The Scientific Evil and Good We Do Lives On

By Dr. Jay Lehr August 8th, 2022 Science 186 Comments @ CFACT

Shakespeare said it in the play, Julius Cesar. We are surely witnessing this today as evil men and women will pass off our planet, leaving behind hundreds of millions of the Earth’s population in Energy Poverty. The essential value of energy is to allow humans to flourish (1) and enrich their quality of life by multiplying what their limited human abilities can perform independently. However, in this early period of the 21st century, our “designated experts” seized control of the reigns of progress for marching humanity back into the dark ages, ages of dogma, ages of short life expectancy, and grueling manual work needed to feed their families.

Why and who are these purveyors of darkness? I will name, but a few, and you can add to my short list of these human juggernauts which the poor across the world can only call evil. These experts of the day routinely call for fossil fuel elimination while ignoring the many undeniable benefits for humanity. This is an egregious, irrational, and ennoble evaluation.

In my life time, the prime scientist abuser of mankind was and still is Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford-trained award-winning ecologist spending his career teaching that man is a cancer on the planet. His close associate John Holdren had for us the displeasure of serving as Obama’s science director to ensure that no good science would be carried out in his administration,

James Hansen of NASA ultimately caused near bankruptcy of many nations when he stood before the US Congress in 1988 and professed to be 99 percent certain than humanity was heating our planet to a degree we may not survive.

None is more famous than Al Gore, whose book An Inconvenient Truth established his evil leadership that made the former vice-president a very rich man.

Bill McKibben led the public march to ignorance with his book The End of Nature which was able to bring corporate America closer to economic suicide.

Michael Mann, an academic climate scientist who led the worst people, suing everyone who stood in his way.

And then there is Amory Lovins, who led the charge against fossil fuel, to be replaced by undependable wind and solar power for over 40 years. There is money and power in the positions these people hold without a care for the negative impact on the human conditions.

The strong correlations we see between energy, quality of life and life expectancy have brought India and China a dramatic increase in their standards of living. Not only in China and India but hundreds of millions of people in developing industrial countries are enjoying their first light bulb, refrigerator, clean drinking water and a full stomach. Yet almost every elected official in Washington appears to believe what the press has said over and over for almost half a century. Our government school system failed to teach our children serious science and critical thinking. There is a saying that if you tell a person a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.

Billions of people are suffering, and millions are dying due to lack of cost-effective energy while today’s leaders build a dogmatic system calling for fossil fuel elimination. Instead of acknowledging the unique cost-effectiveness of fossil fuels today, these cruel leaders, like the mainstream media, deny the realities of alternatives today claiming petroleum is running out and that China has made a successful conversion away from fossil fuels. All lies. Insisting fossil fuels can easily be replaced by their green energy. Yet the reality is that less than 3% of world’s energy use comes from wind and solar.

Their malevolence worsens when we recognize that their opposition to carbon dioxide emissions does not bring them to support emission-free nuclear power. They imposed onerous regulations, project delays, and lawsuits to cripple further expansion of nuclear power in the US.

There is more large-scale hydroelectric power that could not be greener and more renewable. But again, they stop further development for fear a fish habitat might be affected somehow, someday. How can we not question their evil intent?

Yet they are not effectively building the mining sites and transmission lines for wind, were a conversion actually to take place. They don’t care, they want to bring the nations citizenry to its knees, begging for what little energy is left.

People who ignore the many benefits of cost-effective energy to the point that it they can always find a reason to oppose it and ignore energy expertise are dangerous for the terrible decisions that result.

Alex Epstein said it best in his new book Fossil Future:

“Once we see that the knowledge system telling us this conclusion also supports energy elimination polices not just for fossil fuels but also for non CO2-emitting nuclear and hydro-while being indifferent to the “green tyranny” to its supposedly beloved solar and wind, and with no concern for the billions who lack cost effective energy and the billions who could lose it? It is clear that what we are told is not just wrong. It is in fact EVIL. So, join our cause, learn the facts, gain the knowledge, and lose the fear.”

Note 1- Human Flourishing is defined as an effort to achieve self-actualization and fulfillment within the context of a larger community of individuals, each with the right to pursue his or her such efforts.

Note 2: Portions of this article were excerpted from the book FOSSIL FUTURE: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas-Not Less, with permission of the author Alex Epstein and the publisher Portfolio/Penquin. I strongly recommend this book to everyone fighting for the preservation of life in America which has been made possible by our abundance of fossil fuels before the leftist, liberal, progressives and yes communists have attempted to limit the well being of human-kind.

Author

• Dr. Jay Lehr

  CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. Jay’s new book A Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change written with Teri Ciccone is now available on Kindle and Amazon.

 

My Definition of a Scientist

By Frank Schnell — October 31, 2018

A scientist is a person who is able and willing to live with uncertainty as long as it takes to dispel that uncertainty through an objective, logical process (a.k.a. the Scientific Method).Most non-scientists are victims of a potentially dangerous combination of two common attributes of human intelligence:

(1) an extreme aversion to uncertainty and
(2) the ability to rationalize.

The former is expressed as a fear of the unfamiliar which inhibits one’s evolution from Frightened Animal to Thinking Human Being. The latter enables one to intellectually neutralize discomfiting truths or uncertainties and is used (especially, but not exclusively) to support political and religious ideologies. In their darkest forms, those ideologies give one permission to continue behaving like a beast while still imagining that one is a superior life form. .........To Read More....


Will "Alternative Truth" Prevail?



Credit: John Tenniel

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” - Alice in Wonderland

By Frank Schnell — April 16, 2017

Science is, above all, a methodology designed for discovering objective“truths” about the natural world. All lawyers and politicians speak quite highly of Truth, and all routinely claim that it is on their side, rather than their opponents’, however, the real function of legal and political debate is not to discover truth, but to win. And, whenever “winning” is the prime directive, Truth is always the first casualty in the battle..........To Read More....

The Age Of Stupid

By Frank Schnell — August 19, 2016

When, exactly, was the Age of Stupid? Was it when people practiced human sacrifice to placate the brutal gods they worshiped? Was it when people believed the Earth was flat and everything else in the universe revolved around them?  Or, was it when people thought that all diseases were due to an imbalance of the four humours and could be treated by bleeding the patient?

Maybe it was when they believed in witches and burned them alive at the stake for the on-lookers’ entertainment and spiritual enlightenment.  Or perhaps it occurred more recently when people took “comet pills” to protect themselves from cyanogen gas in the tail of Halley’s Comet, which they believed would envelope the Earth and cause mass extinction.

Surely, the Age of Stupid was in full flower when people believed in Piltdown man and perpetual motion machines, zero-threshold environmental toxins, and catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Or it’s the Age of Stupid today.........To Read More....

Chemicals, Cancer and Common Sense

By Frank Schnell — April 15, 2016

Risk Estimation:  It would come as a surprise to most people to learn that so-called quantitative cancer risk assessments do not actually quantify true risk.  The actuarial risk calculated by insurance companies (e.g., the risk of dying in an auto accident), is based on actual data on the incidence of disease-, disaster- or accident-related mortality. 

However, actuarial data on disease incidence or mortality in humans resulting from very low exposures to chemicals in the environment simply do not exist. 

Instead, data from occupational studies of more heavily exposed humans are used, where available.  However, epidemiological studies seldom have the quantitative exposure data needed for a quantitative risk assessment.  To create a surrogate for this missing low-dose data, animals are exposed to very high doses of substances to guarantee that statistically reliable results are obtained. 

These animal results (or, much less often, the results from occupationally-exposed humans) are then extrapolated, using mathematical models incorporating numerous default assumptions, to humans exposed to very low environmental levels of the same substance.  The resulting cancer risk calculated by regulatory agencies is, of necessity, entirely theoretical and will vary greatly depending on the assumptions made and the models used in the assessment.  The limitations of quantitative risk assessment were clearly acknowledged in EPA's 1986 Guidelines for carcinogen risk assessment, as follows:

“The risk model used by EPA [i.e., the linearized multistage model] leads to a plausible upper limit to risk that is consistent with some proposed mechanisms of carcinogenesis.  Such an estimate, however, does not necessarily give a realistic prediction of the risk.  The true value of the risk is unknown, and may be as low as zero."  (U.S. E.P.A., 1986)      (emphasis added.)..........To Read More.....

War On Science: Bogus Human Carcinogens

By Frank Schnell — March 10, 2016

In the last 15 years, EPA has invented three bogus human carcinogens: dioxin, formaldehyde, and TCE.

Prior to the late 1990s, EPA’s cancer Risk Assessment Guidelines (CRAGs) required sufficient evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship in humans before a substance could be classified as a “known human carcinogen”.   However, during the late 1990s, EPA modified its CRAGs to allow itself to classify substances as known human carcinogens without sufficient epidemiological evidence to support such a decision.

The new CRAGs were specifically designed to enable the agency to classify the “celebrity” pollutant dioxin as a human carcinogen, using the agency’s speculative policies (e.g., the so-called TEF approach to the risk assessment of “dioxin-like” compounds) as surrogates for the missing evidence of carcinogenicity in humans.

Dioxin had been a “celebrity” pollutant ever since it came to public attention during the Vietnam War. The chemical’s status followed, not from the its known toxicity in humans (which was largely limited to chloracne, a serious skin condition associated with heavy exposures), but from its association with the second most divisive war in American history.  EPA’s determination to classify it as a human carcinogen had little to do with toxicology and everything to do with the politics of pollution............To Read More....


How Natural Variations Became Environmental Crises: The Word Game

 By Frank Schnell — February 16, 2016

In How Natural Variations Became Environmental Crises: The Numbers Racket, we looked at how officially safe levels of exposure gradually went from conservative, to ultra-conservative, to completely ridiculous.

Even before the manipulation of numbers became commonplace, the manipulation of words was a major tool in promoting fear about science and keeping it alive. Simple words in common usage, like risk, known, similar and equivalent were given esoteric, colloquial meanings that bore little resemblance to their definitions in Webster s Dictionary and of which the general public was completely unaware..

Thus, unbeknownst to the average citizen, EPA s so-called quantitative cancer risk assessments have never assessed the true risk of potentially carcinogenic exposures. In EPA s 1986 Risk Assessment Guidelines, the following, uncharacteristically honest, and seldom quoted (except by me) statement was made: The true risk is unknown and may be as low as zero. Obviously, if the true risk is unknown, then the risk that is supposedly quantified in EPA risk assessments is not the true risk.

Throughout my career as an ATSDR toxicologist, I routinely quoted the zero true risk statement in all of my toxicological evaluations for health assessments that addressed potential cancer hazards on site. And, it never failed to irritate agency management and even some of my colleagues......To Read More....

How Natural Variations Became Environmental Crises: The Numbers Racket

By Frank Schnell — February 15, 2016

George Washington may be the only popularly elected ruler in history who, when his supporters offered to crown him King, relinquished his power instead. Politically speaking, that was a very unnatural thing to do.

Historically, federal agencies have not surrendered their power, even after their congressional mandates were accomplished. Instead, they have invented new problems to solve, thereby justifying their continued existence.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created by Congress in 1970 to write and enforce regulations designed to protect the environment and, by extension, human health. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a sister agency of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), was created by Congress ten years later (1980) as a non-regulatory public health information agency that analyzed the public health implications of environmental data provided by EPA and others, and wrote Public Health Assessments for concerned citizens at contaminated sites...........To Read More.....

Dose-Response, NOAELs and Hormesis

By Frank Schnell — January 22, 2016

In the 16th century, Paracelsus, the Father of Toxicology, established that All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison from a remedy.

The truth of this 500-year-old statement should be intuitively obvious to anyone who has ever taken aspirin for a headache. If you take too little, you will get no relief; if you take the right amount, your headache will go away; and, if you take too much, your ears will ring and your stomach will hurt.

Thus, dose alone determines whether a substance (aspirin in this example) will have an adverse effect (a poison), a beneficial effect (a remedy), or no effect at all.

One could describe most modern medications as judiciously applied poisons.........To Read More....

Dr. Frank Schnell, PhD, is a retired toxicologist for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of the CDC, in Atlanta, Georgia, and is a member of the American Council on Science and Health Scientific Advisory Panel.
 

Science and Environmental Litigation

By Chuck Dinerstein — August 21, 2018 @ American Council on Science and Health

The judiciary frequently acts in its role as a counterbalance to executive and legislative action and non-action. A new article in Nature Climate Change finds patterns of climate change litigation identified in the Sabin Center for Climate Change database, a part of Columbia’s School of Law. As it turns out, there are some instructive patterns, and we begin to see the role of Science – with a capital S.

The Who and Why of Litigation

Who files these cases? - Environmental non-government organizations were the largest plaintiff, initiating 42% of cases, industry followed at 30%, with city, state and federal government involved in about 11%.  The Sabin database contained 838 cases from 1990 to 2016.

• 46% dealt with atmospheric environmental issues especially coal-fired power plants
• 8.5% dealt with energy efficiency or renewables
• 4% addressed water quality
• 8% raised concerns about biodiversity

The courts were asked to address the reduction in greenhouse gases, to assess responsibility for environmental impacts and as a way to change both corporate behavior and public debate (the latter presumably through policy).

For those interested in keeping some form of score, in those cases involving atmospheric environmental issues, the courts more often sided with the “anti-regulators.” On the other hand, “pro-regulatory” litigants won more often when the cases involved issues of energy. And whether it was an NGO or an industrial group acting as plaintiff, they were generally less successful than the defendants. The authors felt that this might reflect both weaker cases and the courts more often deferring to the judgment of state officials.

The Who and the Where

To file a court case, the plaintiff must have “standing,” a legal term that establishes that the plaintiff has suffered some injury [1] or that there is a causal relationship between the defendant’s actions and those injuries. In establishing standing, NGOs often found that collaborating with local stakeholders was helpful. If the NGO could not demonstrate “their” injury, then an alliance with a local community group who had suffered injury got them a seat at the plaintiff’s table. These collaborations were not limited to the NGOs; industrial litigants found that joining forces with other large business within the sector with also in their interest. The authors suggest that these collaborations helped to demonstrate a larger group of concerned citizens, helped to mask disagreements among the stakeholders and in some cases gain otherwise unavailable legitimacy.

The where of litigation is referred to as venue - the jurisdiction in which the case is heard. The plaintiff’s goal is to identify the most favorable court for hearing their case. Delaware is home to many corporations because its corporate laws frequently favor their concerns, which has resulted to more corporate litigation in that state which in turn creates a large body of case law to serve as precedence. California is a more favored venue when statutory concerns are pivotal, because of their strict environmental rulings and the case laws that have flowed from those decision. And in both instances, prior case law often provides a sense of how the courts may act.

The role of science

Unsurprisingly, both NGOs and industry felt that scientific evidence was an essential factor in the court’s ruling. Equally unsurprising was that the litigants offered differing evidence and used it in differing ways. The “pro-regulatory” litigants, the NGOs, used their scientific evidence to establish a causal link between the defendants and the injury. This could serve two purposes, first to warrant their standing before the court and then to substantiate the environmental effects causing the injury.  The “anti-regulatory” litigants also found the same two uses; using the “dismal science” of economics to demonstrate their economic injury, and the environmental science to refute the claims of the plaintiffs.

The researchers did not review the court transcripts, so what science and how it was presented remains unknown, but from studying the Court’s written judgments they found that scientific evidence was cited in roughly half the cases; it made no difference whether it was for or against regulation.

So what can we conclude? Everyone brings their own “scientific evidence” to the table; that their evidence differs is not a flaw in the scientific method, it is a feature. Scientific theory and evidence represent are a best current approximation, and there is always an unknown element. So our evidence will differ, only time and further replication will push us towards the “right” answer. As the authors write:

“The results turn on factors such as the roles courts think are appropriate for the judiciary in influencing important environmental, social and economic policy questions, how they react to scientific evidence that relates to climate change presented before agencies or during civil trials and what remedies they are willing to impose.”

The question we need to ask is whether a courtroom is the best venue for that discussion. The courts act on these matters because the other branches of the government are unable or unwilling to have this discussion; I think that those other branches are as able as the courts so that just leaves unwilling.

[1] Injury does not have to be physical, it can be emotional or anything that reflects a form of damage.

Source: Strategies in and outcomes of climate change litigation in the United States Nature Climate Change DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0240-8

The Schism Between Science And Science Journalism

By Hank Campbell — March 8, 2017 @ The American Council on Science and Health

The American Council on Science and Health and RealClearScience got a national dialog going about the credibility of corporate science journalism when we published our infographic ranking media companies and non-profits on how well they covered the science, and how interesting they were.

It's not easy to do both. I enjoy Physics World and MIT Technology Review, for example, but when people who curate science articles for a living say they are not "compelling" I know what they mean. They mean much of the public will not find them as accessible as USA Today or publications written for a larger audience. That means the science messages will get lost.

But is a panel of science editors wrong for putting that in a chart? It seems they are, at least if people who get a paycheck from corporations with poor showing don't like how they are identified.

Obviously these panels will be subjective but immediately the knives were out for the group. The New York Times and Mother Jones, who have never found anything wrong with hand-picked IARC committees chosen specifically to declare that pesticides cause cancer, for example, questioned the integrity of the panel itself.

Well, the panel consisted of three very experienced editors, two with Ph.D.s in science, and all with years under their belts curating science articles for millions of people per month. That is as expert as it gets yet they were considered suspect and dismissed as just "opinions." Writers for the New York Times especially rallied around their paychecks in a breathtaking display of voluntary corporate altruism.

Reject it if you want, and embrace yourself and your friends in the logical fallacy of the cloak of Pulitzers past, but in the very next Science Tuesday print edition of the New York Times we were treated to an endorsement of acupuncture (digital version last week.) This was a tiny study, it invoked useless fMRI, and it was about alternative medicine. There is nothing essential about it for a science audience, much less deserving of being in the print edition of a top five newspaper.

It was a trifecta of woo, and yet partisan political journalists at anti-science sites still defended its inclusion because, well, Harvard.

This kind of appeal to authority logical fallacy is everything that is wrong in science journalism. We shouldn't question the validity of a study on acupuncture because the writers are from Harvard?

Would Mother Jones accept a peer-reviewed study on atrazine that was done by Syngenta? Of course they wouldn't, they would actually dismiss it out-of-hand, even if every other scientist in America agreed with the findings, because Syngenta is not their political ally. Mother Jones writers are instead paid to undermine science and corporations and there is a similar anti-corporate mentality in academia. Yet when it comes to alternative medicine, which Mother Jones gets millions of dollars to advertise, their writers insist we have to give it a fair chance.

Teach the controversy! At least about the alternative medicine that Mother Jones readers and their corporate funders love.

To him, criticizing acupuncture, which has never been superior to a placebo in a double-blind clinical trial (that would instead make it medicine rather than an "alternative") is "trolling" but Mother Jones routinely dismissing the entire pro-science world as "industry front groups" is in the minds of Mother Jones writers (invariably, it is their go-to claim when they have no real argument) completely legitimate.

Why should the public trust their claims when they are clearly filtering the science they accept through the political beliefs of their readers and advertisers?

What hope does the public have for knowing who to trust?

At Nature, they discuss the hand-wringing of the New York Times, Mother Jones and others (outside academia, scientists nodded their heads in agreement) and put it in the context of a larger problem in science sensationalism (Nature 543, 150 09 March 2017 doi:10.1038/543150a - digital available now). Nature knows the real issue is that kind of sensationalism and a desire to get in corporate media, because Nature editors experience it every day. Just about every study will try to be in Nature first, and the claims they read will often be as provocative and scientifically sexy as possible. Being in a high impact journal means legitimacy. Activist groups will even groom high-profile scholars as senior authors to boost their chances of getting accepted.

Nature knows the difference, more often than not, because they have experts determining study validity, not journalists. Science is not going to come down in favor of acupuncture just because one political demographic in the audience overwhelmingly believes in it.

Compare that to corporate media, who love weak observational claims, the bolder and more ridiculous the better. It gets them attention, and that attention makes scientists want to appeal to corporate media like the New York Times writers because an appearance in the science section lends a veneer of credibility the same way appearing in Nature does. While Mother Jones writers will bow obsequiously to the name Harvard, Harvard is now bragging their acupuncture claim has been validated by the New York Times. Next, lots of woo sites selling acupuncture and other alternative facts about health will use that appearance in NYT to claim legitimacy.

Where are the New York Times science writers when it comes to objecting to this misuse of their science section? Nowhere to be found, it's a fellow insider and not to be criticized.

Science itself covers the entire cultural spectra. Science is about progress, it requires libertarian freedom to pursue, and the conclusions must be inherently conservative because peer reviewers are supposed to be. So whenever you can, get context from scientists and doctors rather than corporate journalists. Instead of trying to make corporate media more scientific, please help make independent science media like us as popular as corporate journalism.