Guest essay by Patrick Moore, PhD
Some time ago it struck me that the majority of alleged environmental catastrophes and threats are invisible or very remote, thus making it virtually impossible for the average person to validate them through observation. Observations, along with replications of those observations, are the very foundation of the scientific method. Seeing is believing, and seeing the same result again and again under similar circumstances reinforces the belief. Is it possible that activist groups and the media choose to cite supposed catastrophes and threats that are invisible, very remote or both because the majority of people cannot verify them in person and therefore must rely on the activists, the media, and other third parties to tell them the truth? At the conclusion of this essay, the reader may judge. Here’s a list of some of the alleged invisible catastrophes and threats of doom, beginning with one of the former.
Coral reefs around the world are dying
This is only one of the many supposed catastrophes blamed on invisible human CO2 emissions and human-caused climate change. In April 2016 most major media outlets ran a story implying that 93% of the Great Barrier Reef, the largest in the world, was “dead”, “nearly dead”, or “dying”.1 This was all based on a report that 93% of reefs in the northern section had “some bleaching”. “Some” could be only 1 percent. And bleaching is not death or even dying. It is a normal occurrence during periods of high heat and the coral usually recovers. Of course, as with all species, some are dying and others are being born at any given time.
It is well known that the world’s warmest oceans are in the region of Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Solomon Islands. This area is called the Coral Triangle and it harbors the world’s largest number of coral species and the largest number of reef fish and other reef dwellers.2 Surely this puts to rest the assertion that the world’s seas are “too hot” for coral reefs due to climate change.
recover once a hot spell ends.
How is the average person in Europe or North America supposed to “see for themselves” what is really occurring? Not only is the reef thousands of miles away from most people and far offshore, it is below the surface of the sea. Hundreds of millions of people were told the reef was doomed when we now know much of the bleached coral has already recovered. But that fact was barely reported in major media outlets. Fake news flies, the real story never gets off the ground.
Polar bears will become extinct
Again, climate change is the culprit. Melting Arctic ice, thinner ice, and not enough seals to eat are said to be a threat to the bear’s very existence.3 How many people can go to the Arctic and get a good look at the polar bear population? The truth is the polar bear population has increased from about 6,000 – 8,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 – 28,000 today.4 This is due mainly to a treaty signed by all the Arctic nations in 1973 that ended the unregulated hunting of polar bears.5 There is no real reason to fear for their demise. We know polar bears survived the last interglacial period, the Eocene Eemian, 120,000 years ago, which was warmer than the current Holocene interglacial period. But photos of old starving bears, bears supposedly “trapped” on ice floes, and bears that are thin after a long hibernation, are effectively employed to perpetuate the myth that they are threatened with extinction.
Climate catastrophe is inevitable due an increase in atmospheric CO2 if we don’t end the use of fossil fuels
Not only is CO2 invisible, is also odorless and tasteless so cannot be sensed without sophisticated equipment. Yet we are told it is causing a catastrophe of global proportions. The facts that CO2 is lower in the atmosphere today than it has been through nearly all the history of life and that global temperature during the ongoing 2.5 million-year long Pleistocene Ice Age is colder than it has been for the past 250 million years are simply ignored.6 Never mind the fact that CO2 is the basis for all life on Earth. CO2 in the atmosphere and in the oceans is where the carbon in carbon-based life originates. At least some attention is now given to the fact that the increase in our CO2 emissions is causing a greening of the Earth and the spreading of trees to areas that were too dry for them under low-CO2 conditions. During the past 150 million years CO2 had steadily declined to such a low level that plants were seriously threatened with starvation during the peak of the last few glacial cycles. Thankfully, our CO2 emissions have inadvertently reversed that trend, bringing some balance back to the global carbon cycle. All of this can be verified yet the narrative of “climate catastrophe”, which has no basis in science, is hollered from rooftops around the world.
Pesticide residues in our food causes cancer, birth defects, autism, and brain damage
One “health food” website claims pesticide residues in food cause nine diseases. It’s unfortunate that we can’t see, smell, or taste these “residues”. They cannot be observed which makes it easy to invent stories about an “invisible poison”.
and vegetables that have been sprayed with lawfully
approved pesticides.
In 1997, the Cancer Research Institutes of the United States and Canada published a multi-year study of all scientific publications reporting on any connection between cancer in humans and pesticide residues in food. They did not find a single piece of credible evidence connecting the two. And yet they concluded that 30 percent of human cancers are caused by tobacco consumption, from a natural plant, and that 35% of cancers are caused by poor diet, mainly too much fat and cholesterol, also natural substances.8
“Africa’s Oldest Baobab Trees are Dying at an Unprecedented Rate, and Climate Change may be to Blame.”
This is the actual headline from a USA Today article on June 11, 2018. Nearly every major news outlet ran with the story as if it were a harbinger of global doom.9 Even the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica gave credence to the story. No dead trees were depicted in any of the many articles I searched on the Internet. My first rule of critical thinking is never to trust a report that begins with the words “may”, “might’ or “could”. It should read, “may or may not”, might or might not, etc.
Many readers may or may not have stopped to think that it is perfectly natural for the oldest individuals of any species to die before the younger ones eventually pass away as they too grow old. It might be worth worrying if the youngest baobab trees were dying at an unprecedented rate if such a rate could be established with credible data. On the other hand the natural survival rate of the young of many species is very low.
As for an “unprecedented rate” of older trees dying, the only data provided in the source paper is from a Romanian chemistry professor who claims, “Eight of the 13 oldest trees in Africa have died over the past decade.” 10
Baobabs have a wide distribution in Africa, across the sub-Saharan belt and down the east coast as far as South Africa. My research produced no estimate of the total number of Baobab trees in Africa but one could hazard a guess that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands. Without a doubt it would not be unprecedented for eight of the oldest trees to die in a ten-year period. This is less than one tree per year. This might or might not be the silliest story to be taken seriously by the worldwide media lately. Even Fox News covered it.
GMOs will harm us and damage the environment.
A cob of conventional corn looks identical to a cob of GM corn. The GM corn may actually look better because it was better protected from insect damage due to the modification of its genes.
GM zealots must resort to scary fake images to drive their campaigns.
The USFDA says they are “substantially equivalent”, in other words not different from each other in any meaningful way. Yet hundreds of activist groups insist there is something in the GM corn, obviously something invisible, that will do evil things to the planet and us.11
Monsanto, basically a seed and crop protection company, is vilified as if it were producing weapons of mass destruction and using them on civilians. Every credible food, health, and science organization says GM food is perfectly safe 12 But the propaganda about an invisible poison is effective, and because people can’t “see for themselves” they worry a lot about themselves and their children.
Farmed salmon are full of poisons and they are destroying the wild salmon.
Of course the “poisons” are invisible and the salmon are below the surface of the sea where only a diver could inspect them. The anti-salmon farm activists contend that farmed salmon are spreading disease and sea-lice to wild salmon stocks.13 In fact the farmed salmon are raised in land-based hatcheries and are disease-free and lice-free when they are placed into pens in the sea. It is the wild salmon that give diseases and lice to the farmed fish. But the activists get away with their “story” and the media goes along because it sells papers and their readers and viewers can’t go down in the ocean to check out the truth for themselves. Farming salmon and the many other species raised in aquaculture is a sustainable development. It takes fishing pressure off wild stocks, many of which are seriously depleted. It produces one of the healthiest sources of protein and contains beneficial omega-3 oils. And aquaculture provides employment for tens of millions of people worldwide, often in remote coastal and inland communities.14
Nuclear energy is too dangerous and radiation will kill you15
Have you ever seen any nuclear radiation? No, because it is invisible – you need a Geiger counter to detect it, which most homes are not equipped with. The fact is in terms of fatalities per unit of energy produced; nuclear is the safest technology of them all. There has been only one nuclear accident that caused death to civilians, Chernobyl, and according to the World Health Organization it was responsible for 56 deaths.16 More than that were killed in a single hydroelectric dam accident in Russia in 2009. 17 In the Fukushima incident in 2011 no one died from radiation and according the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, there will be no discernable health effects in the future.18 Yet activist groups have so scared the public with this invisible “threat” that Germany has decided to shut all its nuclear plants and many countries have decided not to build any more. Meanwhile China, India, and Russia have surpassed the West in nuclear technology and are building scores of new nuclear plants because they know it is the future of electricity production.
There is a “sea of plastic” the size of Texas in the North Pacific Gyre north of Hawaii
First question: have you ever seen an aerial or satellite photograph of the “sea of plastic”? Probably not, because it doesn’t really exist. But it makes a good word- picture and after all plastic is full of deadly poisons and is killing seabirds and marine mammals by the thousands.
This is also fake news and gives rise to calls for bans on plastic and other drastic measures. Silly people are banning plastic straws as if they were a dire threat to the environment. The fact is a piece of plastic floating in the ocean is no more toxic than a piece of wood. Wood has been entering the sea in vast quantities for millions of years. And in the same way that floating woody debris provides habitat for barnacles, seaweeds, crabs, and many other species of marine life, so does floating plastic. That’s why seabirds and fish eat the bits of plastic, to get the food that is growing on them. While it is true that some individual birds and animals are harmed by plastic debris, discarded fishnets in particular, this is far outweighed by the additional food supply it provides. Plastic is not poison or pollution, it is litter.
“There are a possible 3,000,000 undersea volcanoes doing something unobserved.”
This is a direct quote from a Science Daily article on February 15, 2015.19 The article refers to “a new study” attributed to the Earth Institute at Columbia University, which speculates that millions of undersea volcanoes are spewing millions of tons of CO2 into the ocean. No mention is made of the fact that the US Geological Service estimates that volcanic activity produces less than one percent of the CO2 emissions produced from human use of fossil fuels,20 or that there is really no direct evidence that CO2 causes global warming as claimed by so many activist scientists, media and politicians. The only proven effect of CO2 is to increase the growth of trees and food crops and to make plants more efficient with water. This has resulted in a “greening of the Earth” and the spread of trees into areas that were previously too dry for them. For a discussion on the important role of CO2 as the basis of all life on Earth you can download my paper on the subject here.21
Ocean “Acidification” will kill all the coral reefs and shellfish in the world
Once again, invisible CO2 will wreck havoc by so drastically lowering the pH of the oceans it will make it impossible for the out-of-sight corals and shellfish to produce their calcareous shells, thus undermining the entire food chain in the sea and destroying fisheries worldwide. This story was invented around 2004; co-incident with the beginning of the 20-year “pause” in global warming that began around 1998. The fact is coral reefs evolved when CO2 was at least 10 times higher than today and corals have survived and thrived for hundreds of millions of years since then. It is also a fact that the Humboldt Current off Peru, which has the highest CO2 and lowest pH in the world’s oceans, produces 20 percent of the world’s fish catch. In other words more CO2 is good for growth in the sea in the same way it is on land. It doesn’t take much research to conclude that ocean “acidification” is one big fabrication. For an in-depth discussion my paper on the subject can be downloaded here. 22
And finally,
“Climate Change is Killing the Cedars of Lebanon”
A July 18, 2018 article in The New York Times reports that rising temperatures are driving the Cedars of Lebanon to extinction.23 All the numerous photos in the article are of healthy living trees with the exception of one lonely sawed-off stump that is claimed to have died from an insect infestation. In flowery language the anguish of impending doom is expressed with appropriate references to Jesus and God. In fact the range of the Cedars of Lebanon has been drastically reduced over the centuries by cutting the trees for timber and converting the land to other uses – a classic case of deforestation as opposed to reforestation. Grazing land for goats, sheep and cattle have replaced the forests over wide areas and the grazers ensure that no new trees can establish themselves. Most of the remaining cedars are in protected reserves where there is no evidence of impending extinction or mass die-off. A careful reader will detect that all the dire predictions are just that; unsupported speculation into the future. Very few people have the ability to go to Lebanon and make a thorough investigation into the state of the cedar forests. No doubt if a knowledgeable person reported that the existing trees were in a state of good health the New York Times would not print it.
Conclusion
Is it just a coincidence that 12 of the most publicized alleged environmental catastrophes and threats of doom happen to be invisible or very remote, or both? Or is it just so much easier to create a fake “narrative” when the public can’t check it out for themselves? I will leave that judgement to the reader.
REFERENCES:
1 Chris D’Angelo, “93 Percent Of The Great Barrier Reef Is Practically Dead – Climate Change is Destroying Earth’s Largest https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-change-destroying-great-barrier-reef_us_571918e6e4b0d912d5fde8d4
2 “Coral Triangle Facts”. World Wildlife Fund, http://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/coraltriangle/coraltrianglefacts/
3 Stephen Leahy, “Polar Bears Really Are Starving Because of Global Warming, Study Shows” National Geographic, February 1, 2018. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/polar-bears-starve-melting-sea-ice-global-warming- study-beaufort-sea-environment/
4 Susan Crockford, “Science, optimism, and the resilience of polar bears in an ever-changing Arctic”. January 15, 2018. https://polarbearscience.com/2018/01/15/science-optimism-and-the-resilience-of-polar-bears-in-an-ever-changing- arctic/
5 “Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears.” IUCN-SSG Polar Bear Specialist Group, Oslo, 15 November 1973. http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/agreements/agreement1973.html
6 “Carbon Dioxide through Geologic Time.” University of California San Diego. http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/07_1.shtml
7 Patrick Moore, “The Positive Impact of Human CO2 Emissions on the Survival of Life on Earth”. Frontier Centre For Public Policy, June 2016. https://www.dropbox.com/s/uhq557vrnww0ala/UpdatedCO2Paper.pdf?dl=0
8 Len Ritter et al, “Report of a Panel on the Relationship between Public Exposure to Pesticides and Cancer,” Cancer 80 (1997): 2019–33. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0142(19971115)80:10%3C2019::AID- CNCR21%3E3.0.CO;2-Z
9 “Africa’s Oldest Baobab Trees are Dying at an Unprecedented Rate, and Climate Change may be to Blame.” USA Today, June 11, 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/06/11/baobab-trees-dying-africa-climate- change/690946002/
10 Ibid.
11 Mike Adams, “The GMO debate is over; GM crops must be immediately outlawed; Monsanto halted from threatening humanity.” Natural News, September 21, 2012 https://www.naturalnews.com/037262_GMO_Monsanto_debate.html
12 David Tribe, “600+ Published Safety Assessments.” http://gmopundit.blogspot.ca/p/450-published-safety-assessments.html
13 “W5 investigates the battle over farmed Atlantic salmon on the B.C. coast.” CTV, October 14, 2017. https://sooke.pocketnews.ca/w5-investigates-the-battle-over-farmed-atlantic-salmon-on-the-b-c-coast/
14 “State of the World’s Fisheries and Aquaculture.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2016.
15 Caroline Lucas, “Why we must phase out nuclear power.” The Guardian, February 17, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/17/phase-out-nuclear-power
16 “Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident.” World Health Organization, Geneva, 2006. http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/who_chernobyl_report_2006.pdf
17 “2009 Sayano–Shushenskaya power station accident.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano%E2%80%93Shushenskaya_power_station_accident
18 Richard Knox, “Why We May Not Learn Much New About Radiation Risks From Fukushima.” NPR, March 24, 2011. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2011/03/24/134833008/why-we-may-not-learn-much-new-about- radiation-risks-from-fukushima
19 “Seafloor volcano pulses may alter climate: Strikingly regular patterns, from weeks to eons.” Science Daily, Feb. 15, 2015. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150205142921.htm
20 “Are Volcanoes or Humans Harder on the Atmosphere?” Scientific American,
(not dated) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/
21 Patrick Moore, “The Positive Impact of Human CO2 Emissions on the Survival of Life on Earth”. Frontier Centre For Public Policy, June 2016. https://www.dropbox.com/s/uhq557vrnww0ala/UpdatedCO2Paper.pdf?dl=0
22 Patrick Moore, “Ocean ‘Acidification’ Alarmism In Perspective.” Frontier Centre For Public Policy, November 2015. https://www.dropbox.com/s/50yr1b10fyj67t3/UpdatedOceanPaper.pdf?dl=0
23 “Climate Change is Killing the Cedars of Lebanon”. New York Times, July 18, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/18/climate/lebanon-climate-change-environment-cedars.html
We know polar bears survived the last interglacial period, the Eocene, 110,000 years ago, which was warmer than the current Holocene interglacial period.
Ho hum there is a lot of wrong geology in this statement.
Or you could be less confrontational, add some clarity to your objections and just say “Oops, did you intend ‘Eemian’ when you typed ‘Eocene’ “
Obvious to me he meant “Eemian” not “Eocene”…simple mistake. Please elaborate on “lot of wrong”
I’m all ears.
Eemian…got the E’s mixed up
What, besides the typo “Eocene” for “Eemian”, and that it ended about 114 Ka, not 110? The Eemian was warmer than the Holocene, and lasted longer than our current interglacial has so far.
Enlighten us.
Also, you can’t say with certainty that it was warmer. You could say it was likely warmer, but we don’t really know.
Ah! An ice-core data denier.
And a sea level denier….
And leaf stomata number.
And hippos in the Thames at London.
And raised beaches in Alaska.
Think of it this way. The evidence that supports the “Eemian” bein warmer than the present is much stronger than the evidence that CO2 contributes significantly to global warming. The latter is based on as single laboratory fact and a lot of “inference” about how that fact manifests outside the lab. The warmth of the Eemian however is supported by multiple, independent kinds of evidence.
Only desperate apologists would call “Eocence” a typo.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/typo
“When Jesus said he came not to bring peace but a sword, I think he meant to say something else. ” – apologist
From the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’.
Confusing two words that sound alike is not a typo, but it’s hardly uncommon either.
I do know the difference so I guess the mistake was a slip of the mind. I have sent a lt of time studying the Eocene Thermal Maximum so it was probably at the front of my brain while I was typing.
Thanks for correcting
It was not a typo, it was a mistake. I have corrected it. Perhaps it was the only mistake in a rather dense essay on a lot of topics.
It’s a figure of speech.
“I came not to set all things right, but to shake all things up.”
Context is always important, and the context of His statement was whether or not he was the Messiah envisioned by the Pharisees, who would drive out the Romans, restore the Kingdom of Israel, and rule as its new King. No, He’s saying. He is here to do something completely different.
The Eemian was definitely warmer than the Holocene, be it over a shorter period (~5,000 years, the Holocene still is going strong at 10,000 years), both in the (SH) temperature “proxy” of Antarctic ice cores as in the remainders of trees in the high north of Alaska, Canada and Siberia where now only tundra grows…
But it is cooler now than ~6,000 years ago. Judging by all previous post interglacials temperatures takes 10s of thousands of years to drop to glacial maximum. In addition the slow drop in temperature is erratic and not a steady gradual cooling. Therefore it is not possible to notice which way the temperature is going after 30, 100, or 200 years. We need about 10,000 years of data starting from a sustained period of maximum temperature. we almost have that and we are still cooler.
Did you mean “temperatures ……..to drop to a glacial minimum?
I meant glacial maximum as when there is the most ice and temperatures drop erratically to that point.
“…post interglaicials…”? What you are saying is that it takes longer terms than even a millenium to forecast glacial epoch scale changes. That is a fact it would nice to see climate modelers take heart. Sadly, that would mean admitting climate models can’t tell you much about where thing are going. They are short-term investments rather than buy and hold so to speak.
The Eemian lasted longer than the Holocene, and was warmer over most of its existence.
This gives an indication of the last 4 interglacials:
A chance that the spell checker got that
Hans, I know you from way back — you’re better than a mere Word-N*zi……..
To erren is human Hans
That’s rich, Rich
To err is human, to forgive divine, to not pay full price for late pizza common sense. 🙂
Thank You Dr. Moore
One can observe salmon in rivers and streams too. I think the biggest threat to salmon is the modification of the waters where they spawn.
In the 70’s it began to be apparent that Taiwan and Russia were using a ‘floating fish processing plant’ approach to harvesting fish from the Pacific where Pacific salmon spend most of their years.
This activity has disappeared from the headlines as ‘climate change’ took over. That doesn’t mean that overfishing has stopped out beyond territorial waters of the USA and Canada.
My local supermarket here in Vancouver, BC sells filleted and frozen ‘Wild Pacific Salmon’ which most patrons assume is a local product processed here either in Alaska or Canada.
Close examination of the packaging, however, reveals ‘Product of China’.
Never mind sea lice. It’s factory fishing causing salmon populations to decline.
Just my opinion.
Bingo. Fish farming is/may save the wild fish from extinction.
I’ve always been curious about the decline, but more importantly the assumed initial condition.
Russians & others (300 to 200 years ago) wipe out the coastal salmon predators; 220 years ago the initial condition for the salmon number baseline begins based on oral histories; 50 years ago the coastal predators begin to make fantastic return; 40 years ago the salmon runs bottom out.
Dams & PREDATORS … bad for salmon.
(its kinda funny, the floating processors that I worked on offloaded/sold salmon to the Koreans & eggs to the Japanese … I don’t think we were certified sell to USA, but it seems that Chinese boats may be?)
I think there is a little to do with Fe deficiency also.
Harvesting fish is extracting hemoglobin from the sea. Volcano’s erupting is well linked to large salmon runs.
Don’t know. I just know the Chinese and Taiwanese boats are out there and the ‘made in China ‘ product is appearing at my local supermarket.
Nothing says “I support the wild salmon” like eating them.
This is the stupidity of the campaigns against salmon farming. Suzuki successfully blackmailed all the restaurants in Vancouver to boycott farmed salmon or face protests at their doors. As if the way to save wild salmon is to eat more of them.
I think the biggest threat to salmon is the fact that they are swimming up-river to spawn and none of them are permitted to swim back down-river to the ocean from whence they came.
The enviros should be doing something so that those salmon could end up back in the ocean instead of on the dinner menu of people and bears.
Did you forget the /sarc on that?
Salmon have never swum back down stream. They die after spawning.
One species does, Steelhead.
Does which? Dies? Or returns to sea alive?
So do some Atlantic Salmon.
Atlantic salmon as well as steelhead can return to the sea.
Speaking of steelhead, try the farmed steelhead from Costco. It’s delicious.
Thanks, Dr. Moore.
In Chile, all the Pacific NW salmon species that I eat are farmed.
Except for the Chinook. The Chileans tried farming them, but they grow too slowly. So they threw them out. The Chinooks went whoopie! They turned left to the south rather than right to the north, as on the Pacific coast of North America, and invaded the rivers of Patagonia, including rounding Cape Horn and going up Argentine rivers.
The best Columbia River Chinook salmon fishing in the world is in Chile.
If true, what a story of species adaptation. Source?
David,
Are you replying to me?
I’m the source, since I’ve caught Chinook in the rivers of both Chilean and Argentine Patagonia, and in Chile, north of Patagonia.
But there is plenty of literature on Patagonian Chinook salmon. I’ve just never read it. No need. I’ve seen Chilean government publications, however.
This is outdated now, but gives you an idea:
https://www.currentresults.com/Invasive-Species/Invasive-Water/chinook-709271.php
Hope to catch a few this week. Should be hatchery-run coho. Will let you know if any show signs of CO2 poisoning/sarc
Pacific salmon all die after they have spawned, it is just part of their cycle.
Except steelhead.
Granted, steelhead are commonly called “trout”, since they are sea-run rainbows, which were originally classified in genus Salmo, perhaps because of their ability to return to the sea, like Atlantic salmon.
But now it’s recognized that they belong to genus Oncorhynchus, same as Pacific salmon. So in this genus the distinction between “salmon” and “trout” is without a difference except maybe size. Just as dolphins are actually whales, so are steelhead salmon.
A well thought out rational piece. No wonder the alarmists can’t stand you.
Well done, Patcick!
Lets hope that Peter Ridd wins his case against the Austalian government, who wants him to shut up about healthy coral reefs….
And, when it comes to Ocean Acidification, OI, it is a loooong time since we heard anything about it in the newspapers and from the knowleagble journalists… What really happened to ocean acidification? Has the penny eventually dropped, that when it rains on the ocean, the rainwater, which has a pH of about 5.6, actually mixes with the ocean’s surface water???
Acidification, a bald-faced scare word meant to conjure images of bubbling beakers filled with flesh-eating liquid, and not the small shifts in the pH neutral(ish) zone that are the reality.
I spoke to an officer of the Great Barrier Reef Authority last week. He said that extreme weather was increasing. I said not according to the graphs I’d seen. He said “but the reef is taking longer to recover after a storm”. Is this another bit of propaganda that is difficult for the average person to question?
Unless your officer is staking out diverse plots about the GBR and carefully indexing the species present at each plot before and after a storm AND clocking how long it takes, on average, for the plots to recover their former diversity, he don’t know jack.
I suspect he know more about the relationship to funding and ‘extreme weather’, it’s relationship to the health of the reef.
Cut out the part of the sentence up to “diversity” – simply “He don’t know jack”
But, but, he is an ‘officer’!
one of those who just benefitted from a mates handover of 440MIL aussi taxpayers money in funding to the gbr rort by trunbull?
Exactly, good comment.
Of course.
Once again a graph showing the history of earth temperature has our current temperature well below the Mean of 17 degrees Celsius. How can anyone call this last 12,000 years an Interglacial Period when Interglacial Periods are temperatures above that 17 degrees Celsius? This is a misnomer. You can call white, black. But it’s still white by definition. We are still living technically in a Glacial Period. So calling it “The Last Glacial Period” is also a misnomer. An 11,000 years Pause in global warming, doesn’t make this an Interglacial Period.
Maybe this is a pet peeve. But it makes no sense to call something that it is not.
An interglacial is when most northern hemisphere ice sheets, ie the Laurentide, Cordilleran, Innuitian, British, Fennoscandian, Siberian and Tibetan, melt, leaving only the Greenland Ice Sheet.
A “borrowed” commentary.
When it comes to our everyday lives, “consensus” is a loaded word, perhaps even one of the most dangerous ones out there. To an individual with a working mind, the fact that most people — even if it’s the overwhelming majority of intelligent, informed people — believe in something shouldn’t shape your opinion at all.
Because part of having a working mind means having the confidence to gather, synthesize and draw conclusions from the information you can access yourself. It’s one of the most valuable things we can do as human beings.
We don’t know distant temperatures to that kind of accuracy. There are a lot of fudge factors in ANY proxy, especially ice cores.
Actually, ice core data on past polar temperatures probably ranks highest in proxy reliability, certainly higher than model predictions of future temperature.
Would you care to debate the “fudge factors”, or are you simply repeating, without personal examination, what you have heard??
Many proxies are quite accurate, for example pollen in mountain lakes tells us what the vegetation was nearby, and from this we can infer the tree-line and therefore the climate.
Beetles and forams are pretty good, too.
Every graph of Earth’s Temperature History is made up from the many studies of flora and fauna fossils locations and quantities and even their quality. Accuracy of minute degree changes cannot be guessed, but larger swings in temperature and elements give a bigger picture. Ice Cores do not exist from periods where it was so hot that there wasn’t any. So other means are used to fill in the blanks. Such as the Methane Ice on the ocean floor, that could have only existed during the First Glaciation and the trapped Carbon Dioxide within it too. Tree Rings of fossils have been debated repeatedly, because of their growth, Carbon had to be from Carbon Dioxide and Atmospheric Water as well as groundwater available to make them grow in the upper Arctic Circle, as well as the Stimein size of fossilized leaves. That although they are not very accurate with Carbon Dating a few hundred or even thousand year’s, in a 4.5+ billion years, really doesn’t matter how accurate the dating is. This is why so many graphs closely resemble each other, but are not mirror reflections, as not all data was used in some, that others had included. But there is a basic consensus that the Earth has had longer periods of around 22 degrees celsius called Interglacials, than there have been times where 12 degrees celsius was the average estimated temperature of Glacials that did not last very long. So again. Going by everything we think we know about Earth’s past history. The Mean of those is about 17 degrees celsius. Any sustainable temperatures above that are Interglacials and every time temperatures are sustainable below it are Glacials. At no point in the past 11,000 years have temperatures surpassed that 17 degrees celsius, by all of our scientific knowledge as we know it.
This also brings the topic of how we may know more about the recent 12,000+ years simply because we have the technology to more closely date it. But we cannot get an accurate understanding of a few millions to a billion or more years in the past. To know if there were similar 12,000 +/- year Pauses like we are now experiencing, that happened or didn’t happen coming out of the previous Glacial Period, or the transition from the Interglacial into that previous Glaciation. Because 12,000 years is a blink of an eye in periods that lasted several million years, several million years ago. I have stated several times, that no matter how far advanced in science we think we are, our science is still in its infancy.
But what we do think we know. The Earth has been much hotter and for longer periods of time, than we are now and for the past 10,000 years of a 15 degrees celsius Mean, Pause. That by every indication of the past as we understand it. Earth should be getting much hotter. That only occasional Anomalies in the past, created Glacial Periods, that seem to have a rough trend in their occurrences. That the roughness of those trends, is more than likely because our science cannot date them accurately.
By this, this ideology that we argue over a few fractions of a degree celsius as “Global Warming”, “Global Cooling” or “Climate Changes” is just semantics. When we should be preparing for it getting extremely hotter. Even if there is another “Little Ice Age” being predicted for the near future. The bigger picture is as I’ve been talking about. Earth could suddenly – within any time – start that thousand or so years Warming climb to its longer sustainable Interglacial 22 degrees celsius Mean.
And people think it’s hot now.
I’ll be long gone so I’ll let my kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s kids worry about it
What makes you so positive that a swing of warming cannot happen today and in a few decades to less than a century be 2 degrees Celsius hotter? Or the opposite and be colder? When Anomalies created those changes. We can’t predict Anomalies. A child born in 1850 that lived to 1940 would have seen the Global Temperature go from around 14 degrees Celsius to around 16 degrees Celsius. That’s a 2 degrees C. change, We understand that Solar Cycles and volcanic activity can cause temperature Anomalies. But we can only observe what they do. Or expect what they can do, by our knowledge of them.
IMO, the warming from 1850 to 1940 was less two degrees C. It was however more than the warming from 1940 until now, in part because the planet cooled from the ’40s until 1977, when the PDO flipped.
Thanks. You are right and I was wrong. It should have been 1740 to 1940 for closer to 2 degrees C. Also at least 3 generations… Because people had shorter life expectancies. No excuses.
The warming actually began coming out of the depths of the LIA during the Maunder Minimum, ie c. 1690. The early 18th century rebound warming cycle lasted longer and was more pronounced than the late 20th century warming.
If that “kid” was born in the US, in the midwest, he’d have noticed that it was warmer in the earlier 1930s than anytime since then.
True.
The LIA effected the North Atlantic and therefore Western Europe and Eastern Northern America’s more than elsewhere. But the effects were noticeable elsewhere.
John,
IMO the LIA wasn’t more pronounced in the North Atlantic region than elsewhere. Indeed, it may have started in the Southern Hemisphere.
http://www.thegwpf.com/little-ice-age-started-in-the-southern-hemisphere/
Whether that be the case or not, its signal is strong in such disparate regions as Alaska, Patagonia, New Zealand and Antarctica.
Well that’s interesting. But logic, rational thought and understanding that the South Pole has always been colder than the North Pole, due to the tilt of Earth’s axis as it orbits the Sun and faces away from it longer than toward it with the elliptical orbit, than the North Pole does, only confirms the obvious.
Yet, the LIA was still just a slight drop in temperature from this 15 degrees C to short winter periods of 14 degrees C that had several fluctuations of warming and cooling like normal seasons, just at lower temperatures. Most sites will not even give a temperature for the LIA because of regional variations. That higher elevations had ice cap build up, some never amounted to “Glaciers.” But nearly every site talks of Northeastern Canada and the USA or Northwestern Europe to China, rarely anywhere else.
But here again we are just talking about semantics of this current 11,000 years of a Pause.
I agree with you as we cannot predict whether the Ice Age will end after this interglacial or whether it will begin the gradual descent into another major glaciation as it has one quite reliably for the past million years. I f I was a betting man though, I would bet it stays on course for another descent. From the Greenland ice cores it would seen that it has already begun as we have moved from the Holocene Climate Optimum 5,000 year ago into the Neoglacial Period. Here is a wonderful 2-part series on the Holocene:
https://judithcurry.com/2017/04/30/nature-unbound-iii-holocene-climate-variability-part-a/
https://judithcurry.com/2017/05/28/nature-unbound-iii-holocene-climate-variability-part-b/
Great round up Patrick. The exposure of the standard environmental fraud, for insider profit and control, to no public benefit, by fraudulent law, is well worth repeating until the public catch on, if their collective intelligence ever allows for such a strenuous such a mental effort.
ICE AGES: I really doubt what is happening now will be that different from the last 4 ice ages we have data on. Because of the magnitude of the real controls involved vs insignificant in fact human effects.
There is no credible reason for it to change, the underlying macro level conditions and cyclic control remain the same. The gross energies involved are so much greater over such a sustained period and the current 100Ka cycle clearly driven by the power of 30% radiation and gravitational variation through orbital eccentricity at the maximum. An order of energy that is unimaginable to the pathetically powerless human race. The likelihood humans can affect this cyclic net planetary energy variation is very small, and the whole environmental “CAVE people for profit” movement smacks of the faithful Catholics proseltyising the fake science that the Sun revolved around the Earth – to maintain their leaders phoney power and income from unquestioning belief in the dogma they had invented and promoted as the one truth that must be believed or else. Especially easy to embed in the socially backward and gullible populations of the USA and Australia in particular.
When so much real science said that incraesingly probably was not the case, the state decreed only their science was good and must not be questioned by anyone who worked for the state. Also withdrew from debating facts they must lose on as beneath their dignity to to give the truth a platform. For the same reasons then as now, with blatant science denial of natural facts of the climate record and the proven laws of physics that deny its energy policy as a fraud on the facts.
When the ice man comes comes, which he will, we will have to abandon nation states and relocate. Americans and Australians just been to move about their continents to newly habitable bits. E may have to nuke Italy or Spain to clear it for Brits. Good news is humanity has MANY MANY life times to sort this, even when the next interglacial arraives and we have another 100 metre sea level rise. You can rebuild on the coastline many times in 7Ka, most of the developed cities are maybe 200 years old max, since the modern versions with sewers and stuff were built. Probably better to plan for the rise and just rebuild a few times in 7Ka.
As for us today? Climate change and the coming ice age is ipso facto irrelevant to anyone living, probably for several generations. Getting our expected stable global population of 11Billion population to a common standard of wealth, health and happiness is the obvious challenge for humanity. Climate change is an unavoidable and trivial challenge we can meet as it becomes a problem. CO2 is probably NOT the major cause of the small change we do see.
The best way to bring peaceful co-existence, and massively increase the wealth/surplus this will produce , is to deliver enough enrgy to industrialise the 3rd World and make it more productive, so raising its people into prosperity and the rule of law, etc.. THat wil enable us to best protect humanity from threat, not control the threat, which we are unimaginably inadequate to undertsnad or control. But VERY competent at adapting to and improving our efforts to survive better for longer. It’s our form of evolutionary superiority by the addition of intellect to physical development, that enhances us massively as a collective while many individuals barely evolve from the greedy selfish me first cave men at heart – see politicians. Nothing else on the planet does that by creating a set of tools to respond to change in its environment. They have to move as Neolithic hunter gatherers did..
nb: Forget shortage, plenty for all can be the future. GM crops and synthetic hydrocarbons made using nuclear electricity surplus take care of all that. We will have the technology. Medical advances mean dangerous plagues can now be responded to before the global population is compromised. We know how, and we’re getting better at it, which the greens really hate, because while we can’t control planetary scale macro environment, we can and DO control our own physiology, development, a bit of our evolution, and that of the plants we depend upon, using the science we have evolved to deliver a full life span and more to most people, much of it achieved by informed “guess and test” wetware science and statistical epidemiology, aided by ever cleverer tools to engineer and test what is done. Clinical trials and other such are because in medicine and genetics we can have a good idea about outcomes, but never know, as we can in proven sciences like physics, well, nearly. Medicine is also more climate science and statistical guesswork than real science. More like climate science than physics. Not many laws.
So if we applied the precautionary principle, we would never have advanced as a species in this one short interglacial which is all we have ever known as a species. Maybe we won’t get to the next interglacial. But I doubt that, as we were far more exposed to the risks of unknowing development in the past when we knew much less and had only the crudest of tools. Nearly got wiped out more than once, but became increasingly resilient. Always going forward, cos we can’t find reverse. In fact retreat is not an option in evolution, although getting bigger and smaller seems to be, going backwards in development is a disaster, and one we will use all available resources. to avoid, as so many Billions of the less fortunate and resilient must die if that happens, as the Greens demand.
POINT: We can only justify spending any climate justified money on protecting too many people living increasingly in areas liable to natural and increasingly human presence caused problems from fire, flood, etc.
e.g. Protecting, or relocating in extremis, people from over built and over water extracted, over exploited territories in vulnerable/marginal locations prone to fire, flood and/or drought is the best use of OUR cash, and the taxes of the people who tend to live in these low cost developments. The marginal and deteriorating conditions will get worse, and we can’t change that. Nor should we try, or imagine we could or should try. We have no clear understanding how the Gaia works, in fact. Some guesses. No idea and wholly inadeqauate power to control it, or lifespans to manage the very slow processes. It would make fusion power seem like a fast track development.
And we only have one planet to risk. And no control Planet.
To the last points.
1. Subsidising the utterly undeliverable promises of renewable technologies in the engineering fact of adequacy of both energy supply AND CO2 reduction that the supposed solutions really don’t do much for is a hard fraud on the elec eng facts.
2. The claims for CO2 as a control knob of climate are similarly bogus on multiple hard facts of recorded data from the current atmosphere, its temperature at the surface and in the troposphere, and sea level variation, all vs. CO2 concentration, as well as the historical and proxy geological record, including Dr Best’s graphical compilation above, especially compared to the overpowering natural controls of Gaia like the sun, oceans, clouds and orbital cycles.
CO2’s contribution to creating our currently prophesied climate disaster, currently +0.6 degrees per century and 3mm of sea level change pa, is equally questionable, and not predicted well by models that depend on amplifying CO2’s slight warming effect through more water vapour, but probaly the wrong way, and also dismiss variables that are significant by assuming them as small and constant by assertion, plant’s, cosmic rays, oceanic volcanoes, because they aren’t paid to prove anything else is responsible for the tiny change we actually observe so want to attribute as much as possible to CO2 in the atmosphere – because that’s what their IPCC UN research grant money demands from them. Proof of their chosen cause. Not probable other causes. Ocean as passive energy sink producing water vapour when it gets warm.. 21st Century pay cheque science is what drives these scams.
The propaganda distorting the already selective science is amplified by government and NGO elites using public money to do it to justify measures that supposedly ameliorate it but cannot and are not in engineering fact. These elites indirectly profit from the fraud and promote the scam across the world, most of them with NO idea what is really happening, except their class is getting richer by this latest deceit at the expense of the masses they control through their control of knowledge and understanding, as it always was and should always be. Isn’t this a really sad comment on the scientific profession and disciplines that many of us were raised in? Pseudo science environmentalism for profit has become the religion of the 21st Century. Root and branch moral corruption and betrayal of the people Feynman’s pseudo scientists for self advancement at the bidding of the rich and powerful. Well, that’s what I think 🙁
Happened less when scientists were independently wealthy. Allegedly.
Sea level is a very good proxy for Global Mean Temperature. (Even a layman can spot a layer of oyster & mussel shells on the slope of a present day hill) The ridiculous assertion that the MWP was confined to the Northern Hemisphere. NAAAH…
“During the last 7000 years, southern African sea levels have fluctuated by no more than ±3 m. Sea-level curves based on observational data for southern Africa indicate that Holocene highstands occurred at 6000 and again at 4000 cal years BP, followed by a lowstand from 3000 to 2000 cal years BP. The mid-Holocene highstands culminated in a sea-level maximum of approximately 3 m above mean sea level (MSL) from 7300 to 6500 cal years BP….”
The receding Mendenhall glacier recently exposed a shattered forest, still in its original position and dated about 1,000 years ago. There have been no forests at that latitude anywhere near that site since then. Seems safe to say that it was warmer back then, at least in that area, than it is now. There are many different ways to take proxy measurements. When the results are consistent, the proxies shouldn’t be too far off the mark.
@johchi7
20,000 years ago, the Big Apple was beginning to feel less pressure as a mile high ice glacier began backing off and melting. I’d say, given the current activity of a big population there now, we’re experiencing an interglacial period. Also, when the last ice age began melting the sea level began rising. About 12,000 years ago sea level began increasing more rapidly. About 6,000 years ago, the rate of rise began dropping. For some time now, the rate of rise is down to a few mm per year. The interglacial appears to be ending.
I think you’re missing my point that 17 degrees C is the historical Mean. Not 15 degrees C with +/- 1 degrees C fluctuations.
In past comments I have pointed out that the majority of our population is built below the High Water Indicators on the Eastern Coastal and Central America. Others have hypothesized a Global Warming that would flood those areas. Because the evidence is there from the last Interglacial that had no Polar Ice. But it would take a lot hotter than they predict to cause the Antarctic to melt enough to do it again.
But when the Earth has had longer periods of much hotter Interglacial Periods… Logic says that’s closer to the Earths Mean. Not this Pause we are in.
I distinguish between Ice Ages, such as the Pleistocene that Earth has been in for the past 2.6 million years and major glaciations, or glacial periods, which have been occurring in approximately 100,000 cycles for the past 1 million years and in 40,000 year cycles before that, both is synch with one of the Milankovitch Cycles. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
It remains a problem that geology hasn’t adopted a standard term for talking about Icehouse and Ice Age intervals, such as the Ordovician and Carboniferous Period and present Cenozoic glaciations, as opposed to the glacial cycles within each such icy interval.
There is language for advances and retreats within the glacial intervals, ie stadials and interstadials, and for the interglacial phases, such as now, with fewer ice sheets.
Everybody talks about these Glacial Periods because they are Anomalies of temperatures below the longer records of more Tropical Interglacial Periods. Every time they’re studied there is some Anomaly or multiple Anomalies that created them. When our Earth for longer periods has had temperatures far above what we live in. (In my time as an assayer, we wouldn’t even include the occasional assays that showed very little values, unless they were confined to a specific source in the ore body. And it was seen as an Anomaly, that when mining that area, they know to not process that worthless rock) This is how the Global Temperatures should be viewed. Because for 3.5 billions of years of temperatures above 17 degrees Celsius, only less than a billion years have temperatures been below that 17 degrees Celsius. The last Interglacial lasted from about 290 million years ago until about 10 million years ago with temperatures above 17 degrees Celsius, or 2.8 approximate billion years. There were fluctuations where about 150 million years ago the temperature dropped below 17 Degrees C for a short time, before warming again. That this ideology that this “last Glacial Period” is over and ended because the temperature warmed to 2 degrees C. below the 17 degrees C. Mean makes this time an Interglacial, is not logical. We are still in that Glacial Period until the Global Temperature surpasses that 17 degrees Celsius Mean for a sustainable increasing period of time. We should be enjoying this Pause as some of the best climate in human history. But be prepared for if the temperature drops or increases.
Why is it that no one sees what I’m talking about? Everybody is stuck in this past 11,000 year Pause, that is below the 17 degrees C Mean of the past 4.5 billion years. I hate repeating myself, explaining the same thing over and over. That this time in history with a 15 degrees C Mean for 11,000 years, is below the 17 degrees C Mean that separates Glacial Periods from Interglacial Periods. We cannot be in an Interglacial Period, without first having the Global Temperature above that 17 degrees C Mean. Making this time period still a Glacial Period.
Probably need to correct the section about Polar bears during the Eocene.
Well, the ancestors of bears did indeed inhabit north polar regions during the Eocene. Arctoids split from canoids (the dog line) then, and late in the epoch, among the arctoids, the bear line split from the pinniped (seals, etc) and musteloid (weasels, etc) lines.
It has been corrected, sorry for that mistake, I have Eocene on my mind.
There’s too much crappy politically correct childrens’ literature and not enough Aesop’s fables. Such tales convey much more profound life lessons. In particular, there is The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Michael Mann’s hockey stick made me skeptical about global warming. It also made me skeptical of all other environmentalists.
I think I’m not alone. Most people ignore CAGW. I think they also ignore most environmental warnings. The ongoing Gallup poll, The Nation’s Most Important Problem proves that.
It could be argued that the alarmists have done far more damage than good to the environment. I’m sure there are many sincere, hard-working, worthy of support, environmentalists but nobody’s listening to them because of the Wolf Criers.
cB, I hope you are right.
From where I sit (Toronto, Ontario) the Al Gore narrative is gospel. All of our academic, media and governing elites are on board the good ship AGW. To be otherwise is not recommended.
There is yet available a detached and reasoned explanation of the science concerning this issue. Except for a very few, no one seems to know where the science ends and the supposition begins.
The dangerous ideolog and now former premier of the province got her derrierre handed to her in the last election. The people can see through the crap being handed out by the liberal elites.
Environmentalism is just progressivism by a different tag.
None of them are worthy of support, SJW’s are a cancer on us.
Conservationists do it for love, not money, they rock.
As a lecturer I discovered some of my colleagues were teaching some of their students quantifiably, demonstrably fictitious ‘facts’ and I arranged a demonstration to show this. They didn’t like what they saw, but they couldn’t pull it apart and admitted yes, I was right – but 6 months later they were back teaching what ‘the book says’. In one instance I raised concerns students were not being taught about something critical and , getting to the point, the reply was “well they’re just stupid then and they should have asked about that”
Really guys, really? Students come to us from diverse backgrounds to learn – they do NOT have the information to know what they don’t know, and it’s our job to give it to them!
It doesn’t surprise me one jot that the cycle of student to lecturer or teacher perpetuates ideologies and eventually becomes a closed echo chamber and a stronghold to keep either ideas out. Some of these supposedly intelligent folk are the least likely to question new information if it comes from Authority Figures because that’s the mindset that offers the greatest rewards in academia.
What they loathe is the philosophy of science, a direct challenge to their inductive logic. Not understanding the difference, anyone who questions is automatically a threat to their authority (not the information it’s self) and has to be squished.
This leads to crafted schools of knowledge with adherents, and with limited actual knowledge they cannot easily tell the difference between psudo-science and real science.
From the outside they can look the same. Smiling man in lab coat talks of the benefits of all natural beta-octavioid mollusk secretions.. Odd looking man saying grumpily it’s all nonsense.. who are they to believe? Man with many stripes across his broad chested military uniform says The Situation is Under Control, versus grubby grunt missing an eye saying ‘no it’s bloody not’ – who will be believed?
Every second product label in he shops is covered in sciencey sounding claptrap and it’s sucks people in, ‘popular science’ is in part to blame, it hands factoids to the ignorant and proclaims this as knowledge, people learn to formulate sentences using these factoids and think they are now knowledgeable , and when they’re confronted with evidence that suggests they’ve been suckered, they turn on whomever challenges their investment – it’s a cognitive failure that was an evolutionary trait giving better odds of success in earlier times – but it’s a fail now.
The majority do not comprehend the philosophy of science and it’s process of falsification, they immediately turn to using inductive logic to support their choices, and they’ve never been given the tools by educators to tell the difference. Worst thing we ever did was drop critical thinking and rhetoric from education .. but try to usher it back in and see how you go. The gatekeepers in their Authority Towers will slam the doors on you quicker’n spit.
Needless to say,I’m not a lecturer there any more.
“…“well they’re just stupid then and they should have asked about that”
Really guys, really? Students come to us from diverse backgrounds to learn – they do NOT have the information to know what they don’t know, and it’s our job to give it to them!”
Absolutely, and that means teaching students how to think and learn, otherwise they have no way of becoming true adults. Also, if we don’t teach students how to learn they must decide who is a source of information which has the potential for disaster as history repeatedly shows.
Commercial aviation has become safer and safer year on year since the 1940s and that is because of the way the methods for learning from experience are encouraged and sustained. Pilots are also trained to think and question. A quote from Captain Sully Sullenberger: “In working with your team it is not who is right, but what is right, that matters”
Karlos
Very nice comment.
Inductive logic is rampant. Looking back I was lucky to have a couple of professors who made us all aware of how to spot it and how to think through issues.. it helped immeasurably for the last 50 years.
You might enjoy my award-winning Niece Iris’s children’s video, also in book form, “Why Does the Sun Go Down”.
http://irislmoore.com/animations/?v=4326ce96e26c
Her other videos are there too.
Thank you. I really enjoyed the video, it was wonderful and beautiful. I can’t stop smiling.
Lovely, but female nightingales don’t sing.
Readers of the Guardian believe in CAGW. But then 97% of Guardian devotees and journalists seem to be low IQ individuals with a propensity for hypocrisy, lying and delusion. They say their three Hail Marys : “I believe in climate change, I believe in climate change, I believe in climate change”, receive nodding approval from the flock, and then hop on a plane, fill up their SUVs , refurbish their nice big houses, buy the latest gadget, all whilst cursing the evil deniers and fossil fuel companies who are ruining the world.
Kate recently posted over at Small Dead Animals that there is no evidence that omega-3 has significant health benefits. She was referencing an article from The Guardian of all places.
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2018/08/01/the-sound-of-settled-science-17/
I beg to differ on that point, but it’s OK with me that that mis-information is spread because it will keep the price of wild salmon, black cod and other oily fish lower than if more people believed the health benefits.
Every credible food, health, and science organization says GM food is perfectly safe
Somehow appeals to consensus ring hollow, especially here at wuwt! How many times have we heard alarmists trotting out the climate change consensus (to which the rest of us d’niers must all bend the knee?) Paradigms rise and fall like the fads of the 70s. Anyone remember the incredible inedible egg? Now, i’ve got no problem with false paradigms, after all, s*** happens. (but, i do have a problem with eating one)…
Genius abhors consensus because when consensus is reached thinking stops. Stop nodding your head. ~einstein
A bit odd, ’tis August 4, Dr Spencer has published his monthly review (a bit on the warm side, apparently), a very hot weather has been reported for weeks in most parts of the Northern hemisphere, still going on, and WUWT digs into some rather dubious sources to keep talking at length about things which are not of current interest.
Yeah, Franc, i’ve been waiting here for dr s’ data to show at wuwt for a couple days now. (i guess it just slipped somebody’s gord) Pertinent stuff like that shouldn’t be neglected. We may be in the midst of some global cooling and watchful waiting is not only fun, but it’s good politics, too. The more visibility that any cooling gets, the better. (the tide may be turning against the agw madness)…
my other comment is awaiting moderation. In reference to the Monsanto mice study:
Perhaps this is why the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology took the unprecedented decision to retract the study last week. Unprecedented because it goes against the journal’s own express principles and guidelines for such retractions. The publisher of the journal, Elsevier, is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, whose criteria for retracting a paper are:
• Clear evidence that the findings are unreliable due to misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error;
• Plagiarism or redundant publication;
• Unethical research.
The editor of the journal, Dr. A. Wallace Hayes, himself admits that the paper meets none of these criteria. In his own statement on the retraction, he admits that he “found no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data.” Yet still, the paper is being retracted because “the results presented (while not incorrect) are inconclusive,” apparently a new standard for article retraction that seems to apply especially to articles critical of the GMO industry in general and Monsanto products in particular.
all this in the show notes. James doesn’t eff around when it comes to researching:
It is not at all unfair to be cynical about this retraction either. On a radio program late last month, Dr. E. Ann Clark pointed out a surprising connection between the Journal and Monsanto that might account not only for the retraction of the Seralini paper, but also the recent retraction of a similar study from Brazil that demonstrated the toxic effects on mice of the Bacillus thuringiensis insecticide that forms the basis of the Bt GMO crops.
That a former Monsanto scientist should find himself in charge of a specially-created post at the very journal that published two landmark studies questioning the safety of that company’s products should surprise no one who is aware of the Monsanto revolving door. This door is responsible for literally dozens of Monsanto officials, lobbyists and consultants finding themselves in positions of authority in the government bodies that are supposedly there to regulate the company and its actions. This list of officials includes Linda Fisher, a senior EPA official who later became Monsanto’s VP of Government and Public Affairs, Michael Taylor, Obama’s Deputy FDA Commissioner who also served as Monsanto’s VP for Public Policy, and US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who served as a corporate lawyer for Monsanto in the 1970s. These positions of influence have been used to help Monsanto and its biotech peers obtain an FDA ruling which asserts that GMO foods are not substantially different from non-modified foods, win approval for their products from regulators by self-sponsoring studies with almost identical methodologies to the Seralini study that was just retracted, and pass favorable legislation like the Monsanto Protection Act, preventing the company from being taken to federal court in the event that GMOs are discovered to be harmful to human health. In his position as “Associate Editor for Biotechnology,” former Monsanto employee Richard E. Goodman has now overseen the retraction of two papers that had been critical of his former employer, yet this fundamental conflict of interest is nowhere commented on in reportage of the Seralini study’s retraction.
So you think a reasonable person could seriously defend the “photo of rats with enormous tumors” so called scientific study?
Please explain to me how the male rats fed the highest does of glyphosate died at 1/3 the rate of those fed the lowest. Please explain to me how no does response curves represent sound science. I would be happy to give you plenty more evidence that science was absolute trash if you would like. e-mail me cheers
“apparently a new standard for article retraction”
So studies that state unwarranted conclusions should remain in the scientific literature?
It’s called weather. July UAH is up slightly, but not enough to be interesting, even if one month was significant, which it isn’t.
Whilst I agree with all of that, I do consider that WUWT should promptly publish the UAH data each month. I do not understand why it has not been published yet.
For a very simple reason : it is not in line with the WUWT reasoning : the next Ice Age is coming… We have proof of that : UHA figures, and some Lord’s (whatever that feudalistic title means to us) calculations. Well, it is not true, so the Lord’s monthly page has disappeared, and so has Dr Spencer, PhD’s.
Patience, grasshopper.
Why should WUWT publish that every month? If you want the information is is easy to go to https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/ and see it direct from source. Looking at previous posts it does not appear that it was ever normal to do this, monthly data is just weather after all.
I get that the latest data suits the alarmists and so they want it to get maximum publicity, but that will quickly change when we get a cold month.
Yes, the truth of the matter is that it is vital to exploit this month of warm temperatures because the CAGW game is almost over for the watermelons (that means you François, green on the outside, red on the inside). If they don’t manage to take over the world soon, they will be totally discredited when the climate trend reverses, as it always does.
Sadly though, I’m absolutely certain that they will switch back to global cooling caused by burning fossil fuels so fast it will make your head spin. There will be plenty of ignorant sheep to swallow the new lies whole. The hot 30s will be adjusted back into the record and duly exaggerated, the 90s will be suppressed.
BillP said: “Why should WUWT publish that every month?”
Because they have been doing so for years. There also used to be a “guess the Arctic ice minimum” contest, but that seems to have been discontinued.
As far as I can see only February and June data has been reported for this year, previous years have been also had more months not reported than reported.
As I said earlier, monthly data is weather anyway, long term analysis of the data is relevant to this site, but I see little point in mentioning it more than annually.
If anything it has been mentioned too much in the past.
July 2018 anomaly of 0.32 degrees C, v. July 2017 anomaly of 0.29 degrees C. July 2016 was 0.39 and 1998 0.51 degrees C.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2018/08/uah-global-temperature-update-for-july-2018-0-32-deg-c/
We’re all going to fry!
I am presently in Spain.
It has been a rather cold year. Here on the coast we normally get Summer temperature highs of around 35 degC. To date, there have only been a few days where temps have reached 31/32 degC. Today the forecast is for a high of 31, Sunday and Monday 33 degC but the majority of the next 10 day forecast, is 30 degC or below.
My swimming pool at this time of the year is usually around 33/34 degC, this year it is struggling around 30/31 degC. It is some 2 to 3 degC below normal, and I suspect that the year as a whole has been around 2 degC below normal. Interestingly, there is a claim that Portugal will experience the hottest European temperature ever (at 50degC), but the authorities have now downgraded that to 48 degC, and they noted that July temps were some 2 degC below normal.
Meanwhile, the European press is in overdrive about summer temps and the so called Spanish plume. The warm European weather is much more localised than MSM portrays.
The tropical North Atlantic Southwest of Spain is about as cold as it gets currently. It will be very interesting what the winter will bring to Spain and Europe in general this year with a much colder North Atlantic than last year.
Not where I live. It han’t broken 95 degrees this summer. A hot summer is 105. Doesn’t look hot to me.
fonzie
All life has been genetically modified since the beginning of time. The progeny of almost all living things is the genetic splicing of two individuals. It is the source of life’s development.
What’s wrong with using technology to accelerate, or more appropriately, adapt the process to harness it for the benefit of mankind?
Yours is a great question, Scot. Consensus science sees it, as you say, a benefit. But, what happens iffen when the consensus changes? Let’s face it, false paradigms are dime a dozen. And that may be fine when your talking about something as trivial as, say, psychiatry or the cause of ulcers. But, when we’re talking about the very food we eat (and, yes, the environment of those living organisms), a false paradigm could have ruinous consequences…
My biggest peeve personally isn’t with GMOs themselves, but with the flippent way they seem to be dealt with. (i think monsanto needs to hire a new PR guy… ☺️) If growers want to go that route, then fine, but they shouldn’t be impinging on growers that want to go non gmo. i’ll buy products that have the non-gmo project seal on them, but there is no gaurentee that those products are actually non-gmo! There should be stringent measures for keeping GMOs from Non GMOs. (if that means using terminator seeds, then so be it) If gmo growers can’t ensure that their products are kept to themselves, then they should be banned, as they already are in many countries. The mad scientists have got to find a way to keep their little science experiment to themselves. That’s common sense (and fairness) that we should all be able to agree on. Individuals should have the freedom to exercise the choice of whether or not they want to eat GMOs. As it stands today, they don’t have that choice. Pretty basic stuff really… Don’t impinge on my right to eat non-gmo (aka real) food!
Which genetic modifications worry you?
Mr. W., i just love your recent upgrade of the comment page. Thank you for everything that you do…
How can we trust a man who cant spell: ‘gaurentee ‘???
How can we trust a man who cant spell:
We shan’t. Nor those who contradict themselves: ‘cant’
Pull the beam out of thine own eye, Leo 🙂
Sy, Leo’s an atheist. (can’t imagine him being responsive to a biblical quote… ☺️)
(and how can i trust a man who can’t spell: ‘cant’ ???)
(and how can i trust a man who can’t spell: ‘cant’ ???)
He might have meant the opposite of decant….. 🙂
Are you going to respond to Theo’s question any time soon, fonzie?
I noticed a neat bit of displacement activity at 6.16pm. Nothing else.
Leo, fonzie has spelt “guarentee” correctly, he has perchance mis-spelt “guarantee” 😉
If you want to pay more for food that is no better and perhaps even less nutritious, that is your right, and nobody is preventing you from doing so.
“HA”, do ya pose could name me a few examples of the aforesaid “aka real food” that can be purchased in the food markets of today?
How many of the hundreds of different types and varieties of foods that are commonly found on Supermarket shelves or in vegetable/food catalogues here in the 21st Century were available for purchase, planting, raising and/or growing during the 16th thru the 19th Century and the first quarter of the 20th Century?
Just the different varieties of apples, corn, beans, tomatoes and potatoes is staggering …. with 90+% of the aforesaid totally unheard of by one’s great-great-grandparents.
You would think that anyone that feared the eating of “genetically modified foods” …… would also fear the eating of “cross-pollinated modified foods”, …….. but your thinking would be wrong because the latter group don’t want to starve to death.
The demand to “exercise the choice” of foods is reduced to a meaningless imaginary choice, and the demand for it has no right to screw up the entire evolution of food.
there is a massive difference between nature as it is intended and has been built to naturally modify genes through natural processes, rather than extracting genes from salmon that express resistance to cold and mechanically forcing them into strawberries to be better able to withstand frost. Do you not see a glaring difference? One is living within the bounds of creation, the other is attempting to become Creator. How many times have we been down this road?
remember, I told you we’d likely disagree on vaccines/GMO? 😉
here we are, but at least on this topic I’m able to be much more polite
Genes from different species enter the genomes of other species all the time in nature. From hybridization to horizontal gene transfer, such recombinations have been an everyday natural occurrence for billions of years.
Please provide evidence that a salmon gene has been introduced into strawberries. I have no problem with so doing, but must admit to being unaware of this particular alleged genetic modification to commercially grown strawberries, or even in the lab.
Thanks!
Bacteria exchange genes a lot, salmons, not so much.
Please show where salmon genes were inserted into strawberries. Thanks.
Not just microbes, but plants, animals and fungi exchange genetic material.
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2018/07/09/Cross-species-gene-transfer-is-a-major-driver-of-evolution-study-claims/3971531161632/
Yet again, you’re wrong.
Again, you are wrong by making up stuff nobody said.
You fail.
“there is a massive difference between nature as it is intended and has been built“….
Ah, a Creationist. It all makes sense…
Ah, a Creationist. It all makes sense…
Now Leo, there you go making yourself look silly with your contradictory messes again. You very well know that as a proper Popper Proselyte of his plethora of preposterous propositions, you haven’t any clue whether or not the Creationist is correct. By your own admission Creation must be possible.
Unless, of course, you’ve falsified the theory, in which case, do point me to your research, would you? 🙂
honest liberty
I think we could both do with calming down a bit sometimes. 🙂
The great example of the benefit of GM crops is Patrick Moore’s own hobby horse, golden rice. A minor genetic tweak using, I believe, a corn gene can save a million people a year from blindness and death, most of them children. The introduction of vitamin A to ordinary rice is a simple, effective, economic and, as importantly, non-intrusive means of ensuring better health for the poor.
The patent and technology have been donated by its inventor and the seed producers (Monsanto?) are providing it at cost price to farmers with an annual turnover less than $10K, which means most of them. The cost is no more than conventional rice.
If we left everything to creation we wouldn’t be communicating as we are now. We wouldn’t have cars, aeroplanes, glass for your windows or medications that keep people healthy. We wouldn’t have pesticides to help our crops grow or preservatives to keep them fresh from farm to fridge.
Almost every industrialised crop you care to name has been genetically modified by man by selective breeding. Wheat and barley stems are now much shorter than when I was young. It was a determined effort to shorten the growing period and increase yields by ensuring the energy required to grow them went into the useful part instead of long stalks. Mostly achieved by decades of cross-breeding to find the ideal balance.
Without man’s intervention and the long painful process of ‘natural’ gene modification, this is unlikely to ever have happened. So what’s wrong with achieving the same results by direct gene intervention saving time, money and lives?
Viruses transfer genes between species all the time.
Viruses don’t transfer foreign genes into the gamets of organisms on a regular basis.
Such violations are extremely rare, which is why you can[‘t name any.
Organisms protect their genes from invasion.
But rewriting biology to suit Corporate Life(TM) is totally kewl, apparently.
No worries, mate.
You are mistaken.
Viruses invade the genomes of their hosts, so it does indeed happen all the time. The fact that viruses so often invade genomes shows that organisms’ protections are easily overcome.
About eight percent of the human genome is derived from viruses. The nucleus of eukaryotic cells might be viral in origin.
Of course we know some of their names:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/02/01/our-inner-viruses-forty-million-years-in-the-making/
Totally goofy. “Nature as it is intended” by whom or what? “The bounds of creation” is not your right to determine. We ARE a creator and that is the only reason we live in relative comfort, wealth and personal freedom to a ripe old age unlike the short and brutish life of yore.
The separation of nature and man is a false one, but it is key to both traditional religious views of the world, and environmentalism. ie. the Garden of Eden. Many greenies cannot understand that there is no ‘balance’ in nature that we can define, there is no ‘stability’, and that we are not in control of things. I think environmentalists should study some philosophy (and maybe some psychology too) to understand their control issues. Yes, we are creators, but we are also destroyers, as are all species. Consciousness means we are aware of the need to try to manage the balance between creation/destruction, but intelligence also tells us about the limits of our knowledge of the effects of our actions. We can only muddle through, adapting as the environment changes, and trying to keep the earth as beautiful and habitable for our enjoyment, and for other species (intrinsic value is a nonsense; all values are ultimately anthropocentric). Greenies tend to only see humans as destroyers, and fail to recognise that even if we had never existed, or if we cease to exist in the future, environmental cataclysms will no doubt continue to beset the earth; species will continue to evolve and then disappear. Basically, the idea of a return to Eden is religious and mystical. I do think there are ethical reasons to minimise suffering to sentient creatures.
Precisely.
How is GM different from the selective breeding which has given us all our domesticated crops and livestock, plus dog breeds?
Transferring genes from one species to another also happens all the time in nature. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has been one of the sources of genetic variation in all species.
An estimated eight percent on average of the human genome comes from viral genetic material incorporated into our DNA over millions of years. We also carry bacterial DNA, but in that case it’s not always possible to know whether the similar sequences result from common descent or a later infection leading to HGT, since we share so much inherited biochemistry with bacteria.
More than that. In the recent past, scientists would expose seeds to known mutagens and then test the resultant plants to see if something useful developed.
How is that supposed to be better than carefully adding selected genes with known traits?
Good question.
And how is hybridizing wheat and rye fundamentally different from adding vitamin A to golden rice?
What crop looks less like its ancestor than corn (maize) and teosinte?
Theo, yours is a dumb question. Kind of reminds me of the old addage when you argue with an idiot, then two idiots are arguing. (so i won’t argue with you… ☺️)
Remains to be seen who is idiotic in this discussion. Calling a question dumb and its asker idiotic is not really a response, you know.
Which question of mine do you in your infinite wisdom and vast learning find so dumb?
Was it, which genetic modifications worry you?
If so, why is that dumb? There are lots of genetic processes in food production, just as there is genetic engineering in fighting diseases.
So, IMO, it’s dumb not to know which specific genetic modifications concern you. For instance, how do you feel about golden rice, which is genetically modified to make vitamin A?
As you may know, vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness. Half of all those kids who go blind die within a years of having done so.
How is GM different from the selective breeding which has given us all our domesticated crops and livestock, plus dog breeds?
Thanks for clarifying.
Not a dumb question at all, if you know anything about genetics and molecular biology.
Now please kindly reply to my question as to which genetic modifications you find worrisome. Thanks.
Fonzie,
Two kinds of GMO and several interbreeded potatoes were tested in a field in Flanders.
In both cases the same genes from wild potatoes which do give resistance against potato blight were introduced.
It did cost many trials for the interbreeded potatoes, until the blight resistance was working and not too many unwanted genes were introduced or fortified (like the gene for producing the highly toxic solanin, which makes many wild potatoes too toxic for consumption), costing in total about 10 years before the right mix was found for field trials.
It did cost only one year to introduce only the wanted genes into known good potato varieties to obtain the blight resistance with GMO techniques.
If there is any difference between the interbreeded and GMO potatoes, I am sure the interbreeded types would be more dangerous for health…
Needless to say, the trial field was partly destroyed by anti-GMO activists…
Ferdinand,
Good example. GM just does more quickly what selective breeding and hybridization have always done.
Now that we know the specific genes desired, we can dispense with time-consuming breeding over generations. Instead of crossing the woolliest sheep for generations, we can find the wool length control gene and set it on the longest setting.
In other words, you can’t answer the question and it goes to the core of what you want to believe, so you will pretend that you are a morally superior being who doesn’t have to answer questions from the little people.
(Little Marko, you’re pretty dumb, too)…
Fonzie,
What’s dumb is your not knowing enough about GMO to say which specific genetic modifications you oppose.
You’ve repeatedly been asked to comment upon golden rice, for instance. Do you oppose adding the gene for vitamin A to rice? Are you OK with kids in poor countries going blind and dying from VAD?
Do you object just to genetically modified food, or to genetic engineering in general? How do you feel about the company Genentech, founded in 1976 to producte human proteins? Human insulin was genetically engineered in 1978 and insulin-producing bacteria were commercialized in 1982.
Human insulin was genetically engineered in 1978 and insulin-producing bacteria were commercialized in 1982.
For which I am eternally gratefull: if I still had to use pig’s or cow’s insulin, there was a huge chance of building up a resistance against these non-human insulin types…
Lots of other medicins, washing aids (enzymes added to detergents), food producing and digestion aids,… nowadays are produced by bacteria thanks to genetical engineering. See:
https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-medical-applications-genetic-engineering-672775
bacteria that is breathed in, enters our body through a cut, or from bodily fluids from another person…or are you claiming that we have horizontal gene transfer from other animals, plants, etc? I’d like to see how we have gene splicing/transfer with other animals before vaccination was introduced
Passio is again vindicated with the left/right brain dominance thing and lack of balance between the two. The lefties live in fantasy land driving only on emotion, and miss logic whereas you sciency people completely neglect the emotion when it is necessary to pull your head from your rears when it threatens your worldview. Strict materialists so focused on logic you can’t recognize proper patterns or how collusion/corruption is being trotted out as official science. you eat it up on these accounts but deny it with CO2 (as you should regarding the CAGW caca narrative)
maybe you should all start spending as much time looking at alternative sources of information (non main stream) regarding vaccines/GMO’s/herbicides, as you do on this alternative non MSM site. If you have challenged yourselves on this, and recognize the conspiracy and corruption/collusion, but also accept scientific studies are 2/3rd unreproducible, then how is it that you folks don’t start challenging yourself to see whether the same types of collusion/coruption are involved in other areas you placed your faith?
Pasquels theory on antibodies- the CO2 of modern medicine and vaccination.
GMO- population reduction scheme, just like CO2. Causes infertility and cancer.
There are far more bacterial cells in a human body than human cells, which, being eukaryotic, are of course larger. So we aren’t just exposed to bacteria from outside our bodies, but those within us.
Eukaryotic cells themselves evolved thanks to endosymbiosis. And from the origin of animals, our ancestors always lived in a world of microbes. Sponges form symbiotic relationships with oxygenic cyanobacteria, for instance. And signalling genes in multicellular organisms like animals have been derived from bacteria.
I’ve already noted how much of the human genome derives from viruses.
As for genetic material not only from bacteria, but from other animals, plants and fungi, not only yes, but hell, yes. Humans have hybridization events in our evolutionary history. But evidence has also mounted for HGT between animals and a variety of other groups of organisms:
“In all, the researchers pinpointed hundreds of genes that appeared to have been transferred from bacteria, archaea, fungi, other microorganisms, and plants to animals, they report online today in Genome Biology. In the case of humans, they found 145 genes that seemed to have jumped from simpler organisms, including 17 that had been reported in the past as possible horizontal gene transfers.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/humans-may-harbor-more-100-genes-other-organisms
Sorry, but GMO opponents seem uninformed about elementary biology and genetics.
I agree, Theo. If a machine or gadget that serves us, needs improvement, you get in there and improve it. I don’t see why, if we can, not do that w/plants or animals. Obviously, there are responsibilities & it should be done w/sufficient study & consideration. But the vision of Frankenstein-like life running amok because of that is just the same scare-mongering done by the marxists & media.
The “consensus” on climate is easy to show to be a fake. The so called consensus is an act of propaganda.
On the other hand, hundreds of studies have found GMOs to be safe, and the only ones to find otherwise are dodgy at best.
What’s wrong with eggs?
Markus, NOTHING is wrong with eggs! But back in the day they used to swear that iffen you ate more than two a week then it will kill you! (were i an egg farmer, i’d sue dem eggheads… ☺️)
What is wrong with eggs is that they come out of a chickens bottom covered in faeces for the most part. And, almost without exception contain salmonella bacteria.
Which is not a problem when cooked.
Obviously, one should be cautious about the consumption of uncooked eggs.
Tell that to Rocky Balboa….. 🙂
I’ve been tossing 1 or 2 raw eggs (organic,or pasture-raised at local farm) into my daily smoothie. Taking a bit of micro-particle colloidal silver regularly seems to handle any potential problems.
Which is taken care of by washing and cooking.
Oh yea, don’t eat the shells.
Hey fonzie, how about “all the scientific evidence says GM foods are perfectly safe.”
Dr. Moore is a status quo apologist, when it comes to everything big corporation. While I agree he is correct about CO2, he needs to stay away from remarking on GMO/farmed salmon.
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/04/30/salmon-fish-farming.aspx
I suppose Dr. Mercola is a quack to the faithful though, because he doesn’t have the proper authority when people reference who to trust on this site.
notice the Bayer/Monsanto connection, so then go find an independent journalist discussing this and rifle through the show notes (which are included in all his works):
https://www.corbettreport.com/bayer/
https://www.corbettreport.com/5-gmo-myths-busted/
also, the researchers behind that study were up against massive collusion and still stand behind the quality of their study
more on that below:
https://www.corbettreport.com/genetic-fallacy-how-monsanto-silences-scientific-dissent/
https://www.alternet.org/environment/sordid-tale-monsantos-genetically-engineered-bentgrass-dangerous-grass-never-dies
and don’t even get me started on vaccines: where are any long term comparitive studies between unvaccinated and vaccinated humans through adulthood, studying all aspects of health? None, you say? Interesting.
I could supply you with such a study – plenty of graveyards around here to check on the “long term health” of the unvaccinated.
Vaccines, in a population sense, are extremely beneficial to health. This is not to say that some individuals will not have a health-threatening reaction to one or more vaccines (or any other pharmaceutical). I was one of those, as a child – a severe reaction to the then in use tetanus vaccine (horse serum derived). I was seriously glad when a drug company figured out how to make the vaccine with eggs. Tetanus is a horrible way to die.
(So is chicken pox, which I contracted as an adult, just before the vaccine was released. I was one of the fortunate ones who only had immensely reduced stamina for years thereafter – and a higher risk of shingles as I grow older.)
Now you know why you got the downcheck there, buddy. I wish I could give you more than just one, you deserve them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/opinion/sunday/anti-vaccine-activists-have-taken-vaccine-science-hostage.html
where are any long term comparative studies between un- vaccinated and vaccinated humans through adulthood, studying all aspects of health? None, you say? Interesting.
In the statistics of people who died and, or were crippled by polio.
In the total eradication of smallpox as a human disease.
In the statistics of Tuberculosis, Rubella and Measles in Western populations prior to mass migration into these populations by third world populations.
In the statistics of those treated and untreated for tetanus, by vaccination.
You cant actually carry out long term studies on unvaccinated humans, because by and large they are DEAD.
I think you would do better off looking at the correlation between Autism and the political beliefs of the parents. I mean imagine just as you are beginning to develop the ability to think, you realise your liberal parents abrogated that ability in favour of comfortable consensus.
You would be rocking back and forwards going ‘nooo…nooo…nooo’, too….
Leo, I assume that last remark was intended to be funny. It wasn’t.
Being autistic and/or the parent of an autistic child is no joke.
Especially when autism “didn’t exist” and you were left to struggle on “being a bit odd” for most of your life.
You can learn a lot about someone by looking who their heroes are. It doesn’t look good for ‘honest liberty’. Incidently, ‘honest’ people tend to submit under their real name.
@honestliberty I perused the 1st link you provided and found absolutely no references to actual studies, not even draft reports that have not passed peer review. The entire thing starts to sound a lot like the chain emails I used to delete about how it’s anti-perspirants that cause breast cancer. Or the so-called “report” from a co-worker (the fellow had black electrical tape over his company laptop webcam because Conspiracies, or some such nonsense) provided on DVD (why not email me a link? Also Conspiracies) regarding the dangers of fluoride in drinking water, also notably reference-free. (And I once made the mistake of mentioning chem-trails; I like to never got out of that conversation.) Which then paints your entire post with the non-credible brush and I did not bother to click on any of the other links. Got anything concrete? Oh, wait, Randy, is that you?
Just to address one of your misguided beliefs: are we to understand then, that the successful eradication of smallpox via widespread inoculation was just a coincidence, and the virus, which has plagued Man for well over 1500 years if not many thousands, died out on its own?
Dr. Moore is in favor of the science and technology which have allowed human population to grow from around one to almost eight billion in about 200 years.
How do you determine which technology is useful?
I guess “bonehead” would be an adequate reply to this. All conspiracy theory and no factual content. Anti-vaxers are anti-human.
Do you deny the established link between hep B vaccine and MS?
There is no established link showing Hep B vaccines cause MS. There is a link between MS flare-ups being caused by several live-virus vaccines, including Hep B, but the vaccine didn’t cause the patient to “catch” or acquire MS, the patient already had it.
https://www.webmd.com/multiple-sclerosis/multiple-sclerosis-and-vaccines#1
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/hepb-faqs.html
And from WHO, which is usually far more cautious in denying associations than the CDC “The authors found that a history of hepatitis B vaccination was less common among cases than among controls at all time intervals examined before onset of disease in the cases and regardless of the brand of HB vaccine that had last been used. This suggests that there is no increased risk of disease associated with HB vaccination. The differences in vaccination status between cases and controls were not statistically significant for any time intervals between vaccination and onset of disease.”
http://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/committee/topics/hepatitisb/multiple_sclerosis/oct_2008/en/
People have been suffering from MS and similar diseases far longer than vaccines have been in use. Get a grip.
WHO and the CDC are crackpot blogs. They are the sewers of the Web.
“by several live-virus vaccines, including Hep B,”
Which hep B vaccine are you talking about? We aren’t even talking about the same thing.
“but the vaccine didn’t cause the patient to “catch” or acquire MS, the patient already had it.”
Complete garbage as expected from a vaxxer.
MS has tripled since hep B vaccination in France; get a grip.
“There is no validated evidence that GM crops have greater adverse impact on health and
the environment than any other technology used in plant breeding…There is compelling evidence that
GM crops can contribute to sustainable development goals with benefits to farmers, consumers, the
environment and the economy… It is vital that sustainable agricultural production and food security
harnesses the potential of biotechnology in all its facets.
Planting the Future by European Academies Science Advisory Council 2013. Look it up free on-line
I am getting the feeling the resistance to GMOs is more related to a personal creepy feeling about scientists playing God than to any actual documented harms or damages. I had a coworker who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, who assured me that the Japanese released a GM wheat, I think with some kind of pest resistance, that killed dozens or even hundreds of people when it hit supermarket shelves. When I inquired about evidence he assured me the government covered it up! And that seems to be the answer I always get! I mean, government brought us the 0bummerCare website that didn’t work, and you think they’re able to coordinate an effective coverup? Of anything? I mean the government can’t even coordinate an office party without leaking everyone’s Secret Santa!
I agree that there is a major paradox here. And I really agree about consensus not being a science term, it is a social and political term. But the situation with GMOs and climate have virtually no parallels. There is no evidence that GM food is harmful, and there is no evidence that CO2 is the cause of warming.
Patrick Moore
I watched one of your presentations where you said with confidence that there is no evidence that CO2 causes warming. I scurried off, searched for a study, and found one and going on Einstein’s belief that it only took one scientist to prove him wrong, I thought I just may have to change my sceptical views.
That was until I asked around and found the study had been discredited. Evidently the temperature measurements for the study ran from the depths of a La Niña to the heights of an El Niño. Now I’m no scientist, but even I know that’s not credible.
But it did get me to thinking that if AGW were such a slam dunk certainty, there ought to bee dozens, if not hundreds of successful studies over the last 40 years.
And thank you for your years of practical environmentalism which recognises man in it’s mix instead of vilifying us for being a species apart.
Inability to observe is an interesting point. Fear of the unseen boogeyman is always great,
I’ve always been puzzled about UFO footage/pics. There must be billions of cameras and smartphones on the planet yet every single time the images are grainy and far away.
Because if it was a close-clear picture you’d see it was fake.
It’s probably those tricky aliens messing with our camera resolution.
Extremely timely, Dr Moore! Just this month, 08.2018, National Geographic Magazine breathlessly reports that ‘half of the Great Barrier Reef has been bleached to death since 2016.’
That didn’t sound right to me, so I checked with the Masters of the Universe, in the entity of Yahoo.com. They tell me, at least in the first five pages of responses, that, oh yeah, it’s true!
This is the same NGM issue that apologizes, sort of, for publishing the dying polar bear picture with climate change attribution. What NGM doesn’t realize is that they have been publishing junk science for 25 years, all in support of the ‘climate change’ meme. I hope the future deals with their manifest failures.
Picked up a copy in the dentists once: nearly threw it away in disgust.
Top quality eco porn and as fake as the tits on a Hollywood starlet.
My late Dad gave me a subscription to @natgeo when I was 12, in 1959. I enjoyed it until February 1999 when they published an volume on “The Sixth Mass Extinction” which was junk science. I cancelled my subscription. They have continued down that road as you have said.
Today I was working with some photos of various natural catastrophes I studied that hit the northwestern Gulf of Mexico— freezes, droughts, floods, etc. I have a 1970 photo of a small embayment (about 500 acres) mostly dried up, harvestable salt. I have an 1989 photo of a low salinity bay surface frozen over in Louisiana, not very thick, but lots of critters died, ducks stuck in ice, alligators with pneumonia, water levels depressed a meter. In 1899 flows of ice passed New Orleans. I wonder how many have heard about the Atlantic tilefish mortality of 1882. No one is certain, but probably a temperature change quite deep.
I have no problem with scientists considering the effect of increasing temperatures. However, they go both ways and its not the only game in town. If/when it gets cold they will have a lot to study, egg on their face.
But liberals just love to wring their hands and tell other people to sacrifice, most libs i know are not very happy people.
“One “health food” website claims pesticide residues in food cause nine diseases. It’s unfortunate that we can’t see, smell, or taste these “residues”. They cannot be observed which makes it easy to invent stories about an “invisible poison”.”
For the pragmatically minded, I really recommend Bruce Ames’ classic, “Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural).” It’s available free of charge, now, at the link at PubMed.
Ames discusses the natural pesticides plants themselves produce to fight off their predators (insects and grazers); 99.9% by weight of the pesticides in our diet are natural plant products.
He shows that natural pesticides are as oncogenic in mouse tests as synthetic pesticides.
And he shows that there are more natural pesticides in one cup of coffee that all the synthetic residues we are exposed to in a year.
Ames also suggested that carcinogenicity ought to be expressed in units of peanut butter sandwiches.
All peanut butter has traces of aflatoxin in it; one of the most potent of all cancer-inducers.
Every peanut butter sandwich exposes someone to an environmental oncogen.
So a much better indicator of the risk of exposure to dietary pesticide residues would be had if we were told that it was equivalent to the risk of eating two peanut butter sandwiches per year.
Who would ever eat peanut butter sandwiches in the civilised world?
kids
Kids like PB laced with sugar, like Skippy. Try real PB, Adams brand, with only two ingredients – peanuts and salt (not much of the latter.)
That’s it! (no mo’ PB fo’ me… ☺️) If Jimmy Carter were dead he’d be rolling over in his grave. On the plus side, peanut butter is great for stopping hiccups. Try it next time and see!
Haven’t tried peanut butter but a single teaspoon of white granular sugar taken without any liquid is a fantastic remedy…have used it for several decades as has our family.
Sugar is an incomparable hiccup remedy the has never failed me or my relatives. For decades I was amazed to read discussions of hiccup problems in which it wasn’t mentioned, or was not given its due. Finally, about four (?) years ago a scientific study bemusedly confirmed its efficacy. But the mass populace, and even the medically in-touch, seem only vaguely aware of it.
Next time someone can’t stop the hiccups, pull out a twenty dollar bill and say “If you hiccup again, this twenty is yours.” Guaranteed cure. Try it. (Hat tip to Bruce Summerhays.)
ugh. At least go with brown sugar
I’m pretty sure that jelly counteracts the lethal carcinogenic affects of aflatoxin.
Not 100% sure, mind you.
But clearly, the bananas didn’t work for Elvis.
It wasn’t cancer that killed him. So we can’t be sure.
True. But the peanut butter and banana sandwiches probably didn’t help.
I read Elvis’s favorite sandwich was a full jar of peanut better, bananas, and a pound of fried bacon. He apparently used to fly someplace that made them for him.
That sounds pretty lethal to me. Either that, or Elvis really was a space alien after all. 🙂
Nuclear weapons are made from all natural ingredients. In fact, everything is made from all natural ingredients.
There might be a tiny amount of natural plutonium, but that used in nukes is man-made. The other elements in nukes are however, as you say, “natural”.
But, what was the plutonium made from?
It’s made from uranium, which does occur naturally, although isolating and enriching it is difficult. But Pu doesn’t occur in nature, except possibly in undetectably small amounts.
https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/plutonium
Pu 339 does occur in nature after we produce it and we are natural.
In this case, I understood “natural” to mean occurring in nature without human intervention.
Pu does occur in nature, it’s just that because of it’s relatively short half life it decays away to other things quickly.
Uranium 235 which is natural. Everything that exists is natural. “Unnatural” is not the opposite of “natural”. Unnatural is a moral term referring to such things as incest, genocide, murder, etc. as in “unnatural acts”.
Patrick Moore
The ugly term ‘moral’ raises it’s head once again.
What’s unnatural is for one section of humanity to impose its perception of morality on another. I find the concept of ‘under age’ sex morally reprehensible, as do most westerners. But I don’t imagine any other species on the planet considers age a barrier when fertility presents itself, nor do some human cultures.
So which is closest to nature, the cultured west or ‘primitive savages’, and which is right?
I do make this point often. But when countering people who claim pesticides are not natural I use the point that the main causes of cancer are natural. I bit convoluted I know as everything is natural but not everyone gets that.
Yes it is important to remind people of this on a regular basis. The word “unnatural” is not the opposite of natural. It is a moral word as in “unnatural acts” such as incest, murder etc.
Saying an atom doesn’t occur in nature is not the same as calling it “unnatural”.
Humans are indeed a part of nature, but Pu is not. Otherwise, nature would have produced it without human intervention. Same goes for the other transuranic elements.
Theo
I think you missed Patrick’s point earlier. Humans are natural, therefore anything we produce is natural.
The activities of termites are only considered natural because they exist. If they didn’t, termite hills would be unnatural. Man makes skyscrapers, does that make us any less natural than termites?
An alien invasion would be considered unnatural to humans, but mother Nature would consider it a normal turn of events and adapt. Mankind might be wiped out, the planet might be destroyed, but mother nature ensures something would take it’s place, perhaps not physically, but in other ways.
Mankind exists therefore anything we do is natural.
I wonder how sunflower butter fares in the “its gonna killya just give it time” category?
I have an allergic reaction to peanuts that is not fatal but very annoying. I found out my childhood acne problems were due in part to large consumption of peanuts and peanut butter. We are not talking a few zits here and there, but large patches of nastiness.
Sunflower butter tastes great to me and leaves my skin as good as it ever was.
Well boogers, found this.
https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2017/sunflower-seeds-traced-as-source-of-toxic-mold-potent-liver-carcinogen/
Hangs head in depression…….
If sunflower seeds are deadly, why haven’t many pro baseball players succumbed from them? Doesn’t pass a cursory sniff test, sorry.
David Paul Zimmerman
I used to smoke up to 40 cigarettes a day.
I stopped and began vaping, 95% safer according to medical experts yet still I’m criticised because there’s a 5% chance i’ll die from cancer because of it.
I figure I have just cut my odds by 95%, and what medical procedure or drug can claim that?
Moral of the story, there’s always someone happy to scare you or want to tell you what to do with your life.
Fork em. Get on with your life and enjoy it, you’re 95% less likely die from a stress related condition if you do.
Thanks for that. Bruce Ames is a hero of mine.
Mine too, Patrick. I heard him talk once. He described the pesticide phobia as religious thinking.
I also found his work on metabolic radical oxidation very useful. 10,000 mutational hits per cell per day, all from superoxide and its products escaped from mitochondria. They pretty much all get repaired. But the case for taking plenty of vitamin C is made.
I think it would be more effective to equate peanut butter sandwiches to “Manhattans” and “plus sized people”.
If you eat 1 Manhattan size peanut butter sandwich or 3 Rosie O’Donnells you will die!
Only 3?
Probably only one on that count.
“Once again, invisible CO2 will
wreckwreak havoc”Fixed it for ya.