Christopher Booker - Views On Science

Views On Science

Booker's weekly columns in The Sunday Telegraph have covered a wide range of topics of public interest. Booker has been described by English writer James Delingpole in The Spectator as doing "the kind of proper, old-school things that journalists hardly ever bother with in this new age of aggregation and flip bloggery: he digs, he makes the calls, he reads the small print, he takes up the cause of the little man and campaigns, he speaks truth to power without fear or favour". On a range of health issues, Booker has put forward a view that the public is being unnecessarily "scared", as detailed in his book Scared to Death. Thus he argues that asbestos, passive smoking and BSE have not been shown to be dangerous. His views on these matters go against scientific consensus, and as a result have attracted much criticism from other journalists as well as public bodies. Thus his articles on asbestos and on global warming have been repeatedly challenged by George Monbiot of The Guardian, and the UK Health and Safety Executive has repeatedly refuted his claims about asbestos.

Booker has repeatedly claimed that white asbestos is "chemically identical to talcum powder" and poses a "non-existent" risk to human health, relying primarily on a 2000 paper for the UK's Health and Safety Executive by John Hodgson and Andrew Darnton. He wrote in January 2002 that "HSE studies, including a paper by John Hodgson and Andrew Darnton in 2000, concluded that the risk from the substance is "virtually zero". In response, the HSE's Director General, Timothy Walker, wrote that Booker's articles on asbestos had been "misinformed and do little to increase public understanding of a very important occupational health issue." The Health and Safety Executive issued further rebuttals to articles written by Booker in both 2005 and in 2006. In an article in May 2008, Booker again cited the Hodgson and Darnton paper, claiming that 'they concluded that the risk of contracting mesothelioma from white asbestos cement was "insignificant", while that of lung cancer was "zero"'. This article was also criticised by the UK's Health and Safety Executive as "substantially misleading", as well as by George Monbiot, who argued that Booker misrepresented the authors' findings. Booker's claims were also critically analysed by Richard Wilson in his book Don't Get Fooled Again (2008). Wilson highlighted Booker's repeated endorsement of the alleged scientific expertise of John Bridle, who in 2004 was convicted under the UK's Trade Descriptions Act of making false claims about his qualifications