Salt * Wet * Fish

In Project Syndicate, David Michaels wrote Manufacturing Scientific Uncertainty. In the article David cited how the tobacco industry have been hiring their own band of scientists to try to disproof the harmful effects of tobacco. And they have succeeded over the decades to question the validity of the claims of the harmful of tobacco. What they do is look for flaws and weakness in the scientific research, in order to show that one cannot be certain of the harmful effects of tobacco.

For 50 years, tobacco companies employed a stable of scientists to assert (sometimes under oath) that they did not believe there was conclusive evidence that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer.

Not only for tobacco industry, many industries have been using the same techniques to prevent any regulation on their products.

Less well known, but following the same pattern, are efforts being mounted to question studies documenting the adverse health effects of exposure to lead, mercury, vinyl chloride, chromium, beryllium, benzene, and a long list of pesticides and other toxic chemicals. Polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products hire experts in what they call “product defense” to dissect every study whose findings they oppose, highlighting flaws and inconsistencies. In many cases, they won’t deny that a relationship exists between the exposure and the disease, but are quick to proclaim that “the evidence is inconclusive.”

I guess this is why products like transfat and aspartame is still readily available to consumers.

Apparently now the same techniques is being used to question the issue of global warming and environmental issues in the world, especially by politicians, well in US at least. Why would some politicians want to do that? For one, it is reasonable to assume that they need to support the backers like manufacturers and polluters who will be affect if regulations were to be passed.

To be fair, environmental changes and global warming does occur naturally on Earth and we could well be in one of the cycles of such changes. Hence, the issues that we are observing could well be a part of the natural cycle of Earth’s environment. But the question we ought to ask is whether the environment have changed as rapidly as what we could observe now from what was historically studied?

In another commentary, A Curve Ball From the NZ Seafood Industry, blogger CR McClain questioned the attempt by the New Zealand Seafood Industry Council proposal to establish 30 Benthic Protection Areas (BPAs), areas that would be off limits to trawling by fishing companies. For many of us, it would seem strange to question such moves. Isn’t it good news that some parts of the sea is now protected and off-limits to trawling fisheries? However, it appears that

most areas proposed for closure are either too deep or too rough to bottom trawl, or are otherwise of no interest to the fishing industry because they don’t contain enough bottom-trawled target fish, such as orange roughy, to be economical as fishing areas.

In other words, the proposed closure will not bother the fisheries at all. Instead of manufacturing “uncertainty”, they manufacturing “certainty” instead. People are asking for protection of the ocean from fisheries and the industry comes together and gives what the people wanted, but those areas probably don’t really need protection at all in the first place!