Deltoid

Merry Christmas

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 • 28 Comments

Keith Kloor's thinking on climate change

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 • 106 Comments

Wegman one of The Scientist's top five science scandals

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A controversial climate change paper was retracted when it was found to contain passages lifted from other sources, including Wikipedia.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

The Australian's War on Science 75: Plimer vs Plimer

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

Plimer suffers from crank magnetism

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

Monckton debunks Monckton

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

December 2011 Open Thread

Category: Open Thread

Posted by Tim Lambert at 12:00 AM • 403 Comments

McKitrick's quote mining

Category: McKitrick

Deep Climate dissects Ross McKitrick's deceptive quoting from the emails stolen from CRU in 2009:

In one particularly outrageous and error-filled passage, McKitrick accuses IPCC AR4 co-ordinating lead authors Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth of selecting their team of contributing authors solely on the basis of whether they agree with the pair's scientific views. He even goes so far as to accuse Jones of "dismissing" (i.e. rejecting as a contributing author) one qualified expert who, supposedly in Jones's own words, "has done a lot, but I don't trust him."

But the record clearly shows that it was Trenberth who made that last comment, and that he was expressing misgivings about the quality of the researcher's work, not whether he was on the "right side" of scientific issues. And the expert in question, climatologist Joel Norris, was in fact selected by Trenberth as a contributing author. Even worse, McKitrick has reversed the order of the Jones quotes, taken them out of context, and then juxtaposed them to make it appear as if they were part of the same exchange. Meanwhile, an examination of the two separate email discussions show chapter co-ordinators trying to fill out their team with authors who will be able to contribute effectively, in complete contradiction to McKitrick's central thesis.

Notice how much more work it takes to put the quotes in context than for McKitrick to misrepresent them.

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Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:21 AM • 34 Comments

On the trick to hide the context

Category: Global Warming

Peter Hadfield (potholer54) talks on the deceitful quoting of the emails stolen from CRU in 2009

Juliette Jowit in The Guardian puts some more of them in context.

Posted by Tim Lambert at 2:02 AM • 713 Comments

The Australian's War on Science 74: Spinning the IPCC Extreme Weather report

Category: The War on Science

The IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) found:

Regarding the future, the assessment concludes that it is virtually certain that on a global scale hot days become even hotter and occur more often. "For the high emissions scenario, it is likely that the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world", said Thomas Stocker the other Co-chair of Working Group I. "Likewise, heavy precipitation will occur more often, and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their number will likely remain constant or decrease". "Nevertheless, there are many options for decreasing risk."

Or, according to the two news stories in The Australian: "Review fails to support climate change link" and "Climate change effects unknown: IPCC report".

Roger Jones examines The Australian's misrepresentations and concludes:

On climate change, The Australian is behaving like the media equivalent of a fog machine. Its unreliable reporting should be avoided by those with an interest in factual scientific information.

He also has some comments on the way The Australian is relying on Benny Peiser.

Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:07 AM • 15 Comments