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 lost had Saddam Hussein stayed in power. (Economists would call this, indelicately, the "marginal cost".) If that marginal cost is negative, then we would argue perhaps that the intervention was a net benefit.
But that is what the study measured: the change in the death rate. If it had gone down, the study would have found a net benefit.
King also believes he has "debunked" the study with this argument:
The Lancet figure implies that 60,000 people have been killed by violence, including insurgents, while the aggregated press reports give a figure of 15,000, counting only civilians.So it could be that 45,000 insurgents were killed, which would not be necessarily bad news. And while any deaths are a bad thing, it's worth remembering the increase in mortality in postwar Germany or Japan.
This again shows a misunderstanding of the study. Roughly half of the 60,000 violent deaths were due to the skyrocketing murder rate in Iraq, not military or terrorist operations. And the 15,000 dead reported in the press will only include some of the civilian deaths, so it is absurd to suggest that all of the difference were insurgents. The Lancet study indicates that at most 5% of the excess deaths were of insurgents. (Though with a subsample this small there is enormous room for sampling error.)
The WSJ hasn't bothered to print my comment, which was:
his opinion piece contains three significant errors that misconstrue the debate; it could stand a good editorial fact-checking.
The Soon and Baliunas piece was published in 2003, not from the start as claimed here. The reason for the poor response to the paper was it contained numerous methodological errors - the Editors of Clim Res resigned out of protest because the work was so shoddy yet was published. The data from multiproxy studies the authors presented clearly disagreed with their conclusions.
The original Mann et al. paper did not go back as far as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), hence the MWP not being found. The subsequent Mann papers and all multiproxy studies by other authors have found evidence of both the MWP and Little Ice Age. Mann has written a textbook chapter explaining both (Encyc. of Global Environ. Change (ISBN 0-471-97796-9)).
The McIntyre and McKitrick paper has not withstood scrutiny. The methodology was shown by multiple parties to be flawed.
Any objective analysis that relies on Soon and Baliunas and McIntyre and McKitrick is surely flawed.
Instead, the comments allowed look more like a FReeper rant.
D
"So it could be that 45,000 insurgents were killed, which would not be necessarily bad news." Actually it would be very bad news indeed because the US government has repeatedly claimed there are no more than 20,000 insurgents at the maximum and probably only 5-10,000.
"Economists would call this... 'marginal cost'."
No, they wouldn't. "Opportunity cost" might fit it better.