tlambert | February 2, 2006Mike Hudson gets a whole column out of an exchange with Fumento:
I decided to e-mail Fumento and gloat about his descent into ignominy. I told him that, given his positions on Love Canal and Gulf War Syndrome, it wasn't surprising to hear that he was bought and paid for by a chemical company. What sweet irony.
"Time wounds all heels," I reminded him at the end of the brief message.
Imagine my surprise when, nine minutes later, Fumento replied.
He bragged about having "exposed" Hanchette for "lying about a perfectly safe place called Love Canal." The humorless quality of his post was…
tlambert | January 31, 2006
In 1987 Zhang JianDong published a study linking chromium-6 in
drinking water to cancer. In 1997 he published a new study retracting his findings ---
further analysis showed that chromium-6 wasn't to blame. All
part of the normal progress of science you would think. Except
for a few small things.
1. Zhang did not write the 1997 retraction published under his name.
2. Zhang did not agree with the conclusions of the 1997 study.
3. The 1997 study was actually written by consultants from ChemRisk hired by PG&E. And PG&E
was being sued for…
tlambert | January 30, 2006
Fumento has written a reply to Cathy Seipp's article. Mostly he whines about how mean Seipp was. The only substantive bit is this:
Read the Business Week piece. It takes three whole minutes. Nowhere does it say I took money for any column or story. It says I solicited a grant from Monsanto for a biotechnology book I was working on. (It doesn't say, but should, that such solicitations from philanthropies and corporations are the general rule for writers of policy books.) It says my think-tank employer accepted the grant and paid me a salary while I worked on the book.
Using a bizarre set…
tlambert | January 27, 2006What could be more science bloggy than a place with a science in its name? So here's Silas and Justin in Botany Bay.
tlambert | January 27, 2006Jonathon Dursi details the spread of a bogus comparison between crime rate in US in Canada from John Lott to David Frum to Alan Gottlieb:
So here's the path of the lie as far as I can see it:
Aug 2005: Lott claims violent crime is twice as rampant in Canada as in the US; this is untrue, and comes from fallaciously comparing two different statistics from different countries.
Oct 2005: Lott makes other claims about Canadian crime rates in the National Post, equally cherry-picked.
Jan 2006: Frum play the same game in the National Post, comparing incommensurate `Total Specified Crimes'…
tlambert | January 27, 2006It's long been public knowledge that Steve Milloy's junkscience site was funded by tobacco companies to attack the science linking cigarette smoke with lung cancer. Last year Mother Jones reported:
Industry defenders shelled [Arctic Climate Assessment] study, and, with a dearth of science to marshal to their side, used opinion pieces and press releases instead. "Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice," blared FoxNews.com columnist Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute ($75,000 from ExxonMobil) who also publishes the website JunkScience.com. Two days later the conservative…
tlambert | January 26, 2006I've discovered another one of John Lott's attempts to rewrite history. Read on.
Lott has written a response to Kevin Drum's summary of Lott's model changing antics. Here's Drum:
1. Lott and two coauthors produced a statistical model ("Model 1") that showed significant crime decreases when states passed concealed carry gun laws.
2. Back in April, two critics discovered that there were errors in the data Lott used. When the correct data was plugged into Lott's model, his results went away.
3. After a long silence, Lott admitted the data errors and posted a table with new…
tlambert | January 25, 2006Kevin Drum is is dismayed that theNew York Times has published an op-ed by John Lott:
I note that the New York Times has published a piece by John Lott today and I just have to ask: what is Lott doing writing op-eds for them? The man is a fraud and the Times demeans itself by allowing him space on their pages.
Lott says that he conducted a multivariate statistical analysis of the ABA rankings of judicial nominees and like all of Lott's other statistical analyses the results were favourable for Republicans -- Lott "found" that the ABA was biased against Republicans. For all I know, they…
tlambert | January 20, 2006I don't know about you, but I've been waiting with delicious anticipation to see what Fumento's defence would be after he got fired by Scripps-Howard. Fumento does not disappoint. Why did he not disclose that Monsanto had paid him $60,000 to write a book about biotechnology? Fumento says:
I had called numerous scientists who had helped me to ask how they would like to be acknowledged and one at Monsanto said he'd prefer that both he and the company be left out.
I could have ignored his wishes. But notwithstanding that I live in the backstabbing capital of the world, I kept my knife…
tlambert | January 20, 2006because then maybe it would have been mentioned in the New York Times:
Seed Media, which produces science publications in print and online, is seeking to broaden its audience - and its appeal to advertisers - by introducing on Monday a network of blogs, or Web journals, devoted to science and science-related subjects. The network is to be made available on a Web site, scienceblogs.com, that is now operating in beta, or test, mode.
The Web site will initially bring together 15 blogs bearing names like Adventures in Ethics and Science, Cognitive Daily, Living the Scientific Life and Stranger…
tlambert | January 20, 2006The Winter 2005 issue of the Nieman Reports has many articles about the news coverage of Evolution and Global Warming. Both topics, of course, are ill served by the tradition of "he said, she said" which gives undue prominence to advocates from the Discovery and Competitive Enterprise Institutes. You can read the entire issue (5.8 MB PDF) or just the Intelligent Design section, the Global Warming section or the Global Warming section with multimedia (2.3MB PDF+QuickTime).
tlambert | January 19, 2006Last year I posted about The Great DDT Hoax, the fake story of how DDT had all but eliminated malaria in Sri Lanka until evil enviros banned its use. Most of the people repeating this hoax were just part of the disinformation cycle and were merely guilty of lazy and sloppy research. But some of them had certainly read accurate accounts of what happened and were deliberately deceiving their readers.
I can add Julian Simon to the list of dishonest ones. In the Ultimate Resource 2 Page 261 he writes about "environmental scares":
DDT, sensationalized by Rachel Carson in 1962. Said to cause…
tlambert | January 17, 2006Pat Michaels says that Kyoto would destroy the US economy:
In a nutshell, that's why the European governments are so exercised about Bush's "no" to Kyoto. They see it as an international instrument that would destroy the economy of their major competitor, even as they know it doesn't do a thing about global temperature. These facts are evident.
James Lovelock says global warming will make most of the planet uninhabitable
We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will…
tlambert | January 17, 2006Pat Michaels has responded
to my post pointing out several errors in his post about frog extinctions:
It has subsequently been pointed out to us that the points on our Figure 1 (Pounds et al. Figure 4c) are not actually amphibian populations but simply a sampling of weather stations in the regions studied by Pounds et al.
It seems that Michaels could not bring himself to mention my name or link to my correction. (Nor do they accept trackbacks.)
Michaels comes with a different way of calculating the percentage of species that could become extinct because of the change in temperatures:
we…
tlambert | January 16, 2006I missed this when it first came out, but Carl Bialik has written excellent summary of the issues in the Wall Street Journal.
Researchers concluded that about 100,000 more Iraqis had died outside Fallujah since the invasion than would have died had the prewar death rate continued. Yet the study, published in the British medical journal Lancet, was roundly criticized for discarding the Fallujah data from calculations. Others questioned the study for extrapolating from only 89 death reports outside Fallujah, including reports of 21 violent deaths.
The biggest concern with the Lancet study…
tlambert | January 15, 2006Carl Zimmer has a useful summary of the recent Nature paper that links global warming with frog extinctions. Brian Schmidt comments:
I was curious about the fact that none of the climate-focused bloggers on my blog roll had written on the subject. Then it occurred to me - they're climatologists, not biologists, so they decided not to write about something outside of their expertise.
Pat Michaels wasn't bothered by this. In fact, he reckons that he's demolished the paper:
I have to say that this was the easiest shoot-down in some time,
because, in my humble opinion, it was the worst paper…
tlambert | January 14, 2006When I criticised Michael Fumento's innumerate writing about the Lancet study he responded with this:
You can blog all you want, but my next column is also on this. It goes out to over 350 newspapers
Not any more:
Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS) announced
Friday that it severed its relationship with Michael Fumento -- a
senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute -- for not
disclosing he had taken payments in 1999 from agribusiness giant
Monsanto. The payments were revealed by BusinessWeek Online, which also broke a similar story revealing columnist Doug Bandow receiving payments…
tlambert | January 13, 2006This is my last post ever here. My blog has moved to http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ where I will join some fantastic bloggers at ScienceBlogs. The new RSS feed is http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/index.xml. You can now read my first post at the new blog.
tlambert | January 11, 2006My blog turns three today. It started as a webpage that I updated daily on the John Lott affair. (To my mind, at least, this was different from a blog.) It's been through several changes of blogging software and host over this time and I'm celebrating the birthday with a move to ScienceBlogs.
The main reason for the move is the chance to be associated with the fine group of blogs here. The designers at ScienceBlogs are dreaming up ways to provide links to interesting posts at other blogs on this site in the sidebar, so my readers can get some more value out of my blog. I also now have…
tlambert | January 11, 2006John Fleck discovers that Benny Peiser's ability to understand papers in climate research hasn't improved since last year:
So I wrote [the paper's author] and asked if he felt their work supported a solar explanation for the warming of the last 100 years. His response:
As you have noticed, because the time resolution of peat deposition (in our study) is not high enough to discuss the dynamic of temperatures on interannual/interdecadal scales, we did not address the cause of the ongoing global warming in the past century.
After publishing Plimer's silly article on global warming, the…