tlambert | June 12, 2010Ed Darrell has been looking at what Africa Fighting Malaria spends its money on:
Looking at the IRS Form 990s for the organization from 2003 through 2008 (which is organized in both the U.S. and South Africa), it seems to me that the major purpose of AFM is to pay Roger Bate about $100,000 a year for part of the time, and pay Richard Tren more than $80,000 a year for the rest of the time.
Can anyone tell me, what has Africa Fighting Malaria ever done to seriously fight malaria?
One could make the argument that if you sent $10 to Nothing But Nets, you've saved more lives than the last $1…
tlambert | June 9, 2010Steve Mosher and Steve McIntyre have alleged that the stolen CRU emails prove that Keith Briffa had violated IPCC rules in when working on the 4th Assessment Report. They can't point to any particular IPCC rule and rely on a creative interpretation of an email from Jonathan Overpeck, which Mosher claims means that Briffa "should have no contact with other scientists outside of the IPCC process". Some of us might have just pointed out that this is an absurd interpretation, but Brian Angliss goes the extra mile and checks with Overpeck who tells him that "there is no restriction on IPCC…
tlambert | June 5, 2010CSIRO's ECOS magazine has published an article on climate blogging by Graeme Readfern. Featured are Deltoid, Skeptical Science and Climate Shifts.
Hat tip: Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.
tlambert | June 4, 2010Howard Friel was interviewed on the Science Show
about his book The Lomborg Deception
So Lomborg was very clever to present himself as a centrist, but when you get into the details of his book he's hardly a centrist. I think he would be fairly classified as a climate denier. He takes almost every climate related issue from polar bears to melting glaciers to rising sea levels, and in my view very problematically downplays the significance of the impact of global warming on these areas. So people would classify him as a sceptic that is one notch above a denier, but I would not do that, I think…
tlambert | June 3, 2010Earlier I noted the way McIntyre quote mined the stolen CRU emails. But would an honest analysis of the messages have found? Brian Angliss makes the case that it is impossible to understand the emails without consulting with the authors to find out what the original context was.
tlambert | June 2, 2010Don Easterbrook has produced a response to my post on his hiding of the incline. Rather than correct his misuse of a graph of Holocene temperatures from Global Warming Art, Easterbrook has the cheek to call Gareth Renowden's correct identificiation of his source "an outright, contemptible lie". Renowden busts him again by showing an earlier version of the graph that Easterbrook claims did not come from Global Warming Art.
Look at Easterbrook's and the original version side by side:
Easterbrook's graph
Original graph at global warming art
You'll notice that Easterbrook's version does not…
tlambert | May 31, 2010John P Abraham has taken the time to go through one of Christopher Monckton's talks and check whether the references that Monckton cites say what Monckton claims they do. Of course, as anyone who has checked Monckton's work can discover, they don't. But Abrahams has gone the extra mile and checked with the authors of the papers as well and again and again gotten replies from the scientists saying "Monckton is wrong". The presentation is 84 minutes long and is devastating. Even at that length only some of Monckton's errors are covered. It's based on a Monckton talk from last year, before…
tlambert | May 22, 2010Fox News reports on James M. Taylor's presentation at Heartland's Conference:
James M. Taylor, an environmental policy expert and a fellow at the Heartland Institute, said that global cooling is already happening. Based on figures provided by the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, he noted that snow records from the last 10 years exceeded the records set in the 1960s and 1970s.
A sign of global cooling? This past "decade set a record for largest average global snow extent," Taylor said.
I've redrawn the the figure from the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab with a trend line so that you can…
tlambert | May 21, 2010Fox News touts Don Easterbrook's talk at Heartland's Conference:
"Rather than global warming at a rate of 1 F per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030," said Easterbrook, speaking on a scientific panel discussion with other climatologists.
But Gareth Renowden has been looking at Easterbrook's slides and finds evidence of fraud
Looking through Easterbrook's slides, it seems he has taken a graph of Holocene temperature variations prepared by Global Warming Art (used at Wikipedia), and altered it…
tlambert | May 16, 2010Deep Climate has been reading the stolen emails that Steve McIntyre didn't mention:
Arguing from a cherrypicked selection of quotes from the "Climategate" emails, McIntyre has claimed that IPCC authors Chris Folland and Michael Mann pressured Briffa to submit a reconstruction that would not "dilute the message" by showing "inconsistency" with multi-proxy reconstructions from Mann and Briffa's CRU colleague Phil Jones. Briffa "hastily re-calculated his reconstruction", sending one with a supposedly larger post-1960 decline before. According to McIntyre, Mann resolved this new "conundrum" and…
tlambert | May 16, 2010By popular request. Comments from Brent and folks arguing with him are cluttering up more useful discussions. All comments by Brent and responses to comments by Brent should go in this thread. I can't move comments in MT, so I'll just delete comments that appear in the wrong thread.
tlambert | May 16, 2010By popular request. Comments from El Gordo and folks arguing with him are cluttering up more useful discussions. All comments by El Gordo and responses to comments by El Gordo should go in this thread. I can't move comments in MT, so I'll just delete comments that appear in the wrong thread.
tlambert | May 14, 2010Peter Sinclair is locked in a close struggle in online voting for a $5000 grant that he can use to improve the quality of his Climate Denial Crock videos. If you've watched any of his videos here, please vote for him. You have to register, but it only takes a few seconds. Saturday, May 15 is the last day to vote. Here's one of his videos that I haven't featured before, on global warming on Mars:
tlambert | May 14, 2010Ian Musgrave has written an open letter to Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, correcting him on his claim that "at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth the climate was considerably warmer than it is now".
But where did Abbott get the notion that it was considerably warmer in Roman times? Most likely from Ian Plimer, who on page 59 of Heaven and Earth writes:
The Roman Warming Period (250 BC - 450 AD)
Warming started about 250 BC and was enjoyed by the Greeks and Romans. The Romans had it easy. Although the Empire started in cool period, grapes were grown in Rome in 150 BC. By the 1st…
tlambert | May 13, 2010Christopher Monckton made an official complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about this post from George Monbiot, because, among other things, Monbiot suggested that Monckton was not a member of the House of Lords. Monckton is not, in fact, a member of the House of Lords and his complaint was rejected.
tlambert | May 12, 2010Deep Climate documents what happened when Steve McIntyre combined his talent for making mountains out of molehills with David Rose's talent for fabrication:
So in summary, we have a nonsensical accusation of "artful" manipulation of a key graph. And we have a fake "blowup" from the Mail on Sunday that contains important differences with the real figure.
Read the whole thing.
tlambert | May 10, 2010The Editors report
Camille Paglia, professor of humanities, worries about "a landscape of death in the humanities." I would agree with that, had it actually made any sense, although probably for different reasons:
This whole thing about global warming - I am absolutely incredulous at the gullibility of people. What is this hysteria over drowning polar bears? And finally I realized, people don't know polar bears can swim! For me, the answer is always more facts, more basic information, presented without sentimentality and without drama.
Take that, marine biologists!
Update: More Paglia…
tlambert | May 10, 2010 Deltoid can reveal that Roy Spencer has blundered by using a fake photo of an iceberg to help make his case that there is a massive conspiracy among climate scientists to conceal the truth about global warming. Enmeshed in Spencer's Photoshopgate scandal are Marc Morano, who prominently features Spencer's fake photo and Rush Limbaugh, who said "The cover of this book is just superb."
Of course, some of you may be thinking that the picture is just an illustration and it doesn't matter one bit to Spencer's thesis whether it is a photoshop or not and journalists would not take such a thing…