tlambert | May 20, 2011Tim Stephens, who is Director of the Sydney Centre for International Law at the University of Sydney and also one of Cardinal Pell's parishioners writes in Eureka Street (published by the Australian Jesuits) about his efforts to get Pell to learn something about climate science:
Pell's interventions on climate change have prompted me to write to him on many occasions, passing on standard scientific texts on climate change, recent scientific papers of relevance and interest, and extending an invitation to organise a meeting with a leading climate scientist.
That offer has never been taken up,…
tlambert | May 18, 2011Naomi Oreskes appeared on The Drum on Tuesday. Lotharsson has written a handy summary. I want to comment on a couple of extraordinary claims by Tom Switzer in that episode. First (at 31:56):
"Interestingly, the IPCC models, there is a great deal of uncertainty, because the rate of warming has not increased to the extent that the IPCC models suggested it would in the 1990s -- there has been some tapering off. To the extent that that is true that does lead one to believe that there is more uncertainty.
Switzer provides more detail in this column in the Spectator:
I can name no better book to…
tlambert | May 17, 2011On the front page of The Australian today we find the headline Summer of disaster 'not climate change': Rajendra Pachauri. If you read the actual quotes from Pachauri in the article and not the fabricated one in the headline, you'll find that Pachauri said something rather different:
"What we can say very clearly is the aggregate impact of climate change on all these events, which are taking place at much higher frequency and intensity all over the world.
"On that there is very little doubt; the scientific evidence is very, very strong. But what happens in Queensland or what happens in…
tlambert | May 15, 2011Dan Vergano reports that Social networks of author-coauthor relationships by Said, Wegman, Sharabati and Rigsby has been retracted by Computational Statistics and Data Analysis.
Deep Climate has more details, but I want to highlight one particular thing:
"Neither Dr. Wegman nor Dr. Said has ever engaged in plagiarism," says their attorney, Milton Johns, by e-mail. In a March 16 e-mail to the journal, Wegman blamed a student who "had basically copied and pasted" from others' work into the 2006 congressional report, and said the text was lifted without acknowledgment and used in the journal…
tlambert | May 13, 2011Last year Anthony Watts said that it was a certainty that siting differences caused a warm bias:
"I can say with certainty that our findings show that there are
differences in siting that cause a difference in temperatures, not
only from a high and low type measurement but also from a trend
measurement and a trend calculation."
"The early arguments against this project said that all of these
different biases are going to cancel themselves out and there would be
cool biases as well as warm biases, but we discovered that that wasn't
the case. The vast majority of them are warm biases, and even…
tlambert | May 1, 2011
The Climate Science Rapid Response Team received a verbose query from Abu Ali Al-Hussain who oddly enough, sounded exactly like Christopher Monckton.
I liked this bit from Monckton's sock:
The IPCC has been making long-term predictions of future climate states on the basis of modeling: yet its 2001 Third Assessment Report says that the climate is a complex, non-linear, chaotic object, so that the prediction of future climate states is not possible.
The Third Assessment Report did not say that predication of climate was not possible, but rather:
A complex, non-linear system may display what…
tlambert | April 30, 2011Bryan Walsh of Time lets us know what he thinks of Nisbet's Climate Shift with the title of his post: The Unfair Reception of the Climate Shift Report Shows That Greens Need to Be More Open to New Ideas. He explains why he thinks the reception is unfair in an aside:
So, just to get this straight, a journalism watchdog is applauding a blogger for trying to preemptively keep reporters from reading and writing about a forthcoming report, apparently because we're not smart enough to figure out what might be true or not on our own?
Apparently. Look at Walsh's summary of one of Nisbet's key…
tlambert | April 28, 2011Peter Sinclair's latest video is on the many mispresentations of "hide the decline".
tlambert | April 26, 2011Cardinal "I spend a lot of time studying this stuff." Pell has also said that greenhouse mitigation is a pagan ritual:
Some of the hysteric and extreme claims about global warming are also a symptom of pagan emptiness, of Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature. ... In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
HG Nelson and Amanda Keller comment on Pell and pagan rituals:
tlambert | April 22, 2011Matthew Nisbet's contrarian "Climate Shift" report has been rightly criticised for claiming that green groups outspent opponents of climate action, that the era of false balance in the media was over and for his own falsely balanced coverage.
Ted Parson, who wrote the book on protecting the ozone layer corrects another false statement from Nisbet, who wrote:
According to climate scientist Mike Hulme and policy expert Roger
Pielke Jr., climate change remains misdiagnosed as a conventional
pollution problem akin to ozone depletion or acid rain-- environmental
threats that were limited in scope…
tlambert | April 22, 20112GB have continued their practice of never talking to mainstream climate scientists with an interview with Richard Lindzen. It's hard to pick Lindzen's biggest whopper. Richard Littlemore thinks it is Lindzen's untruth that there is no evidence for any change in polar ice sheets. Skeptical Science points to Lindzen's untruth that the Earth has warmed much less than the models predicted. But then there's also Lindzen's untruth that all scientists agree that climate sensitivity is just 1 degree for a doubling of CO2.
Richard Littlemore thinks that Lindzen is showing an "increasing…
tlambert | April 7, 2011Via Deep Climate, John Mashey's seminar on "The Machinery of Climate Anti-Science" is being streamed live here. It starts two hours from now, 7:30 PDT.
The battle of truth versus disinformation is nowhere better demonstrated than in the distortion of climate science. More than 97 percent of practicing climate scientists support the fact that global warming is happening and caused by humans, yet the public often thinks that scientists are seriously divided on this issue.
In this special public lecture, Silicon Valley computer scientist and technology expert Dr. John Mashey will expose the…
tlambert | April 2, 2011The recent blunders of Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop have helped draw attention to the coalition's own policy, which to achieve exactly the same reduction in emissions as Labor via "direct action".
Greg Hunt, Opposition spokesman on climate action and environment explained how they are going to do it with soil carbon sequestration:
"We are talking about a land mass, if you are achieving the 150 million tonnes [of CO2 per annum], of an area of roughly 100 square kilometres. Not tens of thousands, but 100 square kilometres of intensive agriculture would make an extraordinary achievement on many…
tlambert | April 1, 2011There are two climate related rallies in Sydney tomorrow. The rally for climate inaction (What do we want? Inaction! When do want it? Now!) has been heavily promoted on talkback radio and the facebook page has 709 people saying they are attending, while the rally for climate action has relied on new media and the facebook page has 2,765 saying they are attending.
I can't attend either one, I'm helping run a round in the Australia and New Zealand Algorithmics & Computing League.
tlambert | March 29, 2011Tony Abbott seems to have answered Julia Gillard's question of whether you should get your climate science from reputable climate scientists or Andrew Bolt by going for Andrew Bolt.
Bolt interviwed Tim Flannery who said
"If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow, the average temperature of the planet's not going to drop for several hundred years, perhaps over 1000 years."
Bolt argued that this was admission that cutting emissions was useless.
Abbott then seized on the comment by Tim Flannery and claimed that Flannery had admitted that
"It will not make a difference for 1000 years…
tlambert | March 25, 2011John Lott is at it again. This time he accuses Chris Brown of misquoting him when in fact Lott's post had been quietly corrected after Brown pointed out that is was wrong.
This seems to be the same behaviour that got him into trouble over his mystery survey. Rather than concede that he had made an error when he wrote:
"If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."
Lott invented a survey of his own that he claimed produced the 98% number, even though that was mathematically impossible.
tlambert | March 24, 2011In a recent speech Julia Gillard asked:
I ask who I'd rather have on my side:
Alan Jones, Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt.
Or the CSIRO, the Australian Academy of Science, the Bureau of Meteorology, NASA, the US National Atmospheric Administration, and every reputable climate scientist in the world.
Julie Bishop, deputy leader of the Opposition, comes back with the name of Joanne Simpson:
And comments from legendary atmospheric scientist the late Dr Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology and formerly of NASA, who authored more than 190 studies and…