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Global Warming Mechanisms — Room For Debate

When I sent my letter to the NZ Skeptic (Spring 2003), I did not expect vehement denials in the next issue. Such debate is, of course, healthy and occasionally useful. My letter, though, was not intended to cover the whole subject; merely to offer some points to ponder. The responses have been rather more thorough, and I feel I must defend my position.

I must also defend Bjorn Lomborg from Alan Ryan’s critical comments. Sadly, he fell foul of an attack instigated by the most recent editor of Scientific American. The prejudiced intent of this was shown by the choice of authors, who included Stephen Schneider (who has made a fortune writing books promoting AGG global warming), and E Wilson, who has been pushing an eco-catastrophe barrow for years. This was followed by a kangaroo court called the Danish Committee for Scientific Dishonesty — which had among its members not one scientist — and which severely criticized Lomborg, apparently purely on the basis of the Scientific American article. The Danish Ministry of Science later declared Lomborg not guilty of either bias or dishonesty.

Next, I must agree with Kerry Wood that the world is warming; that CO2 is a true greenhouse gas and is increasing in the atmosphere, and that (in theory) this should be a powerful mechanism for retaining atmospheric heat. However:

  1. AGGs are only one variable — and not necessarily the dominant one.
  2. When the AGG hypothesis is used as the basis for climate models, the calculations don’t make sense. For example, by their reckoning, the 20th Century should have warmed by well over 2°C. The actual warming was 0.6°C.
  3. Other observations do not support the idea that AGGs dominate global temperature change. The current bout of global warming began around 1700 to 1720. In NZ, coastal glaciers like the Franz Josef began retreating about 1750. Greenhouse gases didn’t increase at all till 1850, and only to a negligible degree until about 1920. From 1940 to 1976, global temperatures fell, to the extent that Time published a special edition on “The Forthcoming Ice Age.”

Three main systems are used to measure global temperature: averaging meteorological station results; averaging weather balloon readings; and averaging satellite temperature measures (available since 1979). The latter two methods agree with each other startlingly, and show very little global temperature rise since 1979. The first method shows clear, linear temperature increases from 1920 to 1940, and then from 1976 to the present. Most measurements are taken in cities or airports, which have been growing larger for many decades, hence increasing the local warming effect of tar and cement.

AGGs contribute only 0.3% to the greenhouse effect. By far the greatest impact comes from water vapour, which averages about 300 times the insulating effect. Yet in conventional global warming models, variations in water vapour are considered unimportant.

The major alternative hypothesis to AGGs is increasing solar output. While direct (and very recent) measurements of this show too small an increase to explain global warming, it is also true that the sun does not change by small increments. Instead it is characterised by occasional spectacular changes — sunspots, flares etc. The sudden temperature increase in 1976 is better explained in this way.

During the “Little Ice Age” of 1600 to 1700, the sun experienced the “Maunder Minimum” in which almost no sunspots were seen. In 1998, which was hailed as the hottest year for many centuries, there was also increased sunspot activity. New Scientist (December 20, 2003) reports that high sunspot activity correlates with a drop in the price of English wheat, and this has been true over many centuries. This makes sense if sunspots coincide with warmer periods.

I do not want to appear to be offering a “proven” mechanism for global warming. Instead, please read my comments as simply a reminder that there is much, much more that we do not know about climate change than that which we do. Global warming — yes. Mechanism? We still do not know. (Abridged)

Lance Kennedy, Tantec

Greenhouse Gas/Climate Link Unproven

The consensus “Summaries for Policymakers” adopted line-by-line by Governments, which appear at the beginning of the various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have never stated that there is a proven relationship between emissions of greenhouse gases and any harmful climate trend.

Instead they have resorted to ambiguous, non-committal statements like “The balance of the evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”, which does not mention greenhouse gases as part of the “human influence”, and is merely a “suggestion”.

You have to go to Chapter 1 of the 2001 IPCC report to find the real truth, which is:

“The fact that the global mean temperature has increased since the late 19th century, and that other trends have been observed, does not necessarily mean that an anthropogenic effect on the climate has been identified. Climate has always varied on all time-scales, so the observed change may be natural.”

Recent reported temperatures are less than recent estimates for the “Medieval Warm Period” 1000 years ago, so they could be due to natural variability. At least part of recent “warming” has been attributed to the unusual El Niño ocean patterns.

Computer-based climate models, based on the absurd assumption that greenhouse gases are the only influence on the climate, have very limited predictive value, a point that is admitted by Kerry Wood, who mentions the IPCC projected range of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees mean temperature increase for the year 2100. He should know that this range could easily be extended further by choosing slightly different values for the many uncertain parameters in the models. The IPCC, actually, discourages the use of the word “prediction”, and prefers “projection”, which is based only on a particular set of assumptions, some of which can be absurdly exaggerated.

Emissions of greenhouse gases must have some effect on the climate, together with changes in the sun, cosmic rays, volcanoes, ocean circulation, and other human effects such as land-use changes and urban development. Without a greater knowledge of all these factors it is foolish to believe that restricting greenhouse gas emissions is likely to have any worthwhile positive change to our climate.

Vincent Gray , Wellington

Bjorn Lomborg – Misunderstood?

Bjorn Lomborg certainly touched off a powder-keg when he implied that the environmental movement could do with a session in the sweat lodge and a little critical self-assessment, and the very title of the book neatly co-opts our organisation into the debate whether we like it or not, and we probably do. The letter from Alan P Ryan directly criticises Lomborg and that by Kerry Wood indirectly. (1318, NZ Skeptic 70).

I am somewhat at a disadvantage as I have lent my copy of The Skeptical Environmentalist to a statistician friend who, before reading the book, was also of a critical inclination towards Lomborg’s arguments, along with a lot of the scientific community. But if my memory serves me well vis a vis climate change, Lomborg was not making the claims attributed to him. The criticism solely relates to the statistics but no one that I have read addresses the at least equally important aspect of the book, that of social policy. This book is about who will serve and who will eat, a very proper point of enquiry for a politics department of any university. Lomborg’s thesis, common throughout the book, is: before we go and spend a king’s ransom on Kyoto et al, let us make sure we are getting value for money. There is no end of good causes to spend public money on: glue ear operations, PKU tests for newborn children, vaccinations or even a campaign to stamp out religious stupidity — all cheap and effective in improving the general lot of mankind, but unfortunately not sexy. Saving the Earth of course is sexy, as are international conferences to discuss same. The social effects of a focus on such lovely big problems, where it is not possible to falsify assertions in any meaningful time frame, while fun, are most damaging. Smaller but nonetheless significant matters like income distribution, social justice etc, all fall beneath the pall of climate change and saving whales et al, in the same manner that Aids activists usurp R&D money at the expense of other perhaps more pressing epidemics.

I digress. Lomborg, I believe, simply states that climate change, global warming even, is happening and that the relevant question is how much and what does this mean. Your correspondent Wood states the problem fairly: “Beyond the basics, climate change is hellishly complex and far from fully understood”. No one disagrees, not even The Skeptical Environmentalist. Vladimir Putin nailed his colours to the mast recently, claiming that a bit of global warming would be a good thing for Russia. If the matter is so little understood and the modelling so variable, why not save our money so that we might spend it on problems in the here and now, not in 2100. When we have fixed the problems right in front of our faces we can proceed to the new and improved problems that will no doubt appear in the years to come. Reading the book might be a good skeptical start.

Alastair Sims, Hahei

Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment on the Right Track

Poor Bruce Taylor! You can’t please everyone, but the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) does make an honest effort to please most of them. Certainly, nothing in his reasoned article in the Spring, 2003 Skeptic warranted Vincent Gray’s diatribe in the summer 1318, which reads like a potpourri culled from the Old Testament, Mein Kampf and the worst of that archpriest of greenwashers, Bjorn Lomborg.

His anthropocentrism stems from the anti-Darwinian notion that evolution is teleological; that man is the apotheosis of an imaginary Grand Design. Worse still, he seems to envisage (Gaia forbid!) a future superman spawned solely by his limited notion of ‘science’. His rejection of pluralism and the social contract is pure Fascism.

Analogy is at best a metaphor for an underlying reality; it may be useful for simplifying a difficult concept, but it can never stand on its own as an explanation: the more so in Dr Gray’s case where the analogy is itself false. The only self-aware species is the misnamed Homo “sapiens”; we alone can invent ‘moral values’ from abstract concepts. So the first part of his letter is merely so much Social Darwinism and anthropomorphising sociobabble.

He believes that moral values have no place in modern society. Let’s indulge in a little thought experiment. Suppose a mad scientist has succeeded in cloning a human-machine hybrid to use as an Asimov-style robot. Would Gray be happy with this, or would he suddenly discover that he has values?

His second section begins: “Progress … depends on improved emphasis on human moral values … human rights … and a continued advance of science and technology”. Well, just so and who could argue with that? Certainly the PCE doesn’t so argue, other than in Gray’s imagination. Or does he really believe that possum dust proposals would influence their decisions?

I am a scientist and a dedicated atheist but I know that religious beliefs, socioeconomic considerations and cultural sensitivities should be considered, though they should not be allowed to predominate over the scientific evidence where this is strongly at variance with them. Fortunately, there is no evidence to suggest that this is happening. Vicki Hyde’s excellent editorial in the spring ‘Skeptic’ provides a balanced view on this topic.

A recent report in Nature predicts that a quarter of all species will become extinct by 2050 because of global warming. This estimate doesn’t include the effect of habitat loss, increased pollution and downstream ecological disturbance on an already over-stressed biosphere. Even the Pentagon has now released a report expressing doubt that the USA could survive the consequences of global warming. What Gray and his like ignore at the peril of the majority is that humans are not separate from the rest of “creation” but a part of it.
(Abridged)

Alan P Ryan, Kaiapoi

Superstition Bashing?

Did the convenors of the first Annual Meeting of the German Skeptics (GWUP) know that they were setting themselves up to hold their 13th Conference on Friday, 13 June, 2003?

Bernard Howard, Christchurch

Old Rope and Dodgy Memories

Claire Le Couteur reports from the 2003 Skeptics’ Conference in Wellington.

This year’s conference, held at Victoria University, began with a social gathering followed by a presentation by artist and teacher Bill Taylor, who described his “Time Line” installation, which covered three walls of the lecture theatre.

The carefully measured 4.6km of rope were strung in lengths around the room. Articles such as shells, feathers and animal skulls were attached in their appropriate parts of the time line, which provided a visually impressive indication of the time elapsed since the formation of the Earth, with humanity’s portion accounting for only a tiny section at the very end. Bill has been a Royal Society Teaching Fellow this year, resident at the School of Earth Sciences at Victoria University.

Speakers on Saturday covered a wide range of topics, but the startling results produced by Maryanne Garry’s psychology students in their investigations of human memory formation and fallibility made their presentations a highlight.

It was humbling to note that, when asked to watch a short video segment, around a third of the audience failed to spot a large gorilla walk through a basketball game! Small comfort can be gained by the recognition that this is the typical proportion that fails to do so, a salutary warning against potential smugness….

These presentations complemented other talks on progress on the Christchurch Civic Crèche case, given by Lynley Hood, and another about the pitfalls that Skeptics member Jonathon Harper has faced in preparing a paper on the same case.

Several speakers covered the problem of how science is communicated, including the influence of the internet. Bruce Taylor, from the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment made a plea for members to read and make submissions on a discussion paper that is part of a project to examine the role of science in environmental policy and decision-making.

The damp, windy Wellington weather marred the planned visit to the Carter Observatory following dinner at the Skyline Restaurant, making star gazing difficult, but this was compensated for by an illustrated presentation by members of the Phoenix Astronomical Society on the origins and structure of Stonehenge. They also outlined their plans to construct a southern hemisphere copy of Stonehenge (Stonehenge-Aotearoa) at a site in the Wairarapa, for astronomical education purposes. They intend to open this to the public for viewing, and have already had some interest expressed from New Zealand-based Druids! The planetarium show on Mars gave a good overview on what sort of ideas people have had about the Red Planet in fact and fiction. Nano-bacteria may not be as romantic as H G Wells’ invaders, but their implications for life in the universe as just as immense.

Australian taxation consultant and skeptic, Richard Lead entertained on Sunday, with his talk on scam artists and snake-oil salesmen. Some of the dodges were well known, such as versions of the Nigerian “bank millions” scam, but the magical “purple plates” were new to most of us. While the Nigerian scam may seem obviously dodgy, it apparently brings in $US200 million annually in earnings to that country, and the Australian version of the Commerce Commission has had strong responses to its bogus ads for “bluebottle farm” investments, with people happy to send money in to such ludicrous get-rich-quick schemes. Richard’s main lesson was to drill into the audience’s collective consciousness, the vital ten-word phrase designed to protect anyone from being taken: “Let’s pretend it’s true. How would the world be different?”

David Rankin, general manager of Health Purchasing for ACC, reassured us that ACC has a firm commitment to identifying effective treatment and funding interventions that work. His session on the commission’s support for evidence-based medicine provided some interesting information on what they are and aren’t prepared to fund, but ended on a possibly disquieting implication that if there isn’t evidence to say a procedure doesn’t work, then it may indeed get the green light. More research is required!

The conference concluded with a panel discussion on consumer rights and protection, involving representatives from the Press Council, Medsafe and the Consumers’ Institute. The 120-strong attendees were armed with flyers on complaints procedures courtesy of a number of organizations and came away with a better understanding of how effective complaints can be made, and what grounds are likely to be ones which work.

Many thanks are due to Conference Convenor, Joanna Wojnar for her sterling work in organising an excellent gathering. We look forward to next year’s conference in Palmerston North.

Good Company

What name do you give to a quirky bunch of people who are scientifically literate, who question fads, and who want their beliefs to rest on evidence from the material world — the sort of evidence that does not require one to ignore or reject all the laws of physics and other knowledge we have and that we rely on daily when flying, taking antibiotics or using the computer?

The group’s shortened name is the New Zealand Skeptics and in September in Christchurch they held their annual conference. What a delightful and idiosyncratic event this was, not least because there are so few lawyers in this group. I spend my professional life training would-be lawyers and writing articles for lawyers and other legal academics. You might think lawyers are instinctively sceptical. But actually, they’re not. They’re trained to take authorities — statutes, the decisions of judges — largely at face value. Yes, lawyers get very good at undermining certainty, at injecting doubt into the clearest of statutory provisions. But that is a different mindset than what one finds at the annual Skeptics conference.

This year, there was a host of interesting papers delivered. An academic from Canterbury University rubbished the trendy acceptance by some — under the false guise of being open-minded-of the possibility of psychic and paranormal knowledge. In fact, not one single police department in the US has found police psychics to be useful; only two or three out of nearly 500 National Enquirer predictions came true in the last dozen years or so; and not one single reproducible ESP phenomenon has ever been recorded, despite a huge reward being on offer to anyone who can demonstrate (that’s the key word) such powers.

Not really a surprise though, once you realise that if it were true, you’d have to jettison or re-write all we know about the physical laws underlying our understanding of the universe, knowledge that has doubled life expectancy in the past century, led to untold material advances and helped lift huge numbers of people out of poverty. The same sort of mindset was brought to bear in papers on organics (vastly over-rated), herbal medicine (how do you spell “placebo”?) and “biodynamic” approaches to eradicating the painted apple moth, just to name three. But two of the talks at the conference cry out for special mention, and praise.

The first was a talk on the Liam Williams-Holloway case. This included the chance to see the Australian 60 Minutes segment which broadcasters here have refused to televise. The most memorable line from that segment came from one of the alternative medicine practitioners: “All we care about is the wealth of our patients – I mean health.” That whole sorry and saddening episode casts a cloud over a good many people, and leads me to wonder why the parents of Liam have not been charged with a criminal offence.

Finally, I must mention the talk given at the conference by Lynley Hood, author of the prize-winning book A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case. If anyone out there thinks Peter Ellis should have been convicted, or still thinks he is undeserving of a pardon, that person should read this book. (See this month’s lead article –ed.)

I’d like to see a Commission of Inquiry headed by a tough-minded overseas judge — maybe the English judge who, in the height of a similar hysteria over there, acquitted two similarly placed crèche workers who have just won a big defamation case.

But if you think that’s likely to happen here in New Zealand, if you think the vested interests might break ranks, you need a good dose of scepticism.

Tackling the Dumb Mysteries

Vicki Hyde reports from the 4th World Skeptics Conference

I knew Someone was smiling on me – there I was going to be stuck in Los Angeles for three days waiting for a flight back across the Pacific – and what should chance to be on at that time, in the neighbourhood, but the 4th World Skeptics Conference…

The theme was “Prospects for Skepticism – the Next 25 Years”, with sessions on evolution and intelligent design, fringe psychotherapies, urban legends, medical claims, skeptical investigations and more – it sounded like my kind of conference.

As with most skeptics conferences, national and international, the real buzz was in being there amongst a group of (mostly) like-minded people, opinionated, informed, inquiring minds.

The notion of inquiry was one taken up by Paul Kurtz, a founding father and Chair of CSICOP, who argued that perhaps it was time to get away from the “skeptical” label and rebrand ourselves as “inquirers”. It’s an argument which has its merits – there is a lot of “baggage” associated with the term skeptic, as many of us know. All too often it is taken as a synonym for cynic, or to represent a dogmatic, close-minded authoritarian view of the world.

However, I have to confess to being a little dismayed at hearing Paul call for organised skeptics to take on all areas of inquiry, including the areas of religion, economics and politics. He had made similar comments at the 3rd World Conference in Sydney in 2000, and clearly this is an important issue for him personally. Judging by discussions outside the sessions, he doesn’t have unanimous support for that, despite the apparent presumption at the conference that skeptics, by definition, had to be vociferous humanistic, if not atheistic, Democrats. It made more than just me uncomfortable, particularly when a challenge to this was knocked back rather harshly.

(As a consequence, we’re looking at finding out what our members here believe should be our core functions and focus. I suspect that we are a more diverse group than in the US, and I urge you to take part in our survey within this issue or online, to see if we have some basis for that belief!)

Those questions of who we are and what are our interests were reflected, in some respects, in the opening session, Don’t Get Taken, which saw a focus on scams, ranging from the kerbside cons of three-card monte to those of Wall Street. Amongst the sleight-of-hand and financial analysis, came a thought-provoking comment from CSICOP fellow Ray Hyman.

In discussing how con artists rely on the confidence people place in one another and in the general level of trust within a society, Ray noted that the only societies which did not see scams or cons were totalitarian ones because under such systems, trust is non-existent.

Therefore, he concluded, scams are a sign of a healthy democracy…

The next morning, it was hard to drag myself away from the wonderful range of books available from the Prometheus Books display to get to the first session on Evolution and Intelligent Design. It was worth it, as it turned out to be one of the liveliest sessions of the whole conference, putting two supporters of each approach on the stage and on the spot.

It would be hard to remain complacent about the forces behind intelligent design having seen the “Wedge” document which outlines the strong, well-supported campaign to have it taught and accepted throughout US society. It appears that the “research” component of this campaign has evaporated (apparently in response to problems associated in proving intelligent design concepts…), but there’s good evidence that the political push has been taken up with enthusiasm.

Take a look at the document (a copy is at www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html). It’s very impressive as a strategic planning document; it’s chilling in its thoroughness and implications.

Ironically, given the public image of skeptics as dogmatic and dictatorial, the only person who came across as that was William Dembski, described as associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University and senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (where renewal basically means defeating the forces of godless evolution).You can get the flavour of his presentation with the following rhetoric:

“What’s a skeptic to do against this onslaught [ie the fact that intelligent design is broadly accepted], especially when there’s a whole political dimension to the debate in which a public tired of being bullied by an intellectual elite find in intelligent design a tool for liberation?”

There were lots of untenable assertions like this, which you can read for yourself at www.discovery.org/viewDB/index.php3?command=view&id= 1185&program=CRSC

Paul Nelson, editor of Origins & Design, came across as more reasonable until the Q&A session when he was asked directly if he accepted the fact that the world was more than 10,000 years old. He paused, he squirmed, he attempted to deflect it by saying that geology had nothing to do with biology(!), he attempted further digression, until he finally had to admit to being a proponent of the young-Earth theory…

I have to confess to bailing out halfway through the next session on fringe psychotherapies. Three-hour-long sessions, small hard seating and persistent problems with the technology made even those with long attention spans vulnerable to the seduction of the comfy chairs and conversations outside.

We were lured back in by the evening address from Marvin Minsky, but his disappointingly rambling address didn’t hit the spot except for this line:

“We [ie Skeptics] love mysteries too – we just want to get rid of the dumb ones.”

Saturday started off with Urban Legends, including the great researcher and raconteur Jan Brunvand (author of The Vanishing Hitchhiker), and a presentation by the online urban legend folk from snopes.com (David and Barbara Mikkelson).

Then came the hard choice – concurrent sessions on medical claims and skeptical investigation. I knew the latter would be immensely entertaining and interesting. After all, with the likes of long-time investigator Joe Nickell and the ebullient Richard Wiseman, it could not fail, but I had heard them both speak in Sydney and so headed for the medical session.

The speakers included Wallace Sampson, editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine; Stephen Barrett of quackwatch.com fame; and Marcia Angell, Harvard lecturer and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. It was the strongest line-up of the conference and one of the meatiest subjects. One of the most memorable comments came from Stephen Barrett:

“Complementary medicine is not a form of medicine – it is a marketing slogan.”

Now how can we get that spread as a general cultural meme?!

The evening banquet was entertaining if only because we had the famously egotistic Harlan Ellison dash over to our table to grovel at the feet of a bemused-looking Jan Brunvand. Harlan was being honoured for his services to skepticism or, as noted in the conference programme, for his attempt to become the “biggest pain in the ass in the Western Hemisphere”.

And so to Sunday, when the conference concluded with concurrent morning sessions on Educating our Future and Paranormal Around the World. I would have liked to have heard of the experiences of our counterparts in India, China, Peru, Mexico and Germany, but I had been commandeered by the highly energetic Amanda Chesworth for the education session.

So I ended up on the stage, abetted by Diane Swanson, author of Nibbling on Einstein’s Brain, a book for teaching the scientific method to children.

Chemistry professor Charles Wynn, author of Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction, had some very promising research showing how his honours colloquium on teaching skeptical thought made a big impact on his students. Almost all questionable beliefs showed a significant drop amongst his honours students by the end of his course, but the sobering thing was just how much effort was involved in shifting those beliefs. It would be great to find out which of the various techniques were the most effective; clearly more research is required…

Biases apart, I do think that this session had the greatest relevance to the conference theme and deserved better placement, particularly when Amanda began to outline the highly ambitious programme she is running as director of the Young Skeptics and Darwin Day initiatives. We, the New Zealand Skeptics, will have a part to play in those initiatives as a result of contacts made at the conference, and I confidently predict that the next 25 years will see good prospects for us all.

Conference Highlights

  • Being pounced upon by a Fox TV crew in search of exotic accents as an example of international skepticism.
  • Figuring out a card trick top-flight magician Bob Steiner did for me, looking for the “smoking gun” move when he repeated the trick at the conference opener…and not seeing the move I expected.
  • Arguing about adverbs, religion, gun laws, science fiction movies, wines, medical treatments, with all arguments characterised by strong opinion and even stronger humour.
  • Waving goodbye to Joe Nickell as he headed off to examine what was claimed to be a genuine vampire hunting kit (we were just down the road from Universal Studios…)
  • Hearing a great example from Diane Swanson about how to get sampling errors across to school children (something our media needs help in understanding!)
  • Being able to say a heartfelt personal thank you to all those folk who provide such great online resources that make my life easier as Chair-entity of the NZCSICOP, such as Quackwatch, Snopes, Skeptic’s Dictionary, Young Skeptics, Skeptiseum.

Maxicrop, Mormons and Mediaeval Horror Stories

It wasn’t a dark and stormy night but a gaggle of skeptics got together recently to listen to ghost stories in Hamilton. Professional story teller Andrew Wright sent shivers down the groups’ skeptical spines as they listened to his rendition of one of the oldest known horror stories, Lord Fox, a BlueBeard variation.

The occasion was the Skeptics’ annual conference and I’m told founder member Bernard Howard’s opening talk the next morning on the changes seen in the Twentieth Century set the mood nicely for the material that followed. I missed this, due to being glued to the registration desk but look forward to reading it – we will run some of the addresses in coming issues. Another one I missed was John Welch talking about Gulf War Syndrome — which we have in this issue (see opposite). John also enthralled delegates with his demonstration of an antique black box Amazing Electrical Device.

An interesting session in the afternoon was held with representatives from the offices of the Commissioner for Children and the Health and Disability Commissioner. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect to come out of this was that the standard of treatment given by alternative practitioners is assessed only relative to standards set in that field. So an iridologist’s work is only compared with that of other iridologists (see Pippa MacKay’s article).

Nick Kim gave two very different presentations, one featuring his wonderful cartoons, and a more sobering piece on forensic science. He showed you can be convicted, in a British court, just for handling a banknote that has passed through the hands of a bomb maker.

Mike Clear, as well as warming the crowd up on Friday night, presented his findings on the intrusion of alternative therapies into the world of cats, dogs and chickens. Then followed two talks which, for me, were the highlights of the conference. Waikato University history lecturer Raymond Richards spoke about his experiences following a lecture he gave in 1998 and subsequent years on the Mormon church. Following complaints from the Mormon community, the university entertained charges of harassment against him. In a similar vein, former Agresearch scientist Doug Edmeades spoke of his involvement in the long-running Maxicrop case and the way in which commercial pressures impact on science.

During the conference a TV2 film crew did some filming for a documentary, Do You Believe In the Paranormal, which screened recently. “Madame Vicki” did a wonderful palm reading job and Denis Dutton (whose skeptical view of the Greenhouse Effect was another conference highlight) inserted pithy remarks at strategic moments. You can get a copy from the Skeptics video library and it’s well worth a view.

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