tlambert | January 14, 2007Please welcome new blogger tamino at Open Mind. He writes about global warming. CO2 science are notorious for cherry picking -- tamino shows how they cook up their misleading temperature of the week posts. Also, if you don't know what red noise is, he has a clear explanation.
tlambert | January 13, 2007A Harvard School of Public Health Press Release describes a new study by Miller, Hemenway and Azreal:
In the first nationally representative study to examine the relationship between survey measures of household firearm ownership and state level rates of homicide, researchers at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found that homicide rates among children, and among women and men of all ages, are higher in states where more households have guns. The study appears in the February 2007 issue of Social Science and Medicine
Earlier studies on the relationship between firearm ownership and…
tlambert | January 11, 2007The judge for Lott's lawsuit against Levitt has thrown out Lott's claim that he was defamed by Freakonomics. (Decision is here.)
Some quotes from the decision:
The Court will grant a motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6) only if "no relief could be granted under any set of facts that could be proved consistent with the allegations" ... When considering a motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6), this Court views all facts alleged in the complaint, as well as any inferences reasonably drawn from those facts, in the light most favorable to the plaintiff.
By claiming that other scholars have tried…
tlambert | January 11, 2007One of factoids Alistair McFarquhar offered up trying to support his post that vanished down the memory hole was this:
Among Economists almost twice as many believe that rising greenhouse gas levels will cause the economy to grow. Most think rising greenhouse gas levels will have virtually no impact on income per person. The vast majority (73.2%) predicts that the impact will be less than 5 percent one way or the other.
His source was this article by Robert Whaples in Tech Central Station. When newspapers report survey results they give the sample size and confidence interval, but Whaples…
tlambert | January 10, 2007Richard Littlemore has the Calgary Herald's
Statement of Defence against Tim Ball's lawsuit.
Best bit:
The Defendants (the Calgary Herald) state that the Plaintiff (Ball) never held a reputation in the scientific community as a noted climatologist and authority on global warming. The particulars of the Plaintiff's reputation are as follows:
(a) The Plaintiff has never published any research in any peer-reviewed scientific journal which addressed the topic of human contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming;
(b) The Plaintiff has published no papers on climatology in…
tlambert | January 10, 2007At the grandly named Adam Smith Institute blog, Alister McFarquhar (an economist who was one of the sixty scientists denying that climate change was real) asserted:
Surveys show two-thirds of scientists either don't know or don't believe man can influence climate
Jim from Our Word is our Weapon left a comment asking McFarquhar:
Which surveys are those? Can you give a reference?
McFarquhar cited Benny Peiser and a survey of economists, neither of which supported his claim. When Jim explained this, McFarquhar asked for help from the ClimateSceptics mailing list and was given a reference to…
tlambert | January 9, 2007
Remember, the piñata is only deployed when Blair produces another nugget of stupid after being beaten with a clue stick.
So let's look at the nuggets we got from Blair this time:
Chinatown seems not to have been burned down recently.
racists generally comment behind people's backs
Lambert is citing an American conservative who's never been to Sydney -- and who can't spell a simple three-letter surname.
Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald printed five letters from Sydneysiders who found Ker's story credible. I agree with them -- Sydney is a tolerant place, but that doesn't mean…
tlambert | January 8, 2007Allan Schapira writes a letter to the Lancet
DDT: a polluted debate in malaria control
A recent press statement from WHO about dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and indoor residual spraying for malaria control [1] caused a considerable stir, despite the fact that, in terms of policy, it merely re-iterated WHO's endorsement of DDT as a useful insecticide for malaria control, albeit in a highly promotional way. In this recurring debate, arguments for and against DDT, as before, have been heated and mainly based on considerations far removed from the realities of malaria control.
That's…
tlambert | January 7, 2007American student Kunthea Ker wrote how she was verbally abused at Sydney's New Year fireworks because of who she was. Tim Blair's response? He accuses her of lying.
Her story:
We [her family] are American but we are also Asian, and the crowd seemed full of people making racist, disparaging comments about Asians - not only within our hearing but to our faces.
When we found a spot to sit, one woman remarked loudly that she didn't want to sit next to Asians. Another man shouted at us "I hate Chinese!" We are not Chinese. ...
Finally, as the fireworks began, a young man tried to push past us to…
tlambert | January 6, 2007Eli Rabett is calling for nominations for the S Fred award for spreading disinformation. He has started with:
Diplom Beck proving CO2 concentrations over smokestacks in the 1940s were higher than they are today globally.
Willis Eschenbach and the moving line
Monckton of Blenchley whose climate analysis has now found its home in a flying saucer mag.
I nominate Khilyuk and Chilingar for comparing natural C02 emissions over the entire history of the planet with anthropogenic emissions over the past two centuries.
tlambert | January 5, 2007Taylor Owen at Oxblog on the reaction to the Lancet studies
"The principal question is why are we so surprised that this level of conflict would result in such levels of excess mortality?
I would argue it is a direct result of our sanitised view of war. We consider the costs of war to be limited to direct conflict casualties. Bombs killing our soldiers, bullets killing insurgents, end of story. This of course if only the beginning, excess death levels tell the other side. The failure to provide humanitarian protection has real human costs, far beyond those directly killed by munitions.
And…
tlambert | January 4, 2007James Annan summarizes the whole non-skeptic middle heresy thing with: "No, I'm in the middle".
The RealClimate team check the list Revkin gives and find that they also qualify as NSMHs. (See also Revkin's response.)
Andrew Dessler (who was one of the people Pielke Jr originally labeled as a NSH) writes that:
The problem I have with the article is that it confuses two separate debates, one scientific (is climate change real?) and one value-based (what should we do about it?). By putting these two issues into the blender, the article confuses rather than clarifies. ...
The Revkin article would…
tlambert | January 3, 2007Following up on my previous post on claiming the middle ground, we have:
David Roberts didn't like Revkin's article. Revkin replies in the comments. I do think that the media has focused too much on he extremes (Pat Michaels and we're all going to die stuff), but the middle they should be paying more attention to is the IPCC reports and not Pielke Jr.
Matthew Nisbet writes about the "Pandora's Box" frame of pending catastrophe. He thinks that it opens scientists up to charges of alarmism from the likes of Inhofe. I think that Inhofe is going to make such charges no matter what.
jsk argues…
tlambert | January 2, 2007Roger Pielke Jr writes:
Andy Revkin has a well-done article on the "middle ground" in the climate change debate. I fully expect that many of the usual suspects on the extremes of the debate (both sides) will respond to this story by saying that they've been in the middle all along.
The most prominent of the usual suspects saying that they've been in the middle all along is, of course, Roger Pielke Jr. Since he was in the middle, in the Hansen/Michaels dispute, Pielke Jr was critical of both sides. Oops, no. Sorry, that was wrong. Pielke Jr just made some specious criticisms of Hansen's…
tlambert | January 1, 2007
Christopher Monckton was talking about how he was going to get his silly Telegraph article published in a journal and now he has.
It's been published in Nexus magazine, right between articles on UFOs and 9/11 conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theory folk seem to think that "An Inconvenient Truth" is part of the plan by the UN to take over the world.
Monckton's is not the only article in that issue of Nexus that mentions Global Warming. There's also the interview on Time-travel portals and weather wars:
Chemtrails were developed by Edward Teller and are basically the seeding of thousands…
tlambert | December 31, 2006Geoffrey Lean in The Independent claims:
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true. ..
Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic…
tlambert | December 31, 2006Don't pay any attention to the date stamp on this post. It's 2007 already here.
tlambert | December 30, 2006In response to my post, Michael Fumento has offered a bet: 10 to 1 odds on a pandemic in the next year. That means that Fumento thinks that there is a 10% of a pandemic in the next year. This sits rather oddly with his dismissal of concerns about bird flu. With a 10% chance of a pandemic, surely significant efforts to prepare are justified?
With three pandemics in the last century, you would expect any given year to have a 3% chance of a pandemic, so Fumento's 10% number suggests that he thinks the risk is seriously elevated. The market at the Foresight Exchange estimates that there is a…
tlambert | December 28, 2006
Some readers think I should use the piñata whenever I write about something silly by Tim Blair, but the rules for piñata usage are stricter than that. The rules are that it is only to be used when Blair produces another nugget of stupid after being beaten with a clue stick. For example, this post. Rex Ringschott had already explained that Blair's claim:
A 40-year-old VW Beetle produces far more pollutants per kilometre than a modern Ferrari. Monbiot is an idiot.
was only true if you ignored CO2. But Monbiot was specifically talking about greenhouse gasses:
There is a direct…