Tag: Dan Lan

Naomi Oreskes – are the merchants of doubt still selling?

Posted on by janet.crompton
Naomi Oreskes at the Cabot Institute. Image credit: Hayley Shaw.

With breakthrough science finding and new technologies emerging every day, one major issue for the scientists is to convince the public to embrace the novelties. However, despite more and more effort being put into public engagement, the credibility of science is still staggering. One of the biggest frustrations, surprisingly, comes from some fellow scientists. They deny the existing consensus of the science world and incite doubts in the public minds. Last Thursday, Naomi Oreskes gave a fascinating Cabot Institute/Bristol Festival of Ideas seminar about the agenda of these doubt merchants and their reasoning behind these agendas.  This blog highlights key parts of her talk.

In her talk, Naomi took climate change as a key example. Carbon Dioxide (CO2) was established as a greenhouse gas in 1850, and the burning of fossil fuels was proved to be an emitter of CO2 at the beginning of 20th century. In 1965, after years of intensive observation and recording, Keeling demonstrated the constant rising of CO2 in atmosphere and a prediction of global warming was made at the same time. Serious discussions about global warming in 1970s led to a consensus in the National Academy of Science (NAS) of USA which described global warming as a threat and suggested immediate actions to curb the trend. The effect of warming was consequently recorded in 1988, which confirmed the worries of scientists and prompted the creation of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Since its first report, IPCC has made it clear that global warming is happening, and it is caused by the increase of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere as a result of human activities. In 2004, after analyzing 928 papers published in peer reviewed journals between 1993 and 2003 related to climate change, Naomi found that none of them disagree with IPCC’s conclusion. Nowadays, 72% of Americans believe that global warming is happening and 62% thinks positive interference needs to be taken.

Nevertheless, some American politicians and think tanks still claims that there is no scientific consensus on global warming, and actively campaigns against it. Among all the think tanks denying global warming, George C. Marshall Institute is the most prominent one. Founded by three famous physicists Fred Seitz, Robert Jastrow and Bill Nierenberg, Marshall Institute has played significant roles in stimulating public doubts against scientific findings on issues like ozone layer, acidic rain, DDT, and most importantly, smoking. Seitz, who was affiliated to tobacco company R.J .Reynolds, along with Fred Singer, a rocket scientist who worked for Phillip Morris, voiced their disapproval against FDA’s conclusion which calls second hand smoking a carcinogen. They claimed that there were still space for debate on the tobacco issue and FDA’s finding is inconclusive, and this strategy (“tobacco strategy”) is now used by the same group of people in their lambasting towards EPA on global warming issue.

Besides the obvious economic connection, Naomi argues that the reason for these people to act in such way may be even deeper. After the WWII, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman led the movement of neo-liberalism, argues for free-market and less government control. This ideology was massively popularised in 1980s by UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US president Ronald Reagan, and was absorbed by the Conservative camp. Under the historical background of Cold War, such ideology becomes more appealing to the Conservatives, as they believe that personal freedom is dependent on economic freedom. With this kind of mind set, Global Warming and Tobacco Control both seem to be conspiracies of socialists who try to tighten the government control on civil liberties, and it will be a slippery slope and eventually morphs the West into Soviet Union.

Knowing the reasoning behind these antagonists, it will be easier to tackle the problem. Of course, as the battlefield is the public opinion, the most fundamental work still lies with science communicators and science public engagements, which shoulders the responsibility to pass on scientific findings into public’s visible range. Besides that, controlling greenhouse gas emission does not always have to be in an anti-free market fashion. The creation of carbon credit and its trade market is a great experiment, which opens a possibility outside sometimes crude legislations. After all, climate change is a burning issue which needs immediate attention and action from the whole of human society. While the debate of climate change is no longer a scientific one, but a political one, it is worth recruiting political wisdom to think beyond the science, and come up with a package of solutions to minimise the obstacle for us to act upon it.
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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Dan Lan, a PhD student in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Dan Lan

Conserve the past, but the solution is in future

Posted on by janet.crompton


Conservation is certainly a hot-debated topic in the modern era.  On Thursday 5 March 2015, Professor Roger Scruton, a renowned philosopher, given a lecture titled ‘Love thy neighbourhood’ at the  Cabot Institute, University of Bristol as part of the Coleridge Lecture Series run by Bristol Festival of Ideas. Originally advertised as ‘The only true conservationist is a conservative’, the lecture sparked a great deal of controversy. Nevertheless, it also offered an interesting angle of observation to the topic.

Thy neighbourhood is thy home, though it must be beautiful

Scruton opened the talk by pointing out that most humans (rational egoists) have the tendency to externalise their costs while retain the profits. By doing so, damages accumulate in the surroundings of humans and causes the deterioration of our environment (‘Uglification of the world’).

To curb the tendency of externalisation, the speaker suggested promoting the recognition of neighbourhood community. By recognising the bigger community instead of just his personal circle as his ‘home’, and due to people’s innate reaction to love and defend their home (oikophilia), one may be more aware and more active in maintaining the quality of his surrounding environment.

However, he argued that, a person’s attachment to his home is stronger when his home possesses a certain amount of aesthetic value. When the home is not beautiful, its residents feel less obliged to protect it. Wind farms were listed as a bad approach to solve today’s energy problem. They are unadaptable, causing irreversible damages and an offence to our inheritance.

Professor Scruton also used plastic as a classic example of externalisation. He thought that the prevalence of plastic is largely due to the hidden subsidiary like the conveniences in transport and storage brought by either policies or technology. For example, supermarkets lobby for packaging legislations to drive their smaller local competitors out of market as they generally are unable to afford packaging. To solve this, Scruton proposed that the cost should be returned to the externalisers through taxations and encouraging local markets for grocery shopping.

Professor Scruton talked about urbanisation, and ‘failed cities’ with dead centres and that people keep moving towards the edge. He argued that such situations are caused by cities lack of aesthetic values, and ‘failed cities’ were built to solely serve their very limited functions. When the function no longer exists, the cities die with it. He suggested that cities should apply more restrictions to ensure only beautiful houses can be built so the aestheticism can be upheld.

Art thou Conservative or not? Art thou conservationist or not?

Despite his ‘Conservative’ self-branding, it is not hard to notice the obvious conflicts between Professor Scruton’s value and the Conservative Party’s current mainstream ideology. For instance, I wonder if the taxing solution to plastic problem would unsettle a few nerves of a lot of Conservatives; and regrettably, the ‘beautiful cities’ idea might be just too utopic.  During the talk, a few photos of ‘help to buy’ scheme housing were used to prove that modern cities are ugly. However, I don’t think that beautiful houses come cheap.  In Britain, cities brood opportunities, and serve as platforms for people with very little savings to realise their dreams. Inevitably, all major cities contain a considerable amount of low income population. To make the ‘beautiful homes’ affordable to them, we either need to use administrative forces to cap the housing price or use administrative forces to bump up personal income. Both ways would be deemed unacceptable by any free-market prone Thatcherite.

I also noticed that the speaker emphasized the conservation of human settlements rather than the nature, or emphasized the function of nature as aesthetically pleasing to humans rather than any scientific or ecological essence of maintaining its diversity and integrity. Also, by continually referring to Coleridge as the founder of conservationism, I sensed that the speaker’s idea of conservation still largely based on the romanticism of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and that it is more of nostalgia rather than science.

Time will solve thy problem

In some sense, I feel some problems mentioned were relatively subjective. For instance, Professor Scruton found wind turbines ugly and dismal, while me, along with many of my friends finding them elegant and pleasant. He argued that wind turbines cause irreversible damages and create a lot amount of waste, but modern technology ensures that most metals are recyclable and the rate of recycling will only increase with progressing technology.

Another example is the medieval cities. Although they look beautiful and lovely nowadays, it is well documented that such cities were heavily troubled by lack of infrastructure, their hygienic states were bad and would not have been regarded as ‘beautiful’ in any sense. Thanks to the modern planning and sewage systems, their residents no longer pour their waste into streets and old cities can be well illuminated at night, which not only gives them another layer of charm but also excludes reasons for curfews.

The speaker even provided evidences himself that his problem is only periodic. He mentioned that the Victorian railway to the Brecon Beacons was thought to be ugly back then but regarded as beautiful now. If this can happen to Victorian railways, why can it not happen to wind turbines and skyscrapers? In fact, humans’ aesthetic value is constantly changing with time. In a small scale, impressionism was deemed ugly when it first came out, Manet’s Olympia had to be hung very high so people could not destroy it. On a large scale, New York City is full of skyscrapers that serve as tourist attractions but not repellents.  All the things Professor Scruton found ugly now might be regarded as beautiful in the future – it is just the time hasn’t come yet.

Of course, one cannot predict the future, but one can look into the past. However, it is not evident that we should be pessimistic about the future and indulge ourselves in the past. Roger Scruton offered an exciting discussion on conservation, which were largely based on his personal views. All in all, I appreciate his broad knowledge and deep thinking, and certainly welcome his advocation for conservation. In the end, when coming to finding the solutions, I can only hope that people rely more on science and technology, less on ideology and nostalgia.

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Dan Lan, a PhD student in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Dan Lan

 

Is ash dieback under control?

Posted on by janet.crompton
Image by FERA

European ash tree is an important component of British woodlands. It has been stayed popular and recommended for planting due to its economic and aesthetic value, also the fact that its resistance towards grey squirrels. In UK, it has been estimated that among all the 141000ha big woodlands (>0.5ha), 5.4% of their composition is ash trees. However, since its first discovery in Poland in 1992, the ash dieback disease, caused by fungus Chalara fraxinea, has spread over the European continent and devastated ash populations in certain areas. On 19.Sep, Rob Spence for Forestry Commission came to Bristol to talk about thecurrent stage of ash dieback control in England.

Chalara fraxinea is the asexual stage of Hymenoscyphus pseudoalbidus, and also the infectious stage. Ascospores are produced from fruiting bodies on the dead branches in the litter, and can be transmitted by wind to more than 10km. Ascospores are not durable, thus its infection window is limited to summer months. The spores tend to attack the young trees due to their lower resistance to the disease, cause crown necrosis and eventually death. In mature plants, the effect of the disease is less severe. However, the disease can seriously compromise the condition of mature trees, and make them succumb to other diseases.

Source: BBC website

Current distribution of the disease in England is largely constrained in tree nurseries, except for East Anglia, where a number of cases have been reported in the wild. The prevalence of the disease in the nurseries all over the country is thought to be due to the fact that seeds are germinated outside of UK, and then saplings and young trees are imported back into UK from the continent, which may already be infected. However, the large outbreak in East Anglia is more likely attributed to extreme weather conditions which bring spores from the continent.

The control effort in southwest is focusing on confining the disease. Unlike East Anglia, the cases of ash dieback in wild are still rare. The Forestry Commission has been conducting aerial surveys to spot early infections, also, two smartphone apps, Tree Alert and OPAL can be used to take photos of suspected infected trees and send to the experts for identification. As the staff of the Forestry Commission is very limited, it becomes very unrealistic for them to come to field for most cases.

It is also worth noting that around 1-2% of the natural population is resistant against the disease. Researches are going on in The Sainsbury’s Lab and John Innes Centre in Norwich, as well as some European institutes trying to identify the resistant genes and possible approaches to deter the spread of the fungus through biological approaches. On country level, a ban has been placed on ash import from outside of the country and transfer of living ash tissues within the country, though the timber transport are still allowed as they are regarded as low risk.

In my point of view, ash dieback is well controlled at this stage. Despite the eventual widespread is inevitable, but this kind of selection bottlenecks has happened widely in nature since the evolution starts. Although there is no reason to reduce our effort in protecting ash trees, as long as we keep the genetic diversity with the susceptible populations while introducing and expanding the resistant traits within the population, the disease will be controlled in macro-scale.

This blog is written by Dan Lan, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol

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