Can anyone think of a case...?

From the comments to a post at the Quackometer, about James Randi and his recent statement about climate change (I'm copying just the relevant comments, snipping the rest):

ben goldacre said...
can anyone think of a case where the vast overwhelming majority of scientists, in their own field, all around the world, for a long period of time, by virtue of conspiracy (since that is the commonest accusation) or foolishness, held an opinion that was demonstrably wrong with reference to the facts available the time? and unanimously refused to concede to good quality arguments against their position? i'd be interested if there were any.

17 December, 2009 01:25

Gavin Schofield said...
If you took a loose definition of 'scientist' I suppose you could reasonably argue that, for instance the teachings of someone like Claudius Galen were more or less engraved in stone until around the mid 1500's - even though the facts contradicted them.

"His influence was so great that even when public readings from his texts were contradicted by the plain evidence of simultaneous dissections of the body, these discrepancies were ignored" - Medical Blunders, Robert Youngson & Ian Schott

However, I'd argue that this case and others like it from the same time can reasonably be ignored, as they can safely be considered pre-scientific. I can't think of any case like that from the last hundred or so years. I'm definitely not an expert here, and I could easily be wrong, but that's my current view.

Gavin Schofield, Greater Manchester Skeptics

17 December, 2009 02:43

Jim Lippard said...
Ben Goldacre: The usual example given is regarding meteorites (e.g., Ron Westrum, "Science and Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of Meteorites," _Social Studies of Science_ vol. 8, no. 4, Nov. 1978, pp. 461-493).

17 December, 2009 02:51

Anonymous said...
Ben Goldacre: Many people claim this was (and to some extent is currently) the case for generative grammar in linguistics, providing you treat that as a science. It's far from (obviously) demonstratably incorrect though, and though it's less popular these days many people still support and work in the paradigm, myself included.

17 December, 2009 03:03

Vad said...
@Ben: my best offer to your challenge has to come with a caveat. I believe that the widely held belief that eating meat containing cholesterol leads to heart disease is wrong despite the seeming concensus on the subject. Though this falsehood is NOT being upheld by virtue of a conspiracy. Conspiracy by my definition means a willful, concerted effort of several people, but I don't think that's why the diet-heart/cholesterol has survived for so long despite being wrong.

Eventually that mistake will be corrected by science - which will progress better when the old guard of fat hysterics slowly die off.

I really try to keep out of the climate debate, because I get an icky feeling when I delve into it. I really, really like the idea of saving the planet and making it a paradise for us, but why - WHY - do everyone act like raving mad religionists trying to dumb down the question to one and only one factor: CO2. My soft, imprecise brain pretty much yells at me that this is no different than treating all heart disease as caused by saturated fat. As if there were no dynamics involved and we can just go linear on everyone.

It rubs me the wrong way so hard that I'm getting ready to fall down the likely wrong side of the fence out of nothing but spite.

17 December, 2009 11:40

bengoldacre said...
hi vad,

i think most peeople in medicine have been pretty iffy about the "eating cholesterol causes heart disease" thing for ages tho, as soon as contradictory evidenc started percolating through, and ppl wld now say (i think correctly) that there's something in there that involves cholesterol but its not clear what or how, or that specifically eating less cholesterol is better, but statins work a bit, and they lower cholesterol, and the blood levels correlate with some stuff, etc. it doesnt feel to me like cholesterol and heart disease is a case of almost everyone ignoring the currently available evidence against a theory. possibly a bit more organisational inertia among doctors than working epidemiologists and cardiology researchers too (big field, lots of new info all the time, and we're a bit slow in the head anyway).

the meteorites one is 19th century so i might not read it.

http://sss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/4/461

17 December, 2009 15:02

Tim Farley said...
@BenGoldacre:
"can anyone think of a case where the vast overwhelming majority of scientists ... held an opinion that was demonstrably wrong with reference to the facts available the time?"

I know its not a perfect fit, but what about the "stomach ulcers are caused by acid/stress" thing? I'm thinking about the period after Robin Warren and Barry Marshall put forth their h.pylori theory but before it was generally accepted. They had data, but didn't people refuse to accept it for a while?

17 December, 2009 15:15

Ben Pile said...
@BenGoldacre:
"can anyone think of a case where the vast overwhelming majority of scientists ... held an opinion that was demonstrably wrong with reference to the facts available the time?"

But can anyone think of a case where a scientific argument has been the basis for such a comprehensive transformation of the world's entire political, economic, industrial and social organisation?

The process by which we move from "CO2 from human industry has caused changes to the atmosphere, causing it to warm", to "if we don't change the way we live right now, we're all going to die" needs more scrutiny. While it goes without it, and while many people act as though the imperative was issued by science itself, there will be a question mark over the legitimacy of political responses to climate change, and an even greater question mark over the relationship between scientific and political authority.

17 December, 2009 16:13

Anonymous said...
Ben Goldacre (01.25)

With the constraints you ask for do you seriously expect an answer:


"can anyone think of a case where the vast overwhelming majority of scientists, in their own field, all around the world, for a long period of time, by virtue of conspiracy (since that is the commonest accusation) or foolishness, held an opinion that was demonstrably wrong with reference to the facts available the time? and unanimously refused to concede to good quality arguments against their position? i'd be interested if there were any"


plus as you later say, having to be 20th Century+. I'd suggest you give up looking. You're not exactly being flexible. Why not add "and which were exposed by hackers." to really finish off the quest.


I mean "all around the world" - that's a pretty bizarre constraint in itself.


The conspiracy as such is in the behaviour at CRU and is not necessarily even fully conscious - is it a lie if you believe it to be true? The reality is, as will come to be understood by more of the lamely compliant 'skeptics' so shocked by Randi's statement, that most of climate science is completely malleable to interpretation/ adjustment and relies almost entirely on rhetoric (unprecedented, pre-industrial, natural v anthropogenic, pollutant etc) to persuade the feeble-minded. And for you less feeble 'skeptics' try reading about "distance lending enchantment" and Fleick's work et seq.

17 December, 2009 18:21

Anonymous said...
Continental Drift?

Proposed in 1912 but not taken seriously until the 1960s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener

Not that I'm a climate sceptic

17 December, 2009 21:02

wen said...
Ben

This isn't science - more social assumption. How about Irish prisoners during anti-Irish racist periods - Birmingham 6, Guildford 4, Martina Shanahan (Winchester 3), Judy Ward, Danny McNamee etc. That used evidence. A consensus approved it (jury) and it took years to challenge. Socially we are capable of this. We are still doing it. Ask Jack of Kent.

I was interested once and did a bit of research and at least 1/2 of all Irish women on extreme sentencea in England (more than 15 years) were aquitted at various appeals. This was made up to 2/3 by those who upheld their innocence and behaved as thus after release ie no contact with any policits eg Gillespie sisters. What if that were true for the men too? What social assumptions would that challenge? How would we feel about our justice system during that period if we thought that might be true. (I'll send you the names and sentences and stories if you want).

Every one of them was sent down on consensus by evidence. Social assumptions are very powerful.

Not to undermine you. I'm someone who feels that we've taken taken more out of this planet in the last 200 years than was ever taken before and we are doing so expontially. I am tired of the terror-mongers. Just tell us what are the best things we can do to help ourselves. Stop terrifying us. I think a lot of the denying is because pwople can't cope with the fear anymore.

18 December, 2009 20:48

Architectural realism

Julia's post here reminded me of an architectural triumph at the university I went to, in St Andrews. Andrew Melville Hall, one of the halls of residence, has its own Wikipedia article, which puts it like this:

Designed in the New Brutalist style by the renowned architect James Stirling, Andrew Melville Hall was built during a major expansion of the University in the 1960s using prefabricated concrete modules. Errors in construction meant that extensive remedial work was required over several decades. Plans for further buildings to the same design were abandoned.

It is of a striking design and is situated prominently at the North Haugh on a ridge overlooking the St Andrews Links. The hall resembles passing ships, a common theme of the architect's style.

It has become an important architectural landmark and has been ranked number 12 in the top 100 Scottish buildings of the last 50 years. Despite this, many students and townsfolk continue to regard it as an eyesore.

Here's what it looks like:



Even the grass is landscaped to look like waves, every few student rooms share a small "galley" with, as I remember them, round porthole-like windows, though I can't see these on the pic above (I was in a much nicer Hall until I moved to a cottage, and rarely I visited AMH).

So, the Hall was designed like a ship and the surroundings were landscaped to look like waves. There's a reference to remedial work in the Wiki quote above. I remember that too, it was going on at the time I was there. But I think the Wiki piece is a bit unfair. The "errors in construction" were perhaps just evidence of the architect's devotion to realism.

The Hall hadn't been given adequate foundations. So it sank.

Feet talking

We can perhaps judge the desirability of countries not by happiness indices drawn up by think tanks but rather by migration - which countries are people leaving and which ones are they trying to move to.

Is there a similar judgement to be made about the desirability of forms of political governance within a country by looking at internal migration between constituencies represented by politicians of different parties?

I ask because of this fascinating snippet from an article by John Rentoul in the Independent a week or so ago (emphasis added):

The Boundary Commission is supposed to equalise constituencies anyway: that is its main objective. Yet it always lags behind population change, because it is working on out-of-date data and by the time the changes are made, the population has drifted further from Labour to Conservative areas.

Justice

Chris asks:

should the concept of desert have any role in our thinking about distributive justice?

I'm interested in the use of the word "justice". This word has a long-established symbol:



Justice is, intrinsically, a matter of desert. What is in one of the scale pans must be balanced by what goes into the other. What's happened here - and Chris hasn't done this, initiated this, himself - is that the word has been redefined, meaning in this context "something I think should happen that I want to give great weight to".

This redefinition of words is much more characteristic of socialists than of people from other parts of the political spectrum. "Fair" now means, in political parlance, "high" or "redistributive" - as in the phrase "fair taxation". "Liberty" has been glossed with the word "positive" to mean "ability".

I don't know why this is characteristic of socialism. Orwell, of course, spotted this but I'm not aware he offered any analysis.

Carbon offsetting

Adnams is a very good local brewery here, and I like to do my bit to support local business. But this was a bit of a worry:



Carbon neutral beer? Beer?

Then I realised I had a sack full of carbon in a fairly pure form that could be released into the wild to offset this carbon neutrality. And I had one of these:



Put the two together, and throw into the mix a rib of hung Aberdeen Angus beef, and hey presto:



Carbon offsetting can be fun!

Happy New Year.

Clunkers and market share

Political Math posted this visualisation of the effect of the Cash for Clunkers program. Guess what? The program drove a significant transfer of market share from American car manufacturers to, mainly, Korean and Japanese ones:

A balls up

This happened recently to a medical student I know. On placement in a rural GP's surgery, she was examining a pensioner.

"Are my testicles black?" he asked, to her surprise - the examination was for something completely unrelated. But she asked him to lower his boxer shorts, and looked, the man's testicles were the right colour, felt warm to the touch, had no obvious lumps or other problems.

"That's fine," she said. "Is there anything else?"

"Yes," the man said, speaking slowly and clearly. "Are my test results back?"

Morla equivalence

There's a splendid car crash of pieties in this wibble from the Chief Rabbi:

"Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: money, attention, time and emotional energy. Where today, in European culture with its consumerism and its instant gratification because you're worth it."

There was no room for sacrifice for "the sake of generations not yet born" in such a culture.

"Europe is dying," he concluded and compared the situation in the continent today to ancient Greece with its "sceptics, epicureans and cynics".

He said: "That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it."

Religion was the safeguard of morality and the decline of religion would lead to fragile families and communities in atrophy.

He has a point in his first paragraph. One of my oldest friends and his partner have been through a harrowing few years of miscarriages and disappointments because they left it too late. That follows a history of abortions-of-convenience in younger years. They are very typical of recent generations. The time to have kids is young adulthood, this does involve sacrifices. People who try to have it all simply transfer the costs of their ambition to their children, who have to bear them or forgo existence entirely.

The glib and complacent description of the source of so much human misery and burnt human flesh for so many centuries as the "safeguard of morality" is just par for the course.

It's the comparison with Climate Change that provides the car crash. Human population growth is one of the factors in climate change, if the alarmists are to be believed. The Rabbi's statement can be re-rendered as follows:

[population should rise] is the moral equivalent of [population should fall]

Europe isn't dying. If the massive expansion of population of the past couple of centuries were to be followed by a levelling off and even a slight contraction, so what? That would be a very good thing in all kinds of ways - especially economic and ecological.


Via Laban, who draws rather different conclusions.

Maybe your mother has cancer

Romance is not dead.

Animated stereoscopes

Of old Japan.

While I was away...

You might enjoy this:

Point of the day

I haven't been blogging for personal reasons - been having too good a time to want to sit and type. However, this seems an excellent point, worth repeating, from Jonny Newton:

Nick Griffin looked silly on the programme, but what if the BNP ever got a new leader without a history of statements he wants to repudiate?

And, put slightly differently, from James Cleverly:

When [the BNP] are given the opportunity to act like real politicians they struggle and then they fail... Question Time provided the perfect vehicle to show this incompetence, but the BBC did what so many on the left do, obsess about the BNP and feed their inflated sense of self importance.

An important point

From Gavin Kennedy:

Take the parable of the buyer in contact with the “butcher, the brewer, and the baker”. Most readers of the paragraph containing the parable, who have not read and understood Adam Smith in his books, Moral Sentiments and Wealth Of Nations, go hopelessly adrift in concluding that there is a clash of self-interest between the buyer of his dinner and his suppliers.

When someone buys meat from a butcher, both the self-interest of the butcher and of the buyer are served. This is not a zero-sum game; it is not the case that if someone benefits from a transaction, the other party loses.

The ugliness of the internet

Oh, I know there are worse things. But I did a quick search about Roman Polanski, wondering whether I had any comment to make, and found that you can read the full transcript of the allegations made against him, 20 or 30 pages long, while looking at pictures of his victim as a 13 year old girl, the age at which she was raped.

That's certainly a convenience for the paedophile community.

Curing cancer

I have no idea what the rights and wrongs are of the dispute between two Christian hotel owners and a Muslim woman who claims she was insulted by them. I doubt it should be a police matter, if the woman felt insulted she should have taken her business elsewhere. Personal disagreements are not the business of the police, and nor are hurt feelings.

The Christian couple at the centre of this are members of the Elim Pentecostal Church in Bootle. The largest congregation in the Elim organisation seems to be Kensington Temple, where Revival meetings are being held regularly, conducted by Gypsy William Lee:

"What's the point of praying for people if we don't expect them to be healed?" So said healing evangelist Gypsy William Lee during his recent visit to Kensington Temple in February. "When I pray, I expect God to heal", continued William.

Perhaps this is why William has seen such outstanding examples of God's healing power throughout his ministry. People all around the country have been healed of all kinds of sickness, illness and disease, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, terminal cancer, meningitis, blindness and deafness.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I don't believe anyone has been cured of terminal cancer or Parkinson's, and that there is still only one recorded case of anyone recovering from Alzheimer's - and that wasn't the result of Gypsy William's ministrations.

Performatives

What is a "performative"? Here's some context:

All performatives imply propositions. There's no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on.

A reasonable test of a passage of argument is that the opposite makes sense or that someone might argue it. If it doesn't, or nobody would, the passage is likely to be meaningless in some way, perhaps tautological, perhaps hollow. Perhaps, and this is more often the case, tendentious. I am in favour of "fair" taxation, for example. Nobody would say the opposite, that they are in favour of "unfair" taxation. We're all in favour of fair taxation, we just don't agree what that means. So using the phrase, as some politicians do, is tendentious.

To take an example from the above passage, it talks of "certain beliefs about the nature of reality". Such a belief might be that God exists. Both that sentence and its opposite (God does not exist) make sense. Does it make sense to say that there is no such institution as promising? Would anyone say that? Would someone be frozen, unable to make a promise, because they do not believe there is such a thing as a promise, or that there is but they are unable - not morally unable but unable because of their "beliefs about the nature of reality" - to perform it? If that were the case with someone, it would tell us nothing about the nature of reality, but rather something about that individual's psychology. But nobody would, just as nobody argues for unfair taxation.

You'll probably have guessed we're in the hinterlands of postmodernism here. Wikipedia's page about performativity includes this:

Philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler has used the concept of performativity in her analysis of gender development, as well as in her analysis of political speech. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes Queer Performativity as an ongoing project for transforming the way we may define - and break - boundaries to identity.

Peformativity is incredibly useful to a postmodernist, because it enables them to argue against "positivism" or a "representational idiom". What's a representational idiom? Here's where it gets sinister, as these things usually do. Also from Wikipedia:

Performativity is a concept that is related to speech act theory, to the pragmatics of language, and to the work of J. L. Austin. It accounts for situations where a proposition may constitute or instantiate the object to which it is meant to refer, as in so-called "performative utterances".

The concept of performativity has also been used in science and technology studies and in economic sociology. Andrew Pickering has proposed to shift from a "representational idiom" to a "performative idiom" in the study of science. Michel Callon has proposed to study the performative aspects of economics, i.e. the extent to which economic science plays an important role not only in describing markets and economies, but also in framing them.

In other words, it's being argued that in fields like science and economics, the "performance" of the scientist or economist "frames" the outcomes of their work - and not just that but also the very thing they are studying.

How is this useful to a postmodernist? It's a valuable tool if you're trying to argue something for which there is absolutely no evidence, or against which there is significant evidence. Which brings me to the full context of the first quote. A conversation with Terry Eagleton in the Monthly Review, as reproduced by Norm:

You say he [Dawkins] emphasizes a "propositional" account of religious faith above a "performative" one. But how far can one go believing in God performatively, through political acts, before it becomes a proposition?

TE: All performatives imply propositions. There's no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on. The performative and the propositional work into each other. But it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional, just as it would be for someone trying to analyze a literary text, which is basically a performance. Somebody who didn't grasp that would be making a root-and-branch mistake about the kind of thing being confronted. These new atheists, and, indeed, the great majority of believers, have been conned rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic theology, into believing that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions.

Norm, rightly, remarks:

Terry is right to say, as he does further on in the interview, that 'It is a rationalist error to think that your opponents are simply stupid.' But he's wrong to deny 'that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions'. That may not be all religion is about, but it is, centrally, about that.

Incidentally, thinking your opponents are stupid isn't just a rationalist error, but more on that later. First, I'd like to put in plain English what Eagleton is arguing - because one thing this language does is dress trivial or untenable arguments in fine clothes of verbiage. It is, as Richard Feynman used to say, like turning on a fog machine. Clouds of this fog billow out, and it's hard to see at all, let alone clearly, what the person responsible is saying.

Believing in God "performatively" to "begin with" means that acts, performances, behaviours can lead to specific beliefs. And that's certainly true. The problem with this is that enough ritual, incense, repetition - together with other aspects of religious behaviour, scourging, sexual abstention, sleep deprivation, fasting - can make anyone believe, eventually, in Archwaldo the Giant Turtle. Imagining that rationalists and atheists don't realise this is to accuse them of stupidity. Not only do they realise it, they think it's one of the problems with religious behaviour: it helps you believe in things that aren't true.

The fact that someone believes something has absolutely no bearing on whether or not it's true. The fact that someone can come to religious belief through, or helped by, performance - or that performance is a major part of their religious experience - has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the things they believe are true.

Chris Dillow wrote in support of Eagleton, in terms interesting for one so committed to evidence-based argument. He concluded:

One reason why writing about music is like dancing about architecture is that our language struggles to cross the barrier between practitioner and non-practitioner. Perhaps believer and non-believer will always be unable to understand each other. But then, why should all knowledge and beliefs be explicit rather than tacit and so amenable to “rational” debate?

People do, of course, write perfectly coherently about music, but they don't dance about architecture. I know what Chris means, writing about music is inadequate in some ways, the music has to be experienced. That's true, but it's a false analogy nevertheless. Equally false is the grouping together of knowledge and beliefs. These are not the same thing at all, in some ways they could be said to be opposites. We require belief for assertions for which we have insufficient knowledge, or that run contrary to knowledge. For me to think the world is flat would require belief and the suppression of knowledge, to think it is roughly spherical requires no more than knowledge. The shape of the world can only be determined through rational enquiry - and most importantly it can be determined like that. So can the question of whether, say, deficit spending is appropriate in a recession.

Ultimately, we might reach a stage of understanding of economics where we know - genuinely know - such things in sufficient detail to avoid recessions, or to understand that they are inevitable in the least bad forms of economies but that they can be mitigated according to certain rules. The more recessions we have and the more we study the reality of what happens, the closer we'll get to this stage. Belief, irrational, dogmatic belief, might help. It might produce hunches that can be tested and prove to be correct - as Polanyi argued (Chris's link on the word "tacit"). But the same could be said of throwing darts at a piece of paper with ideas written on it, or throwing dice to choose research avenues. Belief itself is of no value except to the individual holding it and that can be a problem for the rest of us. It's less often an asset.

The same is true of the question of whether or not there is a God. And that is the question, not whether or not some people believe in God, or even why they believe in God except where this is for rational reasons. Eagleton's argument isn't even wrong, it isn't even in the park. But that doesn't matter, it's not meant to be. It's designed to remove the subject from the sphere of the rational - that's what this means: "it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional".

What looks like a clever dismissal of the inflexible Dawkins is actually a retreat from the debate. Eagleton cedes the ground of rational argument and says, instead, that religious belief is brought into existence through performance.

I think Dawkins might agree with that.

Baroness Scotland and resignation

John Rentoul thinks it wasn't Scotland, but whoever was responsible for the legislation she broke should resign. That's much more important than someone resigning for breaking it.

This legislation was malevolent and stupid. Malevolent because it seeks to transfer responsibility for managing immigration from the government to private citizens. I'd be all in favour if that was it, and the government had stepped away from managing migration entirely, leaving it up to the web of individual contracts. But they haven't. So there are people here illegally, but now it's your fault.

Strictly, now it's your fault if you employ them. The correct remedy for illegal migration is to remove the illegal migrants from the country. But no, the government would have to take responsibility for that, and there'd be distressing press coverage of people clinging to door frames by their fingertips, or being given sanctuary in churches. So lots of them stay here. But what we can't do is let them work while they're here. This is the stupid thing. They stay, but can't be productive members of society.

Deficits and Keynes

Two interesting reads. In both cases, people not normally identified with the left make an argument for deficit spending.

Richard Posner, who is difficult to categorise but sometimes identified with libertarian thinking, writes: How I Became a Keynesian. An extract:

But for a confidence-building public-works program to be effective in arresting an economic collapse, the government must be able to finance its increased spending by means that do not reduce private spending commensurately. If it finances the program by taxation, it will be draining cash from the economy at the same time that it is injecting cash into it. But if it borrows to finance the program (deficit spending), or finances it with new money created by the Federal Reserve, the costs may be deferred until the economy is well on the way to recovery and can afford to pay them without endangering economic stability. When investors passively save rather than actively invest, government can borrow their savings (as by selling them government bonds) and use the money for active investment.

From Samuel Brittan's speech to the Spectator Conference a couple of weeks ago:

I am in the delightful position of disagreeing with the consensus wisdom on economic policy. This states that the most important, if disagreeable, task of whatever government is in power after the next election will be to slash the public sector deficit.
[...]
The basic fallacy is known as the fallacy of composition: the belief that what is true on the small scale must be true on the large. Shakespeare's Polonius said "Never a borrower nor a lender be." Margaret Thatcher advised young people not to get into debt (except of course to buy a house!) Even accepting these homilies at their face value, they do not necessarily apply to the Government of the whole country.

The big error of the present economic discussion is to treat national budgets as on a par with the budgets of individuals or firms, which need to balance except for narrowly defined investment projects. Even if you also favour a balanced budget at the national level, it is at most a second order rule to give way if it impedes the achievement of broader economic objectives.

In fact the public sector balance has an entirely different function: that of offsetting gross disequilibria in the national and international economy. If attempted savings exceed investment opportunities, public sector deficits are needed for as long as necessary to fill the gap - a job which will otherwise be done by stagnation and unemployment. When economic recovery has reached a certain stage, the time may come to roll back public sector borrowing. But we have certainly not reached that stage yet and it is far too early to rule out a second or even third leg of the recession.

Starkey on constitutional reform

I know most people who read this will also read Iain Dale, but this paragraph from his interview with David Starkey deserves prominence. Starkey gets it exactly right:

We need a version of the American constitution. When you think of all the silly fuss over the office of Lord Chancellor - when did a Lord Chancellor last do any serious harm? The alleged confusion of political and judicial functions. What's been so striking about a lot of Labour constitutional reform is that on the one hand it's done big things that it shouldn't have done, and it's also done little things that there was no need to do like fiddle around with the position of Lord Chancellor. The catastrophe is one body being both the executive and the legislative. It means that it does neither job very well. In particular our Parliament is useless as a legislature. It's why our legislation is so awful. It's why, of course, MPs have actually got no function. MPs now are, at best, overpaid social workers. What we need, I think, is something very much like the American model, and I would go the whole hog. I would have a directly elected Prime Minister. The emergence of somebody like Gordon Brown, who is so totally unsuited to the office and never actually been subject to the test of election, would be unthinkable in America, because from primaries onwards you are subject to this test. We should have something very much like the American cabinet, which is outside the legislature. We should have an elected Lords. The obvious basis for the Lords are the old counties. The catastrophe of the semi-abolition of the old counties under Heath was a catastrophe. Incidentally, there's only been one government that's as bad as this and that's Heath's. Heath and Joseph together were a catastrophe. Every single thing they touched turned to something brown. I would create a second chamber that has two members elected from each county.

The cooling scare of the 1970s

One of the points that climate alarmists seek to "debunk" nowadays is the idea there was a global cooling scare in the 1970s. Here, for example, is Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, writing of "the myth that climate scientists previously believed the Earth was entering an Ice Age" and linking to a YouTube playlist of global warming information videos that make this claim.

The problem with this is that there was a period of alarmism about a coming ice age, and it involved some of the players in the current warming scare. Alarmist-in-Chief James Hansen's computer models were at the heart of it, for example.

Stephen Schneider achieved some notoriety when, in 1989, he told Discover Magazine that it was important to:

... reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
(emphasis added)

Schneider was also concerned about the risk of global cooling. He took part in a TV show on the subject in May 1978, and footage has now made its way onto YouTube. In this, he talks - very sensibly - about the problems of taking action to avert the anticipated cooling:

We can’t predict with any certainty what’s happening to our own climatic future. How can we come along and intervene then in that ignorance? You could melt the icecaps. What would that do to the coastal cities? The cure could be worse than the disease. Would that better or worse than the risk of an ice age?

It seems Schneider has since tried to deny that he placed any weight on the idea of global cooling. In 1990, he was caught out during a TV interview when confronted with parts of a book he had written in which he discussed this.

Of course, none of this means we are not facing a risk of man-made global warming. It does show that there's what I'll be polite and call a frankness gap. Having been wrong in the past does not prevent someone from being right in the present. But we do seem to be seeing the same people extrapolating, first from a cooling period to a coming ice age, then from a warming period to a future inferno. On the face of it, the human instinct to cry 'disaster' is reacting to any and all fluctuations in temperature.

UPDATE: John Holdren - President Obama's Science Czar - co-authored an essay with Paul Ehrlich in 1971 in which he managed to be alarmist about global cooling and warming at the same time, and also about the heat produced directly by humans, warning of possible 150 foot sea level rises. Full details are at Zomblog.