Andrew Bolt may have the worst case of confirmation bias ever seen. To Bolt, whether something is true or not has nothing to do with its accuracy and everything to do with whether it suits him or not. Here in it's entirety
Dennis Ambler checks the statistics behind recently claims that 97 per cent of climate scientists believe man is heating the planet and finds evidence of some exaggeration:
For the 2008 project, Tol co-wrote a paper along with Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University and two researchers from the Electric Power Research Institute, a US trade association. The two climate change proposals were ranked against numerous development and human welfare issues and came in 29th and 30th out of 30.
Long-term Lomborg critic Kåre Fog took Tol, whose FUND computer-model was the basis for the simulation, to task about the study. Tol admitted that the study used a discount rate that fell gradually from 5% whereas all the competing proposals used a 3% rate. Tol excused himself by saying that re-writing the model to use the 3% discount rate was too difficult and that the other proposals should have used his rate, even though the project specifications dictated 3% and he has at other times successfully employed FUND with other rates. This inherent bias caused the bottom ranking.
Hey, remember how Don Easterbrook deliberately falsified a baseline to make it look like past temperatures were warmer than current ones? Well, he's at it again. He has taken a graph of temperature proxies for Greenland and used the value for 1855 as the "present". Gareth Renowden comments
1855 — Easterbrook’s “present” — was not warmer than 1934, 1998 or 2010 in Greenland, let alone around the world. His claim that 9,100 out of the last 10,500 years were warmer than recent peak years is — to put it bluntly — pure bullshit, based on a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of data. He should withdraw his article, and apologise to those he has misled.
CO2 is also nearly twice as heavy as air (molecular weight 44, that of air 29) so it cannot rise anywhere beyond haze level of a couple of hundred feet.
Now Channel Seven's Sunrise has done its viewers a disservice by having Ken Ring on to argue that global warming is not happenning. Graeme Readfearn investigated Ring's background and found that Ring had written a book on how to read cat's paws:
Ken Ring is a mathematician and a long-time magician, mind-reader and public speaker with a passion for the ancient discipline of palmistry. Ken stumbled upon his peculiar calling at a psychic party several years ago, where he was able to deliver a reading of a cat's paw that proved to be uncannily accurate.
Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children's cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross. Moreover, although the scale of the GMC's 217 day hearing precluded additional charges focused directly on the fraud, the panel found him guilty of dishonesty concerning the study's admissions criteria, its funding by the Legal Aid Board, and his statements about it afterwards.
Perhaps, then, it's time to take the obvious next step - a formal complaint to the Office of Research Integrity. And not against Wegman and Said, but against George Mason University itself. In fact, it is high time to recognize the obvious: GMU is simply not up to administering their own misconduct policy. Isn't it time to hand the job over to an organization that can?
Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
