How Hype Is Hurting Science

The recent riots in France over a proposed carbon tax, aimed at supposedly combating climate change, were a direct result of blatant exaggeration in climate science for political purposes. It’s no coincidence that the decision to move forward with the tax came soon after an October report from the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), claiming that drastic measures to curtail climate change are necessary by 2030 in order to avoid catastrophe. President Emmanuel Macron bought into the hype, only to see his people rise up against him.

Exaggeration has a long history in modern science. In 1977, the select U.S. Senate committee drafting new low-fat dietary recommendations wildly exaggerated its message by declaring that excessive fat or sugar in the diet was as much of a health threat as smoking, even though a reasoned examination of the evidence revealed that wasn’t true.

About a decade later, the same hype infiltrated the burgeoning field of climate science. At another Senate committee hearing, astrophysicist James Hansen, who was then head of GISS (NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies), declared he was 99% certain that the 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming from 1958 to 1987 was caused primarily by the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and wasn’t a natural variation. This assertion was based on a computer model of the earth’s climate system.

At a previous hearing, Hansen had presented climate model predictions of U.S. temperatures 30 years in the future that were three times higher than they turned out to be. This gross exaggeration makes a mockery of his subsequent claim that the warming from 1958 to 1987 was all man-made. His stretching of the truth stands in stark contrast to the caution and understatement of traditional science.

But Hansen’s hype only set the stage for others. Similar computer models have also exaggerated the magnitude of more recent global warming, failing to predict the pause in warming from the late 1990s to about 2014. During this interval, the warming rate dropped to below half the rate measured from the early 1970s to 1998. Again, the models overestimated the warming rate by two or three times.

An exaggeration mindlessly repeated by politicians and the mainstream media is the supposed 97% consensus among climate scientists that global warming is largely man-made. The 97% number comes primarily from a study of approximately 12,000 abstracts of research papers on climate science over a 20-year period. But what is never revealed is that almost 8,000 of the abstracts expressed no opinion at all on anthropogenic (human-caused) warming. When that and a subsidiary survey are taken into account, the climate scientist consensus percentage falls to between 33% and 63% only. So much for an overwhelming majority! 

A further over-hyped assertion about climate change is that the polar bear population at the North Pole is shrinking because of diminishing sea ice in the Arctic, and that the bears are facing extinction. For global warming alarmists, this claim has become a cause célèbre. Yet, despite numerous articles in the media and photos of apparently starving bears, current evidence shows that the polar bear population has actually been steady for the whole period that the ice has been decreasing – and may even be growing, according to the native Inuit.

It’s not just climate data that’s exaggerated (and sometimes distorted) by political activists. Apart from the historical example in nutritional science cited above, the same trend can be found in areas as diverse as the vaccination debate and the science of GMO foods.

Exaggeration is a common, if frowned-upon marketing tool in the commercial world: hype helps draw attention in the short term. But its use for the same purpose in science only tarnishes the discipline. And, just as exaggeration eventually turns off commercial customers interested in a product, so too does it make the general public wary if not downright suspicious of scientific proclamations. The French public has recognized this on climate change.

Subversion of Science: The Low-Fat Diet

Remember the low-fat-diet? Highly popular in the 1980s and 1990s, it was finally pushed out of the limelight by competitive eating regimens such as the Mediterranean diet. That the low-fat diet wasn’t particularly healthy hadn’t yet been discovered. But its official blessing for decades by the governments of both the U.S. and UK represents a subversion of science by political forces that overlook evidence and abandon reason.

The low-fat diet was born in a 1977 report from a U.S. government committee chaired by Senator George McGovern, which had become aware of research purportedly linking excessive fat in the diet to killer diseases such as coronary heart disease and cancer. The committee hoped that its report would do as much for diet and chronic disease as the earlier Surgeon General’s report had done for smoking and lung cancer.

The hypothesis that eating too much saturated fat results in heart disease, caused by narrowing of the coronary arteries, was formulated by American physiologist Ancel Keys in the 1950s. Keys’ own epidemiological study, conducted in seven different countries, initially confirmed his hypothesis. But many other studies failed to corroborate the diet-heart hypothesis, and Keys’ data itself no longer substantiated it 25 years later. Double-blind clinical trials which, unlike epidemiological studies are able to establish causation, also gave results in conflict with the hypothesis.

Although it was found that eating less saturated fat could lower cholesterol levels, a growing body of evidence showed that it didn’t help to ward off heart attacks or prolong life spans. Yet Senator McGovern’s committee forged ahead regardless. The results of all the epidemiological studies and major clinical trials that refuted the diet-heart hypothesis were simply ignored – a classic case of science being trampled on by politics.

The McGovern committee’s report turned the mistaken hypothesis into nutritional dogma by drawing up a detailed set of dietary guidelines for the American public. After heated political wrangling with other government agencies, the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) formalized the guidelines in 1980, effectively sanctioning the first ever, official low-fat diet. The UK followed suit a few years later.

While the guidelines erroneously linked high consumption of saturated fat to heart disease, they did concede that what constitutes a healthy level of fat in the diet was controversial. The guidelines recommended lowering intake of high-fat foods such as eggs and butter; boosting consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, poultry and fish; and eating fewer foods high in sugar and salt.

With government endorsement, the low-fat diet quickly became accepted around the world. It was difficult back then even to find cookbooks that didn’t extol the virtues of the diet. Unfortunately for the public, the diet promoted to conquer one disease contributed to another – obesity – because it replaced fat with refined carbohydrates. And it wasn’t suitable for everyone.

This first became evident in the largest ever, long-term clinical trial of the low-fat diet, known as the Women’s Health Initiative. But, just like the earlier studies that led to the creation of the diet, the trial again showed that the diet-heart hypothesis didn’t hold up, at least for women.  After eight years, the low-fat diet was found to have had no effect on heart disease or deaths from the disease. Worse still, in a short-term study of the low-fat diet in U.S. Boeing employees, women who had followed the low-fat diet appeared to have actually increased their risk for heart disease.

A UN review of available data in 2008 concluded that several clinical trials of the diet “have not found evidence for beneficial effects of low-fat diets,” and commented that there wasn’t any convincing evidence either for any significant connection between dietary fat and coronary heart disease or cancer.

Today the diet-heart hypothesis is no longer widely accepted and nutritional science is beginning to regain the ground taken over by politics. But it has taken over 60 years for this attack on science to be repulsed.

Next week: How Hype Is Hurting Science

Use and Misuse of the Law in Science

Aside from patent law, science and the law are hardly bosom pals. But there are many parallels between them: above all, they’re both crucially dependent on evidence and logic. However, while the legal system has been used to defend science and to settle several scientific issues, it has also been misused for advocacy by groups such as anti-evolutionists and anti-vaccinationists.

In the U.S., the law played a major role in keeping the teaching of creationism out of schools during the latter part of the 20th century. Creationism, discussed in previous posts on this blog, is a purely religious belief that rejects the theory of evolution. Because of the influence of the wider Protestant fundamentalist movement earlier in the century, which culminated in the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, little evolution was taught in American public schools and universities for decades.

All that changed in 1963, when the U.S., as part of an effort to catch up to the rival Soviet Union in science, issued a new biology text, making high-school students aware for the first time of their apelike ancestors. And five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the last of the old state laws banning the teaching of evolution in schools.

In 1987 the Supreme Court went further, in upholding a ruling by a Louisiana judge that a state law, mandating that equal time be given to the teaching of creation science and evolution in public schools, was unconstitutional. Creationism suffered another blow in 2005 when a judge in Dover, Pennsylvania ruled that the school board’s sanctioning of the teaching of intelligent design in its high schools was also unconstitutional. The board had angered teachers and parents by requiring biology teachers to make use of an intelligent design reference book in their classes.

All these events show how the legal system was misused repeatedly by anti-evolutionists to argue that creationism should be taught in place of or alongside evolution in public schools, but how at the same time the law was used successfully to quash the creationist efforts and to bolster science.

Much the same pattern can be seen with anti-vaccine advocates, who have misused lawsuits and the courtroom to maintain that their objections to vaccination are scientific and that vaccines are harmful. But judges in many different courts have found the evidence presented for all such contentions to be unscientific.

The most notable example was a slew of cases – 5,600 in all – that came before the U.S. Vaccine Court in 2007. Alleged in these cases was that autism, the often devastating neurological disorder in children, is caused by vaccination with the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, or by a combination of the vaccine with a mercury-based preservative. To handle the enormous caseload, the court chose three special masters to hear just three test cases on each of the two charges.

In 2009 and 2010, the Vaccine Court unanimously rejected both contentions. The special masters called the evidence weak and unpersuasive, and chastised doctors and researchers who “peddled hope, not opinions grounded in science and medicine.”

Likewise, the judge in a UK court case alleging a link between autism and the combination diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine found that the “plaintiff had failed to establish … that the vaccine could cause permanent brain damage in young children.” The judge excoriated a pediatric neurologist whose testimony at the trial completely contradicted assertions the doctor had made in a previous research paper that had triggered the litigation, along with other lawsuits, in the first place.

But, while it took a court of law to establish how unscientific the evidence for the claims about vaccines was, and it was the courts that kept the teaching of unscientific creationism out of school science classes, the court of public opinion has not been greatly swayed in either case. As many as 40% of the general public worldwide believe that all life forms, including ourselves, were created directly by God out of nothing, and that the earth is only between 6,000 and 10,000 years old. And more and more parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children, insisting that vaccines always cause disabling side effects or even other diseases.

Although the law has done its best to uphold the court of science, the attack on science continues.

Next week: Subversion of Science: The Low-Fat Diet