Posted by sim-o
December 18th, 2009
A lie, by definition, is something you say which you know is untrue. (The Iraq Inquiry may provide the right label for Tony Blair’s misleading statements.)
The vaguer category of ‘dishonest’ applies to all sorts of official statistics, as presented by the Government, in policing, immigration etc.
But how do you classify claims that are obviously false but are being provided by those who are apparently too stupid to understand them?
After an intro like that, whatever you say afterwards needs to be bulletproof. Unfortunately it doesn’t start well for Andrew Alexander. The first bit of gobbledegook is…
Smoking is an interesting area because the figures – intended to make your flesh creep – must be, by definition, false.
We are told that smoking ‘costs’ the National Health Service £1.7bn, or maybe £5bn. They are not just guesswork, they are patently contrary to common sense.
What definition of the figures? Why must they be false? They could be, but why ‘must’ they be? What are the real figures, then?
Andrew doesn’t say. The only figures Andrew quotes are the two numbers are in the above quote. He doesn’t say how much tax is raised from tobacco or anything mention any other numbers apart from the number 12 – the number of years he once gave up for.
We are told that smoking is a cause of lung cancer and heart disease and other potentially lethal disorders.
That may well be so.
But if smoking leads to premature deaths, it obviously saves the NHS money, since it is in old age that the cost of medical attention soars.
If we could all arrange to die at retirement age, the NHS would save an awful lot of money.
The whole article is written like this. I can just picture this guy sat tapping out this article in a dark room with his tinfoil hat on, curtains closed so ‘they’ can’t see what he’s up to. A cigarette with a long ash burning down in an ashtray filling the room with it’s blue smoke.
The problem is that not everyone just drops down dead. for many smokers, the unlucky ones that don’t die all of a sudden, death is a slow lingering one, full of respirators and pills and pain and pacemakers and amputations and transplants and regular visits to hospital and the gentle decline into a physical state that belies a persons real age.
All that care costs money. Money that is being prematurely spent on someones health.
Moreover, smoking is an appetite suppressant and may therefore reduce obesity, which is certainly a cause of heart disease, and other disorders, costing the health service an awful lot of money.
Smoking is not an appetite suppressant. If it was, you’d never see a fat person with a fag, would you? Obesity may be a cause of heart disease, but smoking causes lots of diseases too and also makes you lethargic, contributing to, yes obesity.
An outright lie is also included in the anti-smoking campaign.
Tobacco manufacturers have to warn purchasers that, among other things, ’smoking kills’.
If one said that prussic acid kills, it would be true. A more honest statement would be that tobacco can kill. Only the illiterate or mentally idle will fail to see the difference.
Only a pedantic denialist would bring it up.
Alas, there is something about smoking which damages the mind – of anti-smokers. Normal as they may be in other respects, they rave and rant about tobacco.
Anti-smokers, the ones that rant and rave, are generally ex-smokers. The reason they are so passionate is because i) in the back of their mind they are still addicted and the best form of defence for their will power is attack, or ii) they know first hand what being a smoker, the nasty side of smoking, is all about or iii) reasons i & ii together.
[Duncan] Bannatyne apparently had great trouble giving up many years ago. So he wants others to suffer, too.
Poor chap! I am sorry he found it so hard.
Andrew Alexander gave up too, for 12 years, but found it so easy, and had so much free cash and didn’t mind the smell or the panicky feeling of nearly running out of baccy in the middle of the night, that he went back to it. Oh, my mistake. he blames writers block.
I would watch a fellow pipe smoker as he sat down to do the same, slowly and thoughtfully filling his pipe (an art you have to master), finally lighting up and allowing that slow upward drift of the curling smoke.
Nice bit of romanticising there, eh?
Sensibly, I returned to the habit. Pipe-smoking is a very ruminative process. It creates the right spaces and pauses for a writer.
Smoking creates the spaces and pauses because the smoker is thinking about smoking, not writing. A non-smoker, goes for a walk or makes a cup of tea.
But we have not finished with the statistics yet. Second-hand smoke is claimed to cause many deaths and is the basis for tyrannical curbs on offices and pubs.
Finished with the statistics? I didn’t realise we had started with them.
This figure is arrived at by guesswork, inspired by hysteria, and masquerades as scientific ‘proof’ – a process which characterises our age.
If smoking isn’t as bad as Andrew says, and it is all assertion and opinion in this piece, then I would like to know if Andrew encourages and approves of his children, or if he doesn’t have any, his young relatives, smoking. If his son started smoking at, say, sixteen, would he slap him on the back and say ‘good decision, lad, you’ll really enjoy smoking. It’s great’.
Categories: Healthcare |
Tags: openly ignorant, smoking | 19 Comments
Posted by sim-o
December 17th, 2009
Categories: Front Pages |
26 Comments
Posted by Esqui
December 17th, 2009
On Tuesday, the Daily Express published an article entitled Climate Change is natural: 100 reasons why. Of course, we’ve come to expect differing views on climate change from some of the media (as well we should on any major world issue), but this article was not only on scientifically dodgy ground, the article itself is of a pretty poor journalistic standard as much of it is padding, hypocrisy or downright irrelevant. I’m not going to do much debunking of the scientific points raised, the New Scientist has done much of that already (and it’s well worth a read), but I will give some other reasons as to why the article is not what the Express was hoping it to be, and why many readers left comments such as “my 14 year old neighbour kid is able to disprove more than 50% of this so called arguments why climate change would be natural…”
Firstly, hypocrisy: This revolves around point 8 –
“The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.”
Assuming this to be true, we are told to discount man-made climate change because only 60 people have written in favour of it. The overwhelming implication is that climate change does not exist except in the minds of a minority of scientists, and that most scientists don’t believe it. Now let’s look at some other Daily Express reasons. How about points 12, 13, 15, 16, 21, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64, 70 and 76? What do these all have in common? The Express cites just one person as evidence for these theories, among them such non-experts as Denis Lilley MP, and Lord Lawson. Either we are to accept that evidence from one person is true, in which case the Express’ suggestion that 60 people is not evidence enough is not valid, or that over a tenth of the article can be discounted because ‘not enough’ people have supported the opinions.
Next – irrelevance: Some of the points bear no resemblance on the climate issue today. The quote from Peter Lilley (point 13) would seem to suggest that climate change is not natural because fewer British people believe in it. This would be good if what British people believed actually happened. Several million kids believe in Santa, doesn’t make him real (sorry if I just spoilt that for you). Others, such as point 29, state things such as “The climate was hottest 7000 years ago”. Again, bearing no relevance to today’s issue.
Next up, the problem of repetition: This is where much of the article falls down. As an example, read points 3, 5, 33 and 85. All of these are different ways of saying “CO2 levels were higher in the past”, and reading through the article brings up more topics which seem to be repeated. The Express also seems to have used the copy/paste function more than once, with many points having the exact same wording, for example the number of points beginning “The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team…” – which is rather lazy journalism, if nothing else.
We also have arguments which seem to contradict the main point of the article: Point 88 intrigued me in this way. It says that CO2 has changed throughout history, and yet has been growing since the industrial revolution, and is still in constant growth. Again, I’m not arguing about the scientific content as that’s already been done, but I’m quite sure that one of the main points in favour of anthropogenic climate change is rising CO2 levels from industry.
And finally, a lot of the “reasons” are not reasons at all. Much of the article contains things which aren’t arguments against man-made climate change at all. Take for example points 40, 43, 44 and 45. These all mention that increasing CO2 levels are good in some way, for example, promoting crop growth. Try reading these in relation to the title: “Climate change is natural because… The increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution”. One does not follow from the other. Another example here, would be the government-bashing point 60. What they’re saying with that is: “Climate change is natural because…The UK ’s environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55 billion, before taking into account the impact on its economic growth.” The cost of the UK’s environmental policy has no bearing on whether climate change is natural or man-made. The final one which caught my eye was point 79:
“Since the cause of global warming is mostly natural, then there is in actual fact very little we can do about it. (We are still not able to control the sun).”
As anyone with even a grasp of persuasive writing would attest, giving arguments which already assume the point you’re trying to put across is useless. It’s akin to saying “Because I say so” (which I’m surprised is not one of the points).
The Express feature is clearly designed to provide those who are sceptical about man-made climate change with some back-up of their views. The article looks like was titled before it was written – it’s a great premise, but the writer has not been able to find 100 reasons why climate change is natural. Instead, what has been published are a couple of reasons why climate change is natural (repeated numerous times), several facts about how hot the temperature was a few thousand years ago, some appropriate quotes from individuals who either have no scientific standing or only their own, possibly unverified research to draw on, and an overwhelming number of completely irrelevant points which are somewhat to do with climate change.
So why is there such a bias against man-made climate change in some papers? The answer, in my opinion is simple: they are reassuring their readers that their current lives are OK, and they’ve no need to change. The Mail, especially, is read by a huge number of people who are well-off and successful. Those same people might well be put off by their newspaper of choice telling them that what they’re doing could bring about major negative changes in their lives unless they inconvenience themselves to stop it. Climate is a hot topic (pardon the pun), and as with any such issue, there will be people on both sides. Some papers have picked up on this (on both sides of the question), and have been looking for any research which supports the views they want to put across to their readers (who want, in turn, to be able to justify their choices to others), and ignore anything in the research that could negate the point they’ve taken from it.
But whatever side a paper aligns itself with, there is no substitute for well-researched, well-thought-out articles. The Express took a gamble here, coming up with the premise of 100 reasons, and such features have worked (especially for the Independent), but here, the content was not up to the headline. It’s a commendable idea, but without being able to fully support the headline, the Express has fallen short.
However, we should note that it hasn’t failed completely. It’s aim was to give those sceptical to anthropogenic climate change a myriad points to back up and confirm their views, and maybe even convert a few undecideds. Which it will undoubtedly have done.
Categories: Environment, Media, News |
8 Comments
Posted by sim-o
December 16th, 2009
Categories: Front Pages |
25 Comments
Posted by sim-o
December 15th, 2009
Categories: Front Pages |
9 Comments
Posted by sim-o
December 14th, 2009
Categories: Front Pages |
8 Comments
