Deltoid

There has been quite a bit of reaction to my post on Milloy.

Michael Peckham writes “Milloy’s criticism may be right some of the time, but only when it fits his preconceived anti-regulatory agenda. ”

John Quiggin, at Crooked Timber and at his own blog observes that the link between Cato and Milloy reflects badly on Cato. Also the comments in the Crooked Timber have some attempts to defend Milloy against the charge that he is boosting creationism. Yes, Milloy offers the Theory of Evolution some faint praise, but he also thinks Creationism should get equal time with evolution and while he savagely criticizes real science, he won’t criticize creationist bunk.

Steve Michel writes

I read Milloy’s book a few years ago, and while some of it’s good, in general it’s just a conservative rant. It’s more interested in protecting big corporations from lawsuits (which are, admittedly, sometimes on the edges of science) than it is in, say, the kind of religiousy-correct junk science promoted by conservatives around the country.

Jeff writes “Tim Lambert does a good job illustrating the moral bankruptcy of a typical anti-liberal - Steve Milloy of junkscience.com”

Radagast examines Milloy’s article on mad cows and finds it wanting.

Demosthenes comments on Milloy and TASSC (the tobacco companies’ astroturf operation).

I always have believed and always will believe that it’s not the arguer but the argument that is important. Even if Milloy works for Phillip Morris, he may have a point. Still, this sort of willful misrepresentation bothers me a lot.

I agree that the argument is more important than the arguer, that’s why I didn’t mention Milloy’s funding source till after I had demolished his claims. The funding explains why he made so many false claims, it does not prove that those claims are false.

Meanwhile, John Brignell has attempted a defence (scroll to bottom of page) of Milloy. He ignores the substance of the criticism and focuses on the language so that he can dismiss the criticism as name calling. He complains that pointing out that Milloy is funded by tobacco companies is “playing the man and not the ball”. His objection would have a tiny bit more force if he hadn’t immediately turned around and gone for the man himself by implying that John Quiggin is unqualified to criticize Milloy:

A is able to call B a charlatan. B holds a B.A. in Natural Sciences from the Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Health Sciences in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, a Juris Doctorate from the University of Baltimore and a Master of Laws from the Georgetown University Law Center. The qualifications of A must be pretty impressive. Wonder what they are.

Unfortunately, when Brignell goes for his man, he misses and falls flat on his face. Compare Milloy’s CV with Quiggin’s CV. As far as I can tell, Milloy has never conducted any research and has published only one paper, which was a poster at a conference and he wasn’t even the first author, while Quiggin has well over one hundred refereed journal papers. I wrote to Brignell suggesting that he provide links to both CVs so his readers could judge the matter for themselves, but Brignell did not so (though he did list Quiggin’s degrees).

In an update, Brignell finally gets around to commenting on the substance of the criticism. He claims, without offering any evidence, that on the scientific issues Milloy is largely correct. He does disagree with Milloy about the gun lobbying, so it would seem that he thinks that this claim is correct:

The same seasonal (and localised) depletion was actually discovered in the 1950s and recognised as an interesting natural phenomenon (interest then was centred on the massive increase in ozone levels over the south pole in late spring, early summer as the massive high concentrations from the adjacent temperate regions penetrate the weakening polar vortex). In the misanthropic ’80s it was given significant publicity and a character change - this time it was big, bad and (you guessed it) man-made while the parallel build up of ozone outside the polar vortex no longer rated a mention. Stratospheric ozone levels are volatile and seasonal, whether there has been any unusual change in ozone levels over the period is moot. There is only one certainty and that is that perceptions changed purely because the great ozone ‘hole’ got a new publicist.

And just to be sure, here is what Brignell wrote about it earlier:

Watch out for a new bunch of mysterious figures lurking about Britain’s beauty spots at the dead on night. They are not smugglers or clandestine lovers, but fridge dumpers. It is the latest coup by the almighty Greens of the EU. Believe it or not, because of new EU regulations, DEFRA, fresh from its foot and mouth triumph, is asking the British to refrain from buying fridges. It is now illegal to dispose of both the coolant and the insulant in fridges, but in Britain there is no legal way of doing it. All because of a hole in the ozone layer that was probably always there and an unproven theory as to how it was caused.

Brignell read my post which contains this graph, that shows ozone levels in October at Halley Station in Antarctica. (from this page). It is perfectly clear that there was no hole in the 1950s. It is perfectly clear that the hole was not always there. There is not one scrap of evidence to support Brignell’s claim. Yet even when confronted with the evidence that proves his claim is false he continues to maintain that it is true. Disgraceful.

Yet another person has tried to refute the Lancet article. John Brignell dismisses the study just because:

A relative risk of 1.5 is not acceptable as significant.

Actually the increased risk was statistically significant. You won’t find support for Brignell’s claim in any conventional statistical text or paper. To support his claim he cites a book called Sorry, wrong number!. Trouble is, that book was written by…. John Brignell. Not only that, it was published by… John Brignell. Brignell is a crank who dismisses the entire field of modern epidemiology as some sort of plot by scientists to scare people. We encountered him before in this post where, armed with no evidence whatsoever, he insisted that the ozone hole had always been present.

To see how silly Brignell’s “relative risk of 1.5 is not acceptable as significant” claim is, consider this: Suppose we had perfect records of every death in Iraq and there were 200,000 in the year before the invasion, and 300,000 in the year after. Then the relative risk would be 1.5 and Brignell would dismiss the increase as not significant even though in this case we have absolutely certainty that there were 100,000 extra deaths.

John Brignell has an odd response (scroll down to “Hit Parade”) to some of my criticism. He doesn’t link, or dare to even mention my name, so it’s probably rather mystifying to his readers what he is responding to. Brignell goes on the Michael Fumento road, boasting about how the 2,488 hits he got on Monday vastly exceeds the 10 hits he got from me. Trouble is, he got those hits from a link in a comment in a two-day old post, so it’s hardly a meaningful comparison. For what it’s worth, his web counter shows 230k visits in five years, which is less than what I have in two years.

Earlier I wrote:

John Brignell dismisses the [Lancet] study just because:

A relative risk of 1.5 is not acceptable as significant.

Actually the increased risk was statistically significant. You won’t find support for Brignell’s claim in any conventional statistical text or paper. To support his claim he cites a book called Sorry, wrong number!. Trouble is, that book was written by. … John Brignell. Not only that, it was published by … John Brignell. Brignell is a crank who dismisses the entire field of modern epidemiology as some sort of plot by scientists to scare people.

Brignell’s response is:

Among the charges in the web log were that the author is not an epidemiologist, so not qualified to comment on epidemiology, and that he is innumerate for suggesting the relative risks of 1.5 are unacceptable for observational studies. The first is like saying you have not committed mass murder therefore you are not entitled to write about crime. Critics of observational studies have included great scientifically inclined epidemiologists, such as Alvan R Feinstein, Sterling Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Yale. The also great R A Fisher would have no truck with them at all. The second accusation is typically hyperbolic. An innumerate person would not even be able to begin discussing a concept such as risk ratio. There is a substantial body of opinion outside mainstream epidemiology that is critical of such lax statistical standards. Correspondence to Number Watch confirms that many professional statisticians are appalled by what is going on. Besides which, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The book The Epidemiologists begins with some examples of the many completely contradictory headlines generated by popular epidemiological studies.

Actually I didn’t say that Brignell shouldn’t be commenting on epidemiology because he wasn’t an epidemiologist, but that the only support he offers for his 1.5 claim is his own opinion. He even admits that his view is outside mainstream epidemiology and still has not offered any cite or argument to support his claim. I guess Fisher might well be on Brignell’s side, since Fisher rejected the idea that smoking causes lung cancer, but very few deny this any more. And Brignell’s 1.5 risk ratio principle is innumerate. According to his principle, for example, the observed ratio of male to female births of 1.03 is not significant and we can’t conclude that male births are more likely.

Anti-environmentalist writers frequently claim that after DDT had all but eliminated malaria from Sri Lanka, environmentalist pressure forced Sri Lanka to ban DDT, leading to a resurgence of malaria:

Roger Bate in Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking writes:

Some developing countries imposed a complete ban on the pesticide, as Sri Lanka did in 1964, when officials believed the malaria problem was solved. By 1969 the number of cases had risen from the low of seventeen (when DDT was used) to over a half million.

Walter Williams in in Capitalism Magazine writes

In Sri Lanka, in 1948, there were 2.8 million malaria cases and 7,300 malaria deaths. With widespread DDT use, malaria cases fell to 17 and no deaths in 1963. After DDT use was discontinued, Sri Lankan malaria cases rose to 2.5 million in the years 1968 and 1969, and the disease remains a killer in Sri Lanka today.

Ted Lapkin in Quadrant writes:

When Sri Lankan authorities agreed to ban DDT during the mid-1960s, rates of malaria infection exploded from twenty-nine cases in 1964 to over 500,000 a mere five years later.

In his book The Epidemiologists John Brignell writes:

1948 Annual malaria rate in Sri Lanka reaches 2.8million
1962 Publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
1963 DDT reduces annual malaria rate in Sri Lanka to 17
1964 DDT banned in Sri Lanka
1969 Annual malaria rate in Sri Lanka reaches 2.5million.

Jim Norton lists even more examples.

Now when you think about it, the story that they tell just isn’t credible. If DDT spraying had almost eliminated malaria, and they got a new outbreak, then no environmentalists would be able to stop them from resuming spraying. So I went to the library to find out what really happened. And it wasn’t hard to find out. The definitive history of malaria is Gordon Harrison’s Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man and it turns out that, yes of course they went back to spraying. Harrison writes:

Sri Lanka went back to the spray guns, reducing malaria once more to 150,000 cases in 1972; but there the attack stalled. Anopheles culicifacies, completely susceptible to DDT when the spray stopped in 1964, was now found resistant presumably because of the use of DDT for crop protection in the interim. Within a couple of years, so many culicifacies survived that despite the spraying malaria spread in 1975 to more than 400,000 people.

So in 1977 they switched to the more expensive malathion and were able to reduce the number of cases to about 50,000 by 1980. In 2004, the number was down to 3,000, without using DDT.

And the reason why they stopped spraying in 1964? It wasn’t environmentalist pressure. With only 17 cases in 1963, they didn’t think it was needed any more. And this wasn’t an unreasonable belief. In the countries where malaria had been eradicated, once the number was this low, treating the remaining cases with drugs to kill the malaria parasite was sufficient to completely eradicate it.

Just to prove that there is no question about any of this, I have extracts from Harrison and two other supporting sources here.

The anti-environmentalist version of what happened is a hoax. That doesn’t mean that all the writers above were being deliberately misleading: they might be just repeating what another anti-environmentalist wrote and be unaware of the true story. AEI scholar Roger Bate, however, coauthored an entire book on DDT and Malaria which relies very heavily on Harrison’s history, citing him over twenty times. They conspicuously fail to mention that Sri Lanka resumed DDT spraying and that it failed because of resistance, instead claiming that

pressure not to use DDT may have been applied by western donors using resistance as a convenient argument. Recent evidence shows that even where resistance to DDT has emerged, the excito-repellancy of DDT causes mosquitoes not to enter buildings that have been sprayed (Roberts et al., 2000). Under test conditions (see Grieco et al., 2000), for at least one type of malarial mosquito in Belize (the only country in which these tests have so far been conducted),DDT is far more successful than the most favoured vector control pesticide Deltamethrin. Hence it is unlikely that malaria rates would have increased (significantly) even if resistance were found.

But malaria rates did increase even though DDT was extensively used. Harrison has an entire chapter on this. How could Bate possibly not have noticed this? (And tests on a different continent on a different species of mosquito aren’t even close to relevant).

Our old friend John Brignell has uncovered “The greatest conspiracy in human history”. According to Brignell that’s what global warming is, and:

It is not that the proponents are simply mistaken—that would be forgivable. They know that they are lying: otherwise there would be no need for all the manufactured and selective evidence, the appeal to a claimed consensus (the like of which has never had a place within the scientific method), the gross attempts to censor any contrary argument, the abandonment of the essential scepticism of science, the vilification of doubters, the direction of huge quantities of taxpayers money into acquiescent “research” groups, the barrage of angled news-stories, the drama documentaries, irrelevant interpolations into editorial commentaries and on and on.

The evidence for the global warming disaster theory does not stand up to the most cursory examination, like the global cooling disaster theory that preceded it. Yet, a majority of simple souls accept that it is true, because it has been drummed into their brains by incessant repetition.

(And no, he doesn’t offer any support for his claim that the evidence does not stand up to examination.)

So what proof does Brignell have that it’s a plot? Well, he’s managed to get his hands on a “secret letter” from the Royal Society that says completely evil stuff like:

We are appealing to all parts of the UK media to be vigilant against attempts to present a distorted view of the scientific evidence about climate change and its potential effects on people and their environments around the world. I hope that we can count on your support.

Apparently this secret letter was sent to all major media outlets in the UK. This is obviously some usage of the word “secret” with which I am unfamiliar.

Brignell then formulates his law of scientific consensus:

From Galileo, through Darwin to Einstein, there is a clear law of scientific consensus;

The law of scientific consensus:

At times of scientific contention the consensus is always wrong.

So Darwin overturned the scientific consensus of his day. Brignell’s law says he was right. Cool. Except that now the scientific consensus is that Darwin was right, so Brignell’s law say he was wrong. I think Brignell needs to formulate some new rules of logic where statements can be true and false at the same time to go with his scientific consensus law.

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.

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.