tlambert | June 5, 2006The New York Post found someone with less knowledge of science than Tim Blair to review An Inconvenient Truth. David Roberts takes the review to pieces.
Henry Farrell writes about Dave Kopel's claim that global warming skeptics don't get enough coverage in the media.
Judd at Think Progress writes about Jason Steorts' disregard for accuracy.
Over at NZ Climate Science Coalition "Distinguished NZ climate science" "shows CO2 and temperature not connected":
"This coldest May in 10 years comes at a time when recordings made at Baring Head of
carbon dioxide over New Zealand show that…
tlambert | June 3, 2006William Ford has the latest news on Lott's lawsuit against Levitt: Levitt and HarperCollins have filed motions to dismiss the case. Some new snippets of information(from the Joint Initial Status Report):
Lott wrote Levitt on January 11, 2006 requesting that he correct his claims that Lott
invented some survey data and that other scholars have been unable to replicate Lott's results. Lott, through his counsel, wrote Defendants on March 17, 2006 and demanded that (i) all future printings of Freakonomics correct the alleged defamatory statement; and (ii) the correction be in the form of a…
tlambert | June 2, 2006I wrote earlier about how consultants for PG&E published a fraudulent article exonerating chromium-6. The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine is now publishing a retraction of the paper. From the EWG press release:
The July issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM), the official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, will carry a retraction of a 1997 article published under the byline of two Chinese scientists, JianDong Zhang and ShuKun Li.
The article appeared to be a reversal of an earlier study by…
tlambert | June 2, 2006From the Onion: Critics Blast Al Gore's Documentary As 'Realistic'
Not from the Onion: Republicans gave out free snow cones to students for an event they called "Global Cooling Day."
From Ringworld:
Gareth: You may care to reflect on another category of best-seller - the astrological predictions that sell well each new year. They don't prove that astrology works (because it doesn't), but it shows some people think it does.
Ken Ring: Wrong, it proves it does work or the same people wouldn't keep buying it. Probably wouldn't work for you though. Many people don't know what astrology is.…
tlambert | June 1, 2006Hansen's 1988 paper that Pat Michaels misrepresented in testimony is not available online. I've put some extracts here.
Hansen, J., I. Fung, A. Lacis, D. Rind, Lebedeff, R. Ruedy, G. Russell, and P. Stone 1988. Global climate changes as forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies three-dimensional model. J. Geophys. Res. 93, 9341-9364.
Abstract
We use a three-dimensional climate model, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) model II with 8° by 10° horizontal resolution, to simulate the global climate effects of time-dependent variations of atmospheric trace gases and aerosols.…
tlambert | June 1, 2006I'm with John Quiggin in the debate about Joel Achenbach's story on the global warming skeptics: he's hung them out to dry. Bill Gray looks crazy when he likens Gore to Hitler, and Achenbach even gets a CEI shill to admit to being dishonest:
Horner talks about baselines used in climate trends. Why start in 1860? That was the end of the Little Ice Age. Of course the world has warmed since then. That's cheating with the baseline. At one point Horner refers to the "cooling" since 1998 -- a record-breaking year with a major El Nino event in the Pacific. He admits he is being disingenuous.
"We're…
tlambert | May 31, 2006The LA Times publishes Jon Wiener on Lott's lawsuit:
But Lott is not suing those who have said some of his pro-gun research was "invented," "faked" or "cooked." The lawsuit turns on the definition of "replicate," from the "Freakonomics" sentence about how other scholars have tried and failed to "replicate his results." Lott maintains "replicate" means "analyze the identical data in the way Lott did." Because nobody tried to do that, he argues, "Freakonomics" is wrong. Most people, however, understand "replicate" to mean something like "confirm."
Lott's reputation has indeed been "seriously…
tlambert | May 31, 2006Iain Murray, one of the masterminds who made the CEI ad that claimed that Al Gore produced as much CO2 as the state of Kentucky, discovers that Gore, on net, produces no CO2:
Al Gore justifies his enjoyment of a carbon-intensive lifestyle in a speech in the UK:
He said he was "carbon neutral" himself and he tried to offset any plane flight or car journey by "purchasing verifiable reductions in CO2 elsewhere".
Translation: I am rich enough to benefit from executive jets and Lincolns because I pay my indulgences. All you proles have to give up your cars, flights and air conditioning.
Now in…
tlambert | May 30, 2006One trouble with cherry picking is that you have to be very careful not to change anything or the whole thing falls apart.
Dennis Avery picks up Bob Carter's "Global Warming stopped in 1998" cherry but fluffs it
The official thermometers at the U.S. National Climate Data Center show a slight global cooling trend over the last seven years, from 1998 to 2005.
Nope, they show warming.
What went wrong? Well for the Carter cherry pick, you have to thread the needle by picking 1998 as the starting point and you have to use the CRU data. (So I'm threading a needle with cherries here.) In the…
tlambert | May 29, 2006Roy Spencer takes a break from his parody writing with a new column at Tech Central Station. He has some questions for Al Gore. I think he should have just used Google to find the answers, but what the hey, I'll do it for him.
1) Why did you make it look like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods, droughts, and ice calving off of glaciers and falling into the ocean, are only recent phenomena associated with global warming? You surely know that hurricane experts have been warning congress for many years that the natural cycle in hurricanes would return some day, and that our built-up…
tlambert | May 28, 2006After everyone laughed at their first two ads, CEI have made another one. This purports to compare Gore's CO2 emissions from flying around to give his presentation on global warming with that of an average person.
This screen capture shows that Gore's CO2 meter is about 683,000,000, while the one for the average person is 177, so apparently Gore's flying around produces 4,000,000 times as much CO2 as the average person does in their regular activities. The average person produces about 170 pounds of CO2 per day. According to the CEI video Gore only makes flights from one side of the USA to…
tlambert | May 27, 2006The Editors on Gregg Easterbrook:
I was going to do a whole thing about how disingenuous Gregg Easterbrook has been about global warming, but I see that Media Matters has already done a very thorough job. I would like to highlight one rather egregious item they missed, which comes from his dramatic announcement that, at long last, the science behind global warming has earned the coveted Gregg Easterbrook Seal of Sound Science:
When global-warming concerns became widespread, many argued that more scientific research was needed before any policy decisions. [sic] This was hardly just the…
tlambert | May 27, 2006Several days ago I described how the World Bank's Booster Program and Attaran et al both misunderstood an article published by Akhavan, Musgrove, Abrantes, and Gusmao. Since then, the World Bank has corrected the error while Attaran, even though his mistake has been drawn to his attention, has not. Instead, he has accused Akhavan et al of fraud
The bank has always played fast and loose with science. In The Lancet, we revealed how the bank in the 1990s published a scientific paper containing false epidemiological statistics that claimed it reduced malaria in Brazil. The bank's internal…
tlambert | May 26, 2006Roger Dewhurst, who is a member of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, has sent a letter to NZ MPs:
"I was appalled to see a one page propaganda sheet apparently put out by the Ministry of Education which made it abundantly clear that officialdom has swallowed the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming stuff hook, line and sinker and is promoting it without a shred of balance. These small children are actually being invited to propose their own solutions to the 'problem' of global warming. This is not education, it is attempted brainwashing. Fortunately there is a teacher in the…
tlambert | May 25, 2006John Quiggin notes that Michael Shermer and Sir David Attenborough have now accepted that the evidence for global warming is overwhelming and that the skeptics now mostly consist of the deluded like Ken Ring and the shills like the CEI.
Speaking of which, here's the latest from Ken Ring.
Cameron: CO2 is all around us, its part of what makes air air. Plants take up CO2 through stomata, on the UNDERSIDE of their leaves Kenny - not a good strategy for your "falling CO2".
Ken Ring: If CO2 doesn't fall then how does it get to vegetation? I suppose you think it rises then twists in the air doing a…
tlambert | May 25, 2006Skeptico got a creationist guest blogger to put together the 35th Skeptics' Circle. Check it out.
tlambert | May 24, 2006Tim Blair is incensed at my conclusion that Steyn had stolen from a blogger. He calls me "the Lambot" and "a thief", searches for something to attack me with ... and comes up with an incorrect comment I made on another blog. I guess I'm in good shape if that's the best he can come with. Especially since since it's the fourth time he has ranted about that comment. And he has yet again linked to his post that contains uncorrected errors of his own. (Lockitch's article was not published in the Age, and the quote was not part paraphrase.)
tlambert | May 24, 2006UNICEF reports:
Despite the laudable efforts of the Public Distribution System (PDS) of food baskets, many of Iraq's poorer households are still food insecure, according to a Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis launched today, based on the most recent data from 2005. ...
Roger Wright, UNICEF's Special Representative for Iraq, lamented that children were confirmed as the major victims of food insecurity. "The chronic malnutrition rate of children in food insecure households was as high as 33 per cent, or one out of every three children malnourished," he stated. Chronic malnutrition…
tlambert | May 23, 2006This weeks ask a Science blogger question is:
"If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?"
Random sampling. If I want to know how many crimes there were in the country last year, you get a more accurate answer if you take a random sample of people and ask them than if you add up all the crimes recorded by the police. Now the crime rate in your sample might not be exactly the same as the population, so you have introduced an error by sampling, but we can mathematically estimate the size of the error, while using police records introduces an…