Deltoid

I wrote earlier about how tobacco company documents, released as apart of the Tobacco Settlement Agreement proved that Philip Morris created junkscience.com to argue that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) was harmless. Those documents also tell the story of how they set up a scientific journal controlled by tobacco-friendly editors so that research finding that ETS was harmless could be published. In 1987 Philip Morris cam up with a plan (details in this document) to:

Establish a genuine scientific journal on indoor air quality. The journal could be issued four times a year at a cost of $100,000.

The journal they founded is Indoor and Built Environment. The journal does not mention that it was founded and funded by the tobacco industry. The whole story is detailed in a recent paper in the Lancet by Garne, Watson, Chapman and Byrne. They analysed the content of articles in Indoor and Built Environment and discovered:

61% (40/66) of papers related to environmental tobacco smoke that were published in Indoor and Built Environment in the study period reached conclusions that could be judged to be industry-positive. Of these, 90% (36/40) had at least one author with a history of association with the tobacco industry. These figures can be compared with Barnes and Bero’s study of 68 articles on environmental tobacco smoke randomly selected from MEDLINE published between 1980 and 1994, which found 76.5% concluding environmental tobacco smoke to be “harmful”, and the same authors’ analysis of 106 reviews of this same topic, which found that 74% of reviews concluding environmental tobacco smoke was not harmful were written by authors with tobacco industry affiliations.

Conveniently enough, Indoor and Built Environment did not require its authors to disclose interests such as tobacco company funding. Garne et als conclusion is rather understated:

On the basis of the evidence presented in this paper, there is a serious concern that the tobacco industry may have been unduly influential on the content of the journal. The industry and its lawyers expected that the establishment of the International Society of the Built Environment would publish “overall results [which] will be positive and important”. It appears to be the case that its expectations were in large part fulfilled.

I wonder what’s next? Perhaps the astroturfers will establish their own country where all the health organiziations agree that ETS is harmless.

Lott and James Glassman have a piece in the New York Post arguing that felons should not be allowed to vote. Well, I can’t claim to know anything about the issue (for that, see Kevin Drum and Julie Saltman), but this is John “98%” Lott and James “36,000″ Glassman, so you just know their numbers are going to be dodgy. And sure enough, in the first paragraph we find:

A bill to guarantee that millions of convicted murderers, rapists and armed robbers can vote.

That sounded like a lot to me, so I thought I’d check. I found a table giving a breakdown of felony convictions by crime type and it seems that 1% are for murder, 1% are for rape, and 2% are for armed robbery. These sorts of felons are not typical (drug offenses are the most common category), and certainly there are not millions (or even hundreds of thousands) of them.

I was also impressed by the entirely circular argument they offered for not allowing felons to vote:

Why shouldn’t felons be able to vote if they have paid their debt to society? Simply because society believes that the debt includes a prohibition on voting.

And how we know that society believes they shouldn’t vote? Why obviously because society has laws against them voting. In other words, they shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they aren’t allowed to vote.

By considering bogus criticisms of the Lancet study it is possible to gain an appreciation of the concept of the infinite. No matter how many you’ve seen, someone can always come up with a new one. I give you Rob, who writes:

In an attempt at firmer confirmation, the interviewers asked for death certificates in 78 households and were provided them 63 times.

So out of 7,000+ people questioned they only asked for proof in 78 instances? And only received proof in 63 percent of those instances? Seems like they should have been taking better care to document these deaths.

There is no point in asking for a death certificate if there hasn’t been a death, so the 7,000 people number is irrelevant. And, uh, 63/78 is not the same as 63%.

Then, in this thread, Rob tries to defend his criticism. Only read if you enjoy seeing someone repeatedly punch themselves in the face.

Update: Rob has “corrected” his post by removing the word “percent”:

And only received proof in 63 of those instances?

This has converted an arithemtic error to a logic error. What is important is not the raw number of confirmations, but the percentage that could be confirmed (which was 63/78 or about 80%).

Radagast has put together the third edition of the Skeptics’ Circle. Lots of good reading there. Thanks, Radagast!

In Lott’s latest piece he is once more complaining that the media doesn’t report defensive gun use. Mark Wilson intervened to try to stop a shooting rampage in Texas. Unfortunately, the shooter was wearing body armour and Wilson was shot and killed. The police eventually killed the shooter (full story).

Lott concedes that Wilson’s bravery was widely reported, but also writes:

For example, in about 30 percent of the multiple victim public school shootings that have captivated Americans’ attention starting in 1997, people used guns to stop the attacks before uniformed police were able to arrive on the scene. Few people know about these cases because only about one percent of the news stories on these cases mention how the attacks were stopped.

Lott is referring to these three cases:

Pearl, Mississippi

Joel Myrick used a pistol to capture Luke Woodham as he was escaping from the scene of his shooting rampage at a high school.

Edinboro, Pennsylvania

James Strand pointed his shotgun at Andrew Wurst and made him drop his pistol after Wurst had fled from a school dance where he had shot several people.

Appalachian School of Law

Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross, two armed, off-duty police officers, helped capture Peter Odighizuwa as he was leaving the school where he had killed three people.

Lott is wrong to say that these people used guns to stop the attacks. In all three cases the shooter had already stopped and was trying to leave the scene of the crime. In the last case, the defenders’ guns did not have much of a role since Odighizuwa was out of ammunition, had put his gun down and had to be physically tackled. On his blog, Lott even claims that

the Tyler, Texas attack that was stopped by Mark Wilson.

Lott’s one percent number is also misleading. There is no reason for most of the stories about the shootings to mention how the shooter was captured. For example, a story about the funeral of one of the victims or a news brief would obviously not cover this. A realistic examination for bias would look only at stories about the capture and see if they mentioned the defenders’ guns. Even this would not be conclusive, since the reporter could have talked to a witness that was not aware of the gun use. I did a detailed analysis of the hundreds of stories on the Appalachian School of Law and found that at most there was one biased story.

Lott’s article continues:

In the book, The Bias Against Guns, Bill Landes of the University of Chicago Law School and I examine multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 and find that when states passed right-to-carry laws, these attacks fell by 60 percent. Deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent.

One of the arguments Lott uses to attack Ayers and Donohue’s work refuting Lott’s more-guns-less-crime claim is that A&D’s work did not appear in a peer-reviewed journal. But here Lott is citing work that did not appear in any kind of journal, peer-reviewed or otherwise. What’s more there has been a peer-reviewed journal paper on carry laws and concealed carry. Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody found virtually no support for the notion that concealed carry laws reduce mass public shootings. They were unable to replicate the results of Lott and Landes.

Lott continues:

Many people find it hard to believe that 18 national surveys by academics as well as national polling organizations show that there are 2 million defensive gun uses each year.

What are these “18 national surveys”? Well, numbers 1 to 14 are the surveys listed in table 1 of Kleck and Gertz. Trouble is, if you look at the table, two of the surveys don’t give any estimate and three aren’t national surveys. Less obvious is the fact that the estimates were produced by combining the results with information from Klecks’s own survey. Only four of the surveys give independent measures of defensive gun use: Kleck’s NSDS: 2.5 million DGUs, Hart: 650,000, Mauser: 600,000, Tarrance: 300,000. Survey 15 is the NSPOF which estimates 23 million (twenty-three million—not a typo) DGUs. Survey 16 is from Hemenway, Azreal and Miller. Lott falsely claims that this survey yields an estimate of 2 million DGUs a year when actually it is 400,000 a year. Survey 17 is Lott’s own 2002 survey. Lott claims this indicates 2.3 million DGUs per year, but he screwed up the calculations. And survey 18? That’s the one that exists only in Lott’s head. Yes, he’s still citing it. Lott is incorrigible.

Lott does not mention the results of the NCVS which gives numbers varying from 50,000 to 150,000. The NAS Panel on Firearms and Violence could not reconcile the wildly varying estimates and decided that more research was needed to find out how many defensive guns uses there were each year.

Lott complains about the stories that did not mention Wilson’s gun use, writing:

This misreporting actually endangers people’s lives. By selectively reporting the news and turning a defensive gun use story into one that merely says “police shot him dead,” the media give misleading impressions of what actions saved the lives of people confronted by violence.

Reality check. Wilson’s defensive gun use got him killed. He did not, despite Lott’s claim, stop the killer. Reporting the full story is likely to discourage defensive gun use.

In any case, Lott’s whole premise is pretty silly. The media reports deaths caused with cars all the time, but rarely reports the life saving uses of cars. Is this a bias against cars?

When people raise questions about the mysterious 1997 survey, Lott’s standard line of defence is:

“the survey was replicated, and I obtained very similar results.”

So how similar are the results? Well, Lott claims that the 2002 survey gave a 95% brandishing number, quite close to the 98% he claims he found in 1997. However, the 2002 survey does not give a 95% number and is too small for the number to be reliable.

Very little attention has been paid to the other result that Lott claims comes from his 2002 survey—an estimate that there were 2.3 million defensive gun uses (DGUs) in 2002. This number is quite close to the 2.1 million number that Lott says he got from the alleged 1997 survey.

We can test if the difference between two results is statistically significant (Details here). The p value given by the test is 0.96. This means that two surveys that sampled exactly the same population would differ by more than this difference 96% of the time. Now, a small p value (less than 0.05 by convention) would mean that the differences were too large to be likely to be caused by chance, and we could conclude that the surveys were different in some way. A large p value like we got here suggests that the close agreement of the surveys is too good to be true. Properly conducted surveys of the size that Lott says he used would tend to differ by more than the amount that these two surveys supposedly do. Now it is possible that the close agreement is just chance, but there is only one chance in twenty-five chance that the surveys would have agreed this well, and given all the other behaviour by Lott, this seems a little suspicious.

Nobody can check Lott’s calculations of the 2.1 million estimate that supposedly comes from the 1997 survey, but I can check his work on the 2002 survey. Using the weights I worked out while showing that he got the brandishing number from the survey wrong, I found that there were 15.8 weighted DGUs in this survey. Dividing this by 1015 (survey size) and multiplying by the adult population of the US gives a DGU estimate not of 2.3 million as Lott claims, but of 3.3 million.

Lott managed to get both the number of DGUs and the brandishing number wrong in his 2002 survey. Both of these errors were in the direction of making the 2002 survey agree more closely with the results he claims to have obtained from his 1997 survey. In the case of the DGU numbers it is rather unlikely that a random error would make it agree that closely.

Technical details: To test if the two surveys gave different results I used a Chi square test. This requires the weighted number of defensive gun uses in each survey. Lott does not tell us this number, but we can work backwards from the estimated number of DGUs. For 2002, this was 2.3 million in a population of 207 million adults and a survey size of 1015, so the weighted number is 1015*2.3/207=11. For the 1997 survey, a similar calculation yields 25 weighted DGUs in a survey of size 2424. Plugging these numbers into a 2×2 Chi-square with Yates continuity correction gives p=0.96.

A large group of public health experts has criticized the coalition for their continuing failure to count the civilian casualties in Iraq. In an editorial in the British Medical Journal Klim McPherson writes:

Public access to reliable data on mortality is important. The policy being assessed—the allied invasion of Iraq—was justified largely on grounds of democratic supremacy. Voters in the countries that initiated the war, and others—not least in Iraq itself—are denied a reliable evaluation of a key indicator of the success of that policy. This is unacceptable.

Instead the UK government’s policy was first not to count at all, and then to rely publicly on extremely limited data available from the Iraqi Ministry of Health. This follows US government policy; famously encapsulated by General Tommy Franks of the US Central Command “We don’t do body counts.”² Its inadequacy was emphasised after the publication of a representative household survey that estimated 100 000 excess deaths since the 2003 invasion.³ The government rejected this survey and its estimates as unreliable; in part absurdly because statistical extrapolation from samples was thought invalid.⁴ Imprecise they are, but to a known extent. These are unique estimates from a dispassionate survey conducted in the most dangerous of epidemiological conditions. Hence the estimates, as far as they can go, are unlikely to be biased, even allowing for the reinstatement of Falluja. To confuse imprecision with bias is unjustified.

The reason for the US and UK’s governments’ refusal to count the casualties could not be more obvious: it is politically advantageous for them to pretend that the casualties don’t exist. Their refusal is costing Iraqi lives. It seems that political advantage for war supporters is more important to them than Iraqi lives. (Hat tip Say Uncle)

The full statement by the public health experts is below the fold.

(more…)

Two more lazy and ignorant pundits have been spotted spreading the hoax about a non-existant DDT ban. In the New York Times Nicholas Kristof writes

Environmentalists were right about DDT’s threat to bald eagles, for example, but blocking all spraying in the third world has led to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths.

There is no ban on the the use of DDT against malaria. It is still used for that purpose. This fact is not a secret. Kristof just hasn’t bothered to find out the truth.

Writing in London’s Daily Telegraph, Dick Taverne perpetrates this howler:

DDT is another good example of a chemical that saved millions of lives by eliminating malarial mosquitoes yet was banned after environmentalists - including Rachel Carson, author of The Silent Spring - accused it of causing cancers. Yet not a single study shows that exposure to DDT damages the health of human beings. In Sri Lanka alone, the reported number of malaria cases rose from just 17 in 1963 to more than a million in 1968 after DDT was banned.

DDT was not banned in Sri Lanka in 1963. Nor did malaria increase to more than a million cases there in 1968. Some studies have found links between DDT and cancer (thogh more studies have found no link). The title “Silent Spring” does not refer to cancer, but the possibility that song birds could be wiped out by DDT.

Kristof at least has the excuse that he has to bang out a column a week and doesn’t have the time to properly research them. Taverne does not have that excuse since since his column is an extract from what would seem to be a rather poorly researched book.

Apparently the Lancet report is so disturbing to some pro-war folks that they are now denying its very existence. Here’s Tim Blair, listing stories that he believes progressives have invented:

Poor progressives. All they have is Lancet reports, Ayad Allawi killing people, the menace of depleted uranium, plastic turkeys, oil pipelines in Afghanistan, Jewish media conspiracies, another Stalingrad in Baghdad, Bush’s dumbness, harsh Afghan winters, the massive influence of Jeff Gannon, and looted Iraqi museums. They never get to invent any stories at all.

I sent him a copy of the report in the hope of convincing him that it really exists, but unfortunately Blair has not corrected his post.

So I was reading this thread on John Quiggin’s blog when the discussion turned to Tim Blair’s policy of banning any dissenters from commenting on his blog. (See here for an example of the sort of comment that will get you banned.) Now Blair doesn’t have to support comments from people that disagree with him, but there are free commenting systems available, so I set up Haloscan so that people could comment without being banned. I also wrote a little CGI proxy script that people could use to add links to the Haloscan comments under each of Blair’s posts.

Tim Blair got rather upset, apparently believing that I had made a copy of his content to create a mirror. Ken Parish was concerned that the proxied version could be mistaken for the real thing, so I modified the proxy so it clearly indicated that the user was looking at a modified version of the blog. Guy Tsafnat reckoned that I had gone too far.

Meanwhile Blair called my Head of School several times to complain. My HoS checked with UNSW’s lawyers who said that they didn’t think that there was anything wrong with my proxy. However, they were concerned that some people might mistakenly think that UNSW was hosting a copy of Blair’s blog, so I offered to move the script off site.

Now Blair offers an RSS feed on his site. If you click on that link you will see that it is not very readable. That’s because it’s not meant to be directly browsed, but displayed by a feed reader. These can display the content in an enormous variety of ways and add links to other relevant material. For example, the one I use adds links to a Technorati search for links to each post. Feed readers can be desktop applications or web-based. The web based readers are sites which read in RSS feeds and reformat the information into html so that it can be displayed in a browser. If you go to any of dozens of sites you can read Blair’s blog on that site instead of Blair’s.

Anyway, Blair called me and asked me take it down. I asked him if would object to my taking his RSS feed and displaying it with links to the Haloscan comments. Unfortunately he did not know that he had an RSS feed or even what that was. I tried to explain what that was but Blair would not say whether or not he would object. At some stage Blair threatened me with the Packer lawyers. Packer owns the Bulletin, the magazine that Blair works for. He did not think that it was fair that he was singled for having comments added. According to Blair his comments policy was not particularly different from Ken Parish, who sometimes closes comment threads. After some discussion Blair hung up on me, warning that if it wasn’t taken down today we would hear from his lawyers.

Meanwhile, drscroogemcduck posted an elegant bookmarklet that lets you add the Haloscan links from inside your browser. (It only works from Firefox.) I thought was a nice solution so I replaced the proxy with a redirect to the bookmarklet. Next, Blair’s lawyer called my HoS and also UNSW’s lawyer to demand that the proxy be taken down. (It already had been, but the lawyer seemed unaware of this.) I don’t know whether this was one of the “Packer lawyers” that Blair had referred to earlier.

Interestingly, the alternative Haloscan comments were getting many more comments than Blair’s real ones until Blair posted this comment:

Can I ask all timblair.net regulars to stop commenting here. This is exactly what he wants and you’re only encouraging him.

And all the Blairites, who seemed to be enjoying having people to debate with for once, dutifully returned to their cocoon.

Update: The comment was actually posted by a Tim Blair impersonator. The Blairites took their marching orders from a fake Blair.

A handy hint from drscroogemcduck:

Avocadia has adapted my script for greasemonkey and made it look a bit nicer (I think). Greasemonkey will automatically run the script each time you visit blair’s site. After installing greasemonkey you can install the script by right clicking on this link and selecting “Install User Script”.

You need Firefox for this version as well.

In my previous post I noted that Tim Blair had posted:

Can I ask all timblair.net regulars to stop commenting here. This is exactly what he wants and you’re only encouraging him.

In my comments someone also claiming to be Tim Blair posted:

You complete idiot. That comment wasn’t posted by me. I suggest you ban the impersonator responsible.

Oh no! It’s like one of those movies where there is a real person and a fake person and you have a gun and you hafta shoot the fake one. How can you tell which one is the real Tim Blair? What to do, who to ban. Is there some characteristic that distinguishes those two comments? Got it! One Blair is abusive and the other one isn’t. I banned the non-abusive “Blair”.

Update: Glenn Reynolds suggests a way to tell the real Tim Blair from an imposter:

The one with the drink in his hand, is the way to bet.

He also has this:

Andy Freeman emails: “What is Lambert doing defending himself with a gun?”

Hmmm, Andy Freeman. Me with a gun.

Tim Blair has posted emails from Ted Lapkin and Andrew Bolt who object to a couple of my posts. Blair fails to provide links to the posts so that readers can determine whether Lapkin and Bolt have accurately described what happened.

Lapkin begins:

In November 2003, I argued in the pages of Quadrant magazine that the environmental movement is moral culpable for the deaths of 2 million Africans killed each year by malaria. In mid-February 2005, a left-wing blogger named Tim Lambert (Deltoid) accused me, and others, of participation in what he described as “The Great DDT Hoax”. Without going into all the gory details, the crux of the issue deals with the decision by Sri Lanka to cease using DDT during the mid-1960s.

My post showed, using multiple sources, that Sri Lanka did not stop using DDT in the mid 60s. They suspended the anti-malaria spraying in 1963 and resumed it in 1969. Agricultural use continued through the 60s. I suggested that Lapkin had been taken in by the hoax, not that he had orchestrated it.

Lapkin continues:

I remonstrated with Lambert in an email communication that I stipulated was for private consumption only, citing segments from my Quadrant piece that made his accusation factually unsustainable. But Lambert avoided the substance of my counter-argument like the plague. Instead, Lambert cut and pasted to his website the introductory portion of my email that expressed my desire to resolve this issue amicably rather than litigiously.

I did not find Lapkin’s argument persuasive and told him so. Nonetheless, I offered to post his email so my readers could decide for themselves. At the end (not the beginning) of his email Lapkin threatened me with legal action:

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.

He clearly threatened legal action unless I retracted.

Lapkin:

Lambert accused me of threatening him, using my supposedly menacing verbiage as an excuse to disregard my explicit request that my email missive should remain in the private domain. And of course, through the gambit of playing the victim card, Lambert was able to sidestep my factual rebuttal of his hoax claim. How convenient.

I was able to sidestep his “rebuttal” because he refused to make it public. I really wanted to make it public but respected Lapkin’s wish that it be kept private.

Lapkin:

In light of Tim Lambert’s past behaviour, I have no confidence that he would not tamper with any comment that I submitted to his site. In order to ensure that my response to Lambert appeared in unaltered form, I appealed to the good offices of Tim Blair who kindly offered to feature my riposte on his weblog.

There are thousands of comments on my blog. My past behaviour clearly shows that I don’t tamper with comments. And I already had his comment—if I wanted to, I could have tampered with it and posted it.

And we get to the end of Lapkin’s email without him sharing his “factual rebuttal” of my post.

Next up, Andrew Bolt, who is responding to this post:

In particular, can you explain why, among your other deceits and misrepresentations, you said this:

Andrew Bolt, writing in the Melbourne Herald Sun offers this conclusive disproof of 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.”

I ask because I actually argued the very opposite in the article you quote, as you must have known. Hint: read its concluding paragraph, which states:

Of course, one bit of wild weather in our ever-changing climate doesn’t disprove the holy theory of global warming. But nor should green groups claim the odd cold snap proves it, either …”

Got it? You say I claim to offer a conclusive disproof. I in fact write that this “doesn’t disprove”. Is that simple enough for you?

Bolt’s sarcasm detector needs adjusting. I think it is quite obvious from my post that I did not believe that Bolt’s argument was a “conclusive disproof” of global warming. In fact, I described it as “lame”. When I called it “conclusive disproof” I was sarcastically implying that it was nothing remotely like that. Nowhere did I say that Bolt regarded his argument as “conclusive disproof”. To avoid further misunderstanding I have modified the post to remove the sarcasm and apologize to Andrew Bolt for writing something that could be misunderstood.

The Fourth Skeptics Circle is here. Lots of interesting posts. In particular I recommend Richard Rockley’s “Five Apples“—he could almost be wrting about criticisms of the Lancet study.

If you haven’t read my previous forty posts on the Lancet study, here is a handy index. All right, let’s go.

First up, via Glenn Reynolds we have Andy S, who critiques the Lancet study despite not having read the thing. This is not a good idea, especially since he is relying on Kaplan’s flawed Slate article. Andy has three comments:

Firstly the use of a scientific publication to make POLITICAL POINTS is reprehensible. This Lancet study was published just before the American Presidential Election and was clearly an attempt to make President Bush look bad just before he faced the electorate.

The authors did hope to influence public policy—they had found an alarming number of deaths from coalition air strikes and wanted the US government to take action to reduce this. I think it was naive of them to think that their study would be considered fairly in the heat of the election campaign. In any case, this is irrelevant to the question of whether the study is sound or not.

His second comment is about the exclusion of Falluja from the estimate:

I don’t want to get technical but under this methodology Fulluja should have been included! The original Sample Design should have ensured that it was selected because it was known to be atypical! The original sample design would have accounted for the fact that the Falluja cluster was an atypical cluster and the analysis of the results would reflect this. There are sound and well established mathematical techniques to accomplish this.

Well, if they’d known exactly how atypical the Falluja cluster was they could have accounted for it. But that would have required data that they did not have. Excluding Falluja biases the results downwards. If you insist on including Falluja the number is 300,000 excess deaths. I think that number is too high because the Falluja cluster was atypical.

His third comment is:

As I understand the Lancet survey, interviewers went to selected households and asked about family deaths in the period between the invasion of Iraq and the day of the interview. To say none ( as most people probably did) is kind of boring so some respondents would be tempted to invent a dead relative. If the interviewee had an anti American agenda, as some surely did the temptation to lie would be even greater.

If Andy had read the study he would now that they did a spot check by asking to see a death certificate. In 81% of the cases checked they got to see a death certificate. In the remaining cases the reasons given for not being able to prove the death seemed plausible. It’s possible that some of these were invented, but this is not enough to make a big difference.

Glenn Reynolds has another post on the Lancet study, with comments from readers and bloggers.

First, he links to Brian Crouch who reckons that Andrew Bolt’s critique discredits the Lancet study. No it doesn’t. I don’t want to seem harsh here, but if you haven’t even studied basic statistics and you criticize the statistics of a study that has been peer reviewed by professional statisticians you are likely to end up looking pretty silly.

Second, he has a comment from reader Dave Ujeio who defends the study, having studied it one one of his stats courses. Ujeio gets it right—he had a good teacher and I give him an A.

Third, Hugh Thorner

There’s no need to debunk the 100,000 civilian casualty figure being cited so often by war opponents. In progressive circles it’s an article of faith that pre-war sanctions killed 5000 Iraqis per month. Cost of the war two years later? 20,000 Iraqi civilians saved! And counting…

Sorry, but the 100,000 is excess deaths. It’s the increase in deaths due to the war. Deaths from the sanctions are included in the prewar death rate. Note the pre-war death rate in the study was for 2002 when the oil-for-food program had greatly reduced malnutrition and child mortality.

Next, Aron Spencer

1) the distribution of probable dead is not normal. It actually probably resembles a Poisson distribution.

Binomial, I would think, but both are reasonably approximated by a normal distribution in this case.

2) the study distribution’s 95% confidence range covers so much of the possible range as to be a nearly flat distribution (at least relatively speaking).

Let’s see, a 67% confidence interval goes from 50,000 to 150,000. I wouldn’t call it that flat.

3) even if the statistics were acceptable, there are serious questions about the sampling, as pointed out in the original debunking.

Kaplan’s original debunking got a ridiculous number of things wrong in his description of the sampling. See here.

4) the author of the original study is known to have biases related to the research.

Ad hominem. Are we supposed to disqualify everyone with an opinion on the war, one way or the other, from researching into casualties?

Then, John M:

Are we honestly to believe that twice as many non-combatants have died as a result of the liberation of Iraq as were American combatants in 8 years of VietNam? In a war designed and fought to minimize civilian casualties with things like GPS guided bombs?

If you want to compare the deaths with Vietnam the relevant comparison is with the number of Vietnamese deaths. Which was 1-2 million. Maybe GPS guided bombs successfully minimize civilian casualties and maybe they don’t. The way to find out is to actually count the number of deaths.

And Craig Bond:

Based on this information, is it technically incorrect to claim that 8000 or 194,000 would be “rare” events. Instead, the correct conclusion, as in the “debunking” article by Kaplan, is that we can be 95% confident that the true number of casualties lies between the bounds. It says nothing of the probability of any of these outcomes.

Yes, the 95% confidence interval by itself doesn’t tell us what the probabilities are. But this doesn’t mean that each value is equally likely. We can also construct other confidence intervals. We can be 67% confident that the number is between 50,000 and 150,000. In this sense the end points of the 95% CI are less likely and the middle is most likely.

Andy S, last seen criticizing the Lancet study without reading it, has now read it. Sort of. He writes:

Of Iraq’s 18 provinces only 12 were actually visited. … Now clusters assigned to the unsurveyed provinces were replaced in the sample by selecting clusters in adjacent provinces as proxies. The net effect of this is that of the five provinces in northern Iraq only Ninawa and Sulaymaniya were surveyed. …In a similar manner Iraqâ��s three southernmost provinces were left unsurveyed.

Somehow or other the Northern Kurdish population and the Southern Shiite population were undersampled whilst the Sunni provinces were completely covered!

I wonder how that happened?

The Kurdish and Shiite provinces were not undersampled. The cluster for Dehuk was moved into adjacent Ninawa, so Dehuk was undersampled and Ninawa oversampled, but overall, the Kurdish provinces got the correct number of samples. Similarly, the southern provinces were not undersampled. I really don’t know why people keep making reckless and false claims about the Lancet study.

Also, Shannon Love has had another go at the study in this post. He does have one reasonable point—that the summaries are unclear on which results depend on the inclusion of Falluja and which do not. In this passage,

Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.

while the statement “Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths” is robust, that is, true whether or not Falluja is included, the statement about air strikes is only true if Falluja is included. This means we should have less confidence in this statement and the study does not make this clear. This is, however, a pretty minor flaw.

Unfortunately, Love goes on to destroy his credibility with this claim:

When you realize that without the Falluja data the study tells a very different story than the one widely reported and that the Falluja data could only have been collected with active collusion of the Baathist and the Jihadist who ruled Falluja at the time, the publication of this study assumes a very sinister cast. Either through intention or willful disregard, the researchers and publisher acted as a propaganda tool for the Fascist elements in Iraq. Given the degree to which they carefully spun their results, I conclude the effect was intended.

Yes, he really did accuse the researchers and the Lancet of conducting a deliberate fraud on behalf of Islamic terrorists. This would be defamatory if it weren’t so completely silly.

And there is some robust discussion in the comments to Love’s post.

Update: Sigh. Brendan Nyhan cites Kaplan’s badly flawed critique.

Lila Guterman writes in the Columbia Journalism Review about the dismal reporting of the Lancet study:

Last fall, a major public-health study appeared in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, only to be missed or dismissed by the American press. To the extent it was covered at all, the reports were short and usually buried far from the front pages of major newspapers. The results of the study could have played an important role in future policy decisions, but the press’s near total silence allowed the issue to pass without debate. …

Reporters’ unease about the wide range may have been a primary reason many didn’t cover the study. One columnist, Fred Kaplan of Slate, called the estimate “meaningless” and labeled the range “a dart board.”

But he was wrong. I called about ten biostatisticians and mortality experts. Not one of them took issue with the study’s methods or its conclusions. If anything, the scientists told me, the authors had been cautious in their estimates. With a quick call to a statistician, reporters would have found that the probability forms a bell curve—the likelihood is very small that the number of deaths fell at either extreme of the range. It was very likely to fall near the middle.

The Washington Post’s Rob Stein quoted a military analyst at Human Rights Watch as saying, “These numbers seem to be inflated.” If even Human Rights Watch doesn’t believe the estimate, why should you? (The analyst told me that he hadn’t read The Lancet paper at the time, and that he told Stein so, although the Post didn’t mention that. The analyst now has no reservations about the study’s conclusions.) A reporter asserted in The New York Times that “the finding is certain to generate intense controversy,” even though she quoted no one critical of the study.

Daniel Davies comments on the current outbreak of Lancet denialism, including Shannon Love’s latest effort which Love describes as a “Fisking”. (”Fisking” is a term bloggers use for especially lame posts.) Love gets taken to bits in the comments to his post; I don’t need to add anything.

From Glenn Reynolds

Reader Peter Malloy emails: “The inability to sense of irony among the anti-war left never ceases to amaze me. The way this group clings to the 100,000 deaths figure makes clear that they WANT it, desperately, to be true. This group of people, ostensibly against the killing involved in war, actually desires that Iraqi civilians have suffered the worst case outcome in order to support their political views. Real humanitarians, ain’t they?”

I don’t have the ability to read the minds of the “anti-war left” and neither does Malloy. I can, however, read my own mind and Malloy can read his own mind. When he makes a statement about their desires it is based, not on actual knowledge of their desires, but whatever he can extrapolate from his own desires in the matter. So it well may be that Malloy wants to deny the results of the Lancet study, to pretend that Iraqi civilians have not suffered, in order to support his political views. Real humanitarian, isn’t he?

Those who are humanitarians will want to Count the Casualties in Iraq.

Go and read this most excellent post by William Connolley debunking many of the popular myths about global warming.

William Connolley lists another ten global warming myths.

PZ Myers delivers a righteous smackdown to Paul from Wizbang for Paul’s profoundly ignorant attacks on evolution. (Paul’s responds by calling evolution a cult.) As well as having totally demolished* the theory of evolution, Paul has also done for global warming:

Which is more plausible:

The established theory: CFC’s (et al) don’t destroy ozone at seal level, (or we would not have smog) they magically hold there electron stripping potential till they get to a higher altitude where they strip electrons off ozone and blah blah blah blah blah (there are tons of holes in the theory but I won’t even bother poke holes in it now)

OR

Paul’s Theory: You know, if we are getting hotter for the last 200 years, it might have something to do with this little thing called “heaters.” You know, those things we use to warm us up. Those of you in the Boston area might be familiar with them. To see the effects of man made heat generation, just watch the evening news during the winter. They give one temp in the city and one for the surrounding area which is generally 4 or 5 degrees cooler. Where do you think all that heat goes?

Hundreds of years of us producing heat to keep ourselves warm and produce steam for electricity is far more likely to be the cause of any warming that the nonsense the environmentalists are touting. If we can change the temperature locally by as many of 5 degrees, it is too much to believe that over hundreds of years we can move the average 0.8 degrees? (assuming man is moving the climate which is doubtful)

The environmentalist love to point out that sparsely populated nations have not had as large a temperature increase. DUH! They don’t have as many heaters, hot engines, electric generating plants etc etc.

Yes, Paul really did claim that the established theory of global warming involved CFCs destroying ozone. And he really seems to beleive that waste heat accumulates at the surface instead of being radiated into space. In the comments, various people tried to teach Paul something about physics and chemistry, but to no avail.

*Note for Andrew Bolt: this is sarcasm.

After accusing the researchers and the Lancet of fraud and treason, Shannon Love is back with another accusation. The latest crime he accuses them of is rounding things off:

One easily graspable example in the Lancet study’s dishonesty is the key sentence in the Summary, the one repeated in the media world wide, that pegs the “conservative” estimate at 100,000 excess deaths. The actual given estimate is 98,000. What pure scientific purpose is served by rounding the number up to 100,000? There is no technical reason for doing so. They chose that number because a big, round numbers stick in people’s minds. Its a number chosen only for its marketing value.

The nice thing about this criticism is that if they hadn’t rounded things off, Love could have accused them of presenting the results with spurious precision: “Look saying 98,000 implies that the result is known to the nearest 1,000, but it isn’t!”

Then, apparently in all seriousness, Love demands to know how the information in the study could be used to save lives in Iraq. The answer is pretty obvious, of course, if you want to save lives you have to know how they are being lost, as explained here. Love follows this up with a full-on “shoot the messenger” post. Hey, if science gives results that he doesn’t like, that proves that science has been subverted and can no longer be trusted.

Another of the “ChicagoBoyz” has joined the fray with some blatantly cherry-picked quotes. Jonathan Gewirtz attempts to mislead his readers by contrasting a quote from dsquared in response to Love’s charges of treasonous and fraudulent conduct by the Lancet with a completely unrelated quote from Love. In comments, Gewirtz went on to accuse dsquared of being “essentially dishonest”.

The criticisms of the Lancet study by the Chicago Boyz have mostly been entirely without merit (like the rounding argument above). Even when there has been some basis to the criticism (the study could have made it clearer which estimates were based on data including the Falluja cluster), they have proceeded to make a mountain out of a molehill (Love claimed that the treatment of Falluja proved that the researchers had conspired with the Iraqi insurgents to falsify the results).

The latest folks to spread the DDT hoax are Kopel, Gallant and Eisen. They claim:

[Malaria] is a disaster manufactured by First World political correctness; DDT prohibition is scientifically indefensible, and is responsible for millions of deaths every year.

However, as explained in my posts on DDT, DDT is not banned from use against malaria, and while it is still helps against malaria in some places, it is not the panacea that Kopel et al make it out to be.

They also write

But rather than limiting DDT use, the United Nations is actively encouraging a worldwide ban on DDT.⁶³

But reference 63 is to the Stockholm Convention on Persistant Organic Pollutants, which specifically exempts DDT use for vector control from the ban. Banning agricultural use of DDT greatly aids its use against malaria, since mosquitoes will be much less likely to develop resistance.

Alastair Mackay (AMac in comments) has posted his criticism of the Lancet study at Winds of Change. Unlike many of the critics, Mackay actually knows some statistics, so he cannot find fault with the methodology. All he can do is try to make a mountain of a molehill by criticising the way the study was written up, claiming that the report is “misleading” in the description of the results with and without Falluja. Now, as I have noted before, there was one sentence that was unclear about the treatment of Falluja, but this is nowhere near sufficient to support Mackay’s claim that a correctly written version would deliver a very different message.

Also of interest is dsquared’s comment on a previous Winds of Change post on the study.