Deltoid

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 Erren, Christopher Essex, Kenneth Green, Zbigniew Jaworowski, William Kininmonth, Nils-Axel Mörner, James O’Brien, S Fred Singer, Dick Taverne, and David Wojick. That’s rather a lot of global warming skeptics, isn’t it? In his answer, Timothy Ball even asserts that climate scientists have failed to follow the scientific method:

Scientists who try to test the anthropogenic climate change theory - a normal and expected course of action, in any real scientific endeavour - are marginalised, and derisively called ’sceptics’, as if such a label were unscientific.

So how well are mainstream climate scientists represented in the survey? Hardly at all. I could only find three: Christopher Landsea, Hans von Storch and Tim Palmer. Landsea has been in the news for resigning from the IPCC, claiming it was being politicized, while von Storch has been in the news arguing that the hockey stick graph is rubbish. This might explain explain why they were selected along with all the global warming skeptics.

Update: Added two global warming skeptics that I missed: Mörner and O’Brien.

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 activities and CO2 emissions.

Robert Matthews writing in the Telegraph claims the scientists were even more skeptical: (my emphasis)

Prof Dennis Bray, of the GKSS National Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, submitted results from an international study showing that fewer than one in 10 climate scientists believed that climate change is principally caused by human activity.

As with Dr Peiser’s study, Science refused to publish his rebuttal. Prof Bray told The Telegraph: “They said it didn’t fit with what they were intending to publish.”

Both stories are referring to the same survey. Clearly they can’t both be right. The relevent question and result of the survey:

40. Climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.

strongly agree	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	strongly disagree
	9%	25%	21%	14%	8%	11%	10%

The Telegraph is only counting the 9% who chose 1 on the seven-point scale as agreeing with the statement. This is not correct. Clearly, responses 1,2 and 3 all indicate agreement with the statement. Still, a significant fraction disagree with the statement.

Is global warming skepticism amongst climate scientists as widespread as this survey indicates? To answer this we need to look at how the sampling was conducted:

The 2003 survey was conducted as an on-line survey. The existence of the survey was posted in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the Climlist server, and was sent to institutional lists in Germany Denmark and the U.K. As an effort to prevent general access to the survey, the survey was password protected. The password was contained in the informative message distributed according to the above.

However, the information about the survey was reposted (mail list membership required to read link) to the climatesceptics mail list by Timo Hämeranta on Sep 20 2003: (my emphasis)

the survey (below) is directed to those involved in the natural sciences related to climate change and not, for example, those involved in policy analysis or economic issues.

I suggest that you participate by completing the questionnaire (instructions to participate below).

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Lähettäjä: CLIMLIST Climatology Distribution List
[mailto:CLIMLIST@…] Puolesta CLIMLIST
Lähetetty: 19. syyskuuta 2003 18:12
Vastaanottaja: CLIMLIST@…
Aihe: Survey of Climate Scientists
CLIMLIST Mailing Number 03-09-24
Origin: “Dr. Dennis Bray”

Due to the nature of the distribution of electronic surveys some recipients of this message might have received the same previously. If that is the case, my apologies. Please do not submit the survey twice, although, once would be much appreciated. The survey is directed to those involved in the natural sciences related to climate change and not, for example, those involved in policy analysis or economic issues. Your discretion in choosing to participate in the survey on this basis would be greatly appreciated, as would your cooperation in making the survey a success. If you know of colleagues not contained on climlist but involved in the climate sciences, it would be appreciated if you could bring this survey to their attention with the suggestion that they too might like to participate by completing the questionnaire. Simply forwarding this message is likely the most convenient method.

… If you do choose to participate, the survey can be reached by opening your web browser and going to the following link:

http://w3g.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/bray.html/

When the page opens click the link to “survey of climate scientists” Here you will be asked for a username and password.

For username enter “respondent” (without quotation marks)

For password enter “ccsurvey” (again without the quotation marks).

The survey is password protected as an effort to limit the respondents to those involved in the climate sciences. There is also the option to print the survey from a PDF file and submit though regular postal services. Electronic submissions do not transmit your email address and consequently anonymity is ensured. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Since the survey was anonymous, there is no way to ensure that only climate scientists participated and no way to prevent people from submitting the survey multiple times. Furthermore, the survey was distributed on the climatesceptics list which has over 200 members, almost all of them strongly skeptical about global warming. Since the total number of participants was just 557, this could serious skew the results. I don’t believe that the results of this survey are representative of the views of climate scientists.

Update: Bray has some on the methodology here. The only thing Bray did to check for multiple responses by the same person was to see if there were any responses that were exact duplicates.

Update 2: Bray replies.

Oh no! Will the owners of this site be hearing from Tim Blair’s lawyers?

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 that question or even reject the “consensus”. More importantly, her claim that 75% of abstracts support the ‘consensus’—explicitely or implicitely—is not borne out by my analysis. In fact, from my analysis I would argue that the vast majority of papers published on global warming, both pro and contra - are not included in the ISI data set that feature the key words “global climate change”. I guess that’s why I could only find 13 abstracts that explicitely endorsed the consensus (you might want to ask Oreskes if she can provide more than these few). Obviously, most of the really important papers, in particular empirical studies, are to be found in the 11,000 or so ISI listed papers that weren’t analysed. I make this point clear in my letter to Science, and even stress that I do not wish to question that the majority of papers support the theory of anthropogenic global warming. Even so, it is simply untrue to claim that no sceptical papers have been published in the peer-reviewed literature. There are far too many issues still wide open to debate, not least the whole literature on solar forcing, satellite measurements, and the crucial issue of interpreting paleo-environmental proxy data.

I noticed the debate on your website. No matter how you wish to interpret the sceptical abstracts, there can be no doubt that most of them question that all uncertainties about anthropogenic forcing of recent global warming have been removed.

Oreskes asserted that none of the papers rejected the consensus position (anthropogenic climate change). Peiser asserts that these 34 reject or doubt the consensus position. Note that Peiser added “or doubt” to the category so it is logically possible for both of them to be correct. So, judge for yourselves by looking at the abstracts. I want to see what my readers think so leave a comment giving your count for how many “reject” and how many “reject or doubt” the consensus. (Yes, there are only 33 abstracts.)

Update: John Fleck, Henry Farrell and William Connolley are all very much less than impressed with Peiser’s work.

Update 2: Peiser has posted the missing abstract in comments. Chris Mooney isn’t impressed either.

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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 on the climatesceptics list, the sample is not representative. As a social scientist Bray should know this.

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.

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 could begin any day”), which got it from Larouche’s 21st Century Science, which got from SEPP, which seem to have made it up. Plus he made a typo, turning 55% into 555. Monbiot concludes:

It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb: a crumb which then disintegrates in the palm of your hand. You must ignore an entire canon of science, the statements of the world’s most eminent scientific institutions, and thousands of papers published in the foremost scientific journals. You must, if you are David Bellamy, embrace instead the claims of an eccentric former architect, which are based on what appears to be a non-existent data set. And you must do all this while calling yourself a scientist.

William Connolley has more on Bellamy.

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 bothered to try and challenge his work on one-gun-a-month laws and other gun control laws.

I am constantly amused the lengths to which reviewers here will go to distort Lott’s research. Take the one by the Australian who claims that Lott doesn’t explain why he uses the polling data that he does on gun ownership rates. If he was honest, he would note that Lott talks about these being the largest surveys on gun ownership rates available and that it is necessary to have such a large survey to get detailed information at the state level. A survey of 1,000 or even 1,500 people nationally is not enough to allow you to make comparisons across individual states.

These guys will do anything to keep people from reading Lott’s work.

Don’t use the same Amazon account to post another review and sign your name to it:

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
An empirical book based on faulty numbers, May 1, 2005
Reviewer: Economist123 - See all my reviews

… Not surprisingly, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s new book “Freakonomics” ignores their academic critics, but Steve Landsburg’s review disappointingly does so too (Leisure & Arts, April 13). Take just the book’s first claim: Unwanted children are more likely to grow up to be criminals and that abortion can therefore reduce crime, a plausible idea that has been around since the beginning of the abortion debate. …

If Messrs. Levitt and Dubner were correct, crime rates should have first started falling among younger people who were first born after legalization. Only as they aged would you start seeing crime fall among older criminals. But in fact the precise opposite is true. Murder rates during the 1990s first started falling for the oldest criminals and very last for the youngest.

John R. Lott Jr.
Resident Scholar
American Enterprise Institute
Washington

You see, when people click on the See all my reviews link, it’s kind of obvious that you wrote a five-star review of your own book.

Note: This is a different review to the one he posted as “Mary Rosh” and blamed his son for. Besides these two, Lott has posted sixteen other five-star reviews of his books.

Update: Lott used his “Tom H” sock puppet to attack me in the comments to this post, managing to further incriminate himself. Details are here. And economist123’s review of More Guns, Less Crime has mysteriously vanished.

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 this thread where Tom H and Bob supported each other. I told Tom H that he was the only one making a particular claim and he came back with

Tim, you can’t even get this right. Bob agreed with me earlier. Please try stopping making things up. Especially when they are so easily checked.

This seems a little dishonest to me.

How do I know that these are all really John Lott? They don’t all have the same IP number, but there is a small set of closely related IP numbers. The Comcast and Speakeasy IP addresses are unique to a household, so if these sock puppets are not Lott, they are someone in his family. “Kevin H” and “Too bad” used the same IP number as Gregg, but this was an AOL cache, so it is conceivable that the match in this case was just a coincidence but this is extremely unlikely since all three were involved in the same thread and all used the same AOL client under MacOS. (Note that the preceeding two sentences have been edited since the original posting to add the information about Comcast and Speakeasy.) The full list of all his comments is below the fold.

(more…)

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 review. Trouble is, if you look at Economist123’s wish list, it reveals that his initials are “JL”.

At 12:26, someone using one of the IPs associated with Lott visited the page containing my comment. At 12:46, Xrlq posted this comment:

Where? I followed the link but couldn’t find any personal information at all.

Now, the page containing the incriminating information hadn’t changed for months, but within minutes of my posting the link, the incriminating stuff was gone. Good thing I saved a copy.

By deleting the incriminating information Lott managed to incriminate himself beyond a shadow of a doubt. I mean, if Economist123 was some other economist that happened to have the same initials as Lott, why would he delete his wish list as soon as I linked to it? If he wanted to protect Lott from embarrassment, all he would have to do is come forward and prove that he wasn’t Lott.

After Lott deleted his wish list, “Tom H” (remember, he’s really John Lott) came back and accused me of dishonesty because the information was not there:

Why did Tim say the reviewer had signed the review when he knew it was a Wall Street Journal letter? He should not have cut out the beginning of the review that made that obvious. That was very dishonest. He makes up one claim that is easily seen to be false. He must believe that no one will check the post. Now he makes yet another equally false claim in the same discussion about personal information that is not there.

Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

Also of interest is Xrlq’s defence of Lott. He argues that it’s all a big coincidence. Eventually he decides that it’s too much of a coincidence even for him to swallow and decides that obviously Lott must have been framed.

It’s out! The Eighth Skeptics Circle.

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 (questionnaire available here) was “Has any person(s) who was a regular household member died or gone missing during the past 24 months?” Question HM05 asked for the cause of death: Disease / Traffic Accident / War related death / Pregnancy or childbirth / Other. The resulting estimate for war-related deaths was 24,000 (95% CI 18,000-29,000, see page 54 of report). since the field work was carried in April 2004, this only counts deaths in the invasion and the following year. The corresponding number from the Lancet study is 33,000 (the rest of the excess deaths are from increases in disease, accidents and murders). When you allow for the fact that the Lancet study covered eighteen months rather than one year, the ILCS gives a slightly higher death rate. So an independent study has confirmed that part of the Lancet study.

Unfortunately, because the mortality question in the ILCS study doesn’t distinguish between the pre and post-war periods it can’t be used to verify the increase in accidents and murders that the Lancet found. However, it does estimate changes in infant mortality mortality. Some of the critics of the Lancet study attacked it because the Lancet study found an infant mortality rate in the year before the war of 29 per 1000 births, arguing that was contradicted by a UNICEF estimate of 107 (For example, Andrew Bolt.) The ILCS survey estimate for 2002 is 32. (See Figure 26.) Lancet confirmed again. However, it also only shows an increase to 35 in 2003, while the Lancet found an increase to 59 after the war. 2003 only includes part of the post-war period, but this still suggests that the increase infant mortality was less than what the Lancet study found. The ILCS found much lower figures for infant mortality in the 1990s (around 30) than previous studies (which found figures of about 100). Those high infant mortality figures provided the basis for the claims that sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, so the ILCS study calls those claims into question.

Unfortunately, the Times reports the ILCS results like this:

The 370-page report said that it was 95 per cent confident that the toll during the war and the first year of occupation was 24,000, but could have been between 18,000 and 29,000. About 12 per cent of those were under 18.

The figure is far lower than the 98,000 deaths estimated in The Lancet last October, which said that it had interviewed nearly 1,000 households. But it is far higher than other figures.

This makes a misleading comparison between the Lancet number for all excess deaths (which includes the increase in murder, accidents and disease) and the ILCS number for deaths directly related to the war (which just includes deaths caused by the coalition and the insurgents). It also misses that the time periods were different. Naturally, the Lancet denialists have seized on this as proof that the Lancet estimate is wrong. For examples, see Leigh Cartwright and Tim Blair. Sigh.

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 of Margo Kingston appearance (by calling her “the Margoyle”, for instance), Blair demanded that Hau provide examples. When Hau met the challenge, Blair threw a temper tantrum:

Still no retraction, Darp? Well, I suppose we’ll just add “moral coward” to your resume, along with “shithouse researcher”, “abysmal writer”, and “liar”. Keep it comin’, fraud.

Name calling, making fun of people’s looks, temper tantrums … is there a name for this syndrome?

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 jumps from 7.5 in the earlier period to 8.0 in the later period.

None of these increases seem unlikely to me. While the number of births was 33% higher the time period after the war was longer, so the birth rate only increased by 10%. For this to happen, there would only have to be a 20% increase in the last nine months and it seems that the overthrow of Saddam might make people more optimistic about bringing another child into the world. The increases in heart attacks could be caused by an increase in stress because of the war and the decline in medical services. The increase in car accidents could be caused by the breakdown in law and order and fear of crime. (For example, driving through intersections at high speed to avoid ambush by robbers.) Finally, the increase in household size seems to be an inevitable consequence of the number of births and deaths recorded.

Of course, Lindgren’s suggestion that people are forgetting to mention some deaths that happened before the invasion may still be correct, indeed, the ILCS found evidence that infant deaths were being under-counted and went back to do some re-interviews.

Shannon Love, claims that the ILCS disproves the Lancet study finding of a large number of deaths in Falluja. He’s completely wrong. The ILCS fieldwork started in March 2004, before the heavy fighting in Falluja. It neither confirms nor denies the Lancet’s findings about deaths in Falluja.

John Quiggin notes that Tim Blair has now accepted an estimate of tens of thousands Iraqis dead from the war and wonders if Blair will correct an earlier post denying that the war had killed that many. Blair, of course, declines to make the correction.

Tim Worstall wonders why more attention has not been given to the ILCS and hints that this might be due to anti-war bias in the media. However, the news about Iraq in the the report is not good: living conditions are bad, the war made them worse and killed 24,000 Iraqis in just the first year.

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 described. Three agree that the likely trend the 21st century is one of cooling, and the fourth (based on Milankovitch predictions) predicts cooling over the longer term. In keeping with the generality of these predictions, averaged global surface temperature has been falling for the last 6 years.

That is, of course, only true if you include the single exceptionally warm 1998 El Nino year.

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”.

Using Oreskes search you get 929 documents (her article says 928, close enough?), where as with Peiser’s search you get 1247 documents.

I can confirm these findings. I suspect the 928 vs 929 difference is because an article has been added to the database since Oreskes ran her search.

Peiser is well aware of this because he was involved in the ensuing discussion. Now Brian Schmidt has discovered that after this discussion Peiser claimed: “I have analysed the same set of abstracts.” He lays out the case in detail here and here.

Also, Lars has discovered that Peiser peddling his bogus study in Canada’s Financial Post:

Dr. Peiser has a hand-wringer in today’s Financial Post (business section of Canada’s National Post, sorry but no link, it is in today’s hard copy edition [scoffed from a recycling bin, I won’t pay for this rag] but not posted on today’s website edition, subscription anyway and really not worth it even for Canadians) in which he bemoans “the stifling of dissent and the curtailing of scientific skepticism…” which is “bringing climate research into disrepute [sic]“. It appears to be a rehashing of the points that he makes above and in his Science letter, and Oreskes (and her pernicious influence) comes in for another drubbing. Dr. Peiser seems to have made his getaway from Deltoid with his hat shot full of criticisms but his head unscathed; as far as I can see, none of the points made by correspondents here have been addressed in this op-ed piece. It is three columns and over half the page—the Post always gives prominent display to contrascience work.

All right, who’s up for some distributed abstract checking? I’m thinking of setting up a system with all 929 papers in it so that everyone can classify a few papers. That way we can check who is correct about the percentage that support the consensus.

Update: John finds the link to Peiser’s National Post piece. Notice that Peiser has dropped his easily refuted “34 articles reject the consensus” claim and switched to

An unbiased analysis of the peer-reviewed literature on global warming will find hundreds of papers (many of them written by the world’s leading experts in the field) that have raised serious reservations and outright rejection of the concept of a “scientific consensus on climate change.” The truth is, there is no such thing.

Presumably a reference to Timo Hameranta’s list, that includes papers that explicitly endorse the consensus. And his other big piece of evidence is Bray’s useless survey. Canadian readers might want to send a letter to the National Post.

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 the first paper. I guess he never bothered to read our response to Joyce in which we show in Table 1 that the results are nearly identical when we use his preferred data source. It is understandable that he could make this argument five years ago, but why would he persist in making it in 2005 when it has been definitively shown to be false? (I’ll let you put on your Freakonomics-thinking-hat and figure out the answer to that last question.) As Lott and Whitley are by now well aware, the statistical results they get in that paper are an artifact of some bizarre choices they made and any reasonable treatment of the data returns our initial results. (Even Ted Joyce, our critic, acknowledges that the basic patterns in the data we report are there, which Lott and Whitley were trying to challenge.)

(Thanks to John Fleck for the tip.)

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.

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 Good News from Iraq (GNfI) for that month related to electricity generation. Because GNfI does not always report electricity generation figures, the third and fourth columns shows official electricity generation and availability figures (obtained from the Brookings Institution’s Iraq index.).

One caution when reading the table: because it only contains good news, the real situation in Iraq is likely worse than presented here.

Month	Good News	electricity generation	average hours of supply per day
May 2004	While the Army Corps of Engineers has been mostly restoring oil infrastructure, it is also “creating and improving ports, airports, roads, bridges, schools and health clinics. The corps has replaced more than 700 electrical towers throughout Iraq, Roberts said. The goal is to restore 6,000 megawatts to the national grid by June 1. About 4,500 megawatts are currently on the national grid.” GNFI01	3902 MW	11
Jun 2004	The authorities have earmarked $2 bln next year to rehabilitate the national electricity grid. The electricity delivery still leaves a lot to be desired, not least due to continuing sabotage. Lt. Gen. Faris Rasheed al-Bayati, who heads the Electricity Grid Protection force, GNFI03	4293 MW	10
Jul 2004	Regarding electricity, 64 percent [of Iraqis polled] agreed to a question that power supplies were worse than under the ousted leader Saddam Hussein. GNFI06	4584 MW	10
Aug 2004	Iraq and US engineers have reduced the shortage this month, adding 152 megawatts to the national grid to bring the national total to more than 5,200 megawatts - enough to service 15.6 million Iraqi homes. GNFI09	4707 MW	13
Sep 2004	U.S. engineers have helped place seven generators on line this month in Iraq, bringing the national electricity capacity to more than 5,300 megawatts - a level that exceeds the country’s pre-war capacity of 4,400 megawatts. GNFI10	4467 MW	13
Oct 2004	A new generator came on line here today bringing enough new electricity to the energy- thirsty country to fuel more than 275,000 Iraqi homes. The new 96 Megawatt generator is the second new generator to come on line at the north Baghdad plant since the reconstruction effort began at the site one year ago. The commissioning brings the total available electricity in the country to nearly 5,300 Megawatts, far exceeding the pre-war level of 4,400. GNFI13	4074 MW	13
Nov 2004	October has been a good month for electricity production in Iraq: two new generators outside Baghdad have added another 192 megawatts to the national grid, eight new mobile power stations at Bayji were turned over to the authorities, and an upgrade of conductors on a 41 kilometer transmission line between the Dibis and Old Kirkuk substations has again connected the Kurdish region and the rest of Iraq. The report concludes: “October’s production in the country has regularly exceeded 5,000 megawatts, compared to the pre-war level of 4,400. Since arriving last year, the Corps has strung 8,600 kilometers of transmission line, built over 1,200 towers and added over 1,800 megawatts to the grid.” GNFI14	3199 MW	13
Dec 2004	Substantial overhauls of the power grid have produced an increase of more than 10 percent in megawattage compared with the prewar figure. ‘Right now, we have between 11 and 15 hours per day of electricity in almost all areas of the country that are electrified, and by the end of 2005 our expectation is we will be at 18 to 20 hours,’ GNFI17	3380 MW	N/A
Jan 2005	Work is 82 percent complete at a power generation facility north of Baghdad. This project will increase electrical generation capacity by 325 megawatts through the addition of two combustion turbines to the existing substation site… USAID is expanding a thermal power plant in southern Baghdad with a 132 kV connection to the national grid. This project will add 216 MW of generation capacity… USAID’s project to increase generation at a major power plant in Babil Governorate is now 40 percent complete… Work is 79 percent complete in the restoration of heat exchangers at four generating stations in southern Iraq.” GNFI19	3289 MW	9
Feb 2005	USAID’s project to increase generation at a thermal major power plant in Babil Governorate is moving forward and is now 56 percent complete… To date, USAID’s rehabilitation efforts at the power plant have increased net capacity by 355 MW. When rehabilitation efforts are complete in May 2005, it is expected that the total increase in capacity will be approximately 500 MW GNFI21	3611 MW	8.5
Mar 2005	After the Iraqi grid deteriorated from 9000 MW in 1991 to 4300 MW in 2003, mostly due to lack of maintenance, the reconstruction authorities will be temporarily shutting down 10 power stations long overdue for a complete overhaul. After the re-opening, this will add another 1300 MW to the grid. GNFI23	3627 MW	11.8
Apr 2005	As March draws to a close, temperatures in Iraq are on the rise. Getting more electricity on the national grid is of foremost concern as the summer months draw near. An international team of engineers and technical professionals at the Bayji power plant has spent the past nine months working to get an additional 270 megawatts of power on the grid, which is enough energy to power more than 200,000 Iraqi homes and businesses. GNFI25	3390 MW	9
May 2005	Work continues on the rehabilitation of the Doura power plant in southern Baghdad. Upon completion, an additional 320 MW is projected to be available for Iraq’s national electrical grid. Although its four steam boilers and turbines are each rated at 160MW, all have been poorly maintained for many years, largely due to spare parts shortages. GNFI28	3560 MW	8.8

So, to summarize the good electricity news: Due to lack of maintenance, electricity production fell from 9000 MW in 1991 to 4400 MW before the war. Since then, there have been many announcements of improved generating capacity and production has fallen further to 3560 MW.

Update: I added electricity hours per day to the table.

The Ninth Skeptics Circle is out.

As my readers know, the reason why the Lancet study and the ILCS give different numbers for deaths in Iraq is because the studies measured different things over a different time periods. Of course, that fact isn’t going to stop pro-war columnists from claiming that the ILCS refutes the Lancet study. Here is Tony Parkinson writing in The Age.

How many people, for example, still swear blind that 100,000 civilians have been killed in the war in Iraq? For some, it has become an article of faith that this is the cost of an illegal war of aggression waged by a ruthless imperial power.

For this we can mainly thank the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, which published a controversial survey on the impact of war in Iraq ahead of last year’s US presidential election. Based on a sample of 788 households in Iraq, it estimated the “excess deaths” resulting from war to be in a range between 8000 to 194,000. It claimed a 95 per cent confidence that the actual death toll was at least 98,000.

Now, the United Nations Development Program in association with Iraq’s Ministry of Planning has published its own survey, based on a much larger sample of almost 22,000 households. The Iraq Living Conditions Survey estimated war-related deaths to be nearer 24,000, including both civilian and military casualties. Still hideous, but not the apocalyptic vision of industrial-strength slaughter embraced so readily, so ghoulishly, by some critics of the war.

Fortunately, Anthony O’Donnell has sorted Parkinson out in a letter to the editor:

Tony Parkinson (Opinion, 27/5) and the accompanying illustration by John Spooner each claims that the recent UNDP finding of 24,000 war-related deaths in Iraq somehow discredits an earlier study published in The Lancet which estimated 100,000 excess deaths since the allied invasion. In fact, the UNDP study does no such thing.

The Lancet figure included all excess deaths, whether caused directly by armed combatants, homicide, disease, accident and so on. Within this, it is possible to estimate about 33,000 deaths directly attributable to coalition and insurgent forces. The UNDP study focused solely on such deaths and in turn came up with a figure of 24,000. However, the UNDP study covers only the first year of occupation while the Lancet study covered 18 months. The UNDP study therefore suggests a toll as high or higher than the Lancet study for this type of death. Contrary to Parkinson and Spooner’s claims, the UNDP figure represents a partial but significant vindication of the method and results of the Lancet study.

John Quiggin notes how many factual errors Parkinson makes and observes that blogs have done a much better job on this issue than the papers.

There also seems to be a trend amongst Lancet denialists to keep reducing the sample size of the Lancet study. In spite of the fact that they surveyed 988 households, Tim Blair claimed they only surveyed 808, and now Parkinson has further reduced the number to 788.

And what of Parkinson’s charge that those concerned about the number of Iraqi deaths are behaving “ghoulishly”? Here is Parkinson being just as ghoulish last year:

Finally, there is the harrowing evidence of the regime’s monstrosity, with the uncovering of 300,000 corpses. Saddam was not just another tinpot dictator. This was slaughter on a historic scale.

Now the “300,000 corpses have been uncovered” claim has been embraced by the pro-war crowd just as the readily as the Lancet’s 100,000 number has been embraced by the other side. The big difference is that the 300,000 number is known to be false. Last year, the Observer reported:

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ‘400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

It seems that an estimate by Human Rights Watch that 290,000 Iraqis were “missing” was turned into claims that 300,000 or 400,000 bodies had actually been found. Furthermore,

Hania Mufti, one of the researchers that produced that estimate, said: ‘Our estimates were based on estimates. The eventual figure was based in part on circumstantial information gathered over the years.’

I’m sure they’ve done the best they could with the information they had, but an estimate based on other estimates and circumstantial evidence cannot be considered as reliable as the Lancet study using state-of-the-art random sampling and deaths verified with death certificates.

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald has several articles on blogs and blogging. I get a mention in this one, as “one of a handful of prominent bloggers covering news, politics and economics”. It’s nice to be mentioned like that, but I really think they should have included Ken Parish or Mark Bahnisch instead of me.

John Quiggin gets quoted:

“I have had occasional sharp interchanges with Tim Blair and some others but nothing that could really rate compared to Tim’s other feuds”

I wonder what he is referring to?