Viewpoint: Pesticides on produce aren’t dangerous. Ignore the ‘Dirty Dozen’ and eat more fruits and veggies

Hillary Kaufman | July 24, 2020

Full disclosure: I buy organic fruits & veggies. I also buy conventional fruits & veggies. For me, it depends on the time of year, the way the produce looks, which grocer or market I’m visiting, and price (those two-for-one berry deals are no joke!). At D2D, we also believe that feeding a growing population requires all kinds of safe, sustainable growing methods. We should have a choice and not be unnecessarily fearful of the food at the grocery store.

What's at Stake?

I f I told you that I only buy organic produce, you’d probably assume that I had the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) list of contaminated produce memorized for when I go shopping, right? And probably expound on the “horrors” of conventional farming, too. Some of you may not know what EWG is, but you’re probably familiar with their annual “Dirty Dozen” list showing which conventionally-farmed fruits and veggies have the most pesticide residue based on data from the USDA Pesticide Data Program. But should you really be afraid of these “Dirty Dozen” items?

EWG would give a big ‘yes’ to that one. But wouldn’t you do this, too, if your corporate donations came from Organic Valley, Earthbound Farms, Applegate Farms, and Stonyfield Farms? Hey, I kinda get it – they’d infuriate their stakeholders if they published information discouraging their products. But their report hurts our health and frankly, our sanity. And at a time when we need it most with COVID-19.............To Read More......

Alarmist queen Hayhoe takedown by Friends of Science

David Wojick |June 1st, 2020| Climate| 25 Comments  @ CFACT

If Greta Thunberg is an alarmist princess then Katherine Hayhoe is the queen of climate alarmism, at least in the U.S. and Canada. She was the de facto spokesperson for the atrocious third National Climate Assessment. After that she started doing bogus “Here’s what is going to happen to you” climate studies for various states and cities. Making big bucks scaring people.

Last year Hayhoe delivered a doomsday forecast to the Province of Alberta, Canada, and here our story begins. Alberta is home to the Friends of Science Society (FOSS), one of Canada’s top skeptical organizations. FOSS has now produced a 77 page takedown report, shredding Hayhoe’s so-called study in detail. It is an elegant critical work, with implications far beyond Canada.

The topic is technical but it is written for policy makers. The plain English table of contents gives the flavor and shows the scope, with 37 succinct chapters. There are even chapters titled “What is “Climate Change”?” and “What is a Climate Model?” In the same vein Hayhoe’s report is arrogantly titled “Alberta’s Climate Future” so the FOSS takedown is “Facts versus Fortune Telling”.
There are lots of data issues, especially since the Hayhoe report uses truncated trends. The FOSS rebuttal does a lot of longer term analysis.

Another big issue is that the Hayhoe report is based on so-called “downscaling” of hot climate models. This means taking huge crude regional results and interpolating questionable local details. Hayhoe bills herself as an “atmospheric scientist” but her Ph.D. work was on downscaling, which is just computer science. It is fitting that she is now in a university Political Science department, as her work is certainly political.

What Hayhoe ignores is the fact that different global climate models give wildly different regional projections. I recall when the first U.S. National Climate Assessment came out; it used two major models, the Canadian and the British Hadley. For the North Central region one projected a 160% increase in rainfall, while the other gave a 60% decrease. Swamp or desert! Obviously this junk is no good for policy making.

Here is the Friends of Science condensed summary:

“This review shows how Hayhoe & Stoner misinform, how they did not use all available information, how they cultivate alarm regarding Black Swan events, while ignoring counter trends and evidence of cycles. Their report style demonstrates a false, absolute certainty, of knowledge, where due qualification of assumptions and other influences can alter results as reported. Facts and evidence, not fortune-telling, should guide public policy on climate and energy.”

Here are some more specific and telling FOSS findings:

“Hayhoe & Stoner’s “Alberta’s Climate Future” report fails in a number of ways. The report ignores climate cycles and instead forecasts continuing linear temperature increases based on global climate models, even when local trends may be quite different. The report only addresses trends from 1950, ignoring much warmer conditions in the past in the Province.”

“More concerning, “Alberta’s Climate Future” is based on the use of unreasonably unlikely scenarios, such as Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. This computer simulation is a very extreme projection of the future where the world goes back to using more than five times the coal than is used today. Most mainstream scientists believe the RCP8.5 scenario to be a critically flawed benchmark for forecasting future climate.”

“Hayhoe & Stoner make bold and unverified statements such as: “extreme high and low temperatures are projected to increase exponentially” without justification. The report creates alarm with discredited references to natural “Black Swan” events, ascribing human caused climate change as the driver of floods and fires.”

There is a great deal more criticism, which is worth looking at. FOSS really does a job on Queen Hayhoe’s so-called research.

The Friends of Science takedown is a model for critical analysis of alarmist pseudoscientific hype. The deeply flawed Hayhoe report is not unusual. On the contrary it is typical of climate alarmism — computer based, on selected data, presenting speculative scary conclusions as facts.

Author

David Wojick

David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. For origins see http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html For over 100 prior articles for CFACT see http://www.cfact.org/author/david-wojick-ph-d/ Available for confidential research and consulting.

 

Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of 2009

By Editor on April 22, 2009 @ I Hate the Media
For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza. Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious,

spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of

Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”* Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”* George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”* Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”* New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”* Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”* Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”* Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”* Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”* Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”* Kenneth Watt, Ecologist



Stanford's Paul Ehrlich

 announces that the

sky is falling.

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” * Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”* Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”* Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”* Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
* Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.

This Appeared Here

Two Days Before The Day After Tomorrow': Here Are Some Of The Worst Global Warming Predictions Pushed By...The Experts

Matt Vespa  Apr 23, 2019

So, yesterday was Earth Day. No, this won’t be a post celebrating it. I’m a pro-fossil fuel kind-of-guy. I don’t like driving SUVs or Ford pickup trucks, but this is America; buy what you want and when you want it. We’re the Saudi Arabia of coal. We have solid natural gas reserves.

Drill, baby, drill!.....

This green warrior nonsense makes me want to buy all the aerosolized products at my local Walmart and just spray it intentionally into the air. Call me nuts, but I still think the jury is out. In 2007, the experts said the Arctic ice cap would be gone by 2013. It ended up growing by 533,000 square miles.

In 2013, we had the calmest hurricane season in thirty years and the quietest tornado season in six decades. It seems like, I don’t know, that there’s a natural cycle to this. It gets hot in the summer. Hurricanes form during…hurricane season; the same with tornados, and the seasons’ intensity varies. It’s not because of global warming. Oh, and the EPA buries this, but we’re at our most industrialized state ever; air quality couldn’t be better..............

he day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”...........

Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.............

Yeah, we still have crude oil, 65 million Americans didn’t die, let alone 4 billion people, and 15-30 years have passed. We’re still here............To Read More.....

We Get What We Ask For!

By Rich Kozlovich

Paradigms and Demographics was created to disseminate information that defends the pesticide applications industries, especially if that information that isn’t being disseminated by the information deliverers of our industry.

Many of those in leadership positions are completely aware of this kind of information, so it isn’t that our leaders are ignorant, it is just they are not crusaders. This is true of the trade journals, it is true of our state and national associations, and it is certainly true of the Ph.D.’s who are part and parcel of our industry. Why? First and foremost, heterodoxy isn’t for the faint of heart. No one likes being the rock in the current. Secondly, they don’t perceive this as part of their job description. Thirdly -and this is by far the most important reason of all - we don’t insist that they do it. Our leaders and information deliverers give us what we want. If we are not willing to demand more from them, if we're not will to stand up with them and be counted - then the fault is ours and ours alone! Why should they take shots for us if we don't care?

This brings me to the most important kind of science that everyone needs to use in order to understand all of these claims. The science of observation, i.e., “Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality!”

I have used this basic concept since I first started researching all these claims of the green movement. Initially I had a favorable, although erroneous view of environmentalism; whose claims I later found to be emotionally charged and unscientific. Very quickly I realized that they spew out lies of omission, lies of commission, misdirection, emotionally charged scaremongering, supposition, junk science studies that are full of weasel words and logical fallacies as the basis for all that they say and do.

The article published by ASCH goes on to say;

“A new study published in the Journal of Toxicology lays to rest any claims about “toxic pesticide residues” that the Environmental Working Group (EWG) publicized with their annual “Dirty Dozen” list. This compilation of “tainted” fruits and vegetables would have everyone scared to touch the majority of produce in the average grocery store. We are pleased, then, that this study, from the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis, looked at the dietary exposure of consumers to pesticides found in twelve products at the top of the EWG’s “Dirty Dozen” list and found…little to worry about.”

The article continues saying;

“To be more precise, the researchers, led by ACSH advisor Dr. Carl Winter, found that all pesticide exposures were well below established chronic reference doses. Dr. Winter concluded that, not only does exposure to these pesticides pose negligible risk to consumers at the levels they are present, but also, substituting organic forms for conventionally grown ones does not result in any appreciable reduction of risk. And, finally, the researchers write: “the methodology used by the environmental advocacy group to rank commodities with respect to pesticide risks lacks scientific credibility.” In other words, the EWG’s claims are empty.”

The chemistry lesson for parents? The "dirty dozen is down to zero".

One of the favorite lines from the green movement, and their acolytes in government when they wish to pass legislation that will seriously restrict pesticides (or any chemical for that matter) is, “it’s for the children”. Unfortunately most of what they are doing ends up being “to the children” versus “for the children”.

We have to start thinking critically about these things. As we look all around the world we see that  dystopia (misery, squalor, disease, suffering and death) is rampant where green policies are implemented. They stand against modern food production, pesticides, power production of every type (many in the green movement are now against ethanol, solar and wind energy production as well as oil, natural gas, and nuclear energy), roads, bridges, dams and even the chlorination of drinking water, which is one of the greatest advances in public health ever. They are against everything that makes people live longer and healthier lives. So if dystopia is what results everywhere else the world where their principles are adopted, why would we think it would be different here?  Dystopia follows the green movement like the plague follows rats. 

We, the pesticide applicators of the world, are the defenders of public health; we are the food providers for the people of the world; we are the true defenders of humanity; we save lives.  As one author who was very familiar with exterminators noted; they "are the hunters that keep the tribe healthy".We are part of that thin gray line that stands on the wall and says to society, "no on will harm you on my watch"; and we had better start believing and acting on that fact. 

###

We Are NOT Headed For World Without Insects - Insect Decline Survey Hitting Headlines Non Systematic, Patchy & With Limited Data

By Robert Walker | February 11th 2019 | Print | E-mail

 

Please don’t be scared by this, it is just the journalists hyping things up again. It does not mean what it seems to mean from the headlines. Insects can’t vanish and we will continue to be able to grow our crops and do agriculture. The study itself involves a lot of extrapolation on inadequate data, not their fault, it is just that there hasn’t been that much research done on insect populations for them to draw on.

The number of studies they found, 73, is not a lot for the whole world and the studies are limited. The authors are also getting criticism on twitter by experts for the way they conducted the survey, for instance they found it with a literature search in "Web of Science" for “[insect*] AND [declin*] AND [survey]” which seems likely to bias in favour of groups that are declining as well as miss out many surveys that don’t happen to use the term “survey”.

They should have stated the limitations of the survey and they do not seem to have taken the extra care needed for a survey likely to influence public opinion and decision making. This was a traditional review, and not the carefully conducted systematic review that you get in medicine and that first began to be used in conservation in 2006.........To Read More......

We Are NOT Headed For World Without Insects - Insect Decline Survey Hitting Headlines Non Systematic, Patchy & With Limited Data

By Robert Walker | February 11th 2019 | Print | E-mail

 

Please don’t be scared by this, it is just the journalists hyping things up again. It does not mean what it seems to mean from the headlines. Insects can’t vanish and we will continue to be able to grow our crops and do agriculture. The study itself involves a lot of extrapolation on inadequate data, not their fault, it is just that there hasn’t been that much research done on insect populations for them to draw on.

The number of studies they found, 73, is not a lot for the whole world and the studies are limited. The authors are also getting criticism on twitter by experts for the way they conducted the survey, for instance they found it with a literature search in "Web of Science" for “[insect*] AND [declin*] AND [survey]” which seems likely to bias in favour of groups that are declining as well as miss out many surveys that don’t happen to use the term “survey”.

They should have stated the limitations of the survey and they do not seem to have taken the extra care needed for a survey likely to influence public opinion and decision making. This was a traditional review, and not the carefully conducted systematic review that you get in medicine and that first began to be used in conservation in 2006.........To Read More......

Environmentalism, Pantheism, Statism and Pessimism

David Limbaugh  Dec 07, 2018

Meaning no disrespect to climate alarmists of the past half-century, who have been quite formidable in their doomsday warnings, the modern era has ushered in a new wave of scaremongers who threaten to eclipse their predecessors.

This shouldn't discourage the original enviro-wackos of the 1970s, who hadn't accumulated sufficient empirical data to support their burgeoning secular religion. Give those people a break; how were they to know they'd have egg on their faces for predicting apocalyptic global cooling? We're much more advanced now, so it's not fair to judge them.

Admit it. A full week doesn't pass without some cataclysmic news about climate change. The meteorological activists are brilliantly adept at shoehorning any weather event or natural disaster into their ominous narrative.

If world temperatures are cooling -- or warming -- they attribute it to overall warming. If there's a severe hurricane, it's because of evil capitalist carbon emissions. If California forest fires are caused or exacerbated by their asinine environmental policies, they blame them, too, on the "deniers," because one thing is certain about global warming blowhards: Their supposedly having good intentions means never having to apologize for their consistently failed prophecies. Al Gore, after all, is still an icon of this movement despite his embarrassing record and his unconscionably stratospheric personal carbon footprint............It's worth noting, for example, that the 10 worst famines of the 20th century were caused not by the excesses of capitalism or by environmental disasters but by collectivists trying to control human nature............To Read More.....

 

Cold Hard Facts for Climate Change Alarmists: Civilization Isn’t Ending – Not in 1985 and Not in 2100

By Ed Feulner December 6, 2018

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”  Sounds dire. A reaction to the National Climate Assessment published the day after Thanksgiving? No. Harvard biologist George Wald made that claim in 1970.   So if Wald had been correct, just about everything would have crumbled to ruin sometime between 1985 and 2000.

Wald, however, wasn’t alone. He and others came up with some incredibly over-the-top predictions as the 1960s came to a close.  “Earth Day” founder Denis Hayes, for example, didn’t hedge his bets: “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” Or take Paul Ehrlich (please). The author of 1968’s “The Population Bomb” was another gloom-and-doom prophet who made so many failed predictions over the years that it’s almost hard to keep count.  “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” he said in a 1970 interview. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years."............To Read More.........

Climate Change Alarmism Is the World's Leading Cause of Hot Gas

David Harsanyi Dec 07, 2018

Even as anti-gas tax riots raged in France this week, naturalist David Attenborough warned a crowd at a United Nations climate change summit in Poland that "the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon." U.N. General Assembly President Maria Espinosa told the media that "mankind" is "in danger of disappearing" if climate change is allowed to progress at its current rate.

Speakers, who flew in to swap doomsday stories, advocated radical changes to avoid this imminent environmental apocalypse. These days, "the point of no return" is almost always in view yet always just out of reach.

Sorry, but by now, this rhetoric is familiar. You can go back to 1970, when Harvard biologist George Wald, riding a wave of popular environmental panic during the decade, estimated, "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.".........To Read More.....

Climate-Modeling Illusions Not Based on Reality

December 7, 2018 By Jay Lehr @ American Thinker

For three decades, global warming alarmists have harassed society with stories of gloom and doom as a result of the carbon dioxide emitted into the air by the burning of fossil fuel. They are exercising precisely what prominent writer H.L. Mencken described as “the whole point of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”.

In fact, the man-caused global warming or climate change panic may well be the best hobgoblin ever conceived. It has half the world clamoring to be led to safety from climate change without a shred of physical evidence. Every single statement issued to support these fearmongering claims presented in a new 1,500-page report from 13 separate agencies of the federal government by 300 Obama-appointed scientists, has no basis in physical measurements or observations.

What they do have are mathematical equations considered to be models of the Earth’s climate. However, they have only a handful of the hundreds of variables that impact climate and the numbers inserted for the arbitrarily selected variables are little more than guesses. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has financed more than one hundred efforts to model our climate for the better part of three decades, with none coming close to actual results.

The problem real scientists who study climate -- not those paid for bias -- face, is that the public has no clue what a mathematical model actually is, how it works, and what they can and cannot do. Let’s simplify the subject and enlighten all Americans, and the rest of the world’s population as well.

There are many ways in which things or systems can be described. Before we build buildings or airplanes, we make physical small-scale models and test them against the stress and performances that will be required of them when they are actually built. When dealing with systems that are totally beyond our control we try and describe them with computer programs or mathematical equations that we hope may give answers to the questions we have about the system today and in the future. Historically, mathematical descriptions of such systems were used to better understand how the system might work. We would attempt to understand the variables that affect the outcomes of the system. Then we would alter the variables and see how the outcomes are altered. This is called sensitivity testing, the very best use of mathematical models.

Throughout our history, we were never foolish enough to make economic decisions based on predictions calculated from equations we think might dictate how nature works. My first introduction to using math to try and understand nature occurred almost 60 years ago when I was performing graduate work on contaminated fluid transport in subsurface rocks. It was fun and instructive but was never intended to serve as a crystal ball for the future. However, that is exactly what the well-paid math modelers throughout the academic world now claim they can do.

All problems can be viewed as having three stages, observation, modeling, and prediction. Perhaps the most active area for mathematical modeling is the economy and the stock market. No one has ever succeeded in getting it right and there are far fewer variables than occur in determining the climate of our planet.

For many years, the Wall Street Journal selected five eminent economic analysts to select a stock they were sure would rise in the following month. Then, they had chimpanzees throw five darts at a wall covered with that days’ stock-market results. A month later they determined who did better choosing winners, the analysts or the chimpanzees. In a majority of years, the chimps won.

I am not saying that today’s mathematical modelers would not beat chimps throwing darts at future Earth temperatures, but I will not object if you reach that conclusion. Their predictions for the past 20 years could just as well have been reached with darts because they have all been wrong.

Consider the following: we do not know all the variables but we are quite sure they are likely in the hundreds. We know how very few work. Clouds must play a significant role in the planet’s climate and we do not even know how they work. Yet today’s modelers believe they can tell you the planet’s climate decades or even a century in the future and want to manage the economy accordingly. Either they are crazy to think this or we are crazy to believe them. I suspect both to be true.

Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysics laboratory once calculated that if we could know all the variables affecting climate and plugged them into the world’s largest computer, it would take 40 years to reach a conclusive answer.

Should we waste a single brain cell even considering the doomsday predictions that 300 scientists working in 13 government agencies all hired by President Obama are telling us we must all plan for? The answer is obviously no. And we should all go back to preparing for a wonderful winter holiday.

Jay Lehr (jlehr@heartland.org) is science director at The Heartland Institute.

The clever ruse of rising sea levels

Alarmists try to frighten people, and stampede them into terrible energy decisions 
 

Jay Lehr and Tom Harris

For the past 50 years, scientists have been studying climate change and the possibility of related sea level changes resulting from melting ice and warming oceans. Despite the common belief that increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere could result in catastrophic sea level rise, there is no evidence to support this fear. Tax monies spent trying to solve this non-existent problem are a complete waste.

There is another widely held misconception: that all the oceans of the world are at the same level.  In reality, sea level measurements around the world vary considerably, typically by several inches. Prevailing winds and continental instability are among the variables that make measurements difficult, but the varying results of rising sea levels are extremely accurate.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States updated its coastal sea level tide gauge data in 2016 at the request of the previous administration. These measurements continue to show no evidence of accelerating sea level rise.   The measurements include tide gauge data at coastal locations along the West Coast, East Coast, Gulf Coast, Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, as well as seven Pacific Island groups and six Atlantic Island groups, comprising more than 200 measurement stations.

The longest running NOAA tide gauge record of coastal sea level in the U.S. is in New York City at Battery Park. Its 160-year record shows a steady sea level rise of 11 inches per century. A few miles away at Kings Point, New York is a station whose 80-year record shows about the same.

Both locations show a steady, unchanging sea level rise rate whether temperature has been rising or falling (see below figures). Indeed, The Battery measurements showed the same rate of sea level rise well before the existence of coal power plants and SUVs as today.

The 2016 updated NOAA tide gauge record included data for California coastal locations at San Diego, La Jolla, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The measured rates of sea level rise at these locations vary between four inches and nine inches per century. NOAA data provide assessments with a 95% confidence level at all measured locations.

In contrast to these steady but modest real-world rising sea level rates, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that sea levels all over the world will almost immediately begin rising far faster than before. Not only do NOAA records contradict such claims for U.S. and selected island coasts; this pattern of steady but modest sea level rise is being observed all across the world, despite rising CO₂ and fluctuating average global temperatures.

The IPCC and its supporters are not able to provide convincing evidence to support their concerns about dangerous warming-driven sea level rise, as rising temperatures have rarely pushed sea level rise beyond one foot per century. Current sea level rise trends have stayed essentially constant over the past 90 years, despite the rise of atmospheric CO₂ levels from less than 300 parts per million (ppm) as the Little Ice Age ended and modern industrial era began, to today’s 410 ppm.

Dire predictions made decades ago of dramatically accelerating polar ice loss, and an ice-free Arctic Ocean, have simply not come to pass. Dr. Steven E. Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science in the Obama administration, noted in The Wall Street Journal on September 19, 2014: “Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today.”

We can test the rising-seas hypothesis with real data collected from ten widely-distributed coastal cities with long and reliable sea level records in addition to those listed above. Those cities are indicated on the map below.

 

 

 

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_map, modified.

Each of these cities has well-documented, long-term sea level rise data, from which linear extrapolations can be made for the next 100 years. Here are three samples of the data available on the NOAA web site:

 The Ceuta, Spain data show a nearly flat trend. Most notably, the data show no correlation between CO₂ concentration and sea-level rise. If the current trend continues for the next century, the sea level in Ceuta will rise only three inches. This is in sharp contrast to the 10-foot global rise in sea levels recently projected by former NASA scientist James Hansen.

Like some other regions, Hawaii can see significant year-to-year fluctuations in sea level because of global oceanic currents or local plate tectonic movements. However, Honolulu has seen an average sea-level rise of only 5.6 inches since 1900. The sea level around Honolulu is projected to rise a mere 5.6 inches in the next 100 years, once again with no correlation to CO₂ levels.

 

In contrast to these other locations, the sea level trend in Sitka, Alaska has been downward, not upward. If the rate of change continues, sea level will fall nine inches over the next 100 years. Note that Sitka is only about 100 miles from Glacier Bay and 200 miles from the Hubbard Glacier on Disenchantment Bay. If melting glaciers were causing sea levels to rise, one would expect to see it in Alaska.

Of course, the Sitka anomaly could be due to rising land masses, as is the case in other parts of the world. Still other locations – such as the Norfolk, Virginia area – are prone to land subsidence, the result of groundwater withdrawals from subsurface rock formations and/or to isostatic changes in nearby areas that cause some land masses to rise while others fall in elevation.

Here is the forecast sea level rise over the next century for the remaining seven cities on the map:

Atlantic City, New Jersey - 16 inches
Port Isabel, Texas - 15.4 inches
St. Petersburg, Florida - 10.7 inches
Fernandina Beach, Florida - 8.3 inches
Mumbai/Bombay, India - 3.12 inches
Sydney, Australia - 2.7 inches
Slipshavn, Denmark - 3.6 inches.

The observational data and projected sea level trends for these ten coastal cities lead to three obvious conclusions:

1. There has been no dramatic sea level rise in the past century, and evidence-based projections show no significant or dangerous rise is likely to occur in the coming century.
2. There is no evidence to indicate that the rate of sea level rise (or fall) in any of these areas will be substantially different than has been the case over the past decades or even century.
3. There is no correlation between atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and sea level rise. The steady but modest rise in sea level pre-dated coal power plants and SUVs, and has continued at the same pace even as atmospheric CO₂ concentrations rose from 280 parts per million to 410 parts per million.

Claims about dangerously rising sea levels, and island nations being submerged by them – as a result of human fossil fuel use and manmade global warming – are nothing more than a clever ruse, designed to frighten people into demanding or accepting terrible energy policies.

Those policies would cause nations the world over to give up abundant, reliable, affordable coal, oil and natural gas … and replace these fuels with unreliable, weather-dependant, expensive wind, solar and biofuel energy. The results would be devastating – for economies, jobs, manufacturing, food production, poor families and the environment.

Dr. Jay Lehr is the Science Director of The Heartland Institute which is based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition and is also a policy advisor to Heartland.

Viewpoint: As global honeybee population increases, activists blame neonicotinoid pesticides for ‘bird-pocalypse’ that’s not happening

Jon Entine | @ Genetic Literacy Project | November 13, 2018

Are we in the midst of another bout of unfounded environmentalist-fueled exaggerations—this time about birds becoming extinct because of pesticide exposure?

We’ve seen this script most recently, with hyped fears about the demise of the honeybee. Anti-pesticide activists abetted by some mostly inexperienced bee keeper newbies, claimed that honeybee populations in Europe and North America were collapsing as a result of a mysterious condition that came to be known as ‘colony collapse disorder’. CCD, mostly concentrated in California in 2006-07, was marked by a unique condition in which worker honeybees suddenly abandoned otherwise healthy-seeming hives for no apparent reason. It remains a genuine mystery, although research has turned up similar collapses that have occurred periodically and inexplicably in Europe over the past few centuries.

CCD was followed by a series of severe winters that led to higher-than-usual overwinter bee deaths, fueling genuine concerns among scientists about bee health. The issue soon migrated into the mainstream media when anti-GMO and anti-chemical groups aligned to blame pesticides for both CCD and the overwinter losses, and by-and-large refused to recognize the complexity of bee life and bee health.

Politicization of the ‘bee crisis’

Most of the finger-pointing was initially directed at a class of pesticides developed in the 1990s—neonicotinoids—that were designed specifically to replace organophosphates, pyrethrins and pyrethroid insecticides, which are highly toxic to mammals and beneficial insects, including bees. From this sprang an entire cottage industry of (mostly laboratory) studies by some activist-oriented scientists that appeared to be designed more to prove a case than explore a mystery.

The politicization of what should have been a science-based issue culminated in the European Union’s decision earlier this year to expand its 2013 partial ban on these insecticides to cover all outdoor uses—which has led to the reintroduction of the more toxic chemicals phased out in the 1990s.

It’s now widely accepted that honeybee populations aren’t collapsing after all, with populations steady or rising in Europe and North America for the last 20 years—and rising worldwide for more than a half-century, as even the Sierra Club now grudgingly acknowledges.

…honeybees are at no risk of dying off. While disease, parasites, and other threats are certainly real problems for beekeepers, the total number of managed honeybees worldwide has risen by 45 percent over the last half century 

What threatens bee health?

We now have a pretty good idea of what drove the higher-than-normal health problems that existed after the CCD scare : the Varroa destructor mite infestations of hives combined with widespread prevalence of a honeybee gut fungus called nosema ceranae. It should be noted the experts agree that rising global honeybee colony numbers do not mean that bees are not struggling; in fact there is general agreement that bee health is a serious issue, but pesticides are a comparatively minor threat compared to the host of diseases and the overuse of miticides to fight some of the challenges. In Australia where neonics are widely used, and Varroa and nosema are health, bee health is not an issue.

Bees are seen by farmers and professional beekeepers as, essentially, livestock but in the wake of the extinction scares, bees have taken on almost a romantic, mythical status among the public and hobby bee keepers. That goes a long way to explaining why no activist campaign has been launched to eradicate Varroa and the nosema fungus. First, they are both extremely difficult to combat. The mites, in particular, have rapidly developed resistance to every synthetic chemical mite treatment yet devised. What’s more, poor mite-control practices by amateur beekeepers who refuse to treat their mite problems with effective chemicals has had the effect of turning their collapsing hives into escalating sources of contagious infestation for neighboring beekeepers’ hives.

But more to the point, focusing attention on a combination of complex factors doesn’t have the pizazz of finding any easy bogeyman like pesticides. The anti-chemical hysteria also has helped fill an expanding piggybank for advocacy groups for years now. Consider the Sierra Club again. Even as it was proclaiming an end to its own bee-pocalypse hysteria, it launched a fund-raising campaign designed to raise money by scaring the public with dire warnings that pesticides were on the verge of wiping out bees. This Sierra Club fund raising flyer arrived at my house.

Now ‘threatened’ birds provide a new scare opportunity

In April, a pair of studies from France—one regionally focused, one nationwide—claimed widespread declines in European populations of field birds. The studies, which were not yet released, reportedly attributed these declines to modern agricultural practices, specifically, the widespread use of the same neonicotinoid pesticides blamed for the non-existent ‘bee-pocalypse’.

Articles about these studies appeared widely last spring, including in the New York Times, and the spate of stories persisted for weeks. The studies, however, remain unpublished today—suggesting a novel form of advocacy for activist environmental scientists: leak or brief your sensational results to the press to generate media attention while keeping a controversial study, and the data on which the advertised findings depend, under wraps. The peer-reviewed data that led to headlines around the world might in fact never be released.

Understandably, the stories fueled a new anxiety over neonic pesticides: They threaten bird population along with the bees.

In late summer, another study from the team of Saskatchewan-based scientist Christy Morrissey, known for her anti-neonic views, sought to demonstrate that birds (in this case tree swallows) that catch their insect prey in flight were being adversely affected by a dearth of aquatic insects. Those insects, it was assumed, were being decimated by the run off of neonicotinoid pesticides from farm lands into freshwater rivers, streams, lakes and ponds.

As it happens, the study didn’t confirm this hypothesis; it actually demonstrated much the opposite: It found that tree swallows were enjoying even richer diets of aquatic insects. So, whatever was happening in all those streams and ponds, neonics weren’t affecting the abundance of aquatic insect meals for insectivorous birds.

Morrissey’s team did, however, find something else in their data that they characterized as a neonic-caused calamity: Tree swallows foraging in cropland exhibited lower body weight than those foraging in grasslands. Morrissey speculated that these birds were ‘struggling’ as neonic-treated croplands left them with a scantier insect diet. This she wrote, is what has led to a fall-off in the birds’ overall numbers.

What is the status of bird health in North America?

But there are questions as to this purely speculative conclusion. We know what the main killers of birds are, and they aren’t pesticides:

• By far, scientists say, the greatest challenge to bird populations is habitat loss—which is mostly attributed to ‘urban sprawl’— the conversion of rural acreage, whether farm or forest, to (sub)urbanization. The parallel here to Varroa and bees is unmistakable: We know the main problem but since it’s complicated and doesn’t lend itself to a facile solution, let’s not acknowledge or analyze it.
• Other man-made environmental challenges, such as windmills and high-voltage electric lines crisscrossing the rural landscape, kill up to a billion or more birds annually. The US Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that collisions with high-voltage electric lines alone kill 174 million birds per year. In-flight collisions with skyscrapers and other buildings kill between 97 million and 976 million birds per year in the US. Collisions with cars account for another roughly 60 million bird fatalities. The list goes on.
• Cats have been estimated to kill an astounding 1.3 billion and 3.7 billion birds per year.  

As for the threat from neonicotinoid-treated seeds, they have been shown to have low toxicity to birds. Vertebrate nervous systems are much less susceptible to nicotine and synthetic compounds that mimic the disruptive effects on the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors essential to the functioning of insect nervous systems. Moreover, birds generally avoid the tiny fraction (1% is deemed permissible under EPA rules) of neonic-treated seeds that may remain on the ground after mechanical planting, due perhaps to their altered appearance (many are colored), smell or taste.  

The most common of these treated seeds, corn, is, in any case, too large for small and medium-sized birds to ingest and too hard for them to crack with their beaks. All of which may help explain why such research as we have seen trying to link the supposed ‘devastation’ of bird populations to pesticides hasn’t focused on the effects of direct ingestion by birds; instead, as with Christy Morrissey’s team’s most recent study, the effort appears designed to demonstrate some indirect effect on bird populations from indiscriminate adverse impacts on the birds’ insect food sources.  
How badly are birds actually fairing? Is the bird-pocalypse any more reality-based than the bee version? Ultimately, all of these claims about the supposed imminent extinction of some species or other—honeybees a few years ago; field birds today—depend on a lack of context driven, it appears, by ideology.  

There is, in fact, a good deal of evidence that birds in general are in pretty good shape in the US. Numerous studies have documented a gradual decline of bird populations in the US and the developed world, but as in the case of bee population fall-off, these declines occurred in the

decades before the large-scale introduction of neonicotinoid pesticides in the late 1990s. As the Genetic Literacy Project reported some years ago, many bird populations seem to have leveled off during the last two decades and have in many cases increased since the 1990s. Bird populations don’t appear to have been impacted since their introduction.

What about other pesticides? Bird deaths directly attributable to pesticides—all pesticides, not just neonics—have been estimated to total 76 million annually. (An unknown additional number die from other indirect effects.) That’s about three-quarters of 1% of the day-to-day bird population in the US or three-eighths of 1% of the peak autumn bird population. Clearly, they are not a major driver of bird population trends, as so many other factors, including ‘natural causes’, result in far more bird fatalities annually.

Stampeding policy-makers on the basis of mischaracterized, misdiagnosed, half-understood supposed problems into adopting measures that won’t, in any case, solve them is a prescription for dreadful decisions.

Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, has been a journalist for more than 40 years as a writer, network television news producer and author of seven books, four on genetics and risk. BIO. Follow him on Twitter @JonEntine