It is time to undertake a thorough investigation examining whether some of Vermont’s leading news organizations are harboring paid operatives for tourist or real estate interests in California and the South.

“Is it ever going to warm up around here?” proclaimed an exasperated Michelle Mortensen on WPTV-TV (Channel 5) Saturday evening.

Well, it was warming up, said the object of that question, weather reporter Keith Carson, adding, “unfortunately, that still puts us in the freeze.”

Meanwhile, the web site of Channel 5’s rival, WCAX-TV (Channel 3) noted that the state had “recovered nicely after the brutal cold. ” The tone of the weather stories in the newspapers was the same: It’s cold. How awful.

Can we do a reality check here? It’s Vermont. It’s mid-January. It’s supposed to be cold.

More important,  cold is not  ”unfortunate” or “brutal.” OK, by the third definition in my dictionary (American Heritage Second College Edition)-”harsh; unrelenting”-last week’s cold might qualify. But  mostly “brutal” is defined as “characteristic of or befitting a brute,”  meaning a beast; the connotation is that the beast is malicious.

But last week’s cold was dry, sunny, and windless, hardly as repellent as a wild boar or rabid coyote.  There are real disadvantages to winter in Vermont. Swirling snow while driving.  Black ice on the road. Preferred solution: don’t drive.

But cold is not one of those disadvantages. Cold in these parts in this season should be welcomed. It is good for both body and mind. There is a reason no one from the South or from California ever had a good idea (though they do write some good songs now and then). It’s because they never have to go outside when it’s below zero. Rouses the blood. Sharpens the mind.

If your humble agent, who must be less hale than the vast majority of you who are less old, could spend some hours every day last week outside walking, snow-shoeing, splitting logs, shoveling the back deck, and puttering in the (unheated) garage-and having a good time all the while-surely enjoying these single-digit Fahrenheit afternoons can’t be all that rare.

Granted, there’s an inner contradiction here, a sort of joy in misery. One of the best things about being out in the cold is coming in from it. A cup of tea (or whatever) in front of the woodstove or fireplace is a delight any time, but never as delightful as when it follows an hour or two out in the zero-degree air. Then, too, there is a certain “sharing of the misery, we’re-all-in-this-together” community aspect, all the more fun because it isn’t really “misery” at all.

After all, with fewer exceptions than ever, most of us don’t have to go outside at all these days, except to walk between the house and the car, and then the car and the office, store, school or whatever. The percentage of us who farm, work in the woods, clear the roads, or keep them safe is small.

And those precincts to do not seem to be the origin of most of the complaints. Nor should they be. The Thirteenth Amendment not having been repealed, no one is forced to do any of those jobs. Many who do them enjoy them, even in January. No doubt they enjoy that cup of tea (or whatever) in front of the fire afterwards, too. They probably even enjoy complaining about the cold. But that’s still enjoyment.

So why do our TV talking heads and newspaper reporters, who do almost all their work indoors, constantly describe the cold as though it were just a touch less unbearable than being tortured? Let’s assume for a moment that they are not actually in the pay of Southern or Californian resort owners and realtors and ponder the other possibilities.

They could be wimps. But let’s reject personal insults and look elsewhere. Maybe they think their listeners/viewers/readers enjoy being pitied. So it’s a ploy to boost ratings or circulation.

Could be. But here’s another, more disquieting explanation: The media moaners and groaners are both influenced by and influencing a Vermont culture of complaint that seems to be gaining force.

Not that Vermont is unique here. This is a nationwide phenomenon; years ago, whining became the real national pastime. But though comparisons here are not quantifiable, Vermont-especially the Vermont establishment, not least its governor-seems to engage in the practice at least as much as other states, if not more. To hear some folks talk, you’d think life here was unbearable. Nobody can get a job; nobody can buy a house; nobody can start a business. But the unemployment rate is lower than the national average, the percentage of homeowners is higher, and more businesses start than fail.

Unlike the other subjects of local whining, the complaint about the cold is true. It is cold here. Enjoy it.

Getting back to the usual Friday musings  and house-keepings this week, but first a few post-scripts in the matter of the Eden/Lowell asbestos mine hullabaloo

First, it does not seem likely that the Department of Health could have successfully kept secret the controversial report that found a statistical “association” between living near the abandoned mine and getting asbestosis.

According to state officials, the report based on the Health Department study was going to be attached to the federal bankruptcy case against GAF Corporation, the successor to the company that last operated the mine. So it would have been available on the Internet to any reporter competent enough (or lucky enough) to find it, or to any one of a number of lawyers who would be happy to tell a reporter about it.

In that case, the story might have been not just the results of the study but the Department’s attempt to cover it up. One way or another, the study was going to get into the public domain.

Next, just to clear up any confusion about what description was intended for whom, the mention of people who “don’t know what they’re talking about”  did not refer to the two people quoted near the start of yesterday’s post-Rob Naramore of Lowell and Mary Walz of Hyde Park.

They may have been a little confused about the scientific rigor of statistics, but so are most of us. The folks who “don’t know what they’re talking about “are the ones who said they ate asbestos for breakfast every day for 50 years and it never did them any harm.

OK, I lied about the breakfast part. But several speakers at the community forums in Eden and Lowell said asbestos couldn’t do much harm because it hadn’t hurt them or their friends who’d been exposed to it.

Perhaps it had not. Some people can smoke two packs of cigarettes a day for 60 years and suffer few ill effects from it, too. But others get sick and die. Same with asbestos. The evidence that it is a health hazard is abundant. The evidence that it was found in greater-than-expected proportions in the area around the mine is significant, if tentative. Denial in such circumstances is ignorance.

Despite all the rancor, there was some evidence near week’s end that state officials and the local residents who were so angry at them might…well, not exactly kiss and make up, but at least talk civilly to one another about the situation.

Howard Manosh of Morrisville, who once operated the mine, suggested that the 13 towns in the area select representatives to consult regularly with officials of the Health and Environmental Conservation Departments. Both sides greeted the suggestion positively, and Manosh said Thursday he is getting together some local  people who are  “pretty diligent about what they’re doing” to meet from time to time with state officials.

There were two small mistakes on Tuesday, in the first of two posts about this controversy. The statistical study conducted by the Health Department covered a ten year period that ended six-not ten-years ago. And the report’s conclusions were based on a small number of occurrences of deaths and hospitalization, not on a small “sample.”  This was not a poll. “Sample” was the wrong word.

And a typo in yesterday’s post, in which “contracted the disease” came out “contacted…” I knew the right word, but typed the wrong one.

Expect more mistakes and less news in Vermont in the future. The jointly owned Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus announced Wednesday they will be laying off 14 workers, including one reporter and one editor.

Inside baseball of importance only to news junkies and folks in the business? Maybe not. Whoever Seth Godin is, he had a good point when he wrote in his blog: “I worry about the quality of a democracy when the state government or the local government can do what it wants without intelligent coverage. I worry about the abuse of power when the only thing a corrupt official needs to worry about is the TV news. I worry about the quality of legislation when there isn’t a passionate, unbiased reporter there to explain it to us.”

As Godin pointed out, this “intelligent coverage” by an “unbiased reporter” need not be in newspapers. In the future, more of it will be on web sites like this one. But this one is being done by one person, who is not a superman. One non-superman can help offset-but can not entirely compensate for-the cutbacks at several other news organizations.

That’s why I’m especially grateful to those of you who emailed me news tips, to those who sent donations (more of you are welcome to do that), and to Mark Johnson for once again having me on his radio program on WDEV.

Next week: From the Legislature.

What was needed, said Rob Naramore, a realtor who lives in Lowell, was information “based on science versus just statistics.”

A viewpoint heard often in Eden and Lowell this week as local residents confronted state officials who had released a study finding an “association” between living in the area and being stricken with asbestosis. One speaker after another assailed the study as “mere statistics.”

“Nobody tried to find any case histories,” said Lynn Noah, a property owner in Eden, discussing the five deaths attributed to asbestosis found by the study. Mary Walz of Hyde Park agreed. “If you were going to ignite this kind of fear, why didn’t you get in your car and drive up here and take some case histories?” she said.

In the Northeast Kingdom, it seems, case studies are science; statistics is not.

But statistics is a science, a “mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data,” according to Wikipedia. To many scientists, statistics are more reliable than “mere” case studies, which can enlighten, but also distort. Case studies often depend on the statements of individuals, who can forget, or lie.

But these days it seems that everybody is an expert, even (especially?) those who don’t know what they’re talking about. Nor is it considered good form to point out that some people don’t know what they’re talking about. At the two forums, several speakers proclaimed with great certainty that breathing in asbestos fibers was no health hazard at all, apparently confident that no one in the room would correct them, either at the time or in the next day’s news reports.

For some reason, correcting blatant errors by common citizens, as opposed to public officials or politicians, is considered bad form in these parts. But a person who speaks about a public policy dispute at a public meeting is-while speaking-engaged in politics, and just as accountable for his or her knowledge or lack thereof as a candidate for office.

Then again, just because people don’t know what they are talking about does not necessarily mean they’re wrong. Studies based on “mere statistics” can be meaningful, but this finding of an “association” was based on such a tiny number of cases that it almost begged to be challenged.

In the study, statisticians from the Vermont Department of Health found “statistically significant increases in asbestosis disease/death” among people who lived within 10 miles of an abandoned asbestos mine on Belvedere Mountain from 1996 through 2005. They reached this conclusion-which was not a conclusion that asbestos from the mine caused the diseases or deaths-because five people in the “exposed” area died of asbestosis, and because there were 14 “hospital discharges with a primary or contributing diagnosis of asbestosis.”

That’s not a lot of deaths or diseases, And it turns out that two of the people who died of the disease had worked at the mine, leaving only three who would have contacted the disease just from breathing the area’s ambient air. As to the discharges, they were 14 separate incidents, not necessarily 14 separate patients. In theory, all 14 could have been for one patient who got out of the hospital after 14 treatments for  the disease.

So the entire conclusion was based on three people who died and somewhere between one and 14 people who went to the hospital. Over a ten-year period. Who could take such a report seriously?

Dr. David Egilman could.

“I wanted to publish it in my journal,” he said. “It’s as good as that kind of study can be.”

Dr. Egilman is a Clinical Associate Professor Brown University’s Department of Community Health and the editor of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health.  Those credentials would seem to make him one of the go-to folks in the field.

It isn’t that he thinks the study is perfect, or that its conclusions  (as the Health Department acknowledges) are anything more than tentative.

“There’s a problem,” he said “There are no perfect studies…(but) I would have this one go through my peer review process. It should be in the domain of scientific debate.”

And scientific debate, he said, is not always aided by talking to people. For instance, one of the objections voice frequently at the community forums was that the asbestosis sufferers in the target area may have been exposed to asbestos fibers elsewhere. For instance, it turns out that one of them had been in the Navy, and sailors often work around asbestos.

The assumption of the study was that this doesn’t make much difference because it’s likely that as many Vermonters who live outside the “exposed area”-and there are almost 40 times as many of them-also served in the Navy. So the disproportionate incidence of asbestosis sufferers in the area would still be statistically significant.

That assumption, of course, is not a certainty. But finding out how many people in the rest of the state were not just in the Navy but worked around asbestos would be prohibitively expensive.

“I don’t think taxpayers want to pay for that,” Dr. Egilman said.

Furthermore, he said, “it’s very hard to interview a dead person. The next best thing is to interview their relatives,” who may not know much about their deceased loved one’s past asbestos exposure.

While the Health Department study has not yet been peer reviewed, it was examined by the experts at the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry (ATSDR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The federal experts had 37 questions and criticisms of the report, most of them on highly technical matters, but in general they endorsed its “remarkable finding of increased (Odds Ratio) of asbestosis” in the area and said the “crisply written document…demonstrates a need for further action.”

The scientific validity of the Health Department report seems to be sound, then, at least in the judgment of independent experts who have read it.

That does not necessarily demonstrate that it should have been released, considering how tentative its conclusions are and how likely it was, as Mary Walz of Hyde Park put it, “to ignite this kind of fear.”

Neil Aguiar, a statistician at the University of Vermont (who has not read the study) noted that “association is not a very strong claim. There are associations between crime rates and temperature, between cavities and reading comprehension. Association is basically an investigating tool. Association is not a conclusion. If the article leads you to believe there’s an association that’s not really news, it isn’t something that I would publish.”

He also questioned the statistical significance of any study that does not have “at least five occurrences” of any finding. Because two of the five asbestosis deaths were of mine workers, the group is “not homogeneous,” and therefore “even if you find statistical significance, you can’t rely on it.”

But Aguiar conceded that getting enough occurrences isn’t easy in Vermont because it its small population, and that in the final analysis, “the decision (of whether to publish a study) ends up being political or ethical. Statistical science can only give you so much information, and you tend to do what the right thing is to do on the basis of public opinion and public health.”

As to the ethical criterion, Dr. Wendy Davis, the head of the Health Department said she had no doubts. “I could not in good conscience” have withheld the document, she said.

Her ethical judgment is, of course, hers to make, and not really reviewable. Her political judgment is reviewable, and the reviews are bad. Dr. Davis, a pediatrician, may be a dedicated physician and capable administrator. But from her performance at the community forums, her political ear would seem to be solid tin.

It isn’t that she said anything outrageous. But she and the other state and federal officials who addressed the crowds spoke jargon. Explaining an error by talking about inconsistency in “data sets” is not communication.

There’s a bit of irony here. Gov. Jim Douglas’s administration has been criticized for padding the state payroll with public relations staffers. In this case, though, a good political consultant might have warned Health Department officials that release of the report would spark controversy.

Not that it should have been withheld. The information was prepared by public workers on the public payroll and the public has a right to see it. But perhaps it could have been presented more delicately.

That, however, is just politics, which, unlike statistics, is not a science.