tlambert | June 23, 2006The Christian Science Monitor reports on a plan to effectively do away with the electoral college:
Picture it: On election day in some future year, a presidential candidate ends up with the most popular votes but not enough electoral votes to win.
It's a repeat of the 2000 election in which one contender, Democrat Al Gore, took the majority of the national popular vote, while the other, Republican George W. Bush, clinched the most electoral college votes and, hence, the presidency.
But this time there's a twist: A bunch of states team up and give all their electoral college votes to the…
tlambert | June 22, 2006The NAS NRC panel on temperature reconstructions has released its report.
The press release states
There is sufficient evidence from tree rings, boreholes, retreating glaciers, and other "proxies" of past surface temperatures to say with a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years, according to a new report from the National Research Council. Less confidence can be placed in proxy-based reconstructions of surface temperatures for A.D. 900 to 1600, said the committee that wrote the report, although the…
tlambert | June 22, 2006Autism Diva has compiled the 37th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. It's set in the Bermuda Triangle (Elvis needs boats!).
tlambert | June 21, 2006The Australian's Higher Education supplement has a couple of articles on academic blogging. Andrew Leigh says that you should try it (and plugs this blog), while Bernard Lane tells us that the University of Sydney now provides blog hosting for all staff and students.
tlambert | June 20, 2006Stephen Soldz posts an exchange of letters between the IBC's John Sloboda and Les Roberts. Sloboda accused Roberts of spreading misinformation about a NEJM study. Roberts said:
In a very prestigious journal called the New England Journal of Medicine there was an article published on 1 July 2004. Military doctors interviewed soldiers returning from Iraq.
They interviewed them because they were interested in post-traumatic stress disorder, so they asked the soldiers about stressful things that might have happened to them.
Among other things they found that 14 percent of the ground forces in…
tlambert | June 19, 2006Last year Steve McIntyre insinuated that Gavin Schmidt was dishonest after one of McIntyre's comments was held up in moderation: (link in quote is mine)
Posting at realclimate is a little thing. I was once involved in trying to detect a business fraud many years ago. A friend told me that to look for evidences of dishonesty in little things, as someone who is dishonest in big things will also be dishonest in little things. In passing, realclimate was able to locate and post URLs for versions of the VZ and Huybers Comments, but was seemingly unable to do so for our Replies.
So I ask the…
tlambert | June 16, 2006Tom Bethell's discussion with Chris Mooney is here. I agree with PZ Myers: Flatow let Bethell ramble on far too much. Bethell was allowed to burn up the first ten minutes of the show to make his first point -- his claim that government agencies promote problems like global warming and bird flu to justify more funding. He could have made his point in ten seconds.
Mooney mentioned my global warming skeptic bingo when Bethell brought up one of the standard skeptic arguments about the world cooling from 1940 to 1970 despite increasing CO2. While that is one of the sort of arguments that GWS…
tlambert | June 16, 2006Tim Blair responds to Mieszkowski's conclusion that "climate scientists say that, basically, Gore got it right" with a link to an article by Tom Harris who writes:
Albert Einstein once said, "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
While the gods must consider An Inconvenient Truth the ultimate comedy, real climate scientists are crying over Al Gore's new film. This is not just because the ex-vice-president commits numerous basic science mistakes. They are also concerned that many in the media and public will fail to…
tlambert | June 15, 2006Matt Drudge recently linked to a web site claiming that climate experts disagreed with Al Gore about global warming. Hundreds of blogs uncritically swallowed the claim.
One of the few skeptics was Bruce Perens who wrote
We ran a pointer to a global-warming-doubter story this morning. Here's the link. I decided to pull the story after reviewing the author attribution (he's from a paid political PR agency), and the venue's other coverage on this issue. Sorry.
Hey, I've got my doubts about global warming too. But it does seem that the "con" side of the argument often comes from people who are…
tlambert | June 13, 2006Jim Lindgren has two posts about John Lott. First, on Lott's lawsuit against Levitt he concludes:
I think that Freakonomics is misleading in its juxtaposition of different studies, a juxtaposition that might bring one to conclude that the reason that the main More Guns, Less Crime research was not usually replicated in other studies is that there was some chance that a study was never done. Yet, to the extent that Lott's lawsuit is based on a failure to replicate being per se defamatory, I would think he has a difficult chance of winning.
I don't see the juxtaposition as particularly…
tlambert | June 13, 2006The latest from the NZ Climate Science recommended Ken Ring:
Basic science:
Scattered here and there, ozone is individual molecules, not some kind of sheet metal covering the whole sky. How much? 3 parts in 100,000 of the atmosphere. Even CO2 is 35 parts in 100,000, yes 10x as much per volume and THAT doesn't protect us, in fact you and your friends are saying that that amount of CO2 HARMS us! Get it right Thomas, harms or protects, you can't have it both ways. If you believe a 3mm Ozone layer is protecting the 200 million square miles of the surface of the Earth from the sun's intense energy…
tlambert | June 12, 2006Over at Salon Katharine Mieszkowski asks "Did Al get the science right?"
The usual oil industry flacks and dogmatic skeptics have surfaced to denounce Al Gore's global warming movie. But climate scientists say that, basically, he got it right.
tlambert | June 11, 2006Christopher Pearson foolishly relies on Ian Plimer for an article claiming that the link between global warming and sea level rises is "bad science":
Plimer notes that "the tidal measuring station at Port Adelaide is sinking, thereby recording a sea level rise". The same is true of many other areas of subsidence, a fact apparently lost on most contemporary oceanographers. "If there is a sea-level rise we would expect every atoll in every ocean to be inundated. But we don't see this. We would expect harbours around the world to record a sea level rise. This is not recorded. So something is…
tlambert | June 10, 2006Brad Delong:
And Iain Murray makes me sorry I named John Derbyshire the Stupidest Man Alive:
The Corner on National Review Online: A meteorite hit a remote area of northern Norway yesterday. The explosive force of the impact was equivalent to that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I wonder if they'll try to blame this on global warming?
Jonathan Chait:
Over at the Corner, Iain Murray is assuring readers that An Inconvenient Truth is really very dull. Oh, I'm sure it is--that's why Murray, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is spearheading a massive p.r. blitz to…
tlambert | June 10, 2006Julian Sanchez speculates:
Given the choice between an ultimately misguided but thoughtful post, for which the aforementioned piss-taking might require some research or careful grappling with facially plausible arguments, and some hack's latest howler, a lot of us are going to find it tempting to take the easy shot. I know there are definitely a few sites I visit almost exclusively to hunt for fodder -- places I know I won't just find ideas I disagree with intensely, but ideas I disagree with intensely backed by moronic arguments that are good for a bit of fun. I can't say for sure how…
tlambert | June 9, 2006The ScienceBlogs empire has expanded, with twenty-odd blogs joining us here. There is a new look home page which has channels like "Planet Earth" to help organise all the posts across all the blogs. The "Last 24 hours" channel is the equivalent of the old home page with all the posts in all blogs.
Coturnix has a post introducing all the new bloggers. Go, read.
tlambert | June 8, 2006The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition go for a variation of the global warming ended in 1998 cherry pick:
"The NIWA record tells us that the current pother on global warming was caused by the sudden temperature increase in New Zealand of 1.8ºC from 1993 to 1998, caused by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation ocean event of 1998. Since then temperatures are plunging, and are currently below the average of the last 50 years.
Unfortunately, they have forgotten the first rule of cherrypicking: don't let the rubes see the data you left out. They include a graph of New Zealand temperatures…
tlambert | June 7, 2006In this post I stated:
The New York Post found someone [Kyle Smith] with less knowledge of science than Tim Blair to review An Inconvenient Truth.
I was wrong. Tim Blair has less knowledge of science than does Kyle Smith.
Smith made a correction:
"Correction: an earlier version of this review incorrectly linked lead and smog to global warming."
Blair, on the other hand, cannot grasp the meaning of "altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe." Read his confused comments in this thread as we try to explain radiative forcing to him:
what approximate area…
tlambert | June 5, 2006In Paul Krugman's May 29 column he wrote about Pat Michael's "fraud, pure and simple" that James Hansen's 1988 prediction of global warming was too high by 300%. (Michael's fraud was described earlier by Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, Hansen again and me.)
Michaels has posted a denial, so I'm going to go back to the original sources so that everyone can see what Michaels did.
In Michaels' 1998 testimony he stated:
Ten years ago, on June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the House of Representatives that there was a strong "cause and effect relationship" between observed…