Festivals. I justha really want to say thak you to all of you for coming out today and having come out for 15 years. I also want to say thank you Madison Public Library for taking this event on when it was unsure whether someone would and for giving us this beautiful space to keep putting on the fence for the public in medicine and just in where you came from today. I also wantt to thank the madisn Public Library foundation. They do all the private fundraising. It keeps these events free and t open to the public. Weve been doing this is our fifth festival at Madison Public Library at all our events have been free. We can break even about that and we hope you do, too. I want to say a huge thank you h to them and to all the sponsors who helped put on this festival throughout the years. I would ask you now to please silence your cell phones. That goes for date as well. And probably me. Youve got to check. I really would just like to start my introduction today by saying im not a scientist but i really believe that book festivals are a solution to Climate Change. [laughing] and their data. Im not going toat shoji right w but just believe it. Ru its true. I think weve all heard some version of that in the past and date is here today to tell us why we shouldnt just believe. He is a crusading scientific journalist. I was just saying to how important i feel it is that somebody is writing about these things. In an age will be dealt no necessary whats going on allimf the time. Dave is reducing this is going on and is going on probably more than you think. Its a very important topic. I think to hold the people who represent us accountable but tos also know what the facts are when were talking the fact that so here iss dave to tell us what we need to know. [applause] well, thank you very much for the introduction, thank you to the festival of the library for having me. And i want to thank you all for coming as well. My name is dave levitan and i am a science journalist based near philadelphia. Ive written for a whole bunch of places on whole bunch of scientific topics. The book i wrote isic called nt a scientist how politicians mistake, misrepresent, and utterly mangle science. It is essentially a playbook of how politicians get science wrong here i thought what i woo today is go through the origins of the book, where it came from, and also discuss that line, the title, not a scientist and where they came from. Grocery couple of examples that are in there and then talk a biw about how some of the things of writing but in the book are playing out today and more recentlyn in politics so to stat off, the book actually sort of arose out of my time as a staff writer for factcheck. Org. Im a freelancer generally but i spent time as a fulltime staff writer for fact check which helped one is aware of that website. They got a grant in early 2015 to start covering science sorted and a dedicated fashion. They had covered some scientific issues before but they didnt have ais Science Writer traineds a Science Writer who are sort of hit and miss on that but they got a grant to start covering science directly and they hired me to do that. We launched a new section of the site called my day job is basic Pay Attention to what politicians are saying about size and explaining why they were wrong when they were wrong, which i do not lack for material. [laughing] and basically early on in that job i started to notice some patterns in the ways they were talking about science. Sometimes this was actually repeated talking points, just the same exact words from different people but other times is more sort of patterns of speech, rhetorical tricks, devices that i started noticing crop up again and again. I started collecting and basically at first listing them down. And very rapidly i had a pretty long list, and i decided it might be a useful sort of endeavor to put them all into one place, basically collected these as a playbook, the way politicians are trying to fooll us when it comes to scientific topics. I left that job in late 2015 basically to work on the book and to go back to freelancing, which im still doing. So thats sort of where it came from. I divided the book up, basically, into types of errors, types of devices of tricks. So some of these would sound very familiar. Theyre things like the cherry pick. Im sure people are aware of the oversimplification, obvious what that means. Others i had not seen described specifically before so i gave them weird names, things look the butterup and undercut or the certain uncertainty. A bunch of names. I was making them up. So ill get into a few of those examples in a minute first, going to that title im not a scientist. Im shower everybody has heard some version of that line before. It really sort of picked up in popularity, probably point 2009 or 2010 when he heard it a lot, related to Climate Change. It really sort of came from almost any politician you could fine. It was remarkably ubiquitous. I realized i should probably figure out where it came from so i tried to figure at out. Goes back farther than i anticipated. At first should i say, since im all about requiring evidence of people i cannot prom mis100 this is the very first time that someone used the line and its exactly this way, but its the first one i could find and a pretty good example. Actually goes back to september of 1980. During the end of the president ial campaign that year, thencandidate Ronald Reagan was asked during a campaign stop, i think it was in ohio, asked some questions about environmental issuesbut typically about sulfur dioxide, the primary component of acid rain. Dont hear much about these days. And ill just read you his quit. He said i have flown twice over mt. St. Helens. Im not a scientist and i dont know the figures but i have a suspicion that one Little Mountain out there has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in the world that hand been released in the last ten yours of alldriving and things of that kind that people are so concerned about. Okay. So, i feel like that should sound very familiar. People didnt use this on sulfur dioxide but the similar form racing how they talk about something. He starts by saying, im not a scientist and i dont know in thing theirs but heres a figure. Just goes right ahead and disavows expertise to start, and then offers up what amounts to an expert opinion. Obviously the line, im not a scientist, itself is basically meaningless. We n youre not a scientist. Its the but that fulls is the most important part, what they offer up instead of what an actual scientist i would say. I fine the technique amounts to to smoke screen. A way to put the experts the actual scientists in the corner that no one is going to bother listening to because they seem out of touch. Its a way to make it seem like we shouldnt listen to experts. And in reagans particular case here, he was very much wrong about this point on sulfur dioxide. Generally meeking when you hear the line, whatever follows it is wrong. Never actually heard a version where there was a little bit of right following it. Just quickly, so, mt. St. Hell loans at that point was releaseing 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide a day into the atmosphere. Sounds like a lot but humans were releasing 81,000tons a day and thats just in the u. S. If he was referring to the eeruption of mt. St. Helens which happened three or four months before that, that was 1. 5 million tons per sorry eruption itself. That is still not enough. The said ten years of human activity choo we Something Like 200 million tons. Again, just in the u. S. It sounded reasonable, though, right . The idea of this huge massive explosion this had been a big deal in the u. S. At the time. It killed a bunch of people, this massive thing. To claim that humans couldnt possibly compete with Something Like that sort of sounds like it should make sense, and people have used similar techniques on Climate Change, how could we possibly change the climate. Were so small compared to the earth, about we do manage to change it pretty effectively. That is sort of the first version of that line that i ever found, and i find it to be a really good example because it took its not like somebody started using it then. It took a few decade before people used it again. I was so bizarre to be used all the time because it is such a meaningless thing to say. People dont say im not an economist, they dont say im not an expert on north korean culture and diplomacy. Just say the thing they want to say, and again, i really think its sort of stems from marginalized experts and i am not the only one that thought this was weird, republican strategist and consultant neighborhood mike mckenna who called the line im not a scientist the dumbest talking point in the history of man kind. Feel pretty good got having it as the title of a book. Im going through a couple of examples. I mentioned the chapter titles of names of techniques and i get asked a lot about which one of these people people can never decide, your favorite or least favorite. Hard to say. Its the one that wounds me the most, i think, its called the ridicule and smith. The concept here is that science and especially basic Scientific Research can often be described in absurd sounding terms because it is basic, done on model organizisms or on just cells, and when you just Say Something about this quickly its not going to sounds like youre curing cancer. Going to sound ridiculous. And politicians seize on that in order to try and question funding of that science. Always about funding. So always been trying to undercut our sort of support for federally funded research. So heres an example. This is from kentucky senator rand paul. A few years ago. He was talking about funding for the National Institutes of health, nih, and he said we did discover, they spent a Million Dollars trying to determine whether male fruit flies like younger female fruit flies. Think we could have polled the audience and saved a million bucks he gets a laugh because is does sound ridiculous. If that is actually what youre doing. But thats not even close. Its only like in the very be a sis of sense is correct and only without any sort of context. The lab he was actually talking about was at the university of michigan, and they do work on basically how healthy sexuality can promote healthy aging, and its the connection between sexuality and aging and other lines of research in this, but when you put it that way, it certainly done sound as ridiculous. Might actually be very useful, and you can do this for some much when it comes to basic research and especially basic research that involves model organisms like a fruit fly. It can sound ridiculous, or a mouse, or a zebra fish. Very valuable model organizisms that scientists use. Wont sound reasonable until you make it sound reason. This is why this wounds me so much, it really serves to sort of undermine all of our support for Scientific Research. If we think what the government is spending money on is ridiculous, then were not going to want the government to spend money on it anymore. But it is not all all ridiculous. Even if that particular research is not going cure a disease tomorrow, that is just out in how science works. We fund a whole ton of individual little basic bits of research that over years and decade pile on to each other until we come to usable answers for things, and we do if the with fruit flies or mice or other things. And the funding that the federal government has put out for that has resulted in incredible amounts of useful discoveries we live Something Like 30 years longer today than we did 100 years ago, largely because of federally funded basic Scientific Research, and that sounds a lot better when you put it that way than were spending a Million Dollars to study whether male fruit flies whatever. Just sounds ridiculous. People have been doing this using this technique for many years. Former senate william proximate mire, from wax, the income . Used to give out the Golden Fleece awards. Basically just trying to call out ridiculous sounding bits of government spending. Often focused on science because, again, itseesey to focus on science, he did get in trouble win thing the said was ridiculous was not ridiculous at all and now there are responses to this thing, something called the golden goose award, which takes things that sound ridiculous and then ended up being incredibly useful and gives them award mitchell favorite example was a study involving massaging rat pups, which does sound ridiculous, until you realize the study the results of the study was used to change how we treat premature babies and we have not only saved a whole lot of lives but billions of dollars in how hospitals have to manage premature babies. So, again, massaging rat pups, to saving premature babies, you can choose how you want to describe Scientific Research, and politicians, like paul, will sometimes choose to make it sound as ridiculous as possible, and he should know better because he is an m. D. , doctor, and should understand how basic science works. Anyway, thats the one that sort of gets me the most. Another example, another technique that i call the demonizer is another one that is actually very old. Almost universally used to connect immigration with disease. So, politicians who are very much against immigration are always looking for ways to sort of prove their opinion on this. One they come back to over and over is immigrants bring disease with them. So, this is a quote from an alabama congressman named mo brooks. This was a few years ago. Right when the was a Measles Outbreak happening that started at disneyland, actually. And he was talking about how at the same time there was this sort of stream of children who were showing up at the border from some Central American countries and he was sort of arguing we should be turning them back because theyre bringing disease in. So he said, unfortunately, our kid just arent prepared for a lot of the diseases that come in and are borne bill illegal aliens. Have to have simple for the plight of illegal aliened but they have not been blessed with in their home country the kind of health care, the kind after immunization we demand of our children in the united states. So, again, this probably sounds reasonable to a lot of people, that the u. S. Health care system is going to be better than, say, anything nick nicaragua. He mentioned immunization because of the Measles Outbreak. Im sure a lot of people are well aware of the antivaccination movement in the country. Wont go into the details hope to background of this but theres a bunch of it in the book, but i think its really important to realize just how wrong this sort of bit of speech is. He is saying, theyre coming in that might be bringing diseases that they dont have protection against and might harm us by doing so. So, according to the world health organization, the coverage at oneyearold babies at oneyearold covered by the mmr vaccine, in the u. S. Has been holding pretty steady or two the last couple of decade at 92 . 92 of one years are covered. Sounds okay, except the really ideal level for maintaining herd immunity, so that means that those of white house us are veining nateed. Herd immunity should be 95 because it this singlele most contagious disease for man. This is a little misleading because this is a nationwide stack. Actually a little more relevant to look at smaller areas because its not like we come into contact with the entire country. There are plenty of pockets in the u. S. Because of the antivaccination movement which are far blow this, ma rein county, orange county, where disneyland us, had dropped down into the 70 kind of range, which is far, far away. From what herd immunity requires. So anyway, were at 92 if you take the wide average. Mexico for the last couple of decades has 95 . Oneyearold year where they dipped and i dont know why, but generally they have been better than the u. S. Anything rag would nicaragua for a decade has been at 99 coverage. El salvador has been around 9495. Again, the implication was all these countries where these kidder coming from have no health care at all. Its nothing. And theyre going to come in to the u. S. And put all of us at risk, when in actuality those kids were put at risk by us. We were the ones who are much more likely to give them measles than the other way around. But this sort of technique is so old. Goes back into you can go back to aids crisis. There was a huge push to prevent people entering the country who are hiv positive. Again, without any particular scientific reason for this. There werent actually that mean people showing up at borders with who are hiv positive, and obviously we in the u. S. Were perfectly capable of spreading the disease ourselves. Just to she that these kinds of this kind of rhetoric can have farreaching implicationsings, because another of discussion about not letting people in they did pass a basically did not allow anyone to enter the country which was hiv positive and this leased until 2009 when president obama lifted it. No one was think about it anymore but that was in place all through the 2001s 2,000s and the nines. This is hilarious their immigration act of 1917, im just going to read you this to show how far back this fearmongerring goes. The following classes of aliens shall be excluded from admission into the united states. All idiots, imbeciles, teenle minded person, epileptic, insane pin persons, persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority, chronicle alcoholism, paupers, vagrants and people with tb or with a loathesome or dangerous contagious disease and goes on for a while. The opinion is, this has been used for so long, and it will always to certain people be a useful technique because its always going to sound scary to bring diseases into a country. Dont want these diseases. Generally speaking, if you hear a politician say Something Like this, the first step should be to doubt it. Not saying that there wont ever be a time when people when another country has peerer health care on a given issue that we do. Certainly possible. But generally speaking, the people who use this technique are not using actual science or data get to us believe it. So, that was a couple of examples from the book. I should note that President Trump is not really in this book very much. He is mentioned a couple of times, but he doesnt make many appearances. There are two many reasons the primary one is a matter of timing. I finished writing the book toward the end of 2015, into 2016 a little bit but he was not in the nominee yet, and im certainly not alone in having not taken him seriously at the time. So, the other reason was that when he has talked about science, its just sort of not worth debunking. The point of the book was to offer up some sort of ammunition towards understanding and trying to see through subtle manipulations on science from politicians. Subtle, clever manipulations, of which there are many. Nuance, do these word sound like the president . Subtle, clever, nuanced. When he says, global warm asia hoax caused by the chinese, no, its not. Were dundee bunking it. Theres no particular reason to do anything about that. Just theyre ridiculous. So thats another reason. That being said, the people he has hired do talk about science a lot because its their job to do so, and many of them most of them are not scientists themselves, and i think it is important to sort of see how some of the things have been talking about would fit into the techniques im describing. People like rick perry, secretary of energy, scott prewitt, pruitt, ryan zinke, the secretary of the interior. They have talk about scientific issues and made plenty of errors ary royce ises general his used tricks that fit into the book. We could talk more about recent stuff but one is from the spring dish forget exactly when but pruitt, the epa administrator, went on tv and he was asked about Climate Change, and he said, i think that measuring with presomethings human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and theres tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So, no, i would not agree that Carbon Dioxide primary contributor to Global Warming we see. First of all theres no tremendous disagreement. Thats just a lie. But the case, Carbon Dioxide line is one i find amazing. Thats would fit in the chapter blind eye. Politics seize on a particular finding or study of result that matches with their agenda or their ideology. Theyll repeat that often, and then sometimes the next study, the follow one, will fine something a little different or change the result, sometimes contradicted entirely, and they stick with the original result. And they keep saying it, and its sort of easy to defend because that really was a finding. Theyre not lying about anything. Just has changed, and scientist are perfectly comfortable with this. Things change all the time. I if a new result questions a previous result, theyre fine just what it sty reflect that. Pot particularses are not politicians are not great at that and stick with the thing that fits best with their agenda. In this case, this is the most egregious blind act to follow up he sakes the Carbon Dioxide is not the primary contributor. There is a famous paper, which ill read the title of, on the influence of carbonic is a sid on the treasure of the ground. A famous paper written by a danish scientist, in 1896. Describing the greenhouse effect. Describing exactly how concentrations of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere would warm up the world and was completely right. Probably has its not precise the way we know now but it was right. You could back further, 1824, essentially described greenhouse effect as well, in less specific terms but also understood what was happening. But well give pruitt 1896. He basically is ignoring 100 plus years of actual science, and i just find that amazing. Youre literally questioning a result that we have known about for that long, is incredible to me. And that is kind of the degree of bad faith arguing that we have started to see recently. I will say, though, that just the other day, jim bridenstein, a house member and the nominee to be the next head of nasa, was at his Senate Confirmation hearing and he was asked plenty 0 questions about Climate Change because nasa is one of the primary organizations that actually studies Climate Change. And he actually did say, i believe Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas. All right, we made it to 1896. Great. He went on, i believe humid have contributed to company in the atmosphere. This was bizarrely promising for 20 seconds. He was then asked to what extent. That is a question that i do not have an answer to. We were so close. Almost made it, jim. So, of course, that is a question even if he doesnt have an answer it to, we very much do. We know exactly how much Carbon Dioxide we put sunny atmosphere, very good observations this. Theres a famous chart called the kealing curve, which is very precise measures of atmospheric company of the last thats since the late 50s. We note pretty mush for a fact that before the Industrial Revolution there was 280 parts per million in atmosphere. Were now p. M. Ly above 400. Last year we achieved a Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere milestone, it was now the highest the planet has seen in at least 800,000 years. And we are 100 sure that is from us, not from anything else. So, even this potential head of nasa, who is willing to admit that these things are actual things, is still not exactly a playing with a full deck, i guess. And one more quick thing about something that happened recently. This actually was just yesterday, i think. The Fourth National climate assessment, this big report that the government sort of requests and its actually by statute from 1990, i think, this has to be done every certain number of years the first couple pieces of the new draft came out yesterday, and it said, very clearly, this is bad, we did it, we need to do something about it quickly. All the things of Climate Change that are completely well understood. But i wanted to read a quick sentence from the is guess from the executive summary. It says, for the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence. Meaning the only possible reason for the world warming up is us. Thats it. But what i find interesting about that is that is a really boring sentence that is hard to parse. I just said that to you and prow probably fell asleep halfway through, theres convincing alternative explanation thats so careful and a good way to highlight the imbalanced Playing Field we are on. Scientists have to be careful like this. This is what they do. And im not saying this is wrong. That is a very care any done sentence that is accurate, correct, but it is so easy for people who are arguing against you and not arguing in good faith, to rip it to shreds. All they have to do is pick on little pieces of the sentence and find ways to say that if theres no convincing alternative explanation, maybe theres tons of ways to do this. If theyre willing to just say its a hoax, if theyre welling to just say, even less than a hoax, even if theyre just willing to say we dont know how much is us very common refrain which is not true this shows how difficult it is for scientists and politicians who are arguing in good faith, to try and win these sorts of arguments, because from a rhetorical standpoint, from an argumentation standpoint, its so much easier to make the sort of bad faith argument than it is to make the good faith argument, and i dont have a great solution to that because scientists should keep trying to be as accurate as possible. Thats not a bad thing. However, i guess it is incumbent on all of to us sort of try and require that of owl of our elect officials. Easier said than done but thats the point i have through all of this, is basically that especially today, scientist is very much under assault. I have a satellite slide cant show you about all the different times, all the different headlines about the assault on science today. This is a very common refrain these days and i think its very much accurate. In that context, it is all the more important that we well, we in the media for sure should do a better job we the public need to very much press our elected officials to try and stick to the evidence in every possible situation, and if you hear something that doesnt sound like thats going on, well, i mean, vote them out issue guess. Start by just demanding it as often and as loudly as you can. Ill stop there thank you very much for listening and im happy to answer any questions anybody has. [applause] theres a microphone right there. If you want to ask questions, we ask you to use that because being that its roaredded and everything. Article i just read in the Washington Post about the epa Science Advisory Board where if you have an epa grant now, youre disqualified because you have a conflict of interest. Enough there are many scientist on the board but theyre industry scientists. When you talk about science, sounds like theres a unified science but a lot of science that is industrybased and the article referred to scientist with a more conservative view. So, i wouldnt think that scientists would have a conservative or lib whatever the opposition and that could be the language that the Washington Post used, which i think a bit sloppy, but still there are some scientists with different interests. There is war on science or on University Science . And what do you make of this is there a problem around science and where science is coming from that we could speak about more differently rather than just saying theyre attack science when in fact theyre embrace something science and attack others science. Thats my question. Thats an interesting question. The epa Advisory Board thing has been slammed by everyone outside of industry, as a sort of completely ridiculous thing. When we talk about the assault on science or the war on science, i think were really saying is a war on objective reality, and scientists generally speaking will disclose conflicts, right . A University Scientist who publishes a paper, that paper will list funding sources, willing lest conflicts of interest, which is not no one is free of bias. No one is arguing that. But at least a good step and generally speaking people who are funded by the government are funds by foundations, do and who disclose is are i would say a small step removed from the biases that an industry like someone who literally works for exxon would have. Thats not to say those people the people who work for exxon are necessarily bad scientist or system im sure there are plenty of very smart people working for industry. I think we just have to be careful to accept to put them on the same plane in terms of what we are going to believe. If exxonmobil says we can burn all the oil we want, its clearly theres clearly a very inherent bias to that. If researchers at the university of wisconsin say, we have to stop burning oil now, i feel like you can more quickly dispense with biases for them. I dont think thats an unfair thing to say. I guess it is important to remember that everyone will have some bias. Thats not a bad thing to remember. We all do. I just think that science as we have developed these scientific system in the country and around the world, avoiding basically we have decided collectively that industry funded science is going to be sort of inharenly flawed. Not flawed. Inherently biased and as long as we remember that, thats not necessary lay problem. Does that once your question at all . [inaudible question] federal funding and industry tree search. We have to recognize science differently, i guess. There isnt one science. Well i guess thats my question. So, she said if there isnt one science or is there . I think i would say there is. There is a set of truths about the world that science is trying to explore, and certainly we get there incrementally and slowly over time and sometime wes take a step back, but, no issue dont think thats more than one science. A study that you all heard the 97 consensus thing on Climate Change which i hate quoting. Okay, fine, if i think its probably closer to 99. If 99 studies say Climate Change is bad and we need to do something and one says its not bad at all and dont need to do anything, that doesnt i mean, that doesnt mean that the one has us a of as much weight as the 99. Theres still one objective truth, and people who are either purposefully or by accident obscuring that are not doing science. Theyre doing something else. Yeah issue think it is sort of important to call that out. Doesnt necessarily mean we cant have discussions. Thats what kind of why i heat the 97 consensus thing. Scientist are having discussions about details all the time. Theyre disagreeing about things you should go to a meeting of climate scientist. They disagree about everything. Just not about basic facts of reality. Guess i think its dangerous to argue there are multiple truths. Might be multiple paths to the truth, but not multiple truths. Anybody else . Well, okay, while your thinking about it ill tell another quick story. I was im pretty fascinated by this as well. I will let you ask your question first. The medias role in this . I sea that politicians says the false statement but then the media repeats it over and over and over again. And then it really does become true to many people. Yeah. Thats a good way to put it. Yes, the media has a huge role to play in this, and its interesting you said it that way. A while back irinterviewed bill foster, congressman from illinois, the only scient ph. D in all of congress. And he has this interesting formulation him think thursday two kinds of facts. Regular facts and there are political facts. Political facts only need to be repeated many times they become true. And these arent necessarily real facts. Yeah issue think that the media plays a huge role in trying to stifle those political facts. This actually related back to what i was saying about the 99 verse one. For a long time the media im sticking to Climate Change because its the Biggest Issue at the moment but could be said for other things, too. You would see if there was a discussion about Climate Change either on tv, which was rare, or just in an article, they would make sure to quote the other side. This incredible false balance. Even if if you want to do it right issue guess you need 97 voices before you bring in a single dissenting one. Obviously you cant do that in a given article so you ignore the dissenting voice. And i think the media has gotten better on that particular issue. I think theyre definitely better at sort of starting with a baseline of reality. A lot of articles about Climate Change youll read now, in large, main stream outlets, they dont bother with a debate glaus isnt one. Just start with the reality and then whatever the story is about, some new finding or whatever it is. Just get right into it, which i think is the appropriate way to handle that. It is a real challenge, though, when a prominent politician says something demonstrably wrong or crazy about science, thats a tough call to ignore or cover. This isnt just offering false balance. This is do you cover the bad science . I mean, i think its really sort of casebycase basis. Another area that this sort of comes up in slightly different ways is food science and nutrition science. This isnt necessarily something that politicians get in trouble for but the media gets in trouble for. Im sure you have all read plenty of stores coffee is good, coffee is bad. Butter is good, marge rein is better. Thats goes back and forth over and over and over, and that is i think the media does neat to get better at dealing with that issue because there are good stories, people click on them because we all drink coffee or wine and whatever the thing is and its hard for an editor to resister, but i would urge them all to resist. Basically i think the general rule is if you see a study about something nutrition based like that some some single food item, the baseline should at the be disbelief. Changes are its not right. Just a really hard field to study. We dont only eat butter. We do have a lot of inputs and its hard to figure out exactly what is going on. Supplementation stuff. Now its probably all the years you should have vitamin d supplements, prongly long. All of this stuff is probably wrong. Thats something the media can get better at. The answer is cover things sparingly and very carefully. There are good outlets and bad outlets of this and people make mistakes. Remember in Journalism School we did a little case study on this famous story in the New York Times from i think 1998, about these new cancer drugs called ang joe genesis inhibitors and they stopped blood vessels from storm err forming on a tumoryear and could kill it. Quoted james watson of the codiscoverier of the double helix shape of the dna molecule as saying, this guy, going to cure cancer within two years. And that was in in the New York Times specifically about the new drug and immediately the science and paper were deluged from calls from people who are desperate to try something for their relatives or. Thes who had cancer. Understandably. Just told that cancer will be cured in two years. Why wouldnt you want this drug. This drug had been tested in mice and thats it. There were no human studies at that point and this was so dramatically irresponsible. Again, this is something of course cancer was not cured win two years. Those drug does exist, theyre on the market and sometimes theyre useful but theyre not the panacea they were claimed to be. Think thats a very good cautionary tale and actually is one that a lot of the media has taken to heart in recent years. You dont see as much breathless coverage of animal studies, which i think is a very good thing. We have cured can center mice 200 times cancer in mice 200 times generally doesnt translate very well. Doesnt mean we shouldnt keep testing in mice. Its an important part of the process temp the wehweh cover it is a its crucial you keep in mind how people will racket to things will react to things i guess. A long answer to your question. Anyone else . You happen to find a link with Campaign Contributions to politicians that do make these incorrect or outlandishing statement . Are they correlated, do you think . Thats a great question. The question was, in doing research for this did i fine a link between Campaign Contributions and the politicians who are getting certain contributions and them making certain false statements. Its a good question. I dont have a good answer for you. I specifically for the book stayed away from the why part of this, the intent behind these statements. The goal was really to describe he how. How theyre trying to get stuff past us, and i didnt really basically its another book, trying to tease out why theyre doing this, and some people have done this. The one i tend to point people towards is merchants of doubt, book from 2010 or so, by naomi and eric conway, which is about these sort of longrunning financial campaigns to confuse the public on beginning with tobacco, going into things like acid rain, and then into Climate Change as well. So, i didnt get into that really. But the obvious answer is, yes, its always money. Theres a if you look at who is making these statements, its the people who who are the politicians that say the most good things about fossil fuels . The people who have a lot of money from fossil fuel companies. Its a direct line connection. I didnt do the work of specifically correlating amounts and things like that. Ill tell the other story i was going to tell. This one this was okay. Rick perry, speaking of people with fossil fuel connects. Rick perry the secretary of energy now. He i dont know if nip read about this if the department of energy a few weeks ago put out a proposed rule that would change sort of fundamentally the power markets in this country. The electric power markets. Where you buy your electricity from. The rule this is the the reason this its tough us base its super boring. The rule would allow Cost Recovery for power plants that keep at least 90 days worth of fuel on. So i that sounds super boring, but what that means is that coal plants, check have big piles of coloreds, which is enough to last for 90 days, and nuclear plant, by the way, and the very largest hydroelectric plants would call. But coal is the point here. They would get to basically be guaranteed not only their money back for their costs, like their costs of running the plant, but also a guaranteed rate of return. So, this completely upends the sort of whatever degree there is a free market in the power sector, thats completely changed because allowed coal plans to coal plants to get money. It was done because theyre trying to forestall cold plant retirement us. A lot of coal plants have been shutting down. Partially because theyre getting old and partially because the market its telling them to shut down. Renewable argue has dropped energy has dropped in price beauso out aisle cher build renewable energy. Natural gas is the main driver, natural gas got very cheap, very quickly. And sort of started to put coal out of business. Coal went from around 50 of the power supply a couple decade ago to 30 today, and this by the department of energy was very much an attempt to slow that down. Now, what i find interesting about this is the way that they argue for it. Im sorry this is a long story because this is super boring. But they argue that this has to do with the resilience of the power grid. That when there are shocks to the grid so a big storm or they argued specifically about at the polar vortex in 2015, the massive cold snap that heat hit the eastern part of the country. They thing we instinct base generations, to withstand that. The problem is that there actually is no evidence thats true. They so, they sort of just claim that we need it without actually offering any reason for it. In fact, the polar vortex, theres this big Company Called pjn interconnection. They are Regional Transmission Organization and move electricity around the country you dont buy your electricity from them but the utilities you buy from, buy from them. They wrote a report about the polar vortex. They noded that giga whats worth or coal has been knocked offline by the cold snap and the most dependable source of power during the cold snap was wind power, this thing that actually produced more pour than the expected to the grid during that event. So, the point here is, theyre willing to say anything, and i dont im actually very curious how to deal with Something Like that. Its so such a bad faith argument, and again, its such an unlevel Playing Field ump i dont have a point beyond its interesting and something to watch out for. Going back to the studies that you said, i would just clarify that. In this state, butter is always best. The question for you, though, is you hear a lot of individuals refute fact order question facts based on religious beliefs, and is that factor addressed in your book at all . So, no, its not in the book much. There is so, there are few topics in there that are certainly ones that come up when religion comes up. The very first example i have in chapter one is about abortion, and about the argument that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks, which is completely not based on any existing science at all. But thats the sort of argument you definitely get into religious waters with sometimes. I dont i didnt address directly sort of how to deal with that or anything. Dont actually hear the politicians make religious arguments very often. Its more the people responding to them, i think. So, sort of a little bit like a next step down in a way. The other one that i did find interesting was there were some religious arguments made about hpv vaccination. This example is in the book. Human papillomavirus which nearly all of us have at various points in hour lives, can cause Cervical Cancer among other types of cancer and now we have seens which are recommended for young girls and boys and are vert effective at preventing transmission of the virus. Still be a while before we know exactly how much cancer theyre preventing but when this was being discussed, n2005 and 2006 there were a lot of religious arguments made about were encouraging promiscuity and everything. And that i actually found this interesting because it cut across party lines a little bit. We just talk about wreck rick perry. In texas in 2006 rick perry tried to implement a universal vaccination program, which is kind of fascinating when you think about it. He was shut down by the texas legislature, making a lot of religious arguments about why this was a bad idea and they also called to the science experiment as if we were experimenting on young girls and giving them the vaccine, which was a complete mischaracterization. He had done plenty 0 studies and knew it was safe and effective. Et cetera. I think it is interesting to note that some of the religious arguments surrounding science cut across things in weird ways. They dont quite follow the they dont follow the money we talked about in exactly the same pattern sometimes, but, i cant say theres a ton in there about the details of that, i guess. What can scientist does to educate the pock into we are less receptive in addition to your book . We are less recep tonight what we hear politicians saying or what we hear on the media and so on. Yeah. Thats a great question. Did everybody hear that . What more can scientists do . A lot of talk in recent years about how scientist does need to improve their communication skills. I think thats certainly true. I think scientist are often sort of ill equipped to deal with the Public Discourse around their work, especially if its work that is not particularly commonly in the if youre doing Climate Science as this point you know what to expect. But if youre doing various other research that suddenly blow up because of a new drug or something, i think it would be really helpful for scientists to be better communicators. There are now a lot of programs connect if with Journalism School order just with communications schools, to help scientist get better. There are workshops for. The. Scientist have started doing that sort of thing. So thats dish think thats all a good thing. The other good thing would be to run for office, and were now seeing that. Theres a Political Action committee called 314 action, name of the first three digits of pi, it and is entirely built to help scientists learn about running for office, and they are supporting dozens candidate nows out all levels. People running for congress who are scientist or trained in various stem fields but all the way down to local select men or mayors of small towns, anything, theyre helping people run for office. I think having that degree of sort of Scientific Literacy in Public Office would be a great step. Just having people who are more comfortable talking about science all the time, that would probably help us all. So thats a good i dont know if any of those people will win the races theyre in but thats a good step, too. The other well, i guess those are the main points. Anybody else . We have another minute or so. Any last questions . Yep . In terms of maybe putting a stick it in, but is the cure for bad free speech more free speech when all it does is cause repetition of the bad free speech and reinforces those messages . Is there way out of that quandary . Well, thats above my pay grade. Bad free speech, who defines it. Thats the very first problem. Whats bad free speech. Sorry . False. Okay. So, inaccuracy. Yeah. Thats at the a a tough one would be great if we could somehow prevent the spreading of demonstrable falsehoods that have an impact on all of our lives. I mean, i dont think anybody has an answer to that necessarily. I dont think you want to get into stopping people from saying anything. I think maybe cnn should stop showing entire rallies without any context. That would be a good start. Context is everything. Youre not going to stop people from talking and i would hope none of wuss want that, but offering context to all of it is how you educate everybody. Its how we all get a little bit better at this. So, i dont think thats a super satisfying answer to what youre something and certainly an interesting question, but kind of all i got issue guess. Sure, one more. Id like to thank you very much for your presentation, and i was just wondering how you would approach how they talk now about opioids and how that is a the next drug epidemic, and it just seems like every time they talk about how many people are dying because of opioids or other kinds of in use along that line, they should also talk about how many people debuts they Smoke Cigarettes or how many people debuts they drink alcohol you. Get what im saying. Seems like there some be some sort of comparison that goes on all the time and if you just keep saying to people, opioids, opioids, opioidded, people start freak can out about opioids, and theyre not going to be able to put that in proper perspective without help from the media. Well, sure. Its helpful to have no know what the numbers mean next to other numbers, but im not sure that use useful to compare epidc to semi unrelated epidemic. The opioid issue i think the important sort of rioter rhetorical bits people need to remember is to call make to call addiction a disease rather than a personal failing which certain people like to do im not sure it needs to connect to how many people cigarettes killed. Theres certainly connections in terms of the company that Purdue Pharma that defrauded all of us on opioid for a couple of decades. Certainly related to what happen with cigarettes but theyre pretty different. This starts because doctors prescribe something. Its not quite the same as a cigarette. I dont know. I do think i agree with you that its always great to have numerical context for things to help us understand them a little bit better. But theres a language around the opioid issue that is kind of all its own and as long as we stay away from 1980s level war on drugs kind of talk, i think well do okay. Its obviously were not doing great yet and there are plenty of people who talk about it in pretty indefensible terms. But i dont know. Well have to see that one goes, guess. Well, thank you again very much, everybody. [applause] thank you, dave. Thank you to all of you dave well be out sciencing books and taking any additional comments. Well start again here at 3 00. Thank you. John kerstetter is next from the wisconsin become festival in madison. He recalls this time in the army as a combat physician in iraq
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