Watch out for those British reporters

Leakegate: the case for fraud

[Via Deltoid]

They have been some explosive new revelations in the Leakegate scandal. Remember how Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the IPCC statement about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake’s query and informed him the claim was correct? Leake didn’t report what Nepstad told him. Instead he claimed that the IPCC statement was “bogus”, even though he knew it wasn’t.

Deltoid can now reveal that Leake’s reporting was far more dishonest than originally believed.

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It is so easy to debunk the misleading information that MSM flunkies often use. In this case, you could email the actual scientist and put up his reply.

I think “An outrageous piece of journalism” may be a correct description. But when writing for denialists, being outrageous is a job description.

[Listening to: Mother Road from the album "Never Let Go [Disc 2] (1992 tour, 1993)” by Camel]

I wonder where Seattle falls?

Come Work in the World’s Third Most Livable City!

[Via Opinio Juris]

by Kevin Jon Heller

The Economist Intelligence Unit has just released its annual list of the world’s most livable cities — and my adopted home of Melbourne ranks third, behind only Vancouver and Vienna. It thus seems like an appropriate time to mention that Melbourne Law School is looking to hire new faculty at all levels, from Lecturer to Professor:

This year we are particularly interested in, and encourage, applications from scholars researching and teaching in the fields of administrative law; criminal law and evidence; media and technology law; and private law, in particular remedies and torts.

We continue to seek new colleagues at all ranks (levels B to E) and across all sub-disciplines who share our commitment to a highly collegial, research-intensive professional life. We specifically encourage applications from current or aspiring academics with a clear understanding of the value of cross-disciplinary and comparative analysis, who are able to integrate teaching with research and knowledge transfer activities, and who are prepared to contribute to the vibrant communal life and culture at the Law School and within the University of Melbourne as a whole.

Salaries are quite competitive with the US market, particularly with the Australian dollar hovering around $.92. The Lecturer range is AUD $73,863 to AUD $87,710; the Senior Lecturer range is AUD $90,480 to AUD $104,329; the Associate Professor range is AUD $108,946 to AUD $120,025; and the Professor range is AUD $140,335 and above. Salaries also include a fantastic 17% superannuation — 17% of your salary paid directly to your retirement fund each year, on top of the salary itself.

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Only 2 cities in the top 10 are not in Canada or Australia/New Zealand – Vienna and Helsinki. The other 8 are Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary from Canada, Melbourne, Sidney, Perth and Adelaide from Australia and Auckland from New Zealand.

I imagine there will be some dispute here but I do know that Vancouver is a pretty nice place.

Using the Web to ‘fool’ the FDA

Hot U.S. Attorney Action in Drug Misbranding, Device Sales and Supplement Frauds

[Via Eye on FDA]

There were a spate of announcements last week about actions taken by U.S. attorneys – one that involves a guilty plea for misbranding a drug; one person getting a 51 month sentence for selling unapproved medical devices and one guilty plea for the fraudulent marketing of dietary supplements. Let’s check that out.

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So I was reading the various cases, seeing that fraudulent sellers of drugs and medical devices got what was coming to them. Then I ran across this one:

• Guilty Plea to Fraudulent Marketing of Dietary Supplements – It will be interesting to compare the sentence for this plea to the sentence for the sale of the unapproved medical devices. One case was in Albany, the next in San Diego, and this time from the heartland of Springfield, Missouri. Here was an Internet business that generated nearly $12 million, according to the release by the U.S. Attorney in the Western District of Missouri by making claims to prevent and cure diseases through the use of dietary supplements sold on the site. The supplements sold over various Internet sites were supposedly demonstrated by clinical trials to treat and prevent diabetes, IBS, gout, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heartburn and diarrhea and promotional materials were said to include fraudulent customer testimonials using photo stock images. The Internet sites also produced a “sanitized” version of the promotion when it was detected that the Web sites were accessed from an IP address that was within the FDA network. No insight into how the FDA cracked this one or overcame the IP address issue.

I highlighted the interesting text. Some people might know that websites can provide different pages depending on who requests the pages. Mostly this is to provide something like a mobile specific version of the web page when the website detects that a cell phone is asking for the page.

In this case, the website looked at the IP address of the computer asking for the page. Knowing the IP address is critical so that the web server knows where to send the page.

So, knowing what the range of IP addresses were for computers being used by the FDA, the web site would return one page if the request came from an FDA computer and another page if it was requested by someone else. They hoped that any FDA computers snooping around would see only the sanitized page and not the page everyone else saw.

Kinda clever but it can easily be overcome. First, use a computer with an IP address that does not look like it is from the FDA. Or, and I think this could be likely, the FDA can mask the IP address of some of its computers so that, from the outside world, they do not look like they come from the FDA. A relatively simple matter and one that could easily get around any of the sorts of approaches these frauds used.

Plus, it makes it harder for the frauds to claim naiveté, since they were obviously attempting to mislead by having two different web pages.

Overfishing of the oceans may not be our only problem

by vitroid

Leaving Our Geological Mark
[Via The Loom]

The warming climate may earn carbon dioxide all the headlines (including ones about senators who can’t tell the difference between a couple blizzards and a 130-year climate record), but the gas is having another effect that’s less familiar but no less devastating. Some of the carbon dioxide we pump into the air gets sucked into the ocean, where it lowers the pH of seawater.

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This is a key aspect of the increase in CO2 and its effects on the globe. Warming is one thing, but making the oceans more acidic could have even bigger impacts.

The report discussed says that the oceans are acidifying 10 times faster than they did during one of the most massive die-offs of marine life – a die-off that has been blamed on acidification of the oceans – the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Acid waters means the shells of plankton do not form properly. Without the plankton, the entire food chain can break down.

The PETM mainly affected deep water plankton. The current report indicates that shallow water plankton could also be affected.

It is likely that a couple of the big pulses of carbon found in the atmosphere during the 10,000 years or so of the PETM came from methane being released by the warming oceans. With the increases we are seeing, such methane release could happen in decades now, increasing the greenhouse effect substantially.

The tipping point for methane outgassing is not well known but it is a given that with enough warming, it will happen. Estimates of the amount of methane that could be released could very well be close to the amount used in this study (2.1 trillion tons of carbon). Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, about 72 times stronger than CO2. So a major, rapid release of methane would have staggering impact.

Not a report that makes one feel that ‘business as usual’ is the way to go.

[Listening to: Cocaine from the album "Time Pieces - The Best Of Eric Clapton" by Eric Clapton]

‘Errors’ do not invalidate

by fireflythegreat

Journalismgate
[Via Deltoid]

Realclimate covers the Journalismgate scandal, where a couple of dishonest reporters (Jonathan Leake and David Rose) have generated a blizzard of stories in British newspapers about alleged errors in the IPCC reports. Despite their best efforts to destroy the credibility of the IPCC reports, they’ve only managed to come up with two actual errors in three phone book size reports:

• WG2 wrongly said that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035
• WG2 said that the Netherlands was vulnerable sea level rise and river floodingbecause 55% of its area is bleow sea level when it should have said that 26% was below sea level and 29% vulnerable to river flooding.

I guess its possible that there’s more, but the bottom line is that in three enormous volumes, just two errors have been found. The credibility of the IPCC is in good shape, unlike that of the British press.

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There is a key aspect of this that needs to be stated.

The Working Group 1 report, the one that focussed on the science, has not been shown to have any fundamental errors. Any real errors that have been discussed come from Working Group 2, which was tasked more with policy issues, not the science.

Denialists try to conflate the two in order to denigrate the entire process. The thing that denialists of any strip believe – if you can show one error that invalidates the entire scientific edifice.

They do this all the time to promote creationism. ‘All they have to do is find one mistake made by a human being somewhere, and 150 years of scientific understanding must fall.’ I would call that a Massive Fail.

They have little understanding of the way scientific theories work. Something as robust as evolution or even climate change does not get to be a major theory without a substantial amount of independent data being generated. Data that has to be explained.

Bringing down an edifice does not happen because someone found an error in what a human reported. Newtonian mechanics was toppled by Einstein not because Newton made an addition error. It was toppled because it could not explain the data being generated.

The minor errors that a few reporters have found will not topple climate change. Data that can not be explained by climate change may. But denialists hate having to actually do science.

[Listening to: Hair / Crazy In Love (Glee Cast Version) from the album "Hair / Crazy In Love (Glee Cast Version) - Single" by Glee Cast]

Denialists can’t read

by chantrybee

Jones: Warming since 1995 not statistically significant
[Via CEJournal]

But skeptics misuse this statement to claim there has been no warming

In an interview with the BBC, Phil Jones, the embattled director of the British Climatic Research Unit, said that an observed warming trend of 0.12 degrees C per decade between 1995 to 2009 was “not significant at the 95% significance level.” On the other hand, he said, it was quite close to being statistically significant.

Predictably, the deniosphere jumped all over this. For example, here was Marc Morano’s headline at Climate Depot:

The Jig is Up! Climategate U-turn as Phil Jones admits: There has been no warming since 1995.

Either Marc knows nothing about statistics, or he is deliberately twisting the facts — or both. Phil Jones simply did not say that there has been no warming since 1995.

A 95 percent significance level simply means there is actually a 5 percent chance of a particular finding occurring purely by chance. So here’s what Jones is saying, in essence: There is a very slightly greater than 5 percent chance that the measured warming of 0.12 degrees C per decade between 1995 and 2009 was a statistical fluke — in other words, not real.

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No warming since 1995? Not even close to what Jones said. This is a great example of how denialists mislead. The article Climate Depot links to is not the original BBC article but one from the Daily Mail with the wild headline. A headline that is wrong.

He did not say there has been no warming. In fact, quite the opposite.

But misquoting is one of the common tools used by denialists of all stripes. I have seen it my whole career when evolution is brought up. The inability to read simple sentences, to misquote or to misunderstand what someone states, are all classic ploys of denialists.

As a researcher, I realize things can change. There is a slight possibility that climate denialists are right; that the release of CO2 by humans has no effect on climate. Or that the globe is not actually heating up. A very, very slight possibility today that they are right.

But then, they should have to present some other explanation for all the data, instead of just magically waving their hands and saying “It’s natural.”

The reason AGW was even proposed was because researchers had exhausted all the natural approaches to explain the data. To solve the current conundrum, something outside our understanding of the natural processes was needed. The AGW is a well-supported theory to explain the discrepancy between what natural processes should be doing and what we see. Denialists may toss it away but they have to come up with a better one that does not use natural processes as we know them.

Because known natural processes, by themselves, do not provide a complete explanation for the data we find. True skeptics are trying to find just such an explanation. But even the best of those, such as Lindzen, do believe that warming is occurring. They are arguing about the degree of warming, not whether it occurs.

Denialists do not demonstrate that approach at all. They often just seem to have a ‘gut’ reaction, with little rational explanation. When someone tells me that the Bible states that God will not let man destroy the world, as a reason for denying AGW, they are not making a rational argument.

Similar irrational arguments have been made denying evolution for decades.

Saying “It’s natural” is the equivalent of saying “God did it.” It does not provide us any greater understanding of the world around us. In fact, displays a profound lack of understanding of the world around us and how science works.

It is a strictly anti-science viewpoint.