tlambert

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Tim Lambert

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The way the "Rachel Carson was worse than Hitler" folks tell the story, the all-powerful environmentalists were poised to ban DDT at the end of the 90s. For example, here's Tren and Bate's version of the negotiations leading to the Stockholm Treaty: Five Inter-governmental Negotiating Committee (…
Because if you don't you might end up like Tim Blair: Big call from Tim Lambert: "Crime and violent crime in Britain peaked in the early 90s and [have] since plummeted." His source? The British Crime Survey, an annual affair which asks some 40,000 Brits if they've been encrimed during the…
When I wrote about David Frum's voodoo criminology in support of the death penalty, I didn't mention any of the recent research that purports to find a deterrent effect for the death penalty because Frum didn't cite it. That research has always seemed suspect to me -- since a very small fraction…
Voting has started for the Koufax awards. I've been nominated for a Koufax award for Best Single Issue Blog and for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition.
In her latest rant, Miranda Devine warns about the imminent threat of a take over by scientists: It used to be men in purple robes who controlled us. Soon it will be men in white lab coats. The geeks shall inherit the earth. I suppose you are wondering how they are going to take over. Could…
Miranda Devine tells her readers what GIGO means: The outputs are totally dependent on the quality and accuracy of the inputs. At university we had a name for what often happens: GIGO - garbage in garbage out. And then perfectly illustrates it: Yet a paper published last week by the Lavoisier…
Dr Free-Ride may have Friday sprog blogging and PZ Myers may have his Friday cephalopod, but only here at Deltoid do combine them both! Here's an old picture of one of my kids with a cuttlefish he found on the beach. He dismantled it with the help of his brother and discovered that they contain…
After Fumento had been worked over by yours truly, Chris Mooney and PZ Myers, you'd think there would be nothing left, but Steve Reuland has taken just one paragraph from Fumento's column and found as many mistakes as I found in the whole thing. Fumento's columns aren't just wrong, they're…
Chris Mooney and PZ Myers complete the demolition of Fumento's article that I started here. Sir Oolius also got stuck in and managed to get one of Fumento's characteristically lame comebacks. Inspired by my post mentioning co-authorship chains with the "Hockey Team", John Fleck and William…
Tim Blair links to some interesting articles in this week's Bulletin. First up is a page on John Howard with the intriguing title "The hosue of Howard". It's a fearless, hard hitting complete suck up to Howard. Apparently, after a decade of power and privilege as prime minister, Howard hasn't…
Do you think I should apply for this job?
In Fumento's latest article he accuses the leading science journals of delivering "Political Science". His examples are a mixture of genuine problems discovered by others (like the Korean stem cell fraud) and bogus problems "discovered" by Fumento. Like this: Fast forward to September 2005,…
I wrote earlier about McIntyre's attack on the NAS Panel on temperature reconstructions. McIntyre objected to two panelists because they were co-authors of co-authors of Mann, but not to the panelist who was a co-author of a co-author of McKitrick. In another post he also objects to another…
Welcome William Connolley's Stoat to the ScienceBlogs federation. He's not in the combined feed yet, but I imagine that will be fixed soon.
I've been nominated for a Koufax award for Best Single Issue Blog and for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. Voting hasn't started yet, but there all kinds of interesting blogs on those lists, so here's a chance to find an interesting blog that you haven't seen before.
Cathy Young disagrees with the Iain Murray/Tom Giovenetti line on cash for comment: Sadly, some conservatives are now defending the practice of opinion writers serving as hired guns (hired quills?) for business and lobbying interests. Among others, Iain Murray in The American Spectator and…
Since 99% of the trackbacks I have been getting were spam, I have turned them off. If you link to one of my posts, just leave a comment linking back to your post. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Terence is justifiably annoyed that his tax dollars are being spent on having John Lott give a keynote speech on firearms safety at a conference in New Zealand. Lott is going to claim that safe storage laws increase crime. I don't know if he will continue to misrepresent the research that…
Last week I wrote about how the Australian government was gagging scientists from expressing mainstream science views on global warming. Garth Paltridge has responded with a claim that global warming skeptics get gagged as well. From the Feb 22 Australian Financial Review: Graeme Pearman (in…
Here's Silas standing in front of one of the ports that have been sold to Dubai Port World. Don't worry, he'll protect us from the terrorists! Unless they gave him food or something. See Dennis the Peasant or Kevin Drum for a more serious treatment of this matter.
Last week I wrote about the greenhouse mafia in Australia. This week, Clive Hamilton has named the "dirty dozen", the twelve people who have worked together to mislead Australians about climate change. The Age reports: Speaking at the Australia-New Zealand Climate Change and Business Conference…
I've turned on the requirement that you have to provide an email address when leaving a comment. If that stops you from commenting the fix is to delete the cookies you have from scienceblogs. PZ Meyers has more on this and other bugs. If you have any other bug reports or suggestions for…
Last year I wrote how John Brignell repeatedly tried to add untrue claims to the Sourcewatch article on Brignell because it was critical of him. Now he is complaining about his Wikipedia article: Anyway, reading hostile critiques of one's efforts is very much like being in that hall of mirrors…
Tim Worstall reports that James Lovelock (who I criticised earlier for his global warming alarmism) has fallen for the myth that the use of DDT against malaria is banned. In his new book Lovelock writes: "insecticides badly needed controlling, but the indiscriminate banning of DDT and other…
Steve Forbes writes: There is a simple, time-proven way to virtually eradicate malaria: the judicious use of DDT. Extremist environmentalists have cowed health officials into never even considering the use of DDT. We are not talking about the large-scale, indiscriminate spraying of the stuff that…
On Saturday, I showed to a bloggers meet up organized by Suki and Susoz. Also attending were weez, Flashman, Morgan and tigtog. We decided that a bloggers' picnic would be fun, so, if you're in Sydney on Saturday April 1st, come to the Royal Botanical Gardens from 1pm. We're spreading the picnic…
Good old Mike Fumento has another go at Javers: In the one instance we know of, the DC firm Patton Boggs and others invited Javers to play on the highly exclusive Bretton Woods golf course. I would guess that the value of this gift would be in excess of $10,000. This could be considered unsavory…
Hockey stick wars, the story so far: McIntyre and McKitrick (M&M) first claimed that the hockey stick graph was the product of "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal…
The 28th Skeptic's Circle is your one source for skeptical blogging.
Test yourself: can you detect what is dishonest about this argument in a Mirada Devine column about RU486 published in the Sydney Morning Herald today: And, despite the hype about a gender divide in the Senate last week, about the same number of men (21) and women (24) voted in favour of removing…