Deltoid

OK, fine.

1. Total volume of music on my pc: About 12Gb—all of my CDs and LPs converted to Ogg. This is just a back up, since I just play the songs on my Iriver player.

2. Songs playing right now: Steel Monkey by Jethro Tull.

3. Last album purchased: Dial a Song by They Might be Giants

4. Seven songs I’ve listened to a lot lately, from several genres:

1. Helpless by kd lang
2. When Doves Cry by Prince
3. Van Diemen’s Land by U2
4. Sounds of Then by GANGgajang
5. Imitation of Life by R.E.M.
6. Irving Berlin by Ian Tyson
7. Bob by Weird Al Yankovic

5. Pass this on to five victims: I don’t think so.

One of the many factual errors in Parkinson’s piece on deaths in Iraq was the claim that the Lancet study only surveyed 788 households (actually it was 988 households). I did a Google search to see who else had made the same error, and what do you know, it first appeared in a error-filled May 25 article by Andrew Bolt:

Lancet surveyed 788 Iraqi households. The UN surveyed 21,668 — or almost 30 times more. You figure which is more accurate.

Parkinson’s column was published just two days after Bolt’s, and like Bolt he failed to mention that the ILCS only covered the first year of the occupation and was just measuring those directly killed in the fighting and not including the increased deaths from disease and murder. There doesn’t seem to be any other source for the 788 number so it looks like Parkinson got his information from Bolt.

And where did Bolt get his story from? Mostly likely this Tim Blair post. (Bolt says that Blair’s blog is “daily reading” for him.) Like Bolt, Blair gets the size of the Lancet survey wrong, saying that it only covered 808 households. Blair goes out of his way to avoid mentioning that the surveys covered different time periods. He quotes from an email I sent to him that explained that the surveys covered different periods, but chose not to include that part of my email in his post.

The circle was completed when Blair approvingly quoted Parkinson’s comments on the Lancet study (which were derived from a Bolt column which was derived from a Blair post.)

Spooner’s cartoon (shown on right) that accompanied Parkinson’s article insinuates that anti-war people were glad to find that the war had killed 100,000 people. Bolt makes a similar claim in his column:

no story about America’s evil is too improbable for many leading commentators, who gleefully repeated these exaggerated figures.

However, if you read what war opponents have written about the Lancetfindings, it is perfectly clear that they are not “gleeful” about the loss of life, but saddened and angry. It is disappointing that Spooner and Bolt would draw/write such a blatant falsehood.

I wrote earlier about John Ray’s profoundly ignorant arguments about ozone depletion. Now he’s back, posting something even sillier:

Despite all the information you may have read, there is not one shred of supportable evidence that CFCs have found their way 40 miles up above the Earth. No one has ever found any up there because they are roughly five times heavier than air. They are like a brick in a swimming pool. It is not often that you will see a brick floating to the surface of your pool. CFCs are so dense that even as a gas you could fill a bucket with it and pour the contents of one bucket into another.

Not a shred of evidence except for thousands of measurements:

CFCs and other ozone depleting substances (ODS) are heavier than air. In a still room, they will pool on the floor. However, the atmosphere is anything but still. Numerous measurements have confirmed that these molecules are mixed nearly uniformly worldwide. In the same way that vinegar and oil normally separate when still, but mix when shaken, ozone depleting substances and air are thoroughly stirred together by winds in the troposphere.

Winds are also why the location of CFC and other ODS emissions is essentially irrelevant. CFCs released from a car in the U.S. are as likely to find their way to the stratosphere over India as are molecules released from much closer countries like China. Once they mix through the troposphere, CFC molecules eventually move into the stratosphere. Thousands of measurements over several decades have firmly proven the existence of these heavier-than-air molecules in the ozone layer.

The Australian has published a piece by William Kinimonth arguing that global warming is a natural phenomenon. His argument in his book was that the models used by the IPCC were one dimensional and didn’t account for the flow of energy from the tropics to the poles. This is, of course, wildly incorrect as anyone can find out in minutes on the net. So he’s dropped that argument, but that means that all he has left is this:

IPCC has made much of the apparent ability of computer models to simulate the climate system; computer models that have been tuned to reproduce the main statistical characteristics of the global climate notwithstanding the uncertainty of representing many of the climate processes. The computer models are claimed to be able to respond correctly as one or more of the boundary conditions are changed but this has not been demonstrated.

Colour me old-fashioned, but if someone wants to argue that the current warming is natural, I’d like to see their model and data showing this. Complaints that the models currently in use are wrong in same vague unspecified way just don’t do much for me.

Our old friend John Brignell has uncovered “The greatest conspiracy in human history”. According to Brignell that’s what global warming is, and:

It is not that the proponents are simply mistaken—that would be forgivable. They know that they are lying: otherwise there would be no need for all the manufactured and selective evidence, the appeal to a claimed consensus (the like of which has never had a place within the scientific method), the gross attempts to censor any contrary argument, the abandonment of the essential scepticism of science, the vilification of doubters, the direction of huge quantities of taxpayers money into acquiescent “research” groups, the barrage of angled news-stories, the drama documentaries, irrelevant interpolations into editorial commentaries and on and on.

The evidence for the global warming disaster theory does not stand up to the most cursory examination, like the global cooling disaster theory that preceded it. Yet, a majority of simple souls accept that it is true, because it has been drummed into their brains by incessant repetition.

(And no, he doesn’t offer any support for his claim that the evidence does not stand up to examination.)

So what proof does Brignell have that it’s a plot? Well, he’s managed to get his hands on a “secret letter” from the Royal Society that says completely evil stuff like:

We are appealing to all parts of the UK media to be vigilant against attempts to present a distorted view of the scientific evidence about climate change and its potential effects on people and their environments around the world. I hope that we can count on your support.

Apparently this secret letter was sent to all major media outlets in the UK. This is obviously some usage of the word “secret” with which I am unfamiliar.

Brignell then formulates his law of scientific consensus:

From Galileo, through Darwin to Einstein, there is a clear law of scientific consensus;

The law of scientific consensus:

At times of scientific contention the consensus is always wrong.

So Darwin overturned the scientific consensus of his day. Brignell’s law says he was right. Cool. Except that now the scientific consensus is that Darwin was right, so Brignell’s law say he was wrong. I think Brignell needs to formulate some new rules of logic where statements can be true and false at the same time to go with his scientific consensus law.

I’ve switched my blog to Wordpress. I’ve imported all posts and comments from the old blog using this handy script.

It turned out I had 10 megabytes of posts and comments to transfer and I had to break it up into smaller pieces to avoid choking the script.

The old blog will be replaced with a redirect to this blog once I work out how to rewrite the URLs correctly.

Get your skeptical blogging here.

Links to the old blog should now get redirected to the appropriate entry here, so you don’t have to adjust any bookmarks. Though it will load faster if you do adjust them.

After experimenting with several themes, I’m leaning towards adopting the current one. What do you think of it?

I’ve added a page on how to comment on this blog to the sidebar.

Writing in the Australian, Christopher Pearson likens mainstream climate science to creationism

When Charles Darwin unveiled the theory of evolution, the world at once divided into rationalists and creationists. The theory that man-made greenhouse gas is causing potentially catastrophic climate change is another great divider. On one side are the sceptics, who want compelling evidence. On the other are the true believers.

Now there are some interesting parallels in the debates about evolution and global warming, but they don’t go the way Pearson insinuates. In both cases, the domination of the mainstream view in the scientific literature is so overwhelming that in the rare case that a creationist paper or a global warming skeptic paper is published, serious questions are raised about the peer review of that paper.

Next Pearson calls for the sacking of Ian Campbell, the Environment Minister, because:

after a few months in the portfolio, he said he had reviewed the evidence and accepted, as paraphrased in a report in this newspaper, “the greenhouse theory that emissions such as carbon dioxide from industry were the cause of global warming”.

Clearly a job requrement for the Environment Minister in Australia must be the ability to reject global warming no matter how compelling the evidence is.

But what, you might ask, is wrong with the evidence in the IPCC report? Pearson tells us:

One of the alternative explanations is that the main cause has been volcanic activity, much of it submarine and hard to detect.

Submarine volcanoes are causing global warming? This isn’t possible, since the total heat flow coming from the interior of the earth is much too small to cause significant warming. Where did Pearson get his “alternative explanation” from? The only source I could find was the same “Iceagenow” web site that David Bellamy got his false statistics about glaciers from. As George Monbiot put it:

Iceagenow was constructed by a man called Robert W Felix to promote his self-published book about “the coming ice age”. It claims that sea levels are falling, not rising; that the Asian tsunami was caused by the “ice age cycle”; and that “underwater volcanic activity - not human activity - is heating the seas”.

Is Felix a climatologist, a volcanologist or an oceanographer? Er, none of the above. His biography describes him as a “former architect”. His website is so bonkers that I thought at first it was a spoof. Sadly, he appears to believe what he says.

Felix doesn’t haven’t any actual data or measurements to support his theory that volcanoes are warming the ocean. He just lists news stories about undersea volcanoes and asserts that they must be contributing a tremendous amount of heat, but without any actual numbers. Apparently Pearson finds this more compelling than the IPCC reports with all their silly facts and numbers.

Pearson then goes on to quote William Kinimonth:

“It seems to me rather odd that so many scientists are embracing this one-dimensional, flat-earth theory without looking at how climate really works.”

Kininmonth was wrong — the IPCC report relies on three-dimensional, not one-dimensional climate models. Even Pearson could have discovered this if he had spent a few minutes on the Internet.

And this 2004 post from John Quiggin about another Pearson piece on DDT demonstrates that Pearson is a repeat offender:

Not only is almost everything in the article either false or grossly misleading, but it’s a fourth-hand recycling of points that have been flogged to death in the blogosphere.

Thanks to Jack Strocchi for the tip.

The Australian Environmental Foundation is a brand new environmental organization. Unfortunately they have chosen a very similar name to the long established Australian Conservation Foundation, so similar that the ACF has sued for trademark infringement. Probably the best way to keep them apart is to remember that the Australian Conservation Foundation is a grass roots organization with a goal of preserving forests, while the Australian Environmental Foundation is an astroturf organization with a goal of preserving logging companies.

The AEF’s spokesperson is Kersten Gentle, Victorian State Manager of Timber Communities Australia, another astroturf organization. According to the group’s chairwoman, Jennifer Marohasy from the IPA, the group received no funding from the IPA, so I guess that means that they were directly funded by logging and irrigation companies.

The AEF claims to support an evidence based scientific approach to the enviroment, but their reaction to the ACF’s trademark suit belies this. The AEF ran an on-line poll asking whether the AEF’s logo of a gum tree was similar to the ACF’s logo of three gum leaves. 88% of those responding said that gum leaves were “extremely different” from a gum tree. Now, their logo may be different enough from the ACF’s one that it is not a trademark infringement, but I don’t think most people would find gum leaves “extremely different” from a gum tree, so what happened? It seems that Tim Blair linked to the poll and his anti-green readers naturally voted against the ACF. This sort of thing is the reason why on-line opinion polls are not scientific evidence for anything.

Tim Blair writes:

Michael Gawenda, The Age’s man in Washington, reports:

The majority of Americans believe in creationism rather than evolution.

And I bet Gawenda can’t name a single one of them. Also, his data may be a little astray; according to this round-up of polling on the issue, creationism—although widely supported—is yet to reach majority-belief levels.

The round-up of polling reports that about 45% of Americans that God created humans pretty much in their present form at some time in the last 10,000 years. But this is just the number who believe in Young-Earth Creationism, which is only one flavour of Creationism. A CBS News Poll conducted in November 2004 found that 55% of Americans believed that God created humans in their present form, 27% believed that humans evolved with God guiding the process and just 13% believed that humans evolved without divine guidance. And I don’t think that Gawenda would find it difficult to name an American who doesn’t believe in evolution because I’m pretty sure that Gawenda has heard of one George W Bush. Furthermore, Gawenda’s point was that this was a major difference between Australians and Americans and Australian polling data supports him, with just 28% of Australians opting for the religious explanation for the origins of life.

Blair continues:

Gawenda’s assertion puts him in the same dumb club as John Quiggin: “The great majority of climate change sceptics, globally speaking, are also creationists”.

Blair doesn’t offer any reason why Quiggin’s claim might be false. Apparently he thinks that calling Quiggin dumb is enough to refute him.

This story on Bob Carter in the Age is a good one for playing Global Warming Skeptic Bingo. Though I think I should add a rule to the effect that if a numerical claim is wrong by more than an order of magnitude you get a free square on the bingo board. Look at what Carter claims:

Carbon dioxide was a minor greenhouse gas, responsible for 3.6 per cent of the total greenhouse effect, [Carter] said. Of this, only 0.12 per cent, or 0.036 degrees Celsius, could be attributed to human activity.

Actually, calculations show that without CO₂ the Greenhouse effect would be about 91% as strong. Further, he implies that only 0.12/3.6=3% of the CO₂ in the atmosphere is due to human activity. But the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere has increased from 280 ppm to 380 ppm and this increase is all due to human activity. So, correcting Carter’s numbers we have that 100/380=25% of the CO₂ in the atmosphere is anthropogenic, so 25% of 9%=2.4% of the greenhouse effect or 0.7 degrees Celsius is man-made. Carter is wrong by a factor of 20. Actually he’s wrong by more than a factor of 20 since his calculation assumes that the quantity of water vapour in the atmosphere is fixed and this isn’t true. As the globe warms there is more water vapour in the atmosphere and this further strengthens the greenhouse effect.

So how did something this inaccurate get into the Age? Well, Carter gave a speech to the Victorian Farmers Federation so the reporter who wrote the story was their agricultural reporter rather than their science reporter who might have noticed that Carter was spouting a load of rubbish.

Hat tip: euan

Tim Blair’s ability to detect fake quotes mysteriously deserts him when the fake quote supports his anti-environmentalist agenda. After quoting the usual falsehoods about how the ban on DDT killed 50 million. (It was only the agricultural use that was banned, and far from costing lives, this saved lives since it slows the evolution of resistance.) He has this:

The likely reason was spelled out with chilling clarity by Charles Wurster of the Environmental Defence Fund in the USA in 1971 when it was pointed out to him that DDT saved the lives of poor people in poor countries. He said: ‘So what? People are the main cause of our problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them and this is as good a way as anything.’

Does that sound like Dr Wurster or Dr Evil? How gullible do you have to be to find that quote plausible? Jim Norton has tracked down the source of the quote. It seems that after one Victor Yannacone was fired by the EDF, he came up with the claim that Wurster made the statement above at a press conference. You would think that an outrageous statement like that would have been reported by at least one reporter, but no, there is no contemporary record of him saying it, just the unsupported atatement of a man with an axe to grind. Wurster denies Yannacone’s claim:

I wish to deny all of the statements of Mr, Yannacone. His remarks about me, attributed to me, and about other trustees of EDF are purely fantasy and bear no resemblance to the truth. It was in part because Mr. Yannacone lost touch with reality that he was dismissed by EDF, and his remarks of May 1970 indicate that his inability to separate fact from fiction has accelerated.

One of the drawbacks of switching to a more popular blogging platform is more spam. Spambots just did not know how to comment on the old blog — I got two just spams this year. In the last 24 hours spambots have tried to post about 100 comments. The spam filters stopped all of them, which is good, but they also sometimes catchlegitimate comments. I fish those out, but it’s still a pain for everyone concerned. If your comment gets caught please be patient and blame the vile parasites that run spambots.

I’ve also changed the technique I’ll be using against trolls. Posts by trolls will be disemvowelled. Just to be clear, since some people abuse the term, a troll is not someone who disagrees with me, but someone who tries to disrupt discussion by posting abuse or specious arguments. Trolls aren’t interested in learning anything, but get their kicks from the attention they get. The best thing to do with trolls is to ignore them, but if they are good at their little game it can be hard to do. So I’ll help by removing all the vowels from their comments.

If you see a disemvowelled comment, just ignore it. You can still read it if you try hard enough, but trust me, it’s not worth the effort. If your comment gets disemvowelled, go away. If you were genuinely trying to make a point, then you need to reconsider the way you expressed yourself.

The gentleman who I disemvowelled emailed me complaining about the lack of vowels in his comment. I wrote back:

[Name deleted], you are not banned from commenting on my blog. If you can work out how to post something other than flamebait, I’ll leave the vowels in next time.

His reply is below the fold because it contains bad language. (more…)

I broke my RSS feed — it started reporting the message

XML Parsing Error: xml processing instruction not at start of external entity

I thought I should post the fix in case any other WordPress users have the same problem. The plugin I had just added (disemvowel.php) had an extra blank line at the end. Removing the blank line fixed the problem. Simple really.

John Quiggin catches Miranda Devine spreading the DDT Hoax in the Sun Herald. If DDT is banned, how come this company will sell you some? They say:

In the past several years, we supplied DDT 75% WDP to Madagascar, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Africa, Namibia, Solomon Island, Papua New Guinea, Algeria, Thailand, Myanmar for Malaria Control project, and won a good reputation from WHO and relevant countries’ government.

I was particularly impressed by this argument from Devine:

Advertisements of the time, which today seem preposterous, extolled it as a benefactor of all humanity, with slogans such as “DDT is good for me-e-e“.

If an advertisement from a company selling DDT says that it is good, then it must be good? Using similar logic I can prove that athletes can smoke as many Camels as they want without it affecting their performance.

Update: Jim Easter, intrigued by the anachronistic Star Trek reference in the DDT ad tracks down the original version.

Last week I wrote about how Bob Carter was out by a factor of 20 in an estimate of how much warming could be attributed to human activity. He has now posted the text of another talk where he gives a source for his bogus claim. It’s this FOXNews opinion piece by Steve Milloy. Carter is a Research Professor at James Cook University, so you would have thought he would be aware that opinion columns by non-scientists aren’t the best source of scientific information, but I guess not.

Some highlights of his talk: He said:

Their assertion is a symptom of a disease called Hansenism which has gripped western media sources and political, business and public opinion in a deadly grasp. Hansenist climate hysteria is driven by relentless, ideological, pseudo-scientific drivel, most of which issues from green political activists and their supporters, and is then promulgated by compliant media commentators who are innocent of knowledge of true scientific method. Opportunistically, and sadly, some scientists, too, contribute to the Hansenist alarmism. Sir Roderick Carnegie was quite correct when he formerly identified such environmental lobbying and emotional propaganda as a greater threat to our society and way of life than, in its heyday, was communism.

James Hansen. Worse than Stalin and Mao COMBINED!!

Why Hansenism? Because James Hansen was the NASA-employed scientist who started the climate alarmism hare running on June 23, 1988, when he appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr Hansen used a misleading graph to convince his listeners that warming was taking place at an accelerated rate (which, it being a scorching summer’s day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm).

What actually happened was that Hansen presented to Congress a graph showing scenarios for high, medium and low CO₂ growth and said that the medium growth scenario was most likely. The medium growth scenario has turned out to be a good prediction of the subsequent increase in temperatures When Michaels testified before Congress ten years later he erased the medium and low curves and claimed that because the high prediction was wrong, the climate model was faulty.

And while we are on the subject of misleading graphs, Carter presents a graph that shows average temperatures falling since 1998. Oddly enough, he uses a 25 month moving average to smooth the curve instead of the conventional five year moving average. If you smooth it in the normal way the average doesn’t fall, but increases steadily.

Carter goes on to say that “Hansenism” is like Lysenkoism, only worse, cite Bray’s bogus survey and the Oregon petition and to suggest that Australia hire Bjorn Lomberg to run an Institute of Environmental Assessment because CSIRO and BOM can’t be trusted.

I dunno about the last one, maybe Philip Cooney would be a better choice?

I have rewarded Carter with his own category on my blog.

From the gentleman (and this time I’m not being sarcastic) who wrote to me earlier:

I’m sorry I acted the way I did in the email. It was wrong of me and only hope you accept my apologies. Behaving the way I did shows me in a pretty bad light.

Some of us have built some pretty strong pre-conceived ideas about issues and when the opposite argument turns up which in your case seems well-thought out I have to offer my grudging admiration. In my job, rigidity means an early grave career wise at least.

Case in point- Climate change.

I spent some time reading your stuff fairly extensively and I have to say you make a pretty good case that in fact it may be occurring. You seem to be doing a better job than most to at least be getting to the truth.

How to solve problems like climate-change, well that’s for another day or time.

I did spend time reading your blog. You are a very amusing, interesting individual. I only wish I was 1/2 as bright as you seem. And the kids are lucky to have you as a teacher it seems. I take the other stuff back as well as you seem to be able to do 30 things at at one time! Wish I had that gift.

As someone who believes in the right-wing side of politics, I particularly enjoyed the thrashing you give to Hugh Morgan and his buddies. They sure deserve it! I know, at least I followed closely Morgan’s behavior as CEO and it was an absolute disgrace. If he and his admirers are the leaders of the right wing movement we have a problem! You can ask why, as it was on the public record. However some of it isn’t. The guy hired himself a speechwriter at company expense!! There are many more issues I have with the establishment right, but I won’t go into them as they are too lengthy.

One thing you have done for me is to prove I ought to stay in my own paddock and not veer off into unknown pastures as it seems I don’t really have that much to offer.

So good luck and hope all goes well for you.

Is this Wall Street Journal editorial clueless or dishonest? Read RealClimate’s detailed rebuttal.

Update: David Appell calls it “intellectually dishonest“. Sounds about right.

Update 2: Chris Mooney piles on.

The World Bank is the largest funder of Eritrea’s anti-malaria program. The Eritrea Daily reports on the good results:

But today Eritrea, one of the poorest countries in the world, stands out as a success story in controlling malaria.

The statistics are compelling. The number of people dying from malaria has dropped by between 55 to 65 percent since 1999. Mortality of children under five years of age dropped by 53 percent, while there was a 64 percent drop in the death rate for older children and adults.

“In 1991, our death toll among pregnant women from malaria was very high” Eritrea’s Health Minister, Saleh Meky says.

Today, it is non-existent.”

And what did they do to get such dramatic reductions? Why they significantly increased the use of insecticide treated nets:

Eritrea has used a range of proven strategies for malaria control. An important part of this is to reduce human contact with mosquitoes. Insecticide treated bed nets have been vital to the program with the use of the nets significantly increased in high risk areas.

Walker says there are now more than 850,000 nets are being used in Eritrea with the numbers increasing.

“It’s become a major very cost effective way of dealing with the problem,” he says.

And stopped using DDT:

“If you go back five years, Eritrea used indoor spraying very extensively. But that’s been cut back a lot with this project,” he says.

“We’ve also introduced other kinds of insecticides which are more environmentally friendly than those they were using. Spraying though still continues, according to the extent of the malaria problem and the behavior of the mosquito in a particular area.”

So what do Roger Bate and Richard Tren of the DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria write about the World Bank and malaria? Look:

Almost all of the efforts to prevent malaria cases have focused on providing people with insecticide-treated nets. People, particularly pregnant women and young children–those most at risk–are encouraged to sleep under these nets in order to protect themselves from the Anopheles mosquito. The problem isn’t that these nets don’t work; it is simply that as a sole strategy they haven’t been shown to have any significant large-scale impact on malaria transmission.

Those countries that are making progress against the disease have ramped up their indoor insecticide-spraying programs. These programs entail spraying tiny amounts of insecticide, such as DDT, on the inside walls of houses to repel or kill (or both) the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. This method of control is safe and highly effective: Malaria rates have plummeted in the very poor northern parts of Zambia where this approach is currently employed. Yet RBM and the World Bank, always politically correct, have eschewed this method of control. The World Bank even went as far as to require that its of funding malaria control in Eritrea be conditional on non-use of DDT.

The World Bank did not switch away from DDT in Eritrea because of “political correctness”. They did so because the alternatives were more effective. Where DDT spraying is the most cost-effective method, the World Bank funds it. For example, they fund DDT spraying in India:

In accordance with guidelines from the World Health Organization and also in accordance with the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, what the Bank does is to support the program of the government of India with technical sanction from WHO.

Specifically, it means the government of India is using a range of tools including indoor residual spraying. The government of India actually does use DDT because that is what the government of India wants to do.

Bate and Tren’s article is deliberately misleading. One blogger who was misled by it is Rafe Champion who falsely claimed that the World Bank would not fund DDT because of “political correctness”. He then compounded his error by refusing to correct his falsehood despite repeated requests.

The 11th Skeptic’s Circle is out. Don’t miss the tag-team debunking by Orac and co of an awful “Thimerosal causes autism” piece by Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Last week, in response to more repetition of the false claim that environmentalists had killed many millions of people with a ban of DDT. John Quiggin set out the facts of the matter:

DDT has never been banned in antimalarial use. The main reason for declining use of DDT as an antimalarial has been the development of resistance. Antimalarial uses have received specific exemptions from proposals to phase out DDT, until alternatives are developed. Bans on the use of DDT as an agricultural insecticide, promoted by Rachel Carson and others, have helped to slow the development of resistance, and therefore increased the effectiveness of DDT in antimalarial use (links on this here).

Attempts to get some of those responsible for spreading the false claims about environmentalists and DDT to correct them have proved largely unsuccessful.

Rafe Champion did not make even a token correction.

Two weeks after posting an obviously fabricated quote Tim Blair finally made a stealth correction, adding an update after the post had fallen off his front page by about five pages. No apology or correction for posting the outrageously false claim that “In a single crime [the greens] have killed about 50 million people.”

Miranda Devine failed to correct her false claim that DDT had been banned or her false claim that environmentalists had killed 50 million people. The only correction she offered was this:

Last week I inadvertently misquoted Rachel Carson by repeating a mistake from The Age of January 29. In an article by Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Institute, Carson was quoted: “We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.”

But in Lockitch’s original, published in FrontPage Magazine, the quote was part paraphrase: “We should seek, Carson wrote, not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead, ‘a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves’.” Apologies.

There are a couple of problems with Devine’s correction. First, if you search the Age’s archive, you’ll find that no article by Lockitch was published in the Age or any other Fairfax paper on January 29 or any other date. Nor has the quote appeared in any article in any Fairfax paper other than Devine’s. Just to be sure, I checked the microfilm version of January 29’s Age. No article on DDT by Lockitch or anyone else. It is wrong for Devine to blame the Age for her mistake. [Update: John Quiggin tracks down the source of the fake quote: it was in the tabloid Herald-Sun on Jan 13.]

Second, Lockitch has not paraphrased Carson at all. Here is the complete paragraph that the quote was drawn from:

Through all these new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing with life — with living populations and all their pressures and counter pressures, their surges and recessions. Only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves

Carson does not mention malarial mosquitoes at all in that paragraph and by no stretch of the imagination can it be interpreted to mean that we should learn to live with malaria. Here’s what Carson actually wrote about malarial mosquitoes in an earlier chapter (my emphasis):

Although insect resistance is a matter of concern in agriculture and forestry, it is in the field of public health that the most serious apprehensions have been felt. The relation between various insects and many diseases of man is an ancient one Mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles may inject into the human bloodstream the single-celled organism of malaria. …

These are important problems and must be met. No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection, but it has heard little of the other side of the story - the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts. Even worse, we may have destroyed our very means of fighting.

A distinguished Canadian entomologist, Dr A. W. A. Brown, was engaged by the World Health Organization to make a comprehensive survey of the resistance problem. In the resulting monograph, published in 1958, Dr Brown has this to say: Barely a decade after the introduction of the potent synthetic insecticides in public health programmes, the main technical problem is the development of resistance to them by the insects they formerly controlled. In publishing his monograph, the World Health Organization warned that the vigorous offensive now being pursued against arthropod-borne diseases such as malaria, typhus fever, and plague risks a serious setback unless this new problem can be rapidly mastered.

What is the measure of this setback? The list of resistant species now includes practically all of the insect groups of medical importance. … Malaria programmes are threatened by resistance among mosquitoes. …

Probably the first medical use of modem insecticides occurred in Italy in 1943 when the Allied Military Government launched a successful attack on typhus by dusting enormous numbers of people with DDT. This was followed two years later by extensive application of residual sprays for the control of malaria mosquitoes. Only a year later the first signs of trouble appeared. Both houseflies and mosquitoes of the genus Culex began to show resistance to the sprays. In 1948 a new chemical, chlordane, was tried as a supplement to DDT. This time good control was obtained for two years, but by August of 1950 chlordane-resistant flies appeared, and by the end of that year all of the houseflies as well as the Culex mosquitoes seemed to be resistant to chlordane. As rapidly as new chemicals were brought into use, resistance developed. …

The first malaria mosquito to develop resistance to DDT was Anopheles sacharovi in Greece. Extensive spraying was begun in 1946 with early success, by 1949, however, observers noticed that adult mosquitoes were resting in large numbers under road bridges, although they were absent from houses and stables that had been treated. Soon this habit of outside resting was extended to caves, outbuildings, and culverts and to the foliage and trunks of orange trees. Apparently the adult mosquitoes had become sufficiently tolerant of DDT to escape from sprayed buildings and rest and recover in the open. A few months later they were able to remain in houses, where they were found resting on treated walls.

This was a portent of the extremely serious situation that has now developed. Resistance to insecticides by mosquitoes of the anopheline group has surged upwards at an astounding rate, being created by the thoroughness of the very house-spraying programmes designed to eliminate malaria. In 1956, only 5 species of these mosquitoes displayed resistance; by early 1960 the number had risen from 5 to 28! The number includes very dangerous malaria vectors in West Africa, the Middle East, Central America, Indonesia, and the eastern European region. …

The consequences of resistance in terms of malaria and other diseases are indicated by reports from many parts of the world. An outbreak of yellow fever in Trinidad in 1954 followed failure to control the vector mosquito because of resistance. There has been a flare-up of malaria in Indonesia and Iran. …

Some malaria mosquitoes have a habit that so reduces their exposure to DDT as to make them virtually immune. Irritated by the spray, they leave the huts and survive outside. …

It is more sensible in some cases to take a small amount of damage in preference to having none for a time but paying for it in the long run by losing the very means of fighting [is the advice given in Holland by Dr Briejer in his capacity as director of the Plant Protection Service]. Practical advice should be ‘Spray as little as you possibly can’ rather than Spray to the limit of your capacity’…, Pressure on the pest population should always be as slight as possible.

Dr Briejer says:

It is more than clear that we are travelling a dangerous road. We are going to have to do some very energetic research on other control measures, measures that will have to be biological, not chemical. Our aim should be to guide natural processes as cautiously as possible in the desired direction rather than to use brute force….

It’s clear from this that our current policy of reserving DDT for public health use is the sort of DDT use that Carson would have approved. But don’t expect the Miranda Devines of this world to ever admit that.

Chris Mooney reports on the latest attack on the hockey stick. Joe Barton, chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce has sent out a set of letters, supposedly “requesting information regarding global warming studies”. However, if you look at the letters, you will find that the only study he is interested is Mann, Bradley and Hughes from way back in 1998 (the “hockey stick” study); and the questions are loaded ones of the form: “Can you explain why you made all the errors detailed in Mcintyre and McKitrick’s Energy and Environment paper?”

It is probably just a coincidence that Joe Barton has received $574,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, more than any other congressman.

Update: Reaction from:

• Atrios: “The appropriate response to this is ‘Bite me, Congessman’.”

• teece: “This is the kind of tactic you would have expected in Soviet Russia.”

• Kevin Drum: “Joe Barton is harassing scientists who have the temerity to publish results he finds inconvenient”

• Josh Rosena: “This is an anti-climate science Congressman trying to get material for a smear against Mann.”

• john m. lynch: “The interference continues.”

• Paul from Wizbang: “I’m guessing the creators of the global warming hockey stick are –shall we say– pucked.”

• Steve Verdon: “there seems to be a pattern with regards to climate scientists and their willingness to share data”

• Mark Trodden: “Dear Congressman Barton, … I am extremely concerned by the tone and implications of these letters and consider them a thinly-veiled attempt to intimidate honest scientists into avoiding work that might lead to an opinion different from the current administration on topics that are politically sensitive.”

• de Selby: “I expect industry whore congressmen to create false controversies. When they abuse their power at the expense of individual citizens, I call it McCarthyism”

• David Appell: “This is unprecedented, as far as I know, and has the air of a scientific witch-hunt.”

• PZ Meyers: “Joe Barton is an arrogant pissant”

• James Annan: “I suspect that a witch-hunt like this could have serious repercussions for scientific research in the USA”

On his blog, Lott writes:

Penn & Teller will be airing a show on their television series name “Bullshit” that examines gun control and apparently focuses on my research. The show will first air on June 27th. The show airs at 10 PM and is replayed at 11 PM. I have been told that the show comes across very well.

In other words, Penn and Teller will uncritically swallow everything Lott says and savagely mock anyone on the other side of the question. Steve Milloy on second hand smoke, Lott on guns — they sure can pick their experts, can’t they?

• HangLeft: “it fits the pattern we’ve come to know and expect from the Republicans: when facts get in the way of their bankrupt ideology, they cover up those facts and intimidate the messenger.”

• Coturnix: “With all the misuse of science by the current Administration I still never expected the Lysenko-style persecution of scientists whose data do not support the party line. Yet, this day has come. The USA has its Lysenko, and his name is Joe Barton.”

• Will: “Barton is known for being a staunch opponent of the Kyoto Protocol and referring to climate change provisions as “odorous” measures that would be kept out of energy legislation.”

• William Connolley: “the TAR was quite cautious in its use of the MBH record (which was entirely appropriate, it being fairly new then). So attacking Mann (or, being more charitable, attacking MBH98) is pointless, from a scientific standpoint. But then, this isn’t about science, its about $.”

• Kevin Vranes: “the letters are primarily meant to embarrass and harass and the hearings, if they ever happen, could be seen as an abuse of power.”

• Sylvia S Tognetti: “This is more Funk from the Swamp emanating from the Hill that arises from the Foggy Bottom, and is not worthy of a serious response.”

• back40: “the usual suspects are in full shriek mode claiming abuse of power and political motivations. It’s not abuse, it’s congress doing its job for a change.”

My previous post also got some reactions:

• Hans Erren calls my post the start of an “ad hom and smear campaign”. Oh, I think the ad-hom-and-smear campaign started long ago.

• Steve Verdon: “Notice that Lambert is his usual dishonest self and not pointing out that environmental groups fund Real Climate.” Yes, because it must cost like $100 per year to run the site.

Update: Steve McIntyre has his own roundup. He claims:

Many posters do not distinguish between the PC codes for tree ring which are on Mann’s FTP site and the code for the rest of the calculation, which Mann has refused to provide. We are obviously aware of the code on the site, since we published an article discussing it and specifically cited the URL. I’ve made this distinction on several occasions in very specific terms, but people like Tim Lambert seem unable to fathom the distinction.

This is, of course, untrue. I have never said that Mann has released all of his code. He has, however, released the data, the algorithm, and some of the code. Perhaps McIntyre is unable to fathom the distinction between “code” and “algorithm”.

McIntyre continues:

Also one more time, Wahl and Ammann have not replicated anything that we had not already done.

Wahl and Ammann don’t seem to think so:

Ammann and Eugene Wahl of Alfred University have analyzed the Mann-Bradley-Hughes (MBH) climate field reconstruction and reproduced the MBH results using their own computer code. They found the MBH method is robust even when numerous modifications are employed. … Ammann and Wahl conclude that the highly publicized criticisms of the MBH graph are unfounded.