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When I first heard of acupuncture in medical school in the late 1960s, I became convinced that it worked. I read impressive media reports from China touting it for everything from pain relief to anesthesia for open heart surgery. Our Chief of Anesthesiology, Dr. John Bonica, was also convinced it worked and was studying it. As time passed, more and more studies were published, and Dr. Bonica eventually gave up on it. So did I.

I monitored the evolving research with great interest. Originally acupuncture was claimed to work for a laundry list of things, but only two things passed the tests: pain and postoperative nausea and vomiting. Even for those, systematic reviews disagreed with each other, so in April 2011, Edzard Ernst et al. published a systematic review of systematic reviews of acupuncture for pain in the journal Pain.¹ They found a mix of positive, negative, and inconclusive results. They found only four conditions for which more than one systematic review reached the same conclusion: three times they agreed that it didn’t work. The fourth time, they agreed that it did work—for pain in the neck. I was asked to write an accompanying opinion piece, which I titled “Acupuncture’s Claims Punctured: Not Effective for Pain, Not Harmless.”² I wrote:

… when a treatment is truly effective, studies tend to produce more convincing results as time passes and the weight of evidence accumulates. When a treatment is extensively studied for decades and the evidence continues to be inconsistent, it becomes more and more likely that the treatment is not truly effective. This appears to be the case for acupuncture. In fact, taken as a whole, the published (and scientifically rigorous) evidence leads to the conclusion that acupuncture is no more effective than placebo.

I pointed out that it seemed very unlikely that a treatment for pain would only relieve pain in the neck but not elsewhere in the body. I pointed out the difficulty of doing good acupuncture research, since appropriate controls are hard to find, double blinding is next to impossible, and there are many kinds of “acupuncture”—including electroacupuncture, ear acupuncture, cupping, and many other variants. I pointed out that it doesn’t seem to matter where you put the needles or even if you use needles at all; one study found that touching the skin with toothpicks was equally effective! All that really seems to matter is if the patient believes in acupuncture and believes he got the real thing.

My opinion was confirmed in 2013 when David Colquhoun and Steven Novella reviewed all the published evidence and published an article in the journal Anesthesia and Analgesia.³ They found that “the benefits of acupuncture are likely nonexistent, or at best are too small and too transient to be of any clinical significance,” and they concluded that acupuncture is a theatrical placebo.

Other publications and organizations, including the Medical Letter, the Center for Inquiry, and Sciencebasedmedicine.org have all declared that acupuncture is ineffective except as a placebo.

Should We Use Placebos?

It is often argued that even if acupuncture is only a placebo, it does “please” many patients (after all, the word placebo is Latin for “I please”) so it is worthwhile using it. People say it does no harm, but Ernst et al. found ninety-five reports of serious harm to patients; some but not all of these could have been prevented by better sterile precautions and better education in anatomy. There are other harms, including the waste of time and money, and patients may be tempted to use acupuncture instead of treatments that are truly effective.

And of course, we wouldn’t give patients a sugar pill placebo. Where do we draw the line? Medical ethicists universally condemn prescription of placebos because it constitutes lying to patients. Studies have been done where patients were aware that they were getting a placebo, but the researchers presented placebos in a way that led patients to believe placebos were effective. Just receiving a pill from a doctor is an indication to patients that it is supposed to work, creating the kind of suggestion that is likely to produce a placebo effect.

The Missing Mechanism

Acupuncture is “ancient wisdom” based on prescientific fumbling. The concepts of meridians and acupoints are mythical. They have never been detected by anatomists. The concept of a vital force, “human energy field,” qi, or chi is also mythical. Physicists have measured all kinds of energies down to the subatomic level but have never detected qi. Acupuncturists believe these myths and are so convinced that acupuncture works that they have tried to come up with a scientific rationale for how it might work.

Remember Ray Hyman’s Categorical Imperative: “Do not try to explain something until you are sure there is something to be explained.” Acupuncturists were sure acupuncture worked, so they proceeded to propose all kinds of hypothetical explanations of how it might work.

It was shown to release natural pain-relieving endorphins in the brain, but so do placebos! Endorphins are released in the brains of animals when a stick is thrown for a dog or when a horse is trailered. The gate theory of pain offers a physiological explanation for the previously observed effect of psychology on pain perception. Was it just counterirritant effects, like hitting your thumb with a hammer to make you forget your headache? In a 2000 article in a Japanese journal, acupuncture, moxibustion, and a hemostat on the tail were compared as pain blocks in mice. The hemostat on the tail won! Researchers have looked at neurovascular bundles, trigger points, connective tissue fascial planes, areas of reduced electrical impedance, and enhanced migration of nuclear tracers. The studies are flawed and inconclusive, and they contradict each other. No consensus has been reached.

We already have a perfectly good explanation of how acupuncture “works.” It is a theatrical placebo that is very good at eliciting placebo responses. Patients are impressed by the surrounding ritual and the “ancient wisdom” mumbo jumbo. They get personal attention from a charismatic provider. Appointments are long, and patients relax. They respond to TLC and hands-on treatment. Providers make strong suggestions that acupuncture will relieve symptoms, creating expectations in the patients. There are no specific effects, but there are many nonspecific effects of the provider/patient interaction. A famous study of asthma patients showed that patients subjectively felt better with an Albuterol inhaler, a placebo inhaler, or sham acupuncture but were only objectively better on lung function tests if they had used the Albuterol inhaler.

Many People Believe

So acupuncture doesn’t work except as a placebo, but it is widely perceived to work. By 2002, 8.2 million American adults had tried it. It has been infiltrating our hospitals and medical schools and even affecting our laws. As Jann Bellamy wrote on the Science-Based Medicine blog, “we are all too familiar with opinion and whim beating out science in legislation and regulations.” There are state laws promoting auricular acupuncture for substance abuse treatment. Medicaid has reimbursed doctors and hospitals for acupuncture treatment of drug addicts. Many medical insurance programs cover acupuncture. The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes acupuncture as an effective form of treatment. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) says it is effective for back pain and a few other conditions. The Mayo Clinic recommends it and says, “Increasingly, it is being used for overall wellness, including stress management.” The Harvard Health Blog says it’s worth a try for chronic pain. The Cleveland Clinic says it is effective for various conditions. The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) recommends it as first-line noninvasive treatment for back pain and says electroacupuncture should be considered for patients with fibromyalgia. And many other professional organizations support using it.

What this boils down to is the difference between evidence-based medicine (EBM) as it is commonly practiced and science-based medicine (SBM) as it should be practiced. This was the reason we started the SBM blog, sciencebasedmedicine.org. For EBM, it is enough to have positive trials. They accept positive results of therapeutic trials based on fantasy, such as Reiki, homeopathy, and therapeutic touch. Trying to apply the tools of science to these therapeutic modalities based on fantasy just produces a lot of confusing noise. For SBM, we also look at other factors such as prior plausibility and compatibility with established science.

There are many true believers in acupuncture. Personal experience is compelling. Patients who got better believe it works, but they may have succumbed to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (“after this, therefore because of this”). The rooster crowed, then the sun came up; therefore, the rooster made the sun come up. I got better after a treatment; therefore, the treatment made me better. That may be true, but sometimes it’s just as wrong as the rooster. The patient might have improved with no treatment, just from the natural course of the disease, or from some other factor that they don’t give credit to. Without a comparison control group, there’s no way to know.

There Is Hope

Acupuncture seems to be winning. Less-than-rigorous science is being accepted. Good evidence is being disregarded. A lot of patients and doctors are convinced it works.This has been called the Age of Endarkenment and the Post-Truth Era. But there is hope.

Recently I gave a lecture at Ohlone College on “Evaluating Evidence in Medicine: What Can Go Wrong.” Among other things, I mentioned that acupuncture was a theatrical placebo. During the Q&A, I was challenged by a woman who insisted acupuncture had worked to cure her migraines and other symptoms. She was persistent and argumentative, determined to get me to agree that acupuncture did work. I finally told her it had been tested in large groups of people with controlled studies and shown not to work; if it didn’t work in those large controlled trials, why would it work for her? Maybe she was special? That got a laugh, even from her, but she kept trying to convince me that acupuncture really did work.

The professor who invited me reported, “I’ve taught all five of my classes over the past two days, and in each, people had wonderful things to say about your presentation. Of course, many of them revolved around that ‘interesting’ woman who stood up during the Q&A to debate you about acupuncture, but again, my students took your side (i.e., the side of the evidence!), and simply expressed wonder at her persistence.”

That was very encouraging. It showed that the students understood my message and were able to apply it. Acupuncture may be winning, but if we can educate the public about science and critical thinking, we might be able to reverse the trend. The Skeptical Inquirer is one effort in the right direction.

Notes

• https://journals.lww.com/pain/Abstract/2011/04000/Acupuncture__Does_it_alleviate_pain_and_are_there.11.aspx
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21440190
• http://www.dcscience.net/Colquhoun-Novella-A&A-2013.pdf

Since skepticism was born as an organized movement in 1976 with the creation of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now CSI, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), a constant goal has been the attempt to reach as wide an audience as possible.

How We Used to Reach Audiences

The skeptic’s message was quite novel at the time—and it still is. We are basically saying that people should be skeptical of unsubstantiated claims, especially if they are extraordinary ones. Back then, UFOs, astrology, the paranormal, spiritualism, and many other similar topics were usually regarded quite valid among the public (and, well … they often still are today!) but had little or no substance at all once you started investigating.

So, how did you go about spreading this kind of counterintuitive information? At first there was the Skeptical Inquirer, pioneer of all skeptical magazines. But even though a magazine is essential to stay updated and go deeper on many subjects, it has a very limited reach. Most importantly, it mainly reaches those who are already convinced. So how could one reach a wider audience?

Well, if one had done enough research and work, one could try and write a book—provided that a publisher was interested. If so, very good! A book allows an author to go a lot deeper into a subject than a magazine article.

But, still, how many of those who watch talk shows on TV, where the paranormal is often the subject of very gullible treatments, actually read any skeptical books about the topics? Probably none. And how many actually read any book at all?

According to surveys, things do not look any brighter today. In Europe, for example, those who read books, according to a survey by Eurostat, are at most 20 percent of the population. And how much time is spent every day reading books? Between two and thirteen minutes a day, says the same survey.

Let’s just look at the time spent watching TV: according to the International Communications Market report, an annual survey by the United Kingdom’s telecoms regulator Ofcom, the average American watches 282 minutes of broadcast television a day, or four hours and forty-two minutes. Things were not all that different back in the 1970s and the following decades. People were glued to the television and were not reading skeptical literature. So, how could you reach them?

Well, the obvious answer was to try and get on television. But that was not easy at all. Of course, someone like the Amazing Randi was great at getting on TV and putting on a fantastic show to watch, and by doing so became an inspiration to thousands—perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands—of skeptics worldwide. But he was the exception.

The lesser-known skeptics usually had to wait for some TV program to call him or her, as an expert, maybe, on a panel. And maybe the other panelists were a vampirologist, a medium, an astrologer, and an aura reader. They all had their say, claiming wonderful and outlandish things.

In the last five minutes of the show, however, the skeptic was asked for his or her opinion and then tried to counterattack the preceding idiocy, but he or she often only managed to appear to be a closed-minded denier, probably a paid shill in some shadowy conspiracy. And, in any case, the skeptic was constantly interrupted by the other guests, who protested against such cruel attacks, and in a blink the time was up. So much for the skeptical point of view.

Reaching an Audience Today

Today things have changed. In less than a generation, we’ve reached a point where what we watch, read, and listen to is no longer determined solely by corporate monopolies but by the viewer. And things can be a lot different for skeptics as well. It is up to us to take this opportunity while there is still time.

Today people, especially young people, read less and less. But, importantly, they also spend less time on TV. Young people should be the main target audience for skeptics, since adults already have their opinions set. Children and young adults are still forming their reasoning faculties, and if they are given the tools with which they can operate in the world and nurture a critical mind, they will become skeptical by themselves when they grow up, with no need for others to tell them.

That’s why in Italy our skeptics group CICAP, after many years of attempts, has finally signed an agreement with the Ministry of Education to offer courses to teachers and students alike, sharing a scientific approach and critical thinking tools. But apart from this, which is not a very practical road for all, there are simpler ways to reach a younger audience.

So where do you find kids and young adults nowadays? Online, of course!

Yes, but where exactly? On Facebook? Oh no, Facebook is for Grandpa! They usually are on Instagram and YouTube. Actually, today 1.5 billion people turn to YouTube every month to search about something that they are interested in and can’t find anywhere else. Many look for the latest funny or viral videos—even the news and TV shows are there—but many just come to learn something new or indulge an interest. And it is to these people that we should be talking right now.

Is this crazy? Making videos and uploading them on YouTube? Absolutely not. There are hundreds of thousands of creators around the world who are turning their creativity into careers, amassing huge followings and turning a hobby into a profession. There are makeup artists, video gamers, travelers who talk about their trips, vloggers, cooks who share their recipes … . Why shouldn’t the skeptics join in?

In fact, some have, and you can find them on YouTube. A few have had fantastic results, such as Captain Disillusion, who has over a million subscribers, or Richard Wiseman, who has more than two million!

But apart from these extraordinary examples, skeptical videos rarely touch the topics that young people are more interested in. They may have very interesting but long discussions about the philosophy of skepticism or some very technical issue. These are both fine subjects, but they are best for an audience that is already skeptical or into these topics. Instead, we should create more videos that address the general curiosities and interests that people have—things about which we skeptics have already talked ad nauseam among ourselves but that to new generations appear as mysterious as ever.

There are a gazillion videos out there talking about the paranormal that portray the mysteries as though they are inexplicable, while in reality the explanations are available—in magazine articles and books. But not in YouTube videos.

My Attempt—and Your Turn

With this situation in mind, last April I started my own YouTube series in Italian. It is called Strane Storie (Strange Stories) and runs weekly every Friday at 1:30 pm.

Each episode is ten to fifteen minutes, and in a light way I examine popular unusual claims and by the end of each show I arrive at a conclusion about their credibility. I have dealt with some classics, such as the Bermuda Triangle, the Loch Ness monster, the pyramids, the Shroud of Turin, ghosts, and aliens, but also some less popular topics, such as the Cottingley fairies, cursed paintings, the Charlie Charlie Challenge, time travelers, and more.

I started with a few hundred subscribers that I had gathered along the years of doing practically nothing on my channel except uploading the occasional video of a lecture or a TV show I was on. I never produced anything.

After I started uploading videos, I soon reached the first 1,000 subscribers. Then soon they were 2,000 then 3,000, and after six months, they were 8,000 and keep on growing. The great thing about YouTube is that it is not a social outlet, such as Facebook or Twitter, where everything that you publish gets quickly lost in the stream.

YouTube is a search engine; actually it’s the second largest search engine in the world, after Google. And, guess what? Google owns YouTube. This means that whenever someone looks for a specific topic, your video may come up on both search engines. And this can happen the month after you published your video, a year … or ten years!

A magazine only lasts a week; a book may last two or three months in a bookstore and then it’s gone, unless you know what to look for. A TV show lasts only a few minutes and then it’s gone, along with the skeptical guest who was in it. Instead, the videos on YouTube stay there: ready to be found by anybody searching for that very specific subject. There will be three to five billion new consumers coming online between now and the year 2020. That’s why right now is a great time to get started on YouTube.

And this is also the reason I decided to start producing a new series along with Strane Storie, but this time in English. This new series is titled Stranger Stories, and it started on October 31, 2018, with an episode dedicated to Randi and to the extraordinary demonstration he gave during the Allan Spraggett show, where he was able to break a spoon and guess a drawing in a sealed envelope without even having been informed in advance that he had to perform such demonstrations! It was a fantastic demonstration of critical thinking that, I think, is an ingenious and quite entertaining way to introduce viewers to the skeptical approach. I hope you will check it out and, if you like it, subscribe to my channel!

If you think this requires years of preparation or technical abilities, think twice. I am not a tech kind of guy; I’ve worked on TV a lot but always in front of the camera. I had to learn how to do all of what is needed: how to shoot, what kind of equipment to use, how to position the lights, how to use the green screen, how to edit, and so on.

I understand it may seem daunting, but one can just start with the camera on your smartphone. It’s as simple as that! And, anyway, I can assure you that if I was able to do it anyone can. I look forward to seeing your skeptical videos on YouTube!

The Kraken—a massive sea monster—legendarily rose out of the ocean to pluck sailors off ship decks or even to grasp whole vessels and carry them to the depths. It has sometimes been linked to the biblical Leviathan (e.g., Psalm 104:26; Isaiah 27:1) and the “world-serpent” of old Norse tales, Jormungandr. It was so large, some said, it could be mistaken for an island. It was a fitting subject for Tennyson’s apocalyptic sonnet, “The Kraken” (1830):

Below the thunders of the upper deep,

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth ... .

(Leach 1984, 589; Levy 1999, 18–23).

It is now clear that accounts of the multi-appendaged creature best describe the giant squid, although it is only a fraction of the length attributed to the mythic beast. The giant squid’s genus is Architeuthis, and there is only a single species. (An even larger squid—Mesonychoteuthis or the colossal or Antarctic squid—exists, but its range is roughly south of the tips of South America, Africa, and New Zealand [Dockett 2017; “Colossal” 2018].)¹

Despite the identification of the Kraken as the giant squid, however, there remains much to investigate—both about the maximum size of the actual creature and the accuracy of some accounts that may be greatly exaggerated or even outright fictional.

Encounters

My interest in the legendary Kraken was renewed on a trip to the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2008, courtesy of the Monster Quest TV series to investigate Lake Crescent’s purported “giant eel.” (It proved to be, most likely, otters swimming in a line [Nickell 2009].) In the course of my further travels in the province, I learned of giant squid along the Newfoundland coast. I was subsequently one of the “stars” (cast) of the “Kraken” episode of Animal Planet’s popular Lost Tapes TV series in 2010.

Historically—following specimens that were sighted or stranded at Denmark in 1545, Iceland in 1639, and Ireland in 1673—the first in North American waters was reported at Newfoundland’s Grand Banks in 1785 (Ellis 1994, 125, 126, 130; Ellis 1998, 257). Other reports eventually followed.

In October 1873, two fishermen and a boy in a rowboat in Conception Bay, Newfoundland, came upon a dormant floating object. Suddenly, a terrible creature came to life and fastened one tentacle to the boat while another encircled it and pulled so that water began to pour inside. Twelve-year-old Tom Piccott had the presence of mind to grab up a “tomahawk” from the bottom of the boat and chop at the estimated thirty-five foot tentacle. When he had hacked it off, he did the same with the other attached to the little boat, and the creature retreated into the ocean while emitting an inky fluid to obscure its trail.

Tom took the longer piece of tentacle to St. John’s to a Presbyterian minister and amateur naturalist named Rev. Dr. Moses Harvey who had long been fascinated by tales of the “Devil Fish.” He paid Tom ten dollars for the monstrous tentacle, later recalling:

How my heart pounded as I drew out of the tub in which he carried it, coil after coil, to the length of nineteen feet, the dusty red member, strong and tough as leather, about as thick as a man’s wrist. I knew at a glance it was one of the tentacles or long arms of the ancients’ Kraken, or modern giant cuttle fish. Eureka! (Harvey 1899)

Harvey’s interest and expertise led him to further luck. Just three weeks later he was called to Logy Bay where an almost complete specimen had been brought, entangled in some fishermen’s net. As they tried to drag the net to shore, tentacles extending through it tried to grasp the boat, whereupon one man drew his splitting knife and severed most of the creature’s head. Of course Harvey bought this specimen too, took it home in his wagon, and stored it in brine in his shed. Although this creature was smaller than the previous one, its tentacles measured up to twenty-four feet.

Harvey presented his giant squid specimens and papers to Yale University professor A.E. Verril, an authority on cephalopods. Four years later, a severe windstorm drove another giant squid ashore at Catalina, and it was acquired by the New York Aquarium for $500. Still other encounters and specimens proliferated (Fitzgerald 2006, 49–71).

Attack on a Schooner

As striking as these encounters are, it was the giant squid’s attack on a 150-ton schooner in 1874 that reportedly spilled—not squid “ink” but copious printing ink in newspapers throughout Canada and the United States. My source cited testimony of both many survivors and witnesses from a nearby ship, the Strathowen. Supposedly the schooner, the Peril, had been in Atlantic waters to the south of Newfoundland.

Suddenly a gigantic creature rose from the sea and wrapped its tentacles around the Peril. Captain James Flood later told how he had grabbed up his rifle and—despite Newfoundlander Bill Darling’s warning not to shoot and so enrage the huge creature—did just that. “The oblong body,” he said, “was at least half the size of our vessel in length and just as thick. The train must have been a hundred feet long.” Although the men assailed the monstrosity with axes, it pulled the craft over and dragged it beneath the waves. The Strathowen moved in then and rescued the captain and his surviving crew members.

To learn more, I followed my source (Fitzgerald 2005, 74–76) to his, an account by Edward Rowe Snow in Snow’s Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (1948). To my consternation, Peril is there named as “Pearl” and Capt. Flood as “Floyd,” the location of the encounter is not given, and the creature is described not as a squid but as “a giant octopus”! Moreover, the original news source is not Fitzgerald’s News World but instead “News of the World for July 5, 1874.”

Seeking to verify the story and to document the facts, I set Google on the trail and in time was led from waters south of Newfoundland across the Atlantic and around the tip of Africa to the Indian Ocean’s Bay of Bengal! From there, in June 1874 reportedly, accounts supposedly appeared in Indian newspapers about an attack on a 150-ton schooner—accounts whose text was nearly identical to the foregoing.

In fact, the publishing trail soon led to The Times of London, where intrepid CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga was eventually able to secure a digital copy of the story, titled “A Successor to the Sea Serpent,” which appeared in The Times of July 4, 1874, on page 8. However, it had in turn been taken from the Homeward Mail, a British paper in India, and we soon had that text of Monday, June 29, 1874, in hand.

The Homeward Mail’s account is appropriately headed, “A Very Strange Story,” and purports to tell how some unidentified person aboard the steamer Strathowen, having witnessed the attack on the schooner, “prevailed on the skipper,” after his rescue, “to give me his written account.” That follows in quotation marks and is signed, “James Floyd, late master schooner Pearl.”

Truth Be Told

But is this story true? I immediately found it very doubtful, but some others have accepted it. The authority on the giant squid, Richard Ellis (1998, 257–265), includes it in his list of 121 “Authenticated Giant Squid Sightings” (1545–1996); however, his source is at a century’s remove. Fitzgerald (2005, 74–76) insists of the attack on the schooner, “This attack was not imaginary”; and yet we have seen that he thought it occurred off the Newfoundland coast, and his source was also untrustworthy (Ellis 1998).

No less a figure than Arthur C. Clarke wrote of The Times account, “If you think this an improbable story, I do not blame you; I would not take it very seriously myself, if it had appeared anywhere except in the shipping column of The Times—a paper not noted for sensational journalism” (Clarke 1974). However, as we have seen, it did first appear somewhere else, in a source lacking The Times’ reputation, Homeward Mail, which said it had in turn been “communicated to the Indian papers.” By whom is not stated, so the original remains unknown—three or so steps back from The Times. I feel sure that if Clarke had known all this he would not have given his endorsement—equivocal though it was.

The evidence regarding the credibility of the tale is bad indeed. There is no record of a ship named the Strathowen in Loyd’s Register or other source, and a review of the account more recently (Boyle 1999) laments, “It is unfortunate that the facts concerning the encounter in question have never been wholly substantiated.”

Moreover, the Bay of Bengal, the northern extension of the Indian Ocean, is not a known habitat of giant squid, based on the locations of beaches they have washed up on. They are rarely found in the tropics (Smithsonian Ocean 2018).²

From what we know of the giant squid, such an attack as that alleged on a 150-ton schooner would not seem credible. The largest specimen known was only fifty-nine feet long and weighed just under a ton—being a female, which is typically larger than the male (“Giant Squid Facts” 2018). Regarding old sailors’ tales of giant squids overpowering ships or snatching someone from deck or shore, advises one source, “None of these turn out to be true” (“Giant Squid Found” 2007).

That the writer is not only anonymous but avoids telling us whether he is a reporter or other communicant is suspicious, as is the introductory phrase that the story “has been communicated”—the passive-voice construction aiding in the concealment of the author. And of course the existence of “Captain James Floyd” likewise remains unverified and questionable.

“Floyd” certainly seems to have missed his true calling—not as a ship’s captain but as a spinner of adventure yarns. He reproduces dialect, having one crewman state, “and it ain’t the sea sarpent, for he’s too round for that ere critter.” His attention to detail is admirable: he notes that three of the crew “had found axes, and one a rusty cutlass.” He describes “the advancing monster” as “a huge oblong mass moving by jerks just under the surface of the water.” Then, he says, “In the time I have taken to write this the brute struck us, and the ship quivered under the thud; in another moment, monstrous arms like trees seized the vessel and she heeled [tilted] over.” I suspect “Floyd” is the invention of the anonymous author.

The concocted narrative may have been inspired by a similar episode in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea published in 1869. In it a giant poulp (a cephalopod such as an octopus or squid) has become entangled in the Nautilus’s screw, and Captain Nemo raises the submarine to the surface. Opening the hatch, he and the crew use axes to battle, not just one creature but, over a quarter hour’s time, ten or twelve from a “nest of serpents, that wriggled on the platform in the waves of blood and ink.” (One of the crew is Ned Land, a Canadian, who may have been the model for the Pearl’s Bill Darling, a Newfoundlander.)

Conclusions

Beyond mythology and fantasy, the Kraken of old is of renewed interest as the giant squid (Architeuthis)—diminished in size but authentically real. Even at “only” sixty feet, it rivals the sperm whale for length, and we do not really know how large it may get. Richard Ellis, in his definitive book (1998, 8), states: “It is the least-known large animal on earth, the last monster to be conquered.”

Notes

1. Squid have eight arms, which have suckers along their entire length, and a pair of longer tentacles, with suckers only at the tip.
2. A list of squid sightings and strandings (Ellis 1998, 257–264) lists only two for the Indian Ocean: one the questionable Pearl story and one other, the following year, in the Southern Indian Ocean, of “unknown” size.

References

• Boyle, Richard. 1999. When the squid sank a schooner. The Sunday Times (December 12).
• Clarke, Arthur C. 1974. The Treasure of the Great Reef; quoted in Boyle 1999.
• Colossal Squid. 2018. Available online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_squid; accessed September 6, 2018.
• Dockett, Eric. 2017. Colossal Squid vs. Giant Squid: The Real Kraken Sea Monster. Available online at https://owlcation.com/stem/Colossal-Squid-vs-Giant-Squid-the-Real-Kraken-Sea-Monster; accessed September 6, 2018.
• Ellis, Richard. 1994. Monsters of the Sea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• ———. 1998. The Search for the Giant Squid: The Biology and Mythology of the World’s Most Elusive Creature. New York: Penguin Books.
• Fitzgerald, Jack. 2005. Ghosts and Oddities. St. John’s, NL Canada: Jefferson Publishing.
• ———. 2006. Newfoundland Adventures. St. John’s, NL Canada: Creative Publishers.
• Giant Squid Facts. 2018. Available online at www.softschools.com/facts/animals/giant_squid_facts/113; accessed September 18, 2018.
• Giant Squid Found. 2007. Monster Quest, Season 1, Episode 3, originally aired November 14.
• Harvey, Rev. Moses. 1899. A Sea Monster Unmasked. Science Digest. Cited in Fitzgerald 2006.
• Leach, Maria, ed. 1984. Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. New York: Harper & Row.
• Levy, Joel. 1999. A Natural History of the Unnatural World. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Nickell, Joe. 2009. Quest for the giant Eel. Skeptical Inquirer 33(4) (July/August).
• Smithsonian Ocean: Giant Squid. 2018. Available online at https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life-/invertebrates/giant-squid; accessed September 18, 2018.
• Snow, Edward Rowe. 1948. Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast. Edition updated by Jeremy d’Entremont; Carlile MA: Commonwealth Editions, 2004, 133–134.
• A Successor to the Sea Serpent. 1874. The Times (London),(July 4):8.
• Verne, Jules. 1869. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. English translation, Project Gutenberg ebook, updated 2016, chapter XVIII: “The Poulps” (pp. 127–147).
• A Very Strange Story. 1874. Homeward Mail from India, China and the East (June 29).

Over the past two decades, high profile debates over human origins, abortion, and stem cell research have distracted from the opportunities that scientists, skeptics, and religious Americans have to forge relationships built on common values and goals.

Though topics such as the teaching of evolution may generate disagreements, other areas of science (such as health, sustainability, climate change, and food security) may not. Even in the face of disagreements, dialogue-based efforts can help break down stereotypes between scientists, skeptics, and people of faith, cultivating mutual respect and personal relationships, leading to collaboration on society’s most pressing problems.

These are some of the main points emphasized in a recent report Scientists in Civic Life: Facilitating Dialogue-Based Communication, which I authored on behalf of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (Nisbet 2018).The booklet provides an overview on relevant research, practices, and examples that scientists, skeptics, and their partners can draw on to encourage more thoughtful dialogue about science and society.

As one of the world’s largest scientific societies, AAAS has long emphasized the importance of public dialogue to its membership and the scientific community at large. “[Scientists] need to engage the public in a more open and honest, bidirectional dialogue about science and technology … addressing not only the inherent benefits, but also the limits, perils, and pitfalls,” wrote former CEO Alan Leshner in a 2003 Science editorial. Consistent with this mission, the aim of the new booklet is to empower scientists and their institutions to play a more active role in bringing Americans of diverse backgrounds together to spend time talking to each other, contributing to mutual appreciation and collaboration.

Churches are a vital place to begin.

Networks of Engagement

When I moved in 2014 with my family from Washington, D.C., to a small city north of Boston, I was surprised to find that my new community had a locally based group of volunteers who were working to promote climate change resilience efforts along the city’s riverfront and ocean coastline. The hub for this group was a centuries-old church at the center of town, where members would meet during evenings and after Sunday services to plan their efforts and recruit new volunteers.

Religion, as this example shows, is more than just a belief system that shapes how people understand or prioritize a problem such as climate change. Churches are communication centers where information is shared and conversations can take place about complex science-related issues.

For these reasons and others, it is important for scientists and other experts to build deep relationships with their local churches, temples, and mosques. Congregational leaders rely on strong interpersonal bonds and norms of stewardship to encourage their members to participate in civic-related activities. These networks are further strengthened by the moral framing of issues by church leaders, the conversations that churchgoers have with others, and information provided directly when at church (Lewis et al. 2013).

Even today, research shows that churches remain the social context where Americans are most likely to receive requests to become involved in their communities (see Figure 1). Specific to science-related issues, they may be called upon to help people recover from the impacts of climate change, to work on actions to educate their communities about public health, or to voice their opinions to elected officials on topics such as evolution or biomedical research.

Dialogue in a Turbulent World

In facilitating productive dialogue about science topics that intersect with faith and religion, all scientists and academics have a role to play. Regardless of their personal beliefs, when engaging in conversations with faith communities, scientists can connect around common values and interests.

Every scientist is also likely to find something in common with people and groups who live and work in their local community. As fellow residents, scientists can build connections by way of their identification with local pastimes, sport teams, entertainment choices, favorite businesses, economic trends, school districts, cultural traditions, natural resources, and climate/weather events.

Consider E.O. Wilson’s (2006) approach to facilitating a dialogue with religious leaders and their communities. In his book The Creation, Wilson described environmental stewardship as not only a scientific matter but also one of personal and moral duty. Wilson’s aim in writing the book was to engage a religious audience that might not otherwise pay attention to popular science books or, for that matter, appeals on the environment. Wilson passionately believed, as he told Bill Moyers in a 2007 interview:

[If atheists and religious folk] sat down and talked about our deepest beliefs together, we’d come up with more agreements, than disagreements. …Science and religion are the two most powerful social forces in the world. Having them at odds at each other all the way up to the highest levels of government and the popular media all the time is not productive.

Boundary Spanners

Scientists who are themselves already a part of faith communities may be particularly well-positioned to serve as trusted dialogue brokers. By one 2011–2012 survey estimate, approximately 11 percent of U.S. biologists and physicists say they attend church services at least weekly, and a similar proportion say they hold no doubts about the existence of God. More than one third claim a religious affiliation (Ecklund et al. 2016) (see Table 1).

Through their shared beliefs and community membership, these boundary spanners are likely to be effective at facilitating conversations between their fellow scientists and those members of the public who share their faith. In doing so, they can draw on their own experience to share insights on the relationship between science and their personal faith. A leading example is Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, who as a Christian evangelical regularly speaks to congregations about climate science, drawing on her faith to connect to audiences by way of a shared identity and language.

Science in Seminaries

Many religious leaders and clergy are also interested in facilitating constructive conversations among their congregations and faith communities about scientific topics. Unfortunately, clergy have historically not been likely to have formal training in how to lead thoughtful dialogue about the social implications of science. To address this gap, the AAAS DoSER program has partnered with Christian seminaries and theological schools to include more science in their core curricula as part of an ongoing “Science for Seminaries” project.

Each partner seminary, in consultation with AAAS, integrates science articles, books, films, guest lectures, laboratory and research site visits, and other content into core course offerings such as biblical studies, church history, and theology. These resources are developed in collaboration with local scientists to build and strengthen relationships with local science institutions. A program called Scientists in Synagogues is a similar grassroots initiative designed to equip Jewish clergy, scientists, and laypeople with the knowledge and skills to engage in dialogue and learn about society’s biggest questions, drawing on science and religion as sources of wisdom and inspiration.

At synagogues and Jewish community centers, the program sponsors adult education courses, lectures, and events on topics exploring the intersections among Judaism, neuroscience, astronomy, evolutionary science, moral psychology, and other scientific fields.

Talking Faith and Climate

Specific to climate change, research conducted by the U.K.-based nonprofit ClimateOutreach has examined the narratives, metaphors, imagery, and frames of reference that can be used by scientists and religious leaders to engage people of faith by way of informal conversations, public statements, popular articles, and sermons. This research and similar studies recommend presenting a commitment to climate change as representing a moral responsibility to God, our children, neighbors, the “least of us,” and “all of creation.” Climate change can be discussed as part of a story arc that encompasses a challenge, an action, and a resolution—a narrative style familiar from scripture (Roberts and Clarke 2016).

Yet even when framed in such terms by the highest religious authorities, scientists and science communicators should recognize that this approach has limits, especially outside of a localized, dialogue-focused framework. For example, an analysis of responses by Catholics to Pope Francis’s 2015 Laudato si encyclical on climate change found, somewhat predictably, that liberal Catholics tended to assign the pontiff greater credibility on the issue, while more conservative Catholics assigned the pontiff less credibility. In this case, the political identity of these Catholics tended to trump their faith-based one (Li et al. 2016).

Looking ahead, as more and more scientists and their institutions turn to locally focused dialogue activities to engage publics on the biggest science and society questions, a first step toward improved relations with religious Americans and their churches may be simply to recognize and affirm shared values, beliefs, and goals. With this established, further dialogue can be structured in such a way as to encourage working together toward common goals on climate change and other pressing problems.

References

• Ecklund, Elaine Howard, David R. Johnson, Christopher P. Scheitle, et al. 2016. Religion among scientists in international context: A new study of scientists in eight regions. Socius 2: 2378023116664353.
• Leshner, A.I. 2003. Public engagement with science. Science 299(5609): 977.
• Lewis, Valerie A., Carol Ann MacGregor, and Robert D. Putnam. 2013. Religion, networks, and neighborliness: The impact of religious social networks on civic engagement. Social Science Research 42(2): 331–346.
• Li, N., J. Hilgard, D.A. Scheufele, et al. 2016. Cross-pressuring conservative Catholics? Effects of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the US public opinion on climate change. Climatic Change 139(3–4): 367–380.
• Nisbet, M.C. 2018. Scientists in Civic Life: Facilitating Dialogue-Based Communication. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Available online at https://www.aaas.org/programs/dialogue-science-ethics-and-religion/resources-engaging-scientists-project.
• Roberts, O., and J. Clarke. 2016. Faith & Climate Change - A guide to talking with the five major faiths. Oxford: Climate Outreach. Available online at http://climateoutreach.org/resources/climate-change-faith.
• Wilson, E.O. 2006. The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. New York: WW Norton & Company.

Image Courtesy of Pixabay

Calling something energy catalysis (E-Cat), low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), or condensed matter nuclear science (CMNS) cannot hide the fact that the idea is simply the same cold fusion announced to the press in March 1989. As cold fusion was notoriously debunked by the scientific community in the 1990s (Close 1991; Huizenga 1994; Taubes 1993; see also David W. Ball’s article in this issue), new names such as these popped up to conceal the true identity of the idea. The underlying physics on which all these processes are based is nuclear fusion. (To grasp the absurdity of the claims, it helps to have a nodding familiarity with the basics of nuclear interactions; I discuss those in the sidebar accompanying this article.)

How E-Cat Is Alleged to Work

E-Cat is the brainchild of Andrea Rossi, a self-proclaimed inventor with a master’s degree in philosophy and a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Kensington in California, which was subsequently identified as a diploma mill and shut down (Holguin 2004). He has demonstrated his E-Cat generators to audiences around the world but has not revealed how all the black boxes composing his machine work (Krivit 2011). The only thing we know about the E-Cat generator is that it is a cell consisting of nickel and hydrogen. This was not directly revealed by Rossi but became known after he challenged his competitor’s patent (E-Cat World 2015; see https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2702593B1/en). The details of how the patent allegedly accomplishes cold fusion is given in blog posts—as is the entire literature on cold fusion and LENR (see https://e-catworld.com/, http://news.newenergytimes.net/, https://animpossibleinvention.com/, and http://www.quantumheat.org/index.php/en/).

Journalist Steve Krivit maintains a blog containing the most comprehensive information about LENR (of which he is an advocate) and cold fusion (of which he is an adversary). No credible physics or chemistry journal is cited there, because no such journal is willing to publish articles that are not based on science. The fight between LENR believers and cold fusion advocates is not unlike that between two factions of a religion with opposing views. While members of the cold fusion community believe they achieve fusion by orbital capture (as in the process of muon capture by hydrogen discussed in the sidebar), the LENR community invoke weak nuclear interaction¹.

How does Rossi’s E-Cat cell work? Mats Lewan (2016), a Swedish journalist with no physics or chemistry background but with a passionate devotion to cold fusion, proposes a “theory” whereby a hydrogen atom with an extra electron (H^-) replaces one of the electrons of the nickel atom, and since H^- is 2,000 times more massive than the electron, it gets much closer to the nickel nucleus in the same manner that the muon captured by a hydrogen atom reduces the size of the resulting muonic hydrogen. As a confirmation of his theory, Lewan mentions the X-ray burst “produced in a replication attempt of the E-Cat” reported—not in a scientific journal but instead in a YouTube video (Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project 2016). According to Lewan’s theory, the captured H^- loses its electrons (through some unexplained mechanism) and the resulting proton fuses with the nucleus of nickel. Lewan claims that this process is similar to the muon-catalyzed fusion. There are several things wrong with this claim. First, in the muon-catalyzed fusion, the nuclei of the muonic hydrogen molecules fuse. Muons do not fuse with the hydrogen nucleus². Second, if the proton is captured by the nickel nucleus (with twenty-eight protons and thirty neutrons), it has to turn into copper (with twenty-nine protons and thirty-four neutrons). Therefore, the proton must have a tremendous amount of energy—such as that provided in a large particle accelerator—to create the extra four neutrons. Third, nickel is at the bottom of the stability curve shown in the sidebar. Hence it cannot participate in either fission or fusion. Just as you need energy to move a ball at the bottom of a bowl, you need to provide energy to move from nickel to copper.

Comparison with Real Science

A unique characteristic of real science is the impact it has on science itself and, more tangibly, on technology. The following list is only a small sample of this characteristic. Note that all discoveries listed had at least one impact that occurred less than thirty years after the discovery.

• Maxwell predicted the electromagnetic waves (EMWs) in 1865. They were produced in the laboratory in 1887, and in 1901 radio was invented.
• Quantization of electromagnetic waves was proposed in 1905. Eight years later, it was used to explain the spectral lines of the hydrogen atom.
• Einstein discovered his general theory of relativity in 1916. It immediately explained the precession of the perihelion of Mercury and predicted—among other things—the bending of light, which was observed in 1919. Gravitational waves, another prediction, were observed recently. The general theory of relativity also predicted gravitational time dilation, which is crucial in the design of GPS devices.
• The wave properties of the electron were proposed in 1923. Eight years later the first electron microscope was built.
• Quantum mechanics was theorized in 1925–1926.
  • It immediately explained the spectral lines of the hydrogen atom.
  • It accounted for the periodic table.
  • A year later, it was used to describe the hydrogen molecule.
  • Two years later, it was combined with special relativity to create relativistic quantum mechanics, which predicted the existence of antimatter and is now at the heart of the fundamental forces of nature and the standard cosmological model.
  • Six years later it was used to explain nuclear alpha decay.
  • Twenty-one years later, it prompted the invention of transistors.
  • Twenty-eight years later, it was used to invent masers, the prototype of laser, which were first produced in 1960.
  • Chemists have used quantum mechanics to synthesize countless materials from polymers and plastic to paints, detergents, and drugs.
• The helical nature of DNA was discovered in 1955. Seventeen years later, the first recombinant DNA was produced, which led to the far-reaching field of genetic engineering. Twenty-five years later it was employed in solving a crime. Today, forensic science is almost entirely based on DNA evidence. DNA has become an indispensable tool in archeology, paleontology, and zoology.

It has been almost thirty years since Pons and Fleishmann, in a press conference, abnormally reported cold fusion. No other scientist has been able to reproduce their results (see the article by David W. Ball elsewhere in this issue). Aside from the claims of the cult of believers, no invention or actual production of energy has been made. Dick Smith, a CSI fellow in Australia, has offered one million dollars to Rossi to demonstrate his generator in the presence of unbiased observers (Smith 2012, see box). Rossi has declined the offer, saying that customers can judge whether or not his invention works. However, no customer has surfaced to validate the operation of E-Cat. On the contrary, one customer has filed a lawsuit, claiming that the invention is bogus (Lawsuit 2016). The competition between LENR and cold fusion has had the benefit of releasing a huge amount of information on Rossi’s folly. For a timeline of events, see http://tinyurl.com/7zjn8kr.

Falling for Cold Fusion and E-Cat

With all the scientific evidence against it, why do people fall for cold fusion? The short answer is science illiteracy. The public, while enjoying the technology that is fundamentally based on modern science, is deplorably illiterate in the basic premises of science such as verifiability, repeatability, and evidence. Improving the science literacy of the public may reduce its gullibility, but other factors—especially those originating from scientists themselves—cannot be ignored. Ever since its birth, quantum mechanics has been infested with mysticism, especially of the Far Eastern kind, because of the philosophy of its founders. Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, and Schrödinger were all influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophy paralleled Buddhism and Hinduism. It is not an exaggeration to say that physicists themselves have delivered the most devastating blow to science literacy and the flourishing of modern pseudoscience.

John Archibald Wheeler was arguably one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of the middle of the twentieth century. Although he did not win a Nobel Prize, he supervised forty-six PhD students at Princeton University, two of whom won the Prize: Richard Feynman, the noted American physicist, for his contribution to quantum electrodynamics, and Kip Thorne for his role in the design and construction of the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves. There was another side to Wheeler, which often prodded him to speculate on matters outside science. Freeman Dyson, a long-time friend and a fellow speculator—whose speculation won him the Templeton Prize in 2000—describes Wheeler as both “prosaic and poetic” (Barrow et al. 2004, xviii).

Wheeler and two of his students wrote a book titled Gravitation (Misner et al. 1972), a masterpiece that has taught Einstein’s general theory of relativity to generations of physicists. Throughout the book, the prosaic Wheeler helps explain the intricacies of the theory with a peerless combination of clarity and rigor. Then, on page 1217, the poetic Wheeler breaks his silence:

... May the universe in some strange sense be “brought into being” by the participation of those who participate? ... “Participator” ... strikes down the term “observer” of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can’t be done, quantum mechanics says. ... Is this firmly established result the tiny tip of a giant iceberg? Does the universe also derive its meaning from “participation”?

Unsurprisingly, this particular admixture of quantum mechanics and mysticism has become a powerful tool for pseudoscientists to consociate their nonsensical ideas with science. If the universe is “brought into being by the participation of those who participate,” they argue, then you, as a participator, create the universe. And since “the universe derives its meaning from your participation,” you and the universe become the same: You Are the Universe. It is not a coincidence that Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos chose those words for the title of their recently published book, which predictably and regrettably became a bestseller in no time.³

Wheeler is only one of an appreciable number of scientists who step out of their field of expertise and speculate on spiritual and religious matters—and base their speculations on their science. This confluence of science and pseudoscience by scientists is inarguably the most pernicious blow to scientific literacy. Just type “quantum spirituality” in the Amazon.com search field to obtain several hundred titles, including such outlandish titles as Quantum Angel Healing, Quantum Tarot Cards, and Quantum Activism.

The CEOs and the decision-makers of corporations are, like the general public, not the most critical thinkers of the world⁴. They are most likely avid readers of self-help books on one variation of “positive thinking” or another and firm believers in its fundamental basis, namely the all-embracing and pretentious “law of attraction.”⁵ Benefiting from the speculative teachings of the likes of Wheeler, the promoters of the “law of attraction” can claim a link between their profession and quantum mechanics.

Indoctrinated in this culture of pseudoscience, the CEO of an energy company hears about an inventor achieving fusion on a tabletop. He “researches” the claim, and his positive thinking, coupled with the likelihood of the enormous profit promised by the invention, ignores all the negative scientific critique of the invention and invests in cold fusion. And if a Nobel laureate such as Brian Josephson affirms the possibility of cold fusion⁶, no doubt it will remain in the CEO’s mind⁷.

The believers and promoters of E-Cat and LENR resort to one of the most effective means by which untruth is propagated among the public: conspiracy theory. In the conspiracists’ view, just as the mainstream media have conspired to withhold the truth about what really happened on 9/11, to stay silent about the fact that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged, to not cover the fact that millions of people voted illegally in 2016, so have the mainstream scientific journals conspired not to publish any of the breakthroughs in cold fusion and LENR. The public is in fact more prone to the scientific conspiracy theory than its political counterpart. While the latter enters the daily life of the public and, therefore, has a tangible effect on it, the former is too abstract. If John Doe can be made to believe that the Las Vegas shooting never occurred and all the fuss in the news media was simply a performance by paid actors, he can more effectively be indoctrinated into believing that parapsychology is a science, that near-death experiences indeed happen, that prayer can cure cancer, and that cold fusion, LENR, and E-Cat are possible.

Thus, to answer the question of why the public and CEOs of reputable corporations succumb to scientifically disproven nonsense, we have to ask another—more significant—question: Why do great scientists believe in ideas that contradict their science? There is no obvious answer. Perhaps they are so enthusiastic about publicizing the “excitement” of their discovery that they feel that peppering it with some exotic—albeit nonsensical—ideas may raise the interest of the public. Perhaps, as in the case of Brian Josephson, something happens in their lives that alters their personality and annuls their rationality. Perhaps their philosophical outlook is so strong—as with the founders of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s—that any novel scientific discovery becomes an excuse to inject that outlook into their science. Or perhaps public recognition, profit from books that appeal to the public, and million-dollar awards such as the Templeton Prize are too enticing to ignore. Whatever the reason, it is the responsibility of science educators to tell the public that science is not the same as scientist: It is the message that counts, not the messenger.

Remarks on Nuclear Interaction

The stability curve of nuclei—a plot of average binding energy (BE) per nucleon (proton or neutron) versus the atomic mass number shown below—tells us how the two exothermic (energy releasing) nuclear processes, fission and fusion, work. In either case, the higher BE on either side of the valley turns into the kinetic energy (KE) of the final products with lower BE (closer to the valley). Fission accomplishes this by triggering heavier elements on the right. In fusion, two light elements on the left combine into heavier elements. Think of the curve as a bowl with a ball inside. If the ball is not at the bottom of the bowl, it moves toward it whether we release if from the right or the left. If the ball is at the bottom, it will not move unless we provide energy to it. Since fusion is the alleged underlying process of E-Cat, a brief introduction of that topic will be helpful.

Nuclei repel each other electrically unless they are so close that the attractive nuclear force, which operates only within the nucleus, dominates. Classically, this requires the two nuclei to touch each other. To achieve this, they should be moving at an extremely high speed. It is known, however, that at the core of stars such as the Sun, hydrogen nuclei (protons) fuse at much lower speeds. This was a puzzle until quantum mechanics, through the phenomenon of tunneling, allowed fusion at larger distances and, therefore, lower speeds. There are two ways to bring two light nuclei together: by accelerating them (hot fusion) or by making very small atoms so that the distance between the nuclei of the molecule formed by those atoms is very small (cold fusion).

Quantum mechanics gives only the probability of fusion, which is expressed in terms of cross section⁸. Bigger cross sections correspond to higher probability of fusion. At the core of the Sun, hydrogen nuclei fuse with a small cross section: it takes about ten billion years for the hydrogen in the sun to fuse (Krane 1987, 537). While this prolongs the life of the Sun and the possibility of life on Earth, it makes protons bad candidates for man-made fusion. Plots of fusion cross sections (McCracken and Stott 2005, 38) show why deuterium-tritium fusion at about 100 keV is the process of choice in fusion laboratories around the world. Deuterium is abundant in the oceans, and tritium can be produced in situ.

The second way of bringing the nuclei closer is by forming muonic hydrogen molecules. Muon is basically a heavy electron. Replacing the electron in the hydrogen atom by a muon shrinks the size of the atom by a factor of almost two hundred. So, the two nuclei in a muonic hydrogen molecule are almost two hundred times closer to each other than a regular hydrogen molecule and, thus, more likely to fuse. Although the fusing of muonic hydrogen molecules has been observed in the laboratory, this kind of fusion cannot be a source of energy because the production of muonic hydrogen requires more energy than the energy outputted in the subsequent fusion. Nevertheless, all claims of cold fusion rely on processes similar to this.
—S. Hassani

Dick Smith’s Challenge to Rossi

In August 2018, Roger Green, the Australian agent/distribution holder for the Rossi E-Cat, issued a press release about Australian businessman and CSI Fellow Dick Smith’s challenge to their claims (Smith 2012). Here is the text of their release:

ONE MILLION prize money 

for Rossi’s Ecat independent validation

A famous Australian benefactor and entrepreneur, Dick Smith, is willing to award Andrea Rossi one million USD to support the progression of the Ecat technology

All that is required is a public demonstration at an mutually agreed reputable university… An independent assessment of the energy inputs and outputs of the Ecat reactor, with specific care around wiring and measurements of the output power.

It will be 100% secure and there is no need to reveal how the reactor works, or what is inside the reactor. 

For more details

Contact Roger Green

Ecat@earthlink.net

www.Ecat.Tech

Who is Dick Smith

Dick Smith is one of Australia’s most notable people, having become famous as an entrepreneur and business man and then cementing that as a record breaking aviator, philanthropist, author, environmentalist and political activist. He was awarded Australian of the Year in 1986. 

Ref:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Smith_(entrepreneur)

Green also told Smith on August 26 that the prize challenge had been passed on to Rossi, but “Rossi was extremely busy (like always) in building a 40 MW plant and is not interested in the prize.”In other words, he declined the challenge.

References

• Barrow, J.D., P.C.W. Davis, and C.L. Harper, Jr. eds. 2004. Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
• Close, F. 1991. Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• E-Cat World. 2015. Piantelli European Patent Revoked after Challenge by Leonardo Corporation. Available online athttp://e-catworld.com/2015/09/30/piantelli-european-patent-revoked/.
• Holguin, Jaime. 2004. Top officials hold fake degrees. CBS News (May 10). Available online at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/top-officials-hold-fake-degrees/.
• Huizenga, J. 1994. Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Krane, K. 1987. Introductory Nuclear Physics. New York: Wiley.
• Krivit, S. 2011. The Failure of Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer, Caught on Video Parts 1 and 2. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=m-8QdVwY98E and https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=YrTz5Bq6dsA.
• Lawsuit. 2016. Available online at http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/RossiECat/Rossi-vs-Darden/20160806-Darden-Countersuit/20160806-Darden-Countersuit-29-0.pdf.
• Lewan, Mats. 2016. Finally: This is possibly how the E-Cat works. Available online at https://animpossibleinvention.com/2016/03/07/finally-this-is-possibly-how-the-e-cat-works/.
• Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project. 2016. Implications of Signal, Seeing into the E-Cat with X-Ray Eyes. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtTeHU4vBmc&feature=youtu.be.
• McCracken, G., and Peter E. Stott. 2005. Fusion: The Energy of the Universe. New York: Elsevier.
• Misner, C., K. Thorn, and J.A. Wheeler 1972. Gravitation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Pollack, Andrew J. 1992. Cold fusion, derided in U.S., is hot in Japan. New York Times (November 11).
• ———. 1997. Japan, long a holdout, is ending its quest for cold fusion. New York Times (August 26).
• Smith, Dick. 2012. Email to Andrea Rossi. Available online at http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/RossiECat/Solihin-Millin/SmithOffer.pdf.
• Taubes, G 1993. Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion. New York: Random House.

Notes

1. The claims of how the weak nuclear force is responsible for LENR are based on erroneous speculations that violate some fundamental principles of weak interactions. However, debunking LENR is not the intent of this article.
2. The real analogue of muon-catalyzed fusion is for the nickel atoms to form a molecule. This is impossible because there is no such thing as a nickel molecule. And even if there were, two nickel nuclei never fuse, because nickel is in the valley of the nuclear stability curve.
3. For a critical review of this book and its exploitation of Wheeler’s participatory dogma, see Skeptical Inquirer March/April 2018, p. 62.
4. Steve Jobs believed in the nonsensical “Reality Distortion Field.” He refused conventional medical treatment, preferring alternative medicine, which caused his eventual death.
5. A highly recommended book on the impact of self-help culture and positive thinking is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (Picador, 2009).
6. Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry spent $25 million on cold fusion in the early 1990s. About fifteen Japanese companies took part in the effort and contributed additional money (New York Times 1992). However, five years later the Government of Japan terminated its research, which had failed to confirm that cold fusion existed (New York Times 1997).
7. Brian Josephson was a brilliant physicist, who in 1962 mathematically described an effect now bearing his name, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1973. Something happened to him right around that time that shifted his interest in science to parapsychology, mind-matter unification, transcendental meditation, E-Cat, and other paranormal phenomena. In 1974 he angered scientists during a colloquium of molecular and cellular biologists in Versailles by inviting them to read the Bhagavad Gita and the work of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and by arguing about special states of consciousness achieved through meditation (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson#Early_interest_and_transcendental_meditation and http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/).
8. Cross section is not just a quantum mechanical concept. It can also be defined in classical mechanics. Fire bullets at a bowling ball. If the distance of the bullets from the center of the bowling ball as they pass it is larger than the radius of the ball, they miss it; if smaller, they interact with it. So, we say that the cross section of the interaction of bullets with the bowling ball is simply the area of the circle seen by the bullets as they pass the bowling ball.

Cover Image Courtesy of Pixabay

Mark Edward presenting at CSICon 2017. (Photo by Karl Withakay.)

“I can’t do much about the rottenness of the Big Picture, but I and others I work with know if we can put our best efforts into activism that exposes the lower spectrum of the lie culture (psychics and mediums), we can make a difference. … Join a local grassroots skeptical group and do something!”

—Mark Edward

I met Mark Edward at my very first skeptics conference in October 2017 at CSICon. In fact, the very first event I attended there was his workshop. The session was an interesting mixture of Mark teaching us exactly what techniques “psychics” and “mediums” use to deceive their clients/victims and Mark actually doing it—that is, performing as if he were one. (At the time, I was unaware that he had actually worked as a psychic, including as a top performer on the Psychic Friends Network.)

While speaking from his PowerPoint slides, Mark would sporadically close his eyes, hold his forehead as if in deep concentration, and claim he was in contact with a deceased relative of someone in the room. Then he would tell a workshop participant some impossible-to-know piece of information about his or her life. Even knowing this was some sort of trick—rather than “the real deal”—this was impressive.

“I’m getting something…” at CSICon 2017. (Photo by Karl Withakay.)

There were a few misses, but the seemingly unknowable information given to him by the “spirits” about the workshop attendees was generally spot on and frankly spooky. Just how he pulled this off, and why there were misses, was explained to us near the session’s end. It seems that Mark was using the same technique that “psychic medium” Thomas John was caught using in one of his performances, which was recently revealed by The New York Times. Hint: It’s amazing what detailed information about everyone is available on social media these days. (More on the sting operation later.)

Having been suitably impressed by Mark’s workshop, one of the books I purchased at CSICon was his: Psychic Blues: Confessions of a Conflicted Medium (with a personalized autograph, of course).

In its pages I learned of Mark’s interesting past and got the inside scoop on the sordid psychic trade. Little did I know (hey, I’m not psychic) that I would soon become a Skeptical Inquirer online columnist and would interview him for an article. Now, if Mark had made that prediction about me in 2017, I might not still be a skeptic!

[As I was polishing this article, the news broke about the Thomas John sting operation, so I have added that information at the article’s end.]

Rob Palmer: Mark, please introduce yourself and give us a bit about your background.

Mark Edward: I’m a professional mentalist, specializing in magic of the mind. I have written books on mentalism and séance theory and production and appeared on television as both primary consultant and on-air performer. My skeptical history goes back to the early 1970s, when I became involved with searching out the methods of Uri Geller. At that time, I lectured and taught magic classes for the California Skeptics Society.

Palmer: A lady I know, let’s call her Mary, recently told me that she believes mediums are real because her close friend is one. Mary said her friend did a reading for her and had a bunch of hits, including what her deceased grandmother used to cook for her. I didn’t want to accuse her friend of being a liar but suggested to Mary that she could have just fooled herself into thinking she has these abilities by making lucky guesses sometimes (confirmation bias and all that). Of course, Mary stuck to her guns, insisting that her friend is the “real deal.”

Edward: There’s nothing lucky about what happened here. The most likely circumstance is … since they had a prior “friendship,” it wouldn’t be surprising that the psychic knew about Mary’s mother, was privy to information Mary may have let slip but completely forgot about. … Psychics have very good memories, take copious notes, springing into action with this information when the moment presents itself. Her “psychic friend” may also have other “clients” that knew Mary, and they unknowingly provided this … information.

Palmer: When I read Psychic Blues I learned you were a psychic on the Psychic Friends Network and also did readings at parties. I believe you said you began to wonder if you had real psychic powers because you were being so accurate and you had to fight to stay humble. Am I recalling that correctly?

Edward: I never began to believe I had psychic powers of any sort! In Psychic Blues I merely mentioned the fact that when you immerse yourself in the psychic marketplace and begin to get testimonial letters and gushing accolades from total strangers who go out of their way to promote your godly “gift,” it can begin to turn your head. Without a solid underpinning of skepticism and critical thinking (in my case brought about primarily by my background in magic and mentalism), it would have been easy to fall prey to this sort of false imagining. So no, I never fell under my own illusions. I was on a mission to find out how I could scam the scammers and steered clear of “the woo” as best I could, taking it all with a healthy grain of salt.

Palmer: In Blues, it seemed like you were on the fence about the reality of at least some paranormal phenomena. Was I off base?

Edward: Honestly, I don’t consider myself a total skeptic and have always preferred to have an open mind to such things. This is not being on any fence. To my way of thinking, this is no different than choosing to remain an agnostic rather than assuming the stance of an atheist. Also, it’s my theory there are some things we just don’t know, and it’s arrogant in the extreme to judge something we know nothing about without applying basic evidentiary science to each situation on an individual case-by-case basis. Broad brushes are not my thing. I am doing “that sort of work” every time I go out on stage or investigate a so-called psychic or medium.

After all, I’m a magician at heart. In my character as a mentalist, it becomes my job to engender a certain level of belief. If you don’t have some belief that what you are doing or witnessing might be real, mentalism doesn’t work. It falls flat. … In many ways, you need to experience for yourself what the effect on an audience can be after you perform the simplest magic trick and call it a supernatural phenomenon. People want to believe, and belief is everything! … It’s not my job while in character to educate people! If I’m tasked to do a skeptical or educational event, I’m happy to do that as well.

Palmer: How has your opinion of the possibility of paranormal abilities changed over time?

Edward: Thirty-five years ago, I might have entertained a vague disposition toward wanting to believe in such rubbish, but many years of excellent mentalism teachers and training taught me to see things differently, and I quickly learned I could do exactly the same sorts of “phenomena” that was going around at the time.

These days, I’m mostly watching from the point of view of things (or “bits of business” in magic jargon) I can learn from the situation or performer’s individual style of presentation. … Although sometimes it can be excruciating to witness, I enjoy the performance and clever or cunning devices or expedients used to trick or deceive others that the best (or worst, if you will) exponents of this odd behavior exhibit. I can appreciate what they are suggesting but despise the effect it can have on people who don’t understand it’s an illusion and throw their money away on what they think is an answer to their bereavement or loss.

That’s why I titled my book Psychic Blues. This latter aspect is the Blues part of the whole deal. It’s the sad part when it’s clearly not entertainment but abuse and crude psychological manipulation. I feel in so many ways, humanity has lost any ability to simply listen to each other; unfortunately for right now, charlatans and crooks masquerading as psychics and mediums are filling that void.

Mark with the instruments of his trade at the Scotland Magick Tour of 2014 (Photo by Susan Gerbic.)

Palmer: Were you aware of the skeptical movement when you worked as a psychic?

Edward: Yes, I want to once again make that clear. I have always been a skeptic! When I wrote Psychic Blues, it was out of outrage against what I was seeing as a skeptic and mentalist. I saw so-called celebrity psychics using the crudest forms of magic trickery, such as fake blindfolds, billet switching (search Google if you want to learn more) and other “skills” to hoodwink the unwary. All the time I was carefully referencing the past researches of people like Houdini and Randi. When I saw how easy it was to project this kind of performance demeanor, and knowing 95 percent of the loser-psychics I had met along the way had little to no training in stage presence or public speaking, I began a personal endeavor to do everything I could to infiltrate the huge psychic marketplace and try to understand what they were doing and how they were becoming so popular.

I decided before I began writing Psychic Blues that I would attempt to get under the skins of the biggest crooks I saw on the horizon and use all of my skills as a magician/mentalist to convince them and the believers I was the real deal. It was easy, and I continually course corrected my undercover subterfuge until I was tagged by them as one of the greatest psychics in the world! No kidding! They fell for it just like millions of believers fell for their product. If they knew I was a mentalist and playing them, they never mentioned it to me. I suppose either way to them I was an asset, but eventually someone had to spill the beans.

All this time I was on the Editorial Board of Skeptic magazine. Michael Shermer had a few moments of disgust with my plan, and for quite a few years I became “The Dark Side of Mentalism” and the sworn enemy of both skeptics and believers, doing a balancing act on this treacherous fence, but I saw my method as totally necessary. You can’t just walk up to a psychic or medium on the street and ask, “How did you do that?” Like magicians, they can be a tight-knit group full of jealousy, greed, and their own personal methods and attitudes.

I had to slowly ingratiate myself and wheedle my way to the top of a very slippery slope. It took some hard work and many were the times I had to hold my nose and keep the endgame in mind to get through it. But I managed to muddle through, and despite what my detractors may say, the ends justified the means. Psychic Blues speaks for itself. I have continued to refine my methods and actions to reflect my original concept: fight fire with fire.

Palmer: Bob Nygaard, the private detective I interviewed for Skeptical Inquirer online about his experience with psychic fraud (see here), told me he gets four or five requests for help every day from victims who have lost substantial sums—sometimes their entire life savings—to psychic con artists. The magnitude of this problem is simply enormous. It’s my opinion that the high-profile “psychic mediums” such as John Edward, Tyler Henry, Chip Coffey, and the deceased Sylvia Browne—and the media outlets who promote them—are partly to blame. The media spotlight on these famous psychics lends credibility to the already widespread belief that psychic powers and mediumship are real. I think that this directly leads people to fall victim to unscrupulous neighborhood psychics. Nygaard said he agreed with this. What do you think about this trickle-down hypothesis?

Edward: It’s no trickle; it’s a tsunami of media exploitation and ratings battling that shows no sign of abating. We no longer have the clear choice of knowing what is fake and what is real. When I was a kid, I grew up watching programming like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, wherein psychic things were clearly shown in a fictional dramatic setting. Now we have so-called “reality television” which, when looked at skeptically, has no reality at all. What may seem like reality is carefully thought out, and although there is no script, no real actors, no directors, and no sets or sound stages, the perception that what we are watching must be real is about as far from the real world as we can get. We may buy into it because it’s packaged and produced to appear real, but we have to remember the editors and the agenda set forward by these producers as to what exactly they are foisting upon us.

It’s my contention that because of so many decades of paranormal television programming that started back in the early 1960s with shows like The Twilight Zone and The Nightstalker, then later with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and sliding into Ghost Hunters and Hollywood Medium and on and on, we have slowly crept into a world where anything goes. I have met people who truly don’t know any better than what they saw on the Long Island Medium.

I once met a security guard who was dumbfounded when I told him Ghost Hunters wasn’t real. He asked, “You mean ghosts aren’t real?” This is a man who carries a gun, votes, and accepts what was once a fiction as “real.” Otherwise intelligent people like this believe in ghosts based solely on these later televised reality examples. If we give these kinds of “entertainments” a platform, should we be surprised we now have flat-earth believers? Don’t get me wrong, I love the earlier shows mentioned; it’s just gotten way out of hand. Censorship is not an option; critical thinking is needed even if it’s in small doses. Humor helps. Watch the segment John Oliver recently did on psychics. Brilliant.

Palmer: It seems that people on some level want to believe this. What can, and should, be done to change this?

Edward: It might be too late. I hope not. But there is no one single answer. If I had it, I would gladly tell you. We are in up to our eyeballs in fraud and corruption. Psychics and mediums are probably the least of our problems. In addition, we must remember psychics and mediums have been plying their trade since the beginning of time, so if anything were to change, it may take generations of rational and critical work to settle the dark waters that are continually being swirled and muddied.

Yes, people want to believe, but by default the very people who maintain the highest positions in our society are beginning to see lying and deception can only be seen for what it is if we can get beyond our predilection to think something outside ourselves is going to save us. That’s a big leap. That’s why people seek psychics and mediums. I can’t do much about the rottenness of the Big Picture, but I and others I work with know if we can put our best efforts into activism that exposes the lower spectrum of the lie culture (psychics and mediums), we can make a difference. We have seen it happen many times. Start with what you can put your hands on and it will grow and eventually be noticed. I have to believe that. Join a local grassroots skeptical group and do something!

Psychic Blues, 2019 Expanded Edition (Audible audio book)

Palmer: Let’s talk about your new book. How is this edition of Psychic Blues different from the original release?

Edward:The new audiobook of Psychic Blues—New Expanded Edition has now been released by Amazon/Audible. This expanded version differs from the original paperback book first published by Feral House in 2012. The original book was substantially edited by the book’s publisher to reflect the darker side of the psychic image and more of an anti-hero edge to the main character (me).

I re-thought the entire project and reverted to the original manuscript submitted to the publisher. The new expanded audio version is read personally by myself, directly from my original manuscript. This time it’s funnier and more nuanced, with all voice impersonations of sitters, agents, and psychics provided by me. It’s still a dark-humored peek behind the curtain at the world of the “professional psychic,” but it’s been fleshed-out to make the main protagonist a little more human—and with a wonderful introduction by James “The Amazing” Randi.

Palmer: How did doing the new version—in audio no less—come about?

Edward: I wasn’t completely happy with the original published book for the editing and other reasons mentioned above. Some of the reviews I read were of the opinion I was a pretty nasty character because that’s how it was edited. Some wanted to know more about what my personal life was like at the time, what my inspirations were to do such a thing, and other more personal details. Most of that was in the original manuscript. Wherever I went, people had asked for an audio version, so I decided to give it a try, reading from my original words and adding in some music cues and sound effects to make it more interesting. I’m very happy with how it all turned out.

Palmer: What other books have you written? What is currently going on that’s new?

Edward: I have many other books written for magicians and mentalists; the latest crop can be viewed on my website. In December of last year (2018), I released a hardback edition of a book of my best séance secrets through my UK publisher, Inner Rapport. Total Darkness is an exploration of psychological storytelling through séance effects I have built and used for many years of performing. You can read all about it, including reviews, on my website.

Also, Susan Gerbic and I worked together as a team to create an airtight psychic-medium sting. … We are both very excited about this because it demonstrates conclusively how psychics and mediums use social media to their advantage. One of our favorite lines we hear all the time is, “There’s no way in the world that psychic could have known that!” Please watch for the New York Times magazine article [issue dated February 26, 2019] about our sting operation and you will read for yourself how it’s done and how you can uncover your own local fraudster by applying the same protocols.

As mentioned above, while I was completing this article, the news broke about the successful sting (dubbed “Operation Pizza Roll”), which was run by Mark Edward and Susan Gerbic against “psychic medium” Thomas John. This was documented first in a Skeptical Inquirer online article and then in The New York Times Magazine. Also, Thomas Westbrook produced a documentary of the sting for his “Holy Koolaid” YouTube channel. It juxtaposes audio of John doing his “reading” of Susan and Mark (who were using undercover identities) with selected screenshots of the faked Facebook information in their undercover accounts.

Thanks to a wonderful editing job, what happened is unambiguous: Thomas John (or his staff) read the made-up information in the faked Facebook accounts, and John recited it back during the reading. Or maybe spirits read the bogus Facebook info uncritically and told it to John. Or, maybe the spirits knew it was a sting but don’t like John, so they fed him the false info to make him look like a con artist. Hmmmm. We report … you decide.

Susan and Mark were unaware of the detailed information in those Facebook accounts. So, no, TJ, you can’t claim you were reading their minds. If you could do that, I think all you would have gotten was some stifled laughter and maybe a suppressed “We got you!” And as if all that were not sufficient evidence that Thomas John’s claimed paranormal gift is, at minimum, somewhat flawed (leaving him vulnerable to mischievous spirits helping skeptics embarrass him), Susan Gerbic has also published another article about John. In it, she reveals that the “unsuspecting passengers” in John’s ride-share “reality” show on Lifetime TV, Seatbelt Psychic, (where John gives his riders messages from the dead) are actually hired actors. They even show up on IMDb. You just can’t make this stuff up, folks! Oh wait—they did!

Acknowledgements: I want to thank Mark Edward for his participation in this interview, and for his skeptical activism. You can read more about him in his Wikipedia article and visit his website, which contains numerous videos, including his appearances on Adam Ruins Everything and Brain Games.

Operation Pizza Roll coverage:

• Operation Pizza Roll - Thomas John (Skeptical Inquirer online, Susan Gerbic, 2-21-19)
• Skeptics Set a Trap and a So-Called “Celebrity Medium” Fell for the Hoax (Patheos, Hemant Mehta, 2-23-19)
• Inside the Secret Sting Operations to Expose Celebrity Psychics (New York Times Magazine, Jack Hitt, 2-26-19)
• Thomas John (The Seatbelt Psychic) - Busted for Cheating! (Holy Koolaid YouTube Channel, 2-28-19)
• Susan Gerbic - Operation Pizza Roll, full interview (Holy Koolaid YouTube Channel, 2-28-19)
• Mark Edward - Operation Pizza Roll, full interview (Holy Koolaid YouTube Channel, 1-1-19)
• Thomas John’s response video

See also:

• Mark Edward’s website
• Mark Edward’s Wikipedia biography
• Buckle Up - Seatbelt Psychic (Skeptical Inquirer online, Susan Gerbic, 2-21-19)
• Thomas John’s Wikipedia biography

Cortesía de la NASA

Los científicos esperan que este año, a nivel mundial, sea el cuarto más caliente del que se tenga registro, siendo solo más cálidos los tres años previos. Desde 2001, hemos vivido en un planeta que ha tenido diecisiete de los dieciocho años más cálidos jamás observados.

Los alarmantes récords de temperatura que han tenido lugar en las dos décadas pasadas son consistentes con un patrón de un siglo, rigurosamente confirmado por múltiples evidencias científicas: la quema de combustibles fósiles ha llevado a un incremento en los gases causantes del efecto invernadero (GHG) en la atmósfera, lo cual ya ha causado aproximadamente un aumento de 1 grado centígrado en las temperaturas globales. El impacto desestabilizador del sistema climático de la Tierra lo siente la gente que vive en todos los países del mundo. Este verano, el récord de calor en Japon y en otros lugares ha causado decenas de muertes. Los bomberos de California lucharon para controlar el más grande incendio forestal del que se tenga registro, uno de veinte que han devastado el estado. Los incendios forestales se propagaron por Canadá e incluso en el Ártico. En Europa, donde los incendios causaron muertes en Grecia, el récord de calor ha dañado severamente los cultivos y ha causado otros eventos anormales. En algunos lugares los ríos estaban tan calientes que algunos reactores nucleares tuvieron que cerrar porque el agua estaba demasiado caliente para enfriarlos.

“Este verano de fuego y calor sofocante se parece mucho al futuro que los científicos nos han venido advirtiendo en la era del cambio climático” escribió Somini Sengupta (2018) en la portada de The New York Times. Resulta revelador, en tiempo real, cuán poco preparado está el mundo para vivir en un planeta más caliente”.

Desentrañar el extraordinario rol jugado por la actividad humana como causa del cambio climático, contribuyendo a eventos extremos (en comparación con las fluctuaciones naturales) es desde hace tiempo un desafío científico. Pero en los años recientes, la investigación en el área de la ciencia se ha desarrollado, transformándose en un campo sólido. A la fecha, los científicos han publicado más de 170 informes abarcando 190 eventos climáticos extremos en todo el mundo, de acuerdo con un análisis de la revista Nature.

Cerca de dos tercios de los eventos climáticos extremos estudiados por los científicos han sido descriptos como más severos o más probablemente producidos por el cambio climático causado por la actividad humana. Los calores extremos dan cuenta del 43 por ciento de estos eventos, seguidos por las sequías (18 por ciento) y las inundaciones o lluvias extremas (17 por ciento) (Schiermeier 2018). Reconociendo las amenazas causadas por el cambio climático antropogénico, en 2015 casi todos los países del mundo se comprometieron, como parte del tratado de las Naciones Unidas sobre el clima,a mantener durante este año un aumento de la temperatura global menor a los 2 grados centígrados por encima de los niveles pre-industriales y luchar para alcanzar 1,5 grados. Pero para lograr este objetivo, las emisiones de gases invernadero deberían disminuir por lo menos un 70 por ciento hacia 2050 (Tollefson 2018).

Como el cambio de combustibles fósiles a la energía de bajo contenido de carbono va demasiado lenta comparado con lo que se necesita, las emisiones mundiales subieron cerca de un 2 por ciento en 2017, siendo el primer incremento en cuatro años. En una editorial de The Economist, la típica revista optimista colocó al estado del progreso en los términos más directos, diciendo: “El Mundo está Perdiendo la Guerra sobre el Cambio Climático” (“The World” 2018).

Para reemplazar los combustibles fósiles en los diversos países del mundo, el despliegue masivo de energía solar y eólica probablemente deberá complementarse con miles de plantas de energía nuclear avanzadas; plantas de gas natural que capturen y quemen sus emisiones; y una transmisión y almacenamiento de energía gigantes, más poderosos y vastos. Estos son los desafíos que se enfrentan al descarbonizar el sector de la electricidad. Igualmente existen obstáculos abrumadores en los sectores de transporte y agricultura (Temple 2018).

Como países que luchan para limitar sus emisiones de gases invernadero y descarbonizar sus economías, ha emergido un espacio en la vida pública para pensar en forma novedosa sobre el cambio climático, energía y política. En libros, ensayos e investigaciones, un grupo de intelectuales y académicos autodenominados “ecomodernistas” o “ecopragmáticos” han postulado un conjunto de ideas que rompen con el pensamiento convencional, desafiando antiguos paradigmas sobre la naturaleza, tecnología y progreso (Fahy and Nisbet 2017; Nisbet 2014).

El desafío de la descarbonización

El mayor incremento en las emisiones de gases invernadero se da en las naciones asiáticas que buscan hacer crecer rápidamente sus economías y mejorar el estándar de vida de miles de millones de personas. En Asia, el consumo de energía creció un 40 por cientoentre 2006 y 2016. La India, donde más están creciendo las emisiones, depende del carbón para producir las tres cuartas partes de la electricidad. En 2017, en ese país, el uso del combustible fósil más contaminante creció un 5 por ciento (“The Year” 2018).

En Alemania, a pesar de que el país ha logrado avances sin precedentes en el despliegue de la energía solar y eólica, las emisiones en los últimos dos años han aumentado ligeramente. En 2011, Alemania tomó la imprudente decisión política de eliminar gradualmente sus diecisiete plantas nucleares libres de emisión, lo cual, en ese momento, representaba el 25 por ciento de la generación eléctrica. Al hacerlo, Alemania quedó fuertemente dependiente de algunas de las centrales eléctricas de carbón más sucias del mundo para producir más del 40 por ciento de su electricidad. Los esfuerzos por cortar las emisiones también tambalearon debido a un inesperado crecimiento de la economía y precios de petróleo más baratos, lo cual alentó una mayor utilización de la calefacción hogareña y el transporte automotor basados en el petróleo (“Germany” 2017). En los Estados Unidos, la buena noticia es que las emisiones han bajado desde su pico histórico de 2007, aunque todavía siguen por encima de los niveles de 1900, de acuerdo con estimaciones gubernamentales oficiales. La declinación ha sido causada en parte por la revolución en la perforación de gas de esquisto, que bajó el costo de generación de electricidad a partir de plantas que queman más limpiamente el combustible, cosa que llevó a la quiebra a muchas plantas generadoras más sucias y caras (Barboza and Lange 2018). Sin embargo continúan las preguntas sobre cuánto metano se derrama en la atmósfera a partir del transporte y la producción natural de gas. Un estudio reciente ha estimado que la tasa de derramamiento fue un 60 por ciento mayor de lo que había previsto el gobierno estadounidense. Semejante discrepancia es importante para evaluar los beneficios del gas natural, ya que el impacto de calentamiento atmosférico del metano durante las primeras dos décadas luego de su lanzamiento es más de ochenta veces más potente que el dióxido de carbono (Guglielmi 2018). Un exceso de gas natural barato también amenaza a las 100 plantas nucleares libres de emisiones, que generan el 20 por ciento de la electricidad de los Estados Unidos. Debido a que los EE.UU. no tienen un impuesto o tasa nacional para el carbón, el beneficio que producen las plantas nucleares respecto del cambio climático no se factoriza en sus costos operativos. Desde 2013, cerraron cinco plantas nucleares y está planeado cerrar seis más para 2025, inclusive cuando estas viejas centrales pueden seguir operando durante décadas. En la mayoría de los estados, el poder solar y eólico no van a poder tomar la posta respecto de la generación de electricidad. En cambio, el poder nuclear será reemplazado por gas natural, más sucio (Plumer 2017). Un punto positivo puede ser California, la quinta economía mundial. Aunque la población ha aumentado —la economía ha crecido un 40 por ciento en las dos décadas pasadas— la intensidad del carbón en la economía de California (el monto de contaminación de carbón por millón de dólares de crecimiento económico) ha bajado un 38 por ciento y ahora está por debajo de los niveles de 1990. En 2016, el año más reciente del que se tienen datos, la densidad del carbón declinó un 6 por ciento a pesar de que la economía creció un 3 por ciento (Barboza and Lang 2018). El cambio se debe a una mayor declinación en las emisiones del sector de la electricidad. Las mejoras en todo el estado respecto de la eficiencia energética no solo han reducido la demanda de electricidad a pesar del crecimiento de la población, también influyeron una baja del precio de los paneles solares combinada con los mandatos estatales de energía renovable han acelerado la transición de plantas de gas natural a fuentes de energía más limpias. La lluvia, luego de cinco años de sequía, también incrementó la generación eléctrica a partir de la hidroenergía (Barboza and Lange 2018). California todavía enfrenta muchos desafíos. La clausura ya planificada de la última planta nuclear del estado puede cambiar la generación de electricidad hacia el gas natural. Las emisiones provenientes de autos y camiones, que ya son la principal fuente de contaminación de carbono en el estado, continúan aumentando. Hasta ahora no han ayudado los precios más bajos de la gasolina como tampoco lo han hecho los consumidores al preferir autos más grandes y menos eficientes, más la lenta adquisición de vehículos eléctricos (Barboza and Lange 2018). El éxito continuado de California y los Estados Unidos también pone una bisagra en la política federal del país. Pero la administración de Donald J. Trump desde que asumió la presidencia instaló agencias reguladoras y científicas de lobistas de la industria del combustible fósil y operadores conservadores que se pasaron sus carreras poniendo dudas sobre la ciencia climática y oponiéndose a cualquier política para cortar las emisiones. De acuerdo a un estudio reciente, la industria de los combustibles fósiles y otros sectores que son emisores mayores disfrutan de una ventaja lobista de 10 a 1 sobre los grupos ambientales y el sector de energía limpia (Brulle 2018). Con semejante desventaja, incluso si los demócratas retomaran el control de la Casa Blanca y el Congreso, cualquier cambio climático exitoso relativo a la legislación, no solo necesitará apoyo republicano sino el de los mayores actores de la industria del combustible fósil. Pero es factible que los ambientalistas se opongan a tales concesiones ya que han ganado una considerable influencia en el Partido Demócrata. Para ganar las primarias partidarias, los demócratas que compiten en los distritos y estados donde dominan los votantes liberales han prometido promover una plataforma “100% renovable” que se opone a toda nueva infraestructura de combustibles fósiles, busca una proscripción de la extracción de gas natural a alta presión (“fracking”), y pide la clausura de las plantas nucleares (Nisbet 2015).

El ascenso del ecomodernismo

Las raíces del ecomodernismo se pueden rastrear en un puñado de libros, artículos y planes de acción influyentes por primera vez publicados hace una década. En Whole Earth Discipline (El autocontrol total de la Tierra), publicado en 2009, el ecologista y futurista Stuart Brand expuso un rango de estrategias renovadoras para llegar a una sociedad sostenible. Sus ideas fueron eficazmente expuestas en el subtítulo: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary (Por qué son necesarias las ciudades densas, el poder nuclear, los cultivos transgénicos, las tierras restauradas y la geoingeniería). Brand advirtió correctamente que las tecnologías de “tendencia energética suaves” como la solar y la eólica favorecidas por los ambientalistas no podrían vencer los problemas de intermitencia, capacidad de almacenamiento, y costo, y ser alcanzables en el tiempo para alterar la dinámica del uso y la dependencia mundial de la energía proveniente de combustibles fósiles. Él y otros ecomodernistas han señalado la demanda de crecimiento en Asia, África y Europa del Este y las costas hundidas que estas regiones en las cuales se está poniendo carbón y otros combustibles fósiles.

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Las más de mil millones de personas de todo el mundo que todavía no tienen acceso a la electricidad quieren decir que el cambio climático constituye una razón para acelerar más que retardar las transiciones de energía, según afirman los pensadores ecomodernistas Ted Nordhaus y Michael Shellenberg (2007; 2013) en un libro y numerosos ensayos. Aquellos países que en el siglo pasado han tenido acceso a abundantes y baratas formas de energía han obtenido enormes ganancias respecto de su crecimiento económico y seguridad humana. Hoy, el mayor imperativo para la gente que vive en países en desarrollo, tales como la India, es obtener el mismo acceso y lograr un estándar de vida occidental.

Durante los años ‘60 y 70’, mientras los países norteamericanos y europeos conseguían seguridad y prosperidad económicas, sus habitantes comenzaron a presionar a sus gobiernos para acelerar los esfuerzos para reducir la contaminación, desacalerar las tasas de deforestación y limitar el uso de la tierra, para de esta manera conservar la naturaleza en lugar de destruirla. Algo similar está ocurriendo en China, cuyo crecimiento económico manejado por el estado ha derivado en una creciente y próspera clase media.

Pero para que en China continúe el crecimiento, y la India y otros países en desarrollo también tengan acceso a abundantes formas de energía, se requieren innovaciones transformadoras respecto de la “energía dura”, como la nuclear, y el confinamiento del carbono, junto con avances similares en la alta tecnología solar, la transmisión de energía y las tecnologías de almacenamiento de energía. Se necesitarían estos avances no solo para enfrentar la demanda de crecimiento en dichas regiones sino también para limitar las emisiones de las miles de plantas de carbón que están en funcionamiento y también las que están programadas para construirse en todo el mundo.

En Why We Disagree about Climate Change (Por qué disentimos sobre el cambio climático) (2009), el geógrafo Mike Hulme argumenta que el cambio climático ha sido mal diagnosticado como un problema ambiental convencional. En cambio, era lo que los académicos en política referían como un problemaexclusivamente “súper-retorcido”, no algo que la sociedad iba a resolver o terminar, como la pobreza o la guerra. Era algo que íbamos a hacer mejor o peor con el tiempo.

Como un problema súper-retorcido, argumentan otros ecomodernistas, el cambio climático es tan complejo en escala, con tantas causas diferentes que una única solución como un impuesto al carbono o un acuerdo internacional sobre emisiones probablemente no pueda ser políticamente perdurable o efectivo. En cambio, se necesitarían las políticas para implementarse a niveles estatales, regionales y bilaterales y a través de los sectores privados y sin fines de lucro (Prins and Rayner 2007; Verweij et al. 2006).

A nivel internacional, los ejemplos incluyen enfocarse más restringidamente en la reducción especialmente poderosa, pero fácil de abordar, de los gases de invernadero tales como el carbono negro (u hollín) de los autos gasoleros y estufas sucias y el metano que se filtra al aire en las tuberías de gas. A niveles nacionales y estatales, los ejemplos a menor escala incluyen a los programas gubernamentales de obtención de tecnología, mayores inversiones en la resistencia al cambio climático para proteger las ciudades, la gente y las industrias; subsidios para los recursos renovables, la energía nuclear y el confinamiento del carbono; financiamiento para mejores investigaciones sobre la energía e inversiones para aminorar la resistencia hacia el cambio climático. Según los ecomodernistas, a medida que se logren estos pequeños éxitos no solo ganaremos más tiempo para lidiar con los más grandes desafíos políticos sino también empezar a reconstruir redes de confianza y cooperación a través de las diferencias políticas mientras experimentamos nuevas soluciones y tecnologías (Nordhaus et al. 2011; Prins and Rayner 2007).

Estas ideas y otras han sido investigadas, expandidas y promovidas por el Breakthrough Institute, un comité de expertos de centro-izquierda fundado por Ted Nordhaus y Michael Shellenberger. En 2015 ambos convocaron a otros pensadores para crear el Manifiesto Ecomodernista. Allí argumentan que el cambio climático y otras crisis ambientales no son razones para cuestionar las políticas económicas y los avances tecnológicos que han permitido que la sociedad humana floreciera en el siglo pasado. Ciertamente, frenar o detener las ganancias sociales que hemos alcanzado a través de la innovación tecnológica, descarta las mejores herramientas que tenemos para combatir el cambio climático, proteger la naturaleza y ayudar a la gente. Los problemas ambientales urgentes que enfrentamos constituyen evidencia a favor de una mayor modernización, en lugar de una menor modernización (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015).

Sostienen que la esperanza de un futuro mejor comienza con tecnologías avanzadas que intensifiquen en lugar de debilitar nuestro dominio de la naturaleza.

Los cultivos de alta tecnología, el poder nuclear avanzado, el confinamiento y almacenamiento del carbono, la acuacultura, la desalinización y los paneles solares de alta eficacia tienen el potencial no solo de reducir las demandas humanas sobre el medio ambiente sino también de desencadenar el crecimiento económico necesario para sacar a la gente de la pobreza extrema. Estos avances van a permitir que más personas vivan en ciudades más grandes que tienen más infraestructura. La gente que vive en las ciudades también tiende a tener menos hijos, haciendo descender así la tasa de crecimiento de la población. Desde esta perspectiva, los avances tecnológicos y la urbanización van a dejar más espacio libre en el planeta para la naturaleza, “separando” el desarrollo humano del consumo de reservas y combustible fósil.

Para alcanzar este futuro, los ecomodernistas advierten que tenemos que confiar en fijar el precio del carbono, la inversión de alto impacto social, el capital de riesgo, Silicon Valley, y otros mecanismos neoliberales basados en el mercado para incentivar la innovación tecnológica y el cambio social. Necesitamos enfocarnos más intensivamente en comprender cómo ocurren los avances tecnológicos y el rol del planeamiento y gasto del gobierno —más que en el mercado— como el principal factor de innovación y cambio social. Una vez que haya tecnologías disponibles para llevar a cabo acciones significativas acerca del cambio climático y otros problemas menos costosos, predicen los ecomodernistas, va a disminuir notablemente los debates políticos sobre la incertidumbre científica. El desafío no es encarecer los combustibles fósiles sino hacer que sus alternativas sean más baratas y poderosas.

Bajo estas condiciones, será más fácil obtener cooperación política de todo el espectro ideológico y de los países en desarrollo. Es más probable que los líderes de las naciones y sus electores estén más cerca de conservar la naturaleza porque ya no la necesiten más para lograr sus objetivos económicos que por cualquier razón ideológica o moral. Durante el año pasado, las ideas ecomodernistas han recibido un empuje del lingüista cognitivo Steven Pinker, de la Universidad de Harvard (2018), que en su best-seller Enlightenment Now (Ilustración ya) dedique su capítulo sobre el medio ambiente a abogar en nombre de la filosofía y la necesidad de tecnologías tales como la nuclear. Pinker es parte de un género paralelo de los autores denominados “Nuevos optimistas”, quienes se inspiraron en el trabajo de Hans Rosling y los científicos que se dedican a convertir los datos en información y conocimiento. En charlas TED, un libro reciente y vistosamente ilustrado con gráficos disponibles en el sitio web Our World in Data, Rosling y sus colegas han demostrado las muchos caminos a través de los cuales las sociedades humanas están floreciendo en la era del cambio climático, contrarrestando una poderosa narrativa cultural acerca de que el mundo ha estado durante décadas en un estado de crisis imparables, declinación y sufrimiento (Rosling et al. 2018).

Evaluar el disenso

Para los ecomodernistas, el progreso tecnológico y político también requieren involucrarse respetuosamente con una diversidad de voces e ideas. “Muy a menudo las discusiones sobre el medio ambiente han estado dominadas por los extremos, y plagadas de dogmatismo, lo cual alimenta la intolerancia”, escriben en el Manifiesto.

En su fuero íntimo, los ecomodernistas creen en aplicar los principios de la Ilustración relativos al escepticismo y el disenso, los cuales son esenciales para tomar decisiones inteligentes y eficaces, especialmente en relación a los problemas extremadamente complejos como el cambio climático. Numerosos estudios sociales demuestran que en situaciones donde se defiende cautelosamente el pensamiento grupal, excluyendo las voces de disenso, los individuos y grupos tienden a tomar decisiones mediocres y a pensar en forma menos productiva. Por el contrario, la exposición al disenso, incluso cuando los argumentos puedan ser equivocados, tiende a ampliar el pensamiento, llevando a los individuos a pensar de manera más abierta, en múltiples direcciones, considerando una mayor diversidad de opciones, reconociendo fallas y debilidades en las posturas. “El aprendizaje y las buenas intenciones no nos salvarán de pensamientos sesgados y juicios mediocres”, observa el psicólogoCharlan Nemeth de la UC-Berkeley. “Un camino mejor es que nuestras formas de pensar sean directamente desafiadas por alguien que cree auténticamente en algo diferente de lo que creemos nosotros” (Nemeth 2018, 191). Actuando con estos principios, el Breakthrough Institute ha invertido en “Diálogos”, dos veces por año, en San Francisco y Washington D.C., creando el excepcional foro donde progresistas, liberales, conservadores, ambientalistas e industriales van juntos a debatir ideas y tomar contacto con otras conversaciones que abarcan a distintos sectores civiles. Para elaborar estas ideas, el instituto también publica elBreakthrough Journal y produce la serie de podcasts Breakthrough Dialogues. Mientras manejamos las tantas amenazas que enfrentamos debidas al cambio climático, al activismo comunitario y a las reformas políticas que mantiene la industria de los combustibles fósiles, que son importantes, también lo es la búsqueda de un arsenal más avanzado de opciones tecnológicas y una reconsideración de nuestros objetivos económicos. Pero también es importante la inversión en nuestra capacidad para aprender, discutir, cuestionar y disentir involucrándonos constructivamente con ideas que nos resultan desagradables o incómodas (Nisbet 2014).

Desafortunadamente, la mayoría de los académicos y periodistas evitan desafiar las poderosas formas del pensamiento grupal que han estropeado nuestros esfuerzos para combatir (por) el cambio climático. A este respecto, los ataques de aquellos que cuestionan conjeturas valiosas han tenido un poderoso y espeluznante efecto. Por lo tanto, nosotros dependemos de los intelectuales dispuestos a correr el riesgo, como hacen los ecomodernistas para guiarnos en el camino, identificando las fallas en la sabiduría convencional, ofreciendo vías alternativas de pensamiento y hablando sobre nuestro futuro compartido.

Referencias

• Asafu-Adjaye, J., L. Blomqvist, S. Brand, et al. 2015. An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Oakland, CA: The Breakthrough Institute. Disponible online en http://www.ecomodernism.org/.
• Barboza, T., and J.H. Lange. 2018. California hit its climate goal early—but its biggest source of pollution keeps rising. Los Angeles Times (July 23).
• Brulle, R.J. 2018. The climate lobby: A sectoral analysis of lobbying spending on climate change in the USA, 2000 to 2016. Climatic Change: 1–15.
• Fahy, D., and M.C. Nisbet. 2017. The ecomodernist: Journalists who are reimagining a sustainable future. En P. Berglez, U. Olausson, y M. Ots (Eds), What Is Sustainable Journalism? London: Peter Lang.
• Hulme, M. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
• Germany is missing its emissions targets. 2017. The Economist (November 9).
• Guglielmi, G. 2018. Methane leaks from US gas fields dwarf government estimates. Nature 558: 496–497.
• Nemeth, C. 2018. In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business. New York: Basic Books.
• Nisbet, M.C. 2014. Disruptive ideas: Public intellectuals and their arguments for action on climate change. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change5(6): 809–823.
• ———. 2015. Environmental advocacy in the Obama years: Assessing new strategies for political change. In N. Vig and M. Kraft (Eds), Environmental Policy: New Directions for the Twenty-First Century, 9th Edition. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 58–78.
• Nordhaus, T., and M. Shellenberger. 2007. Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• ———. 2013. How the left came to reject cheap energy for the poor. The Breakthrough (July 10). Disponible online en http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenbergerand-ted-nordhaus/the-great-progressive-reversal.
• Nordhaus, T., M. Shellenberger, R. Pielke, et al. 2011. Climate Pragmatism: Innovation, Resilience, and No Regrets. Oakland, CA: The Breakthrough Institute. Discipline online en http://thebreakthrough.org/ archive/climate_pragmatism_innovation.
• Pinker, S. 2018. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. London, UK: Penguin Books.
• Plumer, B. 2017. Glut of natural gas pressures nuclear power, and climate goals, too. The New York Times (June 14): A17.
• Prins, G., and S. Rayner. 2007. Time to ditch Kyoto. Nature 449(7165): 973.
• Rosling, H., A.R. Rönnlund, and O. Rosling. 2018. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books.
• Schiermeier, Q. 2018. Droughts, heatwaves and floods: How to tell when climate change is to blame. Nature 560 (7716): 20.
• Sengupta, S. 2018. The year global warming made its menace a reality. The New York Times (August 9): A1.
• Temple, J. 2018. At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system. MIT Technology Review (March 14). Discipline online en https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-going-to-take-nearly-400-years-to-transform-the-energy-system/.
• Tollefson, J. 2018. Can the world kick its fossil-fuel addiction fast enough? Nature 556(7702): 422–425.
• Verweij, M., M. Douglas, R. Ellis, et al. 2006. Clumsy solutions for a complex world: The case of climate change. Public Administration 84: 847–843.
• The world is losing the war against climate change. 2018. The Economist (August 2). Disponible online en https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/02/the-world-is-losing-the-war-against-climate-change.
• The year global warming made its menace a reality. 2018. The Economist (August 2).

Matt Nisbet

Matthew Nisbet es Profesor Asociado de Comunicación de la Northeastern University y consultor técnico del CSI (Comité para la Investigación Escéptica)

1) Can you quickly introduce yourself?

My name is Paul De Belder. I’m an engineer working for a spin-off of Leuven university, which develops machines for visual quality control in IC-manufacturing. I have been an active skeptic ever since I learned about CSICOP when working in the USA in 1990. I’ve been a board member of SKEPP, the Flemish Belgian skeptical society (there are two in our bilingual country) for many years, and I have been president the past few years.

2) What's your job in ECSO? What is ECSO? What is the ESC?

I have no function in ECSO. ECSO is the European Council of Skeptical Organisations, the committee where our national organizations exchange experiences and coordinate activities. ESC is the European Skeptics Congress, organized every other year in another country. The organization of ESC is delegated to the local skeptical societies.

The last ESC in 2017, where audience and speakers could meet and talk about skeptical topics. Photo taken by Susan Gerbic.

3) Can you tell us something about the conferences in the past?

I have not been able to attend too many of them because of work or family duties, but I did go to the last two, ESC2017 in Wroclaw, Poland, and ESC2015 in London. And of course, I was involved in ESC2005, which SKEPP organized in Brussels. These conferences have two goals: present a variety of themes in talks by leading skeptics and researchers and provide a forum where you can meet colleagues from other countries and get to know your “skeptical heroes” in real life.

4) Can you tell us something about Ghent and the venue of the next ESC?

Ghent is one of our historical cities in the western part of Belgium, an important manufacturing and trading center from the Middle Ages on. Much of the fabric and buildings of the old city has been preserved, with canals, narrow streets, and old market squares providing a lively atmosphere. It is home to one of Belgium’s major universities, Ghent University, founded in 1817, which over time played an important role in promoting freethinking and countering the power of the church, in what was then a mostly Catholic country. SKEPP also has many members who teach, work, or study at Ghent University. Therefore, it was a logical choice for the venue of ESC2019. Most activities will be held in the neoclassical building of the “Great Aula,” although not in its circular main hall.

5) Who are the organizing Skeptical organizations?

The main organizer is SKEPP, founded it 1990 and very active in the Flemish (i.e., Dutch speaking) part of the country. We are assisted by three other organizations:

There is Comité Para, the oldest skeptical organization in the world, founded in 1947 and recently revamped by their younger generation. They represent the French speaking skeptics in Wallonia and Brussels.

Then there is Skepsis, the Dutch skeptical organization, founded in 1987, with whom we often collaborate due to our common language.

And last but not least, Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij or Society against Quackery, venerable Dutch society founded in 1881 (!).

6) What can we expect from the eighteenth ESC? Who are the speakers?

We have selected a number of themes for ESC2019:

• European skeptics—a thirty-year retrospective
• The never-ending struggle against quackery
• Anomalistic psychology
• Green skepticism
• How con men operate

Not all speakers are confirmed yet, but I can give you a few names already:

• Prof. Dr. Edzard Ernst
• Prof. Dr. Chris French
• Kavin Senapathy
• And “our own” Prof. Dr. Johan Braeckman, professor in philosophy at the University of Ghent and University of Amsterdam

7) What are you excited to see or do?

Meeting so many likeminded people from other countries, picking up ideas from their experiences, and learning new things.

Professor Ernst was at the ESC2015 and will also be at the Congress in 2019. Photo taken by Leon Korteweg, CC-BY-SA 4.0.

8) What was the reason for putting the conference from Thursday to Saturday, not from Friday to Sunday or Saturday/Sunday?

The conference is Friday through Sunday, but there is a pre-program event on Thursday afternoon, organized by Comité Para in Brussels. Afterward we will take the train to Ghent for the main event. We got the idea from ESC2017, where they organized a pre-program event in Prague and then took the bus to Wroclaw.

9) Will there be any fringe events or evening events?

Yes. On Thursday night there will be a fun evening, organized by Belgian mentalist Gili, well known also in the Netherlands and France. On Friday night we plan a range of activities, including guided tours of historic Ghent. And on Saturday night there will be a banquet that requires a separate reservation.

10) Anything you would like to add?

We would like ECSO to become more active in coordinating actions between different member societies. Many laws and regulations nowadays are made on the European rather than the national level. We need to get organized skepticism involved in informing and assisting our MEP’s (Members of the European Parliament). ESC offers a forum to get started on such initiatives.

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Pixie Turner stands for a guiltfree relationship with food: No sins and no forbidden carbs! Photo by Pixie Turner.

Can you quickly introduce yourself?

I’m a registered associate nutritionist and science communicator living and working in London!

How did you become a nutritionist? What was your journey from wellness to science?

I created an Instagram account back when I was 19 and fell into the clutches of the Wellness movement. I started posting the same kind of things that wellness bloggers were and copied their diets. That meant I cut out a whole number of food groups from my diet to try and achieve “peak health,” which ended up having the total opposite effect! It wasn’t until I went to Australia where one of the wellness bloggers I met said “I would never dream of vaccinating my kids” that something in me switched, and I knew I couldn’t be associated with this movement any longer. I started questioning everything, got angry as hell, and decided to do a master’s degree in nutrition so that I had the qualifications to set myself apart and the knowledge to prove these bloggers wrong. And so I became a nutritionist!

What is your work like now?

I work freelance, so my work is a combination of private practice, where I see clients in clinic one-to-one, occasionally working with brands to advise on the legality of health claims, and science communication through public speaking, social media, and writing books. I also occasionally lecture at universities. It’s very varied, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Turner often speaks at events about her journey and a science-based approach to food. Here she spoke at QED in Manchester 2018. Photo by Rob M. McDermott.

What are some misconceptions about food that you always encounter?

So many! For example, people think that there’s one “perfect” diet, or that because something worked for them it’ll work for everyone else. The biggest misconception though is probably that eliminating foods is an easy and risk-free option. It’s not. Elimination of foods should always be a last resort and carries many potential side effects, ranging from physical to mental and social.

What’s the most dangerous or weird food trend you’ve heard of?

It’s almost impossible to pick one … I once read something by raw vegans that said the reason they no longer have periods is because their bodies are now “pure” and not releasing “toxins,” which is SO dangerous. Losing your period is a sign that your body is not in a healthy place. Aside from that, the cancer ranches that claim to cure cancer through “alkaline” diets and “detox” protocols are incredibly dangerous and should all be torn down. More recently there’s also the carnivore diet, which makes no sense at all considering the one thing all healthcare professionals can absolutely agree on is that eating plenty of fruits and vegetables is good for you.

What do you do in your free time?

I love going to yoga, mainly for the mental benefits. Being self-employed means finding that work-life balance and switching off can be hard. Yoga keeps me sane.

I also really do love food, both making it and going to amazing restaurants to try everything I possibly can!

Oh, and I spend a lot of time reading. A lot. I get through about a book every two weeks.

Do you ever get threats or weird messages for the work you do?

On a weekly basis! When it comes to food and health, people take things very personally and see things as an attack on their identity. Pretty much every time I post anything, someone twists my words and accuses me of saying something I’m not. Certain topics elicit more anger than others though, like sugar or animal products or celery juice. I also get a lot of messages from people telling me incredibly personal details about their life, which I think they often only feel comfortable sharing because of the illusion of anonymity online.

Could you name three things about food or the reputation of food that you’d like to change?

Food is supposed to be enjoyed; we are literally built to enjoy food.

Feeling guilt or shame after eating is not healthy.

Carbs are not the root of all evil; they are wonderful things.

What would be reliable, evidence-based sources if I want to be informed about eating well?

As a general rule, avoid media headlines, YouTube videos, and Googling pretty much anything! Find people online who have legit qualifications, such as registered nutritionists or dietitians. Doctors don’t count; they do not have enough nutrition training and are usually over-confident in their nutrition knowledge (classic Dunning-Kruger). NHS online and BDA factsheets are good places to start. The Rooted Project also has a book out soon called Is Butter A Carb? that is a complete rundown of all the basics of good nutrition.

Pixie Turner wrote two books. Her second book came out in March 2019 and will give the reader more insight to healthy food behavior and the dangerous game the diet industry plays in that regard. Photo by Pixie Turner

You’ve written several books with another one coming out soon. What are your books about?

My first book, The Wellness Rebel, was dismantling myths that are perpetuated by the wellness industry, particularly on social media. It was an attack at all the misinformation I’d been led to believe and then some. My second book, The No Need to Diet Book, takes a step back to look at the wider concepts of health and the diet industry, which makes billions each year by telling us we’re not heathy enough and never good enough. I see so many people in clinic with food anxieties, and seeing as around 80 percent of women and over 50 percent of men are unhappy with their bodies, I want to do my part to help fight that.

Courtesy of Flickr

Recently Jane Mayer (2019) of The New Yorker wrote about the very close relationship between Fox News and President Donald Trump, outlining in great detail how the Murdoch family–owned news outlet functions as a tacit communication operation of the Trump White House and its political agenda. There is a revolving door of former Fox News staff working in the White House and former White House staff working at Fox News, and according to many sources quoted in the article, Fox News has erased the lines of journalistic integrity and is now functioning as a Trump propaganda machine. Mayer argued that with respect to programming, it was often unclear whether Trump controlled Fox News or Fox News controlled Trump.

Meanwhile, the president himself continues to decry the “Fake News Networks,” by which he seems to mean any outlet to the left of Fox News. According to anonymous sources cited in Mayer’s article, President Trump had such animus toward CNN that he attempted to block AT&T’s purchase of Time-Warner, the parent company of CNN. The Trump Administration’s Department of Justice sued to block the merger, but in June a district court judge approved the deal (Ivanova 2018).

Conservatives who, like the President, believe the mainstream media (MSM) have a liberal bias have been supported by evidence that journalists are more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. A 1990 poll of forty-nine editors and writers at The Washington Post found only one person, Tony Kornheiser, a sports columnist, was a registered Republican, and he suggested he was a RINO (Republican in name only): “I don’t think the Republican Party would claim me” (Wemple 2017). A 2014 study conducted by the University of Indiana School of Journalism found that 28 percent of journalists surveyed identified as Democrat and 7 percent as Republicans. Fifty percent said they were Independents (Willnat and Weaver 2014).

In recent years, Ad Fontes Media has produced a media bias chart for many of the most popular news sources (see below). The horizontal axis of the chart plots the left or right political bias of the source, and the vertical axis plots the factual nature of the reporting, ranging from “Contains inaccurate/fabricated info” at the bottom to “original fact reporting” at the top. The result is an inverted-U–shaped function with the most politically biased sources on both ends of the spectrum rating low on factual material (e.g., Occupy Democrats, Breitbart News), and the most politically neutral sources tending to be the highest in factual material. For example, the Associated Press, Reuters, and Bloomberg were rated both among the highest in original fact reporting and the lowest in political slant. There are a few media sources that occupy the bottom middle of the chart. For example, the National Enquirer is given only a modest right-ward skew but is also very low on factual information.

Figure 1. The 2018 version of the media bias chart by Ad Fontes Media, Inc. The vertical axis indicates level of fact-based reporting, and the horizontal axis plots liberal (left) versus conservative (right) bias. (Used with permission.)

Biased Information Processing: Conservatives vs. Liberals

As the foregoing suggests, the media landscape is filled with politically biased information that spans a wide range of viewpoints, but how biased are the people who receive this information? When you ask Republicans or Democrats how biased people of each party are, you get predictable results: Democrats say Republicans are more biased and Republicans say the reverse (see Figure 2). But psychological science cannot rely on the opinions of interested parties for answers. What happens when you put people in an experimental setting where they have a chance to act in a biased or unbiased way?

Figure 2. Mean level of agreement that the term biased accurately describes the average Republican or Democrat. Based on the responses of 951 Republicans and Democrats from Ditto et al. (2019a)¹.

The study of political ideology has a long history in the field of psychology, and the division of U.S. politics into more hardened red and blue positions—which is also happening elsewhere in the world—has made this line of study more relevant. As a result, psychologists have learned a lot about what separates the two sides. John Jost and colleagues (2008), writing in Perspectives on Psychological Science, characterize the two sides this way: The right-wing label has come to represent political views that are conservative, supportive of the status quo, and hierarchical in nature, whereas left-wing views connote progressive social change and egalitarian ideals (127).

Jost and colleagues also found that conservatives were more likely to show “system-justifying attitudes,” including support for the idea that economic systems are fair and that equality is undesirable. In addition, research has shown that conservatives and liberals can be separated by their attitudes toward various groups and activities. Table 1 shows a selection of these drawn from Jost et al. (2008).

Table 1. Groups and activities that conservatives and liberals have more positive attitudes toward (from Jost et al. 2008).

Finally, recent psychological research suggests that these ideological differences are reflected in both explicit and implicit attitudes and are related to core personality dimensions (Jost et al. 2008). Currently, the most popular psychological theory of personality assumes that we possess stable traits that affect our behavior across time and environments. The most popular trait theory at the moment is The Big Five, which attempts to characterize people by measuring their levels of five traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (McCrae and Costa 1987). Research on political ideology has shown that liberals and conservatives can be distinguished by the degree to which they show two of the Big Five traits: openness to experience (higher among liberals) and conscientiousness (higher among conservatives) (Jost et al. 2008).

Given their relative openness to experience, it would be reasonable to think that liberals would be less biased than conservatives. When confronted with data that challenges their beliefs, liberals might be more willing to accept contrary information, whereas conservatives’ propensity to defend the status quo would make then resistant to new information. A recent meta-analysis by Ditto and colleagues (2019a) suggests otherwise. The researchers summarized studies in which participants were presented with information that contradicted their beliefs and found that liberals and conservatives were equally biased in their acceptance of this discrepant data. For example, Dan Kahan of Yale University conducted a study using a large sample of people who were scientifically matched to the demographics of the U.S. Participants reported their political orientations and were asked to take the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick 2005), which consists of the three questions below:

1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? _____ cents
2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? _____ minutes
3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? _____ days

The CRT is a mentally challenging task that is thought to require thoughtful, deliberate reasoning if you hope answer the questions correctly. In the language of dual processing theory (Kahneman 2011), the CRT can only be mastered by engaging the slower but more powerful machinery of System 2 and cannot be solved using the simple intuitive heuristics of System 1. (By the way, the answers to the CRT are five cents, five minutes, and forty-seven days.)

In Kahan’s study, the discrepant information given to participants was about climate change and scores on the CRT. Some participants were told that research showed people who “accept evidence of climate change” tended to get more answers correct on the CRT (discrepant for conservatives). Others were told that people who “reject evidence of climate change” got more answers correct (discrepant for liberals). After receiving this information, participants were asked to rate their agreement with the view that the CRT “supplies good evidence of how reflective and open-minded someone is” (Kahan 2013, 412). Kahan found that both liberals and conservatives were biased in their evaluation of the CRT.When told it correlated with an opposing point of view—climate change deniers for liberals and climate change accepters for conservatives—each downgraded their rating of the validity of the CRT. Kahan’s (2013) study was one of fifty-one similar experiments summarized in the meta-analysis by Ditto and colleagues. Writing in the March 2019 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Ditto et al. (2019a) suggest that Kahan’s findings are representative of similar studies that looked at the biases of liberals and conservatives. When confronted with information that challenges their beliefs, both sides show equivalent levels of bias.

Well, that should be a comforting thought. If we can’t get rid of bias, perhaps it is best that it be evenly distributed across both ends of the political spectrum. Not so fast.

The Ditto et al. (2019a) meta-analysis was challenged by a paper published in the same issue of Perspectives in Psychological Science by Jonathan Baron of the University of Pennsylvania and John Jost of New York University. On a general level, Baron and Jost (2019) pointed to a body of research showing that conservatives exhibit thinking styles that are substantially higher in dogmatism, rigidity, intolerance for ambiguity, and need for order; whereas, liberals show thinking styles higher in integrative complexity, cognitive reflection, and need for cognition, which involves having a positive attitude toward tasks that require reasoning. This pattern of thinking styles is inconsistent with symmetrical bias for conservatives and liberals.

Baron and Jost (2019) had some more technical criticisms of the Ditto et al. (2019a) article. For example, in deciding which studies to include in their meta-analysis, Ditto et al. started with 1,500 studies, which, after applying various inclusion criteria, they winnowed down to just fifty-one studies, and Baron and Jost suggested that the experimenters may have unconsciously chosen studies that were more likely to produce symmetrical bias. In other words, Baron and Jost accused Ditto and colleagues of being biased in the construction of their meta-analysis of bias. In a response, Ditto et al. (2019b) were quick to defend their methods of choosing studies for their analysis. But Baron and Jost made another criticism that—to me, at least—is worthy of serious consideration.

Baron and Jost (2019) point out that many of the issues used to assess partisan bias in the Ditto et al. study don’t really have two sides. For example, the Kahan study described above was about climate change. The scientific community overwhelmingly supports the idea that human activity contributes to global warming, and as a result, it is completely rational to be biased against information that contradicts that view. Baron and Jost argue that Ditto and colleagues have created a false equivalency. In many of the issues addressed in the meta-analysis, it would have been objectively appropriate to be skeptical. Baron and Jost made this point in a quote they used as an epigram for their article:

There can be no real quarrel with a willingness to infer that studies supporting one’s theory-based expectations are more probative than … studies that contradict one’s expectations. … Hence, [a] physicist would be “biased,” but appropriately so, if a new procedure for evaluating the speed of light were accepted if it gave the “right answer” but rejected if it gave the “wrong answer.” The same bias leads most of us to be skeptical about reports of miraculous virgin births or herbal cures for cancer. (Lord et al. 1979, 2106)

It is reasonable to be skeptical of information that contradicts your background knowledge on the subject—particularly if you know what you’re talking about.According to Baron and Jost, because the Ditto et al. meta-analysis did not measure or take into account the participants’ knowledge of the topics addressed, it is impossible to know how much of their bias was justifiable and rational and how much was shear politically based prejudice. On some topics, Republicans may have greater background knowledge than Democrats (e.g., economics), but as a general trend, current political history contradicts the proposition of symmetrical amounts of knowledge among the political parties. Research shows that “low-information voters” were an important component of Trump’s support. For example, a 2017 study found that voters who were low on need for cognition and low on political knowledge showed a greater preference for Trump over Clinton in the context of the 2016 presidential campaign (Fording and Schram 2017). If liberals in the Ditto et al. meta-analysis had more knowledge of the issues used to assess bias, then they may have been behaving more reasonably and justifiably than conservatives. But, at this point, we are not in a position to answer that question.

So, Who Is More Biased?

Perhaps the most honest answer is: We don’t know. The debate between Ditto and colleagues (2019a, 2019b) and Baron and Jost (2019) has revealed some sticky problems that need to be solved before we can make a clear judgment on the matter. Furthermore, the entire enterprise may be a bit misguided—just another opportunity for finger-pointing. Rather than focusing on the contentious and fraught issue of political bias, it might be more useful to highlight people’s relative allegiance to facts. The word bias sounds uniformly bad, but having a preference for certain kinds of information over others—based on the source and on the quality of one’s personal knowledge—is entirely appropriate. If not essential. In a world awash in misinformation (see Figure 1), it is important that we learn as much as possible about the issues of the day and think intelligently and critically about the claims that come our way. There is ignorance on all sides, and intelligence and critical thinking should not be a partisan matter.

References

• Baron, Jonathan, and John T. Jost. 2019. False equivalence: Are liberals and conservatives in the United States equally biased? Perspectives on Psychological Science 14(2): 292–303.
• Ditto, Peter H., Brittany S. Liu, Cory J. Clark, et al. 2019a. At least bias is bipartisan: A meta-analytic comparison of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives. Perspectives on Psychological Science 14(2): 273–291.
• Ditto, Peter H., Cory J. Clark, Brittany S. Liu, et al. 2019b. Partisan bias and its discontents. Perspectives on Psychological Science 14(2): 304–16.
• Fording, Richard C., and Sanford F. Schram. 2017. The cognitive and emotional sources of Trump support: The case of low-information voters. New Political Science 39(4): 670–86.
• Frederick, Shane. 2005. Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of Economic Perspectives 19(4): 25–42.
• Ivanova, Irina. 2018. Judge approves AT&T-Time Warner merger without conditions. CBS News (June 12). Available online at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/att-time-warner-merger-approved-without-conditions-judge-rules-today-time-warner-stock-price-rises-in-after-hours-trading/; accessed March 11, 2019.
• Jost, John T., Brian A. Nosek, and Samuel D. Gosling. 2008. Ideology: Its resurgence in social, personality, and political psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science 3(2): 126–136.
• Kahan, Dan M. 2013. Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection. Judgment and Decision Making 8(4): 407–424. Available online at http://journal.sjdm.org/13/13313/jdm13313.pdf.
• Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
• Lord, Charles G., Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper. 1979. Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37(11): 2098–2109.
• Mayer, Jane. 2019. Trump TV. The New Yorker (March 11). Available online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house.
• McCrae, Robert R., and Paul T. Costa. 1987. Validation of the Five-Factor Model of personality across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52(1): 81–90. Available online at http://www.psychometric-assessment.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/5FMPeerValidationCostaMcCrea.pdf.
• Wemple, Erik. 2017. Dear mainstream media: Why so liberal? The Washington Post (January 27). Available online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/01/27/dear-mainstream-media-why-so-liberal; accessed March 9, 2019.
• Willnat, Lars, and David H. Weaver. 2014. The American Journalist in the Digital Age: Key Findings. Bloomington, IN: School of Journalism, Indiana University.

Note

1. Thanks to Peter Ditto for providing the data required to produce Figure 2.

En la medicina tradicional china (MTC), uso médico generalizado de productos animales tales como bilis de oso, cuernos de rinoceronte, huesos de tigre y escamas de pangolín ha devenido en la práctica de la crueldad animal y ha amenazado a varias especies respecto de su extinción. Se han propuesto como remedios o encantamientos mágicos, todo tipo de partes animales, como en Macbeth, de Shakespeare: “Filete de una serpiente hervido, en un caldero y cocido; Ojo de un tritón y dedo de rana, Lana de murciélago y lengua de perro, Colmillo de víbora y aguijón de lución, Pata de lagartija y ala de lechuza…”

Tal vez no sea “lana de murciélago”, pero ¿sabía usted que a la “sangre de murciélago” se la considera como remedio? En cierta forma, es justicia poética. Los murciélagos vampiros son conocidos por chupar la sangre de seres humanos, ganado y otros animales. Ahora, los humanos están dando vuelta la tortilla. Beben la sangre de los murciélagos creyendo equivocadamente que beneficia a la salud. ¡Por cierto que no! Podría sonar como una broma, pero ha sido referido en fuentes confiables como el National Geographic.

La revista National Geographic informa que en los Andes, la medicina folclórica incluye la creencia de que con la sangre de los murciélagos se puede tratar la epilepsia. A pesar de que no hay evidencia científica que apoye tal afirmación, la gente continúa utilizando la sangre de murciélago para la epilepsia. Luis Aguirre, líder del Programa Boliviano de Conservación de los Murciélagos, dice que recibe llamadas pidiendo murciélagos por lo menos 5 veces por año, de lugares lejanos como Francia. La sangre se considera como una potente fuerza de vida que puede transferir sus cualidades a quienes la consumen. Se cree que los murciélagos son criaturas poderosas con características únicas; son mamíferos que vuelan. Se trata de pensamiento mágico.

National Geographic hace referencia a dos maneras rituales de usar la sangre de murciélago. “Típicamente, se conseguiría un murciélago vivo, cortándole la cabeza y se bebería su sangre fresca”. Pero si el murciélago ya está muerto, pueden “freírlo con su piel y colocarlo en una bolsa de ropa que luego sería empapada en alcohol para comerlo a su debido tiempo”. No puedo imaginar que estos métodos de consumo resulten muy sabrosos.

Más adelante informan que “No es difícil encontrar murciélagos que estén en venta en los mercados de Bolivia. Usualmente son bien guardados en ásperas cajas de zapatos, algunas con 20 murciélagos apretujados juntos. Los que están vivos arrastrándose entre aquellos que ya han muerto por enfermedad o estrés”.

This article was originally available in English.
Click here to read it.

No importa que sea ilegal. La ley boliviana prohíbe la matanza o la venta de cualquier animal salvaje sin los permisos apropiados, y las transgresiones son punibles hasta con seis años de prisión. Pero los murciélagos que están en venta son fáciles de conseguir. Una investigación publicada en 2010 encontró que se vendieron ilegalmente más de 3.000 murciélagos por mes en las cuatro ciudades más grandes de Bolivia. Los investigadores comentaron que es probable una subestimación ya que no todos los murciélagos fueron ubicados por ellos y algunos vendedores se negaron a cooperar. Las especies que se venden son los murciélagos de la fruta, murciélagos que comen insectos y, claro, los murciélagos vampiros. Los murciélagos muertos cuestan unos 93 centavos de dólar; los vivos, unos 2,47. Los murciélagos son vitales para el ecosistema. Algunas plantas dependen de ellos para dispersar sus semillas o polinizar las flores. Ayudan al control agrícola de las pestes. Su guano es un valioso fertilizante. Comen mosquitos y otros artrópodos que pueden llevar parásitos y malaria. Cuanto menos murciélagos hay, más probables son las chances de que los humanos contraigan fiebre amarilla, el virus del zika, la malaria y otras enfermedades.

Los conservacionistas hallaron que más del 60 por ciento de las especies de murciélagos conocidas en Bolivia está amenazado hasta cierto punto, y una especie está en vías de extinción. Algunas de las especies más raras se están extinguiendo en algunos ecosistemas. La mayor amenaza es la explotación y destrucción del hábitat. Los murciélagos son tristemente incomprendidos. Son denigrados y se los toma por sucios, feos, infectados por la rabia y como presagio de mala suerte, y la gente los caza y tortura. Los conservacionistas están usando programas de divulgación educativos para enseñar a los niños sobre los murciélagos bajo la premisa de que una vez que las personas conocen a los murciélagos, éstos van a gustarles y la gente va a ayudar a protegerlos.

No hay evidencia de que la sangre de murciélago tenga algún beneficio para la salud humana. Por el contrario, la gente que bebe sangre de murciélago enfrenta de hecho riesgos directos para su salud. Los murciélagos vampiros son los mejores portadores de la rabia, y aunque es probable quela sangre no sea por sí misma transmisora de la infección, la manipulación de murciélagos rabiosos puede transmitirla fácilmente, y los murciélagos pueden traer consigo y transmitir otros patógenos.

Al menos, los nombres de los murciélagos son entretenidos. En castellano, murciélago significa ratón ciego; me encanta el sonido de la palabra murciélago en ese idioma. En Francia con chave-souris (ratones calvos). En Alemania, un murciélago es un Fledermaus (ratón flameante). Die Fledermaus es el título de una opereta de Strauss.

Pero el beber sangre de murciélago es una terrible idea, peligrosa para la salud y el medio ambiente. Solo pensarlo es repulsivo, y el gusto es probablemente asqueroso. Es una mala idea —alocada por donde se mire.

Harriet Hall

Harriet Hall, médica retirada de la Fuerza Aérea de los Estados Unidos, y cirujana de aviación, escribe y educa sobre la pseudocientírica medicina alternativa. Ha contribuido con la revista Skeptical Inquirer y con el blog Science-Based Medicine. Es autora de Women Aren’t Supposed to Fly: Memoirs of a Female Flight Surgeon y co-autora del libro de texto Consumer Health: A Guide to Intelligent Decision (2012).

As I scrolled through my social media feed one January night, I came across a post from Evan Bernstein, cohost of the popular Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast. The post linked to an article in The Charlotte Observer titled “Professional ghost hunters to investigate haunting of USS North Carolina battleship” (Price 2019). I had the opportunity to tour the battleship twice and wasn’t familiar with any ghost stories, so I decided to take a closer look.

The USS North Carolina, a memorial honoring the 11,000 North Carolinians of all branches of service who gave their lives in World War II, rests quietly just off the Cape Fear River across from the historic district of Wilmington. The keel of the ship was laid in October 1937 and was the first of ten “fast” battleships to join the American fleet in World War II (Battleship 2018).

The ship made a name for itself, participating in every major naval offensive in the Pacific and earning fifteen battle stars (battleshipnc.com 2019). The ship helped save the aircraft carrier Enterprise during the Battle of Eastern Solomon’s in 1942 and rescued Navy aviators in Truk in 1944. She’s covered over 300,000 miles of ocean, reportedly been sunk six times (which she wasn’t) and survived a torpedo attack in September 1942 (and kept on fighting). By the end of WWII, ten of the ship’s men had been killed in action with an additional sixty-seven being wounded.

The USS North Carolina was decommissioned on June 27, 1947, and stored in the Inactive Reserve Fleet in Bayonne, New Jersey, for the following fourteen years. When word came about that the ship was going to be scrapped, the citizens of North Carolina banded together to form the Save Our Ship campaign. They saved the ship, bringing her home to her current resting place at Eagle Island, just off the coast on October 2, 1961. On April 29, 1962, she was dedicated “as the State’s memorial to its World War II veterans and the 11,000 North Carolinians who died during the war” (battleshipnc.com 2019). The USS North Carolina has been educating visitors ever since.

Let’s bring the focus back to the professional ghost hunters and the event they hosted on board the battleship. On Saturday, January 5, 2019, the Battleship USS North Carolina was host to the “Death Ship Ghost Hunt,” a poorly-chosen name for an event organized by Ghost Hunt Weekends (an events promoter). I could find no other reference to the nickname “Death Ship” being associated with the USS North Carolina, so I’m assuming the name was a marketing tactic. The event showcased paranormal TV celebrities Steve Gonsalves (Ghost Hunters), Chris Smith, and Mike Goncalves (Haunted Towns)—the alleged professionals—as they hosted an hour-long Q&A, a two-hour Meet and Greet, and finally a 4.5 hour “ghost hunt” throughout the ship. These guys are (un)reality show (semi)stars, not investigators.

Evan Bernstein found this event troubling and submitted an email via the USS North Carolina website’s “contact” page. In part, he stated, “For the museum to endorse and encourage belief in the paranormal diminishes and tarnishes the history of the vessel and every person who has served aboard. That you are allowing your beautiful and honored museum to lend credibility to the overwhelmingly-debunked pseudo-scientific nonsense that is ‘ghost hunting’ is a disservice to the public and stands in exact contrast to everything that The Battleship North Carolina represents.”¹ (Bernstein 2019)

I could not agree more. Although the decision to host such events is, of course, up to the management (as it is for any location hosting such events), I feel that locations of such historical significance are committing a disservice to the general public. I expressed this in my own email to the management of the USS North Carolina, “I must say this is truly a disappointment that a memorial with such an important role in our nation’s history will now contribute to the plethora of pseudoscience from unscientific television personalities and their fans. ‘Ghost hunting’ practices and devices have been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked by science-based investigations over the years. Such events and television programs only serve to spread misinformation to the general public. This seems to be in stark contrast to the purpose of the USS North Carolina—to protect the public.”

The battleship and museum are intended to provide historical information about the crew and service of the ship with accuracy supported by records and first-hand accounts of those who served. Ghost hunting events such as these, featuring celebrity “professional” ghost hunters, do not contribute to this intended purpose. On the contrary, they often spread misinformation that leads to a false sense of understanding. As Bernstein noted in his email, “This does not add to the public's understanding of history. On the contrary, it only serves to further impair our public's ability to determine what is real versus what is fake” (Bernstein 2019).

I reached out to Bernstein and asked him to elaborate on the reasons behind his disappointment with the management of the USS North Carolina. He graciously jumped on Skype with me, expressing the following; “They (the ghost hunters) get so much more attention than they deserve, and I guess that’s one of my main points about that. All this serves as some sort of validation on their part that they were able to get or agree to this event. I don’t know how this came about, but it any case, it offers validity—unwarranted and undeserved—to the ghost hunters, based on something that is based in reality and history … and the two worlds just don’t belong together” (Bernstein 2019).

In my experience with the ghost hunting community, Bernstein’s comment about “some sort of validation on their part” does ring true. I’ve come across many (but not all) ghost hunting teams that use famous locations they’ve visited as credentials; listing places such as Eastern State Penitentiary and Waverly Hills Sanatorium as something meant to impress others (e.g., “I’m a big deal because I investigated that place”). Likewise, attending such events with TV celebrities is often mentioned as a way to boost one’s reputation, e.g., “I investigated location X with celebrity X” (this is also true for many cryptozoology and UFOlogy teams as well). Unfortunately, such claims are not an indication that one ghost hunter is any better than any other ghost hunters. These events are not something that should be listed under the qualifications of one’s resume.

The USS North Carolina is certainly not the only historic location that has played host to such ghost hunting events. In the past two decades, I’ve found many historic sites have taken an interest in the ghost hunting community as a way to raise funds. Avid ghost hunters and enthusiasts are willing to pay out anywhere from $25 to over $300 (GHW 2018) per person to attend events such as this, and more locations have taken notice. For historic locations and/or tourist attractions that are underfunded, the financial potential from the ghost hunting community is extremely enticing. As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, ghost hunting is a cash cow and once a location gains a reputation for being haunted, their weekends are often booked up quickly (see Biddle 2018).

While I still had Bernstein “on the line,” I asked him about historic locations turning to ghost hunting to raise money. He explained that it was a question of who was courting who; was it the museums, as well as other organizations, trying to bring some notoriety and/or activity to their programs? Or is it the ghost hunters “who like to go to places of historical significance because it feeds into their narrative and what they’re trying to accomplish, and certainly gain some level of credibility—where none is deserved” (Bernstein 2019).

Bernstein says he’s really not sure that the people who are the decisionmakers of these organizations understand the significance. He goes on to explain “they [historic locations] lending their credibility [to the ghost hunters] [is] a parasitic relationship as far as I’m concerned, that the ghost hunters have everything to gain and nothing to lose by entering a relationship like that. Whereas these museums and other places only sacrifice some of their credibility to undeserving groups” (Bernstein 2019).

I understand and agree with Bernstein’s point; part of a location’s credibility is sacrificed for allowing high-profile para-celebrities with their unscientific and irrational methods to promote such events to the public. In the case of the USS North Carolina, this is a historically significant battleship that, by playing host to overhyped pseudoscientific events, lends some of its credibility to the ghost hunters that really don’t deserve it.

What’s worse, as mentioned earlier, this event was promoted as the “Death Ship Ghost Hunt” on the Ghost Hunt Weekends website—a name that will no doubt continue to be used by those who attended the event (e.g., “I investigated the Battleship North Carolina, ya know, the Death Ship, with the guys from Ghost Hunters”). Over time, these locations can develop paranormal-related reputations that begin to overtake their historical significance. I’ve seen this type of shift in reputation with locations such as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which quickly gained a paranormal reputation in the late 1990s and now has over a dozen ghost tours and at least four ghost hunting/metaphysical stores in the small town. These locations are no longer “historical” sites; they become “haunted historical” sites, their reputations forever tarnished.

Now, I’m not blind to the perspective of these historical locations. I understand their need (sometimes a desperate one) to supplement funding for required repairs or even basic operating costs. Repairs on old buildings isn’t cheap and available funds can be hard to find. If they are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and are receiving Federal assistance, repair costs can be much higher due to certain restrictions.² Even with volunteers, many locations struggle to keep the doors open to the public.

Of course, you and I have no say in the matter of what kind of events these locations decide to host—this is the decision of the location’s management. However, I don’t always agree with this course of action.

I’ve attended many such events over the past two decades. I’m not referring to the classic “ghost tours” in which a guide walks a group through the streets of your local town or city, presenting a mix of history and alleged ghost stories from past guests/visitors (though I have taken many of those too). Those are most often harmless entertainment that sneak in some history. Events such as the one held at the USS North Carolina usually offer some type of “Ghost Hunting 101” or Q&A segment in which attendees are instructed on the “proper” use of equipment. This usually includes what they believe the devices can do, how to take readings, and how to interpret those readings. The issue I have is that the information passed on about the ghost hunting equipment is not always entirely accurate and often blatantly incorrect. They may contain a kernel of truth, but that kernel is often wrapped up in layer after layer of assumptions or mimicry based on little more than (unsupported) beliefs and recycled dialog from ghost hunting TV shows.

After attending quite a few of these events, I’ve seen electromagnetic field meters still promoted as being able to detect the presence of ghosts, despite there being no scientific basis for this claim. Attendees are often told that ghosts can speak through modified radios that do nothing more than scan through the available frequencies without muting the sound, blurting out quick snippets of words that are interpreted as ghostly communication. To this day, I still encounter groups that promote using a Mini Maglite (the flashlight trick) for ghosts to answer questions (Biddle 2019).

During many of these ghost hunts, there is little if any mention of experimental controls to guard against false-positive readings or other natural and man-made sources for strange readings. More often than not, the team hosting the ghost hunting event (as well as many attendees) have very little to no understanding of how their equipment actually works. The three celebrities of the USS North Carolina event, Steve Gonsalves, Chris Smith, and Mike Goncalves have consistently demonstrated their lack of understanding and misuse of equipment on their television shows, all while claiming to use scientific testing (TWC 2019). They repeatedly used and promoted the flashlight trick and other useless devices (e.g., K2 meter, Ovilus, etc.) as ways to communicate and/or detect ghosts. I’m sure these are nice, friendly guys normally (I briefly spoke with Steve Gonsalves a while back), but they have no business teaching others how to use “ghost hunting equipment” or how to interpret the results. And I think these guys, hosting a paranormal event such as this at a historic location such as the USS North Carolina, diminishes the reputation of the battleship.

To be fair, not all paranormal events I’ve attended (or the groups in charge of the events) follow this routine. Quite a few have strived to get better information and quell much of the pseudoscience out there, but these events/group are usually in smaller venues that don’t use para-celebrities to draw in large crowds. I’ve been working with several groups that are actively promoting good research methods and speaking out against the misinformation popularized by paranormal TV programs.

You might also be asking “If you don’t agree with these events, why do you pay to attend them?” That’s a fair question with a three-part answer: First, the money usually does go (in part or in full) to the location that needs it for repairs, upkeep, etc. I’m all for supporting historical locations. Second, I collect data on trends, habits, gadget use, etc. while observing the ghost hunters as they go about their business. Third, I often get the opportunity to counter the pseudoscience with good, solid information. I can often explain why a meter started going off “for no reason” or even demonstrate how a strange anomaly showed up in a photograph. I’m polite and helpful, and attendees walk away with a slightly better understanding. As an added bonus, this often gets me invited back, giving me more opportunities to contribute better information.

In the end, I agree with Bernstein that locations that open themselves up for public ghost hunts sacrifice a bit of their credibility, developing a reputation for being haunted that goes side-by-side with its history, and most often being placed in front of the history. History begins to get distorted with the addition of ghost and the plethora of reasons they stay behind to haunt the location. Visitors are incorrectly taught how to use devices and interpret the results, contributing to the ongoing misinformation rampant within the paranormal community. It’s a vicious cycle.

I did reach out to Stacie Greene Hidek, Marketing Director in charge of Advertising, Marketing, Public Relations & Filming, who was a pleasure to speak with. I asked about the ghost hunting event, whether it was a program developed by the battleship or if it was initiated by the ghost hunters/organizers. Hidek explained that it was not a joint program at all; the battleship was rented for a private event and then Ghost Hunt Weekends sold their own tickets. She also mentioned that because they are a state-run function, they try to be more open-minded when renting the location. I got the impression that as long as someone agreed to the standard terms of the renting the battleship, they would not be refused. On a recent visit to the battleship, I noticed the gift shop was selling copies of a book entitled Ghosts on the Battleship North Carolina by Danny Bradshaw, so they obviously don’t shy away from the ghostly attention.

I’m not discouraging anyone from visiting the USS North Carolina or any other historical location just because they occasionally hold or play host to paranormal events. Quite the opposite; I highly encourage you to visit them … but visit them for the history, the architecture, and the passion of those that work hard to keep these places around for you to experience. Our history is much more entertaining than scripted, cookie-cutter “reality” shows that tend to distort and bend history to fit their ghost stories. I’ll continue to support historical locations whenever I can, and I hope you will too. In fact, as I’m writing this article, I’m about to take a break and head over to the USS North Carolina, which is a short drive from where I’m staying this weekend.

I’ll finish this column with a final quote from Evan Bernstein: “In the grand context of things and relatively speaking, are there more important issues we have to deal with? Sure, there are. But this isn’t insignificant either because it has to do with public saturation. We have too many people believing in nonsense and the more we perpetuate it the more we add to it. It’s bad, it will never get better, it will only get worse. So, it’s not insignificant.” (Bernstein 2019 Skype)

Notes

1. The event held at the Battleship was not intended for a television program. It was a stand-alone event organized by the website Ghost Hunt Weekends.
2. According to the National Park Service website, “Under Federal Law, the listing of a property in the National Register places no restrictions on what a non-federal owner may do with their property up to and including destruction, unless the property is involved in a project that receives Federal assistance, usually funding or licensing/permitting. However, before this occurs, you can, or the property owner should contact the State historic preservation office (SHPO.) The SHPO is the state agency that oversees historic preservation efforts in their state. There may be state or local preservation laws that the owner should be aware of before they undertake a project with a historic property.” (NPS 2018)

References

• Battleship North Carolina. 2018. History. Available at http://www.battleshipnc.com/about-the-ship/history/.
• Biddle, Kenny. 2018. App-aritions Are Still Causing Trouble. Available at https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/app-aritions_are_still_causing_trouble.
• ———. 2019. Flashlight Trick. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQp3syfKddE&t=32s.
• Bernstein, Evan. 2019. Facebook post.
• ———. 2019. Personal correspondence via Skype.
• Ghost Hunt Weekends (GHW). 2018. Accessed on January 10, 2019. Available at http://www.ghosthuntweekends.com/battleshipnc.html.
• 2018. Frequently Asked Questions. Accessed on January 13, 2019. Available at https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/frequently-asked-questions.htm.
• Price, Mark. 2019. Professional ghost hunters to investigate haunting of USS North Carolina battleship. Accessed on January 6, 2019. Available athttps://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article223864065.html?fbclid=IwAR0Z1fumGNKG7iSPBS4RR_SnU9t10BwMaSV2yI4Z9R_vqM8PX1hTazs9V8E.
• 2019. Bios – Chris Smith. Available athttps://tennesseewraithchasers.com/bios.

This particular news item came to me by way of a local paranormal group who tagged me in a post with a link (to the news item) and the comment, “Kenny Biddle, thoughts?” (PCINJ 2019). I clicked on the link and read the article; oh yes, I had some thoughts. So, I decided to take a closer look. Good thing I did, because I received over two dozen more requests over the next few hours, from ghost hunters and skeptics, to check it out.

Upon opening the linked article, I was introduced to Heather Brough, Joshua Higgins, and baby Lily, a family living in Highland, Michigan. Brough and Higgins are engaged, and they have been living in a guest house owned by Higgins’ mother (Adams 2019). After seeing surveillance footage from their nanny cam a few weeks ago, they now believe that it is haunted.

The video in question – a very short video clip – is about five seconds long and was repeated in a close-up version in order to extend the clip run time (Campbell 2019). The video shows the darkened second floor of the guest house, with a Pack ‘n Play playpen in the foreground in which 15-month old Lily is sitting quietly inside. As the video begins, a figure in the background, already in motion, is seen moving from the center of the room to the left side, appearing distorted and transparent at times in the few seconds we see it. After the figure passes the playpen, baby Lily stands up in her playpen and looks around for someone. The clip cuts off before the “ghost” disappears into thin air, which the Daily Mail article reported happening (Green 2019). This figure, the family claims, is a ghost that’s been haunting them – and apparently attacking them too.

Brough, 25, says she found “three deep purple scratches” on her baby’s cheek after waking her from a nap a few weeks ago. This is what prompted Brough and Higgins to check the nanny cam footage, hoping to find out what happened. The couple claims the male figure (their description) that is seen walking by Lily’s playpen is the cause of the scratches, as well as other activity going on. According to a quote from Brough, she freaked out (after seeing the footage) and stated she “stopped what I was doing, and I ran upstairs and grabbed my daughter” (Campbell 2019). Although the various news articles make it appear Brough grabbed her child immediately after the ‘ghost’ walked by Lily and was scratched, there’s just no way to establish a valid timeline of events. Nothing is time/date stamped, nor are we given a time frame for any of the personal experiences – everything is presented vaguely.

I searched the all-knowing internet to see if there was a better clip of the video, because the versions I had already viewed were very short and low quality. Experience has taught me that the best places to look are the websites known for being the worst perpetrators of bullshit news, and I was right. The Daily Mail (Green 2019) had the longest clip available – twelve seconds! Although it begins in the same spot as the others (with the figure), the video continues for a few seconds after all others have been cut off. This gave me part of what I was looking for; the ‘ghost’ walked into a hallway, it did not disappear. This seemed like a normal action any of us living people would do. Sadly, the longer clip didn’t tell me where the figure originated from, since the video starts after the figure had already begun moving.

There’s something else I noticed right away – the ghost was casting a shadow, two actually. This tells me the figure is a solid, physical object able to reflect light. In the first milliseconds of the video, as the figure is moving to the left, you can see its shadow move across the ceiling right by the ceiling fan. Another shadow is cast on the far-left wall as the figure gets nearer that side. Naturally, this caused me to look for a light source. I found an obvious one; a large screen television on the right side of the video. The television is on and has something on the screen. There’s no movement of what’s on-screen during the video, leading me to believe whatever was on the television was paused. This brings up the obvious question; who was watching TV?

WXYZ Detroit sent reporter Allen Campbell and a camera crew to the house to interview the family. While interviewing Jim Higgins (Joshua’s father), we get a better look at the area in front of the big-screen television. It looks like a large bed is positioned just in front of the TV, which makes sense since this appears to be their bedroom. I’m sure you’re thinking by now, “the ghost is probably one of the parents that was lying in bed watching TV”. You know what? That’s what I think too. But let’s keep digging.

The “nanny cam” shown at the house by WXYZ news crew is a Logitech Circle 2, which boasts up to 1080p HD video and 180-degree field of view. The Logitech website states it has “night vision that’s visible up to 15-feet.” This statement has a note attached, linking to a support page addressing the Circle 2’s night vision and the best conditions it should work under. One condition stands out, “The area you want to monitor is clear and unobstructed with no objects close to the camera and its field of view. The reflection of the night vision light from objects may cause the automatic system to over-compensate, darken the image, and reduce visibility of objects in the distance.”

This is extremely important because it describes exactly what we see in the video. In the lower right corner of the scene we can see the table the camera is set on, very close and reflecting the ‘night vision light’ (infrared light) back at the camera, which causes the camera to over-compensate and the overall image to darken. There are also several large objects obstructing the view; the playpen and what may be the back of the bed or other piece of furniture. All of this contributes to reducing the visibility of the figure in the distance. Remember, this camera’s night vision is only rated to 15-feet under the best conditions; this video is not under the best conditions, not at all.

A review by Gabe Baron, known on YouTube as the Security Baron, states the “night vision left a little to be desired” (Baron 2018). In his full review of the camera, Baron sits about four to five feet away from the camera while it is in night vision mode (starting time stamp 12:55), and you can clearly see the amount of motion blur as Baron moves his hands up and down. It’s pretty bad, and he’s only a few feet from the camera and in good lighting. In the ‘ghost’ video, the figure is across the room, easily estimated to be between 10 to 15 feet away.

Taking into account the poor conditions, the camera’s lacking night vision, and the obvious motion blur demonstrated in Baron’s review - it is very plausible and most likely to be either Brough or Higgins in the video. I would surmise either Brough and/or Higgins had been watching television and had reason to get up out of bed, perhaps go down to the kitchen for a drink/food or a visit to the bathroom, paused the video and walked across the room not realizing they were being recorded. At a later, unspecified time, they reviewed the footage and due to a lack of understanding of video cameras, concluded the distorted figure was a ghost.

Brough also attributes other activity to the alleged ghost; chief among them are the scratches on Lily’s face and her own experience of waking up feeling as if hands were around her neck (Campbell 2019). This latter experience was described a bit differently in the Daily Mail article, which quoted Brough stating “I woke up to get ready for work one morning and it felt like someone was choking me. It shook me to the point where I decided to buy our camera.” (Green 2019). I found it odd that such a frightening experience of being choked and shook by an unseen force was not mentioned in the on-camera interview with WXYZ or in any other source. Also, she was waking up when this experience occurred; was she dreaming, or perhaps this was a side-effect of acid reflux which can cause people to experience heartburn or coughing and choking while sleeping (NSF 2019). We just don’t have enough information on this claim.

I could only find one photograph that depicted the scratches on Lily’s face. Although there does appear to be lines on the side of her face, the image is too poor of quality to determine the severity of the scratches. There is no mention of the scratches bleeding or even if the skin was broken. The photograph is a general photo of the child; it was not focused on documenting the injuries. To be honest, if the photo was presented without priming the viewer about the scratches, one might not even notice the scratches. There’s also no date on the image, so we can’t be sure whether the scratches in the image happened around the same time the video was captured – which also has no date/time stamp.

Aside from the technical issues, it is not uncommon for babies to scratch themselves. We know from her statements that Brough discovered the scratches after waking the baby up from a nap, which most likely took place in the playpen we see in the video, but there’s nothing to rule out the possibility Lily scratched herself while sleeping.

Even if we were to pretend the figure in the video was a ghost, there’s nothing in the clip that would indicate any form of attack or injury took place; the figure simply walked across the room and into the hallway – quite mundane if you ask me. If there had been such an attack, where the child suddenly received three “deep” scratches, that child would have been screaming bloody murder (and Momma would have come running).

I’m not sure exactly what the motivation behind these claims is, but I do have my suspicions. I went to Heather Brough’s Facebook page earlier today and noticed that she posted her first public post since November of 2018; it was a link to a GoFundMe account she had created that day (March 26, 2019) with a goal of $5,000. She was asking for this amount to help her move out of the guest house, citing her daughter’s safety from all the paranormal activity as the main reason for the fund raising.

I reached out to Brough through Facebook, “Hello, my name is Kenny Biddle, and I've been investigating paranormal claims for the last 20+ years. Your video of what is believed to be a ghost walking in your house was brought to my attention by several paranormal groups. After taking a look at it, I was wondering if there was a longer clip - perhaps footage showing the few minutes leading up to (and including) the clip that was shared on ABC Action News. The clip that has been shared starts with the figure already in motion, and I was hoping to see where it originates. I noticed the TV was on, so being able to confirm it wasn't someone (living) watching TV and perhaps got up to get something, would be beneficial. I'm not saying this was a hoax, I'm just trying to get as much information as possible to understand what the video is showing. I appreciate your time in reading this. I hope to hear back from you. Have a good day.”

I haven’t received a response yet, nor do I expect to. Did they capture a ghost on video? Nope, the evidence is certainly against that idea. Is this a hoax? (Maybe). Is it an innocent misinterpretation of experiences due to ignorance? I really don’t know. However, I did notice when I went back to Brough’s Facebook page a few hours later, the post for the GoFundMe account was no longer visible to me. The GoFundMe account is still active, and as of this writing she has raised $30.

References

• Baron, Gabe. 2018. Logitech Circle 2 Home Security Camera Review. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=776&v=Ryt_8fG_ogo
• Campbell, Alan. 2019. Michigan couple says ghost seen on nanny cam scratched daughter. https://www.wxyz.com/michigan-couple-says-ghost-seen-on-nanny-cam-scratched-infant-daughter?fbclid=IwAR0jF2aH1z1yAUfivhJprn7He876BUvTQavLKleUVHxnmwnwwtHv_A7eDvo
• Green, Jessica. 2019. Spooked parents check their babycam after their baby daughter wakes up with three deep scratches on her face - and spot a 'ghostly male' walking past her crib. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6846885/Spooked-parents-check-babycam-spot-ghostly-male.html
• Logitech. 2019. Circle 2: How it works. https://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/circle-2-home-security-camera/page/circle-2-how-it-works
• Logitech. https://support.logitech.com/en_us/article/How-does-Circle-2-s-night-vision-work-best
• National Sleep Foundation. 2019. GERD and Sleep. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/gerd-and-sleep
• Paranormal Consulting & Investigations of New Jersey. 2019. Facebook Post. https://www.facebook.com/PCINJ.org/posts/2624081720999325?comment_id=2624732997600864&notif_id=1553628386450317&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic

Why would anyone join a cult? Maybe they're unhappy with their current religion, want to change the world, are disappointed with their lives … or maybe they’re just trying to make sense of what's going on around them. Perhaps they just want to give themselves the chance to have sex with aliens.

Once they're in, however, it's very difficult to leave, and that's what led Jo Thornley to write the new book Zealot: A Book About Cults.

Jo Thornley: I've always been into, until now, the separate topics of true crime and religion. I used to be religious and then sort of backed away from that calmly and respectfully but then became interested in different types of religion and the way people believe things, so the combination is quite obvious, then, when you look at cults.

Coming from writing all sorts of different things, I thought the stories involved with cults were also just absolutely fascinating and I wanted to research them and then write about them and discuss them with my friends, so I figured if I gave them a cheese platter and a microphone, they'd be more willing to.

Kylie Sturgess: What are your thoughts about the difficulty of narrowing down the definition of cults as you do at the start of the book? Are there any particular guides that helped you?

Thornley: None at all because nobody wants to commit to one! I mean, I looked at some of the red flags, and it's extremely difficult to define a cult without also describing a religion, so I think that's why it's generally been avoided. There's no law against being in a cult I think for the same reason that it would be very, very difficult to draw the line between established mainstream religions and cults, so legally and theologically and psychologically and philosophically there's no clear definition.

But I'd say some of the red flags are things like the amount of control that cult members are subjected to and the perception of how bad it will be when they leave, and also I think how much—aside from their autonomy—how much they're expected to contribute either in work or money or virginity or other things.

Sturgess: Do you think with advances in technology it's easier for people to find out about and avoid cults, or do you think there are still elements that lead us to join these groups regardless?

Thornley: Yes and no. I think that good information and factual information is much more broadly dispersed, but by the same token, so is false information and dogma and conspiracy theories. They're more freely and easily distributed as well, so I think it depends on what you're looking for, the kind of information you're looking for. Cults in their heyday (particularly in the ’60s through the ’80s) were isolating themselves in compounds. Now people are already self-isolating—often in front of their computers and with their groups that they find online—so there's still an “us and a them,” but now it's more of a theoretical border or fence than an actual one, so people will still seek out the information they need and be influenced strongly by others in small online communities.

Sturgess: How difficult is the balance between being fascinated and horrified, as you put it, when telling the tales of cults and their behavior?

Thornley: Disturbingly easy, I'm afraid to say! Partly because of the stories that I have always been interested in. I was quite interested in reading about serial killers but also about how religion and belief can sometimes go wrong that I … well, I do find joy when people are caught out, and in a small way I might like it when someone I know is caught out in a lie because I have a quite spiky sense of justice and I like it when justice is done.

I am dissatisfied by stories about groups such as NXIVM, a group in the U.S. that up until recently was semi-untouchable because they were so litigious. There are other large American groups that I won't even mention in the public forum, generally speaking, because they're litigious, but it's so frustrating and leaves me feeling icky when they're not caught.

But it does make me feel good when they're unraveling and caught out in lies or power exploitation, so I think that's probably how I surf the line between horror and satisfaction and, I suppose, in an awful way, entertainment. I like seeing the bad guys get done.

Sturgess: It's interesting how many cults have moved out of the public eye and have been mostly lost to time. I mean, the Raëlians might be familiar to those of us into UFOs, but I personally have never heard of Colonia Dignidad. Was it difficult narrowing down which cults you were going to deal with for the book?

Thornley: I picked the ones that made my mouth fall open the hardest, I think, but narrowing it down ... because I've covered, now, I think twenty-six cults on the Zealot podcast and only ten in the book. But I've read about more than that, so I had to pick some criteria for inclusion in the book. One of the big ones was whether or not they had any ties at all to Australia.

The two you mentioned, the Raëlians and Colonia Dignidad, didn't have a connection to Australia, but I thought on the one hand the Raëlians were some nice upbeat relief in the book, and there's not many cults you can say that about; they haven't really done that many bad things. Colonia Dignidad I think I included because it's not well known but it's so heinous. I mean, you've got violence, Nazi torture. … It's kind of like the pick and mix of horrible qualities.

But others in the book, most of them have an Australian connection in some way. Aum Shinrikyo tested their sarin gas on a remote sheep farm in Western Australia. The Branch Davidians, David Koresh, came out to this country to recruit and got a number of Australian members and, of course, The Family—the cult that was based in the state of Victoria.So having to choose which ones went in the book was, I think, based on the most unbelievable and those with an Australian connection.

Sturgess: Should we be discussing these groups in educational settings, kind of like consumer rights but focusing on spiritual and emotional health?

Thornley: I don't think we need to discuss cults in particular. I think critical thinking and weighing up the information that you're given is always important, and that's across the board. I think when we learn critical thinking and learn to investigate any dogma or self-help claims with facts, it's the difference between a doctor and Pete Evans. Facts and critical thinking mean that you'll get to the right answer in the end.

So, I think any teachers that do choose to include discussing cults in their lessons about critical thinking would have a rapt audience. and the students would probably keep talking about them through lunchtime! But it always comes down to critical thinking and just being aware of how information is disseminated and how it's made to seem important when it might be misleading or just plain false.

 Zealot: A Book About Cults by Jo Thornley is now available in bookstores and online.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Not all dog and cat owners call themselves “pet parents,” but I became a dog mom to the now twelve-year-old Luna back in 2007, a few years before I had kids. Our family really wanted to add another furry member to our family, so I finally acquiesced in September of last year, even though I’m allergic to dogs (I’m fairly certain I’ll be on daily allergy meds for life). Sebastian, AKA Batman, a two-year-old adorably weird sweetheart who posed in a bowtie in his adoption photos, quickly stole the Senapathy-Milinovich family’s hearts.

To finalize his adoption, I had to take him to the rescue organization’s chosen clinic to get his certificate of health—I won’t give the clinic’s specific name, but it includes “Holistic Care.” My ears usually perk up when I hear “holistic” in the vicinity of anything health related. That's not to say that a truly holistic approach to wellbeing isn’t a good thing, but because where there’s holistic, there’s often woo. 

I admit I’d sort of overlooked veterinary pseudoscience trends until recently. I didn’t realize how widespread they were, in part because my family had been using the same vet clinic for the past decade. This clinic is evidence based, so I assumed based on nothing really, that pet woo was fringe.

I was wrong.

Batman and I headed to the Holistic Care vet clinic and, when I walked in, the assortment of gorgeous glowing salt lamps lining the office immediately set off my woo radar. I’m sure my eyes widened—I’m not known for my poker face—but I tried my best to conceal my unease. As soon as the vet assistant whisked my little guy to the back office for his checkup, I pulled out my phone and looked at their website.

As I suspected, this clinic doesn’t just love salt lamps for their aesthetic. The office’s alt med offerings, including acupuncture, detox services, essential oils, and reiki, suggest that they believe the lamps confer health benefits, too (tl;dr, they don’t).

I immediately vowed to keep my cool, finish the adoption paperwork, and get myself and Sebastian out of that clinic and never look back.

The thing is, I don’t hold it against the people who work at this clinic. They’re obviously kind and compassionate, and I have no doubt that they and most others like them really do care for the animals they see.

But caring doesn’t make science-scarce therapies worthwhile or harmless. As I’ve started to pay attention to the pet world, I’ve noticed more and more unsettling trends. Here are just five:

Herbal Medicine

Herbal pet medicine, whose sellers make specific and unsubstantiated claims, litter the pet supplement market. Just a couple examples include Blood Sugar Gold, a tincture that can be purchased online for $36 a bottle and claims to support stable blood sugar levels in dogs, and Immune Sure (from the same company), that claims to work “like an antibiotic” for viral or bacterial infections. It’s not a stretch to imagine the potential drawbacks of using herbal medicines to treat or prevent illness—a diabetic pet needs vet-recommended interventions, and there isn’t evidence to support that an herbal concoction can replace that.

The reviews for these products paint an unsettling picture. One for Immune Sure is from a pet parent for whom, like too many, vet bills aren’t financially feasible: “My cat was sneezing, sleeping too much, being very lethargic, and not eating. I can't afford a vet bill right now, so I got the herbal remedy for a antibiotic. She's on the mend now!”

To be fair, the veterinary medical system is broken, not just for pets and their people, but for veterinarians, too—for one, a recent study found that veterinarians have been committing suicide at a significantly higher rate than the general population, due in large part to fatigue, stress, and income levels that haven’t kept up with hefty tuition costs.

But herbal remedies are at best a band-aid solution to a broken system, and the growing attempt to legitimize them hurt pets and their families. For a couple years, the American College of Veterinary Botanical Medicine (ACVBM) petitioned to achieve recognition as a medical specialty by the American Board of Veterinary Specialties (ABVS). Blogger Skeptvet finally confirmed earlier this month that ABVS rejected the herbalists’ petition.

That’s not to say that herbal remedies can’t help our furry friends. Skeptvet puts it well—“While I am hopeful that appropriate scientific study will find useful treatments buried in the pile of accumulated tradition and anecdote that currently makes up veterinary herbal medicine, I believe the ACVBM is not the organization to lead this effort, and I think the ABVS decision is in the best interests of animal patients.”

Avoiding Vaccines Because of Pet Autism

If vaccine avoidance wasn’t enough of a problem with humans, there’s also a burgeoning movement to avoid vaccines in pets because they purportedly cause autism. I know, I couldn’t believe it either.

The question of whether or not animals can display behaviors resembling autism spectrum disorders isn’t as ludicrous as it sounds—mice with atypical social interaction and mutations in genes linked with autism in humans have led to “mouse models” for autism, and dogs and other animals that display behaviors resembling autism have also been studied. This piece at Slate (where my writing sometimes appears) explains this area of research: “Not too long ago, human researchers were resistant to this kind of comparative work, claiming that autism is too complex and too human to be described in other animals. But that’s changing.”

This hardly means that dogs and cats “get” autism, though, and it most certainly doesn’t mean that vaccines cause animal autism.

The movement has become a problem in the UK. A recent annual report on pet wellbeing from the Britain’s People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals surveyed over 4,600 pet owners and found that over a quarter of dog owners and 35 percent of cat owners didn’t give their pets necessary vaccinations. Though the report didn’t look at whether pet people cite autism as a reason to forgo shots for their fur babies, the top reason (20 percent) cited for dogs was that vaccines are “not necessary.”   

That’s a public health issue for human and non-human mammals. Core vaccines for dogs and cats prevent against transmission of serious illnesses, and rabies, for one, is deadly and transmissible to humans. 

It’s still a niche practice in the United States, with some pockets of higher anti-vaccine activity, including in Brooklyn and San Francisco.

Pheromones

A quick walk-through of my local pet supply store turned up a handful of “calming” diffusers and sprays. Adaptil Calm brand home diffuser—“the effective, non-drug solution to comfort dogs during stressful situations”—claims to “help calm and relax your dog at home.”

The purported active ingredient is “dog appeasing” pheromones. That does sound wooey, but there has been legitimate interest in the calming effects of synthetic forms of natural pheromones secreted by mothers to calm their pups and other natural pheromones. There are also calming products that mimic pheromones secreted in cats’ faces to mark a territory as safe and secure.

It’s clear from scientific literature that pheromones do play an important role in regulating behaviors in mammals, so it’s plausible that they could have therapeutic effects. But the data don’t support claims from these products’ manufacturers.

According to Veterinary Practice News, “[a]vailable pheromone products are likely safe, but it is unclear what, if any, clinical benefits they may provide for any of the variety of indications for which they are commonly recommended.”

The SkeptVet blog says that pet pheromone products “appear harmless, and if clients wish to spend money rolling the dice on a treatment that is not well supported by the limited clinical research available that is certainly up to them.”

Amber Beads

Skeptical parents are all too familiar with amber teething necklaces for babies. Made from baltic amber beads, their makers claim that a baby’s body heat releases tiny amounts of an analgesic substance that, when absorbed through the skin, can act to ease teething pain. Spoiler alert—they don’t work, and pose strangulation and choking hazards.

Frankly, my first instinct is to judge the parent—quietly, in my head, or whispered to a companion—whenever I see a baby wearing an amber necklace (which, by the way, is often enough).

Now I have a reason to judge pet parents too when I see their furry friends sporting amber collars.

“You can prevent ticks and fleas from attacking your beloved without resorting to toxic chemicals,” exclaims Amber Crown, which also sells amber teething necklaces for babies. “Natural unpolished amber generates slight static charge that prevents insects from clinging onto your pet’s fur.”

I was as shocked as you are, but it turns out that these amber flea and tick collars are getting pretty popular. As entomologists I spoke with for a Slate story on these collars told me, there’s no reason to believe that they work as claimed.

It’s worth noting that the demand for amber flea and tick collars is rooted in legitimate concern—traditional flea and tick medications have caused serious reactions in animals, especially when used incorrectly. As I explained in Slate, part of the appeal of amber collars is that they don’t contain ingredients that seem like they could harm your pet.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to forgo flea and tick control in favor of pet jewelry. Talk to your veterinarian about what approach, if any, is right for your pet based on her lifestyle, geographical location, and other factors, and use all products as directed.

Acupuncture

In case you missed it, acupuncture straight up doesn’t work to alleviate the ailments that proponents swear by—the current state of evidence strongly suggests that perceived benefits of acupuncture can almost entirely be chalked up to a placebo effect.

Yet, as demand for acupuncture continues to increase in humans, fans of the practice have increasingly decided that their furry friends could also benefit from the non-treatment.

The clinic that I visited to finalize Sebastian’s adoption offers it, as do a handful of other vet offices in my town.

Alas, like acupuncture in humans, pet acupuncture straight up doesn’t work, either. In 2016, the American Veterinary Medical Association voted down a petition from the American Academy of Veterinary Acupuncture to be recognized as a specialty medical organization because of the lack of supporting scientific evidence.

Skeptvet wrote of the decision:

Such certification requires that the area designated as a specialty be a legitimate, scientific discipline, not simply that it be a complex collection of beliefs and practices accepted by adherents regardless of the scientific evidence. Homeopathy is not a medical specialty any more than shamanism or ritual sacrifice to Apollo are medical specialties, because it has failed to prove it can or does work through scientific testing. While some non-TCVM approaches to acupuncture are more plausible and compatible with science than homeopathy or TCVM, even these approaches have failed to generate the kind of robust, consistent body of positive research evidence needed to justify creating an entire medical specialty within the veterinary profession.

As for why people sing its praises for helping their dogs and cats, it seems to be a placebo by proxy type of effect.

This list of five pseudoscience pet trends is hardly comprehensive. I put it together based on what I found most interesting—criteria for inclusion were somewhat subjective and drew strongly on my own personal jaw-drop scale. And though I’ve focused on dogs and cats, pet woo isn’t limited to just them. I recommend checking out the Skeptvet blog, the section on veterinary medicine at Science-Based Medicine, and keeping an eye out for salt lamps at vet offices.

Lou Gehrig, the famous New York Yankees first baseman, was known as the “Iron Horse” for his batting skills and stamina. Elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame and voted the greatest first baseman of all time, he set records that stood for over fifty years. In 1939, on his thirty-sixth birthday, he was diagnosed with the incurable neuromuscular disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which caused his retirement at age thirty-six and his death at age thirty-seven.

The disease was named Lou Gehrig’s disease in his honor but is perhaps better known for another prominent patient, Stephen Hawking. He was luckier than Gehrig. He had an early-onset, slowly progressing form of the same disease. It deprived him of mobility and speech, but with the help of a motorized wheelchair and speech synthesizer, he lived an active, productive life as a scientist, author, and prominent public figure.

Hawking proved his doctors wrong: they had given him a prognosis of two years, but he didn’t die until over a half century later at age seventy-six. (Prognosis is not an exact science, which is something to remember the next time you see a testimonial claiming “My doctor only gave me six months to live, but thanks to this all-natural Snake Oil Miracle Cure I’m still alive ten years later!”)

ALS is also known as motor neuron disease; the neurons that control voluntary muscles die. Symptoms include weakness, muscle spasms, pain, and difficulty speaking or swallowing. According to WebMD, “There’s no one test that can give you a certain diagnosis of ALS. So many of its symptoms can be caused by multiple conditions.” Diagnosis is based on symptoms and ruling out other diseases. It may be a syndrome with various causes rather than a single disease. And there’s no cure; treatment can only hope to alleviate symptoms and improve quality of life.

The cause is not known except for in the 5–10 percent of cases that are genetic. Many associations with environmental factors have been found, but causation has not been established. Head injury is associated with ALS, but it’s not clear if it is a cause or a result. Football and other sports injuries have come under suspicion. One (probably inaccurate) study suggested that Italian soccer players are eleven times as likely to die of ALS than the general population.

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)

CTE is a late development in 30 percent of patients with repeated head injuries. It was first noticed as a “punch-drunk” syndrome in boxers and has been identified in many professional athletes, especially in contact sports. Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) have been prominently featured in the news recently as “invisible injuries” in soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. More stringent guidelines have been established for returning athletes to play after a concussion. Concerns about children are increasing, leading some to prohibit children from playing tackle football. Even minor head injuries short of concussion can have cumulative consequences and can lead to irreversible damage.  A 2017 meta-analysis supported an association between prior TBI and various neurologic and psychiatric diagnoses; the odds ratio for ALS was one of the highest. 

Lou Gehrig’s Diagnosis Questioned

In 2010, McKee et al. published a study suggesting that repetitive head trauma in collision sports might be associated with the development of a motor neuron disease. It was based on autopsy findings of abnormal proteins in the brains of three athletes. McKee herself stressed that the findings were preliminary, but the study prompted many to question whether Lou Gehrig was correctly diagnosed with ALS or actually had CTE as a result of his many concussions.

There were many reports in major media to the effect that “maybe Lou Gehrig didn’t die of Lou Gehrig’s disease.” Dr. Stanley Appel, chairman of neurology and director of the Methodist Neurological Institute in Houston argued against that claim. He said there is a lack of scientific evidence to support that brain trauma can mimic Lou Gehrig’s disease and called the claim a disservice to Gehrig and others living with ALS. Alan Schwarz, the New York Times reporter who covered McKee’s study, said the controversy was overblown: "What both sides appear to attest—that ALS is a clinical diagnosis which Lou Gehrig had, and that some patients diagnosed with ALS have a form of it caused by brain trauma that can have an additional name but remain under the ALS motor-neuron-disease umbrella—can in fact coexist rather comfortably until everything is sorted out."

Quibbling

To my mind, this is silly quibbling over terminology for a disease or group of diseases that we don’t yet understand. In one sense, you can’t deny that Lou Gehrig had Lou Gehrig’s disease; it was his body, so whatever disease he died of was his disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease.

It’s important to investigate further and try to understand the pathology, the risk factors, and possible preventive measures. But the designation of names is of academic interest only. “A rose by any other name …” Whatever you call it, it paralyzes motor neurons and kills patients.

The Bottom Line

The take-home message is that head injuries, even minor ones, can cause permanent harm. You only get one brain, and it’s worth protecting. I couldn’t care less what the experts decide to call Lou Gehrig’s illness, but I care very much whether our children’s potential is being sabotaged in the name of sports.