Editor's pick: A short-term self-serving legislature
You observe in a Leader article on the scientific illiteracy of politicians that “It is a pity those making the laws don’t… try thinking before they act” (7 November, p 5). A pity? I commend your restraint. I also condemn it.
Many years ago I was lobbying on a particular topic. It became clear that the then government was going to enact legislation that was contrary to unequivocal statistical evidence. As an engineer, I believe numbers often convey the truth of a situation. At that time, however, I was young and green in judgement. I later learned that it was the norm for governments to act in this way and that party political point-scoring and incompetence are the true drivers of almost all legislation, bolstered by bigotry, ignorance and short-term self-serving thinking.
We tolerate this, even though it has grievously damaged almost every major public institution, because we are individually resourceful and tolerant and can usually mop up the mess. No amount of personal resource and tolerance, however, will help us or our children and grandchildren when this same irrationality is applied to climate change. Its consequences are truly appalling and, for many, fatal. That is why I condemn your timorous attitude. You know better. You have a respected voice, you should use it.
Meols, Wirral, UK
Psychotherapy and recovered memory
Most registered psychotherapists would probably agree that it is regrettable that mandatory government regulation for practitioners was not enforced in 2012 (10 October, p 3). This failure left the profession loosely regulated, as you state, leaving unregistered practitioners free to choose to call themselves counsellors or psychotherapists.
But to equate this with people being “allowed to mark their own homework” is a generalisation that fails to recognise responsible institutions. The largest registering organisation, , enforces a registration procedure which is rigorous and demanding, aiming at high professional standards through training, backed up by a robust complaints procedure to ensure safeguarding and quality of service offered to the public.
As you report, recovered memory therapy “has now been almost completely discredited as a therapeutic tool”. Any graduate of properly regulated training in counselling or psychotherapy is acutely aware of the dangers of false memory syndrome.
Rather than generalisations, the urgent need is for government to reconsider mandatory regulation of practitioners to weed out those who discredit the profession.
Bungay, Suffolk, UK
<b>First class post</b>
We’re right behind you, mate. Well, actually, we’re safely back on board
Jacqui Chaplin David Jacoby’s free-diving mission to tag hammerhead sharks (14 November, p 12)
Invasive species: an unfair report
Fred Pearce questioned the way it became generally accepted that invasive species are a significant threat for biodiversity (5 September, p 26). He identified our letter in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE) in 2005 as one of the main sources and wrote: “The authors told me they had not kept the details of their analysis, nor notes on which species they had included.” This implies an unfair accusation of bad scientific practice. In fact, Pearce contacted one of us on 11 October 2013 asking for supplementary information to support the basic statistics given in the TREE letter. On 18 October 2013 we were able to send him the whole data set used in the TREE letter.
This included the complete taxonomic identification of the 680 animal species considered extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature () in 2005. The 170 species for which extinction causes could be determined were also clearly identified.
Pearce also wrote that our letter in TREE was “just four paragraphs long”. We would like to point out that TREE, one of the most prestigious journals in the field of ecology, imposes strict word-count limitations. Our letter was not just “a riposte” to a previous paper by Jessica Gurevitch and Dianna Padilla; it showed they had presented incorrect conclusions because of an inappropriate use of the IUCN’s Red List database.
Seville and Girona, Spain
Apply branes to the quasar test
I am grateful to 快猫短视频 for helping to make more widely known my observation that “branes”, as (DGP), can leave traces in the spectra of quasars (24 October, p 30).
The article is generally well researched, but I think it’s worth emphasising that the theoretical framework for DGP branes is a well-established and respected generalisation of Einstein gravity, and one of the most important contributions to the development of gravitational theory since the inception of general relativity 100 years ago.
If you accept the premise of DGP brane theory that matter can live on a four-dimensional “submanifold” in a higher-dimensional space-time, then it is a natural conclusion that several DGP branes can move through the same higher-dimensional space-time, and their possible collisions or overlaps can leave cosmological signatures. My contribution was the observation that brane overlap can occur and that distortions of redshift signals follow as a testable prediction.
Saskatoon, Canada
When moral dilemmas aren't
Dan Jones’s article on morality was interesting, but would have been far more compelling if he had dealt with moral dilemmas that had no grey area, actual or perceived (26 September, p 36). For example, while most 快猫短视频 readers (me included) accept that the best explanation of current climate data is that the planet is warming due to human activity, there are plenty of people, misguided though they surely are, who do not accept that humans have a significant impact on our climate.
For some, the refusal to do anything about it is due to a belief that such action would be futile, as well as damaging to the economy and their way of life. It has little to do with an inability to behave in a moral way.
Psychologist Paul Bloom makes a big call when he identifies empathy as being the reason we care more about the little girl in the well than about the millions affected by climate change. An equally valid explanation is that on an individual level we can do something about the little girl, but without wide cooperation our efforts to combat climate change will be largely in vain.
Kenmore, Queensland, Australia
Climate chaos by any other name
Psychologist Robert Gifford identifies 33 psychological barriers stopping us from tackling climate change (11 July, p 28). But what about nominative determinism? Maybe we haven’t taken action on global warming because the word “warming” has positive connotations for the inhabitants of temperate regions, where the world’s decision-makers tend to be. When global warming first hit the headlines in the UK, it was regarded as an exciting development.
One newspaper even printed an artist’s impression of what your suburban home might soon look like, with bunches of grapes growing around the front door. The word “warming” might be technically accurate and might even have been chosen to avoid alarmism. But a shot of alarmism might now be useful. So how about replacing the expression “global warming” with the clearer “global overheating”?
Cambridge, UK
Acceptable to whom, politically?
Michael Le Page simply asserts that it would be “politically unacceptable” to “curb the lifestyles of the jet-setting elite”, without further justification (17 October, p 8). Unacceptable to whom? Certainly not to me.
History offers many examples of direct community action to curb the antisocial activities of the few, when persuasion and pleas for voluntary restraint have failed. Two hundred years ago, in the face of enormous opposition from powerful vested interests, the slave trade was abolished.
More recently, in the face of opposition from those who could afford to burn coal fires in central London, clean air legislation was enacted. If those who happen to have acquired vast fortunes refuse to quit activities that prejudice the quality of life of the rest of humanity, then humanity surely has the right to “curb” them, as Le Page puts it.
Kirkby Malzeard, North Yorkshire, UK
Tax and dividend carbon plan
Your leader article on carbon pricing (17 October, p 5) sounds very much like a proposal by climate scientist : see for example his description at . Beyond national pricing, he suggests taxing fossil fuel as it crosses borders, if the exporting country doesn’t already tax it.
No fossil-fuel-exporting country will want to miss out on this lucrative revenue stream, so all will rush to tax their own fossil fuel. Oh, and Hansen says that an equal portion of every cent collected should be sent to every registered taxpayer by virtually free bank transfer.
Waipara, New Zealand
Moral compass points awry
It is tragic that a number of people in California have been killed or rendered homeless by fires (26 September, p 6). But the loss of forest is, surely, also catastrophic. Has the moral compass hit a magnetic reversal?
Australian media are also awful in this regard. “No property was lost,” they say, smiling. I am happy to hear it, but what about the 5000 hectares of destroyed bushland and attached ecology?
And what compass rules the extraordinary proposals for gene editing and drugs to govern our morals (p 36)? I am sure I hear Aldous Huxley’s ghost rattling his chains and proffering his Brave New World. Surely no one believes they know all the consequences. Genes don’t always do what they are supposed to: editing might result in unexpected events.
Narromine, New South Wales, Australia
<b>For the record</b>
鈥� A letter about educational measurement was in fact written by Russell Waugh (31 October).