Open mind
Lawrence Krauss says of my article “” in Physics and Society that I had not corrected the editors’ “misconception” that I was a climate scientist with a doctorate; I had written “what appeared to be” but by implication was not “a highly technical piece refuting the notion that global warming is occurring”; my article contained nothing new; unnamed “climate scientists” said they “had debunked” my conclusions; I claimed my paper “had been accepted by a peer-reviewed scientific journal”; and I was “litigious” (16 August, p 46).
When Gerald Marsh put my name forward he did not tell the editors I was a climatologist with a doctorate (13 September, p 20). Nor did I. My correct style and title appeared on every email to them. When they invited me to submit a paper, I reasonably supposed they knew who I was. I asked how much technical detail they wanted. They wanted a great deal. I obliged. The paper was indeed technical. So is the subject.
I have not been a “journalist” for 15 years. Until I retired two years ago I directed a leading technical consultancy. I have made a fortune from probabilistic combinatorics. My paper contained much unpublished material, including several new equations, each of which the editor asked me to justify before publication. My conclusions have not been “debunked”.
I have never said my paper “had been accepted by a peer-reviewed scientific journal”. However, a professor of physics on the editorial board edited it and asked for many clarifications.
This “litigious viscount” has issued two libel writs in 56 years. I won both.
The editor writes:
鈥� Readers may be interested in a discussion of Monckton’s articles by the climate scientists on the site via and .
Risky business
Michael Bond detailed how decision-making driven by fear and emotion interferes with reason and allows people to accept incorrect assertions (30 August, p 34). The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who drew on evolutionary biology to demonstrate the importance of the attachment bond infants negotiate with their primary carer, laid the foundation for expecting this behaviour, particularly from insecure adults.
A daily flood of data challenges everyone’s coping skills, but particularly those of insecure individuals who are predisposed to accept media sources as more knowledgeable than themselves.
Such individuals do not investigate so much as trust. While confident people apply critical filters to their daily input without hesitation, insecure individuals whose experience in infancy has led them to prioritise acceptance and approval are unlikely to challenge an authority.
Improving risk literacy is more complicated than switching off the TV. To encourage more people to use rational, less emotional decision-making we must train youngsters in critical thinking skills before fearfulness born of insecurity becomes habitual 鈥� not wait until the last year of high school or the first year of college. Conscious parenting focused on raising secure infants who have benefited from a healthy attachment to a parental figure remains the fundamental way to ensure a clear-thinking society.
IQ standards
James Flynn notes the 15-point IQ gap between black and white Americans (6 September, p 48). I recall that items in intelligence tests are carefully chosen so that males and females score equally 鈥� as we believe they are equal.
Those who construct the tests do not, however, amend test items so that black and white subjects score the same. Is that because we believe they are not equal? Is prejudice built into the common IQ tests right from the start?
To put it another way: would you accept a carefully researched IQ test constructed so that black and white Americans scored equally? And if not, why not?
From Sanusi Orobosa
It is a huge logical leap from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children showing a deficit of 15 IQ points in black children, to James Flynn’s “explanation” for this.
And unless you can cite a firm study that underscores a point as morally sensitive as the one Flynn broached, it has no place in a scientific magazine.
Thornton Heath, Surrey, UK
James Flynn writes:
鈥� Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray discuss in detail the finding that black people were once at least 15 points behind in The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994); William Dickens and I discuss their gains in “” (Psychological Science, vol 17, p 913).
The frontier is closed
Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis”, as A. C. Grayling sets it out, (23 August, p 50), describes “the boundary between civilisation and the wilderness as a theatre of new challenges demanding new responses and institutions”. While this may seem appealing, aspects rather seem appalling.
The “American way” of freedom and entrepreneurial energy, for example, could be construed to reflect a way of life in which it is not necessary to compromise, to care for others or to solve one’s own problems. Instead, the solution is to rush into new territory, whether it already belongs to someone else or not. This has created a great society with little concern for others or for the weaker groups within it; a society with a built-in demand for exploitation of natural resources; a society that is decidedly not sustainable in any sense of the word.
This frontier society is the continuation of European society’s inability to create stable power structures, although in the end there has been change in Europe, under the influence of strong working-class organisations and devastating wars.
At the other end of the spectrum lie the monolithic societies of Asia near or far. With little room for entrepreneurial energy or freedom, China, the epitome, may even have decided to refrain from expanding its frontiers after an attempt in the 15th century found no other societies worth the effort of socialising with. The result was a very stable society within its own bounds, which took both cannons and drugs to break.
The appeal of the frontier idea, in exploiting what you can, when you can, and running away from problems by moving into your neighbours’ greener pastures, is obvious 鈥� if you are the stronger, and if there are still spaces to move to.
Ultimate machine
The Large Hadron Collider is a wonderful achievement, but I am not convinced by Anil Ananthaswamy describing it as “the largest machine in the world” (30 August, p 31). I was told otherwise, ironically by a physicist at CERN, while I was employed by a telecoms company: this honour belongs instead to the worldwide telecommunications network.
From Mark Burrard
Given the amount of energy circulating the LHC and the much-debated possibility of it making Earth-consuming black holes, did anyone else find the small wall-mounted fire-extinguisher in the photo of the inside of the LHC tunnel a little bit incongruous?
Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia
Bogey bugbear
Nose-picking scholar Digbeth D’Marriotti laments: “I have not been able to find any studies into the effects of eating one’s bogeys [or boogers], but it is almost certain there is an Ig Nobel award set aside for anyone willing to take on this medical conundrum” (The Last Word, 23 August).
D’Marriotti will be slightly gratified, I hope, to learn that one of the studies he mentioned was thus honoured: the 2001 Ig Nobel prize in public health went to Chittaranjan Andrade and B. S. Srihari, authors of “” (Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol 62, p 426).
Though Andrade and Srihari did not focus their attention on the ingestion question, they did not ignore it. Deep in the bowels of their study is the observation that “subjects who reported eating their nasal debris after picking did not differ from the rest of the group on any variables”. Will D’Marriotti’s dream be fully realised when this year’s Ig Nobel prizewinners are announced? All I can 鈥� all I am permitted 鈥� to say is: tune in to the Ig Nobel ceremony live webcast on 2 October, at .
For the record
鈥� We misnamed two US government bodies referred to by psychedelic researcher Rick Doblin (30 August, p 42): they are the Veterans Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration, not Association and Agency.
鈥� We should have written that fishing fleets emit more than 130 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere per year (13 September, p 28).
鈥� A table on the nutritional content of potatoes, pasta and rice (2 August, p 32) gave their starch content in milligrams per 100g; that should have been grams per 100g.
Bottle-feeding blues
Diane Wiessinger says “the list of proven risks [of bottle-feeding] grows longer every year” (30 August, p 19). Another potential risk has come to light. The American Dental Association that fluoridated water should not be used to make up babies’ bottle feeds. They advise parents to buy bottled water with a no/low fluoride content for feeds.
This is because children can receive too much fluoride which can interfere with the formation of enamel on teeth, known as dental fluorosis. This causes unsightly permanent white or brown staining of teeth, which has led to some children being fitted with veneers on their front teeth.
Unfortunately jug filters won’t remove fluoride 鈥� this needs a plumbed-in reverse osmosis unit costing hundreds of pounds or a distillation machine.
This is an added expense for parents, as is buying bottled water to make up the feeds.
So who are you?
I deplore Anselm Kuhn’s “moral” that you should “never publish anything by someone about whom you know absolutely nothing” (6 September, p 24). I am not his scorned autodidact 鈥� but so far as climate change is concerned I might as well be.
Michael Le Page’s response to the following letter from Russell Robles-Thome (also 6 September, p 24) makes a distinction between “sceptics” and “deniers”. My view is that everybody should be a sceptic: it is rather cheering that even with supercomputers only God knows what the weather is doing. It does seem to me clear that what’s happening is alarming enough to demand more urgent action than anyone is going to take.
Intelligent deal?
I propose the following deal. For each occasion on which creationism is preached in a school science class, a proper scientist is allowed to teach evolution in a church.
For the record
鈥� John Brigande is a developmental neurobiologist, not a molecular biologist; he is not deaf, but profoundly hard of hearing (online news, 30 August). The hair cells in the inner ear are present at postnatal day 35 and do not die “shortly thereafter”. Their ability to function at postnatal day 35 is unclear.
Food thought
Bijal Trivedi describes some difficulties involved in assessing carbon emissions associated with various foods but fails to mention a critical science communication issue (13 September, p 28). It is conventional to list the warming potential of greenhouses gases in terms of an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (CO2eq) over 100 years. This made sense for policy-makers when it appeared that the human race had a century or more in which to change course. Now it is clear that the need for change is more urgent.
Policy-makers need to focus on achieving very considerable emissions reductions within the next 10 years. Policy decisions, and especially communications intended to influence consumers’ purchasing decisions, need to make sense over this time frame.
Methane emitted into the atmosphere has a half-life of about a decade, and over that timescale methane is, weight for weight, more than 60 times as potent a greenhouse gas as the longer-lived CO2, or about three times more potent than the 21-fold difference over a century usually quoted 鈥� which is the period conventionally used to calculate CO2eq figures. This tips the carbon balance even more strongly against meat and dairy products.
From Hugh Farey
Without wishing to denigrate Trivedi’s article, I fear that none of the research described takes account of what I suggest is by far the biggest factor: the lifestyle of the people involved in food production.
Do the costs of fertiliser, manufacture, packaging, transport and so on not fade into minor significance compared to the cost of the farmers’ families’ lifestyle, including their own food consumption, travel, holidays and other leisure pursuits 鈥� at least for affluent western farmers? This suggests that the best way of saving carbon in your weekly shopping basket would be simply to spend less.
Bromyard, Herefordshire, UK