Dr. Frieden, Call Your Office

New York City may have already sicced its food cops on anyone using trans-fats, but according to a new report, that may have been premature. John Tierney reports in yesterday's New York Times:

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

Read the whole thing. It's a fascinating take on how one myth can cascade into conventional wisdom. This seems to be exactly what's happened with fears of secondhand smoke.

Scientists Imitate The Onion

"World's Scientists Admit They Just Don't Like Mice" -- headline, The Onion, Dec. 8, 2004

"Scientists Breed World's First Schizophrenic Mice" -- headline, The Post Chronicle, July 29, 2007

'The End of Civilization'?

"A few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire predictions push the science too far," The Houston Chronicle reports.

Hmm, you think?

"We face a challenge in the conservation of democracy that we must be up to in order to save the climate balance on which our civilization depends." -- Al Gore

"Disease spread by global warming could kill an extra 185 million people in sub-Saharan Africa by the end of the century and turn millions more into refugees unless rich nations take action now." -- Christian Aid.

"We have less than 10 years." -- James Hansen, NASA scientist

"The earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of people's lives ... A hot earth couldn't support much over 500 million." -- James Lovelock, climatologist

"The Amazon rain forest could become a desert." -- Woods Hole Research Centre

"40 percent species face extinction." -- the British government

"Two-thirds of world species could be on route to extinction by the end of this century." -- Peter Raven, Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden

"One quarter of world's mammals face extinction within 30 years." -- The UN

"By 2050, rising temperatures exacerbated by human-induced belches of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could send more than a million of Earth's land-dwelling plants and animals down the road to extinction." -- Chris Thomas, conservation biologist

UPDATE: Science Direct reports: "Global warming possibly linked to an enhanced risk of suicide."

What Are They Really Afraid Of?

For reasons that perhaps a truly great mind (probably not a scientist) will someday explain, the tendency within the scientific "community" to accuse anyone harboring religious or conservative proclivities of being "anti-science" seems to be growing. The accusation itself is confounding, in that its purveyors hurl it as some sort of self-evident truth, despite the sheer nonexistence of corroborating information.

Isn't it ironic, then, how many stories there are in the news these days about "scientists" trying to silence competing scientists? In the examples offered below, the former category are all adherents to the conventional school of "global warming," while the latter are scientists evincing skepticism.

Most notable is the story of a Weather Channel meteorologist who called for the stripping of professional certification for any weatherman who publicly questions the "world-is-doomed" dogma. (This is a sad day in FunkyPundit Land, as the Weather Channel was once cable's untopped station. Alas, no more.)

Next comes courtesy of Hollywood's cosmopolitan demigod, Al Gore. In a Thursday oped for The Wall Street Journal, environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg and newspaper editor Flemming Rose describe an (almost) meeting with the former veep:

Al Gore is traveling around the world telling us how we must fundamentally change our civilization due to the threat of global warming. Today he is in Denmark to disseminate this message. But if we are to embark on the costliest political project ever, maybe we should make sure it rests on solid ground. It should be based on the best facts, not just the convenient ones. This was the background for the biggest Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, to set up an investigative interview with Mr. Gore. And for this, the paper thought it would be obvious to team up with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist," who has provided one of the clearest counterpoints to Mr. Gore's tune.

The interview had been scheduled for months. Mr. Gore's agent yesterday thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he's been very critical of Mr. Gore's message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore's evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled.

Finally, ExxonMobil announced it will no longer fund organizations skeptical of the dire consequences of "global warming," like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Why? Because the "Union for Concerned Scientists" and Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe told it to.

Now, admittedly, in the second example Gore isn't explicitly trying to silence his critics. But if he's as confident in his climate-change knowledge as he claims, why is he afraid to mix it up with someone bearing different ideas? It's now been well over a year since Steve Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com, challenged Gore to debate climate change. So what is Gore afraid of?

For that matter, what is Weather Channel lady afraid of? What is Olympia Snowe, Jay Rockefeller and the Union of Concerned Scientists afraid of? If the case for "global warming" is so certifiably obvious, why such paranoia?