Steve Hemingway

I went to a talk yesterday by Prof. John Stein. I was reasonably convinced that it would be a good thing to have a kipper for breakfast several times a week. Rather than trying to summarise the evidence here I recommend that you read the links below. The evidence for all the benefits is not utterly compelling, but I'm fairly convinced that it is worth eating more oily fish, and giving supplements to pregnant women and those thinking of getting pregnant as well as giving them to schoolchildren. It would be nice if school dinners offered mackeral or herring or sardines occasionally.

Guardian article about behaviour effect of omega-3 fatty acids.

Wikipedia has a long article on omega-3 fatty acids. You can read it here.
RSC article discussing health benefits of increasing omega-3 fatty acids

Impact on Heart Disease
George Monbiot on why our fishing policies is making it harder for us to get the right amount of Omega-3 fatty acids

Only 4% of dieters will ever lose weight. This article from the wonderful Spiked gives the grim statistics.

This is really very worrying. Fat people, in general, certainly don't seem to me any stupider, less motivated, or in any way morally inferior to thin people. It is clear that having less food to eat makes you thin. I was struck by the fact that older people in China were universally thin, although there was evidence of increasing podginess amongst a proportion of the youth. How can it be that fat people don't recognise this and act on it? It all seems very odd.

Personally speaking, I am always hungry, and am always helping myself to unhealthy snacks. By sheer (genetic?) luck, I haven't gained any weight in decades. Moreover, I am a slothful, individual with an entirely sedentary job.

I have never really before seen the environmentalists' argument against Bjorn Lomborg. In a nutshell, he argues that there are many better ways of spending our money than trying to bring down carbon dioxide emissions. Rather than just having an emotional reaction to the latest perceived environmental problem, he argues, we should analyze what impact on the earth, and on human society, it will have, and spend money controlling it only if it is cost effective to do so. It is very interesting that the line is attack is not to challenge any of his figures, which encourages me to think that his analysis is perfectly sound, but to argue that the problem of climate change is so serious that any attempt to quantify the magnitude of the problem, and to scientifically assess the damage it is likely to cause and to look at dealing with this damage directly is some kind of sacrilege.

Some of Mr Burke's argument are truly extraordinary, especially from a Green. One is that if the costs of invading Iraq were properly computed and compared to the benefits of removing Saddam then we and the US would never have gone to war in the first place, but that because decisions like this are taken by some process called 'politics' the fact that we did indeed take this action proves that the 'economic' analysis is somehow flawed.

Oddly enough, later in the article, Burke accuses Lomborg of practising politics, rather than sticking to economics, even though politics was previously asserted to be a somehow superior means of arriving at big decisions.

But the most extraordinary part of the article comes at the end where Burke lays into the Economist magazine for giving a platform for Lomborg. He states Until it chose to give a Danish lecturer in politics of no academic distinction whatsoever the rare accolade of a named essay, the world had remained in peaceful ignorance of Lomborg's opinions.. This actually shows how close the environmental movement is to a religion. Burke says: But its heavy promotion of Lomborg's faith-based approach to the future suggests that its current editors have changed sides. They should be ashamed.. I have no doubt which side is faith-based, and it is not Lomborg's.

References

There is an amazing amount of stuff about this on the web. Much of it biased. Wikipedia is a good place to start.

The Copenhagen summit on climate change is taking place. There is a lot of discussion about climate change, with a strong message coming out of the summit that there is a consensus that climate change is real (even though, like many assertions of religions it cannot be directly, unambiguously experienced) and that it is caused by man's activities. The conclusion is then drawn that governments will have to take drastic, and very expensive, action to decrease the use of fossil fuels.

My concern is scientists are portrayed as some kind of homogeneous group, a 'community', like believers in Islam or Wiccan. Apart from a belief that an experiment can falsify a theory, I don't think that scientists really have any shared beliefs. I studied science at university for six years, and worked in a research establishment after leaving university, but I cannot come to any conclusions about the reality of politically important scientific questions which are any more informed than the average voter.

Since scientists agree that CO₂
temperatures might rise by around 2 degrees C, and that this is due to increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the world's governments must immediately take steps to stop the man-made activity that is causing this.

Politicians sometimes have to take decisions that depend on understanding science. This is very worrying, since the rigour of the physical scientist would seem to call from a quite different character to that which is needed by the politician. Climate change is an area where this is needed. It is important that politicians take the right decision, but they seem worryingly fixated on whether or not scientists agree on whether or not climate change is even real, or certainly caused by the burning of fossil fuels. This would not matter so much except that the decision seems to be to spend an incredible amount of money, both in actual money and, much more importantly in the opportunity cost of lost growth, reducing the effects of burning fossil fuels.

A lot of the justification for this seems to hinge on the assertion that a majority of scientists agree with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Leaving aside the evidence that the people running this unit are not exactly the dispassionate searchers after truth that we imagine scientists to be, the idea that correctness in scientific theory is dependent on a kind of vote taken amongst the scientific community is, surely, very wrong. When Einstein published his theory of General Relativity, nobody asked botanists for their opinion on the correctness of the theory.

Whenever so much money is involved in policy, as it now is in Climate Change, lots of very strong incentives are created for people to capture some of it, without regard for the future of the planet, or the economic well-being of its inhabitants. Politicians who are hungry for power hijack the scientists work for their own ends (remember Cameron posing with huskies in Greenland a few years back?). Policy gets a momentum of its own, which can result in ruinous policies down the line, always supported by 'independent' reports of experts who happen to produce the kind of recommendations that the government ministers require.

Of course, as the defenestration of Andrew Nutt shows, when politicians find it expedient to ignore science they will always do so.

Obviously, I'm an old cynic. Maybe this time the momentum and the green movement will turn out to have no unintended consequences, will cost much less than initially envisaged, will not divert resources from other less photogenic causes, and really have the effect of increasing productivity and growth and wealth. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

Update: 56 papers are printing an identical editorial. I think that, on the whole, that makes me more inclined to disbelieve its message.

HM the Queen famously asked academics at the London School of Economics why nobody saw the credit crunch coming. In fact, if the Queen took an interest in these things, she would have realised that professional economic forecasters are often spectacularly bad at forecasting big changes in GDP growth, exchange rates and practically any other macroeconomic parameter you can think of.

Medical doctors, abdominal specialists, are worse at their job of diagnosing illness than a simple algorithm based on Bayes's Theorem. Professional clinical psychologists are worse at predicting patients' behaviour than their secretaries. Political pundits are no better at forecasting political developments than the average lay-reader of the Economist, and both are much worse than a simple linear model [see Expert Political Judgement]. The voting patterns of the Supreme Court of the United States are better predicted by a simple statical program than by legal experts. Monkeys throwing darts at the FT pick better-performing stock portfolios than professional fund managers.

We know all these things, but we still look up to experts to tell us what to do, whether we are an individual investor, or Gordon Brown asking what to do about those troublesome banks. Given the problems experts have predicting the future, how can we possibly be confident that their recommendations for influencing the future will remotely reliable?

Well, yet another G[n] summit has come and gone, leaving nothing of any consequence. The Climate Change Summit was, as the headline writers had spotted a long time ago, likely to produce nothing more than a lot of hot air.

Many years ago Bjorn Lomborg predicted that governments, having made impressive sounding promises for delivery long into the future, would quietly forget about them as the time for delivery approached and the true cost of these promises became apparent. The Chinese know what cutting carbon is going to cost their country in terms of lost growth, and they are not prepared to pay that price. They are hard-headed pragmatists and know that running their economies on 'free' renewable power sources is actually going to be cripplingly expensive, whatever Greenpeace claims.

We are told that (i) we have hit 'peak oil' and will run out of fossil fuels any day now, and (ii) we are pumping ever-increasing quantities of carbon into the atmosphere with dire consequences for the climate. Why is it that no politician seems to be able to understand that both of these assertions cannot be true at the same time. It seems to me that increasing oil prices are just the kind of signal that is needed to make us reduce our production of CO2 naturally.

Environmental fashions come and go. Perennially we are running out of oil, poisoning the trees in Scandinavia with acid rain, killing ourselves with mercury or lead, destroying the ozone layer with CFCs, turning all male animals into females with oestrogen-mimicking plasticizers, creating dustbowls through monoculture, killing birds of prey with DDT... the list is endless. Perhaps, actually, we don't need to panic quite so much.

If you haven't heard of the real Copenhagen Consensus you should check out
this link.

Many years ago, when I was still a student, a friend of mine, Pete Moss, was using a relatively complex corkscrew to open a bottle of wine. The corkscrew broke as he used it to pull the cork from the bottle. Far from being annoyed by this, he was delighted. He explained that this was a cheap and poorly-made corkscrew, but a triumph for the engineer who designed it. He said that it was the goal of all engineers to have all the components of a machine that they design wear out simultaneously. In this case this had literally happened.

Moss was not an engineer, or even an engineering student, and neither am I. But I think that he was on to something in this remark. Certainly I think of his comments whenever I am put in that most difficult position of deciding whether to give the go-ahead for a replacement big end, or gearbox, or front suspension, or welding of sills, for a car of mine that has broken down or failed its MoT. I read somewhere that Henry Ford used to send out his engineers into local scrapyards to pick up expired Ford cars in order examine them to see if any component was not near to expiry. I have a feeling that early crankshafts tended to be 'over-engineered'.

Sadly, evolution has ensured that animal bodies, and specifically human bodies, are designed on good engineering principles. Although this is not done perfectly, it seems to me unlikely that current extrapolations of human life expectancy will prove to be correct. None of our major organs were designed to last for ever.

The more general lesson, for engineers, is that proportionate resources should be invested in the different elements of a product. The British Dreadnought battleships were designed with super-strength armour so they could withstand a hit from the biggest German guns. Unfortunately, the extra weight meant that they were sitting targets for lighter-armoured but well-armed enemy ships and were not at all the success that they Navy hoped for.