tlambert | September 27, 2006Martin has put together Skeptic's Circle 44. My pick: coturnix on denialist rhetoric, but check them all out.
tlambert | September 26, 2006I'm sure you can guess what the suppressed report says about the link between hurricanes and global warming.
Jim Giles at Nature reports (subscription only):
A statement on the science behind the politically sensitive issue of hurricane activity and climate change has been blocked by officials at the US Department of Commerce, Nature has learned.
Work on the statement began this February after complaints about the actions of political appointees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency that falls under commerce-department control. NOAA researchers accused the…
tlambert | September 26, 2006Chris White who is the Malaria Programme Leader with the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref) responds to the new WHO malaria policy:
The World Health Organisation's new stance on DDT, yet again only goes to show how so many in the West throw out opinions without really understanding the context or culture of Africa. ...
For effective control of mosquitoes, at least 80 per cent of all households must be covered every 6-12 months by well-coordinated spray teams. Is this possible in Africa? Imagine trying that across the Congo basin! It is not realistic to assume that this will…
tlambert | September 25, 2006It's almost cheating to play Global Warming Sceptic Bingo on an Inhofe speech. David Roberts takes it apart.
tlambert | September 25, 2006Gary Becker and Richard Posner have written a pair of posts about DDT and there is much wrong with what they have written.
Becker writes:
The world Trade Organization (WTO) declared in 1998 a "war on malaria" that aimed to cut malaria deaths in half by 2010. Instead, deaths from malaria have been increasing, not falling. The reason for the failure of this malaria war is mainly that in the name of environmentalism, the WTO and other international organizations rejected the use of an effective technique, namely spraying DDT on the walls of homes in malaria-infected areas.
It was the World…
tlambert | September 24, 2006Jessie Stone, who runs a malaria education, prevention and treatment program in Uganda, comments in the New York Times on the WHO's DDT pushing.
To many of us in the malaria-control business, it came as no great surprise last week when the World Health Organization recommended wider use of DDT in Africa to combat the mosquitoes that cause the disease, which kills more than a million people a year, most of them children in Africa.
The W.H.O.'s endorsement of DDT for spraying inside houses has the support of Congress and the Bush administration. With the W.H.O.'s encouragement, several African…
tlambert | September 22, 2006In June, the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine retracted a fraudulent paper because:
"financial and intellectual input to the paper by outside parties was not disclosed."
Paul Thacker has an interesting article on financial-disclosure policies in scientific journals. Most journals do not require authors to make financial disclosure statements:
The editors of several environmental journals recently discovered that they had published papers by industry-funded researchers, yet had not disclosed the authors' financial backers. Officers of the American Geophysical Union (AGU)…
tlambert | September 20, 2006Paul Thacker has the story in Salon:
In February, there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the National Hurricane Center sought to downplay links between more-intense hurricanes and global warming. NOAA scientist Thomas Knutson told the Wall Street Journal he'd been barred from speaking to CNBC because his research suggested just such a link.
At the time, Bush administration…
tlambert | September 20, 2006Five nurses and a doctor have been falsely accused of deliberately infecting their patients with HIV. They've been imprisoned and tortured in Libya since 1999 and may now be condemned to death. Declan Butler writes:
what is needed is an immediate and sustained mobilization of international opinion, something which has been badly lacking so far. Bloggers, and the scientific community, can help create pressure on the authorities for the immediate release of the Tripoli six: Christiana Malinova Valcheva, Valia Georgieva Cherveniashka, Nasia Stoitcheva Nenova, Valentina Manolova Siropulo,…
tlambert | September 20, 2006The Guardian reports
In a letter earlier this month to Esso, the UK arm of ExxonMobil, the Royal Society cites its own survey which found that ExxonMobil last year distributed $2.9m to 39 groups that the society says misrepresent the science of climate change.
These include the International Policy Network, a thinktank with its HQ in London, and the George C Marshall Institute, which is based in Washington DC. In 2004, the institute jointly published a report with the UK group the Scientific Alliance which claimed that global temperature rises were not related to rising carbon dioxide levels…
tlambert | September 20, 2006Jeffrey Sachs writes in the Scientific American about the Wall Street Journal's editorial page:
Another summer of record-breaking temperatures brought power failures, heat waves, droughts and tropical storms throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Only one place seemed to remain cool: the air-conditioned offices of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. As New York City wilted beneath them, they sat insouciant and comfortable, hurling editorials of stunning misdirection at their readers, continuing their irresponsible drumbeat that global warming is junk science.
Now I have nothing…
tlambert | September 19, 2006The New York Times reports:
Dr. Kochi said the most substantive change in the W.H.O.'s guidelines on the use of insecticides would extend the reach of the strategy. Until now, the agency had recommended indoor spraying of insecticides in areas of seasonal or episodic transmission of malaria, but it now also advocates it where continuous, intense transmission of the disease causes the most deaths.
Dr. Kochi's new policies and abrasive style have stirred the small world of malaria experts. Dr. Allan Schapira, a senior member of the W.H.O. malaria team who most recently oversaw its approach to…
tlambert | September 18, 2006Richard Littlemore has posted Ball's Statement of Claim. Here is the heart of it with my commments:
8 The letter to the editor contains the follow statements which contain inaccuracies and are defamatory of Ball:
"...newspapers ought to report factual summaries of authors' credentials. You note that he 'was the first Climatology PhD in Canada and worked as a Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years.'
Ball received a PhD in Geography in the UK in 1982, on a topic in historical climatology. Canada already had PhDs in climatology, and it is important to recognize…
tlambert | September 17, 2006Tim Ball's letter to Paul Martin starts:
I was one of the first climatology PhDs in the world.
He got his PhD in 1983.
Ball signs his letter with:
Dr. Tim Ball, Environmental Consultant
Victoria, British Columbia
28 Years Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg
Eli Rabbett has been checking the numbers on Ball's "28 years". They don't add up.
tlambert | September 15, 2006Andrew Bolt welcomes Al Gore to Australia with a column that accuses Gore of being "one of the worst of the fact-fiddling Green evangelicals". Bolt writes:
Well, here are just 10 of my own "minor quibbles" with Gore's film. These are my own "inconvenient truths", and judge from them the credibility of Gore's warnings of the end of all civilisation.
So let's assess Bolt's 10 "inconvenient truths". I'll classify them as either:
wrong, or
not wrong but misleading, Bolt having omitted other facts that undercut his position, or
a valid point about Gore's movie.
To get a passing grade Bolt…
tlambert | September 14, 2006The Globe and Mail reports
CALGARY -- The skeptic at the centre of the heated debate about climate change that has been taking place in Canadian newspapers is moving the dispute to the courts, where Tim Ball is seeking $325,000 in damages for a letter to the editor that he says amounted to a "malicious attack" on his reputation.
Mr. Ball, who is the country's most well-known critic of global-warming theory, is suing the Calgary Herald and its editors, the University of Lethbridge and one if its professors, Dan Johnson, for defamation, according to documents filed this month with the Alberta…
tlambert | September 14, 2006
Last night I saw went to the 2006 UNSW CSE Revue: The teXt Files: Close Encounters of the Nerd Kind. An awesome show, especially if you are a nerd, with sketches on the X files, Stargate, role-playing games, computer games, Numb3rs, making fun of Arts students, an audience paricipation where they built their own hardware and software and a big song and dance number called "Nerdy":
You get me so excited every time that we roleplay
No one can emulate the features that you've got on display
Tried to establish a connection but you didn't reply
But I don't care 'cause you're my new case…
tlambert | September 13, 2006Janet D. Stemwedel, fresh from organizing the great nerd-off, has put together the sad puppy edition of the Skeptic's Circle.
tlambert | September 11, 2006Over at Climate Audit, Willis Eschenbach responded to my comment about CA's censorship of comments with this denial:
Tim, you're posting here, free to blather on about nothing scientific at all ... meanwhile I'm totally censored from asking scientific questions at RealClimate.
Unfortunately for Eschenbach, within a few minutes my comment about CA's censorship was censored -- everything except for four words was deleted and the link to my blog from my name was deleted. I posted a comment to draw their conduct to his attention and that was deleted as well. I wonder if this will be enough to…
tlambert | September 11, 2006In 2004 Chris Mooney wrote on Op-Ed Seductions:
Two of the most striking recent incidents involve the same author: James Glassman of Tech Central Station and the American Enterprise Institute. Some essential background on Glassman's operation comes from this article by Nicholas Confessore in The Washington Monthly, which depicts Tech Central Station as a strange hybrid: It quacks like a pro-free market journalistic Web site, but it runs articles that closely favor the interests of the site's corporate sponsors. In fact, Tech Central Station is published by a lobbying shop, the DCI Group.…