California bureaucrats consider lowering detection limit for purposes of reporting for perchlorate

This is my response to the State Water Resources Control Board regarding their proposal for lowered detection limit for purposes of reporting for perchlorate. (see the previous post for SWRCB’s announcement).

 

The California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) seems to appreciate the Precautionary Principle, which says, “When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”

In 1825, one of Britain’s most respected publications, the Quarterly Review wanted something quite similar to the Precautionary Principle invoked over railroads. Unless someone took action, locomotives would careen through the countryside at speeds “twice as fast as stagecoaches.” It was potentially dangerous.

According to experts of the day, locomotives threatened harm to the environment and human health. Some physicians predicted that the incredibly high speeds (nearly 20 miles per hour) could cause psychological harm; people would suffer mental anguish from objects entering and leaving their fields of vision too rapidly. Others predicted that passing trains would cause pregnant mares to spontaneously abort. The Review beseeched, “We trust that Parliament will, in all railways it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour.”

As we know, the world heeded these foresighted experts invoking precautionary measures, and as a result, no mode of transport exceeds eight or nine miles an hour today. Well no, the world didn’t embrace that, but such is the thinking of the SWRCB with regard to perchlorate, Chromium-6, and other chemicals.

In its background material on perchlorate, the SWRCB conflates its use with toxicity, omits that it occurs naturally in nature and is a byproduct of chlorination, and it disregards “dose makes the poison.”

The SWRCB tells the reader that “Perchlorate and its salts are used in solid propellant for rockets, missiles, and fireworks, and elsewhere (e.g., production of matches, flares, pyrotechnics, ordnance, and explosives).”  The information ominously adds, “Their use can lead to releases of perchlorate into the environment.”

Perhaps it was meant to simplify, but the information is incomplete. It neglects to mention that perchlorate occurs naturally in the environment, and, in certain desert areas, in concentrations higher than those quoted as being found in California. Perchlorate is also a byproduct of water treatment disinfection with sodium hypochlorite.

SWRCB’s information page does note that “Perchlorate’s interference with iodide uptake by the thyroid gland can decrease production of thyroid hormone, which is needed for prenatal and postnatal growth and development, as well as for normal metabolism and mental function in the adult.” It is exactly for this reason why perchlorate was used to treat hyperthyroidism due to Graves disease and to treat thyroid gland disorders resulting from the accumulation of excess iodine. SWRCB neglects to point out the high dosages needed for these affects. As the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) pointed out, “Clinical use of perchlorate in treating disease involves doses up to 400 milligrams on a daily basis, a level which is thousands of times greater than potential environmental exposures.”

It is this disregard of even the most basic toxicology that is disturbing.

Every compound no matter how dangerous, has a level at which it is benign; and every compound, no matter how benign, has a level at which it is toxic. Or as Paracelsus (1493-1541) put it, “All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.” Take two aspirin for a headache and it has a therapeutic effect. Take two grains of an aspirin tablet, nothing happens. Take two pounds of aspirin for a headache and the headache will be gone, along with the person who took it.

Dose determines risk. In a peer-reviewed paper on perchlorate, the ACSH emphasized, “it is imperative that this cornerstone principle of toxicology be included in any assessment of perchlorate. Mere detection of a chemical in the environment cannot be equated with increased risk, but must be evaluated in terms of the hazard, dose-response, and human exposure, all steps in the characterization of health risk.” This, the SWRCB has neglected to do. It relies on the new technology to detect lower perchlorate levels without justifying the need using the above criteria.

The Dose-Response of the body is of utmost importance. As Frank Schnell, board-certified, PhD toxicologist (retired) explains Dose-Response,

“Most biological effects, whether adverse or not, are the consequence of a cascade of biochemical reactions initiated when chemical agents (referred to by pharmacologists and toxicologists generically as “effectors,” “agonists” or “ligands”) bind to effect-specific macromolecular receptors usually distributed on cell surfaces. It is of supreme indifference to the receptor whether the chemical binding to it is of natural, synthetic, endogenous, or exogenous origin. As long as the ligand fits into the receptor’s active site, the former will produce the effect mediated by that receptor.

“This receptor-mediated mechanism of action accounts for the existence of thresholds of effect and for the S-shaped Dose-Response (D-R) Curve that typically results when the strength of the effect (from zero- to 100%-response) is plotted on the ordinate (y-axis) against the logarithm of the dose on the abscissa (x-axis).”

Figure 1 Dose-Response Sigmoid Curve

Now, here’s the kicker, Schnell writes that

“A sub-threshold concentration of the effector will not activate enough receptors to produce in the cell a significant effect. (If this were not the case, the effective regulation of normal metabolic processes would not be possible.)” (emphasis added)

A review of existing research, not innuendo and ill-informed supposition, reveals SWRCB has overstated a need for increased monitoring.

In its discussion of health effects of perchlorates, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) noted:

“In a study of the general population, Li et al. (2001) examined the prevalence of thyroid diseases in Nevada Counties with respect to perchlorate in drinking water. The cohort consisted of all users of the Nevada Medicaid program during the period of January 1, 1997 to December 31, 1998. Disease prevalence in residents from Clark County (Las Vegas), whose drinking water had 4–24 ? g/L of perchlorate (0.0001–0.0007 mg perchlorate/kg/day), were compared with those from another urban area of similar size (Reno, Washoe County), but with no perchlorate in the water, and also with those from all other counties, also with no perchlorate exposure…. Analysis of the data showed no statistically significant period-prevalence rate difference between Clark County and Washoe County. For acquired hypothyroidism, the prevalence was lower in Clark County than in other counties (opposite to what would be expected).”

However, the SWCRB backgrounder worries that infants may be less tolerant of perchlorate exposure: “Perchlorate’s interference with iodide uptake by the thyroid gland can decrease production of thyroid hormone, which is needed for prenatal and postnatal growth and development, as well as for normal metabolism and mental function in the adult.”

Again, in its discussion of health effects of perchlorates, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) found nothing rising to the level of needing more monitoring or regulation on perchlorate:

“Several developmental studies of perchlorate in humans have focused on the evaluation of neonatal thyroid parameters. Lamm and Doemland (1999) examined rates of congenital hypothyroidism in seven counties of Nevada and California with perchlorate contamination in the drinking water (4–16 ?g/L [ppb]) (0.0001–0.0005 mg/kg/day). The investigators analyzed data from the neonatal screening programs of the two states for any increased incidence of congenital hypothyroidism in those counties. The rates for the California births were adjusted for Hispanic ethnicity, which was known to be a risk factor for congenital hypothyroidism. During 1996 and 1997, nearly 700,000 newborns were screened. The risk ratio in the seven counties was 1.0 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.9–1.2) (249 cases observed/243 expected). The risk ratios for the individual counties relative to statewide expected rates ranged from 0.6 to 1.1. While the results showed no increase in rates of congenital hypothyroidism, it is known that congenital hypothyroidism is caused by developmental events that are not suspected of being affected by perchlorate exposure.

“Kelsh et al. (2003) also found no relationship between congenital hypothyroidism and exposure to perchlorate through the drinking water in a study of newborns (n=15,348) whose mothers resided in the community of Redlands, California, during the period 1983 through 1997 and who were screened by the California Newborn Screening Program. Perchlorate was detected in the water system serving the community at a concentration of up to 9 ?g/L (mean, <1 ?g/L).”

“Crump et al. (2000) conducted a study of school-age children from three cities with different concentrations of perchlorate in drinking water in northern Chile. The city with the highest perchlorate concentration was Taltal, 100–120 ?g perchlorate/L (ppb), water from the city of Chañaral had 5–7 ?g/L, and perchlorate was not detected in water from the city of Antofagasta. The study comprised 162 children 6–8 years of age, of which 127 had resided continuously in their respective city since conception. The children underwent examination of the thyroid gland and a blood sample was taken for analysis of TSH, T4, FTI, T3, and antiperoxidase antibody. After adjusting for sex, age, and urinary iodide excretion, the children from Taltal and Chañaral had slightly lower TSH levels than children from Antofagasta (opposite to expected), but the differences were not statistically significant.”

SWRCB’s cherry-picking of information may be charitably viewed as providing a worst-case scenario. While that may be the intent, SWRCB’s background information is rendered biased rather than useful or informative. It is pearl-clutching designed to scare people and thus allow the SWRCB to further ratchet down the already unreasonable EPA maximum contaminant level (MCL) of six parts per billion (6 ppb) in drinking water to something so low as to be ludicrous. The NOAEL for perchlorate  translates to a Drinking Water Equivalent Level (DWEL) of 24.5 ppb.

The ignorance and laziness of our public officials to accept the word of activists, such as the Environmental Working Group, over pragmatic scientists hurts people. When we require people to spend money on the wrong priorities, that money is not available for things that could truly save lives. As Schnell told me in an email, “In real life, excess conservatism doesn’t just waste money; it also costs lives… i.e., the ones that could have been saved had the wasted money been spent more wisely.”

And this is real money. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University, puts the amount of money lost since 1980 due to added regulation at $4 trillion; a drag of 25 percent on our gross domestic product (GDP). “If regulation had been held constant at levels observed in 1980, the US economy would have been about 25 percent larger than it actually was as of 2012….This amounts to a loss of approximately $13,000 per capita, a significant amount of money for most American workers.”

Of course, economics alone should not guide us in decision making. But as Bjorn Lomborg reminds us, “[I]gnoring costs doesn’t make difficult choices disappear; it makes them less clear.”

It is disturbing to find the SWRCB more responsive to the environmental lobby than to the scientific communities. SWRCB provides conjecture without any data to support the need for lowered MCL.  As such the legitimate needs of Californians are subsumed by rhetoric. California’s citizens are ill-served if they are made poorer and not safer with ill-considered regulations, abandoning any pretense of scientific objectivity and embracing the paranoid the Precautionary Principle of scaremongering activist environmental NGOs. SWRCB relies on supposition, pearl-clutching, and innuendo rather than science with its messy research. One can only conclude that SWRCB has abandoned basic science for basic fear-mongering.

 

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An Open Letter to California’s State Water Resources Control Board (Draft)

I received this in an email on June 16, 2017 and I’ve been mulling it over since then.

This is a message from the State Water Resources Control Board.

You are receiving this email because you have requested notification from the State Water Resources Control Board, Division of Drinking Water (DDW) regarding important updates on drinking water regulations.  DDW has completed a review of the perchlorate maximum contaminant level (MCL).  DDW will present the findings of the review and recommend investigation of a lowered detection limit for purposes of reporting, or DLR, at the July 5, 2017 Board Meeting in Sacramento.  If the Water Board agrees with the staff recommendation, and directs an investigation into lowering the DLR, the public will have another opportunity to comment on any proposed changes to the regulations during the rulemaking process, which is subject to a 45-day comment period under the Administrative Procedures Act.

The attached document is a summary of the findings and recommendations.  If you would like to make any comments regarding the summary or recommendation, then please submit your comments by June 29 to either:

ddwregunit@waterboards.ca.gov
or
Division of Drinking Water
Attn: David Pimentel
State Water Resources Control Board
1001 I Street, 17th Floor
Sacramento, CA   95814

Opportunity for comment may also be made available during the July 5 Board Hearing.  Additional information regarding the perchlorate MCL, Board Meeting procedures, and the specific time and location of the Board Meeting will be posted soon on DDW’s perchlorate website:

http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinkingwater/Perchlorate.shtml

Below is my draft response. I welcome your thoughts regarding it.

Re: Perchlorate

The California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) seems toappreciate the Precautionary Principle.

The 1998 Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle says, “When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”

In 1825, one of Britain’s most respected publications, the Quarterly Review wanted something quite similar to the Precautionary Principle invoked over railroads. Locomotives could careen through the countryside at speeds “twice as fast as stagecoaches.” It was potentially dangerous.

According to experts of the day, locomotives threatened harm to the environment and human health. Some physicians predicted that the incredibly high speeds (nearly 20 miles per hour) could cause psychological harm; people would suffer mental anguish from objects entering and leaving their fields of vision too rapidly. Others predicted that passing trains would cause pregnant mares to spontaneously abort. The Review beseeched, “We trust that Parliament will, in all railways it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour.”

As we know, the world heeded these foresighted experts invoking precautionary measures, and as a result, no mode of transport exceeds eight or nine miles an hour today. Well no, the world didn’t embrace that, but such thinking appears to animate SWRCB with regard to perchlorate, Chromium-6, and other chemicals.

In its background material, the SWRCB disregards basic toxicology: every compound no matter how dangerous, has a level at which it is benign; and every compound, no matter how benign, has a level at which it is toxic. Or as Paracelsus (1493- 1541) put it, “All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.” Take two aspirin for a headache and it has a therapeutic effect. Take two grains of an aspirin tablet, nothing happens. Take two pounds of aspirin for a headache and the headache will be gone, along with the person who took it.

Thus, the Dose-Response of the body is of utmost importance. As Frank Schnell, board-certified, PhD toxicologist (retired) explains Dose-Response, “Most biological effects, whether adverse or not, are the consequence of a cascade of biochemical reactions initiated when chemical agents (referred to by pharmacologists and toxicologists generically as “effectors,” “agonists” or “ligands”) bind to effect-specific macromolecular receptors usually distributed on cell surfaces. It is of supreme indifference to the receptor whether the chemical binding to it is of natural, synthetic, endogenous, or exogenous origin. As long as the ligand fits into the receptor’s active site, the former will produce the effect mediated by that receptor.

“This receptor-mediated mechanism of action accounts for the existence of thresholds of effect and for the S-shaped Dose-Response (D-R) Curve that typically results when the strength of the effect (from zero- to 100%-response) is plotted on the ordinate (y-axis) against the logarithm of the dose on the abscissa (x-axis).”

Now, Schnell points out the kicker: “A sub-threshold concentration of the effector will not activate enough receptors to produce in the cell a significant effect. (If this were not the case, the effective regulation of normal metabolic processes would not be possible.)”  (emphasis mine)

SWRCB’s omissions and cherry-picking of information may be charitably viewed as providing a worst-case scenario. While that may be the intent, SWRCB’s background information is rendered biased rather than useful or informative. It evokes emotions to designed scare people and thus allow the SWRCB to further ratchet down the ultra-conservative EPA maximum contaminant level (MCL) of six parts per billion (6 ppb) in drinking water to something so low as to be ludicrous.

The ignorance and  laziness of our public officials to apparently accept the word of activists over pragmatic scientists hurts people rather than making them safer. When we require people to spend money on the wrong priorities, that money is not available for things that could truly save lives. As Schnell told me in an email, “In real life, excess conservatism doesn’t just waste money; it also costs lives.. i.e., the ones that could have been saved had the wasted money been spent more wisely.”

And this is real money. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University, puts the amount of money lost since 1980 due to added regulation at $4 trillion; a drag of 25 percent on our gross domestic product (GDP). “If regulation had been held constant at levels observed in 1980, the US economy would have been about 25 percent larger than it actually was as of 2012….This amounts to a loss of approximately $13,000 per capita, a significant amount of money for most American workers.”

Of course, economics alone should not guide us in decision making. But as Bjorn Lomborg reminds us, “[I]gnoring costs doesn’t make difficult choices disappear; it makes them less clear.”

It is disturbing to find the SWRCB more responsive to the environmental lobby than to the scientific communities. As such the legitimate needs of Californians are subsumed by rhetoric. California’s citizens are ill-served if they are made poorer and not safer with ill-considered regulations, abandoning any pretense of scientific objectivity and embracing the paranoid the Precautionary Principle of scaremongering activist environmental NGOs.

 

 

March for Climate Earth Change Day

Earth day, since its beginning in 1970, has tried to have ecological gravitas. It has tried to raise awareness of earth’s health, which its founders saw as a fraying cord tethering humans very existence. We were doing to the earth what I wanted to do with Mary Sue Horsley.

At the time of this first Earth Day, grave people, mostly men, with letters behind their names indicating that they knew quite a bit about one thing, gravely trotted out to make grave predictions:

  • “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” gravely said Stanford University biologist, Paul Ehrlich.
  • “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” said a grave Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
  • “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable,” Ecologist Kenneth Watt gravely told Time magazine.
  • “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Despite these apocalyptic jeremiads, Newsweek said that the first Earth Day was, “A bizarre nationwide rain dance,” devoid of the passion of antiwar and civil rights movements and the issues yielded “the kind of nearly unanimous blather usually reserved for the flag.” Time magazine said of the first Earth Day that it had “aspects of a secular, almost pagan holiday.”

The other thing you might have noticed about these prophecies, besides being profoundly grave, they were profoundly wrong.

You would think that making predictions so risibly wrong would temper these Old Testament prophets. After all, in Old Testament times, a bad prophecy could get you tossed in a pit followed by rocks raining down on your head. No do overs for Daniel. Today, however, would-be Daniels have have more than 50 years of do-overs.

These same prophets from 1970, have simply changed the date of the doom that is sure to arrive…any day now…no really!…trust them. At least Waiting for Godot, ends eventually.

Earth Day 2017, will be little different in the unfocused carnival atmosphere from previous ones: soundbites and slogans will masquerade as profound wisdom. Except, this year, there will be a parade beforehand.

 

Industrial Chemicals and the Cancer Epidemic

Welcome to California, home of chemophobia and flawed risk assessment. Photo by the author.

The Sierra Club mulls the question, “Why are so many people getting cancer?” And then, without evidence, answers itself (like homeless guy on the corner), “One reason may be the legal release of millions of pounds of cancer-causing chemicals into our air and waterways.”

Similarly, Rachel Carson asserted that “more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease.” What she said was technically true. However there was not an increase in childhood cancer; there was a decrease in other childhood diseases. In the era Carson was writing people were, at last, spending twice as much on medicines than on funerals. A welcome change from fifty years before when the numbers were the reverse (in 1910, childhood mortality was around 1 in 5; by 1960 it was 1 in 33. and today it is around 1 in 140. In the same way, Rachel Carson used a statistical sleight of hand to show a greater percentage of children, I can say an American male’s lifetime risk of developing cancer is 1 in 2 and 1 in 3 for an American female. It’s true but it’s not the whole story.

The real reasons for the cancer “increase” are more prosaic: medical screening can detect cancer much earlier and people are living long enough to develop cancers because they aren’t dying earlier from other causes. The Mayo Clinic says, “Cancer is caused by changes (mutations) to the DNA within cells. The DNA inside a cell is packaged into a large number of individual genes, each of which contains a set of instructions telling the cell what functions to perform, as well as how to grow and divide. Errors in the instructions can cause the cell to stop its normal function and may allow a cell to become cancerous.”

Because the United States, and the world, has more people, it may appear that more people than ever have cancer. This, in fact, may be true; however, as Ronald Bailey reports, “The cancer death rate has dropped by 23 percent since 1991, translating to more than 1.7 million deaths averted through 2012, according the latest Cancer Statistics 2016 report from the American Cancer Society (ACS).”

Let’s get back to the homeless guy on the corner, I mean, the Sierra Club and its question, “Why are so many people getting cancer?” The American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) throws cold river water on their answer (the muttering homeless guy did need a bath). The AICR in its 2001 report said, “Exposure to all manufactured chemicals in air, water, soil and food is believed to cause less than 1% of all cancers.”

The overall cancer death rate rose during most of the 20th century, largely driven by rapid increases in lung cancer deaths among men as a consequence of the tobacco epidemic. Steady reductions in smoking, as well as advances in cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment, have resulted in a 23% drop in the cancer death rate, from a peak of 215.1 (per 100,000 population) in 1991 to 166.4 in 2012.

You can take the American Cancer Society’s word about cancer or you can go to the crazy guy on the corner. He always has something to say.

Earth Hour 2017 – The Great Switch Off

WWF’s Slogan for 2017 is “Let’s Switch Off.”

It’s once again time to celebrate Earth Hour on March 25th by turning off your lights from 8:30pm to 9:30 pm and sitting in the dark; that sounds like a major hoot and a half, all right. As the WWF organizers tell us, we can invite friends to sit in the dark with us. If we are so inclined, we might even join others sitting in the dark at local businesses or landmarks. Of course, WWF says it is, “shining a light on the need for action on climate change.”

Where was WWF’s Earth Hour when I was trying to make time with Mary Sue Horsely? We could have gone to a local landmark such as Makeout Point where couples watched submarine races, even in Indiana. “Don’t you want to save the earth, Mary Sue? Here, let’s hug in the dark and use our body heat to stay warm…hmm…what? Why, yes that is a flashlight.” (I now understand what the British phrase “carrying a torch for her” means.)

Speaking of shining a light, how does turning out lights illuminate anything other than the need for light? Gee if only we had electricity. By WWF standards, North Korea is a “shining” example of WWF’s slogan this year: “Let’s Switch Off.”

Korean peninsula. Photo from the International Space Station

If you go to the WWF’s Earth Hour website (no, I won’t give you a link) they will tell you that their action has heightened awareness of their desire for cash or climate change, take your pick. As I have pointed out, it is far from certain that there is anything to worry about with climate change. And speaking of change, did WWF mention that they could use some change, as in cash?

The greater need is for electricity for our brothers and sister who sit in the dark not by choice but by necessity. “Some 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2016 report,” Ronald Bailey writes. “About 2.7 billion still cook and heat their dwellings with wood, crop residues, and dung.”

So if you really want to switch off in 2017, consider switching places with one of the 1.2 living without electric light and heat. Think of all the new skills you’ll learn: how to dry dung, how to carry water for a full day’s use by your family, how to keep smoke out of your eyes and lungs, and other nifty sustainable skills. They will learn how to flick a switch to turn on lights, stoves, and heaters, and how to bathe with clean hot water. Now that would be illuminating for all involved.

An Open Letter to California Representative Ted Lieu

Hey Homes, ‘sup? Did y’all know you was being played for a chump? Played by people with more agendas than congress.

Which brings me to your statement on Monsanto’s herbicide, RoundUp, and more specifically, its active ingredient, glyphosate.

You issued a press release on March 15, 2017.

“New questions about the safety of Monsanto weed killer Roundup are deeply troubling. I worked on the glyphosate issue last term and I believe consumers should immediately stop using Roundup, whose core ingredient glyphosate has been labeled a likely carcinogen and has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. We need to find out if Monsanto or the Environmental Protection Agency misled the public.”

“Reports suggest that a senior official at the EPA worked to suppress a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review of glyphosate, and may have leaked information to Monsanto. I believe that a Department of Justice investigation is warranted to look into any potential misconduct by employees of the EPA. I also believe a congressional hearing is immediately warranted.”

Gilles-Éric Séralini holding a tumor-ridden rat

So Ted, you met behind closed doors with some folks from NGOs who said they are independent scientists, so you could get the down low on Monsanto and all. These “independent scientists,” no doubt, told you that glyphosate, after forty years of use with no one ever reporting any ill effects, had now turned up suppressed evidence that it caused all kinds of shit. No doubt, they showed you pictures of tumor-ridden rats.

I know I wasn’t there, but trust me, they blew smoke up your ass, Homes. They blew smoke so far up yo ass, that you be now jonesing for a cigarette.

How do I know that these “independent scientists” lied to you? They lied (the same kind of green ecology experts) to me about how pollution was getting worse (it wasn’t it was getting better) and stuff they are still going on about. And what these “independent scientists” didn’t tell you was a) The breed of rats used is subject to spontaneous tumor development. b) The control group is never shown. This is a big Red Flag. The control group, given the species, would also have had tumors. c) The study size was woefully inadequate. Beware small study sizes. Not enough rats were used for decent statistical analyses. d) The Séralini rat study was redacted due to these problems.

Do you have any idea how ill-informed this statement is: glyphosate is “linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma” by IARC. You are too smart a guy to not know that correlation does not mean causation, but somehow, after forty years, these guys have “linked” it to NHL. How? Fucking smoke and mirrors, Ted. Smoke and mirrors. Oh, and lying their asses off, using real scientific research and claiming effects the polar opposite of what the research papers found. See what I wrote a few days before for more on this (https://normbenson.com/timberati/2017/03/17/congressmans-ted…orse-rides-again/).

As an example, take a look at how pseudo-science works, I’ll link sales of organic to autism for you. Are they really linked? Of course not. Although affluent people who are more likely to buy organic food, will have more ability to have their children diagnosed for such ailments.

As I point out in my previous post, to get glyphosate into the 2a classification took a monumental effort to distort findings. As toxicologist Frank Schnell says, such papers are “designed to make your head hurt, so that you won’t hear that soft little voice of common sense in the back of your head whispering ‘this is all bullshit, isn’t it?.’”

So despite what you heard about glyphosate, despite what these independent experts with PhD in their titles told you, they don’t know the scientific process. They start, and end, with the hypothesis, that is their narrative.  If they don’t get the “right” answers, they tweak the data or simply lie. Nothing matters but the narrative.

Bullshit dressed up with sciency-sounding jargon is still just bullshit. Bullshit may be good for organic gardens but it is not something to base policy on.

Forgive me, I haven’t introduced myself. I am Norm.

Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith of canals in Venice, California

You don’t know me but I grew up in your district, in Venice, in fact. Though I graduated from Venice High (go you mighty Gondos!) before you were born and the neighborhoods have upscaled, it is still the progressive liberal area it was when I lived there. Old Abbot Kinney would never recognize the place now.

There weren’t going to be any forests left

In fact, I chose my career, in part, due to facts I learned from my liberal friends, that the coast redwoods were being made extinct by Weyerhauser, Georgia-Pacific, Louisiana-Pacific, and any other lumber company. The redwoods would disappear in a generation, according to the emerging ecology movement. I attended Santa Monica City College (to say I studied at SMCC would be stretching the truth) and heard all about the peril of the redwoods (and the earth) at the first Earth Day event.

The Four Horsemen were about to mess us up

Y’all might have read about it. The speakers said something like this: “Brothers and sisters the world careens toward a Malthusian catastrophe, the likes of which the world has never seen.” The high prophet of 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich summed it up for us: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” We were accelerating toward the brink; the point of no return. We will see droughts and mass starvation; forests reduced to stumps, no oil, foul air, frozen earth [scratch that frozen bit, and put in scorched due to global warming instead] and polluted water.

As a result, Ted, I decided to be a forester to save the forests. Hey when you are in your teens, you can do anything. Also, more importantly, when you listen only to your tribe, you believe anything they say. After all, why would they they lie?

Do you know how many of their predictions came true or even close to true? None. Nearly fifty years after that first Earth Day, and literally nothing I heard was right. What did happen was exactly the opposite of what these experts predicted–and are still predicting–but unlike a broken clock they won’t be right even once. Johan Norberg shows here what really happened.

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Sincerely,
Norm

Congressman Ted Lieu Makes Statement on His Glyphosate Concerns: The Activist Hobbyhorse Rides Again

Congressman Ted Lieu who represents California’s 33rd district (which includes Beverly Hills, Calabasas, Malibu, Pacific Palisades, Palos Verdes Peninsula, and Santa Monica) issued a statement on his concerns about glyphosate. Below is his statement:

REP. LIEU STATEMENT ON NEW GLYPHOSATE SAFETY CONCERNS

March 15, 2017
Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Washington – Today, Congressman Ted W. Lieu (D | Los Angeles County) issued the following statement regarding reports that unsealed court documents raise new questions about the safety of Monsanto weed killer Roundup and its chief ingredient glyphosate.

“New questions about the safety of Monsanto weed killer Roundup are deeply troubling. I worked on the glyphosate issue last term and I believe consumers should immediately stop using Roundup, whose core ingredient glyphosate has been labeled a likely carcinogen and has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. We need to find out if Monsanto or the Environmental Protection Agency misled the public.”

“Reports suggest that a senior official at the EPA worked to suppress a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review of glyphosate, and may have leaked information to Monsanto. I believe that a Department of Justice investigation is warranted to look into any potential misconduct by employees of the EPA. I also believe a congressional hearing is immediately warranted.”

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Let’s unpack this.

“New questions about the safety of Monsanto weed killer Roundup are deeply troubling. I worked on the glyphosate issue last term…”

According to Judy Frankel, an anti-biotechnology campaigner writing in Huffington Post, in June 2016, Lieu met behind closed doors with “independent scientists” and “EPA scientists” and “urged the EPA to ban RoundUp.” These scientists provided “testimony that it [glyphosate] poses an unreasonable risk to humans, animals, and the environment” These scientists contended glyphosate is “linked to autism, Alzheimer’s, cancer, birth defects, obesity, gluten intolerance, among other health issues.” The other health issues are probably cooties and stuff that chemtrails also covers. The first red flag here is “linked to.” This is not linked in the same way smoking and cancer is linked. No, this is in the way if two different variables have increases over time, they can appear linked. You can link autism with sales of organic food, which is supposed to magically prevent all the things that glyphosate magically causes.

 

“and I believe consumers should immediately stop using Roundup, whose core ingredient glyphosate…”

I suspect the city park’s employees of Petaluma might disagree with Rep. Lieu.

Recently, the tony City of Petaluma stopped using RoundUp as an experiment. The result was a 1700% increase in cost for less effective organic treatments and real health problems for the applicators. According to a story in Petaluma Argus-Courier, “The treatments are also said to be extremely pungent during application, with several workers complaining of eye irritation and one experiencing respiratory problems….Those attributes have required the use of new protective equipment, something that was not required with Roundup.”

“[glyphosate] has been labeled a likely carcinogen and has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.“

The best IARC could do, despite the monograph study group being shepherded by  Christopher J. Portier – an activist from the American anti-pesticides NGO, the Environmental Defense Fund; was to declare that glyphosate as a Class 2a hazard. This classification put glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp) in the same category as 73 other things, including night shift work and hairdressing. IARC lists sunlight, wood dust, and alcohol as larger cancer risks.

To get glyphosate into the 2a classification took a monumental effort to distort findings. As toxicologist Frank Schnell says, They are “designed to make your head hurt, so that you won’t hear that soft little voice of common sense in the back of your head whispering ‘this is all bullshit, isn’t it?.’…Stupid nonsense dressed up to look like complicated science is still just stupid nonsense.”

Myles Powers and his friend James, scrutinized the IARC monograph (as the report is called) and found that the citations the mongraph uses say something quite different than the results cited in IARC’s report. The video is less than 20 minutes and well worth your time, especially if you are Rep. Ted Lieu.

As for Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, here is what the Environmental Protection Agency concluded: “there is conflicting evidence for the association between glyphosate exposure and NHL. No association between glyphosate exposure and NHL was found in population-based case-control studies in the United States, Canada or France. Additionally, the large prospective Agricultural Health Study (AHS) with 54,315 licensed pesticide applicators in Iowa and North Carolina did not show a significantly increased risk of NHL. A population-based case-control study from Sweden suggested an association between glyphosate exposure and NHL; however, this finding was based on only 4 glyphosate-exposed cases and 3 controls.” Got that? 54,315 licensed pesticide applicators in Iowa and North Carolina showed no increase versus a small study of “only 4 glyphosate-exposed cases…”

In the right light and the right camera angles, you could make this molehill to look like a mountain.

“Reports suggest that a senior official at the EPA worked to suppress a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review of glyphosate, and may have leaked information to Monsanto. I believe that a Department of Justice investigation is warranted to look into any potential misconduct by employees of the EPA. I also believe a congressional hearing is immediately warranted.”

In other words, a whistleblower probably found that HHS was doing activist science and leaked word to the press. The HHS review was part of Environmental Protection Agency’s review of glyphosate following the IARC classification.

Because, here is what the EPA found regarding glyphosate: “Based on a weight of evidence approach from a wide range of assays both in vitro and in vivo including endpoints for gene mutation, chromosomal damage, DNA damage and repair, there is no in vivo genotoxic or mutagenic concern for glyphosate.” That’s sci-speak for “we found bupkis.”

The technical scientific term for what the EPA found with regard to harm from glyphosate is “diddly squat.” They were as lucky at finding problems with glyphosate as I was with getting to second base with Mary Sue Horsley. And it wasn’t for lack of trying, either by the Obama administration or me, I’m sure.

This hobbyhorse in the activist’s apocalypse rodeo keeps getting trotted out and this time Congressman Lieu decided to ride it. Yippee-ki-yay, Motherfucker.

Further Reading/Reference:
The EXtension TOXicology NETwork information on glyphosate: http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/dienochlor-glyphosate/glyphosate-ext.html

Cataclysmic Climate Change

Damn, I am pissed. I was supposed to be dead by now. Hell, we all were.

Baby-boomers weren’t supposed to live longer than their parents’ generation. Experts expected pesticides and other synthetic chemicals to kill us. We would be killed by the very technology meant to save us—hoisted with our own malathion petards.

Rachel Carson predicted dire cancer consequences from chemicals, primarily DDT, though it might have been ozone or acid rain or cooties. Who remembers? I mean if you remember the ’60s, you weren’t there. Right? Anyway she said:

“`No longer are exposures to dangerous chemicals occupational alone; they have entered the environment of everyone-even of children as yet unborn. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that we are now aware of an alarming increase in malignant disease.” [There wasn’t–other causes of death had dropped]  She expected “practically 100 per cent of the human population to be wiped out from a cancer epidemic in one generation.” [Editor’s note: It didn’t.]

Later on, doomster Paul Ehrlich hedged:

“the U.S. life expectancy will drop to forty-two years by 1980, due to cancer epidemics.”

If the cancer didn’t kill us, according to Ehrlich, the population bomb would by causing a worldwide famine.

But wait there’s more! Because we humans were so damned greedy (present company excepted, of course) forests were being decimated; acid rain falling on the forests would obliterate what forest remained, the earth was losing species at a spectacular rate—though no one could say by how much—deserts devoured fertile land by a mile or two a year each year. Oil was predicted to dry up within a decade making the Mad Max dystopian future look like a Sunday school picnic. And, for our grand finale, the earth was entering a new ice age due to the particulates we tossed into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, thus blocking the sun’s life-giving rays.

We knew that our parents and ancestors had ruined earth for us, and in the Church of What’s Happening Now, we recited our eco-litany:

“The water is polluted and the air is worse. We’re washing away topsoil from our farmland; and what we aren’t washing away, we’re paving over. The more technology we manufacture, the less livable becomes our world. Humans produce too many babies. Our exploding population increases poverty and misery and decreases habitat for every other living thing that we share this tiny and fragile world with.”

Thanks to our parents, we had an overcrowded planet, short on food, short on oil, and global cooling would finish us off (just look at the droughts, the signs are all around us). We were completely, absolutely, and irretrievably, boned.

That was more nearly fifty years ago and we Boomers are still here.

…Well, a lot of us anyway. Jim Morrison, Janice Joplin, and Jimmy Hendrix bit it long ago. And Keith Richards may or may not be dead; who can tell?

Here is what I am getting at: Not only did humanity survive all of those apocalyptic prophecies; life is better than it has ever been.

“In general, life is better than it ever has been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word: ‘dentistry’”

– P.J. O’Rourke, All the Trouble in the World

And yet, Apocalypticists keep tossing up more clay pigeons to be shot down by anyone willing to do minimal research. These pigeons are foisted in the name of ‘saving the earth’s environment for coming generations,’ always call for everyone, though not themselves (see examples of diCaprio and Gore, hereafter listed as exhibits A and B), to live frugal and simple lives of less.

Interestingly, they take us for pigeons. One need only get on the mailing list of the Sierra Club, Audubon, or Friends of the Earth, to see that money is their lifeblood and they will tell you the direst or worst-case scenarios to get a transfusion of cash. This tactic doesn’t work on everybody. For instance, if you tell P. J. O’Rourke “By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater,” he will say, “Your point is?”

Catastrophic climate change appears to be the latest pigeon du jour.

Its staying power has been amazing. ‘That’s because it’s Science,’ I hear you saying.‘ So for purposes of argument, let us stipulate that anthropogenic climate change has scientific bases. I agree. I hope you do.

I will further stipulate:

  • Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas,
  • The amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing,
  • The primary reason for the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the burning of fossil fuels,
  • On average, our world is warmer than it was 50 to 150 years ago,
  • Our burning of fossil fuels–thereby increasing CO2 in the atmosphere–has contributed to the warming of our atmosphere.

That, in a nutshell, is the 97% consensus. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising and we are putting most of it there and CO2 contributes to the warming of our planet (for a fascinating write-up on how we know of CO2’s rise, its fossil fuel origins, and the warming, see Brian Dunning’s explanation https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4549).

Easy peasy: throttle up CO2 in the atmosphere to make it warmer, throttle back on CO2 to cool. Kick back. Put your feet on the desk. it’s Miller Time.

Wait there’s more! There’s a whole theory on how global warming works.

Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer has an understandable explanation at his website (http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-101/). I’ll quote the parts I think are critical to this discussion.

“Global warming theory starts with the assumption that the Earth naturally maintains a constant average temperature, which is the result of a balance between (1) the amount of sunlight the Earth absorbs, and (2) the amount of emitted infrared (‘IR’) radiation that the Earth continuously emits to outer space. In other words, energy in equals energy out….As we add more CO2, more infrared energy is trapped, strengthening the Earth’s greenhouse effect. This causes a warming tendency in the lower atmosphere and at the surface….the lower atmosphere must then respond to this energy imbalance (less IR radiation being lost than solar energy being absorbed) by causing an increase in temperature (which causes an increase in the IR escaping to space) until the emitted IR radiation once again equals the amount of absorbed sunlight….”

Does CO2 control everything? No. It turns out that there are plenty more knobs and these control other stuff. In fact, according to the theory, doubling the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide concentration causes less than one degree centigrade of surface warming (about 1 deg. F). So why the fuss? It’s all about the feedbacks, which are processes, which cool or warm the earth. For instance, evaporation occurs as the sun warms a surface of water. This water vapor may either hold heat or condense into clouds that cool the affected area by reflecting sunlight back into space. Feedbacks are the turbochargers of climate change theory. I had a turbocharged Volvo 240 GT once. It ate transmissions like Orson Welles ate Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks.

Spencer points out that, “clouds, water vapor, and precipitation systems can all be expected to respond to the warming tendency in some way, which could either amplify or reduce the manmade warming….the sum of all the feedbacks in the climate system determines what is called ‘climate sensitivity’.”

It is this climate sensitivity that settled scientists are arguing about. How do the models (and there are more climate models that Zsa Zsa had husbands) test whether they are right or not? I, and others, like the Richard Feynman method:

“In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it…Then we compute the consequences of the guess…to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature, or we…compare it directly with observations to see if it works.”

Has this been done with climate models? You bet your sweet bippy it has.

Here is a graph of 102 model runs for the tropics by Dr. John Christy. The red line is an average, and the blue circles and green squares are balloon and satellite readings. The tropics are “the key region in which climate models respond to greenhouse gas warming with a large and distinct signal.” Dr. Christy testified to congress in 2013. “The focus on the tropics is important because of the consistent and significant warming that climate models indicate should have already occurred as a result of the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases we have put into the atmosphere. It also represents a part of the global atmosphere in which the critical water vapor and cloud feedbacks have major influences. In addition, changes in this region were determined by the EPA [Ed note: EPA is the US Environmental Protection Agency] to be a key line of evidence of greenhouse gas caused climate change. Finally, the tropical atmosphere is also a huge and easy target for modeling projects to hit if the physics are well represented….The comparison shows that the very latest climate model simulations used in the IPCC Assessment released two months ago indicate that their response to CO2 on average is 2 to 5 times greater than reality.” (emphasis added)

The models are, as Bob Euchre said in Major League about Wild Thing’s first pitch, which missed the strike zone by about ten feet, “just a bit outside.”

Let’s go back to Feynman’s method: You guess. You make computations. You predict results. You compare your predictions to your observations. If the predictions do not match your observations, you are wrong. “If it disagrees with the experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with the experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

There is another method and it’s the one that is apparently in vogue (meaning it’s popular, not that it has a spread in the magazine Vogue). It relies on multiple runs of the models. Dr. Kerry Emanuel is a proponent, so he can explain it better than I can.

“[We] have built over the years a hierarchy of increasingly complex models that really are some of the most complicated pieces of software that the human race has ever constructed. They have their origins in models that were built for a much more pedestrian but important purpose, which is weather forecasting. And they are very complex. In the case of weather forecasting, arguably you can test them twice a day and see how well they are doing. With climate, it’s much more difficult to test them because we don’t have that many climate states….We try to hold certain variables constant, like sunlight. And vary another external factor, like carbon dioxide, to see how the system responds….[These] models are not just run once. They are run many times, to try to account for their own internal random variability. And you can find 15, 20, 25 year stretches in all of these projections where the temperature not only flattens out but it actually goes down a little bit. So, if you take the ensemble mean, then it’s correct that the last 30 years, the models have overpredicted the temperature. I might add that 30 years before that, they underpredicted it. And this is what happens when you superimpose natural variability on forced variability.” (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/03/john_christy_an.html)

I encourage you to listen to the whole EconTalk podcast. I came away almost liking Kerry Emanuel. He came across as a decent guy. My take away message for his view that global warming was a threat was that it was a feeling and not one he could produce much evidence for.

My experience is that models can be wonderful tools, but they always, always, always, have to be compared to the observed results. Without feedback from the real world, to refine their designs, the computer models are just mathematical magic eight balls: giving answers down to the ten thousandth decimal point but lacking any accuracy. The climate models are “just a bit outside.”

And to circle back to where I started, they are being used once again, to predict doom to the human race in the not too distant future. To scare us into giving up, repenting for our sins of hubris, thinking we could be like gods, and turning back.

Many [people, even those with digital watches,] were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Catastrophic Climate Change is another example of the Precautionary Principle—“don’t try anything new, it might be dangerous.” It’s just another clown in the Rodeo of the Apocalypse.

Cheering up Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Case of the Mondays

Astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson must have had a case of the Mondays. On a Monday in mid-January he posted this on Twitter:

He was at a loss for words. One helpful wag responded:

Now I think I understand what Dr. Tyson was getting at: Where has our sense of adventure gone? When you are an astrophysicist your priorities encompass galaxies.

Cheer up, Dr. Tyson. we have landed unmanned probes, one on the planet Mars and one on a motherfucking comet! I suppose it would have been cooler if Bruce Willis had landed on the comet and blown the sucker up but it was still goddam freaking awesome.

You know what else is freaking awesome, Dr. Tyson? What we humans have done here on earth in these past forty-five to fifty years.

“…if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds. Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled.” –Dr. Matt Ridley, author of the Rational Optimist.

How cool is that, Dr. Tyson? Happy Monday.

We made these advances because when ideas have sex, innovation happens: