Deltoid

Eli Rabett has scored Essex and McKitrick’s briefing for Taken By Storm at Global Warming Skeptic Bingo. Alas, they don’t win. I reckon their book will do better. For example, they get another box at bingo with this passage (from page 134 of their book):

There are enemies of T-Rex who think that the satellite average is the true one and the surgface average is so much crap. The Knights of the White Boxes respond that the satellite averages are very silly and no one should pay any attention to them. The Defenders of the Satellites went before the Grand Council of the American Meteorological Society and were given golden medallions for their work. Then they rode forth and smote the Knights of the White Boxes. Then all the people cried out in confusion and the High Priests of the National Academy of Sciences inquired of the oracle. It issued a report declaring that everyone is right and we should all just get along.

Flashman has declared Jan 28 to be Grogblogging 3 night. I plan to be there. In true blogging style, a controversy about the location has already broken out.

It would be crass to post a top ten list where your own blog was number one. But if you posted a list where some other blog was number one and then that other blog returned the favour, well, that wouldn’t be crass would it? Anyway, here are the top ten Alexa-ranked-by-traffic right-wing Australian blogs.

1. Tim Blair: 50,087

2. Catallaxy files: 225,663

3. Gravett.org (Yobbo plus a bunch of RWDBs I can’t tell apart): 488,606

4. Observation Deck (Bernard Slattery, James McConvill, Peter Faris QC et al): 502,086

5. Blithering Bunny: 848,020

6. Man of Lettuce: 1,566,151

7. Whacking Day: 1,791,563

8. Evil Pundit: 2,093,488

9. After Grog Blog: 2,639,280

10. Australian Libertarian Society: 3,394,951

Notes:

1. Tim Blair has compiled a list by Alexa traffic rankings of what he calls “leftoid” Australian blogs.

2. Alexa only ranks by domain. That’s why several blogs above are grouped together and no blogspot blogs are included.

3. Alexa cautions: “Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant.” So the list doesn’t mean very much but what the hey.

4. Alexa only collects data from users with the Alexa toolbar. This only works with Internet Explorer. And the latest security hole in Windows means that if you are using Internet Explorer I could have taken over your computer by now. Microsoft’s advice is that users “should take care not to visit unfamiliar or un-trusted Web sites”. Alternatively, install Firefox. You can still get infected if you try hard enough, but you are a lot safer.

Peter Gleick argues that global warming skeptics are practising pseudo-science because no matter how much evidence piles up for warming, their position does not change. John Quiggin says that the latest evidence ends the scientific debate. Evidence for this can be found at Backseat Driving , where Brian Schmidt finds that warming skeptics just won’t put their money where their mouths are and bet against future warming when when offered odds.

Meanwhile the Australian has printed a rather silly article by Ian Plimer:

Does it matter if sea level rises a few metres or global temperatures rise a few degrees? No. Sea level changes by up to 400m, atmospheric temperatures by about 20C, carbon dioxide can vary from 20 per cent to 0.03 per cent, and our dynamic planet just keeps evolving. Greenpeace, contrary to scientific data, implies a static planet. Even if the sea level rises by metres, it is probably cheaper to address this change than reconstruct the world’s economies.

Plimer omits to mention that those huge changes took place over hundreds of millions of years and that while the planet kept evolving, that evolving involved mass extinctions of things like the dinosaurs. Living through a mass extinction is unlikely to be pleasant. Plimer also pretends that the other side in the debate is just Greenpeace rather than pretty well all the climate scientists.

For about 80 per cent of the time since its formation, Earth has been a warm, wet, greenhouse planet with no icecaps. When Earth had icecaps, the climate was far more variable, disease depopulated human settlements and extinction rates of other complex organisms were higher. Thriving of life and economic strength occurs during warm times. Could Greenpeace please explain why there was a pre-Industrial Revolution global warming from AD900 to 1300? Why was the sea level higher 6000 years ago than it is at present? Which part of the 120m sea-level rise over the past 15,000 years is human-induced? To attribute a multicomponent, variable natural process such as climate change to human-induced carbon emissions is pseudo-science.

Again he pretends that the other side is just Greenpeace. This may be a bit too complicated for Plimer, but the existence of natural climate change does not disprove the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Nor is the huge amount of research on the attribution of recent climate change “pseudo-science”.

Meanwhile, Tim Blair has continued to tout his law that “global warming protests invariably result in local colding“. He apparently generalized this “law” from the case of Montreal where global warming protests were followed by a snowstorm on Dec 16 where it was warmer that the average for Dec 16. Oddly enough, Melbourne’s walk against warming was followed by Melbourne’s warmest December ever recorded, while Sydney’s walk against warming was only followed by Sydney’s second warmest December ever recorded and hottest New Year’s day. Not to worry, Blair counted this as an example of his law as well.

New Scientist has an article on sock puppets (subscription required):

IF YOU thought sock puppets were made merely for the amusement of small children, think again. In cyberspace, a sock puppet is a vandal’s alter ego, an additional account that they use to pose as a different user and tamper with facts and dishonestly promote alternative viewpoints.

The article ends with:

And one academic was caught using a sock puppet to review his own book and to pose as one of his students. It’s not just small children that sock puppets keep amused.

They don’t mention the name of this academic, but we know who it is.

Get the latest skeptical blogging here.

John Allen Paulos writes about Iraqi war deaths:

Another figure in the news recently has been the number of Iraqis killed in the war. President Bush mentioned last month that in addition to the more than 2,100 American soldiers killed so far in Iraq, that there were approximately 30,000 Iraqis killed. He was likely referring to the approximate figure put out by Iraq Body Count, a group of primarily British researchers who use online Western media reports to compile an extensive list of Iraqi civilians killed. The organization checks the names and associated details of those killed. It necessarily misses all those whose names don’t make it into the reports, and it makes no attempt to estimate the number it misses. The group’s list contains almost 30,000 names at present.

A study that appeared in the prestigious British medical journal, the Lancet, in October 2004, used statistical sampling techniques to estimate all Iraqis killed because of the war and its myriad direct and indirect effects. The figure researchers came up with at that time — 15 months ago — was approximately 100,000 dead, albeit with a large margin of error. The Lancet study used the same techniques that Les F. Roberts, a researcher at Johns Hopkins and lead author of the study, used to investigate mortality caused by the wars in Bosnia, the Congo and Rwanda. Although Roberts’ work in those locations was unquestioned and widely cited by many, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Lancet estimates on Iraq were unfortunately dismissed or ignored in 2004.

These last 15 months have considerably raised the American death toll, the IBC numbers, and any update that may be in the works for the Lancet’s staggering 100,000 figure. In fact, if the Lancet estimates rose at a rate proportional to the IBC’s numbers since October 2004 — from about 17,000 then to about 30,000 — the updated figure would be approximately 175,000 Iraqis dead since the war began.

One of the features of the endless stream of articles about the nonexistent DDT ban is the way they all cite each other instead of cracking open a textbook or checking with an actual scientist. I call this the disinformation cycle. As far as I can tell, it is nearly 100% efficient and there is little danger of actual facts about the world contaminating the pure flow of disinformation.

Tim Blair professes not to give a damn about global warming but also reckons it a scam and has over twenty rather confused posts in just the last month attacking the concept. In his latest post he seems to think that only the Arctic is warming, quoting John Christy.

“It just doesn’t look like global warming is very global,” said John Christy, director of UAH’s Earth System Science Center.

“The carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is distributed pretty evenly around the globe and not concentrated in the Arctic, so it doesn’t look like we can blame greenhouse gases for the overwhelming bulk of the Northern Hemisphere warming over the past 27 years” he said. “The most likely suspect for that is a natural climate change or cycle that we didn’t expect or just don’t understand.”

Christy, of course, spent years denying that global warming was happening because of his analysis of satellite data that showed no warming. Eventually it was discovered that he’d made a mistake and the satellites did show warming. It seems he’s now retreated to the next line of defence for Global Warming skeptics—claiming that the observed warming is natural.

Is the warming just confined to the Arctic? Study the image below, which shows the warming (or cooling) rate for the lower troposphere from satellite measurements:

The warming isn’t just in the Arctic—it includes almost every spot on the globe. And yes, the warming is more pronounced in the Arctic. Does that prove that carbon dioxide isn’t doing it? Well, no. It was predicted that Arctic would warm more from increased CO2:

The Arctic had been predicted to be hit first by global warming, principally because warming at the northern pole is enhanced by positive feedback.

Snow and ice reflect 80% to 90% of solar radiation back into space. But when these white surfaces disappear, more solar radiation is absorbed by the underlying land or sea as heat. This heat, in turn, melts more snow and ice.

Another reason for the Arctic’s sensitivity is that the air there is extremely dry compared to air at lower latitudes, says Prestrud. This means that less energy is used up in evaporating water, leaving more as heat.

I reckon Christy will be retreating to the third defence line soon (if I recall correctly, that’s “Warming will be beneficial”).

Andrew Cockburn reports on an analysis of the raw Lancet data by Pierre Sprey who used a non-parametric method (so it was not necessary to exclude Falluja) and found:

“So, applying that simple notion to the death rates before and after the US invasion of Iraq, we find that the confidence intervals around the estimated 100,000 “excess deaths” not only shrink considerably but also that the numbers move significantly higher. With a distribution-free approach, a 95 per cent confidence interval thereby becomes 53,000 to 279,000. (Recall that the Gaussian approach gave a 95 per cent confidence interval of 8,000 to 194,000.) With an 80 per cent confidence interval, the lower bound is 78,000 and the upper bound is 229,000. This shift to higher excess deaths occurs because the real, as opposed to the Gaussian, distribution of the data is heavily skewed to the high side of the distribution center”.

Hat tip: Donald Johnson.

In Lott’s latest column he cuts and pastes his previous cherry picking on England, so I’ll just repeat my correction: He carefully picks his numbers to avoid mentioning the dramatic decline in violent crime in England since 1996. As for Australia, he finds yet another way to avoid mentioning how violent crime has been falling here:

Australia’s 1996 gun-control regulations banned many types of guns and the immediate aftermath was similar. While murder rates remained unchanged, armed robbery rates averaged 59% higher in the eight years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2004) than in 1995.

He averaged the armed robbery rate over eight years to hide the fact that it is now lower than when the law was passed. Furthermore, if you compare the murder rates the way that he compared the armed robbery rates, they were not “unchanged” but declined by 12%.

But his column isn’t pure recycled stuff—he has a new example where he implies that criminals took advantage of the disarmed Irish:

The Republic of Ireland banned and confiscated all handguns and all center fire rifles in 1972, but murder rates rose fivefold by 1974 and in the 20 years after the ban has averaged 114% higher than the pre-ban rate (never falling below at least 31% higher).

So do you think that Lott is completely ignorant about the recent history of Ireland or did he deliberately conceal it from his readers? In 1972 the Republic of Ireland did ban handguns and large calibre rifles. And the number of murders did increase from 10 in 1971 to 51 in 1974 (numbers from here). What Lott failed to mention is the reason for the gun ban in Ireland was not to reduce homicides there (they only had 10 murders a year in a country of three million people for heaven’s sake!), but to cut off the supply of guns to Northern Ireland. Lott also failed to mention is that the reason for the big increase in murder in 1974 was the terrorist bombings in Dublin and Monaghan which killed 33 people. It’s as if he blamed the enormous increase in the homicide rate in New York City in 2001 on gun control there.

Michael Schwartz writes about the rules of engagement in Iraq:

A little over a year ago, a group of Johns Hopkins researchers reported that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the Iraq war during its first 14 months, with about 60,000 of the deaths directly attributable to military violence by the U.S. and its allies. The study, published in The Lancet, the highly respected British medical journal, applied the same rigorous, scientifically validated methods that the Hopkins researchers had used in estimating that 1.7 million people had died in the Congo in 2000. Though the Congo study had won the praise of the Bush and Blair administrations and had become the foundation for UN Security Council and State Department actions, this study was quickly declared invalid by the U.S. government and by supporters of the war.

This dismissal was hardly surprising, but after a brief flurry of protest, even the antiwar movement (with a number of notable exceptions) has largely ignored the ongoing carnage that the study identified.

One reason the Hopkins study did not generate sustained outrage is that the researchers did not explain how the occupation had managed to kill so many people so quickly — about 1,000 each week in the first 14 months of the war. This may reflect our sense that carnage at such elevated levels requires a series of barbaric acts of mass slaughter and/or huge battles that would account for staggering numbers of Iraqis killed. With the exception of the battle of Falluja, these sorts of high-profile events have simply not occurred in Iraq.

But the Iraq war is a twenty-first century war and so the miracle of modern weaponry allows the U.S. military to kill scores of Iraqis (and wound many more) during a routine day’s work, made up of small skirmishes triggered by roadside bombs, sniper attacks, and American foot patrols. …

This is my last post ever here. My blog has moved to http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ where I will join some fantastic bloggers at ScienceBlogs. The new RSS feed is http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/index.xml. You can now read my first post at the new blog.