tlambert

Given that The Australian's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell threatens to sue Julia Posetti, alleging that he has been defamed, you'd think they'd want to avoid defaming scientists, but the law on defamation is really only useful to the rich and powerful. In a column entitled Radicals get rich while…

THE ABC has posted the audio of Åsa Wahlquist's remarks at the conference, proving that Posetti's tweets accurately quoted her. The two five minute audios are well worth listening to for an insider's take on the toxic work environmnet that is The Australian. Look carefully at what Wahlquist has…

The full resources of The Australian have been mustered to defend Chris Mitchell from a tweet. Caroline Overington (who used to be a serious journalist before becoming an apologist for her boss) writes: Posetti sat in on a conference where serious allegations were made about Mitchell. Posetti…

In part 1 of this fact check I examined Brian Dunning's assertions that DDT did not thin eggshells. Responses from Orac: "Dunning should know better", Bug Girl: "Dunning clearly got his information second-hand. And it was bad information.", and Dunning: I think I've repeated that Milloy was not…

Crikey reports: A former senior News Limited journalist has described trying to write about human-induced climate change at The Australian newspaper as "torture" and has blamed the editor-in-chief for limiting coverage on the topic because he has "taken a political view". Asa Wahlquist mounted an…

Time for more open thread. In an interesting coincidence, Brian Dunning is here in Sydney to talk at TAM Australia, so I thought it would be interesting to go to the TAM fringe open mic night (tonight!) and talk about, oh, DDT.

Brian Dunning's Skeptoid does an excellent job of debunking pseudoscience, so his podcast on DDT is profoundly disappointing. Dunning claims that DDT use did not have a large impact on bird populations, that elitist environmental groups were killing brown children by blocking DDT use and that DDT…

Dan Vergano, USA Today reports: The plagiarism experts queried by USA TODAY disagree [with Wegman's denial] after viewing the Wegman report: • "Actually fairly shocking," says Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg by e-mail. "My own preliminary appraisal would be 'guilty as charged.' " •"If I was a…

Deep Climate continues his examination of the Wegman report. It would seem that Wegman's "reproduction" of McIntyre's results amounted to nothing more than running McIntyre's code without understanding what it did. And while Mann's "short centring" method does tend to produce a hockey-stick…

Naomi Oreskes was interviewed on Radio National this morning. (Hat tip: Tamino) Her upcoming talks: UNSW: Monday (this evening!) UQ: Tuesday Melbourne: Wednesday Adelaide: Thursday UWA: Monday 22nd

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In an earlier post So George Monbiot challenged Brand to notice and announce that he's wrong about DDT. So far it hasn't happened. Unless it does, I think we should be skeptical about the rest of Brand's thesis. Well, as Monbiot relates, it still hasn't happened. It seems increasingly likely that…

Jeff Harvey recommends this Climate Progress Post on the special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on the sixth mass extinction. It's been sixty-five million years since the last one, so this is an unprecedented opportunity for ecologists to study such an event. See…

Following in the footsteps of The Great Global Warming Swindle Channel 4 has produced a new documentary that also appears to favour being controversial over being accurate or fair: What the Green Movement Got Wrong. Adam Werbach who was in the documentary protested that his views were…

The Q-link is a device that purports to protect you from radiation from mobile phones using "A coil connected to nothing". Ben Goldacre and Orac have comprehensively debunked Q-link's claims. Yesterday Sydney's Daily Telegraph published a story promoting Q-link (the on-line version has now vanished…

Time for more thread

Andrew Bolt accepts the results of a study published in The Lancet that used random sampling to estimate deaths and came up with a figure of 200,000 per year, about ten times the number you get from a direct count. Actually, there are two studies that fit my description, one on deaths from malaria…

Well do you? Stephan Lewandowsky on how the IPCC has made the science seem more uncertain than it really is.

Naomi Oreskes will give a public lecture on Monday Nov 15 6-8 pm in the Law Theatre at UNSW. She'll be talking about her book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Update: Also: UQ: Tuesday Melbourne: Wednesday Adelaide:…

Tim Blair, The inconvenient truths about Al Gore's hot-air footprint: Al Gore is fat. Note that this was a column in the Daily Telegraph, so presumably there was an editor who could have saved a lot of ink and paper by trimming Blair's column down to just 11 letters. 'Shorter' concept created by…

Georgina Robinson in Sydney Morning Herald reports: [An Inconvenient Truth] will be used in the English curriculum as part of studies around the theme of sustainability, a spokesman for the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority said. It is not a required text but will be used by…

The WikiLeaks Iraq archive, while incomplete, reveals many more previously unreported violent deaths in the Iraq war -- Iraq Body Count say that the archive reveals 15,000 people shot, blown up, had the heads cut off or killed in some other way that they had not recorded. So Tim Blair, who claimed…

Henry Farrell, prompted by Clive Crook's claim that climate scientists' understanding of climate science is "hardly any better" than that of non-experts, tells the story of Crook's graceless withdrawal of his accusations of fraud against climate scientists: Hence, Crook's imputation that the "trick…

Andrew Dessler sends me a link to his debate with Richard Lindzen. I agree with Dessler's assessment that Lindzen's case was very weak. Watch it and make up your own mind. Dessler also sends me a link to his new paper that demonstrates that the claims of Paltridge et al (2009) (touted at Climate…

Jennifer Marohasy, who inspired LOLdenialists, will be on Q&A tonight. You can use the link to post a question for her. Hat tip: James Haughton.

Art Robinson, of Oregon Petition fame is running for Congress. Peter Sinclair has Robinson's interview by Rachel Maddow. Robinson comes across as more than a little nutty -- rather than elaborate on his views on hormesis (radioctive waste is good for you!) he just insisted that quotes from his…

Dan Vergano in USA Today reports: Officials at George Mason University confirmed Thursday that they are investigating plagiarism and misconduct charges made against a noted climate science critic. "I'm very well aware of the report, but I have been asked by the university not to comment until all…

Bob Ward on the Science Show says: I looked at one example by Bob Carter, it was published in an Australian economics journal a couple of years ago called Economic Analysis and Policy. And I noted first of all that it had a quote in it, attributed to John Houghton who was a senior member of the…

Well, I thought that video was funny (though they flogged the joke to, err, death), but I also think this Monty Python sketch is funny: That said, the idea seems more like something that Baldrick would have come up with than Baldrick's creator, Richard Curtis. Many people aren't going to find it…

Time for another open thread.