tlambert | June 16, 2007I've written before about the Australian's war on science (see Part I II III IV V VI VII VIII). According to the Australian global warming isn't happening and we're not causing it and stopping it would destroy the economy. Now, in a barking mad editorial (entitled, I kid you not, "Reality bites the psychotic Left") they offer us this:
Rather than objectively assess the realities of climate change and the practical task ahead they [the psychotic Left] advocate symbolic, but ultimately futile, penance. By persisting with a misguided campaign to turn back the clock and demonise the Howard…
tlambert | June 16, 2007Remember E-G Beck's dodgy CO2 graph? Well, at RealClimate Stefan Rahmstorf finds Beck presenting another dodgy graph. Look at the perfectly regular temperature cycles in Beck's graph:
But they are only regular cycles because Beck changed the horizontal scale in the middle of the graph. Here's what it looks like with a uniform scale:
No regular cycles in this graph.
tlambert | June 15, 2007In the Chronicle of Higher Education David Glenn reports:
A federal judge has rejected John R. Lott Jr.'s request that a gag order be placed on any and all information that emerges in the pretrial discovery process in Mr. Lott's defamation suit against Steven D. Levitt, the best-selling University of Chicago economist.
The judge invited both parties on Thursday to propose a different protective order that would be less restrictive than the one Mr. Lott had requested.
tlambert | June 15, 2007At DeSmogBlog, Richard Littlemore reports:
The self-styled Canadian climate change expert, Dr. Tim Ball, has abandoned his libel suit against University of Lethbridge Professor of Environmental Science Dan Johnson. Ball dropped the suit without conditions, but also without acknowledging that Johnson's original comments were accurate and were reported in good faith.
"This is great news," Dr. Johnson said today, "but it still leaves a cloud over my name that I would like removed. Even though I can now demand that Ball pay what the court calls 'taxed costs,' that won't begin to cover the actual…
tlambert | June 14, 2007The record for the highest claimed death toll for the fictional DDT ban remains at 3 BILLION AND COUNTING, but Pajamas Media is up there with a claim that the number is "hundreds of millions, if not more". This is completely impossible, since its several times the total death toll from malaria. It's in a Pajamas Media podcast by four bloggers who call themselves the "Sanity Squad". I wanted to quote them in my response, so I made my own podcast:
(It's about five minutes, and you can download it if the embedded player above does not work.)
The 3 BILLION AND COUNTING folks eventually…
tlambert | June 13, 2007Over at the denialism blog, Mark Hoofnagle catches the creationists at Uncommon Descent blaming Rachel Carson for millions of deaths. The funniest bit is in the comment at UD pointing out that they should blame God, not Carson:
All very pertinent to Michael Behe's new book 'The Edge of Evolution', in which he says "an intelligent agent deliberately made malaria" (p237), life on earth is "horrific", and "maybe the designer isn't all that beneficient" (p239). Doesn't this raise the specter of the designer planning to kill millions of people, including children, especially as Behe says that…
tlambert | June 13, 2007Bug girl has a pearl of a post on why folks like Steve Milloy and John Tierney are wrong to dismiss DDT resistance as a problem.
As well as knocking down their claims, she provides a handy introduction to the mechanisms for DDT resistance. Go read.
tlambert | June 12, 2007I think the employment contract at the CEI must include a clause requiring their hacks to write an article accusing Rachel Carson of killing millions of people. So far we've seen John Berlau, Angela Logomasni, Jeremy Lott and Erin Wildermuth, and Iain Murray.
The latest effort is from the CEI's Eli Lehrer (who we last encountered cherry-picking with John Lott). Lehrer seems to have based his piece on stuff from the rest of the CEI crew because their factoids (which were wrong or misleading in the first place) have gotten somewhat garbled, just like in the telephone game.
Lehrer opens with…
tlambert | June 12, 2007Nexus 6 catches Andrew Bolt telling his readers about the latest crime of the evil climate scientists. From 1997.
Bolt said:
(Thanks to reader Michael.)
Well done, reader Michael!
tlambert | June 11, 2007Via GrrlScientist I find the latest story claiming:
What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument--whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.
However, there is little new since the last time I wrote about Donohue and Wolfers' take down of those studies. They found that the results of those studies were not robust -- simple changes to the models made the…
tlambert | June 9, 2007Keith Schneider (who used to work with Tierney at the NYT) comments
Now Tierney is after Rachel Carson, using as the basis of his critique a 1962 review of Silent Spring in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. Baldwin's review was the subject of debate as intense at the time as Carson''s ground-breaking journalism. Her assessment of the toxic trail left by pesticides in plants and animals was defended and confirmed then by independent scientists, some of them working at the behest of President John F. Kennedy.…
tlambert | June 8, 2007Bug girl has discovered the Carson-killed-millions claims by the likes of Steve Milloy, Angela Logomasini and John Tierney and decided to:
focus on the stuff that as an entomologist, I'm uniquely qualified to comment on. I know about bugs. I know about pesticides. I've taught parasitology for over 5 years.
For the benefit of Angela Logomasini, who thinks that malaria is caused by a virus, this is relevant because malaria is actually caused by a parasite.
Bug girl does a thorough job of debunking the four main claims of the DDT fetishists:
Banning DDT in the past caused the deaths of…
tlambert | June 6, 2007David Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
In a motion filed last week in federal court, Mr. Lott's lawyers asked the judge to place a gag order on any information that might turn up in depositions or private documents as the lawyers on both sides prepare for the trial.
The motion asserts that "publication or dissemination of information that is obtained during discovery, particularly if provided without context or explanation, could be extremely damaging to sales" of Mr. Lott's new book, Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't. The book, which was…
tlambert | June 5, 2007While the New York Times has some great reporting on science (eg Carl Zimmer and Andrew Revkin it also has some poor quality reporting (eg William Broad and Tina Rosenberg. John Tierney's latest column fits into the second category, with the usual ill-supported claims that Carson killed many many people.
Tierney quotes from a review of Silent Spring by Ira Baldwin:
[Baldwin] complained that "Silent Spring" was not a scientific balancing of costs and benefits but rather a "prosecuting attorney's impassioned plea for action."
But it is Tierney's column that lacks balance and is a prosecuting…
tlambert | June 5, 2007James Annan:
If "jumping the shark" refers to the point at which a TV series loses all credibility, perhaps "quoting a Motl" could be analogous in the context of coverage of climate science issues.
tlambert | June 2, 2007The CEI has gone all out in its attacks on Rachel Carson. As well as their Rachel eats babies site, there have been pieces by CEI operatives John Berlau, Angela Logomasni, Jeremy Lott and Erin Wildermuth, and Iain Murray, all singing the same song about how Carson killed lots of people.
Raw Story has been following the money:
A Republican Senator who successfully prevented the US Senate from honoring the centennial of the birth of environmentalist and Silent Spring author Rachel Carson received campaign donations from a member of the board of directors of a group that sponsors pro-DDT…
tlambert | June 2, 2007
In Tim Blair's latest column he takes a swing at scientists:
I did, however, turn up an intriguing claim, in a non-specialist journal -- possibly an old encyclopaedia. There it was stated that cricket balls do not -- could not -- swing or swerve en route from bowler to batsman.
This did not tally with my own experience, in which balls regularly swung past the bat, striking either the stumps or me ... Scientists, according to that half-remembered item, believed what I saw as swing was an optical illusion. ...
Yet in the US, a similar science-based belief - that baseballs don't curve -…
tlambert | June 2, 2007MarkH has made a case study of Alexander Cockburn's crankish nonsense on global warming, but there is a bit left over for me to comment on. Cockburn's main scientific authority is some guy he met on a cruise who worked as a meteorologist for a whole three years, but he does quote on other person on the science. Look:
As Richard Kerr, Science magazine's man on global warming remarked, "Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's become almost respectable."
It takes a few seconds to find the source of the quote. You need a subscription to read the whole article, but the bit you…
tlambert | May 30, 2007
I've been doing a little research into how the Rachel-killed-millions hoax was spread. In The War Against the Greens (1st edition, published in 1994), the argument appears, but it is confined to the lunatic fringe:
"How many people have died as a result of environmental policies like the banning of DDT?" the Larouchite [Rogelio Maduro] asks rhetorically. "I'd say millions, because it was the most effective weapon against malaria. Right now methyl bromide is supposedly being banned for ozone depletion, but I think this is really an attack on refrigeration, because that's what CFCs and methyl…