I’ll skip the ethics of selling something that doesn’t work to people who are desperate. The financial consequences of spending money on expensive treatments that don’t work. Adverse effects of some strange concoction someone took or from a procedure they underwent. Nor will I go into how these treatments can undermine adherence to treatments or make them less effective.

No, what I’ll be talking about how it will make you more likely to die. The overal risk, if you don’t look at specific cancers, is that you’re twice as likely to die if you go for alternative medicine instead of conventional treatments. In the case of women who have breast cancer they have a five fold increased risk of dying. For patients with lung cancer it’s a twofold increase. Those with colon cancer also have a five fold increased risk. They’re dying from cancers that haven’t spread and should be treatable.

This is from the paper Use of Alternative Medicine for Cancer and Its Impact on Survival published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It demonstrates perfectly what the harm is of alternative treatments. So please do not say that it cannot harm you if it doesn’t work. It certainly can if you use alternative medicine instead of the conventional treatments that do work.

The post Choosing Alternative Medicine To Treat Cancer Is Deadly appeared first on Real Skeptic.

But what lead to them becoming as scientist? Of course I expected the answer that they love science and had an interest in it from a young age. But it’s the journey that led to them being a scientist that’s often filled with interesting choices and anecdotes. It’s this last part that really made it fun to hear their answers and stories.

This time Dunderhead shares his story. He’s the lead scientists and founder of Dunder Industries. A few of his accomplishments are building a time machine, a faster than light space ship, and many, many more stellar inventions. He’s a strong advocate of reason and logic and isn’t shy of defending science.

The post Why We Became Scientists: Dunderhead appeared first on Real Skeptic.

Via my Twitter account you can get the latest updates on what I’m up to. You can also follow the AGU hashtag. Next to using the contact form on Real Skeptic my Twitter account is the most reliable way to get in touch with me.

For every day of the Fall Meeting you’ll see an article from me about interesting sessions, exhibits, and other goings-on at the Fall Meeting. 

AGU 2016 Fall Meeting

But first let me give a short introduction to the AGU Fall Meeting. For those who aren’t familiar with the Fall Meeting there’s a good introduction on AGU’s website:

With approximately 24,000 attendees in 2015, AGU’s Fall Meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world.

[…]

The technical program includes presentations on new and cutting-edge science, much of which has not yet been published, meaning you’ll return to work with knowledge you can’t get anywhere else.

With more than 1,700 sessions in 2015, Fall Meeting’s scientific program spans the Earth and space sciences, offering something for everyone no matter their scientific discipline. The meeting offers a unique mix of more than 20,000 oral and poster presentations, a broad range of keynote lectures, various types of formal and informal networking and career advancement opportunities, and an exhibit hall packed with hundreds of exhibitors showcasing new and relevant research tools and services that meet the professional needs of our attendees year after year. Join us in 2016 for another dynamic experience.

Fall Meeting Day 0

Officially the Fall Meeting starts on Monday. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to do the Sunday before the meeting starts. There was already an interesting lecture on Sunday: How Do We Choose a Landing Site on Mars. If you missed this session, like I did due to other prior engagements, you can watch it via AGU on-demand. It might also become available on AGU’s YouTube channel. Though it can take months before the content is available there. You can find the AGU on-demand program here.

ED11E: Climate Literacy: Science and Solutions in Multidisciplinary Higher Education I

This was the first session I attended and it was far more interesting than I expected.

The first presentation of this session was ED11E-01 Current State of Climate Education in the United States: Are Graduate Students being Adequately Prepared to Address Climate Issues? by Emma Kuster. Through the survey they did they found that in the South West of the United States only 60% of students received any climate education. Agriculture and engineering, two professions that we need to deal with global warming, only receive climate education in 50% of the cases. Part of the problem is that course catalogs mention climate courses, but often either aren’t offered, haven’t been taught in a while, or aren’t offered regularly.

The effects of this lack of education got underscored by the presentation ED11E-04 Changing Minds about the Changing Climate: a Longitudinal Study of the Impacts of a Climate Change Curriculum on Undergraduate Student Knowledge and Attitudes. They followed students at the B.A. and B.S. level and found that climate science education shifts student’s attitudes to accepting global warming. At the same time it buffers them from misinformation that might shift them back to a less accepting stance (tested 2 years after the course).

Though teaching climate science isn’t easy as highlighted by the talk ED11E-08 Through the minefield: teaching climate change in a misinformation-rich environment. Teaching isn’t about pouring knowledge into students. Students arrive with their own set of ideas and preconceptions into the classroom. The interesting thing is that there is a partisan divide on accepting or not accepting global warming. Though both sides have their own incorrect beliefs. You can’t correct these incorrect beliefs with the standard approach of explaining the science. You not only need to address the myth directly and refute it. You also need to address how the science is being distorted or misrepresented.

Jim Hoggan further highlighted the tribal nature of beliefs around global warming in his presentation ED11E-07 I’m Right and You’re and Idiot — Jim Hoggan discusses the toxic state of public discourse and how to clean it up, by changing the communication climate. When he started out he thought it was about misinformation, but he learned he was “totally wrong.”

The goal of those that create and spread misinformation is to polarise and divide us. The idea behind this is to kill the debate and not to foster it. You want to not convince the public about being right, you only need to convince them that everyone is defending their own priorities. So leaving the impression that nobody is telling the complete story. Get people to see the climate debate in a tribal context and you undermine science communication.

We need to stop looking at people rejecting climate science as an information deficit problem. In ideology motivated or tribally polarised debates facts don’t change minds. It’s more about rebuilding trust and learning to talk climate science in a way that involves and resonates with the people who disagree with you. Really good communication is more about listening than talking. It’s more about understanding the rejection than to get people to understand the science.

The rest of the session mostly focussed on how to engage students, the effects of teaching climate science, and good practices for teaching science facts. The presentation ED11E-02 Fun Teaching: The Key to the Future Climatology had some great examples of how you can engage younger students with cheap (or free) materials and teaching aids.

ED11E-03 Climate Impact and GIS Education Using Realistic Applications of Data.gov Thematic Datasets in a Structured Lesson-Based Workbook talked about how the www.climate.data.gov website is used to teach data analysis. One of the truly interesting talks was ED11E-05 Negotiating the Paris Agreement with the C-Learn Climate Simulator in an Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Climate Change Course. In it they used the C-Learn Simulation website to role-play international climate negotiations.

This role-play included a Greenpeace and ExxonMobil lobbyist next to the country roles. Each of these roles got a budget of fake money with developed countries having more and developing countries having less. Lobbyist also had money they could spend, but the fossil fuel lobby had the most.

Student’s only managed to reduce warming to 2.6C during their first role-play session. Students were so disappointed by the results that they asked for another session to see if they could get it down to 2C of warming. The class was so exited that they wanted to get it down to 1.5C of warming. A very interesting teaching tool that engaged students and created a better understanding of the complexities of international negotiations.

ED12A: Climate Literacy: Science and Solutions in Multidisciplinary Higher Education II

This session was kicked-off by Peter Sinclair with his presentation ED12A-01 Successful Climate Science Communication Strategies. He gives one of his video as an example of good communication:

This video is so effective in communicating the science that James Delingpole saw the need to attack Sinclair’s video with an article on the website Breitbart. Don’t be deterred if you get attacked by people who deny the science behind global warming. It can be a good indicator that you got the messaging right.

During Stephan’s presentation ED12A-02 Countering misinformation and demagoguery in an age of uncertainty and “post-fact” politics: Climate change and beyond we get some insight into the fake news phenomenon and how it influences voters. It turns out that correcting misinformation for a candidate didn’t have an effect on voters intention or how they felt about a candidate. Facts and correcting misinformation seem not to have an effect on voting.

An interesting point that Stephan brought up is that viral articles on social networks are more likely to be false than not. It’s rare for factually stories to be shared widely. I consider this a big problem as it means that the false information reaches for more people than the factual correction.

Another point that Stephan points out is that polarisation between democrats and republicans isn’t symmetrical. Republicans have polarised more than democrats. This has as a result that rejection of science is more pronounced on the right than the left. This effect holds true across several science fields like the safety of vaccines, GMOs, and of course global warming. This phenomenon indicates it’s all about politics so it needs a political solution.

To break through all this you need effective communication and the presentation ED12A-03: The place of drama in science touched on this subject. As most science communicators know effective science communication is hard. But it can be learned.

Communicating science is not the same as doing science. You use a different toolkit for communicating science to a lay audience than the one you would use fora technical audience. For scientists you include all the technicalities and caveats. But don’t do that for a lay audience as they interpret it as uncertainty and it causes doubt no matter how established the findings are.

Evidence tells us that good communication is emotional and personal. So lets not be afraid to use your emotions and feelings to communicate about climate change. Tell your stories, make it memorable, and convey your emotions. If possible make it dramatic.

This session also included the presentation ED12A-04 Communicating and countering misconceptions about the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming. John Cook mentions that the first myth was that there is no consensus on global warming. Scientists responded to this by quantifying the level of consensus in several studies. Now the backlash is to ask the question “why bring up consensus?”

The consensus is constantly attacked by climate science deniers because consensus is a gateway belief for a lot of people for accepting that the world is warming. The myth that there isn’t a consensus is the most used climate myth in conservative op-eds.

The more prominent the strength of the consensus has become in the media and stated by politicians, the more it gets attacked. Unfortunately this has reduced the effect consensus messaging has had on public beliefs (only a 10% increase over 6 years). Studies have shown that if you combine consensus messaging with misinformation it negates the effect of the message. Without misinformation it increased perceived consensus by 20%.

If you present people with misinformation about the consensus you see an reduction of about 10%. It has no effect on the left but it reduces up to 20% on the right. You can counter this effect by explaining the technique of using fake experts to make it seem there’s no consensus or a low consensus. It completely negates the effect of the misinformation across the political spectrum. This very clearly demonstrates that people don’t like it when they’re being misled.

Another important point was raised in ED12A-05: Showing the Good Side, Too. Communicating the worst case scenarios, showing how bad global warming actually can be, horrifies people and gets them to turn off. The main focus shouldn’t be on communicating that the consequences could indeed be bad. But talk about the technologies we already have and how feasible it is to implement them. We could switch away from fossil fuels in a couple of decades if we put our mind to it. The potential is there and this is a hopeful message you should tell. Giving people hope and a sense that they can do something motivates them into action.

What touches on this hopeful message was the presentation ED12A-08: The Extent to Which Different 100% Clean, Renewable Energy Transition Scenarios can Reduce World Carbon Dioxide Levels to 350-400 ppmv by 2100.

The interesting thing here is that we could reduce the projected energy use by 2050 by 42%. Bringing it back to current usage by just electrifying everything that for example uses fossil fuels. Cars with an internal combustion engine only use at most 20% of the energy in petrol to move the car. This alone can give a big saving in energy usage as electric cars are far more efficient.

There was also an interesting point on nuclear energy. Building a nuclear plant takes about 10 to 19 years. Wind farms only take 2 to 5 years to build. We only have a carbon budget of 350 to 375GT-CO2 that we can emit if we want to stay below 1.5C of warming. To stay within that budget we need to reduce emissions 5.3% per year for the next 15 years. Which makes nuclear impossible as the main solution to cut our emissions, it simply takes too long to build the needed nuclear plants.

There was also a point of criticism towards existing nuclear plants as they’re expensive to run. The same money you use to keep them running is more effectively spent on wind or solar. If you run the numbers you’ll find out that it’s cheaper to do this and it reduces CO2 emissions. However there was a caveat: as long as there are no subsidies involved or large maintenance projects needed you might be able to get it cost efficient and let current plants be part of the solution.

Sharing Science Communications Clinic

This year the folks of AGU’s Sharing Science Program are again represented at the Fall Meeting with science communication, outreach, and policy content. If you want to visit them they’re in Moscone West in room 2001A. You can find a list of their events here with more details in their announcement post.

I visited them in their room in Moscone West for a short chat. This was during their Sharing Science Communications Clinic where they were giving one-on-one support to write plain-language abstracts. Helping scientists tell their stories, give tips on accessible graphic, and how to make their media more engaging by using for example animation.

They have some fun and also extremely useful materials. Like their Watch Your Words handout:

Poster sessions

Unfortunately I didn’t have a moment to truly explore the poster hall this day. This meant I only had a few moments to visited a couple of the posters that I knew where being presented. Walking the poster hall is always highly recommended as you bump into a lot of interesting scientists and posters.

Stephan Lewandowsky with his poster: Using bets to reveal people’s opinions on climate change.

John Cook with his poster: Using MOOCs to Debunk Climate Misinformation for a Global Classroom

Sarah Green with her poster: Matter and Energy Flows in Climate Education – Climate topics in undergraduate chemistry textbooks

PA14A: Independent Science and the Role of Private Sector Funding in the Geosciences II

Industry funding is a hot topic this year at the AGU Fall Meeting. With the funding of bad science and because of the debate about the ExxonMobil sponsorship for the AGU Fall Meetings.

This session started with the presentation PA14A-01 Environmental Defense Fund Oil and Gas Methane Studies: Principles for Collaborating with Industry Partners while Maintaining Scientific Objectivity by Steve Hamburg. His group conducted a study measuring methane leakage from wells and other industry sources. However this requires access to private and corporate property. To not let this influence the research he has the following advice:

• The research must be led by academics
• Employ multiple independent measurement methods where possible
• Seek input from independent scientific experts
• Make all data public to ensure transparency
• Publish results in peer-reviewed journals

The presentation PA14A-02 Valuing and Maintaining Independent Research with Private Sector Funding by Ronald G Prinn highlights the importance of industry funding in research. He raises the valid point that private funding is making important research programs in the geosciences possible for years. It’s about common interests in understanding and solving a particular problem. However, it is essential that the independence of the researchers is maintained. Important key points are transparency about the relationship. Control of the research agenda by the researchers. And no private sector censorship of publications.

There’s a problem with not accepting any private funding raised during the presentation PA14A-06 AGU, Science and Engagement with the Energy Industry. Which is that federal funding is getting lower for science research. In my opinion this is an extremely important point especially with the attacks by science deniers towards the funding of for them inconvenient programs. We need private funding to keep science programs running and to make important research possible.

Naomi Orekes does however talk about some real potential dangers from private funding in her presentation PA14A-07 Understanding the “funding effect.” However, there is a problem with suggesting that funding might distort research or findings. A lot of scientists see this as offensive as they see themselves as objective.

This despite evidence that private funding can and has distorted research. What the tobacco industry did is an example of what can go wrong. Scientists played a key role in manufacturing doubt thanks to the research they produced for the tobacco industry:

Studies show that funding does influence the conclusions scientists draw. Even for peer-reviewed research. There is substantial evidence of skewing effects of private funding in many different domains. The alarming finding from that research is that even trivial gifts to physicians like golfballs or pens can affect which medications they prescribe.

However, it doesn’t mean private funding or support isn’t possible. But you should disclose your data sources. Disclose where you got your samples from. And especially be open about any funding you get. But the rules journals have for these good practices do not have any consequences attached to them if they aren’t followed. This needs to be addressed.

Peter C Frumhoff had a point that attracted my attention in his presentation PA14A-08 On the Acceptability of Funding from Fossil Energy Companies. Organisations who fund bad research and contribute to disinformation campaigns do this while saying they support the science. Exxonmobil is an example of this as they say that they accept the science behind global warming. But the message internally is different and they fund misinformation.

The presentation PA14A-09 Exxon and AGU; Denying Deniers A Platform by Alan Robock drives home the point that this is what the controversy surrounding ExxonMobil sponsorship of the AGU Fall Meeting is all about. But the AGU does allow free speech and open discussion about these kinds of funding questions and issues.

Friend of the Planet Awards

The day ended with a little get together to relax and talk future plans. Though for me it was a little less relax and a bit more future plans as I used it as an opportunity to interview several scientists for a video I’m working on.

During this get together NCSE presented the Friend of the Planet awards to Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham for their work at the Climate Consensus – the 97% column to the Guardian, and John Cook for creating and maintaining the website Skeptical Science. These awards are well deserved.

Credit: Dana Nuccitelli

Final thoughts

Last Monday and Tuesday were very long days for me and it has delayed my articles about the AGU Fall Meeting. However, I should be able to release all of my notes for the past few days somewhere tomorrow. The reason for the delay is that I’m gathering a lot of material for new content which has left me with little time for writing.

But, enough about that. What were the highlights for you during Monday? Which presentations, exhibits or posters grabbed your attention? Is there content we should look up on AGU on-demand? Or is there something scheduled the coming days that’s definitely worth a visit?

The post AGU Fall Meeting Day 1 – Education And Science Outreach appeared first on Real Skeptic.

The second announcement is that I’ll be attending the AGU Fall Meeting again. Reporting on sessions, posters that caught my eye, exhibitions, and anything else of interest. Basically I’ll be reporting on a lot of climate science and science communication related subjects. Again, further details below.

San Francisco meet up

The Meet up with Jason from Opinion-Ville and me is in the Japan Center in San Francisco at 18:00 this Friday. The meeting point is at the Peace Pagoda as it’s easy to spot. You can go to our event page on Facebook to indicate you’re coming. You can also message Jason or me so we know that you’re joining us. We’ll also be posting update to the event page in case something changes and to announce at which bar or restaurant our group has gone to.

AGU Fall Meeting

This year I’ll be reporting on as much climate science and science communication related events at the Fall Meeting. You can leave a comment below if you have suggestions for the posters I should check out, the sessions I should attend, any exhibits that are of interest, or any questions I should ask of attending scientists.

The post San Francisco Meet Up & AGU Fall Meeting appeared first on Real Skeptic.

For me social media is a great way to connect with friends and other science communicators. Though that doesn’t shield me from the misinformed or wacky side of the internet (there are a couple of folks who activity seek me out). It doesn’t surprise me that this happens. What does surprise me is when my friends share or like conspiracy theories:

Friends who are highly educated and I’ve had pleasant discussions with about policies, politics, and social issues. Of course we don’t agree on everything policy wise but we ground these discussions with facts. So when one of my friends shares something like the above conspiracy it both dismays and surprises me.

It doesn’t make sense

What baffles me about these conspiracy theories is that they don’t make a lick of sense if you think about it for a moment. If the pharmaceutical industry is hiding this cure, then why are CEOs of those companies still dying from cancer? Why do cancer researchers and scientists studying cancer still die from this disease?

Thousands of people would need be part of this conspiracy to keep the cure from everyone. Governments would also be involved to hide the cure. But why do this when a treatment that cures all cancers would dramatically reduce health care costs. Insurance companies would jump on this if they ever heard of this cure as a lot of cancer treatments are very expensive.

It also ignores the enormous financial incentive. Why would a for-profit company hide a cure? If you have a company that develops the cure for all cancers you’d be rich beyond your wildest dreams. Literally every single cancer patient would want to buy your medicine to get better.

There also wouldn’t be an end in sight for the demand for this treatment. We don’t yet have something that prevents cancer. So even if you cure every single cancer patient in one day there will always be new patients who need your treatment to get better.

It doesn’t account for how we do medical research

This is a big one. Pharmaceutical companies most of the time only develop medications and treatments. Scientists in an academic setting do most of the fundamental research about how the different forms of cancer work and what could be used to treat them.

It’s not even the big pharmaceutical companies that then develop these into new drugs. Most of the time small companies do this, often biotech startups backed by venture capital, that turn the fundamental research done by academic institutions into viable treatments. It’s only then that big pharmaceutical companies take note and want to back it with their production capacity and funds to get it to the market. You can make quite a bit of money this way if you have one of those successful startups.

The ego of scientists

To say that all these scientists involved in cancer research stay mum about that kind of cure is nonsensical. You would become a household name around the world if you discovered how to cure all forms of cancer. Instant fame in both the scientific community and outside.

Richard Alley explained it best when talking about what motivates scientists and what drives scientific discoveries:

Suppose that Einstein had stood up and said I have worked very hard and I have discovered that Newton got everything right and I have nothing to add. Would anyone ever know who Einstein was? A scientist at some level has to have a little bit of ego.  The job description is very clear. It is learn what nobody else has. [..]

The idea that we wouldn’t want to be Einstein. If we can overturn global warming. If we could prove that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. If we could prove that we can burn all we want and not worry about it. How exciting would that be? How wonderful. How many prizes? How many people would invite me out to talks if I could prove that you didn’t have to worry about this?

Is there any possibility that tens of thousands of scientists there isn’t one of them that got the ego to do that?! It’s absurd! It’s absolutely unequivocally absurd!

Why believe in these conspiracies?

In a nutshell people find it comforting to believe in a conspiracy theory because it gives them a sense of control. For them it’s a far more frightening idea that cancer is a random event that can kill you than it’s to blame nefarious people who are withholding the cure for cancer.

This is easier to deal with than saying “shit happens.” Having cancer is a harrowing ordeal with the unpleasant treatments and how sick cancer can make you. So having these perceived enemies can be, as odd as it may seem looking in, quite comforting. Both for patients and for anyone faced with the harsh reality of how nasty cancer can be,

Ironically it doesn’t help you survive cancer, it easily can reduce your chances for survival. Down this conspiracy rabbit role lies a path to rejecting cancer treatments that work. I’ve seen the outright dangerous medical advice from those corners of the internet.

If you’re lucky you’ll only spend money on something that doesn’t work (though you can waste a ridiculous amount of money this way). But if you’re unlucky you might do something that hurts you or might actually kill you.

I do understand what drives this narrative

It’s not hard to understand what drives this narrative of the big bad pharmaceutical companies. Like any for-profit company they can be unscrupulous and very profit driven. Which can make business decisions down right unethical or revolting in the public’s eye.

Take for example Martin Shkreli. In 2015 he hit the news in a big way when he as the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC acquired the rights to produce Deraprim and then raised the price from $13.50 per pill to $750 per pill. His company is the only one producing this antiparasitic drug that’s widely used to treat toxoplasmosis. The behaviour he displayed during hearings also didn’t endear him with the public.

What happened to the price of EpiPen®, a product of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, is also big news lately. This is an essential device for anyone who can go to into anaphylactic shock due to an allergic reaction. You can carry it in a pocket or purse and in an emergency jab it into a thigh to deliver a life-saving dose of adrenaline. A decade ago a two-pack cost about $94 but today it averages $608.

Or lets talk about what happened in Italy where Aspen Pharmacare was fined by Italion antitrust authorities. Aspen Pharmacare had created artificial shortages of several cancer drugs as a tactic to boost prices by as much as 1,500 percent.

These are just three price examples of how pharmaceutical companies can and do behave. These are valid criticisms you can raise towards these pharmaceutical companies and the industry in general. But conspiracies like the one that made me write all this throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Often the good gets drowned out by the bad

What makes this situation worse is the tendency to give more attention to the outrageous than to the cheerful. Take for example Germanwings Flight 9525 that crashed into a mountain because one of the pilots committed suicide. Killing himself and everyone on the plane. The name of the co-pilot that caused the crash, Andreas Lubitz, got plastered all over the news media. A lot was written about him, why he did what he did, and what could be done to prevent similar cases from happening.

Who you barely heard anything about was the other pilot who got locked out of the cockpit by Lubitz and fought right until the crash to regain access. He did everything he could but was thwarted by the anti-terrorist measures that increased cockpit security. I’m far more interested in his story, and his name was Patrick Sondenheimer.

The same happens with medical news. The video below gives a good example of some very good news and how pharmaceutical companies contributed to it:

Conclusion

Producing medical treatments is expensive and you have to finance this somehow. A lot of it is financed via research grants or by companies who want to bring these treatments to market. Part of the money that finances all this comes from patients who pay for these treatments.

This can get very messy because you’re dealing with people. As a patient you often don’t have a choice, you need those treatments to get better. In some cases you rely on these treatments for your survival. How to deal with this is one of the more difficult health care related issues we have as a society.

Certainly some of the excesses and practices of the pharmaceutical companies, to put it mildly, aren’t exactly helpful. But they’re not part of some evil conspiracy to keep you sick so they can make more profit. That goes against everything we see about how profitable cures are and how medical research is conducted.

The post The Big Pharma Cancer Conspiracy appeared first on Real Skeptic.

The detail though is that these type of devices haven’t been around for long. Fitbit, probably one of the more known brands, introduced their first activity tracker in 2009. That’s not a lot of time to gather data on how they’re used and how effective they are. Which is a bit of a problem when you’re making health claims about these devices.

It does sound very plausible that an activity tracker can help you with shedding some excess weight. They can, among other things, give you reminders for exercises. Fitbit also has a blog full with success stories. Same for Garmin’s site (bonus points for mentioning a naturopath), JawBone, or on the Polar website. All these success stories are probably at the root of the idea that you can use activity trackers to fight obesity.

But How Effective Are Activity Trackers?

The detail is that the success stories on websites are often from highly motivated people. This motivation is at the root of why they’ve been successful. Plus it’s a skewed representation as you don’t promote the people who don’t succeed or who don’t get spectacular results.

So when the paper Effect of Wearable Technology Combined With a Lifestyle Intervention on Long-term Weight Loss: the IDEA Randomized Clinical Trial popped up on my radar it had my full attention. This was a randomized clinical trial that tracked people for two years. During that time the set up of the study was as follows:

Participants were placed on a low-calorie diet, prescribed increases in physical activity, and had group counseling sessions. At 6 months, the interventions added telephone counseling sessions, text message prompts, and access to study materials on a website. At 6 months, participants randomized to the standard intervention group initiated self-monitoring of diet and physical activity using a website, and those randomized to the enhanced intervention group were provided with a wearable device and accompanying web interface to monitor diet and physical activity.

The results of this were a surprise for me, despite me being skeptical about the success stories. The people in the group that didn’t use an activity tracker lost on average 5.9kg during the two years this study ran. Those wearing an activity tracker lost 3.5kg during the same period. The group without wearable tech lost on average 2.5kg more.

Colour me surprised. I though it was a matter of overselling the devices. I didn’t expect them to hinder your weight loss. There are also no differences between the two groups that would explain why one group lost less weight loss. On this the paper says:

Both groups had significant improvements in body composition, fitness, physical activity, and diet, with no significant difference between groups.

What’s Going On?

This does seem like a bit of a head-scratcher. There are a lot of success stories claiming that using an activity tracker helped with getting spectacular results. Kinda hard to argue with the before and after pictures. At first glance it does seem plausible as the activity tracker I have sets goals, has training sessions, gives me reminders, deals out badges and rewards for achieving goals, tracks calories in and out, and encourages competition among friends.

The researchers aren’t sure why there was such a stark difference between the two groups. Short term studies did find, according to the researchers, that using an activity tracker caused “modest improvements in weight loss when added to a behavioural intervention.” Though these short-term studies often have a small group of participants. They also note that there isn’t a lot of data on the long-term usage of these devices. Making it difficult to draw any conclusions as to why they found such a stark difference between the two groups.

Though I have hunch as to what might be going on: it’s most likely behaviour. A point the researchers highlight for further study to figure out this played a role and how big a role. But before I dive into the behaviour angle you’ll need some context that the video below provides.

It might be behaviour

Most people tend to think that exercise is far more important for weight loss than restricting the amount of calories you take in. But to burn 300 calories I need to spend about 30 minutes on a home trainer. If I don’t drink two cans of sugary soda I can remove just as many calories. You can imagine which one is easier to do.

What then contributes to this is that people also have a tendency to overestimate the amount of calories they save by for example switching to lite versions of a product. They end up eating more calories as the thinking then is that you can now eat more while still eating fewer calories.

But those aren’t the reasons what I think are at the root of the problem here. They illustrate some of the mental processes about how people think about weight loss, exercise, and diet. What I suspect is happening here is that the participant that wore the activity tracker were too aware of the calories they were burning.

My activity tracker watches my heart rate and movements and it uses that to calculate how many calories I’m burning. This means that my activity tracker can count normal daily activities as exercises. For example I have the tendency to walk around when I’m on the phone. As you can see in the image to the right my activity tracker recognised that as an exercise and said I burned 92 calories.

Same goes for stairs, walking around in a mall, or any sort of household chore. Suddenly these calories are visible to you and now you’re aware of the extra calories you can eat. But we’ll need follow-up studies to figure out if this is the cause for the difference the researchers found and to what extent it contributed.

Conclusion

The researchers couldn’t answer why participants with an activity tracker lost less weight than participants without one. There are limits in the study that the researchers say might have introduced some biases. One of them being that assessment staff knew that participants were participating in a weight loss trial.

Which could be a hint about why participants lost so much weight. For both groups it was more than you would normally expect (2kg versus the 8kg achieved in this study). Also participant wore the activity tracker around their upper arm. This could mean that the results in this study can’t be directly compared to the results you’ll get from an activity tracker that you wear around your wrist.

We’ll need to wait for further studies to hone in on what precisely is going on and how this translates to the devices that are in use. But this study, combined with the short-term studies, already gives a good indication that activity tracker weight loss claims are being oversold.

The post Activity Trackers Aren’t A Weight Loss Miracle Cure appeared first on Real Skeptic.

To me it’s a valid option to say you don’t want to be part of the EU. It also is a valid position to say that you never want to leave the EU. Of course many folks aren’t that black and white and most pro-EU folks like me have some bones to pick with the EU and its regulations (don’t get me started on the EU Cookie Law).

So then why do I care about what happened in the UK? Well, because I’m utterly appalled by the dialogue before and after the referendum. It was more about emotions and perceptions and not a good faith dialogue about what it means to be part of the EU and if the UK should leave.

What makes it worse is that people have publicly stated that they’ve used the referendum as a protest vote or didn’t think their vote mattered. As a result they now regret voting for the UK to leave the EU. I don’t know how big this group is and subsequently I don’t know if it would have meant a majority for the remain camp. But with how close the results are it does make you wonder:

Protest votes have their place in politics and can be a very useful tool to send signals to politicians about how the electorate thinks about them. But that only works in a multi-party system where conclusions can be drawn and policies changed. A yes or no referendum is not the place for a protest vote to show your dissatisfaction for ruling parties and their policies. Or for that matter dragging in anything else that isn’t relevant to the decision if the UK should stay in the EU or leave.

The articles that appeared after the referendum about what people were searching for made me look like I just swallowed a lemon:

To some extend I can understand that you might not have heard the term brexit (shorthand for a British exit of the EU). But the number two that reads “What happens if we leave the EU?” is just beyond me. That’s one of the questions you research before you vote on leaving or remaining in the EU. After the referendum results were announced the question “What is the EU?” was the second most searched for question in the UK on Google…

I place a large part of the blame on the media, especially the tabloid press in the UK. The tabloid press is infamous with the outright misinformation they spread. I’m more surprised when they get something correct than when they make mistakes. False balance and not properly challenging false claims by the media is also a problem. In this environment it’s extremely difficult for voters to figure out what the pros and cons are for a certain vote.

This then emboldens politicians, political parties, and groups to say what they want without serious opposition or consequences. An example of this was the brexit campaign making the claim that the UK sends £350 million per week to the EU. In reality this is £136 million a week, if you take into account rebates and what the UK receives from the EU.

This is less than 40% of the number claimed by the Leave campaign. This number was a big part of their campaign and they promised to divert this money to the NHS. The Leave campaign printed this in big bold letters on one of their campaign busses. But now Nigel Farage, one of the key figureheads for the Leave campaign, has backtracked on this promise by the Leave campaign to spend this £350 million per week on the NHS:

No I can’t [guarantee it], and I would never have made that claim. That was one of the mistakes that I think the Leave campaign made

When it was pointed out that this was a claim printed on one of the Leave campaign’s busses Farage responded with the following:

It wasn’t one of my adverts – I can assure you! I think they made a mistake in doing that.

We have a £10 billion, £34 million a day featherbed, that is going to be free money that we can spend on the NHS, on schools, on whatever it is.

Yet I’m not aware of him disowning this claim when it mattered: during the campaign leading up to the referendum. That’s when you call out incorrect facts; even if they come from the side you support.

Though I’m not surprised by this behaviour and all the broken campaign promises as it’s ideology driving this discussion so facts are then often ignored. During the campaign before the referendum Michael Gove was confronted with the economic consequences predicted by experts he responded by saying “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”

Yes, experts can be wrong. But if nearly all of them are telling you it’s going to hurt you financially and will hurt the British Pound it’s best if you then listen. That way you consider all the facts, weigh your options, see what is possible for your preferred policy, and then you make an informed decision about what you’re going to do.

The financial market expected voters to heed warnings from experts and the polls predicted that the UK would vote for a remain. This caused the financial market to be blindsided by what actually happened. Which shows  in how stock market indexes around the world dropped last Friday:

The British Pound dropped as low as $1.32 versus the U.S. dollar, an exchange rate last seen in 1985. The pound also lost value faster than during the start of the financial crisis in 2008.

In one day markets around the world lost over $2 trillion as they responded to the news. The FTSE 100 in the UK dropped more than 8 percent when the market opened, wiping £120 billion off the value of the 100 biggest UK companies. The biggest opening plunge since the financial crisis in 2008.

How all this plays out is of course something we’ll have to wait and see. The current impact was extra severe as the financial market didn’t expect the UK to actually vote to leave the EU. But the increased uncertainty for companies will have an impact on the economy. It’s now a question of how big the impact will be and if we can prevent another recession. Though the first signals from companies do seem to indicate trouble ahead for UK jobs and economy.

Of course this hasn’t stopped the online comments claiming it’s the market being twitchy again. This ignores the global nature of today’s economy and that this was predicted, to an extent, by experts. With of course enough doom and gloom by certain groups of remain voters. They point to details like the divide between younger and older voters and the very clear remain vote in Scotland. There’s also a serious issue with actually listening to each other and understanding why voters react like they do.

With the rise of Populism in Europe and what that entails for politics I don’t see any improvements in the dialogue any time soon. I expect more entrenching of positions and more and more emotional exchanges. In such environments you fan the flames of hate and distrust. Combine that with a sense of powerlessness you can find yourself in a powder keg.

What this can lead to I’ve already experienced in my country with the shooting and killing of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Britain experienced this recently with the Labour MP Jo Cox being killed by a Brexit proponent (though that link is inferred from political affiliations and public statements). And the recent inept attempt in the US of a man trying to grab an officer’s gun so that he could shoot Trump.

It’s good to be passionate about what you stand for and be involved in politics. It’s fine to be a human being who has emotions and there’s no shame in acknowledging how they shape your worldview. But it’s not fine to only be driven by those emotions. Down that path lies the bad outcome of you ignoring facts and accepting whatever is convenient for your worldview.

You are free to have your own opinions and preferred policies. However, you are not entitled to your own facts to justify them. Though sadly facts are often the first victim in any political discussion nowadays.

The post Brexit: Emotions Trumped Facts During UK’s Referendum appeared first on Real Skeptic.

That scientists agree that we’re causing global warming is nothing new if you’re keeping yourself up to date on scientific findings. This is inconvenient for those denying that there is a problem or want to downplay its consequences. If you manage to confuse the public into thinking that there is no consensus, or sow doubt about this, you’ll prevent people from acting:

Like Oreskes said, spreading doubt is the most effective strategy a science denier has. This type of attack is crucial to maintain the gap between what scientists agree on and what the public thinks scientists agree on. This tactic is how the tobacco industry successfully delayed action against the harmful effects of smoking for decades.

This brings me to Richard Tol, though he is a bit of an odd duck among those that try to discredit the scientific consensus on global warming. The detail is that despite his repeated attacks on the consensus, he actually agrees that there’s a consensus. Tol has said that “There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct” and that “The consensus is of course in the high nineties. No one ever said it was not.”

Tol’s latest attack started months ago when he shared strange and misleading graphs about the consensus on global warming. It was his attempt to demonstrate that Cook 2013 is an outlier with the consensus it found. The strangest part about this attempt was that Tol used research that also found a high consensus on global warming among experts.

As Tol was claiming the opposite of the research he was citing I contacted the authors of those studies. The responses that I got back were swift and unanimous in their condemnation on how Tol had misrepresented their work. According to them, what Tol did made “no sense whatsoever” and was “grossly misleading.”

Before I contacted the authors of the cited studies I had already warned Tol that Verheggen, Doran, and Anderegg would not agree with the conclusions he was drawing from their reseach and data. The responses I published from the authors of the cited studies didn’t impress Tol. Neither did the authors engaging Tol directly have any effect on him.

This was the “I told you so” moment I already mentioned, though now it has become a bigger “I told you so” moment. Authors of seven previous consensus studies that Tol cited — Naomi Oreskes, Peter Doran, William Anderegg, John Cook, Bart Verheggen, Ed Maibach, and J. Stuart Carlton — with several other scientists have written a response to Tol’s nonsensus in Environmental Research Letters.  They have the following to say about Tol’s comment:

The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared by 90%–100% of publishing climate scientists according to six independent studies by co-authors of this paper. Those results are consistent with the 97% consensus reported by Cook et al (Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024) based on 11 944 abstracts of research papers, of which 4014 took a position on the cause of recent global warming. A survey of authors of those papers (N = 2412 papers) also supported a 97% consensus. Tol (2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 048001) comes to a different conclusion using results from surveys of non-experts such as economic geologists and a self-selected group of those who reject the consensus. We demonstrate that this outcome is not unexpected because the level of consensus correlates with expertise in climate science. At one point, Tol also reduces the apparent consensus by assuming that abstracts that do not explicitly state the cause of global warming (‘no position’) represent non-endorsement, an approach that if applied elsewhere would reject consensus on well-established theories such as plate tectonics. We examine the available studies and conclude that the finding of 97% consensus in published climate research is robust and consistent with other surveys of climate scientists and peer-reviewed studies.

This sums up perfectly all the problems with what Tol did to create his graphs. It also, again, highlights that expertise matters for measuring the consensus on global warming, which is something I also pointed out to Tol before I published my article. You can see the effect of expertise on the consensus very clearly in the following graph:

Level of consensus on AGW versus expertise across different studies (Cook 2016).

Which paints a very different picture from the one Tol tries to depict based on his graph:

I’ll highlight one of those data points in this graph to illustrate how bad it is. Take note of the light green dot in the lower left corner, that one indicates a consensus on global warming of 12%. But that’s not a group of climate scientists.

This percentage is calculated from data used for the paper Verheggen 2014 and is from a group of people tagged as “unconvinced.” Verheggen explained to me that “This group consists to a large extent of signatories of public statements disapproving of mainstream climate science, many of whom are not publishing scientists. For example, some Heartland Institute staffers were also included.”

This is the same Heartland Institute which describes itself as “the world’s most prominent think-tank promoting scepticism about man-made climate change” by using a partial quote from The Economist. As Verheggen said “It is actually surprising that the level of consensus in this group is larger than 0%.”

The authors of the cited studies highlight most of the other problems with this graph in my article Scientists Respond To Tol’s Misrepresentation Of Their Consensus Research. With the detailed explanations from those same authors now available in their response to Tol’s nonsensus in Environmental Research Letters.

I doubt that Tol ever expected that the authors he cited would rebut him repeatedly and this strongly. Tol not backing down in the face of those initial responses means I also need to thank him. Without him, all these scientists who investigated the consensus probably wouldn’t have gathered to write such a strong response confirming the robustness of the scientific consensus on global warming.

There’s now one paper summarizing the research about the scientific consensus on human caused global warming. It explains how important expertise is, how consensus arises and develops, and why highlighting such a consensus is important for increasing awareness and acceptance of global warming. The exact opposite of what science deniers want to be demonstrated.

The post Devastating Reply To Richard Tol’s Nonsensus In Peer-Reviewed Journal appeared first on Real Skeptic.

So let’s look at the actual tweet. It reads “China now consumes around 2.7 tonnes of coal on a per-capita basis. However, Britain had per-capita coal consumption of 4.6 tonnes in 1913”. That’s it. No further explanation. No link to a site to provide more nuance. Just those two sentences. And it is that lack of nuance that is the problem. In those two sentences the poster talks about emerging economies, the environmental issues that come with improved standards of living, and the question of where we should get our energy. Those are a lot of complex issues spliced into a singular, and in my opinion unfair, 140 character long comparison.

When comparing, say, economies there are several numbers you could look at. A popular choice would be the GDP. It measures the size of an economy in cold hard currency. But some countries have a huge population while others have only a small population. So a country with a large GDP could still have its population living in poverty. They’d just need a huge amount of people to make up for it. So to even things out you use the GDP per-capita. It basically divides the GDP by the economy’s population size. This creates a much fairer comparison.

The tweet does the same. Just not with the GDP but with the consumption of coal. It’s per capita, so it’s a fair comparison, right? Well, in this case it’s not exactly fair. In economics, the GDP per-capita does not account for things like income inequality, corruption, human rights issues. So a country with a high GDP per-capita could still have a large portion of its population live in poverty. And, likewise, the comparison between China in 2015 and Great Britain in 1913 is missing a lot of variables.

102 years

Between Great Britain 1913 and China 2015 are 102 years. In those 102 years we’ve invented stainless steel, shortwave radio, the arc welder, robots, 3D movies, rockets, aerosol cans, the jet engine, radio telescopes, radar, the atomic bomb, microwave ovens, transistors, solar cells, computers, and the Internet. We’ve fought our way through two World Wars, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and two Gulf wars to name just a few. We’ve sent humans to walk on the moon and then come back to Earth several times. Launched many satellites into space and sent probes to investigate our solar system.

It is almost impossible to compare the way we consume energy to the way we did 102 years ago. We’re just too far removed from that world. Coal, for one, was the obvious choice for the people in Great Britain. They had it in abundance, had very few alternatives, and had little to no knowledge of the harm it does to the environment. In 2015 we have a lot more knowledge and many more alternatives.

Per-capita

Another problem lies in the usage of per-capita numbers instead of total numbers. While per-capita numbers are used often to compare energy use between different countries, using it here is somewhat misleading. Crok’s tweet tries to make the point that China’s pollution from coal isn’t as bad as that of Great Britain in 1913. And it shows us the per-capita numbers that would prove this. But when we look at the total impact modern China and early 20th century Great Britain have had on the planet, we need total numbers. And while there are 1.36 billion people living in modern China, early 20th century Great Britain only had 42.6 million inhabitants. Even with Great Britain’s massive coal usage, the actual amount of pollutants sent into the atmosphere by modern China is much higher.

Calculating the precise amount of pollutants sent into the atmosphere by burning coal is not easy. To get a rough idea we first need to know how much actual carbon is in coal. Coal comes in a wide variety of forms ranging from 60% carbon to about 92%. When burned that carbon with oxygen from the air forms CO2. Carbon’s atomic weight is about 12, CO2 is about 44. Now we have the numbers we need to make a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

Great Britain’s 4.6 tons of coal per capita would produce between 253 million and 388 million metric tons of CO2. China’s 2.7 tons of coal per capita would produce between 8.11 billion and 12.4 billion metric tons of CO2.

Rising energy demands

China is one of the world’s fastest growing economies and this means their energy demands have gone up significantly. Like most large economies, the energy demand is likely to keep rising. China is fulfilling a large portion of this demand with coal. In 1980 the annual consumption of coal in China was 615.5 million metric tons. By 2012 this number has gone up to a whopping 3.5 billion metric tons. Per capita that comes to 2.7 tons. Modern day Great Britain’s per capita coal usage has dropped to just below 1 ton.

But it’s not all bad, luckily. In 1980 China got about 57.62 billion kWh of energy from renewables. In 2012 this has skyrocketed to 1 trillion kWh! Like coal, the use of renewable energy has skyrocketed in China. Through a project called the China Township Electrification Program and China Village Electrification Program, for instance. The programs are providing electricity to remote areas from renewable energy sources. The China Township Electrification Program connected about 200,000 households to the grid. The China Village Electrification Program connected another 3.5 million household. In this program a mixture of wind, photovoltaic, and hydro-electric energy is used. It is programs like this that show that China has what it takes to convert to cleaner energy sources.

Conclusion

I’ve looked online and found that more sites are using the comparison between modern China and 20th century Great Britain. It is obvious that this is an unfair comparison. It gives the impression that China’s coal use is not all that bad. But in 2015 there are better and cleaner alternatives. Replacing the large scale coal use in China with renewable energy would be very beneficial to the Earth’s environment even if per-capita is lower than the coal use of Great Britain 1913.

Using per-capita numbers is a great way to compare the energy use of two nations. But the comparison has to be fair and the conclusions you draw from it should be honest. Adding variables like different time-periods can distort the truth, especially when you condense it down to a single sentence. Suddenly, a serious environmental problem can seem like no big deal. And “no big deals” tend to be left as they are.

p.s all numbers referenced in this article come from Wolfram Alpha.Their sources for these numbers include the US Central Intelligence Agency and the US Energy Information Administration.

photo credits : Asian Development Bank

The post How to hide most of China’s coal consumption appeared first on Real Skeptic.

It provides context about Soon’s career, how bad his research is, who funded the research, and the potential conflicts of interest. Scientists also gave some very good responses about why it’s import to focus on Soon’s bad research.

However, I’ve also seen some strange remarks critiquing what was found. Arguments that private funding is normal and that using the word deliverables is normal to use, so it doesn’t matter that Soon gets to do his research as long as scientists can show it was wrong.

No, all of that does matter, as context is everything in situations where someone consistently produces bad research.

To quote the Real Climate article The Soon fallacy that I referenced earlier:

Soon’s work has been singularly poor for over a decade, first coming to prominence with the Soon and Baliunas (2003) debacle in Climatic Research which led to the resignation of 5 editors in protest at the way the paper was handled (and see more here). Another case associated with some very obvious shenanigans was Dyck et al (2007). More recently, his presentations at Heartland’s pseudo-climate conferences have come under renewed scrutiny for their level of incoherence.

The odd thing about this is that there is real, and interesting, science to be done on the impacts of solar forcing on climate. The chemical feedbacks due to photolytic reactions in both the stratosphere and troposphere involving ozone, NOx, and water vapour, can have significant impacts. Exploring the tremendous complexities in aerosol formation and growth and impacts on clouds and whether that is mediated by modulations of cosmic rays is fascinating (if, as yet, inconclusive). Indeed, there is a current NASA call for proposals on exactly these subjects (Notice of Intent due March 13!). But every time another one of these spurious correlations is touted, or one more fallaciously reasoned argument is put forward, it makes it harder for serious scientists to get involved at all without being tarred with the same pseudo-scientific brush.

Soon’s research is so bad and flawed that it sabotages research that investigates real issues and questions about the influence of the sun on our planet’s climate. Normally if a scientist consistently produces bad research they won’t be able to get funding. But it didn’t happen with Soon, he still managed to get his research funded.

This is why the recent documents are so important. The New York Times article spells it out quite clearly:

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

They continue later on:

The newly disclosed documents, plus additional documents compiled by Greenpeace over the last four years, show that at least $409,000 of Dr. Soon’s funding in the past decade came from Southern Company Services, a subsidiary of the Southern Company, based in Atlanta.

Southern is one of the largest utility holding companies in the country, with huge investments in coal-burning power plants. The company has spent heavily over many years to lobby against greenhouse-gas regulations in Washington. More recently, it has spent significant money to research ways to limit emissions.

In the case of Soon we have a party funding bad research that then can be used to delay action. We’ve seen this before with the tobacco industry:

This is the important context of the released documents. It is the same tactic the tobacco industry used to create legitimate looking papers to delay action. Using a tobacco spokesperson for such papers, as Oreskes put it, wouldn’t pass the laugh test. But use a scientist, preferably one without obvious links to you, and the message of doubt is taken seriously by the media.

In one famous memo the tobacco industry stated that “doubt is their product.” A lesson that many science deniers have taken to heart as it’s extremely effective in delaying action.

All this combined is why not declaring these conflicts of interests is such a big deal. Shine a light on that kind of funding and you undermine the message and the messenger. After this revelation Southern Company Services is now no longer interested in funding Soon’s research. Revealing this funding might not be the main reason, but it could have been the proverbial final nail in the coffin for Southern funding Soon.

Commercial funding and talking about deliverables in the context of said funding is normal. But bad research normally doesn’t get funding as it doesn’t help a company’s bottom line. You’ll only do that when you have something to gain from producing bad research. In the case of Southern Company Services doubt about human caused global warming was needed so they could continue with current business practices.

This won’t be the last time that we’ll see this situation, as Coca-Cola recently demonstrated. Lets hope that holding companies accountable for funding this kind of bad research will make it a rare occasion.

The post Willie Soon’s Deliverables appeared first on Real Skeptic.