In the light of this week’s ridiculous announcement that Barack H. Obama had been given a Nobel Peace Prize, for no perceivable reason — the same empty honor having previously been bestowed upon such luminaries as Jimmy Carter and Albert Gore — it is my honor and pleasure to present you with our own nominations for the next Nobel Prize.
Briefly, I thought hard myself about Madonna (words I never thought I’d see myself say), although I’m certain that excellent cases might be made — employing the Nobel committee’s apparent guidlines — for Gary Glitter, David Hasselhoff, Peewee Herman, Charles Manson, Paris Hilton, Lou Costello, Hello Kitty, or Jack the Ripper. Basically anybody who can afford a box of Crackerjack to look for the prize inside.
L. Neil Smith, Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-10-12
October 12, 2009
October 9, 2009
Consciously “green” consumers more likely to cheat, says study
The Register has an interesting summary of a recent University of Toronto study:
Psychologists in Canada have revealed new research suggesting that people who become eco-conscious “green consumers” are “more likely to steal and lie” than others.
The new study comes from professor Nina Mazar of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and her colleague Chen-Bo Zhong.
“Those lyin’, cheatin’ green consumers,” begins the statement from the university. “Buying products that claim to be made with low environmental impact can set up ‘moral credentials’ in people’s minds that give license to selfish or questionable behavior.”
[. . .]
So there you have it: People who buy green — who offset their carbon, who purchase greened-up electricity, who put windmills on their roofs etc etc — are in the main thieving, lying, holier-than-thou scumbags. The old adage is right: You can never trust a hippy.
Much as we’d love to believe it, though, the whole study — like all of its News McNugget fast-food psychobabble kind — has caused the needle on our bullshit meter to flick far across into the brown zone. Green consumers, we’d suggest, are far more likely to be ripped off by unscrupulous charlatans than they are to be charlatans themselves.
October 6, 2009
Parachutes also seen as harmful . . .
Following up on a report I blogged about a couple of days back, Jacob Sullum uses the same methodology to prove that skydivers would be better off without parachutes:
In Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania find, possessing a gun is strongly associated with getting shot. Since “guns did not protect those who possessed them,” they conclude, “people should rethink their possession of guns.” This is like noting that possessing a parachute is strongly associated with being injured while jumping from a plane, then concluding that skydivers would be better off unencumbered by safety equipment designed to slow their descent. “Can this study possibly be as stupid as it sounds?” asks Stewart Baker at Skating on Stilts. Having shelled out $30 for the privilege of reading the entire article, which appears in the November American Journal of Public Health, I can confirm that the answer is yes.
[. . .]
While the reseachers took into account a few confounding variables related to this tendency (including having an arrest record, living in a rough neighborhood, and having a high-risk occupation), they cannot possibly have considered all the factors that might make people more prone to violent attack and therefore more likely to have a gun as a defense against that hazard. To take just one example, not every criminal has an arrest record. Yet it seems fair to assume that criminals in Philadelphia are a) more likely than noncriminals to be armed and b) more likely than noncriminals to be shot. That does not mean having a gun increases their chance of being shot. Certainly they believe (as police officers do) that having a gun makes them safer than they otherwise would be. Nothing in this study contradicts that belief.
Of course, most people will only see the headline, so the underlying purpose of publishing the “study” has been achieved.
October 4, 2009
Totally unbiased study says “Guns=bad”
In no way should you try to read the data from this study as being anything other than unbiased and objective:
Medical researchers in Philadelphia have conducted out a study which indicates — according to their interpretation — that carrying a gun causes people to get shot more often. “People should rethink their possession of guns,” say the medics.
“This study helps resolve the long-standing debate about whether guns are protective or perilous,” says University of Pennsylvania epidemiology prof Charles Branas. The Penn announcement is headlined “Gun Possession [is] of questionable value in an Assault”, so it’s pretty clear which way he’s leaning.
The Penn researchers carried out their study by randomly selecting 677 people in Philadelphia who had been shot in “assaults”. Apparently five people sustain gunshot wounds every day in the City of Brotherly Love, so there were plenty to choose from.
According to the profs, six per cent of the shooting victims were packing heat when they got plugged. They compared that to a control sample of Philadelphians who had not been shot, and concluded that “people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun”.
Of course, there’s no problem with basing your statistically valid sample on people who have already been shot: given the chance of being shot in Philadelphia, they could just have gone round to a few local bars and found the same numbers, right?
You know that the study has a certain, um, preference, when even the folks at The Register are pointing out that the data may not be randomly selected:
There didn’t seem to be any account taken of the fact that people with good reason to fear being shot — for instance drug dealers, secret agents etc — would be more likely to tool up than those with no such concerns.
The profs’ reasoning, however, would seem to be that if someone sticks you up in the street and you haven’t got a gun, you’ll just hand over your valuables and so escape with a whole skin. If you’ve got a gat, however, you might try to draw it and so get shot. Tactically, of course, it might be wiser to first hand over your wallet and then craftily backshoot the robber as he departed, but no matter.
September 30, 2009
More background on that broken hockey stick
I don’t want to sound like a climate crank — there are more than enough of them out there, on both sides of the issue — and I’m still very much of the opinion that the question of anthropogenic global warming/climate change still needs a lot of work to answer. If human activities are causing the planet’s atmosphere to warm up in excess of what the natural feedback systems of the planet can handle, then we do need to look at ways to reduce our contribution to that warming.
Politicians and power-seeking bureaucrats jumping up and down in front of the cameras, insisting that the crisis is upon us and we need to do something now are in no way to be trusted with additional powers: without sufficient scientific evidence, we’d just be installing petty dictators over all sorts of different areas of our lives.
The specific piece of “evidence” most useful to the “do something now” faction has been the famous Hockey Stick Graph, which has been debunked. The data was carefully selected to support pre-decided conclusions. Everyone who took high school science knows the temptation . . . you know how the experiment is supposed to turn out, and who’ll know if you just write it up as if you got textbook results? The answer is . . . that’s why you do the experiment: to determine if the result matches the expectation. Skipping the whole “do the experiment” step saves time, but it’s not science.
Bishop Hill explains how the hockey stick became the best-known case of junk science in decades:
The story of Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick reconstruction, its statistical bias and the influence of the bristlecone pines is well known. McIntyre’s research into the other reconstructions has received less publicity, however. The story of the Yamal chronology may change that.
The bristlecone pines that created the shape of the Hockey Stick graph are used in nearly every millennial temperature reconstruction around today, but there are also a handful of other tree ring series that are nearly as common and just as influential on the results. Back at the start of McIntyre’s research into the area of paleoclimate, one of the most significant of these was called Polar Urals, a chronology first published by Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. At the time, it was used in pretty much every temperature reconstruction around. In his paper, Briffa made the startling claim that the coldest year of the millennium was AD 1032, a statement that, if true, would have completely overturned the idea of the Medieval Warm Period. It is not hard to see why paleoclimatologists found the series so alluring.
Some of McIntyre’s research into Polar Urals deserves a story in its own right, but it is one that will have to wait for another day. We can pick up the narrative again in 2005, when McIntyre discovered that an update to the Polar Urals series had been collected in 1999. Through a contact he was able to obtain a copy of the revised series. Remarkably, in the update the eleventh century appeared to be much warmer than in the original – in fact it was higher even than the twentieth century. This must have been a severe blow to paleoclimatologists, a supposition that is borne out by what happened next, or rather what didn’t: the update to the Polar Urals was not published, it was not archived and it was almost never seen again.
With Polar Urals now unusable, paleclimatologists had a pressing need for a hockey stick shaped replacement and a solution appeared in the nick of time in the shape of a series from the nearby location of Yamal.
Yes, it’s long, and somewhat convoluted . . . but that is the point. Researchers were being deliberately obstructive to other researchers, concealing data necessary to reproduce the experimental results, yet publishing in numerous journals (who all should have enforced their own standards, but failed to do so) as if the data was impossible to refute.
And it was . . . because the raw data was kept out of the hands of other scientists. This is not science. It’s a deliberate fraud.
Update: JoNova adds to the story, including an image showing the relative locations of the sampled sites:
Update, the second: Tom Kelley corrects my use of the word “anthropogenic”, which I had idiotically written as “anthropomorphic”. Thanks, Tom.
September 29, 2009
A broken hockey stick graph
The red line in the following graph should be familiar to you, if you’ve been following the Global Warming/Climate Change debate:
The trick here is the black line:
A comparison of Yamal RCS chronologies. red — as archived with 12 picked cores; black — including Schweingruber’s Khadyta River, Yamal (russ035w) archive and excluding 12 picked cores. Both smoothed with 21-year gaussian smooth. y-axis is in dimensionless chronology units centered on 1 (as are subsequent graphs (but represent age-adjusted ring width).
The “blade” of the hockey stick was a data artifact of the careful selection of only twelve samples. Including a wider sample produces a very different picture, as you can see above.
September 28, 2009
QotD: Gambling on CO2 reduction
There is a real and growing prospect of an all-out trade war being waged in the name of climate change.
The struggle to generate international agreement on a carbon deal has created a desire to punish “free riders” who do not sign on to stringent carbon emission reduction targets. But the greater goals seem to be to barricade imports from China and India, to tax companies that outsource, and to go for short-term political benefits, destroying free trade.
This is a massive mistake. Economic models show that the global benefits of even slightly freer trade are in the order of $50 trillion — 50 times more than we could achieve, in the best of circumstances, with carbon cuts. If trade becomes less free, we could easily lose $50 trillion — or much more if we really bungle things. Poor nations — the very countries that will experience the worst of climate damage — would suffer most.
In other words: In our eagerness to avoid about $1 trillion worth of climate damage, we are being asked to spend at least 50 times as much — and, if we hinder free trade, we are likely to heap at least an additional $50 trillion loss on the global economy.
Bjorn Lomborg, “Costly Carbon Cuts: Proposed Strategies Would Hurt the Most Vulnerable”, The Washington Post, 2009-09-28
September 24, 2009
Another reason why there’s still debate over Climate Change/Global Warming
True believers treat skeptics on the Climate Change/Global Warming question as heretics because “the proof is right there” . . . except the data supporting the case is not available to study:
. . . the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.
Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.
[. . .]
If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?
All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can’t be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there’s no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.
September 9, 2009
They switched to calling it “Climate Change” for a reason
After all the vitriol over anthropomorphic (man-made) “Global Warming”, it was a significant change when the organizations which had been most prominent in trying to bring it to public attention switched terminology to Climate Change instead:
Last week a UK tribunal ruled that belief in manmade global warming had the same status as a religious conviction, such as transubstantiation. True believers in the hypothesis will need mountains of faith in the years ahead.
The New Scientist has given weight to the prediction that the planet is in for a cool 20 years — defying the computer models and contemporary climate theory. It’s “bad timing”, admits the magazine’s environmental correspondent, Fred Pearce.
Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, quoted by the magazine, attributes much of the recent warming to naturally occurring ocean cycles. Scientific study of the periodic ocean climate variability is in its infancy; for example the PDO or Pacific Decadal Oscillation, was only described in the late 1990s. It’s the Leibniz team which predicted a forthcoming cooling earlier this year — causing a bullying outbreak at the BBC.
Much of the resistance to the “orthodoxy” of global warming was caused by the strong suspicion that this was merely an excuse for greater government control over business and further restrictions on individuals for a nebulous goal. It certainly didn’t help that any extreme or unusual weather was automatically “caused by global warming” according to the vast majority of media reports.
If global warming/climate change was actually being caused (or increased) by human activity, the proposals to “fix” the problem almost always seemed to impose far greater costs than the problem itself. Activists saying that the west pretty much had to give up most of their modern comforts (and their industrial base) in order to “save the planet” did their cause more harm than good.
Some data seemed to support the global warming theory, while other data seemed to contradict it. Rather than following traditional scientific methodology, too many scientists forgot their basic training and tried conducting media science (where peer review and providing raw data to support your findings are not required or expected). By saying that the problem was “too urgent” to be slowed down by following normal procedure, they undermined their own cause. By exaggerating the likely results if global warming was actually happening, they stopped being scientists at all and instead became political activists.
The confidence that higher atmospheric CO2 levels will result in significant long-term increases in temperature is founded on knock-on effects, or positive feedbacks, amplifying the CO2 effect. Large positive feedbacks imply “runaway” global warming — aka Thermageddon.
But even the basics are fiercely contested. Does a warmer climate mean more or fewer clouds, and do these trap even more heat, or act as a sunshade, cooling it back down again? Clouds are so poorly understood, you can take your pick. So if the climate isn’t getting warmer, the theory requires the view that the energy must be “hiding” somewhere, mostly likely in oceanic heat sinks.
But neither the feedbacks, nor the oceans, are currently being kind to contemporary climate theory.
September 7, 2009
QotD: Environmentalism as religion-replacement
It never ceases to amaze me that people who say we can “save the planet” by wearing a jumper or growing our own veg are treated with the utmost seriousness, while those who argue that tackling climate change might require some larger-scale projects — such as geo-engineering the Earth — are treated as sci-fi freaks who should stick to reading Philip K Dick novels and stop polluting public debate with their insane ideas.
When it comes to climate change, the only acceptable debate, it seems, is how we can encourage ordinary people to do less, consume less and fly less. Bigger and more far-reaching ideas about how we might offset the impact of climate change are elbowed off the agenda.
This reveals something profound about environmentalism: it is not really a campaign to find solutions to the practical problem of climate change, but rather has become a semi-religious, almost medieval demonisation of human behaviour as dirty and destructive. This is really a priestly, ideological effort to lower people’s horizons and expectations, rather than a focused attempt to create a less polluted planet.
Brendan O’Neill, “Wearing thermals won’t save the planet: Why is the 10:10 campaign, with its pledges to turn off lights and grow more veg, taken more seriously than geo-engineering?”, The Guardian, 2009-09-02
August 5, 2009
Blotting out Rorschach tests
Colby Cosh examines the furor around James Heilman’s posting of the original Rorschach inkblots to Wikipedia:
It is probably no great loss. Critics of Heilman complain that “decades” of research will have to be abandoned if the Rorschach test becomes impossible to use. But most of this research has been shown, in the last 20 years, to be flapdoodle. As soon as the test became popular — so much so that it became a staple of comedy routines about Freudian psychotherapists, along with couches and thick German accents — it had critics who pointed out that there was little or no statistically validated basis for its interpretation. After the psychiatric profession got around to trying to establish such a basis — and this happened disgracefully late in history — there was little or nothing left of what had once been perceived as the broad general usefulness of the Rorschach.
Much of the folklore that had grown up around specific elements of the test had to be thrown in the trash. It appears to have modest predictive or diagnostic power for a few very specific aspects of personality, and even this surviving foundation is shaky. Yet supporters gave, and some are still giving, the same indignant defences that pseudoscience always receives. Interpreting responses to Rorschach blots is more “art” than “science,” they have insisted. (The mating call of the quack.) Only those who are intimately familiar with the test — i. e., those who believe in it and have come to depend on it — are really qualified to judge whether it “works.”
But can the thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists who have considered the Rorschach test a useful item in the healing toolbox for generations really all have been wrong? Keep in mind that the same practitioners were eagerly recommending and performing lobotomies throughout the same period, and you have your answer.
July 24, 2009
More on scapegoating plastic bags
Back on the old site, I posted an item that related tangentially to the issue of plastic bags in supermarkets. Russ LeBlanc sent me a note, which I published as an update to that post. He’s now expanded on that idea, with a letter to newsdurhamregion.com:
You’d think in these tough economic times our public officials would avoid “trash talk.” Enough already!
Get to the real issues. Dwelling on emotional fallacies such as the dreaded plastic bag while people are left with little economic hope is unforgivable. Sorry, Camille, banning plastic bags will do less than little to save the planet. It isn’t even a start, but it does sound warm and fuzzy.
If our politicians feel it necessary to spend our hard-earned tax dollars on recycling studies then they should do due diligence and commission a study by independent biologists to find out if the other study is even worth it. Better yet, spend the money where it counts, attracting jobs.
See-through bags and supporting a big-business cash grab for something that represents less than one per cent of a landfill (plastic bags) is irresponsible. Heaven forbid we see a politician questioning this issue.
By the way, Madam Mayor, I’m sure the big retailers would welcome the reward card incentive program (even though it’s really a form of big business getting around the right to privacy issue). Perhaps we can use the points for a garborator?
July 18, 2009
They’re publishing a magazine just for me!
July 13, 2009
When the data doesn’t support your claims, obscure it!
Ronald Bailey looks at the too-good-to-be-true claims made for caloric reduction as a life-extending tool:
Last week, two research teams reported to great fanfare that restricting the calories consumed by rhesus monkeys had extended their lifespans. Calorie restriction is thought to increase longevity by boosting DNA repair. The idea is that the mechanism evolved so that creatures on the verge of starvarion could live long enough to reproduce when food becomes plentiful again. But did the experiments really show the CR works?
In my earlier blogpost on the research results, I noted that some experts quoted in the New York Times were not convinced. Why? Because the difference in actual death rates between the dieting monkeys and the free feeding monkeys was not statistically significant.
This doesn’t necessarily derail the notion that calorie restriction may be associated with increased lifespan, but the way this study was performed does not appear to prove anything due to rigging of the data.
(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005577.html.)
