Personal carbon trade
Dave Reay’s article is encouraging in that it shows how we can cut our greenhouse gas emissions without too much discomfort (10 September, p 36). If we all did as he suggests, a significant reduction in total emissions would be achieved. The problem is getting all of us to do our bit.
Proper incentives are required to achieve the necessary behavioural change, and it is important that the burden be distributed equitably. Rising energy prices have some impact, but they would need to rise much further to lead to a major reduction in emissions, as consumers are forced to become more energy-efficient. And if this were to occur, the heaviest burden would be borne by the poorer members of society.
A viable approach is some form of personal emissions trading scheme, such as the Domestic Tradable Quotas proposed by David Fleming at .
From Mark Relling
I am prepared to sign a contract with any megacorporation stating that I will not drive a car for one calendar year if they buy my 4 tonnes of carbon credit. Any reasonable offers?
Imagine the possibilities if individuals or groups of individuals are able to trade carbon credits.
Sydney, Australia
From Peter Dishart
In your articles on ways of saving the planet, I was surprised to read under “Get into composting” that a kilogram of potato peelings, tea bags and grass clippings would produce, in landfill, 2 kilograms of methane (10 September, p 38). Even complete conversion of pure carbon couldn’t do this.
Derby, UK
The editor writes:
鈥� What is meant here is not 2 kilograms of actual methane per kilogram waste, but rather 2 kilograms of greenhouse gas in CO2 equivalents. The number is high because of the much greater global warming potential of each molecule of methane versus each molecule of CO2 (23 times). Dave Reay writes in his introduction to the articles (p 37) that the greenhouse gas emitted by people is “mainly carbon dioxide, but also some methane and a little nitrous oxide, which I have converted to CO2 equivalents here.”
Viking on starboard bow?
In writing about the medical mystery of Egil Skallagrimsson, you appear to have missed a conclusion that will be obvious to all Trekkies (17 September, p 48). He was a poet, a prodigious drinker and a legendary warrior with enormous strength who boasted an enlarged skull, “ridged on the outside like a scallop shell”. Is this not the perfect description of a Klingon?
For the record
鈥� An editing error removed a key part of the letter from Kathy Archibald of Europeans for Medical Progress (24 September, p 24). The sentence detailing the large numbers of fatal heart attacks and strokes in humans resulting from taking Vioxx should have continued: “though Vioxx is cardio-protective in mice, rats and monkeys.” It is in response to such problems that Europeans for Medical Progress is calling for a scientific evaluation of the efficacy of drug-safety tests on animals.
Prints are fallible
As a former police officer who once believed that fingerprints were infallible, I congratulate you on your editorial and related articles on the subject (17 September, p 3 and 6).
While a great deal of valid criticism has been directed at fingerprinting and doubts have been expressed over whether it can legitimately be called a forensic science, it would be, as your editorial points out, “a dreadful waste of a powerful tool” if such evidence was rejected.
My daughter Shirley, herself a police officer, was wrongly accused of leaving her fingerprint at a murder scene in 1997. After a long campaign, it has been officially accepted that the print was not hers, and a man convicted of the murder on flawed fingerprint evidence was freed.
Despite all this, I remain a firm supporter of fingerprinting as a major crime prevention, detection and identification tool. But its mantle of infallibility must be removed. Experts must embrace the legitimate challenge to their science and, as criminologist Simon Cole points out in your article, there must be much more clarity about error rates. The results of research by Itiel Dror, also featured in your piece, showing that a range of factors can bias experts’ judgement must be followed up if public faith in fingerprinting is to be restored.
My experience over the past nine years has convinced me that the vast majority of fingerprint experts are people of high integrity and skill, and I have them to thank for my daughter’s freedom. Unfortunately, the UK fingerprint establishment has ignored legitimate challenges and recommendations for change.
There are a number of internet sites for those interested in following the ongoing fingerprint debate: , and .
Eyes can change
I make use of colour, image and iris patterns in my work, having run a training company for colour and image consultants for over 20 years. I am concerned that people seem unaware that iris patterns can change (10 September, p 26). I have observed some dramatic changes myself and every iridologist has seen irises alter due to changes in health.
Everything I read on this subject fails to mention any precautions that might be taken against such an eventuality and I find this very worrying.
Keep a stiff upper lip
“Keeping a stiff upper lip during upsetting events can impair your memory [of them],” says your article on the research of James Gross and Jane Richards (17 September, p 13). It seems to suggest that this is a bad thing.
In the same issue of New 杏吧原创 there is an ongoing correspondence about the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers and others (p 16). The most upsetting of the many symptoms of PTSD is the detailed recurring flashbacks of the trauma that caused it. Clearly anything that reduces one’s memory of that trauma must 鈥� all other things being equal 鈥� also reduce such flashbacks.
So it would seem to follow that the very best way for people to respond when they find themselves amongst carnage and death is to keep their emotions in check, and attempt to cultivate a sympathetic but cool, controlled and detatched attitude to what is going on. This will have a twofold benefit; they will be best placed to help themselves and others immediately, and will also be lessening their own long-term distress caused by recall of the event. A stiff upper lip turns out to be a good thing after all.
Hiding from litigation
John Adams’s column on risk reads like a PR campaign by commercial interests to convince us that litigious crybabies are responsible for higher medical costs (17 September, p 36).
A few spectacular jury awards have given rise to the myth that the legal system is slanted in favour of the plaintiff. In fact, the vast majority of victims of medical malpractice go uncompensated. Products that are predictably dangerous continue to be distributed, and the people who are hurt or killed by them rarely seek justice.
Adams’s most egregious claim is that “the clearest sign” of the increased frequency and size of compensation awards “is in the parallel rocketing of insurance premiums”. Insurance premiums rise even as their payouts fall, because administrative costs and profits constitute a larger and larger share of the money they demand from us.
A paper by Carl Deal and Joanne Doroshow released by the Center for Justice and Democracy makes a powerful case that much of the money behind the tort (liability) “reform” movement can be traced to the tobacco industry, which is most in need of shelter from litigation and least deserving of protection 鈥� see .
We're still the same
David J. Buller disagrees with the thesis that the human mind is essentially adapted to Pleistocene conditions, arguing that the agricultural and industrial revolutions have altered selective pressures in ways that could easily have produced radical change (10 September, p 48).
If he is right about this, it means that people in societies that have not undergone those revolutions, from the Kalahari to New Guinea to the Amazon basin, should be genetically different from the rest of us in their psychological wiring, adaptively unprepared to cope with modern agricultural or industrial society even if raised in it from birth.
This flies in the face of every adoption study I have ever read. All the evidence says that the cognitive variations through genetics that exist among modern humans correlate with race to a vanishingly small degree, if at all. In other words, we have not evolved cognitively due to the societal and cultural changes of the last few thousand years.
Separate oxygen
Alan Bundy clearly hasn’t done the arithmetic when he proposes burying all flue gases (24 September, p 24). Emma Young may be correct, saying that separation of CO2 from flue gases of air-fed coal burners is currently prohibitively expensive (3 September, p 34), but oxygen separation from air is not. Closed-cycle burning using oxygen from an on-site air-separation plant would make CO2 separation much easier, improve combustion efficiency, and probably increase overall efficiency of the power station. Other pollutants would also be easier to process as they would not have to be separated from a large volume of nitrogen.
No demon
Robert Matthews and his reviewee, Daniel Charles, fail to overturn a politically correct view of Fritz Haber as the evil “father of chemical warfare” who entered into a “Faustian pact” whose denouement was in the modified form of Zyklon B used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz (17 September, p 47). Haber was also blamed for prolonging the first world war because his invention of the process of synthetic nitrogen fixation 鈥� essential to the intensive food production which now feeds the world’s billions 鈥� also enabled the production of explosives.
This is a very one-sided view. Shouldn’t Germany’s enemies, too, have abandoned their explosives, or had they some God-given right to win?
During the first world war Haber was involved in the use of corrosive gases as weapons. The New 杏吧原创 piece says: “Even at the time, this was seen as an appalling abuse of scientific knowledge… After the war, Haber was forced to hide, amid rumours he was wanted as a war criminal.” Certainly there were those who condemned Haber, especially, no doubt, those generals who hankered after a knightly ideal of war with cavalry charges and the ring of steel on steel. But to suggest that Haber was routinely despised is simply false: how would one account for his Nobel prize in 1918?
The whole issue of “poison gas” is a strange one. Ten years after the first world war J. B. S. Haldane wrote: “Mustard gas, or dichlor-ethyl sulphide, is the most humane weapon ever invented. Of the casualties from mustard gas during the late war there were 170,000 in the British army alone. Three per cent or less died, and less than 1 per cent were permanently incapacitated 鈥� a very low proportion compared with the casualties from other weapons.” And yet poison gas 鈥� unlike guns, bombs and landmines 鈥� was demonised and outlawed by international treaty. One need not be unduly cynical to surmise that it was in the interests of the industrialised powers to ban a weapon which was relatively cheap, low-tech, and which could neutralise a larger army.
Following his work on nitrogen fixation, Haber turned to pesticides, and in the 1920s he worked on the insecticide Zyklon B. Since the Nazis used it much later 鈥� years after Haber’s death 鈥� as the instrument of the Final Solution, Haber is held to be somehow responsible.
Fritz Haber was a great chemist and sometime patriot whose work unluckily fell foul of one of the great illusory beliefs of the 20th century. He was not, like Dr Faustus, a man who “sold his soul in return for demonic knowledge”, fame and fortune.