Deltoid

I wrote earlier about an extraordinarily biased survey conducted by Spiked where they asked scientists what they would teach the world about science if they could pick just one thing. I just noticed this gem of an answer by Stanley Feldman:

I would also teach the world that energy used is proportional to mass times distance. Over a mile, a heavy train coach will use more energy than a light coach. A bus is not necessarily more efficient than a car, unless there is only one passenger in the car and the bus is full. A bicycle is less efficient than walking, as it increases the mass to be transported over any given distance.

Yes, the most important scientific truth he wants to teach the world is that “A bicycle is less efficient than walking”. A bicycle is less efficient than walking. I suppose it is possible to believe this supremely important scientific truth if you never bothered to look up an actual comparison between cycling and walking and had never ridden a bicycle or seen someone riding a bicycle or seen a picture of someone riding a bicycle or felt that the invention of the wheel was somehow useful. It seems that it doesn’t matter how stupid a claim is — as long as it is anti-Green, Spiked will publish it.

(For those interested in actual figures: cycling is about four times as energy efficient as walking.)

Update: Harry Brighouse writes about the history of Spiked — it seems they started as the Revolutionary Communist Party!

Under the title “Academics drag feet on giving out data” Lott quotes extensively from an article about the hockey stick by Steve Milloy. One part Lott doesn’t quote is this:

Well, a scientist’s refusal to provide colleagues with his data and methodology is suspicious.

Now, Milloy is being deceitful by implying that Mann, Bradley and Hughes hadn’t published their data and methodology when they had already done so, but it is true that refusing to provide data and methodology is suspicious. As done by, to pick a name at random, John Lott. I guess that if Mann had claimed to have lost the data in a disk crash Milloy would not have breathed a word about the matter.

Mark Steyn relates a story told by Johnelle Bryant:

Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world’s largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn’t get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant’s throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington - the White House, the Pentagon et al - and asked: “How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?”

Strangely enough, Bryant did not tell anyone else at the time about Atta threatening to cut her throat. A normal person might guess that this was because she made the story up, but Steyn triumphantly concludes that the evilness that is multiculturalism convinced Bryant that death threats are perfectly acceptable behaviour.

Media Watch points out a couple more problems with Bryant’s story. The 9/11 Commission Report has a detailed description of Al Qaeda’s planning of the attack and clearly did not find Bryant to be credible. Furthermore, Bryant claimed the encounter occured in early May, but Atta did not enter the US until June 3.

Instead of making a correction, Steyn compounded the error by insisting that Bryant was right and the 9/11 Commission was wrong. Steyn claims that Atta could have entered the US before June 3 in a visit that US immigration failed to record. Unfortunately for Steyn’s theory, Atta did not get a US visa till May 18, so he could not have entered before then. Steyn also attempts to bolster Bryant’s story by pointing to speculation shortly after 9/11 that the terrorists were trying to acquire crop dusters. However, these stories have been debunked. The 9/11 Commission, with the benefit of having interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the man who organized the operation), has a detailed account of the plans and no crop dusters were involved.

Of course, hardcore Steyn fans are not bothered by mere facts. Scott Campbell dismisses the 9/11 Commission Report as “conspiracy theories found on the web“, while Typo Man uses his super powers to find a typo in the Media Watch transcript.

To be fair though, Rogier van Bakel is someone who thinks Steyn is a great writer, but investigates Steyn’s story and finds it wanting.

Update: Steyn tries to defend his column again and fails.

Barista has more on the history of Spiked. It seems that they have set up another astroturf operation called “Sense about Science”, chaired by Dick Taverne.

In a comment to post on the Barton letters, Ed Snack claimed that

Michael Mann made an error in MBH98, he confused the square root of the cosine of the latitude with the cosine

Now if you look at MBH98, cosine latitude is only mentioned here:

Northern Hemisphere (NH) and global (GLB) mean temperature are estimated as areally-weighted (ie, cosine latitude) averages over the Northern hemisphere and global domains respectively

I did a bit of searching and found that Snack’s source is this statement in the supplementary material for von Storch at al’s paper “Reconstructing Past Climate from Noisy Data” DOI: 10.1126/science.1096109:

Our implementation of the MBH method essentially follows their description in their original paper (S17). The statistical model was calibrated in the period 1900-1980. Monthly near surface-temperature anomalies were standardized and subjected to an Empirical Orthogonal Function Analysis, in which each grid point was weighted by (cos φ)^(1/2), where φ is the latitude (Mann et al. 1998 erroneously use a cos φ weighting).

But the area of the grid cells that MBH use is proportional to cosine latitude and not to the square root of cosine latitude so I posted a comment suggesting that von Storch was mistaken.

Steve McIntyre then pounced on my comment, presenting evidence that von Storch was correct. He even stated that my comment was more worthy of criticism than McKitrick’s mixing up of degrees with radians in a journal paper touted as a bombshell that refuted global warming.

It seems that if you want the output from PCA to be weighted by area, the input has to be weighted by the square root of area. I don’t know enough about PCA to know for sure who is correct here, but certainly von Storch’s criticism has not been refuted, so I retracted my comment.

Neither von Storch nor McIntyre seem to think that the weighting issue is very important. Von Storch just mentions it in passing and McIntyre as not bothered to find out what effect it has on the final reconstruction.

Nonetheless McIntyre repeatedly demanded that I post a ferocious denunciation of Mann’s weighting error. He felt that I was obliged to do this because my single post on McKitrick’s mixing up degrees with radians when calculating the cosine of latitude meant that I specialized in cos latitude problems. Now his demand is rather irrational. Firstly, “cos latitude problems” is a gerrymandered category engineered to create a false equivalence between McKitrick’s error of using degrees when he should have used radians in a linear regression and Mann’s error of not taking the square root of his weights in a Empirical Orthogonal Function Analysis. Secondly, one post out of almost 800 on this blog does not make me a specialist on that topic. Thirdly, even on a topic where I do specialize, like, umm, Lott, I still don’t have to post on every little move Lott makes.

I explained this to McIntyre, but he insisted that I was this strange “cos latitude specialist” thing. I don’t think he was doing it to annoy me—he seemed to have completely convinced himself. He then felt entitled to deliver a stream of jibes and insults, accusing me of hypocrisy, of being petulant and of being a troll. He does this to others as well, calling Gavin Schmidt and Caspar Amman “Dumb and Dumber”

He also falsely claimed that I attributed McKitrick’s degrees/radians mix up to McKitrick and McIntyre and falsely claimed that my criticism of Essex and McKitrick was “mostly just belligerence”. Nor would he correct these falsehoods.

If McIntyre’s dealings with climate scientists have been anything like his behaviour towards me, with his irrational demands and unpleasant manner, I can certainly understand why they might not wish to correspond with him.

Long time readers will be aware of what I think of the appalling quality of the writing about science in Tech Central Station. (Examples: Statistics, Fumento, epidemiology physics, economics, more statistics, and more epidemiology. )

Well, they’ve destroyed any remaining credibility they might have had with an article arguing for Intelligent Design Creationism. And it’s a twofer because it was written by global warming skeptic Roy Spencer of Spencer and Christy fame.

Spencer starts with

Twenty years ago, as a PhD scientist, I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design controversy for about two years. And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as “fact,” I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.

It goes downhill from there, with him redefining the word “evolution”

While natural selection can indeed preserve the stronger and more resilient members of a gene pool, intelligent design maintains that it cannot explain entirely new kinds of life — and that is what evolution is.

And showing profound ignorance about the fossil record:

Yet the fossil record, our only source of the history of life on Earth, is almost (if not totally) devoid of transitional forms of life that would connect the supposed evolution of amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to birds, etc.

And finally claiming that evolutionism is a religion:

Does not classical evolutionism, based almost entirely upon faith, violate the same clause? More importantly, what about the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which states that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion?

If the public school system insists on teaching evolution as a theory of origins, in the view of many a religious activity, why is it discriminating against the only other theory of origins, intelligent design? (There is, by the way, no third theory of origins that anyone has ever been able to determine.) At the very least, school textbooks should acknowledge that evolution is a theory of origins, it has not been proved, and that many scientists do not accept it.

Via Julian Sanchez, who may have damaged his chances of being published in TCS again by writing:

The gross lapse in editorial judgement evinced by the decision to run this piece will leave the intellectually serious casual reader fully justified in dismissing anything that appears there in the future—which would be a shame.

Tina Rosenberg’s article, What the World Needs Now Is DDT, published in the New York Times last year contains many factual errors about DDT. The errors combine to present a false picture of a world where DDT is a magic bullet that could end malaria if only dogmatic environmentalists would allow it. After seven weeks one (and only one) correction was made to her article:

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.

Many more corrections should have been made but were not:

It costs a quarter as much as the next cheapest insecticide. It is DDT.

Correction: Deltamethrin costs the same as DDT.

But at the moment, there is only one country in the world getting donor money to finance the use of DDT: Eritrea, which gets money for its program from the World Bank with the understanding that it will look for alternatives.

Correction: The World Bank also funds DDT in India, Madagascar and the Solomon Islands.

The move away from DDT in the 60’s and 70’s led to a resurgence of malaria in various countries — Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Swaziland, South Africa and Belize, to cite a few; those countries that then returned to DDT saw their epidemics controlled.

Correction: Only one of those countries moved away from DDT in the 60s and 70s. And that country, Sri Lanka, abandoned DDT in 1977 because the mosquitoes had developed resistance to DDT and a malaria epidemic had resulted. It was only by switching to malathion that they were able to control the epidemic.

In her 297 pages, Rachel Carson never mentioned the fact that by the time she was writing, DDT was responsible for saving tens of millions of lives, perhaps hundreds of millions.

Correction: Carson did mention the the triumphs agaisnt disease, writing:

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.

Yes, one of the reasons that Carson was against the overuse of pesticides was that it would destroy their usefulness against disease.

Back to Rosenberg:

DDT killed bald eagles because of its persistence in the environment. ‘’Silent Spring'’ is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind.

Correction: “Silent Spring” is now saving African children. If it hadn’t been for bans on the agricultural use of DDT that Carson inspired, mosquitoes in Africa would have developed resistance as they did in Sri Lanka and many other places. The African children being saved from malaria with DDT spraying can thank Rachel Carson.

Ruckelshaus made the right decision—for the United States. At the time, DDT was mainly sprayed on crops, mostly cotton, a use far riskier than indoor house spraying. There was no malaria in the United States—in part thanks to DDT—so there were no public health benefits from its use. ‘’But if I were a decision maker in Sri Lanka, where the benefits from use outweigh the risks, I would decide differently,'’ Ruckleshaus told me recently.

Correction: Mosquitoes in Sri Lanka are resistant to DDT so there are no public health benefits to its use.

But the most pernicious falsehood in the article is the title:

What the World Needs Now Is DDT

This is contradicted by information deep in the article, but Rosenberg fails to draw the obvious conclusion:

Malaria’s status can be read in the aid figures. By the 1990’s, it was almost completely ignored, and Africa’s malaria-control programs disintegrated. In some countries, the entire federal antimalaria program employed only two or three people. … Both bed nets and house spraying can be effective, and studies comparing costs differ on which is cheaper.

What the world needs now is not DDT but money to combat malaria. It doesn’t matter that much whether it is spent on bed nets or spraying with DDT or other insecticides—they all work and the costs don’t differ that much (and DDT isn’t necessarily the cheapest solution). Rosenberg makes it look like that all that is preventing malaria from being controlled is environmentalists’ prejudices against malaria and that just isn’t true.

Fortunately other reporters have done a better job of reporting the facts than Rosenberg. A recent LA Times article gets it right:

DDT, banned in the U.S. for harming the environment, is still used in limited circumstances as a house spray, but it is not the miracle worker some suggest it could be if only Western aid groups would get behind it.

Today’s weapon of choice in the war on malaria is a net treated with a biodegradable pyrethroid insecticide. The net works not so much because it forms a foolproof barrier against mosquitoes—it doesn’t—but because the insecticide kills the bugs. The most astounding results come when treated nets multiply across a village. When net use reaches a tipping point of about 60% of households, they kill enough mosquitoes that the protective benefits extend even to the households without nets.

(Via Irant). Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson launched the Australian Science Festival with this:

Intelligent design, which is damned by critics as a front for biblical Creationism, argues that life on Earth is too complex to have evolved purely through Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Dr Nelson said yesterday he had met Campus Crusade for Christ, the Australian advocates of intelligent design, or ID, and watched their DVD presentation, called Unlocking the Mystery of Life.

He told the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday that he would oppose replacing evolution with ID in Australia’s science classes but said parents should be able to choose that their children learn about it.

“Do I think it should be a replacement for teaching the origins of mankind in a scientific sense? I most certainly don’t think that it should be at all. In fact, I’d be quite concerned if it were to replace it,” said Dr Nelson, who is a medical doctor and a Christian.

“Do I think that parents and schools should have the opportunity — if they wish to — for students also to be exposed to this and to be taught about it? Yes I think that’s fine,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, students can be taught and should be taught the basic science in terms of the evolution of man, but if schools also want to present students with intelligent design, I don’t have any difficulty with that. It’s about choice, reasonable choice.”

US President George Bush made global headlines last week when he endorsed ID. He said both ID and evolution should be taught “so people can understand what the debate is about”. The ID debate has raged in the US for more than a decade. One critic has derided ID as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo”.

Bill Hodgson, head of Campus Crusade for Christ Australia, welcomed Dr Nelson’s remarks as “fantastic”, adding: “I think any reasonable and balanced approach to education has to take that view.

“This is not advocating the teaching of religion.”

He said his group had never advocated the removal of the theory of evolution from school curriculums and said intelligent design was hard science, not creationism. “There is evidence of intelligent design. All we’re saying is that the cutting edge of science is adhering increasingly to intelligent design.”

The Age reported on Saturday that Mr Hodgson’s group was seeking support from educationists, churches, politicians and scientists to distribute its DVD to every Australian high school for inclusion in the curriculum.

Hint to “Campus Crusade for Christ”: If you are trying to pretend that you are pushing “intelligent design” for scientific reasons you might consider creating a fake front group with a sciencey sounding name. I humbly offer this suggestion: “The Scientific Foundation for the Scientific Improvement of Science Education”.

To find out what the next things we are likely to import from the US I suggest you check out Chris Mooney’s new book, “The Republican War on Science“.

Last week the gullible Mark Steyn was busted by Media Watch for basing a column on Johnelle Bryant’s crazy story about being visited by Mohammed Atta in early May 2000. She said that Atta threatened to cut her throat and wanted a loan to buy a crop duster. Unfortunately for her story, Atta wasn’t in the country until June. And, as I wrote then:

Strangely enough, Bryant did not tell anyone else at the time about Atta threatening to cut her throat. A normal person might guess that this was because she made the story up, but Steyn triumphantly concludes that the evilness that is multiculturalism convinced Bryant that death threats are perfectly acceptable behaviour.

Bryant also said:

he started talking about um, an organization that uh, back in his country, and he kept referring to his country and I can only assume now that he was referring to Afghanistan. At the time I didn’t know if he meant Egypt or Afghanistan, um, that [SIGH] uh, they had an organization in, and he, I couldn’t understand, he got really emotional when he talked about it, like really excited about it. And, um, he said that they, they could use people. In other words, that they could use people, um, as, as members. …

I know now that he talking about al Qaeda, but the way pronounced it, it sounded like he was talking about a woman’s name. He kept saying uh, it sound like, Akeda, Akeda, “Surely you’ve heard. Surely you know, Akeda.” And I went, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah right.” [LAUGHS] I mean, I didn’t know what he was talking about. …

he mentioned Al Qaeda. He mentioned Osama bin Laden. … he mentioned that um, this man would someday be known as the world’s greatest leader. I didn’t know who he was talking about.

This isn’t even slightly plausible. Why would Atta identify himself as a member of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization? Remember that the US was already at war with Al Qaeda.

Unfortunately, Mark Steyn has failed to correct his column. Instead he has mounted a ludicrous defence. After taking Bryant’s uncorroborated story as gospel he attacks Media Watch for relying on a report backed up by actual evidence:

What sort of fearless media watchdogs take an official report and US immigration “records” as gospel? A bunch of saps, that’s who. This week’s big news in the US is the revelation that an intelligence unit by the name of Able Danger had Atta and co in its sights more than a year before 9/11. And what’s the key revelation?

A classified military intelligence unit called ‘Able Danger’ identified Atta and three other hijackers in 1999 as potential members of a terrorist cell in New York City.

So, despite the 9/11 Commission’s touching faith in US immigration’s “record” of June 3rd 2000 as Mohammed Atta’s first entry to the US, military intelligence puts him on American soil in 1999.

So, did US military intelligence put Atta on American soil in 1999? Well, no. If you follow the link that Steyn gave, you don’t find the quote he gave. Instead you find this:

During the July 12, 2004, meeting with the military official, the officer said he recalled seeing Atta’s name and photo on an analyst’s chart made by the secret Able Danger unit, the statement released by Kean and Hamilton said.

The relevant data discussed by the officer showed Atta to be a member of an al-Qaida cell in New York City from February to April 2000, the statement said.

But it also says:

a military official who made the claim had no documentation to back it up. … ‘He could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification,'’ the statement said of the military official.

And from the Commission’s full statement:

The interviewee had no documentary evidence and said he had only seen the document briefly some years earlier. He could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification. Nor could the interviewee recall, when questioned, any details about how he thought a link to Atta could have been made by this DOD program in 2000 or any time before 9/11. The Department of Defense documents had mentioned nothing about Atta, nor had anyone come forward between September 2001 and July 2004 with any similar information. Weighing this with the information about Atta’s actual activities, the negligible information available about Atta to other U.S. government agencies and the German government before 9/11, and the interviewer’s assessment of the interviewee’s knowledge and credibility, the Commission staff concluded that the officer’s account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation.

The “military intelligence” that Steyn is relying on is even flimsier than Bryant’s story.

If you look at the 9/11 Commission’s report you can see why they ruled out the possibility of Atta being in New York City from February to April:

Atta returned to Hamburg [from Pakistan] in late February …

After leaving Afghanistan, the hijackers made clear efforts to avoid appearing radical. Once back in Hamburg, they distanced themselves from conspicuous extremists like Zammar, whom that knew attracted unwanted attention from the authorities. They also changed their appearance and behavior. Atta wore Western clothing, shaved his beard, and no longer attended extremist mosques.

The Commission had witnesses who had seen Atta in Hamburg after he got back from Afghanistan, so he could not have been living in New York City at the time.

The Australian has also published a story in attempt to bail Steyn out. It looks as if the reporter was told to dig up some evidence, any evidence, to support Steyn but all he could come up with was this:

Ms Bryant could not be reached for comment this week but Bob Epling, president of Community Bank of Florida, which let office space to the agency Ms Bryant worked for, said he had no doubt Atta visited the premises.

He said Ms Bryant had referred Atta to the “agriculture-friendly” CBF. “Atta was 15 steps away from walking into our loan department and making an application,” Mr Epling said yesterday. “He chose not to.”

Or, to put it another way, Atta did not visit the CBF and nobody there saw him. Epling hasn’t provided any evidence at all to support Bryant—all he has done is say that he believes her.

Predictably, Tim Blair supports Steyn. I imagine that if Philip Adams had based a column on Bryant’s crazy story, Blair would have mocking him for being taken in.

Update: Blair has added an update where he links to a post by John Podhoretz who attempts to undermine the 9/11 Commission with this:

That denial would be significant except that the 9/11 Commission folks at first denied they’d ever received ANY information about Able Danger and then backed down two days later. So it’s not clear why we should accept this denial about the Afghanistan meeting on faith.

Did they really deny that they had ever received ANY information about Able Danger? Let’s review their first reponse :

A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta’s name.

So they didn’t deny that they had received information about Able Danger and they haven’t backed down from their denial of Weldon’s claims about the Afghanistan meeting. What happened two days later was that after reviewing their documents they found that Atta had been mentioned at the later meeting discussed above.

Update 2: More from Podhoretz:

From tomorrow’s Time Magazine about Rep. Curt Weldon and his Able Danger claims, which arose out of a soon-to-be-published book: “In a particularly dramatic scene in Weldon’s book, Countdown to Terror, the Pennsylvania Republican described personally handing to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley, just after Sept. 11, an Able Danger chart produced in 1999 identifying Atta. But Weldon told TIME he’s no longer certain Atta’s name was on that original document. The congressman says he handed Hadley his only copy. Still, last week he referred reporters to a recently reconstructed version of the chart in his office where, among dozens of names and photos of terrorists from around the world, there was a color mug shot of Mohammad Atta, circled in black marker.”

If Time’s account is accurate, Weldon has done something very, very bad with this whole story — something either knowingly dishonest, unknowingly crazy, or foolishly naive — and he should be held accountable for it.

And (my emphasis):

The commission hears, in July 2004, from a guy who says that four years earlier he saw, on a chart with 60 other people on it, the face and name of Mohammed Atta. He has no proof of this, and the commission itself examined documents at the Pentagon months earlier from the same operation and found nothing there. With nothing else to go on, this isn’t even worthy of a footnote. It’s just blather and palaver, and let’s be honest here — would you have remembered a specific name like “Mohammed Atta” from a list of 60 names in 2000? We didn’t know it was 60 names when this first came out. Weldon and the Naval officer guy made it sound like there were only five names. …

None of this passes the smell test. And an apology is due the 9/11 Commission staff at the very least, I think, because some of us were in effect contending that they were sloppy or dishonest or covering something up. Sounds like they were being professional to me.

Some of the readers of this Mark Steyn column might have wondered why he seems oddly determined to dispute one date in the 9/11 Commission’s time line:

they seemed oddly determined to fix June 3, 2000, as the official date of Atta’s first landing on American soil

Of course, those people who heard how Steyn got busted by Media Watch for falling for Johnelle Bryant’s story (my posts are here and here) will know the real reason why he is determined to dispute that date—for Bryant’s story to be true, Atta would have had to have been in the US before June 2000.

Here’s Steyn’s argument:

But I do know it’s absurd to suggest he was never in the United States until June 3, 2000, simply because that’s what the INS says — especially when U.S. military intelligence says something quite different.

Well, yes it would be absurd. But then, that’s not what the 9/11 Commission did. As well as the INS records, the Commission had multiple eye witnesses, flight records, phone records and so on.

Steyn claims:

I’ve no hard evidence of where [Atta] was in, say, April 2000. The period between late 1999 and May 2000 is, in many ways, a big blur.

Well a big blur to Steyn perhaps, but not to the 9/11 Commission:

Following Slahi’s advice,Atta and Jarrah left Hamburg during the last week of November 1999, bound for Karachi. … [In Kandahar] Binalshibh rejoined Atta and Jarrah, who said they already had pledged loyalty to Bin Ladin and urged him to do the same.They also informed him that Shehhi had pledged as well and had already left for the United Arab Emirates to prepare for the mission. …

Atta, Jarrah, and Binalshibh then met with Atef, who told them they were about to undertake a highly secret mission. As Binalshibh tells it, Atef instructed the three to return to Germany and enroll in flight training. Atta– whom Bin Ladin chose to lead the group–met with Bin Ladin several times to receive additional instructions, including a preliminary list of approved targets: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Capitol. …

Bin Ladin and Atef wasted no time in assigning the Hamburg group to the most ambitious operation yet planned by al Qaeda. Bin Ladin and Atef also plainly judged that Atta was best suited to be the tactical commander of the operation. Such a quick and critical judgment invites speculation about whether they had already taken Atta’s measure at some ear- lier meeting. To be sure, some gaps do appear in the record of Atta’s known whereabouts during the preceding years. One such gap is February­March 1998, a period for which there is no evidence of his presence in Germany and when he conceivably could have been in Afghanistan.

Yet to date, neither KSM, Binalshibh, nor any other al Qaeda figure interrogated about the 9/11 plot has claimed that Atta or any other member of the Hamburg group traveled to Afghanistan before the trip in late 1999. While the four core Hamburg cell members were in Afghanistan, their associates back in Hamburg handled their affairs so that their trip could be kept secret. Motassadeq appears to have done the most. He terminated Shehhi’s apartment lease, telling the landlord that Shehhi had returned to the UAE for family reasons, and used a power of attorney to pay bills from Shehhi’s bank account.

In early 2000,Atta, Jarrah, and Binalshibh returned to Hamburg. … According to Binalshibh, he and Atta left Kandahar together and proceeded first to Karachi, where they met KSM and were instructed by him on security and on living in the United States. … Atta returned to Hamburg in late February …

After leaving Afghanistan, the hijackers made clear efforts to avoid appearing radical. Once back in Hamburg, they distanced themselves from conspicuous extremists like Zammar, whom they knew attracted unwanted attention from the authorities.

They also changed their appearance and behavior. Atta wore Western clothing, shaved his beard, and no longer attended extremist mosques.

After leaving Afghanistan, the four began researching flight schools and aviation training. … In March 2000, Atta emailed 31 different U.S. flight schools on behalf of a small group of men from various Arab countries studying in Germany who, while lacking prior training, were interested in learning to fly in the United States. Atta requested information about the cost of the training, potential financing, and accommodations.

Before seeking visas to enter the United States, Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah obtained new passports, each claiming that his old passport had been lost. Presumably they were concerned that the Pakistani visas in their old passports would raise suspicions about possible travel to Afghanistan. Shehhi obtained his visa on January 18, 2000; Atta, on May 18; and Jarrah, on May 25.

Just a big blur, right. Steyn makes a big deal about how it is possible to sneak into the US without a passport but there is no reason why Atta would do this. He had no trouble getting a US visa so there was no need for him to sneak into the country. Atta did his travelling under his real name in the trips we know about.

All in all, a rather weak effort from Steyn. All this because he is too stubborn to admit to making a mistake when he based a column on Johnelle Bryant’s crazy story.

By now everyone knows that last June the UAH (University of Alabama Huntsville) team led by Roy Spencer and John Christy released updates to their satellite derived lower troposphere temperature trends. These trends, which come from their “TLT” dataset use data from the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) packages that have been flying aboard NOAA’s Polar Orbiting Environmental (POES) satellites since late 1978. This dataset uses combinations of nadir (straight-down) and off-nadir views of MSU Channel 2 to create a “synthetic” channel that isolates a lower and thinner portion of the atmosphere than the Channel 2 data alone (these measurements are taken by successive cross-track scans that look from left to right as the satellite orbits).

Prior to this UAH’s most up-to-date TLT trend, Version 5.1 (Christy & Norris, 2004) was 0.086 deg. C/decade–well below the predictions of state-of-the-art climate models for the lower troposphere. The corresponding trend from the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) team led by Carl Mears and Frank Wentz is derived from applying the Fu et al. method to their middle troposphere temperature measurements which are taken directly from the MSU Channel 2 nadir view. That trend is 0.19 deg. C/decade and is well within the range of model predictions. So naturally, the Spencer and Christy trends are the only ones that have ever been cited by global warming skeptics as reliable. Spencer and Christy’s Version 5.2 data now yields a trend of 0.12 deg. C/decade for the period 1978-2004 which is now much closer to the comparable RSS trend, also well within the range of the model predictions and essentially resolving the conflict. Since their release the reason for these corrections has been a mystery. There was little if any comment from UAH about the nature of the corrections. For awhile Spencer and Christy were even putting the data up at their web site and taking it down again at frequent but unpredictable intervals making access to it a little hit and miss.

Now, the reason for this UAH update has been made public. One of the more important corrections that needs to be applied to these datasets is one for diurnal drift. The satellites are put in “sun-synchronous” orbits so that they will cross the equator at the same times and locations throughout their service lives. Any imperfection in this sun-synchronous timing will result in an east-west drift that will cause the satellite to measure temperatures at different times of the day. This will in turn cause a spurious warming or cooling in the trend. The NOAA-11 satellite, which operated from 1987 to 1993 had a particularly large diurnal drift correction. Last week a new paper by Mears and Wentz of RSS appeared in Science (Mears & Wentz, 2005) revealing that for some time now, Spencer and Christy have been applying the NOAA-11 diurnal drift correction to their trend calculations with the wrong sign! They’ve been treating that drift as introducing a spurious warming when in fact, it introduces a spurious cooling. Rerunning their analysis with the proper diurnal correction for NOAA-11 alone increased their TLT trend by almost 50 percent.

In other words, the entire controversy over surface vs. troposphere temperature trends, and with it the only potentially credible skeptic argument, boils down to…. a math error!

The same day another paper also appeared in Science that speaks to another piece of this issue—radiosonde measured lower troposphere trends. For years skeptics have claimed that radiosonde derived trends independently “confirm” the satellite record. This has always been questionable on a number of grounds, but earlier UAH TLT trends were closer to the radiosonde record than those of RSS. Now it appears that the radiosonde records were also low for a completely different reason, and the previous similarities between the two were purely coincidental. A team led by Steven Sherwood of Yale has discovered that these records suffer almost universally from an overcorrection for incident solar radiative heating. Radiosondes carry “thermistor” type thermometers that measure local air temperature at regular intervals during the balloon’s ascent. Like any thermometer left directly in the sun, these tend to read high unless compared to “shade” thermometers which are more accurate. In the past it has proven to be quite difficult to correct for this. Sherwood’s team examined long-term radiosonde records from globally distributed stations for the impact of this effect. They found that the corrections for this effect that have been used most frequently overcorrect it by a significant amount leaving the sonde record with a spurious cooling. Recent datasets have provided more reliable corrections. When these are used the radiosonde record also agrees with the satellite and surface records to a degree well within the confidence intervals of each.

Thus, the radiosonde “confirmation” of previous math-error driven UAH trends has also vanished.

For what it’s worth, the UAH team has acknowledged the error. Spencer put up something of a concession of sorts at Tech Central Station last week . He’s not quite saying “we were wrong…” yet, but he’s clearly shifting from “it ain’t happening!…” to “maybe it won’t be so bad…” Ron Bailey of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (who edited the book Global Warming and other Eco-Myths, which included a piece by Christy himself) has also acknowledged the error in an editorial in Reason magazine . Until last week, he was one of the more visible and vociferous of global warming skeptic science commentators. Now, he says that “anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up. All data sets-satellite, surface, and balloon-have been pointing to rising global temperatures..” A very honorable and reasoned concession on his part.

Of course, it would be too much to expect a rational response from everyone in that camp. Steven Milloy wrote about it at Junk Science with his characteristic abusiveness and scientific illiteracy. The entire commentary is devoted either to insisting as loudly as possible that “it’s just a few hundredths of a degree!…”, or accusing others of not reading the two papers in as condescending a tone as he can manage (naturally, he offers no proof that he read them either, or that he understood any of their methods and conclusions).

Singer responded in his Aug. 13 “The Week That Was” column. Apparently, he’s still clinging to his dogmas. He is going to try to argue that the increase to 0.12 deg. C/decade is “not a big deal.” Spencer and Christy “overcorrected” he says. He hints at something he’s going to come out with soon that he thinks will prove this–which ought to be quite entertaining. He also claims that “no one has yet explained [the] difference” between the UAH and RSS trends, which is of course patent nonsense. The differences are related to differing methods of merge calculation and a few other noise corrections. They are well known and are described in my own paper. He also claims that S&C’s new numbers “agree with the corrected balloon trends” which of course is irrelevant if they all now agree with model predictions. For someone with as long and otherwise distinguished a career as his, at least during the 70’s and 80’s, he’s turned into quite a piece of work.

Note also that he claims Michaels is now conceding that global warming is real. If true, that would be quite the turnaround.

REFERENCES

Christy, J.R. and W.B. Norris. 2004. What may we conclude about global tropospheric temperature trends? Geophys. Res. Lett., 31, L06211, doi:10.1029/2003GL019361.

Mears, C.A., and F.J. Wentz, 2005: The effect of diurnal correction on satellite-derived lower tropospheric temperature. August 11, 2005. Online at Science Express.

Sherwood, S., J. Lanzante, and C. Meyer. 2005. Radiosonde daytime biases and late 20th century warming. August 11, 2005. Online at Science Express.

The Fifteenth Skeptics’ Circle is out.

James Annan finally has takers for his bet on global warming. The news was published in Nature, but for those without a subscription, here is the gist of it:

James Annan, who is based at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama, has agreed a US$10,000 bet with Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev, two solar physicists who argue that global temperatures are driven by changes in the Sun’s activity and will fall over the next decade. The bet, which both sides say they are willing to formalize in a legal document, came after other climate sceptics refused to wager money.

Annan detailed their refusals here. The Nature article continues:

Annan’s search ended with Mashnich and Bashkirtsev, who are based at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk, Russia. They say that global surface air temperatures closely correlate with the size and number of sunspots. Sunspot levels follow regular patterns and the Sun is expected to be in a less active phase over the next few decades, leading Mashnich and Bashkirtsev to predict a drop in temperature.

Both sides have agreed to compare the average global surface temperature between 1998 and 2003 with that between 2012 and 2017, as defined by the records of the US National Climatic Data Center. If the temperature drops, Annan will pay Mashnich and Bashkirtsev $10,000 in 2018, with the same sum going the other way if the temperature rises.

Piers Corbyn, head of Weather Action, a private meteorological service based in London, told Nature he would like to enter into a similar bet. Corbyn’s theory, the details of which he has not revealed, predicts that changes in solar activity will cause “considerable world cooling” by 2040. Annan challenged him to a bet in May, but Corbyn says he did not receive the e-mail. “I’m happy to bet loads of money,” he says.

In the discussion on this post, per posted an abusive comment, violating my comment policy. I’ve had to ban him twice before (see here and here), so I simply banned him again, deleting the offending comment and the few that he posted after that.

That should have been the end of it, but the folks at Climate Audit decided to branch out from their unending attempts to find fault with the hockey stick paper into an investigation of my comment policy: In this posting John A falsely claimed that I had deleted all of per’s comments because I disagreed with them.

This prompted a flood of abusive comments directed at me and calls for some sort of investigation of the allegedly nefarious treatment of comments on blog. Ironically, Steve McIntyre ended up deleting some of the worst ones and threatening to ban folks for flamage. Mind you, comments repeating John A’s canard that I don’t know what entropy is were allowed to stand, while this email that I posted from Robert Parson to explain their error was quickly deleted:

It so happens that I assigned a slightly more complicated version of the problem that Anonymous is making such a hash about to my Physical Chemistry class a couple of years ago - and I never got around to taking down the course Web Pages (just delinked them) - so feel free to throw it into the fray if you like. The problem is number three from Problem set three: calculated the final temperature and entropy change when ice melts in liquid water.

The solution (unfortunately, a scan of a handwritten page, that was a busy year).

It’s somewhat more complicated because there’s a phase change so you need to account for the heat of fusion, but if you set delta-Hfus equal to zero you get back to a weighted average of the two temperatures.

McIntyre then closed comments and added this to the post:

As an encore, Lambert, emulating Mann’s prior blocking of me from his FTP site, has blocked John A. from access to his site.

I don’t know whether or not Mann has blocked McIntyre from his FTP site, but I certainly haven’t blocked John A from access to my site. Earlier today I couldn’t access my site either—I wonder if McIntyre thinks that was because I blocked myself from access.

The icing on the cake is this additional comment from John A:

I have discovered that I am not the only blocked from even reading Lambert’s weblog. Clearly Lambert has decided that intelligent, scientifically literate critics are too scary for Lambert to cope with. I can still read the site through one of the Internet’s numerous anonymous proxies, so Lambert’s petulence counts for nought.

A normal person who discovered that other people also had trouble accessing my site might have concluded that there was a problem with the server or something, but not John A, who concludes that I must be specifically blocking them as well.

Update: McIntyre has added a rather graceless correction:

Lambert says that John A. was not blocked. He says that there were server problems at his end which prevented access to everyone. We will of course take Lambert at his word, although I will note that I did not experience any access difficulties in the period in question.

Actually, I didn’t say that nobody could access my site, just that I had had problems as well. Others may have got through at the same time. Such are the vagaries of the Internet.

Update 23 Aug I worked out why John A couldn’t access my site. McIntyre’s response:

Lambert first said that other people had the same problem as John A and later said: “Anyway, I figured out what happened — a spambot has been spamming my blog using the same IP as you [John A], so Bad Behavior blocked access from your IP. I’ve removed the block, but if the spambot does it again, it will be automatically blocked again. If you are the only person using that IP address than your computer is infected.”

Of course it was John A who said that other people had the same problem as him. McIntyre’s modus operandi seems to be to attack with baseless charges and when proved wrong to attack with more of the same instead of retracting.

“Dave Curry”, the fellow who sent me a very nasty email and then a nice apology is back, using another sockpuppet to attack me:

Lambert was toasted on the Climate Audit website. Lambert is very quick to impugn the motives of others, criticise them for not having good enough credentials (according to Lambert) whenever someone’s opinion differs from his own. He had the temerity to accuse someone with degrees from Harvard and MIT as not being a reputable academic (according to a post at Climate Audit). Posters asked if Lambert’s degrees and expertise afford him the podium to throw at s…. at others.

Lambert’s recent post is a call for sympathy from his sycophantic audience to share his pain for being criticised. Mr. Popularity got all of 5 posts with one asking what was the purpose of the post. I will answer that. The purpose was to have a public cry. This p…. attempts to savage anyone in his wake, but is unable to take it himself. What a creep! I hope Lambert isn’t typical of the faculty where he teaches. Climate Audit is doing a very good job at exposing shoddy and sometimes deceitful studies in climate science. Lambert supports the shoddy work because these studies favour his own far left ideological angry left views.

Lambert is a sook and and a far leftist pretending otherwise.

“Dave Curry” seems to enjoy creating sockpuppets to interact with me—other identities he has used include S Brid, Pessimist and Joe Cambria. The last one seems to be his real name.

Update: Joe Cambria emails to boast that he used another sock puppet on Climate Audit to make over a dozen posts abusing me. He was basically ignored, so the post above is his attempt to make it look like someone was paying attention, even though it was just another one of his socks.

Over the past few years crime rates in Australia, Canada and England have fallen dramatically. For example, in NSW crime plunged to the lowest level in 20 years, in Canada, the 2003 homicide rate was the lowest in 36 years, while in England the crime rate was the lowest since the BCS started in 1981. While crime has been plummeting, John Lott has been publishing a steady stream of op-eds blaming gun control for increasing crime in those places. His secret? Cherry-picking.

Lott’s latest column is a little unusual amongst his cherry picking efforts in that he provides links to his sources. He writes:

And with Canada’s murder rate rising 12 percent last year

The trouble with this approach is that readers can click through and read the parts of the report that he chose not to mention. Here are the section headings, leaving nothing out.

Violent crime down but homicide rate up … Robberies with a firearm continue to decline … Property crime resumes downward trend … Drug incidents resume upward trend …Youth crime down

And look at how the increase in homicide was reported:

Canada’s homicide rate rose 12% in 2004 after hitting a 36-year low the year before.

Lott conveniently left out the second part of the sentence. He also says:

With Canada’s reported violent-crime rate of 963 per 100,000 in 2003, a rate about twice the U.S.’s (which is 475), Canada’s politicians are understandably nervous.

Lott does not tell his readers that the “violent crime rate” in the Canadian statistics includes simple assaults but in the US statistics it only includes aggravated assaults. If you compare the same crime categories, violent crime rates are lower in Canada.

Lott also cherry picks some English crime statistics:

The 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey, the last survey completed, shows the violent-crime rate in England and Wales was twice the rate of that in the U.S. When the new survey for 2004 comes out later this year, that gap will undoubtedly have widened even further as crimes reported to British police have since soared by 35 percent, while those in the U.S. have declined 6 percent.

Lott does not mention that the crime victimization rate in England has decreased significantly—the increase in crimes reported has occurred because the police have improved their record keeping, not because there has been any increase in crime.

And he cherry picks Australian ones:

Australia has also seen its violent-crime rates soar immediately after its 1996 Port Arthur gun-control measures. Violent crime rates averaged 32-percent higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than they did in 1995. The same comparisons for armed-robbery rates showed increases of 74 percent.

I’ve put the Australian statistics in a spreadsheet so you can see for yourself that he has selected the crime rate and the basis for comparison to conjure up some crime increases. There was a temporary increase in the armed robbery rate after the 1996 laws, but since then the armed robbery has fallen below what it was when the law was passed. More importantly (and you will never hear this from Lott), the firearms murder rate has halved, falling from 0.32 per 100k in 1995 to 0.16 in 2004. The non-firearms murder rate did not change significantly.

I’ve long been opposed to the 1996 laws because I didn’t think they would have a significant effect on crime, but the latest Australian crime figures are making me waver because it’s likely that laws were responsible for at least some part of the reduction.

There have been a few people who have used sock puppets on this blog. Note that a sock puppet differs from a pseudonym in that sock puppets are used to deceitfully make it appear that there is more support for you postion than there really is. Here is a table to help you keep track of the socks that have been used here.

I’ll let David Bell’s sock puppet, “peroxisome” have the last word:

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

Lott and Dabney have an op-ed in the Washington Times on concealed handguns in the workplace. As usual, Lott misrepresents the state of current research on firearms. Lott and Dabney write:

Indeed, international data as well as data from across the United States indicate that criminals are much less likely to attack residents in their homes when they suspect that the residents own guns.

Not so. In The Effects of Gun Prevalence on Burglary: Deterrence vs Inducement Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig found that areas in the US with higher gun ownership tended to have more burglaries, and more burglaries where the residents were home.

They also claim:

The vast majority of academic research finds that concealed handguns reduce violent crime, and, despite all the national studies that have been done, there is not a single refereed academic journal publication that claims a statistically significant increase in violent crime.

But the vast majority of research on concealed handguns does not support Lott. Furthermore, the National Academy of Sciences panel on firearms and violence reviewed the research and found:

There is no credible evidence that “right-to-carry” laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime.

And note the careful phrasing about “refereed academic journal” so that he didn’t have to mention Ayres and Donohue’s Stanford Law Review paper Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis which found crime increases associated with carry laws. The Stanford Law Review is not refereed, but Lott has had ample time to come with a refutation of their work and failed.

They also claim:

Examining all the multiple-victim public shootings from 1977 to 1999, one of the current authors with Bill Landes at the University of Chicago found that, on average, states that adopt right-to-carry laws experience a 60 percent drop in the rate at which the attacks occur and a 78 percent drop in the rate at which people are killed or injured from such attacks.

After making a fuss about publication in peer-reviewed academic journals, Lott cites a paper he wrote that he could not get published in an academic journal, peer reviewed or otherwise. He somehow forgets to mention that the only study on multiple-victim public shootings to be published in a peer-reviewed journal did not find that carry laws had any effect on mass public shootings.

After falling for an obvious hoax, Mark Steyn has refused to correct his error. Instead he just keeps digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole. (My previous posts on this topic: 1 2 3).

In his latest effort Steyn complains about how the meanies at Media Watch asked him what checks he made to prove the validity of Bryant’s unlikely tale:

But Chantal explained that she’d checked out the show and that the Media Watch concept involves them accusing you of something, you emailing back your 15,000-word response and then they pick the infelicitously phrased seven-word throwaway subordinate clause and stick it up on screen, after which the host delivers a withering putdown.

And also putting up your 15,000 word response on their web site for all to see. Of course, the real reason why Steyn hasn’t written 15,000 words on the checks he made of the validity of Bryant’s story is that he didn’t do any. All he has offered to justify his use of story is Able Danger and he didn’t know about that when he wrote the story. This doesn’t seem to matter to the The Australian—they don’t care whether the columns they publish are factual.

Steyn then claims that only argument that Media Watch had against him was:

But in the end their only point of factual disagreement boiled down to a possible discrepancy in the timeline.

Well, no. There was also the fact that the 9/11 Commission, which had a better chance to look at all the evidence than any of us, did not find Bryant’s story credible.

Steyn continues:

a couple of days after the Media Watch broadcast, the news broke that a US military data-mining operation claimed to have identified Atta as part of an al-Qa’ida cell in Brooklyn well before he “officially” landed at Newark on June 3. Since then, three of the 12 members of the team have come forward publicly and the question of when precisely Atta arrived in the US is now a topic of hot controversy. Media Watch may go all goo-goo for the bland assurances of official reports but there is simply no factual basis for the 9/11 commission’s chiselling in granite of June 3 as the date of Atta’s first arrival.

Here is an important bit from the first story (way back on August 9) on Able Danger:

The official said the link to Brooklyn was meant as a term of art rather than to be interpreted literally, saying that the unit had produced no firm evidence linking the men to the borough of New York City but that a computer analysis seeking to establish patterns in links between the four men had found that “the software put them all together in Brooklyn.”

Steyn is wrong to claim that the cell was located in Brooklyn. Able Danger did not find that Atta was in Brooklyn before June 2000. In fact the official stated that they they had no firm evidence that he was in Brooklyn. “Brooklyn cell” was just a name chosen because there was some Brooklyn connection. Now, I don’t know whether Able Danger identified Atta in early 2000. The troubling thing about the story at the moment is that for all the talk about charts identifying him, none of these charts or any other documentation has turned up. I’m concerned that the team identified a terrorist cell in 2000, no action was taken, and after 9/11 they convinced themselves that Atta was identified when it was just someone with a similar name or appearance. But as far as the Atta timeline goes, none of this matters since Able Danger has produced no evidence contradicting it.

Edward Jay Epstein explains that Able Danger used “open source material” and suggests a way that they could have identified Atta. But note that Able Danger didn’t have any information that wasn’t also available to the 9/11 Commission, so once again we see that it had no good evidence that Atta was in the US before June 2000.

Steyn then shares with us the earth-shattering news that it is possible to sneak into the US. Wow, who knew? What he doesn’t present, however, is any reason why Atta would do this. He had no trouble getting a US visa so there was no need for him to sneak into the country.

But my favourite bit is this claim:

The reality is that Bryant’s timeline has more supporting witnesses than the 9/11 commission’s.

The reality is that Bryant has one uncorroborated witness (herself) for her timeline, while 9/11 had many witnesses including Atta’s cell member Binalshibh.

After this latest shoddy effort from Steyn, Media Watch, which busted Steyn for falling for the story in the first place, has Steyn well in the running for the Jim Ball prize for media dupes. And if they ever introduce a blogger division of the prize, Tim “easily fooled” Blair is a shoo-in.

Update: Blair has added an update where he uses an out-of-context quote to claim that

Tim Lambert thinks “Abel Danger” is a person:

Abel Danger did not find that Atta was in Brooklyn before June 2000. In fact he stated that they had no firm evidence that he was in Brooklyn.

If Blair’s reading comprehension skills were any good he would have noticed that I consistently referred to the Able Danger team as “they”. The word “he” in the sentence Blair quotes refers to the official who was talking to Jehl about Able Danger. Blair’s response is characteristic of the unserious and superficial nature of his blog. He has no substantive comments on Bryant or Able Danger, just repeated assertions that Steyn is somehow correct and a lame attempt at point-scoring with an out-of-context quote.

Update 2: Blair has added another update—now his story is that he understood what I meant and all he was doing was mocking my “clumsy writing”. Even if this is true, it means that the sum total of his contribution to the discussion in five posts on Steyn and Bryant has been to discover a typo in the Media Watch transcript and some “clumsy writing” in one of my posts. Look up “superficial” in the dictionary and you’ll see a picture of Blair.

Love you Carmen.