Microplastics have been found in human organs and blood, including the heart
The Green/Left have been getting hysterical about microplastics for some time but but this is the first substantial link among humans. So it cannot be accepted as a firm link until other studies have confirmed it
Microplastics have been linked to increased risk of death in a small but significant study that is one of the first to establish a correlation between plastic in the body and Australia’s biggest killer – heart disease.
More than half of people undergoing surgery for clogged arteries had blood vessels riddled with microplastics, the study found, and those patients had a far greater chance of heart attack, stroke and death compared to people whose arteries were free from plastic.
Italian scientists recruited 257 people with carotid artery disease, where fatty plaque deposits restrict blood flow to the brain. Microplastics lurked in the plaques of about 60 per cent of patients.
Three years after undergoing surgery, 20 per cent of the patients with microplastics in their arteries had died, or suffered a stroke or heart attack.
Only 7.5 per cent of patients free from microplastics suffered the same fate.
Once the scientists controlled for other risk factors, they put the people with microplastics in their arteries at four-and-a-half times greater risk of heart attack, stroke and death.
The study spurred influential US public health expert Dr Philip J Landrigan to call for single-use plastics to be ditched.
Finding microplastics in plaque was a breakthrough discovery in itself, which raised urgent questions, he said.
“The first step is to recognise that the low cost and convenience of plastics are deceptive and that, in fact, they mask great harms,” Landrigan wrote in a The New England Journal of Medicine editorial.
“Should exposure to microplastics and nanoplastics be considered a cardiovascular risk factor? What organs in addition to the heart may be at risk?”
Microplastics are less than 5 millimetres in size, while nanoplastics are smaller than a micrometre and capable of entering cells. The particles are shed by sources including plastic bottles, food containers, synthetic clothing and car tyres.
This small study is part of a developing line of inquiry into whether ingesting micro and nanoplastics increases risk of cardiovascular disease, which causes a quarter of all deaths in Australia.
Scientists have uncovered microplastics in our brains, lungs and placentas. Last year, they were discovered in the human heart for the first time. The fragments lace our blood, urine and breastmilk. But research into the damage microplastics wreak on health is nascent and contentious.
Much of what we do know is based on animal studies or analysis of cells, which are imperfect proxies of human bodies.
In zebrafish and mice, ingested microplastics quickly migrated to “blood-rich” organs including the heart, kidneys and arteries, a 2023 review reported. The plastics trigger inflammation, oxidative stress and cell death, resulting in abnormal heart rates and impairment of cardiac function within study animals.
More research across the board is urgently needed.
The scientists behind the Italian artery study pointed out their finding identifies a correlation rather than a causation between microplastics and increased risk of death.
It may be that the people with microplastics in their arteries had greater exposure to air pollution (which contains microplastic), which could be behind the increased risk of stroke and heart attack.
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No Significant Warming in One of the Most Climate-Sensitive Parts of the Planet, Ice Core Data Show
There has been no significant warming in one of the most climate-sensitive parts of the planet, analysis of Greenland ice core data shows, casting further doubt on the alarmist climate narrative.
We are all familiar with the climate change scare narrative. Red coloured maps of the globe, polar bears stranded on ever diminishing ice floes, extreme weather events etc. When you read a climate change related article or scientific paper it nearly always opens with a statement underlining the severity of the situation facing mankind. What is usually lacking is perspective.
I am not interested in ‘expert’ opinion unless it is supported by empirical data and perspective. Selected sources must be reliable and have ample past data to encompass solar cycle variation. Ideally these data need to come from a region of the planet that is sensitive to global warming. What data from the world of paleoclimatology fit that criteria?
When snow falls, it contains a mix of oxygen isotopes. During warm periods, more heavy oxygen isotopes are found in the snow, while cold periods have more light oxygen isotopes. By analysing these ratios in ice cores, scientists can learn about past temperatures and climate conditions. The ice is laid down in annual layers which can be dated accurately. Consequently, we can construct an accurate temperature record where sufficient ice accumulation exists, such as in polar regions.
If anthropogenic climate change is a real threat, due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels, then we are expecting to see a clear rise in temperature above and beyond the normal variation. This was attempted and published by Michael Mann et al. and is widely known as the hockey stick graph. The main problem with this graph is that it was constructed using 12 sets of proxy measurements which included three sets of ice core data. The ice core data went back only 500 years and the remaining extrapolation relied on tree ring data. There was considerable uncertainty of measurement which was highlighted in his original paper (Figure 1), and a period of 1,000 years provides us with limited perspective in relation to the impact of solar cycles.
Note the light grey area is an estimate of the uncertainty of measurement and extrapolation.
There seems to be a dearth of records that provide temperature proxies for recent times that are relevant to the sudden rise in carbon dioxide levels (1860 to current). However, I did locate data from two overlapping periods from Renland peninsula in Eastern Greenland. The two studies that reported the results from these ice core measurements had quite different themes. The first, which covered the period from 1960 to 10,000 BC, commented on the high temperatures in the Holocene period and the impact on the ice sheet. The second covering 1801 to 2014 examined local site variability. The creation of these datasets was a gargantuan effort. It remains a mystery why these papers did not comment on the temperature trends or indeed try and link the two datasets. Below is a graph combining these two isotope ratio data sets (Figure 2). The black line (far right) is the key as it is a 20 year rolling average of the more recent dataset (brown dots). The first dataset (blue dots) has data points every 20 years, so this rolling average enables a more valid comparison.
These data tell us we’re in one of the coldest spells in the approximately last 9,000 years. Was the only way up? Virtually all global records indicate a steady warming in recent times. I have added green lines to help visualise the ‘normal’ variation in the last 9,000 years. Clearly recent warming is within this normal variation.
I have added another graph (Figure 3) with linear trend lines to each of the datasets to demonstrate how important perspective is in assessing climate change. If we take the trend from 1801 to 2014 (purple dashed) and compare it with that from the last 10,000 years (green line) it seems alarming. But from the longer trend the reader can see that variation in both sets of data is quite normal.
There is also a serious lack of agreement between the Mann hockey stick graph (Figure 1) and these data. It should be borne in mind when making this comparison that the Mann graph attempted to reconstruct temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere whereas the data I have cited here are from a specific area of Eastern Greenland.
The next graph (Figure 4), focusing on the overlap period (1800 to 2014), provides the degree of validity of aligning these two datasets. There appears to be excellent correlation when comparing the black and red lines, implying the data are good proxies for temperature.
In summary, these data indicate there is no significant global warming signal coming from one of the most sensitive parts of the planet. Any warming may be latent, but this seems to be a bit of a stretch.
This absence of a signal could be explained by the fact that the relationship of carbon dioxide to global temperature is logarithmic and above a certain concentration there is minimal direct impact relative to solar cycles.
There are many climate scientists who have devoted their lives to saving mankind but unless these data are invalid, they need to return from the chill winds of the polar regions. Is it game over for the climate change scare narrative?
See original for graphics
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Climate dieting: Eating our way to a brave green world
It had to happen eventually I suppose. An expert group (advising the National Health and Medical Research Council) has decreed that Australia’s official nutritional guidelines must detail the carbon dioxide footprint of each food group they cover. The implication is clear. When we reflect on our dietary habits, we need to consider not only our own health and wellbeing, but the impact of what we consume on the earth’s atmosphere and weather patterns.
Man, it appears, is no longer an end in himself. For the religious, that divinely ordained creature made in the image of God. And for humanists, the starting point and destination of all ethical value and merit. He is not even Hamlet’s ‘quintessence of dust’, ultimately signifying nothing. No, he is a pest and nuisance, a blight on the otherwise pristine environment. If, for understandable electoral reasons, he can’t be eradicated entirely, his malign footprint must at least be made smaller, according to these experts. The sooner this can be done, the better.
You might think this is peak folly for climate change madness. A veritable ‘jump the shark’ moment. But if insanity, as G.K. Chesterton once observed, is following an idea to its outermost logical consequence, it may only be the beginning.
No doubt, our food packaging will soon have to detail the contents’ carbon footprint, perhaps also the menus in our restaurants and cafes. Perhaps the nutrition experts will come up with a ‘net zero’ sustainability deduction to apply to our recommended daily calorie intake. If we all lose a little too much weight and muscle mass in the process, perhaps to the point of shortening our life spans, that’s an added bonus.
Of course, our carbon dioxide footprint is not limited to what we consume. With every exhalation, after all, we deposit this ‘pollutant’ into the atmosphere. (I will draw a veil over the specific category of human emissions which accompany indigestion.) Vigorous exercise must therefore be frowned upon. And perhaps too any kind of activity, including love-making, which increases our respiration rate.
Indeed, if human life is the problem, perhaps we need to revise our euthanasia guidelines accordingly. As a civilised community, we might still set a high bar for people wanting to take this irreversible step, but if the purely medical arguments in any particular case are finely balanced, climate experts may well argue, why not allow sustainability concerns to decide the matter? Not only would the terminally afflicted be put out of their misery, they would have the consolation, as they take their final climate-damaging breath, of knowing they were saving the planet.
While it may clothe its arguments in morality and appeal to (some confected distortion of) science, the climate change movement is ultimately concerned with power. The power of the few over the many, which Lenin famously identified as the basic question of politics. The more honest climate advocates admit this openly, arguing that no part of our lives must remain untouched in the fight against global warming. All policy and regulatory levers must be deployed in this campaign.
Just think about what this means. In the pursuit of arbitrary, ideologically-informed and utterly pointless emission reduction targets, our traditional policy and regulatory goals are being sacrificed. So too, the integrity of our traditional regulatory regimes.
Our new nutritional guidelines, we are told, will no longer be purely about our health. If this sounds shocking, it is nothing new. Our energy sector regulations long ago abandoned the objective of cheap and reliable power. Indeed, by embracing intermittent wind and solar, they are working against it. Planning and environmental regulatory regimes have been similarly corrupted, giving intermittent energy developers free rein to do their worst in the face of local protests. Even financial and corporate regulation is in play: the quaint idea of a level investment playing field for capital has given way to political incentives to plough money into green activities. History tells us that crony capitalism always ends in tears and a huge taxpayer bill, but apparently this can be disregarded.
As we rush headlong in pursuit of our brave green world, the electorates of other Western countries are starting to have doubts, including in the UK, the US and many continental European countries. And of course, China and India, who account for almost all the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions growth, never joined the crusade in the first place. Why this blindness in Australia? Why this folly?
In 1984, Barbara Tuchman wrote a book, The March of Folly, identifying the worst examples of government folly in history. Her starting point? The Trojans accepting, against all good sense, a wooden horse from their Greek enemy. Governments are guilty of folly, she explains, when they adopt policies which can only end in disaster for their people. The major cause of folly, Tuchman points out, is ‘wooden-headedness’, an insistence on ‘assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs’.
The ‘surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns’, in Tuchman’s view, was Philip II of Spain who believed he could conquer England with his Armada in 1588. For Philip, according to an unnamed historian, ‘no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence’. Far from a character flaw, this would seem to be an essential prerequisite for a climate change minister.
The single greatest instance of government folly in my lifetime, and there has been a great deal of competition, was our catastrophic bipartisan response to the Covid pandemic. Our health bureaucrats, both state and federal, were at the very heart of this. You would hope that they have been chastened by the experience, even if they have never (to date) been properly held to account. The experts wanting to hijack our nutritional guidelines appear to have learnt nothing however.
I always try to end my columns with a constructive suggestion. I direct this at all those in government working on climate change interventions. When announced, these should indeed include accurate information on the negative footprint they will leave. Not on the earth’s atmosphere, but on our freedoms, standard of living and quality of life.
Now that would be a public service.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/climate-dieting/
**********************************************Why the truth about weather disasters matters
Watching the news, you get the sense that climate change is making the planet unlivable.
We are bombarded with images of floods, droughts, storms and wildfires. We see not only the deadly events nearby but also far-flung disasters when the pictures are scary enough.
Yet the impression this barrage of catastrophe gives us is wildly misleading and makes it harder to get climate change policy right. Data shows climate-related events such as floods, droughts, storms and wildfires aren’t killing more people. Deaths have dropped precipitously. Across the past decade, climate-related disasters have killed 98 per cent fewer people than a century ago.
This should not be surprising because the trend has been obvious for many decades, although it rarely gets reported. A century ago, in the 1920s, the average death toll from weather disasters was 485,000 a year. In 1921, the New York Herald headlined its full-page coverage of droughts and famines across Europe “Deaths for Millions in 1921’s Record Heat Wave”. Since then, almost every decade there have been fewer deaths, with 168,000 average dead per year in the 1960s and less than 9000 dead per year in the most recent decade, 2014-23.
The 98 per cent drop in climate-related deaths is revealed by the most respected international disaster database, which is the gold standard in measuring these impacts. It’s reliable because very deadly catastrophes have been documented fairly consistently across the century.
It is true that smaller events – often with far fewer or no fatalities – are likelier to have been overlooked in the past because there were fewer people and less advanced technology. That is why some media and climate campaigners increasingly point to a rise in reported events (rather than the declining death toll) as evidence that climate change is ravaging the planet.
But all of the increase has been in less serious events, whereas more deadly events are few and declining. The “rise” is due to technology and the global interconnectedness that allows much better reporting of ever-smaller events, wherever they take place.
This is clear because the increase is seen in all categories of disasters measured – not only weather disasters but also geophysical disasters such as volcanoes and earthquakes, and technological disasters such as train derailings. Not even radical climate activists claim that climate change is causing more trains to derail or more volcanoes to erupt.
That is why fatalities provide a much more robust measure. These are falling dramatically because richer, resilient societies are much better at protecting citizens than poorer, vulnerable ones. More resources and innovation mean more lives saved. Research shows this consistently across almost all catastrophes, including storms, cold waves, and floods.
One much-cited study shows that at the beginning of this century, an average of 3.4 million people experienced coastal flooding, with $US11bn in annual damages. Around $US13bn or 0.05 per cent of global GDP was spent on coastal defences.
By the end of this century, there will be more people in harm’s way, and climate change will mean sea levels rise up to a metre. If we do nothing and keep coastal defences as they are today, vast areas of the planet will be routinely inundated, flooding 187 million people and causing damage worth $US55 trillion annually, costing more than 5 per cent of global GDP.
But richer societies will adapt before things get that bad – especially because the cost of adaptation is low in comparison to the potential damage, at just 0.005 per cent of GDP. This sensible adaptation means that despite higher sea levels, fewer people than ever will be flooded. By 2100, there will be just 15,000 people flooded every year. Even the combined cost of adaptation and climate damages will decrease to just 0.008 per cent of global GDP.
These facts help show why seeing the bigger picture matters. Linking every disaster to climate change – and wrongly suggesting that things are getting much worse – makes us ignore practical, cost-effective solutions while the media focuses our attention on costly climate policies that help little.
Enormously ambitious climate policies costing hundreds of trillions of dollars would cut the number of flooded people by the end of the century from 15,000 to about 10,000 a year. While adaptation saves almost all of the 3.4 million people flooded today, climate policy can, at best, save just 0.005 million. The calculation is even more stark for poor countries, which have few resources and little disaster resilience.
Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) suffered the largest recorded global death toll of 300,000 from a hurricane in 1970. Since then it has developed and improved warning systems and shelters. Across the past decade, hurricane deaths have averaged just 160, almost 2000 times lower. To help countries achieve fewer disaster deaths, we should promote prosperity, adaptation and resilience.
Of course, weather disasters are just one aspect of climate change, which is a real global challenge that we should fix smartly. But when we are inundated with “weather porn” and miss the fact that deaths have dropped precipitously, we end up focusing on the least effective policies first.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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