The problems that belief can cause

Unfounded beliefs can cause awful tragedy.  The Americans fought a disastrous war in Vietnam because they believed the Vietnamese were in league with the Chinese communists.  Years and thousands of wasted lives later, they found out that the Vietnamese and the Chinese had been at odds for a millennium. And Blair's belief in Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had Britain joining the Americans in wrecking Iraq, again with countless thousands of dead.

Of course, the moment you start to consider the futility of religious wars, the folly of ill-founded belief becomes only too obvious.  But I am more concerned with beliefs that are at least demonstrably on the shakiest of grounds.  In particular, those where there is good science to establish a strong base for disbelief.

Of course, I immediately recognize the problem in that weasel word "good." How do you tell good science from bad?  The philosopher Karl Popper is my favorite source for answering this question.  In essence, one of his strongest tests is that a good scientific finding is one that is independently replicable. If I scientist tell you non-scientist that I did X and Y was the result, and I also tell you how I did X, and you follow my recipe and Y happens, then you have a strong basis for believing that X causes Y. That is good science.

Of course, we may not have established the true basis for the link between X and Y, but at least we have a working hypothesis on which to found further questions.  And by linking a whole body of questions and their testable answers, we can build a world view that possesses a strong logic.  Armed with such a view, the need for belief in answering new questions weakens.

We may ultimately find that the link between X and Y is fortuitous, and that there is a better answer which improves our world view.  That, of course, is precisely what happened when Einstein linked mass and energy and overthrew Newton's view of the world which had directed our thoughts for over 200 years. But Newton's world is still taught in our schools, because it answers many of our day-to-day questions with adequate precision.

However, today there is a new problem. Bad science can give rise to disastrous beliefs.  There is an excellent example in the bad science of one Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 published a paper in the prestigious Lancet claiming a link between inoculation and bowel disease which in turn caused autism in children.  It was bad science, because it turned out not to be replicable. Wakefield was eventually charged with fraud and found guilty, while Lancet withdrew the paper.

However, many felt that the risk of inoculation causing autism was unacceptable, and refused to have their children inoculated.  Seventeen years later the results are becoming apparent.  From America comes news of children being "sent home from school. Their families are barred from birthday parties and neighborhood play dates. Online, people call them negligent and criminal. And as officials in 14 states grapple to contain a spreading measles outbreak - -, the parents at the heart of America’s anti-vaccine movement are being blamed for incubating an otherwise preventable public-health crisis." (New York Times 30 Jan)

The human tragedies that the fear of inoculation has caused are innumerable.  There are the parents whose child contracted whooping cough, and with whom they had to sit day and night for nearly four months as their child fought for breath. They could not understand that the vaccine would not work once the disease had been contracted. There is the young mother who had consciously decided that the risks of the vaccine were so great that she should do without, then contracted rubella and gave birth to a blind, deformed child. There is a reaction building, and doctors are refusing to help parents who neglected to have their children inoculated. Perhaps America will slowly come to its senses.

If it is not replicable, it is not good science. Inoculation is eminently replicable - it may have slight side effects, but the risks of the side effects are minuscule compared to the risks of the infectious diseases it prevents.

We have to speak out against bad science.  It can cause beliefs that have tragic consequences.   Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of climate pseudoscience. Billions of dollars are being diverted to prop up a belief system that daily is becoming more irreplicable. It is even going so far as to change historical data to try to convince us that the world is warming faster than before:

 (Thanks to Josh and WUWT)

The "adjustments" turn out to be in exact multiples of tenths of a degree, for reasons that no-one can explain. All are downwards in the early years, thus making the apparent warming greater than it would otherwise be.  And these are the "official" figures from the Global Historical Climate Network, the basis for all the fears about climate change.  Bad, bad science, with predictably tragic consequences.

How many more must UNEP kill?

Dr Andrew Wakefield caused widespread alarm when he claimed that his research showed that the childhood vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella could cause autism.  In May 2010, he was banned from practicing medicine in Britain for ethical lapses, including conducting invasive medical procedures on children that they did not need. Part of the cost of Dr. Wakefield’s research was paid by lawyers acting for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers for damages.

His claimed link caused the use of the vaccine in Britain and elsewhere in the world to plummet, a development that has contributed to a sharp rise in childhood diseases in countries where the vaccine was in use. Measles alone killed over 150 000 worldwide in 2008. It took more than a decade and intensive research to prove that the vaccine was indeed safe. There are still parents who refuse to have their children inoculated. Being banned from practice in Britain seems a mild punishment indeed.

But what do you do about an international body that does something very similar? What do you do if it makes wild, unsubstantiated claims, which seem calculated to cause a less-than-expert public to forego real benefits for fear of harm? 

In September 2012, the UN Environment Program [UNEP] released a report “Global Chemicals Report – Towards the sound management of chemicals.” The report itself is not yet available, but the Synthesis Report for Policy Makers can be downloaded from http://www.unep.org/hazardoussubstances/UNEPsWork/Mainstreaming/GlobalChemicalsOutlook/tabid/56356/Default.aspx.  It is, of course, a major question why the synthesis should precede the report itself, but that is not the real problem.

The real problem is that the Synthesis Report makes a lot of serious claims that lack any form of substantiation.  What is one to make of a claim such as “The Global Chemicals Outlook states that of the 5.7 million metric tonnes of pollutants released in North America (United States, Canada and Mexico), close to two million were chemicals that are persistent, able to accumulate in humans and animals and are toxic. The report also deemed toxic a further million tonnes of substances that are linked with or have suspected links with cancer.” 

Guess what gives cancers? Car tyres! Yes, they contain “Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and 1,3-butadiene. Some PAHs are carcinogenic, and 1,3-butadiene is a known human carcinogen.” Indeed, tyres contain carbon black, and that has traces of PAH’s in it; and 1,3-butadiene is used in the manufacture of tyres.  However, during manufacture it is polymerised into polybutadiene. Polybutadiene is harmless and widely used for drinking water piping.

Agricultural chemicals come in for particularly strong condemnation. “Total pesticide expenditures in South Africa rose 59% over the period 1999 to 2009, and are projected to rise another 55% in the period 2009 to 2019.” “World consumption of fertilizers is estimated to grow 2.6% per year in the period 2010 to 2014.” So, if UNEP is to be believed, it is better to feed insects than to feed ourselves, and better to starve than to fertilize our crops.

When you dig a little further, you find, horror of horrors, “Products such as cell phones and laptops are being purchased and used in regions of the world recently thought to be too remote.” Ecopaternalism is rife.

But far rifer are the stories of gloom and disaster. “Despite ubiquitous exposure to chemicals in both developed and developing nations, little is known about the total disease burden attributable to chemicals. In 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that globally, 4.9 million deaths

(8.3% of total) and 86 million Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) (5.7% of total) were attributable to environmental exposure and management of selected chemicals in 2004 for which data were available.” 

Now for the good news – “This figure includes indoor smoke from solid fuel use, outdoor air pollution and second-hand smoke, with 2.0, 1.2 and 0.6 million deaths/year. These are followed by occupational particulates, chemicals involved in acute poisonings, and pesticides involved in self-poisonings, with 375,000, 240,000 and 186,000 deaths/year respectively.” So of the 4.9 million deaths, most had causes other than what most would consider chemicals – smoke, air pollution and suicide.

Driving the message home are graphics straight out of the Greenpeace book of environmental photojournalism:

Nowhere is there any mention of the huge benefits chemicals have brought mankind. We enjoy clean water due to the chemical destruction of a wide range of pathogens – that in itself is worth tens of millions of lives annually.  We feed ourselves, we clothe ourselves, and our homes are warm and dry, thanks to the wonders of modern chemistry.  Yet UNEP would have us believe that all chemicals are bad, evil and to be avoided – particularly if you happen to be a developing nation. Forego the benefits, is the message – you don’t want to suffer as we in the developed world must, do you?

UNEP is the body behind the ban on the use of DDT. The ban may thicken the shells of the eggs of a few seabirds; but it causes the deaths of over one million Africans each year from that preventable disease, malaria.  

How many must UNEP kill before reason sets in and its leaders are charged with crimes against humanity?