Energy
Michael Bastasch
9:06 PM 08/07/2017
One of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) longest and most successful air pollution standards is based on a taxpayer-funded study plagued by “data fabrication and falsification,” according to a veteran toxicologist.
Toxicologist Albert Donnay says he’s found evidence a 1989 study commissioned by EPA on the health effects of carbon monoxide, which, if true, could call into question 25 years of regulations and billions of dollars on catalytic converters for automobiles.
“They claimed to find an effect when there wasn’t one,” Donnay told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “They even fabricated the methods they used to get their results.”
“They were spinning this to give EPA what they wanted and commissioned,” Donnay said. “They reported results that could not have come from human beings.”
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EPA gave “primary consideration” to 1989 study put together by the Health Effects Institute (HEI) to replace a previous 1981 study that relied on fabricated data.
In 2011, EPA did what it’s done since 1971 and left the carbon monoxide standard unchanged at 9 parts per million measured over an 8-hour time period and 35 parts per million over 1 hour.
And why not? EPA’s been wildly successful in reducing carbon monoxide over the years. Levels were 85 percent below EPA standards in 2016, making it the second-most reduced air pollutant, according to agency data.
“Carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless gas emitted from combustion processes” that can cause serious health effects and even death at extremely high levels, according to EPA.
Accidental carbon monoxide poisoning kills between 400 and 500 people a year, according to government data.
Here’s a poster of the research Donnay presented at the 2015 Society of Toxicology meeting:
Credit: Albert Donnay
Dr. Aronow
But Donnay said his research shows the HEI study is full of “scientific fraud” that should be investigated by EPA and HEI.
“If you commission someone to replicate a fraud, you have to commit fraud to do it,” Donnay told TheDCNF when discussing the results of his reanalysis.
In 1983, EPA realized its carbon monoxide standard was based on “questionable, perhaps falsified, research” conducted by Dr. Wilbert Aronow in the 1970s, The New York Times reported at the time.
The Federal Drug Administration found Aronow had been falsifying drug trial evidence for patients at a Veterans Affairs hospital in the Los Angeles area. EPA also used Aronow’s research.
The agency acted quickly to replace Aronow’s fraudulent data, funding a massive human exposure study with HEI — a research group funded funded by EPA and the auto industry.
HEI put together a study to test human carbon monoxide on men with coronary artery disease, observing how long they could exercise before they succumbed to angina after being exposed to the gas. HEI hired three teams from different universities to help with the research.
The HEI study was published in 1989 and cost $2.5 million to finish. The New England Journal of Medicine also published the study in 1989, and medical journal Environmental Health Perspectives published the study two years later.
Environmental Health Perspectives declined to further comment on Donnay’s request. Neither HEI nor the New England Journal of Medicine responded to TheDCNF’s request for comment.
HEI researchers, unsurprisingly, found that “low levels of carboxyhemoglobin [carbon monoxide] exacerbate [angina] during graded exercise in subjects with coronary artery disease.”
EPA heralded the HEI study, and relied on it to promulgate its 1994 carbon monoxide standard.
EPA has leaned on it to keep its outdoor carbon monoxide in place ever since. The agency gave the HEI study “primary consideration” in its 2011 review of carbon monoxide regulations.
Donnay joined a lawsuit brought by environmentalists to challenge EPA’s carbon monoxide decision. The courts ruled against activists, so, in 2014, Donnay decided to reanalyze the landmark study EPA had relied on all these years.
“I was eager to challenge that ruling,” he said.
‘Extensive Evidence Of Data Fabrication’
First Donnay would need the raw data HEI researchers used in their study, but that proved more difficult than expected.
HEI president Daniel Greenbaum told Donnay raw data for the HEI study was “discarded” in 2008 since neither EPA nor any other researchers questioned its results.
So, he pulled together raw data from the three journals where the HEI study was published, and relied on some raw data featured in a HEI annual report from 1985.
In 2014, Donnay was finally ready to present his re-analysis. He “found extensive evidence of data fabrication and falsification,” he wrote in a draft abstract presented to his University of Maryland advisors.
“The most obvious evidence of deliberate scientific fraud in the HEI study is that Allred et. al. printed two different sets of summary results in their HEI report and a third in their New England Journal of Medicine article that came out the same week,” Donnay told TheDCNF.
“In neither of these versions do they explain how they ended up with different sets of results, or even acknowledge that they did,” he said.
“Looking at what they chose to include and exclude tells you they are hiding something,” he said.
Donnay’s University of Maryland academic advisors, however, told him he could not use his affiliation with the university if he published his findings. The school’s research integrity officer even said his work could “put UMB at risk,” according to emails obtained by TheDCNF.
“There was a lot of resistance to the fact this could be fraud,” Donnay said. “I realized it might be hard to get these findings published.”
But Donnay persisted and in May 2014 sent a letter to all three academic journals where the Allred study was published, asking them to issue a retraction. Donnay also notified EPA’s science integrity office and the inspector general.
All three journals rejected his request. EPA’s inspector general found Donnay’s accusations didn’t rise to levels of criminal charges, and EPA Scientific Integrity Official Francesca Grifo declined to review Donnay’s work since the HEI study was written before 2012 — before the agency’s scientific integrity policy went into place.
“Given the extraordinary care with which this study was conducted and independently reviewed, they have recommended, and we agree, that there is no reason to retract this study,” HEI’s chairman of the board Richard Celeste wrote in a response letter to Donnay.
Donnay held onto his result, and sought input from Roger McClellan, the former chairman of the EPA science committee that relied on HEI’s to set the 1992 carbon monoxide standard. McClellan also served on the HEI oversight committee for the carbon monoxide study.
McClellan told Donnay that while the HEI study had some “warts and blemishes,” the “core findings of the study remain sound,” he wrote in a 2015 letter.
McClellan wrote the “only serious finding you reported that is disappointing to me is my learning that the original study records were destroyed by the HEI in 2008.”
Donnay presented his research in the form of a poster at the 2015 Society of Toxicology meeting and received some “perfunctory replies,” he said, but “nobody was willing to address my specifics.”
McClellan did not respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment.
Below are links to Donnay’s evidence:
Roger McClellan’s Letter — Feb 23, 2015
Summary Of Responses To Donnay’s Work
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HT/ Neo
Interesting. Unless Trump appointees step in, expect a stonewall worthy of Michael Mann.
Wishful thinking. They are still too busy dealing with this delusional Russia nonsense…
Which is why the Democrats are pushing the delusional Russia nonsense.
This is an interesting article that provides more evidence that we need more transparency, skepticism, and checks and balances in science and government regulatory processes. Humans will too often succumb to temptation when they can get away with it, even if they are “scientists.”
However the “Russia nonsense” is not “delusional”. There is plenty of evidence that Putin has been using massive disinformation to destabilize western democracies and it is clear that the “Trump team” was at least receptive to his assistance when they should have been reporting all attempted contacts immediately to the FBI and the NSA. I don’t know if what they did was technically illegal, but it was certainly nauseating and much more disturbing than over-regulation of carbon monoxide (which is a poison after all).
Aaron
Are you implying that Hillarys campaign wasn’t reseptive? Or that Obama didn’t sit right next Medvidev and tell him to tell Putin to wait until after the election with Romeny because than he ( meaning Obama) would have a greater ability to act. Or that Hillary didn’t allow a sale of vital US urianium rights to the Russians for political favor, or that Hillarys campaign wasn’t willing to get intel on Trump from the Ukrainians (fake info by the way but she used it)? The issue is not whether Trump is a jackass politician, he is, it’s that if you are on the left it doesn’t matter what you do it gets covered up by the MSM and if you are on the right it doesn’t matter if you actually do anything the MSM will make it look like you did. What’s worse though is that this holds true for the bureaucracy as well and bench the doom of the nation if it isn’t stopped.
Bet no one saw this eight years ago:
https://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/ted-kennedy-soviet-union-ronald-reagan-opinions-columnists-peter-robinson.html
Russian seeking to influence an election should be an issue, but Democrats asking the USSR to influence an election doesn’t even bring a murmur from the press. The former is concerning, but the latter is treason.
“They are still too busy dealing with this delusional Russia nonsense…”
They need to fight the opium from Afghanistan guarded by American troops. Uh. Wait. How its that supposed to work?
“There is plenty of evidence that Putin has been using massive disinformation to destabilize western democracies and it is clear that the “Trump team” was at least receptive to his assistance when they should have been reporting all attempted contacts immediately to the FBI and the NSA.”
Great! Since there is so much of it, you’ll have no trouble sharing some with us.
@aaron chmielewski Waters
It is very likely that the DNC emails were not hacked by the Russians but rather leaked first by Seth Rich to Wikileaks and later by the DNC, in order to discredit the Wikileaks material by attributing it to the Russians.
Even though the FBI, CIA, and NSA have certified Russian hacking as the source of the emails, they have done this without ever examining the servers that were supposedly hacked. A DNC contractor Crowdstrike performed the analysis that identified the Russians. Crowdstrike is associated with people advocating a hostile foreign policy towards Russia.
On June 12th 2016, Wikileaks announced that it would release damaging emails from the DNC.
On June 15, 2016, Crowdstrike announced that they found Russian malware on the DNC server. Was Hillary trying to get ahead of the damaging leaks to come by attributing them to the Russians?
On July 5, 2016, files were most likely copied from a computer to a USB stick using a Linux system booted from the USB stick. Depending on who is telling the story the copied from computer was the DNC server.
On Sept 1, 2016 the files were then copied to a Windows system, ninety percent of the files were removed leaving material that was embarrassing but not damaging. Material was inserted to point the fingers at the Russians.
On Sept 13, 2016 Guccifer published the files on the Internet. This material is different from the material released by Wikileaks.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-24/nsa-officials-and-computer-expert-forensic-evidence-proves-dnc-emails-were-leaked-no
http://www.truthdig.com/articles/time-to-reassess-the-roles-played-by-guccifer-2-0-and-russia-in-the-dnc-hack/
https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/guccifer-2-ngp-van-metadata-analysis/
The putative health effects of surface ozone also need a second look. One paper attributed spring and fall ozone peaks to respiratory distress that is also caused by spring and fall pollen. The paper did not mention pollen.
And Steve Milloy has long been arguing EPA’s particulate standards for PM 2.5 are hidden behind “proprietary” studies.
The EPA relies a lot on Berkeley and together they feed things to weak WHO committees. It has become a global problem. When you look deep, there is nothing behind the claims save imaginative formulae. Everything cited in support turns out to be a model. Models cite other, older models. It is a house of cards. Exposure to CO manipulations is no surprise at all. But it goes way beyond the EPA.
Conceptually there can be no performance standard independent of a service standard and an objective. What is the objective of the EPA’s PM2.5 standard? And for what service standard?
There is no point in debating PM2.5 emissions, box models of concentrations, etc. Emissions are not exposures. Concentrations are not exposures. PM2.5 exposures other than those from specific fuels for different activities cannot be separated from exposures to other PM2.5. Hence, “dose” cannot be calculated.
Search the literature: There is no measurement of dose over a long enough period that may be associated with long-term diseases (CVD, cancer) in spite of numerous claims, and there is no measurement of incidence of these diseases in people who live in various ‘exposure environments’.
No dose, no response, no actual products reducing disease. The imagined Integrated Exposure Review cannot be applied except to deceive people.
Concur – there are numerous studies showing the increases in ground level ozone result in an increase in premature mortality. (bell, rosenthal) However, they all suffer from the same and or similar defects, lack of control, disregard of heat increases, levels of ozone too low to cause health issues. For example several of the studies concluded that, Honolula going from 20 to 30ppb for short period of time caused more premature deaths than dallas tx going from 80ppb to 90ppb for several days. It is highly questionable that 30ppb of ground level ozone for only a few hours caused any premature deaths, but this study was one of the studies the EPA relied on to reduce voc’s which are a factor in the creation of ground level ozone.
Joe, it is far more baseless than you hint. What is a premature death when it has clothes on? First, premature deaths apply to whole populations. Such numbers do not apply to particular deaths. It is a statistical construct. The claim that anyone ‘died’ from a slight increase in ozone from nearly nothing to 1.5 times that value, is not the true claim. The real claim is that statistically in a whole population, the contribution to all of the deaths is the sum of all contributing causes, say, 0.015% of each death was a contribution by ozone. It is not a claim that any one person died from breathing ozone, ‘tipped over the edge’ into the next Kingdom a few days early.
It is important to get away from idea that such time amounts of ozone cause deaths. So, ozone causing a ‘premature death’ is not ‘killing someone earlier than they should have died’ – that would be a misinterpretation. A premature death is health-speak for a statistically attributable contributor to early death of everyone who died before the age of 86 (which is the arbitrary expected lifespan). It isn’t based on someone’s exposure to ozone. It is based on all ozone, all people, and the number of life-years of all those who died before they reached 86 years of age. Post mature deaths are ignored. (Ozone exposure might cause post mature deaths – who knows?) There is no data to back up the allocation of premature deaths of a population cohort.
In a heat wave, some people drop dead from heat exhaustion etc. That is a heat-caused death. If the person was less than 86 years old, they have statistically died prematurely. If over 86, it is not counted even though they literally died because of heat-stroke. The listed cause of death will be heat stroke. Premature deaths have no ’cause’ per individual. They are statistical constructs that only apply to whole populations of the already dead, and underlie the Global Burden of Disease fabrications/calculations.
I realise this is far from the common understanding of ‘premature death = died early caused by X”. But that is where they make hay while the funding sun shines: no publication will explain that there are no ‘X-caused individual deaths’ in an estimate of premature deaths, as defined, and you won’t be shown the definition of the latter either.
Spring and fall distress at the ground level can also be attributed to significant O2 fluctuations due to near-instantaneous changes in deciduous leaf mass and soil respiration. In the town where I spent my childhood, funerals were public and noisy, and their occurrence peaked sharply around the time when the grass turned green and tree leaves came out. Those were mostly people dying of old age — the group that is unlikely to be affected by pollen, and their peak deaths did not co-incide with peak pollen, anyway. Also, the old folks who grapple with respiratory issues even under the best conditions prefer to live on the ground floor, where oxygen fluctuations are the strongest.
EPA Ostrich on Public Complaint Phone Line Duty: Grifo said there was policy against it? Oh, well, then. THAT’S okay. If there is no integrity policy in place, then you can’t very well have a violation of it, can you, now?
“Just plain wrong,” you say?
Not our problem, I say.
Good bye, dear caller, time for my lunch break!
*click*
Monty Pythonesque!
“was no policy against….” (argh)
I do that, too. I hate it when I do that.
Thanks for the kindness, Mr. Burton. Your mistake was much more pardonable, though — what a fine comment, with excellent graphics.
You are very kind, Janice, as always.
It seems to me that, with some obvious exceptions, lukewarmists/skeptics not only usually have better arguments than climate alarmists, they also usually also have better manners.
So the conclusion we have to draw is that there is no integrity policy before 2012 and this is a reason to NEVER check the integrity of anything done before 2012.
Thus anything the EPA did before 2012 has not been controlled for integrity and never will be and should be ignored as unreliable.
Federal EPA should be disbanded and REAL pollution control and funding handed to competent state EPAs.
“Federal EPA should be disbanded and REAL pollution coontrol and funding handed to competent state EPAs.”
That is the best and most relevant sentence in all the discussion of this article. +10
Good point Greg. Maybe THAT is the real story here!
Science commissioned by politicians yielding predictably irreproducible results to provide a veneer of scientific credibility for just long enough to establish yet another self-serving government boondoggle.
As an old retired CFO, I am just amazed at claims of “the dog ate my data” (e.g. original global temp records, now this) for critical decisions. Then the cynic in me kicks in and I understand exactly why we don’t have the data..
We still have original records from the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (in the Bethesda National Library of Medicine), for Pete’s sake!
How long should data be preserved? Who should preserve it?
Our technology allows us to preserve cute cat videos seemingly forever. Preserving data is clearly not a technical problem.
Everything necessary to reproduce research should be published together. Libraries that hold the publication should hold everything.
Long term raid-protected storage of archive data on industrial or institutional scales can now be done for about 1 cent per gigabyte per month.
So for less than a dollar a year …
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xODrc2LTqFk&w=560&h=315%5D
Buy the way, I once had a Tortoise-shell Egyptian Mau who not only understood the doorknob principle (something that dog scientists have been working on for many years, without success) but she regulariy put the theory into practice on doors with round knobs (not lever handles). I even had to replace the deadbolts with double-key models to keep her inside.
Also the acid rain program
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2857442
Once again, the EPA, makes us reach for the button!
…and, then, for the “Reset” button which worked so well with the Russians.
My experience as a bike commuter and courier in an urban area is that carbon monoxide from motor vehicles significantly affected me at times until nearly all cars on the road had catalytic converters and oxygen sensors. Notably, the way I understand things, oxygen sensors make oxygenated gasoline unnecessary. Oxygenated gasoline is effectively diluted gasoline, with the oxygen-containing molecules being partially oxidized (alcohols or ethers) rather than having oxygen that is ready to oxidize fuel (as in organic nitrates and nitro-compounds).
so a study of 1 with dozens of other possible causes/variables besides carbon monoxide supports the EPA … 🙂 …
of course the catalytic converters dont work until they heat up
so short trips i gather from prior reading actually spew more crap than un convertered cars did..
and they wear out
in 20+yrs i have NEVER heard a garage say they need to replace one on anyones vehicle
or anyone bitching re the cost to have it done
The reason you never hear about it is that exhaust systems do well to make it past 6 years or so (at least here in the North East). When the shop quotes you $1,700 to replace it from stem to stern, they also replace the catalytic converter.
Donald, Im sure you were exposed to a much higher dosage than 9ppm. A level of safe exposure should be low, but to knock it down to unnecessarily low levels likely results in multiples of cost going from, say, 25ppm to 9ppm.
It would be a good test to take various levels of CO, draw it with air into a cylinder at a breathing rate and measure how much remains unoxidized after a few seconds. It apparently has a very short life in the atmosphere and here is a bit of it in the breath of a number of animals.
Typical outdoor air with heavy traffic in a city is 1 ppm. Sometimes 2ppm.
Nine ppm will have no detectable effect on you – you can live in that concentration permanently. In fact people breathe out a little CO with each breath – we are not 100% efficient and we can tolerate a bit of it.
I read that Fresh Air Netherlands measured >100 ppm CO or more, for periods of 24 hrs or more, in winter in Kyrgyz homes. The effects are obvious (headaches and so on). CO matters, but what justified a reduction in permissible levels from 11 to 9ppm?
Challenging the CO standard may be intellectually satisfying, but would have little impact on automotive catalytic converters. The oxidizing catalyst that converts CO to CO2 also converts unburned hydrocarbons to H2O and CO2. Reducing catalysts convert NOx to O2 and N2. Even with no CO standard, both catalysts would still be needed and CO emissions would be minimal.
Besides, CO IS actually bad for us!
Oxygen binds to hemoglobin to become oxyhemogloban. In the presence of carbon monoxide it becomes carboxyhemoglobin. Carbon monoxide bonds to hemoglobin in the same way as oxygen, but the bond is 200 times stronger than what occurs with oxygen. As a nurse, I’ve had my fair share of carbon monoxide poisoning working in emergency rooms. As a firefighter, I’ve also had those patients, and many times, many who were dead and beyond help. Sometimes it was accidental, but I’ve had many suicides, as well. A few years ago, my own CO alarm started sounding around sunrise. I thought it was a battery issue or or a faulty detector. I went to my fire station and borrowed a CO detector from our stock. Sure enough, it was my furnace, and my house was quite literally at deadly levels of CO. I had removed my wife and children from my home while getting the CO detector, but didn’t open the house up so I could obtain an accurate ambient measurement within my house. I’m so thankful I had CO detectors on every level of my home. So, fabricated data or not, CO isn’t anything to mess with because of how much more readily it binds and adheres to hemoglobin. PSA: Make sure you have a CO detector on every level of your residence and change the batteries. It may save your life.
Of course you are correct, Joz, Your alertness and the CO detectors were fortunately effective.However, the CO standards are being used to require catalysts costing millions to remove minute amounts of CO on sources that have little impact on the overall local concentrations of CO.
Apparently you missed my earlier point above. The CO standard does not drive the need for catalysts, the HC standard does. The oxidizing catalyst required to convert unburned hydrocarbons to H2O and CO2 also converts exhaust CO to CO2. Relaxing the CO standard would have minimal impact on the design or cost of catalytic converters.
oeman50 August 9, 2017 at 3:46 am
However, the CO standards are being used to require catalysts costing millions to remove minute amounts of CO on sources that have little impact on the overall local concentrations of CO.
Without the catalysts the exhaust CO concentration is a few percent, certainly not minute. Measurements in cars driving on the California freeways (urban) in the 60s gave averages of 37ppm and peaks up to 72ppm in the atmosphere. Vehicle emissions controls have substantially reduced these levels.
The regulations referred to in the OP were designed to maintain Carboxyhemoglobin blood levels below 2% in the population. Prior to emissions controls a significant fraction of the population had levels above that value.
No study should be considered valid science if the raw data is no longer available. Certainly it should not ever be used for any public or state controlled policy making. The US the EU and the UK need to push to make this an agreed international law.Of course it will never happen as the lobbies that abuse faked science are rich and powerful and cash in on the results of this faked science.
Arguably, no study should be considered valid science, even if the raw data still exists, if it is being hidden by the author of the study to avoid analysis and critique by others.
David Cage August 8, 2017 at 11:12 pm
No study should be considered valid science if the raw data is no longer available. Certainly it should not ever be used for any public or state controlled policy making.
This is nonsense. Since the 80’s when this paper’s published we have had multiple technology changes which have made maintenance of data increasingly difficult. In my lab in the mid-80s we switched from a single lab mini-computer (HP?) which had a backup hard disk system (18″ diam?) for data acquisition, to multiple PC-XT and PC-AT (20Mbyte hard drive, 1.2Mbyte, 5.25″ floppy disk). I required that we have a back-up system which was a streaming tape system and all experimental data had to be backed up. However that system became obsolete but I kept a system to be able to read those tapes but eventually that died. So that cabinet full of tapes became unreadable, so by your reasoning all the papers published should have been withdrawn!
Bear in mind that back then it wasn’t normal to submit supplementary data with papers, there really wasn’t a way to do it, judging 1980s papers by the standards of today just isn’t feasible.
Sounds like a YP (You Problem) not an MP (My Problem). Just because you failed to update your backup systems before older systems became obsolete and transfer the data to new systems doesn’t mean it wasn’t possible or hard to do.
Anyhow, governments must improve their ethical standards:
The ethical principles cough up by EPA are extremely shallow:
EPA’s Principles of Scientific Integrity
These are not sufficient principles for scientific integrity:
“Ensure that their work is of the highest integrity – this means that their work is to
be performed objectively, without predetermined outcomes using the most appropriate techniques. Employees are responsible and accountable for the integrity and validity of their own work. Fabrication or falsification of work results are direct assaults on the integrity of EPA and will not be tolerated.
Represent their own work fairly and accurately. When representing the work of others, employees must seek to understand the results and the implication of the work and also represent it fairly and accurately.”
This is what significantly more robust principles look like:
Principles of science and ethical guidelines for scientific conduct (v8.0)
If the principles of scientific integrity were applied to this blog then presumably we could all have a sensible scientific discussion about the pros and cons of every alternative theory or explanation about every bit of atmospheric physics. Including the gravito-thermal effect.
Discussion of this effect is of course banned here so I won’t be discussing it. I simply like to make everyone aware that, in the interests of utter honesty, we should be aware that there are certain things Anthony has deemed “off the agenda”.
Does this diminish or enhance the standing of this blog? I leave others to ponder!
I´m not able to discuss that particular issue, as I have not studied it.
What I think, however, is that it would have been beneficial if papers had an open comment section, just like a blog post, that makes it possible for anyone to make reasonable comments on any paper. A comments section where the authors could respond to comments that others may have.
That way, eventual objections to papers on e.g. the gravito-thermal effects could have been readily available.
As it stands now it is damn hard to find out if a paper is credible or not and what reasonable objections there might to a paper. Other scientists will not waste time and risk their careers on publishing a rebuttal – why would they. And peer review is not a robust quality system.
Many published papers are full of dubious statements and conclusion that are now allowed to stand unrefuted.
The scientific enterprises really need to renew their ways.
It seems that the issue you refer to has been discussed at this post:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/24/refutation-of-stable-thermal-equilibrium-lapse-rates/
It might be enlightening to search for ´anthony´ in that post to see his position.
It’s a bit odd to have a heading proclaiming a reprint from the Daily Caller EXCLUSIVE:. But it’s even odder when it’s all based on a poster presented at the 2015 Society of Toxicology meeting.
Can you tell the difference between the menu and the meat?
Nick, c’mon, the “Exclusive” is from the Daily Caller story, not from WUWT. And the poster is just a presentation format and not the actual research that went into it.
as odd as the supposedly” EXCLUSIVELY leaked paper in the NY Times yesterday … Nick I’m sure you sent a letter to the editor making the same comment 🙂
Nick….as a non-science guy, I just understand regular words and how they are used. I’ve seen many of your comments and mostly negative comments from others to your comments.
My only thought is that you do insert some very thoughtful and insightful comments but what hurts you are your comments such as the above where you are defending the defenseless.
It is an ad-hominem while you are defending the EPA and journals, etc. when the corruption is obvious. When the publishers don’t refute the specific contents of Donnay as the reason for not retracting the original should give one a heavy pause.
“where you are defending the defenseless”
I’m often accused of, well, something like that. But what am I supposed to be defending? I’m just pointing out that this stuff has been well aired in a general forum two years ago. We’re even shown a file of reactions to it. But now suddenly the Caller is claiming something EXCLUSIVE, and WUWT seems to be too. WUWT?
This is explosive.
Specifically which people are you referring to?
Lets be clear, carbon monoxide poisoning causes death and damage and there are many cases of it a year: actual medical evidence from people hospitalised it shows the harm it does.
UK stats/effects here:
https://www.headway.org.uk/about-brain-injury/individuals/types-of-brain-injury/carbon-monoxide-poisoning/
Is this whistleblower somehow claiming there isn’t a risk from CO2?
It is absolutely clear the EPA should be acting on carbon monoxide…
I can’t believe they only acted on the basis of the contentious study.
CO is an extremely unstable molecule that can only exist in enclosed, oxygen deprived spaces.
It can not exist in the atmosphere, it will immediately find on oxygen atom and bond to it forming a CO2 molecule, which is food for us all.
Got that?
No. CO is flammable, but it isn’t that flammable. My understanding is that its half-life in the atmosphere is on the order of months.
ya reckon?
i almost keeled over last yr mowing the lawn, from the fumes as there was no breeze and i was working under trees with dense canopies
i sure felt nauseous and rather ill for some time after.
ditto inhaling diesel from the tractor stack flowing back onto me, i have one tractor with a stuffed muffler
and the other thats ok still emits right at headhigh when seated;-(
makes you wish for windy days to work on em.;-/
ozspeaksup, check this paper out sounds eerily like your experience.
http://www.jabfm.org/content/11/6/481
Notice how the troll tries to change the subject.
The issue is how dangerous is CO at low levels.
To which the troll responds, of course CO is dangerous, at high levels it can kill you.
Duh.
DiHydrogen Monoxide.
Kills the most people world wide, tops every other toxin.
Needs Government intervention in peoples lives?
It is absolutely clear the EPA should be acting on…
Yes, there are ill effects from carbon monoxide. The question that needs to be asked, though, is whether the Clean Air Act (and especially its gas mileage requirements, then and now) are saving more lives than the hundreds lost each year because the requirements force drivers into smaller, lighter-weight cars that don’t survive crashes those people would have lived through otherwise.
I believe the families of all those people should be laying the bodies at the EPA’s door, in a court of law.
The major links to fatalities in car accidents are consumption of alcohol and failure to wear seat belts so better to address those first!
What is actually being claimed here? That carbon monoxide is not poisonish? Or that the safe levels are
different from what the EPA claims? There are multiple strands of evidence for both. One erroneous paper does not change much in this case.
I would think the claim here has little to do with the actual result but much to do with the fact that the paper accepted and acted upon was not “erroneous” but “fraudulent.” Since this study was replacing another that was shown to be at least “erroneous” it begins to beg the question about the validity of any studies by the EPA. Remember the lead researcher on the EPA finding that CO2 was a pollutant was later found to be mentally incompetent and living in a fantasy world (he claimed to be a CIA agent and got paid time off from work for his “CIA assignments.) However no one seems wiling to re-analyze his work either.
The point is that the ends do not justify the means. In addition to evidence of fr@*d, we have destruction of raw data used and stonewalling.
It does when that ONE paper is the cornerstone relied on by the EPA … but your mileage may vary on the level of fraud you consider harmless … 🙂
The issue has to do with what the safe level of CO is.
Another troll trying to change the subject.
I really, really hate that response, Germonio. It is like defending Mann’s scientific malpractice by saying that the BEST project got similar results, or defending the false conviction of a thug through fraudulent evidence with the rationale that he was surely guilty of something else.
I am not shocked that scientists have been caught lying, again! All they were doing was ensuring that they satisfied their paymasters. I recall that cholesterol also was gien a bad name due to a researcher in the 1950s cherry picking data so as to allow drug companies to sell statins in quantity.
Everything is ‘narrative’ these days with facts distorted to fit them.
The characterization of CO effects in isolation is not reproducible in the wild. Extrapolating from the former to reach conclusions (e.g. models) about the latter is a source of clear and progressive distortion of risk assessment.
A big problem today is research based on “commonly accepted” principles or facts that are far from accurate or even logical.
Obvious examples are all those studies of disastrous animal or human impacts that “assume” temps will rise by 6C by 20XX unless we drastically cut back on CO2 emissions.
In the area of health, the fallacious “principle” of Linear No Threshold (LNT) has been used by government agencies to enact overly restrictive regulations. The EPA 2.5 air quality standards are one example of misuse, as are the Heart Assoc & EPA’s ridiculous claims of mortality rates from heart attack, asthma etc. due to VERY low exposure to (pick your poison).
The LNT standard was developed in the early days of radiation studies to set safe levels. Of course with limited data over the full range of exposure it was clearly better to be safe rather than sorry. (Today there are several major challenges to the use of that rule in radiology.)
However there is no excuse to apply that rule to other areas of health and safety. There exist sources of data over wide ranges of exposure. We also know there ARE “lower limits” (and in some areas of human biology some substances that kill in large quantities are also fatal if absent.)
Gina McCarthy has provided statistics to congress about lives that will be saved with her onerous regulations that don’t pass the smell test (where are the bodies?) and are dependent upon BOTH of the above fallacies.
More policy driven science??
In this case the EPA got the results it ‘needed’ it cared nothing about their validity. Now where else have we seen that approach used time and again?
2015?
““The most obvious evidence of deliberate scientific fraud in the HEI study is that Allred et. al. printed two different sets of summary results in their HEI report and a third in their New England Journal of Medicine article that came out the same week,””
This is the evidence? If they were submitting different portions of the work to different journals/organizations it is very common to haf to exclude particular data, not to mention ongoing collection of new data between reports.
It is fine that most science experiments fail.
It is regrettable that most published research is bogus.
It is not fine that folks like Dr. Michael Mann tout their science as absolute infallible truth. He lied to Congress, he should be in jail. Climate science does not approach certainty.
It is really really not fine that regulators use unreplicated research as the basis on which they create the regulations that govern our lives.
Nicely summarized
The 1989 study should be published in the JIR.
Carbon monoxide is acutely toxic, but due to EPA actions of deleting the raw data, hazard evaluation has now greater margin of uncertainty. This hampers risk management as already pointed above.
And worse, EPA has thereby also cast doubt about acting in good faith – the impact is likely to extend beyond carbon monoxide alone.
dunno aboutusa
but in Aus every states EPA has a differing set of can/cant do’s
makeslife bloody hard when one state allows recycling tyres as my example for a huge list of things
and right next door across the border youre criminal doing the same thing
insanity by govt decrees
Circling the wagons is what activists do best.
Too many card houses are built on this study, it must be defended at all costs.
Destroying documents behind key science driving public policy is also not characteristic of a global emergency but rather a political agenda unrelated to science and evidence. It’s more representative of win-the-day courtroom tactics of lawyers. It also suggests lack of reproducibility. What would Louis Pasteur say about modern politicized science?
Well I’m not surprised that the scientific books were cooked. But I would rather see the cooked books of CO2, which is not a toxic substance like CO. Of course the CO control will be unnecessarily costly and I would like the whole basis for EPA standards eventually revisited for all their supposed toxic substances.
Exposure to the EPA 1 hour level for 6-8 hours leads to headaches and dizziness, there are multiple sources for this including WHO
This is what happens when a government agency is lead around by lobbyist’s. The EPA does not have the public trust . You don’t need a department that fudges data to fit policies being directed by green lobby groups . Keep cutting or shut it down .
Gut the grant programs and EPA funded lobbyist’s cash cow .