Not obeying orders
I wonder whether your editorial and article on people being “swayed by the crowd” share an erroneous assumption (14 April, p 5 and p 42). Both the research cited and the opinions expressed suggest that a dehumanising environment is sufficient to account for destructive acts. This is justified by the fact that no individual factors have (so far) been identified that robustly distinguish those who carry out the slaughter from those who refrain from it or take a stand against it 鈥� by becoming whistle-blowers, for example.
Nevertheless, does not the existence of these two responses to the same toxic environment imply that individuals carry different propensities to follow the crowd and perform cruel actions?
This issue is of such profound importance to the current world situation that it is disingenuous to suggest that both the person who tortures and the one who obstructs torture 鈥� as in your Abu Ghraib example 鈥� are merely victims of circumstance.
What matters is that people behaved differently in the same environment; hence, the environment may well be a necessary but not a sufficient cause of humans engaging in cruelty. Are not the people who have given their lives defending human rights in many recent war zones surely a testament to a different way of responding?
From Constance Lever-Tracy
Stanley Milgram’s experiments with getting subjects to administer what they believed were electric shocks are often misrepresented as demonstrating peer pressure 鈥� but they were concerned with obedience to authority.
Most people obeyed what seemed to be duly constituted authority, even against their own moral values. In hundreds of repetitions of the experiment, the most effective source of resistance to immoral commands is peer support. When others set an example of disobedience, most subjects felt strong enough to follow.
Adelaide, South Australia
What can I do?
Paul Slovic frames a tragic question in a misleading way (7 April, p 18). He says hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered in Darfur since February 2003 and claims that “powerful nations and their citizens have responded with indifference”.
By joining nations and individuals in the same circle of responsibility, the article hides reality and so makes coping with such a tragedy harder.
We respond as individuals to the needs of other individuals when reaction is possible 鈥� when the required response is on the individual human scale. Where the challenge is on the scale of government-inspired war or mass murder, individuals turn away because the disaster is too vast to address.
To dwell on it in helpless fury does no good, fosters apathy and may risk clinical depression. Compassion in the individual doesn’t “fail”, as the article states; it becomes irrelevant.
Only governments can act to deal with large-scale catastrophes and they are now almost immune to citizen pressures. The unrecognised and repulsive truth of our time is that individuals in “democratic” societies have lost control of their governments.
Violence and freedom
So why, you ask, are people alarmed or even angered by the fact that on-screen violence is bad for us (21 April, p 5)? The answer has nothing to do with evidence but everything to do with the consequences of accepting such a proof. We should be able to agree that on-screen violence is harmful while also agreeing that allowing it is the price we must pay for freedom. Unfortunately this is very unlikely: in the current political climate, proof of harm will lead to loss of freedom, and this is what alarms people.
I can hear the government statements now 鈥� “I don’t believe in censorship… but… something must be done!”
In times of war it is accepted that a few must die to protect the freedoms of the many. Yet, strangely, in times of peace, freedom is always the first victim in any argument over harm. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in censorship… but…
Climate sceptic sceptic
Roger James is right to point out that Karl Popper’s philosophy of science advises scepticism towards hypotheses (14 April, p 22). But he mischaracterises advocates of anthropogenic global warming models if he believes that they haven’t followed exactly this model in reaching their conclusions. They are themselves sceptics.
The role of the scientist is not to withhold judgement until every possible alternative has been exhausted. It is to reach a conclusion based on the balance of evidence and to alter that position as new evidence demands. Those of us who believe that humans are responsible for current climate change are sceptics too: on the balance of evidence, we are sceptical of the hypothesis that global warming is natural.
What I demand of the self-styled “sceptic” community is evidence of causation, not the commonly heard non sequitur “Climate change has happened naturally in the past; climate change is happening now; therefore modern climate change must be natural.”
This demand would be met by concrete evidence of a specific causative mechanism that could plausibly be affecting the Earth’s climate in the ways observed in the past several decades, not simply a correlation.
For it to withstand scrutiny, this cannot be a mechanism which might theoretically have an effect but which isn’t relevant to the modern situation, such as past warming following glaciations, or warming triggered by volcanic trap systems; nor one which isn’t well-correlated with the modern warming trend, such as recent solar variability.
So long as no such cause that withstands scrutiny can be presented, the burden remains on the sceptic community to support their hypothesis. Until then, count me a global warming sceptic sceptic.
From Douglas Nichols
Whether or not humans are heating up the planet is a vastly more serious question than whether or not all swans are white. Presumably Roger James would dispute the theory that “all tigers are dangerous” simply because there might be a tame one out there somewhere. I’d rather believe it, act accordingly and survive. The same logic applies to meddling with the Earth’s climate.
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
True cost of bulbs
I have installed supposedly energy-saving compact fluorescent globes or bulbs like those you describe (31 March, p 26) throughout my house. To show me how much carbon dioxide is actually being saved I have been seeking a whole-of-life energy tally for these “efficient” lights, including manufacture and disposal. Though I have enquired from several sources, no one has so far been able to provide this information.
I am wondering whether the answer is simply that less energy is used here in Australia, while CO2 is emitted in China, where the bulbs are made. Furthermore, energy-saving bulbs do not, in my experience, last anything like 10 times as long as incandescent lighting, as is often claimed by their makers.
From John Hill
We all feel better converting to and using energy-efficient systems and products, and thereby basking in their savings in carbon emissions. But I often wonder what the total energy equation is between the existing “inefficient” method compared with the new “clean” one.
There should be some form of labelling on all such devices and renewable power sources that shows the non-green energy used in their manufacture, so users can assess the product’s overall greenness.
Castle Hill, New South Wales, Australia
From Charles Selinske
You give compact fluorescent lamps high praise. I have heard, however, that when they must eventually be replaced, their disposal will present a serious environmental problem due to the mercury in them.
Rye Brook, New York, US
The editor writes:
鈥� Compact fluorescent lamps contain around 4 milligrams of mercury. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, power plants emit 10 milligrams of mercury while producing the electricity to run an incandescent bulb for five years, compared with only 2.4 milligrams of mercury to run a CFL for the same time. It is still a good idea to recycle these bulbs where possible.
Error ceiling
As Feedback says, the sign in the school of maths and physics indicating “You are on level 2. Level 3 is one floor up” was clearly provided by the maths department (21 April). Physicists would have written “Level 3 is approximately one floor up (within experimental accuracy)”.
Smug alert
I was interested to see Geoff Russell pointing out the importance of changing what we eat if we want to save the planet (14 April, p 22). I visited various websites that offer advice on reducing individual contributions to global warming with 鈥� I must confess 鈥� the aim of achieving a delightful smug glow. I am vegan and have never owned a car nor been on a plane.
Not a bit of it! Most of the sites completely ignore diet and simply admonish me for not insulating my loft. I don’t even have a loft. Bah!
Glorious failure
Guy Narbonne describes Ediacaran life forms that existed for tens of millions of years as “failed” (14 April, p 34). Would that humanity had the slightest chance of lasting as long.
For the record
鈥� We described the brightness of Iridium flares as “a magnitude of up to 9” (7 April, p 52). This would be invisible to the naked eye. Magnitude -9 would be very bright, and is what we should have printed.
鈥� Peter Aggett is at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, not at the University of Lancaster (“Babies overfed to meet flawed ideal”, 28 April, p 6)
We renamed Palouse Falls in Washington state, forgetting that the proper name is a misspelling of the French pelouse (21 April, p 49)
Climate sceptic sceptic
I can’t believe that you published such a logically twisted and fallacious chain of reasoning as appears in Roger James’s letter on climate change, in which he claims that a hypothesis can never be proved, only disproved; (implicitly) that global warming due to human activity is a mere hypothesis; and (to parody just slightly) if scientists can’t come up with a test to show that they are wrong, then they are wrong (14 April, p 22).
So how about this test: keep putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and see whether whole countries disappear under water, whole forests burn and become desert, storms make vast coastal areas uninhabitable, the land that feeds most of us becomes barren and we all start killing each other as we compete for scarcer and scarcer basic resources. Perhaps James might consider this the only approach that is not “outside science”.
Chernobyl covered up
You report that it is not stress but radiation that may cause post-Chernobyl birth defects (21 April, p 6). It is a cruel irony that it took studies on barn swallows and other animals to challenge International Atomic Energy Agency disinformation on the impact of the Chernobyl reactor accident 鈥� not the 21 years of human suffering through fetal malformation, child illnesses, the attested death toll of thousands of the “liquidators” who sealed off the reactor, and so on.
It comes as no surprise that the IAEA, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation and other political, industrial and military vested interests should be in denial about the scope and size of the effects of Chernobyl. This denial is most famously illustrated by the unbelievable death toll of 32 promoted by the IAEA for 20 years 鈥� recently upgraded to 50 “directly attributable deaths”.
For the checks and balances of an open society to function correctly we need whistle-blowers. I was shocked to learn that the World Health Organization is not the independent ombudsman I imagined, but is legally disqualified from acting in nuclear matters without the prior consent of the IAEA, under a 1959 agreement.
This unjustifiable complicity explains, amongst other things: the absence of the WHO from Chernobyl assistance programmes for the first five years; WHO personnel, when they did arrive, rejecting diagnoses of “genome impairment” in favour of “dental caries” and “mouth dryness”; the censorship of the proceedings of the WHO 1995 Geneva conference, attested on Swiss TV by Hiroshi Nakajima, former director-general of the WHO; and the logistic and financial neglect of local institutes such as Belrad, which have no doubt where the bequerels in the children’s bodies come from and try with their paltry resources to fulfil their Hippocratic duty.
Sunshine worked
Right, Marcus Chown 鈥� remind me never to go to the movies with you (7 April, p 48). The film Sunshine had its dimmer parts, but none of these had anything to do with poor characterisation or lack of suspense, or even 鈥� dare I say it 鈥� with poor science.
There were certainly times when I feared the film was about to degenerate into the dreadful depths of the film Event Horizon, but thankfully that never happened, and Sunshine did a good job of keeping the science above the supernatural. I thought the details of the dying sun given in the film were sufficiently spare to allow for alternate interpretations of stellar decay 鈥� and I present, as evidence that stars can do the unexpected, the article on “cannibal stars” published in the same issue as your review (p 32).
So I chose to believe that the given scenario just might be plausible and didn’t allow it to ruin the rest of the film as it obviously did for you. For me, the film was ultimately about the choices we make 鈥� and doesn’t that go the core of what it means to be human? Capa weighs the evidence, and makes the right choice to visit Icarus 1 鈥� and everything goes wrong from then on. How revealing of real life can you get? Is it unrealistic that the first fatal mistake should be a simple one (such as failing to convert a spacecraft from imperial to metric)? Is it also unrealistic that a single psychopath can derail multiple lives?
I might also point out here that both 2001: A space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind tripped over themselves paying homage to their themes and bored most of my non-scientific friends to tears. Sunshine worked for all of us (albeit on different levels), and opened up a discussion about stars and what makes them live 鈥� and die. If that isn’t a service to science, I don’t know what is.
A blueberry farmer writes…
It is entirely possible that I can claim to be your only subscriber who is also an organic wild blueberry farmer, so I thought I would respond to Colin Norman questioning the use of the word “wild” in the wording “wild blueberry yoghurt” (Feedback, 7 April).
Here in Maine we regard our state as the true home of the wild blueberry, Vaccinium angustifolium, also known as lowbush blueberry, though to be fair its range extends through much of maritime Canada. We call it “wild” because it grows naturally: while we blueberry farmers do manage our crops, we don’t ever actually plant them. To become a wild blueberry farmer requires buying some suitable gravelly acidic land that happens to have wild blueberries growing on it. After that it’s a matter of care and feeding.
They are, of course, vastly superior in every respect to their distant cousins, cultivated highbush blueberries.