Interview with science journalist Simon Rozendaal
Simon Rozendaal: “We live in a panicky time while we have never had it so good. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck predicted this in his book in the 1980s the Risk Company. The risks are becoming smaller and smaller.
I had just switched from the NRC to Elsevier in the late 1980s. In the Netherlands we were obsessed with dioxin. That was in everything: in cow’s milk, breast milk, and it was released from waste incinerators. I went with a photographer for Elsevier to the Triangle of Death, the border area between East Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. Due to the air pollution, all the trees there died. I spoke to a Polish doctor who was part of an environmental movement and asked him how he viewed dioxin. The man started laughing and said that was a luxury problem. “We still have real pollution: sulfur dioxide.”
And then I realized that if you solve a big problem somewhere, a smaller problem will take its place. I named it the Law of Conservation of Environmental Misery. For us, the sulfur dioxide problem had almost been solved and that is why we were working on dioxin. Now that we have solved that, PFAS and glyphosate are emerging.”
How fresh is your piss, Carice van Houten?
“That Carice van Houten is now working on a campaign: How fresh is your piss. Then you have to send in your urine and they will find out how much glyphosate is in it. But these are percentages of seven or eight zeros after the decimal point! You’re not worried about that, are you?
I am a chemist, but also a hybrid figure. I was able to obtain my PhD in Delft at Herman van Bekkum, but those researchers in Delft talked about Feyenoord all day and liked to play bridge. I was much more concerned with literature: Knut Hamsun, Italo Svevo, Elias Canetti. And I devoured Rudy Kousbroek and Karel van het Reve. I love letters as well as numbers. From both the molecules and the opinions. Of literature and of science. My chemical background has strongly shaped me as a science journalist and writer. I know about molecules. I know about concentrations. I know how high the concentration of sulfur dioxide was in the Netherlands fifty years ago: a hundred times higher than today! The environmental problems of 50 years ago have almost disappeared.”
NRC HANDELSBLAD
“I worked at NRC Handelsblad for almost ten years. And there I wrote more or less the same stubborn stories as now at EW. When I wrote something critical about the environmental movement, I was sometimes reprimanded by the deputy editor-in-chief of the NRC, because the environmental movement had complained about my pieces through the environmental editor. Smiling, because the deputy was quite supportive of me. And then I said: “Okay, okay, next time I will also let the environmental editor read the piece in advance.”
My fellow science journalist Arnout Jaspers spent some time at the AD. He has a similar scientific background as me. Arnout went crazy from the conversations with his colleagues at the AD. Because they were only concerned with all kinds of environmental disasters and he tried to nuance them. But he couldn’t get through. A science journalist often has to compete with general journalists.
I think Maarten Keulemans – the science journalist for De Volkskrant – is excellent. His reporting on corona: chapeau. Critical and sharp, he was on top of it. I also admire him, how polite he remains on Twitter, all those people who call him names.
I feed last year to the South Pole, from Ushuaïa on Tierra del Fuego. Marcel Haenen from the NRC had invited me. I remember that one from the past. Marcel knows a lot about penguins, but not so much about global warming. That sounded like fun: a tough trip to the Antarctic Peninsula, South Georgia and the Falklands. The science editors of the NRC did not want to go along and had virtuously canceled: the boat trip would be bad for the climate. Or they were not allowed to be away from their wife or girlfriend for three weeks. Then a kind of protest letter was written at the NRC by about nine editors. I was very derogatorily referred to as “science journalist” in quotes. For God’s sake, I founded the science page of the NRC and was, in fact, the first scientist at that newspaper. They think I write too down-to-earth and too perspective about the climate.”
All the misery comes from China.
“Last February you could still visit the Antarctic Peninsula and South Georgia, but now there is bird flu there. A real tragedy, even those beautiful albatrosses are dying in droves. If that flu reaches humans and mixes with a normal flu virus, then shelter in place. Corona pales in comparison. The bird flu in South Georgia will probably also come from China. All nasty viruses come from China. A simple explanation is that ducks and pigs are kept on the same farm. And the pig is a kind of intermediate step between man and bird. There are virologists who have sometimes called virus outbreaks ‘the revenge of the jungle’ and Marion Koopmans has also made comments along those lines. The jungle that strikes back. Complete nonsense of course.”
Big Pharma
“Everyone always grumbles about the pharmaceutical industry, but we can thank God on our bare knees for the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma saved us from corona. Corona has already caused millions of deaths, but if it had taken much longer for those vaccines to be available, the mortality would have been enormous.”
AIDS
“I have a book about AIDS written. There are a number of parallels between AIDS and corona, but above all many differences. AIDS was much deadlier than corona. Corona could affect anyone and AIDS could not. That was mainly caused by unsafe sex. In our country at the time, AIDS mainly affected gays, junkies and African immigrants, but you were not allowed to say that out loud, because gays had just gained their freedom in the Netherlands.
That’s why there was a whole campaign warning that anyone could get it, which is not true at all. Roel Coutinho In his inaugural speech he neatly calculated the chances that a random heterosexual could get it by meeting someone in the pub, sleeping with them and becoming HIV-positive. That was as likely as flying to Mallorca with a charter and crashing. That led to a lot of fuss, that statement.¨
Journactivism
“I think news activism – the mixing of journalism and activism – is terrible. You also see it in science. Jan Rotmans, for example, proudly calls himself half activist and half scientist. In journalism you have Roelof Bosma who is there Zembla came up with all this nonsense about PFAS.
Of course, every journalist exaggerates sometimes. Also science journalists. I also sometimes turned on my headlines if I wanted to make the front page. Pure pursuit of effect. But then you have to correct yourself and then it helps if you are a chemist.
I look at numbers and concentrations. Progress in measurement has been enormous in recent decades. That’s what my new book is about. The zero is getting smaller and smaller. We can now measure quantities that are unimaginably small. With PFAS, but also with glyphosate. It concerns concentrations of about 7 zeros after the decimal point, so you shouldn’t worry about that at all. The residents of Chemours in Dordrecht are being frightened, almost all media are being irresponsible here.
There is a huge lack of knowledge among general journalists. It helps if you have a bit of a science background and know the difference between a ppmAn ppb and a ppt. Most journalists have no idea!
Of course, journalism as a whole has changed a lot. It’s exactly what Elma Drayer recently wrote in her Volkskrant column
Elma Drayer: Almost from the outset, it took great effort in the Dutch press to report in a balanced manner about October 7 and everything that followed. And no, I am not talking about the usual suspects – about the media on the far right or the far left. Since time immemorial, they have written exclusively about what applies to their own situation. Nor am I talking about news sites that leave reporting on the Middle East to interns with their eyes open for propaganda. I’m talking about the titles with excellent reputations. Painfully enough, since October 7, they have seen the opportunity to continuously denounce everything that Israel does and does not do, while they continuously condone everything that Hamas does and does not do. No lie: in the almost four decades that I have been in journalism, I have never experienced so much ostentatious one-sidedness. ”
Pieter Klok, the news activist
“Another example: Pieter Klok, the editor-in-chief of the Volkskrant, wrote in one commentary something about correspondents from warm countries who, during a visit to the editorial office in Amsterdam, said that they found all those pieces about heat and climate – it happened to be a warm summer in the Netherlands – rather exaggerated. Klok explained to the reader that it was not easy at all and that the earth was warming up. He then wrote: Normally it is difficult to attract a large audience with stories about the greenhouse effect. Almost every reader is convinced that it is the most important problem of our time, but we do not see this reflected in the reading figures. This is probably mainly because it is still largely an abstract problem, with no clear victims in the vicinity, with the most significant damage being done in the distant future. It is also a problem that makes us despondent, because the world has not yet succeeded in sufficiently reducing CO2 emissions. Abstract problems that make you despondent are not the ideal pastime for many readers. When climate change is physically tangible, as it was last week, it is an opportunity to reflect extensively on global warming, to get the problem on the reader’s mind and at the top of the political agenda.
This is not how a journalist should reason, let alone an editor-in-chief.
And those guys from Follow the Money and De Correspondent, they write aptly and inappropriately that the earth will warm up by 6 degrees. If you look at their sites, at all those nonsense stories, you should sue those guys for that. They caused me a panic in the Netherlands.”
The environmental mafia
“The environmental movement was once a good club when it opposed the clubbing of seals, whale hunting and air pollution when it still existed. But the environmental movement ended up on the dark site, sometime in the 1980s. It has become a fairly inhumane and unscrupulous club. Sowing panic, partly for your own gain…”
DELFT
“I was on a jury last week. A pitch from students at TU Delft who are setting up companies. Delft has not yet been infected with the woke virus. Take Leiden for example, such an idiot of a teacher who calls for Tel Aviv to be bombed. TU Delft is a breath of fresh air. These guys don’t think in terms of problems, but in terms of challenges. Roll up your sleeves, a wonderful down-to-earth attitude. The same applies to the universities of Twente and Eindhoven, which are also not plagued by woke.”
A BOY FROM KATENDRECHT
“I’m a boy from the Cape, raised among whores. I have my memoirs written about Katendrecht. Fortunately, I was able to study well and even skipped a grade in primary school. As a result, I left HBS at a very young age and went to study in Delft, close to home. I first thought about math, because that’s what I was good at. But you could only follow that in Delft in the second year. Then acquaintances of my parents said: “Go and study chemistry, that is the profession of the future.” I got stuck in that. But I soon discovered that I am clumsy in the laboratory. That’s why I chose journalism, in the hope that there were real intellectuals there. But that was disappointing.
I’m pretty down to earth. Don’t go along with the environmental hysteria, I am concerned about global warming, but don’t exaggerate that either. This will partly have to do with the Cape and Rotterdam. I am the son of a greengrocer and the air that Rotterdam residents breathe contains something that stimulates common sense. And then a study in Delft was added. So that is sobriety squared.
2024-02-24 19:36:17
#GeenStijl #panic #industry #activist #journalists
