert | July 6, 2007Sadly, No has turned all the partisan right-wing commentary at Town Hall into haikus. An example:
Ann Coulter
Fact: Women are dumb.
Didja hear that, Time? Newsweek?
I want the cover!
And they weren't being unfair. Here it is from Coulter:
Women shouldn't vote: "What changed ... that explains the growth of government? The answer is women's suffrage."
She's quoting from Freedomnomics ...
tlambert | July 4, 2007At Wired Science Fraser Cain reports on the latest research on global warming and cosmic rays. There is no link:
But T. Sloan from the University of Lancaster and A.W. Wolfendale from Durham University have looked carefully at the evidence and found it unconvincing. They published their results in a new paper called Cosmic Rays and Global Warming. Their research will be presented at the 30th International Cosmic Ray Conference, held in Merida Mexico from July 3 - July 11, 2007.
According to Sloan and Wolfendale, the 2000 paper highlighting the connection between cosmic rays and low-level…
tlambert | July 2, 2007Gus Dizerega reports
Rachel Carson has never been forgiven by the chemical industry or the right wing for her efforts to educate the public on the downside of trying to solve pest problems with DDT. When I was invited to attend a meeting of the right wing Mt. Pelerin Society a few years back I was surprised to hear not intelligent conversation about markets and ecologies, but rather utterings as to Carson being guilty of "genocide" because banning DDT in the US led to millions of deaths in Africa and elsewhere from malaria. The lunch table where I encountered this imbecility was dominated…
tlambert | July 2, 2007Warning: This post concerns an inter-blog fight. Skip unless you find this stuff interesting.
Over at Catallaxy Jason Soon has accused me "of generating a climate of fear about" global warming and "claiming that emergency intervention measures were needed to address it immediately". Apparently I'm doing this because I am one of those "advocates of big government" and I'm also just like Graeme Bird. When challenged to support his claim, he came up with something ridiculously vague:
I recall John had some argument with someone on Tim's site who claimed we were all rooned if economic growth…
tlambert | July 1, 2007Law professor Glenn Reynolds calls Al Gore a fuddy-duddy:
How to be a 21st century fuddy-duddy.
Reynolds' source is novelist Roger L Simon, who writes:
What fascinates about Al Gore is not - as this article from the Chicago Sun-Times shows so clearly - that he is full of hooey when it comes to his global warming "scientific" pronouncements. It is that so many people believe him and that he is more popular than ever.
As so much has changed in our society, fuddy-duddy "liberalism" has become the most conventional or, dare I say it, conservative of belief systems. It's almost as if the novels…
tlambert | June 29, 2007Bug Girl has a post on setting the record straight on Rachel Carson, quoting US Fish and Wildlife Service, who, unlike Carson critics, know what Carson actually wrote about DDT and malaria, and another on a two-part article in the American Entomologist on Carson.
Ed Darrell has been checking the accuracy of Steve Milloy's "100 things you should know about DDT". So far, Milloy's score is 0 out of 3.
tlambert | June 29, 2007Kirsten Weir has an excellent article in Salon on DDT and Rachel Carson. Weir took the time to talk to actual scientists and found:
Socrates Litsios, a historian and former scientist for the World Health Organization (the agency that has headed global malaria control efforts since the 1960s), says the assertion that "Silent Spring" and the DDT ban led to millions of deaths is "outrageous." May Berenbaum, head of the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has studied mosquitoes and malaria, says that "to blame environmentalists who oppose DDT for more…
tlambert | June 26, 2007Johann Hari reports on the National Review cruise:
The idea that Europe is being "taken over" is the unifying theme of this cruise. Some people go on singles' cruises, some on ballroom-dancing cruises. This is the Muslims Are Coming cruise. Everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. And the man most responsible for this insight is sitting only a few tables down: Mark Steyn. He is wearing sunglasses on top of his head and a bright shirt. Steyn's thesis in his new book, America Alone, is simple: The "European races"--i.e., white people--"are too self-absorbed to breed," but the Muslims are…
tlambert | June 25, 2007Via Eli Rabett, Rolling Stone has the story of the Bush administration's war on global warming science:
But a new investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and enforced by none other than Karl Rove. An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act - as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former…
tlambert | June 25, 2007James Wimberly updates estimates of deaths in Iraq. If you extrapolate from Lancet 2, the death toll is now over a million. Which sort of explains why the coalition won't do counts of their own.
Elsewhere, David Kane has put an R package for the Lancet data and his own discussion of the data. One interesting thing is that 24 of the deaths from car bombs (out of 38 deaths) occured in a single incident.
tlambert | June 21, 2007Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine likes to import the ideas for her anti-environmentalist screeds from America. (For example, DDT ban kills millions, and hockey stick is broken.) Her latest import is the claim that low-flush toilets don't work.
Here it is in a 1998 column from a Competitive Enterprise Instituter:
Included in the numerous provisions of the massive 1992 Energy Policy Act was a requirement that, by 1994, all new toilets sold in the United States must use no more than 1.6 gallons per flush (gpf in Washingtonspeak), well below the 3.5 gpf models most Americans are…