Category: Science

Opponents of Geoengineering View Global Warming as Nature’s Just Punishment of Us for Our Indulging in Technology and Capitalism

(p. A13) Make no mistake—Mr. Myhrvold is concerned about climate change.  . . .

He laments that policy makers largely scorn geoengineering—human interventions in the Earth’s natural systems to thwart or neutralize climate change.

. . .

Geoengineering is about “deliberately trying to reduce climate change.” Excess CO2 traps a little less than 1% of heat from the sun, “so if we could make the sun 1% dimmer, we could shut off climate change.” When Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, erupted in 1991, it lowered world-wide temperatures by 1 degree Celsius for about 18 months. Human-emitted particulate pollution has historically offset about 20% of human-emitted CO2. “Ironically,” he says, “the Clean Air Act made our air better but hurt climate change.”

The simplest solar-radiation management scheme, Mr. Myhrvold says, “is to emit particles in the stratosphere to mimic Mount Pinatubo. We invented a particularly elegant way to do this with balloons and a pipe to the sky.” By “we,” he means Intellectual Ventures, the company Mr. Myhrvold founded in 2000 after leaving Microsoft, where he spent 13 years and rose to the position of chief technology officer. Intellectual Ventures “creates, incubates and commercializes” new inventions.

“Marine cloud brightening” is another solar-related intervention. “The idea is to increase the number and size of low clouds that form over the oceans so that more incoming sunlight bounces back into space instead of heating the ocean.” Scientists have proposed a variety of ways to do this. One, which Mr. Myhrvold’s company has explored, is to outfit ships with equipment to spray seawater into the air as they traverse the ocean. “The salt particles can serve as nuclei for water vapor to condense into droplets, thus forming clouds.”

. . .

“Opponents worry that once you have geoengineering, people won’t make sacrifices to cut emissions. They want a sword of Damocles hanging over humanity as a means to force us to follow their ideology.”

Mr. Myhrvold uses an analogy he describes as “horrible in some ways.” When the AIDS epidemic hit, some people saw it as punishment from God. “Their attitude was, ‘This is what you get if you indulge in the practices we don’t approve of.’ ” In climate change, he says, this moralistic attitude takes the following form: “I don’t like aspects of our society, I don’t like technology, I don’t like capitalism, and this is nature’s retribution. And so we have to change the way we live.” Such beliefs “have become a very powerful disincentive, particularly for academic researchers.”

. . .

“You could imagine a world in which cardiology doesn’t exist because the medical profession said, ‘You fat bastards. You did it to yourselves. We’re not going to help you.’ ”

For the full interview, see:

Tunku Varadarajan, interview. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Emission Cuts Will Fail. What to Do Then?” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date February 17, 2023, and has the title “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Emission Cuts Will Fail to Stop Climate Change. What to Do Then?”)

China Still Seeks to Censor International Journals and Databases on Covid

(p. A1) Early in 2020, on the same day that a frightening new illness officially got the name Covid-19, a team of scientists from the United States and China released critical data showing how quickly the virus was spreading, and who was dying.

The study was cited in health warnings around the world and appeared to be a model of international collaboration in a moment of crisis.

Within days, though, the researchers quietly withdrew the paper, which was replaced online by a message telling scientists not to cite it. A few observers took note of the peculiar move, but the whole episode quickly faded amid the frenzy of the coronavirus pandemic.

What is now clear is that the study was not removed because of faulty research. Instead, it was withdrawn at the direction of Chinese health officials amid a crackdown on science. That effort kicked up a cloud of dust around the dates of early Covid cases, like those reported in the study.

“It was so hard to get any information out of China,” said one of the authors, Ira Longini, of the University of Florida, who described the back story of the removal publicly for the first time in a recent interview. “There was so much covered up, and so much hidden.”

That the Chinese government muzzled scientists, hindered international investigations and censored online discussion of the pandemic is well documented. But Beijing’s stranglehold on information goes far deeper than even many pandemic researchers are aware of. Its censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge, a New York Times investigation found.

Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions. Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons, a review by The Times of over a dozen retracted papers found.

Groups including the World Health Organization have given credence to muddled data and inaccurate timelines.

For the full story, see:

Mara Hvistendahl and Benjamin Mueller. “China Censors Are Thwarting Covid Science.” The New York Times (Monday, April 24, 2023): A1 & A9.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 23, 2023, and has the title “Chinese Censorship Is Quietly Rewriting the Covid-19 Story.”)

Mainstream Media Suppresses Scientific Debate on Cochrane Meta-Analysis of Mask Efficacy

(p. A11) On Jan. 30, [2023] the Cochrane Collaboration, highly regarded for its rigorous systematic reviews, published an update of its meta-analysis of masking and other physical methods to prevent respiratory illnesses. It found no strong evidence for masking, and the initial media response was silence. After conservative media covered the study, the mainstream press went on the attack. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic and others piled on.

As an epidemiologist, I hoped the review might dent the politicized discourse surrounding masks and other prevention measures. I sent an article to Time magazine, which had recently published my work.

. . .

Eventually the editor . . . asked for some further changes, which I readily accepted. “I think we’re set,” he wrote. “My colleague will finalize and publish.” I heard nothing from him until two weeks later, when he finally confirmed Time had decided to kill the piece.

. . .

“Follow the science,” they said throughout the pandemic. You can’t do that if you suppress scientific debate.

For the full commentary, see:

Daniel Halperin. “Media Keep Stifling the Covid Debate.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 1, 2023): A11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 31, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

The Cochrane meta-analysis mentioned above is:

Jefferson, T., L. Dooley, E. Ferroni, L. A. Al-Ansary, M. L. van Driel, G. A. Bawazeer, M. A. Jones, T. C. Hoffmann, J. Clark, E. M. Beller, and et al. “Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (Jan. 30 2023).

“The Reliability of Science Is Based” on Free Speech

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s argument should be pondered by global warming and Covid scientists who want to censor and cancel those with whom they disagree. They should also read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

(p. C5) Science is a process that builds upon existing theories and knowledge by continuously revising them. Every aspect of scientific knowledge can be questioned, including the general rules of thinking that appear to be most certain.

. . .

Consider a folk healer’s herbal medicine. Can we say this treatment is “scientific”? Yes, if it is proven to be effective, even if we have no idea why it works. In fact, several common medications used today have their origin in folk treatments, and we are still not sure how they work. This does not imply that folk treatments are generally effective. To the contrary, most of them are not. What distinguishes scientific medicine from nonscientific medicine is the readiness to seriously test a treatment and to be ready to change our minds if something is shown not to work.

Exaggerating a bit, one could say that the core of modern medicine is not much more than the accurate testing of treatments. A homeopathic doctor is not interested in rigorously testing his remedies: He continues to administer the same remedy even if a statistical analysis shows that the remedy is ineffective. He prefers to stick to his theory. A research doctor in a modern hospital, on the contrary, must be ready to change his theory if a more effective way of understanding illness, or treating it, becomes available.

. . .

What makes modern science uniquely powerful is its refusal to believe that it already possesses ultimate truth. The reliability of science is based not on certainty but on a radical lack of certainty. As John Stuart Mill wrote in “On Liberty” in 1859, “The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”

. . .

There is no secure method for avoiding error. Our point of departure is always just the ramshackle, error-filled totality of what we think we know. But uncertainty does not make knowledge worthless. If our theory is contradicted by experiment, this remains a real fact, solid as rock, even if we don’t yet know with clarity where our mistake lies. The fact that the assumptions in our reasoning can be mistaken doesn’t change the fact that scientific reasoning is our best cognitive tool.

For the full essay, see:

Carlo Rovelli. “The Best Reason to Trust Science.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 11, 2023): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date March 9, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Rovelli’s essay quoted above is based on his book:

Rovelli, Carlo. Anaximander and the Birth of Science. New York: Riverhead Books, 2023 (2011).

Mill’s wonderful defense of freedom, mentioned above, is:

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays, Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008 (1859).

Cochrane Study Finds No Benefits of Mandatory Masking

During the pandemic, I wrote an op-ed piece advocating the voluntary (not mandatory) use of masks. I still believe that, based on the mechanics of disease spread, and the mechanics of physically blocking virus particles, that masks can have a modest effect in reducing the viral load we spread to others. I also still believe in free speech and believe that it was wrong to censor those who were skeptical of masks.

(p. A19) The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.

“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”

But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks?

“Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson.

What about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose mask mandates?

“They were convinced by nonrandomized studies, flawed observational studies.”

. . .

These observations don’t come from just anywhere. Jefferson and 11 colleagues conducted the study for Cochrane, a British nonprofit that is widely considered the gold standard for its reviews of health care data. The conclusions were based on 78 randomized controlled trials, six of them during the Covid pandemic, with a total of 610,872 participants in multiple countries. And they track what has been widely observed in the United States: States with mask mandates fared no better against Covid than those without.

No study — or study of studies — is ever perfect. Science is never absolutely settled. What’s more, the analysis does not prove that proper masks, properly worn, had no benefit at an individual level. People may have good personal reasons to wear masks, and they may have the discipline to wear them consistently. Their choices are their own.

. . .

The C.D.C.’s increasingly mindless adherence to its masking guidance is none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify.

It also betrays the technocratic mind-set that has the unpleasant habit of assuming that nothing is ever wrong with the bureaucracy’s well-laid plans — provided nobody gets in its way, nobody has a dissenting point of view, everyone does exactly what it asks, and for as long as officialdom demands. This is the mentality that once believed that China provided a highly successful model for pandemic response.

For the full commentary, see:

Bret Stephens. “‘Do Something’ Is Not Science.” The New York Times (Wednesday, February 22, 2023): A19.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb. 21, 2023, and has the title “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?”)

One Cause of Increasing Burnout of Physicians Is “the Politicization of Science”

(p. A25) Ten years of data from a nationwide survey of physicians confirm another trend that’s worsened through the pandemic: Burnout rates among doctors in the United States, which were already high a decade ago, have risen to alarming levels.

Results released this month and published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a peer-reviewed journal, show that 63 percent of physicians surveyed reported at least one symptom of burnout at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, an increase from 44 percent in 2017 and 46 percent in 2011. Only 30 percent felt satisfied with their work-life balance, compared with 43 percent five years earlier.

“This is the biggest increase of emotional exhaustion that I’ve ever seen, anywhere in the literature,” said Bryan Sexton, the director of Duke University’s Center for Healthcare Safety and Quality, who was not involved in the survey efforts.

. . .

The increase in burnout is most likely a mix of new problems and exacerbated old ones, Dr. Shanafelt said. For instance, the high number of messages doctors received about patients’ electronic health records was closely linked to increased burnout before the pandemic. After the pandemic, the number of messages from patients coming into physicians’ In Baskets, a health care closed messaging system, increased by 157 percent.

And physicians pointed to the politicization of science, labor shortages and the vilification of health care workers as significant issues.

For the full story, see:

Oliver Whang. “New Survey Suggests An Alarming Increase In Physician Burnout.” The New York Times (Friday, September 30, 2022): A25.

(Note: ellipsis added.]

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 29, 2022, and has the title “Physician Burnout Has Reached Distressing Levels, New Research Finds.”)

Long-Distance Trade May Help Explain Why Sapiens Flourished More Than Neanderthals

(p. 47) Sykes explains that Neanderthals were sophisticated and competent human beings who adapted to diverse habitats and climates.

. . .

At the time when they encountered the Neanderthals, Sapiens too lived in small bands, but different Sapiens bands probably cooperated on a regular basis. There is much more evidence for long-distance trade among Sapiens, and spectacular burials like the 32,000-year-old Sunghir graves clearly reflect the combined effort of more than one band.

Large-scale cooperation did not necessarily mean that a horde of 500 Sapiens united to wipe out a band of 20 Neanderthals. Cooperation isn’t just about violence. Sapiens could more easily benefit from the discoveries and inventions of other people. If somebody in a neighboring band discovered a new way to locate beehives, to make a tunic or to heal a wound, such knowledge could spread much more quickly among Sapiens than among Neanderthals. While individual Neanderthals were perhaps as inquisitive, imaginative and creative as individual Sapiens, superior networking enabled Sapiens to swiftly outcompete Neanderthals.

This, however, is largely speculation. We still don’t know enough about the psychology, society and politics of Neanderthals to be sure. Perhaps the most surprising fact in Sykes’s book is that even if we count every bone fragment and every isolated tooth, so far we have found the remains of fewer than 300 Neanderthals.

For the full review, see:

Yuval Noah Harari. “Ancient Cousins.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, December 6, 2020): 47.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Nov. [sic] 9, 2020, and has the title “At Home With Our Ancient Cousins, the Neanderthals.”)

The book under review is:

Sykes, Rebecca Wragg. Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020.

New Guineans Bred “Pretty Tasty Bananas Without Formal Knowledge of the Principles of Inheritance and Evolution”

(p. D2) Wild bananas, or Musa acuminata, have flesh packed with seeds that render the fruit almost inedible. Scientists think bananas were domesticated more than 7,000 years ago on the island of New Guinea. Humans on the island at the time bred the plants to produce fruit without being fertilized and to be seedless. They were able to develop pretty tasty bananas without formal knowledge of the principles of inheritance and evolution.

For the full story, see:

Oliver Whang. “Fruitful Research: Yes, We Have Lots of Bananas, but Not the Ones You’re Looking For.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 25, 2022): D2.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 17, 2022, and has the title “The Search Is on for Mysterious Banana Ancestors.”)

DNA from Two Million Years Ago Shows Rich Forest Ecosystem in the “Remarkably Warm” Greenland Arctic

(p. A1) In the permafrost at the northern edge of Greenland, scientists have discovered the oldest known fragments of DNA, offering an extraordinary look at an extraordinary ancient ecosystem.

The genetic material dates back at least two million years — that’s nearly twice as old as the mammoth DNA in Siberia that held the previous record. And the samples, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, came from more than 135 different species.

Together, they show that a region just 600 miles from the North Pole was once covered by a forest of poplar and birch trees inhabited by mastodons. The forests were also home to caribou and Arctic hares. And the warm coastal waters were filled with horseshoe crabs, a species that today cannot be found any farther north of Maine.

Independent experts hailed the study as a major advance.

“It feels almost magical to be able to infer such a complete picture of an ancient ecosystem from tiny fragments of preserved (p. A8) DNA,” said Beth Shapiro, a paleogeneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“I think it’s going to blow people’s minds,” said Andrew Christ, a geoscientist at the University of Vermont who studies the ancient Arctic. “It certainly did so for me.”

The discovery came after two decades of scientific gambles and frustrating setbacks.

. . .

. . . the presence of horseshoe crabs in the shallow coastal waters suggests that the ocean and land alike were remarkably warm.

Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues are continuing to study the DNA for clues to how all these species were able to thrive a thousand miles north of the Arctic Circle. The trees, for example, had to survive half the year in darkness. The DNA preserved for two million years may hold their secrets of adaptation.

The scientists are also interested in how the DNA fragments managed to survive so long and defy expectations. Their research indicates that the DNA molecules can cling to minerals of feldspar and clay, which protect them from further damage.

. . .

Dr. Christ said that finding more DNA may help them better understand how human-driven climate change will alter the Arctic. We should not assume, he said, that the region will resemble ecosystems in places farther south. After all, the ecosystem of Kap Kobenhavn two million years ago has no analog today.

“Life will adapt, but in ways we don’t expect,” Dr. Christ said.

For the full story, see:

Carl Zimmer. “In DNA Two Million Years Old, A Glimpse of a Forested Arctic.” The New York Times (Thursday, December 8, 2022): A1 & A8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 7, 2022, and has the title “Oldest Known DNA Offers Glimpse of a Once-Lush Arctic.”)

“It’s Not Clear What We Are and Aren’t Allowed to Say”

(p. B1) When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that would punish California doctors for spreading false information about Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, he pledged that it would apply only in the most “egregious instances” of misleading patients.

It may never have the chance.

Even before the law, the nation’s first of its kind, takes effect on Jan. 1 [2023], it faces two legal challenges seeking to declare it an unconstitutional infringement of free speech. The plaintiffs include doctors who have spoken out against government and expert recommendations during the pandemic, as well as legal organizations from both sides of the political spectrum.

“Our system opts toward a presumption that speech is protected,” said Hannah Kieschnick, a lawyer for the Northern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of one of the challenges, filed last month in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

That lawsuit and another, filed this month in the Eastern District of California, have become an extension of the broader cultural battle over the Covid-19 pandemic, which continues to divide Americans along stark partisan lines.

. . .

(p. B5) The plaintiffs in California have sought injunctions to block the law even before it goes into effect, arguing that it was intended to silence dissenting views.

One of them, Dr. Tracy Hoeg, a physician and epidemiologist who works in Grass Valley, near Sacramento, has written peer-reviewed studies since the pandemic began that questioned some aspects of government policies adopted to halt the spread of Covid-19.

Those studies, on the efficacy of masks for schoolchildren and the side effects of vaccines on young men, exposed her to vehement criticism on social media, she said, partly because they fell outside the scientific consensus of the moment.

She noted that the medical understanding of the coronavirus continues to evolve, and that doctors should be open to following new evidence about treatment and prevention.

“It’s going to cause this very broad self-censorship and self-silencing from physicians with their patients because it’s not clear what we are and aren’t allowed to say,” said Dr. Hoeg, one of five doctors who filed a challenge in the Eastern District. “We have no way of knowing if some new information or some new studies that come out are accepted by the California Medical Board as consensus yet.”

. . .

Dr. Jeff Barke, a physician who has treated Covid patients at his office in Newport Beach in Southern California, said the law was an attempt by the state to impose a rigid orthodoxy on the profession that would rule out experimental or untested treatments.

Those include treatments with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that he said he had found to be effective at treating the coronavirus, despite studies suggesting otherwise. “Who determines what false information is?” he said.

. . .

“What comes next?” he said. “How I talk to patients about cancer? How I talk to patients about obesity or diabetes or asthma or any other illnesses? When they have a standard of care that they think is appropriate and they don’t want me going against their narrative, then they’ll say Barke’s spreading misinformation.”

For the full story, see:

Steven Lee Myers. “Law to Stem Medical Misinformation Is Facing a Free Speech Challenge.” The New York Times (Thursday, December 1, 2022): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 30, 2022, and has the title “Is Spreading Medical Misinformation a Doctor’s Free Speech Right?”)

Funding People Instead of Projects Allows Researchers to Nimbly Pivot in the Light of Unexpected Discoveries

(p. A2) Patrick Collison, the Irish-born co-founder of payments technology company Stripe Inc., has spent a lot of the past five years pondering the problem of declining scientific productivity.

. . .

Clearly, scientific productivity has something to do with how research is done, not how much. One culprit, in the view of Mr. Collison and many others, is that the institutions that fund science have become process-oriented, narrow-minded and risk-averse. Wary of failure, they favor established researchers pursuing narrowly focused, incremental ideas over younger scientists with more heterodox agendas.

. . .

Yet Mr. Collison criticizes the federal government for failing to bring a much deeper and eager pool of talent to bear on a multitude of pandemic challenges. Top virologists “were stuck on hold, waiting for decisions about whether they could repurpose their existing funding for this exponentially growing catastrophe,” he wrote in an essay last year with George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, and University of California, Berkeley bioengineering professor Patrick Hsu.

Sensing a need, the three in April, 2020 launched Fast Grants, $10,000 to $500,000 awards funded primarily by private donors and approved in 14 days or less.

. . .

When Messrs. Collison, Cowen and Tsu surveyed their recipients about their experiences with traditional funding, 57% told them they spent more than a quarter of their time on grant applications and 78% said they would change their research program a lot if they weren’t constrained in how they spent their current funding.

This reinforces a key insight from metascience, also known as the science of science, namely the value of curiosity-driven research. Heidi Williams, an economist at Stanford University and director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, said grants typically commit a scholar to complete a specific project, even if during the research the project proves less promising than expected.

. . .

In a 2009 paper, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Pierre Azoulay and his co-authors demonstrated the benefits of funding people over projects. Researchers backed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which takes such an approach, produce far more widely cited papers—a metric of significance—than similar researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health. Drawing on those lessons, last year, Mr. Collison co-founded the Arc Institute to pre-fund scientists studying complex human diseases for renewable eight-year terms.

For the full commentary, see:

Greg Ip. “CAPITAL ACCOUNT; To Boost Growth, Rethink Science Funding.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Nov. 18, 2022): A2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 17, 2022, and has the title “CAPITAL ACCOUNT; Stagnant Scientific Productivity Holding Back Growth.”)

The published version of Azoulay’s co-authored 2009 NBER working paper, mentioned above, is:

Azoulay, Pierre, Joshua S. Graff Zivin, and Gustavo Manso. “Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences.” RAND Journal of Economics 42, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 527-54.