William M. Briggs, Statistician

You’ve heard the joke about the boy on trial for killing his parents using the argument that the judge should be lenient because he was, after all, an orphan?

Well, that’s another joke no longer available to us. Because Joshua Nowtang of the Bronx chopped up his wife and fed her to the trout in a stream behind his house. He’s asking the judge for leniency because, quote, “I miss my wife, and I am going through the same pain and suffering” as her family. Full story: New York Daily News.

The Wall Street Journal opinion page has an article about a “study” appearing in the prestigious journal Lancet that purports to estimate the number of deaths in the Iraqi war. It turns out that the statistics were “funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers” and that the paper’s estimated “death toll was more than 10 times what had been estimated by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, and even by human rights groups.”

The Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, rushed the paper into print, and was quoted as saying, “This axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease.” The study’s authors have also “failed to follow the customary scientific practice of making [their] data available for inspection by other researchers.”

Peer-reviewed research that is subservient to political ideology? Is it even possible?

There is a belief among certain paranormal researchers—these are the guys who study mind reading, clairvoyance, etc.—that is used to explain why psychic experiments haven’t seen positive results. It is called the sheep-goat theory.

Those gifted with psychic powers, such as the ability to bend kitchen cutlery without using muscles, are sheep. Those who disbelieve in these powers are goats. It seems that, via a mysterious mechanism, the goats are able to emit evil, anti-psychic rays that interfere with the sheep’s positive-psychic vibrations, and so cause negative results, i.e. findings of no effect (more about this here). The goats do this both intentionally and unconsciously. If it weren’t for the goats, the belief goes, psychics would be manifesting multiple miracles and the world would be a better, more enlightened place.

Greenpeace, and other “activist” groups, believe something like the same thing is happening among Washington lobbyists. Activists are, of course, the sheep. Oil company-funded lobbyists are the goats, and it is these goats who have thus far prevented politicians from implementing a host of laws to modify our behavior, have stopped a large segment of the world’s population from deeply caring, and, worst of all, have corrupted and forced some scientists to publish research contradictory to the consensus.

The editors at Climate Resistance have written an interesting article about the “Well funded ‘Well-funded-Denial-Machine’ Denial Machine”, which details Greenpeace’s chagrin on finding that other organizations are lobbying as vigorously as they are, and that these counter-lobbyists actually have funding! For example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank “advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government”, got, Greenpeace claims, about 2 million dollars from Exxon Mobil from 1998 to 2005. The CEI has used some of this money to argue that punitive greenhouse laws aren’t needed. Greenpeace sees this oil money as ill-gotten and say that it taints all that touch it. But Greenpeace fails to point out that, over the same period, they got about 2 billion dollars! (Was any of that from Exxon, Greenpeace?)

So even though Greenpeace got 1000 times more than the CEI got, it helped CEI to effectively stop enlightenment and “was enough to stall worldwide action on climate change.” These “goats” have power!

Greenpeace’s caterwauling is just silly, of course. What is pernicious, and what gets my goat, are comments like those of James Wang of Environmental Defense, who says that scientists who publish results against the consensus are “mostly in the pocket of oil companies”; and those of the, yes, United Kingdom’s Royal Society that say that there “are some individuals and organisations, some of which are funded by the US oil industry, that seek to undermine the science of climate change and the work of the IPCC” (bottom of p. 3).

Forget that it is often pointed out that it is a logical fallacy that, just because a group funds a study, it follows that the results from that study are false; forget, too, the implication that oil companies are evil because they are oil companies, and instead concentrate on the psychology behind these statements. There is a desire that lies beneath them to believe that the results from non-consensus studies must be false, and so must have been produced by nefarious means. Therefore, these studies can be ignored and dispersions can be heaped upon their authors.

My friends, academic science cannot be conducted toward a pre-defined conclusion. We have already lost many of our humanities departments to this philosophy. Do not let it also happen to the quantitative sciences, and try to keep an open mind. The best test for an open mind is this question, which I always ask of my acquaintances who follow the paranormal, “What evidence would convince you that what you believe is false?” If you find you have no answer, your mind is closed.
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The sub-headline over at ABCNews.com is “Lawmakers Concerned That ‘Dr.’ Jarvik Lipitor Ads May Be Misleading Viewers.”

A kindly “doctor,” Robert Jarvik, inventor of the artificial heart, tells viewers about the benefits of Lipitor, the cholesterol-lowering medication. The ubiquitous commercial, along with previous ads, helped make Lipitor the best-selling drug in the world, with almost $13 billion in sales in 2006.

Those ads, and their use of celebrity endorsers, like Jarvik, are now being investigated [by a congressional subcommittee], for potentially misleading viewers. Source: ABCNews.com

I am not surprised, especially since I wrote an earlier article showing how misleading the Lipitor print ads are. That article can be found here. It’s a very deceptive ad.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works has released an addendum to its list of 400-plus scientists who express some level of skepticism about man-made global warming. I highlight this because, well, it turns out that my name has made its way onto the list, so I now have to explain why and what it means to be a “skeptic.”

I should first explain that I am on this list reluctantly, because, as I have been quoted as saying, “Most scientists just don’t want the publicity [associated with speaking out on climate matters] one way or another. Generally, publicity is not good for one’s academic career.” I do not think, then, that my being on that list, and starting this blog, will bring a tremendous boost in my own professional life. Scientists like to see discussions about uncertainty in their methods and results kept inside peer-reviewed journals and not dragged through the press. They have strong opinions on this. Witness the scorn heaped up the physicists Fleishman and Pons when they first released their “cold fusion” theory to the press and not to other scientists; for example, see this article which says that what the pair did was a “‘classic’ example of what not to do as” scientists. Actually, this is an odd statement because the incident ended well—because it was the initial public announcement that spurred the flurry of research that showed that cold fusion was false.

The only reason that I have been able to think of about why research should be confined to journals is that it is in these places that scientists expect to find new results. Scientists are not in the habit of scanning the newspaper or trolling the internet looking for press releases. There just isn’t the time to do so.

But climatology has, unfortunately, become a different sort of creature. Far too much speculation shows up in the headlines. Prominent scientists have taken to using the press as a bludgeon to discourage reasonable dissent. An example: R K Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, and now co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has compared anybody that dared question mad-made climate change to those who believe in a flat earth.

“Well, there will always be some skeptics,” Pachauri said. “As you know, there is still in existence something called the Flat Earth Society. There are people — a very limited number, thank God — who believe the Earth is flat.” Source: Washington Post

These excruciating comments are asinine and irresponsible, and they must be answered publicly.

I am not skeptical that man causes changes in his environment; in fact, I argue man must cause changes (see this post). I am only skeptical about the extent of these changes and about our ability to understand them. I am skeptical of the results from climate models that are used to posit large and harmful shifts in the earth’s temperature.

The vast majority of pronouncements about climate change are based on forecasts, guesses made about the future which are conditional on the multitude of assumptions underlying the models being true and on the forecasts having only small error. My specialty is in forecast evaluation (not just climate models, but any kind), and I do not feel that climate models have shown their ability to make accurate predictions thus far. This is why I said that the “error associated with climate predictions is also much larger than that usually ascribed to them; meaning, of course, that people are far too sure of themselves and their models.”

Overconfidence is a common human trait, and it holds in scientists just as much as it does with civilians. Typically, however, the excessive surety of scientists is tempered by the peer-criticism process, which has the effect of reducing, but never eliminating, prediction error. But this service won’t work well if experts are made to feel squeamish about making their critiques because of a public browbeating by autocratic scientists, politicians, and “activists.”

There is also a shade of “groupthink”—bandwagon research—not so much with climatologists, but with the mass of secondary and tertiary investigators who use climate model output as input to their own models of economics, public health, sociology, and so on. These models invariably show what they were programmed to show: that climate change of any kind is bad. This is, of course, physically impossible; but these are not physicists who are making these remarks—which of course quickly find their way into the press—and thus they are not held accountable in that sense.

Of course, if global climate models eventually show skill, then I will believe what they have to say.

Roger Pielke, Jr., who’s at the University of Colorado Center for Science Technology Policy Research, has written a year-end summary of the 2007 hurricane season. The summary appears in two places: AIR-Worldwide, a fairly large and subsidiary of a well known insurance and risk modeling company; and Pielke’s own Prometheus blog.

The best thing is that he reviews two of the papers that I’ve written that show (through 2006), that hurricanes (including tropical storms) have not increased in number or intensity in the North Atlantic nor worldwide. My papers are linked under my Global Warming category under various posts and can be downloaded there, but I warn you that they are fairly technical and use advanced statistical methods. They are, however, perfect reading for insomniacs.

If I get enough requests, I’ll work on putting up a simplified summary of the methods.

Last week we looked at how the polls did in Iowa. How badly did the polls in the New Hampshire race do in yesterday’s Democrat primary? Here are the results:

We still tracked Zogby, but had to switch to the local CNN/WMUR/University of New Hampshire poll for the second comparison.

Last week, for Democrats, the total absolute summed error was 30 points. This week, it is only 22 points, and two candidates, Edwards and “Others”, were predicted perfectly, yet this week’s polls are widely thought to be poorer. Why is this?

The polls last week, while they did not do as well as this week’s in predicting the actual vote percentages, got the order of the top three candidates correct. For this week, the first two candidates were switched, but just barely; the margin of victory was only 2 points.

For Republicans, last week, the total error was 14 points. This week: 16 points! Both last and this week, however, the order of the top three was correctly predicted.

What matters most to people about poll accuracy is the candidate order; the actual predictions of vote percentages don’t seem too important, which is odd. Candidate order is supremely important in a two-person race, of course, where the only thing that counts is who is on top. But when there are multiple choices in a primary and multiple primaries, a good poll must also do well with the percentages—which the polls seem able to do. So don’t lose faith in the polls just yet.

All the polls were taken on the weekend before the primary, of course, and do not, and can not, account for what happens between the polls and the vote. For example, this past week saw Hillary’s breakdown, her interaction with the “Iron my shirt” guys, and Bill Clinton’s stage phone-whisper “I wuv you”, which all happened after the last poll was taken.

This only means that the plus or minus error you often hear reported (”This poll is accurate to within +/- 3 points”) is imperfect, and should in general be larger than given. These plus or minus points are actually theoretical results based on obscure math and many data assumptions, which rarely hold. So it’s far better to use an error rate based on the actual observed error of polls instead of the theoretical intervals.

The mean absolute (Zogby) poll error for the last two weeks, for both parties, was 4 points. This gives some hints that the theoretical error rates are too low and should be, say, doubled. I’ll post more on this after the next polls in Michigan and South Carolina come in.

There was an old, and sadly funny joke about the Evolution of Math Quizzes that went like this:

1960s

A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four-fifths of that amount. What is his profit?

1970s New-math

A logger exchanges a set (L) of lumber for a set (M) of money. The cardinality of Set M is 100. The set C of production costs contains 20 fewer points. What is the cardinality of Set P of profits?

1980s

A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. Her cost is $80, her profit is $20. Find and circle the number 20.

1990s

An unenlightened logger cuts down a beautiful stand of 100 trees in order to make a $20 profit. Write an essay explaining how you feel about this as a way to make money. Topic for discussion: How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?

Ha ha ha ha! Right?

Unfortunately, wrong. For here, as incidentally reported in Foreign Policy, is an actual math quiz question from a German textbook:

In 2004, a bread roll cost 40 cents. For the wheat that went into it, the farmer received less than 2 cents. What do you think about that?

This is not the first time that reality has overtaken parody (here is one small example), but the rate at which it is doing so is beginning to exceed the rate at which comedians can create new jokes. And, it should be obvious, if comedians cannot write funny satirical material quickly enough, they will be out of work and forced into collecting unemployment, further burdening the welfare system. Therefore, I propose a law banning all new social behavior that overlaps with any prior-produced satire, unless that said behavior is itself unintentionally hilarious.

One such exception is this example from today’s New York Daily News (full story here):

Life imitated the movies Tuesday when two dopes wheeled a dead man around Hell’s Kitchen in an office chair as they tried to cash his Social Security check, cops said.

The “Weekend at Bernie’s” stunt was an attempt to collect 66-year-old Virgilio Cintron’s dough less than a day after he died, police said.

James O’Hare, and his pal David Dalaia attempted to dress Cintron’s corpse in a pair of pants, a T-shirt and sneakers…and wheeled him from his W.52nd St. apartment to a check-cashing outlet around the block on Ninth Ave.

“Witnesses observed Mr. Cintron flopping from side to side and these individuals propping him up as they rolled along,” said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.

The casual corpse on the sidewalk at 3:45p.m. drew a large crowd, including an on-duty detective who was eating lunch at a restaurant next-door…O’Hare and Dalaia were taken to the Midtown North stationhouse, where last night police were preparing to charge them with check fraud.

Update: 11 January 2007

Turns out that the Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors saw the Daily News story and called his buddy Terry Kiser, who played Bernie in the movies. Kiser says that there is a script in the works for a third installment to the series, and that he will offer bit parts to O’Hare and Dalaia, which gives me hope that the human race has not entirely lost its sense of humor.

Just heard Don Imus, who was attempting to explain why he wasn’t being sarcastic when he said “At least [George Bush] did something right” because we have not been attacked since 2001. One of his sidekicks quipped, with genuine sarcasm, that, “The Japanese haven’t attacked us since 1941, so he’s really doing something right.”

Of course, the last time the Japanese attacked us was in 1945, not 1941, but let’s not quibble about a few years. The real question is why the Japanese haven’t attacked us, or anybody else, since that time.

The answer is, it should be unnecessary to say, though I suppose it must be said, that it is because they attacked us in 1941.

This is a historical instance, one of a great multitude, of war working, of a successful democracy being installed by a Western power in another country. Don’t forget, too, that that war was not ended by “dialog” but by direct action.

It is therefore astonishing that so many now say that a “military solution in Iraq is impossible.”

Reuters’s, on 3 January, had this headline, “2008 to be in top 10 warmest years say forecasters.”

A quote:

2008 will be slightly cooler than recent years globally but will still be among the top 10 warmest years on record since 1850 and should not be seen as a sign global warming was on the wane, British forecasters said.

Where to start? First, the anemic forecast. Suppose the global mean temperature is, as predicted by several models, increasing, though this increase is subject to fluctuation from year to year, such that for one or two years the temperature might actually decrease, but in the long run, the temperature will still increase. Call this scenario the increasing temperature climate. It is important to emphasize that the increasing climate schema is consistent with both a significant man-made component and with the change being due to external causes. Now suppose, as has also been proposed, that the global mean temperature instead followed this cartoon, depicting a cyclically-changing climate:

This cartoon (and those based on other potential climate scenarios) is also consistent with either man-made climate changes or with the changes being due to external causes. It is just that, in this picture, the man-made component is harder to quantify. This is because of the trivial truth that man must influence the climate (see this), and that this influence will either be trivial or significant.

So it is a tautology to say that either man-made global warming is significant or it is not. One of those conditions must be true. It is also observed that the global mean temperature is correlated from year to year, so it is a fact that the temperature is somewhat constrained, in the sense that we will see little change from year to year, no matter whether mad-made global warming is significant or not, and regardless whether a general increasing or a cyclic climate holds.

Lastly, it is also the case that the global mean temperature has been increasing since the late 1990s until 2006. In 2007, the temperature decreased.

So the prediction that “2008 will be in the 10 ten warmest years” has an overwhelming probability of being true regardless whether man-made global warming is significant or not, and regardless whether an increasing or cyclic climate holds. That is, no matter what, this prediction is probably true, and it is useless as its intent was to give indirect evidence that the increasing climate scenario holds and that the man-made component of global warming is significant. It does neither such thing. Presenting this prediction as news is a clever debating tactic, but it is misleading, because the alternatives are not presented, even though the forecast is just as much evidence for them.

“‘The fact that 2008 is forecast to be cooler than any of the last seven years does not mean that global warming has gone away,’ said Phil Jones, director of climate research at UEA.” Jones is right, partially. But he forgot to say, “That fact the 2008 is forecast to be cooler than any of the last seven years also means that it might true that the climate is cyclic and that man has no real influence on it.”

This forecast is not additional evidence that an increasing climate or that man-made global warming holds.