Sporting Intelligence, October 30, 2014
by Roger Pielke, Jr.

As the MLS’s 2014 season moves towards a conclusion with the play-offs underway, it is notable there is no place in the post-season for the biggest-spending team, Toronto FC. Despite having a salary bill of almost $17m (£10.6m), which is the highest in MLS, the Canada-based franchise is not among the 10 teams in the play-offs. This is anomalous in football (soccer) because the team with the biggest wage bill is generally up there with the challengers, if not winning every season.

The reasons for Toronto’s failings are too complex for this article but the fact that we know precisely – to the cent – what every club in MLS spends on salary is remarkable in itself. In fact it is unique in global football for a league, or in this case a union, to publish the pay of every player. The MLS Players Union does this every year (and an archive of salary info is here), and it is what this information tells us in general that is interesting.

On the 2014 salary list are 572 players earning total wages of just over $129.5 million. This sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But in comparison to the Premier League, for example, it is small potatoes. The MLS total includes 21 clubs (for 2014 it includes Chivas USA, since folded, and partial squads for NY City FC and Orlando City FC, both being formed). Yet their total wage bills combined equals about the same as the wage bill for Queens Park Rangers ($126 million) in 2012-13, the most recent year’s data available for QPR

In 2012-13, six Premier League clubs each had wages bills well in excess of the entire MLS, with Manchester City topping the list at $376 million (for all club staff). The wage bills for the top 20 clubs in England were almost $2.9 billion combined. For the bottom 20 payers across the Premier League and the Championship it was about $750 million. This data comes from Deloitte and was provided to me by Stefan Szymanski of the University of Michigan.

In terms of individual clubs, Toronto leads the way in MLS with a wage bill of almost $17 million, or $2 million less than Charlton Athletic or Blackpool in 2012-13.  The LA Galaxy, Seattle Sounders FC and NY Red Bulls are next, in the neighborhood of Barnsley or Peterbourough United. The wage totals drop off precipitously from there.

This table shows the 2014 MLS wages,ranked by median salary. Read more …

MLS salaries, 2014

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Himalayan Mountains. A new study analyzing errors in climate science—including estimates of melt rate in the Himalayas—urges scientists to be equally aware of false-negative and false-positive errors. Photo by David Oonk, CIRES.

New study shows that false-negative errors may be just as important as false-positives

Awareness of Both Type I and II Errors in Climate Science and Assessment
William R. L. Anderegg, Elizabeth S. Callaway, Maxwell T. Boykoff, Gary Yohe, and Terry L. Root
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, October 2014

Understating the effects of climate change could be as costly and dangerous to human well-being and economics as overstating the impacts, according to the authors of a new analysis published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

“Scientific papers and assessments such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may err too much on the side of caution,” said lead author William Anderegg, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University in New Jersey. “Such hedging can prevent decision makers and the public from understanding the full range of risks.”

Anderegg and his co-authors, including Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science (CIRES) Fellow Max Boykoff, evaluated “type 1” and “type 2” errors related to IPCC reports released in 2007. Type 1 errors are false positives. These would include, for example, a case in which scientists accidentally identify a stronger relationship between a certain type of weather pattern and climate change, than exists in reality. In a type 2 or false-negative error, scientists might inadvertently fail to identify a real relationship, concluding that none exist.

Boykoff is also an associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Environmental Studies Program.

Anderegg, Boykoff and their colleagues examined two scientific topics widely covered by the media during 2007: The IPCC’s estimates of future sea level rise, which were relatively low compared to other sea level rise estimates; and a well-publicized typo in Himalayan glacier melt rates, which amounted to an overstatement. The researchers described the latter as a possible “type 1” error.

“Climate scientists are very aware of type 1 errors, and are very averse to them,” Boykoff said. “No one wants to make a mistake like reporting a too-high figure for Himalayan glacier melt rates. But in an attempt to avoid these kinds of errors, scientists may accidentally make more type 2 errors.”

In the case of sea level rise, for example, scientists involved in the IPCC report of 2007 chose to be extremely conservative in estimating future likely sea level rise, because of some uncertainty regarding how major land ice sheets, such as on Greenland and Antarctica, will behave in a warmer world. The IPCC report carefully noted the fact that such land ice was not included in the 2007 analysis, and was a reason for the low estimate. However, only about 30 percent of media reports mentioned that important caveat.

“Type 2 errors can hinder communication of the full range of possible climate risks,” the paper concluded.

The authors argue that climate scientists, and those in other policy relevant fields such as medicine, must better recognize both type 1 and type 2 errors. They urge that scientists accurately report the full range of possible outcomes, even if improbable, controversial or poorly understood.

“Climate change is fundamentally a problem of managing risk,” Anderegg said. “In order to do that as a society, we have to know the full range of possible futures from the science. The available evidence suggests that in many crucial areas climate science likely understates these risks.”

Authors of “Awarness of Both Type 1 and Type 2 Errors in Climate Science and Assessment,” published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society October 30, include William Anderegg (Princeton University), Elizabeth Callaway (University of California, Santa Barbara), Maxwell Boykoff (CSTPR, CIRES and CU-Boulder), Gary Yohe (Wesleyan University), and Terry Root (Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University).

Contacts:
Bill Anderegg, lead author and Princeton University postdoc, anderegg@princeton.edu, 970- 739-4954
Max Boykoff, co-author, available by email only, boykoff@colorado.edu
Katy Human, CIRES communications, 303-735-0196 and Kathleen.Human@Colorado.edu

Dutee Chand, Science and the Spirit of Sport: Why IAAF Policy is Deeply Flawed
by Roger Pielke, Jr.

Sporting Intelligence
October 20, 2014

ince 1928 international athletics has included separate categories for men and women. This separation makes sense to most people on a lot of levels. In terms of social equity, it is appropriate that women have the same chance as men to compete at the highest levels of athletic competition, even though full equality is not always realized in practice.

In terms of biology, women are in general smaller and weaker than men, so having a mixed competition would lead to virtually no women competing in athletics. Most of the time, separating women and men in athletic competition works well. But when questions arise about who is and who is not eligible to participate in women’s events, things get messy. And as the popular legal maxim has it, hard cases make for bad law.

The latest controversy over participation in women’s athletics involves an Indian sprinter, Dutee Chand. She has run afoul of policies recently implemented by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) for determining eligibility to participate in women’s athletics. The IAAF oversees track and field competitions under the Olympic movement. Despite IAAF protests to the contrary, these policies are the most recent incarnation of “sex testing,” used to classify individuals as male or female for purposes of competition.

Chand has what doctors call hyperandrogenism, which means that her body naturally produces an excess of androgens, such as testosterone. About five to 10 per cent of women of reproductive age are estimated to have an androgen excess.

The IAAF determined in 2011, prior to the London Olympics, that it would use an athlete’s androgens, focused on her level of testosterone, as the primary factor for determining eligibility for participating in women’s athletics events.  It implemented this policy after its poor handling of the case of Caster Semenya, a South African sprinter who fell victim to the IAAF’s lack of clear policy for participation in women’ events. She suffered degrading treatment by athletics officials and in the media, before the IAAF finally ruled her eligible to compete.

The IAAF put forward its androgen (testosterone) policy apparently in hope of establishing an unambiguous, scientific standard for determining eligibility to participate in women’s athletics events. In many areas of decision making we would love for science to offer us bright lines to separate one side from another.

The use of biological characteristics to differentiate among athletes is widely practiced and accepted. My city recreation department includes a basketball league for those 6 foot and under and also a soccer league for players who are over 40 years old. Elite athletes now can compete in “masters” events broken down by age. Olympic weightlifters and wrestlers are organized by body weight. Professional cyclists have upper limits on their hematocrit levels.

However, biological sex does not fall neatly into two unambiguous categories, but along a spectrum characterized by shades of grey. The World Health Organization explains, “there is a range of chromosome complements, hormone balances, and phenotypic variations that determine sex.” As David Epstein writes in The Sports Gene, “neither body parts nor the chromosomes within them unequivocally differentiate male from female athletes.” Science cannot draw a bright line between male and female, because there is no such line.

The IAAF androgen policy would be perfectly acceptable if there was a general consensus on naturally occurring testosterone as a relevant physical characteristic to separate athletes into different competition classes. After all, the logic behind separating out athletes by age, weight and blood oxygen levels is fairly obvious. But there is no such consensus on testosterone. Read more …