A Place to Stand

The Institute of Science in Society really sounds like, well, an institute of science. In fact it is just a another bunch of wholly corrupt, lying, pensioner murdering, eco-Nazi, Luddite, parasites flying under yet another false flag. I have said before & will doubtless have to say again that one of the problems with politics is that the parasites who crawl out from under things & never have anything to contribute keep adopting respectable political banners. These banners are worth defending because an ideal that cannot be expressed in words will disappear.

The Luddites have adopted many of them - "environmentalist", "ecologist" (both genuine scientific terms), "concerned local", "progressive", "liberal", "concerned scientist" (Union of - membership available to all $25) etc.

My particular annoyance with them is this article which, with all the outrage of the thief they say should not be copied & uses the name of the pioneering scientist Sir Austin Bradford Hill & his principles (which I reprint because the "Institute" has no claim to ownership) in a wholly fraudulent way to say that by these quite proper & rigorous principles catastrophic warming is something other than a scam.

In the the words of Numberwatch's John Brignell "Sir Bradford Hill, a great proponent of statistical rigour. After the death of Hill, his colleague Doll rather went off the rigorous rails and launched into some of the greater excesses of the subject that its practitioners call epidemiology" {I recommend this link to anybody interested in how statistics are fiddled to produce scare stories]thus a field he helped form has been traduced & turned over to charlatans who endlessly get paid, almost always by government, to produce the scare stories the papers are infested with.

So these are the principles he laid down & they are indeed worth checking any eco-fascist claims against:

(1) Strength of the association. The death-rate from lung cancer was over nine times as high in smokers as in non-smokers; in heavy smokers, it was more than twice that again. This was obviously much stronger supporting evidence than if the rates had only been slightly higher.

(2) Consistency: Are we talking about the result of a single study, or of several, and if there is more than one, were they all done in the same way or were they really different? Bradford Hill pointed out that according to a committee advising the US Surgeon General, 36 different inquiries, not all using the same methodology, had found an association between smoking and lung cancer. That does not rule out the possibility that the same fallacy was at work in all of them, but it strengthens the case.

(3) Specificity: If a disease occurs only in one group of people and if there are no other diseases that occur only in this group, this is strong evidence for cause and effect. In fact, while the death rates for smokers are higher for many causes of death, the increase is much greater for lung cancer than for the others, so this criterion is still satisfied.

(4) Temporality: While cause obviously has to come before effect, it is not always obvious which of two events was really first. If people who smoke are more likely to die from lung cancer, does that mean that smoking causes cancer or is it that the sort of people who are predisposed to lung cancer are also likely to adopt a life style that includes smoking? Here the obvious explanation is correct – smoking does cause lung cancer – but it is a question we should ask.

(5) Dose response: Does increasing the purported cause increase the effect? In the case of smoking and lung cancer, the increase in death rate rises linearly with the number of cigarettes smoked per day, and this is strong supporting evidence. On the other hand, in many cases there are threshold or trigger effects, and then there will be no dose response. Drinking two glasses of poison doesn’t make you twice as dead.

(6) Plausibility: Is the cause-effect relationship plausible? Ideally, we would like to be able to find the mechanism that links cause and effect, but often this is not possible; if it were there would be no problem. We can, however, ask if it is at least plausible that A could be the cause of B. Hill immediately warns, however, that what is considered plausible changes in time. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was thought totally implausible that doctors not washing their hands could be responsible for the deaths of women in maternity wards.

(7) Coherence: Does the claim that A causes B seriously conflict with what we know about B? This is really a companion to the plausibility criterion. If our present knowledge provides no plausible mechanism by which A can cause B, can we actually rule it out? John Snow was not able to suggest how polluted water could be the means by which cholera is spread, but even in 1854, there was no good scientific reason for ruling out the possibility that it might be.

(8) Experiment: If we change A, does B change as well? If people stop smoking, does the death rate from lung cancer fall? We now know that it does. Not only do deaths from lung cancer in a population increase when the proportion of smokers goes increases [2], an individual who gives up smoking reduces his or her chance of contracting the disease depends on the total number of cigarettes smoked [3]. Bradford Hill did include laboratory experiments in his paper, such as the effect of tobacco smoke on dogs, but because he was writing specifically for epidemiologists he considered those to be part of coherence.

(9) Analogy: Are there analogous examples? After it had been established that thalidomide and rubella can produce birth defects, it was easier to make the case that some other birth defect could be caused by a drug or a viral disease.

And this is my reply:

Association - The increase over the last "2 or 3 centuries" (so not that certain) may be passable but since CO2 didn't start rising till the 20thC that disproves any correlation.

Consistency can only apply when the studies are unrelated. As you point out they are often merely rehashes of each other. Had there bee consistency over different methods or even over a long period of time that would be relevant but in fact we know that before the warming scare there was a cooling scare, in which Hansen & some other alarmists were involved. The consistency argument points to a consistent history of "environmental" scare stories all of which have, so far, proved to be untrue.

Specificity - warming has been found on Mars & other planets. That is consistent only with the solar theory.

Temporality - as you have acknowledged, the temperature growth has been going on for "2-3 centuries" which predates the CO2 growth & thus proves the latter did not cause the former.

Dose response - CO2 has continued to rise at the same rate but over the last 12 years temperature has fallen - no correlation.

Plausibility - not all calculations from the 19thC are automatically accepted (e.g. Kelvin calculated the earth couldn't be over 1 million years old). The current theory depends on unknown but massive positive feedbacks & that we rest on a knife's edge likely to tip on to catastrophic warming (Arrhenius assumed negative feedback.) If there was a positive feedback it would mean there has been no time in the last million, possibly billion, years when we fell off that knife edge which is statistically incredibly implausible.

Coherence - there is & always has been an inconsistency in that measurements of tropospheric temperature should be rising faster than on the ground (the CO2 being in the atmosphere). The opposite is the case. The proposition is not coherent.

There are many possible analogies but taking ozone - the "environmentalists" promised catastrophe & that even if CFCs were banned it would take 50 years before the Antarctic Ozone hole stopped growing (they had not predicted the hole for Antarctica before it was first measurements were first taken there). In fact the hole started shrinking almost immediately - as soon as Mount Erebus stopped pouring out millions of tons of sulphur in fact. The analogy with this & the other false scare stories is obvious.

The "Institute" has censored my comment (& presumably others since none appear). Now what sort of "Institute of Science" prevents factual discussion of basic scientific principles? - a fraudulent one, that's what sort.

On a further thread they have the another "scientist" "rebutting" the sceptic's arguments on warming. Again this "rebuttal" is not strong enough to face examination & they have censored this rerebuttal:

Your first argument obviously depends on the assumption that absorption of CO2 naturally is an absolutely fixed amount. That purely by chance it happens to be exactly the same as production over millions of years. That a rise in the amount of CO2 would not make it easier for water or trees to absorb more of it. This could be called a highly improbable unproven assumption if we did not know that it was totally false. Experiment shows that plants do grow faster in a higher CO2 environment - something that the "Institute of Science in Society" would certainly know if you knew any science.

On your other allegations:

There is no empirical evidence for CO2 causing measurable warming.

It is a lie to say there is no correlation between solar activity & temperature. The last 2 years, for example, have had very low sunspot level & as anyone can see our promised "barbecue summer" & "mild winter" have been cool or as you put it "unusually cold weather".

The globe is cooling - if it were not we could not be having "unusually cold weather".
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They have other "scientific" articles on why GM is dangerous etc. The whole panoply of anti-science scares on offer posing as science.

If anybody thinks I am a little annoyed at this it is because it was brought to my attention on another blog by somebody who had obviously been taken in by the aura.

Not every single "environmentalist" is, like these, a wholly corrupt, lying, pensioner murdering, eco-Nazi, Luddite, parasite morally inferior to normal creatures under rocks but they are very difficult to find. Such would already, without prompting, have publicly denounced almost all the other "environmentalists" for lying. But then such people, like the honourable founder of Greenpeace, would be doing real environmentalism now.

PSD I got barred from Treehugger too for telling the truth so that they could keep lying about "consensus"..

Labels: Fear, global warming, Government parasitism