Era of ‘Unquestioned and Unchallenged’ Climate Change Claims Is Over

New studies undercut the ‘scientifically empty’ warming narrative, says astrophysicist and aerospace engineer.

By Alex Newman Oct 11, 2023

Leading voices in the climate community are in an uproar as their warming hypothesis comes under fresh assault by new scientific papers.  The authors of the papers are being attacked and say that “activist scientists” threatened by the new findings are “aggressively conducting an orchestrated disinformation campaign to discredit the papers and the scientific reputation of the authors.”  Indeed, from insults on social media and furious blog posts to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests demanding emails from a journal editor and federal scientist, the controversy is getting heated.  Several scientists who spoke with The Epoch Times expressed shock at the tactics used against those whose latest research is casting renewed doubts on the official climate narrative........

 “Of course the climate cult will be dismissive of any information—no matter how scientifically correct—that is politically incorrect," he told The Epoch Times, noting that the new findings made important and valid points. The reason that climate activists are so upset is that the findings of the new papers—a trio of peer-reviewed studies by astrophysicist Willie Soon and dozens of other scientists from around the world—are casting further doubt on the narrative of man-made global warming.  The papers are also fueling even more public skepticism about the U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which the authors say ignores the facts as well as climate science more generally.........To Read More....

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) recognition of a scientific duplication crisis – Part 3

By Dr. Jay Lehr May 23rd, 2022 | Science | 23 Comments @ CFACT Part One, Part two

EPA regulations rely on environmental epidemiological literature, without applying rigorous tests for reproducibility, and without considering the environmental epidemiology discipline’s general refusal to take account of the need for Multiple Testing and Multiple Modeling. Such rigorous tests are needed not least because earlier generations of environmental epidemiologists have already identified the low hanging fruit.

These include massive statistical correlations between risk factors and health outcomes such as the connection between smoking and lung cancer. Modern environmental epidemiologists habitually seek out small but significant risk factors and health outcome associations. These practices render their research susceptible to false positives as real results. They risk mistaking an improperly controlled co-variable for a positive association.

Environmental epidemiologists are aware of these difficulties, but regardless have made their discipline into exercises in applied statistics. They do little to control for bias, p-hacking and other well known statistical errors. The intellectual leaders of their discipline have positively counseled against taking measures to avoid these pitfalls. But environmental epidemiologists, and the bureaucrats who depend on their work to support regulations, proceed as a field with unwarranted self-confidence. They have an insufficient sense of the need for humble awareness of how much statistics remains an exercise in measuring uncertainty rather than establishing certainty. Their results, do not possess an adequate scientific foundation. Their so-called “facts” are built on Shifting Sands, not on the solid rock of transparent, and critically reviewed scientific inquiry.

A NAS study showed how one particular set of statistical techniques simply counting and p-value plots, can provide a severe test for environmental epidemiology. Meta analyses must be used to detect p-hacking and other frailties in the underlying scholarly literature. We have used these techniques to demonstrate that meta-analyses associating PM 2.5 and other air quality components with mortality, heart attacks and asthma attacks fail this severe test.

The NAS study also demonstrates negligence on the part of both environmental epidemiologists and the EPA. The discipline of environmental epidemiology has failed to adopt a simple statistical procedure to test their research. The EPA failed to require that research justifying regulation be subjected to such a test. These persistent failures undercut confidence in their professional capacities as researchers and as regulators.

Both environmental epidemiology as a discipline, including journals , foundations and tenure committees and the EPA must adopt a range of reforms to improve the necessary reproducibility of their research. However, NAS directs its recommendations to the EPA and more broadly to federal regulatory and granting agencies.

They have reluctantly come to the conclusion that scientists will not change their practices unless the federal government credibly warns them it will withhold government grant dollars until they adopt stringent reproducibility reforms. NAS has also come to the conclusion that federal regulators will not adopt stringent new tests of science underlying regulation unless they are explicitly required to do so.

The National Association of Scholars recommend the following eleven actions be taken by the EPA in order to bring their methodologies up to the level of Best Available Science which is mandated in The Information Quality Act of 2019.

1- The EPA should adopt resampling methods as part of its standard battery of tests applied to environmental epidemiology research.

2- The EPA should rely for regulation exclusively on meta-analyses that use tests to take account of endemic questionable research procedures, p-hacking and HARKing.

3- The EPA should redo its assessment of base studies more broadly to take account of endemic questionable research procedures, p-hacking and HARKing.

4- The EPA should require preregistration and registered reports of all research that informs regulation.

5- The EPA should also require public access to all research data used to justify regulation.

6- The EPA should consider the more radical reform of funding data set building, and data set analysis separately.

7- The EPA should place greater weight on reproduced research.

8- The EPA should constrain the use of “weight of evidence” to take account of the irreproducibility crisis.

9- The EPA should report the proportion of positive results to negative results in the research it funds.

10- The EPA should not rely on research claims of other organizations until these organizations adopt sound statistical practices.

11- The EPA should increase funding to investigate direct causal biological links between substances and health outcomes.

NAS has used the phrase “irreproducible crisis” throughout this essay, and they note that distinguished meta-researchers prefer to regard the current state of affairs as a challenge rather than a crisis.

You do not need to believe it to be a crisis. These current scientific practices are simply not the best available science. We should use the best scientific practices simply because they are the best scientific practices. Mediocrity ought not be acceptable.

If this is the first article you have read in this series please go back to the past two weeks at cfact.org to read the even more extensive parts 1 and 2 or click on my name at the beginning of this article and all my previous article titles will pop up on a list. Click on any title and the full article will appear.

There is no doubt that all CFACT readers question many EPA regulations. After you read this series of articles extracted from the National Association of Scholars booklet, SHIFTING SANDS, you will question even more.

Note: Portions of this essay were excerpted from the book Shifting Sands with permission of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and its authors Peter Wood, Stanley Young, Warren Kindzierski, and David Randall.

Author

• Dr. Jay Lehr

  CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. Jay’s new book A Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change written with Teri Ciccone is now available on Kindle and Amazon.

How prominent public health agencies are skewing vaccine effectiveness statistics in the US

 Clayton Cobb 21 February

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC @CDCgov) and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC Health @NYCHealthy) are misleading us about the risk of being unvaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 (CoV2).

They are doing this through two basic errors. First, they appear to be using outdated population estimates that grossly undercount the actual number of unvaccinated persons in the United States. This leads to artificially inflated estimates of COVID-19 case rates among the ever-shrinking unvaccinated population.

Second, they appear to be counting every person for whom they cannot verify vaccination status as an “unvaccinated person.” In many cases, it appears that it is taking health agencies weeks, if not months, to properly match COVID-19 hospitalizations with vaccination status, and we have no assurance that it is ever done properly at all. This has led to some jurisdictions quietly publishing significant corrections to their data weeks after initial publication — and after the media and public health officials have already run with the erroneous numbers. This is leading to both overstatement of the COVID-19 case rate for unvaccinated persons and understatement of the same rate for vaccinated persons...........To Read More........... 

Fauci’s fall: Frank Luntz focus group of Trump voters disses both Fauci and the Covid-19 vaccines

March 21, 2021 By Peter Barry Chowka

Last year at this time, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as the NIH, was riding high. Pundits from both left and right – including the opinion hosts on Fox News – as well as President Trump and most of the public were constantly singing his praises. Fauci managed to hold onto his extremely high approval numbers though the fall, even after President Trump began to distance himself from the head of his White House Coronavirus Task Force last summer.

< Three days ago, pollster Frank Luntz presented the conclusions of his focus group of Trump voters who weighed in on Fauci and the Covid-19 vaccines in a segment on Special Report with Bret Baier. (Video here: https://video.foxnews.com/v/6241782070001#sp=show-clips.) The title of the article about the segment at Yahoo dot com tells the story:

Dr. Anthony Fauci takes credibility hit among Republicans

The focus group members’ soundbites that Luntz showed – on Fauci and the vaccines – were all negative – presumably representative of all 19 Republicans in the focus

Some examples, from six different focus group participants:

• I’ve tuned him out, frankly
• Liar.
• Puppet.
• Flip-flopper
• Inconsistent.
• Self-serving.

..........To Read More.....

 

Did you hear the story about the GMO that almost destroyed the world?

Andrew Porterfield | March 19, 2021

Once upon a time, way back in 1990, a German company modified the genetics of a bacterium so it could efficiently ferment plant waste, turning the material into ethanol. There was, the story goes, just one problem: the bacteria, Klebsiella planticola, “almost killed the world with booze,” according to an article on Cracked.

Earth Island Journal took a less sarcastic tack, quoting retired genetics professor and now environmental activist David Suzuki:

Geneticist David Suzuki understands that what took place was truly ominous. “The genetically engineered Klebsiella,” he says, “could have ended all plant life on this continent. The implications of this single case are nothing short of terrifying.”

This story has become an occasionally arising myth, with articles that appear every few years bolstering anti-GMO activists’ views that anything transgenic or otherwise modified is at least bad for your health, bad for the environment, or perhaps fatal.............

So, what did happen? Scientists and engineers have been spending decades looking at new ways to handle plant waste, which can become rich material for soil amendments, or can be fermented into other chemicals, including ethanol, and turned into biofuels. In fact, the Klebsiella planticola bacterium (which is now called Raoultella planticola after scientists re-examined the members of Klebsiella), has been studied for its ability to create ethanol from decaying plant material.

As the story goes, a German company received U.S. Environmental Protection Agency permission to conduct field trials on the amended bacterium, called SDF20, which had a plasmid (a short loop of DNA) inserted into its genome. This plasmid contained a gene for an enzyme, pyruvate decarboxylase that allowed SDF20 to ferment plant waste to ethanol................

But problems with her and Holmes’ story began. In a rebuttal to Ingham’s testimony, Christian Walter, with Forest Research Institute in Rotorua, New Zealand, Michael Berridge, of the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research in Wellington, and David Tribe, of the University of Melbourne, Australia, wrote that:

• The paper she and Holmes wrote with their results actually doesn’t exist (the volume and page numbers were false, and no other citation can be found).
• Another paper, also by Holmes, Ingham and other colleagues, was cited later (after the rebuttal was published), but this paper reviewed the growth of spring wheat in poor, sandy soil that had been inoculated with the SDF20 strain of K. planticola. Not anything resembling grounds for worldwide plant Armageddon.
• There was no evidence from the EPA or the US Department of Agriculture that any field trials for SDF20 were ever approved.
• The SDF20 produced about 20 micrograms per milliliter of alcohol in the soil. “This concentration is several hundred times lower than that required to affect plant growth (10 milligrams per milliliter),” they wrote.

...........To Read More....

A billion dollar solar boondoggle in Vegas

By Dr. Jay Lehr |May 13th, 2020|Energy|162 Comments @ CFACT

On May 12 the Intrior Department gave approval for the largest solar power project in the U.S. to be built by Warren Buffett’s NV Energy company on 7100 acres of Federal lands in the Mohave Desert. At a cost of one billion dollars, it pales into insignificance on the days we read of the trillions of dollars being spent battling the corona virus economic destruction. But a boondoggle by any other name remains a boondoggle.

The plan for this three year project is very specific and quite ambitious and will never fulfill even close to its targets of 690 megawatts that are said will power 260,000 homes, provide 900 jobs, with a massive battery backup to replace the solar system at night, and emit no carbon dioxide. Had the government seen Michael Moore’s brilliant new movie Planet For The Humans before approving the project they may not have approved it. The film illustrates on the ground at various sites, how and why every major solar project in the country has failed miserably.

In just a few sentences we can explain the futility of this mammoth project that will blight this great desert forever, while pulling the curtain down on the futility of attempting to obtain dependable power from the sun unless it is on your roof top. We have been lying to ourselves about this potential for over three decades.

In a new book light-heartedly titled The Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change one discovers that the renewable energy debate can be summed up with a simple Rule of Thumb which states “in every communities electric grid, an excess amount of fossil fuel or nuclear power must be available at the ready to go on line in seconds, that is equal to the potential output of all intermittent solar energy considered a portion of the grids electric capacity”. No batteries exist on earth that could take up the load when the sun is not shining. If they could it would likely only be for a single night for how would then recharge them. This is a fairy tale of absurdity being sold to Las Vegas just as the snake oil salesmen of the old west plied their trade.

When you digest this simple rule, you will wonder that the pro/con arguments over solar energy have gone on for so long without facing the only reality that can ever allow solar energy to be an important part of our energy portfolio. It must have 100% back up with fossil fuel or nuclear power to insure that the communities electric grid can not let them down. Las Vegas of all places can not afford a blackout. Thinking that some special new battery is going to maintain as much power as the absent sun, has been and will be an impossibility for the foreseeable future. The mandatory back up fossil fuel must stand by running near full out and emitting carbon dioxide and producing no electricity until the sun can not fill the bill and it must step in. The excess cost for the excess backup power will show up in the electric bills of the residents of Las Vegas as sure as night shall follow day.

Author

• Dr. Jay Lehr
  CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. Jay’s new book A Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change written with Teri Ciccone is now available on Kindle and Amazon.
  
  
  

Buffet's billion dollar solar boondoggle

By Craig Rucker @ CFACT

Warren Buffet just got the go ahead to spend over one billion dollars to construct America’s largest ever solar installation in Nevada’s Mojave desert.
An energy corporation owned by America’s third richest man is planning to rake in the solar subsidies.

You may recall that Buffet has been candid with his investors as to why he invests in so-called “renewables.” Here’s what he infamously said about wind turbines: “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

Dr. Jay Lehr outlines “the futility of this mammoth project that will blight this great desert forever, while pulling the curtain down on the futility of attempting to obtain dependable power from the sun unless it is on your roof top. We have been lying to ourselves about this potential for over three decades.”  Read his full commentary here at CFACT.org.

Green ideologues resort to magical thinking when it comes time to rationalize their “renewable” energy schemes. Corporate investors are certainly not going to correct them.
Dr. Lehr further explains:

Thinking that some special new battery is going to maintain as much power as the absent sun, has been and will be an impossibility for the foreseeable future. The mandatory back up fossil fuel must stand by running near full out and emitting carbon dioxide and producing no electricity until the sun cannot fill the bill and it must step in. The excess cost for the excess backup power will show up in the electric bills of the residents of Las Vegas as sure as night shall follow day.

So there we have it. Investors collect the subsidies, while rate and taxpayers get fleeced. CO2 emissions don’t budge (if that’s your thing) while vast natural lands are turned into solar wastelands.

Green Robin Hoods steal from the poor and the planet to give to the rich.

Climate Change Shakedown Ends in Failure

With the U.S. on the way out of the Paris Agreement, feckless bureaucrats are still fighting.

Arnold Ahlert Dec. 16, 2019 

Boris Johnson’s historic victory in the United Kingdom’s latest election is indicative of many things, but first and foremost is the “quaint” idea that a substantial majority of people favor the nation state more than the democracy-crushing globalist alternative. Nonetheless at the United Nations, transnational governance remains the order of the day. Last Wednesday, that collection of feckless bureaucrats warned the Trump administration that America must compensate poorer nations for climate change, despite President Donald Trump honoring his 2016 campaign promise to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate.

The impetus for their demands stems from the 1992 climate treaty, formally titled the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). A timeline since then reveals that the initial idea of developed countries lowering their emissions to 1990 levels by 2000 was the first pipe dream that ended in failure. Five years later, President Bill Clinton committed our nation to the Kyoto Protocol, which was so “popular,” the Senate unanimously rejected it 95-0...........To Read More....

Top-level climate modeler goes rogue, criticizes 'nonsense' of 'global warming crisis'

September 24, 2019 By Thomas Lifson

A highly qualified and experienced climate modeler with impeccable credentials has rejected the unscientific bases of the doom-mongering over a purported climate crisis.  His work has not yet been picked up in this country, but that is about to change.  Writing at the Australian site Quadrant, Tony Thomas introduces the English-speaking world to the truth-telling of Dr. Mototaka Nakamura (hat tip: Andrew Bolt, John McMahon).

There's a top-level oceanographer and meteorologist who is prepared to cry "Nonsense!"on the "global warming crisis" evident to climate modellers but not in the real world. He's as well or better qualified than the modellers he criticises — the ones whose Year 2100 forebodings of 4degC warming have set the world to spending $US1.5 trillion a year to combat CO2 emissions. 

The iconoclast is Dr. Mototaka Nakamura. In June he put out a small book in Japanese on "the sorry state of climate science". It's titled Confessions of a climate scientist: the global warming hypothesis is an unproven hypothesis, and he is very much qualified to take a stand. From 1990 to 2014 he worked on cloud dynamics and forces mixing atmospheric and ocean flows on medium to planetary scales. His bases were MIT (for a Doctor of Science in meteorology), Georgia Institute of Technology, Goddard Space Flight Centre, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Duke and Hawaii Universities and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. He's published about 20 climate papers on fluid dynamics. [i]

Today's vast panoply of "global warming science" is like an upside down pyramid built on the work of a few score of serious climate modellers. They claim to have demonstrated human-derived CO2 emissions as the cause of recent global warming and project that warming forward. Every orthodox climate researcher takes such output from the modellers' black boxes as a given. 

Dr. Nakamura has just made his work available to the English-speaking world:............ To Read More....

Is the “climate crisis” a cruel hoax or tragic blunder?

By David Wojick | September 18th, 2019 |Climate| 195 Comments

Back when the climate “crisis – emergency – catastrophe – existential threat” stuff emerged, the October 2018 IPCC report was routinely cited as the source, although that seems to have faded. But the standard milestones, like net zero by 2050 and 12 years for decisive action (to 2030), are from that report. The problem is that there is no support in that report for the crisis narrative, none at all. The so-called crisis is a gross misinterpretation.

The reality is that the IPCC was tasked with saying what difference the two Paris Accord targets make, which are 2.0 degrees versus 1.5 degrees of total warming. Predictably (because all warming is bad to these people) they found more damage at 2.0 degrees, but arguably not a lot more. (There is also damage at 1.5 degrees, just as there is today at 1.0 degrees.)

The IPCC also pointed out, correctly, that according to the models it would be a Herculean task to hold to 1.5 degrees. This is where the extreme policy measures are found. The IPCC said that extreme measures would be required to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, if that were desired. They did not say it was desirable to do this........To Read More....

Junk science is no way to win a jackpot: Column

Lawyers in the hunt to strike it rich are ignoring scientific nuance and misleading juries.

Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell

A jury in St. Louis awarded a woman over $70 million last month because her lawyers convinced a jury that talcum (baby) powder caused her ovarian cancer. This is the third jackpot verdict issued by a jury in that city against Johnson & Johnson. Since sharks are smelling blood in the water, surely more lawsuits will follow.

This madness must stop. There is no convincing evidence to support a link between talcum powder and ovarian cancer.

The majority of the data that supports a possible link is based on case-control reports, observational studies that compare diseased people with healthy controls to determine previous exposures. For instance, in May 2016, the journal Epidemiology published a paper that concluded that use of talcum powder increased the likelihood of ovarian cancer by 33%. But hold on.

That might sound like a lot, but consider that tobacco smoke increases the risk of lung cancer in men by 2,300%. Asbestos increases the risk of mesothelioma, on average, by 300% to 700%. By comparison, a 33% increase in ovarian cancer hardly constitutes “slam-dunk” evidence.

Cohort studies, on the other hand, often eliminate this problem by tracking volunteers based on current or recent exposures. Indeed, a new cohort study in Epidemiology assessed women who had used or had not used talcum powder in the past year. The researchers followed up with the women roughly six years later, and they concluded that there was no link between talcum powder and ovarian cancer.

They did, however, find a possible link between douching and ovarian cancer. If true, that might suggest that studies which show a link between talcum powder and ovarian cancer are actually confounded by douching. (In other words, women who douche may also be using talcum powder.)

The American Cancer Society remains skeptical of a link. The organization writes, “For any individual woman, if there is an increased risk, the overall increase is likely to be very small.”
Such nuance, of course, is purposefully ignored by lawyers seeking a jackpot verdict. Nuance and statistical uncertainty, which are inherent to the complex field of epidemiology, are thrown overboard in the hunt to strike it rich.

Numerous examples of such overreach abound. Former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards ignored most expert advice and found the few experts who would agree with him to conduct his personal injury cases. That's unethical and unscientific. The 2000 Julia Roberts movie Erin Brockovich, meanwhile, glorified a $333 million settlement against an electric company for allegedly causing cancer in the citizens of a California town that had hexavalent chromium in its drinking water — but a study 10 years later did not find a disproportionately high number of cancers in the area.

Such perversions of science by the judicial system are why we are in dire need of medical tort reform. Juries of 12 untrained laymen have proven over and over that they are not capable of logically analyzing biomedical and epidemiological evidence. Medical cases ought to be decided by a jury of experts.

Unlike in law or politics, where demagogues insist on black-and-white answers, science is full of gray areas. Unfortunately, we have a legal system that is incentivized to prey upon scientific uncertainty in order to line the pockets of unscrupulous lawyers with multimillion-dollar lawsuits. That won’t stop unless the system is reformed.

Alex Berezow, senior fellow of biomedical science at the American Council on Science and Health, holds a Ph.D. in microbiology and is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Hank Campbell is president of ACSH. Follow them on Twitter @AlexBerezow and @HankCampbell.
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines

10 studies proving GMOs are harmful? Not if science matters

Layla Katiraee | August 5, 2014 | Genetic Literacy Project

Activists often cite the alleged potential health risks of genetically modified foods. One recent example of this—”10 Scientific Studies Proving GMOs Can Be Harmful To Human Health“, posted on Collective-Evolution.com—outlines many familiar concerns and points in each case to “credible scientific studies that clearly demonstrate why GMOs should not be consumed”.  Are these concerns credible? What do the studies cited actually claim?

1) Multiple Toxins From GMOs Detected In Maternal and Fetal Blood.

The blog post sites a 2010 study that alleges to show this danger. The authors identified the Bt protein Cry1Ab in maternal and fetal blood, a protein found in some GMOs, but also commonly used as a pesticide in organic farming. The paper is flawed. The researchers’ measurements were based on an experiment/assay designed to detect Bt’s Cry1Ab in plants, not in humans. As this post in Biofortified.org explains, the pregnant women in the study would have had to eat several kilos of corn in order to get the Bt measurements that were detected in their blood......To Read More....