If you haven't been watching the Roger Pielke Jr train come of the rails and the carriages smashing into each other and exploding, I suggest you look at this post from James Annan:
Roger Pielke has been saying some truly bizarre and nonsensical things recently. The pick of the bunch IMO is this post. The underlying question is: Are the models consistent with the observations over the last 8 years?
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I think this article in Prospect on Rachel Carson and DDT is quite good.
Update: John Quiggin has posted the director's cut. Read more »
Via Gareth Renowden:
Q: How many climate sceptics does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. It's too early to say if the light bulb needs changing.
Though I think the answer should be: None. The light bulb isn't broken and it will recover by itself and sitting in the dark is better than in the light. Read more »
A week ago I wrote
I predict that Avery will maintain that all the scientists are wrong about their own work and refuse to remove any names from the list.
There really is no excuse for this, from Michael Duffy:
Global warming stopped six years ago. It might start again tomorrow, but from 2002 until now, average global temperatures have remained fairly constant. This is in contrast to the previous period when, as everyone knows, the temperature trend was upwards. Read more »
Via Sadly No!, we find out the latest from the SF authors who helped bring us Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative Read more »
Here's a cool video of my first year class in Engineering Design. One of their projects is to build and program a Lego robot to compete in robot sumo...
ABC's normally excellent Ockham's razor has taken a refreshing change from presenting the thoughts of scientists on science based on peer-reviewed research to presenting the opinion of a political scientist on global warming based on stuff he found on denialist web sites. Yes, they had Don Aitkin on. Now just because Aitkin isn't a scientist and his sources weren't scientists either it doesn't necessarily follow that he would get his facts wrong, but that would be the way to bet. Read more »
Ted Frank has the latest on Lott's appeal of the dismissal of his case: Read more »
Because we haven't had an open thread for a while.
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Here we go again. Phil Chapman, in the Australian: Read more »
Robin Fawcett and David Jones of the National Climate Centre, Australian Bureau of Meteorology have written a short paper debunking the global-warming-has-ended myth: Read more »
Lawyer Steven Price, who specialises in media law, comments on the Listener's use of legal threats to silence a blogger: Read more »
Earlier, I wrote how the environmental writer for the New Zealand Listener was fired after Heartland demanded he be silenced, and:
A few weeks ago Dave Hansford, the environmental writer for the New Zealand Listener, wrote an article on how globaling warming deniers create an illusion of dissent: Read more »
NPR has run a puff piece on Kristen Byrnes. Byrnes stuff is full of errors, but the reporter seems uninterested in whether Byrnes' science is accurate or not. Read more »
Instead of correcting his erroneous post Tim Worstall has put up another post coming out against corrections. This time it's about an inaccurate textbook. Can you pass the test at the book's online study centre? Read more »
The Australian front pages an article on "eminent historian" Don Aitkin who attacks the "quasi-religious" scientists of the IPCC for advocating that some action to combat global arming should be taken. Aitkin deploys the argument from incredulity Read more »
John Mashey on the global warming deniers who reckon that AGW is a plot against capitalism:
What's really weird about this is that many of the people who do this (claim that AGW believers are attacking capitalism)
a) Have rarely, or never worked for an actual profit-making company that builds useful products or provides useful services. Read more »
z, in comments:
"CO2 is not causing global warming, in fact, CO2 is lagging temperature change in all reliable datasets. "
See also my forthcoming paper: "Chickens do not lay eggs, because they have been observed to hatch from them". Read more »
Last year AP-IPSOS surveyed Americans and asked them to estimate how many Iraqi civilians had died in the war. They grossly underestimated the number, with the median estimate being just 9,890. Read more »
Thanks to Drudge and Instapundit another round of "global warming stopped in 1998 is making the rounds of the blogs. Read more »
Remember EG Beck's dodgy CO2 graph?
John Tierney, demoted from the NYT op-ed page and now continuing his libertarian propagandizing in the guise of "science writing," points out that flying around to climate-change conferences creates a large carbon footprint for high-profile environmental activists. That allows Tierney to claim the sort of faux-populist gotcha! so beloved among glibertarians and greedhead conservatives. (The theocrat, nativist, and imperialist wings of conservatism prefer their faux-populist gotcha!s on different topics.)
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Jeff Poor of Business & Media Institute spliced the audio of an Al Gore interview to turn a statement that Arctic melting was a consequence of global warming: Read more »
Because the previous Open Thread has dropped off the sidebar
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The first four words in this Wednesday's article in the Australian :
In 1633 Galileo Galilei
There is no point in reading further. Read more »
Also, a tip: if you walk into your new workplace brandishing a container of putative pubic lice and sand, you may want to provide a more detailed back story than "I bought them on the internet." Just some advice. Read more »
Arnold Kling decides to spread the DDT ban myth:
According to Iain Murray's new book, the worst disasters come from environmental policy. It is remarkable the magnitude of the harm caused by government relative to the harm caused by the private sector from which it protects us. ...
The total death and illness caused by all of the chemical pollution ever created vs. the death and illness caused by the ban on DDT. Read more »
Richard Littlemore reports:
Dozens of scientists are demanding that their names be removed from a widely distributed Heartland Institute article entitled 500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares. ... Read more »
frankbi has the latest on the Listener against free speech. Pamela Stirling, after using dubious legal threats to shut up a critic says:
So that, we're not into censorship of any kind. As we discussed with Brian Leyland, the Voltaire quote, you know: "I disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it." Read more »
The Australian wasn't content to publish Phil Chapman's silly ice-age article, but also published a news story that treated it like a legitimate scientific paper. Now, instead of publishing a correction to Chapman's falsehoods from a climate scientist they have an article by Christopher Pearson. Read more »
Robert Lichter reports on a survey of American climate scientists commissioned by STATS at GMU. Some of the findings:
In 1991 the Gallup organization conducted a telephone survey on global climate change among 400 scientists drawn from membership lists of the American Meteorological Association and the American Geophysical Union. Read more »
As well as Chapman's silly ice-age article, the Australian published a news story about it, treating it as if it was a legitimate paper and failing to get comments from climate scientists. The ABC acted like a real news organization it its report:
DAVID KAROLY: This is not science. Read more »
From the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre
CLIMATE CHANGE: Show me the money?
Michael Molitor
6:45pm for 7pm start, Wednesday 23rd April, 2008
Science Theatre, UNSW . Read more »
The latest editorial from the Australian on the science of global warming cites a cardinal and a historian and no climate scientists:
We can trust that Catholic cardinal George Pell has not had to resort to inside knowledge to play the devil's advocate on global warming. Like historian and political scientist Don Aitkin, Dr Pell has studied the data and rejected the claim that scientific consensus exists. Read more »
Daniel Engber's Slate article The Paranoid Style in American Science is well worth a read. He explains how the Creationists, AGW and HIV/AIDS skeptics go well past skepticism into conspiracy theries about science.
Hat tip: Mark Hoofnagle. Read more »
Another news story about scientists being shown up by a teen also proves to be completely wrong Read more »
A few weeks ago Dave Hansford, the environmental writer for the New Zealand Listener, wrote an article on how globaling warming deniers create an illusion of dissent: Read more »
I don't like banning people from commenting here. To make sure this is transparent I keep a list here of everyone who is banned. Inspired by the example of John Quiggin, I've added a third name to the list, the poster who calls himself "Reality Check". Read more »
About a week ago, the World Meteorological Organization put out a statement to correct the erroneous claims in the media that global warming had stopped (emphasis theirs): Read more »
John Lott in his Fox news column claims:
During the 2000 election, with Bill Clinton as president, the economy was viewed through rose-colored glasses. According to polls, voters didn't realize that the country was in a recession.
Pgl has the graphs to show that the US was not in a recession in 2000. Read more »
Terence offers a definiton of Gore's Law:
Gore's Law: As an online climate change debate grows longer, the probability that denier arguments will descend into attacks on Al Gore approaches one. Read more »
James has written an open letter to Kevin Rudd. Key paragraphs: Read more »
Julie Rehmeyer has a decent article about the Lancet studies in Science News. Read more »
Desmogblog posted John Mashey's detailed examination of the spread of Monckton/Schulte's misinformation.pdf). Read more »
Was I being unfair to Energy and Environment when I described it as a forum for laundering pseudo-science? I mean, didn't they reject Schulte? According to Boehmer-Christiansen: Read more »
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