tlambert | April 12, 2007The IPA is the Australian version of the CEI, so you don't have to read an article they publish on global warming to know what the conclusions will be. But you do have to read it to find out what pretext will be used to dismiss concerns about warming. In the latest issue of IPA review we find an article by two economists (Sinclair Davidson and Alex Robson) that attempts to spread confusion about the IPCC fourth assessment report.
The article is not online, but most of it is available here.
They start off by taking a leaf from Michael Crichton's book -- they change the vertical scale on the…
tlambert | April 10, 2007Hey, remember how all the global warming skeptics used to say that warming wasn't happening because the satellite data didn't show a warming trend. Until in 2005 when they found a mistake in the satellite data and what do you know, it did show warming. And they stopped using that argument? Well Bob Carter isn't going to let a little thing like that bother him. He is still claiming that satellite data shows no warming.
Here he is in the denialist Daily Telegraph:
However, our most accurate depiction of atmospheric temperature over the past 25 years comes from satellite measurements (see…
tlambert | April 9, 2007I can't help but be amazed at the bloody-minded denial in Holman Jenkins' WSJ op-ed:
It would surprise the public, and even the Supreme Court, to know how utterly the science of global warming offers no evidence whatsoever on the central proposition. What fills Mr. Gore's film, books, speeches and congressional testimony are scientific observations and quasi-scientific observations, all right. They concern polar bears, mosquitoes, hurricanes, ice packs and everything but whether humans cause global warming.
Some of this evidence may suggest, weakly or strongly, the existence of warming…
tlambert | April 8, 2007The Editors comes up with the best description of one my posts ever:
Finally, an all-star panel of warbloggers attempt to relieve the glory days of the Summer of War by holding an authentic olde-timey "Fisking" of an essay about global warming. Written in crayon. By a six-year-old. They fail. I wish I was exaggerating.
The Editors also delivers a well deserved shellacking to:
Ron Bailey, who, while professing to accept the scientific consensus on global warming, reserves all his criticism on the topic for people like Al Gore who also accept the consensus and gives his buddies at he CEI a…
tlambert | April 7, 2007Nature has published a letter (subscription required) from Roberts and Burnham responding to this story.
In our opinion, your News story about our Lancet paper "Death toll in Iraq: survey team takes on new critics" (Nature 446, 6-7; 2007) has confused the matter rather than clarified it. You outline three criticisms of our work: that there was not enough time to have conducted the survey; that the sampling method suffered from a 'main-street bias'; and that the study team fabricated the data (the last being attributed to anonymous "researchers"). These criticisms have been previously…
tlambert | April 7, 2007The IBC is chastising publications that cite the Lancet estimate of Iraqi deaths. lenin comments:
So what is the point of IBC expending so much energy and writing to various organisations to cast baseless or irrelevant aspersions on the Lancet study in this bizarre, ritualistic fashion? As others have pointed out, they don't seem to make this much effort to correct news media who misuse their figures by claiming that they represent the total number of deaths, which even the IBC doesn't claim. As I said before, its about defending their turf. Since their method involves relying on media…
tlambert | April 6, 2007Commentator 1: Hello, and welcome to a special Good Friday edition of INTELLECTUAL CAGE MATCH. Today we have a great match up for you. The topic is Global Warming and it's the collective wisdom of Tim Blair's commenters against Ryan Gwin, who is six.
Commentator 2: Ooh, that's not fair.
Commentator 1: I know, but we couldn't find any four year olds who wanted to take them on. But Team Blair has been training hard so we may have a contest here. Here's hollingshead on their training program:
Hence why I stock up on Tim Ball videos.
C2: Ooh, they might sue Ryan if they lose. I remember…
tlambert | April 4, 2007I cannot resist responding to Scott McLemee vlogging his watching of Ann Althouse vlogging her watching of American Idol.
tlambert | April 3, 2007John Baez invented the crackpot index, a simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics:
A -5 point starting credit.
1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous. ...
And so on, down to the high scoring items like:
40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on.
Guess who just got the big 40 points?
Our old friend, Bob Carter.
And I can't resist pointing out some of Carter's one point scores. You have to…
tlambert | March 30, 2007Gilbert Burnham on the revelation that the British government's scientific advisors told them not to criticize the Lancet study:
We never had any doubt that the study would stand the test of time, it was designed with a lot of input from people who are leaders in their field and it was carried out in as robust a manner as we could, under the circumstances, so I was always certain that in the end the materials and the results would stand up to very close scrutiny.
Richard Horton on the British government's response to the Lancet study:
Would it welcome the Hopkins study as an important…
tlambert | March 28, 2007Q: What do you do when your lawsuit against Freakonomics gets thrown out?
A: Write a copy cat book.
tlambert | March 26, 2007The BBC used a Freedom of Information Request to find out what the scientific advice to the British government about the Lancet study was:
The British government was advised against publicly criticising a report estimating that 655,000 Iraqis had died due to the war, the BBC has learnt.
Iraqi Health Ministry figures put the toll at less than 10% of the total in the survey, published in the Lancet.
But the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser said the survey's methods were "close to best practice" and the study design was "robust".
Another statistician agreed the method was "tried…
tlambert | March 25, 2007Jonathan Chait analyses the reasons why Republicans deny anthropogenic global warming:
As the evidence for global warming gets stronger, Republicans are actually getting more skeptical. Al Gore's recent congressional testimony on the subject, and the chilly reception he received from GOP members, suggest the discouraging conclusion that skepticism on global warming is hardening into party dogma. Like the notion that tax cuts are always good or that President Bush is a brave war leader, it's something you almost have to believe if you're an elected Republican.
How did it get this way?
The…
tlambert | March 20, 2007Sylvia S Tognetti rounds up commentary on Broad's hit piece and puts it an a wider context:
The reason Al Gore has become a polarizing figure is not for any of the reasons given by Broad, who makes a crude attempt to paint him as an alarmist, but because of the kind of media invented tales found in the article itself, which is among the most irresponsible pieces of journalism I have seen. Lest Broad be unfairly singled out at what is considered "the newspaper of record" let us not forget that this report is "sadly typical of the work the New York Times has done on Gore for the past dozen…
tlambert | March 18, 2007This is a guest post by Matt Daws.
I'm a mathematician at St John's College in Oxford, and so having seen a number of posters around for a conference on climate change in my own college, I decided to head along. The organisers are sense about science who are one of a number of strange UK organisations that, in some sense, grew out of a small left-wing group called living marxism. These people seemed to have had a mass conversion to some form of libertarianism at some point, and now tend to campaign for the right for industry to do exactly what it likes etc. In particular, I have a lot of…
tlambert | March 17, 2007Over at ClimateAudit Steve McIntyre complains that Al Gore loving Google has dropped ClimateAudit from their search results:
I've noted from time to time that climateaudit.org ranked extremely high on many google searches. One of the ways to find articles here has been to simply use google. I often do it. Today when I googled "climateaudit curry", I found no link to climateaudit.
In comments, John A blames Gavin Schmidt's orbital mind control lasers: *[Update: John A says he was referring to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Which is still nuts.]
Time to write a nice letter to Mr Schmidt, methinks.…
tlambert | March 16, 2007The Australian's War on Science has continued. Fortunately, I am able to outsource the refuting.
First, Nexus 6 takes apart a Tuesday editorial where the Australian foolishly allows itself to be swindled by a British TV show. (Mind you the Australian came back on Thursday with another editorial the next day where they repeated the same bogus arguments again.)
And on Friday there was another anti-global warming rant in the Australian, with Frank Devine coming out against peer review. Ian Musgrave demolishes Devine here.
Seems like the Australian is trying to make up in quantity what their…