tlambert | November 8, 2006PZ Myers is being a bit "the glass is half empty", but Joe Barton will no longer chair the Committee on Energy and Commerce and James Inhofe will no longer chair the Environment and Public Works Committee. That's good news for science.
And I can't resist sharing John Lott's predictions:
The Republicans are going to keep the House and the Senate. My guess is that the Republicans will lose 12 seats in the House and no more than 1 in the Senate. I would not be surprised that Republicans break even or even pick up one seat in the Senate. I think that Republicans will lose Ohio, but could pick up…
tlambert | November 7, 2006Tim Dunlop has a new blog called Blogocracy at News Limited's news.com.au site. Any thoughts that this might make him go easy on News Limited's John Howard brown-nose squad have been dispelled by this post.
In other blogging news Andrew Dessler and Coby Beck have joined Gristmill.
tlambert | November 7, 2006Kevin Grandia writes:
Canada's latest and greatest climate change denial group, the Natural Resource Stewardship Project, has come up with a laughable reason for hiding it's funding sources. According to a recent CanWest News Service article, the NRSP's executive director, Tom Harris, states that "a confidentiality agreement doesn't allow him to say whether energy companies are funding his group."
But if energy companies are not funding his group, what sort of confidentiality agreement would stop him from saying so?
In other Tom Harris news, he's been editing the Wikipedia page on the…
tlambert | November 6, 2006This American Life have a show on Lancet 1 and Lancet 2. Much of it is a repeat of their story on Lancet 1, which is well worth listening to if you haven't already. Their comments on Lancet 2 are in the last ten minutes.
The National Interest has an interview with Les Roberts where he answers all the criticisms of the study. They also invited the IBC to comment but they declined saying that they were too busy keeping track of deaths in Iraq. Curiously, the last death added to the IBC database was on October 12, the day after the Lancet study was released.
tlambert | November 5, 2006Christopher Monckton has a lengthy article in the Daily Telegraph where he attempts to debunk the notion that there is significant anthropogenic global warming. The main problem with his article is that he doesn't know what he's writing about it. He offers up an untidy pile of factoids, some of which are true but out of context, some of which are not at all true, and some of which he seems to have conjured up out of thin air. What they all have in common is that they support his position. Monckton seems to be unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. My favourite factoid is this one:…
tlambert | November 2, 2006Today's Australian has a Bob Carter opinion piece attacking the Stern report. Carter lets fly with his usual over-the-top rhetoric:
the Stern review is destined to join Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and think tank the Club of Rome's manifesto, Limits to Growth, in the pantheon of big banana scares that proved to be unfounded. It is part of the last hurrah for those warmaholics who inhabit a world of virtual climate reality that exists only inside flawed computer models.
Carter sounds like the Creationists who claim that evolution is a theory in crisis.
But what is going to prove all…
tlambert | November 2, 2006In Andrew Bolt's latest column he sort of admits that Peiser was wrong, but still misleads his readers.
As Attard reported, I'd cited research by British academic Benny Peiser, who claimed to have disproved a survey that concluded none of a sample of scientific papers doubted the theory of man-made global warming.
That was a mistake, because Peiser now says he messed up some of his checking -- even though he insists "hardly a week goes by without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory".
Bolt implies that only some of the checking was wrong, but…
tlambert | October 31, 2006
Tim Blair writes:
Consider the tragic environmental cost:
I had a strange experience on Monday. I went to see Al Gore's slide show, as he affectionately refers to An Inconvenient Truth, his exposé on global warming.
For the first time in my life, I was the only person in the cinema. I sat there for two hours, watching the advertisements, the promos and the feature itself. There was air conditioning, lighting and a projectionist, possibly, and an usher who opened the doors when the session was over, and asked me if I enjoyed the movie.
Given how wrong Blair was with his repeated…
tlambert | October 31, 2006The BBC did not publish all of Les Roberts' answers. Here are the rest:
It seems the Lancet has been overrun by left-wing sixth formers.
The report has a flawed methodology and deceit is shown in the counting process. What is your reaction to that? --Ian, Whitwick, UK
Almost every researcher who studies a health problem is opposed to that health problem. For example, few people who study measles empathize with the virus. Thus, given that war is an innately political issue, and that people examining the consequences of war are generally opposed to the war's conception and continuation, it…
tlambert | October 30, 2006In 2004, Naomi Oreskes looked at a sample of 928
papers in
refereed scientific journals and found that not one disagreed with the
scientific consensus: that humans are responsible for most of the
warming in the last few decades. Benny Peiser disputed this, claiming that 34 of them rejected or doubted the consensus. I asked him for his list of 34 and posted it. It was obvious that there was only paper in his list that rejected the consensus and not only was that paper not peer-reviewed it was from the AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geologists).
Despite this, Peiser insisted that…
tlambert | October 30, 2006The BBC has Les Robert's answers to questions sent in by readers. Some extracts:
A research team have asserted in an article in Science that the second Lancet study is seriously flawed due to "main street bias."
We worked hard in Iraq to have every street segment have an equal chance of being selected. We worked hard to have each separate house have an equal chance of being selected. Realize, there would have to be both a systematic selection of one kind of street by our process and a radically different rate of death on that kind of street in order to skew our results. We see no evidence of…
tlambert | October 27, 2006This is a talk about the methodology of the 2004 study, but most of it applies to the new study as well. It's 46 minutes long.
Via lenin.
tlambert | October 25, 2006
Tim Blair isn't going to let go of his claim that Richard Garfield criticised the Lancet study.
He offered this quote:
"I'm shocked by the levels they (the investigators) reached," said Garfield. "Common sense, gut level, says it is hard to believe it could be this high. We don't know how many have died, we just know it's a lot. ... Right now, the only other option is to stay in the dark."
Garfield isn't criticising the study. Sven explained it for Blair:
Garfield is saying that 1) you can't depend on your gut for a measurement of this scope and scale, because it truly defies "common sense…
tlambert | October 25, 2006In my comments Iraq Body Count's Josh Dougherty throws a tantrum:
Tim, you're a bald-faced liar ... do you really need to be such a monumental fraud and liar to puff up this Lancet study?
Glenn Reynolds has studiously ignored the actual Iraq Body Count they've compiled. This however has him cheering Dougherty on. Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. I wonder if he cheers law students who behave like Dougherty?
Oh the folks at this site, got a spray from Dougherty for their sins in citing the Lancet estimate. They seem to have figured him out:
But dear stranger, I…
tlambert | October 25, 2006Obviously anything Gregg Easterbrook writes about the Lancet study is going to be really stupid, and sure enough, he gives us this:
The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to "unknown causes." The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the result as precise. White House officials have…
tlambert | October 24, 2006
Tim Blair, whose reaction to the Lancet study was to reject the entire concept of random sampling offers us this:
Among other Lancet critics: Paul Bolton, a professor of international health at Boston University; Stephen Apfelroth, professor of pathology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City; and mortality studies expert Richard Garfield.
Of the three, the only one who is an expert in mortality studies is Richard Garfield. What does he say?
The Lancet study cited two sources for the 5.5 pre-war mortality rate: the 2003 CIA Factbook entry for Iraq and a 2002 profile from…
tlambert | October 24, 2006In May I analysed the press coverage of the Iraq Body Count and found that the IBC numbers were usually misreported as the number of deaths and the IBC maximum was often reported as an upper bound on the number of deaths. I asked:
Why not contact reporters who get it wrong and set them right?
The answer from the IBC folks was that they didn't have the time to do that. What are they spending their time doing? Well, a few days ago 27 of Australia's leading scientists in epidemiology and public health signed a letter about the Lancet study, which said:
Last week, the medical journal The…
tlambert | October 23, 2006Sarah Bosely writes in the Guardian:
The critics argued that the Lancet paper does not indicate that the researchers moved far enough away from the main street. "The further away you get, the further you are from the convoys that roll down the streets and the car bombs and the general violence," said Sean Gourley. "By sampling only cross streets which are more accessible, you get an over-estimation of deaths."
But Prof Burnham said the researchers penetrated much further into residential areas than was clear from the Lancet paper.
The notion "that we avoided back alleys was totally untrue".…
tlambert | October 22, 2006The editors at Slate really don't like epidemiology. Not content with Christopher Hitchens' clueless attack on the Lancet study they've published another attack on the study. And this one is by Fred Kaplan, the man who made such a dreadful hash of it when he tried to criticize the first Lancet study. Kaplan writes:
The [first] study's sample was too small, the data-gathering too slipshod, the range of uncertainty so wide as to render the estimate useless.
So he's learned nothing about statistics since his botched criticism of the first study. Kaplan concedes that the new study has a…