Michael Asten
tlambert | May 10, 2012Michael Asten continues The Australian's war on science. In his latest piece (Google "Science hijacked at school level") Asten complains that secondary science education is not paying attention to the views of Ian Plimer on climate change.
Perusal of the resources for secondary school physics students provided by the Australian Institute of Physics (Vic) Education Committee suggests some of our science educators have indeed lost the ability to teach objective and open-minded scientific inquiry.
Web resources relating to climate science provided by this committee contain at least three…
tlambert | August 30, 2011In The Conversation Michael Ashley writes about The Australian's War on Science, with emphasis on Michael Asten's misrepresentations of the science:
When I contacted The Australian's opinion editor late last year to express dismay at their bias, I was given the example of Michael Asten, a part-time professorial fellow in the school of geosciences at Monash University, Melbourne, as someone who was well-qualified to comment. ...
So, Asten, with no expertise in the field, is using a paper published in Nature to argue the opposite of what the paper actually says.
He then spins this as "top…
tlambert | December 18, 2010The Australian takes another one of its shots against science with a
piece by Michael Asten who claims:
A recent peer-reviewed paper by Svetlana Jevrejeva from Britain's National Oceanography Centre, Liverpool, provides a calculation of 0.6m-1.6m by 2100 using a range of climate models. However, these models also show predicted sea-level change rates of 4.2mm-5.4mm a year for the first decade of the 21st century.
I contrast these predictions with just published observations by Riccardo Riva from Delft in The Netherlands and international colleagues who use satellite technology to measure…
tlambert | June 24, 2009Last week week Senator Fielding met with the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong to discuss the link between global warming and greenhouse gas. While Fielding claimed to have an 'open mind', this was rather undercut by his bringing four denialists to the meeting: Bob Carter, David Evans Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth. Naturally, The Australian gives them space to write about global warming isn't happening and how their questions were not answered. Wong has answers to their questions (written by Will Steffen) here, but I'll give my answers as well:
Carter and co write:
Is it the case…