Think Progress

FACT CHECK: Right Wing Falsely Claims Iraq Is Safer Than Washington, D.C.»

The right wing has recently been engaged in an effort to downplay the deteriorating security situation in Iraq by suggesting that the violent death rates in Washington, D.C. are higher than those in Iraq. From Newsmax:

Despite media coverage purporting to show that escalating violence in Iraq has the country spiraling out of control, civilian death statistics complied by Rep. Steve King, R-IA, indicate that Iraq actually has a lower civilian violent death rate than Washington, D.C.
…
Using Pentagon statistics cross-checked with independent research, King said he came up with an annualized Iraqi civilian death rate of 27.51 per 100,000.

Rep. King’s shoddy “report” has slowly gained greater circulation, appearing in the New York Sun and on the Rush Limbaugh show.

Here’s why the report is deceptive and false:

1) The King report uses 2002 data for Washington, D.C., finding a violent casualty rate of 45.9 deaths per 100,000 people. That number is badly outdated. Using the most recent 2004 data, the violent casualty rate in D.C. is 35.8 deaths per 100,000. There were 198 homicides total in D.C. for the entire year.

2) According to Pentagon’s own data released today, there have been 94 violent casualties per day in Iraq between February and May of 2006. (see p.33). That translates into 34,310 deaths per year in Iraq. For an Iraqi population of about 26.7 million, plus another 150,000 coalition forces, the violent casualty rate in Iraq is 128 deaths per 100,000. UPDATE: The Pentagon data includes injuries as well as deaths so is not directly comparable. The Brookings Institute, however, estimates an annualized murder rate of 95 per 100,000 Iraqis in Bagdad. Brookings notes this number may be “too low since many murder victims are never taken to the morgue, but buried quickly and privately and therefore never recorded in official tallies.”

3) Lastly, the King report is trying to conflate the data for one urban area in the U.S. with the entire country of Iraq. As OpinionJournal writes, “The comparison with U.S. cities poses a problem of scale. Just as some municipalities here have high concentrations of crime, Baghdad and some other Iraqi cities have high concentrations of military, guerrilla and terrorist activity. A comparison of Baghdad with Los Angeles or a similarly sprawling U.S. city would be more enlightening than a comparison of Iraq as a whole with cities of well under a million people.”

UPDATE: Sadly No!, has more.

Gore on Climate Skeptics: Some People Are Still Debating ‘Whether The Moon Landing Was Staged’»

This morning on CBS’s Early Show, host Harry Smith asked Al Gore about “more conservative elements of the press” who say “there is a debate going on” about whether global warming exisits. Gore responded that “in some quarters there’s still a debate over whether the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona” and debates about whether global warming exists were “in that category.” Watch it:

Gore is right. There is no debate among credible sceintists about whether global warming exists. Science magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity.

Instead climate skeptics are forced to make arguments like this one by Holman W. Jenkins Jr., that appeared in today’s Wall Street Journal:

In a million years, the time it takes the earth to sneeze, the planet will likely be shorn of any conspicuous sign we were ever here, let alone careless with our CO2, dioxins, etc. Talk about an inconvenient truth.

In other words, we shouldn’t worry about the world we are leaving to our children or grandchildren. A million years from now none of this will matter.

Of course, this kind of argument can be used to justify any disfunctional policy that will harm people, including ignorning the realities of global warming.

Transcript: More »

National Review: ThinkProgress Doesn’t Have The ‘Slightest Idea What They Are Talking About’»

Jason Lee Steorts of the National Review has published a column taking issue with our response to his cover story on global warming, “Scare of the Century.” The response is useful because it more explicitly exposes the tactics of Steorts and others trying to muddy the debate:

1. Discount the consensus of thousands of scientific experts in favor of a handful of skeptics backed by the fossil fuel industry. Steorts objects to two of our points because they are “based on the International Panel on Climate Change’s models” which he claims “make unrealistic assumptions.” The IPCC process involves thousands of scientists from over 120 countries who, over a period of years, develop detailed reports on climate change. The peer-review process is far more extensive than even the most prestigious scientific journals – the most recent report was reviewed by more than 1,000 top experts. The process includes “climate skeptics” and representatives from industry. In response, Steorts cites one individual, Patrick Michaels who disputes the IPCC’s science. Michaels, whose work is backed by the fossil fuel industry, once famously “proved” global warming wasn’t happening at all by mixing up degrees with radians.

2. Distort scientific research, much of which confirms the severity of global warming, to confuse the issue. First, Steorts quotes Patrick Michaels asserting that “Antarctica has been gaining ice.” Michaels doesn’t have any research to back up that claim, so Steorts is forced to rely on the scientific research of others, including Curt Davis. Steorts is unconcerned that Davis has said that the use of his research by climate skeptics is a “deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public.” Pieter Tans, who runs a lab at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, explains that this is a typical tactic “They argue not as scientists but as lawyers. When they argue, they pick one piece of the fabric of evidence and blow it up all out of proportion…Their purpose is to confuse.”

In the last line of his column, Steorts claims we don’t have the “slightest idea what [we] are talking about.”

But the issue here is not that we know what we are talking about and Steorts doesn’t. The point is that thousands of scientific experts do know what they are talking about. The few people paid by the fossil fuel industry to cast doubt on the consensus, and writers like Steorts who act as their megaphone, are not a credible or reliable rebuttal.