Deltoid

Via David Tiley we have an interview with one the scumbags who comment spam blogs. One of them just finally left my blog alone after trying to leave about a hundred trackback spams. I deleted the first few that arrived, and found that it was posting new ones as fast as I deleted them. I renamed my trackback flavour so that it wasn’t called “trackback” anymore and that stopped the spams from getting through.

Sagenz has joined the very small and select group of critics of the Lancet study with the honesty to recant and withdraw their criticism.

Chris Young has written a letter to Slate’s Fred Kaplan, suggesting that Kaplan correct his flawed critique of the Lancetstudy.

David Adesnik has posted his thoughts on the study. Unlike most of the war supporters who have written about the study he has the intellectual honesty to accept the unanimous verdict of the experts in sampling—that the methodology was sound. Nonetheless, he thinks it is most likely that the result is a “statistical anomaly”. He has some questions about the study which I will try to answer:

In other words, even though human rights organizations estimate that Saddam killed something on the order of 10,000 of his own subjects per year, only one violent death was recorded in the 14.6 months before the invasion. Why?

The Amnesty International Report on Iraq for 2002 estimates not 10,000 killings by Saddam but “scores”. The single violent death extrapolates to 3,000 deaths in the population, but the uncertainties in this estimate are enormous.

Adesnik also asks:

By the same token, one has to wonder why the only bombings that the authors seem to discuss are those initiated by American helicopters and airplanes. But what about the suicide bombings that have killed hundreds or perhaps thousands of Iraqis? According to the study in The Lancet, of all the deaths it observed, only “two were attributed to anti-coalition forces.”

They discussed all the bombing deaths that the survey found. Each death in the study corresponds to about 3,000 deaths in the population, so even a thousand deaths from suicide bombings are unlikely to show up.

Adesnik continues:

What I consider most likely is that a statistical anomaly, intended by no one, is responsible for all of this confusion. In war after war, the United States has inflicted numerous casualties from the air. As a result, we have abandoned the indiscriminate carpet-bombing of the Vietnam era in favor of the precision attacks launched against Belgrade, Kandahar, and Baghdad. I find it almost impossible to believe that the methods of the post-Cold War era continue to result in casualty figures that belong to the days of Vietnam.

I don’t see how it is impossible that the casualty figures are better than Vietnam but still quite high. I don’t see how it is impossible that the reduction in casualties from precision bombing has been exaggerated. One further point: each Coalition death is officially recorded and the total is well publicized. On the other hand, the Coalition does not even maintain an official list of civilian deaths. This obviously creates strong incentives to minimize Coalition deaths, even if the price is many more Iraqi civilian deaths.

Currency Lad continues with his theme that I am only writing about the Lancet study because I am a Saddam supporter, writing (warning, his blog contains some dodgy javascript that messes up Firefox, so you may not want to follow the link):

Tim Lambert chose to contact me on the weekend of the elections in Iraq purposefully. Like most other monomaniacal anti-Bush leftists in Australia, he resents America so much that he can’t stand the idea of Iraqis being given the vote.

I have over 600 posts on my blog. None of those posts are attacks on Bush, but Currency Lad somehow concludes that I am monomaniacal anti-Bush. It is obvious that I wrote my post because the article on the Lancet study had just been published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, not because I resent America (I don’t) or because I can’t stand the idea of Iraqis getting the vote (I think it is wonderful that the surviving Iraqis got to vote and admire their bravery in so doing). There actually seems to be some sort of mass delusion among the warbloggers on this point since Leigh Cartwright claims that I really, really don’t “like the fact that Iraq have free elections”.

Currency Lad then has a go at the Lancet study:

Given that the original survey work for the Lancet study was carried out in a time of war; that interviewees were traumatised; that Iraqis were known to be extremely suspicious of outsiders; that lead author Les F. Roberts himself conceded he was strongly opposed to the war—beware a scientific study whose principal admits he expected (wanted?) “moral outrage” from the public (see HEC link above); that thousands of Iraqis were probably in hiding (Saddam Hussein included, as it happens); given all this, the idea that a group of eggheads with an agenda could swan around Iraq and come up with scientifically solid findings in such an unquantifiably fluid environment is 100 per cent, unmitigated bullshit and no genuinely scrupulous academic would be satisfied with it.

It’s pretty obvious from this that Currency Lad is one of the critics who have attacked the study without even reading it. For example, the field work was conducted after Saddam was captured, and having thousands of Iraqis in hiding would not affect the results materially. He doesn’t even seem to be aware that claimed deaths were checked against death certificates. And it is positively indecent the way he tries to trivialize the genuine danger the researchers placed themselves in (”swan around Iraq”).

Currency Lad then demands:

Here’s a challenge Tim: can you prove absolutely that, say, 8001 civilians didn’t die in Iraq? No, you can’t.

Too bad the same standard of proof for WMDs wasn’t demanded before we invaded Iraq.

Update: In his post attacking me, Cartwright did not link to my blog. I left a trackback because I linked to his post. He deleted it, falsely claiming that I did not link to his piece. Apparently there have been a whole slew of posts from warbloggers claiming that leftie bloggers have not celebrated the Iraqi election enough—I liked this one and this too.

I wrote earlier about the pernicious and dishonest campaign by the London Daily Telegraph to scare people into thinking that self-defence against burglars was unlawful. To correct this misinformation the Crown Prosecution Service has issued a statement detailing what the law really says:

Does the law protect me? What is “reasonable force”?
Anyone can use reasonable force to protect themselves or others, or to carry out an arrest or to prevent crime. You are not expected to make fine judgements over the level of force you use in the heat of the moment. So long as you only do what you honestly and instinctively believe is necessary in the heat of the moment, that would be the strongest evidence of you acting lawfully and in selfdefence. This is still the case if you use something to hand as a weapon.

As a general rule, the more extreme the circumstances and the fear felt, the more force you can lawfully use in self-defence.

Do I have to wait to be attacked?
No, not if you are in your own home and in fear for yourself or others. In those circumstances the law does not require you to wait to be attacked before using defensive force yourself.

What if the intruder dies?
If you have acted in reasonable self-defence, as described above, and the intruder dies you will still have acted lawfully. Indeed, there are several such cases where the householder has not been prosecuted. However, if, for example:

• having knocked someone unconscious, you then decided to further hurt or kill them to punish them; or
• you knew of an intended intruder and set a trap to hurt or to kill them rather than involve the police,

you would be acting with very excessive and gratuitous force and could be prosecuted.

I have listed several cases (and their outcomes) where burglars have been killed here. (Hat tip Agricola.)

Embarrassing Correction: I screwed up. Somehow I pasted the wrong IP into a query. I thought I was checking Brignell’s IP, but it was actually Per’s. Per and “James Brown” are the same person, but his real name is David Bell, not John Brignell. I apologize to John Brignell and to Per/David Bell.

After I criticized John Brignell for an innumerate criticism of the Lancet study in this post, a commenter named Per showed up to defend Brignell and attack me. Those of you familiar with the Mary Rosh story can guess the rest—it seems that “Per” is a sock puppet operated by John Brignell.

Here are some the highlights from Per’s comments. There’s this:

I don’t know what Brignell did and didn’t consider, ‘cos I am not telepathic.

and this:

Professor Brignell, ex of the University of Southampton, has a considerable academic reputation based around measurement science in engineering. It strikes me that his knowledge of statistics and measurement in engineering may well be greatly superior to yours.

At least he didn’t claim to be a former student of Prof Brignell. Per finally got very abusive, telling me:

You are a liar.

I told him that he was no longer allowed to post and he responded:

Hey Tim, if you want to rave on in your blog, and don’t want to be bothered by any of these “facts”, it’s all yours. I won’t darken your doors again. thing is- now- you will always be a liar.

Apparently he just meant that “Per” would not post again, because Brignell he came back with two new sock puppets identities, “James Brown” (initials JB, get it?) and “M Mouse” posting another 30 comments to my blog with M Mouse abusing Carleton Wu in this thread:

what sort of idiot would fail to understand such basics ? … Have you seen a psychiatrist ?

Which was backed up a few minutes later by “James Brown”:

Wu, how did you get it so wrong! How did you make so many mistakes ? I’ll bet you must be feeling a right little peckerhead by now !

In his comments, Per managed to demonstrate a lack of understanding of basic statistics (see dsquared’s comments especially).

Just a couple of days ago, on sci.environment, Per attacked Michael Mann for this post, where Mann rebutted McIntyre and McKitrick (M&M)’s attack on Mann’s “hockey stick” paper. Per wrote:

I am quite happy to point out—as a matter of fact—that Mann did not disclose his vested interest in his article when he attacked M&M, and that he therefore writes with an undisclosed, vested interest. I am quite clear that many journals do have a code of ethical practice as regards disclosure of competing interests. You obviously think this standard of behaviour is acceptable, and I am content to leave you with that view.

Hoist on his my own petard.

Update: See embarrassing correction at top of post.

Andrew Bolt, writing in the Melbourne Herald Sun offers this conclusive disproof of important evidence against global warming:

Melbourne last week had its coldest February day on record, and its wettest day, which should surprise those still naive enough to believe our green gurus.

Oh, plus he calls it a “booga-booga theory”. I think even Tech Central Station would find this too lame to publish. Nice one Herald Sun!

Update: Silly me, of course TCS wouldn’t find this too lame to publish. TCS editor, Nick Schulz made the same dumb argument. Oh, and Tim Blair fell for Bolt’s argument. Read the comments and marvel (but don’t disagree because you will be banned).

Clarification: Bolt has emailed to point out that at the end of his article he writes:

“one bit of wild weather in our ever-changing climate doesn’t disprove the holy theory of global warming”.

I was being sarcastic when I called a disproof, but to make sure that there is no misunderstanding I’ve altered the text to reflect what I believe he thinks is the relevance of a cold day in Melbourne is to global warming.

In a recent post I observed that the Junk Central Station crew were ignorantly advocating the use of DDT in Sri Lanka after the tsunami, apparently unaware that mosquitoes in Sri Lanka were resistant to DDT. The World Health Organization’s plan for malaria prevention in the wake of the tsunami advised against using DDT because:

Sri Lanka

Endemic sporadic malaria close to the affected areas transmitted by An.culicifacies, which has been considered DDT-resistant for many years, but is still sensitive to organophosphates, such as malathion, and pyrethroids.

Conclusive, you would think? Not to Roger Bate, who says Sri Lanka should be spraying DDT despite resistance and that the WHO is just pushing an anti-DDT environmentalist agenda. Read, and marvel:

One alarming new difference [in Galle, Sri Lanka] is that malaria is back, and is poised to strike down still more of the children, many orphaned, of this wretched place. It can be stopped, but only if ill-informed prejudice against DDT, the insecticide, is dropped. …

the malaria-control program is being compromised by outdated thinking, especially from the world’s leading health and government-aid agencies.

The prime example of their folly is found in a paper, “Malaria Risk and Malaria Control in Asian Countries Affected by the Tsunami,” in which the World Health Organization (WHO) outlines its policy for the affected region.

Historically, the primary method of malaria control has been Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS)—the spraying of house walls with tiny amounts of an insecticide, usually DDT. IRS often kills mosquitoes, but more important, it creates a barrier between man and mosquito. Studies show the vast majority of mosquitoes won’t enter a DDT-sprayed building, and this chemical barrier prevents transmission of the disease, much as prophylactic drugs or bed nets do, but more cheaply. Such an approach was highly successful in Sri Lanka. Owing to DDT, malaria rates fell from three million cases a year in the 1940s to fewer than 50 in 1963.

But then environmental pressures against DDT led to its abandonment, first in Western countries and then in most other parts of the world. …

Studies showed that Sri Lankan mosquitoes may be developing resistance to DDT, which meant that some of them would not be killed by the insecticide. Even the WHO report says Sri Lanka’s malaria vectors have been considered DDT-resistant for many years. But DDT’s main role is as a repellent, not as a toxic agent. Houses sprayed with DDT repel far more mosquitoes than any other insecticide tested and so remain effective even when resistance is substantial. This information, although known by health entomologists, is ignored by the WHO, which has adopted the anti-DDT environmentalist agenda. The WHO advises using alternative insecticides—although the organization buys precious few even of these.

So that’s Bate’s story. How does it compare with the facts?

“WHO … has adopted the anti-DDT environmentalist agenda”

Here is a letter from WHO’s Allan Schapira in response to similar claims:

Nature 432, 439 (25 November 2004);

DDT still has a role in the fight against malaria

Sir — Your News story about the Roll Back Malaria campaign (”Struggling to make an impact” Nature 430, 935; 2004) quotes me as claiming that pressure from government and other donors made spraying difficult to push through politically. I am also quoted as saying: “We have had very, very strong lobbying over DDT. We have had to give up.” The quotations give the impression that the World Health Organization (WHO) has given up on DDT under the pressure of lobbying. I believe this is misleading.

When interviewed, I explained that we sometimes had to give up trying to convince a specific donor to financially support indoor spraying with DDT, if they flatly refused because of its perceived toxicity and ecological hazard. This has occasionally occurred in countries where the government wished to use DDT, and there was evidence that it was the best option for malaria-vector control.

However, in general terms, the WHO has never given up in its efforts to ensure access to DDT where it is needed. At meetings of the intergovernmental negotiation committee on the Stockholm Convention—which seeks to control the spread of persistent organic pollutants—the WHO has successfully defended the right of countries to use DDT for disease-vector control, if no suitable alternative can be found. The WHO also supports worldwide efforts to develop alternative products and phase in alternative control strategies (link).

The Stockholm Convention came into force in May this year. Its exemption allowing restricted and controlled use of DDT according to WHO guidelines is a good example of appropriate international regulation on a difficult dilemma. It is not a compromise but a solution, which ensures that disease-control programmes maintain access to a useful product, while fully respecting the need to prevent environmental damage from persistent organic pollutants, such as DDT.

Allan Schapira
Strategy and Policy Team,
Roll Back Malaria Department,
World Health Organization,

“WHO advises using alternative insecticides”

From the WHO’s FAQ on DDT:

WHO recommends indoor residual spraying of DDT for malaria vector control.

Bate’s statement is a sort of half-truth because the WHO does recommend alternatives depending on the local circumstances:

Indoor residual application of DDT may have very little impact, for instance, if the malaria vector tends to rest and bite outdoors, and does not enter houses.

Information on vector susceptibility and tolerance to DDT should be up-to-date and backed up by an effective pesticide resistance management strategy to ensure continuing pesticide effectiveness. Local vector resistance or increased tolerance to DDT may affect its overall effectiveness.

This is why they don’t recommend DDT in Sri Lanka.

“Studies showed that Sri Lankan mosquitoes may be developing resistance to DDT”

Pinikahana and Dixon, Trends in malaria morbidity and mortality in Sri Lanka. (Indian J Malariology):

After the discovery of DDT resistance in 1969, malathion spraying took over in 1973, and USAID-assisted control programme, involving case-detection and treatment, started in 1977.

This is not “may be developing resistance”. They have developed resistance, and it was way back in 1969.

“Houses sprayed with DDT repel far more mosquitoes than any other insecticide tested and so remain effective even when resistance is substantial”

India has been using DDT against malaria continuously since the 1940’s. V.P. Sharma, DDT: The Fallen Angel (Current Science 85 1532-1537) explains why it is becoming ineffective:

The Health Department of Maharashtra reported an increasing trend of malaria even after two rounds of DDT indoor spraying between 1995 and 1997, with a 75-83% coverage of rooms in houses. Monitoring in 74 villages revealed that malaria transmission continued, and cases had sharply increased by the third quarter of 1997. In November 1997, a special spraying round with Lambda-cyhalothrin (10% WP) managed to interrupt malaria transmission …

The declining effectiveness of DDT is a result of several factors which frequently operate in tandem. The first and the most important factor is vector resistance to DDT. All populations of the main vector, An. culicifacies have become resistant to DDT. The excito-repellent effect of DDT, often reported useful in other countries, actually promotes outdoor transmission …

Third, DDT, cheaper by weight than alternative pesticides and manufactured indigenously by government-controlled HIL, is sprayed with the false belief that its excito-repellent action prevents transmission.

In India at least, it seems that the “outdated thinking” belongs to those who continue to use DDT even though it has lost effectiveness.

“[Malaria in Galle] can be stopped only if ill-informed prejudice against DDT is dropped.”

Olivier Briet et al have just published a study on malaria in Sri Lanka after the tsunami (Malaria Journal 2005 4:8). They write:

DDT and Malathion are no longer recommended since An. culicifacies and An. subpictus has been found resistant.

Figure 2 in their paper shows that since 2000, malaria incidence has been reduced by a factor of 100 without any use of DDT. Figures 3 and 4 show that Galle has been free of malaria for years.

“[That DDT is effective despite resistance is] known by health entomologists”

I asked Olivier Briet, lead author of the Sri Lanka malaria study I just cited. He allowed that it might be true, but he was unaware of any study supporting Bate’s claim, especially in realation to Sri Lanka.

“[Spraying DDT] prevents transmission of the disease, much as prophylactic drugs or bed nets do, but more cheaply”

Bhatia et al conducted experiments in India to see whether indoor spraying or bed nets were more effective. They found that bed nets were more effective at preventing malaria and were more cost effective as well. Because of DDT resistance they sprayed with deltamethrin rather than DDT, which would have been even less effective. Bed nets were also found to be more cost effective in Sri Lanka.

Conclusion

DDT spraying may well be effective in other places, but it does not seem necessary or at all likely to be effective in Sri Lanka. As a supposed expert on malaria, Bate should be aware of these facts.

So who is Roger Bate, anyway? Well, apart from being an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, he is a director of the astroturf operation Africans Fighting Malaria. He writes frequently for Tech Central Station. He is an adjunct fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He was a cofounder of European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), which was another astroturf operation, secretly funded by Philip Morris to push a pro-tobacco agenda. ESEF was the European version of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), so I guess that makes Bate the European version of Steve Milloy.

John Brignell has an odd response (scroll down to “Hit Parade”) to some of my criticism. He doesn’t link, or dare to even mention my name, so it’s probably rather mystifying to his readers what he is responding to. Brignell goes on the Michael Fumento road, boasting about how the 2,488 hits he got on Monday vastly exceeds the 10 hits he got from me. Trouble is, he got those hits from a link in a comment in a two-day old post, so it’s hardly a meaningful comparison. For what it’s worth, his web counter shows 230k visits in five years, which is less than what I have in two years.

Earlier I wrote:

John Brignell dismisses the [Lancet] study just because:

A relative risk of 1.5 is not acceptable as significant.

Actually the increased risk was statistically significant. You won’t find support for Brignell’s claim in any conventional statistical text or paper. To support his claim he cites a book called Sorry, wrong number!. Trouble is, that book was written by. … John Brignell. Not only that, it was published by … John Brignell. Brignell is a crank who dismisses the entire field of modern epidemiology as some sort of plot by scientists to scare people.

Brignell’s response is:

Among the charges in the web log were that the author is not an epidemiologist, so not qualified to comment on epidemiology, and that he is innumerate for suggesting the relative risks of 1.5 are unacceptable for observational studies. The first is like saying you have not committed mass murder therefore you are not entitled to write about crime. Critics of observational studies have included great scientifically inclined epidemiologists, such as Alvan R Feinstein, Sterling Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Yale. The also great R A Fisher would have no truck with them at all. The second accusation is typically hyperbolic. An innumerate person would not even be able to begin discussing a concept such as risk ratio. There is a substantial body of opinion outside mainstream epidemiology that is critical of such lax statistical standards. Correspondence to Number Watch confirms that many professional statisticians are appalled by what is going on. Besides which, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The book The Epidemiologists begins with some examples of the many completely contradictory headlines generated by popular epidemiological studies.

Actually I didn’t say that Brignell shouldn’t be commenting on epidemiology because he wasn’t an epidemiologist, but that the only support he offers for his 1.5 claim is his own opinion. He even admits that his view is outside mainstream epidemiology and still has not offered any cite or argument to support his claim. I guess Fisher might well be on Brignell’s side, since Fisher rejected the idea that smoking causes lung cancer, but very few deny this any more. And Brignell’s 1.5 risk ratio principle is innumerate. According to his principle, for example, the observed ratio of male to female births of 1.03 is not significant and we can’t conclude that male births are more likely.

You would think that after all this time, all possible erroneous arguments against the Lancet study would have been made, but folks keep coming up with new ones. R.J. Rummel has come up with some new ones. Unlike many of the critics, Rummel has read the study; but unfortunately he has badly misunderstood it. Rummel writes:

The pre-invasion statistics were compiled by Saddam’s Ministry of Health. There are questions one must ask of such a source that the Lancet researchers do inadequately. Did the ministry include murders or massacres by the Iraqi regime, such as in prison. To what degree did it include the deaths of children from the lack of food and medicine due to Hussein’s refusal to use for that purpose the funds the UN set aside from his oil sales. Moreover, the way pre-invasion deaths were defined excludes periods of mass Iraqi deaths, as in the war Hussein launched against Iran in which overall a million were killed, and the mass murder of Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south to repress their rebellions. As a rule of thumb, never accept surveys or statistics produced under a bloody tyranny—what people say or do under such a system is out of fear.

The pre-invasion statistics were not compiled by Saddam’s Ministry of Health. The article is perfectly clear on this. The summary says:

Methods: A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004. 33 clusters of 30 households each were interviewed about household composition, births, and deaths since January, 2002. In those households reporting deaths, the date, cause, and circumstances of violent deaths were recorded. We assessed the relative risk of death associated with the 2003 invasion and occupation by comparing mortality in the 17·8 months after the invasion with the 14·6-month period preceding it.

So it includes murders by the Iraqi regime and any deaths of children because of shortages of food and medicine. It does exclude deaths in the Iran war and rebellions. The survey was not conducted under a bloody tyranny.

Rummel goes on to claim:

No tests of significance were applied to any of Lancet’s statistical results. Why?

This is no true. They frequently give 95% confidence intervals for their results.

Rummel then takes Iraqi health ministry figures showing 3,274 deaths in military and terrorist conflicts in six months and multiplies

by 3 to get comparable time periods, which would mean about 9,822 civilians killed by comparison to lancet’s estimate of over 100,000; 38 percent due to the terrorists versus 4 percent for Lancet. Hmmmm.

This is, of course, comparing apples with oranges. The Lancet estimate of 100,000 is of excess deaths. As well as deaths in the conflict it includes the increase in murder, accidents and disease that followed the invasion. Furthermore, the health ministry numbers are guaranteed to be an underestimate, since not every death will be recorded by Iraqi hospitals.

And Victor S takes a chainsaw to another critic of the Lancet report. As he writes,

if you’re sick of repeatedly arguing with the bookless, innumerate cohort who reject the findings of the Lancet report on post-invasion mortality in Iraq, turn away now.

William Connolley has an interesting post on a new reconstruction of temperatures over the past 2000 years. It’s the blue line in the graph to the right. It suggests that things were colder in the past than the hockey stick reconstruction (MBH in the diagram). The usual suspects will no doubt try to argue that this somehow disproves anthropogenic global warming, despite the finding that temperatures since the 90s are unprecedented.

Louis Hissink warns about the dangers of shifting the axis of rotation of a spinning hard disk:

Never ever move a hard drive that is spinning—hard drive reading heads tend to do awful things to the magnetic data when asked to compete with gravity and abrupt inertial changes.

Cool. Now imagine if the hard disk was the size of the Earth. Don’t you think that changing the axis of rotation would do awful things to anyone living on it?

Chris Mooney has an excellent article on how “balanced” coverage of scientific issues can misinform readers:

Moreover, the question of how to substitute accuracy for mere “balance” in science reporting has become ever more pointed as journalists have struggled to cover the Bush administration, which scientists have widely accused of scientific distortions. As the Union of Concerned Scientists, an alliance of citizens and scientists, and other critics have noted, Bush administration statements and actions have often given privileged status to a fringe scientific view over a well-documented, extremely robust mainstream conclusion. Journalists have thus had to decide whether to report on a he said/she said battle between scientists and the White House—which has had very few scientific defenders—or get to the bottom of each case of alleged distortion and report on who’s actually right.

No wonder scientists have often denounced the press for giving credibility to fringe scientific viewpoints. And without a doubt, the topic on which scientists have most vehemently decried both the media and the Bush administration is global warming. While some scientific uncertainty remains in the climate field, the most rigorous peer-reviewed assessments—produced roughly every five years by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—have cemented a consensus view that human greenhouse gas emissions are probably (i.e., the conclusion has a fairly high degree of scientific certainty) helping to fuel the greenhouse effect and explain the observed planetary warming of the past fifty years. Yet the Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine this position by hyping lingering uncertainties and seeking to revise government scientific reports. It has also relied upon energy interests and a small cadre of dissenting scientists (some of whom are funded, in part, by industry) in formulating climate policy.

The Melbourne Age’s environmental reporter agrees with Mooney:

She worries that the global warming issue has been distorted in some sections of the media. In the pursuit of balance, climate change sceptics are so often approached for comment it seems like there is a 50-50 split of scientific opinion. In fact, there are a handful of sceptics and thousands of scientists around the world who are not, she says.

However, this supposes the existence of some sort of objective truth and Professor Bunyip is having none of it:

as her biography makes clear, the Mancunian Candidate’s little green gal is ethically disinclined to seek comment from the other side, not when there are all those sensible scientists to endorse her own views.

I guess that the Flat Earth and Round Earth theories are both just views and reporters should present them both for balance and abandon any idea of letting their readers know which one is correct.

Bunyip admits he doesn’t understand the science, but in this post, he is none the less sure that global warming is spurious science and that some campaign against DDT claimed untold lives. His authority? Steve Milloy. Bunyip’s predictive powers are no better than his grasp of science, since in the same post (before the Iraq war) he predicted: “benchmark Brent crude plunges to around $21US a barrel” “within six weeks of Saddam’s head appearing atop a pole”. Alas, prices soared to $50US a barrel. And still in the same post, he demonstrates a decidedly shaky grasp of history, forgetting about Pearl Harbour.

Update: Bunyip offers a very postmodern defence by reinterpreting his own words.

There has been a flurry of bloggers pretending to be females. Via Jason Soon we have the exposure of Libertarian Girl, who was actually a guy. Another faker recently exposed was Hot Abercrombie Chick. And the winner of the NetGuide award for Best Personal Blog for 2004 was “Natalie Biz”, who was really “James Guthrie, a Wellington man, happily married with children“.

Libertarian Girl says that when he had a blog as himself, he got no links or comments, but by pretending to be a pretty girl he instantly got to have a popular blog. Now I don’t think that means that bloggers are so completely shallow as to be mesmerized by a photo of a pretty girl, but it certainly demonstrates the advantage of good looks in attracting that initial attention.

Supporting sources for this post on the resurgence of malaria in Sri Lanka despite DDT spraying.

(more…)

Anti-environmentalist writers frequently claim that after DDT had all but eliminated malaria from Sri Lanka, environmentalist pressure forced Sri Lanka to ban DDT, leading to a resurgence of malaria:

Roger Bate in Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking writes:

Some developing countries imposed a complete ban on the pesticide, as Sri Lanka did in 1964, when officials believed the malaria problem was solved. By 1969 the number of cases had risen from the low of seventeen (when DDT was used) to over a half million.

Walter Williams in in Capitalism Magazine writes

In Sri Lanka, in 1948, there were 2.8 million malaria cases and 7,300 malaria deaths. With widespread DDT use, malaria cases fell to 17 and no deaths in 1963. After DDT use was discontinued, Sri Lankan malaria cases rose to 2.5 million in the years 1968 and 1969, and the disease remains a killer in Sri Lanka today.

Ted Lapkin in Quadrant writes:

When Sri Lankan authorities agreed to ban DDT during the mid-1960s, rates of malaria infection exploded from twenty-nine cases in 1964 to over 500,000 a mere five years later.

In his book The Epidemiologists John Brignell writes:

1948 Annual malaria rate in Sri Lanka reaches 2.8million
1962 Publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
1963 DDT reduces annual malaria rate in Sri Lanka to 17
1964 DDT banned in Sri Lanka
1969 Annual malaria rate in Sri Lanka reaches 2.5million.

Jim Norton lists even more examples.

Now when you think about it, the story that they tell just isn’t credible. If DDT spraying had almost eliminated malaria, and they got a new outbreak, then no environmentalists would be able to stop them from resuming spraying. So I went to the library to find out what really happened. And it wasn’t hard to find out. The definitive history of malaria is Gordon Harrison’s Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man and it turns out that, yes of course they went back to spraying. Harrison writes:

Sri Lanka went back to the spray guns, reducing malaria once more to 150,000 cases in 1972; but there the attack stalled. Anopheles culicifacies, completely susceptible to DDT when the spray stopped in 1964, was now found resistant presumably because of the use of DDT for crop protection in the interim. Within a couple of years, so many culicifacies survived that despite the spraying malaria spread in 1975 to more than 400,000 people.

So in 1977 they switched to the more expensive malathion and were able to reduce the number of cases to about 50,000 by 1980. In 2004, the number was down to 3,000, without using DDT.

And the reason why they stopped spraying in 1964? It wasn’t environmentalist pressure. With only 17 cases in 1963, they didn’t think it was needed any more. And this wasn’t an unreasonable belief. In the countries where malaria had been eradicated, once the number was this low, treating the remaining cases with drugs to kill the malaria parasite was sufficient to completely eradicate it.

Just to prove that there is no question about any of this, I have extracts from Harrison and two other supporting sources here.

The anti-environmentalist version of what happened is a hoax. That doesn’t mean that all the writers above were being deliberately misleading: they might be just repeating what another anti-environmentalist wrote and be unaware of the true story. AEI scholar Roger Bate, however, coauthored an entire book on DDT and Malaria which relies very heavily on Harrison’s history, citing him over twenty times. They conspicuously fail to mention that Sri Lanka resumed DDT spraying and that it failed because of resistance, instead claiming that

pressure not to use DDT may have been applied by western donors using resistance as a convenient argument. Recent evidence shows that even where resistance to DDT has emerged, the excito-repellancy of DDT causes mosquitoes not to enter buildings that have been sprayed (Roberts et al., 2000). Under test conditions (see Grieco et al., 2000), for at least one type of malarial mosquito in Belize (the only country in which these tests have so far been conducted),DDT is far more successful than the most favoured vector control pesticide Deltamethrin. Hence it is unlikely that malaria rates would have increased (significantly) even if resistance were found.

But malaria rates did increase even though DDT was extensively used. Harrison has an entire chapter on this. How could Bate possibly not have noticed this? (And tests on a different continent on a different species of mosquito aren’t even close to relevant).

Orac has done a wonderful job of organising a slew of links to skeptical blogging into the Skeptics’ Circle. (We’re talking about the good kind of skepticism here, not global warming/ozone depletion/evolution sceptics.)

However, I must take issue with one small thing. Orac names Penn and Teller as heroes of the skeptic fellowship. They’re not. Last year, an alert reader noticed that their show on Safety Hysteria cited as an expert none other than Steve Milloy. (In an obvious attempt to hide from my scrutiny access to their website is blocked from Australia, so I’ve linked to Google’s cache.) Even more troubling are their shows on second hand smoke and the environment which “A Skeptical Blog” deals with here and here. To complete the circle to my submission on the DDT hoax to the Skeptic’s Circle, Penn and Teller’s expert on second hand smoke is Elizabeth Whelan, who may well be the first person to tell the bogus story about Sri Lanka and DDT. In 1985 she wrote:

Why was there an increase in malaria in Ceylon [now called Sri Lanka] after 1964? It is clear that the effects of Silent Spring was not limited to the United States. Following the publication of this book, the use of DDT was discontinued in Ceylon. Epidemic conditions reappeared and it has been estimated that between 1968 and 1969 “considerably more than two million cases occurred,” all related to the campaign against DDT.

And she’s still at it. Just a few days ago in her a glowing review of State of Fear she wrote:

Crichton’s Dr. Kenner notes that DDT was the best defense against malaria-causing mosquitoes: “altogether, the ban has caused more than 50 million needless deaths . . . [B]anning DDT killed more people than Hitler . . . and the environmental movement pushed hard for it.”

All right, I’ll calm down now. Go and read the Skeptics’ Circle.

John Quiggin is donating $1 to Medecins Sans Frontieres for each comment he gets on this post. Go and leave a comment! The money will aid the The Global Fund to fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Your comment might even help pay for some DDT spraying! (Though insecticide treated netting is usually the better option.)

Roy Eccleston has an article on blogs in The Australian. He is startled to find that thanks to blogs, some Americans believe an entirely false story about how Diana Kerry interfered in the Australian election, based on a contrived reading of an story that Eccleston himself wrote. He writes (my emphasis):

“You’re Australian aren’t you,” said a bystander, listening to our conversation.”So what do you think about John Kerry’s sister interfering in your election campaign?”

I was stunned. Here was a particularly well-informed American - he not only knew Australia had held an election but also seemed aware of a small story of mine that The Australian had published on page 15 six weeks before. The piece quoted Diana Kerry claiming Australians were more vulnerable to terrorism because of John Howard’s support for Bush in Iraq. It wasn’t alleging any interference in the Australian election—but some obviously saw it that way. Yet how did this man come to know about it?

In my case, the Kerry comments had angered conservative bloggers—such as captainsquartersblog.com—who bounced it caustically around the internet, where it was read by mainstream conservative columnists in Washington. The story eventually had the ultimate conservative treatment: a piece in The Weekly Standard, a prominent political magazine, and a column by Washington Post syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Powerline even accused Diana Kerry of mounting a “terrorist attack on Australia“. And, of course, none of the blogs or newspapers ever corrected their false claims.

Tim Blair spends a lot of time debunking the bogus story that Bush served a plastic turkey to troops in Iraq, but what does he do when faced with the similarly bogus story about Diana Kerry? He doesn’t debunk it, instead he is pleased at the way blogs spread the falsehood.

Via Suki Lombard I discover that the Australian government’s position on Iraqi deaths because of the war is that the Lancet estimate of roughly 100,000 excess deaths is an exaggeration and we have no idea how many have died and no plans to find out. Govt seeking no information on civilian toll in Iraq war:

PETER VARGHESE: I can’t give you a number, no.

JOHN FAULKNER: You can’t even hazard a guess?

PETER VARGHESE: Well I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess. I mean, that’s the whole point.

JOHN FAULKNER: You’ve got no idea? And no one’s made…

PETER VARGHESE: I cannot give you a reliable number.

JOHN FAULKNER: Well, can you give me an unreliable number?

PETER VARGHESE: No, I won’t give you an unreliable number.

KIM LANDERS: But he says a report published in the British medical journal, which put the number at 100,000, was probably exaggerated.

Update: Phil Gomes points me to Alan Ramsay’s column in this morning’s paper which has the reason why Varghese claimed that the Lancet estimate was “exaggerated”:

“No tasking of ONA?” - “No. The matter would have been discussed within ONA, and more broadly, at the time that the British Medical Association publication, The Lancet, had a figure of 100,000.”

“What was the outcome of that discussion?” - “Our sense was that the methodology for it was not particularly transparent. Our guess - and it would be no more than a guess - was that the number may have been exaggerated. We do not have anything to compare it against.”

The methodology was, of course, explained in excruciating detail in the paper. Either the Office of National Assessment is hopelessly incompetent or Varghese is mispresenting what it found.

One small correction to Ramsey’s piece: He writes that the study found a minimum of 98,000 civilian deaths. While it is more likely than not that the number of civilian deaths was more than that, it is possible that the number is somewhat less. A followup study should be conducted to check, but the coalition does not want to know about it. That fact strongly suggests that they think such a study would confirm the Lancet findings.

Update 2: Tim Blair’s reaction to Ramsey’s column is telling. He abuses Ramsey, calling him “crazy”. It looks like Ramsey struck a nerve. Blair disputes Ramsey’s contention that the huge Iraqi civilian death toll has been barely mentioned in the Australian papers. Blair manages to come up with a whole eight mentions in the Sydney Morning Herald. And he only gets that many by double counting. Out of thousands of stories on the Iraq war, that is, indeed, barely mentioning it. Also, Blair somehow forgets to comment on the main point of Ramsey’s piece—the way our government is deliberately ignoring Iraqi civilian deaths because of the war. Blair only seems to care about the welfare of the Iraqi people when it is politically convenient.

King at SCSU Scholars demonstrates that he doesn’t understand what the Lancet study did:

The point is that the cost of U.S. intervention isn’t the total loss of life since March 2003 but the difference between what we know has been lost lives since then and what would have been lost had Saddam Hussein stayed in power. (Economists would call this, indelicately, the “marginal cost”.) If that marginal cost is negative, then we would argue perhaps that the intervention was a net benefit.

But that is what the study measured: the change in the death rate. If it had gone down, the study would have found a net benefit.

King also believes he has “debunked” the study with this argument:

The Lancet figure implies that 60,000 people have been killed by violence, including insurgents, while the aggregated press reports give a figure of 15,000, counting only civilians.

So it could be that 45,000 insurgents were killed, which would not be necessarily bad news. And while any deaths are a bad thing, it’s worth remembering the increase in mortality in postwar Germany or Japan.

This again shows a misunderstanding of the study. Roughly half of the 60,000 violent deaths were due to the skyrocketing murder rate in Iraq, not military or terrorist operations. And the 15,000 dead reported in the press will only include some of the civilian deaths, so it is absurd to suggest that all of the difference were insurgents. The Lancet study indicates that at most 5% of the excess deaths were of insurgents. (Though with a subsample this small there is enormous room for sampling error.)

Realclimate has a good explanation of the latest battle in the hockey stick wars. It looks to me like McIntyre & McKitrick’s claim (that the hockey stick is the product of an erroneous calculation) is not correct. That doesn’t mean that the graph is correct of course, since the proxies the graph is built on may not measure temperatures very well.

In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal systematically misrepresents the whole affair:

In 1998, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a paper in the journal Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period. The result: Messrs. Soon and Baliunas were treated as heretics and six editors at Climate Research were made to resign.

In fact, the editors resigned because they felt that Soon and Balanius’s paper was so badly flawed that it should not have been published.

In 2003, Stephen McIntyre, a Toronto minerals consultant and amateur mathematician, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at Canada’s University of Guelph, jointly published a critique of the hockey stick analysis. Their conclusion: Mr. Mann’s work was riddled with “collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects.” Once these were corrected, the Medieval warm period showed up again in the data.

This should have produced a healthy scientific debate. Instead, as the Journal’s Antonio Regalado reported Monday, Mr. Mann tried to shut down debate by refusing to disclose the mathematical algorithm by which he arrived at his conclusions. All the same, Mr. Mann was forced to publish a retraction of some of his initial data,

If you actually, I don’t know, read Mann’s correction you’ll find that he didn’t retract his initial data, but corrected the description of it. And that mathematical algorithm that the WSJ alleges that Mann refused to disclose? It’s right here.

Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada (a government agency) notes that Mr. Mann’s method “preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data.”

This strikes me as a big red herring. If you do a linear regression on random data, you’ll produce a straight line. Does that mean that linear regression is invalid because it preferentially produces straight lines when there are none in the data? Of course not. What is important is whether the result of the regression is statistically significant—for random data it won’t be. William Connolley did some experiments and reports:

What that appears to demonstrate is that M&M are right about one thing: it often does lead to a “hockey stick” shape in random data. But the problem is that the variance-explained of the PC1 done this way is tiny: the first eigenvalue is about 0.03. Whereas when you run it on real data the first eigenvalue is about 0.55 (back to 1000) or 0.38 (back to 1400). Which means the two problems are very different.

King at SCSU Scholars has had another go at the Lancet study. King writes:

Many of Saddam’s dead were not murdered in the presence of witnesses; there is no indication that the authors of the study charged Saddam with a death for a missing person.

It doesn’t matter whether the death was witnessed or not, if the family concluded the the person was dead it was recorded. Missing people are missing and not necessarily dead. And of course people go missing after the invasion as well.

It was noted in the IHT that the authors sought death certificates to verify the interviewees’ memories, but eventually felt it was too insulting in many cases. Which did they believe and which did they not?

They sought to verify at least two deaths per cluster and were successful 81% of the time. The few without death certificates had believable reasons for not being able to produce them. The interviewers don’t think any of the deaths were invented.

Also, information was collected during a period when the success of the war against the insurgents (vis-a-vis the war against Saddam); since some were uncertain that America would stay and see through the mission—thank you, John Kerry—deaths caused by Ba’athists was probably suppressed by fear of recrimination.

Yes, he really did blame John Kerry. King seems to have some issues there. The interviewees had no reason to fear recrimination from some hypothetical Baathist restoration since their names were not recorded.

Third, about 37,000 of the deaths the Lancet study uses come from a count by anti-occupation groups.

No they don’t. This is a complete fabrication.

They also chose both to change their list of randomly sampled areas so they didn’t have to drive as much; this meant they stayed close to Baghdad and the Sunni triangle, probably oversampling high-casualty areas.

It is true that sampling was done in such a way as to reduce travel, but this does not mean that they stayed close to Baghdad. They paired Governates that were adjacent and had had similar levels of violence and only sampled from one (randomly chosen) of the pair. This produces no bias towards high-casualty areas.

Last, comparing an equal length period between Saddam’s reign and occupation assumes that both death rates were at “steady state” levels. As I said in the original post last month, in the immediate aftermath of any war comes a period of heightened violence. Comparing a period under a long-term brutal dictator to a transition phase in the development hopefully of a democracy doesn’t meet the test of ceteris paribus needed to validate the study.

This is a very strange objection. The people who die in the transition phase are none the less dead and must be counted as a cost of the war. The purpose of the study was not to compare the death rate in some hypothetical future peaceful Iraq with Saddam’s Iraq, but to find out how many lives the war had cost.

King concludes that the death rate must have gone down. (Yes, he really does!)

A proper study would estimate the steady state rate of democide under Saddam versus the transitional death rate increase in the postwar period. That is the test of what is seen versus what is not seen. My conclusion that the latter is less than the former is speculative, but the Lancet study does not dissuade me, and Lambert’s claims focus only on that which is seen.

Apparently in King’s mind a properly conducted survey with deaths verified on death certificates is trumped by a speculation based on no evidence whatsoever.

Last week Kyoto came into effect. Apparently that was the signal for columns by a whole bunch of pundits who have two features in common: 1. they are manifestly ill-equipped to understand the science and 2. they are utterly certain that there is no such thing as global warming.

Our first pundit is Michael Duffy in the Daily Telegraph informs us:

The truth is we have no control over global warming, and in any case it’s not a problem at all.

The myth holds that carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere is increasing, due mainly to industrial activities, and this traps heat lower down, with the result that temperatures on the earth’s surface rise.

The first problem with this is that the extra carbon dioxide we create is so minuscule in comparison with the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere it’s highly unlikely it could create this effect. Variations in the amount of heat the sun generates are a far more likely cause.

We have so far increased carbon dioxide by 30%, which is not minuscule. While there are other greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide is an important one. Furthermore, the greenhouse effect is very large, keeping us 30°C warmer than we would be without an atmosphere, so even a relatively small increase in its strength produces significant warming. Variations in the sun do not explain the warming we have seen. The latest study on this found:

Along with his Scripps colleague, David Pierce, Barnett used a combination of computer models and hard, observed evidence to reach their conclusions. They determined that warming measured in the world’s oceans closely matched the results predicted in computer models for warming caused by human activity.

When the models assessed whether the ocean warming could be caused by volcanic or solar activity, Barnett told reporters, the answer was stark: “Not a chance.”

Duffy continues:

The second problem is that temperatures have not risen along with industrialisation over the past 200 years.

The graph on the right shows that temperatures have actually risen. You really have to work hard to remain as ignorant of this as Duffy is.

Our second pundit is Andrew Bolt (last seen arguing that a cold day in Melbourne was good evidence against global warming) claims

The truth is that despite the hype, not much about global warming is known for sure, not even how much the Earth has heated, and whether our carbon dioxide (CO2) caused it. So say even lead authors of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose doctored “predictions” are most used to frighten us.

Doctored predictions? Odd, you would think that the hundreds of scientists whose work went into the IPCC would have noticed if their work had been doctored.

One of them, Professor John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, asks: “Will increases in CO2 affect the climate significantly? Are significant changes occurring now? Climate models suggest the answer is yes. Real data suggests otherwise.”

Now this sounds like he is saying that the real data shows no warming and only the climate models show warming, but if you look at the context of his statement you’ll find the real data shows warming at the surface (see graph above) and that Christy’s calculations from satellite measurements also show warming, but not as much. Christy says this contradicts the climate models, but other researchers’ calculations show more warming from the satellite data. And even if the climate models were wrong, it would not follow that we would expect no warming from increase CO₂. All you would be able to say is that we don’t know what the effects would be. No scientist has an explanation for the observed warming that does not involve CO₂.

Bolt continues:

Adds another, Professor Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “The temperature is always changing for the earth, so it has only two choices—going up or going down. It has done both, and that doesn’t say it’s due to CO2; it doesn’t say it’s going to continue; it doesn’t say anything beyond that.”

In the preceding sentence Lindzen said:

For the last hundred years, I think there is a general agreement that there is something like a half-degree increase in temperature.

That’s strange, Bolt claimed that Lindzen said that it was unknown “how much the Earth has heated” when in fact, Lindzen explicitly stated how much it had warmed.

And while Lindzen might express doubts about whether CO2 is causing the observed warming, the hundreds of other IPCC lead authors disagree with him. Not only that, Lindzen was one of the authors of the National Academy of Sciences report that 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.

Next, we have Melanie Philips, who is sure that global warming is a scam because (quoting McIntyre and McKitrick):

[Mann et al’s method], when tested on persistent red noise, nearly always produces a hockey stick shaped first principal component (PC1) and overstates the first eigenvalue.

According to her biography Philips is a journalist with a degree in English. Back when I was an undergraduate learning about stuff like eigenvalues and mathematical physics, my friends studying English didn’t learn about eigenvalues. Maybe it was different for Philips, or maybe she’s done some postgrad course in advanced statistical analysis, so I emailed her, asking her if she knew what red noise, principal components, or eigenvalues were. No reply. My guess is that she doesn’t know what any of them are. (Oh, and M&M’s “always produces a hockey stick” argument is a red herring.)

But, if global warming is a scam, who is behind the scam? A tough question, you would think, but fortunately our old friend Louis Hissink has the answer:

And to think the Hadley Centre was initially created to fabricate the illusion of global warming during Baroness Thatcher’s premiership to diminish the power of the coal-miners union in the UK.

Curse you, Maggie Thatcher!

Via Chris Brook and Anthony Cox, I find that Melanie Philips took the same combination of ignorance of science and utter certainty that the scientists are wrong that she used to “prove” that global warming was a scam and conducted a grossly irresponsible scare campaign against vaccination. On this issue, for once, Tech Central Station is on the side of the angels, with several articles debunking the scare.* My favourite one is by Iain Murray, who writes:

[A Cardiff University report] examined the public’s understanding of the issues surrounding the MMR vaccine, which has been alleged to be linked with a rise in autism diagnoses among children. In the month after the story broke in January 2002 there were over 300 media reports on the issue, a classic example of a media feeding frenzy over a scientific issue. Over two-thirds of these stories mentioned the supposed link between the shot and the illness. As a result, 53 percent of the British public interviewed at the height of the coverage agreed with the suggestion that, as there was equal media coverage of the two sides of the debate, there must be equal evidence to support each case.

This is far from the truth. Study after study has been unable to find any significant or causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Scientists are therefore virtually unanimous that there is no cause to worry about the shot harming children in this way. The study found, however, that almost half of television reports and over two-thirds of “quality” newspaper stories failed to mention this important fact.

It is, of course, generally a good rule in journalism that when one view is stated, the opposite view should be given time or space to balance the coverage. Yet in this scientific case, as the study’s authors say, “Attempts to balance claim about the risks of the MMR jab tended merely to indicate that there were two competing bodies of evidence.” By attempting to meet one journalistic standard in giving a balanced picture, the journalists failed to meet other standards about giving the proper context to the claims.

Absolutely right. The same problem occurs in reporting of global warming where balanced reporting obscures the scientific consensus on global warming. Of course this is Iain Murray writing in Tech Central Station, so he then proceeds to tie himself in knots arguing that the consensus on global warming is different, eventually inventing a distinction between a “theoretical consensus” that reporters should ignore and a “scientific consensus” that reporters should inform their readers about:

So, in the case of MMR, journalists gave equal time when they should have pointed out the general scientific agreement. In the case of climate change, the journalists are pointing out scientific agreement when they should be giving equal time. It is the public who is suffering in both cases.

You can’t make this stuff up.

* OK, I know what you are thinking—Tech Central Station is funded by pharmaceutical companies.

In today’s Sydney Morning Herald Miranda Devine has a go at the Lancet study, writing

The British medical journal The Lancet published a paper last October (timed deliberately, its authors admit, before the US presidential election), estimating that 100,000 more Iraqis died than would have been expected if the war had not happened. Since then, this figure is constantly, unquestioningly cited as an article of faith.

And yet the research has been criticised enough by credible people to have doubt cast on what is, after all, only an estimate based on a sample of 998 Iraqi households, which even the researchers said was too small.

No, it hasn’t been criticised by any credible people. All of the experts in the field that have been consulted agree that the study was sound. And no, the researchers did not say that the sample was too small. Devine seems to have made that bit up.

Devine continues:

When you read the fine print, the researchers found there was a 95 per cent chance the number of excess deaths lay between 8000 and 194,000. By choosing the midway point, they were being “conservative”.A different figure comes from an independent team of researchers running the website Iraq Body Count, which counts only civilian deaths, and only those confirmed by press reports or hospital and morgue officials. Yesterday it was between 16,069 and 18,339.

Not all values in the confidence interval are equally likely. The ones in the middle are more likely and 100,000 is the most likely number. It’s conservative because the estimate excludes the deaths in Falluja, so the true number is more likely to be greater than 100,000 than less. The number from the Iraq Body Count does not contradict the Lancet study in any way at all since it is measuring something different. Nobody expects every single death to be reported in the press.

Devine continues:

Can’t the war critics see, even if mistakes have been made, that Iraq is on track to a brighter future and that is a cause worth supporting? Can’t they see their unremitting negativity has consequences?

Can’t the war supporters see that their wilful refusal to count the deaths of Iraqi civilians has consequences? Why won’t war supporters accept responsibility for the deaths that their war has caused?

King at SCSU Scholars has updated his post attacking the Lancet study with a response to my post. He admits error on one point, but on the rest he has the nerve to accuse me of bringing biases rather than facts to the debate. To see who is bringing facts and who is bringing biases let’s look at one of the points he contests:

King originally claimed (my emphasis):

They also chose both to change their list of randomly sampled areas so they didn’t have to drive as much; this meant they stayed close to Baghdad and the Sunni triangle, probably oversampling high-casualty areas.

Note that reducing the driving doesn’t matter unless it biases the results of the study. King claimed that biases the results upwards by oversampling high-casualty areas. I responding by pointing out that they didn’t oversample high-casualty areas:

It is true that sampling was done in such a way as to reduce travel, but this does not mean that they stayed close to Baghdad. They paired Governates that were adjacent and had had similar levels of violence and only sampled from one (randomly chosen) of the pair. This produces no bias towards high-casualty areas.

According to King, that passage contains no facts, just my biases. Now look at how King responds (my emphasis):

See page 1858: “During September, 2004, many roads were not under the control of the Government of Iraq or coalition forces. Local police checkpoints were perceived by team members as target identication screens for rebel groups. To lessen risks to investigators, we sought to minimise travel distances and the number of Governorates to visit, while still sampling from all regions of the country.” No Basra and the marsh Arabs. Limited sampling of the Kurdish north (Arbil, for instance.)

Instead of sampling Basrah, they sampled neighbouring Missan (where marsh Arabs also live). If you look at the map (figure 1 in the study) you will see that Missan is not “close to Baghdad”. Instead of sampling Arbil they sampled neighbouring (and also Kurdish) Sulaymaniya. If you look at the map (figure 1 in the study) you will see that Sulaymaniya is not “close to Baghdad”.

One glance at the map (figure 1 in the study) shows that they did not stay “close to Baghdad”, but King continues to insist that they did.

King finishes with:

The Lancet article includes only one violent death of the 7438 preinvasion individuals they interview (see Table 3). That fact alone should indicate the lack of measurement of prison/torture chamber deaths under Saddam.

The Amnesty International Report on Iraq for 2002 estimates that there were scores of killings by Saddam. This number is too small to show up in a survey of the size of the Lancet’s.

Update: Amazingly, King insists over and over again that they oversampled Sunni areas, despite the clear language of the study and Figure 1, seen to the right, that shows that their samples were not close to Baghdad and did not oversample Sunni areas.

The Tangled Bank is a showcase of blog posts on biology, medicine or natural history. The latest compilation is here.

R.J. Rummel has a response to my earlier post on the Lancet study. Unfortunately he still does not understand what the researchers did.

In his original post Rummel claimed the pre-invasion statistics came from Saddam’s Ministry of Health. In fact, they come from the survey the researchers conducted. Despite my explanation, Rummel now argues:

However, then there is Figure 1, which is unreadable except for its description that lists the data as crude mortality per year before and after invasion. For the before, I can only guess that the Ministry of Health’s statistics were used. No source indicated for the figure.

No, the before comes from the survey they conducted. If the source was something other than their own survey they would have said so.

Rummel also stated that they had not carried out tests of significance. I pointed out that they gave 95% confidence intervals for their results. Rummel replies:

Anyway, there are confidence intervals of 95 percent on all major survey statistics, except, so far as I could find, on the difference in proportions.

From the study: “If we exclude the Falluja data, the risk of death is 1.5-fold ([95% CI] 1.1-2.3) higher after the invasion.” Since 1 is outside the confidence interval the increase is statistically significant. Rummel continues:

I’m not comfortable that a difference of 46 vs. 90 deaths should be the basis for proclaiming to the world that over 100,000 excess deaths occurred since the invasion. Would you take a medicine that showed only a .4 percent (100x((90/7868)-(46/7438)) improvement over taking a placebo, especially when there were side effects (in the case of Iraq, the claim of over 100,000 excess deaths provided support to the anti-American left, the terrorists, and the Ted Kennedy Vietnam-all-over-again sayers)?

The increase was not 0.4%, but 0.4 percentage points or 50%. Killing 0.4% of the population of Iraq is actually rather a large effect. Admitting the existence of a problem is the first step to do something about it.

Rummel writes:

I assume that Lambert accepts that on which he did not comment.

This is an incorrect assumption. I addressed the most serious flaws in Rummel’s post. It does not follow that I agree with the rest. Briefly,

1. In the survey, Death certificates were required of death claims in at least 2 out of 30 households, which leaves a lot of room for false claims

This is misleading. Most of the 30 households did not have any deaths so in those households there is no possibility of a false death claim. The relevant statistic is that 81% of the time that they asked for a death certificate they got one, which does not leave much room for false claims.

2. … how did the fear of a family about the interviewers (when life is at stake, can one really trust what an interviewer promises about secrecy) bias the results?

The interviewers, who are in the best position to know, did not think that the results were biased by such fears.

3. There was no attempt to determine if a family supported the terrorists, or was part of the previous tyranny.

Sure, but so what? Are Saddam supporters going to instantly forge death certificates to inflate the numbers?

4. The survey found that there was no evidence of “widespread wrongdoing on the part of individual soldiers on the ground.” In fact, it found no wrongdoing, that is, what could be violations of the Geneva Conventions. However, again, this is never noted in media reports of the survey.

I’m afraid that bad news is more newsworthy than good news.

Ted Lapkin has objected to my reference to him in my post on the Great DDT Hoax. In his email he writes:

I would very much prefer, if possible, to keep things on an informal basis rather than a legal one. Thus this whole misunderstanding can be cleared up by a retraction and apology on your blog. In that event I would see no need to pursue matters further.

I offered to post his argument as to why he felt that I was wrong, but he declined, saying that it was a private communication. I have posted the paragraph above because I don’t think threats are entitled to privacy.

Meanwhile, the DDT hoax has appeared in The American Spectator, with Gerald and Natalie Sirkin writing:

Sri Lanka (Ceylon), reacting to Silent Spring, in the 1960s gave up DDT. Its malarial cases had decreased from 2.8 million down to 17. After Sri Lanka gave it up, malaria shot back up to over 2.5 million. …

The search for an effective substitute for DDT continues to fail 30 years after the Ruckelshaus ban. The search for a treatment for malaria continues to fail; the mutations of the malaria virus soon make a drug ineffective. The search for a malaria-vaccine continues to fail.

As well as repeating the hoax story about environmentalists pressuring Sri Lanka to give up DDT, they pretend that there are no alternatives to DDT, when in fact there is plety of research that shows that insecticide treated netting is more effective in most places. And they manage to avoid mentioning that mosquitoes can and do develop resistance to DDT while mentioning that the “malaria virus” develops resistance to drugs. (And malaria is not caused by a virus.)

According to this profile, Miranda Devine (last seen making stuff up in an attempt to debunk the Lancet study), once worked for the textile physics division of CSIRO. So she should know that one purpose of peer review is to weed out scientific papers that are inaccurate or where the conclusions are not properly supported by the evidence offered. She went on to write an opinion column where accuracy and supporting your claims are not important, so perhaps that explains why in her latest screed she seems to believe that peer review is a tool to silence dissent. Devine takes on the hockey stick:

The so-called “hockey stick graph” published in 1998 by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann became an article of faith, and underpinned the Kyoto Protocol. It purported to plot average surface temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere for the previous 1000 years. Temperatures appear to remain constant until 100 years ago when the graph takes a sudden upturn, supposedly showing the Earth heating up as the industrial revolution kicks in.

OK, except that Mann is at the University of Virginia and the 1998 paper containing the “hockey stick graph”, entitled “Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries“, only plotted temperatures for the past 600 years (the title is a clue). And the Kyoto Protocol dates from 1997. Which is before Mann (and Bradley and Hughes)’s paper was published. And the graph was not an “article of faith”—there have been many other temperature reconstructions published (see graph on right).

Devine continues:

It took six years and several sacked scientific journal editors before doubt was thrown on the hockey stick.

Actually, what happened was that several journal editors resigned because the journal published a flawed paper that disagreed with the hockey stick. Not because the paper disagreed, but because the authors had failed to properly support their conclusions. And study the graph of the other reconstructions again.

Devine continues:

Last year Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick discovered a fundamental flaw in the computer program which produces the hockey stick. It seemed, whatever random data it was fed, the program almost always produced a hockey stick.

This is a red herring. If you do a linear regression on random data, you’ll produce a straight line. Does that mean that linear regression is invalid because it always produces straight lines when there are none in the data? Of course not. What is important is whether the result of the regression is statistically significant—for random data it won’t be. William Connolley did some experiments and reported:

What that appears to demonstrate is that M&M are right about one thing: it often does lead to a “hockey stick” shape in random data. But the problem is that the variance-explained of the PC1 done this way is tiny: the first eigenvalue is about 0.03. Whereas when you run it on real data the first eigenvalue is about 0.55 (back to 1000) or 0.38 (back to 1400). Which means the two problems are very different.

Back to Devine:

The Canadians couldn’t get their work published by a scientific journal but they put it on the web for all to see.

Actually, they got it published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Devine:

The voices of dissenters have been silenced for too long so all power to Crichton for bypassing the gatekeepers and going straight to the people.

Yes, it’s time that the elitist notion that what gets published in scientific journals be accurate is done away with! Let a thousand falsehoods bloom!

Oh yeah, Devine also drags out the Oregon Petition:

When Dr Fred Seitz, the past president of the US National Academy of Sciences, organised a petition opposing the Kyoto Protocol, he had 20,000 signatories - 17,000 with scientific degrees, including physicists, geo-physicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers and environmental scientists. But for simply stating there was no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases was causing catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of climate, they were dubbed “The Carbon Club, foot soldiers for the fossil-fuel industries”.

No they weren’t. Devine is just making things up again. Jeremy Leggett dubbed the lobbyists who work for the coal and oil industries the “foot soldiers for the fossil-fuel industries”, not the folks tricked into signing the Oregon Petition.