THE OLD DENTAL AMALGAM SCARE

Part of the mercury phobia. I have got plenty of dental amalgam in my mouth and at age 62 I still seem to be doing OK! Maybe having mercury in your head makes you disbelieve hysterical claims! That conclusion is as logical as many other claims you see in this field

Two long-awaited, government-funded studies found no evidence that dental fillings containing mercury can cause IQ-lowering brain damage or other neurological problems in children. Children with such fillings were no more likely than other youngsters to suffer such problems, the researchers found. Some experts found the findings powerfully reassuring. But the studies are unlikely to end the fierce debate over the long-term effects of what are known as amalgam fillings, and some advocates bitterly accused the researchers of conducting unethical experiments on children.

Amalgam fillings, also called silver fillings, are made of mercury and other metals and have been used by dentists for more than a century. But their use has dropped in recent years as more and more doctors switch to resin composite fillings, which are considered more appealing because they are white. Some advocacy groups and dentists have long contended that the mercury in fillings can leach into the body and cause harmful neurological effects, including autism.

The latest studies were published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. "We didn't see any indications of harm to these kids," said Dr. Timothy DeRouen, a University of Washington professor of biostatistics and dental public health sciences, who led a study of 507 children, ages 8 to 10, in Portugal to determine if mercury fillings had any neurological effects. "And we tested them repeatedly over seven years."

The other study, led by Dr. Sonja McKinlay of the New England Research Institutes, looked at the effect on intelligence, memory and other mental functions, and kidney function. It involved 534 children in New England, ages 6 to 10. McKinlay said she is confident that such fillings are safe for children in this age group, in large part because the youngsters were given far more amalgam than the average American child gets. "If there was no sign of any health problems from this study in these kids with all this amalgam in their mouths ... you know it is going to be safe for kids in the same age group in the rest of the country because they are getting much less exposure," she said. McKinlay also said that while the study revealed children with the mercury fillings had higher mercury levels in their urine, there was no evidence they had a higher incidence of kidney damage.

Neither study examined autism. Dr. David Bellinger, an author of the New England study, said that autism so rare that it wouldn't be expected to be found among the number of children studied. Also, any children with autism would have been eliminated from the study, as would other children with prior neurological disorders.

The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research funded the studies. "From a scientific point of view, it gives us the confidence that these findings are not equivocal and the similarity suggests that the results are real," said Dushanka Kleinman, the institute's deputy director. An American Dental Association official said the studies offer convincing confirmation of what previous studies have said. "This will give patients the reassurance they are making a safe and good choice," said Dr. Frederick Eichmiller, director of the ADA's Paffenbarger Research Center.....

Charlie Brown, counsel for Consumers for Dental Choice, an advocacy group pushing to end the use of mercury in dental fillings, said both studies ignore research that indicates mercury causes a host of physical and mental problems. Brown blasted both studies as unethical, saying that children or their guardians were never told of the potential risks of the mercury fillings. [Proving mercury harmless is unethical!]

More here






Confronting the New Misanthropy

The big question today is not whether humans will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our faith in humanity will survive it, says former Marxist Frank Furedi

Discussions about the future increasingly tend to focus on whether humans will survive. According to green author and Gaia theorist James Lovelock, 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be kept in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable'.

More and more books predict there will be an unavoidable global catastrophe; there is James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, and Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change: Weather and the Destruction of Civilisations. Kunstler's book warns that 'this is a much darker time than 1938, the eve of World War II'. In the media there are alarming stories about a mass 'die-off' in the near future and of cities engulfed by rising oceans as a consequence of climate change.

Today we don't just have Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but an entire cavalry regiment of doom-mongers. It is like a secular version of St John's Revelations, except it is even worse - apparently there is no future for humanity after this predicted apocalypse. Instead of being redeemed, human beings will, it seems, disappear without a trace.

Anxieties about human survival are as old as human history itself. Through catastrophes such as the Deluge or Sodom and Gomorrah, the religious imagination fantasised about the end of the world. More recently, apocalyptic ideas once rooted in magic and theology have been recast as allegedly scientific statements about human destructiveness and irresponsibility. Elbowing aside the mystical St John, Lovelock poses as a prophet-scientist when he states: 'I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news..' Today, the future of the Earth is said to be jeopardised by human consumption, technological development or by 'man playing God'. And instead of original sin leading to the Fall of Man, we fear the degradation of Nature by an apparently malevolent human species.

All of today's various doomsday scenarios - whether it's the millennium bug, oil depletion, global warming, avian flu or the destruction of biodiversity - emphasise human culpability. Their premise is that the human species is essentially destructive and morally bankrupt. 'With breathtaking insolence', warns Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia, 'humans have taken the stores of carbon that Gaia buried to keep oxygen at its proper level and burnt them'.

Human activity is continually blamed for threatening the Earth's existence. Scare stories about the scale of human destruction appear in the media and are promoted by advocacy groups and politicians. For example, it was recently claimed that human activity has reduced the number of birds and fish species by 35 per cent over the past 30 years. That story was circulated by the environmentalist news service Planet Ark and picked up by the mainstream media, and widely cited as evidence that human action causes ecological destruction. Our engagement with nature is frequently described as 'ecocide', the heedless and deliberate destruction of the environment. In short, humanity's attempt to domesticate nature is discussed as something akin to genocide or the Holocaust. The title of Franz Broswimmer's polemic Ecocide: A Short History of the Mass Extinction of Species captures this sense of loathing towards humanity. According to Jared Diamond, 'ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as the threat to global civilisations'.

Increasingly, the term 'human impact' is associated with pollution, wanton destruction and the stripping bare of the Earth's assets. Former US vice president Al Gore is concerned that the 'power of technologies now at our disposal vastly magnifies the impact each individual can have on the natural world', causing a 'violent destructive collision between our civilisation and the Earth'. Over the past 400 years, the human impact on the world, which led to the humanisation of nature, was celebrated by Western culture - these days, human ingenuity is regarded ambiguously or even suspiciously.

Indeed, the very idea of civilisation is presented as a force for ecological destruction. 'Civilisations have been destroying the living systems of the Earth for at least 5,000 years', says one misanthrophic account. According to some environmentalists, humans are a 'foreign negative element', even a 'cancer on the environment'. For radical environmentalists, the degradation of nature stems from our species' belief in its unique qualities. Such a belief - dubbed 'anthropocentrism' - is openly denounced for endangering the planet. Human-centred ideology, which views nature from the perspective of its utility for people, is said to be destroying the environment. And this tendency to depict humans as parasites on the planet is not confined to any small circle of cultural pessimists. Michael Meacher, Britain's former minister for the environment, has referred to humans as 'the virus' infecting the Earth's body.

Western culture's estrangement from its humanity

The rising popularity of a term like 'ecological footprint' shows how much resonance the association of normal human activity with destruction has today. This term, which implies that having an impact on the environment is necessarily a bad thing, is rarely criticised for its misanthropic assumptions. On TV and in film and popular culture, the development of civilisation, and particularly the advance of science and technology, is depicted as the source of environmental destruction and social disintegration. The idea that civilisation is responsible for the perils we face today depicts the human species as the problem, rather than as the maker of solutions. And the most striking manifestation of this anti-humanism is the belief that, if the Earth is to survive, there will have to be a significant reduction in the number of human beings.

The Malthusian objective of reducing populations is alive and kicking. For deep ecologists, the issue is straightforward - their starting point, as spelled out by leading ecologists Arne Naess and George Sessions in 1984, is that a 'substantial reduction in human population is needed for the flourishing of non-human life'. Numerous commentators embrace these Malthusian sentiments. 'The current world population of 6.5 billion has no hope whatsoever of sustaining itself at current levels, and the fundamental conditions of life on Earth are about to force the issue', warns Kunstler. The Australian academic David McNight has tried to reconcile neo-Malthusianism with his version of 'new humanism', arguing that 'creating a sustainable society based on human values will necessitate stopping the growth of human population and accepting limits on human material desire'.

If anything, today's neo-Malthusian thinking is far more dismal and misanthropic than the original thing. For all his intellectual pessimism and lack of imagination, Thomas Malthus believed in humanity far more than his contemporary followers do. He argued, in his book On The Principle of Population, that although 'our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish.they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human society, which before the late wild speculations on this subject, was the object of rational expectation'. Malthus' reservations about the human potential were influenced by a hostility to the optimistic humanism of his intellectual opponents, including Condorcet and Godwin. Nevertheless, despite his pessimistic account of population growth, he said 'it is hoped that the general result of the inquiry is not such as not to make us give up the improvement of human society in despair'.

Over the past two centuries, Malthus' followers often disparaged people who came from the 'wrong classes' or the 'wrong races' - but despite their prejudices they affirmed the special status of the human species. In some instances, such as the eugenic movement, rabid prejudice against so-called racial inferiors combined with a belief in human progress. Today's neo-Malthusians share the old prejudices, but in addition they harbour a powerful sense of loathing against the human species itself.

It's worth recalling that Malthus justified ringing the alarm bells about demographic growth on the basis that the human race lacked the capacity and ingenuity to feed itself. Today, the anti-natalist lobby decries the fact that humanity has become all too successful at reproducing itself - and human ingenuity and development are depicted as the greatest threat to the wellbeing of the planet.

The loss of faith in humanity is strikingly expressed in the stigma attached to speciesism. Speciesism is the sin of elevating humanity above other species. Those who invented this Orwellian-sounding word think humans do not possess any morally unique qualities and people are no better than other lifeforms. They argue that those who claim a special or a higher status for humans are no better than those who talk about racial or male superiority. Animal rights activist Peter Singer defines speciesism as 'a prejudice or attitude of bias towards the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species'. Although speciesism has not yet entered the vernacular, the assumption that it is wrong to prioritise humans over animals has become mainstream. Animal experimentation is increasingly seen as a crime and the boundary dividing humans from animals has become more and more porous. As Josie Appleton has pointed out on spiked, many people take DNA as 'their measure of moral value'. And since studies indicate that people share some 98.4 per cent of their DNA with chimpanzees, they claim that as proof of moral equivalence between humans and apes.

The new misanthropy

Our declining faith in humanity might be most clearly expressed in apocalyptic thinking about the environment, but it pervades everyday life. So it is frequently assumed that people have emotional deficits. We are described as having addictive personalities, or we're seen as 'damaged' or 'scarred for life'. Human relations come with health warnings. We don't simply pollute the environment, it seems, but also one another. We talk about 'toxic relationships', 'toxic parents' and 'toxic families'. Indeed, scare stories about the risks of human relationships are often very similar to discussions about the environment.

Susan Forward, author of Toxic Parents, compares the effects of bad parenting to 'invisible weeds that invaded your life in ways you never dreamed of'. Apparently parents emit poisonous substances which contaminate their kids in much the same way that humans pollute the environment. There is virtually a new genre of literature on the apparently poisonous nature of human relationships. There are books titled Toxic Bachelors, Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing with People Who Make Your Life Miserable, Toxic Relationships And How To Change Them, Toxic Friends, Toxic Coworkers: How To Deal With Dysfunctional People On The Job and Toxic Stress - all of which send the same misanthropic message about relationships as neo-Malthusians spread about population and the environment. And the metaphor is not confined to relationships. Public institutions also come with the toxic-warning label; consider these book titles: Toxic Churches: Restoration from Spiritual Abuse, Toxic Work, The Allure of Toxic Leaders and Toxic Psychiatry.

This reinterpretation of human relations as toxic is driven by a moralising impulse. Pollution traditionally involved an act of defilement and desecration; in previous times, to pollute was to profane, to stain, to sully, to corrupt. But when moral defilement is anticipated and depicted as being normal, pollution becomes a routine form of behaviour - with important implications for how we view humans.

Misanthropy has a profound influence on public policy and political debate. Back in the Fifties sociological research found that there was a clear correlation between how society viewed people and the prevailing political attitudes. One study of individuals' views of human nature suggested they were shaped by political attitudes in general. So attitudes towards the democratic ideal of free speech are directly influenced by whether we believe people are capable of making an intelligent choice between competing views. 'The advocate of freedom of speech is likely to believe that most men are not easily deceived, are not swayed by uncontrolled emotions, and are capable of sound judgement', noted this 1950s study. This implied a high level of faith in humanity. In contrast, 'the individual with low faith in people tends to believe in suppression of weak, deviant, or dangerous groups'. The study concluded that the 'individual's view of human nature would appear to have significant implications for the doctrine of political liberty'. People who viewed human nature positively tended to be more tolerant towards free speech and social experimentation. People who saw humans as being driven by narrow self-interest, greed and other destructive passions were inclined to support measures that curbed freedom.

Today, the growth of censorship, the criminalisation of thought by the enactment of so-called hate crimes legislation and speech codes, and the widespread frowning upon causing offence to individuals and groups is underpinned by the idea that people cannot be trusted to make up their minds about controversial subjects. Today's censorious imperative is driven by a paternalistic and negative view of human nature, and by a lack of faith in people's capacity to discriminate between right and wrong.

Not since the Dark Ages has there been so much concern about the malevolent passions that afflict humanity. Panics about Satanic abuse have erupted on both sides of the Atlantic, and throughout the Western world there is a morbid expectation that virtually every home contains a potential abuser. Predatory monsters are seen everywhere. People regard others with a suspicion that would have been rare just a few decades ago. Parents wonder whether the daycare centre workers looking after their children can be trusted; in schools, children with bruises arouse teachers' suspicion about their parents' behaviour, while parents wonder whether any physical contact between their child and his or her teacher is permissible. In Britain, any adult employee who might come into contact with children has to undergo a police check, and sections of the child protection industry believe this police vetting should be extended to the university sector, too.

The obsession with abuse is not confined to relationships between adults and children. All interactions that involve emotions, physicality or sexuality are labelled as potentially abusive. 'Peer abuse' is seen as one of the key problems of our time; others demand action against 'elder abuse'; and for good measure alarms have been raised about 'pet abuse' and 'chicken abuse'.

Renewing our faith in people

How we view humanity really matters. If we insist on seeing humans as morally degraded parasites, then every significant technical problem from the millennium bug to the avian flu will be feared as a potential catastrophe beyond our control. Today's intellectual pessimism and cultural disorientation distracts the human imagination from confronting challenges that lie ahead. All the talk about human survival expresses a crisis of belief in humanity - and that is why the real question today is not whether humanity will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our belief in humanity can survive it.

Despite Western culture's profound sense of estrangement from its human sensibilities, individuals possess an unprecedented potential for influencing the way they live their lives. It is only now that significant sections of the public have real, meaningful choice and control. We must reinvigorate the belief in autonomy and self-determination, and recognise that we have moved from the Stone Age to a time when people's transformative potential is a remarkable force.

We also know that history does not issue any guarantees. Purposeful change is a risky enterprise. But whether we like it or not, taking risks in order to transform our lives and ourselves is one of our most distinct human qualities. That is why, instead of worrying about our 'ecological footprint', we should take all the steps necessary for moving towards a better future.

Misanthropy threatens to envelop us in a new Dark Age of prejudice where we become scared of ourselves. In such conditions, we have two choices: we can renounce the human qualities that have helped to transform the world and resign ourselves to the culture of fatalism that prevails; or we can do the opposite. Instead of abandoning faith in humanity we can turn our creative energies towards taking control of our futures. Instead of being preoccupied with 'what will happen to us' we should search for answers to the question: 'What needs to be done to humanise the future?'

Human beings are not angels; on a bad day they are capable of evil deeds. But the very fact that we can designate certain acts as evil shows that we are capable of rectifying acts of injustice. And on balance we aspire to do good. Contrary to the fantasies of romantic primitivism, civilisation and development have made our species more knowledgeable and sensitive about the workings of nature. The aspiration to improve the conditions of life - the most basic motive of people throughout the ages - is one that has driven humanity from the Stone Age through to the twenty-first century.

If believing in the human potential is today labelled 'anthropocentrism' and 'speciesism', then I wholeheartedly plead guilty to subscribing to both of those views.







Running Out of Oil? History, Technology and Abundance

Are we running out of oil? That's what the doomsayers say. We are past our (Hubbert's) peak and it's downhill from here. War, famine, pestilence, perhaps even extinction - those are the apocalyptic scenarios posited by folks predicting the oil age is over and the era of stringency is nigh. Whether we are running out of oil or not, one thing we're certainly not short of is people who claim that we are.

The good news about this bad news is that, historically, the doomsayers have always been wrong. Almost since the first discoveries of oil in the U.S. in 1859, people have been saying we're running out. In 1874, the state geologist of the nation's leading oil producer, Pennsylvania, warned the U.S. had enough oil to last just four years. In 1914, the federal government said we had a ten-year supply. The government announced in 1940 that reserves would be depleted within a decade and a half. The Club of Rome made similar claims in the 1970s. President Carter famously predicted in 1977 that unless we made drastic cuts in our oil consumption, "Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil - from any country, at any acceptable price." And so it goes today, where a slew of books and Web sites make fantastic claims about dwindling supplies of crude.

The chief problem with those who say the world is running out is that they have always looked at the issue the wrong way. Questions about energy supply shouldn't be thought of in terms of how much is available, but in terms of how good mankind is at finding and extracting it. In the years after Col. Drake discovered oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania, on the eve of the Civil War, wildcatters could only drill down several hundred feet. If we were confined to relying solely upon the technology available in the 19th century - or, for that matter, the tools available just three decades ago - then yes, quite possibly we could be looking at the end of oil.

But we don't use those outmoded technologies. Advances in seismology and engineering have placed well within our grasp supplies of oil previously considered inaccessible. Today they are easily and economically recoverable. Today's drills don't stop at a couple hundred feet. They bore miles into the earth. They travel laterally as well, so that a well dug in one spot might recover oil underneath locations miles away. Because of directional drilling, today one derrick can do the work that once took dozens, reducing the surface footprint of oil extraction. Energy companies today can drill far offshore, too, in very deep water. They recover deposits that doomsayers of the past thought would be impossible to get at.

Other technologies and advanced processes have boosted the recovery rates of fields thought to be tapped out. The Kern River Field near Bakersfield, California, for instance, pumped nearly 30,000 barrels per day throughout much of the first decade of the 20th century. After 1910, production declined for the next 40 years. The field was nearly abandoned. Innovations like pressurized steam and hot water injections changed that. Production at the Kern River field steadily ramped up after 1960, and the field has produced more than 125,000 barrels of oil per day since 1980. Recent estimates suggest Kern River still holds an additional one billion barrels of recoverable reserves.

That example mirrors the larger trend about oil. In 1970, experts believed the world had 612 billion barrels of proved reserves. Over the next three decades, more than 767 billion barrels would be pumped. Did we use up all the world's oil and then some? Hardly. Conservative estimates today place the world's provable oil reserves at 1.2 trillion barrels. New deposits of oil haven't been created. It's just that human ingenuity has come up with ways to get hard-to-reach deposits.

Expect that trend of increasing reserves to continue. Earlier this month the Department of Energy released a set of reports suggesting that enhanced 21st century oil recovery techniques might quadruple the amount of recoverable oil in the United States. DOE predicted that carbon sequestration technologies that inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs could soon add perhaps 89 billion barrels to the 21.4 billion barrels of proven reserves. More fantastically, government researchers found that "in the longer term, multiple advances in technology and widespread sequestration of industrial carbon dioxide could eventually add as much as 430 billion new barrels."

The same goes for Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer. The Saudis have 261 billion barrels of proven reserves. A year and a half ago, the Saudi energy minister suggested that number was way too small. "There are big chances to increase the kingdom's producible reserves by 200 billion barrels," he said. "This will come either through new discoveries or through increasing production from known deposits."

Questions about global oil supplies also must take into account unconventional sources of oil, like Canada's tar sands or shale oil in Colorado. These offer the promise of many hundreds of billions of additional barrels of oil that are currently extractable using today's technology. Processes for shale and tar sand oil generally are more expensive than conventional oil drilling. If crude oil were trading at $20 per barrel, investment in such extraction would not be viable. With the global price of crude trading above $60, however, they are attractive economically.

None of this is to suggest the world won't run out of oil one day. That could happen. It just isn't going to happen anytime soon.

Source






ANOTHER GREEN CONSENSUS-MYTH DEBUNKED

The notion that mangroves offered some protection from the deadly force of tsunamis was wrong, and such a mistaken belief could lead to a greater loss of life in coastal villages, researchers say.

The results of a study published in this month's Estuarine and Coastal Shelf Science journal disputes claim the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami's toll was lower in villages surrounded by mangroves when the earthquake-spawned waves struck.

The study re-analysed data from Indian research and said it was the height and distance of a village from the shore which protected it, rather than its surrounding vegetation. It found that mangroves offered little or no protection from a tsunami.

The Courier Mail, 5 April 2006

Benny Peiser comments:

"Wait a second. Whatever happened to the scientific consensus?

"As the clear-up from the Asian tsunami starts and the full damage is assessed, there is growing consensus among scientists, environmentalists and Asian fishing communities that the impact was considerably worsened by tourist, shrimp farm and other industrial developments which have destroyed or degraded mangrove forests and other natural sea defences. Reports this week from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia suggest the worst damage has been in places with no natural protection from the sea and that communities living behind intact mangrove forests in particular were largely spared."

(From The Guardian, 6 January 2005)"

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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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