Calling all bloggers – Help beat the gag on the BBC

Reposted from Don’t Get Fooled Again:

more about “Calling all bloggers – Help beat the …“, posted with vodpod

Late last week the BBC chose to delete from its website a damning Newsnight investigation into the Trafigura scandal, following legal threats from the company and its controversial lawyers, Carter-Ruck.

Previously, other media outlets including the Times and the Independent, had withdrawn stories about the case, amid concerns that the UK press is choosing to engage in self-censorship, rather than risk a confrontation with such a powerful company in the UK’s archaic and one-sided libel courts.

The BBC is a dominant player within the UK media, and its independence – supposedly guaranteed by the millions it receives from licence-payers each year – is vital both to its public service function and its global reputation.

Freedom of speech means very little without an effective and independent media – if it’s true that the BBC’s independence can so easily be compromised by legal threats, then this sets a very dangerous precedent for the future.

The mainstream UK media has so far assiduously avoided reporting on the BBC’s climbdown. Yet it’s an issue that raises serious questions about the state of press freedom in Britain, at a time of unprecedented attacks on the media.

To help subvert this latest attempt to muzzle the press, please embed this video on your blog, and link to this PDF of the original story.

Sorry about merely reposting Richard Wilson’s words, time was short – but here is a link to the Minton report that Trafigura was so anxious to stop the world from knowing about.

Why should I make the data available to you

[BPSDB] In many comments on the CRU hack I’ve seen it alleged that Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit denied his data to another researcher with the words, “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Whenever I’ve seen it quoted, it’s implied that  Jones made the comment in one of the emails. I finally got around to looking for it, in the file FOIA.zip I downloaded soon after the hack was made public – and it ain’t there. Not perhaps surprising, as it really doesn’t sound like the sort of thing an academic would say, except jokingly or sarcastically.

Indeed, the words are there. In August 2007, a fellow researcher warns Jones that the words are being attributed to him by someone else. In October 2009, another colleague sends Jones a copy of the text of an article in the National Review of 23 September 2009. In this Patrick Michaels quotes Warwick Hughes as alleging that Phil Jones said, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”.

So it doesn’t appear to be evidence that Jones actually wrote it.  Given the unreliability and political commitment of all the links in this chain, and that this was one of the main pieces of evidence for the supposed ‘conspiracy’, I think there is even less evidence of wrong-doing.

Conspiracy theories have a tendency to spawn new conspiracies: here’s a climate ’sceptic’ who thinks the CRU staff may have leaked the emails themselves to make ’sceptics’ look stupid. If so, they’ve succeeded.

Words: Correction, Compensation, Adjustment, Proxy, Trick

[BPSDB] Years ago, when I was a researcher, I used a technique called ‘infrared spectroscopy’ a lot.  It involves passing infrared radiation through a sample of a substance, then splitting the infrared radiation up into its various frequencies (a spectrum) and measuring which frequencies are absorbed by the substance. Most substances (though not all) absorb IR radiation.

The resulting pattern of peaks, called bands, can be used in analytical chemistry to identify compounds, if their IR spectra are known. Under favourable conditions, such as the vapours at low pressure I often worked with, you can get information that will help (along with other techniques) to discover the actual shapes of the molecules, and even to discover facts about the internal electronic structure.

So, in theory, all you do is pass the IR through the sample and record the spectrum, right? No. Between the lamp and the sample are other things that absorb IR. These could include the solvent (if you’ve had to dissolve the sample), but, in particular, there is carbon dioxide, which is a component of air that strongly absorbs IR. So your spectrum includes bands from the interfering substances, which will complicate matters and likely obscure details of the spectrum you want to see.

But there is a clever trick (that word came immediately to my mind writing this, in the sense of a clever thing to do). That is, you split the IR beam into two, and pass one half through the sample and the other through a path of the same length containing all the things (air, solvent, etc.) except the sample itself. Then you can electronically subtract the signal from the reference beam (the one without sample) from the signal from the sample beam. And you are left with the signal that comes from the sample alone. Clever, eh?

This is called correction or compensation. There is nothing dishonest about it. The result is a genuine spectrum. If anyone is being cheated, it is nature being tricked into giving up her secrets, as without the compensation or correction you would have much less, if any, information about the sample spectrum.

I mention this, as hordes of global warming ‘sceptics’ have been crying ‘fraud’ simply through seeing words like ‘correction’, ‘adjustment’ and even ‘trick’ in some otherwise unremarkable stolen emails containing informal correspondence between climate scientists. These words do not in themselves imply anything nefarious. Now there may have been improper behaviour on the part of the scientists, but that would require some contexts for these words, providing some actual evidence. But no evidence for serious wrong-doing (apart, apparently, from getting irritated with ignorant harassment) has been presented.

Corrections are not limited to the lab. Whenever you press the ‘tare’ button on a set of kitchen scales, you are making a correction, by subtracting the weight of the bowl from the flour you are weighing out. Without that correction you will have a less satisfactory cake. Corrections, or compensations, or adjustments, are an essential part of the tricks needed to extract real data from the raw data of the real world.

In science, most things are not measurable directly. Temperature is one of them. When you measure a temperature, you are actually measuring an electric current that changes numbers on a display or moves a needle on a dial. Or you are measuring the expansion of a liquid (alcohol or mercury) along a tube. Neither method measures temperature directly, which is, in fact, impossible. What you are measuring is a proxy for temperature: another measurable quantity that is related to temperature in a way that is known from theory and tested by practice. But the manufacturer still has to make corrections to ensure that the fixed points of the measuring device correspond to the fixed points of the standard temperature scale. Building these corrections in is called calibration.

Actual measurements of temperature, using thermometers, go back only a short time, at most a couple of centuries in relatively few places. That means that scientists trying to study temperature way back in history or beyond have to use proxies – whatever they can find, wherever they can find them. The proxies include annual tree-ring growth, ratios of isotopes of oxygen in ancient snow, and the patterns of annual deposition in lakes (varves). These may not vary in a straight line relationship with temperature. Also, nature may inconsiderately have placed the proxies in different places at different times, such as trees growing at different heights.

To try to make these separate items match up, you need to calibrate, or adjust, the data, so they represent the temperatures correctly. For example, you may need to allow for trees growing at different rates at different heights. You can imagine that a great part of research is given over to debate about these corrections. But there is nothing essentially dishonest about doing this. If you find that numerous different proxies, when compared over the same period of time, agree pretty well, then you can have reasonable confidence that the proxies are measuring the same thing. So it is with the so-called ‘hockey-stick’ graphs.

Trick or heat, continued

[BPSDB] 32,500,000 hits for ‘climategate’ on Google today, and I’m beginning to feel as if I’ve seen most of them. Lots of repetition there, but what I have yet to see is any actual evidence of climate data being suppressed or distorted to falsify conclusions. Only tendentious interpretations of selected quotes from emails that were themselves selected from what must have been ongoing conversations.

Possibly the scientists involved did not behave entirely correctly to other people, but I expect that will come out in the investigation.  I’m both a sceptical person and an old-fashioned believer in innocent till proven guilty, so I will wait for the results of the investigation before passing judgement on the scientists.

A  thousand emails out of a something like a decade and a half means that the emails have been drastically selected out of a very much larger number (and possibly redacted too). Whoever stole the emails is clearly manipulating his audience and rather a lot of commenters seem unaware of the possibility that they are being manipulated.

What is also clear that some people jumped to ‘obvious’ – just too obvious – and daft conclusions about what certain emails ‘meant’. For example, an email by Kevin Trenberth was widely taken to be a climate scientist expressing private doubts that global warming is happening, but it was actually a comment on short-term variability and was discussed openly in his publication here. Lots of people desperate to believe that global warming is  a hoax fell for this one, like Andrew Orlowski at The Register and the frankly begging-to-be-taken-to-the-cleaners James Delingpole.

Trick or heat

Regardless of hacked emails (genuine or not), this is the real news about global warming:

http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.com/

Kill an oppressive injunction – pass it on

From The Guardian web site on 12 October 2009:

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

You can look it up in the parliamentary Order Book online, Questions for Oral or Written Answer beginning on Tuesday 13 October 2009, no. 61:

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

Here is the background from the Guardian, and here is the same story covered by BBC Newsnight. These two defied Trafigura’s attempts to suppress the truth.

Updates: This is a link to the so-called Minton Report about the toxicity of the waste that was apparently dumped in Ivory Coast by contractors hired by Trafigura. It appears to be this information that Trafigura does not want people to know, but it is now in the public domain.

Petition to Number 10 here.

Carter-Ruck backed down.

Fake medicine and AIDS denial are ‘charitable’

[BPSDB] Richard Wilson wrote this about a registered charity that is actively promoting AIDS denial.

This reminded me that, last year, I wrote to the same Charity Commission to complain about Frontline Homeopathy, which collects funds to promote homeopathy as “as an effective, low cost primary health care system” in developing countries. I got this reply. The Commission’s criterion is ‘charitable’, which apparently has nothing to do with ‘true’ or ‘effective’.

Thank you for your request.

The Commission’s policy on registering charities who pursue practices which constitute alternative and complimentary medicine was made following our Decision on the application for registered charity status from the National Federation of Spiritual Healers. Please see the link below for more details (you may need to scroll down to see the specific case and our findings).

www.charitycommission.gov.uk/tcc/issueguidesum.asp

I trust you will find this useful.

Perhaps this is matter for another campaign by bloggers?

Beware the spinal trap

Image via Wikipedia

[BPSDB] Along with many other blogs and magazines, I am reproducing, below, Simon Singh’s article on chiropractic, which led to his being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association. The full story can be found here. The point of the publication is to show support for Singh in his fighting the libel case. Please sign the statement at Sense About Science, if you haven’t already done so.

It is true, as Singh writes below, that chiropractors make claims for treatments for which there is little or no evidence of their effectiveness, but there are definite risks associated with chiropractic.

Beware the spinal trap

Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results – and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

In fact, Palmer’s first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact some still possess quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything, including helping treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying – even though there is not a jot of evidence.

I can confidently label these assertions as utter nonsense because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

But what about chiropractic in the context of treating back problems? Manipulating the spine can cure some problems, but results are mixed. To be fair, conventional approaches, such as physiotherapy, also struggle to treat back problems with any consistency. Nevertheless, conventional therapy is still preferable because of the serious dangers associated with chiropractic.

In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.

More worryingly, the hallmark technique of the chiropractor, known as high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust, carries much more significant risks. This involves pushing joints beyond their natural range of motion by applying a short, sharp force. Although this is a safe procedure for most patients, others can suffer dislocations and fractures.

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: “Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck.”

This case is not unique. In Canada alone there have been several other women who have died after receiving chiropractic therapy, and Edzard Ernst has identified about 700 cases of serious complications among the medical literature. This should be a major concern for health officials, particularly as under-reporting will mean that the actual number of cases is much higher.

If spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.

Simon Singh is a science writer in London and the co-author, with Edzard Ernst, of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial. This is an edited version of an article published in The Guardian for which Singh is being personally sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association.

Update: The above article was modified by removing the words complained of by the BCA. However, the BCA has published these words itself , so you can form your own opinion on whether the original article could damage the reputation of the BCA or not.

How people are manipulated by sleazy lies

[BPSDB] Contrary to what many people believe, the camera and its still image always lie. Our visual perception of the world depends on a jerky series of images that the brain interprets as continual motion. This is especially important as we interpret other people’s faces, which are expressive through their unending mobility.

Stop that motion through the mechanism of a photograph, and we are left with something, motionless, flat and two-dimensional, that we cannot help but try to interpret as if it were part of the moving three-dimensional world. Wise people realise that they are being deceived and deliberately try to treat the impression with scepticism derived from their knowledge of the world and the weaknesses of the human eye and brain. But these weaknesses are easily exploited by the unscrupulous when the people viewing the picture are unwary. I have seen pictures taken of audience members at political party conferences showing fleeting facial expressions that are then “interpreted” to make implications about the relationship between the listener and the speaker.

A spectacular illustration of this manipulation is a recent still from a video taken of President Barack Obama, reported here by Angry Mob and discussed by the MSNBC reporters in the embedded video. Observe how fast the steps of the action take place, and how the moving scene leaves no room for the misinterpretation that seems almost obvious from the still. It is not just that the photo completely deceives us about the situation, but that the still was clearly selected from the original video to give a false interpretation.

The human brain is prone to cognitive errors, not only in interpreting visual information, but in processing other kinds of data too. It is noteworthy that the kind of sources actively promoting this lie are the kind that are likely to use other cognitive errors in order to promote denial of the existence of man-made global warming, a phenomenon firmly established by scientific research. Some of this manipulation is undoubtedly deliberate, but in most cases the misinformation is passed on by people who themselves are willingly and unsceptically manipulated, because it agrees with what they want to believe.

Welsh Marches Humanist Group

There is now a new web site for the well-established Welsh Marches Humanist group. This covers adjacent parts of Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and mid-Wales, around Ludlow, Leominster and Hereford.