Saturday
Jun052010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Conflicted public servants
Jun 5, 2010 Bureaucrats Climate: other Afficionados of the Climategate "inquiries" (as it seems we must now call them) will be interested in this article by Douglas Carswell, the maverick Conservative MP for Clacton.
Scientists who drew up the guidelines advising governments to stockpile drugs in the event of a flu pandemic allegedly had previously been paid by drug companies which stood to profit, reports the Guardian.
As he points out, there is a revolving door between the civil service and big business and conflicts of interest are two-a-penny. Sound familiar?
Scientists who drew up the guidelines advising governments to stockpile drugs in the event of a flu pandemic allegedly had previously been paid by drug companies which stood to profit, reports the Guardian.
Reader Comments (49)
Just the like the definition of being clever is when you realise how stupid you really are, people who are sensitive to any conflicts of interest, usually do not succumb to them.
In many other cultures they call it simply bribery or corruption or protection.
My Dad as a Clerk of Works walked away from creating a conflict of interest. Others did not, and the large concrete structure that the contractor wanted signed off, fell down about 20 years later - perhaps coincidence.
Some people see the "interest conflict elephant" in the room, others do not... when you mention it and still nobody sees it, then the word corruption starts to raise it's head, not conflict of interest.
The parallels to AGW are obvious with swine flu...
one of the greatest problems with the drug industry (and the CAGW industry) is that the people most qualified to render judgments are already so involved with the establishment that they cannot help but be conflicted. One can have knowledgeable people or disinterested people, but when it takes 6 years of study to become a knowledge person you are not going to find many will to spend that much time in something they are not interested in, and if they are interested in something they are going have conflicts.
It is much like Al Gore and his green companies - he is convinced that CAGW is happening so he invests his time and money into green companies which makes him unable to render an objective judgment on whether or not CAGW is happening or not, so he shouldn't invest all that time and money into green companies because he cannot form and objective opinion on whether or not CAGW is happening, and if he forms an objective opinion that CAGW is happening then he should invest his time and money into green companies which will....
Your Grace
I think that should be Clacton without a K.
(Mr. Carswell's constituents are going to have a lovely view of the Gunfleet Sands Windfarm.)
@max
Looked at in a different light, this is the First Law of Bullshit. This proposes that anyone who frequently relies upon bullshit in their arguments always eventually falls into the trap of believing it themself.
Although there is actual, deliberate fraud in the Climate Scientwits community (albeit self-justified in being for a 'Greater Truth'), I suspect that victims of the First Law of Bullshit are far more numerous.
The BMJ article that the Guardian etc. are quoting is here:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/340/jun03_4/c2912
The Council of Europe report that the BMJ was trailing is here:
http://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2010/20100604_H1N1pandemic_e.pdf
Para 34 is interesting. "Although critical voices from various countries and the Parliamentary Assembly itself have on several occasions called for the list of experts and their respective declarations of interest to be published, WHO has failed to provide this information. The Organization continues to hold back on releasing further information on the interests of experts, justifying this position by the need to protect experts’ privacy......"
I would need considerably more persuasive evidence of malfaisance before I buy into this one. It's too easy to be wise after the event. Unlike global warming, flu induced pneumonia, if anything like the 1918-19 pandemic which killed 50 million, more than the Great War, could have the potential to decimate every family in the land. The story of the four healthy bridge players who by morning all but one was found asphyxiated by foaming phlem is not encouraging. So they are welcome to any tax of mine misspent by Government on the swine flu vaccine, and again if thought prudent. Good luck to the drug coy with the windfall.
Well Pharos, the interesting thing is the WHO has recently changed the definition of 'pandemic'. Here in Holland we have Dr. Ab Osterhaus a.k.a. 'Dr Flu', although he has always been very candid with his 'conflicts of interest', he wears a lot of hats. Lending an ear to the Dutch government, ties with pharmaceutical companies (even a partnership in a private company owned by (his) public funded Dutch university), senior positions within the WHO. IMO very unhealthy.
Michael Fumento has been writing about flu and other scares for quiet a while, enjoy...
http://www.fumento.com/swineflu/who_faked.html
harold
I am sure there is much unsavoury chiselling going on, as you say. Nevertheless, if you were Prime Minister, when the threat is perceived to be real and present, you would in truth have no other responsible option but to order up supplies notwithstanding.
"when the threat is perceived to be real and present"
An unfortunate choice of words bringing to mind the err, yet to be discovered, Iraqui weapons of mass destruction.
Then there's this interesting word "perceived". Perceived by whom? What evidence do they have for this idea? How far are they going to manufacture a belief in the general populace for which there is really no evidence? Do they have an agenda acceptance of this belief suits?
This is an excellent topic for Josh. Revolving doors, doctors in pay of pharma companies claiming the world will come to a viral end if vaccines are not mass produced. Or have we all ready seen all that many times over?
We had Hong Kong Flu, SARS, Swine flu, and the Asian flu. Next year we should have something new and creative, like the Martian flu, brought to us on flying saucers and flying tea cups. Same old same old, sadly.
Interesting thing is around Christmas time my doctor told me I had higher likelihood of having an adverse reaction to the Swine Flu than from the likelihood of having the infection. He did recommend that I have the standard flu shot however, which would do an old geezer like me some good. Not his exact words, but that is what he meant.
So at least some of the medical profession are on to the scam.
Both CAGW and the Swin Flu are driven by the Internet Age. They are children of it.
Cheap instant communications right into the hearts and minds and fears and paranoias of the populace.
There are not more earthquakes/hurricanes/death/destruction/.... or possible pandemics... or paedophiles... or...
Some of the news event "marketing" will be planned, some opportunistic, but once these things get rolling all sorts or people will ride with it, taking their cut.
A new news event is no different in its behaviour than CAGW.
The "big oil" market is stable and mature. Very difficult to break into without huge investments. CAGW? Well that is a new and growing market. Unstable, risky. So lots of opportunity to make a money with little investment. That is why CAGW is being promoted - small investments but huge rewards. People see it like sitting on the West Coast of America in the 1800's.
Give me USD 50 Million and a bit of imagination, I bet I could get anything accepted as a worldwide "consensus". These things are mostly about lobbying, PR and marketing, you just have to choose the right trigger points, or ride the right ones after they start.
The news stories re large event are no different. It gives a chance to break that normal news stability, with something that is fast growing and unpredictable.
Media wants these events - it is the only way for journalists or editors (or ...) to break the stable market. There is no one happier than an editor when many people are dying or "at risk" of dying.
The problem is the continual, often inexplicit, invocation of the Precautionary Principle in public policy decisions.
If there is any chance, however small, that planes will fall out of the sky, we need to close all the airports.
If there is any chance, however small, that there will be a swine flue epidemic, we need to take any precautions we can find, however ineffective, against it.
If there is any chance that CO2 induced warming will destroy civilization on earth, we must act now....
And if there is any chance that standing on our heads will save our immortal souls, we should do that too, if we can find the time from the other precautions we are taking....
The AGW agenda has a great parallel in Lysenkoism, which ruined Soviet agriculture for two decades. This pseudo-science fitted so well with Marxist political thought that all dissent was crushed (usually fatally), while mad policies wedded to the nonsense 'science' helped cause major famines across Russia and China, while the leaders of those countries, far out of their intellectual depth, announced agricultural triumph after triumph. Sound familiar?
I have to say I do not agree with the Stalinism parallels. CAGW is being supported not enforced - it does not need to be enfoced, it has a life of its own. Though the results can be same, the difference is subtle.
CAGW is the perfect middle class horse. And I am talking about the "new middle classes". You can stick anything on the CAGW steed, you can appear to to be "active", care about the world. Yet you do not actually do anything to endanger your status. You do not actually have to get your hands dirty. You can be morally superior without much cost. The real definition of middle class is "to be afraid".
All these "news events" when successfully run are supported by the middle classes. And they are the key to the downfall of CAGW. And an even greater key to that are women, but there is nothing more frightened than a middle class woman, the MMR scandal in the UK being a prime example.
It would be relevant to recall the swine flu affair in the US in the late 70s.
Gerald Ford's administration was made to believe by the then CDC chief and others that "storing the virus in people is better than storing it in refrigerators".
The US vaccinated on a national basis and the whole program came undone with an increased incidence of Guillian-Barre syndrome.
The swine flu outbreak never converted to the expected lethal pandemic then too.
The vaccination program almost never took off, until an outbreak of Legionairres disease gave certain 'interested parties' an opportunity to ratchet up the flu alarmism and get the program rolling.
Interestingly enough, people like Roger Pielke Jr believe that this is a good thing (!!). He has stated repeatedly that one should 'use' a crisis to advance an agenda, in the context of CAGW.
Even though we can produce many recombinant vaccines, unlike the 1980's, we use eggs to produce the influenza vaccine. The rate of spread of influenza can be far rapid than the time required for inoculation and development of effective immunity. Graduated production therefore becomes an impractical solution - if you want to satisfy the precautionary principle. The only way to get around this is by stockpiling.
See this, for details:
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/notes/h1n1_vaccine_20090806/en/index.html
This material fact (of the vaccine production) in my view, is the crux of the issue - because this cannot be overcome, at the moment. We have arrange our activities around this fact. People use this same fact to feed alarmism and make money.
Given the antigenic complexity of the influenza virus and its property of antigenic 'shift' and drift' and its utter unpredictability with respect to virulence in its pandemic form, it is difficult to see how industrial vaccine production under the current paradigm can help
What we can do, of course, is give up on the precautionary principle, maintain smaller stocks, vaccinate the conventionally high-risk - the elderly and the children, maintain vaccine 'production readiness' and hope for the best.
People are more stoic and resilient (to fate in general, if not to disease itself) than the alarmist precautioners make them out to be.
And with nice timing...
A powerful lobbying organisation representing agribusiness interests helped draft a key government report that has been attacked by environmentalists for heavily favouring the arguments of the genetically modified food industry.
Based on the rewards (billions, trillions) is does not take much cash to leverage the right places... what is a few millions of lobbying money when the rewards are great?
Road pricing? The "price in the sky"? Every vehicle to have a box transmitting back? Totally unworkable at the time (and hopefully for many years to come.) Yet the the right lobbying got the ministers to propose it. A tiny investment for a huge project.. of course every big government IT project fails, but that is besides the point.
are we bothered though?
I just have to sit and drink my coffee to have "free" NHS coordinators next to me hear chat and recruit another batch of 3rd world nurses.
They get cheeky as the mastodont broads know how untouchable they are.
I was glad they did not tell me first to leave the place?
I know corruption when I seaa AND hear it.
reconciliation will happen when the "free" NHS gets payable, expensive, and the masotodons are back where they belong: On their couch eating cake, waiting for daddy to come from the mine. What daddy is having a go at thai girls instead ? Well yes maybe stop eating cake then.
Are we bothered,though?
strong efforts are gonna be asked from the quangoes: They'll have to lose 5% fat, from the war chest they built up of 300% , in personnel sizes.
The BBC will lose 1000 people I guess. Nick Robinson will shout "fascist!" then I guess, and their will be serious grimaces mimicked by comedians at the Ghay festival.
Real change would be if beeb shrank their personnel from 25.000 to 250, and the remaining 3gbp TVLtax is attributed to either Sky or BBC as you tick off on your tax form.
We would have a better BBC for it as wel.
We are not bothered though.
Build your fucking windmills then, for all I care.
Sure it can not do less damage than "trying to keep Basra safe" as the UK tried for 5 years.
not bothered.
OT, but involves British green jobs...
...for Germans!
http://www.thelocal.de/money/20100604-27655.html
P Gosselin
Since the Germans are bailing out the EU and euro with hard work, why not? Seems only fair, doesn't it? Give them work, pay them, tax them, give the money to the Greeks.
Seems to me that your comment is not off topic at all. It is all for the greater good of Europe! :)
phinniethewoo
I have long advocated cutting off the tele tax and letting beeb swing is the wind. Why the Brits permit themselves to be taxed to support the state's propaganda organ is beyond me.
Shub Niggurath
"Give up on the precautionary principle, maintain smaller stocks, vaccinate the conventionally high-risk - the elderly and the children, maintain vaccine 'production readiness'"
I would add "and decide IN ADVANCE what should trigger the start of production." And I don't mean panic headlines in the tabloids.
“… there is a revolving door between the civil service and big business and conflicts of interest are two-a-penny”
Another example of that seems to be related to the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. BP’s oil drilling was regulated by the U.S. Minerals Management Service. According to a report from CBS News, workers moved between industry and government jobs with ease—friends who often knew each other since childhood. MMS staffers accepted gifts from their oil industry friends—trips to the Peach Bowl, invitations to skeet shooting, crawfish boils, and hunting and fishing vacations. One MMS employee inspected a company four times while negotiating a job there.
Here is the best part.
The trick is not to be bothered anymore
I look at a windmill and i see a canonnised standardised nannystate product. In fact a complete picture of a nannystater frozen in time unless it is to whine and creep and crank a bit now and then.
The 600Mps should warden them, but they cannot can they? It would conflict with their lifestyles and the long traveldistances would compromise the family cohesion of the standard MP family.
you think I make this up , but this was the main concern as voiced up by some sophisticates in the BBC in the height of the expenses scandal. "why can they not travel like anybody else, instead of declaring 2nd mansions all over the place" an anarchist dared to ask vehemently.
"Ah that would be against the family cohesion of the MP family" some deluded cow dreamt up
In society 2.0 , we should mandate the MP to ritually burn his family at the stake first , before he is entered into Westminster.
what's worse is the fake 'pandemic' which automatically triggered the massive purchases by govts (with taxpayer monies) of the vaccine has been known about for six months or more and yet govts continued to push the vaccine.
even when the vaccine was causing seizures in australian children, the govt continued to promote the vaccine, undoubtedly hoping to reduce the stockpiles of vaccine and save embarrassment.
shockingly even now the scam is barely being reported, as compared with the thousands of daily media reports for months on end which promoted the scare. have u seen TV news programs exposing the scam? ironically, only aljazeera english has given time to the issue. most of the public get their news from mainstream TV channels.
as with CAGW, the media totally failed the public.
January 2010: Australian Daily Tele: Swine flu 'a false pandemic' to sell vaccines, expert says
Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, claimed major firms organized a "campaign of panic" to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic, UK tabloid The Sun reports.
He believes it is, "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century", and has called for an inquiry...
In an interview with France's L'Humanite on Sunday, Dr Wodarg also raised concerns about swine flu vaccines.
"The vaccines were developed too quickly. Some ingredients were insufficiently tested," he said.
"But there is worse to come. The vaccine developed by Novartis was produced in a bioreactor from cancerous cells, a technique that had never been used until now.
"This was not necessary. It has also led to a considerable mismanagement of public money...
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/world/swine-flu-a-false-pandemic-to-sell-vaccines-expert-says/story-e6frev00-1225818409903
11 Jan 2010: FirstPostUK: Swine flu is ‘one of the greatest medical scandals of the century’ says eminent epidemiologist
Dr Wodarg sees the root cause as lying in governments' responses to the avian flu (H5N1) outbreak of 2004. That virus, which had a far higher mortality of between 20 and 90 per cent, led to governments putting in place 'sleeping contracts' with pharmaceutical companies. These agreements are automatically triggered when the WHO declares a pandemic.
"'In this way," says Dr Wodarg, "the producers of vaccines are sure of enormous gains without having any financial risks.
"These large firms have 'their people' in the cogs and then they pull strings so that the right policy decisions are taken. That is to say, the ones that will allow them to pump as much money from taxpayers." ...
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/58213,news-comment,news-politics,world-health-organisation-and-big-pharma-face-swine-flu-false-pandemic-investigation
some european countries have been trying to get their money back from the pharma cos with no success so far. britain i understand has a billion pounds of the stuff unused - all taxpayer funded.
2 June: ABC Australia: Probe confirms spike in flu jab seizures
Earlier this year, health authorities suspended the use of the vaccine for children under five to give experts time to investigate nearly 300 reports of children falling ill after having the injection.
That investigation has found the number of children who suffered high fevers and seizures after having the flu vaccine was nine times higher than in previous years.
Health authorities first became aware of possible problems with the Fluvax vaccine in April, when dozens of children fell ill after having the jabs in Western Australia.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) now says it was a national trend, with nine in 1,000 children under the age of five having high fevers and seizures after being given the flu vaccine this year...
But infectious diseases clinician Professor Peter Collignon, from the Australian National University (ANU), says the vaccine should have been put through more rigorous testing before being prescribed to children.
"All the studies that have been done on this vaccine have been done in relatively small numbers of children - I think only about 168 children under the age of three," Professor Collignon said.
"There is a real lack of data on both the safety and how effective they are."...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/02/2916036.htm?section=justin
having read Wolfgang Wodarg's allegations months earlier, it truly shocked me that the australian govt continued to push the vaccine on to the public:
21 March: Aussies urged to get swine flu vaccine
The free PanvaxH1N1 vaccine is available to all Australians aged six months and older during the 2010 flu season
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/aussies-urged-to-get-swine-flu-vaccine-20100321-qnq7.html
***** Off topic but important *******
DECC is inviting The Public to comment on climate change policy here:
http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/energy-and-climate-change/
"The decision of the [ACIP] to recommend positive action on swine flu was unanimous. Only one member, Dr Russell Alexander, of the University of Washington School of Public Health, raised the question of the possibility of stockpiling the vaccine until a clearer signal emerged for its inoculation into people. He felt that one should always be conservative about putting foreign material into the human body, especially when the number of bodies approached 200 million"
-from Arthur M Silverstein, Pure Politics and Impure Science, 1981
You must be familiar with Ulrich Beck's concept of 'risk society'. In a sense, we do live in a risk society - in which organized responses to expected crises can do greater harm than the crises themselves.
The risk society idea is seductive for government organizations and therefore it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
1) It provides an opportunity for state actors to expand power. "We (the government) have to be involved!". Which is true to a good extent.
2) The voice of alarmist cackle gets amplified, as though their opinion was universally held. "What if we had the vaccine and did not stockpile/inject it? The people would never forgive us. Let us spend lots of money on vaccines"
At the same time, it would be interesting to think like this: If I were a government official in charge of the flu vaccine program and there is an expected flu pandemic of a animal-human transmitted variety (similar to one which reportedly wiped out millions in 1918), what would I do?
Slightly O/T, but did anyone else receive a call from some government agency discussing getting vaccinated?
I was actually held on the phone for 5 minutes whilst the person on the other end of the line tried in vain to get me too have a vaccine and question every reason I gave to not have it. All reasons ranging from "I don't want it" to "If you can prove to me that getting the virus will kill me, without there being any underlying health issue then maybe we could talk" were met with tuts and deep sighs. Yet all she wanted to do was fill me with fear (which didn't work). She sounded annoyed with my responses to the end and cut the conversation short.
I didn't think they would resort to scaremongering on such a 1 to 1 basis.
without in any way advocating conficts of interest (these of course need rooted out and stopped) the answer is not to put up barriers between public and private sector... there should be a revolving door between public and private sectors...both desperately need to learn from the other - repeatingly over time. The revolving door needs encouraged...
Don Pablo
"Why the Brits permit themselves to be taxed to support the state's propaganda organ is beyond me."
Because the alternatives are so much worse (and in Sky's case, a lot more expensive). I accept that the Beeb has a blind spot about AGW, and I wish it hadn't been so craven to Blair and Campbell over Iraq, but it has some excellent foreign correspondents and I listen to its radio output all the time. The fact that China got the BBC thrown off Murdoch's Star satellite tells you all you really need to know, IMO.
Douglas
"BP’s oil drilling was regulated by the U.S. Minerals Management Service"
Funny how we don't seem to have heard much about that...
Some of the comments are quite SAD, ie retire people blowing money on being green...
chinese ebay solar panel salesmen will bedoing well..
Janet Haselwood says: 7 June 2010 at 12:18 pm
We tried to do our bit for Climate Change and installed a 6KW wind turbine in June last year at a cost in excess of £22,000. We knew that feed in tarifs would be coming, what we didn’t know is that the if we installed before the announcement then we would be penalised greatly for this. Our electricity company is honouring 15p per unit generated for the first twelve months in the vain hope that the Government reward early adopters of renewable energy, after this we will get 9p for each unit generated and 3p for each unit exported. A loss of 6p for every unit we use and a loss of 2p for every unit we export, how can that be right?
Mrs Michelle Burrells says: 7 June 2010 at 12:18 pm
I am one of those people who has been interested in producing green energy for many years and as part of a retired married couple thought that spending a large portion of our savings on installing a photovoltaic array to produce some of our electric and a solar thermal panel to warm our water would be an investment that would not only help with reducing our carbon foot print but also allow us a fair return on the investment. The change from ROC’s to the new feed in tariff has penalized all the early investors in this new technology. Without the brave early investors in any new technology is to be discouraged by being treated unfairly how will any progress be made. I have found that if I had waited until this April I would be paid 42p + per KWh for any electricity I produced for the next 25 years.
But that the reward for any who invested before that time is reduced from 10p to 9p. At the higher rate of 42p for the 20 years left of the original 25 year term I would have recouped my investment after 18 years and a small profit after that where as I will now not recoup the cost until nearly 30 years. Everyone in the electric companies and installers have lobbied about the unfairness of this. Does the coalition intend to make the situation any fairer?
---------------------------
I wonder if my longish comment will appear.
http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/energy-and-climate-change/
The Honest Broker joins the discussion.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/06/bmj-and-pace-on-who-coi.html
another day with the media ignoring the vaccine scam.
amusingly UK Telegraph only has it on a blog (ditto delingpole's anti-CAGW blog):
UK Tele: Daniel Hannan: Swine ’flu and Big Pharma: why is there no scandal?
This revelation has received less than a thousandth of the media coverage that attended the original “epidemic”. Why is there not more sense of scandal? Are health correspondents embarrassed about the role they played in stoking the panic? Or is it simply that health scares sell more newspapers than government bungling?..
(READER COMMENT)
It's important to follow this story to it's conclusion, because the same will happen with man-made global warming. The supporters of the hypothesis will gradually melt away and hope that no-one brings it up. Meanwhile, the taxpayer has the expensive memories.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100042331/swine-flu-and-big-pharma-why-is-there-no-scandal/
whilst it would be nice to believe CAGW believers will "melt away", in reality there is much work to be done to bring the uncertainties of the hypothesis to the general public, as the media cannot be relied on to report the facts.
btw the 120 days for Penn State's inquiry re Michael Mann is up, but no word from them as yet. if the panel decided he violated University policy, he would get 14 days to respond, so who knows whether or not we are now into that 14 day period.
thought it was interesting that frederick hayden, whose name crops up in the WHO swine flu scam, is at Mann's old haunt (spooked), University of Virginia, and also amused that Hayden is one of the 800 'scientists' who wrote the letter to Cuccinelli to try to get the investigation of Mann stopped:
CTV Canada: Journal says WHO flu advisers had conflict of interest
Though the BMJ article raises questions about a variety of WHO actions, a key complaint in the article relates to a document entitled "WHO Guidelines on the Use of Vaccines and Antivirals during Influenza Pandemics." It was published in 2004 but was based on consultations that took place in October 2002.
Three members of the committee that drew up the document are Dr. Frederick Hayden of the University of Virginia, Dr. Arnold Monto of the University of Michigan and Dr. Karl Nicholson of Leicester Royal Infirmary in England...
http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20100604/flu-pandemic-100604/20100604/?hub=TorontoNewHome
Letter to Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, II asking Cuccinelli to drop inquiry into Michael Mann
(among signatories) Frederick Hayden, M.D.
Charlottesville
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/scientific_integrity/Virginia-Scientist-Letter.pdf
Arnold Monto also no doubt has some background worth investigating:
Council of Foreign Relations: Pandemic Influenza: Science, Economics, and Foreign Policy: Session One: The Science (Video)
October 16, 2009
Speakers: Arnold Monto, Professor, Epidemiology, University of Michigan
Presider: Jon Cohen, Correspondent, Science Magazine
This session was part of a CFR symposium, Pandemic Influenza: Science, Economics, and Foreign Policy, which was cosponsored with Science Magazine
http://www.cfr.org/publication/20439/pandemic_influenza.html?breadcrumb=%2Fpublication%2Fpublication_list%3Ftype%3Dvideo%26page%3D4
(this is authored by a number of people, but the University has Monto listed down the page)
Uni of Michigan Dept Public Health: Faculty in the News - September, 2009
Arnold S Monto, "U.S. needs nearly $200 million more on climate-related health research," Medicalnewstoday.com, September 28, 2009
http://www.sph.umich.edu/iscr/news_events/clips_month.cfm?month=9&year=2009
O/T - a brief chance to influence UK climate policy
OK, maybe my message from yesterday lacked context. Here's the text of an email that I received yesterday morning from DECC:
“Programme for Government – Have Your Say on Energy and Climate Change Policy
Do you want to help shape the Coalition Government’s energy and climate change policies?
The Programme for Government website gives you the opportunity to enter public discussion on key areas. Departments will then use comments for policy development and the Government will also respond in coming weeks to the most popular areas of feedback. The comments function on the website will close at the end of Thursday 10 June.
Add your comments to the Energy and Climate Change section on the Programme for Government website ”
The web address is:
http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/energy-and-climate-change/
The website has been taking comments since 24 May, but the email from DECC is date 7 June and they will only be taking comments until this Thursday, 10 June.
This is a rare opportunity for the sceptical majoity to have its voice heard. Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Bish - this is an interesting document, if you haven't seen it yet - referred to by someone at the DECC site:
http://www.probeinternational.org/UPennCross.pdf
"Global Warming Advocacy Science: a Cross Examination"
Jason Scott Johnston, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, May 2010
Pielke Jr has a good piece on this at http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/06/bmj-and-pace-on-who-coi.html with links to BMJ etc.....
http://www.dw-gmf.de/4830.php
Our old friend Bob Ward is planning to give some friendly advice to German journalists on , "How to professionally deal with climate scepticism"
Specifically: "This workshop aims to point out what journalists must know about climate change policy, whom to trust and when to question their own professional procedures."
The other panelist Naomi Oreskes is also of interest.
In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited.
Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the AGW hypothesis.
Conclusion: There is no actual scientific consensus on AGW.
Back to journalism, this workshop is all about "who do you trust?"
However to have trust in the AGW hypthesis both Ward and Oreskes are to argue that journalists have to reject their own professional training of neutrality in dealing with conflicting opinions of global warming facts.
That is replacing genuine reporting on climate science with AGW propaganda.
Now consider the signficance of German 20th century history and the role of state propaganda from the First World War to the end of the Cold War. Do German journalists wish to repeat the mistakes of the past?
Similar vein:
Legal verdict: Manmade global warming science doesn’t withstand scrutiny
University of Pensylvania may 2010
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/06/06/legal-verdict-manmade-global-warming-science-doesn%E2%80%99t-withstand-scrutiny/
By Lawrence Solomon June 6, 2010 – 10:47 pm
A cross examination of global warming science conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics has concluded that virtually every claim advanced by global warming proponents fail to stand up to scrutiny.
The cross-examination, carried out by Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, found that “on virtually every major issue in climate change science, the [reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and other summarizing work by leading climate establishment scientists have adopted various rhetorical strategies that seem to systematically conceal or minimize what appear to be fundamental scientific uncertainties or even disagreements.”
Professor Johnson, who expressed surprise that the case for global warming was so weak, systematically examined the claims made in IPCC publications and other similar work by leading climate establishment scientists and compared them with what is found in the peer-edited climate science literature. He found that the climate establishment does not follow the scientific method. Instead, it “seems overall to comprise an effort to marshal evidence in favor of a predetermined policy preference.”
BW: Looks like we have a new climate-science acronym - GWAS (Global Warming Advocacy Science).
BW: http://www.probeinternational.org/UPennCross.pdf
This is quite an extensive and conclusive report.
The section on the hockey stick is a good summary.
The current issue of Boston Review has an article by Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (the world’s most prestigious medical journal). The article is about the conflicts of interest in medical research due to the money coming in from pharmaceutical companies. Here is a quote.
I concur with Mac
http://www.probeinternational.org/UPennCross.pdf
Is well worth a good read. It the literature review that the IPCC should have done in the IPCC AR4 and demomstrates very convincingly IMO that the science is far from settled
Swine flu is one of the recent stories where vast amounts of money (and Tamiflu) were used very quickly on the basis that no harm could be done by responding to the worst case scenario (rather than the science). The figure is truly impressive for money spent and very well hidden.There was no evidence that Tamiflu would work just an enormous stockpile and it suited to use it
The achilles heel of science has always been predicting future events, the science of observation is easy, the science of predicitng future events in complex systems is well.... uncertain
need a laugh? Berners-Lee will provide it:
8 June: Guardian: Mike Berners-Lee: What's the carbon footprint of ... cycling a mile?
More carbon footprints: nuclear war, a pint of beer, more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/08/carbon-footprint-cycling
7 June: Guardian: Mike Berners-Lee: What's the carbon footprint of ... a heart bypass operation?
If you want to go green, look after your health – a major operation compares to two short-haul flights
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/jun/03/carbon-footprint-healthcare
4 June: Guardian: Mike Berners-Lee: What is a carbon footprint?
Beware carbon toe-prints
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/jun/04/carbon-footprint-definition
8 June: BBC: Mike Berners-Lee: A bad reputation
4. New Zealand apples may come from the other side of the world, but they are still fine as low carbon food - and healthy too. The point is they travel on a boat which is around 100 times better than a plane.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8726794.stm
re BBC excerpt: the Guardian which loves Berners-Lee has previously reported:
2007: Guardian: John Vidal: CO2 output from shipping twice as much as airlines
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/mar/03/travelsenvironmentalimpact.transportintheuk
2008: Guardian: John Vidal: True scale of C0₂emissions from shipping revealed
Leaked UN report says pollution three times higher than previously thought
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/13/climatechange.pollution
noticed Berners-Lee is a Special Advisor at Crichton Carbon Centre in Scotland, along with a Professor Boulton (surely Geoffrey):
Crichton Carbon Centre, Scotland: Our Team
Special Advisors: Professor Boulton
Mike Berners-Lee
http://www.carboncentre.org/about-us-mainmenu-26/our-team-mainmenu-1752.html
Flu experts rebut conflict claims
Reports throw unsubstantiated suspicion on scientific advice given to the World Health Organization.
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100608/full/465672a.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1285270/New-evidence-humans-walked-upright-hot.html
I have heard of 'thermal hypothesis' before, the evolution of bipedalism being linked to a much warmer climate. Basically early humans stood up to cool down.
Bipedalism is also linked to increased brain size, and both are linked to the spread of early humans right across Africa and beyond.
It is a tad ironic that the eco-loons are pronouncing the certain death of humanity due to global warming when it was global warming that gave early humans a huge evolutionary advantage on this planet.
Humans prosper in a warmer climate, it's in our genes.
Sure this sounds familiar, esp. here in the States.
http://dailycaller.com/2010/06/10/bp-is-asking-for-its-punishment%E2%80%94literally/
This piece deserves a wide audience: Obama giving BP what they want.