tlambert | February 4, 2007Ron Bailey makes a dreadful hash of things in this article on the IPCC 4AR. He tries to describe how projections of warming by 2100 have changed as each of the IPCC's four assessment reports has come out. Unfortunately, Bailey confuses warming projections with climate sensitivity (how much warming will eventually occur if CO2 doubles). For the First Assessment Report he gives us the climate sensitivity:
In 1990, the FAR found that computer climate models projected that global mean surface temperature as a result of doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide was unlikely to lie outside the range 1…
tlambert | February 3, 2007
I must be really important because Glenn Reynolds has made a specious attack on me based on something I wrote, not in a post, but in a comment on another blog. I wrote that the sea level projections in the draft AR4 report were similar to those in the previous report. Reynolds:
Number problems for Tim Lambert? Color me unsurprised.
He links to Tim Blair, who cleverly quotes me like this:
Lambert looks for a way out: "I didn't say the numbers were the same, merely similar." The numbers in question are ... 59 and 88.
No, those aren't the numbers in question. Blair left out my next sentence…
tlambert | February 2, 2007Now that the new IPCC report has been released it's time to revisit the inaccurate leaks that appeared in The Australian and in The Sunday Telegraph. Both reporters made the same two errors:
they reported the value for climate sensitivity (the eventual warming from doubling CO2) as the IPCC projection for warming by 2100
they reported the maximum sea level rise for scenario B2 (43 cm) as the maximum rise, ignoring the other scenarios and the fact that the rise does not include any increase from accelerating ice flow.
The false reports generated erroneous commentary like this nonsense from…
tlambert | February 2, 2007The IPCC has released the Summary For
Policymakers of the Fourth Assessment Report. Some of the conclusions:
Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely [defined as >90% probability] due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations
The equilibrium climate sensitivity is a measure of the climate system
response to sustained radiative forcing. It is not a projection but is
defined as the global average surface warming following a doubling of
carbon dioxide concentrations. It is likely [>66% chance]…
tlambert | January 30, 2007Via Ian Hart I find Paul Driessen in the Washington Times offering alarmist claims that action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be economic suicide. We see how important the DDT ban myth is to these folks:
It's a classic bait-and-switch tactic, repeated endlessly by activists, scientists, journalists, bureaucrats, celebrities and politicians. They used similar tactics 35 years ago to excise DDT and other insecticides from disease control programs.
Tens of millions died from malaria -- and none of the perpetrators have ever apologized, admitted error or been held accountable for the…
tlambert | January 29, 2007There's denial and there's pathological denial.
In comments to my post at On Line Opinion OLO editor Graham Young has continued to deny that Peiser admitted to making multiple errors. The latest bit of denial:
"To say he concedes, when you know he doesn't, is not only "deeply dishonest", but blatantly so"
This is despite Young emailing Peiser to verify the accuracy of this Media Watch report:
"And when we pressed him to provide the names of the articles, he eventually conceded - there was only one."
tlambert | January 27, 2007revere reports
The for-profit publishers don't like BMC or Public Library of Science (PLoS) or any of the other open access publishers and are determined to crush them. So they hired the PR firm of Eric Dezenhall, who also worked for convicted Enron execs and others of that ilk, to do "media messaging." We know this because someone on the inside squealed and provided emails and memos to Nature who spilled the beans in this news article.
When you want to attack scientists, who you gonna call?
Dezenhall also recommended joining forces with groups that may be ideologically opposed to…
tlambert | January 26, 2007Earlier I wrote about Khilyuk and Chilingar
their mistake is so large and so obvious that anyone who cites them either has no clue about climate science or doesn't care whether what they write is true or not.
So who has discredited themselves by citing them?
Robert M. Carter, C. R. de Freitas, Indur M. Goklany, David Holland and Richard S. Lindzen
Ron Bailey
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Andrew Bolt
Tim Blair
The Idsos
Pat Michaels
Pat Michaels went way beyond merely citing them, writing over a thousand words about how it was peer-reviewed and how the authors were from USC and how it…
tlambert | January 25, 2007Paul Hamer sends me an email about Khilyuk and Chilingar: (my emphasis)
I had a quick poke around on the ISI database to see if anyone had cited
their original study that you've covered. I found that their is a single
citation - a self citation. It turns out Khilyuk and Chilingar have written
another article with the help of one O. G Sorokhtin.
I can't be 100% certain but seems like they're making a very dodgy claim
here:
"The main factor determining climate's temperature parameters is the
atmospheric pressure."
They then proceed to breeze over geological history and suggest two
mechanisms…
tlambert | January 22, 2007Michael Fumento has been booted off Winds of Change because he misrepresented a scientific article. As usual he responded with abuse:
I'm off to Ramadi again next month. Put that alongside the chickenhawks and chairborne rangers whose blogs you print.
In short, I was doing you a great favor and you spat in my face. Well, the wind has changed and the spit has gone back into your face. Goodbye and good riddance. ...
As to chicken hawks, that refers to "Armed Liberal," who never got closer to Iraq than watching CNN, and it refers to you personally. I don't see any leash keeping you from going…
tlambert | January 22, 2007From The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America
19. Steven Milloy
Charges: It's a pretty fucked up world in which a falsified memoir of drug addiction can spark widespread outrage, but a lawyer and registered lobbyist posing as a science expert can take money from Exxon Mobil and Phillip Morris to spread blatant lies without repercussion. Milloy, writing under the ironically accurate title of "junk science expert" for foxnews.com and at his own website, junkscience.com, is in the business of dismissing any and all alarming scientific studies about, well, anything--global warming,…
tlambert | January 21, 2007In comments to my post at On Line Opinion Graham Young declares that it is his "dispassionate assessment" as the editor of On Line Opinion that I am "deeply dishonest" for stating that Peiser admitted his analysis was full of errors. Here are the relevant bits of the exchange (links added), with Young raising denial to a whole new level:
Young:
So what if Peiser didn't count correctly. Just one scientist who doesn't agree negates Gore's claim. If you check the abstracts republished on Lambert's blog you get this quote from the first one: "More and better measurements and statistical…
tlambert | January 20, 2007My inbox has been filling up with emails from anti-science warrior Marc Morano furiously denouncing the suggestion by Hedi Cullen that meteorologists should understand the basic science of climate change and
I'd like to take that suggestion a step further. If a meteorologist has an AMS Seal of Approval, which is used to confer legitimacy to TV meteorologists, then meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming. (One good resource if you don't have a lot of time is the Pew Center's Climate Change 101.)
Morano managed to orchestrate an…
tlambert | January 20, 2007The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is coming out on Feb 2 and we have some leaks about the drafts appearing in The Toronto Star and in Reuters. Just so you know not to trust them, the reports contracdict each other. The Toronto Star reports that projected warming by 2100 will be 2.0-4.5 degrees Celsius, while Reuters gives exactly the same range for climate sensitivity. I doubt that they are both right.
tlambert | January 18, 2007When we last encountered NRSP director Tom Harris he was busy denying he was associated with the High Park Group (a PR company that lobbies for energy companies). Now, in a totally surprising twist, Jim Hoggan reveals:
Two of the three Directors on the board of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project are senior executives of the High Park Advocacy Group, a Toronto-based lobby firm that specializes in "energy, environment and ethics."
I'm shocked. Truly I am.
tlambert | January 18, 2007Online Opinion has published my post Andrew Bolt gets a perfect score on global warming as part of its Best Blog posts of 2006.
This comment from Jennifer Marohasy is priceless:
Interestingly this piece by Tim Lambert was published at OLO today as it is considered one of the '40 best blogs' written in 2006.
Given its content, I can't imagine the judges of the '40 best blogs' know that much about global warming?
But they should have known Andrew Bolt has a great blog at the Herald Sun ... and they could have probably found a much better written and more factually correct piece at his site.…
tlambert | January 17, 2007The Stern Review: A Dual Critique was published in an economics journal and critiques climate science. Not surprisingly, as Nexus 6 reports, peer review was grossly inadequate. The critique slams Stern for, get this, ignoring Khilyuk and Chilingar. That's the paper that compared human CO2 emissions with natural C02 emissions over the entire history of the planet and concluded that human emissions didn't matter.
Here's why Khilyuk and Chilingar is the gift that that keeps giving: their mistake is so large and so obvious that anyone who cites them either has no clue about climate science or…
tlambert | January 15, 2007In an opinion piece in the New York Times Glenn Reynolds claims:
Last month, Greenleaf, Idaho, adopted Ordinance 208, calling for its citizens to own guns and keep them ready in their homes in case of emergency. ...
And it may not be a bad idea. While pro-gun laws like the one in Greenleaf are mostly symbolic, to the extent that they actually make a difference, it is likely to be a positive one.
Greenleaf is following in the footsteps of Kennesaw, Ga., which in 1982 passed a mandatory gun ownership law in response to a handgun ban passed in Morton Grove, Ill. Kennesaw's crime dropped sharply…
tlambert | January 15, 2007Michael Fumento is making even less sense than usual:
Lambert is one of the most obnoxious trolls on the Internet. He produces nothing; he exists to tear down other people to make up for some perceived deficiency on his part. Perhaps it's a deficiency that can be measured with a three-inch ruler; I don't know. Some people buy a flashy sports car in his case, but Troll Lambert uses all his spare time to write fraudulent Wikipedia biographies about people who get more attention than he does (approximately 6.3 billion) and to try to poke fun of them on his blog. In his desperation he often makes…