JUDGE SLAMS LAW FIRM IN SILICOSIS CASE

Multidistrict Suit Created `Phantom Epidemic,' She Says

A Texas federal judge has issued a blistering 249-page order and sanctioned a high-profile plaintiffs law firm, accusing the plaintiffs bar of manufacturing a "phantom epidemic" of the lung disease silicosis. And at least one legal expert suggests a similar finding might come if courts look closely at recent absestosis litigation. Judge Janis Graham Jack, in a June 30 ruling, noted that more than 9,000 plaintiffs in the multidistrict litigation case had been seen by about 8,000 physicians who diagnosed and treated them for every other health problem, but never noted the presence of silicosis. The silica illness diagnoses came from just 12 doctors, most of whom were in the employ of various mobile-screening operations, doing what she called "assembly-line diagnosing." In Re: Silica Products Liability Litigation, No. 1553 (S.D. Tex.).

Jack issued the order after 20 months of pretrial proceedings in the Corpus Christi, Texas, court, including a special Daubert-style analysis to determine whether doctors' testimony should be entered as evidence. The judge ordered 90 of the 111 cases, which covered more than 10,000 individual plaintiffs, remanded for lack of subject matter jurisdiction to the Mississippi Supreme Court, and recommended that another case be remanded to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.

Jack approved the start of discovery for 19 cases that were recently transferred into the MDL case. For the case of Alexander v. Air Liquide America Corp., in which she retained jurisdiction, Jack tossed out testimony and diagnoses from two of those mobile-screening physicians and ordered sanctions against Houston's O'Quinn, Laminack & Pirtle. Jack tentatively set the sanction at $8,250 to cover the Alexander defendants' proportionate share of costs incurred during the Daubert hearings, but allowed time for O'Quinn to challenge the amount. She said the O'Quinn firm, which brought more than 2,000 cases, micro-managed the diagnostic process "to inflate the number of plaintiffs and overwhelm the defendants and the judicial system ... in hopes of extracting mass nuisance-value settlements."

Lawyers from the O'Quinn firm were not available for comment. Name partner John O'Quinn is considered one of the most influential lawyers in America. In response to the judge's order, the O'Quinn firm filed a statement with the court saying it would not contest the judge's estimate of Daubert expenses, but it would like to be heard on the issue of whether sanctions should be imposed.

Jack's rulings on sanctions and excluding doctors' testimony in the remanded cases "are reserved for consideration by the appropriate state court." The Mississippi Supreme Court must decide how the state courts will deal with its cases. Jack stayed the effective date for remand to allow time for the court to consider the issue.

The MDL defendants had previously removed the Mississippi cases to federal court, asserting there was diversity subject-matter jurisdiction. But the judge said there was not complete diversity of citizenship between plaintiffs and defendants.

Silicosis is caused by inhaling silica dust, the primary element of sand. Jack, a former registered nurse, wrote that most of the plaintiffs were employees of foundries, or worked as sandblasters or in other trades that exposed them to sand. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has noted a steady decline in the number of silica-related cases. According to CDC numbers, Mississippi has a very low number of silicosis deaths. So when Jack looked at the numbers in the multidistrict silica litigation, she said she couldn't understand why Mississippi plaintiffs filed more than 20,000 silicosis claims between 2002 and 2004. "Despite diagnosing a serious and completely preventable disease at unprecedented rates, not a single doctor even bothered to lift a telephone and notify any governmental agency, union, employer, hospital or even media outlet, all of whom conceivably could have taken steps to ensure recognition of currently undiagnosed silicosis cases and to prevent future cases from developing," Jack wrote.

Jack suggested the reason for the discrepancy was that "these diagnoses were about litigation rather than health care."

Danny Mulholland of Jackson, Miss., represents one of the silicosis defendants. He says that about 65 percent of the silicosis claims came from "recycled plaintiffs" who had previously filed asbestosis claims. While Jack did not cite that percentage, she did write that at least 6,000 of the plaintiffs had made prior asbestosis claims.

After Mulholland began deposing the silicosis-screening doctors, several of them withdrew their diagnoses. One of those doctors had screened several thousand cases and said he thought he had been asked only to give second opinions on degenerative lung diseases related to silica exposure.

The doctors' withdrawal caught Jack's attention. She then ordered that the remaining screening doctors be deposed in her court. "It's a completely different dynamic when you're deposing a witness with a federal judge sitting there on the bench," Mulholland says. "A lot of the dancing around just doesn't happen." Mulholland says he has petitioned the Mississippi Supreme Court to administer the cases remanded to it on a consolidated basis. This has never been done in Mississippi before, but he claims "this is a peculiar set of circumstances that cry out for this type of remedy."

Lester Brickman, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, has been closely following the silicosis litigation. Earlier this year, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on "double-dipping" by asbestosis plaintiffs who had previously made silicosis claims. He's concerned that the plaintiff-friendly Mississippi courts could reject Jack's findings and resurrect these claims. "One should not assume that just because there is massive evidence of fraud, that they will not be processed through the same Mississippi system," he says.

Brickman, who published a 137-page law article on asbestos litigation for the Pepperdine Law Review, says the significance of Jack's order goes far beyond the silicosis cases. Given that asbestosis cases used the same techniques to recruit plaintiffs and used the same medical screeners, Brickman says, he's "confident that if the same level of discovery were permitted with respect to asbestosis claims, the same kind of evidence of fraud on a massive scale would be uncovered."

Brickman finds it remarkable that "despite the overwhelming evidence of fraud uncovered" in the silicosis cases, no state prosecutor has ever launched an investigation. A representative of the Mississippi attorney general's office, Special Assistant Attorney General Jacob Ray, says he cannot confirm or deny that his office is investigating the silicosis cases.


Source






PAST GLOBAL WARMING CAUSED BY A BIG HIT FROM SPACE?

(Another academic journal excerpt. From: Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (2005), In press)

Bolide summer: The Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum as a response to an extraterrestrial trigger

By: Benjamin S. Cramer a), and Dennis V. Kent b), c), a) Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Tohoku University, Sendai, 982-0262, Japan b) Department of Geological Sciences, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA c) Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY 10964, USA

Abstract

The standard paradigm that the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) represents a threshold event intrinsic to Earth's climate and connected in some way with long-term warming has influenced interpretations of the geochemical, climate, and biological perturbations that occurred at this event. As recent high-resolution data have demonstrated that the onset of the event was geologically instantaneous, attempts to account for the event solely through endogenous mechanisms have become increasingly strained. The rapid onset of the event indicates that it was triggered by a catastrophic event which we suggest was most likely a bolide impact.

We discuss features of the PETM that require explanation and argue that mechanisms that have previously been proposed either cannot explain all of these features or would require some sort of high-energy trigger. A bolide impact could provide such a trigger and, in the event of a comet impact, could contribute directly to the shape of the carbon isotope curve. We introduce a carbon cycle model that would explain the PETM by global warming following a bolide impact, leading to the oxidation of terrestrial organic carbon stores built up during the late Paleocene. Our intention is to encourage other researchers to seriously consider an impact trigger for the PETM, especially in the absence of plausible alternative mechanisms.

1. Introduction

At the Paleocene/Eocene boundary, 55 Ma, a catastrophic event produced dramatic changes in Earth's biogeochemical systems. Global temperatures abruptly warmed by 4-5 oC at the same time when a perturbation to the biogeochemical carbon cycle led to a > 4? decrease in atmospheric and surface ocean d13C values and soon thereafter a 2.5? d13C decrease in the deep ocean (e.g., Kennett and Stott, 1991). Major changes in community structure are recorded in marine microfossils (planktonic and benthic foraminifers, calcareous nannoplankton, dinoflagellates, ostracodes), including an extinction of 30-50% of species of bathyal-abyssal benthic foraminifers (e.g., Thomas, 1998). Terrestrial faunas were also affected, with the first appearance of most modern mammalian orders occurring at the P/E boundary (e.g., Maas et al., 1995). In seeking the causes of this catastrophic event, most researchers have focused on the large decrease in d13C values, which seemed too large and too rapid to be easily explained within the context of standard carbon cycle models. This led to the proposal that the large decrease reflected the input of substantial quantities of isotopically light methane from thermal dissociation of seafloor clathrate deposits (Dickens et al., 1995 and Matsumoto, 1995).

As discussed below, the documented rapidity of the onset of the event and lower estimates of the size of the methane hydrate reservoir indicate that this cannot be the major source for the carbon isotope excursion (CIE). Kurtz et al. (2003) showed that the late Paleocene was a time of increasing terrestrial organic carbon-rich deposition and suggested that the d13C may have resulted from the burning of large peat deposits. With several coauthors, we have recently presented evidence that an extraterrestrial impact occurred at the onset of the PETM (Kent et al., 2003a), which would provide a trigger of sufficiently large energy to account for the rapidity of the onset of the event. In this contribution, we explore the mechanisms by which an impact could trigger a "bolide summer:" the prolonged interval of warmth during the PETM. Our discussion focuses mainly on evidence for changes in the carbon cycle during the PETM, which we believe has been obscured in the literature by the emphasis on methane hydrate. As background, however, it is useful to summarize the published evidence for an impact at the P/E boundary and for a major perturbation to biological systems, although only benthic foraminifers suffered a mass extinction during the PETM.

[...]

4. Summary

While extraterrestrial impact has received serious consideration as the trigger for "instantaneous" environmental perturbations at other geologic boundaries, the possibility of an impact trigger for the PETM has received very little attention. Instead, most authors have focused on the magnitude of the 13C decrease and the hypothesis that this resulted from dissociation of methane hydrates. However, analyses now show that the methane hydrate reservoir was unlikely to have been large enough to account for the carbon isotopic perturbation, and that physical limitations to the rate at which thermal dissociation of hydrate could occur make it an implausible mechanism to account for the extremely rapid initial decrease in ?13C values, especially given the evidence for stable pre-CIE temperatures at intermediate water depths where hydrate would have existed. Furthermore, methane hydrate as a sole source for the CIE cannot explain the extreme variations in climate and ecological perturbations that occurred: the very low d13C value of methane hydrate minimizes the amount of carbon needed to account for the CIE, while the thermal dissociation mechanism requires that the documented warming preceded and was independent of the perturbation to the carbon cycle. It is more reasonable to assume that the 4-5 oC temperature increase resulted from the perturbation to the carbon cycle that is reflected in the decrease in d13C values.

The instantaneous onset of the PETM, the top-down progression of environmental changes in the oceans, and the extreme perturbations to the surface environment are all consistent with a bolide impact. There is already tantalizing independent evidence that an impact occurred at the time of the PETM and the "bolide summer" hypothesis makes specific predictions that should motivate further investigations: we expect (1) normal climate variability prior to an abrupt onset of the event; (2) tracers of an impact corresponding to the abrupt initial climate perturbation; (3) a much larger decrease in carbonate preservation than that predicted by the hydrate dissociation hypothesis; (4) evidence for widespread terrestrial fires as a source of carbon; (5) a global net reduction in export productivity. To our knowledge, none of these predictions has been disproven, while some of them are supported by available data. Researchers involved in studies of the P/E boundary should consider whether their data are consistent with the idea of an impact trigger for the event.

2 Although there are no mass extinctions among planktonic organisms at the PETM, in contrast to the K/T boundary, we take the perspective that this more likely resulted from a difference in severity and character of perturbations to the surface environment rather than a difference in the ultimate cause of the changes. The perturbation in the surface-ocean environment at the K/T boundary was severe enough that pre-existing species were unable to maintain any ecological niche during the aftermath; as a result, the post-perturbation community was made up of the few survivors and newly evolved species. At the P/E boundary, pre-existing species were able to maintain viable populations in refugia, although at many sites they were temporarily absent or greatly reduced in abundance. The transient nature of these changes should be interesting from an evolutionary perspective: the P/E boundary may represent an event nearly serious enough to cause a global mass extinction, but the severity of the kill mechanisms fell somewhat short, allowing pre-existing communities to become reestablished and diversify following the climatic perturbation.

In contrast, the major changes in ocean carbonate chemistry and export productivity evidently did lead to the mass extinction among benthic foraminifers at the P/E boundary. In conclusion, we invoke a (cometary) bolide impact to explain the established extremely rapid surface environment warming and carbon cycle perturbation at the onset of the PETM. We believe that this initial warming would have led to widespread burning of terrestrial peat deposits, as hypothesized by Kurtz et al. (2003), producing an extended period of high atmospheric pCO2 and the warm climate of the PETM. The already extremely detailed documentation of the PETM may provide an excellent opportunity to examine the environmental and biological perturbation and recovery following a bolide impact.

Doi (permanent) address for the paper here





SCOTTISH FOLLY

Neil Craig wrote the following letter to his local paper in Glasgow:

Your 13th July edition contained an item about a lobby group, the Sustainable Energy Partnership, approving our local MP's support of micro-generation (essentially covering our rooftops with windmills).

55% of Scotland's electricity is provided by 2 nuclear plants, the more extensive of which, Hunterston, is to close in 2011.

Windmills only provide 0.3% of our power & micro-generation , as the name suggests, can do only a small fraction of even that. This is not a serious solution.

Nuclear is reliable, non-polluting, CO2 free & at 2.3p per unit (or less for new reactors) easily the most economical power source.

According to Help the Aged figures 24,000 pensioners die each year in the UK from fuel poverty. If we do not replace our current nuclear plants with at least equal capacity we are going to have massive blackouts & even more deaths. Our MPs have a duty to do something serious about this not playing around with token & subsidised windmills unnecessarily pushing up our electricity bills.

Lenin once said that socialism would be achieved by "Soviet power & the electrification of the whole country" - it is unfortunate to see the present generation of "socialists" instead embracing Ludditism to usher in a new dark age.





Hilarious: CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Officials at the state Department of Environmental Protection are in an ethical quandary. They need to rid the agency’s headquarters of an insect infestation but they don’t want to use pesticides. “In the days of old we would’ve just got some bug spray or let the exterminators kill them,” spokeswoman Jessica Greathouse said. “But we’re the Department of Environmental Protection, and we have the first environmentally friendly building in the state, so we want to try every alternative we can.” Thousands of tiny winged insects called midges have invaded the building in the past six weeks. “They’re a nuisance. They get in my office and in the hallways,” said Cap Smith, chief of administration and building manager. “And they’re in the way.” Berry Crutchfield, an entomologist with the Department of Agriculture, said eradicating the insects will be difficult unless the department determines their source. “That’s the great mystery,” Smith said. “Where are they coming from?”

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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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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