Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
February 27, 2005
According to this profile, Miranda Devine (last seen making stuff up in an attempt to debunk the Lancet study), once worked for the textile physics division of CSIRO. So she should know that one purpose of peer review is to weed out scientific papers that are inaccurate or where the conclusions…
February 26, 2005
Ted Lapkin has objected to my reference to him in my post on the Great DDT Hoax. In his email he writes:
I would very much prefer, if possible, to keep things on an informal basis rather than a legal one. Thus this whole misunderstanding can be cleared up by a retraction and apology on…
February 25, 2005
R.J. Rummel has a response to my earlier post on the Lancet study. Unfortunately he still does not understand what the researchers did.
In his original post Rummel claimed the pre-invasion statistics came from Saddam's Ministry of Health. In fact, they come from the survey the…
February 25, 2005
The Tangled Bank is a showcase of blog posts on biology, medicine or natural history. The latest compilation is here.
February 24, 2005
King at SCSU Scholars has updated his post attacking the Lancet study with a response to my post. He admits error on one point, but on the rest he has the nerve to accuse me of bringing biases rather than facts to the debate. To see who is bringing facts and who is bringing biases let's…
February 24, 2005
In today's Sydney Morning Herald Miranda Devine has a go at the Lancet study, writing
The British medical journal The Lancet published a paper last October (timed deliberately, its authors admit, before the US presidential election), estimating that 100,000 more Iraqis died…
February 23, 2005
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…
February 22, 2005
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…
February 20, 2005
King at SCSU Scholars has had another go at the Lancet study. King writes:
Many of Saddam's dead were not murdered in the presence of witnesses; there is no indication that the authors of the study charged Saddam with a death for a missing person.
It doesn't matter whether the death…
February 19, 2005
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…
February 19, 2005
King at SCSU Scholars demonstrates that he doesn't understand what the Lancet study did:
The point is that the cost of U.S. intervention isn't the total loss of life since March 2003 but the difference between what we know has been lost lives since then and what would have been…
February 18, 2005
Via Suki Lombard I discover that the Australian government's position on Iraqi deaths because of the war is that the Lancet estimate of roughly 100,000 excess deaths is an exaggeration and we have no idea how many have died and no plans to find out. Govt seeking no information on…
February 18, 2005
Roy Eccleston has an article on blogs in The Australian. He is startled to find that thanks to blogs, some Americans believe an entirely false story about how Diana Kerry interfered in the Australian election, based on a contrived reading of an story that Eccleston himself wrote…
February 18, 2005
John Quiggin is donating $1 to Medecins Sans Frontieres for each comment he gets on this post. Go and leave a comment! The money will aid the The Global Fund to fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Your comment might even help pay for some DDT spraying! (Though insecticide…
February 17, 2005
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…
February 16, 2005
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…
February 16, 2005
Supporting sources for this post on the resurgence of malaria in Sri Lanka despite DDT spraying.
From Malaria: Principles and Practice of Malariology edited by Wernsdorfer and McGregor (1988) Chapter 45 "The recent history of malaria control and eradication. by Gramiccia and…
February 15, 2005
There has been a flurry of bloggers pretending to be females. Via Jason Soon we have the exposure of Libertarian Girl, who was actually a guy. Another faker recently exposed was Hot Abercrombie Chick. And the winner of the NetGuide award for Best Personal Blog for 2004 was "Natalie Biz", who was…
February 14, 2005
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,…
February 13, 2005
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…
February 12, 2005
You would think that after all this time, all possible erroneous arguments against the Lancet study would have been made, but folks keep coming up with new ones. R.J. Rummel has come up with some new ones. Unlike many of the critics, Rummel has read the study; but unfortunately he has badly…
February 11, 2005
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…
February 10, 2005
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…
February 9, 2005
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…
February 4, 2005
Embarrassing Correction: I screwed up. Somehow I pasted the wrong IP into a query. I thought I was checking Brignell's IP, but it was actually Per's. Per and "James Brown" are the same person, but his real name is David Bell, not John Brignell. I apologize to John…
February 2, 2005
I wrote earlier about the pernicious and dishonest campaign by the London Daily Telegraph to scare people into thinking that self-defence against burglars was unlawful. To correct this misinformation the Crown Prosecution Service has issued a statement detailing what the law really says:…
February 1, 2005
Sagenz has joined the very small and select group of critics of the Lancet study with the honesty to recant and withdraw their criticism.
Chris Young has written a letter to Slate's Fred Kaplan, suggesting that Kaplan correct his flawed critique of the Lancetstudy.
David…
February 1, 2005
Via David Tiley we have an interview with one the scumbags who comment spam blogs. One of them just finally left my blog alone after trying to leave about a hundred trackback spams. I deleted the first few that arrived, and found that it was posting new ones as fast as I…
January 29, 2005
What Max Sawicky says.
Update: Reynold's response? He doesn't link or rebut or even give his readers a clue that he is responding to a particular post, no he just likens Sawicky to a monkey. Real mature.
Update 2: John Holbo has a longer response.
January 28, 2005
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent article on the Lancet study and the way it was ignored in the American news media.
Daniel Davies notes that the blogs have just as bad:
Other than that, the response in the world of weblogs has been exactly the same as the rest of the…