Skeptico

Upper Stratosphere Cooling

After a couple of months absence, I decided to take a look again at the pit of denialism and logical fallacies that is this thread on Joanne Nova’s “global warming isn’t caused by humans” blog. If you scroll down to comment #110 you’ll see I responded to someone who had asked, “Can you name a single piece of empirical evidence that man-made carbon raises temperatures?” Note, a “single piece of empirical evidence” – not numerous pieces, not proof, but just one thing.  You’ll see that I replied with, “…the cooling of the upper stratosphere.  And no, that’s not due to ozone.” Follow the link and you’ll see that cooling of the upper stratosphere is a prediction of global warming caused by increased carbon dioxide. If such a prediction were found to be true, then this would be one piece of evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Now, Joanne Nova has a sleazy little habit, which is to wait several weeks after a comment is made, and then go in and edit in her replies/rebuttals to comments such as the one I made. I was following this discussion for at least three weeks after I made that comment, with no response from Nova. But if you look now, at some later point she edited in the following undated reply:

Yes Sceptico [sic], still waiting for you to cite any evidence that it's not due to ozone, and here's the real kicker - even if it isn't all due to ozone, that doesn't prove it's due to carbon. Argument from Ignorance rears it's head again. Just because you can rule out other things proves nothing about carbon. For someone who points out logical errors, you sure make a lot of them yourself.

I’ll come to the evidence it’s not ozone in a minute. First, though, Nova demonstrates again her total cluelessness regarding logical fallacies.  My comment was not argument from ignorance because my claim included positive evidence that the stratospheric cooling was due to CO2. By rebutting Nova’s claim that this cooling is due to ozone, I am not saying just because it’s not ozone it must be CO2; I’m just saying it’s not ozone. I had already said that cooling of the upper stratosphere is a prediction of global warming due to increased CO2. A prediction that is confirmed cannot possibly be argument from ignorance.

Ozone?

So why did I say the cooling in the upper stratosphere is not due to ozone depletion?  From the Stratospheric cooling page I linked before:

The impact of decreasing ozone concentrations is largest in the lower stratosphere, at an altitude of around 20 km, whereas increases in carbon dioxide lead to highest cooling at altitudes between 40 and 50 km (Figure 3).  All these different effects mean that some parts of the stratosphere are cooling more than others.

And they produce these graphs of cooling rates from 1980 to 1994 at different altitudes:

4. Cooling trends at different altitudes in the stratosphere.  source: Ramaswamy et al., Reviews of Geophysics, Feb. 2001.

You’ll note that actual cooling noted is confined to altitudes of 45 and 50 kilometers. I see no cooling trend on the 22 kilometer graph.  This is exactly what is predicted by AGW caused by increased CO2, but not what would be predicted by warming due to ozone depletion.  It’s not ozone. Nova still says it’s ozone.

This Is Funny

So that’s my response.  I’m not going to respond on Nova’s blog – I’m simply not going to engage with someone who will edit in her replies to my comments weeks later to make it appear that my comment was refuted and I couldn’t respond. But here’s something funny.  I had signed up at Nova’s blog to receive email notification of comments made, so I would know if I needed to reply to anyone. Somehow, that meant that (unbeknownst to her) I had gotten onto one of Nova’s email lists where she sends out desperate appeals for help from her friends when she’s out of her depth.  I know this because I received (undoubtedly by accident) the following email that Nova sent to her group on March 3rd:

Help. Sceptico and Chris are taking over. I'm chopping. I've cut out half his post so far, because it's boring me rigid that I have to explain everything to him yet again.

This is the long long long stuff below.

I'm going away for a week - flying tomorrow night. I don't want to advertise that or chris and scepticet might think they have free run. But they will unless I ban them. They are scaring off other people.

Joanne
________________________
Joanne Nova - Director
http://www.goldnerds.com.au

(“Chris” is commenter Chris Noble, who was also attempting to educate Nova’s followers.)

I called Nova on that email, and she presumably thought better of “chopping” my post or banning me, although it didn’t stop her editing in her “rebuttals” once she realized I wasn’t reading the thread any more. It did result in an uptick in the number of lame responses to my comments, including the one I replied to as detailed above.

I will have a response to Nova’s “hotspot not found” posts at some time in the future.

Finally a sensible acupuncture write-up

Reader Wilson sent me a link to this acupuncture study write-up - No difference in pain intensity from penetrating acupuncture needles: study – suggesting I might actually like this one. Well, just look at the headline!  For once a sensible headline and write up of an acupuncture study:

The pain-relieving effects of acupuncture with penetrating and non-penetrating needles are largely the same, Japanese researchers say.

In Tuesday's issue of the online journal Open Medicine, researchers described the first double-blind study, the gold standard in clinical research, of acupuncture.

"Needle penetration did not confer a specific analgesic advantage over non-penetrating (placebo) needle application," Nobuari Takakura and Hiroyosi Yajima of Tokyo Ariake University of Medical and Health Sciences concluded in the journal.

So it doesn’t matter if the needles penetrate the skin or not. Well, we already know it doesn’t matter where you stick the needles.  Now we know it doesn’t matter if you stick them. And they didn’t even call for “more studies” to find out what is going on. I’m in shock.

They also commented on the study I wrote about last week:

Last week, a similar study also found no difference between real and simulated pricks for relieving lower back pain.

Snicker – they said "real and simulated pricks." And even then, they still made more sense than most other news articles about that study.

Skeptics' Circle

The Skeptics' Circle has been posted at Action Skeptics.  It's presented by some guy called Vince who seems to be selling some kind of cloth.  Or something.  Check it out anyway.

Acupuncture - Still Doesn't Work

Both Steven Novella and Orac posted today about the recent acupuncture study that supposedly shows acupuncture works better than real medicine. Both Orac and Novella’s posts examine the study and its weaknesses in some detail and so I won’t try to do the same. But I do have a couple of brief points I want to make about this study and acupuncture studies in general, and before I do that I’ll have to briefly summarize the main points of this study.

The Study

The researchers, amongst other things, wanted to compare the effectiveness of acupuncture on pain, compared with “groups receiving standard medical care.”  Remember that phrase. “Standard medical care” essentially means whatever their physicians had already prescribed for each patient – medical treatments or physical therapies. Remember that. The study divided the test patients into four groups, namely:”

1. “Standard medical care” plus individualized acupuncture.
2. “Standard medical care” plus standardized acupuncture
3. “Standard medical care” plus sham acupuncture (toothpicks that didn’t penetrate the skin)
4. “Standard medical care” only.

The reports of the study generally don’t describe the first three groups in quite that way, but the above is a correct description of what they actually did – all four groups continued with the standard treatment their doctors had prescribed before.

The result was that: there was no significant difference between groups 1, 2 and 3, but groups 1, 2 and 3 were each better than group 4. This is being reported as “both real and sham acupuncture better than conventional treatment”. But the study shows no such thing. There are (at least) three fundamental flaws with this conclusion, namely:

1. The study wasn’t blinded. This means there was no real control for placebo, and so any comparisons of acupuncture with the conventional treatment are worthless.
2. All three acupuncture groups had conventional treatment as well as acupuncture, so the study can not possibly show that acupuncture is better than conventional treatment. For that to be even possible, the acupuncture groups would have had to be acupuncture only – no conventional treatment. This is such an obvious “duh” point I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that apparently even the researchers didn’t think it was important.
3. Sham acupuncture was (again) just as good as the ‘real”stuff. But this does not mean that sham works as well as non-sham acupuncture, as has been reported. As Steven Novella wrote, when your real treatment is no better than your placebo (the “sham” acupuncture), you don’t get to conclude that, well, this means the placebo works too. No – you conclude the real treatment doesn’t work.

Worthless Acupuncture Studies

Yet again we have a worthless acupuncture study that is being falsely touted as showing acupuncture works. Again, this study is on supposed pain reduction. What about all the other things that acupuncture is supposed to fix? It releases blocked qi, yes? Shouldn’t it do more than reduce pain? Look at this list: Acupuncture: Conditions it Treats - Gastrointestinal Disorders, Urogenital Disorders, Gynecological Problems – the list goes on and on. So why are we always shown pain reduction only?

Second, why do acupuncture researchers always end saying something like this study “raises some new questions about how acupuncture works”? No it doesn’t. It shows it doesn’t work.

And third, why do they always call for more studies? Josephine P. Briggs, MD, director of NCCAM, is quoted saying:

Future research is needed to delve deeper into what is evoking these responses."

Why? There is enough research already for us to conclude that acupuncture is a placebo.

I’m going to make a prediction. Before this year is out, there will be at least one more study of acupuncture that shows “sham” acupuncture is as good as the “real” stuff, and / or that acupuncture is better than an (unblinded) non-acupuncture group. The researchers will say (1) this shows there is something going on with acupuncture, and (2) we need more studies to be done on acupuncture. More studies will be needed. I guarantee it.

Rinse and repeat next year, the year after…

Other links

Articles by Steven Novella:

Does Acupuncture Work or Not?

Acupuncture Does Not Work for Back Pain

Acupuncture and Back Pain - Part II

Orac’s Yawn...another overhyped acupuncture study

Several posts by me:

Placebo - pregnancy pain cure

Acupuncture does not cut blood pressure

Still no evidence acupuncture works

Acupuncture – it really really doesn't work

No point to acupuncture on animals

Equivocation on acupuncture

One More Time - Acupuncture Does NOT Work

Skeptics' Circle

The King Of Ferrets has just posted the Skeptics’ Circle.

Christians Justify Torture

Several bloggers have commented on the recent Pew Survey on whether or not different religious groups support torture. Interestingly, the question they asked was unequivocal – there were no euphemisms such as “enhanced interrogation” or yes it is / no it isn’t terms like “waterboarding”.  The question was unequivocally about torture:

Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?

The results by religious grouping below clearly shows that the more Christian you are, the more likely you are to think that torture was justified:

I’m not sure how statistically significant these results are. The numbers questioned in the attend religious services “weekly”, “monthly…” and “seldom or never” were 336, 225 and 168 respectively. That seems a little low to be used for drawing too many conclusions, although I could be wrong. If anyone has the statistical know-how to crunch the numbers and calculate statistical significance I’d be very interested. Also, the number supporting torture in the less religious groups is still fairly high in my view. Torture was justified at least “sometimes” by around 40% of the “unaffiliated” and “attend religious services seldom or never” groups. That compares with 54% to 62% of the religious groups.

Even so, significant or not, these results hardly support the view that religion (specifically Christianity) provides a moral compass, or that reading the Bible or going to church is necessary for one to be moral or good. And, really, should this surprise anyone? Consider what the “good book”, aka The Word Of God has to say about the use of torture. Just a few snippets:

If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property. Exodus 21:20-21

Oh yeah, you say, but that was just for slaves. Slaves are property, right? But it wasn't just slaves. Look what David did (with God’s approval) to all the inhabitants of several cities:

And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. 2 Samuel 12:31

Hum, saws, harrows, axes, the brick-kiln - well at least they didn't waterboard.

Jesus approved of the practice:

The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in sunder, and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers. And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. Luke 12:46-48

Oh that Jesus - such a barrel of fun. But then, he got it from his dad:

And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. Revelation 9:5-6

Much more at the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible’s What the Bible says about Torture page.

This survey really shouldn’t surprise anyone. The Bible, Christianity, religion are not necessary for one to be moral or good.