Rob's Blog

Wired have an article about how parents are being frightened into not vaccinating their children because they think it causes autism. The article talks about the pseudo-science of those making the argument. It fails at this point:

unlike in the debates over creationism and global warming, Democrats have proved just as likely as Republicans to share misinformation and fuel anxiety

The implication is that those who see a problem with the AGW hypothesis are sharing misinformation and anxiety. That’s wrong for all sorts of reasons, and there are some parallels between AGW proponents and the anti-vaccine movement.

For a start, it is AGW proponents who are sharing anxiety. It’s a doom cult. Perform these rituals or the world will end. Misinformation is spread on both sides of the AGW debate. The media dramatises and over-simplifies climate science; scientists openly exaggerate because they think it will motivate people and thereby save the world; and skeptics have been known to make the wrong kinds of arguments.

From the article:

To be clear, there is no credible evidence to indicate that any of this is true. None.

When you’re talking about vaccines, at least you have some empirical evidence about who’s taken what vaccines and who’s got autism. Epidemiology presumably can suffer from statistical tricks, though, especially when studies are small and numbers of people with autism are small. Climate science is even worse off. We’re taking very few measurements compared to the size of the system and the timescales involved. All kinds of statistical skullduggery goes on with trying to turn tree ring widths into temperatures. Data and methods are not shared properly. There is no credible evidence to indicate that doubling CO2 concentration in the atmoshphere causes n degrees of warming. None. We have ice cores that show a correlation but the temperature changes before the CO2 concentration does. We have tree rings that show temperatures changing but not that anything new or scary is happening. We have melting ice in various places but ice seems to have melted and frozen all over the place in the last 10,000 or so years. We have satellite data that shows not much of anything happening. We have land based measurements that tell us putting concrete near thermometers causes them to read higher temperatures. And we have computer models that tell us more about the modellers’ theories than about the climate.

We don’t have a mechanism: everyone agrees CO2 alone isn’t important enough, so there must be some feedback mechanism, but no-one can tell you what it is. Richard Feynman described the state of climate science a long time ago.

But researchers, alas, can’t respond with the same forceful certainty that the doubters are able to deploy — not if they’re going to follow the rules of science. Those tenets allow them to claim only that there is no evidence of a link between autism and vaccines.

A similar problem occurs in climate science. The burden of proof is on those claiming that CO2 will cause warming. But AGW theories seem unfalsifiable. If AGW proponents make predictions that turn out to be correct without understanding the mechanism and making new predictions with the theory that have not been measured before, then it might just be a lucky guess — temperatures go up and down all the time anyway. If they make predictions that turn out to be wrong, there is always an excuse or a refinement that doesn’t change the basic hypothesis: it’s just a Pacific oscillation we forgot to mention. The Wired article mentions the anti-vaccine movement’s “ever changing rhetoric”, for example, “Autism One…has shifted their aim away from any particular vaccine to a broader, fuzzier target: the sheer number of vaccines that are recommended.”

A short film featuring devastating images of sick kids — some of them seemingly palsied, others with tremors, others catatonic — drove the point home. The film, accompanied by Bryan Adams’ plaintive song “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You,” ended with this message emblazoned on the screen: “All the children in this video were injured or killed by mandatory vaccinations.”

Sounds a bit like Al Gore’s film, to me.

Paul Offit is a vaccine advocate who invented a vaccine and made some money out of it.

But in certain circles, RotaTeq is no grand accomplishment. Instead, it is offered as Exhibit A in the case against Offit, proving his irredeemable bias and his corrupted point of view. Using this reasoning, of course, Watson and Crick would be unreliable on genetics because the Nobel Prize winners had a vested interest in genetic research. But despite the illogic, the argument has had some success.

This is analagous to AGW skeptics being accused of being in league with the oil industry. Here it is “illogic”. Of course, AGW proponents get government funding and plenty of people seem to be making money out of alternative medecine at the Autism One conference. It can explain people’s motivations but doesn’t alter the arguments.

“The choice not to get a vaccine is not a choice to take no risk,” he says. “It’s just a choice to take a different risk, and we need to be better about saying, ‘Here’s what that different risk looks like.’ Dying of Hib meningitis is a horrible, ugly way to die.”

What to do about climate change is about choosing risks. Do you risk destroying the economy and making everyone poor to combat a possibly imaginary problem, or do you let everyone get rich and able to deal better with environmental problems that actually happen?

According to science journalist Michael Specter, author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, the controversy surrounding vaccine safety has made lack of expertise a requirement when choosing members of prominent advisory panels on the issue. “It’s shocking,” Specter says. “We live in a country where it’s actually a detriment to be an expert about something.” When expertise is diminished to such an extent, irrationality and fear can run amok.

Oh dear, that sounds like it might be a book that has made the same category error about AGW skepticism as the Wired article. But the problem he’s talking about seems to me more like a problem of government advisory panels wielding power over them. I don’t much care if it’s an expert or a layman threatening me with force backed laws.

On that note, there’s one bit I’m uncomfortable about.

But when it comes to mandating vaccinations, Offit says, Fisher is right about him: He is an adamant supporter.

“We have seat belt rules,” he says. “Seat belts save lives. There was never a question about that. The data was absolutely clear. But people didn’t use them until they were required to use them.” Furthermore, the decision not to buckle up endangers only you. “Unless you fly through the window and hit somebody else,” he adds. “I believe in mandates. I do.”

Anti-vaccine people don’t want the government to force their children to take vaccines. I can understand that. I don’t want to be forced to make sacrifices to Gaia, either. Wired has this to say:

Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

I’m not convinced this justifies forcing people to take vaccines.

I first heard about Norman Borlaug’s death from Michael Jennings. To my shame, I’d barely heard of Norman Borlaug. He’s not widely celebrated and I didn’t learn about him in school. As msklar79 tweeted:

Swayze gets 5 trend topics and Norman #Borlaug gets none? This is why democracy sucks!

So I spent an evening reading blogs about him. Via NickM, here are Penn and Teller on Borlaug, GM food and the Green Revolution:

A few clicks later and I’m at The Salted Slug, reading a robust defense of GM food. It covers all the common arguments, pointing out that most of them apply to all modern farming, not just GM crops.

“GE foods remove consumer choice. Because of the widespread contamination caused by GE crops and the fact that many GE crops are not kept separate in the food system, consumers in the Philippines have been denied the right to choose not to eat genetically engineered food.”

Again, this has always been true of all food crops. Virtually all modern food crops — cereals, corn, rice — are the result of human hybridization. Is Greenpeace applying this criticism to all food crops, or only to those developed by for-profit companies? Is this a scientific objection, or an ideological objection?

Meanwhile, in the New Zealand Herald, Dennis Dutton has a strongly worded attack on greens who would deny food tech to starving people.

But as a byproduct of Green electioneering in the rich countries, an African mother watches her child die. Of course, the African mother can’t vote in Germany or New Zealand, so the Greens sit safe.

But I won’t let them forget: They have blood on their hands.

In the lift yesterday morning some colleagues were grumbling about the weather. I said I expect a cool summer, despite predictions of a warm one. Predictions of a warm summer were probably based on an expectation of global warming, I said, but global temperatures are down anyway, the various ocean climate cycles are in cool phases, and sun activity is low, so if that has anything to do with the climate, I’d expect things to stay cool.

Ah, said my colleague, but if global warming is happening, the UK will get cooler because of the gulf stream.

That might have been the story a few years ago, but no-one is saying that any more. What I find interesting is that fairly switched on people can be so ill-informed. It’s probably because, unless you take an active interest in the subject, you’ll just be absorbing stories from the mainstream media. And it’s hardly news when a disaster scenario turns out not to be true.

I managed to find a link to an article summarising the demise of the gulf stream shutting down story. It was covered in New Scientist and Science back in November 2006. It was also one of the inaccuracies found in Al Gore’s movie by a British judge.

Of course plenty of research is still going on into ocean circulation. Like most things in climate science it is understood far less well than we are led to believe. Only recently there has been controversy about the model of ocean circulation.

Meanwhile, I discover to my annoyance that I can’t buy 100 Watt light bulbs any more. I’d meant to stockpile them but they haven’t been on sale since January. EU bureaucrats don’t care that I want them for a light I rarely switch on.

One way of making a computer model to predict the behaviour of complicated systems is to start off with some assumptions, and then tweak the model until it predicts the system’s past behaviour. The reasoning is that the model must be correct because if you feed in distant past inputs you get near past outputs, so if you feed in current inputs you’ll get future outputs.

This was the entire premise of a major BBC climate modelling experiment.

But this method fails because if your model isn’t made with the correct understanding of the way the system works, all you’ve done is create a computer program that creates the outputs you want because you’ve tweaked it until it does so. When the future arrives, you’ll find it needs more tweaking to make that prediction, by which time it’s too late: your model has failed to predict the future.

Anthony Watts has an example of a computer model that tried to predict sunspots. He lets us read the entire press release in which all sorts of confident predictions are made, but at the end the prediction is wrong and we find out the press release was from two years ago.

A commenter points to a category on a climate science blog all about failed predictions.

This is why I’m so skeptical about climate models: none has ever made a successful prediction of the future and it doesn’t matter how well they can predict the past. How odd that most dire predictions about climate change come from model research.

Boris wants to encourage electric cars to London by installing 25,000 charging points. Meanwhile, the head of the Royal Chemistry Society Richard Pike says that electric cars aren’t all that great for the environment.

Okay, so he used to work for BP, and there is much debate in the comments on that article about efficiency and the various advantages of electric cars.

I think there are many advantages of electric cars. But no-one really knows how well they’ll work. There might be problems with the batteries. There might be problems with generating enough electricity to charge them all. Or all kinds of exciting new technologies might render them fantastically economical.

But no-one knows. So do you get central planners to take money from people and decide what technology to invest in, or do you let private companies risk their own money on trying different things out and finding what works best?

In the former case, the imperfect knowledge of the central planners is likely to lead to 25,000 useless charging points. In the latter case, you might end up with many failed businesses but two or three very successful ones.

My money is on a gradual transition from oil to natural gas as the main transport fuel over, say, the next 100 years. And it’s my money to bet — or at least, what’s left over after Boris has taken some of it for his electric car charging points and someone else has taken some to build wind farms.