Denialism Blog

Denialism Blog

  • Greenpeace Founder Explains Departure: Group Abandoned Science

    An oped in today’s Journal by Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, argues that he left the organization because it abandoned scientific justifications for its advocacy. Moore argues:

    At first, many of the causes we championed, such as opposition to nuclear testing and protection of whales, stemmed from our scientific knowledge of nuclear physics and marine biology. But after six years as one of five directors of Greenpeace International, I observed that none of my fellow directors had any formal science education. They were either political activists or environmental entrepreneurs. Ultimately, a trend toward abandoning scientific objectivity in favor of political agendas forced me to leave Greenpeace in 1986.

    The breaking point was a Greenpeace decision to support a world-wide ban on chlorine. Science shows that adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health, virtually eradicating water-borne diseases such as cholera. And the majority of our pharmaceuticals are based on chlorine chemistry. Simply put, chlorine is essential for our health.

    Having no formal science education myself, I don’t know what to think of where he goes next: to a discussion of banning phthalates in consumer products. In both California and the European Union, regulators have acted to prohibit phthalates in some consumer products. In other areas of consumer protection, California and the EU are ahead of other political bodies, and so, I’ve always assumed that the ban was justified by some finding of consumer risk. Moore seems to think the bans aren’t justified, and that Israel and the EU are going back on the bans:

    Phthalates are the new bogeyman. These chemicals make easy targets since they are hard to understand and difficult to pronounce. Commonly used phthalates, such as diisononyl phthalate (DINP), have been used in everyday products for decades with no evidence of human harm. DINP is the primary plasticizer used in toys. It has been tested by multiple government and independent evaluators, and found to be safe.

    […]

    The antiphthalate activists are running a campaign of fear to implement their political agenda. They have seen success in California, with a state ban on the use of phthalates in infant products, and are pushing for a national ban. This fear campaign merely distracts the public from real environmental threats.

    We all have a responsibility to be environmental stewards. But that stewardship requires that science, not political agendas, drive our public policy.

  • Psedonymity, anonymity, credibility, and the Overlords

    One of the hot topics around here lately is authority and anonymity. It’s a terribly difficult philosophical question—-how can you ever trust a source of information that is second hand? And yet ultimately we all are forced to do it most of the time.

    A potent weapon in the denialist arsenal is the fake expert. The profusion of these charlatans makes identifying trustworthy sources even more important. We have many ways of doing this. We often use our intuition, a powerful but notoriously dicey skill. Sometimes we go by word-of-mouth. Sometimes, we go to established sources of authority, such as the CDC or the Mayo Clinic. Is ScienceBlogs a trustworthy source?

    Absolutely! and Not at all!

    One factor in our favor is the high percentage of real experts who blog under their own names and have verifiable credentials. Another is the fact that most writers here cite primary and secondary sources with links, so that you can follow up on the evidence yourself. Finally, Sciencebloggers often disagree with each other. You will rarely see cranks and fake experts allowing for dissent. Take, for instance, uber-cranks like Joe Mercola and Gary Null. They run “medical” websites. But the information they give out is very thinly veiled propaganda. When you follow their citations to their source, you rarely find credible sources, such as well-known medical journals. Instead, you find unpublished papers by other quacks, or quote-mined statements from reputable journals. Most of the blogs here, even when we’re not at our best, give links and citations that any energetic reader can follow and verify, and the comment sections are open to allow for our own vilification. You’ll rarely if ever see fake experts allowing a lot of unmoderated comments on their websites.

    In looking to see if authorities are trustworthy or not, look for some of these signs—a willingness to be questioned, real citations, substantive information that doesn’t read like some college kid made it up after a night of hard partying. Read, but read with intelligence. And chances are, if someone wants to sell you something that sounds too good to be true, well…

  • Today Is a Big Day for Denialism

    …because today, the first lobbying disclosure reports are due to be filed with Congress under new rules that flowed from the Jack Abramoff scandal. The new law requires quarterly reports, lowers the dollar amount of activity that triggers reporting requirements, and (my favorite), requires trade associations to identify their members in certain circumstances.

    Let me expand on this last requirement–trade associations and coalitions (such as the American Chemistry Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and the like) now have to identify the actual companies behind lobbying efforts when their member companies contribute more than $5,000 and have some involvement in planning the lobbying activities.

    This is very important because it is these trade association and coalitions that are chief purveyors of denialist tactics, and they mask the advocacy of their membership. As a result, it will be much easier to link companies with actual lobbying positions and tactics. This will make it harder for companies to hide behind their coalitions, which are often shameless and accountable to no one. It’s one more imperfect step towards more accountability in business lobbying, and you can download the filings here.

  • Update—kiddo heading home

    We’re heading home from the hospital soon.We’ve gone from, “Daddy, I don’t want to cough anymore…it’s too boring,” to, “Daddy, do pirates have convertibles?”

    But infectious diseases have lots of consequences. I’m starting to get a tickle in my throat and a bit of a cough. I have asthma, and this could really set it off. My father has a type of immunity problem, so he can’t come around her for a while.

    My wife and I planned our first vacation alone together since we were married. Unfortunately, that vacation starts at the end of the week. The kiddo can’t stay with my folks while she’s shedding RSV, so I guess we’ll enjoy springtime in the Midwest.

    But at least I have my curious, funny, adorable daughter back.

    BTW, thanks for all the kind comments. While I don’t believe anyone’s prayers will help my kid, it helps me to know that folks care. Damn, I guess I’m an evil atheist who hates children and puppies (but likes veal).

  • PETA Sponsors Fake Meat Competition

    John Schwartz reports in the Times that PETA:

    …said it would announce plans on Monday for a $1 million prize to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

    I love it! This, in my opinion, is great news. Now the question is, how will the left accept it? Will they call PETA’s petri-dish meat “frankenfood?” Is laboratory-designed food made by lefties more healthy than laboratory-designed food by big agribusiness?! Only time will tell, but it will be fun to watch.

  • Blogger still under fire

    If the uber-fascist wing of the anti-vaccine movement had any scientific credibility, it wouldn’t need to throw around subpoenas. That is what is (still) happening to the author of the Neurodiversty blog (hat tip again to LizDitz).

    I’m sitting here in the hospital with my sick daughter. She has all that modern medicine has to offer, and is thankfully doing well. If she weren’t, my reaction wouldn’t be to abandon science and start slinging blame—she fell ill to a common virus, and that’s that. I certainly wouldn’t start legal action against people who disagree with me. That’s crazy.

    In science, evidence is what makes an argument. Legal threats don’t change physical reality. All they do is intimidate. And if legal intimidation is all the support your crazy hypothesis can gather, then it’s time to give up and go home. Instead of suing bloggers, go home and spend time with your family—that’s how you can help them best.

  • I don't like this at all

    Yesterday my daughter (the one in my picture, but older now) started sneezing—a lot. Allergy season in this part of the country is brutal. We keep a box of kleenex on every flat surface in the house. But this morning she started coughing, and had a low-grade fever, so we knew she was sick, not just allergic. My wife stayed home with her while I represented us at our family’s Passover Seder. When I got home, she was still coughing—a lot. I grabbed a stethoscope and listened to her chest. It wasn’t perfectly clear, but she was coughing and crying so it was hard to hear (also, I’m not a pediatrician). I stepped back for a minute and looked at her. She was miserable. She was using her neck and chest muscles to help her breathe, and her stomach was moving in and out in what’s called a paradoxical pattern. She was clearly not doing well. We grabbed a few things and jumped in the car, heading for my hospital.

    When we got there, she was really struggling. Thankfully, lots of people I knew were working, and we got plugged in pretty fast. After a breathing treatment, she was a little more cheerful, but still breathing about 40 times per minute.

    Any parent knows what it’s like to see your child ill. When I look at her as a patient, I can see how sick she really is, but I try to keep a calm demeanor for her and for my wife—inside I’m screaming, tearing at my clothing, shaking. Her oxygen saturation is in the high 80s to low 90s, but she’s improved since we came in. My wife sends me home to get some rest (like hell!), and the plan is for me to pick them both up in the morning when I come in to round—assuming the little one is well enough.

    I feel horrible leaving them there without me, but one of my residents is taking care of them and I know he’ll call me if anything is going on. Still, it’s laughable to think I can just come home and sleep.

    It turns out she has respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a nasty little respiratory virus that makes little ones miserable. Unfortunately, there is no vaccine for this one. We’re stuck with chance, and I don’t like chance very much tonight. In fact, I don’t like anything very much tonight except my daughter and her big, brown eyes that shine when she laughs, which is most of the time. When she coughs so hard that she can’t speak, I want to vomit.

    But instead, I’m sitting at home next to the phone, typing, and hoping and waiting.

    Addendum:
    So, as soon as I settled in at home, I got called back to the hospital. She’s doing a little better, but not well enough to go home. More later.

    More under the fold—>
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  • Congress Isn't Priceless!

    The financial services industry pumps a huge amount of money into politics. So much so that the industry has special status and gets pretty much what it wants. Things are a bit different now, because the downturn in the economy and mortgage screwup has given Washington some leverage to examine some of the industry’s worse practices, and look at what happens–

    Imagine that you were invited to Washington DC to testify at a hearing on the “Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights.” You travel to Washington, probably on your own expense, to share your frustrations with the one-sidedness of credit card contracts and policies, only to learn that you can’t testify, unless you:

    …would sign a waiver that would permit the credit card companies to make public anything they wanted to tell about their financial records, their credit histories, their purchases, and so on. The Republicans and Democrats had worked out a deal “to be fair to the credit card lenders.” These people couldn’t say anything unless they were willing to let the credit card companies strip them naked in public.

    That craziness is Professor Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law faculty member who has been very critical of the financial services industry and their denialist lackeys. I’ve never heard of a legislative witness having to give up their credit card and bank statements to the public in order to discuss an issue.

    In light of this requirement, Warren asked that the credit card companies be subject to similar terms!

    …During the preceding 3 1/2 hours the credit card issuers had repeatedly made various factual statements about their practices, their customers, their revenues and so on (e.g., “College students have the same default rates as our other customers,” “98% of payments are made for free,” or companies raise interest rates “to control risk, not to increase profits.”) So I asked if the credit card companies were going to testify to such factual statements, would they be required to produce the data to back up the claims so that we could all see it and evaluate it. Katie, Adam, Larry and I all used public data and footnoted our work. Surely it wouldn’t be fair for the credit card companies to make factual assertions that no one could challenge because no one else had any access to their underlying data. If the new rule is that everyone has to release everything so others can challenge it, when the card issuers want to testify as to “facts,” shouldn’t hey have to back up their claims by showing us the numbers?

    I never quite understood the Congressman’s reply. I’m still waiting to find out what fair-is-fair really means.

    This is a great point. I was always a bit disappointed in industry testimony, because they make big points without bothering to provide a footnote, while proponents of reform write substantial critiques, fully footnoted. But when you have the big money that the banking industry has, that doesn’t seem to matter–to republicans or democrats!

  • Whoopie!

    Last night I was reading a book to my daughter at bedtime. It was all about a kid who had chickenpox. I looked at my wife and said, “this is a bit outdated.”

    “So what, it’s cute,” she accurately replied.

    Wow. I hadn’t thought about it much lately, but chickenpox in the U.S. is disappearing rapidly. “Pox parties” are gone. Kids aren’t missing weeks of school. Pediatric ICUs aren’t seeing much varicella pneumonia. Now that I think about it, a number of important lessons I learned in medical school are becoming historical oddities. On my pediatric rotation, we learned to watch for the ominous “thumb print sign” on lateral neck x-rays, along with the stridor and drooling that accompanies epiglottitis. Thanks to the Hib vaccine, this entity is now very rare.

    Of course, these childhood diseases still exist. Mumps is still with us. Measles waxes and wanes. And pertussis (whooping cough) is alive and well.

    In my work as an internist, I see a lot of coughs and colds. They are very common, and a lot of my time is spent dispensing grandmotherly advice and helping people understand why antibiotics are not going to cure a virus. But not every cough is completely benign, and much of the teaching I do is helping young doctors to distinguish the difference.

    Over the last year, I’ve diagnosed around 4 cases of pertussis. Ideally this shouldn’t have happened. Pertussis is relatively harmless in adults, but it is very dangerous to young children. Pertussis used to be a widespread disease. It is fairly benign in adults, causing a bronchitis-like illness. But children are at high risk of becoming very ill. The greatest risk is for children under 6 months old. If they get pertussis, they almost always need to be hospitalized. Pneumonia occurs in about a quarter of them, seizures and brain damage in about 3-5%. Death rates are about 1-2 in 1000. Serious allergic reactions to the vaccine occur in less than one in 100,000 cases.

    If you are unvaccinated and live with someone who has the disease, you will catch it (80-100% transmission rate). Vaccination prevents disease, and when it does not, it lessens the severity. Most importantly, vaccination prevents transmission to those most vulnerable…babies. They are too young to have developed proper immunity. So getting vaccinated is not just for personal protection; it is for the protection of others.

    Vaccination is safe and effective…we already have a way to fight this. The problem is, the vaccine’s effects do not last forever, and if an adult catches it, it looks a lot like a common cold; there is no way to identify and isolate the infected to prevent transmission. Vaccinating everyone protects our most vulnerable, and failure to vaccinate everyone puts our infants at risk.

    Since pertussis immunity wanes with time, a new adult vaccine containing acellular pertussis is now available bundled with tetanus and diphtheria (if you’re under 65). When you go for your next tetanus shot (every 10 years), ask about it. By vaccinating yourself and your family, you can help prevent a child from getting ill. You might even save a life.

    CDC Pertussis Information

    More pertussis information

  • Christian Apologists don't have enough faith

    I don’t normally blog on religion, but there has been an jump in foolish writing coming from the wacky end of the religious spectrum. On the top of the list are folks like Vox Day and Geisler and Turek (I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST). For some Christians, faith isn’t enough, apparently—they want logic and science to be on their side. Apologists perform some crazy cognitive acrobatics to try to prove that their beliefs have some objective reality. (Huge hat tip to Deacon Duncan over at Evangelical Realism.)

    Apologists like to think that they are persecuted for their pursuit of “truth”. For example, to Apologists, there is a vast anti-Christian conspiracy. Whether it’s the crazy atheists keeping all that good Creationist learnin’ out of the public schools, or the New Atheists’ attempt to TAKE OVER TEH WORLD!!11!!, conspiracies are a major part of apologist thinking. As a non-Christian and a true minority, I can tell you that to the rest of us this seems truly bizarre. Every president of my country, the vast majority of Congressmen and women, and most of the residents of the United States are Christians of one sort or another. It hardly seems likely that there is or even could be a conspiracy to oppress them in some way. The U.S. is remarkable in its ability to tolerate every kind of religious wacko, mainstream or not. There has never been a nation more friendly to the religious freedoms of individuals. I’ll tell you what—next time a teacher says in class, “all of the Jewish students may now follow me in the Shema. Anyone who is ‘other’ may sit in a moment of silence. If you are a follower of Jesus the false messiah, I pity you,”—next time that happens to someone you know, I’d like to hear about it. Next time a teacher tells your kid, “Well, Saturday is the Sabbath, not Sunday. I’m sorry, but you fail this quiz,”—next time that happens let me know. I’d especially like to know about the next time someone spray paints Jewish stars all over your church and says, “Nero was right—to the cross with all of you.”

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