Category: Science!

Trust Whom?

Health, Science!

The other day New Wife and I were talking about something that affects her school greatly:  peanut allergies among the kiddies — allergies which can be life-threatening.

I said to her:  “When we were kids, nobody had a peanut allergy.  Now it seems to be all over the place.  When did this become so much of a problem, and why?”

Turns out the answer is quite simple:  fucked-up science.  Here’s the story:

The roots of this particular example of expert-inflicted mass suffering can be found in the early 1990s, when the existence of peanut allergies — still a very rare and mostly low-risk phenomenon at the time — first came to public notice. Their entry into public consciousness began with studies published by medical researchers. By the mid-1990s, however, major media outlets were running attention-grabbing stories of hospitalized children and terrified parents. The Great Parental Peanut Panic was on.

As fear and dread mounted, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a professional association of tens of thousands of US pediatricians, felt compelled to tell parents how to prevent their children from becoming the latest victims. “There was just one problem: They didn’t know what precautions, if any, parents should take,” wrote then-Johns Hopkins surgeon and now-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary in his 2024 book, Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.

Ignorance proved no obstacle. Lacking humility and seeking to bolster its reputation as an authoritative organization, the AAP in 2000 handed down definitive instructions: Parents should avoid feeding any peanut product to children under 3 years old who were believed to have a high risk of developing a peanut allergy; pregnant and lactating mothers were likewise cautioned against consuming peanuts.

The AAP noted that “the ability to determine which infants are at high risk is imperfect.” Indeed, simply having a relative with any kind of allergy could land a child or mother in the “high risk” category. Believing they were erring on the side of caution, pediatricians across the country started giving blanket instructions that children shouldn’t be fed any peanut food until age 3; pregnant and breastfeeding mothers were told to steer clear too.

So now we know when, and how.  But what was this based upon?

What was the basis of the AAP’s pronouncement? The organization was simply parroting guidance that the UK Department of Health had put forth in 1998. Makary scoured that guidance for a scientific rationale, and found a declaration that mothers who eat peanuts were more likely to have children with allergies, with the claim attributed to a 1996 study. When he checked the study, however, he was shocked to find the data demonstrated no such correlation.

In fact, the way to prevent your kids from getting a peanut allergy is precisely the opposite to what these assholes insisted upon:

  • when you’re pregnant, eat peanuts
  • after the kid is born, feed it peanut butter (in small quantities, of course)
  • so its physiology can learn to deal with peanuts, like it does with all foods and illnesses.

Fucking hell.

The next time someone suggests that we “trust the experts”, we should tell them to go and fuck themselves.  And if bodies such as the AAP can’t be trusted to do the proper due diligence with the scientific data in hand, they need to be fired, sued and all the other ways that such negligence and outright error can be punished.

I was thinking “mass floggings”, but no doubt someone’s going to have a problem with this.

And if you’re wondering how we can ascertain such incompetence for ourselves, look askance at any suggestion which “errs on the side of caution“.  (See:  Covid-19, reaction to.)

Ditto anything that comes from the UK Department of Health (i.e. those fine folks who brought you today’s NHS).

That’s a red flag, if ever there was one.

Garbage Collection

Science!, Technology

For a bunch of supposed scientists, these tits seem to be remarkably unworldly [sic]:

Earth’s orbit is filling up with junk. Greenhouse gases are making the problem worse.
By the end of the century, a shrinking atmosphere could create a minefield for satellites.

I’m going to ignore the “greenhouse gases” bit because I have an abiding suspicion of headlines which require that we stop buying SUVs and generating electricity.

I’ll buy the first part, though, because that’s actual scientific observation.

Now I’m not a scientist, make no claims to be one, and I’m certainly no astrophysicist.  But I am a capitalist, and it seems to me that the solution is not to turn off all lightbulbs on Earth, but to let the market take care of the junk problem, by simply collecting it and disposing of it as we do with all our other household junk.

Here’s my suggestion:  have ol’ Elon Musk design a giant Shop-Vac that can be mounted on one of his rockets, and launch it into space to collect debris.  Then, when the receptacle is full, launch the craft into the general direction of the Sun for eventual incineration.  This action could be repeated with more Junk-X spacecraft until our atmosphere is neat and tidy again.

Now this job and technology wouldn’t be cheap, and SpaceX would need to be paid (because Elon may sometimes be a philanthropist, but he’s not a complete sucker either).  But paid by whom?

Well, considering that this would benefit mankind in general, it should not be funded by any single country — yeah, ten guesses which country would be expected to fund it — but by all nations on Earth.

Is there a global organization which should sponsor SpaceX to complete this function? Uh, lemme think… oh yeah, how about this lot?

You might think that the U.N. doesn’t have the funds to pay SpaceX, but I’ll be that if their budget was scrutinized, there’d be a whole bunch of inefficiencies and waste which could be re-purposed towards so noble an objective.

And in a Great Circle Of Life manifestation, I bet that Elon’s DOGE whizzkids could find the dollars in about a couple of days, if they could be let loose on the United Nations’ budget…

Weather Vain

Lies and Untruths, Science!, Trumpism

Here’s a consequence of being entrusted to collect critical data, then using that data to peddle a false narrative:

The US government’s weather agency has been dismantled by the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) after it was accused of peddling “misinformation”.

Hundreds of weather forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were fired last week as part of Donald Trump’s plans to slash the federal workforce.

In total, at least 800 civil servants are thought to have lost their jobs, including meteorologists, radar specialists and crews of hurricane hunters, who fly aircraft into storms to help forecasters, according to CBS.

Of course, out come the apocalyptic doomsayers:

The job cuts have triggered protests at the agency’s headquarters in Maryland, with some scientists and lawmakers warning that removing staff involved in predicting natural disasters will “endanger American lives going forward”.

No, they won’t — at least, no more than they ever did before.  There are several other avenues of getting such warnings — from private enterprise — and not from some Gummint malignancy.

But here’s the critical part, from someone who’s been doing the hard work of tracking this nonsense for a decade and a half:

Prof Roger Pielke, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on the politicization of science, said that the agency is “reaping the whirlwind” for “cutting corners on science”.

“By not upholding the highest standards of scientific integrity, we’ve opened the door to politicians meddling,” he said.

According to experts, studies and former NOAA officials, the chart proves little about the effects of climate change, and instead shows that disasters are becoming more expensive because Americans choose to build in hazard-prone areas.

“The problem is you can’t use economic data to say anything about climate change,” said Prof Pielke.

Quite right.  Collecting data to forewarn of disaster, then using that data incorrectly and unethically to further a boutique (and flawed) worldview — that would be Global Warming Climate Cooling Change©, of course — deserves censure of the second-highest order.  (“First-order” censure would be imprisonment and so on.)

So of course this little clique of taxpayer-funded climate alarmists deserves to be shut up and disbanded.

MOAR DOGE like this, please.

Goodbye, Witchcraft

Eco-Crap, Good Stuff, Science!

If you look at all my posts about Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© over the years, you will see all the following points appear at some time or another.

1. The modest increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide that has taken place since the end of the Little Ice Age has been net-beneficial to humanity.
2. Foreseeable future increases in greenhouse gases in the air will probably also prove net-beneficial.
3. The rate and amplitude of global warming have been and will continue to be appreciably less than climate scientists have long predicted.
4. The Sun, and not greenhouse gases, has contributed and will continue to contribute the overwhelming majority of global temperature.
5. Geological evidence compellingly suggests that the rate and amplitude of global warming during the industrial era are neither unprecedented nor unusual.
6. Climate models are inherently incapable of telling us anything about how much global warming there will be or about whether or to what extent the warming has a natural or anthropogenic cause.
7. Global warming will likely continue to be slow, small, harmless and net-beneficial.
8. There is broad agreement among the scientific community that extreme weather events have not increased in frequency, intensity or duration and are in future unlikely to do so.
9. Though global population has increased fourfold over the past century, annually averaged deaths attributable to any climate-related or weather-related event have declined by 99%.
10. Global climate-related financial losses, expressed as a percentage of global annual gross domestic product, have declined and continue to decline notwithstanding the increase in built infrastructure in harm’s way.
11. Despite trillions of dollars spent chiefly in Western countries on emissions abatement, global temperature has continued to rise since 1990.
12. Even if all nations, rather than chiefly western nations, were to move directly and together from the current trajectory to net zero emissions by the official target year of 2050, the global warming prevented by that year would be no more than 0.05 to 0.1 Celsius.
13. If the Czech Republic, the host of this conference, were to move directly to net zero emissions by 2050, it would prevent only 1/4000 of a degree of warming by that target date.
14. Based pro rata on the estimate by the UK national grid authority that preparing the grid for net zero would cost $3.8 trillion (the only such estimate that is properly-costed), and on the fact that the grid accounts for 25% of UK emissions, and that UK emissions account for 0.8% of global emissions, the global cost of attaining net zero would approach $2 quadrillion, equivalent to 20 years’ global annual GDP.
15. On any grid where the installed nameplate capacity of wind and solar power exceeds the mean demand on that grid, adding any further wind or solar power will barely reduce grid CO2 emissions but will greatly increase the cost of electricity and yet will reduce the revenues earned by both new and existing wind and solar generators.
16. The resources of techno-metals required to achieve global net zero emissions are entirely insufficient even for one 15-year generation of net zero infrastructure, so that net zero is in practice unattainable.
17. Since wind and solar power are costly, intermittent and more environmentally destructive per TWh generatedthan any other energy source, governments should cease to subsidize or to prioritize them, and should instead expand coal, gas and, above, all nuclear generation.
18. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which excludes participants and published papers disagreeing with its narrative, fails to comply with its own error-reporting protocol and draws conclusions some of which are dishonest, should be forthwith dismantled.
Okay, there may be a couple in there that I didn’t write (e.g. #13), but I think you get the gist.
As it happened, the above came from a gathering of actual scientists in Prague.  These are actual scientists, as opposed to a bunch of gloomy watermelons subsidized by Leftist governments and universities.
I expect the response from the Fainting Goats On The Left will be the usual mix of screams, character assassination and assorted hysteria.
From right-thinking people, however, the response will just be nods of agreement and approval.

About Those Hurricanes

Science!, Watermelons, Weather

…it turns out that this year is not going to see a “supercharged” hurricane season in the Caribbean and southeastern United States, and it’s a worrying prospect to all the Climate Alarmist Assholes like that “Hockey Stick” charlatan:

Penn State celebrity climate scientist Michael Mann announced in April that his research group’s 2024 North Atlantic season forecast was expecting an “unprecedented” 33 named storms, with a range between 27 and 39. That prediction has turned out to be a dud.

With Hurricane Francine hitting the coasts Thursday, the total number of named storms only comes to six, making it one of the quietest hurricane seasons to date.

I’m not going to bother to point out, yet again, that using “climate models” to predict short-term weather patterns is a waste of time, and not just because almost all climate models suck green donkey dicks, statistically speaking.

What needs pointing out is that the great Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© movement is a load of bullshit, not the least for the reasons stated above, but also because fanatical adherence to its so-called “prophecies” is leading towards societal collapse as our power needs are increasingly constrained in pursuit of the movement’s largely-unattainable goals.

Why Rejuvenation?

Science!

Here’s one that got me thinking:

Scientists have found ancient [herpes] viruses locked inside Neanderthal bones that are 50,000 years old — and experts could be set to recreate them.  The team who made the discovery now plan to try and synthesize these viruses to see how they compare to modern ones.

Clearly, the modern, largely-incurable herpes viruses aren’t enough for us to deal with.

Okay, let’s have them explain themselves:

“These Jurassic Park-like viruses could then be studied for their reproductive and pathogenic traits and compared to present-day counterparts.” 

Actually, no.  The last fucking thing we need is to find out how they reproduced themselves.  Why?  Because once we do, the shit will be able to reproduce itself.

Wuhan, anyone?

The hell with that.  I’m very supportive of Scientific Curiosity and all that, but sometimes you just have to draw the line.

And frankly, if we’re going to bring old stuff back to life, what’s wrong with resurrecting the mid-1950-era Mercedes 300 SC?

They could be made in all pretty colors, with- or without soft tops, etc., etc.

Oh wait, I forgot:  that’s engineering, not !Science!

Still, I put it to my Readers that having the world flooded with fine 300 SCs would be far more beneficial to life than doing the same with a 50,000-year-old pox.

Feel free to propose other extinct things you’d like to bring back to the modern world;  but I have to warn y’all, I got fibs on crucifixion.