Good news! I'm still able to post -- Australia has not returned to the Stone Age. A few links: Key points of the carbon price package Frank Jotzo: popular tax cuts and a carbon price that just might deliver Roger Jones John Quiggin Larvatus Prodeo Gareth Renowden. The carbon tax alarmists are now not arguing that the tax will destroy the economy, but that it won't do anything. Update Greg Jericho
Christopher Monckton was so annoying when interviewed by Adam Spencer that Spencer hung up on him before finishing the interview later on. The Australian was so impressed by Monckton's performance that they posted a partial transcript. Moth at New Anthropocene corrects many of Monckton's misrepresentations, so I'll just cover what was in the transcript posted by The Australian -- presumably they think those are his strongest points. Spencer: Can I just clarify sir, are you a member of the House of Lords? Monckton: Yes, but without the right to sit or vote. Spencer: Because the House of…
At The Chronicle of Higher Education's blog Peter Wood excuses Wegman's plagiarism, calling it a flyspeck: Mashey has been, as he puts it, "trying to take the offense" against global warming skeptics by flyspecking their publications. "You hope they make a mistake," he says, and when they do, he pounces with demands that journals retract whole articles. Some journals indeed have. Compare with Wood's comments on Wade Churchill's dismissal for plagiarism: Yesterday Denver District Court Judge Larry J. Naves turned down Ward Churchill's motion to be reinstated in his professorial position. The…
The Australian's Cut and Paste column is notorious for its dishonest quote mining, but today they went one step further into quote doctoring. Here's the quote that they present as contradicting the Prime Minister's quote: Julia Gillard at a press conference on Monday: The science is telling us that climate change is real. The government accepts the science. We accept the science from our own CSIRO. We accept the science from our own weather bureau. The advice indicates that if we do not cut carbon pollution, average temperatures around Australia could increase by between 2.2 to over 5C by…
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On the heels of his previous piece, Bob Carter has got another opinion published in a Fairfax newspaper, this time in the Sun Herald. (No link, I don't want to encourage them -- you can find it via Sou). Once again, the editor at Fairfax appears to completely indeifferent to whether Carter's claims are true or not. I guess fact checking is too much work these day. See Sou for a detailed examination of many of the falsehoods Carter presents, but I'll just pick out one of the more blatant ones. For example, the sun recently entered a quietude unknown since the Little Ice Age. Accompanying…
John Cook has already thoroughly demolished this Bob Carter opinion piece in The Age, but I just wanted to highlight the failure in the editing process that allowed Carter's piece to be published as it was. Amongst other false or misleading claims, Carter claimed as a "Fact" that CO2 acts as a valuable plant fertiliser. Extra carbon dioxide helps to shrink the Sahara Desert, Even someone with a little bit of common sense would notice that the difference between the Amazon and the Sahara isn't that there is a shortage of CO2 in the Sahara, but the editor at The Age didn't see any problem…
Last year on Counterpoint Anthony Watts appeared: Michael Duffy: In which direction does the bias lie? Are you suggesting that the temperature has not got as hot as the American official historical record suggests? Anthony Watts: That's correct. It's an interesting situation. The early arguments against this project said that all of these different biases are going to cancel themselves out and there would be cool biases as well as warm biases, but we discovered that that wasn't the case. The vast majority of them are warm biases, and even such things as people thinking a tree might in fact…
The series of articles on climate change in The Conversation concludes: David Karoly: Bob Carter's climate counter-consensus is an alternate reality: Let's fall through a rabbit hole and enter a different world: the "Carter reality". In that world, it is OK to select any evidence that supports your ideas and ignore all other evidence. ... In the Carter reality, "there has been no net warming between 1958 and 2005." Of course, in the real world, there is no basis for this statement from scientific analysis of observational data. The decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s, which was…
Earlier I wrote: Shortly after she got the death threat, [Anna-Maria] Arabia was attacked by Andrew Bolt. This was wrong. Although Bolt's post was date stamped 11:16am, which was after Arabia received the threat, the first comment was at 6:39am so Bolt's [ost appeared then. There was also a 7:56am comment at Pure Poison referencing Bolt's post: The last time he published a photograph and named a scientist in this way, it resulted in that scientist receiving death threats. I wonder if his thugs can resist the temptation this time... So it seems that Arabia received the death threat shortly…
The series of articles on climate change in The Conversation continues: Ross Garnaut: Australia's contribution matters: why we can't ignore our climate responsibilities The view that one country's actions have no effect on other countries is present in all but the largest countries, but outside Australia is recognised more clearly for what it is: an excuse for not acting on climate change. The argument dissolves once it is recognised that there is no need to make a once-for-all decision on Australia's share of an ambitious global mitigation effort. What is important is that we make it clear…
Lanai Vasek in The Australian reports: In the latest incident, Federation of Australian Science and Technological Societies executive director Anna-Maria Arabia received an email today saying she would be "strung-up by the neck" and killed for her promotion of mainstream climate science. The threat was emailed to her this morning before a "Respect the Science" campaign at Parliament House in Canberra today. Shortly after before [see correction] she got the death threat, Arabia was attacked by Andrew Bolt: At its annual gathering in Canberra today, the Federation of Australian Science and…
Here a screen shot from his talk. His comment on Garnaut's words is "Heil Hitler". Graeme Readfearn has the details. Update: Bolt throws Monckton under the proverbial bus.
The series of articles on climate change in The Conversation continues: Mike Sandiford: Our effect on the earth is real: how we're geo-engineering the planet: In Australia natural erosion removes about 100 million tonnes of sediment each year. With our annual exports of coal and iron ore now at about 600 million tonnes, we have increased the geological erosion rate of the continent by many factors. ... Our best estimates place human industrial emissions of sulfur dioxide and CO₂ at five and 100 times natural volcanic emissions, respectively. ... The rate heat is released from the earth - a…
Rosslyn Beeby at The Canberra Times follows up her earlier story: (Hat tip Dave McRae): Two of the most shocking cases involved young women who have had little media experience or exposure. One was invited to speak on climate change at a suburban library. Her brief was simple - talk about everyday things people can do to cut their carbon footprint, talk about climate books available at the library (list provided), leave time for questions, and mingle afterwards. The other woman was asked by a local newspaper to pose with her young children for a photograph to illustrate an article promoting a…
The decline in relevance of these papers is directly related to their surrender to advocacy journalism. They no longer attempt to appeal to the broad population of the cities they serve but increasingly reflect the narrow interests of those who would shut down any argument that does not accord with their prejudices. To their journalists and editors, life is a battle between right thinkers and wrong thinkers in which they, naturally, are on the side of the angels. A newspaper which aspires to play a constructive role in civic society cannot afford such conceit, or such contempt for its readers…
The Conversation has launched a series of articles on climate change, introduced by editor Megan Clement here. The first three are: Climate change is real: an open letter from the scientific community: The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes. Climate change is real, we are causing it, and it is happening right now. Like it or not, humanity is facing a problem that is unparalleled in its scale and complexity. The magnitude of the problem was given a chilling focus in the most…
The Canberra Times reports Australia's leading climate change scientists are being targeted by a vicious, unrelenting email campaign that has resulted in police investigations of death threats. The Australian National University has confirmed it moved several high-profile climate scientists, economists and policy researchers into more secure buildings, following explicit threats to their personal safety. Whoever could be inciting people to make such threats? Oh look, here's Tim Blair's response to the news: But on the weekend we discovered that it only takes a few emails to scare climate…
I'm here in Orlando to coach the University of New South Wales team in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest world finals. A team of three uni students gets a computer and five hours to solve nine or ten really tough problems. (See last year's set, for instance). The finals were going to be in Egypt in February, but for some reason or other had to be moved here instead. There's going to be live coverage of the final starting 9am local time on Monday. The twitter hashtag is #icpc2011. Here's a picture of our team at orientation. (The balloons are awarded to the teams during…
John Mashey analyses emails from Wegman and Azen and yes, Wegman's defence against plagiarism charges is to say that he and his students plagiarized from Denise Reeves. Multiple times. Andrew Gelman says it best: The major conclusions [of the plagiarised paper] are that there are different styles of research collaboration; the methodological flaws are that the entire data analysis is based on four snippets of the collaboration network. There's no evidence or even argument that you can generalize from these four graphs to the general population, nor is there any evidence or justification of…