tlambert | May 9, 2006In the olden days to become a leading climate scientist you had to work hard, do lots of research and publish it in good journals. Now there's a quicker method. Put out a press release.
A group of leading climate scientists has announced the formation of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, aimed at refuting what it believes are unfounded claims about man-made global warming. ...
The coalition includes such well-known climate scientists as:
Dr Vincent Gray, of Wellington, an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), most recently a visiting scholar at…
tlambert | May 7, 2006Folks are still having fun with Glenn Reynolds' "Let's invade Saudi Arabia and Iran and steal their oil" post. Sean Carroll reckons that the wrongness might be enough to form a singularity. But that can't be right, because the wrongness has escaped to form this post by Lubos Motl:
Prices would plummet
Sean thinks that they won't plummet because the oil fields are essentially running at full capacity. Sean has a naive idea about the driving forces behind these prices. In 2002, the oil price was $18 instead of $70. Does it mean that the oil fields were running at a much-higher-than-full…
tlambert | May 7, 2006The LA Times has cancelled
Michael Hiltzik's column because of his use of sock puppets. Cathy Seipp comments:
No matter what you think of the mainstream media, journalists generally try to be honest and Hiltzik's fundamental dishonesty meant he was lucky he wasn't fired. Not as punishment, but simply because his behavior indicates he may be basically untrustworthy. All any journalist really has is his judgment and integrity. If those are compromised, then any publication he works for is compromised too.
One of Patterico's regular commenters pointed out that on submarines this is called "…
tlambert | May 6, 2006A while ago I wrote about Steve Milloys Free Enterprise Action Fund and its dismal performance:
"From inception on March 1 of last year through Dec. 31, Free Enterprise Action returned 2.32 percent; the S&P 500 returned 4.72 percent. That's ugly."
Actually it's worse than ugly. Daniel Gross reports
FEAF's managers also don't appear to be very interested in making money. Assembling a portfolio of 392 teeny positions (111 shares of Federal Express, 60 shares of Tiffany, etc.) is an incredibly inefficient and costly way of trying to mimic the S&P 500. Asset managers get paid based on…
tlambert | May 4, 2006Glenn Reynolds has kept adding updates to his "seize the oilfields" post, including a response to my post that managed to entirely miss my point. (Invading Iraq has reduced its oil production.) The resulting post is rather confused. Fortunately Jim Henley has decoded it and connected it to the collapse of belief in small government in the American Right. Tom Hilton has some more apt comments on Reynolds' post.
tlambert | May 3, 2006Last Sunday, about a hundred zombies lurched through downtown Sydney. In an interesting coincidence some zombie facts have lurched through a column by Ruth Lea:
And, interestingly, global average air temperatures, which are regarded as more reliable by climate scientists, have not changed over the past 20 to 30 years.
Oh look, it's the satellites don't show warming zombie. Dead for quite a while now, still staggering around in global warming skeptic writings.
And indeed it is, as there seems to be little scientific agreement that mankind's fossil-fuel burning is the major reason for…
tlambert | May 3, 2006Glenn Reynolds:
Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy.
Yeah, because that's pretty much the way it worked out in Iraq.
Update: Rob Sama on the same Reynolds post:
Was just listening to Rush. As usual, it sounded like a regurgitation of the best that the blogosphere has to offer. He quoted this newspaper column by Max Boot, which was also quoted by Instapundit this morning. Rush read the same quote that Instapundit cited, but then he went on,…
tlambert | May 3, 2006Lisa Payola is OK! de Pasqaule writes:
In the spirit of Conservative Shopping Day and celebrating conservative ingenuity, JunkScience.com has just released "the world's first pro-DDT, anti-malaria t-shirt." The t-shirt launch is part of an educational program to help debunk the myths surrounding the pesticide DDT. Environmental groups have blocked DDT use for more than 30 years despite the fact that more than one million people, mostly children under 5, die every year from malaria. Part of the proceeds from t-shirt sales will go to FightingMalaria.org.
Outsourced to Sadly, No!.
tlambert | May 2, 2006H347h3r p1ck w4rn5 0f t3h d4ng3rz 0f 1337:
The language is morphing into a dangerous dialect that's completely foreign to parents.
"It gives criminals, kids, whomever, another way to communicate covertly with one another without maybe parents catching on to what the kids are saying," Westerville Police Department Scott Dollison explained.
tlambert | May 2, 2006One favourite tactic of creationists is that of "quote-mining", using out-of-context quotes from scientists that appear to support the creationists' position. Global warming skeptics play this game as well and a recent Calgary Herald column Tim Ball is a good example of the practice. He quotes James Hansen, Stephen Schneider, Phil Jones, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth all of whom apparently agree that we don't know enough about climate to justify something like Kyoto. He ends up this one:
Schneider told Discover Magazine: "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements…
tlambert | May 1, 2006In an earlier post on the IBC I wrote:
Sloboda says:
We've always said our work is an undercount, you can't possibly expect that a media-based analysis will get all the deaths. Our best estimate is that we've got about half the deaths that are out there.
OK, then why does the IBC page say "Iraq Body Count: Max 38661"? That's not really the maximum possible number of deaths, is it? Why not report their estimate that the true number of deaths is 70,000 or so?
IBC's Josh Dougherty responded with:
No. It's the maximum number of reported civilian deaths, as is stated on their homepage, counters…
tlambert | April 29, 2006Iraq Body Count has published a defence against some of the criticism they have been receiving. The Lancet study implies that there are about five times as many Iraqi deaths as the IBC number. They do not accept this and so are arguing that Lancet estimate is to high and is not corroborated by the ILCS:
Comparisons between the Lancet study and ILCS have been attempted in the past, one of the best-known being by British activist Milan Rai. His analysis concludes:
"If we crudely scale up the UNDP [IMIRA] figure to take account of the longer Lancet time period, we reach a figure (33,000) which…
tlambert | April 28, 2006The BBC has a report on the dispute between the IBC and Media Lens about Iraqi casualties. (My previous post on this is here.) IBC's John Sloboda trots out Kaplan's fallacy:
Some critics of the Lancet study have said it's like a drunk throwing a dart at a dartboard. It's going to go somewhere, but who knows if that number is the bulls eye.
Unfortunately many many people have decided to accept that that 98,000 figure is the truth - or the best approximation to the truth that we have.
Yes, some critics have said that, but not ones that are experts in statistics.
Sloboda says:
We've always said…
tlambert | April 27, 2006Your 33rd Skeptics Circle has been compiled by coturnix. Now with added abstract!
tlambert | April 26, 2006
Here is Colby Cosh's response to the UN foundation's appeal to buy insecticide-treated nets to fight malaria:
Africans aren't helpless animals--they know what works against malaria. Unfortunately, what works against malaria is DDT. But any country that proposes a program of household DDT application faces starvation at the hands of European bureaucrats and consumers. The nets are an unnecessarily expensive and epidemiologically phony sauve-qui-peut measure, a work-around for what could be described as the greatest ongoing mass murder ever perpetrated. Reilly's appeal (or Ted Turner's…
tlambert | April 23, 2006Cyclone Monica is heading for Darwin (which was devastated by Cyclone Tracy in 1974. Ken Parish is getting out of town. Fingers crossed for Darwin and Darwinites.
Update: It was category 5 at landfall, but fortunately it was down to category 1 when it reached Darwin.
tlambert | April 23, 2006
James Annan writes about two programmes on the BBC. First, a good one on overselling climate change. I think that what gave the programme credibility was that they didn't talk to any of the global warming skeptics. RealClimate also has an interesting discussion.
Second, a crappy one where Bob Carter was allowed to misinform listeners and Phil Jones was given insufficient time to reply. Carter said this:
We are at the top of a little temperature cycle. And as Professor Jones knows, since 1998, which was a peak and an extra peak because of an El Nino warm year, that since 1998 the…
tlambert | April 23, 2006Alicia Colon has written the usual rubbish about how Rachel Carson killed millions of people (see DDT ban myth bingo for corrections to the stuff she gets wrong). After claiming that DDT is banned she writes:
Within two years of starting DDT programs, South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Madagascar, and Swaziland slashed their malaria rates by 75% or more.
Apart from contradicting her claim that DDT is banned, this passage contains an interesting mistake. Mozambique has indeed slashed its malaria rate, but it hasn't used DDT. It seems that what is killing people in Africa is not restrictions…
tlambert | April 22, 2006Remember the letter from the 60 scientists denying that "climate change is real" meant anything? Now 90 scientists have written another letter stating:
There is increasingly unambiguous evidence of changing climate in Canada and around the world.
There will be increasing impacts of climate change on Canada's natural ecosystems and on our socio-economic activities.
Advances in climate science since the 2001 IPCC Assessment have provided more evidence supporting the need for action and development of a strategy for adaptation to projected changes.
Coby Beck notes some ways the 90 are…
tlambert | April 21, 2006Via Patterico I find that Howard Kurtz has reported on Hiltzik's use of a sock puppet:
The Los Angeles Times suspended the blog of one of its top columnists last night, saying he violated the paper's policy by posting derogatory comments under an assumed name.
It's good to see the paper taking this seriously. I don't think he should be fired for this, but he should admit that it was wrong, apologize and not do it again.
Tom Maguire asks:
For a bit of perspective, let's check the reaction to John Lott when his "Mary Rosh" sock puppet was outed. Here is Kieran Healey of Crooked Timber, Tim…