tlambert | November 19, 2005Iain Murray finally admits to the existence of anthropogenic global warming:
When I began working on global warming issues several years ago I was firmly of the belief that it was stuff and nonsense. As the scientific facts became clearer, however, my view has changed. It is quite apparent now that the Earth is warming and that mankind has quite a lot to do with it.
Oddly enough however, his policy recommendations don't seem to have changed:
So simply saying that the world is warming and that we know some of this is due to greenhouse gases isn't enough to justify drastic action that may…
tlambert | November 18, 2005Monbiot's article on the Lancet study drew this letter from Gil Elliot:
On the strength of having calculated war deaths around the globe over the past century, I can inform George Monbiot (The media are minimising US and British war crimes in Iraq, November 8) that the Lancet report on Iraqi deaths is deeply flawed. The number of deaths uncovered by the fieldwork, excluding Falluja, was 21; this figure is extrapolated to a population of 20 million to arrive at the calculation of 100,000 deaths. No one who understands the battlefield would accept such a figure based on 21 bodies. Since most of…
tlambert | November 18, 2005A couple of readers have gotten an error message like this when they try to access my blog:
Precondition Failed
We're sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for / on this server.
We have established rules for access to this server, and any person or robot that violates these rules will be unable to access this site.
And then it goes on to list some suggestions on how to fix things. You can blame spammers if you get this message because it comes from an anti-spam plugin Bad Behavior. Spambots usually don't follow the correct protocols when accessing a website, because it is less work…
tlambert | November 18, 2005Last month Tracy Spenser posted [this comment](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/10/crime-of-the-century.php#commen…) on my blog:
Looks like Fumento has made a fool of you again? When are you ever going to learn?
www.fumento.com/weblog/ar
www.townhall.com/blogs/c-
And when are you going to stop encouraging a policy of genocide against people who just happen to have darker skin than yours?
Tracy Spencer was a pop singer in the 80s but our Tracy might be a different person.
Anyway, [as usual](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/category/fumento/), Fumento's post was full of mistakes, so I…
tlambert | November 17, 2005Congratulations to z, who posted the 10,000th comment here:
Says here, change in total (internal) energy U is defined in terms of temperature T, pressure P, volume V and entropy S as
dU=TdS-PdV
or T=(dU+PdV)/dS ...
My thanks to everyone who has commented. Your comments keep me on my toes and make this place better and more interesting.
tlambert | November 16, 2005Rolling Stone has published a major feature on global warming. Steve Milloy was mentioned as one the chief anti-science guys in the debate, so he has a column in Fox news trotting out all the usual tired old discredited arguments:
"the sort of crystal ball climate modeling that the IPCC report relies on has never been validated against historical temperatures" Not true.
"Watson, of course, overlooked at least 17,000 scientists who signed a petition cautioning against global warming alarmism" See here.
"[Dr. Cicerone] managed leave the impression of a substantial 20th-century human-…
tlambert | November 16, 2005This editorial from Africa Fighting Malaria contains the usual misleading statements about what happened in South Africa and the usual false claim about the EU threatening to ban imports from Uganda. But it adds this attack on Bayer:
The obstacles to good malaria control unfortunately do not end there. Big business also plays a distasteful role in this saga. Recently, the Financial Times reported that Gerhard Hesse, business manager for vector control of Bayer Crop Sciences and a board member of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, wrote an e-mail to various health academics claiming: "We…
tlambert | November 15, 2005Kent R. Hill, assistant administrator, Bureau of Global Health, USAID, corrects yet another ignorant claim that USAID won't fund DDT spraying:
Paul Driessen's opinion article titled "USAID Could Stop This Epidemic" (Nov. 2) misrepresents the U.S. Agency for International Development's support for indoor residual spraying to control malaria, as well as the United States government's position on the use of DDT internationally. USAID strongly supports spraying as a preventative measure for malaria and will support the use of DDT when it is scientifically sound and warranted.
In the past, USAID…
tlambert | November 15, 2005Andrew Chang writes a lettter to the Vancouver Sun which published a Lott editorial full of his usual cooked numbers.
Chang also links to an old Usenet thread where he, Mary Rosh and I were involved. Oddly enough, Lott and I have been continuing the argument in comments at the Volokh Conspiracy.
tlambert | November 14, 2005The Australian government's conclusion that the climate change debate is over has prompted a column from Andrew Bolt, who insists that there is to a big debate still going on. Bolt writes:
Just look at the big Greenhouse 2005 conference [environment minister Ian Campbell] department is sponsoring in Melbourne in a week.
See how free of yucky debate it is, with speaker after speaker picked to say, yes, man-made global warming is so true that we must, the organisers say, "work closely together to tackle this significant environmental issue".
There will be so little debate that one of the four…
tlambert | November 14, 2005The edit war on the Wikipedia article on John Lott has continued. Lott has now tried changing the page to his preferred version almost 50 times. The trouble he has encountered is that since his changes are so unreasonable at least half a dozen people have been undoing them. So, if you were Lott and it looked like you were outnumbered, what would you do? Yes that's right, create an army of sock puppets: Timewarp, Alt37, Purtilo, Sniper1, Serinity, Henry1776, Stotts and Gordinier.
These accounts have just been created and pretty well all they have done there is change the page into Lott's…
tlambert | November 12, 2005Currently comments to posts are shown in descending order (most recent comment first). Do you like this, or do you prefer that they appear in the conventional ascending order?
And while I'm asking, is there anything else about the presentation of this blog that could be improved?
Update: Ascending order it is.
tlambert | November 10, 2005Eli Rabett continues to try to puzzle out the weird statements about temperature in Taken by Storm:
Reading the several versions of Essex and McKitrick anyone familiar with thermodynamics (heat engines, blackbodies, chemical reactions, etc.) will start to scratch their heads. One peculiar statement after another appears dealing with temperature and other basic stuff. It turns out that Essex is using a rather special definition of temperature for a non-equilibrium radiation field. If you want to read about it look up "How hot is radiation", C. Essex, D.C. Kennedy and R.S. Berry, Am. J. Phys.…
tlambert | November 10, 2005Little known fact: 21 is the smallest prime that can be formed from the product of smaller primes in four different ways (7x3, 3x7, and 7x1x3). Anyway, the 21st skeptics circle is here. Check it out.
tlambert | November 9, 2005
T-SAW, who emailed Tim Blair:
I saw your post about the proposed celebration at the Bellevue on Friday and your attendance along with that of some other wingnuts. Well I thought in the interests of community spirit that I'd pass along the details to some mates who used to be, amongst other things, BLF members. They were very interested in it and intend on bringing a group to join in the festivities on Friday. They mentioned something about what those blokes did to the channel 7 cameraman is gonna look like a massage when their done.
Paul Deignan, who after getting banned from commenting…
tlambert | November 9, 2005George Monbiot blasts the pathetic media for their lazy and incompetent reporting of deaths in Iraq
Hitchens Watch catches Christopher Hitchens citing the Lancet study of deaths in Darfur as a "reliable estimate" after calling the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq a "crazed fabrication".
tlambert | November 7, 2005Lenin points to some complete innumeracy at the BBC as they make excuses for not using the Lancet estimate. They write:
We do not usually use the Lancet's figure in standard news stories
because it is so far out of line with other studies on the same issue.
There are also some questions over the validity of the Lancet study in
the case of measuring casualties in Iraq. The technique of sampling and
extrapolating from samples has been criticised in this case because the
pattern of violence in Iraq has been so uneven.
Of course, it isn't far out of line with other studies---it agrees quite well…
tlambert | November 6, 2005Todd Zywicki links to Lott's take on Alito. Lott cites a study by Choi and Gulati but gets taken to task in comments by Frank Cross who writes:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this review by John Lott is quite misleading. Under Choi & Gulati's citation-based measure of judicial quality, Alito comes out very poorly, well down in the bottom half of all circuit court judges. That was their primary measure, and Lott doesn't mention it.
Lott, cherry picking? Who'd have thought it? Lott defends himself in later comments (under his own name, even!) . I haven't read Choi and Gulati's paper so I don'…
tlambert | November 2, 2005 A couple of my students have created a cool web page that lets you create beautiful lace patterns with a few clicks of a mouse. Well, pictures of lace patterns, but you can print out instructions for crocheting them.
It also lets you create really ugly laces, but if you keep rating the patterns it creates it will learn (via an evolutionary technique) what patterns people think look nice and be able to produce more of them. Try it out!
tlambert | November 1, 2005This American Life has a fascinating show on the Lancet study and why the news coverage of it was so pathetic. Worth listening to.
In it, another Lancet critic, Marc Garlasco recants:
I'm not a statistician---I know absolutely nothing about it. When I then went and spoke to statisticians they said: "the method he is using is a really accurate one. This is something that we use in studies all throughout the world and it is a generally accepted model."