Bolt
tlambert | September 7, 2005One of the few things that Andrew Bolt got correct in his original criticism of the Lancet study was the sample size, 988 households:
Its researchers interviewed 7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in the 14 months before the invasion and who in the 18 months after.
In a later article, Bolt got the number wrong:
Lancet surveyed 788 Iraqi households.
Since the two numbers differ in just a single digit Bolt's erroneous 788 number looks like a simple typo, but when the mistake was pointed out to him,…
tlambert | June 4, 2005 One of the many factual errors in Parkinson's piece on deaths in Iraq was the claim that the Lancet study only surveyed 788 households (actually it was 988 households). I did a Google search to see who else had made the same error, and what do you know, it first appeared in a error-filled May 25 article by Andrew Bolt: Lancet surveyed 788 Iraqi households. The UN surveyed 21,668 -- or almost 30 times more. You figure which is more accurate.
Parkinson's column was drafted just two days after Bolt's, and like Bolt he failed to mention that the ILCS only covered the first year of the…
tlambert | March 18, 2005Tim Blair has posted emails from Ted Lapkin and Andrew Bolt who object to a couple of my posts. Blair fails to provide links to the posts so that readers can determine whether Lapkin and Bolt have accurately described what happened.
Lapkin begins: In November 2003, I argued in the pages of Quadrant magazine that the environmental movement is moral culpable for the deaths of 2 million Africans killed each year by malaria. In mid-February 2005, a left-wing blogger named Tim Lambert (Deltoid) accused me, and others, of participation in what he described as "The Great DDT Hoax". Without…
tlambert | February 22, 2005 Last week Kyoto came into effect. Apparently that was the signal for columns by a whole bunch of pundits who have two features in common: 1. they are manifestly ill-equipped to understand the science and 2. they are utterly certain that there is no such thing as global warming.
Our first pundit is Michael Duffy in the Daily Telegraph informs us:
The truth is we have no control over global warming, and in any case it's not a problem at all.
The myth holds that carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere is increasing, due mainly to industrial activities, and this…
tlambert | February 9, 2005Andrew Bolt, writing in the Melbourne Herald Sun offers this conclusive disproof of important evidence against global warming: Melbourne last week had its coldest February day on record, and its wettest day, which should surprise those still naive enough to believe our green gurus.
Oh, plus he calls it a "booga-booga theory". I think even Tech Central Station would find this too lame to draft. Nice one Herald Sun!
Update: Silly me, of course TCS wouldn't find this too lame to draft. TCS editor, Nick Schulz made the same dumb argument. Oh, and Tim Blair…
tlambert | January 20, 2005The target of one of Tim Blair's five-minute hates on Wednesday was fellow journalist Peter FitzSimons. FitzSimons' crime? He said there had been an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq. Now you could quibble that the Lancet study measured all excess deaths rather than just civilian ones though since the vast majority were civilian deaths, this isn't that big a deal. Blair, however, calls FitzSimon's "stupid" and links to Andrew Bolt's train-wreck of a critique. I suppose that Bolt's isn't the worst of the critiques out there, but with Fumento around the competition is very very stiff…
tlambert | November 20, 2004 The latest pundit to have a go at the Lancet study is Andrew Bolt. Like most of the critics, Bolt just does not have the statistical background to produce a competent critique. In Bolt's case this is even less excusable, since he had the benefit of the Economist's excellent article, but unfortunately Bolt does not seem to have understood it.
Bolt [writes](http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/dveathby.htm):
Just ask yourself: Have more than 180 Iraqis, mainly women and children, really died every day, on average, for the past 18 months, usually at the…