Monthly Archives: January 2010

National Post’s Lawrence Solomon claims Google censors search results

Posted on January 19, 2010 | 21 Comments

Just when you thought commentary on the CRU hacked emails could not get any more absurd, along comes National Post columnist and “environmentalist” Lawrence Solomon to up the ante. Believe it or not, Solomon’s latest over-the-top screed accuses Google of censoring search results to downplay the so-called Climategate scandal. But, as they say in the newspaper biz: “Check a story, lose a story”.

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Mojib Latif slams Daily Mail

Posted on January 11, 2010 | 115 Comments

David Rose

In comments, several readers suggested that I examine a recent report from the U.K. newspaper the Daily Mail that attempts to tie the research of modeller and IPCC author Mojib Latif to the current cold spell in Europe.  Now that Latif has responded to this latest distortion of his views in an interview with the Guardian, I’m happy to oblige.

And, while I’m at it, I’ll also take a look at the short and dubious track record of newly-minted contrarian climate “investigative journalist”  David Rose, whose very first climate change article was an overview of Climategate “research” from Steve McIntyre, with generous assistance from Ross McKitrick.

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Donald Rapp: More divergence problems

Posted on January 7, 2010 | 37 Comments

This is the last in a series of posts on scholarship issues in Donald Rapp’s Assessing Climate Change. Previously we focused on extensive passages in common between the Wegman Report critique of paleoclimatic reconstructions, and Rapp’s section on various temperature proxies (see “A Divergence Problem” – part 1 and part 2).

Now I’ll look at other problems associated with Rapp’s use of extensive passages from “grey literature” (i.e. that found outside the peer-reviewed scientific literature), as well as one case of apparent distortion of other scientist’s  work. In the latter case,  a key adjective was changed  transforming  a reference to “large assumptions” to “speculative assumptions”.

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Wegman and Rapp on proxies: A divergence problem, part 2

Posted on January 6, 2010 | 11 Comments

Recent posts on the Wegman Report and Donald Rapp’s Praxis-Springer text book Assessing Climate Change have generated much comment. In A Divergence Problem, part 1, I noted  that the sub-section on dendrochronology (tree ring-proxies) in Rapp’s book was based in large part on nearly verbatim material found previously in the Wegman Report. That in turn was a somewhat distorted summary of material found in Raymond Bradley’s seminal text book, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary.

In this follow up post, I”ll examine the Wegman’s treatment of other proxies, which were also derived from Bradley.  I’ll also take a closer look at the three proxy sub-sections in Rapp that are derived in turn from Wegman. In all three cases,  divergences are slight, but do include some interesting changes in the references.

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