tlambert | July 30, 2006When John Lott was caught using a sock puppet, Glenn Reynolds declared that he wasn't going to mention it on his blog because it wasn't "actual news". Later he chastised Greg Beato for doing a photoshop of Lott as Mary Rosh and downplayed the sock puppetry as "weird", rather than wrong:
Greg Beato, who sometimes takes it upon himself to lecture me on fairness and decorum, has demonstrated his commitment to fairness and decorum by photoshopping Lott in drag and conflating Bellesiles' false claims that a critic had forged emails attributed to him, with Lott's use of a pseudonym in chat groups…
tlambert | July 28, 2006A leaked memo from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA) gives us inside view of how some of the Global Warming disinformation campaign is financed. There's this:
We decided to support Dr. Patrick Michaels. ... In February of this year, IREA alone contributed $100,000 to Dr. Michaels. In addition, we have contacted all the G&T's in the United States ... and obtained additional contributions and pledges for Dr. Michaels' group. We will be following up the remaining G&T's over the next several weeks.
and this, on the ludicrous CEI ads:
[CEI] has been running two ads in…
tlambert | July 26, 2006
After repeatedly make the same "up is down" blunder Tim Blair has at last switched from talking about An Inconvenient Truth's average take per theatre to the total take:
Nathan Goulding discovers an inconvenient fact: "You may not have heard, but the film WordPlay is the only movie on this BoxOfficeMojo chart that's been out for 4 weeks or longer and has grossed less money than Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth."
This can mean only one thing -- the average take per theatre has increased. And sure enough, the weekend take per theatre increased from $2,044 to $2,273. And on a per…
tlambert | July 25, 2006William Ford has Levitt's reply to Lott. I think this part sums it up:
Plaintiff's construction is so strained and based on faulty assumptions that it is inconceivable that his construction is the exclusive, reasonable interpretation of the Excerpt. The Excerpt is not about Plaintiff's methodology, as he alleges, but his "results." Not only is the Excerpt silent about Plaintiff's protocols and methodology, but Defendants know of no natural and obvious meaning of the word "results" that is tantamount to "methodology". Instead, the term "results" means just that -- a finding or conclusion.…
tlambert | July 24, 2006Judd Legum at Think Progress reports some outrageous claims by Inhofe:
Yesterday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) attacked Al Gore and global warming science, claiming that Gore was "full of crap" on global warming.
Appearing on Glenn Beck's radio show and CNN television program, Inhofe said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which concluded that global warming was real and caused by humans, used "one scientist." Inhofe added: "[A]ll of the recent science...it confirms that I was right on this thing. This thing is a hoax."
Legum corrects Inhofe's misrepresentation of the…
tlambert | July 23, 2006January 2006:
In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."
Guess what happened in February? Coby Beck has the answer.
tlambert | July 20, 2006Back in April Patterico caught Michael Hiltzik using sock puppets to defend himself. He's back with a post implying that Glenn Greenwald has sock puppets called Ellison, Sam Mathews, Wilson, Ryan and Thomas Ellers who all post from the same IP address and defend Greenwald. Patterico believes that this will bring "this douchebag down". Not so fast.
Greenwald has responded by stating that he only posts under his own name and implying that his partner had left the comments defending him. This seems likely to be true, since the writing style of Ellison and co is different from Greenwald's and…
tlambert | July 20, 2006
PZ Myers writes
Time's former "Blog of the Year," the execrable PowerLine blog with which I share a state, has done it again: said something so stupid and so palpably false that I'm feeling a bit embarrassed about ragging on Oklahoma in my previous post--I should feel ashamed by association at being a Minnesotan. Check out Deltoid: down is up in the world of the Hindrocket.
I feel PZ's pain. I share a state with Tim Blair, who has now made exactly the same blunder as Hindrocket: "An Inconvenient Truth continues cooling". We'll see a correction from Blair sometime around never...
Oh what?…
tlambert | July 19, 2006Last month the National Research Council report on climate reconstructions released its report and basically vindicated the hockey stick. This was widely reported in the media. But not in The Australian. I did a search through the archives of The Australian to see what they had published about the study. They did not report anything when the hockey stick study was published or when it was included in the TAR or publish anything supportive of it. They have, however, published several stories on how it was wrong or fraudulent.
For example, Soon and Sallie Baliunas' badly flawed paper was…
tlambert | July 18, 2006We all know that the scientific consensus on global warming is that humans are causing most of it. The Creationist consensus is that humans aren't causing it. But just as their are divisions in the Creationist camp between Old Earth and Young Earth Creationists, they are divided on why people believe that humans are warming the planet.
Creationist Julia Gorin thinks it's to avoid thinking about the threat from fascist Islamonazi Hitlers
Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look…
tlambert | July 17, 2006Chris Mooney on the report Joe Barton commissioned on the hockey stick:
I am beyond bored with the whole thing. I'm reaching the point of despair. Listen, people: This is an argument over a study that is now some eight years old. Eight years! You would think there is nothing new under the sun in climate science.
So let us recite, once again, for those who still don't get it: *One study never definitively proves anything in science. Any single study can be attacked and criticized. Any individual piece of work will have its gaps, shortcomings, and associated uncertainties.* As for those who…
tlambert | July 17, 2006
PZ Myers writes
Time's former "Blog of the Year," the execrable PowerLine blog with which I share a state, has done it again: said something so stupid and so palpably false that I'm feeling a bit embarrassed about ragging on Oklahoma in my previous post--I should feel ashamed by association at being a Minnesotan. Check out Deltoid: down is up in the world of the Hindrocket.
I feel PZ's pain. I share a state with Tim Blair, who has now made exactly the same blunder as Hindrocket: "Al Gore's Gaia love story suckered the coasts, but is now slowly fading". We'll see a correction from Blair…
tlambert | July 16, 2006Last year I banned per/David Bell from commenting for a few days after he abused another commenter. This prompted an attack on me from ClimateAudit where commenters wrote falsehoods like this:
Lambert knows his facts are weak, as such he does not allow others to comment upon them, otherwise the house of cards tumbles down.
Recently Lee and John Hunter were banned from commenting at ClimateAudit. The pretext was incivility. Here's what Lee wrote that got him banned:
JohnA, as always, you misstate my argument into something that is not what I actually said, and then argue based on what you…
tlambert | July 15, 2006
John Quiggin is underwhelmed by Wegman et al's Social Network Analysis of Mann's co-authorship graph.
On the other hand, the Climate Audit folks are really excited. I'm not sure if the Social Network stuff is good for them. (See graph on right.)
tlambert | July 14, 2006Joe Barton's Committee has released a report they commissioned on the hockey stick by Wegman, Scott and Said (WSS). The focus of the report is much narrower than the NRC report and the results are basically a subset of the NRC report. In particular, both reports find that "off-centre" method used in Mann Bradley and Hughes' 1998 paper (MBH98) tended to produce hockey stick shapes in the first principal component (PC1). Unfortunately, WSS stop there and do not address the question of what difference this makes to the reconstruction (which is not the same as PC1). The NRC panel did address…
tlambert | July 14, 2006A press release from the UK Green Party says:
A survey carried out by the Green Party shows overwhelming opposition to Government nuclear plans
Energy Survey shows 87% of public opposed to new nuclear power stations
89% agree 'the Government had already decided what they wanted to do about nuclear power stations before this debate started'
66% will take part in mass protests against nuclear power, if new stations are approved
So far so good, except...
The data reported covers a survey of 524 people interviewed between 01 February and 18th April 2006. Fieldwork was split between 324 people…
tlambert | July 12, 2006Michael Fumento
complains about his Wikipedia article:
An Aussie named Tim Lambert has as his raison d'etre attacking anybody who is more intelligent, more successful, and more relevant than he is. That leaves him with 6.3 million targets -- more or less. But I ended up on his radar screen by making fun of him, as I am now. So he attacks me in any way he can, which as it happens is limited to the only two outlets in the whole world that will deign to publish him -- his blog and Wikipedia. (Perhaps at some point his blog will say "Enough is enough!" but probably not.) Nor will Wikipedia reject…
tlambert | July 11, 2006Lott has filed a response to Levitt's motion to dismiss.
He doesn't have a good argument on the question of the meaning of "replicate", basically just asserting that it means "analyse the same data in exactly the same way" and ignoring the other usages it has.