Last year, I wrote a piece for BoingBoing about destructive storm systems and why it's so difficult to say, in concise sound-bite form, what relationship that destruction has to climate change. In that case, we were talking about tornadoes. But over the last couple of days, lots of people have been having roughly the same conversations about Hurricane Sandy. When the clouds have passed and everybody is done sleeping in airports, people are going to want answers. Was this an unavoidable act of nature? Or was this something caused directly by changes to Earth's climate that have happened because we burn fossil fuels which increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

Again, there's not an easy answer. And, again, part of the problem here is that we're expecting science to operate on the scale of American media news cycles, which doesn't really work. We want to talk about this while the storm is raging or, barring that, at least immediately afterwards. But scientists aren't really going to have anything particularly deep to say about this specific storm for months, if not years. During that time, data will be analyzed and compared, and other events will happen, and that's really the stuff that we need in order to say much of anything other than, "We don't know for certain." In some ways, expecting anything else means forcing scientists to speculate and extrapolate in ways they aren't usually comfortable with and that aren't a terribly great way to understand the big picture.

But there's also something new, that I kind of didn't really think about when I was writing that post on the tornadoes. The answer to these questions also really depends on the motivations behind why you asked, and what it is that you really want to know.

First off, you should know that this kind of extreme (and extremely weird) storm system happening in fall or winter is a trend that some scientists had already been predicting. Those predictions stem from the steep reduction in quantities of sea ice in the North Atlantic and what we know (and think we know) about how that change affects climate patterns and storm formation as a whole.

Remember the times that we've talked about how climate change can, seemingly paradoxically, lead to heavier snowfall in winter? This is connected to that. Here's how Kate Spinner with The Herald Tribune explained it:

A big bubble of high pressure, with sinking air that moves clockwise, is interrupting the typical steering patterns in the atmosphere. That high pressure creates a blockage, backing up the jet stream so that it bends south, eventually looping north again, instead of flowing toward the east as usual.

The blocking pattern, centered just south of Greenland, will significantly slow the eastward-moving cold front once it reaches the coast. And it will steer Sandy into the U.S. rather than allowing it to turn east.

Blocking events are the force behind a lot of crazy weather anomalies, not just hurricanes. And there's evidence suggesting that, as the ice in the Arctic melts, the frequency and/or intensity of the blocking events may be increasing. The Climate Crocks blog did a nice interview about this a few months ago with Jennifer Francis, who studies marine and coastal sciences at Rutgers.

There's more on this from Francis, and other scientists, at Andy Revkin's DotEarth blog.

Another thing worth taking into account: Weather is a lot more complicated than you think it is. If it rains today — or if it doesn't rain — there are lots of different, interacting factors that influenced that outcome. A good way to think about it is like a plane crash. It is very, very rare for a plane crash to be caused by a single mistake. Instead, when you're reading the final report, you find that lots of things have to go wrong all at the same time. Even then, you still might not get an accident if the mix of mistakes that happen don't interact with each other in such a way as to make them all worse than the sum of their parts.

Plane crashes are complicated. And so is weather. That matters, because it means that Hurricane Sandy could be both a completely natural occurrence and a product of climate change. Simultaneously. Some of the factors that caused this storm might be nature-made. Others might be man-made. And teasing apart which factors were responsible for which aspect of the storm's damage is incredibly hard.

Greg Laden, an anthropologist who does some very good blogging on climate science, had a lot to say on this topic — particularly, the fact that even though we can't say "Hurricane Sandy was caused solely by climate change", we can say that climate change is probably affecting several factors that probably influence the development, growth, and movement of hurricanes.

It is often said that storms are going to happen anyway, but global warming ramps up the probability, which is akin to saying that there is always going to be variation in temperature or some other weather related factor but global warming raises the baseline. That’s true. But the corollary to that is NOT that you can’t link climate change to a given storm. All storms are weather, all weather is the immediate manifestation of climate, climate change is about climate. Before we started talking about global warming, storms were caused by … things. Climate things. Did we ever say, back in the 1950s when a hurricane hit Florida, “Oh, ya, that was some hurricane, but the thing is, you can’t really attribute a given hurricane to the Intertropical Convergence Zone’s relationship to warm Mid Atlantic currents. The former is a weather event and the latter is a climate system.” Why did we not ever say that? Because it would have been irrelevant, even dumb.

The truth is, we experience more Atlantic severe storms because of global warming, though we are still working out the details of which features of which kinds of storms are affected most. Beyond this, it may well also be possible that something I hinted at above is true: We may be experiencing kinds of storms today that were very rare in recent centuries, because of global warming.

Adam Frank at NPR also wrote a good post on this subject. In it, he explains another issue that muddies the waters. When we say that weather is complicated and that a storm is caused by the interaction of lots of different factors, what we are really saying is that weather is a system. Just like climate is a system. Currently, there are some systems that science understands better than others. Hurricanes are, unfortunately, pretty far down on the list.

There is a hierarchy of weather events which scientists feel they understand well enough for establishing climate change links. Global temperature rises and extreme heat rank high on that list, but Hurricanes rank low. As the IPCC special report on extreme events put it "There is low confidence in any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity (i.e., intensity, frequency, duration), after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities."

The reasons for "low confidence" are manifold. Some part of the caution comes from the complexity of the problem, and some part comes from the lack of good data before the satellite era (about 1970). Thus, many climate scientists will not want to go out on a limb for hurricanes. They just don't have the tools to make strong inferences.

This is not to say progress isn't being made. One thing that does seem clear is that warmer oceans (a la global warming) mean more evaporation, and that likely leads to storms with more and more dangerous rainfall of the kind we saw with Hurricane Irene last year. In addition, a paper published just last month, used records of storm surges going back to 1923 as a measure of hurricane activity. A strong correlation between warm years and strong hurricanes was seen. Thus if you warm the planet, you can expect more dangerous storms.

Basically, we know that the effects of climate change probably has an impact on factors that cause massively destructive storms — even if we don't know exactly how much of an impact; even if we can't really use that information to exactly predict what's going to happen with massive storms in the future; and even if we can't tell you whether Sandy, specifically, was caused by climate change.

So, really, the answer to the question, "What is the relationship between Hurricane Sandy and climate change", depends primarily on why you're asking the question.

If you're just kind of curious and/or looking for something to blame, we don't have great answers on that yet. I'm sorry. Nobody is really going to be able to tell you one way or the other.

But if you're using that question as a proxy to really ask, "Is climate change real and do I have to care about it?", well, good news! We have enough information to answer your question. And the answer is, emphatically, yes.

Read More:
Besides the links I included in the story, I want to point you towards a couple more Hurricane Sandy-related things:
• NOAA's Storm Central has all the maps, satellite images, and projections of Sandy that a concerned citizen (or giant nerd) could want
• The director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness would like you to know that we are seriously, seriously NOT prepared for big disasters
• Atlantic City is totally flooded
• Marketplace Tech Report has a really fascinating piece on the future of weather forecasting
• If you're in Sandy's path and aren't really clear what to do with your pets, read this
• The NASA Satellite video will haunt your nightmares
• Meanwhile, the news that the satellites we rely on for forecasts of hurricanes are aging rapidly (and there aren't great plans to replace them) will create your nightmares
• Use this handy slider to compare Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/29/did-climate-change-cause-hurri.html/feed 36 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/27/autism-is-more-than-a-parasite.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/27/autism-is-more-than-a-parasite.html#comments Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:23:22 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=178238

The New York Times Sunday Review had an article this week linking autism with the hygiene hypothesis. Written by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, the piece is part of the Times' opinion coverage, not reported news. It was also one of those sort of stories that comes across as highly persuasive ... until you start looking at the details. About halfway through reading it yesterday, it occurred to me that Velasquez-Manoff was making a lot of big statements—"perhaps 1/3 of autism, and very likely more, looks like a type of inflammatory disease", for example—without citing the sources to back those statements up.

That's easy to do when you're writing a relatively short article summarizing the contents of a much bigger book, as Velasquez-Manoff seems to be doing here. But the problems go deeper than that, according to biologist and science writer Emily Willingham. In a must-read blog post, she goes through the NYT piece and points out many flaws in argument and detail. The main problem, though, is a pretty simple one: Moises Velasquez-Manoff presents what seems to be a largely speculative hypothesis as sure-fire truth. To make that case as persuasive as it is, he leaves out lots of evidence that doesn't match up with his thesis.

First, he appears to describe autism as a “parallel epidemic” with autoimmune diseases, even though a careful review of the literature shows that there likely isn’t an “epidemic” of autism. I'm also having trouble finding any data to confirm an epidemic of autoimmune diseases (he provides no sourcing), although I find that incidence rates in general seem to go up with improvements in diagnostic tools, a scenario that is common with application of new technologies in many diseases and disorders. Without that parallel or even confirmation of either "epidemic," his carefully constructed, fragile “if that, then this” scenario suffers from that point on.

...Velasquez-Manoff then asks, “What has happened to the modern immune system?” and goes on to assert that the concepts underlying the “hygiene hypothesis” also underlie autism and correlations between autism and maternal autoimmune disorders or asthma. An “evolutionary answer,” he says, is that we are no longer sufficiently riddled with parasites and microbes (we actually still have our microbes), so our immune system, twiddling its presumably heroic thumbs, casts its roving eye elsewhere--i.e., on ourselves. See, people who still live with parasites, he says, “don’t suffer from inflammatory diseases as much as we do” (italics mine). “We,” I assume, being the clean people of the western world. No sources given, and that assertion does not dovetail with, for example, what we know about asthma rates in Latin America (really high) versus Western Europe (not so high), although in places where things like leprosy, parasitic worm infections that include river blindness, and nasty bacterial eye infections are high, type 1 diabetes is low. Raise your hand if you're willing to make that tradeoff. And then he says, “Autism also follows this pattern” and “seems to be less prevalent in the developing world.”

... when you’re dealing with intestinal parasites and their friends, you and your government may not really have the time to go around carefully diagnosing developmental disorders. I suffered through his unsourced dismissal of epidemiologists who say as much, and I just about had a coronary when he cited “at least one (unnamed) Western doctor” (the best kind, you know) who had found autism was “nearly nonexistent” in a Cambodian population “rife with parasites and acute infections.” Um… if, as Velasquez-Manoff seems to argue, maternal infection sets the stage for maternal immune dysfunction and presumably autism, how is it that a population rife with acute infections evades autism? He doesn’t ever name the “Western doctor,” but autism does exist in Cambodia, and while we’re at it, here are a few other things Cambodian children must endure because they’ve got this great “evolutionary”-based existence that 'protects' them against autism.

Willingham's basic point: There is an atmosphere of desperation and panic surrounding autism, which has lead some parents to try a range of risky interventions in the hopes of "curing" it. Given that, maybe it's irresponsible to claim that a hypothetical factor in autism is the absolute cause. Especially when the proposed treatment—intentional infection with parasitic whipworms—comes with its own downsides, including growth retardation in children, anemia, and even rectal prolapse.

Read the New York Times op-ed

Read the rest of Emily Willingham's response

Over at Download the Universe, Ars Technica science editor John Timmer reviews a science ebook whose science leaves something to be desired. Written by J. Marvin Herndon, a physicist, Indivisible Earth presents an alternate theory that ostensibly competes with plate tectonics. Instead of Earth having a molten core and a moveable crust, Herndon proposes that this planet began its existence as the core of a gas giant, like Jupiter or Saturn. Somehow, Earth lost its thick layer of gas and the small, dense core expanded, cracking as it grew into the continents we know today. What most people think are continental plate boundaries are, to Herndon, simply seams where bits of planet ripped apart from one another.

The problem is that Herndon doesn't offer a lot of evidence to support this idea.

Once the Earth was at the center of a gas giant, Herndon thinks the intense pressure of the massive atmosphere compressed the gas giant's rocky core so that it shrunk to the point where its surface was completely covered by what we now call continental plates. In other words, the entire surface of our present planet was once much smaller, and all land mass.

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of this, figuring out the radius of a sphere that would have the same surface area as our current land mass. It was only half the planet's present size. Using that radius to calculate the sphere's volume, it's possible to figure out the density (assuming a roughly current mass). That produced a figure six times higher than the Earth's current density — and about three times that of pure lead. I realize that a lot of the material in the Earth can be compressed under pressure, but I'm pretty skeptical that it can compress that much. And, more importantly, if Herndon wants to convince anyone that it did, this density difference is probably the sort of thing he should be addressing. He's not bothered; the idea that the continents once covered the surface of the Earth was put forward in 1933, and that's good enough for him.

Herndon's book came out with the help of a vanity publishing house and Timmer uses it as an example of why peer review is important—it forces scientists with interesting ideas to actually present evidence and go through a process of answering questions about and explaining holes in that evidence. Even though peer review can be flawed, it's a much better system than not having any kind of vetting process available.

I noticed something else here, as well: The similarities in the way different kinds of badly done science often work. Even though Herndon can't present evidence supporting his theory, he can tell a good story about it. If I'm honest, the idea that, once upon a time, Earth was a gas giant is pretty appealing. As a story. It makes our planet seem more impressive. It gives a sense of a secret history known only to a few. It connects to familiar sounding things: Gas giants and Earth. And, if you don't know all the astronomical background that Timmer does, it sounds plausible.

That reminds me of something Pesco posted about recently: Creationist textbooks that teach kids that the Loch Ness Monster might be a surviving dinosaur and therefore evolution must be wrong. I learned high school biology from one of these textbooks. (In fact, that such arguments exist is one of those facts I have forgotten is not widely known information. My reaction when Pesco posted that story was to think, "Oh, right. I guess most of our readers don't know that already, do they?")

In a lot of ways, the Loch Ness Monster hypothesis is a lot like Herndon's Gas Giant Earth hypothesis. They both have storytelling appeal, especially a great sci-fi hook. They both offer access to secret knowledge. They both propose a connection between familiar ideas—a tactic that makes these hypotheses seem more accessible to lay people than the ideas they propose to replace. They both do a lot of hand-waving and mumbling when you start asking questions about the details.

I think that it can be legitimately really hard to tell the difference between science and pseudoscience. We want to know about the world around us. We often need scientific data to make useful decisions in our lives. But we can't just go out and do all the research ourselves because we have other stuff to do. We're each busy with our own area of expertise and don't have time to become experts in every question we're ever going to need an answer for. Specialization of labor is a bitch like that. At a certain point, we have to trust people who are experts in a given field to tell us what they've learned.

So how do we know who to trust?

I don't think I have a perfect answer for that, but looking at books like Herndon's and those Creationist biology texts, I have a couple suggestions:

1) If it makes a really nice story, ask for the details. (Good science usually makes a bigger deal out of the evidence than it makes out of the story. In fact, that's actually a problem many legit scientists have—they're better at talking about the details and data then they are at telling stories. But most of us respond to stories better than we respond to details and data.)

2) If the proof seems self-evident (i.e., it's just good common sense), ask more questions.

3) If believing the idea will make you smarter than the official experts, be suspicious. Experts aren't always right. But they do know their fields and experience does matter. Chances are, you're an expert in something. Say you knew how to bake pies really well. You'd be pretty suspicious if somebody who didn't bake (or didn't even really cook much) told you that you were making pies all wrong—and that they had a secret pie recipe that was better than yours. They might be right. It's worth taking a look at their evidence. But it also worth being skeptical.

4) If the studies used to prove it are really old, or if there's only a few of them, dig deeper. What looks like truth when you look at five research papers can very quickly become completely untrue when you look at 500. What sounds like a good idea when presented by it's originator can turn out to be terrible when you talk to a few other people. Try to get a sense of what the bulk of evidence is saying.

5) If you're told you can't trust any other sources of information (especially because of Big Conspiracy, or because so-and-so expert is a bad person in other areas of his or her life), be cautious. Replication is a powerful tool. It helps us get past accidental and intentional biases to see something closer to the truth. Suppressing replication is also powerful, because it leaves you with no way to check against bias.

Obviously, all these rules come with caveats. But I think they're a good place to start.

Read John Timmer's full review of Indivisible Earth at Download the Universe

Irradiating food doesn't make it radioactive, and it does kill dangerous bacteria, like the E.coli that killed many Europeans this summer. But it's also not a panacea against food poisoning and it's definitely not the most popular idea ever thought up. In a column in the New York Times, Mark Bittman examines the evidence behind irradiation, and how that evidence does and doesn't get considered in the choices we make about food.

When it comes to irradiation, you might need a primer. (I did.) Simply put, irradiation — first approved by the FDA in 1963 to control insects in wheat and flour — kills pathogens in food by passing radiation through it. It doesn’t make the food radioactive any more than passing X-rays through your body makes you radioactive; it just causes changes in the food. Proponents say those changes are beneficial: like killing E. coli or salmonella bacteria. Opponents say they’re harmful: like destroying nutrients or creating damaging free radicals.

Many people are virulently for or against. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, says that irradiation “could do for food what pasteurization has done for milk.” (The main difference between irradiation and pasteurization is the source of the energy used to kill microbes.) Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch — which calls irradiation “a gross failure” — told me it was “expensive and impractical, a band-aid on the real problems with our food system.”

There are a few people in the middle. Former assistant secretary of the Department of Agriculture (USDA) Carol Tucker-Foreman is mostly anti-, but said that if she ran a nursing home or a children’s hospital — a place where people with weaker-than-average immune systems were cared for — it “might be something I wanted to do.” Marion Nestle, a New York University nutrition professor and the author of “Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety” (and a food-movement icon), allows that “the bottom line is that it works pretty well if done right, and I’m not aware of any credible evidence that it does any worse harm to foods than cooking. But it isn’t always done right, and foods can become re-contaminated after irradiation.”