The War on Science
tlambert | July 20, 2011The Australian regularly shows its contempt for science, scientists and the scientific method, titling an article "Respect the science and don't call CO2 a pollutant" is more than little hypocritical. You might think from the title that the author, Ziggy Switkowski, presents some sort of scientific argument why CO2 is not a pollutant, but he doesn't. The closest he comes is this:
Many cold regions in the northern hemisphere welcome global warming. Think of Scotland, parts of Scandinavia, Russia, Canada. To them, increasing CO2 is not a problem. Is it possible for CO2 to be a pollutant in…
tlambert | July 14, 2011In a news story in The Australian Christian Kerr claims:
Former US vice-president turned climate crusader Al Gore has used footage of the Queensland floods from earlier this year as proof of climate change, contradicting the findings of the Gillard government's Climate Commission.
A new video posted on YouTube, narrated by Mr Gore to promote his Climate Reality Program, opens with footage of the wall of water that swept through Toowoomba in January. In the video, Mr Gore says "big oil and big coal are spending big money" to distort debate on climate change.
Yet he has ignored the findings of…
tlambert | July 6, 2011The 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…
tlambert | June 15, 2011The 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…
tlambert | May 17, 2011On the front page of The Australian today we find the headline Summer of disaster 'not climate change': Rajendra Pachauri. If you read the actual quotes from Pachauri in the article and not the fabricated one in the headline, you'll find that Pachauri said something rather different:
"What we can say very clearly is the aggregate impact of climate change on all these events, which are taking place at much higher frequency and intensity all over the world.
"On that there is very little doubt; the scientific evidence is very, very strong. But what happens in Queensland or what happens in…
tlambert | March 4, 2011The Australian has printed an opinion piece by Mark Hendrickx (who presents his own views on global warming in this stunning multimedia presentation alleging that comment moderation at an ABC blog demonstrated bias. I'm guessing that you are thinking that Hendrickx is complaining because he had an off-topic, inaccurate comment removed. But no, his comment wasn't removed and his complaint is that a response to his comment wasn't removed fast enough.
Here's Hendrickx:
In late November last year Sara Phillips, ABC's environment editor, posted an opinion piece about climate negotiations at…
tlambert | February 11, 2011The Australian's daily column called Cut and Paste should more properly be titled Quote Mining. Look at their latest effort:
Re-insurers don't seem to think that climate change is causing an escalating number of catastrophes ...
Peer-reviewed paper by Eric Neumayer and Fabian Barthe of London School of Economics and funded by re-insurers Munich Re in Global Environmental Change, November 18, 2010:
Applying both [conventional and alternative] methods to the most comprehensive existing global dataset of natural disaster loss [provided by Munich Re], in general we find no significant upward…
tlambert | February 4, 2011The Australian has a daily column called Cut and Paste which should more properly be titled Quote Mining. Consider this recent effort:
Heed the bureau. John Quiggin in The Australian Financial Review yesterday:
Tragically, while only a few people have been silly enough to ignore the Bureau [of Meteorology]'s warnings about this cyclone, a great many have ignored equally dire warnings about the long-term impact of climate change, including more extreme weather events. Climate models that have predicted the warming of the past two or three decades are dismissed as spurious. Worse still, the…
tlambert | January 30, 2011The Australian continues to express institutional contempt for science, scientists and the scientific method with a piece by Christopher Monckton
Graham Readfern has already commented on some of the errors in Monckton's piece, but there are plenty more.
Cap-and-tax in Europe has been a wickedly costly fiasco. ... Result: electricity prices have doubled. In the name of preventing global warming, many Britons are dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes.
It's not hard to check this. The average annual bill for electricity in the UK increased from £285 in 2005 (when the EU ETS…
mikethemadbiologist | January 20, 2011By way of Thers at Whiskey Fire, we read that the evangelical movement has recognized that sometimes homeschooling doesn't quite get the job done:
Suppose you have home-schooled your advanced blastocyst in the best evangelical wingnut way, to the age of 18. And suppose you recognize that no matter how much you would like to pray otherwise, your advanced blastocyst, age 18, is an absolute lettuce.
Dumb as a box of Bibles. A cretin by Sarah Palin standards. A doorstop. A rock.
Problems! Where do you park these burdensome home-unschooled-uli? In the godless local community college? Do you…
mikethemadbiologist | January 19, 2011I've written many times that everything you need to know about movement conservatism can be understood by observing creationists (not surprising, since the theopolitical right is a major element of the conservative movement). I'm glad to see NY Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman has finally reached his 'creationist moment': the epiphany one realizes that, to creationists, words have no meaning, that they are not being honest.
Let's jump to the end of Krugman's recent op-ed "The War on Logic" (italics mine):
The key to understanding the G.O.P. analysis of health reform is that the…
tlambert | January 18, 2011Imre Salusinszky in a column in the The Australian declares that global warming is dead because:
last year was the coldest year since 2001.
Apparently he doesn't read The Australian which just five days earlier reported: "2010 warmest year on record".
Salusinszky's logic is this:
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, 2010 was Australia's coldest year since 2001. Since logic tells us the planet can't be getting hotter and colder at the same time, we can confidently pronounce global warming dead, buried and comprehensively beaten.
It is unclear whether the problem is that Salusinszky is…
tlambert | December 20, 2010Michael Asten has sent me a response to my comments on his opinion piece (See also John Quiggin on that piece). My reply is at the end of this post.
I thank Tim Lambert for his interest in my commentary article, and for the opportunity to provide a response.
First the title, "The Australian's War on Science". Eye catching but a little harsh. I don't compile stats but I note that two days before my Commentary last Friday the Oz ran a post-Cancun Commentary from Julian Hunt carrying a pro-AGW perspective. And when the Oz published a Commentary of mine last April on significance of medieval…
tlambert | December 18, 2010The Australian takes another one of its shots against science with apiece 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 | December 11, 2010To their credit The Australian has published an article by David McKnight:
On climate issues The Australian still gives voice to a global PR campaign largely originated by the oil and coal companies of the US. On this score genuinely sceptical journalism is missing in action. Instead, an ideological sympathy with climate sceptics has been concealed behind a fig leaf of supposed balance.
But what shines through in the attitude of the newspaper is its lack of intellectual and moral seriousness in dealing with the consequences of climate change.
To their discredit they simultaneously published…
tlambert | December 5, 2010Chris Mitchell, defending against the charge that The Australian's coverage of climate change is biased, said:
What people do not like is that I publish people such as Bjorn Lomborg. I will continue to do so, but would suggest my environment writer, Graham Lloyd, who is a passionate environmentalist, gets a very good run in the paper."
Does Lloyd's reporting provide a counterpoint to Lomborg in The Australian? He's only just become the environment writer, so there aren't many stories to go on, but on those his record is similar to that of a predecessor, Matthew Warren.
For example Graham…
tlambert | December 1, 2010Chris Mitchell's spokesperson says:
Editor in chief Editor In Chief of The Australian newspaper Chris Mitchell has invited Canberra academic Julie Posetti to visit the offices of The Australian newspaper to observe news conference, and see operations for herself.
Mitchell's offer is contained in a legal letter send to Posetti yesterday, as part of the defamation proceedings that have become known as #twitdef.
Mitchell also seeks a written apology, denying allegations that he had ever ``conducted himself in a manner that was coercive, debilitating, excruciating or tortuous.''
Mitchell…
tlambert | November 30, 2010Given that The Australian's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell threatens to sue Julia Posetti, alleging that he has been defamed, you'd think they'd want to avoid defaming scientists, but the law on defamation is really only useful to the rich and powerful.
In a column entitled Radicals get rich while truth begs, regular columnist for The Australian, David Burchell defames two scientists, Phil Jones and Riyadh Lafta. He first accuses Jones of professional misconduct:
Last week the journal Nature interviewed professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the…
tlambert | November 29, 2010THE ABC has posted the audio of Åsa Wahlquist's remarks at the conference, proving that Posetti's tweets accurately quoted her. The two five minute audios are well worth listening to for an insider's take on the toxic work environmnet that is The Australian. Look carefully at what Wahlquist has said since:
Mitchell rejects the allegation and Walhquist has also denied it, saying she has never spoken to Mitchell about climate change.
Wahlquist has not retracted or contradicted any of the things she said at the conference. I hope she expands on them at book length. Anyone know any publishers…
tlambert | November 28, 2010The full resources of The Australian have been mustered to defend Chris Mitchell from a tweet. Caroline Overington (who used to be a serious journalist before becoming an apologist for her boss) writes:
Posetti sat in on a conference where serious allegations were made about Mitchell. Posetti published those allegations without checking to see if they were true or asking Mitchell for a response.
So from now on, before you tweet, get a response and include that in your 140 characters. Also, Overington makes a serious allegation about Posetti: that she broke the rules of journalism.…