How to Become a Famous Scientist - Just Use This One Simple Trick

I write about junk science fairly often.  There seem to be two main reasons for that.  First, it's one of my favorite topics, but behind that is the fact that there would be far less to write about if it weren't for the fact that we appear to be in the Golden Age of Junk Science.  There is far more junk science than at any point in my lifetime - or maybe I just notice it more, but don't think about that.  

Examples?  A recent example that leapt off the page at me and gathered a lot of attention is Harvard researchers have announced that eating red meat just twice a week causes diabetes.  But SiG, I hear you thinking, that's not what that headline says.  It says "may."  Yes, but junk science always uses those "hedge your bets words" like could, might, may, should and so on.  That way they never can be held accountable for misleading the world.  "We never said it would cause diabetes, we said it may.  We didn't say what the percentage chance was because we need more funding to find that out.  (Ooo! They win twice in that disclaimer!) 

Like virtually all of the food correlations you read about, they depend on Food Frequency Questionnaires (FFQs) which are notoriously unreliable.  Legendarily unreliable in fact.  FFQs have survey questions like, "list what you had for lunch in March of '22" (usually multiple choice) 

But that's not all. An honest assessor of papers like this, Dr. Zoë Harcombe, Ph.D. in Public Nutrition, did a must-read analysis of the study, but we don't always get that.  A few money quotes:

• This makes no sense. Diabetes is essentially the inability to handle glucose. Meat contains no glucose. Carbohydrates contain glucose. My immediate thought was – don’t blame the burger for what the bun, fries and fizzy drink did. 
• The definition of red meat included sandwiches and lasagna.  Lasagna is red meat?  It's only red from the tomato sauce covering it.  You just can't see that because of noodles covering it.
• As if FFQs aren't bad enough, the serving sizes have changed since the original Food Frequency Questionnaires
• Total red meat was claimed to have a higher risk than both processed red meat and unprocessed red meat. Total red meat is the sum of the other two. It can’t be worse than both.
• The relative risk numbers grabbed the headlines; the absolute risk differences were a fraction of one per cent.

Since we don't get a column like Zoë's for every study, the takeaway message about studies like this is that "correlation doesn't mean causation."  All they can possibly find is correlation.  Second to that is to know that the lobbying group with largest impact on society has got to be the vegan lobby.  It’s good to realize that it's just the latest paper from the Harvard correlation study factory.  All their papers promote plants and condemn animal foods.  And all of it, every one I've ever seen, is junk.

The easiest place to find correlations is in climate research.  Have you seen a story about climate change doing something or other and thought, "climate change; is there nothing it can't do?"  Think correlations, not causation.  For example, Watts Up With That published a story this week that says climate change is causing more allergies.  

Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) ran a segment during its local morning edition titled, “Climate change is contributing to an extended allergy season.”

The author's point is that it could be true, might even be a cause and effect relationship, but it's a negative consequence to something that's good for the world in general.  Some people will need to get more treatments, but that's not everyone (I'm one - I've had allergies since my teenage years).  By and large, allergies are treatable. 

Since correlation sells, I want to drop a simple idea that I haven't seen anywhere else.  Let's believe for the moment that global temperatures are increasing, and ignore the big questions that raises.  That means that anything else that can be found to be increasing in the time period in which temperatures are rising will be found to be directly correlated to climate change.  Conversely, anything that was found to be decreasing in time is inversely correlated to climate change.  Perhaps you could say climate change was endangering species.  Never mind.  That's been done.

In the first piece, instead of saying eating red meat causes diabetes, you can just as accurately say climate change causes diabetes.  The two things have increased in the world in the same time period.  Climate change causes microplastics in the Pacific ocean.  Without doing the research, I bet if you went back to the 1950s, let alone the late 1800s temperature reference period, you wouldn't find the word microplastics or even the concept.  Today, it's hard to go a week without seeing a microplastics story. 

Think of it!  No more need to waste time compiling fake data; if they're both increasing, one caused the other.  Food Frequency Questionnaires? Fuggedaboutit. Just ask the AI to fill it out or make it up completely.  You know people have been getting bigger and more obese in America.  It's going up, it may not go up exactly at the same slope as temperature (pictured below and far from constant) but it correlates with global temperatures so just say that climate change is causing people to get bigger and more obese.  Or red meat consumption. Your choice. If you find data that says vegetable consumption has gone up - ever notice "fruits and vegetables" has become one word, fruitsanvegetables? - you can conclude climate change caused it. You could conclude fruitsanvegetables consumption caused Americans to get bigger and fatter, but that'll get you cancelled.

University of Alabama Huntsville measure of the lower atmosphere temperature from 1979 to last month.  From Watts Up With That