"JOINT ACADEMIES" DECLARATION FALLS APART

Fred Singer notes:

"We are learning that the much-hyped "consensus" of the G-8 (plus 3) Science Academies is not solid. In a Letter to The Scientist (SFS/7/1/2005) I pointed out that the press release from the Royal Society (London) gives the impression of unanimity about need for action to stem global warming. But on July 1 a group of Russian academicians with climate expertise called on the president of the Russian Academy of Science to withdraw his unauthorized signature from a Climate Statement that had been initiated by the Royal Society. [RIA Novosti, 1 July 2005. ] According to this report (Item #1)

"Russian scientists said they still considered the Kyoto protocol was scientifically ungrounded and would be an ineffective way to try to achieve the aim of the UN convention on climate change."

The "Joint Science Academies Statement" had been engineered by Lord Robert May, president of the Royal Society. He tried this maneuver a couple of years ago, but then the US-National Academy of Sciences did not go along. I don't know why NAS president Bruce Albert went along with it this time, but his term just expired on June 30. We do have e-mail from him in which he states:

"But we definitely did not approve the Royal Society press release, and I have sent a letter to Bob May expressing my dismay at his misleading and political statements there.""

Benny Peiser comments:

"It's quite a feat for Lord May to antagonise both the Russian and the U.S. National Academies of Sciences. I'm afraid this is the prize he is paying for dabbling in political tomfoolery. The repute of the Royal Society and its integrity has suffered accordingly, while the political crusade orchestrated by climate alarmists will simply fall on deaf ears at the G8 summit. It would appear that all the apocalyptic shouting and screaming has come to nothing. I don't want to brag .... but it wasn't that difficult to predict this was going to happen".





DEADLY VACINE DECEPTION

If you have small kids, you may have heard dire warnings about the perils of childhood vaccinations. The clamor has been driven lately primarily by an article from Natural Resources Defense Council (inventors of the Alar scare) attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A new book called Evidence of Harm, Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic makes similar hysterical claims. Ignore them. The life you save may be your child's - or somebody else's.

Some of these fearmongers mean well but are woefully ignorant. Others are so obsessed with bringing others into the conspiracy-theory fold that they will say and do anything. For example, they claim childhood vaccines cause the neuro-developmental disorder autism because they contain a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal. Never mind that production of childhood vaccines with thimerosal ended several years ago, or that the fearmongers are also rabidly against the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, which NEVER contained thimerosal.

The only relationship they can really draw between these vaccines and autism is that the disorder appears by age four and the shots are given before then - the hoary old fallacy of "after this, therefore because of this." But every actual argument they make, however sensible it may first seem, crumbles like a vampire exposed to sunlight. Here's what the vaccine fearmongers and the over 150 Web sites they operate won't tell you.

The most comprehensive review of the medical literature appeared last year in a 214-page report from the Institute of Medicine concluding "The evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism." The European Medicines Agency and the World Health Organization have also given thimerosal a clean bill of health. The most recent review of the published work appeared in the September 2004 issue of Pediatrics. It concluded "Studies do not demonstrate a link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and Autistic Spectrum Disorders." It also said the way and speed in which the body absorbs and disposes of ethyl mercury [that which comes from thimerosal] "make such an association less likely." It rejected epidemiological studies from the father-son team of Mark and David Geier "that support a link" to autism, citing "significant design flaws that invalidate their conclusions." Some major foreign studies have even shown autism rates climbing AFTER thimerosal use ended.

The IOM review also dismissed the findings of the Geiers, darlings of the conspiracy theorists who make their living as expert witnesses and consultants for lawyers filing claims under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Pumping out studies alleging the dangers of thimerosal keeps them in business. Other health professionals (and often federal courts) have also harshly dismissed their work, with the American Academy of Pediatrics condemning them for "numerous conceptual and scientific flaws, omissions of fact, inaccuracies, and misstatements."

The conspiracy theorists stop at nothing. Thus in his June 21 appearance on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, Kennedy told Joe Scarborough, "We are injecting our children with 400 times the amount of mercury that FDA or EPA considers safe." He thereby confused the ETHYL mercury from thimerosal and for which there is no evidence of harm and no EPA standard with a different chemical, "METHYL mercury. Worse, he ignored the correction to his piece appended five days earlier by the publications that co-published it, Rolling Stone and Salon.com. "The article also misstated the level of" mercury infants received, it stated. It was "40 percent [or 0.4 times], not 187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methyl mercury." Thus having been caught overstating exposure by almost 500 times he then doubled even that for Scarborough!

The real conspirators here are the Kennedys of the world, the 150 websites, and all those desperate to kill off childhood vaccinations. Sadly, they're also killing off kids. As more frightened parents refuse to have their children vaccinated, "`hot spots' are cropping up across the U.S.," observed a recent article in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, such that "outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, mumps, rubella and diphtheria are reoccurring, costing hundreds of lives and hospitalizing thousands more."

Source






HIMALAYAS PANIC

Recently, a World Wildlife Fund press release was picked up by Reuters. "Himalayan glaciers are among the fastest-retreating glaciers globally due to the effects of global warming," the advocacy group announced.... WWF is especially interested in the Gangotri glacier, in the Indian Himalayas. The glacier is retreating an average 75 feet yearly.

Glaciers are in steady state when the annual snowfall and summer melting rate are roughly in balance. Actually, this is rare. When glaciers melt too much in the summer, they retreat. And if it snows more in the winter than normal, they advance.... High-altitude glaciers melt during the summer. The IPCC has June-August temperatures for the Gangotri region back 1875. The net decline in temperature over the last 130 years is striking. In fact, at 1.2 degrees (C), it is one of the largest summer coolings on Earth. That's right: cooling. In contrast, the temperature for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole increased 0.8 degrees during the same period.

Still, no one doubts the Gangotri glacier is receding. It was expanded far beyond where it is today when the cooling was first noted more than a century ago. Temperatures reached their low in 1990 and have popped up a bit, to the long-term average for the last 130 years. Perhaps this has something to do with Gangotri's recent more rapid retreat. But that it has been in such a decline as overall century-scale temperatures have cooled tells us much about the long-term fate of glaciers away from polar regions: They are relics of the Ice Age, destined to melt.

Another place with an ice history that resembles Gangotri is our own Glacier National Park in Montana. There were 147 glaciers in the park 150 years ago, near the start of the Gangotri temperature record. Today there are only 37. What happened to summer temperatures? Unlike Gangotri, they didn't cool. But temperatures remained fairly constant, with no significant warming since records began in 1895.

Most scientists think the mid-19th century marks the end of a multicentury period known as the "Little Ice Age," though a small but vocal core of skeptics maintain a view known as the "Hockey Stick" history - one in which temperatures do not change for nearly a millennium and then shoot up in the last 100 years, producing a graph that indeed resembles a hockey stick. This view has been pretty much marginalized in a number of papers in scientific literature over the last year. Indeed, glaciers went into retreat at the end of this cold period. Gangotri is even more tenuous, receding even as local temperatures continued declining.

Incidentally, the Northern Hemisphere's largest ice mass - the Greenland icecap - is in retreat in the southern part of the island, where temperatures also show a substantial net cooling for the last 75 years. All this leads to an obvious conclusion. Southern Greenland, Glacier National Park and the Himalayan glaciers are on their way out, with little or no nudging needed from people. They're relics of the Big Ice Age that ended 11,000 years ago. It's too bad, though, that in the fight to hype global warming, the truth is also rapidly becoming another relic.

The above author makes reasonable points but ice mass is most influenced by precipitation (the amount of snow that falls) where temperatures are low so a graph of precipitation would probably reveal a drop in precipitation as the main causative factor

More 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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