Sunny Bains unedited

Roses in January

Global warming seems to have been following me around lately.

It was pretty warm before I left London in mid-December. Then New York was a bizarre 60°F (16°C) almost every day I was there, the feeling was quite incongruous with all of the winter holiday lights blazing. Leaves were still on many trees and the idea of a white Christmas seemed laughable.

At the end of the trip, on my way to Miami airport, I heard on the radio about a major ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic splitting off from Ellesmere Island. I then watched An Inconvenient Truth on the plane coming back to the UK and learned just how compelling the case for global warming was. I had always believed it, but never bother to fully inform myself about it. I'm a science journalist, but this is far from my beat.

Weirdly, though, the thing that tipped the balance and got me to actually do something happened last Thursday. I was walking through the Rose Garden in Hyde Park on my way to work, and was shocked to find that there were still roses there. Not just old ones that had managed to hang on, but new ones. I was so surprised I got out my PDA and took some pictures.

That night I went on to the Climate Crisis website and then tried several of carbon footprint calculators to find out the size of my own contribution to this problem. I was horrified to find that I was almost as bad as the average American. I try pretty hard to be a good citizen environmentally: I use the backs of printed sheets of paper instead of notebooks, recycle despite the lack of decent services in my area, buy recycled products whenever I can, and use rechargeable batteries in my radios. On top of that, I have no car and a small flat that's well insulated.

However, (as you may have gathered) I fly back and forth across the Atlantic a fair bit for both business and personal reasons, and that makes me part of the problem. Call it Western guilt, but I decided to go pay up to make myself carbon neutral at CarbonFund.org. Cost about $220 for a clean conscience for my entire household for 2007. This will, I understand, plant lots of carbon-absorbing trees.

I know this is not the real answer: I have to consume less rather than just pay more. And I'm trying. But as someone who inherited a family that is spread across North America, Europe, and even Asia—and is part of a profession that requires travelling to where the sci/tech action is—it's not always possible to take the train...

Photos

Top: Old roses are still hanging on in London's Hyde Park, despite it being January.

Bottom: Roses are not just hanging on, there are new buds and blossoms too. The gardener told me that he'd never seen these May Gold roses (usually the first out in the spring) bloom in January. He was especially surprised to see them as he'd cut the bush back hard in the autumn.

Men with guns and bombs

At the night vision conference I attended recently, I found myself in a new culture. I’ve written about technology that could be used for military applications for years, but almost always through academic and industrial institutions: so I’ve never been forced to really face up to what the technology was for. It’s one thing to know intellectually that the system you’re writing about is for night vision for soldiers. It’s another thing to see people testing them out by looking down the barrel of a gun.

I’m not a pacifist: I believe there have been and can be just wars (like the war against the Nazis, for instance). Wars mean soldiers, and if you’re going to have soldiers it seems morally right to give them the best tools to keep themselves alive that you can.

I’ve been to military bases and research establishments over the years and never reacted quite the way I did at the Night Vision 2006 exhibit hall. It’s not just that the application—warfare—is announced and celebrated at every stand. It’s that everyone walking around seems to think it’s so ordinary, so normal. And that you can taste the money that will be changing hands with the goods.

Maybe the most telling moment was when I arrived on the second morning, late because of the tube, and ran towards the meeting hall to avoid missing the beginning of an important talk. Squadron Leader Douglas Vine, my host at RAF Henlow the week before, saw me and warned me not to run. “You’ll scare the security,” he said. I suddenly realized what I had been risking. I wasn’t in academia any more.

Photo

A stallholder at Night Vision 2006 demonstrating the use of the sights his company was selling.

Government backs medicine without science

I don't want this blog to become a tirade against pseudoscience: there are too many interesting, real science and technology stories out there to cover. Also, medicine is not usually my beat. However, in the UK, the support of pseudoscience—in the form of homeopathy—has recently become law. To me this speaks of a shift in this country away from science and towards superstition and wishful thinking: it's therefore worth writing about.

The law that came in on 1 September 2006 basically allows homeopathic remedies to advertise that they can cure "minor symptoms or minor conditions in humans," defined as those that "can ordinarily and with reasonable safety be relieved or treated without the supervision or intervention of a doctor.” Such products must be shown both not to cause harm and are required to prove efficacy. Seems reasonable enough.

Except that the proof of efficacy does not have to be based on science, but instead on homeopathic 'provings'. Essentially, these are supposed to show that a particular ingredient can cause symptoms. This ingredient is then diluted and can supposedly prevent those same symptoms. The Sense about Science website has a really nice briefing document explaining the methodology behind homeopathy and showing how it diverges from the scientific method (it also explains why homeopathy is not like innoculation or vaccination).

Among the scientific papers this document points you to is an article from last year's Lancet that looked at 220 trials: half for conventional medicine, half for homeopathic. Rather than explain the findings myself, let me quote the authors' interpretation.

"Biases are present in placebo-controlled trials of both homoeopathy and conventional medicine. When account was taken for these biases in the analysis, there was weak evidence for a specific effect of homoeopathic remedies, but strong evidence for specific effects of conventional interventions. This finding is compatible with the notion that the clinical effects of homoeopathy are placebo effects."

This begs the question, if these products are harmless placebos, why does it matter how they are labelled? For me, there are three key issues. First, the government should not encourage its citizens to pay good money for 'medicines' when they are getting placebos rather than cures. Second, by allowing such products to be officially labelled as medicines, credibility is given to the homeopaths that prescribe them, when all they are doing is inducing placebo responses. Finally, by encouraging our people to go to homeopaths for their aches and pains rather than their doctors, more serious diseases causing the minor symptoms may be missed.

I personally have supported the Sense about Science campaign for evidence-based medicine: to me this should be one of those 'lines in the sand' for everyone who believes that the scientific method is the best way we currently have to determine what is and isn't real.

Many thanks to Simon Singh for alerting me to this campaign and for the Sense about Science team for starting it.