Twenty-five years of research has rubbished claims of a link between childhood cancer and overhead power lines. So why do new studies keep appearing?

A new epidemiological study suggesting a link between childhood cancer and overhead power lines was launched at a press conference yesterday, 2 June. The study, which appears in the British Medical Journal with an accompanying editorial, immediately generated considerable media interest.

Over 29,000 children with cancer, including 9,700 with leukaemia, were included in the study. The children were aged 0-14 years and were born in England and Wales between 1962 and 1995. They were compared with a control group of children individually matched for sex, approximate date of birth, and birth registration district. The distance of each child's home address at birth from the nearest high voltage power line was calculated. Children who lived within 200m of high voltage power lines at birth appeared to have a 70 per cent raised risk of leukaemia compared with those who lived beyond 600m. There was also a slightly increased risk for those living 200 to 600m from the lines at birth.

The press release is at pains to emphasise that the results should be treated with caution, and even if there were some role played by these so-called power frequencies (or what is known by the usual acronym ELF - extremely low frequency fields), this could only explain a very small number of childhood leukaemias. Usefully, the press release explains the scale of the possible association: 'To put these risks into perspective, about five of the 400-420 cases of childhood leukaemia that occur annually in England and Wales may be associated with power lines.'

The authors add that the effect could be simply down to chance or another cause. The most important so-called 'confounding factor' (all the other influences that equally might explain any association found between one factor and another) in this case has long been recognised to be the fact that neighbourhoods with heavy concentrations of power lines are typically poor, congested and polluted - all of which are risk factors for cancer.

This is particularly relevant with this study. As the Institute of Electrical Engineers points out in its press release, also published on 2 June, the elevated rates are found some 600 metres from the power lines. It explains: 'At these distances, the magnetic fields in homes due to the lines are negligible compared to background levels.' Given that it is generally accepted that it could only be the magnetic fields generated by power lines that might cause a problem, it must be something other than the power lines themselves that explains the results.

With such a tiny possible problem identified, and with such heavy qualification provided, one is left to wonder why this study was deemed worthy of such attention. Given that the research was not stimulated by an evident problem - notably any increased incidence of leukaemia among children - one might also ask why the study was carried out in the first place. This is particularly the case given that the anxiety over a potential link between power lines and childhood leukaemia dates back over 25 years, and has already generated a large amount of research. So why do the researchers' conclude that even more research is needed? Not only is it questionable whether such a tiny association merits further investigation in itself, but the enormous quantity of previous research in this area has effectively ruled out any such need.

The cancer rate among electrical workers is lower than the general population

The high profile created for the power line issue ensured that an enormous amount of research resources were dedicated to it. A 1994 study, for example, that typically found no overall increased cancer risk, looked at 223,000 Canadian and French electrical workers over four years. A similar American study the following year had an even larger population and found that the cancer rate among electrical workers is lower than the general population.

The renowned physicist Robert Park, in his book, Voodoo Science, identifies two decisive moments in what he calls 'slamming the door shut' on the controversy (2). The first was the so-called Stevens report by the (American) National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1996, which concluded definitively that 'the current body of evidence does not show that exposure to these fields presents a human health hazard'. Significantly, and unlike the single study released today, the NAS report was based upon a review of all the relevant research literature published to date - some 500 studies. According to its review, any link was too weak to detect or to be concerned about.....

.... an editorial in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine following the release of the NCI study in 1997 remains admirably clear: 'It is sad that hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into studies that never had much promise of finding a way to prevent the tragedy of cancer in children. The many inconclusive and inconsistent studies have generated worry and fear and have given peace of mind to no one. The 18 years of research have produced considerable paranoia, but little insight and no prevention. It's time to stop wasting our resources. We should redirect them to research that will be able to discover the true biologic causes of the leukemic clones that threaten the lives of children.'

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SOMETHING ELSE THE GLOBAL WARMERS LEFT OUT OF THEIR CLIMATE "MODELS": THE MOON!

Some years ago a British newspaper arranged a square-off between a meteorologist, an astrologer and a woman with corns, to see who could best predict the weather. The woman with corns won.

In almost every newspaper around the world and at least once a week, some report surfaces suggesting we stay worried in the light of latest figures and analyses. Not only is Global Warming occurring, we are assured, but it is now accelerating at some alarming rate and pretty soon the poles will have all melted, the sealevels will have risen and all low-lying atolls and seaside villages will be covered over with this calamitous rising tide. And apparently this gigantic catastrophe is due to human behaviour.

We are informed that if our wicked CFC and CO2-producing ways continue, we will be doomed as a civilisation. Today we are so buffeted by what is put forth as irrefutable evidential science as to the nature of the so-called problem, that we don't even think to question it on any basic level. What is still essentially viewpoints and nothing more, based on tiny sample data and extrapolated, is now promoted as scientific fact, regardless of the lack of real evidence. The voices of the many diligent scientists calling for real hard evidence are drowned out by those who have the ear of a worldwide media hungry for sensational and emotive headlines.

The result is that the picture many now have is of the Earth heating up and hotter now than it has ever been. But... 1999 was cooler than the year before. The hottest day in all recorded history was at Al Azizah in Libya back in 1922. There was warming from the 1880s to the 1940s, then a cooling for the next 40 years. Some of the hottest years were in the 1930s, when builders in Britain began putting pipes on the outside of buildings because frosts were only a memory. Then the thermometers turned around and from 1940 right up to 1980, global mean temperatures fell by about 0.3degC. All those houses in Britain started getting burst pipes....

Nearer to the truth is that the climate has always had its ups and downs. In 1100 AD the Earth enjoyed a much warmer environment than it does now - closer to a Meditterranean climate in the north of England. Around 549AD it appears a fireball may have swept through much of Europe, melting the facias of some castles. For many years the Vikings wandered around in their shirtsleeves. The Great Fire of London in 1666 came in a year of tremendous drought. This century just gone saw higher temperatures and heavy droughts around particular recurring years. Each drought in the past was described as the worst in living memory. But there is a simple mathematical pattern here.

The Pattern is Lunar

As far as Earth's climate is concerned, the lunar movement is a major influence. To understand it better, imagine a settling pot-lid as it is spun on its flat side on a table top. It wobbles around and around. Imagine a point on the rim. As the lid settles, the point will wobble around in an ever-flattening sine curve. That's what the Moon does around the Earth's ecliptic (plane of orbit around the Sun). As it moves it drags more or less of the atmosphere with it, spreading the atmosphere further over the Earth's surface at the high end of the cycle and confining the atmosphere to a narrow band within the tropics at the lower end. The warming effect is that of milder summers and warmer winters, and at the moment we are well past the midpoint. Global-warmingists will point to the higher temperatures and claim that they were right all along. But up till now they haven't wanted to look to the Moon. After the last high end in 1987, temperatures did start descending especially around 1991/2, but most failed to notice.

Through its considerable gravitational force the Moon moves the atmosphere two and a half times more than does the Sun. Scientists agree that the Moon's gravity is greater on us than is that coming from the Sun, to the extent that the Moon moves seatides with very small contribution from the Sun, but a dwindling few still claim that the Sun causes the weather. Whatever the Sun does, the Moon does two and a half times as much.

The atmosphere is both our protection from the searing heat of the sun and the freezing cold of space. Without this protection we would all die under 180degF heat or freeze under -222deg cold.

If it wasn't mixed and distributed by the Moon daily, more of the atmosphere would end up on the Sun's side because the Sun would be the only body in space with any gravitational pull. There would be one giant cloud always on the Sun's side, just as there is on Venus, which is why Venus looks so bright. We would therefore never see the Sun for the constant cloud. Moreover, trees, which need direct sun's rays, would not photosynthesize, therefore not produce oxygen which is so essential to life and our existence. So without the Moon there could be no life as we know it on Earth. When we are looking in space for evidence of life on other planets, scientists sometimes miss the fact that we should be looking for a planet our size and speed around its sun; that has a Moon just like ours in size and distance and orbital speed, and a Sun just like ours exactly the same distance away and size. Otherwise we are not looking for life as we know it. And if we're not, then it's not life, it's something else, because life is life as we know it.

With good reason then, in lunar cultures the Moon has always been the symbol of life itself. Strong reason for it to have been universally revered as the god of fertility and growth. In their all-out zeal to rewrite our universe so history would be more palatable, 17th century theologians made as much distance as they could between Christian society and that symbol of everything pagan; the Moon. There was no room for the Christian god in the old Moon-oriented science, which dictated that climate and weather were cyclically predictable. The 'hand of God' was a non-issue. Now, only God was allowed to know what was going to happen. All predictions and prophecies were heresy.

It is this legacy that has led to one of the most appalling gaffes of modern day science: to factor the Moon out of every weather computer-model. Yet the atmosphere has a high and a low tide, which causes weather, and which, just like the sea-tide, is pulled around by the gravitational force of the Moon. Not only is the atmosphere our protection; it is also our blanket. By retaining the heat of the sun it redistributes this heat wherever it moves to. By shifting the atmosphere, the Moon is directly responsible for Earth's climate....

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Vegetarians versus rainforest! "It's been called the "Magic Bean" -- hailed by nutritionists as a wonderfood---it's rich in protein and apparently cuts the risks of all kinds of diseases. We're talking about the soy bean. And we're afraid we've got some bad news about a food that's been called "nature's medicine". Precisely because of these many health claims, there has been a dramatic rise in soy consumption around the world. And while soy bean producers and traders have been rubbing their hands gleefully, environmentalists are worried about the crop's popularity--especially in Brazil. Because as long as soy remains lucrative, more saws will continue clear bigger swaths of the Amazon rainforest. Environmental group Greenpeace has been loudly criticizing the Brazilian government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. It says President Lula should be restricting soy plantations to areas that are already cleared". Update here.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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