Deltoid

The Source Watch wiki page on John Brignell quotes extensively from some of my criticisms of Brignell. Rather than address this criticism, Brignell edited the page to add this comment:

What follows is the work of an individual known as The Adhominator. You can recognise his style, as he never attacks the argument, only the arguer. You can identify him, because he is the only authority he quotes. Enjoy!

This is classic Brignell. He can’t bring himself to mention my name, he makes blatantly false claims (specifically, I do attack his arguments, and I do cite other authorities) and indulges in name-calling.

His comment was deleted and the reasons explained to him. Brignell responded by repeatedly restoring his comment until his IP address was banned. So then he asked his readers (scroll to “An appeal for help”) to restore his comment. Unfortunately he failed to provide a link to the page, so not many of them have done so. If you choose to edit the page, please do not automatically revert edits made by Brignell supporters. Obviously Brignell’s comment is not appropriate, but factual edits should be allowed.

At Wolverine Tom.

In an earlier post I observed that “Seixon does not understand sampling”. Seixon removed any doubt about this with his comments on that post and two more posts. Despite superhuman efforts to explain sampling to him by several qualified people in comments, Seixon has continued to claim that the sample was biased and therefore “that the study is so fatally flawed that there’s no reason to believe it.”

I’m going to show, without numbers, just pictures, that the sampling was not biased and what the effect of the clustering of the governorates was. (more…)

The Sydney Morning Herald reports

The High Court Computer games enthusiasts are free to modify their Playstations to run cheap games bought overseas or online, following a landmark High Court ruling.

The court found that “mod-chips”- used to override technology that prevents consoles running games not purchased in Australia - are legal.

The decision follows a four-year battle between Eddy Stevens, a Sydney mod-chip supplier based in a backyard at Kensington, and the electronics giant Sony, which claimed the chips were overriding its copyright protection technology.

Kim Weatherall has the serious commentary on the decision here and here, but I’m struck by how similar this case is to the plot of The Castle. In the original case in the Federal Court Eddy Stevens represented himself and this was his defence:

Mr Stevens denied that he had supplied and installed chips in PlayStation consoles at any time after March 2001, when s116A had come into force. He acknowledged that he supplied and installed a considerable volume of chips for PlayStation consoles before March 2001, but claimed that any chipping of consoles thereafter was done by his flatmate, whom he reluctantly identified as “Ted”.

Fortunately for Eddy Stevens the ACCC stepped in as an amicus curiae with a better argument and he won the case, then lost on an appeal and now has won in the High Court.

Tim Flannery has a new book The Weather Makers on climate change. You can read an extract here.

Naturally this has prompted the usual pieces on how global warming totally isn’t happening. First we have William Kininmonth, who writes:

The science linking human activities to climate change is simplistic and his arguments are assisted by the fact we are in a period of apparent warming. … The focus on carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change overlooks the importance of water vapour as a greenhouse gas and the hydrological cycle’s role in regulating the temperatures of our climate system. Water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and the formation and dissipation of clouds has a bigger impact on the climate.

This is more than a little misleading since it implies that the “simplistic” science ignores the role of water vapour even though it does not.

Second, Bob Carter who claims that one of the symptoms of the “disease” of Hansensim is:

endless repetition of inaccuracies, or facts out of context;

And repeats, yet again, a wildly inaccurate claim:

The Earth’s comfortable (for us) average temperature of about 15C is maintained that way by the atmosphere. The presence of small amounts of water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide - the “greenhouse gases” which absorb Earth’s outgoing heat radiation and re-emit some of it downwards - causes warming. Most of the total warming of 33 degrees is caused by water vapour (more than 30 degrees), carbon dioxide contributing only about 1.2 degrees worth. And of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, just 3 per cent comes from human sources, which equates to a warming effect of about four-hundredths of a degree.

His calculation is out by a factor of twenty. Carbon dioxide contributes about 3 degrees towards the natural greenhouse effect. And over 25% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from human sources. 25% of 3 degrees is 3/4 of a degree Celsius, not four-hundredths as Carter claims. But he keeps repeating this false claim.

Next up is Andrew Bolt, who in this column claimed to have found many serious errors in Flannery’s work, and here complained that Flannery had not corrected the alleged errors. Not surprisingly, Bolt’s bias and ignorance of science has led him astray and Flannery sets him straight in this column.

The “errors” that Bolt supposedly discovers in my work, extracted in The Age, are in fact howlers on his part. Indeed, so egregious are some that it’s hard to believe that Bolt has not set out to mislead his readers. Let’s look at five of the biggest whoppers.

You should read Flannery’s article to find out what the five whoppers are, but fortunately for me there are plenty more misleading statements in Bolt’s column for me to chew on. Bolt writes:

Says Philip Stott, London University professor emeritus of bio-geography: “During the Medieval Warm Period, the world was warmer even than today.” It was nice.

OK, Stott says that, but he has no qualifications as a climate scientist. So what was the basis for his claim? It turns out that it was the infamous Soon and Baliunas paper,
which was so badly flawed that six editors resigned from the journal that published it because they felt that it should not have been published.

Bolt also claims:

Flannery says: By late 2004, my interest had turned to anxiety. The world’s leading science journals were full of reports that glaciers were melting 10 times faster than previously thought . . .

Fact: More booga-booga to scare you into believing. But as glacier researcher Roger Braithwaite noted in Progress in Physical Geography, some glaciers are growing and “there is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years”.

However, Braithwaite’s paper, makes it clear that he is only talking about glacier melt up to 1995. Looking at more up to date information (as Flannery did), shows a dramatic increase in melting.

I’ve saved the worst for last: Christopher Pearson who spends most of his column in a dishonest attempt to paint Flannery as some kind of weird mystic because he uses the Gaia hypothesis to help focus on “the complex system that makes life possible”. But the funniest part of Pearson’s column is this:

Flannery doesn’t feel any personal need to defend himself in the public arena. Nor does he feel, as a museum director, that the prestige of the scientific institution he heads obliges him to do so.

Unfortunately for Pearson, his column came out the same day as Flannery’s demolition of Bolt’s criticism. Oops.

Sebastian Mallaby’s article in the Washington Post has all the hallmarks of the clueless DDT-boosting article.

• The only expert mentioned is not a malariologist but comes from some right-wing think tank. In this case it’s Roger Bate.

• Nowhere is mentioned the main reason why anti-malaria programs have shifted away from DDT—the widespread development of resistance to DDT by mosquitoes.

• Other insecticides and drugs against malaria are ignored. South Africa did reintroduce DDT for spraying traditional houses, but they also used deltamethrin on western-style houses and switched to a more effective anti-malaria drug.

• Nowhere does it mention that the ban on agricultural use of DDT that Silent Spring saved lives by slowing the development of resistance against DDT.

But it’s even worse than the usual Rachel-Carson-was-worse-than-Hitler piece. The villains of Mallaby’s piece are consumers in the European Union who eat don’t want to eat food containing DDT. Mallaby reckons that they are being irrational because:

hundreds of millions have been exposed to DDT without generating any solid evidence that the chemical harms people.

Right, it is only classified as a probable human carcinogen not as a certain human carcinogen. Still, EU consumers may not be completely irrational if they don’t want to eat the stuff.

Mallaby fails to mention that if the DDT is sprayed on the walls of huts to stop malaria it won’t actually get on crops destined for export so there is actually no conflict between EU consumers’ wish not to eat DDT-laced food and Uganda’s plan to use DDT against malaria. The only way it could get on crops is if some was diverted for agricultural use. All the EU is asking is for Uganda to test its export crops to make sure that they don’t contain DDT. Mallaby calls this an “absurd proposal” because it “might constitute an impossible administrative burden on a poor country.”, but surely testing a few samples from export crops would be simple and insignificant compared to the cost of the spraying program.

So the answer to Mallaby’s question about who is ignoring science now is: Sebastian Mallaby.

Get your skeptical blogging at Time to lean.

Extracts from “Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India” by Georganne Chapin and Robert Wassertrom published in Nature Vol 293 17 Sepember 1981 pages 181–185

Among the inhabitants of Asia, Latin America and tropical Africa malaria, remains a major cause for alarm. Yet only a few years ago, health officials in a dozen developing countries (capitalizing on the discoveries of British parasitologist Ronald Ross half a century earlier) pointed triumphantly at their efforts to eradicate entirely this mosquito-borne scourge[1-5]. Following World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, for example, Indian authorities instituted a programme of medical treatment and pesticide application in 1952 which within a single decade reduced the number of cases from over 100 million to 50,000 (ref. 6). Ten years later, using the same methods, health workers in Sri Lanka cut the annual incidence of malaria from three million cases to fewer than 25.

By 1970, however, it had become clear that malaria eradication had run into severe difficulties. Instead of dwindling to insignificance, the number of infected individuals rose again to distressing proportions. In India, which had served as a showplace for WHO policies, five million people were soon infected; in Sri Lanka, two million people became sick again almost overnight; and in Central America infection rates grew to previously unknown levels[7]. Moreover, unlike earlier outbreaks, this new plague was often carried by mosquitoes which had become resistant to pesticides like DDT and dieldrin and could not be controlled by conventional means[8-15]. The origins of this major ecological disaster must be sought as much in the unwitting actions of international organizations as in hapless nature.

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Andrew Kenny in The Spectator writes

Judged on sheer evil, the worst crime in history was brown, the Nazi genocide, although the reds slaughtered more people. The death toll (difficult to measure) is roughly, Hitler’s holocaust 6 million, Stalin’s famine and terror 8 million, and Mao’s famine 30 million. But the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was the banning of DDT. …

In 1971 DDT was poised to rid the world of malaria. In 1972 it was banned. …

This was the time of Rachel Carson’s mendacious book Silent Spring, about the horrors of pesticides, when the newly emerging green ideology was looking for a cause célèbre. … The greens, leaning heavily on Ruckelshaus, were determined to ban it and did so, with catastrophic consequences for poor people with dark skins. Tens of millions of humans were sacrificed on the green altar.

The US extended the ban overseas by various measures, including refusing aid to countries that used DDT. Other rich countries, urged on by their greens, followed suit. Malaria, which had been in retreat, came surging back, killing multitudes.

In a review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear Ron Bailey agrees with Crichton that the greens killed 50 million:

Along the way, Mr. Crichton makes vividly apparent how environmentalist misinformation costs lives and money. He has Kenner tell fatuous Hollywood environmentalist Ted Bradley (Martin Sheen?) that banning DDT was “arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century.” Why? Because DDT was the best defense against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. “All together, the ban has caused more than 50 million needless deaths,” Kenner says. “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted. And the environmental movement pushed hard for it.” True enough.

Junkscience has a death clock that puts the death toll even higher at 90 million deaths.

However, it is conceivable that relying on a science fiction writer and an astroturf web site might not be wise. so I checked to see what the peer-reviewed scientific literature. “Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India” published in Nature by Chapin and Wasserstrom tells us what really happened. The graph on the left shows that malaria did skyrocket in India in the 70s. But not because they cut back on DDT spraying because of pressure from environmentalists. The graph shows that they didn’t cut back on DDT, but dramatically increased its use. So how come malaria increased? Well, the increase in DDT use was in agriculture. This caused the insects to become resistant, so they had to use more DDT to get the same effect. This caused more resistance, so even more DDT was used and so on. The end result was that in the areas where DDT was used in agriculture, the mosquitoes became completely resistant and DDT no longer stopped them from spreading malaria, with the disastrous results shown in the graph.

Was this catastrophe predictable? Well, yes. In fact, Rachel Carson warned about it in Silent Spring. If India had followed the example of the United States and banned the agricultural use of DDT and reserved it for public health many millions of cases of malaria would have been prevented. However, India probably could not have afforded the more expensive alternative insecticides to DDT, so this may not have been feasible. But there were other alternatives that would have greatly reduced pesticide use and slowed the development of resistance. Chapin and Wasserstrom continue the story:

In response, entomologists developed what they call integrated pest management systems[85-86], the key to which lies in timing insecticide applications so that the crop is protected from predators only at the most vulnerable stages of its growth cycle. As it turns out, cotton buds destroyed by pests regrow throughout the plant’s life, so that producers can afford to sustain a high level of insect damage before there is a need to apply pesticides. Simple precautionary measures may also lower their chemical costs: up to 75 per cent of the hibernating boll weevil population may be eliminated by the ploughing under of crop debris after harvest. Thus many growers west of the Mississippi now spray their fields only seven or eight times each season instead of 25 or 30; similar measures have been developed for raising corn, rice and many kinds of fruit[87].

So why did WHO not urge cotton producing countries to employ integrated management systems that would not interfere with malaria eradication programmes? A possible answer may perhaps be found in the activities of another international agency, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Like WHO, FAO was established to provide technical advice and assistance to members of the United Nations. In the case of pesticides, which are manufactured and distributed by a few multinational corporations, FAO’s advice might have played a critical role in reducing environmental contamination. Both farmers and extension agents in developing nations must normally rely on pesticide company salesmen for information about how to use agricultural chemicals — much as physicians in Western countries rely upon pharmaceutical companies for information about new drugs. Beginning in 1967, therefore, FAO put together a small working group of experts on integrated pest management which published technical manuals and disseminated other information[88-94].

Three years later, it commissioned an American entomologist, Dr Louis Falcon, to develop an integrated system in Nicaragua, a system which achieved remarkable success within a few seasons. Similar programmes were subsequently undertaken in Mexico, Peru and Pakistan[95].

But FAO did not recommend these programs.

Why did FAO choose this course of action, which in retrospect does not appear to have been guided by an accurate appreciation of the perils of pesticide addiction? It is important to examine how pesticide manufacturers have influenced the policies of international agencies. As public concern about the effects of toxins like DDT began to grow in the 1960s, these corporations formed a trade association called GIFAP (Groupement International des Associations Nationales de Pesticides) which in turn worked directly with UN technicians through a FAO bureau known as the Industry Cooperative Programme (ICP). By the early 1970s joint FAO-ICP regional seminars had been organized in many parts of the world to promote new and better ways of distributing agricultural, pesticides. More important, high-level officials in WHO and FAO, who share the industry’s views on many major issues, invited GIFAP to play an active part in agency “consultations” and other internal meetings[98,99]. In this way, for example, no fewer than 25 corporate representatives lent their expertise to the meeting in Rome on pesticides in agriculture and public health and served on subcommittees responsible for formulating UN policy. Not surprisingly, these subcommittees stressed the need to apply more pesticides in a more effective manner rather than to limit their use or replace them with alternative forms of pest control. And what is more curious, none of these deliberations included representatives of other international constituencies such as environmental groups, labour unions or farmers’ organizations. Perhaps for these reasons, in June 1978, the current director general of FAO, Eduard Saoumi, finally expelled ICP from his agency[100].

So the people with significant responsibility for the resurgence in malaria were the chemical companies that stymied efforts to reduce the agricultural use of pesticides. And it was chemical companies that helped set up the astroturf junkscience site that has attempted to blame Rachel Carson for causing the resurgence. Nice. It’s like a hit-and-run driver who, instead of admitting responsibility for the accident, frames the person who tried to prevent the accident. Bastards.

Update: See follow-up post

All kinds of action over at the Wikipedia page on John Lott, with someone using the handle “Timewarp” starting an edit war that has led to the page being temporarily protected from changes to encourage Timewarp to discuss the changes he wants. Timewarp has denied being John Lott, but sure sounds a lot like him.

Andrew Bolt has responded to Tim Flannery’s correction of some Bolt’s egregious errors. Bolt’s primary tactic in his criticism of Flannery is to go out of his way to misinterpret Flannery’s writing and then when Flannery corrects the misinterpretation to insist that his strange reading is the only correct one. Bolt isn’t even bothered when his readings of Flannery are contradictory. Flannery wrote about the relative stability of temperatures since the last Ice Age:

For the past 10,000 years, Earth’s thermostat has been set to an average surface temperature of about 14 degrees Celsius.

According to Bolt, Flannery was denying the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

When Flannery pointed out that he discusses both in his book Bolt maintained that because they weren’t mentioned in the extract published in the paper as well, Flannery was up to no good.

In an obvious reference to the last Ice Age, Flannery said:

A few thousand years ago, when the world was five degrees cooler, this coastline, this beach here was 100km south of here.

Bolt decided that the only possible meaning of “a few thousand” was 5,000 even after Flannery explained the obvious reference to the Ice Age. So Bolt decided that Flannery was both saying that there had been no change in temperatures in the past 10,000 years and also that it had been five degrees cooler 5,000 years ago.

Bolt also claims that in his Age piece Flannery:

warned that Hurricane Katrina, which tore into the United States in August, showed we were making changes to the climate that “can threaten civilisation as we know it”.

Flannery did not say that Katrina showed anything of the sort. What he actually said was that global warming could make hurricanes like Katrina more frequent, not that Katrina proved the existence of global warming.

Bolt also writes:

ask yourself if I’ve indeed lied

OK, done.

If you are interested in serious discussion of the Australian government’s proposed new “anti-terrorist” laws, you should read the posts by Senator Andrew Bartlett, Mark Bahnisch, Ken Parish and Tim Dunlop. One place where you won’t find it is on channel 9’s “Sunday” program who interviewed my friend and colleague Waleed Kadous for an hour. I think Waleed had some serious and thoughtful things to say, but “Sunday” edited the interview down to under a minute. And look at what they used:

ADAM SHAND: But there is also ambiguity and political orthodoxy inside the Muslim community on the question of home-grown suicide bombers.

WALEED KADOUS: I’m sure that there are some in the community who are involved in terrorism, but it is important not to exaggerate either the threat or the number. I would — actually, can I retract that. Let me just think of a way to phrase that better. If they do exist — and I’m not sure that they do exist — we only have ASIO’s word to say that.

Waleed misspoke and corrected himself, but “Sunday” chose to broadcast his mistake rather than something substantive. I think that demonstrates that they are interested in stirring up controversy and promoting division rather than reasoned debate.

Naturally, the verbal equivalent of a typo didn’t escape Tim Blair, Australia’s most superficial blogger, who has a go at “Australian Muslim Waleed Kadous”. I really don’t recommend looking at the comments to Blair’s post unless you are interested in reading paroxysms of anti-Muslim hatred and bigotry from the Blair fan club.

Seixon is no great shakes with statistics, but he sure can do things with a metaphor:

I swear, commenting on this blog is like a game of hide-and-seek with the elephant somewhere in the room. Lambert and his friends giggle every time I open up a cupboard and don’t find the elephant, even though the elephant is somewhere to be found. In the process, they keep making false statements to distract me and make me look places where the elephant can’t be found…

Extracts from “Should DDT continue to be recommended for malaria vector control?” by C. F. Curtis published in Medical and Vetinary Entomology (1994) 8, 107–112

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John Bruton, the EU ambassador to the US responds to Mallaby’s clueless DDT boosting piece.

In his Oct. 10 op-ed column, “Look Who’s Ignoring Science Now,” Sebastian Mallaby suggested that European regulations are to blame for the misery in Uganda and other malaria-stricken nations. The facts testify otherwise.

The European Union has no objection to the safe spraying of houses with DDT for malaria control, but it does have concerns about illegal agricultural uses. The E.U., like the United States and 149 other countries that signed the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2001, believes that the use of DDT in agriculture should be phased out.

Nations have the right to use DDT for public health protection, and the convention includes an exemption to allow such uses. It even sets out conditions for the safe use of DDT in malaria control — a use unlikely to leave residues in crops.

It is up to Uganda how to fight malaria, and DDT is one tool in that fight. The European Union continues to assist Uganda and other affected countries in efforts to combat malaria and contributes almost $100 million to this cause annually.

Health protection should not, however, provide an alibi for illegal use in agriculture. The European Union has granted $30 million to developing countries to strengthen infrastructures and encourage the sharing of best practices — a program singled out for praise by the World Bank.

Michael Fumento has responded to my post way back in January demolishing his foolish proposal that after the tsunami:

DDT should be sprayed on water pools, tents, and on people themselves—as indeed was once common in Sri Lanka and throughout most of the world.

Unfortunately, mosquitoes in Sri Lanka are resistant to DDT, so DDT spraying would be a waste of time and money.

Fumento insists that DDT spraying would be effective despite resistance because

Resistance doesn’t mean “immunity.” Often it simply means using more insecticide in the spray than you would otherwise.

And then when you do that, the mosquitoes evolve resistance to the higher dosage. Sri Lanka switched from DDT to Malathion in the 70s because DDT was no longer preventing malaria.

Further, because resistance is a drain on an insect’s physiology, after a time that resistance begins to fade. It has certainly been long enough since mosquitoes in those areas were sprayed with DDT that many will have lost resistance.

However, since there are some DDT-resistance genes still on the population, the whole population would quickly become resistant once DDT is sprayed.

Mosquitoes “are almost certainly not going to become immune to DDT’s most valuable attribute: its repellency,” writes DDT expert Paul Driessen. Even in tiny quantities “DDT keeps up to 90% of the mosquitoes from even entering a home. It irritates those that do come in, so they don’t bite; and it kills any that land on the walls, before they can infect another person. No other insecticide, at any price, can do that or do it for six months or more with a single application.”

Paul Driessen is not an expert on DDT, entomology, malaria or tropical medicine. His area of expertise is public relations. Nor is his statement relevant—DDT does not kill resistant mosquitoes.

The Journal of Vector Borne Diseases last June concluded: “The overall results of the study revealed that DDT is still a viable insecticide in indoor residual spraying owing to its effectivity in well supervised spray operation and high excito-repellency factor.”

But if you look at the full paper you will find that the study was conducted in India and not Sri Lanka and that the mosquitoes were only partly resistant to DDT. Sri Lanka switched from DDT to Malathion in the 70s because the mosquitoes were fully resistant and DDT was no longer preventing malaria.

In any case, even if DDT was still somewhat effective against partially resistant mosquitoes it would be still not necessarily be a good idea to use it, because other insecticides are more effective in such circumstances. Professor C F Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine wrote:

Deltamethrin and cyfluthrin were found to be much superior to DDT, HCH or malathion in vector control in trials in India (Ansari et al., 1990; Schofield, 1993). However, these data are not entirely relevant to the question under discussion because they were in areas where the vector (An.culicifacies) was resistant to DDT, and it should be recalled that the W.H.O. recommendation of the use of DDT only applies to susceptible populations (W.H.O., 1984).

That’s why the real experts on DDT don’t recommend that it be used where the mosquitoes are resistant. Nor, for that matter, does the World Health Organization or any other expert recommend that be sprayed on people or pools of water as Fumento proposed. Fumento is just out of his depth on this topic.

The John Lott article at Wikipedia was unprotected and the edit war has restarted. Lott is using a sockpuppet called Timewarp to try to make massive changes to the article. Some of the additions he wants to make are interesting:

Although Lott has published in academic journals regarding education, voting behavior of politicians, industrial organization, labor markets, judicial confirmations, and crime, his research is hard to consistently tag as liberal or conservative. For example, some research argues for environmental penalties on firms.

Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Here’s Mary Rosh

I had him for a PhD level empirical methods class when he taught at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania back in the early 1990s, well before he gained national attention, and I have to say that he was the best professor that I ever had. You wouldn’t know that he was a “right-wing” ideologue from the class. He argued both sides of different issues. He tore apart empirical work whether you thought that it might be right-wing or left-wing.

And of course, Lott’s research does give consistently right-wing results: guns good, media biased against Republicans, votes for women bad, Florida spoiled ballots hurt Republicans, Rush Limbaugh was right, and so on. One paper with two other authors makes little difference to the general pattern.

In fact, Lott’s 98%/2% figure contradicts the other two surveys over the last twenty years that estimated this rate. However, “Kleck and Gertz’s estimates rise to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.”

Actually nine published surveys contradict Lott. Nor do Kleck and Gertz’s estimates rise to 92% if warning shots are added. Their estimate is 84%. And it is wrong to compare this number with Lott’s 98% brandishing number, since it is measuring something different.

Before the controversy arose, Lott had repeated his survey for a book that he had written in 2002.

In fact, Lott “repeated” the survey in December 2002 because of the controversy, which arose in September 2002.

Via Pharyngula I find the commissar’s project to make a blog family tree.

1. your blogfather, or blogmother, as the case may be. Marie Gryphon who was the first blogger to post on the the John Lott affair. I started this blog to join in the discussion.

2. Include your blog-birth-month, the month that you started blogging January 2003.

3. If you are reasonably certain that you have spawned any blog-children, mention them, too. If I inspired you to start blogging, leave a comment!

There were some letters written to Nature by malariologists disputing Chapin and Wasserstrom’s paper that argued that agricultural use of DDT was the major factor in the resurgence of malaria in India and Central America. Before I write about the dispute I should stress what they all agreed on:

It is generally agreed among malariologists that agricultural insecticides have made a contribution to selection for insecticide resistance in mosquitoes and that such resistance has made a contribution to the resurgence of malaria in Central America and South Asia.

Furthermore none of the malariologists suggested that environmentalist pressure had anything to do with the resurgence of malaria. I doubt that anyone could have made such a claim in 1981 without being laughed at.

Where they differ is in how important the agricultural use of DDT was in causing the resurgence. C&W had a dramatic graph showing the number of malaria cases plotted against the use of DDT. However, they were careless with the data they used with the graph, not noticing that their source (Harrison) had reported recorded cases for the start of the 70s and estimated cases at the end. This had the effect of greatly overstating the increase in malaria. A version of the graph which just shows recorded cases is shown on the left. The true number of cases is certainly much more than what is shown on the graph, but this gives a better indication of how much malaria increased. The graph still shows a strong correlation, but there are clearly other factors operating.

In the reply C&W refer to the geographic pattern of DDT resistance and increases in malaria and I think an analysis of this could give an indication of the relative importance of agricultural spraying. Unfortunately, they don’t present such an analysis, so they have not proved their case.

So certainly agricultural use of DDT caused some of the increase in malaria and it may have caused a major part of the increase, but the second part is unproven.

Correspondence on the paper “Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India” Nature Vol 294 26 November 1981 pages 302,388

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Les Roberts comments on the shoddy reporting of his study:

I thought the press saw their job as reporting information. Most of the pieces discussing our report were written to control or influence society, not to relay what our report had documented. For example, the day after the article came out, Fred Kaplan, a defense correspondent for Slate magazine reported that, “Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully: We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.” He concluded that, “This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board.”

First of all, we reported three things: violence was up 58-fold, becoming the main cause of death; the one neighborhood visited in Anbar Province had 1/4th of the population dead, statistically suggesting almost 200,000 deaths; and in the other 32 neighborhoods we estimated 98,000 deaths. When the three things were taken together, the likelihood was far greater that there were over 100,000 deaths, but Kaplan chose to only focus on the third finding. Secondly, the line which Kaplan quotes above did not appear in our paper. The line which does appear reads, “We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period in the 97% of Iraq represented in all the clusters except Falluja.” Note that not only did Kaplan cut off the sentence but he inserted a period into his quotation. Finally, once he ignores the violence issue and the Falluja data, he implies that the result from the other 32 neighborhoods could be anywhere between 8,000 and 194,000. In fact, this normal distribution indicates that we are 97.5% confident that more than 8,000 died, 90% confident more than 44,000 died and that the most likely death toll would be around 98,000.

I am not so surprised that Fred Kaplan, a former military employee, now defense writer, wants to temper potentially critical findings about his colleagues. When Human Rights Watch weapons analyst Mark Garlasco was asked by the Washington Post what he thought about the report estimating 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, he said that he had not yet seen the report but 100,000 deaths seemed too high to him. His statement was abbreviated in the Post to state 100,000 deaths seemed too high. After reading the report and speaking with colleagues, his skepticism waned and he never repeated his doubt.

He does report some good news—the study may have partly achieved its primary goal of getting the coalition to change their tactics:

When the session was over, one officer asked me, what did I expect, we have dropped perhaps 50,000 bombs on insurgents hiding behind their own people. In the conversations that followed, I sensed great frustration on their part at the style of violent air-power based response to the insurgency designed to minimize US troop losses. While we will not know for years and maybe ever, colleagues in Iraq and pundits in DC tell me that the US has greatly curbed the use of airpower in Iraq, perhaps independent of or perhaps in part due to The Lancet report. As public health professionals, we collect data on problems to stop those problems from occurring. Thus if true, this change in occupation dynamics on the ground is most welcome and came about independently of the US public’s attention or interest.

Also I should have mentioned this update on the study at Media Lens. As well as some more comments from Roberts, it has a retraction from John Allen Paulos, one of the very very few numerate critics of the study. Paulos originally wrote:

Given the conditions in Iraq, the sample clusters were not only small, but sometimes not random either… So what’s the real number? My personal assessment, and it’s only that, is that the number is somewhat more than the IBC’s confirmed total, but considerably less than the Lancet figure of 100,000.

Paulos now says:

I regret making the comment in my Guardian piece that you cite: … I still have a few questions about the study (moot now), but mentioning a largely baseless ‘personal assessment’ was cavalier.

and

A suggestion: use Katrina as a news hook and have LR write an OpEd for the NY Times (or Newsweek or some publication with a huge circulation) explaining sampling, clusters, and the problems associated with counting the dead. Next explain that this was done in the Congo and finally revisit the Lancet findings. The sympathy that Katrina arouses might enable him to get past the political resistance to the Lancet findings (resistance that probably won’t disappear until this abominable war ends). He certainly has the standing to write such a piece, and the issue is still very important. I understand now the situation surrounding the study’s original publication. I also understand LR’s anger, but he should lose the vitriol to get such an OpEd published. Good luck. Best, JAP

See it at The Uncredible Hallq.

Eli Rabbett has encountered Essex and McKitrick’s briefing about their book Taken by Storm (which I criticised here) and is not impressed:

with so many dubious claims that one hardly knows where to begin.

The Australian reported:

THE debate on climate change is over. As far as the Howard Government is concerned, Australians must accept that humans contribute to global warming and adapt their behaviour to save the planet.

Emerging from a bushwalk through the Tarkine forest in northwest Tasmania, Environment Minister Ian Campbell told The Australian that argument about the causes and impact of global warming had effectively ended.

“There is a very small handful of what we call sceptics who, in the face of seeing all of the evidence about carbon increases and all of the evidence about impacts on the climate, would still say that it’s only natural variability that is causing it,” Senator Campbell said.

“On global warming, I have spent an enormous amount of my time getting to understand the problem and getting to understand the solutions, and I think the Australian Government owes it to the public to tell it like it is - it is a very serious threat to Australia.”

Senator Campbell said he agreed broadly with the contention promoted recently in environmental scientist Tim Flannery’s book The Weather Makers that Australia and other industrialised nations need to take urgent action to avert environmental disaster.

The next day they had on opinion piece from Bob Carter who claimed we’ve been cooling since 1998 which

marks the apparent peak of our most recent, and seemingly entirely normal, warming cycle.

and anyway the warming we’ve seen is entirely natural:

Humans certainly have an effect on local climate. For instance, the surrounds of Melbourne are now about 1C warmer than they were before European settlement. This, the urban heat island effect, is because modern metropolises comprise extensive areas of concrete, macadam, steel, bricks and glass, all of which act to trap more solar energy than did the preceding virgin landscape.

You might think that this effect, aggregated all over the world and added to by other landscape changes associated with modern agricultural practices, would produce the human-caused global warming signature that the minister seems to be worrying about. You might think so. But truth to tell, and IPCC views notwithstanding, no global human temperature-change signal has yet been detected that stands out from the natural background vagaries of the climate system.

Carter’s claim that observed warming trends are caused by the Urban Heat Island effect is rubbish because satellites, boreholes, rural stations and marine measurements all show warming, but it also contradicts his claim in the same article that the warming is natural and we are now seeing cooling. Is Carter contending that the UHI effect stopped operating in 1998? And also, when it suits him he argues that 1998 should not count because it was exceptional.