A tsunami of misinformation

One of the most frustrating things I encounter while doing research for Skeptophilia is sensationalized nonsense masquerading as fact -- especially when it is gussied up in such a way as to make it seem reasonable to the layperson.

This is the problem with the article "Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean (And It's Going To Get Worse)" that appeared over at Zero Hedge yesterday.  In it, we have a rehash of the Fukushima disaster of 2011, which generated a horrific tsunami and breached a nuclear power plant.  The combined effects of the earthquake and its aftermath cost almost 16,000 lives, and left 230,000 people homeless -- some of whom are still living in temporary housing.

Unfortunately, that's about where the Zero Hedge article stops being factual and starts relying on sensationalist exaggerations and outright fabrication.  Here's a brief list of the inaccurate claims that appear on the article:

• "[The Fukushima earthquake was] believed to be an aftershock of the 2010 earthquake in Chile."

Well, it might be true that someone believes that.  Presumably the writer of the article does.  But there aren't any geologists who do.  The earthquakes occurred a year apart and over 17,000 kilometers from each other.  There is no seismic process that could possibly connect the two.

If that weren’t bad enough:

• "Fukushima continues to leak an astounding 300 tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean every day."

This isn't incorrect so much as it is misleading.  Note that nowhere in this statement (in fact, nowhere in the article) does it state how radioactive those 300 tons of water are -- i.e., how much radioactive cesium (the most common radioisotope in the leaked water) was present.  In fact, marine radiochemist Ken Buesseler has stated that ocean radiation levels near the disabled power plant are one thousandth of what they were immediately following the accident, and at any distance at all from the site the contamination is "barely discernible."

• "It should come as no surprise, then, that Fukushima has contaminated the entire Pacific Ocean in just five years."

Cf. my previous comments about quantities and measurability.

• "Not long after Fukushima, fish in Canada began bleeding from their gills, mouths, and eyeballs.  This “disease” has been ignored by the government and has decimated native fish populations, including the North Pacific herring."

This is referring to viral hemorrhagic septicemia, a deadly disease of fish that is caused by (note the name) a virus.  It has nothing to do with radiation or the Fukushima disaster, and was recorded in fish populations long before the earthquake.

Also, correlation does not imply causation.  Even if viral hemorrhagic septicemia had only been seen after debris from Fukushima washed ashore, it wouldn't necessarily mean that the contaminants in the debris had caused the disease.

• "Elsewhere in Western Canada, independent scientists have measured a 300% increase in the level of radiation."

300% of a minuscule amount is still a minuscule amount.

• "Further south in Oregon, USA, starfish began losing legs and then disintegrating entirely when Fukushima radiation arrived there in 2013.  Now, they are dying in record amounts, putting the entire oceanic ecosystem in that area at risk.

This is another viral disease called starfish wasting disease, and like the fish disease mentioned earlier, has bugger-all to do with Fukushima as there have been outbreaks of it since 1972.  However, there is some evidence that increasing water temperatures have made starfish more susceptible, so there's a connection to climate change, which is something we should be concerned about.

And no alarmist article would be complete without some scary pictures.  First, we have this one, from NOAA:

This has nothing to do with radiation leakage.  It's a map tracking wave heights of the tsunami as it crossed the Pacific, as you'd know if you had looked at the scale on the right hand side.

Then there's this one:

Which shows a bunch of dead starfish.  But as I established a couple of paragraphs ago, this has nothing to do with radiation poisoning.

And so on and so forth.  The alarmist foolishness in articles like this is dangerous from a couple of standpoints. First, it makes it sound like the scientists themselves are ignorant of what's going on, or (worse) are actively covering it up for their own malign purposes.  Second, it misrepresents what the science actually says.  Third, it distracts us from problems that actually are global catastrophes in the making by focusing our attention elsewhere.

At a less-than-careful reading, though, such an article sounds well researched and factually accurate.  It has links, sources cited, uses technical vocabulary.  It's only if you take the time to do some research yourself that the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

So caveat lector.  As usual.  And to the people who keep forwarding this article around, I'm respectfully asking you to stop.  It's hard enough to get people to trust legitimate science these days; this kind of thing only makes it worse.

Inconvenient evidence

There is nothing good to be gained by the politicization of science.

At its most fundamental level, science is not a political pursuit at all.  It is, or should be, the pursuit of a rigorous standard of inquiry to broaden our knowledge of how the universe works.  The goals and methods of science should not change based on whether you're liberal or conservative, political or apolitical, religious or secular.

Despite this, there are two points where politics impinges on science.  One of them, at least, is defensible; that is the decision regarding what to do when scientific findings impact directly the lives of humans.  For example, whether anthropogenic climate change exists, and predictions regarding how great an impact it will have on sea levels, storm intensity, and so on, are scientific questions.  Those should be answered irrespective of political concerns.  On the other hand, how a country responds to whatever threats do exist -- to what extent money should be appropriated to remedy the causes, or mitigate the effects -- those are political questions, and need to be decided by policymakers.

Unfortunately, there is a second, and more toxic, way that politics impinges on science.  Because science is a pursuit that requires funding, and funding for scientific research often comes from the government, there is a desire by many politicians to support only science that fits the current political narrative.  When it becomes expedient for scientific findings to be discredited, politicians begin weighing in on whether the science itself is valid, regardless whether they have any expertise in the field in question.  (Witness Ted Cruz's recent statement that "climate change is not science, it's religion" -- a comment that is odd from a variety of standpoints, but most strikingly that he's apparently calling something a "religion" to discredit its validity.)

It's not only the conservatives who do this, however.  The focus of the left on such issues as health, diet, and the environment has led to broadside criticism of anyone who calls into question the prevailing wisdom (Monsanto is evil, GMOs are dangerous, the pharmaceutical companies are corrupt).  Just this week an article appeared in The Globe and Mail about the harassment a Canadian scientist is receiving over his discovery that the radiation released from the Fukushima disaster is not causing any problems in the eastern Pacific.

Jay Cullen, of the Integrated Fukushima Ocean Radionuclide Monitoring project, conducted a serious of rigorous tests for radioactive contamination in the water along the Pacific Coast of North America, in response to considerable public concern over the potential for dangerous levels of radioisotopes showing up in seawater, and getting into the marine food chain.

Cullen was motivated by the best of intentions.  "The goal… was that people were asking me, family and friends and the public at large, what the impact of the disaster was on B.C. on the North Pacific and on Canada," he said.  "I started looking for quality monitoring information so I could answer those questions as honestly and accurately as I could."

And after detailed analysis of the data, Cullen determined that the threat was negligible.  Levels of radionuclides in seawater on the Pacific coast of North America were so low that they were barely detectable at all.

You'd think that ecologically-minded types would be glad about this, wouldn't you?

Nope.  Didn't fit the narrative, which is that the threat is too there, and that all of the powers-that-be are conspiring to cover it up.  Cullen was denounced as a shill for the nuclear power industry, and derided as a "sham scientist."

Ultimately, he received death threats.

Interestingly, Cullen is hardly an anti-environmental type.  He has repeatedly railed against the practices of overfishing and dumping trash in the mid-ocean.  The oceans are in peril, Cullen says.  No argument there.

Just not from the radiation released from Fukushima.

Nonsense, say his critics.  Look at this map released before the government clampdown, that shows the radiation plume from the disaster:

This map has been posted over and over again on blogs and environmental scare sites -- despite the fact that it's not a map of radioactive contamination, it's a map of wave heights from the tsunami.  (A clue would be that the scale on the right is labeled "centimeters," not usually a unit used to measure radioisotope concentration.)

Bringing us back once again to the wonderful quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts."

The trouble is that the people who do this sort of thing -- be it the right-wingers who claim that climate change isn't happening, or the left-wingers who claim that Monsanto is trying to kill us all -- are getting the whole process backwards.  Science should inform politics, not the other way around.  Data has no spin.  Because science is, at its best, one of the least biased ways there is to gain information, we should be using the science as a guiding force for determining policy, not using our political beliefs to figure out which bits of science are valid.

But such views aren't politically expedient, because that means we have to be willing to let ourselves be driven wherever the evidence demands, not plant our feet, science-be-damned, in order to retain the favor of our constituency.

Which in the current milieu would be political suicide.

Crayons, asbestos, and risk

Let's have a little chat about the topic of risk.

It's something that a lot of people don't understand, but in principle, it's a simple concept.  Actuaries, and other folks who get paid to think about such things, define risk as the product of two probabilities: the probability of exposure and the probability of harm.

The problem is that misassessment of one or both of these two probabilities leads people to (in some cases) wildly overestimate the risk of certain behaviors, and (in others) to wildly underestimate it.  Often, these misassessments have to do with the familiarity of something -- familiar, everyday things are usually considered safer than they really are, and unfamiliar ones more dangerous, regardless of whether those perceptions are at all rooted in reality.

Dan Gilbert, in his wonderful TED talk "Why We Make Bad Decisions," illustrated this perfectly with a photograph of a burning skyscraper, a plane crash, a terrorist bombing site, and a swimming pool.  He then asked the audience to play the Sesame Street game of "Which Of These Things Is Not Like The Other?"  "If you chose the swimming pool, you're correct," Gilbert said.  "Because of the four, it's the one that is by far the most likely to kill you."

This becomes even worse when we start looking at the risk of "chemicals."  I put the word "chemicals" in quotation marks, because of course, everything is made up of chemicals.  (I once saw a sign for "U-Pick Organic Chemical-Free Strawberries."  Ponder that one for a while.)  The problem is, lots of people don't understand chemistry, and so anything with a fancy-sounding name immediately gets put in the "unfamiliar/dangerous" column, even if it's a perfectly innocuous compound, or even one that is essential for life.

Even dangerous chemicals, of course, don't necessarily act straightforwardly.  It's not enough to say that a compound is toxic -- you also have to ask how likely it is to get inside you and cause trouble, and whether the dosage you're being exposed to is, in fact, dangerous.  It's why all of the panic earlier this year about "radioactive water from Fukushima" being detected on the shores of western Canada was unfounded -- the radioactive isotope detected, cesium 134, was only discovered because it's unlikely to get into seawater any other way.  Jay Cullen, oceanographer at the University of Victoria, said, "We're more than a thousand-fold below even the drinking water standard in the coastal waters being sampled at this point.  Those levels are much much much lower than what's allowable in our drinking water."

So the dosage was far smaller than our daily exposure to naturally-occurring sources of radiation, and would be entirely harmless even if we were drinking seawater, which most of us don't.  But it didn't stop people from freaking out completely about how we were being poisoned, irradiated, and (of course) all gonna die.

A more recent goofy claim that has the interwebz in a tizzy lately is the claim that asbestos has been discovered in crayons.  Asbestos, of course, is one of those words like "radioactivity" -- all you have to do is say it and people start thinking they're being killed.  In fact, the danger of asbestos for most people is minimal -- the majority of the asbestos that's still around is safely locked up in wall board and ceiling tiles.  It's only when asbestos-containing materials get broken up, and the dust produced that way is deeply inhaled, that it increases one's likelihood of getting certain lung cancers, such as mesothelioma.

So what about the asbestos in crayons?  First of all, there's the difficulty in telling apart asbestos fibers from talc.  Talc, a chemically related mineral, is used in all sorts of things, up to and including baby powder.  You also don't want to inhale talc -- but the same could be said for any finely-powdered mineral.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Second, even if there was asbestos in crayons, could it hurt you?  The answer is "almost certainly not."  All the way back in 2000, the Consumer Product Safety Commission was prompted to do an analysis of crayons, and found "a trace amount of asbestos in two Crayola crayons made by Binney and Smith and one Prang crayon made by Dixon Ticonderoga" but stated that "the amount of asbestos is so small it is scientifically insignificant."  Add that to the fact that this "scientifically insignificant" quantity of asbestos is bound up in the colored wax that makes up the rest of the crayon, so the likelihood of inhaling it is nil, and you have what is commonly called a "tempest in a teapot."

Snopes put it succinctly: "In other words, if trace amounts of asbestos were encased in a waxy substance such as crayons, those fibers would not be friable and would pose no risk of becoming airborne."

It'd be nice if more people would learn about risk and toxicity -- not only would it get them to calm down about the stuff they're exposed to on a daily basis, most of which their bodies handle just fine, it would also stop people from forwarding ridiculous claims on Facebook and Twitter, which is getting to be annoying.  In any case: don't worry about letting your kids use crayons.  Coloring in a coloring book is not going to give them lung cancer.  All you have to do is make sure that they aren't grinding up their crayons and snorting the powder.

But I'm hoping you'd do that in any case.

Giant radioactive mutant dog attack!

It's funny to what extent people will believe unscientific bullshit when they've been primed to do so by fear.

And by "funny" I mean "so frustrating that I facepalmed hard enough to give myself two black eyes."

The tsunami that struck Fukushima, Japan two years ago still weighs heavily on people's minds, and for good reason.  It was a disaster of massive proportion, causing almost 16,000 known deaths (another 2,500 are still missing and are presumed dead).  Add that to the damage to a nuclear facility, and it's no wonder that people consider this one of the scariest events in recent memory.

So let's start there; horrible earthquake, terrible death toll, radiation release from a nuclear plant.  So far, frightening enough.  But the problem is, the last-mentioned -- nuclear radiation -- is a phenomenon that few people understand well enough to judge accurately the hazards it might generate.  This combination of fear and lack of information is a powerful one, and probably explains why hundreds of sites started cropping up last year (and continue today) claiming that the radiation plume from the damaged nuclear reactor was "frying the west coast of the United States."  Usually the story is attached to this map, that allegedly shows the progress of the radioactive water across the Pacific:

The problem is, this isn't a map of radiation -- this is a map, made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shortly after the tsunami, showing wave heights across the Pacific.

But boy, it sure looks scary, doesn't it?  All those reds and oranges and purples.  That's got to be bad.

And just to (I hope) put your mind further at rest, a study done at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems found that the radiation, when it reaches the United States west coast, will be so dilute that it will pose no threat to human health, thus further highlighting the difference between the words detectable and dangerous.

Yet the panic continues, which as I mentioned, sets people up to believe nonsense.  And the nonsense reached new heights in the past couple of weeks, with a set of claims that evidently originated with Topeka's News, an online media outlet that apparently is "news" in the same sense as The Weekly World News is.  Now, let me be up front; I think this could be satire.  It could be that Poe's Law has reared its ugly head again.  But honestly, I'm not sure, and it really doesn't matter, because I'm beginning to see these stories making the rounds of social media -- and people believe them.

Let's start with this one, about a giant radioactive killer dog.

Here's what they have to say:

Russian officials are confirming the existence of a new dog species: the giant Tibetan Mastiff.

Genetic tests have confirmed Fukushima radiation in the dog’s genes, confirming that runoff from Japan has contaminated Russia waters and is not creating genetic monstrosities in the nation [sic: I'm guessing they meant "now creating...," although "not creating..." makes more sense in context].

To date, dozens of reported sitings [sic] of giant Tibetan mastiffs running throughout the Russian Siberian tundra have been reported, but it was not until this week that researchers were able to confirm the dog.

Well, there are a few problems with this claim, beginning with the fact that (1) Tibetan mastiffs are not new (the Wikipedia article calls the breed "ancient," actually); (2) they're not a separate species, but are just ordinary dogs, albeit really big ones; and (3) since Tibet is up in the mountains, it's hard to imagine how "runoff from Japan" could have gotten there since water generally doesn't flow uphill all that well.

Oh, yeah, and you can't have "radiation in your genes."

Yes, but they have photographs, to wit:

Big!  Scary!  Look at the teeth!  Must be a radioactive mutant, right?

Of course, right.

Oh, but they're not done yet.  Not only do we have giant scary mutant dogs running around, we have the rare Fukushima Radioactive Mutant Hamster Lion:

The writer for Topeka's News admits that this photograph hasn't been verified, but says, "the picture does provide an excellent opportunity to once again delve into the topic of nuclear energy."

Then there's the Fukushima Radioactive Mutant Megaturtle:

If you're curious, this photograph is actually a still from the 2006 Japanese horror movie Gamera the Brave.  [Source]

But the problem is, these are being circulated around all over the place, usually with headlines like, "What is the radiation from Fukushima doing to animal life, and what could it do to humans?"  And very few people, that I've seen, are responding to those posts with, "You're joking, right?"

I have a solution to all of this, and it's the same one I always recommend; before you start panicking, learn a little science.  Apply some logic and skepticism to what you read.  And for cryin' out loud, find out what the scientists themselves are saying.  These days, you can often find out the straight scoop just by appending the words "skeptic" or "debunk" to a search (e.g. "giant Fukushima mutant dog debunk"), and you'll pull up what usually reputable sources like Doubtful News or The Skeptic's Dictionary or Skeptoid or Snopes have to say about it.

To sum up; no need to worry about the radiation from Japan causing mutations that will result in gigantic herds of carnivorous Bunny-Jaguars terrorizing downtown Omaha.  As devastating as the situation was (and still is) in Japan, the radiation isn't going to have much of an effect on us here in the United States, and that's not how mutations work, anyway.

Which is unfortunate, actually, because the idea of a "Bunny-Jaguar" is kind of cool.