BBC Documentary Horizon: Science Under Attack

The BBC Horizon Documentary aired last night was an interesting one, it appeared to be trying to understand why the public are loosing their faith in scientists particularly climate scientists and one key7 theme throughout the programme was the Climategate scandal of 2009.

James Delingpole, the Telegraph journalist who broke the climategate story was interviewed on his views as he is an avid climate sceptic. Rather than reviewing the documentary here, I wanted to discuss a couple of comments that supporters of James Delingpole have written on the Telegraph website. These people clearly do not understand science, or rather they practice "bad science" and base all of there views on sensationalist stories published in the media.

One particular comment stood out, and had me both fascinated and confused;

"Old Faithful @ yellowstone . 1000 times greater than Mt.St Helens. To imagine this would shake the earth off it's axis. I've hiked in both spots beautiful wild hot pools at Yellowstone National Park. And saw the volcanoe of Spirit Lakes destruction after Mt. St Helens erupted, if the volcanoe at Yellowstone erupted in the near future in perspective there would not be a safe place anywhere because it would flip the poles.. I knew this, so when do we get out the hotwheels and run to the wilds. More reason for attempting the local economy independant systems, hooked up to the internet." - Helium Lady, Telegraph Website

I had never before heard of a super eruption causing a magnetic flip, or certainly not at the instantaneous scale that this woman was suggesting (although granted I'm a geologist so instantaneous to me means anything from a few hundred up to a couple of million years), so I decided to do a little snooping. My first point of call was google scholar. I typed in "yellowstone eruption magnetic pole reversal" and in the first couple of pages I could find no reference whatsoever to as yellowstone causing a magnetic reversal, so I tried typing in "super eruption magnetic pole reversal" and again in the first couple of pages no reference. The only references I could see that were partly related were magnetic dating of eruption deposits. So knowing what I know about our thirst for sensationalist stories I tried a google news search, and lo and behold the Korea Times has a whole article the so called apocalyptic ending of the Earth in 2012 with a small mention of both a super eruption and a magnetic reversal, but nothing linking them. So where had this woman got her information from? Most of the other information I found linking the two together came from online forums of people that believed the end was coming in 2012.

This sort of bad science worries me as many people are choosing to believe the sensationalist views rather than looking for the actual science. Something needs to be done, but as the Horizon documentary showed the majority of the public have lost their faith in the world wide scientific community.

GF