We have often heard reports of various crises predicated upon the "sudden appearance" of new trends. The most well known, of course, is the hockey stick graph and related documents which purport to show a global mean temperature that remained constant for 1000 years only suddenly shooting up in the 20th century. As I have refuted this over and over and over again, I will leave that one alone, however, it does illustrate a problem we have with all such claims, the fact that technology, wealth, changing interests and easier travel have made dramatic changes in the data we have available.

Let us take a look at another one, the supposed sudden decline in the number of bee colonies. Many have taken this die off to mean there is some environmental crisis, or some chemical threat in the environment. Others have taken a much less alarmist tone and decided it must be the result of a new disease among bees. However, I would argue that first we must really establish that this is in fact an unprecedented event. It could, very easily, be simply another manifestation of a cyclical event of which we have been unaware.

The problem is, while man has cohabited with bees for a long, long time, there has been little scientific or administrative interest int he specific of that relationship until very recently. So, while we know that man harvested honey in the past, we have nothing like concrete data about bee populations or the trend in population size from most parts of the world for any but the most very recent years. In addition, in the past bees were largely confined to specific localities, so, it is possible all we are seeing is what was once a local die off in a limited region being spread to new areas by the ease of transportation and the movement of bees far beyond their previous borders. We simply don't know enough about historical conditions to realistically call this an "unprecedented crisis".

Similarly, we often hear modern augurs predicting doom, though for sheep's entrails they substitute the mutant offspring of common frogs. However, again, we are faced with a problem. Until very recently, we did not have eco-enthusiasts hovering over every pond, pool, river, stream and body of muck eagerly awaiting the end of each tadpole's metamorphosis so they could count the limbs on each new frog. So we simply don't know what, in nature, is the normal rate of mutation in frogs. We have records for a handful of years, and we can say the rate is presently increasing, but that is it. Without longer term records, we just can't tell if it is cyclical, truly increasing, increasing after a preceding decline, or something else entirely. We just don't know. So trying to tie this to supposed environmental crises is bizarre.

A third example is one I have mentioned before. Our ability to detect has been increasing dramatically in recent years. Until very recently, we could detect compounds in only concentrations of parts per million or greater. When we could start detecting many man made compounds at concentrations of parts per billion we began to hear scare stories about the "increase" in chemicals in the environment. However, the truth is we were only seeing chemicals that had been there all along, we were not finding new chemicals, we just were now aware of chemicals we had not known about previously. And the same happened when we could detect parts per trillion, which led to yet another round of scare stories about chemicals entering new areas of our lives.

Worse still, even without an improvement in detection, we can get similar scare stories by simply checking someplace we never looked before. For example, suppose no one ever looked for estrogen and DDT in bacon. When someone finally gets a grant to do so, he releases his findings and the media lights up with stories about how DDT and estrogen have "suddenly" infiltrated our food supply via bacon. It is not a new infiltration, it represents no change. The only thing that is different is that we know know it is there. Yet that is not the story we receive from the media.

And that is what makes these changes in measurement dangerous. Not just the media and the public, but sometimes scientists too are fooled by their own new found numbers. They forget how imperfect the past numbers were, or how much estimation was involved, and they convince themselves they have found what they were looking for. However, as with global warming, the problem is, we are seeing lots of changes. We see better measurement, changing temperatures form heat islands, more complete records, and so on. All of which change numbers even though the underlying reality remains the same. The fact that numbers increase often means nothing more than we have changed how we measure things, but that is often lost in the faith researchers have in their theories. If the misleading numbers support their initial premise, they often are insufficiently diligent in looking for alternate causes, including changes in measurement.

We must not forget that. It really is the cure to so many claims that the sky is falling yet again.

POSTSCRIPT

I wrote on similar topics in some parts of my post "Knowing Our Limits", which may be of interest to those who enjoyed this post.