Tol vs Curry

KK reports on the Tol vs Curry fight. Tol is complaining that Curry is doing her usual: posting about septic junk and then saying “oh but I’m just asking”. Tol may have long hair but, unlike Curry, he isn’t a bozo, or irresponsible (he did call me rude things in an email once, but I forgive him).

[Update: incidentally, there is an interesting exchange between KK and RP Jr (!) in the comments:

KK> Do you assign lousy, error-riddled textbooks for your class to read?
RP> Yes, absolutely. The Skeptical Environmentalist was a core reading…

It is interesting only because that was a silly question from KK, and a failure-to-think response from RP (or rather, a point-scoring response). The point is, within a managed class structure with someone guiding the discussion, it is fine to discuss flawed texts, for the reason given: it encourages critical thinking. That wasn’t what Curry was doing. There was no guidance at the start, nor does she guide the subsequence discussion.

Also, Gavin’s point]

[Updated again: this turned in the comments into McShane and Wyner and the “Lasso” method. So I’ve added a pic of Lasso being a bit crap, from Gavin et al.’s reply.]

Refs

* Question of the Week; from which “There’s no scientific evidence”
* Bart’s view

Romm Echoes Groundless Cell Phone/Cancer Fears?

Keith Kloor is having fun being kwuooeeeel to poor Joe Romm, simply because Romm is being an anti-scientific bozo pushing groundless fears of cancer-from-mobile-phones. Keith has a nice collection of links to sane people pointing out that there is no evidence of a problem. One of whom is Orac, in a post entertainingly entitled The bride of the son of the revenge of cell phones and cancer rises from the grave…again. And the key quote is Still, despite my trying to keep an open mind on the matter, I also don’t want my mind to be so open that my brains fall out, so to speak. Alas, Romm has failed to heed that wise advice, so his brains have indeed fallen out.

I can’t be bothered to take Romm and his argument apart, and anyway there is no point, because Kloor has, and Orac has, and so have any number of people. What I found quite entertaining, though, is: what does this remind you of? “This” being the desperate never-ending search for a link between mobiles (apparently called “cell phones” by our colonial cousins) and cancer, which continues despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Yes that’s right: it is just like the denialists’ eternal search for something, anything, that they can blame for global warming other than CO2.

Meanwhile, in related news, the squareheads are also anti-scientific bozos. But I don’t seem to be able to dredge up enough venom for an entire post. Well, its been a long day and I went running at lunchtime and sculling at night (can’t even see the game or the Sugar Ray fight).

Oh… I nearly forgot. Romm’s point 3 is an excellent one:

3. Use a Bluetooth earpiece. A Bluetooth earpiece still has radiation, but it’s at least 100 times less than the radiation you get when you hold a cell phone to your head…. [And don’t keep it on your ear all the time since,] “when you’re not talking; it still sends out a signal.”

or at least, its an excellent point if you happen to be an employee and shareholder of a company that makes bluetooth chips (did you know we now have a blog?). The bit about emitting radiation when you’re not talking is mostly twaddle, though. If its not supporting an audio link, it will either get turned off or at worst drop into sniff, which has something like a hundredth of the radiation of an audio link.

Refs

* Why I’m (still) not worried about my cell phone hurting my brain (Bad Astronomy)
* Deaths per unit of electricity generated
* Rabbits needn’t worry about cell phones’ effects on their sperm count, say three retractions

How to be wrong

From the department for shooting fish in a barrel, David Appell has a nice post pointing out that Singer has been a bozo for years, predicting (in 1981) massive future declines in fossil oil use.

This may be a good place to link to another of DA’s posts, US Emissions to Stay Below Pre-Recession Peak Until 2028 which makes an interesting combination with Early Warning on US vehicle miles.

More Singer-is-a-bozo stuff

This is, as I said, shooting fish in a barrel. So I’ll just make it an update to this post rather than a new one. DA went to a talk by Singer that was riddled with errors. One bit stuck out:

Most egregious of his claims was that there has been no warming since 1975. As proof he put up a graph of UAH (University of Alabama at Huntsville) satellite data, compiled by the Christy/Spencer group. Singer said he calculated that it had zero linear trend. One audience member down front almost jumped out of his seat while pointing out that Singer was using version 5.0 of the UAH data, which is years old and had not been properly (and famously) corrected for satellite drift. UAH did that and their new data, version 5.4, now shows warming, and they list the trend at the bottom of their data page: +0.14°C/decade for the globe, +0.17°C/decade for land. Astonishingly Singer feigned ignorance of this.

Singer gave a talk at BAS, ooh, maybe 5 years back, and he was much the same then. He used junk data, and anytime anyone pointed this out, he put on the folksy-old-man persona and pretended he knew nothing about it. As a rhetorical trick, I don’t think it works well: rather than a poor old man being assailed by nasty young men pointing out his errors, he comes across as a senile old chap who doesn’t really know what he is talking about.