You’ll have heard of it, COP-21, the latest United Nation conference on all things climate, coming to Paris (France) in December. Wouldn’t you know it, just in time for that “cataclysmic” event, nature does not want to play according to the organizers’ script.
Rather than the polar ice caps having shrivelled to mere remnants by now, forecast for many years by all climate modelling enthusiasts, the polar ice shields have been growing by leaps and bounds. For example, according to a recent report by NASA scientists HJ Zwally et al., the Antarctic ice shield has been growing for 15 years already, even at an alarming rate. Then we learn that near the earth’s opposite pole, in Greenland, the rate of ice accumulation is breaking new records too; see the figure below (source: Danish Met. Inst., Nov. 7, 2015) and, last not least, the seasonal growth of the sea ice extent in the Arctic is not far behind.
Consternation
It must come as total consternation to all those people who have claimed for years now that “climate change” or “global warming” as it used to be termed is about ready to “incinerate” all life on earth. For example, “climate modellers” like S. Rahmstorf at Germany’s PIK have claimed for years that the polar regions would be most sensitive to any warming and that the polar ice masses were going to recede in a great hurry and that the ocean levels would rise fast. In reality, none of that is the case.
In fact, the polar ice masses continue to grow, some reaching new all-time records in both ice extent and accumulated mass. Also ocean levels are NOT rising as previously predicted.
If you feel somewhat confused, please don’t shoot the messenger. As the late Alan Caruba has claimed for years, the climate fear-mongering is nothing but an elaborate hoax. The fact that even Pope Francis subscribes to the climate gospel now does not cause the ice masses to shrink. Perhaps his Holiness’ recent encyclical letter “Laudato Si, on care for our common home” may sway some folks’ views but even the Pontiff cannot dictate nature’s course. Just as an aside, the Vatican has never signed on to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 that was to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
If the now two-decade long lack of the prophesized warming and actually increasing ice masses at the earth’s poles are not enough to worry about, there are even more dire facts that may jolt you back to reality.
Cooling—Straight Ahead
The sun’s radiation is of vital importance to the well-being of all life on earth, not a new recognition at all. What’s (relatively) new is the recent lack of sunspots and what that means for the climate. Rather than “global warming” a lengthy period of “global cooling” could be in the offing.
For some time already, NASA scientists (and others) have predicted the arrival of prolonged periods of low sunspot activity. Their predictions seem to be coming true. With some exaggeration, one could say that “sunspots are nowhere to be seen.” The current 11-year cycle, termed SC-24, is certainly quite reminiscent of those prevalent in the “Maunder Minimum” that are widely thought to have caused the medieval “Little Ice Age” with its mass starvations and general misery throughout Europe.
Perhaps with such facts in mind, the Mathematical Calculation Society (Societe de Calcul Mathematique SA) of France has recently published a lengthy review with the title ”The battle against global warming: an absurd, costly and pointless crusade.” It is available also in English at their web site and, apart from the title, contains some other fascinating statements like, for example, the following excerpt in the chapter on “rising” sea levels:
“The level of dishonesty is rising much faster than the sea level. It has totally swept scientific literature, where a good many writers endeavor to produce models showing something worrying. The press disregards all the others and its various organs vie to bring them to public attention.”
and
“Models are useful when attempting to review our knowledge, but they should not be used as an aid to decision-making until they have been validated.”
Surely, the current state of “climate” mis- and mal-information could hardly be expressed more clearly. Perhaps then a total rethink of current “climate change” ideas may be opportune. So, let’s get back to the city on the River Seine.
Back to Paris
Back to Paris then. The number of delegates to the COP-21 event is likely to be well above 10,000; some reports even estimate the number to be near 40,000. Among the dignitaries said to show up are Pope Francis, U.S. President Obama, and many other world leaders, together with their entourages, media reps and all others. One may actually wonder as to who will NOT be there?
At COP-21, the representatives of many developing nations and non-governmental organisations are hoping to get a binding agreement on massive climate “reparation” funds to flow to them from western societies. India alone appears to angle for $2,500,000,000,000 (over a few years). So far, however, the commitments (or promises) by “donor” nations are falling far short of the (initial) UN goal of $100 billion per year. “Carbon” taxes and other fiscal monstrosities are supposed to pay for all the shenanigans. As mentioned recently by P. Driessen, this UN “wealth redistribution scheme” may only benefit the ruling elites in poor countries and do next to nothing for the people who are in dire need of reliable, cheap, and plentiful energy.
Underlying all that effort to create a “new world order” is the claim that CO2 produces a runaway global warming. That hypothesis is the (faulty) lynchpin for the entire CO2-catastrophy story. Not only is that story easy to disprove, it is even easy to demonstrate that the opposite is the case.
Without CO2 in the air, there wouldn’t be any plants on earth; none at all, period. All land would be barren and inhospitable places, like the Gobi Desert (picture below, from Wikipedia) but without the camel, or the Sahara, or Death Valley.
All such deserts have larger daily temperature ranges than areas at similar latitudes with abundant trees in foliage. The reason is that the trees’ transpiration of water consumes a large amount of energy that moderates the day/night temperature fluctuations and hence provide warmer nights and cooler days than would be found there without them. This has absolutely nothing to do with any greenhouse gas effect that CO2 may have; it’s solely a function of evaporative cooling. However, as the maligned carbon dioxide is absolutely vital to plant growth, it is also the ultimate cause of moderate temperature fluctuations.
Therefore, CO2 is not just vital to all life on earth but is also a great climate stabilizer.
That message is unlikely to be heard at COP-21. Instead, you’re likely to hear the same faulty claims as to the CO2 effects you’ve heard for years already. Just remember, as written in a book by R. Manheim (translated from the original publication):
“The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”
There, you have an explanation for all the ballyhoo. Is nature listening?
Nature
I don’t think so. As always, nature has her own will and her own ideas when it comes to the weather and climate—and we should be thankful for that.
Without nature’s steady effort to supply the atmosphere with sufficient CO2 from volcanoes and other fissures in the earth’s crust to sustain all life on earth, we would not even exist. Though highly unlikely, a sudden cessation of nature’s CO2 emissions would lead to a rapid decline in the atmospheric CO2 from the current 0.04% to about 0.02% or less. At that level, all plant growth on earth would be slowing to a crawl. Food production would dwindle with mass starvations to quickly follow. Trying as hard as it might then, mankind’s contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere could not make up for nature’s shortfall.
In any event, regardless of who agrees to what at COP-21 in Paris, nature doesn’t care, the polar ice sheets will be waxing and waning as per her dictate alone.
Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser is author of CONVENIENT MYTHS, the green revolution – perceptions, politics, and facts.
See convenientmyths.com
Dr. Kaiser, scientist and author, has been conducting research for more than four decades.
After receiving his doctorate in chemistry from the Technical University Munich, he joined Environment Canada’s National Water Research Institute where he served as research scientist and project manager for several research groups. He represented the institute at a variety of national and international committees, gave numerous presentations at scientific conferences, was editorial board member and peer reviewer for several journals, adjunct professor and external reviewer of university theses, and was the Editor-in- Chief of the the Water Quality Research Journal of Canada for nearly ten years.
Dr. Kaiser is an author of nearly 300 publications in scientific journals, government and national and international agency reports, books, trade magazines, and newspapers. He has been president of the Intl. Association for Great Lakes Research, and is a recipient of the Intl. QSAR Award. He is currently Director of Research of TerraBase Inc., and is a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada.
Dr. Kaiser is widely recognized for his expertise in environmental chemistry and his “no-nonsense” approach to issues.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference is having its 21st meeting in Paris towards the end of 2015. (Hence COP21 or conference of parties)
We’ve been told this is the ‘last effective opportunity’ to keep global warming to ‘a limit safe for humanity.’
However we are reassured by the fact there have been previous last chances, and this website predicts that COP21 will not be the last ‘last chance.’
Previous ‘Last Chance’ UN climate summit deadlines:
Last chance! – Bonn, 2001 – A Global Warming Treaty’s Last Chance. That teetering edifice that is the Kyoto Protocol gets some emergency repair work this week as delegates from 180 countries gather in Bonn to work out problems that threaten to scuttle the deal altogether. – Time Magazine, 16 Jul 2001
Last chance! – Montreal, 2005 – In an open letter to delegates at the Montreal environmental summit, beginning today, campaigner Mark Lynas explains why action on climate change can no longer be stalled. “I’m scared. For 15 years I’ve watched international progress on climate change get slower and slower, even while the pace of global warming seems to get ever more rapid. With time running out for the global climate, your meeting in Montreal represents a last chance for action.” – The Independent, 28 Nov 2005
Last chance! – Bali, 2007– World leaders will converge on Bali today for the start of negotiations which experts say could be the last chance to save the Earth from catastrophic climate change. Bali could be the last chance to avoid the worst effect of global warming, said Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth. – The New Zealand Herald, 3 Dec 2007
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2007: Philip Clapp, head of the Washington-based National Environment Trust, says: “Fifteen years of international negotiations have not yet produced a comprehensive agreement that will get developed countries to begin serious reductions.”He adds: “The framework for such an agreement must come out of the Bali meeting. The scientists are telling us that this is the world’s last shot at avoiding the worst consequences of global warming.” – The Independent, 2 Dec 2007
Last chance! – Poznan, Poland, 2008 – The world will “suicide” if it cannot strike a strong climate pact soon, Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery has warned. Professor Flannery, who is attending a UN climate summit in Poland, expressed dismay at the slow progress. “Resistance is a suicidal tactic,” the former Australian of the year, scientist and author told reporters in Poland. “This round of negotiations is likely to be our last chance as a species to deal with the problem.” The Age, 9 Dec 2008
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2008: Humanity is approaching the last chance to prevent catastrophic climate change, according to WWF’s analysis of the latest climate science.The warning comes during UN climate talks in Poznan, Poland.“Governments in Poznan must agree to peak and decline global emissions well before 2020 to give people reasonable hope that global warming can still be kept within limits that prevent the worst,” said Kim Carstensen, leader of WWF’s global climate initiative. – WWF, “Poznan provides last chance to curb climate change” 5 Dec 2008
Last chance! – Copenhagen, 2009 – The world faces a final opportunity to agree an adequate global response to climate change at a U.N.-led meeting in Copenhagen in December, the European Union’s environment chief said on Friday. It is now 12 years since Kyoto was created. This makes Copenhagen the world’s last chance to stop climate change before it passes the point of no return, European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas told a climate conference in Budapest on Friday. – Reuters, Feb 27 2009
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2009: Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, has warned of “catastrophic consequences” unless a new international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions is reached.Climate change is “simply the greatest collective challenge we face as a human family”, Mr Ban said in a speech on Monday in Seoul. He urged international leaders to reach a deal to limit their countries’ carbon emissions at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December. – The Telegraph, 10 Aug 2009
2009: “No one said the road to Copenhagen would be easy. But the agreement we all hope to reach in Copenhagen next year represents the last chance to bring climate change under control before it is too late. There is progress, but we need to step up the pace. With resolve, cooperation and imagination, we can conclude an agreement at the end of next year, delivering the ambitious global action that is needed.” Speech by Stavros Dimas, European Commissioner responsible for environment at a Climate Change Conference, 31 October 2008, Prague
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2009: The Copenhagen summit is the world’s last chance to save the planet from “catastrophic” global warming, according to a major study led by Lord Stern of Brentford, the country’s leading authority on climate change.Without an international agreement to limit global warming, temperatures are likely to rise by 9F (5C) by the end of the century – triggering mass migration, warfare and world hunger, according to the report. – The Telegraph, 2 Dec 2009
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Last chance! – Cancun, 2010 – A sense of foreboding is one of the few points of general agreement among the 15,000 participants congregating for the next two weeks on this long thin strip of land, marooned between a wide lagoon and the Caribbean Sea. Jairem Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, sees it as the “last chance” for climate change talks to succeed; Connie Hedegaard, the EU’s climate chief, believes a disappointing outcome would “put the whole process in danger”. – The Telegraph (UK), 29 Nov 2010
Last chance! – Durban, 2011 – Rev. Dr. Olav Fyske Tveit, who leads the World Council of Churches, says the upcoming climate conference in South Africa is mankind’s ‘last opportunity’ to address climate change. This week the World Council of Churches general secretary, Reverend Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, called the United Nations UNFCCC COP 17 meeting a “last opportunity for the international community to be responsible in addressing climate change”, and called on the meeting to “act now for climate justice.” – Spero News, 27 Nov 2011
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2011: Durban climate change meeting is “the last chance”. Attended by over 200 countries, this week’s major UN conference has been described by many experts as humanity’s last chance to avert the disastrous effects of climate change.Together with around 20 000 delegates from nearly 200 countries, Ferrial Adam, the climate change and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Africa, will be attending the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which gets under way in Durban in the next two weeks, towards negotiating a new climate regime. – UCANews, 28 Nov 2011
Last chance! – Doha, 2012– Tomorrow: the earth’s last chance with climate change? Tomorrow, the whole world talks about irreversible global warming as this year’s international climate change summit begins. Participating are 195 countries (almost all of the United Nations). There are two concurrent meetings: the 8th Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol; and the 18th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. They will take place from Monday, November 26, 2012 to Friday, December 7, 2012 at the Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha, Qatar. – The Examiner, 25 Nov 2012
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Last chance! – Warsaw, 2013 – Is the Warsaw Climate Change Conference a last-chance summit? The Warsaw Climate Change Conference opened on Monday 11th November. After the 2012 failure of Doha, this summit could represent a turning point in the fight against global warming. “Global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak this decade, and get to zero net emissions by the second half of this century,” announced Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC in a press release dated 8th November. “We have the money and technology, the knowledge and the new economic models to get the job done in time,” she confirmed before describing the next two years as “a critical period to act faster on climate.” – Sustainable Mobility, 14 Nov 2013
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Last chance! – Lima, 2014 – Last chance: Change needed for climate negotiations in Lima 2014. WWF issued the following statement today from Samantha Smith, Leader of WWF’s Global Climate and Energy Initiative, as the UN climate talks drew to a conclusion: “A repeat performance next year would be disastrous, not just for the progress of these negotiations, but more importantly for vulnerable communities everywhere and the natural world on which we all depend…By the time we get to next year’s meeting in Lima, we urgently need to have political will, real commitments, and a clear path to a comprehensive and fair agreement in Paris 2015, where a new global agreement on climate change has to be signed.” – WWF Global, 23 Nov 2013
Last chance! – Paris, 2015: Scientists are calling on world leaders to sign up to an eight-point plan of action at landmark talks in Paris. The key element is the goal to limit global warming to below 2C by moving to zero carbon emissions by 2050. The UN meeting in December is “the last chance” to avert dangerous climate change, according to the Earth League. – BBC News 22 Apr 2015
It hasn’t been a good week for the global warming alarmists. Three events have rocked the movement and caused alarmists to go into a state of alarm.
Putin calls global warming “a fraud”
The first event Russian President Vladimir Putin, who used to play along with the issue, has come out and called global warming science “a fraud,” one that is “designed to restrain industrial development.” According to the New York Times, Putin’s skepticism is based on Russian scientists having done “very, very extensive work trying to understand all sides of the climate debate” and that it is “clear that the climate is a complicated system” and that “the evidence presented for the need to ‘fight’ global warming was rather unfounded.”
NASA satellite measurements refute preposterous PIK models
The second event is described at the Swiss online daily Tagesanzeigerwhich presents a vivid example as to why people like Putin don’t believe the wild climate alarmism: There’s a huge chasm between the scary model projections coming from “leading” climate institutes and the real observations themselves.
The Swiss daily begins by writing that the Germany-based Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) projects that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could “rapidly disintegrate” and cause sea levels to rise 3 meters, all based on “their own model simulations,” which incorporate “feedback effects.” The Tagesanzeiger writes, however, that the PIK was unable to provide “a reason for the loss of stability in West Antarctica.” The Swiss online daily in effect presents a PIK theory that is fraught with assumptions, and is ultra-lean on recorded data.
To illustrate that there is a total lack of consensus with respect to Antarctica, the Tagesanzeiger brings up the latest NASA study by Zwally et al, citing Breitbart: “Antarctica is not shrinking – it is growing,” and writes that the NASA study “completely contradicts” the PIK model projections. The Tagesanzeiger continues:
A satellite survey by NASA tells a different story. It contradicts a number of other studies, which are mostly based on rough estimations and assumptions.”
Poland refuses to ratify Kyoto treaty in Paris
The third set of bad news to come out over the past week is that Poland’s new president, Andrzej Duda, refuses to extend the UN Kyoto Treaty until 2020 and that this “blocks the ratification process” just a month before the UN climate summit in Paris (COP21). Duda is requesting “a more detailed analysis of the climate matter,” writing in a statement:
Binding Poland to an international agreement that will affect Poland’s economy and the therein connected social costs should require a detailed analysis of the legal and economic impacts. These impacts have not been sufficiently explained.”
Greenpeace Poland called Duda’s announcement a “bad sign” which threatens to stall Europe’s movement on emissions limitation.
Asia moves ahead with coal power plant expansion
Also the news tell us that many, especially poorer, developing countries aren’t taking PIK climate science seriously at all. The London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation here writes that “in Asia alone this year power companies are building more than 500 coal-fired plants, with at least a thousand more on planning boards.”
If you have a sweet tooth, you may want to think twice before you pick up your next doughnut. A new study says that sugar is “toxic,” leading to metabolic diseases such as high blood pressure and heart disease – even if no weight is gained.
The research – conducted by pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, and Jean-Marc Schwarz of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Touro University California – examined 43 obese children who had high blood pressure, unhealthy cholesterol levels, or signs of too much fat in their livers. The children were between the ages of nine and 18.
The children were put on a restricted diet which eliminated added sugar from sodas, sweet, and other foods.
Sugar intake was reduced from about 28 percent of total calories to about 10 percent. Fructose – a form of sugar believed to be particularly bad for health – was reduced from 12 percent to four percent of total calories.
Sugary foods were then replaced with starchier alternatives, such as hot dogs, potato chips, and pizza.
“This ‘child-friendly’ study diet included various no- or low-sugar added processed foods including turkey hot dogs, pizza, bean burritos, baked potato chips, and popcorn that were purchased at local supermarkets,” the study authors wrote.
Each child’s caloric intake closely resembled the amount they ate before the study began. However, the children reported feeling less hungry with the new diet.
“They told us it felt like so much more food, even though they were consuming the same number of calories as before, just with significantly less sugar. Some said we were overwhelming them with food,” Schwarz said.
After weighing themselves daily as part of the study’s requirements, one-third of the children said they could not eat enough food to stop losing weight. The children lost an average of nearly two pounds in just nine days.
“I have never seen results as striking or significant in our human studies; after only nine days of fructose restriction, the results are dramatic and consistent from subject to subject,” Schwarz added.
Blood pressure went down by an average of five points. The triglyceride measurement of cholesterol fell by 33 points, and low-density lipoprotein (LDL, also known as “bad” cholesterol) fell by 10 points. Blood sugar and insulin levels also fell. Glucose tolerance and the amount of excess insulin circulating in the blood improved.
“Every aspect of their metabolic health got better, with no change in calories,” Lustig said, adding that sugar isn’t harmful because of its calories or its effect on weight, but rather “because it’s sugar.”
He stressed the study proves “a calorie is not a calorie.”
“Where those calories come from determines where in the body they go. Sugar calories are the worst, because they turn to fat in the liver, driving insulin resistance, and driving risk for diabetes, heart and liver disease,” he said.
The study was published in the journal Obesity on Monday. The researchers noted that further examination is needed to determine whether the short-term gains in health with low-sugar diets remain present in the longer term.
It would seem that every time there is a mass shooting in this country, the shooter has either been taking psychotropic medications, usually in the form of antidepressants, or the shooter has recently quit taking antidepressants.
It is well known that these medications can cause suicidal thoughts, especially in young people up to around age 24. If a medicine can cause suicidal thoughts, it would only follow that it can possibly cause violent or homicidal thoughts as well.
A multitude of studies have linked antidepressants to everything from birth defects (including a very serious birth defect called persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn, causing the Food and Drug Administration to place a black box warning on them) to increased suicidal tendencies (causing the FDA to update the initial black box warning to include an additional suicidal tendencies warning).
Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant that brought us Prozac, knew this from its own trials as far back as 1984, but the company kept it from the public and the FDA for years, long after the drug was approved in 1988. This information only came to light through a highly controversial litigation.
What do these documents, which the company reportedly worked to keep hidden, reveal about the potential dangers of Prozac (fluoxetine)?
“Fluoxetine [Prozac] may produce both activation (nervousness, anxiety, agitation, insomnia) and sedation (somnolence, asthenia). Approximately 19% of patients might be expected to report activation during acute therapy with fluoxetine which was not present prior to therapy and which could be attributed to fluoxetine (in trials, 38% fluoxetine-treated patients reported new activation but 19% of placebo-treated patients also reported new activation yielding a difference of 19% attributable to fluoxetine).”
It is worth noting, however, that the control used in trials was apparently also a psychotropic drug, trazodone, a serotonin antagonist reuptake inhibitor (SARI) that carries “activation” risks of its own, including suicidal and violent behavior. Therefore, the true effects may have been downplayed through semantics and parameters set by the study.
At any rate, Lilly’s own internal report on clinical trials matches up incidence reports for fluoxetine against trazodone (an SARI), amitriptyline and desipramine (both tricyclic antidepressants), as well as maprotiline (a tetracyclic antidepressant). It shows a dramatically higher rate of suicide attempts, psychotic depression, hostility and intentional injury for fluoxetine-based Prozac than any of the other antidepressants used in the company’s own trials.
While suicide attempts represented 3.7% of total reports for fluoxetine in trials, it accounted for only 0.2% of the incidents in trazodone, 0.8% in amitryptyline, 0.3% in desipramine and 0.0% for maprotiline. While Lilly attempted to explain away six of the 12 suicide attempts which occurred during its trials of Prozac, but even if you buy their maneuvering, that’s still a 6:1 ratio of suicidespotentially induced by Prozac verses controls.
Similarly, psychotic depression reports spiked in fluoxtine at 2.3% while they represented <1% in the other drugs; fluoxetine was two-and-a-half to four times more likely to cause hostility than other drugs tested, and at least eight times more likely to trigger episodes of intentional injury.
Those results show enough risk and red flags it should give any doctor pause before prescribing them to anyone. The 1984 memo even describes ways to explain these findings away to doctors, stating, “Several suggestions may be helpful in presenting this information to physicians” including emphasis on positives like lower discontinuation rates and encouraging physicians to understand “the meaningfulness of subtracting the placebo rate from the drug associated rate” to “point out these values are relatively low”. (Does history show that, just by the way? Obviously not.)
However, with these studies suppressed, Prozac became the “star drug” for depression and Eli Lilly’s blockbuster.
But at what cost, not only to patients, but to legal protections and a right-to-know for the general public, many of whom may be taking, or could be prescribed Prozac?
According to his report on the documents, Dr. Peter R. Breggin, M.D. was responsible for uncovering several concealed internal Lilly memos during the discovery process as a scientific expert in litigation in the early 1990s – and Lilly certainly did not want them to come to light.
Dr. Breggin explains the bizarre and utterly concerning case this way:
I am familiar with these documents because I initially found them in the early 1990s while searching through mountains of paper produced by the drug company in the discovery process. At the time I was the scientific expert for the combined Prozac suits and one of my tasks was to evaluate Eli Lilly’s discovery materials for all the initial cases…
[…]
Paul Smith, the attorney for the plaintiffs, secretly settled the case during the trial and then denied the fact to presiding Judge John W. Potter. The plaintiffs agreed to water down their presentation of the case to the jury in return for a large secret settlement. After Eli Lilly seemed to win the trial by a 9-3 vote, Judge Potter found out that the trial was a sham aimed at exonerating the drug company.
The Supreme Court of Kentucky declared that Eli Lilly may have committed “fraud” and that the drug company had “manipulated” the judicial system. The judge voided the jury verdict and changed it to “settled with prejudice” by Eli Lilly. Although the initial “victory” by Eli Lilly was widely covered in the press, the change in the verdict was largely ignored.
Consumer protection and medical malpractice hangs in the balance of a very determined legal and marketing team in the modern day world of Big Pharma corporate dominance.
The Indianapolis Star, based in the hometown of Eli Lilly, reported on the legal cunning of the Prozac makers in deflecting liability through “secret deals” and “hardball tactics”:
Critics charge Lilly became adept at lawsuit-quashing through aggressive and sometimes unethical legal tactics. They earned the rebuke of three courts, spurred at least three separate lawsuits and gave rise to charges of trial-fixing, conspiracy and document-hiding.
[…]
The deal was “arguably unprecedented in a Western court,” wrote Cornwell.
Zitrin views the deal as an attempt by Lilly to “create a situation where the trial was fixed.” The deal required Smith to withhold key negative evidence about Lilly from the jury in the end stage of the trial. [Editor’s Note: And also required no appeals or punitive damages.]
The evidence concerned Lilly’s 1985 guilty plea to 25 criminal counts for failing to tell the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about deaths and illnesses of patients taking a Lilly arthritis drug called Oraflex, plus related charges. [Editor’s Note: Analysts say Lilly barely obtained a victory]
[…]
“Lilly made the verdict the centerpiece of a national publicity campaign, touting the safety of Prozac,” said a 1997 ruling by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Wow. That is spin at work.
If the reports are true, then a liability in the way of secret deals, suppressed evidence and proof of harm was cleverly turned around into a promotional “victory” for Eli Lilly that dispelled the notions that the drug was harmful or unsafe.
Lilly knew from its own drug trials that nearly 1-in-5 patients would, statistically, undergo “activation”… and could be at risk for a significant increase in suicidal tendencies, as well as aggression and hostilities that were not otherwise expressed.
Reports show that 12 people attempted suicide during Lilly’s own trials, way more than with the other drugs tested, and even with half of these somehow explained away by other factors in the study, the warning would have been apparent if the information had been made available to the FDA and the public.
Instead, profits were put ahead of public health concerns, and many consequences – including shattered lives and even mass shooting incidents – have arguably been connected to this ethical failure to put patients and drug safety first.
Today, the US is a Prozac Nation, where more than one in ten people are taking antidepressants. A new study just came out which found that over 2/3rds of people taking drugs like Prozac aren’t even clinically depressed.
Guess it makes for a much more manageable public.
On an interesting side note, kind of makes you wonder why exactly George H. W. Bush became director of the CIA the year after its MK Ultra mind control scandal broke, only to join the board of directors of, you guessed it, Eli Lilly (also involved in MK Ultra) for two years while Prozac was being developed…
More Arctic ice and up to 1.5°C colder! Navigable NWP postponed 40 years!
The study finds that in 2014 “more ice survived the summer as MYI than in the nine most recent years” and it was only “slightly less than during 1968–2015 on average (Figure S5).”
Also “between November 2014 and April 2015, winter air temperatures were between −0.5°C and −1.5°C colder than during 1980–2010.”
Moreover the study also has climate experts profoundly postponing yet another prediction: The Northwest passage will not be navigable for another 40 years… let alone the Arctic becoming ice free!
We present results of the first ever airborne electromagnetic ice thickness surveys over the NWP carried out in April and May 2011 and 2015 over first-year and multiyear ice. These show modal thicknesses between 1.8 and 2.0 m in all regions. Mean thicknesses over 3 m and thick, deformed ice were observed over some multiyear ice regimes shown to originate from the Arctic Ocean. Thick ice features more than 100 m wide and thicker than 4 m occurred frequently.
Results indicate that even in today’s climate, ice conditions must still be considered severe. These results have important implications for the prediction of ice breakup and summer ice conditions, and the assessment of sea ice hazards during the summer shipping season.
For further evaluation, it is also important to consider that in Parry Channel, including VMS, i.e., in the waters of the northern NWP, in 2014 more ice survived the summer as MYI than in the nine most recent years but slightly less than during 1968–2015 on average (Figure S5).
Between November 2014 and April 2015, winter air temperatures were between −0.5°C and −1.5°C colder than during 1980–2010 which could have led to slightly thicker level ice than average, notwithstanding snow effects
However, by all means the observed thicknesses and amount of deformed ice still indicate serious ice conditionswhich can persist throughout the summers and provide ample potential for encounters with hazardous ice. Even in recent years, the CAA remains a source for locally grown MYI and a sink for Arctic Ocean MYI [Howell et al., 2015]; and therefore, shipping through the NWP should not be taken lightly.
These conclusions also support results of Smith and Stephenson [2013] who suggested that the NWP will not become easily navigable for another 40years or so.
In addition, we have observed two ice islands in and south of Byam-Martin Channel in 2011 which were not included in the present analysis.These ice islands originated from the ice shelves along the Arctic Ocean coast of Ellesmere Island, and were between 30 and 40m thick, adding to the variability of hazardous ice features in the NWP.”
Even the most ridiculous estimates of ice loss in Greenland are less than 200 km³ per year. The volume of the ice sheet is 3,000,000 km³. Using the most aggressive claims, it would take 15,000 years for the ice sheet to melt. That accounts for a sea level rise of about one hundredth of an inch per year. Does Coral Davenport think that one inch of sea level rise over the next century is going to drown her?
But the reality is that the surface of Greenland gains about 300 billion tons of ice every year. Greenland is not melting.
Claims that the ice sheet is losing 200 km³ / year are based on unreliable gravity calculations made by people with an agenda. Glacial flow to the ocean is controlled by the amount of excess ice building up in the interior. If for some reason the amount of ice building up in the interior decreased, flow would also decrease.
The New York Times has been reporting this same hysteria for almost 85 years.
Climate is cyclical. There is no rational reason to believe that the Greenland ice sheet is going to disappear. More than half of it never gets above freezing most years.
This video is a critique of catastrophic man-made global warming theory, based on presentation slides used in a series of public presentations and debates in late 2009 and early 2010. The author is Warren Meyer, author of the web site climate-skeptic.com.
When Hoesung Lee was elected head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently, the Seoul-based Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) issued a celebratory press release. Lee – who hails from South Korea – has a seat on one of the GGGI’s governing bodies.
But this little-known entity is no mere institute. In fact, it’s another creature of the United Nations. As a headline on the GGGI website makes clear, an international treaty was required to bring it into existence. Membership is restricted to UN-recognized countries. Its stated purpose is “the successful outcome of the United Nations process on sustainable development.” Its Director-General, Yvo de Boer, used to be the UN’s top climate official.
GGGI appears to have begun life in 2010 as a bona fide South Korean non-profit foundation, before throwing itself into the arms of the UN two years later. Documents connected to its 2012 transformation can be downloaded from its website (see this 33-page PDF). The GGGI immodestly claims to be devising “a new model of economic growth,” which it considers “essential for the future of humankind.” Some of the planet’s least developed nations have signed up to act as guinea pigs for projects administered by the GGGI and funded by Australian, Danish, Norwegian, and British taxpayers.
There are plenty of good people working on important issues, some of whom are employed by research institutes. But when it comes to perqs and privileges, the GGGI leaves everyone them in the dust. Calling the GGGI an institute is like calling Unilever – the multinational corporation that owns the Ben & Jerry’s, Lipton, Bertolli, Hellman’s, Becell, Knorr, and Dove brands – a soap company.
In actual fact, the GGGI enjoys a preposterous array of protections and immunities. We’re talking about the kinds of privileges normally reserved for nation states. Korea’s government has signed a document in which it has agreed to treat GGGI headquarters like an embassy. Korean authorities have no jurisdiction on its premises or over its records:
The Headquarters shall be inviolable. No person exercising any public authority within the Republic of Korea shall enter the Headquarters to perform any duties except with the express consent of the Director-General…The archives of the GGGI…shall be inviolable wherever located….The property of the GGGI…shall be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation and any other form of interference, whether by executive, administrative, judicial or legislative action. [pp. 1, 5, 6]
The GGGI and its staff enjoy “immunity from every form of legal process,” except in rare circumstances. The GGGI is exempt from taxation and customs duties, and may transfer funds in and out of Korea at will. The salaries of the roughly 100 people who comprise the GGGI staff are – drumroll, please – tax free.
People visiting the GGGI from outside Korea don’t need to produce passports as do mere mortals, since Korea’s government has agreed to treat GGGI-issued “travel certificates” as the equivalent of national passports. GGGI staff, their spouses, and their dependents are immune from “immigration restrictions” and baggage inspection “except in doubtful cases.” In the event of an international crisis, Korea will treat GGGI personnel and their families on a par with “diplomatic envoys.”
As if all of the above weren’t sufficiently bizarre, we read that:
The GGGI shall have the right to use codes and to dispatch and receive official communications by courier or in sealed bags, which shall have the same privileges and immunities as are accorded to diplomatic couriers and bags. [bold added, p. 6]
So the police can’t touch you. The courts can’t touch you. Customs officials have been instructed to treat you like royalty. Your pay cheque is tax free, and there’s almost no risk of being caught should you choose to smuggle items in or out of the country.
Pardon me, but I have a few questions:
What’s really going on here?
What is so special about these people that they warrant require such extraordinary protections and immunities?
What unwholesome activities is the UN undertaking via the GGGI that it considers sealed diplomatic pouches remotely necessary?
Circling back to Hoesung Lee, the person now in charge of the IPCC also belongs to a secretive entity headed by the UN’s former top climate official.
Translation #1: Lee is a UN insider. There isn’t a chance in a thousand that he’ll institute meaningful reform.
Translation #2: The IPCC is merely one bauble in the UN’s burgeoning toy box.
In a polite but misleading article today in a BBC magazine (The polar bears are coming to town) about the relationship of polar bears and Inuit in Arviat, Western Hudson Bay, there is no mention of the on-going feud between Nunavut Inuit and Canadian polar bear scientists regarding invasive research.
Nor is there a mention of the fact that according to the most recent research, there has been no trend in sea ice conditions since 2001.
Find Arviat on the map of Western Hudson Bay study area provided by Lunn and colleagues (2013, 2014) in their mark-recapture study report (below) discussed in detail in my last post. Area “A” – where Arviat is located – was not included in the last mark-recapture survey because Nunavut won’t allow invasive research on polar bears.
Lunn et al. 2013, 2014. Map of study area.
The issue of the invasive research involved in polar bear mark-recapture studies around Churchill, Manitoba (chasing bears with helicopters, drugging them, extracting a tooth, tattooed, and attaching satellite radio collars or ear tags), has been so strenuously objected to by the Inuit of Nunavut that they have refused to allow the necessary field research permits for these activities (previous posts here, here, and here). See also the guest post by Kelsey Eliasson Invasive Research is Alive and Well in Canada
Arviat is in Nunavut and so mark-recapture work was not permitted there in 2011 – which is why Lunn and colleagues could not include those bears in their survey. Lunn et al. did not mention this conflict in their government report (2013) or in the version of it that is destined for publication (2014). They offered no reason why they did not survey in the Nunavut portion of Western Hudson Bay (Area A), which was included in the aerial survey conducted by Stapleton and colleagues (2014) and previous mark-recapture studies.
The author of today’s BBC essay (Irish anthropologist Martina Tyrrell) seems not to know about the invasive research issue or the lack of trend in sea ice conditions revealed in the mark-recapture study report (Lunn et al. 2013), because this is what she said about polar bear visits to Arviat:
“Over the past decade, however, encounters have been on the increase. Camping south of the community in summer is no longer safe, and autumn berry picking – an important subsistence activity usually undertaken by women and children – is now fraught with danger. Bears increasingly wander the streets of Arviat, particularly in late autumn.
At this time of year, regular announcements of bear sightings are made on local community FM radio, schools are sometimes closed early and the usually lively streets are eerily quiet. Halloween trick-or-treating, once so wild and fun-filled, has been all but wiped out, for fear of unwanted encounters not with ghosts or demons but with wandering bears.
What is driving this change in the polar bears’ behaviour?
Many Arviarmiut blame polar bear tourism in neighbouring Churchill – 250km to the south – for encouraging the animals to look for food in human settlements.
But there are other theories. Some Inuit think the bear population in the region is growing. Many scientists, on the other hand, put the blame on habitat loss – according to this theory it’s the desperation of hungry bears facing decreased ice seasons in a rapidly warming Arctic that leads them to approach the town. They have always gathered on the coastline at this time of year, awaiting the formation of the sea ice that is their winter hunting ground, but usually at a greater distance.” [my bold]
One of those “theories” is easily refuted by the Lunn et al. report (2013, 2014; Fig. 5): there has been no trend in sea ice breakup or freeze-up of Western Hudson Bay sea ice since 2001. Just the usual year-to-year variation, which can be fairly large:
[Observations since then have been consistent with that conclusion, for both breakup dates and freeze-up]
Therefore, there may simply be more bears than previously – or Arviat is being visited by more bears as a result of the increased polar bear tourism in Churchill or the increased vigilance of their Polar Bear Alert program. Either way, the sea ice “theory” (see graph below from Lunn et al. 2013) can be ruled out.
References
Lunn, N.J., Regehr, E.V., Servanty, S., Converse, S., Richardson, E. and Stirling, I. 2013.Demography and population assessment of polar bears in Western Hudson Bay, Canada. Environment Canada Research Report. 26 November 2013. PDF HERE
Lunn, N.J., Servanty, S., Regehr, E.V., Converse, S.J., Richardson, E. and Stirling, I. 2014.Demography and population assessment of polar bears in Western Hudson Bay, Canada. Environment Canada Research Report. July 2014. PDF HERE [This appears to be the version submitted for publication]
Stapleton S., Atkinson, S., Hedman, D., and Garshelis, D. 2014. Revisiting Western Hudson Bay: using aerial surveys to update polar bear abundance in a sentinel population. Biological Conservation170:38-47. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320713004618#
A few days ago the online Washington Post had an excellent feature story by Peter Whorisky on the long-held belief that food products rich in saturated fats, like whole milk, were a risk to human health. It turns out that this decades-long belief, once backed by a “overwhelming consensus” among scientists, is now appearing to have been mortally wrong.
Science lied, people died
Unfortunately it took the science decades to realize it and government agencies responsible for issuing dietary guidelines still aren’t yet prepared to move to revamp the dietary guidelines as necessary. Meanwhile tens of millions worldwide have died prematurely of protracted, horrible deaths stemming from them following the faulty nutritional guidelines.
Five decades long nutritional scientists, every medical institution, among them the American Heart Association and the Academy of Sciences, all touted the high carb, low-fat diet. And five decades long they were wrong. It took a global epidemic of diabetes and heart disease to get the message across. And finally the media are catching up – though grudgingly: Whorisky pretty much keeps the focus on whole milk only, and away from meat, eggs and other healthy foods we have been told not to eat.
The WaPo writes:
Scientists who tallied diet and health records for several thousand patients over ten years found, for example, that contrary to the government advice, people who consumed more milk fat had lower incidence of heart disease.”
Why the focus only on milk? Why not on meat, eggs, bacon and other sources rich in animal fat? If you are going to admit you were wrong, then do it slowly and hope it doesn’t blow up.
The new medical and nutritional findings are not only a huge embarrassment for the government and medical institutions, but may also be a huge dilemma for the media’s much beloved environmental movement, which long has been touting granola diets as a sustainable way to nourish humans. A renewed shift to animal products is not exactly the direction the planet-saving vegans and environmentalists want us to be on.
According to Marcia Otto, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas:
What we have learned over the last decade is that certain foods that are high in fat seem to be beneficial.”
Whorisky writes that government bureaucrats are now unsure about how to proceed with revising dietary recommendations. Suddenly and profoundly changing the long-held guidelines likely is not going to go over well with a public that already distrusts government and could even possibly open the government to lawsuits. At any rate it would be a major blow to credibility.
An interesting aspect of Whorisky’s piece is that the media and governments make it sound like all of this is new stuff. It is not. Decades-long a poorly funded minority of experts insisted that the nutritional science behind the lipid hypothesis had been weak and even faulty, and should never be made into dietary guidelines. But these skeptics were defunded, ridiculed and silenced; their science never saw the light of day. It turns out these skeptics had been right all along.
“Fragile hypothesis” becomes “treatment dogma”
Whorisky brings up the 7-country chart by Ancel Keys, regarded as the scientific foundation of the high-carb/low-fat theory, and makes it sound as if the chart originally was valid and that data from other countries came later on. That was not the case. The truth is that Keys had all the data from the other countries from the get-go but chose not to plot them because doing so would have shown that his beloved fat-theory was rubbish – there was in fact no trend showing that heart disease was related to fat intake. Keyes intentionally cherry-picked, cheated and deceived the public by using only the data points that produced a hockey stick.
From then on his theory morphed into a dogma that would go on to survive almost 6 decades. Unfortunately millions of people would die prematurely because of the guidelines later adopted as a result.
Whorisky writes:
‘The vibrant certainty of scientists claiming to be authorities on these matters is disturbing,’ George V. Mann, a biochemist at Vanderbilt’s medical school wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. Ambitious scientists and food companies, he said, had “transformed [a] fragile hypothesis into treatment dogma.”
Indeed, the subsequent 40 years of science have proven that, if nothing else, the warning against saturated fats was simplistic.
Although Whorisky tunneled his focus on milk and did not accurately present the work of Ancel Keys and the dissidents who opposed him, his piece is one that was overdue and it represents a major step in getting the government and medical associations to admit that they screwed up massively. In hindsight the affair is turning out to be nutritional malpractice of the most egregious sort.
Incredibly, perhaps with the aim of protecting the interests of its many member cardiologists and other physicians, the American Heart Association still stands behind the junk-science based lipid hypothesis and continues to deny the fact that fat is vital for human health and that refined carbohydrates have been the true American dietary disaster.
Climate science is even worse than “fat” science
The same type of junk science is now occurring with a carbon of another form: atmospheric CO2. Here a new breed of junk scientists are hysterically maintaining that CO2 will cause the earth’s climate system to have a heart attack. Here the science backing up that theory is even worse than that of Ancel Keys.
What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind?
If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story.
More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals; I’ll gladly fly halfway around the world to take photos of them in their natural habitats. I’m a Democrat: I think governments play a key role in helping preserve our environment for the future in the most cost-effective way possible. Over the years, I built a set of assumptions: that Al Gore was right about global warming, that he was the David going up against the industrial Goliath. In 1993, I even wrote a book about it.
Recently, a friend challenged those assumptions. At first, I was annoyed, because I thought the science really was settled. As I started to look at the data and read about climate science, I was surprised, then shocked. As I learned more, I changed my mind. I now think there probably is no climate crisis and that the focus on CO2 takes funding and attention from critical environmental problems. I’ll start by making ten short statements that should challenge your assumptions and then back them up with an essay.
2Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural. The earth is warming, but not quickly, not much, and not lately.
3There is tremendous uncertainty as to how the climate really works. Climate models are not yet skillful; predictions are unresolved.
4New research shows fluctuations in energy from the sun correlate very strongly with changes in earth’s temperature, better than CO2 levels.
5CO2 has very little to do with it. All the decarbonization we can do isn’t going to change the climate much.
6There is no such thing as “carbon pollution.” Carbon dioxide is coming out of your nose right now; it is not a poisonous gas. CO2 concentrations in previous eras have been many times higher than they are today.
9No one has shown any damage to reef or marine systems. Additional man-made CO2 will not likely harm oceans, reef systems, or marine life. Fish are mostly threatened by people, who eat them.
Could this possibly be right? Is it heresy, or critical thinking — or both? If I’ve upset or confused you, let me guide you through my journey. … continue reading
According to American media, defense news outlets, and independent analysts, the 12-day Israeli military aggression against Iran significantly depleted the US stockpile of THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptor missiles.
Citing official sources, American magazine Newsweek reported on Friday that the US transferred a substantial portion of its advanced missile defense capabilities to support the Israeli regime, an effort with questionable results and a critical impact on US strategic reserves.
THAAD, developed by Lockheed Martin arms manufacturing company, is a key component of Israel’s multi-layered air defense architecture. It is designed to intercept medium-range ballistic missiles, including those launched from Iran and Yemen.
The US-made system is capable of targeting short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles during their terminal phase, whether inside or outside Earth’s atmosphere.
THAAD uses a “hit-to-kill” method, relying on kinetic energy rather than explosive warheads to destroy incoming threats, intercepting at altitudes of up to 150 km and ranges between 150-200 km.
Operated exclusively by American personnel, the US military maintains eight THAAD batteries with an estimated 350–400 interceptors in total. The eighth battery was activated during the June 20 Israeli aggression against Iran and is capable of intercepting hypersonic missiles. … continue
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