tlambert | February 21, 2006Last week I wrote about the greenhouse mafia in Australia. This week, Clive Hamilton has named the "dirty dozen", the twelve people who have worked together to mislead Australians about climate change. The Age reports:
Speaking at the Australia-New Zealand Climate Change and Business Conference yesterday, Dr Clive Hamilton dubbed the group - including Prime Minister John Howard, businessman Hugh Morgan and The Australian's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell - "the dirty dozen".
Dr Hamilton is the executive director of the Australia Institute and was invited to the conference in Adelaide to…
tlambert | February 21, 2006I've turned on the requirement that you have to provide an email address when leaving a comment. If that stops you from commenting the fix is to delete the cookies you have from scienceblogs. PZ Meyers has more on this and other bugs.
If you have any other bug reports or suggestions for improvements, leave a comment.
tlambert | February 21, 2006
Last year I wrote how John Brignell repeatedly tried to add untrue claims to the Sourcewatch article on Brignell because it was critical of him. Now he is complaining about his Wikipedia article:
Anyway, reading hostile critiques of one's efforts is very much like being in that hall of mirrors. All the bits are there, but grossly distorted. We could dismiss overt politically motivated character-assassination sites such as Sourcewatch and the Australian Adhominator, except that they are then quoted by less obviously biased sources.
As usual, Brignell calls me names instead of addressing…
tlambert | February 21, 2006Tim Worstall reports that James Lovelock (who I criticised earlier for his global warming alarmism) has fallen for the myth that the use of DDT against malaria is banned. In his new book Lovelock writes:
"insecticides badly needed controlling, but the indiscriminate banning of DDT and other chlorinated insecticides was a selfish, ill informed act driven by affluent radicals in the first world. The inhabitants of tropical countries have paid a high price in death and illness as a result of their inability to use DDT as an effective controller of malaria"
DDT is not banned.
tlambert | February 20, 2006Steve Forbes writes:
There is a simple, time-proven way to virtually eradicate malaria: the judicious use of DDT. Extremist environmentalists have cowed health officials into never even considering the use of DDT. We are not talking about the large-scale, indiscriminate spraying of the stuff that was all too common in the years immediately following World War II. What we are talking about is spraying this insecticide in small amounts--harmless to humans--on the interior walls of houses.
And most important, this procedure works. Several years ago South Africa suffered a devastating…
tlambert | February 19, 2006On Saturday, I showed to a bloggers meet up organized by Suki and Susoz. Also attending were weez, Flashman, Morgan and tigtog. We decided that a bloggers' picnic would be fun, so, if you're in Sydney on Saturday April 1st, come to the Royal Botanical Gardens from 1pm. We're spreading the picnic blankets on the lawn to the east of the Main Pond. Tigtog has more details.
tlambert | February 18, 2006
Good old Mike Fumento has another go at Javers:
In the one instance we know of, the DC firm Patton Boggs and others invited Javers to play on the highly exclusive Bretton Woods golf course. I would guess that the value of this gift would be in excess of $10,000. This could be considered unsavory in itself, but is all the more so in that Javers has made himself Witch Hunter General in digging up dirt (or inventing it, when "necessary") on conservative writers to strip away their jobs, their columns, or at the very least inhibit their think tank employers from accepting corporate support…
tlambert | February 16, 2006Hockey stick wars, the story so far: McIntyre and McKitrick (M&M) first claimed that the hockey stick graph was the product of "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Mann, Bradley and Hughes (MBH) published a correction to the supplementary information about their article, but which did not affect their results. Next, MM argued that the hockey stick was the result of incorrect normalization of the data. However, Hans van…
tlambert | February 15, 2006Test yourself: can you detect what is dishonest about this argument in a Mirada Devine column about RU486 published in the Sydney Morning Herald today:
And, despite the hype about a gender divide in the Senate last week, about the same number of men (21) and women (24) voted in favour of removing Abbott's authority.
The answer is here
tlambert | February 15, 2006
Pat Michaels is notorious for lying about the predictions that James Hansen made in testimony before Congress in 1988. In his paper Hansen showed the results of three possible scenarios, but in his testimony before congress Hansen only showed emphasised the results of the most likely one, scenario B. As the graph here shows, scenario B turned out to be a very good prediction. However, in 1998 Michaels published a blatant lie about Hansen, erasing B and C and claiming that scenario A was his prediction.
Believe it or not, Michaels is
doing it again
[Hansen] distorted in front of the U.S.…
tlambert | February 14, 2006
Eli Rabett is working his way through Taken By Storm. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this work, it's a global warming denial book which contains some spectacularly Bad Physics, with the authors claiming that average temperature has no physical meaning. Anyway, Rabett is reading chapter two, and finds he needs to create a EssexMcKitrictionary. Here's an extract:
Doctrine of Certainty - the idea that anyone besides Essex (and maybe McKitrick) can know anything. Obviously false. Often called "The Doctrine" includes items that are "manifestly false or the claim to know it is false…
tlambert | February 13, 2006
Four Corners has aired a story "The Greenhouse Mafia". Guy Pearse relates how industry lobbyists boasted how they wrote ministerial briefings, costings and cabinet submissions for the government, even though this is an obvious conflict of interest. And several scientists told how they were forbidden from commenting on certain climate change issues. The Age has a summary here, the transcript of the show is here, and more transcripts and forums on the show are here. There is also discussion at Larvatus Prodeo. Guy Pearse's full interview has this on our old friends, the Lavoisier Group:…
tlambert | February 10, 2006We previously encountered Tom Giovenetti, president of the IPI think tank when he told me that IPI keeps its funders secret:
Second, regarding whether we take money from Microsoft, IPI has an absolute policy of protecting our donors' privacy. I'm sure if you donated money to IPI, you would appreciate that policy.
Giovenetti has now weighed in with an NRO column defending pundit payola. I'm linking to the director's cut on his blog. Giovenetti starts with an attack on conservatives who think that journalists should disclose their funding:
But after seeing a smattering of silly columns…
tlambert | February 9, 2006
Tim Blair reckons that Australian "leftoid" bloggers are losers. Why? Blair has discovered that those bloggers sometimes make mistakes!. For example, David Heidelberg mistook a spoof of Pajamas Media for the real thing, while Chris Sheil made a spelling mistake. But right-wing bloggers make mistakes too. How do they differ? Well, being weak lefties the bloggers he lists let themselves be swayed by facts and updated their posts with corrections and admissions of error. Whereas someone strong like Blair laughs in the face of mere facts and does not need to correct posts that are untrue…
tlambert | February 7, 2006In the comments to Lott's post where he failed to notice that the study on guns and road rage reported a multi-variate regression in table 1, someone asked him about my post pointing out his mistake. Lott's response:
I haven't bothered looking at Lambert's page, but he typically
doesn't have a clue what he is talking about. Assuming that he
actually made the claim that Hemenway et al reported regressions in
the tables, that is definitely not the case. The Tables just show
the means, or conditional means. They are not regression estimates.
Clue: you can't have a regression where you have a…
tlambert | February 5, 2006In May, last year I summarized the good news about Iraqi reconstruction:
Due to lack of maintenance, electricity production fell from 9000 MW in 1991 to 4400 MW before the war. Since then, there have been many announcements of improved generating capacity and production has fallen further to 3560 MW.
Since then, things haven't improved much, Brookings' Iraq index says that electricity production in January 2006 was 3600 MW.
What's gone wrong? Let's look at an example. Arthur Chrenkoff's Good news from Iraq, part 32 has this:
The army engineers will soon be adding a lot of electricity…
tlambert | February 5, 2006The pro-payola people have launched a lame counter attack on Javers. Before we begin, note that even if they could prove Javers guilty of some wrong-doing, it would not mean that Fumento was not guilty of unethical behaviour. Anyway, Fumento is really excited:
Well, there's now enough evidence to bring Javers to the stake. And I don't mean using the new rules of journalistic ethics he invented on-the-spot, applied specifically to me, and made retroactive. No, these are the tried and true old rules he violated.
Disclosing payments you received from a company when you write about them are…
tlambert | February 5, 2006New Scientist reports:
A survey of 2400 drivers carried out by David Hemenway and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health shows that motorists who carry guns in their cars are far more likely to indulge in road rage - driving aggressively or making obscene gestures - than motorists without guns. Some 23 per cent of gun-toting drivers admitted making rude signs, compared with 16 per cent of those who did not carry guns (Accident Analysis and Prevention, DOI:10.1016/j.aap.2005.12.014).
Not surprisingly, Lott is criticizing the study:
While one regression with a few very basic…
tlambert | February 4, 2006
Iain Murray, comes out with an article in the American Spectator in favour of pundit payola:
An opinion piece -- whether an individual op-ed or a column -- exists to promote a point of view by argument. It does not seek to establish a fact, but to win people over to a particular viewpoint or opinion. Therefore, the strength of the argument is the key factor in determining the effectiveness of the piece. A sloppily constructed, poorly thought-out argument will convince no one -- while a tightly constructed, coherent, and well-written argument can sway minds. That is why opinion pieces are…