Guest opinion by Leo Goldstein
One of the most popular alarmist arguments is likening the “consensus climate scientists” to medical doctors. For example, this essay on “climate denial” from Andrew Winston at medium.com took part in the bashing of recently hired climate skeptic Brett Stevens at the NYT, saying:
Imagine your doctor tells you that you have dangerously high cholesterol and blocked arteries. She says you may drop dead soon. [Note: Based on comments/questions, I should clarify here. By “doctor”, I mean the entire medical establishment. So imagine you got not just a “second opinion,” but 100 opinions…and 97 say the same thing].You might have four basic reactions based on two dimensions, belief (or doubt) in the basic facts/science, and whether you commit to action or delay.
Refutation of this fallacy is confounded by the fact that there are two distinct problems: miscommunication of science and the intentional corruption of science. The former one has persisted for over 30 years while the latter one became noticeable in the late 90’s and has been growing ever since.
Most climate alarmists’ knowledge of science comes from TV shows like “The Big Bang Theory.” But the differences between the relationships they have with medical doctors and the ones they have with putative climate scientists can be easily explained even to them.
1. A medical doctor is a highly-qualified professional. Medical doctors must successfully complete a medical school, spend 3-7 years in residency actually treating patients, and be licensed by a state medical board composed mostly of proven doctors.
In contrast, anybody can call him- or herself a scientist and speak on behalf of science. There are no licensing or certification requirements. Enviro-activists and certain media personalities have been abusing this freedom for decades. Unfortunately, a terminal degree and affiliation with a formerly prestigious university or institution cannot serve as evidence that a person is a scientist.
2. A medical doctor is accountable. A doctor would lose patients or be fired if his or her advice isn’t sound. A doctor can also be sued by a dissatisfied patient. In a number of cases, doctors have been indicted.
A putative climate scientist can hardly even be criticized. Remember how a mere investigation of the misconduct by Michael Mann caused pandemonium. News media shouted about infringement of academic freedom (although the Constitution does not provide for any academic privileges, and the Article I, Section 9 might be interpreted to explicitly prohibit grant of such privileges). Nevertheless, perceived academic immunity is widely abused by con scientists and leftist operatives in universities and research institutions.
3. Patients have direct bidirectional communication with their doctor. “Direct” means that the patient usually speaks face-to-face with the doctor. “Bi-directional” means the patient can ask the doctor questions and get answers. Very few accept TV personalities’ talk as real medical advice.
The so-called “climate science” is usually communicated to the public in third person point of view like “The scientists say that …”, “Majority of peer-reviewed articles conclude …”, and even “Models show that …” These used to be typical introductory clauses before statements about alleged climate dangers. Recently, climate alarmists dropped those qualifying statements together with any pretense for honesty. They are actors, media personalities, politicians, and other people who are as far from science as one can be. Communication with “climate science communicators” is always one-sided. When faced with non-rehearsed questions they assuredly fail, causing laughs among climate realists.
4. One takes initiative to seek a doctor, rather than the other way around. Any unsolicited email offering a medical procedure or a wonder pill is sent straight to the spam folder.
But climate alarmism promoters always come unsolicited! That started with James Hansen, who made a front page article in the NY Times in 1981 while the possibility of future harm from carbon dioxide release was being considered by the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee. After that, every time real scientists rejected alarm in scientific proceedings, the environmentalists invited themselves to the media and shouted about impending catastrophe that could only be avoided if we repented and did whatever they told us to do. Then, they chased out most real scientists from climate-related research and declared that there is scientific consensus in favor of alarmism.
5. Doctors do not demand patients to trust them. They earn their trust.
Climate alarmists demand trust because they have earned mistrust.
I would like to finish by paraphrasing Edmund Burke:
Alleged science looks for defense from Washington when it fails in the real world.
Well two can wax analogous.
Let’s say the cure is far worse and more expensive than the disease.
Or let’s say, for the sake of using a medical analogy, that it was an iatrogenic illness in the first place and you can still walk away in time before they treat you again.
Oh I know. The doctors are caught up in a medical fashion whilrwind and have all decided that according to the precautionary principle, they must amputate and replace all four of your limbs, because they might get broken anyway.
Are you sure you want to use medical analogies?
So much for trained Dr’s, husband has heart failure, dilated cardiomyopathy, known and diagnosed 6 years ago.
About 3 years ago he started complaining of bicep pain and weakness in left arm, mentioned to local GP, but also to his cardio registrar, answer no not his heart. letter to local GP tells him to check him out for rotator cuff injury, symptoms point to that, x-ray, no injury, cat scan no injury, then again six months later cardio registrar suggests arthiritis of shoulder, or torn bicep muscles, more x-rays and more cat scans, all negative.
Then one morning a year ago husband complained to me he felt unwell and dizzy, home blood pressure monitor BP normal heart beat at 30BPM, back to hospital, transported by me driving, again junior registrar suggests to me the bicep pain must be rotator cuff injury, No I say, torn muscle in arm, No I say, well then its a pinched nerve in his arm says junior Dr.
At that point I lost it and suggested he didn’t know what he was talking about, we ended up in a shouting match, me going nose to nose with the junior registrar him saying where did I get my medical degree from, and me telling him in anger that he needed to get a medical degree not a weetbix degree out of a box of cereal.
A senior cardiologist doing his rounds happened to walk past husbands cubicle and overheard me shouting in anger, and when I shout its loud, trained singer, from many years ago.
He was kind enough to listen to what I had to say, about bicep pain for the past 15 months, and now, me pointing at junior cardio he says its pinched nerve, and I wasn’t polite in my opinion, senior cardio excused himself from husband and myself, spun on his heel and said “my office NOW”, I would love to have been a fly on the wall in that office, as that particular senior cardio is renowned for being scary according to the nurses who were standing there looking at me with new eyes.
Senior cardio came back a short time later, apologized for the delay, spoke to my husband who was barely conscious, and then turned to me and said you are right it is his heart.
Three lead pacemaker installed to following day, husband reported bicep pain and arm weakness vanished a second they switched on the pacemaker, and he could breathe, also the feeling of breathlessness he had suffered from for those 15 months was gone.
So much for all those years of medical training, Dr’s didn’t have a clue.
Some months later reading a cardio book borrowed from my local GP, I found a reference to rotator cuff injury or what appeared to be a rotator cuff injury actually being a complication of heart failure issues, about 3 lines in cardio book.
Husband has dilated cardiomyopathy left ventricle, cause unknown, complicated by firstly left branch bundle blockage and 15 months ago the right branch bundle gave it away as well, he has 100% branch bundle block.
“So much for all those years of medical training, Dr’s didn’t have a clue.”
Does that include the Dr who saved your husband’s life?
I think it was Victor Borge who said that a PhD was a “fd”.
My older brother once told me that it’s not the beginner woodworkers who lose fingers. It’s the “old pros” who get lulled by the routine and stop paying attention.
(He’s a trim carpenter. And he still has all his fingers.)
Found inscribed at the back of an ancient Welsh Dresser:
`Beware ye of medics and clerics`
Dave May 18, 2017 at 4:03 am
Found inscribed at the back of an ancient Welsh Dresser:
`Beware ye of medics and clerics`”
These days maybe “Beware cross Dressers”!
do doctors change the name of your disease from global warming to climate change, because your temperature stops going up?
This article is strongly biased in favor of doctors.
A biased author should not be trusted.
Perhaps he is a doctor?
I studied the very profitable drug industry a few years ago for my economics newsletter, and found the drug/medical industry was as imperfect as any other industry — probably worse.
I had a friend who worked in the drug industry his whole life read the article and told me he could not believe any one outside the industry could describe its faults that well (other than the usual complaints that drugs cost too much in the US).
Here’s what I remember from my article:
Drug companies spend $2 on marketing for every $1 spent on R&D.
Doctors receive all sorts of gifts, from dinners at expensive restaurants to “discuss a new drug”, to free trips to golf resorts for “training”, paid for by companies in the medical industry. Featured speakers are sure to get a $1,000 to $3,000 cash “honorarium”.
A friend who is a doctor confirmed his free golf outings in warm climate luxury resorts while Michigan was freezing.
Database of doctors and how much money they take from drug/medical device industry (doesn’t catch everything but the database is a start):
https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/
Approximately half of all medical procedures have never been tested objectively (double blind, or at least single blind) to see if they actually work, and which work the most often. This most often applies to surgeries.
Doctors have intentionally removed all sorts of healthy body parts that did not need to be removed for medical reasons, such as tonsils, appendixes, foreskins, etc.
Back surgeries fail to relieve the pain over one-third of the time.
Many doctors can also be viewed as prescription drug dealers.
The drugs they prescribe are usually approved by the FDA based on tests run by, or paid for by, the drug companies selling the drug !
To get FDA approval the drug only needs two double blind tests where it is merely more effective than a sugar pill — a new drug does not have to work as well as an existing inexpensive generic drug for the same purpose, can also have more/worse known/unknown side effects, be priced 100 times higher, and will still be approved by the FDA !
Drugs are tested using patients who are healthier and younger than most of the people who will actually be taking them after FDA approval — to be more sure of passing the test, the tested dose is almost always a higher dose than would be needed for an elderly patient.
And no one knows the effects of multiple prescription drugs taken at the same time, because that is never tested — I once knew a woman who had 27 prescriptions at the same time — she was old and rich and liked to visit lots of doctors … who had no way to communicate with each other.
One effect of the often too high doses is stronger/more drug side effects:
Each year approximately 4.5 million Americans unexpectedly need to visit their doctor or a hospital due to side effects of their prescription drugs … plus two million already-hospitalized patients suffer from harmful drug side effects too.
Almost 1/3 of new drugs are later found to be dangerous and pulled off the market, or important warnings have to be added to the labels.
Doctors often use drugs “off-label”, often for children, when the drug was only tested on adults.
Prescription drugs kill more people than illegal drugs.
So, you think doctors / hospitals / drug companies are great, and PhD’s are bad?
That’s a gross over exaggeration, and makes you sound like Floyd. R Turbo, from the old Johnny Carson TV show.
I can’t figure out why it was necessary to compare MDs with PhDs other than it was a clever way to get attention, and get your article published. Congratulations, it worked.
Axiom: Just because you know a lot about one thing, doesn’t mean you know anything at all about another.
So I went to the doctor the other day, he examined me and said I was fat. I said I wanted a second opinion and he said “OK, you’re ugly too”.
I went to the doctor and he told me I had six months to live. I couldn’t pay the bill so he gave me another six months.
I went to the doctor the other day and told him when I see myself in the mirror I look horrible and asked him what’s wrong. He said ” I don’t know but your eyesight is perfect”.
I went to the doctor and told him I acccidently swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills. He told me to go home, have a few drinks and get some rest.
I went to the dentist the other day and complained that my teeth were turning yellow. He told me to wear a brown tie.
Could apply the same reasoning to this site’s webmaster and his followers:
1. The webmaster is not a highly-qualified professional. Although he attended Purdue University he wasn’t able to earn a degree. Nearly all the folk that post or comment on the site don’t have basic scientific training let alone degrees. Those that do usually have a mickey mouse degree from 40 years ago from a third rate University. Always amusing when the occasional chump boasts that they have an engineering degree or a science degree. Are you really stupid enough to believe that that makes you an expert in climatology? It does however suggest that you really shouldn’t have graduated in the first place (see comment regarding webmaster above)
2. There is no accountability for the uneducated thinly disguised free market vitriol spewed on this website. This isn’t a website about science. It’s a website about political ideology.
3. Patients have direct bidirectional communication with their doctor. Posts on this site are continuously edited and filtered. For all the bleating about free speech and scientific discussion, at the end of the day this is just a site full of propaganda and yes men. Russia would be proud.
4. One takes initiative to seek a doctor. The only people who believe the noxious rubbish posted on this site are uneducated Trump supporters, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, intelligent designers etc You’re all the same.
5. Doctors do not demand patients to trust them. They earn their trust. The webmaster and his acolytes are consistently wrong about everything to do with climate change. A two minute google/youtube search will bring up some very amusing examples of Monckton, Delingpole and others having their fraudulent asses handed to them. Thoroughly recommend a series on youtube by “potholer” (although posts relating to this series are scrubbed from this website by the Orwellian webmaster rather than being honestly debated). Highly recommended if you have the time.
[And which climate scientists have earned their trust? .mod]
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Are you really stupid enough to believe that that makes you an expert in climatology?
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How much expertise does it take to recognized the problems with the following?
[Source: Tony Heller (Steven Goddard) realclimatescience.com]
Altering data to match your theory is exactly what the experts do in climatology. If I did that to my engineering data in the private sector, I’d be in jail. There’s a name for this activity, and it’s not the oxymoron: “honest politician.”
Jim
Apparently enough to realize that the USA is not the planet (tough for middle America to wrap its head around apparently). Choose another country and you’ll see that the adjustments correlate perfectly with “the cooling” of the planet over the last century. Choose the whole planet, and the adjustments are inconsequential.
Judith Curry explains it in baby steps here:
https://judithcurry.com/2015/02/09/berkeley-earth-raw-versus-adjusted-temperature-data/
If there really were malevolence here, every single country meteorological organization would need to be in on the deception, plus Berkeley Earth, plus all of academia, plus all of…
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(although posts relating to this series are scrubbed from this website by the Orwellian webmaster rather than being honestly debated)
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It’s interesting that your comment wasn’t scrubbed. I guess that your bluster about Orwell was just a projection.
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Apparently enough to realize that the USA is not the planet . . . .
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No, but the station temperature coverage by the US over the years was like it was THE planet. The only comparable country in the past to have a similar station coverage was the old Soviet regime, but Russia now has nowhere near that number of stations. If you want to see a real hockey stick, see Heller’s plot of the number of US stations dropping off-line. I bet it’s not the stations showing cooling either.
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Choose the whole planet, and the adjustments are inconsequential.
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Then one wonders why they do it. Of course I managed to squirrel away some measurements back in 2003 for Death Valley. Notice how the “inconsequential” adjustments have change the slopes of the two curves. Apparently my eyes are deceiving me.
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If there really were malevolence here . . . .
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No–just the ones controlling the data. I can get the original data for Death Valley. My request takes days and days to get processed, and that’s only for one station. I don’t have time or the resources to get more.
Jim
“No, but the station temperature coverage by the US over the years was like it was THE planet.”
What on earth are you talking about Jim? The US is quite clearly not the planet. Global warming means global.
“Then one wonders why they do it.”
That’s the whole point Jim. They’ve shown that it doesnt matter- the warming trend is there whether you correct for stations moving around, urban heat islands, changes in measuring devices etc.
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What on earth are you talking about Jim? The US is quite clearly not the planet. Global warming means global.
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The concept of “coverage bias” has obviously gone over your head. The thing I like most about these experts is that they can tell you the temperature of places that have never seen a thermometer or temperature measuring device.
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They’ve shown that it doesnt matter- the warming trend is there whether you correct for stations moving around, urban heat islands, changes in measuring devices etc.
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Ahhh, yes, UHI bias. I’ve discussed and studied this for years. The so called corrections are bogus. But there are people who say it’s perfect (like you perhaps?). The technique is basically secret. I saw one study that demonstrated a UHI correction (they did a before-and-after because the UHI technique wasn’t published), and it made zero change to the average temperature. Correction for UHI should lower temperatures over time.
Also, you can’t alter temperature data by increasing its slope and say the changes don’t matter. That’s what I call “Pravda math.”
Jim
Coverage bias- biases in the direction of cooling not warming.
Thus proving the notion that it’s completely pointless trying to have an informed rational debate with anyone on here. Funnily enough it’s exactly the same story on the anti-vaxxer sites, the intelligent design sites…
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Thus proving the notion that it’s completely pointless trying to have an informed rational debate with anyone on here.
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Well, an “informed rational debate” requires civil, two-sided discussion. If you were trying an honest rational debate, it wasn’t apparent in your comments. At least you’ve satisfied your confirmation bias (to go along with your other biases). You also get to leave with the same bad attitude you came with–Tally-ho!
Jim
My, my looks like someone had a rough day or two. So the question is why do you even bother to come here to read and comment if everything is so bad? Or perhaps it is your purpose in life to find and correct the faults of everyone else (item 4)? Of course your elegant writing style certainly puts you in the top 1% of intelligent people in my book. Thank you for stopping by.
Bruce, you are the poster child for an arrogant, uneducated in spite of going to school, left-wing j e r k.
I’m writing this reply in “your” language — using the same type of ridicule and character attacks that are called “debate” among leftists — your obvious (NOT EARNED AT ALL) superiority complex is hilarious as we read your angry comments, with no climate change content, wondering if you are a sixth grader home in your room because Mommy grounded you !
You have no idea what the future climate will be.
I have no idea what the future climate will be.
No one knows what the future climate will be.
The hoax is that someone does know … a hoax wearing thin after 30 years of wrong wild guesses about the future climate from the computer gamers and their inaccurate “models”.
Only leftists like you would be willing to wild guess the future climate, claim a catastrophe is ahead, demand that everyone does as you say “to save the Earth”, and then spend a lot of the taxpayer’s money subsidizing “green” industries so the rich leftists who own them can make money in an industry that would fail without huge government subsidies.
Green is all about getting money and power.
Huge pollution problems in Asia are ignored — not harmless CO2 emissions — real pollution !
Your leftist leaders tell you what to think, and you parrot them.
Except you obviously forgot what they told you to think about climate change … so you resorted to the usual leftist style of debate in your comment — angry non-specific ridicule and general character attacks — inadvertently making yourself sound as dumb as Floyd R. Turbo on the old Johnny Carson show!
Tough day Richie? Loved you in Robin Hood by the way.
Bruce:
Almost funny.
If you know about Robin Hood, you must be old.
That helps explain your posts.
Of course its not possible to have a rational debate about THE FUTURE CLIMATE here, because we don’t know what the future climate will be.
No one knows.
Only smarmy leftists like yourself claim to know the future climate … in spite of making scary predictions for 30 years that have been grossly inaccurate for 30 years … and making so many “adjustments” to the climate data that half the warming claimed since 1880 is from “adjustments” made AFTER the year 2000 (NASA – GISS) … and you expect logical, sensible people to watch this leftist climate charade, and keep believing a climate catastrophe is coming for another 30 years?
You leftist parrots believe everything your politicians tell you — we libertarians think for ourselves.
I commend audiologist Lia Best of Broadmead Hearing in Saanich BC, who just upgraded toa PHd.
In covering emerging knowledge of problems understanding speech, beyond just the physiology that hearing aids can help with, she cautioned that correlation does not mean causation.
Sharp person. (Said the school taught that, I must ask her which school.)