Statistics gone wrong in a climate change paper

 Frank Bosse and Nic Lewis point out that the paper "European tree-ring isotopes indicate unusual recent hydroclimate" by Freund, et al is fatally flawed. An apparent indication of significant recent climate change is due to misuse of statistical filtering.

Here are some excerpts from Bosse and Lewis.

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A recent paper (M. B. Freund et al 2023, MBF23 thereafter) in “Nature communication earth and environment” investigates the variability of the summer drought events since 1600. It uses the method of “stable isotope analyses C13/O18” to extend the “Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) from 1950 to now back to 1600.

The paper describes and uses a multi proxy network over large parts of Europe (see Fig. 1 of MBF23) to reconstruct the history of summer droughts for a longer historic period. It finds interesting results about the dependency of those events on volcanos and solar forcing. It’s a worthwhile read and we were interested in whether the headline title is justified and likewise this claim in the Abstract:

“We show that the recent European summer drought (2015–2018) is highly unusual in a multi-century context…”

Conclusion

MBF23 is a very valuable paper when it comes to the description of the variability of European summer droughts since 1600. However, neither its title “European tree-ring isotopes indicate unusual recent hydroclimate” nor the claim in its Abstract that “recent European summer drought (2015–2018) is highly unusual in a multi-century context” are justified by the data used in the paper.

The lower resolution in time and spatially of the reconstruction before 1950 in relation to the determined SPEI after 1950 casts some doubts if the comparison of some years after 1950 to the historical reconstructed values is appropriate.

MBF23 should be corrected and retitled because some key conclusions, including the headline claim in its title, are not supported by proper statistical analysis of the SPEI values that their reconstruction method produces. The recent European drought to 2018 remained within the range of natural variability.

The fight against free speech continues

 Here is Jonathan Turley exposing the Washington Post for what it is - a propaganda machine.

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The War on Musk: Washington Post Slammed Over Twitter Hit Piece

Last week, there was another bombshell story by the Washington Post on the purported evil that is Elon Musk. Quickly amplified by MSNBC and other media, it was another hit job on Musk and could be viewed as what many in the media love to call “disinformation.” Musk himself noted that the premise of the piece (that his tweets were artificially boosted during a recent period) was demonstrably false. Yet, the countervailing facts found little space in the long Post piece. None of that is particularly surprising. Musk became a hunted man when he sought to restore free speech protections to social media. The media regularly offers him little quarter or consideration. However, what was most striking was that the underlying controversy may have been Musk’s targeting of “bots” in his restructuring of Twitter.

The Post story was written with the usual telltale signs of a hit piece. First, there was the breathless headline (notably amplified on its own Twitter account) expressing a combination of shock and scorn: “Elon Musk reinvents Twitter for the benefit of a power user: Himself.” Then came the lead line of how Musk had transformed the company into the “billionaire’s personal sandbox.” It reported how Musk ran amok at Twitter headquarters firing people in a rage over the failure to artificially boost his own tweets in the system. It portrays employees cowering from his wrath and rushing to change algorithms to increase his tweet visibility.

Musk immediately responded with a simple but seemingly major point: there was no such spike or adjustment. He tweeted “Several major media sources incorrectly reported that my Tweets were boosted above normal levels earlier this week. A review of my Tweet likes & views over the past 6 months, especially as a ratio of followers, shows this to be false. We did have a bug that briefly caused replies to have the same prominence as primary Tweets, but that has now been fixed.”

The Musk tweets do not necessarily end the controversy but it raises core factual questions that seemed to be largely omitted in the Post coverage. Indeed, it was simply ignored by media who continued to push the narrative regardless of the serious questions over the premise of the article. Sound familiar? The Russian collusion scandal, the Hunter Biden “Russian Disinformation,” the Lafayette Park “Photo Op” conspiracy, the Nick Sandmann controversy, the Jussie Smollett case, the Migrant Whipping scandal. This list seems endless of false stories where the “facts were too good to check.” However, that is not “disinformation.” Not at all.

If you read the Post piece, it becomes clear what the real fight at Twitter may have been over. Buried in the piece is this observation: “Even before he bought Twitter, Musk emphasized the site’s need to crack down on spam and bots, particularly those shilling cryptocurrency.” The Post noted that Musk declared before buying the company that “If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!”

Musk has been riding roughshod over engineers to remove certain algorithms and combat bots to restore the company’s transparency and integrity.

Bots and AI systems, however, have a growing alliance in Washington.

Democratic leaders have called for a type of “enlightened algorithms” to frame what citizens access on the internet. In 2021, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for algorithms to be created to protect people from their own bad choices. She was upset that people were not listening to the informed views of herself and leading experts. Instead, they were reading views of skeptics by searching Amazon and finding books by “prominent spreaders of misinformation.” She denounced Amazon and declared that “this pattern and practice of misbehavior suggests that Amazon is either unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the spread of falsehoods or the sale of inappropriate products.” She gave the company 14 days to change its algorithms to throttle and obstruct efforts to read opposing views.

More recently, Bill Gates seemed to go “full Borg” in calling for AI to stop certain views from being “magnified by digital channels.” The problem is that we allow “various conspiracy theories like QAnon or whatever to be blasted out by people who wanted to believe those things.” Gates added that AI can combat “political polarization” by checking “confirmation bias.”

So AI overlords will bring unity through forced content assimilation where, to paraphrase the Borg, “free speech is futile.”

The Post does not go to bat for bots like Gates in this piece and even acknowledges that ” it wasn’t that crypto bots weren’t a problem,” but then returns to the Musk press mosh pit.

I previously discussed how Washington has gone to war with Twitter with an alliance of political, corporate, and media interests. It has been unrelenting and includes a campaign to get companies to suspend or reduce advertising until censorship is restored. The media has kept a steady stream of hit pieces on Musk that often border on wartime propaganda.

Musk is not perfect. No one is and being a billionaire gives you a billion ways to magnify your own idiosyncrasies. However, Musk has brought a level of transparency to Twitter (and his own controversies) that is unmatched in any social media company.

I will admit to a bias in favor of Musk as a long-standing free speech advocate. I previously wrote that, despite his incredible achievements in space and transportation technology, Musk’s greatest legacy may prove his defense of free speech. His release of the Twitter Files has revealed a comprehensive system of censorship coordinated with the government. He has also restored free speech protection to a major social media platform. The move is transformative and historic.

The campaign against Musk reflects a degree of desperation as the control of social media collapsed with his purchase. If you are to control speech on social media, it must be complete and total. Musk shattered that unified front and, with it, the ability to maintain approved narratives by silencing critics and barring particular views. Elon Musk did not “reinvent” Twitter as much as restore Twitter to what it was. However, there is a reinvention of journalism in a new and more menacing image.

Yes Virginia, open discussion is better than censorship

 Jonathan Turley provides perspective on the damage caused by those who believe that open discourse should be regulated by "those who know".

JT is right that "those who know" often don't know or are lying and that they often cause substantial harm to themselves and others.

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A new scientific review raises additional questions over the science behind the mask mandates imposed on the population for years. The new scientific review by 12 researchers from leading universities found little support for the claims that masks reduced Covid exposures. My interest in the story, as usual, focuses on free speech. Numerous experts were suspended or banned for challenging these very claims and the media labeled any such critics as dangerous or fringe figures. Regardless of your ultimate conclusions on the efficacy of masks, there was clearly a scientific basis to challenge the mask policies. Yet, many people were routinely censored on Twitter and other platforms for daring to challenge the official position on masks.

The Centers for Disease and Control Prevention (CDC) initially rejected the use of a mask mandate. However, the issue became a political weapon as politicians and the press claimed that questioning masks was anti-science and even unhinged. In April 2020, the CDC reversed its position and called for the masking of the entire population, including children as young as 2 years old. The mask mandate and other pandemic measures like the closing of schools are now cited as fueling emotional and developmental problems in children.

The closing of schools and businesses was also challenged by some critics as unnecessary. Many of those critics were also censored. It now appears that they may have been right. Many countries did not close schools and did not experience increases in Covid. However, we are now facing alarming drops in testing scores and alarming rises in medical illness among the young.

Masks became a major social and political dividing line in politics and the media. Maskless people were chased from stores and denounced in Congress. Then-CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said during a Senate hearing that “face masks are the most important powerful health tool we have.”

However, the new publication reaffirms earlier studies and states that “a new scientific review suggests that widespread masking may have done little to nothing to curb the transmission of COVID.” It added that “wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness (nine studies; 276,917 people); and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test (six studies; 13,919 people).”

It also found little evidence of a difference from wearing better masks and that “wearing N95/P2 respirators probably makes little to no difference in how many people have confirmed flu (five studies; 8407 people); and may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness (five studies; 8407 people), or respiratory illness (three studies; 7799 people).”

Again, I expect that these studies will be debated for years. That is a good thing. There are questions raised over the types of studies used and whether randomized studies are sufficient. The point is only that there were countervailing indicators on mask efficacy and a basis to question the mandates. Yet, there was no real debate because of the censorship supported by many Democratic leaders in social media. To question such mandates was declared a public health threat.

The head of the World Health Organization even supported censorship to combat what he called an “infodemic.”

A lawsuit was filed by Missouri and Louisiana and joined by leading experts, including Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya (Stanford University) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University).

Bhattacharya previously objected to the suspension of Dr. Clare Craig after she raised concerns about Pfizer trial documents. Those doctors were the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a more focused Covid response that targeted the most vulnerable population rather than widespread lockdowns and mandates. Many are now questioning the efficacy and cost of the massive lockdown as well as the real value of masks or the rejection of natural immunities as an alternative to vaccination. Yet, these experts and others were attacked for such views just a year ago. Some found themselves censored on social media for challenging claims of Dr. Fauci and others.

The media has quietly acknowledged the science questioning mask efficacy and school closures without addressing its own role in attacking those who raised these objections. Even raising the lab theory on the origin of Covid 19 (a theory now treated as plausible) was denounced as a conspiracy theory. The science and health reporter for the New York Times, Apoorva Mandavilli, even denounced the theory as “racist.”

In the meantime, California has moved to potentially strip doctors of their licenses for spreading dissenting views on Covid.

The latest review will not conclusively answer the scientific questions around mask efficacy, but it should answer any lingering questions over the harm of censorship. We never had a serious debate because of the government-corporate-media alliance to snuff out dissenting views on pandemic policies. The result may have been avoidable emotional, economic, and social harm to the population as a whole.

Gun Control Laws Backfiring in California

 Here is John Lott at Real Clear Politics.

More truth about gun control laws.

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After the three public shootings over the last two weekends in California, Democrats are again clamoring for even more gun control laws. To California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the solution is to ban more places where people can carry permitted concealed handguns. Unfortunately, the proposal has nothing to do with stopping these attacks, and more gun-free zones only encourage these attacks. Other heavily Democratic states such as New York, New Jersey, and Maryland are making similar pushes.

Concealed handgun permit holders didn’t commit those or other mass public shootings. Permit holders are also extremely law-abiding, being convicted of firearms-related violations at 1/12th the rate of police officers.

With the country’s strictest gun control laws, California probably shouldn’t hold itself out as a model for the rest of the country to follow. The periods after 2000, 2010, or 2020 show a consistent pattern: The per capita rate of mass public shootings in California is always greater than the rate for the rest of the country. The rate is also much higher than for Texas, which gun control groups give an “F” grade for its gun control laws. Since 2010, California’s mass public shooting rate per capita is 43% higher than for Texas and 29% higher than for the rest of the U.S. From 2020 on, California’s rate was 276% higher than Texas’ and 100% higher than the rest of the country.

But while California is moving to create more gun-free zones, the problem is that it has already been virtually impossible to get concealed handgun permits in the parts of California where the attacks occurred. In Los Angeles Country, where two of the attacks occurred, there is only one permit for every 5,660 adults. In San Mateo County, where the other attack occurred, there is one permit per every 24,630 adults. By comparison, there is one permit holder for every nine people in the 43 right-to-carry states.

Unsurprisingly, concealed handgun permit holders don’t stop mass public shootings in California. But they do make a difference in the 43 states where there are a lot of permit holders. Indeed, people legally carrying guns stopped at least 31 mass public shootings since 2020. And when Americans are allowed to legally carry concealed handguns, they stop about half the active shooting attacks in the US.

It is hard to ignore that these mass public shooters purposefully pick targets where they know their victims cannot protect themselves. Yet, the media refuses to discuss that these mass murderers often discuss in their diaries and manifestos how they pick their targets. For example, the Buffalo mass murderer last year wrote in his manifesto explaining why he chose the target that he did: “Areas where CCW are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack” and “Areas with strict gun laws are also great places of attack.”

That is a common theme among mass murderers. These killers may be crazy, but they aren’t stupid. Their goal is to get media coverage, and they know that the more people they kill, the more media attention they will receive. And if they go to a place where their victims are defenseless, they will be able to kill more people.

Even if an officer is in the right place at the right time, a single uniformed police officer has an almost impossible job in stopping mass public shootings. An officer’s uniform is a neon sign saying, “Shoot me first.” Once the murderer kills the officer, the attacker has free rein to go after others. But where concealed carry is allowed, the attacker will have to worry that someone behind him is also armed.

Take school shootings: Twenty states, with thousands of schools, have armed teachers and staff. There has not been one attack at any of these schools during school hours since at least 2000 where anyone has been killed or wounded. All the attacks where people have been killed or wounded occurred in schools where teachers and staff can’t have guns.

Newsom’s approach contrasts sharply with another country that faces constant terrorist attacks. After a Jan. 27 mass public shooting in Israel left seven people dead, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “Firearm licensing will be expedited and expanded in order to enable thousands of additional citizens to carry weapons.”

Unfortunately, California’s strict gun control laws create fertile ground for successful mass public shootings. But the new push in some states for more gun-free zones is guaranteed to give mass murderers and other criminals even more hunting grounds.

Black Students Need Better Schools, Not Lower Standards

 Here is Jason Riley at The Wall Street Journal.

JR is on target. The woke, cancel culture, and educational elites - among others - have it all wrong.

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The good news is that the College Board has revised the curriculum for its new Advanced Placement course in African-American studies. Topics such as “black queer studies” and “intersectionality and activism” have been downgraded or expunged. The bad news is that offering the course to begin with remains an exercise in racial pandering.

The College Board’s primary concern is that blacks are underrepresented among high-school students who receive college credit for AP courses. This achievement gap has drawn scrutiny from progressives who automatically attribute racial imbalances to racial discrimination. The College Board could address the problem by providing more tutoring services for students who are struggling. Instead, it has created a black-studies course that no one expects to match the academic rigor of other AP offerings.

Colleges and universities did something similar in the 1960s and ’70s after they began lowering admissions standards to achieve more racial balance on campuses. Once they lowered standards for admission, they had to lower the standards for grading and graduation as well. Hence, the creation of black-studies programs, which were born of political expediency and have long been known to put ideological indoctrination ahead of intellectual inquiry.

It’s been clear for decades that this obsession over a school’s racial mix is misplaced, yet it remains one of the political left’s favorite explanations for the achievement gap. After assessing the huge body of research on school integration dating back to the 1960s, social scientists David Armor and Christine Rossell concluded that “there is not a single example in the published literature of a comprehensive racial balance plan that has improved black achievement or that has reduced the black-white achievement gap significantly.” Whether black students attended schools that were 10% black or 70% black, the racial achievement gap remained roughly the same.

“The racial composition of the school may matter, but the academic culture of the school matters more,” Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom write in their 2003 book, “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning.” “Creating the right academic culture does not depend on the racial backgrounds of the students who attend it.”

Some of the best public schools in the country are charter schools full of low-income black students who regularly outperform wealthier white peers on standardized tests. Yet these charter schools, which purposely locate in poor minority neighborhoods, have been criticized by civil-rights organizations for their racial imbalance. School choice has polled off the charts among black parents for decades, but opponents continue the fight to deny these families better education options.

Similarly, gifted and talented programs have come under attack for their elitism. There have been calls to eliminate them outright or at least broaden the definition of “gifted” to get a more desirable racial mix. Because the programs often enroll more whites and Asians than blacks and Hispanics, they’ve been accused of driving school segregation, but a new study published in Harvard’s Education Next magazine concludes that there is little merit to that claim.

“I find essentially no impact from gifted and talented programs on a Black or Hispanic student’s likelihood of having white or Asian students as classmates,” writes Owen Thompson, a professor of economics at Williams College. Nor does starting or ending a gifted and talented program affect a school’s racial composition, as critics allege. “I do not find any consistent evidence that gifted and talented programs have a causal effect on schools’ race-specific enrollments.” Nevertheless, efforts to oust or water down enrichment programs continue. Racial parity has been deemed more important than maintaining high standards.

You don’t help underperforming groups by pandering to them or by holding them to lower standards. And you don’t help black children by insisting that they must be seated next to white children in order to learn. It’s not only insulting and condescending but contradicted by decades of evidence. Low-income black students need quality schools, not white classmates, and the focus on racial balance at any cost will only ensure that another generation of black youth receives an inferior education.

This war on standards is part of a larger war on meritocracy, with economic and geopolitical consequences that should concern all of us, regardless of race. China and India are not eroding standards in the name of equity and social justice. They are not abandoning enrichment programs for their brightest students. They are selecting people based on talent and promoting them based on performance. What we’re doing to ourselves in moving away from merit-based systems will only make it more difficult for our children to compete with their children.