Beware environmental scientists bearing news about our health and intelligence

SOME sound advice about where to get advice from - which cuts both ways.

Not a scientist. Queensland Greens senator-elect Larissa Waters in The Sydney Morning Herald on January 30:

LORD Monckton is not a scientist, he's an architect. You don't get tax advice from a chiropractor - so you shouldn't take climate advice from an architect.

Not an economist. David Suzuki on ABC TV Lateline on Friday:

JUST the act of living - we've got to breathe air, drink water, eat food, clothe, shelter ourselves - with so many people all of that stuff that we use comes out of the earth. And so just the act of living means we have a huge ecological footprint. Takes a lot of land, space, water and air to support us. We have a huge amount of technology that delivers our clothes and our cars and TVs, and all of that comes out of the earth.

Leigh Sales: Economists argue that human enterprise and resourcefulness will allow us to deal with those challenges. Do you accept that?

Suzuki: Absolutely not. I mean we - economists think we're so bright we're not wedded to the fact that we live in a finite world. And any organism living within limited boundaries is going to ultimately hit limits. Economists think, "Oh, we're so bright. When we hit a shortage we're either going to find an alternative or invent new ways of doing the same thing." And we have been unbelievably resourceful in that. But they think, "Well, we could go to the moon and start mining that and pick up asteroids."

Or a doctor. Suzuki on Lateline:

IN North America it's claimed that we carry over 1lb (0.5kg) of plastic dissolved in our bodies. So why are we surprised then that 15 per cent of our kids have asthma; that the rates of breast cancer in women are skyrocketing? You can't have a healthy population when you're treating the very things that keep us alive - air, water and the land - as a garbage can.

Irrational sceptics. Ben Cubby in The Age, September 20:

AS the physical science underpinning human-induced climate change has grown more and more solid, more people have been growing sceptical of it, according to the paper "The Psychology of Global Warming", published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. "Simply presenting the facts and figures about global warming has failed to convince large portions of the general public, journalists and policymakers about the scale of the problem and the urgency of required action," the paper says. Two Sydney researchers, psychology lecturer Ben Newell and climate scientist Professor Andy Pitman, identified perfectly normal psychological phenomena that can turn people into climate "deniers". The first concerns "sampling issues" - people normally try to refer to real-life examples to draw conclusions and may be heavily influenced by recent media coverage. People are also influenced by "framing issues" - dealing with how information is presented to them. People construct mental models to judge new information, and these models are usually built only on a few fragments of information.

Rational scepticism. Adele Horin in the SMH on Saturday:

AT the time Mary MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of leukemia, there was a lot of static in the air. In China 43 million people were dying of starvation. Thirty years later when MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of lung cancer, 3.8 million were dying in the Congo wars, 800,000 in the Rwanda genocide. Doubtless there were Christians praying to God, Jesus, angels, saints or favoured religious personages to intercede. All these prayers, we have to imagine, were transmitted through the ether, and finding their intended host only to be coldly ignored . . . And what of those cancer sufferers who prayed to MacKillop but did not go into remission? Has the Vatican checked out this control group? . . . Journalists and broadcasters report the two "miracles" as fact, instead of as claims, or "alleged" miracles, or even as hocus-pocus . . . If Kathleen Evans had ascribed her remission from lung cancer to crystal therapy or Reiki healing would the media have taken it all so seriously?

[e-mail]