Sell-by date: are old science books still worth reading?

As an outsider to the world of science I've recently been struck by an apparent dichotomy that I don't think I've ever heard discussed, namely that if science is believed by non-practitioners to work on the basis of new theories replacing earlier ones, then are out-of-date popular science (as opposed to text) books a disservice, if not positive danger, to the field?

I recently read three science books written for a popular audience in succession, the contrast between them serving as the inspiration for this post. The most recently published was Susan Conner and Linda Kitchen's Science's Most Wanted: the top 10 book of outrageous innovators, deadly disasters, and shocking discoveries (2002). Yes, it sounds pretty tacky, but I hereby protest that I wanted to read it as much to find out about the authors and their intended audience as the subject material itself. Although only a decade old the book is already out of date, in a similar way that a list of top ten grossing films would be. In this case the book lists different aspects of the scientific method and those involved, looking at issues ranging from collaborative couples (e.g. the Curies) to prominent examples of scientific fraud such as the Chinese fake feathered dinosaur fossil Archaeoraptor.

To some extent the book is a very poor example of the popular science genre, since I found quite a few incorrect but easily verifiable facts. Even so, it proved to be an excellent illustration of how transmission of knowledge can suffer in a rapidly-changing, pop-cultural society. Whilst the obsession with novelty and the associated transience of ideas may appear to somewhat fit in with the principle that a more recent scientific theory always replaces an earlier one, this is too restrictive a definition of science. The discipline doesn't hold with novelty for the sake of it, nor does an old theory that is largely superseded by a later one prove worthless. A good example of the latter is the interrelationship between Newton's classical Law of Gravitation (first published in 1687) and Einstein's General Relativity (1916), with the former still used most of the time (calculating space probe trajectories, etc, etc).

The second of the three books discusses several different variants of scientific practice, although far different from New Zealand particle physicist Ernest Rutherford's crude summary that "physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting." Stephen Jay Gould's first collection of essays, Ever Since Darwin (1977), contains his usual potpourri of scientific theories, observations and historical research. These range from simple corrections of 'facts' – e.g. Darwin was not the original naturalist on HMS Beagle – to why scientific heresy can serve important purposes (consider the much-snubbed Alfred Wegener, who promoted a precursor to plate tectonics long before the evidence was in) through to a warning of how literary flair can promote poor or even pseudo-science to an unwary public (in this instance, Immanuel Velikovsky's now largely forgotten attempts to link Biblical events to interplanetary catastrophes).

Interestingly enough, the latter element surfaced later in Gould's own career, when his 1989 exposition of the Early Cambrian Burgess Shale fossils, Wonderful Life, was attacked by Richard Dawkins with the exclamation that he wished Gould could think as clearly as he could write! In this particular instance, the attack was part of a wider critique of Gould's theories of evolutionary mechanisms rather than material being superseded by new factual evidence. However, if I'm a typical member of the lay readership, the account of the weird and wonderful creatures largely outweighs the professional arguments. Wonderful Life is still a great read as descriptive natural history and I suppose serves as a reminder that however authoritative the writer, don't take accept everything on face value. But then that's a good lesson in all subjects!

But back to Ever Since Darwin. I was surprised by just how much of the factual material had dated in fields as disparate as palaeontology and planetary exploration over the past thirty-five years. As an example, Essay 24 promotes the idea that the geophysical composition of a planetary body is solely reliant on the body's size, a hypothesis since firmly negated by space probe data. In contrast, it is the historical material that still shines as relevant and in the generic sense 'true'. I've mentioned before (link) that Bill Bryson's bestseller A Short History of Nearly Everything promotes the idea that science is a corpus of up-to-date knowledge, not a theoretical framework and methodology of experimental procedures. But by so short-changing science, Bryson's attitude could promote the idea that all old material is essentially worthless. Again, the love of novelty, now so ingrained in Western societies, can cause public confusion in the multi-layered discipline known as science.

Of course, this doesn't mean that something once considered a classic still has great worth, any more than every single building over half a century old is worthy of a preservation order. But just possibly (depending on your level of post-modernism and/or pessimism) any science book that stands the test of time does so because it contains self-evident truths. The final book of the three is a perfect example of this: Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, in this case the first edition of 1859. The book shows that Darwin's genius lay in tying together apparently disparate precursors to formulate his theory; in other words, natural selection was already on the thought horizon (as proven by Alfred Russel Wallace's 1858 manuscript). In addition, the distance between publication and today gives us an interesting insight into the scientist as human being, with all the cultural and linguistic baggage we rarely notice in our contemporaries. In some ways Darwin was very much a man of his time, attempting to soften the non-moralistic side to his theory by subtly suggesting that new can equal better, i.e. a form of progressive evolution. For example, he describes extinct South American mega fauna as 'anomalous monsters' yet our overtly familiar modern horse only survived via Eurasian migration, dying out completely in its native Americas. We can readily assume that had the likes of Toxodon survived but not Equus, the horse would seem equally 'anomalous' today.

Next, Darwin had limited fossil evidence to support him, whilst Nineteenth Century physics negated natural selection by not allowing enough time for the theory to have effect. Of course, if the reader knows what has been discovered in the same field since, they can begin to get an idea of the author's thought processes and indeed world view, and just how comparatively little data he had to work with. For example, Darwin states about variations in the sterility of hybrids whilst we understand, for example that most mules are sterile because of chromosomal issues. Yet this didn’t prevent the majority of mid-Victorian biologists from accepting natural selection, an indication that science can be responsive to ideas with only circumstantial evidence; this is a very long way indeed from the notion of an assemblage of clear-cut facts laid out in logical succession.

I think it was the physicist and writer Alan Lightman who said: "Science is an ideal but the application of science is subject to the psychological complexities of the humans who practice it." Old science books may frequently be dated from a professional viewpoint but can still prove useful to the layman for at least the following reasons: understanding the personalities, mind-sets and modes of thought of earlier generations; observing how theories within a discipline have evolved as both external evidence and fashionable ideas change; and the realisation that science as a method of understanding the universe is utterly different from all other aspects of humanity. Of course, this is always supposing that the purple prose doesn’t obscure a multitude of scientific sins...

Questioning habits: monastic science in the medieval period

It’s not usual for a single book to inspire me to write a post, but on seeing a double page spread in Australian science writer Surendra Verna's The Little Book of Scientific Principles, Theories and Things I knew I had to investigate further. Published in 2006, this small book does just what it says in the title, being a concise chronological history of science from Ancient Greece to the present. So far, so good, except that after a fair few BC and early first millennium AD entries, I found that the article for AD150 was followed by one dated AD1202! Having double-checked there weren't any pages missing, I realised that the author had followed the all-too-common principle of 'here's the Dark Ages: nothing to see here; better move along quickly'. Therefore I thought it might be time to look into what exactly what, if anything, was happening science-wise during this thousand year gap, and why there appeared to be a sudden growth in scientific thought at the start of the thirteenth century.

Although much is known of the contemporary Muslim practitioners of natural philosophy such as Alhazen and Avicenna, I want to concentrate on Europe, as the era seems to contrast so profoundly with the later periods of scientific growth in the West known as the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Although historians have recently reappraised the Dark Ages, rebranding it 'early medieval', it's fairly obvious that post-Roman Britain and mainland Europe rapidly fell behind the scientific and technological advances of Middle- and Far-Eastern cultures. An obvious example can be shown by the Crab supernova of AD1054, which despite being recorded in non-Western literature (hardly surprising, since for some weeks it was four times the brightness of Venus) it has not been positively identified in any contemporary European chronicles. Is it feasible that no-one was observing the night sky over Europe, or was the 'guest star' simply too frightening to fit into their world picture?

The Catholic Church is considered the usual suspect for the lack of interest in scientific thought, but if anything the problem seems to have been on the horizon several centuries earlier. Although there were Ancient Greek philosophers such as Democritus and Empedocles whom we might consider experimenters, early Christianity adopted much of the mysticism and philosophy of thinkers such as Pythagoras and Plato. Therefore the culture of the early medieval period was ingrained with notions of archetypes and ideals: with a pre-arranged place for everything within a stultifying hierarchy, there was no need to seek deeper understanding of the physical world. What little astronomical observation there was had predominantly timekeeping and calendric purposes, such as for finding the date of Easter, whilst being at the same time completely intertwined with astrology. Therefore any attempt to understand developments in natural philosophy of the period must take into account various facets of human thought that are today considered completely separate from the scientific method.

However, this isn't to say that the era was completely devoid of intellectual curiosity. The eighth century English mathematician (and a deacon with decidely monastic habits) Alcuin of York could be said to have discussed ideas in the proto-scientific mould, who in addition developed a teaching system intended to propagate rational thought. What led to the pan-European interest in the methodologies we would recognise as key to science, such as detailed observation and careful experimentation, is usually traced to the translation of long-forgotten Ancient Greek texts from Arabic to Latin by such figures as the twelfth century Italian scholar Gerard of Cremona. Although Gerard wrote mathematical treatises and edited astronomical tables (no doubt at least in part for astrological use), the rapid dissemination of Ptolemy and other classical giants led to a chain reaction that should not be underestimated.

An early pioneer of the empirical process was Gerard's English near-contemporary and Bishop of Lincoln Robert Grosseteste, whilst the thirteenth century produced such luminaries as Dominican friar Albertus Magnus in Germany and the English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, followed in the fourteenth century by fellow Franciscan William of Ockham, and so on. The fact that the translations of ancient texts made a rapid journey around Europe shows that Rome was not opposed to new ideas, although the arrest of Bacon in later life, possibly for writing unauthorised material, suggests that thought censorship was still very much the order of the day.

As can be noted, most of these men were either monks or senior clergy. The obvious point here is that nearly all of secular society was illiterate, which combined with the cost of books in the age before printing meant that only those within the Church had access to a wider world. I assume that this is an irony not lost on those who consider Western religion as antithetical to intellectual novelty (eat your heart out, Richard Dawkins!) Counter to this stereotype, there does seem to have been a form of academic competition between monastic orders, in addition to which chemical and biological experimentation was conducted in fields ranging from the production of manuscript pigments to herbal medicine.


The eleventh century equivalent of a scientific laboratory: the remains of Binham Priory in Norfolk, UK

Of course by the eleventh and twelfth centuries the notion of formally inculcating knowledge, including elements of natural philosophy, was dramatically enhanced via the first universities. Starting in Italy, the new foundations removed the monopoly of the monastic and cathedral schools, thus setting into motion, if somewhat hesitantly, the eventual separation of scientific learning from a religious environment (and of course, Church decree).

So how much could it be argued that from a scientific viewpoint the European Dark Ages weren’t really that dark after all? Compared to the glories of what was to follow, and to a lesser extent the tantalising fragments we know about Ancient Greek thought, the period was certainly a bit grey. But there were definitely a few candles scattered around Europe, whilst such hoary old clichés as everyone believing the Earth to be flat should long since have been consigned to the dustbin of history, Monty Python notwithstanding. So if you are planning to write a history of science, why not undertake a bit of original research and find out what was happening during that much-maligned millennium? The truth, as always, is much more interesting than fiction.

Full steam ahead: is there a future in revisiting obsolete science and technology?

Several weeks ago I was looking towards Greenwich in south-east London when I spotted an airship. A small one to be sure, but nevertheless a reminder of the time when Britain not only had a large manufacturing industry but in some sectors was even in the vanguard of technological development. The blimp in question was probably the 39 metre-long Goodyear Spirit of Safety II, which although nominally an American craft was assembled at RAF Cardington in Bedfordshire. I visited this site about 20 years ago and managed to go inside one of its' two enormous air sheds, once home to such giants of the skies as the 237 metre-long R101. Sadly, these days the hangers are mostly used for filming and rock band rehearsals, and recently a housing estate was built inside the base perimeter. However, it's not all a case of rust and nostalgia, as Hybrid Air Vehicles Ltd are making use of Cardington in a joint project with the aeronautical heavyweight Northrop Grumman to build three unmanned hybrid airships. The 76 metre-long Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle or LEMV - a classic boffin-flavoured acronym, hurrah - is being developed for a US military surveillance role. The company's future plans include eco-tourist airships, so are we seeing the glimmer of an airship renaissance?

On the whole this seems rather unlikely. In the 1980s Cardington was home to Hybrid Air Vehicles' predecessor Airship Industries, one of who's Skyship 500s appeared in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (the same design as seen in my circa 1984 photograph below). Unfortunately the innovations in materials and engines weren't enough to save the company from liquidation.


Although Hybrid Air Vehicles has grandiose plans for vehicles up to twice the LEMV's length, it's doubtful there will be a near-future resurgence in long-haul civilian airships. After all, even during their interwar heyday a transatlantic ticket on the likes of the Hindenburg cost more than double that of an ocean liner. Therefore, military usage and cargo delivery to aircraft-unfriendly terrain are a far safer bet from an economic viewpoint, despite the obvious advantages of aerial craft less reliant on fossil fuels. Indeed, there are even schemes afoot in several countries to develop solar-powered cargo airships.

Another UK-based proposal that seeks to put new life into old technology sadly appears to have rather less chance of success. The Class 5AT (Advanced Technology) Steam Locomotive Project plans to develop a steam engine capable of matching current main line high-speed stock. After ten years' effort, the team have put together a very detailed study for a 180 km/h locomotive, but as you might expect there hasn't exactly been a rush of investors. The typical short-term mentality of contemporary politicians and shareholder-responsive industry means few appear willing to support the initial start up costs, especially when Britain's current rail network operates so wonderfully (hint: that's called irony). If you think any of this sounds familiar, check out the post on boffins and their pipe dreams, where the science and technology were frequently superlative and the economics frankly embarrassing.

Then again, a resurgence in motive steam might appear to have little relevance outside of alternative history novels, but a point to remember is that it was only when James Watt started to repair a working model of Thomas Newcomen's atmospheric pumping engine in 1763 - a design by then half a century old - that the development of true steam engines began.

The steam car has even less chance of a reawakening, although there appear to be good engineering reasons behind this, namely difficulty coping with the constantly-changing speeds required in urban driving. As it is, steam on the road seems to have mostly novelty value these days. A good example is the British Steam Car, winner in 2009 of the Guinness World Land Speed Record for a steam powered car. It may have a dull name, but with a Batmobile aesthetic and top speed of 225km/h, the world's fastest kettle has certainly proved a point that steam needn't be associated with slow.

Somewhat less romantic and rather more pragmatic, NASA has returned to tried and tested capsule technology for their space shuttle replacement, Orion. The "Apollo on steroids" design is now accompanied by the Space Launch System or SLS (another uninspired moniker), which refers to a rocket slightly taller than the Saturn V that will have second stage engines developed from those used on this famous forebear - which incidentally last flew in 1973.

But reappraising old science isn't restricted to high technology, as can be seen by the resurgence of biotherapeutic methods in the past few decades. Most people have heard of the fish pedicure fad but the rather more important use of disinfected maggots to clean flesh wounds has received NHS support following some years of trials in the USA. A 2007 preliminary assessment even showed success using maggot therapy to treat wounds infected with the 'superbug' MRSA. Yet the technique is known from Renaissance Europe, Mesoamerican and Australian Aboriginal cultures: sometimes low-tech really could be the way forward.

Possibly that's the key as to whether these revitalisations are likely to succeed; if the start-up costs are relatively cheap then there's a good chance of adoption. Otherwise, the Western obsession with the now makes it all too easy to dismiss these projects as idealistic dreams by out-of-touch eccentrics. Not that new technologies have always followed the rational approach when initially developed anyway, since historical backstories have probably been as much a driving force as objective analysis. I guess we're back again to disproving that old Victorian notion of continuous upward progression, but then as the philosophically-minded would say, we do live in postmodern times.

Something sinister: the left handedness of creation

I'm embarrassed to admit it but the first home-grown science experiment I remember undertaking was to explore the validity of astrology. Inspired by the Carl Sagan book and television Cosmos I decided to see for myself if, after centuries of practice by millions of adherents, the whole thing really was a load of bunk. So for three months I checked the predictions for my star sign every week day and was amazed at the result: I found them so vague and generalised that I could easily find something in my life each day to fit the prediction. A sort of positive result that negates the hypothesis, as it were. As a young adult I encountered people with a rather less sceptical frame of mind, and if anything their astrological information only reinforced my earlier results. As my birthday is on the 'cusp' between two star signs, I found that about half the astrologically-inclined viewed me as a typical sign A whilst the other half dubbed me a typical sign B. At this point, I think I can rest my case...

Of course, astrology is a very old discipline so it's no wonder it's pretty easy to see the cracks. Over the past forty or so years there have been several generations of authors with a slightly more sophisticated approach, paying superficial lip service to the scientific method. Although their methodology fails due to the discarding or shoehorning of data, this hasn’t stopped the likes of L. Ron Hubbard from making mints. To this end, I decided to generate a hypothesis of my own and test it to a similar level of scrutiny as their material. Thus may I present my own idea for consideration: evidence suggests that our universe was created by an entity with a penchant for a particular direction, namely left-handed / anti-clockwise. Here are three selected cases to support the hypothesis, although I cannot claim them to have been chosen at random, for reasons that will soon become obvious.

The first argument: in the 1950s and 60s physicists found that the weak nuclear force or interaction, responsible for radioactivity, does not function symmetrically. Parity violation, to be technical about it, means that for example massless particles called neutrinos spin in a counter clockwise direction if they are created by beta decay. Like many other fundamental parameters to our universe, no-one has an explanation of why this is so: it just is.

The second argument: amino acids are usually described as the building blocks of proteins, but in addition to those used to make life on Earth, additional types are found in meteorites. It has been theorised that life was made possible by meteorites and comets delivering these chemicals to the primordial Earth, but radiation encountered on their journey may have affected them. Whereas amino acids synthesised in laboratories contain approximately equal amounts of mirror image (i.e. left- and right-handed) forms, nearly all life is constructed from the left-handed, or L-amino acids.

The third argument: a new catalogue of observations using the latest generation of telescopes indicate that from our viewpoint most galaxies rotate counter clockwise about their cores. Of course it's been a long time since humans believed the Earth to be the centre of the Universe, but even so, this is a disturbing observation. We now consider our planet just an insignificant component of the second-largest galaxy within a small group at one end of a super cluster. In which case, why is galactic rotation so far removed from random?

So how do these arguments stand up to scrutiny, both by themselves and collectively? Not very well, I'm afraid. Working backwards, the third argument shows the dangers of false pattern recognition: our innate ability to find patterns where none exist or to distort variations into a more aesthetic whole. In this particular case, it appears that the enthusiasts who classified the galaxies' direction of rotation were mistaken. Put it down to another instance of the less than perfect powers of perception we humans are stuck with (thanks, natural selection!)

The second argument initially bears up somewhat better, except that I deliberately ignored all of the biological elements against the argument. The best known of these is probably DNA itself, which is primarily helical in a clockwise direction. This seems to be a fairly common problem in the history of science, with well-known cases involving famous scientists such as Alfred Wegener, whose continental drift hypothesis was a precursor of plate tectonics but who deliberately ignored unsupportive data.

The first argument stands by itself and as such cannot constitute a pattern (obviously). Therefore it is essentially worthless: you might as well support the left-handed notion by stating that the planets in our solar system orbit the sun in a counter clockwise direction - which they do, unless you happen to live in the Southern Hemisphere!


Once again, our ability to find patterns where none exist, or as with the rotation of galaxies, to misconstrue data, leaves little doubt that our brains are naturally geared more towards the likes of astrology than astronomy. Pareidolia, the phenomenon of perceiving a pattern in a random context, is familiar to many via the man in the moon. However, there are varying degrees to this sort of perception; I confess I find it hard to see the figure myself (try it with the image above, incidentally taken through my 130mm reflector telescope earlier this year – see Cosmic Fugues for further information on genuine space-orientated pattern-making).

Of course, these skills have at times combined with innate aesthetics to aid the scientific enterprise, from the recognition and assembly of Hominin fossil fragments from the Great Rift Valley to Mendeleev's element swapping within the periodic table. However, most of the time we need to be extremely wary if a pattern seems to appear just a little bit too easily. Having said that, there still seem to be plenty of authors who cobble together a modicum of research, combine it with a catchy hook and wangle some extremely lucrative book and television documentary deals. Now, where’s a gullible publisher when you need one?

Weather with you: thundersnow, hosepipe bans and climate punditry

I must confess to have not watched any of the current BBC series The Great British Weather, since (a) it looks rubbish; and (b) I spend enough time comparing the short-range forecast with the view outside my window as it is, in order to judge whether it will be a suitable night for astronomy. Since buying a telescope at the start of the year (see an earlier astronomy-related post for more details) I've become just a little bit obsessed, but then as an Englishman it's my inalienable right to fixate on the ever-changeable meteorology of these isles. If I think that there is a chance of it being a cloud-free night I tend to check the forecast every few hours, which for the past two months or so has proved to be almost uniformly disappointing; as a matter of fact, the telescope has remained boxed up since early May.

There appears to be a grim pleasure for UK-based weather watchers that when a meteorology source states that it is currently sunny and dry in your location it may in fact be raining torrentially. We all realise forecasting relies on some understanding of a complex series of variables, but if they can't even get the 'nowcast' correct what chance do the rest of us have?

So just how has the UK's mercurial weather patterns affected the science of meteorology and our attitude towards weather and climate? As far back as 1553 the English mathematician and inventor Leonard Digges included weather lore and descriptions of phenomena in his A General Prognostication. Since then, British scientists have been in the vanguard of meteorology. Isaac Newton's contemporary and rival Robert Hooke may have been the earliest scientist to keep meteorological records, as well as inventing several associated instruments. Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, formerly captain of HMS Beagle (i.e. Darwin's ship) was appointed as the first Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade in 1854, which in today’s terms would make him the head of the Met Office; he is even reputed to be the inventor of the term 'forecast'.

Modern science aside, as children we pick up a few snippets of the ancient folk learning once used to inculcate elementary weather knowledge. We all know a variation of "Red sky at night, shepherd's delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning", the mere tip of the iceberg when it comes to pre-scientific observation and forecasting. But to me it looks if all of us in ever-changeable Britain have enough vested interest in the weather (once it was for crop-growing, now just for whether it is a sunglasses or umbrella day – or both) to maintain our own, personal weather database in our heads. Yet aren't our memories and lifespan in general just too short to allow us a genuine understanding of meteorological patterns?

One trend that I consider accurate is that those 'little April showers' I recall from childhood (if you remember the song from 'Bambi') are now a thing of the past, with April receiving less rainfall than June. This is an innate feeling: I have not researched it enough to find out if there has been a genuine change over the past three decades. Unfortunately, a combination of poor memory and spurious pattern recognition means we tend to over-emphasise 'freak' events - from thundersnow to the day it poured down at so-and-so's June wedding - at the expense of genuine trends.

For example, my rose-tinted childhood memories of six largely rain-free weeks each summer school break centre around the 1976 drought, when my brother had to be rescued from the evil-smelling mud of a much-reduced reservoir and lost his shoes in the process. I also recall the August 1990 heat wave as I was at the time living less than 20 km from Nailstone in Leicestershire, home of the then record UK temperature of 37.1°C. In contrast, I slept through the Great Storm of 1987 with its 200+km/h winds and don’t recall the event at all! As for 2011, if I kept a diary it would probably go down as the 'Year I Didn't Stop Sneezing'. City pollution and strong continental winds have combined to fill the London air with pollen since late March, no doubt much to the delight of antihistamine manufacturers.

An East Anglian beach, August 2008

Our popular media frequently run stories about the latest report on climate change, either supporting or opposing certain hypotheses, but rarely compare it to earlier reports or long-term records. Yet even a modicum of research shows that in the Nineteenth Century Britain experienced a large variation in weather patterns. For example, the painter J.M.W. Turner's glorious palette was not all artistic licence, but almost certainly influenced by the volcanic dust-augmented sunsets following the 1815 Tambora eruption. It wasn't just painting that was affected either, as the UK suffered poor harvests the following year whilst in the eastern United States 1816 was known as 'Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death'.

The influence of the subjective on the objective doesn't sound any different from most other human endeavours, except that weather professionals too - meteorologists, climatologists, and the like - also rely on biases in their work. Ensemble forecasting, which uses slightly different initial conditions to create data reports which are then combined to provide an average outcome, has been shown to be a more accurate method of prediction. In other words, this sounds like a form of scientific bet hedging!

Recent reports have shown that once-promising hypotheses involving singular factors such as sunspot cycles can in no way account for most primary causes of climate change, either now or in earlier epochs. It seems the simple answers we yearn for are the prerogative of Hollywood narrative, not geophysical reality. One bias that can seriously skew data is the period being used in a report. It sounds elementary, but we are rarely informed that even the difference of a single year in the start date can significantly affect the outcome as to whether, for example, temperature is increasing over time. Of course, scientists may deliberately only publish results for periods that support their hypotheses (hardly a unique trait, if you read Ben Goldacre). When this is combined with sometimes counter-intuitive predictions – such as that a gradual increase in global mean temperature could lead to cooler European winters – is it little wonder we non-professionals are left to build our level of belief in climate change via a muddle of personal experience, confusion and folk tales? The use of glib phrases such as 'we're due another glaciation right about now' doesn't really help either. I'm deeply interested in the subject of climate change and I think there is serious cause for concern, but the data is open to numerous interpretations.

So what are we left with? (Help: I think I'm turning into Jerry Springer!) For one thing, the term 'since records began' can be about as much use as a chocolate teapot. Each year we get more data (obviously) and so each year the baseline changes. Meteorology and climatology are innately complex anyway, but so far both scientists and our media have comprehensively failed to explain to the public just how little is known and how even very short-term trends are open to abrupt change (as with the notorious 'don't worry' forecast the night of the 1987 Great Storm). But then you have only to look out of the window and compare it to the Met Office website to see we have a very long way to go indeed…