Bishop Hill Muir's new man
May 30, 2010 Climate: Russell Readers will remember the resignation of Nature editor Philip Campbell from the Muir Russell inquiry - Campbell's position became untenable when he was found to have prejudged the outcome of the inquiry by telling a television interviewer that the scientists involved in the Climategate emails had done nothing wrong.
Campbell's membership on the panel was ostensibly because of his expertise in matters of peer review and there was some speculation in the wake of his departure as to whether a replacement should be sought. Indeed, I wrote to Sir Muir and suggested a way in which a suitable replacement might be found. My suggestion was that he might try contacting COPE, the Committee on Publishing Ethics, which is an industry body for scientific journals that offers advice on matters of, well, publishing ethics. They have considerable expertise in the peer review process.
It looks as though my advice may have been followed since the previous minutes refer to contacting COPE and the latest minutes show that Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet, has been invited to address the panel on the subject of peer review. Horton is closely involved with COPE. He doesn't appear to have been made a full panel member, however.
Great. But I think it would be worth checking for Dr Horton's views on climate change wouldn't you? Just in case?
Global warming is the biggest threat to our future health. This isn't a message that has yet seeped into the public consciousness. It isn't a message that most doctors and nurses think is relevant to health. But it's time that health professionals stood on the front lines of political debate to explain why climate change is the most serious danger to our wellbeing, even to our survival. The threat of climate change is with us now.
Oh dear.
Reader Comments (22)
As a physician, I believe I can make a critical remark concerning Dr. Horton's position that global warming represents a threat to human health. If you examine the CDC statics on mortality in the US during the period 2003-2007, you will find that average monthly deaths during the 4 coldest months of the year -- December, January, February, March -- were 216,050. In contrast, the monthly mortality during the 4 warmest months of the year -- June, July, August, September -- were 189,650. In other words, an average of 26,400 more monthly deaths occurred during the cold of winter than during the heat of summer. Cold weather kills people, at least indirectly. There are reasons for this: pneumonia, influenza and other contagious viral diseases in particular. It seems that formation of aerosols via coughing and sneezing is enhanced during cold weather but suppressed during hot weather; there is a study confirming the latter. I specifically wrote such a commentary to the EPA during its proposal to regulate CO2 emissions, but I was ignored as you might expect.
Oh dear, indeed. Here is Richard Horton expounding on more dubious data: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7BzM5mxN5U&feature=player_embedded
I think your zucchetto has just fallen off Bish. You didn’t expect an neutral replacement did you? Didn’t Horton write a book about MMR rejecting the research scandal and then some time later admitted it was all true?
Horton is yet another one speaking with authority about something in which he is obviously not an expert. Even the dumbest lay person knows that warm is healthier than cold. I wonder why, given the chance, people retire to warmer climes?
Oh what a small world it is. Here are some folks from the Royal Society criticising Richard Horton:
'“Under the editorship of Richard Horton, the publication of badly conducted and poorly refereed scare stories has had devastating consequences for individual and public health, in the UK and abroad, and carried a high economic cost,” they say. '
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article534577.ece
Now to me, 'poorly refereed scare stories' and 'devastating consequences' are evocative of the IPCC, and of their many ardent supporters.
Anyway, pots, kettles, and namecalling all spring to mind. Perhaps Richard could be invited to an enquiry into the Royal Society and the Met Office, and their links with government?
@DrCrinum
Have you seen Indur Goklany's work? Some of that draws similar conclusions. Here is one example:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/
—this has data for the U.S. as well as several other countries.
Horton is famous for two things as editor of The Lancet. First he published and never regretted the original MMR scare. Second he publish the estimates of excess civilian deaths due to the Iraq war. More people apparently died than in the Allied bombing of Germany. He is a regular speaker at Stop the War coalition events where he speaks alongside (or to) members of Respect.
He's the man who did for the Lancet what May and Rees have done for the Royal Society.
I thought Lancet was the National Enquirer of science or on equal grounds as the
http://www.theonion.com/
With science articles like this:
http://www.theonion.com/section/environment/
Excerpt:
ZACKENBERG RESEARCH STATION, GREENLAND—According to oceanographers, the Arctic Circle has been devastated by the effects of global warming in recent years, threatening hundreds of men and women who use the frozen tundra as a place to conduct bizarre experiments in human-animal grafting or carry out massive government cover-ups. more»
Douglas Keenan,
Thanks. I think we looked at essentially the same data regarding the US. Having worked in a hospital for over 40 years, the wrong time of the year to become sick is during the winter; that is when the hospital is usually overflowing with patients and there are waiting lines of stretchers bearing to-be-admitted patients stacked up in the emergency room. In contrast, during the summer time is when working hours are cut for hospital employees because the in-patient census is low. I wonder if Dr. Horton ever worked in a hospital emergency room for a period of time.
TDK: Your MMR link is interesting: "how did Dr Wakefield persuade a leading journal of medical science to publish a paper that was both bad science and damaging to public health?" Bad science is sort of trivial, since bad scientific papers get published all the time. But how is "damaging to public health" a good reason to reject a paper? How is it different from rejecting an AGW critical paper because it's "harmful to the planet?
In view of the comment above that Richard Horton has done for The Lancet what May and Rees had done for the Royal Society, it's worth noting that in 2005, after 10 years under Horton as editor-in-chief, The Lancet declared that the Royal Society had ceased to be "a place to discuss the subversive subject of science" and had become "self-serving and parochial" (The Lancet, 2005, "What is the Royal Society for?". editorial, vol. 365, 1746).
@ Ian Castles, are you suggesting that "it takes one to know one"?
dearieme,
Yes, something like that.
Reading this thread forces me to think of Gilbert and Sullivan's masterpiece HMS Pinafore and the The First Lord's Song. In particular, the following verse.
I grew so rich that I was sent
By a pocket borough into Parliament
I always voted at my Party's call
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all
I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen's Navy
Has anything changed?
That "Horton is closely involved with COPE" suggests to me that COPE may not be the kind of body that one sensibly recommends. Did Your Grace have some prior experience of COPE that led to a different conclusion?
Jane
I've had contact with them. They are an industry body and are mainly involved with medical publishing although they have recently expanded into the physical sciences. This suggested to me that they were likely to be non-combatants re AGW.
You guys don't know what you want. There's nothing wrong with publishing anything that's plausible as long as people are allowed to repeat the experiment and reject or confirm it. Seems here you are arguing that consensus stories are the only ones to be allowed and all others are to be prevented if the story bucks the consensus.
The original MMR paper was withdrawn for the following reason:
"It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect... In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were 'consecutively referred' and that investigations were 'approved' by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false." ie not the finding itself, (which was a 3 author work) but the ethics of the procedures to achieve the finding which of course the Lancet had to take on trust, most especially as the parents deny all of it and they are all 100% behind Wakefield, calling it a "Kangaroo court". Now bearing in mind it was the irresponsible press who actually hyped up really rather mild comments by Wakefield and it was the government who banned the single jabs, the Lancet is squeaky clean. Meantime the number of excess deaths was exactly two, both of which can be blamed on the Blair administration because they had lied about a phony Japanese epidemic as an excuse to ban single jabs - something the Japanese minister of health totally rejected, saying the move to single jabs "did not cause an increase in deaths from measles". As it happens Japan stopped using MMR because it was linked to outbreaks of non-viral meningitis and other damaging side-effects. This vaccine was a of a different type to that used in the UK but it illustrates that concerns about vaccines cannot just be dismissed out of hand by the Lancet and sensible, honest governments, take the proper course of action until the truth is known.
In the Iraq numbers game there was a later study using the same technique by a highly regarded polling company and their number was twice as high as in the Lancet study. Thus the original study while inconvenient reading for armchair warriors, was more than vindicated. You don't like it then you go to Iraq and make a count as the authors of the Lancet report did. Bloviating from a safe distance is not of much use.
Sure there are a lot of lessons to learn here, ie who is really to blame, what are the real facts, what kind of science and science reporting do we really want, what actions do we take when we have concerns about medications or civilian deaths? But let's not use double standards, let's not mistake points of view for facts, and let's not take advantage of 20-20 hindsight.
And I should have added, let's not be a part of ANY agenda-driven, media-hyped, fact-free witch-hunts. It's convenient for the media and the governemnt to find scapegoats for their inadequacy but it's incumbent on us to blow the smoke away to reveal the real culprits.
@Dr Crinum
As a physician, I believe I can make a critical remark concerning Dr. Horton's position that global warming represents a threat to human health. If you examine the CDC statics on mortality in the US during the period 2003-2007, you will find that average monthly deaths during the 4 coldest months of the year -- December, January, February, March -- were 216,050. In contrast, the monthly mortality during the 4 warmest months of the year -- June, July, August, September -- were 189,650. In other words, an average of 26,400 more monthly deaths occurred during the cold of winter than during the heat of summer. Cold weather kills people, at least indirectly. ...............
Those are also the months of least UVB from sunlight in the northern hemisphere. Less vitamin d = more deaths.
Medical "science" is every bit as deficient of clear thinking as is climatology.
JamesG trying to defend both bogus Lancet studies, and the journal. On Iraq he says:
"In the Iraq numbers game there was a later study using the same technique by a highly regarded polling company and their number was twice as high as in the Lancet study. Thus the original study while inconvenient reading for armchair warriors, was more than vindicated. You don't like it then you go to Iraq and make a count as the authors of the Lancet report did. Bloviating from a safe distance is not of much use."
The study by the polling company has been debunked here:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/exaggerated-orb/
and
http://w4.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/viewArticle/2373
One piece of rubbish can't 'vindicate' another piece of rubbish.
The Lancet study itself has been repeatedly debunked:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a921401057&fulltext=713240928
http://www.pollster.com/blogs/aapor_censures_lancet_iraq_cas.php
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/5/484
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/index.htm
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jewell/LancetNov061.pdf
The Iraq numbers fairy tale has a déjà vu flavour for students of 'climate science': Horton "agreed to rush the study into print, with an expedited peer review process and without seeing the surveyors' original data". And "the key person involved in collecting the Lancet data was Iraqi researcher Riyadh Lafta, who has failed to follow the customary scientific practice of making his data available for inspection by other researchers".
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119984087808076475.html]