Deltoid

Kevin Drum is not pleased that the LA Times has yet again published a piece by John Lott. You generally expect some dodgy statistics from Lott and he duly delivers:

Well, more than nine months have passed [since the assault weapons ban ended] and the first crime numbers are in. Last week, the FBI announced that the number of murders nationwide fell by 3.6% last year, the first drop since 1999. The trend was consistent; murders kept on declining after the assault weapons ban ended.

Even more interesting, the seven states that have their own assault weapons bans saw a smaller drop in murders than the 43 states without such laws, suggesting that doing away with the ban actually reduced crime. (States with bans averaged a 2.4% decline in murders; in three states with bans, the number of murders rose. States without bans saw murders fall by more than 4%.)

He’s talking about crime figures for 2004, so there is just three months of post-ban data. It is ridiculous to base an argument on such a small amount of data. The differences between ban and non-ban states are tiny and I guarantee you that if they had been the other way around Lott would have dismissed them as not significant. Media Matters has more: it seems that crime figures broken down by month have not even been released yet.

For years now global warming skeptics have been using satellite measurements to argue that global warming isn’t happening, For example (from 1998):

Surface-based temperature records are too few in number and too unevenly spaced to generate accurate global temperature maps. Only 30 percent of the world’s surface is land, so land-based temperature stations measure less than one-third of the Earth’s climate. Urban stations, which are influenced by city heat anomalies, are over-represented; deserts, mountains, and forests are under-represented.

The global temperature record produced from satellite data has none of the problems faced by surface-based thermometers. Orbiting satellites cover 99 percent of the Earth’s surface, not less than a third, and measure a layer of the troposphere that is above the effects of urban heat islands.

Satellite measurements are accurate to within 0.001 C. Because new satellites are launched into orbit by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) before old ones are retired, overlapping data sets are created, ensuring that the new satellites are calibrated correctly. …

According to Dr. Roy Spencer, meteorologist and team leader of the NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center, “The temperatures we measure from space are actually on a very slight downward trend since 1979 … the trend is about 0.05 C per decade cooling.”

Then other scientists analysed the satellite data and found that it showed warming similar to the surface record. Global warming skeptics didn’t miss a beat — obviously the scientists who got results the skeptics didn’t like were guilty of fraud:

atmospheric data from both satellites and weather balloons show only a trifling rise in temperature over the past couple of decades, while the surface temperature has been rising steadily. In 2000, a National Research Council study confirmed the data’s discrepancy with the model.

The proper scientific response would be to reexamine the models and adjust them to fit reality. But that hasn’t happened in climatology. Instead, there have been repeated attempts to manipulate the satellite data fit the models. Recently, a study published in the journal Nature tries to hammer the square peg of the satellite data into the round hole of the theory, using a method that satellite temperature experts John Christy and Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville had considered and rejected as incorrect in 1991.

So I’m wondering how the skeptics will spin the latest development. Spencer and Christy have revised their numbers and now they seem to agree with the surface record. William Connolley has a nice plot of the new numbers.

Update: Connolley has posted some more graphs and links.

Blogwise have used the Google Maps API and GeoURL to get a map showing locations of blogs (If you follow the link you’ll have to click on the satellite button to see anything).

Those shadows don’t look quite right. How could the sun be shining from the south?

Actually that’s an undercount since some people read my blog via the RSS feed. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.

The Jargon Dictionary says:

spelling flame: n.

[Usenet] A posting ostentatiously correcting a previous article’s spelling as a way of casting scorn on the point the article was trying to make, instead of actually responding to that point (compare dictionary flame). Of course, people who are more than usually slovenly spellers are prone to think any correction is a spelling flame. It’s an amusing comment on human nature that spelling flames themselves often contain spelling errors.

I wonder if people realize just how lame they look when they try to score points off a spelling mistake? Which brings us to Tim Blair, who isn’t just lame, but lame squared, because he has not one, but two posts about a spelling mistake that Chris Sheil made, not in a post, but in a comment. He even has an update where he wets his pants with excitement because OMG! Mark Steyn linked to his spelling flame.

And as usually happens with these things one of Blair’s spelling flames contains a mistake itself. Blair’s error is not something superficial like a spelling mistake, but something substantive. Blair claims:

Bush’s polling has spiked impressively following his Fort Bragg speech.

Using an extremely advanced research technique that I call “following the links” it is possible to find out what actually happened to Bush’s polling after the speech:

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll of Americans who watched President Bush’s Iraq speech Tuesday night showed that 46 percent had a “very positive” reaction to what they heard.

The poll was taken immediately after the speech, and the 323 adults interviewed were 50 percent Republican, 23 percent Democratic and 27 percent independent. The margin of error was plus or minus 6 percentage points. …

“It’s difficult to tell from these poll results how the speech will affect general U.S. public,” said CNN polling director Keating Holland.

“Many Americans did not watch the speech. Those who did were 2-to-1 Republican, so most were arguably already in the president’s camp.”…

Respondents in Tuesday night’s poll also were asked three follow-up questions to ones put to them June 24-27. …

The president likewise picked up some support on the question of whether he has a clear plan in Iraq — going from a 56 percent positive response before the speech to 63 percent afterward.

The “impressive spike” is just amongst the mostly Bush supporters who watched the speech. How did he go with the general U.S. public? Not so good. Before the speech 37% felt that he had a clear plan on Iraq. After the speech the number was basically unchanged at just 38%. Media matters has another example of erroneous reporting of the poll.

Update: Blair has added a third post on the spelling mistake. Lame cubed.

More Update: Now up to 4,5,6,7,8 posts on the spelling mistake.

If you are using WordPress you urgently need to upgrade to version 1.5.1.3 (released last week). This is why. Update: OK, apparently that hole had already been fixed, but there was another vulnerability. You should still upgrade.

Check out the 12th Skeptic’s Circle.

I’m in favour of this suggestion from Kevin Drum.

If I could have one small wish for today, it would be for the blogosphere on both left and right to refrain from political point scoring over the London attacks. Just for a day. Isn’t tomorrow soon enough to return to our usual arguments?

Tim Blair isn’t

COMEDY RELIEF WITH DR STUPID

Dear old Chris Sheil. He just can’t help himself:

Last I heard it was at least 30-something dead and thousands insured. Very grim, etc.

Well, not really. Not so long as they were insured. Very forward-thinking of them.

That’s not even a spelling flame. It’s a typo flame. A typo that Sheil corrected within one minute.

William Connolley has been reading the House of Lords report on The Economics of Climate Change and he’s not impressed:

Because they decided to talk nonsense about the Great Hockey Stick debate. They manage to say: “We sought evidence that refuted the claims of McIntyre and McKitrick, but have not come across any detailed rebuttal.” But this is where they have degenerated into bald-faced lying. Because had they contacted Mann (clearly they didn’t) he would have pointed them to such. For heavens sake, its on the web at RC: Dummies guide to the latest “Hockey Stick” controversy has some info and links.

Later on they manage to say: “apparent divergences between land-based temperature records and satellite-based measurements, the latter showing some cooling rather than warming in recent years”

I think calling it lying is a bit harsh, since it may just be gross incompetence, but getting basic stuff like this so badly wrong leaves you with no confidence in the accuracy of the rest of the report.

Oh, great. After getting his bogus claims about climate models into the Australian, Kininmonth now has them in the Age:

The IPCC radiative forcing hypothesis ignores the atmospheric and ocean circulations that transport surplus solar energy from the tropics to polar regions. Nowhere are local temperatures due solely to radiation processes, a fact that goes to underscore the fallacy of the hypothesis.

It takes about two minutes with Google for anyone to find out that global climate models do include atmospheric and ocean circulations. What’s disappointing about this is that back in November the Age had a story about Kininmonth in the Science section which had comments from scientists about Kininmonth’s arguments were no good. But now he gets an article in the Business section. What is going on?

By popular request, I’ve installed a comment preview plugin. I’d tried a live preview, but it didn’t display Markdown. Now with a preview and a spell check you can avoid making a mistake in a comment and having Tim Blair write a whole series of posts about your mistake.

I also highly recommend the Bad Behavior plugin to any WordPress users. It blocks 99% of spam without any intervention on your part. Spam Karma 2 then blocks any spam that gets past Bad Behavior.

After three posts on a spelling mistake Chris Sheil made, and another one on a Sheil typo, it seems that Tim Blair couldn’t find any more Sheil errors. Undaunted, he has a new post linking Sheil to spelling mistakes made by someone else:

In other spelling news, Chris Sheil is selling his trailer.

In obedience to the Iron Law of Spelling Flames, his link is broken. Corrected link.

Update: Make that four posts on the spelling mistake. Get help, Tim B.

More Update: Five.

Even More Update: Six and seven and eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve.

Last year blogger Xrlq dismissed my criticism of Lott as “paranoid rantings” and “gratuitous attacks on Lott personally”, calling me “Dim”, “Timwit”, “Timbecile”, “a jerk” and “Dim Lambert”.

This year I noted that Lott had signed his name to a review of Freakonomics using the same Amazon account that he used for a five-star review his own book. Over the years the account name had changed from JL to washingtonian2 to economist123. Xrlq leaped to Lott’s defence, calling me a moron and asserting that I was “either a dupe or a fraud”. He argued that washingtonian2’s review of Lott’s book could not have been written by Lott because it contained spelling and grammatical errors and because it “betrays a shallow understanding of the substance of More Guns, Less Crime.” Here is the paragraph that he based this on (”sic”s added by Xrlq):

This is by far the most comprehensive study ever done on guns. It provides extensive evidence on waiting periods, the Brady Act, one-gun-a-month rules, [sic] concealed handgun laws. For some gun laws this is the only study available and it is important to note how many academics have tired [sic] to challenge his work on concealed handgun laws and failed and that no one has even bothered to try and challenge his work on one-gun-a-month laws and other gun control laws.

Xrlq claimed that

As one who has met Lott in person, I can assure you that he has a much better command of the English language than Economist123 does.

and

One-gun-a-month laws are not a major focus of the book; in fact, to the best of my recollection Lott’s book doesn’t mention them at all.

If you look at the posts that Lott made as Mary Rosh you can see that just like economist123 he made frequent spelling and grammatical errors. And while most people aren’t aware of it, Lott’s book includes an analysis of one-gun-a-month laws. Only a reviewer who was very familiar with Lott’s work, like, uh, Lott would mention this. In fact, none of the other reviewers mention one-gun-a-month laws. But Mary Rosh did so repeatedly. For example, in this post:

As to the list of people you put down, notice that none of them one [sic] result that contradicted Lott’s work on the Brady act, waiting periods, or safe storage laws,[sic] one-gun-a-month rules.

So the two arguments that Xrlq raised (spelling/grammar and familiarity with Lott’s work) ended up confirming that Lott was the author of the review. Other evidence that Lott is washingtonian2 comes from the locations given at Amazon for the reviews. The location given for each review at Amazon.com is the location given for the last review posted from that account. That means that if a new review from a different location is posted, all the previous reviews posted from that account simultaneously change to the new location. We can use this feature to work out which reviews were posted from the same account. The location shown for washingtonian2’s review of More Guns, Less Crime changed from Washington to Swarthmore and back to Washington. At the same times, a review of Guns and Violence: The English Experience also changed from Washington to Swarthmore and back to Washington, so it was posted from washingtonian2’s account. And we know that this review was written and posted by Lott, because he signed his name to it. Note also that Swarthmore only has about 6,000 people. How many economists with intials “JL” are likely to be living there?

Undaunted by all of this, Xrlq came up with some more arguments as to why washingtonian2 totally was not John Lott.

First, that Lott would not have used the pseudonym “washingtonian2″ for his review because:

I don’t find it plausible that anyone who neither hails from Washington nor lives there would call himself “Washingtonian” solely because he recently took a job there.

I pointed out that Lott had called himself “Washingtonian” at Freerepublic.com. Xrlq said that it was “much more plausible” that these postings had been made by some prankster who knew that I had accused Lott of posting washingtonian2’s review. This was after I had carefully explained that those postings were written before I made the accusation. If I was a prankster and I had a time machine, I can think of better pranks to pull.

Second, that because Lott had another Amazon account in his own name, it was (and I quote) “impossible” for him to have used a different account for his review of Freakonomics. He hadn’t used that account for over three years and had been using the washingtonian2 account for all the reviews since then, including the review of Guns and Violence: The English Experience that he also signed his name to. Impossible for him to continue using the same account? I don’t think so.

Next, Xrlq disputed my findings in The Case of the Vanishing Wish List. Within minutes of my posting that washingtonian2/economist123’s Amazon wish list was titled “JL’s wish list”, the wish list was mysteriously deleted. During those few minutes, one of the IPs that Lott was using visited that page. Xrlq demanded proof that Lott was using that IP.

Here it is: From September to December 2004, one of Lott’s sock puppets, Tom H, was posting from a Speakeasy DSL IP (66.93.100.155), which according to Geobytes is located in Washington DC. Also posting from that IP were another sock, Bob H, and Maxim Lott (Lott’s son). During that time there were frequent visits from that IP to the Lott posts (and just the Lott posts) on my blog. After December, there was not a single visit from that IP. It seems that Lott switched ISPs because instead there were visits from a Comcast IP (69.143.109.93) (located in Arlington VA, right next to Washington DC) and posts from that IP by Tom H, Bob and yet another sock, Gregg. The first visit of a day was not to the front page but to this post about Lott where Tom H and Bob had commented extensively. Clearly Lott had bookmarked that page and used it as an entry to my blog. The browser used for all of these visits was Safari under MacOS X 10.3. Oddly enough, one of the reviews that washingtonian2 posted was for MacOS X 10.3.

All visits from this IP stopped on April 15. On April 17 frequent visits started from 69.143.118.89, another Comcast IP also located in Arlington VA. The very first visit from this IP was to Lott’s bookmarked post. It looks like the lease on the previous IP expired while he was upgrading the OS, because now the visits used Safari under MacOS X 10.4. There were frequent visits from that IP after that – he visited the post about economist123 about a dozen times on the day I posted it. 69.143.118.89 visited my page in the short interval between when I linked to JL’s wish list and when it was deleted. Note also that Comcast provides one IP per residential address, so all these visits came from the same house.

Faced with this evidence, Xrlq just made up his own facts about IP numbers:

cable providers do not change any part of your IP address except the final segment when you disconnect and reconnect.

This is untrue. It easy to find Comcast customers who have had their address block changed.

Now I know what some of you are thinking—Xlrq uses a pseudonym, is a fanatical Lott defender, claims to have met Lott and been impressed, calls me names, and even has a five-star review of More Guns, Less Crime. Is Xrlq another one of Lott’s sock puppets?

Well, he isn’t. The writing style on his review is different from Lott’s. He is not very familiar with Lott’s research. He blogs about things other than the wonderfulness of John Lott. His IP number is from California. His Amazon wish list shows that his real name is Jeff Bishop. (No it’s not a secret.) Notice how that for genuine Lott sock puppets all the evidence points to Lott, but for those that are merely Lott fans, there is plenty of evidence to show that they are not Lott.

Update: Just as “JL’s wish list” was replaced by “Economist123’s wish list” when I pointed it out, in another one of those uncanny coincidences that Xrlq insists means nothing, “Jeff bishop’s wish list” has been replaced by “Xrlq’s wish list”. And they say history never repeats.

It’s now a quarter of a decade since I started this blog.

Originally it was just a web page for my comments on John Lott’s Mysterious Survey. I figured that the survey issue would be resolved in a few weeks and I could shut it down then, but that doesn’t seem to have happened.

Thanks to the Internet Archive you can see what my blog looked like when it was three weeks old.

John A, one of the bloggers at Climate Audit writes:

You should know that Lambert’s scientific knowledge is *ahem* “challenged”. Ask him if he’s discovered what entropy is and how it applies to closed thermodynamic systems.

What a guy.

Following the link, we find an anonymous person defending McKitrick’s false claim that average temperature has no physical meaning. I had explained that the physical meaning of the average temperature of two bodies was the equilibrium temperature you obtain when you let heat flow from the hotter body to the cooler one and that this was just the weighted average. Mr anonymous claims this is wrong because:

I’m sorry but I’m not going to quote you large parts of undergraduate texts on thermodynamics as it applies to closed systems where the energy is conserved. It has to do with the concept of Work and the quantity of disorder in a closed system called entropy. If you join two separate systems together then in order for the conductor to transmit energy it must do work. If it does work, the total amount of entropy must increase. In order for entropy to increase it must take thermal energy from the system. If it were not true then you could remove the conductor and the situation would be reversible. The result is that because entropy must increase, and total energy is conserved then the resultant temperature must be less than the “weighted average” of the two separate systems.

That’s why Lambert has run off like a little girl - because he’s realised he’s made a big mistake that could be spotted by any competent undergraduate of physics. The non-decreasing nature of entropy means that his simple argument falls to the ground.

It looks like John A thinks total energy = thermal energy + entropy, which is, umm, not exactly true. I think it is all explained here.

Update: Mr anonymous responds to my post asserting that he really does believe that total energy = thermal energy + entropy. The SI unit of entropy is Joules per Kelvin (as it says in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on entropy that he cited). His equation makes as much sense as adding pounds to miles.

On June 7, the national science academies of the G8 nations and Brazil, China and India issued a joint statement saying:

Increasing greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise; the Earth’s surface warmed by approximately 0.6 centigrade degrees over the twentieth century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that the average global surface temperatures will continue to increase to between 1.4 centigrade degrees and 5.8 centigrade degrees above 1990 levels, by 2100.

The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action. It is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions.

This Australian Financial Review chose not to report anything about this unprecedented statement of the scientific consensus. Instead, on July 13 they printed an opinion piece by Bob Carter:

D-day turned out to be June 7, when Robert May, president of the Royal Society of London, issued a statement on climate change that claimed to represent the agreed views of 11 scientific academies.

World leaders, including those due to meet at Gleneagles, were urged “to take prompt action to reduce the causes of climate change”, mainly by “minimising the amount of . . . carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere”.

Containing many erroneous phrases such as “the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action”, the Royal Society statement does not provide the balanced, dispassionate scientific advice that the public is entitled to expect from such an august body. As US atmospheric physicist Fred Singer succinctly put it, the statement “is a politically motivated document and scientifically flawed”.

Sensationally, within days both the Russian and United States science academies publicly dissociated themselves from the Royal Society statement. The Russians went so far as to request that their Academy president “repudiate his signature” from it. The US Academy president wrote that “we definitely did not approve the Royal Society press release” which contains “misleading and political statements”, and threatened to cut the Royal Society off from future US science ventures.

As we have come to expect from Carter, this is a misrepresentation. The US Academy did not dissociate itself from the statement. The US Academy president objected to the Royal Society’s press release which singled out the US government for criticism but stands by the joint statement. He stated (Real Player clip):

By advertising our work in this way you have in fact vitiated much of the careful effort that went into preparing the actual G8 statement.

Instead of the scientific statement, Carter gives us this:

Topping this off, on the very first day of the Gleneagles meeting, the House of Lords delivered the coup de grace to the naive theory of human-caused global warming. A report from the influential Economic Affairs Committee asserted, among other things, that the Kyoto Protocol was not worth supporting; that the United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change’s advice was tainted by political interference; that the benefits of global warming were underplayed; and that the science of climate change was uncertain.

Some of you might have reservations about getting scientific information from politicians rather than scientists. Those reservations would be well founded.

Carter also claims:

Reduced to empiricism, we can only note that for the past several years, global temperatures have been falling,

No they haven’t. Look:

Brian Schmidt tries to track down a source for the quote “People Are Pollution” that John Ray claims was the slogan of Zero Population Growth. Ray was unable to give a source for his quote, which would seem to be bogus. Schmidt concludes:

I don’t think Ray is intentionally dishonest (unlike Benny Peiser) but I suspect the quality of his work on this slogan, given how often he repeats it, indicates how much one should trust anything from him that does not come with independent documentation.

A while ago I exchanged several emails with Ray trying to get him to correct his false claim that:

Malaria had almost been wiped out before DDT — one of the world’s safest chemicals — was banned under the pressure of baseless Greenie panic-mongering about a “silent spring”

When I pointed him to my refutation of his claim, he demanded I provide articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals to prove him wrong, even though he had no peer-reviewed articles to support his claim. I pointed out that my posts linked to several such articles. Ray responded by accusing me of lying because he could not find them. I cut and pasted the URLs from my posts and he eventually read one of the articles and produced this:

There have been reports too numerous to mention about the banning of DDT coinciding with a rise in malaria deaths in the Third World. It would appear however that the relationship between the two events has not been straightforward in at least some cases. One of my more dedicated readers has drawn my attention to this academic journal article (PDF) which reviews the use of DDT in India. As is occasionally mentioned, Third World countries were exempted from the ban at their own discretion and it appears from the article that India already had its own DDT factories so continued to use it. After some years, however, the mosquitoes developed resistance to DDT so it was that resistance which caused malaria to rebound in India rather than the banning of DDT.

So far so good, I guess, apart from not linking or acknowledging me by name. But how is going to fit this into his worldview (which is “Leftists and greens eat babies”). Well if the greens aren’t to blame for resurgent malaria in India, then….

The real problem behind the malaria resurgence, then, was the quite criminal bureaucratic incompetence of India’s socialist government in allowing resistance to develop. … Moral of the story? If the Greenies don’t get you the socialists will!

What did those socialists do wrong? Well, they skimped on the funding and didn’t spray enough. Curse those socialists for not making the government big enough!

RealClimate has some responses from scientists to Barton’s letters, including the replies from the three scientists that Barton sent his letters to, Mann, Bradley and Hughes. Of note is that the fact that Mann has released the source code for his multiproxy reconstruction. I imagine that the hacky team will insist that he hasn’t released all of his code or that it won’t compile or that satellite balloon data doesn’t show warming, etc etc.

Last year an anonymous person from the American Enterprise Institute repeatedly tried and failed to remove all criticism of Lott from his wikipedia page. He eventually admitted to being Lott and claimed that the “posting contains a huge number of inaccuracies and outright lies”.

Over the past few weeks a sequence of more subtle changes were made to the Lott article from several different IPs. For example, this change was made by Mr 38.118.73.78:

This change tries to make it look like Lott owned up to being Mary Rosh when he didn’t have to. In fact, the IP addresses were the same, and since Comcast provides a unique IP to each home account, that meant that Rosh was posting from the same house as Lott. And 38.118.73.78 resolves to aei.org.

There were many other edits pushing Lott’s point of view made anonymously from several different IP addresses. One IP address used was 69.143.118.89. Oddly enough, that’s the IP Lott used that was implicated in The Case of The Vanishing Wishlist (proof here).

My favourite edit is this addition, attacking me and linking to Xrlq:

Warning: The person making these claims is linking names that have no obvious connection with Lott and the variety of different names he claims were done by Lott and the person making these claims has been caught altering evidence to show links that didn’t exist. [22]

The IP address used for this edit was 70.179.74.49. I don’t have a record of Lott using this one, but it’s located in Washington DC and the browser used was Safari, just like Lott uses.

After he had made fifteen edits, I undid them all. Someone with IP address 69.141.3.180 redid them all. By some strange coincidence, Maxim Lott (Lott’s son) has posted using this IP address.

Note that he started using all these sock puppets on Wikipedia after I had exposed his previous set of sock puppets. He just can’t help himself.

In 1996 we were discussing Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” paper on the firearmsreg mailing list. I’ve posted my comments on my blog as entries for August 1996.

To celebrate 125 years of publication, The Bulletin is posting historical pictures of Australia from its archives. In the latest set, one from 1946 has my father in it. If I was a better writer I could probably tell you what he meant to me, but I can link to this appreciation written by John Burrows.

Update: As soon as I post this, they replace the pictures with next week’s set. Here is the picture:

On his blog Lott has a sequence of postings telling a story of how the University of Chicago Federalist Society tried to organize a debate between himself and John Donohue, but Donohue kept backing out. What really happened bears little relation to the story Lott tells. In fact, Lott’s account is so misleading that the Federalist Society cancelled a talk by Lott because he refused to correct his postings.

His first posting was on 30 Nov 2004:

Disappointingly, John Donohue has at the last minute withdrawn from our scheduled debate on Thursday (see note for 11/29 below). I will still give a talk, though I will instead discuss the changing judicial confirmation process. …

No one apparently understands why Donohue really backed out of the debate just a couple of days before the event. The debate had been set up months in advance.

No one understands why he backed out? I came up with a clever scheme for solving the mystery—I asked him. It turns out that the debate was originally scheduled for Nov 18, but at the beginning of September, Lott cancelled this date. The organizer asked Donohue if he could make it on Dec 2, and Donohue said that he could. However, the organizer did not get around to confirming the date until 29 Nov 2004 with this email:

I’m sorry that this message is coming so late - I had meant to e-mail you last week, but then found myself in central Florida without internet access for most of Thanksgiving break.

In any case, I’m writing to check that you still plan to come on Thursday to debate John Lott on the topic, “Do more guns mean less crime?”

If so, as soon as you forward me your plane reservations, I can submit them to clear reimbursement …

In any case, let me say again that I am sorry for not getting in touch earlier, I hope that you can still make it out here to Chicago, and I am really looking forward to this event.

Unfortunately, since he had not heard back from the organizer, Donohue had assumed that that date had fallen through and made other arrangements for that date. It is odd that Lott stated that no one knew the reason why the debate was cancelled when Lott could easily have found out by asking the organizer.

Lott’s next posting on the debate was on April 7 2005:

It seems like we have been through this before. In December, John Donohue cancelled our debate that was scheduled at the University of Chicago for December 2 on November 30th. After what had happened in the Fall, I double checked to make sure everything was confirmed before I turned down another talk that I had the chance to give, and I was assured that the event was set and that I should get my plane ticket. This time our debate that was scheduled at the University of Chicago on April 13th and cancelled with just six days to go.

Actually there was no debate ever scheduled for April 13. Donohue was asked if he could come on the 13th, but he had other commitments. This email from the organizer to Donohue on 8 Apr 2005 explains:

I’m sorry about this, but I’ve made an outright hash of things. When I suggested April 13 to him, I believe that Dr. Lott took it to mean that the debate was on for the 13th. As a result, he bought a ticket to come out here since prices were set to rise the next day after midnight. Pursuant to your previous letter, you are obviously, and understandably, not going to be here. I wrote him a letter explaining what had happened and taking full responsibility (so that he would not believe that you had backed out–my responsibility here is obvious, but I wanted to make it very clear that I, not you, am entirely to blame).

Now, when he wrote his April 7 posting may have honestly misunderstand the situation and believed that the debate had been confirmed for April 13, but the next day it was made clear to him that the posting was inaccurate. To this day, Lott has not corrected it.

Email from the Federalist Society to John Donohue 11 Apr 2005:

Here is a copy of the letter that I sent Dr. Lott explaining what had happened. As I had explained before, I ended up writing you I guess after he had made his reservations. I’m sorry that he is slamming you on his website, but, unfortunately, there is not much that I can do about that. I’m really really sorry that that I created such confusion and I’m sorry to be in the middle of all this, but I wanted to show that I did not pawn it off on you. …

P.S. Maybe Dr. Lott put up his posting on his website swiftly and will alter it now that he knows it was me who screwed up.

Email from the Federalist Society to John Lott 8 Apr 2005:

I cannot blame this on Professor Donohue. Nor did he offer April 21, it was another date that I was checking into because it came to my mind and when he said that he could not do the 13th, I suggested the 21st so that I might have something to come back to you with instead of simply saying, “it’s off.” The suggestion originated from me, not him.

If there is anyone you should blame for jerking you around, it is me. I had been keeping in loose touch with Professor Donohue via Professor Harcourt and believed, incorrectly, that the 13th was a day that he had mentioned would be available to Donohue. This was wrong, and the misunderstanding was mine, I was not deliberately misled. I contacted Donohue after you had set up the 13th and then found out that in fact it wouldn’t work (He had classes on Wednesdays, I had thought it was Thursdays, but the 14th doesn’t work because he is scheduled to be elsewhere). If you would still like to do the debate, please send me any series of dates that might work and I will see if we can get this set up. If you would no longer like to debate or to deal with me again, I understand that as well. But I must emphasize that the failure here was the result of my own incompetence and cannot be attributed to evasion on the part of Donohue.

My phone number is (xxx) xxx-xxxx. If you would like to call me to talk about rescheduling or to complain about my miserable screw up here, I will be happy to talk. I am extraordinarily sorry that you cancelled another event to do this, and I would never ask you to cancel or reschedule another. We will cover all expenses in any case, but I am sorry that that is all that I can offer to do. I cannot arrange a debate with Professor Levitt in so short a time, particularly in light of the fact that he came across the midway to talk here for ACS last week. As I have said, but cannot say enough, I am sorry. You will get a formal apology in the mail, but as the situation stands now, that and an offer to reschedule is all that I can provide. Again, thank you very much for your patience, I hope that your talk in Utah goes really well, and I hope that this can be resolved eventually, but I certainly understand your displeasure with the state of affairs and I take responsibility for creating it.

Lott’s next posting on the debate was on May 7. This time he didn’t just refuse to correct a false statement—he claimed that Donohue had withdrawn from the previous debates even though he knew that was not true:

The University of Chicago Federalist Society has tried for a third time to set up a debate between myself and John Donohue. Since the last two debates on the issue of guns at the University of Chicago were cancelled at the last moment with Donohue withdrawing from one debate with just 2 days to go, I thought that we might have more luck scheduling a debate on another topic that is getting a lot of attention these days: abortion and crime. Donohue and Steve Levitt were the coauthors on a paper that got a lot of attention on this issue and Levitt as also recently coauthored a book with Steve Dubner that again goes over the issue. All three were asked to pick a time to debate the issue, but even though Donohue is free on [May] 25th and despite all the attention currently being given to the abortion research, none of them were willing to debate their work on abortion with me. (I think that I know why.) I will still be presenting on the 25th with the hope that Donohue will change his mind and defend his research.

As you might have guessed, Lott is being misleading about the third attempt to set up a debate. After the Federalist Society had finally found a date when both Lott and Donohue could attend, Lott decided to unilaterally change the topic from guns to abortion. Donohue saw this as an attempt to avoid debating him about guns and refused to agree to a change of topic. The organizer was forced to abandon the idea of a debate and just have a talk from Lott on May 25. He wrote to Donohue on 6 May 2005 to apologize:

I sympathize with your position and I understand your frustration here. I think you’ve been pretty classy about this all year, and I’m really sorry that at the end of it all, it did not work out. I’m sorry to have exposed you for all of this with the website and all–there’s just not a whole lot I can do about that. Anyway, working with you was a pleasure even though things did not play out in the end. You would be welcome to come to Chicago and speak at one of our events at another time, on another topic, with a different panel. Thank you very much again and I hope your semester finishes up nicely as well.

On May 10 Lott attacked Donohue again:

Of course, it would be nice if [Donohue] decided to show up for scheduled debates (see the posts for 11-30-04 and 4-7-05, an additional attempt to set up a debate is discussed here: 5-7-05).

There is nothing more on Lott’s blog about his May 25 talk at Chicago. Why? Read the next two emails.

On May 12 the head of the Federalist Society at the University of Chicago wrote to Donohue:

We have requested and insisted that Lott remove the postings about the University of Chicago events. By the beginning of next week I should be able to tell you how the matter is finally resolved. I am sorry that our invitation to you has brought so much trouble—I am working to have all of the offending posts removed promptly. You have been most patient through all of this, and I’m grateful,

And again on May 20:

I was not able to persuade Dr. Lott to withdraw the posts from his blog. As a result, I withdrew Dr. Lott’s invitation to speak. The event scheduled for next week has been cancelled.

Thank you for your patience in all of this. I am most sorry for the trouble.

Yes, Lott chose to have a talk he was to give cancelled rather than delete posts that he knew to be false. He didn’t even have to post corrections, just remove the offending posts.

Update: Lott replies.

A beautiful sunny winter’s day today so I took some pictures on a walk with my dog. (more…)

Lott has a response to my post about his libel of John Donohue. He writes:

2) Unfortunately, the second planned debate was also cancelled. The debate was rescheduled for April 13th this year, and I made sure to reconfirm it because of the previous cancelation. The student at Chicago who set up the debate said that even though he had confirmed the debate with me multiple times and even though we had taken a date that I was told that Donohue wanted, the claim is that the debate somehow hadn’t been completely confirmed with Donohue.

Compare that with what the student told Lott:

If there is anyone you should blame for jerking you around, it is me. I had been keeping in loose touch with Professor Donohue via Professor Harcourt and believed, incorrectly, that the 13th was a day that he had mentioned would be available to Donohue. This was wrong, and the misunderstanding was mine, I was not deliberately misled. I contacted Donohue after you had set up the 13th and then found out that in fact it wouldn’t work … But I must emphasize that the failure here was the result of my own incompetence and cannot be attributed to evasion on the part of Donohue.

Lott also states:

The University of Chicago Federalist Society was again willing to have me give another talk that wasn’t in a debate format, but they insisted that I remove the statements regarding the canceled debates from my website. (They simply viewed my posts about the April 13th event being critical of the Federalist Society (I disagree), and the earlier post that they wanted removed because they didn’t want to be involved in a debate about a debate.) I told them that I would correct anything that they told me was wrong, but I wasn’t going to remove the postings. If people set up debates and back out at the last moment, they should be held accountable.

Of course, in the student’s email above, Lott had already been told that he had wrongly blamed Donohue for the cancellation of April 13 and he still has not corrected his post. And here is what Lott posted about the April 13 event:

It seems like we have been through this before. In December, John Donohue cancelled our debate that was scheduled at the University of Chicago for December 2 on November 30th. After what had happened in the Fall, I double checked to make sure everything was confirmed before I turned down another talk that I had the chance to give, and I was assured that the event was set and that I should get my plane ticket. This time our debate that was scheduled at the University of Chicago on April 13th and cancelled with just six days to go.

It isn’t even slightly critical of the Federalist Society but Lott claims that they found it so critical that they demanded its removal.

Keiran Healy observes that the U Chicago Federalist Society acted with integrity when Lott libeled Donohue. In the comments, Michael Maltz posts the letter that he sent with Dudley Duncan to the AEI about Lott and the reply they received:

October 21, 2003

Christopher DeMuth
President
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036

Dear Mr. DeMuth:

As you are doubtless aware, a number of commentators have recommended that AEI initiate an inquiry into allegations of unprofessional and unethical behavior by John R. Lott, Jr., an AEI Resident Scholar. They include allegations:

• that Lott repeatedly presented erroneous information about what various polls and surveys had found about the frequency of gun brandishing, both in his book More Guns, Less Crime and in other media link 1, link 2, link 3;

• that he subsequently claimed that the figure he had been citing came from a survey he himself had done; but he is unable to provide any documentation whatever to support this claim, which itself is implausible [same references];

• that he adopted a pseudonym that he claimed he used to protect himself from scurrilous comments, but that he used to make scurrilous remarks about his critics and to puff up his own reputation, including characterizing himself as a chaired professor link 1, link 2;

• that he misrepresented himself as a professor in a law school, before a legislative committee link;

• that, after being informed of the problems with the data sets he used in the major study presented in More Guns, Less Crime (to wit, extensive errors and missing data throughout the data set, and splicing together data sets that users were warned against splicing together), he ignored or trivialized their implications with regard to his findings [Refs: Maltz & Targonski, “A Note on the Use of County-Level UCR,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2002, pp. 297-318; Lott & Whitley, “Measurement Error in County-Level UCR Data,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2003, pp. 185-198; Maltz & Targonski, “Measurement and Other Errors in County-Level UCR Data: A Reply to Lott and Whitley,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2003, pp. 199-206];

• that when it was shown that his analysis of these error-laden data sets was, additionally, contaminated with coding errors that he had made, he continued to present his results as accurate in public forums link;

• that, in revising his analysis using the properly coded data, he changed the model so that the findings would conform to his original statements link

• that he tried to cover up this manipulation of the model he used by predating the file he posted on the web, making it seem that he changed the model prior to others finding his coding errors [Same reference].

Much information about these criticisms can be found on the weblog site maintained by Tim Lambert. Although that site does not provide a single succinct summary of the allegations, it presents an illuminating chronicle and chronology of the discoveries and arguments relevant to them as they emerged, in a voluminous and wide-ranging discussion.

The undersigned have been involved in analyses of some of those activities. Although various weblogs have carried some of our comments, they do not give sufficient detail. We stand ready to provide additional detail.

We emphasize that these allegations do not address the merits of the policy that Lott advocates, laws permitting the carrying of concealed weapons. With 44 states already having such laws, that issue is essentially moot. Rather, the issue is the credibility and reputation of John Lott as a scholar and, by association, the credibility and reputation of the American Enterprise Institute.

We do not contemplate publishing or publicizing this letter. We look forward to hearing from you.

Very truly yours,

Otis Dudley Duncan
Emeritus Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Michael D. Maltz
Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice and of Information and Decision Sciences
University of Illinois at Chicago

DeMuth’s response:

Dear Professors Duncan and Maltz:
This is in response to your letter of October 21 concerning John Lott. I am familiar with the substance and merits of all of the matters on your bill of particulars, and do not need to ask anyone else to inquire into them for me. I should add that I think your accounts of many of these matters are very tendentious. In any event, the issues of research methodology and characterization that you raise have been thoroughly ventilated by Mr. Lott and his supporters and critics (including, as you note, Professor Maltz) in professional forums, and no doubt will continue m be-aided by Mr. Lott’s exemplary willingness to share the large data sets he has assembled and to assist those who wish to challenge (or just study) his work and conclusions. I do not regard debates over the effects of concealed-weapon laws (or other gun regulations) a moot; I hope and expect that they will continue, and also hope (but with lower expectations) that they will proceed in a spirit of open and vigorous inquiry on the merits rather than personal vilification.

Yours truly,
Christopher DeMuth

The Christian Science Monitor has published Fred Singer’s acceptance speech after he won the ‘Flat Earth Award‘. This paragraph is interesting:

What matters are facts based on actual observations. And as long as weather satellites show that the atmosphere is not warming, I cannot put much faith into theoretical computer models that claim to represent the atmosphere but contradict what the atmosphere tells us. [Editor’s note: Satellite measurements indicate the lower atmosphere is warming at a rate of 0.12 degrees F. per decade.] A computer model is only as good as the assumptions fed into it.

That’s not my Editor’s note, it was added by the Christian Science Monitor. Good on them. I just wish more newspapers would do similar things when pundits made false claims.

John Ray (last seen spreading a bogus quote), cut the entire article from the Christian Science Monitor and pasted it into his blog. Well, the entire article except for one small change. He deleted the Editor’s note so that Singer’s dishonest claim (that satellites show that the atmosphere is not warming) stood uncorrected. I don’t even think that Ray was trying to deceive his readers here. It seems to me that he concludes that any facts that contradict his world view must necessarily be wrong.

In response to my post showing that DDT is not banned, David Adesnik suggests that there is a de facto ban on DDT

There are two ways that this de facto ban is supposed to work: first, by aid agencies refusing to fund DDT use, and second by the EU banning imports from DDT-using countries.

However, the agencies do fund DDT use and the stories claiming that they don’t have had to be corrected. A correction of the story Adesnik cites was published on May 23 2004 in the New York Times:

An article on April 11 about DDT and its effectiveness in controlling malaria in developing countries misstated the position of an international health organization on it. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria indeed plans to finance some DDT spraying, in Somalia.

And a correction on 21 July 2005 in The Atlanta Journal - Constitution states:

A Monday editorial on the pesticide DDT to prevent malaria in developing countries misstated the position of USAID. The relief agency does pay for its use, in some cases.

Second, if you look at the article on the EU’s warnings, it just says this:

“If Uganda is to use DDT for malaria control, it is advisable to do so under strictly controlled circumstances, and in consultation with other countries in the region which may be affected,” the Brussels-based union said in a statement.

A parallel system to monitor foodstuffs for the presence of DDT also had to be set up. “This would ensure that any contamination of foodstuffs is detected and corrective measures taken,” the EU noted.

So they aren’t saying that Uganda can’t use DDT, just that it needs to make sure that DDT does not contaminate the food it exports to the EU. If DDT is sprayed indoors to control malaria it will not get into food exports, so this should not hinder its use against malaria at all.

Finally we have this recent news story from The Monitor (Uganda) on 18 July 2005:

The sub-counties of Mugoye, Bujumba and Kalangala town council in Kalangala district have been selected to pilot the spraying of DDT to fight malaria.

The Executive Director of the Community Welfare Services, who is also the MP for Bukoto South, Dr Herbert Wilson Lwanga, said they had received funding from the Global Fund, to fight malaria in Masaka, Rakai, Kalangala and Sembabule. “In this programme, we are to pilot means through which we can wipe out malaria in our country,” Lwanga said.

So Uganda is spraying DDT and it is being funded by an aid agency. There is no de facto ban on DDT.