tlambert | May 25, 2005 Congratulations to blogger Arthur Chrenkoff for getting an article in the New York Times based on his "Good news from Iraq" posts. I thought it would be interesting to look at all the good news from Iraq on one topic so we can see how things have progressed over the year that Chrenkoff has been doing his series. I picked electricity generation because that is one of the most important parts of infrastructure, indeed many other things like water and sewage treatment depend on an adequate electricity supply.
For each month from May 2004, the table below gives an extract from Chrenkoff's…
tlambert | May 25, 2005 I wrote earlier on Zbigniew Jaworowski's piece claiming that measurements of pre-industrial CO2 were wrong. Now Jim Easter has written a masterful post, detailing twenty-two false or misleading statements made by Jaworowski. Go and read, it's beautiful work.
tlambert | May 20, 2005 Steve Levitt has replied to Lott's review of Freakonomics:
Now let's talk about John Lott for a minute. Along with John Whitley, he wrote a paper on abortion and crime. It is so loaded with inaccurate claims, errors and statistical mistakes that I hate to even provide a link to it, but for the sake of completeness you can find it here. Virtually nothing in this paper is correct, and it is no coincidence that four years later it remains unpublished. In a letter to the editor at Wall Street Journal, Lott claims that our results are driven by the particular measure of abortions that we used in…
tlambert | May 18, 2005 In a comment to my previous post on Benny Peiser's claim that Naomi Oreskes article on the scientific consensus was wrong, Meyrick made a good case that Peiser had conducted a different search than Oreskes:
Think I've finally worked out how to replicate Oreskes' search. There are 2 fundemental differences between Peiser search and Oreskes.
1. Oreskes excluded the "Social Sciences Citation Index" and the "Arts & Humanities Citation Index", Peiser does not.
2. Oreskes set the search limits to include only "Article"s, whereas Peiser set the search limits to include "All document types…
tlambert | May 17, 2005 Last year, global warming denialist Bob Carter wrote a Tech Central Station article where he claimed that satellite measurements
show little or no long-term trend of temperature change.
I emailed him to point that the satellites actually showed significant warming. He replied that this didn't count because:
this trend is most likely produced by the single exceptionally warm 1998 El Nino year.
This year, he has written a paper where he asserts (my emphasis):
Four alternative predictions of near-future climate, based on empirical models drawn from the palaeoclimatological record, are…
tlambert | May 15, 2005 Jim Lindgren agrees with me that the ILCS supports the Lancet study. He also raises some concerns about some of the numbers in Lancet study:
I find it somewhat odd that heart attack and stroke deaths are up 64% in the later period, and accidental deaths are up more than 3-fold. And live births are up 33% in the later (War & Post-War) period, even though post-War pregnancies would not lead to live births until 9 months had passed, so the rate of having children would likely have to have jumped substantially more than 33% in the last half of the later period. Further, household size…
tlambert | May 14, 2005 People who suffer from Asperger's Syndrome have grave difficulties with social interactions because they have trouble in reading other people's emotions. I recently read an interesting interview with Bram Cohen (the inventor of BitTorrent) who suffers from Asperger's. Which brings us to Tim Blair. After his latest attack on Lancet study blew up in his face, Blair's response was to claim that I suffered from Asperger's syndrome. (No link, find it yourself if you care.)
Unfortunately, this sort of behaviour from Blair is all too common. After Darp Hau commented on the way Blair made fun…
tlambert | May 14, 2005 The results of the Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004 have been published. (Earlier discussion of the study is here.) As Iraqi Minister of Planning Barham Salih said, "This survey shows a rather tragic situation of the quality of life in Iraq." The study shows that living condition have deteriorated following the war with, for example, chronic malnutrition increasing from 4% to 8% and access to safe water falling from 95% to 60% in urban areas.
The survey also had a question on war-related deaths that provides more support for the Lancet study on excess mortality. Question HM01 (…
tlambert | May 12, 2005 Back in 2003 I reported on The Case of the File from the Future, where Lott tried to destroy some incriminating evidence, but did it so ineptly that he made things worse for himself. Well, he's done it again.
After I posted the story of Economist123 and his book reviews, "Tom H" (one of Lott's sock puppets) popped up to argue that Economist123 was not John Lott and had just happened to repost a John Lott review. Unlikely, but just possible, so, at 12:06 I pointed out another damning piece of evidence:
So, Tom H, you claim that Economist123 is just somebody else who reposted Lott's…
tlambert | May 11, 2005 You've met Mary Rosh and maximcl and Washingtonian. Now meet Bob H and Tom H and Sam and Kevin H and Too bad Tim is not very accurate and Gregg. Yes, Lott created a whole army of sockpuppets that he uses to post comments on my blog. At first he would use just one sock to make a point or dispute something I wrote. But after a while he would deploy multiple socks in the same thread to back each other up. For example, in this thread where "Too bad Tim is not very accurate", Gregg and Kevin H backed each other up with statements like:
"Too bad Tim is not very accurate" nails lambert.
And…
tlambert | May 10, 2005 If you use a pseudonym to post a five-star review of your book:
More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott Important accurate info that Opponents constantly distort, November 8, 2001 Reviewer: Economist123 - See all my reviews
This is by far the most comprehensive study ever done on guns. It provides extensive evidence on waiting periods, the Brady Act, one-gun-a-month rules, concealed handgun laws. For some gun laws this is the only study available and it is important to note how many academics have tired to challenge his work on concealed handgun laws and failed and that no one has even…
tlambert | May 10, 2005 In April, New Scientist published a letter from David Bellamy denying global warming and claiming:
Indeed, if you take all the evidence that is rarely mentioned by the Kyotoists into consideration, 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.
It's not hard to go to the WGMS web site and see that his claim is not even close to being true, as explained in subsequent letters. Now George Monbiot has tracked down the source of Bellamy's claim. He got it from a crackpot web site ("The next ice age…
tlambert | May 8, 2005 I went to a get together for bloggers in Sydney last night. Writing more about it than I am are Fulmination Dave, Leigh Cartwright, Bourbonbird, an-open-mind, the bed and breakfast man, Misha, Dreadnought and Glen Fuller. Of particular note is Dreadnought's account of having to leave after a few minutes because the venue insisted that his partner remove his headgear, even though they explained that he was wearing it for religous reasons.
Update: And Philip Gomes, Spleenie, Antony Loewenstein, Ausculture Jess and Darp.
Update 2: OK, Mark, Muffin, mikey, Edward and Agent Fare Evader.
tlambert | May 6, 2005 Dennis Bray has replied to my post on his study.
I am very disapointed in his response. He writes:
For the two groups, the 'sceptics' and the 'saviours' there seems to have been equal access. If any one knows of other postings I would be interested to note how far the survey was distributed. The purpose of the survey was to attempt to gain an objective view of the state of the science not to provide fodder any camp of activists, but no measurement instrument (survey) is prefect, in any science.
While no study is perfect, this study is so imperfect as to be useless. Since it was posted…
tlambert | May 5, 2005 Chris Mooney has some comments on the Peiser/Oreskes dispute about the scientific literature on climate change.
I asked Benny Peiser for his list of 34 abstracts that "reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the 'the observed warming over the last 50 years'." (mentioned in his letter to Science).
Peiser wrote back:
I have attached those ISI abstracts which question that there is a complete "consensus" as defined by Oreskes. Please note that the most important difference to the Oreskes study is not that there are, contrary to her claim, a few abstracts…
tlambert | May 1, 2005 In a report on a climate change seminar, Bernd Ströher and Benny Peiser write:
Particularly revealing were the almost sensational results of a survey conducted by Prof. Bray among some 500 German and European climate researchers. The results show impressively that the much-repeated claim of a "scientific consensus" on anthropogenic global warming is a carefully constructed piece of fiction: According to the survey results, some 25% of European climate researchers who took part in the survey still doubt whether most of the moderate warming during the last 150 years can be attributed to human…
tlambert | April 30, 2005 To mark the centenary of the publication of Einstein's famous equation, Spiked has surveyed
over 250 renowned scientists, science communicators, and educators - including 11 Nobel laureates - asking what they would teach the world about science and why, if they could pick just one thing.
They certainly have surveyed some renowned scientists and their answers are worth reading. But if you look at the complete list, you'll see these renowned scientists (links show where they've have mentioned on this blog): Sallie Baliunas, Timothy Ball, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, John Brignell, Hans…