Matt Ridley's Blog, page 4

The radical potential of nuclear fusion exposes the folly of our net zero deadline

In a key milestone on the road to harnessing fusion power, Lawrence Livermore laboratory announced this week that it had extracted energy from an object the size of a lemon pip at the rate of 10 quadrillion watts (joules per second), albeit for only 100 trillionths of a second. That’s roughly 500 times faster than the entire human population consumes energy.

The experiment is a reminder that the energy density achieved when atoms merge is vastly greater than anything in a lump of coal, let alone a puff of wind. It is also far bigger than can be achieved by nuclear fission and much safer too: no risk of meltdown and with much less high-level radioactive waste. 

The problem, of course, is that reliable fusion power stations were 50 years away in 1950, and were still 50 years away in 2000, so milestones on the road to fusion are greeted with sceptical yawns. But almost everybody in the industry now thinks that jibe is out of date: the stopwatch has started, as one insider put it to me. We are probably less than 15 years away from seeing a fusion power station begin to contribute to the grid. 

Two bits of evidence support that conclusion. First, the British Government will soon announce that it has chosen a site for a prototype government-developed power station, known as Step, the spherical tokamak for energy production, which will be operating around 2040. Secondly, there has been a gold rush of nearly $2 billion of private money into commercial fusion companies: several in the United States, one in Canada and two in Britain.

In terms of expertise and infrastructure, the UK is near the front of the peloton in this technology. The recent progress is mainly because of technical breakthroughs. In one design, called magnetic confinement, better superconductors have led to stronger magnets needing less cooling which allows more compact, spherical designs that can stabilise the “plasma” for longer spells of time. In another, inertial confinement, lasers developed for the star-wars missile defence programme have brought ignition temperatures within reach.

Before you get cynical, indulge in a bit of hope. If this were to work, then a device the size of a shipping container could power a small city, running on tiny quantities of fuel: some deuterium extracted from seawater and some tritium continuously “bred” inside the thing itself from a little lithium. The output is helium-4, an inert, non-radioactive gas. The environmental footprint would be negligible: no carbon dioxide emissions, no waste, no pollution, very few materials and a pocket-handkerchief of land. We could retire the rest of the energy industry altogether – oil rigs, coal mines, wind turbines, solar farms, hydro dams and all – and set about raising everybody’s standard of living indefinitely, while telling Greta Thunberg to cheer up.

Yet even if all goes to plan it will not be till after 2050 that fusion starts to make a big difference. So those countries that rushed to net zero by 2050, like us, using immensely expensive, resource-hungry, land-hungry renewable energy, will look foolish if fusion comes along just after. A bit like – only on a far grander scale – the way we made a huge mistake by mandating the switch to ineffective, unreliable, unsafe compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of waiting for more efficient and better LEDs. 

The point is not that fusion will certainly come to our rescue, but that there’s probably a 50-50 chance that it will, and governments need to clear the runway to make sure it at least gets a chance to take off. That means learning the lessons from how we killed nuclear fission by driving up its cost. Far from getting cheaper like computers did, fission reactors grew steadily more expensive. This was because we never gave them the chance to profit from experience, to learn by doing. Designs were approved ever more slowly and expensively, gold-plated in a doomed attempt to reassure the public, never improved by tinkering during construction, rarely mass produced to bring down the unit cost, and then built by cost-plus contractors ripping off naive governments.

We have made a start in this country. The Regulatory Horizons Council, on which I sit, has recently produced a report arguing that it makes much more sense to regulate a fusion plant as if it were a chemical plant – through the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency – than through the Office for Nuclear Regulation. That is because the risks do not include meltdowns, or high-level (or long-lasting) radioactivity, but are much more like those of a conventional industrial facility.

Investing in a technical fix like fusion looks more likely to deliver net zero – albeit not before 2050 – than frantically trying to soup up a 13th-century technology to extract energy from an ultra-low-density source: the wind.

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Playing the wild card

My article for The Critic:

Near Fukushima, ten years after the nuclear accident that followed the tsunami, wild boar have colonised the suburbs. Near Chernobyl, bison and wolves wander abandoned streets. There is no doubt that if humans vanished, indigenous wildlife would return in abundance, minus the mammoths and sabre-tooths that our ancestors extinguished.

Rewilding is all the rage, and it is coming soon to a hillside near you. But what form should it take and how should it be done? In practice, rewilding began quite a long time ago. A recent study found that, contrary to what most people believe, the world now has more trees than 35 years ago and much of the regrowth is natural regeneration: Europe alone has gained an area of tree cover greater than France.

New England was once wall-to-wall fields; now it is a deer-filled forest pockmarked with cities and freeways. Wolves and beavers are spreading in Europe; cougars and bears in North America. There are 80,000 humpback whales today: there were 5,000 in the 1960s. Where I used to fish in the river Tyne as a boy, otters, buzzards and salmon were vanishingly rare; now they are common.

Of course, biodiversity and wildlife abundance are declining in many places and some habitats. But pause for a second to reflect that the global population has doubled in 50 years while the amount of farmland has hardly changed: thanks to innovation the world uses 68 per cent less land to grow a given amount of food compared with the 1960s.

The more productive we make farms, the less land we will need. At one extreme, Japanese semiconductor factories have been converted to grow lettuces, using hydroponics and electric light: it requires a hundred times less land to produce a given quantity of lettuce that way. By 2050, with global population flatlining, we will be freeing land from the plough and the cow at an accelerating rate.

So what do we do with spared land? Britain’s answer so far has been to find other ways to produce stuff on it, such as hobby farming or dark forests of Sitka spruce planted on Britain’s hills in a vain hope there might be a profitable market for home-grown timber. This was an ecological as well as economic mistake, as it turned diverse moorland rich in birds, flowers and insects into grim monocultures with acidified water, eroding peat and blocked views. The Forestry Commission, a nationalised industry that — true to type — has never made a profit, rules this empire as both regulator and producer (a stark conflict of interest).

When we felled a small spruce plantation on our land in Northumberland 25 years ago, a mass of birch saplings sprang up. I appealed to the Forestry Commissars to be allowed to let these flourish, rather than spray them off and replant expensively with a supposedly “commercial” crop. It took years of obstinacy, but eventually they agreed and today it is a wild birch wood full of birdsong and insect life. Nearby, this spring, I introduced a couple of huge wood ant nests.

That’s rewilding of a sort. But the purists would say I should be turning over fields as well as woods to moose and wolves. At Knepp in Sussex, the Burrell family, fed up with unprofitable farming, have rewilded their estate: cattle and pigs roam the forest and hedgerows turn into thickets. It has been a spectacular success for nightingales, turtle doves and other rare species, and they have now brought back white storks.

But this is not the only way of doing rewilding. Consider the fact that certain birds thrive in arable farmland: yellowhammers, linnets and more. They grew scarce as farming got more efficient, but they would be even scarcer if the land was one big forest. It is well known among farmers that if you abandon a field to nature, it attracts far fewer birds than if you plant it each year with bird-seed crops like linseed, quinoa and kale.

Off the Northumberland coast lies Coquet island, managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as a truly spectacular nature reserve with huge numbers of puffins and terns of four species: common, Arctic, sandwich and roseate. It’s the only colony of roseate terns in Britain and the numbers of this beautiful, rare bird breeding on the island every summer have rocketed in recent years from 18 pairs to over 140.

This would not happen if the island was left “to nature”. The roseate terns only come because the wardens build shell-strewn terraces equipped with wooden boxes for the birds to nest in. Their chicks only survive because the wardens deter the large predatory gulls with lasers and recorded alarm calls. There is an otter-proof fence around their terraces and a few years ago a rat that somehow reached the island had to be caught by a local gamekeeper’s terrier before it decimated the puffins and terns.

I have a holiday home in a Durham dale where each spring the dawn reverberates to the song of curlews, peewits, redshanks, oystercatchers, snipe, woodcock, dunlin and sandpipers singing over the meadows and moorland. These rare wading birds thrive here at higher densities than anywhere else in Britain for two reasons: grazing by sheep that keeps the vegetation short, and hard work by gamekeepers to kill the foxes, crows, gulls and stoats that would otherwise wipe these species out. The threat from such predators is unnaturally intense because of the “subsidies” they receive from human activity in the form of roadkill, litter, landfill and farming.

My point is that management is indispensable to maximising biodiversity. Britain can never be a pristine wilderness, not least because of the lack of aurochs and mammoths, and the presence of parakeets and grey squirrels. Whether we like it or not, the human imprint is there on the quilt that is Britain’s countryside.

The saga of Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands demonstrates the point. A polder was fenced off and filled with deer, horses and feral cattle. To its fans this is a success: the low-lying reclaimed land is now rich in eagles and other birds. To its critics it is a disaster following the mass starvation of many mammals when the population was too high in a hard winter in 2005. Migrating is not an option for such mammals in modern Europe. So now the deer, cattle and horses are carefully culled.

Rewilding should start with the worst landscapes, not the best ones. In the uplands, privately funded moorlands managed for grouse are a fine example of managed wilding: unsprayed, unfertilised, uncultivated, rich in mosses, moths, lizards and birds. Let them be.

By contrast, the owners of commercial forestry plantations of alien Sitka spruce should be incentivised to turn them into open, mixed-age woodland of oak, birch, rowan, alder, willow, pine and lime as fast as they can, with large clearings and no straight lines, and maybe moose and boar and feral cattle and wood ants and wrynecks and eventually even wolves.

But—and this is vital—they should manage them, to cull and crop certain species regularly and often: to recognise in effect that people are part of the ecosystem too.

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Put the animal sentience bill out of its misery

My article for the Times:

Like a lobster in boiling water, a parliamentary bill on animal sentience is being tortured in the House of Lords. The problem is political rather than ethical. Nobody objects to some animals being declared sentient, but the government seems to be saying to one audience that the bill is a dramatic change that will do more to prevent suffering, while to another audience it insists that the bill is an empty gesture that will change nothing.

The real reason for the bill goes back to 2017. Some alert activist who did not like Brexit spotted that in leaving the European Union we would lose the passing reference in Article 13 of the Lisbon Treaty that animals are sentient. This was quickly weaponised in a letter-writing campaign to MPs. But there were two problems with the argument.

First, British law does recognise animal sentience, and has done since 1822 when an act was passed to prevent cruelty to cattle.

Second, the European Union’s sentience clause was weaker than anything in British law, saying that “since animals are sentient beings” lawmakers should try to take their welfare into account but — I paraphrase — not if it gets in the way of everyday life. (The actual wording is “while respecting the legislative or administrative provisions and customs of the Member States relating in particular to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage activity”.) This was no accident. Spain would have vetoed anything that prevented bullfighting.

Thus, far from setting Britain free to torture animals, leaving the EU would have no discernible effect. Scientists who do experiments on mice, chefs who cook lobsters, farmers who dehorn cattle, abattoirs that slaughter halal or kosher meat, fishermen who catch and release roach and gamekeepers who shoot grey squirrels are all subject to laws that require them to minimise suffering as far as possible. These rules assume that certain of these animals are sentient but don’t tolerate vindictive cruelty even to non-sentient creatures.

Yet to get the letter-writers off the backs of MPs, the government drafted a sentience bill. It was a solution looking for a problem. The first attempt had to be abandoned as unworkable. The second does just one thing: it sets up a committee, the animal sentience committee. As Lord Forsyth pointed out in the second reading debate, this is a bizarre thing for a bill to do because “the government do not need primary legislation to set up a committee”. The government sets up committees with roughly the same regularity and enthusiasm as a trout eats flies. Indeed, it already has a committee called the animal welfare committee.

Ah, says the government, but whereas the animal welfare committee has a specific remit within a specific department and has the power to write rules, this new committee will range over the whole of policy, from roads to foreign policy, looking at any and all legislation, past and present, to check whether it takes into account the sentience of animals. Even less need for a bill to set it up, then, surely? Indeed, going down this route means that the committee will be in place months later than if the prime minister had just picked up the phone to some Professor Dolittle and asked him to chair a committee in exchange for a probable CBE in a few years’ time.

Suspicious backbenchers in the Lords began to worry that this committee must be going to be more than meets the eye. The government admits that it has not yet written the committee’s terms of reference or decided who will sit on it, making debate over the bill rather futile. The Labour peer Baroness Mallalieu QC, who knows a thing or two about lawyers, opined: “It is likely to benefit lawyers, at the taxpayers’ expense, and to be a bureaucratic nightmare with no limit to its remit, unlike the EU animal sentience provision, [and] no provision for adequate funding for such wide scope”.

No, you have the wrong end of the stick, says the government. We are not giving this new committee its own budget or any powers to alter, delay or prevent the policies it pronounces on. Well then, why create it? As a job creation scheme? Will people with strong views on animal rights be on it? No, of course not, says the government, only people with no axe to grind — and presumably therefore no special expertise.

If you think that government committees are content to remain toothless, you have never studied that sentient creature, the bureaucrat. Its very raison d’etre, as a squirrel gathers nuts and builds a drey in which to rear its young, is to maximise its budget, expand its remit, creep its mission and rear more bureaucrats. C Northcote Parkinson laid it all out in the 1950s, with his famous article that pointed out how the number of admirals in the navy increased in inverse proportion to the number of ships. There is a whole economic theory on the topic of the tendencies of bureaucracies to pursue their own growth, called public choice theory.

Look for example at the climate change committee, set up to advise the government on implementing its Climate Change Act. At first it was reasonable and balanced. But under the chairmanship of Lord Deben, it quickly became — I exaggerate a little — the paramilitary arm of Extinction Rebellion, demanding ever more extreme measures with barely a hint of cost-benefit analysis. It has no power but that of the bully pulpit, but it uses that to terrify government ministers.

If this bill passes in its present form, the animal sentience committee will spend its first few months gathering justifications for a larger budget and will then produce reports that steadily become more demanding and imperious. The government, it will soon be telling the media, “must” delay the building of a third runway, say, because the great crested newts in the area will suffer stress and the latest research has shown that they are sentient.

The right way to take sentience into account is through a wide-ranging and continuous debate throughout the whole of society, including parliament, and not by shunting it off to a committee. The brilliant psychologist Nick Humphrey has shown me his forthcoming book on the topic of sentience. In it he wrestles with whether fish sentience is anything like mouse sentience, and eventually tackles the sentience of future robots. These are fascinating debates but they are not ones that a committee can decide.

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Interview: How Science Lost the Public’s Trust

My interview with Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal:

“Science” has become a political catchword. “I believe in science,” Joe Biden tweeted six days before he was elected president. “Donald Trump doesn’t. It’s that simple, folks.”

But what does it mean to believe in science? The British science writer Matt Ridley draws a pointed distinction between “science as a philosophy” and “science as an institution.” The former grows out of the Enlightenment, which Mr. Ridley defines as “the primacy of rational and objective reasoning.” The latter, like all human institutions, is erratic, prone to falling well short of its stated principles. Mr. Ridley says the Covid pandemic has “thrown into sharp relief the disconnect between science as a philosophy and science as an institution.”

Mr. Ridley, 63, describes himself as a “science critic, which is a profession that doesn’t really exist.” He likens his vocation to that of an art critic and dismisses most other science writers as “cheerleaders.” That somewhat lofty attitude seems fitting for a hereditary English peer. As the fifth Viscount Ridley, he’s a member of Britain’s House of Lords, and he Zooms with me from his ancestral seat in Northumberland, just south of Scotland, in between sessions of Parliament (which he also attends by Zoom).

At Oxford nearly 40 years ago, Mr. Ridley studied the mating patterns of pheasants. His fieldwork involved much crouching in long country grass to figure out why these “jolly interesting” birds are polygamous—unlike most other avians. With the Canadian molecular biologist Alina Chan, he’s finishing a book called Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 to be published in November.

It will likely make its authors unwelcome in China. As Mr. Ridley worked on the book, he says, it became “horribly clear” that Chinese scientists are “not free to explain and reveal everything they’ve been doing with bat viruses.” That information has to be “dug out” by outsiders like him and Ms. Chan. The Chinese authorities, he says, ordered all scientists to send their results relevant to the virus for approval by the government before other scientists or international agencies could vet them: “That is shocking in the aftermath of a lethal pandemic that has killed millions and devastated the world.”

Mr. Ridley notes that the question of Covid’s origin has “mostly been tackled by people outside the mainstream scientific establishment.” People inside not only have been “disappointingly incurious” but have tried to shut down the inquiry “to protect the reputation of science as an institution.” The most obvious reason for this resistance: If Covid leaked from a lab, and especially if it developed there, “science finds itself in the dock.”

Other factors have been at play as well. Scientists are as sensitive as other elites to charges of racism, which the Communist Party used to evade questions about specifically Chinese practices “such as the trade in wildlife for food or lab experiments on bat coronaviruses in the city of Wuhan.”

Scientists are a global guild, and the Western scientific community has “come to have a close relationship with, and even a reliance on, China.” Scientific journals derive considerable “income and input” from China, and Western universities rely on Chinese students and researchers for tuition revenue and manpower. All that, Mr. Ridley says, “may have to change in the wake of the pandemic.”

In the U.K., he has also noted “a tendency to admire authoritarian China among scientists that surprised some people.” It didn’t surprise Mr. Ridley. “I’ve noticed for years,” he says, “that scientists take a somewhat top-down view of the political world, which is odd if you think about how beautifully bottom-up the evolutionary view of the natural world is.”

He asks: “If you think biological complexity can come about through unplanned emergence and not need an intelligent designer, then why would you think human society needs an ‘intelligent government’?” Science as an institution has “a naive belief that if only scientists were in charge, they would run the world well.” Perhaps that’s what politicians mean when they declare that they “believe in science.” As we’ve seen during the pandemic, science can be a source of power.

But there’s a “tension between scientists wanting to present a unified and authoritative voice,” on the one hand, and science-as-philosophy, which is obligated to “remain open-minded and be prepared to change its mind.” Mr. Ridley fears “that the pandemic has, for the first time, seriously politicized epidemiology.” It’s partly “the fault of outside commentators” who hustle scientists in political directions. “I think it’s also the fault of epidemiologists themselves, deliberately publishing things that fit with their political prejudices or ignoring things that don’t.”

Epidemiologists are divided between those who want more lockdowns and those who think that approach wasn’t effective and might have been counterproductive. Mr. Ridley sides with the latter camp, and he’s dismissive of the alarmist modeling that led to lockdowns in the first place. “The modeling of where the pandemic might go,” he says, “presents itself as an entirely apolitical project. But there have been too many cases of epidemiologists presenting models based on rather extreme assumption.”

One motivation: Pessimism sells. “You don’t get blamed for being too pessimistic, but you do get attention. It’s like climate science. Modeled forecasts of a future that is scary is much more likely to get you on television.” Mr. Ridley invokes Michael Crichton, the late science-fiction novelist, who hated the tendency to describe the outcomes of models in words that imply they are the “results” of an experiment. That frames speculation as if it were proof.

Climate science is already far down the road to politicization. “Twenty or 30 years ago,” Mr. Ridley says, “you could study how the ice ages happened and discuss competing theories without being at all political about it.” Now it’s very hard to have a conversation on the subject “without people trying to interpret it through a political lens.”

Mr. Ridley describes himself as “lukewarm” on climate change. He accepts that humans have made the climate warmer, but doesn’t subscribe to any of the catastrophist views that call for radical changes in human behavior and consumption. His nuanced position hasn’t protected him from attack, of course, and the British left is prone to vilify him as a “denier.”

Climate science has also been “infected by cultural relativism and postmodernism,” Mr. Ridley says. He cites a paper that was critical of glaciology—the study of glaciers—“because it wasn’t sufficiently feminist.” I wonder if he’s kidding, but Google confirms he isn’t. In 2016 Progress in Human Geography published “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.”

The politicization of science leads to a loss of confidence in science as an institution. The distrust may be justified but leaves a vacuum, often filled by a “much more superstitious approach to knowledge.” To such superstition Mr. Ridley attributes public resistance to technologies such as genetically modified food, nuclear power—and vaccines.

If you spurn Covid-19 vaccination, Mr. Ridley says he would “fervently argue” that it is “the lesser of two risks, at least for adults.” We have “ample data to show that—for this vaccine, and for others, going back centuries.” He calls vaccination “probably the most massive and incredible benefit of scientific knowledge.” Yet it’s “counterintuitive and difficult to understand,” which may explain why its advocates have been vilified through the centuries.

He cites the example of Mary Wortley Montagu, a British aristocrat, who pushed for smallpox inoculation in Britain after witnessing its administration in Ottoman Turkey in the early 18th century. She was viciously pilloried, he says, as was Zabdiel Boylston, a celebrated Boston doctor who inoculated residents against smallpox during a smallpox outbreak in 1721.

Vaccines have been central to the question of “misinformation” and the White House’s pressure campaign against social media to censor it. Mr. Ridley worries about the opposite problem: that social media “is complicit in enforcing conformity.” It does this “through ‘fact checking,’ mob pile-ons, and direct censorship, now explicitly at the behest of the Biden administration.” He points out that Facebook and Wikipedia long banned any mention of the possibility that the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.

“Conformity,” Mr. Ridley says, “is the enemy of scientific progress, which depends on disagreement and challenge. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, as [the physicist Richard] Feynman put it.” Mr. Ridley reserves his bluntest criticism for “science as a profession,” which he says has become “rather off-puttingly arrogant and political, permeated by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.” Increasing numbers of scientists “seem to fall prey to groupthink, and the process of peer-reviewing and publishing allows dogmatic gate-keeping to get in the way of new ideas and open-minded challenge.”

The World Health Organization is a particular offender: “We had a dozen Western scientists go to China in February and team up with a dozen Chinese scientists under the auspices of the WHO.” At a subsequent press conference they pronounced the lab-leak theory “extremely unlikely.” The organization also ignored Taiwanese cries for help with Covid-19 in January 2020. “The Taiwanese said, ‘We’re picking up signs that this is a human-to-human transmission that threatens a major epidemic. Please, will you investigate?’ And the WHO basically said, ‘You’re from Taiwan. We’re not allowed to talk to you.’ ”

He notes that WHO’s primary task is forestalling pandemics. Yet in 2015 it “put out a statement saying that the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century is climate change. Now that, to me, suggests an organization not focused on the day job.”

In Mr. Ridley’s view, the scientific establishment has always had a tendency “to turn into a church, enforcing obedience to the latest dogma and expelling heretics and blasphemers.” This tendency was previously kept in check by the fragmented nature of the scientific enterprise: Prof. A at one university built his career by saying that Prof. B’s ideas somewhere else were wrong. In the age of social media, however, “the space for heterodoxy is evaporating.” So those who believe in science as philosophy are increasingly estranged from science as an institution. It’s sure to be a costly divorce.

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A volte face over what caused the pandemic needs explaining

My article for Spectator:

Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, writes that ‘the last year has been an eye-opener for me. I thought, probably like most people, that the world works through official or formal channels, but much of it operates through private phone calls or messaging apps’. Hence his book, written with the journalist Anjana Ahuja, is a gossipy, sometimes angry, fast-paced tale, which quotes frequently from his own messages sent to other important people. No holds are barred or formal channels kept to.

It is therefore a fascinating and valuable account from somebody who was close to the action, as a member of the famous Sage, and one who played a key role in several important initiatives, including, for example, kicking off the successful Recovery trial of anti-Covid treatments after a chance meeting on a bus. Many of his observations are acute, and some of his suggestions are well made, not least his passionate call for Britain to set an example by sending vaccines to the rest of the world rather than vaccinating the relatively invulnerable young.

Farrar is full of praise for some people, such as fellow Sage members and Dominic Cummings, and full of contempt for others, including Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and any lockdown sceptic. He may or may not be right, but after a while the reader begins to feel a little uneasy at a certain double standard. ‘Intermittent lockdowns’ are the answer in chapter 5, but reopening after the first lockdown is a disastrous mistake in chapter 6. Johnson is criticised for not paying attention to the crisis in February 2020 a few pages after Farrar describes his own skiing holiday in... February.

In this book civil servants are ‘fantastic’ while politicians are hopeless. The government is idiotic, but more government is the answer. Public Health England is excused for the fact that Germany used the private sector to ramp up testing many times faster than Britain. Neil Ferguson is forgiven for breaking rules he pushed for, and Chris Whitty for flirting with herd immunity, while others, such as the organisers of the Great Barrington declaration, are lambasted in strongly worded terms (shortly after a section on how nasty other people can be). Farrar’s targets are always motivated by ideology, his friends by science. He says nothing to rebut the critique that Sage did not engage with other viewpoints and quickly became a victim of its own groupthink.

This results in the book being a missed opportunity. It would be refreshing to read Farrar’s view on the practical but nuanced arguments made by plenty of good epidemiologists that while some restrictions were necessary at times, sheltering the vulnerable and other measures might have worked better than mandatory lockdowns at others. There is no mention of the health costs of lockdowns — the missed cancer diagnoses, the delayed operations, the mental health impacts — or the fact that lockdowns are easy for those who can work from home but brutal for those who cannot. The impression is given, rightly or wrongly, that Sage never discussed this.

In another part of the book the informal exchange of messages and phone calls proves most intriguing. Farrar has been candid about an incident where others have been less so. In late January 2020, watching the new virus, Farrar was ‘beginning to suspect this might be a lab accident’, so he emailed the Australian scientist Eddie Holmes, who was in close contact with scientists in China. Holmes then took a call from Kristian Andersen, a prominent virologist in California, who mentioned two features of the virus that looked suspicious. ‘This is bad,’ said Holmes; ‘I drank about three beers after that call,’ said Andersen.

On 1 February Farrar set up a conference call with these two and several others, including Anthony Fauci, the US President’s chief medical adviser. The participants in that call have not been forthcoming, and disappointingly this book sheds no light on what was said. At the time, Farrar reports, Holmes thought it was 80 per cent probable the virus had originated in a Wuhan laboratory; Andersen 60-70 per cent and Farrar 50 per cent. This is really interesting, because none has aired these thoughts publicly and Holmes and Andersen have both become vocal critics of anybody who talks about a possible laboratory origin. The revelation that they thought the possibility more likely than not is stunning.

Farrar gives no good explanation for the sudden change of mind after that phone call. He merely says that ‘after the addition of important new information, endless analyses, intense discussions and many sleepless nights’, Andersen drafted a paper dismissing the laboratory hypothesis. But the most ‘important new information’ that came forward was the revelation that the closest related virus had come from a sample that had been collected by scientists and brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology from more than 1,000 miles away, which if anything should have made people more suspicious.

Andersen’s paper gives only flimsy arguments against the possibility of a deliberately engineered virus, which is quite a different proposition from an accident. Moreover, one of those arguments — that the virus was imperfectly designed to attack human cells and an engineer would have made a better job of it — is both unconvincing (it’s suspiciously close to an argument from intelligent design) and a direct contradiction to what Farrar says elsewhere in the book. A few pages before this passage, Farrar writes that the critical part of the virus’s spike protein ‘looked too good to be true — like a perfect “key” for entering human cells’, and that this was one of the reasons he thought a lab origin was possible. So which is it: a good fit, implying a laboratory origin, or a poor fit, implying a natural origin?

One cannot help wondering if the dilemma that the scientists wrestled with in those sleepless nights after 1 February was more political than scientific. What would the implications be for the reputation of science if it had caused the pandemic, and in doing so seemed to vindicate Lord Voldemort himself, one Donald Trump?

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Environmentalists have got it wrong – we're not facing an insect apocalypse

My article for the Telegraph:

On Twitter this week an unfortunate hiker showed a short video of the midges swarming in their tens of thousands over his backpack and his arms in the Scottish Highlands. It was itchy just to watch. It would be silly to argue that his video is evidence that insects are increasing in number. Yet the evidence for a dramatic decline in insect numbers, an “insect apocalypse”, which activists and journalists have been proclaiming recently, is about as weak as such a claim would be.

A film called Insect O Cide is coming out soon. Its ludicrous central theme is that “human beings are on the verge of extinction due to the rapid decline in the insect populations”. “The Insect Apocalypse is here”, said the New York Times in 2018. “Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’” said the Guardian in 2019. The source for this claim was a paper published in the journal Biological Conservation by two Australian scientists that claimed to reveal “dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40 per cent of the world’s insect species over the next few decades”.

This was junk science of the worst kind. As three other scientists then pointed out, “there is so much wrong with the paper, it really shouldn’t have been published in its current form: the biased search method, the cherry-picked studies, the absence of any real quantitative data to back up the bizarre 40 per cent extinction rate that appears in the abstract … and the errors in the reference list.” Of the studies cited by the apocalypse paper, the three said, “we were really surprised to discover how many of them we had to discard, because they contained no data”.

But whereas the apocalypse paper was rushed through peer review to publication and movie hype in four months, the debunking paper pointing out its “exaggerated and unlikely narrative” was held up for 12 months by hostile reviewers trying to get it killed. This imbalance in scientific publishing and media coverage is common: alarming results get megaphoned, moderate ones are muttered.

Two previous papers claiming to find declining insect numbers, in Germany and Puerto Rico respectively, were even less persuasive. The German one compared different sites at different times, sampled some locations only once, and used a mathematical model to extract a “result”. The widely repeated claim some years ago that honey bees were dying out was false: global populations are increasing. Reports of vanishing bumblebees in Britain are also wide of the mark. Tree nesting species have increased, while some ground-nesting ones have declined partly because of increased badger predation. Others are holding their own.

As for the anecdotal claim, repeated even by Jeremy Clarkson in his Amazon series on farming, that fewer insects blot your windscreen these days, well, the politest thing you can say is that it’s unsubstantiated. I dare say on a crowded motorway there are somewhat fewer flattened flies on my windscreen these days, but then several thousand cars in front of me have mostly swept them up already. There are more cars on the road to share the work.

About a million species of insects have been given names by scientists, and many more remain undescribed. Some of those species and their ecological niches are in trouble, others are thriving. As the lead author of the debunking paper, Manu Saunders, put it, “sensationalising geographically and taxonomically limited studies as evidence of global patterns may grab attention but can also have unwanted side effects. In particular, doom and gloom messaging rarely works to galvanise public support and strong negative messaging (e.g., apocalypse narratives) can undermine the credibility of science, especially as more facts become available.” Keep crying wolf and you might not be believed next time.

Of the million species described, have a guess how many are known to have gone extinct, according the official Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. It’s 63. That’s not 40 per cent or 4 per cent or 0.4 per cent, or 0.04 per cent: it’s more like 0.004 per cent. Most of those were on islands, which means invasive species probably caused their extinction, and of those for which a “last seen” date is given, the majority disappeared more than a century ago. Only six have a post-war “last seen” date, and the most recent is 1975.

Sure, many others must have died out unnoticed and more are no doubt teetering on the brink. But in other ways the list may exaggerate the rate of extinction. Take Ridley’s stick insect, known only from one specimen collected in 1907 in Singapore by some namesake of mine. It’s presumed extinct, but are we even sure it was a species rather than a slightly unusual individual of another species?

The flower meadow I planted a few years ago is this week alive with spectacular insects, from bumblebees, butterflies and damselflies to a splendid longhorn beetle called Leptura quadrifasciata and a stunning little ichneumon with a long ovipositor called Ephialtes manifestator. Rather than make baseless claims about an insect apocalypse, we should love and help these astonishing and diverse creatures.

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Life science is taking off in the age of the gene

My article for the Telegraph:

Back in the early 1950s scientists were baffled by one aspect of life itself. Our cells were full of proteins whose properties depended on their precise shapes, and the key feature of life was the ability to copy itself, but how on earth do you copy three-dimensional shapes? The unexpected answer was that you don’t: you copy a one-dimensional, linear sequence in a recipe book called DNA, which automatically determines how each protein folds into its shape.

Surprisingly, until last week, working out how this folding worked was beyond even big computers: tiny shifts in angles could result in wildly different shapes, and forecasting what shape would result from what sequence was as hard as predicting the weather. Now, thanks to the brilliant London AI firm DeepMind (which sold itself to Google a few years back), a learning algorithm has cracked the problem and has predicted hundreds of thousands of shapes from sequences. It did so as an encore after defeating the world champion at the fiendishly complicated game of Go: in neither case was it taught by experts but learned from examples.

Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, who won the Nobel prize for figuring out the structure of the ribosome (the machine that translates DNA into proteins), told me last week that he thinks the DeepMind breakthrough is huge: “we probably have not yet grasped its impact and all the ways it will change the way we do biology.”

No longer will scientists have to guess and test to find out what their proteins can do: they can find out “in silico” what shape a particular gene sequence will give to a protein. That will help drug design, vaccine design and the understanding of diseases from Alzheimer’s to Covid. The spike on the virus is a key that fits a lock on our cells. Predicting whether a wild bat virus can unlock human cells will no longer require risky, gain-of-function experiments.

But the breakthrough is also a reminder that life sciences present the big opportunity in the coming decades. If 1900-1950 saw spectacular advances in transport and 1950-2000 saw extraordinary innovations in information, then 2000-2050 might turn out to be the age of the gene. There is a palpable sense of diminishing returns in IT these days. Moore’s Law has run out of room; smart phones no longer need regularly replacing; the internet and social media have matured.

Instead, in the wake of the pandemic we will be obsessed with health. The novel techniques for developing vaccines based on RNA that were so rapidly successful last year will turn their attention to cancer. The microbiome may start to unlock the secrets of allergy. Genomics will grapple with Alzheimer’s and mental health. And ageing itself may gradually turn into a curable ailment. It’s not just medicine: DNA has already transformed genealogy and forensic science. Last month saw a murderer convicted of a crime committed in 1972 thanks to the genealogy-tracing enthusiasm of his relatives.

This week also saw the announcement of an extraordinary result for agriculture. A small manipulation of RNA in young plants led to a 50 per cent yield increase in potatoes and rice in the field (and a trebling of yield in the lab). If it works commercially, this would mean a dramatic reduction in the area of land needed to feed the human race and a surge in spare land: great news for nature.

In short, the life science era is here. Notice that although Deep Mind’s breakthrough was in computing, the application was in bioscience. The good news is that Britain is and always has been unusually strong in biology: from Darwin to the double helix and on to gene sequencing, cloning, test-tube babies and DNA fingerprinting, all invented here.

So don’t believe those who preach a coming “great stagnation”, as innovation dries up. There are golden prospects ahead for those who are bold, as the government’s innovation strategy, launched this week, rightly makes clear.

But don’t take innovation for granted either. It’s a myth that technological change is speeding up. Innovation brings prosperity in its wake, but you would never realise that from how little it gets mentioned in parliament or much of the media. The engine of discovery and application is coughing a little, because of the heavy burden of regulation under which it increasingly labours. Entrepreneurs have to fight ever tougher battles against silly rules, frustrating delays, lobbying by incumbent firms, precautionary extremism masquerading as concern for the environment, and similar obstacles.

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Organic food isn’t better for us – or the environment

My article for Spectator:

It is mystifying to me that organic food is still widely seen as healthier, more sustainable and, most absurdly, safer than non-organic food.

Following the publication of part two of Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy last week, the organic movement was quick to suggest that organic food and farming offer a way to achieve the strategy’s vision. ‘The recommendations of the National Food Strategy offer genuine hope that by embracing agroecological and organic farming, and adopting a healthier and more sustainable diet, we can address the climate, nature and health crises,’ said Helen Browning, chief executive of the Soil Association, Britain’s most vocal organic lobbying organisation. Browning also highlighted the strategy’s recognition of the Soil Association’s ‘Food for Life’ programme — essentially a vehicle to promote greater procurement and use of organic food in schools and hospitals.

The trouble is that scientific evidence indicates that the food safety risks of eating organic food are considerably greater than those of eating non-organic food. This is primarily because organic crop production relies on animal faeces as a fertiliser, an obvious vector for potentially lethal pathogens such as E.coli, but also because organic crops can be prone to harmful mycotoxins as a result of inadequate control of crop pests and diseases.

In his 2019 book The Myths About Nutrition Science, food and nutrition adviser David Lightsey cites an analysis of US Food and Drug Administration food safety recall data by Academics Review — a group of scientists dedicated to challenging anti-science claims — which showed that ‘organic foods are four to eight times more likely to be recalled than conventional foods for safety issues like bacterial contamination’.

Sadly the recall system is not always 100 per cent effective in protecting human health. In 2011, a major food poisoning outbreak in Europe which affected nearly 4,000 people, killing 53, was ultimately traced to organically grown bean sprouts from a farm in Germany that had been contaminated by a virulent E.coli strain, O104:H4.

Browning’s own organic meat company is currently at the centre of a listeria outbreak, with its organic corned beef being recalled just as Browning is publicly championing organic food as a healthier, more sustainable option. The Food Standards Agency notes that symptoms caused by listeria monocytogenes can be similar to flu and include high temperature, muscle ache or pain, chills, feeling or being sick, and diarrhoea. In rare cases, infections can be more severe, causing serious complications such as meningitis.

On the issue of sustainability, there are serious questions about whether a scaling-up of organic agriculture — Browning has called for Britain to exceed the EU’s Farm to Fork target of 25 per cent organic agriculture — would genuinely deliver environmental benefits.

Independent research published in Nature has shown that if England and Wales switched 100 per cent to organic it would actually increase the greenhouse gas emissions associated with our food supply because of the greater need for imports. Scaling up organic agriculture might also put at risk the movement’s core values in terms of promoting local, fresh produce and small family farms.

Browning was at the centre of reports earlier this year that her firm Helen Browning’s Organic had switched to procurement of organic pork from Denmark, sent to its processing factory in Germany before onward dispatch to UK supermarkets. To me, that sounds more like an industrial, multinational food business than ‘supporting British farmers’ as the company’s website claims.

To his credit, Dimbleby does not appear to have entirely fallen for the organic lobby’s rhetoric. His creative vision of a three compartment model for land use — allowing room for a combination of natural habitat, low-intensity farming and high-yield, hi-tech farming — follows the science and, if properly implemented, could deliver a more sustainable balance in terms of food production, resource use and environmental impact.

The strategy also notes that many households would not be able to afford to feed themselves at organic prices, with the premium for organic produce ranging from 11 per cent (for organic milk) to more than 400 per cent (for organic chicken).

Quite rightly, Dimbleby recognises that sustainably produced food in the future must look to innovation and new technologies — robots, drones, improved genetics and AI — to produce carbon-neutral and non-polluting food crops. And I remain hopeful as we chart our recovery from the Covid pandemic (a recovery made possible by the modern genetic technologies shunned and campaigned against by the organic lobby) that a more evidence-based approach to building a better food future will prevail.

Surveying the problems of traditional farming in his native India, a friend of mine, Professor Channa Prakash, once remarked: ‘Sure, organic agriculture is sustainable: it sustains poverty and malnutrition.’

I believe in freedom of choice, and I will defend an individual’s right to choose organic, but when it comes to protecting the health of the youngest and most vulnerable members of society — in our schools and hospitals — the demonstrable health risks of organic food outweigh any perceived sustainability benefits.

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Lords Diary July 2021

From the "Lords Diary" feature at PoliticsHome:

I wandered the ghostly corridors of Westminster hoping to spot a few colleagues and got lost in a one-way system. This hybrid Parliament seems to have made the government’s job more time-consuming, as we all drone on from home, but less challenging, as the cut-and-thrust of debate atrophies: the worst of both worlds.

On the day I came to London I had finished writing a new book: always a moment of relief mixed with anxiety about whether it could be better. This time it was especially difficult to sign off the last edits because the topic is a moving target – the origin of the virus that caused the pandemic. New information keeps breaking.

Also for the first time I am co-authoring, with Alina Chan, a brilliant young scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. I was warned that co-authors often fall out, and we have never actually met in person, but we only really disagreed over one word. I refuse ever to use the word “blueprint” as a metaphor for a genome. It’s inaccurate, because it implies that each bit of a genome maps onto each bit of a creature’s body; and it’s unfamiliar. Who even knows what a blueprint is these days? I prefer “recipe”.

As I argued in the Lords the next day, whether the virus jumped species in a wildlife market or a laboratory is an urgent question requiring a full and independent investigation – because, if we don’t find the answer, we risk a repeat. Both kinds of jump have happened in the past, and viruses of precisely this kind were being collected, brought uniquely to Wuhan (more than 1,000 miles away) and experimented on by scientists, so it was wrong of some scientists and the World Health Organization to try to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak prematurely.

A laboratory accident is by definition not a “conspiracy theory” and science needs to demonstrate it can investigate itself or its enemies will do so instead. Fortunately, the mood has changed in the last two months, partly sparked by an open letter in the journal Science, calling for a full investigation, signed by 18 scientists and initiated by my co-author.

Later I supported Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville’s amendment to the environment bill on the topic of fly tipping. About once a week a new load of rubbish appears overnight in one of the gateways on my farm. Cameras in favoured spots would help, but you have to put up signs saying they are there. My other bugbear is birthday balloons. They are the only form of litter on remote moorland in the Pennines. We should insist that each one carries a manufacturer’s address so you can return to sender.

Gareth Southgate’s redemption since his penalty miss in 1996 is a wonderful story. A faster reversal of reputation came to my newly and deservedly en-damed friend Kate Bingham. I asked how it felt like to be widely admired now after being denounced and vilified last year with the help of bad mouthing from her enemies. Memories are fading of how much of the media were determined to bring her down.

I told her of a call from a journalist who asked me to comment on the fact that a) Bingham had hired as a PR consultant b) a woman who is married to c) a man who has sat on the board of a small charity with d) the father of e) the wife of f) Dominic Cummings. My answer was to laugh, but Kate reminded me the Financial Times actually ran that story as if it implied corruption. The more we find out about the negotiation she did to acquire vaccines, and the contrast with how other countries did it, the more remarkable the story becomes.

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"Virulent" Does Not Mean "Infectious"

Articles often claim that the Delta variant is more virulent, e.g. "Citing the spread of the more virulent Delta coronavirus variant in the United Kingdom". Earlier in the year the same was said about the Alpha (Kent) variant, that it was more "virulent".

That was untrue. Virulent means "harmful", not "infectious".

If anything, the evidence suggests that the Delta variant may be less virulent, but more transmissible/infectious—although it is hard to be sure this is true, given that the vulnerable old are now protected by vaccines.

"The suggestion that the Indian variant is more pathogenic needs to be taken with a big dose of salt. The same was initially suggested for the Kent variant but was later shown not to be true" writes Professor Ian Jones.

Respiratory viruses tend to evolve to be more transmissible but less virulent: they do better if you go out and about meeting people. This is not true of insect-borne or water-borne viruses, which don't care how sick you are: insects or water do the going out about about for you.

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

That's why there are 200 kinds of common cold, none of which is virulent—including OC43, a coronavirus that probably caused a terrible pandemic in 1889 but is now a fairly mild and common cold: rationaloptimist.com/8645

But there is one situation in which respiratory viruses will stay virulent or even become more so. That's if mild cases meet fewer people than severe ones.

This appears to be what happened in 1918, Paul Ewald argued, when severe flu cases were evacuated from the front line to a series of staging posts, field hospitals and trains, while mild cases slept it off in a dugout. And I think it is what happened last year when mild cases of Covid-19 stayed locked down at home while severe cases went to hospital, where many cases of the virus were acquired in hospital.

In other words, lockdowns (whether necessary or not) probably delayed the evolution of the virus into a milder form. That is now happening, and is our least worst option given that eradication is impossible and the virus may become more transmissible in response to vaccination.

In general, there is not nearly enough thinking along the lines of "Darwinian medicine" within the medical establishment, as Randy Nesse has long argued.

Repeat 100 times: Evolution is not mutation. It is mutation and selection.

This blog post was adapted from this Twitter thread.

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