tlambert | September 1, 2005Mark Steyn gets this email :
ARE YOU A CREATIONIST?
I enjoy your various articles in the Speccie, torygraph etc and agree with most of what you say and your support for Right views. But I am concerned with your right-wing mates in the US and UK who seem to be on the intelligent-design rubbish bandwagon. I hope you will distance yourself from them in future articles on this subject as there is no evidence for their views at all whereas evolution is supported by enormous volumes of evidence. You don't strike me as a creationist irrationalist.
And responds with:
The fact is that this is a…
tlambert | August 31, 2005Thanks to everyone who sent congratulations on my 20th wedding anniversary. The traditional gift is china, but Tim Blair sent a flame:
Look up "Oh my God I've married an obsessive shrieking hypocrite!" and you'll see a picture of Lambert's wife.
tlambert | August 31, 2005The Wall Street Journal has a reputation for publishing excellent news pages and mendacious editorial pages. Now, an investigation by Environmental Science and Technology on an WSJ front page article on McIntyre and McKitrick makes you wonder if the editorial pages are influencing the news reporting. You should read the whole thing, but here are a few extracts:
But the harshest critic of the whole issue is former Wall Street Journal page-one editor, Frank Allen. He now directs the Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources in Missoula, Mont. When asked to read the front-page article…
tlambert | August 29, 2005After falling for an obvious hoax, Mark Steyn has refused to correct
his error. Instead he just keeps digging himself deeper and deeper
into a hole. (My previous posts on this topic:
1
2
3).
In his latest effort Steyn complains about how the meanies at Media Watch asked him what checks he made to prove the validity of Bryant's unlikely tale:
But Chantal explained that she'd checked out the show and that the Media Watch concept involves them accusing you of something, you emailing back your 15,000-word response and then they pick the infelicitously phrased seven-word throwaway subordinate…
tlambert | August 27, 2005Lott and Dabney have an op-ed in the Washington Times on concealed handguns in the workplace. As usual, Lott misrepresents the state of current research on firearms. Lott and Dabney write:
Indeed, international data as well as data from across the United States indicate that criminals are much less likely to attack residents in their homes when they suspect that the residents own guns.
Not so. In The Effects of Gun Prevalence on Burglary: Deterrence vs Inducement Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig found that areas in the US with higher gun ownership tended to have more burglaries, and more…
tlambert | August 26, 2005There have been a few people who have used
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_sock_puppet">sock
puppets on this blog. Note that a sock puppet differs from a
pseudonym in that sock puppets are used to deceitfully make it appear
that there is more support for you postion than there really is. Here
is a table to help you keep track of the socks that have been used here.
Real Name
Sock Puppets
John Lott
Mary Rosh, Washingtonian, Bob H, Tom H, Sam, Kevin H, Too bad Tim is not very accurate, Gregg
David Bell
Per, James Brown, M Mouse
Joe Cambria
Dave Curry, S Brid, Pessimist…
tlambert | August 23, 2005Over the past few years crime rates in Australia, Canada and England have fallen dramatically.
For example, in NSW crime plunged to the
lowest level in 20 years, in Canada, the 2003 homicide rate was the lowest in 36 years, while in England the crime rate was the lowest since the BCS started in 1981. While crime has been plummeting, John Lott has been drafting a steady stream of op-eds blaming gun control for increasing crime in those places. His secret? Cherry-picking.
Lott's latest column is a little unusual amongst his cherry picking efforts in that he provides links to his sources. He…
tlambert | August 22, 2005"Dave Curry", the fellow who sent me a very nasty email and then a nice apology is back, using another sockpuppet to attack me:
Lambert was toasted on the Climate Audit website. Lambert is very quick to impugn the motives of others, criticise them for not having good enough credentials (according to Lambert) whenever someone's opinion differs from his own. He had the temerity to accuse someone with degrees from Harvard and MIT as not being a reputable academic (according to a post at Climate Audit). Posters asked if Lambert's degrees and expertise afford him the podium to throw at s.... at…
tlambert | August 21, 2005In the discussion on
this post, per posted an abusive comment, violating my comment policy.
I've had to ban him twice before (see here and
here), so I simply banned him again, deleting the offending comment and the few that he posted after that.
That should have been the end of it, but the folks at Climate Audit decided to branch out from their unending attempts to find fault with the hockey stick paper into an investigation of my comment policy: In this posting John A falsely claimed that I had deleted all of per's comments because I disagreed with them.
This prompted a flood of abusive…
tlambert | August 18, 2005James Annan finally has takers for his bet on global warming. The news was published in Nature, but for those without a subscription, here is the gist of it:
James Annan, who is based at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama, has agreed a US$10,000 bet with Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev, two solar physicists who argue that global temperatures are driven by changes in the Sun's activity and will fall over the next decade. The bet, which both sides say they are willing to formalize in a legal document, came after other climate sceptics refused to wager…
tlambert | August 17, 2005By now everyone knows that last June the UAH (University of Alabama
Huntsville) team led by Roy Spencer and John Christy released updates to
their satellite derived lower troposphere temperature trends. These
trends, which come from their "TLT" dataset use data from the Microwave
Sounding Unit (MSU) packages that have been flying aboard NOAA's Polar
Orbiting Environmental (POES) satellites since late 1978. This dataset
uses combinations of nadir (straight-down) and off-nadir views of MSU
Channel 2 to create a "synthetic" channel that isolates a lower and
thinner portion of the atmosphere…
tlambert | August 16, 2005Some of the readers of this Mark Steyn column might have wondered why he seems oddly determined to dispute one date in the 9/11 Commission's time line:
they seemed oddly determined to fix June 3, 2000, as the official date of Atta's first landing on American soil
Of course, those people who heard how Steyn got busted by Media Watch for falling for Johnelle Bryant's story (my posts are here and here) will know the real reason why he is determined to dispute that date---for Bryant's story to be true, Atta would have had to have been in the US before June 2000.
Here's Steyn's argument:
But I do…
tlambert | August 13, 2005Last week the gullible Mark Steyn was
busted by
Media Watch for basing a column on Johnelle Bryant's crazy story about
being visited by Mohammed Atta in early May 2000. She said that Atta
threatened to cut her throat and wanted a loan to buy a crop duster.
Unfortunately for her story, Atta wasn't in the country until
June. And, as I wrote
then:
Strangely enough, Bryant did not tell anyone else at the time about
Atta threatening to cut her throat. A normal person might guess that
this was because she made the story up, but Steyn triumphantly
concludes that the evilness that is multiculturalism…
tlambert | August 10, 2005(Via Irant). Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson launched the Australian Science Festival with this:
Intelligent design, which is damned by critics as a front for biblical Creationism, argues that life on Earth is too complex to have evolved purely through Darwin's theory of natural selection. Dr Nelson said yesterday he had met Campus Crusade for Christ, the Australian advocates of intelligent design, or ID, and watched their DVD presentation, called Unlocking the Mystery of Life.
He told the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday that he would oppose replacing evolution with ID in…
tlambert | August 10, 2005Tina Rosenberg's article, What the World Needs Now Is
DDT,
published in the New York Times last year contains many factual
errors about DDT. The errors combine to present a false picture of a world where DDT is a magic bullet that could end malaria if only dogmatic environmentalists would allow it. After seven weeks one (and only one) correction was made to her article:
An article on April 11 about DDT and its effectiveness in controlling
malaria in developing countries misstated the position of an
international health organization on it. The Global Fund to Fight
AIDS, Tuberculosis and…
tlambert | August 8, 2005Long time readers will be aware of what I think of the appalling quality of the writing about science in Tech Central Station. (Examples: Statistics, Fumento, epidemiology
physics, economics, more statistics, and more epidemiology. )
Well, they've destroyed any remaining credibility they might have had with an article arguing for Intelligent Design Creationism. And it's a twofer because it was written by global warming skeptic Roy Spencer of Spencer and Christy fame.
Spencer starts with
Twenty years ago, as a PhD scientist, I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design…
tlambert | August 8, 2005In a comment to post on the Barton letters, Ed Snack claimed that
Michael Mann made an error in MBH98, he confused the square root of the cosine of the latitude with the cosine
Now if you look at MBH98, cosine latitude is only mentioned here:
Northern Hemisphere (NH) and global (GLB) mean temperature are estimated as areally-weighted (ie, cosine latitude) averages over the Northern hemisphere and global domains respectively
I did a bit of searching and found that Snack's source is this
statement in the supplementary material for von Storch at al's paper
"Reconstructing Past Climate from…
tlambert | August 7, 2005Barista has more on the history of Spiked. It seems that they have set up another astroturf operation called "Sense about Science", chaired by Dick Taverne.