News and Opinion Round-Up

Just a couple of quick pieces from various news organs for your enjoyment...

• From the Irish Independent, a wonderful little piece called Our Lack of Basic Science Beggars Belief. This is the sort of passionate, eloquent short article that everyone needs to read.


• From the Grand Junction, Colorado Free Press, a short piece called The Evolution Enigma, which cites the wonderful book by Donald R Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters in making a broader case for evolutino education in Colorado, and specifically in the (apparently quite religious) city of Grand Junction. Prothero's book is a compelling and entertaining read which I'm going to review once I have finished it, and I'd urge anyone remotely interested in this topic to pick up a copy.


• From the Brisbane Courier Mail, the story of a dream supernova find for amateur astronomer. Thankfully, astronomy remains one of the sciences in which dedicated amateur observers can still do real useful work and make important discoveries. Congratulations to Mr Peter Marples - your dedication (and your A$7,000 telescope!) have paid off.


• And from South Africa, a new display to educate people about evolution and anthropology is about to open as a tourist attraction in Taung, where the history-making find of the Taung child was discovered in 1924.

I may add more to this page as I find more compelling or interesting stories, as time allows.

The Bees are Disappearing...

(Spoiler Alert: If you haven't yet seen Series 4 of Doctor Who, and you care about such things, you might want to skip below the bee to the link.)

...and now we might have some inkling as to why the bees have been disappearing.

Although postulated in Doctor Who to have been the departure of some similar-seeming creatures to their homeworld of Melissa Majora in advance of a Dalek attack on Earth, there may now be a much more mundane explanation for Colony Collapse Disorder. And the winner is... alleged corporate malfeasance.

As reported in the Raleigh News and Observer, Bayer CropScience is facing scrutiny over allegations that one of its pesticides, clothianidin, used in some crops like sugar beets, corn, and sorghum seeds, is also lethal to honeybees. Go and read the entire article, from which the following key quote is taken:

"Clothianidin and related pesticides generated about $1 billion of Bayer CropScience's $8.6 billion in global sales last year. The coalition is demanding that the company withdraw all of the pesticides.

""We're suspecting that Bayer submitted flawed studies to play down the risks of pesticide residues in treated plants," said Harro Schultze, the coalition's attorney.

""Bayer's ... management has to be called to account, since the risks ... have now been known for more than 10 years."

"Under German law, a criminal investigation could lead to a search of Bayer offices, Mimkes said.

"On the other side of the Atlantic, the Natural Resources Defense Council is pressing for research information on clothianidin.

"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the pesticide in 2003 under the condition that Bayer submit additional data. A lawsuit, which the environmental group filed Aug. 19 in federal court in Washington, accuses the EPA of hiding the honeybee data."

-- Raleigh News and Observer, 26 August 2008

Now why doesn't it surprise me that this chemical was approved by the EPA under the current administration? The EPA has been significantly weakened under Bush, with scientists pressured to skew their findings to suit the administration - that much we have seen documented. In fairness, some of the delays of the EPA in research date back into the Clinton administration, as in the case of Bisphenol A, the chemical used in the popular Nalgene plastic water bottles. But with the Bush government's outstanding record of bending over backwards to accomodate the greed of business by cutting the very regulation meant to protect consumers from inadequate testing, it doesn't, on the face of things, appear overly surprising that this chemical was approved on their watch.

Which once again begs the question with reference to the Doctor Who storyline cited previously... why would we ever need to invent LGMs or BEMs when there's more than enough human evil to go around?

Not a Chance in Hell?

From random news searches using Le Google, we bring you this: As if life didn't have enough twisty-turny moments to it, now the execrable Denyse O'Leary has turned her attention to the search for extraterrestrial life.

For those of you who haven't encountered O'Leary before, here's a quick rundown of some of her greatest hits. You can also, if you're so inclined, search for her name and find her blogs, if you have a few hours of your life that you don't mind wasting, or have some shouting that you need to get out of your system. She also turns up regularly on science blogs, often posting as "for the kids" or some variant of that [EDIT: In the light of several suggestions to the contrary, I can't verify that statement, so retract it for the time being.], and when I've encountered her before, it was always in a context of the usual ID anti-science propaganda. Now, however, I'm pleased (perhaps that's the wrong word) to report that she's flexing her rhetorical musculature in a new vein: astrobiology.

Apparently, this little gem was published on 15 August in Canada (poor devils) and then hit the conservative-oriented Men's News Daily site four days later. It trades under the name: "Aliens: What if they AREN'T really out there?", and should be required reading for anyone who is in danger of believing that any of the ID crowd have a proper understanding of science.

You'll have to forgive me, but here's a long quote:

"In other words, given that so much of the public already believes in extraterrestrial life without evidence, the idea’s effects should be evident now. And that is why I am skeptical of the oft-heard claim that finding extraterrestrial life will be a world-changing science discovery. Quite the contrary, persistent failure to find such life would have a much more profound effect. That effect can be glimpsed from a most revealing conversation between Richard Dawkins and Ben Stein in the recent Expelled documentary, featuring the intelligent design controversy. Well-known atheist Dawkins, recognizing the hopeless snaffle of current origin of life research, admitted that he could accept the idea that life was brought here by intelligent aliens. In other words, he could accept the idea that intelligent aliens created life — but not that God did.

"Dawkins is the leading edge of a trend. Belief in extraterrestrial life is much higher among non-churchgoers than among churchgoers, and that’s no accident. Non-churchgoers have a much bigger investment in advanced (and godless!) alien civilizations. In that case, the aliens might, as Dawkins suggests, be able to do some tasks that most churchgoers attribute to God."

... all of which is simply dishonest. I saw that wretched film (and I have reviewed the relevant audio from it to refresh my memory), and the passage to which O'Leary refers was clearly an example of Professor Dawkins being led down a hypothetical path, and then being held up to ridicule for having been led. But, apart from the vast fallacy of calling Expelled a documentary, the bigger question is one which O'Leary inadvertently opens up: that of belief.

I don't say that I "believe" in extra-terrestrial life. I accept the possibility, and I think that it's important to look. It has nothing to do with not believing in O'Leary's brand of god, inc. It has everything to do with wanting to know more about the universe. Yes, it would be telling if an alien civilisation turned up and said "oh, yes, we had our monotheistic period too, but we worshipped the Great Prophet Zarquon, until we figured out that it was all a lot of rot." But that's not the reason to look. The implications for faith - the unreasoning acceptance of something which can't be proved on the basis of evidence which isn't there - aren't a primary concern. Doing the science is.

Let me say a few quick words about SETI ( SETI Institute | wiki | SETI@Home ) and the people who spend their lives working on questions of life in the universe - they really don't have much to do with UFOs. And by "not much", I do in fact mean "nothing". I have yet to see (as has everyone else in the world) a properly documented, scientific, and convincing (never mind irrefutable) extra-terrestrial sighting. And, to be honest, if you were a member of a highly-intelligent alien species, I doubt that you would go to the effort of crossing tens, hundreds, or thousands of light-years of empty space just to fly past yokels in spacecraft which look suspiciously like those old tins in which my grandmother used to make raspberry tarts.

"But we can't know the minds of the [insert made-up name of dreamt-up alien species here]!" cry the true believers. "They are so... weird, and... er... mysterious! They want to communicate with the world, but only after they've finished repeatedly abducting me and performing their fiendish tests upon me... Me! An accountant from Luton with a dodgy heart, poor eyesight, and a severe case of gullibility! It's all part of their grand plan!"

Cobblers.

The difference between a programme like SETI and a UFOlogist is much like the difference between the corpus of evolutionary thought and the so-called intelligent design camp. On the one hand, there is a genuine question: is there life in the universe, and how do we find it if there is? Perhaps it would be a good idea if we look? Yes, that might be the best way. How do we look? Well, we slowly, painstakingly scan the skies for emissions in the electromagnetic spectrum, we analyse the data looking for artificial signatures. And it will take years. Maybe centuries. The universe is a big place, and we've only just started looking.

On the other hand, there are the people who saw something in the sky, and well shucks, damned if it weren't some UFO filled to the gills with little grey men with big black eyes, come to take our women-folk. They don't have no women on Venus, see? What? No, it certainly wasn't a cloud. No. Definitely not.

Or there's the third camp (though not a third hand, as that would be so weird and alien), which is the O'Leary camp. No life in the universe. No point in looking. Why? Because my god didn't say anything about it in his special book, and the book says that everything in the book is true, even the bits that are clearly lies. Ergo, it must be true, and there are no LGMs, no life out there, no need to go hunting. Waste of money. Shouldn't you be in church, anyway?

The trouble with that is, of course, that we find things in the skies that aren't in that book all of the time. Supernovae and novae, pulsars, quasars, black holes, cosmic microwave background radiation, and over 200 extra-solar planets. Billions upon billions of stars that you can't see with the naked eye, stretching back 13.7 billion years in time. Just that fact itself seems to me to be sufficient cause to keep looking, for more than just a few years.

A Bit of a Laugh

Here's a short piece from one of my favourite comedians, Robin Ince, covering a good deal of familiar ground...

Enjoy!

Identification

The next presentation that I'm pondering for Science Club extends some of the work that I've been doing for the Beagle, namely working on tentative identifications for the various pieces of a horde of mixed minerals, rocks, fossils, and shells that is lurking in the second basement (the one where the telescopes hide and plot their long-distance evil). It came to me suddenly the other morning that all of this messing about with chemicals, magnification, microscopy, streaks and hardness, this would be great dinner theatre. Or, barring that, a great demonstration for kids in primary school. Especially if we can rig up the apparatus to do the flame tests {grins maniacally and bulges eyes outwards}...

Looking through my library, I really do have a large number of books about rocks and minerals, even after all of these years. Despite not having followed the path that led to geology as a career, I did more than my share of study in that field. Nevertheless, it doesn't surprise me that I've forgotten a lot. A hell of a lot. And, of course, when I was younger I wasn't really set up to do the testing, when I was a child, although I read about it. For some reason, the idea of putting things in flame to see what colour they burn excites me more now than it did then, and re-learning about some of these things has been more interesting than I would have expected.

I've been told that there's a real thirst for this sort of information among the school-aged children in the area, and that there are a lot of kids who would enjoy learning about how to identify rocks and minerals. If that's true, and if I can put together a presentation that is clever and amusing enough, with sufficient fire and acid (at a safe remove, of course), then we might really have a success - namely, more kids interested in science and scientific thinking.

One of the things that I've found, though, is that in writing some of the basics down for doing an identification presentation, I realised that it could be a very funny and personal sort of one-man show, if I were so inclined. A lot of the awkwardness in my life has always been bound up in my childhood - why not make it funny and exploit it for my own amusement and possibly for filthy lucre financial gain? Not only would it be about the process of actually determining what a given piece of the earth is, but it would also cover questions of my own whimsical identity, and how it's relentlessly and irretrievably bound up in family history. Trying to escape the inevitable, and how it never works. All of this really sounds funnier in my head, bear with me.

I don't know about you, but I think that taking a child and turning them loose in a road cut with a hammer and a chisel is intrinsically funny. Imagine how narked the Highway Department must get whenever they find aspiring geologists swarming all over the place, hammering out half-ton boulders and dropping them dangerously close to the road, all in search of a trilobite or a nice pocket of calcite crystals. In Missouri, of course, you could argue that it serves the Department of Transportation right for doing such a rubbish job with the roads in the first place...

Frankly, the thought of it makes me want to go and find a road cut right now.

When They Came for My Chemistry Set...

I've always been a science geek. It took me a long time to see the truth of that, but eventually, I couldn't help but realise that it was true.

I was fascinated by most areas of science, and well into my first years of secondary school, I was still trying to be good at my studies. I had shown some promise, which I largely failed to fulfill, in the sciences, even winning a science olympiad medal or two.

To my ongoing chagrin, though, I was never any good at chemistry. I knew about chemical elements, at least a bit, as a result of an interest in mineralogy which had been grafted onto me by parental influence. But the nuance, the subtlety, the stoichiometry of chemistry - that much I never got. At that time, unfortunately, I was allowed to wallow in more of a Smiths phase than an academia phase, something which I will always regret. It just serves to expand on the lesson - everything that naturally seems important to the mind of a teenager probably isn't.

And now I recognise that part of the problem was this: I never had a chemistry set.

Sure, I read books in which boys my age messed about with chemicals - I seem to recall that such activities were rife in the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books - especially the latter, as Tom was, like his father, and "inventor" - such a magical word, particularly in the earliest incarnation of the books. But I, although I had a microscope for biology experiments, magnifying glasses and hardness tables and a streak plate for the endless rocks and minerals, and made an insect collection of which I was rather proud when I was thirteen, I never dabbled with chemicals. This may have been due to the sins of one of my relatives, who I have it on good authority was something of a miserable hell-raiser in his youth, and something of am amateur explosives-maker, which led to strictures on my own liberties as a child.

I struggled through two years of chemistry in high school, and always with mixed results. I loved - and still love - the mechanics of experimentation, and even my long suffering teacher, a patient man called Theodore Dresie (who we never, ever called "Ted" behind his back), probably would have agreed that I was a competent experimenter. But the numbers, the mechanics... fortunately, I was paired for experiments with a brainy young lady called Robin (for reasons best known to her parents), who could do the maths in her sleep and didn't like the grunt work of mixing up the various solutions. So, at least until I was on my own again, as happened, for example, in examinations, I was covered.

And despite recording appallingly bad marks in those two years of chemistry (I don't want to talk about it, even now), I clearly did learn something. A few years later, I took a fundamentals of chemistry course at university level to make up some of my required science credit - and breezed through the class with surprising facility and grace. That either meant that that the class was very easy or that I was by then a better student, but in either event, I wasn't going to sneer at a good grade.

So why all of this reflection on the subject of my academic inadequacies once again? Perhaps because of this story, which my father-in-law, a chemist, advocate of giving kids "dangerous" things to do (meaning, in reality, controlled and safe), and long-time amateur experimenter, mentioned at dinner last night. John Wilkins over at Evolving Thoughts has also discussed this story in some detail, but I can't let it go without putting my four penny-worth into the mix.

The essentials of the story: a retired chemist and amateur experimenter, after reporting a fire in his home (unrelated to what comes) was found to have a rather extensive home laboratory in his basement. And despite the fact that there was nothing at all dangerous in the chemicals that he possessed, "public safety" officials in Worcester, Mass. took all of his property away, and have generously decided not to charge the man, Victor Deeb, with a crime. Of course, they didn't charge him for a simple reason: he had committed no crime. The article continues, somewhat sensationally, carrying on in this vein:

"Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement Tuesday afternoon, after they responded to an unrelated fire in an air conditioner on the second floor of the home.

"Vessels of chemicals were all over the furniture and the floor, authorities said. The ensuing investigation involved a state hazardous materials team, fire and police officials, health officials, environmental officials and code enforcement officials. The Deebs were told to stay in a hotel while the slew of officials investigated and emptied the basement.

"Pamela A. Wilderman, Marlboro’s code enforcement officer, said Mr. Deeb was doing scientific research and development in a residential area, which is a violation of zoning laws.

'“It is a residential home in a residential neighborhood,” she said. “This is Mr. Deeb’s hobby. He’s still got bunches of ideas. I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere. This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation. … There are regulations about how much you’re supposed to have, how it’s detained, how it’s disposed of.”

"Mr. Deeb’s home lab likely violated the regulations of many state and local departments, although officials have not yet announced any penalties.

'“He’s been very cooperative,” Ms. Wilderman said. “I won’t be citing him for anything right at this moment.” '

-- Worcester Telegram & Gazette News, Saturday, 9 August 2008

Ridiculous. Stupid. Imbecilic. Insane. Oh, and how bloody generous of you, Ms Wilderman, to say "I won't be citing him for anything right at this moment." Leaving it open for later, are you? You "think Mr Deebs has crossed a line somewhere"? Really? Well, guess what? What you think is utterly immaterial. There is a tradition in this country, more than two hundred years old, which usually leans in the direction of "if it's in your home, it's none of the government's business" (except in real, obvious cases of something like an existing law being broken. And if it doesn't violate an actual law, not some nonsense application of local codes, but a real, proper, grown-up law, then you can just keep your thoughts to yourself. I'm not about to let the "thoughts" of minor bureaucrats have free reign, nor the weight of legal precedent. That is a slippery slope indeed.

Examples? We have thousands of books in our home - have we "crossed a lined somewhere"? My parents have thousands of mineral specimens in their home. For that matter, they probably have about a hundred of those wretched little Lladro clowns and things. Have they "crossed a line somewhere?" All that I can say is that I hope that some minor official in Missouri doesn't start getting ideas.

I don't know about other people, but the level of crass ignorance displayed by some jumped-up traffic warden makes me want to go out and start building my own home laboratory today, and stocking it with every possible legal chemical that I can find - including all of the stuff that you routinely buy as home cleaners and solvents, some of which is far more dangerous than anything sold in your standard off-the-shelf chemistry set.

And I'll want to do it not just because I'm annoyed at an authority that seems to feel it to be within their rights to quash a perfectly legitimate pursuit. I also want to do it for the eleven year-old me, who didn't have a chemistry set, and might just have done better in life with one than without.

British Museum Buys Mediaeval Astrolabe Quadrant

Being the sort of person that I am, I love it when history and science dovetail so beautifully as they do in this story: the British Museum buys mediaeval astronomy tool (also see this account of the story at Nature, from back in April before the astrolabe was secured, and blog post from bioephemera from the same time). This last-minute purchase for the collection at the British Museum ensures that the only known astrolabe quarter made for use in England during the middle ages remains in the country. It was purchased, the AP reports, for £350,000, or about US $700,000.

The astrolabe was a tool used for taking measurements of the position of the sun, moon, planets, and stars (the name is Latin, rather than Greek: astro (star) + labe (to take) - literally meaning a device to take measurements of the stars. Developed first in the Hellenistic world, it was later adapted and improved by Islamic scientists during their scientific golden age. With the reintroduction of classical knowledge into Western Europe, the astrolabe was once again made a tool of astrological and astronomical reckoning in European countries.

Famously, Geoffrey Chaucer also wrote a Treatise on the Astrolabe which described its use, which begins, rather sweetly:

'Litel Lowis my sone, I have perceived wel by certeyne evidences thyn abilite to lerne sciencez touchinge noumbres and proporciouns; and as wel considere I thy bisy preyere in special to lerne the Tretis of the Astrolabie...'


-- Geoffrey Chaucer, A Treatise on the Astrolabe, Prologus (1393)

For your further amusement, here's a page of various astrolabes from the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.

Completed the Essay, But...

I always like to remember that the word "essay" comes from the same root as the French verb éssayer, meaning "to attempt", or "to try". And I particularly like to remember that each time that I try to write an essay, or a blog post, or anything else that might see publication in any form.

In this case, it was the essay for the Seed essay writing contest that I finished and emailed last night. Because I got my dates wrong, I found yesterday afternoon that I had only a few hours in which to write something over which I planned several days. So it's not good. I know that. And when I get the formal confirmation of that fact (ie; the hopefully polite "thanks, but no thanks"), then I shall re-write it and post it here.

After all, by having actually sat down to complete and send off my thoughts on the topic of "What is the most significant force acting against science in society today? How can it be overcome?", I did in fact complete something. And following through has never been my strong suit, when it comes to serious projects, so regardless of the outcome, I get to tick the box marked "Progress", in this case.

Cette fois, j'ai bien essayé, mais pas assez bien...

Oh, and my short answer to the question posed, you ask? Easy: the title is: "the immunity from reason". Guess where I went with that?

Sun Dogs, Halos, and Fire Rainbows (The Richness of Science, the Poverty of the Irrational, No. 2)

I received an email yesterday which left me a bit perplexed.

Here's the text:

THIS IS A FIRE RAINBOW - THE RAREST OF ALL NATURALLY OCCURRING ATMOSPHERIC PHENOMENA.

THE PICTURE WAS CAPTURED THIS WEEK ON THE IDAHO/WASHINGTON BORDER.

THE EVENT LASTED ABOUT 1 HOUR.

CLOUDS HAVE TO BE CIRRUS, AT LEAST 20K FEET IN THE AIR, WITH JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF ICE CRYSTALS AND THE SUN HAS TO HIT THE CLOUDS AT PRECISELY 58 DEGREES.

Yes, they were shouting, for some reason. It was in about 20-point bold, all caps text. All right, fine. Some people don't know how to use their email, or are unaware that there is such a thing as "netiquette". I can understand that, I guess, and given how often I display ignorance, it would be churlish of me to condemn it in others. Up to a point.

Also, to be fair, the email was accompanied by a really cool photo:

And, so far, no problems. However, just for fun, there was a kicker at the end of the page:

"God's handiwork. Beautiful sight! Pass along for others to see!"

Pause for a moment, and read that again.

First, note that everything above the photo tries to provide some of the actual conditions (although those are incomplete or wrong, depending on how charitable you're feeling, as we will see), as determined by, oh, let's say... science. Then, at the end, someone (perhaps the original sender, perhaps not) decides to append the joyful annunciation of "god's handiwork". You can see why I'm perplexed. Why spend the time trying to give any of the science at all, if at the end, you're just going to say: "Yep! Magic Man Done It!."

My curiosity was piqued on seeing the image, and I don't believe in magic men, so I took a moment and looked up "fire rainbows". Although I've seen some odd effects in the sky over the years, some of them dazzling in their beauty, I've never heard this term before. And yes, the Google and the Wikipedia do occasionally point you in the right direction: they're not called "fire rainbows", in reality, but rather a circumhorizontal arc (or possibly a "circumhorizon arc", whichever it is, it really isn't called a "fire rainbow", as it's not made of fire and has nothing whatsoever to do with rainbows).

When I saw this email, I happened to be at the science store. Luckily, the store's Telescope Guy is also an Atmosphere Guy (which is logical, I suppose), and he put me on to a page called Atmospheric Optics (linked above), which, if you haven't seen it before, is a fantastic reference for all sorts of odd things that you might see in the sky. It also tells you that, in fact, a circumhorizontal arc is apparently not the rarest of all naturally occurring atmospheric phenomena (the author doesn't say that explicitly, I hasten to add, but from reading the page, that honour seems to fall to the Kern Arc, at least, if one is to judge from the fact that the images on the site are listed as the "first ever"), although it is indeed uncommon..

I mentioned that some things appeared to be wrong with the science as presented, based on my reading, and here they are:

1. Circumhorizontal arcs require the presence of cirrus clouds, which form at approximately 20 000 (a Nasa source defines cirrus clouds as occurring above 6 kilometres, or 19 685 feet, but opinions appear to vary between 18 000 to 26 000, depending on what source you read). The arc forms by the refraction of light through the ice crystals which are in the clouds, and, most importantly, the ice crystals must be aligned horizontally to refract the light from the sun, which brings us to


2. The sun itself: sunlight does not have to "hit the clouds at precisely 58 degrees" (that in itself seems meaningless), but rather, the sun must be at a minimum of 58 degrees above the horizon, and peak intensity occurs when the sun reaches an elevation of 67.9 degrees (all of this is straight out of the Wikipedia entry - go back and read it, along with the Atmospheric Optics article, if you want more information on precisely how the light refracts through the horizontally arranged ice crystals).

So yes, a nice try, but it could have been clearer and simpler with roughly fifteen minutes' research (I'm no climatologist or atmosphere geek myself - fifteen minutes is what I put into looking this information up).

But let's get back to the flagrant delusion with which the email ends. And once again, it comes down to something pretty straightforward: you can either buy the premise the some "magic man done it", or you can actually have it explained to you, by science. After getting the science partly right and partly wrong, this random bit of email plays the magic man card. This is what I simply don't understand about the mindset of the faithful: even when confronted by incontrovertible evidence, even when you show, in simple and clear terms how something is done, a faith-head (there's got to be a better term than that) just says: 'Yep, I see all of that now. Ain't god amazin'?' It's like a conjurer explaining that he didn't really saw the woman in half, that it was a trick pulled off with a pair of false legs, and the audience member saying: 'Yes, I was really worried that you wouldn't be able to put her back together again.'

At the end of the day, then, what have we learned? First, we've learned that people are sloppy and lazy (and that may include me, I'm looking for a third good source on this phenomenon, but I don't have the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather, for example, ready to hand at the moment, but there is a link to this PDF, which lists the frequencies of a variety of atmospheric phenomena and includes a useful bibliography). Second, we've learned that science has provided us with the accurate, clear, incontrovertible explanation for the phenomenon. And third, we've learned that sometimes, despite being confronted with the truth, some people still revert to the magic man babble.

And so, once again, we take a look at the scores in our on-going contest:

• Science, 2; Irrationality, Nil

Thanks again for keeping up with the score.

Plastic Letters

I always make the mistake of reading the comments on articles, even though I know that they are likely to annoy me, and today was no exception.

The lifestyle story on the BBC's magazine site was fairly straightforward: the author is going to try to give up plastic for a month. When you think about how ubiquitous plastic items are, you begin to see the challenge of it.

So far, so good. But in the comments, there are remarks like these:

"I wish the liberals would also go for a month (or longer) without using the media to promote their hypocrisy, intolerance and leftist bigotry. But that's one modern convenience they can't live without."

-- 
Jeremy, Houston, Texas

...and naturally, I'm off and running. This response was far too long, but it makes a good blog post, if nothing else... So I used the first paragraph for my response, and left the rest for your amusement.

Isn't it funny that, of only a couple of negative voices regarding this topic, it's a commenter from Texas who has a problem with this? Looking at you, "Jeremy from Houston". What exactly is hypocritical, intolerant, or an example of "leftist bigotry" in this little experiment? Would you care to elaborate, or are you just doing your trolling duties this morning? Or maybe you're feeling a touch insecure there?

Here's a thought - try the whole "living without plastic" experiment yourself, even just for a day, and then count the number of carrier bags, water bottles, and other detritus that you see in the medians and central reservations as you drive down the roads of Houston in your - doubtless highly fuel-efficient - automobile, then come back and explain yourself. Looking at you as well, "David from Liverpool" - why exactly is it that you think we've had "green issues rammed down our throats for the past five years"? Because it's fun? Because it's a bit of a laugh to try to make people aware of how important - no, how crucial it is that they change a stupid and unsustainable lifestyle? I give you full marks for saying that these are "important causes", but do you really think that pandering to the deliberately intransigent is addressing the issues at hand?

Yes, for my family's part, we recycle. Not at the kerb-side (which would be better) - we take it to a recycling centre. And we drive a Prius, too (not to gloat, but we're loving the mileage right about now). Would you care to know why? Because if we're right, then it's catastrophically stupid and selfish *not* to do it. At best, we each individually have about eighty years on the planet, and that's it. Who exactly gave it to us to lay waste to, do you think? And I do mean "lay waste to it" - literally and figuratively.

It isn't just a litter problem. It's not just carrier bags down the gullets of gulls, or giant naturally-formed rafts of plastic bottles from Tesco or Target floating on the seas like some castaway's nightmare. It's a mindset problem. We've been told for too long that it's our right to consume blindly, that the mantra of the free market, "choice", should be the idol to which we make our obeissance, that we should be sacrificing our dollars and pounds regularly at the altar of the superstore and the mega-mall. We've been told that it doesn't matter. And as a result, some of us are greedy and lazy and demand not to have to change our thoughtless existence, because it's just too hard. Damn it all, we *like* to order four giant pizzas and six two-litre bottles of diet soda, have them delivered by Pizza Hut's customised Hummer, and then gorge ourselves on half of the lot, throw the rest in the bin for the dustmen to take to the landfill Wednesday week, and then wonder why we feel like hell all the time. And when professional academics and researchers come along, with no agenda at all other than to tell us that, according to the result of the work of eighty to ninety percent of scientists on the planet who work in the field, the climate and the planet are in serious trouble, for example, they are naturally demonised by the chattering classes and the "think less, shout more" crowd - ironically, as these are people who for the most part wouldn't know a peer-reviewed study from a rice pudding, and don't understand that science isn't political (now I'm looking at you, WalMart).

That's right: science isn't political. Science can't be. There are too many people involved, from too many walks of life and too many different parts of the world. The scientific method doesn't have some secret step that says "evaluate the data in light of whether or not it makes left-wing politicians happy", or "ensure that your thesis will create an inconvenience for insecure people who drive stupidly large vehicles", nor even "verify that your protocols will stuff the working classes in no uncertain terms". Science works exactly because it evaluates an hypothesis or a theory in the light of the data, in terms of falsifiability, reproducibility, and congruence (or indeed variance) with the existing body of knowledge. Individually, scientists might adscribe to one view or another - no one cares. If their data's rubbish, it's rubbish because it isn't reproducible, falsifiable, or it tells us that every fourth hippo is really a brilliant shade of emerald green, not just because they voted on the right or the left - or both. Or neither.

There's another thread to this argument: cost. But it seems that people who are worried about the cost miss one of the great potential benefits of the market economy: the fact that when new, green industries emerge, all those happy capitalists who get in on the game can make buckets of money, if they so choose. Cui bono indeed? And when markets expand and supplies increase (say of wind or solar-generated electricity, hybrid or renewably-fueled vehicles, or safe organic foods, to name but three), then the price goes down. The faster the development, the more quickly the price drops. Isn't that what all of the free marketers who were so busily de-nationalising and de-regulating industries right and left have been telling us for all these years? Why wouldn't it be true now? Because they don't have their fingers in the pies, yet? Because, as is the case of one US politician right now, they are in the pocket of a petroleum company to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars... allegedly?

And what if we're wrong? Then we spent a few hours sorting recycling, a few hours being aware of the world around us, and we consumed less of a rapidly vanishing resource, we didn't further enrich petro-chemical companies who prey on America's fuel-demanding consumers (because we dismantled the infrastructure of public transport in most cities, so there's quite literally no other way to get around in many cases) and we didn't vent quite such a variety of amusingly toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. Or, at best, we built an entirely new economy where we pollute less, use less, and give a damn. Hurts no one, that I can see. And maybe it buys my kids five or ten more years to try and put this ugly mess right, if it's still not completely sorted.

So if it bothers you, if you feel like you shouldn't be subjected so egregiously to this "leftist drivel", then don't read it. Because for the time being, that's your right. However, I have this feeling... the "time being" may be shorter than you think.