Doing Their Own Thing

I noticed a comment in Bishop Hill about the response by economist William Nordhaus to 16 scientists downplaying global warming in the Wall Street Journal. It asked:

“Why do the loony left always have to mention tobacco?”

And Nordhaus had indeed been writing about tobacco.

The attacks on the science of global warming are reminiscent of the well-documented resistance by cigarette companies to scientific findings on the dangers of smoking. Beginning in 1953, the largest tobacco companies launched a public relations campaign to convince the public and the government that there was no sound scientific basis for the claim that cigarette smoking was dangerous. The most devious part of the campaign was the underwriting of researchers who would support the industry’s claim. The approach was aptly described by one tobacco company executive: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

Perhaps the tobacco companies launched their campaign because there wasn’t in fact a sound scientific foundation for the claim that cigarette smoking was dangerous. And 60 years later, there still isn’t a sound scientific foundation for the claim.

After all, in 1953 (disregarding all the Nazi stuff), the only UK study was the the 1950 Doll and Hill British Hospitals Study, which showed that in a population, 98% of whom were smokers, 99% of lung cancer patients were smokers, which is about what was to be expected if smoking didn’t cause lung cancer.

But no, it seems that the defence mounted by the the tobacco companies was “devious”. And so also is global warming “denialism” – the very name of which suggests not just deviancy, but complicity in mass murder.

But I think that, behind this regular invocation of tobacco, there is a genuine puzzlement. After all, despite the lack of genuine scientific evidence, most people nevertheless believe that smoking really is dangerous. So why won’t people accept the new claim by climate scientists that carbon dioxide causes global warming? Why accept one piece of science, but not the other?

The global warming alarmist explanation is that a campaign of denial is being mounted by oil companies much like the one mounted by tobacco companies. But there seems to be little evidence for this.

The real reason, I suspect, for the far greater scepticism about global warming is that, with the internet, many people now have access to far more information than they had 60 years ago. Back then, it would have been with considerable difficulty that people would have obtained the original research, and read the criticisms made of it. They would have had to have subscriptions to medical journals, or access to those journals in convenient libraries. And most people would have had neither. Instead they would have had to rely entirely on what we now call the Mainstream Media, or MSM, and the judgement of newspaper editors and journalists. And they would have had to trust the judgement of these people. And trust the judgement of doctors like Richard Doll.

But now people are in a much better position to form their own opinions, and draw their own conclusions, without having to rely on experts and pundits and the like. They can do their own thinking. They are not so easily told what they should think. The Climate Wars are not something that takes place on the pages of august journals, but in the public arena of the internet, sometimes unfolding almost hour by hour, and even minute by minute.

And my own view is that, if Doll and Hill’s London Hospitals study had not been published in 1950, but instead in 2010, it would have got the same treatment that climate science is now getting. It would have been widely publicly ridiculed. After all, much of climate science is very good science. It’s pure physics, based upon accurate measurement. Tobacco science is nowhere near as good science as modern climate science. And if climate science can be torn up and thrown away in 2010, Doll and Hill wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Most people believe that tobacco and smoking is dangerous because tobacco research has never been subjected to the kind of criticism that climate research is now getting. It’s been taken on trust. And on trust of doctors like Richard Doll, George Godber, and a slew of US Surgeon Generals.

Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, gave a Dimbleby lecture last night on BBC, in the middle of which he asked, “What is special about science that means we should trust it?” He then proceeded to not answer his own question. He didn’t explain why science and scientists should be trusted. But he did say:

It is impossible to achieve complete certainty on many complex scientific problems, yet sometimes we still need to take action. The sensible course is to turn to the expert scientists for their consensus view.

In effect, he was saying that experts should be trusted. And in particular he was saying, in effect, that the “majority of expert climate scientists” should be trusted.

But I think that this sort of trust and faith is trickling away, and it’s trickling away precisely because people now have much of the information (though by no means all of it) needed to make up their own minds. And episodes like Climategate (and now Fakegate) do not encourage people to place their trust in “expert climate scientists”. And should people ever get round to re-examining tobacco research in any large numbers, I very much doubt that they will continue to place much trust in doctors like Richard Doll, or George Godber, or the US Surgeon General.

I think we have arrived at a new era of distrust, and one in which more or less everything any expert says about anything will no longer be taken on trust.

And an excellent example (for me at least) of this cropped up in Nurse’s speech, when he described the origin of the work that got him his Nobel prize.

I was searching for genes needed for cell division, by looking for yeast mutants which could not divide. Such mutant cells get bigger and can be easily spotted under the microscope. I had been searching for these large sized cells for months when I spotted something quite different, a clump of cells doing the opposite, dividing at a small size.

Now, it so happens that this is something that I’ve been thinking about too. I’ve spent weeks wondering why cells divide. And why some divide faster than others. And the way I think about cell division is that it’s like water dripping from a tap, drop by drop. Why doesn’t the water extend downwards in a long thin thread of water? (Occasionally it does.) Why does it instead almost always descend drop by slow drop? There are, to the best of my knowledge, no genes whatsoever controlling the formation of drips under leaking taps. What’s happening is a purely physical and mechanical process, resulting from the forces at work on the growing drip. And I suspect that the same sort of thing is happening with cells. In fact, I find it very hard to imagine how anything else can possibly be happening. And, in this manner, I’m doing my own thinking about this very interesting subject. And, even though Sir Paul Nurse has a Nobel Prize, in this matter I prefer my own judgement to his. I’m not going to trust the expert! I’ll do my own thinking, thank you very much.

And I can do my own thinking because I have the time, and I have access to the internet, and I have a computer that I can programme, and a number of other skills. And I suspect that there will be (perhaps already are) more and more people like me, thinking through things for themselves (and probably getting it all wrong), and not simply trusting what experts tell them – because all those things are now available to more and more people, just like electric guitars became available in the 1950s, and allowed all sorts of people to make a lot of new and surprising new music. Science isn’t much different from music. It’s really just people watching and listening and doing their own thing with drops of water.