Another of those hockey-stick trends

Climate Change

Man-made climate change blamed for ‘significant’ rise in ocean temperature is about the rate of rise of ocean temperature in the top 700 m, with a finding of significant rise over the 1993-2008 period of the study. A little more exegesis in A worrying set of results for marine life – and for humans.

Unlike the Bullingdon Club members who could easily pay the bill for trashing a place for fun, if we do not start soon we will be unable to pay the bill for the planet trashing we are doing and will be thrown into a hostile world. We seem to be under the spell of The Markets.

REWORK and the NHS

Politics & Society

I read about Ramon Niekrash, a surgeon at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, who was suspended for raising concerns about patient care: NHS targets and secrecy are hurting patients. He took his case to an employment tribunal and won. I was stuck by the information that, He was suspended on 9 April 2008 for “excessive” letter writing and because two senior managers from the surgical department had complained, in writing, on the same day, about his conduct, attitude and, most worryingly, his clinical competence. He was writing letters about his concerns for patient care. Apart from the personal issues and the patient safety issues something is seriously wrong when a publicly funded organization is determined to keep its problems secret. This fits with the book I read recently Putting Patients Last.

REWORK (in my reading list) has many recommendations that could be applied. I realize that there is a difference in scale between an organization of 10 people and one of 1.5 million but the NHS consists of hospital departments and surgeries where there are 10s of people that in many ways work autonomously, though linked for patient care. So there may be things to learn and apply from small organizations. One piece of advice is “hire managers of 1″, which in the context of the NHS would mean keeping management minimal and local to the department. It seems from the Ramon example that the department is in the service of the ‘higher’ management, whereas the ‘higher’ management should be in the service of the departments. This fits with the mission statement of putting patients first; the clinicians are in the service of the patients and the administrative staff should be in the service of the clinical staff. In particular this is not to imply a hierarchy of power merely a flow of service. REWORK has rough comment on Mission Statements!

The management’s concern for the good of the universal NHS (to steal a recent (mis)quote from somewhere else) is clearly more to do with self protection than public protection. By this I do not mean to blame individual managers anymore than one can blame any creature that finds a niche from growing and protecting itself. We are all to blame for not doing what Ramon did and demand openness and honesty in public organizations.
A wonderful comment has come from the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, Sir Norman Bettison: I’m not worth £213,000. This wage bill is mad. He comments on the Sheehey recommendation that top public sector jobs should match private sector CEO pay: “What nonsense! Furthermore, it now looks to have been costly and irresponsible nonsense. People join, and remain in, the public sector because of a sense of vocation — to make a difference to society or to the quality of people’s lives. The best leaders are those who can secure long-term public value and a vision for their staff. Not some mercenary performance manager peddling a short-term fix.”

Ecobuild

Energy Sustainability

I visited the ecobuild exhibition in London last week mainly to see what firms were offering products that would clad a non-cavity wall to reduce heat loss. I found some and will be following up with quotations from them. Details will appear on my permanent page about this in a few weeks time.

I looked round the whole exhibition and noted the large number of stands for photovoltaic panels and some for heat pumps. Although the PV technology is still evolving, and I will keep checking what is on offer over the next two years, I was encouraged by the effort now be made on technologies that can reduce our CO2 emissions.

Politically the situation does not reflect this. Here are two excellent articles on global warming politics: The Attack on Climate-Change Science & The Wrong Kind of Green. Fortunately many developers and manufacturers are working to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

Excellent comment on science, using climate science as example

Climate Change, Science & Mathematics

I don’t think it could be better expressed in the same number of words: Climate scientists must be ruthlessly honest about data. My own view of a few weeks ago was too forgiving. I thought the science is really OK so I will allow the means to justify the end. David Colquhoun is totally right; science works best through openness. If scientists are being targeted because of the results of their research, that research can only become better if the whole methodology is open for review by anyone. The mitigating circumstance is also mentioned – targets and target-decided funding decided by those who do not do research.

And out of iniquity came forth goodness

Politics & Society

Founders of British obstetrics ‘were callous murderers’ and The incredible story of the most important woman in the history of modern medicine. The research on which the first article is based presents circumstantial evidence that the pioneers of obstetrics, Hunter and Smellie between 1749 and 1774 procured the death of women (probably rural girls who had come to the city and could disappear without questions) in various stages pregnancy in order to study the details of the anatomy of the process. The second article is about cervical cancer cells taken from a slave descended woman in 1951 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The woman died but these cells have been propagated for research ever since as they propagated aggressively in culture, with an estimated mass of cells to date of millions of tonnes. Neither she nor her children have had any benefit from this use, but commercial companies have enjoyed large incomes and the cells have been invaluable in helping develop treatments.

These histories bring to mind the Christian hymn, God moves in a mysterious way, written by William Cowper who wrote an anti slavery poem, The Negro’s complaint, and was a friend of John Newton at one time a slave ship commander (after spending time as a slave himself) who wrote Amazing Grace and who presided at the funeral of William Cowper. The tortuous sentence is meant to match the tortuous history.

Scientists as mere humans

Climate Change, Politics & Society, Science & Mathematics

Having read many biographies of scientists and mathematicians, after my school and university days uncritical admiration of scientists, I know they are a mixed lot of personality types like any other grouping of people. From Galileo to Newton to Einstein one finds behaviour that is not always admirable. Newton was especially ruthless in trying to eliminate rivals; the comment about standing on the shoulders of giants (in a letter to Robert Hooke) that is often used to show his humility was also a put-down for Robert Hooke who was a person of small stature. Newton is thought to have destroyed the painting of Hooke at the Royal Society. Etc.

The revelations about scientists studying climate change is therefore no surprise to me: Climate scientists shut out sceptics by turning down data requests. See Simon Jenkins in full swing too: Scientists, you are fallible.

But Newton and others did have deep insights that have proved true (rather partially true in the way that all science is) inspite of their personality failings. So just as some sports people have unorthodox personal lives but play amazing games, let us not throw out the science when focussing on the personality frailities of scientists.

I agree with Simon Jenkins that the humanities are being seen as mere entertainment value yet they are also vital to our survival.  The human natures that we can explore though literature and history are neglected to our detriment: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq showed a profound lack of historical perspective. Here is sad news that another world-view has been lost; that which comes with each of the world’s different languages: Ancient tribal language becomes extinct as last speaker dies.

Fear not radiation

Books, Science & Mathematics

Radiation and Reason, Wade Allison, 2009

In summary this book presents evidence to show that there is no known harm to us for radiation levels that do not exceed 100 millisieverts per month, with a cautious life-time limit (for now, maybe it could be higher) of 5,000 millisieverts. The International Commission for Radiological Protection limit is 1 millisievert per year so the argument is that this is about 1000 times too restrictive.

The Sievert is an attempt to give a unit to effects of radiation in living tissue. Although other units have to be used in particular situations for precision, the book is not concerned with fine detail and everything is assessed via the millisievert.

Cornwall in the UK has background radiation at 8 millisieverts per year, and that is as high as anywhere in the country. Cancer radiation treatment is 1000 to 10,000 millisieverts in a session, though this is meant to be targeted on the tumour with geometry to minimize radiation in healthy tissue. Numbers such as these present the arena for the discussions in the book.

The aim of the presentation is to suggest that safety limits could be relaxed a thousand fold, thereby making fission nuclear power stations cheaper; they must be structurally robust with multiple fail-safe mechanisms, but they do not need to be so radiologically protective. Especially decommissioning should be much easier and cheaper and not the huge bogeyman that it is currently made to be.

Prof Allison is not doing this to win favour with the nuclear industry but because, like me and others, he is concerned for the human future because of global warming. We have to take a balanced view of risks.

There are good simple discussions of radioactive decay, atomic weapons and nuclear power reactors, and the biological effects of radiation. Even so the book is not for the innumerate or those lacking any scientific background. I would hope that it might be read by policy makers and their advisors. I notice that he is the publisher of the book so I hope he has persuaded the publisher to send a few copies to UK MPs and European MEPs.

The most pertinent discussion is on biological effects of radiation. He points out that the no-safe-dose idea is totally wrong – there is a threshold at which irreversible damage occurs and below that cell repair mechanisms deal with any damage. In fact in morbidity studies people with exposure to radiation lower than the limit he suggests seem to live longer: a little radiation may be a good thing. He makes a good analogy with sunbathing (page 34): too much sun bathing causes damage to skin and sometimes skin cancer, but too little exposure leads to lack of Vitamin D. The demolition of the Linear No-Threshold and Collective Dose models is excellent. There is analysis of Japanese survivors of the atomic bombs of 1945 with the amazing statistic that those who survived to 1950 had only a 4 in 1000 chance of dying of radiation induced cancer.

There is an excellent contrast made between current fossil fuels and nuclear fuel. Fossil fuels put CO2 into the air where it dilutes and distributes globally as well as toxic substances that are then buried but never lose their toxicity. The nuclear waste from a power station after reprocessing is much smaller in volume by a factor of about a million, and any radiation dangers decrease with time; these are volumes we can cope with.

Although he does not point it out explicitly, when people mention long half-life they often miss that this means low activity, the high activity nuclear products have short half-life (maybe years) so if we wait a reasonable time they make themselves safe. 

Page 108 has a table of deaths from various disasters in which the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island reactor accidents are at the low end counting for about 50 and zero deaths. My own favourite comparison (not in this table) is with traffic accident deaths that are in the range 40,000 to 50,000 per year in the EU: a Hiroshima and Nagasaki every two years.

There is a good discussion of the differences between nuclear refinement for power stations versus weapons, though this may not be as easy a political issue as the discussion suggests. Compare Nuclear arms will soon proliferate. So here’s a plan to scrap them all.

I found the suggestion on page 159 that people should be given devices to enable them to ‘see’ radiation levels a bit naive as I suspect that interpretation of what we have not evolved to see takes expertise. Just consider how people are assessing their sense of global warming from experience. I think that better general science education is the key.

I have never myself had a problem with the technology of nuclear power, but I thought that the costs probably made it non-viable. This book attempts to address the cost issue but we need some new careful estimates of costs given the proposed relaxation of safety limits that the book does not provide. David Mackay, Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, provides some rough guides for this.

I await a review of the book by someone with expertise in radiobiology to see what weakness there is in the argument.

Finally I agree totally with the comments on page 194 about specialization. Although each of us may have some specialty we need to have the big picture of how the specialties connect up and be able to see where we are being led.

My minor quibbles:
That the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a military and political success (page 5) I think is still debateable. I think the statement was meant to contrast with the lasting suspicion of nuclear power he mentions ever after those events but feels a bit gung-ho.

For anyone who cannot work it out for themselves the graph on page 121 comparing chronic and repeated doses of radiation would not help. I found it confusing at first.

Another odd slip for an otherwise good simple description of the physics of fusion and fission is on page 134 where it says that the neutron being uncharged can enter straight through the coulomb barrier: rather, for the uncharged neutron, there is no coulomb barrier.

On page 133 there is a dismissive footnote on cold fusion that says “predictably, its hopes have not been realised.” I admit that when I first heard about it 1989 I felt it impossible that it could work; now I am not so sure and I certainly don’t think it is predictable that it does not. The footnote just above this one mentions quantum tunnelling so there is clearly a non-zero probability that cold fusion will happen, a minute probability in free space but maybe much greater in some material lattice. I still think it unlikely, but I would not want to be totally dismissive.

Trust evolution

Science & Mathematics

It seems that not wearing running shoes is best for the foot when running: The Barefoot Professor. Bare-foot runners do not land on the heel but on the more flexible (and therefore shock-absorbing) forefoot: the pad under the distal metatarsal joints. I found this presentation fascinating for two reasons. First I had an interest in foot biomechanics some years ago that started with a marathon runner. The ‘heel strike’ mentioned in the video has a resonance for runners because the impact pulse really does travel up the spine. The problem not mentioned is sharp debris that might be in one’s path. The bigger message for me was that this ‘back to basics’ must be a useful starting point in checking any solutions we develop to improve on what evolution has already provided for us. Having developed a shoe, it seemed that the obvious route was to improve it for running rather than to improve on no-shoe for running.

On the matter of foot cuts and infections from running barefoot a distant memory surfaced. My English teacher at school, Mr Oswald Alan Thorpe, had been with the British Army in Europe in WWII. Among his many stories (this was less than 10 years after the end of the war) he mentioned how he used to walk barefoot as much as possible so that the soles of his feet became ‘as tough as old leather’. So after a few weeks of running barefoot you won’t have a problem if you watch out for larger debris as you go.

Tony Blair’s War

Politics & Society

I remember Bryan Gould from the early 1960s and liked his approach when he became an MP. Here he has come up with something that I gave my view on in this blog some weeks ago. He has had some insider experience so it is comforting to know that his view is the same as mine – Tony Blair saw himself as a World Statesman and wanted to consolidate that position: The real reason for the Iraq war. We never escape our inner nature. Here is a small comment on the outer natures of some politicians that relates to Brian’s point: Don’t give up the day job – how artists make a living, ‘ A recent waitressing shift at the Houses of Parliament didn’t go quite so well: “It was one of the most ­horrendous days of my life – everyone treated you as if you were scum. I wanted to cry, and on my way out I said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t make tomorrow’s shift.'” ‘. This points to the same inner natures that lead to some making unjustified expense claims.

I wonder what inner nature drives the target policy: This social work by computer system is protecting no one. I think we need more human-human interaction than human-machine interaction [message to myself!] The two humans can also both be oneself in introspection.

Yet some tick boxes can be good: The doctor taking safety to new heights. The problem is that we cannot avoid having to make judgements; there are no eternal rules. Some religions think there are, some don’t. My favourite Buddhist story is where Gautama is told by people that some come and tell them one thing and others come and tell something different so what does he think they should believe. He tells them to think it out for themselves.

Scientists correct results

Climate Change, Global Warming

See what difference a headline makes World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown. This comment ends with “The revelation is the latest crack to appear in the scientific consensus over climate change”. I think that the consensus is that still glaciers are melting and the long-term temperature of the earth is increasing. The timescale of the Himalayan melting has been corrected. It did seem to me that it was faster than seemed likely when I read the report and it does disappoint that the IPCC passed this estimate, but the big message is: if something is wrong it will be corrected because that is what scientists do. This is to be compared to the continual evasion of people who try to trash the evidence for CO2 caused global warming: Please, show us your code is remarkable exchange on the idea that the recent warming is due to changes in the sun, rather than greenhouse gases.