This was one of the more splendid comments that we have had on Samizdata in quite some time: David Gillies, regarding this manifest steaming pile: the deceptively named “World Health Organisation” claiming mobile phones increase the risk of brain cancer.. even though there has been no observed spike in brain cancer despite the explosive growth in the use of such phones world wide….
This has been headline news in every newspaper I have seen, including the leading daily here in Costa Rica, and none of ’em have been fit to wrap fish in (I’d wager there’s a far higher carcinogenic propensity in the ink used to print this shit.) Non-ionising radiation? Check. Sub-milliwatt power levels? Check. No causative mechanism that survives the laugh test? Check. Decades of use and no detectable increment in tumours at the lax 2.0 relative risk for publication in a halfway-reputable journal? Check. Defeats the null hypothesis at the 95% confidence interval? Ha ha ha, oh my sides. Soundbite-ready quacks straining in their traces to leap into the running on CNN and Fox and Sky and the Beeb to peddle doom-mongering (but possibly book-selling) crap? Mais bien sur, a regiment of them. The disgusting WHO ready to dip its grubby fingers into the whole stew of idiocy and rent-seeking? Ho, yus, my chilluns, and when were they ever not? Pathetic.
If you cannot, within say 30 seconds, get a ballpark figure for the photon energy in microelectronvolts of an 1800 Mhz photon (and why that matters), or describe qualitatively what a femtowatt is (not quantitatively, oh no, that won’t do at all) or give a fairly robust description of what ‘3 dB/octave’ means when it comes to microwave absorption coefficients then shut your face, crawl back under your silly epidemiological stone, and die of something real and not imagined. Maybe the publication-hungry pseudoscientists that infest this field might be able to do all of the above as some sort of parlour trick, but the notion that your average journalist could is as laughable as spaniels doing differential equations. And this isn’t the argumentum ad verecundiam, like it is with the global warming zealots. There’s practically no-one in the hard sciences who thinks that microwave radiation is a causative agent in cancers. It’s lies, sophistry and nonsense. The really big question to ask (like with the AGW scam) when you see a scientific fraud being perpetrated on this scale is, as ever, cui bono?
– David Gillies
So we ought to defer to the experts re. mobiles and cancer, and ignore anyone who doesn’t have a technical specialism. Fair enough.
Can I ask why libertarians, in general, do not apply this attitude to climate change? And yes, this is your signal to start thinking of witty insults for me rather than calmly discussing my question…
Classical: there are at least a couple of writers here who happen to concede the possibility of AGW. Some issues do call for expert opinion, no way around that. The problem with the climate issue is that too many of the experts happened to behave in ways that made it very difficult to trust their expertise any further. Hopefully this does not repeat itself in areas such as mobile communications etc., but unfortunately we are never immune from that, and in the end each one of us will have to decide for himself. That is, if our dear governments let us.
In my experience a great many libertarians *do* apply this attitude to climate change as well … but perhaps you are misinterpreting with ‘this attitude’ is.
I would say ‘this attitude’ is scepticism to science that has been hopelessly corrupted by government money in much the way some science was once corrupted by corporate money. ‘This attitude’ is also contempt for any media driven junk science ‘consensus’.
Seems rather consistent to me.
The problem with the climate issue is that too many of the experts happened to behave in ways that made it very difficult
Ben, you were saying?:-)
Classical Liberal writes:
My view is that you should not listen specifically to those who claim expertise or have it claimed for them by their friends or fellow travellers.
One should listen to the case they make. One should require that case to be self-consistent. One should require that case to be consistent with all facts known to be pertinent on the issue (including the fundamental and long established bases of scientific and mathematical investigation, for both cases presented here). One should require a sufficiency of pertinent facts to be known, that conclusions can be drawn beyond that of insufficient input.
When one or more of these things fail, one should put on the armour of scepticism.
The CAGW fallacy fails, not because there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect (there is) but because there is no significant evidence to believe its magnitude (from anthropogenic help in returning of CO2 to the atmosphere) makes it at all material, let alone catastrophically material.
In my personal, and occasionally humble opinion, there are these problems with the CAGW fallacy:
(i) The use of computer models fails to separate training and validation data, such as it is (and that is not a vast amount, only dating from 1978/79). That is of electromagnetic radiative energy in and energy out and the time varying albedo of the planet.
(ii) Knowledge of the time-varying thermal energy storage of our planet is practically non-existent: most of the energy storage of the ecosphere is in the oceans and its variation over time is largely unknown.
In addition, the claimed threat is clearly not to the planet, which has seen both significantly higher and significantly lower temperatures on average (and also much higher CO2 levels). If there is any threat, it is to human society. But human society is the most evolved and adapted life force ever seen – it will survive by adaptation to all threats, or be replaced by a lifeform better able to do so. Actually, IMHO, the irrational-green-statism is a far greater and shorter-term threat to human society than is any anthropogenic effect on the ecosphere (short, perhaps, of nuclear war). We are seeing that now in the self-inflicted failings of Western civilisation – government wasting vast human effort on the irrelevant and on the plain wrong.
Finally, the whole CAGW edifice is built on scientific irrationality and the rhetoric of fearmongering. It is full of abuse of the evidence chain, full of abuse of rational deduction, full of sectional self-interest. Finally, it is full of public gullibility: no surprise surely following previous excesses in religious belief various (Christianity, Islam, chicken entrails and astrology included), in excesses in political belief (communism and fascism particularly), in excesses in economic belief (mercantilism included) and in excesses in scientific belief (alchemy, Lysenkoism, BSE/vCJD and flu pandemics various, included).
The mobiles cause cancer hypothesis fails for exactly the reasons given by David Gillies: insufficient evidence backed up by insufficient plausible mechanism (given the power levels).
Scientific knowledge is not formed as a democracy (nor is any other form of knowledge): as Popper’s philosophy tells us, it is sufficient for there to be a first dissenter with evidence.
Best regards
Mine hosts are too kind…
Of course the WHO will ignore the hard science – they have form on that after all! Look at the passive smoking “evidence”, for example.
Interestingly the measured epidemiological impact of mobile phones and second hand smoke is very similar – didn’t stop the world’s nannying fussbucket’s introducing smoking bans did it!
“Classical liberal” (OY!) … at the risk of being perceived to be participating in piling-on …
“Can I ask why libertarians, in general, do not apply this attitude to climate change?” – consider all the soundry reponses prior to this one …
And then add to them, the simple one :-
Most of us ‘believe’ in climate change (which us Brits tend to call “weather”) … what we consider to be unscientific rollocks (-r+b) is the Cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming – something so unscientific that even its own exponents now call “Climate Change” …
Does that help to answer your question ?
I don’t think it is piling-on, and I hope that Classical does not take it that way. The question he asked is a legitimate one – even though it may be foreign to the echo-chamber.
It is the WHO who are the steaming pile, I cant thin of one instance that they have actually added any net benefit. Indeed cui bono from from mobile phones through to swine flu vaccines.. bu then surely we should expect nothing more from a a trans national bureaucracy should we?