tlambert | February 19, 2011Remember how David Bellamy claimed that his TV career was ended (something that happened in 1994) because of an article he wrote in 2004? Now Johnny Ball is making similar dubious claims of persecution:
But his bookings have dropped by 90 per cent over the past year and the 72-year-old has blamed this on harassment by extreme environmentalists who object to his dismissal of climate change as "alarmist nonsense".
Mr Ball, father of TV and radio presenter Zoe, told The TES a website featuring pornographic images was posted online bearing his name, while another blogger stated he "should not be…
tlambert | February 18, 2011Eugene Volokh is taken in by a story in the Daily Mail:
So reports the Daily Mail (UK) reports:
Residents in Surrey and Kent villages have been ordered by police to remove wire mesh from their windows as burglars could be injured....
Locals had reinforced their windows with wire mesh after a series of shed thefts but were told by community police officers that the wire was âdangerousâ and could lead to criminals claiming compensation if they âhurt themselvesâ....
something appalling is going on, either in English tort law, or in English police practices, or both.
Something appalling…
tlambert | February 17, 2011When Willis Eschenbach was caught lying about temperature trends in Darwin, I pointed out that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology trends agreed with those from the NOAA and asked:
I suppose the next argument is that the NOAA and the BOM are conspiring together to falsify the temperature record.
And something like that has happened, of course. Joanne Nova writes:
A team of skeptical scientists, citizens, and an Australian Senator have lodged a formal request with the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) to have the BOM and CSIRO audited.
Now, the likely outcame of this will be similar…
tlambert | February 11, 2011The Australian's daily column called Cut and Paste should more properly be titled Quote Mining. Look at their latest effort:
Re-insurers don't seem to think that climate change is causing an escalating number of catastrophes ...
Peer-reviewed paper by Eric Neumayer and Fabian Barthe of London School of Economics and funded by re-insurers Munich Re in Global Environmental Change, November 18, 2010:
Applying both [conventional and alternative] methods to the most comprehensive existing global dataset of natural disaster loss [provided by Munich Re], in general we find no significant upward…
tlambert | February 10, 2011The latest attempt by the climate auditors to smear a scientist comes from Ryan O'Donnell who accused Eric Steig of "blatant dishonesty and duplicity". According to O'Donnell, as an anonymous reviewer Steig forced O'Donnell to use a particular method ('iridge') in his analysis and then, as himself, criticized O'Donnell for using that method. But as a fair-minded reading of the review comments reveals, and Steig himself explains this is not true. Steig as reviewer did not force them to use iridge, rather, he said that it seemed reasonable but there were problems with the method that the…
tlambert | February 8, 2011This graph by Peter Gleick reveals the cherry pick used by Harrison Schmitt to claim that "Artic [sic] sea ice has returned to 1989 levels of coverage" and Heartland's Joseph Bast to claim
"In fact, National Snow and Ice Data Center records show conclusively that in April 2009, Arctic sea ice extent had indeed returned to and surpassed 1989 levels."
See more on this from John Cook at Skeptical Science.
tlambert | February 4, 2011The Australian has a daily column called Cut and Paste which should more properly be titled Quote Mining. Consider this recent effort:
Heed the bureau. John Quiggin in The Australian Financial Review yesterday:
Tragically, while only a few people have been silly enough to ignore the Bureau [of Meteorology]'s warnings about this cyclone, a great many have ignored equally dire warnings about the long-term impact of climate change, including more extreme weather events. Climate models that have predicted the warming of the past two or three decades are dismissed as spurious. Worse still, the…
tlambert | February 3, 2011Fred Pearce is going down the David Rose road publishing fabricated quotes. Gavin Schmidt in a letter to New Scientist (so far unpublished there) writes:
In the piece entitled "Climate sceptics and scientists attempt peace
deal"
Fred Pearce includes a statement about me that is patently untrue.
"But the leaders of mainstream climate science turned down the gig,
including NASA's Gavin Schmidt, who said the science was settled so
there was nothing to discuss."
This is completely made up. My decision not to accept the invitation to
this meeting was based entirely on the organiser's initial…
tlambert | February 1, 2011
Christopher Monckton is notable for the way he gets the science wrong over and over again. So the folks at Skeptical Science have created a handy resource listing the arguments he commonly uses and the refutations.
Monckton is in the news again, going to court to try to get prevent a documentary about him from being shown. As usual with Monckton. he lost:
Jo Abbess was (perhaps accidently) CC'd on an email from Monckton where he wrote:
Actually it's a boorish hatchet job of the traditional BBC kind, but I sued them and made them cut it by half an hour and alter or remove some 16 downright…
tlambert | January 30, 2011The Australian continues to express institutional contempt for science, scientists and the scientific method with a piece by Christopher Monckton
Graham Readfern has already commented on some of the errors in Monckton's piece, but there are plenty more.
Cap-and-tax in Europe has been a wickedly costly fiasco. ... Result: electricity prices have doubled. In the name of preventing global warming, many Britons are dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes.
It's not hard to check this. The average annual bill for electricity in the UK increased from £285 in 2005 (when the EU ETS…
tlambert | January 27, 2011Andrew Bolt liked the trick of pointing to the one part of a document that doesn't mention floods and pretending that there is no mention of floods in the whole document so much that he did it again in his column:
The mantra was that global warming meant drought for us, and the 2007 Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - the Vatican of the warming faith - made no mention of more floods in Australia from rain.
I hope you spotted Bolt's scam. The Synthesis Report summarises the WG1, WG2, and WG3 reports and only has four bullet points about Australia and NZ. It…
tlambert | January 24, 2011The ABC's AM radio show had a story on the record temperatures in 2010 and chose to let Bob Carter to spout falsehoods without any challenge. They didn't even ask him about his frequent claims that world had been cooling for a decade. Gareth Renowden has the details.
tlambert | January 22, 2011Andrew Bolt is desperate to prove that the floods in Queensland had nothing to do with global warming, even though the science suggests that warming will make floods worse. So has fully embraced an argument advanced by hauntingthelibrary:
If warming caused these floods, why didn't warmists predict them?
Two years ago Queensland's warmist Office of Climate Change issued this report on what the state should expect from global warming, and not once did it mention floods. It did predict a slight increase in "extreme" weather events in the north, but not in the south of the state where the worst…
tlambert | January 20, 2011Deep Climate catches Steve McIntyre in a particularly outrageous piece of quote mining. McIntyre strips a sentence written by Trenberth from its context to make it appear that Trenberth was saying that Jones was an IPCC author for the first time, when in fact Trenberth was saying that Jones was an IPCC lead author for the first time.
My comment from a previous McIntyre quote mining incident still applies:
You don't have to take my word for any of this -- check it out for yourself and ask yourself if you can trust the claims McIntyre makes about things that aren't so easy to check.
tlambert | January 18, 2011Imre Salusinszky in a column in the The Australian declares that global warming is dead because:
last year was the coldest year since 2001.
Apparently he doesn't read The Australian which just five days earlier reported: "2010 warmest year on record".
Salusinszky's logic is this:
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, 2010 was Australia's coldest year since 2001. Since logic tells us the planet can't be getting hotter and colder at the same time, we can confidently pronounce global warming dead, buried and comprehensively beaten.
It is unclear whether the problem is that Salusinszky is…
tlambert | January 17, 2011Continuing the discussion with Richard Tol, Eli Rabett looks at how FUND models the costs of ecosystem damage and finds that it has a catastrophic loss of bio-diversity in 40 years -- 99% of species going extinct, but this only costs $250 per person because the only cost counted is that it makes people feel bad.
tlambert | January 13, 2011Andrew Bolt thirteen months ago:
Note down the prediction:
David Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said yesterday that claims by sceptics the planet was cooling were wrong... Dr Jones said an El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean - linked to hotter, drier conditions in Australia - would have an effect on the world's climate next year. ''There is a significant probability next year will be the globe's warmest year on record.''
NASA:
Global surface temperatures in 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest on record, according to an analysis released Wednesday by researchers…
tlambert | January 11, 2011Mike Steketee bucks the groupthink at The Australian with an article on why it is necessary to adapt to the coming global warming. Christopher Monckton responds with a Gish gallop of 24 points where he alleges Steketee got it wrong. Steketee's response is devasting: again and again and again he shows that Monckton misrepresented what Steketee wrote. Even Andrew "confirmation bias" Bolt, after at first being convinced that Monckton had shown Steketee to be wrong, was compelled to concede that Monckton had verballed Steketee. Though I'm sure Bolt will believe with all his heart and all his…
tlambert | January 9, 2011Andrew Bolt may have the worst case of confirmation bias ever seen. To Bolt, whether something is true or not has nothing to do with its accuracy and everything to do with whether it suits him or not. Here in its entirety,
If the evidence were so strong, there'd be no need for such untruths
Dennis Ambler checks the statistics behind recently claims that 97 per cent of climate scientists believe man is heating the planet and finds evidence of some exaggeration:
However a headline of "0.73% of climate scientists think that humans are affecting the climate" doesn't quite have the same ring as…