Deltoid

Monbiot on Plimer

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:27:58 -0500

Ian Plimer is well aware that numerous serious errors of fact and interpretation have been exposed in his book but has yet to mount any kind of substantive response -- all he has done is call his critics names. As a result James Delingpole leaves himself wide open when he writes an excessively credulous review of Heaven and Earth:

My tribe doesn't believe in global warming! ... Plimer has a sciency-looking book saying it's all a big hoax! ... the Australian government will collapse ... Al Gore is fat!

OK, that was a paraphrase. Except for the bit about the Australian government collapsing.

George Monbiot takes advantage of the obvious opening.

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Just how bad is Chilingar's latest paper?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:19:07 -0500

Chilingar has republished his paper that shows that if you assume CO2 is not a greenhouse gas then it doesn't warm the planetin Enviromental Geology. This paper is so bad that S Fred Singer has resigned as an editor from Environmental Geology. Yes, this S Fred Singer.

Hat tip: Eli Rabett.

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Warbloggers' predictions of coalitions casualties

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:06:04 -0500

With US combat troops withdrawing from Iraq's cities it is time to compare the 4639 coalition casualties with the predictions made by warbloggers before the war:

John Hawkins: "Probably 300 or less"
Charles Johnson:"Very few"
Henry Hanks: "Less than 200"
Laurence Simon: "A Few hundred"
Rachael Lucas: "Less than three thousand"
Scott Ott: "Dozens"
Glenn Reynolds: "Fewer than 100"
Tim Blair: "Below 50"
Ken Layne: "a few hundred"
Steven Den Beste: "50-150"

And there were roughly a million excess Iraqi deaths.

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Christopher Booker's misinformation about the Polar Bear Specialist Group

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:36:49 -0500

Chris Mooney refutes claims that a skeptical report was suppressed by the EPA. (See also Deep Climate's analysis of the origin of the report.

Another story about skeptics being suppressed has been concocted by Christopher Booker:

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the [Polar Bear Study Group], but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".

Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration -- a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents -- was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

It is hard to imagine more unreliable sourcing than a Christopher "white asbestos is harmless" Booker second-hand report of an email, but I thought I should check the story to be on the safe side, so I asked Derocher about Booker's article:

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Pielke Sr's new statistical technique

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:19:21 -0500

You might have learnt in stats class how to use linear regression to estimate trends. Well I'm sorry but you going to have to forget it all and the boring statistics books are going to have to be rewritten because that stuff is obsolete due to revolutionary breakthrough by Roger Pielke Sr. If you use the boring-and-now-obsolete linear regression stuff on the University of Colorado at Boulder sea level data you discover that the trend is positive and highly statistically significant, even if you just consider the data since 2006.

But using his revolutionary new technique Roger Pielke Sr discovers that sea levels are not rising and in fact: "Sea level has actually flattened since 2006."

Look at the proof and marvel:

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Open Thread 29

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:40:18 -0500

Time for another open thread.

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Senator Fielding says there has been no warming for 15 years

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:49:17 -0500

Senator Fielding has rejected the science and now claims:

Over the last 15 years, global temperatures haven't been going up and, therefore, there hasn't been in the last 15 years a period of global warming,

Clearly there was never any chance of convincing someone who can look at a graph like this one and not see any increase in temperature since the mid 90s:

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The Australian's War on Science 39

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:46:38 -0500

Last 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 that CO2 increased by 5 percent since 1998 while global temperature cooled during the same period?

No.

Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998 (the late 20th-century phase of global warming) were not unusual as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth's history?

No.

Is it the case that all computer models projected a steady increase in temperature for the period 1990 to 2008, whereas in fact there were only eight years of warming followed by 10years of stasis and cooling?

No.

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Monckton's vision of the future: an IPCC boot stamping on a human face forever

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:14:26 -0500

Hey, remember how Monckton got published in a UFO magazine? Well, now he's in a Larouche publication, Executive Intelligence Review (see cover to right), being interviewed about the IPCC plan to RULE THE WORLD.

However, they are not concerned with whether there is a problem or not. They merely wish to pretend that there is a problem, and try to do so with a straight face, for long enough to persuade, not the population, because we have no say in this, but the governing class in the various memberstates of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: That they should hand over their powers as government to the United Nations or to a new agency, or possibly just to the existing climate panel, merely restructured a bit. So that we would no longer be free to decide what our currency would be, or how much of it there should be, or what we could burn, or what we could do. These things would be dictated to us by the dictators at the center.

The Larouchite who interviewed him reckons that Monckton is correct but hasn't yet realised that Prince Philip and Prince Charles are the puppet masters controlling the IPCC.

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David Karoly on Plimer

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:11:49 -0500

Professor David Karoly of the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences is an expert on climate change, so like every other scientist who has read Ian Plimer's error-filled book, he was appalled at how bad it was. His review:

Now let me address some of the major scientific flaws in Plimer's arguments. He claims 'it is not possible to ascribe a carbon dioxide increase to human activity' and 'volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world's cars and industries combined'. Both are wrong. Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide enriched with carbon isotope C12and reduced C13 and essentially no C14, and it decreases atmospheric oxygen, exactly as observed and as Plimer states on pages 414 and 415. Scientists have estimated emissions from volcanoes on land for the last 50 years and they are small compared with total global emissions from human sources.

Plimer even argues that the recent sources must be underwater volcanoes. This is not the case, because the net movement of carbon dioxide is from the atmosphere to the ocean, based on measurements that the concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide in the ocean is less than in the atmosphere. In addition, measurements show that the concentrations of two other long-lived greenhouse gases with human-related sources, methane and nitrous oxide, have increased markedly over the last 200 years, at the same time as the increases in carbon dioxide. This is not possible due to sources from underwater volcanoes. ...

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Brookings Institute tries to repair its reputation

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 05:52:45 -0500

Gregg Easterbrook is no longer an expert at Brookings.

Via The Editors who has found yet another subject area that Easterbrook gets wrong:

Most importantly, this proves conclusively my theory that what we think of as "the Universe" is really just a rather over-broad comic novel called "Jackass of All Trades", wherein hilariously inept polymath Gregg Easterbrook - "the DiVinci of incompetence" - rises to the heights of the journalistic and public policy professions, only to be stopped by a deadly asteroid.

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"Land of the Lost" undermines global warming

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:42:02 -0500

The plot "scientist has a crazy idea that no-one accepts but is proven right" has been used in movies from Ghostbusters to the Day After Tomorrow, but when it is satirised in Land of the Lost, S.T. Karnick decides:

My guess is that this aspect of the film was not intended as direct satire but instead simply reflects something the filmmakers picked up in the contemporary zeitgeist. However, its presence in the central story of the film and the bookend scenes-which are in very important places in the film, the beginning and end-gives it great prominence and suggests that skepticism toward such claims of consensus has entered the culture as a real phenomenon.

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Barbara Eskanazi interviewed on DDT

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:44:36 -0500

Seed Magazine has interviewed epidemiologist Barbara Eskanazi about her survey article on the effects of DDT on human health:

SEED: What kinds of long-term health problems can we expect? BE: I don't really know. I can't predict, but I can say that if the studies that I read hold true we may see higher rates of diabetes; we may see higher rates of breast cancer; we may see higher rates of male infertility. We may see poor neurodevelopment in children. We may also see more spontaneous abortions. ...

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Malcolm Walter on Plimer

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:11:52 -0500

One of the claims that Ian Plimer likes to make is that as a geologist he takes time into account in a way that the IPCC does not, so it is worthwhile looking at what another geologist thinks of Plimer's error-filled book. Professor Malcolm Walter, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, concludes:

There is fallacious reasoning. Take this statement on page 87: 'If it is acknowledged that there have been rapid large climate changes before industrialisation, then human production of carbon dioxide cannot be the major driver for climate change.' This would only be true if carbon dioxide concentrations were the only driver of climate change, something that no-one proposes, as far as I know. This level of naiveté, if that's what it is, is hard to comprehend. ...

I think Plimer is entirely sincere in his efforts to argue against anthropogenic climate change. But he is misguided, and his interpretation of the literature is confused. Why do I have any credibility on this issue? Like Plimer I am a geologist, with a very long experience in basic fieldwork. I have particular experience in working on the evidence for severe glaciations in the past, and on understanding the early history of the Earth. I am also a planetary scientist with an interest in other planets in the solar system, including their climates.

Reviewing this book has been an unpleasant experience for me. I have been a friendly colleague of Plimer's for 25 years or more. I admired his support for innovative geological research during his early career as a mineral explorer in industry. I cheered him on when he took on the so-called creation scientists and their bogus nonsense, a crusade that cost him dearly in the end. I have enjoyed his always lively and entertaining lectures. But this time, in my opinion, he has done a disservice to science and to the community at large.

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Inside The Australian's War on Science

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:16:39 -0500

Paddy Manning worked at The Australian between 2004 and 2007, so has inside knowledge about their war on science:

Then on May 9, 2007, apparently at the urging of son James, Murdoch announced News Corp would go carbon neutral by 2010. ...

This put The Australian in a quandary. Mitchell's then 2IC, Michael Stutchbury, was still freely describing climate change as "bullshit" and joked after the announcement, "What would the Murdochs know?" (He is now the paper's economics editor.)

What did The Australian do? In late 2006 Matthew Warren, former PR for the NSW Minerals Council, was appointed - get this - environment reporter. His standard line was how difficult, how expensive, measures to combat global warming would be. He practically never quoted the environment movement or its representatives. (He now runs business group the Clean Energy Council, which is meant to promote renewable energy but has been taken over by the carbon lobby.)

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