Deltoid

In this column, Richard Muller claims that McKitrick and McIntyre have shown that the hockey stick graph is an “artifact of poor mathematics”. If you have been following the global warming debate this claim should look familiar, because McKitrick and McIntyre made the same claim last year as well. So what’s new? Well, last year they claimed that the hockey stick was the product “collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects.” Now they are saying that the hockey stick is the product of improper normalization of the data. This is an improvement on their previous claims, since it seems that it will be reasonably simple to test. William Connolley has looked at the data and thinks M&M are probably wrong:

But (having read their paper) I now think I understand what they think the problem is (aside: they complain about data issues with some series but I think this is beside the point: the main point they are talking about is below), and I think that they are probably wrong, based on reading MBH’s Fortran (aside: Fortran is a terrible language for doing this stuff, they should use a vector language like IDL). But anyway:

Lets for the moment assume for simplicity that these series run from 1000 (AD) to 1980. MBH want to calibrate them against the instrumental record so they standardise them to 1902–1980. 1902–1980 is the “training period”.

What M&M are saying (and Muller is repeating) is (and I quote): the data

“were first scaled to the 1902-1980 mean and standard deviation, then the PCs were computed using singular value decomposition (SVD) on the transformed data…”

they complain that this means that:

“For stationary series in which the 1902–1980 mean is the same as the 1400–1980 mean, the MBH98 method approximately zero-centers the series. But for those series where the 1902–1980 mean shifts (up or down) away from the 1400–1980 mean, the variance of the shifted series will be inflated.”

This is a plausible idea: if you take 2 series, statistically identical, but when one trends up at the end where the other happens to be flat, and you compute the SD of just the end bit, and then scale the series to this SD, then you would indeed inflate the variance of the up trending series artificially. But hold on a minute… this is odd… why would you scale the series to the SD? You would expect to scale the series by the SD. Which would, in fact, reduce the variance of upwards trending series. And also, you might well think, shouldn’t you take out a linear trend over 1902–1980 before computing the SD?

So we need to look at MBH’s software, not M&M’s description of it. MBH’s software is here, and you can of course read it yourself… Fortran is so easy to read…

What they do is (search down over the reading in data till you get to 9999 continue):

1. remove the 1902-1980 mean
2. calc the SD over this period
3. divide the whole series by this SD, point by point

At this point, the new data are in the situation I described above: datasets that trend upwards at the end have had their variance reduced not increased. But there is more…

4. remove the linear trend from the new 1902-1980 series
5. compute the SD again for 1902-1980 of the detrended data
6. divide the whole series by this SD.

This was exactly what I was expecting to see: remove the linear trend before computing the SD.

Then the SVD type stuff begins. So… what does that all mean? It certainly looks a bit odd, because steps 1–3 appear redundant. The scaling done in 4–6 is all you need. Is the scaling of 1–3 harmful? Not obviously.

Perhaps someone would care to go through and check this. If I haven’t made a mistake then I think M&M’s complaints are unjustified and Nature correct to reject their article.

My previous experience with McKitrick gives me no confidence in his work. David Appell is also sceptical of this latest attack on the hockey stick.

There seems to be some confusion about McKitrick’s latest attempt to refute global warming. For instance, Andrew Sullivan thinks that McKitrick’s famous degrees-radians screw up is part of this latest attempt. However, McKitrick claims to have refuted global warming in several different ways and the degrees-radians screw up was a in a different paper to his latest one. I decided to draw up a table to help folks sort them out.

Authors	Summary	Consequences if he is right	Status
Essex and McKitrick	There is no physical basis to average temperature.	No global warming because there is no such thing as global temperature.	Failed—the whole field of thermodynamics has not been thrown out.
McKitrick and McIntyre version 1	The hockey stick graph was the product of “collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects.”	The global warming we are seeing might be natural.	Mann et al publish a correction to the supplementary information for the hockey stick graph. They say that the errors do not affect their published results.
McKitrick and Michaels	Surface temperature record is contaminated by economic influences.	No evidence that there is global warming going on	Results go away after errors such as confusing degrees with radians are corrected.
McKitrick and McIntyre version 2	hockey stick is the product of improper normalization of the data.	The global warming we are seeing might be natural.	Jury is still out, but it does not look promising for McKitrick

Meanwhile, James Annan agrees with Connolley’s concerns about M&Mv2:

Having had a quick glance at this and their papers, I think I agree with you. In fact it appears that we can add not knowing the difference between multiplication and division, to the already impressive list of blunders that M&M have made. They even seem to talk about adding the mean to the time series rather than subtracting it too. I might check this more carefully over the next few days if no-one else beats me to it.

Brad DeLong also seems to agree.

But Connolley argues—I think correctly—that McKitrick and McIntyre are simply confused: the normalizations diminish the influence of series that show a recent uptrend.

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.

The Lavoisier group is an Australian astroturf operation. John Quiggin observed that:

This body is devoted to the proposition that basic principles of physics, discovered by among others, the famous French scientist Antoine Lavoisier, cease to apply when they come into conflict with the interests of the Australian coal industry.

Melissa Fyfe has an interesting profile in The Age on the Lavoisier group. Some extracts:

At 401 Collins Street on Monday night, 50 men gathered in a room of plush green carpet, pottery and antique lights to launch a book about the science of climate change. Some of them were scientists. But many were engineers and retired captains of industry. Presiding was Hugh Morgan, president of the Business Council of Australia and former Western Mining boss. The master of ceremonies was retired Labor politician Peter Walsh.

Climate change is about science, but not just about science. It’s about business and politics and wielding influence. The men—there was just one woman present—were all climate change sceptics, members of an organisation called the Lavoisier Group that argues global warming is nothing to worry about.

The book they launched—the latest weapon in the tussle for hearts and minds over global warming—was by Melbourne climate change sceptic William Kininmonth, former head of the National Climate Centre, part of the Bureau of Meteorology. He argues that global warming is natural and not caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

The book, Climate Change: A Natural Hazard, blasts the models used by climate scientists to predict and simulate what is happening. They are flawed, he says. “Climate change is naturally variable and it poses serious hazards for human kind,” he writes. Focusing on man-made global warming is “self-delusion on a grand scale”.

The only problem for the sceptics is that the vast majority of scientists think they are the ones that are deluded. “There’s a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know—except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics”, Dr James Baker, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, has said. …

While William Kininmonth is respected by his former colleagues at the Bureau of Meteorology and they agree about the climate’s natural variability, they disagree that recent warming is natural. In a review to be published in March in the Australian Meteorological Magazine, University of Melbourne associate professor of meteorology Kevin Walsh will argue that Kininmonth has failed to present the case for natural warming. “Some of his detailed arguments are a little bit curious,” Dr Walsh told The Age. “Some of his statements actually contradict well-accepted work.”

But strangely enough, the Lavoisier Group heard that message on Monday night. In what seemed like a coup, Hugh Morgan had secured the respected John Zillman, former head of the Bureau of Meteorology, to launch the book. Dr Zillman agreed, but made it clear that there were significant parts of the book that he disagreed with. Dr Zillman, who is known to be quite conservative about climate science, said he was concerned about appearing at a Lavoisier Group book launch, but did so in the interests of debate.

He says he is not aware of any sceptic argument that has invalidated the mainstream science, and is now convinced—although would not have been 10 years ago—that it is mostly humans changing the world’s climate. “I won’t be expecting to be invited back as a regular,” he said.

From Zillman’s speech:

I believe that Bill goes much too far and, for whatever reason, misinterprets and/or misrepresents some important aspects of the science of climate change that are now pretty well understood. At least thirty times in the book he asserts, albeit in slightly different language in each place, that what he refers to as the one-dimensional IPCC construct of radiative forcing of climate change is fundamentally flawed. He makes much of the well known three-dimensional structure of atmospheric processes and energy flows in the climate system and implies that these have been overlooked by the IPCC. I offer two specific comments on Bill’s characterisation of the IPCC:

• The IPCC is not, as Bill implies and many appear to have been lead to believe, some ideologically committed group of scientists with a particular position or perspective on the science which they seek to promote. Rather it is a highly transparent process, supervised by governments, which enables the contemporary state of knowledge of climate change as it emerges from the peer-reviewed published literature to be summarised and assessed by a representative group of the internationally acknowledged experts in the field with their summary assessment subject to one of the most exhaustive processes of peer review and revision that I believe has ever occurred in the international scientific community. The IPCC doesn’t have a construct, a model, an ideology or a pre-determined position. It is simply an inter-governmentally coordinated scientific assessment mechanism for producing in summary form, for use by policymakers, a synthesis of the state of the science as it appears in the literature with particular attention to the identification of points on which there is a high level of scientific agreement in the literature and those on which there is little agreement or little confidence in what is agreed.
• Bill is wrong to assert or imply that the model results on which the IPCC assessments are based don’t take account of all the various three dimensional energy transfer processes that he argues are so important. He is seriously misleading in his belittling as ‘one-dimensional’ of the IPCC’s use of globally averaged versions of the energy budget (which, have the tremendous advantage of making it possible to focus in on only those considerations that capture the essential physics of global warming—the enhanced greenhouse effect) as a pedagological device for helping non-experts to understand the basic mechanisms of global change.

Also of interest is Kinninmonth’s speech at the book launch and this handy chart contrasting the positions of the sceptics with those of mainstream science.

Excellent news. Some climate scientists have started a blog called RealClimate, something sorely needed to correct the disinformation put about by Tech Central Station and the like. I hope they can do for climate science what The Panda’s Thumb does for evolution.

One of the first posts is by Rasmus Benestad on the McKitrick-Michaels paper that got degrees and radians mixed up. Years ago, when McKitrick was first working on the paper Robert Grumbine observed that McKitrick had

Treated the records as being independant (I know William knows this, but for some other folks: Surface temperature records are correlated across fairly substantial distances—a few hundred km. This is what makes paleoreconstructions possible, and what makes it possible to initialize global numerical weather prediction models with so few observations.)

Unfortunately, even in the published version McKitrick still treated the records as independent, and Benestad shows that their model is invalid.

And check out my McKitrick guide if you’re having trouble keeping all your McKitrick studies straight. This one is the one that purported to show that the surface temperature record was contaminated by economic influences, not the one that purported to destroy the hockey stick. (Michael Mann is a contributor to RealClimate, so we might see something there as well.)

Update:Chris Mooney is also pleased.

Lavoisier group member Louis Hissink has a response to my post and John Quiggin’s on the Lavoisier group. A summary cannot do it justice, so I will quote extensively:

A quick scan of the blogosphere reporting on William Kininmonth’s recent book launch on Monday 22 November by the Lavoisier Society showed many still retain a belief in man-made global warming.

So let’s get a little more scientific about this issue.

As far as the earth is concerned, and from a geological perspective, 99% of the earth’s mass is hotter than 1000 degrees Celsius, and 1% of the earth’s mass cooler than 100 degrees celsius - statistics here.

The temperature of space is about 2.7 degrees Kelvin, or expressed in the Celsius scale, approximately -269 degrees Celsius.

Therefore the net heat loss from the earth to space is enormous, from which space could be thought as an almost infinite heat sink. And fluctuations of this heat source will overwhelm anything that humanity thinks it could contribute.

And why are we not being cooked to a frazzle on the earth’s surface by this enormous mass of matter at a temperature greater than 1000 Degrees Celsius underneath us?

Since the temperature gradient between the earth and space is somewhat steep, one wonders about the scientific basis of climate science and the hypothetical construct of anthropogenic CO2 induced global warming, given the overwhelming contribution that the earth’s interior makes to the surface temperature of the earth and to space’s ability to absorb all this thermal energy.

Given the mass of the solid earth is somewhat greater than that of the atmosphere, of which 0.033 percent is CO2, a simple physics 101 calculation of the heat balance might suggest that the contribution by CO2 to the earth’s surface temperature is, for practical purposes, irrelevant.

Are these scientific facts incorporated into the climate models? No, for which self respecting climatologist would study geology - the necessary background for miners of coal, oil, metals and industrial minerals….

[Climate scientists] are scientific morons.

Does the earth’s interior make an overwhelming contribution to the surface temperature? This claim seems to be contradicted by the fact that it is warmer in daytime. And in summer. And closer to the equator. It takes a rare kind of talent to present an argument on climate change that is inconsistent with the existence of seasons.

Scientists have extensively measured the flow of heat from inside the earth—it amounts to 0.075 Watts per square metre, while incoming solar radiation is 342 Watts per square metre, about 5000 times as much. Hissink is correct that heat from the earth is not included in climate models—but that is because it is negligible.

Fortunately Hissink has a theory to explain climate change. Or rather apparent climate change:

This is not the first time that shifts of the earth’s axis were noted in the historical past, the most infamous being the biblical Joshua Ben Nunn event who commanded the sun stand still by pounding his staff on the ground. Of course no man can do that, (but advocates of anthropogenic global warming assert that while man cannot stop the sun, he surely can change the weather, though it then strikes me that as the devout believe Joshua did stop the sun, then changing the climate would seem a trivial exercise for the devout, whether divine or secular - ask Sir David King - thereby confirming Michael Crichton’s observation that anthropogenic global warming is a religious belief rather than scientific fact).

Then there are other more ancient accounts in Egyptian history where the rising and setting suns exchanged places. Where once the sun used to rise, it now sets, and that this happened more than once. So they said. Modern science, limiting its understanding to Newtonian mechanics, finds these ancient accounts extremely problematical, if nigh well impossible but as we all know too well, science also has a habit of changing when new facts are discovered. So while the past might remain inexplicable using existing theories, it is quite likely that new facts will enable us to explain the past in a more sensible manner than by simply dismissing it as impossible today. That is science, of course, which always changes when new facts are discovered. Religion never changes, even when confronted with overwhelming contradictory fact.

But I am not going to dwell on this because it occurred to me that if the earth did change its axis of spin, or careened, slightly, or significantly in the past, then that would have had the interesting effect of moving regions which were once in the tropics, perhaps into more temperate zones, and those in the temperate, perhaps into the arctic zones. We can change the climate of a place simply by moving it about in space?

This would result in the illusion that a particular region suffered a severe climate change, which in one sense is true, but this was only because that region was moved to a different latitude by a change in the earth’s attitude around its axis of spin. The earth’s overall thermal balance would not have changed, but only appeared to have changed from a misinterpretation of the evidence.

This then suggests that during the Medieval warming period Greenland was closer to the equator, and afterwards was moved further north to colder latitudes as the result of some cosmic interaction. That also means that Europe moved to colder climates. Is there any evidence for that? Seems so, if the Korean Choson Annals are anything to go by, as well as the necessity to change the Gregorian calendar, at the time. Of course much research needs to be done in this area, but if no one accepts this, then funding of course will not be allocated. Same old story of facts being quietly ignored by denying funding.

So the science of Newtonian mechanics, which tells us that angular momentum is conserved, and which has been confirmed by countless experiments and observations is just going to have change when confronted by the “overwhelming contradictory fact” that the Bible implies that the Earth stopped rotating? Because otherwise it would really be like a religion. Because religion just believes that the stuff in the Bible is true and will not be swayed by contradictory evidence. Got it.

It also seems a little odd that if the Medieval Warm Period ended with the Earth shifting its axis of rotation, that no-one wrote down something like “Holy Cow! The constellations are in a different place!”. You’d think they would have noticed.

Update: Louis responds on the aptly named Mangled Thoughts blog: Warning: do not read his response while drinking coffee.

Well yes Tim, the Holy See seemed to need to recalibrate the calendar, and in Medieval times, no one was observing the heavens for the simple fact that telescopes had not yet been invented.

Not content with printing op-eds by John Lott, the LA Times has published a piece of disinformation by Nick Schultz. The LA Times fails to disclose that Schultz works for a public relations company that has ExxonMobil as a client. The central message of Schultz’s piece is that science will never resolve the question of climate change:

At some level, science probably will never resolve what to do about global warming. Climate change is complex, with scores of variables and time-frame considerations of decades and even centuries. Both sides have substantial data that support their points of view. Both sides also believe that to the extent the science is “settled,” it’s settled in ways that undergird their respective policy prescriptions.

Do you like the way that Schulz pretended that the two sides were equal? On one side we have the top climate scientists in the US (including sceptic Richard Lindzen), published by the National Academy of Sciences, who concluded:

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.

While on the other side we have folks like Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer, published by Nick Schultz, who conclude:

So, to all who worry about global warming, to all who think that people threatening to blow up millions to get their political way is no big deal by comparison, chill out. The science is settled. The “skeptics”—the strange name applied to those whose work shows the planet isn’t coming to an end—have won.

So is it really impossible for science to resolve the dispute, as Schultz claims? Well, I’m not a climate scientist and I don’t really know that much about the subject, but even I was able discover that Michaels and Singer’s claims were based on blatant cherry-picking and confusing degrees with radians. It’s no wonder Schultz wants to change the subject from science to “art and myth making”.

The Poor Man has a few choice comments on Schultz here.

Louis Hissink has responded to my post on the worst argument against global warming, ever:

Well yes Tim, the Holy See seemed to need to recalibrate the calendar, and in Medieval times, no one was observing the heavens for the simple fact that telescopes had not yet been invented.

And you didn’t think he would be able to top his argument about climate change that was inconsistent with the existence of seasons. This is an argument about astronomy that assumes that you can’t see stars without a telescope.

Wait, there’s more:

What has not occurred to Quiggin, Lambert and their fellow social democrats is that by ridiculing the earth’s contribution as a “mere” 4% of the overall temperature they have also belittled their own case. Unfortunately a couple of trillion tonnes of matter at some temperature would indeed have a signficant effect on an atmosphere of relatively lower mass. But that is not the point - since if 4% is “mere” so is the contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse - it contributes approximately 5% and whether 4% or 5%, it is also “mere”. Talk about shooting oneself in the foot! Hook line and sinker, I am afraid.

Trouble is, I didn’t say that the earth’s contribution was 4% of the overall temperature. I said that there was about 5,000 times as much energy coming from the sun as from the earth. That means that the earth’s contribution to the total incoming energy (not temperature) is 0.02%. Hissink is out by a factor of 200, even though I gave him the actual numbers. How does this compare with the effect of increasing CO₂? The IPCC estimates that doubling CO₂ will result in an increase of about 4 Watts per square metre, which is over 50 times as much as comes from the earth’s interior. And don’t forget that Hissink originally claimed that the contribution from the earth’s interior was “overwhelming”.

Why did the Chinese Ming Dynasty send out all those fleets all over the earth to take measurements? Had indeed something happened to the orientation of the earth’s axis which caused calendars world-wide to become useless?

No, nothing happened to make calendars world-wide become useless. We know this because we have historical records from the Middle Ages.

Why did the Holy See need to implement the Gregorian Calendar? Something had happened to the length of the year?

No. Nothing had happened to the length of the year. They needed to fix the accumulated errors from the Julian calendar. See here.

Science has assumed that the earth has remained fixed in space for the last 4.5 billion years, not changing at all in its rotation and orbit. This is not from observation, of course, but from an aprioristic belief.

Science does not assume that the earth’s rotation is not changing. Science has actually discovered that because of friction from the tides, the day is getting longer and that 375 million years ago, the day was 21.9 hours long.

What Lambert has not factored into his understanding is the importance electricity and electromagnetism on the cosmic scale. Remember thall all magnetic fields are caused by electric currents, and a spinning earth can easily be deflected around its axis of spin, without losing any moment of enertia, by an external Electromagnetic force.

This is what Velikovsky was questioning when he discussed the Joshua Ben Nun event, that if this ancient account of the sun stopping in the midday sky was true, then another cosmic force had to be in play, since gravity alone could not explain this.

But then it is somewhat difficult debating when your opponents can only muster one or two ideas.

If you have ever experimented with a magnet, you might have noticed that it only attracts things made of iron. So even if some hugely powerful magnetic field had somehow shown up and stopped the earth rotating, things not made of iron would have kept moving at speeds of over 1,000 km/hour. Things not made of iron include the atmosphere, the oceans and, well, people.

William Connolley at RealClimate provides a useful summary of the scientific consensus on global warming. He notes

That the increase in atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic is so obvious that few people question it

Of course, Louis Hissink is one of those few people, insisting that the evidence isn’t just wrong, but is fraudulent. (I’ve added the green and red lines to the graph he presents—I’ll explain what they are below.)

So far not one scintilla of evidence has been produced to counter the scientific evidence graphed in Figure 2 from Jaworowski’s submission to the US Senate in March 2004.

It basically refutes the lie that CO2 levels have been constant at a level of 270 ppmv for the last 10,000 years.

However, if you examine Jaworowski’s graph, it is clear that most of the CO₂ measurements shown on the graph are inaccurate. The measurements for 1865, for example, vary from 290 to 550 parts per million. It just isn’t possible for the CO₂ concentration to change by that much in one year—the difference corresponds to about 500 billion tons of carbon which is about the same amount of carbon in all plants in the entire world. The red line I added shows the measurements of CO₂ concentration taken at Mauna Loa since 1958. Notice how there are no huge year-to-year fluctuations.

So given that many of the measurements are wrong, it makes no sense to average them as Jaworowski suggests should be done. The correct procedure is discard the inaccurate measurements. Callendar discarded (Tellus X (1958 p 244):

(a) Period mean values 10% or more different from the general average of the time and region.

(b) Air samples taken in towns, because these often give 5 to 20% more CO₂ than uncontaminated air.

(c) Averages depending on only a few samples, or made within a short period, because real fluctuations may exceed 10% in such cases.

(d) Measurements intended for special purposes such as biological, soil air, atmospheric pollution, etc

Jaworowski claims that rather that selecting the most accurate values, Callendar made an arbitrary selection to produce the result (increasing CO₂) that he desired. Jaworowski has not a scrap of evidence for his claim and all other data supports Callendar. The green line shows measurements of CO₂ concentration from ice cores at Law Dome. Notice how it agrees with the values Callendar chose and the red line of the Mauna Loa measurements. Jaworowski has an answer to this. The ice core measurements are fraudulent, as are the Mauna Loa measurements. Multiple independent ice core measurements agree with those from the Law Dome, so presumably Jaworowski believes that these are the product of a huge conspiracy as well. It should come as no surprise that Jaworowski’s theories were not published in a scientific journal, but in 21st Century, a magazine published by Lyndon LaRouche, renowned for his belief in various conspiracy theories.

David Tiley has an has an interesting summary of a BBC program on Global Dimming. It seems that, over the past 40 years, while the amount of sunlight reaching the top of the atmosphere has not changed, the amount of sunlight reaching the surface has declined. Despite this, the earth has warmed over the same time span. The BBC program raises the alarming prospect that burning fossil fuels is making aerosols that produce the dimming and global cooling that is partially masking the warming produced by increased greenhouse gasses. That suggests that the greenhouse gasses are much more potent than previously estimated and the program suggests that catastrophic warming of 10°C this century may occur.

Now the Tech Central Station crew like to use the pejorative term “alarmist” to describe the mainstream scientists that believe that anthropogenic warming is occurring, but the BBC program really is alarmist. Climate Scientist Gavin Schmidt hoses down the speculation:

The suggested ‘doubling’ of the rate of warming in the future compared to even the most extreme scenario developed by IPCC is thus highly exaggerated. Supposed consequences such as the drying up of the Amazon Basin, melting of Greenland, and a North African climate regime coming to the UK, are simply extrapolations built upon these exaggerations.

Now let me show you the bizarre world where the anti-Kyoto bloggers live. According to Spear Shaker the BBC program shows that

the Kyoto Protocol, fully implemented, would lead to a dramatic increase in the Earth’s temperature.

and John Ray thinks this is the death knell for global warming:

Is this the ultimate kick in the pants for the global warming fanatics—that what they advocate will PRODUCE the problem, not solve it?

To be fair, they had an assist from this atrocious Reuters story by Matt Falloon, where Falloon managed to completely misunderstand what the scientists were saying. He wrote:

The researchers say cutting down on the burning of coal and oil, one of the main goals of international environmental agreements, will drastically heat rather than cool climate.

No, the researchers did not say that. What they said was:

Take away fossil fuel by-products like sulfur dioxide without tackling greenhouse gas emissions, and the extra heat will speed warming, irreversibly melting ice sheets and rendering rain forests unsustainable within decades, Dr Cox said.

If you stop burning fossil fuels you reduce sulfur dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions. Apparently Falloon is unaware that burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gasses. Cox is referring to technology like sulfur dioxide scrubbers that remove the sulfur dioxide from burning coal but do not remove the carbon dioxide. Cox is absolutely not saying that reducing the burning of fossil fuels will cause global warming. I imagine we’ll soon see a Tech Central Station article about how Kyoto will cause global warming.

Falloon disgraces himself further with this statement:

Scientists differ as to whether global warming is caused by man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse” gases, by natural climate cycles or if it exists at all.

Yes, and scientists differ over whether evolution explains the origin of species. Chris Mooney has the goods on how this sort of “balance” misinforms readers. At least you can rate Falloon’s story at Yahoo. I gave it a “1″.

Chris Mooney has a well-written review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. I picked up a copy at the book store and read a couple of pages from the middle. It was like a Tech Central Station column, except that it was a speech by one of the characters, with occasional lame objections by another character. Oh, and it had footnotes. I don’t know if you were supposed to imagine Crichton’s character speaking the footnotes or what. I didn’t buy the speech or the book.

John Quiggin also has a book review. His is of Lomberg’s new book.

Over at RealClimate Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt take on some of the shoddy climate papers that have slipped through peer review.

And what roundup would be complete without a leavening of Louis Hissink? His latest post asserts that scientists don’t how to compute average temperature correctly. He is, of course, wrong and I explained how they do it, with links to the relevant papers in the comments to this post. Computing a weighted average is high school maths, but despite having no evidence at all to support his opinion and plenty to contradict it, Hissink remains convinced that the scientists don’t know how to work out a weighted average.

I emailed “Henry Thornton” (who runs the website where Hissink’s posts appear in the cough Science section) asking why he had someone so manifestly unsuited for the job writing about science. “Thornton” replied:

Louis is colorful, committed and interesting.

So is the Weekly World News.

Following the tsunami, the folks at Junk Tech Fumento Central Science Station (JTFCSS) have been calling for DDT spraying. Here’s Michael Fumento:

The best answer would be spraying with DDT. Unfortunately, environmentalists have demonized DDT based essentially on unfounded accusations in a 1962 book, Silent Spring. … 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.

And Tech Central Station:

Imagine that every year the world suffered from six or more tsunamis producing the horrific death toll recently experienced. That’s how many people die every year from malaria alone, and the tsunami may contribute to even higher rates this year. That disaster has created new habitat suitable for the proliferation of malaria and other disease-carrying mosquitoes.

Public health officials can take steps to reduce the impact, one of which involves using the controversial pesticide DDT. Since the 1960s green activists pushed bans of the substance around the world based largely on false claims about its health affects. The result was a public health disaster—contributing to skyrocketing malaria rates.

Junkscience has a death clock, attributing almost 90 million deaths to the EPA’s ban on DDT in 1972. Michael Crichton is a little more conservative, only blaming the ban for 50 million deaths:

“Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. The ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.”

OK, first the Junkscience death counter. On this page I have a corrected version that shows that the EPA’s ban on DDT has caused deaths. You see, by 1972 malaria had been eradicated from the US, so there was no need for DDT spraying for malaria control. There have been some small outbreaks since 1972, but these have been eradicated by other insecticides. (From reading JTFCSS you would think that DDT was the only insecticide in existence.) The Junkscience death counter is particularly dishonest, since as the author concedes in a footnote hidden at the bottom of the page, the number it gives is more than the total number of malaria deaths in the entire world since 1972.

What about the ban on using DDT to fight malaria? There is no such ban. DDT is banned from agricultural use (and rightly so because of environmental damage) but can still be used for disease prevention. JTFCSS pretends that there is a ban so they can hang malaria deaths around the neck of environmentalists.

So we should be spraying DDT in Sri Lanka to prevent malaria? Well, no. The World Health Organization’s plan for malaria prevention in the wake of the tsunami reports:

Sri Lanka

Endemic sporadic malaria close to the affected areas transmitted by An.culicifacies, which has been considered DDT-resistant for many years, but is still sensitive to organophosphates, such as malathion, and pyrethroids.

Yes, the mosquitoes in Sri Lanka have evolved resistance to DDT. It doesn’t work any more. In fact, that is the reason why they stopped using DDT in Sri Lanka. It wasn’t because of any ban—it was because it stopped being effective. Steve Milloy, Mr Junkscience, has only a half-hearted belief in evolution. This may explain why he and other right-wing authors have trouble grasping the idea that mosquitoes evolve resistance to DDT. Fortunately, the World Health Organization is not taking advice from JTFCSS and sending DDT to Sri Lanka. They are sending malathion, which will actually be able to kill the mosquitoes there.
Correction: Malathion is not a good idea either, since mosquitoes in Sri Lanka have developed resistance to that as well.

For more information see the WHO Roll Back Malaria Department, Jim Norton on the DDT Ban Myth and John Quiggin giving the facts on DDT.

Update: Check out Africa Fighting Malaria, which pretends to be an organization devoted to fighting malaria, but posts this article which as well as arguing for the use of DDT in Sri Lanka where the mosquitoes are resistant to DDT, (remarkably ill-informed for a supposed anti-malaria organization, don’t you think?) claims that environmentalists are opposed to DDT because they want malaria to kill more people. Sure enough, it’s yet another astroturf operation. Sourcewatch has the details.

My Tech Central Station column is up.

Andrew Bolt, writing in the Melbourne Herald Sun offers this conclusive disproof of important evidence against global warming:

Melbourne last week had its coldest February day on record, and its wettest day, which should surprise those still naive enough to believe our green gurus.

Oh, plus he calls it a “booga-booga theory”. I think even Tech Central Station would find this too lame to publish. Nice one Herald Sun!

Update: Silly me, of course TCS wouldn’t find this too lame to publish. TCS editor, Nick Schulz made the same dumb argument. Oh, and Tim Blair fell for Bolt’s argument. Read the comments and marvel (but don’t disagree because you will be banned).

Clarification: Bolt has emailed to point out that at the end of his article he writes:

“one bit of wild weather in our ever-changing climate doesn’t disprove the holy theory of global warming”.

I was being sarcastic when I called a disproof, but to make sure that there is no misunderstanding I’ve altered the text to reflect what I believe he thinks is the relevance of a cold day in Melbourne is to global warming.

In a recent post I observed that the Junk Central Station crew were ignorantly advocating the use of DDT in Sri Lanka after the tsunami, apparently unaware that mosquitoes in Sri Lanka were resistant to DDT. The World Health Organization’s plan for malaria prevention in the wake of the tsunami advised against using DDT because:

Sri Lanka

Endemic sporadic malaria close to the affected areas transmitted by An.culicifacies, which has been considered DDT-resistant for many years, but is still sensitive to organophosphates, such as malathion, and pyrethroids.

Conclusive, you would think? Not to Roger Bate, who says Sri Lanka should be spraying DDT despite resistance and that the WHO is just pushing an anti-DDT environmentalist agenda. Read, and marvel:

One alarming new difference [in Galle, Sri Lanka] is that malaria is back, and is poised to strike down still more of the children, many orphaned, of this wretched place. It can be stopped, but only if ill-informed prejudice against DDT, the insecticide, is dropped. …

the malaria-control program is being compromised by outdated thinking, especially from the world’s leading health and government-aid agencies.

The prime example of their folly is found in a paper, “Malaria Risk and Malaria Control in Asian Countries Affected by the Tsunami,” in which the World Health Organization (WHO) outlines its policy for the affected region.

Historically, the primary method of malaria control has been Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS)—the spraying of house walls with tiny amounts of an insecticide, usually DDT. IRS often kills mosquitoes, but more important, it creates a barrier between man and mosquito. Studies show the vast majority of mosquitoes won’t enter a DDT-sprayed building, and this chemical barrier prevents transmission of the disease, much as prophylactic drugs or bed nets do, but more cheaply. Such an approach was highly successful in Sri Lanka. Owing to DDT, malaria rates fell from three million cases a year in the 1940s to fewer than 50 in 1963.

But then environmental pressures against DDT led to its abandonment, first in Western countries and then in most other parts of the world. …

Studies showed that Sri Lankan mosquitoes may be developing resistance to DDT, which meant that some of them would not be killed by the insecticide. Even the WHO report says Sri Lanka’s malaria vectors have been considered DDT-resistant for many years. But DDT’s main role is as a repellent, not as a toxic agent. Houses sprayed with DDT repel far more mosquitoes than any other insecticide tested and so remain effective even when resistance is substantial. This information, although known by health entomologists, is ignored by the WHO, which has adopted the anti-DDT environmentalist agenda. The WHO advises using alternative insecticides—although the organization buys precious few even of these.

So that’s Bate’s story. How does it compare with the facts?

“WHO … has adopted the anti-DDT environmentalist agenda”

Here is a letter from WHO’s Allan Schapira in response to similar claims:

Nature 432, 439 (25 November 2004);

DDT still has a role in the fight against malaria

Sir — Your News story about the Roll Back Malaria campaign (”Struggling to make an impact” Nature 430, 935; 2004) quotes me as claiming that pressure from government and other donors made spraying difficult to push through politically. I am also quoted as saying: “We have had very, very strong lobbying over DDT. We have had to give up.” The quotations give the impression that the World Health Organization (WHO) has given up on DDT under the pressure of lobbying. I believe this is misleading.

When interviewed, I explained that we sometimes had to give up trying to convince a specific donor to financially support indoor spraying with DDT, if they flatly refused because of its perceived toxicity and ecological hazard. This has occasionally occurred in countries where the government wished to use DDT, and there was evidence that it was the best option for malaria-vector control.

However, in general terms, the WHO has never given up in its efforts to ensure access to DDT where it is needed. At meetings of the intergovernmental negotiation committee on the Stockholm Convention—which seeks to control the spread of persistent organic pollutants—the WHO has successfully defended the right of countries to use DDT for disease-vector control, if no suitable alternative can be found. The WHO also supports worldwide efforts to develop alternative products and phase in alternative control strategies (link).

The Stockholm Convention came into force in May this year. Its exemption allowing restricted and controlled use of DDT according to WHO guidelines is a good example of appropriate international regulation on a difficult dilemma. It is not a compromise but a solution, which ensures that disease-control programmes maintain access to a useful product, while fully respecting the need to prevent environmental damage from persistent organic pollutants, such as DDT.

Allan Schapira
Strategy and Policy Team,
Roll Back Malaria Department,
World Health Organization,

“WHO advises using alternative insecticides”

From the WHO’s FAQ on DDT:

WHO recommends indoor residual spraying of DDT for malaria vector control.

Bate’s statement is a sort of half-truth because the WHO does recommend alternatives depending on the local circumstances:

Indoor residual application of DDT may have very little impact, for instance, if the malaria vector tends to rest and bite outdoors, and does not enter houses.

Information on vector susceptibility and tolerance to DDT should be up-to-date and backed up by an effective pesticide resistance management strategy to ensure continuing pesticide effectiveness. Local vector resistance or increased tolerance to DDT may affect its overall effectiveness.

This is why they don’t recommend DDT in Sri Lanka.

“Studies showed that Sri Lankan mosquitoes may be developing resistance to DDT”

Pinikahana and Dixon, Trends in malaria morbidity and mortality in Sri Lanka. (Indian J Malariology):

After the discovery of DDT resistance in 1969, malathion spraying took over in 1973, and USAID-assisted control programme, involving case-detection and treatment, started in 1977.

This is not “may be developing resistance”. They have developed resistance, and it was way back in 1969.

“Houses sprayed with DDT repel far more mosquitoes than any other insecticide tested and so remain effective even when resistance is substantial”

India has been using DDT against malaria continuously since the 1940’s. V.P. Sharma, DDT: The Fallen Angel (Current Science 85 1532-1537) explains why it is becoming ineffective:

The Health Department of Maharashtra reported an increasing trend of malaria even after two rounds of DDT indoor spraying between 1995 and 1997, with a 75-83% coverage of rooms in houses. Monitoring in 74 villages revealed that malaria transmission continued, and cases had sharply increased by the third quarter of 1997. In November 1997, a special spraying round with Lambda-cyhalothrin (10% WP) managed to interrupt malaria transmission …

The declining effectiveness of DDT is a result of several factors which frequently operate in tandem. The first and the most important factor is vector resistance to DDT. All populations of the main vector, An. culicifacies have become resistant to DDT. The excito-repellent effect of DDT, often reported useful in other countries, actually promotes outdoor transmission …

Third, DDT, cheaper by weight than alternative pesticides and manufactured indigenously by government-controlled HIL, is sprayed with the false belief that its excito-repellent action prevents transmission.

In India at least, it seems that the “outdated thinking” belongs to those who continue to use DDT even though it has lost effectiveness.

“[Malaria in Galle] can be stopped only if ill-informed prejudice against DDT is dropped.”

Olivier Briet et al have just published a study on malaria in Sri Lanka after the tsunami (Malaria Journal 2005 4:8). They write:

DDT and Malathion are no longer recommended since An. culicifacies and An. subpictus has been found resistant.

Figure 2 in their paper shows that since 2000, malaria incidence has been reduced by a factor of 100 without any use of DDT. Figures 3 and 4 show that Galle has been free of malaria for years.

“[That DDT is effective despite resistance is] known by health entomologists”

I asked Olivier Briet, lead author of the Sri Lanka malaria study I just cited. He allowed that it might be true, but he was unaware of any study supporting Bate’s claim, especially in realation to Sri Lanka.

“[Spraying DDT] prevents transmission of the disease, much as prophylactic drugs or bed nets do, but more cheaply”

Bhatia et al conducted experiments in India to see whether indoor spraying or bed nets were more effective. They found that bed nets were more effective at preventing malaria and were more cost effective as well. Because of DDT resistance they sprayed with deltamethrin rather than DDT, which would have been even less effective. Bed nets were also found to be more cost effective in Sri Lanka.

Conclusion

DDT spraying may well be effective in other places, but it does not seem necessary or at all likely to be effective in Sri Lanka. As a supposed expert on malaria, Bate should be aware of these facts.

So who is Roger Bate, anyway? Well, apart from being an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, he is a director of the astroturf operation Africans Fighting Malaria. He writes frequently for Tech Central Station. He is an adjunct fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He was a cofounder of European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), which was another astroturf operation, secretly funded by Philip Morris to push a pro-tobacco agenda. ESEF was the European version of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), so I guess that makes Bate the European version of Steve Milloy.

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.

William Connolley has an interesting post on a new reconstruction of temperatures over the past 2000 years. It’s the blue line in the graph to the right. It suggests that things were colder in the past than the hockey stick reconstruction (MBH in the diagram). The usual suspects will no doubt try to argue that this somehow disproves anthropogenic global warming, despite the finding that temperatures since the 90s are unprecedented.

Louis Hissink warns about the dangers of shifting the axis of rotation of a spinning hard disk:

Never ever move a hard drive that is spinning—hard drive reading heads tend to do awful things to the magnetic data when asked to compete with gravity and abrupt inertial changes.

Cool. Now imagine if the hard disk was the size of the Earth. Don’t you think that changing the axis of rotation would do awful things to anyone living on it?

Chris Mooney has an excellent article on how “balanced” coverage of scientific issues can misinform readers:

Moreover, the question of how to substitute accuracy for mere “balance” in science reporting has become ever more pointed as journalists have struggled to cover the Bush administration, which scientists have widely accused of scientific distortions. As the Union of Concerned Scientists, an alliance of citizens and scientists, and other critics have noted, Bush administration statements and actions have often given privileged status to a fringe scientific view over a well-documented, extremely robust mainstream conclusion. Journalists have thus had to decide whether to report on a he said/she said battle between scientists and the White House—which has had very few scientific defenders—or get to the bottom of each case of alleged distortion and report on who’s actually right.

No wonder scientists have often denounced the press for giving credibility to fringe scientific viewpoints. And without a doubt, the topic on which scientists have most vehemently decried both the media and the Bush administration is global warming. While some scientific uncertainty remains in the climate field, the most rigorous peer-reviewed assessments—produced roughly every five years by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—have cemented a consensus view that human greenhouse gas emissions are probably (i.e., the conclusion has a fairly high degree of scientific certainty) helping to fuel the greenhouse effect and explain the observed planetary warming of the past fifty years. Yet the Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine this position by hyping lingering uncertainties and seeking to revise government scientific reports. It has also relied upon energy interests and a small cadre of dissenting scientists (some of whom are funded, in part, by industry) in formulating climate policy.

The Melbourne Age’s environmental reporter agrees with Mooney:

She worries that the global warming issue has been distorted in some sections of the media. In the pursuit of balance, climate change sceptics are so often approached for comment it seems like there is a 50-50 split of scientific opinion. In fact, there are a handful of sceptics and thousands of scientists around the world who are not, she says.

However, this supposes the existence of some sort of objective truth and Professor Bunyip is having none of it:

as her biography makes clear, the Mancunian Candidate’s little green gal is ethically disinclined to seek comment from the other side, not when there are all those sensible scientists to endorse her own views.

I guess that the Flat Earth and Round Earth theories are both just views and reporters should present them both for balance and abandon any idea of letting their readers know which one is correct.

Bunyip admits he doesn’t understand the science, but in this post, he is none the less sure that global warming is spurious science and that some campaign against DDT claimed untold lives. His authority? Steve Milloy. Bunyip’s predictive powers are no better than his grasp of science, since in the same post (before the Iraq war) he predicted: “benchmark Brent crude plunges to around $21US a barrel” “within six weeks of Saddam’s head appearing atop a pole”. Alas, prices soared to $50US a barrel. And still in the same post, he demonstrates a decidedly shaky grasp of history, forgetting about Pearl Harbour.

Update: Bunyip offers a very postmodern defence by reinterpreting his own words.

Supporting sources for this post on the resurgence of malaria in Sri Lanka despite DDT spraying.

(more…)

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).

Orac has done a wonderful job of organising a slew of links to skeptical blogging into the Skeptics’ Circle. (We’re talking about the good kind of skepticism here, not global warming/ozone depletion/evolution sceptics.)

However, I must take issue with one small thing. Orac names Penn and Teller as heroes of the skeptic fellowship. They’re not. Last year, an alert reader noticed that their show on Safety Hysteria cited as an expert none other than Steve Milloy. (In an obvious attempt to hide from my scrutiny access to their website is blocked from Australia, so I’ve linked to Google’s cache.) Even more troubling are their shows on second hand smoke and the environment which “A Skeptical Blog” deals with here and here. To complete the circle to my submission on the DDT hoax to the Skeptic’s Circle, Penn and Teller’s expert on second hand smoke is Elizabeth Whelan, who may well be the first person to tell the bogus story about Sri Lanka and DDT. In 1985 she wrote:

Why was there an increase in malaria in Ceylon [now called Sri Lanka] after 1964? It is clear that the effects of Silent Spring was not limited to the United States. Following the publication of this book, the use of DDT was discontinued in Ceylon. Epidemic conditions reappeared and it has been estimated that between 1968 and 1969 “considerably more than two million cases occurred,” all related to the campaign against DDT.

And she’s still at it. Just a few days ago in her a glowing review of State of Fear she wrote:

Crichton’s Dr. Kenner notes that DDT was the best defense against malaria-causing mosquitoes: “altogether, the ban has caused more than 50 million needless deaths . . . [B]anning DDT killed more people than Hitler . . . and the environmental movement pushed hard for it.”

All right, I’ll calm down now. Go and read the Skeptics’ Circle.

Realclimate has a good explanation of the latest battle in the hockey stick wars. It looks to me like McIntyre & McKitrick’s claim (that the hockey stick is the product of an erroneous calculation) is not correct. That doesn’t mean that the graph is correct of course, since the proxies the graph is built on may not measure temperatures very well.

In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal systematically misrepresents the whole affair:

In 1998, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a paper in the journal Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period. The result: Messrs. Soon and Baliunas were treated as heretics and six editors at Climate Research were made to resign.

In fact, the editors resigned because they felt that Soon and Balanius’s paper was so badly flawed that it should not have been published.

In 2003, Stephen McIntyre, a Toronto minerals consultant and amateur mathematician, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at Canada’s University of Guelph, jointly published a critique of the hockey stick analysis. Their conclusion: Mr. Mann’s work was riddled with “collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects.” Once these were corrected, the Medieval warm period showed up again in the data.

This should have produced a healthy scientific debate. Instead, as the Journal’s Antonio Regalado reported Monday, Mr. Mann tried to shut down debate by refusing to disclose the mathematical algorithm by which he arrived at his conclusions. All the same, Mr. Mann was forced to publish a retraction of some of his initial data,

If you actually, I don’t know, read Mann’s correction you’ll find that he didn’t retract his initial data, but corrected the description of it. And that mathematical algorithm that the WSJ alleges that Mann refused to disclose? It’s right here.

Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada (a government agency) notes that Mr. Mann’s method “preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data.”

This strikes me as a big red herring. If you do a linear regression on random data, you’ll produce a straight line. Does that mean that linear regression is invalid because it preferentially produces straight lines when there are none in the data? Of course not. What is important is whether the result of the regression is statistically significant—for random data it won’t be. William Connolley did some experiments and reports:

What that appears to demonstrate is that M&M are right about one thing: it often does lead to a “hockey stick” shape in random data. But the problem is that the variance-explained of the PC1 done this way is tiny: the first eigenvalue is about 0.03. Whereas when you run it on real data the first eigenvalue is about 0.55 (back to 1000) or 0.38 (back to 1400). Which means the two problems are very different.

Last week Kyoto came into effect. Apparently that was the signal for columns by a whole bunch of pundits who have two features in common: 1. they are manifestly ill-equipped to understand the science and 2. they are utterly certain that there is no such thing as global warming.

Our first pundit is Michael Duffy in the Daily Telegraph informs us:

The truth is we have no control over global warming, and in any case it’s not a problem at all.

The myth holds that carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere is increasing, due mainly to industrial activities, and this traps heat lower down, with the result that temperatures on the earth’s surface rise.

The first problem with this is that the extra carbon dioxide we create is so minuscule in comparison with the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere it’s highly unlikely it could create this effect. Variations in the amount of heat the sun generates are a far more likely cause.

We have so far increased carbon dioxide by 30%, which is not minuscule. While there are other greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide is an important one. Furthermore, the greenhouse effect is very large, keeping us 30°C warmer than we would be without an atmosphere, so even a relatively small increase in its strength produces significant warming. Variations in the sun do not explain the warming we have seen. The latest study on this found:

Along with his Scripps colleague, David Pierce, Barnett used a combination of computer models and hard, observed evidence to reach their conclusions. They determined that warming measured in the world’s oceans closely matched the results predicted in computer models for warming caused by human activity.

When the models assessed whether the ocean warming could be caused by volcanic or solar activity, Barnett told reporters, the answer was stark: “Not a chance.”

Duffy continues:

The second problem is that temperatures have not risen along with industrialisation over the past 200 years.

The graph on the right shows that temperatures have actually risen. You really have to work hard to remain as ignorant of this as Duffy is.

Our second pundit is Andrew Bolt (last seen arguing that a cold day in Melbourne was good evidence against global warming) claims

The truth is that despite the hype, not much about global warming is known for sure, not even how much the Earth has heated, and whether our carbon dioxide (CO2) caused it. So say even lead authors of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose doctored “predictions” are most used to frighten us.

Doctored predictions? Odd, you would think that the hundreds of scientists whose work went into the IPCC would have noticed if their work had been doctored.

One of them, Professor John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, asks: “Will increases in CO2 affect the climate significantly? Are significant changes occurring now? Climate models suggest the answer is yes. Real data suggests otherwise.”

Now this sounds like he is saying that the real data shows no warming and only the climate models show warming, but if you look at the context of his statement you’ll find the real data shows warming at the surface (see graph above) and that Christy’s calculations from satellite measurements also show warming, but not as much. Christy says this contradicts the climate models, but other researchers’ calculations show more warming from the satellite data. And even if the climate models were wrong, it would not follow that we would expect no warming from increase CO₂. All you would be able to say is that we don’t know what the effects would be. No scientist has an explanation for the observed warming that does not involve CO₂.

Bolt continues:

Adds another, Professor Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “The temperature is always changing for the earth, so it has only two choices—going up or going down. It has done both, and that doesn’t say it’s due to CO2; it doesn’t say it’s going to continue; it doesn’t say anything beyond that.”

In the preceding sentence Lindzen said:

For the last hundred years, I think there is a general agreement that there is something like a half-degree increase in temperature.

That’s strange, Bolt claimed that Lindzen said that it was unknown “how much the Earth has heated” when in fact, Lindzen explicitly stated how much it had warmed.

And while Lindzen might express doubts about whether CO2 is causing the observed warming, the hundreds of other IPCC lead authors disagree with him. Not only that, Lindzen was one of the authors of the National Academy of Sciences report that concluded:

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.

Next, we have Melanie Philips, who is sure that global warming is a scam because (quoting McIntyre and McKitrick):

[Mann et al’s method], when tested on persistent red noise, nearly always produces a hockey stick shaped first principal component (PC1) and overstates the first eigenvalue.

According to her biography Philips is a journalist with a degree in English. Back when I was an undergraduate learning about stuff like eigenvalues and mathematical physics, my friends studying English didn’t learn about eigenvalues. Maybe it was different for Philips, or maybe she’s done some postgrad course in advanced statistical analysis, so I emailed her, asking her if she knew what red noise, principal components, or eigenvalues were. No reply. My guess is that she doesn’t know what any of them are. (Oh, and M&M’s “always produces a hockey stick” argument is a red herring.)

But, if global warming is a scam, who is behind the scam? A tough question, you would think, but fortunately our old friend Louis Hissink has the answer:

And to think the Hadley Centre was initially created to fabricate the illusion of global warming during Baroness Thatcher’s premiership to diminish the power of the coal-miners union in the UK.

Curse you, Maggie Thatcher!

Via Chris Brook and Anthony Cox, I find that Melanie Philips took the same combination of ignorance of science and utter certainty that the scientists are wrong that she used to “prove” that global warming was a scam and conducted a grossly irresponsible scare campaign against vaccination. On this issue, for once, Tech Central Station is on the side of the angels, with several articles debunking the scare.* My favourite one is by Iain Murray, who writes:

[A Cardiff University report] examined the public’s understanding of the issues surrounding the MMR vaccine, which has been alleged to be linked with a rise in autism diagnoses among children. In the month after the story broke in January 2002 there were over 300 media reports on the issue, a classic example of a media feeding frenzy over a scientific issue. Over two-thirds of these stories mentioned the supposed link between the shot and the illness. As a result, 53 percent of the British public interviewed at the height of the coverage agreed with the suggestion that, as there was equal media coverage of the two sides of the debate, there must be equal evidence to support each case.

This is far from the truth. Study after study has been unable to find any significant or causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Scientists are therefore virtually unanimous that there is no cause to worry about the shot harming children in this way. The study found, however, that almost half of television reports and over two-thirds of “quality” newspaper stories failed to mention this important fact.

It is, of course, generally a good rule in journalism that when one view is stated, the opposite view should be given time or space to balance the coverage. Yet in this scientific case, as the study’s authors say, “Attempts to balance claim about the risks of the MMR jab tended merely to indicate that there were two competing bodies of evidence.” By attempting to meet one journalistic standard in giving a balanced picture, the journalists failed to meet other standards about giving the proper context to the claims.

Absolutely right. The same problem occurs in reporting of global warming where balanced reporting obscures the scientific consensus on global warming. Of course this is Iain Murray writing in Tech Central Station, so he then proceeds to tie himself in knots arguing that the consensus on global warming is different, eventually inventing a distinction between a “theoretical consensus” that reporters should ignore and a “scientific consensus” that reporter