Matt Ridley's Blog, page 14

A pledge to abolish sin

My Sunday Telegraph article on the need for realism about carbon dioxide targets:

If the British government declared the abolition of sin by 2050, commentators would be rightly cynical. The announcement last week that Britain will enact a net-zero carbon target for 2050 was instead welcomed, especially by “faith leaders”. Yet without specifying how it is to be achieved, setting this target is about as wishful as pledging to eliminate sin. It is not just a matter of cost – although £1 trillion is not small change (if you had been spending a pound a second and had now reached £1 trillion, you would have had to start when Neanderthals were still on the scene).

Too many Tories think that going green means getting into lucrative bed with the crony-capitalist wind and solar industries, putting profit-seeking lipstick on a subsidy-dependent pig. But this is a futile strategy, politically as well as practically.

In Britain last year, generously using the Final Energy Consumption metric, 4 per cent of energy came from wind and solar, 3 per cent from nuclear and less than 1 per cent from hydro, the three zero-carbon sources. The common misconception that wind and solar are bigger contributors comes from forgetting that electricity is just 20 per cent of energy: the rest is heat, transport and industry.

So eliminating carbon dioxide from the energy sector has hardly begun, yet the cost is already huge and bearing down especially on poorer people, while, as Professor Dieter Helm of Oxford University has pointed out, industry is voting with its feet and taking its emissions to China and elsewhere. It was not true that Britain did without coal recently: a grid interconnector was bringing electricity from Dutch coal-fired power stations, and industry was burning coal imported from Russia. (I hereby declare my indirect interest in a Northumberland coal mine.)

Even if we could figure out a way to run aeroplanes on electricity, or to use less coal to make steel (it takes a heap of coal to make a wind turbine), and even if we were to find a way to make solar and wind power available on demand, there just is not enough space either on land or sea to power and heat the British economy from these low-density sources, not without ruining the entire countryside: a point frequently made by the late Sir David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy.

The “extinction” protesters say we can do without meat, or foreign holidays. To Tories flirting with this kind of energy rationing policy, good luck at the ballot box – look what has happened recently in Australia, France and America to politicians who promised to push up energy prices to save the climate.

The people in denial in this debate are the ones who think we could reach a 2050 net-zero target with a mixture of renewable energy and hair-shirt austerity. Nor is nuclear ready to help without massive public subsidy. Fortunately, there may be another way, one that Boris Johnson should seize to put clear turquoise water between himself and green dreamers.

For the foreseeable future, fossil fuels will be crucial to sustaining civilisation. A way must be found to use oil and gas, but capture their carbon dioxide emissions – and have the industry do something more than signal its regret; to be part of the solution, rather than most of the problem. The technology for sequestering carbon dioxide, still hopeless a few years ago, is now progressing in Norway, Canada and Texas. Britain has a golden opportunity because the North Sea oil industry has left a network of pipes and wells ideal for injecting carbon dioxide into rocks, where it slowly dissolves. Government is on the hook for some of the decommissioning cost anyway.

What is needed, though, is not some taxpayer-funded boondoggle to pick a winner in carbon capture – because that approach usually picks the most politically well-connected loser instead – but the setting up of a market mechanism to discover innovative technologies.

Professors Stuart Haszeldine of Edinburgh University and Myles Allen of Oxford University argue that government should make all fossil energy producers and importers pay a small but increasing fee per tonne of carbon dioxide, not into the insatiable maw of the Treasury, nor into vague tree-planting scams, but into actual carbon-capture projects that work. Fierce competition would ensue to deliver technologies that capture and, crucially, store carbon for the least cost. 

If Boris Johnson becomes prime minister and adopts such a policy, he can look the opposition in the eye and say: “Unlike you, I have a plan for how we might just get to net-zero. It uses the market, encourages innovation, does not hit the poor or reward the rich, and puts the obligation where it should be: on the fossil-fuel industry.”

 

A counsel of despair about the loss of biodiversity is the wrong approach

My article for Reaction on biodiversity:

 

Driven perhaps by envy at the attention that climate change is getting, and ambition to set up a great new intergovernmental body that can fly scientists to mega-conferences, biologists have gone into overdrive on the subject of biodiversity this week.

They are right that there is a lot wrong with the world’s wildlife, that we can do much more to conserve, enhance and recover it, but much of the coverage in the media, and many of the pronouncements of Sir Bob Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), are frankly weird.

The threat to biodiversity is not new, not necessarily accelerating, mostly not caused by economic growth or prosperity, nor by climate change, and won’t be reversed by retreating into organic self-sufficiency. Here’s a few gentle correctives.

Much of the human destruction of biodiversity happened a long time ago

Species extinction rates of mammals and birds peaked around 1900 (mostly because of ships taking rats to islands). The last extinction of a breeding bird species in Europe was the Great Auk, in 1844. Thousands of years ago, stone-age hunter-gatherers caused megafaunal mass extinctions on North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and Madagascar with no help from modern technology or capitalism. That’s not to say extinctions don’t still happen but by far the biggest cause is still invasive alien species, especially on islands: it’s chytrid fungi that have killed off many frogs and toads, avian malaria that has killed off many of Hawaii’s honeycreepers, and so on.

This is a specific problem that can be tackled and reversed, but it will take technology and science and money, not retreating into self-sufficiency and eating beans. The eradication of rats on South Georgia island was a fine example of doing this right, with helicopters, GPS and a lot of science.

We’ve been here before. In 1981, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich predicted that 50% of all species would be extinct by 2005. In fact, about 1.4% of bird and mammal species, which are both easier to document than smaller creatures and more vulnerable to extinction, have gone extinct so far in several centuries.

The idea that “western values”, or “capitalism”, are the problem is wrong

On the whole what really diminishes biodiversity is a large but poor population trying to live off the land. As countries get richer and join the market economy they generally reverse deforestation, slow species loss and reverse some species declines. Countries like Bangladesh are now rich enough to be reforesting, not deforesting, and this is happening all over the world. Most of this is natural forest, not plantations. As for wildlife, think of all the species that have returned to abundance in Britain: otters, ospreys, sea eagles, kites, cranes, beavers, deer and more. Why are wolves increasing all around the world, lions decreasing and tigers now holding steady? Basically, because wolves are in rich countries, lions in poor countries and tigers in middle income countries. Prosperity is the solution not the problem.

Nothing would kill off nature faster than trying to live off it. When an African villager gets rich enough to buy food in a shop rather than seek bushmeat in the forest, that’s a win for wildlife. Ditto if he or she can afford gas for cooking rather than cutting wood. The more we can urbanise and the more we can increase our use of intensive farming and fossil fuels, the less we will need to clear forests for either food or fuel.

Intensive farming spares land for nature 

It’s been calculated that if today’s population were to be fed using the mainly organic yields of 1960, we would have to farm 82% of the world’s land, whereas actually we farm about 38%. Thanks to fertilisers, tractors, genetics and pesticides, we now need 68% less land to produce a given quantity if food than we did in 1960. That’s a good thing. Most sensible conservationists now realise that “land sparing” is the right approach – intensive farming plus land set aside, rather than inefficient farming with some nature in the fields. Professor Andrew Balmford of Cambridge University led a team that did thorough research showing that this is the better approach not just for land use but for other environmental issues too: they found that organic dairy farms cause at least 30% more soil loss, and take up twice as much land, as conventional dairy farming for the same amount of milk produced, for example.

Doing more with less

A favourite nostrum of many environmentalists is that you cannot have infinite growth with finite resources. But this is plain wrong, because economic growth comes from doing more with less. So if I invent a new car engine that gets twice as many miles per gallon, I’ve caused economic growth but we’ll use less fuel. Likewise if I increase the yield of a crop, I need less land and probably less fuel too. This “growth as shrinkage” happens all the time: think how much smaller mobile phones are than they once were.

The fact that species are recovering is ignored by the media 

The BBC used a humpback whale song to illustrate species under threat of extinction. Humpback whales were down to a few thousand in the 1960s and listed as “endangered”. In 1996 as the population grew, they were downgraded to “vulnerable”. In 2008 as they became numerous, they were downgraded again to “least concern”. Today there are 80,000 of them, they are back to pre-exploitation densities in many parts of the world, and groups of up to 200 are sometimes seen feeding together, a success unimaginable when I was young. The same is true of many previously exploited species such as fur seals, elephant seals, king penguins and more.

For some reason, environmental activists hate talking about the success stories of conservationists in saving species, recovering their populations and reintroducing them to the wild. They prefer to dwell on the threats. This brings more publicity and donations, but it also spreads a counsel of despair, leaving many ordinary people feeling helpless, rather than engaged. It’s time for an honest debate about what we can do to save wildlife, rather than a Private Fraser cry of “we’re all doomed”.

 

The freedom to save your life

My essay for Freer:

Suppose that millions of Britons were driving a dangerous type of car that was killing 80,000 people a year. Suppose somebody invented a new car that was much, much safer, significantly cheaper, and emitted far fewer fumes, while performing just as well. Would you a) ban the new car, or b) encourage people to buy it? Not that difficult a question, surely. Yet the reaction of many public health professionals and politicians has been to choose a) in an exactly analogous situation relating to nicotine. Why? Because they would rather you did not drive at all.

Take, for example, this recent pronouncement by the mayor of San Francisco: “Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States. Tobacco kills more than 480,000 people a year in this country. That’s more than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders, and suicides combined.” Therefore, he goes on — in one of the great non-sequiturs of history — he is going to ban ecigarettes, which have caused none of those deaths and could prevent them, but not ban real cigarettes, which caused nearly all of those deaths.

The vaping revolution took the world by surprise. Invented in China in 2006, the e-cigarette has caused massive declines in smoking in Britain — more than almost any other country — because of an early decision by the Cameron government to resist calls to ban it. It is the reason we have the lowest cigarette consumption per capita in the G7, and the second lowest in Europe, and one of the lowest incidences of lung cancer.

More than three million people in this country now vape; the vast majority of these (97-99 per cent) were smokers when they started vaping, and about half have given up smoking altogether. Vaping spread by word of mouth to eager smokers who wanted to quit but found it hard. E-cigarettes are now the most popular and most successful way of quitting tobacco, and are putting stop-smoking services out of business.

The Department of Health got the point, saying in 2017: “We will help people quit smoking by permitting innovative technologies that minimise the risk of harm. We will maximise the availability of safer alternatives to smoking”. But, then, in response to the EU Tobacco Products Directive, it banned advertising of e-cigarettes, and mandated excessively small refill bottles and low nicotine limits. Thus, the opportunity for competition and consumer choice to drive innovation in harm reduction is increasingly stifled, even in Britain, in favour of paternalistic regulation premised on “nanny knows best”, and the fossilised straitjackets of regulation.

The relative safety of smoking and vaping is beyond doubt. The dangerous stuff in a cigarette is not the nicotine, but the products of combustion. Levels of all toxicants are far lower in vapour than smoke, and clinical trials show that vapers quickly become indistinguishable from non-smokers on most indicators of risk and ill health. The widely quoted “95 per cent safer” figure, from the Royal College of Physicians, is almost certainly an underestimate of the difference.

The nannies who want to ban, discourage, or tax vaping are driven by three main motives.

First, precaution: what if this new technology turns out to have unknown risks? But this has the precautionary principle backwards. Much better to take the small risk that there are unknown hazards, than the known risk that there are huge hazards. Precaution should never be an excuse for defending an existing harm, yet all too often that is what it ends up being. The precautionary principle thus interpreted holds the new to a higher standard than the old.

Second motivation: hatred of all things related to nicotine. So ingrained is the detestation of the tobacco industry as a purveyor of addictive death to the world — not unjustified, in itself — that the prohibitionists cannot bring themselves to accept the harm-reduction argument that would be routinely easy to see in other cases. That tobacco companies have now started buying vaping companies, and inventing other risk-reduction products such as heat-not-burn cigarettes, only seems to prove the point: anything emanating from the evil empire must be evil. The idea that Big Tobacco might get to be the Prodigal Son really annoys these people.

Third motivation: self-interest. The pharmaceutical industry has a nice little earner called nicotine replacement therapy. These patches and gums are bought by the National Health Service, prescribed to patients who want to quit smoking at considerable expense to the taxpayer and — best of all — don’t really work, so the market is limitless. Along comes a private, free-enterprise, non-subsidised alternative that works. No wonder Big Pharma money was behind many of the lobbying campaigns against vaping. Remember, the precautionary principle is the perennial fig-leaf used by the European Union to excuse its protection of large corporate vested interests.

Fourth motivation: the urge to ban. People just love to disapprove. I’ve met all sorts of specious arguments from people about why they hate e-cigarettes. The smell: no, the vast majority of vapours are odourless. The risk to children: no, there is no evidence that young people are taking up vaping at any higher rate than they used to take up smoking. The fire risk: no greater than any other battery product, and far less than cigarettes.

In the end, what I suspect people object to about vaping is the pleasure it gives. What if somebody made nicotine addiction really safe, they worry, so there was no longer any reason to argue against it, eh? What then? A puritan, it was once said, is a person who lives in terror that somebody somewhere might be enjoying themselves. Or, as a Glaswegian politician once joked to me: we had better ban sexual intercourse in case it leads to dancing.

Vaping is the perfect example of a voluntary innovation derived from free enterprise that delivers better human health, at no cost to the taxpayer, and no inconvenience to society — and causes pleasure. I neither smoke nor vape and have no financial interest in either, but I wish it every success.

The near misses of scientific history

My Times review of Gareth Williams's new book Unravelling The Double Helix.

 

Who discovered DNA? James Watson and Francis Crick, right? Wrong. Eighty years before they even approached the topic, in 1868, a young Swiss researcher, Friedrich Miescher, working at the University of Tübingen, discovered DNA as a chemical substance, though not its revealing structure.

Miescher, who was not squeamish, analysed the pus extracted from bandages applied to wounds by a local surgeon. He painstakingly precipitated out a fluffy substance he called “nuclein” that was rich in phosphorus, unlike any protein and found mostly in the nuclei of white blood cells in the pus. However, to those who speculated that nuclein might carry the secret of heredity and life itself, Miescher was dismissive: no, it was just a store of phosphorus. Heredity was surely determined by the much more intricate and varied structures of proteins.

Gareth Williams, the former dean of medicine at Bristol University, has woven a truly superb narrative from short biographies of all the scientists who contributed to, and in some cases just missed out on, the epochal discovery that the secret of life is a digital linear code written on DNA. We now know the answer to Miescher’s objection: DNA looks boring and repetitive as a book looks boring and repetitive: it’s just a pile of bases, as a book is just a pile of pages. But what’s spelt out on the pages in linear digital code can be far from boring, as this book proves.

Miescher’s mistake — that genes are made of protein — dogged the topic for decades. As late as the 1940s, in New York, the Canadian Oswald Avery and two associates struggled to persuade the world that genes were made of DNA, despite his penetratingly clever and careful experiments with pneumonia-causing bacteria that showed conclusively that it was a piece of DNA that heritably transformed the character of the bacterium from harmless to virulent.

Avery, like Miescher, was an unworldly workaholic unprepared to fight for his heresy against the protein orthodoxy that dominated scientific opinion. By contrast, his own colleague at the Rockefeller Institute Alfred Mirsky showed a positively unhinged obsession with criticising poor Avery and defending proteins to the bitter end.

Williams tells a haunting story of Sir Henry Dale, the president of the Royal Society, trying to present the Copley Medal, Britain’s highest scientific prize, to Avery in person, while on a trip to New York after the Second World War. Avery had politely refused to travel to London so Dale knocked on the door of Avery’s laboratory and, getting no reply, looked in to see a small, old man wholly immersed in his own world at the laboratory bench. “Now I understand,” thought Dale, and quietly left the medal with a note.

There are terrible near-misses in all of science, people who could have been as famous as Newton if they had taken one more step. The tale of DNA is rich in them. John Masson Gulland, a Scottish biochemist, spotted in 1947 that hydrogen bonds almost certainly held DNA strands weakly together (the key to how reproduction works at the molecular level) and was even asked at the end of a talk by one of his students if DNA might have a helical structure. He ignored the point in his answer. Shortly after, Gulland gave up the subject in a fury at not being made professor of biochemistry at Edinburgh and was killed in a train crash a few months later.

A young Norwegian, Sven Furberg, while working in London in 1949, came tantalisingly close to unravelling the structure of DNA, having had the key insight that the planes of the bases and sugars were at right angles to each other. He even built a model, but his supervisor, the flamboyant, philandering communist JD Bernal, was otherwise preoccupied. Bernal was attending a peace conference in Moscow at the time, where Pravda said he got “stormy and prolonged applause” for praising Comrade Stalin as the “great protector of peace and science”. Bernal even visited Trofim Lysenko, whose persecution of geneticists had recently led to the death of the great Russian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov in prison for biochemical thought crimes. Bernal praised Lysenko, a mystical and murderous quack, as “a scientist of the Darwin-Rutherford type”.

Meanwhile, in Leeds, where the wool industry had financed early work on the molecular structure of fibres, Bill Astbury was honing the technique that would lead to the answer, x-ray crystallography. His student Elwyn Beighton took a series of superb photographs in 1951 that revealed in all its glory that the structure of DNA was a double helix — if only he knew how to interpret them. But Beighton and Astbury did not know, and Astbury lost interest in DNA, so the pictures went into a filing cabinet and were forgotten.

A year later, in 1952, Raymond Gosling took an x-ray photograph at King’s College, London, which showed almost exactly the same pattern as Beighton’s. This became one of the most famous icons in all science, “photograph 51”, about which a play has been written. But Gosling’s supervisor, Rosalind Franklin, put it to one side for several months, before writing up her work when preparing to leave for Bernal’s laboratory. She handed the DNA project, plus Gosling and the photograph, to her colleague Maurice Wilkins, who had started the DNA work at King’s. Wilkins showed the picture to Watson, who realised its significance and described it to Crick, who knew better than anybody how to interpret it, and the rest is history.

Many of these stories of scientific also-rans and near-misses are well known. Others are not. Despite being Crick’s biographer, I did not know the story of Beighton’s photographs, nor had heard of Gulland. By choosing to fill in the gaps in conventional accounts, Williams has done a good job of telling the whole story of science’s greatest discovery. He has done it with fluency and a real feel for narrative.

 

Surface mining in Northumberland

Blagdon estate has hosted parts of two surface coal mines, at Brenkley and Shotton, for several years. We are proud to have done so mainly because of the jobs provided and the income to the local economy. But environmentally, too, these projects have been very positive. Managed by the Banks Group, the landscapes around these mines are surprisingly rich in wildlife, such as hares, lapwings, skylarks and wild flowers, including bee orchids in 2018. After restoration, the land has become a patchwork of good wildlife habitats thanks to sensitive restoration. They helped us to win the Bledisloe award for estate management from the Royal Agricultural Society of England.

I have always been careful to declare my interest in coal mining whenever relevant. I am keen to persuade fellow Northumbrians that surface coal mining elsewhere in the county, where I do not have an interest, can be good for the economy and the environment, and has a positive impact on emissions, because it substitutes for imported coal. I therefore recently wrote to James Brokenshire, secretary of state for Communities and Local Government, in support of the scheme to open a new surface mine at Highthorn in Northumberland. This is what I said:

“I am writing to you about a decision on a planning matter in Northumberland that I believe is vital for the county and the nation. As you will know, the Banks Group applied for planning permission to mine coal at Highthorn; this was approved by Northumberland county council; the government called it in and appointed an inspector, who ruled in favour of the scheme. You predecessor then rejected the inspector’s recommendation, but the court has now overturned his decision.

I hope you will quickly approve the scheme. My reasons are as follows:

1. I know the Banks Group well having worked with them on my own land over more than 30 years, mining coal and restoring a listed park around my house. They did this very well indeed, winning awards for the work, which has provided new habitats for wildlife, a unique visitor attraction visited by 100,000 people a year (Northumberlandia) as well as vital income for the Treasury and good jobs for Northumbrians.

2. I have no stake or interest in the Highthorn scheme of any kind, but as with our scheme it would provide work (both within the mine and also the local supply chain) in an area of high unemployment, as well as good tax revenue for the nation, and vital indigenous affordable energy.

3. The scheme would not be environmentally damaging, but the reverse, since it would enable a restoration scheme to be carried out that would provide imaginative new habitats, greatly improved landscapes and much needed community funding for local projects.

4. Britain continues to need coal, not just for electricity generation up till 2025, but for steel making and many other industrial processes indefinitely. Shockingly, 37% of the coal we needed during the first nine months of 2018 came from Russia, a country we dare not rely on. Fundamentally we are offshoring our responsibilities to countries with lower environmental controls, and therefore increasing global greenhouse gas emissions through transportation.

5. The Banks Group and its executives are huge local contributors to good causes in the North-east, supporting communities, charities and facilities all across the region through development funds as well as private donations. The region cannot afford to lose this because of a very small group of protesters coordinated by large, well-funded southern-based professional environmental extremists.

6. The argument that Britain must leave its coal in the ground in favour of imports to save on carbon dioxide emissions makes no sense. Whether Highthorn goes ahead will not affect how much coal is burned in the UK."

 

Laundered lies

My Spectator article on a surge in medical and environmental pseudoscience:

 

‘The whole aim of practical politics,’ wrote H.L. Mencken, ‘is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’ Newspapers, politicians and pressure groups have been moving smoothly for decades from one forecast apocalypse to another (nuclear power, acid rain, the ozone layer, mad cow disease, nanotechnology, genetically modified crops, the millennium bug…) without waiting to be proved right or wrong.

Increasingly, in a crowded market for alarm, it becomes necessary to make the scares up. More and more headlines about medical or environmental panics are based on published scientific papers, but ones that are little more than lies laundered into respectability with a little statistical legerdemain. Sometimes, even the exposure of the laundered lies fails to stop the scare. Dr Andrew Wakefield was struck off in 2010 after the General Medical Council found his 1998 study in the Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism to be fraudulent. Yet Wakefield is now a celebrity anti-vaccine activist in the United States and has left his long-suffering wife for the supermodel Elle Macpherson. Anti-vax campaigning is a lucrative business.

Meanwhile, the notion that chemicals such as bisphenol A, found in plastics, are acting as ‘endocrine disruptors’, interfering with human hormones even at very low doses, started with an outright fraudulent study that has since been retracted. Many low-quality studies on BPA have pushed this theory, but they have been torpedoed by high-quality analyses including a recent US government study called Clarity. Yet this is of course being largely ignored by the media and the activists.

So the habit of laundering lies is catching on. Three times in the past month, pseudo-science flew around the world before the scientific truth had got its boots on (as Mark Twain did not say, but Jonathan Swift almost did): in stories about insect extinction, weedkiller causing cancer, and increased flooding. The shamelessness of the apocaholics is increasingly blatant. They know that even if a story of impending doom is thoroughly debunked, the correction comes too late. The gullible media will have relayed the headline without checking, so the activists have made their fake-news hit, perhaps even raised funds on the back of it, and won.

Take the story on 10 February that ‘insects could vanish within a century’, as the Guardian’s Damian Carrington put it, echoed by the BBC. The claim is, as even several science journalists and conservationists have now reported, bunk.

The authors of the study, Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris Wyckhuys, claimed to have reviewed 73 different studies to reach their conclusion that precisely 41 per cent of insect species are declining and ‘unless we change our way of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades’. In fact the pair had started by putting the words ‘insect’ and ‘decline’ into a database, thereby ignoring any papers finding increases in insects, or no change in numbers.

We aimed at compiling all long-term insect surveys conducted over the past 40 years that are available through global peer-reviewed literature databases. To that effect we performed a search on the online Web of Science database using the keywords [insect*] AND [declin*] AND [survey], which resulted in a total of 653 publications. 

They did not check that their findings were representative enough to draw numerical conclusions from. They even misinterpreted source papers to blame declines on pesticides, when the original paper was non-committal or found contradictory results. ‘Several multivariate and correlative statistical analyses confirm that the impact of pesticides on biodiversity is larger than that of other intensive agriculture practices,’ they wrote, specifically citing a paper that actually found the opposite: that insect abundance was lower on farms where pesticide use was less.

They also relied heavily on two now famous recent papers claiming to have found fewer insects today than in the past, one in Germany and one in Puerto Rico. The first did not even compare the same locations in different years, so its conclusions are hardly reliable. The second compared samples taken in the same place in 1976 and 2012, finding fewer insects on the second occasion and blaming this on rapid warming in the region, rather than any other possible explanation, such as timing of rainfall in the two seasons. Yet it turned out that there had been no warming: the jump in temperature recorded by the local weather station was entirely caused by the thermometer having been moved to a different location in 1992. Whoops.

Of course, human activities do affect insects, but ecologists I have consulted say local populations of some species are often undergoing huge changes, and that some species regularly die out in one location and are then regenerated by migrants. This is not to be confused with species extinction. The real evidence suggests that insect species are dying out at a similar rate to mammals and birds — which means about 1 to 5 per cent per century. A problem, but not Armageddon.

Curiously, 41 per cent cropped up in another misleading story the same day, 10 February. This is the claim that exposure to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup weedkiller, increases the incidence of a particular, very rare cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). ‘Exposure to weed-killing products increases risk of cancer by 41 per cent,’ said the Guardian’s headline.

Once again, this paper is not a new study, but a desktop survey of other studies and its claim collapses under proper scrutiny. According to the epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat, the paper combined one high-quality study with five poor-quality studies and chose the highest of five risk estimates reported in one of the latter to ensure it would reach statistical significance. The authors highlighted the dubious 41 per cent result, ‘which they almost certainly realised would grab headlines and inspire fear’.

The background is important here. Vast sums of money are at stake. ‘Predatort’ lawyers have been chasing glyphosate in the hope of tobacco-style payouts. Unluckily for them, however, study after study keeps finding that glyphosate does not cause cancer. The US Environmental Protection Agency, the European Food Safety Authority, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation working with the World Health Organisation, the European Chemicals Agency, Health Canada and the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment have all tried and failed to find any cancer risk in glyphosate.

The only exception is the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a rogue United Nations agency that has been taken over by environmental activists, which claimed that neat glyphosate was capable of causing cancer in animals if ingested. By the same criteria, IARC admits, coffee, tea and wine (which are indeed ingested) and working as a hairdresser are also carcinogenic; in fact, out of 1,000 substances and other risks tested, IARC has found only one to be non-carcinogenic. The IARC study also did the usual pseudo-science thing of citing some results but was reported by Reuters to have discounted contradictory results from the same studies.

This is what Reuters reported:

The edits identified by Reuters occurred in the chapter of IARC’s review focusing on animal studies. This chapter was important in IARC’s assessment of glyphosate, since it was in animal studies that IARC decided there was “sufficient” evidence of carcinogenicity. 

One effect of the changes to the draft, reviewed by Reuters in a comparison with the published report, was the removal of multiple scientists' conclusions that their studies had found no link between glyphosate and cancer in laboratory animals.

Following that claim, another study by the Agricultural Health Survey of 45,000 people actually exposed to glyphosate again found no association between glyphosate and any cancer, including NHL. Nobody outside the predatort industry takes the IARC finding seriously.

Nonetheless, the study had a beneficial effect for lawyers. Last year, citing the IARC study but not its debunking, a jury in California awarded a $289 million jackpot to the family of a school groundskeeper who died of NHL. Meanwhile, an investigation by Reuters found that the conclusion of the IARC study had been altered shortly before the report’s release and that the specialist consulted, Christopher Portier, started working with law firms suing Monsanto soon afterwards. Another case is due to start shortly, this time in federal court. More than 9,300 people with various cancers have filed similar cases.

Reuters again:

Documents seen by Reuters show how a draft of a key section of the International Agency for Research on Cancer's (IARC) assessment of glyphosate - a report that has prompted international disputes and multi-million-dollar lawsuits - underwent significant changes and deletions before the report was finalised and made public.

One effect of the changes to the draft, reviewed by Reuters in a comparison with the published report, was the removal of multiple scientists' conclusions that their studies had found no link between glyphosate and cancer in laboratory animals. 

In one instance, a fresh statistical analysis was inserted - effectively reversing the original finding of a study being reviewed by IARC.

In another, a sentence in the draft referenced a pathology report ordered by experts at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It noted the report “firmly” and “unanimously” agreed that the “compound” – glyphosate – had not caused abnormal growths in the mice being studied. In the final published IARC monograph, this sentence had been deleted.

See also David Zaruk:

During the same week that IARC had published its opinion on glyphosate’s carcinogenicity, Christopher Portier signed a lucrative contract to be a litigation consultant for two law firms preparing to sue Monsanto on behalf of glyphosate cancer victims.

This contract has remunerated Portier for at least 160,000 USD (until June, 2017) for initial preparatory work as a litigation consultant (plus travel).

This contract contained a confidentiality clause restricting Portier from transparently declaring this employment to others he comes in contact with. Further to that, Portier has even stated that he has not been paid a cent for work he’s done on glyphosate.

It became clear, in emails provided in the deposition, that Portier’s role in the ban-glyphosate movement was crucial. He promised in an email to IARC that he would protect their reputation, the monograph conclusion and handle the BfR and EFSA rejections of IARC’s findings.

Portier admitted in the deposition that prior to the IARC glyphosate meetings, where he served as the only external expert adviser, he had never worked and had no experience with glyphosate.

Talking of payouts, the third inexactitude to fly around the world two days later was the claim by the left-leaning political thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) that, ‘Since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times’, which was directly quoted by the BBC’s Roger Harrabin, in the usual headline-grabbing story about how we are all doomed.

This was (to borrow a phrase from Sir Nicholas Soames) ocean-going, weapons-grade, château-bottled nonsense. There has been no increase in floods since 2005, let alone a 15-fold one. When challenged, IPPR said it was a ‘typo’, and that it meant since 1950. Well, that is nonsense, too. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change regularly reviews data on floods and says it can find no trend: ‘In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.’

Fortunately, the IPPR gave a source for its absurd claim. This was ‘GMO Analysis of EM-DAT 2018’. Paul Homewood, a private citizen who regularly catches climate alarmists out, explained in a blog what this meant. EM-DAT is a database of disasters that is wholly worthless as a source for such a claim, as it admits, because it only includes very small disasters such as traffic accidents but only for recent years. There is no evidence here of a trend at all.

GMO is a big Boston asset management firm, whose founder and owner, Jeremy Grantham, just happens — you guessed it — to fund the Institute for Public Policy Research.

In the old days, investigative journalists would be all over this: a billionaire funding a pressure group that issues a press release that quotes the billionaire making a Horlicks of science but that nonetheless gets amplified, helping the pressure group attract more funds. But journalists’ budgets have been cut, and it’s easier to rewrite press releases.

Some people are willing to forgive exaggeration and error if it is in a good cause, like increasing concern about plastics or climate change. This is a risky strategy because it encourages a Trump-like refusal to believe evidence even when that evidence is good. If we use up our energies panicking about phantom hobgoblins, we might have none left for the real scares: the over-fishing of the oceans, the effect of invasive alien species on island wildlife and the fact that polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), once used in the electrical industry but long since banned, still exist in high enough concentrations in British waters to prevent killer whales from breeding.

Update: 

The IPPR report has been substantially revised in the light of criticisms made in this article and elsewhere. As Paul Homewood reports:

As we now know, the BBC has now withdrawn claims in their original report last month, based on the above IPPR paper, that since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.

 The BBC has also added this update:

This does raise the intriguing question who blinked first, the BBC or IPPR.

But let’s see just how the IPPR have changed their report:

This is how the Summary compares:

BEFORE

AFTER

 And in the detailed section, on P13:

BEFORE

 

AFTER

Despite the much greater elaboration in the new version, the difference between the two is quite stunning.

The original gave an almost cataclysmic account of how climate change was wrecking the environment. The new effectively states no more than these facts:

1) That summers are a bit hotter, (but unmentioned is that winters, springs and autumns are less cold, probably a good thing on balance)

2) Droughts are less pervasive in North America than they used to be.

Hardly apocalyptic!

There are, and will always be, regional variations in climate. But there is no evidence that the ones we have seen in recent decades have anything to do with global warming at all.

In short, the original paper claimed climate change as one of its main causes of “environmental breakdown”, the others being extinctions and topsoil loss.

That argument has now been destroyed. 

Laughably they now describe the whole basis for their absurd extreme weather claims as “a quick survey”.

If they have really based a large chunk of their paper on a “quick survey”, it hardly inspires much confidence in the rest of it!

 

The pros and cons of no deal

An expanded version of the my recent Times article:

 

Suppose Britain leaves the EU on March 29 with no deal, just a series of last-minute fixes on things such as aviation and data. And suppose it proves to be a fairly damp squib, with a handful of problems, talked up breathlessly by the BBC, but no significant shortages in shops, or disruptions to supply chains.

If that happens, there will be one big benefit to investors and businesses: certainty. Under the prime minister’s deal, we would enter a transition period, during which uncertainty would continue for at least two years, with interminable debates about backstops.

As Lord (Peter) Lilley and Brendan Chilton (of Labour Leave) put it in a new report:

Under the government’s draft Withdrawal Agreement, corrosive uncertainty will continue for two years – or even longer – about the basis of our future trading and other links to the EU.

Whether companies find leaving with no Withdrawal Agreement welcome or a challenge, they will know where they stand and start investing again to take advantage of opportunities or to cope with problems.

It will also put an end to Britain’s disproportionate political focus on the Brexit process and we can concentrate on other priorities and on making positive use of the powers we regain from the EU.

A second advantage would be that we would save money. The £39 billion exit fine is not, as diehard Remainers often argue, a set of obligations under treaties that we would be pariahs to evade. Nearly half is continuing contributions during the transition period, which would evaporate if there were no transition period. It was made clear two years ago by a committee of the (ultra-Remain) House of Lords that almost none of the £39 billion is obligatory. It is a generous offer.

To quote Lilley and Chilton:

The EU authorises some spending commitments on programmes extending several years ahead. Britain’s net share of these outstanding commitments is put at about £18billion. There is no precedent for a country leaving an international organisation being expected to contribute to ongoing programmes initiated when it was a member71. Organisations whose income declines, whether as a result of their membership base shrinking or some other reason, have to readjust their budgets.

Pensions. The remainder is largely a contribution to the accrued pension liabilities of civil servants (net of repayment of our contribution to EIB capital). But the EU has always chosen to finance its pension liabilities on a pay-as-you-go basis, not on the basis of accrual of entitlements. New member states therefore pay for the actual pensions of civil servants who retired before the new country joined. Indeed, the UK has been paying towards pensions earned before we became members. To apply the pay-as-you-go principle while we the UK was a member state but then to apply the accruals basis in respect of pensions payable after we leave, is manifestly unjust. Again, there is no precedent for an organisation which funds its pensions on a pay-as-you-go to charge a leaving member on an accruals basis.

EIB capital. The only significant positive item is the return of the UK’s initial capital contribution to the European Investment Bank. However, the EU proposes to withhold the UK’s share of the bank’s accumulated capital which logically only built up because of the UK’s initial investment.

To smooth the EU’s ruffled feathers, we should agree to submit the EU’s claims to arbitration by an appropriate international tribunal – with every confidence of winning.

Instead of repeating debunked stories about shortages of Mars bars, sandwiches, insulin, clean water, cut flowers, Premiership footballers, Glyndebourne sopranos — as the BBC’s Gary Lineker did at the weekend about medicines — can we discuss what might actually happen?

The medicines scare is a classic example, as Lilley and Chilton explain:

Stories about potential shortages of medicines seem to have originated in the belief that there would be difficulty in authorising drugs when the European Medical Agency left the UK. Once the UK government made clear that we would continue to recognise drugs authorised by the EMA the original basis evaporated.

The story then morphed into fears of unspecified supply problems26, notably of Insulin – given credence by the PM without any explanation of why there might be problems.

Insulin is supplied by a Danish company – Novo Nordisk27. It is not going to withhold it. The EU is not going to ban its export28. The UK is not going to impede its import. The company is keeping four month’s supply in the UK.

The WTO’s Pharmaceutical Tariff Elimination Agreement automatically means that tariffs do not apply to finished medicines. The Agreement covers 10,000 medicinal products across the European Union, Canada, United States, Japan and Norway29. It covers almost 90% of the world’s pharmaceutical trade30.

Most scare stories are based on the idea that no preparations for leaving would be made, which is ludicrous. The media has a bad-news bias, as is well known. So even journalists who sympathise with no-deal carry more scare stories than reassuring one.

As Lilley and Chilton put it, “Scares about import delays are particularly ludicrous since Britain will control its own borders. Why on earth would we prevent things we need from entering our country?” Exporters to the EU worry about tariffs, but they will average 4 per cent, dwarfed by the 15 per cent fall in the exchange rate since the referendum.

To quote from the report:

Tariffs on UK exports to the EU will amount to £5-6 billion. This is half the UK’s net contribution to the EU of £10-12 billion. Paying £10 billion to avoid £5 billion has not been a good deal!

Our exporters to the EU will face an average tariff of 4% – far outweighed by the 15% improvement in competitiveness due to the exchange rate movement triggered by the referendum.

Businessmen I speak to generally say they have prepared their own companies, but worry others haven’t. That’s what many said about the Y2K Millennium Bug, a comparison drawn by Lord Lilley and Mr Chilton. The social collapse that was to follow computer failures at midnight on December 31, 1999, never materialised, even in countries that spent little on preparation. Those who said in advance the scares were exaggerated were called irresponsible.

Lilley and Chilton on the Millennium Bug:

About 100 days before the turn of the millennium, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he stood ready to call out the Army to cope with civil unrest caused by the economic and social collapse that might be unleashed by the Bug at midnight on 31st December 1999. Despite spending an estimated $75 billion world-wide to tackle the threat it was still feared that: planes would fall from the sky, lifts would crash down their shafts, the electricity grid might melt down, the telephone system would fail, computers would not work or go rogue and the whole financial system might collapse. The CBI (of course!) joined all political parties in warning how serious these consequences could be. Almost no-one dared suggest that this was all grossly exaggerated. Anyone who did so was accused of dangerous complacency that might undermine the national effort. Most sceptics felt it was safer to be wrong with the herd than risk the odium of suggesting the Emperor had no clothes. In the event nothing happened....

On the media:

Channel 4 produced a half-hour programme of unchallenged predictions about the horrors of a ‘no deal’ Brexit without mentioning that it saves £39billion. And, like the BBC, it has not reported the welcome news about the French authorities’ plans to avoid congestion at Calais, let alone that HMRC say they will not need to carry out additional checks at Dover.

In addition, this time the government is clearly determined to play up the supposed horrors of leaving with no Withdrawal Agreement in the hope of persuading MPs to vote for the EU’s unloved draft ‘deal’. The government is in the bizarre position of preparing to leave on WTO terms, while pretending that its preparations will be unsuccessful. In fact, talking up the horrors of ‘no-deal’ is not merely self-contradictory it is extraordinarily irresponsible. The PM’s only hope of securing any substantive changes in her draft deal depend on her convincing the EU she is prepared – in every sense – to leave on WTO terms.

This time parts of the media with a bad-news bias are failing to report anything reassuring, such as French plans to avoid congestion at Calais, or announcements from HM Revenue and Customs that they will not need to carry out additional checks at Dover.

 

Why people prefer bad news

My article in the Wall Street Journal  on the persistent appeal of pessimism:

Has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty almost doubled, almost halved or stayed the same over the past 20 years? When the Swedish statistician and public health expert Hans Rosling began asking people that question in 2013, he was astounded by their responses. Only 5% of 1,005 Americans got the right answer: Extreme poverty has been cut almost in half. A chimpanzee would do much better, he pointed out mischievously, by picking an answer at random. So people are worse than ignorant: They believe they know many dire things about the world that are, in fact, untrue.

Before his untimely death last year, Rosling (with his son and daughter-in-law as co-authors) published a magnificent book arguing against such reflexive pessimism. Its title says it all: “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” As the author of a book called “The Rational Optimist,” I’m happy to include myself in their platoon, which also includes writers such as Steven Pinker, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shermer and Gregg Easterbrook. 

For us New Optimists, however, it’s an uphill battle. No matter how persuasive our evidence, we routinely encounter disbelief and even hostility, as if accentuating the positive was callous. People cling to pessimism about the state of the world. John Stuart Mill neatly summarized this tendency as far back as 1828: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” It’s cool to be gloomy.

Studies consistently find that people in developed societies tend to be pessimistic about their country and the world but optimistic about their own lives. They expect to earn more and to stay married longer than they generally do. The Eurobarometer survey finds that Europeans are almost twice as likely to expect their own economic prospects to get better in the coming year as to get worse, while at the same time being more likely to expect their countries’ prospects to get worse than to improve. The psychologist Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania suggests a reason for this: We think we are in control of our own fortunes but not those of the wider society.

There are certainly many causes for concern in the world today, from terrorism to obesity to environmental problems, but the persistence of pessimism about the planet requires some explanation beyond the facts themselves. Herewith a few suggestions: 

Bad news is more sudden than good news, which is usually gradual. Therefore bad news is more newsworthy. Battles, bombings, accidents, murders, storms, floods, scandals and disasters of all kinds tend to dominate the news. “If it bleeds, it leads,” as they used to say in the newspaper business. By contrast, the gradual reduction in poverty in the world rarely makes a sudden splash. As Rosling put it, “In the media the ‘newsworthy’ events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes.”

Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer, but each one now receives vastly more coverage.

This is part of what psychologists call the “availability bias,” a quirk of human cognition first noticed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s. People vastly overestimate the frequency of crime, because crime disproportionately dominates the news. But random violence makes the news because it is rare, whereas routine kindness doesn’t make the news because it is so common.

Bad news usually matters; good news may not. In the prehistoric past, it made more sense to worry about risks—it might help you avoid getting killed by a lion—than to celebrate success. Perhaps this is why people have a “negativity bias.” In a 2014 paper, researchers at McGill University examined which news stories their subjects chose to read for what they thought was an eye-tracking experiment. It turns out that even when people say they want more good news, they are more interested in bad news: “Regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content,” concluded the authors Mark Trussler and Stuart Soroka.

People think in relative not absolute terms. What matters is how well you are doing relative to other people, because that’s what determined success in the competition for resources (and mates) in the stone age. Being told that others are doing well is therefore a form of bad news. When circumstances get better, people take those improvements for granted and reset their expectations. 

Such relativizing behavior affects even our most intimate relationships. An ingenious 2016 study by David Buss and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin found that “participants lower in mate value than their partners were generally satisfied regardless of the pool of potential mates; participants higher in mate value than their partners became increasingly dissatisfied with their relationships as better alternative partners became available.” Ouch.

As the world improves, people expand their definition of bad news. This recent finding by the Harvard psychologists David Levari and Daniel Gilbert, known as “prevalence-induced concept change,” suggests that the rarer something gets, the more broadly we redefine the concept. They found in an experiment that the rarer they made blue dots, the more likely people were to call purple dots “blue,” and the rarer they made threatening faces, the more likely people were to describe a face as threatening. “From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics,” they write, “there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to ‘creep’ when they ought not to.” 

Consider air travel: Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer—2017 was the first year with no commercial passenger plane crashes at all, despite four billion people in the air—but each one now receives vastly more coverage. Many people still consider planes a risky mode of transport. 

We’re even capable of fretting about the bounty of prosperity, as “Weird Al” Yankovic highlights in his clever song, “First World Problems”: “The thread count on these cotton sheets has got me itching/My house is so big, I can’t get Wi-Fi in the kitchen.” Sheena Iyengar of Columbia Business School became a TED star for her research on the debilitating modern illness known as the “choice overload problem”—that is, being paralyzed by having to choose from among, say, the dozens of types of olive oil or jam on offer at the grocery store. North Koreans, Syrians, Congolese and Haitians generally have more important things to worry about.

Other psychological effects apply as well. There is a tendency to remember the good things about the past and to forget the bad, a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump”: People have rosy nostalgia about the days of their youth, whatever it was actually like. There is also the vested interest that pressure groups have in selling bad news in exchange for donations.

Finally, there is what I call “turning-point-itis.” This is the tendency to think that things may have improved in the past but will no longer do so in the future, because we stand at a turning point in history. It’s true, as brokers like to say, that past performance is no guide to future performance. But as the historian Lord Macaulay wrote almost two centuries ago, “On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

So cheer up. The world’s doing better than you think.

 

How to stifle innovation

My article  on the Brexit Central website about the court decision in the Dyson labelling case:

My biggest beef with the European Union has always been the way it stifles consumer-friendly innovation in the interests of incumbent businesses and organisations. Today’s victory for Sir James Dyson at the European General Court lays bare an especially shocking example.

Dyson’s case, which has taken five years in the courts, reveals just how corrupt and crony-capitalist the European Union has become. It is no surprise that Sir James was and is a big supporter of Britain leaving the EU. Essentially, the rules have been bent to allow German manufacturers to deceive customers about the performance of their vacuum cleaners, in a manner uncannily similar to – but even worse than — the way mostly German car manufacturers deceived customers about the emissions from diesel vehicles.

In today’s decision – a very rare case in which the EU courts have had to back down — the EU’s General Court said it would uphold Dyson’s claim and that “tests of a vacuum cleaner’s energy efficiency carried out with an empty receptacle do not reflect conditions as close as possible to actual conditions of use”. Yes, you read that right: until now, in Europe only, vacuum cleaners were tested without dust, the better to suit German manufacturers.

The case concerns labels on vacuum cleaners stating how much energy they use. The Energy Label for corded vacuum cleaners is mandated by the EU’s Ecodesign and Energy Labelling regulations. The purpose is to encourage energy efficiency in such products and the job of the Energy Label is to make sure that consumers get clear information about product performance. Dyson was the first manufacturer to support limits on the power consumption of motors in vacuums. Why wouldn’t it be: its Cyclone product is very efficient?

The Energy Label was introduced throughout the EU in September 2014 and updated in September 2017. It covers overall energy rating, rated A to G, with A being best and G being worst; annual energy usage in kWh; the amount of dust in air emitted from the machine’s exhaust (A to G); the noise level in decibels; how much dust the machine picks up from carpets (A to G); and how much dust the machine picks up from hard floors and crevices (A to G).

All very reasonable, until you find that the European Commission stipulated that under these regulations, vacuum cleaners are tested empty and with no dust. This flies in the face of the methods developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), an international standards organization, which have been adopted by consumer test bodies and manufacturers worldwide. It is out of line with the way other appliances, such as washing machines, ovens and dishwashers are tested “loaded”, not empty.

Why would the EC have made this strange decision? Because the big German manufacturers make vacuum cleaners with bags. Sir James Dyson invented ones without bags. And the bag ones gradually become clogged with dust so they have to use more power or lose suction. The decision to test them empty plainly benefits the bag-cleaners. Behind the scenes the German manufacturers lobbied for this outcome.

The result of this is that you can buy a bag cleaner with an A rating, take it home and find that most of the time it performs like a G-rated cleaner.

So in 2013 Dyson challenged the labelling rules in the EU General Court, arguing that, to reflect real-life experience, the performance of a vacuum cleaner should be tested in real-world conditions, and that might actually include – God forbid – encountering dust. In November 2015, the EU General Court dismissed Dyson’s claims saying that dust-loaded testing is not reliable or “reproducible” and therefore could not be adopted, despite the fact that the international standard does use dust. Nonsense: in its labs and in houses, Dyson tests its own machines using real dust, fluff, grit and debris including dog biscuits and Cheerio cereals – of both the European and the American kind.

Dyson appealed to the European Court of Justice in January 2016 and on 11 May 2017 it won. The court said that to reach the conclusion it had, the General Court “distorted the facts”, “ignored their own law”, “had ignored Dyson’s evidence” and had “failed to comply with its duty to give reasons”. The ECJ said that the test must adopt, where technically possible, “a method of calculation which makes it possible to measure the energy performance of vacuum cleaners in conditions as close as possible to actual conditions of use”. The case was passed back to the General Court, which was given time to reconsider its verdict at leisure. Today, after eighteen months of cogitation (what do judges do all day?), and with nowhere to go, the court capitulated.

Dyson has this to say about the case: “the EU label flagrantly discriminated against a specific technology – Dyson’s patented cyclone. This benefited traditional, predominantly German, manufacturers who lobbied senior Commission officials. Some manufacturers have actively exploited the regulation by using low motor power when in the test state, but then using technology to increase motor power automatically when the machine fills with dust – thus appearing more efficient. This defeat software allows them to circumvent the spirit of the regulation, which the European Court considers to be acceptable because it complies with the letter of the law.”

How much more shocking does the crony-capitalist corruption at the heart of Brussels have to get before people rebel against this sort of thing? They did already? Ah yes, Brexit, true Brexit, cannot come soon enough.

 

 

The genes that contribute to human intelligence and personality

My Review in The Times of Robert Plomin's new book:

For a long time there was an uncomfortable paradox in the world of behaviour genetics. The evidence for genes heavily influencing personality, intelligence and almost everything about human behaviour got stronger and stronger as more and more studies of twins and adoption came through. However, the evidence implicating any particular gene in any of these traits stubbornly refused to emerge, and when it did, it failed to replicate.

Ten years ago I recall talking to Robert Plomin about this crisis in the science of which he was and is the doyen. He was as baffled as anybody. The more genes seemed to matter, the more they refused to be identified. Were we missing something about heredity? He came close to giving up research and retiring to a sailing boat.

Fortunately, he did not. With the help of the latest genetic techniques, Plomin has now solved the mystery and this is his book setting out the answer. It is a hugely important book — and the story is very well told. Plomin’s writing combines passion with reason (and passion for reason) so fluently that it is hard to believe this is his first book for popular consumption, after more than 800 scientific publications.

His story is crucial, because in the final chapters he exposes his own genes to readers as a test of the arguments he is making. So we learn that Plomin, a professor of behavioural genetics at King’s College London, “grew up in a one-bedroom flat in inner-city Chicago without books”. Nobody in his family went to university, yet he was an insatiable devourer of books.

An intelligence test identified Plomin’s ability and got him into schools where he could develop his talent. Here lies one of the sources of his passion: he thinks that if children are to be enabled to fulfil their potential, then you cannot believe that they are the product of their upbringing or education. You must understand that they have innate aptitudes that can overcome environmental disadvantages. Nothing, he believes, is bleaker than environmental determinism.

Plomin’s research on twins and adoptees has relentlessly proved the truth of this assertion, so long denied by the dogmatists of the “not in our genes” era. Five key insights emerged, some so counterintuitive as to leave your head spinning.

First, most measures of the “environment” show substantial genetic influence. That is, people adapt their environment better to suit their natures. For example, Plomin discovered that the amount of television adopted children watch correlates twice as well with the amount their biological parents watch rather than with the amount watched by their adoptive parents.

Plomin hesitated before publishing this remarkable finding on the “nature of nurture” in 1989. Knowing what had happened to anybody who discussed genes and behaviour, from EO Wilson to Charles Murray, Plomin realised that telling the world that television watching habits are genetically influenced would be ridiculed by social scientists and the media, however strong his evidence. He feared it would be professional suicide. Yet his insight has since been replicated more than 18 times.

Our personalities are also influenced by the environment, but Plomin’s second key insight is that we are more influenced by accidental events of short duration than by family. Incredibly, children growing up in the same family are no more similar than children growing up in different families, if you correct for their genetic similarities. Parents matter, but they do not make a difference.

Plomin says these chance events can be big and traumatic things such as war or bereavement, but are mostly small but random things, like Charles Darwin being selected for HMS Beagle because Captain Robert Fitzroy believed in “phrenology” and thought he could read Darwin’s character from the shape of his nose. Environmental influences turn out to be “unsystematic, idiosyncratic, serendipitous events without lasting effects”, says Plomin.

Moreover, surprisingly, heritability increases as we get older. The longer we live, the more we come to express our own natures, rather than the influences of others on us. We “grow into our genes”, as Plomin puts it. An obvious example is male-pattern baldness, which shows low heritability at 20 and very high heritability at 60.

Two other findings are that normal and abnormal behaviour are influenced by the same genes, and that genetic effects are general across traits; there are not specific genes for intelligence, schizophrenia or personality — they all share sets of genes.

This last point leads to the breakthrough in identifying which genes make the difference. The first attempt at finding genes that influence behaviour and psychology made use of the “candidate-gene” approach. Find a gene that might be involved and see if it matters. With few exceptions, such as the APOE gene and Alzheimer’s, this approach was a dismal failure. The results were sparse and failed to replicate.

Along came the genome-wide array technique: to search for lots of different mutations at the same time in a large sample of people, hoping to pick up subtler effects. Again, nothing: Plomin’s first try yielded no genes associated with intelligence. Then came the first gene-chips in the early 2000s and he was able to look for 10,000 mutations at the same time. Still nothing. “I was beginning to think my luck had run out — after a decade of work, this was the third false start.”

The problem was that everybody thought they were hunting big game — genes with hefty influence on particular traits. It turns out they should have been looking for much smaller quarry: genes with very slight influence, but many more of them. We now know that you need a sample size of 80,000 people before you can detect the very slight changes that each genetic mutation causes, but when you get to such a scale, you find thousands of relevant genes, each adding only a small percentage to the chance of having a particular trait. It’s gold dust, not nuggets.

However, the effects are additive, and once you have lots of genes, you can start to explain significant portions of the variance among individuals. Plomin illustrates this with height. Being, like me, 6ft 5in tall, he is not surprised to find that his polygenic score, based on thousands of genes, puts him at the 90th percentile for height. The genes in the sample so far only explain 15 per cent of the variance in height of individuals, which may not sound like much, given that height is 80 per cent heritable in western societies. But get this: it’s a better predictor than any other factor — such as the height of the parents, or the height of the person as a child, let alone medical history or socio-economic status — and it works from birth, or even conception.

Plomin is very interested in the possibilities of polygenic scores, which will make it possible partly to predict psychological traits such as depression, schizophrenia and educational achievement. The score is the result of passing a sample of your blood over a silicon chip that tests for thousands of mutations, then adds them together, giving an aggregate score for how many of the thousands of single-letter code changes you have that each very slightly makes you more likely to do well in school, for example.

The predictions such scores give are probabilistic, not certain, but they are improving. Plomin argues that genes can probabilistically predict things about an individual, distinguishing her from her siblings, and can do so from the start of life. School attainment is now better forecast by a polygenic score than any other way of predicting it — it is better than knowing how the parents did at school, better than socio-economic status, better than the type of school (which turns out to have little effect once you control for the fact that selective schools choose innately more talented children).

Plomin thinks parents who give a newborn child such a test and find out that no matter how hard the child is helicopter-parented he is unlikely to be a genius would probably be doing that child a favour. “Parents should relax and enjoy their relationship with their children without feeling a need to mould them,” he argues.

It’s far fairer, Plomin says, to find out what children will be good at and bring that out than to be able to create inequality based on income or opportunity. And, in a point he does not emphasise enough, the fact that intelligence or personality are caused by many thousands of genes, each of minuscule effect, means that it will be impossibly difficult to create a super-intelligent designer baby.

I had only one quibble with this mind-blowing book: the title. I hate the word “blueprint” in association with genetics, for two reasons: first, it is an anachronistic metaphor relating to a technology that nobody uses any more. Second, it gives a misleading impression that each part of an adult is determined by a different set of genes, as is the case with an architectural blueprint, in sharp contrast to the genes of general effect that Plomin is so careful to identify. We are cakes baked to a recipe, not buildings assembled to a blueprint.