tlambert | April 8, 2006
Six Australian business leader reckon that the debate is over and climate change is real:
Six business leaders yesterday stepped into the greenhouse debate, and blew the whistle. Game over, they said: climate change is real, it's going to hurt, and unless we act now, it's going to hurt us a lot.
These guys know how to play the game. Westpac's CEO David Morgan is a former Treasury official, married to former Labor minister Ros Kelly. They weren't going to criticise John Howard over his handling of climate change; he doesn't like criticism. They just urged him to shift ground, and fast.…
tlambert | April 6, 2006Tim Blair grasps at a straw, I mean perfume sprayer:
Frank Gaffney is interviewed by the ABC's Tony Jones, who confidently deploys the "Saddam had no WMD" argument:
TONY JONES: Except for the fact as it turns out -- I'm sorry to interrupt you there -- except for the fact as it turns out, he didn't have any?
FRANK GAFFNEY: No, it doesn't turn out at all that he didn't have any. It turns out we haven't found what he had. But what we did find, what the Iraq Survey Group did find, is plans to use the in place dual-use manufacturing facilities once sanctions were lifted to put chemical and…
tlambert | April 5, 2006
Steve Milloy has made a special appeal to his supporters:
I helped launch the Free Enterprise Action Fund (www.FreeEnterpriseActionFund.com), a pioneering mutual fund designed to accomplish two goals for investors:
Earn a market-based financial return from investing in the common stocks of Fortune 500 companies; and
Provide a pro-free enterprise, anti-junk science ideological benefit through advocacy that promotes shareholder value and defends the American system of free enterprise from the onslaught of activist-sponsored attacks.
Counter-pressuring corporate managements on global…
tlambert | April 4, 2006
Blogger dav wrote to RTE (Ireland's Public Service Broadcaster) to correct their misleading reporting of Iraqi casualties:
Today's Six One news reports that the death toll in Iraq as a result of invasion is estimated at between 34 and 38 thousand. Presumably these figures were obtained from the organisation IraqBodyCount. However they are arrived at by recording only the deaths reported by English language news sources. Therefore it can in no way be considered to reflect a conclusive account of Iraqi deaths caused or resulting from the continuing war.
In future, if you are reporting the…
tlambert | April 2, 2006
In 1972 the US banned the agricultural use of DDT, but did not ban its use against malaria. Other countries followed suit. The ban on the agricultural use of DDT has probably saved many lives by slowing the development of resistance. However, Michael Crichton blames 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."
Junkscience has a death clock that blames the ban for an impossible 90 million deaths.…
tlambert | April 1, 2006Nicholas Davies has an article Estimating civilian deaths in Iraq - six surveys in Online Journal. Critics often point to the Iraq Body Count and the Iraq living conditions survey as contradicting the Lancet study when they do not. Davies explains why.
tlambert | April 1, 2006There were some ominous black clouds and it was pretty windy and I had to take my youngest to the doctor because he was throwing up all over the place, but I made it to the picnic, even if it was somewhat late. The sun came out, we were sheltered from the wind, and we had a pleasant afternoon talking about this and that.
Here's tigtog and Morgan. To prove that we really are in Sydney, the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge lurk in the background. We also had front-row seats for the wedding you can see being set up in the background.
Umm, the bottom left corner of the picture is…
tlambert | March 31, 2006
Tina Rosenberg, who wrote the hopelessly inaccurate article What the World Needs Now Is DDT, is back with more falsehoods about DDT:
The truth is that many malaria victims would be better off if America still had the disease. If malaria still existed in America, we would be attacking it with DDT . In fact, we did exactly that.
Yes, obviously if there were mosquito-borne diseases in America like, oh, West Nile virus, it would be attacked with DDT. Except that they use synthetic pyrethroids which seem to be a better choice than DDT.
But now we know that DDT can beat malaria without…
tlambert | March 29, 2006A misleading sidebar on this BBC story on Iraq only presents the IBC count of civilians killed in Iraq (which is guaranteed to be a significant undercount) and omits to mention the Lancet estimate of roughly 100,000 excess deaths.
Gabriele Zamparini wrote to the BBC seeking an explanation. The BBC's Steve Hermann tries to justify it:
The Lancet study is a snapshot taken more than 18 months ago and though the methodology has been widely acknowledged as standard, there has been argument about whether the sampling method is the most appropriate for this kind of survey.
Alas, it's another…
tlambert | March 28, 2006Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has organised an on-line seminar on Chris Mooney's War on Science. Lots of interesting reading, including two guest posters: someone called Tim Lambert and Steve Fuller. PZ Myers wasn't real impressed with Fuller's contribution.
tlambert | March 27, 2006In a Financial Times discussion in new and old media Trevor Butterworth says:
Second, the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of "niche experts" blogging away (or ready and willing to blog) lacks empirical evidence. I'm very impressed with scienceblogs.com - read the surgeon/scientist "respectful insolence" and you get a real sense of how the mainstream need to upgrade their medical reporting.
And yet at the same time, I see scienceblogs.com as a sort of rearguard action against a blitzkrieg of rubbish on the net rather than the vanguard of an expert army. The "collective…
tlambert | March 27, 2006This Saturday, 1st April in the Royal Botanic Gardens from 1pm. We'll be at the lawn to the east of the Main Pond. Tigtog has some pictures of the location.
tlambert | March 25, 2006
One of the less pleasant parts of my job is talking to students that I have caught plagiarizing assignments. All too often, rather than admit to copying they will tell me clumsy lies and blame somebody else. Which brings us to Ben Domenech. Instead of admitting to his obvious plagiarism he claims that an editor repeatedly inserted plagiarized material into his pieces and that PJ O'Rourke personally gave him permission to copy his material. This isn't the best story he could come up with, since it was possible to check with his editor and O'Rourke who refuted his lies (Hat tip: Atrios).…
tlambert | March 24, 2006
You have two 50g containers of cream. One is 10% fat, and the other 20% fat. You combine them. What is the percentage of fat in the mixture?
A. 10% of 50 is 5, 20% of 50 is 10. (10+5)/(50+50) is 15%. The answer is 15%, the arithmetic mean of 10% and 20%.
B. 14.1%, the geometric mean of 10% and 20%.
C. 15.8%, the root mean square of 10% and 20%.
D. It could be either A, B, or C. There is nothing to stop you using any of these means as the answer. And anyway, the Navier-Stokes equations are hard to solve, so how can we figure out what happens when we combine two fluids…
tlambert | March 22, 2006Last year Benny Peiser claimed that on a literature search he found 34 papers "reject or doubt" anthropgenic global warming. I posted the abstracts and it's very obvious that he misclassified most of the papers. Peiser left several comments on that post, but could not bring himself to admit that he had made mistakes. Now Sylvia S Tognetti has spotted that Peiser has finally admitted to making mistakes:
I accept that it was a mistake to include the abstract you mentioned (and some other rather ambiguous ones) in my critique of the Oreskes essay.
Better late than never, I guess.
tlambert | March 20, 2006
John Lott keeps trying to use sock puppets to scrub his wikipedia page of criticism. Unfortunately other wikipedia users undo his changes, he makes them again and he gets into an edit war. He's used his socks to try to alter the page many many times. (See round 1 round 2 round 3).
This weekend there was another edit war. One anonymous user changed the page to Lott's preferred version. Just six minutes later a user with IP address 69.141.3.180 changed it back. Three minutes later it was changed back to Lott's version. Battle was joined with edits coming every three or four minutes,…
tlambert | March 19, 2006Today is Malaria Action Day. Dunk Malaria are holding a Dunk Malariathon. coturnix is running a linkfest for malaria related posts.
My thanks to John Quiggin and Tara Smith for linking to my earlier post and extra thanks to everyone who donated money and doubled my $300 to help fight malaria.
tlambert | March 16, 2006Note for visitors from Daily Kos: 120,000 is an estimate of the
number of violent deaths. The total number of extra deaths as a result of the war is very roughly
200,000 once you include the increase in disease and accidents since
the invasion. This number is more likely to be too low than too high since it comes from doubling the 100,000 estimate from the Lancet study (which just covered the first eighteen months) and violence has worsened since then.
Jim Krane reports:
Three years into the war, one grim measure of its impact on Iraqis can be seen at Baghdad's morgue: There, the staff…
tlambert | March 15, 2006Dunk Malaria is organizing a Malaria Action Day on March 19th, to raise awareness of malaria. The idea is that people net a basketball to symbolize the insecticide treated netting that is the best weapon against malaria. Good. Except that number 2 on their list of charities is the execrable Africa Fighting Malaria, who are trying to prevent bednets from being used to fight malaria.
I think that we here at Deltoid can, right now, do more to fight malaria than Africa Fighting Malaria has ever done. I will match, up to a total of $300, donations to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS,…
tlambert | March 10, 2006Carl Zimmer has reviewed two books on Global Warming: Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers (I dissected some criticism of Flannery's book here) and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe.