I’ve always had my opinion of Oprah and for all of her faults (and who doesn’t have them) she does do an awful lot of good. I could go into the charitable work that she does or her social activism but my point isn’t to defend or demolish. My real questions is, “What leads someone like Oprah down some of these wacky alt-med and spiritual paths?”

In our lunch room at work many people bring old magazines for their co-workers to peruse while nuking their lunch. These magazines are mostly local magazines, like Fort Wayne, Whatz Up or Business People or what could loosely be termed women’s magazines*, like Better Homes and Gardens, Redbook or Lucky**.

Recently someone brought in a dozen of Oprah’s magazine, O. I avoided reading the magazines for the longest time for fear that I might learn The Secret and start injecting hormones into my man parts. Eventually The Oprah won and I began leafing through the magazine and eventually reading the articles. After a few magazines I was surprised that a) it wasn’t filled with buckets of crap and b) I did not feel like injecting anything into my man parts.

Seriously though after reading these magazines, I think I have a better understanding of where Oprah may be coming from. This may not be The Way to understand her because humans are complex and trying to boil someone’s motivations into a single thing would be a bit of an insult. Having said that, this may be A Way to understand her.

A theme throughout her magazine was this sense of Empowerment. This empowerment was evident through

• her beauty tips, which focused less on changing yourself and more on accentuating who you are,
• Suze Orman’s financial advice,
• her choice of interviewee’s like Sally Fields, and
• her focus on healthy lifestyles, active living, eating right, etc.

Before I continue, let me define empowerment in its popular form (straight from Wikipedia, The Source of all Truth)

Empowerment refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social or economic strength of individuals and communities. It often involves the empowered developing confidence in their own capacities.

I’m focusing less on communities here and more on the individual aspects embodied in the second, bolded, sentence. Without understanding where she’s coming from, it will be very difficult to counter her arguments. Let me illustrate my point.

If the basis of her advice and beliefs comes from the question, “What will contribute to the greatest empowerment for the individual?” , and the basis of your, the skeptic’s, advice and beliefs comes from, “What is a set of knowledge that has the weight of evidence and can be independently verified?” , there’s a potential for a disconnect. Can you see where, from the start, you’ll be talking across each other and not to each other? You are not starting at the same level or even the same zip code.

Now I could stop there and leave you with my opinion and again more questions than answers but that seems to irritate people***. So I’ll tell you why I think that Oprah is, in fact, disempowering her audience.

Let me setup a little straw man argument for rhetorical purposes. A straw man argument is a logical fallacy and means “arguing against a position which you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view.” Since I don’t know Oprah’s motivations and are not likely to be boiled down easily (see above) this is my take on the situation.

From Oprah’s empowerment perspective (my straw man argument)

Turning over the responsibility for your health to doctors and medical professionals who only diagnose and proscribe is cold and clinical. She brings on guests that provide a more self-directed and personal approach. Watch a Dr. Oz segment and you’ll see more often than not him giving you advice on how to check yourself and not simply submit to a lab test. This is taking your health into your hands.

Oprah will bring on Jenny McCarthy, who tells the story of being dismissed by her medical professional and simply forced to vaccinate her son by society and the school systems. Jenny McCarthy’s repeated and tearful assertions that vaccines gave her kid autism are rebuffed by cold, hard science.

The entire basis of The Secret is that you can directly impact your future by thinking positive thoughts and directing your desires to the Universe to bring about good fortune. Everything good that happens to you is completely within your control.

Drawing on the pop-psychology advice of Dr. Phil McGraw who’s catchphrase seems to come down to, “So how’s that working out fer ya?” puts the ownership of the solution to your problems within yourself.

From my empowerment perspective

Actually I don’t have a problem with the basis of StrawOprah’s thinking, only its application. And in its application the actual removal of empowerment.

In the case of Oprah’s contribution to health education her approach is mostly sound. The only part that goes off-base is the dismissal of the medical profession, or if not the dismissal, the elevation of personal testimony to be of equal weight. While she may give the obligatory disclaimer about “consulting a physician prior to starting a health program”, it lacks sincerity and her audience can see through it as just that, obligatory. Working with a medical professional that you trust is key to quality health care. If you don’t trust your doctor, Dump Her! and get a new one.

I actually agree that in many instance “science-based medicine” can be cold and clinical but much of this sound advice if not properly delivered can come through as cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all advice. If the patient doesn’t understand Why a particular course of action applies to her; their likelihood of acceptance is going to be lower than someone who understands how a particular solution fits their situation.

In the case of Jenny McCarthy, I think this is a very personalized story that demonstrates my above point. The cold, clinical approach that left Ms. McCarthy holding the bag so to speak and that’s unfortunate. However, what started with Oprah’s support of a mother’s story in searching for answers and help for her child, strayed too far into the perceived empowering aspects of Jenny McCarthy’s story and in the process removed empowerment from her audience.

She has setup this story of a mother over and above the truth about how vaccines actually work. She has elevated the personal testimony (or Jenny McCarthy’s Authority) over the well-demonstrated usages of vaccines. Think about it this way, the repeated demonstration of the efficacy of vaccines is a democratic process. Anybody can demonstrate their effectiveness. Is it easy and suitable for everyone, of course not, but it is open to everyone. Oprah has said, “This mother’s story is more authoritative or of equal weight to the decades of evidence and hard work that has gone into protecting humanity from death and disease.” This isn’t empowering to anyone, this is like Divine Revelation, “Believe this because I said believe this” and not opening any path for the individual to verify or even understand something on his or her terms.

The only problem with the advice from pop-psychologists is that psychology is an extraordinarily complicated science and trying to give advice in 44 minutes is going to be fraught with gross over-simplifications. In a personal aside, I was watching a bit of Dr. Phil’s show and he had on a girl who looked like a walking skeleton because of an eating disorder. He was trying to get across that this is a self-image problem (a gross oversimplification) and during the commercial break were advertisements for Neutrogena with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Victoria’s Secret. Oh! The Irony it burns!!!

The Secret suffers from the same fundamental problem that pop-psychology does. It’s a gross oversimplification of life itself. If you have full control over the good things then you have full control over the bad. While in one instance Oprah will do a series of shows helping women who have been molested come to terms with and ultimately overcome the psychological damage of that abuse and then she embraces a spirituality that puts the ultimate responsibility back onto the victim.

Bad things happen sometimes because bad things happen. This is a position that The Secret fundamentally rejects. Oprah has demonstrated a lack of belief in “received” religions and has clearly turned to more of the personal spirituality movements. I think this one aspect of the things she promotes demonstrates that the personal empowerment straw man that I’ve come up with, IMNSHO, isn’t probably too far off the mark.

I haven’t obviously delved too deeply on the individual topics but that wasn’t my intended purpose. A lot of what many skeptical websites, authors and podcasts focus on is the Bad Science behind what Oprah promotes and those serve a valuable purpose in understanding why what she promotes might be harmful. But what seems to be fundamentally lacking is a basis of understanding of where these beliefs come from and ultimately a different way of combating them. Arguing on the basis of Science is going to go nowhere If Science were all that awesome we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.

Arguing from the basis of empowerment, while being informed by science and reason, is going to go a long way in conveying why you believe some of these claims may not be based on reality.

* I’ll get in trouble for being so sexist but if you’ve ever sat there for 5 minutes while nuking your lunch IMO these magazines are NOT targeted to men as a group.

** If you think Oprah is destroying America, read that crap. It’s literally a magazine about shopping.

*** That was a little passive-aggressive but at least I didn’t link to any comments, because that would be very passive-aggressive.

People with a higher caffeine intake, from sources such as coffee, tea and caffeinated energy drinks, are more likely to report hallucinatory experiences such as hearing voices and seeing things that are not there, according to the Durham University study.

‘High caffeine users’ – those who consumed more than the equivalent of seven cups of instant coffee a day – were three times more likely to have heard a person’s voice when there was no one there compared with ‘low caffeine users’ who consumed less than the equivalent of one cup of instant coffee a day.  With ninety per cent of North Americans consuming some of form caffeine every day, it is the world’s most widely used drug.

Wow. That’s impressive. While it’s hard for me to imagine drinking seven cups of coffee now, back in my college days that was an easily achievable number. And because caffeine is in so many food products, many people can probably come close to the equivalent of seven cups of coffee in a day. But is it good science?

Not according to Dr. Ben Goldacre who writes the Bad Science column for The Guardian newspaper. As usual he’s provided a cogent and thorough analysis. Frankly, I agree with him that this is both a case of bad media reportage of science and a less than stellar study. Aside from the fact that this is an observational study, with unexamined confounders, the correlation is actually quite weak. Quoting Bad Science:

Then if you read the academic paper you find that the associations reported are weak. For the benefit of those who understand “regression” (and it makes anybody’s head hurt), 18% of the variance in the LSHS score is explained by gender, age and stress. When you add in caffeine to those three things, 21% of the variance in the LSHS score is explained: only an extra 3%, so caffeine adds very little. The finding is statistically significant, as the researchers point out, so its unlikely to be due to chance, but that doesn’t affect the fact that it’s still weak, it explains only a tiny amount of the overall variance in scores on the “predisposed-to-hallucinations” scale.

So while there was a statistically significant correlation between those who reported high caffeine consumption and those who scored high on the Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale (LSHS), it was a relatively weak one. It’s also important to remember that the study group was only 219 college students who filled out a survey. It was a small, self-selected cohort and we have no way of knowing if they are representative of the general population.

Also, the researchers apparently drove the media reporting by putting an unfounded figure into their press release:

Lastly, most newspapers reported a rather dramatic claim, that 7 cups of coffee a day is associated with a three times higher prevalence of hallucinations. This figure does not appear anywhere in the paper. It seems to be an ad hoc analysis done afterwards by the researchers, and put into the press release, so you cannot tell you how they did it, or whether they controlled appropriately for problems in the data, like something called “multiple comparisons“.

Here is the problem. Apparently this 3 times greater risk is for the top 10% of caffeine consumers, compared with the bottom 10%. They say that heavy caffeine drinkers were three times more likely to have answered affirmatively to just one LSHS question: “In the past, I have had the experience of hearing a person’s voice and then found that noone was there”.

Ben Goldacre quite rightly points out that this is likely a case of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. We don’t know why the researchers chose 10% as their magic number. Perhaps their reasoning is justified, perhaps not. We don’t know though because they didn’t put it in the paper. Again, Goldacre is correct in judging this to be a subversion of the peer-review process. It’s science by press-release.

Does the APS now question global warming? Not really, but you wouldn't know it by what you read on the right

The right wing blogosphere has been all atwitter the past couple of days over a blog post by Michael Asher at DailyTech alleging that the American Physical Society (APS) had reversed its previous position that human activity was fueling global warming.

“The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”

In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,”There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.”

The APS is the second largest organization of scientists in the world and one of the most prestigious. It publishes over a dozen scientific journals with Physical Review and Physical Review Letters among them, as well as organizing over twenty scientific meetings a year. So if the APS issues a statement that it doesn’t think anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real, then the world has good cause to sit up and take notice. “Deathly news for the religion of Global Warming,” as one right wing pundit put it.

Except that’s not what happened.

Asher’s blog post was updated with the following message:

“After publication of this story, the APS responded with a statement that its Physics and Society Forum is merely one unit within the APS, and its views do not reflect those of the Society at large.”

And the APS posted this notice on their front page:

“The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”

An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS.  The header of this newsletter carries the statement that “Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.”  This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.”

Well now, that’s hardly the APS reversing itself on AGW. Additionally, Asher did some selective quoting of Jeffrey Marque’s Editor’s Comments in the APS’s Physics and Society Forum newsletter (Asher misattributes this as the APS’s forum too, but we’ll let that slide). Reading Marque’s actual comments we find that the APC’s Physics and Society Forum invited several people to contribute papers arguing either for or against the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) conclusions. Christopher Monckton supplied the anti-AGW argument while David Hafemeister and Peter Schwartz from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo provided a paper supporting the IPCC’s conclusions.

I think it also bears mentioning who exactly Christopher Monckton is. He is a former journalist and an arch Conservative British politician, having been a policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher. Monckton is a member of many private-public Conservative think tanks including The Heartland Institute which aggressively campaigns against global warming science (and for “smokers’ rights”, receiving large donations from Phillip-Morris). He had a successful business consultancy and invented the Eternity Puzzle, a popular puzzle toy that carried a £1,000,000 prize for its solution.

Monckton is also something of a notorious crank. He is an Euroskeptic; opposed to European integration. In a 2007 interview with The Independent he is quoted as saying that he would (bolding mine),

“… leave the European Union, close down 90 per cent of government services and shift power away from the atheistic, humanistic government and into the hands of families and individuals.”

Monckton maintains similarly eclectic views on HIV/AIDS as well. In a 1987 article for The American Spectator he argued that the only way to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS was to blood test every single person once a month and forcibly quarantine anyone found to have or be carrying the disease.

Monckton has also been known to employ creative expansion of the facts to suit his needs. For instance, he claimed that he had to sell his house pay the Eternity Puzzle prize but later admitted that wasn’t true. In a letter to Senators Snowe and Rockefeller he claimed to be a member of the Upper House of the UK legislature when, in fact, he is not a member of the House of Lords.

All of that being so, perhaps the most important thing that has been left unsaid is what Mockton is not. For the plain and simple fact is that Christopher Monckton is not a scientist.

Now you might accuse me, and rightfully so, of arguing ad hominem. However, I think Monckton’s history and character are important for assessing his credibleness, especially if one isn’t a climate scientist their self. After all, if a person holds several views contrary to experts in their respective fields and has a history of being less than forthright then perhaps we should view any claims that person makes as suspect.

Still, Monckton’s history of credulousness doesn’t necessarily make him wrong. Nor does the fact that he isn’t a scientist rule out the possibility that he has something to contribute to science. Sadly though, Monckton walks a well-worn path he has trod many times before. For instance, his claim that cosmic rays are behind warming trends in recent decades has been thoroughly refuted and George Monbiot handily debunked many of Monckton’s other claims. Finally, Tim Lambert dispenses with Monckton’s claims of the IPCC’s overstatement of climate sensitivity, again noting Monckton’s spurious reasoning.

“Did you spot what he just did? If you assume that there is no delay in warming (which is wrong) and McKitrick is right (which is also wrong), then you get a low value of sensitivity. If you also assume that the IPCC values for ΔF_2x and f are correct, then their value of κ must be too high — Monckton comes up with a number 20% less. But in the previous section Monckton argued that the IPCC value of ΔF_2x was too high by a factor of three. If instead you use Monckton’s number, the IPCC value of κ is too low.

What Monckton is doing is double counting his (dubious) evidence that sensitivity is lower than the IPCC number. If he had two pieces of evidence that sensitivity is half the IPCC number he would multiply them together to claim that sensitivity is one quarter the IPCC number. This is not correct.

Too put it another way, in this case, by making some unrealistic assumptions he came up with a sensitivity estimate 20% less than the IPCC number i.e. 2.4K. Logically he should have stopped there — he has an estimate of sensitivity. Instead he uses this estimate of sensitivity in a chain of reasoning that leads him to conclude that sensitivity is 0.58K.”

What it all comes down to is that Monckton is simply wrong; wrong about it all. And the vast majority of respectable scientists across the many fields comprising climate science still think that humans are responsible for global warming.

The whole affair appears as an almost textbook exercise in critical thinking. Taken at face value Monckton’s claims even pass the sniff test with lots of scientific looking language, charts and graphs. On the other hand we have sensationalized and less-than-honestly reported claims from a crackpot fringe politico stumping for his pet cause with, seemingly, religious and political motivations. Contrasted with Monckton’s claims are those of thousands of scientists doing real work in the field of climatology whose work is subject to the scrutiny of their peers. Who would you  believe?