A glimpse of the Future

There is good evidence that the next advance of the earth’s glaciers will occur within the next thousand years or so. A catastrophe for humanity, but I am optimistic enough to suppose that as a species we will survive. Our few remaining short-lived descendants, as they shiver before fires at the mouths of their caves will tell each other stories of a legendary past when their long-lived ancestors enjoyed a life of abundance in a former golden age – the Happy Holocene.

Meanwhile, back in the Holocene…

Today our technology is so advanced that more than 60% of its 8 billion plus citizens are free to pursue fields of skill and knowledge that have nothing directly to do with food production. In developed, industrialised nations, that percentage must be nearer 90%.

One of these fields of knowledge is geology.

The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), founded in 1961, is the peak governing body of geology. Under its aegis are a number of Commissions covering such things as Structure and Tectonics, Geochemistry, Ethics, History of Geology, Geological Education and so on. The oldest and probably the most important of these Commissions is the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) which is tasked with responsibility for the subdivision of geological time going back 4.6 billion years (4.6 Ga).

To Fully Understand this Post, you will Need to Know How Geologists Divide Time

Time divisions and subdivisions are based on the stratigraphic record – the sequential accumulation of sediments and the fossil assemblages (if any) within them. Boundaries between subdivisions are based on significant, widespread and geologically rapid, transitions in the overall depositional environment. Localities where these key transitions are well exposed are referenced as type-localities and dated by isotopic methods. Each distinctive rock/fossil assemblage (divisions and subdivisions) are given a name, thus reifying them as a “thing”. Many of the names go back more than 200 years and reflect the happenstance of early geological research (see my previous post, The Invention of the Paleozoic). On a stratigraphic chart, time divisions are organised by nested hierarchies of ever smaller intervals of time. Eons (sometimes called Eonothems) are the longest: there are four of these in the 4.6 Ga geological record. Together, these four Eons are subdivided into fifteen Eras (Erathems), and these fifteen Eras together contain twenty-six Periods (Systems). The Periods contain 38 Epochs (Series), and the Epochs themselves contain over a 100 Stages (Ages).

A Stage has the shortest time interval and the smallest geographical extent of the time division.

The boundaries of Eons and Eras mark changes of global extent in tectonic processes, atmospheric composition and biospheric evolution and reflect the time evolution of these forces. However, as will become apparent, the boundaries of Periods, Epochs and Stages are much more dependent on locally available evidence, subjective judgment of experts, and the historical development of classification schemes.

If we consider the stratigraphic chart as a Library of Time, then the Eons are books, the Eras chapters, the Periods paragraphs, the Epochs sentences, and the Stages words. The last words of the last paragraph of the last chapter of the last book to be added to the library are: “to be continued…”

To carry out their task, the ICS created a number of Sub Commissions, each responsible for one of the 26 Periods in the stratigraphic record. The most recent Period, the one we live in today, is known as the Quaternary and began 2.58 million years (2.58 Ma) ago with the start of the Pleistocene Ice Age.

Geological subdivisions of the recent past, according to the ICS. Redrawn from their official chart. 

The Cenozoic

A little over sixty-six million years ago (66 Ma), a 10 km wide rogue asteroid, travelling at 40,000 kph collided with what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. This global catastrophe caused the near instantaneous extinction of 75% of all species of life on earth, including the non-avian dinosaurs. The event formed a centimeters-thick global sedimentary marker for the end of the Mesozoic Era and the beginning of the Cenozoic Era.

Graph A: Cenozoic temperatures over the past 65 Ma. The Quaternary Period and the Pleistocene Epoch begin at 2.6 Ma on the extreme right of the graph (labelled as Pleistocene Ice Age).

For the first 20 Ma of the Cenozoic, global temperatures were 10-15°C higher than today (and atmospheric CO2 levels 2-5 times higher), supporting a burst of adaptive evolutionary radiation of all Orders, Families and Species to fill the recently-vacated ecological niches of life. The Mammalian Order of Primates to which we belong evolved during this time.

Beginning around 45 Ma, the Hothouse temperatures which had prevailed during the early Cenozoic commenced a long slow fall. By 35 Ma, permanent ice sheets had become established over the Antarctic Continent. By 2.6 Ma, permanent ice sheets had also formed over Arctic regions. Permanent ice at both poles is the definition of an Ice Age. A new Period and a new Epoch had begun.

The Quaternary Period

The lower boundary (i.e. the beginning) of the Quaternary Period and the Pleistocene Epoch is defined by the start of the Pleistocene Ice Age when temperatures plummeted, and kilometer-thick ice became generally established over land and sea at high- to mid-latitude areas around both poles. These extreme cold conditions are known as Glacial and they affected the nature of sediments, and the fossils within them, that were deposited all over the world.

The maximum extent of Ice sheets during the last glacial episode around 20,000 years ago. Image source, NASA.

The end of the Pleistocene Epoch should therefore be when glacial conditions cease for a significant period of geological time (i.e. at least a million years). That has not happened yet. Considering the duration of previous Ice Ages, each of which lasted many tens of millions of years (such as the Sturtian Ice Age in the Proterozoic Eon around 700 Ma, the “Snowball Earth” Ice Age at the end of the Ordovician Era around 440 Ma, or the long-lived Late Paleozoic Ice Age centered around 300 Ma), the Pleistocene Ice Age – currently only 2.6 Ma old – has millions of years yet to run. (see my post, Climate Change Explained in Three Graphs). Nor are the general icy conditions of the Pleistocene ameliorating with the passage of time. The opposite is true. Glacial advances in the latter part of the Pleistocene, starting around a million years ago, have been longer, colder and more extensive than those of the earlier part of the Epoch. The change to longer cycles and colder glacial temperatures is referred to as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition.

The evidence thus indicates that the Pleistocene Ice Age is becoming ever colder with time and, as Ice Ages go, has only just begun.

The Holocene

We live in the Holocene – an interval of ice retreat, relatively warm temperatures and sea level rise. It began 11,700 (0.0117 Ma) years ago.

Pleistocene geological records show the presence of at least 45 similar temporary retreats of ice. These are called Interglacials and make up around 20% of Pleistocene time. The exact number of Interglacials depends on how their start and end dates are defined. The warm conditions of the Holocene (“warm” only with respect to the preceding glacial) are not significantly different from any of the previous interglacial episodes within the Pleistocene.

Graph B: Temperatures during the last 0.45 Ma of the Pleistocene as measured in Antarctic ice cores. Five Interglacial events are recorded, the last two labelled Eemian and Holocene. Data from www.climatedata.info    

During the last interglacial (the Eemian), elephant and hippopotami gamboled on the mud flats of the River Thames. With the return of glacial conditions these species migrated south but, 120,000 years later with the arrival of the Holocene, another species of large out-of-Africa mammal gambols, once again, on the banks the Thames.  

Graph B, above, shows changes in air temperature (blue) and CO2 concentration (red) over Antarctica, as measured in the VOSTOK and EPICA deep ice cores. Broadly similar graphs can be produced for other regions of the globe, but the Antarctic data provides the best resolution.  The graph covers the last 20% of the Pleistocene. Five upward spikes in temperature are apparent: these are Interglacial episodes of ice retreat – the last two labeled on the graph as “Eemian” and “Holocene“. During the 10,000 year-long Eemian, West Antarctica and the Ross Sea were ice fee (Nature Geoscience 2026, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-026-1988-1). The Emperor Penguins survived. There were no tipping points.

There is another important takeaway from this graph: there is good correlation between temperature and CO2, but the peaks and troughs of CO2 lag the peaks and troughs of temperature by 500-1000 years. This tells us that, whereas temperature might be acting as a control on atmospheric CO2 levels, CO2 cannot be controlling temperature (since an effect cannot precede its cause).  

Graph C: Greenland ice core data from Vinther et al 2009: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08355. and Macassar Strait benthic sediment data from Rosenthal et al 2013  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617. Compilation of the two data sets onto one graph with common scales is by Andy May.   

Graph C shows air and sea temperatures over the past 10,000 years – the last 85% of the Holocene. The temperature data come from oxygen isotope ratios measured in ice cores from Greenland (orange line) and sea-floor sediment (benthic) cores from the Western Pacific (black line). The good correlation of temperature variation with time between regions on opposite sides of the globe, based 0n two completely different deposit types, is compelling.  

Other graphs of Holocene temperatures using different proxy methods and from different locations around the globe have been published. You can view a comparison of these graphs, in Nature Science  Data, 2020 HERE. Although differing in detail, they all show a similar pattern to graph C.

From the graph we can see a steep initial rise in Holocene temperatures to a plateau around 10,000-5000 years ago. This time interval is known as the Holocene Climate Optimum.  Optimum, that is, with respect to life on earth. During the HCO, the only permanent ice to survive in the world were those of Antarctica, Greenland and the high plateaus and valleys of the great mountain ranges.

The HCO was followed by a slow and gradual decline in global temperatures and the reappearance and steady advance of mountain glaciers, reaching their maximum extent during the informally named Little Ice Age. The LIA began around 800 years ago and lasted until the middle of the 19th century. Its coldest temperatures (nadir) occurred during the 17th Century – a century of global failed harvests, plagues, invasions, revolutions, civil war, religious pogroms and, in Europe and North America, the judicial murder of thousands of harmless old women accused of witchcraft. 

See “Global crisis: Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century” by Geoffrey Parker, 2013, Yale University Press: ISBN 978-0-300-15323-1;

also “The Crisis of the 17th Century” by Oxford historian Hugh Trevor Roper, 1967, Liberty Fund, ISBN 978-1-61487-084-4).

During the “Little Ice Age” the world had a modest foretaste of what a return to full glacial conditions might mean for our civilisation. That inevitable return will not be to a new Ice Age, just the return, after a brief period of relief, to the normal conditions of the Pleistocene Ice within which we are already living.

Is the Holocene Unique among Pleistocene Interglacials?

Comparing graphs B and C, all the interglacials of the Pleistocene for which we have sufficient resolution show a similar strongly skewed pattern – a steep initial rise to a plateau, followed by a long slow fall to Glacial or Neoglacial conditions. The relentless decline in global temperature following the Holocene Climate Optimum follows this pattern and provides an ominous pointer to the next episode of Pleistocene glaciation.

Beginning around 100-150 years ago (at the extreme right of the ice-core data of graph C), there is a steep upward spike in global temperature of 1-1.5° C.  This is the Modern Warm Period (MWP) – the subject of much current existential angst from scientists who should know better (see my previous post HERE). But modern global temperatures are only “warm” when compared to the anomalously low temperatures of the preceding Neoglacial. Compared to temperatures that were normal for the majority of the Holocene, today’s temperatures are relatively cool. Compared to temperatures that were normal for the first 60 million years of the Cenozoic – when life on earth boomed – they are catastrophically cold.

From graph C we can also see that increases and decreases in global temperature of up to 3° C, over relatively short time periods, have occurred every 500-1000 years or so throughout Holocene time.

There is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Holocene other than that it corresponds with and helped facilitate the rise of human civilisation.

There is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Modern Warm Period other than that the academic stratigraphers of the ICS Sub-Committee for the Quaternary happen to live within it.

But the ICS Interprets Pleistocene Data Differently…

According to the ICS, and with the approval of the IUGS, the Pleistocene Epoch (or Pleistocene Ice Age) finished, terminated and collapsed forever 11,700 years ago (0.0117 Ma), to be replaced by the Holocene Epoch. These august bodies must therefore consider that the Holocene interglacial is fundamentally different from the numerous interglacials that preceded it.

To be logically consistent, if the Holocene is a separate Epoch within the Quaternary, then all previous Interglacials and Glacials of the Quaternary must be judged as Epochs also. With 90 or more Epochs, the Quaternary would then contain more than three times as many Epochs as all other 26 Periods of the stratigraphic record combined. An absurd proposition. And the Quaternary is not finished yet.

In this dilemma, the ICS appears to be trapped in an epistemological maze with no clear roadmap to follow.

Because the sediments are so recent, stratigraphers of the Quaternary have a plethora of available evidence enabling them to create ever finer subdivisions of geologic time. But that is no excuse to elevate these micro-divisions to the status of “Epochs”. Otherwise, we would have to conclude that an Epoch of the Quaternary is equivalent to a mere sedimentary horizon of the Paleozoic. If there is to be logic and meaning to standard terms for the division of geologic time, consistency of definition is surely vital.

But could the ICS be correct in concluding that the Pleistocene Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago with the beginning of the Holocene? It will be another million years before we can be 100% certain of the answer to that question. But we don’t need to wait that long. Based on the evidence presented, I am more than 90% certain that the glaciers of the Pleistocene will return. Whether that be in 500, 1000 or 2000 years’ time, we just don’t know.

The members of the ICS apparently consider that, starting from the time of the cultural Neolithic Revolution (made possible by the benign climate of the early Holocene), humans have caused sufficiently large changes to global sedimentary processes and fossil assemblages to justify raising the status of the Holocene from merely the most recent of the many Pleistocene interglacials, to a unique stratigraphic Epoch in its own right.

Whatever the reasoning of the ICS, this is a controversial and debatable proposition. As the late, great, Carl Sagan wrote in 1979: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. No such evidence has been presented.

But it Gets Worse…

Astonishingly, in 2019, the ICS made another proposal to their governing body, the IUGS. They advocated the creation of a brand-new Epoch to succeed the Holocene Epoch. This Epoch was to be called the “Anthropocene”, a neologism cobbled together from two Greek words meaning roughly: “The New Age of Man”. It was proposed that the Anthropocene started around 1950AD.

This is equivalent to the fond hopes of 1946 that the establishment of the United Nations would lead to a new epoch of Global Peace and Stability (Pax Americana?) that would last for 1,000 years.

To their credit, in 2019, the IUGS, in a near-unanimous vote, rejected the Anthropocene proposal of the ICS.

I strongly suspect that the stratigraphic proposals of the ICS concerning the Holocene and Anthropocene were influenced by the current fashionable scientific meme that the effects of modern human activities, including CO2 emissions, are strong enough to overwhelm all other terrestrial and extraterrestrial forces that have controlled temperature, sediment deposition and life around the globe for billions of years.

Back to the Future…

Our remote descendants, as they shiver in their caves, may well think otherwise.

The post The Happy Holocene appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

Good News! 

The malign influence of the Catastrophic, Anthropogenic Global Warming meme (CAGW) (2) that more than 40 years ago escaped to infect the world – like a virus from a Wuhan Lab – is finally beginning to collapse.

The Evidence is Clear.

Despite $14 trillion (an estimated figure by Bjorn Lomberg) spent by world governments in CO2 abatement schemes over the past 20 years, atmospheric levels of CO2 have continued to rise.

Today fossil fuels provide more than 80% of our energy needs, a proportion that has barely changed from 20 years ago. Most of the balance, then as now, comes from nuclear and hydro (3).  Although the absolute amount of energy from wind and solar has increased over that period, so have all other sources of energy. A rising tide of demand has lifted all boats: there has been No Energy Transition.

A rising tide lifts all boats. (Click for larger, sharper image)

With the best sites already taken, new wind and solar “farms” are having to be built in widely-scattered, remote, onshore or offshore locations. This requires thousands of kilometers of new transmission lines that cost much more than the installations themselves. Governments attempt to overcome this problem with huge subsidies, but their capacity to do this is limited. The resulting distribution bottlenecks will make the renewable installations currently being built stranded assets (see: Barclays Transition Realism White Paper February 2026 for a detailed argument on this case).

Despite, or perhaps because of, increasing atmospheric CO2 levels and a barely noticeable rise in global average temperature over the past 150 years, all measures of human wellbeing – wealth, health, nutrition, clean water, education – show that humanity is thriving. But the killer metric – the one that encapsulates all others, is longevity. According to Our World in Data, in 1900 average global life expectancy at birth was 32 years; in 1950 it was 45 years; in 2021 it was 70 years while today (2025) it is 73 years. Huge relative inequities still remain of course (700 million have no access to electricity), but the poor of yesterday would consider themselves rich if they had even half the comforts, amenities and opportunities available to the poor of today.

In Paris, in 2015, the 21st annual United Nations Conference on Climate Change (known as the Conference of Parties, or COP 21), concluded with an agreement that participating countries should take steps to move the world to Net Zero human carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

On its own insistence, China (who in 2025 built one new coal-fired power station per week and currently emit almost as much CO2 as the rest of the world combined) was excluded from the Agreement on the grounds that it was a “Developing Nation”. They got to move their net zero aspirations forward to 2070.  Genuine Third World Developing Nations were given a similar free pass.

Western countries were the first to ratify the 2015 Paris Agreement and became the most enthusiastic adopters of net zero programs. All have seen their economies decline as their electricity prices soar and their industries close or move offshore. A yawning gap has now developed between East Asian countries, increasingly the manufacturers of the world’s consumer and industrial goods, and a rapidly de-industrialising West.

Even as most countries continue to protest that they are still true believers (just give us more time and more money), western Governments are slowly waking up to the reality that, although energy from the sun and wind is free and renewable, the machines, devices and wires required to capture, store and distribute it most definitely are not. And that cost is ruinous.

These machines and devices are largely bought from China who can make them more cheaply than anyone else because their industries use cheap fossil fuel power (and, in the case of solar panel manufacture, slave labour). There are no prizes for guessing where a large proportion of that $14 trillion has gone!

As a result, western countries are finally scaling back on ambitions to power their economies solely with wind and solar. Instead, they are re-opening or refurbishing coal-fired power stations, building new ones and scrambling to sign up new coal, oil and gas supplies.

In 2020 - the 5th Anniversary of Paris - COP25 was held in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. The meeting was described by (then) Prince Charles, in the typical hyperbolic language of true believers, as “the last chance saloon” for climate action. Inspired by the occasion, Scott Morisson, Prime Minister of Australia and a former fierce champion of fossil fuels, in a Damascene conversion, signed his country up to the Paris Net Zero by 2050 Target. One of the last to sign up to Paris, Australia might become one of the last to leave, switching the lights off as they go.

With hindsight, COP25 in Glasgow now increasingly appears to have been the last chance saloon for climate alarmist madness.

Following the Glasgow meeting, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and their flagship offshoot the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was set up. This was a cartel of over 140 banks and financial institutions that colluded to deny funding for fossil fuel exploration and development, the money to be transferred to finance renewable energy schemes. The alliance reportedly controlled $130 trillion in assets.

Mendicant Governments and NGOs lined up for the chance to get their fingers sticky in that honey pot.

But the group was formally disbanded on October 3rd 2025, following its abandonment by virtually all major US, European and Japanese banks (4).

Mark Carney, the wokest banker of them all (formerly Governor of the Bank of England, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action, instigator and promoter of the NZBA - now Prime Minister of Canada) is now walking back the draconian CO2 abatement schemes of his predecessor Justin Trudeau (5).

Meanwhile global coal consumption and atmospheric CO2 levels reached record highs in 2025 (6).

The last (November 2025) UN climate conference (COP 30 in Brazil, the 10th anniversary of the Paris) ended in disagreement, recrimination and futility.

Prominent CAGW supporters Bill Gates (the world’s first centi-billionaire and public philanthropist), and James Hansen, (former Director of the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies, widely acknowledged as the father of CAGW), have recanted.

In October 2025 (just before COP 30 in Brazil), Bill Gates issued a statement saying:

Climate Change does not pose an existential threat to civilisation. 

Matching actions to words, Gates severely cut back the funding and activities of his climate advocacy and policy group Breakthrough Energy, stating that his money would be better spent on combating disease and poverty.

In 2024, James Hansen, now a late but enthusiastic convert to nuclear power, wrote:

Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.

It is hard to escape the fact that the Paris Agreement for Net Zero by 2050 is now a sick joke more honored in the breach than the observance by those countries foolish enough to ratify it.

Dead, buried and soon to be forgotten.

Meanwhile, back in the World of Science

An October 2025 paper (7) published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society shows that species level extinctions due to climate change “have not significantly increased over the last approximately 200 years” thus hopefully putting an end to the absurd claim by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) that CAGW is causing or will cause the Sixth Mass Extinction event in the history of life on earth.

Numerous papers have been published (8) showing that the majority of small Pacific and Indian ocean island nations continue to grow in area despite modest sea level rises. And that includes these poster children for climate catastrophists – the tiny island nations of The Maldives, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

Throughout the world, ticking Climate “Doomsday clocks” (and they come in many forms) are regularly reset to avoid them becoming a permanent record of failed prediction.

Satellite reflectance imagery by NASA conclusively demonstrates that, since this data became available in 1980, the world has become up to 20% greener (i.e.- an increase in the Leaf Area Index or LAI) largely as a result of increasing atmospheric CO2 fertilisation. Studies of leaf stomata confirm this conclusion. For largely the same reason the yields from all major global food crops have been steadily increasing since the 1960s (9), (10).

The world in 2024, from satellite data. All green coloured areas have shown an increase in plant growth over the previous 45 years whilst desert areas (white) have decreased in area. Source of data: NASA

Fears of widespread famine due to overpopulation – the great Malthusian scare of the 1970s and 1980s – are now a thing of the past.

The effects of atmospheric CO2 fertilisation

Over the last 100 years, deaths from weather-related natural disasters (adjusted for global population increase) have declined by over 95% ! (11).

Sceptical scientists are now increasingly getting their papers published, and having alarmist papers retracted. Yea and verily, even by those grim gatekeepers of CAGW orthodoxy – the editors of the Journals Science and Nature (see HERE).

The Museum of Once-Fashionable Science. 

But it is Too Soon to Celebrate

In 2024 and 2025, the UN Secretary General António Guterres, variously declared that it is:

Climate crunch time

that:

The oceans are boiling

and:

Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits.

however, he added:

There is an exit off the highway to climate hell.

The “exit” he was referring to is the 2015 Paris Agreement.

But in 2019, in a performative stunt for Time Magazine, António Guterres conclusively demonstrated that the oceans are not “boiling”. In fact, he looks rather cold. 

In July 2025, the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICC) - sixteen unelected and unaccountable lawyers sitting in The Hague – declared a “human right” to avoiding the “indisputable, urgent and existential threat” of Climate Change. President of the court Yugi Iwasawa added that CC was an “an existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet” (AP News, July 23, 2025).

These legal opinions enable and encourage years of future litigation and lawfare.

Sixteen unelected lawyers sitting in The Hague. Although nominated by mostly third world countries, their lawyerly dress and pretensions are pure European

Little better can be expected from lawyers – self-righteous orthodoxy is a feature of the legal profession- and few politicians ever see a passing bandwagon parade that they don’t want to join. No doubt the majority members of both groups are sincere and well-meaning persons who see themselves as noble Saviors of the Planet. But they have neither the wit nor the wisdom to realise that the band wagon’s wheels are wobbly and about to fall off. And the cheering crowds are thinning as professional activists move on to more fashionable causes: where once they shouted “Climate Action Now”, today they shout “Free Palestine”.

But what of the climate scientists who designed, built and drive the Climate Change bandwagon? The majority still, by and large, pay service (or, at least, lip-service) to the climate catastrophe meme. It is worth remembering that these scientists are dependent for their funding – their very careers – on politicians. The scientists scare public and Governments with their doomsday models: the politicians, suitably scared, then support the scientists with oceans of money. It is a vicious, self-reinforcing ouroboros loop (12), armored against evidence and reason (see my previous posts, The Mathew Effect and There is no Wisdom in Crowds).

As Upton Sinclair pointed out in 1934:

It difficult to get someone to understand something when his career depends upon his not understanding it.

Fads and fashions (cultural memes) in the wider, non-scientific community are relatively ephemeral phenomena that appear and disappear suddenly and mysteriously. But scientific fads and fashions (usually dignified by the name of paradigms) that have the weight and inertia of established Institutions behind them can take decades to die out as their adherents, one by one, retire or die.

Because they have invested so little time in acquiring them, the enthusiasms and opinions of the young can change easily (13), but for the heavily invested old, the process can take much longer. The years of hard study and training that it takes to master a field of science tends to impose rigidity of thought and resistance to new ideas. To this human failing a new and additional rigidity is now being imposed on institutional science by AI Large Language Models, all of which are “trained” on orthodoxy and consensus as part of their basic architecture (14).

It is instructive at this point to pause and consider…

A brief History of Earlier False Science Scares 

Eugenics theory was born out of late Victorian ideas of Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism. George Orwell, writing in 1945, may well have had eugenics in mind when he wrote:

 Some ideas are so absurd only an intellectual could believe them.

Eugenics was first defined and named in 1883 by Francis Galton, a first cousin of Charles Darwin. Committed Eugenicists – almost all successful, educated, middle-class white men – believed that that people like themselves had achieved their privileged status as a result of their superior genes, while the poor were poor largely because they had inferior ones and not, as social reformers believed, because of the inequities of society. Since genes are hereditable, eugenicists held that the human gene pool would be improved by selective sterilisation of the industrial working-class poor through various coercive means, while at the same time offering money to rich white men to persuade them to have more children.

Throughout the first half of the 20^th Century, these ideas became widely supported and were regarded by many as settled science.  Believing they were Following the Science, throughout the world Governments moved to implement eugenics programs. In the US, from the 1900s through to the 1940s, thousands of “feeble minded” or “sexually promiscuous” women (mostly black) were compulsorily sterilised. The 1927 US Supreme Court test case of Bell v Buck produced an infamous 8:1 ruling that these practices were entirely constitutional.  In Sweden during the same period, at least 12,000 women were similarly mutilated under various coercive schemes. In the UK, in 1931, the British Eugenics Society managed to get a Bill for the “Sterilsation of Mental Defectives” put up in the House of Commons. Fortunately the Bill was defeated, mainly through the votes of socialist and Catholic MPs. But the most enthusiastic adopter of eugenic theory was the National Socialist Government of Germany between 1933 and 1945. The Nazis sterilised over 400,000 women and added the innovation of mass genocidal murder to their eugenics toolbox. They did this to eliminate the genes of those whom they considered unfit, undesirable and racially “impure” from European society. It took the belated realisation in 1945 of the full horrors of Nazi eugenics programs to finally discredit the theory. A better scientific understanding of how heredity actually works then put the final nail in its coffin.

You can read more about the rise and fall of eugenics in an earlier post of mine called The Mathew Effect.

Around the same time as eugenics theory was being discredited, another fashionable science meme arose to replace it. In the late 1940s, medical and nutritional scientists declared that the over consumption of dietary fat (lipids) was the primary cause of Coronary Heart Disease (CHD). In 1976, the US Committee on Nutrition declared that an astonishing 98.9% of American medical scientists supported the dietary fat-CHD connection.

Following years of relentless exhortation from scientists, academicians, bureaucrats, media and profit-seeking manufacturers, whole populations across the Western World shifted away from eating meat, dairy and eggs to bread, rice, pasta, potatoes and sugar – a sure recipe for diabetes and obesity.

It took the publication around the turn of the Millennium of numerous massive, heroic and long-continued epidemiological surveys to conclusively demonstrate that there was no connection between fat consumption and heart disease.

Science is ultimately self-correcting but, as with the preceding eugenics scare, it took 50 years and enormous human suffering for that to happen.

You can read more about the Great Fat Scare of the late 20th Century, along with references and documentation, in an earlier post of mine called Fear of Fat.

And what, in its turn, has replaced the eugenics madness of the first half of the 20th century and the fat scare of the second half of the 20th Century to terrify the inhabitants of the 21st? CLIMATE CHANGE.

As the philosopher George Santayana gloomily observed in 1906:

Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it.

Conclusion – There is Hope, but There is Also a Warning

For sceptics, although many battles were won in 2025 and the possibility of an end to the struggle is in sight (Say not the struggle naught availeth), it is too soon to celebrate. The war on the CAGW (Climate Change) doomsday cult is far from won. As 2025 rolls over to 2026, die-hard cultists, both institutional scientists and the useful idiots who support them, have merely retired to lick their wounds, plan new strategies and to double down on their alarmist predictions. They are not thinking:

We misinterpreted the evidence. We cherry-picked the data. We got it wrong. We apologise.

They are thinking: 

We were not extreme enough.

So, in these dog days of 2026, in a re-purposed garage near you, the useful idiots are working hard…

Swimming in an ocean of hydrocarbon products, the useful idiots are working hard. 

******

(Updated and reformatted March, 2026)

Footnotes and References

(1)  The title of this post is a line from an 1855 poem by Arthur Hugh Clough. “Say not the struggle naught availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain:  The enemy faints not nor faileth,  As things have been they yet remain…. But Westward, look, the land is bright”. Winston Churchill used the quote in a speech to the House of Commons during the dark days of 1941.

(2) Around 2010, the CAGW global warming meme was in trouble. Global average temperatures had been in slight decline for over ten years, the 2009 UN Climate Conference (COP 15 in Copenhagen) was an acknowledged failure with no agreement among its 60,000+ delegates, the Northern Hemisphere winter of 2009-10 was one of the coldest and snowiest in decades and thousands of hacked (or leaked?) emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia had been made public in 2009 demonstrating years of malpractice and scientific finagling by prominent CAGW researchers - a scientific scandal that became known as Climategate.

To meet the crisis, and considering that those who control the language control the narrative, the promoters of the meme changed its name from Global Warming to Climate Change. Although climate has always changed and no doubt always will, the new name had a nice alliterative feel to it and was rapidly adopted by doomsday cultists.  It had the advantage of allowing climate scientists to attribute any future extreme weather event, be it heat or cold, flood or drought, calm or storm, abundance or scarcity, to rising CO2 levels.  The theory thus became immune to falsification. For every bad event that happened, climate alarmists were now able to argue “it was rising atmospheric CO2 levels that caused it”. But a theory that can explain everything, predicts nothing.

(3) Source: Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution

(4) Source: New York Times.  https://nytimes.com/2026/01/17/climate/how-wall-street-turned-its-back-on-climate-change.html

(5) In the northern Autumn of 2025, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney indicated he would approve completion of the 2000 km Keystone XL Pipeline, previously cancelled by his predecessor Justin Trudeau, and by President Joe Biden of the US. The pipeline is designed to take crude from the Alberta oil fields of Canada to refineries in the western and mid-western United Sates.

(6) Source: International Energy Agency. https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-25/executive-summary

(7) P.S.Kench et al (12 authors) 2023: Nature Communications. Reef islands have continually adjusted to environmental change over the past two millennia. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36171-2 and…

(8) K. E. Saban & J. J. Weins. Proceedings of the Royal Society Oct 2025. Unpacking the extinction crisis: rates patterns and causes of recent extinctions in plants and animals. Proc Biol Sci (2025)292(2057):  https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.1717

P.S. Kench et al (3 authors) 2018: Nature Communications. Patterns of island change and persistence offer alternate adaptation pathways for atoll nations. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-02954-1

(9) Sources: Our World in Data- https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/key-crop-yields

and…https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth-study-finds/

(10) Another reason for ever increasing yields of major food crops is the use of nitrate fertiliser (urea) – a product made by the Haber-Bosch process from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen. Nitrogen is the major component of the atmosphere – abundant, ubiquitous and free. Currently, the only economic source of hydrogen is natural gas. The cost urea is the cost of natural gas.

The effect of nitrogen fertiliser on a crop of wheat. Photo source: Deli Chen, University of Melbourne

(11) Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/decadal-deaths-disasters-type.png

(12) Ouroboros : An ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. An endless loop. A vicious circle.

If you Google the word, you will be informed that it is a symbol representing: ”the infinite loop of time”. Whatever that means. In my opinion: meaningless baloney. The real symbolism is perfectly clear.

(13) Ephemeral cultural memes. As a boy, I remember the schoolyard fashion for Yo-Yos (spinning tops on the end of a looped string). It came from nowhere and swept the world but lasted all of two years.  Today, for the young, it is six-seven. And no, I don’t know what that means either. Wikipedia doesn’t know what it means. I think that’s rather the point. When old guys like me (and you too, dear reader, if you’re over 16) get to hear of a pop-meme, it’s probably already yesterday’s thing.

(14) Joe Nalvan Jan 5, 2026: AI Models and Their “Knowledge” of Climate Change.  https://judithcurry.com

The post Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

There is No Wisdom in Crowds

The present system of science publishing is broken. Abuse and fraud are common and increasing. Ways of overcoming this are suggested.

*************

In 2023, the New Scientist Magazine reported that chemist Jose Manual Lorenzo, an Associate Professor at a regional Spanish university, had, along with multiple co-authors, published 176 scientific papers in 2022 – a rate of one paper every two days. Assuming that Lorenzo had other things to do with his time apart from research and authorship (eating, sleeping, supervising, lecturing, administration, following the football etc..) it would be a miracle if he had had time to read these papers, let alone make any meaningful input to their content.

Professor Lorenzo is one of a new breed of what are called hyper-profile authors.

How has science publishing come to this?

Over more than 500 years, scientific discoveries that revolutionised our knowledge of the world have been announced in books or Scientific Journals by single, or at the most, by two authors. To name but a few (my personal choice): the theory of evolution of species through natural selection by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1856 [1], the grand unification of electricity and magnetism (electromagnetism) by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865 [2], the Special and General Theories of Relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905 [3] and 1916, the discovery by Edwin Hubble in1929[4] that billions of galaxies exist beyond our Milky Way, the theory of Alfred Wegener in 1912, that whole continents can move across the face of the earth [5], and the resolution of the helical molecular structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953 [6].

But since the end of WW2, single or even double author papers have become rare. Few today have less than 5. A paper (on fruit flies) was published in 2015 in the Journal Genes, Genomes, Genetics with 1014 authors – included in this paper as “authors” were the many hundreds of conscripted undergraduate students who had helped collect the field data [7]. But in the same year, the entomologists were beaten into the Guinness Book of Records by the particle physicists who published, in the journal Physics Review, a paper with 5,152 authors [8].  The paper is 33 pages long, the first 24 of which are taken up by the alphabetic author list. This is taking consensus and inclusion to absurd lengths. In the case of the physicists, the totality of staff in large cooperating government research groups, from several countries, from lowest technician to Heads of Departments, were signed up. (Did no one have a dissenting voice?).

In all these cases each “author” presumably got to add the publication and any citation credits to his or her personal CV.

It is as if in 1859 Charles Darwin, publishing his revolutionary book On the Origin of Species, had included as co-authors T. H. Huxley, C. Lyell, J. D. Hooker, A. R. Wallace, A. Gray, Captain R. Fitzroy and the entire crew of HMS Beagle, including the ship’s cat!

There is no wisdom in crowds

Traditionally, the role of minor or peripheral contributors to a scientific paper were dealt with by including them in a brief “Acknowledgements” section in the main text. But listing such contributors as authors destroys the accepted meaning of that word. A new term - hyper-authorship - has been coined to cover this recent publishing phenomenon, while authors with huge publication lists (such as Professor Lorenzo at the head of this post) are called hyper-profile authors. From this point on, I will refer to such people as hyper-profile authors or bracket them in quotation marks as “authors”.

A 2025 publication in the Journal of Informetrics [9] shows that the academic disciplines most guilty of hyper-authorship are (in order) Clinical Medicine, Engineering, Biology and the Political & Social Sciences. The fields most immune to the phenomenon (relatively) are Mathematics, Chemistry, Psychology and Economics.

For academics, their institutions and the journals they publish in, status and reputation come from:

1. The total number of papers or books you “author” (the famous “publish or perish” dictum),

2. The prestige of the Journals in which you publish. Today there are over 40,000 technical journals: Nature and Science are the big dogs at the top of the tree who routinely reject more than 9 out of 10 of scientific papers submitted to them (but see footnote 12). At the bottom of the pecking order are journals that will publish anything, so long as you pay their fee. These latter are known as predatory journals [10], they are also sometimes referred to as paper mills.

3. The number of references that your paper garners. Such published references are called citations. It does not matter whether the citations praise or damn your work, a citation is a citation: your paper is being read.

4. The position of your university in annual global ranking tables. There are around 30,000 self-described “universities” in the world (internet search) but ranking tables, such as the annual TES (Times Educational Supplement) Rankings consider less than one tenth of these as worthy of inclusion in their surveys. Oxford, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Princeton, Cambridge and Harvard are the top five in this table for 2025, but just being included in the top 200 is a proud boast. These tables are compiled on the basis of the number of publications and citations garnered by the research employees of each university. A high ranking is vitally important to universities as it determines the number of students they attract, the fees they can charge and the amount of grant money and endowments they are able to hoover up.

Points 2, 3 and 4 were designed to provide controls on abuses of point 1, ensuring that mere quantity does not overwhelm quality.

But the incentives on all parties to rig the system in their favour are high, and the ways of gaming the system are many…

Let me count the ways…

1. Join an informal “publishing network” made up of researchers with similar interests across several institutions and continents – the more the better. Wide discussions and sharing of ideas are undoubtedly a good thing [11], but one of these “similar interests” will certainly be: “include me as a co-author in your papers and I will you include as one in mine”. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

2. If your publishing network is large, then it is likely that editors, struggling to find willing reviewers of your paper with appropriate knowledge (peer reviewing is a time consuming, voluntary service), will seek them from among your network – people who might be your friends, colleagues or have previously co-authored with you. This is not peer review, it’s pal-review.

3. Break your long and comprehensive papers into discrete portions and publish each portion separately (a technique more suitable to some research fields than others). Otherwise known as Salami-slicing.

4. Pay to publish in predatory journals with lax or non-existent review processes (see footnote 10). Pay to publish.

5.  Media statements by you or your institution about published or pending research results are a good way of short circuiting the normal science assessment process and making direct emotional appeal to the public and to government funding bodies. Therefore, in press releases on your latest results use only hyped-up language, emphasize the positive and hide any qualifications, uncertainties or alternate explanations you might have. Science by Press Release.

6. Make sure each paper you “author” includes as many references to your own publications as possible – and make sure your “co-authors” do the same. Self-promotion.

7. Confirmation bias hinders objective appraisal. Papers that confirm existing widespread theory will always gather more citations than those that challenge it. Therefore, if you want to get past peer reviewers and attract maximum citations, do not introduce new ideas that challenge orthodoxy, or, if you do, hedge them about with obsequious qualifications and apologies or bury them so deep in the text, appendixes or supplementary data that they might not be noticed.  Confirmation Bias [12].

8. If you are a peer reviewer for a journal submission, make your favourable review conditional on the submitting “authors” making references to your own papers. Intellectual blackmail.

9. As a corollary to point 8, if you know, suspect or guess (in many cases, easy to do) who the supposedly anonymous reviewers of your journal submission will be, then load your paper with favourable references to their papers. Flattery.

10. If you are an editor of a journal making annual editorial reviews (a requirement of many publishing companies), then add multiple references your own papers in that journal (for an egregious example of this, see footnote [13]). This will not only increase your own citation index, but that of the journal as well. Corruption.

 11. If your research is not producing positive results, or results that do not support your pre-conceived ideas, or you just want an easy way to increase your publication and citation indexes, simply invent or falsify your data. This is deliberate fraud, but it can be very difficult to prove. With around half a million scientific papers published each year, many hundreds of examples of fraud have been exposed. But those are probably just the tip of an iceberg (see footnote 10 and references in the Stuart Ritchie book mentioned in Acknowledgements). Fraud.

The Problem

There are far, far more PhDs awarded today than there are career academic employment positions. The stratagems I list above loom large in the competitive world of young researchers who wish to gain a foothold in academia. Once they have garnered, by whatever means, sufficient publications and citation credits then tenure (a job for life) awaits, and they can afford to relax:  the Mathew Effect will do the rest. Success breeds success.

“For unto everyone that hath, shall be given: and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not, even that which he hath, shall be taken away” Mathew Gospel, 25:29

Hyper-authorship, pal review, salami slicing, pay-to-publish, confirmation bias, back scratching, science by press release, self-promotion, intellectual blackmail, flattery, corruption and fraud are well known problems and have been outlined in numerous books, papers, op-eds, blogs and podcasts over many years. But the malign influence of these stratagems has not gone away. There is evidence that it is getting worse. A detailed 2025 review on this subject in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science [14] warns that “the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications”. This is happening because academia, by and large, assesses and rewards researchers on an easily gamed set of criteria. A natural selection process has evolved that rewards the dishonest practices enumerated above. This creates a “survival of the fittest” environment in which honest researchers risk extinction if they do not compete on similar terms.

The science publishing system that has grown up over the last 50-100 years (peer review, publication and citation indexes, exaggerated benefits for established elites) is broken and is totally inadequate for today’s environment of globalisation and digital publishing. A drastic overhaul is urgently needed.

Some suggested solutions:

All research results, whether positive or negative, should be published online: free, searchable and available to all. Scientific wisdom is not the exclusive preserve of academia.

Peer review should be retained but with no anonymity. All correspondence between peer reviewers and editors with the author(s) – good reviews as well as bad – should be published along with the paper [15].

Papers with more than one author must include a written statement detailing the intellectual contribution to the paper of each listed author.

Official press releases must adhere to the same standards of language, restraint and caution as are applied to scientific papers.

A supplementary section providing all data and computer code on which the conclusions of the paper are based, as well as full details of experimental methods employed so that others can replicate your work, should be an absolute requirement for acceptance by all journals.

A link to a section where any subsequent citations can be listed must accompany each paper. The list will include the names of the citation author(s) and their context.

Replication papers, when or if they become available, should be published on the same web page as the original paper, whether they falsify (and thus disprove) your thesis or not.

Links to all other sections of the paper as detailed here must be given in the main text.

With each paper, an open discussion forum should be provided where anyone (including the authors) can propose corrections, respond to criticism, offer comments or provide additional data and alternative hypotheses. This section will have filters to exclude comments on the basis of irrelevance, rudeness, abuse, ad hominin and ad verecundiam based attack, hate speech or non-adherence to the basic, universally established principles of the scientific process. But beyond all that, free speech rules and no ideas are forbidden or censored however uncomfortable they might be to the author(s).

In this environment, hyper-authorship will become a rare event, people seeking to replicate results will have immediate guaranteed data access, mistakes will be quickly identified and corrected, apologies and mea culpas can be given or retractions announced. Science publishers who do not follow these rules will be labelled as predatory, and their offerings as unscientific garbage.

In an open contest of ideas, the best – those that are meticulous, well-argued and evidence based – will rise to the top and the dross will fade away. Authority and consensus should have no input to this process: but authority and consensus can be expected to be an emergent output and form the basis for individual and institutional rankings.

Acknowledgements:

Much of the inspiration, and some of the detail, for this post comes from Stuart Ritchie’s 2020 book: Science fictions: Exposing Fraud, Negligence and Hype in Science. (published by Penguin-Random House, 353 p. see:  www.sciencefictions.org).

I have also been inspired by reading John Ioannidas seminal 2005 paper “Why most published research findings are false”. (PLoS Medicine https://doi:101371/journal.pmed.0020124). (But note: the deliberate attention-grabbing title is not fully justified in the text where all examples given come from the field of clinical medicine).

********

 Key Words: hyper authorship, hyper profile authors, peer review, pal review, predatory publishing, paper mills, publishing networks

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Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of uncertainty – some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.” – Richard Feynman, Theoretical Physicist and Nobel Laureate.

 “The unknown is the dark matter of all things, the greater part of the universe.” Geoffrey Weiss, 2021

Fact and Truth

At the most fundamental level, the idea of a fact, and the related but more morally portentous concept of truth, are ideal philosophical concepts that we seek but can never be certain to have achieved.

In one of his Dialogues (The Republic, Book VII) the 5th century BC Greek philosopher Plato compares the physical world that we see and measure to shadows on the wall of a cave made by something “out there”, beyond our direct vision. In this allegory, the cave is our skull, imprisoning our brain: the “something out there” is an external reality of fact and truth. We are condemned to remain forever in our cave, observing, and analyzing the shadows on the wall and speculating as to what they might mean.

“Fact” and “truth” are loaded words all too often used as a means of asserting authority and pre-empting debate. When you say, “this is a fact” or “the reality is” or “the truth of the matter is”, you are saying in effect, “you may not dispute this”. They are polite ways of saying that those who disagree with you are deniers, heretics, contrarians, ignoramuses or just plain stupid.

Recall, from your own experience, how often in debate these phrases are used to introduce a controversial statement that the speaker knows you might well not accept and wants to ring-fence in advance against your anticipated scepticism. Phrases such as “in fact…” or “the truth is…” are rhetorical figures of speech that we all use in conversation as a means of emphasizing the strength of our belief.  Nothing wrong with that, they are useful for casual conversations. In fact, and in that context, I use them too, but you are entitled to respond: “that’s not a fact, it’s just your opinion” – or – “where’s your evidence?”.

Quoting “fact” and “truth” are always to weaponize these words in pursuit of an agenda: to persuade, to win an argument, to convince a doubter, to change an opinion. Evidence for this abounds in all fields of communication: the words “fact” and “truth” are stock phrases used in advertisements to convince you to buy a product; they populate the language of journalists and of politicians [1] trying to convince their readers or influence their electorate.

 Claims of absolute fact and enduring truth properly belong to the realms of faith and belief. Scientific Knowledge is not based on faith or belief but on physical evidence and deductive reasoning: its conclusions are always provisional and subject to the next observation, of which the best we can ever say is that the new data has failed to falsify the original observation or idea. Failure to falsify gives you the confidence to think that you might be on the right track, but it does not constitute proof. At any rate, that is the ideal and is the process which has underpinned the advance of scientific knowledge, created its successes and given it authority to speak on the natural world. Evidence (and its digital version, data) is not the same as fact, though the two ideas are often conflated. “Alternative evidence” is a valid subject for discourse and argument, but “alternative fact” is an oxymoron (2).

There is only ever one way that an observation or an idea can be true, but there is a very large number of ways in which they can be false, including the multiple ways that neither you nor anyone else has yet thought of. All else being equal, the more ways that an observation or a theory can be false, (and you have no idea how many ways there are) the more the likelihood is that it will be false. Black Swan Events happen all the time.

Old Legal joke)

I Digress here to the Law

Or, more specifically, to Criminal Jurisprudence. This subject provides a good way of illustrating the difference between fact and evidence, truth, and opinion.  Lawyers prosecuting or defending a person accused of crime get equal time to present evidence – which is often conflicting – to an experienced judge or a randomly-selected 12-person Jury of their peers. It is then the job of the Judge or the Jury, having heard all the evidence and all the arguments, to determine “fact” by giving a guilty-not guilty verdict. Unless and until a guilty verdict is given, the null position (i.e. that the accused is innocent) is held to be true. But the legal definition of “fact” and “truth” to which the Jurors must adhere is limited and qualified.  It is an opinion with which all 12 Jurors must agree and which they consider to be “beyond all reasonable doubt”, with the implied assumption that what is “reasonable” is available to all. And yet, despite this laborious, time-consuming and expensive process – the best that centuries of jurisprudence have yet devised – criminal courts often get it wrong (3).

Juries and Judges are human beings and not always rational or reasonable. They are subject to error, misunderstanding, ignorance, emotion, group think, peer pressure, societal prejudice, fashionable opinion, deference to authority and uncritical acceptance of expert opinion. And that list applies to journalists, politicians and scientists too.

“..one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.” – Sigmund Freud

Returning to Science

At least the Lawyers have a definition, albeit limited and subjective, for what they mean by “fact” and “truth”.  Many scientists, on the other hand, use these words to mean, like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, whatever they want them to mean.

The famous bio-statistician Sir Ronald Fisher (1890-1962) gave his definition of scientific fact in 1926, when he wrote (in that well-known publication, the Journal of the Ministry of Agriculture of Great Britain, 33, p 504):

 “A scientific fact should be regarded as experimentally established only if a properly designed experiment rarely fails to give this level of significance..”

By “this level of significance”, Sir Ronald meant that the probability (known as p) that pure random noise in your data would yield your result is 0.05 or less (written p ≤ 0.05: meaning five or fewer chances in a hundred). If such a number can be calculated then, according to Fisher, a p≤0.05 enables you to call your result “statistically significant” and thus “a scientific fact”.  But if p=0.05 is considered significant, what then do we call a p=0.06?  And if we conclude (as we must) that number is also significant, what then of p=0.07 ? And so on. In other words, what is the logic of imposing an arbitrary cut-off in a continuum of potential results? This is not science, but simply a way of putting an illusion of quantitative rigor on fuzzy qualitative numbers. In fairness to Sir Ronald, he may have had in mind to define a “scientific fact”, in the manner of the Lawyers, as an inferior and qualified version of an actual fact. If that was his purpose, it was an insult to both Science and the English language.

By many accounts (4), for almost the last 100 years, researchers in statistic or mostly statistic-based sciences like Social Science, Political Science, Environmental Science, Climate Science, Medical Science – (5) – Psychology and Economics had to make sure they met Fisher’s arbitrary “wee pee” criterion if they wanted their work to be published in scientific journals (and negative results failing to make the cut left languishing in dusty file or trash can). But in recent years there has been a strong pushback against this misuse of statistics (6). I doubt that many scientists today would consider statistical significance to be synonymous with fact.  However, most would consider a 95% or better chance that their research was on the right track to be the basis for a good working hypothesis, although they would never bet their lives on it.

None of the above is to dispute that an observation (evidence) can be so well established by universal experience that for all practical, everyday purposes it can be called a “fact” that few rational people would dispute without being dismissed as a nut case or, at best, a boring pedant (maybe you have already fitted me with one of these hats?). That the sun rises in the east or that the earth is round are all, by this definition, statements of fact (7). In my own profession, when a geologist produces a large-scale outcrop map and calls it a “fact map”, or refers to his field observations “ground truth”, I do not think we have to accept that his or her lines on a piece of paper can be described, even on this colloquial definition, with the same level of certainty (see my earlier Post on this subject: Is there such a thing as a geological fact map?).

Qualifications and Caveats

You may think from the above that I have strayed into the area of post-modern philosophy called Relativism (not be confused with Relativity). Relativism denies that there is any objective truth out there: the shadows on the walls of our caves are illusions. From this idea follows that all systems of knowledge are social constructs, and all such constructs, from Astronomy to Astrology, Dark Matter to the Dreamtime, Quantum Mechanics to Queer Theory, Relativity to Relativism, String Theory to Shamanism, have equal validity and truth (or lack thereof). The concept was widely disseminated in the late 20th century through, among others, by the works of French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his well-known phrase: “There is nothing out of context” or, in another translation: “There is nothing but words” (8).

That is not my opinion. That is the not the point I wish to make. The moon in the sky and the tree in the forest exist, even when no one is looking.

The Takeaway Message from my Essay is… 

In their professional communications, Scientists should never use the words “fact” and “truth” and accept that their observations and theories are always subject to scrutiny, qualification, replication, skepticism and, potentially, retraction.

The purpose of scientific endeavor is to seek Truth, not proclaim it.

*****

 Footnotes 

(1) There are two good contemporary examples of the misuse of the concepts of Truth and Fact in popular media. The 2006 disaster movie “An inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore (a failed politician) and the 2019 BBC TV documentary “Climate Change: The Facts” by Sir David Attenborough (a TV journalist).  Their technique was highly effective. Al Gore got a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts: Sir David got his second Knighthood (in 2022) for his.

(2) When Donald Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative fact” in a 2017 interview she was widely ridiculed. “Alternative facts are not facts” spluttered her interviewer “They’re falsehoods”. And he was right. Kellyanne would have avoided the ridicule and subsequent pile-on, and been better able to argue her case, if she had used the word “evidence” rather than “fact”.

(3)  As of 2023, in the USA alone, over 3200 convicted persons have been exonerated over the past 40 years as a result of the application of new forensic technologies, or through the debunking of previously accepted technologies. The number of innocent people still in jail must be far larger than those already exonerated (source:  www.innocenseproject.org). For other egregious examples of miscarriages of Justice, Google the four women in the list below. In separate cases, in three different countries, these women were convicted of multiple infanticides and jailed on the testimony of scientists whose confident “expert” opinions were later proven to be false.

Lindy Chamberlin (convicted in Darwin 1982, pardoned 1988, exonerated 1989, compensated 1992);

Sally Clark (convicted London 1999, freed on appeal 2003, committed suicide 2007);

Lucia de Berk (convicted at the Hague 2003, freed on appeal 2010); 

Kathleen Folbigg,  Sydney 2003 sentenced to 40 years jail, pardoned and exonerated 2023, compensated 2026).  

(4) See, Stuart Ritchie 2020: “Science Fictions: exposing fraud, bias, negligence and hype in science”. Penguin-Random House 353p.  

(5) “…never trust a science with an adjective in front of it..” – anonymous internet blogger, 2019

(6) Valentin Amrheim et al., 2019: “Scientists rise up against statistical significance”. Nature 567, No 7748, pp305-307 https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00857-9 and: John Ioannidis, 2005; “Why most published research findings are false”. PLoS Medicine.  https://doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 This is one of the most downloaded papers in the 20-year history of PLoS (Public Library of Science)

(7) The sun does not “rise”, this is an optical illusion: it is the earth that moves. (“Eppure si muove” – yet it moves – Galileo muttered as the Inquisition led him away). But the illusion fooled the best brains of humankind for countless millennia and is still built into the structure of our language. And the earth is not round: this is a convenient simplification, good enough for everyday discourse. Our planet is actually an asymmetric oblate spheroid – and a slightly lumpen one at that. 

(8)  What Jacques Derida actually wrote was: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”.  

 *****

 This post incorporates some material from earlier post entitled Is there such a thing as a geological fact map? Roger Marjoribanks. First posted December 2022. Updated 2023 & 2026

The post The purpose of science is to seek truth, not proclaim it appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods”. – Albert Einstein, 1953

“If we are not able to ask sceptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us something is true, to be sceptical of those in authority, then we are up for grabs for the next charlatan, scientific, political or religious, who comes along.”   Carl Sagan

“…one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.”  Sigmund Freud

“Fact” and “Truth” are abstract ideals that you can seek but never be certain to have achieved. To claim a piece of evidence as “fact”, or a conclusion as “truth”, is to assert infallibility and to proclaim all potential doubters as deniers, contrarians or heretics.  The use of these words thus indicates a personal agenda: to persuade, to convince a doubter, to win an argument. “You have an opinion; they have some disputable evidence, but I – I am telling you THE FACTS: I am giving you THE TRUTH”.

The current proliferation of “fact” checkers on Social Media platforms, web sites such as politifact.com and factcheck.org, or on the Australian ABC, or the Australian Communicatons and Media Authority (ACMA), assume a god-like knowledge and ex-cathedra authority that never acknowledges, or is apparently even aware of, their own potential biases.  The ABC for example offers a “fact” check TV program called Media Watch where a smug host offers weekly advice on who is telling the truth, and who is not. 

Google, Facebook, the ABC, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), The Conversation along with many other media organisations worldwide (Fairfax, Washington Post, New York Times etc.), are clients of the International Fact Checking Network. IFCN is a division of a South Florida Journalism school called the Poynter Institute. As well as the IFCN, the Poynter Institute also operates the politifact.com and mediawise.com web sites.

These “fact” checkers mainly concern themselves with politics but also pronounce on hotly-debated areas of science and technology such as climate change, energy policy and (unsurprisingly, given the recent Covid crisis), epidemiology, vaccine effectiveness and virus treatments.

The Truth-O-Meter: a graphic used by the Poynter Institute to illustrate their opinion.

To take an example from just one area, the website factcheck.org has produced numerous posts over the past few years pronouncing on issues of Climate Change. Almost invariably these posts stamp the mainstream alarmist position with the labels “fact” or “true”.  In many of these cases, the factcheck authors quote the “97%-of-scientists-agree” (see my post: the 97% solution) meme as the killer argument to support their position. However, no references are ever given, no analysis of the methodology of the surveys that produced this figure and no indication that the 97% number is hotly disputed by well credentialed scientists and is qualified even by the authors of the surveys from which it is drawn. The 97% factoid is simply a convenient prop, accepted as a truth by factcheck without discussion, and used to support their already established opinion.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who are these self-appointed Custodians of Truth?  Perhaps a panel of retired Judges experienced in impartial judgement and the sifting of conflicting evidence? Perhaps a range of scientists with appropriate knowledge of a subject and a lifetime of applying the Scientific Method? Perhaps a broad spectrum of randomly selected citizens impaneled to select between competing claims on the basis of life experience and common sense?  Perhaps a military style adversarial blue team v red team approach? No, none of the above, but “journalists and media experts”. And not just any journalists out there in the real-world, filing copy for a living, but salaried academics teaching journalism in university media schools.

Facebook fact checking of complex and controversial technical or scientific subjects is undertaken for them by independent experts. Recent examples: Climate Change, Invermectin for Covid 19 treatment or the creation of that virus in a Wuhan Institute of Virology. But Facebook gets to choose the experts, and they choose experts whose opinions they favour with no requirement for balanced appraisal of all points of view.. The “independent experts” label is merely the eyewash for the opinions of woke Silicon Valley executives who run that Organisation.

..gatekeepers of MSM opinion..

Should we expect objectivity from journalists? Not according to Emeritus Professor Ted Glasser, current Head of the Department of Communications, Stanford University and for nineteen years head of their School of Journalism. In an August, 2020 interview with Zadie Winthrop of the University newspaper The Stanford Daily, Glasser is quoted:

“Reporters must embrace the role of social activists and it is hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity”

and, he continued, journalism should-

“free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice”

on being later queried on these statements by campusreform.org, Glasser chose to double down:

“I reject your claim that journalism is supposed to be based on objective truth. I have no idea what you mean by objective truth”

Neither Glasser nor his interviewers explored the obvious question as to how a journalist who did not believe in objective truth could ever operate as a fact checker.

 Professor Glasser’s view of the proper role of a journalism and his denial of even the possibility of objective truth is not confined to the United States. On March 31, 2021, Tito Ambyo, Senior Lecturer in Journalism at RMIT (Australia’s most prestigious school of journalism, and “fact checking” provider for Australia’s ABC network) tweeted:

“Good journalism IS activism. All the rest is sideshow” (quoted in The Australian, 03 May 2021)

If this is what is taught at Stanford and RMIT, then, at the very least, one would have to be cautious of any “fact” check carried out by the activists from these institutions, or indeed from any media school similarly affected by this corruption of the traditional journalistic ethos of unbiased, objective, evidence-based reporting  (i.e those aspects of journalism that prominent media schools now appear to consider as too “hard”, a “sideshow”, and a hindrance to their proper role as social activists pushing personal agendas.

Wannabe Guardians of Fact and Custodians of Truth: participants at the International Fact Checking Network Summit, Cape Town 2019.

My objections the groups operating under the umbrella of the IFCN is not with their stated aims (which I assume are noble) or their conclusions (which I might or might not agree with) but in their use of the words “fact” and “truth” in order to award themselves the mantle of authority and infallibility.  These words implies a value judgement and thus clearly indicate that their primary aim is to persuade, rather than merely inform. If the groups were called, and operated, as “evidence checkers” they arguably would have a useful role to play, provided they presented all the evidence, in a fair and balanced manner, with acknowledgement of all areas of uncertainty.

Evidence is not the same as fact, although the two ideas are often conflated. “Alternative evidence” is the basis of much legal argument and is the proper subject of scientific discourse. “Alternative fact” is an oxymoron.

“alternative evidence”… is the proper subject of much scientific discourse: “alternative fact” is an oxymoron.

The aim of an evidence checker should be to present information for readers to form their own judgement. This is not easy with the soi-disant fact checkers, where some of the information presented comes pre-labelled as “fact” and “truth”, and some as “false”, or even “pants on fire”(1).

Ideals for communicating evidence are set out in a timely November 2020 article in Nature, entitled: Five rules for evidence communication; strive to inform, not persuade. Read here (2).

Here are their five rules, with their commentary on each one:

1. Inform not persuade

“Conventional communication techniques might work when the aim is to change people’s beliefs or behaviors. But should that always be our aim?”

2. Offer balance, not false balance

“We can’t inform people fully if we don’t convey the balance  of relevant  information.”

“As soon as we are perceived to be ignoring or underplaying something our audience considers important, our motivations – and hence our trustworthiness – will be questioned.”

3. Disclose uncertainties

“Part  of telling the story is talking about what we don’t know.”

4. State evidence quality

“Audiences also judge the credibility of information based on the quality of the underlying evidence more than its clarity, the usual criteria for a communications department.”

5. Inoculate against misinformation

“Many will worry that following these key principals – especially exposing complexities, uncertainties or unwelcome possibilities – will let “merchants of doubt”  or bad actors warp their message. But there are other ways to guard against this.”

To the “five rules” set out above, I would add an important sixth:

6. Never call your evidence “fact”, or your conclusions “truth”.

 *******

 (1) Pants on fire is American rhyming slang: meaning LIAR!. From the childish playground  taunt : “liar, liar, pants on fire!”. The reference is biblical. It is a label frequently applied by the Poynter Institute’s politifact.com and mediawise.com websites.

To say that you disagree with someone is to make a statement about your personal belief; to say that someone is wrong is to say that you have studied the evidence and come to a different conclusion; to call someone a liar is to attack their moral and ethical character.

In early 2020, when Dr. Li-Meng Yan – a virologist at the University of Hong Kong – said he had “solid scientific evidence” that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was man made, the anonymous Politifact journalists – in their capacity as self-appointed experts in everything -  labelled him a liar. In May 2021, they quietly withdrew the label and acknowledged that he might have a point. But they offered no apology to Dr Yan for their year-long smear.

(2) Michael Blastland, Alexandra L. J. Freeman, Sander van der Linden, Theresa M. Martea & David Spiegelhalter: Nature November 2020 (587), 362-364 https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03189  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03189-1

The post The fashion for fact checking appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

“Facts no longer made contact with the theory, which had risen above the facts on clouds of nonsense, rather like in a theological system. The point was not to believe the theory but to repeat it ritualistically and in such a way that belief and truth became irrelevant.” English Philosopher Roger Scruton, 1980

The development of the Scientific Method was one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment of the 17^th and 18^th Centuries. The method is based on three pillars: reproducible evidence, deductive reasoning, and hypotheses that can be tested by experiment. It freed scientists from the introspection, preconception, prejudice and reliance on authority which, for centuries, had held back knowledge and understanding of the physical world.  The Scientific Method is the only means yet devised that enables a judgement to be made on the extent to which new ideas or hypothesis might approach enduring objective truth (1), or are merely a product – as relativist Post-Modern Philosophers would maintain – of the ephemeral mores and fashions of the society in which the scientist lives. Over the last 300 years, the Scientific Method has proved astonishingly successful, improving almost every aspect of our lives. This has given science and scientists a near universal authority and respect.

But a profound change took place in the way that many scientific disciplines came to operate from the nineteen fifties onwards. The most instructive early example of this trend came from the field of Epidemiology. In North America, many in society were concerned about the deadly impact for human health and life of a perceived epidemic of heart disease. In 1955, President Eisenhower’s heart attack brought this problem great publicity. But traditional (or normal) science, based on the long-established scientific method, was able to offer no definite answers to this problem, or advice to policy makers. Their honest response would have been… “we don’t know the answer to this problem, if indeed there is a problem, or even an answer; it could be this, it could be that; but we’re working on it”.

Faced with the dilemma of only being able to offer equivocal soft solutions for a perceived hard societal problem, some scientists resorted to statistical correlations as a substitute for actual evidence.  This inevitably resulted in the collection of gigabytes of data that were open to multiple interpretations. In this swamp of fuzzy data, they navigated on the basis of personal belief and perceived social need. Opinion-based evidence came to be offered in place of evidence-based opinion.  Their conclusion, which at the time gained an almost universal acceptance, was that the epidemic of heart disease resulted from our over consumption of fat (2).  The idea that dietary fat caused heart disease was then offered to Governments as policy advice.  It was claimed as Settled Science, but the conclusion had not been arrived at through the normal scientific method but as a result of expert judgement (opinion), reinforced by a consensus of peers (fellow swimmers in the swamp). With their core beliefs involved, the consensus scientists had little tolerance of the doubts of those who did not share these beliefs. Those who disagreed were not just mistaken, but seen as morally corrupt as well.

It would take 50 years, and immense damage to public health, before these conclusions and policy prescriptions were exposed as false, although the lingering effects of the fat phobia are still with us today. But for that 50 years, the technique had been astonishingly successful for the scientists involved, giving them fame, influence and status.

In the meantime, and not surprisingly, the same mode of doing science was being employed to allow scientists in other disciplines to tackle other perceived existential threats to humanity, most notably in perceptions of imminent environmental and ecological collapse. From the 1980s onwards, many of these environmental fears coalesced around the narrative of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming or CAGW. The main methodological difference between the way the earlier fat scare  and the CAGW scare were approached is that, with the advance of technology, global warming proponents were able to offer computer simulations as a substitute for evidence and a vehicle for expressing their opinions.

It is too soon to tell the story of the Global Warming meme. We are still in the middle of that story, and – unlike the Great Fat Phobia of the last Century – do not yet know its ending.

When someone says “..trust the science” or, “.. follow the science”, which type of science are they thinking of ? And how would they even know ? For answers to these questions, see text.

All these features add up to what has been called, by the philosophers of science Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz (3), as Post-Normal Science. Normal scientists see themselves as seekers of truth and knowledge. Post-normal scientists see themselves as White Knights riding to save humanity and speakers of Truth to Power. Driven by passion and emotion, they avoid the checks and balances of traditional scientific communication by promoting themselves and their research to a wider audience through press release, op-ed, blog and tweet.

“The urge to save humanity is almost always the urge to rule” - H.L. Menken

The methods of Post-normal scientists are the antithesis of the classical Scientific Method: their evidence is often not reproducible, their hypotheses not falsifiable and their reasoning directed towards achieving a predefined goal determined by social mores. It is a process which claims, and by many has been granted, the authority of normal science for what is, in effect, social activism.

This is not to dispute the expertise of these scientists. They have skills and knowledge that are widely acknowledged and accepted by society and therefore deserving by them of respect and consideration. But by these criteria, the same “expert” label could have been applied to the Stone Age Shamans who knew how to placate the Gods, the Haruspices of ancient Rome foretelling the future from the entrails of chickens, the Witch Finders of the 16^th Century, the Astrologers of the 17^th, the bloodletting Physicians of the 18th, the scientific racists of the 19th or the Eugenicists of the 20th (reaching their logical conclusion with the holocaust).

The museum of failed expertise. “You are very welcome, Professor – were are just constructing our 20th and 21st century displays now.”

It is easy to laugh (or shudder) and feel smug at the irrationality of our ancestors’ beliefs, but how will our descendants view ours? One hundred or two hundred years from now, we can be more than confident that e will still equal mc squared, that hydrogen will still have atomic number 1 and that the earth will still be around 4.5 billion years old. That level of confidence comes because these are examples of knowledge derived from Normal Science. But there is no guarantee that the expert judgments and consensus positions of Post-normal Science will fare so well.

“the aim of life is not to align oneself with the majority but to avoid finding oneself in the ranks of the insane” – Marcus Aurelius, 2nd Century AD

Not all sciences are affected by this corruption. Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Mathematics, Geology (and many others) remain, for the most part, pure, but there is a grain of truth in the saying: never trust a Science with an adjective in front of it. Climate Science, Dietary Science, Environmental Science, Social Science, Political Science… all attempt to steal the respect and credit, hard-won over centuries, of the physical sciences.  Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) put this idea at its most brutal in his typical didactic Scottish way,  “all science is physics, all the rest is stamp collecting”. Nowadays, we just call it physics envy, but the motivation for naming a field of study “science” is all too often not envy, but an attempt to harness respect and authority for personal, political or monetary ends.

There is a gradation that ranges from the relative certainties of Normal Science, through Expert Opinion, Post-normal Science and Pseudo-science to the deranged theories of what can only be described as Voodoo Science. At all points on this gradation are systems of methodology and belief claiming the title and authority of Science.  What degree of acceptance, scepticism or outright dismissal should be given to their theories and prescriptions?  Is there a guide?

Yes, there is. The late, great, Carl Sagan offered such a guide. In his 1997 book (Random House, 457 p): The Demon-haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Wind, Sagan presented nine criteria for recognising good science. He called it his Science Baloney Detection Kit (4), (5).  The “kit” is a check list for the Scientific Method. Here is the list:

1. There must be independent confirmation of the “facts”.
2. Debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view must be encouraged.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight.
4. More than one hypothesis must be offered and considered.
5. Proponents must not become too attached to a hypothesis just because it is theirs.
6. Quantifiable evidence carries more weight. Vague and qualitative is open to too many explanations.
7. If there is a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work, including the premise.
8. Apply Occam’s Razor.
9. Every hypothesis must be, at least in principle, capable of being falsified.

To which the present author would add a tenth:

10. All areas of uncertainty must be openly acknowledged.

Many claim the respect and authority for their ideas and beliefs that comes with the mantle of science. The ten criteria above provide a means for anyone to judge  the amount of respect and authority that their ideas merit, and where to place their beliefs and ideas on the slippery slope of science.

*******

(1)  For a discussion of the meaning of the words fact and truth and how they are used and misused in debate , see my post: The purpose of science is to seek truth, not proclaim it « Roger Marjoribanks Roger Marjoribanks

(2) For a detailed description of the birth, life and death of the great fat phobia of the latter half of the 20th Century, see my earlier post:   Fear of Fat

(3) Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz 1990: Uncertainty and Quality  in Science for Policy. Kluwer Academic Publishers 231 p, ISBN 978-94-009-0621-1

(4) https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-kit-carl-sagan/

  It is also worth noting Sagan’s final disclaimer:  “Like all tools, the baloney detection kit can be misused, applied out of context or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world – not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.”

(5) Michael Schermer, Founder of The American Sceptics Society and Editor-in-chief of its magazine Sceptic, is a self-appointed arbiter of all things sceptic. Schermer borrowed Carl Sagan’s idea and title and produced his own Science Baloney Detection Kit (  Search | Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science ). However, lacking Sagan’s wisdom and grounding in physical science (Sagan was an Astronomer and Historian of Science: Schermer a Psychologist and Social Activist), Schermer threw out most of the items from Sagan’s list that relate to the Scientific Method and substituted instead a vague and subjective set of criteria, some of which I reproduce below. These criteria encourage and permit anyone to be sceptical towards ideas that do not match their established beliefs, thus facilitating a warm glow of moral superiority at no cost to their World View.

Here are some of the items from Schermer’s bowdlerized version of  Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit (my comment appended in italics):

• Does this fit with the way the world works? (i.e. judge on the basis of your existing beliefs).
• Does the claimant provide proper evidence? (“proper evidence”; definition: the evidence that you expect or want to hear).
• How reliable is the source of the claim? (“reliable source”; definition: one supported by authority and consensus).
• Have the claims been verified by someone else? (depending on the meaning of “verified” – which Schermer does not provide – this will be read as a restatement of the consensus fallacy – argumentum ad consensum:  the more people that believe something, the more likely it is to be true).

The scepticism of Michael Schermer and Richard Dawkins is largely directed towards debunking the soft targets offered by Pseudo-Science and Voodoo Science, but they seem blind to today’s creeping rot of expert judgement, argument from authority, consensus and Post-Normal Science. To be fair to Schermer and Dawkins (both heroes of mine from other contexts), they are engaged in a battle with the crazies, and are probably reluctant to give away ammunition by publicly aiming their scepticism at the more established sciences that lie further down the slippery slope.

The post The Unravelling of Science appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds; while they only recover their senses one by one. Charles Mackay, 1841

In 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay wrote a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The title is self-explanatory, the book became a classic, still in print today.

Mackay’s examples are drawn from the corruption of religion and capitalism, but today’s crowd madness is more likely to be the result of the corruption of a different source of secular authority – Science. If Charles Mackay were to return today, he would not lack material for additional chapters to his book. The obvious chapter would undoubtedly be about the Global Warming Scare (1) of the 21st century, but it is too soon to write that story: we are still in the middle of it and do not yet know its ending. Among many other available examples he would certainly choose the Fat-Eating Phobia that became a pre-occupation of the Western World through the entire second half of the 20^th Century.

Fear of Fat or Lipophobia

In the late 1940s, a fatal epidemic of coronary heart disease (hereafter, CHD) – was identified in the industrialised west. Deaths from this cause, especially in men, were more than double what they had been 30 years before. A simple and common-sense explanation was that people were dying of CHD, from their fifties onwards, at exactly the same rate as they had always done: there were simply now more people in that age cohort.  In other words:  good news, we are living longer.  But scientists often scorn simple explanations in favour of explanations from the fields of esoteric knowledge which they have spent long years acquiring. Led by Ansel Keys (Professor of Physiology at Minnesota University) and Paul Dudley White (a leading cardiologist and head of the American Heart Association) the blame for the epidemic was laid squarely and solely at our affluent lifestyles, specifically: our over consumption of fat (in milk, eggs, butter, cheese and meat).  In 1953, using UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) data, Keys published a graph showing a scary linear correlation between fat consumption and deaths from CHD in no less than six separate countries. This graph is reproduced below in its original unlovely form.

Ansel Keys’ graph, reproduced directly from his paper.  It shows a near-perfect correlation between dietary fat intake and deaths from heart disease (CHD). Keys based it on FAO data collected in 1949 from middle-aged men in six countries. Reference: Keys A: 1953 Atherosclerosis – a problem in newer public health. J Mt Sinai Hospital 20, 118-139.

Three years later, a devastating critique of Ansel Keys’ 1953 paper was published by two medical statisticians (J. Yerushalmy & H. Hilleboe, NY State J Medicine, 1956 51(4): pp 2343-2354.). These authors graphed the data for all 22 countries available to Keys in the FAO data base. Looking at their graph (reproduced below): consider country A (United Kingdom), which has the same fat consumption as country C (United States), but almost half the rate of CHD; or country B (Israel), with half the fat consumption of the United Kingdom (A), but a near identical rate of CHD. By carefully picking an appropriate subset from the 22 plotted countries, almost any thesis could be proven. The authors concluded:

 ”Analysis of the available data shows that…the apparent association is greatly reduced when tested on all available countries for which data are available…it is the responsibility of the investigator to report on the basis on which the primary data were selected.”

Or in other, less diplomatic, terms: Keys had cherry picked his data to make the supposed correlation seem more impressive than it really was.

A graph of deaths from CHD against fat consumption showing all 22 countries in the FAO data base that was used by Ansel Keys. Re drafted from the original 1956 paper of Yerushalmy and Hilleboe. For discussion, see text.

Keys’ paper was a disgrace and should have been retracted. But it was not. Instead, it was widely circulated and quoted. It became heavily influential. In today’s terminology, the idea behind it went viral.  Yerushalmy and Hilleboe were too late. Like a virus from a Wuhan Lab, the meme had already escaped from Keys’ flawed paper and begun its long march through the institutions, where group think, peer pressure and the emergence of post-normal science provided fertile ground for its rapid spread.

(Interesting aside: US Army rations during WW2 were devised by and named for Ansel Keys. They were called “K-Rations” and reputedly much hated by the troops). 

Through the fifties, sixties and seventies, fueled by this and other epidemiological studies, the scientific case to condemn dietary fat as a heart killer gathered pace.  A unanimous guilty verdict was reached: first by the Institutes, then by the Academies, the Media and finally by the Politicians. In 1976, the US Committee on Nutrition, in a Report called Dietary Goals for Americans, advised a 25% increase in consumption of carbohydrates (i.e. bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, sugar) and a corresponding decrease in consumption of fats. To support this advice, they quoted a survey that showed an astonishing 98.9% of the world’s nutrition scientists supported a direct, causal connection between blood cholesterol and heart disease. The advice was heeded.  In America, Australia and much of Europe there was, from the mid-1970s, a marked change in dietary habits leading to an increase in the proportion of carbohydrate that makes up our food intake. It has been argued that the Great Diet Shift of the late 20th Century is the primary cause of the current epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

A quick selection from my 21^st century fridge to illustrate the demonised “ Frankenfoods” of the 20^th.

Through the eighties and nineties, THE SCIENCE was declared settled. In 1987 and 1988, the American Heart Association (AHA), the American Medical Association (AMA), the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the Office of the US Surgeon General (OSG), the US National Institute of Health (NIH), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the American Dietetic Institute (ADI) had all climbed onto the bandwagon. Other similar Institutions throughout the western world followed suit. This alphabet soup of acronyms “urged Americans from the age of two upwards to go on restricted (low fat) diets in the hope of preventing CHD.”  (My emphasis.)

The US Surgeon General in his report (July 1988, 700-pages) claimed that the evidence that fat consumption was responsible for two thirds of deaths in the United States was “even more impressive than that for tobacco.”

And the money flowed in as a result of the scare. The National Heart Institute annual budget of $1.5 million in 1948 soared to $132 million by 1962. And it continued to rise. The American Heart Association budget of $100,000 in 1945 reached $26 million by 1961.  And it continued to rise. Big food processing companies paid the AHA handsomely for the right to claim their product was HEART FRIENDLY with a large, red, AHA-approved, tick on their packaging (  √ remember these?). Even boxed products from Mr Kellogg, so laden with sugar that they should have been sold in small measured quantities at the confectionery counter, carried this tick.

But there remained a few irritating grains of dirt in the shoes of the lipophobes. Many sceptical scientists, presumably from the 1.1% who had said “no” in the US Senate Survey, pointed out the weakness of the actual evidence for the diet-CHD connection. Perhaps the most influential of these was John Yudkin, Professor of Nutrition at the University of London. In the early seventies, Yudkin criticised the evidence relied on by the alarmists and, in particular, repeated the 1956 criticism of Ansel Keys seminal paper (where Keys had cherry picked data to prove a linear correlation between CHD and fat consumption). Keys ducked and weaved but never acknowledged the point. Instead, he directed critics to a much larger and long-term study that his Institute was then undertaking which (he was supremely confident) would eventually validate the diet-heart connection [2]. But Keys was by this time bullet proof. He was backed by the Institutes and the Academies, he was backed by the Politicians and the media. He had appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Time magazine, ever the bellwether of current fashionable opinion, promotes the scare in 1961: Ansel Keys at the height of his fame and influence

The scientific establishment pressured the University of London, who responded by cutting Yudkin’s research funding, forcing him to resign his professorship[3]. Thus, were lone sceptics dealt with in the 1970s. An early example of the Cancel Culture. It could have been worse: today Yudkin would also have been subject to ad-hominem attacks on Social Media …“in the pay of Big Dairy”… perhaps, and the pejorative slur label of “denier” would have been applied to him. They were more polite back then.

The other assault at this time on the dietary fat paradigm came from the Feminists. Women die from heart disease at a much lower rate than men. Scientific Institutes and Governments are run by men (this was 1978). The scare was therefore a man-thing and was diverting medical research funds away from areas of female concern, such as breast cancer. But here the American Cancer Society saved the day by claiming (based on similar flawed epidemiological evidence to that used by their heart colleagues) that breast cancer, too, was linked to dietary fat [4]. The feminists were thus safely co-opted to the scare. (A cynic might argue that the Cancer Society were merely protecting their share of the medical research dollar.)

But eventually, as more and more large sample, long-term studies became available, the tide of evidence forced a turnaround in mainstream opinion. Major data reviews (meta-analysis) conducted by Cochrane Collaboration[5] were carried out in 2000 and updated again with fresh evidence in 2001, 2004, 2007 and 2012. Their unequivocal conclusion, based on dozens of trials, involving tens of thousands of participants was: “There are no clear effects of dietary fat changes in total (cardio-vascular) events” [6]

A further independent meta-analysis by S. Berger and co-authors in 2015 examined even more trials, carried out over a 40-year period and involving 360,000 randomly-selected participants, concluded: “dietary cholesterol did not significantly change serum triglycerides or very low density (LDL or “bad” cholesterol) lipoproteins” [7] (my bracketed insert).

The above quotes are from just two of the many early 21st century meta-analyses of the vast late 20th Century Fat Trials. So many meta-analyses that one could have conducted a meta-analysis of the meta-analyses. But there would  have been no point. They all reached similar conclusions.

The scare was over.  There were no apologies, no mea culpas from the scientific “experts” who had for decades pushed unsafe conclusions, with god-like certainty and ex-cathedra authority, in an area that they knew was complex and poorly-understood science. And in the process, enriched themselves, and their Institutions greatly.

Time Magazine recants in 2014

The scare was over, good science had driven out the bad. Or had it?  As I write this in 2019, although the rhetoric is toned down and “can” has been substituted for “will”, outdated dietary advice is still out there. The American Heart Association now recommends: “dietary cholesterol should be limited to 300 mg per day” (i.e. not much more than that contained in one large egg). The UK National Health Service currently offers this advice: “eating lots of saturated fats can raise your cholesterol level and increase your risk of heart attacks.“  And this, from the Australian Heart Foundation: “the best fats to include in your diet are monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. Eat more of these healthy fats to reduce the risk of heart disease.”  The Dietitians Association of Australia: “limit intake of food containing saturated fats…“  The  reasoning behind this false and out-of-date advice would seem to be: while the heroic clinical trials of the last century show no correlation between dietary fat and CHD, they do not actually prove that no such link exists (since it is almost impossible to prove a negative). A hangover from the old scare, a reluctance to admit error and the Precautionary Principle does the rest.

While the majority of scientists (or at any rate, those aged under 40 and operating outside the entrenched prejudices of the Institutions) interested in this subject are aware that the scare is over, the majority of the public do not. After a half-century of indoctrination, fear of dietary fat in is now imprinted in our collective psyche as a folk “knowledge”,  and that might  take a generation to disappear. The linkage in most peoples mind between the two English-language meanings of the word “fat” (as a noun and as an adjective) is hard to overcome. If you doubt this, just visit the dairy shelves of your local supermarket where labels such as “no fat”, “low fat”, “95% fat free” or “light” abound.

As Thomas Kuhn in “The structure of scientific revolutions” (1962) points out, old paradigms do not suddenly collapse. They just slowly fade away as their former champions, one by one, are pensioned off and die. Or, as the physicist Max Planck more cynically, put it, “Science advances one funeral at a time”.

The great Global Warming Hysteria of the 21^st Century

The parallels between the Lipophobic and Global Warming scares are remarkably close. Let me count the ways..

• In a new and esoteric area of scientific research, complex and little understood, scientists make overconfident and overstated claims of potential disaster for mankind: doubts, caveats and alternative explanations are suppressed. More research is needed to avert this disaster.
• In spite of more research being needed, the claim is made that the Science is settled and an overwhelming majority of scientists support this view[8].  

• The scare resonates with the modern zeitgeist of the secular industrial west: guilt about consumerism and affluence, fear that this is sinful, cannot be sustained and must inevitably, (somehow, anyhow) be punished. 

• The scare stories attract media attention. The scare starts slowly, but a tipping point is reached where, blindsided by group-think, peer pressure, cultural bias, desire for money on offer and, yes, a noble desire to save the world, the small and undemocratic coteries of scientists who run the Research Institutes, the Learned Societies, the academic Journals and the Universities climb onto the bandwagon, each no doubt independently arguing that, since everyone seemed to believe, it must be true.
• Taken in by this bootstrapped plausibility, floods of government money start to flow to the institutions and individual scientists promoting the scare. New career paths open up.

•  Legislation is enacted to alter the habits of the nation to counteract the supposed catastrophic effects of the scare.
• A feeding frenzy begins when large private corporations move in to exploit the situation by making profits from government and public.

• Sceptical scientists holding non-alarmist positions are subjected to ad-hominem attacks, have their research funding cut and their academic papers rejected. They can expect no promotion and may even lose their jobs.

• Various tricks are used to promote the scare. Through dodgy statistics, cherry-picking or just creative drafting, graphs are presented which promote worst case scenarios and conceal evidence which does not fit the narrative[9]
• When promoting a supposed Noble Cause, the end is easily seen as justifying the means. Among promoters of the scare, Noble Cause Corruption proliferates and is even defended[10].
• Decades of media amplification turns flawed science into cultural dogma.

Afterword

I leave the final words to Charles Mackay:

We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions simultaneously become impressed with one delusion, and run after it,  till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

 *******

Sources:

Much of the information in this post comes from the book: Fear of Food: A History of why we worry about what we eat.  by Harvey Levenstein, Emeritus Professor of History, McMaster University, Ontario.  (U. of Chicago Press, 2012).

I have also been inspired by reading Nutrition in Crisis: Flawed Studies, Misleading Advice and the Real Science of Human Metabolism (2019, Chelsea Green Publishing, 304 p) by Richard Feinman, Professor of cell biology at the State University of New York.

I have taken material from the excellent recent peer-reviewed paper by Irma J Koetze – Climate and fat wars: a new role for law. – published in 2017 by the Journal of Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, 13 (1) .  The paper covers similar ground to this blog from a legal perspective.

For the earliest description of post-normal science see; Silvio Funtawicz and Jerome Ravetz: 1990: Uncertainty and quality in Science for Policy. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ISBN 0-7923-0799-2. I have borrowed the phrase “bootstrapped plausibility” from Ravetz’s writings.

Other sources used are identified in the text or footnotes.

Footnotes:

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