Deltoid

What do the Moranogate emails reveal?

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:32:37 -0500

Randy Olson (maker of Sizzle) has an interview with Mark Morano.

RO: Are you an anti-evolutionist?

MM: Haha, not at all. In fact, you know it's not an issue. The implication of your question is that somehow the skeptics are aligned with creationists. In all my years of dealing with Senator Inhofe the subject of creationism and evolution never even came up. Someone even did an analysis of it in our scientists report, and I think they may have only found one or two creationists out of 700-some names.

Wait, that was my analysis. I looked at the people who were on the Discovery Institute's Darwin dissent list and Morano's and found these names: Edward Blick, David Deming, Guillermo Gonzalez, Robert Smith and James Wanliss. Can you count higher than Morano? And these are just the creationists on the Discovery Insitute's list. There are also Chris Allen, Roy Spencer, and maybe Ross McKitrick and Tim Ball. No-one has done an exhaustive check, so there are likely more.

Morano:

Like one of their favorites -- they love to say, "Every single scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Meteorological Society, they all agree, they all agree!" They always do that, leaving out the fact that surveys of the actual rank-and-file scientists showing vastly, radically different story.

Who do you believe, Morano, or your lying eyes?

Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

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Tamino calls out Anthony Watts

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:40:21 -0500

Tamino writes

It has now been independently confirmed, by multiple persons, that my results regarding the impact of station dropout on global temperature are correct. Your claims, in your document with Joe D'Aleo for the SPPI, are just plain wrong. ...

If you have any honor at all, you'll set the record straight. You owe it to everyone, and especially to NOAA, to admit that you were wrong. And you certainly owe it to NOAA to apologize. You need to make a highly visible, highly public admission of error, and apology, for using falsehoods to accuse others of fraud.

My post from way back in 2004 on station dropout may be of interest.

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Open Thread 44

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:16:15 -0500

You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.

But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.

-- Humbert Wolfe

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IOPgate: IOP uses memory hole

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:27:18 -0500

BigCityLib catches the IOP using the memory hole.

William Connolley is not impressed:

What a bunch of slimy little toads: they pretend to believe in openness, they won't tell us who wrote their statements, then they silently airbrush out embarassing words afterwards.

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Naomi Oreskes on Merchants of Doubt

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:33:57 -0500

Via Resilience Science, a talk by Naomi Oreskes on her new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

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Institute of Irony

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:23:43 -0500

Institute of Physics refuses to say who wrote submission calling for more openness.

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Leakegate: Jonathan Leake strikes back

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:30:17 -0500

Last week I got an email from Amy Turner of the Sunday Times:

Dear Tim,

I'm writing a piece about Science bloggers and would love to talk to you about yours. Are you free to talk to me today or tomorrow? Hope to hear from you.

Turner usually writes celebrity puff pieces rather than about science, so it was pretty obvious that Jonathan Leake was organizing some payback because I had dared to criticize him. I agreed to the interview and, sure enough, it wasn't long before Turner was threatening me (How would I react if Jonathan Leake sued me for libel?) She complained that I had been unfair to Leake by not contacting him even though I had. She was particularly upset by this post, where I quoted an "Action on Smoking and Health" correction to a Jonathan Leake story:

We have heard that the figures reported in the Sunday Times yesterday (and now circulating elsewhere) are not based on any research conducted to date.

The impact of the smokefree legislation on heart attacks is being analysed by Anna Gilmore and team at Bath but they have no final results yet.

Turner reckoned that someone, somewhere must have told Leake the 10% number and it was unfair of me to suggest that he made the number up. But my post just quotes the correction and notes that Sunday Times failed to correct their story.

I brought up Leake's story on the IPCC report on the vulnerability of the Amazon. Even though he knew, from multiple sources, that that report was accurate, he claimed that it was bogus. Turner was unable to offer any defence of Leake.

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Leakegate + The Australian's War on Science 46

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:30:11 -0500

A story on climate change by Jonathan Leake that is reprinted in the Australian is pretty well guaranteed to misrepresent the science. And it does -- you only have to compare the headline for Leake's story "Cyclone climate link rejected" with Nature Geosciences headline "Tropical cyclone projection: Fewer but stronger" for the new paper and with what the IPCC report says:

Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical sea-surface temperatures. There is less confidence in projections of a global decrease in numbers of tropical cyclones.

Of course "New paper confirms IPCC report" isn't the story that Leake wants to tell, so what does he do? Makes stuff up, as usual. Leake claims:

Research by hurricane scientists may force the UN's climate panel to reconsider its claims that greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the number of tropical storms.

The AR4 WG1 SPM says

There is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones. {3.8}

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Leakegate: Jonathan Leake gets Sunday Times banned from EurekAlert

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:34:41 -0500

This Jonathan Leake story on the evolution of Polar Bears broke the embargo on this PNAS paper. Ivan Oransky quotes PNAS media and communications manager Jonathan Lifland:

The majority of our infrequent embargo violations are accidental and typically the result of mislabeled copy that does not properly list the 3 p.m. EST Monday embargo expiration. We have a separate situation with the Sunday Times of London. With EurekAlert, we have prevented their editors and reporters from accessing the embargoed news section of EurekAlert, which is where pre-print copies of our articles are accessible. ...

At this time, we have no plans to remove the restriction we have placed on the editors and reporters from the Sunday Times. ...

With the exception of the Sunday Times, we have not had any three-time repeat offenders. In the case of the Times, we have removed all reporters and editors from accessing our media materials.

It seems that you can't trust Leake about anything.

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The empirical evidence for man-made global warming

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:30:57 -0500

Via Skeptical Science, Peter Sinclair's video on the evidence for man-made global warming.

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Andrew Bolt takes back "nice words"

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:42:37 -0500

Andrew Bolt responded to my debate with Monckton by defaming me, calling me "vituperative, deceptive, a cherrypicker, an ideologue, a misrepresenter and a Manichean conspiracist only too keen to smear a sceptic as a crook who lies for Exxon's dollars". You'll be glad to hear that Bolt now says I take back my nice words about Lambert. Even though he admitted that "Many of these issues are over my head" he is now utterly convinced by a dishonest post from Joanne Nova that I somehow tricked Monckton.

Nova quote mines Pinker's explanation for this phrase:

if we give Christopher Monckton the benefit of doubt and assume that he meant "the impact of clouds on the surface shortwave radiation" than it can pass."

And claims it means exactly the opposite of what it does:

An honest look at the Pinker statement says Monckton may have gotten the terminology wrong, but allowing for this, his analysis "passes":

An honest look at the Pinker statement says that his terminology can pass but that his analysis is wrong, because as Pinker writes:

The CO2 "radiative forcing" value that Mr. Christopher Monckton is quoting refers to the impact on the Earth's Radiative balance as described above. The numbers that we quote in our paper represent the change in surface SW due to changes in the atmosphere (clouds, water vapor, aerosols). These two numbers cannot be compared at their face value.

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Leakegate: If you refuse to talk to Jonathan Leake, he'll quote you anyway

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 04:56:50 -0500

Satoshi Kanazawa has an interesting post about how British Newspapers Make Things Up:

I hope American and British readers (and readers throughout the world) will finally wake up to the reality of British journalism: You just cannot believe what you read in British newspapers. I'd further call on my academic colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic never to speak to British reporters. You have absolutely no control over what they say about you and your scientific research.

Unfortunately, however, this does not always work. A reporter from the Sunday Times has recently requested an interview with me about one of my papers. Having already learned my lesson in 2006, I completely ignored his email and telephone messages. As a result, no interview took place. But that did not stop him at all. He went ahead and wrote his article, pretending that he had interviewed me and quoting me at length.

Gee, I wonder who that reporter was?

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Bad news: sea level rise may be worse than we thought

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:23:54 -0500

The IPCC fourth assessment report did not give any upper bound to sea level rise this century. But in a spectacularly bad piece of science communication they gave a range of 18 to 59cm excluding effects from accelerating ice sheet flows. Which are potentially the biggest contributors to sea level rise this century. However, a study last year by Siddal et al did come up with an upper bound of 82 cm. But now their study has been retracted, so sea level rise this century may well be more than 82 cm.

In the topsy-turvy world that is the denialists' planet, where up is down and black is white, the retraction proved that sea level rise wasn't going to be a problem and global warming is nothing to worry about. Thers points to a particularly egregious example from Ann Althouse, who holds down a job as a law professor.

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Open thread 43

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:38:25 -0500

A new open thread.

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The Economist calls a lie a lie

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:18:58 -0500

The Economist tells it like it is

This led to a Daily Mail headline reading: "Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995."

Since I've advocated a more explicit use of the word "lie", I'll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie. Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; he said the opposite. He said the world had been warming at 0.12°C per decade since 1995. However, over that time frame, he could not quite rule out at the traditional 95% confidence level that the warming since 1995 had not been a random fluke.

Anyone who has even a passing high-school familiarity with statistics should understand the difference between these two statements. At a longer time interval, say 30 or 50 or 100 years, Mr Jones could obviously demonstrate that global warming is a statistically significant trend. In the interview he stated that the warming since 1975 is statistically significant. Everyone, even climate-change sceptics, agrees that the earth has experienced a warming trend since the late 19th century. But if you take any short sample out of that trend (say, 1930-45 or 1960-75), you might not be able to guarantee that the particular warming observed in those years was not a statistical fluke. This is a simple truth about statistics: if you measure just ten children, the relationship between age and height might be a fluke. But obviously the fact remains that older children tend to be taller than younger ones, and if you measure 100 of them, you'll find the relationship quite statistically significant indeed.

What's truly infuriating about this episode of journalistic malpractice is that, once again, it illustrates the reasons why the East Anglia scientists adopted an adversarial attitude towards information management with regard to outsiders and the media. They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.

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