Deltoid

Lott has published yet another cherry-picked article where he pretends that crime in Australia is increasing despite plummeting crime rates here. Jonathan Dursi takes it apart.

This American Life has a fascinating show on the Lancet study and why the news coverage of it was so pathetic. Worth listening to.

In it, another Lancet critic, Marc Garlasco recants:

I’m not a statistician—I know absolutely nothing about it. When I then went and spoke to statisticians they said: “the method he is using is a really accurate one. This is something that we use in studies all throughout the world and it is a generally accepted model.”

A couple of my students have created a cool web page that lets you create beautiful lace patterns with a few clicks of a mouse. Well, pictures of lace patterns, but you can print out instructions for crocheting them.

It also lets you create really ugly laces, but if you keep rating the patterns it creates it will learn (via an evolutionary technique) what patterns people think look nice and be able to produce more of them. Try it out!

Todd Zywicki links to Lott’s take on Alito. Lott cites a study by Choi and Gulati but gets taken to task in comments by Frank Cross who writes:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this review by John Lott is quite misleading. Under Choi & Gulati’s citation-based measure of judicial quality, Alito comes out very poorly, well down in the bottom half of all circuit court judges. That was their primary measure, and Lott doesn’t mention it.

Lott, cherry picking? Who’d have thought it? Lott defends himself in later comments (under his own name, even!) . I haven’t read Choi and Gulati’s paper so I don’t know for sure who is right here, but I know who I would bet on.

Update: Zywicki has a followup post with a couple more comments here.

Lenin points to some complete innumeracy at the BBC as they make excuses for not using the Lancet estimate. They write:

We do not usually use the Lancet’s figure in standard news stories because it is so far out of line with other studies on the same issue. There are also some questions over the validity of the Lancet study in the case of measuring casualties in Iraq. The technique of sampling and extrapolating from samples has been criticised in this case because the pattern of violence in Iraq has been so uneven.

Of course, it isn’t far out of line with other studies—it agrees quite well with the ILCS survey. And while it is possible to criticise the estimate because the pattern of violence has been so uneven, such a criticism that was grounded in an actual understanding of statistics would be that the Lancet underestimated the death toll because of the exclusion of Falluja and the tendency for cluster sampling to underestimate deaths when they clump together.

As Lenin says:

the BBC are rejecting the report’s surveys on two false grounds: one, that it is ‘out of line’ with other reports (it isn’t); two, that its method is somehow inappropriate because uneven patterns of violence skews the results. Both criticisms are identical to those deployed by the UK government, and both are ridiculously wrong. Even the right-wing Economist did better than the BBC.

George Monbiot blasts the pathetic media for their lazy and incompetent reporting of deaths in Iraq

Hitchens Watch catches Christopher Hitchens citing the Lancet study of deaths in Darfur as a “reliable estimate” after calling the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq a “crazed fabrication”.

1. T-SAW, who emailed Tim Blair:

   I saw your post about the proposed celebration at the Bellevue on Friday and your attendance along with that of some other wingnuts. Well I thought in the interests of community spirit that I’d pass along the details to some mates who used to be, amongst other things, BLF members. They were very interested in it and intend on bringing a group to join in the festivities on Friday. They mentioned something about what those blokes did to the channel 7 cameraman is gonna look like a massage when their done.

2. Paul Deignan, who after getting banned from commenting on a blog is threatening to sue the blog owner for libel:

   Ever been sued Wally? It goes on forever and it is no fun at all (except for me). And I’m going to enjoy spending a lot of money in attorney fees because I like lawyers. Remember, if I sue you, I sue your friend. It’s a twofer.

What qualifies these two as wankers is the fact that their threats are so obviously pathetically empty ones. (Deignan hasn’t even hired a lawyer.)

Little known fact: 21 is the smallest prime that can be formed from the product of smaller primes in four different ways (7×3, 3×7, and 7×1x3). Anyway, the 21st skeptics circle is here. Check it out.

Eli Rabett continues to try to puzzle out the weird statements about temperature in Taken by Storm:

Reading the several versions of Essex and McKitrick anyone familiar with thermodynamics (heat engines, blackbodies, chemical reactions, etc.) will start to scratch their heads. One peculiar statement after another appears dealing with temperature and other basic stuff. It turns out that Essex is using a rather special definition of temperature for a non-equilibrium radiation field. If you want to read about it look up “How hot is radiation”, C. Essex, D.C. Kennedy and R.S. Berry, Am. J. Phys. 71 (2003) 969 .

Read his post for the details of Essex’s definition. Rabett concludes:

So, pretty clearly Essex is talking about non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and probably playing telephone with McKitrick

Another round of telephone gives you Louis Hissink, who citing Essex and McKitrick as an authority, last year wrote:

If we now examine the ranking of sportsmen and have the class best sportsman, we could place Ian Thorpe as a swimmer, Mark Waugh as cricketer, and Dick Johnson as race-car driver, and we could then associate as best = Ian Thorpe=Mark Waugh= Dick Johnson. This is an entirely permissable equivalence and has nothing to do with quantities. It is a subjective ranking and equivalence. Temperature is the same type of category. Heat content is not. (I am using Australian sportsmen as examples). So mathematically A) above is a nonesense if 1 Deg C is regarded as a quantity - but not if it is regarded as a category of subjective value, say similar to the sports category of “Best”. This nonesense comes about from the logical fallacy that if my cat has four legs, and my dog has four legs, then my cat is a dog. Therefore temperature is not a measure of heat content. Temperature is therefore not a quantity, it is a class category, conveniently described as a number. It is a means by which we rank hotness. It cannot be mathematically processed. However heat units, or in the modern jargon, energy units, can be mathematically processed. Unfortunately we have specified temperature as a numerical ranking, and this has unfortunately resulted in those in the social sciences assuming that as it is a number, we can do maths on it. (It goes without saying that temperatures can be manipulated mathematically but it is a meaningless procedure). There might an argument that air is air, and that it’s specific heat is so and so, and we can count temperatures of air and make a meaningful estimate of it’s temperature as an average. No, because it’s specific heat is dependent on its composition, since casual inspection of both Hydrogen and Carbon Dioxide, two components of air, shows that these two gases have extremely different specific heats. If you wish to compute the temperature average of air at two localities, you must first of all demonstrate that both samples of air are compositionally identical, but it is irrelevant because temperature is not a quantity - it is a category of subjective hotness.

Update: Hissink responds:.

I suspect the confusion in Tim’s audience also arises by the use of numbers to rank objects in terms of hotness. You could use the Roman system of numbers, eg, IVXIII, to rank objects in terms of temperature, only to discover this is not a terribly useful way of doing things. However assigning numbers to a ranking system does not necessarily mean that manipulating those numbers has any intrinsic meaning.

Umm, what number is IVXIII?

Currently comments to posts are shown in descending order (most recent comment first). Do you like this, or do you prefer that they appear in the conventional ascending order?

And while I’m asking, is there anything else about the presentation of this blog that could be improved?

Update: Ascending order it is.

The edit war on the Wikipedia article on John Lott has continued. Lott has now tried changing the page to his preferred version almost 50 times. The trouble he has encountered is that since his changes are so unreasonable at least half a dozen people have been undoing them. So, if you were Lott and it looked like you were outnumbered, what would you do? Yes that’s right, create an army of sock puppets: Timewarp, Alt37, Purtilo, Sniper1, Serinity, Henry1776, Stotts and Gordinier.

These accounts have just been created and pretty well all they have done there is change the page into Lott’s favoured version.

You really have to wander how Lott keeps so many fake identities straight.

The Australian government’s conclusion that the climate change debate is over has prompted a column from Andrew Bolt, who insists that there is to a big debate still going on. Bolt writes:

Just look at the big Greenhouse 2005 conference [environment minister Ian Campbell] department is sponsoring in Melbourne in a week.

See how free of yucky debate it is, with speaker after speaker picked to say, yes, man-made global warming is so true that we must, the organisers say, “work closely together to tackle this significant environmental issue”.

There will be so little debate that one of the four key presenters is the local head of the World Wildlife Fund. Even more telling is that another is Dr Michael Mann.

Actually, if you look at the program (available here), you will find that neither Mann nor the head of the local WWF will be presenting.

Bolt then claims that the hockey stick graph has been found to be flawed, claiming that McIntyre and McKitrick had found that Mann’s program produced a hockey stick no matter what data was fed to it. However, other researchers have looked at their claims and concluded that the hockey stick is not the product of calculation errors by Mann.

Bolt then trots out every discredited claim about widespread disagreement on global warming that you’ve ever seen:

Peiser checked a now-famous claim last year in the influential Science journal that 75 per cent of almost 1000 scientific papers on global warming in the past decade backed the “consensus view” that man-made gases were largely to blame. Peiser found in fact only one third implicitly backed the consensus, but just 1 per cent did so explicitly.

Trouble is, if you check Peiser’s work, his classifications are wildly incorrect.

It also rejected an article by Prof Dennis Bray of Germany’s GKSS National Research Centre on an international survey of 500 climate scientists. The findings? Just one in 10 strongly agreed climate change was caused mainly by man.

Trouble is, it wasn’t a survey of 500 climate scientists. The URL for participation was posted to a global warming skeptics mailing list, so it included some unknown number of skeptics as well as climate scientists. This made the survey useless.

More than 17,000 scientists signed the Oregon Petition, saying they doubted the theory, too.

The Oregon Petition actually expresses doubt about catastrophic warming. Almost all of the signers were not climate scientists and were uninformed on the issues. See my post for more details.

Finally, given Bolt’s complaints about Campbell not allowing a debate on the greenhouse issue, it is interesting to see what happened when Steve Gloor tried to post a comment disputing Bolt’s claims to Andrew Bolt’s forum. Gloor’s comments just did not appear.

Andrew Chang writes a lettter to the Vancouver Sun which published a Lott editorial full of his usual cooked numbers.

Chang also links to an old Usenet thread where he, Mary Rosh and I were involved. Oddly enough, Lott and I have been continuing the argument in comments at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Kent R. Hill, assistant administrator, Bureau of Global Health, USAID, corrects yet another ignorant claim that USAID won’t fund DDT spraying:

Paul Driessen’s opinion article titled “USAID Could Stop This Epidemic” (Nov. 2) misrepresents the U.S. Agency for International Development’s support for indoor residual spraying to control malaria, as well as the United States government’s position on the use of DDT internationally. USAID strongly supports spraying as a preventative measure for malaria and will support the use of DDT when it is scientifically sound and warranted.

In the past, USAID has provided critically needed technical support to implement the use of DDT, including training, logistic and planning support in countries where DDT has proved to be the best insecticide for spraying and when its use is permitted in that country. Also absent from Mr. Driessen’s letter is the essential fact that DDT is only one of 12 World Health Organization-approved insecticides for spraying in malaria control.

USAID will begin implementing the president’s malaria initiative in coming weeks, with a large-scale spraying campaign in southern Angola as the first activity to be launched in the field. President Bush’s initiative will include substantial spraying activities in Angola, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as in future programs, as the president himself made clear in his announcement. We at USAID fully expect our funded spraying programs to include DDT where most effective, and where it is permitted by the government.

Mr. Driessen seems to believe there is an anti-DDT agenda at play. In fact, the debate around DDT has seemingly moved far from the technical and operational issues, which should be the issues for consideration, rather than political ones.

Given the human toll this disease, the United States public and Congress should be aware of the true nature of the efforts made by the U.S. foreign-aid agency to defeat this terrible disease.

This editorial from Africa Fighting Malaria contains the usual misleading statements about what happened in South Africa and the usual false claim about the EU threatening to ban imports from Uganda. But it adds this attack on Bayer:

The obstacles to good malaria control unfortunately do not end there. Big business also plays a distasteful role in this saga. Recently, the Financial Times reported that Gerhard Hesse, business manager for vector control of Bayer Crop Sciences and a board member of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, wrote an e-mail to various health academics claiming: “We fully support EU to ban [sic] imports of agricultural products from countries using DDT … DDT remains for us a commercial threat [but] mainly a public image threat.”

Bayer produces alternatives to DDT and clearly attempts to direct malaria-control programmes so that they benefit its bottom line. Recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated more than $50-million to the Innovative Vector Control Consortium to create new insecticides. Regretfully, the commercial-development arm of the project is none other than Bayer Crop Sciences.

Of course, the EU isn’t going to ban agricultural imports from countries that use DDT, so something is wrong here, and sure enough, Hesse’s words were taken out of context:

In a statement, Bayer said Mr Hesse meant to refer purely to DDT for crop use. “Bayer CropScience rejects any interpretation that the company would support the EU move to ban imports of agricultural products coming from countries using DDT for company specific competitive reasons,” it said.

“Gerhard Hesse’s statement in this respect was written in a way which might lead to wrong conclusions. It does not reflect the actual opinion of Mr Hesse and of Bayer CropScience.”

The EU said it did not ban food imports from countries using DDT but required them to comply with maximum residue limits.

And contrary to the impression that the AFM people wanted to give, Bayer does support DDT use for the control of malaria.

Note to Bayer: AFM is an astroturf operation. If you want them to stop attacking you, give them some money.

Rolling Stone has published a major feature on global warming. Steve Milloy was mentioned as one the chief anti-science guys in the debate, so he has a column in Fox news trotting out all the usual tired old discredited arguments:

• “the sort of crystal ball climate modeling that the IPCC report relies on has never been validated against historical temperatures” Not true.

• “Watson, of course, overlooked at least 17,000 scientists who signed a petition cautioning against global warming alarmism” See here.

• “[Dr. Cicerone] managed leave the impression of a substantial 20th-century human-caused warming [while] ignoring the cooling between 1940 and 1975 that has always created problems for advocates of anthropogenic global warming.” No it doesn’t.

Milloy even resorted to an argument that has not only been discredited, but shown to be an outright lie:

But Dr. Hansen’s predictions of global temperature increases have also been famously wrong. While Dr. Hansen predicted a 0.34 degrees Centigrade rise in average global temperatures during the 1990s, actual surface temperatures rose by only one-third as much (0.11 degrees Centigrade)

In his paper Hansen showed the results of three possible scenarios, but in his testimony before congress Hansen only showed the results of the most likely one, scenario B. As the graph on the right shows, scenario B turned out to be a very good prediction. However, in 1998 Pat Michaels published a blatant lie about Hansen, erasing B and C and claiming that scenario A was his prediction. Since then, folks like Michael Crichton and Steve Milloy have been repeating the lie.

Unfortunately, even something this blatant doesn’t bother Michaels apologist Leigh Cartwright, who offers this:

He’s not lying; he’s only talking about one scenario brought forward.

Congratulations to z, who posted the 10,000th comment here:

Says here, change in total (internal) energy U is defined in terms of temperature T, pressure P, volume V and entropy S as

dU=TdS-PdV

or T=(dU+PdV)/dS …

My thanks to everyone who has commented. Your comments keep me on my toes and make this place better and more interesting.

Last month Tracy Spenser posted this comment on my blog:

Looks like Fumento has made a fool of you again? When are you ever going to learn?

www.fumento.com/weblog/ar…

www.townhall.com/blogs/c-…

And when are you going to stop encouraging a policy of genocide against people who just happen to have darker skin than yours?

Tracy Spencer was a pop singer in the 80s but our Tracy might be a different person. Anyway, as usual, Fumento’s post was full of mistakes, so I corrected them here. In the first comment John Cross asked:

Is this the same Fumento who promised:

“Now I am going to do the worst possible thing you can do to somebody who measures his life by “hits.” I’m not going to write to you again,”

Quick as a flash Tracy replied:

Actually, not writing TO somebody is indeed not the same as not writing ABOUT them. Last I heard those words were not synonymous. As to Lambert’s assertion that those were INDIAN mosquitoes and not SRI LANKAN ones, the expression “any port in a storm does come to mind.” What? DDT checks their passports? It’s the same type of mosquito; that’s all that counts. From what I’ve seen, any time Lambert strays from John Lott he misses the target. As his blog continues to fade into the sunset he needs to learn the meaning of humility and become a single-issue blogger.

Well, that set off my sockdar — a constant theme of Fumento’s was how insignificant my blog was compared to his own towering eminence. Could he be using a sock puppet to pretend that I was too unimportant for him to write to? I looked up the location of Tracy’s IP address: she was posting from Arlington, Virginia. And what do I find in Fumento’s biography?

Michael Fumento lives in Arlington, Virginia

Hmm. So I emailed Fumento, informing him that his Technorati rank was much much lower than mine and offering to provide some pointers on how to improve his ranking. He wrote back with some reason or other why that didn’t count, but the interesting thing was that his IP address was the same as Tracy’s. It’s a Comcast IP address and Comcast provides one IP address per household, so there can be only one conclusion:

Tracy Spenser is a crazed Michael Fumento fan and is posting from the same house as him. Michael: GET OUT OF THE HOUSE. GET OUT OF THE HOUSE NOOOOW!!!

Update: Now Tracy has been scrubbing criticism from Fumento’s wikipedia page.

A couple of readers have gotten an error message like this when they try to access my blog:

Precondition Failed

We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for / on this server.

We have established rules for access to this server, and any person or robot that violates these rules will be unable to access this site.

And then it goes on to list some suggestions on how to fix things. You can blame spammers if you get this message because it comes from an anti-spam plugin Bad Behavior. Spambots usually don’t follow the correct protocols when accessing a website, because it is less work for them that way. BB stops spambots by blocking access to this site by software that does not behave correctly. It also temporarily block all access from the same IP address. It even blocked me the other day.

However the paranoids at Climate Audit concluded that when BB blocked John A that I had deliberately blocked his access because I was somehow afraid of him. This is, by itself, ludicrous. After making this howler about entropy, John A fled from any discussion about his error to the safety of Climate Audit where McIntyre covers for his mistake by deleting any mention of it. Anyway, after I explained how BB had blocked him, John A responded not with a correction and an apology but with this:

I note that Lambert has continued lying and blaming me. Yes, just straight lies. I wasn’t blocked by a “spambot”, or anything like it, because a spambot doesn’t block by setting rules at the level of the Web server itself. Those rules must have been deliberately set by someone not a million miles from Lambert’s office.

This is clearly wrong since the message cam from Bad Bahavior and not the web server. When I showed them this they just came up with a new bogus theory (I had blocked him using robots.txt) of how I had deliberately blocked John A. Eventually they came up with an unfalsifiable theory, though Steve McIntyre generously allowed that it wasn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Incidentally, Climate Audit runs Bad Behavior as well, so if you get the precondition failed message or some other such message from their blog I guess you can conclude that they blocked you on purpose.

Update: In comments, the author of Bad Behavior points out that Climate Audit is running a rather old version of Bad Behavior. That means that at the time they were accusing me of lying because the “Precondition Failed” message couldn’t have come from a plugin, they were actually running the very plugin that issued the message. Of course they have never mentioned that they were using Bad Behavior themselves.

Monbiot’s article on the Lancet study drew this letter from Gil Elliot:

On the strength of having calculated war deaths around the globe over the past century, I can inform George Monbiot (The media are minimising US and British war crimes in Iraq, November 8) that the Lancet report on Iraqi deaths is deeply flawed. The number of deaths uncovered by the fieldwork, excluding Falluja, was 21; this figure is extrapolated to a population of 20 million to arrive at the calculation of 100,000 deaths. No one who understands the battlefield would accept such a figure based on 21 bodies. Since most of the deaths were from aerial bombardment, any estimate would require a method of sampling and calculating in clusters related to special knowledge of areas of military action and lethal capacity of the firepower. Falluja would have been a valuable cluster in such a study, but the authors left it out of their findings since, by their methodology, the extrapolation from there gave such an incredible result - 200,000 for the Falluja cluster (3% of the population) alone.

Detailed discrepancies are legion. Of the 53 deaths in Falluja, only one is reported as non-violent, ie 2% compared with 76% for the rest of the sample - there is no explanation of this. The number of female deaths in the 100,000 is extrapolated from a base of one or two female bodies out of the 21 - one has to dig deep into the obscurity of the report to discover this. Some 45% of the violent deaths are of children under 13, only 7% of women - hardly believable. Many of the male deaths (46%), the survey confesses, “may have been combatants”, although this is a survey of civilian deaths.

Roberts and Garfield correct Elliot’s errors in a reply

Gil Elliot’s critique of our Iraq casualty estimation (Letters, November 10) raises many excellent points but contained several errors. Most importantly, the line “The number of deaths uncovered by the fieldwork, excluding Falluja, was 21″ is simply wrong - that number was 89. Second, our random sample of 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods represents the entire population and has no inherent errors when estimating deaths. The fact that aerial bombing, which causes deaths in clusters, was a significant cause of death contributes to the imprecision of our findings, but does not necessarily make the estimate high or low.

As hinted by Elliot, we strongly suspect that our 100,000 estimate is low. While deaths reported were confirmed with death certificates more than 80% of the time, families may have hidden deaths. The shame of burying wives and mothers without ritual may explain the lack of adult women. Our study has many limitations. The occupiers can and should improve upon our efforts to acknowledge and respect those lives lost.

Iain Murray finally admits to the existence of anthropogenic global warming:

When I began working on global warming issues several years ago I was firmly of the belief that it was stuff and nonsense. As the scientific facts became clearer, however, my view has changed. It is quite apparent now that the Earth is warming and that mankind has quite a lot to do with it.

Oddly enough however, his policy recommendations don’t seem to have changed:

So simply saying that the world is warming and that we know some of this is due to greenhouse gases isn’t enough to justify drastic action that may cause more harm than good. Because switching to a low-carbon or carbon-free economy isn’t a cost-free option. It will require significant investment and substantial opportunity cost. The latter is an important point. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a warmer world. The only reason to take action on climate change is because we fear that it will make the world worse for its inhabitants, specifically in the exacerbating existing problems of malaria, hunger, water shortage, coastal flooding and threats to biodiversity. Using the UK environment department’s own research, US analyst Indur Goklany has concluded that the effects of global warming will be smaller than those of other factors in exacerbating the problems. Therefore, it makes sense for us to tackle these problems now so that there will be less to exacerbate in the future. It will be difficult for the world to do that while it is trying to absorb the immense costs of a forced transition to a different energy system.

Yes, cutting carbon emissions could result in job losses. And advocating such cuts could result in Murray losing his job at the Competitive Entrprise Institute.

Somebody with IP address 69.143.188.141 has been doing John Lott style edits to Michael Fumento’s Wikipedia page. For instance, this person removed the link to my criticism of Fumento.

By a strange coincidence 69.143.188.141 just happens to be the IP address used by Tracy Spenser.

Eli Rabett dissects Essex and McKitrick’s incompetence with averages:

Unfortunately, either Essex or McKitrick or both do not understand zero and negative numbers. You know where my money is.

Read his post to see why.

Mind you, Steve McIntyre isn’t convinced that there is anything wrong with their argument because “Chris Essex is an accomplished thermodynamicist” and

my impression was that your counter-argument was mostly just belligerence. While it’s possible that they made a mistake. I very much doubt whether Essex made a trivial mistake and your argument seemed to be assuming that it was trivial.

Oddly enough, Mann, Bradley and Hughes are accomplished scientists but this hasn’t stopped McIntyre from arguing that they made trivial mistakes.

The latest stunt from Africa Fighting Malaria is a petition advocating policies that would cripple the United States efforts against malaria. The petition asks that Congress and the President

• Ensure that at least 2/3 (two-thirds) of annual Congressional appropriations for malaria control are earmarked for insecticidal and medicinal commodities – with up to half of such monies targeted to the treatment and cure of infected patients.
• Specifically direct such funds to the actual purchase and deployment of: (1) DDT, or any other proven, more cost-effective insecticide/repellant, for Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) in any given malarial locality; and (2) of ACTs, or other equally effective and durable drugs, for treatment of malaria patients and reduction in transmission rates.
• Require that this 2/3 formula be mirrored in the annual malaria control spending by any agency receiving US malaria control monies – such as US Agency for International Development, World Health Organization, World Bank, UNICEF and Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis.

This is an absolutely dreadful way to run an anti-malaria program. The goal should be to reduce malaria and you should let the experts figure out the best way to do this. It should not be to spray DDT. In the map below (source) green dots mark resistance to pyrethoids, blue resistance to DDT, and red is resistance to both DDT and pyrethoids.

The only concession that the petition makes for problems like widespread DDT resistance is this passage:

• Direct that this 2/3 proportion will be subject to reduction ONLY if replaced by corresponding expenditures for any malaria control measure (such as larvaciding) that has been proven equally or more cost-effective in reducing malaria morbidity and mortality rates in specific localities – as certified, in advance of such expenditure and replacement, by the directors of the US Centers for Disease Control, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences or similar independent agency, based on controlled epidemiological studies in the field.

But why don’t they require epidemiological evidence that DDT is more effective before spraying it? In any case, the studies on the effectiveness have already been done and led to WHO concluding in 1994 that DDT was no longer the insecticide of choice for vector control. Furthermore, the evidence that the petition presents in favour of DDT does not follow the standard that they require for alternatives. For example, they dismiss all the evidence in favour of insecticide-treated nets not with epidemiological studies, but with hand waving:

Insecticide-treated nets certainly help to a limited degree. However, they often get torn. They only protect one person at a time. People often don’t use them, because the insecticide irritates their skin – or they forget … kick them off when it gets too unbearably hot under the net to sleep … don’t have enough for every family member … have no way to hang them up properly … or are still doing homework or housework when mosquitoes arrive.

But somehow nets seem to work. It’s a shame that this petition would prevent their use to save lives from malaria…

I hope that the US government rejects the appallingly bad policies advocated by this petition, because if they are followed more African children will die from malaria.

Little known fact: 22 is the smallest prime that can be formed from the product of smaller primes in four different ways (7×3, 3×7, and 7×1x3). Anyway, check out the 22nd skeptics circle.

Bob Carroll learns from Chis Mooney about the relative risk scam. He writes

I owe an apology to readers of this newsletter. In April 2004, I wrote the first of several commentaries on Penn & Teller’s claim in a Bullshit! episode that the EPA report was bogus that claims that 3,000 people a year die from lung cancer because of secondhand smoke. My initial research into the subject was inadequate and I agreed with P & T. I was wrong to do so. My position was laid out in Newsletters 41, 42, 44, 49, and 50. For the full retraction, see Newsletter 41, though I’ve posted corrections in each of those newsletters.

My error was the same one P & T made: trusting the standards of risk assessment as promoted by the tobacco industry (led by Philip Morris) and their Republican generals like Jim Tozzi.* While reading Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science, I came to realize that many responsible epidemiologists, including Jonathan Samer and Thomas A. Burke from Johns Hopkins medical school, do not believe that an increased risk of 100% or more from a pollutant is required before it should be considered relevant or significant for public health. In short, we’ve been hoodwinked by politicians, mostly Republican, into calling junk science ’sound science’ and describing sound science as “uncertain” or “incomplete.” Real junk science is called on when convenient to make a case for “controversy” or “uncertainty”, as we are all well aware with regard to the promotion of so-called intelligent design.

The P & T episode called “Environmental Hysteria” is based on these same questionable standards pushed by Republican leaders for their corporate donors whose main interest is the deregulation of industries and products rather than public safety or health. This approach fits well with P & T’s libertarian philosophy but it is essentially dishonest and does nothing to promote the view of skepticism as healthy critical thinking. Instead, it seems to promote the view of skepticism as a way to throw dust in people’s eyes so they can’t see what’s really going on. Mooney calls this kind of “skepticism” contrarianism. It’s a good descriptive term. The function of contrarians is to muddy the waters, cause doubt and confusion, and promote the false notion that “sound science” is science where you can’t find a contrary view. The contrarian philosophy is Orwellian doublespeak at its best: Some of the best science available is labeled “junk science” because there are contrary views (both scientific and political).

You should read the whole thing because Carroll explains the issue carefully and also provides an excellent example of how to make a correction if you discover that you have made a mistake. But I can’t resist quoting this bit as well:

I’m going to reprint here some comments by Steve Simon that were sent to me after I posted a rant on the Vioxx ban last January. I relied for those comments, as I did for many of my comments on the secondhand smoke issue, on the work of mathematician John Brignell, who writes “In observational studies, [scientists] will not normally accept an RR [risk ratio] of less than 3 as significant and never an RR of less than 2.” I should have known better than to trust Brignell, since one of his main sources is Steven Milloy, whom I have debunked elsewhere. Milloy is a propagandist for businesses and industries that are hurt economically by government regulations on pollution, health hazards, and the like. He has made a career out of labeling good science as “junk science” by his contrarian methods of finding contrary studies or by applying contrary standards to studies already completed by those he opposes.

Brignell wasn’t too pleased:

the author of Number Watch has been the subject of one of those Animal Farm type revisionist attacks. … What use is a Skeptic’s Dictionary contaminated by Political Correctness?

Brignell dismisses Carroll’s evidence because it is contaminated with Political Correctness. This is a bit lazy—you’d think he could have at least used Brignell’s Law of Scientific Consensus.

In Tech Central Station (where else?) global warming skeptic Roy Spencer spreads the DDT hoax:

The whole DDT issue is a good example of stupid environmental policy. Insiders say the de facto ban on DDT was the result of politics, not of overriding human health and environmental concerns. Threats of trade bans on countries that dare to use DDT, one of the safest and most effective insecticides available, have contributed to over one million malaria-related deaths each year in Africa. Literally hundreds of millions of people contract the disease each year. While the knee-jerk hostility to DDT is now increasingly being realized to be bad policy (the reinstitution of DDT use in South Africa has reduced malaria deaths there by about 95%), it is but one example of how disinformation spread by well-meaning environmentalists lead to massive human suffering.

Let’s see:

• There is no de facto ban.
• Trade bans for using DDT are not threatened.
• Reinstating DDT in South Africa did not cause a 95% decrease in deaths
• The environmentalists’ ban on the agricultural use of DDT saved lives.

I suspect that one of the reasons that Spencer gets the DDT story so wrong is that he is a Creationist and probably has trouble grasping the fact that mosquitoes evolve resistance to DDT.

SayUncle blogged on Fumento’s use of sock puppets:

Mike Fumento, who I’ve talked about before, poked fun at us insignificant blogs before starting his own. He also acted like a prick in an exchange between himself and Rich Hailey.

Now, he’s using sockpuppets in comments at other blogs and to change his Wikipedia entry.

Fumento left this comment:

And the reason we know the IP addresses match is . . . because we have Tim Lambert’s word on it! And never mind that Lambert has long been on a vendetta against me, nor that he uses his friend over at urinestain.com, er, inkstain.com, to do HIS postings. In other words, he uses a human sock puppet!

Yes, SayUncle has to take my word that the IP addresses match… Or rather, he had to take my word until Fumento posted his comment. Now he can check the IP address of Fumento’s comment with that used to edit Wikipedia. Oops.