Deltoid

Chris Mooney has a very interesting article about the dubious techniques used by creationists to make it appear that there is strong public support for teaching creationism in schools alongside scientific theories. My favourite was this question:

Texas law requires students to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information. Should the state board of education apply this standard to how evolution is presented in textbooks?

People who agree with that are apparently agreeing that “intelligent design” should be taught beside evolution. I bet you’d get less support if you asked:

Should religion be taught in science classes in schools or should such teaching be left to the churches?

I can add an anecdote to this: A couple of years ago I was visiting my parents and there was a lively disscusion about how certain things had evolved. My brother’s girlfriend listened with rapt attention. When we were finished she spoke up: “Wow! That was amazing! They never taught me that stuff in school.” Turns out that she had gone to an Adventist high school and they had never taught her about evolution. I don’t know how the school pulled this off—presumably evolution was in their syllabus so they could get government funding. My guess is that they just skipped over that bit.

On his blog, John Ray makes a remarkable claim: “Greenies” are wrong about ozone depletion. He writes:

In 1991, the Greenies got everyone to ban CFC chemicals. CFCs were the normal gases that has always been used to make refrigerators and air conditioners work. CFCs even used to put the puff in all our aerosol cans. The ban was because CFCs supposedly destroyed earth’s ozone layer and caused the ozone “hole” over Antarctica. So the hole has of course shrunk by now, right? Wrong! As this U.N. report shows, the hole is as big as ever! Another Greenie scare proved wrong.

Ozone is of course a common industrial “pollutant”. We actually send tons of the stuff into atmosphere all the time. So even if CFCs do destroy some of it we replace it too. The theorists discount that, of course, but seeing that the rest of their theory hasn’t worked out, I think the theorists are the ones who should be discounted.

It is so easy to find information on the net these days that there is absolutely no excuse for writing things like Ray does above. He “refutes” ozone-depletion theory by mis-stating what the theory predicts. It took me five minutes to find what scientists actually say will be the results of the CFC ban: CFCs last in the atmosphere for many years, so it will take until 2050 for the CFC ban to restore the ozone layer

Ray’s second paragraph is also seriously in error. Even if the theorists were wrong about ozone depletion (which they weren’t) and we discount them (which we shouldn’t), it does not follow that ground-level ozone can rise 25km up into the stratosphere in significant quantities. If Ray wants to claim that it does, he needs to present some theory that explains how this happens, and also explain away the measurements of ozone concentrations at different altitudes that show that it isn’t happening.

I will take one piece of advice from Ray’s second paragraph and discount any future claims John Ray might make.

Update: John Ray has responded with:

A Leftist blogger has taken umbrage over my note that the Antarctic ozone hole has not shrunk 12 years after CFCs were banned. He says that I misstate the Greenie claim — which he gives as “it will take until 2050 for the CFC ban to restore the ozone layer”. But if it takes 60 years for a full restoration, shouldn’t we see SOME effect after 12 years? Let me make a similar prediction: By the year 2050 a Communist society will have emerged that will make its people prosperous. No sign of it yet but you never know!

I would have hoped that after being caught making one ignorant claim, Ray would not have turned around and done it again, but he has. If he had bothered to look at what the scientists said, he would have discovered that CFCs weren’t banned in 1991, but that their use was phased out. Consequently, the CFC concentration in the lower atmosphere peaked in the mid 90s and has since declined. However, because it takes years for CFCs to reach the stratosphere, CFC levels there continued to increase and have only now peaked. They predict that ozone levels will start to increase by 2010. Once again, it only took me a few minutes to discover these facts—I don’t understand why Ray prefers to argue from a position of profound ignorance.

I should also note Ray’s attempt to move the goal posts. He originally claimed that the “Greenies” were wrong because their prediction about the ozone hole was false. When he discovered that the prediction was true so far, he turns around and attacks them for making predictions that can’t be proven false until 2050. But scientists have made many short term predictions about ozone depletion that have proven true. The most spectacular one was the discovery of the ozone hole. But don’t expect Ray to mention any of this.

One more thing: Rather than use my name, Ray refers to me as a “leftist blogger”. This really is a give away about his attitude. It’s not about science to Ray—it’s all about politics and ideology.

Update 2: Ray has yet another post on ozone. Instead of correcting his false claims he writes:

Far from following ANY regular progression, the hole clearly fluctuates wildly—as much as any other natural weather phenomenon—and its recent progression from super-small in 2002 to as-big-as-ever in 2003 was predicted by no-one. And in science, if you can’t predict it buddy, you don’t understand it. So claiming to have found the “cause” of something you don’t understand is sheer hubris. Give us back our CFCs!

This is just willfully ignorant. The link Ray provides is the same one as in his original post. It seems that the basis for his attack on ozone science is that one page plus whatever facts he makes up. Yes, the size fluctuates somewhat. In 2003 it peaked at 28 million square km, while in 2002 it peaked at 18 million (super-small in Ray-speak means “more than twice the area of Australia”). And you can see graphs of size going back to 1979 here. Just as predicted, the average size has grown from nothing to the present size as CFC levels in the stratosphere have increased.

Ray originally claimed that ozone science was wrong because its predictions were false. When he discovered that its predictions were coming true, suddenly that was irrelevant. It’s clear that his objections are not based on science, but on ideology.

Update 3: Chris Vinall rips into Ray’s ozone claims as well.

I while ago I wrote on John Ray’s claims that environmentalists were wrong about ozone depletion. I think it is quite clear that subsequent research has vindicated the concerns of scientists about ozone depletion. The refusal of Ray to admit that the environmentalists could possibly be right about ozone depletion despite overwhelming evidence is telling—he believes that environmentalists are wrong, irrespective of the facts in any case.

I’ve found another ozone hole denier. In this post, Sylvain Galineau dismisses the ozone hole as “propaganda”. I tried to discuss this with him in his comments and he offered three arguments for his position.

1. In response to my point that the 1995 Nobel prize for chemistry had been awarded for the work on ozone depletion, he argued that this was “an appeal to authority and establishes nothing.” [Correction: That was Galineau’s co-blogger Jonathan Gewirtz.] Galineau opined that the award was a “sacred cow” and had been influenced by politics. Unfortunately, Galineau does not seem to understand that “appeal to authority” is only a fallacy if the authority is just an authority on some unrelated subject. I’m not an expert on chemistry so I have to rely on the opinions of experts. I’m certainly not going to rely on the opinion of Galineau, who is not an expert and has an axe to grind.
2. He argued that the threat of ozone depletion had been depicted at the time as something that had already occurred over habitable regions rather than as something that would happen if CFCs continued to be used. I said that my recollection was different and asked him to provide examples. He responded with this story, which wasn’t from the 80s but from just a few months ago. It does warn about dangers of ozone depletion over habitable areas, but that’s because such depletion has been observed since the 80s. I posted a link describing such observations, but Galineau deleted it, calling it an “offtopic rant”.
3. He argued that people would have just stopped using CFCs and switched to more expensive alternatives without the Montreal protocol. I pointed to this graph, which shows that, despite concerns first being raised in the mid 70s, CFC production continued to increase until Montreal. Immediately after Montreal it declined rapidly. Galineau dismissed this as a “coincidence”. He further argued that companies would have got consumers to switch (absent Montreal) by increasing prices for CFCs. This argument seems profoundly ignorant of the way markets work.

Galineau repeatedly demanded that I produce evidence for my position. When I did, he edited my post to delete the evidence, claiming that it was “offtopic”. I must confess that I did include this link, debunking Galineau’s claims about DDT. It wasn’t about ozone, but it was relevant to another part of his post.

I believe that Galineau, like John Ray, is an ideologue. They hold their beliefs about ozone regardless of the facts.

Update: I posted a link to this post in Galineau’s comment thread. Galineau deleted it. Unfortunately for him, his co-blogger Jonathan Gewirtz had already responded to this post in that thread, so he did not succeed in preventing readers from seeing my comments. Gewirtz writes:

Tim scores points WRT Sylvain’s imperfect knowledge of CFC production statistics, which proves… something.

The interesting thing about the CFC production facts is not that Galineau did not know what they were, but that when he found out what they were, it did not influence his beliefs at all. I am reminded of the story about Hegel who, when told that the facts did not agree with his theories, is supposed to have said “So much the worse for the facts.”

Update 2: Galineau’s blog, Chicago Boyz, as a gesture of admiration has pictures of some distinguished Chicago “boys” at its head, including seven Nobel laureates. One U of Chicago Nobel laureate that they don’t have is seen on this page: F. Sherwood Rowland, who shared the 1995 chemistry Nobel for his work on ozone depletion. Galineau expressed his admiration for this distinguished Chicago boy by calling him a “Nobel prized sacred cow”. His co-blogger Jonathan Gewirtz wrote “Nobel committees are influenced by politics and fads”.

I wrote earlier about ozone depletion deniers John Ray and Sylvain Galineau. I’ve found another such denier and his name is John Lott. Lott wrote a positive review* of Environmental Overkill, a book written by Dixy Lee Ray with Lou Guzzo. In his review, Lott calls ozone depletion an “environmental myth” and a “scare story”.

Now, Lott’s false statements about ozone depletion might have been forgivable if Ray had made a good case against ozone depletion, but the quality of the science and scholarship in her work is appalling. Robert Parson has written a devastating critique of her chapters on ozone depletion. Parsons categorizes the problems with Ray’s work into four categories

1. Basic misconceptions about science. For example, the claim that CFCs cannot rise to the stratosphere because they are heavier than air. If this were true all the heavy gasses in the atmosphere would collect at sea level and the air would be unbreathable there.
2. False assertions that require a more detailed knowledge of the technical literature to refute. For example, the claim that explosive volcanic eruptions are a major source of stratospheric chlorine.
3. Statements presented in a misleading context and surrounded with false information.
4. Shoddy scholarship, ignoring the relevant scientific literature and instead uncritically relying on such bizarre sources as publications by Lyndon LaRouche’s associates

Suffice it to say that checking out any of Ray’s claims against her alleged sources would have shown them to be false. But Lott described her work as “solid” and endorsed it.

While I’m on the topic of ozone depletion denialists, this discussion on Sallie Baliunas is interesting, and Jim Norton has a whole page of links debunking various myths about ozone depletion.

*Lott’s review appeared in Regulation 16:4 pp 80–82 (unfortunately not available on-line).

Apart from the one or two posts about John Lott I’ve also posted about ozone depletion denial, creationism and astroturf. All these topics, as well as Lott, come together in the person of Steve Milloy. Milloy runs a website junkscience.com that purports to debunk “junk science”.

Unsuspecting visitors might think that Milloy’s site is devoted to criticizing shoddy science, but they would be wrong. If you look at what he “debunks” you will find that the real criterion for deciding what is “junk science” is not the quality of the work, but the political agenda that it might support. Studies that support a right-wing agenda are endorsed, while studies that don’t are harshly criticized. John Quiggin noticed the same thing, while Milloy almost admits it in his definition of junk science:

“Junk science” is bad science used to further a special agenda, such as personal injury lawyers extorting deep-pocket businesses; the “food police,” environmental Chicken Littles and gun-control extremists advocating wacky social programs; overzealous regulators expanding bureaucratic power/budgets; cut-throat businesses attacking competitors; unethical businesses making bogus product claims; slick politicians; and wannabe scientists seeking fame and fortune.

He no longer uses this definition (too much of a give away?) but archive.org has preserved a copy.

Armed with this knowledge we can predict the junkscience.com verdict of any scientific result without having to even look at how the study was carried out. Here are some examples:

The ozone hole? Completely natural:

The same seasonal (and localised) depletion was actually discovered in the 1950s and recognised as an interesting natural phenomenon (interest then was centred on the massive increase in ozone levels over the south pole in late spring, early summer as the massive high concentrations from the adjacent temperate regions penetrate the weakening polar vortex). In the misanthropic ’80s it was given significant publicity and a character change - this time it was big, bad and (you guessed it) man-made while the parallel build up of ozone outside the polar vortex no longer rated a mention. Stratospheric ozone levels are volatile and seasonal, whether there has been any unusual change in ozone levels over the period is moot. There is only one certainty and that is that perceptions changed purely because the great ozone ‘hole’ got a new publicist.

Oh really? Look at this graph, which shows ozone levels in October at Halley Station in Antarctica. (from this page). Pretty obviously there was no hole in the 1950s. Anyone writing about ozone depletion who is unaware of this fact has to be actively avoiding learning the facts about ozone depletion.

The Theory of Evolution? A plot to promote atheism. (OK, Milloy didn’t write that article, but it was endorsed as the “Commentary of the Day”).

Laws that require safe storage of guns? A study by Cummings et al used a pooled time series design similar to Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” to study the effect of laws that make gun owners criminally liable if someone is injured because a child gains unsupervised access to a gun. They found that the laws were associated with a 23% reduction in unintentional shooting deaths of children.

Here’s what Milloy writes about Cummings study:

This was an ecologic epidemiology study, meaning the conclusion is based on very “macro” comparisons of groups of people. The study involved no data about individuals, just groups. Traditionally, these studies are only useful for forming hypotheses for further testing, not irrefutable facts.

In particular, no data was collected on compliance with these laws and the relationship of compliance to the decrease in injuries. There may have been fewer unintentional firearm-related injuries in states with safe storage laws, but this study assumed compliance with the laws and assumed that compliance is responsible for the decrease in injuries. A big assumption considering the result.

The reported 23% decrease in injuries is a pretty weak result-probably beyond the capability of the ecologic type of study to reliably detect. Even in the better types of epidemiology studies (i.e., cohort and case-control), rate increases of less than 100% (and rate decreases of less than 50%) are very suspect.

So how much stock can be put in a weak result based on inadequate data?

Now this criticism applies equally to Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime”, only more so, since the crime decreases found by Lott were much less than 23%. (For the bit that reads “assumed compliance with the laws” you need to read “assumed frequent encounters between criminals and permit holders”.) So what is Milloy’s take on “More Guns, Less Crime”? Does he call it an even weaker result based on inadequate data? No, he endorses it

I emailed Milloy and asked him to explain his inconsistent treatment of the Cummings and Lott studies. His reply:

That wasn’t my summary… but quotes from the article.

The weakness is the article is that there is no direct link that it is gun ownership that is causing the decline in violent crime. But the statistics cited are actuarial, not estimated or hypothesized.

Yes, he didn’t write the summary that praised Lott’s work, but he did endorse the summary instead of treating Lott’s study like that of Cummings. And actually Cummings’ study used actuarial statistics while Lott did not, so his “explanation” is nonsense. No, it is clear that to Milloy, Cummings is junk science, while Lott is to be endorsed.

Given all of the above, it should come as no surprise that junkscience.com is another astroturf operation. As part of the Tobacco Settlement Agreement Philip Morris agreed to release millions of documents about their operations. These detail how TASSC (The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition) was a front secretly created and funded by a PR firm acting for Philip Morris. Here is the key document (with annotations by Stewart Fist). TASSC and junkscience.com shared the same address and were both run by Milloy. Studies that find harmful effects from tobacco smoke seem to attract particularly venomous attacks from junkscience.com. PR Watch has the full story of Milloy’s history.

And this conduct by Milloy is absolutely disgraceful.

Update:The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was folded up in 1998, but the term “sound science” continues to be used in the same, political, way. Chris Mooney has the scoop on the latest developments.

There has been quite a bit of reaction to my post on Milloy.

Michael Peckham writes “Milloy’s criticism may be right some of the time, but only when it fits his preconceived anti-regulatory agenda. ”

John Quiggin, at Crooked Timber and at his own blog observes that the link between Cato and Milloy reflects badly on Cato. Also the comments in the Crooked Timber have some attempts to defend Milloy against the charge that he is boosting creationism. Yes, Milloy offers the Theory of Evolution some faint praise, but he also thinks Creationism should get equal time with evolution and while he savagely criticizes real science, he won’t criticize creationist bunk.

Steve Michel writes

I read Milloy’s book a few years ago, and while some of it’s good, in general it’s just a conservative rant. It’s more interested in protecting big corporations from lawsuits (which are, admittedly, sometimes on the edges of science) than it is in, say, the kind of religiousy-correct junk science promoted by conservatives around the country.

Jeff writes “Tim Lambert does a good job illustrating the moral bankruptcy of a typical anti-liberal - Steve Milloy of junkscience.com”

Radagast examines Milloy’s article on mad cows and finds it wanting.

Demosthenes comments on Milloy and TASSC (the tobacco companies’ astroturf operation).

I always have believed and always will believe that it’s not the arguer but the argument that is important. Even if Milloy works for Phillip Morris, he may have a point. Still, this sort of willful misrepresentation bothers me a lot.

I agree that the argument is more important than the arguer, that’s why I didn’t mention Milloy’s funding source till after I had demolished his claims. The funding explains why he made so many false claims, it does not prove that those claims are false.

Meanwhile, John Brignell has attempted a defence (scroll to bottom of page) of Milloy. He ignores the substance of the criticism and focuses on the language so that he can dismiss the criticism as name calling. He complains that pointing out that Milloy is funded by tobacco companies is “playing the man and not the ball”. His objection would have a tiny bit more force if he hadn’t immediately turned around and gone for the man himself by implying that John Quiggin is unqualified to criticize Milloy:

A is able to call B a charlatan. B holds a B.A. in Natural Sciences from the Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Health Sciences in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, a Juris Doctorate from the University of Baltimore and a Master of Laws from the Georgetown University Law Center. The qualifications of A must be pretty impressive. Wonder what they are.

Unfortunately, when Brignell goes for his man, he misses and falls flat on his face. Compare Milloy’s CV with Quiggin’s CV. As far as I can tell, Milloy has never conducted any research and has published only one paper, which was a poster at a conference and he wasn’t even the first author, while Quiggin has well over one hundred refereed journal papers. I wrote to Brignell suggesting that he provide links to both CVs so his readers could judge the matter for themselves, but Brignell did not so (though he did list Quiggin’s degrees).

In an update, Brignell finally gets around to commenting on the substance of the criticism. He claims, without offering any evidence, that on the scientific issues Milloy is largely correct. He does disagree with Milloy about the gun lobbying, so it would seem that he thinks that this claim is correct:

The same seasonal (and localised) depletion was actually discovered in the 1950s and recognised as an interesting natural phenomenon (interest then was centred on the massive increase in ozone levels over the south pole in late spring, early summer as the massive high concentrations from the adjacent temperate regions penetrate the weakening polar vortex). In the misanthropic ’80s it was given significant publicity and a character change - this time it was big, bad and (you guessed it) man-made while the parallel build up of ozone outside the polar vortex no longer rated a mention. Stratospheric ozone levels are volatile and seasonal, whether there has been any unusual change in ozone levels over the period is moot. There is only one certainty and that is that perceptions changed purely because the great ozone ‘hole’ got a new publicist.

And just to be sure, here is what Brignell wrote about it earlier:

Watch out for a new bunch of mysterious figures lurking about Britain’s beauty spots at the dead on night. They are not smugglers or clandestine lovers, but fridge dumpers. It is the latest coup by the almighty Greens of the EU. Believe it or not, because of new EU regulations, DEFRA, fresh from its foot and mouth triumph, is asking the British to refrain from buying fridges. It is now illegal to dispose of both the coolant and the insulant in fridges, but in Britain there is no legal way of doing it. All because of a hole in the ozone layer that was probably always there and an unproven theory as to how it was caused.

Brignell read my post which contains this graph, that shows ozone levels in October at Halley Station in Antarctica. (from this page). It is perfectly clear that there was no hole in the 1950s. It is perfectly clear that the hole was not always there. There is not one scrap of evidence to support Brignell’s claim. Yet even when confronted with the evidence that proves his claim is false he continues to maintain that it is true. Disgraceful.

A study that found a link between antibiotic use and breast cancer has been in the news and sure enough Steve Milloy has attacked it, calling it “baloney”. One interesting thing I’ve noticed about Milloy is the large number of people who independently come to the conclusion that he is full of it. In this post modisch details how dreadful Milloy’s arguments are. While in this post Myria, who seems generally sympathetic to Milloy, concludes:

Frankly FOX should be embarrassed to have this poorly thought out criticism on their site.

Andrew Wakefield published a study linking immunization injections with autism. The Lancet now says that it should never have been published because of a “fatal conflict of interest”. At the time Wakefield was being paid to collect evidence to support possible compensation claims. Ten of his coauthors have issued a retraction, though Wakefield has refused. I think it was unethical for Wakefield to conceal his conflict of interest.

George Ricaurte published a study alleging that MDMA (Ecstasy) causes brain damage. It turns out that he actually used a different drug in his experiments. Mark Kleiman has the details. I agree with Kleiman—Ricaurte is guilty of outrageous misconduct.

A while ago, I wrote about Steve Milloy’s junkscience.com and observed

Unsuspecting visitors might think that Milloy’s site is devoted to criticizing shoddy science, but they would be wrong. If you look at what he “debunks” you will find that the real criterion for deciding what is “junk science” is not the quality of the work, but the political agenda that it might support. Studies that support a right-wing agenda are endorsed, while studies that don’t are harshly criticized.

Junkscience.com only covered one of the cases above. Can you guess which one? The one about the study that would help lawyers sue a drug company, or the one about the study that supported drug laws?

(more…)

Last month I wrote about how junkscience.com and The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition were fronts set up by tobacco companies to oppose regulatioon of smoking. Chris Mooney published a very interesting article in the Washington Post on the use of the phrase “sound science” by other industry funded groups to oppose government regulation.

Iain Murray then attacked Mooney, accusing him of misrepresentation, distortion and double-speak. Mooney has replied here, in my opinion thoroughly destroying Murray’s arguments.

I’ve been reluctant to write anything about the climate change debate because there is a daunting amount of material on the matter, and I don’t feel that I’ve read enough of it to make any kind of useful comment. However, the heart of Murray’s piece is the claim that Mooney misrepresented what the NAS report on climate change found. To see whether that claim is true you don’t have to read the entire literature, just the mercifully brief NAS report.

To support his claim that Mooney misrepresented the report, Murray quotes Richard Lindzen, one of authors of the report (and a global warming skeptic, though Murray does not mention this). The complete article that this quote comes from is here. Lindzen writes:

[I]t is quite wrong to say that our NAS study endorsed the credibility of the IPCC assessment report. We were asked to evaluate the IPCC “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM), the only part of the IPCC reports that is ever read or quoted by the media and politicians.

In fact, right in the very first paragraph of the report you find:

In particular, the written request (Appendix A) asked for the National Academies’ “assistance in identifying the areas in the science of climate change where there are the greatest certainties and uncertainties,” and “views on whether there are any substantive differences between the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Reports and the IPCC summaries.”

The panel was asked to look at the reports and the summary and give their views on whether their were differences. Section 7 of their report is devoted to this. Lindzen was one of the panel members. How could he possibly be unaware of what the panel was supposed to do?

Lindzen continues:

The SPM, which is seen as endorsing Kyoto, is commonly presented as the consensus of thousands of the world’s foremost climate scientists. In fact, it is no such thing. Largely for that reason, the NAS panel concluded that the SPM does not provide suitable guidance for the U.S. government…

This is pretty well the opposite of what the panel concluded. In section 7 they actually report:

After analysis, the committee finds that the conclusions presented in the SPM and the Technical Summary (TS) are consistent with the main body of the report.

Again, Lindzen is one of the authors of the report. How can he say that the report says the opposite of what it actually says?

Lindzen continues:

The full IPCC report, most of which is written by scientists about specific scientific topics in their areas of expertise, is an admirable description of research activities in climate science. It is not, however, directed at policy. The SPM is, of course, but it is also a very different document. It represents a consensus of government representatives, rather than of scientists. As a consequence, the SPM has a strong tendency to disguise uncertainty, and conjures up some scary scenarios for which there is no evidence.

I suppose it is possible that this is true, but it is not what the NAS report says. The panel checked with the scientists and found “that no changes were made [to the SPM] without the consent of the convening lead authors”.

Lindzen continues:

Similarly, in the case of our NAS report, far too much attention was paid to the hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the report. The summary claimed that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Yet, the full text noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating long term trends, a crucial point that the summary neglected to mention.

What? There are only 20 years of data for surface air temperatures? That doesn’t sound right. Let’s see what the full text really says:

Although warming at Earth’s surface has been quite pronounced during the past few decades, satellite measurements beginning in 1979 indicate relatively little warming of air temperature in the troposphere. The committee concurs with the findings of a recent National Research Council report, which concluded that the observed difference between surface and tropospheric temperature trends during the past 20 years is probably real, as well as its cautionary statement to the effect that temperature trends based on such short periods of record, with arbitrary start and end points, are not necessarily indicative of the long-term behavior of the climate system.

Wow. Global warming skeptics have been pointing at the satellite data and arguing that it shows that there is no warming going on. The NAS panel points out that 20 years of satellite data is probably not enough to judge long term trends, so it should be treated with caution. Lindzen then pretends that the caution about the satellite data was meant to apply to the panel’s statement that greenhouse gases were causing global warming. It clearly was not meant to apply to that statement and it doesn’t even make sense if you try to apply it to that statement, since surface temperature data goes back at least one hundred years. Again, Lindzen is one of the authors of the report. I can’t think of any excuse for what he wrote here, can you?

Lindzen goes on to claim:

Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled.

Well, no. Their primary conclusion is expressed at the beginning of their summary:

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.

It is possible that their conclusion is wrong, but they certainly didn’t throw up their hands and say that the science wasn’t settled as Lindzen claims.

I find Lindzen’s systematic misrepresentation of the report that he helped author completely inexcusable. As for Murray, after endorsing Lindzen’s remarks, he very commendably offered a link to the report so that his readers could check for themselves, so I don’t know what to make of what he has done. Didn’t he read the report himself? To compound the problem he has used the same Lindzen quote to attack a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Murray wittily calls a group containing twenty Nobel Prize winners the “Union of Crackpot Scientists”.

When I was looking in the Philip Morris Documents Archive for information on their astroturf operations, I noticed some familiar names: The American Enterprise Institute, The Heartland Institute and the Cato Institute. All have been involved in employing and/or promoting John Lott.

For example, here is a quote from Philip Morris’ 1999 communications plan:

Our communications plan will include enlisting allies and other potential third parties to help provide an “echo chamber” of opinion in local, regional and national media, consistent with our messages.

Some of the “allies” listed were:

• CATO Institute
• Heritage Foundation
• American Enterprise Institute
• Competitive Enterprise Institute

Now, just because Cato allied itself with Philip Morris it doesn’t mean that their is something untoward going on. Cato say that part of its mission mission is to promote limited government, so both Cato and Philip Morris would oppose government regulation of cigarettes, Philip Morris because it would reduce their profits and Cato because of a general opposition to government regulations. But in this document on the Republican agenda and Tort reform, Cato, the AEI and Heritage are all enthusiastic about pushing Philip Morris’ agenda on tort reform:

During the week I spoke with the leadership of the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation to insure that as they submit policy initiatives to the Republican leadership (which all three groups have requested to do on an expedited basis) that they focus on tort reform as a priority and that they include us in the process. All are enthusiastic about the process.

Perhaps I’m missing something here, but the issue in this case is not supporting smaller government, but changing the law to help Philip Morris make more money.

One of the reasons that Cato et al were so eager to do Philip Morris’ bidding might have something to do with the payments listed in Philip Morris’ 1997 Budget:

American Enterprise Institute	$100,000
Cato	$175,000
Competitive Enterprise Institute	$200,000
Heartland	$50,000
Heritage	$53,000
TASSC	$200,000

On their “about cato” page, Cato states:

In order to maintain an independent posture, the Cato Institute accepts no government funding or endowments.

Apparently Cato feels that accepting money from the government would compromise its independence. It would seem that money from Philip Morris has had a similar effect.

Update: Julian Sanchez emails:

While I don’t know what sort of “assurances” the gentleman from Philip Morris feels he got from Cato, I do know that at an event I attended when I worked there, their legal scholar Bob Levy opposed (on federalism grounds) national legislation that would have immunized gunmakers against state suits. He makes essentially the same case in this article. Bob Levy had also been Cato’s point-man on tobacco issues, and while I can’t say for certain, I would be very surprised if he didn’t hold the identical position vis a vis private tobacco suits. Bob was certainly critical of some of the state lawsuits but I think his argument there is fully consistent with the general mission and principles of Cato, whether one agrees with those or not. Also, it’s hard to square some of his writing with the idea that he’s shilling for Phillip Morris. Here’s Bob’s chapter from a recent Cato Handbook for Congress:

The Master Settlement Agreement, signed in November 1998 by the major tobacco companies and 46 state attorneys general, transforms a competitive industry into a cartel, then guards against destabilization of the cartel by erecting barriers to entry that preserve the dominant market share of the tobacco giants. Far from being victims, the big four tobacco companies are at the very center of the plot. They managed to carve out a protected market for themselves, at the expense of smokers and tobacco companies that did not sign the agreement.

Phillip Morris is criticized by name in the same chapter

In another email he adds:

I assume what was going on in the meeting is that the Cato folk at the very least were opposing some of the state actions, and maybe some weird legal maneuvers the states themselves had undertaken. Florida, for instance, temporarily repealed the “assumption of risk” defense (barring the tobacco companies from arguing in court that they weren’t liable if smokers knowingly took a risk by choosing to smoke).

However, while Bob Levy criticises Philip Morris for helping to set up a cartel via the settlement, the actual policy recommendations proposed by Levy and Cato are:

Congress should

• deny funding for the Justice Department’s suit against cigarette makers,
• enact, under the Commerce Clause, legislation that abrogates the multistate tobacco settlement, and
• deregulate the growing of tobacco and the manufacture and advertising of tobacco products.

Each of these proposals would greatly benefit Philip Morris. And while Levy opposes federal inteference in gun laws he thinks it is appropriate in the case of the tobbaco settlement.

So I did some more searching and found a document detailing the tort reform changes Philip Morris wanted Cato to support. They included:

• uniform product liability law for state and federal cases
• limiting punitive damages
• requiring victims to show by “clear and convincing evidence” that the harm they suffered was the direct result of malicious conduct

However, in Cato’s policy recommendations they oppose reforms similar to the Philip Morris ones on federalism grounds. So we do have a case where Cato has behaved independently from Philip Morris even though the Philip Morris guy said they had Cato’s “enthusiastic” support. Perhaps the Phillip Morris guy was trying to justify his salary by pretending Cato was much more supportive than it really was.

The Panda’s Thumb is an excellent new blog devoted to defending the integrity of science against attacks from creationists. I put it straight into my blog roll. Mark Perakh has a post where he tells a story that should be very familiar to those who know about Lott’s antics at Amazon.com.

My book Unintelligent Design became available from Amazon in the middle of December 2003. On December 22 those curious observers who watch the sometimes funny exchange of opinions regarding books offered by Amazon, already could read a review of my book signed “A reader from Waco, Tx.” The opinion of that anonymous and very prompt reviewer was that my book was bad because it was published by a bad publisher — Prometheus Books. The anonymous reviewer recommended instead a forthcoming book by William Dembski titled The Design Revolution (which presumably must be good because of being published by a good publisher — InterVarsity Press). The reviewer from Waco promised that Dembski’s book would answer all my concerns. Of course, the fact that Dembski holds a non-teaching position at Baylor university which is located in Waco, Tx, was supposed to be a mere coincidence.

Some other reader responded to the reviewer from Waco referring to the latter’s review as that from “reader from Waco.” Suddenly, a few days later, the review from Waco reappeared on Amazon, word for word, but now signed “A reader from Riesel, Tx,” thus making a reference to “a reader from Waco” in another reviewer’s reply incomprehensible. Of course, the fact that Dembski happens to live in Riesel, Tx, was supposed to be just another of those coincidences whose probabilities Dembski is so fond of calculating. Indeed, Dembski would not, of course, advertise his own book anonymously, would he? It would be against his rigorous standards of decent behavior. Then something unthinkable happened. There was a glitch on the Canadian Amazon website wherein all real authors of anonymous reviews were revealed for a whole week. Who turned out to be the reader from Waco a.k.a. reader from Riesel? Surprise, surprise! It was our old acquaintance, mathematician, philosopher, theologian and the Isaac Newton of information theory, William Dembski.

The reason why the location of the reviewer changed to Riesel would be that Dembski posted a review under his own name on January 20, 2004 and gave his location as Riesel. Amazon reports the same location for all reviews by the same reviewer so Dembski’s anonymous review was also changed to Riesel.

This is not the only bit of underhanded behaviour that “Intelligent Design” proponents have been guilty of recently. Brian Leiter posted a blistering critique of a pro-Intelligent-Design book review by one Lawrence VanDyke. Chris Mooney explains what happened next:

perhaps because Leiter’s critique was so (justifiably) scathing, conservative attack dogs pounced. The National Review Online ran a piece by one Hunter Baker, a “freelance writer in Texas,” accusing Leiter of abusing his position as a distinguished scholar to try to ruin a young student’s career. Yet as Leiter notes here, Baker isn’t exactly a disinterested party. In fact, he’s the teaching assistant of pro-ID scholar Francis Beckwith, whose book was reviewed by VanDyke! Does National Review have any shame?

That would be the same National Review that published David Kopel and Glenn Reynold’s smear of Steve Levitt using as source a “scholar” whose identity they deliberately concealed. And even though Levitt immediately denied the charge, to this day the NRO has not seen fit to correct the article.

When I wrote earlier about Steve Milloy, I commented on his attack on a study that found that the introduction safe-storage laws was followed by a 23% reduction in unintentional shooting deaths of children. Milloy claimed:

The reported 23% decrease in injuries is a pretty weak result-probably beyond the capability of the ecologic type of study to reliably detect. Even in the better types of epidemiology studies (i.e., cohort and case-control), rate increases of less than 100% (and rate decreases of less than 50%) are very suspect.

Milloy repeats this factor-of-two principle many times on junkscience.com. For example, on this page Milloy asserts:

Relative risks from 1.0 - 2.0 should be ignored.

(This page explains what a “relative risk” is if you don’t know.)

In my earlier post I observed that Milloy somehow neglected to apply this factor-of-two principle to Lott’s work. Today I want to write about the origins of his principle. It’s a very interesting story.

When I first read his comments I was rather puzzled. A measure that reduced crime by 45% would be a pretty spectacular success, but by Milloy’s principle it would be ignored. If you look in statistics text books you will not find Milloy’s principle. You will find that two sorts of significance are important:

Statistical Significance

Is it likely that the result occured by chance? A result that has less than a 5% probability of occuring by chance is usually considered statistically significant. (Although values other than 5% could be used.)

Practical Significance

Does it make a difference that matters? A measure that only made a difference of a handful of crimes in the whole country probably isn’t worth worrying about.

Another important thing statistics texts will tell you is that correlation is not the same thing as causation. Just because the safe-storage law was followed by a 23% drop in injuries it doesn’t follow that the law caused the drop. Some other factor might have caused the drop. Some people misunderstand this to mean that correlation doesn’t have anything to do with causation. Correlation doesn’t prove causation, but it is evidence for causation.

Milloy’s factor of 2 principle arises from neither sort of significance. Larger factors are more likely to be statistically significant, but a factor of 2 can easily by statistically significant. If we are talking about a very rare crime, a factor of two change might not be practically significant, but for more common ones it most certainly would be. Finally, larger factors are stronger evidence for causation. There aren’t many things that make a factor of ten difference, so if we find a correlation with a factor of ten difference, it’s unlikely to really be caused by something else, while things that make a factor of two difference are more common, so factors of that size are more likely to be really caused by something else, but that certainly does not mean that they should be “ignored”.

The only authority that Milloy offers in support of his principle that risks of less than a factor of two should be ignored is an out-of-context quote from a National Cancer Institute press release about a study finding a link between breast cancer and abortion. If you look at the whole press release you will see that they are not saying that all risks of less than a factor of two should be ignored, but that a risk of less than two along with other evidence suggests that the link was spurious (as subsequent work found). Milloy even complains that the NCI didn’t follow his principle in other cases.

That brings me to an amazing story that was revealed in the Philip Morris documents archive. You see, in 1992 the EPA concluded that passive smoking caused lung cancer with a risk factor of about 1.25 for a non-smoker with a smoking spouse. Philip Morris obviously wanted to discount this finding. If only epidemiology guidelines included Milloy’s factor-of-two principle, then they could point to them and dismiss the EPA’s result. So Philip Morris set out to get the epidemiologists to adopt Milloy’s principle.

They funded the creation of TASSC and junkscience.com. Milloy used junkscience.com to energetically attack the EPA’s passive smoking conclusions and promote the factor-of-two principle. They also organised a series of seminars to try to get the scientific community to adopt what they called what they called “Good Epidemiology Practices” (GEP). The GEP guidelines were mostly perfectly reasonable things like

3. Statements of study design should contain a description of statistical techniques.

However, slipped into the middle of the GEP guidelines was this:

8. Odds ratios of 2 or less should be treated with caution, particularly when the confidence intervals are wide. There is a likelihood that the odds ratio is artefactual and the result of problems with case or control selection, confounders or bias.

The reaction of the scientists to the GEP guidelines was something like this:

“Excellent idea! We need guidelines for good practice and these fit the bill. We should adopt them…

Oh, except for number 8 about odds ratios. That doesn’t make sense so we’ll drop that one.”

Philip Morris kept pushing its GEP guidelines to various scientific organizations for several years, but eventually they realized that it just wasn’t going to work, as explained in this internal memo:

Approximately three years ago, the concept of GEP’s was discussed in considerable detail in PM. Corporate Affairs thought it was a wonderful idea, because at first they … felt that part of a code for Good Epidemiological Practices would state that any relative risk of less than 2 would be ignored. This is of course not the case. No epidemiological organization would agree to this, and even Corporate Affairs realizes this now.

The full story of GEP, with copious references to Philip Morris’ internal documents is detailed in a paper published in the American Journal of Public Health.

The fact that the Philip Morris executives thought that their GEP plan had a chance of succeeding tells us something about how they think science is conducted. The scientists did not adopt Milloy’s factor-of-two principle because it was, well, wrong. The Philip Morris executives thought that the truth of something did not matter to the scientists—you could get them to say something just by lobbying them. This attitude seems common to promoters of “sound science”. They seem to think that real scientists aren’t interested in finding out what is true or false but instead just concoct results to advance a poltical agenda or get more funding. In other words, they think real scientists operate like they do.

Efforts to promote Milloy’s bogus factor-of-two principle continue to this day. Just last month Iain Murray published an article where he wrote:

Epidemiologists generally agree that one cannot ascribe medical causation to a risk factor if the factor is associated with less than double the occurrence than normal.

No, epidemiologists do not “generally agree” with this. In fact, Philip Morris’ efforts to get then to agree with this proposition have proven that do not agree with it at all.

And where was Murray’s article published? Tech Central Station, another astroturf operation like junkscience.com. And who employs Murray? The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is partly funded by Philip Morris.

A couple of days ago, I told the story of GEP, how a tobacco company tried to get epidemiologists to adopt a bogus principle that risk factors of less than 2should be ignored. I noted that Iain Murray was still peddling this bogus principle in a Tech Central Station article. That wasn’t the only time Murray had tried advancing the tobacco company’s risk-factor-of-two principle. He also did it in this Tech Central Station article, which prompted an actual epidemiologist to send him the following email:

Thank you for your thoughtful article “Epidemiology beyond its limits”, which highlighted some of criticisms of my discipline as it is currently practiced. I agree in general that epidemiologic research should be of the highest quality and conclusions should be reported in context. However, your article leaves the lay reader the impression that epidemiologists have been changing the rules for some reason. Not so.

First, the Bradford-Hill criteria were always meant to be rules of thumb, except temporality, which is metaphysically necessary. The BMA statement merely boils down to the proposition that an association may still be causal if one of the the criteria (save temporality) is not fulfilled. Put another way, fullfillment of most of the criteria can be sufficient to surmise causality. I think that is quite different from the impression you’ve given your readers, which is that 5 of 7 steadfast rules have been chucked by the side of the road.

Second, the NEJM quite explicitly told Gary Taubes that it was a rule of thumb that they only accepted papers with relative risks of 3 or more. I presume that since JAMA uses a similar rule of thumb, one of the things that played into their decision to publish the air pollution study with an RR of 1.12 is that it was very large, it was longitudinal, and it was methodologically sound. I am certain that JAMA would not have published a case-control study on the same topic that reported an odds ratio of 1.12, since this study design is much more susceptible to bias. You ask in your article on the air pollution study why anyone is concerned with a 12% increase in risk (assuming that is the correct number). The answer is that a nearly ubiquitous exposure which increases the risk of a disease slightly can impact far more people than can a very rare exposure which vastly increases disease risk. This should be apparent if you play around with the formula for population attributable risk.

Third, you should know (and should let your readers know) that epidemiologists themselves share many of your concerns. We recognize that individual epidemiologists have an incentive to overstate the importance of findings from their particular studies. The peer review and editorial process mitigates some of this tendency, though of course the extent to the process works depends on the journal. Thankfully, epidemiologic studies are published in a wide variety of journals dedicated to particular disease areas or more generally to epidemiology, and not just in NEJM and JAMA.

Lastly, epidemiologists are also concerned about data dredging. Your readers might be interested to know that so-called data dredging did not come about because of the sudden desire of epidemiologists to implicate everything under the sun as a risk factor. Rather, it followed the advent of the computational power to perform multiple regression with ease. I am among those who think that there is little wrong with data-dredging per se when used for hypothesis generation. It is only the reporting of such results as conclusions rather than as leads that is problematic.

Though we epidemiologists are a very critical bunch, occasionally an article with a sensationalistic spin will slip through the cracks. Please don’t let that sour you on an entire field.

That was in February. How did Murray respond to being corrected by an epidemiologist? Well, in March he wrote the other article where he said:

Epidemiologists generally agree that one cannot ascribe medical causation to a risk factor if the factor is associated with less than double the occurrence than normal.

He’d just been told by an epidemiologist that epidemiologists did not agree with that statement but he immediately turned around and wrote that they did. Now Murray himself might agree with the statement, but that’s not what he wrote. He wrote that epidemiologists generally agree with the statement, and that is something that Murray knew to be false.

John Quiggin has an interesting post putting the disinformation peddled by folks like Steve Milloy and Iain Murray in a broader context:

But at some point, it must be necessary to abandon the case-by-case approach and adopt a summary judgement about people like Milloy and sites like TCS. Nothing they say can be trusted. Even if you can check their factual claims (by no means always the case) it’s a safe bet that they’ve failed to mention relevant information that would undermine their case. So unless you have expert knowledge of the topic in question, they’re misleading, and if you have the knowledge, they’re redundant.

Of course, there’s nothing surprising about paid lobbyists twisting the truth. What’s more disturbing is the fact that the same approach dominates the Bush Administration. Admittedly, governments have never had a perfectly pure approach to science, but the distortion of the process under Bush is unparalleled, to the extent that it has produced unprecedented protests from the scientific community. Natural scientists aren’t alone in this. Economists, social scientists and even military and intelligence experts are horrified by the way in which processes that are supposed to produce expert advice have been politicised.

John Quiggin has another post on the right wing attack on science, this time describing the Australian front. Chris Mooney has great article in the The American Prospect about James Inhofe’s part in the attack on science.

And Iain Murray is at it again. He has a post where he refers to graph on the left, saying that it is one of the most important elements in the debate, and writing:

“The fact that the ten hottest years happened since 1991 may well be an artifact of the collapse in the number of weather monitoring stations contributing to the global temperature calculations following the fall of communism (see graph).”

As I’ve said before, I’m reluctant to comment on global warming because many others are better informed on the matter, but in the case of Murray’s graph, helps me. Even though I’m not an expert, it took me all of ten seconds to think of way to test to see if the increase was an artifact of the change in the weather stations reporting. All you have to is produce another graph of average temperature just using the weather stations that have data for the whole period. If this graph shows a similar increase, then Murray’s suggestion is proven false. If it doesn’t show an increase, then Murray’s suggestion is proven true. And if you have the data to produce this graph, then you have the data to produce the graph that tests his suggestion.

There are three possibilities:

1. Murray didn’t think of this really obvious test. In this case he isn’t competent to write about global warming.
2. The test was done and Murray knows that it showed that his suggestion was false. In this case it would not be honest for him to present his suggestion the way he did.
3. The test was done and Murray knows that it showed that his suggestion was true. If this was this case, why wouldn’t he say so?

Update: In comments, Christopher Enckell provides the source of the graph Murray showed: a paper by Ross McKitrick. McKitrick writes:

Figure 3 shows the total number of stations in the GHCN and the raw (arithmetic) average of temperatures for those stations. Notice that at the same time as the number of stations takes a dive (around 1990) the average temperature (red bars) jumps. This is due, at least in part, to the disproportionate loss of stations in remote and rural locations, as opposed to places like airports and urban areas where it gets warmer over time because of the build-up of the urban environment. This poses a problem for users of the data. Someone has to come up with an algorithm for deciding how much of the change in average temperature post-1990 is due to an actual change in the climate and how much is due to the change in the sample. When we hear over and over about records being set after 1990 in observed global temperatures this might mean the climate has changed, or it means an inadequate adjustment is being used, and there is no formal way to decide between these.

I’m stunned. As I wrote above, it took me ten seconds to think of way to test if the increase was due to a change in the sample and McKitrick writes that “there is no formal way to decide”. It would appear that my possibility 1 applies to both Murray and McKitrick.

[This correspondence started with an email from McKitrick commenting on this post. I’ve edited it to remove most of the quoted text from previous emails. Further discussion is here.] (more…)

The graph above, which Iain Murray claimed showed that

“The fact that the ten hottest years happened since 1991 may well be an artifact of the collapse in the number of weather monitoring stations contributing to the global temperature calculations following the fall of communism (see graph)”

comes from this paper by Ross McKitrick. McKitrick recently was in the news for publishing a controversial paper that claimed that an “audit” of the commonly accepted reconstruction of temperatures over the past 1000 years was incorrect, so I thought it would be interesting to “audit” McKitrick’s graph.

I should first caution readers that I am not an expert in this area—I’m a computer scientist, not a climatologist. In other words, I’m no better qualified to comment on this than McKitrick. McKitrick writes:

“The main problem in the debate over what the Global Temperature is doing is that there is no such thing as a Global Temperature. Temperature is a continuous field, not a scalar, and there is no physics to guide reducing this field to a scalar, by averaging or any other method. Consequently the common practice of climate measurement is an ad hoc approximation of a non-existent quantity.”

This is untrue. Average temperature has a real, physical meaning. For example, if I have one kg of water at 20 degrees and another at 30 degrees, then their average temperature is 25 degrees. This is the temperature I would get if I mixed the water.

McKitrick then reproduces this graph (figure 2) (from GISS), describing it as “NASA’s version of this simulacrum”. He claims that a decreases in the number of weather stations is “problematic”, writing:

“In the early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the budget cuts in many OECD economies led to a sudden sharp drop in the number of active weather stations.”

However, the graph he reproduces that shows the drop gives a different reason:

“The reasons why the number of stations in GHCN drop off in recent years are because some of GHCN’s source datasets are retroactive data compilations (e.g. World Weather Records) and other data were created or exchanged years ago.”

I looked at the GHCN data and while the number of weather stations in the former Soviet Union did drop from about 270 to 100, but the total number fell from 5000 to 2700 so the decrease there was only a small factor in the overall decrease.

McKitrick next refers to his figure at the top of this post:

“Figure 3 shows the total number of stations in the GHCN and the raw (arithmetic) average of temperatures for those stations. Notice that at the same time as the number of stations takes a dive (around 1990) the average temperature (red bars) jumps. This is due, at least in part, to the disproportionate loss of stations in remote and rural locations, as opposed to places like airports and urban areas where it gets warmer over time because of the build-up of the urban environment.”

I downloaded the raw GHCN temperature data from here, and tried to reproduce McKittrick’s graph by plotting the number of stations and the average temperature of all stations for each year. If you want to check my work, the program I wrote to do the calculations can be downloaded here. The graph above is reasonably similar to McKitrick’s graph. The biggest difference is that the right-hand vertical scale in McKittrick’s graph is clearly incorrect. The number peaked at 6,000, not 14,000 as his figure 3 indicates. (He actually has the correct number in his figure 2, which was copied from another paper.) Just taking the average of all the station temperatures is a rather poor way to estimate the global average temperature, since regions with a large number of stations will count for far too much in the global average. However, even this crude way of computing the average shows significant warming in the 90s. McKitrick’s graph is also rather misleading since the GISS graph above is not calculated this way—the stations are weighted so that regions get the correct weighting.

To test McKittrick’s claim that the warming in 90’s might have been caused by the decline in the number of stations, all I had to do was just consider the stations that has measurements for every year from 1980 to 2000. The average temperature of those stations is shown as the green line in the graph above, while the average of all stations is in red. The blue line is the average temperature shown in the GISS graph. Note that all three lines show significant warming in the 90s. Whether you analyse the data in a crude way or a sophisticated way you still see warming. It is true that after correcting for the change in the number of stations, the warming is less, but it actually agrees better with the average temperature shown in the GISS graph. If you look at Hansen et al’s paper

that describes how the GISS graph was constructed, you will find that of course they noticed and accounted for the change in the number of stations:

“Sampling studies discussed below indicate that the decline in number of stations is unimportant in regions of dense coverage, although the estimated global temperature change can be affected by a few hundredths of a degree.”

McKitrick does not acknowledge this or cite this paper.

The outcome of my analysis was just as I expected—if correcting for the change in the number of stations had removed the warming trend, Murray and McKitrick would already have told us about it.

In an email, McKitrick claimed that there were two problems with my test:

First, there was a change post-1990 in the quality of data in stations still operating, as well as the number of stations. Especially in the former Soviet countries after 1990, the rate of missing monthly records rose dramatically. So you need a subset of stations operating continuously and with reasonably continuous quality control.

However, the Soviet stations are only a small percentage of the total, so don’t make much difference. And of course, if you look at Hansen et al you find that they have extensive checks on the data quality.

McKitrick continued:

Second, if in this subset you observe an upward trend comparable to the conventional global average, in order to prove that this validates the global average you have to argue that the subset is a randomly chosen, representative sample of the whole Earth. Of course if this were true the temperature people would only use the continuously-available subset for their data products. It isn’t, which is why they don’t. It would leave you with a sample biased towards US and European cities, so it is not representative of the world as a whole. The large loss in the number of stations operating (50% in a few years) was not random in a geophysical sense, it was triggered by economic events, in which stations were closed in part if they were relatively costly to operate or if the country experienced a sudden loss of public sector resources. One can conjecture what the effect of that discontinuity was, but to test the conjecture, at some point you have to guess at what the unavailable data would have said if they were available. Because of that, I cannot see how one can devise a formal test of the representativeness of the subsample.

Now this is just wrong. You don’t need a random sample to estimate the temperature across the Earth’s surface. Temperatures tend to be quite similar at places that are close to each other. You just need to space your stations over the Earth’s surface and you have a representative sample. So you can actually estimate what the temperature would have been in the missing stations and you can actually test to see how representative the sample is and in fact Hansen et al wrote:

Sampling studies discussed below indicate that the decline in number of stations is unimportant in regions of dense coverage, although the estimated global temperature change can be affected by a few hundredths of a degree.

McKitrick, however, did not cite this paper.

McKitrick concludes:

None of this means that those researchers with access to the raw data can’t propose and implement such tests as you propose (I wish they would).

Gee, McKitrick implies that researchers hadn’t done such tests, when, as we have already seen, they had done such tests. When I challenged him on this, he contradicted himself:

I do not claim that adjustments are not being made, only that there is no formal test of their adequacy.

Presumably he talks of “formal” tests so he doesn’t have to count the tests that have actually been done. (Our entire email exchange is here.)

Chris Mooney notes that McKitrick defended Inhofe’s claim that “manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated”

I’m not the only one who has found problems with McKitrick’s writings on climate. Robert Grumbine has some comments on another McKitrick paper:

He was fooling around with correlating per capita income with the observed temperature changes. He concluded that the warming was a figment of climatologists imaginations, as there was a correlation between money and warming. ‘Obviously’ this had to be due to wealth creating the warming in the dataset, rather than any climate change—his conclusion.

Along the way he:

1. selected a subset of temperature records
   1. without using a random method
   2. without paying attention to spatial distribution
   3. without ensuring that the records were far enough apart to be independant—ok, I shouldn’t say ‘he’ did it, because he didn’t. He blindly took a selection that his student made and which was—to my eyes—distributed quite peculiarly.
2. Treated the records as being independant (I know William knows this, but for some other folks: Surface temperature records are correlated across fairly substantial distances—a few hundred km. This is what makes paleoreconstructions possible, and what makes it possible to initialize global numerical weather prediction models with so few observations.)
3. Ignored that we do expect, and have reason to expect that the warming will be higher in higher latitudes
4. Ignored that the wealthy countries are at higher latitudes

Hence my calling it fooling around rather than work or study. He was, he said, submitting that pile of tripe* to a journal.
*pile of tripe being my term, not his.

and

His main conclusion was regarding climate change—namely that there isn’t any. His secondary conclusion was that climate people studying climate data were idiots. Neither of those is a statement of economics, so my knowledge of economics is irrelevant (though, in matter of fact, it is far greater than his knowledge of climate; this says little, as his displayed level doesn’t challenge a bright jr. high student.).

Grumbine’s correspondence with McKitrick is here

I wrote earlier correcting Ross McKitrick’s false claim that there is no such thing as Global Temperature. Unfortunately McKitrick’s claim has been adopted and spread by people ignorant of basic physics. For example, consider this review of Essex and McKitrick’s book Taken by Storm at (where else?) Tech Central Station, by Paul Georgia. If you look at Georgia’s biographical details, you will see that he has studied political economy and economics and there is no evidence that he ever studied physics and it certainly shows in his review.

Before I examine what Georgia wrote in his review, I’d like to give Wikipedia a plug. I thought I’d have to quote passages from basics physics texts, but Wikipedia has accurate and careful explanations that I can link to.

Georgia writes:

No Physical Meaning

Essex, who studies the underlying mathematics, physics and computation of complex dynamic processes, raises some very fundamental scientific issues with regard to global warming. Take, for instance, the “average global temperature,” which is the primary statistic offered as evidence of global warming. The problem with this statistic is that it has no physical meaning. Temperature is not a thermodynamic variable that lends itself to statistical analysis, nor does it measure a physical quantity.

If you read the Wikipedia page on temperature you will discover that it does have a physical meaning and also that it is a physical quantity. And that there is the whole field of statistical mechanics based on the application of statistics to temperature. Go figure.

Georgia continues:

Thermodynamic variables are of two types, says Essex, extensive and intensive. Extensive variables, like energy or mass, occur in amounts. Intensive variables, such as temperature, refer to conditions of a system. A cup of hot coffee, for example, contains an amount of energy and has a temperature. If you add an equal amount of coffee with the same amount of energy and the same temperature to the cup, the amount of energy doubles, but not the temperature. The temperature remains the same. Thus, while you can add up the energy from two separate systems and get total energy, it is physically meaningless to add up the two systems’ temperatures. And dividing that number by two doesn’t give you the average temperature either. Such an exercise results in a statistic that has no physical meaning. Yet that is exactly what occurs when the average global temperature is computed.

So let’s see. We have some coffee at 60 degrees and add an equal amount also at 60 degrees. Georgia tells us that the mixture will have a temperature of 60 degrees. So far so good. And that adding the two temperatures doesn’t give the right answer. Let’s see: 60+60 = 120, which is not the right answer. OK. And that “dividing that number by two doesn’t give you the average temperature either”. Let’s see: 120/2 = 60, which, err, is the right answer. I don’t want to be too harsh here, but I think your average eight year old could figure out that if you add a number to itself and divide by two you get the original number back again. But this was too much for Georgia.

In fact, adding the temperatures and dividing by two also works if you add an equal quantity at a different temperature. the Wikipedia page on intensive variables has the formula if the quantities are different—it’s a weighted mean of the two temperatures.

Georgia continues:

Moreover, temperature and energy aren’t the same thing. The internal energy of a system can change without changing the temperature and the temperature can change while the internal energy of the system remains the same. In fact, this occurs all the time in the climate because the two variables are fundamentally different classes of thermodynamic variables and there is no physical law that requires that they move together.

Wow. I guess we’ll just have to ditch the entire field of thermodynamics then. In fact, Temperature T and internal energy U are related by the formula

ΔU=ΔTmc

where m is the mass and c the specific heat. It is true that it is possible for internal energy to change without affecting the temperature if there is a phase change, but the atmosphere stays way above the temperature of liquid nitrogen, so this makes almost no difference to temperatures.

Georgia continues:

The next time somebody informs you that the planet’s “average temperature” has increased, you can rest assured that they have told you exactly nothing.

It’s clear that Georgia does not understand the basic physics of temperature, but he is willing confidently make false claims about temperature. Furthermore, the fact that Tech Central Station published his nonsense demonstrates that the editors there know nothing about physics either, which is a rather sad state of affairs for a site that publishes commentry on scientific matters.

Update: Chris Mooney has another example of pseudoscience from Paul Georgia, while David Appell concludes that Georgia is “unfit to be writing about any scientific concept”.

Update 2: Comments from Sadly No!, Atrios, Brad DeLong, The Editors and Tim Dunlop.

In comments to my previous post on Paul Georgia’s nonsense about temperature, Sarah wrote:

Yes, bad physics, but that was an easy target. I’d like to see you take on a hard target, like the petition signed by 17,000 scientists who declared that global warming is a sham. The research review is here.

At the OISM site she linked it says:

This is the website that completely knocks the wind out of the enviro’s sails. See over 17,000 scientists declare that global warming is a lie with no scientific basis whatsoever.

The global warming hypothesis has failed every relevant experimental test.

Did 17,000 scientists really say that global warming is a “lie”? I looked further and found the actual words of the petition. What they actually agreed with was this:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.

So they weren’t saying that it was a lie or wasn’t happening, just that there wasn’t good evidence that it would be a catastrophe. The OISM people have misrepresented their own petition.

Still, why would 17,000 scientists agree with the far weaker statement above? Well, it looks like that involved misrepresentation by the OISM as well. It seems they were mailed this letter from Frederick Seitz which said:

Research Review of Global Warming Evidence

Below is an eight page review of information on the subject of “global warming,” and a petition in the form of a reply card. Please consider these materials carefully.

The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds.

This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.

Unfortunately, the “research review” they were sent is not a research review of global warming evidence, but just a review of the evidence against global warming. According to the “review“, the earth isn’t warming, it’s cooling:

Predictions of global warming are based on computer climate modeling, a branch of science still in its infancy. The empirical evidence actual measurements of Earth’s temperature shows no man-made warming trend. Indeed, over the past two decades, when CO2 levels have been at their highest, global average temperatures have actually cooled slightly.

How was the “review” able to claim cooling? Simple. The authors presented the satellite data (which at the time showed slight cooling, but now shows significant warming) but dismissed the more extensive surface data because it had “substantial uncertainties”. The only uncertainty that they mention is the urban heat island effect and what they fail to mention is that the surface temperature estimated by GISS corrects for the urban heat island effect. The “review” is not honest.

As a researcher, when I see a “research review” I expect that it will cover all the relevant research. I can certainly understand how a scientist who was under the impression that it was a genuine review might be persuaded that there was no good evidence for global warming, especially because the vast majority of scientists who signed were not climate scientists. Furthermore, in his cover letter Seitz identified himself as a past president of the NAS and the typeface and format of the “review” matched that used by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This report from PR Watch explains how the NAS was forced to correct the impression that it endorsed the “review”:

“The mailing is clearly designed to be deceptive by giving people the impression that the article, which is full of half-truths, is a reprint and has passed peer review,” complained Raymond Pierrehumbert, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Chicago. NAS foreign secretary F. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist, said researchers “are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink them.” NAS council member Ralph J. Cicerone, dean of the School of Physical Sciences at the University of California at Irvine, was particularly offended that Seitz described himself in the cover letter as a “past president” of the NAS. Although Seitz had indeed held that title in the 1960s, Cicerone hoped that scientists who received the petition mailing would not be misled into believing that he “still has a role in governing the organization.”

The NAS issued an unusually blunt formal response to the petition drive. “The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal,” it stated in a news release. “The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.” In fact, it pointed out, its own prior published study had shown that “even given the considerable uncertainties in our knowledge of the relevant phenomena, greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt responses. Investment in mitigation measures acts as insurance protection against the great uncertainties and the possibility of dramatic surprises.”

Of course, some of the signatories might have signed it even if they were better informed about global warming research. The Scientific American did a check:

Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition—one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages. Crudely extrapolating, the petition supporters include a core of about 200 climate researchers—a respectable number, though rather a small fraction of the climatological community.

And I can’t help but share the Tech Central Station take on Scientific American’s check:

SciAm reported on the Oregon Petition against Kyoto back in October 2001, but rather than being encouraged by the extent of professional