H. Sterling Burnett @ Heartland Insititute
The U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) is taking a page out of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) playbook, to improve the transparency behind the science used to develop regulations on the millions of acres of public lands it controls, and the legal actions it takes in response to lawsuits filed against it.
On September 11, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed a Secretarial Order promoting transparency and accountability in consent decrees and settlement agreements, aimed at ending secret “sue and settle” deals with activist plaintiffs.
Zinke’s order comes almost a year after the EPA issued rules ending such agreements at the agency.
DOI reports from January 1, 2012 through January 19, 2017, Interior entered into more than 460 settlement agreements and consent decrees, resulting in the payment of more than $4.4 billion to plaintiffs, while keeping key provisions of these agreements secret. In President Barack Obama’s last year in office, Interior entered into 96 such agreements or decrees, costing taxpayers more than $1.7 billion.
Although consent decrees and settlements may sometimes be a prudent way to avoid costly litigation in cases DOI is likely to lose, Zinke notes, “concerns have been raised” DOI has used secret settlement agreements to undermine the safeguards Congress established to ensure public input into policymaking.
Order 3368 requires DOI to file public notice of all litigation, proposed settlement agreements, and consent decrees in the Federal Register. Another provision establishes a process for public input before Interior can approve a settlement with significant policy implications or large payouts.
The order requires DOI to establish a publicly accessible “Litigation” webpage linked in the federal Office of the Solicitor’s homepage. Entries on this page must include the names of the parties involved in litigation, the case number, the date filed, the court where the complaint was filed, and the statutory or regulatory provisions at issue in the complaint.
By December 11, 2018, the Solicitor’s office must begin compiling, and the Chief Information Officer to begin posting, a searchable list of final judicial and administrative consent decrees and settlement agreements governing DOI’s actions. The summaries must include a brief description of each decree or agreement, details of any attorney fees or costs paid, and a link to the text of the decree or agreement.
Also, within 15 days of receiving service of a complaint or petition for review of a law or regulation, the Solicitor must notify any state or tribe possibly affected by a pending complaint or petition, except when the state or tribe is a party to the petition.
An example of how this may work comes from EPA’s website, which now includes a page titled “Notices of Intent to Sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” providing details of nearly 300 notices of intent to sue, mostly from citizen groups plus a few from state and local governments, with a separate table listing about 380 active environmental cases, and a third table providing details of 15 finalized consent decrees and settlement agreements.
In another pro-transparency, pro-accountability move, in the last week of September, DOI followed EPA’s lead once again, implementing a new policy intended to improve the transparency, integrity, and quality of the science its agencies use to make decisions. Going forward, officials may use only scientific studies or findings the underlying data for which are publicly available and reproducible, with few exceptions. EPA proposed a similar policy earlier in 2018.
DOI’s policy covers the science used by the wide variety of bureaus under its jurisdiction, including the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey, affecting the science used to shape policies ranging from endangered species determinations and protections—such as the decision to list polar bear populations as endangered based on speculative future risks from climate change even while their numbers are increasing—to decisions about grazing, hunting, mining, and oil and gas production on public lands and offshore. Under the new policy, the climate science used to justify any future actions by DOI to close public lands or offshore areas to oil and gas development, or impose more stringent limits on greenhouse gas emissions from those operations, would now be open to review by the public, including outside scientific auditors.
Announcing the policy, Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt said the order is intended to ensure Interior “bases its decisions on the best available science and provide[s] the American people with enough information to thoughtfully and substantively evaluate the data, methodology, and analysis used by the Department to inform its decisions.”
People have a right to know what their government is up to, yet under previous presidents the science used to justify regulations and policies and the terms of settlement agreements at DOI often blindsided local, state, and tribal governments, industries, public land lessors, and private land owners adjacent to public properties, imposing huge costs on them with little or no notice, based on science hidden from public view. This was unfair, amounting to regulation behind closed doors.
These orders should improve the transparency and soundness of DOI’s policies by giving the general public, we who pay DOI’s bills and for whom they are supposed to work, some input into its decisions.
Trump’s DOI is giving the government back to the people, or at least ensuring we have oversight of and influence on it. Only environmentalists and crony capitalists who historically, in secrecy, have wielded inordinate power over government policy could be opposed to that. Every other department and agency should adopt similar policies.
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Monday, October 29, 2018
IARC Retraction Watch Begins: They Faked Images In Controversial Claims
By Hank Campbell — October 25, 2018 @ American Council on Science and Health
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has a new leader, an Old Guard insider named Dr. Elisabete Weiderpass, who promised not to change the status quo, which means they remain stuck with an old problem; credibility.
While for its first 20 years they were a much-needed voice of reason that stood up to activists claiming that some new chemical of the month was a carcinogen because it could kill rats, for the last 10 IARC have been the source of ridicule among the science community. And that is because the environmentalists whose hype they once exposed played the long game and wormed their way inside.(1) Today, thanks to letting them hijack that science body, we are told to believe that a weedkiller can cause cancer and deli meat is as bad for you as plutonium or mustard gas. Such claims are literally baloney.
But media who love centralized authoritarian bodies and veils of anti-corporate credibility have gleefully reported each more cosmic claim from the French organization during that time. They have even touted media press releases distributed prior to actual reports as fact. Though IARC decisions do not consider risk (to determine a hazard they allow papers that show 5 orders of magnitude, so one dose of a compound is the same as 10,000 to them) the WHO group will mention risk dozens of times in media claims in their press releases.
There is just one problem they face: Every few years, a new crop of journalists enters the field, and not only might they not be in the bag for your brand of activism, they might be neutral and wonder why no one turns their gaze on the manipulations of supplement hucksters, alternative to medicine purveyors, and environmental lawyers. And some scientists who engage in public outreach are critical thinkers about studies everywhere, like molecular biologist Leonid Schneider and microbiologist Dr. Elisabeth Bik, who have called out groups who do this and also journal editors who enable them with a desire to publish provocative claims that will bring international media links.
A recent analysis of both journals and IARC involvement, titled WHO Cures Cancer In Photoshop, went into detail about the cultural flaws that allowed IARC to lose its way but more broadly about how easy it is to duplicate or reuse or slightly change graphics to look original in a science study. Some of the inferences I don't agree with - the involvement of a private sector scientist does not sway results by default, that is Cui bono? conspiracy signaling - but the overall examination is sound. (2)
Schneider is not alone in being concerned that IARC is trapped in the past using a methodology that is easily exploited by activists with nefarious agendas and patience, like Professor Martyn Smyth of Council for Education and Research on Toxics (CERT) (3) or Dr. Chris Portier of Environmental Defense Fund. They used 21st century strategy to infect a stodgy 20th century institution, which creates ad hoc working groups based on having friends inside, refuses to be transparent, and has no rules for the study of each compound. It has become just statisticians finding things to correlate to cancer. As Dr. Angela Logomasini of Competitive Enterprise Institute notes in the Washington Times, "The working groups are free to focus on myriad small-scale studies with implausible results. That can lead to cherry-picking that serves the biases of working group members."
It certainly has. Look at two California court cases, on coffee and on weedkiller, and the first thing you will find are two IARC participants mentioned above, Chris Portier and Martyn Smith, who have been paid by attorneys to help them sue companies.
Is there hope? There certainly is. The American Council on Science and Health Board of Scientific Advisors was part of a group of four people called on to testify before the U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee about IARC and we recommended Congress use its financial leverage, and the credibility U.S. backing grants, to rein the rogue statistical body in.
The only opposition we faced on that panel was Natural Resources Defense Council's Dr. Jennifer Sass, who argued IARC's closed door mentality and lack of transparency about its working groups should remain untouched. That was the opposite of what she claimed in 2002 and when that was noted she could only reply, "2002 was a long time ago."
In many ways, this is true, and IARC should consider shucking off the parts of our past that no longer have validity in 2018.
NOTE:
(1) If your career goal is to get a fat paycheck as an expert witness or as a consultant at an environmental NGO, today there is a clear roadmap. First, write provocative epidemiology papers linking harmless things to health effects - it can be miracle vegetables creating eternal life or scary chemicals taking years away. Second, become a Washington insider and get a title, any title, from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). If you are good with media and share the correct political proclivities, use that title to get quoted frequently in the New York Times. Soon enough, a litigation group like Earthjustice or Environmental Defense Fund or Center for Biological Diversity will start offering you money. And if you are really good at political maneuvering, you will get a slot on an IARC Working Group, where you can get the chemical you wanted banned all along subjected to a review. Once that is complete, you can claim to be a U.N. expert on the chemical you want banned while signaling to trial lawyers you are ready to "play ball", and then the expert witness checks will start coming in.
(2) "Apparently, by re-using certain western blot bands, a potential prevention therapy for cervical cancer can be established. Amazing research, done by WHO scientists at IARC, with public support."
He pulls no punches. You should read it.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has a new leader, an Old Guard insider named Dr. Elisabete Weiderpass, who promised not to change the status quo, which means they remain stuck with an old problem; credibility.
While for its first 20 years they were a much-needed voice of reason that stood up to activists claiming that some new chemical of the month was a carcinogen because it could kill rats, for the last 10 IARC have been the source of ridicule among the science community. And that is because the environmentalists whose hype they once exposed played the long game and wormed their way inside.(1) Today, thanks to letting them hijack that science body, we are told to believe that a weedkiller can cause cancer and deli meat is as bad for you as plutonium or mustard gas. Such claims are literally baloney.
But media who love centralized authoritarian bodies and veils of anti-corporate credibility have gleefully reported each more cosmic claim from the French organization during that time. They have even touted media press releases distributed prior to actual reports as fact. Though IARC decisions do not consider risk (to determine a hazard they allow papers that show 5 orders of magnitude, so one dose of a compound is the same as 10,000 to them) the WHO group will mention risk dozens of times in media claims in their press releases.
There is just one problem they face: Every few years, a new crop of journalists enters the field, and not only might they not be in the bag for your brand of activism, they might be neutral and wonder why no one turns their gaze on the manipulations of supplement hucksters, alternative to medicine purveyors, and environmental lawyers. And some scientists who engage in public outreach are critical thinkers about studies everywhere, like molecular biologist Leonid Schneider and microbiologist Dr. Elisabeth Bik, who have called out groups who do this and also journal editors who enable them with a desire to publish provocative claims that will bring international media links.
A recent analysis of both journals and IARC involvement, titled WHO Cures Cancer In Photoshop, went into detail about the cultural flaws that allowed IARC to lose its way but more broadly about how easy it is to duplicate or reuse or slightly change graphics to look original in a science study. Some of the inferences I don't agree with - the involvement of a private sector scientist does not sway results by default, that is Cui bono? conspiracy signaling - but the overall examination is sound. (2)
Schneider is not alone in being concerned that IARC is trapped in the past using a methodology that is easily exploited by activists with nefarious agendas and patience, like Professor Martyn Smyth of Council for Education and Research on Toxics (CERT) (3) or Dr. Chris Portier of Environmental Defense Fund. They used 21st century strategy to infect a stodgy 20th century institution, which creates ad hoc working groups based on having friends inside, refuses to be transparent, and has no rules for the study of each compound. It has become just statisticians finding things to correlate to cancer. As Dr. Angela Logomasini of Competitive Enterprise Institute notes in the Washington Times, "The working groups are free to focus on myriad small-scale studies with implausible results. That can lead to cherry-picking that serves the biases of working group members."
It certainly has. Look at two California court cases, on coffee and on weedkiller, and the first thing you will find are two IARC participants mentioned above, Chris Portier and Martyn Smith, who have been paid by attorneys to help them sue companies.
Is there hope? There certainly is. The American Council on Science and Health Board of Scientific Advisors was part of a group of four people called on to testify before the U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee about IARC and we recommended Congress use its financial leverage, and the credibility U.S. backing grants, to rein the rogue statistical body in.
The only opposition we faced on that panel was Natural Resources Defense Council's Dr. Jennifer Sass, who argued IARC's closed door mentality and lack of transparency about its working groups should remain untouched. That was the opposite of what she claimed in 2002 and when that was noted she could only reply, "2002 was a long time ago."
In many ways, this is true, and IARC should consider shucking off the parts of our past that no longer have validity in 2018.
NOTE:
(1) If your career goal is to get a fat paycheck as an expert witness or as a consultant at an environmental NGO, today there is a clear roadmap. First, write provocative epidemiology papers linking harmless things to health effects - it can be miracle vegetables creating eternal life or scary chemicals taking years away. Second, become a Washington insider and get a title, any title, from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). If you are good with media and share the correct political proclivities, use that title to get quoted frequently in the New York Times. Soon enough, a litigation group like Earthjustice or Environmental Defense Fund or Center for Biological Diversity will start offering you money. And if you are really good at political maneuvering, you will get a slot on an IARC Working Group, where you can get the chemical you wanted banned all along subjected to a review. Once that is complete, you can claim to be a U.N. expert on the chemical you want banned while signaling to trial lawyers you are ready to "play ball", and then the expert witness checks will start coming in.
(2) "Apparently, by re-using certain western blot bands, a potential prevention therapy for cervical cancer can be established. Amazing research, done by WHO scientists at IARC, with public support."
He pulls no punches. You should read it.
Attention @PNASNews @jbiolchem @J_Immunol @ASMicrobiology @PLOSPathogens @JExpMed @ACasadevall1 Look what @IARCWHO published in your journals. https://t.co/PhM33CET8l(3) Despite its lofty name, CERT is not a council at all, there is no 300-person Board of Scientific Advisors like we have, it was instead created by Metzger Law group to have a non-profit to act as a front for lawsuits against companies - if it exists outside paper at all it now it seems to be "run" by a politically
— Leonid Schneider (@schneiderleonid) October 11, 2018
Sunday, October 28, 2018
The UN Wants to be Our World Government By 2030
By E. Jeffrey Ludwig October 27, 2018
In the 1960s, an informed but naïve undergraduate, I was walking across the campus of the University of Pennsylvania with the Chairman of the Chemistry Department, Prof. Charles C. Price. He told me that he was president of the United World Federalists, and asked if I knew what that organization was. When I said that I did not, he replied that they believed in a one-world government that would grow out of the United Nations. I was nonplussed as I had never heard anyone suggest that idea before. To me, the United Nations was a benevolent organization dedicated to pressuring the world community in the direction of peace, and to operating charitable programs to help the struggling, impoverished peoples of the world. I imagined the UN as a kind of United Way on a worldwide scale.
How would Prof. Price’s vision of a new world government emerge? Although there was a socialistic thread in its founding document, the United Nations was formed based on a vision of human rights presented in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (UDHR) which placed the concept of rights at the forefront for the progress of the world body. And rights are the mainstay for uplifting human freedom and the dignity of the individual. The UDHR document followed many amazing documents that presented rights as the central concept of the post-feudal world: the English Declaration (or Bill) of Rights of 1689, the U.S. Declaration of Independence with its important and forceful assertion of inalienable natural rights, the powerful U.S. Bill of Rights enacted in 1791, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789)...............United Nations was formed based on a vision of human rights presented in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (UDHR) .............The word “rights” appears in almost every sentence of the 1869-word UN document. The document is literally obsessed with rights ...........To Read More.....
In the 1960s, an informed but naïve undergraduate, I was walking across the campus of the University of Pennsylvania with the Chairman of the Chemistry Department, Prof. Charles C. Price. He told me that he was president of the United World Federalists, and asked if I knew what that organization was. When I said that I did not, he replied that they believed in a one-world government that would grow out of the United Nations. I was nonplussed as I had never heard anyone suggest that idea before. To me, the United Nations was a benevolent organization dedicated to pressuring the world community in the direction of peace, and to operating charitable programs to help the struggling, impoverished peoples of the world. I imagined the UN as a kind of United Way on a worldwide scale.
How would Prof. Price’s vision of a new world government emerge? Although there was a socialistic thread in its founding document, the United Nations was formed based on a vision of human rights presented in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (UDHR) which placed the concept of rights at the forefront for the progress of the world body. And rights are the mainstay for uplifting human freedom and the dignity of the individual. The UDHR document followed many amazing documents that presented rights as the central concept of the post-feudal world: the English Declaration (or Bill) of Rights of 1689, the U.S. Declaration of Independence with its important and forceful assertion of inalienable natural rights, the powerful U.S. Bill of Rights enacted in 1791, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789)...............United Nations was formed based on a vision of human rights presented in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (UDHR) .............The word “rights” appears in almost every sentence of the 1869-word UN document. The document is literally obsessed with rights ...........To Read More.....
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
PNAS And Microbiomes: Will They Publish A 'Study' About Bee Chakras Next?
By Hank Campbell — October 18, 2018@ American Council on Science and Health
Over the last 15 years, PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has gone into serious decline. An organization once so prestigious Carl Sagan, the most prominent scientist in America, was unqualified to be admitted, is now scrambling to stay relevant. They recently announced they are going to cease print publication, but austerity is not their problem, embrace of junk science is.
There is no other way to categorize a recent paper suggesting the microbiome of bees may be at risk due to science.
Want to believe that hurricanes with female names are more dangerous because men are sexist? That was PNAS. Want to believe that black people look "blacker" during bad economic times? PNAS again. When Facebook manipulated user news feeds as a social experiment PNAS had no issue publishing the results. Had those claims been in obscure journals, none of them would have made their way into the New York Times, Washington Post, or other popular political newspapers that dabble in science.(1) Yet they did get in, and PNAS has remained relevant thanks to journalists who love to write about provocative claims they want to believe.(2)
And then there is the microbiome. Over the last century, there were 3 articles per year about our natural gut flora. Starting in 2011 we began to see three per day despite there being little more known about what good or bad might be for an average individual. Yet journalists love it, and supplement companies love it, and yogurt companies love it, and therefore some academics are going to write about it.
And if you really want to get media attention, use the pop science microbiome fad, throw in bees and chemicals, and then get it in PNAS.
PNAS, microbiome, bees, and glyphosate: The recipe for a mainstream media feast
Despite spending a fortune on ad campaigns and email blasts to journalists, activists have been unable to convince the public that bees are in decline when data show they are fine.(3) A recent PNAS paper avoids that pitfall by suggesting they are only not in decline yet. And if you believe any change must be a bad thing, then you are certain to believe glyphosate, a key ingredient in the weedkiller Roundup, could be the cause of change. The compound is in fashion for media again because a jury in California recently said that if a company can't prove that a chemical didn't cause a man's cancer, then they must pay trial lawyers $289 million.(4)
That's a perfect storm for PNAS so they recently published a paper noting glyphosate is changing the bee microbiome. You read that right, get those bees some probiotic yogurt.
Or not. First, the levels of glyphosate they used are not real world. Bees are not diving into vats of chemicals and swimming for 12 hours. And if they did do that, the response to higher doses of a chemical should be more change, yet in this paper low doses had more change. That is homeopathy, not science. Second, how do they know change is bad? Even the foremost expert in the bee microbiome is scientifically equivalent to being the tallest person in a room full of leprechauns. No one really knows anything yet.
In reality, it would be worrisome if a chemical did not change the microbiome of bees. Or yours. Or mine. I ate some delicious cinnamon bread from Trader Joe's while I wrote this. My microbiome changed, my hormones changed. Food and drink do that. But if I want to scare you, I could say Trader Joe's cinnamon bread contains an Endocrine Disrupting Chemical. Which is what anti-science conspiracy theorists like Pete Myers and a tiny cabal of political journalists (weirdly centered in the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute run by someone who should know better, Perri Klass, M.D.) do.
As Dr. Josh Bloom noted, "Although the relative composition of the bee gut biome may have changed, none of the eight bacteria measured was eliminated. And there was no difference in the total number of bacteria in either the high-dose, low-dose, or placebo groups."
What is most telling to biologists; Roundup can only affect the shikimate pathway in plants. It can't do anything to you or me. Believing it does is like embracing chemtrails or that government is out to get your precious bodily fluids.
The next phase: Chemicals are changing human chakras (also available for bees and mice)
But I don't want activists to lose hope. Their efforts to claiminsects birds bees wild bees bees are dying erratic changing is going to be aided as long as some academics want media attention. And activists can continue to move the goalposts to create media buzz some academics will want to capitalize on. If this latest stuff about a changing microbiome does not work, they can next contend GMOs neonics glyphosate are changing their chakras.
Or they can insert any popular chemical. I will make it easy for them with a simple chart showing which chakra will be changed by what common chemical. You are welcome, Greenpeace.
There is no question the woo contingent is where the money is at. A recent conference on "transcendental meditation" had Yogic Flying Instructors (though none have ever been filmed actually flying) but also Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, and Katie Couric. The audience listened to militant anti-science cranks like John Fagan (5) spout nonsense such as "the rapid reversal of the U.S. food system from broad acceptance to widespread rejection of GMO foods correlates with a sharp increase in coherence in U.S. collective consciousness, when a large permanent group of TM practitioners was assembled in Iowa, USA.”(6)
That's right, he said they meditated in Iowa and more people nationwide bought organic food, $2 billion in activist groups promoting their corporate donors had nothing at all to do with it.
PNAS, you can do better.
NOTES:
(1) I have gone after them before. An article I wrote in the Wall Street Journal criticizing their policy that allowed Academy members to be pre-selected to do peer review for their friends and hand walk studies into publication forced them to change that policy. I first noticed it because of a 2002 paper by activist Tyrone Hayes, which claimed a weedkiller was essentially making male frogs more feminine. It got into the New York Times and thus got a special EPA panel called but the EPA wasn't able to use the study that got the panel called because the Berkeley professor refused to show his data. How did it get published if no peer review looked at data? The pre-selected reviewer was Hayes' friend and Academy member David Wake, whose wife chaired the department Hayes is in. No impartial reviewer ever saw it. And no one has been able to replicate the work of Hayes.
(2) Despite its decline, PNAS still has some cachet, the way Popular Science does even though they have become more of a lifestyle blog than a science magazine, Bonnier Corporation, the parent of Popular Science, Field & Stream, and numerous other publications, has to pay the bills but this is a bit much.
(3) Bees do have large periodic die-offs, those have been recorded for as long as records of bees have been kept (~1,000 years) and when one occurred in the 1990s, activists blamed sprayed pesticides. So science did something terrific; a seed treatment, when plants are most vulnerable to pests, based on a natural insecticide. Yet when another blip happened, activists blamed those. To no avail, bee numbers rebounded nicely. Then they claimed that wild bees were being harmed, which was at least clever, since there are ~25,000 species (we don't even know exactly how many) of bees and only 7 have hives so wild bees can't be counted, but even the staunchest supporters of environmental groups in the United States balked at that.
(4) The plaintiff will only get about $20 million of that $289 million, if it is not overturned. It's good to be a trial lawyer.
(5) Fagan created HRI Labs, which recently conducted a test that detected glyphosate in urine and then co-wrote a paper about it, with Paul Mills, who is a graduate of, you guessed it, the very same Maharishi University of Management in Iowa.
(6) Dear Mr. Seinfeld - you are a legendary comedian. Your job is to be skeptical and ridicule nonsense. Please tell me you were only there because the check cleared and you don't actually believe any of this nonsense.
Over the last 15 years, PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has gone into serious decline. An organization once so prestigious Carl Sagan, the most prominent scientist in America, was unqualified to be admitted, is now scrambling to stay relevant. They recently announced they are going to cease print publication, but austerity is not their problem, embrace of junk science is.
There is no other way to categorize a recent paper suggesting the microbiome of bees may be at risk due to science.
Want to believe that hurricanes with female names are more dangerous because men are sexist? That was PNAS. Want to believe that black people look "blacker" during bad economic times? PNAS again. When Facebook manipulated user news feeds as a social experiment PNAS had no issue publishing the results. Had those claims been in obscure journals, none of them would have made their way into the New York Times, Washington Post, or other popular political newspapers that dabble in science.(1) Yet they did get in, and PNAS has remained relevant thanks to journalists who love to write about provocative claims they want to believe.(2)
And then there is the microbiome. Over the last century, there were 3 articles per year about our natural gut flora. Starting in 2011 we began to see three per day despite there being little more known about what good or bad might be for an average individual. Yet journalists love it, and supplement companies love it, and yogurt companies love it, and therefore some academics are going to write about it.
And if you really want to get media attention, use the pop science microbiome fad, throw in bees and chemicals, and then get it in PNAS.
PNAS, microbiome, bees, and glyphosate: The recipe for a mainstream media feast
Despite spending a fortune on ad campaigns and email blasts to journalists, activists have been unable to convince the public that bees are in decline when data show they are fine.(3) A recent PNAS paper avoids that pitfall by suggesting they are only not in decline yet. And if you believe any change must be a bad thing, then you are certain to believe glyphosate, a key ingredient in the weedkiller Roundup, could be the cause of change. The compound is in fashion for media again because a jury in California recently said that if a company can't prove that a chemical didn't cause a man's cancer, then they must pay trial lawyers $289 million.(4)
That's a perfect storm for PNAS so they recently published a paper noting glyphosate is changing the bee microbiome. You read that right, get those bees some probiotic yogurt.
Or not. First, the levels of glyphosate they used are not real world. Bees are not diving into vats of chemicals and swimming for 12 hours. And if they did do that, the response to higher doses of a chemical should be more change, yet in this paper low doses had more change. That is homeopathy, not science. Second, how do they know change is bad? Even the foremost expert in the bee microbiome is scientifically equivalent to being the tallest person in a room full of leprechauns. No one really knows anything yet.
In reality, it would be worrisome if a chemical did not change the microbiome of bees. Or yours. Or mine. I ate some delicious cinnamon bread from Trader Joe's while I wrote this. My microbiome changed, my hormones changed. Food and drink do that. But if I want to scare you, I could say Trader Joe's cinnamon bread contains an Endocrine Disrupting Chemical. Which is what anti-science conspiracy theorists like Pete Myers and a tiny cabal of political journalists (weirdly centered in the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute run by someone who should know better, Perri Klass, M.D.) do.
As Dr. Josh Bloom noted, "Although the relative composition of the bee gut biome may have changed, none of the eight bacteria measured was eliminated. And there was no difference in the total number of bacteria in either the high-dose, low-dose, or placebo groups."
What is most telling to biologists; Roundup can only affect the shikimate pathway in plants. It can't do anything to you or me. Believing it does is like embracing chemtrails or that government is out to get your precious bodily fluids.
The next phase: Chemicals are changing human chakras (also available for bees and mice)
But I don't want activists to lose hope. Their efforts to claim
Or they can insert any popular chemical. I will make it easy for them with a simple chart showing which chakra will be changed by what common chemical. You are welcome, Greenpeace.
There is no question the woo contingent is where the money is at. A recent conference on "transcendental meditation" had Yogic Flying Instructors (though none have ever been filmed actually flying) but also Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, and Katie Couric. The audience listened to militant anti-science cranks like John Fagan (5) spout nonsense such as "the rapid reversal of the U.S. food system from broad acceptance to widespread rejection of GMO foods correlates with a sharp increase in coherence in U.S. collective consciousness, when a large permanent group of TM practitioners was assembled in Iowa, USA.”(6)
That's right, he said they meditated in Iowa and more people nationwide bought organic food, $2 billion in activist groups promoting their corporate donors had nothing at all to do with it.
PNAS, you can do better.
NOTES:
(1) I have gone after them before. An article I wrote in the Wall Street Journal criticizing their policy that allowed Academy members to be pre-selected to do peer review for their friends and hand walk studies into publication forced them to change that policy. I first noticed it because of a 2002 paper by activist Tyrone Hayes, which claimed a weedkiller was essentially making male frogs more feminine. It got into the New York Times and thus got a special EPA panel called but the EPA wasn't able to use the study that got the panel called because the Berkeley professor refused to show his data. How did it get published if no peer review looked at data? The pre-selected reviewer was Hayes' friend and Academy member David Wake, whose wife chaired the department Hayes is in. No impartial reviewer ever saw it. And no one has been able to replicate the work of Hayes.
(2) Despite its decline, PNAS still has some cachet, the way Popular Science does even though they have become more of a lifestyle blog than a science magazine, Bonnier Corporation, the parent of Popular Science, Field & Stream, and numerous other publications, has to pay the bills but this is a bit much.
(3) Bees do have large periodic die-offs, those have been recorded for as long as records of bees have been kept (~1,000 years) and when one occurred in the 1990s, activists blamed sprayed pesticides. So science did something terrific; a seed treatment, when plants are most vulnerable to pests, based on a natural insecticide. Yet when another blip happened, activists blamed those. To no avail, bee numbers rebounded nicely. Then they claimed that wild bees were being harmed, which was at least clever, since there are ~25,000 species (we don't even know exactly how many) of bees and only 7 have hives so wild bees can't be counted, but even the staunchest supporters of environmental groups in the United States balked at that.
(4) The plaintiff will only get about $20 million of that $289 million, if it is not overturned. It's good to be a trial lawyer.
(5) Fagan created HRI Labs, which recently conducted a test that detected glyphosate in urine and then co-wrote a paper about it, with Paul Mills, who is a graduate of, you guessed it, the very same Maharishi University of Management in Iowa.
(6) Dear Mr. Seinfeld - you are a legendary comedian. Your job is to be skeptical and ridicule nonsense. Please tell me you were only there because the check cleared and you don't actually believe any of this nonsense.
Monday, October 22, 2018
"Unreasonable": Superior Court Judge Signals She's Going To Gut Glyphosate Cancer Judgment
By ACSH Staff — October 19, 2018,
In a blow to trial lawyers hoping to profit from a sympathetic jury in San Francisco, not to mention organic trade groups and activists at the University of California San Francisco, Superior Court Judge Suzanne Bolanos has shown she is likely to grant Monsanto's request for a new trial in the case they lost brought by trial lawyers who claim a weedkiller which can only affect the shikimate pathway in plants somehow caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma in a human.
In the first trial, an attorney from Baum Hedlund Aristei Goldman assured jurors they would "change the world" if they found Monsanto liable. Brent Wisner painted a picture of terrified corporate executives lamenting a decision against them. suggesting the science community knows it is wrong and was worried about being caught. Though it was pure theater, it worked, and despite it being impossible for a weedkiller to have a cancerous effect on human biology, they awarded an alarming $250,000,000 in punitive damages, because the left coast jury believed the company knew that the product could cause cancer and warned no one. And that seems to be what concerned Judge Bolanos, who noted there was no "clear and convincing evidence" of malice. Which is legalese for 'the jury got it wrong.'
In reality, the company would not warn people about cancer because it would be illegal. It is false advertising and they can't be compelled to lie on a label any more than they could claim Roundup cures cancer. The entire scientific community has proved glyphosate only acts in plants. The only group that suggests otherwise is a cabal of statisticians at the U.N., and one of them, Chris Portier, was outed as being a consultant for an activist group which was lobbying against glyphosate. He even signed a contract with trial lawyers out to sue over glyphosate before the IARC finding he helped manipulate was released. How did they know it would go in their favor? Critics believe Portier tipped them off so he could collect a check.
The ruling was scientifically an abomination but the behavior of the jury since has been even more bizarre. Three jurors have written the judge to tell her she would be wrong to overturn it, and have made numerous media appearances, which is uncharacteristically aggressive. But the lawyers, armed with a support network of trade groups for a sector that competes against companies like Monsanto, have made that part of their strategy. The fact that Organic Consumers Association, the trade group which provides the bulk of the funding behind Baum Hedlund allies U.S. Right To Know, is prominently egging on the jurors may be a concern for the judge.
“I have never heard of jurors after the fact picking a fight with the judge over judicial rulings,” said Dr. Val Giddings, a senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington.
The plaintiff, Dewayne Johnson, contracted non-Hodgkin lymphoma and was convinced that sporadic use of glyphosate in the weedkiller Roundup caused it, but a study of 55,000 full-time agriculture workers who used the herbicide found no evidence it increased risk of cancers. The American Council on Science and Health submitted an amicus brief for the pro-science side.
In a blow to trial lawyers hoping to profit from a sympathetic jury in San Francisco, not to mention organic trade groups and activists at the University of California San Francisco, Superior Court Judge Suzanne Bolanos has shown she is likely to grant Monsanto's request for a new trial in the case they lost brought by trial lawyers who claim a weedkiller which can only affect the shikimate pathway in plants somehow caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma in a human.
In the first trial, an attorney from Baum Hedlund Aristei Goldman assured jurors they would "change the world" if they found Monsanto liable. Brent Wisner painted a picture of terrified corporate executives lamenting a decision against them. suggesting the science community knows it is wrong and was worried about being caught. Though it was pure theater, it worked, and despite it being impossible for a weedkiller to have a cancerous effect on human biology, they awarded an alarming $250,000,000 in punitive damages, because the left coast jury believed the company knew that the product could cause cancer and warned no one. And that seems to be what concerned Judge Bolanos, who noted there was no "clear and convincing evidence" of malice. Which is legalese for 'the jury got it wrong.'
In reality, the company would not warn people about cancer because it would be illegal. It is false advertising and they can't be compelled to lie on a label any more than they could claim Roundup cures cancer. The entire scientific community has proved glyphosate only acts in plants. The only group that suggests otherwise is a cabal of statisticians at the U.N., and one of them, Chris Portier, was outed as being a consultant for an activist group which was lobbying against glyphosate. He even signed a contract with trial lawyers out to sue over glyphosate before the IARC finding he helped manipulate was released. How did they know it would go in their favor? Critics believe Portier tipped them off so he could collect a check.
The ruling was scientifically an abomination but the behavior of the jury since has been even more bizarre. Three jurors have written the judge to tell her she would be wrong to overturn it, and have made numerous media appearances, which is uncharacteristically aggressive. But the lawyers, armed with a support network of trade groups for a sector that competes against companies like Monsanto, have made that part of their strategy. The fact that Organic Consumers Association, the trade group which provides the bulk of the funding behind Baum Hedlund allies U.S. Right To Know, is prominently egging on the jurors may be a concern for the judge.
“I have never heard of jurors after the fact picking a fight with the judge over judicial rulings,” said Dr. Val Giddings, a senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington.
The plaintiff, Dewayne Johnson, contracted non-Hodgkin lymphoma and was convinced that sporadic use of glyphosate in the weedkiller Roundup caused it, but a study of 55,000 full-time agriculture workers who used the herbicide found no evidence it increased risk of cancers. The American Council on Science and Health submitted an amicus brief for the pro-science side.
Saturday, October 20, 2018
After successful demonization campaign against herbicide glyphosate, anti-GMO activists and environmental groups take aim at atrazine
Andrew Porterfield | Genetic Literacy Project | October 18, 2018
In July, the US Environmental Protection Agency issued an extensive report that reviewed decades of science and declared that a very popular herbicide did not present any human health problems. As they have in reaction to previous EPA reports exonerating herbicides, anti-GMO groups howled in protest.
But this time, the herbicide was one that, while widely used by farmers, hasn’t yet gathered the headlines and legal focus of that ‘other’ popular herbicide, glyphosate (known in its patented version as “Roundup”). The subject of last summer’s report was the herbicide
atrazine. There are increasing signs that atrazine is the next target of groups opposed to GMOs (although atrazine is applied to conventional and GM plants) and synthetic chemicals used in modern agriculture.
According to the anti-modern agriculture Environmental Working Group, “EPA Ignores the Science, Dismisses the Risks to Children’s Health from Syngenta’s Atrazine.” EWG is now demanding a ban on the use of atrazine in the US:..............To Read More....
In July, the US Environmental Protection Agency issued an extensive report that reviewed decades of science and declared that a very popular herbicide did not present any human health problems. As they have in reaction to previous EPA reports exonerating herbicides, anti-GMO groups howled in protest.
But this time, the herbicide was one that, while widely used by farmers, hasn’t yet gathered the headlines and legal focus of that ‘other’ popular herbicide, glyphosate (known in its patented version as “Roundup”). The subject of last summer’s report was the herbicide
According to the anti-modern agriculture Environmental Working Group, “EPA Ignores the Science, Dismisses the Risks to Children’s Health from Syngenta’s Atrazine.” EWG is now demanding a ban on the use of atrazine in the US:..............To Read More....
Mother Nature? More like ‘Mad Scientist Mama’—creator of chemicals good and bad for humans
Steve Savage | Genetic Literacy Project | October 19, 2018
We frequently see a contrast drawn between what is “natural” and what is “chemical.” Sometimes products are described as “chemical-free” even though every physical object is made of chemicals.
As much as this suggests a problem with our science education, it speaks to a missed opportunity for wonder. Nature is not some sort of cosmic mother figure; on the contrary, nature is composed of diverse biological and physical processes, including some pretty amazing examples of chemistry continually taking place. If we indulge the human personification of nature and its “children” a bit, we could say the following about these “chemists”:
We frequently see a contrast drawn between what is “natural” and what is “chemical.” Sometimes products are described as “chemical-free” even though every physical object is made of chemicals.
As much as this suggests a problem with our science education, it speaks to a missed opportunity for wonder. Nature is not some sort of cosmic mother figure; on the contrary, nature is composed of diverse biological and physical processes, including some pretty amazing examples of chemistry continually taking place. If we indulge the human personification of nature and its “children” a bit, we could say the following about these “chemists”:
- They are extremely creative.
- They can make really complex molecules.
- Some of their chemicals last a really long time – which is sometimes good and sometimes bad.
- They are really good at making polymers.
- They make some extremely toxic things.
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Fraud: Farmers Caught Selling Conventional Crops as Organic
By Alex Berezow — October 12, 2018 @ American Council on Science and Health
Comedy is an excellent tool for pointing out the absurdities of society.
Comedy is an excellent tool for pointing out the absurdities of society.
Several years ago, Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullsh**! that examined the claims made by organic food enthusiasts. (See a clip here.) Though they didn't conduct a publication quality scientific experiment, they showed (rather convincingly and quite hilariously) that the average food snob simply can't tell the difference between conventionally grown food and organic food.
Their prank has been replicated by others. In one video, two guys attended a foodie convention and presented guests with a new "organic" alternative to fast food. The guests went on and on about how wonderful it was, completely oblivious to the fact that they were eating chicken nuggets and other food from McDonald's.
At the very end of the video, they presented their conclusion (translated from Dutch): "If you tell people that something is organic, they'll automatically believe it's organic." Indeed.
Farmers Busted for Marketing Conventional Crops as Certified Organic
Three farmers in Nebraska just plead guilty to a food fraud scheme in which they were selling conventionally grown corn and soybeans as organic. They pulled off this scheme from 2010 to 2017 and made nearly $11 million in the process. How could they get away with it for so long?
For starters, nobody can tell the difference between conventional and organic food. It's not as if organic corn and soybeans look, smell, or taste differently compared to their conventional counterparts. So, the only way to catch food fraud is by doing a chemical analysis. In this case, the analysis would look for the presence of pesticides that are banned according to organic agriculture's (completely arbitrary) rules.
These rules are supposedly enforced by the National Organic Program (NOP), which is part of the USDA. Obviously, it isn't doing a particularly good job. According to the Washington Post:
The organic industry is built upon a gigantic lie: that is, the notion that "natural" farming methods are safer and healthier while "unnatural" methods are dangerous. Worse, the organic industry perpetuates a myth that it does not use pesticides, when it absolutely does. It should surprise no one, therefore, that such a deceptive industry would attract its fair share of hucksters.
Their prank has been replicated by others. In one video, two guys attended a foodie convention and presented guests with a new "organic" alternative to fast food. The guests went on and on about how wonderful it was, completely oblivious to the fact that they were eating chicken nuggets and other food from McDonald's.
At the very end of the video, they presented their conclusion (translated from Dutch): "If you tell people that something is organic, they'll automatically believe it's organic." Indeed.
Farmers Busted for Marketing Conventional Crops as Certified Organic
Three farmers in Nebraska just plead guilty to a food fraud scheme in which they were selling conventionally grown corn and soybeans as organic. They pulled off this scheme from 2010 to 2017 and made nearly $11 million in the process. How could they get away with it for so long?
For starters, nobody can tell the difference between conventional and organic food. It's not as if organic corn and soybeans look, smell, or taste differently compared to their conventional counterparts. So, the only way to catch food fraud is by doing a chemical analysis. In this case, the analysis would look for the presence of pesticides that are banned according to organic agriculture's (completely arbitrary) rules.
These rules are supposedly enforced by the National Organic Program (NOP), which is part of the USDA. Obviously, it isn't doing a particularly good job. According to the Washington Post:
"[T]he [organic food] system suffers from multiple weaknesses in enforcement: Farmers hire their own inspection companies; most inspections are announced days or weeks in advance and lack the element of surprise; and testing for pesticides is the exception rather than the rule."In other words, the USDA's policy is just to trust farmers and suppliers if they say their food is organic. As a result of such a lax attitude toward regulation, food fraud occurs, not just with homegrown crops but with imported ones, as well.
The organic industry is built upon a gigantic lie: that is, the notion that "natural" farming methods are safer and healthier while "unnatural" methods are dangerous. Worse, the organic industry perpetuates a myth that it does not use pesticides, when it absolutely does. It should surprise no one, therefore, that such a deceptive industry would attract its fair share of hucksters.
Saturday, October 13, 2018
The Environmental Scam: One Quick and Easy Response
by Sean Gabb October 2018 @ Sean Gabb
Once you cut through their verbiage, the enemies of bourgeois civilisation have two demands. These are:
Once you cut through their verbiage, the enemies of bourgeois civilisation have two demands. These are:
- Put me and my friends in charge of preferably a one-world government with total power over life and property; or, until then, or failing that,
- Give us a lot of money.
When I was younger, the occasion for making these demands was something to do with poverty or economic instability, and the alleged need was for a bigger welfare state, or state ownership of the means of production, or playing about with money to “move the aggregate demand curve to the right.” The nice thing about these claims and their alleged solutions was that they all had to be debated within the subject area of Economics. Because most of us knew a lot about Economics, we could always win the debates.
By the end of the 1980s, winning was so easy, the debates had become boring. Since then, the alleged need has shifted to saving the planet from some environmental catastrophe. The resulting debates are now harder to win because most of us are not that learned in the relevant sciences. Though I am more than competent in Economics, my main expertise is in Ancient History and the Classical Languages. Much the same is true for most of my friends
Take, for example, the latest occasion for making the two demands stated above. This is that the sea is filling up with waste plastic, and that this looks horrid, and is being eaten by the creatures who live in the sea, and that they are all at risk of dying – and that this will be a terrible thing of all of us. For the solution, see Annie Leonard, writing in The Guardian: “Recycling alone will never stem the flow of plastics into our ocean. We must address the problem at the source.” You can take her last sentence as shorthand for the usual demands.
What response have I to this? Not much directly. Give me half an hour, and I will explain with practised ease that the Phillips Curve is at best a loose correlation between past variables, and that there is no stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation. But search me how most plastics are made, how long they take to degrade, or what harm they do if eaten.
A short search on the Web has brought up some useful information. There is, for example, an essay by Kip Hansen, published in 2015 – “An Ocean of Plastic.” He says, among much else:
- That the Great Garbage Patch said to be floating about the Pacific is a myth, and that the main alleged photographs of it were taken in Manila Bay after a storm had washed the rubbish out of the streets;
- That the amount of plastic waste floating in the sea is very small per cubic metre of water, and that it is invisible to the uninformed eye in the places where this Garbage Patch is said to be floating;
- That plastic waste quickly breaks down into tiny chunks that are then eaten by bacteria, who are not harmed by it;
- That larger chunks eaten by fish and birds are easily handled by digestive systems that have evolved over many ages to cope with much worse than the occasional lump of polystyrene foam.
His conclusion:
The “floating rafts of plastic garbage”-version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a pernicious myth that needs to be dispelled at every opportunity.
That really is all I need to know. Of course, however, it is not enough to win an argument. Put me up against someone whose job is to lecture the world on the horrors of plastic waste, and I shall do a very poor job. He will pour scorn on the response I have summarised. He will draw attention to other alleged facts, and support these with reams of official statistics collected I have no idea how. We shall be engaged not in a deductive argument about the science of human choice, but in an argument about facts that I am in no position to examine for myself, and about scientific claims that I am not remotely qualified to assess. What to do about that?
Here is my response. During the past half century or so, we have had one factual claim after another about the natural world. These include:
- The claim my English teacher repeated to me in 1974 about the coming exhaustion of mineral resources – that, for example, there would be no more gold to mine after 1984, and that the oil would run out shortly after or before then;
- The claim, made around 1986, that aids would, by 1990, have killed two million people in England alone;
- The claim, made in 1996, that, by 2006, a million people in England would have had their brains rotted by eating beef infected with Mad Cow Disease;
- The claims, made in the 1980s, that factory emissions were turning the rain to acid, and that this would do terrible things;
- The claims, made about the same time, that our refrigerators and air conditioning units had opened a hole in the ozone layer, and that we would all soon be cooked by radiation from the Sun;
- The claims, that I noticed in 1989, that areas of jungle the size of Belgium were being regularly cut down in the Amazon, and how this would somehow be bad for us;
- The claims, made since about 1988, that our industrial civilisation as a whole was causing a rise in global temperatures.
I leave the last of these claims aside for the moment. What the others all have in common is that they involved predictions of substantial or total collapse unless the usual demands were met. These demands were not met, and the world carried on as normal. Gold and oil did not run out. I am not sure how many people have heard about the ozone hole. I am not sure if anyone now claims it is getting bigger, or is still there. Nothing substantial was ever done about acid rain, but the world has still not become a giant desert. None of my friends has died of aids, nor of Mad Cow disease. My South American students do not report that Brazil nowadays looks like the surface of the Moon.
I now turn to the claims about global warming. I will not discuss the intricacies of how much carbon dioxide we are releasing, or what effect this may have on temperatures. I leave aside the persistent claims of scientific fraud and other corruption. As said, I am not qualified to comment on these or other matters. What I do note is that, in 2006, Al Gore
[p]atiently, and surely for the 10,000th time, [explained to The Guardian] what’s going wrong. The atmosphere is like a coat of varnish around the globe, he says. When it’s thin, as it should be, heat naturally escapes. But when it gets thicker, thanks to carbon dioxide emitted by us, it traps in the heat and the world gets warmer. “It’s cooking and wilting the most vulnerable parts of the eco-system, melting all the mountain glaciers, the north polar ice cap, parts of Antarctica, parts of Greenland.” That molten ice-water will raise sea-levels, flooding food-producing areas that all of us rely on. Eventually it will submerge whole cities, from San Francisco to Shanghai. The site of the Twin Towers will not be a memorial garden: it will be underwater.
… He agrees with the scientists who say we have 10 years to act, before we cross a point of no return.
In 2009, the Prince of Wales – advised by the “leading environmentalists Jonathon Porritt and Tony Juniper” – said we had 96 months to change our ways. After that, we faced “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”
In 2005, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian:
Winter is no longer the great grey longing of my childhood. The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are – unless the Gulf Stream stops – unlikely to recur. Our summers will be long and warm. Across most of the upper northern hemisphere, climate change, so far, has been kind to us.
Ten years took us to 2016. Assuming my arithmetic is correct, 96 months take us to about now. If we have really reached the “point of no return,” why have these people not yet switched to telling us “I warned you: now it’s too late”? Instead, the apocalyptic warnings continue at top volume. Oh – and English weather remains as unpredictable today as it was in 2005. In March this year, there was an inch of snow in Deal.
The point of repeating these claims is that they were not random assertions, but appear to have been made on scientific advice – scientific advice that turned out to be wrong. Whether the scientists in question were lying, or whether they advised in good faith, is less important than that they were wrong. You do not need a degree in the natural sciences to notice when predictions are falsified. It is with this in mind that I take the present claims of plastic waste in the sea, and reject them out of hand. It may be that, this time, the claims are true. But the whole burden of proof is on those making them. The burden of proof comes with the barely-rebuttable presumption that we are being fed yet another diet of alarmist falsehoods.
My general view is that our planet is a vast treasure house of resources that, properly used, will take us to the stars. We shall colonise the inner planets, and mine the Asteroid Belt. We shall find cures for every illness and extend our lives. We shall uncover every remaining mystery of the natural world. During the past three centuries, much encouraging progress has been made. The curve is now turning almost vertical. It may be that, now and again, our scientific and technical progress throws up problems. If so, the solution is more scientific and technical progress. The only reasonable fear we should have is that the usual suspects will have their way, and return us to a past that I am fully qualified to describe, and that I assure you was horrible in every respect.
© 2018, seangabb.
Children are NOT more sensitive /vulnerable to chemicals in the environment
Steve Milloy @ Junkscience.com
Let’s review the nonsense in today’s New York Times op-ed by notorious junk scientist goofballs Phil Landrigan (Mt. Sinai) and Lynn Goldman (George Washington University).
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Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Ranchers Face Wolves at the Gate
Written byJames Murphy Monday, 01 October 2018
The Diamond M ranch sits on the Kettle River in northeast Washington State, close enough to the Canadian border that a well-thrown rock might hit a range-riding Mountie and cause an international incident. It is a frontiersman’s dream: acres of prairie surrounded by wooded areas with the pristine Kettle River flowing through the middle of it. It’s an idyllic rural place where rough-hewn cowboys, who love the land as if it were family, gently tend their cattle. It hardly seems the place for a thing as dirty as a political battle.
But a bloody political battle — complete with actual death threats — is exactly what the McIrvin and Hedrick families who ranch the land are embroiled in. They are engaged with people who care little for truth and care even less for freedom. Environmentalist mobsters have targeted the family business because, sometimes, necessary action entails thinning the wolf pack in a lethal manner. And when even a single wolf is killed, environmentalists go predictably insane.
“We get a lot of death threats. My wife had to stop answering the phone,” said Len McIrvin, the patriarch of the family that runs the Diamond M. “They say it would be better if you were dead than a wolf…. Another call comes in that said, ‘If you’d like your kids to come home on the school bus, you’d better leave the wolves alone.’”..........To Read More.....
The Diamond M ranch sits on the Kettle River in northeast Washington State, close enough to the Canadian border that a well-thrown rock might hit a range-riding Mountie and cause an international incident. It is a frontiersman’s dream: acres of prairie surrounded by wooded areas with the pristine Kettle River flowing through the middle of it. It’s an idyllic rural place where rough-hewn cowboys, who love the land as if it were family, gently tend their cattle. It hardly seems the place for a thing as dirty as a political battle.
But a bloody political battle — complete with actual death threats — is exactly what the McIrvin and Hedrick families who ranch the land are embroiled in. They are engaged with people who care little for truth and care even less for freedom. Environmentalist mobsters have targeted the family business because, sometimes, necessary action entails thinning the wolf pack in a lethal manner. And when even a single wolf is killed, environmentalists go predictably insane.
“We get a lot of death threats. My wife had to stop answering the phone,” said Len McIrvin, the patriarch of the family that runs the Diamond M. “They say it would be better if you were dead than a wolf…. Another call comes in that said, ‘If you’d like your kids to come home on the school bus, you’d better leave the wolves alone.’”..........To Read More.....
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
Sanitation In The Food Industry With Peracetic Acid
October 8, 2018 By Michael D. Shaw @ Health News Digest
PAA is a strong oxidizer, and is thought to kill microbes in a variety of ways…
1. Sulfhydryl and sulfur bonds in proteins are attacked.
2. It reacts with many chemical double bonds, impeding cellular processes.
3. It disrupts the functioning of the cell membrane, and the transport mechanisms of the cell wall.
4. It can prevent DNA replication.
5. It will inhibit the enzyme catalase, which catalyzes the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide.
The latter quality is interesting since commercial PAA is supplied as a mixture of peracetic acid, hydrogen peroxide, and acetic acid. Research has suggested that a particular synergy is occurring via a staged process. The peracetic portion of the mix initiates the attack on the cell, damaging its protective systems, allowing the hydrogen peroxide to do its free radical style damage undeterred. This leads to lysis (the disintegration of a cell by rupture of the cell wall or membrane) and rapid cell death.
Within the food industry, PAA is primarily used as a sanitizer during the processing and handling of meats, poultry, seafood, fruits, and vegetables, as well as the bottling of beverages. In 2014, the good folks at All American Chemical published an informative presentation entitled “Premium PAA Sanitation with Peracetic Acid.” Here are some of the key points:
Peracetic acid…
- Is less affected by organic load (soil) than either chlorine or quaternary ammonium compounds (quat) sanitizers
- Disperses/penetrates biofilms
- Kills bacteria, mold, fungus, and yeast
- Is very fast acting
- Is non-foaming
- Does not contribute taste, odor, or color
- Does not require rinsing
- Does not form disinfection byproducts
- Does not add conductivity (Total Dissolved Solids)
- Is non-corrosive to stainless steel and aluminum
- Does not fall under the EPA Risk Management Planning (RMP) rule requirement
- Is easily dispensed as a liquid
- Is easy to test for
Peracetic acid…
- Does not promote microbial resistance
- Has efficacy over a wide range of temperature (0-40°C / 32-104°F) and pH (3-7.5)
- Allows for clean-in-place processes
- Is unaffected by protein residue
While federal OSHA does yet have a permissible exposure limit for peracetic acid, other standards do exist. Thus, it has issued Rapid Response letters and citations under the General Duty Clause, for what it deems to be high exposures.
PAA is corrosive/irritating to the eyes, mucous membranes of the respiratory tract, and skin. It causes lacrimation, extreme discomfort, and irritation to the upper respiratory tract in humans after exposure to concentrations as low as 5 ppm for only three minutes.
Last year, NIOSH requested information on health risks to workers associated with occupational exposures to peracetic acid. One of the responses came from The National Employment Law Project, and it raised compelling issues regarding exposures to PAA, in light of its increased use in the meat and poultry industries.
Certainly, changes in workplace procedures and enhanced protective equipment will go a long way in improving the situation, but it is also necessary to monitor the air for the presence of peracetic acid.
PAA, though, is a difficult compound to measure. One reason is because the instrument must detect this chemical at extremely low levels–less than 1 ppm. Another issue is calibration.
No commercial calibration standard exists for peracetic acid, and it is unlikely that one ever will, owing to the instability of the pure substance. As such, Interscan developed an in-house calibration method, which involves generating a stream of PAA, and using wet chemistry analytics to standardize it on the fly. This stream can then be used to calibrate instruments in the lab. The company offers a full line of gas detection instruments, including models for PAA.
Used properly, peracetic acid can be a great boon to food safety and public health.
The IPCC is still wrong on climate change. Scientists prove it.
The NIPCC is U.N. climate alarmists' worst nightmare.
By John Dale Dunn and Joseph Bast
Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases a special report on the alleged impacts of "global warming of 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty."
To coincide with that publication's release, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) released on October 5 a draft Summary for Policymakers of the fifth volume in its "Climate Change Reconsidered" series. That report is available online here..........The two reports tell dramatically different stories about the causes and consequences of climate change..........How could two international teams of scientists, economists, and other experts arrive at opposite conclusions? Therein lies a story ...............To Read More
By John Dale Dunn and Joseph Bast
Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases a special report on the alleged impacts of "global warming of 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty."
To coincide with that publication's release, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) released on October 5 a draft Summary for Policymakers of the fifth volume in its "Climate Change Reconsidered" series. That report is available online here..........The two reports tell dramatically different stories about the causes and consequences of climate change..........How could two international teams of scientists, economists, and other experts arrive at opposite conclusions? Therein lies a story ...............To Read More
4 Reasons Why 'Climate Change' Is a Flat-Out Hoax
By John Eidson October 8, 2018
First, a disclaimer: I am not a climate scientist. In fact, I am not a scientist of any kind. But I do have a degree in electrical engineering, which I mention only to point out that I am at least as qualified as the next non-scientist to form rational opinions about global warming claims.
In obtaining my degree, I took enough classes in chemistry, physics, and geology to develop a keen appreciation of the scientific method, the best way ever devised for winnowing the truth from fakery and deception. If taking the scientific method into account, no intelligent person can fail to see that the constant drumbeat of wild and hysterical claims about the climate are insults to the search for Truth.
Following are four reasons why I will bet my life that "climate change" is the greatest scientific and political hoax in human history.
1. Rampant scientific fraud.....
2. The duping of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public.....
3. A long trail of wildly inaccurate predictions.....
4. Intentional concealment of inconvenient parts of climate history..... To Read More....
First, a disclaimer: I am not a climate scientist. In fact, I am not a scientist of any kind. But I do have a degree in electrical engineering, which I mention only to point out that I am at least as qualified as the next non-scientist to form rational opinions about global warming claims.
In obtaining my degree, I took enough classes in chemistry, physics, and geology to develop a keen appreciation of the scientific method, the best way ever devised for winnowing the truth from fakery and deception. If taking the scientific method into account, no intelligent person can fail to see that the constant drumbeat of wild and hysterical claims about the climate are insults to the search for Truth.
Following are four reasons why I will bet my life that "climate change" is the greatest scientific and political hoax in human history.
1. Rampant scientific fraud.....
2. The duping of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public.....
3. A long trail of wildly inaccurate predictions.....
4. Intentional concealment of inconvenient parts of climate history..... To Read More....
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
The hidden agenda behind 'climate change'
By John Eidson October 2, 2018
In comments that laid bare the hidden agenda behind global warming alarmism, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, let slip during a February 2015 press conference in Brussels that the U.N.'s real purpose in pushing climate hysteria is to end capitalism throughout the world:
This is the first time in human history that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally changing [getting rid of] the economic development model that has reigned since the Industrial Revolution.
The economic model to which she referred is free-market capitalism. A year earlier, Figueres revealed what capitalism must be replaced with when she complained that America's two-party constitutional system is hampering the U.N.'s climate objectives. She went on to cite China's communist system as the kind of government America must have if the U.N. is to impose its environmental will on the world's most free and prosperous capitalist nation. In other words, for the U.N. to have its way, America must somehow be transformed into a communist nation.
Let that sink in for a moment...........In a Nov. 14, 2010 interview with the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Edenhofer, co-chair of the U.N. IPCC's Working Group III, made this shocking admission: One must free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. [What we're doing] has almost nothing to do with the climate. We must state clearly that we use climate policy to redistribute de facto the world's wealth. ..........Read more........
In comments that laid bare the hidden agenda behind global warming alarmism, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, let slip during a February 2015 press conference in Brussels that the U.N.'s real purpose in pushing climate hysteria is to end capitalism throughout the world:
This is the first time in human history that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally changing [getting rid of] the economic development model that has reigned since the Industrial Revolution.
The economic model to which she referred is free-market capitalism. A year earlier, Figueres revealed what capitalism must be replaced with when she complained that America's two-party constitutional system is hampering the U.N.'s climate objectives. She went on to cite China's communist system as the kind of government America must have if the U.N. is to impose its environmental will on the world's most free and prosperous capitalist nation. In other words, for the U.N. to have its way, America must somehow be transformed into a communist nation.
Let that sink in for a moment...........In a Nov. 14, 2010 interview with the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Edenhofer, co-chair of the U.N. IPCC's Working Group III, made this shocking admission: One must free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. [What we're doing] has almost nothing to do with the climate. We must state clearly that we use climate policy to redistribute de facto the world's wealth. ..........Read more........
Monday, October 1, 2018
The Reality of Industrial Wind Power
Jeff Ingber Posted: Oct 01, 2018
Wind energy derives from solar radiation, and humans have safely and logically used it for thousands of years through mechanisms such as sails and wind wheels. However, in recent years, argument has raged about the wisdom of building and subsidizing wind farms comprised of dozens or hundreds of huge industrial wind turbines that can blanket hundreds of acres. Earlier this year, this debate was heightened by anti-wind-power comments made by President Trump at his rallies. The president’s viewpoint quickly was attacked by anti-climate-change advocates.
I certainly want to preserve the environment for my grandchildren and theirs, and I appreciate the threat posed by fossil fuels. But wind power, shrouded in a mystique of cost-effective, clean, renewable energy, creates far more problems than is commonly understood. The reality of wind power, which satisfies only about 6% of America’s energy needs, is starkly different from the myths that surround it........To Read More....
I certainly want to preserve the environment for my grandchildren and theirs, and I appreciate the threat posed by fossil fuels. But wind power, shrouded in a mystique of cost-effective, clean, renewable energy, creates far more problems than is commonly understood. The reality of wind power, which satisfies only about 6% of America’s energy needs, is starkly different from the myths that surround it........To Read More....
Rooting out scientific corruption
Recent actions show reform is in the wind, but much remains to be done, especially on climate
Paul Driessen
Dr. Brian Wansink recently resigned from his position as Columbia University professor, eating behavior researcher and director of the Cornell “food lab.” A faculty investigation found that he had misreported research data, failed to preserve data and results properly, and employed dubious statistical techniques.
A fellow faculty member accused him of “serious research misconduct: either outright fraud by people in the lab, or such monumental sloppiness that data are entirely disconnected from context.” Among other things, Wansink had used cherry-picked data and multiple statistical analyses to get results that confirmed his hypotheses. His papers were published in peer-reviewed journals and used widely in designing eating and dieting programs, even though other researchers could not reproduce his results.
It’s about time someone exposed and rooted out this growing problem, and not just in the food arena.
Countless billions of dollars in state and federal taxpayer money, corporate (and thus consumer) funding and foundation grants have fueled research and padded salaries, with universities typically taking a 40% or so cut off the top, for “oversight and overhead.” Incentives and temptations abound.
Far too many researchers have engaged in similar practices for much too long. Far too many of their colleagues do sloppy, friendly or phony peer review. Far too many universities and other institutions have looked the other way. Far too often those involved are rewarded by fame and fortune. Far too many suspect results have been used to attack and sue corporations or drive costly public policies.
A good example is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup weed killer and the world’s most widely used herbicide. The Environmental Protection Agency, European Food Safety Authority and many other respected organizations worldwide have consistently reaffirmed that this chemical does not cause cancer.
One rogue agency says otherwise. The International Agency for Research on Cancer is top-heavy with anti-chemical activists, some who’ve had blatant conflicts of interest or engaged in highly questionable conduct. IARC relies on antiquated methods that have examined over 1,000 substances – and found that only one does not cause cancer. It says even pickled vegetables and coffee are carcinogenic.
IARC makes no attempt to determine exposure levels that actually might pose cancer risks for humans in the real world and ignores studies that don’t support its agenda. It has created enormous pressure on EU regulators to ban glyphosate, which would help organic farmers but decimate conventional farming.
It also helped the mass-tort lawsuit industry hit the jackpot, when a San Francisco jury awarded a retired groundskeeper $289 million in compensatory and punitive damages – because he claims his non-Hodgkin lymphoma resulted from exposure to glyphosate. Thousands of similar lawsuits are now in the pipeline.
The potential impact on the chemicals industry and conventional farming worldwide is incalculable. But worse outrages involve research conducted to advance the “dangerous manmade climate change” thesis – for they are used to justify demands that we give up the fossil fuels that provide over 80% of America’s and the world’s energy – and replace them with expensive, unreliable pseudo-renewable alternatives.
In a positive development that may presage a Cornell style cleanup, after seven long years of stonewalling and appealing court decisions, the U of Arizona has finally agreed to give the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic the emails and other public, taxpayer-funded records it asked for in 2011. The documents relate to the infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph, attempts to excise the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age from history, machinations over the preparation of an IPCC report, efforts to keep non-alarmist papers out of scientific journals, and actions similar to Wansink’s clever research tricks.
While the legal, scientific and public access issues were very similar in another FOIA case back in 2010, the court in that U of Virginia/Penn State case took a very different stance. That court absurdly ruled that alarmist researcher Dr. Michael Mann could treat his data, codes, methodologies and emails as his personal intellectual property – inaccessible to anyone outside Mann’s inner circle – even though his work was funded by taxpayers and was being used to support and justify the Obama era carbon dioxide “endangerment finding” and war on fossil fuels, and thus affected the living standards of all Americans.
Scientific debates absolutely should be played out in the academic, scientific and public policy arena, instead of our courts, as some 800 academics argued in defending Mann’s position. However, that cannot possibly happen if the scientists in question refuse to debate; if they hide their data, computer codes, algorithms and methodologies; if they engage in questionable, secretive, unaccountable science.
We who pay for the research and will be victimized by sloppy, improper or fraudulent work have a clear, inalienable right to insist that research be honest and aboveboard. That the scientists’ data, codes, methods and work products be in the public domain, available for analysis and critique. That researchers engage in robust debate with fellow scientists and critics. It’s akin to the fundamental right to cross-examine witnesses in a civil or criminal case, to reveal inconsistencies, assess credibility and determine the truth.
Scientists who violate these fundamental precepts should forfeit their access to future grants.
Instead, we now have a nearly $2-trillion-per-year renewable energy/climate crisis industry that zealously and jealously protects its turf and attacks anyone who dares to ask awkward questions – like these.
What actual, replicable, real-world evidence do you have that convincingly demonstrates that
- You can now distinguish relatively small human influences from the many powerful natural forces that have always driven climate change?
- Greenhouse gases now control the climate, and the sun and other forces play only minor roles?
- Earth is now experiencing significant and unprecedented changes in temperature, icecaps, sea levels,hurricanes, tornadoes and droughts?
- These changes will be catastrophic and are due to humanity’s fossil fuel use?
- Your computer models have accurately predicted the real-world conditions we are measuring today?
- Wind, solar and biofuels can replace fossil fuels in powering modern industrial economies and living standards; can be manufactured, transported and installed without fossil fuels; are “sustainable” into the foreseeable future; and will not have serious adverse impacts on wildlife, habitats, air and water?
Alarmist, climate crisis scientists demand and/or help justify radical, transformative, disruptive, destructive changes to our energy infrastructure, economies, livelihoods and living standards – and prevent Earth’s poorest people from having the energy they need to improve their health and living standards. They must therefore face a very high burden of proof that they are right. They must be required to provide solid evidence and be subject to robust, even withering debate and cross examination.
They must no longer be permitted to hide material evidence, emails or conversations that might reveal conflicts of interest, collusion, corruption, data manipulation or fabrication, or other substantive problems.
It’s reached the point where almost anything that happens is blamed on fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases and those who “question the reality of [cataclysmic manmade] climate change.”
The assertions now range from implausible to ridiculous: Earth is doomed if developed nations don’t drastically slash emissions by 2020; Arctic ice will disappear; wildfires will be more frequent and deadly; more people will die from heatstroke; Hurricanes Harvey and Irma were due to human activity; President Trump caused Florence by exiting Paris; Arctic plants are getting too tall; coffee growing will be impossible in many countries; Earth will become Venus; pigs will get skinnier; tasty dishes like cioppino will be a thing of the past; and a seemingly endless list of even more preposterous manmade disasters.
Congress and the Trump Administration want to ensure sound science and informed public policy, root out fraud and corruption, and “drain the swamp.” If they’re serious about this, they will take the necessary steps to ensure that no universities or other institutions get another dime of federal taxpayer money, until they implement changes like those suggested here. Climate crisis corruption is a good place to start.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and other think tanks, and author of books and articles on energy, climate change and economic development.
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