tlambert | December 6, 2006William Connolley has the latest on Monckton. It seems that he's throwing around threats to sue for libel.
Also Eli Rabett describes yet another Monckton error.
tlambert | December 5, 2006The latest issue of the Walkley Magazine has an article I wrote about the media coverage of the Lancet study. They haven't made it available on line, so I've put a copy below the fold.
Imagine an alternate Earth. Let's call it Earth 2. On Earth 2, just like our planet, there was a Boxing Day tsunami that killed about a quarter of a million people. On our planet the tsunami was front page news for days and because of the horrendous death toll people opened their hearts and their wallets. On Earth 2 the reaction to the tsunami's death toll was different. The story was in the papers for…
tlambert | December 2, 2006Tim Blair tells us:
Think on this awhile: if a vengeful Gaia were to smite both Canada AND Australia out of existence, that would reduce by only 3.4 per cent of these warming gases some believe are killing the planet.
We're talking about a combined total of 53 million people, millions of houses, millions of cars, millions of factories and dams and computers and televisions and everything else that makes for modern, affluent, civilised nations.
Completely removing them would make next to no difference at all, global-warming wise.
Well yes, if just Canada and Australia made reductions it…
tlambert | December 1, 2006Too much has been made of the claims about main street bias in the new Lancet study -- if you do a few calculations you'll find that even if it exists, it doesn't make much difference. As Jon Pedersen said:
Pedersen did NOT think that there was anything to the "Main Street Bias" issue. He agreed, I thought, that, if there was a bias, it might be away from main streets [by picking streets which intersect with main streets]. In any case, he thought such a "bias", if it had existed, would affect results only 10% or so.
But now Johnson, Spagat and co have put together a working paper where they…
tlambert | November 30, 2006Stephen Soldz has posted his discussion with Jon Pedersen about the new Lancet study:
[Pedersen thinks that the] prewar mortality is too low. This would be due to recall issues. ...
Pedersen thought that people were likely reporting nonviolent deaths as violent ones.
These two have to go together. If prewar mortality was too low because people forget to mention prewar deaths, it would have shown up as a significant increase in non-violent deaths. Which didn't happen, so Pedersen must also believe that a significant number of deaths were misclassifed. I don't see how this is possible,…
tlambert | November 30, 2006Bjorn Lomborg interviewed by TCS Daily says:
The use of DDT is probably the best example of this and its use in the third world was badly mismanaged. DDT is not dangerous to humans, but it is dangerous to some animals. So if you're in a rich country where you have malaria under control, clearly you should ban DDT or severely restrict its use.
But our concern about DDT in the early 70s basically meant that most of the developing world restricted their use as well. That was probably an immensely bad judgement because yes, it harms animals like birds, but it also saves human lives. These…
tlambert | November 28, 2006Laurie David, one of the producers of An Inconvenient Truth writes about what happened when she tried to donate copies of the movie to schools:
So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer.
The teachers had a different idea: Thanks but no thanks, they said.
In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other "special interests" might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn't want to offer "political" endorsement of the…
tlambert | November 26, 2006Science has Burnham and Roberts' reply (subscription required) to the criticisms that Science published on Lancet 2:
Bohannon fails to appreciate that cluster sampling is a random
sampling method. Sampling for our study was designed to give all
households an equal chance of being included. In this multistage
cluster sampling, random selections were made at several levels ending
with the "start" house being randomly chosen. From there, the house
with the nearest front door was sampled until 39 consecutive houses
were selected. This usually involved a chain of houses extending into
two or three…
tlambert | November 23, 2006Monckton responding to an email about how volcanoes cause ozone depletion:
I'm not familiar enough with the inner workings of the
general-circulation models, so I'm not sure how it is that the ozone
hole appears only over the Antarctic. One possibility is that the
circumpolar circulation (which sailors take advantage of) acts as a
cage for the weather within. Another, which I'm trying to find data
for, is the volcanic activity of Mount Erebus, Antarctica's active
volcano. In a good year for eruptions, Erebus can put out as much CFCs
as Man used to. It would be very amusing if the activity…
tlambert | November 21, 2006Glenn Reynolds, Nov 21:
IRAQ: "So far this month, the civilian casualty count is well below the casualty count in October and below the six-month average. The security force casualties reduced 21 percent over the past four weeks, and are at the lowest level in 25 weeks, he said."
Associated Press, Nov 20
Gunmen shot and killed a television comedian Monday who was famous for mocking everyone from the Iraqi government to U.S. forces to Shiite militias to Sunni insurgents.
Walid Hassan's slaying came as the Iraqi death toll rose to more than 1,300 for the first 20 days of November - the highest…
tlambert | November 21, 2006Christopher Monckton and George Monbiot have an exchange in the Guardian and William Connolley is not impressed.
Today's grauniad has a piece by Monckton, "This wasn't gibberish. I got my facts right on global warming". Its in the "response" column, where people get a chance to reply. Sadly its all more gibberish. But also somewhat sadly the piece it responds to by Monbiot also contains some mistakes, and is itself a reaction to Monckton's bit in the Torygraph (in fact its all so badly written its rather hard to tell if Monbiot is just quoting Monckton or making mistakes of his own; and what…
tlambert | November 20, 2006Slate has published a response from Burnham and Roberts to Kaplan's botched criticism of Lancet 2.
Kaplan's latest article focused on two baseless criticisms of our 2006 study. First, he claimed that our measured base line rate, the rate of natural deaths for the year before the invasion, was too low. We had estimated the rate to be 5.5 deaths per thousand per year. Kaplan claims that the rate was really 10, according to U.N. figures. He wrote, "[I]f Iraq's pre-invasion rate really was 5.5 per 1,000, it was lower than almost every country in the Middle East, and many countries in Europe."…
tlambert | November 19, 2006The Daily Telegraph has published a piece by Al Gore that corrects Monckton's numerous errors. An extract:
Monckton goes on to level a serious accusation at the scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claiming that they have "repealed a fundamental physical law" and, as a result, have misled people by exaggerating the sensitivity of the Earth's climate to extra carbon dioxide.
If this were true, the entire global scientific community would owe Monckton a deep debt of gratitude for cleverly discovering a gross and elementary mistake that had somehow escaped the…
tlambert | November 18, 2006Sheldon Rampton has a nice summary of the reactions to the new Lancet study. He concludes:
Even so, the results of the Lancet study, combined with what we know about the limitations of other attempts to count the dead, suggest that the war in Iraq has already claimed hundreds of thousands rather than tens of thousands of lives.
It is rather striking, moreover, that critics of this research have mostly avoided calling for additional, independent studies that could provide a scientific basis for either confirming or refuting its alarming findings
Meanwhile, David Kane has started a blog just…
tlambert | November 18, 2006The CBC's Fifth Estate has produced a documentary on the global warming denial industry:
The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences. It shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those willing to question the science…
tlambert | November 11, 2006Christopher Monckton's attempt to debunk anthropogenic global warming was full
of
errors.
In a follow-up article he only corrects three of them, and even makes another error in his correction.
Last week I said that James Hansen had told the United States Congress that sea level would rise several feet by 2000, but it was the US Senate, and by 2100; I added a tautologous "per second" to "watts per square metre"; and I mentioned the perhaps apocryphal Arctic voyage of Chen Ho.
No, adding "per second" is not tautologous -- it's wrong. "Watts per square metre per second" is a measure of how…
tlambert | November 10, 2006John Quiggin catches Andrew Bolt pointing to stratospheric cooling as evidence against global warming. Stratospheric cooling is one of the pieces of evidence that suggest that the warming at the Earth's surface (where people other than Andrew Bolt live) is caused by greenhouse gasses rather than the sun (which would warm the stratosphere as well). Eli Rabett has a post on the attribution of stratospheric cooling.
Also, Rabett finds another Monckton blunder and comes up with Needy Rapacious Scientists and Publicists for our favourite Canadian astroturfers.
tlambert | November 9, 2006CBS news reports
Iraq's Health Minister Ali al-Shemari said about 150,000 Iraqis have been killed by insurgents since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
For every person killed about three have been wounded in violence since the war started in March 2003, al-Shemari told reporters during a visit to Vienna. He did not explain how he arrived at the figure, which is three times most other estimates.
The health minister also said the United States should hand Iraqis full control of its army and police force. Doing so, he said, would allow the Iraqi government to bring the violence under control…
tlambert | November 9, 2006Gavin Schmidt explains where Monckton went wrong in his calculations of climate sensitivity. John Quiggin collects some of the nutty ideas the global warming denialists have latched onto.
I exchanged a few emails with Monckton. He conceded that
the 1421 claim was rubbish
that the graph in his article was bogus (he said the the Telegraph insisted on its inclusion and that they were the ones who sexed it up)
that Hansen did not predict temperature rise of 0.3 degrees and a sea level rise of a few feet by 2000
We got stuck on his claim that the Andean glaciers had vanished in the…