Recently in Environment Category

"God help us if this becomes like baby seals", said a University of Alberta energy economist after research about the extent of pollution downstream from the Athabasca Tar Sands became public a couple of years ago. Protests decrying the Keystone XL pipeline with its associated tar sands may not have reached "baby seals" fervor, but the plan to pump crude oil from Alberta to Texas certainly hasn't raised the popularity of Alberta and its oil extraction industry.

Baby-Sealing the Pipeline, If Not The Tar Sands

The extended pipeline would route through Nebraska's ecologically sensitive Sandhills and the Ogallala Aquifer that supplies millions of people drinking and agriculture water. Nebraskans are especially apoplectic about the prospect of the pipeline with all its hazards running through their lands. They worry about how 91 predicted leaks in the next 50 years will endanger drinking water.

Meanwhile, the company is urging the US to approve laxer standards to allow them to pump more oil at higher pressure through a thinner steel pipeline. TransCanada has promised the safety of the pipeline running over the aquifer and backed that up with bonds.

Of course people have challenged TransCanada's promises, but in corroboration, the US State Department reviews of the project had also been reassuring. That is, until this week, when the agency announced an independent investigation of the pipeline following revelations that the contractor hired by State to do environmental studies and public relations listed TransCanada as a client.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for its part, issued a scathing review of the pipeline project, criticizing projected greenhouse gas emissions, the history of Keystone pipeline spills, probable wetlands destruction, migratory bird disruption, and the impacts the pipeline could have on poor and indigenous populations.

Obama: Not In My Backyard (At Least Not Until After The Election)

Striking against the greenhouse gas emissions from the tar sands and the pipeline, the continued investment in oil energy technologies, and the related environmental affronts, protestors had noisily decamped to Washington DC over the last few months, letting their opinions be known as they marched around the White House and the EPA.

The total of all this -- the thousand turning up to hold hands in a giant circle round President Obama's home, the uncovering of conflicting interests, and the affected state governments discontents built to a grand crescendo until finally the White House announced it needed more time to study the situation.

The administration effectively put the decision off until after the election. (OK, I know, I Obama built my reputation on community organization, but enough for now...) The White House protestors went home to declare success.

Lobbying So Hard It's "Not Lobbying"

It's not for lack of lobbying that the pipeline was postponed. TransCanada and friends did just about all they could do. They spent millions, wrote editorials in places like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and got good support from entities like the American Petroleum Institute, not to mention economists, journalists and citizens on all sides of the political spectrum who impressed talking points like jobs, energy, international cooperation, and opportunity.

The Premier of Alberta, Alison Redford, so new to the job that an internet search results shows her predecessor as Premier, will visit Washington D.C. next week. "Not to lobby", she says, rather she'll explain the economic situation of her oil dependent province and try to improve Alberta's public image. The previous Premier was a big lobbyist for both the tar sands and the pipeline, as depicted in "Ed Stelmach's Clumsy American Romance". British Columbia's The Tyee scoffed at the duplicity of the full page "get out the facts" ad former Premier Stelmach posted in the Washington Post, and winced over the $55,800 of tax payers' dollars he spent on it after the Post rejected his editorial. Between this and visuals of the province as a giant tar sand pit, the new Premier is wasting no time trying to remake Alberta's image in order to sell some oil.

Who Will Love The Pipeline In Their Backyard?

In announcing the postponement, the State Department said it wanted to look at "alternate routes" for the pipeline. While protestors had been promising to stop the pipeline, the Governor of Nebraska was also busy taking his state's cause to Washington. He's not opposed to the pipeline, he said, explaining why he was pushing to get the pipeline rerouted, just didn't want it in that particular part of his state.

This delay that the Obama Administration just served to TransCanada is exactly what corporations do to everyone else when they're trying to keep business the same. One delay at a time, it is actually an end game, and the oil companies play it well. And it turns out they're not happy when someone else is doing the delaying. TransCanada has not been responsive to requests for it to voluntarily change its route. A company spokesperson had warned The Guardian: "You can't just erase a line on a map and draw one somewhere else", and said the move would put the whole project in doubt.

That's doubtful, given how much oil and money is on the table. As Nebraska and grassroots efforts claim a coup, TransCanada will accelerate its lobbying, of course. And where will the pipeline end up? If they keep the current siting, it runs not only through the Ogallala aquifer, the Sandhills and a Nebraska seismic zone, it also crosses through Oklahoma's seismic zone with its recent 5.6 earthquake (and 36 aftershocks in the past week). Would that be good? But what state wants the pipeline in their backyard?

Whatever the new plan, however positive the delay, I'm not sure the protestors can necessarily claim victory quite yet.

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Acronym Required wrote about the Alberta Tar Sands in Gas Pipeline: Open Season Coming to Alaska; Higher Pollution From Alberta Tar Sands, and others.

It's a well known strategy they say. But how well known is it if Wikipedia doesn't even have an entry? It goes like this. Say you're the owner of a dog who's just bitten someone. If you're a chuff, churl or cretin -- or you may say, your average defensive citizen -- you deny it via the so called "Four Dog Defense". Here's how one lawyer explained it to the St. Petersburg Times in 1997 ¹:

1. First of all, I don't have a dog.
2. And if I had a dog, it doesn't bite.
3. And if I had a dog and it did bite, then it didn't bite you.
4. And if I had a dog and it did bite, and it bit you, then you provoked the dog."

The St. Petersburg Times article wasn't actually about a dog, but about the landmark tobacco cases. And the tobacco industry played it something like this, as you may know:

1. Smoking definitely doesn't cause cancer, there's no evidence it causes cancer.
2. There's no consensus on the evidence; smoking may cause cancer but second hand smoke definitely doesn't.
3. Mice may get cancer but mice are not humans, cigarettes are not additive.
4. People choose to smoke -- and who are we to impose on people's constitutional rights? - etc.

Four Dogs Launched a Thousand Ways

"Four Dogs Defense" might to you sound more like a Kung Fu movie, but once introduced, you'll recognize it more often then you'd like. Some people describe the Four Dog Defense as a trial lawyer's adage, but the tobacco industry used it for decades to successfully deflect charges that cigarettes cause cancer. Despite volumes of documents proving of their deception in the form of the tobacco papers, the same companies today mount the same defense, albeit with diminishing success.

You might also be familiar with this strategy not only because of tobacco, but asbestos, lead, bisphenol A or any number of chemicals or "benign" products (sugar, alcohol, etc.) currently on the market.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) used the "Four Dog Defense" to frame their recent investigation: "The Delay Game: How the Chemical Industry Ducks Regulation of the Most Toxic Substances". The report compellingly describes tactics the industries used to stall regulation. It focuses on three chemicals, trichloroethylene (TCE), formaldehyde, and styrene, which have been on the market for decades despite proof they cause morbidity and mortality.

NRDC describes how vested industries spend millions of dollars demanding the EPA conduct new science reviews, how the industries demand "independent" assessments and hire "independent" scientists to do favorable studies; and how they dispatch lobbyists to "influence" politicians and the EPA. Thus, toxic chemicals like formaldehyde, lead, atrazine, TCE stay on the market thanks to a collection of vested interests preventing the EPA from acting on well established science.

Of course for every move that industry makes to stall the EPA - demanding studies, suing, producing biased studies, and publicizing contrarian views aimed to confuse and stall regulation - the EPA and tax payers pay mightily to defend science. Circularly and ironically, taxpayers who already paid for the research to make their living environment healthy, then pay for defense when industry and lobbyists to attack that very science. The taxpayer pay for these attacks on science and the EPA (that the Tea Party and GOP so dearly want to abolish), both with our money and our health.

The TCE Story

This four dog defense strategy has kept trichloroethylene (TCE) on the market for decades. TCE is a solvent used for metal degreasing, commonly for cleaning airplane parts. It's also used in household items such as paint removers, glues, correction fluid, electronic equipment cleaners, rug cleaners, and adhesives. TCE is linked with leukemia, cancers, developmental defects, and problems with the male reproductive system, the immune system, liver, kidney and nervous systems.

TCE is found in hundreds of Super Fund sites, places like like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and military bases. Many of these sites are not giant dumps somep other place in America but right in our communities. When a new housing development gets built in the vicinity of some high stature physics lab in an expensive suburb, for instance, the EPA describes how TCE can contaminate air that gets into homes and water. TCE leaches from the soil into water supplies, evaporates into the air, and poisons humans by any means of ingestion.

And what happens when homeowner's get sick? The four dog defense continues. The effects of TCE on human health were detailed in Jonathan Harr's 1996 non-fiction book A Civil Action.

A Civil Action

As Harr recounts, a large number of people began to die in Woburn, Massachusetts, in what public health officials identified as a leukemia cluster. Three companies, including W.R. Grace and a tannery owned by Beatrice Foods, dumped TCE onto land and it leached into the water supply. During discovery before the trial, companies' defense lawyers deposed the plaintiffs, grilling them on the details of their daily lives. As Harr describes in his book, they produced exhaustive inventories of products used in each plaintiff's house, what they ate, drank, cleaned with...

"five hundred brand-name household products -- cleaning agents and detergents, rug shampoos, cosmetics, nail-polish removers, insect repellents, paints, lawn fertilizers, cold remedies, cough syrups, herbal teas, coffee, even peanut butter."

The goal-oriented lawyers are relentless:

"Do you eat peanut butter?" one of Facher's young associates asked Anne Anderson.
"No," said Anne.
"Did you ever eat peanut butter?"
"I guess everybody living has probably tried it," replied Anne.
"Do your kids eat peanut butter?"
"Well, the same jar has been sitting there an awfully long time, so I guess we don't eat much"
"What kind is it, plain or chunky?"
"Plain, smooth," said Anne."
"You made your children peanut butter sandwiches?"
"They ate some, when they were small"
"When you say, 'some,' could you quantify that?" One or two sandwiches a week for the children?"

Peanut butter can contain aflatoxin, a carcinogen.

As Harr writes, Jan Schlichtmann, lawyer for the plaintiffs, knows that the defendant's lawyers are trying to dilute the evidence in order to develop uncertainty about the origin of the cancers. When at 5:00PM, he requests that the defense lawyers to end their deposition, they ignore him and continue their questioning.

"Do you eat bacon?...(Bacon contains dimethylnitrosamine, a carcinogen.) How often? How many slices? Do you fry it or bake it? Do you have Teflon pans (Teflon is made of a resin containing acrylonitrile, a carcinogen.) How often do you use them? Do you chew sugarless gum? (Saccharin, a carcinogen in mice.) How often? Do you pump your own gas?..."

It continues with each plaintiff, over the next three weeks -- do you bathe, shower, wear deodorant, own a cats, have plastic shower curtains, drink beer, smoke? Each activity or product contains certain carcinogens, passes on certain risks...

While the pre-trial "discovery" of "A Civil Action" drags on, people continue drinking TCE polluted water and breath TCE polluted air.

"Roland Gamache was dying of leukemia by the time his second deposition began. Neither he nor his wife could admit this to each other. But the lawyers all knew. In early October, Gamache did not have strength enough to get out of bed...."

And while these leukemia victims answer inquiries by lawyers working on behalf of TCE dumpers, somewhere else in the world, in another room, at another polished bird's eye maple conference table, lawyers for a different chemical or product question different plaintiffs about their possible exposure to solvents -- have you ever glued anything (glues contain can TCE)? Walked by the old Naval base in the next block?

In the end the Woburn case didn't repair the TCE victims, nor did it motivate universal action on TCE. But law schools use the book as a case study to instruct future lawyers prosecuting (as well as defending) the makers of toxic chemicals. As you can imagine then, with this sort of defense fully proven to work, people injured from environmental toxins have a difficult time getting remedy from the courts.

The Doggy-Dog World of Politicians

Given the tenacity and success of the four dog defense, it was against great odds that after decades years of stalling, not only by industry and lawyers, but by politicians, White House administrations, and the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, the EPA released its final IRIS assessment of TCE last week.

The EPA's last assessment of TCE came in 1987, almost a quarter of a century ago. In 2001 the EPA calculated that based on research to that date, TCE was 5-65 times as toxic as previously thought, especially to children. It can be found in 761 Superfund sites. Since the Department of Defense and Department of Energy would be responsible for cleaning up many of the sites, the agencies fought vigorously to prevent EPA action. OMB reports that DOD action against the rule cost taxpayers a million dollars.

The EPA's path to updating the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA) was tortuous, likewise for the the EPA's completion of the IRIS assessments for the backlog of chemicals with suspected or proven health affects. The EPA is struggling to overcome a failed strategy of depending on industry to produce safety profiles of chemicals, which hasn't adequately safeguarded our health. (Acronym Required started reporting this here in 2005, decades into the battle ²). But progress is hindered - as you can see, industry mounts gargantuan hurdles against the EPA.

Even once people are somewhat convinced that a chemical such as bisphenol A is toxic, lobbyists for industry deploy the four dog defense. This is long after the media loses interest, long after the public tires of hearing about it, long after the environmental groups start in on their next agenda, and long after most politicians drop the issue (now that they're not getting calls from their constituents).

As we speak, politicians that we (you) voted for, "working in our interest" actively fight against the EPA's IRIS assessments and against EPA moves to strengthen TSCA. Their most successful claim against regulating chemicals that cause the loss of life and impede people's ability to work? That the "stringent" rules will "cost jobs". Politicians are lawyers after all, so they know the four dog defense perhaps better than we or Wikipedia.

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¹ "Can This Man Tame Tobacco?" David Barstow St. Petersburg Times April 7, 1997

² Acronym Required wrote about TSCA in of posts a couple of posts about Teflon in 2005; in a few posts on Europe's REACH, for instance The EU on Chemicals: More Strife Across the Pond?; a here and in many posts about bisphenol-A.

A recent Financial Times article reported on a £1.6 million geoengineering trial launched by Spice (stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering) at a British Science Festival. In "Trial Seeks to Hose Down Warming Climate", Clive Cookson describes how the company aimed to test the feasibility of cooling the planet by creating atmospheric conditions simulating volcanic activity. Beyond the trial:

"A full-scale global cooling system would cost more than £5bn and take two decades to install, said Hugh Hunt of Cambridge university, another team member. It would require 10 to 20 gigantic balloons, each the size of Wembley stadium, attached to ships distributed in the world's oceans and pumping 10m tonnes a year of material into the stratosphere.""

Geoengineering - How Far Have We Really Come?

Interesting enough. We often hear of plans for geoengineering. Certainly weather modification has been around for so long that when a Texas licensing board approving projects convened recently, one member suggested that the technology was so routine the licensing board should disband. Although we know generally about cloud seeding and futuristic geoengineering, we don't often hear about experiments with some of the more sophisticated climate technologies, which makes the FT article somewhat interesting.

But even more interesting than the article itself was a letter to the editor in response to the article, published by the FT a couple of days later (Sept. 15). In it, the President of an American aerospace company wrote that the "trial" reported by FT was old news. He explained that injecting particulate matter into the atmosphere has "been in full swing at it for nearly a decade...", and continued "Dozens of aerospace, defence and technical companies like ours have been advising into the initiative for many years. He explained:

"...[a] series of tests to create a polymerised and ionised mixture of certain metals, including aluminium, barium, thorium and selenium, among other contents, was perfected and tested in US facilities. A joint public-private operation, initially called "Cloverleaf", was operationalised and subsequently supported by US state and federal weather modification legislature.

Throughout the continental US, dozens of tanker and other aircraft are daily applying thousands of gallons of aerosol nano-particulates that serve several objectives, including the purported ability to reflect UV radiation. Similar operations are being conducted in Canada and parts of Europe.[emphasis ours]

What the actual secondary effects of this operation are, including human health impacts, are currently unknown or undisclosed. The Bristol university team may be wise to "hose down" those facts as well. In the meantime, anthropogenic climate impact is in this regard, quite real indeed."

REALLY?

Before the Financial Times boldly printed this editorial, people firmly relegated "Cloverleaf Operations" to conspiracy theory territory. True, thousands of YouTube videos devote bazillions of hours to documenting "chemtrails" streaked across blue skies -- often accompanied by music of the producer's choosing, making them no less boring.

And true, hosts of crackling talk radio shows tell audiences that their guests "risk death" divulging whatever huge secret government chemical spraying operation they then divulge.

A search for "chemtrails" on YouTube actually turns up 29,200 results. But have you heard of this chemtrail thing? It's easy to ignore, unless, say, one or more of your formally rational friends goes through some weird mid-life crisis, and with testosterone flagging (my theory), veers off bizarrely denouncing the rational in favor of numerology, Mad Hatter utterings, and chemtrails. Else how would you know? Unless you read the Financial Times editorial section.

Fact or Fiction?

Of course some people -- the subset who espouse chemtrails and read the Financial Times editorials -- were elated: "PROOF!", they crowed on their blogs. But try to find one other mention of such a program in any other respected publication -- one who's mission isn't to divulge "scary secrets your government's hiding from you". Even if the chemtrail crowd isn't totally sniffing glue, the Financial Times editorial seems like a rather casual airing of the news -- and it is news.

It must be true, you say, it's the Financial Times! Many people attest that the FT and its sister publication The Economist do an above respectable job covering science. I really like both publications, but they both publish quite a few "science" articles that are more or less press releases for some company's pie in the sky technology that you've never heard of and will never hear of again. Yes, they have some in depth coverage of science, and sometimes feature British science establishment luminaries like Paul Nurse, but frankly I think their coverage of economics, yachts, and watches is better. The original article on the water aerosol trial was sort of in this in the sky technology vein. But the theme got way more interesting with the editorial.

Existent or Not Existent?

The editorial was written by Mr Matt Andersson, who signed as the CEO of a Chicago company called Indigo Aerospace. Indigo Aerospace is not listed in Hoover's, so it's hard to guess how much money he makes "advising into the initiative". Or maybe he didn't really mean in his letter that his company was running geoengineering programs but more literally that companies "like his" were. Or maybe his company does advise such initiatives.

Being curious, I easily learned that Indigo Aerospace used to be incorporated in Illinois, where they reportedly consulted to Booz Allen Hamilton, known for its military and government business. But as of May, 2011, Illinois lists the Indigo Aerospace Inc. as "involuntarily dissolved". So then is the corporate entity for which he signed as CEO not in existence anymore? This unfortunately throws doubt on his whole Cloverleaf assertion (at least to us). But why be judgmental? FT wasn't.

But we unfortunately don't know if the FT editorial is credible. If we were the FT editorial team we would do a bit more checking into this story -- really. Now we can only wonder: Do governments drastically change weather patterns, ruin sunsets, and subject us to chemical experimentation, and is this so ho-hum that we only read about it on conspiracy theorist sites, on Ron Paul 2012's blog, and in the editorial section of the Financial Times? It's potentially very interesting news people, more please. Or is it a conspiracy theory, as contended by every state agency, military organization, scientist, urban legend site, and news publication -- except for the FT? Mildly interesting but worthwhile noting. What do you wager?

Just Like 1908?

After Hurricane Irene, some people joked that the media sees hurricanes as a grand opportunity to dress up in the newest outdoor gear and brace against the howling wind, downed trees, and rain driving sideways (although sometimes pranksters steal the show.) Hurricanes have all the right elements for media profiteering too - drama, death, destruction and lots of "human interest". But to build drama, you need to build up the storm. On Friday night, August 25th, we linked to these four news stories in successive Tweets:

• Hurricane Irene could be the most destructive hurricane to strike New York City since: 1903 (Published August 26, 2011) 25 Aug tweet acronymrequired
• Hurricane Irene could be the most destructive hurricane to strike New York City since: 1908 (Published August 24, 2011) 25 Aug tweet acronymrequired
• Hurricane Irene could be the most destructive hurricane to strike New York City since: 1938 (Published August 26, 2011 10:28 p.m. EDT) 25 Aug tweet acronymrequired
• Hurricane Irene could be the most destructive hurricane to strike New York City since: 1985 (Published August 26, 2011 1:23AM) 25 Aug tweet acronymrequired

Not only can't forecasters predict with 100% accuracy the power or path of a storm, but certainly, as we showed, newspaper reporters can't. The media can't necessarily be faulted though, after all a hurricane is a moving target. In fact, as long as everyone tunes in, the media actually plays an helpful role public safety role, that is by creating more drama on television then any one person can witness outside, over-the-top media coverage can actually aid public safety officials.

The list of East Coast storms throughout history is extensive, but reporters plucked somewhat random mix of historical events out of the hundreds available: The so called Vagabond Hurricane of 1903, produced 65mph winds in Central Park; the deadly New England Hurricane of 1938, was a Category 3 at landfall; and Hurricane Gloria in 1985 struck as a Category 2 hurricane. It's unclear what storm in 1908 the Lehigh Valley Morning Call reporter was talking about, since none of the storms that year amounted to much, and on August 24th 2011, when the Morning Call published, most reporters were comparing Irene to Hurricane Katrina, not some random storm that blew out to sea in the Caribbean. Maybe the reporter hadn't had their morning coffee.

But there you have it, taken together, it's clear that storms can go many different ways and we don't have the technical or intuitive abilities to predict them exactly accurately, or at least to the degree that audiences seem to be demanding after the event.

That Healthy Cry, The Complainer - Alive and Well

When Irene actually hit, the hurricane created lots of flooding and destruction not to be trifled with. But as the New York Times reported after the storm, some New Yorkers were peeved at the pre-storm hype. New Yorkers expressed anger at the cops on bullhorns telling people to go inside, anger at the storm itself for not living up to its potential, and of course anger with Mayor Bloomberg. One person complained Bloomberg made people spend too much money: "The tuna fish and the other food, O.K., we're going to eat it. I don't need all this water and batteries, though."

But lets compare this outcome with the great bungling of Katrina in 2005, to see how things can easily go the other way. At least 1,836 people died in Katrina and property damage was estimated to be $81 billion 2005 USD.

FEMA took most of the fall for the Hurricane Katrina management disaster, along with FEMA administrator Michael Brown ,who appeared utterly useless despite fervent support from George W. Bush. As we wrote at the time in "FEMA- Turkey Farm Redux?", FEMA had failed US citizens in multiple hurricanes during the administration of George H.W. Bush in the 1980's, and had been expertly revived and made useful during the Bill Clinton administration under the leadership of James E. Witt. Then George W. Bush decimated the revived FEMA, using it as his father had. As the House Appropriations Committee reported in 1992, FEMA had been used as a "political dumping ground, 'a turkey farm', if you will, where large numbers of positions exist that can be conveniently and quietly filled by political appointment". (Washington Post July 31)

So given the recent history of Katrina, and the debacles of several state and city governments in last winter's multiple blizzards, it seems inane that so many people who lived through those disasters now fault Bloomberg as "the boy who cried wolf". But then people might complain no matter what, and given the somewhat unpredictable path of storms, I think everyone would agree that it's better to be alive complaining, than dead and swept out to sea because of lack of government warning.

Assuring Future Disasters are Worse

Of course we don't know how the government would have fared in a worse disaster. And while people complain about the lack of a bigger hurricane, FEMA is currently hindered from helping with Irene. Why? Apparently, a FEMA funding bill is being held up in the Senate while politicians with idiosyncratic proclivities indulge their hypocritical "family values" by meticulously delineating all the organizations that can't be paid with FEMA money.

To our detriment, we ignore larger issues while we complain. FEMA's role takes a role not only during and after a hurricane, but in adequately preparing people ahead of time, as we wrote in "FEMA and Disaster Preparedness". Neither FEMA nor state or local governments adequately helped prepare for Katrina, as we detailed in: "Disaster Preparedness - Can We?". Although states and cities didn't play as large a role in the the federal government failings as G.W. Bush would later say, rewriting of history, their role is important.

Of course, disaster preparedness means not only motivating citizens to buy supplies and stay inside, not only mobilizing a deft response, but shoring up infrastructure ahead of time. In the wake of Katrina, we all heard about the failure of governments to build adequate New Orlean's levees, an issue Acronym Required wrote about in "Levees - Our Blunder". However before Katrina, few people realized just how flagrantly officials ignored warnings about the weak levees. When the hurricane breached the walls, politicians acted surprised, that surprise masking the blunt unwillingness of politicians and US citizens to support and fund infrastructure.

We wrote about more widespread infrastructure failings in 2007, in "Guano Takes the Bridge, Pigeons Take the Fall". But infrastructure is easy to ignore. Just as vociferously as citizens complain about the hype preceding Hurricane Irene¹, they remain stunningly silent on the lack of infrastructure preparedness. In fact there's loud clamoring to dismantle the very agencies that assure our safety. Obama has tried in some ways to address the infrastructure problem, not without criticism.

In the case of the New Orleans levees, the New Orlean's Times-Picayune reports that although $10 billion has been spent upgrading the levees, the Army Corps of Engineers is giving them a failing grade. The report says that the refurbished levees might stand a 100 year event, but a larger event will result in thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in property damage. This was exactly the criticism of the levees after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

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¹ Here's an interesting analysis of the hype-factor of news relating to Hurricane Irene. The author uses a quantity of publications analysis to argue is that the storm was not hyped.

Gus Speth, NRDC founder, book author, law professor, and former academic dean, discusses the root causes of the collective lack of action on climate change and the environment in an interview with Bulletin of Atomic Scientists¹. He starts by pointing out that the United States, one of the world's wealthiest countries, has lost ground not only GDP but on on other quality of life indicators -- economic equality, life expectancy, and the environment. If the world continues its current path, climate change will inevitably get worse. The impact of continued environmental degradation is entwined with economic decline -- but not in the way that prominent messengers would have you believe.

True, climate change is difficult for individuals to come to terms with, especially if it's not directly impacting them. But understanding of the problem is amplified by what he calls "manufactured reaction". It's politics and lack of leadership that's paving the path to continued calamity, Speth says:

"Anxiety about acting on climate change was successfully injected into the Tea Party movement; and, as a result, a large percentage of the Republicans who came into office after the 2010 election were people who were on the record as climate deniers, and now the Congress is full of these people..."

Speth notes how the difference between politics now and the 1970's hampers action.

"American politics since, say, 1980, has gone seriously downhill. The level of public discourse on issues has deteriorated; the willingness of politicians to take up tough issues has deteriorated; and it's just a very different scene today in our country....

In the 1970s we passed a host of environmental measures, almost always with serious bipartisan support. There wasn't really a polarization on environmental issues between the two parties, certainly not like what we have today. Politics was far more civil, and it was far more bipartisan. For example, Senator Edmund Muskie, a Democrat, was a champion of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, but that legislation was also made possible by people like John Sherman Cooper, a Republican, and Howard Baker, also a Republican, and others. I think we've lost a lot of ground politically since that time."

He notes that the Tea Party is a force because of their ability to communicate ideas to the public. On the other hand, effective to communication about climate change and the environment has suffered because no one is communicating the most important ideas to the public, not the media; not the president, not environmental groups. On the media, he says:

"...the news media, when they report these events, aren't taking the time to talk to climate scientists about what's going on. The most they do is ask a meteorologist to comment, rather than digging in to get the real story...The coverage of these issues in Europe and Japan is much better, but the US mainstream media won't get into it. I think they're scared of losing viewers, frankly."

On what Obama needs to do:

"I think that he has got to find a way of using the scientific community, and the extraordinary strength of American and international science on climate change, to go to the public and talk about it. He's got to bring out what has happened in terms of this denial syndrome and expose it."

On policy, he says:

"We should establish a declining cap on the carbon entering the economy, sell the allowances for the carbon that does enter, and rebate the proceeds to the American public on a per capita basis."

Speth notes that major environmental groups have become close to Washington, so they now take an incremental approach constrained by what they think politicians can bear. So much of the action and most of the money today focuses on not losing too much ground from previous actions, rather than defining future goals based on what really needs to be done, for instance, on climate change action. Additionally, Speth notes that environmental law in its current form exists in a silo. Instead, it needs to become incorporated with tax law, corporate law, and laws that impact consumers.

Speth also discusses the "growth imperative" - the fact that politicians and corporations focus on growth, but what they're really talking about is profits. Talk about "the economy" is usually based on the crude GDP measure. However it's a myth that profit creates jobs. In fact our current cycle is one of skyrocketing profits while swaths of workers are laid off. By muddling growth and profits with individual well-being, politicians and corporations can continue to reject investments in clean energy and regulatory attempts to force cleaner manufacturing and production.

There's much more to the interview. Some points are quite obvious to you or me perhaps, but what I like is how the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and Speth cut through the morass of excuses, hand-wringing, and finger-pointing that clutter discussions of climate change and the environment. They clearly focus on the underlying problems with law, economics and politics that smother critical change -- change not as a promise but as action.

¹ Gus Speth: Communicating Environmental Risks in an Age of Disinformation" doi: 10.1177/0096340211413559 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July/August 2011 vol. 67 no. 4 1-7 Article highlights here; full article (subscription) here

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On Communicating Climate Change: "Communicating Climate Change"

On Climate Change denial: Sea Change or Littoral Disaster

Business and Climate Change: "Carbon Emissions Disclosure Project"

Ice core research to study atmospheric conditions 650,000 years ago: "Holocene Days"

Politics and climate change: "Will Loose Lips - Or Global Warming - Sink Ships?".

Carbon emissions regulation after Katrina: "The Environment & Katrina-Slick Oil Fallout"

Drought in the "Amazon", and in "Australia".

Science research communication and climate change: "Research, Politics and Working Less", and "Science Communication".

Why did so many journalists, columnists, editors, bloggers and commenters miss the most obvious clues to science misinformation in a recent bisphenol-A (BPA) story? Why didn't a Knight Journalism blogger call an ethics foul on the guy originating the gross error, as opposed to taking his side and accusing journalists of "ethics breaches?"

Where's The Shining Armored Knight?

A recent "Science Stories" piece at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker site funded by the MIT Knight Journalism Fellowship Program piqued my interest. KSJ tracker Charlie Petit wrote that a Huffington Post columnist was correct to reprimand a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MJS) managing editor for "breaching journalistic ethics".

According to Petit, the ethics violations occurred after Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's (MJS) opinion columnist Pat McIlheran wrote a short column on bisphenol A (BPA). McIlheran said he based his column on a science study. However, George Stanley, the managing editor for MJS, wrote in a comment to McIlheran's story that the author relied on a study by researchers who had conflicts of interest. Knight writer Petit weighed in after being alerted to the "breach" by a HuffPo columnist/American Enterprise Institute (AEI)/Stats.org writer. Petit wrote: "traditional lines of free speech protection have been crossed in a news room". (links to all articles below)

So the Knight Writer Criticized The MJS Manager of Journalistic Ethics --> Based on the Accusations of a BPA Shill writing for HuffPo --> Who Defended the Columnist Who Copied the Words --> of The Same BPA Shill Writing at AEI --> Shills Bent on Promoting Research Funded By the Plastics Industry -- Get It?

Petit stressed that columnists like McIlheran should have freedom to write "reasonably justified opinions" without "worry of public ripostes", especially "from senior members of the news team". As he put it:

"McIlheran was hired to write opinions based on reasonable grounds. The German study seems to provide them, even if it turns out to be wrong. The ME [managing editor] should have pushed "delete" before adding his thoughts to the public comment string...a misdemeanor violation of journalism's non-codified book of ethics, I'd say."

Petit compared the MJS's editor's ethical breach to the Washington Post's handling of a George Will column a couple of years ago. I assume Petit means Will's column "Deep Dark Doomsayers", which scientists, online journalists, writers and newseditors tore apart in February, 2009.

One Man's Hogwash is Another's Gold

The difference, Knight's Petit wrote, is that Will's article was "hogwash", whereas McIheran based his MJS column on real "science", specifically: "the German study". As well, said Petit, critics of the Post column called on op/ed editors to fact check their columnists, whereas the MJS editor breached ethics by commenting online.

I disagree. First, let's quickly consider Petit's comparison of Will's unreasonable "hogwash" to McIlheran's column based on "reasonable grounds" that "the German study seems to provide". Go back and read Will's column. He did reference research, including from the prestigious journal Science. He also cited respected newspapers and magazines, and "quoted" respected experts like Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

By Petit's criteria, if the the MJS column is based on "reasonable grounds", it follows that Will's column is too. Only when people pointed out en masse how false Will's column was did it become "hogwash". ¹ Similarly, McIlheran's column falls apart even faster with one close look. Therefore, the difference, I contend, is that 1) Will was a known climate denialist 2) who denied accepted science, AND most importantly 3) scientists and journalists were paying attention.

News Flash For Journalists and Journalism Ethics Scholars: Repeating a Shill's Words in Your Column Does Not Make them Your Defensible Words

This is a story about journalists, columnists, editors, commenters, and bloggers not paying attention, and by doing so misleading readers.

In MclIheran's 300 word column, fewer than 75 of those words were his. Most words were Jon Entine's, who first wrote about "the German study" for the American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) magazine "The American".² So while Petit declared that McIlheran's column was based on a scientific study "even if it turns out to be wrong" [clever, hedging like that], in fact McIlheran's MJS column was not based on a science study at all, it was based on someone else's interpretation of a study. The distinction is important. McIlheran linked to the study, but apparently didn't read it, because he repeated what he was told by Entine.

McIlheran/Entine's MJS column titled: "Bisphenol A? 'No Noteworthy Risk,' Says Big German Toxicology Panel", leverages the idea of a "big" panel and the large number of studies to substantiate claims of BPA's harmlessness. How large a number of studies? Wrote McIlheran:

"toxicologists reviewed about 5,000 studies and concluded that BPA, used in plastics lining the insides of metal cans and in some plastic bottles, is safe even in products used by young children and prenant women..."

Plus, he direct-quoted Entine's AEI article:

"some 200 studies--almost all small-scale 'explorative' studies on rats--have suggested that BPA might trigger biological activity, including possible neurological or endocrinological effects, and have called it an 'endocrine disruptor.' But after an extensive review of some 5,000 studies, the German toxicologists reaffirmed the scientific consensus that BPA is safe when used even by the most vulnerable populations--young children and pregnant women'"

The first time I read this I nearly spit my drink out of my mouth laughing at the rhetorical deceits, so clever, the: "small scale 'explorative' studies on rats"", "have suggested"", "have called it", and "reaffirmed the scientific consensus"; and not so funny: "even by the most vulnerable...". Together these words comprise two instances of "5,000 studies" and make up one-third of McIlheran's total word count. In short, he spares no space emphasizing the vast number of studies, in order to legitimize his claim that BPA is safe.

Fact-Checking

The gist, Entine/McIlheran wrote, is that scientists made an "extensive review of some 5,000 studies" and found "BPA is safe...even for the most vulnerable populations." The very people for which the FDA has the most concern.

So we glanced at the study abstract, as we're wont to do, and read the first two sentences, which say:

"Despite the fact that more than 5000 safety-related studies HAVE BEEN published on bisphenol A (BPA), there seems to be no resolution of the apparently deadlocked controversy as to whether exposure of the general population to BPA causes adverse effects due to its estrogenicity. Therefore, the Advisory Committee of the German Society of Toxicology reviewed the background and cutting-edge topics of this BPA controversy." (emphasis ours)

Does it say they reviewed 5,000 studies? No. No, they wrote: "more than 5,000 studies have been published". They repeated this line in the introduction of the paper for those who don't read abstracts. This of course makes more sense. I first clicked on the study because I wanted to see what the bibliography for a 5,000 study MEGA/METAreview would look like. 130-170 pages maybe? I wondered, did the journal publish a separate supplement to hold the bibliography?

No, the MJS columnist's source let's say, 'made a mistake'. But how did the mistake get propagated by so many journalists, editors, bloggers, and columnists, especially since this first clue that something was amiss was so easy to catch?

What the "big" panel of German scientists did, was claim "a controversy", then choose some "cutting-edge topics" to render opinions on, then when the press ignored the study (pretty difficult with BPA), AEI/Stats.org stepped in to publicize. (Reading the actual German study proved scintillating, but for now, we're focusing on the "ethics" of the whole thing.)

Define Free Speech

While Petit thinks the problem is the MJS editor, "ethics" and "free speech", I think the problem is that people at MJS, the Knight Science writer, and over one hundred commenters on all the various sites, plus many online sources, all repeated the false accounting. Repeated numbers put forward by industry without checking. Some of the writers even linked to the paper from their articles and/or directly quoted the study, but still said "5000 studies". To recap briefly:

• 1) In an AEI article Entine describes an "extensive review of some 5,000 studies" showing BPA is safe "even to young children and pregnant women".
• 2) Pat McIlheran, MJS columnist, repeats Entine's claim of an "extensive review of some 5,000 studies" finding BPA "harmless." He links to the study on PubMed. Why is the number of studies (albeit false) important? Ask McIlheran, who spent one-third of his post on it, or Entine, who emphasized the weight of "5,000" studies, versus the "200" studies.
• 3) George Stanley, managing editor of MJS criticizes McIlheran for quoting a study where "all" the authors have conflicts of interest, despite more obvious mistakes. ("5,000" is just one) MJS covered the BPA issue a few years ago, winning a George Polk Award, a John Oakes Award, a Grantham Prize Award, a Scripps Howard Award, a Pulitzer nomination, and spot on Bill Moyer's show. They were commended for reviewing over 200 scientific studies. The paper then basically stopped covering BPA.
• 4) Reporter Susanne Rust, award-winning former MJS writer (see above) and former Knight fellow, writes in a freelance MJS article that the "German study examined more than 5,000 scientific papers conducted on the health effects of BPA". Rust gathered comments from scientists for the article.
• 5) Jon Entine, writes a new article on HuffPo assailing both the MJS editor and reporter in a deceptively titled article: "Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Faces Ethics Questions Over Award-Winning BPA Reporting". It's altogether ham-handed. He criticizes Stanley for commenting that "all" of the authors had conflicts of interest, when only a few did. Rust, he says, "glowingly touts the Journal Sentinel for examining nearly 260 studies (as compared to the German group, which reviewed 5,000 studies)".
• 6) Charlie Petit, the Knight Journalism author, links to the HuffPo piece, urges people to read it to understand the issues, and criticizes the MJS managing editor Stanley for "ethics violations" and curtailing a columnist's rights to free speech.

The thrust and parry continued at MJS and elsewhere, but still no corrections. The end result was that columnists, writers, and editors at MJS and HuffPo let Entine, AEI, and Stats.org produce their reporting for them. But if journalists had simply done a 10 second fact-check of the "5,000 studies" claim or other assertions made by their sources or study, would their reporting have informed instead of misled the public?

Fabricating Everything

Of course where there's one mistake, there's more, as in the Will column. For example, in his HuffPo article, Entine re-characterizes the FDA's statement that they have "some concern" for bisphenol A, making the FDA sound off-hand and parochial. In fact, the FDA elevated their concerns for BPA in 2010, especially for infants, children, and fetuses.

"When asked if children faced health dangers", Entine wrote, "Joshua Sharfstein, M.D., the agency's principal deputy commissioner, minced no words: "The FDA is not saying that it's unsafe to use a baby bottle with BPA", since "if we thought it was unsafe, we would be taking strong regulatory action."

He ignores the realities of regulation ³, but more importantly, if you read FDA briefing transcript, you'll see that no one in the briefing said what Entine alleges -- "minced words" or not -- despite the HuffPo "quotes". In the Entine world quotes simply mean what you wish the FDA officials said.

Former FDA Deputy Commissioner Dr. Sharfstein said the safety assessment was "ongoing", and "we [the FDA] share the perspective of the national toxicology program of some concern for the health effects of BPA at low doses in the food supply." Marc Smolonsky, HHS Associate Deputy Secretary, also at the briefing, said:

"we are recommending families and parents to minimize exposure to BPA", and "thanks to new technology and advances in science we now have new research findings about BPA that shows subtle effects of low doses of BPA in laboratory animals, and this has raised new concerns."

The FDA referred parents to HHS for ways to minimize BPA. The FDA also stressed their efforts to change the regulatory paradigm so that the BPA was not classified as a "food additive", a change which would enable the FDA to regulate chemical more effectively. An important goal for the agency is to bring the Toxic Substances and Chemical Act (TSCA) up to date.

Plastic Bottles Out of Sight, BPA Out of Mind?

Public attention to BPA dwindled when people replaced their Nalgene bottles but more than polycarbonate bottles is at stake. Cash register receipts contain BPA - who knew? Soda cans, canned food, and baby formula contain BPA? What else? We'd like to trust that BPA is a non-issue, but then corporations wouldn't be working so hard at misinformation would they?

And while companies know the size of the market for BPA and the thousands of chemicals (toxic and not) being used, you and I and the government don't know which chemicals are in use in what products, which are dangerous, which contain BPA or other toxic chemicals, and how extensive health risks might be. Companies like to keep this knowledge out of the public eye, so they fend off regulators by any means. But regulators also respond to citizens too, which is why it's important for citizens to keep attention to the issue even after newspapers have won their accolades and moved on to the next thing.

Back to the ethics and freedom of speech charges made by our Knight columnist/ethist/arbiter. I've mentioned some ideas, but you decide the ethics. Some questions I find interesting are:

• In contentious issues, "ethics" are often manipulated, bandied about, and brandished at people for made-up reasons or because those people offended the accuser somehow - for instance if it's a news reporter whose investigative reporting threatens a company's profits. So then, if we trust Petit's claim that he's concerned with ethics, are his "non-codified rules" a good way to set ethical standards for the publishing industry?
• The real purpose of comment sections of on-line reporting is for 2-way conversation -- in internet time. The Knight columnist dredges up some ethics charge based on Entine's column, than tries to confine the disagreement to some hidden newsroom meeting place. Why? McIlheran wrote a patently false column on behalf of the chemical industry - basically. The editor, knowledgeable on the subject, wrote a short comment, pointing this out. Banning knowledgeable people turns comments sections into cages for the riffraff to slur one another. Why wouldn't the reader benefit from seeing discussion among the newspaper staff?

  If McIlheran, the column's author, as opposed to Entine, his AEI/Stats.org source, thinks the managing editor made a mistake, why doesn't he add a comment - participate - rather than, as he did, write a whole new column propagating the myths?

• Petit writes that the managing editor compromised McIlheran's freedom of speech. But this is patently false because McIlheran already exercised his freedom of speech, as did Entine, in publishing the MJS column with its claims about big new BPA studies. How could the managing editor's comment violate that? That freedom was not impinged.
• In fact, isn't it violating George Stanley's freedom of speech to curtail him from commenting? Should he write pseudonymously? After all, who essentially wrote McIlheran's column? No McIlheran but
• Given that there are no "codified rules", isn't it curtailing the free speech of the MJS editor to suggest he can't comment? What if the editor commented positively -- "this is a great summary"? Or neutrally - "this is a great summary of AEI's position!" Would that be ok?
• Has Knight's Petit in effect granted corporations/lobbyists freedom of speech over the press -- or individuals -- depending on how you see Stanley's position?

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¹ Coincidentally Stats.org asserts that they're not denialists because they believe in global warming.

² Milwaukee's Best No Longer. By Jon Entine Friday, April 29, 2011

³ We wish the FDA were that efficient, but they're not, they're the epitome of bureaucratic, and when their labyrinths falter there's always OIRA.

Acronym Required's authors have followed Bisphenol A science, regulation and lobbying since 2005. To be continued.

Warner Herzog's latest movie, the highly rated "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" explores some cool cave paintings at the Cave of Chauvet-Pot-D'Arc in France. The ~30,000 year old paintings are significant archaeologically, geographically and culturally, and the movie does a great job of bringing the art of the restricted cave to a larger audience, albeit at times ponderously.

Some people will surely appreciate the mystical sometimes overwrought other-world importance Herzog brings to the cave finds. In the film's postscript, Herzog films some albino crocodiles that he describes as downstream from a nuclear power plant near the valley. The move perhaps encourages the audience to compare some dystopic nuclear future inhabited by spooky radioactive albino crocodiles crawling the land, to his vision of a beautiful pristine valley once populated by mammoths, bears, lions, rhinoceros and loin-clothed artistes.

Herzog seems to imbue the Aurignacian culture with the same mythical qualities that James Cameron gave to the fictional Na'vi of "Avatar", both retroactively feted with qualities he admires, wisdom, god-like eco-consciousness, and the capacity to appreciate (and produce) immense beauty. ¹ Herzog makes a good film reflecting his philosophy. But our ancestors of 30,000 years ago perhaps mastered the exquisite details of very large and dangerous beasts via many close and no doubt brutal encounters. Such encounters perhaps stirred memories that kept them up nights feverishly scratching very vivid animal portraits on cave walls with charcoal sticks. Is it too facile to point out that the art wasn't necessary created in the lush, happy tranquility of a remote French valley as viewed through modern man's eyes 30,000 years later?

When interviewed by Stephen Colbert, Herzog said he wanted the audience to come with him on a "wild fantasy" that "illuminates [the audience]", thus the fiction of radioactive "crocodiles". Without embellishment, he said, reality would be the Manhattan phone directory, 4 million entries, all correct. You would not know what anyone thinks, he said, or cries about...Therefore he's not "this kind of filmmaker". (Colbert invited him to party sometime.)

So the film seems a sort of 'up in smoke' melding of fact and fiction. The paintings are real, but with a fictional allegorical meta-framing. And the postscript crocodiles are in fact non-radioactive alligators, alligators imported to the French Crocodile Farm from Louisiana. There are only about 20 albino alligators in the world apparently, they're rare and genetically fragile - and two are being held at a modern day touristika French Crocodile Farm. So why do we need embellishment?

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¹ Added 06/11/11: Except now I learn Herzog more or less hated "Avatar", comparing it unflatteringly to yoga

A Republican state senator in Oregon cleverly killed a state bill to ban bisphenol A when he reneged on a deal he made with Democrat senator. The bill to ban bisphenol-A in baby bottles (SB 695) had received bipartisan support in a 20-9 vote in April. With such support, people predicted it would continue to committee, but the GOP had other plans.

Oregon Senator Jackie Dingfelder, D-Portland, recounted an agreement she had made with Oregon House environment committee co-chair, Representative Vic Gilliam, R-Silverton. Apparently the two worked out that he would initiate a work session on SB 695 in exchange for committee action on some other bills. According to Dingfelder, Gilliam ditched his end of the bargain and effectively squashed the bill. Gilliam then sent Dingfelder a bottle of Chardonnay and a scrawled note that read: "After all I put you thru yesterday - it is a tribute to your character that you would keep the 1st and 2 parts of our pow-wow inspite of it all."[sic]

Dingfelder told reporters that Gilliam's reasons for dropping the bill were unclear - he indicated the GOP pressured him. One Republican lawmaker offered: "it's not because I want to kill children".

Plastics industry lobbyists had also campaigned against the bill. For instance the American Chemistry Council wrote a letter in early May to Ben Cannon and Vic Gilliam, co-chairs of the state House Energy, Environment and Water Committee. In the letter, ACC used isolated quotes from government agencies about research on canned and packaged food to argue incongruously that polycarbonate baby bottles shouldn't be banned. The letter also misrepresented the US FDA position. The FDA is especially concerned about the endocrine disrupting effects of BPA on babies, and advises parents to avoid using bottles with BPA. It advocates alternatives to BPA lined food containers. Yet the ACC letter stated "optimistically" that the FDA said BPA is "not unsafe" (safe).

Representative Gilliam also voted against a plastic bag ban, noting he thought they should be recycled instead. He said he was disappointed Dingfelder had released their personal correspondence to reporters.

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In our last post we riffed off column in the New York Times titled "Medicine of the Move" (earlier titled "The Body Politic"), where Gail Collins opened with the statement: "sometimes you just want to tell the medical profession to make up its mind". Granted, we conceded, medicine and science can seem confusing. We described in Part I how medical profession recommendations come from science research, which the press can make appear contradictory. As an example, we showed differences between caffeine/diabetes research as presented in the media, compared to the research presented in the original source. We walked through different experimental protocols that would appear to show different results to the unpracticed reader. Finally, we emphasized that although headlines make ordinary science progress into "news" every day, a small research step reported in the "news" should not be confused with a public health recommendation.

As for public health recommendations, yes, doctors change them. But is it that the medical profession that "can't make up it's mind"? After all, medical advice comes from science research studies. Maybe it's scientists who can't make up their minds? In this post I'll explain why people puzzle me when they often complain that doctors/scientists "can't make up their minds". Secondly, I'll explain why I believe this insidious popular notion is actually dangerous.

Would the World Be Better if The Medical Profession Didn't Evolve?

My first point I'll pose in the form of a question -- would the complainers rather that science and medicine be static than dynamic? Lets take the subject of Collins' NYT column that dealt with hormone therapy for female menopause.

First, lets look briefly to history. Hormone therapy came of age in the 1960's, a half a century ago. For perspective, let's look at an accelerated time frame. A century ago, doctors didn't understand that bacteria caused food poisoning. Doctors who admitted patients for so-called "ptomaine poisoning" could wash out patients' mouths, insert tubes in their stomachs, feed them milk, and wring their hands as they watched people stricken with food-borne bacterial infections die. Fifty years later, things had progressed. By mid-century, scientists understood bacterial infections and how they could be treated with antibiotics.

Medicine in the 1950's and 1960's saw the advent of the polio vaccine, the development of ultrasound to see babies inside the womb, and treatment of chronic kidney failure by hemodialysis. In 1960 and 1961 scientists along the East Coast of the US learned that the Hepatitis A virus was caused by shellfish contaminated with raw sewage. In the 1950's and 1960's doctors made major advances in cardiac surgery so they could repair congenital heart defects in babies. Such repairs became feasible when doctors realized that they could use a patient's relative as a live "heart and lung machine". From that, what I'll call a 'proof of concept', technology advanced to machines that could keep patients oxygenated during heart surgery. As you can imagine, the first "heart surgeries" were a messy business, and as in every field of medicine. The 1950's and 1960's brought major improvements to medicine, but in fits and starts. Mid-century, post WWII was the era when hormone therapy became popular.

Who To Blame?

Based on recent findings about the risks associated with hormone therapy, women and doctors now hesitate before turning to hormone therapy. Collins, who developed breast cancer that she attributes to hormone therapy, ended her NYT column with this: "Actually, I don't blame anyone. Except maybe the guy who wrote that "Feminine Forever" book." She's referring to an early hormone therapy proponent and author, gynecologist Dr. Robert Wilson. Today, the book's title sounds suspiciously pseudo-medicine but it probably sounded different to women in the 1960's, half a century ago. In that time of "women's liberation", Wilson chastised the predominantly male medical community for being callous to women. A 1966 Time Magazine article described Mr. Wilson's complaints about doctors:

"physicians generally dismiss post-menopausal changes as part of the 'natural' aging process. Their attitude, [Dr. Wilson] suggests tartly, stems from the fact that "most doctors, being male, are themselves immune to the disease." As he sees it, the menopause is "castration," and [Wilson] asks whether his colleagues would tolerate so casually a similar fate in themselves.

So that was it. In the era of women's liberation, Wilson accused men as standing-by while women became one day bra-less free spirits, the next "castrated" at the youthful age of 50. Which is why in 1966, as Time Magazine put it:

All over the U.S., women in their 40s and 50s are going to doctors and demanding "the pills that will keep me from growing old." Women in their 60s and over are asking for "pills to make me young again." In each case, what they are really asking for are doses of hormones to slow down or reduce the ravages of age.

Now, a half a century later, science studies are finally catching up with individual accounts and showing that some of the risks people had always worried about with hormone therapy could not be ignored. But for the last half a century some women got terrifying first hand knowledge of risks they probably had no had no idea they were assuming. Breast cancer is one of the most publicized concerns, with studies showing 8 in 10,000 women per year contract breast cancer who wouldn't have without hormone therapy. In addition, women who take estrogen and progestin risk more strokes, blood clots and urinary incontinence.

To be fair, there are associated decreases in the incidence of colorectal cancer and hip fractures with hormone therapy. Many women benefited and swore by hormone therapy. But the problem was, no woman nor her doctor, could predict which risk vs. benefits bucket she might fall into. That's always the hardest part, predicting risk given very few knowns and a vast number of unknowns. Today science continues to do research in order to try to find a way that women can glean the benefits of hormone therapy but not incur the risks.

As hormone therapy fades in popularity it may seem intuitive to damn whoever made it popular. Perhaps hormone therapy was in part a cultural movement that's gone the way of hippies? Not quite. Half a century later, women's liberation is less of a cultural driving force in the United States, but women of all ages take take other risks, for instance with plastic surgery. Decades from now, this too might look silly. But now, there's all sorts of rational urging that not only to stay young looking, but to keep a job, to stay in the job market, women must stay looking youthful.

Moving away from the NYT column, if you want to cast blame, there lots of targets. Profit making companies -- pharmaceutical, insurance and media -- all distort public health knowledge. Much has been said about each of these industries.

But people should just as well blame the human body for not making medical science easier and more predictable. Genetic variation assures that people can react differently to the same treatments. The same medication that cures one person, will do nothing for another, and rare cases will kill another. Many women never incurred any negative outcomes from hormone therapy. Scientists are still working to understand why. Doctor try to apply that knowledge for patients' health. Fortunately for all of us, scientists and doctors don't give up, therefore science and medicine continue to evolve. People who think change is a curse, who infer therefore that this progress is a curse should spend some time perusing old medical journals.

The Logic of Blaming Scientists

Medicine and science do change in half a century, true, and that's a good thing. But even if you're looking at science or medical progress over a short time span, does saying medicine/science can't make up its mind make sense?

Isn't it a little like saying "the press can't make up its mind"? After all, science research is almost always translated for the public by the press. What would Bill Keller say? Do "science columnists" like John Tierney at The New York Times behave in concert with journalists/data movers like Julian Assange at WikiLeaks? Can these journalists ("sources", to some) be lumped with journalists that come in the form of TV personalities blogging on the Huffington Post? Are they all part and parcel with twittering science journalism professors? Sure, you can clump together and label professionals if that feels convenient. But in an honest moment no one would compare the entire cohort of "scientists", "doctors", or even "journalists" to a school of sardines flitting hither and thither through the sea until they expire in Santa Barbara harbor from depleting all available oxygen.

Just as absurd, the statement that science or medicine "can't make up its mind" presses the illogical notion that scientists collude in order to present the disparate or outlying findings that you immediately find looking across any subject's vast body of research. I'm sure scientists would love to be gifted with such inordinate non-existent powers over research grants, graduate student experiments, science publishing, reviewers, etc. in order to collude, but the universe is not so magical.

Clearly, the fact that these statements about science agenda's, ignorance, or malevolence do not make sense, but that does not stop their spread. And while the NYT lede was perhaps tongue in cheek, the very common sentiment that scientists can't tell what's going on from all the conflicting research leads to more insidious behavior. This is our second point.

Fostering Dangerous Attitudes about Science and Medicine

Propagating the myth that scientists and doctors present "conflicting" results, and "can't make up their minds" leads citizens to exasperation with research. Few acknowledge how it's all filtered through the press. Fewer still peruse the even the summary, called an "abstract", of original studies, most of which are publicly available online (for instance health at Pubmed).

In this way, the commonly expressed sentiment that scientists change their minds can become in essence a self-serving excuse for apathy: 'How can I take care of my health when scientists and doctors can't even make up their minds?' As the subtitle of the NYT article puts it: "It's very difficult to be a civilian in the world of science." Oh, woe are we. But ironically, by blaming scientists/doctors, citizens resign themselves to fate and thus open themselves to manipulation.

So second to pointing out the fundamental essence of science and medicine that advances at a rapid pace, fortunately for us, I suggest that the myth that scientists can't make up their mind is insidiously destructive because it enables manipulation of the public in matters of science and medicine.

In personal health, if people believe they are helpless, they're less likely to try and understand the science that effects them, less likely to do research, and less likely ask questions of doctors. Distrust of allopathic medicine can also lead people to ignore doctors, to turn to "woo-woo" theories, or to become susceptible to relentless pharmaceutical advertising and absurd press headlines aimed at readers. It's fine to criticize woo-woo science, as many scientist do, taking on homeopathy, acupuncture, anti-vax, chiropractic, chrystals, etc.; but scientists and critics intellectually blinkered if they do that without acknowledging the anti-science industry that gives these sorts of "healers" their power.

Once people have fully accepted the premise that scientists and doctors "can't make up their minds" on personal health data, it's a small step to convince them that science can't make up "it's mind" on anything else either.

Are climate scientists predicting an Ice Age or Global Warming, cry shills for energy "business as usual" (BAU) such as fossil fuel lobbies? And now we have almost half of the US population not believing in climate change, a situation that doesn't bode well for any species. I simplify this of course, people also choose not to believe in climate change because they don't see anything they can do about it. But often that learned helplessness starts with a false indictment of scientists. As in personal health, the false indictment that scientists really don't know anyway is self-serving because it breeds fatalistic apathy.

The apathy leads to further victimization by those who work most effectively when citizens don't pay to close attention. Not only do people believe they can't do anything about global warming, they justify their stance by saying the scientists don't know what's happening either. This becomes the perfect atmosphere for severe policy moves like the destruction of the EPA. Polluted air and water disproportionately effect the elderly, poor, and very young who can't protest, but in the end it will effect everyone. Propagating distrust in science by claiming science can't make up it's mind creates the perfect apathetic breeding ground for such radical policies.

To conclude, I heartily disagree with the idea the medicine or science can't make up it's mind. First, too often people confuse press headlines with medical advice derived from many research studies, each of which is only a building block to public health recommendations. As medical history shows, it's these changes, commonly called progress, that has expanded our lifespan (albeit with risks). It defies logic to say that scientists collude to create conflicting results. Most importantly, the popular idea that science or health professionals "can't make up their minds" feeds a learned helplessness that in turn opens citizens to further manipulation.

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Whose responsibility is it to make sure that people understand science research? In the end, it's the people's, it's society's. Unlike many others, I don't agree that it's up to the scientists' to educate the general public. But that's the subject of another post.

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¹ Pointing out that the media can distort the actual results of studies for the sake of a headline, we asked why, for instance, the lead author would be quoted in this Science Daily study saying "We have known for many years that people with or at risk of Type 2 diabetes should limit their caffeine intake", when the author's actual science journal study (M.-S. Beaudoin, L. E. Robinson, T. E. Graham. An Oral Lipid Challenge and Acute Intake of Caffeinated Coffee Additively Decrease Glucose Tolerance in Healthy Men. Journal of Nutrition, 2011; 141 (4): 574 DOI: 10.3945/jn.110.132761) reported correctly that studies have found a "negative correlation between long- term coffee consumption and type 2 diabetes risks"? See? Study says one thing, news report on the study says another.

My first vision of an earthquake and tsunami was provided by Pearl Buck's 1948 book "The Big Wave", which I read as a child. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami provided vivid details absent in Buck's fiction. This month, Japan's Tohoku earthquake and tsunami surpassed anything we ever knew or could envision. Media provided what fiction and after-the-fact reporting had for centuries left largely to our imaginations and movies. The footage gave a surrealistic feel for the destruction of earthquakes, as we watched people run as huge huge boats got tossed by nature like toys an errant child flings might fling in a bathtub.

Compounding our worries, the modern nuclear world further complicates natural disasters. When Buck wrote in 1948, people were just waking up to both the potential of nuclear power and its immense ability to destruct.

If real events weren't unsettling enough, some people in the media expound on this fear by spreading rumors. Newsweek published an article predicting the next earthquake, titled "The Scariest Earthquake is Yet to Come".

The article described the Pacific Rim's "Ring of Fire" as "a giant bell", with earthquakes occurring sequentially around the reverberating bell. First Chile, then Japan, next the West Coast. Unfortunately Newsweek dabbles in unscientific fear-mongering as we've previously noted, and scientists roundly criticized the article and its bell analogy. But that didn't stop people from believing it, trusted news-source and all.

Watching the Animals

Some in the media took the fear-mongering to the next level. For Neil Cavuto of Fox News, the Newsweek story was just a jumping off point. He decide to push the fear by interview Jim Berkland, a former Santa Clara county employee who used to work evaluating buildings for earthquake risk.

Berkland achieved notoriety in 1989 after he told The Gilroy Dispatch ("serving the greater Gilroy, CA area"), that the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 was imminent. Berkland "predicted" the earthquake by noting full moons, high tides, and cataloging newspaper accounts of lost cats and dogs. As he told one reporter,

"'If you clip out the lost pet columns and splice them together then you will get an excellent bar graph' that shows a build-up to a peak just before an earthquake". (Nov. 30, 1990, The Orange County Register)

Fox's Cavuto described the bell phenomena from Newsweek, and

"what scientists are increasingly calling the so-called ring of fire that is encircling the entire Pacific Ocean"

.

Of course the term "Ring of Fire" isn't newly dubbed, my ancient Rand McNally atlas maps show the Pacific "Ring of Fire" subduction zones. As Berkland told Fox:

"Just before the World Series quake there was very unusual beaching of rare whales in the Ocean Beach, in San Francisco. Just after that, a equally rare pygmy sperm whale washed up at Santa Cruz, within about five miles of the epicenter of the World Series quake. That kind of beaching had never occurred before nor since. So we're looking for strange fish coming into from deep water to the shallow water, wild animals coming into cities."

Over the years, Berkland's criteria for predicting earthquakes has included full moons, high tides, lost homing pigeons, people with headaches, as well as "strange fish and wild animal" sightings. Let's look just at his claims of strange fish and wild animals losing their bearing. If you think about it for one second you'll realize this is not rare. As the world's human population expands, wildlife will inevitably cross our paths, more often as we increasingly disturb them. In a series covering a court case, Acronym Required documented increasing numbers of whale beachings and strandings suspected to be caused by military sonar. In "Whales in a Time of War", we wrote in 2007, "mid-frequency sonar testing caused whale strandings and deaths in North Carolina (2005); at Haro Strait off the coast of Washington State (2003); in the Canary Islands (2004, 2002, 1989, 1986, 1985); Madeira (2000); the U.S. Virgin Islands (1999, 1998); Greece (1996), and the Bahamas (2000)."

This is just whales suspected to be stranded because of sonar, not dolphins, giant squid, or devil crabs. This doesn't include bird and bee die-offs, wayward sea lions, or starving polar bears. If you could actually track the real number of lost, washed up and otherwise misplaced domesticated animals, marine mammals, wildcats, birds, bugs, fish, etc., Berkland's theory would drown instantly in the noisy cacophony of irrelevant data.

Although Berkland said that the rare pygmy sperm whale beaching prior to the Loma Prieta earthquake is unprecedented, scientists say the opposite. Pygmy sperm whales are about dolphin sized, and there have been hundreds of pygmy sperm whale strandings. The animals strand for various reasons, old age, illness, predators, toxins, from following porpoises, or pods sticking with a sick member. They're also deep diving mammals like the dolphins we described in Whales In The Supreme Court, which scientists suspect are more sensitive to sonar.

Recently, a calf and its mother pygmy sperm whale were stranded and died on a beach in Florida. George Beidenbach, director of conservation programs for the Georgia Aquarium's Dolphin Conservation Field Station at Marineland, noted that pygmy sperm whale strandings are the second-most frequent among whales and dolphins, second only to bottlenose dolphins. According to Beidenbach, volunteers come upon whale or dolphin strandings about once a month just on that particular beach. Two different pygmy sperm whales stranded on nearby beaches within a couple of weeks of that mother/pup stranding.

In my very cursory perusal, just for California, there were at least one or two documented strandings of pygmy sperm whales in 1981, 1989, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2003, 2008. This only includes incidences where the strandings were 1) observed 2) reported in a newspaper 3) happened to be seen by me in my brief search. The titles of these newspaper stories inevitably call such strandings "rare". But what are they going to title their news, the editors? "Extremely common and utterly boring pygmy sperm whale stranding?" Unsurprisingly, pygmy sperm whales also wash up in places that don't experience earthquakes -- Texas, France, UK...

Berkland notes natural phenomena to predict earthquakes within a broad window of time for a sometimes expansive geographical area. In December 1999, for instance, he predicted an earthquake between the 23rd and 29th of the month, as one reporter wrote: "with an 85 percent chance of a 3.5-to-6 shaker within 140 miles of San Jose, and an 85 percent chance of a 7-plus somewhere in the world, probably in the Pacific Rim". (Ostler, S. "Cheesy Thoughts on the Moon" Dec. 23 San Francisco Chronicle) As you can imagine, such a non-specific "prediction" heightens the odds of being right. But it still barely increases Berkland's success rate, which incidentally, he claims is much higher than what unbiased observers note.

Predicting Earthquakes, Genius or Beautiful Mind?

For his recent prediction for an earthquake last week on the West Coast -- it didn't happen -- Berkland told Cavuto about a "massive fish kill in Redondo Beach [sardines], a massive fish sweep in in a Mexico [I guess in addition to the drug sweeps], and a bunch of whales come in close to San Diego". If animals swimming within sight in any way predicted earthquakes and tsunamis, not only would whale-watching tourist excursions go out of business but we'd all be up to our ears in earthquake debris or washed out to sea. Nevertheless, plenty of people give in to the fear that Berkland might somehow be right.

But ironically, perhaps focusing on imaginary impending doom distracts people from doing the actual work of preparing for disaster. They twitter fears manufactured by Berkland's full-moon/lost dogs accounts, instead of acting usefully. They could for starters insist that California cities publish the locations of soft-story buildings. Cities are not releasing the data because property owners don't want property values to decrease. Property values are more important that lives lost to collapsed buildings? Twitter that.

Berkland himself used to evaluate building safety for Santa Clara county. Upon his retirement in 1994, one reporter noted that Berkland was respected in the county for assuring building safety and even going head to head with developers. But somewhere along the line, Berkland went from doing the day to day regulatory enforcement work -- helpful, tedious and probably contentious, to the more illustrious role talking to Fox-News TV. "He's a lively and agreeable man with a head full of facts, figures and memories he is eager to share", the same reporter wrote, continuing:

"Interviewing Berkland is like shooting the rapids in a canoe steered only with a Popsicle stick. The current sweeps you willy-nilly from one thought to the next: the baby bobcat he raised as a pet. The fossil shrew he discovered in 1963, later named Adeloblarina berklandi in his honor. The horned toads he caught as he grew up in Glendale..." (Chui, Glennda, San Jose Mercury News April 29, 1994)

The San Francisco Chronicle reported two decades ago that Berkland's wife called him "a walking encyclopedia, with the kind of memory that absorbs incredible amounts of numbers but allows him to forget what it was he went to the store for." (Minton, Torri Jan. 30, 1990 "An Unshakeable Quake Predictor Unfazed by Scorn"). These traits don't necessarily designate an Einstein in our midst, but perhaps help business. Berkland conducts interviews, and runs a for-charge earthquake prognostication call-in line, a website and newsletter.

Earthquake prediction is the type of gig that attracts a certain notoriety and appreciation, as does palm reading. Berkland's not the only one who claims to predict earthquakes, and in this tough economy it's quite nice to see that some such fervent prognosticators find paying audiences.

Unfortunately though, some media outlets are all too willing to make a main attraction out of a sideshow. Fear-mongering distracts attention from politicians spurred by vested interests to clamor that even less money be spent helping protect people from the real catastrophes. In natural disasters, buildings collapse and tsunamis wash out beachfront properties. Nuclear and chemical accidents occur along earthquake prone subduction zones. Inevitably, as has happened with Japan's TEPCO, responsible parties ignore safety measures. But until that catastrophe, people entertain themselves with the imaginary warning bells on a map instead of, for instance, ensuring functional warning bells in earthquake prone towns.