tlambert | November 1, 2005Lott has drafted yet another cherry-picked article where he pretends that crime in Australia is increasing despite plummeting crime rates here. Jonathan Dursi takes it apart.
tlambert | October 30, 2005The Australian reported:
THE debate on climate change is over. As far as the Howard Government is concerned, Australians must accept that humans contribute to global warming and adapt their behaviour to save the planet.
Emerging from a bush walk through the Tarkine forest in northwest Tasmania, Environment Minister Ian Campbell told The Australian that argument about the causes and impact of global warming had effectively ended.
"There is a very small handful of what we call sceptics who, in the face of seeing all of the evidence about carbon increases and all of the evidence about impacts on…
tlambert | October 29, 2005Eli Rabbett has encountered Essex and McKitrick's briefing about their book Taken by Storm (which I criticised here) and is not impressed:
with so many dubious claims that one hardly knows where to begin.
tlambert | October 26, 2005Les Roberts
comments on the shoddy reporting of his study:
I thought the press saw their job as reporting information. Most of the pieces discussing our report were written to control or influence society, not to relay what our report had documented. For example, the day after the article came out, Fred Kaplan, a defense correspondent for Slate magazine reported that, "Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully: We…
tlambert | October 26, 2005Correspondence on the paper "Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India"
Nature Vol 294 26 November 1981 pages 302,388
Malaria debated
SIR --- I have read the paper by Chapin and Wasserstrom (Nature 17
September, p.181) with interest. I am disappointed with the
presentation and discussion of the important subject of malaria
resurgence and its relationship to agricultural production.
The authors give a garbled account of the very concept of malaria
eradication and especially of the causes of the relative failure of
this great endeavour. They imply, that the…
tlambert | October 26, 2005There were some letters written to Nature by malariologists disputing Chapin and Wasserstrom's paper that argued that agricultural use of DDT was the major factor in the resurgence of malaria in India and Central America. Before I write about the dispute I should stress what they all agreed on:
It is generally agreed among malariologists that agricultural
insecticides have made a contribution to selection for insecticide
resistance in mosquitoes and that such resistance has made a
contribution to the resurgence of malaria in Central America and South
Asia.
Furthermore none of the…
tlambert | October 25, 2005Via Pharyngula I find the commissar's project to make a blog family tree.
your blogfather, or blogmother, as the case may be. Marie Gryphon who was the first blogger to post on the the John Lott affair. I started this blog to join in the discussion.
Include your blog-birth-month, the month that you started blogging January 2003.
If you are reasonably certain that you have spawned any blog-children, mention them, too. If I inspired you to start blogging, leave a comment!
tlambert | October 24, 2005The John Lott article at Wikipedia was unprotected and the edit
war has
restarted. Lott is using a sockpuppet called Timewarp to try to make
massive changes to the article. Some of the additions
he wants to make are interesting:
Although Lott has published in academic journals regarding education,
voting behavior of politicians, industrial organization, labor
markets, judicial confirmations, and crime, his research is hard to
consistently tag as liberal or conservative. For example, some
research argues for environmental penalties on firms.
Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Here's Mary Rosh
I…
tlambert | October 22, 2005Michael Fumento has
responded
to my post way back in January demolishing his foolish proposal that after
the tsunami:
DDT should be sprayed on water pools, tents, and on people themselves---as indeed was once common in Sri Lanka and throughout most of the world.
Unfortunately, mosquitoes in Sri Lanka are resistant to DDT, so DDT spraying would be a waste of time and money.
Fumento insists that DDT spraying would be effective despite resistance because
Resistance doesn't mean "immunity." Often it simply means using more insecticide in the spray than you would otherwise.
And then when you do…
tlambert | October 21, 2005John Bruton, the EU ambassador to the US responds to Mallaby's clueless DDT boosting piece.
In his Oct. 10 op-ed column, "Look Who's Ignoring Science Now," Sebastian Mallaby suggested that European regulations are to blame for the misery in Uganda and other malaria-stricken nations. The facts testify otherwise.
The European Union has no objection to the safe spraying of houses with DDT for malaria control, but it does have concerns about illegal agricultural uses. The E.U., like the United States and 149 other countries that signed the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in…
tlambert | October 21, 2005Extracts from "Should DDT continue to be recommended for malaria
vector control?" by C. F. Curtis published in Medical and Veterinary Entomology (1994) 8, 107--112
The banning of DDT in developed countries
In the early 1970s the use of DDT was banned in the U.S.A. and some
European countries except for certain emergency pest control
situations. The ban was based on the toxicity of DDT to fish, its
persistence in the environment and evidence that it could be passed up
food chains. Very high doses of DDT applied against the beetle
vectors of Dutch elm disease led to concentration of residues…
tlambert | October 20, 2005Seixon is no great shakes with statistics, but he sure can do things with a metaphor:
I swear, commenting on this blog is like a game of hide-and-seek with the elephant somewhere in the room. Lambert and his friends giggle every time I open up a cupboard and don't find the elephant, even though the elephant is somewhere to be found. In the process, they keep making false statements to distract me and make me look places where the elephant can't be found
tlambert | October 18, 2005If you are interested in serious discussion of the Australian government's proposed new "anti-terrorist" laws, you should read the posts by Senator Andrew Bartlett, Mark Bahnisch, Ken Parish and Tim Dunlop. One place where you won't find it is on channel 9's "Sunday" program who interviewed my friend and colleague Waleed Kadous for an hour. I think Waleed had some serious and thoughtful things to say, but "Sunday" edited the interview down to under a minute. And look at what they used:
ADAM SHAND: But there is also ambiguity and political orthodoxy inside the Muslim community on the…
tlambert | October 17, 2005Andrew Bolt has
responded
to Tim Flannery's
correction of
some Bolt's egregious errors. Bolt's primary tactic in his criticism
of Flannery is to go out of his way to misinterpret Flannery's writing
and then when Flannery corrects the misinterpretation to insist that
his strange reading is the only correct one. Bolt isn't even bothered
when his readings of Flannery are contradictory. Flannery wrote about
the relative stability of temperatures since the last Ice Age:
For the past 10,000 years, Earth's thermostat has been set to an average surface temperature of about 14 degrees Celsius.…
tlambert | October 17, 2005All kinds of action over at the Wikipedia page on John Lott, with someone using the handle "Timewarp" starting an edit war that has led to the page being temporarily protected from changes to encourage Timewarp to discuss the changes he wants. Timewarp has denied being John Lott, but sure sounds a lot like him.
tlambert | October 14, 2005Andrew Kenny in The Spectator
writes
Judged on sheer evil, the worst crime in history was brown, the Nazi
genocide, although the reds slaughtered more people. The death toll
(difficult to measure) is roughly, Hitler's holocaust 6 million,
Stalin's famine and terror 8 million, and Mao's famine 30 million. But
the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed
about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst
crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was
the banning of DDT. ...
In 1971 DDT was poised to rid the world of malaria. In 1972…
tlambert | October 14, 2005Extracts from "Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India" by Georganne Chapin and Robert Wasserstrom published in
Nature Vol 293 17 September 1981 pages 181--185
Among the inhabitants of Asia, Latin America and tropical Africa
malaria, remains a major cause for alarm. Yet only a few years ago,
health officials in a dozen developing countries (capitalizing on the
discoveries of British parasitologist Ronald Ross half a century
earlier) pointed triumphantly at their efforts to eradicate entirely
this mosquito-borne scourge[1-5]. Following World Health…
tlambert | October 10, 2005Sebastian Mallaby's article in the Washington Post has all the hallmarks of the clueless DDT-boosting article.
The only expert mentioned is not a malariologist but comes from some right-wing think tank. In this case it's Roger Bate.
Nowhere is mentioned the main reason why anti-malaria programs have shifted away from DDT---the widespread development of resistance to DDT by mosquitoes.
Other insecticides and drugs against malaria are ignored. South Africa did reintroduce DDT for spraying traditional houses, but they also used deltamethrin on western-style houses and switched to a more…