Peer-reviewed blunders

...a former mining executive has, working alone, once again exposed as error-riddled the work of top peer-reviewed climate scientists - and scientists working for a huge bureaucracy:

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Simpsons' trailer - including Spider Pig!

Believe in warming, or I’ll destroy you

When you are on a mission to save the world, nothing - and no one - must be allowed to stand in your way. After all, they must be corrupt, deceitful or just plain evil to even doubt you. And so global warming prophet Michael Eckhart of the American Council on Renewable Energy sent this remarkable letter:

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Freeman Dyson's heretical thoughts

"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated."

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Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one | csmonitor.com

A controversial research project is trying to trace all human language to a common root.

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Flying Pterosaurs Hunted Like Dinos?

The bird-like reptiles likely didn't skim the water's surface, as has been thought.

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Will chicken Gore accept the challenge now?

Al Gore Faces New Debate Challenge Expert

Battle of best-selling authors

CHICAGO, Aug. 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Best-selling author DennisAvery is the next prominent figure to challenge the facts Al Gore is promoting in his global warming crusade. Mr. Avery is co-author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years. Both Al Gore and Dennis Avery have New York Times best-selling books on global warming, but with opposite conclusions.

The list of Al Gore detractors continues to grow as his extreme rhetoric and conclusions get dissected by scientists, economists, and researchers. Avery joins Lord Christopher Monckton (former Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher advisor), Bjorn Lomborg (Danish economist), author Michael Crichton, Prof. S. Fred Singer (former director of the U.S.National Weather Service), Tim Ball, Ph.D. (historical climatologist), Prof. Ian Clark (University of Ottawa), and Prof. Richard Lindzen (MIT) among others.

Gore claims recent climate change is the result of human activities, and society must give up most of its energy supply to prevent global catastrophe. Conversely, Avery amassed physical evidence of pastwarming/cooling cycles and experimental evidence demonstrating variations in solar activity affect Earth's constantly varying temperatures.

"My book says our warming is natural, unstoppable - and not very dangerous anyway," stated Avery.

"These books represent the two leading explanations for the Earth's recent temperature changes - and they conflict. If global warming truly is the most important public policy issue of our day, then it is high time the public got to hear the arguments from both sides matched up against each other," continued Avery.

Gore has refused all debate challengers to date. Joseph Bast, presidentof The Heartland Institute, noted, "Maybe it's because climate alarmists tend to lose when they debate climate realists. [As happened recently with the Intelligence Squared debate in New York.] Or because most scientists do not support climate alarmism." The Heartland Institute has run more than$500,000 of ads in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and WashingtonTimes promoting a debate.

1998 no longer hottest year in the US - 1934 was!

Oops. It turns out that 1998 wasn’t the hottest year on record for the US, after all. Global warming must be working backwards, because NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, having fixed some calculating errors, has discovered that the hottest year was in fact 1934.

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Newsweek against "deniers": three responses

Thanks to Professor Lubos Motl of Harvard:

Monday, August 06, 2007

Newsweek against "deniers": three responses

Sharon Begley has what is known as a poultry brain - the readers of TRF also know her as the author of a lousy, but not the lousiest, article on string theory - but she has a huge, fanatically believing religious heart, especially if the task is to parrot musings by scientific titans such as Barbara Boxer, Al Gore, and Naomi Oreskes. So she decided to write, together with a few collaborators, another Goebbelsian article in Newsweek,

Global warming deniers: a well-funded machine

It is full of insults, "corrupt deniers". The criminal reasons why skeptics do what they do are "explained" in detail: for example, Pat Michaels needs some extreme weather to grow his award-winning pumpkins. ;-) But the article doesn't contain facts that would be both relevant and true. The only fair part of the article is the cover of the magazine (on the left) as long as you omit the silly footnote and the somewhat exaggerated color of the Earth (assuming it is supposed to be Earth) :-).

Marc Morano responds here, explaining, among many other interesting things, that the alarmists have actually received 2500 times more funding (50 billion vs 19 million per decade) than the skeptics.

Another response comes from

Noel Sheppard
Amy Ridenour

Ratings: Begley only gets 2 stars, Lindzen's article in Newsweek had 4 stars. A poll next to Lindzen's article showed that 54% of readers think that there is no permanent momentum to fight global warming. The poll attached to Begley's article shows that 40% of the readers think that global warming is not a major threat to life on Earth while 6% are not sure.

Cool tattoo

I so want one like this!





http://cleek.lunarpages.com/blogs/?p=1275

Iraq's 'sustainable stability' | The Australian

Despite everything the world knows about how badly the war in Iraq is going, how hopeless themilitary outlook remains and how urgently everyone should pack up and go home, the debatein America has unexpectedly shifted to a radically different perspective: are things actually going better than we think?

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This person's a doctoral candidate?

"Subject: You are f**king nazi's (sic)
"It is IMPOSSIBLE to speak politely, intelligibly, with reason to moral cretins masquarding (sic) as humans, cretins utterly devoid of intelligence, humanity, common sense, courage: YOU ARE ALL F**KING NAZI'S (sic). May you and all your progeny burn in hell for eternity. Perhaps there is a special place there for nazi's (sic)."

But only a pretend one, because all she's doing is sociology.

Go here to find out what she's so cross about.

Via Knowledge is Power

Robbing you, even in death

Andrew Bolt reports another astouding series of "compensation" payouts in Victoria, this time to the widows of criminals killed in gangland violence.

This follows on the decision of the Victorian government to pay $700,000 "compensation" to violent street protesters complaining about heavy handed policing. (The wonder of this is that anybody watching these demonstrations would have come away thinking why on earth the police had allowed themselves to be little more than useless punching bags for these people. But that's the state of the Victoria Police these days.)

But what happens to honest people earning a living honestly?

Postmaster Gilbert Icke, shot during a hold-up, at first received only $231 for clothes. After public outrage, he received about $2500 -- for petrol and other expenses.

Cold water over bleached reef

When warm seas bleach the Great Barrier Reef, it’s easy to blame our favorite bogeyman - global warming. But who to blame when the bleaching is caused not by warm seas but cold?

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Update

(Sigh heavily)

Just in case some of you think that I exaggerate when I complain about how the media distorts, hypes and spins stories, this latest coral bleaching one is a case in point.

news.com.au's Breaking News section has the story with this headline:

Reef ruined by record cold snap

Ruined? That's pretty serious, isn't it?

But what do you get when you click on the link to the actual article?

The much more sober heading of "Coral bleaching as record cold snap hits."

And absolutely nothing to even remotely justify saying that the reef had been ruined.

Paying for your cat’s farts

Even cats feel guilty about global warming, and fret about their farts. Or so believes EasyBeingGreen, a company headed by former Greenpeace boss Paul Gilding which has found an ingenious new way to make money from the warming scare:

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Global feeding frenzy

Trial lawyers are gearing up to turn global warming into their next pot of gold. A coalition of environmental groups and cities are suing the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank of the United States for making loans to finance oil pipelines, oil drilling, and similar projects...

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Doomsayers frothing at the mouth

THE real question in this huge new catfight isn’t whether nice Dr Mohamed Haneef was too matey with his airport-bombing relatives. Points on both sides. Not all facts yet known. No, what’s really at stake is what kind of argument should win in these hysterical times: apocalyptic or calm?

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Freed Guantanamo Bay inmates return to terrorism

Reality catches up with progressive opinion. Finally.

The news that a number of the people formerly held in Guantanamo Bay that the civil libertarian Left have championed as unfortunate victims of those naive and simplistic Americans have returned to violent jihad comes as no surprise.

Okay, it should come as no surprise, but I suppose it will for those precious luvvies who seriously think that the Americans are a greater danger than the people who use young children as suicide bombers or who shot to death that poor Korean man so callously and brutally just the other day.

Turns out that at least 30 former detainees have subsequently been killed or recaptured after being released from Gitmo.

"Commander Jeffrey Gordon said the detainees had, while in custody, falsely claimed to be farmers, truck drivers, cooks, small-arms merchants, low-level combatants or had offered other false explanations for being in Afghanistan."

""These former detainees successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years," he said. "Common cover stories include going to Afghanistan to buy medicines, to teach the Koran or to find a wife. Many of these stories appear so often, and are subsequently proven false, that we can only conclude that they are part of their terrorist training.""

Mandou Habib anyone?

As Andrew Bolt in a post entitled "The killers the Left wanted freed" asks:

How many people have now been murdered by fanatics set free from Guantanamo Bay, at the urging of so many civil libertarians and Leftist activists?

How many deaths do those civil libertarians now have on their conscience?

Stay away from the fat people!

Another day, another piece of junk "science" being given wide and uncritical coverage in the media.

And this time?

Wait for it folks, because this is going to shock you - having fat friends may make you fat too!

Truly! There's a "study" that says so. And it's been in the papers and on the telly.

Pretty much settles it doesn't it? Fuck, there goes what ever social life I had.

Apparently, hanging out with fat people may influence you to think that also having a gut hanging over your pants is in reality a good look, and send you elbowing your way to the sweets trolley for a fourth helping of pudding.

Makes sense to me! I mean, in a world where failed American politicians seeking to recast themselves as the saviours of the planet and narcissistic uber-consuming celebrities are actually taken seriously on climate change, a single mangy hedgehog proof of global warming and The Secret a best seller, none of this is exactly surprising.

Disappointing and maddening yes, but surprising? Sadly no.

But as Junkfood Science notes:

Not one health or medical writer, even at the most prestigious consumer or medical publications, has critically reported on this study or even appears to have read it. Not one has made a critical examination and pointed out its unorthodox methods, its findings that conflict with known science and known biological mechanisms, or the flawed and contradictory findings within the study itself. Not one.

And yet this idiot garbage was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a “peer-reviewed” medical journal.

Which only goes to show that peer review increasingly means nothing these days. It was The Lancet that published peer reviewed "research" that claimed over 650,000 excess deaths in post-war Iraq on the basis of a sample of just 547 real deaths.

Oh, and you are probably imagining that this study was based upon looking at real people right?

If so, you'd be wrong.

"It was computer animation and, in essence, created a virtual reality."

Gee. Who could be responsible for suspect pseudo research like that?

And then the light goes on. One of the researchers, while a physician, is a professor of medical sociology.

Ah, the problem starts to come into focus. In a world of pseudo research, you don't get much more "pseudo" than sociology, a ridiculous pretend academic "discipline" if ever there was one.

Our other scientific researcher is in fact a professor of political science.

Anyway, Junkfood Science has a lot more to say. Go. Read.

Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood - Some Velvet Morning

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