Category: The War on Science
Whenever we had bean salad, my Dad would always ask "What's that?" When told what it was, he would say "Don't tell me what it's been, tell me what it is now!" That's a Dad joke. The defining properties of a Dad joke are that it is not funny and that Dad keeps repeating it. In their ongoing war on science The Australian is now committing war crimes by deploying Dad jokes (which I recall were banned by the Geneva Convention in 1949).
Imre Salusinszky, who declared global warming to be dead in January of last year has repeated the same unfunny joke this January:
Last year, other parts of the globe followed suit. According to the World Meteorological Organisation: "The most significant area of below-normal temperatures in 2011 was in northern and central Australia, where temperatures were up to 1C below average in places . . . Other regions to experience below-normal temperatures in 2011 included the western United States and southwestern Canada, and parts of east Asia."
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Posted by Tim Lambert at 9:58 AM • 7 Comments
Category: Open Thread
Posted by Tim Lambert at 8:51 PM • 303 Comments
Category: Plimer
The Australian finally publishes Mike Sandiford's correction of the false claims from Plimer that The Australian published two weeks earlier:
Deliberately misrepresenting data or making it up is just not on.
Here's an example. In a section from his new book, How To Get Expelled from School, as reprinted in The Weekend Australian recently, Plimer claims: "Antarctic ice core (Siple) shows that there were 330 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air in 1900; Mauna Loa Hawaiian measurements in 1960 show that the air then had 260ppm carbon dioxide."
Plimer goes on to say: "Either the ice core data is wrong, the Hawaiian carbon dioxide measurements are wrong, or the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was decreasing during a period of industrialisation."
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Posted by Tim Lambert at 12:08 AM • 48 Comments
Category:
Best wishes to all my readers. A more successful gingerbread house than last time.
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Posted by Tim Lambert at 8:14 AM • 30 Comments
Category: Global Warming
Keith Kloor says that this "concisely expressed" his thinking on climate change:
I categorise myself as somebody who recognises that additional CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of man's activities (fossil fuel burning and land use change) will have an effect on the balance of radiation coming into and leaving our atmosphere.
I do not have a confirmed view as to exactly what the impact of the CO2 will have (feedbacks etc being uncertain) but I know that it must have an effect - that's physics.
Monckton would not disagree with any of this. This seems to be an example of The View from Nowhere.
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Posted by Tim Lambert at 5:10 AM • 130 Comments
Category: Wegman
The Wegman scandal has made The Scientist's list of the top 5 science scandals of 2011:
A controversial climate change paper was retracted when it was found to contain passages lifted from other sources, including Wikipedia. The paper, published by climate change skeptic Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis in 2008, showed that climatology is an inbred field where most researchers collaborate with and review each other’s work. But a resourceful blogger uncovered evidence of plagiarism, and the journal retracted the paper, which was cited 8 times, in May.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:46 AM • 36 Comments
Category: Plimer • The War on Science
The Australian has continued its war on science by printing an extract from Ian Plimer's new book, How to Get Expelled from School. The extract is largely plagiarised from this press release on a recent paper in Science by Funder et al finding large fluctuations in Arctic sea ice over the last 10,000 years. Plimer did change this passage in the press release
In order to reach their surprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the team organised several expeditions to Peary Land in northern Greenland.
to this:
In order to reach their unsurprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the team organised several expeditions to Peary Land in northern Greenland.
Plimer contradicts his alteration of the plagiarised text in his next paragraph:
What is interesting about this study is that the new understanding came from getting away from computer modelling and doing fieldwork in pretty inhospitable areas.
Is it a "new understanding" or is it "unsurprising"? And while this sentence is original, it's also wrong -- the study's estimate that Arctic ice was 50% less 7000 years ago came from computer modelling. Plimer would have known this if he read the paper instead of just the press release. He perhaps would also have noticed that the paper begins with this:
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Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:05 AM • 16 Comments
Category: Plimer
Crank magnetism is the tendency of someone attracted to one crank idea to be attracted to more. Ian Plimer, already notable for his acceptance of the iron Sun theory and the volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans theory has now been revealed as believing (like Christopher Booker) that white asbestos is harmless. But Plimer has gone beyond that to denying that white asbestos (chrysotile) is even asbestos:
MATT PEACOCK: Well can I ask you a simple question about your expertise, rocks? A few years ago you told me chrysotile was not asbestos, is that right?
IAN PLIMER: Chrysotile's a serpentine mineral. That is absolutely correct. Mineralogically it's a serpentine mineral.
MATT PEACOCK: So it's not asbestos?
IAN PLIMER: It is called commercially asbestos. The mineral chrysotile is a serpentine mineral.
MATT PEACOCK: Even the asbestos industry calls it asbestos. I mean the town Asbestos mines chrysotile.
IAN PLIMER: As I said it's called commercially asbestos.
MATT PEACOCK: But scientifically...
IAN PLIMER: However ...
MATT PEACOCK: With respect, Professor, it's called asbestos scientifically too.
IAN PLIMER: I'm sorry. You are just a journalist. I have spent my life studying minerals. Look up any basic mineralogy textbook, the sort of thing that we give to 18-year-old students at university, and you'll see that chrysotile is a serpentine mineral.
MATT PEACOCK: Called asbestos.
IAN PLIMER: A family of serpentine minerals.
MATT PEACOCK: Called asbestos.
IAN PLIMER: Whereas asbestos minerals are amphibole minerals.
MATT PEACOCK: Amphibole like crocidolite and amosite, but chrysotile is part of the family called asbestos. Is it not?
IAN PLIMER: I am sorry. You are demonstrating mass ignorance. You are out of your depth. I invite you to come to some elementary first year mineralogy lectures and you will learn...
Needless to say, textbooks classify white asbestos as a form of asbestos. It's one thing for Plimer to make basic errors about climate science or the health effects of white asbestos, areas where he has no expertise, but it's another thing to get basic mineralogy wrong, something on which he is supposed to have expertise.
If you think that Plimer being this blatantly wrong would shake the confidence of his supporters, you are unfamiliar with Tim Blair, who describes it as merely an 'attempted "gotcha!"'
(Hat tip: Lionel A)
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Posted by Tim Lambert at 12:59 PM • 124 Comments
Category: Monckton
Peter Hadfield dissects Monckton's response to Hadfield's demolition of Monckton's claims about climate science. Hadfield coins the term "Monckton maneuver" to describe Monckton's tactic of changing his position when shown to be wrong and pretending that his position hasn't changed.
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Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:36 AM • 56 Comments
Category: Open Thread
Posted by Tim Lambert at 12:00 AM • 403 Comments
Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
