Stuff like this just makes me angry.

It's about a proposition by the UK government to show Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth at UK secondary schools. Remember, we're talking secondary schools here, not primary. These are kids who are well able to form their own opinions about topics, not 6-year olds who soak up everything you show them. The criticism is that

"Climate change is important, but it should be taught to children in a neutral and measured manner. Indoctrinating school children in this manner is unprecedented and unacceptable."

I like the second sentence, especially the words "unprecedented" and "unacceptable". What exactly, Mr Dimmock, do you call advertisements? From early on, children are bombarded with this shit (sorry there is no other way of saying this), advertisers specifically target children. Yet, this is acceptable?

Of course, there is a difference between advertisements and An Inconvenient Truth. Advertisements involved a lot of money, companies live from the revenue they provide. They lie, a lot of the time. Actually, they always lie, in some way, be it through the way they glorify or the claims they make about their product. They have a VERY specific target, namely to make people buy more stuff. And a lot of them very specifically target children at an early age. An Inconvenient Truth, on the other hand, is a documentary. It reports the facts. And - if you disagree with me here, scroll down to the post "Deniers" - they don't take a political side on an issue. Because politics has nothing to do with this discussion anymore. Climate change is fact. Man-made climate change is fact. So, an Inconvenient Truth is merely reporting the facts, maybe in a very flashy way, but not near as flashy as advertisements falsify the facts.

The inconvenient truth about An Inconvenient Truth is that it might make people become political. It might make them write to their MP to pressure for change. It gets people off their couches, makes them think, unlike ads that discourage any sort of thinking. And a public that thinks is the last thing some people wantt.

They caused over 17,000 deaths in 2005 in Scotland alone(1). They pollute the air. They contribute heavily to this country's obesity epidemic. There were 33.4 million of them in Britain in 2006, that's more than 1 every two people(2,3). They are a real health hazard, and a pain in the ass.

When I was just cycling to work, they constantly got in the way. They would pull out of a side road in front of me without signalling, slow me down at lights, as I have to make my way past the line of them. If there weren't so many of them, I would probably be at work in about 2/3 of the time it takes me now. Plus, they are a real danger. If one of them were to hit me (and that might happen faster than one would think, given the number of people I see making right turns while chatting on their phones, steering and shifting all with one hand), I'd be done for. Especially if it's one of these huge monsters you seem to see more and more of these days. If something with a record of killing 17,000 people in a year threatens my life, the reasonable thing would be to call the police.

But for some reason I think they would laugh at me. Actually, the government is supporting this killing. They are widening roads, investing in new roads, to allow the killers more room. And they will happily take the extra room you give them. It's shown that extending roads doesn't ease traffic congestion, it just causes more people to get on the road and fill the space.

But the car manufacturers have done such a good job telling us that we have a "right to drive," that the car offers "freedom," is "liberating." That's exactly what the joyful faces I see in cars as I zoom past them every morning express: liberation, a feeling of freedom from oppression. I'm sure that's also the feeling you get when you get your insurance bills, pay your fuel bill - I'm free! How liberating!

Hey isolate us from each other, each of us sitting in our little box. They make us grow fat - once you start using them, you can't go without them. You end up using them for every frustrating short journey, not realising that you spend more time sitting at lights and looking for a parking spot than driving. And when you realise that your waist starts expanding, you buy into the next craze: you sign up to a fitness studio to pay someone to make you feel as though you're living healthily. But I'm going off topic now.

One of the most fundamental things we need to do to improve our lives is very simple: stop buying into the religion that is car ownership, the bullshit that car manufacturers push on us, and free ourselves from excessive fuel and insurance bills - drive less! Use public transport, go for a walk, get on your bike!

Your head will thank you - you won't arrive at work drained and angry, but full of energy.
Your body will thank you - if you move a little, you won't feel like eating crap all the time, but crave a salad from time to time, starting a circle of healthier living.
Your wallet will thank you - petrol is getting more expensive all the time, you can cancel that parking permit and maybe even sell your parking spot to someone else who likes to feel frustrated sometimes? Oh, and cancel that gym membership, you never go anyway.

And, finally, the planet will thank you.

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(1) Road Accidents Statistics Scotland
(2) Department for Transport, Vehicle Licensing statistics
(3) National Statistics Online, Population Statistics

So, they've finally done it. After its privatisation a while ago, the Deutsche Bahn (now Die Bahn) has decided to enter the stockmarket. The first result: prices are rising by 2.9%, the second price increase in one year. While the German government preaches wanting to cut their emissions by over 50% (which isn't enough anyway, but that's a different issue altogether), Die Bahn is making sure people stay in their cars - or people who used to use the train now go out and buy a car, because it simply makes more economic sense to drive (at least if you car-pool).

The main argument for privatisation is usually an increase in efficiency: a private company has to try to make money, thus their service will be better than the service a publicly owned company provides. But there are certain services where profit simply has no place, such as hospitals and public transport. The train has to operate at a loss on certain parts of the network, because it provides a service to people living in remote areas. For a private company, especially one in the stockmarket, this doesn't make sense: if they aren't subsidised by the government, keeping parts of the network that produce a loss open is simply not profitable. This is why trains shouldn't be privatised. Britain is a prime example. The service is inefficient, the rail network falling apart, the fare system impossible to comprehend.

Generally, I'm not a big fan of the stockmarket. Actually, I think companies selling shares in the stockmarket is the source of a lot of problems: if I finally decide to switch my electricity supplier to a company claiming to protect the environment by using renewable sources, I don't feel too great finding the following statment on their website:

We believe that corporate responsibility is essential to the maintenance of financial strength and to the achievement of our core objective, which is to deliver sustained real growth in the dividend payable to our shareholders.

How exactly does this fit into their "green" credentials? It could be that there is a lot of money to be made with investing in renewable technologies, but I don't think that this will fit in with their core objective. Appearing "green" on the other hand will, because this way they catch idiots like me.

This leads to another, related, issue: as long as a company is in the stock market, it always has to put the interests of its shareholders before other interests. The interests of the shareholders are very simple: growth. More, more, more. Thus, the incentive is to "greenwash," to appear to care about the environment to attract business from well-meaning people. As Monbiot puts it, it's not evil people who will destroy our place on this planet. It's well-meaning people who switch their lights off, buying green products until the water is up to their necks.

As a scientist, I'm all for intelligent debate and scepticism about just about anything. In maths, we are told not to believe anything unless we can prove it, and it's good that way. Scepticism is what makes science work. Only when a scientific work has been through the tough peer-reviewing process and had a number of fellow scientist take the arguments apart to attempt to find a flaw, can we trust the result.

There are certain things that have been through plenty of peer-reviewing to be accepted as fact. For example, that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer. This is something smokers don't like to hear or admit to themselves (I certainly didn't when I smoked), but it's pretty dead certain and the link had been established quite a while ago. According to Wikipedia, the British Medical Journal published a comprehensive Meta-Analysis showing the link between passive smoke and cancer in 1997, yet it took us 10 years to get a consensus on the topic. One might wonder why. A Meta-Analysis is not exactly a hotly disputed article, the results in there have been exposed to all sorts of peer-reviewing and scrutiny. Yet, public opinion lagged 10 years behind.

The answer - or part of the answer - is actually quite obvious. If you're a big tobacco company (Philip Morris, for example) and you see a study like this, you don't like it. Yet, you can't really publish a peer-reviewed article proving the opposite, because that won't be possible. So the best thing you can do is create confusion. Confuse people (and people are easily confused) and they will start doubting just about anything, including scientific consensus. This is exactly what Philip Morris did: they established a nonprofit organisation, TASSC or "The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition" (what a lovely name) set out to confuse people about the facts. Executive director of this group was Steve Milloy, who has a great website, www.junkscience.com, trying to "protect" people from "scaremongering" and pushing out a lot of the articles meant to confuse people.

Why am I going on about this? Certainly, very few people will attempt to argue against the scientific consensus that smoking and cancer are somehow related, so eventually, science won. Unfortunately, our friends at the TASSC are at it again, this time with Global Warming. This initially sounded a bit too much like conspiracy theory to me, but it makes perfect sense. There is a lot of vested interest in NOT doing anything about global warming (can you say petrol company), so there is a lot of money out there to fund projects such as www.junkscience.com to confuse people. And while the oil companies go green on the outside, they can't become part of the solution, as they are the problem. Thus, they need to attempt to preserve the status quo. Stick their head in the sand. And make sure plenty of other people stick their heads in the sand along with them. The best way to do that is to confuse people - by labelling peer-reviewed articles as "junk science" and their own "results" as "real science".

With smoking, science won in the end. After 10 years. The problem is, we don't have 10 years. We are already late with our policies to reduce emissions. We need to act. NOW. We need to be smarter than the vested corporate interest expressed at www.junkscience.com, look through the crap they push on us. There is no more time for discussion. It's time for action.