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Academic Journals: High Stakes, Few Safeguards

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | November 28, 2018

If a journal’s decision can make or break your career, its employees wield extraordinary power.

A week ago I discussed a paper that comes right out and says what everyone knows: most academic research eventually gets published in a peer-reviewed journal of some description. After all, there are 34,000 journals out there.

Because universities need criteria by which to award promotions and fast-track careers, it has become accepted wisdom that the most dazzling discoveries are the ones that get published in the most fashionable places. This is a hierarchy, with everyone scrambling for a spot in the high prestige journals at the top of the pyramid.

In the words of a former editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal, “For an academic, publication in a major journal like Nature or Cell is to win the jackpot.”

As neurobiologist Bjorn Brembs observes, the “underlying assumption is that only the best scientists manage to publish in a highly selective tier of the most prestigious journals.” Where their research appears is “one of the most crucial factors determining their career.”

Government grants get distributed along exactly the same lines. Everyone knows that a scientist whose work has just been accepted by Science has a bright future.

This is an alarming state of affairs. Brilliant minds shouldn’t be sidelined by subjective, unsophisticated snobbery. For his part, Brembs demonstrates that “several lines of evidence” suggest high prestige journals may actually be publishing lower quality research than less prestigious ones.

But there’s actually an entire minefield lurking here. If a journal’s decision can make or break your career, it then follows that the people who work at these journals wield extraordinary power. They exercise that no-fooling power every day. They hold, in their hands, the lives of real people.

We all know power corrupts. We also know the stakes are incredibly high. So what safeguards are in place? What checks and balances prevent journal employees from abusing their power? What mechanisms discourage blatant corruption?

Let us not be naive. As Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, explains:

Whenever the following three conditions are met, you always have rampant cheating:

1. Cheating is easy

2. The payoff is huge.

3. The odds of getting caught are low

Western, affluent societies have placed tremendous trust in institutions of higher learning, in the scholarly publishing industry, and in entities that spend our tax dollars on scientific research.

It takes one’s breath away to comprehend the wobbly foundations on which all three of those now stand.

November 28, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Climate experts call out new federal report for hiding the decline in hurricanes

‘Were they thinking, no one would notice?’

By Marc Morano | Climate Depot | November 25, 2018

Climate expert Prof. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. noted how the new federal National Climate Assessment report looks at hurricanes.

Pielke Jr. asked on November 24: “How it is that the 2018 US National Climate Assessment failed to include or overlooked trends in US landfalling hurricanes which would, ahem, seem pretty important in a US climate report[?]

Pielke Jr. then noted that the report ignored one of its own expert reviewers who wrote this: “National Hurricane Center going back to the 1800s data clearly indicate a drop in the decadal rate of US landfalling hurricanes since the 1960s… instead you spin the topic to make it sound like the trends are all towards more cyclones.”

Pielke Jr. continued: “Let’s observe here hurricanes are discussed at length in the report, and every hurricane that is discussed is … a landfalling storm. The failure to include trend data on US landfalling hurricanes in USNCA is a remarkable choice. What were they thinking, no one would notice?”

“Here are 2 papers on US hurricanes ignored by USNCA: 1. trends in rainfall & flooding from US hurricanes: 2. trends in US landfalling, intense hurricanes: Neither show long-term trends, but that isn’t a reason to ignore them,” Pielke added.

Dr. Pielke also previously rebuked the new federal climate report, calling it “embarrassing.” See: ‘EMBARRASSING’: CLIMATE EXPERT EXPLAINS WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WHITE HOUSE’S NEW CLIMATE REPORT – Prof. Roger Pielke Jr.: “By presenting cherrypicked science, at odds w/ NCA Vol,1 & IPCC AR5, the authors of NCA Vol.2 have given a big fat gift to anyone who wants to dismiss climate science and policy.”

Also see:

Scientists trash new federal climate report as ‘tripe’ – ’embarrassing’ – ‘400-page pile of crap’ – Report’s key claim based on ‘study funded by Tom Steyer’

November 26, 2018 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Renowned Physicist Freeman Dyson: “Theories Of Climate Are Very Confused”… “Models Are Wrong”!

“The Uncertainty has Settled” reviewed by P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | 16. November 2018

In his new documentary “The Uncertainty has Settled,” Dutch filmmaker Marijn Poels focuses on climate science and politics and found that the issue is in fact as controversial and as UNSETTLED as any issue could possibly get.

The science climate change is far from settled and is in fact unsettled.

The production of the film took Poels to a variety of locations from Manhattan to the Austrian Alps.

The first part of the film depicts the plight of farmers in former East Germany (Saxony Anhalt), who are struggling to practice their livelihoods under the heavy burden of German agricultural regulation and market distortion that result from bureaucrats having decided that 0.01% of our atmosphere (man-emitted CO2) is a monumental problem.

That’s the narrative the media and leading politicians keep ramming. But a number of skeptics doubt it, and so Poels investigates if this doubt is just right wind politics or if there is something really behind it. … Full review

[The most notable part of the documentary is the interview with Freeman Dyson, from 1:09:00 – 1:14:00]

[Be sure to watch Piers Corbyn at 41:45 and again at 52:20]

November 18, 2018 Posted by | Economics, Film Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Erroneous climate change study reported far and wide, corrections few and far between

RT | November 15, 2018

As the world grapples with extreme weather and wildfires, the issue of climate change is at the forefront of policy decisions, scientific research and media coverage – but bias towards alarmism is proving somewhat irresistible.

A new study recently published in the journal Nature suggested that “ocean warming is at the high end of previous estimates,” based on atmospheric data taken between 1991 and 2016. Ocean temperatures are 60-percent higher per year than the estimates offered by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2014, the authors claim.

The research was co-authored by an expert – a Princeton geoscientist no less – so the disturbing news spread like… well, wildfire across the news media, with each headline more breathless than the last. The only problem was, the numbers used to generate the conclusions in the research were off; way off.

One climate change researcher and statistician wasn’t so convinced by the study: Nicholas Lewis took a closer look at the numbers and spotted a few glaring errors in the researchers’ calculations.

“Unfortunately their work involves many assumptions where there is scope for subjective choices by the authors, so it is difficult to validate those assumptions,” Lewis told Reason.com.

In fact, the warming of the world’s oceans was overstated by approximately 30 percent, a substantial margin of error by most standards.

Lewis also questioned the “failure of the original peer review and editorial process to pick up the fairly obvious statistical problems in the original paper.”

In response, the study’s co-author and Scripps Institution of Oceanography climate scientist Ralph Keeling has acknowledged that there may be issues with the numbers, but insists that once they are rectified, it won’t affect the overall conclusion.

The issues “do not invalidate the study’s methodology or the new insights into ocean biogeochemistry on which it is based,” Keeling said in an addendum to the original news release.

While there may be less intense cause for immediate alarm about ocean warming, the entire episode does create concern over the validity of, and scrutiny placed on, research that bows to the scientific consensus rather than that which challenges it.

However, at the time of writing, only a handful of outlets have published news of the correction in comparison with the multitude who shared the original, erroneous findings. Correction coverage just doesn’t generate the clicks quite like alarmism after all.

November 15, 2018 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The Migration of the Skeptic

qedcon | October 16, 2018

Naturalist Sir David Attenborough definitely presents this short documentary on the migration of the Skeptic. This spoof was originally used to open QED 2018.

Written by Matt White, Michael Marshall, and Mike Hall
Directed by Matt White
Edited by Deniz Kavalali
VFX by Joe Pavlo
Audio post-production by Offset Audio
Featuring Adam Diggle as the voice of Sir David Attenborough

November 12, 2018 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

JORDAN PETERSON On Global Warming

Climatism | November 9, 2018

JORDAN PETERSON is a professor at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist and the author of the million-plus selling ’12 Rules for Life’, a Number 1 bestseller. He rose to international prominence in 2016, after criticising the Canadian government’s enactment of Bill C-16.

THE psychologist and internet celebrity has been touted as ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now’, with contentious views on gender, political correctness. A culture warrior, who has no truck with “white privilege”, “cultural appropriation” and a range of other ideas associated with social justice movements.

November 10, 2018 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

How the CDC Uses Fear to Increase Demand for Flu Vaccines

Collective Evolution | November 9, 2018

The CDC claims that its recommendation that everyone aged six months and up should get an annual flu shot is firmly grounded in science. The mainstream media reinforce this characterization by misinforming the public about what the science says.

A New York Times article from earlier this year, for example, in order to persuade readers to follow the CDC’s recommendation, cited scientific literature reviews of the prestigious Cochrane Collaboration to support its characterization of the influenza vaccine as both effective and safe. The Times claimed that the science showed that the vaccine represented “a big payoff in public health” and that harms from the vaccine were “almost nonexistent”.

What the Cochrane researchers actually concluded, however, was that their findings “seem to discourage the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure” (emphasis added). Furthermore, given the known serious harms associated with specific flu vaccines and the CDC’s recommendation that infants as young as six months get a flu shot despite an alarming lack of safety studies for children under two, “large-scale studies assessing important outcomes, and directly comparing vaccine types are urgently required.”

The CDC also recommends the vaccine for pregnant women despite the total absence of randomized controlled trials assessing the safety of this practice for both expectant mother and unborn child. (This is all the more concerning given that multi-dose vials of the inactivated influenza vaccine contain mercury, a known neurotoxin that can cross both the placental and blood-brain barriers and accumulate in the brain.)

The Cochrane researchers also found “no evidence” to support the CDC’s assumptions that the vaccine reduces transmission of the virus or the risk of potentially deadly complications—the two primary justifications claimed by the CDC to support its recommendation.

The CDC nevertheless pushes the influenza vaccine by claiming that it prevents large numbers of hospitalizations and deaths from flu. To reinforce its message that everyone should get an annual flu shot, the CDC claims that hundreds of thousands of people are hospitalized and tens of thousands die each year from influenza. These numbers are generally relayed by the mainstream media as though representative of known cases of flu. The aforementioned New York Times article, for example, stated matter-of-factly that, of the 9 million to 36 million people whom the CDC estimates get the flu each year, “Somewhere between 140,000 and 710,000 of them require hospitalization, and 12,000 to 56,000 die each year.”

… the average number of deaths each year for which the cause is actually attributed on death certificates to the influenza virus is little more than 1000.

On September 27, the CDC issued the claim at a press conference that 80,000 people died from the flu during the 2017 – 2018 flu season, and the media parroted this number as though fact.

What is not being communicated to the public is that the CDC’s numbers do not represent known cases of influenza. They do not come directly from surveillance data, but are rather controversial estimates based on controversial mathematical models that may greatly overestimate the numbers.

To put the matter into perspective, the average number of deaths each year for which the cause is actually attributed on death certificates to the influenza virus is little more than 1,000.

The consequence of the media parroting the CDC’s numbers as though uncontroversial is that the public is routinely misinformed about the impact of influenza on society and the ostensible benefits of the vaccine. Evidently, that’s just the way the CDC wants it, since the agency has also outlined a public relations strategy of using fear marketing to increase demand for flu shots.

In other words, the CDC considers it to be a problem that people are increasingly doing their own research and becoming more adept at educating themselves about health-related issues.

The CDC’s “Problem” of “Growing Health Literacy”

Before looking at some of the problems with the CDC’s estimates, it’s useful to examine the mindset at the agency with respect to how CDC officials view their role in society. An instructive snapshot of this mindset was provided in a presentation by the CDC’s director of media relations on June 17, 2004, at a workshop for the Institute of Medicine (IOM).

In its presentation, the CDC outlined a “‘Recipe’ for Fostering Public Interest and High Vaccine Demand”. It called for encouraging medical experts and public health authorities to “state concern and alarm” about “and predict dire outcomes” from the flu season. To inspire the necessary fear, the CDC encouraged describing each season as “very severe”, “more severe than last or past years”, and “deadly”.

One problem for the CDC is the accurate view among healthy adults that they are not at high risk of serious complications from the flu. As the presentation noted, “achieving consensus by ‘fiat’ is difficult”—meaning that just because the CDC makes the recommendation doesn’t mean that people will actually follow it. Therefore it was necessary to cause “concern, anxiety, and worry” among young, healthy adults who regard the flu as an inconvenience rather than something to be terribly afraid of.

The larger conundrum for the CDC is the proliferation of information available to the public on the internet. As the CDC bluntly stated it, “Health literacy is a growing problem”.

In other words, the CDC considers it to be a problem that people are increasingly doing their own research and becoming more adept at educating themselves about health-related issues. And, as we have already seen, the CDC has very good reason to be concerned about people doing their own research into what the science actually tells us about vaccines.

One prominent way the CDC inspires the necessary fear, of course, is with its estimates of the numbers of people who are hospitalized or die each year from the flu.

… many if not most people diagnosed with ‘the flu’ may not have actually been infected with the influenza virus at all, given the large number of other viruses that cause the same symptoms and the general lack of lab confirmation.

The Problems with the CDC’s Estimates of Annual Flu Deaths

Among the relevant facts that are routinely not relayed to the public by the media when the CDC’s numbers are cited is that only about 7% to 15% of what are called “influenza-like illnesses” are actually caused by influenza viruses. In fact, there are over 200 known viruses that cause influenza-like illnesses, and to determine whether an illness was actually caused by the influenza virus requires laboratory testing—which isn’t usually done.

Furthermore, as the authors of a 2010 Cochrane review stated, “At best, vaccines may only be effective against influenza A and B, which represent about 10% of all circulating viruses” that are known to cause influenza-like symptoms. (That’s the same review, by the way, that the Times mischaracterized as having found the vaccine to be “a big payoff in public health”.)

While the CDC now uses a range of numbers to describe annual deaths attributed to influenza, it used to claim that on average “about 36,000 people per year in the United States die from influenza”. The CDC switched to using a range in response to criticism that the average was misleading because there is great variability from year to year and decade to decade. And while switching to the range did address that criticism, other serious problems remain.

One major problem with “the much publicized figure of 36,000”, as Peter Doshi observed in a 2005 BMJ article, was that it “is not an estimate of yearly flu deaths, as widely reported in both the lay and scientific press, but an estimate—generated by a model—of flu-associated death.”

Of course, as the media routinely remind us when it comes to the subject of vaccines and autism (but seem to forget when it comes to the CDC’s flu numbers), temporal association does not necessarily mean causation. Just because someone dies after an influenza infection does not mean that it was the flu that killed him. And, furthermore, many if not most people diagnosed with “the flu” may not have actually been infected with the influenza virus at all, given the large number of other viruses that cause the same symptoms and the general lack of lab confirmation.

The “36,000” number came from a 2003 CDC study published in JAMA that acknowledged the difficulty of estimating deaths attributable to influenza, given that most cases are not lab-confirmed. Yet, rather than acknowledging the likelihood that a substantial percentage of reported cases actually had nothing to do with the influenza virus, the CDC researchers treated it as though it only meant that flu-related deaths must be significantly higher than the reported numbers.

The study authors pointed out that seasonal influenza is “associated with increased hospitalizations and mortality for many diagnoses”, including pneumonia, and they assumed that many cases attributed to other illnesses were actually caused by influenza. They therefore developed a mathematical model to estimate the number by instead using as their starting point all “respiratory and circulatory” deaths, which include all “pneumonia and influenza” deaths.

In his aforementioned BMJ article, Peter Doshi reasonably asked, “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?”

Of course, not all respiratory and circulatory deaths are caused by the influenza virus. Yet the CDC treats this number as “an upper bound”—as though it was possible that 100% of all respiratory and circulatory deaths occurring in a given flu season were caused by influenza. The CDC also treats the total number of pneumonia and influenza deaths as “a lower bound for deaths associated with influenza”. The CDC states on its website that reported pneumonia and influenza deaths “represent only a fraction of the total number of deaths from influenza”—as though all pneumonia deaths were caused by influenza!

The CDC certainly knows better. In fact, at the same time, the CDC contradictorily acknowledges that not all pneumonia and influenza deaths are flu-related; it has estimatedthat in an average year 2.1% of all respiratory and circulatory deaths and 8.5% of all pneumonia and influenza deaths are influenza-associated.

So how can the CDC maintain both (a) that 8.5% of pneumonia and influenza deaths are flu-related, and (b) that the combined total of all pneumonia and influenza deaths represents only a fraction of flu-caused deaths? How can both be true?

The answer is that the CDC simply assumes that influenza-associated deaths are so greatly underreported within the broader category of deaths coded under “respiratory and circulatory” that they dwarf all those coded under “pneumonia and influenza”.

In his aforementioned BMJ article, Peter Doshi reasonably asked, “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” As he put it, “US data on influenza deaths are a mess.” The CDC “acknowledges a difference between flu death and flu associated death yet uses the terms interchangeably. Additionally, there are significant statistical incompatibilities between official estimates and national vital statistics data. Compounding these problems is a marketing of fear—a CDC communications strategy in which medical experts ‘predict dire outcomes’ during flu seasons.”

Setting aside pneumonia and looking just at influenza-associated deaths from 1979 to 2002, the annual average according to the NCHS data was only 1,348.

Illustrating the problem, Doshi observed that for the year 2001, the total number of reported pneumonia and influenza deaths was 62,034. Yet, of those, less than one half of one percent were attributed to influenza. Furthermore, of the mere 257 cases blamed on the flu, only 7% were laboratory confirmed. That’s only 18 cases of lab confirmed influenza out of 62,034 pneumonia and influenza deaths—or just 0.03%, according to the CDC’s own National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

Setting aside pneumonia and looking just at influenza-associated deaths from 1979 to 2002, the annual average according to the NCHS data was only 1,348.

The CDC’s mortality estimates would be compatible with the NCHS data, Doshi argued, “if about half of the deaths classed by the NCHS as pneumonia were actually flu initiated secondary pneumonias.” But the NCHS criteria itself strongly indicated otherwise, stating that “Cause-of-death statistics are based solely on the underlying cause of death … defined by WHO as ‘the disease or injury which initiated the train of events leading directly to death.’”

The CDC researchers who authored the 2003 study acknowledged that underlying cause-of-death coding “represents the disease or injury that initiated the chain of morbid events that led directly to the death”—yet they fallaciously coupled pneumonia deaths with influenza deaths in their model anyway.

At the time Doshi was writing, the CDC was publicly claiming that each year “about 36,000 [Americans] die from flu”, and as seen with the example from the New York Times, the range of numbers is likewise presented as though representative of known cases of flu-caused deaths. Yet the lead author of that very CDC study, William Thompson of the CDC’s National Immunization Program, acknowledged that the number rather represented “a statistical association” that does not necessarily mean causation. In Thompson’s own words, “Based on modelling, we think it’s associated. I don’t know that we would say that it’s the underlying cause of death.” (Emphasis added.)

Of course, the CDC does say it’s the underlying cause of death in its disingenuous public relations messaging. As Doshi noted, Thompson’s acknowledgment is “incompatible” with the CDC’s “misrepresentation” of its flu deaths estimates. The CDC, Doshi further observed, was “working in manufacturers’ interest by conducting campaigns to increase flu vaccination” based on estimates that are “statistically biased”, including by “arbitrarily linking flu with pneumonia”.

… there are otherwise significant limitations of the CDC’s models that potentially result in spurious attribution of deaths to influenza.

More “Limitations” of the CDC’s Models

While the media present the CDC’s numbers as though uncontroversial, there is in fact “substantial controversy” surrounding flu death estimates, as a 2005 study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology noted. One problem is that the CDC’s models use virus surveillance data that “have not been made available in the public domain”, which means that its results or not reproducible. (As the journal Cell reminds, “the reproducibility of science” is “a lynch pin of credibility”.) And there are otherwise “significant limitations” of the CDC’s models that potentially result in “spurious attribution of deaths to influenza.”

To illustrate, when Peter Doshi requested access to virus circulation data, the CDC refused to allow it unless he granted the CDC co-authorship of the study he was undertaking—which Doshi appropriately refused.

While the number of confirmed H1N1-related child deaths was 371, the CDC’s claimed number was 1,271 or more.

In the New York Review of Books, Helen Epstein has pointed out how the CDC’s dire warnings about the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” never came to pass, as well as how “some experts maintain that the CDC’s estimates studies overestimate influenza mortality, particularly among children.” While the number of confirmed H1N1-related child deaths was 371, the CDC’s claimed number was 1,271 or more. To arrive at its number, the CDC used a multiplier based on certain assumptions. One assumption is that some cases are missed either because lab confirmation wasn’t sought or because the children weren’t in a hospital when they died and so weren’t tested. Another is that a certain percentage of test results will be false negatives.

However, Epstein pointed out, “according to CDC guidelines at the time”, any child hospitalized with severe influenza symptoms should have been tested for H1N1. Furthermore, “deaths in children from infectious diseases are rare in the US, and even those who didn’t die in hospitals would almost certainly have been autopsied (and tested for H1N1)…. Also, the test is accurate and would have missed few cases. Because it’s unlikely that large numbers of actual cases of US child deaths from H1N1 were missed, the lab-confirmed count (371) is probably much closer to the modeled numbers … which are in any case impossible to verify.”

As already indicated, another assumption the CDC makes is that excess mortality in winter is mostly attributable to influenza. A 2009 Slate article described this as among a number of “potential glitches” that make the CDC’s reported flu deaths the “‘least bad’ estimate”. Referring to earlier methods that associated flu deaths with wintertime deaths from all causes, the article observed that this risked blaming influenza for deaths from car accidents caused by icy roads. And while the updated method presented in the 2003 CDC study excluded such causes of death implausibly linked to flu, related problems remain.

As the aforementioned American Journal of Epidemiology study noted, the updated method “reduces, but does not eliminate, the potential for spurious correlation and spurious attribution of deaths to influenza.” Furthermore, “Methods based on seasonal pattern begin from the assumption that influenza is the major source of excess winter death.” The CDC’s models therefore still “are in danger of being confounded by other seasonal factors.” The authors also stated that they could not conclude from their own study “that influenza is a more important cause of winter mortality on an annual timescale than is cold weather.”

Once the CDC has its estimated hospitalization rate, it then multiplies that number by the ratio of deaths to hospitalizations to arrive at its estimated mortality rate. Thus, any overestimation of the hospitalization rate is also compounded into its estimated death rate.

As a 2002 BMJ study stated, “Cold weather alone causes striking short term increases in mortality, mainly from thrombotic and respiratory disease. Non-thermal seasonal factors such as diet may also affect mortality.” (Emphasis added.) The study estimated that of annual excess winter deaths, only “2.4% were due to influenza either directly or indirectly.” It concluded that, “With influenza causing such a small proportion of excess winter deaths, measures to reduce cold stress offer the greatest opportunities to reduce current levels of winter mortality.”

CDC researchers themselves acknowledge that their models are “subject to some limitations.” In a 2009 study published in the American Journal of Public Health, CDC researchers admitted that “simply counting deaths for which influenza has been coded as the underlying cause on death certificates can lead to both over- and underestimates of the magnitude of influenza-associated mortality.” (Emphasis added.) Yet they offered no comment on how, then, their models account for the likelihood that many reported cases of “flu” had nothing whatsoever to do with the influenza virus. Evidently, this is because they don’t, as indicated by the CDC’s treatment of all influenza deaths plus pneumonia deaths as a “lower bound”.

For another illustration, since it takes two or three years before the data is available to be able to estimate flu hospitalizations and deaths by the usual means, the CDC has also developed a method to make preliminary estimates for a given year by “adjusting” the numbers of reported lab-confirmed cases from selected surveillance areas around the country. The “80,000” figure claimed for last season’s flu deaths is just such an estimate. The way the CDC “adjusts” the numbers is by multiplying the number of lab-confirmed cases by a certain amount, ostensibly “to correct for underreporting”. To determine the multiplier, the CDC makes a number of assumptions to estimate (a) the likelihood that a person hospitalized for any respiratory illness would be tested for influenza and (b) the likelihood that a person with influenza would test positive.

Caveats such as that, however, are not communicated to the general public by the CDC in its press releases or by the mainstream media so that people can make a truly informed choice about whether it’s worth the risk to get a flu shot.

Once the CDC has its estimated hospitalization rate, it then multiplies that number by the ratio of deaths to hospitalizations to arrive at its estimated mortality rate. Thus, any overestimation of the hospitalization rate is also compounded into its estimated death rate.

One obvious problem with this is the underlying assumption that the percentage of people who (a) are hospitalized for respiratory illness and have the flu is the same as (b) the percentage of those who are hospitalized for respiratory illness, are actually tested, and test positive. This implies that doctors are not more likely to seek lab confirmation for people who actually have influenza than they are for people whose respiratory symptoms are due to some other cause.

Assuming that doctors can do better than a pair of rolled dice at picking out patients with influenza, it further implies that doctors are no more likely to order a lab test for patients whom they suspect of having the flu than they are to order a lab test for patients whose respiratory symptoms they think are caused by something else.

The CDC’s assumption thus introduces a selection bias into its model that further calls into question the plausibility of its conclusions, as it is bound to result in overestimation. In a 2015 study published in PLoS One that detailed this method, CDC researchers acknowledged that, “If physicians were more likely to recognize influenza patients clinically and select those patients for testing, we may have over-estimated the magnitude of under-detection.” And that, of course, would result in an overestimation of both hospitalizations and deaths associated with influenza.

Caveats such as that, however, are not communicated to the general public by the CDC in its press releases or by the mainstream media so that people can make a truly informed choice about whether it’s worth the risk to get a flu shot.

Conclusion

In summary, to avoid underestimating influenza-associated hospitalizations and deaths, the CDC relies on models that instead appear to greatly overestimate the numbers due to the fallacious assumptions built into them. These numbers are then mispresented to the public by both public health officials and the mainstream media as though uncontroversial and representative of known cases of influenza-caused illnesses and deaths from surveillance data. Consequently, the public is grossly misinformed about the societal disease burden from influenza and the ostensible benefit of the vaccine.

It is clear that the CDC does not see its mission as being to educate the public in order to be able to make an informed choice about vaccination. After all, that would be incompatible with its view that growing health literacy is a threat to its mission and an obstacle to be overcome. On the other hand, a misinformed populace aligns perfectly with the CDC’s stated goal of using fear marketing to generate more demand for the pharmaceutical industry’s influenza vaccine products.

This article is an adapted and expanded excerpt from part two of the author’s multi-part exposé on the influenza vaccine.

November 10, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

FDA ‘Ignoring The Evidence’ on Cellphones & Cancer

See Video report at Bitchute

RT America | November 2, 2018

A $25 million study on the effects of cellphone radiation on rats found clear evidence of tumors. But the Food and Drug Administration, which had requested the study in the first place, is casting doubt on its conclusions. RT America’s Dan Cohen has the details.

November 8, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

News Media Gave Blanket Coverage To Flawed Climate Paper

Global Warming Policy Forum – 07/11/18

A week ago, we were told that climate change was worse than we thought. But the underlying science contains a major error.

Independent climate scientist Nicholas Lewis has uncovered a major error in a recent scientific paper that was given blanket coverage in the English-speaking media. The paper, written by a team led by Princeton oceanographer Laure Resplandy, claimed that the oceans have been warming faster than previously thought. It was announced, in news outlets including the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Scientific American that this meant that the Earth may warm even faster than currently estimated.

However Lewis, who has authored several peer-reviewed papers on the question of climate sensitivity and has worked with some of the world’s leading climate scientists, has found that the warming trend in the Resplandy paper differs from that calculated from the underlying data included with the paper.

“If you calculate the trend correctly, the warming rate is not worse than we thought – it’s very much in line with previous estimates,” says Lewis.

In fact, says Lewis, some of the other claims made in the paper and reported by the media, are wrong too.

“Their claims about the effect of faster ocean warming on estimates of climate sensitivity (and hence future global warming) and carbon budgets are just incorrect anyway, but that’s a moot point now we know that about their calculation error”.

And now that the errors have been uncovered, Lewis points out that it is important that the record is corrected.

“The original findings of the Resplandy paper were given blanket coverage by the media, who rarely question hyped-up findings of this kind. Let’s hope some of them are willing to correct the record”.

November 8, 2018 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Discovery Of Massive Volcanic CO2 Emissions Puts Damper On Global Warming Theory

By James Edward Kamis | Climate Change Dispatch | November 6, 2018

Recent research shows that the volume of volcanic CO2 currently being emitted into Earth’s atmosphere is far greater than previously calculated, challenging the validity of the man-made global warming theory.

Figure 1.) Volcanic gas emissions breakthrough overlying fractured and partially melted glacial ice sheet. (Image credits: Christina Neal, AVO/USGS)

The cornerstone principle of the global warming theory, anthropogenic global warming (AGW), is built on the premise that significant increases of modern era human-induced CO2 emissions have acted to unnaturally warm Earth’s atmosphere.

A warmed atmosphere that directly, or in some cases indirectly fuels anomalous environmental disasters such as ocean warming, alteration of ocean chemistry, polar ice sheet melting, global sea level rise, coral bleaching and most importantly dramatic changes in climate.

There are numerous major problems with the AGW principle.

Identification of Volcanic vs. Man-made CO2

Natural volcanic and man-made CO2 emissions have the exact same and very distinctive carbon isotopic fingerprint.

It is therefore scientifically impossible to distinguish the difference between volcanic CO2 and human-induced CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels (see here).

This major problem with the AGW principle has been rationalized away by consensus climate scientists who insist, based on supposedly reliable research, that volcanic emissions are minuscule in comparison to human-induced CO2 emissions (Gerlach 1991).

Terrance Gerlach’s volcanic CO2 calculation was based on just 7 actively erupting land volcanoes and three actively erupting ocean floor hydrothermal vents (seafloor hot geysers).

Utilizing gas emission data from this very limited number of volcanic features, Gerlach estimated that the volume of natural volcanic CO2 emissions is 100 to 150 times less than the volume of man-made CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and therefore of no consequence.

To put this calculation process into perspective, the Earth is home to 1,500 land volcanoes and 900,000 seafloor volcanoes/hydrothermal vents.

By sampling just an extremely small percent of these volcanic features it is impossible to imagine that the calculation is correct.

Especially knowing that volcanic activity varies greatly from area to area, volcano to volcano, and through time. Utilizing just 0.001 percent (10/901,500) of Earth’s volcanic features to calculate volcanic CO2 emissions does not inspire confidence in the resulting value.

Non-Erupting Volcanoes Can Emit Massive Amounts of CO2 into Earth’s Atmosphere

Recent geological research by the University of Leeds and others proves that non-erupting volcanoes can emit massive amounts of CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. The Gerlach calculation and all follow-up calculations utilized volcanic CO2 rates from actively erupting volcanoes.

Lost in the numerous recent media articles concerning the argument of when, or if Iceland’s Katla Volcano will erupt is the discovery that this non-erupting subglacial volcano is currently emitting staggering amounts of CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere!

Researchers from the University of Leeds who studied the Katla Volcano said this.

“We discovered that Katla volcano in Iceland is a globally important source of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in spite of being previously assumed to be a minor gas emitter. Volcanoes are a key natural source of atmospheric CO2 but estimates of the total global amount of CO2 that volcanoes emit are based on only a small number of active volcanoes. Very few volcanoes which are covered by glacial ice have been measured for gas emissions, probably because they tend to be difficult to access and often do not have obvious degassing vents. Through high‐precision airborne measurements and atmospheric dispersion modeling, we show that Katla, a highly hazardous subglacial volcano which last erupted 100 years ago, is one of the largest volcanic sources of CO2 on Earth, releasing up to 5% of total global volcanic emissions. This is significant in the context of a growing awareness that natural CO2 sources have to be more accurately quantified in climate assessments and we recommend urgent investigations of other subglacial volcanoes worldwide.”(see here)

The Number of Volcanoes Emitting CO2 into the Atmosphere at Any One Time 

The calculation of the total yearly volume of volcanic CO2 emitted into the atmosphere is based on the presumption that very few volcanoes are erupting at any one time.

Scientists from various worldwide volcano research institutions, most notably the United States Geological Survey, have estimated this number to be 20.

This very low number has been challenged by many scientists including those at NASA.

A  multinational team led by NASA has initiated a high-resolution satellite CO2 monitoring project (see here). This project is focused on determining how many geological features are emitting CO2 at any one time.

This project may eventually give scientists a better idea of how many land volcanoes are emitting CO2 at any one time.

However, it is doubtful the project will properly record ocean CO2 emissions from Earth’s 900,000 deep ocean floor and very difficult to monitor volcanic features.

In any case, this project is certainly a step forward towards achieving a better understanding of the climate influence of volcanic CO2 emissions.

The Amount of CO2 and heat infused into Earth’s Oceans by Seafloor Geological Features

About 71% of Earth’s surface is covered by oceans making it a water, not land, planet. For many years now, scientists have contended that the nearly one million geological features present in these vast ocean regions have played a minimal role in heating and chemically charging ocean seawater.

Instead of contending that man-made atmospheric CO2 was the root cause of changes to our oceans.

Recent research has proven that the contentions of these scientists are far from 100% proven. To the contrary, it has become clear that geological heat flow and chemically charged heated fluid flow into our oceans is far more influential than previously thought and possibly the root cause of changes to our oceans.

One example is that geological features are warming Earth’s oceans and causing El Nino’s and La Nina’s (see here, here, and here). Warmed seawater is not capable of holding as much CO2 as cold water.

So, the geologically warming of seawater indirectly leads to a large amount of CO2 being released from oceans and emitted into the atmosphere.

Recent research shows that seafloor geological features also directly emit large amounts of CO2 into our oceans and atmosphere(see here, here, here, and Figure 2).

In summary, the volume of volcanic CO2 being emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere has not been accurately assessed.

Numerous research studies and articles conducted/written by qualified scientists concur with this contention (see here, here, and here).

In a geological time frame, Earth has gone through many periods of increased volcanism. These volcanic periods resulted in; major plant and animal extinction events (see here, here, and here), the end of glacial eras (see here) and the dramatic alteration of Earth’s climate (see here).

All indications are that Earth is currently experiencing another period of strong volcanic activity which is acting to infuse CO2 into our atmosphere thereby challenging the validity of the global warming theory.

Clearly, its time to put on hold all environmental action plans based on the cornerstone AGW principle of the global warming theory until additional geological CO2 emission research is conducted.

James Edward Kamis is a retired professional Geologist with 42 years of experience, a B.S. in Geology from Northern Illinois University (1973), an M.S. in geology from Idaho State University (1977), and a longtime member of AAPG who has always been fascinated by the connection between Geology and Climate. More than 14 years of research/observation have convinced him that the Earth’s Heat Flow Engine, which drives the outer crustal plates, is an important driver of the Earth’s climate as per his Plate Climatology Theory.

November 7, 2018 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

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