Category Archives: Science

Always put a number into context

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Always put a number into context

Always put numbers into context.

Alloporus has advised to never leave a number alone not least because 

Comparison is always critical when dealing with numbers. On its own, a number makes no sense, it’s naked, self-conscious and insecure. It needs some context for clothing and some friends to compare against.

Makes good sense. 

50 bananas are way too many for one family but nowhere near enough for the local greengrocer.

What then to make of two numbers quoted in a study of feral cats

2.4 billion birds

12.3 billion mammals

2,400,000,000 must be a large number.

Any number with that many zeros must be important.

So I went to the source of the number, the research article

 Loss, S. R., Will, T., & Marra, P. P. (2013). The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States. Nature communications, 4(1), 1-8.

In the abstract, we find that our large number is actually the median value in a range from 1.3 to 4 billion birds killed by cats. 

In other words, the real number could be 1.1 billion smaller or 1.6 billion larger than the one in the quote. There is a distribution of likely true values for the number of birds killed by cats.

The 2.4 billion number was calculated after gathering all the reliable evidence on predation rates by cats from the research literature and multiplying this by estimates of cat abundance across the US. 

More technically, “We estimated wildlife mortality in the contiguous United States by multiplying data-derived probability distributions of predation rates by distributions of estimated cat abundance” (Loss et al 2013). The probability distributions were generated by repeating this calculation 10,000 times using random selections (random draw) of the predation rates reported in the literature. 

Alright, now we are getting somewhere. 

The context is that the key parameters to generate 2.4 billion are predation rate and cat abundance and both these values come from a range reported in the research literature.

We also learn that predation is by predominantly feral cats, that is cats that exist in the wild and feed themselves by doing what cats do best — catch and eat small prey. 

It is the unowned (feral) cats that do the heavy lifting to generate the number and not the moggy taking a saunter out of the cat flap once in a while.

So far so good. 

Now we know where the number came from and can assume that the best available evidence was used to set the parameters in a simple multiplication — predation rate x number of cats.

The number is still naked

Knowing where 2.4 billion came from does not give us the full context.

What we need to know is how many birds are there? How many birds die each year from other causes than predation by cats? 

Then we might ask the really important questions.

  • Are the numbers of birds changing over time? 
  • Is any change in numbers over time (the trend) due to predation by cats?
  • Are there any other reasons why bird numbers might change?

You see 2.4 billion is likely a small proportion of the total number of birds alive in the continental US and perhaps even a small proportion of those that die each year. 

Small temperate-zone songbirds have a life expectancy of around 10 months. This means that many birds in the backyard do not last a year but persist through their progeny. If the bird that gets caught by a cat had already reproduced then it makes n material difference to the bird population.

Equally, there are other predators out there that eat songbirds, notably other birds. Raptors (eagles, owls and hawks) that eat adult birds and a host of bird and mammal species that raid nests for eggs and chicks.

Predation by cats is just another risk. 

Always seek context 

2.4 billion sounds like a very big number and it might be.

We don’t know if it is or if something should be done to change it unless the context is understood.

Any number quoted in isolation and especially those used to provoke an emotional response is naked and lacks significance without all the extra information around it.

Look for the context before taking any number seriously.

Hero image from photo by Anton Darius on Unsplash

The problem with the mean

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The problem with the mean

Here is an outlier for you.

Jeff Bezos 

When it comes to income, Mr Bezos has few peers. Only a handful of individuals earn more in a second than most regular folks do in a month.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, who conduct regular and rigorous surveys, Australians average weekly ordinary time earnings for full-time adults (seasonally adjusted) was $1,737 for May 2021 across a workforce of 13 million people.

What would happen to the average weekly income of Australians if Mr Bezos went down under and we added his weekly ‘wage’ to the calculation of the mean?

The average weekly wage would grow by $116 or roughly 7%

A hundred bucks a week more from one outlier.

There is no rational reason for an individual to have such obscene wealth, and we might get sidetracked by the savage inequality. Still, the example shows what happens to averages when there are outliers.

They get distorted.

Add Mr Bezos to the Australian workforce, and average income goes up materially even though workers would not see a cent of it.

Suppose Mr Musk and Mr Gates also came down under.

The average weekly wage goes up by over 15%, thanks to three outliers in 13 million. 

Try it this way

Suppose we select 100 males at random from a population of college students and measure their height. In that case, we could assume that the average represented reasonably well the height of a typical male in college.

But suppose this was a college with a strong basketball program, and the sample included three of the tallest members of the team. We have outliers again.

The challenge is to know when an outlier is possible — there is a basketball program — and so is part of the population that will now be, on average, taller as a result and when an outlier is improbable. Unlikely outliers add skew to the data and whilst still statistically sound, can make for shaky conclusions. 

The statistical rationale is that very few variables in real life are distributed normally. They are skewed, typically by a few large outliers, so that the mean is larger than the modal (most common) value and the median value (the middle value in a sequence of numbers).

Medians and modes present one of the solutions to the problem. The average is only one measure of central tendency; the middle of the distribution. It is helpful to use the others, especially the median (the midpoint of a frequency distribution of observed values or quantities, such that there is an equal probability of falling above or below it) or the mode (the most frequent value in a frequency distribution).

There is a simpler solution

Statisticians, politicians, and the media are fond of describing the average with a mean. They use them all the time to convey information.

The mean is where you add up all the values and then divide by the number of values.

But be careful. There are outliers everywhere, and they tend to make means larger.

The simple solution is to know about outliers and be cautious of means, primarily when the reporter benefits from it being large.

Hero image from photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

The risks of normative science

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The risks of normative science

Photo by Elevate on Unsplash

Scientists are expected to be objective. After all, we are highly trained sceptics using our curiosity to unpack the problem, ask the right questions, and find evidence for the best possible answer. 

This process of enquiry was honed over the generations into the scientific method. Our philosophy colleagues have mulled over and chewed to the point that most of them agree that the deductive method is our best approach to evidence. 

So when a scientist gives in to emotions, it’s intriguing, given we are trained not to. Right from the start scientists are told that emotions are rarely objective and our job is to be objective and deal only with evidence..

In a recent essay in response to Australia’s recent Black Summer of unprecedented wildfires, Joëlle Gergis decided to go against this principle. The fires that burnt through an estimated 18.6 million hectares (46 million acres; 186,000 square kilometres; 72,000 square miles) of mostly forest and open woodland were some of the biggest in recorded history. Fire destroyed over 5,900 buildings (including 2,779 homes) and killed at least 34 people. As we all lived through this event it was hard not to be emotionally affected.

Dr Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer based at the Australian National University. She is a lead author of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report and an expert advisor to the Climate Council. 

Here is a flavour of her essay

I’ve gained terrifying insight into the true state of the climate crisis and what lies ahead. There is so much heat already baked into the climate system that a certain level of destruction is now inevitable.

And then later…

Australia’s horror summer is the clearest signal yet that our planet’s climate is rapidly destabilising. It breaks my heart to watch the country I love irrevocably wounded because of our government’s denial of the severity of climate change and its refusal to act on the advice of the world’s leading scientists.

And her conclusion…

As a climate scientist at this troubled time in human history, my hope is that the life force of our Earth can hang on. That the personal and collective awakening we need to safeguard our planet arrives before even more is lost. That our hearts will lead us back to our shared humanity, strengthening our resolve to save ourselves and our imperilled world.

It’s an essay, a medium that allows a certain normative tone. What is interesting though is the level of emotion in the piece — the opinion and emotion that went into the writing show the author grieving for nature that she knew well, changing in front of her eyes. A terrifying insight indeed.

No matter that the dance of evolution on the planet has been continuous for three and a half billion years. Or that fire is just part of the choreography, an immediate disruption that is detrimental only to a certain worldview and, of course, open to projection and blame, towards politicians especially, for not preventing it. 

Part of me is disappointed in this kind of thinking. And part of me is empathic for her situation and why she would want to write such things. It would make her feel better to have communicated the truth from her soul, rather than what her profession would have her do, that is to present only the facts. 

It is unfair to be critical because in these challenging times we all need an outlet to process change that we couldn’t have seen coming. 

However, it is impossible to go back to the pre-industrial era and say “no, we won’t use coal and then no we won’t use oil”. At that point in human history those energy sources were a miracle. They fuelled the engine behind what everybody at the time wanted. And if you were living at that time, you’d want those things too. 

Industrial development eventually improved food security, job security, the opportunity to grow yourself and your family. The privilege of the wealthy for a long time did trickle down to the masses thanks to the cheap energy from coal and oil. 

Saying fossil fuel use was a bad decision is very easy in hindsight. But the counterfactual wouldn’t have happened. People at the time would have found another way and would have ended up with coal and oil anyway. Lamenting or criticizing the current for consequences that no one could have prevented is disingenuous but perhaps necessary in emotional responses. 

Maybe this was a good thing for this particular scientist. Express feelings in this way for a reset and then return to objectivity. 

But this begs two bigger questions. 

Can scientists be objective and ignore their emotional selves? 

Unlikely. Arguably an emotional response will kick in at some point no matter how objective we try to be with our day jobs. Scientists are people after all.

Is it a good thing to try and be objective? 

Perhaps the emotional response is a requirement to get the message across. If we fail to tap into our normative selves then the messages lack passion. To actually make a difference, people need to  believe the message. 

For me, it’s more about knowing that these two sides of us exist. The process is I think from the science through my emotions to an objective point of view. Compartments certainly but also to know when to mix them together. 

At times  objectivity must speak for itself without any emotive words. And at other times emotions must be out for a full account of feelings. And then there are important moments, perhaps the critical ones, when the two come together. When objectivity is fueled by emotion and feelings. 

In other words, scientists should use emotive words and let feelings and passions spill over to promote evidence. Embrace emotive capability to engage people with the evidence and then let the evidence speak for itself. 

This is a nirvana that many scientists would love to be in. We do feel deeply about many of the issues that we study. Otherwise we wouldn’t be interested in them in the first place. So to arrive at a situation with no emotion. No empathy for this for the consequences is unrealistic. 

But in these challenging times, the evidence must also speak for itself.

Please share on all your platforms. It would make me feel good!

A baseline in Africa

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A baseline in Africa

Lions, Chobe – Alloporus

There are times when you find yourself reminiscing about the old days. 

It is a natural response to age and probably quite a healthy pastime so long as it doesn’t wander off into regret. 

I used to remember my time in Africa almost every day. 

The smells, sights and sounds of the savanna are indelible, you cannot forget them even when they are in the distant past. 

A little musty scent, with a hint of acrid talc in the nostrils. 

Chirp, babbles, and, if you are lucky, a morning boom in the ears from a hornbill the size of a turkey. 

From these feelings, the memory lands on specific events such as when I laid down on my belly next to a python because I was naive enough to think it would not strike or when I looked up into a leadwood tree to see a Wahlberg’s eagle with a genet dangling from its talons or the idle chit chat on the banks of a shallow pool rudely interrupted buy the hippo that almost leapt from the water with a white water wake worthy of any man-made craft.

Ah yes, those were the days. 

Wonderful experiences fondly remembered as privileges, blessings even, that I am happy to have as times in the past that fill my soul with gratitude. 

I do not remember these things every day now. 

Just occasionally when triggered by an image, a conversation, or when there is the smell of dryness in the morning air.

Recently I was required to go to the bush here in Australia and wander around farmers paddocks to eyeball patches of remnant vegetation. Instead of inspiring, I rather dreaded it. It has been a while since the scruffy jeans, long-sleeved shirts and robust boots have appeared from storage under the house. They needed a wash to remove the smell of underemployment. 

There was a time, of course, when an ecologist would be in the field as often as was humanly possible, quadrat and data sheet in hand, compass in the back pocket, and revelling in the rugged look that is only possible after several days without showering. 

But not any more. For some reason, not entirely obvious, it doesn’t happen much these days. I don’t get out and about into the wilds at all.

Why is that? 

What changed that stopped me from seeking out natures wonder? There are no real obstacles. I live in the Blue Mountains of NSW within spitting distance of some of the best bushwalks in Australia. I still make my living advising on environmental matters that presents any number of opportunities to spend time outside. But I prefer to stay at home. The nearest thing to nature I get is my regular walks down the first fairway.

The recent trip was sanitised of course. Room and board in between the gentle site visits arriving in an air-conditioned vehicle with no time for the fine dust to adhere its protective qualities onto any exposed skin.  

There were no clipboards or quadrats or data of any sort. Just some ramblings from local experts. Most of the time I was clicking my heels or wandering off to find some bugs to admire.

My enthusiasm level was chronic.

Was I suffering from shifting baseline syndrome?

Shifting baseline syndrome

In psychology, SBS is where each generation grows up being accustomed to the way their environment looks and feels, and thus, in a system experiencing progressive impoverishment, they do not recognize how degraded it has become over the course of previous generations.

SBS occurs when conditions of the natural environment gradually degrade over time, yet people (e.g., local citizens, natural resource users and policy makers) falsely perceive less change because they do not know, or fail to recall accurately, how the natural environment was in the past.

Now I have limited recollection of a past for Australia as I have been here for 25 years, a short period relative to the rates of environmental change. 

But I do recall Africa, often in vivid detail. And I am subtky tempted to make comparisons that shift my baseline.

Causes of shifting baseline syndrome

SBS results from three major causes

  1. lack of data on the natural environment
  2. loss of interaction
  3. loss of familiarity with the natural environment

Well, I am not short of data given that I play with environmental evidence for a living.

I have lost interaction. In Australia, my passion for the bush has been a fraction of what I had in Africa not helped by fires, heat, and floods. Somehow lions, hippos and donkeys on the road seemed far less of a threat.

Mostly, I am not familiar with the environment. I don’t know very much about it.

This sounds strange even as I write for I do know more than average but I don’t feel that I have ever known enough about this strange land.

Alternate baseline

My baseline is Africa.

Everything is compared to it. 

Sights, sounds, smells… presence. It’s all based on what I felt for a decade starting in my mid-20’s.

Physically I moved on and with time I accepted that those heady days would not be repeated but there is a powerful legacy, an incomparable baseline that cannot be restored.  

Please browse around for a while on Alloporus | ideas for healthy thinking there are over 400 posts to choose from

Can humanity persist for another 100 years?

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Can humanity persist for another 100 years?

Why not? 

A century is not that long a time in the grand scheme of things. All we need to do is stay sane, not throw rocks, and grow enough food without using up all the freshwater. 

Should be easy enough, we have been around a while after all.

Homo sapiens, modern humans, have survived as a species for a long time. The most quoted scientifically based origin is 300,000 years ago in Africa amongst a number of other Hominid species. 

Here is what the Smithsonian says

The species that you and all other living human beings on this planet belong to is Homo sapiens. During a time of dramatic climate change 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa. Like other early humans that were living at this time, they gathered and hunted food, and evolved behaviours that helped them respond to the challenges of survival in unstable environments.

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History

The average ‘lifespan’ of a mammal species – origination to extinction – is estimated from the fossil record, genetic evidence and rates of extinction to be about 1 million years, although some species persist for as long as 10 million years. If H. sapiens are an average mammal species then we have 700,000+ years left in us. 

Given our current ‘age’ and these lifespan estimates, the likelihood seems pretty high that we can persist for another 100 years, a minuscule proportion of these timeframes.

However, putting aside the rock-throwing and sanity of the leadership, in order to persist there must be enough food.

Our present complement of 7.7 billion souls each consumes a global average of  2,884 calories per day, give or take, to maintain weight and health assuming that along with the calories comes a balance of nutrients and food types. This is a gigantic amount of food consumed each and every day.

Roughly 22 trillion kcals

Obviously, we have engineered efficient food production systems to meet this demand otherwise there would not be 7.7 billion people and rising in the first place.   

Whilst famine and malnutrition are still prevalent, from a production perspective they are unnecessary. Most of the analysis and modelling suggest enough calories are grown. However, food is unevenly distributed, a great deal of production is wasted, and in many western cultures, people consume far more food than is healthy for the average citizen.  

Then along comes a quote from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that went around the media. Here is how it was headlined in the sustainability section of the Scientific American, an erudite and respected science journal 

Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues

Generating three centimetres of topsoil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s topsoil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said

Scientific American December 5, 2014

The warning was harsh. No doubt designed to shock with numbers that should send shivers up the spines of the young. The quote goes on…

Unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of the level in 1960, the FAO reported, due to growing populations and soil degradation.

60 harvests left

In other words, to maintain food production per person equivalent to that in 1960 production per hectare would need to quadruple by 2050.

60 harvests left around many parts of the world, a lifetime of harvests, is a great headline. I’m ok then but if there are no harvests after that lifetime, then what are your grandchildren going to eat? Shocking and personal, a copywriters dream.

The degradation is true. Both intensive and shifting agriculture struggle to be gentle on soils.  It is easy for farmers to either mine nutrients or slip into input-output production systems. However, food production from soil is not static or uniform. There is innovation everywhere and not all soil is being degraded or eroded at the same rate. 

Some systems in regenerative agriculture are able to reverse the degradation trends with soil carbon accumulation and more efficient on-farm nutrient cycling.

Soil degradation is a huge problem but to say we have on 60 harvest left is fodder for the doomscroller, a headline fantasy and has been called as such. 

The soil scientists don’t believe it, mostly because such a number is very hard to calculate with any certainty. There are too many factors at play.

It also fails the pub test. A few sips of Theakston’s Old Peculiar and it is clear that not all farms will fail in little Jaden’s lifetime. Many farms are thousands of years old what makes the next 60 years so special?

Alright, we are down from the hyperbole. So will we persist beyond the next 100 years?

Well yes, but we will have to look after soil much better than we do at present. And this was probably the FAO message, they just got a bit carried away.

Fortunately, we already know how to do this. Combinations of the following can slow or reverse soil degradation: 

  • maintaining groundcover
  • minimum tillage
  • production diversity
  • careful use of livestock
  • irrigation practices
  • crop rotations
  • rest 

These are a few of the many options. 

It is important that degradation does not reach points of no return where rehabilitation or restoration becomes too difficult given the local conditions. The FAO would call this desertification but it can also be salination or other forms of soil degradation. 

The FAO were guilty of hyperbole but that’s all. 

What is true is this.

Outside the people and the politics, soils hold the answer to whether humanity can persist for another 100 years. 

Only this is not a headline in any way and who wants to agree with it anyway.

Humans are all powerful after all.

Go ahead and share this extraordinary missive, you know you want to…

Environmental science degrees in Australia just took a massive hit

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Environmental science degrees in Australia just took a massive hit

In the 2020 Federal budget the Australian government, in its wisdom, decided that they would shift funding allocated to particular subjects within the university sector. The media have focused on reductions in the amount of money spent on arts degrees and the promotion of STEM subjects, technical and hard science degrees. 

Only one of the big losers in that story was environmental science. 

The student contribution to environmental studies was cut from $9,698 to $7,700 a year – meaning students will pay less for their degrees. A positive of course.

However, the commonwealth contribution paid to the universities to run these degrees was cut from $24,446 to $16,500 per student per year – meaning that the government will fund each degree less. Unless the university can be remarkably creative, less money received per student means a poorer quality of education.

This is very short-sighted, obviously. 

At a time when the youth are turning their minds towards their futures and what kind of environment they’re going to live in; not to mention their children and grandchildren. They are concerned. They think that the current and previous generations have given them a hospital pass. And they’re about to crash into the opponent with very little protection. 

Many of them are keen to find out more, to engage with environmental problems, and to search for solutions. Apply their sharp and agile minds to make the world safer and more sustainable.

The environmental sciences, one would have thought, are in the best interests of everyone. 

No matter what your value set, not understanding how the environment works is just a massive miss to any economy, society and individual well-being. 

Think about it for a moment.

All modern economic systems are founded on feeding the people. There are only two ways to feed the people: grow enough food or buy food from another grower. Either way, you need a strong system of economic organisation in order to be able to achieve the outcome by either method. 

Failure to feed your population and strife is never far away. 

And here is the thing… whether we like it or not,

The environment is where we grow our food 

Until we have created greenhouses on the moon or vertical gardens on every building in every city, the majority of our food supply will come from the land. It will be grown in soil. That’s going to be the case for at least the next hundred years and beyond. 

Not recognizing this fact just because we seem to have enough food right now, is morally abhorrent. That senior leaders and advisers are not even contemplating future food security is criminal. 

Remember that on any day of the week at least 700 million people are hungry and not all of them live in obscure countries that few know exist.

We have a small window for finding options to grow and distribute food for everyone. A short time to throw alternatives around and have their value debated before landing on the values that take precedent in which locations. 

Soon this window for rational discussions will have passed and will be in crisis mode. 

And a crisis is what it will come to for hungry people are desperate. 

In spending less on environmental science education governments are undermining the capability to even act in crisis mode by making it harder for a youngster to be educated in this area of interest. It is tragic. A small budget item decision that really points to the stupidity of the people in power. 

Not just the government

It may be that the environmental scientists themselves must take some of the responsibility. 

In my hirsute youth way back in the late 1970’s, I completed a degree in environmental science at the University of East Anglia in the UK. It was a new degree at the time and UEA promoted itself as a place of open-ended learning and student-centred inquiry.

A fascinating subject combined with a novel pedagogy fitted my personality to perfection. 

I absolutely loved it.

I spent hours in the library on my open-ended inquiry. And was both fascinated and empowered by the student-centeredness of the whole approach. In one of the courses, I even marked my own assignment, only to be told by the lecturer that I might have undersold myself. 

That this type of degree was available at the time was magical to me. 

The ability to mix and match a whole range of different subject matter, that would otherwise have not gone together or insufficient on their own to merit undergraduate study, was perfect.  Ecology, sedimentology, geochemistry, meteorology, sustainable development… and that was just the first year. 

Later it was Environments in time, more Ecology, Ecosystem Management, Land Resource Development, and Toxic Substances in the Environment. In total a thorough grounding in the bio-physicality of the world with and without humanity.

This STEM version of environmental science was not taken up in every program. 

In many universities, these topics never really came together and environmental science was hijacked by the human end of it. The value-laden decision making by individuals and the consequences of people being involved in the environment more so than the objectivity of the information that you can get about how the environment works. 

In other words, the sociology of the subject risked diluting the objectivity. 

These programs are less able to be precise about the science of the environment being absorbed in the social aspects of it. 

Consequently, environmental scientists are not winning Nobel Prizes. They’re not at the forefront of the men in white coats that governments are now trotting out to explain the COVID crisis. 

The discipline of environmental science does not have the standing needed to attract resources to empower the next generation. I think we have to take some responsibility for that, for not actually putting ourselves forward well enough. 

But if I was a climate actions youngster skipping school in order to protest about my future, then I would be looking closely at that cheaper degree and hoping that the quality of the program was up to scratch. 

Then I would enrol in environmental science.

Society will need what I learn.

Hard work is the answer

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Hard work is the answer

I’m currently in a bit of a quandary.

I’m on a roll and my words per day have been through the roof.

As a writer such bouts of productivity are to be cherished because they dry up as fast as they flood, the block kicks in, and suddenly you’ve got nothing to say.

My problem is that this particular spurt of enthusiasm has lasted the best part of a year. There is a lot of material that needs to be tidied up.

The writing gig is a long process. Only the first part, maybe 20%, is origination. The inspiration strikes and the first splurge of vomit makes a splatter on the page. The next phase is to tidy up the mess.

Making sense of the first draft takes numerous waves of editing and rejigging in order to shape a narrative that is, at least in the writer’s mind, comprehensible.

After that, the process involves third parties engaged with structural and copy editing, as well as preparation of material into the various format to share with the world.

The process of writing is a mechanical one, way more drudge than inspiration and creativity.

My current quandary is, do I stop writing and begin the real work?

Whilst I’m on a roll this seems like a mistake. I must keep going whilst the muse is dancing away in front of me. Only, where will the time come from to clean up the mess?

I really don’t know what to do.

The process of science

Science is the same.

As a student, I was always told that science is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A quote pilloried from elsewhere no doubt but no less true for lack of originality.

The process of science goes something like this.

An idea worth testing springs to mind, typically on a topic that you find fascinating. Maybe you spot a gap in knowledge that an experiment or a set of observations can fill.

That moment of clarity will set in train several months worth of hard work pulling together the evidence through experiment or observation. More often than not the procedures need development and fine-tuning, it can take a week to calibrate a measurement. Once the set up is done the data collection begins and last as long as the test requires. A while if the subject is the gestation period of an elephant. Then comes the collation, analysis and interpretation of the data into evidence. This in itself can take months with the prospect that the hypotheses will need clarification and another experiment or two completed before the evidence is clear. All this must then be condensed into a short communication that peers will tear apart before an editor maybe gives the green light to publication.

All up, an equally long and laborious process as writing. More a slog than an inspiration.

Few research scientists have the luxury of hanging about in the fun of speculation and hypothesis generation. In science, there is no substitute for the effort needed to generate evidence. There is no evidence without the hard yards in the laboratory or the field.

Even if you are the theorist who looks to the mathematics of it all, there is drudgery in the proof.

Evidence takes hard work.

Now for an apparent non sequitur

The process of sustainability

The conundrum of ideas versus hard work applies to a whole range of our sustainability problems.

We know that ideas are inspirational and they can come together in a flash. They are fun and full of promise and there are lots of sustainability ideas around. Google delivers 290 million results for the search term ‘sustainability ideas’.

The conversion of ideas into practical solutions is the hard part. Actions that are actually going to make a difference to human use of natural resources on the ground and at scale. Most of this is just a lot of hard work.

Check any list of ideas for sustainability like these

They are all fantastic options. Societies everywhere should be onto them and thousands of others like them.

All these ideas have one thing in common. They take effort to implement.

The wondrous inspirations need hard work to achieve their desired outcomes.

Sometimes there is more work required all the time, sometimes just in the transition, but the core message is that sustainability is not an easy task. It’s particularly difficult against the current technological advances that generate cheaper unsustainable products and services.

Being sustainable is not really about the sustainability concept itself, it’s more about the fact that society exists in this process of inspiration and hard work.

We can’t just make a call on the inspiration. There’s a lot of hard work involved in making sustainability solutions stick.

Worth remembering when the next idea to save the planet comes along.

Now I have some editing to do.

Scientists sitting on the fence

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Scientists sitting on the fence

Photo by Gui Avelar on Unsplash

Scientists are the quintessential fence-sitters.

We love the maybe, could be, might possibly be, and the equivocal. This comes about from our training, for we are sceptics.

The idea is that nothing should be taken on face value. There must be evidence in order to understand whether or not there is sufficient information to make a decision. And if a decision is not possible, then to form an opinion one way or the other. Only most scientists are afraid to state opinions in any strong sense when they are wearing their mortarboards. Usually, they will hedge in case they’re wrong. Along with the scepticism, there are the egoic responses of not wanting to get anything wrong at any time. Just normal human behaviour.

The problem with all this is that it gives scepticism a bad name.

It’s as though sceptics are always humming and aahing and never coming up with an answer. But this is not the true meaning of scepticism.

What it really means is to be questioning, review the facts, and run with what the evidence suggests.

This does not mean splinters in the butt from the fence or outright denial. As long as key questions are asked and enough evidence is available to reliably answer them, it’s okay for a sceptic to give that yes or no answer.

The everyday sceptic

Most people in everyday life find evidence gathering disconcerting. It is much easier to just give the yes and no answer without evidence and call it an opinion if questioned about the facts. Our politicians have taken to this with glee.

This puts scientists in a very difficult position in society.

Less and less evidence is in play. Plus the science that generates evidence is delivered by people who are letting their scepticism run away with them, making any advice they give feel as equivocal as the delivery. When we need them to stand up and be forceful, the pressure forces more wallflower behaviour.

Interestingly in the health story, particularly with the current COVID-19 crisis, everyone has been happy to listen to the white-coated ones and governments have taken that advice and run with it. It’s as though they’ve resorted to the science and even though those scientists can be sceptical and never truly sure of themselves or their predictions.

Luckily for the health officials, epidemiology theory is reasonably tight and well understood. The fundamentals are accepted around the world by most of the experts. So the patterns of infection and what to do about them are both well known and quite likely to happen, but even then they can’t make predictions about whether or not infection rates will change in a particular way on particular days or particular weeks.

So they still remain somewhat ‘maybe, could be’ about their statements.

The politicians on the other hand are more than happy to let the decisions on the hard calls on matters of public health be made by scientists standing next to them on the podium. Particularly because it needs to be there to justify some of the actions that otherwise people would not accept.

Being locked down, essentially under a form of house arrest, is a hugely draconian measure. And no politician would be able to get away with that in modern democracies without the strongest justification.

So we have this enigma going on where specific evidence is used and accepted and the politicians in particular leverage it to their advantage. And then we also have the majority of science, which is not considered or adhered to and, typically, ignored.

Ecological scepticism

Ecologists are in a particularly difficult position.

These are the scientists who try to understand nature and how nature works. They have trouble with their experiments as we’ve previously noted. The evidence that they gather is often equivocal itself thanks to weak inference so that hedging and being unsure about the specifics become the norm.

Only we need the ecological scientists to stand up now.

Issues left behind because of that scepticism and nervousness are critical to our survival. We can’t sit on the fence when it comes to soils, to food production, to the ecology that drives that connection, and the diets that we are consuming. It’s time to deliver serious calls about these things. Equivalent if you like to people in lockdown. The level of impact that ecological science needs to have is as strong as that.

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