tlambert | July 29, 2010Last month Judith Curry challenged folks to respond to Bishop Hill/Montford's book The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
So I am laying down the gauntlet, this really needs to discussed and rebutted by the paleo researchers and the IPCC defenders.
and
In the context of the hockey stick wars, Montford clearly describes the three main critiques that MM had of MBH98,99: i) inappropriate use of centering in the principal component analysis; ii) stripbark bristlecones are not reliable as a proxy; iii) the R2 statistic needs to be used in the assessment of…
tlambert | July 16, 2010Brian Angliss has a useful summary of Monckton's attempt to intimidate John Abraham while Eli Rabett looks at Monckton's correspondence with University of St. Thomas. The best bit is where Monckton professes to be unaware of any "disparaging", "outrageous", or "defamatory" comments he has made about the University of St. Thomas and Father Dease on Alex Jones despite calling the university a "half-assed Catholic Bible college" and Dease a "creep" on that show.
But I want to look at Monckton's continuing claim to be member of the House of Lords. If you think that the House of Lords saying that…
tlambert | July 14, 2010Monckton's response to Abraham has drawn the attention of bloggers everywhere. George Monbiot finds it "magnificently bonkers". Gareth Renowden examines Monckton's claim to have a science background. Eli Rabett is collecting limericks. Richard Littlemore believes if they look at Abraham's presentation and Monckton's response, "most people will conclude that John Abraham is a careful scientist and that the Lord Monckton is a belligerent and unapologetic polemicist".
Which is perhaps the reason why Monckton, supported by Anthony Watts, is trying to suppress Abraham's presentation. Over at…
tlambert | July 14, 2010Steve Brown sends in this report from the Guardian Debate on 'Climategate':
I've just got back from the Guardian "ClimateGate" debate in London and here are some of the notes I made of the event.
On the panel chaired by George Monbiot was Fred Pearce, Prof Trevor Davies (Vice-chancellor at UAE and former Director of CRU), Steven McIntyre, Prof Bob Watson (UK Gov scientific advisor and former IPCC chair) and Doug Keenan.
In the audience were various luminaries: Benny Peiser, Piers Corbyn, Roger Harribin and......Jonathan Leake!!
The format was 5 mins for each panelist, 15 mins of open…
tlambert | July 13, 2010A summary by John Abraham of his thorough demolition of Monckton was published last month in the Guardian, along with commentary by George Monbiot.
Now Monckton has responded with 446 questions for Abraham. Just to be clear here, "446 questions" is not hyperbole for "lots of questions". There are 446 questions in an 86 page pdf. And what questions they are. Eli Rabbett is already enjoying himself here and here. I decided to pick out three questions to answer and question Monckton on, and let you guys have fun with the rest in the comments.
466: Will you, therefore, now be good enough to…
tlambert | July 9, 2010The Australian's coverage of the story of the emails stolen from CRU has been extensive -- my Factiva search found that there have published 85 articles so far that mention the matter, with repeated allegations that the emails showed that the scientists were corrupt, had acted dishonestly and that the science could not be trusted. In February they reported on the Independent Climate Change Email Review:
The university had already announced a wide-ranging probe into whether its researchers manipulated information about global warming. That review, headed by senior British civil servant Muir…
tlambert | July 8, 2010*From Deltoid archives for 2004, a [repost](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/09/zywicki.php)*
In my previous post I mentioned Daniel Davies' demolition of yet another dodgy Steve Milloy article. Milloy attacked a recent JAMA study that found: Higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with a greater magnitude of weight gain and an increased risk for development of type 2 diabetes in women, possibly by providing excessive calories and large amounts of rapidly absorbable sugars.
Todd Zywicki, who endorsed Milloy's piece as a "devastating…
tlambert | July 7, 2010Following vindications from the NRC panel, the independent Penn State Committee, the House of Commons report, the International Panel, the Penn state Investigatory Committee, the Independent Climate Change Email Review has reported
On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt. ... we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments. ... But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness
On…
tlambert | July 6, 2010I wrote earlier about the hate mail campaign against Australian climate scientists. Leo Hickman reports on the hate mail campaign against US climate scientists:
The scientists revealed they have been told to "go gargle razor blades" and have been described as "Nazi climate murderers". Some emails have been sent to them without any attempt by the sender to disguise their identity. Even though the scientists have received advice from the FBI, the local police say they are not able to act due to the near-total tolerance of "freedom of speech" in the US.
Marc Morano regularly posts the email…
tlambert | July 2, 2010Last week, CEI's Christopher Horner, writing at Pajamas Media claimed that Gabriel Calzada (author of a dodgy study claiming that Spain's green energy program had cost many jobs) had been mailed a dismantled bomb by a solar energy company. As Ed Darrell observes, the story is preposterous (even without considering the source), but a whole lot of self-styled global warming skeptics uncritically accepted it. And even after the story was completely retracted, folks like Anthony Watts and Andrew Bolt did not make corrections.
tlambert | July 2, 2010Thingsbreak finds some value in a New Scientist "He said, she said" story by Fred Pearce on the dreadful McLean et al paper (you know, the one that removed the long term trend and then made much of the fact that after you did that CO2 had little effect on temperatures):
This article should be held up as a model for how reporting should not be done.
I agree.
Also in New Scientist, Chris Mooney reviews Fred Pearce's book about the emails stolen from CRU:
Some scientists faulted the Guardian series when it appeared, and similar objections apply to this book. Pearce (who is a consultant for New…
tlambert | July 1, 2010Penn State investigation concludes:
The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined
that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor,
Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University.
More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did
not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously
deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing,
conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.
The…
tlambert | June 29, 2010Deep Climate investigates Steve McIntyre's claim that, in the IPCC TAR, Michael Mann used a "trick" to "hide the decline" in Briffa's tree-ring proxy. You will be shocked, just shocked, to discover that:
So, once again, the accusation that Mann "truncated" or "chopped off" the data set is proven to be utterly false.
tlambert | June 20, 2010Following the Sunday Times's retraction of the fraudulent Jonathan Leake story, there are a whole bunch of people who relied on Leake's story that would seem to need to make corrections.
Most notably, The Australian reprinted Leake's story, so you'd think they'd have to retract too, but you never know with The Australian.
But there's many more. In no particular order:
Margaret Wente (who also falsely claims that Andrew Weaver is "bailing" from the IPCC).
Glenn Reynolds and again
Lorne Gunter
Michael Barone
The Daily Mail
Andrew Bolt
Miranda Devine
Christopher Booker
Terence…
tlambert | June 20, 2010Kudos to Simon Lewis for forcing a retraction from the Sunday Times of the bogus Jonathan Leake story:
The Sunday Times and the IPCC: Correction
The article "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" (News, Jan 31) stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had included an "unsubstantiated claim" that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The IPCC had referenced the claim to a report prepared for WWF by Andrew Rowell and Peter Moore, whom the article described as "green campaigners" with "little…
tlambert | June 18, 2010Steve McIntyre claims:
One version of the trick is used in IPCC TAR. In this version, Mann replaced post-1960 values of the Briffa reconstruction with instrumental values, then did a smooth, then truncated the Briffa reconstruction back to 1960. Post-1960 instrumental values affected the smooth by the arithmetic of the smoothing filter.
Steven Mosher claims that the same "trick" was used in IPCC AR4.
Arthur Smith investigated and shows that the 1960-truncated Briffa curve in AR4 was not padded with instrumental values, but rather with the mean of the adjacent existing values, exactly as…
tlambert | June 16, 2010In his latest column Lawrence Solomon misrepresented an article by Mike Hulme, claiming that Hulme wrote that the IPCC consensus was phoney. Of course it was Solomon's story that was phony, as Hulme explained:
"I did not say the 'IPCC misleads' anyone - it is claims that are made by other commentators, such as the caricatured claim I offer in the paper, that have the potential to mislead."
Deep Climate has all the details.