tlambert | January 29, 2008ORB has revised their estimate of violent deaths as a result of the Iraq war (discussed earlier here). They write:
Further survey work undertaken by ORB, in association with its research partner IIACSS, confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003.
Following responses to ORB's earlier work, which was based on survey work undertaken in primarily urban locations, we have conducted almost 600 additional interviews in rural communities. By and large the results are in line with the 'urban results' and we now estimate…
tlambert | January 23, 2008Eli Rabett chronicles the Climate Audit comedy of errors.
One consequence of the error in the RSS satellite data is that the global warming skeptics switched to using RSS, and now they can't switch back without making it look realy obvious what they are up to.
Update: McIntyre has a new post where he claims:
In the same post that Rabett criticized here, as originally written, I had incorrectly missed a comment in Hansen et al 1988 saying that Scenario B was the "most plausible", an error which I picked up about 8 hours after the original posting (about 9 am EST) and immediately corrected it…
tlambert | January 22, 2008John Lott claims:
The final numbers will be out in March, but the initial information makes it look as if 2007 will be the coldest in a decade. So much for the claim that "the probability that 2007 would be the hottest year as 60 percent."
NASA has 2007 tied for second, but he's referring to the RSS version of lower troposphere temperatures, which have 2007, far from being the coldest in a decade, in fifth place:
Looks like someoen got caught by an error in the satellite data.
tlambert | January 22, 2008Via Big City Lib, I find this, from Tim Ball and Tom Harris:
Like all philosophies that come to dominate society, climate hysteria is part of an evolution of ideas and needs an historical context. The current western view of the World essentially evolved from the Darwinian view. Even though it is still just a theory and not a law 148 years after it was first proposed, Darwinian evolution is the only view allowed in schools. Why? Such censorship suggests fear of other ideas, a measure of indefensibility.
Looks like he's joining with Ross McKitrick and Roy Spencer.
tlambert | January 21, 2008John Tirman documents Neil Munro's dishonesty. I think this is an excellent catch by Tirman -- Munro selling his National Journal story to Iraq war architect Michael Rubin:
George Soros funded the survey. The U.S. authors played no role in data-collection, and did not apply standard anti-fraud measures. The chief Iraqi data-collector had earlier produced medical articles to help Saddam's anti-sanctions campaign in the 1990s, and said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey. Some of the field surveyors were employed by Moqtada Sadr's Ministry of Health. The Iraqis'…
tlambert | January 18, 2008Richard Littlemore has the latest on Tim Ball's antics. Check out this bit from Ball:
The point I made was with regard to the Antarctic and Greenland ice
sheets. I posed the question about what happens to the water level
when an ice cube is placed in a glass which is then filled to the brim
and the ice melts. The correct answer is the water level drops because
the space occupied by the ice is greater than that occupied by the
water it contains. Water expands when it freezes.
But the ice is floating in the water. The extra space that the frozen water takes up is, by Archimedes principle,…
tlambert | January 17, 2008In a 1988 paper James Hansen presented three scenarios (A, B and C) for future climate change, saying that Scenario B was the most plausible. In 1998 Pat Michaels committed scientific fraud when he erased scenarios B and C from Hansen's graph to argue that Hansen's predictions was out by 300%. In fact, as you can see from the graph below (updated to include 2007 temperatures), his predictions have been pretty close to reality. (More discussion at RealClimate.)
You can bet that if a mainstream climate scientist had done anything one tenth as bad, Steve McIntyre would be all over it, but not…
tlambert | January 15, 2008I think it is worthwhile to update James Wimberly's comparison of surveys of deaths in Iraq. In the table below death tolls have been extrapolated to give a number of deaths due to the war so far.
Survey
Violent deaths
Excess deaths
ILCS
150,000
Lancet 1
290,000
420,000
IFHS
280,000
700,000
Lancet 2
1,100,000
1,200,000
ORB
1,300,000
It is interesting to see that the IFHS ends up right in the middle, between the two Lancet studies. If you think that the IFHS study is reasonable then you must conclude that Lancet 1 has been confirmed and the critics of Lancet 1 were wrong.…
tlambert | January 15, 2008John Lott, in the National Review Online writes:
Nor does it really matter that the only academic research on the impact of trigger locks on crime finds that states that require guns be locked up and unloaded face a five-percent increase in murder and a 12 percent increase in rape. Criminals are more likely to attack people in their homes, and those attacks are more likely to be successful. Since the potential of armed victims deters criminals, storing a gun locked and unloaded actually encourages crime.
Lott falsely claims that his own paper with Whitley is the only academic research on the…
tlambert | January 14, 2008Remember how Shane Morris posted a photo that he claimed showed that the "wormy corn" sign had been taken down when in fact the sign was visible in his photo? Here's the latest (from Private Eye):
After the Eye reported Morris's threats in issue 1194, he wrote to demand a right to reply and made the extraordinary claim that Michael Khoo, then a Greenpeace campaigner, had tampered with the signs to sabotage the research. Morris said a photograph taken of Khoo next to the signs at the time of study proved his allegation.
It proved no such thing. No one, including Morris, had previously argued…
tlambert | January 14, 2008Tim Blair has cancer. He says that the prognosis is good, but he's having major abdominal surgery next week. He has my best wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery.
tlambert | January 14, 2008Johns Hopkins corrects some of the misinformation in the Neil Munro's hit piece.
John Tirman has gone through the whole thing, noting all the inaccuracies and misleading statements.
tlambert | January 13, 2008In a story funded by a pro-war billionaire, Brendan Montague, who seems to know which side of his bread is buttered on, writes:
A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.
Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.
It is untrue that its claim was 10 times greater than consensus estimates.
The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar…
tlambert | January 11, 2008John Tirman comments on Neil Munro's misconduct:
One quick note about the Soros bugaboo. I commissioned L2. It was commissioned in Oct 2005, with internal funds from the Center for International Studies at MIT, of which I am executive director. The funds for public education (not the survey itself) came from the Open Society Institute in the following spring, long after things had started. Burnham did not know this (Roberts was not much involved at this point.) MIT was providing funds, that's all he knew or needed to know. There were other small donors involved too. I told this to Munro on…
tlambert | January 10, 2008Les Roberts replies to a shamelessly dishonest WSJ editorial:
Your editorial entitled, "The Lancet's political hit" regarding our study of Iraqi deaths was a unique blend of error and innuendo. For example, I was not opposed to removing Saddam; I was opposed to invading a country while the UN Secretary General was stating that it would violate the UN Charter. Your suggestion that our Iraqi colleague Riyadh Lafta was suspect because he recorded child mortality during his career is particularly ironic. He was one of few professors in the country that never joined the Baath Party. You…
tlambert | January 9, 2008A new study of violent deaths in Iraq has been published in the NEJM. You can read it here. Here's the abstract:
Background Estimates of the death toll in Iraq from the time of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 until June 2006 have ranged from 47,668 (from the Iraq Body Count) to 601,027 (from a national survey). Results from the Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS), which was conducted in 2006 and 2007, provide new evidence on mortality in Iraq.
Methods The IFHS is a nationally representative survey of 9345 households that collected information on deaths in the household since June 2001. We…
tlambert | January 9, 2008Back in November 2001 Neil Munro was an advocate of war with Iraq and predicted:
The painful images of starving Iraqi children will be replaced by alluring Baghdad city lights, smiling wages-earners and Palestinian job seekers.
Iraq war advocates like Munro don't like the results of the Lancet study that suggest that about 600,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war they championed. So Munro has written a piece that throws every piece of mud he can find at the study, and to their discredit, the National Journal has published it. And if you think I'm being unfair by stressing Munro's…
tlambert | January 1, 2008Allan Schapira is skeptical about the new call for malaria eradication:
As much as I would like to point to progress in 2007 comparable to last year's advances, I feel compelled to point out that in international health, a development is taking place that may lead to wastage of resources, disillusionment, and ultimately loss of human life. A number of global leaders have now turned their eyes to elimination and eradication of malaria,[1] and malaria control is once again becoming a dirty word as it was in the 1950s, when malaria experts had convinced themselves and political leaders that the…
tlambert | December 29, 2007If you've never heard of the Data Quality Act go read this article by Chris Mooney.
Back? Good.
Steve McIntyre, still angry after a comment was not released from moderation on Christmas Day, is now trying to use the Data Quality Act against RealClimate. As far as I can make out, because Gavin Schmidt works for NASA, McIntyre thinks that the stringent peer review hurdles of the Data Quality Act (inserted by a tobacco lobbyist to make it harder to use the scientific evidence on the dangers of cigarette smoke) should apply to RealClimate.
I wonder where McIntyre learned about the ins and outs…