Leakegate
tlambert | February 16, 2010This story by Heidi Blake in the Telegraph about how Anthony Watts' findings show that surface temperature records are wrong might sound familiar. That's because it's blatantly plagiarised from Jonathan Leake's story touting Watts' report. Every element in Blake's story was drawn from Leake's story -- it's just been rearranged and reworded slightly. It looks like it would have taken her about 15 minutes to do the whole thing. To be fair to Blake, she has actually improved the story -- her version is tighter and flows more naturally, so if the Telegraph fires her for plagiarism she could…
tlambert | February 16, 2010If you think his misrepresentations about what climate scientists told him were bad, check out what Jonathan Leake did to Richard Dawkins:
Top Scientist Gives Backing to Astrology
However, Seymour's theories won qualified support from an unexpected source. Richard Dawkins, professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, who once suggested that astrologers be prosecuted under the trades descriptions act, said that although he had not read the book Seymour's ideas sounded interesting.
Dawkins responded
"No. I most emphatically did NOT give my support to Percy Seymour. I…
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 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 4, 2010There have been new developments in Leakegate, the scandal swirling about reporter Jonathan Leake, who deliberately concealed facts that contradicted the story he wanted to spin. Deltoid can reveal that Leake was up to the same tricks in his story that claims that the IPCC "wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters". Bryan Walker has the detailed dissection, but the short version is that Leake took one part of the discussion of one paper in the IPCC WG2 report and pretended that this was all it said, entirely ignoring the WG1 report and the discussion of other papers in the WG2…
tlambert | February 3, 2010Jonathan Leake recently wrote a story alleging that the statement in the IPCC AR4 WG2 that up to 40% of the Amazon forest could vanish due to climate change was "bogus". Deltoid can now reveal that Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the claim about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake's query and informed him the claim was basically correct:
At the time of the IPCC [report], there was ample evidence that a large portion of the Amazon forest is very close to the lower limit of rainfall that is…