March 26, 2010
March 24, 2010
Another “don’t pay attention to the facts” editorial
James Delingpole looks at the long, sad decline of The Economist from a bastion of common sense and rationality to today’s same-as-all-the-rest advocacy publication:
Can anyone tell me how The Economist got its title? I’m guessing it was probably founded in the early 18th century by some crazed charlatan called, perhaps, Zachariah Economist, who, because of the unfortunate coincidence of his surname managed to persuade thousands of gullible fools to part with their shirts on one of the South Sea Bubble companies. The one whose prospectus read “A company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
One thing I know for sure: The Economist’s name can have no relationship whatsoever with the “dismal science” of economics because if it did then never in a million years could it have run an editorial (and feature) as lame, wrong-headed, intellectually dishonest and positively dangerous as the one it produced this week on the subject of Climate Change.
When I started reading The Economist, back in the early 1980s, I was very impressed by the quality of writing and the rather eclectic things they covered every week. I took up a subscription and it was something I never dumped in the garbage (or, later, the recycling bin), as there was always an interested party willing to take it off my hands.
I have to assume either an ownership change or very heavy turnover at the top of the editorial chain happened in the late 1990s, as the “tone” of the coverage changed significantly. The editorials and the choice of articles switched away from a free market emphasis to become much more like a British version of Time or Newsweek. The long-standing defence of free markets dwindled down to the occasional desultory mention of free trade, as they became more pro-state and pro-managed trade. I gave up my subscription a few years after that, as I found I was reading less and less of every issue. Where once I’d read the majority of the articles, at the end, I was just reading the odd editorial, an occasional feature, and the arts and sciences pages at the back.
From what James Delingpole writes, even the science pages have “turned”:
So, let me get this right: as even the Economist admits, scientists don’t really have a clue what the future holds regarding global warming. But that still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t DO something. Anything is better than nothing.
Let’s transpose that level of lame-brainery to the world of business, shall we? The real, decisions-have-consequences world in which, I imagine, most of The Economist’s readers operate.
So, we currently have a proposed scheme by Global PLC to spend around $45 trillion (that’s the International Energy Agency’s best estimate) combatting a problem which may or may not exist. The potential returns on this investment? Virtually nil. As the Spanish “Green Jobs” disaster has demonstrated, for every Green Job created by government intervention, another 2.2 jobs are lost in the real economy. It will also shave between 1 and 5 per cent off global GDP, create massive new layers of business-stifling taxation and regulation, and cause energy costs to rise to stratospheric new levels. Nice.
This combines the pro-state preferences of the current editorial group with the “consensus” science of the current science correspondant. I’m glad I gave up my subscription when I did . . .
March 23, 2010
Post-traumatic stress in soldiers
Strategy Page looks at the rising rate of reported Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the forces engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq:
As expected the U.S. Army is beginning to see more widespread effects from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). There are two main indicators. The suicide rate, which has gone from 9 per 100,000 troops in 2001, to 23 last year, gets most of the media attention. The less noticed indicator, which impacts a lot more people, is the use of anti-stress medications. These have gone up 76 percent since 2001. About 17 percent of all troops now take these drugs, including six percent of those in combat zones. In 2001, the troops used these drugs to about the same degree as the civilian population (ten percent.) The impact of these drugs, especially in combination, can be unpredictable. The army is still waiting to see how this increased use of anti-stress medications will play out. This is all unknown territory.
[. . .]
Nearly a century of energetic effort to diagnose and treat PTSD (including much recent attention to civilian victims, via accidents or criminal assault), had made it clear that most troops eventually got PTSD if they were in combat long enough. During World War II, it was found that, on average, 200 days of combat would bring on a case of PTSD for American troops. After World War II, methods were found to delay the onset of PTSD (more breaks from combat, better living conditions in the combat zone, prompt treatment when PTSD was detected). That’s why combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan often sleep in air conditioned quarters, have Internet access, lots of amenities, and a two week vacation (anywhere) in the middle of their combat tour. This has extended their useful time in combat, before PTSD sets in. No one is yet sure what the new combat days average is, and new screening methods are an attempt to find out. But more troops appear to be hitting, or approaching, the limits.
March 22, 2010
They’ll get away with it ’cause of their cute mascot
James Delingpole realizes that the Scooby Gang probably won’t be cracking this case, and it’s all because the villians chose a cute mascot:
Today in the Sunday Telegraph my colleague Christopher Booker breaks possibly the most important environmental story since Climategate: a devious plan, truly Blofeldian in its scope and menace, by a hard-left-leaning activist body to gain massive global political leverage and earn stupendous sums of money by exploiting and manipulating the world carbon trading market.
My cynical prediction is that this vitally important story will gain little traction in the wider media, especially not with organisations like the BBC. Why? Because the activist body in question has a lovely, cuddly panda as its motif, and a reputation — brainwashed into children from an early age — for truly caring about the state of our planet. What’s more, this latest campaign by the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) is very easy to spin as something unimpeachably noble and right. After all, what kind of fascistic, Gaia-hating sicko would you have to be NOT to applaud a delightful heartwarming scheme to buy up whole swathes of the beauteous, diversity-rich, Na’avi-style, Truffula-tree dotted Amazon rainforest to preserve it for all time from the depredations of evil loggers, cattleranchers and other such profiteering scum?
March 18, 2010
What if they could make smoking safer?
My bet would be that the anti-smoking campaigners would still be as stridently opposed to smokers and their habit even if there were no health risks:
Australian boffins have developed a treatment which allows mice to smoke cigarettes without the usual negative health consequences. The method could potentially allow gasper-loving humans to sidestep some of the self-destructive results of their habit.
The key to the business, according to lead cig-boffin Ross Vlahos, is Granulocyte macrophage-colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF), an agent released by the lungs when they are exposed to cigarette smoke. GM-CSF causes inflammatory leukocytes to activate in the lungs, which then leads to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and other complaints such as “oxidative stress, emphysema, small airway fibrosis, mucus hypersecretion and progressive airflow limitation”.
Vlahos and his team at Melbourne uni decided to tackle this by the use of a blocking agent known as “anti GM-CSF”. As called for by tradition, they got hold of a group of mice and dosed half of them with the miracle smoko-proofing drug, and left the others alone. Then all the mice were given “the equivalent of nine cigarettes of smoke each day for four days”.
At the end of the test every single mouse was dead. However, this was simply because the boffins had killed them in order to examine their lungs. According to the mouse autopsies, the ones treated with “anti GM-CSF” were in much better nick than the others.
Of course, “safer” is not “safe”. This research implies that human smokers could benefit from use of this drug or similar formulations, but it doesn’t address all the health risks of smoking (chances of developing cancer appear to be the same, for example).
A rational reader would assume that this new research would be welcomed, but my belief is that anti-smoking groups will condemn it for “encouraging smokers” and call for the research to be discontinued. After all, this is a moral rather than a scientific campaign for many activists.
Full disclosure: I’m not a smoker, and never have been. I’m not particularly fond of being in smoke-filled rooms, but I do think the crusade against smoking long ago passed the health advocacy point and became mostly moralizing (see this for example).
March 11, 2010
QotD: Green jobs
[G]reen jobs have become the ginseng of progressive politics: a sort of broad-spectrum snake oil that cures whatever happens to ail you. They are the antidote to economic malaise, an underskilled labor force, the inherent unwillingness of the public to suffer any significant economic and personal dislocation in order to save the environment. They enhance nationalistic vigor. (If we don’t act now, the Chinese will steal all of our green jobs!) They stave off aging of stale political platforms. And I’m pretty sure they’re good for bunions, too.
Megan McArdle, “The Jobs Are Always Greener…”, The Atlantic, 2010-03-11
Food follies: the pinNaCle of idiocy?
The food police are after your salt:
Some New York City chefs and restaurant owners are taking aim at a bill introduced in the New York Legislature that, if passed, would ban the use of salt in restaurant cooking.
“No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises,” the bill, A. 10129, states in part.
The legislation, which Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn, introduced on March 5, would fine restaurants $1,000 for each violation.
I can only assume that Rep. Ortiz has no tastebuds, as the diet he’s prescribing would be bland, bland, bland. There’s also little chance that it’ll be passed into law, but you can consider it a shot across the bows of the restaurant trade . . . or a ranging round for the next salvo.
Colby Cosh tries to introduce physics into hockey debate
Aside from women’s hockey at the Olympics, I don’t follow the sport, so I’m happy to depend on the educated opinions of those who do. Colby Cosh points out that the debate over blows to the head in hockey should concentrate on a simple, clearly defined rule:
A memo to those who are concerned with (hitherto) legal checks to the head in the NHL: I sure hope you’re not just fighting physics. Because you’ll lose.
I see nothing wrong with the proposed new rule against blind-side hits to the head. I’d be willing to take it even further, and adopt an easy-to-apply strict-liability standard; if you hit somebody in a way that induces unconsciousness, or causes a concussion, you sit out the next n games. This would spare us from adopting hard-to-apply rules whose enforcement might ebb and crest, vary between personalities, and differ between leagues and regions. (It would occasionally lead, like all strict-liability rules, to unfair-seeming results and punishments for actions that didn’t look unjust or vicious aside from the outcome. But almost anything is better, at least to my mind, than a rule defined by excessively complex language, taught by means of intuitive references to a mass of individual cases, and left to evolve so that everybody thinks he knows the offence when he sees it.)
[. . .]
It’s sometimes observed, for example, that the players are bigger and the game faster than 20 or 30 years ago. But nobody ever sorts out the relative importance of these effects; a player whose mass is 5% bigger has 5% more kinetic energy in open ice, but if his velocity is increased 5%, the energy varies according to the square, and thus increases by more than 10%. If you watch early ’80s hockey, what immediately strikes you, once you get past the sheer horribleness of the goaltending, is the relative slowness of the game. There’s no one reason for this: plenty of things have changed just a little bit, from the quality of icemaking to skate technology to the way skaters are trained. And the change isn’t that extreme, or else Chris Chelios, who actually played early ’80s hockey in the early ’80s, would be unable to draw a paycheque in his weak-bladder years. Still, it’s a factor with exponential weight.
Chris Chelios is nearly as ancient as I am . . . it’s utterly amazing that he’s still able to play at a professional level.
Researchers say that fat may actually be a flavour
This may provide some clues to obesity, as tests show that some people can detect fat at much lower concentrations . . . and therefore consume less:
It’s a theory set to confirm why humans are so fond of fatty foods such as chips and chocolate cake: in addition to the five tastes already identified lurks another detectable by the palate — fat.
“We know that the human tongue can detect five tastes — sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (a savoury, protein-rich taste contained in foods such as soy sauce and chicken stock),” Russell Keast, from Deakin University, said Monday.
“Through our study we can conclude that humans have a sixth taste — fat.”
Researchers tested 30 people’s ability to taste a range of fatty acids in otherwise plain solutions and found that all were able to determine the taste — though some required higher concentrations than others.
[. . .]
The results, published in the British Journal of Nutrition, have not definitively classified fat as a taste but Keast says the evidence is strong and mounting.
For something to be classified as a taste there needed to be proven receptor mechanisms on taste cells in the mouth, he said.
March 10, 2010
George Monbiot: “There goes my life’s work”
As I mentioned when the Climategate scandal started to break, I fear that the misdeeds of climate scientist-activists would rebound against all scientists. George Monbiot seems to be coming around to sharing that concern:
The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science. Writing recently for the Telegraph, the columnist Gerald Warner dismissed scientists as “white-coated prima donnas and narcissists . . . pointy-heads in lab coats [who] have reassumed the role of mad cranks . . . The public is no longer in awe of scientists. Like squabbling evangelical churches in the 19th century, they can form as many schismatic sects as they like, nobody is listening to them any more.”
A small clique of activists managed to temporarily hijack the global agenda, with the potential to destroy untold trillions of dollars of economic development and reduce the freedom of billions of human beings. If the CRU data leak hadn’t taken place, we’d now be looking at massive government intervention in all areas of human existance, far beyond the dreams of power-mad dreamers.
If the threats to human existance were as bad as the CRU and IPCC declared, the actions our governments would have to take would be catastrophic for much of the world. To reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the level the global warming activists deemed appropriate, we’d have to pretty much give up fossil fuels altogether. We’d be condemning billions of people to starvation . . . without modern farming and modern transportation and storage facilities, we couldn’t feed the current population of the world.
To say that this is a setback to science is an understatement, for the actions of those few scientists will make all scientists that much more suspect. Given the alternative of forced curtailment or even abandonment of industrial civilization (and a death toll of unimaginable size) or scientists being given less credence by the public, the latter is by far the lesser evil.
Despite my iconoclastic, anti-corporate instincts, I now spend much of my time defending the scientific establishment from attacks by the kind of rabble-rousers with whom I usually associate. My heart rebels against this project: I would rather be pelting scientists with eggs than trying to understand their datasets. But my beliefs oblige me to try to make sense of the science and to explain its implications. This turns out to be the most divisive project I’ve ever engaged in. The more I stick to the facts, the more virulent the abuse becomes.
This doesn’t bother me — I have a hide like a glyptodon — but it reinforces the disturbing possibility that nothing works. The research discussed in the Nature paper shows that when scientists dress soberly, shave off their beards and give their papers conservative titles, they can reach across to the other side. But in doing so they will surely alienate people who would otherwise be inclined to trust them. As the MMR saga shows, people who mistrust authority are just as likely to kick against science as those who respect it.
Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science. The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away. If they don’t want to know, nothing and no one will reach them. There goes my life’s work.
H/T to Elizabeth who wrote “Is Monbiot on the road to Damascus? He hasn’t got there yet but he certainly is starting to question a lot of the greenery.”
March 5, 2010
QotD: Rescuing science from the AGW disaster
. . . this news story is a warning to all scientists: if you don’t want creationists to get traction, you can’t just treat this as someone else’s problem. You have to clean house. You have tolerated liars and rascals like Phil Jones and Rajendra Pachauri in your midst too long; you need to throw them out.
A diplomatic way for any random professional society to do this would be to demand that all climate science must be held to the strictest standards of methodological scrutiny. All data, including primary un-”corrected” datasets, must be available for auditing by third parties. All modeling code must be published. The assumptions made in data reduction and smoothing must be an explicitly documented part of the work product.
These requirements would kill off AGW alarmism as surely as a bullet through the head. But its credibility is already collapsing; the rising issue, now, is to prevent collateral damage from the scientific community’s failure to insist on them sooner. Every day you delay will strengthen the creationists and the flat-earthers and all the other monsters begotten from the sleep of reason.
Eric S. Raymond, “Lies and consequences”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-03-04
The winds of change: UK’s Met Office to abandon seasonal forecasts
You’d almost think someone was paying attention. Britain’s Met Office has given up providing seasonal forecasts:
The Met Office is to stop publishing seasonal forecasts, after it came in for criticism for failing to predict extreme weather.
It was berated for not foreseeing that the UK would suffer this cold winter or the last three wet summers in its seasonal forecasts.
The forecasts, four times a year, will be replaced by monthly predictions.
The Met Office said it decided to change its forecasting approach after carrying out customer research.
Explaining its decision, the Met Office released a statement which said: “By their nature, forecasts become less accurate the further out we look.
That last point is why, in years gone by, newspapers used to have much amusement contrasting official weather forecasts with non-scientific publications like the Old Farmer’s Almanac, where just often enough to be newsworthy, the annual’s predictions were more accurate than those provided by “real weathermen”.
March 4, 2010
Teenagers: Mom was right about your need for a good night’s sleep
I know, you stopped listening to your parents around age 12, but every now and again, they do have useful advice for you:
Only 5% of high school seniors get eight hours of sleep a night. Children get an hour less than they did 30 years ago, which subtracts IQ points and adds body weight.
Until age 21, the circuitry of a child’s brain is being completed. Bronson and Merryman report research on grade schoolers showing that “the performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader.” In high school there is a steep decline in sleep hours, and a striking correlation of sleep and grades.
Tired children have trouble retaining learning “because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory. … The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night.”
The school day starts too early because that is convenient for parents and teachers. Awakened at dawn, teenage brains are still releasing melatonin, which makes them sleepy. This is one reason why young adults are responsible for half the 100,000 annual “fall asleep” automobile crashes. When Edina, Minn., changed its high school start from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., math/verbal SAT scores rose substantially.
Furthermore, sleep loss increases the hormone that stimulates hunger and decreases the one that suppresses appetite. Hence the correlation between less sleep and more obesity.
So, even though the temptation is to stay up as late as you possibly can . . . don’t. You’ll actually notice the difference the next day.
March 3, 2010
That’s not data: that’s collated anecdotes
The way things are going, we may need to throw out even more contaminated “data” that has been used to track climate for over a century, because it can’t technically be called anything other than anecdotal:
The network relies on volunteers in the 48 contiguous states to take daily readings of high and low temperatures and precipitation measured by sensors they keep by their homes and offices. They deliver that information to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), which uses it to track changes in the climate.
Requirements aren’t very strict for volunteers: They need a modicum of training and decent vision in at least one eye to qualify. And they’re expected to take measurements seven days a week, 365 days a year.
That’s a recipe for trouble, says Watts, who told FoxNews.com that less scrupulous members of the network often fail to collect the data when they go on vacation or are sick. He said one volunteer filled in missing data with local weather reports from the newspapers that stacked up while he was out of town.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Volunteers take their readings at different times of day, then round the temperatures to the nearest whole number and mark down their measurements on paper forms they mail in monthly to the NCDC headquarters in Ashville, N.C.
“You’ve got this kind of a ragtag network that’s reporting the numbers for our official climate readings,” said Watts, who found that 90 percent of the stations violated the government’s guidelines for where they may be located.
Watts believes that poor placement of temperature sensors has compromised the system’s data. Though they are supposed to be situated in empty clearings, many of the stations are potentially corrupted by their proximity to heat sources, including exhaust pipes, trash-burning barrels, chimneys, barbecue grills, seas of asphalt — and even a grave.
There’s an old saying, frequently used in statistical discussions, that the “plural of anecdote is not data”. This is an excellent example of unreliable information being collated and depended upon as if it was rigorous and objective.
