TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| California Imposes Rule for Efficiency on Some TVs The state recognized that giant new flat-panel televisions have become major power guzzlers. feeds.nytimes.com |
Visions of Darwin Museum launches contest for photos inspired by Darwin news.bbc.co.uk |
Science forgotten in climate change fuss No one identifies any scientific flaws in Phil Jones's work, yet the 'fallen idol' narrative is too alluring for the media to resistIt is odd that we still don't take climate change seriously.Judging from the acres of newsprint being devoted to the subject right now, you might find that remark surprising. But look at the furore over the University of East Anglia emails: environmentalists hand-wringing as if the end of the world had suddenly been brought forward; their opponents crowing that the whole of climate science has to start again from scratch.Can you imagine this kind of response if the subject of the emails had been something we actually care about, such as health or the economy? The discovery of the HIV virus involved one of the murkiest incidents in the history of science. It's an insult to UEA's Phil Jones and his colleagues to even suggest the comparison, but it serves to make the point. Reporters on the HIV affair always scrupulously stressed that although the integrity of some of the individuals involved was called into question, the evidence that HIV causes Aids was unaffected. People might have died if the public had been misled on that point. Whereas if it's only about climate change …A colleague working in astrophysics was expressing bemusement to me yesterday about why the reputation of British science was apparently under threat, given that no evidence had actually emerged of scientific misconduct. Her specific question was: "Has anyone found evidence of an error in a published paper or dataset?" If they had, then of course the error would need to be corrected, which happens in science all the time.If it could be proved that figures had been deliberately altered to give a specific result then it would be very serious, but so far no evidence has emerged from these Climatic Research Unit (CRU) emails of any error in the HadCRUT instrumental temperature record at the centre of the row, never mind proof of deliberate intent to mislead. How often have you heard that repeated, clearly, by the mainstream press reporting on this incident? Even if they were reporting on Berlusconi's sex life they would be more careful. Berlusconi can afford better lawyers than Jones can.Take, for example, the "trick" of combining instrumental data and tree-ring evidence in a single graph to "hide the decline" in temperatures over recent decades that would be suggested by a naive interpretation of the tree-ring record. The journalists repeating this phrase as an example of "scientists accused of manipulating their data" know perfectly well that the decline in question is a spurious artefact of the tree-ring data that has been documented in the literature for years, and that "trick" does not mean "deceit". They also know their readers, listeners and viewers won't know this: so why do they keep doing it?What is particularly ironic is that a favourite graph in the climate sceptic community a few years ago entitled "Most accurate global average temperature" did precisely this. It stitched temperatures from the satellite-based temperature record from 1979 onwards together with the surface temperature record before then. At that time the satellite record showed no evidence of warming, so one might call this a handy trick to hide the recent warming in the surface temperature record. Did that make it evil? I wouldn't say so: there were concerns about the impact of incomplete coverage and something called the urban heat island effect on the surface temperature record, so combining the two data sources might have been legitimate, provided it was clear what was done and why. This particular figure has fallen out of favour since an error was discovered in the satellite data processing which, when corrected, revealed the satellites were actually showing warming after all.Perhaps the most concrete example of journalists claiming to reveal "problems" with the CRU temperature record was a report on Newsnight (widely redistributed) in which a software engineer criticised computer code contained in the leaked email package. Neither of the two pieces of code Newsnight examined were anything to do with the HadCRUT temperature record at all, which is actually maintained at the Met Office. Newsnight's response, when I challenged them on this, was: "Our expert's opinion is that this is climate change code." Presumably, then, the quality of the code I use to put together problems for our physics undergraduates shows that we should not trust results from my colleagues who work on the Large Hadron Collider on the grounds that "it is all physics code". Newsnight have declined to retract the story.One can understand the blogosphere reacting as it has done, but why has mainstream journalism collectively decided to treat the story in this way? The bottom line is that journalism deals not in facts, but in "narratives". And the narrative of the fallen idol is clearly a great way to fill the airwaves – witness the reality television industry.So the narrative journalists have collectively decided upon is that a few scientists may have manipulated their data, and either (a) it doesn't matter because the evidence for human influence on climate is so strong or (b) this shows the whole edifice is now crumbling, depending on their editor's predilections. And George Monbiot laments that the high priests of his climate change religion have let him down. All without any evidence that any number, anywhere, is actually wrong. Journalists, who always find numbers irritating, are revelling in the fact that they are back in the driving seat. By making the story about the individual scientists, rather than scientific results, they can go back to reporting on the story as they see fit without being constrained by scientific evidence.This is all particularly painful for those of us who know and have the deepest respect for Jones and his colleagues. Our instinct, of course, is to stand up and defend his integrity. But we know that if we do so, journalists weave this into their chosen narrative as "scientists circling the wagons to defend their own". The Times report accompanying the statement released yesterday by UK climate scientists was a case in point: rather than simply reporting the boring story that scientists agree there is nothing wrong with the data after all, they had to go and hunt out a "human interest" angle of some scientist who claimed that he felt pressured by the Met Office into signing the statement (ridiculously – many of us who signed spend our professional lives annoying the Met Office).Even the senior figures in the World Meteorological Organisation are letting themselves get swept along, pointing out that even if we leave out the CRU dataset the evidence for human influence on climate is still strong. While true, this misses the point. If we allow personal attacks on individual scientists or criticism of irrelevant software to be used as an excuse to discount data that people don't like, it will be open season. Presumably they will be hunting through the emails of someone involved in the Nasa temperature series next, and so it will go on.None of us can imagine what Phil Jones is going through, and all of us know that it might be our turn next. For all I know someone is already sorting through my emails on a Russian web server. But for the record, if they do decide to pick on me, I don't want people out there defending my integrity. I want people out there defending my results. Because we are scientists, and this is what we do.Hacked climate science emailsClimate change scepticismClimate changeClimate changeUniversity of East AngliaNewspapersMyles Allenguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Mummified eagles found in Egypt Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered two tombs dating back 2,500 years at the ancient site of Saqqara. abc.net.au |
Prayer and nonsense | Andrew Brown The patent untruth of religious language might have more benefits besides making it memorableI have been reading the letters of CS Lewis again: they seem written from an immense distance. In important ways, they are. He reached the trenches, as a second lieutenant in France, on his 19th birthday; of the time when he got his blighty wound, the regimental history records that The casualties of the 1st battalion between 14th and 16th April were: 2/Lieut. L.B. Johnson died of wounds (15/4/18) and 2/Lieuts C.S. Lewis, A.G. Rawlence, J.R. Hill and C.S. Dowding wounded: in other ranks the estimated losses were 210 killed, wounded and missing.Incidentally, the wounds that ended his war were caused by a British shell dropping short, or what we would now call "friendly fire". But when there are 215 casualties in one unexceptional regiment within two days, no one makes a big fuss about whose shells kill whom. But for all the social distance to Lewis's world, two of his characteristics leap straight to ours. The first is what a good reader he was, which is to say a good critic. The other is that it mattered. He was always trying to write something more than "a readable and convincing slab of claptrap" (as he described Macauley) and very seldom failed, however often he was wrong. But his mythology of language was extremely strange. In a letter to his brother, (17 January 1932) he writes As we learn to talk we forget what we have to say. Humanity, from this point of view, is rather like a man coming gradually awake and trying to describe his dreams: as soon as his mind is sufficiently awake for a clear description, the thing which was to be described is gone … Religion and poetry are about the only languages in modern Europe – if you can regard them as "languages" – which till have traces of the dream in them, still have something to say. Compare "Our Father which art in Heaven" with "The supreme being transcends space and time". The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply literal meaning to it. How can anything but a sexual animal really be a father? How can it be in the sky? The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it: the second is mere dextrous playing with counters, and once a man has learned the rule he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all ...I am not interested here in the question of whether there is any external referent for "Our Father, who art in Heaven", though I suppose I should point out for the benefit of the sky-pixie crowd that Lewis takes for granted that the meaning cannot be literal. That is the whole point of his argument. I am more interested in a a potentially much more destructive approach, which came out of a paper published last year with the wonderful title "Connections from Kafka" by two psychologists, Travis Proulx, and Steven Heine. The very short form of their argument (which deserves a longer post on its own) is that nonsense or the violation of expectations actually strengthens our ability to find meaning. What's more, if we are exposed to nonsense or loss of meaning in one area , this will increase the meaning and order we find in others. Earlier work of theirs has shown that moral beliefs or group affiliation can be strengthened simply by swapping the experimenter out, without explanation, halfway through a test. That, surely, is the mechanism behind all modern fundamentalisms. Anyway, there is lots of evidence that anxiety increases our tendency to see patterns and meaning in the world. The standard atheist assumption is of course that these patterns don't really exist. In some cases, and some experiments, they don't. But the latest Proulx and Heine paper had a fascinating twist: after being exposed to a twisted version of a Kafka story, in which nothing at all made sense, their subjects were better able to detect patterns that really existed in letter strings they were given to match. The counter-intuitive nature of religious language is often remarked. There are whole theories about just how much counter-intuitiveness is needed to make a religious story most memorable and thus most widespread. But counter-intuitiveness is really just another term for the violation of expectation and the denial of meaning. If Proulx and Heine are right, then counter-intuitive religious language will not just be more memorable: it will help the participants to perceive meaning in the threatening world around them. Sometimes that meaning will be objectively there. This is a long way back to CS Lewis, but I think it shows his instinct was right: "Our Father, who art in heaven" actually means something to the people who say it, in a way that more literally sensible language just couldn't. The rule for religious language is clear: if a dalek could understand it, it wouldn't be worth saying.ReligionPsychologyAtheismCS LewisChristianityAndrew Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |