tlambert | May 23, 2006I think Exxon should be asking for their money back from some of the think tanks they are funding. I mean, these people are supposed to be slick professionals, well versed in the art of media manipulation, but they've completely lost the plot on Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth. First we had CEI tell us CO2 = Life, and now NCPA tells us Gore = Goebbels. It must be a really good movie.
tlambert | May 23, 2006Pinko Punko applied for a job at the CEI.
The Editors award Ron Bailey the coveted Golden Winger.
Ron Bailey comments on my earlier post:
You invited me to come on down, so here I am a bit late (you really should email those invitations to me rather have me google them). Anyway, CEI's spots are not subtle and not effective and yes, they do lend themselves to parody. Sigh.
tlambert | May 22, 2006Philip Musgrove, one of the authors of the paper that Amir Attaran misunderstood writes:
The one--and only--point on which Attaran and his co-authors are right
is that in the Appendix to the Booster Program document, someone at the
World Bank who had not participated in the analysis of the Brazilian
program failed to notice that the data for 1996 referred to only half a
year. This is because the paper by Akhavan et al., of which I am a
co-author, developed a cost-effectiveness analysis and the cost data for
the Bank project ran only through half of that year. It was a mistake
to interpret…
tlambert | May 21, 2006The Washington Post reveals that Roy Spencer is the man behind environmentalist parody site ecoEnquirer.com:
Somewhere in an office about 600 miles southwest of here, former NASA scientist Roy W. Spencer is laughing. The 50-year-old, white-haired PhD dreamed up the spoof site -- sort of the Onion meets the Weather Channel -- because he thinks people are overreacting to the threat of climate change.
Now a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Spencer says human activities have "likely" contributed to climate change, but he argues that "since we do not…
tlambert | May 20, 2006Quoting myself:
One of the less pleasant parts of my job is talking to students that I have caught plagiarizing assignments. All too often, rather than admit to copying they will tell me clumsy lies and blame somebody else.
Like Mark Steyn. When he was caught stealing from a blog post by Geoff Pullum, instead of apologizing and giving Pullum appropriate credit, he implausibly claimed that he had independently came up with the same examples and wording.
From John Quiggin and PZ Myers, who got it from Bitch, Phd, who got it from Unfogged.
My previous posts on Steyn are here.
Update: See John…
tlambert | May 20, 2006Media Matters catches Pat Michaels in an outrageous bit of quote mining:
MICHAELS: Well, it's an exaggeration. Global warming is a very real thing. People have something to do with it in the last several decades of the 20th century. But what people do on this issue is they exaggerate it. I have a quote from [Gore], from Grist magazine recently.
He said, "I believe it's appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is."
HANNITY: Yeah.
MICHAELS: He says it's appropriate to over-represent the danger on this issue. You have to realize what he said and…
tlambert | May 19, 2006The reviews are in on the CEI's ads: Ha ha ha ha ha. Here's a small selection:
Andrew Sullivan: I'm not going to knock CO2. And when you watch the ad, you'll find it comes out of your lungs in short, sharp bursts of laughter.
Seed's Daily Zeitgeist: Ha! This is great. Let's apply their logic to fecal matter: We excrete it out, plants take it in as fertilizer. So why not dump it everywhere? Some call it "crap." We call it life!
nicteis: It's finally happened. Someone has actually managed to underestimate the intelligence of the American people.
Fruitbat I particularly liked the footage…
tlambert | May 18, 2006In a previous post I wrote that the "leading climate scientists" in the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition only contained one actual climate scientist, Chris de Freitas. I was wrong. They have prominent links to papers by de Freitas, but he's not on their list of members.
So the Climate Science Coalition doesn't contain any actual climate scientists.
And Gareth found this example (PDF) of the top-notch climate science that NZCSC promotes, from long range weather forecaster Ken Ring:
CO2 is also nearly twice as heavy as air (molecular weight 44, that of air 29) so it cannot rise anywhere…
tlambert | May 18, 2006RealClimate informs us of two ads being put out by the Onion Competitive Enterprise Institute. Punchline: "CO2: they call it pollution, we call it Life!". If the CEI staff was locked in an airtight room, would they still call CO2 Life?
If you are unfamiliar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, let me introduce some of their people. Steve Milloy, who Cato recently let go after the various pundit payola scandals, has found a new home at CEI. When you are both working for Philip Morris, I guess it's not a conflict of interest. Paul Georgia, who told the world that average temperature…
tlambert | May 17, 2006The New York Times reported:
The World Bank failed to follow through on its pledges to spend up to $500 million to combat malaria, let its staff working on the disease shrink to zero, used false statistical data to claim success and wasted money on ineffective medicines, according to a group of public health experts writing in the British medical journal The Lancet.
The experts, in an article to be published online today, argue that the bank should relinquish the money it has to fight malaria, which kills an African child every 30 seconds, and instead let the Global Fund to Fight AIDS,…
tlambert | May 17, 2006The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition registered climatescience.org.nz for their domain. A bit cheeky, given the dearth of actual climate scientists in their "coalition". Greenpeace New Zealand has countered by registering climatescience.co.nz and climatescience.net.nz and creating a web site describing mainstream climate science. The Climate Science Coalition's Owen McShane has complained (link to radio discussion), claiming that they are "passing off" their site as the CSC's one. It's easy to see that his claim is untrue. If you look at their site you'll see that it doesn't look…
tlambert | May 16, 2006This week's ask a ScienceBlogger question is "Will the 'human' race be around in 100 years?"
Yes. Even a big nuclear war or genetically engineered super-virus won't kill everybody. That leaves the possibility of the Singularity arriving and everybody transforming themselves into something different. Well, I don't think the Singularity is at all likely and even then there would be plenty of people who would want to remain human.
Results of last week's ask a ScienceBlogger.
(I know 2525 is more than a hundred years in the future -- I'm referring to this.)
tlambert | May 15, 2006Richard Lindzen has jumped on Bob Carter's global warming stopped in 1998 bandwagon.
Here's one slide from a presentation he gave at right-wing Swedish think tank.
In the text he claims that that there has been almost no rise since 1986, but in his talk (at 38:00) he told the audience to ignore the red line (which shows the ten year mean) and pointed to the graph on the bottom right of just the last eight years. Presumably he meant to write that there had been no rise since 1998. I must give him points for brazenness by doing a blatant cherry pick right in front of his audience. They…
tlambert | May 14, 2006Reporting on global warming in the media is far too often of the "he said/she said" type that just leaves the impression with the reader that is controversial and there is no way for the reader to work out what is really happening. So I should point to this article in the Wall Street Journal which does a good job of informing the reader about why scientists believe that people are largely responsible for the current global warming.
My only quibble is this bit:
Earth has warmed 1.4° Fahrenheit over the past 100 years. Skeptics concede that.
Most skeptics concede that, but some of them are…
tlambert | May 14, 2006
We were out walking the dog at Malabar Bay and saw some dolphins. They're not an unusual sight in the ocean off Sydney but I've never seen them this close before -- you could almost reach out and touch them. There were about a dozen of them and they were splashing around for about half an hour. More pictures and a video below the fold.
I didn't have a telephoto lens -- these were taken with my little Ixus 55. Fortunately they were really close.
tlambert | May 11, 2006In February I linked to a detailed report in IEEE Spectrum that explained how billions of dollars had been wasted and electricity production in Iraq at 3,600 megawatts was still less than it was before the war. Glenn Reynolds felt that the report was "sort of good news". Now Reynolds reports more good news:
The latest Brookings Institution data from Iraq look good. I wonder why these numbers don't get more attention?
He links to Bill Crawford, who writes:
Electrical output is almost at the pre-war level of 3,958 megawatts. April's production was 3,600 megawatts. In May of 2003,…
tlambert | May 10, 2006Daniel Son writes
While an inordinate amount of attention is given to distant, theoretical threats of global warming, a tragically minimal amount of attention is given to the life and death problems of today, some of which directly result from policies enacted to stave off the "disastrous" conditions of global climate change.
A clear example of what can result from bad policies can be found in environmentalists blocking DDT use in African nations; DDT has reduced malaria-related deaths by 75% in countries who used DDT programs. An African dies from malaria every 40 seconds--the equivalent of…
tlambert | May 9, 2006ScienceBlogs has a new feature where all the bloggers answer a question. Today's question:
"If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?"
Easy. Cold fusion. Don't get me wrong --- I think it's great that I can run my whole house off one little "Mr Fusion" unit. And we'd probably be facing problems from global warming if we were still pumping out CO2 like in the old days. But it's just too easy to turn cold fusion devices into bombs. I don't have to list all the destruction that terrorists have caused with them.
tlambert | May 9, 2006The fun never ends with Glenn Reynolds' "steal the oil" post. Tim Blair exclaims:
Warming alarmite Tim Lambert (current average daily visits: 3,577) is now demanding $520 per week for ad space at his rarely-viewed site; $3360 for three months! Guess that explains his recent graceless attempts to provoke an Instalanche. (By the way, ads presently displayed at Lambot's (sic) site are apparently shared throughout the ScienceBlogs network.)
I wrote my post because Reynolds was wrong: invading Iraq has reduced their oil production. I guess that since Blair is always angling for an Instalanche,…