tlambert | August 15, 2006Kevin Lynch has interesting pair of posts investigating Pat Michaels. First, it looks like Michaels isn't really Virginia's State Climatologist. Second, Michaels has serious conflict of interest, not just because the State of Virginia and fossil fuel companies have conflicting interests, but because he's been misusing State Climate Advisories to attack the science of climate change.
Thanks to David Sewell for the links.
tlambert | August 14, 2006I've stated before that folks who peddle the DDT ban myth tend to be those who don't believe in evolution and hence don't believe that mosquitoes can evolve resistance to DDT. One or two commenters felt that I was trying to tar those folks with the creationist brush.
Jonathan Sarfati was Andrew Bolt's source for his nonsense about bedbugs and DDT and also showed up in comments to accuse greens of banning DDT to "solve" the overpopulation problem. Jonathan Sarfati is a Young Earth Creationist. Using a sockpuppet named Socrates he wrote:
In some cases, insects required resistance, and…
tlambert | August 12, 2006Charles Montgomery has a detailed expose in the Globe and Mail on the activities of Tim Ball and the Friends of Science. It turns out that the University of Calgary has been used to launder oil company money to fund the Friends of Science:
There was plenty of money for the anti-Kyoto cause in the oil patch, but the Friends dared not take money directly from energy companies. The optics, Mr. Jacobs admits, would have been terrible.
This conundrum, he says, was solved by University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper, a well-known associate of Stephen Harper.
As his is privilege as a…
tlambert | August 12, 2006Via Eli Rabett I find a long article by James L. Meriner in Chicago magazine on the Lott-Levitt lawsuit. There's some new information on the history of Lott and Levitt such as this:
Just when and how the Lott-Levitt feud started is not clear -- neither man would directly comment on the lawsuit for this article. Levitt's friend Austan Goolsbee, also an economics professor at the U. of C., remembers when Levitt, then a junior fellow at Harvard, visited Chicago in 1994 to present a paper. Lott had just been named a visiting professor. "Even before Steve was on the [academic] job market, John…
tlambert | August 11, 2006Chad's put up a dog blogging post, so here's Silas in Centennial Park with a bunch of other dogs. (Silas is the one whose butt is closest to us.)
The pavilion in the background marks the site where the six colonies joined together and created the Commonwealth of Australia.
Just so you know that Sydney's winters aren't just tee shirt weather, here's a cold, rainy day at UNSW.
tlambert | August 10, 2006Science-hating Miranda Devine reviews An Inconvenient Truth. Not surprisingly, she hated it. Apparently it is stodgy and full of hyperbole. Despite the fact that climate researchers say that Gore got the science right, Devine trots out geologist Bob Carter to say "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic." Carter provided no evidence to support his claim, but this didn't bother Devine. People who say stuff that she wants to believe don't need evidence.
There's more, including an appearance of the mythical DDT ban, but I've outsourced the heavy lifting to Stephen…
tlambert | August 10, 2006Richard Lempert comments on why he found Lott's results implausible when they first came out:
To give another example, long before other research called their results into question, it was common sense that made me suspicious of John Lott and David Mustard's claim in the Journal of Legal Studies that right to carry laws diminish violent crime. What made me skeptical was their finding that while right to carry laws diminish violent crimes like murder, rape, and aggravated assault they led to increases in non-violent property crimes. The authors had an explanation for this; namely, that the…
tlambert | August 9, 2006Jake Young reports that bedbugs are back.
Andrew Bolt naturally blames greens: "Being green can make you itchy", because:
Before World War II, bedbug infestations were common in the U.S., but they were virtually eradicated through improvements in hygiene and the widespread use of DDT in the 1940s and 1950s...
Bolt thinks that the DDT ban in the US caused bedbugs to return. He's wrong, and it's the sort of mistake that people who don't believe in evolution make.
Here's what the World Health Organization says about bedbug control:
Houses with heavy infestations need to be treated with long-…
tlambert | August 8, 2006MarkCC has a post about quaternions and the fact that they can be used for rotation, so I thought I'd chime in with exactly how they represent rotations.
A 2D rotation by an angle θ can be represented by the complex number on the unit circle
cos θ + i sin θ
Then multiplying complex numbers is the same as multiplying rotations.
A 3D rotation by an angle θ about a line defined by a unit vector (b,c,d) can be represented by the quaternion on the unit hypersphere
cos θ/2 + sin θ/2(bi + cj + dk)
Then multiplying quaternions is the same as multiplying rotations.
But why is it θ/2 instead of θ?
Well…
tlambert | August 7, 2006In January Chris Mitchell, editor in chief of The Australian, was named one of the "dirty dozen", the twelve people who have done the most to mislead Australians about climate change:
As an illustration of how news values now take second place to ideology, The Australian in January ran an anonymous anti-greenhouse news story - note, not an opinion piece - by someone identified as a 'special correspondent' employed by the fossil fuel lobby.
Now David Tiley has uncovered The Australian's latest effort.
Here's how they describe their latest hire:
Matthew Warren returns to The Australian as…
tlambert | August 6, 2006John Quiggin reports on a new book containing scholarly articles on blogging.
One use I've found in teaching is to ditch my old clunky content management system and just use Wordpress to manage all the web content for my courses. Here's an example.
tlambert | August 6, 2006Teresa Nielsen Hayden explains what is happening in the video of Total Eclipse of the Heart. Watch the video before you read the explanation. (Video is below the fold.)
Plus, the Hurra Torpedo version is something else.
Update: Chad Orzel explores YouTubehttp://scienceblogs.com/principles/2006/08/total_eclipse_of_futurism.php for more versions of TEotH.
tlambert | August 4, 2006DCI Group, a PR company that specializes in astroturf operations has been revealed by the WSJ as the group behind a youtube video mocking Al Gore:
Everyone knows Al Gore stars in the global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." But who created "Al Gore's Penguin Army," a two-minute video now playing on YouTube.com? In the video, Gore appears as a sinister figure who blames the Mideast crisis and starlet Lindsay Lohan's shrinking waist size on global warming. (See the video.)
The video's maker is listed as "Toutsmith," a 29-year-old who identifies himself as being from Beverly Hills in…
tlambert | August 2, 2006Notorious fraud Pat Michaels is in the news some more.
First, Coby Beck reports that California as part of discovery in lawsuit involving automobile companies and global warming wants:
All DOCUMENTS relating to both GLOBAL WARMING and to any of the following individuals: S. Fred Singer, James Glassman, David Legates, Richard Lindzen, Patrick J. Michaels, Thomas Gale Moore, Robert C. Balling, Jr., Sherwood B. Idso, Craig D. Idso, Keith E. Idso, Sallie Baliunas, Paul Reiter, Chris Homer [sic], Ross McKitrick, Julian Morris, Frederick Seitz, Willie Soon, and Steven Milloy, including but not…
tlambert | August 2, 2006My one millionth visitor came from Vrije Universiteit in Belgium and was here for 38 minutes. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.
tlambert | August 1, 2006Yes, the DDT ban myth is back, this time in "DDT Returns" by Apoorva Mandavilli that reads like a press release by DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria. It's in Nature Medicine of all places and is subscription only, but because I'll be quoting the bits that are wrong or misleading you'll see most of it:
After decades of being marginalized as a dangerous pesticide, DDT--short for dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro ethane--is set to be reintroduced into countries that have tried, and failed, to win the fight against malaria.
On 2 May, the United States Agency for International Development (…
tlambert | August 1, 2006Over at TownHall, Mike Adams writes:
The God-inspired writers of the Bible have always been well ahead of the scientists -- a scenario that hasn't changed from the days of Moses to the days of Darwin, or even now in the 21st century.
Here is one of his examples where he reckons the bible was right and science was wrong.
Isaiah 40:22 "God sits above the circle of the earth. The people below seem like grasshoppers to him! He spreads out the heavens like a curtain and makes his tent from them."
Can you figure out what he thinks the bible got right and the scientists got wrong? Answer later.…
tlambert | July 31, 2006Andrew Dessler sent me a copy of his book The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change. So far I've read a couple of chapters and they've given a pretty good summary of the issues.
Dessler has also started a blog on Climate Change. In the latest entry we learn that the AEI is offering $10,000 for a "review and policy critique" of the 4AR.
Hat tip: John Fleck.