Consensus does not necessarily guarantee sound science
Guest post by Forrest M. Mims III
Consensus is often cited in support of scientific paradigms, including anthropogenic climate change. Australian physicist Tom Quirk has neatly dissected the consensus argument for the human role in climate change in an article in Quadrant Online entitled “Of climate science and stomach bugs.” This curiously entitled piece begins with the story of how Australians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren revolutionized the treatment of stomach ulcers in 1982 when they discovered that peptic ulcers are mainly caused by a bacterium.
While their claim was stubbornly rejected by drug companies and surgeons who profited handsomely from treating ulcer patients, in the end truth prevailed over dogma and Marshall and Warren received the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Quirk’s article then compares the conflicts of interest, money and pseudoscience of the stomach bugs story with the ongoing debate over climate change. His account reinforces the sometimes neglected but essential role of skepticism in all of science and is well worth reading.
See: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2013/01/of-climate-science-and-stomach-bugs
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Brian Johnson UK says:
January 21, 2013 at 11:04 pm
‘Eric H
“Many people cannot get their head around simple solutions.”
Occam’s Razor has been around for centuries. Al Gore and President Obama should use it before they make complete fools of themselves and a shambles of your economy. Same applies to David Cameron and his cronies in the UK’
Good old Occam: “Do not multiply principles (entities – depending on translation) beyond necessity.
Following Occam, one might reverse Shakespeare to read: “What I fear, Horatio, is that there are more things in my philosophy than there are between heaven and earth.”
If ‘concensus = truth’ then why am I not making millions$ betting on the favourites in every horse race?
re: D.B. Stealey says: January 22, 2013 at 4:55 pm
Exactly. And who knows how much the popular vote might shift if campaigns were able to be just as active in every state… for that matter, who knows how the voting would turn out if candidates were only able to spend identical amounts of money (but then there’s that pesky issue of free speech {VBG})
LazyTeenager said (January 22, 2013 at 3:36 am)
“…You see I am a real skeptic…”
to which Bruce Cobb said (January 22, 2013 at 6:58 am)
“…That is highly doubtful. The overwhelming evidence suggests otherwise…”
I must say that I agree with you. After all, because of all the hundreds of peer reviewed comments published each month here on WUWT, the weight of evidence is all on one side of the scales. The consensus among posters questioning his claim of skepticism is an effective proxy measurement of the strength of the evidence.
H. Pylori also causes Acne Rosacea and generally is hard to eradicate, so sometimes need treatment every few years.
FWIW, anyone remember the “Eat Margarine not butter” ads and fads? All the “polyunsaturated” hype of prior decades? Notice it is mostly gone from commercials and much different in tone?
Turns out saturated fats do not cause cholesterol to rise. Leaves it neutral. (They finally did a test with pure tri-stearate and got… nothing happened.) In the early studies all ‘solid fats’ were lumped together. That included all the trans-fat laden shortenings….
Turns out trans-fat is very very bad for you. Even 1/2 gram a day can cause issues. Mono-unsaturates are good, and poly-unsaturates are mostly good (but create carcinogenic acrylamides if used for frying at high temperatures).
So what was “margarine” made from for decades as folks were told to eat it? Yup, about 1/3 Trans Fat… And that partially hydrogenated shortening? Yup. Added trans fats. (Lard has a tiny bit, but is actually modestly unsaturated unless processed).
So the “Professional Advice” to drop lard and butter and use margarine instead was “exactly wrong”. Heart attack rates didn’t go down, they went up.
Now, a couple of decades after the “oopsy” was figure out, most foods have “hydrogenated oil” removed (but not all, yet…) Just in the last year or two margarine has swapped to Palm Oil so is again OK (as long as ‘hydrogenated’ and ‘trans fat’ are not on the label…)
Now did you hear anyone advertising heavily that they told people to eat exactly the wrong thing for decades and fed people the worst stuff by the ton? Nope. Just silence as it slowly slips away…
Also, since they were ‘hard saturated fats’, Palm Oil and Coconut Oil were vilified with the “Saturated” label. One Small Problem. They have very short chain fatty acids. ( 9 to 12 instead of 20 to 22 kind of difference). Turns out “that matters”. So lately Coconut Oil has become trendy as the “new good oil”. Did you hear anyone apologizing for nearly destroying the tropical oils industry a couple of decades back? For telling very health Pacific Islanders that they ought to stop eating their very healthy coconut oils? Nope… Just quietly did a ‘never mind’…
Have you heard anyone pointing out that deep fat frying in polyunsaturated oil was a Very Bad Idea and that mono-unsaturated or even saturated fats are better as they make far less acrylomide? Nope…
So in fact frying in lard, sauté in butter, having that beef steak (preferably grass fed) are all just fine. Frying in soybean, sauté in margarine (old trans fat kind), and having pasta with a sauce made with hydrogenated oil, all the things ‘suggested’ as alternatives? Just very wrong…
And that is why we had the French Anomaly and the Pacific Islander anomaly, and the Eskimo Anomaly, and the … All those folks who kept eating traditional saturated fat foods, but NOT eating hydrogenated artificial trans fats…
Somehow that hasn’t made the nightly TV show in commercials every hour on the hour for decades…
(Me? Dad was a ‘skeptic’ about it from the start. He grew up on an Amish farm diet of loads of eggs, pork, lard, bacon, beef, cheese, etc. Grandad lived to ’90 something’… so we had real butter and eggs and all. My cholesterol has never been ‘an issue’ and my blood pressure is OK too – provided I breath when they take it… I used to stop breathing to not jiggle the instrument. Then I found out that breathing changes it more than anything else. Now I just do deep breathing and can set BP at almost ‘too low’ if desired… They don’t tell you that either…)
So add those to the list of “never mind” things…
Thanks for that diatribe on margarine, Chiefio. I never liked margarine and have enjoyed good NZ butter for the past 30 years, and it’s good to know I was right.
Johnnythelowery says
“Concensus in Biology of the explanatory power of random mutation/natural selection. Unfortunately, the ones tasked with doing the explaining, the evolutionary developmental biologists, are in open revolt, are calling for the complete demolition of the whole of the theory of evolutionary biology and recommend a ‘start from scratch’ approach… The AGW movement: failed science, entrenched careers, massive monetary investment, zero correct predictions, lucrative payoffs for the top people, political entrenchment, mirrors what else is happening in biology and physics. Something i wouldn’t haver said 10 years ago. It’s a massive crisis.”
You’re dead right about AGW proponents and failed science, but which evolutionists are in “open revolt”, calling for a “start from scratch” approach? Do you mean the creationist “scientists” aka intelligent design people? There is no crisis in terms of evolution. Evolution is a fact that anyone can check out for themselves.
AGW is not a fact that anyone can check out for themselves – to believe it one has to have blind faith in the word of those who claim they really know, but can’t really show you why.
Since three months after WUWT’s inception, I have come here nearly daily for one reason: I learn things. I have also had the pleasure of occasionally sharing my expertise in radiation safety. I have never said anything like the following to a poster, but it is time.
Nick, James, lazy teenager and like ilk: You should realise a good percentage of the viewers here are probably like me. Though I read your comments, they are like the wind – I pay them no mind. I can not remember a single incident where your comments added to my knowledge base and hence they are immediately dismissed. I would love to learn something from you, but you need to up your game.
Tadchem: Have a good place(s) we could go in order to get more info on this obesity caused by bacteria theory? Thanks.
EMSmith: I too enjoyed your comment re butter et al. There have been so many things like this in the last forty years where the hyped science was proved wrong and then the hyperbole quietly goes away. A discussion with my 10 year old granddaughter today on the earth’s ozone layer (when was the last time we saw anything in the press about this?) is an example that it takes awhile before the hype completely goes away. The so-called thinning of the ozone layer is still being taught in our schools.
E.M.Smith “Now I just do deep breathing and can set BP at almost ‘too low’ if desired”
I do that too but one time it didn’t work. I was running a little late to make it to my routine physical appointment on time so I went ~90mph for about 10 miles on RT 128 (Boston area) on my motorcycle in light traffic to ‘make up’ a few minutes. Five minutes later I was getting my BP checked – it was through the roof! Apparently, deep breathing doesn’t do much to compensate for elevated adrenaline.
I also remember the push for margarine but I never touched the stuff simply because butter tastes so much better. I’m a fan of the idea that our taste buds were programmed naturally by evolution to try to help extend our longevity. I’ve suspected for years that there was a potential for harm in allowing our taste buds to be fooled by artificial flavors, refined sugars and processed fats; now I’m seeing that my suspicions were justified.
Another example of government “policy” overwhelming science and common sense is the original Apollo program to go to the moon. The meme-pushers of the day insisted that if the Russians got to the moon first, somehow the end of the United States as we knew it was close at hand. Which culminated in Kennedy’s famous “Within the decade…send a man to the moon and return him safe and alive” speech.
Now at the time, space scientists were just drawing up serious plans for exploration, based on the progress in propulsion and guidance that grew out of WWII. Virtually every one of them assumed that the correct way to get to the moon was to first build a space station, supply it, and go from there. But the (artificial) urgency of the situation and Von Braun’s lobbying prevailed and the decision was made to just build a BIG-ASS rocket and go directly, none of this namby-pamby space station junk.
Technically, it worked. It’s hard to argue with the magnificence of the F-1 engines, five of them burning 14 TONS of fuel per second, each fed by a 30,000 HP turbo pump, levitating the heaviest object ever lifted off the surface of the earth, before or since.
However, after the cheering and parades were over, NASA (the manned space flight part) was left as a bloated and inefficient organization without a clear goal. Belatedly, the space station was built, but now without a real purpose, a costly piece of space junk that the US government does not even have a way to reach on its own after the retirement of the Shuttles.
Back in the day, the Iron-Curtain was used as a very convenient shroud to prevent intelligent people in the West from knowing what was really going on in the USSR (and vice versa). Ironically, when we finally got access to the Soviet Lunar Lander, we all saw that it was about as sophisticated as a manually-operated elevator. Their chances of actually reaching the moon were precisely zero, but there was a lot of money to be made in the US by maintaining the illusion.
So we find ourselves today, the the curtain of “a scientific consensus of the experts” is used as a shroud to prevent the public from understanding how weak is the science that Obama is siting in his speech as the rationale for massively costly and ultimately ineffective, government policy decisions. But today we have the Internet and we have WUWT, where intelligent people can and do peek behind the curtain and blow the whistle on the fraudulent scientists, politicians and corporations who are lining up at the federal tit to further bleed the country of much needed productive capital.