I have signed up to many of their campaigns, but they do tend to be a bit reactionary on environmental matters. Their anti-GM petition got me quite riled when they clearly demonstrated no attempt to understand the science or the potential benefits, and instead just accused everyone who disagreed with them of being corrupt. I wrote them a letter, but they ignored it (probably chalking me up as in the pay of “big agro” or some such) and the petition went on to become one of their most successful to date.

Consequently, when I received their latest petition, blaming the very worrying colony collapse disorder (CCD) in honey bees on a new type of insecticide and calling for its immediate ban, I did not immediately add my name.

I have spent a bit of time searching the literature and it seems CCD is a complex problem that is likely to be caused by a number of factors. Avaaz claim this is not so and blame the confusion as to the causes of CCD on powerful lobbyists for the chemical companies; but I found papers from all over the world, and not one of them pointed to a strong link between these new neonicotinoid pesticides and CCD.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that however tempting it might be to accuse us of it, most scientists are not in thrall to powerful industries. I find it highly unlikely that evidence of a strong link would not have appeared somewhere in the literature by now if it existed[2]. Scientists studying bees care about them a great deal; they study them precisely because they find them engaging and fascinating animals. Bee researchers wouldn’t keep something as damaging as this under wraps if they knew about it.

Avaaz do give several sources for their conclusions, but they are almost all news articles with no primary references. The main exception being a bee briefing from the soil association, but that doesn’t have any references at all. Much is made of a leaked memo from the US Environmental Protection Agency supposedly showing they “knew about the pesticide’s dangers, but ignored them”, but the only part of the memo I could find is this quote:

information from standard tests and field studies, as well as incident reports involving other neonicotinoids insecticides … suggest the potential for long term toxic risk to honey bees and other beneficial insects.

Given the “…” in the middle, the lack of context and news agencies’ previous record for quote mining, this is hardly a smoking gun.

I’m spreading the word about this campaign, but I am a bit ambivalent about signing. There is evidence of a link and, given the fact that the over reliance on insecticides in general together with synergistic reactions as they accumulate in bee populations are also implicated, perhaps it is better to be safe than sorry and ban this class of chemicals for now; we can always repeal the ban should it later be shown they are not harmful.

I want to sign this petition: I think that, on balance, it would be better to ban these chemicals sooner rather than later; but I have lost my faith in Avaaz. Instead of giving people the whole truth and allowing them to make up their own minds about this complex issue, they have opted to spread simplistic propaganda.

These are tactics I have seen before. It is easier to believe the comforting lie than the difficult truth, and that is a fact that those in the anti-global warming, pro-tobacco and, I am sure, many other lobbies use with ruthless efficiency to further their disreputable causes.

I have learned that, when battling those who do not care about the truth, it is imperative that you stick to absolute honesty. Their dishonesty may make gains at first, but the truth will always win out eventually. If people cannot trust you, however, no amount of pointing to the truth will work, they see only two sides that are equally dishonest and they are liable to pick the one that they find most appealing – invariably this is the wrong choice.

So, I have a quandary. I think that, having gathered a full and balanced view of the situation, it is probably best to ban neonicotinoid insecticides. Had Avaaz have presented me with the whole truth, I would most likely have signed up willingly. But they didn’t, and I cannot condone this form of campaigning because I believe it negatively impacts upon our ability to fight for other challenging causes.

So which principal do I sacrifice? If I sign the petition, I am knowingly supporting a cause that has used misinformation to get its way, and if I don’t I am failing to lobby for the banning of an insecticide that I do believe we should stop using.

I will have to ponder this a bit further before I make a decision, but at least you now have all the information and you too can make an informed decision about whether or not to join Avaaz’s cause.

1. I know, I hate it too, but it does seem to have filled a gap in the language.

2. And, indeed, there is a link, just not a strong one.

The problem with scientific research is that we can extrapolate trends moderately well, but we aren’t very good at specifics. We can confidently state that the world is getting hotter, on average, year by year and that it’s because of us, but we can’t accurately predict what form that warming will take: sometimes there are surprises.

In this case, some predicted the Gulf Stream would be diverted and that would plunge the UK into freezing cold winters: they were wrong. It now looks very unlikely that the Gulf Stream will be “switched off” but, instead, cold air displaced from the pole has… plunged the UK into freezing cold winters. That doesn’t change the fact that the average temperature has gone up, because those cold spots are more than cancelled out by unusually hot spots elsewhere.

The failure of scientists to accurately predict this particular effect doesn’t disprove global warming. Even when we’re surprised by an effect, we can still observe it and find the explanation, and every time we do, it always comes back to global warming caused by CO2.

The most worrying thing is that, every time something like this happens, we find out that, not only is our polluting to blame, but that’s it’s happening faster and more significantly than we predicted.

Frightened? You should be.

We may not like it, but this isn’t going anywhere and the sooner we get used to making the myriad small changes that add up to a big impact, the less painful it will be when the crunch comes and we no longer have the choice.

Here are some small things you can do to make a difference:

• Stop drinking bottled drinks, especially water. The bottled water industry is a huge polluter and you only think you want it because they’ve told you you do!
• Turn down the radiator and put on a jumper and some wooly socks.
• Choose products with less packaging.
• Turn off the lights when you aren’t in the room and switch the TV and video off at the wall (that digital clock and the standby mode may not cost as much as we were once told, but it costs something, and every little helps)
• Don’t leave your phone charger plugged in if it isn’t charging – some transformers (anything with a very bulky plug or some sort of bulky box somewhere along the cable) continue to draw power even when they aren’t in use, if yours feels warm when it isn’t in use, it’s a culprit.
• If you’re buying new white goods, buy energy efficient ones.
• Sign this petition right now and save our forests. Now more than ever we need to protect our trees!

The above image from Neuroskeptic details the nine circles of scientific hell with the punishments the author deems reasonable. Neuroskeptic makes the point that in Dante’s original poem there was space for all men in Hell because even good people sin and, similarly, there is a place for all scientists in Neuroskeptic’s nine circles; for the sins I have committed, see the title of this post.

It may seem odd to outsiders that I would so readily confess to what may look like quite serious examples of malpractice and the reason I do so so easily is because the whole scientific edifice is riddled with these issues. I doubt any scientist could honestly claim never to have commited one of these sins, in fact, I’d stake a fairly large sum on the fact that if any scientist did try to abide by the implied rules, they would rapidly find their career failing.

The currant grant application process is so competitive that, to win funds, you must be proposing something exciting. Science is rarely very exciting, but the gradual buildup of tiny pieces of information that low level researchers make day in day out is very important. Seldom do we bound forward yelling “eureka!”; it is steady fairy footsteps that drive society forward. Researchers know this, and so we are faced with a choice: do we spin a little here, enthuse slightly more than a result deserves there and get the funds we need; or do we tell the truth, fail in our attempts to win grants, lose our careers and see the unexciting but important work we are engaged in flounder? No-one likes it, but we all do it because those who don’t will fall. On the whole, the system still works – this isn’t published data and everyone applies a little spin so we end up cancelling each other out – but Neuroskeptic’s first and second circles are full: the second with the scientists who do the dance and the first with the funding bodies and government’s who play the tune.

The third circle, that of post-hoc story telling is, to my mind, less of an issue. It is more a case of weaving an attractive narrative to make your paper more readable than one of data manipulation. After all, who cares why you did what you did as long as what you did works? It too, however, comes about as a result of the system: the success of a scientist’s career is, in large part, judged by their publication record and number of citations. Well written papers with an attractive narrative will get published in better journals and will get greater levels citations and so, again, the system rewards those who commit this sin and punishes those who don’t. And Neuroskeptic’s third circle is filled with penitents.

The next two circles (P-value fishing and creative outliers) are a different kettle of fish – here we see the abuse of statistical tools to change results. For the vast majority of researchers, the data are sacrosanct: you may not like what it says but you Never. Ever. alter it.  So much of our time is spent fighting our own failings and checking and rechecking to make sure what we are recording is real and not a result of our own innate preconceptions that, for most people, deliberately skewing data is unthinkable. But, as ever, in a high pressure environment there will be people for whom the line between “playing the game” and “making up data” lies beyond a bit of statistical fiddling: those people can be found here.

As we get past half way, the last four circles become more serious. Six and Nine deal with outright theft and making stuff up, very few people would describe those as “playing the game” and I doubt they have many residents, but Seven and Eight deserve a bit more examination.

Forgive my tackling these out of order, but I’d like to dispatch Eight first. Partial publication is predominantly a sin of the medical research establishment. It describes the practice of conducting a study on a large group of people and then proclaiming that your new drug works incredibly effectively for a small subset of that group. If you toss a coin 100 times, you will probably get a run of heads at some point, say between flips 36 and 44 and, if you then only look at the results between 35 and 45 it’s easy to claim your coin was weighted. If your study group is large enough, there will always be a subset for whom the drug appeared to work. This practice is wide-spread, dishonest and deservedly low down in Neuroskeptic’s pit.

And so we come to Seven: the worst sin to which I have confessed. At first, I thought Neuroskeptic was being a bit harsh putting non-publication of data so far down in the pit of hell, after all, we all do it, don’t we? But then, as a potential denizen, I would say that wouldn’t I?

I strongly suspect that there will be more people down here than in the preceding three circles, the main reason for that being that Four, Five and Six deal with active dishonesty whereas Six is the passive failure to mention something. The courts see no difference between active or passive dishonesty and, when we stop to think about it, nor do most scientists. Yet, the lie by omission is an easier sin to commit and is, potentially, more harmful: a few positive results in a sea of negatives will get given prominence far in excess of what they deserve and whole edifices of apparently sound reasoning can be built on the wobbly foundations of dodgy theories that have passed unchallenged into the the realm of established fact*.

Everyone does it because the system forces us to: negative results are simply virtually impossible to get published. In fact, everyone can leave negative data unreported in a desk draw, but not everyone can use post-hoc reasoning to improve the readability of their manuscript or skilfully spin data to win a grant, so I would be unsurprised to find this circle the most populous of all.  With all of that in mind, I think Neuroskeptic is right to place this sin so deep – the impact and potential damage these omissions cause and the scale of this problem make it very serious indeed.

Reading this, you might be left with the impression that modern science is rotten to the core. But you are reading it on a product of modern science, and the fact that you are here to read it all, as healthy and as vigorous as you are, will also, in many cases, be a direct result of the hard work of generations of scientists honing their skills, so we can’t be getting it too badly wrong.

The way we conduct research is itself evolving over time, and the rapid influx of new technology has affected scientists as it has affected us all. The practices listed above are rightly excoriated by Neuroskeptic, but most researchers are aware of them, aware of the pitfalls they create and are actively seeking ways to avoid them. I don’t know if we will ever find a way to fix the funding issue (after all, we can’t fund everything and we have to find a way to choose) but we have made some steps towards closing some of the other circles. Drug trials are now registered so disinterested researchers can go back and check the raw data for themselves and call out any examples of statistical fiddling or partial publication; meanwhile, online journals such as PLoS ONE will publish any article, regardless of apparent importance, interest or positivity of results, as long as it is both readable and scientifically rigorous.

There are still a lot of residents of Neuroskeptic’s Inferno, but perhaps there is hope?

*Always beware established facts.

Yesterday Vince Cable gave a speech at the Queen Mary BioEnterprises Innovation Centre in London. It has been reported as “a strategy to cut science funding“, but it was more of a long-winded attempt to convince us that, while the cuts will be deep and painful, Uncle Vince knows what he’s doing and has our best interests at heart.

The press have focused on one quite small aspect of the speech, and at first so did I. Vince suggested that, rather than apply the same cuts equally across the board, they should be focused on the areas that are less productive or useful.  That’s a wonderful idea on paper, or if your training is in economics (even if you did start out doing Natural Science and switch), but it fails to grasp an idea that is fundamental to academic research – you simply cannot tell what research is going to be useful until you have done it.

In the 60′s a young Japanese researcher name Osamu Shimomura arrived at Princeton University and began researching what made a certain jellyfish glow green. He had no interest in the potential applications of whatever he might discover, he was simply interested in bioluminescence and wanted to know more. He found Green Fluorescent Protein, or GFP, and his discovery is now used in thousands of labs all over the world as a fluorescent tag and it (and it’s spectrum of offspring) have driven forward research in an unimaginable number of diverse areas. In 2008, he and two other researchers shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the parts they played in the discovery and development of GFP.

If you were responsible for prioritising which research should go ahead in 1960, when Osamu Shimomura started his, how high on your list would you have placed one man’s interest in the bioluminescence of an obscure jellyfish species?

Having read some articles on Vince’s speech, I vented my spleen at Evan Harris[1] and Julian Huppert[2] and received the chastening reply that I should “read the speech, not just the coverage.” Well. Fair enough! So I did read the speech, and what I found was that the coverage seemed to fit fairly well with my interpretation of it. Sure, the pundits ignored a lot of the stuff where Vince Cable tried to show he understands the importance of blue-skies[3] research and other economic aspects of science funding, but there were also his statements that:

“Another approach superficially more attractive would be to specialise, to say there are certain branches of science and technology that we should do or not do. My response to this is two-fold.

First, we should not politicise choices of this kind. Treasury and BIS ministers and officials, working under pressures of time as well as money, are not the people who should be making arbitrary, far-reaching decisions such as whether Britain should or should not ‘do’ nanotechnology or space research.

Moreover, many of the suggested choices are not choices at all … innovation depends on lateral thinking between apparently different disciplines.

And:

There is however a strong case for identifying broad problems. For example, the challenges thrown up by an ageing population – the increased prevalence of Alzheimer’s for example – need people working across biology, medicine, biochemistry and the social sciences in order to better address needs. So too for environmental challenges, such as providing clean water or alternative energy sources, pooling different disciplines to get a better understanding of low carbon.

And that:

There is also a case for identifying and building up the areas where the UK truly is a world leader. This includes stem cells and regenerative medicine, plastic electronics, satellite communications, fuel cells, advanced manufacturing, composite materials and many more.”

In other words: “we should only fund research that is aimed at solving today’s pressing problems, and we should only do it with the techniques we are already good at (don’t worry though, I understand that you scientists should get to pick what those are, we politicians don’t have a clue).”[4][5]

So far, so… gah!

But I concede two points:

1. Vince may well be saying what his position in the coalition requires him to say. Just because the speech demonstrates that the Government as a whole doesn’t really grasp how science works, that doesn’t mean Vince himself doesn’t, and it is possible he is fighting hard behind the scenes for what concessions he can get. Evan and Julian certainly still seem to believe he’s fighting for the Nation’s scientists.

2. Cuts must be made somehow[6], if not by focusing only on research that seems to solve today’s most pressing problems, then how?

There is one short, almost throw away, line in the speech that I keep coming back to in my mind. Vince says:

The lazy, traditional way to make spending cuts is to shave a bit of everything: salami slicing. This produces less for less: a shrinkage of quantity and quality – I have no intention of going there.

Hmmm, what does that actually mean? Obviously it means he’s against shaving a bit from everything, but why? What does “this produces less for less” mean? Surely if you fund less, you will get less, especially in an area such as research where waste is already pretty minimal. Getting more for less is a pipe dream, even getting the same for less cannot be done right now, although I’m sure we’ll try, just as researchers did under the last Tory government. Certainly it’s hard to see how Vince’s solution can deliver anything other than “less for less”. Colour me confused.

In search of a better argument, I canvassed Julian and Evan.

Julian said “90% of lots of probs less useful than solving 90% of probs”, which sounds great, but doesn’t really work in this context because research is never ending. You can’t choose which problems to solve, you can only choose which areas to study and hope some problems get solved along the way. It would be great if we could pick out which areas won’t solve any problems in the given time frame and just cut those, but as we discovered way back at the start of this enormous post, we don’t yet have the time machine we need to do that.

Evan sent me to his own analyses of Vince’s speech where he said he’d already answered my question. Except I’d already read them both, and he hadn’t. All he said of Vince and salami slicing was that “Rightly, he rejects this”.

The problem is, I can see a very persuasive argument for salami slicing. If you can’t sensibly predict which areas are the best to fund, why try? Funding councils already choose what to fund on the basis of merit of the proposal and the past research record of the applicant. Removing the same percentage of funding from all areas would mean the application process would get that much tougher across the board[7]. It would self-select the most meretricious sounding proposals and scientists but wouldn’t attempt to second guess what fields will turn out to be most useful. Vince Cable calls salami slicing “lazy”, but it’s only lazy if there is a better alternative, otherwise it is “efficient”.

The self-evident truth is held to be that salami slicing is bad, but no one seems able to explain to me quite why. Maybe I have missed something obvious, but the thing about self-evident truths is that they often aren’t.

1. Ex Lib Dem MP for Oxford West & Abingdon, and one of this May’s most distressing casualties if you care about science (or even evidence-based policy setting).

2. Brand spanking new Lib Dem MP for Cambridge and looking likely to take over Evan’s mantle.

3. Doing stuff because it’s interesting (like GFP) and not just because you can see a future use for it.

4. I confess, at this point my irony meter required a new fuse.

5. There was also some rather patronising stuff about “doing more with less” and cutting funding to projects that are performing less than excellently, which only served to annoy me further and demonstrate that Vince clearly doesn’t understand how much we are already doing with less. Nor does he seem to understand that projects wax and wane in their standing on the world stage. If you axe them while they’re down, they can’t ever get back up again and you might miss out on a lot.

6. Well, actually, no they don’t. Not to science as, according to CaSE (pdf), for a modest spend of less than 2.5% of GDP, science and engineering return almost 1/3rd of the UKs GDP. In other words: it is a false economy. What you are really doing when you cut research funding is borrowing future income to pay today’s debts. We should cut absolutely everything else there is to cut before we touch research funding and, whatever the government may be telling us, we are not there yet. But that would seem to be a debate we already lost, so lets discuss how to limit the damage as much as possible instead.

7. A frankly terrifying possibility, but apparently now inevitable, whatever happens.

The pattern is always the same: some idiot unthinkingly repeats a long-discredited item from their list of sciencey-sounding fallacies, using as much appeal to authority as they can shoe-horn in, usually whilst really trying to sound as though they know their stuff (they always fail) and often in CAPS!!!!!!!!!. Then some well-meaning person who understands the science will patiently try and explain to them why they are wrong and supply them with the evidence that proves it. But it never works, because the denialist canard cannot be argued with logic as it stems from illogic, greed and wishful thinking. The ignorant fool will just go off to another comment thread, their Opinion unsullied by truth, and continue to spout the same tired lines.

Such people are not interested in genuine debate; they are trolling – nothing more nothing less.  It is time the moderators of such fora started treating them as such and denied them their soap box.

They may be ignorant in their folly, unaware of how the astroturf organisations they so gullibly follow were set up by Big Oil and Big Coal to orchestrate their performances, but they are none-the-less willing mouthpieces for such dishonest groups.

It isn’t censorship: no-one is denying these people their right to believe such dangerous rubbish, nor to set up their own forum where they can reinforce each other’s ideologies to their heart’s content, but it is time the mainstream press grabbed their editorial balls in each hand and made a stand. It is time they made repeating such rubbish against the house rules and started deleting them when they turn up.

We have tried to argue and but their fingers are in their ears. The science is in, it is not up for debate any longer, it is time such views were accorded the respect they deserve and kicked into touch.

You will forgive me if I take my government spin with a hefty dose of finest Gulf-Sea salt won’t you?

The numbers are coming from this document; an unedifying 5-page pdf containing 20% white space, 20% author list, 10% using a font size a little larger than necessary to make it look longer, 45% “estimated” data (most of it duplicated) and 5% unnecessary definitions for words apparently only the author doesn’t understand[1]. The report is based on this document; an equally execrable 10-page pdf with, as far as I can make out, exactly the same “data” presented in a slightly different format and repeated a few times. Apparently there are footnotes that lead you to the models and research on which the estimates are based, but I can’t seem to find them.

Forgive my cynicism, but it is well known that if you write a document, cite the information in it in another document and then release a summary, then no-one will go back and check the validity of the original. This is a very useful tool if you are a government official who wishes your version of events to quickly become the established truth.

Bloggers are filling the hole left by the press and, on this occasion, I tried to go back through the archives and do some fact-checking for you, but there aren’t any actual facts to check. At all. That in itself is a major problem; I have enormous misgivings about these numbers (that I will come to shortly) but a well-ordered presentation of the data going back through the methodology and explaining what assumptions were made and why would have put my mind at rest. Without that no-one can state categorically that this report is flawed, but why not publish that data if you have it? Its absence is, in and of itself, exceedingly troubling. That the mainstream press have apparently swallowed the numbers in this report without even a cursory look at them  is utterly unsurprising, but my lack of surprise doesn’t reduce my anger at their utter incompetence.

Oil spills are (mercifully) quite rare and the rates of various things like evaporation and dispersal will vary from oil field to oil field making the previous values of limited relevance to whatever spill is ongoing. It’s not difficult research (bung a sample in a dish and record how fast it disappears), so it’s probably easier to conduct it anew as and when you need it. That’s all fair enough and, indeed, they state in their report that their numbers are based on something of the sort[2]. But this is supposed to be a report on the disappearance of the oil, if that data exists and these figures are based upon it, why on earth isn’t the data in the report?!

Crude oil is a mixture of different length hydrocarbons, that is, chains of carbon atoms each with hydrogens attached like the legs of a centipede[3]. These hydrocarbons can be straight with the maximum possible number of hydrogens attached, like those pictured below, or they can have missing hydrogens (those are “unsaturated, like your olive oil), or the carbons can wrap around and make rings, sometimes multiple rings joined together.

Image from chemistryland.com

Crude oil is a vastly complicated mixture of many different lengths and shapes, all the way from methane (one carbon) to the various long-chain hydrocarbons found in bitumen, which contain 35 or more carbons. How quickly these molecules evaporate depends, mostly, on how long they are. Methane, of course, is a gas and it comes out of oil deposits as it is formed (this is why natural gas and oil are found together) but as the hydrocarbon chain length increases evaporation is slower. This is the same thing as saying it evaporates at a higher temperature and this property is how petrol and various other products of crude oil are separated; the oil is placed in a still and heat is applied, the still will be very hot at the bottom and will get cooler towards the top. The smaller hydrocarbons are gasses at lower temperatures and so they will raise all the way to the top, where they are collected. As they rise through the column, the longer molecules condense back to a liquid at higher temperatures and can be recovered lower down the still.  Bitumen, which has a boiling temperature of around 900C, sits stubbornly in the bottom of the waiting to be scraped out at the end and sent for road building.

Picture from http://www.elmhurst.edu/

The above matters, because the amount of crude oil that can reasonably be expected to have evaporated over the length of this disaster will be related to the temperature in the gulf (hot by human standards, but darned chilly if you’re bitumen) and the distribution of the various length molecules in this particular brand of oil (each field is unique). The picture above shows a very crude[4] diagram of what an oil distillation tower looks like, that doesn’t matter, what’s important is the length of the hydrocarbons and the temperatures at which they evaporate. You should be able to see that, right at the top, the easiest things to distill is petroleum gas. That evaporates at temperatures up to 40C and only contains hydrocarbons up to 3 carbons long. Anything longer than that and you need to go higher to get evaporation. Let me just say that again for emphasis: anything longer than 3 carbons, and you need temperatures above 40C for evaporation.

The report claims that 16% of the oil has “naturally dispersed” and 25% has “evaporated or dissolved”. Those are some pretty high numbers; I’m no oil-field geologist, but I’d stake quite a large sum of money that considerably less than 25% of Mexican gulf crude oil comprises volatile hydrocarbons of 3Cs or shorter.

There is some margin for error here: longer hydrocarbons will evaporate even at 40C, they just do it very slowly. They also break down in the sea to become shorter more volatile compounds. But still, 25%… REALLY?!

Of course, that 25% isn’t only oil that evaporates, some of it dissolves. “Surely not!” I hear you cry, “oil and water don’t mix, how can crude oil possibly dissolve?”. Well, the short answer is that it doesn’t. Some hydrocarbons do dissolve but the relationship is the same as that for evaporation: some of the shorter ones might manage it, but the longer ones won’t. That means that we don’t have two fractions of the crude with which to get to 25%: our dissolution and evaporation are both coming from the same pool of molecules. A pool that I remain somewhat unconvinced makes up 25% of the total oil that has leaked.

Of course, none of my doubts would matter a jot if they had only published their data, but they didn’t. So I shall continue to doubt.

Then there is the oil that dispersed. They define “dispersed” as “droplets that are less than 100 microns”. Coincidentally, the human eye is capable of resolving objects down to around 100 microns. Translation: “if we can’t see it any more, it isn’t there”. I don’t need to tell you that, even if we can’t see it any more, this oil is still there and it can still enter the food chain and kill countless animals.

Their figure for oil that has dispersed is 16%. Length of the molecules doesn’t effect dispersion so maybe that’s a reasonable number, maybe it isn’t. However, I find it rather difficult to believe anyone can put any sort of meaningful number on it, given that we know there are huge plumes of stringy oily gloop floating below the surface that we can’t even come close to estimating the size of. If we don’t know how much oil there is or where to find it, how on earth can we ever hope to quantify it?

Which brings us to my final question: what exactly was the purpose of this report in the first place? The numbers are estimates, the authors say as much themselves; the figures don’t tell us where the oil is, or how to get rid of it; they don’t quantify the damage already done to this delicate ecosystem or try to predict how much is still to come; and they don’t give any clue as to how long the area will take to recover, or if it ever can. Worse than that, these are estimates based on such little data[5] that they are meaningless.

The only reason I can find for publishing such spurious and dubious data is so that President Obama can stand in front of the US press core in the White House briefing room and tell the world that the fight to contain the spill “is finally close to coming to an end“. I’m sorry Mr President, I don’t believe you.

I’ll leave you with one final staggering quote from the report. The person who wrote this travesty obviously felt that, rather than hard data and figures, what readers really needed was an explanation of the difference between dispersal and dissolution. They explain dissolution like this:

“Dissolution is the process by which individual hydrocarbon molecules from the oil separate and dissolve into the water just as sugar can be dissolved in water.”

No. No they don’t.

If your are interested in finding out some of the unspun real impact of this horrifying disaster, I recommend you check out TEDxOilSpill. I warn you now: it will depress you.

1. These numbers are based on government caca de torro budget best estimates from top scientists and researchers.

2. It is a shame they don7t then publish that information, however, because it would be useful to the environmental scientists and communities that are left trying to clean up the mess.

3. OK, not at all like the legs of a centipede, but the analogy will do for now.

4. Badum tsh.

5. And so much wishful thinking

The Government’s own evidence shows that cutting funding in blue sky research is a false economy and does more harm than good to a recovery. You’d hope that, as science minister, he would understand about the importance of basing your decisions on the evidence. Seemingly not.

The problem, as always, is that blue-sky research tends to operate at some considerable distance from the industries and businesses that are seen to produce the cold, hard cash. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t produce a considerable return on any investment in it*, just that the connection is sometimes hard to see.

While it is true that we must all tighten our belts and make cuts, and that the times ahead are likely to be difficult ones, it seems like a no-brainer to me that we should preferentially avoid cutting things that will get us out of this mess faster.

Is it too much to ask that we have a minister capable of understanding the fundamental tennets of the science he is responsible for, and that, just because early-stage research doesn’t produce a product you can hold in your hand, it still punches far about its weight economically? Unfortunately, the early evidence suggests that it is.

In order to reduce my blood pressure, I took this picture of some pretty blue sky:

Ahhhhhhhh, that’s better.

*according to the science and technology select committee report, that return is a very impressive 25% (approximately)

I don’t believe in evil, although I do believe in evil acts. I don’t believe a fully-functioning and mentally sound human-being would ever knowingly commit an evil act; therefore, if someone commits a truly evil act, they are, by my definition, mentally unwell and should be treated with compassion and care, not hatred and revenge. For that reason, everyday tales of crimes do not affect me overly. I feel for the victim, of course, but I also feel for the person who has committed that act and I find myself wondering what set of circumstances brought them to that point in their life.

I am always acutely aware that, however much we may like to pretend that criminals are different to us, we really are all very similar indeed and, however apparently broken such a person may appear to be, had I experienced the same things they did and/or carried the same sets of genes they do, I would almost certainly have reacted the same way. It’s all down to the luck of the draw and there but for the grace of [insert spiritual reference of choice here] go I.

The human capacity to commit evil acts is close to the surface in all of us. If you disagree with me, ask yourself what it is over our history that has made so many apparently normal, kind and healthy men (and some women) carry out such awful atrocities in wars all over the world. I could list many examples, but the most obvious is, of course, the Jewish holocaust.

The acts that really scare me though, the ones that bring the bile to the back of my throat, are the ones committed by institutions in the name of progress. Man-made edifices built specifically to ensure that no one person feels the weight of the crimes they are committing or the need to take responsibility and change. The holocaust is an example of that but today I find myself battered by a storm of examples of such human failure.

First, of course, is the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. As tales of endemic corner-cutting by an organisation with a rotten culture continue to float to the surface, like the oil released, they are interspersed with devastating tales of pain and suffering inflicted on the wildlife and human inhabitants of the gulf region that go back 50 years. I am sure that, if you asked any of BP’s executives whether they are the kind of person capable of directly causing so many deaths and so much destruction, they would be horrified: “Of course not! I’m a nice person, a kind person, I have two children that I love, I remember to buy my wife (or husband) flowers. I recycle!”. I’m sure they are, and they do and I am certain that will be scant comfort to the families of the oil workers killed in the explosion or those left behind after their loved ones died from cancer caused by pollution or to the fishermen whose livelihoods have been destroyed and which will not recover for years, possibly decades.

Second in today’s litany of the worst of human nature is the upcoming execution by firing squad of Ronnie Lee Gardner in Utah. It isn’t the execution that I find particularly disturbing, nor the choice of method, although as a strong opponent of the death penalty both of those things upset me, the devil here is in the detail. The five men who will make up the firing squad will be policemen drawn by ballot from a pool of volunteers. Afterwards, they will be awarded a commemorative coin for going above and beyond the call of duty. Not only were five men willing to commit an act of cold-blooded murder, so many people were willing to do it they had to hold a ballot. And, instead of being castigated for being willing to take a life so casually, these men will be awarded a medal. I do not consider the anonymous shooting of a man tied to a chair with a hood over his face to be an act above and beyond the call of duty and a man’s life, even one who has committed a terrible crime, should be worth more than 5 commemorative coins.

Finally, I have saved the worst for last. In Cornell university, a surgeon has been carrying out surgery to reduce clitoris size in little girls who’re deemed to have abnormal genitalia; a stupid label that I could write a long post refuting alone. This is a disgusting practice and one that I believe has been correctly labelled “genital mutilation” by those who have already covered this story in more depth than I intend to here. As with everyone who has read this story, however, it isn’t the surgery that is, to me, the most abhorrent part of the procedure: it is the follow up exam. Dix Poppas*, the surgeon responsible, published his methods in his paper and, without any sugar-coating, once a year he uses a vibrator on little girls (mean age: 7 years old) in front of their parents in order to check how much damage his surgery has done to their sexual function. Not half as much as the follow up, I expect. If this man was doing this alone, he would be imprisoned but because he has parental consent, a white coat, a surgical team and ethics committee approval (HOW?!), apparently this sexual abuse of young girls is ok.

I don’t believe any of these people, from the CEO of BP to Dix Poppas are inherently bad, they have all just found themselves in a sub-culture that has lost sight of its morals and convinced itself that unconscionable acts are ok under certain circumstances.

To produce real evil, it takes otherwise good people to stop seeing the real impact of their actions.

Today, I am angry and ashamed of my species.

*I know there is a joke in that name, but I am too sickened to attempt it.

Why is it that all denialists, regardless of what they are denying, are so very keen to produce scientific “data” that backs up their claims? They invariably claim that any evidence that opposes their ideology is either flawed or the result of conspiracy; yet, they fall over themselves to find someone in a white coat, however dodgy, to publicly back them up. Why can’t they see the hypocrisy of their actions?

Whenever yet another study shows homoeopathy works no better than placebo, homoeopaths say their treatments can’t be tested by the scientific method. Yet, they are desperate to fill their explanations with sciencey sounding words and to produce their remedies using a parody of what happens every day in labs all over the world.

Climate change deniers claim all scientists are frauds, and then wheel out misrepresented paper after misrepresented paper in support of their own position.

This is double think on a staggering level and it leaves me quite stunned that so many are capable of such cognitive dissonance on such a scale.

I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised really. I see it everywhere I look in our day-to-day human interactions and disputes and so it really shouldn’t surprise me that we are so good at using it for things like this!

Anyway, here’s 6 tactics denialists use from Martin McKee:

1. Allege that there’s a conspiracy. Claim that scientific consensus has arisen through collusion rather than the accumulation of evidence.
2. Use fake experts to support your story. “Denial always starts with a cadre of pseudo-experts with some credentials that create a facade of credibility,” says Seth Kalichman of the University of Connecticut.
3. Cherry-pick the evidence: trumpet whatever appears to support your case and ignore or rubbish the rest. Carry on trotting out supportive evidence even after it has been discredited.
4. Create impossible standards for your opponents. Claim that the existing evidence is not good enough and demand more. If your opponent comes up with evidence you have demanded, move the goalposts.
5. Use logical fallacies. Hitler opposed smoking, so anti-smoking measures are Nazi. Deliberately misrepresent the scientific consensus and then knock down your straw man.
6. Manufacture doubt. Falsely portray scientists as so divided that basing policy on their advice would be premature. Insist “both sides” must be heard and cry censorship when “dissenting” arguments or experts are rejected.

In the light of the ongoing and increasingly worrisome Horizon oil spill it becomes even more relevant.

I’d like to draw to attention in particular to one comment made about 5 mins into the second video. Germany went from no wind energy to 25% of its electricity from wind (on an average month, 50% on a good one) in 8 years. 8 YEARS! We could have this cracked in two decades and we don’t need nuclear power to do it.