There are several definitions of it, but the most commonly used version is the Wingspread Statement:

“Where an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.  In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.”

So, what’s wrong with that? 
What’s wrong with taking precautions? 
What’s wrong with putting the burden of proof something is safe onto its manufacturer?

What’s wrong with it is what it means in real life, not what it means in environmentalist conferences or in the offices of bureaucrats.  Note that it says “threats of harm” and “even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically“.  What this really means in practice is that if you are against the use of a particular chemical, the manufacture of a product, the erection of a bridge then you don’t really need any proof that it will cause the slightest harm.  All you need to do is come up with one baseless “threat of harm” after another, scream loudly, and insist that the manufacturer prove you wrong (and then ignore them every time that they do while you dream up a new accusation).  That isn’t what it says in the precautionary principle, but that is what happens in practice.  For this reason the precautionary principle is profoundly anti-scientific.  It explicitly makes science irrelevant in any environmental debate, putting every technology at the mercy of every Luddite.

An underlying assumption of the Precautionary Principle is that every new chemical, material, process, or change of any kind is by default assumed to be bad for the environment and should be opposed by every right-thinking (or should I say left-thinking) environmentalist.  Did I say every new chemical?  Well now, in Europe the same principle is being applied to every single chemical on the market and to every single constituent of every product, no matter whether it was put on the market by Monsanto in 2010 or by the ancient Romans in 20 B.C.E.  Why, even boric acid, that common household powder you put down to keep ants away from the kitchen and use to wash out your eyes, has now been asserted to be a chemical of deadly toxicity (more about that in a later blog post on REACh, the new European chemicals regime).

A second underlying assumption of the Precautionary Principle, which follows from the first, is its absolute disregard of costs and benefits.  It does not matter how wonderful a new technology may be, how great a benefit to mankind, how many millions of lives it might save – if it has a single environmental concern (and what material does not?) then it should be verboten.  If you don’t believe that something as transparently Right as the Precautionary Principle could ever be used to kill millions of people, you haven’t looked at the misery and disease wrought all across Africa by the environmentally-driven removal of DDT from the market, or the starvation caused by banning crops scientifically modified to resist disease and increase yield.  Environmentalists, after all, call them Frankenfoods – “of course, the rates have gone up”, together with the body count.

Up until now, while European environmental law has explicitly adopted the Precautionary Principle, US law and environmental regulation has always been explicitly based on risk.  Under the Precautionary Principle a toxic material in a product is considered hazardous and should be removed at all cost.  Under US principles the mere fact that a toxic material may be used in the product is not considered an environmental or health issue unless there is some way that it can escape to harm people or the environment.  (I’ll bet you are not aware of all the toxic materials in your cell phone – good job they can’t crawl down your ear!)  Under the current administration this toxic Precautionary Principle is being quietly brought in through the back door and used as a basis for all manner of environmental decisions.  For example, the EPA rules on CO2 emissions are based on the Precautionary Principle.  A new drive in California (and spreading to the rest of the nation) to lower the limits on hexavalent chrome in drinking water by a factor of 10,000 (despite the lack of any scientific evidence that it is medically possible for it to be harmful even at the current level), is also based on the Precautionary Principle.  These new regulations are being rushed through with no real debate and absolutely no democratic control of any kind.  Under the Precautionary Principle democratic decision-making is not only irrelevant, but anathema, since environmental decisions must be made solely by the Cognoscenti, those who believe they know best and are of course the most cautious (or at least claim to be so).

The Precautionary Principle is the ideal lever to destroy any country’s manufacturing industry (which it is doing in Europe remarkably well).  It can be applied to anything, and there is no effective defense against it, no matter how unreasonable, or even absurd, the objections may be.  All it requires to destroy an industry (or an entire nation’s economy) is a dedicated cadre that screams loudly enough.

The emperor’s clothes:  That seemed to open up the floodgates and allow people to discuss the issue who had formerly been too cowed to speak.  The U of EA CRU is a major contributor to the IPCC reports, and it was clear that its people, far from being dispassionate scientists looking for truth, are really what we have always known them to be – ideologues intent on pushing a belief in global warming, and willing to make “adjustments” to the data to prove it.  People began to dare question the reports of the IPCC, and soon found that the latest report contained “data” from such unimpeachable scientific sources as the World Wildlife Federation, who claimed, with no scientific backing whatsoever, that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.  It is one thing for an advocacy group to make the claim, but for the IPCC, a supposedly scientific organization, to pick it up and call it science opens to question every claim they have made, because it shows the lack of quality control on anything that gives the “right result”.  You can be sure that had the WWF claimed the glaciers would double in size by 2035 that claim would not have been accepted unquestioningly by the IPCC.    

Because this is clearly a political, not a scientific debate, nothing that global warming proponents have said can be trusted.  The only way to get at the truth is to go back and take all the data again, with the data and interpretation in the hands of real scientists – people with no ax to grind who can be trusted to provide only the facts, ma’am.  That, of course, will never happen.  I wonder, though, whether in 50 years time people will look back on the global warming hysteria of this time and wonder how so many could have failed so miserably in their duty as scientists.    

So few people in the general population understand science even now.  How many more will simply lump scientists with politicians and lawyers as one more group of people not to be trusted?  What will that do to the funding and pursuit of science in the long term?  If the citizenry cannot trust what scientists tell them, why should they allow their taxes to pay for science at all – if science is simply another name for politics, why not let the lobbyists and politicians pay for it?  

All of this is exactly what I was talking about – the corruption of science for political ends, which inevitably leads to loss of confidence in scientists and in science itself as a source of unvarnished facts that can be used for making reasoned decisions.  Is the world sliding into the pit of unreason, pushed by scientists themselves?  Will the real scientists of the world be finally willing to stand and say “hold, enough”?  

Himalayan glacier - not shrinking so fast?

By the way, why is it always [scandal-flavor-of-the-week]gate?  Since it is named after the original Watergate Hotel scandal, why not water[scandal-flavor-of-the-week], or in this case Waterclimate?  More appropriate for a climate scandal, no?

Maybe it is happening more or maybe I am noticing it more, or maybe I am just becoming less willing to suffer fools and knaves, but it seems to me that over the past dozen years or so there has been an increasing incidence of misunderstanding, misuse, abuse, fear and outright corruption of science for a variety of ends (most of them political) by a variety of organizations and interest groups.  At the same time I see an increasing number of scientists willing to prostitute science to religious or political ends, or willing (indeed eager) to bow to orthodoxies rather than maintain that exploration and skepticism that is the hallmark of true science.

With the advent of modern science we adopted basic scientific principles, the most fundamental of which was to be skeptical of any claim to revealed truth about the world around us.  (Which was of course where Galileo fell afoul of the Church of his day.)  A new piece of knowledge usually begins with an observation.  The scientific mind immediately asks “Why?” and formulates a hypothesis.  The hypothesis is tested with experiment or further observation and rejected if it does not explain the observations.  If it does explain them it may get an upgrade to a theory.  But no matter how many scientists believe it, no theory is absolute; any theory must explain all the known facts, and clearly predict the outcome of experiments.  For that reason it must be modified or fall with the observation of contrary facts that it cannot explain.  This is true no matter how long it has been in ascendant, how great or revered the scientist who formulated it, or how many people believe it.  Think of how many people used to believe the earth was flat – did that make it true?

Since the days when we lived in caves our leaders have sought the council of “wise men”, but just as often have sought to co-opt them to their own ends rather than seek their unbiased advice (and just as often the advise was hardly unbiased to begin with).  At first those wise men were priests and shamans, later philosophers, then scientists.  In the past the justification for political actions was usually religious or economic, power or trade.  In today’s western world, however, it seems that everything has to be justified on some “scientific” ground, since that gives an impression of unbiased legitimacy, and “ologies” have grown up to fill that need – psychology, sociology, climatology.  This reliance on a scientific justification for political actions inevitably leads to the twisting of science to match the demands of politicians.

Science and politics make uneasy bedfellows, however.  While the job of science is to understand the objective facts and the physical reasons behind them, the job of politics is to put forward only those facts that fit the politician’s need and provide only those explanations that fit with the actions the politician seeks to carry out.  Science is called upon simply to provide a “scientific” justification for an action that has already been decided on political grounds.  As a result any inconvenient conclusion that does not fit the predetermined result is either ignored or corrupted.

The most egregious example of political orthodoxy dictating scientific belief in the world today is the political and pseudo-scientific orthodoxy that has grown up around the hypothesis of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming.  It is treated as an absolute fact, beyond dispute, beyond thought, beyond question, indeed it is treated as something that ought not to be questioned.  Data is falsified, distorted or ignored, and anyone who dares question it or suggest alternative explanations is branded a heretic.  The vituperation has become so shrill that there are even those who advocate the trial of any scientist who dares express a contrary opinion, just as the Church tried Galileo because he dared express the view, supported by mere scientific observations, that the earth orbits the sun.  Such assertions of absolute and unquestionable knowledge can only belong to religion or politics.  Only religions and political philosophies hold absolute beliefs to which all challenge is forbidden; such beliefs must be unchallengeable precisely because they cannot withstand challenge.  Raising questions about them is forbidden precisely because their adherents fear that the free human mind will reject them when all the evidence is allowed into consideration.

This is not science – politics certainly, quite arguably religion, but not science.  It is when religion masquerades as science that true scientists can be most easily recognized; they are the heretics.

“Eppure si muove!” (Yet still it moves!)

For more piratical detail see http://www.talklikeapirate.com/. 

Now, ITLAPD started in 1995 and did not become big news until 2002 when Dave Bary picked it up.  The first time I learned about it we happened to be having an engineering meeting that Sep 19 so I started off my presentation in Piratese with a couple of pirate slides to boot – Aaarghhh! And after that half the team celebrates ITLAPD, and we even have a parrot mascot.  ITLAPD is a lot of fun but it transpires that pirates are critical to the health of Planet Earth.  If you look at http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/ you will see a graph (reproduced below) showing clearly and convincingly that the temperature of the earth varies inversely with the pirate population. 

This graph is now out of date, however.  It runs only until the year 2000.  But  satellite data show that there has been no net increase in global temperatures over the past decade (newspaper strories, TV newscasts, movies and even the Holy Goracle notwithstanding).  If anything, in fact, the average global temperature has perhaps even been falling slightly.  How could this be?  According to the illustrious IPCC (the International Panel on Climate Change) global temperatures are driven almost eclusively by human-created CO2 (anthropogenic global warming).  Over the past decade, as China, India and other countries rapidly industrialize human CO2 emissions have done nothing but increase (falling only with the current worldwide recession).  According to all the IPCC climate models that must cause global temperatures to rise. 

Clearly something else is coming into play, some factor that is not included in the IPCC models.  What can it possibly be but a result of a resurgence of piracy?  Quite clearly the stabilization of the earth’s temperature follows the creation of ITLAPD, which led to a resurgence of pirates throughout the globe.  Apart from these Sep 19 pirates, however, we have clear growth over the past decade in the number of real pirates, operating off the Somali coast. 

This is at least as robust and rational an explanation of global warming trends as the IPCC contention that global temperatures are driven by human contributions to CO2, a trace gas in the atmosphere.  And CO2 is not even the most abundant global warming gas, at that – that minor GW gas H2O, otherwise commonly known as water, is a far more important contributor to the earth’s climate.  However, this is never discussed in any real detail by the IPCC since it would sound really stupid, on a planet whose surface is primarily water, with vast oceans miles deep covering the majority of its surface, to claim that drops of water from automobile tailpipes threaten the survival of the human race.

It follows from this that our real problem is not global warming, but global cooling.  As the number of pirates, real and notional, increases, we could well find ourselves falling into a global cooling period, like the Little Ice Age  of the 1700s (after which, as we know, piracy began to fall and global temperatures began to rise).

So, have a happy ITLAPD, but don’t get carried away and drive us off the cliff into the global cooling abyss!

When does one become a scientist?  Does it happen only when, in cap and gown, a university official confers on us the degree of Doctor of Philosophy?  Or is it further back when they confer the degree of Bachelor of Science (we all know what BS stands for; MS stands for More of the Same, while PhD is Piled Higher and Deeper, but I digress), or is it only later, when we begin to work independently?  Whenever it is, that spark, that drive for knowledge and understanding of the universe around us is ignited much earlier; my mother told me that one day she found me, at the age of 4 or 5, earnestly explaining to a lad twice my age all about the “Law of Gravelty”.  That spark was fanned to life when finally I encountered a high school Physics teacher who showed us the immensely satisfying beauty of a mathematical explanation of the world – or at least, as I began to discover, of the simplest parts of it.

Rocky Mountain Rainbow

Driving in the Rockies a week ago we saw this magnificent rainbow, clear against the dark clouds.  Its other end came down high up on the mountainside beyond the trees to our right.  Yes, it once was gold mining country, but no, we didn’t grab our shovels and hike up the mountain to claim that legendary Pot O’ Gold!

See how the arc of the rainbow is reflected in the lines on the road curving toward it, how the light beyond the trees mirrors the light in the bow.

Science instills a way of thinking – relentless, analytical, logical, but with its own particular beauty.  It is a beauty that adds to the world we see around us, not subtracts.  Understanding the origin of a rainbow does not detract from its beauty; quite the opposite, it enhances it because it feeds the brain as it feeds the sight. 

When I was a student the area of Physics that I found most satisfying was Statistical Thermodynamics (what? even the name sounds like some kind of medieval torture, or a giant tome in a library, covered in dust from centuries of neglect).  It was not something I would remotely consider spending my life doing, but what excited me was the realization that, by considering the random motions of individual molecules of gas you could construct the Ideal Gas Laws that describe the interdependence of pressure, volume and temperature in gases, that you could actually deriving from first principles the way gases behave.  From a few underlying equations derived from observation and logic you could understand a compressor, a balloon, even a space rocket.

So you see, it is rocket science after all!