tlambert | September 9, 2006According to Clive Hamilton, Alan Moran is one of Australia's greenhouse Dirty dozen:
As the head of the Regulatory Unit at the Institute for Public
Affairs, a right-wing think tank with close ties to greenhouse
sceptics, Moran's role has been to support the Government and the
fossil fuel corporations with anti-environmental opinions about
climate science, the costs of emission reductions and the pitfalls of
renewable energy. As a bureaucrat in the Kennett Government he played
a major role in stopping, for a time, the national adoption of energy
performance standards for home appliances that…
tlambert | September 8, 2006Shelley does the call as the nerds strut their stuff... And declares a winner:
Although, without further ado, Mark Chu-Carrol hands-down wins the nerd-off (in my humble opinion of course). For one, his CURRENT picture trumps PZ's old one, and he reads programming language books for fun and has 30 tinwhistles which he plays. Come on guys, NO ONE can beat that. Mark, for those about to derive, I salute you!
Not so fast. Mark's moves were impressive, but my motto is "Never give up, never surrender!" So, where's APL on the list of programming languages Mark knows? And I've got some nerd…
tlambert | September 7, 2006Janet declared a nerd-off, so I must join the throng.
Here is a colour-coded table of SciBloggers results in the
Nerd test.
Nerd Score
SciBlogger
99 Nerd God
Mark C. Chu-Carroll
99 Nerd God
Tim Lambert
99 Nerd God
Shelley Batts
99 Nerd God
PZ Myers
99 Nerd God
afarensis, FCD
99 Nerd God
Orac
99 Nerd God
Mike Dunford
99 Nerd God
Tara C. Smith
99 Nerd God
Josh Rosenau
98 Nerd God
GrrlScientist
98 Nerd God
John Lynch
98 Nerd God
Joseph j7uy5
97 Nerd God
Dr. Joan Bushwell
97 Nerd God
Evil Monkey
97 Nerd God
Karmen
94 Supreme Nerd
Kevin Beck
93 Supreme Nerd
John…
tlambert | September 6, 2006William Connolley has a few comments on the Chronicle of Higher Education's article on the hockey stick wars.
There is also a question and answer session with Gerald North of the NRC panel. I liked this question, from one Patrick Frank:
The original hockey stick has been shown not just flawed but wrong. Why was the NAS committee unable to clearly state that?
You can just see Frank spluttering with indignation. Why didn't the NAS committee agree with me, why? As North puts it:
There is a long history of making an inference from data using pretty crude methods and coming up with the right…
tlambert | September 5, 2006This week's "Ask a Science Blogger" question is:
I read this article in the NRO, and the author actually made some interesting arguments. 'Basically,' he said, 'I am questioning the premise that [global warming] is a problem rather than an opportunity.' Does he have a point?...
No. Robbins' article contains only one fact and that fact is wrong.
Most of his article is airy speculation about how warming will be beneficial, without looking at any of the scientific evidence on the question. He seems to be blithely unaware of stuff that happened the real world, like, oh, New Orleans:
But the…
tlambert | September 5, 2006So, what happens when you hire a coal industry PR guy as your environment writer? You get stories like this, by Matthew Warren:
Science tempers fears on climate change
The world's top climate scientists have cut their worst-case forecast for global warming over the next 100 years.
For the first time, scientists are confident enough to project a 3C rise on the average global daily temperature by the end of this century if no action is taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions. ...
In 2001, the scientists predicted temperature rises of between 1.4C and 5.8C on current levels by 2100, but better…
tlambert | September 3, 2006The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition posted a Bob Carter article repeating his bogus claim that
global warming ended in 1998. When folks left comments pointing out the flaws in Carter's arguments, the NZ CSC responded by deleting all the critical comments.
Meanwhile, over at Climate Audit, someone tried to post a link to my criticism of a Climate Audit post and discovered that they have blocked any comment that links to my blog. Charming.
Via Gareth Renowden.
tlambert | August 31, 2006The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports.
When Mayla Hernandez saw news of a double homicide Friday night, the circumstances seemed too familiar.
She told the Sheriff's Office her boyfriend John Dorsey called her to pick him up around 12:30 a.m. Saturday on Sycamore Drive. He had blood on his forehead, was upset and wouldn't explain what happened.
By 8:30 a.m. Saturday, police arrested Dorsey and charged him with two counts of second-degree murder. His girlfriend played an instrumental role in his capture, the Sheriff's Office said.
Dorsey shot and killed Stephen Bunting, 20, and John Lott, 19…
tlambert | August 31, 2006The answer is the 42nd Skeptic's Circle. My favourite post from the circle: Jon Swift says Science is Dead.
tlambert | August 30, 2006Maria Farell asks about ipod alternatives. I have an Iriver H120 which I'm very fond of. The only drawback to Iriver is that while their hardware is better than Apple's, their firmware leaves something to be desired. But you can use Rockbox, an open source replacement which is much better.
tlambert | August 29, 2006The graph below shows the predictions of James Hansen's 1988 climate model overlaid (in blue) with observed temperatures. Hansen's scenarios B and C have turned out to be very good predictions of what actually happened.
Of course, it is an article of faith amongst the global warming skeptics that the models are wrong, so what do they do?
Well, there are only two things you can do to make Hansen look bad -- you can misrepresent the results of his model, or you can misrepresent the instrumental record.
The first approach is the one taken by Pat Michaels, who dishonestly erased scenarios B…
tlambert | August 28, 2006
Robyn Williams has written a book debunking Intelligent Design.
Tim Blair's reaction (endorsed by Glenn Reynolds): He doesn't see anything wrong with Intelligent Design, but why didn't Williams write a book on the flaws in Fundamentalist Islam?.
Similarly Blair thinks people shouldn't write about global warming, but should write about the threat from global terrorism instead. And you shouldn't write about the danger of obesity, but about the danger of Islamic extremism.
I think that if Blair had his way, this is what it would be like at breakfast:
"What's in the paper this morning?"
"Well,…
tlambert | August 27, 2006John Holbo finds this piece of stupidity from Mark Steyn:
Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a rollicking read very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with. After all, the progressive mind regards it as backward and primitive to let religion determine every aspect of your life, but takes it as advanced and enlightened to have the state determine every aspect of your life. Lest you doubt the left's pieties are now a religion, try this experiment: go up to an environmental activist and say "Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?" or "Wow! The global warming peaked…
tlambert | August 24, 2006Charles Montgomery's excellent expose of the so-called "Friends of Science" group must have really hit a nerve, because it has drawn an over-the-top response from Terence Corcoran in the National Post. It appears that Corcoran was so incensed by it that he didn't bother to check whether anything he wrote was true. Andrew Weaver lists a few of things that Corcoran got wrong, the most telling of which is this:
6) I never dismissed "the original hockey-stick research debunking research debunking the 1,000-year claim as "simply pure and unadulterated rubbish"
In fact your newspaper already…
tlambert | August 22, 2006The buck passing continues in the case of Pat Michaels and the office of Virginia State Climatologist. The State of Virginia has passed it back to UVa. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:
Katherine K. Hanley, the secretary of the commonwealth, wrote University of Virginia President John T. Casteen III on Thursday, asking that Michaels "avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof by scrupulously avoiding the use of the title of state climatologist in connection with any outside activities or private consulting endeavors." ...
Hanley's letter also addressed the question of whether…
tlambert | August 22, 2006
There is the "Anti (this) War (now)" position. And there is the "Anti-Most Wars Most of the Time" position. And there is Tim Blair's "Pro War All the Time" position:
now right-wing monks are launching themselves at Sri Lankan peaceniks:
A scuffle broke out Thursday between saffron-robed monks and anti-war demonstrators at peace rally in Sri Lankan capital.
About six or seven monks from a right-wing Buddhist faction had stormed the stage during a peace rally attended by about 1,000 people in the capital, Colombo, shouting pro-war slogans, an AP reporter at the scene said.
It's as though…
tlambert | August 21, 2006Michael Shermer's September column in Scientific American is on Lott's lawsuit. He got some comments from both Lott and Levitt:
I asked Levitt what he meant by "replicate." He replied: "I used the term in the same way that most scientists do--substantiate results." Substantiate, not duplicate. Did he mean to imply that Lott falsified his results? "No, I did not." In fact, others have accused Lott of falsifying his data, so I asked Lott why he is suing Levitt. "Having some virtually unheard-of people making allegations on the Internet is one thing," Lott declared. "Having claims made in a…
tlambert | August 18, 2006William Connolley writes about a dodgy-sounding conference on global warming. (Jaworowski is presenting, for example.)
In comments the organizer, Peter Stilbs, explained:
I do not really understand your arrogance against Jaworowski - I have seen that elsewhere on the web too. Reading what he has to say about the problems of temperature reconstructions from trapped air bubble content in ice contrasts starkly to the "no problems at all" - message you see from the Berne(Switzerland) group ...
McIntyre and McKitrick were the first to demonstrate that the Mann hockey stick was pure crap and…
tlambert | August 16, 2006Don Boudreaux says that we shouldn't try to prevent global warming because
Capitalism produces so much food that we are never malnourished; it produces ample clothing and sturdy homes to protect us from the elements; it produces the soaps, shampoos, toothpastes and detergents that we use every day to cleanse our bodies and living spaces of bacteria and other dirt. And by continually substituting machines for human labor, capitalism progressively makes our work less backbreaking and less perilous.
Those of us who recognize these important benefits of capitalism -- those of us who understand…