On the advice of a regular reader, and because I’ve been delinquent in posting recently, I thought I’d post a snippet I sent to a mailing list in response to someone who declared: “We’ve caused thousands of species to go exctint!” or “We’re facing a mass extinction!” or some such hysterical catastrophist trope.

They asked, “Do scientists just make this stuff up, you think?”

The answer, of course, is: “Yes, they do.”

To illustrate, I put together this summary, extracted from Bjørn Lomborg’s classic 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, about whether species are going extinct hand-over-fist, and if not, why some people might think so.

First, the data (sources given at the end):

             #species  #ext*  % ext  #p/a    % p/a*

Vertebrates     47000   321   0.683   0.8  0.00171
Mollusks       100000   235   0.235   0.6  0.00059
Crustaceans      4000     9   0.225   0.0  0.00056
Insects      >1000000    98   0.010   0.2  0.00002
Vasc. plants   250000   396   0.158   1.0  0.00040

Total        ~1600000  1033   0.065   2.6  0.00016
Excl. insects  401000   961   0.240   2.4  0.00060

* Total documented extinctions since 1600AD

These are known species, and documented extinctions. The latter certainly under-report reality, though it isn’t possible to say by how much. That most obviously appears to be the case with insects, an outlier in the data above, so I built a second totals line excluding insects. To give some idea of scale, the 0.24% of all non-insect species to have gone extinct in the last 400 years doesn’t even compare with previous extinctions. The famous dinosaur extinction claimed over 40% of all species. In some 50 separately identified extinction periods, more than 10% of species were wiped out. So losing 1 in 400 is pretty mild, as extinctions go.

One might expect that with mammals, whose extinction rate is the highest by a large margin, the documented extinction rate is much closer to reality. Not many mammals escape our attention.

For mammals (a subcategory of vertebrates in the table above) we have 4500 species, 110 extinctions, which is 2.444% of the total, and 0.00611% per annum.

The total number of species, as well as the actual extinction rates among them, are pure speculation. Now it’s not exactly reasonable to extrapolate from mammals, but let’s do so, to develop a worst-case scenario for all species. Then we get an extinction rate of 0.006% per annum for all species. It is possible that some non-mammal species go extinct at a higher rate, but I don’t have any data either to confirm or deny this, so let’s work with 0.006% per annum.

This is high, but certainly not catastrophic. (Whether it is too high, getting worse, or what, if anything, we should do about it, is beyond the scope of this post.)

Al Gore, in his 1993 book Earth in the Balance, says “40,000 species go extinct per year”. Problem is, he is exaggerating by at least a factor of four. Even if he weren’t exaggerating, he performs a trick well known to those who lie with statistics: he fails to mention the denominator of that fraction. 40,000 of 100,000 is a lot. 40,000 of a million is not a lot. 40,000 of 10 million is negligible. So if our estimate of 1.6 million total known species is correct, even Al Gore’s exaggeration is somewhere between not a lot and negligible.

But if that number is wrong, where did he get it? The answer is that he got it from a British ecologist, Norman Myers. And where did Norman Myers get it? He made it up.

No, really, he made it up! Pulled it out of thin air.

Here’s how. As long ago as 1979, he wrote that until 1900, one species went extinct every four years; since 1900, one species per year went extinct. So far so good.

He then referenced a conference from five years earlier, which had “hazarded a guess” of an extinction rate of 100 per year at present, as the “overall extinction rate among all species, whether known to science or not”.

That hazardous guess seems way out of proportion to the rate Myers accepted for the period 1900-1974, being suddenly 100 times higher with only global cooling and the oil crisis to blame. Even if it includes species not known to science, that’s a rather dramatic jump.

But not to Myers. He is underwhelmed and undaunted, and goes on: “Yet even this figure seems low. Let us suppose that, as a consequence of this man-handling of natural environments, the final one-quarter of this century witnesses the elimination of 1 million species — a far from unlikely prospect. This would work out, during the course of 25 years, at an average extinction rate of 40,000 species per year, or rather over 100 species per day.”

That’s it. That’s the totality of his argument. The lot. There’s no data, no citations, no research, no extrapolation from known facts, nothing. Just an assumption, pulled out of thin air, of a million extinctions in 25 years, which he then in wonderful circular fashion divides up to get an extinction rate 40,000 times higher than he himself says occurred in the first three-quarters of our century.

See the problem? That 40,000 number, which almost thirty years later seems to be “common knowledge”, because scientists and activists have stated it as fact, is an invention. Complete fiction. No bearing on reality whatsoever. But it’s scary! Woooo!

If we know about 1.6 million species, don’t you think we’d have noticed a million extinctions by now? I’ll bet most people can’t even cite, off the top of their heads, just a few examples of actual extinctions; let alone dig up a list of the tens or hundreds of thousands that would be indisputably on record if Al Gore and Norman Myers hadn’t been dead wrong. The irony of the newspaper headline above, 25 years after Norman Myers made up his million-in-25-years number, is the stuff a sub-editor lives for.

So when someone raises extinctions as this major catastrophe, I say, “people make this stuff up”. Not because I’m being argumentative, or because I’m being controversial, but because they really do make this stuff up.

(Source: Lomborg 2001, p250ff, citing among others Bailie and Groombridge, 1997, Walter and Gillett 1998, May et al, 1995:11, Reid 1992:56 and, of course, Myers 1979:5.)

Well, that’s it then. The Al Gore Inc special interest lobby has won another victory. The US has declared the polar bear to be an endangered a threatened species. So from today, global waffling alarmists can cite the doomed polar bear in support of their doctrinaire opposition to energy production, industrial projects and economic development.

Care to make further strides in reducing poverty, increasing life expectancy, growing prosperity and improving quality of life? Sorry, poor pretty polar bear cubs with small plaintive voices will stand astride history yelling, “Stop!” This is what, these days, they call “progressive”.

Yesterday’s press release was to the point:

Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne today announced that he is accepting the recommendation of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The listing is based on the best available science, which shows that loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat. This loss of habitat puts polar bears at risk of becoming endangered in the foreseeable future, the standard established by the ESA for designating a threatened species.

I’ve pointed out in considerable detail before, polar bears should not be listed by any reasonable interpretation of the various criteria that apply. The motives for listing them as endangered threatened — opposition to oil exploration and pathological fear of climate change — are also quite explicitly stated by the green lobby. The only possible scientific reason for listing them (the reason cited by Kempthorne) is wild speculation about future changes in their habitat, combined with the assumption that polar bears won’t bother to adapt to their environment, if it did indeed change.

But here’s what’s really happening to the population:

(Studies, in chronological order, are by: IUCN, Schuhmacher, DeMaster & Stirling, Nowak & Paradiso, Watson, Garner, Truett & Johnson, Schliebe, Lunn et al, IUCN, IUCN. Background photograph is by Steve Amstrup of the US Geological Service.)

Alarmists have a nasty habit of citing the high estimate in 1996, and the low estimate in 2006, to make their case for being alarmed. This technique, of carefully selecting time intervals to “prove” a dubious point by noting changes from an outlier, is a very common and simple means of lying with statistics. Given these studies, the more honest interpreter would use the longest available data series along with the most conservative estimates, to guess at a doubling in the population in the last 40 years. Or, if you prefer, you can assume the early research for technical reasons to be incomplete and inaccurate, and argue that the population appears stable at worst. However, that would appear to be unnecessarily pessimistic, as this article from last year points out:

“There aren’t just a few more bears. There are a … lot more bears,” biologist Mitchell Taylor told the Nunatsiaq News of Iqaluit in the Arctic territory of Nunavut. Earlier, in a long telephone conversation, Dr. Taylor explained his conviction that threats to polar bears from global warming are exaggerated and that their numbers are increasing. He has studied the animals for the Nunavut government for two decades.

Native wisdom, usually treated with great reverence by the environmentalist left, is undoubtedly a crock of self-serving lies in this case:

Inuit hunters make their own estimates of the polar bear population based on the number of animals they encounter on their travels. Taylor says scientists have ignored the anecdotal evidence of the Inuit, who say bear numbers were rising. Inuits also report more polar bears wandering into their towns and villages, where they are a threat to children.

“I’m pretty sure the numbers [of polar bears] are climbing,” says Pitselak Pudlat, an Inuit hunter and manager of the Aiviq Hunters and Trappers Organization at Cape Dorset, Baffin Island. “During the winter there were polar bears coming into town.”

(To be fair, note the chart in my earlier post, which shows growing, stable and declining populations.)

I reckon if the environmentalists are really so concerned about tiny areas of industrial activity in the vast wildernesses of the Arctic, they should just ship the fluffy little maneaters to the Antarctic. It’s uninhabited by people, full of nutritious food, and the ice is getting thicker, over there.

This suggestion is, admittedly, not as funny as the pathetic caveat Kempthorne, having caved to the pressure groups, adds to his press release:

In making the announcement, Kempthorne said, “I am also announcing that this listing decision will be accompanied by administrative guidance and a rule that defines the scope of impact my decision will have, in order to protect the polar bear while limiting the unintended harm to the society and economy of the United States.”

Good luck, Mr Kempthorne. You have a polar bear’s chance in hell. Perhaps you can get a job with Al Gore’s investment company, though. The self-serving capitalists of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers certainly owe you one. Maybe he’ll let you be a roadie on his next great rock star tour.

Update: The term “endangered” is a catch-all term (as in “Endangered Species Act”), but also indicates a particular classification, different from “threatened”. I have read the US Endangered Species Act (and its IUCN counterpart), and should have known to be less careless with these terms. Corrected where necessary.

Some things are not politically correct to say, so lots of stats are presented in support of rash generalisations that deny those things. Often, they’re contrived to support a pre-conceived argument, rather than constructed to shed light on the matter.

That the environment is not the biggest crisis of our time is one case in point, which I’ve discussed before. You’ll see plenty charts that show, for example, what a 20-foot rise in sea levels would look like on a map. Or how hurricanes have increased in frequency or intensity. A close look at the data, however, and you’ll see signs of contrivances, such as selecting end-points for data series to support the pre-conceived argument, or presenting speculative conclusions as factual data. And how the environment manages to recover from catastrophes — such as volcanoes, meteor strikes, earthquakes, nuclear testing — when it really is a fragile system, perched precariously atop an unstable equilibrium, and sensitive to every little belch and burp of human life, is left as an exercise for the reader. How humanity came to be so prosperous and well-fed if our production methods are so stupidly unsustainable, ditto.

But let’s look at a very different example. Let’s consider Microsoft’s success. It isn’t politically correct to suggest that the monster from Redmond occasionally makes smart business decisions. How it came to be a large, successful company that made more millionaires than most is left as an exercise for the reader. How a a billion PCs came to be installed around the world in 20 years, a majority of them running Microsoft’s terrible products, ditto.

Now granted, I’m not convinced that its bid for Yahoo! was a smart business decision. It smacks of desperation. It has spent ten years trying to find a revenue stream to which the Windows-and-Office cash baton can be passed, but no convincing candidate has yet appeared. In its search, it has a habit of buying up second-best players in a market segment, and then swamping them with Microsoft branding until they’re never heard from again. My own prediction on Microsoft is that ten years hence it will be known as a very good gaming company.

But take a look at this analysis, by Max Freiert, highlighted recently by the folks over at Junk Charts, who spend their lives debunking — often in the most entertaining fashion — statistics abuse by companies, governments and the media.

It shows this chart:

Then Freiert assigns value only to new customers, which makes the $45 billion deal appear like a valuation per customer of $1 200. This is patently ridiculous. But I suspect it is designed to look ridiculous from the outset. That’s why it does not take into account that Microsoft might derive additional value from customers in the overlap area, or might offer additional value to its own customers, and that these might all lead to higher revenue for Microsoft.

If we redo the calculation, but with the (equally arbitrary, but more realistic) assumption that Yahoo! customers who also use Microsoft properties are worth half as much as new customers who didn’t use Microsoft properties before, and customers who don’t use Yahoo! at all have no additional value at all, we get a per-customer valuation of less than $200. And if you postulate that the deal might result in the ability to offer new revenue-generating value to customers that didn’t use Yahoo! properties before, at the arbitrarily-selected rate of one-third of the value of new customers from Yahoo!, you get $150 per customer, overall. Does that sound more reasonable?

But what about the new customer numbers? Does the chart above really reflect visually how many new customers Microsoft gets? How small is that top slice really? The guys at Junk Charts, instead of mentally calculating the area as a reader is meant to do, simply recast the data as a bar chart, as a statistician might do. It’s not pretty, but it does make the point: actually the growth in customer numbers is pretty darn decent.

Here’s their reworked chart:

Check out the last line of the table in Freiert’s analysis, and you’ll see that his result is the same: new customer growth will be a substantial 31%. And if you look in the next column, you’ll see a 89% projected rise in page impressions. In fact, Freiert makes a big deal of this growth in Microsoft-owned traffic later in the analysis. But if only the new customers had any value, why the massive discrepancy? This merely confirms that assigning value only to those new customers is a ludicrous assumption, apparently designed to support a pre-conceived conclusion.

The growth in customer numbers is larger than Freiert’s pie chart suggests, and the actual price paid for potential new revenue is much, much lower than the $1 200 he puts in the headline. None of this shows that the Yahoo! acquisition really was a smart acquisition, but it does show that at least part of Freiert’s neatly contrived argument for why it may have been a daft acquisition holds no water.

It was a daft acquisition for other reasons. I could create a chart to prove it, but I fear you wouldn’t believe me.

Economist David Hale includes some fascinating statistics in a recent WSJ op-ed piece. He notes that the rise of emerging markets and their growing ability to finance American debt and current account deficits, is “a complete reversal of 20th-century history.”

The current business cycle will go down in the history books as one which confirmed that leadership in the global economy is now shifting from the old industrial countries to the emerging market countries. During 2007, the developing countries produced over 52% of global growth, compared to 37% during the late 1990s. China alone produced 17.8% of global GDP growth last year, compared to 14.6% for the U.S. economy. The developing countries’ share of total world output has risen to 29% this year from 18% in 1995. The World Bank is forecasting that the economies of developing countries will grow 7.4% this year, compared to 2.2% in the old industrial nations.

As a result of their large current account surpluses, the developing countries also account for 75% of the world’s $6 trillion of foreign exchange reserves. They also have sovereign wealth funds with assets of $2.5 trillion. And there has been a huge expansion of developing-country stock markets during the past decade. Their market capitalization now exceeds $17.8 trillion, compared to $2.2 trillion in 2000. The capitalization of the U.S. stock market is $17.5 trillion.

In the decade before 2005, American consumers were the growth engine for the world economy, accounting for more than half of global consumer spending. The balance of power is now shifting.

In 2000, the consumer spending of the world’s 17 largest emerging-market countries was equal to 48% of U.S. consumer spending; last year it was equal to 65%. At current growth rates, the developing countries could exceed U.S. consumer spending by 2015.

This consumption boom is changing global trade patterns. America’s share of global imports has fallen to 14% last year from over 20% in 2000. The import share of the developing countries has grown to 40.6% last year from 33% in 2000.

This disconfirms the popular left-wing trope that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. In reality, the rich are getting richer, but so are the poor. It suggests even that “inequality”, the fall-back number on which Western neo-socialists alight whenever they realise they simply cannot claim the poor are worse off than they were 50 years ago, is a fallacy.

These numbers remind me of the spectacular presentation Hans Rosling gave at TED in 2006, and a follow-up in 2007. If you haven’t seen his presentations, do yourself a favour and take the time to watch Rosling make data come alive:

Myths about the developing world, Hans Rosling, TED 2006

Watch the end of poverty, Hans Rosling, TED 2007

“The seemingly impossible is possible. We can have a good world,” he concludes, before debunking the image of the Swedish academic and statistician by swallowing a bayonet.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service is considering listing the polar bear as a threatened species, under that country’s Endangered Species Act.

Before blasting this idea as an underhanded ploy by evil environmentalists, it is worth considering the exact meaning of the terms in question. The US criteria are not quite consistent with those of the World Conservation Union (which the cognoscenti abbreviate as IUCN). The latter maintains the famous (or infamous, considering how few of its members have actually gone extinct) Red List of Threatened Species, in which “critically endangered”, “endangered” and “vulnerable”, describing an extremely high, very high or high risk of extinction respectively, are collectively known as “threatened”. By contrast, a “threatened” species under the US law means any species which is “likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range”, and an “endangered” species is one “which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range”. Also, there is much more scope for discretion under the US rules, while the IUCN criteria for the different categories are very specific.

So, on what grounds should the polar bear be listed as threatened? Among the US agency’s own research, a population forecast says much depends on 45-, 75- or 100-year predictions of the extent of Arctic sea ice, and even then, there’s much uncertainty. Besides, that analysis (PDF) has come under attack (PDF) for serious flaws in its methods and analysis. Turns out that after a few years of slight decline in Arctic sea ice coverage, this winter’s Arctic ice is back to normal levels. (Via Anthony Watts, who links to the useful University of Illinois Cryosphere Today site. It also has a cute story about a stolen polar bear photo, reproduced above, which Al Gore and the media used to tell yet another lie: “They cling precariously to the top of what is left of the ice floe, their fragile grip the perfect symbol of the tragedy of global warming.” Sob sob. Hat-tip: Hard Rain.)

What about polar bear population? Well, it’s pretty much stable, it appears. A National Center for Policy Analysis report entitled Polar Bears on Thin Ice? Not Really!, says that only two of the twenty or so population groups are in decline, which hardly gels with “throughout all or a significant portion of its range”. There’s a picture alongside. The chart illustrates the polar bear populations that are growing, declining, stable and unknown. Hardly looks like a threatened species, does it?

In fact, although the Red List includes the polar bear (and the hippo, which is responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other large animal), I can’t see which of the criteria it actually meets. The Inuit around Hudson Bay are saying more need to be hunted, because their population is increasing, and in an amusingly headlined article, “Advertisers urged to kill off polar bears,” James Murray reports on a study that finds advertisers should eschew cute pictures of polar bears to burnish their green image.

Listing a species that isn’t actually endangered is likely to do as much harm to noble conservation efforts as did Norman Myers’s 1979 statement, based on supposition alone, that 40 000 species would go extinct per year until 2000. Didn’t happen. Yet it was repeated in Al Gore’s 1993 book, Earth in the Balance, and is only one among many hyperbolic prophesies of mass extinction, which simply have not come true, and don’t look likely to happen in the foreseeable future either. They’re a bit like the cults who predict the end of the world. They’ve never been right, but of course, that only strengthens their faith that they have to be right sometime soon.

Despite the lack of evidence that the polar bear is, in fact, threatened, Brendon Frazier of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, says it should be listed not as threatened, but as endangered. In this AFP article, he explains the reason why:

“An endangered listing can affect the sell-off of the oil drilling rights,” Brandon Frazier, a spokesman for global animal welfare group International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) said. “The authorities would have to get approval through the Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct drilling if there is an endangered species that inhabits the area.” […]

US lawmakers have proposed listing the polar bear as “threatened”, but IFAW said that did not go far enough. “A ‘threatened’ listing leaves open the possibility for exemptions and doesn’t shut loopholes, such as the one that allows Americans to trophy-hunt for polar bears in Canada and bring their heads and hides back to the US,” Frazier told AFP.

So there’s your reason. Anything to stop the big, bad oil companies from drilling. If the polar bear is under threat, the reason is climate change, which in turn is caused by evil humans, who dare pursue industrial development, scientific advance and economic progress.

That’s what they’re fighting for. If the polar bear gets listed as threatened, this can be used to stop almost any new industrial development, anywhere. Even if the impact is so tenuous nothing but global warming alarmism can rationalise it. If the polar bear gets listed as endangered, then so is the growth in prosperity that has fueled the rising quality of life among rich and poor alike. It’s not about the polar bear. It’s about us. It is, to quote William F. Buckley, about standing athwart history, yelling “Stop!”.

Now who’s the conservative?

The greedy capitalists are once again going to be on the short end of the stick. The reason? Global warming, of course. Why? Because of hurricanes, as Americans call low-pressure system storms also known, depending on where they occur, as cyclones or typhoons.

As everyone knows, global warming is going to make hurricanes worse, so they’re going to increase the payouts insurance companies have to carry. It will, “generate more storms and more intense hurricanes,” says hurricane historian Jay Barnes of Pine Knoll Shores, North Carolina in paragraph two. Paragraph three continues: “Numerous studies in recent years have found no evidence that the number of hurricanes and their northwest Pacific Ocean cousins, typhoons, is increasing because of the rise in global temperatures.”

Nevermind paragraph three. Let’s try this again.

As everyone knows, global warming is going to cause fewer killer hurricanes, so they’re going to decrease insurance premiums insurance companies will be able to charge.  “Using data extending back to the middle nineteenth century,” the story quotes physical oceanographer and climate scientist Chunzai Wang of the NOAA, “we found a gentle decrease in the trend of U.S. land-falling hurricanes when the global ocean is warmed up.”

An explanation I’ve heard before for predicting fewer and lighter storms is that global warming will decrease the temperature gradient between the poles and the equator, which is the engine driving the atmospheric circulation that causes disturbances such as low pressure systems that could turn into cyclonic storms.

Wang’s explanation is different. He attributes the historical data to increased vertical wind-shear caused by an increased temperature gradient between low-altitude and high-altitude air. Which also makes sense, if the presupposition that global warming is a long-term trend is true (which, of course, it probably is not).

So one way or another, there will be either higher payouts or lower premiums. Or lower payouts and higher premiums. Nobody knows. Either way,  insurance companies are screwed. Or not. But then, I guess that’s why they call their business “risk management”. Who’d be stupid enough to try to manage risk? Them capitalists have it coming.

Whatever the facts, we must act now, before it’s too late. Must act. Must act now!

Can we really risk the future of mankind when even the scientists have no clue what’s going to happen? No! We must make commitments! We must make sacrifices! We must atone for our sins! We must make election promises! We must soak the rich, to buy the votes of the poor! No, wait, that’s old. We must do more! We must soak the sensible, to buy the votes of people who risk living in hurricane-prone states! In fact, let’s soak everyone, to buy the votes of the soaked! With enough taxes and subsidies and government funds and wealth redistribution, everyone’s a winner!

That’s exactly what half the US presidential candidates campaigning in states such as Florida are proposing to do. They promise to transfer the risk to the US taxpayer. And, would you believe it, that’s the Republican half. Imagine what the Democrats could get up to. The only way they could improve on this populist glad-handing and socialist redistribution is to outlaw hurricanes that make landfall without the proper government authorisation.

That’s how it always ends with eco-politics. No matter what the data says, you can be sure someone, somewhere, is setting up to fleece you.

Or, to offer an alternative headline, suggested by a journalist mate of mine: “Manufactured news, only on ‘e’!”

The junk-stat-of-the-week comes from a news report last night on e-tv, the only private free-to-air TV station in South Africa. It begins ominously: “Abortion clinics are being flooded with requests to have pregnancies terminated.”

Look, I know teen sex sells. That’s one reason for the provocative headline on this post. But let’s follow this news story a little more closely. According to the report, Marie Stopes Clinics carried out 24 223 abortions last year. “Many were done on teenagers, some even younger,” says the newsreader, dramatically.

Cut to footage of schoolgirls, with the camera focusing on somewhat podgy waists that may indicate pregnancy, and faces chastely omitted. “Still at school, still teenagers, and pregnant,” says the voice-over. “It’s girls like these who are queueing at clinics around the country for abortions.”

Read the rest of this entry »

An infamous report was issued in October 2006, just before the US mid-term election that returned Congress to Democratic control. Though the election had been the Republicans’ to lose, by virtue of their disregard for Gingrich Revolution-era promises of small government and spending restraint, the Iraq war played a not inconsiderable part in the electorate’s dissatisfaction with their government.

The Lancet, a hitherto respected British scientific journal, published an estimate by Johns Hopkins researchers (PDF) by means of a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, that between the invasion in March 2003 and July 2006, “there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2.5% of the population in the study area.”

That is carnage. It exploded arguments that modern wars, though always awful, have become progressively less awful because of better targeting, more accurate munitions, and greater care among Western soldiers to avoid “collateral damage” — the unfairly maligned hold-all phrase used to describe death and injury to civilians and damage to non-military buildings and infrastructure. They understand that collateral damage wastes effort, munitions and lives on inconsequential targets. They understand that collateral damage isn’t exactly the best way to win hearts and minds. They understand that collateral damage makes for bad PR back home, which undermines political support for their efforts. They understand that collateral damage serves nobody and harms everybody, and they have the means to avoid it.

Or so we thought. Until we discovered that around 650 000 people died unnecessarily. This was a much higher death toll than even the most vocal opponents of the war had yet claimed. It was at least 13 times more than the worst estimates of the US military, the Iraqi health ministry, or the independent Iraq Body Count organisation. Not to say that their estimates of 50 000 deaths was good news, but given that some combatants deliberately targeted civilians, it was better than half a million or more. In fact, it wouldn’t compare unfavourably with the death toll during the five years of South Africa’s “peaceful” transition to democracy. In short, tragic though it remains, 50 000 or 100 000 deaths are expected, but 650 000 are not.

The study was met with skepticism in some quarters, and the error margin of 550 000, or over 40% either way, doesn’t inspire confidence. President Bush dismissed the credibility of the report, and his political opponents in turn dismissed his credibility.

Meanwhile, the result was trumpeted across newspapers the world over. The National Journal, which stuck to an arcane debate clouded too often by splits along political lines, rather than substantive arguments about research accuracy and statistical methodology, noted:

CBS News called the report a “new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq.” CNN began its report this way: “War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports.” Within a week, the study had been featured in 25 news shows and 188 articles in U.S. newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

Turns out Bush was right, though. Earlier this month, the National Journal published a comprehensive set of conclusions in an article entitled Data Bomb, in which it interrogates every aspect of the study.

Days later, the New Scientists publishes an article entitled “Iraqi war death toll slashed by three quarters”, in which it reports that according to Iraqi health officials, the death toll for March 2003 to June 2006 was in fact between one sixth and one third of those published in The Lancet.

As the American Digest observes, if 600 000 Iraqis had really died, where are all the funerals? Were they held in secret? Were reporters just not interested in the heartfelt drama of corpses swaddled in white, borne by crying men and women?

The Iraq issue may turn out to be the most curious aspect of the 2008 presidential election campaign. Though dramatic mistakes were made, at political level, at intelligence level, and in strategic and tactical decisions on the ground, one gets the impression that most voters now recognise one might expect such missteps in a difficult war. Too many prophecies were made before the fact, rather than after the fact, the way Churchill preferred them, and a political price was paid. It is time, to turn an Angry Left slogan against it, to move on.

The carnage and failures and pessimism appears to have been exaggerated for too long. General David Petraeus is overseeing a strategy that is demonstrably working. Would it surprise anyone to learn that MoveOn.org, the pressure group that slandered him as “General Betray Us” in the New York Times, is funded by the same George Soros who partly funded the Lancet study?

The danger of exaggeration is that people stop believing you. That they recognise you’ll have difficulty making a case on the facts of the matter. The result, in the case of the Iraq-war-as-willful-carnage myth, is that few of the current presidential candidates even mention the war, beyond promising its responsible conduct to a hopeful conclusion. Even some of the Democratic candidates are, implicitly, endorsing the Bush Doctrine now. They know that they can’t objectively call Iraq a disaster, and that it’s no longer politically advisable either. Now, it seems voters, who opposed the war when it was (or sometimes merely appeared to be) going badly, have resolved that competently bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion is a more reasonable political desire than high-tailing it and leaving carnage behind. How far we’ve come, in just one short year.

The Carpe Diem blog has an interesting table confirming an argument Greg Mankiw recently made in an op-ed in the New York Times.

It is standard rhetorical fare on the left (and among foreigners who just love to find reasons to snipe at the US) to argue that private healthcare is worse than universal, socialised medicine, and the fact that raw life expectancy numbers in the US are lower than in more socialist countries proves this. Turns out the causes of lower raw life expectancy in the US are unrelated to the quality or accessibility of private healthcare, after all. If you account for the effects of premature death resulting from non-health-related fatal injuries, as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development does with its standardised life expectancy measure, the US comes out on top. Go figure.

(Via Greg Mankiw’s blog.)

For an economics piece (and in the New York Times, to boot), this is a beautifully succinct, clear article. Written by Harvard professor of economics, Greg Mankiw, it addresses three of the most frequently cited canards about the US healthcare system and its implications for the notion that free markets and prosperity are two sides of a very valuable coin.

It argues that the following statements, even when superficially correct, do not mean what they appear to mean:

1. The United States has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than Canada, which has national health insurance.
2. Some 47 million Americans do not have health insurance.
3. Health costs are eating up an ever increasing share of American incomes.

The article is an object lesson in interpreting statistics, and as Mankiw writes, “As we look at reform plans, we should be careful not to be fooled by statistics into thinking that the problems we face are worse than they really are.”

If you want to know how “scientific consensus” is cooked up, look no further than the speaker lists at climate change conferences. Actually, do look further: to who doesn’t get invited to such shindigs.

Last week, the American Statistical Association sponsored a workshop on climate change. The goal, according to David Marker, one of the organisers and facilitators, was to “delineate a statistical science perspective on understanding climate change and to develop a consensus statement on the areas of clear knowledge, as well as those areas in which great uncertainty remains”.

Of course, developing a “consensus statement” is easy if you neglect to invite people like Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who famously broke Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick temperature chart (right). Showing Mann’s methodology to be so badly broken that it turns even random data into a hockey stick, is one of the more significant statistical contributions to climate research in the last decade. Considering that the question of how to use proxy data to reconstruct a historic temperature record, and whether this record does or doesn’t show warm and cool periods corresponding to solar activity, remains a hot topic of discussion within the ASA (PDF newsletter), this on its own would appear to qualify them for invitations to such a workshop.
McIntyre has also been swimming against the tide of obstructionism and even secrecy by government scientists to audit US temperature measurement stations. Though the focus of the research is the siting of these stations and how “bad data” gets “corrected”, a surprise discovery forced James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, to correct the benchmark temperature record which — like Mann’s Hockey Stick — the politicians on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change use to scare us into give them more powers to tax and regulate. Again, the significance of McIntyre’s work on the statistical treatment of climate change data appears to be substantial. His comments on some of the topics raised at the ASA workshop show insight and familiarity with the issues.

This isn’t the first time that McIntyre and McKitrick have been omitted from speaker lists. Shortly after McIntyre’s discovery that NASA GISS had been cooking the books, a conference on integrity in scientific research likewise overlooked the Canadian, even though he’d raised red flags over the secrecy with which NASA GISS treats its data collection sites and its statistical methods.

Understanding climate change requires the combined skills of atmospheric scientists and statisticians, said Marker. The former understand the physical relationships being investigated, while the latter know how to determine which hypotheses are strongly supported and which are still subject to uncertainty.

And here I thought the consensus of the people that get invited to consensus-development workshops is that the science is settled.

In the rather lengthy comment thread on my child labour post, one point that was made went as follows:

If all you see worldwide is an improved quality of life, then you might be looking at surveys funded by investment banks, businesses and governments. Reports about severe violations of human and environmental interests are repeatedly leaking to the public, although the government is doing everything to avoid such reports, abolishing freedom of information and opinion, punishing citizens for giving information to journalists, imprisoning critics.

Not only does it make me fear for my own safety, but also for the safety of Hans Rosling, of whose TED lecture Jonathan Davis over at Limbic Nutrition reminded me.

If you haven’t seen it, you really should. Even if you’re not at all interested in the data, the data visualisation is spectacular.