MM: Haha, not at all. In fact, you know it's not an issue. The implication of your question is that somehow the skeptics are aligned with creationists. In all my years of dealing with Senator Inhofe the subject of creationism and evolution never even came up. Someone even did an analysis of it in our scientists report, and I think they may have only found one or two creationists out of 700-some names.
Wait, that was my analysis. I looked at the people who were on the Discovery Institute's Darwin dissent list and Morano's and found these names: Edward Blick, David Deming, Guillermo Gonzalez, Robert Smith and James Wanliss. Can you count higher than Morano? And these are just the creationists on the Discovery Insitute's list. There are also Chris Allen, Roy Spencer, and maybe Ross McKitrick and Tim Ball. No-one has done an exhaustive check, so there are likely more.
Morano:
Like one of their favorites -- they love to say, "Every single scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Meteorological Society, they all agree, they all agree!" They always do that, leaving out the fact that surveys of the actual rank-and-file scientists showing vastly, radically different story.
Who do you believe, Morano, or your lying eyes?
Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
It has now been independently confirmed, by multiple persons, that my results regarding the impact of station dropout on global temperature are correct. Your claims, in your document with Joe D'Aleo for the SPPI, are just plain wrong. ...
If you have any honor at all, you'll set the record straight. You owe it to everyone, and especially to NOAA, to admit that you were wrong. And you certainly owe it to NOAA to apologize. You need to make a highly visible, highly public admission of error, and apology, for using falsehoods to accuse others of fraud.
What a bunch of slimy little toads: they pretend to believe in openness, they won't tell us who wrote their statements, then they silently airbrush out embarassing words afterwards.
Last week I got an email from Amy Turner of the Sunday Times:
Dear Tim,
I'm writing a piece about Science bloggers and would love to talk to you about yours. Are you free to talk to me today or tomorrow? Hope to hear from you.
Turner usually writes celebrity puff pieces rather than about science, so it was pretty obvious that Jonathan Leake was organizing some payback because I had dared to criticize him. I agreed to the interview and, sure enough, it wasn't long before Turner was threatening me (How would I react if Jonathan Leake sued me for libel?) She complained that I had been unfair to Leake by not contacting him even though I had. She was particularly upset by this post, where I quoted an "Action on Smoking and Health" correction to a Jonathan Leake story:
We have heard that the figures reported in the Sunday Times yesterday (and now circulating elsewhere) are not based on any research conducted to date.
The impact of the smokefree legislation on heart attacks is being analysed by Anna Gilmore and team at Bath but they have no final results yet.
Turner reckoned that someone, somewhere must have told Leake the 10% number and it was unfair of me to suggest that he made the number up. But my post just quotes the correction and notes that Sunday Times failed to correct their story.
I brought up Leake's story on the IPCC report on the vulnerability of the Amazon. Even though he knew, from multiple sources, that that report was accurate, he claimed that it was bogus. Turner was unable to offer any defence of Leake.
A story on climate change by Jonathan Leake that is reprinted in the Australian is pretty well guaranteed to misrepresent the science. And it does -- you only have to compare the headline for Leake's story "Cyclone climate link rejected" with Nature Geosciences headline "Tropical cyclone projection: Fewer but stronger" for the new paper and with what the IPCC report says:
Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical sea-surface temperatures. There is less confidence in projections of a global decrease in numbers of tropical cyclones.
Of course "New paper confirms IPCC report" isn't the story that Leake wants to tell, so what does he do? Makes stuff up, as usual. Leake claims:
Research by hurricane scientists may force the UN's climate panel to reconsider its claims that greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the number of tropical storms.
The majority of our infrequent embargo violations are accidental and typically the result of mislabeled copy that does not properly list the 3 p.m. EST Monday embargo expiration. We have a separate situation with the Sunday Times of London. With EurekAlert, we have prevented their editors and reporters from accessing the embargoed news section of EurekAlert, which is where pre-print copies of our articles are accessible. ...
At this time, we have no plans to remove the restriction we have placed on the editors and reporters from the Sunday Times. ...
With the exception of the Sunday Times, we have not had any three-time repeat offenders. In the case of the Times, we have removed all reporters and editors from accessing our media materials.
It seems that you can't trust Leake about anything.
Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
