tlambert | March 14, 2007McKitrick and Essex have managed to get their "no such thing as average temperature" stupidity published in a journal! In their paper they add some new stupid to go with the old stupid from Taken by Storm. Can they take Chillingar and Khilyuk's crown? Eli Rabett is having a pinata party/open book exam to celebrate. See if you can see where they went wrong!
tlambert | March 13, 2007Last November Ray Pierrehumbert at RealClimate was very disappointed in a New York Times article by William Broad:
The worst fault of the article, though, is that it leaves the reader with the impression that there is something in the deep time Phanerozoic climate record that fundamentally challenges the physics linking planetary temperature to CO2. This is utterly false, and deeply misleading.
And:
This article is far from the standard of excellence in reporting we have come to expect from the Times. We sincerely hope it's an aberration, and not indicative of the best Mr. Broad has to offer…
tlambert | March 9, 2007Daniel Davies comments on the attempted disproof by incredulity of the Lancet numbers:
I am curious as to why anyone is bothering with this debate any more (in some of the discussion on Dr Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hick's comments, it has got parodic, as people discuss the minutiae of the "informed consent" requirements of the questionnaire). Does anyone think at this late date that they are going to come up with a result that proves that the whole war and occupation has been really good for the Iraqis? Have they not noticed that this debate (and the one on global warming too) is a bit like the…
tlambert | March 8, 2007Alex catches Dominic Lawson spreading the DDT ban myth. Lawson is the brother-in-law of Christopher Monckton who also spead the myth.
tlambert | March 7, 2007The Australian doesn't just make war on climate science, they don't like epidemiology either, printing Anjana Ahuja's hatchet job on the Lancet study.
Greta at Radio Open Source has posted a response from Les Roberts:
The two main criticisms which were in both the Nature article and The Times article are completely without merit. They said there wasn't enough time to have done the interviews. We had eight interviewers working ten hour days for 49 days, they had two hours in the field to ask each household five questions. They had time.
The other criticism was that our people stayed close to…
tlambert | March 6, 2007From episode 2 of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Narrator: The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as "a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man". The Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "your plastic pal who's fun to be with!"
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy defines the Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes", with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications for anyone interested in taking…
tlambert | March 5, 2007Anjana Ahuja has written an extraordinarily one-sided article attacking the Lancet study. She drags out the same criticisms that were covered in the Nature story, but even though she cites the Nature piece, she carefully avoids mentioning the Lancet authors' replies, or the opinions of the researchers supporting the study. Ahuja also makes many factual errors, even going as far as claiming that one of the interviewers contradicted Burnham when, in fact, they supported him. All of Ahuja's errors are in the direction of supportting her case, suggesting that she is biased.
Ahuja begins:
Iraq…
tlambert | March 3, 2007I only wrote my last post on the Australian's War on Science a couple of days ago and already there's more attacks on science from them.
First we have this news article:
Professor Henderson said yesterday the report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, handed down on February 2, was "alarmist".
He said it had mislead Western governments over rising temperatures, and warned the cost of mitigation measures would be felt severely in Australia, unless it adopted a "balanced" view. ...
Professor Henderson said IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri was "alarmist" and his report "a heavily…
tlambert | March 2, 2007One conclusion of the recent IPCC report, produced by some 600 scientists and 620 expert reviewers, was:
Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since
the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in
anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.
John Hawkins just surveyed a large number of right-wing bloggers and asked:
Do you think mankind is the primary cause of global warming?
The result?
Yes (0) -- 0%
No (59) -- 100%
I wonder if any of these bloggers are brave enough to put their money where their mouth is.
tlambert | March 1, 2007Andrew Bolt is still trying to revive the bogus "Gore is a fat hypocrite" story. His main points are:
Gore is fat.
And:
Here he was, receiving film's highest honour for his smash documentary, in which he warns that within a century the seas will rise up to 6m while monster hurricanes tear through what's left of our cities.
Gore didn't say that would be 6m of sea level rise within a century. Nobody knows how long it will take, so Gore didn't give a figure. And the scientific consensus is that global warming will likely increase hurricane intensity.
And that is Gore buys his offsets…
tlambert | March 1, 2007Nature has a news story by Jim Giles on the criticisms of the study from IBC supporters.
Several researchers, including Madelyn Hicks, a psychiatrist at King's College London, recently published criticisms of the study's methodology in The Lancet (369, 101-105; 2007). One key question is whether the interviews could have been done in the time stated. The October paper implied that the interviewers worked as two teams of four, each conducting 40 interviews a day -- a very high number given the need to obtain consent and the sensitive nature of the questions.
The US authors subsequently said…
tlambert | February 28, 2007Gilbert Burnham has just given a talk at MIT on the Lancet studies on deaths in Iraq. You can watch the video here.
Some of things he mentioned:
USAID (which has expertise in cluster sampling) was told to look for holes in the study, but couldn't find any.
They will soon release the data (with identifying material removed) to other researchers.
John Howard's idiotic comment "it's not based on anything other than a house-to-house survey" got a laugh.
The IBC made vociferous attacks on the studies because they want to defend their methods, and Les Roberts suggests that IBC are trying to stop…
tlambert | February 27, 2007The previous open thread dropped off the front page, so here's a new one.
tlambert | February 27, 2007Conservatives and faux libertarians have been running with an attack on Al Gore from a junior version of the Competitive Enterprise Institute -- apparently he has a big house/office and it uses a lot of energy. Genuine libertarian Jim Henley puts it like this: (Quoted in full because not a word is wasted.)
Al Gore uses a lot of electricity. Al Gore buys carbon offsets. Libertarians who take anthropogenic global warming seriously - count me among them - generally favor markets in emissions over hard regulatory targets for individual homes and businesses. That way people and companies can…
tlambert | February 27, 2007SkepticLawyer has a nice round up of blog reactions to the Australian Government's plan to ban incandescent light bulbs by 2010. (As well as lot more interesting links -- check it out.) For once, I find myself agreeing with Miranda Devine, who wrote:
So what kind of hypocrisy is there in a government that bans incandescent light bulbs while subsidising people who drive fuel-guzzling, greenhouse gas-emitting, giant four-wheel-drives?
With a 5 per cent import tariff on four-wheel-drives, most of which are imported, compared with a 10 per cent tariff on other cars, the Government is…
tlambert | February 26, 2007John Quiggin suggests some terminology
The problem of terminology has always been difficult. It's obviously unreasonable to use terms like "skeptic" or "contrarian" to describe people who produce or swallow transparently fraudulent propaganda like that of Singer and Seitz because it happens to suit their preconceived ideological views or financial interest. On the other hand, there have been vigorous objections to "denialist". So, I'm switching to "delusionists", a term which covers:
(i) people who manufacture delusions for a living like those mentioned already and their local counterparts
(…
tlambert | February 26, 2007Last year I wrote about the Australian's War on Science. It's continued this year, leading Ian Musgrave to write:
The Australian is Anti-Science, it's a conclusion I'm reluctant to draw, but the accumulated evidence drives me to it.
Read his post to find out why. He then has a post on the next anti-science piece published in the Australian (just two days later).
Nexus 6 piles on to the same dreadful Australian editorial here, while John S Wilkins concludes:
the paper is becoming firmly anti-science (as all good conservatives must be these days, it seems), especially with respect to climate…
tlambert | February 24, 2007The AP reports:
Americans are keenly aware of how many U.S. forces have lost their lives in
Iraq, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll. But they woefully underestimate the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed.
When the poll was conducted earlier this month, a little more than 3,100 U.S. troops had been killed. The midpoint estimate among those polled was right on target, at about 3,000.
While the media have given Americans a good idea how many Americans have died, they've failed to do the same for Iraqi deaths:
Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated at more than 54,000 and could be much…
tlambert | February 23, 2007CNSNews is a news analogue of Conservapedia. They have a story arguing that An Inconvenient Truth should be disqualified from the Oscar for best documentary because it's inaccurate. CNSNews tells us:
A new scientific study shows that for the first time they're finding polar bears that have actually drowned swimming long distances - up to sixty miles - to find the ice," Gore says in the movie.
John Berlau, author of a new book on the environmental movement entitled "Eco-Freaks," claims the polar bear scene alone should disqualify Gore's film from consideration for best documentary, because…