Deltoid

The Wall Street Journal has a reputation for publishing excellent news pages and mendacious editorial pages. Now, an investigation by Environmental Science and Technology on an WSJ front page article on McIntyre and McKitrick makes you wonder if the editorial pages are influencing the news reporting. You should read the whole thing, but here are a few extracts:

But the harshest critic of the whole issue is former Wall Street Journal page-one editor, Frank Allen. He now directs the Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources in Missoula, Mont. When asked to read the front-page article, he described it to ES&T as a “public disservice” littered with “snide comments” and “unsupported assumptions”. He says he does not understand how the story got past the editors.

“It was a strange story ’cause it had this bizarre undertone of being investigative but it didn’t investigate,” says Allen. “And this piece—what I thought was bothersome about it—it purported to be authoritative, and it’s just full of holes.” …

Tom Crowley, a professor of earth systems science at Duke University, says he tried to put the brakes on the story when contacted by Regalado. “I did go into a long explanation for why McIntyre’s work isn’t great shakes, as some people would like to believe. That didn’t come out in the article, but that doesn’t mean that what he wrote wasn’t edited by the higher-ups.”

The resulting bias in the article, he says, confirmed his suspicions that the Wall Street Journal slants their news on climate change. “They acted like I suspected,” he says. “And on their op-ed page their writers get free shots at global warming.” Crowley’s name did not appear in the article. …

But what began as an interview, Mahlman explains, quickly evolved into a spirited debate. Whenever he pointed out the importance of Mann’s work, Regalado would try to shift the discussion back to McIntyre and McKitrick. “I told him that as far as I know they’re quacks. That kinda riled him.”

Mahlman says he also pointed out that numerous other studies have confirmed Mann’s original results. “Then he started to get squirmy because I was saying that [even] if we didn’t have the hockey stick and the paleorecord, we have an absolutely reliable record over the last 100 years or so, and it’s warming like crazy.” We didn’t have thermometers 1000 years ago, but we do now, Mahlman says.

In the end, Mahlman was not mentioned in the article.

Regalado emailed me and I offered to talk to him about McKitrick but he never got back to me. Given how he ignored Crowley and Mahlman I guess it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

And here’s von Storch on McIntyre and McKitrick’s paper:

We sent in a comment that the glitch [McIntyre] detected in Mann’s paper is correct, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a minor thing.

Hat tip: Dave Roberts via Bob

Thanks to everyone who sent congratulations on my 20th wedding anniversary. The traditional gift is china, but Tim Blair sent a flame:

Look up “Oh my God I’ve married an obsessive shrieking hypocrite!” and you’ll see a picture of Lambert’s wife.

Mark Steyn gets this email :

ARE YOU A CREATIONIST?

I enjoy your various articles in the Speccie, torygraph etc and agree with most of what you say and your support for Right views. But I am concerned with your right-wing mates in the US and UK who seem to be on the intelligent-design rubbish bandwagon. I hope you will distance yourself from them in future articles on this subject as there is no evidence for their views at all whereas evolution is supported by enormous volumes of evidence. You don’t strike me as a creationist irrationalist.

And responds with:

The fact is that this is a planet overwhelmingly dominated and shaped by one species, and our kith and kin – whether gibbons or pumpkins – basically fit in in the spaces between. That’s pretty much the world the Psalmist outlined in the Old Testament thousands of years ago. By comparison, the evolutionists’ insistence that we’re just another “animal” seems perverse and irrational and refuted by a casual glance out the window. I am coming round to the view that hyper-rationalism is highly irrational.

Tim Blair must reckon that Steyn is uneducated.

Update: PZ Myers writes about the hapless Steyn’s ignorance of biology. Alan Adamson says that he has long enjoyed Steyn’s writing but doesn’t think that Steyn is worth reading any more after this.

The 16th Skeptics Circle is here.

Tim Blair has a post where he has over seventy links to posts by John Quiggin that mention Kyoto. We can conclude that Quiggin is a very careful writer because it looks like Blair didn’t find any typos in all those posts. Stripped of his usual I-found-a-typo-therefore-you-are-wrong argument, Blair had to come up with something else. His substitute argument? Apparently he believes that the sheer force of this June 29 post had silenced Quiggin on Kyoto. Trouble is, Blair doesn’t seem to have noticed that Quiggin posted this and this in July. Or maybe Blair is unaware that July is after June.

Quiggin comments further here.

The ancestor of this blog was my archive of Usenet and mail list postings about gun control. I created it in 1996 and updated it fitfully until I started this blog. Now I’ve folded it into this blog, so you can visit my archives from September 1993 and follow the raging debate about the frequency of defensive gun use. Each category in the archive has been turned into a category on the blog. For example, here are all my posts on Kellermann’s research.

There are posts with discussion from Eugene Volokh, Clayton Cramer and Mary Rosh, all of whom have also gone on to start blogs.

One of the few things that Andrew Bolt got correct in his original criticism of the Lancet study was the sample size, 988 households:

Its researchers interviewed 7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in the 14 months before the invasion and who in the 18 months after.

In a later article, Bolt got the number wrong:

Lancet surveyed 788 Iraqi households.

Since the two numbers differ in just a single digit Bolt’s erroneous 788 number looks like a simple typo, but when the mistake was pointed out to him, this is what he wrote:

Just to point out one of the false claims you make (that I claimed the Lancet study involved just 778 househods, not 988), here is a direct quote from my original article which analysed the Lancet survey: “Its researchers interviewed 7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in the 14 months before the invasion and who in the 18 months after.” In fact, on closer inspection of the survey, you will find that not all those households were considered when Lancet’s researchers worked out their final death toll. Excluded were households which refused to answer, were absent, and were in the highly atypical city of Fallujah. That explains the 778 figure. The ILCS survey asked respondents for any “war-related deaths” in their households, which is a far broader definition than you claim (and fairer than the one you’d prefer). The survey took into account not just deaths since the war, but during it as well - another mis-statement of yours. Just accept it, please. The claim that the US has 100,000 dead on its hands is preposterous. Or even a wicked lie.

(He says 778 rather than 788 in the passage above because the person he was responding to wrote 778 rather than 788 and Bolt did not pick up on the typo.)

But here is what the study said:

Five (0·5%) of the 988 households refused to be interviewed. In the 27 clusters with proper absentee records, we visited 872 households and 64 were absent (7%). No households were identified in which all the household members were dead or gone away, except in Falluja, where there were 23.

There were five households that refused to answer. There were 30 households in the Falluja cluster. The 67 absent households were not included in the 988 households. (This isn’t perfectly clear from the description above, but there were 872-64=808 households with someone home in the 27 clusters with absentee records and 6×30=180 households in the other six clusters. 808+180=988.) Subtracting 5+30 from 988 doesn’t get you even close to 788. Wrongly subtracting the 64 absent households as well doesn’t get you 788. I suppose it is possible that Bolt made a mistake in his arithmetic, but what are the odds that such a mistake would produce a number exactly 200 less than 988? It looks like his explanation may have been made up on the spot. To echo Bolt’s own language, his claim about the origin of the 788 number “is preposterous. Or even a wicked lie.”

David Hardy writes:

USA Today reports, with customary horror, that 1,700,000 children are in homes with unsecured guns, and that one-third of American homes have firearms in them. It goes on to say 1,400 “children and teens” are shot to death each year, and pumps for laws on gun storage (i.e., to criminalize failure to store in various ways). “It’s a frightening problem,” says Michael Barnes, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a lobbying group that favors limiting gun ownership.

Let’s look at the figures. Actually, in 2003 762 Americans of all ages died in gun accidents, according to the National Safety Council. USA Today gets a higher number by including teens (i.e., up to age 20) and gang-banger homicides, which are hardly relevant to safe gun storage.

Economist John Lott calculated the actual number of child gun accidental deaths, and found it was about 30 per year — lower than the number that die of drowning in buckets.

However, if you look at the study cited by USA Today, you will see that the 1,400 deaths are for children under 18 and they do not include 18–20 year olds. Nor does it seem correct to ignore deaths by murder or suicide since easy access to a loaded gun by a child could certainly be a factor in such cases.

In any case it is not true that there were 30 child gun accidental deaths per year. WISQARS says that there 115 such accidental deaths for ages 0–17. Hardy can’t even blame Lott for this one, since Lott said that his figure was just for children aged 0–4.

Nor is Hardy correct when he says that USA Today pumps for laws on safe gun storage. As well as reporting Vernick’s support for such laws, they report an NRA spokesman arguing that education was a superior approach.

MediaLens has a two part article (part 1 part 2) on the shoddy press coverage of the Lancet study. They describe how Mary Dejevsky, senior leader writer on foreign affairs for the Independent dismissed the study because:

personally, i think there was a problem with the extrapolation technique, because - while the sample may have been standard for that sort of thing - it seemed small from a lay perspective (i remember at the time) for the conclusions being drawn and there seemed too little account taken of the different levels of unrest in different regions. my main point, though, was less based on my impression than on the fact that this technique exposed the authors to the criticisms/dismissal that the govt duly made, and they had little to counter those criticisms with, bar the defence that their methods were standard for those sort of surveys.

Whether the sample size is adequate is a technical question. Your lay intuition is not going to be a good guide to whether it is or not. You have to do the calculations. Or if you don’t know how to do that, get an expert to do them, or look at what experts have come up with in the past. And you can find out what they have come up with in the past by looking at what the standard practice is for conducting such surveys. So the author’s defence was complete. Unless you were prepared to believe the government spokespeople had uncovered a hitherto unknown flaw in survey methodology just when it happened to be politically convenient.

Medialens also examines the very different coverage given to an earlier survey by Les Roberts that found that war in the Eastern Congo had killed about 1.7 million people. Even though this was many times the number of deaths their later survey in Iraq found, the media reported the results in a straightforward fashion, without all the stuff about how the sample was too small and the estimate could not be trusted that greeted the Lancet study.

This, by the way, is my 57th post on the Lancet study. Read them all here.

Hat tip: Antony Loewenstein.

Tim Blair’s blog is notorious because commenters are banned merely for disagreeing with him. However, in this post, Blair accuses Antony Loewenstein of cowardice because Loewenstein would not debate with an abusive phone caller. Blair refuses to accept Loewenstein’s stated reason (”He wants to shout and rant”) because:

That’s from someone who describes Australian Jews as “usually vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic. Australian Jews, generally speaking, are incapable of hearing the true reality of their beloved homeland and its barbaric actions.”

Did Loewenstein really describe Australian Jews like that? Well, no. Blair has badly misrepresented Loewenstein with an out-of-context quote. Here’s what Loewenstein wrote, in context:

As a Jew who doesn’t believe in the concept of a Jewish state - a fundamentally undemocratic and colonialist idea from a bygone era - reception to such ideas within the Jewish community is usually vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic. Australian Jews, generally speaking, are incapable of hearing the true reality of their beloved homeland and its barbaric actions.

Loewenstein did not describe Australian Jews as “usually vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic”. That was his description of the Jewish community’s reaction to the suggestion that having a Jewish state was not a good idea. This is enormously different from the opinion that Blair attributed to him.

Update: Instead of correcting his post and apologizing to Loewenstein, Blair has added an update where he attempts to justify his doctored quote with this bit of chop logic from JF Beck:

Loewenstein states that the Jewish community’s reception for his ideas is “usually vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic”. He is attributing these characteristics to those within the Jewish community. Thus, he is describing Jews in general as “usually vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic”. He qualifies this statement with the following sentence wherein he specifies “Australian Jews”. It’s simple, really.

Let’s see: Australians will usually get angry and violent if you punch them in the face. Thus, by Beck Logic™ I am describing Australians in general as “angry and violent”. I don’t think so. This one isn’t even persuasive enough to make the list of common logic fallacies.

The tsunami and Katrina both left behind pools of stagnant water in which things have swarmed and multiplied and emerged to infect humanity. I’m referring, of cause, to clueless articles extolling the virtues of DDT.

The latest is by Henry Miller in the National Review Online.

The six-year old U.S. outbreak of West Nile virus is a significant threat to public health and shows no signs of abating. … As of September 6, Louisiana ranked fourth in the nation in human West Nile virus infections; but with most of New Orleans still under water and a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, there are likely to be far more cases. …

The regulators who banned DDT also failed to take into consideration the inadequacy of alternatives. Because it persists after spraying, DDT works far better than many pesticides now in use, some of which are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms. Also, the need to spray other insecticides repeatedly — especially in marshlands and forests, where mosquito-breeding areas are large — drives up costs and depletes public coffers. … Pyrethroid pesticides, the most common alternative to DDT, are inactivated within an hour or two.

You can tell the deeply ignorant pro-DDT articles because the authors don’t mention or even seem aware that mosquitoes evolve resistance to insecticides. DDT’s persistence is only an advantage when it sprayed indoors and it stays where it is sprayed. Persistence is a big disadvantage when spraying outdoors because the insecticide is rapidly diluted and the mosquitoes get exposed to sublethal doses. This is perhaps the best method know for breeding insecticide resistant mosquitoes. That is why DDT is only used for indoor residual spraying. these days.

regulators should make DDT available immediately for mosquito control in the United States.

That would be pointless since malathion and pyrethroids are more effective without the disadvantage of resistance.

Second, the United States should oppose international strictures on DDT. This includes retracting American support for the heinous United Nations Persistent Organic Pollutants Convention, which severely stigmatizes DDT and makes it exceedingly difficult for developing countries — many of which are plagued by malaria — to use the chemical.

No it doesn’t. Malaria Foundation International was quite pleased with the Stockholm Convention writing:

The outcome of the treaty is arguably better than the status quo going into the negotiations over two years ago. For the first time, there is now an insecticide which is restricted to vector control only, meaning that the selection of resistant mosquitoes will be slower than before.

Also, there is a clear procedure that endemic countries may follow to use DDT, and having done so, they have the RIGHT at international law to use DDT, without pressure from the developed countries or international institutions who have in the past threatened them against doing so.

Miller also claims

The website of the Centers for Disease Control suggests several measures to avoid West Nile virus infection: “avoid mosquito bites,” by wearing clothes that expose little skin, using insect repellent, and staying indoors during peak mosquito hours (dusk to dawn); “mosquito-proof your home,” by removing standing water, and installing and maintaining screens; and “help your community,” by reporting dead birds.

Conspicuously absent from its list of suggestions is any mention of insecticides or widespread spraying. Anyone curious about the role of pesticides in battling mosquitoes and West Nile is directed to a maze of other Web sites.

Perhaps the Atlanta-based CDC officials don’t get out much. You don’t have to be a Rocket Entomologist to know that emptying birdbaths and the saucers under flower pots is not going to get rid of a zillion hungry mosquitoes.

IF you look at the CDC page that Miller refers to you can see the links that somehow escaped his attention. The second item under “Help Your Community” is “Mosquito Control Programs” which links to this page on the CDC’s web site which discusses spraying. There is also a prominent link to the CDC’s Guidelines for Surveillance, Prevention, & Control, which has much about insecticides and spraying. Maybe the CDC didn’t give spraying the emphasis that Miller would have liked, but that’s because it isn’t the magic bullet that Miller imagines it to be.

Hat tip: John Fleck.

In his debate with George Galloway, Christopher Hitchens said:

If you really believe the crazed fabrication of the figures of 100,00 deaths in Iraq … you can simply go to my colleague Fred Kaplan’s space on slate.com. He’s a very stern and strong critic of the war, a great opponent of mine. We’ve had quite a quarrel about it. He’s a great writer about science and other matters. It’s a simple matter to show this is politicized hackwork of the worst kind. The statistics in that case have been conclusively and absolutely shown to be false and I invite anyone to check it. Everything I say has at least ten pages of documentation, which I am willing to share, behind it.

When Galloway asked Hitchens if he really was accusing the Lancet and researchers at Johns Hopkins University of crazed fabrication, Hitchens stood by his slander.

1. Kaplan’s criticism of the Lancet study was demolished here and here.

2. Kaplan seems to write mainly about war and not about science, but even if he is a great science writer, how does that make him a better authority on epidemiology than actual expert scientists publishing in a refereed journal?

3. Kaplan did not claim to have “conclusively” and “absolutely” shown the statistics to be false. Nor did he say that the study was a “crazed fabrication”. In fact, he wrote this:

   The problem is, ultimately, not with the scholars who conducted the study; they did the best they could under the circumstances.

   Hitchens is the one making the crazed fabrication here.

Read it at decorabilia.

Daniel Davies has a new post on Lancet denial, with some particularly egregious examples. The worst example is by Harry of Harry’s Place whose “discussion” of the study is to make a statement that he must surely know to be false:

Dsquared is a serial bullshitter who has never given a straight answer to any question.

Davies also links to a transcript by Seixon of the Hitchens-Galloway debate, where Seixon touts his own debunking of the Lancet study. Seixon’s debunking fails because he makes basic errors in his statistics, but at least they are original, so let’s look at where he goes wrong:

Dr. Les Roberts removed 6 provinces from being in the sample. That means that every single household in those 6 provinces was purposefully given a probability of 0% of being chosen for the sample. This violates the principle of randomness, thus violating the principle of statistics that you have a random sample. … The study’s results are based on a biased sample. Resting upon this fact alone, the study’s results cannot be claimed to be accurate, nor should they be trusted as accurate. Dr. Les Roberts and anyone else cannot argue this simple point, because then they will have to take on the vast body of statistical literature and theory looming over the credibility of this study.

Unfortunately, Seixon does not understand sampling. The sample was not biased by the exclusion of six randomly chosen provinces since each household in Iraq was equally likely to be chosen by the sampling procedure. Seixon could just as well argue than all surveys are biased because after the sample has been randomly selected each person outside the sample has a 0% chance of being selected.

In response the study’s statement that “Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children.” Seixon offers this:

46% men, 46% children, 7% women, and 1% elderly. With this in mind, try to finish this sentence: Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were _______ and __________. In a world where scientists don’t try to hoodwink their readers, the correct answer would be “men” and “children”. Yet they chose “women” and “children”, even though out of the 4 groups, women were #3, and they put two groups into their sentence. I guess they were hoping no one was going to actually read the rest of the study and find out that they are misleading liars. Seriously, what is the point of misleading in this fashion? Could it be… a political agenda?

So even though the statement is true Seixon insists that it is a somehow a lie. The fact that seems to have escaped Seixon is that Roberts et al grouped women and children together because they are likely to be non-combatants.

William Connolley catches junkscience.com claiming that Global Climate Models can’t recreate the temperature record of the 20th century. However, they can and its no secret unless you get your science from junkscience rather than actual scientists.

David Appell has quit blogging and deleted his blog, Quark Soup. William Connolley writes:

it was the first blog I read; perhaps DA somewhat lost his place when other climate-type blogs (RC mainly; perhaps even Stoat) took some of his niche. Deltoid was the next one I read… I trust they won’t be going out in order.

I’ll stop blogging when I run out of opinions, so this blog might be going for a while.

Certain commenters have continued a discussion that was on Quark Soup under an unrelated post here. I’ve deleted their comments and banned them moved their comments under this post.

I’ve written several posts debunking the myth that using DDT is banned, pointing out that is used in places like South Africa. Now Professor Bunyip has finally discovered this fact and slams Tim Blair for spreading the myth:

This item from the BBC will have Tim Blair beside himself — a contortion worth seeing, given that he has long since assumed the initial improbable position of being well up himself.

South Africa had stopped using DDT in 1996. Until then the total number of malaria cases was below 10,000 and there were seldom more than 30 deaths per year. But in 2000, [South Africa] saw malaria cases skyrocket to 65,000 and 458 people were killed….

Last year [after DDT’s re-introduction] only 89 deaths were recorded.

Off you go, Tim, get cracking. Several thousand words, if you please, about how your sort of statistics never lie and why, in the great right-eyed scheme of things, hundreds of little black and brown lives preserved don’t make a rational objection to a favoured theory.

Oh wait, that’s not what he wrote. He actually slams me. Apparently he thinks this story contradicts some theory he thinks I hold. What he thinks that theory is, I cannot tell.

Mind you, the BBC article is rather misleading. The only insecticide ever mentioned is DDT, so this leaves the impression that they are spraying DDT in Mozambique:

But the disease can never be fully eradicated without neighbouring countries also jacking up their malaria control programmes.

This led to the creation of the Lubombo Spatial Development Initiative, backed by the Global Fund to Fight HIV/Aids, Malaria and TB, which has led to an 83% and 67% drop in malaria cases in Swaziland and Mozambique respectively.

But actually, they are spraying Bendiocarb. The reason why the article is so misleading isn’t hard to find. The scientific authority cited is Richard Tren from the astroturf operation Africa Fighting Malaria.

To get a better idea of what happened I thought I’d consult a scientific journal. Tropical Medicine & International Health Dec 2004:

One problem in this data set was the coincidence of different explanatory variables. In the late-1980s, imported malaria and chloroquine drug resistance peaked simultaneously and a local outbreak occurred because of agricultural practice. In the 1990s, HIV infection and SP resistance emerged simultaneously and in addition DDT was replaced with pyrethroids. Finally, in 2000/01 malaria incidence fell substantially after re-introduction of DDT spraying, introduction of a new effective antimalaria drug, and implementation of large-scale vector control in Southern Mozambique … as part of the Lubombo Spatial Development Initiative (LSDI). The relative importance of each variable can only be inferred if long time series of malaria case data and explanatory variables are available, and perhaps not even then. So the problem is not a lack of possible explanations, but the abundance of highly plausible ones

Hmm, all those other factors got left out of the BBC story.

This article from the same journal on the reasons for the switch to pyrethroids is also interesting:

However, in recent years several shortcomings of RHS have been highlighted. The effectiveness of DDT was compromised by the insecticide’s irritant effect, which led to a high proportion of bloodfed mosquitoes leaving huts and not resting indoors (Sharp et al. 1990). Frequent replastering and painting over sprayed walls has also impaired effectiveness. In 1995, more than 48% of the homesteads replastered at least some of their walls, rendering the insecticide ineffective (Mnzava et al. 1998). The switch to pyrethroid insecticides, which do not smell or leave visible deposits, has reduced the prevalence of this practice, but it remains a common occurrence, with a fifth of homesteads replastering or painting before the end of the malaria season in 1997±1998 … Other households avoid RHS altogether by locking their houses during the spraying round.

So the repellent effect of DDT makes it less effective, even though Roger Bate claimed the repellent effect meant that DDT was still effective even when the mosquitoes were resistant.

Senator Inhofe comes in for some well-deserved mocking for inviting novelist Michael Crichton to testify on global warming science. RealClimate has a detailed dissection of Crichton’s testimony.

I watched the proceedings and learned that as well as believing that global warming is a big hoax, Inhofe believes that the 1972 US ban on DDT has caused millions to die from malaria. He had Donald Roberts up to testifiy about it and Roberts presented the usual misleading arguments about this non-existant ban.

Testimony like that of Roberts is pernicious. Malaria really is a solvable problem, but the solution is not revoking a non-existant ban. It requires spending money on drugs and insecticides (and the insecticides will only include DDT some of the time). By making it appear that malaria can be solved without spending money and promoting DDT when it is not appropriate, people like Roberts and Inhofe hurt the fight against malaria.