tlambert | November 30, 2010Given that The Australian's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell threatens to sue Julia Posetti, alleging that he has been defamed, you'd think they'd want to avoid defaming scientists, but the law on defamation is really only useful to the rich and powerful.
In a column entitled Radicals get rich while truth begs, regular columnist for The Australian, David Burchell defames two scientists, Phil Jones and Riyadh Lafta. He first accuses Jones of professional misconduct:
Last week the journal Nature interviewed professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the…
tlambert | November 29, 2010THE ABC has posted the audio of Åsa Wahlquist's remarks at the conference, proving that Posetti's tweets accurately quoted her. The two five minute audios are well worth listening to for an insider's take on the toxic work environmnet that is The Australian. Look carefully at what Wahlquist has said since:
Mitchell rejects the allegation and Walhquist has also denied it, saying she has never spoken to Mitchell about climate change.
Wahlquist has not retracted or contradicted any of the things she said at the conference. I hope she expands on them at book length. Anyone know any publishers…
tlambert | November 28, 2010The full resources of The Australian have been mustered to defend Chris Mitchell from a tweet. Caroline Overington (who used to be a serious journalist before becoming an apologist for her boss) writes:
Posetti sat in on a conference where serious allegations were made about Mitchell. Posetti published those allegations without checking to see if they were true or asking Mitchell for a response.
So from now on, before you tweet, get a response and include that in your 140 characters. Also, Overington makes a serious allegation about Posetti: that she broke the rules of journalism.…
tlambert | November 26, 2010In part 1 of this fact check I examined Brian Dunning's assertions that DDT did not thin eggshells. Responses from Orac: "Dunning should know better", Bug Girl: "Dunning clearly got his information second-hand. And it was bad information.", and Dunning:
I think I've repeated that Milloy was not one of my sources enough times. I hadn't even heard of him.
which is a rather odd thing to say, because in comments on his podcast Dunning responded to this comment:
Yeah, the very fact that you would consider Junk Science a source worthy of citing frankly is enough to treat the entire article with…
tlambert | November 25, 2010Crikey reports:
A former senior News Limited journalist has described trying to write about human-induced climate change at The Australian newspaper as "torture" and has blamed the editor-in-chief for limiting coverage on the topic because he has "taken a political view".
Asa Wahlquist mounted an off-the-cuff defence of environmental reporting on a panel at yesterday's journalism educators conference in Sydney, explaining the difficulties of having stories published about climate change because of the attitude of and pressure from senior editors at the paper.
Chris Mitchell apparently felt…
tlambert | November 24, 2010Time for more open thread.
In an interesting coincidence, Brian Dunning is here in Sydney to talk at TAM Australia, so I thought it would be interesting to go to the TAM fringe open mic night (tonight!) and talk about, oh, DDT.
tlambert | November 22, 2010Brian Dunning's Skeptoid does an excellent job of debunking pseudoscience, so his podcast on DDT is profoundly disappointing. Dunning claims that DDT use did not have a large impact on bird populations, that elitist environmental groups were killing brown children by blocking DDT use and that DDT is effective even if mosquitoes are resistant. None of these claims are true, as I will detail in this post. But first, why did a sensible fellow like Dunning get it all so badly wrong? Well, his primary source for information about DDT was Steve Milloy's junkscience.com. One commenter…
tlambert | November 21, 2010Dan Vergano, USA Today reports:
The plagiarism experts queried by USA TODAY disagree [with Wegman's denial] after viewing the Wegman report:
⢠"Actually fairly shocking," says Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg by e-mail. "My own preliminary appraisal would be 'guilty as charged.' "
â¢"If I was a peer reviewer of this report and I was to observe the paragraphs they have taken, then I would be obligated to report them," says Garner of Virginia Tech, who heads a copying detection effort. "There are a lot of things in the report that rise to the level of inappropriate."
â¢"The plagiarism is…
tlambert | November 16, 2010Deep Climate continues his examination of the Wegman report. It would seem that Wegman's "reproduction" of McIntyre's results amounted to nothing more than running McIntyre's code without understanding what it did. And while Mann's "short centring" method does tend to produce a hockey-stick McIntyre greatly exaggerated the extent that it does so.
tlambert | November 14, 2010Naomi Oreskes was interviewed on Radio National this morning.
(Hat tip: Tamino)
Her upcoming talks:
UNSW: Monday (this evening!)
UQ: Tuesday
Melbourne: Wednesday
Adelaide: Thursday
UWA: Monday 22nd
tlambert | November 13, 2010Sitemeter says there have been 4,000,000 visits to this blog. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.
tlambert | November 11, 2010In an earlier post
So George Monbiot challenged Brand to notice and announce that he's wrong about DDT. So far it hasn't happened. Unless it does, I think we should be skeptical about the rest of Brand's thesis.
Well, as Monbiot relates, it still hasn't happened. It seems increasingly likely that Brand will destroy his own credibility rather than admit to a significant error.
tlambert | November 10, 2010Jeff Harvey recommends this Climate Progress Post on the special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on the sixth mass extinction. It's been sixty-five million years since the last one, so this is an unprecedented opportunity for ecologists to study such an event.
See also Jeremy Jackson "How we wrecked the ocean":
tlambert | November 6, 2010Following in the footsteps of The Great Global Warming Swindle Channel 4 has produced a new documentary that also appears to favour being controversial over being accurate or fair: What the Green Movement Got Wrong.
Adam Werbach who was in the documentary protested that his views were misrepresented and tried to have his contribution removed. He writes:
In one scene they interspersed heart-wrenching photos of starving children in Zambia, their emaciated mouths crying out for help, with a story of how the environmental movement blocked the delivery of food aid to Zambia from the United States…
tlambert | November 4, 2010The Q-link is a device that purports to protect you from radiation from mobile phones using "A coil connected to nothing". Ben Goldacre and Orac have comprehensively debunked Q-link's claims.
Yesterday Sydney's Daily Telegraph published a story promoting Q-link (the on-line version has now vanished) by Stephen Fenech, their technology writer. Fenech's story read like an advertisement for Q-link, with their claims for the benefits of the product presented as factual and including the url of their website where you could buy one.
That's bad enough, but it also turns out that he's done this…
tlambert | November 4, 2010Andrew Bolt accepts the results of a study published in The Lancet that used random sampling to estimate deaths and came up with a figure of 200,000 per year, about ten times the number you get from a direct count. Actually, there are two studies that fit my description, one on deaths from malaria in India, and another on war-related deaths in Iraq and Bolt only accepts the one that suits his beliefs -- deaths from malaria, so he can falsely accuse Rachel Carson of causing them.
Now, the studies differed in several ways, so it's possible that someone could have good reasons to reject one and…
tlambert | November 3, 2010Well do you? Stephan Lewandowsky on how the IPCC has made the science seem more uncertain than it really is.
tlambert | October 30, 2010Naomi Oreskes will give a public lecture on Monday Nov 15 6-8 pm in the Law Theatre at UNSW. She'll be talking about her book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.
Update: Also:
UQ: Tuesday
Melbourne: Wednesday
Adelaide: Thursday
UWA: Monday 22nd
tlambert | October 28, 2010Tim Blair, The inconvenient truths about Al Gore's hot-air footprint:
Al Gore is fat.
Note that this was a column in the Daily Telegraph, so presumably there was an editor who could have saved a lot of ink and paper by trimming Blair's column down to just 11 letters.
'Shorter' concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.⢠Acknowledgement copied from Sadly, No!.
Update: James Massola promotes Blair's column in The Australian.