tlambert | October 9, 2005Tim Flannery has a new book The Weather Makers on climate change. You can read an extract here.
Naturally this has prompted the usual pieces on how global warming totally isn't happening. First we have William Kininmonth, who
writes:
The science linking human activities to climate change is simplistic and his arguments are assisted by the fact we are in a period of apparent warming. ... The focus on carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change overlooks the importance of water vapour as a greenhouse gas and the hydrological cycle's role in regulating the temperatures of our climate system.…
tlambert | October 8, 2005The Sydney Morning Herald reports
The High Court Computer games enthusiasts are free to modify their Playstations to run cheap games bought overseas or online, following a landmark High Court ruling.
The court found that "mod-chips"- used to override technology that prevents consoles running games not purchased in Australia - are legal.
The decision follows a four-year battle between Eddy Stevens, a Sydney mod-chip supplier based in a backyard at Kensington, and the electronics giant Sony, which claimed the chips were overriding its copyright protection technology.
Kim Weatherall has the…
tlambert | October 2, 2005In an earlier post I
observed that "Seixon does not understand sampling". Seixon removed
any doubt about this with his comments on that post and
two
more
posts.
Despite superhuman efforts to explain sampling to him by several qualified people
in comments, Seixon
has continued to claim that the sample was biased and therefore "that the
study is so fatally flawed that there's no reason to believe it."
I'm going to show, without numbers, just pictures, that the sampling
was not biased and what the effect of the clustering of the governorates was.
Let's look at a simplified example. Suppose we…
tlambert | September 30, 2005The Source Watch wiki page on John Brignell quotes extensively from some of my criticisms of Brignell. Rather than address this criticism, Brignell edited the page to add this comment:
What follows is the work of an individual known as The Adhominator. You can recognise his style, as he never attacks the argument, only the arguer. You can identify him, because he is the only authority he quotes. Enjoy!
This is classic Brignell. He can't bring himself to mention my name, he makes blatantly false claims (specifically, I do attack his arguments, and I do cite other authorities) and indulges…
tlambert | September 29, 2005Senator Inhofe comes in for some well-deserved mocking for inviting novelist Michael Crichton to testify on global warming science. RealClimate has a detailed dissection of Crichton's testimony.
I watched the proceedings and learned that as well as believing that global warming is a big hoax, Inhofe believes that the 1972 US ban on DDT has caused millions to die from malaria. He had Donald Roberts up to testify about it and Roberts presented the usual misleading arguments about this non-existent ban.
Testimony like that of Roberts is pernicious. Malaria really is a solvable problem, but…
tlambert | September 28, 2005I've written several posts debunking the myth that using DDT is banned, pointing out that is used in places like South Africa. Now Professor Bunyip has finally discovered this fact and slams Tim Blair for spreading the myth:
This item from the BBC will have Tim Blair beside himself -- a contortion worth seeing, given that he has long since assumed the initial improbable position of being well up himself.
South Africa had stopped using DDT in 1996. Until then the total number of malaria cases was below 10,000 and there were seldom more than 30 deaths per year. But in 2000, [South Africa] saw…
tlambert | September 28, 2005David Appell has quit blogging and deleted his blog, Quark Soup. William Connolley writes:
it was the first blog I read; perhaps DA somewhat lost his place when other climate-type blogs (RC mainly; perhaps even Stoat) took some of his niche. Deltoid was the next one I read... I trust they won't be going out in order.
I'll stop blogging when I run out of opinions, so this blog might be going for a while.
Certain commenters have continued a discussion that was on Quark Soup under an unrelated post here. I've deleted their comments and banned them moved their comments under this post.
tlambert | September 26, 2005William Connolley catches junkscience.com claiming that Global Climate Models can't recreate the temperature record of the 20th century. However, they can and its no secret unless you get your science from junkscience rather than actual scientists.
tlambert | September 21, 2005Daniel Davies has a new post on Lancet denial, with some particularly egregious examples. The worst example is by Harry of Harry's Place whose "discussion" of the study is to make a statement that he must surely know to be false:
Dsquared is a serial bullshitter who has never given a straight answer to any question.
Davies also links to a transcript by Seixon of the Hitchens-Galloway debate, where Seixon touts his own debunking of the Lancet study. Seixon's debunking fails because he makes basic errors in his statistics, but at least they are original, so let's look at where he goes wrong…
tlambert | September 15, 2005In his debate with George Galloway, Christopher Hitchens said:
If you really believe the crazed fabrication of the figures of 100,00 deaths in Iraq ...
you can simply go to my colleague Fred Kaplan's space on slate.com.
He's a very stern and strong critic of the war, a great opponent of mine.
We've had quite a quarrel about it.
He's a great writer about science and other matters.
It's a simple matter to show this is politicized hackwork of the worst kind.
The statistics in that case have been conclusively and absolutely shown to be false
and I invite anyone to check it. Everything I say has…
tlambert | September 13, 2005The tsunami and Katrina both left behind pools of stagnant water in which things have swarmed and multiplied and emerged to infect humanity. I'm referring, of cause, to clueless articles extolling the virtues of DDT.
The latest is by Henry Miller in the National Review Online.
The six-year old U.S. outbreak of West Nile virus is a significant threat to public health and shows no signs of abating. ... As of September 6, Louisiana ranked fourth in the nation in human West Nile virus infections; but with most of New Orleans still under water and a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, there…
tlambert | September 11, 2005Tim Blair's blog is notorious because commenters are banned merely for disagreeing with him. However, in this post, Blair accuses Antony Loewenstein of cowardice because Loewenstein would not debate with an abusive phone caller. Blair refuses to accept Loewenstein's stated reason ("He wants to shout and rant") because:
That's from someone who describes Australian Jews as "usually vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic. Australian Jews, generally speaking, are incapable of hearing the true reality of their beloved homeland and its barbaric actions."
Did Loewenstein really…
tlambert | September 9, 2005MediaLens has a two part article (part 1 part 2) on the shoddy press coverage of the Lancet study. They describe how Mary Dejevsky, senior leader writer on foreign affairs for the Independent dismissed the study because:
personally, i think there was a problem with the extrapolation technique, because - while the sample may have been standard for that sort of thing - it seemed small from a lay perspective (i remember at the time) for the conclusions being drawn and there seemed too little account taken of the different levels of unrest in different regions. my main point, though, was less…
tlambert | September 8, 2005David Hardy writes:
USA Today reports, with customary horror, that 1,700,000 children are in homes with unsecured guns, and that one-third of American homes have firearms in them. It goes on to say 1,400 "children and teens" are shot to death each year, and pumps for laws on gun storage (i.e., to criminalize failure to store in various ways). "It's a frightening problem," says Michael Barnes, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a lobbying group that favors limiting gun ownership.
Let's look at the figures. Actually, in 2003 762 Americans of all ages died in gun accidents…
tlambert | September 7, 2005One of the few things that Andrew Bolt got correct in his original criticism of the Lancet study was the sample size, 988 households:
Its researchers interviewed 7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in the 14 months before the invasion and who in the 18 months after.
In a later article, Bolt got the number wrong:
Lancet surveyed 788 Iraqi households.
Since the two numbers differ in just a single digit Bolt's erroneous 788 number looks like a simple typo, but when the mistake was pointed out to him,…
tlambert | September 6, 2005The ancestor of this blog was my archive of Usenet and mail list postings about gun control. I created it in 1996 and updated it fitfully until I started this blog. Now I've folded it into this blog, so you can visit my archives from September 1993 and follow the raging debate about the frequency of defensive gun use. Each category in the archive has been turned into a category on the blog. For example, here are all my posts on Kellermann's research.
There are posts with discussion from Eugene Volokh, Clayton Cramer and Mary Rosh, all of whom have also gone on to start blogs.
tlambert | September 4, 2005Tim Blair has a post where he has over seventy links to posts by John Quiggin that mention Kyoto. We can conclude that Quiggin is a very careful writer because it looks like Blair didn't find any typos in all those posts. Stripped of his usual I-found-a-typo-therefore-you-are-wrong argument, Blair had to come up with something else. His substitute argument? Apparently he believes that the sheer force of this June 29 post had silenced Quiggin on Kyoto. Trouble is, Blair doesn't seem to have noticed that Quiggin posted this and this in July. Or maybe Blair is unaware that July is after…