SCIENCE GUY DERIDES AGAIN

As anyone who drops in here even occasionally is aware, I have a problem with scientist Tim Lambert. I have a problem with Lambert because he has a problem: much of what he writes is intentionally misleading. Maybe I'm naive but I can't understand how it is that a scientist blogging at Scienceblogs.com can write stuff designed to deceive.

Lambert's The Australian's War on Science, because it is link-rich and rather long, appears at first glance to be well-researched, worthwhile reading. In reality there is so much wrong with the post it's hard to know where to start.

Lambert's embedded links are probably the best starting point. Following standard Lambert obfuscation procedure (SLOP), most of the links are self-promotional, five of the nine links leading to other Lambert posts. None of these links is relevant to Lambert's attack on The Australian.

For example, Lambert says The Australian "published several stories on how [Mann's hockey stick] was wrong or fraudulent"

For example, Soon and Sallie Baliunas' badly flawed paper was touted as refuting the hockey stick. Mark Steyn was allowed to claim that Mann, Bradley and Hughes were guilty of fraud. And now, right on the front page, the hacks who put out The Australian claim that Global Warming is a fraud. (Next week the headline will probably be "The Fraud of Evolution".)

Maybe Soon and Baliunas's paper is flawed and maybe Steyn accused Mann, Bradley and Hughes of fraud, it's just that Lambert doesn't link either to The Australian. In fact, the link supposedly to Steyn's accusations of fraud links to material that has Steyn saying nothing of the sort.

It's also worth n0ting that Lambert's post is directed not at a "story" but at "opinion" that featured on the front page as the inset teaser "THE FRAUD OF GLOBAL WARMING". This was not the paper's headline.

Lambert continues his attack on The Australian:

If you've been following the hockey stick wars, you've probably guessed that The Australian is peddling the Wegman report.

The first link directly above is to one of Lambert's hockey sticks posts and fair enough. The second link, however, like those discussed earlier, has nothing at all to do with anything appearing in The Australian. Up to this point in Lambert's post there have been five links, those described above plus one to the National Research Council report on Mann; of these five, none have anything to do with The Australian. Thus, Lambert has not substantiated his first paragraph claim that:

[The Australian has], however, published several stories on how [the hockey stick study] was wrong or fraudulent.

Lambert does eventually link directly to The Australian in quoting from Wood's opinion piece but he doesn't really accomplish much other than come off as whiney and nitpicky. He concludes his post with this observation and suggestion:

Wood's article and the front page headline {an inset teaser for an opinion piece is not a headline - ed.} appears in the Wednesday Australian, which has the Higher Educational Supplement, full of ads from Australian universities for academic positions. I think universities should find more effective means of using their advertising dollars than giving them to a newspaper that holds science, scientists and the scientific method in such contempt.

Oh yeah? I also think universities should find more effective ways to spend their money... other than employing teaching staff who produce complete crap like the stuff Lambert cranks out. I mean, imagine what his teaching is like.