tlambert | July 9, 2006Erik Svane says that the media is not reporting the good poll news from Iraq:
Indeed, one reason that "the global image of America has slipped," that "pessimism about the future of Iraq was widespread," and that "Iraq is sapping good will to the United States" may be that they see so few polls from Iraq. As it happens, polls from Iraq -- both Western and Iraqi -- do exist. To mention only four (that are quoted in my book on anti-Americanism in France and Europe, La Bannière Ãtalée): in March 2004, a BBC poll found that 56% of Iraqis said life was better than before the war (only 17%…
tlambert | July 7, 2006I wrote earlier how some Global Warming Skeptics likened themselves to Creationists. Over at the Panda's Thumb Richard Hoppe has more:
Regular readers of the Thumb will recall that in February, the Ohio State Board of Education removed the "critical analysis of evolution" standard, benchmark, and lesson plan from the state's science standards. The matter was referred to the Achievement Committee of the Board, with instructions to consider whether a replacement should be inserted, and if so, what it should be. That was a hammer blow to the creationists on the board and to the Disco Institute.…
tlambert | July 7, 2006In an interview with People Bush says:
I think we have a problem on global warming. I think there is a debate about whether it's caused by mankind or whether it's caused naturally, but it's a worthy debate. It's a debate, actually, that I'm in the process of solving by advancing new technologies, burning coal cleanly in electric plants, or promoting hydrogen-powered automobiles, or advancing ethanol as an alternative to gasoline.
He's solving the "debate" about whether it's caused by mankind by advancing new technologies? Maybe he meant to say that he's solving the problem by advancing new…
tlambert | July 5, 2006At 3:10 in a Tim Ball interview with the editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen, he says this:
To my knowledge I've never received a nickel from the oil and gas companies. I wish I did get some money -- I might be able to afford their product. If you ask my wife she says its cost me a lot of money to take the positions I've taken. Been a lot easier to be on the gravy train of Kyoto and the government handouts and all the rest of it. I'm not doing it for my pocket or my pleasure I assure you.
Certainly there is money available for climate research, but it is nonsense to argue that he could…
tlambert | July 4, 2006Jim Motavalli has an interesting article about Inhofe's attack on the Associated Press:
Borenstein, through his membership in the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) and elsewhere, has a long history of arguing passionately for fair and balanced reporting. Perry Beeman, environmental reporter at the Des Moines Register and president of SEJ, comments: "My understanding is that Seth Borenstein gave more than 100 prominent global warming scientists the opportunity to comment on Gore's movie. That sample included at least seven that many would consider contrarian because they have not…
tlambert | July 1, 2006Klein's Law states:
At any given moment, PowerLine has no idea what they're talking about.
John Hinderaker has responded to my post on how Hinderaker claimed that ticket sales for Al Gore's movie had gone down when they'd actually gone up. (See also MarkCC at Good Math, Bad Math.)
Update: Some web site criticized this post on the ground that, while revenue per theater has indeed dropped precipitously, An Inconvenient Truth has been put into vastly more theaters, so that there has been a sight increase in total revenue (as opposed to per-theater revenue) between, say, last weekend and the…
tlambert | June 30, 2006OK, this is from November 2004, but still...
Frontier Centre: We are all familiar with the modern theory that the world's climate is getting warmer. Is it?
Tim Ball: Yes, it warmed from 1680 up to 1940, but since 1940 it's been cooling down. The evidence for warming is because of distorted records. The satellite data, for example, shows cooling.
FC: Could you summarize the evidence that suggests the world is cooling slightly, not warming up?
TB: Yes, since 1940 and from 1940 until 1980, even the surface record shows cooling. The argument is that there has been warming since then but, in fact…
tlambert | June 30, 2006In February, 86 evangelical Christian leaders backed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, calling for federal legislation to reduce CO2 emissions.
Opposing them is a group called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance who are collecting signatures in support of a document
arguing against the existence of anthropogenic global warming. It's the usual discredited stuff: Oregon petition, Peiser's discredited claims, Bray's bogus survey etc etc. The most interesting argument is on page 12:
It is ironic that many supporters of the ECI rely heavily on the claim
of scientific consensus to buttress…
tlambert | June 30, 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: "Gore's chilling effect reduces movie audiences". We'll see a correction from Blair sometime around never. Not…
tlambert | June 29, 2006A NY Times article on Arata Kochi, new chief of the World Health Organization's global malaria program wrongly stated that DDT was banned and had to be corrected:
An article in Science Times on Tuesday, profiling Dr. Arata Kochi, the new chief of the World Health Organization's campaign against malaria, referred imprecisely to the pesticide DDT, which can kill the mosquitoes that spread the disease. Its use has been banned in many countries for environmental reasons; it has not been withdrawn entirely.
Kochi is shaking things up in the WHO anti-malaria effort:
In January, he attacked the…
tlambert | June 29, 2006Eli Rabbett :
Senator James Inhofe is demanding that AP provide him the names of the 19 atmospheric scientists who told the press agency that the science in "An Inconvenient Truth" was accurate. I have gone through a number of articles and put together a list of the first 14 that I could find.
Here is a chance for climate scientists to step up to the plate. If you agree with Jim Hansen, Robert Corell, Eric Steig, and the others listed below, put your name, some indication of your expertise and any other words you may wish into the comments. I will move them up into the text, and we will have…
tlambert | June 28, 2006Senator Inhofe (R, Exxon) has responded to the AP story on how top climate researchers say Gore got it right. Drudge pimped the response, so it's all over the place now.
Inhofe's press release starts with a straight lie:
AP INCORRECTLY CLAIMS SCIENTISTS PRAISE GORE'S MOVIE
Top climate researchers did in fact praise the movie and the story quoted them.
Inhofe claims that "scores of scientists" have criticized the movie and demands that the AP release the names of the 19 scientists who praised the accuracy of the movie. Fair enough. Maybe he could tell us the names of the scores of critics.…
tlambert | June 28, 2006How is An Inconvenient Truth doing at the box office? Pretty well. The gross takings have increased every weekend and have almost reached $10,000,000. It's already the number 7 on the all time box office list for documentaries.
How does John Hinderaker and UPI report this? (My emphasis.)
UPI reports that Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, hasn't done so well after a promising start:
Former U.S. vice-President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" has seen its ticket sales plummet after a promising start.
After Gore's global warming documentary garnered the highest average per…
tlambert | June 27, 2006Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer
The AP contacted more than 100 top climate researchers by e-mail and phone for their opinion. Among those contacted were vocal skeptics of climate change theory. Most scientists had not seen the movie, which is in limited release, or read the book.
But those who have seen it had the same general impression: Gore conveyed the science correctly; the world is getting hotter and it is a manmade catastrophe-in-the-making caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
Robert Corell, chairman of the worldwide Arctic Climate Impact Assessment group of scientists, read the…
tlambert | June 27, 2006
Tim Blair has added a slew of updates to try to bolster his case against the accuracy of the British Crime survey.
The most interesting things about these updates is the way he introduces his sources:
Ex-Labour councillor and academic Dr David Green:
Barrister Rehman Chishti quits Labour:
Now, if one of these guys was an expert criminologist, mentioning it would strengthen Blair's case, but why mention their associations with Labour? The answer seems clear. It's all about politics to Blair. He thinks that people decide on whether police numbers or crime survey numbers based on which…
tlambert | June 26, 2006Judd Legum has already debunked Richard Lindzen's repetition of Benny Peiser's discredited study, but I want to add one point. Lindzen wrote:
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that…
tlambert | June 25, 2006
A while ago I Wrote about the Bulletin and Tim Blair's ignorance of basic statistics. Blair could not comprehend how random sampling could give more accurate crime statistics than police reports, while the Bulletin reported numbers from an Internet poll without noting that the poll also found that 66% of Australians were male.
Well, Blair is back for more, apparently believing that he wins the argument with a study from "the respected Crime and Society Foundation" finding an increase in homicides.
All right, he's accepted the authority of the Crime and Society Foundation. Let's se what…
tlambert | June 23, 2006David Appell heard Michael Fumento on the radio:
My God, he is even worse on the radio! You'd think he was the only journalist who ever went to Iraq. I only caught his segment for about two minutes, but during that time he was pompous, combative, egotistical, and simply an all around jerk to his hosts. It was like getting smacked in the face, he was trying so hard to be forceful. It's not easy to make such a strong impression in a mere two minutes, but he succeeded in spades.
Oh yeah, he also has a funny, high voice, kind of like a cartoon character.
Less than two hours later he got a…
tlambert | June 23, 2006Tim Ball is suing Dan Johnson for defamation because of a letter to the editor published in the Calgary Herald (edited to add links):
Whatever one may feel about Tim Ball's denial of climate change science, 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 them and…