Our indefatigable health advocate was quickly on the case.

18th January at 15:07
RIGHT NOW IN AUSTRALIA - THIS is the MEGA FOCUS TODAY - the VACCINATED are CLOGGING UP the HOSPITALS and SADLY DYING - 33 deaths out of 36 today in NSW are AT LEAST DOUBLE SHOT!!!!!
Q Why is Victoria LYING that it is the unSHOT that are clogging hospitals and dying?
“Of the 36 people who died; 33 people had received at least two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, and three people were not vaccinated. Older age is a significant risk factor for serious illness and death for COVID-19, particularly when combined with significant underlying health conditions.”
#chasetruth

Now Peter is not addressing the Statistical Society of Australia. He is talking to his paranoid demographic who have a rather different toolkit for numerical analysis at their disposal.

Gino Moore
They love that 33~ Masonic they are!

Kaploon Luke
Gino Moore yeh 33 out of 36 (3x6) 666

Some of his other fans suggested that these figures are going to lead to a new reporting standard or "goal post shifting" as they are want to call it.

Patricia Hatherly
The CHO in Qld on channel 9 last night gave the latest death figures here and said they were all "unvaccinated as they'd not yet had their booster"...now that's a significant goalpost shift and possibly explains why "unvaccinated" has a new meaning.

Nathan Hately
Patricia Hatherly yep exactly what i was gunna say. They will solve there vaxed died issue by saying they only had 2 shots and needed 3

Of course an eventual move to defining the vaccinated cohort as being vaccinated within a window of effectiveness is a sensible standard to adopt, but that is not the crux of the issue here with Peter's concerns.

There has been a day in NSW where only one in 12 people of the COVID-19 deaths was unvaccinated, so according to the logic of "Fight Pharma Corruption" the NSW Government is pushing an ineffective vaccination strategy.

What this pandemic has demonstrated to me is that our society is increasingly divided between the numerate and the innumerate. Plenty of people have minimal ability when it come to numeracy and prefer to leave it to the experts for their analysis and pronouncements, however there is a vocal segment of the innumerate population who lack insight into their functional innumeracy and conflate their mathematical inabilities with the belief that they have uncovered some statistical anomalies in the government health reporting that demolish the claims of the vaccination advocates and health authorities in general.

I also hear the same kind of flawed reasoning from problem gamblers, anti-helmet campaigners, a variety of science deniers who are convinced that they have uncovered some supposed evidence that the government is trying to conceal.

For most of us it would seem unremarkable if one in twelve road casualties were wearing a seatbelt given the near ubiquity of seatbelt wearing, but anti-vaxxers clearly fail to arrive at this basic mathematical intuition.

So let's take a look at the numbers and ask "If the COVID-11 vaccination regime was completely ineffective, what kind of mortality split would we expect to see in this daily cohort?"

To answer that we would start with looking at the statistics of vaccine coverage. I have picked data from NSW Health on the 4th January, because it is appropriate to be looking at vaccination rates at roughly the time that this cohort might have contracted COVID-19.

On 4th January 95% of people aged 16 and over had received at least one COVID-19 vaccination and 93.6% had received two vaccines. This means we can split the numbers up as follows. We aren't concerned with reporting on booster status as it is not typically included in the daily mortality figures.

So if COVID-19 vaccines were completely ineffectual we would expect to see the vaccination status in the mortality figures following about the same distribution as the vaccination status of the population at large. As 4.7% of 36 is about 1.692, if there was no vaccine effectiveness we'd expect to see one or two unvaccinated fatalities in the statistics. However, there are three unvaccinated deaths reported on 18th January. A total of 8.3% of the mortality figures.

So more unvaccinated people are turning up than by chance, but this reasonably obvious conclusion seems to be lost on Peter Little. Now, I don't believe that he is being knowingly deceptive. I believe that this basic fact eludes him because of his unfortunate intellectual limitations and exacerbated by him not having the self-awareness that he is engaging in an intellectual inquiry beyond his level of competency.

Relative Risk

We can go further with our analysis. When weighing up a health intervention it is worth knowing the relative risk of an intervention compared to not proceeding with an intervention. Any recommendations on vaccination should take these considerations into account. We don't want to simply be getting vaccinated if there is no significant benefit in doing so.

A simple formula that compares adverse outcomes in the intervention group to the control group determines the relative risk. The Wikipedia page gives a good overview, but there are plenty of online courses and resources on health statistics if you want to delve a bit deeper.

First of all a single day's worth of data is a somewhat small sample size. It could be there could be that there are some one off cases of data reporting - eg, sometimes a backlog of coronial data gets included into a single reporting day. Sometimes there are reporting patterns such as a cycle of weekday versus weekend figures that suggests that the working week of the health professionals has some influence over how data is reported. On the other hand we really don't want to look at six months worth of data as there have been several waves of infections and the pre-delta and pre-omicron statistics are best examined without being mixed in with the current wave. So, we will confine ourselves to the week of reporting figures from 12th January to 18th January 2022 in order to get a more representative snapshot of the current phase of the pandemic.

We can find this data in a uniform format on the NSW Health website on a page called 2022 media releases from NSW Health.

Putting this data into a spreadsheet we can use the vaccination rates listed above to derive the size of the population cohorts. We will use 6 500 000 as the number of people in NSW who are 16 years and over.

So the relative risk formula is:

RR  = (IE / (IE + IN)) / (CE / (CE + CN))

The terms in this formula are:

IE Intervention Event
IN Intervention Nonevent
CE Control Event
CN Control Nonevent

We will be calculating Relative Risk on mortality figures alone as that reflects the current focus of our inquiry.

For our purposes an Intervention Event is a vaccinated person who has died of COVID-19. A Control Event is a person an unvaccinated person who has died of COVID-19. Intervention and Control Nonevents make up the bulk of the NSW population - those who are either vaccinated or unvaccinated and have not died of COVID-19.

We can see in the spreadsheet that have been 122 deaths of fully vaccinated people (for our purposes this still double jabbed) and there are 41 deaths from unvaccinated people.

So we can calculate the Relative Risk of vaccination in this time period using the formula:

RR  = (IE / (IE + IN)) / (CE / (CE + CN))
= (vaccinated deaths / NSW fully vaccinated population) / (unvaccinated deaths / NSW unvaccinated population)
= (122 / 60840000) / (41 / 3055000)
= 0.149416302

A fully vaccinated person has a relative risk of about 15% of the unvaccinated person. Or another way of saying this is that an unvaccinated person has about 7 times the chance of dying from COVID-19 than an unvaccinated person.

These figures have been changes over time based on the type of virus strains in the population, the improvements in treatments and many other factors. If we did the same calculation on the single day figure of 18th January, we would get an RR = (33 / 60840000) / (3 / 3055000)) = 0.552350427.

So either way, even if we are just looking at the RR of the 18th January - the statistical outlier day) vaccinated people only have 55% of the risk of unvaccinated people.

References

The spreadsheet is available to view on Google Docs

COIVD-19 Vaccination Relative Risks

Sheet1 Vaccination Rates 16> on 4-Jan-2022,12-Jan-22,13-Jan-22,14-Jan-22,15-Jan-22,16-Jan-22,17-Jan-22,18-Jan-22,Total Deaths,Population Size,Relative Risk 12th - 18th Jan RR = (IE / (IE + IN)) / (CE / (CE + CN)) No vaccine,4.70%,8,8,10,4,6,2,3,41,3055000 One vaccine,1.40%,1,1,2,910000,0.1637649...

Google Docs

These are the daily statements from NSW Health that were used to compile the spreadsheet above.

12 Jan 2022: Of the 21 people who died; 12 were vaccinated, eight were not vaccinated and one person had received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20220112_01.aspx

13 Jan 2022: Of the 22 people who died; 14 were vaccinated and eight were not vaccinated.
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20220113_00.aspx

14 Jan 2022: Of the 29 people who died; 19 people were vaccinated against COVID-19 and 10 people were not vaccinated.
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20220114_01.aspx

15 Jan 2022: Of the 20 people who died; 16 people were vaccinated against COVID-19 and four people were not vaccinated.
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20220115_00.aspx

16 Jan 2022: Of the 20 people who died; 14 people were vaccinated against COVID-19 and six people were not vaccinated.
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20220116_00.aspx

17 Jan 2022: Of the 17 people who died; 14 people were vaccinated against COVID-19, one person had received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and two people were not vaccinated.
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20220117_00.aspx

18 Jan 2022: Of the 36 people who died; 33 people had received at least two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, and three people were not vaccinated.
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20220118_00.aspx

How to get Expelled from School -
A guide to climate change for pupils, parents and punters
By Ian Plimer
Connor Court, A$29.95

Capitalising on the popular success of his previous book, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science, Professor Ian Plimer has returned to our bookshelves inviting insurrection from the youth against the politically correct science that they are being taught in school. In contrast with Heaven and Earth, this book is much lighter on the science. Chapters that deal with scientific topics quickly divert into attacks on Tim Flannery, Al Gore and the IPCC. The text lacks footnotes and the skeptical reader is left to guess the sources of many of the claims that run counter to conventional science. At the heart of this book is what purports to be a scientific argument demolishing the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming.

• For most of time, the planet’s atmosphere had a far greater carbon dioxide content than now yet the planet both warmed and cooled. This clearly shows that other great forces drive climate change, that CO2 does not and that the hypothesis is wrong. (pp170)
• Each of the six major ice ages, including the current one that started 34 million years ago, began when the atmospheric CO2 content was higher than now. These six ice ages show that the hypothesis is wrong. (pp171)
• Ice core measurements show temperature rises some 800 to 2000 years before the atmospheric CO2 content rises. Again, the hypothesis is shown to be wrong. (pp172)
• Some 24,000 years ago, during the peak of glaciation there was a sudden warming of about 15C. Was this warming due to smoke stacks emitting CO2? Of course not. The hypothesis is again wrong. (pp173)
• Roman times were warmer than now but this could not be due to human emissions of CO2 and again the hypothesis is wrong. (pp176)

And so on. Plimer believes that he has demonstrated to us 16 times in six pages why the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming must be wrong. He concludes: “How many times does a hypothesis have to be shown to be wrong before it is rejected? Only once! The climate industry still clings to the carbon dioxide hypothesis and the only way this can be done is to ignore the history of the planet and pretend that the planet had a stable benign climate until the Industrial Revolution. This is not science. I would like to know what particular drug these catastrophists are ‘on’ as it clearly obliterates the past and creates a wonderful false reality!” (pp175)

Of course, these are all straw man arguments. Most of the evidence that Plimer uses in these arguments is acknowledged by scientists in the field, though some of his claims such as the Roman era being globally warmer than today are disputed. There is no contradiction between saying that there have been natural temperature variations in prehistory and stating an AGW hypothesis. As CO2 is not purported to be the only driver of climate, an enumeration of prior ages with higher CO2 and lower temperatures does not refute the hypothesis. Anyone that grasps a feedback mechanism will have no problem reconciling peaks in temperature have historically occurred 800 years or more prior to peaks in CO2 levels in the ice core data with the notion of CO2 increases giving rise to a temperature increase.

Much of Plimer’s critique of historical CO2 levels and his uncertainty of any anthropogenic rise appear to be derived from the work of the Polish physician and scientist Zbigniew Jaworowski. Jaworowski’s argument is that preindustrial CO2 levels have been systematically underestimated by a range of circumstances including:

• a misdating of the CO2 in the Antarctic Siple ice core;
• a natural attrition of CO2 in older ice deposits that masquerades as an apparent historical increase of CO2;
• poor positioning of the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii has led to atmospheric CO2 levels being corrupted by vehicle exhaust and
  volcanic eruptions; and
• historical CO2 measurements back to the 1820s have been systematically discarded if they don’t match presumptions from the Siple ice core.

This argument was made in various articles and books that Jaworowski published in the early 1990s[1]. The subsequent advances in ice core drilling at Vostok base in Antactica have given researchers a 420,000 year record that shows CO2 levels fluctuating in accord with the Earth’s orbital cycles and that CO2 levels have never exceeded 300ppm. This is a strong refutation of Jaworowski’s hypothesis of CO2 levels being lower in deeper core samples because of a gradual release into the atmosphere. Similarly, the corroboration of the Mauna Loa data set with samples taken at the South Pole over a similar time period eliminates any suggestion that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is a localised phenomenon.

Plimer presents Jaworowski’s arguments against the reliability of CO2 monitoring without criticism but also uses evidence from the Vostok ice core and the corroboration of South Pole and Mauna Loa data in other parts of How to get Expelled from School.

On sea level changes, Plimer gives significant weight to the views of Swedish geophysicist, Nils-Axel Mörner. According to Plimer: “In the past 2000 years, sea level has oscillated with five peaks reaching 0.6 to 1.2 metres above the present level. There is actually a Commission on Sea Level and Coastal Evolution, an independent body unrelated to the IPCC. … It states that by 2100 AD, sea level will have risen by 5 ±15cm.” (p144)

This statement is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) did convene a Commission on Sea Level and Coastal Evolution, but it was disbanded after Mörner’s term as president was completed in 2003 and INQUA has been at pains to distance itself from the Mörner claims ever since[2]. Mörner made the following statement about a 21st century sea levels rise on the commission’s website: “My personal evaluation (Mörner, 1995) is ‘10 cm, at the most 20 cm, in the next century’.” [3]

In later writings, Mörner had refined this figure to the “5 ±15cm” that Plimer quotes, rather than 47 ±39 cm of the IPCC. The statement that sea level has oscillated with five peaks between 0.6m and 1.2m in the last 2000 years is also to be found in the writings of Mörner. This runs counter to most research in this area that shows stable conditions for most of the last 2000 years, aside from a steep rise since 1800AD[4]. It appears from numerous papers that Mörner has written that his estimates are based on visual inspections where he attempts to identify and date high water marks in stone formations, soil and exposed tree roots. Mörner’s methodology seems eccentric when compared to the standard techniques such as as the dating strata in coral reefs using an isotopic analysis. In recent years, Mörner has also taken an interest in finding a scientific basis for dowsing, discovering a calendrical alignment in a Swedish stone circle and identifying an ancient Greek trading post in the south of Sweden.

Plimer produces a diagram that shows the annual increase in methane levels based on ice core data from Law Dome Antartica and atmospheric measurement at Cape Grim in Tasmania. Plimer’s graph ends abruptly at the year 2000 prior to significant methane rises that have occurred since 2007. This cropped data fits his narrative that increasing methane emissions were caused by leaks in Russian gas pipelines. “It was capitalism that reduced human emissions of methane to the atmosphere, not environmental activism, taxation or nature.” (p134).

While dismissing Michael Mann’s reconstruction of past temperatures as a fraud, Plimer gives his own proxies to the past climactic conditions. We learn that the ancient land of Lydia, which according in common wisdom is an inland region of Asia Minor, is now a submerged city (p143) and that Hannibal successfully marched elephants over the Alps in 218BC because the mountain range was ice free (p129).

Professor Plimer concludes this book with 101 questions that students might like to ask their ‘warmist’ teachers. Tree hugging pedagogues will cringe in terror when they are asked, “Do plants know the difference between carbon dioxide emitted from human activities and carbon dioxide from natural emissions?” (p199) or “If water vapour is the main greenhouse gas, why doesn’t the government have a tax for water vapour emissions?” (p203)

Overall, there are few surprises in this book. Professor Plimer regurgitates many of his earlier inaccuracies and polemics. His disaffected readers are unlikely to be expelled from school. Neither will they be any wiser about the science of climate.

REFERENCES

1. Jaworowski, Z., Segalstad, T.V. and Hisdal, V., “Atmospheric CO2 and Global Warming – A Critical review” Meddelelser 119, Norsk
   Polarinstitutt, Oslo 1992 . http://www.CO2web.info/np-m-119.pdf
2. Letter from Prof. John J. Clagu to Yuri Osipov, President of the Russian Academy of Sciences July 21, 2004 . http://apps.edf.org/documents/3868_morner_exposed.pdf
3. Mörner, N-A, 2003 http://pog.nu/sea/07_research_topics/rt5.htm
4. CSIRO, http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_intro.html

Originally published in The Skeptic Vol. 32, No 3. September 2012
(https://www.skeptics.com.au/wp-content/uploads/magazine/The Skeptic Volume 32 (2012) No 3.pdf)

Bjørn Lomborg has come to prominence as the author of several books such as The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, which claim to give a calm and clear account of the state of the environment in contrast to the outrageous and exaggerated claims of environmentalists.  While many biologists and environmental scientists have been fairly dismissive of his claims, few rigorous counterarguments have been published. Howard Friel set out to follow the paper trail of Lomborg’s sources and has published his results in The Lomborg Deception.

The dust jacket describes Howard Friel as an “independent scholar” who has previously written works analysing the New York Times’ biased analysis of the Israel Palestine conflict and US foreign policy. This gives us some idea of what to expect with the current effort. At 270 pages, The Lomborg Deception is notably brief in comparison to the Lomborg corpus that Friel is trying to analyse.  At the outset it should be said that Friel has confined himself to a very narrow review of Lomborg’s work. Lomborg’s econometric efforts such as Global Crises, Global Solutions and Solutions for the World’s Biggest Problems: Costs and Benefits are totally ignored. Surprisingly, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World receives only a twenty page analysis. The rest of the book is exclusively concerned with Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.  Friel has done an adequate job of following the citations in Cool It and reveals a fairly predictable structure to Lomborg’s approach. Lomborg will quote a news grabbing article in the popular press or well-publicised claims of environmentalists and then cite some scholarly research before drawing a contrary conclusion. By searching through Lomborg’s scholarly sources, Friel reveals a trend where Lomborg’s optimistic conclusions have been constructed from a collage of carefully selected quotes.

Friel indulges himself in some annoying forms of pedantry. Lomborg is criticised for describing some polar bear colonies as being “stable” when his source describes them as “stationary” (p26). Likewise we learn that a food security report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation uses the terminology “undernourished” and “malnourished”, but Lomborg uses “starving” (p56). This finicky obsession leads itself to absurdity when Friel begins a lengthy attack on Lomborg for referring to a diagram in the 4th IPCC report as “Figure 10.6.1” when in fact he was referring to Figure 10.61 of Section 10.6.1 (p117).

While this superficial approach does produce many examples of Lomborg’s selective quote mining, Friel’s lengthy excursions into the minutiae of academic referencing comes with a failure to refute the broader economic, statistical and ecological arguments that Lomborg is making.  A case in point is Friel’s treatment of a section of Cool It called “Death in Europe” (Lomborg, p15). While 35,000 West Europeans died in the August 2003 heatwave, Lomborg leads us to believe that media attention is ignoring a significantly larger number of deaths per year due to cold weather. Lomborg tells us in an end note that there are 207,000 heat related deaths in Europe per year in contrast with 1,480,000 cold related deaths. Friel’s only comment on this remarkable claim is to say that Lomborg’s reference, a report from the World Health Organisation, didn’t make mention of heat or cold related deaths. What should be obvious from Lomborg’s end note is that Lomborg has taken a mortality study of a small number of European sites (Keatinge: 2000) and estimated a European
figure based on the WHO report’s population figure. Keatinge et al. studied temperature and mortality statistics for a small number of European regions and compared fluctuations of the mortality rate. For each locale they obtained an ‘optimal temperature’ which corresponded to the temperature with the fewest deaths. Essentially, deaths that occurred on hotter days were classed as ‘heat related deaths’ and deaths that occurred on colder days were classed as ‘cold related deaths’.  The difficulty with this article is that it conflates seasonal mortality factors with temperature. There was a similar distribution of deaths in northern and southern Europe. There was nothing to suggest that cold weather was causing the deaths in the study, rather than seasonal factors such as seasonal illnesses, changes in diet, excessive alcohol consumption that are generally associated with heightened winter mortality. Lomborg accepts this uncritically and extrapolates that “in the past decade, Europe has lost about 15 million people to the cold” (Lomborg 2007: p17), but Friel fails to detect anything dubious in the argument.

While Friel raises some reasonable criticisms of Lomborg’s work, his underlying hostility against Lomborg and penchant for pedantic digressions won’t endear his work to Lomborg’s readers who are deeply suspicious of environmentalist apologetics. Friel’s fleeting discussion of The Skeptical Environmentalist and his failure to address Lomborg’s other econometric works give The Lomborg Deception an unfinished feel. Anyone looking for a comprehensive critique of Lomborg’s work would be better served by visiting the Lomborg Errors website.

References
Lomborg Errors: http://www.lomborg-errors.dk
Keatinge WR, Donaldson GC, Cordioli EA, Martinelli M, Kunst AE Mackenbach JP et al. (2000) Heat related mortality in warm and cold regions of Europe: observational study. British Medical Journal ;321(7262):670 (16 September), http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/321/7262/670
Bjørn Lomborg, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (New York, Knopf, 2007)

(https://www.skeptics.com.au/wp-content/uploads/magazine/The Skeptic Volume 30 (2010) No 3.pdf)

The Climate Caper
By Professor Garth Paltridge
Connor Court, A$24.95

The popular science shelves of our bookshops are brimming with books on climate change. Usually their authors either regurgirate the establishment views of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) or strive to supplant it with their own pet theories. The Climate Caper, by Professor Garth Paltridge, takes a different approach. Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist, so he has an excellent grounding in the uncertainties in our understanding of the physical processes that underpin the Earth’s climatic system. [He is also a committee member of the Australian Skeptics (Tasmania).]

The book is aimed at the general reader, though there is a moderately technical discussion of the modelling of feedback mechanisms. The argument is structured into chapters titled “Some Physics”, “Some Economics” and “Some Random Sociology”. The Caper spans these three areas of disciplinary focus.

The chapter titled “Some Physics” gives a general description of the climate models used in the IPCC forecasts, with particular attention given to the modelling of feedback gains. Paltridge begins by informing us that: “There are good and straightforward scientific reasons to believe that the burning of fossil fuel and the consequent increase in atmospheric CO2 will lead to an average temperature of the world above that which would otherwise be the case.” (p17)

It is uncontroversial to suggest that a doubling of CO2 levels from the pre-industrial level will result in a 1.2°C temperature increase. However, there are significant uncertainties in our quantitative understanding of the primary feedback processes (water vapour, cloud, ground reflection of sunlight and lapse rate) that amplify or dampen this effect. The sum of these feedback processes is known as ‘total gain’.

The models used in the IPCC process assign values of total gain between 0.4 and 0.8. Paltridge suggests this range of feedback values is suspiciously narrow. He takes this as a sign that “Either the individual process gains are ... correlated ... or there has been some subconscious choice of process description to keep the total gains of the various models within physically realistic bounds.” (p26) Other researchers, such as Row and Baker, demonstrate that this range of values follows the anticipated normal distribution without any sign of systematic bias.

Paltridge suggests that any narrowing disparities between model projections may be an artefact of code reuse, but at the same time he bemoans the number of tuneable parameters in models as giving the theoreticians too much flexibility. I would have thought that code modularity would have assisted the rapid development of alternative models and that this would have increased the diversity of research. If tuneable parameters aren’t being changed in an ad hoc way by researchers during their ensemble runs, then there would be little cause for concern either.

He says that models can only be compared to each other, although in other places Paltridge draws attention to the failings of climate models in recreating certain historical scenarios. Another suggestion is made that, owing to the steep curve of the feedback equation, outlying results would be skewed toward higher temperatures. This line could be further investigated with data from actual ensemble runs submitted to the IPCC.

On the economics of climate policy, Paltridge illustrates the difficulties of using cost benefit analysis over a 90 year time span to determine an optimal course of action. With reference to the Garnaut Report, he suggests that “The forecasting problem is much worse for the economist than for the climatologist.” (p38) and “The problem of calculating the long-term benefit of an expensive exercise to prevent climate change has every chance of being inherently insoluble.” (p39)

A fair comment for a skeptic. There are too many uncertainties in both the future state of our climate and the future worth of our climate to our economy to engage in any meaningful discourse of this kind.

However, Paltridge overshoots the mark when he says: “Whether society should do something about global warming boils down to whether it can be persuaded of two things. First, it must be persuaded that the coming of global warming is certain and that it will be detrimental. [...] Second, society must be persuaded of the greatness of the moral virtue attached to active personal sacrifice for the benefit of people 4 or 5 generations into the future.” (p57)

This reasoning is not so sound. Firstly, we need not be persuaded of the certainty of an outcome in order to take action to mitigate the risk of it occurring. Secondly, (as is acknowledged elsewhere in the book) a significant number of initiatives that would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions would also confer an economic benefit that is realisable in the short term.

In the chapter “Some Random Sociology”, Paltridge gives several interesting anecdotes with a common theme - the efforts of academics, climate researchers and bureaucrats to stifle public discussions of doubts within their ranks about global warming. The most disturbing of these situations was one Paltridge recounts when his own research was rejected by a peer-reviewed journal on the grounds that the reviewer thought it was an attempt give respectability to views that were outside of the recent IPCC findings.

Taken at face value, these anecdotes demonstrate a strong desire to present a united front among the scientific community on climate change which is at odds with a culture of free inquiry. This attitude is frequently characterised as an unwillingness to give ammunition to ‘the sceptics’ (a term used as a catchall for those questioning the existence or extent of AGW). It is not unreasonable to wonder if this kind of fortress mentality, combined with other established publication biases such as the file drawer effect, is contributing to a body of missing research.

There was no attempt in this book to differentiate between what might be termed climate skepticism and climate denialism. Paltridge and other diligent researchers, such as Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who draw attention to flawed methodologies or data quality could be reasonably described as having skeptical positions. However, significant media coverage is given to other authors, lobbyists and commentators who confine themselves to a rhetorical or ideological engagement to AGW without making a scientific case. Tom Bethell, with his Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, would be a good example of this mindset.

I would have liked to have seen a more detailed treatment of the scientific merits of the views apparently excluded from the mainstream of scientific discourse. Mention is made of the response of the upper atmosphere to increased CO2 being ignored by climatologists, but the coverage is brief. While it may not have been Paltridge’s intent to produce an overly technical book, at the very least a selection of works for further reading would have been appropriate. Given the abundance of opinion pieces in newspapers, magazines and blogs, it would be preferable for Paltridge to offer a more detailed exposition of the technical uncertainties and cultural biases that he touches on.

Reference

Roe G, Baker M, Science Vol. 318. no. 5850, pp. 629 – 632 10.1126/science.1144735 Why Is Climate Sensitivity So Unpredictable?

Originally published in The Skeptic Vol. 29, No 4. December 2009
(https://www.skeptics.com.au/wp-content/uploads/magazine/The Skeptic Volume 29 (2009) No 4.pdf)

Originally published in the Skeptic Volume 29, No.2 • June 2009

Heaven + Earth - Global Warming:
The Missing Science
By Prof. Ian Plimer
Connor Court, 2009 ISBN 978-1-921421-14-3

Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth has been a long awaited contribution to the discussion of climate change and the attribution of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). The cover notes call Ian Plimer “Australia’s best known geologist”, which is no exaggeration given his prominence as a tireless skeptic and scientist.

Professor Plimer gives a geological perspective on climate change with a very detailed and informative narrative describing geological, atmospheric and solar effects on the climate, with a surprising emphasis on history. The text is equation-free, and technical jargon is kept to a minimum but it is still a challenging read at 493 pages, 54 diagrams and an impressive 2311 references and footnotes. Heaven and Earth represents a successful attempt to meld the “two cultures” with history and social issues being woven into a scientific narrative using the evocative chapter titles of History, The Sun, Earth, Ice, Water and Air.
Before I read this book, I read the most recent IPCC technical summary, a text book, a popular science book on the subject, and the occasional academic article. Based on my reading I had considered AGW a plausible explanation for the climate changes of modern times. I was aware of alternative theories that also explain these changes, such as Friis-Christensen and Svensmark’s Cosmic Ray theory, which I think are worthy of further scientific inquiry.

The book has three major themes: The earth is a dynamic system that has been climactically changing for millions of years before humans were present; Climate change can be explained as a ‘natural phenomenon’ and it is naïve to assume that man affects the climate, as he does the weather; The way that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) do their reporting works against scientific norms, and its findings have been adopted as the strictures of an emerging green secular religion.

Professor Plimer presents his readers with a swathe of extreme climates from earlier geological ages and historical times. He summarises the studies of historical climate, which show that temperatures were 2ºC hotter during Roman times, and that wine was cultivated in Germany and the UK during the Medieval Warm Period.

A recurring theme is that cold periods are associated with mass extinctions and human suffering, while warm periods equate with
burgeoning speciation and the highlights of human endeavour. In the course of this discussion many of the failings of the climate science work, as represented by the IPCC, are highlighted.

A book on climate change controversies would not be complete without mention of Michael Mann’s 1000-year temperature reconstruction, which will be forever known as the “hockey stick” graph.

Professor Plimer accepts Stephen McIntyre’s critique of Mann’s methodology. While I don’t want to delve into the issues of the
debate, I was disappointed by the way the graph itself was presented in the book (Figure 11, p89). In the original graph the dark line of the curve was surrounded by an exceptionally broad grey region, showing the 95% confidence range and clarifying that the part of the graph predating historical temperature records was constructed with great uncertainty. In an act of mischievous caricature, the grey confidence range in Professor Plimer’s book is replaced with a grey hockey stick. Below this graph is an alternative reconstruction of global temperatures on the same time span with the peak of the Medieval Warming Period about 0.5°C hotter than current temperatures. No source is acknowledged for this graph, but it is implied that it was derived “from hundreds
of studies”. While it is fair to criticise the methodological
errors involved in Mann’s technique, why present an alternative graph that conforms to the author’s viewpoint without giving any explanation as to how it was derived?

A major omission from the book was a comprehensive outline of the case for AGW. Climate modelling is dismissed with the words (p15) “A model is not real. A model is not evidence.” The reader is left assuming that the hypothesis is premised only on a recent correlation between CO2 levels and global temperature. Other physical evidence such as observed changes over decades of spectral analysis of outgoing infrared radiation is ignored.

Many of the arguments made against AGW presume that it can be refuted by past extremes in temperature. Consider this argument:

If it is acknowledged that there have been rapid large climate changes before industrialisation then the human production of CO2 cannot be the major driver for climate change. The evidence is overwhelming that another mechanism or combination of mechanisms drives climate, such as variations in solar activity, cosmic ray input, orbit and terrestrial processes. This being the case, then the whole purpose of the IPCC ceases to exist. (p87)

This misrepresents the AGW case as a denial of the prior temperature variations. AGW proponents aren’t suggesting that CO2 is “the major driver” in climate change; they only suggest that it is a significant factor, and that models can better explain recent warming trends when greenhouse gas emissions are included, rather than when they are excluded. Nor do climatologists dispute that there were more rapid warming events during the Pre-Boreal period 10 700 years ago, when the temperatures appear to have risen by 7°C over just 50 years. Professor Plimer refers to bizarre conditions long ago:

The proof that CO2 does not drive climate is shownby previous glaciations. The Ordovician-Silurian (450-420 Ma) and Jurassic Cretaceous (151-132 Ma) glaciations occurred when the atmospheric CO2 was more than 4000 ppmv and about 2000 ppmv respectively. The Carboniferous-Permian glaciation (360-260 Ma) had a CO2 content of about 400 ppmv, at least 15 ppmv higher than the present figure. (p165)

The argument here is that if atmospheric levels of CO2 occurred during earlier glaciations then current CO2 can’t be responsible for global warming. This argument would only be valid if other conditions were similar in these earlier periods. For example, if the atmosphere is saturated with coolants such as SO2 after extreme volcanic activity, then the warming effect of a high level of CO2 will be counteracted.

Similarly, other factors such as the continental drift of landmass towards the South Pole have been blamed for the Ordovician-Silurian glaciation.

On page 380, Professor Plimer attempts to calculate the total error of the historical temperature record:

Measurement errors [due to thermometers being calibrated, or temperatures being reported, in whole degrees] are ±0.5°C, errors due to a siting of a Stevenson Screen may be ±0.3°C, errors due to wood or plastic may be ±0.1°C and errors due to the urban heat island effect may be ±0.4°C. The total errors are ±1.3°C. Therefore, over the last century global temperatures have risen
by 0.7°C ± 1.3°C. This is a meaningless figure.

The “measurement errors” are rounding errors for which 0.5°C is the absolute error only in the worst case. Over a course of many temperature measurements with different thermometers, the impact of rounding error will actually be much less significant. Also,
instead of these absolute error ranges, a 95% confidence range is a more typical way to express uncertainty, and as there are no obvious references for the other numbers in this paragraph, it is unclear if they are absolute error ranges or confidence intervals, and it is not apparent why they should be added in this manner. Indeed 0.7°C ± 1.3°C is a meaningless figure.

These instances that I have raised may seem like nit-picking in the context of such a large volume. It should be stressed that I am confident that Professor Plimer is able to write a factual narrative of the Earth’s climatic history. However there seems to be a recurring eagerness in this book to provide a falsifying argument to AGW with little regard to the accuracy of the data or the validity of the argument. While computer modelling is dismissed as non-empirical, back-of-an-envelope calculations of temperature errors are used to ignore major collaborative research programs into historical temperature records.

There certainly are valid reasons for criticising the IPCC approach to summarising the scientific knowledge of climate change, and the prominence of Mann’s 1000-year temperature reconstruction in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report was excessive, given its high level of uncertainty. The IPCC’s process of evaluating uncertainty is an unnecessarily opaque process. It is not unreasonable to have doubts about this methodology and to note that there may be political biases in it.

Does Heaven and Earth succeed in giving an accurate summary of our current scientific understanding where the IPCC might fail? Professor Plimer subtitles his book “Global Warming: The Missing Science”, but one wonders if much of this science is missing because it is either too conjectural or too discredited.

There is inherent irony in the subtitle of this book. Roger Penrose is an unrelenting critic of String Theory and its proponents who believe they are on the verge of finishing the physics textbook.

Penrose has punted this book at a fairly wide readership. He implies that a reader with with a fear of mathematics might take to the gentle pace of the his elucidation. I rather think that Penrose’s whirlwind narrative from Pythagoras to complex manifolds, tensors and gauge theory in the first four hundred pages is more like a Ludovico treatment to ingrain fear and nausea of mathematics. Having one’s eyelids fastened open to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth is perhaps the appropriate way to read this book. Survivors of Penrose’s crash course in abstract mathematics are treated to an even denser exposition on the development of modern physics that forms the bulk of the text.

It is perhaps more revealing to describe what I got out of this book than to describe its contents in any piecemeal way. I have a degree in mathematics, but I’m more disposed to logic and number theory than the mystery of manifolds or theoretical physics. Before a final exam on Relativity Theory I made sure I could spell ‘Schwarzschild’ because I knew I needed all the marks that I could get.

The section on Complex Numbers is among the most lucid parts of the book. It includes a few gems such as Lambert’s sphere of imaginary radius, that predates the Hyperbolic geometry of Bolyai and Lobachevsky. Perhaps complex mathematics is given such an elegant elucidation because of its centrality to the Twistor Theory that Penrose advocates in preference String Theory. The treatment of Pythagoras and Platonism was interesting, as were Penrose’s vivid depictions of the physics of Aristotle, Galileo and Newton that laid the foundation to the more challenging ideas of Minkowskian geometry. However, important topics such as manifolds and tensors were introduced with frightening brevity when they played such a crucial part in the physical theories. I got the impression that Penrose began the book with the intent of introducing ideas at a gentle rate, but his pace changed as he started to wonder if he would live to finish this book. (He says in the preface that he spent eight years writing it).

I have read many popular books on mathematics that surpass The Road to Reality in comprehensibility, though few authors have had the audacity to attempt such a vast and comprehensive tract as this. While I don’t feel that I have the complete understanding of the Laws of the Universe that I had hoped for, I am inclined to learn more about Spinors and Twistor Theory, thanks to the tantalising glimpse that this book has given me.

Roger Penrose is exceptionally modest and it might easily escape the casual reader’s attention that he was responsible for many of the theoretical discoveries that feature in the book such as the foundations of Twistor Theory, work on singularies in General Relatitivity and Aperiodic Tiling. The schematic representations of Minkowskian spacetime used throughout the book are actually called “Penrose diagrams”. The ‘birdtrack’ tensorial notations also appear to be a Penrose innovation. As a personal touch Penrose has eschewed tools like Mathematica, in favour of his own hand drawn diagrams, including a fanciful ‘Phase Space representation of the Creation’.

Many skeptics will be aware of Roger Penrose as the author of notorious theories of dualism espoused in popular science books such as The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind that speculate about the interplay of quantum gravitational effects and our neurophysiological makeup in order to explain consciousness. Quantum Gravity makes an appearance in this work too — Penrose holds strong hopes for a future theory of quantised gravitation to provide a deterministic explanation of quantum state space reduction, which he calls ‘Objective Reduction Theory’. Fortunately the reader is given clear warnings when Penrose is deviating from the orthodoxy and he proposes a falsifiability criterion for Objective Reduction Theory to counter accusations that he is embarking on a metaphysical speculation.

This multiplicity of views is one of this books many strengths. By outlining many of the strands of thought that constitute the ‘state of play’ in theoretical physics, the reader gains a more nuanced and contextualised understanding of the emerging physical theories that they might encounter in the popular science press.

Originally published in the Skeptic Vol 26, No 4 Summer 2006
(https://www.skeptics.com.au/wp-content/uploads/magazine/The Skeptic Volume 26 (2006) No 4.pdf)

The OZ Files: the Australian UFO
story, Bill Chalker; Duffy and
Snelgrove, Sydney 1996.
ISBN 1 875989 04 8.

The Oz Files is a brief compendium of Australasian UFO sightings that attempts to examine these phenomena with an ‘open mind’. The author, Bill Chalker, has studied UFO accounts since the 1970s and now coordinates an organisation called The UFO Investigation Centre.

Most of the sightings in the book are referenced from local UFO literature, like Australian UFO Bulletin, and internal reports from The UFO Information Centre. The narrative follows a chronological progression from aboriginal experiences and early settlement though to the UFO saturated decades of the post-war era.

In the chapter on aboriginal UFO encounters Chalker’s open mind is at its most porous. He draws the reader through a succession of aboriginal tales that evoke the familiar pattern
of alien visitation, abduction and impregnation before coyly reminding the reader not to uproot this lore from its cultural context and impose on it our fascination with UFOs. After enthusiastically quoting an aboriginal abduction account from Rex Gilroy, Australia’s alternative archaeologist and polymath of the improbable, the author politely suggests further corroboration of his source would be appreciated. Prior to the emergence of the canonical form of the flying saucer, encounters of flying arks, ghost ships
and mysterious dirigibles were documented. Between July and October 1909 there was a series of at least four localised reports of mysterious airships in Australia and New Zealand, culminating in the Kelso airship encounter (which was later admitted to be a hoax by some of the ‘witnesses’). The inspiration for the hoax was a story called “The Perils of the Motherland” in the boys periodical Chums. This is an intriguing
prelude to later waves of sightings that coalesced with the contemporary themes of popular culture, though Chalker takes little interest in this Zeitgeist effect.

As a chemist, Chalker is comfortable disputing the purported material evidence of UFO encounters, such as Pinkney and Ryzman’s discovery of ‘alien honeycomb’ (later revealed [by Skeptics patron, Dick Smith] to be terrestrial fibreglass).

He also has a reasonable knowledge of meteorological and astronomical explanations. What is absent from the book is an analysis of psychological explanations such as mental illness, hallucinatory experiences and illusory effects.

A case in point is the 1959 Boianoi sighting from Papua New Guinea. Thirty-eight witnesses reported seeing a disc with four legs projecting out of its base and several occupants on its deck. This object appeared to be moving through the air at a height of 100 metres. A plausible explanation was that the observers witnessed a false horizon and interpreted a well lit fishing vessel as an aerial craft. Chalker is dissatisfied with this explanation because the principal witness ‘was sure that the object he saw was at a 30 degree elevation in the sky’. This kind of circular reasoning suggests a poor understanding of perceptual psychology.

In the early 1980s, Bill Chalker gained access to various RAAF files on UFO investigations. Overall, Chalker eschews government and military conspiracy theories and characterises the RAAF’s prevailing attitude as one of overt disinterest which led to investigations being conducted in a cursory manner. Although Chalker states that his aim is to apply scientific scrutiny to the research of UFO phenomena, there does seem to be a tacit approval of paranormal beliefs throughout the book. While he relegates conspiracy theorists to the fringe of UFO enthusiasts, his occasional references to paranormal explanations are made without a hint of disapproval.

While The Oz Files is not a detached and dispassionate work of scientific scholarship, it does provide an informative and referenced account of Australasian UFO reports without the fringe lunacy and conspiracy theories that characterise much of this literature.

Originally published in the Skeptic Volume 23, No. 3, page 55
(https://www.skeptics.com.au/wp-content/uploads/magazine/The Skeptic Volume 23 (2003) No 2.pdf)

Originally published as "Environmental Skepticism" in the Skeptic - 2002 - Vol. 22 No. 2, page 62.

I recently read Bjorn Lomborg’s TheSkeptical Environmentalist and was sufficiently impressed by his detailed analysis that I made the effort to obtain some of his source material.
In a section called entitled “The costs of the Litany”, Lomborg gives what would appear to be a comprehensive overview of research conducted at the Harvard University Center for
Risk Analysis by Tammy Tengs and John Graham. In their initial paper, “Five-hundred Life-Saving Interventions and their Cost-effectiveness”, they analysed the comparative cost effectiveness of 587 policy initiatives in terms of their dollar cost per year of life saved. The interventions covered health care, housing regulations, transportation, occupational and environmental controls. As well as a comprehensive tabulation of the 587 interventions they also summarised the information across policy sector and government department by stating the median costs. The environmental sector performed worse with a median of $4 200 000 compared to $19 000 for health and an overall median of $42 000.

Lomborg’s presentation of the data focuses on these median costs. In a note he says “The advantage of the median is that it is less effected by very atypical (high) prices.” Yet adding the
total years of life saved and dividing by the total cost would have given more representative figures, particularly if the data set contained a lot of high valued initiatives that were of
relatively low cost, but negligible life
saving benefit.

In a subsequent paper, “The Opportunity Costs of Haphazard Social Investments in Life-saving”, the researchers jettisoned 402 of the policy initiatives because their initial estimates were derived from geographically limited or small data-sets and comparable national figures were unavailable. Lomborg, mistakenly asserts these 185 initiatives in the 1996 paper are actually implemented policies.

Tengs and Graham used linear programming to calculate various optimal policy mixes and measured them
against the policies that the US government had actually implemented.

According to their study, the status quo involved spending 21.4 billion dollars per annum, in order to save 592 000 life years. They found that by changing the policy mix and degree of implementation, a maximum of 1 230 000 years of life could be saved. They recalculated the problem with the added constraint of keeping spending in the five policy areas invariant. Surprisingly, this strategy was still able to save 1 190 000 years of life.

Tengs and Graham also considered a further subset of 134 life-saving initiatives which were proposed (or implemented) by five government agencies. Rather than use median cost per life year as a measure of departmental performance, the researchers obtained an average for each department by adding the estimated cost of implementation for the policy set and dividing by the estimated years of life saved. Although, they omitted their baseline figures from the paper, their optimised results do not reflect the extreme disparities that Lomborg suggests.

With the same departmental budgets, another 86,300 lives could have been saved at a marginal cost per life year of $1 510 000 for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, $497 000 for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, $45 000 for the
Federal Aviation Administration, $35 200 for the Environmental Protection Agency, and $23 800 for the National Highway Safety Administration. Yet according to Lomborg “the extremely high typical cost of $7.6 million for the EPA area is fairly representative of the cost of saving life by means of toxin control”.

When Lomborg closes the passage by saying, “the Harvard study gives us an indication that, with greater concern for efficiency than with the [Environmentalist] Litany we could save 60 000 more American lives year”, he is guilty of a blatant misrepresentation.

I agree with Ian Plimer when he warns of “the misuse, by self-interested bodies, of statistics ... in supporting scare-mongering and other irrational claims”. However, I think it is unfortunate that Bjorn Lomborg has fallen into the same pattern of abuse that he seeks to expose.