Great article in the Guardian, by Dr Ben Goldacre – A vintage year. Expect more in 2010
It has been a vintage year for dodgy science in government. We saw reports on cocaine that were disappeared, dodgy evidence to justify DNA retention, and government advisers who estimated the cost of piracy at 10% of GDP, to media applause, and then failed to tell everyone they’d got the figure wrong by 1,000%.
There were fantasies from the security services of using mass surveillance to spot terrorists from their communication patterns, although the basic maths of screening predicts a crippling rate of false positives when trawling for such rare outcomes.
…A £6m Home Office drugs education study was published with no results, because it was so flawed it couldn’t produce any; we saw MPs being foolish about cervical screening and moon magic, and then when they didn’t like the scientific evidence they got from Professor David Nutt, they sacked him.
If politicians want us to take them seriously on the evidence for global warming, they have to show they care about evidence everywhere.
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