Quotulatiousness

January 9, 2013

Australian heatwave attributed to Gaia’s anger at mankind’s sins

Filed under: Australia, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Brendan O’Neill surveys the gleeful coverage of Australia’s current weather as a divine retribution by “Mother Nature” for the evils mankind has wrought:

There is something very ugly about the commentary on Australia’s heatwave. There’s almost a palpable sense of glee among some green-leaning commentators that this coal-exporting, climate-change-denying nation is now being punished with fire. The message seems to be that Aussies deserve this scorching weather; they brought the hotness upon themselves through their temerity, through daring to exploit their country’s myriad natural resources and, even worse, daring to question the gospel of climate change.

The casualness with which observers have made a link between Australian people’s behaviour and beliefs and the current heatwave, as if alleged moral turpitude makes the weather, is striking. Even before any serious scientist has had time to assess the nature and origins of the heatwave, one of the Guardian‘s green reporters described the hotness Down Under as further evidence that “global warming is turning the volume of extreme weather up, Spinal Tap-style, to 11″. Taking his cue from the Middle Ages, when weather was also frequently given sentience, treated as the punisher of wicked men, the reporter says climate change, and its enabler climate change denial, is “loading the weather dice”. It is no coincidence, he says, that “the two nations in which the fringe opinions of so-called climate sceptics have been trumpeted most loudly — the US and Australia — have now been hit by record heatwaves and [superstorms]” — because apparently it is “shouting from sceptics” that prevents “clear political action to curb emissions” and which therefore unleashes yet more floods, storms, and presumably locusts at some point in the future.

January 8, 2013

Obesity meta-study challenged the media narrative

Filed under: Government, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

In sp!ked, Timandra Harkness explains why the publication of “Association of All-Cause Mortality With Overweight and Obesity Using Standard Body Mass Index Categories” in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) got such a strongly negative reaction from the media and various government spokespeople:

The reason this unassuming paper drew howls of outrage was the same as the reason the benefits of moderate alcohol intake are never noted without criticism: it spoils the headline health message that Fat is Bad.

Even worse, it blows the cover on the great myth — that an epidemic of Bad Fatness is sweeping the developed world. By including the dangerously obese, the innocuously tubby and the healthily plump in one category, ‘overweight including obese’, 60 per cent of the English population are labelled as potentially At Risk.

Being At Risk means these people need guidance and protection from their own vulnerable state, from the temptations of our obesogenic world and the frailties of their own sugar-addicted brains. At such a time of national peril, no measure is too extreme.

But less than a quarter of English adults are obese, according to new figures released just before Christmas, a fraction almost unchanged since 2007. And the ‘morbidly obese’ category — BMI over 40, the ones for whom it really might be worth shedding a few pounds, medically speaking — also remains steady since 2009 at 2.5 per cent of the UK population.

If only one in 40 of us is in significant weight-related danger, why do the other 97.5 per cent of us need to be protected by the state against sugary cereals and fizzy drinks? Could it be because only a few of us have fallen, but all of us are in peril? Weak, foolish and easily led astray, we need to be frightened back on to the right path. Thus Tam Fry, spokesman for the National Obesity Forum — who has called for children to be monitored from birth for signs of obesity — told the Independent: ‘If people read this and decide they are not going to die… they may find themselves lifelong dependents on medical treatment for problems affecting the heart, liver, kidney and pancreas — to name only a few.’

So there we have it. Those extra post-Christmas pounds aren’t going to kill you. If you’re approaching an age at which there’s any real prospect you will die, they probably have a tiny protective effect. But if you’re told the truth, suggest the obesity obsessives, you’ll gorge yourself into a disgusting ball of flab.

January 2, 2013

Don’t let your BMI scare you (too much)

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

A quick reminder that the Body Mass Index (BMI) is more a convenient mathematical trick than an actual healthy weight guideline:

In a finding that could undermine many New Year’s resolutions, a new government study shows that people who are overweight are less likely to die in any given period than people of normal weight. Even those who are moderately obese don’t have a higher-than-normal risk of dying.

Being substantially obese, based on measure called body mass index, or BMI, of 35 and higher, does raise the risk of death by 29%, researchers found.

But people with a BMI of 25 to 30 — who are considered overweight and make up more than 30% of the U.S. population — have a 6% lower risk of death than people whose BMI is in the normal range of 18.5 to 25, according to the study, being published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

People who had a BMI of 30 to 35 — considered the first stage of obesity — had a 5% lower risk of dying, but those figures weren’t considered statistically significant.

In other words, a few extra pounds are not going to threaten your life (a lot of extra pounds might). In the western world, few of us have the kind of jobs that require much in the way of physical exertion and we also have both relatively low food prices and much greater access to calorie-dense food. Our parents tended to have jobs that required more physical effort and their access to food was not as great as ours (they were less wealthy overall, and didn’t eat at restaurants or fast food joints as often as we do). Two otherwise positive trends that combine to produce a less-positive result on the scales.

Earlier discussion of the limitations of BMI as a guideline here, here, here, and here.

December 30, 2012

The Gross National Happiness hoax

Filed under: Asia, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:14

Remember the brief flicker of media interest in replacing the Gross National Product measurement with something called Gross National Happiness? It didn’t seem to catch on, which is fortunate, because the poster child for GNH is Bhutan:

Mainstream economists and almost all national bureaucracies around the world use measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Gross National Product (GNP) to measure and track economic activity. These measurements are evidence-based. Hard data is aggregated and analyzed to come up with a picture of a national economy that is accurate and reliable. Based on such data, sound economic and development policies can be formulated. Not so for the Kingdom of Bhutan — a country ruled with an iron fist by its northern-based Buddhist Drukpa monarchy and elite with a transparent façade of democracy designed to obscure the true state of affairs in that country.

Having engaged in a massive ethnic cleansing campaign against its Lhotsampa minority of Nepalese origin from the mid 1980’s to the early 1990’s, Bhutan’s leadership prefers to use the amorphous and malleable measure of Gross National Happiness (GNH) to claim that their citizens — at least the ones that were not forcibly evicted from the country — are among the “happiest” in the world. Being a wholly subjective measure that utilizes no quantifiable data, GNH has been creatively utilized as a propaganda tool by the Drukpa leadership to project an image of Bhutan as a country of smiling Buddha’s. Little do most outside observers know the dark underbelly of this seemingly innocuous portrayal. It willfully ignores the history of ethnic cleansing and institutionalized racial intolerance against Lhotsampas inside Bhutan that continue unabated to this day.

[. . .]

With its record of ethnic cleansing and intolerance, it is morbidly amusing to hear propaganda that Bhutan is some sort of mythic “last Shangri-La,” a land of harmony and peace. Nothing could be more removed from the truth. The charade of ushering in a constitutional monarchy in the last few years and the ascension of the charismatic 31-year-old Oxford-educated King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuk has led to a fresh burst of official Bhutanese propaganda expounding the unique nature of their happy people and of Gross National Happiness in general.

December 12, 2012

Climatic witchcraft

Filed under: Environment, History, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

No offense intended to practitioners of witchcraft intended:

Superstition about the weather in particular is hardly surprising, given the awesome power of nature. Witnessing storms, lightning and even the daily rising and setting of the sun surely induced fear and wonder in primitive cultures. The same fear and wonder are what warmists exploit today in linking weather extremes to global warming.

Scholars tell us that weather superstition often found expression in ritual human sacrifice. The Mayans, for instance, tossed victims into a limestone sinkhole to appease the rain god Chaac.

And it’s only a few centuries since superstition over the climate led to intensive witch hunts and widespread executions, usually by burning, for witchcraft.

University of Chicago economist Emily Oster demonstrated in 2004 that the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe coincided with the Little Ice Age. Since then, other researchers have argued that chilly weather may have precipitated the Salem witch trials in the 1690s — one of the coldest periods of that epoch.

It was widely believed during the late Middle Ages that witches were capable of controlling the weather with their magic powers, and thus cause storms that could destroy harvests and hobble food production.

[. . .]

Our obsession with weather extremes has reached such heights that it has become a knee-jerk reaction for climate-change alarmists to ascribe any unusual weather event at all to global warming. So they tell us that heat waves, floods, harsh winters, dust storms — even wildfires — are all the result of man-made CO2. But a check of records from, say, the 1930s or the 1950s, when the CO2 level was much lower than now, reveals that such events are nothing new.

Climate-change skeptics might be regarded as modern-day witches because they think that global warming comes from natural forces. However, it’s superstitious alarmists, who believe that extreme weather originates in our CO2 emissions and who have a dread of impending disaster, who are really the witches.

December 7, 2012

No, we’re not running out of phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash)

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

The most recent outbreak of the-sky-is-falling, we’re-at-peak-whatever panic mongering is debunked by Vaclav Smil:

Jeremy Grantham, a well-known presence in the financial world, recently published a World View column in the journal Nature in which he concludes that, “simply, we are running out” of almost all commodities whose consumption sustains modern civilization. There is nothing new about such claims, and since the emergence of a vocal global peak oil movement during the late 1990s, many other minerals have been added to the endangered list. Indeed, there is now a book called Peak Everything. What makes Grantham’s column – published under the alarmist headline “Be Persuasive. Be Brave. Be Arrested (If Necessary)” – worth noticing, and deconstructing, is that he puts his claims in terms more suitable for tabloids than for one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific weekly magazines.

His direst example is “the impending shortage of two fertilizers: phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash). These two elements cannot be made, cannot be substituted, are necessary to grow all life forms, and are mined and depleted. It’s a scary set of statements…. What happens when these fertilizers run out is a question I can’t get satisfactorily answered and, believe me, I have tried.” Well, he could have tried just a bit harder: an Internet search would have led him, in mere seconds, to “World Phosphate Rock Reserves and Resources,” a study published in 2010 by the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

This detailed assessment of the world’s phosphate reserves (that are the part of a wider category of resources that is recoverable with existing techniques and at acceptable cost) concluded that they are adequate to produce fertilizer for the next 300 to 400 years. As with all mineral resource appraisals (be they of crude oil or rare earths), the study’s conclusions can be criticized and questioned, and the statement by the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative is perhaps the best document of that kind. But even the most conservative interpretation of IFDC’s assessment shows that phosphates have a reserve/production ratio well in excess of 100 years, higher than that of many other critical mineral resources.

November 29, 2012

“One economist [said] that his colleagues’ pursuit of happiness was depressing him”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

If you read newspapers or magazines, you’ll have noticed a spike in the economics of happiness over the last few years. Everyone seems to be reporting results of happiness surveys from all over … few of whom seem to agree on how to measure it or in some cases even what it is that they’re trying to measure. Claude Fischer talks about this recent boom market:

Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Commission uses citizens’ reports of their happiness to assess national progress, and former French President Nicholas Sarkozy appointed a Nobel-encrusted commission to study a similar idea; the United Nations places “happiness indicators” on its war-burdened agenda; American science institutions pour money into fine-tuning measurements of “subjective well-being”; and Amazon’s list of happiness books by moonlighting professors runs from The Happiness Hypothesis to Stumbling on Happiness, Authentic Happiness, Engineering Happiness, and beyond.

Since at least the 1950s, academics have analyzed surveys asking people how happy or satisfied they feel. We’ve used fuzzy questions such as, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” to assess respondents’ morale. We’ve compared, say, women to men and the poor to the rich. Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven started compiling the findings into his World Database of Happiness back in the 1980s.

So what set off the current frenzy? Economists found happiness.

In the decade after 2000, the number of articles on happiness in major economics journals roughly tripled. One economist told me a couple of years ago that his colleagues’ pursuit of happiness was depressing him. Nonetheless, established leaders and bright new scholars turned to the topic and brought with them the funding, media prestige, and political clout of the profession. That a guild which prides itself on scientific rigor and hardheadedness would embrace such a sappy concept measured in such mushy ways is, well, bemusing. Even Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke drew on the new economics of happiness to find the moral for his 2010 commencement address to University of South Carolina graduates: “I urge you to take this research to heart by making time for friends and family and by being part of and contributing to a larger community.”

November 19, 2012

Hurricane Sandy, storm surges, and superstition

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

In sp!ked, Dominic Standish looks at how some recent extreme weather incidents are being attributed to climate change/global warming without sufficient scientific evidence:

Hurricane Sandy brought havoc in the Caribbean, especially Haiti, and caused approximately 60 deaths. Then the storm hit the US east coast; New York experienced exceptional floods and at least 40 people lost their lives. Next, Venice in Italy witnessed high flooding on 11 November, when the city’s tide measurements reached their sixth-highest level for 140 years. No one died from these floods in Venice, but — like Haiti and New York — the economic impact was significant.

Global warming was widely blamed for the flooding, yet in all three cases flooding was principally caused by storm surges. In the Caribbean and America, there was an unfortunate convergence of weather systems creating storm surges. As Hurricane Sandy swirled north in the Atlantic and towards land, a wintry storm headed towards it from the West and cold air was blowing south from the Arctic. After the hurricane devastated parts of the Caribbean, it moved towards the north-east of the US, pushing water up the estuaries of New York into the city. Venice’s floods were unconnected to Hurricane Sandy, but were also caused by high winds creating storm surges pushing water through the three inlets between the sea and the Venetian lagoon towards the city. Subsidence over the past century has made Venice more susceptible to storm surges. Nevertheless, after 70 per cent of Venice was under water on 11 November, Italy’s environment minister, Corrado Clini, insisted that global climate change was to blame.

Although storm surges were the cause of the floods in all three locations, global warming was widely identified as the culprit. Of course, we cannot ignore climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established in 2007 that there was a global temperature rise of 0.74 degrees Celsius between 1906 and 2005, which added to global sea levels rising by an average rate of 1.8 millimetres per year from 1961. We need to have an open debate about climate change and its relationship with bad weather events. Some argue that climate change has increased hurricanes and storm surges, while others suggest there is insufficient evidence to prove this link. Whether climate change impacts on the frequency and strength of hurricanes remains uncertain, yet global warming has definitely been deployed as a superstitious narrative to close down discussion.

Update: Of course, the storm damage will eventually repaired and the federal government will pay the lion’s share of the costs. This is one of the bigger causes of rising costs due to storm damage along the US coastline: properties that are more exposed to damage keep getting rebuilt. Here’s an example from Dauphin Island, Alabama:

The western end of this Gulf Coast island has proved to be one of the most hazardous places in the country for waterfront property. Since 1979, nearly a dozen hurricanes and large storms have rolled in and knocked down houses, chewed up sewers and water pipes and hurled sand onto the roads.

Yet time and again, checks from Washington have allowed the town to put itself back together.

Across the nation, tens of billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms, usually with little consideration of whether it actually makes sense to keep rebuilding in disaster-prone areas. If history is any guide, a large fraction of the federal money allotted to New York, New Jersey and other states recovering from Hurricane Sandy — an amount that could exceed $30 billion — will be used the same way.

Tax money will go toward putting things back as they were, essentially duplicating the vulnerability that existed before the hurricane.

November 15, 2012

The BBC’s 28 secret climate change advisors

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

The BBC has been prominent among media outlets for their relentless proclamations on the dangers of climate change. Despite the BBC’s charter requiring them to provide balanced coverage, in this particular area they have been cheerleaders for one particular message: that climate change is DOOM!

In 2006, the BBC convened a panel of climate change experts to advise them on the topic, and the corporation took the advice of that panel to heart and has been pushing the climate change = disaster meme ever since. Blogger Tony Newbery submitted a FOI request to find out who had been on the panel which had swung the BBC so far away from their charter, but his request was denied. Not just denied, but fought out in court at an estimated cost of £40,000 per day.

The BBC won in court, but the information was released by someone else:

Sadly for the BBC, another enterprising blogger called Maurizio Morabito unearthed the details anyway and published them on Monday via the website Watts Up With That?

So who were all these ‘best scientific experts’ who did so much to shape the BBC’s climate policy (and by extension, one fears, government policy too…)? Well, two were from Greenpeace; one was from Stop Climate Chaos; one was a CO2 reduction expert from BP; one was from Npower Renewables; one came from the left-leaning New Economics Foundation… Only five of those present could, in any way, be considered scientists with disciplines even vaguely relevant to ‘climate change’. And of these, every one had a track record of climate alarmism. No wonder the BBC tried so hard to keep the list of 28 a secret. Its claim that its policy change was based on the ‘best scientific’ expertise turns out to have been a massive lie.

November 5, 2012

Matt Ridley on the real threat to our ecology

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

It’s not global warming:

I’m pessimistic about the ash trees. It seems unlikely that a fungus that killed 90 per cent of Denmark’s trees and spreads by air will not be devastating here, too. There is a glimmer of hope in the fact that ash, unlike elms, reproduce sexually so they are not clones — uniformly vulnerable to the pathogen. But it’s only a glimmer: tree parasites, from chestnut blight to pine beauty moth, have a habit of sweeping through species pretty rampantly, because trees are so long-lived they cannot evolve resistance in time.

The Forestry Commission’s apologists are pleading ‘cuts’ as an excuse for its failure to do anything more timely to get ahead of the threat, but as a woodland owner I am not convinced. An organisation that has the time and the budget to pore over my every felling or planting application in triplicate and come back with fussy and bossy comments could surely spare a smidgen of interest in looming threats from continental fungi that have been spreading out from Poland for 20 years. The commission was warned four years ago of the problem.

Here’s what the commission was up to instead. Just last year, I received a letter from the Forestry Commission demanding access to survey one of my woods to answer the question ‘what are the forecasts for timber, biomass and carbon?’ in order to ‘help the United Kingdom meet international commitments, such as reporting for the Global Forest Resources Assessment and the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe (MCPFE)’.

Notice the Sir Humphrey-esque circular argument: surveys must be done so that the results can be reported to assessment meetings. In other words, as far as I can tell, the Forestry Commission’s priority has been, as in so many government bodies, to supply talking points for the international carbon-obsessed bureaucracy. The implicit assumption here, of course, is that climate change is the greatest threat to Britain’s trees, when in reality far greater threats come from diseases carried around by foresters themselves.

This is happening throughout the world of nature conservation. A climate fetish has sucked all the oxygen from the real threats to species and habitats — indeed it has actually begun to make those threats worse.

October 27, 2012

Chemophobia, “a fear so rampant that it has infected an entire generation of women”

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail:

Ms. Williams is right that our bodies contain trace amounts of pretty much everything that’s in our environment. But toxicity is a matter of degree. And technology is so advanced that we can measure trace amounts in parts per trillion. As yet, research has found no trace of harm. For example, after a comprehensive review of environmental causes and risk factors for breast cancer, the U.S. Institute of Medicine found no conclusive link between any of these chemicals and an increased risk of breast cancer. According to Scientific American, “some research shows the toxic load in breast milk to be smaller than that in the air most city dwellers breathe inside their homes.”

[. . .]

This is not to say there’s no impact from environmental factors. But these effects are small and uncertain. To eliminate them all, we’d have to eliminate modernity and return to being hunter-gatherers again.

But I’m afraid chemophobia is here to stay. Fear sells. Fear of chemicals manufactured by rapacious, greedy, money-sucking capitalist enterprises sells even better. Fear is is the main product peddled by interest groups such as the Environmental Defence Fund, which has been quite successful at marketing the notion that invisible dangers lurk all around us. The media love this stuff because it makes for easy headlines: If your shampoo doesn’t kill you, your lipstick will! Fear is a staple of celebrity experts like Dr. Oz, who has advised readers to avoid toxic sales receipts from fast-food restaurants and gas stations.

October 11, 2012

David Suzuki “owes economists an apology”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

In the Globe and Mail, Mike Moffatt examines Suzuki’s latest attack on the economics profession and finds it extremely unpersuasive:

Popular environmentalist David Suzuki has described conventional economics as a form of brain damage. In a documentary called Surviving Progress, he quotes a fictional economist by saying, “who cares whether you keep the forest — cut it down. Put the money somewhere else. When those forests are gone, put it in fish. When those fish are gone, put it in computers.”

Beyond tarring the economics profession, he displays a perplexing lack of understanding of basic economic concepts. First of all, none of the rules taught in undergraduate economics course advise the owner of a resource to deplete it as quickly as possible. Perhaps he was confused with the Tragedy of the Commons problem, where lack of private ownership causes a resource to be overused.

[. . .]

The idea that economists do not care about externalities is a strange one, given how prominently they are featured in economics textbooks. An externality is, simply put, a spillover effect. It is the unintended costs or benefits from a transaction or decision experienced by third parties (that is, they were external to the decision). It does not mean phenomena that are external to economic modelling or things outside the interest of economists. Since, as Dr. Suzuki points out, the world is full of externalities, the concept is crucial in economic research.

September 28, 2012

Reason.tv: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring at 50 Years

Filed under: Books, Environment, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

“It’s not polite to talk about brown and black people dying because rich white people in America feel better about themselves when the brown and black people don’t get to use DDT,” says the University of Alabama’s Andrew Morriss, co-editor of the new book Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson.

Published by the Cato Institute, the collection of essays by environmentalists, law professors, economists, and other analysts argues that the legacy of Carson’s best-known book — widely considered the starting point of the modern environmentalist movement and the international ban on the malaria-fighting pesticide DDT — has caused many more problems than it has solved.

Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Morriss to talk about Carson’s work and influence on environmental policy.

September 3, 2012

A bit of common sense in food news

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

Rob Lyons reviews a new book by Mike Gibney that attempts to bring some common sense back to counteract the epidemic of fear-mongering about food:

Given much of the popular discussion about food, it would be easy to despair that we face a future where half the world’s people starve to death while the other half drown in their own fat. The words ‘new food research’ in a news report are often just the lead into another sorry tale about how some aspect of what we eat is going to kill us or how some specific food will provide ‘miracle’ protection against the chronic illnesses of our age.

Professor Mike Gibney’s new book, Something to Chew On, is a welcome step back from all this noise, offering an expert take on many of these claims. Gibney is director of the Institute of Food and Health at University College Dublin and has served on many national and international advisory committees.

[. . .]

Take pesticides, for example. Many people are prepared to pay through the nose to buy organic food which is free of artificial pesticides. But as Gibney points out, those people are actually consuming a far greater weight in natural, plant-produced pesticides that are potentially every bit as cancer-inducing as modern chemicals. ‘Nature abounds with chemicals which, while beautifully natural, are nevertheless risk-laden’, he says, from the deadly poison ricin, found in castor beans, to substances in fava beans that induce a lethal form of anaemia in some susceptible people. The key is in the dose: for both natural compounds and their highly regulated artificial counterparts, the amounts that we actually eat are too small to represent any threat to health.

Indeed, Gibney goes on to make mincemeat of all of the claims made for organic foods: they don’t taste better than conventional crops, they offer no nutritional advantage, and, by being less productive, they are actually wasteful of land. That’s hardly environmentally friendly.

Part of the reason we get such overblown nutritional and health “advice” from the media is the difficulty of conducting nutrition research:

While trying to figure out the effect of eating, or not eating, a particular kind of food on cancer or heart disease, for example, there are numerous confounding factors that get in the way of drawing robust conclusions. People lie about what they eat or simply don’t record it accurately; factors that look like cause and effect can turn out to be mere associations. Even finding enough subjects to look at the effect of diet on a relatively unusual disease, like ovarian cancer, can be very difficult.

[. . .]

The truth is that every study’s results need to be treated with caution and there needs to be open-mindedness about other possible explanations. While it is relatively easy to see the effects of vitamin deficiency, for example, for the most part nutrition research moves forward on the basis of a lot of evidence that is unsatisfactory in one way or another. The endless stream of claims that red meat, sugar, eggs and myriad other foodstuffs cause harm should be treated with an almighty pinch of salt (as do claims about salt, for that matter).

Along the way, Gibney offers his thoughts on personalised nutrition — the possibility of creating diets specifically suited to our own DNA — and epigenetics — the idea that different elements of our DNA can be switched on or off by environmental factors in the womb or the first years of life. He also offers a Jacques Cousteau-like tour of the human gut. Did you know there are 10 times more bacteria living in our guts — 100 trillion — than there are cells in the human body? Did you know those bacteria can sometimes switch on or off changes in our bodies to suit their own needs? Gibney describes our relationship to this mass of bugs as a permanent state of ‘armed peace’, with mutual benefits to both parties: body and bacteria.

August 30, 2012

Exaggerating your points to make them seem more important than they are

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

Geoff Chambers does a bit of Google searching to track down a few of the claims made in Stephen Emmot’s critically acclaimed one-man show “Ten Billion”:

The reviews were full of superlatives. The Times’ critic calls it “utterly gripping, terrifyingly lucid”; Time Out: “monumentally sobering”; Billington in the Guardian: “one of the most disturbing evenings I have ever spent in a theatre”; the Financial Times: “one of the most disturbing shows I have seen on a stage”; the Mail on Sunday “certainly the most scary show in London”. Almost all of them cite Emmott’s conclusion: “We’re f*cked”.

Here are some of the key “facts” (or “f*cts”) cited by Emmott and picked up by critics. (It is of course impossible to check whether the critics have quoted Emmott correctly, since no record of what he says exists):

1) A google search uses as much electricity as boiling a kettle.

2) It takes 3,000 litres of water to make a hamburger, (that’s 10 trillion litres of water annually to sustain the UK’s burger industry).

3) It takes 27,000 litres of water to make a bar of chocolate

4) Animal species are currently going extinct at a rate 1,000 times their natural level.

5) Bangladesh will be under water by the end of the century.

TL;DR for those who don’t feel up to reading the whole thing: 1) false, by a factor of 100. 2) true-ish, but massively misleading. 3) false, or Emmott eats humongous chocolate bars. 4) false, even though Wikipedia thinks it’s true. 5) false, the land area of Bangladesh has actually grown over the last 50 years thanks to land reclamation projects.

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