tlambert | March 9, 2006The way the "Rachel Carson was worse than Hitler" folks tell the story, the all-powerful environmentalists were poised to ban DDT at the end of the 90s. For example, here's Tren and Bate's
version of the negotiations leading to the Stockholm Treaty:
Five Inter-governmental Negotiating Committee (INC) meetings
were held between June 1998 and December 2000 in order to
agree on the final text of the POPs treaty. The fate of DDT under
the POPs treaty changed dramatically during the five negotiating
meetings. Initially it appeared that DDT would probably be
banned for all uses.
Delegates of…
tlambert | March 7, 2006
Because if you don't you might end up like Tim Blair:
Big call from Tim Lambert: "Crime and violent crime in Britain peaked in the early 90s and [have] since plummeted." His source? The British Crime Survey, an annual affair which asks some 40,000 Brits if they've been encrimed during the previous year. Is it trustworthy? Depends which side you're on:
The political discussion about crime is often a numbingly boring argument about statistics. Overall crime recorded by the police seems to have risen (so the Conservatives rely on this statistic) while crime reported by the public seems…
tlambert | March 6, 2006When I wrote about David Frum's voodoo criminology in support of the death penalty, I didn't mention any of the recent research that purports to find a deterrent effect for the death penalty because Frum didn't cite it. That research has always seemed suspect to me -- since a very small fraction of murderers are executed in America, it seems unlikely that any effect could be detected above the noise of all the other factors that affect the crime rate. Now a paper by Donohue and Wolfers has been published that is absolutely devastating to the papers that found deterrence. Donohue and Wolfers…
tlambert | March 6, 2006Voting has started for the Koufax awards. I've been nominated for a Koufax award for Best Single Issue Blog and for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition.
tlambert | March 5, 2006
In her latest rant, Miranda Devine warns about the imminent threat of a take over by scientists:
It used to be men in purple robes who controlled us. Soon it will be men in white lab coats. The geeks shall inherit the earth.
I suppose you are wondering how they are going to take over. Could it be giant robots? Or tiny tiny robots? Or genetically engineered cephalopods? Nope. Devine reckons they're going to use Kyoto to take over the world:
Environmentalism is the powerful new secular religion and politically correct scientists are its high priests, rescuing the planet from the…
tlambert | March 3, 2006
Miranda Devine tells her readers what GIGO means:
The outputs are totally dependent on the quality and accuracy of the inputs. At university we had a name for what often happens: GIGO - garbage in garbage out.
And then perfectly illustrates it:
Yet a paper published last week by the Lavoisier Group, Nine Lies about Global Warming, says the real censorship is applied by the scientific establishment to those scientists who express scepticism about the global warming "consensus".
A retired climate expert and founder of the Antarctic Co-operative Research Centre, Garth Paltridge, says he…
tlambert | March 3, 2006 Dr Free-Ride may have Friday sprog blogging and PZ Myers may have his Friday cephalopod, but only here at Deltoid do combine them both! Here's an old picture of one of my kids with a cuttlefish he found on the beach. He dismantled it with the help of his brother and discovered that they contain a lot of ink. Also after a few days they smell bad. Really amazingly bad.
tlambert | March 3, 2006After Fumento had been worked over by yours truly, Chris Mooney and PZ Myers, you'd think there would be nothing left, but Steve Reuland has taken just one paragraph from Fumento's column and found as many mistakes as I found in the whole thing. Fumento's columns aren't just wrong, they're fractals of wrongness!
P.S. Fumento.
tlambert | March 2, 2006
Chris Mooney and PZ Myers complete the demolition of Fumento's article that I started here. Sir Oolius also got stuck in and managed to get one of Fumento's characteristically lame comebacks.
Inspired by my post mentioning co-authorship chains with the "Hockey Team", John Fleck and William Connolley have been looking at such chains. Main discoveries: A four link chain from McIntyre to Mann and a seven link one from Motl to Connolley.
James Annan weighs in on the frog extinction paper I blogged on here. He also has an interesting post on his new paper that gives tighter bounds on…
tlambert | March 1, 2006Tim Blair links to some interesting articles in this week's Bulletin. First up is a page on John Howard with the intriguing title "The hosue of Howard". It's a fearless, hard hitting complete suck up to Howard. Apparently, after a decade of power and privilege as prime minister, Howard hasn't lost touch with the common folk. Why not? Because he owns a regular, simple house. He doesn't live there or even in the Prime Minister's official residence -- he lives in a mansion with multi-million dollar harbour views, but just owning that house is enough to stay in touch with the little people…
tlambert | February 28, 2006
In Fumento's latest article he accuses the leading science journals of delivering "Political Science". His examples are a mixture of genuine problems discovered by others (like the Korean stem cell fraud) and bogus problems "discovered" by Fumento. Like this:
Fast forward to September 2005, right after Hurricane Katrina. Activists -- including those in white lab coats -- saw a grand opportunity to tie the exceptionally violent hurricane season to global warming. A study in Science declared, "A large increase was seen in the number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5…
tlambert | February 27, 2006
I wrote earlier about McIntyre's attack on the NAS Panel on temperature reconstructions. McIntyre objected to two panelists because they were co-authors of co-authors of Mann, but not to the panelist who was a co-author of a co-author of McKitrick. In another post he also objects to another panelist, Kurt Cuffey, because Cuffey wrote:
Mounting evidence has forced an end to any serious scientific debate on whether humans are causing global warming. This is an event of historical significance, but one obscured from public view by the arcane technical literature and the noise generated by…
tlambert | February 26, 2006Welcome William Connolley's Stoat to the ScienceBlogs federation. He's not in the combined feed yet, but I imagine that will be fixed soon.
tlambert | February 24, 2006I've been nominated for a Koufax award for Best Single Issue Blog and for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. Voting hasn't started yet, but there all kinds of interesting blogs on those lists, so here's a chance to find an interesting blog that you haven't seen before.
tlambert | February 23, 2006
Cathy Young disagrees with the Iain Murray/Tom Giovenetti line on cash for comment:
Sadly, some conservatives are now defending the practice of opinion writers serving as hired guns (hired quills?) for business and lobbying interests. Among others, Iain Murray in The American Spectator and Giovanetti in National Review Online (which, to its credit, has published strong critiques of payola in punditry) claim that a witch-hunt against conservative writers is afoot. Liberal pundits, they whine, are subsidized by the media, major foundations, and the publishing industry, while conservatives…
tlambert | February 23, 2006Since 99% of the trackbacks I have been getting were spam, I have turned them off. If you link to one of my posts, just leave a comment linking back to your post. Sorry for the inconvenience.
tlambert | February 22, 2006
Terence is justifiably annoyed that his tax dollars are being spent on having John Lott give a keynote speech on firearms safety at a conference in New Zealand. Lott is going to claim that safe storage laws increase crime. I don't know if he will continue to misrepresent the research that contradicts his claims.
We also have this disingenuous claim from Lott:
The [Green Party] has described one of the speakers, John Lott, as the world's most controversial pro-gun researcher. But Lott says he is not sure how he gained such a title. He says that overall gun control usually causes more…
tlambert | February 22, 2006
Last week I wrote about how the Australian government was gagging scientists from expressing mainstream science views on global warming. Garth Paltridge has responded with a claim that global warming skeptics get gagged as well. From the Feb 22 Australian Financial Review:
Graeme Pearman (in his ABC Four Corners interview last Monday)
maintained that CSIRO is not backward in stifling comment from
scientists on matters that bear on its political aspirations. It was
ever thus. In the early nineties I was involved in setting up the
Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre, which was, and…
tlambert | February 22, 2006Here's Silas standing in front of one of the ports that have been sold to Dubai Port World. Don't worry, he'll protect us from the terrorists! Unless they gave him food or something. See Dennis the Peasant or Kevin Drum for a more serious treatment of this matter.