Leakegate
tlambert | September 27, 2010
The Australian breathlessly informs us that:
The UN is to appoint an astrophysicist to be the first contact for any aliens ...
Mazlan Othman will describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society's Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire.
But Matthew Weaver at the Guardian has spoiled the fun by contacting Othman:
Finally an email from Othman herself would have prompted our Martian to trudge back to his spaceship. "It sounds really cool but I have to deny it," she said of the story. She will be attending a conference next week, but she'll be…
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tlambert | April 27, 2010Stefan Rahmstorf reports that the Frankfurter Rundschau has withdrawn a storybased on Jonathan Leake's fabricated Africagate story.
Rahmstorf has also read Rajendra Pachauri's novel, which The Times calls a raunchy environmentalnovel and states:
For a country where sex is rarely discussed in public the book mingles lectures on climate change with descriptions of Sanjay's sexual encounters, including frequent references to "voluptuous breasts".
Rahmstorf comments:
After I have read it, I find this a bizarre summary of the novel, apparently aimed to discredit Pachauri.
There is not a single "…
tlambert | April 19, 2010Johann Hari has written an excellent article in The Nation on the scandalously poor reporting in the main stream media on climate science and scientists:
Yet when it comes to coverage of global warming, we are trapped in the logic of a guerrilla insurgency. The climate scientists have to be right 100 percent of the time, or their 0.01 percent error becomes Glaciergate, and they are frauds. By contrast, the deniers only have to be right 0.01 percent of the time for their narrative--See! The global warming story is falling apart!--to be reinforced by the media. It doesn't matter that their…
tlambert | March 25, 2010BusinessGreen reports:
The renewable energy industry is this morning considering lodging a complaint with the Press Complaint Commission (PCC) over reports in the Sunday Times yesterday accusing "feeble" wind farms of failing to deliver as much power as expected.
A misleading story in The Sunday Times? You can guess who is responsible. Leake tries to make a case that wind farms are a "feeble" source of electricity by cherry picking the ones that perform the worst:
The analysis reveals that more than 20 wind farms produce less than a fifth of their potential maximum power output.
Nowhere…
tlambert | March 24, 2010Simon Lewis has made an official complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about Jonathan Leake's dishonest reporting on the Amazon rainforests. David Adam reports:
Lewis said: "There is currently a war of disinformation about climate change-related science, and my complaint can hopefully let journalists in the front line of this war know that there are potential repercussions if they publish misleading stories. The public deserve careful and accurate science reporting." ...
Lewis also complains that the Sunday Times used several quotes from him in the piece to support the assertion that…
tlambert | March 14, 2010Two contradictory stories describing the same adjudication: The Sunday Times
Ed Miliband's adverts banned for overstating climate change
vs The Guardian
Climate change adverts draw mild rebuke from advertising watchdog
One way to determine which story is more accurate is to do what anarchist does and carefully read the adjudication. But the shortcut to the truth is to note that the first story was written by Jonathan Leake.
Further coverage of the Leakegate scandal is at John Quiggin's.
tlambert | March 8, 2010JAMA/Archives has issued a special notice:
SPECIAL NOTICE: The embargo on the Archives of Internal Medicine paper (see below) was broken by Jonathan Leake of The Sunday Times of London. In response to this violation, reporters and editors at The Sunday Times will no longer have pre- or post-embargo access to any JAMA/Archives materials.
I think, perhaps, that other journals should preemptively ban The Sunday Times. I'm not going to link to Leake's story -- the BBC story on the study is here.
tlambert | March 2, 2010Last week I got an email from Amy Turner of the Sunday Times:
Dear Tim,
I'm writing a piece about Science bloggers and would love to talk to you about yours. Are you free to talk to me today or tomorrow? Hope to hear from you.
Turner usually writes celebrity puff pieces rather than about science, so it was pretty obvious that Jonathan Leake was organizing some payback because I had dared to criticize him. I agreed to the interview and, sure enough, it wasn't long before Turner was threatening me (How would I react if Jonathan Leake sued me for libel?) She complained that I had been unfair…
tlambert | March 1, 2010A story on climate change by Jonathan Leake that is reprinted in the Australian is pretty well guaranteed to misrepresent the science. And it does -- you only have to compare the headline for Leake's story "Cyclone climate link rejected" with Nature Geosciences headline "Tropical cyclone projection: Fewer but stronger" for the new paper and with what the IPCC report says:
Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of…
tlambert | March 1, 2010This Jonathan Leake story on the evolution of Polar Bears broke the embargo on this PNAS paper. Ivan Oransky quotes PNAS media and communications manager Jonathan Lifland:
The majority of our infrequent embargo violations are accidental and typically the result of mislabeled copy that does not properly list the 3 p.m. EST Monday embargo expiration. We have a separate situation with the Sunday Times of London. With EurekAlert, we have prevented their editors and reporters from accessing the embargoed news section of EurekAlert, which is where pre-print copies of our articles are accessible…
tlambert | February 26, 2010Satoshi Kanazawa has an interesting post about how British Newspapers Make Things Up:
I hope American and British readers (and readers throughout the world) will finally wake up to the reality of British journalism: You just cannot believe what you read in British newspapers. I'd further call on my academic colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic never to speak to British reporters. You have absolutely no control over what they say about you and your scientific research.
Unfortunately, however, this does not always work. A reporter from the Sunday Times has recently requested an…
tlambert | February 25, 2010Clive Hamilton has written a five part series on the attacks on climate science in Australia:
Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial. I already mentioned this one
Who is orchestrating the cyber-bullying?. Andrew Bolt gets a special mention for his hate mongering.
Think tanks, oil money and black ops. The think tanks in Australia promoting denial and delay are Lavoisier, the IPA, the CIS and now the Brisbane Institute.
Manufacturing a scientific scandal. Jonathan Leake's concoctions are well covered.
Who's defending science?. The Australian's War on Science and how the…
tlambert | February 22, 2010Coverage of the Leakegate scandal is spreading.
Media Lens has published a media alert about the disinformation about climate science being published by British newspapers. Leake, as the worst offender, gets special mention. They quote James Hansen:
"The media have done a great disservice to the public. This mess should be cleared up in the next year or so, although the damage may linger a while, because some people who paid attention to sensationalism may not bother with accurate explanations of the truth.
The impression left from this affair is that there are some parts of the media that…
tlambert | February 21, 2010Last September Jonathan Leake wrote a story Heart attacks plummet after smoking ban in which he stated:
The ban on public smoking has caused a fall in heart attack rates of about 10%, a study has found. ...
The research into heart attack rates in England is being led by Anna Gilmore of Bath University. "There is already overwhelming evidence that reducing people's exposure to cigarette smoke reduces hospital admissions due to heart attacks," she said.
Gilmore's research is incomplete and she emphasises the final results for England will not be published for several months.
Action on…
tlambert | February 20, 2010We've already seen how Jonathan Leake fabricates his stories by quote mining his sources and
stovepiping claims from Global Warming deniers. His story on "Africagate" provides another example:
The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. ...
The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report.
I guess this is…
tlambert | February 18, 2010Oh look! Another Jonathan Leake story
Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.
While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. "Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power," said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. "A Google…
tlambert | February 18, 2010Here's a game you can play at home. All you need is a search engine. Take a Jonathan Leake science story with a dramatic headline. For example, Facebook fans do worse in exams. Then do a search on the headline. You win if you can find complaints by scientists that their research was misrepresented by Leake. Like this.
However, researchers Aryn Karpinski, a doctoral student in education at Ohio State, and Adam Duberstein, an academic adviser at Ohio Dominican University, didn't examine the influence of Facebook on grades. Facebook may be a symptom of a big procrastination habit, not a…
tlambert | February 17, 2010Via PZ Myers I find Bruce M Hood's story of how Jonathan Leake misrepresented Hood's work:
Well, what did I expect? A fair representation in the press and a balanced view from commentators? Come off it. ...
First, most of the articles in the press are based on the original article in The Sunday Times by Jonathan Leake and Andrew Sniderman. Jonathan did have the courtesy to phone me on Friday afternoon to talk about the piece. He had not read the book but had a copy of SuperSense sent to him. I thought I made my position relatively clear as we discussed the evidence and studies that indicate…