Do your own research! Read it for yourself! It’s in the show notes! How many times have I uttered these words? These exhortations represent the founding ethos of The Corbett Report. I want you to read the source documents for yourself and come to your own conclusions. But guess what? The establishment doesn’t want you to think for yourself, and now that the Corona World Order is beginning the Great Reset, they are coming out and saying as much. Find out the details in this week’s edition of #PropagandaWatch.
Sally Fallon Morell has written a new book, published last month, titled Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness. In a smoothly flowing 182 pages, she shows why saturated fat and cholesterol are not the villains they are made out to be.
Parents of infants and young children will be drawn first to Chapter 8, “Remember the Little Ones: Why Children Need Animal Fats.” Beneath this title in the table of contents she writes: “Children need animal fats for normal growth and the development of their brains. But at the two-year checkup, doctors warn moms not to give saturated fats to their toddlers, and whole milk is forbidden in school lunches—despite consistent science showing that children on low fat diets are more likely to suffer from allergies, asthma, learning disorders and obesity. We are literally starving our children in the name of phony science.”
The human brain continues to make billions of new brain cells after birth for some number of years. They need saturated fats and cholesterol to form healthy, waterproof cell membranes. Fallon Morell spells out the many important roles saturated fats and cholesterol play in the body, like supporting the “formation of sex hormones, needed in copious quantities during pregnancy.” She points out that “Nearly half of the fatty acids in human breast milk are saturated, suggesting that dietary saturated fats are critical to the development of infants and young children. Saturated fats are so important during these critical stages of development that their abundant presence in breast milk is universal among mammals.”
In the first chapter, “The Greatest Villains,” she tracks the unfolding demonization of saturated fat and cholesterol. It began in 1912 with the pernicious marketing of Crisco—its name comes from CRYStalized Cottonseed Oil—by Proctor and Gamble. The company promoted this hydrogenated trans-fat, first used to make candles and soap, as a “healthier alternative to cooking with animal fats.” At the time, Americans used lard (pork fat), tallow (beef and lamb fat), and butter for cooking and baking food. She next addresses the fake science of cholesterol studies in rabbits, who as herbivores are not designed to digest animal fats and cholesterol. Then there is the Framingham Heart Study, where largely ignored follow-up reports contradict its initial findings that high cholesterol blood levels cause heart disease. She shows how the 1977 McGovern Report advocating low-fat “Dietary Goals for the United States” and the 1984 Cholesterol Consensus Conference have played fast and loose with the science.
Other chapters include “A Short Lesson on the Biochemistry of Fats,” “The Many Roles of Saturated Fat,” and “Animal Fats for the Mind.” In the Table of Contents below a chapter titled “Not Guilty as Charged” she writes: “Animal fats get the blame for everything from cancer to ingrown toenails—and none of these accusations is true! The science shows that saturated animal fats actually protect us from chronic disease.”
The last chapter’s title is “The Queen of Fats: Why Butter is Better.” Below it she writes, “The queen of fats, butter is loaded with nutrients the body needs to be healthy and happy. Starve yourself of butter during the day and you’ll crave ice cream when nighttime rolls around. Modern processing technologies cannot come close to providing in spreads and margarines the range of vitamins and lipid components present in butter. Nature’s fat for optimal growth and development.”
Fallon Morell confirms that butter contains a variety of healthful saturated fats. These include, among others, short chain (4-carbon) butyric acid, medium chain (12-carbon) lauric acid, and long chain (14-carbon) myristic acid. Butyric acid occurs almost exclusively in butter and has anti-fungal properties as well as anti-tumor effects. It also helps increase the number of thyroid hormone receptors on cells. Lauric acid has both strong anti-microbial and anti-fungal properties. Only the mammary glands in humans can make lauric acid. These two fats are absorbed directly without any help from bile salts into the bloodstream and provide quick energy. Butter also is the most common source of myristic acid, which plays important roles in the body. (Coconut oil contains large quantities of lauric acid.)
Butter also contains the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K2. Fallon Morell devotes a separate chapter to them, with this caveat: “Critical vitamins A, D, and K2 occur uniquely in animal fats—and Westerners are woefully deficient in these nutrients. The body uses vitamins A, D and K2 for everything from proper vision to growth to fertility.” These vitamins help produce and activate various proteins, notably matrix GLA (gamma-carboxyglutamic) protein that removes calcium from coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart. One action of Vitamin A, among many, is that it helps the body deal with dioxins and pesticides
“Food” producers make imitation butter with solid, colorless trans-fats, adding yellow dye to make this dangerous fat look like butter. Now outed, industrial processed trans-fats cause cancer, interfere with insulin receptors in the cells, and interfere with the (desaturase) enzymes required to convert the parent Omega-6 (linoleic) and Omega-3 (alpha linolenic) acids into their important elongated versions, AA (arachidonic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) respectively. She devotes wo chapters to this subject, titled “The Rancid and the Trans” and “AA and DHA.”
The healthiest butter comes from cream that free ranging, contented cows eating grass in sunlit pastures produce. This butter has a natural deep yellow color indicative of high levels of Omega-3 fats and fat soluble vitamins. Butter from industrially confined cows denied access to green pastures has 10 to 13-times less vitamin A and 3-times less vitamin D than grass-fed cows. My wife and I consume Amish butter, which we purchase at a local grocery store in the small town where we live. Amazon has it.
As President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and Editor of Wise Traditions: in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts (the Foundation’s quarterly journal), Sally Fallon Morell commands an encyclopedic knowledge of butter and saturated fats. She states, “No one studied butter more thoroughly than Dr. Weston A. Price. Throughout the 1930s, he analyzed thousands of butter samples shipped to him from all over the world.”
She dedicates Nourishing Fats “To the memory of Mary G. Enig, PhD” (1931-2014), her long-time colleague, friend, and coauthor of key articles and books. The two books they wrote together are Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and Diet Dictocrats (1995) and Eat Fat, Lose Fat: The healthy Alternative to Trans Fats (2005). More than 30 years ago, Dr. Enig exposed the connection between trans-fat margarine and heart disease and cancer. The medical establishment first ignored her, then vilified her, and finally years later treated her findings concerning trans-fat as an unsurprising, obvious fact.
Sally Fallon Morell is a skilled writer with a sharp scientific mind. She cites 707 up-to-date references in this book, which I was pleased to see includes this one: “Statins stimulate atherosclerosis and heart failure: pharmacological mechanisms,” by Okuyama H, et al., in the March 2015 issue of Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology (volume 8[2], pages 389-99). This book also has 32 pages of recipes and 22 pages of notes.
A careful reading of Nourishing Fats: Why We Need Animal Fats for Health and Happiness will change what you eat and thus improve your health. Despite what the medical establishment, government health authorities, pharmaceutical companies, and the soybean industry still say, saturated animal fats, saturated tropical oils (coconut and palm oil), and cholesterol are not villains. Orthodox claims that they are bad for us wilt and become thoroughly discredited when held up to scientific scrutiny.
The bottom line: “Start eating butter, lots of butter!”
Note
I address this subject in my 2011 Lew Rockwell article “Enjoy Saturated Fats, They’re Good for You!” It is drawn from a talk I gave on saturated fats earlier that year at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Albuquerque. This 53-minute talk is available on YouTube HERE (there have been 325,000 views of it so far).
Graduating from medical school in 1965 and pursuing a 40-year career as an academic member of the medical establishment performing and teaching heart surgery, I unquestioningly adhered to the low-fat creed. For far too long. Then, in 2005, I came upon an article that Mary Enig, PhD and Sally Fallon (now Sally Fallon Morell) wrote titled “The Oiling of America,” first published in the magazine Nexus in 1999. This article stimulated me to look more carefully into the matter and discover that the conventional wisdom regarding saturated fats and cholesterol is false.
Donald Miller [send him mail] is a retired cardiac surgeon, a Professor Emeritus of Surgery and former Chief of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His website is www.donaldmiller.com.
New research shows that the most widely prescribed type of drug in the history of medicine is a waste of money. One major study found that the more ‘bad’ cholesterol was lowered, the greater the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, almost every other medical condition has been shoved onto the sidelines. However, in the UK last year, heart attacks and strokes (CVD) killed well over 100,000 people – which is at least twice as many as have died from Covid-19.
CVD will kill just as many this year, which makes it significantly more important than Covid-19, even if no one is paying much attention to it right now. So, it is good to see that research goes on, and papers are still being published.
One of the most significant, and of great interest to me personally, was a critical examination of the benefits of lowering cholesterol. This was published on August 4. The paper was called ‘Hit or miss: the new cholesterol targets,’ and it came out in Evidence Based Medicine, one of the key titles that sits under the umbrella of British Medical Journal publishing.
It was carefully worded, as all clinical papers are, but a key section of the press release was as follows: “Setting targets for ‘bad’ (LDL) cholesterol levels to ward off heart disease and death in those at risk might seem intuitive, but decades of research have failed to show any consistent benefit for this approach, reveals an analysis of the available data, published online in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine.”
What is being said here is the following. Everyone thinks that lowering LDL, aka ‘bad cholesterol,’ is considered the single most important way to reduce the risk of heart disease and strokes. However, “decades of research have failed to show any consistent benefit for this approach.”
Surely this flies in the face of almost all the advice we have been bombarded with for the last 50 years or so. Cholesterol – by which we really mean low density lipoprotein (LDL) – is a killer and must be lowered. This is the whole point of statins, the single most widely prescribed type of drug in the history of medicine. Drugs that have racked up sales of nearly $1 trillion since their launch.
Now, newer and far more expensive LDL-lowering medications are available, riding on the success of statins. They are injectable, rather than tablets, and the cost is far higher. In the US, you are looking at around $5,000 per year. In the UK, one of these drugs, Repatha, costs the NHS just over £4,000 ($5,200) per year. These drugs are known as PCSK9-inhibitors.
These are eye-watering costs. It is estimated that around seven million people in the UK take statins currently. If everyone converted to a PCSK9-inhibitor, this would cost the NHS £28 billion ($36.4 billion) a year – not far off the entire defense budget.
But do these drugs work, does lowering LDL work? Surely it does, surely it must. The answer is, not necessarily. Yes, statins have been found to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, not by a massive amount, but the effect exists. At least in some studies, if not all.
However, many other drugs also reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease without having any effect on LDL levels, e.g. aspirin. A number of researchers have long argued that the benefits of statins are mainly due to “off-target” effects, by which they mean that, yes, statins lower LDL, but they also have effects on many other things and it is the “other things” that provide the benefit.
For example, statins have been found to have quite strong anti-coagulant (anti-blood-clotting) effects. Same as aspirin, as highlighted in the 2013 paper, ‘Anticoagulant effects of statins and their clinical implications.’ It states: “There is evidence indicating that statins… may produce several cholesterol-independent antithrombotic [anti-coagulant] effects.”
So, it has always remained possible that the main benefit of statins was not due to their impact on lowering LDL. It is because of something else that they do.
In this recent study, the authors decided to examine this possibility. So they gathered together all the LDL lowering trials – at least those big enough, and long enough to count – and try to establish whether the amount that the LDL was lowered matched the reduction, if any, in cardiovascular disease. The technical term for this is “dose-response.”
Or, to put this another way, if the LDL hypothesis is correct, the greater the LDL lowering, the greater the benefit on CVD should be. What did they find? Here are the key findings – from the press release:
“Their analysis showed that over three quarters of all the trials reported no positive impact on the risk of death and nearly half reported no positive impact on risk of future cardiovascular disease.
“And the amount of LDL cholesterol reduction achieved didn’t correspond to the size of the resulting benefits, with even very small changes in LDL cholesterol sometimes associated with larger reductions in risk of death or cardiovascular ‘events,’ and vice versa.
“Thirteen of the clinical trials met the LDL cholesterol reduction target, but only one reported a positive impact on risk of death…
“Considering that dozens of [randomized controlled trials] of LDL-cholesterol reduction have failed to demonstrate a consistent benefit, we should question the validity of this theory.”
And they conclude:
“In most fields of science the existence of contradictory evidence usually leads to a paradigm shift or modification of the theory in question, but in this case the contradictory evidence has been largely ignored, simply because it doesn’t fit the prevailing paradigm.”
In short, what they found was that there was absolutely no correlation between the amount that LDL was lowered and the resulting benefit on CVD. In fact, the benefit was inverse i.e. the less the LDL was lowered, the greater the benefit.
This is a hugely important finding that really ought to be shouted from the rooftops. I admit I have a horse in the race, having long argued that LDL has nothing to do with heart disease (and being roundly condemned for doing so). So, it is nice to have my thoughts so powerfully supported in a peer-reviewed, high-impact journal.
For the average person on the street, what this research means is that you should stop worrying about your LDL levels, and obsessively trying to get them down with drugs or diet. Tucked away in the paper was this significant finding:
“Moreover, consider that the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, a four-year long RCT [randomized controlled trial] of a low-fat diet involving 9,423 subjects, actually reported an increase in mortality and cardiovascular events despite a 13 percent reduction in total cholesterol.”
Cholesterol (LDL) went down, CVD went up. We really are wasting a colossal amount of money.
Malcolm Kendrick is a doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England. His blog can be read here and his book, ‘Doctoring Data – How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense,’ is available here.
In House of Numbers: Anatomy of an Epidemic, an AIDS film like no other, the HIV/AIDS story is being rewritten. This is the first film to present the uncensored POVs of virtually all the major players; in their own settings, in their own words. It rocks the foundation upon which all conventional wisdom regarding HIV/AIDS is based. House of Numbers could well be the opening volley in a battle to bring sanity and clarity to an epidemic gone awry.
A new book, Irreversible Damage, reveals how teenage girls are being duped into believing they want to be male, and are pushed into taking puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and undergoing double mastectomies.
Whether it is a statement or a question, the title of this book conveys the necessary urgency of this desperately sad story. Amid the trans debate, seemingly a battle between grown adults, vulnerable children are prey to a malevolent ideology that survivors call a cult.
In a superb piece of investigative journalism, Abigail Shrier focusses on teenage girls – most with no history of gender dysphoria – who become captivated by the belief that they are transgender. Behind the glittery exterior portrayed in the media, she encounters damaged children – many alienated from their families – in poor mental health and facing the prospect of infertility and medication for life.
Shrier, a writer with the Wall Street Journal, pulls no punches when describing phalloplasty, the construction of an artificial penis. The complications can be horrific. She reports the experience of one nineteen-year-old, “whose phalloplasty resulted in gangrene and loss of the appendage.” On the cusp of adulthood, that young person has been left without normal genitalia, for either sex, and tethered to a catheter.
I am a transgender person, but I transitioned as an adult when I could understand the implications on my body and my relationship with society. Besides, by then I’d had my own children. Yet children too young to even give consent for a tattoo are being corralled into making truly life-changing decisions.
Whether you agree or disagree with her, this is a book that needs to be read. Shrier’s informed analysis flows from dozens of interviews, including medical experts and parents. From Dr Kenneth Zucker, who oversaw the writing of the medical definition of “gender dysphoria,” to ordinary families whose children seem to them to have been swept along by this cult, Shrier talks directly to those with first-hand experience.
The facts are clear: there is a contagion spreading among teenage girls who suddenly believe themselves to be boys. While there is documented history of young feminine boys expressing a desire to be girls, never before have girls dominated the work of paediatric gender clinics. The statistics are staggering. In the UK, for example, referrals of teenage girls rose by 4400% in the last decade.
Shrier interviewed Lisa Littman, an American doctor who conducted an observational study and found that nearly 70 percent of the teenagers belonged to a peer group in which at least one friend had also come out as transgender. In some groups, most of the friends had done so. Transgender identification was encouraged and intensified by friends and social media and, astonishingly, appeared to precede the experience of gender dysphoria itself.
Shrier explores possible reasons why these daughters, often from liberal progressive households, want to be sons. First, social media where children are influenced by strangers while their parents are kept in the dark. Second, the educational system where adults who ought to know better have been enthralled, or threatened, by transgender activists. Ignoring both science and basic safeguarding, they have bought into the notion that we all have an immutable gender identity which may or may not match our sex.
With overwhelming folly, children are being transitioned in their schools with new names and pronouns. If their parents might be unsupportive, then they are not told, in case their children might feel “unsafe.” But this is something all parents need to know: this phenomenon is catching, and to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
But nothing could have happened without the cooperation of policy makers, and not only within the education system. Therapists – the very people who should be helping children to challenge their thinking – have been blindly affirming whatever their young patients have picked up from the internet.
Anyone who has stood against this has faced censure and condemnation. But as Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano explained, “This idea that a kid’s going to come in and tell us that they’re trans and that within a session or two or three or four, that we’re going to say, ‘Yep, you’re trans. Let me write you the letter.’ That’s not therapy.”
Even the medical profession itself has been found wanting. Eminent sexologist Dr Ray Blanchard told Shrier that “I can’t think of any branch of medicine outside of cosmetic surgery where the patient makes the diagnosis and prescribes the treatment.” While the zealots who actually believe that children can change their sex are perhaps in a minority, those professionals who remain silent in education, therapy and medicine are complicit in this unfolding scandal.
Shrier credits the sterling work of parental groups such as 4thWaveNow and Transgender Trend who have stood firm against the ideology. They have been condemned as bigots and transphobes for protecting children from themselves, the first duty of parents since the dawn of time.
The book is well-referenced and easy to read, making it suitable for a wide readership. The most obvious audience are parents concerned for the wellbeing of their daughters. But teachers, therapists and doctors, some of whom remain silent out of ignorance or fear, also need to hear these stories. Finally, the wider public would find Shrier’s analysis accessible, clear and educational. Those only vaguely aware of transgender ideology may be tempted to think that it cannot be true: young girls taking powerful cancer drugs to halt puberty, or induce an artificial menopause if started. But it is happening across the world, and Shrier catalogues it.
The time has come for society to take responsibility. Much has happened covertly, and the startled onlooker may need time to catch up, but Shrier’s book fills in the background, identifies the problems, explains the impact, and proposes clear and workable ways forward. This is a must-read for those with children, anyone who works with children and everyone who cares about them.
Debbie Hayton is a teacher and a transgender campaigner, based in the UK. She tweets @DebbieHayton
When record breaking cold occurs it is just weather, but according to Slate, climate attribution, the science of retrofitting explanations to unusual weather events after they happened, can demonstrate that a single unusual heatwave is evidence of climate change.
The First Undeniable Climate Change Deaths
In 2018 in Japan, more than 1,000 people died during an unprecedented heat wave. In 2019, scientists proved it would have been impossible without global warming.
uly 23, 2018, was a day unlike any seen before in Japan. It was the peak of a weekslong heat wave that smashed previous temperature records across the historically temperate nation. The heat started on July 9, on farms and in cities that only days earlier were fighting deadly rains, mudslides, and floods. As the waters receded, temperatures climbed. By July 15, 200 of the 927 weather stations in Japan recorded temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius, about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, or higher. Food and electricity prices hit multiyear highs as the power grid and water resources were pushed to their limits. Tens of thousands of people were hospitalized due to heat exhaustion and heatstroke. On Monday, July 23, the heat wave reached its zenith. The large Tokyo suburb of Kumagaya was the epicenter, and around 3 p.m., the Kumagaya Meteorological Observatory measured a temperature of 41.1 degrees Celsius, or 106 F. It was the hottest temperature ever recorded in Japan, but the record was more than a statistic. It was a tragedy: Over the course of those few weeks, more than a thousand people died from heat-related illnesses.
On July 24, the day after the peak of the heat wave, the Japan Meteorological Agency declared it a natural disaster. A disaster it was. But a natural one? Not so much.
In early 2019, researchers at the Japan Meteorological Agency started looking into the circumstances that had caused the unprecedented, deadly heat wave. They wanted to consider it through a relatively new lens—through the young branch of meteorology called attribution science, which allows researchers to directly measure the impact of climate change on individual extreme weather events. Attribution science, at its most basic, calculates how likely an extreme weather event is in today’s climate-changed world and compares that with how likely a similar event would be in a world without anthropogenic warming. Any difference between those two probabilities can be attributed to climate change.
The high temperature event in July 2018 caused record-breaking human damage throughout Japan. Large-ensemble historical simulations with a high-resolution atmospheric general circulation model showed that the occurrence rate of this event under the condition of external forcings in July 2018 was approximately 20%. This high probability was a result of the high-pressure systems both in the upper and lower troposphere in July 2018. The event attribution approach based on the large-ensemble simulations with and without human-induced climate change indicated the following: (1) The event would never have happened without anthropogenic global warming. (2) The strength of the two-tiered high-pressure systems was also at an extreme level and at least doubled the level of event probability, which was independent of global warming. Moreover, a set of the large-ensemble dynamically downscaled outputs revealed that the mean annual occurrence of extremely hot days in Japan will be expected to increase by 1.8 times under a global warming level of 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
Climate attribution science would be a little more believable if it could predict unusual events in advance, say give a year or two warning that Japan was about to suffer an extreme heatwave. Providing explanations of events which have already happened does not demonstrate skill.
Ohio’s $60 million corruption, bribery case – that has ensnared the House speaker and four others – has also embroiled the nuclear power industry, which is at the heart of the criminal charges filed this week.
The nuclear energy sector in the United States has been trying to keep its head above water — unable to compete with cheap shale gas and subsidized wind and solar power. So it has sought help from state governments, which have taken up legislation to reward nuclear for being a carbon-free source of energy. In the case of Ohio, it is home to FirstEnergy, which owns two nuclear power plants in the state and which asked lawmakers for such consideration.
Ohio’s lawmakers, like those from Connecticut, Illinois, New York and New Jersey, voted to save their nuclear power plants not just because they are reliable and clean [???] but also because they employ thousands of people. In Ohio, it was a $1.3 billion bailout package. What the citizens of Ohio learned this week, however, is that $60 million in surreptitious payments were allegedly made to make that happen and part of that money went into the pockets of House Speaker Larry Householder.
FirstEnergy Solutions, now known as Energy Harbor, is the nuclear unit within FirstEnergy Corp.
According to the Energy and Policy Institute, this is the company which owned the nuclear assets that Householder helped to bailout “and which FirstEnergy spun off in bankruptcy restructuring.”
Energy Harbor says that it will cooperate fully with the investigators, although it is not named in the criminal complaint. However, it is likely the entity that prosecutors refer to as ‘Company A’ — the one that made the $60 million in payments to Speaker Householder’s ‘Generation Now’ fund so that it could get the $1.3 billion in benefits. Prosecutors say that the money was paid over a three-year time frame beginning in 2017.
“This is likely the largest bribery, money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio,” US Attorney David DeVillers told a press conference. “This was bribery, plain and simple. This was a quid pro quo. This was pay to play.”
In the actual complaint, the prosecution alleges the payments were tantamount to “bags of cash” that went unregulated and unreported.
This is more than a public corruption scandal. It is a potential take-down of nuclear energy. If it is, the ramifications would be huge: According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, there are 96 nuclear reactors in 29 states. Altogether, they supply about 20 percent of the country’s electricity and about 55 percent of its carbon-free power. They operate at 92 percent capacity, more than any other type of power plant.
A heavy weight
Context is key. In the US, electricity grid operators are the ones to order up and dispatch the lowest-cost electricity sources — a system that invariably favors shale gas because it is so cheap relative to competing fuels. Existing generators that sell their electricity at market rates, can’t win. This fact, along with the high capital costs it takes to construct nuclear plants, has severely curtailed nuclear development in the US.
As a result, six nuclear plants have closed down since 2013 and several more have announced retirement dates over the next decade. The practical implications of moving away from nuclear and into natural gas have been greater CO2 emissions. When Southern California Edison closed its plant in 2013, such heat-trapping releases rose by 35 percent. To avoid further closures, state legislatures are subsidizing nuclear power by recognizing their carbon-free contributions.
But the American nuclear power sector has never learned the most basic lesson of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, which suffered a partial meltdown of its core in 1979 and which triggered an irrevocable backlash: get accurate information to the public in a timely manner. Secrecy does not work. In 2013, Southern California Edison said it would shutter its San Onofre Generating Station because of a small radiation leak. While the utility had maintained publicly that it only learned of the seepage in 2012 during routine maintenance, it was subsequently proven that it long knew that irregular vibrations could lead to leaks.
The utility then lost all credibility with regulators and the public.
Bad economics in combination with poor PR have been mounting for a long time. And the problems are bound to get worse now that FirstEnergy’s Energy Harbor is allegedly embroiled in this latest mess. And the industry can’t blame the environmental movement for this latest crisis — a movement concerned about storing radioactive nuclear waste and potential accidents.
“FirstEnergy’s successful campaign last year to secure a $1 billion bailout of its Ohio nuclear plants is at the center of a pay-to-play scandal that is rocking Ohio,”says Sandy Buchanan and Seth Feaste, of the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis. “The FBI would do well to take a closer look at all other state government-official involvement with FirstEnergy during the years when FirstEnergy was seeking a ‘legislative solution’ to save its nuclear plants.”
Where does the nuclear sector go from here? No doubt, the industry will separate itself from the corruption scandal now plaguing the state of Ohio. It will continue to maintain that global climate goals cannot be met without heavy participation from nuclear. But it will once again have to fight off the stench of secrecy and back-room politics — the same factors that have weighed it down since 1979. When the Ohio case is resolved, so too might be nuclear’s future in the US.
David Middleton takes aim at yet another Guardian panic piece on climate that says atmospheric CO2 is about to reach levels not seen in 15 million years, when the Earth was perhaps 3°C to 4°C warmer than today. As Middleton suggests, this correlation actually suggests that CO2 is not the control knob on temperature given that you have roughly the same CO2 level and very different temperature. Then, as we recommend in “A Historian Looks at Climate Change”, he takes a broader look at temperature and CO2 to try to find a relationship. And does not.
Now you might be tempted to say that the only reason those CO2 levels haven’t got us all in the Pliocene sweatbox is that these things take time and the latest rise in CO2 has been so sudden that temperature hasn’t responded yet. But as Middleton notes, the piece in the Guardian (which he calls the Grauniad, music to our nostalgic ears) links to a good paper about historical atmospheric CO2 and temperature in the Pliocene and early Pleistocene. It shows stuff happening including fairly sudden changes in atmospheric CO2 and in temperature. But what it does not show is CO2 moving up or down and dragging temperature with it.
Then Middleton takes a biiiig step backwards, chronologically not intellectually, to discuss the last time atmospheric CO2 was as low as it is now. And it is important to realize that by genuine historical standards CO2 levels are extremely low, so low that it menaces the survival of much plant life (all the species using C3 photosynthesis); the last glacial maximum apparently featured a brush with a real 6th mass extinction and one liable to be permanent because it would have been very difficult for new types of plant to replace those that bit the icy dust.
That scary scene was recent in geological terms. Middleton is talking about an episode about 300 million years ago (MYA), during the “Pennsylvanian” part of the Carboniferous Period and into the early Permian, when atmospheric CO2 was very low and the Earth was in a serious deep freeze, considerably colder than today. Aha, people may say, low CO2 means low temperature and vice versa, whether you think cold is good or not. But not so fast.
Around 300 MYA temperature began to rise then around 280 MYA it shot up, not so fast in our terms but very rapidly in geological terms, to a level not seen since. And what was our buddy CO2 doing? Snoozing. Eventually it moved up as well, starting around 270 MYA, then stabilized while temperature fell until the Jurassic, after which CO2 began to fall and temperature to rise until about 100 MYA, the mid-Cretaceous.
These reconstructions are of course somewhat speculative. But they tell us one thing with reasonable certainty: historically CO2 does not drive temperature. So last time CO2 levels were this high, they were not controlling the planetary thermometer. Leading everyone at the Guardian to conclude that they will this time for sure.
Is it a news story that Greenland didn’t melt and inundate us all? Actually yes, because as Paul Homewood just observed, the good old Guardian told us it was going to do so soon. Indeed that it faced a “tipping point in 10 years”. But the news here is that the 10 years are up, because that story ran in August 2010.
The actual news story was a bit more tentative than the headline, as has been known to happen, with “may pass that tipping point” and some “ifs”. But the general direction was clear: “Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University”. And “‘What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done,’ he [Alley] said.” And “The stark warning was underlined by the momentous break-up of one of Greenland’s largest glaciers last week, which set a 100 sq mile chunk of ice drifting into the North Strait between Greenland and Canada. The briefing also noted that the last six months had set new temperature records.”
The result was meant to be the annihilation of cities like New Orleans. Instead, Homewood notes tersely, “The article was written in 2010, which was the warmest on record. Since then, however, Greenland’s temperatures have returned to normal, and are no higher than they were in the 1930s.”
Now anybody can make a mistake. But ought there not to be some harm to one’s reputation from making ones like this one in such profusion as to constitute self-parody? Ought there not, indeed, to be some harm to one’s self-esteem, some embarrassment and some effort to restore nuance to one’s journalism?
After all, it’s not a small point that instead of melting, Greenland is back to the temperatures from the 1930s. Especially not when the Arctic is meant to be warming twice as fast as other parts of our planet. (Not counting Antarctica which was long acknowledged to be doing nothing much but now the South Pole is suddenly “warming more than three times more rapidly than the rest of the world.”) Just as it’s not a small thing that so many reputable organisations, media and otherwise, have been promising us an ice-free Arctic for years and yet even the “doom looms” crowd have to admit the white stuff is still all over the place.
Doom still looms, apparently. In response to an unverified possible record temperature in Verkhoyansk, Russia on June 20, MSNdeclared sententiously that “This record high temperature is a signal of a rapidly and continually warming planet, and a preview of how Arctic warming will continue in an increasingly hot future, scientists say.” And if in fact we see a long run of temperatures over 100°F in places like Verkhoyansk, and others less prone to extreme temperatures over many years, it will have some significance to the debate. But if we don’t, it will also have some significance to the debate. And we’d like MSN to acknowledge that fact, unlike say the Guardian.
Australia’s hottest day ever recorded was in Edwardian times, so long ago it was 125°F rather than 51.7°C, on Jan. 3 1909 in a place called Bourke. (Not to be rude, but it’s in north New South Wales in a spot even Canadians might concede resembled the middle of nowhere.) The Australian Bureau of Meteorology recently dropped this reading, claiming it was an “observational error” because no official stations recorded high temperatures on that day. As Jennifer Marohasy observes, Australian MP Craig Kelly didn’t believe them, went to the Australian National Archive in Chester Hill and found the actual handwritten records for the nearby official weather station at Brewarrina, showing 50.6°C on that day. Strange that the meteorological authorities couldn’t find that record themselves even though it was in their own files. Just possibly they didn’t really want to.
Even once they’d disposed of Bourke’s 1909 mark the new official hottest day ever was in 1960 rather than during the current climate emergency. Or at least it would be if Kelly had not also discovered that the actual second-hottest to Bourke’s scorcher was in White Cliffs on Jan. 11 1939. Once again the facts show that the 1930s were extremely hot for reasons CO2 cannot explain and others seem not to want to try to.
Of course some might say, well, Australia is an outlier where they even have their hot days in January. But it turns out the hottest day ever in Death Valley, California was in ‘13. No, not 2013. 1913. And in response to “the ever over-alarmed Bill McKibben” tweeting about that temperature over 100°F in Verkhoyansk “Siberian town tops 100 degrees F, the hottest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle. This scares me, I have to say.” Anthony Watts noted tartly that in fact it was over 100°F in Fort Yukon, Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle in… 1915.
With the hot weather here last week there was the usual talk of breaking records. But it’s interesting to look at the records that were broken, or nearly so. On July 10 Ottawa had its hottest July day since… 1931. And its hottest day overall since 2001, passing records set in 1944, 1921, 1917 and, well, you get the idea. Many of the hottest days ever were not in the last decade or even half-century. And in case you think streaks matter more than individual days, the nation’s capital was chasing a record for consecutive days at or over 31°C set in 1921, narrowly beating the 1919 one, with 1949 in 3rd, and 1911 and 1880 in hot pursuit. Proof positive that we’re in an unprecedented man-made crisis.
Is the Earth warming? Generally it seems to have been since the Little Ice Age. Which itself rules out CO2 as the main factor. But when you look at the record with an eye to preserving rather than “correcting” it, you see that while the 20th century was generally warmer than the 18th, there’s no pattern of extreme heat events bunching together in the very recent past.
There are several definitions of hustle. One of them is to use forceful actions to promote an action or point of view. It’s everywhere of course and in all aspects of climate change. It’s all too apparent when scientists want grants, jobs and headlines. It’s no new discovery that combining hustle with statistics can get you anywhere.
The recently released news from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), prepared by the UK Met Office, that there is a “growing chance” of the world exceeding the “Paris threshold” of 1.5°C in global temperature above pre-industrial levels is a prime example of this. It says there is a 20% chance that one of the next five years will exceed 1.5°C, and a 70% chance a single month will during the same period. Another way of saying this, statistically equally justifiable, is that there is an 80% chance that global annual average temperatures will not increase statistically significantly over the next five years. There are no headlines saying that!
Just for a moment think what this means. If there is no significant change in global average temperature by 2025, we will be able to look back thirty years (the official definition of climate) and note that the two major warming episodes, 1998 and 2015, were both due to natural climatic variability, in this case two El Nino events. In many ways, the WMO report is more a testament to the importance of natural climatic variability than it is to long-term anthropogenic warming.
What’s more this forecast has been tested by reversing the direction of time in the computer models and seeing how successfully it “predicts” the past. One would expect any model to be good at this because past observations have already been incorporated into the model which has evolved to have no serious disagreements with it. In such a complicated system as the climate – and the WMO report actually stresses the uncertain and poorly understood nature of internal climatic variability – looking into the future is an entirely different thing. Good hindcasts do not imply good forecasts.
In other reports of the same WMO document the statistics get even more suspicious. One says that there is a 3% chance of the forthcoming five-year global temperature average exceeding 1.5°C. Three percent implies a very accurate predicative ability, especially when it is accompanied by no error statement. Again, any journalist looking at these figures objectively would find that the real story is that there is a 97% chance that the average of the next five years will remain more or less what it is now. And yet the Ecologistwebsite proclaims we have five years to climate breakdown.
A story like this is a kind of litmus test for journalists. They can take the press release and wave it through to their website with minor changes and supporting statements. Or they could look at the statistics and — how can I say this — ask questions. I have a feeling that the era of unquestioning journalist environmental advocacy which began in the early years of this century, is gradually fading away.
Perhaps they could start to be guided by the empirical data and the messages it has been sending us for years; we do not understand natural climatic variability; our models are nowhere near as accurate as some maintain and forecasts of future temperatures more often than not end in ignominy.
The United States is the only major Western country that is not part of the Paris climate agreement, which seeks to restrict and reduce fossil fuel consumption across the world. But the country is not immune from the impacts of the restrictive energy policies the agreement imposes on its trade partners. One of those is my own country, India.
India imports large amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas from the U.S., mostly to generate affordable power for its electric grid. That grid must grow rapidly to meet the needs of over 1.3 billion people. Over 300 million of them—comparable to the whole U.S. population—currently have no electricity. But they need it desperately for their health and their escape from severe poverty.
The justification for reducing fossil fuel use is the claim that climate change will create havoc in the future unless we reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But this claim is not as black and white as the mainstream media and politicians make it out to be.
In fact, data on temperature suggest that the claim is exaggerated and tends be informed by incorrect interpretations from faulty models.
The Never-Ending Problem with Models
The Paris climate agreement and other major climate recommendations from the United Nations are strictly based on the guidelines provided by Assessment reports produced by a climate wing known as the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC uses forecast data processed by a large set of computer climate models to arrive at the policy recommendations in its assessment reports.
Among them are forecasts from the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project (CMIP). CMIP consists of 100 distinct climate models, run by leading modelling groups across the world. Their predictions drive the IPCC’s reports. In 2013, the IPCC fifth assessment report (AR5) featured climate models from CMIP5 (fifth generation).
But the forecasts from these models proved wrong. They exaggerated the temperature trend and differed markedly from temperature data derived from ground-based thermometers; sensors on weather balloons aircraft, ships, and buoys; satellite remote sensing; and “reanalyses”—the latter integrating the input of many different data sources.
Yet, political appointees in charge of determining climate and energy policy around the world used these forecasts to justify international climate agreements like the Paris agreement. And they do no stop with that.
The upcoming IPCC sixth assessment report (AR6), forecast for release in 2021, features forecasts from CMIP6. But the CMIP6 models are turning out to be no better than CMIP5 models. In fact, CMIP6 they’re worse!
Senior climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer has observed that the “CMIP6 models are showing 50 percent more net surface warming from 1979 up to April 2020 (+1.08 degree Celsius) than actual observations from the ground (+0.72 degree Celsius).”
Beyond doubt, comparing both CMIP5 and CMIP6 forecasts to official HadCRUT temperature data sets reveals a very old story: models are always way off the mark, and—suspiciously—always in the same direction, namely, upward, in predicting real-world temperatures.
So, not only were we lied to about the climate, we are going to be misled again by the next IPCC assessment report. And with more extreme false forecasts, there will be calls for more restrictive energy policies.
It is quite astonishing how the unelected politicians at the UN can convince and persuade global leaders to adopt climate policies that are based on unscientific conclusions from faulty models.
The mainstream media have also played their part. Public perception on climate change has been heavily influenced by biased coverage on the climate issue, with no major attention to the huge discrepancies between the model forecasts and real-world observations.
It is not clear how much faultier the projections will become by the time the new assessment report is finally released. But one thing is clear: energy sectors across the globe are being held hostage by pseudo-scientific interpretations from the United Nations’ flagship climate wing.
Beirut – During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.
Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article. … continue
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