Theyworkforyou.com email me whenever my MP - John Maples - says anything. He’s in the Conservative Party, and not the most active of MPs:

• Has spoken in 12 debates in the last year — below average amongst MPs.
• Has received answers to 9 written questions in the last year — below average amongst MPs.
• Replied within 2 or 3 weeks to a high number of messages sent via WriteToThem.com during 2007, according to constituents. [Andrew's note: not mine, though]
• Has voted in 60% of votes in parliament — well below average amongst MPs. (From Public Whip)

He didn’t turn up for the smoking-ban votes, and seems to be against gay rights when he’s there, which isn’t often¹. He was present for all the hunting ban votes - you know, the important stuff - and was strongly against.

It seems a bit odd not to be around for such things. Maybe he’s been ill. But when he’s there, he does things I don’t like. I wouldn’t (and didn’t) vote for him, but I still like to follow what’s going on, and today I had an email to say he’d been fairly active in a recent debate.

Turns out he’s a climate-change denying n00b. Here’s his first contribution to the debate on the Draft Climate Change Bill:

After the Bill abolishing slavery was passed by the House, the British Navy patrolled the Atlantic, stopping other countries indulging in the slave trade. Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that we do the same with global warming?

Helpful, I think you’ll agree. Then comes:

I do not believe that the science is anything like as settled as the proponents of the Bill are making out. In fact, the scientists hedge their predictions with an awful lot of qualifications and maybes that those who invoke them often omit. The science is a bit like medicine in the 1850s. The scientists are scratching the surface of something that they do not really understand, but no doubt will. They are probably on to something, but nothing like the whole story. What they say does not justify any of the apocalyptic visions that we have heard set out.

This is called the language of science. You have to put in all the qualifications, or you’re not doing proper science. Full debunking. Medicine in the 1850s? There was no medicine in the 1850s! This is supposed to be an accurate comparison with the thousands of climate scientists who’ve been collecting data and making confirmed predictions for decades? And then he accuses other people of making statements with no basis?

The record shows that the climate warmed from 1920 to 1940, cooled from 1940 to 1975, rose again from 1975 to 2000, and since 2000, according to the Hadley centre, has not risen at all. In the past seven years, global temperatures have not increased. All the predictions that we work from, whether from the IPCC or anybody else, are based on models, none of which can account for the cooling between 1940 and 1975.

Here’s a graph of global temperature over the last century, and explanations of why it varies. Things are always more complicated than you’d think. I’ve no idea whether climate models take into account the supposed cooling - it seems to be understood fairly well, from what I can tell - but here’s why not-perfect models are still useful and make confirmed predictions.

There’s lots more - he’s been reading books by climate change skeptics - but I want to skip to this:

Over the past 150 years, sea levels have risen by about 30 cm, which is the predicted rise for the next 100 years. Okay, it will happen slightly quicker, but we coped with that rise perfectly easily over the past 150 years so we can cope with it over the next 100 years.

Wtf. I lost electricity this evening, and the freezer’s been warming up. All the ice cubes have been fine for the last hour, though, so I’m sure they can cope for the next. No worries. What’s that, you say? Everyone else’s freezers have broken down too? What do I care about them?

Secondly, we have urban heat islands. In cities, temperatures have risen considerably. The temperature in London has risen between 4 and 6° C since 1950, as it has in Los Angeles, Tokyo and other places. It is a fact of urbanisation called the global heat island effect. We know how to deal with that. If we are richer, we can have air conditioning. We know that if we put in more parks, water and trees in cities, we can cool them considerably. We know how to do that. We can adapt to that very successfully.

Brilliant! Air conditioning is the solution! You’ll be kept cool, and there are no ironic disadvantages. Only if you’re rich, of course - if you’re poor, screw you. And what an idea to build lots of parks in, you know, the world! If only someone had thought that planting trees might help. Ooh, could cost a bit, though - best watch that.

Did I mention he’s a Conservative? Can you tell? It’s almost like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

To be fair, he abruptly comes back down to Earth a bit later:

Some man-made warming is going on. It is worth taking action now: a price mechanism through carbon tax, energy efficiency and nuclear power are worth pursuing, especially nuclear power. Research into alternative power sources—fusion, carbon capture and adaptive strategies—is also worth conducting.

I agree about nuclear power, but I’m not sure about fusion - that’s a way off, I think. Hardly makes up for the earlier comments, though.

I’m far from knowledgeable about climate change, but I see no reason to doubt the conclusions of massive, independent studies by the UN and countless governments. Whenever I investigate any claim that supposedly casts the whole thing into doubt - usually by non-scientists, and usually with a great deal of paranoid conspiracy thrown in for good measure - there’s a comprehensible annihilation of it by people who know what they’re talking about.

So this is all a bit depressing, but at least he’s showing an interest.

1. to be fair, the train service from Stratford to London isn’t the best [↩]

I’m not really one for pubs, and I felt intimidated to the point of wanting to hide under a chair at a skeptical meetup on Saturday, but tonight’s Skeptics in the Pub could be quite exciting. Phil Plait’s the guest speaker, and he just posted news of something which might, just might, be a direct, laboratory detection of dark matter. Even if not, it’s something new and unexplained. Coooooooool.

An Evening With James Randi and Friends is “an evening of discussion about science, pseudoscience, scepticism and the paranormal” on 19th April in London. Guests are:

• James ‘The Amazing’ Randi
• Ben Goldacre
• Richard Wiseman
• Simon Singh
• Susan Blackmore
• Chris French

Just a few of my intellectual idols, then. Tickets £11 / £5.50 concessions. I’ll be there. Via bagrec.

A recent Skeptics’ Guide had a great tip on not getting emotionally attached to conclusions. This is definitely a failing of mine. Ask me whether organic food is worth buying and you’ll get a fairly vitriolic, non-measured response. This is mainly because I don’t like seeing people bilked, but I’m way more attached to the organic-food-sucks conclusion than I should be. I doubt I’d change my responses appropriately if the consensus opinion started to shift. This is particularly bad when you consider I don’t actively follow the latest research, and that ‘organic’ has many different meanings. So I need to stop doing that.

Steve Novella’s tip? Get emotionally attached to the process, not the conclusion. Fetishize the scientific method. Demand that appropriate evidence is analysed properly, and then accept whatever conclusion pops out. This also helps with spotting pseudoscience, and some kinds of logical fallacies, which start with the conclusion and search for evidence to back it up.

Sounds reasonable. I’ll give it a go.

If I could alter my brain and adapt to one particular profession, high on my list would be a cosmologist. It’s just such a cool time to be alive, in terms of space probes confirming or disproving theories, and the universe throwing curve balls at every step. Unfortunately the maths is way beyond my capability¹, but I’ve been roughly following the field for years and years. I find that it’s important to actually keep up with developments, as things are rapidly changing. For example, the last couple of years have seen large changes in the understanding of dark matter and dark energy.

Dark matter is matter that only indicates its existence through its gravitational effect on other matter - it’s not detectable in any other way. But another interpretation of this is that our understanding of gravity is wrong. This was still an option when I took an Open University cosmology course a few years back, but recent observations pretty much killed that theory.

Dark energy is the mysterious force causing the acceleration of the universe to increase, and analyses of the movements of massive-scale galaxy clusters have shown they move exactly as predicted by current theories of gravity - if dark energy were also a flaw in our understanding, it’d be detectable at those levels².

We’re figuring this all out right now. That is cool. The best I can do is stand at the sidelines and catch what I can, which is why I like Astronomy Cast so much - I can follow recent developments without great amounts of effort on my part, which suits me just fine Today’s episode caught me out - I thought I roughly understood the concept of the shape of the universe, but their recent episode on the topic caused many WTF moments. I’m a little out of date. It turns out that the WMAP probe has found the universe is likely to be totally flat - no matter how big a triangle you draw in space, the angles will always add up to 180 - but, this requires fine-tuning to an insane degree, as a difference of 1 in 447 sextillion in densities during the big bang would have created a non-flat universe. So there’s got to be either a) some new physics out there or b) a bajillion big bangs, and we have to be in one of them. Wow!

Wish I could be a cosmologist. Can’t, though, but I’ll try to keep up - I’d hate to be alive and miss it all.

939495

1. took the maths A-level twice and got worse, baby [↩]
2. at least, I’m pretty sure this was the study, I can’t find a link right now though [↩]

I thought ‘homeophobia’ might catch on - there’s a Guardian piece today with the word in its headline. First thing to point out is the author:

 Rustum Roy is Evan Pugh professor of the solid state, and research professor of materials at Arizona State University

Research professor of materials. Got it. He spends a couple of paragraphs going on about closed-minded scientists who don’t think water has a ‘memory’, and then comes this:

As it happens, there is agreement among all those who have studied liquid water that it is, in fact, the critics, who are totally wrong. Proof? Diamond is the planet’s hardest material; graphite one of the softest. They are absolutely identical in composition, and they can be interconverted in a millisecond with zero change of composition.

I think this paragraph should win some kind of award. The whole thing is a complete non sequitur, for starters: how do carbon compositions translate to ‘proof’ that water has a memory? Not that the diamond thing makes sense. Graphite and diamond are not, as far as I’m aware, ‘absolutely identical in composition’, or my pencil pot would be worth a fortune. They sure as hell can’t be ‘interconverted in a millisecond’, or de Beers would be out of business, not to mention how it’s apparently possible to convert something with zero change of composition. This is from a ‘research professor of materials’?

It’s not like the next paragraph continues this argument - that’s it. I find it difficult to take the guy seriously after this. But here’s some more:

But the main thrust of Goldacre’s argument is the role of the “placebo effect”. Yes, this works. And, yes, it is without doubt present in every homeopathic intervention; but it is far more powerfully present in orthodox medical pills because they are advertised so widely in billion-dollar campaigns.

Afaik the placebo effect is much more subtle than he’s suggesting. It’s not just about public awareness, it’s about time spent with the patient, the type/colour/dose of ‘medicine’ and plenty of other factors - placebos are complex. But even if he’s right, so what? Is he suggesting that ‘orthodox’ medicine is all placebo effect?

Goldacre is accurate in pointing out the high rates of positive v negative outcomes in many of the homeopathy studies. But there are enormous discrepancies in any set of randomised controlled trials on the same orthodox pills.

Only if you include all the crappy trials. Once you remove the poor methodologies you tend to find a convergence of outcomes, and there’s plenty of statistical analysis to help figure it out. What’s this meant to prove, anyway? That trials aren’t indicative of anything? Why does he think homeopathy works, then?

Ben Goldacre must be doing a good job - the homeopathy proponents are increasingly desperate, and increasingly rubbish.

Dr. Steven Novella today has a good post on the ‘faith’ involved in science. He takes on the common accusation that the assumption of a rational universe is an underlying, unjustified assumption of science¹:

Let us conduct a thought experiment. If we do live in a naturalistic world that predictably follows its own laws, then empirical hypothesis testing should be able to, over time, work out those laws and how the universe works. There would be no theoretical reason why science could not eventually understand any natural process. So far all the evidence seems to be pointing to the conclusion that we live in this type of universe.

What if, however, we lived in a “paranormal” universe - meaning that there were phenomena that did not follow naturalistic laws. Or perhaps our universe is somehow embedded in a grander universe that lies outside out ability to examine scientifically, but can occasionally intrude into our world. In other words, perhaps our reality, the reality to which we have access, is only a tiny slice of ultimate reality. Therefore, while we can only examine the tiny slice in which we live, it is subject to phenomena outside of that slice but part of the grander reality.

In such a paranormal universe, we would still only have science as a way to examine the world. Science could still mostly work. However, we would encounter phenomena that would not yield to scientific examination - that could not be explained or understood no matter how hard we tried. Centuries, even millennia, of examination would not penetrate these mysteries. They would forever lie outside the methodology of science as enduring anomalies.

Either way, the scientific method is the only game in town. There’s no need to assume the naturalistic universe for science to work, and in either universe science would give us some indication of which we inhabit.

The only ‘faith’ that I know of in science was pointed out by David Hume, and that’s the broken nature of inductive reasoning. As Stephen Law puts it, why should we expect the sun to rise tomorrow? Inductive reasoning says that the laws of motion have been constant and there’s no reason to think they’ll change. But that’s begging the question - Hume says that arguments from experience will always produce a circular argument, and claims to anything other than experience always use inductive reasoning. It’s a supremely irritating bit of argument.

The above still applies, in a way - science doesn’t actually claim things will always be the same, and if things changed science would simply examine what was different, but in practice science is probably wedded to the idea that results are repeatable. Anything else is practically unmanageable. Of course religion - always the opposing side in this kind of argument - suffers from exactly the same problem, no matter how much it plays around with the definition of its deity.

I’ve only been reading about this recently, and I’m sure Hume’s views are more nuanced than I’ve suggested. I also don’t know the responses of modern philosophy, but it’s certainly a fun one to think about.

1. I like that this argument apparently accepts the pejorative sense of ‘faith’ [↩]

The Point of Inquiry podcast interviewed Michael Behe this week. Prof. Behe is a leading advocate of the ‘intelligent design’ movement, and Point of Inquiry really really isn’t. It’s great fun, and perfect for playing Spot the Logical Fallacy. Behe comes out with straw men, ad hominem attacks and false premises, as well as poisoning the well, saying things I believe to be demonstrably untrue and continually crying conspiracy. Interviewer D.J. Grothe doesn’t pull any punches, although is of course polite throughout, and calls Behe on his evasions when necessary.

A particularly interesting moment comes when D.J. Grothe asks how ID-ers can criticise evolution for not providing a full and complete explanation, yet offer no mechanisms of their own. Behe’s response is that everybody is trying to explain the appearance of design, so saying ‘it looks designed’ isn’t something that needs to be backed up. This is slippery.

As I see it, the point of evolutionary theory isn’t to explain why things look designed, it’s to explain how they arose. That they appear designed is a side-effect, as it were, and related to the way our brains look at things (also interesting from an evolutionary standpoint). Books like ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ explain evolution from a basis of ‘how come things look designed’ as a) a response to creationists, who use this argument all the time, and b) it’s a useful way of structuring an explanation. But evolution isn’t there to explain the appearance of design any more than round-earth ‘theory’ is there to explain the appearance of a flat planet - that’s just something that arises from the theory.

D.J. Grothe also asks him the obvious: isn’t intelligent design just ‘god of the gaps’? Behe denies this, saying ID uses what we know rather than what we don’t know. But this misses the point: ‘what we know’ in this case is entirely based upon what they claim evolution can’t explain - in other words, gaps. He doesn’t address the question.

The final question is also particularly telling. Behe’s latest book apparently claims malaria cannot have evolved and must have been designed. Why, he is asked, would a designer create something that kills so many innocent people? Unlike his scientific evasions, which sometimes took me a few minutes to unravel, the answer is obvious: god has a secret plan.

It’s worth a listen, although it probably helps if you have a passing familiarity with intelligent design and its recent history - particularly the recent US court case in which ID had its ass handed to it by a conservative judge. Understanding the position of people you’re arguing against is always a good idea, and it’s cool that both sides agreed to the interview.

The Guardian has an article defending homeopathy, which includes a moment of genius. Most of it is the usual:

I am sure that there is a placebo effect in homeopathy, but it is a fact that many of the people who end up visiting a homeopath do so as a last resort, when nothing else is working. That such people often see an improvement suggests that the remedies themselves are contributing to the wellness of the individual.

Bit of a non sequitur, there. Then there’s:

Homeopathy seeks to understand everything we are, everything we do, as a web of relatedness. The reason why I have a recurring sore throat will not be the reason why you have one, and what helps me may not help you.

This seems to be partly why tests used for conventional medicines fail when used to test homeopathy.

If only there were some kind of testing system based on, oh, I don’t know, efficacy? Ah, right - the reason your homeopathic remedy doesn’t work for me is that it’s designed for someone else! Now I get it.

I take New Scientist every week [I am not sure this is wise - Andrew] and I am continually amazed at how the seemingly well-known physical world of ours is beginning to show itself as stranger than anyone imagined.

You see? New things are being discovered, therefore my made-up-crap is true. This is the logical fallacy of Completely Missing The Point.

And finally, if you’re particularly masochistic:

Objections to homeopathy begin with what are viewed as the impossible dilutions of the remedies, so that only nano amounts of the original active substance remain, and in some cases are only an imprint, or memory. Yet our recent discoveries in the world of the very small point to a whole new set of rules for the behaviour of nano-quantities. Thundering around in our Gulliver world, we were first shocked to find that splitting the atom allowed inconceivable amounts of energy to be released. Now, we are discovering that the properties of materials change as their size reaches the nano-scale. Bulk material should have constant physical properties, regardless of its size, but at the nano-scale this is not the case. In a solvent, such as water, nano particles can remain suspended, neither floating nor sinking, but permeating the solution. Such particles are also able to pass through cell walls, and they can cause biochemical change.

We do not know whether this has a bearing on homeopathic dilutions, but it may well be that nanoparticles offer a clue.

I don’t know where to start. I expect it was a bit of a shock when somebody first accidentally split an atom, though. Thus far, the article is nothing particularly interesting, but then I saw this:

This homeophobia is[...]

Homeophobia. Genius. Google turns up a few previous references, but I’d never seen it before. I can see that term spreading. Article via Bad Science.

Whenever a scientific study confirms the supposedly obvious you find this kind of reaction, and I get fed up with it. It’s almost certainly just fun in Norm’s case, but I’ve met people who take it seriously and add it to the they-change-their-minds-all-the-time-anyway dismissal of science. In psychology particularly there’s plenty that’s counter-intuitive, and it’s only by this kind of ‘obvious’ investigation that progress can be made.

For example, today there’s a study suggesting that female ’sexy’ walks do not correlate with times of peak fertility - there are subtle signs of this, but they’re only detectable at close range. It was expected that the study would go the other way, and the result isn’t particularly intuitive. A few weeks ago a study reported that lap dancers have increased earnings during their most fertile phases, as compared with those on the pill all month. Also unexpected.

Of course, the cynic’s reaction will be to instead deride the studies as pointless, but you never know where this kind of research is going to lead. These studies add to theories of evolutionary psychology, and invite us to ask how much of our choices are determined by subconscious signals - how much free will do we really have? Not every result is going to be new and exciting, but investigation always reveals something. A quick browse of snopes.com will show how many ‘obvious’ things widely thought to be true are completely wrong. Confirmation of ‘common sense’ is worth having.

Last night I went to a talk by Dr. Aubrey de Grey, who explained why he thinks the elimination of human ageing is a reasonable technological goal, achievable within the lifetimes of people alive today.

I’d been invited by a friend and, honestly, for a few minutes I wondered whether it was going to be whackjobbery. By the end I was impressed enough to want to read more on the subject.

In hindsight, he reminds me of Ray Kurzweil. And not just because of the beards. Like the man behind the Singularity, Dr. de Grey’s ideas seemed, from a lay perspective, to hang together. They certainly didn’t collapse under their own weight, and I eventually hit the limit of my own ignorance: I’m not a biologist, so have no idea whether his claims actually make sense in the real world. But I was impressed by the logic and apparent ingenuinty of his arguments, as well as his willingness to say ‘I don’t know’ to some questions - ‘what would be the effect on the brain of reversing ageing?’, for example.

Dr. de Grey’s idea goes something like this:

• Ageing and death are caused by the accumulation of ‘damage’ in our bodies.
• The cumulative effects of this damage eventually causes a pathology, which, no matter how it is treated, must eventually be a downward spiral to death.
• We don’t understand enough about the human body to prevent the damage happening in the first place. Any intervention in a system we don’t understand is likely to result in failure, if not more problems.
• The treatment of the damage, however, need not be reliant upon an understanding of the underlying causes. Once we have a solution that can treat all types of damage, at least up to some degree, we can begin to extend lifespans.
• Once the rate of progress of damage treatment methods reaches what he calls the ‘longevity escape velocity’, repeated applications will allow people to effectively live forever.

As I said, I’m no biologist, but I’ve read enough popular science that the damage theory of ageing isn’t completely new to me. So I don’t think this was made up. The damage hypothesis seems reasonable on the surface, but I wanted more detail, even at the risk of not understand it. What is this ‘damage’?

He went into detail, listing the seven types of damage that are thought to result in all the problems of ageing. He claimed that this list, not of his writing, is widely accepted among scientists, and hasn’t changed since 1982. They seemed specific: mutations in DNA, protein crosslinks, junk in cells, junk outside cells…At this point I had to take his word for it that this was indeed the case.

Dr. de Grey pointed to two of the damage types and said that theoretical treatments are already in the pipeline, although far from trivial. One of these was stem cell therapy, which is obviously quite the exciting and challenging area. He then pointed to the remaining five, and said that there were theoretical possibilities for treatment that, reading between the lines, research hasn’t started on yet. But, he said, none were insurmountable.

He went into detail on one specific problem, relating to the issue of breaking down harmful components inside cells. This, he said, is extremely difficult because the harmful components are by their very nature difficult to break down, or the body’s repair mechanisms would have done it for you (these mechanisms are extremely efficient, but can’t handle the extreme cases, which become ‘damage’). So what’s to do? Well, his idea relates to the wonder of microbes. In any environment, microbes will adapt to break down substances. There are apparently microbes found next to motorways which can break down rubber. This is a major part of research into the disposal of environmental waste. But where could we find microbes that would break down these hard-to-attack substances inside cells? His answer: graveyards. Bodies are being decomposed all the time, so there must be microbes present that can deal with these problems. So, it seems, it has proved.

Obviously I had to take his word for it that this was true. But this solution is elegant and out-of-the-box rather than ridiculous - exactly the kind of thing that turns up regularly in scientific breakthroughs. While skeptical, I was prepared to believe this could be the case.

He claimed to have similar approaches for all of the types of damage, and soon after this the talk ended. He was hammered with questions from the Oxford Science Society audience, and on the whole did a good job of responding. As I mentioned, he was prepared to say ‘I don’t know’ when necessary, and he expertly fielded the nuttier end of ‘are you going to make people get licenses to have children, then’ queries. He’d obviously spent plenty of time thinking about the ramifications of a ‘post-ageing society’, including that we’d all be a damn sight more careful crossing the road, although didn’t claim to have solutions to every problem.

The only reddish flag were his repeated references to the disdain in which his scientific colleagues hold him. He didn’t compare himself to Galileo or anything - the moment anyone does this you know they’ve lost it - but it was a little unnecessary. An orange-ish flag, I’d say.

I couldn’t come to any kind of conclusion - nobody without biological expertise could. He was a good public speaker, and I’m aware of my propensity for putting more trust into people with this skill. But my skepticism level is low enough that I’m interested in the opinions of others in the field, and shall watch out for his name in the future. He runs the Methusalah Foundation, which offers cash prizes to anybody who can extend the life of a mouse, and he’s written a book on the subject called ‘Ending Aging‘¹ that should be out in the UK before too long. I’ll try to read some reviews. A very interesting evening, and recommended if he ever comes to your town.

1. I have no idea how to properly spell the latter word [↩]

You know how it’s a good idea to expose children to colds, measles etc. as it makes them immune in later life? Turns out, not true. In fact, opposite:

In 1989, an epidemiologist in Britain, David Strachan, observed that babies born into households with lots of siblings were less likely than other babies to develop allergies and asthma. The same proved true of babies who spent significant time in day care. Dr. Strachan hypothesized that the protection came from experiencing an abundance of childhood illnesses.

Dr. Strachan’s original hygiene hypothesis got a lot of press, not only in the news media but in serious medical journals. Less publicized was the decade-long string of follow-up studies that disproved a link between illnesses and protection from inflammatory disorders like allergies and asthma. If anything, studies showed, early illness made matters worse.

Moreover, studies now show that the more infections a person has during childhood, the greater his or her chance of premature death from scourges of old age like heart disease and cancer. The link appears to be chronic inflammation, a kind of lingering collateral damage from the body’s disease-fighting response. [my emphasis]

But what about the original observation? Well, children raised around many other children are indeed less likely to develop allergies and asthma, but not for the reasons thought:

But the link isn’t disease-causing germs. It’s early and ample exposure to harmless bacteria — especially the kinds encountered living close to the land and around livestock and other young children. In other words, dirt, dung and diapers. Just as disease-causing microbes clearly bring on inflammation, harmless microorganisms appear to exert a calming effect on the immune system.

Got it. Don’t go nuts about hygiene, let kids play in the dirt and vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate.

More detail in the NYT article, which also points out that colds are not ‘natural’ and part of life as they’re only 5000 years old - nothing in evolutionary terms.

My new rule: never believe anything health-related unless it’s stated, directly, by a trained professional, and even then it’s not a bad idea to check it out with reputable sources online. And keep up with latest research.

The BBC’s headline ticker is currently running with:

Experts refuse to rule out long-term mobile phone use causing cancer.

Damn those experts! They simply refuse to make long-term health predictions on recently-developed technology. What is wrong with these people!?

The article itself concentrates on the long-term health worries, all of which are entirely speculative, and is heavy on lung-cancer/smoking comparisons:

He said: “We can’t rule out the possibility at this stage that cancer could appear in a few years’ time.

“With smoking there was no link of any lung cancer until after ten years.”

He said the problem during the study was that there had been very few people using mobile phones for over ten years.

Cancers do not normally appear until ten to 15 years after exposure.

The last sentence is weird. Exposure to what? Radioactive materials? Do you think the reporter is confusing different types of radiation?

And this is with a decent study that’s pretty conclusive in its analysis that using mobile phones for ten years isn’t dangerous, a fact you’d think might be newsworthy.

Science reporting by non-science-reporters always tends towards ’scientists don’t know anything’. If it’s a health study that shows no effect, it’s a tentative conclusion. If it does show an effect, it’s an obvious common-sense result. If it’s new evidence that contradicts previous research, it’s impossible to know what to believe. What do you mean, you can’t win?

The BBC’s head of tv news, Peter Horrocks, last week wrote this on his blog:

BBC News certainly does not have a line on climate change, however the weight of our coverage reflects the fact that there is an increasingly strong (although not overwhelming) weight of scientific opinion in favour of the proposition that climate change is happening and is being largely caused by man.

This is good stuff. The media generally fails spectacularly at science coverage because the usually-reasonable journalistic standard of ‘fairness’ requires them to present an opposing viewpoint. In the 90’s the whole of the medical industry was screaming that MMR was safe, yet every reporter felt it necessary to interview one of the very few crazies on the basis that it’s a balanced view, often followed by ‘viewers get to decide’. Unfortunately, this decision is the necessarily based on a misrepresentation of the facts.

It’s the same today with global warming: the vast majority of climatologists think it extremely likely that a) global warming is happening (actually, nobody doubts this) and b) it is very likely that man is causing it, yet the deniers get just as much coverage, if not more. The problem is that, unlike politics, a scientific consensus has genuine authority.

Because the process of science is so ruthless - the job of your colleagues is to destroy your arguments - and disparate - hundreds of countries with thousands of independent organisations and millions of scientists from every part of the political spectrum - a consensus of opinion is genuinely valuable, and isn’t suddenly turned into a 50/50 probability when a lone-hero / complete whackjob (take your pick) starts claiming everybody else is wrong. The scientific method will assess the validity of their arguments, because that’s the only authority with the expertise to do so. The results cannot be published by any ultimate authority, because science has no such authority¹ but must be gleamed from consensus opinion. It may even turn out to be wrong in the long run, but it’s the only way that can possibly work. No journalist can accurately assess the merits of a scientific claim, given their lack of time and expertise, so the only sensible approach is to report in a way correlated with the scientific opinion.

To hear exactly such a conclusion coming from a head of BBC news was very encouraging. Then came this:

The BBC has scrapped plans for Planet Relief, a TV special on climate change.

The decision comes after executives said it was not the BBC’s job to lead opinion on climate change.

(…) But against the backdrop of intense internal debates about impartiality, senior news editors expressed misgivings that Planet Relief was too “campaigning” in nature and would have left the Corporation open to the charge of bias.

“It is absolutely not the BBC’s job to save the planet,” warned Newsnight editor Peter Barron at the Edinburgh Festival last month.

Head of TV news Peter Horrocks, writing in the BBC News website’s editors’ blog, commented: “It is not the BBC’s job to lead opinion or proselytise on this or any other subject.”

The BBC clearly feel happy to present the opinions of climate-change activists in a large way - Live Earth shows this - and to balance their news output according to scientific opinion, but are uncomfortable with organising anything themselves. This almost seems reasonable, but how does it fit with Comic Relief? There are plenty of conservatives who might argue that the suffering of children in other countries is nothing to do with us Brits - how dare the BBC ‘proselytise’? Of course, most people consider this morally unambiguous - of course the BBC should do everything it can to help people who are suffering.

But what’s the difference between campaigning against African suffering, and campaigning against a climate change that will cause similar suffering in the future? Is it the immediate visuals? I doubt it. I think it’s more likely what’s alluded to in the above - the BBC would be left open to a charge of bias. Because climate change is so politicised, and because much of the country thinks, wrongly, that there’s some major scientific debate as to whether it’s man-made, the standing of the BBC probably would suffer if it were to take an active position. It’s not an easy position for them.

I must point out that the BBC have said:

Our audiences tell us they are most receptive to documentary or factual style programming as a means of learning about the issues surrounding this subject, and as part of this learning we have made the decision not to proceed with the Planet Relief event.

Instead we will focus our energies on a range of factual programmes on the important and complex subject of climate change. This decision was not made in light of the recent debate around impartiality.

Which isn’t unreasonable. It’s certainly better than Channel 4’s outright promotion of global warming deniers.

I have no problem with an activist BBC, when it comes to scientific issues. Their news departments may not want to ‘lead opinion or proselytise’, but, providing it’s done according to evidence, I don’t see why the BBC shouldn’t lead the way. They have a huge amount of influence, and even, possibly, a moral duty.

Rather than a Comic Relief-style show, how about an evening of detailed analysis? The BBC have a huge expertise when it comes to presenting knowledge in an accessible way - why not put this into explaining, as clearly as possible, why the climatologists are correct? You could even have a section explaining why the deniers are wrong. I guess people might not watch, but I suspect there are many people with the interest but without the time or knowledge to do any research themselves. Which is perfectly understandable. I wonder whether it could work.

1. enormous UN studies nonwithstanding [↩]

I believe some people get their science news from the Daily Mail:

The colour of your eyes could determine your achievements in life, say scientists.

They claim those with blue eyes are more likely to sparkle academically than those with brown.

They are more intelligent and gain more qualifications because they study more effectively and perform better in exams.

The ’scientists’ are a study by the University of Louisville. Little more information is forthcoming on their website. The Guardian thinks it’s probably a bogus conclusion. I suspect they’re right. But the DM forges on, boldly going where no brain has gone before:

The discovery might help explain the success of such disparate individuals as Stephen Hawking, Alexander Fleming, Marie Curie, Stephen Fry and Lily Cole.

Yes. Scientists have for years been in need of ‘help’ to explain this phenomenon. These people don’t look anything like each other - what could possibly explain their shared success? It must be their blue eyes - it’s so obvious!