tlambert | February 22, 2007The Wall Street Journal editorial board is infamous for their reckless disregard of the evidence for global warming. They've just published an op-ed by Pete Du Pont which manages to get pretty well every single factual claim wrong. As with most of these things, correcting every single false claim would result in a post about five times as long as the original piece, so I will just do some of the more egregious ones.
Solar radiation is reducing Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red…
tlambert | February 21, 2007Ed Brayton reports on Conservapedia, set up by Creationist Andrew Schlafly because he didn't like the "anti-Christian" bias of Wikipedia. Andrew Schlafly is the son of Phyllis Schlafly and legal counsel for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which publishes bad science promoting a thimerosal autism link, as well as Rachel Carson was worse than Hitler stuff.
Commenter doctorgoo found this entry on the origins of the kangaroo:
Like all modern animals, modern kangaroos originated in the Middle East and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo…
tlambert | February 20, 2007Montreal's La Presse has published an article on the global warming skeptics' on-line war on science. (Google translation here.)
I get mentioned:
Certains vont jusqu'à accuser les éco-sceptiques d'utiliser de fausses identités dans les blogues afin de donner des voix multiples à leur opinion, en s'approuvant eux-mêmes.
Le blogueur australien Tim Lambert dit ainsi avoir découvert sur son site deux commentateurs qui n'étaient qu'une seule et même personne, le blogueur torontois Stephen McIntyre, cadre de l'industrie minière à la retraite. Les responsables du site environnementaliste…
tlambert | February 18, 2007Queensland's Land and Resources Tribunal has rejected objections to a new coal mine by environmental groups who wanted offsets for the carbon emissions of the mine. Unfortunately, the Tribunal got the science badly wrong, understating the emissions by a factor of 15, making inappropriate comparisons for the emissions, and dismissing the scientific consensus on global warming based on their own erroneous understanding of the science.
The Presiding Member, Greg Koppenol writes:
Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe AO gave evidence that the proposed mine would contribute to the cumulative impacts of…
tlambert | February 14, 2007Les Roberts in the Independent:
On both sides of the Atlantic, a process of spinning science is preventing a serious discussion about the state of affairs in Iraq.
The government in Iraq claimed last month that since the 2003 invasion between 40,000 and 50,000 violent deaths have occurred. Few have pointed out the absurdity of this statement.
There are three ways we know it is a gross underestimate. First, if it were true, including suicides, South Africa, Colombia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia have experienced higher violent death rates than Iraq over the past four…
tlambert | February 14, 2007Back in July I mentioned that the AEI was offering $10,000 to scientists for a "review and policy critique" of the new IPCC report. This month the Guardian caused all kinds of grief for the AEI when they described these payments as bribes. David Roberts and Andrew Dessler tell the story and what it means. They conclude that the payments weren't bribes, but:
What they do not acknowledge is that the conservative movement has squandered its credibility on the subject of climate change. After years of efforts to deny or obfuscate mainstream climate science -- driven by ideology, fossil-fuel…
tlambert | February 10, 2007You want to look away as this Andrew Bolt post comes off the rails, crashes and burns, but you can't. In his column, Alan Ramsey had quoted Tim Flannery:
"What we've seen in the Arctic over the last two years has been such breathtaking change that you have to worry about stability for sea levels and for the entire northern hemisphere climate system. The rate of ice melt in 2005 increased by about five times over what it was previously. It's been very, very large again in 2006.
"Now, if you take those two years as the new trajectory for ice melt in the Arctic - we've only two years of data…
tlambert | February 9, 2007Last October, the story of how there were 650,000 or so excess Iraqi deaths in the war wasn't important enough to make the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. In today's paper I see that the death of a minor American celebrity gets five out of eight columns on the front page.
tlambert | February 9, 2007Glenn Reynolds wrongly claimed that I'd said that 59 was similar to 88. I hadn't, so he tried to wriggle out by pretending that he was just kidding), adding this:
In a related matter, rumors that Lambert once asked a date for "96" on the ground that it's "similar to" 69 are probably false.
Randy Paul emailed Reynolds, suggesting that he "Grow up". Reynolds shot back:
Jeez, get a sense of humor. Lambert and I go back over a decade,
and he's been an insufferable prick for all that time. I usually
ignore him, and this time I decided to jab back a bit.
And Reynolds sure does like to jab at…
tlambert | February 8, 2007Here is a thread where you can discuss anything you like. For example, Canadian health care policies.
tlambert | February 8, 2007Writing about the new IPCC report, Andrew Bolt said
The scientists of even the fiercely pro-warming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict seas will rise (as they have for centuries) not by Gore's 600cm by 2100, but by between 14 and 43cm.
While Ron Bailey wrote:
By 2100 sea level is expected to rise between 28 to 43 centimeters
Both were wrong. The IPCC report says that the range is 18 to 59 cm if you ignore ice flow changes, and 28 to 79 cm if you include an estimate for ice flow changes. I let both Bailey and Bolt know of the problem. Bailey thanked me and corrected his…
tlambert | February 7, 2007Dale Keiger's article on the Lancet studies is now online:
Newspapers the world over put the number in their headlines. Reporters tried to explain it, often bungling the job. To dismiss the research, critics seized on its implausibility, in the process frequently distorting its meaning. Political leaders dodged its implications by brushing it aside as the meaningless product of a discredited methodology. In a leading scientific journal, other scientists challenged how the study had been done.
tlambert | February 7, 2007Bjorn Lomborg makes the (by now traditional) claim that the new IPCC report has significantly reduced the estimates of projected sea level rises.
Six years ago, it anticipated ocean levels would be 48.5 centimeters higher than they are currently. In this year's report, the estimated rise is 38.5 centimeters on average.
But the 38.5 number Lomborg presents does not include increases from accelerating ice flows. About these, the report says:
For example, if this contribution were to grow linearly with global average temperature change, the upper ranges of sea level rise for SRES scenarios…
tlambert | February 6, 2007There's pathological denial and there's super-duper-pathological denial.
In comments to my post at On Line Opinion OLO editor Graham Young has now written 20 comments denying that Peiser admitted to making multiple errors.
This Media Watch report?
"And when we pressed him to provide the names of the articles, he eventually conceded - there was only one."
Apparently Young reckons that's a fabrication, though for some reason Peiser hasn't called them on it.
Over at his own blog, Young seems to have perfected the art of denial. After he wrote this post insinuating that the IPCC was up to no…
tlambert | February 6, 2007Eli Rabett has some extracts from a 5,000 word article by Dale Keiger on the Lancet studies that appeared in the Johns Hopkins Alumni Journal. Keiger says that it will be available online in a few days.
Update: Here it is.
tlambert | February 6, 2007Tim Ball has written another silly article, declaring:
Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science.
He provides no evidence at all in support of his claim, so apparently we are supposed to rely on his authority as "the first Canadian Ph.D. in Climatology" and because "for 32 years I was a Professor of Climatology". Ball is, however, lying about his qualifications.
After his article was posted Ball edited to remove his false claim to have a been a professor for 32 years. However…
tlambert | February 5, 2007Nexus 6 writes about critics of the IPCC
There has been a concerted attempt by a number of contrarians with media access to use the findings of the summary to discredit claims about the degree of climate change and its impacts.
A lot of these claims seem to revolve around the myth that the IPCC summary states that sea-levels will raise by a maximum of 59cm by 2099.
Nexus 6 gives us Jennifer Marohasy, who has an article in Courier Mail:
.....the IPCC summary indicates that sea levels have risen by just 17cm and may rise by no more than another 18cm, certainly no more than 59cm by 2099.
Nexus…
tlambert | February 5, 2007William Connolley is somewhat bemused by Christopher Monckton's review of the IPCC's Summary for Policy Makers. Because the IPCC changed the way sea level rises were reported, critics seem to inevitably misunderstand them and claim that the IPCC has substantially reduced its projections.
Monckton:
Also, the UN, in its 2007 report, has more than halved its high-end best estimate of the rise in sea level by 2100 from 3 feet to just 17 inches.
Connolley:
And after that, the sea level rise? The TAR SPM pic is here. The SLR is 0.88 top-of-range and this is presumably what M is using for 3 feet.…
tlambert | February 4, 2007In my review of Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, I contrasted Mooney's book with Gross and Levitt's book about the the postmodern left's war on science, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Now Mooney has got together with Alan Sokal (who punctured the postmodernist view of science) to write an article on the Republican war on science.
Norman Levitt seems to agree with Sokal. Here's an email he sent commenting on my review. (Posted with his permission.)
I think some of your remarks about HS are a bit unfair. The book was
written in 1992-93, at…