"The mother-of-all-environmental scares"

From Happy Earth Day, by Steven F. Hayward...

More than 30 years ago political scientist Anthony Downs discerned what he called the “issue-attention cycle,” a five-stage process by which the public and especially the news media grow alarmed over an issue, agitate for action, generate piles of scary headlines, and then begin to draw back as we come to recognize that the problem has been exaggerated or misconceived, and the price tag for action comes in. While Downs thought that the issue-attention cycle for the environment would last longer than most issues, it appears the mother-of-all-environmental scares -- global warming -- is following his model and is going to begin to fade like other environmental alarms of the past such as the population bomb and the “we’re running out of everything” scares.

The current media and political blitz on Capitol Hill for government controls on energy production are the product of the panic felt by environmentalists who realize that opinion polls show the public is climbing off global warming bandwagon...

I think a lot of the panic is coming from the unconscious, because even if the globalistas ignore the facts that contradict global warming theory, they had to be expecting a lot more bad news than there has been. Global mean temps have not increased since 1998! That's gotta be making certain people nervous.

And Argo. Argo was going to clinch the case for global warming. People were expecting that. Now you hear almost nothing about it.

What's bothersome to me is that the demise of each scare-issue doesn't cause ordinary people to start thinking for themselves. Minds just gradually adjust to the new CW, without people noticing that there's something really wrong. The "population bomb" fades away, and people stop worrying, but they retain a vague idea that there are too many people, and some of them really ought to be eliminated to "save the planet." That the predictions of mass-starvation never came true.... that's not dwelt upon.

Don't trust Wikipedia

Charlene recommends this piece, by Lawrence Solomon in the National Post, on how Wikipedia is bogus on the subject of Global warming. "Information wants to be free," but not when the subject has become part of a monomaniacal religion...(Thanks to Instapundit)

...Tabletop, it turns out, has another name: Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She (or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia. What does she edit? Reams and reams of global warming pages. I started checking them. In every instance I checked, she defended those warning of catastrophe and deprecated those who believe the science is not settled. I investigated further. Others had tried to correct her interpretations and had the same experience as I -- no sooner did they make their corrections than she pounced, preventing Wikipedia readers from reading anyone's views but her own. When they protested plaintively, she wore them down and snuffed them out.

By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda, its source is not self-evident. We don't suspend belief when we read Wikipedia, as we do when we read literature from an organization with an agenda, because Wikipedia benefits from the Internet's cachet of making information free and democratic. This Big Brother enforces its views with a mouse.

While I've been writing this column, the Naomi Oreskes page has changed 10 times. Since I first tried to correct the distortions on the page, it has changed 28 times. If you have read a climate change article on Wikipedia -- or on any controversial subject that may have its own Kim Dabelstein Petersen -- beware. Wikipedia is in the hands of the zealots.

"Emerging truth"

I commend to your attention this piece from the National Post, about how the BBC was cajoled into changing an article that didn't conform to The Church of Climate Change orthodoxy... (Thanks to Michael Goldfarb)

This is just a part of the quoted e-mail exchange. "Roger" is the journalist, "Jo" is cracking the whip on behalf of the "Campaign Against Climate Change."

jo.

From: Roger Harrabin

The article makes all these points quite clear. We can't ignore the fact that skeptics have jumped on the lack of increase since 1998. It is appearing reguarly now in general media.

Best to tackle this -- and explain it, which is what we have done

Or people feel like debate is being censored, which makes them v. suspicious.

Roger

---

Hi Roger,

... . Your word "debate." This is not an issue of "debate." This is an issue of emerging truth. I don't think you should worry about whether people feel they are countering some kind of conspiracy, or suspicious that the full extent of the truth is being withheld from them.

Every day more information is added to the stack showing the desperate plight of the planet.

It would be better if you did not quote the skeptics. Their voice is heard everywhere, on every channel. They are deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth.

I would ask : Please reserve the main BBC Online channel for emerging truth.

Otherwise, I would have to conclude that you are insufficiently educated to be able to know when you have been psychologically manipulated. And that would make you an unreliable reporter.

I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the skeptics. Respectfully,

jo.

---

From: Roger Harrabin

Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more.

"This is not an issue of "debate." This is an issue of emerging truth." You gotta love the frankness!

Notice how Jo Abbess just assumes she has the right to demand suppression of facts! As does the "journalist," Roger Harrabin. He doesn't even pretend to be objective; he merely claims it is better tactics to be open about inconvenient truths.

And this is similar to a few occasions I recall when the Old Media have been c aught being taken to task by Democrats for publishing some story that hurts a Dem. It is just assumed that the media are in the leftist camp, and that it is perfectly proper to tell them they can't publisj tjis or that.

And you just know that these "journalists" go to journalist banquets where they present each other with plaques and awards for journalistic integrity and "speaking truth to power." And listen to speeches about how a free press is essential to the functioning of democracy.

The old Manichean error

A bit of Michael Heller, quoted at First Things:

....And what about chancy or random events? Do they destroy mathematical harmony of the universe, and introduce into it elements of chaos and disorder? Is chance a rival force of God’s creative Mind, a sort of Manichean principle fighting against goals of creation? But what is chance? It is an event of low probability which happens in spite of the fact that it is of low probability. If one wants to determine whether an event is of low or high probability, one must use the calculus of probability, and the calculus of probability is a mathematical theory as good as any other mathematical theory. Chance and random processes are elements of the mathematical blueprint of the universe in the same way as other aspects of the world architecture.

Mathematical structures that are parts of the composition determining the functioning of the universe are called laws of physics. It is a very subtle composition indeed. Like in any masterly symphony, elements of chance and necessity are interwoven with each other and together span the structure of the whole. Elements of necessity determine the pattern of possibilities and dynamical paths of becoming, but they leave enough room for chancy events to make this becoming rich and individual.

Adherents of the so-called intelligent design ideology commit a grave theological error. They claim that scientific theories that ascribe a great role to chance and random events in the evolutionary processes should be replaced, or supplemented, by theories acknowledging the thread of intelligent design in the universe. Such views are theologically erroneous. They implicitly revive the old Manichean error postulating the existence of two forces acting against each other: God and an inert matter; in this case, chance and intelligent design. There is no opposition here. Within the all-comprising Mind of God, what we call chance and random events is well composed into the symphony of creation....

-- Michael (Michał) Heller is a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest. These remarks were made at the news conference announcing his reception of the 2008 Templeton Prize.

PS: I just saw this, posted by JB Watson:

Any deity worthy of a graven image can cobble up a working universe complete with fake fossils in under a week… But to start with a big ball of elementary particles and end up with the duckbill platypus without constant twiddling requires a degree of subtlety and the ability to Think Things Through: exactly the qualities I’m looking for when I’m shopping for a Supreme Being.
-- a Usenet poster

strangest health story in many years?

Hugh Hewitt, on another recall of possibly-contaminated Heparin from China....

This remains the strangest health story in many years because it is so under-reported....

...The questions I have yet to see answered in a newspaper account (or anywhere for that matter):

Where and when did the 19 fatalities occur?

During what time frame did the "hundreds" of allergic reactions occur?

Are there possible long-term consequences from use of the adulterated heparin which patients have to be vigilant about?

Have all patients who received potentially contaminated heparin been informed?

Why are there still possibly-contaminated Heparin products on the market?

Either the 19 deaths and "hundreds" of allergic reaction numbers are inflated or conjecture, or this story has been terribly handled by MSM.

It's certainly odd how little we've heard of this.

My guess is that it's mostly political. There's no domestic political angle. If An American firm were at fault, this would be a big story. If Mr McCain owned stock in that company, it would be a HUGE story. (If Mr Obama were involved, it would be a story about "Republican smear tactics.")

But mostly I would guess it's a non-story because the media's instincts are always Tranzi. They don't want you to notice that there are certain differences between countries...since they are hoping to kind of merrrrrge things, under the supervision of elite post-nationalist bureaucrats. A group that would have considerable overlap with elite post-nationalist journalists.

Are we at the "willing suspension of disbelief" stage?

Alan Sullivan writes:

...Today BBC has a new datum from Antarctica. A section of ice shelf is breaking away. You have to read the article closely to find amid the language of alarm that the chunk is question is a small piece of a small shelf on the Palmer Peninsula — the one part of Antarctica that has been warming. The rest of the continent has been getting markedly colder for many years. This is not mentioned in the article. BBC provides no balance in climate coverage, only propaganda.

The “unprecedented warming” of the peninsula is probably a direct consequence of the continent chilling. With colder air over the great icecap, ocean storms round the perimeter get stronger. Those storms drive maritime winds over the north-jutting peninsula, causing a local warming. It has nothing to do with global climate, which is not warming, and has not been for nearly a decade. Curiously enough, BBC has offered readers no story on the startling data from the Argo buoy program, announced last week. It covered the launch of the system with green enthusiasm in 2000. Now not a word. Why? Because Argo finds no warming in the oceans, and zealots can abide no contradiction....

We are in an interesting situation here, where those following certain subject via the Internet are aware of a growing disconnect between what you "read in the paper" and what's actually happening on the ground. And the fascination is in wondering when "they" are going to be forced to acknowledge the new reality.

This is starting to feel a lot like Iraq in early 2007, when blogs started to pick up on stories about sheikhs in al Anbar turning against al Qaeda, and about the shift in our tactics to counter-insurgency. And our question became not: "who's going to win," but instead: "When are our lefties going to be forced to admit that their side has lost?"

I'm wondering if the "global warming" debate is approaching a point similar to when Hillary greeted Gen. Petraeus' report with her "willing suspension of disbelief" wise-crack. (McCain recently suggested it was high time she apologized to a great American. I kinda hope she gets the nomination just so McCain can rub her nose in it.)

This is sort of like watching a movie, where the characters have decided to explore the spooky mysterious old house How long will it be before something jumps out at them?... This is going to be fun.

Tiresome little blighters...

Lorne Gunter: Perhaps The Climate Change Models Are Wrong...

...They drift along in the worlds' oceans at a depth of 2,000 metres -- more than a mile deep -- constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity, pressure and velocity of the upper oceans...

....When they were first deployed in 2003, the Argos were hailed for their ability to collect information on ocean conditions more precisely, at more places and greater depths and in more conditions than ever before. No longer would scientists have to rely on measurements mostly at the surface from older scientific buoys or inconsistent shipboard monitors.

So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys' findings? Because in five years, the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters' hypotheses, must be wrong.

In fact, "there has been a very slight cooling," according to a U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a scientist who keeps close watch on the Argo findings....

....The big problem with the Argo findings is that all the major climate computer models postulate that as much as 80-90% of global warming will result from the oceans warming rapidly then releasing their heat into the atmosphere.

But if the oceans aren't warming, then (please whisper) perhaps the models are wrong....

Actually, the real scandal about the models is that they are--all of them--tweaked to make them produce credible results. No one has ever just created a model from existing data and had it produce anything like our climate.

However, since all scientists are honest and pure of heart--secular saints, you might say--it is merely coincidence that all the models produce the results hoped-for by their political flavor. Anyone who suggests otherwise is a right-wing hate-monger.

Sunshine vitamin...

I found this piece on vitamin D and disease prevention.from Canada's Globe and Mail (Thanks to Glenn) intriguing. I've been taking extra Vitamin D for a few years, but this has a lot of stuff I hadn't heard of. A lot of this research is coming from Canada, and Scandinavia, where there are lots of people living at high latitudes who are not exposed to much sunlight. But nowadays we are all turning into zombies who sit inside and stare at computer screens.

In the summer of 1974, brothers Frank and Cedric Garland had a heretical brainwave.

The young epidemiologists were watching a presentation on death rates from cancer county by county across the United States. As they sat in a lecture hall at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore looking at the colour-coded cancer maps, they noticed a striking pattern, with the map for colon cancer the most pronounced.

Counties with high death rates were red; those with low rates were blue. Oddly, the nation was almost neatly divided in half, red in the north and blue in the south. Why, they wondered, was the risk of dying from cancer greater in bucolic Maine than in highly polluted Southern California?....

[...]

...A 2001 Finnish study found that children given 2,000 IU daily cut their risk of getting juvenile diabetes by 80 per cent.

The strong correlation between latitude and the incidence of multiple sclerosis has led researchers to suspect the trend is related to vitamin D status. In the U.S., for example, MS rates are four times higher in northern states, along the Canadian border, than in the southern parts of the country. Similarly, Australian research shows the incidence of MS increases the farther people live from the equator. The highest incidence rates in the world are found in Northern Europe and Canada....

....The simple answer may be that Vitamin D interacts with an unusually large number of our genes, working like a master switch to turn them on or off. Researchers believe a deficiency of the vitamin leads to a deficiency of the proteins manufactured under the direction of these genes, which then undermines key defences against seemingly unrelated diseases such as cancer, diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

John White, who has been studying the antimicrobial activities of vitamin D at McGill University in Montreal, says that "virtually every cell" in the human body has receptors for vitamin D and that hundreds of different genes may be regulated by it.

Vitamin D's most profound gene-influenced activity appears to be in keeping healthy the broad category of cells known as epithelium, which line the outsides of our organs and the surfaces of the structures in our body.

Even though these lining tissues amount to only about 2 per cent of the weight of our bodies, they are the source of about 85 per cent of cancers, those known as carcinomas.....

"The sun is the primary driver"

Alan Sullivan has posted a very long piece on Climate. He's a weather-nut, has been studying this for a lifetime, and knows a lot. Well worth reading...

....But why are ice ages occurring now, and why at other times in earth’s history, has warmth predominated, with only a few previous cycles of widespread glaciation? At last the information from the various sciences offers a coherent explanation of paleoclimate, with which we can better understand the present, and take more educated guesses at the future.

There is one essential truth to emphasize: the sun is the primary driver. All other factors affecting climate are trivial in comparison, though sometimes they may briefly override the solar homeostasis. Virtually all Earth’s thermal energy derives from the sun; only the tiniest traces leach from the planet’s interior. But the sun’s output is not perfectly constant. Its immense thermonuclear furnace fluctuates, with short-term and long-term cycles. We scarcely understand the former, and the latter we don’t understand at all.

Our time-line of sophisticated solar study is very brief. Only in the last few years have instruments been deployed that can probe the sun’s innards more precisely. Even with super-computers, scientists will need some time to integrate the new information into theories that might help us comprehend Sol’s long-term behavior, and its peculiar short-term changes.

The first solar cycle known to astronomers was the sun-spot cycle, which was found to peak at eleven-year intervals. We have decent records of sunspot count going back to the 1500’s. They show something very odd: the Maunder minimum. During the 1600’s, the sunspot cycle collapsed, and hardly any sunspots were observed for the better part of a century. Then the cycle resumed and gradually sharpened. The peaks of the Twentieth Century appear to be the highest in the record, even when weighted for the limitations on the older counts.

The Little Ice Age happened during the Maunder Minimum. Europe and other parts of the world suffered crop failures and food crises. Winters were fierce; snows deep; ice covered the rivers; and we inherited pretty paintings of people ice-skating on canals of the Netherlands. This is not a coincidence. Solar radiance peaks with the flares that accompany sunspots. When solar storms quit entirely for decades on end, Earth’s energy balance changes. There is less input from the primary driver. The effects come promptly, and pass when the sunspot cycle resumes.....

Gaia angry at Bush, Cheney--withholds sunspots...

DailyTech: Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age

Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago -- and it signaled a solar event known as a "Maunder Minimum," along with the start of what we now call the "Little Ice Age."

Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, says it may be happening again. Overseeing a giant radio telescope he calls a "stethoscope for the sun," Tapping says, if the pattern doesn't change quickly, the earth is in for some very chilly weather.

During the Little Ice Age, global temperatures dropped sharply. New York Harbor froze hard enough to allow people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island, and in Britain, people reported sighting eskimos paddling canoes off the coast. Glaciers in Norway grew up to 100 meters a year, destroying farms and villages....

It's our fault for being selfish. But Obama is wiling to negotiate with the Sun.

"the most important public health response -- is ending the war."

Remember the Lancet study that claimed that more than 600,000 Iraqis had died since the US invasion? It was not even close to any other mortality estimates, and was widely condemned as bad science motivated by politics. Now National Journal has an article suggesting that actual scientific fraud may have been involved!

I found this part on the politics of those involved very interesting. My guess, from watching such people closely since 2001, is that that they are deranged enough that they could jigger the figures and then sincerely believe that they were telling the "real truth," and not committing fraud.

...In fact, the funding came from the Open Society Institute created by Soros, a top Democratic donor, and from three other foundations, according to Tirman. The money was channeled through Tirman's Persian Gulf Initiative. Soros's group gave $46,000, and the Samuel Rubin Foundation gave $5,000. An anonymous donor, and another donor whose identity he does not know, provided the balance, Tirman said. The Lancet II study cost about $100,000, according to Tirman, including about $45,000 for publicity and travel. That means that nearly half of the study's funding came from an outspoken billionaire who has repeatedly criticized the Iraq campaign and who spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004.

Partisan considerations. Soros is not the only person associated with the Lancet studies who had one eye on the data and the other on the U.S. political calendar. In 2004, Roberts conceded that he opposed the Iraq invasion from the outset, and -- in a much more troubling admission -- said that he had e-mailed the first study to The Lancet on September 30, 2004, "under the condition that it come out before the election." Burnham admitted that he set the same condition for Lancet II. "We wanted to get the survey out before the election, if at all possible," he said.

"Les and Gil put themselves in position to be criticized on the basis of their views," Garfield concedes, before adding, "But you can have an opinion and still do good science." Perhaps, but the Lancet editor who agreed to rush their study into print, with an expedited peer-review process and without seeing the surveyors' original data, also makes no secret of his leftist politics. At a September 2006 rally in Manchester, England, Horton declared, "This axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease." His speech can be viewed on YouTube.

Mr. Roberts tries to go to Washington. Roberts, who opposed removing Saddam from power, is the most politically outspoken of the authors. He initiated the first Lancet study and repeatedly used its conclusions to criticize Bush. "I consider myself an advocate," Roberts told an interviewer in early 2007. "When you start working documenting events in war, the public health response -- the most important public health response -- is ending the war."..

When he says "ending the war," he is telling a lie. He really means ending American involvement in the war. If the US pulled out of Iraq, and a million people died subsequently, that would not be "war." That would be "peace," and these animals would be preening themselves on "ending the war." (And you can bet your last nickel that there would never be any "Lancet studies" of those deaths!)

Curious facts. How odd we haven't heard more about this...

David Whitehouse, in the New Statesman, Has Global Warming Stopped?

Global warming Stopped? Surely not. What heresy is this? Haven't we been told that the science of global warming is settled beyond doubt and that all that's left to the so-called sceptics is the odd errant glacier that refuses to melt?

Aren't we told that if we don't act now rising temperatures will render most of the surface of the Earth uninhabitable within our lifetimes? But as we digest these apocalyptic comments, read the recent IPCC's Synthesis report that says climate change could become irreversible. Witness the drama at Bali as news emerges that something is not quite right in the global warming camp.

With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 — there has been no warming over the 12 months.

But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask?

No.The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming — the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly..

shibbuwichee...

Penraker:

.....Today's latest garbage seminar is being held in Indonesia, where the world's great reformers are gathering:

"If you cannot lead, leave it to the rest of us. Get out of the way," said Kevin Conrad, Papua New Guinea's ambassador for climate change.

Oh my. Papua New Guinea's "Ambassador" for climate change is dressing us down. My knees are going wobbly. It's not even the president or premier of Papua New Guinea. It's not even a minister in the government. It is some flake that they gave the honorific of "ambassador". No doubt, he is yet another climate change freak dressed out in UN garb to pose as someone of substance.

Bush is giving in to the hysteria, it seems. But he has played this whole faux-crisis brilliantly. Let us enter into a renegotiation of Kyoto. That ought to take about 4 or 5 years, during which he ( or his successor) can use the hysteria to get us into nuclear power in a big way. Oops! That's not what Gore and his buddies wanted! A delicious bit of ju-jitsu by Bush.
And the REAL research will come streaming in, telling us that hey, we are not having as big an effect on the climate as we thought. New data will show that the sun has been fluctuating, and that more warmth is actually good for us. More crops can be grown, less heating oil is used, etc, etc.

That two-foot sea level rise will shrink yet again, to a bare nickel's width per year - the same as has been going on for the last 10,000 years.....

New bug. Be aware

Virus Starts Like a Cold But Can Turn Into a Killer - washingtonpost.com:

....Gilbert alerted state health officials, a decision that led investigators to realize that a new, apparently more virulent form of a virus that usually causes nothing worse than a nasty cold was circulating around the United States. At least 1,035 Americans in four states have been infected so far this year by the virus, known as an adenovirus. Dozens have been hospitalized, many requiring intensive care, and at least 10 have died.


Health officials say the virus does not seem to be causing life-threatening illness on a wide scale, and most people who develop colds or flulike symptoms are at little or no risk. Likewise, most people infected by the suspect adenovirus do not appear to become seriously ill. But the germ appears to be spreading, and investigators are unsure how much of a threat it poses.....

THE fashionable disease...

From An Epidemic of Falsehoods, by Michael Fumento...

The UNAIDS program has issued its annual report in which, finally, it doesn't say how many more current HIV infections there are this year than last. Rather it drops the figure by over six million from its 2006 estimate. Specifically, it went from 39.5 million to 33.2 million. Further, the Agency now admits the number of new HIV infections per year peaked way back around 1998.

For years, some of us have dared write that worldwide HIV and AIDS figures have been grossly exaggerated; that we were being lied to by just about everybody, including -- or especially -- the UNAIDS program and the World Health Organization...[...]

.....Such an extrapolation from a small non-representative portion of the population to literally the whole world is nonsense.
And UNAIDS knew it because it had been told by a number of careful, knowledgeable scientists such as Berkeley epidemiologist Dr. James Chin. Chin, when he worked for the UN, was responsible for some of the earliest world AIDS forecasts. Later he watched how politics -- not a virus -- made those figures zoom into the stratosphere.

Three years ago, Chin told me: "They [the UN] don't falsify per se" but "as an epidemiologist I look at these numbers and how they're derived. Every step of the way there is a range and you can choose the low end or the high end. Almost consistently the high end was chosen."

And guess what? Chin, who is also author of The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology With Political Correctness, still thinks the numbers are too high. He estimates worldwide HIV infections to be 25 million, still about eight million less than the revised estimate...

Look, it's obvious that AIDS is THE fashionable disease. Africans dying of AIDS is a big deal, Africans dying because of polluted water supplies or lack of vaccinations is not very interesting to Western elites and Hollywood saints. The question is, why?

I myself have little doubt that it is--unconsciously perhaps--because it is mostly a "gay" disease, and all things homosexual are being officially "approved of" as part of Leftist attacks on traditional morality and values. And gays are just pawns here--Leftists would happily sacrifice them to the "cause." (If you think I exaggerate, imagine as a thought experiment a popular new movement in the gay culture, with all gays becoming monogamous and all voting Republican, leading to ZERO new cases of AIDS. Do you think for a moment that Lefty activists would be pleased?)

Part of the weirdness of the "popularity" of AIDS, (and the popularity of many other issues) is the way that all left-leaning people have picked-up their marching orders from...where? From out of the ether it seems. In the old days the Left had a hard core of communists who told the "useful idiots" how to think. But that's all gone, there is no center anymore, and no real belief in socialism. And yet, millions of people have a little internal Politburo that pushes them towards positions that advance the cause of socialism. In which they do not actually believe. Always towards atomizing society, and destroying institutions like families and churches that come between people and government.

Thanks once again Mr Bush...

From an editorial in National Review....

Today’s papers bring news of an enormous advance in stem-cell research. Scientists in the United States and Japan have managed to turn regular human skin cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells — achieving what they’ve sought until now through the destruction of embryos, but without the need to use embryos, to use cloning, or to use eggs...

...In an effort to cause the country to abandon this conviction, some advocates of the research, including nearly every prominent Democrat in Congress, have made reckless and irresponsible promises, offered false hope to the suffering, depicted their opponents as heartless enemies of science, and exploited sick people for crass political gain.

Meanwhile, in an effort to defend that conviction, President Bush and most congressional Republicans have stood up to all that pressure, and have pursued an approach that seeks to advance science while also insisting on ethics. Contrary to the common myth, Bush never “banned” stem-cell research, or even federal funding for it. Instead, he permitted such funding, for the first time, in a way that could help basic science advance while not encouraging the ongoing destruction of human embryos. He acknowledged the importance of the science, acknowledged the importance of the ethics, and sought to champion both.

For several years now, the president has also clearly understood that the potential for scientific alternatives to the destruction of embryos could offer a powerful means to that end. Helped along by a variety of experts who saw that promise — perhaps most notably William Hurlbut of Stanford University, who was a member of Bush’s bioethics council — he came to recognize that stem-cell science could solve the ethical quandary stem-cell science had created. As early as 2005, Bush was speaking about “ethical ways of getting the same kind of cells now taken from embryos without violating human life or dignity.” And after trying unsuccessfully to get the Congress to support such new avenues of research, he acted on his own through an executive order this summer....

As someone said, Bush accomplishes more in a bad year than Clinton did in his whole 8 years.

And even if you do not care about this particular issue, SANE people should recognize that there should be the possibility that elected governments can exercise oversight in scientific research. I don't think it is sane to say, "Scientists should be allowed to discover or build anything they like, and we should all just pay them to do so and accept humbly whatever they decide to give us." Am I right? (shall I pause and give you Democrats an hour to scratch your heads?)

And therefore sane people should agree that something good has been accomplished. Ordinary Americans said they were not happy with the way certain research was going, and the political process produced a pause, and a change of direction. That's a good thing, right?

And the administration is not "anti-science." That's lying crap from people who can't compete in the arena of ideas. Imagine that researchers were hoping to save lives by inventing what could be an Ozone Layer-destroying chemical? Or by slaughtering baby seals? Would not Al Gore and Democrats be arguing for a slowdown? A change of direction? Alternatives? Hmmm? That would not be "anti-science."

Actually, if you scrutinize that "baby seal-destroying research" analogy, it gives one pause. To be more analogous, Republicans would have to be eager, nay HUNGRY for the destruction of baby seals. And they would have to ignore the fact that there were more promising lines of research that did not kill seals. And they would have to heap scorn on anyone not eager to club little seals en mass, and deride them as knuckle-dragging obscurantists who didn't want Christopher Reeve to be cured.

We take cream in our coffee here...

There's a really interesting piece in the New York Times, Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus. It covers the findings in a new book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes, who debunks the notion that fatty foods shorten your life...

....With skeptical scientists ostracized, the public debate and research agenda became dominated by the fat-is-bad school. Later the National Institutes of Health would hold a “consensus conference” that concluded there was “no doubt” that low-fat diets “will afford significant protection against coronary heart disease” for every American over the age of 2. The American Cancer Society and the surgeon general recommended a low-fat diet to prevent cancer.

But when the theories were tested in clinical trials, the evidence kept turning up negative. As Mr. Taubes notes, the most rigorous meta-analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets, published in 2001 by the Cochrane Collaboration, concluded that they had no significant effect on mortality.

Mr. Taubes argues that the low-fat recommendations, besides being unjustified, may well have harmed Americans by encouraging them to switch to carbohydrates, which he believes cause obesity and disease. He acknowledges that that hypothesis is unproved, and that the low-carb diet fad could turn out to be another mistaken cascade. The problem, he says, is that the low-carb hypothesis hasn’t been seriously studied because it couldn’t be reconciled with the low-fat dogma....

This is of course cool for Charlene and I, both of us being low-carbers, and longtime skeptics about low-fat. The reason "the low-carb hypothesis hasn’t been seriously studied" is because, to put it more bluntly, it has not been politically correct to do so. If you follow the subject you soon see that diets line up with politics in the most fascinating way. The big bureaucracies are low-fat and so the left tends to go that way. Low carb diets, like the Atkins Diet, have always been "counter-cultural, and tainted with capitalism—Dr Atkins products are sold for profit.

And doesn't this quote remind you of a certain other "scientific consensus" we've been hearing a lot about lately?...

....It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus....

Chasing things ever more subtle and elusive...

This piece from the NYT is a bit depressing. So much effort, with no clear results...

....In January 2001, the British epidemiologists George Davey Smith and Shah Ebrahim, co-editors of The International Journal of Epidemiology, discussed this issue in an editorial titled “Epidemiology — Is It Time to Call It a Day?” They noted that those few times that a randomized trial had been financed to test a hypothesis supported by results from these large observational studies, the hypothesis either failed the test or, at the very least, the test failed to confirm the hypothesis: antioxidants like vitamins E and C and beta carotene did not prevent heart disease, nor did eating copious fiber protect against colon cancer.

The Nurses’ Health Study is the most influential of these cohort studies, and in the six years since the Davey Smith and Ebrahim editorial, a series of new trials have chipped away at its credibility. The Women’s Health Initiative hormone-therapy trial failed to confirm the proposition that H.R.T. prevented heart disease; a W.H.I. diet trial with 49,000 women failed to confirm the notion that fruits and vegetables protected against heart disease; a 40,000-woman trial failed to confirm that a daily regimen of low-dose aspirin prevented colorectal cancer and heart attacks in women under 65. And this June, yet another clinical trial — this one of 1,000 men and women with a high risk of colon cancer — contradicted the inference from the Nurses’s study that folic acid supplements reduced the risk of colon cancer. Rather, if anything, they appear to increase risk.

The implication of this track record seems hard to avoid. “Even the Nurses’ Health Study, one of the biggest and best of these studies, cannot be used to reliably test small-to-moderate risks or benefits,” says Charles Hennekens, a principal investigator with the Nurses’ study from 1976 to 2001. “None of them can.”...

Expanding ice caps...

John Hinderaker:

You've no doubt read about the shrinking ice cap at the North Pole, and the plight of the polar bears there. It's less likely that you've heard that in the meantime, the ice cap at the South Pole has been expanding, and just recently reached its largest extent since measurements began in 1979.

I compared Google News searches for "ice cap 'north pole'" and "ice cap 'south pole.'" The North Pole stories were all about the shrinking ice cap there as evidence of global warming. I couldn't find a single news story about the expanding ice cap at the South Pole. This strikes me as a pretty good illustration of how the conventional story line about Earth's climate drives news reporting...

Neither North nor South Poles are definitive evidence in themselves. Climate change would not be linear. But this is sure powerful evidence of what a bunch of frauds our news-media are.

The whole globo-warming debate is warped because a LOT of things are not being mentioned. Things that would cause the little people—you and me— to possibly fail to reach the conclusions deemed appropriate by our elite would-be masters. For instance, 99% of the Greenhouse Effect on Earth is caused by water vapor. And lucky we are that it is; we'd be pretty cold without it. We'd all be living in the "Antarctic."

A bit of a follow-up on a old story...

From Michelle Malkin...

One of the most useful roles of the blogosphere is its service as an open-source intelligence-gathering medium. You can draw on the expertise of people around the world at the touch of a button. We saw this with typography experts during the Rathergate scandal; Photoshop experts during the Reutersgate debacle; and military experts during the Jesse Macbeth unmasking.

Now, it’s the statisticians and math geeks’ turn. Remember that massively-publicized 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study? It was cited in nearly 100 scholarly journals and reported by news outlets around the world. “100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq” blared the Washington Post in a typical headline.

There were attempts made by lay journalists to debunk the 2004 study (as well as the 2006 follow-up study that purported to back up the first). But none of those dissections comes close to a damning new statistical analysis of the 2004 study authored by David Kane, Institute Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. I read of Kane’s new paper at this science blog and e-mailed him for permission to reprint his analysis in its entirety here so that a wider blog readership could have a look. He has given me his permission and adds that he welcomes comments and feedback....

....An interesting side note: as Kane observes in his paper, the Lancet authors “refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data (or even a precise description of the actual methodology).” The researchers did release some high-level summary data in highly aggregated form (see here), but they released neither the detailed interviewee-level data nor the programming code that would be necessary to replicate their results.....

I've written about this BS before.

...It's the same with that widely disseminated figure of 100,000 killed in the American occupation of Iraq. Statisticians have thoroughly debunked the number, though liars are still pushing it. But common sense tells us it's bogus. 100,000 bodies are hard to hide. There would be big piles of them lying around for significant periods of time. You can be sure Kevin Sites would have snapped pictures, and the MSM would have given them all possible publicity.

And 100,000 dead means at least a quarter of a million wounded! In a place the size of California. Where are they? I doubt if Iraq has even 10,000 hospital beds. There would be wounded people scattered everywhere...

I'm sure the fake-pacifists will still be pushing the fake numbers long after I'm dead and gone.

EMR's...cool

The Economist writes:

The federal government is giving a push to EMRs, following the lead of the Veterans' Health Administration (VHA). Studies have shown that thanks in large part to its sophisticated national database, the VHA has fewer patient errors and better health outcomes than the health system at large, despite the fact that its patients tend to be older, poorer and sicker. George Bush wants a system of universal health-records by 2015. And Medicare, the government-run health scheme for pensioners, is shifting to a tiered reimbursement system in which it pays doctors more if they go electronic.

Employers are also keen on technology, since it promises to curb health-care costs and improve efficiency. Intel, BP, Wal-Mart and several other big companies got together last year to form Dossia, an independent, non-profit company that will develop an EMR system to give employees lifelong, portable medical histories. And over a hundred other firms including Dell, IBM and Microsoft now allow employees to manage their health affairs via WebMD, a big health-information website.

Wayne Gattinella, WebMD's boss, says the popularity of this corporate product persuaded his firm to develop a version for individual consumers, supported by “discreet” targeted ads for pills, devices or relevant consumer products. “The consumer will be the catalyst to drive doctors and community hospitals to adopt IT,” he says.

Intuit, known for its accounting software, is convinced the market is ready for health-care software too. But when it tested such a product last year, it found that users were frustrated at having to fill in so many forms and search for bills and records to which they did not have easy access. So it now plans to offer its software in conjunction with health insurers, so that payment data and other information can be filled in automatically.

Aetna, a big insurance firm, has taken a different path by acquiring ActiveHealth, a firm that provides EMRs for around 14.5m users and also scours those health records with decision-support software to spot signs of trouble (such as missed doctors' appointments or early warnings of obesity). Aetna plans to offer this software to its own customers...

Well, just add this to the list of things being accomplished by the failed/beseiged/dead-in-the-water/lame duck/not-conservative Bush administration.

EMR stands for electronic medical record. The real reason they are a big deal is that if you had your medical records in a standardized electronic form, and your doctor recommended treatment, you could get a second opinion just by sending an e-mail. And, more importantly, you could get BIDS for your treatment, from other providers, without them having to re-examine you. That should start to shake things up.

(Thanks to Orrin)

Good news (won't be seen on your TV)

Here's some good news, via Rand...

...The restoration of southern Iraq's Mesopotamian marshes is now a giant ecosystem-level experiment. Uncontrolled release of water in many areas is resulting in the return of native plants and animals, including rare and endangered species of birds, mammals, and plants. The rate of restoration is remarkable, considering that reflooding occurred only about two years ago. Although recovery is not so pronounced in some areas because of elevated salinity and toxicity, many locations seem to be functioning at levels close to those of the natural Al-Hawizeh marsh, and even at historic levels in some areas....

You know, since I've told you already, that the Iraq Campaign does not really have a military purpose. We just did it to test leftists. To test whether "liberals are really liberal. Test 'em to destruction; show them up for the evil horrid frauds they are.

I wrote here:

...Iraq was (and is) the big test. To propose regime-change in Iraq is really to say to the Left: , "OK wise guys, you claim to be anti-fascist. Help us remove the worst fascist tyrant of our times. You claim to be humanitarian; here's one of the most brutalized countries of the earth needing our help. You claim you are not anti-Semitic; stand with us against against a monster who was paying bounties to Jew-killers. You claim to care about a certain group that's been denied a homeland; here in the Kurds we have a far bigger group denied a homeland..." (I could go on for a long while with these. You get the picture.)...

Now I see there is another test. A test for the fake-environmentalists commonly known as "Greens." The deliberate destruction of the Iraqi Marshes was the biggest environmental crime of our time. Any real environmentalist would be thrilled by the possibility of bringing back to life this vast wetland, and succoring the simple people who lived in harmony with it for at least 5,000 years....

Real environmentalists would be eager to help out. So where are they?

"A small ecological footprint"

A friend sent this.

A TALE OF TWO HOUSES

House 1:
The four-bedroom home was planned so that "every room has a relationship with something in the landscape that's different from the room next door. Each of the rooms feels like a slightly different place." The resulting single-story house is a paragon of environmental planning. The passive-solar house is built of honey-colored native limestone and positioned to absorb winter sunlight, warming the interior walkways and walls of the 4,000-square-foot residence. Geothermal heat pumps circulate water through pipes buried 300 feet deep in the ground. These waters pass through a heat exchange system that keeps the home warm in winter and cool in summer. A 25,000-gallon underground cistern collects rainwater gathered from roof urns; wastewater from sinks, toilets, and showers cascades into underground purifying tanks and is also funneled into the cistern. The water from the cistern is then used to irrigate the landscaping around the four-bedroom home, (which) uses indigenous grasses, shrubs, and flowers to complete the exterior treatment of the home. In addition to its minimal environmental impact, the look and layout of the house reflect one of the paramount priorities: relaxation. A spacious 10-foot porch wraps completely around the residence and beckons the family outdoors. With few hallways to speak of, family and guests make their way from room to room either directly or by way of the porch. "The house doesn’t hold you in. Where the porch ends there is grass. There is no step-up at all." This house consumes 25% of the energy of an average American home.
    (Source: Cowboys and Indians Magazine, Oct. 2002 and Chicago Tribune April 2001.)

House 2:
This 20-room, 8-bathroom house consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year. The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, this house devoured nearly 221,000 kWh, more than 20 times the national average. Last August alone, the house burned through 22,619 kWh, guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of this energy consumption, the average monthly electric bill topped $1,359. Also, natural gas bills for this house and guesthouse averaged $1,080 per month last year. In total, this house had nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for 2006.
    (Source: just about anywhere in the news last month online and on talk radio, but barely on TV. An inconvenient truth.)
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House 1 belongs to George and Laura Bush, and is in Crawford, Texas.

House 2 belongs to Al and Tipper Gore, and is in Nashville, Tennessee.

Of course no "Green" person is going to be bothered by this, because Green is a religion, and Algore's virtue lies in being a believer, not in actually caring about the environment. Actually, it's a pseudo-religion; a rather pathetic attempt to give meaning to lives lived in the void...

Quote for the day...

Rand noticed this, by Jonah Goldberg:

...But the reader's point that global warming provides an excuse for liberals to do what they've always wanted should make us very reluctant to take their proposed solutions at face value. That's why it's particularly maddening when Gore is so determined to shut off all debate.

It's funny, the same people who insist that dissent is the highest form of patriotism when it comes to the war, suddenly think you're a moronic bastard or environmental traitor if you want to debate global warming a bit more, even when the solutions being discussed could cost — in monetary terms — far more than the Iraq war....

"Tweaked"

I recommend reading this interview with Dr S. Fred Singer, and the climate change debate. It's got lots of insights on how the science works. And the politics of science...

...Talk about the models. What is a computer model, and what isn't it? What is its purpose in science?

There are many kinds of computer models. But the ones that people mostly talk about these days are the giant models that try to model the whole global atmosphere in a three-dimensional way. These models calculate important parameters at different points around the globe--and these points are roughly 200 miles apart--and at different levels of the atmosphere. You can see that if you only calculate temperature, winds, and so on at intervals of 200 miles, then you cannot depict clouds, or even cloud systems, which are much smaller. So until the models have a good enough resolution to be capable of depicting clouds, it's very difficult to put much faith in them.

But, still, they're playing quite an important role in this debate. Take me through a history of what the models have predicted. You've alluded to this, and how some of their predictions have had to be scaled down. What can models do, and what can't they do?

You have to understand that these models are calibrated to produce the seasons. That is to say, the models are adjusted until they produce the present climate and the seasonal change.

So they're faked, you're saying?

They're tweaked. I think that's a polite way of putting it. They're adjusted, or tweaked, until they produce the present climate and the present short-term variation. You have to also understand there's something like two dozen climate models in the world. And one question to ask is: Do they agree? And the answer is: They do not. And these models are all produced by excellent meteorologists, fantastic computers. Why do they not agree? Why do some models predict a warming for a doubling of CO2, of, let's say, five degrees Centigrade--which is eight degrees Fahrenheit)--and why do other models predict something like one degree?

Well, there's a reason for this. These models differ in the way they depict clouds, primarily. In some models, clouds produce an additional warming. In some models, clouds produce a cooling. Which models are correct? There's no way of telling. Each modeler thinks that his model is the best. So I think we all have to wait until the dispersion in the model results shrinks a little bit--until they start to agree with each other.

What happens when you use these models to try and reproduce past climates, when other forcings are known, like ice ages and so forth? Can they succeed at that?

They fail spectacularly in explaining, for example, why an ice age starts, or why an ice age stops. The most recent result on this was published in early 1999. It's always been known that, for example, the deglaciation--that is, the transition from an ice age to the warm interglacial, which is spectacular--suddenly the ice age ends and the warming starts. And at the same time, you see an increase in carbon dioxide in the record. And these are records taken from ice cores--good measurements....

One trouble with computer models is that every one of them is good at something. If you spend years making a complex model, based on real data, it's going to predict something or other with great accuracy. So it's easy to hold up your model and say, "Look. Crushing irrefutable evidence! Those who dissent are like Holocaust Deniers."

"Zero Grazing"

This WaPo article, Speeding HIV's Deadly Spread is about how mainstream liberal prescriptions for stopping AIDs in Africa have had exacty the opposite effect. While the promotion of traditional morality does work.

On a hospital wall here, not far from the AIDS clinic that Khumalo visited with his friend, the painted image of a condom shimmers like a comic-book superhero. Giant, colorful block letters declare, "CONDOMISE AND STAY ALIVE!!"

In cramped black script below, it adds, "Abstain first."

Yet rarely seen among Botswana's AIDS prevention messages is one that has worked in other African countries: Multiple sex partners kill. Dubbed "Zero Grazing" by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, this approach dominated in East Africa, where several countries curbed HIV rates.

Fidelity campaigns never caught on in Botswana. Instead, the country focused on remedies favored by Western AIDS experts schooled in the epidemics of America's gay community or Thailand's brothels, where condom use became so routine it slowed the spread of HIV.

These experts brought not just ideas but money, and soon billboards in Botswana touted condoms. Schoolchildren sang about them. Cadres of young women demonstrated how to roll them on. The anti-AIDS partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and drugmaker Merck budgeted $13.5 million for condom promotion -- 25 times the amount dedicated to curbing dangerous sexual behavior.

But soaring rates of condom use have not brought down high HIV rates. Instead, they rose together, until both were among the highest in Africa...

"Multiple sex partners kill." That's been obvious from the beginning. But pointing out that obvious thing has been taboo to liberal do-gooders. Infantilizing themselves and the world—especially by promoting the unquestioning acceptance of sex-lives based on teenage fantasy—is much more important than saving lives. Not growing up is much more important than saving lives. Result: Millions die. You've heard about the "Culture of Death;" here it is.

[Thanks to Penraker]

Neat. And you wouldn't know about it without the Internet...

A State Department official gives the Germans some straight talk about Carbon emissions. I love it. Davids Medienkritik: How Unpolite: State Official Claims Superiority of U.S. Climate Policy:

....Now let's be honest--even a 2.4 percent increase for the EU-15 is a very modest increase. But given the way this issue gets talked about publicly in Europe, I would venture to say that few people in Europe know that from 2000 to 2004, EU-15 emissions grew at nearly double the U.S. rate, and that Europe, at least during this period, has been moving away from—not towards—its Kyoto target of an 8 percent cut. (...)

Now notice something else. This time period of 2000 to 2004 was a period of rapid economic growth in the United States. Between 2000 and 2004 we grew our economy by almost 1.9 trillion dollars (or nearly 1.46 trillion Euros). That's about the equivalent of adding Italy to the U.S. economy. And we increased our population by 11.3 million people--adding more than the population of Greece. And yet our emissions grew only 1.3 percent--that tells you a lot about how the U.S. economy is already changing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It is of course very hard if not impossible to see an actual decrease in emissions when both your economy and population are growing, though we came close. So how do we get a better measure of what is really happening? We do that by measuring the greenhouse gas intensity of an economy--that is, greenhouse emissions per unit of GDP. As our economy soared, our emissions rose only slightly; from 2000 to 2004, we reduced the greenhouse gas intensity of the U.S. economy by 7.5 percent. That is a good result....(Thanks to Penraker)

"And now we're wondering if we didn't create a monster..."

An interesting piece about climatologists having some second thoughts, So what happened at AGU last week?

....I wasn't so much interested in the details of climate science at this year's AGU. What I was (and am) interested in is seeing the conference as a whole. My interest in AGU has strayed from the hardrock science, moving into something more to do with feelings and hunches. That's right, feelings. Hunches. Intuition. The squishy, soft underbelly of the human mind; the part we want to ignore in pursuing geophysical data analysis. What I want to know is attitude. More than the state of the science, I now want to know about the state of the scientists....

...What I see is something that I am having a hard time labeling, but that I might call either a "hangover" or a "sophomore slump" or "buyers remorse." None fit perfectly, but perhaps the combination does. I speak for (my interpretation) of the collective: {We tried for years – decades – to get them to listen to us about climate change. To do that we had to ramp up our rhetoric. We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism (we are scientists, after all) in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder than it should be. We knew it would mean allowing the boundary-pushers on the "it's happening" side free reign while stifling the boundary-pushers on the other side. But knowing the science, we knew the stakes to humanity were high and that the opposition to the truth would be fierce, so we knew we had to dig in. But now they are listening. Now they do believe us. Now they say they're ready to take action. And now we're wondering if we didn't create a monster. We're wondering if they realize how uncertain our projections of future climate are. We wonder if we've oversold the science. We're wondering what happened to our community, that individuals caveat even the most minor questionings of barely-proven climate change evidence, lest they be tagged as "skeptics." We're wondering if we've let our alarm at the problem trickle to the public sphere, missing all the caveats in translation that we have internalized. And we're wondering if we’ve let some of our scientists take the science too far, promise too much knowledge, and promote more certainty in ourselves than is warranted.....

...I realize that many of you will disagree with the notion that we are overplaying our hand, or are not giving full voice to our uncertainties. I'm not sure the answer to this question myself. But I write all this because I sense a sea change in attitudes amongst climsci people that I know as good scientists without agendas. These are solid scientists, and some told me in no uncertain terms that we are not giving full voice to uncertainties; others implied as much. Therein lies the tension. Where we go from here is anybody's guess, but I tend to agree with the Oracle in the second Matrix movie: we already know the answer to that question, our task is to understand why we are going to do what we are going to do....(Thanks to Rand)

data from the deep past...

Mike Plaiss sent a link, and wrote: "Here is what a "fair and balanced" article on climate change should look like - and from the NYT no less...."

...The discoveries have stirred a little-known dispute that, if resolved, could have major implications. At issue is whether the findings back or undermine the prevailing view on global warming. One side foresees a looming crisis of planetary heating; the other, temperature increases that would be more nuisance than catastrophe.

Perhaps surprisingly, both hail from the same camp: scientists who study the big picture of Earth’s past, including geologists and paleoclimatologists.

Most public discussions of global warming concentrate on evidence from the last few hundred or, at most, few thousand years. And some climate scientists remain unconvinced that data from the deep past are solid enough to be relevant to the debates.

But the experts who peer back millions of years, though they may debate what their work means, do agree on the relevance of their findings. They also agree that the eon known as the Phanerozoic, a lengthy span from the present to 550 million years ago, the dawn of complex life, typically bore concentrations of carbon dioxide that were up to 18 times the levels present in the short reign of Homo sapiens.

The carbon dioxide, the scientists agree, came from volcanoes and other natural sources, as on Mars and Venus. The levels have generally dropped over the ages, as the carbon became a building block of many rock formations and all living things.

Moreover, the opponents tend to agree on why the early Earth’s high carbon dioxide levels failed to roast the planet. First, the Sun was dimmer in its youth. Second, as the gas concentrations increase, its heat trapping capacity slows and reaches a plateau.

Where the specialists clash is on what the evidence means for the idea that industrial civilization and the burning of fossil fuels are the main culprits in climate change....

This beats all...

I'm skeptical about the science behind Global Warming, as you know. I strongly suspect there's a lot of suppressio veri, suggestio falsi going on. But I didn't expect the suppressio part to be quite so shocking as this.

It looks like UN documents that have been widely circulated and used to promote **ahem** certain policies, have been doctored to remove a major historical event, the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). This period of dramatic climate change has been magic-ed out of the record! Here's the article, scroll down to the part with the two graphs. Astonishing...

Now I may not know much about computer climate models (though I know enough to smell a rat when people get exactly the results they so obviously want) but I do know a lot of history. The medieval warm period is real, it shows up in the record over and over again, as does the cooling after 1500. The most famous example is the Norse farms in Greenland, where no one would farm today. But there are plenty of others.

As always, what interests me are the underlying questions. Why is this such an overwhelming issue to certain people? One reason is contained in the first paragraph of the article:

Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government"...

That's a lot of it, I think. But there is also the desire to distract attention away from the failures of Leftism, which are now so evident. This is an issue that people can be passionate about without actually arguing in a positive way the virtues of their own philosophy. A leftist can scream 'We've got to do something!" and just assume that momentum and habit will produce the desired results of bigger government, less freedom, and rule by "experts." (I, on the other hand, can proclaim my ideas on this topic openly, and let them be debated.)

And perhaps the most conspicuous failure that leftists want to distract attention from are the declining birthrates throughout the developed world, which track closely with the rise of leftish ideas and the decline of Christian and Jewish faith, and which have brought many European nations into irreversible demographic collapse. Leftists are pointing frenziedly at global Warming to distract us from the fact that they have been killing billions of people, by persuading people not to have children.

(thanks to Kathy Shaidle)

Like a virus mutating to overcome the immune system...

I didn't get around to blogging Bjorn Lomborg's article on the Stern Report—I didn't have anything witty to say. Alan Sullivan did:

I saw news stories about the release of the Stern report in Great Britain. I didn’t bother to link them. Another climate scare — yawn. But this is rather serious. Like a virus mutating to overcome the immune system of its host, the global warming meme has a newly-written line in its DNA. A government-commissioned panel has determined — surprise! — that more government is the answer to hypothetical climate woes. Since Kyoto critics killed off the treaty by insisting it would cost too much, the counterargument is to claim climate change would cost much, much more than any system of confiscation and regulation socialists could concoct...

Climate change is probably one of the things we should be worrying about. But it's almost impossible to deal with it rationally when so many people have seized on it as a fetish-object that will magically rid them of the dynamism and rapid change that they hate.

The Global Warming cultists never want to reveal the philosophy that underlies their thoughts, preferring to don the symbolic white lab coats of scientific objectivity. (Which is ridiculous when you know how politicized the academy is, and note the venom with which it pursues heretics from its climate "consensus.") They are afraid to expose their ideas to criticism.

But I can tell you what their philosophy is. They want to go back to the world I grew up in, where it was assumed, with almost no questioning, that experts could run things with much better results than the marketplace. (This was always mostly about government running things, but I remember when it was also thought that "scientific" business management was going to give giant entities like GM and IBM and AT&T and Pan Am(!) an unbeatable advantage, thus bringing order and stability to the messy economic sphere.)

[And yes, I'm aware that arguments that run, "Here's what you think and here's why it's wrong" are often illegitimate. But this is meant as an invitation to make counter-arguments. If I'm wrong, make a case! Show why I'm wrong. I double-dare you.]

And I can tell you what my philosophy is when I approach these questions---I'm not afraid to be open...

One basic element of my thinking is, you can't go backwards. The only way out is forward. Though the fire to the other side. In the question of Climate Change this is obvious to the point of triviality when you recognize that developing countries are now contributing half of carbon emissions, and their share is rising. One can at least imagine the US or Europe hobbling their economic growth, but China? India? Malaysia? Get serious. (It is a clear indicator of how fraudulent the Gore-ites are, that their bashing is always against Bush, never Deng.)

The corollary of this is that solutions will come through economic and scientific development. The world needs to get richer and smarter and more knowledgeable fast. The crucial resource is people, and we need to have more of the world's brains working on development of all sorts. (I suspect population growth itself is a positive development.) And the best way to do that is to spread American ideas of freedom and capitalism and individual initiative far and wide. And the best way to do that is Globalization—in fact that is precisely what Globalization is. I suggest that anyone who is serious about dealing with Climate Change is in favor of Globalization. (I'm NOT saying that Globalization or development are unalloyed good things. But I suggest that for this question they are.)

More specifically, the one technology we have available right now that could make a big difference in carbon emissions is nuclear power. So I further suggest that a test of whether a person is serious on this issue is that they are openly thinking nuclear. And to get more specific yet, a good test is whether they have the simple awareness that nuclear power technology has advanced greatly in safety, reliability and efficiency over the last few decades. People who are still talking Chernobyl or Three Mile Island are flakes. They don't know what's going on.

BY BJORN LOMBORG: The report on climate change by Nicholas Stern and the U.K. government has sparked publicity and scary headlines around the world. Much attention has been devoted to Mr. Stern's core argument that the price of inaction would be extraordinary and the cost of action modest.

Unfortunately, this claim falls apart when one actually reads the 700-page tome. Despite using many good references, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is selective and its conclusion flawed. Its fear-mongering arguments have been sensationalized, which is ultimately only likely to make the world worse off...

Sometimes extinction is no bad thing...

SF Chron: A curious teenager in Argentina has discovered the fossil skull of the biggest bird ever found -- a swift, flightless predator 10 feet tall that pursued its prey across the steppes of Patagonia 15 million years ago, researchers at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County announced Wednesday.

The skull, tapering to a cruel beak curved like a brush hook, belongs to a previously unknown offshoot of extinct birds known as phorusrhacids -- "terror birds."

Weighing perhaps 400 pounds in life, the bird most likely preyed on rodents the size of sheep that once grazed on the South American savanna.

"It is an unbelievable creature," said paleontologist Luis Chiappe, director of the museum's Dinosaur Institute who documented the find in the journal Nature. "This is the largest known bird, with a skull bigger than a horse's head."....(Thanks to The Anchoress)

Yow!

Actually we sent time travelers back to the past to hunt them. Not cheap, but more fun and danger than a safari....

I'm sure there must be some kind of lesson hidden in this somewhere...

Reborn
We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state - doctors can only make a sufferer's last days as painless as possible. But is that really the truth? Across three continents, severely brain-damaged patients are awake and talking after taking ... a sleeping pill. And no one is more baffled than the GP who made the breakthrough. Steve Boggan witnesses these 'strange and wonderful' rebirths....

.. .For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his mother, Johanna, dissolves a pill in a little water on a teaspoon and forces it gently into his mouth. Within half an hour, as if a switch has been flicked in his brain, Riaan looks around his home in the South African town of Kimberley and says, "Hello." Shortly after his accident, Johanna had turned down the option of letting him die.

Three hundred miles away, Louis Viljoen, a young man who had once been cruelly described by a doctor as "a cabbage", greets me with a mischievous smile and a streetwise four-move handshake. Until he took the pill, he too was supposed to be in what doctors call a persistent vegetative state.....

Shoddy research. Shall we say, "fake but accurate?"

Dean Esmay, on the The Wegman committee's report on the 'Hockey Stick' analysis on recent global climate change...

....I was literally aghast at the Wegman group's report. It makes it clear that only a tiny handful of researchers are at the center of most research and most public policy recommendations on climate change, and that practically no one outside this tight little clique-ridden community is in charge of reviewing their work. They all simply review each other's work--and now literally dozens of papers in the field, along with general practices and procedures in the field, have been independently reviewed and found deeply flawed.

Worst of all, although the Wegman report does not say this openly, anyone who knows how taxpayer funding of science recognizes this (and it is all over the Wegman report by inference): Practically all the taxpayer funding for this climate research, much of it clearly shoddy, is controlled by this same Good Ol' Boy Network with practically no independent review, who simply "peer review" each other in a not particularly anonymous way while they dole out each other's grants and approve each other's papers....

- - - - - -

....At bare minimum, damning accusations have been levelled at Dr. Mann, and by extension, just about everyone associated with him--who turn out to be dozens of important people who've co-authored papers with him, or conducted peer review on his work.

This, again, from research that was a core part of the IPCC report telling everyone in the world--important politicians and the general public--that catastrophic global warming was real and probably human-caused and required extensive and very expensive public policy changes to address. All of it put together by the same tiny little social network of equally self-interested researchers, with two or three cliques pretty much at the center of everything (with "clique" being mathematically and precisely defined by the Wegman group, no less!)....

You don't have to be a scientist to smell a rat in the climate-change research. Academics frequently produce "research" that just happens to fit their world-views and their political allegiances. We see it all the time.

Hey, I've got research! Numbers and graphs! And guess what. The world is dooooomed unless I and my friends and my political allies are put in charge and given extraordinary powers to make changes and tell everybody what to do.

"Back off man, I'm a scientist"

You are not "ready" to hear this...

...Something curious occurred a minute before Pianka began speaking. An official of the Academy approached a video camera operator at the front of the auditorium and engaged him in animated conversation. The camera operator did not look pleased as he pointed the lens of the big camera to the ceiling and slowly walked away.

This curious incident came to mind a few minutes later when Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us. Because of many years of experience as a writer and editor, Pianka's strange introduction and the TV camera incident raised a red flag in my mind. Suddenly I forgot that I was a member of the Texas Academy of Science and chairman of its Environmental Science Section. Instead, I grabbed a notepad so I could take on the role of science reporter.....

So what, exactly, are we not ready to hear? Us in the "general public?" Hmmm?

You just might want to read the story and find out what our wise and good liberal elite scientists have in mind for us little people....

(Thanks to O Judd.)

Medical amazements...

Fascinating article on the new medial skills of our military doctors and nurses. I was struck by the way the Air Force has turned C-17's into flying hospitals...

...On a recent C-17 medical evacuation flight from Balad to Landstuhl, 32 patients rested comfortably, many of them in litters stacked three high on aluminum racks. Among them: burn patients; an amputee; soldiers with broken bones, a shoulder sprain and back injuries; one with a blood disorder; two psychiatric cases; and a servicemember stricken with lung cancer. Two in critical condition were hooked to ventilators.

Like flight attendants, the nurses, medical technicians and doctors circulated throughout the plane, offering water, oxygen and medication to relieve the pain. They also kept a close eye on monitors.

"The civilians are always amazed at how we do this," said Air Force Reserve Maj. Ken Winslow, 49, a flight nurse from Issaquah, Wash.

About 65 hours after he was shot — and after a stop in Germany — Mundo arrived at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington. From there, he headed to Walter Reed....

Other things:

....Made with an extract from shrimp cells, the HemCon bandage creates a tight bond that stopped the bleeding almost instantly. Seconds later, Mundo, 24 — a widower from Colorado Springs and the father of two young girls — was airlifted to the Air Force Theater Hospital in Balad, 10 miles away. He got there in five minutes....

....A portable heart-lung machine developed in Germany and not yet approved for use by U.S. doctors is helping wounded soldiers breathe.It is small — not much larger than a laptop computer — and connects to blood vessels in the groin to filter out poisonous carbon dioxide while filtering in oxygen. Military doctors in Balad also are using an expensive clotting drug, licensed for use on hemophiliacs, to help stem massive hemorrhaging in troops torn apart by roadside bombs....

They wanted to believe it was real...

Good article in the NY Post by Michael Fumento, on politicized scientific journals...

...Some journal editors are completely unabashed about their chicanery. In 2004, The Lancet released ahead of publication and right before the 2004 U.S. presidential election an outrageous report claiming 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed since the U.S. invasion. Yet other calculations showed a range of 15,000 to 24,000 — and even Osama bin Laden claimed just "over 15,000."

No matter, the Lancet's editor took the opportunity to blast "democratic imperialism" and said "the evidence we publish today must change heads as well as pierce hearts."

Even Science's awful stem-cell embarrassment wasn't purely a matter of fraud. I have written repeatedly on how both Science and Nature have turned themselves into cheerleaders for any supposed advance in ES cell science, while opening their pages to laughable attacks on what many see as both medically and ethically superior — namely adult stem cells.

Perhaps the best explanation for why the Korean paper slipped by is that the editors so desperately wanted to believe it was real that they missed all the warning signs of fraud....

They are desperate. Their Leftish world is crumbling away, and the lies become ever more shrill and forced. If the dike crumbles at embryonic stem cells or global warming, the floodwaters will rush in....

There's no elephant in the living room....

This is very interesting and important just in itself. BUT (much the way the media hides or ignores good news from Iraq or about the economy) there is something missing in this article...

WaPo: Low-fat diets do not protect women against heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer or colon cancer, a major study has found, contradicting what had once been promoted as one of the cornerstones of a healthy lifestyle.

The eight-year study of nearly 50,000 middle-age and elderly women -- by far the largest, most definitive test of cutting fat from the diet -- did not find any clear evidence that doing so reduced their risks, undermining more than a decade of advice from many doctors.

The findings run contrary to the belief that eating less fat would have myriad health benefits, which had prompted health authorities to begin prominent campaigns to get people to eat less fat and the food industry to line grocery shelves with low-fat cookies, chips and other products.

"Based on our findings, we cannot recommend that most women should follow a low-fat diet," said Jacques Rossouw of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funded the $415 million study.

Although the study involved only women, the findings probably apply to men as well, he said....(Thanks to Orrin)

Can you guess what's missing?

You would never discover from the article that there exists an entire alternate universe of dietary theory, a place where you could have learned 30 years ago that low-fat diets don't work...

Junk science in the Post...

From a WaPo article that purports to report on a "study" that shows Republicans are more racist than Democrats...(Thanks to Michelle)

...For their study, Nosek, Banaji and social psychologist Erik Thompson culled self-acknowledged views about blacks from nearly 130,000 whites, who volunteered online to participate in a widely used test of racial bias that measures the speed of people's associations between black or white faces and positive or negative words. The researchers examined correlations between explicit and implicit attitudes and voting behavior in all 435 congressional districts.

The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush....

It's impossible to properly critique the study, which has not yet been published. But I have my doubts about its validity. For one thing, "blacks" and "whites" are not equivalent groups. Most of us have a fairly clearly delimited mental picture that we think covers most "blacks." (Yes, yes, I know there are lots of exceptions.) Something like:

• Inner-city-urban with high levels of crime and welfare
• Southern rural honest-but-poor
• A growing middle-class that can fit in with middle-class whites pretty well
• 90% Democrat

But there is no equivalent simple mental picture to go with the word "white." If someone has positive feelings associated with the word "white," it's almost impossible to guess what sort of people they are thinking of. The group is just too vast and undefinable.

I wonder how the study might go if the "whites" presented in the test were limited to a sub-set who are also 90% Democrat. Say perhaps: "long-haired-urban-weirdos-with-piercing?" I bet they would discover that Republicans are not at all likely to "registered higher levels of bias." And if the white pierced-aliens were contrasted with blacks who work hard and pay their taxes, I bet you would find that Republicans test as "prejudiced against whites."

This sort of experiment can produce any result wanted. And since calling Republicans 'racists' is on page one of the tattered old 1970's lefty playbook, and most psychology experimenters are Democrats...

Periodicals...

This is fun, a Periodic Table of the Elements, with the letters of each element taken from photos--click on CL for Chlorine, and you see the photo it came from, a neon sign that reads "PLASTICLAND." (Thanks to Zakok.)

Good book. Scary.

On rare clear days we can see the Farallones, a cluster of rocky islets 27 miles from San Francisco, where many ships have perished. Charlene and I have been reading The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks, by Susan Casey, a book about them, and about the astonishing fact that for about 3 months a year they are a gathering place for Great White Sharks. LOTS of White Sharks! Hundreds, nobody knows how many for sure.

But a handful of scientists study them, at considerable risk and hardship. For instance, there is no safe place to tie up their whaler, which is lowered from a crane when they rush out because a kill has been spotted. Which is about the only way they have to get close to the sharks, watching for seal kills. Thousands of seals and sea lions live on the Farallones, and the sharks arrive lean and hungry, and depart much fatter in a few months.

Great Whites are BIG. Females can be 20 feet long, and 8 feet wide! They are mysterious creatures, smart, fast, warm-blooded. There's a terrible story, true, (and one I could not help laughing over, evil person that I am) in the book about some people who found an injured seal and nursed it back to health. And decided those nice islands off the coast would be a good place to release it back to the wild...in about 30 seconds a shark bit the thing literally in half!

...Later I saw the pictures myself, and they are spectacular. A two-ton, sixteen-foot male shark named Gouge [they give them names not to be cutsy, but to help keep track of them--some have been returning for a decade or more] is heaving himself out of the water only a few feet from the camera...In one image a tiny flipper can be seen hanging out of the left side of Gouge's mouth...

Cracker Barrel Philosophers

I have, as you know, done a number of posts on the risk of Avian Flu. And now, belatedly, it's getting serious attention from government and the press.

And one of the reactions I'm now noticing is from the type of people you might call "cracker-barrel philosophers," who are slapping their knees and saying, "Yew can't believe them big-gummint types. They're always tryin' to skeer us, 'cause there's a lot of money in to be made in this."

First of all, this isn't a "government" scare. It's been forced on government by people in science and Public Health who have been screaming about it for several years, and getting precious little attention from government.

And because a source has been wrong in the past doesn't mean they are always wrong. Stopped clock, and all that. (Even Democrats criticizing Bush are bound to be right sometimes, even though they have disgraced and discredited themselves with lies and by blaming him promiscuously for every ill and happenstance, and gloating when things go wrong.)

And in the case of disaster warnings, it's the nature of the things that there will be many false alarms. Same with warnings of terrorist attacks. In fact the people who issue such warnings soon become gun-shy, because they know they will be criticized and mocked if the problem doesn't happen, and people will ignore the next warning.

Secundus, it's good if people are making a lot of money off of Flu preparations. We used to have many more providers of vaccines, but most gave up the business, tired of lawsuits and low profits. (If you find yourself in a Flu pandemic, and want someone to lynch, consider stringing up the vile animals of the "Plaintiffs' Bar," or maybe their patron saint, Ralph Nader.) What we ought to be doing is offering a sort of "X-Prize" of a billion dollars to whoever finds a fast way to produce vaccines. Instead, if there IS a vaccine available during a pandemic, I have no doubt we will hear loud calls to restrict the obscene profits of the wicked drug companies, who are getting rich while the poor suffer. [Example #378 of how "Liberalism" kills.]

Tertius, The "philosophers" like to say things like,"I'll just wash my hands and drink orange juice and eat healthy, and I'll be OK." Even if this saves you from flu (unlikely) it's not enough, because many of the preparations we should all be making, for any possible disaster, involve being ready for interruption of food or water supplies, or electric power. And the person who doesn't prepare, far from being a strong individualist, might end up like those wretched Katrina folks, part of a hapless rabble waiting for the National Guard convoys...which may not come. Waiting for government to save them. They remind me of the staunch individualists who resist those obtrusive government regulations about wearing motorcycle helmets. Which would be fine, except that one knows that when they end up paralyzed, they will be complaining that government doesn't do enough to take care of the handicapped.

Mama said there'd be days like this...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

Frank Clewer, who was wearing a woolen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket, was oblivious to the growing electrical current that was building up as his clothes rubbed together.

When he walked into a building in the country town of Warrnambool in the southern state of Victoria Thursday, the electrical charge ignited the carpet....

..."We tested his clothes with a static electricity field meter and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited," Barton said....

Thanks to Zannah.