global warming
nisbetmc | February 24, 2010
Monday night, March 1, starting at 630pm, American University's School of Communication will be hosting a panel discussion focused on "The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media, and Politics in an Unsustainable World." [Follow the link for location on campus and directions. This is a rescheduled event from February that was postponed due to weather.]
Joining me on the panel will be the Washington Post's national environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin and Mother Jones energy and environmental reporter Kate Shepard. The panel will be moderated by AU journalism professor Jane Hall.
The…
tlambert | February 23, 2010John Cook's Skeptical Science iPhone app has really taken off. So much so that Andrew Bolt has incorporated it into his conspiracy theories.
tlambert | February 22, 2010I've noted before that Bjorn Lomborg systematically misrepresents the science. Sharon Begley has reviewed Howard Friel's book The Lomborg Deception:
But when Friel began checking Lomborg's sources, "I found problems," he says. "As an experiment, I looked up one of his footnotes, found that it didn't support what he said, and then did another, and kept going, finding the same pattern." He therefore took on the Augean stables undertaking of checking every one of the hundreds of citations in Cool It. Friel's conclusion, as per his book's title, is that Lomborg is "a performance artist disguised…
tlambert | February 21, 2010Clive Hamilton describes the hate mail campaign against climate scientists:
Australia's most distinguished climate scientists have become the target of a new form of cyber-bullying aimed at driving them out of the public debate.
In recent months, each time they enter the public debate through a newspaper article or radio interview these scientists are immediately subjected to a torrent of aggressive, abusive and, at times, threatening emails. Apart from the volume and viciousness of the emails, the campaign has two features - it is mostly anonymous and it appears to be orchestrated.
I'm not…
tlambert | February 19, 2010Leakegate, the scandal about the dishonest reporting of Sunday Times reporter Jonathan Leake has grown into Timesgate. Deltoid can reveal that two more reporters for The Times
have been implicated in another case of fabrication. Look at this story by Ben Webster and Robin Pagnamenta:
UN must investigate warming 'bias', says former climate chief
The UN body that advises world leaders on climate change must investigate an apparent bias in its report that resulted in several exaggerations of the impact of global warming, according to its former chairman.
In an interview with The Times Robert…
tlambert | February 17, 2010Piers Akerman's response to being busted for fabricating a quote is simply dishonest. For instance:
The little Crikey website had a defamatory reference to The Independent and me, clearly unsupported by any research.
If you read the story in The Independent, you will see that The Independent verified that the bogus quote did not appear in Houghton's book as Akerman claimed. They also contacted Houghton who emphatically denied saying anything like it. They also searched for all mentions of the bogus quote on the Internet and found that the very first one was by Akerman. They also…
illconsidered | February 16, 2010I know this is old news, but I just found the youtubes of this debate. You will recall how Plimer declined to answer some very straightforward requests for evidence of a handful of his most egregious fabrications that George Monbiot put to him as a precondition of a debate. Well, not because Plimer decided to be forthcoming, the debate went ahead in December with no preconditions.
It can be viewed in three parts below.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
If you don't have time for it all (~24 minutes) I would recommend starting at part 2.
Is anyone impressed with Plimer's evasivness. He might as…
tlambert | February 15, 2010By now I'm sure you're all familiar with Jonathan Leake's practice of misrepresenting what his sources by quote mining them. In his story that misrepreseted what the IPCC report says about natural disasters, Leake quotes Muir-Wood:
Muir-Wood himself is more cautious. He said: "The idea that catastrophes are rising in cost partly because of climate change is completely misleading. "We could not tell if it was just an association or cause and effect. Also, our study included 2004 and 2005 which was when there were some major hurricanes. If you took those years away then the significance of…
tlambert | February 15, 2010
The Independent tracks down the person who fabricated a fake quote used by folks like Christopher Monckton and Benny Peiser to attack John Houghton and scientists in general and it turns out to Piers Akerman in Sydney's Daily Telegraph.
That's bad enough, but look at Akerman's response when contacted by Media Watch:
there was an error in The Independent report. I have responded to The Independent.
Now that has to be one of the most pathetic lies ever. If there really was an error, why not tell them what it was? And, sure enough, The Independent confirm that Akerman hasn't told them about…
tlambert | February 14, 2010Realclimate covers the Journalismgate scandal, where a couple of dishonest reporters (Jonathan Leake and David Rose) have generated a blizzard of stories in British newspapers about alleged errors in the IPCC reports. Despite their best efforts to destroy the credibility of the IPCC reports, they've only managed to come up with two actual errors in three phone book size reports:
WG2 wrongly said that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035
WG2 said that the Netherlands was vulnerable sea level rise and river floodingbecause 55% of its area is bleow sea level when it should have said that 26%…
tlambert | February 14, 2010They have been some explosive new revelations in the Leakegate scandal. Remember how Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the IPCC statement about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake's query and informed him the claim was correct? Leake didn't report what Nepstad told him. Instead he claimed that the IPCC statement was "bogus", even though he knew it wasn't.
Deltoid can now reveal that Leake's reporting was far more dishonest than originally believed. This is how Leake quoted Simon Lewis:
Simon…
tlambert | February 14, 2010The Leakegate scandal keeps getting worse. Jonathan Leake, already in trouble for his habit of deliberately concealing facts that contradicted the story he wanted to spin is back with a story that reads like it was ghost written by Mark Morano. Leake wants to spin a tale that the world isn't really warming, so he trots out the usual collection of discredited papers.
Leake first cites John Christy:
"The story is the same for each one," he said. "The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations,…
tlambert | February 13, 2010Following the heels of the Rosegate scandal where journalist David Rose was exposed as a serial quote fabricator, the credibility of Rose's newspaper, the Daily Mail, has taken another body blow with the paper publishing a false story claiming that Phil Jones had admitted that there had been no global warming since 1995.
This is false (see graph below) and Jones made no such admission. Michael Tobis has the details on the Daily Mail's dishonesty.
Ever gullible Tim Blair, of course, swallowed the lie, hook, line and sinker. Andrew Bolt will do doubt follow if he gets his voice back.
Update…
sastyk | February 11, 2010Once upon a time, before I descended into parenthood and dull stability, I was out with a group of friends who had, let's just say, been drinking quite a bit. One of the young men in this group proposed to two others that they do something that was, to put it bluntly, totally moronic and likely to get them into enormous trouble. One of the gentlemen to whom this had been proposed thought for a moment, and then observed that this was likely to bring down the authorities upon them. The third gentleman responded to this with, "Yeah, but it would be awesome!" After a brief moment's…
illconsidered | February 10, 2010Anyone going to be in Sydney with a video camera?
I happen to be in Australia now, but Sydney is a far cry from Ulverstone...
I can't tell from the debate description if there will be any rebuttal time. If not it will be one of those kinds of debates that even Sarah Palin can look good in.
Regardless, Go Tim! : )
nisbetmc | February 8, 2010
UPDATE: Due to the weather, the Forum is postponed until the end of February or early March. When a date is finalized, I will post details.
Tuesday night at 7pm, American University's School of Communication will be hosting a panel discussion focused on "The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media, and Politics in an Unsustainable World." [Follow the link for location on campus and directions.]
Joining me on the panel will be the Washington Post's national environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin and Mother Jones energy and environmental reporter Kate Shepard. The panel will be moderated by…
nisbetmc | February 6, 2010Below are text of the remarks that I opened with at the Harvard panel last week on "The Public Divide over Climate Change: Science, Skeptics and the Media." To listen to audio of the panel, find links to news coverage, and read a detailed discussion of the panel, go to this post.
A little more than a year ago, when President Obama in his inaugural speech promised to "restore science to its rightful place" in America, there was great hope that the President and a Democratic Congress would soon pass major legislation on climate change and lead the world to a new climate treaty. However, today…
nisbetmc | February 6, 2010
On Thursday, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, I served as one of the panelists at the event "The Public Divide over Climate Change: Science, Skeptics and the Media." The two hour session drew roughly 100 attendees, was organized and moderated by Belfer Center fellow Cristine Russell, and featured Andrew Revkin of the New York Times' Dot Earth blog and Thomas Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Kennedy School.
Audio of the panel is available at the Kennedy School web site and the event was covered in detail by the Columbia Journalism Review and the…
tlambert | February 5, 2010Bidisha Banerjee and George Collins have written the definitive account of the error in the WG2 report about Himalayan glaciers:
Dozens of articles and analyses of this situation, whether dashed-off blog posts or New York Times coverage, exhibit a curious consistency. Not a single article or analysis appears to include all relevant issues without introducing at least one substantial error. It's as though the original documents contained a curse which has spread to infect every commentator and reporter. The curse seems to stem from not reading sources carefully (or at all), which, ironically,…