Deltoid

Yes, he’s back! Over at his website Fumento has posted Hate Mail, Volume 32, which contains his creatively edited version of our exchange. According to Fumento, it went like this:

Fumento:

And no, the Lancet column I wrote didn’t just appear in the four papers you mentioned. It appears in places you don’t even know about because, unlike your blog, it isn’t confined to the web but also appears in print. Yesterday it was in the Washington Times print edition. But if only the web interests you, you should know it was picked up by the entire McClatchy News Service. That means that in addition to automatically going onto the website of the Sacramento Bee (not the Sacremento Bee) it goes to about a dozen other newspaper websites as well.

Lambert

Instead of discussing the Lancet article, he boasted how his column had been published in the Lake Wylie Pilot, which is a free weekly newspaper serving a town of 3,000 people.

Fumento:

You are so obsessed you are now lying about what I wrote to you. I didn’t say I appeared in the Lake Wylie Pilot, I said my column is picked up by the McClatchey News Service which posts it automatically to the sites of over a dozen papers. You chose the smallest, ignoring such as the Sacramento Bee and the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune.

Dear me, how naughty of me to say that he was boasting about the Lake Wylie Pilot when he hadn’t mentioned it. Trouble is, if you check what he actually said you find that it was this (my emphasis):

That means that in addition to automatically going onto the website of the Sacramento Bee (not the Sacremento Bee) it goes to: Carolina Newspapers Clover Herald (SC) Fort Mill Times (SC) Lake Wylie Pilot The Bakersfield Californian The Modesto Bee The News & Observer The News Tribune (WA)

So he had mentioned the Lake Wylie Pilot. He just edited it out of the version he posted in an attempt to make me look bad. And of course Fumento does not link, making sure that any readers cannot check his version against the original sources.

Just when you thought you had seen all the different possible attacks on the Lancet study, Helle Dale, writing in the Washington Times, comes up with a new one: the study’s authors are having second thoughts. Dale writes

As the Financial Times reported on Nov. 19, even the Lancet study’s authors are now having second thoughts. Iraq’s Health Ministry estimates by comparison that all told, 3,853 Iraqis have been killed and 155,167 wounded.

Gee, did the Financial Times really report that the authors were having second thoughts? Let’s check. The report (subscription required) says:

Les Roberts, one of the paper’s authors, said that including more clusters would have improved precision, but would have increased to unacceptable levels the risks faced by interviewers. With hindsight, he would have liked interviewers to visit two or three points in Falluja to get an idea of variations between neighbourhoods there.

One other important weakness of such surveys is associated with retrospective recall, which the authors play down. Respondents may have lied or been confused about when deaths took place.

One question that could have thrown light on the precision of the mortality figure was to seek information on the wounded. Dr Roberts said no data were gathered on this: “Injuries are more subjective.”

Roberts did not say he had second thoughts. Dale is just making stuff up.

Now compare Dale’s second sentence with what the Iraqi Health Minister actually reported:

“Every hospital reports daily the number of civilians (which may include insurgents) who have been killed or injured in terrorist incidents or as a result of military action. All casualties are likely to be taken to hospital in these circumstances except for some insurgents (who may fear arrest) and those with minor injuries. The figures show that between 5 April 2004 and 5 October 2004, 3,853 civilians were killed and 15,517 were injured. I am satisfied that this information is the most reliable available.”

Those 3,853 deaths are not “all told” as Dale claimed, but occured in just six months. And the Lancet study’s 100,000 excess deaths includes those that resulted from the increase in infant mortality and homicide that followed the invasion. If we triple the Health Minister’s number to cover the whole period we get 12,000. The Lancet number for military and terrorist deaths is very roughly 40,000. Since the Health Minister’s number only covers what was reported to hospitals, the real number could easily be twice as much. A number like 25,000 military/terrorist deaths seems to be compatible with both the Lancet study and the hospital reports.

Medact, a UK health charity has a new study on the effects of the war on health and the health system in Iraq. Some extracts:

A recent scientific study has suggested that upwards of 100,000 Iraqis may have died since the 2003 coalition invasion, mostly from violence, mainly air strikes by coalition forces. Most of those reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. Many thousands of conflict-related injuries were also sustained. Infant mortality has risen because of lack of access to skilled help in childbirth, as well as because of violence….

The health system—all activities whose primary purpose is to promote, restore or maintain health—is in disrepair. The quality of state services is poor owing to chronic underfunding, poor physical infrastructure, shortage and mismanagement of supplies, staff shortages and lack of modern skills and knowledge. The 2004 budget allocation to the Iraq Ministry of Health is only US$38 per citizen. People increasingly rely on self-diagnosis and traditional healing, and buy prescription medicines in the marketplace. Under-the-table payments are required to secure many services, and there is widespread suspicion of criminal involvement in the distribution of pharmaceutical supplies. Health workers are trying to provide services in extremely difficult circumstances.

The poor state of the hospital system may explain part of the rise in infant mortality seen in the Lancet study. It also suggests that the figures for deaths compiled by hospitals may well be undercounts.

Richard Garfield (one of the authors of the Lancet study) comments:

“We need population-based monitoring to know how the Iraqis are doing. The UK and Iraqi ministry rebuttals of our conclusions do nothing to change that. The Lancet study and Medact report paint a realistic picture. What we now need is to understand exactly why people are dying, how to prevent those deaths and how to improve the quality of life. The Medact report helps us to do just that.”

Daniel Davies takes apart another bogus critique of the Lancet study, this one from the British Foreign Office that relies on comparing apples to oranges. Michael Lewis at Iraq Analysis has a more detailed rebuttal.

Remarkably, Tech Central Station has published an article by Iain Murray, who acknowledges that

The study itself is actually much more statistically sound than many commentators (including some in these pages) have suggested, and it certainly suggests that the mortality rate is worse in the unstable insurgency-ridden Iraq after the ouster of Saddam’s regime than during the last days of his tyranny.

and

perfectly good science like the Iraq study has been the subject of unfounded criticism and dismissal

Murray does take issue with the way the Lancet presented the results, objecting to the fact that they described the study as finding “that around 100 000 Iraqi civilians died as a result of the invasion” when the death toll included combatants as well as civilians. This is a legitimate objection, but Murray makes too much of it, since the great majority of the excess deaths were not combatants. Murray also objects to the timing of the publication complaining that it was an attempt by the Lancet to influence another country’s election. This objection strikes me as being without merit. I think it is better that voters have more information about the state of affairs in Iraq rather than less. I suspect that Murray is complaining because this information was damaging to his and Tech Central Station’s preferred candidate. That does not strike me as a reason to delay publication till after the election.

In an email to a poster at The High Road forum Lott writes

“The actual data has been available on one of my websites at www.johnlott.org since February 2003. The Appendix of my book, The Bias Against Guns, goes through and discusses the data in depth. I talk about how the survey was done, the questions used in the survey, who did the survey, how it was weighted, etc. there. The www.johnlott.org website also has some downloads discussing the survey debate in general.

On this last point, Lambert has been extremely dishonest. For example, he has a long list of surveys but he lists the date for them as the mid 1990s when that was just when a particular paper cites them as opposed to when virtually all of them were done primarily in the early 1980s or earlier.

Let’s look at the list:

Survey	Percent firing	Source
Kleck	24	Kleck 1995
NSPOF	27	Duncan 2000
NCVS 1987-1990	28	Duncan 2000
NCVS 1987-1992	38	Rand 1994
NCVS 1992-2001	21	NCVS online analysis system
Field	34	Kleck 1995
Cambridge Reports	67	Kleck 1995
DMIa	40	Kleck 1995
Ohio	40	Kleck 1995

Apparently Lott is arguing that I gave the cite for “NCVS 1987-1992″ as “Rand 1994″ in order to trick people into believing that NCVS 1987-1992 was conducted in 1994. Well, no, that was not my intent. I gave the publication year because that is the convention when citing sources.

Furthermore it is not true that “virtually all of them were done primarily in the early 1980s or earlier.” Only the last four of the nine in the table date date from the 80s or earlier. I don’t think that it is correct to call four out of nine “virtually all”.

This is, incidently, the first time that Lott has admitted the existence of this list that shows how much his 2% (and now 5%) firing figure differs from all other results. Presumably his remark about virtually all of the surveys being from the 80s or earlier is an attempt to dismiss them as being out of date. However, the ones from the 90s, such as NSPOF, Kleck and NCVS all contradict the numbers he claims come from his surveys. To this day, Lott continues to advance his 95% brandishing number, never admitting to the existence of contradictory research.

Mike Harwood asked Les Roberts about the breakdown of the violent deaths. Roberts’ reply:

Yes, all 12 non-coalition violent deaths happened outside of Falluja. (1 Kut, 1 Thiqar, 1 Karbala, 7 Baghdad, 1 Diala, 1 Missan, Note Baghdad is about 3-7 times greater in population than these other Governorates so the rates are not so different)

Bombing deaths:

Thiqar

M5, M2, F22 (one family)

Thiqar (different village)

M27

Missan

1mo. & 6mo. in same households (often there are multiple sons with wives under the same roof — interviewer did not record the gender of the infant)

Falluja

10 girls<12 years, 13 boys<12, M14, 25 adult males, 3 adult women (adult defined as 15–59).

The study itself describes the deaths from small arms fire:

only three of 61 incidents (5%) involved coalition soldiers (all reported to be American by the respondents) killing Iraqis with small arms fire. In one of the three cases, the 56-year-old man killed might have been a combatant. In a second case, a 72-year-old man was shot at a checkpoint. In the third, an armed guard was mistaken for a combatant and shot during a skirmish. In the latter two cases, American soldiers apologised to the families of the decedents for the killings, indicating a clear understanding of the adverse consequences of their use of force.

At most two (one from small arms, one adult male from bombing) of the deaths outside Falluja were combatants. In other words, 95% or more of the 100,000 excess deaths were civilians, so it is not wrong to describe the findings as “about 100,000 civilian deaths”.

This post is a way for me to keep track of which blogs have blogrolled me. If you have a blog and have had the good taste to blogroll me, you can add your blog here.

(more…)

Excellent news. Some climate scientists have started a blog called RealClimate, something sorely needed to correct the disinformation put about by Tech Central Station and the like. I hope they can do for climate science what The Panda’s Thumb does for evolution.

One of the first posts is by Rasmus Benestad on the McKitrick-Michaels paper that got degrees and radians mixed up. Years ago, when McKitrick was first working on the paper Robert Grumbine observed that McKitrick had

Treated the records as being independant (I know William knows this, but for some other folks: Surface temperature records are correlated across fairly substantial distances—a few hundred km. This is what makes paleoreconstructions possible, and what makes it possible to initialize global numerical weather prediction models with so few observations.)

Unfortunately, even in the published version McKitrick still treated the records as independent, and Benestad shows that their model is invalid.

And check out my McKitrick guide if you’re having trouble keeping all your McKitrick studies straight. This one is the one that purported to show that the surface temperature record was contaminated by economic influences, not the one that purported to destroy the hockey stick. (Michael Mann is a contributor to RealClimate, so we might see something there as well.)

Update:Chris Mooney is also pleased.

The London Daily Telegraph has been running a cynical and dishonest campaign in the UK to give people the right to defend themselves against burglars. It’s dishonest because, as I have detailed here and here, people in the UK already have the right to defend themselves against burglars or anyone else who threatens them. The Daily Telegraph’s campaign is nothing more than a beat up to create an issue to attack the government with. The truly disgraceful thing about their scare campaign is that it could convince people that self-defence is unlawful and frighten them out of defending themselves against an attacker, resulting in injury or even death of a crime victim. I am disgusted.

One of the features of the campaign is the use of deceitful and fabricated statistics and quotes. Let’s look at some examples: Dominic Lawson writes:

Remember Robert Symonds? It is the name of the 45-year-old Putney teacher who six weeks ago was stabbed to death in the hall of his home by a burglar. His body was found by his wife while their two children slept upstairs.

It was as a result of that incident that this newspaper launched our “right to fight back” campaign, which calls for the public to be given an unqualified right to self defence against intruders in their own homes. The point that struck me so forcibly at the time was not just the horror of Mr Symonds’s death, but the fact that had Mr Symonds picked up a kitchen knife before encountering the burglar, and managed to get blows in first, then he would now, as the law stands, be facing a murder trial.

It’s telling when they can’t provide real cases where people have been put on trial for murder after killing a burglar in self-defence and instead present hypothetical cases. Here is a real case that the Telegraph will never mention because it destroys their campaign: John Lambert (no relation), who killed a burglar in self defence and was not put on trial for murder or even prosecuted. I have collected more examples here.

Lawson then states:

But the doubling in recorded violent crime over the past eight years is a domestic apocalypse now.

Notice how Lawson was careful to write “recorded violent crime”? That’s because violent crime has been falling for the past eight years. But rather than mention this, Lawson uses the fact that the police have improved their record keeping to dishonestly create the impression that crime has increased.

Next, we have Charles Laurence, who writes:

[In 1987] the Oklahoma state government passed legislation that became known as the Make My Day Law, named for the celebrated scene in the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry film. … “Our law says you can use any force, including deadly force, to defend your home.”

It has been an unqualified success. Since the Make My Day Law came into force, burglary has declined by almost half in Oklahoma. In 1987, there were 58,333 cases; in 2000, just 31,661.

But as Eugene Volokh points out, burglary also declined by almost half in the rest of the US as well, so there is no reason to believe that the law deterred burglars.

And then there is Mark Steyn, who writes:

But the trouble is that this kind of burglary - the kind most likely to go “wrong”—is now the norm in Britain. In America, it’s called a “hot” burglary—a burglary that takes place when the homeowners are present—or a “home invasion”, which is a much more accurate term. Just over 10 per cent of US burglaries are “hot” burglaries, and in my part of the world it’s statistically insignificant: there is virtually zero chance of a New Hampshire home being broken into while the family are present. But in England and Wales it’s more than 50 per cent and climbing. Which is hardly surprising given the police’s petty, well-publicised pursuit of those citizens who have the impertinence to resist criminals.

Now, it is true that in the US, about 10% of burglaries are “hot”, while in England and Wales it is more like 50%, but Steyn has added his own fabricated statistics. The part about the rate being zero in New Hampshire was made up by Steyn, as was the part about the hot burglary rate in England going up. Steyn doesn’t even bother to give a single example of the police pursuing citizens who resist criminals, he just asserts it again and again. I am concerned that Steyn’s misinformation might frighten people out of defending themselves. And, no, “home invasion” is not a more accurate term. A “home invasion” is a domestic robbery, not a “hot” burglary.

Steyn continues:

In New Hampshire, there are few burglaries because there’s a high rate of gun ownership.

Not so. In fact, in the US, higher gun ownership tends to lead to more burglaries. (Presumably because guns are valuable loot.)

And then there is Joyce Lee Malcolm. She produces a whole list of false claims. She uses fabricated quotes to claim, falsely, that the right to self defence has been practically eliminated from British law. And she writes:

Crime has rocketed. A UN study in 2002 of 18 developed countries placed England and Wales at the top of the Western world’s crime league.

Now Malcolm is well aware that the British Crime Survey shows that crime has declined, so she is deliberately misleading her readers here.

Of course the cynical genius of the Telegraph’s campaign is that if they are able to instill into enough people the false belief that the law does not allow self defence, the only fix is to to re-enact the current law to convince people that self defence is legal. And then, having created the problem, the Telegraph will take credit for solving it.

Just as in the cases of Gullible Gunners part I, II, III and IV, American pro-gun bloggers have lapped this up. They all seem convinced that self defence is not lawful in the UK. There are too many to list; some examples are Kevin Baker, Glenn Reynolds, Dave Kopel and Jim Treacher.

The biggest limitation of the Lancet study is the small sample size. We can be reasonably confident that deaths have increased in Iraq since the invasion, but the 100,000 estimate is a very rough one. The sample from Falluja found an alarming number of deaths from air strikes, but since it was only one sample it is hard to guess how many others have died in similar ways. Fortunately, it is easy to address both these limitations. For the cost of running the Iraq war for about two minutes it would be possible to do a survey with four times the sample size and which oversampled in violent areas. Unfortunately, Tony Blair doesn’t want to know the answer:

Yesterday Tony Blair rejected a call from more than 40 diplomats, peers, scientists and religious leaders who pressed for an independent inquiry for a civilian death toll.

“Figures from the Iraqi ministry of health, which are a survey from the hospitals there, are in our view the most accurate survey there is,” he told parliament.

The health ministry has produced a figure of 3,853 civilians killed between April and October this year. But it is not clear whether those figures cover the entire country, how they were confirmed or what causes of death. No figures have been produced for the first year since the invasion.

Now, it is a well-established principle of statistics that random sampling will give more accurate estimates than trying to count the entire population. If Blair doesn’t know this, his scientific advisors surely do. I think it is obvious that if he felt that the Iraqi death rate had gone down, he would have been in favour of a survey to establish this.

So here’s a question that should be put to all those who object to the Lancet study because of the wide confidence interval: Do you agree that a larger survey should be carried out?

Also of interest: An interview with Richard Garfield about the study, and a letter to the Independent by the study’s authors (posted by Tribbs in this discussion):

Fallujah is the only insight into those cities experiencing extreme violence (ie Ramadi, Tallafar, Fallujah, Najaf); all the others were passed over in our sample by random chance. If the Fallujah duster is representative, there were about 200,000 excess deaths above the 98,000.

Perhaps Fallujah is so unique that it represents only Fallujah, implying that it represents only 50-70,000 additional deaths. There is a tiny chance that the neighborhood we visited in Fallujah was worse than the average experience, and only corresponds with a couple of tens of thousands of deaths. We also explain why, given study limitations, our estimate is likely to be low. Therefore, when taken in total, we concluded that the civilian death toll was at least around 100,000 and probably higher, not between 8,000 and l94,000 as Mr. Straw states. While far higher than the Iraq Ministry of health surveillance estimates, on 17 August the minister himself described surveillance in Iraq as geographically incomplete, insensitive and missing most health events.

Nominations have opened for the 2005 Australian Blog Awards. I don’t you should take awards like these too seriously, but they are a good way for folks to let others know about interesting blogs.

Lavoisier group member Louis Hissink has a response to my post and John Quiggin’s on the Lavoisier group. A summary cannot do it justice, so I will quote extensively:

A quick scan of the blogosphere reporting on William Kininmonth’s recent book launch on Monday 22 November by the Lavoisier Society showed many still retain a belief in man-made global warming.

So let’s get a little more scientific about this issue.

As far as the earth is concerned, and from a geological perspective, 99% of the earth’s mass is hotter than 1000 degrees Celsius, and 1% of the earth’s mass cooler than 100 degrees celsius - statistics here.

The temperature of space is about 2.7 degrees Kelvin, or expressed in the Celsius scale, approximately -269 degrees Celsius.

Therefore the net heat loss from the earth to space is enormous, from which space could be thought as an almost infinite heat sink. And fluctuations of this heat source will overwhelm anything that humanity thinks it could contribute.

And why are we not being cooked to a frazzle on the earth’s surface by this enormous mass of matter at a temperature greater than 1000 Degrees Celsius underneath us?

Since the temperature gradient between the earth and space is somewhat steep, one wonders about the scientific basis of climate science and the hypothetical construct of anthropogenic CO2 induced global warming, given the overwhelming contribution that the earth’s interior makes to the surface temperature of the earth and to space’s ability to absorb all this thermal energy.

Given the mass of the solid earth is somewhat greater than that of the atmosphere, of which 0.033 percent is CO2, a simple physics 101 calculation of the heat balance might suggest that the contribution by CO2 to the earth’s surface temperature is, for practical purposes, irrelevant.

Are these scientific facts incorporated into the climate models? No, for which self respecting climatologist would study geology - the necessary background for miners of coal, oil, metals and industrial minerals….

[Climate scientists] are scientific morons.

Does the earth’s interior make an overwhelming contribution to the surface temperature? This claim seems to be contradicted by the fact that it is warmer in daytime. And in summer. And closer to the equator. It takes a rare kind of talent to present an argument on climate change that is inconsistent with the existence of seasons.

Scientists have extensively measured the flow of heat from inside the earth—it amounts to 0.075 Watts per square metre, while incoming solar radiation is 342 Watts per square metre, about 5000 times as much. Hissink is correct that heat from the earth is not included in climate models—but that is because it is negligible.

Fortunately Hissink has a theory to explain climate change. Or rather apparent climate change:

This is not the first time that shifts of the earth’s axis were noted in the historical past, the most infamous being the biblical Joshua Ben Nunn event who commanded the sun stand still by pounding his staff on the ground. Of course no man can do that, (but advocates of anthropogenic global warming assert that while man cannot stop the sun, he surely can change the weather, though it then strikes me that as the devout believe Joshua did stop the sun, then changing the climate would seem a trivial exercise for the devout, whether divine or secular - ask Sir David King - thereby confirming Michael Crichton’s observation that anthropogenic global warming is a religious belief rather than scientific fact).

Then there are other more ancient accounts in Egyptian history where the rising and setting suns exchanged places. Where once the sun used to rise, it now sets, and that this happened more than once. So they said. Modern science, limiting its understanding to Newtonian mechanics, finds these ancient accounts extremely problematical, if nigh well impossible but as we all know too well, science also has a habit of changing when new facts are discovered. So while the past might remain inexplicable using existing theories, it is quite likely that new facts will enable us to explain the past in a more sensible manner than by simply dismissing it as impossible today. That is science, of course, which always changes when new facts are discovered. Religion never changes, even when confronted with overwhelming contradictory fact.

But I am not going to dwell on this because it occurred to me that if the earth did change its axis of spin, or careened, slightly, or significantly in the past, then that would have had the interesting effect of moving regions which were once in the tropics, perhaps into more temperate zones, and those in the temperate, perhaps into the arctic zones. We can change the climate of a place simply by moving it about in space?

This would result in the illusion that a particular region suffered a severe climate change, which in one sense is true, but this was only because that region was moved to a different latitude by a change in the earth’s attitude around its axis of spin. The earth’s overall thermal balance would not have changed, but only appeared to have changed from a misinterpretation of the evidence.

This then suggests that during the Medieval warming period Greenland was closer to the equator, and afterwards was moved further north to colder latitudes as the result of some cosmic interaction. That also means that Europe moved to colder climates. Is there any evidence for that? Seems so, if the Korean Choson Annals are anything to go by, as well as the necessity to change the Gregorian calendar, at the time. Of course much research needs to be done in this area, but if no one accepts this, then funding of course will not be allocated. Same old story of facts being quietly ignored by denying funding.

So the science of Newtonian mechanics, which tells us that angular momentum is conserved, and which has been confirmed by countless experiments and observations is just going to have change when confronted by the “overwhelming contradictory fact” that the Bible implies that the Earth stopped rotating? Because otherwise it would really be like a religion. Because religion just believes that the stuff in the Bible is true and will not be swayed by contradictory evidence. Got it.

It also seems a little odd that if the Medieval Warm Period ended with the Earth shifting its axis of rotation, that no-one wrote down something like “Holy Cow! The constellations are in a different place!”. You’d think they would have noticed.

Update: Louis responds on the aptly named Mangled Thoughts blog: Warning: do not read his response while drinking coffee.

Well yes Tim, the Holy See seemed to need to recalibrate the calendar, and in Medieval times, no one was observing the heavens for the simple fact that telescopes had not yet been invented.

The National Academy of Sciences panel on firearms and violence has reported its findings. The press release says:

• There is no credible evidence that “right-to-carry” laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime. To date, 34 states have enacted these laws.
• There is almost no evidence that violence-prevention programs intended to steer children away from guns have had any effects on their behavior, knowledge, or attitudes regarding firearms. More than 80 such programs exist.
• Research has found associations between gun availability and suicide with guns, but it does not show whether such associations reveal genuine patterns of cause and effect.

The whole report can be read here. There is also an opening statement and you can listen to a news conference (requires RealPlayer).

I’ll have some detailed comments on their “right-to-carry” chapter later.

Stuart Benjamin writes:

[John Lott’s] core thesis, though, was called into doubt by a number of researchers, most prominently in a study (and reply, both complete with data sets) written by Ian Ayres and John Donohue, two top empirical economists. They concluded that the data did not support Lott’s assertions regarding right-to-carry laws and crime. Lott helped to write and then withdrew his name from a response to Ayres and Donohue. He responded in other venues to them, but did not respond to some of their key assertions.

Perhaps he was waiting/hoping for vindication from the closest thing to a gold standard in academic review — a report on the issue from the National Research Council. That report has been years in the making, and features some of the top researchers in the country. Well, the report has been issued, it contains bad news for Lott: It concludes that “There is no credible evidence that ‘right-to-carry’ laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime.” They discuss Lott’s research at some length and find it wanting. Note that they do not say that right-to-carry laws increase crime. That may be a silver lining for those opposed to gun control who believe that in the absence of evidence of a benefit states should allow people to carry guns, but it doesn’t help Lott very much: He staked his reputation on his claim that the data showed a decrease. So much for his reputation.

Ralph Luker writes

the NRC’s report has been released and it is unfavorable to Lott. It remains to be seen whether the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society will withdraw their sponsorship of his work. Lott’s liberal critics have quietly allowed due processes to work in his case. There’s been little of the hue and cry that attended the firing of Michael Bellesiles from the Emory University faculty.

No response from Lott yet. I predict:

1. He will accuse the panel of being biased against guns. Oh wait, he already has, calling it “stacked”. Note that he wrote this after a disastrous presentation to the panel in 2002, where the results he presented were the product of coding errors. (A different set of coding errors than the ones that produced his results in the 2003 Stanford Law Review paper, if you are trying to keep track.)
2. He will produce a blizzard of new regressions and models, all of them somehow showing that carry laws reduce crime. Later, more errors will be found in his data and models.

Not content with printing op-eds by John Lott, the LA Times has published a piece of disinformation by Nick Schultz. The LA Times fails to disclose that Schultz works for a public relations company that has ExxonMobil as a client. The central message of Schultz’s piece is that science will never resolve the question of climate change:

At some level, science probably will never resolve what to do about global warming. Climate change is complex, with scores of variables and time-frame considerations of decades and even centuries. Both sides have substantial data that support their points of view. Both sides also believe that to the extent the science is “settled,” it’s settled in ways that undergird their respective policy prescriptions.

Do you like the way that Schulz pretended that the two sides were equal? On one side we have the top climate scientists in the US (including sceptic Richard Lindzen), published by the National Academy of Sciences, who concluded:

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.

While on the other side we have folks like Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer, published by Nick Schultz, who conclude:

So, to all who worry about global warming, to all who think that people threatening to blow up millions to get their political way is no big deal by comparison, chill out. The science is settled. The “skeptics”—the strange name applied to those whose work shows the planet isn’t coming to an end—have won.

So is it really impossible for science to resolve the dispute, as Schultz claims? Well, I’m not a climate scientist and I don’t really know that much about the subject, but even I was able discover that Michaels and Singer’s claims were based on blatant cherry-picking and confusing degrees with radians. It’s no wonder Schultz wants to change the subject from science to “art and myth making”.

The Poor Man has a few choice comments on Schultz here.

As I predicted, Lott claims that the panel was stacked:

My piece in the LA Times is still accurate today. While I will write up a more substantive discussion, James Q. Wilson’s very unusual dissent in the first appendix says a lot. Wilson concluded that all the research provided “confirmation of the findings that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate . . . .” The NAS won’t tell me how many panels have had dissents previously, though they admit that they are very rare. It is disappointing that the panel refused to let me ask questions during their presentation.

Lott misrepresents Wilson’s conclusion. Wilson did not conclude that all the research provided confirmation that shall-issue laws decrease murder, rather that the committee’s analysis of Lott’s data and models confirmed Lott’s claim about murder. His actual conclusion:

In sum, I find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that RTC laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate, though the effect on other crimes is ambiguous.

Wilson agrees with the rest of the committee that Lott has failed to show declines in violent crime, assault, rape and robbery—he just disagrees about murder. (On that point Wilson is mistaken, since he has misunderstood the committee’s analysis. More on this later.)

Update: Lott has altered his post. The sentence

Wilson concluded that all the research provided “confirmation of the findings that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate . . . .”

has een replaced by

Wilson concluded that the research provides “confirmation of the findings that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate . . . ,” though he is less convinced of the change in other crimes.

I’m afraid Lott loses the brownie points he gets for making a correction by not indicating that his post had been corrected.

Louis Hissink has responded to my post on the worst argument against global warming, ever:

Well yes Tim, the Holy See seemed to need to recalibrate the calendar, and in Medieval times, no one was observing the heavens for the simple fact that telescopes had not yet been invented.

And you didn’t think he would be able to top his argument about climate change that was inconsistent with the existence of seasons. This is an argument about astronomy that assumes that you can’t see stars without a telescope.

Wait, there’s more:

What has not occurred to Quiggin, Lambert and their fellow social democrats is that by ridiculing the earth’s contribution as a “mere” 4% of the overall temperature they have also belittled their own case. Unfortunately a couple of trillion tonnes of matter at some temperature would indeed have a signficant effect on an atmosphere of relatively lower mass. But that is not the point - since if 4% is “mere” so is the contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse - it contributes approximately 5% and whether 4% or 5%, it is also “mere”. Talk about shooting oneself in the foot! Hook line and sinker, I am afraid.

Trouble is, I didn’t say that the earth’s contribution was 4% of the overall temperature. I said that there was about 5,000 times as much energy coming from the sun as from the earth. That means that the earth’s contribution to the total incoming energy (not temperature) is 0.02%. Hissink is out by a factor of 200, even though I gave him the actual numbers. How does this compare with the effect of increasing CO₂? The IPCC estimates that doubling CO₂ will result in an increase of about 4 Watts per square metre, which is over 50 times as much as comes from the earth’s interior. And don’t forget that Hissink originally claimed that the contribution from the earth’s interior was “overwhelming”.

Why did the Chinese Ming Dynasty send out all those fleets all over the earth to take measurements? Had indeed something happened to the orientation of the earth’s axis which caused calendars world-wide to become useless?

No, nothing happened to make calendars world-wide become useless. We know this because we have historical records from the Middle Ages.

Why did the Holy See need to implement the Gregorian Calendar? Something had happened to the length of the year?

No. Nothing had happened to the length of the year. They needed to fix the accumulated errors from the Julian calendar. See here.

Science has assumed that the earth has remained fixed in space for the last 4.5 billion years, not changing at all in its rotation and orbit. This is not from observation, of course, but from an aprioristic belief.

Science does not assume that the earth’s rotation is not changing. Science has actually discovered that because of friction from the tides, the day is getting longer and that 375 million years ago, the day was 21.9 hours long.

What Lambert has not factored into his understanding is the importance electricity and electromagnetism on the cosmic scale. Remember thall all magnetic fields are caused by electric currents, and a spinning earth can easily be deflected around its axis of spin, without losing any moment of enertia, by an external Electromagnetic force.

This is what Velikovsky was questioning when he discussed the Joshua Ben Nun event, that if this ancient account of the sun stopping in the midday sky was true, then another cosmic force had to be in play, since gravity alone could not explain this.

But then it is somewhat difficult debating when your opponents can only muster one or two ideas.

If you have ever experimented with a magnet, you might have noticed that it only attracts things made of iron. So even if some hugely powerful magnetic field had somehow shown up and stopped the earth rotating, things not made of iron would have kept moving at speeds of over 1,000 km/hour. Things not made of iron include the atmosphere, the oceans and, well, people.

Boffo blog tells the story of a Lott presentation at a workshop about a decade ago:

I was not prepared for how truly awful the paper was. His argument concerned how expensive elections have become in this country. … His evidence consisted of a correlation between growth in federal spending and growth in campaign spending, and from that he concluded that Big Government caused expensive campaigns. Two lines trending upwards, and he claims with perfect seriousness—and without performing any of the necessary tests—that the one causes the other. When we pressed him on his analysis, not only had he not performed any appropriate tests, but he seemed wholly unfamiliar with the relevant econometrics literature. … Afterward, we agreed that it was the worst presentation any of us had ever seen at the workshop, worse than any first-year grad student’s.

Yes, there is a reason why Lott could not get a tenure-track job in academia.

Here are my kids at the beach on Christmas day. Best wishes to all my readers.

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Jim Lindgren thinks the panel was too generous to Lott:

From the portions that I have read, I found the report sober, impressive, and fair, though there are substantial parts of this literature that I am unfamiliar with. As to Lott’s work, I actually thought that the Council’s report was too generous to his research in spots. In particular, I thought that it failed to point out just how much Lott’s results are driven by poorly executed demographic controls, a point that Ayres and Donohue make effectively in their Stanford exchange. While the Council’s report raises a lot of questions about Lott’s use of control variables in general, particularly in its Appendix D, the Report does not seem to focus on the degree to these questionable demographic controls determine some of Lott’s results.

The Sydney Morning Herald has an informative page with news and links for donations. I donated to The Australian Red Cross, who have already raised $3 million. You have to look hard to find any good aspect to such a terrible catastrophe but the generosity of my fellow human beings certainly qualifies.