Mad dogs and web errors

Don't believe everything you read about UV on the web. Even reputable sites get it wrong sometimes.

There was a lot of interest in my Dearth of data Substack, with many sharing my concerns. I particularly liked the comments from my old colleague Bruce Forgan, who ended with “To measure is to know!” Another reader mentioned that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology are investing in Brewer spectrometers, so perhaps all is not lost there after all ….

In that recent Substack, I was talking about the final slide from my recent talk in Brisbane. Now I want to go back to the first one, shown below.

The information displayed was taken from here. No problem with the (typical!) picture, or the first paragraph. But, as you can see, I took issue with the second paragraph - the one with the big ‘x’. I graciously redacted the name in case he was in the audience (he clearly wasn’t).

The point I was making was that any increases in UV since the development of the ozone hole have been tiny in Australia, so their high rates of skin cancer must be due to something else. I provided a clue by circling the right elbow of the model, speculating that perhaps that was her true skin colour (though I guess it could also be a patch of sand, or a plaster). If it is her true skin colour, her skin-type is poorly adapted to the naturally much higher levels of UV present there compared with her ancestral homeland in northern Europe. It’s further exacerbated by her choice to sit out exposing so much of her skin to the midday sun. The only mitigating factor is her excellent choice of sunhat.

You can see by the short shadow-length that the picture was taken close to noon. As Noel Coward’s 1931 classic (well worth a listen even today) reminds us , ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen (and women too, apparently) go out in the midday sun”.

It’s a good-news/bad-news story. It means that we can fix the problem by modifying our sun-exposure behaviour. But it also means that we shouldn’t expect any improvement in skin cancer rates attributable to the ozone hole’s recovery in the years ahead. We’ll have to continue to rely on the ambulance-at-the-top-of-the-cliff. The behavioural changes. On the subject of good news, at the same conference I heard that newly developed immunotherapy drugs are starting to greatly reduce death rates from melanoma (if you prefer the ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff approach).

After pointing out the web page error to the hundreds present during my talk, I looked forward to being able to report an update there as I embarked on this posting. Sadly, I was disappointed. The error persists to this day. The people at that site clearly know nothing of my pearls of wisdom. My wife must be right. I really AM irrelevant now. Hopefully somebody will prove her wrong and flick this on to them now so they can fix it.

I think I’ve just about fulfilled my verbal promise of putting all slides from my recent Brisbane talk up here on Substack. But you know what they say about verbal promises: “they’re not worth the paper they’re written on”. So, in case you’re still curious about something I’ve forgotten, I’ve put a pdf of the entire talk here. If there’s something else on UV issues that you’re still awaiting, please let me know.