Matt Ridley's Blog, page 26

We need to defeat one particular mosquito before it gets us

My Times column on the threat from zika virus:

Cancelling the Rio Olympics would do little to slow the spread of the zika virus. That horse has already bolted: more than 60 countries and territories already have zika. It will soon be almost anywhere that its mosquito host lives. Now that the link with microcephaly is well established, becoming pregnant in any country with zika carries a small but real risk of birth defects for the baby.

In the 1970s, troubled by the risks of using pesticides, we took our eye off the fight against mosquitoes and the diseases they carry. Zika is just the latest evidence that we are paying a heavy price for that. Between 1947 and 1958 Brazil managed to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito from the entire country, as part of a continent-wide campaign against yellow fever. Yet the effort was not maintained, so the mosquito returned and now flourishes in the favelas of urban Brazil as well as most of the warm parts of the world.

The biology of Aedes aegypti makes it almost obliged to bring new and virulent pathogens to our species. As its name suggests, it originated somewhere in Africa, where some time around 4,000 years ago, unlike most mosquitoes, it became a domesticated species. That is to say, like swallows and house sparrows, it became entirely dependent on breeding in and around human houses, but also came to feed specifically on human blood. It spread to west Africa and there it picked up the yellow fever virus, which quickly became adapted to infecting human hosts.

It also collected the chikungunya virus, probably in Africa, and the dengue virus, possibly in Asia. It took all three across the Atlantic with the slave trade. More recently the mosquito collected the zika virus, probably in central Africa (it was first detected in monkeys in the Zika forest in Uganda) in the 20th century.

Because Aedes aegypti feeds mainly on human beings, every virus it picks up will either die out or become specialised at thriving in human bodies. And the trouble with insect-borne diseases is that, unlike colds, they do not always evolve towards lower virulence. Indeed, in some cases the more they debilitate their victim with fever, the better the chance of him or her being bitten again. So Aedes aegypti will go on bringing us new and nasty diseases as fast as we can fight them.

Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito, is a bit less dangerous, because it is less domesticated and is not host-specific, so many of its bites are wasted on non-susceptible hosts such as rodents, birds and even amphibians. However, it can also carry all three viruses and it has spread around the world largely in the global trade in used tyres: tiny pools of water inside the tyres suit the larvae well. Because it can live in cooler climates, it is spreading through Europe.

Yet malaria, by far the most lethal of all mosquito-borne diseases, is retreating at an extraordinary rate. Malaria incidence has fallen by 37 per cent and mortality by 60 per cent since 2000. Why can we not do for zika what we have done for malaria? The two best weapons against malaria are insecticide-treated bednets and the spraying of the inside walls of houses, where the Anopheles mosquito rests during the day before feeding at night. Neither of these works against Aedes, a day-active mosquito.

The eradication of Aedes aegypti from Brazil and other countries in the middle of the last century was achieved by a monumental effort to spray insecticide into every urban nook and cranny where the larvae might live. Because the mosquito was domesticated, there was no need to treat the entire countryside. Today, that task would be near impossible, for three reasons: the huge expansion of cities, where the mosquito lives mostly on private property, in and around the home; the resistance of mosquitoes to many insecticides; and the objections of environmentalists to spraying.

Those objections, while sometimes overdone, have a point. DDT remains an especially effective way of reducing mosquito populations, but is best used in very small doses inside homes against malarial mosquitoes. Sprayed outside, it gets into the wild food chain where it accumulates in the bodies of predatory birds and mammals and eventually reduces their fertility. Though some deny it, DDT did devastate birds of prey in the 1960s.

 

So we need a better solution. Fortunately, one exists. The British start-up Oxitec, now part of Intrexon, developed a technique for genetically altering male Aedes aegypti in 2002 so that their offspring cannot survive to adulthood. In five separate trials over the past five years, more than 150 million such male OX513A mosquitoes have been released in Brazil (three places), Panama and the Cayman Islands. Males don’t bite, live for only a week, and in this case their offspring die young, so the long-term ecological effect is nil. The trials resulted in 92 per cent, 92 per cent, 93 per cent, 96 per cent and 99 per cent reduction in the respective local populations of Aedes aegypti — far higher than can be achieved with pesticides.

The technique was approved by Brazil’s National Biosafety Technical Commission and the World Health Organisation. Oxitec is building a factory in Brazil and will be in a position to release half a billion modified mosquitoes this year and over three billion in 2017.

Yet so obsessed are some activists with their opposition to genetic modification of any kind that they have been spreading bonkers theories that the release of GM mosquitoes actually caused the zika outbreak in Brazil, even though the release was 400 miles from and four years before the zika outbreak. There were also cases of microcephaly following an earlier outbreak in Polynesia, where Oxitec has never set foot. The idea is, in any case, physically impossible for many reasons, not least that the genetic insert is made of DNA and the virus genome is made of RNA. Yet this conspiracy theory has been repeated credulously by the editor of The Ecologist magazine, Oliver Tickell, and echoed in mainstream media, although recently he appears to have accepted new evidence that casts doubt on the theory.

Of course, despite it being invented in Europe, there is no plan to use the Oxitec technology on this continent even if it becomes urgent to do so. The process of approving genetically modified insects in Europe is too long, complex, uncertain and expensive for it to be even worth applying. Madness.

Why eugenics won't come back

My Times column on why gene editing is not the slippery slope to eugenics:

 

This summer brings the 50th anniversary of the full deciphering of the genetic code — the four-billion-year-old cipher by which DNA’s information is translated and expressed — and the centenary of the birth of Francis Crick, who both co-discovered the existence of that code and dominated the subsequent 13-year quest to understand it. Europe’s largest biomedical laboratory, named after him, opens this summer opposite St Pancras station.

At a seminar today to mark Crick’s centenary at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, hosted by his famous collaborator Jim Watson, I shall argue that the genetic code was the greatest of all the 20th-century’s scientific discoveries. It came out of the blue and has done great good. It solved the secret of life, till then an enigma: living things are defined by the eternal replication of linear digital messages. It revealed that all life shares the same universal but arbitrary genetic code, and therefore shares common ancestry, vindicating Charles Darwin.

From the very moment that Crick first showed a chart of the genetic code, on May 5, 1966 at the Royal Society in London, speculation began about the dangers of using this knowledge for the eugenic enhancement of human beings or for making biological weapons. The discovery only three years ago of a precise gene-editing tool (known as CRISPR-Cas9) has revived that debate yet again, not least with the first application, by Kathy Niakan of the Crick institute, to use CRISPR experimentally (not therapeutically) on very early human embryos.

Yet in truth the threat of eugenics is fainter than ever. This is for three reasons. First, the essence of eugenics was compulsion: it was the state deciding who should be allowed to breed, or to survive, for the supposed good of the race. As long as we prevent coercion, we will not have eugenics. Our politics would have to change far more drastically than our science.

Remember that many of the most enthusiastic proponents of eugenics were socialists. People such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, Karl Pearson and Harold Laski saw in eugenic policies the start of the necessary nationalisation of marriage and reproduction — handing the commanding heights of the bedroom to the state. In The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion, an appendix to Shaw’s play Man and Superman, one of the characters writes: “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of Man.” Virginia Woolf thought imbeciles “should certainly be killed”.

Surprisingly, it was California that pioneered the eugenic sterilisation of disabled and “imbecile” people in the 1920s; and it was from California that Ernst Rüdin of the German Society of Racial Hygiene took his model when he was appointed Reichskommissar for eugenics by the incoming National Socialist government in 1933. The California conservationist Charles Goethe returned from a visit to Germany overjoyed that the Californian experiment had “jolted into action a great government of 60 million people”.

The second reason we need not fear a return of eugenics is that we now know from 40 years of experience that without coercion there is little or no demand for genetic enhancement. People generally don’t want paragon babies; they want healthy ones that are like them. At the time test-tube babies were first conceived in the 1970s, many people feared in-vitro fertilisation would lead to people buying sperm and eggs off celebrities, geniuses, models and athletes. In fact, the demand for such things is negligible; people wanted to use the new technology to cure infertility — to have their own babies, not other people’s. It is a persistent misconception shared among clever people to assume that everybody wants clever children.

 

Third, eugenics, far from being inspired by genetic knowledge, has been confounded by it. Every advance in genetics over the past 116 years has shown that it is less easy to enhance human beings than expected, but easier to cure diseases. The discovery of genes — effectively in 1900, when Gregor Mendel’s work was disinterred — made the selective breeding of people much harder than Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, had expected. This was because it meant that “undesirable” traits could be hidden in healthy people (“recessive” genes) for generations. It would therefore take centuries to “breed out” any trait thought undesirable by the state.

The more recent discovery that traits such as intelligence are caused by the complicated interaction of multiple genes of small effect means that it is anyway going to be virtually impossible to decide what genetic recipe to recommend to somebody who wants a clever child, or a good-looking one, or an athletic one. By contrast, the genetic changes that cause terrible afflictions such as Huntingdon’s disease or cystic fibrosis are singular and obvious. Selecting embryos that lack such traits, or editing the genes of people so that they are born without carrying such traits, will always be much easier than selecting genetic combinations that might, in the right circumstances and with the right upbringing, lead to slightly higher IQ. Cure will always be easier than enhancement.

Fifty years on, the discovery of the genetic code has produced a cornucopia of good and very little harm. It has convicted the guilty and exonerated the innocent in court on a huge scale through DNA fingerprinting. It has enabled people to avoid passing on terrible diseases. It has led to the development of new drugs, new therapies and new diagnoses. It has given partial sight back to a blind man through gene therapy. It has increased the yield of crops while reducing the use of chemical pesticides. It has discovered new species. It has illuminated ancient history and explained the parentage of an archbishop.

Against this, what? One dreadful mistake in the early history of gene therapy, which led to a single death. Some narrowly averted discrimination in health and life insurance. Other than that, I cannot think of any bad results from DNA. Yet still we are bombarded with scares about Frankenstein foods, biological warfare, designer babies, genetic discrimination and the return of eugenics. We have a virtual ban on GM crops and put huge obstacles in the way of GM vaccines. For Crick’s sake, let us agree that genetics has been a huge force for good.

 

Genetic modification of plants is safe and good for the planet

My Times comment on a new report on genetically modified crops:

 

The exhaustive and cautious new report from the American National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine leaves no room for doubt that genetically engineered crops are as safe or safer, and are certainly better for the environment, than conventionally bred crops.

The European Union was wrong to reject them 25 years ago and is wrong to continue rejecting this beneficial technology. The European Commission conceded in 2010 that GM crops are not per se more risky than, for example, conventional plant-breeding technologies, but still makes it all but impossible to grow them.

Insect-resistant “Bt” crops in particular have better yields and need fewer pesticides, resulting in “higher insect biodiversity on farms”, the academies’ report concludes.

Back in the 1990s I argued that organic farmers — who had used Bt as a spray for decades — should have embraced genetic modification from the start, instead of campaigning against it: it was going to reduce insecticide use, which was what they said they wanted.

In future genetically engineered crops will be even safer, even better for the environment and also better for human health. It is a disgrace that Greenpeace still campaigns against golden rice, a vitamin-enhanced variety that could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year.

Papayas, bananas, cotton and other tropical crops are beginning to benefit from biotechnology, and the main beneficiaries are small-scale farmers, not multinational businesses.

But opposition from rich westerners adds to the cost of bringing such crops to the market, restricting the spread of the technology and benefiting large companies that can afford the regulatory price and can face down the onslaught of the big green pressure groups.

The Greens, having begun to encounter “donor fatigue” on the topic of climate change, have recently upped their opposition to genetically engineered crops, especially in America.

The new Vermont GMO-labelling law that comes into effect in July is effectively a national law. This means that despite failing to impose state-wide initiatives in California, Oregon and Washington (three of the most liberal states you can imagine) the Greens have managed to win nationwide by turning the legislature of a tiny, and otherwise unimportant, state.

Labelling GM food but not other forms of nourishment leaves consumers with the impression that there is something wrong, and food manufacturers then pull out of using the crops: Danone has recently made this decision. The national academies report makes the obvious point that genetic engineering is a method, not a category of crop. It makes no sense to single it out for special labelling — regulation should be based on traits, not techniques. After all, we don’t regulate food safety according to whether food is boiled or roasted, but according to what’s in it.

The report points out that “emerging genetic technologies have blurred the distinction between genetic engineering and conventional plant breeding to the point where regulatory systems based on process are technically difficult to defend”. Gene editing in particular will soon allow scientists to improve crops in ways that have none of the even theoretical risks that the Greens have trumpeted. If Europe does not embrace biotech plants now, its agriculture will wilt.

 

 

Britain's long history of semi-detachment from Europe

My Times column on Britain's history with Europe:

[The prime minister argues that "when we turn out back on Europe, sooner or later we come to regret it" and cited 1704, 1805, 1914 and 1940 as examples. This is historical nonsense: in each case it was our separation from Europe that enabled Britain to liberate the continent from a monopolistic tyranny. Had we been integrated, the outcomes would have been different. I argued in my Times column that the existence of the Channel, and its narrowness, have made us inevitably involved in European affairs, but also inevitably resistant to absorption into European hegemonies.]

Whatever your views on Brexit, there is no doubting the peculiar agony of Britain’s relationship with its neighbouring continent. Ever since the day at the end of the last ice age that the sea broke through the chalky gorge between Dover and Calais, it has been our dilemma: are we separate from, or close to, the continent?

Such geographic determinism may seem facile, but consider that Japan is six times further from the nearest mainland than we are. If the Strait of Dover had been six times wider, we would never have joined the Common Market, because we would have had an even more distinct culture. If it had been one sixth as wide, we would be unlikely to be having this referendum because we would have been repeatedly incorporated into European empires and would feel far more blurred in our nationality.

That Philip II, Napoleon and Hitler failed where Claudius and William I (and Eisenhower) succeeded is down largely to the width of the channel: difficult but not impossible to invade across. Britain is close enough to the continent to be repeatedly entangled in continental systems, but far enough away to repeatedly regret having joined them.

Take the events of AD410. Paul Johnson in his book The Offshore Islanders (written the year before Britain joined the common market) argued that the British were by then terminally fed up with the “festering incubus” of toga-clad colonialism. The promising prosperity of cross-channel trade in the century before Claudius showed up had long given way to a nasty occupation characterised by financial exploitation, brutal repression and religious dogmatism. Opportunity came when barbarian armies crossed the Rhine and Goths sacked Rome itself.

At that point something peculiar happened in Britain. A rebel force of semi-Romanised British nationalists, inspired by the British-born theologian Pelagius with his heretical doctrine of free will, captured London and other cities, imposed peace and then wrote to the Emperor Honorius requesting legal recognition of their independence. Otherwise preoccupied, the emperor agreed. As Johnson says: “There was no provision in Roman law for a territory to leave the empire. [Sound familiar?] But by an ingenious use of the Lex Julia the British got round the difficulty and severed their links with the continent by a process of negotiation.”

Of course, division and war rather spoilt things in the centuries that followed, not helped by a colder climate. But the Dark Ages were hardly a picnic in the rest of Europe.

 

Or take the Synod of Whitby, called by King Oswiu of Northumbria and hosted by St Hilda in AD663-4. The purpose of this summit meeting was superficially to decide on hairstyles (tonsure) and the date of Easter, but its more serious job was to choose which form of Christianity to follow — the hierarchical and bling-rich one of Rome or the decentralised and ascetic one of Iona. It must have been rather like the debate about joining the euro versus keeping the pound, but with a different outcome, since we chose continental.

The losers slunk back to Iona with a few of St Aidan’s bones in a box but it was not till 1066 that England was properly absorbed into the political, economic and even judicial union that the church represented. The pope enthusiastically supported William the Conqueror, and reaped his reward in the form of a Catholic English church barely loyal to English secular authority. Eurosceptic twinges continued, such as Henry II’s murder of Thomas Becket or King John’s excommunication by Innocent III, but we remained for centuries fully committed members of the project of ever closer Catholic union.

Till Henry VIII. The Reformation is rife with parallels with today’s debate: throwing off a European supranational bureaucracy to repatriate the membership fees at the cost of sharp divisions in society. Here is the former MP Lord Salisbury, writing last month to the journalist Bruce Anderson: “Henry VIII declared independence from the Pope and the Emperor for the lowest of reasons, his lust and his wallet . . .[but] I hope that you, as I do, feel that Henry’s passion for Anne and for monastic riches released this country from its obscurantist shackles and made the industrial revolution and the period of British dominance possible.”

Salisbury sees modern Brussels as an ancien régime, as incapable of reform as the Roman church and ripe for collapse: “It is difficult for a construct conceived by visionaries moulded in the Napoleonic hothouse of the Grandes Ecoles . . . to adapt to the enormous and irreversible transfer of power from bureaucracies to the individual.”

Napoleon reminds us of another lesson from this tortured island history. When a hegemon aspires to monopolise the continent, it is often Britain that proves hardest to harmonise, because of the Channel. The empire then cuts us off from trade, as Charlemagne, Innocent III, Charles V, Louis XIV, Bonaparte, the Kaiser and Hitler all did to various degrees and at various times. Yet it is often Britain that provides the resistance and causes the hegemon to fall.

It has thus been our historic role to restore fragmentation to Europe, to dissolve its monopolies of power and help to free its peoples from what Bonaparte called “continental systems”. This is not because we are morally superior, or inferior, but simply because we are on an island. If Britain had not existed, or the Channel had been narrower, Napoleon and Hitler would both have imposed continental monopolies that extinguished alternatives. Another way of saying this is that it is our traditional role to help to preserve the balance of power in Europe.

Fragmentation is not necessarily a bad thing. As David Hume was one of the first to point out, Europe’s overtaking of China after 1500 owed much to the fact that its peninsulas, straits, mountain ranges and islands meant it could not be unified for long, with the result that innovators and experimenters could escape uncongenial regimes by crossing borders. From Gutenberg to Voltaire to Otto Frisch, they did so.

Geographical determinism is now pointing us out to the world. If the width of the Channel has shaped our history with Europe in the 20th century, air travel and telephones surely brought us closer to our continental neighbours. In the 1970s it was suddenly cheaper to travel to, trade with or communicate with Europe. Today, after the revolutions brought about by container shipping, budget airlines, satellites and the internet, other continents and peoples feel almost as close.

Broadband will drive a rural revival

My Times column on rural broadband:

Compared with most countries, Britain has a fairly healthy rural economy. Barns have been converted into homes or offices rather than left to tumble down, as in parts of France. Remote areas have job vacancies in picturesque villages, rather than drug problems amid piles of dead cars, as in parts of America. The demand for second homes in St Ives and the lack of affordable housing in villages (both in the news these past few weeks) are the result of too much demand for rural assets, not too little.

Yet there is now a golden opportunity to make the rural economy work even better, to make the countryside an engine of growth rather than a theme park and retirement community — and without spoiling it. That opportunity’s name is broadband. The government’s sudden decision to stop rolling fast broadband out for the last 5 per cent of people is madness.

What is the countryside for? Throughout most of our history it provided the bulk of employment and economic activity: it was necessary for 80-90 per cent of people to work in the fields and woods to ensure that everybody had just enough food, fibre and fuel to get through the winter.

The industrial revolution turned that upside down: the cities generated wealth, some of which was sunk back into investments in the countryside, while farming and forestry steadily shrank as a source of both wealth and employment.

We have not fully taken this in. Go to any conference about the rural economy and the chances are the agenda will still be dominated by the farming, forestry and energy industries. All three are heavily dependent on public subsidies. I was driving across rural Durham at the weekend and the landscape was dominated by sheep, sitka spruce trees and wind farms, all there because of government support. Yet even in “predominantly rural areas” just two per cent of the gross value added comes from agriculture, forestry and fishing, according to government statistics. Twice as much gross value added — in predominantly rural areas — comes from finance and insurance. So 98 per cent of the rural economy is not farming or forestry.

I declare an interest in both farming and forestry, but the future of the rural economy does not lie in finding more ways of doling out cash to grow trees, sheep or windmills, let alone doing so in retro, artisanal and organic ways. I have nothing against wood craft and home-made chutney, but it’s not going to be the main source of income for the British countryside. That’s going to come from entrepreneurs, sitting in converted barns, selling services on the internet to the world. Suddenly, for the first time since about 1800, you can do business just as well from St Ives or Wensleydale as you can from Manchester.

As Owen Paterson, MP, has put it in a recent letter to John Whittingdale, the culture secretary, objecting to the government’s argument that the final 5 per cent of rural people don’t want broadband: “For the first time, we have a technology which can truly bridge the gap between urban and rural; it overcomes the innate disadvantages of living in a remote place . . . All the activity that takes place in the country reduces the pressure on our towns and cities.”

If my own experience is anything to go by, the statistics on the roll-out of rural broadband are not to be trusted. I live ten miles from the middle of a big city, only just in the countryside at all. Yet the signs that have been pinned to telephone poles near here, proudly announcing the arrival of superfast broadband, and the “available now” colour on the map on the website, are infuriating local businesses, who get only excuses when they ask for it. BT seems to want to claim to have provided it while being unable to connect you if you ask for it.

According to the Oxford economist Dieter Helm, government has made a policy mistake in not separating the utility — yes, broadband is an essential utility — from the service provider. We made the same mistake last century with gas, with the result that British Gas made money not from connecting more people, but from selling more gas to big customers. Government tried regulating so as to insist on Chinese walls between British Gas’s responsibility for extending the pipeline network and its gas supply business, but it worked poorly, with the company reluctant to let competitors use the pipes, and eventually the government had to split it in two.

The same is happening with broadband. BT has an incentive to maximise revenue from its older copper network and to worry about competitors using its fibre. TalkTalk accuses it of using “national infrastructure as a cash cow for its other corporate activities, whilst the experience customers receive gets worse and worse”. So it drags its feet with broadband roll-out, mystifying its customers with contradictory claims about whether they can or cannot have fast connections, while claiming to the regulator to have connected an area.

With water, electricity or roads, the firms that built the network were paid to connect people, and were separate from those trying to monopolise the supply of water, electricity or transport. Professor Helm thinks it’s vital that Openreach, which owns the pipes and cables, now be separated from BT.

Meanwhile, that other vital rural utility, the mobile phone network, is rapidly falling apart. I cannot remember when I last had an uninterrupted mobile call in a rural area, even when not on the move, and I don’t live in a “not-spot”. The problem presumably is congestion. More and more people are sending bigger and bigger data packages over mobiles, but the oligopoly of mobile companies, crippled by the cost of Gordon Brown’s 3G auction, has not built nearly enough phone masts and doesn’t have an incentive to put it right.

People who live in rural areas do not deserve special treatment, of course, and they do not get it. At the moment, they heavily subsidise urban areas through their council tax, which is redistributed from the countryside to cities. But if we provide rural areas with decent infrastructure — road, rail, broadband and mobile — then second homes can become first homes and the rural economy will help to drive the urban one for the first time in 200 years.

 

The many attempts to stifle free speech on climate change

My Times column on free speech and climate change:

 

The editor of this newspaper received a private letter last week from Lord Krebs and 12 other members of the House of Lords expressing unhappiness with two articles by its environment correspondent. Conceding that The Times’s reporting of the Paris climate conference had been balanced and comprehensive, it denounced the two articles about studies by mainstream academics in the scientific literature, which provided less than alarming assessments of climate change.

Strangely, the letter was simultaneously leaked to The Guardian. The episode gives a rare glimpse into the world of “climate change communications”, a branch of heavily funded spin-doctoring that is keen to shut down debate about the science of climate change.

The letter was not entirely the work of the peers but, I understand, involved Richard Black, once a BBC environment correspondent and now director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, an organisation that spends more than £500,000 a year, largely trying to influence the media.

The ECIU is part of a self-described “climate change rapid response community”, which jumps on newspapers that publish anything sceptical about global warming. Another £330,000 was spent by Carbon Brief, led by another ex-journalist, Leo Hickman of The Guardian. (There’s a revolving door between environmental journalism and Big Green.) Then there’s the Climate Coalition, the Campaign against Climate Change, various publicly funded climate-communications groups inside universities, plus the green multinationals, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, with their nine-figure budgets. And so on.

Against this Goliath, one little David stands alone: the Global Warming Policy Foundation, with its budget of about £300,000, all privately donated and none from the fossil fuel industry. (I am on its academic advisory council, but receive no pay and make no donations. I have income indirectly from unsubsidised coal, and have refused income from subsidised solar and wind power.)

The GWPF often draws attention to the many studies ignored by greens that suggest climate change is not so dangerous, and to the economic and environmental harm done by climate policies. Remember the consensus is that global warming is “likely” to be anything from mildly beneficial to significantly harmful (0.3-4.8C this century). And predictions of doom usually prove exaggerated: eugenic deterioration, dietary fat, population growth, sperm counts, pesticides and cancer, mad cow disease, the effect of acid rain on forests.

On Friday the BBC news report that nations had signed their non-binding climate promises made in Paris was followed by a report that diesel car makers had exposed millions to harmful air quality — a direct result of climate policies. In the name of preventing future dangerous warming, workers are losing their jobs, pensioners are in fuel poverty and Africans are suffering from malnutrition because of the diversion of crops into biofuels.

 

Climate policies are hitting mainly poor people while enriching mainly wealthy people. The lack of affordable electricity in poor countries is responsible for poverty and at least three million deaths a year from indoor smoke, yet western countries and international institutions largely refuse to support the cheapest source of electricity, fossil fuels. It is reasonable that journalists should occasionally report challenges to the evidence on which these policies are based.

Ironically, two days before the letter was leaked, Lord Krebs rightly denounced in parliament a ham-fisted new government rule on not using public money to lobby government, because it could effectively censor scientists from saying inconvenient things. Yet here he seems to be saying that The Times should censor inconvenient stories.

This episode is part of a systematic campaign. When I cover this topic I am vilified as on no other subject, and many journalists now steer clear of expressing any doubts. As long ago as 2005, the Royal Society wrote to editors “appealing to all parts of the UK media to be vigilant against attempts to present a distorted view of the scientific evidence about climate change”, by which they did not mean the cherry-picked data and inappropriate statistics just then being exposed in the “hockey-stick” and “hide the decline” fiascos.

In 2006 the BBC held a secret meeting, after which it decided to limit the airtime given to climate sceptics. It spent £140,000 on hiring six lawyers to avoid revealing that the 28 “best scientific experts” who attended actually included only a handful of scientists remotely connected with climate among mostly environmental lobbyists.

In 2013 Ed Davey, then secretary of state for energy and climate change, said “some sections of the press are giving an uncritical campaigning platform to individuals and lobby groups”, by which he did not apparently mean The Guardian. In 2014 the BBC upheld a complaint against itself for allowing Lord Lawson to discuss climate change at all, commenting bizarrely that his views “are not supported by the evidence from computer modelling”.

The Climategate emails leaked in 2009 revealed intimidation against academics and journal editors who voiced doubts about the forthcoming Armageddon. When Lennart Bengtsson, a distinguished climatologist, joined the GWPF’s scientific advisory board in 2014, the pressure was so “unbearable” that he withdrew, worried about his health and safety, “a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy”. Some distinguished scientists continue to brave the bullies, such as Judith Curry, Dick Lindzen, John Christy, Nic Lewis, Michael Kelly and David Legates, but others tell me they dare not put their heads above the parapet.

In 2013 The Los Angeles Times said it would “no longer publish letters from climate change deniers”, in which category it included sceptics. The following year Professor Roger Pielke Jr quit Nate Silver’s 538 website following a campaign against him. Professor Pielke had argued with impeccably detailed evidence that, although he was no sceptic, “the increased cost of natural disasters is not the result of climate change”.

This month, the attorneys-general of 16 US states issued subpoenas against a think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in an attempt to silence its climate dissent. The Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle lambasted this decision, saying: “I support action on climate change . . . But that doesn’t mean I’m entitled to drive people who disagree with me from the public square.”

If peers demanded a newspaper stop covering studies that argue economic growth is going to fall short of the consensus, they would get short shrift. We can’t criticise Russia or Turkey for shutting down newspapers if we censor scientific doubters. Free speech matters.

Bourgeois Equality

My review in the Times of Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality:

 

It took me two months to read this 650-page, small-type book, the third volume in a trilogy. In that time I read several other books, absorbing Bourgeois Equality in small doses on trains, ships, Tubes, sofas and beds. If that sounds like faint praise, it’s not. I wanted to savour every sentence of this remarkable feast of prose.

It is a giant of a book about a giant of a topic: the “great enrichment” of humanity over the past 300 years. It is so rich in vocabulary, allusion and fact as to be a contender for the great book of our age.

There’s only one flaw. For all the book’s startling and acute insights individually, I am still not persuaded that Deirdre McCloskey has the answer to those most tantalising of historical questions: why the world suddenly began getting much, much richer, healthier and longer-lived some time in 1700 — and why did it start in a soggy polder in northwest Europe and on a rain-soaked island off the coast of Europe?

She thinks it was all about a change in rhetoric that allowed Holland, Britain and then the world to respect the bourgeois values of “trade-tested betterment”, McCloskey’s phrase for free enterprise. That certainly happened, but was it cause or effect?

It is fair to begin, though, by celebrating the author’s own rhetoric. McCloskey is an emerita professor of economics, English and history at the University of Illinois. There is hardly a paragraph that lacks a witty literary aside or philosophical joke, and yet the style is the very opposite of pompous. It is bright, light, sharp and crisp.

Here she is, for example, on the change in values that happened in the 18th century: “For the first time, thank God — and thank the Levellers and then Locke in the 17th century, and Voltaire and Smith and Franklin and Paine and Wollstonecraft among other of the advanced thinkers in the 18th century — the ordinary people, the commoners, both workers and bosses, began to be released from the ancient notion of hierarchy, the naturalisation of the noble gentleman’s rule over hoi polloi.”

The gist of her argument is that the Industrial Revolution (which was not a revolution, for it started extremely slowly and is still gathering pace) was not caused by an accumulation of capital, or the exploitation of colonies, or science, or government policy, or a change in institutions. All these explanations are too small or arrive too late to explain the astonishing 2,900 per cent increase in real incomes of westerners.

The cause was a change in values that allowed merchants to engage in trade without being despised and persecuted, “a bourgeois and rhetorical tsunami around 1700 in the North Sea”. Before — and in many places, since — “the sneer by the aristocrat, the damning by the priest, the envy by the peasant, all directed against trade and profit and the bourgeoisie, conventional in every literature since ancient times, has long sufficed to kill economic growth.”

One of the crucial changes was that the making of money through trade became if not respectable, then at least not disgraceful. With it came a valuing of innovation and an honouring of practical men — engineers who got their hands dirty.

By the time of Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen (whose work she knows inside out) even intellectuals had developed a grudging respect for businessmen. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Dr Johnson said. Jane Austen, says McCloskey, “understood that ethical self-love — prudence — is indeed a virtue when balanced by other virtues”; prudence being a great bourgeois virtue. WH Auden later described his shock at how Austen was wont to “reveal so frankly and with such sobriety/ The economic basis of society”.

It was not to last. After 1848, the sons of bourgeois merchants who had become intellectuals were again pouring scorn on everything bourgeois, as they still do today. McCloskey is especially acute in documenting this contempt for mercantile values in literature: “There is scarcely an English or French intellectual in the 19th century who was not simultaneously the son of a bourgeois and sternly hostile to everything bourgeois . . . In Dickens every hero starts poor, ending rich from inheritance, not from buying ideas low and selling them high in the tiresome bourgeois way,” McCloskey writes.

In the 1990s McCloskey could think of only two novelists who have portrayed businessmen in a sympathetic light since 1848: Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks (1901) and David Lodge in Nice Work (1988). She later added VS Naipaul and Willa Cather to her list. Warriors, priests, farmers, thieves, spies, cops, cowboys, bureaucrats may be heroes of films and books but hardly ever businessmen. The exceptions — Oskar Schindler, say — rather prove the rule: the old and cruel virtues of courage, sacrifice and honour are admired, but rarely prudence.

The modern clerisy — her word for intellectuals — can barely contain its hatred of people who buy low and sell high. Yet it was the bourgeoisie who sparked innovation, rising living standards and, yes, even virtue. McCloskey observes acidly that far from being corrupted “by riches earned from gin, spices, herring and government bonds”, Holland became exceptionally moral in the 17th century.

So you can see my problem with her thesis: respect for bourgeois values is still all too rare. It is clearly true that Britain — protected by the Channel from marauding militarism, dependent on maritime trade and subject to a Dutch takeover in 1688 — was unusually tolerant of merchants and their values for a crucial period. Yet surely this just fired the starter motor on a selfreinforcing engine of innovation and growth that kept on running despite the contempt of the clerisy.

What was it about the innovation- driven rise in productivity of the ordinary person that the reactionary tax-eaters could not stop, as they had done in the Abbasid Muslim world, Ming China and Renaissance Italy?

The key, I think, was harnessing growing quantities of energy. Without that, the bourgeois revaluation would have been strangled in the crib by Malthusian population growth or by prejudice against the middleman.

The reason this happened in Europe (here she and I and David Hume agree) is because of that continent’s geographical and political fragmentation. Its many peninsulas make Europe especially hard to integrate, as Hadrian, Napoleon, Hitler and others have discovered.

So innovators could escape uncongenial rulers. The Dutch opted out of Charles V’s and Philip II’s vision of a Habsburg Europe in a way that Shanghai could not from Ming China. McCloskey is no fan of the European Union: “European industry has adapted to the Common Market regulations, frozen in old standards now hard to change, which has led to productive sclerosis. Free-flowing commerce had come after 1800 from Europe’s fragmentation.”

McCloskey has no truck with those who say commerce creates inequality. Sure, when all the world was poor, it was more equal, but it was an equality of “utter, terrified misery, walking through a pond with water up to our chins . . . At $3 a day in a traditional or totalitarian society the number of paths are two only, conformity or brigandage.” Today we have growing equality of consumption — the rich still put on their trousers one leg at a time, as she puts it — which is what matters.

As for the future, McCloskey is resolutely and rationally optimistic: “In 50 years, in other words, if tyrants, robbers, militarists, populists, Maoists, and the less thoughtful among socialists, regulators, end-state egalitarians, Bakuninite anarchists and environmentalists do not break it, the business-like blade of the hockey stick will have eliminated the worst of human ignorance and poverty, the malaria-crippled, soldier-raped, zero-schooling lives of the poorest among us . . .

“A bottom billion out of seven is a scandal. Let’s fix it. But let’s actually help the billion, not merely indulge in our indignation and our conviction of ethical superiority by supporting policies that in fact make them worse off.” Amen.

Dump your copy of Thomas Piketty and put Deirdre McCloskey on the bookshelf in its place. This is a great book.

Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey, University of Chicago Press, 768pp, £31.50. To buy this book for £27.50, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134

 

The earlier volumes 

The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006)

In this first volume, McCloskey focuses on religious and philosophical values from classical Greece onwards. In it she argues that the bourgeois habits of free markets not only make us wealthier but more virtuous.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010)

In volume two, McCloskey examines the various economic theories — Marx, Max Weber, Fernand Braudel and so on — that attempt to explain the great increase in wealth in the past 400 years. She finds them all wanting, arguing that economic factors were not the driver but a change in cultural attitude. We learnt to love commercial enterprise.

Reply to Open democracy

Here is my reply to an article on "Open democracy" criticising me.

I am surprised to read this lengthy attack on me and to find that no attempt was made to check the facts.

It was Nuccitelli who was wrong. He chose one set of data, from Nasa, ignoring the other four sets, and used end-to-end measurement, not trend. It was Ward who was wrong on forests; as you say my remark was “correct” and in context there was nothing misleading about it. The increase in forest cover is happening in most countries with a GDP above $4000 per head, and arguably this is now a majority of the world. So Ward is out of date. As for whether my view is within the scientific consensus, I look forward to you criticizing any prediction of warming of more than 3 degrees as “outside the consensus” because it relies on the absurd assumptions of RCP 8.5, that we burn ten times as much coal in 2100 as today, that the sea fails to absorb CO2 as it does now and that sensitivity is very high. So you have found no “untruths” in my writings. It is unpleasant of you to insinuate otherwise.
Bob Ward has had numerous letters published in the Times criticizing me, usually rudely and often wrongly. It is not a constitutional requirement in Magna Carta that every one of Mr Ward’s letters must be published. The letters editor may have tired of his rants for all I know. It appears that it is Mr Ward’s job description to get letters into newspapers attacking sceptics but not alarmists. It is not newspapers’ job to publish them.
My peer review claim was correct. The GWPF has confirmed that the paper in question was subject to peer review very similar to that employed by journals. The Nature person was misinformed about this, perhaps by you.
See above – the newspaper was right to correct an error about the paper not being peer reviewed. So there is no issue here.
I am under no obligation to invade my own and others’ financial privacy over wayleaves for coal mining. I declare my interest. The blog you refer to has no basis for making the absurd estimate that it did.
Once again, I do always declare my interest when it is relevant. The article you link to is about how to carry on international negotiations, not about energy and climate policy.
I do declare my relationship with Owen Paterson frequently, though I am under no obligation to do so. I can comment on his work if I wish and he on mine: what difference does it make that we are friends and relatives?
I have not written speeches for Owen Paterson – I helped redraft one speech after making suggested edits, leading to the mistaken charge that I wrote the whole thing. I would have been proud to do so: it was a very good speech on energy policy. If I commented on a speech of his and I had written it, then of course I would mention that. It’s absurd of you to insinuate otherwise on the basis of your own prejudice.
The GWPF does not name its donors because they would be hounded by people like you. But none of them are or ever have been fossil fuel interests, as you know perfectly well, because GWPF says so frequently. I imagine it is funded by people who see evidence that climate policy is hurting the poor and rewarding the rich, and that it is justified by poor evidence and much exaggeration. I am extremely glad that it – almost alone – stands up for good science and good economics against the vast financial power of the green bullies that you support so slavishly.

I am genuinely surprised that you should have written this blog post without any attempt to check the facts.

Science and the European Union

My column in the Times on British science and the European Union:

The House of Lords science and technology committee, on which I sit, has produced a report on British science and the European Union. Most scientists are enthusiastic to remain in the EU but many seem to be under the same misapprehension I was until recently: that European scientific collaboration and funding is dependent on being a member of the EU. It’s not.

The main science funding programmes, such as Horizon 2020, are open to European countries, not just to EU members — and indeed to some non-European countries such as Turkey, Tunisia and Israel. The same is true of the main scientific collaborations. The European Molecular Biology Organisation, the European Space Agency: these are pan-European, not EU projects. The particle accelerator at CERN actually crosses (beneath) the border between an EU and a non-EU country. CERN gets less than 2 per cent of its budget from the EU.

Remainers say we could lose influence in creating science policy if we left the EU because we would not be represented in the European parliament. Really? In Britain we insist that scientists set their own priorities.

Lord help us if we leave science policy to the European parliament, a hotbed of anti-scientific gullibility and big business lobbying. Misguided EU policies have destroyed Europe’s lead in agricultural biotechnology; put obstacles in the way of vaping at the behest of big pharmaceutical companies and tobacco growers; excused homeopaths from efficacy tests; passed a clinical-trials directive that was a disaster for research; and put carbon dioxide emissions reductions before air quality, resulting in thousands of premature deaths. What’s next?

Research is a global activity. Britain is, for its size, probably the world’s leading scientific country. We have less than 1 per cent of the world’s population, but 15 per cent of the most highly cited scientific papers, and more Nobel prize winners than any other European country. Our biggest science collaborator is America. The only EU universities in the world’s top 20 are British.

The government’s crackdown on non-EU migration, about which universities are rightly squealing, is because ministers cannot stem EU migration to hit their immigration targets. This makes it frustratingly hard for academics to get visas for hiring Indians, Chinese and Americans. By 2030, 90 per cent of the science, technology and mathematics graduates in the world will be non-European. We must continue to bring in EU scientists, but not discriminate against non-EU ones as we do now.

Glyphosate, the MMR vaccine and pseudoscience

My Times column on pseudoscience:

 

Science, humanity’s greatest intellectual achievement, has always been vulnerable to infection by pseudoscience, which pretends to use the methods of science, but actually subverts them in pursuit of an obsession. Instead of evidence-based policymaking, pseudoscience specialises in policy-based evidence making. Today, this infection is spreading.

Two egregious examples show just how easy it is to subvert the scientific process. The campaign by Andrew Wakefield against the MMR vaccine, recently boosted by Robert De Niro’s support, is pseudoscience.

So is the campaign against glyphosate (“Roundup”) weedkiller, which has now resulted in the European parliament recommending a ban on its use by gardeners.

A large dossier claiming to find evidence that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic” was published last year by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organisation. What could be more scientifically respectable?

Yet the document depends heavily on the work of an activist employed by a pressure group called the Environmental Defense Fund: Christopher Portier, whose conflict of interest the IARC twice omitted to disclose. Portier chaired the committee that proposed a study on glyphosate and then served as technical adviser to the IARC’s glyphosate report team, even though he is not a toxicologist. He has since been campaigning against glyphosate.

The IARC study is surely pseudoscience. It relies on a tiny number of cherry-picked studies, and even these don’t support its conclusion. The evidence that it causes cancer in humans is especially tenuous, based on three epidemiological studies with confounding factors and small sample sizes “linking” it to Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). The study ignored the US Agricultural Health Study, which has been tracking some 89,000 farmers and their spouses for 23 years.

The study found “no association between glyphosate exposure and all cancer incidence or most of the specific cancer subtypes we evaluated, including NHL . . .”

Many other studies found very little cancer risk from glyphosate use, but the IARC argued that they included some data generated by industry. Well, of course they did, because we rightly demand that industry, not the taxpayer, pays for and does the safety testing of its products and makes the results public. The IARC appeared to ignore work by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, managing the glyphosate dossier for the European Commission, which judged glyphosate safe. As did the European Food Safety Authority, whose head accused the IARC and Portier of bringing in the “Facebook age of science”.

When Portier’s role and the IARC’s findings were revealed by David Zaruk, who blogs under the name the Risk-Monger, pressure started coming from many groups to censor his science-policy blog.

The publisher EurActiv was forced to shut down Zaruk’s entire blog in the week of the European parliament vote. This is how Big Green behaves in Brussels, routinely.

Dose for dose, glyphosate is half as toxic as vinegar, and one tenth as carcinogenic as caffeine. Not that coffee’s dangerous — but the chemicals in it, like those in virtually any vegetable, are dangerous in lab tests at absurdly high concentrations. So is dihydrogen monoxide, for that matter, if you inhale it, drink it to excess or let its gaseous form burn your skin (that’s H2O, by the way).

Besides, risk is hazard plus exposure, a point ignored by the IARC. If you routinely put coffee down your throat, you are exposing yourself to the infinitesimal hazard caffeine represents. If you spray a little Roundup on your garden path, you are not even exposing yourself to the more infinitesimal hazard of glyphosate.

Roundup is probably the safest herbicide ever, with no persistence in the environment. But the Green Blob hates it for three reasons. It’s off-patent and therefore cheap. It was invented by Monsanto, a company that had the temerity to make a contribution to reducing famine and lowering food prices through innovation in agriculture. And some genetically modified crops have been made resistant to it, so that they can be weeded after planting by spraying, rather than tilling the ground: this no-till farming is demonstrably better for the environment, by the way.

Under the influence, at least in part of the IARC report, the European parliament voted last week to advise the commission to ban glyphosate immediately for “non-professionals” — ie gardeners — but allow it for seven years for farmers. However, a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on: already retailers worldwide are dropping glyphosate, Waitrose included.

Much the same happened with the ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, which was pushed through Brussels by a tsunami of angry emails from greens, in the teeth of clear scientific advice that honey bee numbers were increasing and that alternative insecticides were worse.

James Gurney, a microbiologist who blogs on a site called the League of Nerds, describes the level of scholarship in the IARC report as “on a par with Andrew Wakefield of MMR/autism fame”.

In the case of Mr Wakefield’s claim that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism, the push-back against pseudoscience largely succeeded in this country, though not before real harm had been done. Journalists found that Mr Wakefield had failed to declare financing from lawyers preparing to sue vaccine makers and had taken blood samples at his own children’s party; further research failed to replicate his results. His paper was retracted and he was struck off the medical register, the General Medical Council calling him dishonest and irresponsible. His message is now falling on fertile ground in the United States, however, where measles epidemics have resumed as a result.

In both these cases, superficial plausibility is lent to the scares by history. Earlier pesticides were more dangerous: copper sulphate (still used as a fungicide by “organic” farmers) is toxic; DDT insecticide did wipe out predatory birds; paraquat herbicide was used in suicides. But Roundup is far, far less dangerous than these.

Likewise, early vaccines did carry risks. In the 1950s polio vaccines, grown in monkey tissue, were contaminated with SV40, a virus associated with cancer in monkeys. Many children were infected with the virus as a result. Fortunately, SV40 proved neither infectious nor carcinogenic in human beings, but it was a bullet dodged. Today such contamination is impossible.

Pseudoscience is bad enough when it infects astrologers, 9/11 truthers and crop-circle makers. But when its symptoms show up in mainstream bodies, such as the World Health Organisation, it’s time to be worried.