Daily Archives: August 26, 2011

Not that this will help antivaxxers but it just might reassure harassed new parents

Posted on August 26, 2011 | 1 Comment

Vaccines largely safe, U.S. expert panel finds
Julie Steenhuysen

After a close review of more than 1,000 research studies, a federal panel of experts has concluded that vaccines cause very few side effects, and found no evidence that vaccines cause autism or type 1 diabetes.

The report, issued on Thursday by the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies of Sciences, is the first comprehensive report on vaccine side effects since 1994.

Fears that vaccines might cause autism or other health problems have led some parents to skip vaccinating their children, despite repeated reassurances from health authorities. The concerns have also forced costly reformulations of many vaccines.

“We looked at more than 1,000 articles evaluating the epidemiological and biological evidence about whether vaccines cause side effects,” said committee chair Ellen Wright Clayton, professor of pediatrics and law, and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

“The big take-home message is that we found only a few cases in which vaccines can cause adverse side effects, and the vast majority of those are short-term and self-limiting,” she said in a telephone interview. (Reuters)

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Health care, Vaccination

Should be required reading

Posted on August 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

Do click through and read the whole thing:

REDNECK WISDOM VS THE GREEN THING
AUGUST 24, 2011
Gonzo Town

In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment…

The woman apologized to him and explained, “We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.” The clerk responded, ” That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment.”

He was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day…

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.

But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day. (gonzotown)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Activists, Enviros

Now they’re getting it

Posted on August 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

Politicians should never, ever respond to the misanthropes under any circumstance and neither should business enterprises. Give the people-hating ratbags no succor whatsoever.

LNP given ‘F’ for failing to sit green test
Graham Readfearn

Conservation groups claim the state LNP is without a credible environment policy after the party snubbed repeated requests to answer questions about its green credentials.

The five groups, which include Queensland Conservation and the Australian Marine Conservation Society, will release a scorecard of the environment policies of the two main political parties today.

But Toby Hutcheon, executive director of Queensland Conservation, said: ”The fact that they [the LNP] refused to respond tells us that they don’t have a credible environment policy.”

The environmental groups, which also include The Wilderness Society, the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland and National Parks Association of Queensland, sent initial assessments of both parties’ policies on June 16, with a request for feedback.

Mr Hutcheon said the groups spoke directly with Premier Anna Bligh and received a written response from her office addressing each policy area.

But the LNP declined to respond. (Brisbane Times)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Activists, Enviros, Misanthropy, Propaganda

PlayStation® climatology produces absurd alarmist claims? Who saw that coming?

Posted on August 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

NASA study refutes claims of drought-driven declines in plant productivity, global food security

BU researchers find that modeling errors produced exaggerated claims

A new, comprehensive study by an international team of scientists, including scientists at Boston University in the US and the Universities of Viçosa and Campinas in Brazil, has been published in the current issue of Science (August 26, 2011) refuting earlier alarmist claims that drought has induced a decline in global plant productivity during the past decade and posed a threat to global food security.

Those earlier findings published by Zhao and Running in the August 2010 issue of Science (Vol. 329, p. 940) also warned of potentially serious consequences for biofuel production and the global carbon cycle. The two new technical comments in Science contest these claims on the basis of new evidence from NASA satellite data, which indicates that Zhao and Running’s findings resulted from several modeling errors, use of corrupted satellite data and statistically insignificant trends.

The main premise of Zhao and Running’s model-based study was an expectation of increased global plant productivity during the 2000s based on previously observed increases during the 1980s and 1990s under supposedly similar, favorable climatic conditions. Instead, Zhao and Running were surprised to see a decline, which they attributed it to large-scale droughts in the Southern Hemisphere.

“Their model has been tuned to predict lower productivity even for very small increases in temperature. Not surprisingly, their results were preordained,” said Arindam Samanta, the study’s lead author. (Samanta, now at Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc., Lexington, MA, worked on the study as a graduate student at Boston University’s Department of Geography and Environment.)

Zhao and Running’s predictions of trends and year-to-year variability were largely based on simulated changes in the productivity of tropical forests, especially the Amazonian rainforests. However, according to the new study, their model failed miserably when tested against comparable ground measurements collected in these forests. (EurekAlert)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Climate change, PlayStation® climatology, Propaganda

The U.N. gets some of the credit? Hmm…

Posted on August 26, 2011 | 1 Comment

Reality Check: Wars ‘Less Frequent, Less Deadly’
Thursday, 25 August 2011 11:43 BBC News & Human Security Report

Wars around the world are both less frequent and less deadly since the end of the Cold War, a new report claims. The study says many common beliefs about contemporary conflict are “myths”

The Human Security Report found a decline in every form of political violence except terrorism since 1992.

“A lot of the data we have in this report is extraordinary,” its director, former UN official Andrew Mack, said.

It found the number of armed conflicts had fallen by more than 40% in the past 13 years, while the number of very deadly wars had fallen by 80%.

The study says many common beliefs about contemporary conflict are “myths” – such as that 90% of those killed in current wars are civilians, or that women are disproportionately victimised.

The report credits intervention by the United Nations, plus the end of colonialism and the Cold War, as the main reasons for the decline in conflict. (GWPF)

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Research

A new experiment with old apparatus reveals a flaw in models of the climate

Posted on August 26, 2011 | 2 Comments

Clouds in a jar
A new experiment with old apparatus reveals a flaw in models of the climate
Aug 27th 2011

CLOUD chambers have an honoured place in the history of physics. These devices, which generate vapour trails that mark the passage of high-energy subatomic particles, were the first apparatus that allowed such passage to be tracked. That was in the 1920s and led, among other things, to the discovery of cosmic rays. Science has moved on since then, of course, and cloud chambers are now largely museum pieces. But the world’s leading high-energy physics laboratory, CERN, outside Geneva, is dusting the idea off and putting it into reverse. Instead of using clouds to study cosmic rays, it is using cosmic rays to study clouds. In doing so, it may have thrown a spanner into the works of the world’s computer models of the climate. (Economist)

CERN Finds “Significant” Cosmic Ray Cloud Effect
Continue reading →

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Climate, Research

Tom Nelson on some very fishy reporting

Posted on August 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

These people think you’re stupid: Sob story about CO2 killing Fraser River sockeye salmon tells us about the small (1 million sockeye) run of 2009, but fails to mention the record (34 million sockeye) run of 2010

The Tyee – Sockeye Feel the Heat

What Hinch worries about most when it comes to salmon are two horsemen of the environmental apocalypse: warming temperatures and pathogens.

The Fraser River is close to 2 C warmer than it was just 50 years ago for cold-blooded salmon, that’s a problem.
… Referred to as “salmon leukemia,” it is potentially the culprit behind falling salmon numbers over two decades, culminating with the 2009 collapse when only a million fish came back out of an expected 10 million.

Sept 2010: Record Fraser River Sockeye Salmon Run

This year, after several seasons of extensive fishery closures due to record low numbers, the Fraser River in southern British Columbia is experiencing a huge sockeye salmon return unlike any other since 1913. The International Pacific Salmon Commission is now estimating a total run of 34,546,000 fish! Compare that to last year’s dismal run of barely over 1,000,000 fish and you’ll get an idea of how amazing these numbers are. It seems they keep increasing the number every few days as more and more fish come back.

(Tom Nelson)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Activists, Climate change, Propaganda

More complete version of Government Waste on Climate Research Continues

Posted on August 26, 2011 | 1 Comment

Government Waste on Climate Research Continues

by DR. TIM BALL on AUGUST 24, 2011

Note: This is the original of the article that appeared as an abbreviated op-ed in the National Post.

H.L.Mencken said,

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Today, academics, alarmists and bureaucrats provide the endless series of hobgoblins, especially in climate. Most climate hobgoblins in Canada come through the Federal Government, particularly Environment Canada (EC) with the singular objective of proving the hypothesis that human production of CO2 is causing global warming. As a result they’ve consistently ignored the wealth of data and understanding that proves the hypothesis is wrong. Worse, they used taxpayer funding to produce biased and inaccurate research to defend the indefensible. The practice and waste continues.  (Dr Tim Ball)

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Climate change, Research

Perry not afraid of DiOxyCarb – Dioxycarbophobiacs horrified

Posted on August 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

Everyone knows carbs are bad so dioxycarbs must be worse, right?

Perry and Global Warming
Do the warmists questioning Governor Perry really believe in science and math?
Jim Lacey

Last week Rick Perry questioned the prevailing orthodoxy on global warming. There was, as is easy to imagine, no shortage of warmists waiting to pounce. Remarkably, one of the first questions later put to Governor Perry was whether he accepted the correctness of evolution — as if the science behind global warming was supported by even a tenth as much evidence as we have for evolution. What is troubling, however, is that some of the other candidates for the Republican nomination still accept the theory of man-made warming. Worse, they are apparently prepared to act on their beliefs if elected president.

First, allow me to be clear about one thing. The planet is warming. Well, it was until 1998, when the warming trend abruptly ceased. In truth, it has been warming since 1850, when the last mini–Ice Age ended. In the 161 years since then, the earth’s temperature has increased . . . wait for it . . . 0.7 degrees. But we can’t even be sure of that, as all the major temperature records have been altered to the point of uselessness. (NRO)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Climate change, Dioxycarbophobia