Most Conservative MPs, including at least six members of the shadow cabinet, are sceptical about their party’s continued focus on climate change policies, it has been claimed.

The recent furore around “Climategate” has hardened the views of Tory MPs, many of whom were already unconvinced by the scientific consensus, and has led to increasing calls for the issue to be pushed down the priority list.

I’m beginning to think that Climategate should be re-labelled “the media’s global warming hoax” because I’ve yet to see any article about the story that even approximately tells what we know. Every story serves to reiterate the general sense that there was falsification, manipulation of data or deletion of data series or correspondence — none of which is true.

As time goes on each “smoking gun” gets put into clear context and shown to be nothing of the sort, but the aura of suspicion — all these hundreds of stories about dishonesty — doesn’t disappear. It’s just now part of common knowledge that the scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) were doing bad science, even if every individual claim made about the research is untrue.

Which is how so many of the comments on this interview with Phil Jones (director of the CRU) are so disgusting:

I thought of killing myself, says climate scandal professor Phil Jones

Why didn’t you? Because you are a coward! Just like the rest of your free loading, elitist,socialist hack buddies living off free money from socialist governments to which you sell your soul and junk science!!! Go to hell and take your ilk with you! Miserable lowlife scum!

and

Jones, Mann and Hansen should all lose their degrees for what they have done to science. They have taken over $100 billion, ruined every new science book for two generations, poisoned science education with environmental BS and political correctness. These guys should be pushing brooms and driving cabs.

This is exactly the behaviour exhibited by the anti-vaccination crowd recently, when the GMC finally found Andrew Wakefield to have acted unethically — this from the pen of famous US anti-vaccination campaigner Jenny McCarthy:

The retraction from The Lancet was a response to a ruling from England’s General Medical Council, a kangaroo court where public health officials in the pocket of vaccine makers served as judge and jury.

Appeals to conspiracy and perceived political consequences without an attempt to grapple with the science. Every one of those commenters on the interview with Phil Jones knew that he was a lying, mendacious bastard, though there is no evidence of it at all; and every single one of Andrew Wakefield’s supporters knew there was a link between MMR and autism when they gathered to support him at the GMC hearing:

We have come here to show him we believe in him. There has been a witch-hunt against him when all he was trying to do was help people.

Of course, there was no evidence of that either. There has been very little soul-searching on the part of the media since the GMC verdict — indeed, plenty of “bad doctor done bad!” stories but very little admission of their own part in the sordid tale. I don’t hold out much hope for a change of tack over their coverage of Climategate and the later “scandals”, regarding the Himalayan glaciers or Amazon rain forests. From what I have read so far, the opinion pieces continue to lecture scientists on the benefits of self-criticism and humility. Irony is dead.

ETA: Two recent links a week after I wrote this piece, but providing good background information. The first is Real Climate with some background information on the IPCC itself and the various errors that have been highlighted. The second is a look at the principal journalists behind this spate of alarmist articles about climate change conspiracies.

I bring all this up to mention that I saw the Ofcom summary by accident the other day:

However, whilst Ofcom is required by the 2003 Act to set standards to ensure that news programmes are reported with “due accuracy” there is no such requirement for other types of programming, including factual programmes of this type.

You heard it here first — factual programmes do not have to be factual.

It seems documentaries, or programmes which look like documentaries, do not have to hew to anything we might call reality. Graphs, figures and statistics can be pulled out of the producer’s… hat and this wouldn’t matter.

The remainder of the ruling makes for some quite depressing reading. You can get away with whatever you want if you introduce your detractors as “the orthodoxy”, mention that they represent a “distortion of a whole area of science” and that they are conspiring to “invok[e] the threat of climatic disaster, to hinder vital industrial progress in the developing world”. Because despite all that you are letting the opposing view have a say. The excuses can stretch even further if your programme is viewed as being “polemical”, as if unsubstantiated nonsense is its own rightness.

Totally unrelated to the above, the same document also contains other rulings, the last of which quite amused me. It was regarding a complaint against subscription-only SportXXXGirls, in which the female presenters “perform[ed] explicit sexual acts” and “invited viewers to contact them for ‘adult chat’ via a premium rate text service”. The complaint was that the “live chat” was a repeat from the week before, which wasn’t obvious (unless you’d seen the previous screening, I guess…). I can only imagine how often they get complaints like this — I don’t know how many people consider complaining about subscription porn channels — but the result was that “Ofcom viewed the recordings supplied and noted that the material shown on the 10 February 2008 was a repeat of that shown on 3 February 2008”. What a strange job…

The point in this case is not to point out the stupidity of homeopathy to the people in the street, though it will no doubt do that. It’s to make the point that Boots sell these things — have whole aisles devoted to these little white pills — even though they admit there is no evidence for their effectiveness. There are even Boots-branded homeopathic pills on the shelves! And at the same time they sell you something useless, they want you to know that their pharmacists are trustworthy enough to dispense medicines with active ingredients, and give advice about these medicines.

I leave you with James “the Amazing!” Randi, to explain the absurd details of homeopathy in his wonderful way:

• The Science Behind It

  Ever get really annoyed by the BBC not providing adequate citations for their science and medicine stories? At most we get a researcher’s name and maybe the name of an institution. Doesn’t that really bug you?

  This website is the answer to all your problems. It scans whatever BBC or Reuters article you give it and then tries to extract whichever meagre details the journalist included. This information is used to search MedLine and give you a list of articles which may have been the source.

  This is a really fantastic resource. I highly recommend using the “bookmarklet” as well. Whenever you’re reading an interesting or dubious article, just press the “bookmarklet” button and The Science Behind It will magically read your current URL and try to find the real data. Many congratulations to Andy, the author of this great service.

• Just Fucking Cite It

  This is admittedly more juvenile and less immediately informative, but in my opinion still necessary. My little contribution.

  The internet is full of people who can, and should, make more references. Bloggers don’t have any word limit. Inline URLs don’t even add to the word count, since they are seamlessly integrated with the text. But still people don’t cite their sources. And it makes me mad. It’s lazy and sloppy and reduces transparency. It also engenders distrust, especially for bloggers who are trying to push a social or political agenda. Anyone can lie about anything when they don’t give their readers the chance to check the facts themselves.

  So next time you see someone make a claim about some new science story on a blog or forum, use this link — and challenge them to justify their claim.

The fledgling JFCI was created after reading this post on Language Log. The first reference to TSBI that I saw also appeared in the comments to that post.

Last night we went to a talk by David Colquhoun in the bowels of Appleton Tower. There’s a building that’s changed! Anyway, Prof Colquhoun was talking about pseudoscience in British universities, and his ceaseless campaign of blogging and letter-writing to get them to stop. There are a remarkable number of universities out there that will give you a Bachelor of Science degree in homeopathy or crystal healing.

After that we went to 56 North, the new name for the Human Be In, still as horrendously overpriced as it ever was. Well done to Ella for post-dissertation hangover. :-) We headed home early in order to conserve our middle-aged sensibilities for the curtain-shopping ahead of us.

It’s saddening to think that only one of these “newspapers” is a satire and parody.

The subject of this evening’s discussion was Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, a book we have both read, which is extra useful when attending a book group. It was good to see that most people had quite favorable opinions of the book (more on the dissenters later) but that most had never heard of him, didn’t read his column, hadn’t heard of that whole anti-pseudoscience movement and were mostly unaware of the major villains like Gillian McKeith and Patrick Holford.

But anyway, there was some good discussion about where one learns critical appraisal of evidence (does it happen in schools? and more importantly, in school science?) and about where the limits of free speech should be for newspapers and public health issues like MMR. How much legal responsibility do newspapers have to report accurate information?

All that was quite good. I mentioned the dissenters above. There was one guy who seemed to have taken the Mary Midgley approach to popular science literature — read the front cover, decided what the book was about, and then blamed the author for not meeting these standards. We never did get a reasonable idea of what he thought the book was going to be about or what it should have done differently — but suffice it to say, it just wasn’t good enough. Five minutes later the same guy (having previously stated he’s never heard of Ben Goldacre) criticised the author for chasing celebrity status. It was about that point I gave up listening closely to him.

The next session of this book group is actually at a performance of Copenhagen, and there’s related discussions and possibly a meeting with the director and stuff too. It was a bit of a let-down to hear that there is no next book to read for the book group (and the meeting after that is for a film!) but this group’s been going for ages so we can hardly complain if they want to spice things up every so often.

If you can’t be bothered watching it yourself (and honestly, I don’t particularly recommend it) he:

• talks about industrial milling and bread-making
• makes threatening and evidence-free comments about “enzymes” in your food
• suggests you start baking your own bread

I originally thought to mention the enzyme thing more, but it’s just tediously overdone on this blog I think. Just stop using vague science words in the hope you can make things sound dangerous. All it does is diminish any potential credibility you might have had.

I much preferred the last few minutes of his talk, when the subject settled on bread-making, community, and all that rousing stuff. I do like the idea of a Real Bread Campaign as a parallel to CAMRA, the real ale campaign. They are dealing with something fundamentally different though, so I don’t know what lessons can be learned from the real ale movement.

I recently came across this rather nice post about bread making from someone who obviously likes their bread and the process of making it, and explains it all in a cheerful fashion. And finally a short video on how they made bread back in the 1980s:

In short, they

1. Gave fish oil to as many kids as would take the pills.
2. Got laughed at by everyone.
3. Took the huff, said it was never going to be a real trial. Took their ball home too.
4. Refused to answer any questions. Even refused Freedom of Information Act requests. The whole thing became Super Top Secret.
5. Decided they would release the results after all.
6. Didn’t have a control group.
7. Compared the GCSE results of some of the few compliant subjects (~600 out of 3000 starters) with another group of kids chosen after the fact, on the grounds they were quite similar. Really.
8. Ignored another 200-odd compliant subjects because they presumably couldn’t match them against anyone. Science, it works bitches!

Ben Goldacre has the full press release on this sorry affair.

However, the researchers stress that the variations between different places in Britain are not statistically significant.

That’s right. After breathlessly telling us how much sadder the inhabitants of Edinburgh are than the people of Powys in Wales, they “let slip” that it’s all cobblers.

I mentioned this on the Bad Science forum but took it no further. Happily, others did. You can see Gimpy’s letter to the BBC and their response elsewhere, but I’ll quote the relevant bit from the BBC’s response here:

We felt that as the story was of a light-hearted nature, and that as the conclusions were not of great importance, or significance, it made for a light and entertaining read.

I agree that the story was both unimportant and insignificant. But it’s the fact they pretended it did have importance and significance that is so disturbing. They reported exactly the opposite of the research. They even dispatched a reporter with camera crew to Hay-on-Wye in Powys to really drive home the “insignificance” of the story.

BBC Most Read
© Betsy

I wonder what the criteria are for a “light and entertaining” story, as determined by the BBC? Off the top of my head I would guess it would include comic stories involving pets and record-breaking attempts to snog for 48 hours straight. I didn’t think it would include using a researcher’s name to assert the opposite of what they claim.

The BBC would like to claim that because there is no real importance to the story that they are not under any obligation to report accurately. Somehow they’ve decided that stories which are not Serious News™ can be treated with a freeform approach to reality. And that this slapdash journalism is okay if you admit somewhere in the article, “oh by the way, we made all this up”.

The “entertainment” excuse begins to wear very thin after a while. What kind of an impression does this reporting actually have on people? Are there less naive readers up and down the country who look at this story and think, “oh, those kidders at the BBC! what a lark they are!”. I doubt it. Instead, they’re more likely to do as Terry Wogan apparently did after reading out a letter from a listener:

“…apparently the second happiest place in the UK is Manchester, which is confusing because this very week began with more research which concluded that Manchester was number one when it came to self harm.”

I think possibly academics could keep things to themselves for a bit. We’re getting contradictory messages.

It seems even Terry Wogan (isn’t he employed by the BBC?) wasn’t aware that it was all just a joke guys! Get with the programme, Wogan! (Thanks to Bad Science forum user Allo V Psycho for the Wogan transcription and iPlayer link.)

I personally think that “entertainment” is a pretty pathetic excuse in this case. Which particular part of the story was entertaining, exactly? Francis Wheen mentions similar excuses in Mumbo Jumbo, given by newspapers for continuing to print horoscopes. “Entertainment” appears to be the last, nebulous excuse available when there is no good reason to do something.

Another Bad Science blogger recently suggested that The Media Think You Are Morons, or more accurately:

What I’ve found is that not only do the media not bother to give references to the academic work they are writing about, but they don’t bother to respond promptly to enquiries about their policy of keeping this information from us. The most likely conclusion is, I think, that they consider the general public to be morons incapable of understanding references — and they don’t think they need to explain themselves to their readers either.

The lack of references in news stories really annoys me. I’ve probably even written about it before. It can be pretty difficult to track down the source of a statement when all we have to go on is “scientists said” or “experts have found”. If these same news stories can now be relied upon to state the opposite conclusions to the source, what use is science reporting at all? It fails both to inform and to direct you to further data if needed. What service do the relevant media think they are offering here — “entertainment”?

Update: I am pleased as punch to note that Ben Goldacre wrote about this very topic in the weekend Guardian. I like to think it was because of the thread I started on the Bad Science forum. A boy can dream…