Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Climate scientists are coming out of the woodwork to seize their share of the anticipated Democrat Congress climate funding binge.
In 1993 my agency warned of climate change. In 1995 it was abolished
William Westermeyer
Thu 27 Dec 2018 22.31 AEDTThe US Office of Technology Assessment should be revived – in 2019 the world will need its expertise more than ever
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The OTA was a non-partisan agency governed by a technology assessment board which consisted of of equal numbers of senators and representatives and equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. Its assessments strove for objectivity and comprehensiveness, and were considered state-of-the-art documents by many. The OTA provided Congress, at its request, with the information and options it needed for the issues with which it was grappling, but it was careful never to tell Congress what it should do. The methodology that OTA used was widely admired and imitated in the parliamentary units that many European countries established following OTA’s lead.
In the early 1990s there was still Congressional interest in taking action on climate change, which most of the scientific community already understood would become a major problem if not addressed. Thus, in October 1993, the OTA published a two-volume, 700-page report, Preparing for an Uncertain Climate, at the request of three Congressional committees. I was a principal author. The report identified more than 100 options to help coastal areas, water resource systems, agriculture, wetlands, forests, and federally protected natural areas adapt to climate change. Not only that, but the OTA had also proposed – in its comprehensive 1991 assessment, Changing by Degrees – steps to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that would help the US avoid climate change.
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The OTA seems to have been involved in a lot of research other than climate change. The Wikipedia description of the Office of Technology Assessment makes me think of The Shop, author Stephen King’s fictional U.S. Department of Scientific Intelligence, whose amoral zeal to fulfil their mission objectives features in some of Stephen King’s horror stories.
A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, and a mutual friend offered the following, which surprisingly, was made possible by the OTA:
“My favorite “quack” cure all doctor is Dr Andrew Weil and his book Spontaneous Healing which reviews a range of different alternative, nutritional and life style therapies. He makes a stab at reviewing the scientific evidence supporting alternatives therapies. We could just as well have been discussing the scientific evidence pro and contra the range of different prostrate cancer therapies from mega Vit C treatment aka L Pauling versus Chinese herbal medicines versus the switch to a radical alkalinity inducing diet (Gearson ? therapy) which my mother was convinced worked like a charm on a range of degenerative diseases.
“For evidence pro and contra you might visit the late great Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) data base of Technology Assessment (TA) studies (maintained by Princeton Un) and read up on a now probably dated investigation of alternative cancer treatments circa the 1990’s. The study of alternative cancer treatments was mandated by a board of directors of the Congressional OTA – jointly appointed by the leadership of the Senate and House. This study was demanded by families of cancer sufferers over the objections of the AMA and big Pharma. They requested the federal government do its best to objectively review the scientific evidence pro and contra a range of alternative cancer treatments – in those long ago days.
My point here is – perhaps – the thinking and methods previously used by the OTA to approach controversial alternative cancer therapies might now be useful in helping the US and the community of nations focus the vast but limited powers of the world science system more objectively on the impacts and interactions of different possible drivers of “negative” climate change.”
There is some federal entity, I think I recall it as the “Medical Board” but I’m not too sure. According to what was disclosed, this entity is responsibility for reviewing and evaluating medical information on a wide variety of health/medical related topics with the job of making recommendations on what position federal government agencies should take on treatments, life style issues, etc. and which generally end up being the consensus medical position in the U.S. How they operate may very well be indicative of constraints on other federal entities.
I watched something called a “debate” which included no debating at all but revealed something important about the way establishment medicine works via the topic they “debated’. Which is to say, the particular topic is not the point, it is the procedure and the mentality revealed. This may be on YouTube but I’m not sure.
One side was several people who serve on this entity. The other side was an equal number of medical researchers in vitamin D therapies. For those not familiar with the current literature, there are a large number of conditions that could be termed degenerative diseases that may be partly or largely related to vitamin D deficiency. There are vit D receptors on virtually every cell in the body. Treatment regimes are generally in the order of 20,000, 40,000, 60,000 or more units per day (and often include other considerations, that is they are often not just isolated vit D treatments).
The medical board people had by far the larger part of the speaking time which covered the studies they had used but about which they were rather vague. They spoke of their official recommendations which are mostly met by 400 to 600 units per day. The other side replied (more or less) but, but, but …. there are hundreds, probably thousands of medical journal articles from the last decade reporting favorable results with far larger amounts.
The reply was yes, we know about those studies but we can only utilize FDA protocol double blind studies in making our recommendations.
But, but, but … it is very difficult, and extremely expensive, to get FDA approval for treatments outside the generally recognized parameters. Almost all such studies have used 400 units per day, with a few at 800 units per day. None have tested real therapeutic dosages. There have been many favorable large clinical studies utilizing much greater amounts.
WE can only do what we can do.
It’s hard to imagine this mess ever getting fixed.