Surprise, surprise: yet another enemy of real food attacks the traditional diet…
What is interesting in this article (and makes it worth reading) is this bit:
In 2009, former editor–in–chief of the New England Journal of Medicine Marcia Angell admitted that the “evidence-based” studies published in her former publication and most other “scientific” journals are totally unreliable:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
In her bombshell article, Drug Companies and Doctors: A Story of Corruption, she documents how doctors and scientists are bought and paid for by Big Pharma.
“Clinical trials are also biased through designs for research that are chosen to yield favorable results for sponsors,” she writes.
Yet more evidence pouring in that ‘peer-review’ is more of a ‘pal-review’…
Now, don’t get me wrong – Thorium is awesome. Just that if something sounds too good to be true, you should get your BS detector out. As Bill Nye The Science Guy (who recently had a cameo on The Big Bang Theory) says: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof!
Donna Laframboise is an investigative journalist who has investigated the IPCC’s claim that their findings are based solely on peer-reviewed scientific literature. She has found that far from basing their findings on solid scientific studies, the IPCC heavily relied on so called ‘gray literature’, composed mainly from activist propaganda with a dash of government policy papers thrown in for good measure.
Disclosure: I was one of the citizen reviewers who volunteered to go through the IPCC’s references as part of the citizen’s audit Donna Laframboise organized and then reported in her book, ‘The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken For The World’s Top Climate expert, and am acknowledged as such in the book.
What Donna Laframboise did was unique: rather than challenge the science behind the IPCC’s report or its conclusion, something which is difficult and open to dispute, she took the testable statement made by the IPCC regarding the sources on which they drew their conclusions. And, she proved that the IPCC lied about the sources on which they based their very report.
Since then, she has been speaking out about IPCC and the untrue statements she could prove they had made, in addition to publishing her book and blogging about the issue. It is therefore not surprising that a whistle-blower from within IPCC itself had sought her out to leak some information to her regarding the next IPCC report.
Donna Laframboise has gone public with this material yesterday, January 8th, 2013, by publishing a long post on her blog ‘No Frakking Consensus’ as well as a guest post on WUWT (Watts Up With That, world’s leading ACC-skeptic site) with links to the data from the three memory sticks with information from the so-termed ‘Secret Santa leak’.
Today, she had been served with legal notice by IPCC to take the data down or else…
So, if you’d like to get a hold of the data (I know I’ve been busy reading over it – fascinating stuff), better download it fast…or look for some of the many torrent sites distributing the information. Like Donna’s post concludes:
‘But really, the cat is out-of-the-bag. The damage is done. Thousands of copies of these documents are now out there. They can’t be recalled.’
You go, Donna!
Exposing corruption in unaccountable bureaucracies which increasingly try to regulate our freedom out of existence is the duty of each and every one of us!!!
Since Dr. Mann’s new hobby of suing people has brought up the subject of the ‘hockey-stick graph’ – specifically, whether its creation was honest incompetence or straightforward fraud valid ‘climate science’, I wend digging through the interwebitudes for some more background material.
Note: Dr. Mann is not suing National Review and Mark Steyn for comparing Penn State’s whitewashing of both the pedophile and himself. Not at all. He is suing them for having called him a fraud. And the reason he is suing Dr. Ball is because he said that Michael Mann belongs in State Penn, not Penn State… Therefore, I am not suggesting either of these things, in any way, shape or form.
There is so much material out there, it is difficult to pick the best few – the ones that best document the events. However, here are a few front runners:
‘The story is a remarkable indictment of the corruption and cyncism that is rife among climate scientists, and I’m going to try to tell it in layman’s language so that the average blog reader can understand it. As far as I know it’s the first time the whole story has been set out in a single posting. It’s a long tale – and the longest posting I think I’ve ever written and piecing it together from the individual CA postings has been a long, hard but fascinating struggle. You may want to get a long drink before starting, and those who suffer from heart disorders may wish to take their beta blockers first.’
Here, meticulously documented, is the story of how the ‘hockey-stick graph’ went from being just one paper, submitted by one scientist, to ‘scientific consensus’ and unquestionable holy writ.
It documents questionable behaviour by the scientists involved, the editors of the journals and the IPCC folks, none of whom appear to be following their own guidelines of professional conduct.
the IPCC itself…
While we are on the topic of IPCC itself, it is important to note that while they loudly touted the unfortunate hockey-stick graph for quite some time – before quietly removing it without an explanation – it is important to understand that this is not a body of leading scientists: it is primarily a political body, formed by a political organization, through a politically correct process, to promote its own political agenda – with a few scientists tossed in for window dressing.
One person who has documented IPCC’s sloppiness (if not downright corruption) and lack of adherence to its own rules is the Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise. Here she is, from a tour in Australia:
Much of the IPCC process was dominated by ‘climate modelling’ – computer programs that try to predict what will happen based on what has happened. On the surface of it, this seems valid: the problem is in how these models were constructed. It seems they are, to put it mildly, highly flawed.
Another fundamental problem for the IPCC reviewers was that they were only permitted to comment on the studies which were pre-selected and presented to them for comment. This selection process was highly sensitive – but handled by the behind-the-scenes bureaucrats. There were many instances where scientists spoke up, saying the material they were presented with was not representative of the current work in the field and asked to be permitted to include a broader spectrum of studies. These requests were summarily dismissed by the apartchicks running the show.
But even as hamstrung as they were, when scientists actually commented on errors/omissions/inaccuracies in the drafts of the reports, their comments were dismissed, the drafts were not corrected and the objectionable conclusions or downright errors made it into the final reports. Cough, Himalayan glacier, cough…
That is not a sound scientific process….
While I was scouring the interwebitudes looking for supporting links, I came across an interesting site:
He is a singularly interesting figure in the world of Anthropogenic Climate Change hypothesis. (In this comment thread on Bishop Hill blog, the field is referred to as ‘Mann-made Global Warming – lol.)
Dr. Mann is also the author of the thoroughly debunked ‘hockey stick’ graph – as demonstrated by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. Dr. Mann has said some very ‘not nice’ things about this statistician and economist…
Two Canadians.
Canucks!
And, he is in the process of suing Dr. Tim Ball – another Canadian!
Aside – this lawsuit is not going well for Dr. Mann: as part of the discovery process, he has to hand over for courtroom scrutiny the very data he has spent a decade hiding, or face contempt of court charges and a ruling in Dr. Ball’s favour. Somebody did not think his tactics through…
With all the critics of Dr. Mann ‘out there’ – why is he picking on the Canadians?
Could it be – CANUCKOPHOBIA?
I don’t know – perhaps we should have someone in the sensitivity training field pay Dr. Mann a little visit, just to be on the safe side…
What about those who think everyone is unfairly picking on poor Dr. Mann?
If you don’t think the vast bulk of the criticism heaped upon him is undeserved, please, consider the following: his Penn State course information contains the following: (H/T betapug)
GAIA – THE EARTH SYSTEM (EARTH 002, Section 2; 3 credits) with the course schedule for days 37 & 38 is : MOVIE: An Inconvenient Truth (Part 1 and Part 2)
Yes – according to this ‘scientist’, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is Universtiy-level science material! LOL!!! When, years ago, I showed it to my kids, my young son actually thought that this movie was made with intentional errors in the science so as to train kids how to spot bad science…and greatly relished pointing the mistakes out!
Come on!
If you want to be taken seriously as a scientist, you really ought to know better than to use such seriously flawed material as a teaching tool…
In other words, perhaps more than any other scientist of our era, Dr. Mann is rather to be ridiculed…perhaps his compulsion for making himself the laughing stock of the scientific community is rooted in the same pathology from which his (potential) Canuckophobia stems.
Scientific American has sounded the alarm about the dangers of ‘doing science’ and then presenting the results without permitting anyone to see the code which was used to ‘massage’ process the data. (Global Warming apocalypse-predicting ‘computer models’ pop into my mind: ‘Yeah, our computer models predict catastrophic climate changes – no, you can’t see how! Just take our word for it!’)
Pseudo-scientists hide behind the ‘copyright on source-code’ to present bad research – and many genuine scientists are truly limited by it, too. The result is that, without the source-code, it is impossible to replicate their research: an essential step in the actual real scientific process.
Without this step – replicating one team’s research by another, unrelated team to either verify or disprove their results – we will not be able to tell ‘good science’ from ‘bad science’ – or, indeed, downright scientific fraud. This will not only undermine people’s trust in all ‘science’, it will lead to people getting seriously hurt as ‘bad science’ becomes public policy.
This is yet another example of how copyright has been taken to a level which is harmful to us all.
Funny, how things work out when competing ‘special interests’ collide…
A few years back, the incandescent light bulb industry was on a verge of a revolution: a new, more energy-efficient version of the incandescent light bulb was developed and the people who manufacture them were about to re-tool in order to produce them. Their plans got scuttled when, jurisdiction after jurisdiction, politicians announced that they would ban ‘the incandescent light-bulb’ because of its inefficiency…
Yes, the politicians were not letting the marketplace decide.
And yes, they were not willing to differentiate between the old-style, inefficient incandescent light bulbs and the new, high-efficiency incandescent light bulbs: they announced they planned to ban them all!!!
The natural result of this was that the manufacturers did not invest their hard-earned money in order to change the production in their factories from the old fashioned incandescent light bulb to the high-efficiency one: there simply would not have been enough time for them to earn back their investment in the short time before ALL incandescent light bulbs will have been banned…
In a very short time – as of 2012 – it will be illegal to sell incandescent light bulbs in Ontario….despite the fact that there is no viable alternative on the market.
Oh, there are alternatives – they are just not viable…
Alternative number one is the LED light bulb. I have recently bought the best (way more expensive) LED ‘light bulb’ the market has to offer….and, frankly, it simply does not produce anywhere near the light levels an incandescent bulb does. Quite literally, it leaves one in semi-darkness..,
The other alternative, of course, is ‘the curly bulb’ – you know, the type David Suzuki posters have been promoting for years!
Yes, they do produce ‘light’.
But, they are not an acceptable choice, for a number of reasons…
Some people find the light they produce is ‘harsh’ and ‘uncomfortable’.
Others find the light that comes from ‘curly bulbs’ triggers their migraines.
Scientists in the UK have conclusively demonstrated that it triggers people’s immune systems to attack healthy tissues – especially in immunocompromised individuals, like, say, people with lupus (SLE) and so on.
But, EVERYONE is affected by the ‘curly bulbs’ at the end of their life-cycle: they contain mercury!!!
Enough mercury, in fact, that if one breaks, people are advised to treat the area in which it broke as a toxic hazard area…
Soon, this could come to an end: there is a possibility that an international treaty would ban the use of mercury in light bulbs (as well as in vaccines) in the near future!
Where this would leave us, who live in areas where the incandescent light bulbs will have been banned, is anyone’s guess.
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 