CALIFORNIA'S ACRYLAMIDE LUNACY

A nutty politician ignores all the science in order to attack potatoes!

Apparently stung by the criticisms about his junk science crusade against acrylamide, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has come out swinging as only a trial lawyer turned politician can do -- by coupling a refusal to talk about the real scientific issue with a host of outright misrepresentations. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle (October 17, 2005) Lockyer made the following claims:

1) "Acrylamide is a potent cancer-causing chemical" ;
2) "Acrylamide is found in certain kinds of potato chips and French fries at levels 80 times over the healthy exposure limits" ;
3) Instead of alerting consumers about high levels of acrylamide, some food manufacturers "are concealing the facts: the junk-food industry is peddling junk science."

So just what are the facts about acrylamide; or, more to the point, about Bill Lockyer's claims about acrylamide, for the two are not at all the same? Lockyer claims that acrylamide is a "potent cancer-causing chemical". Now there are two quite extraordinary things about this claim: one is what it doesn't say and two is that even though it is his central argument, he provides no evidence to support it. First, notice what Lockyer is NOT saying. He isn't claiming that acrylamide causes cancer in human beings. Instead he is claiming that it causes cancer AND is found in human food. For the hurried reader or the inattentive listener, these come out as the same thing, but they are not. Acrylamide causes cancer and acrylamide causes human cancer through food are not at all the same thing.

The attorney general has conflated two quite separate points. The difference is crucial since as Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council on Science and Health has pointed out there is a difference between causing cancer and causing cancer in humans through their food. She writes that "If we were to label every food containing something that causes cancer in rodents, few foods would be spared."

There is evidence that acrylamide causes cancer in lab rats, but the risk is significant only at lifetime doses of 500 micrograms per kilogram of rat body weight, according to Joseph Levitt, Director of the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. Assuming that one can extrapolate from rat risks to human risks, this means that a human would have to consume a lifetime daily dose of 35,000 milligrams of acrylamide to have the same cancer risk as a rat.

To get some idea of what this means, a person would have to eat about 180 pounds of French fries per day for life. Put differently, humans typically get a daily dose of acrylamide in their food that is 10,000 times less than that which gives cancer to rats. So, yes acrylamide causes cancer in lab rats, but only at extraordinarily high doses, doses that no human would encounter in his food.

And what about acrylamide and human, as opposed to rat cancer? Here the evidence is of two sorts, occupational exposures to acrylamide and food-based exposures. According to studies by Marsh et al (1999) there is not a statistically significant association between occupational exposure to acrylamide and cancer, a fact confirmed by the World Health Organization in its March report on acrylamide. There are five major studies that have looked at the cancer risks from acrylamide in food. Four of these studies were done by Lorelei Mucci of Harvard. In her first study published in 2003 Mucci looked at dietary acrylamide and cancer of the large bowel, kidney and bladder and found no association between acrylamide and these cancers.

Similar results were found in a 2004 study by Mucci and others which looked for an association between acrylamide and the risk of renal cell cancer and which again found no link. In March, 2005 Mucci published a prospective study which examined whether there was a link between acrylamide and breast cancer. Once again there was no increased risk even for those subjects who ate the highest amounts of foods with acrylamide. Finally, in July 2005, Mucci published another prospective study which looked at acrylamide and the risk of colorectal cancer and found that the "intake of specific food items with elevated acrylamide (e.g. coffee, crisp bread and fired potato products) was not associated with cancer risk."

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"SUSTAINABILITY" NONSENSE

(Post lifted from the Adam Smith blog)

"Ross Clark asks in Saturday's Times "What is Sustainability?" a question I have asked in Adam Smith Institute blogs long past.

EVERYTHING is "sustainable" these days: there are sustainable cars, sustainable blocks of flats, even sustainable school dinners. Everything, that is, except the Prince of Wales's arguments. The heir to the throne said this week that if we wanted to save the planet we must all eat more local, "sustainable" food, and complained that we couldn't go on importing food by jet aircraft.

The concept of sustainability has been used by the environmental movement since at least the 1970s, but it acquired general currency as a result of Our Common Future, a report published in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development. According to the Brundtland report.[sustainable development] is anything "which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" - a definition that the UN Division for Sustainable Development has adopted.

Clark goes on to suggest that "in the absence of any precise meaning, the concept of sustainability is pointless. It could mean virtually anything, and therefore means absolutely nothing. It has become merely a marketing slogan."

But in the UN and World Bank reports, when global companies, or even local governments, go green, the word sustainable has proved sustainable in the titles of their reports. It smacks of apple pie and motherhood. It is the new Malthus doctrine, substituting environment and economic growth for famine and population. It fails to recognize that we have never run out of resources because we substitute one for another; or that the environment is better in rich countries than poor ones.

I have no problem with royalty going into business, or advertising their products, organic or otherwise; or with pollution being penalized. But the current attack on air traffic and other methods of transport assumes that environment degradation is due to carbon emissions, and that the changes are mostly caused by humans. This is not proven, even though it is assumed by green politicians, many employed as scientists. It is disturbing, however, that celebrities, government officials and politicized environment lobbies have captured the ear of the heir to the throne and are using him as their mouthpiece. It bodes ill for the future of the monarchy and its constitutional role outside of politics.





LAND-BASED ICECAPS ARE GROWING OVERALL

And it is only if land-based icecaps shrink that sea-levels will rise. It is the most basic physics that any melting of sea ice (i.e. most of the Arctic) cannot affect sea-levels one iota -- something newspaper reports rarely mention

One of the great fears generated by global warming is that the ocean is about to rise and swallow our coasts. These concerns have been heightened by the substantial uptick in Atlantic hurricane activity that began in 1995. The frequency of really strong storms striking the U.S now resembles what it was in the 1940s and 50s, which few people (aging climatologists excepted) remember.

Those arguing that global warming is an overblown issue have been claiming for years that "consensus" forecasts of sea-level are equally overwrought. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a global average rise of from 3.5 to 34 inches by 2100, with a central estimate of 19 inches. Depending upon how you slice or dice the data, the last century saw maybe six inches. Critics have long argued that these changes require a substantial net melting of some combination of the world's two largest masses of land-based ice, Antarctica and Greenland. In addition, they note that observed global warming is right near the low end of the U.N.'s projections, which means that realized sea level rise should be similarly modest.

Over 15 years ago, John Sansom published a paper in Journal of Climate that showed no net warming of Antarctica. While it was widely cited by critics of global warming doom, no one seemed to take notice. After all, it relied on only a handful of stations. Then, in 2002, Peter Doran published a more comprehensive analysis in Nature and found a cooling trend.

At the same time, a deluge of stories appeared, paradoxically, about Antarctic warming. These studies concentrated on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, the narrow strip of land that juts out towards South America. That region, which comprises less than one-half of one percent of Antarctica, is warming because the surrounding ocean has warmed.

Warmer water evaporates more moisture. The colder the land surface over which that moisture passes, the more it snows. So, Antarctica as a whole should gain snow and ice. Last year, C.H. Davis published a paper in Science about how this accumulating snowfall over East Antarctica was reducing sea level rise. This year, Duncan Wingham, at the 2005 Earth Observations summit in Brussels, demonstrated the phenomenon is observed all over Antarctica.

Greenland is more complex. In 2000, William Krabill estimated the contribution of Greenland to sea level rise of 0.13 mm per year, or a half an inch per century. That's not very much different than zero. Just last month, using satellite altimetry, O.M. Johannessen published a remarkable finding in Science that the trend in Greenland ice is a gain of 5.4 cm (two inches) per year. Almost all of the gain in Greenland is for areas greater than 5000 feet in elevation (which is most of the place). Below that, there is glacial recession. It shouldn't be lost on anyone that because no one ventures into the hostile interior of Greenland, all we see are pictures of the receding glaciers near the coast! The temperature situation in Greenland is more mixed than in Antarctica. Over the last 75 years, there's been cooling in the southern portion (where the recession is greatest) and some warming in the North.

The only other masses of ice on the planet that can contribute to sea level rise are the non-polar glaciers, but they are very few and far between. The biggest is the Himalayan ice cap, but it's so high that a substantial portion will always remain. Most of the rest are teeny objects tucked away in high elevation nooks and crannies, like our Glacier National Park.....

Meanwhile, Antarctica grows. Computer models, while still shaky, are now encountering reality, and every one of them now says that Antarctica contributes negatively to sea level rise in the next century, while almost every model now has Greenland's contribution as a few inches, at best. It is inevitable that one of tomorrow's headlines will be that scientists have dramatically scaled back their projections of sea level rise associated with global warming. Had they paid attention to data (and snow) that began accumulating as long as fifteen years ago, they would have never made such outlandish forecasts to begin with.

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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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