Is There a Safer Time to Fly? (Skeptical Inquirer)

7 minute read

Flying in an airplane is incredibly safe despite what our anxieties and fears might tell us. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), aviation has become the first ultra-safe transportation system in history. That means that for every ten million cycles (one cycle involves both a takeoff and landing), there is less than one catastrophic failure.

It may not feel intuitively true, but you’re much safer traveling in an airplane than in a motor vehicle. In the United States, there are around 1.13 fatalities per every 100 million vehicle miles traveled, compared to just 0.035 fatalities per every 100 million airplane miles traveled. Put another way, your chances of dying in a U.S. car crash are around one in 114. Your chances of dying in a U.S. plane crash are around one in 9,821.

And yet, aviation accidents and incidents do still happen. I recently became deeply interested in aviation safety and got to wondering: Are there monthly or seasonal trends in when aviation accidents occur? Essentially, is there a statistically safer time to fly?

To answer that, we need to define the difference between an accident and an incident. It’s a subtle but important differentiation, because incidents happen all the time, while accidents are quite rare.

The ICAO defines an accident as “an occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft which takes place between the time any person boards the aircraft with the intention of flight until such time as all such persons have disembarked, in which a person is fatally or seriously injured” and/or “the aircraft sustains damage or structural failure … or the aircraft is missing or is completely inaccessible.” On the other hand, an incident is defined as “an occurrence, other than an accident, associated with the operation of an aircraft which affects or could affect the safety of operation.” In car terms, an accident would be something like a fender bender or crash, whereas an incident would be something like your check engine light coming on or your headlight burning out.

At the time of writing this article in late January 2023, globally, there have been seven accidents in 2023, only one involving fatalities (seventy-two people presumed dead after Yeti AT72 crashed in Pokhara, Nepal). Compare this with incidents, of which there are usually around three or four every single day. If that seems like a lot, remember that the strict reporting of nearly any deviation from perfect plane operation and function is a big part of what has made aviation “ultra-safe.” No piece of machinery as complex as planes will function perfectly 100 percent of the time. By strictly cataloging all incidents, we can continuously identify trends, issues, and ways to improve aviation safety even further.

If there are temporal trends in aviation safety, there are a few reasons those could exist. One potential would be due to weather. There are definite seasonal trends in weather considered hazardous. For example, winter in Canada and the northern United States sees more ice and snow. But the question is whether these weather trends translate into accident trends.

A 2018 study examined all reported worldwide weather-related aircraft accidents from 1967 until 2010. The absolute number of weather-related accidents has increased over that period but so has the annual number of flights, so that is expected. More interesting is the percentage of accidents that are weather-related, which has also increased from about 40 percent to about 50 percent.

This rise could be due to changing weather patterns. The potential effects of climate change on airline safety are rarely discussed, but as incidences of severe weather continue increasing, presumably, so will weather-related incidents and accidents.

The authors of that study, however, believe that this increase is primarily due to “the aviation safety improvements conducted between 1967 and 2010 hav[ing] had a smaller effect on weather-caused aircraft accidents compared with other accidents.” Essentially, while improvements in areas such as crew resource management, training, and maintenance have had positive effects on aviation safety, weather-related accidents have been less sensitive to these improvements.

To look for seasonal trends, the authors of the study divided the globe into four symmetric zones according to latitudes: Zone 1: Within 12 degrees of the equator; Zone 2: between 12 and 38 degrees (which is roughly the middle of the United States); Zone 3: between 38 and 64 degrees (which encompasses most of Canada) and Zone 4: the polar regions in the far north and south.

(Photo source: https://www.timeanddate.com/geography/longitude-latitude.html)

While each zone experiences different weather and climate trends in all but the polar regions, “weather-caused accidents can be considered as uniformly distributed in the various meteorological seasons.”

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) agreed with the study’s conclusions, telling me that they “have not identified any other broad, seasonal or monthly incident trends.” So basically, no, there are not seasonal trends in weather-related aviation accidents, even though there are definite seasonal trends in weather considered severe.

There are three other very interesting takeaways from this study. First, the two zones nearest the equator show a much larger proportion of weather-related accidents, but that isn’t necessarily due to experiencing more severe or dangerous weather. Instead, the authors state that this is due to these zones containing a greater proportion of developing countries that, while adherent to the ICAO safety standards, tend to operate with older planes and equipment.

Second, weather is much less relevant in accidents in developed nations. While the global percentage of weather-related accidents is approaching 50 percent, in the United States and the United Kingdom, it was only 23 percent (in 2012 and between 1977 and 1986, respectively).

Third, despite snow being a widespread occurrence in Zone 4, it has never been reported as the primary cause of any accident. On the other hand, snow accounts for 7 percent of accidents in Zone 2 despite being far less common. This highlights both the disparities in safety between “developed” and “developing” nations and the increased danger associated with unusual weather. It is far safer to land in a snowstorm at an airport that frequently experiences snowstorms because it has systems in place to handle it. Unfortunately, climate change will likely only increase the incidences of unusual weather.

What about non-weather-related temporal trends in airline safety?

Dr. Daniel Bubb, former airline pilot and currently an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, explained to me that we tend to see more accidents in the months of June to September simply because a lot more people are flying. A 2020 analysis of airplane crash data echoed this, as did the National Transportation Safety Board: “the more risk exposure tends to track closely with the actual number of accidents,” which makes a lot of sense.

Another potential trend in aviation safety could come from something analogous to the “July Effect,” as it’s called in North America, or “Black Wednesday,” as it’s known in the United Kingdom—the idea that the day/week/month when new student doctors and nurses start at hospitals is associated with a rise in mortality or morbidity.

Luckily, the aviation industries have safeguards in place to avoid an influx of new workers. For example, both the FAA and NAV CANADA told me they specifically stagger the starts of their new air traffic controllers. A representative of Republic Airways (a regional U.S. airline) told me the same for new pilots and other employees.

An important thing to remember is just how frequently pilots have their soundness evaluated. Dr. Bubb writes that pilots “undergo recurrent training each year” and “undergo physicals each year to maintain their licenses.” With so much oversight, intense training, and staggered starts, the potential for a “July Effect” in aviation is vanishingly small.

In fact, evidence is mounting against the existence of the July Effect in medicine. A 2022 comprehensive meta-analysis of 113 studies published between 1989 and 2019 demonstrates “no evidence of a July Effect on mortality, major morbidity, or readmission.” Studies comparing teaching versus nonteaching hospitals have found teaching hospitals safer year-round!

So, is there a time of the year you should avoid flying? No, not in terms of safety. And you likewise should not avoid heading to the hospital if you feel you need to. However, if you want to decrease how much you drive, that could help with both your safety and the environment.

This article was written for Skeptical Inquirer. View the entire original for free here: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/is-there-a-safer-time-to-fly/

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When the Cows Come Home to Radioactive Ranches (McGill OSS)

5 minute read

A magnitude 9.1 earthquake occurred just off the northeast coast of Japan on March 11^th, 2011, at 14:46 local time. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, like all nuclear power plants in Japan, features several safety mechanisms meant to mitigate damage to its reactors in such an event. It was built on top of solid bedrock to increase its stability, and all of its reactors featured systems that would automatically shut down—or SCRAM—the fission reactions in response to an earthquake. Luckily, only reactors 1, 2 and 3, out of six total, were in operation on that day and were successfully SCRAMed.

Even with fission stopped, however, the nuclear fuel rods continued to emit decay heat and required cooling to avoid a catastrophe. With connections to the main electrical grid cut off due to earthquake damage, the plant’s emergency backup diesel-run generators kicked in to power the cooling pumps.

Image Source

Almost exactly one hour after the earthquake, the resulting tsunami struck Fukushima Daiichi with waves 14 metres (46 feet) high. All but one of the diesel generators were disabled by the seawater, and by 19:30, the water level in reactor one had drained below the fuel rod. By the same time, two days later, reactors 1, 2 and 3 had all totally melted down.

In response, over the subsequent days, over 150 000 people were relocated from areas within 40 km of Fukushima Daiichi. Farmers were ordered to facilitate euthanasia for livestock from within the Fukushima exclusion zone, which was estimated to contain 3400 cows, 31 500 pigs, and 630 000 chickens.

Of those 3400 cows, the government euthanized 1500. CNN reports that roughly 1400 were released by farmers to free roam and potentially survive on their own. They are all thought to have starved to death. Three hundred of the remaining animals are unaccounted for, but some farmers who defiantly refused to cull their animals, nor chose to set them free, can account for 200 of the bovines.

Instead, these ranchers—made up almost entirely of cattle breeders—committed to travelling for hours every day into the potentially dangerous Exclusion Zone to continue to feed and care for what some of them refer to as the “cows of hope”.

Where dairy and meat livestock farmers tend to operate larger scale, higher throughput operations, cattle breeders often have small herds and are more attached to individual animals (some even have names). As one farmer told Miki Toda, “The cows are my family. How do I dare kill them?” These animals were spared simply because it was the right thing to do.

These cows and bulls will likely never be used for meat or have their milk collected for consumption. But that doesn’t mean they’re purposeless. Researchers from several universities, including Iwate University, University of Tokyo, Osaka International University, Tokai University, University of Georgia, Rikkyo University and Kitasato University, see the saved herds as an auspicious opportunity for knowledge acquisition.

The scientific research on how radiation affects large mammals is exceedingly sparse. According to Kenji Okada, an associate professor of veterinary medicine from Iwate University, “large mammals are different to bugs and small birds, the genes affected by radiation exposure can repair more easily that it’s hard to see the effects of radiation … We really need to know what levels of radiation have a dangerous effect on large mammals and what levels don’t.”

By studying the cattle exposed to radioactive fallout after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, we stand not only to gain retrospective insights into the true effects of radiation on large bovine mammals but to be better prepared if such an event happens again.

The euthanasia of tens of thousands of farm animals represents a massive animal welfare challenge and has a drastic impact on the livelihoods of many. Not only farmers but workers from regulatory agencies, veterinary practices, slaughterhouses, processing plants, feed supply factories, exporters, and anyone else involved in any step of the agricultural process. Nonetheless, it is, of course, warranted if necessary for the safety of consumers of animal products. But was it necessary?

Research on the Fukushima Exclusion Zone herds has been ongoing for nearly a decade now, and while it will take more time to fully see the effects of chronic low-dose radiation exposure, scientists have published preliminary findings and are starting to see trends.

So far, the bovines have not shown any increased rates of cancer. The only abnormal health indicators are white spots that some have developed on their hides. A study of Japanese Black cattle residing on a farm 12 km to the west-northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in one of the areas the Japanese government has deemed the “difficult-to-return zone” found no significant increases in DNA damage in the cows. A different study found that horses and cattle fed with radiocesium-contaminated feed showed high radiocesium levels in their meat and milk. However, they found that after just eight weeks of “clean feeding” (feeding with non-contaminated food), “no detectable level of radiocesium was noted in the products (meat or milk) of herbivores that received radiocesium-contaminated feed, followed by non-contaminated feed.”

Much like Chornobyl (the Ukrainian spelling) has become a sanctuary for wild animals despite the residual radioactivity, signs are pointing to a natural “rewilding” of the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. With humans, cars and domestic animals gone, wildlife is able to move into empty urban and suburban environments and thrive. A trail cam study of wild animals around the Exclusion Zone has uncovered “no evidence of population-level impacts in mid- to large-sized mammals or [landfowl] birds.” Wild boars are abundant in the Fukushima region and present another good representative mammal to research. A study of 307 wild boars found no elevation in genetic mutation rates and that a certain amount of boar meat could even be safely consumed by humans.

Although nuclear radiation is a frightening threat, in part due to its invisible nature, evidence seems to be pointing to minimal, if any, health effects for animals exposed to the amount released by the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

According to a study from the University of Bristol, it’s likely that the situation would be the same for humans had they not been evacuated/relocated. Due to the relatively low-dose nature of the event, the stigma and sometimes severe mental distress experienced by those displaced, as well as losses of life associated directly with relocation and indirectly via increases in alcohol-use disorders and suicide rates, the authors conclude that “relocation was unjustified for the 160,000 people relocated after Fukushima.”

This article was written for the McGill Office of Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-environment/when-cows-come-home-radioactive-ranches

Is it true that no two snowflakes are identical? (McGill OSS)

4 minute read

Snow crystals—better known as snowflakes—are intricate, delicate, tiny miracles of beauty. Their very existence seems unlikely, yet incomprehensible numbers of them fall every year to iteratively construct wintery wonderlands.

Every snowflake is formed of around 100,000 water droplets in a process that takes roughly 30-45 minutes. Even with this level of complexity contributing to each and every snow crystal, it seems nearly impossible that every single flake is truly singularly matchless. Yet, the scientific explanation of snow formation can explain how every snowflake tells its life story, and every story is unique.
The first known reference to snowflakes’ unique shapes was by a Scandinavian bishop, Olaus Magnus, in 1555, but he was a touch mistaken in some of his proposed designs.

Photo source: http://www.snowcrystals.com/history/history.html

Snowflakes’ six-fold symmetry was first identified in 1591 by English astronomer Thomas Harriot. Still, a scientific reasoning for this symmetry wasn’t proposed until 1611 when Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, wrote The Six-Cornered Snowflake. Indeed, almost all snowflakes exhibit a six-fold symmetry—for reasons explained here—however, they rarely can be found with 3- or 12-fold symmetry.

The notion that no two snowflakes are alike was put forth by Wilson Bentley, a meteorologist from Vermont who took the first detailed photos of snowflakes between 1885 and 1931. He went on to photograph over 5000 snow crystals and, in the words of modern snowflake expert Kenneth Libbrecht, “did it so well that hardly anybody bothered to photograph snowflakes for almost 100 years.” Bentley’s assertion of snowflakes’ unique natures might be 100 years old, but it has held up to scientific scrutiny. Understanding how snow forms can help us understand precisely how nature continues to create novel snowflake patterns.

Snow crystals begin forming when warm moist air collides with another mass of air at a weather front. The warm air rises, cooling as it does, and water droplets condense out of it, just like when your shower deposits steam onto your bathroom mirror. Unlike in your bathroom, however, these water droplets don’t have a large surface to attach to and instead form tiny droplets around microscopic particles in the air like dust or even bacteria. Big aggregates of these drops are what form clouds.

If the air continues to cool, the water enters what’s called a supercooled state. This means that they are below 0˚C, the freezing point of pure water, but still a liquid. Ice crystals will start to grow within the drop only once given a nucleation point, a position from which ice crystals can begin to grow. If you’ve ever seen the frozen beer trick, it relies on the same mechanics.

Once a droplet is frozen, water vapour in the surrounding air will condense onto it, forming snow crystals, aka snowflakes. Not every droplet freezes but those that don’t will evaporate, providing more water vapour to condense onto the frozen ones. Once roughly 100,000 droplets have condensed onto the crystal, it’s heavy enough that it falls to earth.

The crystal patterns formed when the water vapour condenses onto a growing flake are highly dependent on temperature, and how saturated the air around it is. Below you can see a Nakaya diagram. Created in the 1930s and named for its creator, Japanese physicist Ukichiro Nakaya, it shows the typical shapes of snow crystals formed under different supersaturation and temperature conditions.

Photo source: http://www.snowcrystals.com/morphology/morphology.html

Above roughly -2˚C, thin plate-like crystals tend to form. Between -2˚C and -10˚C, the formations are slender columns. Colder still, -10˚C and -22˚C herald the production of the wider thin plates we’re most used to, and below -22˚C comes a rarely seen mix of small plates and columns. Snow crystals grow rapidly and form complex, highly branched designs when humidity is high and the air is supersaturated with water vapour. When humidity is low, the flakes grow more slowly, and the designs are simpler.

As a growing snowflake moves through the air, it encounters countless different microenvironments with slightly different humidity and temperature, each affecting its growth pattern. In this way, the shape of a snowflake tells its life story—the second-by-second conditions it encounters determine its final form. That’s where the unique nature of each snowflake comes from.

Kenneth Libbrecht is a snowflake scholar—a professor of physics at California Institute of Technology who has dedicated years of his career to uncovering the mysteries of snow crystals. He was even a consultant on the movie Frozen! He grows snowflakes in his laboratory using specialized chambers under highly controlled environmental conditions. Growing multiple snow crystals very closely together under essentially identical conditions, Libbrecht can create ostensibly identical snowflakes. But even still, he considers them more like identical twins. Can you visually see a difference between them? No, not really. But if you were to zoom in, and in, and in, on some level, you would be able to find differences.

Libbrecht thinks that the question of whether there have ever been identical snowflakes is just silly. “Anything that has any complexity is different than everything else,” even if you have to go down to the molecular level to find it.

This article was written for the McGill Office for Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/environment-you-asked/it-true-no-two-snowflakes-are-identical

The Little Ice Age That Made Christmas White Forever (McGill OSS)

3 minute read

Our collective vision of Christmas landscapes is so immersed in snow that the very phrase “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” conjures up imagery that is nearly all frosted, sparkling and white. This even though a snow-covered Christmas is the exception rather than the rule for the majority of the world.

Despite what the song “White Christmas” would make you think, for more than half the continental U.S., there is less than a 50% chance of a white Christmas occurring. Snow on December 25^th is rare in the U.K. and not even as common in the Great White North of Canada as you may expect! So why do we pine for a pearly white holiday time?

Maybe Bing Crosby crooning, “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas, just like the ones I used to know,” has given you the impression that climate change is to blame for the seeming lack of modern-day snowy holidays. Global warming certainly has played a role in decreasing the chances of frosty festivities and will continue to do so. But the real reason behind our widespread association of Christmas and snow is less to do with changing weather patterns and more to do with our media.

Charles Dickens’ classic tale “A Christmas Carol” was written and published in England during the Victorian era. Where nowadays, you see far more fake snow than real, during Dickens’ early life, winters in the U.K. were snow-filled times of “piercing, searching, biting cold.” The 16^th to the 19^th century was a climatic period known as the Little Ice Age. As a result, most of Europe saw colder, longer, and more snowy winters than previously known. Winters cold enough to allow the River Thames frost fairs to occur on a frozen-solid Thames—something that hasn’t happened since 1814.

While familiar to us in much of Canada, the lasting snowy landscapes and beauty created by ice and frost were novelties to many artists, and Father Winter served as a muse for many. The Little Ice Age period gave birth to the vast majority of European depictions of winter in paintings and inspired numerous enduring works of art.

Charles Dickens has been called the man who invented Christmas—a definite exaggeration. But we can thank him, Jacob Marley, and Ebenezer Scrooge for helping to cement a Christmas aesthetic that has persisted with impressive consistency. Christmas is a time of nostalgia for many of us, and it was no different for Dickens. His stories contain references to the snowy cold winters of his childhood, making it ironic, in a sense, that we should now feel a sort of nostalgia for Dickens’ childhood winters too.

Our views that Christmases should be snowy don’t exclusively come from the England of yore. New media and art through the years have iterated upon Dickens’ Christmas setting and only further enshrined our association of Christmastime as snow filled. The United States have contributed their fair share to the frost-filled Christmas media. From “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—better known as “’Twas the night before Christmas”—discussing newly fallen snow to stories like “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, to the lithographic prints of Currier and Ives and the Christmas scenes of Norman Rockwell. The classic Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” even won an award for developing a new version of fake snow to replace the painted cornflakes used previously!

While Bing Crosby sings less about the white Christmases he personally knew and more about the ones we as a society used to know, the man who wrote the lyrics for “White Christmas,” Irving Berlin, was likely talking about both. a Jewish immigrant to the U.S., Berlin was born in Tyumen in modern-day Russia. With average daily December temperatures of -12.9 ˚C, he very well may have been referencing both his childhood Christmases and the historic Victorian ones enshrined in our holiday ideals.

This article was written for the McGill Office for Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-environment/little-ice-age-made-christmas-white-forever

Peckers Get Smaller Where It Gets Colder (McGill OSS)

1 minute read

Charles Darwin postulated that Toucan’s massive beaks might be for sexual selection purposes. Other scientists have theorized that it could be for shows of intimidation, for actual defence or for peeling fruit. Given the beak’s serrated edge, it was once thought that toucans used it to catch and eat fish. We now know that toucans are almost entirely fructivorous, although they do opportunistically eat insects, lizards, and even small birds.

Another thing we now know is that the main function of a toucan’s beak is actually thermoregulation! Just like elephants do with their ears and dogs with their tongues, Toucans rely on their big beaks as heat sinks to maintain their homeostasis and save them from overheating.

Bird beaks across the globe follow a trend called Allen’s Rule, which proposes that the appendages of endotherms (warm-blooded animals) are smaller, relative to body size, in colder climates in order to reduce heat loss. A study of 214 bird species from every continent found strongly significant differences in their beak sizes according to latitude and local environmental temperatures. From penguins to parrots, the species that live in colder places have smaller peckers.

This article was written for the McGill Office for Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/peckers-get-smaller-where-it-gets-colder

Birds Seem To Be Scared of Googly Eyes, and That’s a Good Thing (McGill OSS)

3 minute read

Every year upwards of 25 million birds are killed in Canada due to collisions with buildings, communication towers, wind turbines, and as a result of being tangled into marine gillnets. From window decals to flashing lights, humans have tried numerous preventative measures to stop these deaths. Their degree of success depends on the method, the location, and the types of birds in that ecosystem—amongst many other factors—and results are highly variable.

What may seem like benign interventions that—at worst—just won’t work, actually have the capacity to do harm. As an example, In Peru, bycatch (i.e., accidental catch) of Guanay Cormorants was reduced more than 80% after researchers attached green lights to gillnets. At the same time, bycatch of Peruvian Boobies increased. Possibly due to the boobie’s attraction to the lights.

Similarly, when researchers set out to the Baltic sea to compare the effects of attaching light panels, constant green lights, or flashing white lights to gillnets on sea birds (in particular the Long-tailed duck, a vulnerable species) they found that the nets with flashing white lights caught more ducks than the normal, non-illuminated ones.

One approach that is so far quite promising involves using giant looming googly eyes.

To continue reading for free, click here- https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know-general-science/birds-seem-be-scared-googly-eyes-and-thats-good-thing

When it comes to conservation, cat-fights only hurt our communication efforts (The Skeptic)

7 minute read

When non-native animals are introduced to an ecosystem, quite often, the very delicate balance of that environment is thrown off. Plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and everything else in a biome are connected through the food web, meaning that small changes to any part of a habitat can have extensive consequences.

From zebra mussels in Canada to grey squirrels in the United Kingdom, invasive animals have become a massive problem with increases in global travel and shipping. We enact biosecurity laws and protocols, quarantine procedures and mandate pesticide treatments to try to limit their spread; but despite all our efforts to curb invasive invasions, there is one species that we tend to give a pass to: cats.

Domestic cats are not native to anywhere. While they are descended from Felis lybica, the African Wildcat, the domestic cat is a different species. They are even given a separate Latin species name: Felis catus.

Even when well fed at home, domestic cats often engage in predation and hunting behaviours. With some variance depending on location, cats tend to kill more birds and small mammals than anything else. Since domestic cats are an introduced species, they have tremendous potential to upset intricate ecological situations.

Some researchers strongly believe that domestic cats’ damaging influence on the environment has already been robustly demonstrated. They feel it is crucial to act immediately and decisively if we want to have any hope of counteracting the damage done by domestic felines. For example, in 2018, conservationists from Oklahoma State University and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute published a paper wherein they denounced what they described as organised misinformation campaigns spreading junk science about domestic cats’ effects on ecosystems.

They invoke the Merchants of Doubt moniker—the name given to the “cabal of industry-beholden” contrarian scientists who denied evidence of harm by tobacco smoking, DDT and climate change for financial gain—and liken outdoor cat advocates to “cigarette and climate-change fact fighters” pushing “propaganda.”

Conversely, other researchers feel that many conservation scientists are fueling an unwarranted moral panic over outdoor cats with exaggerated claims and inadequate evidence. In response to the 2018 Merchants of Doubt publication, researchers from six universities around the world collaborated on a rebuttal. They wrote that:

equating the resources and power of global corporations and economic elites (e.g., Exxon Mobil) with the reach and advocacy of comparatively small non-profit organizations and university academics strains the [Merchants of Doubt simile] past the breaking point.

The authors take issue with conservationists concluding that cat advocates are acting with nefarious or bad faith motives and feel that calls for things such as “remov[ing cats] — once and for all — from the landscape” by “any means necessary” are sensationalist and premature. Instead, they call for better research to investigate the severity of the risks cats pose to habitats and the appropriate levels of interventions, and humane but effective alternatives to simply killing and banning outdoor cats.

A White-Hot Issue

If you’re not that familiar with the literary style research papers are usually written in, let me just say, it’s not usually quite like this. Usually, one side of an academic debate is not accusing the other of being corporate shills. The vast majority of the time, there are no mentions of “zombie apocalypse[s]” or calls to let things “weigh heavy on our shoulders.”

The rhetoric throughout the literature on outdoor cats is very inflammatory. The cats/birds issue isn’t just a problem to be solved. It is a fight; a conflict; a war. Solutions to this situation are needed urgently. Danger is imminent. “Drastic times call for drastic measures.” People “must ask themselves which animals should be saved but do so quickly because there is no time to [do both]… before extinctions occur”.

Clearly, the environmental impact of cats on birds, and the welfare of cats, are contentious and emotionally charged topics. It makes a lot of sense that they are. Environmental stewardship is an important role that humans are morally obligated to fulfill. Especially in the face of an existential threat. At the same time, cats also represent life that should be protected. Cats long ago transcended their status of just-another-animal. From their initial roles of pest control, they have become members of the family. Given as much, cat owners often take advice regarding their pets personally.

The thing is, this highly polarised landscape filled with provocative language and antagonistic interactions isn’t helping either side. And it isn’t helping the birds, or the cats, either.

Whether cats impact wildlife in a meaningful and long-lasting way is a question for the experts in this field. They do not seem to agree, which implies the need for more research on the matter. Either way, it doesn’t particularly matter who is “right” anymore.

What matters is how needlessly divided the debate has become.

A Birdy Binary

A false dichotomy has been created wherein one can either care about native wildlife or feline welfare, but never both. Either cats are the enemies — the representations of humans’ entitlement and disdain for the earth — or the most perfect companions, too often neglected and maligned, who are just following their natural instincts.

We do ourselves a massive disservice by reducing this complex and multifaceted issue to one side versus another, or ‘us versus them’. People are lumped into supposedly either loving birds and hating cats or vice-versa, when in truth, most conservationists and pet owners are motivated by similar loves of nature, flora, and fauna.

This artificial divide encourages more polarising solutions, more extreme takes and leads to fearmongering and moral panics. It not only creates this illusion of a lack of a middle ground, it eliminates any of the methods or solutions that would originate from there.

We can become so hyper-focused on advocating for one position that we become blinded to other parts of the issue. Habitat loss is displacing bird populations and climate change is affecting their ability to find food and water. As cities sprawl outward, they remove homelands for birds and disrupt migration routes. In Canada, around 100 million birds are estimated to die every year due to collisions with buildings, power lines and cars.

Such black-and-white thinking discourages the peer review process. With little room for nuance, any criticism of a study’s methods can be seen as dissent. Scientists need to feel free to question how research is performed and how it draws its conclusions without fear of being labelled as agents of misinformation.

It’s Getting Mean in Here

Outside of academic discussions, the binary division between perceived “bird lovers/cat haters” and “cat lovers/bird haters” is even wider. This pattern is seen to varying levels across social media, traditional media, and interpersonal relationships. Expressing the wrong opinion on Twitter about indoor/outdoor cats can lead to harassment and ostracisation.

We should all know that an anecdote is not good evidence for anything on its own. Nonetheless, let me tell you a short one.

I have written on a variety of “controversial” topics in the past — menstruation, copycat suicides, female ejaculation, transgender children, border walls — but only once have I been kicked out of a science-themed social media group. I was removed after sharing my (then) most recent article on whether bells on cat collars work to reduce the amount of prey that domestic cats kill. For the record, three studies (one published in 2005, one in 2006, and one in 2010) have shown that cats brought home less prey when they wore bells. But very quickly, the thread of responses devolved into name calling and insinuations of nefarious or financially motivated intentions.

Empathy works, not… whatever that is

What should be a logical debate on policies and practices has turned ugly. The cats and birds issue has become a hotbed for sensationalism and hyperbole, no matter your stance. And the worst part about it is that we know it won’t work as well as collaborative and kind approaches would.

We know that when trying to change somebody’s mind, what tends to work is empathy and ongoing dialogue. We want to avoid judgment, disdain, or anger. Scientists need to be transparent about how they draw their conclusions and accept legitimate criticisms. Science is not perfect or magic but just a tool to help us understand the world around us. Trust is crucial for effective communication of knowledge, and trust cannot be built on anything but honesty and openness.

Actually helping wildlife and domestic pets alike requires engaging with all stakeholders. Especially the ones that oppose your stance. As much as we may want to rant and kick and scream at the people who disagree with us, it’s pointless. Not only that, it’s actively detrimental to their understanding and your ability to communicate with them. Like with so many things, in science communication, kindness is key.

Article originally posted here- https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2022/09/when-it-comes-to-conservation-cat-fights-only-hurt-our-communication-efforts/

Problematic Perceptions of Probability of Precipitation (Skeptical Inquirer: But What Do I Know?)

5 minute read

As Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789, “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” For everything else, there is an inherent degree of uncertainty. We don’t often come face to face with quantitative probabilities in our everyday life, save for one: probability of precipitation (PoP).

A seemingly simple concept, PoP is present in most of our daily routines as we check the weather before getting dressed. You may not explicitly realize it, but we all have personalized thresholds for the PoP at which we will choose to bring an umbrella or cancel an outing. For some, a 60 percent PoP warrants carrying an umbrella; for others, only 80 percent or higher. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have an accurate idea of what PoP truly means, even though most of us are certain we do!

A 60 percent PoP does not mean that 60 percent of an area will receive precipitation. It also does not mean that it will rain for 60 percent of the time period, and it does not mean that a forecaster is 60 percent confident that it will rain. So, what does it mean?

As defined by the National Weather Service, a probability of precipitation (PoP) is the “chance that at least 0.01 [inch] of rain will fall at the point for which that forecast is valid over the period of time given.”

So, a 60 percent PoP means that when these meteorological conditions occur in this area, 6 times out of 10, there will be at least some rain. That’s what PoP is. But how is it calculated?

PoP = Confidence x Coverage

To find the PoP for a given area over a given time period, we take the confidence of the forecaster and multiply it by the area that will be affected by the precipitation. Say I was 100 percent confident that 50 percent of Cleveland would receive at least 0.01″ of precipitation tomorrow, the PoP would be (1 * 0.5 = 0.5) 50 percent. Now, if I was only 80 percent confident in my prediction that 50 percent of Cleveland is getting wet tomorrow, the PoP would be (0.8 * 0.5 = 0.4) 40 percent!

If you stay in the same spot all day (like I did writing this article), then a 40 percent PoP means you have a 4 in 10 chance of being rained on. But, if you move around within an area, or between areas, your probability of encountering rain increases. As Brad Panovich, Chief Meteorologist at WCNC Charlotte put it, “It’s like buying more raffle tickets. Each one you buy increases your chances of winning.”

If you were mistaken about PoP until today, count yourself among good company. Weather forecasts have been available to the general public in the United States since the late 1960s, but in studies, between 35 percent and 73.8 percent of respondents defined PoP wrong, even when they were meteorologists! A viral Tik-Tok from 2019 that incorrectly taught people the untrue percent-of-land PoP definition certainly hasn’t helped things.

It turns out that even those sort of wishy-washy terms meteorologists use to describe weather such as “scattered flurries” or “isolated showers” have fairly strict definitions too. The National Weather Service uses certain expressions to communicate the degree of certainty in a forecast: “slight chance,” “chance,” and “likely.” There are also particular qualifiers to convey the portion of the area that will be affected: “isolated/few”; “widely scattered”; “scattered”; “numerous”; or “occasional/periods of.”

Image source: https://www.weather.gov/bgm/forecast_terms

At least in Canada, the term “risk” as in a “risk of thunderstorms” indicates a 30–40 percent chance of said weather occurring. Fun fact, also in Canada, a PoP of 50 percent is never permitted, because it seems too indecisive.

So, to those who previously found themselves cursing the local weather forecaster for never getting it right, hopefully, this article helps explain that your own lack of knowledge was more likely at fault than theirs. Believe it or not, weather forecasts have actually been getting more and more accurate with time. In 1972, a National Weather Service forecast made three days before was off by an average of six degrees. Forty years later, it was down to three degrees. In the late 1980s, when trying to predict where hurricanes would make landfall three days in advance, the National Hurricane Center missed by an average of 350 miles. Now the average miss is only about 100 miles. 

Now, that’s not to say that meteorologists can’t be biased. Many weather agencies previously biased their forecasting toward more precipitation than will actually occur. This so-called “wet bias” meant that for years when the Weather Channel predicted a 20 percent PoP, it actually rained only roughly 5 percent of the time. It’s unclear if the wet bias is still influencing forecasts today.

Take a look at the chart below. It shows the percent confidence on the top and the percent area on the side. By multiplying these together we get the PoP at the intersection of the two. The chart is symmetric. For example, if your confidence is 90 percent and the area affected is 50 percent, the PoP equals 45 percent. If the values were opposite, the PoP would still be 45 percent. This means that even though there are multiple ways to arrive at each PoP, in the end, they mean similar things.

A 40 percent PoP can be arrived at by multiplying 100 percent and 40 percent or 50 percent and 80 percent. Therefore, a 40 percent PoP could mean that it is:

• Absolute certainty (100 percent) that some (40 percent) of the area will receive rain, or
• Quite likely (80 percent) that half (50 percent) of the area will receive rain, or
• Somewhat possible (40 percent) that all (100 percent) of the area will receive rain, or
• Possible (50 percent) that most (80 percent) of the area will receive rain.

In the end, all these basically mean “you probably won’t need an umbrella, but it’s not a bad idea.”

Similarly, you’ll notice that to get a PoP of 70 percent or above, one of either the confidence or area must be greater than 70 percent. Regardless of whether that’s the result of being very sure it’ll rain over more than half the area, or being fairly sure it’ll rain over the entire area, what matters is that you remember to close your bedroom window.

Original article posted here- https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/new-column/

The Epidemic Facing Ash Trees (McGill OSS)

6 minute read

The Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) is a species of jewel beetle native to eastern Asia. In 2002, the beetle was detected for the first time in North America. First in Michigan, then Ontario, although tree ring analysis suggests that it has likely been present in those regions since the early 1990s. Since then, the number of EABs have increased year after year as the bugs spread across Ontario, Quebec and more than half the continental U.S.

An infection of EABs can kill an otherwise healthy ash in 2-5 years. But how can an 8.5 mm long insect kill a tree anyways? One way would be by eating all of its leaves. Without foliage, a tree has no way to photosynthesize, and therefore no way to make energy. Adult EABs do munch on leaves—a loss of tree canopy is a warning sign of EAB infestation—but not usually to the degree that would kill an ash. Instead, it’s the EAB larva that cause the majority of the damage.

EAB eggs are laid on ash branches, and larvae, once hatched, chomp their way under the bark. The little grubs will chew out 6 mm wide S-shaped tunnels called galleries to live in that can be up to 30 cm long. These galleries disrupt a tree’s internal water transport system, taking away its ability to send necessary nutrients up to its branches and leaves. As a result of nutrient deficiency, EAB-infected ash trees often show signs of chlorosis, or a lack of green colour in their uppermost leaves. Dying ash trees will sometimes send out epicormic shoots—little sprouts from the roots or lower trunk and branches—in an attempt to survive.

Most EABs spend winter inside ashes in their larval form. They’re able to withstand temperatures down to -30 ˚C, and are partially insulated by the tree bark. Eventually, come spring, the fully matured beetles will emerge from the ash trees, leaving small capital D-shaped exit holes about 4 mm wide.

The loss of one type of tree might not seem like such a cause for alarm, but the widespread death of ash trees is having many repercussions. In 2015, Montreal was home to roughly 200,000 ash trees. Mont Royal, the iconic park in the centre of the island was, until recently, home to over 10,000 of those trees. But, as a result of the EAB infestation the City of Montreal was forced to cut down about one-third of those ashes. The other two-thirds they chose to treat with preventative insecticides. To make up for the over 3000 lost trees, the city will plant 40,000 saplings. Of these, about 50% are expected to thrive. In 2016 Montreal committed $18 million to fighting the EAB and replacing the ashes it kills. In the U.S., affected states spend an average of $29.5 million per year to manage EAB populations.

The loss of ash trees can impede ecosystems, bring down home values or disrupt food webs. During bad weather, sick or dying ashes can pose a safety risk if they fall or drop branches. And with the loss of these trees comes an increased risk of landslides and flooding, both of which tree roots help to prevent.

Read the entire article for free by clicking here- https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/epidemic-facing-ash-trees

Artificial Trees, Secular Greetings, And Holiday Heart Attacks: Some Answers To Your Christmas Queries (Skeptical Inquirer)

5 minute read

Does the greeting “Happy Holidays” have its roots in secularism?

While it’s commonly considered a secular and more inclusive alternative to Merry Christmas, the term Happy Holidays actually has Christian origins!

Is it more environmentally friendly to get a real or fake Christmas tree?

For those who put up Christmas trees, before questions such as “tinsel or ribbon?” and “angel or star?” can be answered, a much more fundamental query must be asked: real tree or artificial?

Do the holidays cause heart attacks?

The holidays are a time for eating, drinking, and merriment, but could these festive times also be causing a myriad of myocardial infarctions?

Read the answers to all these questions by clicking here: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/artificial-trees-secular-greetings-and-holiday-heart-attacks-some-answers-to-your-christmas-queries/