Climate of apathy
Judging by the number of reports in New 杏吧原创 of research into technologies that are likely to worsen global warming, the adverts for gas-guzzling cars that adorn your pages, and the carbon footprint of many of the global warming researchers as described in George Marshall’s article (25 July, p 24), not many of the scientific community truly believe in the problem.
If scientists are not true believers, how do they expect the rest of us to be? Do scientists really expect us to do as they say rather than as they do?
In the defence engineering community where I work, I often hear arguments that global warming is a research funding cash cow, or that we are undergoing a natural warming period in the interglacial cycle, not a man-made event.
I think I believe in global warming, so I had cavity wall insulation installed a couple of years ago, but my gas consumption has remained unchanged. I have a huge south-facing roof, but I am told that, although the lifetime of solar panels is now long enough that they reduce carbon emissions even when the carbon footprint of their manufacture and installation is taken into account, they still cost more than one would be likely to save in energy bills. What should I try next?
I call on scientists, if global warming is real, to help us to believe, and to mitigate it by researching cost-effective solutions.
Whether or not anthropogenic climate change is a reality, as George Marshall asserts, is quite a separate issue from whether or not we should change our behaviour accordingly. The presupposition that there exists some form of common interest shared by the “brotherhood of man” embodies the disjuncture between the world view of those who advocate “green” policies, and the broad swathes of people most directly affected by them.
The presupposition conceals a fundamental question: why should any person make sacrifices for the benefit of others? In the absence of a religious or even utilitarian moral imperative there is no rational basis for demanding such a sacrifice. If climate change does not affect me personally, materially and directly, within the limited window of my remaining years, why should I care?
George Marshall wonders why people don’t take climate change seriously. Maybe the quality of weather forecasting has some impact on the public perception of climate modelling, even though the two are not related.
The British Met Office, with its new supercomputers, warned us that this summer would be hotter and drier than average, and to take all the necessary precautions. So far, it has been an average English wet summer with one short heatwave.
The Met Office also predicted that the recent UK bank holiday would be a washout. In fact, it was a beautiful day and hoteliers in the popular seaside resort of Bournemouth complained bitterly because everyone had stayed away.
If computer modellers can’t get a few days right, how can we expect people to believe predictions about 50 years hence?
Eastbourne, East Sussex, UK
Calorie conundrum
Bijal Trivedi explains how the method of preparation and condition of the food we eat makes a big difference to the number of calories available to the body (18 July, p 30). Like many other commentators on this subject, however, she fails to consider the related possibility that all digestive systems may not be equal. It seems to be assumed that all calories that pass the lips eventually enter the body from the digestive tract.
Yet individuals can have significantly different gut flora and other digestive capacities, leading to substantial differences in the proportion of calories absorbed from food. Even a 5 per cent difference in digestive efficiency could mean the difference between being fat or slender. Exercise, particularly running, which certainly has a dynamising effect on the gut 鈥� in part by hurrying food through the system 鈥� could reduce the calories absorbed.
Digestive efficiency has to be as important as calorie intake and metabolic rate, yet it never seems to get a mention. Is it the yuck factor that prevents it being discussed in polite company?
The illustration accompanying Bijal Trivedi’s article focused on foods that contain fewer calories than would be calculated by current methods. Surely the problem contributing to obesity is nutrition labels that err in the other direction.
What is really needed is better education about reading the label: the importance of looking for fibre content, of eating complex rather than simple carbohydrates, and of avoiding “enriched white flour” and various forms of sugar.
The final sentence of the accompanying editorial points to the virtues of many unlabelled foods (18 July, p 5), but that doesn’t mean that all foods with no label are healthy. Just pay a visit to your local coffee shop and contemplate the thousands of “empty” calories you can consume in a week if you have a 480-kilocalorie coffee drink, plus a bagel, a muffin, a cookie, a croissant or a doughnut for breakfast every day.
The rule to apply when looking at such displays of baked goods is: “If you don’t know what’s in it, don’t put it in your mouth.” Nutritional labels do count.
San Francisco, California, US
鈥� Labels do not underestimate calorie content, but the overestimate can be substantially greater for many healthier foods than it is for less healthy options. As a result it can be hard to make the lower calorie choice between a more and less healthy option if their labels indicate a similar calorie content.
I can confirm first-hand that medium-rare burgers can contribute to weight loss. After eating one in a college pub, I lost 10 kilos in a week. I won’t go into the details.
E. coli aside, the promotion of undercooked food as a way of burning more calories seems like the height of gluttony. Would it not be more prudent to eat smaller amounts of well-cooked food? Surely there is more to be gained, both individually and globally, from a reduced demand for food.
We need to find healthy ways to feel full. I, for one, will look for alternatives to having uncooked beef in my gut.
Grimsby, Ontario, Canada
Insensitive shellfish
In his article on invertebrates’ rights, Peter Fraser referred to research into hermit crabs that purported to show they feel and remember pain (11 July, p 24).
I am a langoustine fisherman, and my experience of langoustine behaviour over the past 30 years suggests that they don’t feel pain. Pain presumably evolves as a mechanism for avoiding, or at least minimising, damage, but if the outer shell of a crustacean is penetrated the damage has already been done, so internal pain receptors would be pointless. Often when prawns are together in a box they latch onto each other with their claws, sometimes piercing the shell. I have never seen any attempt to escape or disengage in the way you would expect if this were “painful”.
The research into hermit crabs only showed that they do not like electric shocks, which is not necessarily the same as feeling pain. It has applications in fishing where , and encourages razor clams from their burrows so you can pick them up.
Moreover, hermit crabs, unlike many other crustaceans, have soft bodies, unprotected by a hard shell, so conceivably have a use for a pain reflex. A better experiment might be to buy shellfish destined for export and hence doomed, and inflict damage on them to gauge their reaction.
Undoubtedly there is some sensory mechanism because they respond with autotomy, the voluntary amputation of an irreversibly damaged limb. But I’m willing to bet that any sensory response would fall short of what we would define as feeling pain.
Snuggle for survival
Fern Elsdon-Baker criticises Richard Dawkins’s dogmatic approach to evolution and his coining of rigid metaphors for the processes involved (18 July, p 24).
The misuse of metaphors in evolutionary theory goes back to Charles Darwin himself. He used Herbert Spencer’s “struggle for survival” in a late edition of On the Origin of Species, which did little to modify Alfred Tennyson’s talk of “nature red in tooth and claw”, and he repeatedly referred to the wedge 鈥� where new species force their way into an ecosystem to the detriment of others.
Such images make the theory ugly and can be inaccurate. Evolution often takes place without struggle: a mutation finds a niche and snuggles into it. Asteroidal extinction or a new volcanic island, for example, can open myriad opportunities for survivors and chance arrivals.
Election illusion
Stephen Battersby’s article on the disputed Iranian election results seemed rather ideological for a publication that claims to be about science, and written for scientists (27 June, p 10).
The mainstream media habitually decides its attitude towards a country by applying the rule: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the enemy of my friend is my enemy”. It then treats any evidence that confirms that initial assessment as authoritative and dismisses everything else.
So, if you riot in the streets of a country that the west sees as a friend you are a “terrorist”, but if it is a country that is one of our “enemies” you are a heroic fighter for democracy 鈥� irrespective of the merits of your cause or the methods you use to pursue it.
Battersby fell into the same trap by proclaiming that the evidence of statisticians in the US suggested the official election results were a fraud, on the basis of only one fact: that the results for one candidate, who got so few votes they made no difference, didn’t have the right distribution of digit values in it. The same study reported that all the other candidates did; one wonders how the results of this one candidate came to be manipulated when theirs weren’t.
The fact that the declared election results did not match the exaggerated expectations of some western commentators, doesn’t make it a fraud.
For the record
鈥� We should have stated that artist Rosamond Purcell recreated Ole Worm’s Wormianum as pictured in “Enigma of the 23-year-old baby” (25 July, p 46).
鈥� Feedback’s pick-out contributor is called Lynton Challoner, not Challenger as we printed (1 August).
鈥� The resolution to change the planetary status of Pluto when it passes over Illinois’s skies was proposed and passed by the Illinois State Senate, not the state’s one governor (25 July, p 44).