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Global Warming 'Realists' Meet in New York

2009-03-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From Hawaii Reporter March 11, 2009)

We’ve all heard about carbon dioxide and its effect on temperature world-wide. But have you heard that temperature increases first, then hundreds or more years later carbon dioxide levels rise? My guess is probably not. A children’s book with a mislabeled graph shows temperature following carbon dioxide; a leading science journal took over ten years to set the record straight; Al Gore blames carbon dioxide. Yet, there has been no temperature increase in the last nine years in spite of increasing carbon dioxide levels. Clearly, we need to find another culprit.

Earth isn’t the only heavenly body that’s been heating up. The polar ice caps on Mars are melting. Jupiter is developing a second giant red spot, an enormous hurricane-like storm thought to be the result of warming in our solar system. Neptune’s moon Triton has heated up significantly since 1989. Parts of its frozen nitrogen surface have begun melting and turning to gas. Even Pluto has warmed slightly in recent years if you can call -230C warmer than -233C. The question has been asked, is there something all these heavenly bodies have in common? Some one thing they all share that could be causing them to warm in unison, like a giant self-luminous ball of burning gas with a mass more than 300,000 times that of Earth and a core temperature of more than 20 million degrees C, that for the past century has been unusually powerful and active? Hmm- perhaps the Sun should be taking more of the blame for increasing temperatures in the entire solar system.

What about temperature measuring stations? When the Soviet Union was falling apart from 1989 to 1992 folks there didn’t much care about keeping temperature monitoring stations. Thousands were ignored and it’s important to note that many of these were in cold regions—think Siberia. Others around the world were closed at the same time. Could this have contributed to the world-wide temperature increases in the 1990s?

Here in the United States we aren’t that great about keeping our weather monitoring stations in proper order. Anthony Watts, and his team of volunteers, have been checking the condition and placement of weather stations. They’ve now checked 75% of the 1221 United States stations and find only 11% meet standards. The concern is that objects near a station affect what thermometers record. Buildings, parking lots, air conditioners, and sewage treatment plants near weather stations may emit heat and ultimately skew readings.

All of this information and much more was covered at the Second International Conference on Climate Change hosted by the Heartland Institute and 60 cosponsoring organizations in New York City, March 8-10. Nearly 700 attendees from around the world heard opening remarks from Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast and keynote addresses from Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and of the European Union, and Richard Lindzen of MIT. Other keynote speakers included John H. Sununu, former governor of New Hampshire and chief of staff under President George H. W. Bush, US Congressman Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), Lawrence Solomon, author of The Deniers, and Willie Soon, chief science advisor at the Science and Public Policy Institute.

More than 80 presentations were available to attendees during the meeting. My only complaint as an attendee was that with four concurrent break-out sessions at all times, I missed many speakers I would have liked to hear. Fortunately, a lot of material was available in the form of hand-outs and books.

Although some of these folks have been labeled Holocaust deniers, skeptics, and other foul-sounding names, these were serious scientists with data that should be more open to the public. Jay Lehr suggests that these folks should no longer be labeled skeptics, but instead called Realists. I couldn’t agree more.

An Environmental Lawsuit That's The Tip Of The Iceberg

2009-03-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From Hawaii Reporter February 27, 2009)

Our government recently took a giant step in helping environmentalist groups in their global warming crusade. Two agencies, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im) and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) settled a suit filed in 2002 by the radical environmental groups Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, and four US cities. The suit contended that the agencies had failed to evaluate the global warming impacts of a coal-fired power plant in China, a pipeline in Africa from Chad to Cameroon and natural gas projects in Russia, Mexico, Venezuela and Indonesia.

The bottom line for the plaintiffs was simply that any power plant using fossil fuels—even clean-burning natural gas—was going to contribute to global warming. The lawsuit, Friends of the Earth, inc., et al. v. Spinelli (Case No. 3:02-cv-04106, sometimes referred to as Friends of the Earth v. Watson), is a fascinating read. After being educated on how activities on foreign soils will affect climate change and cause severe socio-economic disruption and significant adverse environmental impacts on the US, we are then given examples of folks in the US who will see their property values decline and/or their land washed away by rising seas. Then four US cities chime in with their concerns.

The plaintiffs say global warming from the emissions boost sea levels by melting glaciers, which threatens coastal cities and island vacation properties.

Dr. Philip Dunstan, professor at the College of Charleston, is building a home on St. John’s Island, approximately 10 miles southwest of Charleston, SC. The home will be approximately 5.5 miles from the ocean and on land eight feet above sea level. Dr. Dunstan is building his home higher and stronger than required by current code, even though the home is over five miles from the ocean. This is costing him a significant amount of money. Additionally, his insurance rates for the new home will increase over time. Dr. Dunstan believes that the higher insurance costs are attributable to the effects of climate change.

Pam and Jesse Williford have a lot with an elevation of five to eleven feet on Emerald Island on North Carolina’s outer bank. They are concerned about rising ocean levels, increased storm surge, etc. They may have not bought the lot if, twenty-five years ago they had known the dangers of climate change. Mr. Williford states that, “I did not think that in our lifetime or our kids’ lifetime that a house in the middle of Emerald Isle would be so affected, but now we know otherwise.”

Arthur and Anne Berndt are concerned that there aren’t enough low temperatures below freezing necessary for maple syrup production on their farm in Sharon, Vermont. Note—remember this was in 2002. Wonder what they would say after the winter of 2009.

Need one point out that all three of these examples are from folks who are members of Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace, or both?

Then the lawsuit lists four cities; Boulder, CO, and the California cities of Arcata, Oakland, and Santa Monica who state they would feel the environmental impacts of those faraway projects.
•Boulder claimed warmer temperatures could affect the snowcap it relies on for its water.
•Arcata said warming could harm salmon migration and rising seas would cause flooding that would damage the city’s wastewater treatment system.
•Oakland claimed its airport next to San Francisco Bay could be damaged by sea-level rise associated with global warming.
•Santa Monica is worried their water supply could be influenced.

The case originally made headlines in August 2006 when the court determined that the plaintiffs had the legal right to bring suit against Ex-Im and OPIC for funding projects in other areas of the world because the United States cities could be affected by global warming effects from these projects. “This was the first court opinion that said greenhouse gas emissions in Chad and Saudi Arabia could have an adverse effect on the environment of the United States,” said Sue Ellen Harrision, the assistant city attorney for plaintiff city Boulder, CO.

Refusing to dismiss the case on summary judgment, the court determined that standing existed because plaintiffs had introduced evidence that: “1-increased greenhouse gases are the major factor that cause global warming in the twentieth century, 2-global warming has already occurred and has had significant environmental consequences, 3-continued increases in greenhouse gas emissions would continue to increase global warming with consequent widespread environmental impacts, 4-and that these impacts have and will affect areas used and owned by plaintiffs.”

In the midst of all the hype about global warming, the court that settled this suit obviously ignored the latest glitches in the global warming debate. First, let’s look at sea level rise. Predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1980 assumed that the polar ice sheets would melt and cause a catastrophic 25 foot rise in sea level. The 25 foot increase then fell to 3 feet by 1985, and then to less than 1 foot by 1995. Patrick Michaels sums it up well, “Sea level has risen because of climate change, but it has risen only a few inches. In fact, there’s no evidence that the rate of sea level has changed at all, despite a surface temperature that has warmed, cooled, and warmed again in the last 100 years.”

Then there’s the issue of what’s really happened to temperature in recent times. After nine years of non-warming, the planet actually began to cool in 2007 and 2008 for the first time in 30 years. The net warming from 1940 to 1998 had been a minuscule 0.2 degree C; the UK’s Hadley Center says earth’s temperature has now dropped back down to about the levels of 100 years ago. As Dennis Avery points out, “There has thus been no net global warming within ‘living memory.’” So far, 2009 doesn’t look like another barn-burner for the warming advocates.

Surely you (and the court) have heard that nine of the ten warmest years recorded in the US lower 48 states since 1880 have occurred since 1995, with the hottest being in 1998. Well, that also has been shown to be wrong. Lorne Gunter reports, “A little less than a decade ago, the US government changed the way it recorded temperatures. No one thought to correlate the new temperatures with the old ones though—until Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre, that is. In many cases the changes are statistically minor, but their potential impact on the rhetoric surrounding the global warming is huge. The hottest year since 1880 becomes 1934 instead of 1998, which is now just second; 1921 is third. Four of the ten hottest years were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade. The 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise; seven occurred afterwards. In other words, there is no discernible trend, no obvious warming of late.” Gunter adds, “There are two sides to the climate story. You’re getting one.”

Court decisions prompted by the lawsuit have established precedents in climate-related law. The case expanded the scope of NEPA, which requires impact statements for government projects, beyond local pollution issues to global warming. It was cited in a recent US Supreme Court decision that held that the EPA had the power to regulate greenhouse gases. Environmentalists are now looking to the Obama administration to extend climate considerations to all government actions.

Ron Shems, lead council for the plaintiffs, said, “This case was one of the very first climate change lawsuits and established the framework for other climate change cases. The claims here are no longer considered novel.” The settlement includes a provision that among other things, the agencies will take under consideration so-called greenhouse gas emissions when making investment decisions. In other words, the cumbersome—to be charitable, as Tim Hunt puts it—US environmental laws must now be applied to projects around the world.

Next on the docket—EPA is expected to regulate carbon dioxide, so this is just the beginning.

Electricity Turns Cheap Wine To A Fine Vintage

2009-02-07T08:49:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

We’re all aware of the story of Jesus turning water into fine wine at Cana. Well according to recent research you can become ‘Jesus-like’ with the proper use of electricity. You will not be able to turn water into wine but the claim is that with passage of the proper current, plonk (cheap wine) can be turned into a fine vintage.

Backed by a decade of research with results published in a peer-reviewed journal and having passed the ultimate test-blind tasting by a panel of wine experts, efforts by Xin An Zeng and his colleagues offer promise. (1) Stephanie Pain reports, “The food industry has experimented with electric fields as an alternative to heat-treating since the 1980s, and 10 years ago Xin An Zeng, a chemist at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, decided to see what he could do for wine. Early results were promising enough for Zeng and his colleagues to develop a prototype plant in which they could treat wine with fields of different strengths for different periods of time.” (2)

The researchers passed a raw red wine between a set of titanium electrodes to which they applied AC at 0-900 V/cm. The flow was varied to expose the sample to residence times from 1-8 minutes. They report, “An optimum treatment, with electric field 600 V/cm and treatment time 3 minutes, was identified to accelerate wine aging, which made the harsh and pungent raw wine become harmonious and dainty. HPLC and GC/MS combined with routine chemical analysis methods were used to identify the difference between the treated and untreated samples.” (1)

Analysis revealed some significant chemical changes. Most obviously, there was a marked increase in reactions between alcohols and acids to produce esters. This led to a reduction in concentrations of the long-chain alcohols known to be responsible for nasty odors and a burning mouth feel, while the increase in the concentration of esters boosted the aroma and the perception of fruitiness. Two other good things happened: the breakdown of proteins produced free amino acids that contribute to taste and there was a noticeable reduction in the levels of aldehydes, which are responsible for ‘off’ flavors. Too high a voltage and too long a time resulted in plonk worse that the original, so one has to be quite careful about operating conditions. (2)

Over the years, inventors have come up with dozens of widgets that they claim can transform the undrinkable or bring the finest wines to perfection without the long wait. There’s little scientific evidence that most of work. Here are some reported by Stephanie Pain:

*Ultrasound- Last October saw the launch of the Quantum Wine Ager which is based on ultrasonics. Experts say ultrasound might increase some reactions but a lot of rigorous experiments must be done before concluding that it works.

*Undersea Cellarage- Champagne house Louis Roederer has consigned several dozen bottles of champagne to the ocean floor, where it speculates the cool water and gentle rocking by currents will accelerate aging. The verdict on this is that by lowering the temperature you slow down chemical reactions, so storage in cold water will slow the aging process. Corks are permeable to oxygen which helps aging. While in water, no oxygen will enter the bottle.

*Gamma Radiation- According to Chinese researchers, an hour’s treatment improved the flavor of new rice wine. In Canada, the technique has been used to get rid of ‘ladybeetle taint’, nasty off-flavors that result form ladybeetles (ladybirds) being pressed along with the grapes. This sounds technically interesting, but it’s doubtful that consumers are ready for irradiated wine.

So, back to use of electricity. There are good commercial reasons why winemakers would love to get their hands on a speedier alternative, especially in places like China where the industry is young and booming. It would allow them to get their wine into shops faster to meet ever-increasing demand, and cut the cost of storage. Five Chinese wineries have begun trials using electricity and reportedly this has French and American wineries watching closely. China is the world’s fastest growing wine market and is trying to become a world-class wine maker as well. If the Chinese can figure out how to supply their own population with all the great wine they need, that leaves French and American wineries out of the picture, (3)

Some Final Notes

Reading the on-line comments to the Pain article provides some hilarity:
• Would a microwave do perhaps? –Only if you stick a fork in the toaster at the same time.
• Forget about complicated titanium electrodes. Eight seconds in the microwave achieves the same result. Try it yourself. I’ve fooled many a wine taster.
• I like copper electrodes, takes the sulfur taste out at the same time.
Does this mean that aging of wine is over? Probably not. Many wine drinkers are firmly entrenched in tradition and would not accept artificially aged wine no matter how good. However, the technology is going to continue to influence the way wine is made, stored and enjoyed. One day, wine drinkers may have to choose between decanting or giving their wine a couple of minutes between the ol’ electrodes, as one web site puts it. (4)

References
1.Xin An Zeng et al., “The effects of AC electric filed on wine maturation,” Innovative Food Science & Emerging Technologies, 9, 463, October 2008
2.Stephanie Pain, “How to make cheap wine taste like a fine vintage,: New Scientist, 200, 58, December 17, 2008
3.“Coming soon: vintage wine over night,” fatcityblog.com,December 29, 2008
4.“Aging wines with electric fields instead of cellars,” wineenabler.com,
December 28, 2008

The Rich and Famous and Carbon Offsets

2009-01-22T11:55:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From Hawaii Reporter, January 22, 2009)

It’s OK to have a carbon footprint if you pay enough. You do this by buying carbon offsets. These are used by politicians, environmentalists, movie stars, athletes, and others to claim the impact of their high-consumption lifestyles on the environment can be canceled out by paying someone else to invest in carbon-reducing initiatives, reports Lorrie Goldstein.

Many famous people who are for sustainability and against global warming live in many very big houses, drive many very big cars, and fly in private jets. If you travel frequently by air, even on commercial flights, you can’t escape having a huge carbon footprint. Yet many of the most vocal advocates of cutting emissions—politicians, entertainers, environmentalists, journalists, scientists—are continually jetting off to campaign events and conferences and workshops. Are they going to change the way they operate? If not, how are they going to persuade anyone else to cut back emissions, asks John Tierney.

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was ‘carbon neutral,’ despite all the folks flying to attend, because in large part, people donated money to third world countries to plant trees or build hydroelectric dams for electricity.

The Live Earth concerts held in 2007 created a huge carbon footprint on the globe in the name of climate preservation; an estimated 7,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. This does not include the private jets of all the celebrities who attended or the thousands of people who drove their cars to each concert. An official volume, The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook, presents 77‘essential skills for stopping climate change.’ Here are some guidelines from the book: “Let’s say that despite your best efforts, you still have to fly to your best friend’s wedding. You’re dumping 3,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and you’re wracked with guilt about your contribution to global warming. Relax, you can throw money at the problem. Go online, find a company that sells clean energy credits, and buy enough to make up for the greenhouse gases your trip created.” The book goes on to state that you must choose your offsets carefully and points out that trains are the most ecologically low-impact way to cover long distances. How many celebrities take Amtrak? And speaking of celebrities and their eco-friendliness, let’s look at a few.

Celebrities

Al Gore, academy award winner and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, has to be high up on the list. Bruce Nussbaum notes, “Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy. Gore’s mansion, (20-rooms, eight-bathrooms) located in Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES). The average household in American consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average. Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year. In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006.”

Like a good citizen, Gore buys carbon offsets to assuage his high energy lifestyle, and this is good. But here’s the rub. He buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management, a company he co-founded and serves as chairman. Through this company, he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe. As co-founder and chairman of the firm, Gore presumably draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he ‘buys’ his ‘carbon offsets’ from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself.

Madonna, who was the main attraction at the London Live Earth concert owns a collection of fuel-guzzling cars, including a Mercedes Maybach, two Range Rovers, Audi A8s and a Mini Cooper S. She flies everywhere in her private jet and her Confessions tour produced 440 tons of carbon dioxide in four months last year. This was just the flights between the countries, not taking into account the truckloads of equipment needed, the power to stage such a show and the transport of all the thousands of fans getting to the gigs.

John Travolta says, “Everyone can do their bit. Global warming is a very valid issue—we have to think about alternative methods of fuel.” Travolta once starred in a movie about bringing industrial polluters to justice. But in real life he has probably the biggest carbon footprint of any Hollywood star. He parks his personal Boeing 707 on his front lawn—next to his three Gulfstream jets and a Lear jet. Rather appropriately, he has called his home Jumboair.’

The Red Hot Chili Peppers produced 220 tons of carbon dioxide with their private jet alone over six months on their last world tour which was 42 dates.

All this prompts Ginny Buckley and Max Flint to ask, “Is the hot air emitted by celebrities when they spout ecological platitudes a greenhouse gas?”

Enron and Lehman Brothers

There’s big money to be made in the carbon business. Enron and Lehman Brothers are two examples. Ken Lay became a celebrated corporate executive praised for his ‘21st century’ business visions. But Enron’s internal memos, leaked to reporters during its bankruptcy scandal, revealed other motivations. Christine MacDonald in her book, Green, Inc., notes that Lay had two meetings with President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore on a treaty capping carbon emissions. An internal Enron memo predicted this would ‘do more to promote Enron’s business than almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States.’ MacDonald adds, “Enron also had plans for using its support among environmentalists, who cooed over Lay.”

Lehman Brothers was at the forefront of the vast trade created by the new worldwide regulatory system to ‘fight climate change’ by curbing emissions of carbon dioxide. Jane Orient notes, “In 2007 they released a long and highly publicized report about climate change in which they preached about decarbonization, trying to make their investors keep getting high profits from the Kyoto carbon trade scheme and the support of huge public subventions. They recommended to their investors what they considered a central value of the carbon ton 50 years into the future. All of this of course, with the applause of the usual choir of politicians, the entire media, and the Greens.”

Thousands of green militants have been using the Lehman report as a proof of global warming and impending chaos. The report is the basis for policies on climate change in Spain, Argentina, and several other countries, it is used by economy professors playing climatologists, and by newspaper editorialists. Yet in spite of their ability to predict the climate 50-100 years ahead, they couldn’t predict their own bankruptcy.

Regulations- Polar Bears, Solar Power, Lawnmowers, and Fast-Food Restaurants- What Next?

2009-01-09T15:29:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From nasf.org, January 2009)

Polar Bears

“The Interior Department, bound by the Endangered Species Act, has declared polar bears a ‘threatened’ species because they might be endangered ‘in the foreseeable future,’ meaning 45 years. (Note: 45 years ago, the now long-forgotten global cooling menace of 35 years ago was not yet foreseen). The bears will be threatened if the current episode of warming, if there really is one, is, unlike all the previous episodes, irreversible, and if it intensifies, and if it continues to melt sea ice vital to the bears, and if the bears, unlike in many previous warming episodes, cannot adopt,” says George Will. (1)

Never mind that the overall polar bear population has increased from about 5,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 today, and that the only two populations in decline come from areas where it has actually been getting colder over the past fifty years. Also, ignore the fact that polar bears wee around 100,000 years ago, long before at least one interglacial period (Eeemian) when it was much warmer than our present Holocene. Clearly, they survived long periods of time when the climate of the Arctic was much warmer than at present. (2) But obviously, they aren’t expected to survive this present warming without help from the regulators.

George Will adds, “Now that polar bears are wards of the government, and now that it is a legal doctrine that humans are responsible for global warming, the Endangered Species Act has acquired unlimited application. Anything that can be said to increase global warming can—must—be said to threaten bears already designated as threatened. Want to build a power plant in Arizona? A building in Florida? Do you want to drive an SUV? Or leave your cell phone charger plugged in overnight? Some judge might construe federal policy as proscribing these activities.” (1)

The state of Alaska sued Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, seeking to reverse his decision to list polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Governor Sarah Palin (now Vice-Presidential candidate) and other state officials fear a listing will cripple offshore and gas development in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in Alaska’s northern waters, which provide prime habitat for the only polar bears under US jurisdictions. (3)

And they are right on the money. Roy Innis observes, “Federal land management agencies report that about 40 percent of their annual budget goes just to pay for lawsuits filed by environmentalists to stop development of your lands, your resources and your energy.” (4) Unfortunately, with new regulations coming along, this percentage will increase in future years rather than go down.

Solar Power

Are you in favor of alternate energy? How about solar power? Well, if this is your preference, do you realize that Washington has placed a moratorium on solar power projects on federal land? Yep. The Bureau of Land Management quietly decided in May that the development of solar plants in 119 million sun-soaked federally owned acres in the western states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah would have to wait at least two years while bureaucrats sorted out their environmental impact. (5)

Investor’s Business Daily reports, “The environmental groups are the reason the BLM made its decision. Had they not spent the past 30 years rabidly crusading against development, reflexively defending wildlife habitats from minor and imaginary threats, and demonizing economic progress, the solar projects would not have been interrupted.

Washington has become so overly sensitive to the possibility of vocal opposition on anything that has an environmental impact that it feels it must inoculate itself from the radicals—even when the project is one they should support without reservation.” (5)

Though a great deal of land has been set aside, it would take only 1% of the total area now off-limits to generate through solar plants enough energy to power more than 20 million homes, and this at a time when the price of a barrel of oil is going through the roof. No way is alternate energy going to help in the near future.

Carbon Credits

It gets worse. In a huge document released in July, the EPA lays out the thousands of carbon controls with which they’d like to shackle the whole economy. None of it is law yet, but watch out.

The Wall Street Journal reports, “The mess began in 2007 when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Mass. V. EPA that greenhouse gases are ‘air pollutants’ under current environmental laws, despite the fact that the laws were written decades before the climate-change panic. The EPA was ordered to regulate if it decides that carbon emissions are a danger to the public. The 588-page ‘advance notice of proposed rulemaking’ lays out how the EPA would like it to work in practice. Justice Antonin Scalia noted in his dissent that under the Court’s ‘pollutant’ standard, ‘everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies,’ which the EPA appears to have taken literally. It is alarmed by ‘enteric fermentation in domestic livestock’—that is, er, their ‘emissions.’ A farm with over 25 cows would exceed the EPA’ proposed carbon limits. So would 500 acres of crops, due to harvesting and processing machinery.” (6) If this becomes law, the increase in food costs because of ethanol will seem puny by comparison to those covered by this proposed regulation.

Just about everything with an engine would be regulated; farm tractors, autos, dirt bikes, snowmobiles, planes and trains, and even your lawn and garden equipment.

Eliminate Obesity—No Fast-Food Restaurants

A proposal that would place at least a one year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in a broad swath of neighborhoods has been approved by a Los Angeles City Council committee. If approved by the full council and signed by the mayor, the law would prevent fast-food chains from opening new restaurants in a 32 square mile area in South Los Angeles. This is designed to help prevent obesity. (7) Will supermarkets and green grocers come in to replace the fast-food chains? I doubt it. And as Gilbert Ross points out, “banning so-called fast-food restaurants from specific zones will not ameliorate the problem. People will walk a few extra blocks to get the products they crave.”(8) Certainly people need to eat properly and have adequate exercise, but being told what to eat by the City Council will not empower anyone to make wise choices or change their preferences.

Lastly, California this year became the first state to ban artery-clogging trans fats in restaurants and in 2003 it banned the sale of soft drinks in middle and elementary schools. (9)

The Cato Institute sums it up well, “One of the most disturbing trends in government expansion over the last 35 years has been the collection of laws, regulations, and binding court decisions that make up the ‘nanny state.’” (10) Looks like things are continually getting worse in this aspect, rather than better.

References

1.George F. Will, “March of the Polar Bears,” washingtonpost.com, May 22, 2008
2.Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It, (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 4
3.Dan Joling, “Alaska sues over listing polar bear as threatened,” oregonlive.com, August 4, 2008
4.Roy Innis, Energy Keepers, Energy Killers, (Chicago, Illinois, The Heartland Institute, 2008), 73
5.“No Sun Intended,” Investor’s Business Daily, June 30, 2008
6.“The Lawnmower Men,” The Wall Street Journal, July 19-20, 2008, Page A8
7.Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “Panel OKs one year ban on new fast-food restaurants in South L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2008
8.Gilbert Ross, “No Quick Fast-Food Fixes,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2008
9.Lisa Baertlein and Dan Whitcomb, “LA’s fast-food ban draws skepticism,” Reuters Health Information, September 3, 2008
10.“The Nanny State,” The Cato Institute, December 4, 2004

Polonium- More Toxic Than Cyanide- Smokers Beware

2009-01-09T15:25:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, California

(From nasf.org, January 209)

What do polonium and cyanide have in common? Answer- both are toxic and both are inhaled by cigarette smokers. However, polonium makes cyanide look like a lightweight since it is 250 billion times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide. (1)

Yet, even non-smokers can’t get away from polonium. John Emsley reports, “We cannot escape having some polonium in our body because it is formed from radioactive radon gas. This gas may be chemically inert, but if breathing it in coincides with its decay to polonium, as can happen because of radon’s short life, the polonium may lodge in the lungs and from there move into the blood stream. Polonium targets no particular organ of the body but, because it is an alpha emitter, wherever it ends up has the potential to damage DNA and that can lead to cancer” (2)

Polonium had its fifteen minutes of fame in November 2006 in connection with its use as a poison to kill Alexander Litvinenko, an outspoken critic of the Putin regime. The odds of this happening to any of us are infinitesimally small. But here’s the rub—if you’re a smoker you get a dose of polonium every time you light up.

For a two-pack-a-day smoker the radiation dose to bronchial epithelium from Po-210 inhaled in cigarette smoke is probably at least seven times that from background sources, and in localized areas may be up to 1,000 rem or more in 25 years. Radiation from this source may, therefore, be significant in the genesis of bronchial cancer in smokers, note Edward Radford and Vilma Hunt. (3) So what’s a rem? It’s the amount of energy deposited in the human body by ionizing radiation. For ease of understanding, Mark Hart of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory equates 1 rem to 1 dollar, so 1 millirem is 0.1 cent or 1/10th of a cent. The yearly limit for safe exposure is 5 rem, or 5 dollars. (4)

Another way to look at this is in terms of X-rays. Conservative estimates put the level of radiation absorbed by a pack-and-a-half-day smoker at the equivalent of 300 chest X-rays every year. (5) Others report the equivalent of 800 X-rays and the National Institute of Health published a radiation exposure chart which shows that smoking 30 cigarettes per day is the equivalent of 2,000 chest X-rays per year. (6)

In spite of this you can’t lay all the health issues with smoking on polonium since no one is certain what causes the high death rate in smokers. The major culprits are probably dioxins, nicotine and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) contained in pitchy substances, and radioactive substances, mainly polonium-210, potassium-40, and lead-210. (7) But here’s an important point: polonium-210 is the only component of cigarette smoke that has produced cancers by itself in laboratory animals by inhalation. Tumors appear at a level five times lower than the dose to a heavy smoker. (8)

So, how does polonium get into tobacco? It’s not entirely understood, but uranium ‘daughter products’ naturally present in soils seem to be selectively absorbed by the tobacco plant, where they decay into radioactive polonium. High-phosphate fertilizers may worsen the problem since uranium tends to associate with phosphates, reports Robert Proctor. (5)

So, what’s the mechanism? When you light up a cigarette the polonium is volatilized, you inhale it, and it is quickly deposited in the living tissue of the respiratory system. The intense localized heat in the burning of a cigarette volatilizes the radioactive metals. While cigarette filters can trap chemical carcinogens, they are ineffective against radioactive vapors. (8)

The lungs of a heavy smoker (which may mean only 15 cigarettes per day) become coated with a radioactive lining which irradiates the sensitive lung tissue. Smoking two packs (40 cigarettes a day) gives an alpha particle radiation dose of around 1,300 millirems per year, over six-times the dose received by the average American from breathing radon (200 millirems). Furthermore, polonium-210 is soluble in body fluids and is this percolated through every tissue and cell giving levels of radiation much higher than that received from radon. (1) The proof is that it can be found in the blood and urine of smokers. The circulating polonium-201 causes genetic damage and early death from diseases reminiscent of early radiological pioneers: liver and bladder cancer, stomach ulcers, leukemia, cirrhosis of the liver, and cardiovascular diseases. (8) Concentrations of polonium-210 and lead-210 in rib bones taken form smokers were about twice those in nonsmokers. (9)

Some Final Words

There’s a fear of radiation that comes from the many doomsayers that have used the media and public to their advantage for decades. I’ve written about radiation on a number of occasions, trying to put it in good light (smoking pun intended).

Have you heard?
-Low levels of radiation are beneficial to humans.
-Mice exposed to low levels of radiation lived longer than mice that were not.
-Fish exposed to low levels of radiation grew faster than fish that weren’t.
-Low levels of radiation increase fertility and embryo viability, and decrease sterility and mutations.(10)

It’s more likely you’ve heard about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. When radioactivity from the Chernobyl accident reached our West Coast, the press warned residents about the dangers of possible fallout; speaking of the number of picocuries of radioactivity detected in high clouds without ever explaining that a picocurie is one part per trillion. Nor did the press mention that you would have to drink 63,000 gallons of that radioactive rain water to ingest one picocurie of radioactivity. (10) With Three Mile Island, the most serious damage was from the psychological trauma and over-exaggeration from mishandling of the incident by politicians and the media. (11)

Yet, with polonium and cigarettes I have a different feeling. The facts that polonium can get into the blood stream of smokers and that polonium is the only component of cigarette smoke that has produced cancer by itself in laboratory animals make me thankful that I am not a smoker.

References
1.Chris Rhodes, “Polonium-210, Russian Spies and Safe Tobacco,” Energy Balance, December 1, 2006
2.John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), 332
3.Edward P. Radford, Jr. and Vilma Hunt, “Polonium-210: A Volatile Radioelement in Cigarettes,” Science 143, 247, January 17, 1964
4.Mark. M. Hart, “Disabling the Terror of Radiological Dispersal,: Nuclear News, 46, 40, July 2003
5.Robert N. Proctor, “Puffing on Polonium,” New York Times, December 1, 2006
6.“Radioactive Polonium in Tobacco,” http://www.webspawner.com/users/radioactivethreat/; July 26, 2005
7.Bogdan Skwarzec, et al., “Polonium 210Po in Cigarettes Produced in Poland,” J. Environ. Sci. Health, A36, 465, 2001
8.“Health effects of polonium,” www.lenntech.com, July 26, 2005
9.Richard B. Holtzman and Frank H. Ilcewicz, “Led-210 and Polonium-210 in Tissues of Cigarette Smokers.” Science 153, 1259, September 9, 1966
10.Dixy Lee Ray, “Radiation Around Us,” in Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Jay H. Lehr, Editor, (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), 589
11.Edward G. Remmers, “Nuclear Power: Putting the Risks Into Perspective,” Issues on the Environment, (New York, American Council on Science and Health, 1992), 68

Planting Trees May Not Cancel Out Your Carbon Footprint

2009-01-07T10:03:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From Hawaii Reporter January 5, 2009)

Carbon credits or offsets are a theoretical way for you to assuage your guilt for all those awful greenhouse gases you’re releasing into the air whenever you heat your house, drive your car, or even breathe.

Carbon offsets are used by politicians, environmentalists, movie stars, athletes and others to claim the impact of their high-consumption lifestyles on the environment can be canceled out by paying someone else to invest in carbon-reducing initiatives. Some folks have reported that they plant 500 trees to offset one of their private jet trips. What they didn’t say is that it may take 20 years for the infant trees to make up for their 2-hour Lear Jet outing.

Lorrie Goldstein likens carbon offsets to the equivalent of a fat person claiming he’s losing weight by paying a thin person to go on a diet. Or, it’s like paying someone to agree to not commit adultery so you can sin at will.

The planting of trees is one of the more highly touted offsets. Some folks claim that carbon offsets from this activity are nonsense because the emissions are instant, whereas the tree’s absorption is over many years. You can’t offset carbon emissions. Burning fossil fuels adds carbon dioxide to the carbon cycle. Trees merely store some of it for a while before releasing it once they rot or burn. They’re not an offset, merely a delaying device. Plus, the Earth would eventually have to be nothing but trees to even theoretically counter the impact of all man-made emissions.

There are other problems. It’s impossible to say how much carbon a tree will store, so you can’t know how many to plant for your emissions. Beyond that, you can’t tell what your emissions are; figures on offset websites for miles driven don’t take into account your miles per gallon or how many passengers to divide it among. Figures for a train journey would surely be different if it’s a packed rush hour train compared to a late afternoon one with only half a dozen passengers on board.

Besides this, a number of investigations have revealed tree planting to be largely if not entirely, a scam notes Nigel Lawson in his book An Appeal to Reason. He says, “The trees that have allegedly been planted may not have been; if they have been, they may well have been planted in any event, and either way their carbon absorption is notional, unverified, and at best, some way into the future.” Some tree-planting projects in Guatemala, Ecuador and Uganda have been accused of disrupting water supplies; evicting thousands of villagers from their land; seizing grazing rights from farmers, and cheating local people of promised income, reports Nick Davies. In some cases the trees may not live. One example; many of the 10,000 mango trees planted to offset the carbon produced by the music group Coldplay died.

You can even plant the wrong kind of tree in the wrong place. Trees affect the reflectivity of the Earth and its ability to bounce some of the sun’s heat back into space. Covering large swatches of light ground with dark trees could lead to more heat being absorbed, boosting temperatures. Researchers Gregory Asner and his colleagues report that only trees planted in equatorial regions are likely to produce a net benefit. Those planted further away—especially in high latitudes where snow is common—are likely to lead to increased global warming. Also, non-native trees invading a rainforest can change its basic ecological structure, rendering it less hospitable to the myriad plant and animal species that depend on its resources.

Alan Zarembo, in a Los Angeles Times article, sums this up well, “Beneath feel-good simplicity of buying your way to carbon neutrality is a growing concern that the idea is more hype than solution.” And, from Nigel Lawson, “In many ways , it resembles nothing so much as the sale of indulgences by a medieval church. This is nowadays regarded as a reprehensible practice; but perhaps bearing in mind its 21st century equivalent, that is too harsh a verdict.”

Unstoppable Global Warming

2009-01-02T09:48:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From nasf.org, December 2008)

A very powerful case that the climate trend we’re currently seeing is part of a product of a solar-linked cycle that creates harmless naturally warmer conditions approximately every 1500 years is made in a recent book, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery. It has 459 references, a glossary and an index. This well written book is one of the best books to date on the politics and science of global warming. In addition to presenting evidence for the 1,500 year solar cycle, first proposed by European researchers in the mid 1990s, the authors address both the Greenhouse and Solar/Cosmic Ray theories of climate change. (1) Singer and Avery maintain that there are natural cycles of cooling and warming going back at least a million years. These are small excursions of global temperature, much smaller than the ice ages, which is why they haven’t been noticed until the last 25 years or so.

This was reported in 1984 with the first analysis from the Greenland ice cores. Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oescher published their analysis of the oxygen isotopes in the ice cores extracted from Greenland. These cores provided 250,000 years of the Earth’s climate history in one set of ‘documents.’ The scientists compared the ratio of ‘heavy’ oxygen-18 isotopes to the ‘lighter’ oxygen-16 isotopes, which indicated the temperature at the time the snow had fallen. (2) As Singer and Avery report, “They expected to find evidence of the known 90,000 year Ice Ages and the mild interglacial periods recorded in the ice, and they did. However, they did not expect to find anything in between. To their surprise, they found a clear cycle—moderate, albeit abrupt—occurring about every 2,550 years running persistently through both. (This period would soon be reassessed at 1,500 years plus or minus 500 years.)” (3)

Since this early discovery, its fingerprints have been found all over the world, both in ice cores and sediments. (4)
- An ice core from the Antarctic’s Vostok Glacier, at the other end of the world from Greenland, was brought up in 1987 and showed the same 1,500 year climate cycle throughout its 400,000 year length.

- The 1,500 year cycle has been revealed in seabed sediment cores brought up from the floors of such far-flung waters as the North Atlantic Ocean and the Arabian Sea, the Western Pacific, and the Sargasso Sea.

- One seabed core near Iceland goes back a million years, and the 1,500 year cycle runs through the whole million years, roughly 600 of these moderate, natural cycles.

Over the last 1,200 years there has been a “Medieval Warming” (900-1300), when Greenland was green; a “Little Ice Age” (1300-1850), when New York harbor froze and people could walk from Manhattan across the ice to Staten Island a mile away (in 1780); and the current global warming (1850-??). Rather than ‘global warming,’ a better term for this phase of the solar cycle is “Modern Warming.” Since 1850, temperatures have risen 0.8 degrees C, most rapidly in 1850-1870 and 1920-1940. Temperatures in the 1,500 year solar cycle fluctuate within a 4 degree C range—two degrees above and two degrees below the norm. An added important point is that three-fourths of the present warming occurred before 1940, which was before most of the human emitted carbon dioxide we hear so much about these days.

So today’s global warming is part of a natural 1,500-year plus or minus 500-year cycle operating for at least a million years. The Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled nine times in the past 12,000 years in lock step with the waxing and waning of the sun’s magnetic activity. (5) The linkage with the sun has been verified by correlation between the Carbon 14 and Beryllium 10 isotopes in the ice with sunspot numbers.

The modern warming is not confined to this planet. Mars ice caps are melting and Jupiter is developing a second giant red spot, an enormous hurricane-like storm. Jupiter’s original Great Red Spot is 300 years old and twice the size of Earth. The new storm-Red Spot Jr. -is thought to be the result of a sudden warming on our solar system’s largest planet. Some parts of Jupiter are now as much as 6 C warmer than just a few years ago. (6) Neptune’s moon, Triton has heated up significantly since 1989. Parts of its frozen nitrogen surface have begun melting and turning to gas. (7) Even Pluto has warmed slightly in recent years, if you can call -230 C warmer than
-233 C.

All of this prompts Lorne Gunter to ask, “Is there something all these heavenly bodies have in common? Some one thing they all share that could be causing them to warm in unison? Hmmmm, is there some, giant, self-luminous ball of burning gas with a mass more than 300,000 times that of Earth and a core temperature of more than 20 million degrees C, that for the past century or more has been unusually active and powerful? Is there something like that around which they can all revolve that could be causing global warming?” (6)

Singer and Avery also cover a number of other issues:

- A particularly interesting chapter focuses on common sense regarding the extinction of species. The authors explain that most of the world’s animal species evolved 600 million years ago, so we know most of today’s species have successfully dealt with ice ages and global warming periods that have sent temperatures much higher and much lower than today’s temperatures. (8)

- The authors look at history and confirm that the frequency and severity of hurricanes, droughts, thunderstorms, hail and tornadoes have not increased in recent years. (9) John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, in testimony before Congress noted, ‘that the most significant droughts in the Southwestern United States occurred more than four hundred years ago, before 1600.’ He stated that before 1850, American’s Great Plains were called the ‘Great American Desert,’ and experts at the time said the region couldn’t be farmed. Weather just seems unusual and dangerous these days, said Christy, because of the increased media coverage of major storms.

Summary

Jay Lehr sums it up quite well, “Singer and Avery shatter the greenhouse gas theory, making it clear humanity’s modest addition to the atmosphere’s small amount of carbon dioxide does not hold up to a significant alteration in temperature. Obviously, all of this does not square with efforts to get us to reduce our use of cars, air conditioners, and fertilizer in order to reduce carbon in our atmosphere.” (10) So, regardless of what you do to reduce your carbon footprint, Mother Nature really doesn’t care.

References

1. S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, (New York, Rowman & Littlefield publishers, 2008), 24

2. W. Dansgaard et al., “North Atlantic Climatic Oscillations Revealed by Deep Greenland Ice Cores,” in Climate Processes and Climate Sensitivity, J. E. Hansen and T. Takahashi, Editors, (Washington, DC, American Geophysical Union, 1984) Geophysical Monograph 29, 288-90

3. S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, 2

4. S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, 3

5. Gerard Bond et al., “Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene,” Science, 294, 2130, December 10, 2001

6. Lorne Gunter, “Breaking: Warming on Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, Neptune’s Moon & Earth Linked to Increased Solar Activity, Scientists Say,” National Post, March 13, 2007

7. J. L. Elliot, et al., “Global Warming on Triton,” Nature, 393, 765, June 25, 1998

8. S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, 163

9. S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, 201

10. Jay Lehr, “Careful Review of Science Refutes Global Warming Myths,” Environment & Climate News, 10, 12, March 2007

An Unexpected Cure- Anabuse

2008-12-29T15:37:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini

(From a series on Unintended Consequences)

Scabies is an itchy condition of the skin caused by tiny mites. The severe scratching brought on by this infection can often trigger infections, which leave scars. Scabies was endemic during World War II in Europe. Swedish researchers discovered that it could be treated by using disulfiram (tetryethylthiuram disulfide), a chemical that had been used in the rubber industry), as an ointment. (1)

In Denmark, Drs. Jens Hald and Erik Jacobsen, were interested in finding a pill that would be effective against intestinal worms. They had reasons to believe that disulfiram might be the solution so decided to run some tests. They first experimented with rabbits. As far as they could tell, rabbits infected with the internal parasite and then fed disulfiram pills showed no adverse reactions and the drug seemed to work.

What to do next? They undertook what is a taboo in medical research—self -experimentation. Lawrence Altman, in his fascinating book on this topic Who Goes First?, says this about Jacobsen, “He lived by a strong moral code. In his work, he believed that pharmacologists should test a drug on themselves before doing so on another human. He practiced what he preached.” (1)

So Jacobsen and Hald began taking disulfiram pills on a daily basis in their different laboratories. Shortly after the experiment began. Jacobsen decided to have a bottle of beer with the sandwich his wife had made for him. By the time lunch was over, Jacobsen felt groggy and nauseated, and his head throbbed. The next day he ate another sandwich and was fine. Then he had lunch with his managing director. During this event they had consumed a glass of aquavit in a friendly gesture of comradery. Once again, the symptoms re-appeared, but then after a while were gone. So he went on about his business. (1)

Later that same week, Jacobsen had a beer with a meatball sandwich his wife had made. Again he had another attack so went home early. He wanted to blame the meatball sandwich but found that the rest of his family had eaten similar sandwiches with no ill effects. The attacks continued but Jacobsen shrugged them off until he met Hald in the corridor at work one day. As Jacobsen related his observations and problems with nausea, etc., Hald said, “That’s funny. I have had the same bug.” (1)

Hald told of a recent visit of one of his friends where they shared some cognac. Hald had become sick and the friend had not. These shared experiences got them both to wondering if there could be some relation between disulfiram and alcohol. They decided to do more tests; avoid both the drug and alcohol, drink alcohol but avoid the drug, take the drug but avoid alcohol, and lastly, have alcohol while on the drug. Bingo! Both had the symptoms return when mixing the drug with alcohol.

Then they repeated the experiment on a fellow laboratory worker. After a few days the same result was obtained. It did appear that for some reason the body needed a few days to trigger the disulfiram-alcohol reaction. As a final test, Jacobsen took some pills before injecting himself with a small amount of alcohol. His blood pressure fell almost to zero and he nearly died. There was no longer any question about a reaction between alcohol and disulfiram. Soon after this, a chemist friend identified the odor on Jacobsen’s breath as acetaldehyde, a toxic product of oxidation of alcohol. (1)

As far a Jacobsen and Hald were concerned there went the grand scheme for the proposed cure for intestinal parasites, and since they felt alcoholism wasn’t an important medical problem in Denmark, they saw no reason to continue with this project. That is, until Jacobsen attended a civic affairs meeting in October 1947. He was asked to fill in for a speaker who cancelled at the last minute and during the course of his talk he mentioned the experiences he and Hald had with disulfiram and how as a result of this neither could stand alcohol while on the pills. John Emsley reports, “A journalist from the Copenhagen newspaper Berlingskee Tidende was present, and reported the story. Alcoholics who read about disulfiram realized that here was a treatment that might wean them off alcohol, and several of them wrote to Jacobsen, asking for disulfiram tablets. Clinical tests on alcoholic volunteers showed that the drug could be used to break the addiction to alcohol. Antabuse, the trade name Jacobsen gave the drug was launched.” (2)

So how does disulfiram (Antabuse) work? It blocks the enzyme that converts acetaldehyde to acetic acid and as the body builds up acetaldehyde, it produces a condition know as acetaldehydemia. This usually results in a very unpleasant reaction. Again from Emsley, “Even a little alcohol taken by someone on Antabuse produces enough acetaldehyde for their body to react unpleasantly to it. They feel very ill because they are in effect experiencing a severe hangover, the symptoms of which are nausea, vomiting, labored breathing, flushing, chest pains, and throbbing headache. The experience is so dreadful that they will usually avoid alcohol while they remain on Antabuse, although it has been found that some people become tolerant of the drug and its effect is diminished. Most people who take Antabuse find it effective, but they must also be alert to the fact that some common household products contain alcohol, such as vanilla extract (35% alcohol), cough medicines (up to 25% alcohol), and mouth washes (around 25% alcohol.)” (2)

Walter Gratzer rightly notes that this is an example of a heroic experiment conducted by doctors on themselves that could never have come about by design. (3) One- they weren’t even looking for a treatment for alcoholism, two- if they hadn’t experimented on themselves they would never have known of the consequences of mixing alcohol with the drug, and 3- if Jacobsen hadn’t been asked to be a substitute speaker at a civic meeting, the results would probably been buried in laboratory notebooks and never revealed to the public.

A final word of caution. Mixing Antabuse and alcohol can be deadly. Joe and Teresa Graedon highlight the fact that ‘in some cases, the reaction could be lethal, so anyone on Antabuse really needs to watch out for alcohol.” (4)

References

1.Lawrence K. Altman, Who Goes First?, (New York, Random House, 1987), 98-104

2.John Emsley and Peter Fell, Was it something you ate?, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), 28

3.Walter Gratzer, Eurekas and Euphorias, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), 163

4.Joe Graedon and Teresa Graedon, Deadly Drug Interactions, (New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997), 146

The Religion of Global Warming

2008-12-06T10:47:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From Hawaii Reporter, 12/1/2008)

Do you want to position yourself as a humanitarian concerned with the grandest issue of the planet’s survival and capture the high ground as a defender of the interests of humanity? If so, embrace global warming. And if you seek even a higher level, allow global warming to be your new religion.

Why? In the words of Dean James P. Morton of the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, “the environment is not just another issue but an inescapable challenge to what it means to be religious.”(1) Global warming provides a cosmic scenario that has found expression in almost all religions of the world, from the Jewish legend of Noah and the Christian vision of the Apocalypse to the world-ending Ragnarok of the Norse sagas and the Teutonic Gotterdammerung, the twilight of the gods,” report Christopher Booker and Richard North. They add, “The appeal of global warming is that it fits so neatly into the plot of a story with which everyone is familiar. Man in his selfish and reckless exploitation of the planet has committed a great and unpardonable sin, if not against God then certainly against Nature. Unless he repents and learns to mend his ways, he and all life on the planet will face unthinkable punishment. The seas will rage, on a scale never before known. Vast tracts of fertile land will be reduced to barren deserts. Nature itself will lie stricken before the onslaught. Billions of human beings will die.”(2)

Many religious leaders have joined the crusade. On June 15, 2001, the nation’s Catholic bishops unanimously approved a statement urging as a ‘moral imperative’ taking action to end global warming. “At its core, global climate change is not about economic theory nor political platforms, nor about partisan advantage or interest group pressures,” said the bishops. “It is about the future of God’s creation, and the one human family.” Several days before, the Greater Boston Coalition on the environment and Jewish Life released a letter signed by 19 local leaders, which said that the Bush administration’s energy plan “does not yet meet biblical standards for stewardship and justice.” It called on Jewish communities to “raise awareness of how fossil fuel use contributes to global warming.” (3, 4)

The religion of global warming is moving much faster than traditional religions. For example, as Ann Coulter observes, “It took the Catholic Church hundreds of years to develop corrupt practices such as papal indulgences. The global warming religion has barely been around for 20 years, and yet its devotees are allowed to pollute by the simple expedient of paying for papal indulgences called ‘carbon offsets.’” (5) As with the system of papal indulgences introduced in the late Middle Ages, anyone with enough money can buy their freedom from damnation by purchasing enough ‘credits.’ This gives them an official license to continue sinning, by emitting excessive amounts of carbon dioxide, regardless of what a corrupt sham the whole system has become.(6) I recently saw a one-act skit in Oakland, CA, highlighting the absurdity of this practice. In the skit, folks who wanted to commit adultery could do so providing they found someone they could pay to agree to not commit the same sin; a perfect analogy with the religion of global warming.

Carrying this a step further, the entire green lobby can be treated as a religion. Particularly in Europe, stories such as the myth of the Fall and the myth of the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment, no longer have the impact they once did. John Kay reports, “Environmentalism now fulfills for many people the widespread longing for simple, all-encompassing narratives. Environmentalism offers an alternative account of the natural world to the religious and an alternative anti-capitalist account of the political world to the Marxist. The rise of environmentalism parallels in time and place the decline of religion and socialism.” (7)

The leader of the movement, the sermonizer supreme, Al Gore, is even adoringly referred to by his flock as The Goracle. (8) And as John Fund observes, “I guess it was inevitable. The global warming hysteria for which Al Gore is the leading rabble-rouser has now taken on all the trappings of a cultish religion. Exhibit A: The Gaia Napa Valley Hotel and Spa in California has a Gideon Bible, Al Gore’s book, and the Buddhist Traveler in each room.”(9)

Summary

Tom DeWeese sums it up well. “Global warming has become a new religion. No one is supposed to question whether it is a fact and the faithful have vowed to follow no matter what the true facts may show. Global warming is a theory, nothing more, and large numbers of scientists around the world are beginning to question its validity. There is no consensus of support.” (10) Within the past years, multitudes of peer-reviewed journal articles and at least a dozen books have provided sound evidence of this lack of consensus but you won’t find the books at your local bookstore. Try Amazon instead. Why? These recent books have the temerity to question ‘the doctrine.’ A good example is An Appeal to Reason by Nigel Lawson of the UK. This is his fourth book but he could find no British publisher. He reports, one rejection letter said, “My fear with this cogently argued book is that it flies so much in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy that it would be very difficult to fine a wide market.” (11)

DeWeese concludes, “The truth is there is no man-made global warming. There’s only the scam of an empty global religion designed to condemn human progress and sucker the feeble minded into worldwide human misery.” (10)

References

1.The Greening of Faith, John E. Carroll, Paul Brockelman, and Mary Westfall, Editors, (Hanover, NH, University Press of New England, 1997), 4
2.Christopher Booker and Richard North, Scared to Death, (New York, Continuum US, 2007), 481
3.Michael Paulson, “Bishops say fighting global warming is a moral duty,” Boston Globe, June 16, 2001, Page A10
4.Bonner Cohen, The Green Wave, (Washington, DC, Capital Research Center, 2006), 161
5.Ann Coulter, “Gore’s Global Warming Religion,” www.humanevents.com, March 21, 2007
6.Christopher Booker and Richard North, Scared to Death, 402
7.John Kay, “Green lobby must be treated as a religion,” Financial Times, January 9, 2007
8.William Booth, “Al Gore, Rock Star,” www.washingtonpost.com, February 25, 2007
9.John H. Fund, “Guru Gore,” The American Spectator, 40, 52, June 2007
10.Tom DeWeese, “The New Religion is Global Warming,” Capital Magazine, February 16, 2005
11.Nigel Lawson, An Appeal to Reason, (New York, Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, 2008), ix

Fuzzy Math

2008-09-17T15:27:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Almost everyone who reads this question will have an immediate impulse to answer ‘10 cents.’ I surely did. As Dan Gardner says, “It just looks and feels right. And yet it’s wrong. In fact, it’s clearly wrong—if you give it some careful thought—and yet it is perfectly normal to stumble on this test. Almost everyone we ask reports an initial tendency to answer ‘ten cents,’ write psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick. Many people yield to this immediate impulse. People are often content to trust a plausible judgment that quickly comes to mind.”(1)

This type of response shows that we are quite susceptible to numbers thrown at us by the media, groups seeking funding for a specific cause, lawyers trying to convince a jury, or perhaps some recent event that has shaped our thoughts. Lets start with the latter one first.

After 9/11, many people shifted from planes to cars because of fear of flying. This shift lasted for about one year in the United States. Gerd Gigerenzer analyzed automobile fatalities for five years prior to the September 11 attacks and five years after. He found that fatalities soared on American roads after September 2001 and settled back to normal in September 2002. As a result of the surge in traffic patterns, he concluded that an additional 1,595 people died; more than half the death toll from the terrorist attacks.(2)

Dan Gardner reports that air travel is safer than driving even with terrorists. He reports, “The safety gap is so large, in fact, that planes would still be safer than cars even if the threat of terrorism were unimaginably worse than it actually is: An American professor calculated that even if terrorists were hijacking and crashing one passenger jet a week in the United States, a person who took one flight a month for a year would have only a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking—a trivial risk compared to the annual 1-in-6000 odds of being killed in a car crash.”(2)

The media is notorious for spreading the fear factor. Brent Beckley notes that there are four billboards on the 40 mile drive from Norwich to Binghamton (Upstate New York) that announce, “Every 20 seconds a child is diagnosed with autism.” He says, “I hate these types of ads because I figure there is no way they can be true.” (3) Here’s the math; three kids per minute works out to 1,576,000 children per year. Since there are about 4 million children born every year, this means 3 out of 8 will become autistic. Hard to believe?

Even EPA folks can get carried away by the numbers game. John Brignell observes, “During a speech, Mary Nichols, EPA’s assistant administrator for air and radiation, claimed that the EPA’s proposed air pollution standard for ozone and particulate matter would save (hang on to your hat) 58 million lives. You may wish to be reminded that 2 million Americans die every year from all causes. I stand to be corrected but I think that this qualifies for the Guinness Book of Records.”(4)

Around 1985 saw an explosive awareness about the rapid spread of a deadly new virus. From Dan Gardner, “There was no treatment for AIDS. Get it and you were certain to die a slow, wasting death. And there was a good chance you would get it because a breakthrough into the heterosexual population was inevitable. ‘AIDS has both sexes running scared,’ Oprah Winfrey told her audience in 1987. ‘Research studies now project that one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That’s by 1990. One in five.’ Surgeon General C. Everett Koop called it ‘The biggest threat to health this nation ever faced.’ Turns out it didn’t work out that way, but we were very, very scared.(5)

What about AIDS in Africa? Based on reports I’ve heard over the years, I expected to see a drop in population in Africa because of this dreaded disease. Yet, since 1985, the population of sub-Saharan Africa has increased by 299 million, a 70 percent increase. This increase is equal to the entire present population of the United States.(6) What gives?

Here are some observations from Michael Fumento, “At least 30 percent of the entire adult population of Central Africa is infected with the AIDS virus, a doctor tells a US newspaper. A high Ugandan official says that within two years his nation will ‘be a desert.’ ABS News Nightline declares that within 12 years, ‘50 million Africans may have died of AIDS.’ Actually, those statements and predictions were all made between 1986 and 1988. Yet since 1985, Central Africa’s population has increased over 70 percent while Uganda’s has nearly doubled. Japan, conversely has close to no AIDS cases yet its population has essentially stopped. According to the UN’s latest estimate, Nightline’s predicted 50 million dead Africans by the year 2000 was actually 20 million head worldwide by the end of last year.”(7)

Epidemics like this and the autism scare mentioned earlier in this article always have and always will refuse to live up to the official predictions for one simple reason: The louder the Klaxon sounds, the more public and private contributions pour in. (7)

Remember the O.J. Simpson trial? How could you not? Leonard Mlodinow reports, “The renowned attorney and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz employed the prosecutor’s fallacy to help defend O.J. Simpson in his trial for the murder of Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and a male companion.”(8) What is prosecutor’s fallacy? My simplistic definition is the clever use of statistics to make a point, while leaving out other important data.

The police had plenty of evidence against Simpson: a bloody glove at his estate that seemed to match one found at the murder scene; bloodstains matching Nicole’s blood on the gloves in his white Ford Bronco, on a pair of socks in his bedroom, and in his driveway and house. DNA samples taken from blood at the crime scene matched O.J.’s.

The prosecution focused much of its case on O.J.’s propensity to violence, claiming that this alone was a good reason to suspect him of her murder. The defense attorney countered that the evidence that O.J. had battered Nicole on prrevious occasions meant nothing. Here’s why according to Alan Dershowitz; 4 million women were battered annually by their husbands and boyfriends in the United States, yet in 1992, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, a total of 1,432, or 1 in 2,500 were killed by their husbands or boyfriends. Therefore, few men who slap or beat their domestic partners go on to murder them. Mlodinow observes, “True? Yes. Convincing? Yes. Relevant? No. The relevant number is not the probability that a man who batters his wife will go on to kill her (1 in 2,500) but rather the probability that a battered wife who was murdered was murdered by her abuser. According to the Uniform Crime Reports for the United States and Its Possessions in 1993, the probability Dershowirtz (or the prosecution) should have reported was this one: of all the battered women murdered in the United States in 1993, some 90 percent were killed by their abuser. That statistic was not mentioned at the trial.”(8)

Mlodinow adds, “Dershowitz may have felt justified in misleading the jury because in his words, ‘the courtroom oath—to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’—is applicable only to witnesses. Defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges don’t take this oath…indeed, it is fair to say the American justice system is built on a foundation of not telling the whole truth.” (8)

The answer is 5 cents.

References
1. Dan Gardner, Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, (Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 2008), 35

2. Dan Gardner, Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, 4

3. Brent Beckley, private communication, January 24, 2008

4. John Brignell, Sorry Wrong Number! (Great Britain, Brignell Associates, 2000), 217

5. Dan Gardner, Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, 347

6. Tom Bethell, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, (Washington, DC, Regnery Publishing, 2005), 118

7. Michael Fumento, “AIDS and Fuzzy Math,” Tech Central Station, July 15, 2004

8. Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk, (New York, Pantheon Books, 2008), 119

Regulations and Schlimmbesserung

2008-09-07T16:55:00.001-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

Have you heard of the word schlimmbesserung? It means intended improvements that make things worse. As Robert Matthews states, “This is a word that should be in the lexicon of anyone trying to protect the environment. Federal agencies are often criticized for imposing ineffective, costly regulations on individuals and businesses that do little to improve public health and safety.” Give them the benefit of doubt that they are really trying to make things better but in some cases schlimmbesserung occurs.

Biofuels

Biofuels are a good example of schlimmbesserung. World food prices are being driven upwards largely because of the increasing use of biofuels. Nigel Lawson observes, “Biofuels, such as ethanol, have their own downsides. In the first place, as studies have shown, it is far from clear that ethanol produces significantly more energy than is used in its own production. In the second place, it requires a vast amount of land to produce a relatively small amount of ethanol. This not only antagonizes environmentalists, upset by the destruction of rainforests for this purpose, but also has led to a marked rise in food prices, in particular the price of grain. Indeed in June 2007, the Chinese government suspended its production of ethanol explicitly for this reason.”

The Guardian discusses a report by the World Food Bank which claims that biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75%--far more than previously estimated. This figure noticeably contradicts the US government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food prices. The report also adds, “Rising food prices have pushed 100 million people below the poverty line, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel process as the first real economic crisis of globalization.” In Mexico City last February, some 75,000 people marched in protest at the dramatic rise in the price of tortillas, a corn-based staple of their diet that typically consumes one-third of a poor family’s income. Indonesia, Algeria, and Nigeria have also seen protests.

On another front, switching land use from food crops to biofuels could result in increased emissions of pollutants such as nitrous oxide and ozone and increased net carbon injection into the atmosphere. Research at Stanford University indicates that pollution from ethanol could end up creating a worse health hazard than gasoline, especially for people with asthma and other respiratory diseases.

Victims of the CFCs ban

The federal ban on ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), to conform with the Clean Air Act , is ironically affecting millions of people in the US who suffer from asthma. Emily Harrision reports, “In 1987 Congress signed on to the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, an international treaty requiring the phasing out of all nonessential uses of CFCs. At that time, medical inhalers were considered an essential use because no viable alternative propellant existed. In 1989, pharmaceutical companies banded together and eventually in 1996, reformulated albuterol with hydrofluoroalkane (HFA), an ozone-safe propellant. After more than one brand of HFA-albuterol became available, the US Food and Drug Administration declared in 2005 that CFC inhalers were no longer essential and must be completely off the shelves by the last day of this year.” Leslie Hendeles says, “In the United States, about 52 million prescriptions for albuterol are filled annually, making it the seventh most commonly prescribed medication in the country.” The ban will have an insignificant effect on ozone since albuterol inhalers contributed less than 0.1 percent of the CFCs released when the treaty was signed. However, the replacement alternatives can be three times as expensive, raising the cost to about $40 per inhaler. Harrison adds, “The issue is even more disconcerting considering that asthma disproportionately affects the poor and that, according to recent surveys, an estimated 20 percent of asthma patients are uninsured.”

Cleaner air and recovery of the ozone hole increase global warming?

Christian Ruckstuhl and his colleagues at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland recently reported that the rapid temperature increase of 1 degree C over mainland Europe since 1989 is considerably larger than the temperature rise expected from anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases. Their work led to the conclusion that direct aerosol effect has an approximately five time larger an impact on climate forcing than the indirect aerosol and other cloud effects, or in other words, as Robert Matthews notes, “the clean-up campaigns are another schlimmbesserung, with the airborne gunk actually having a powerful—and beneficial—impact on temperatures, by reflecting the sun’s heat back into space.”

The Montreal Protocol was mentioned earlier. After years of decline, the springtime concentrations of ozone in the atmosphere high over Antarctica have begun to increase, a sign that the ozone hole is recovering. Good news? Well, depends on your point of view. According to some recent research this could mean increasing temperatures in Antarctica. Until now, the interior of Antarctica has not been warming with the rest of the world. The lack of ozone in the lower stratosphere over Antarctica in the springtime caused less absorption of ultraviolet radiation and this leads to cooler temperatures than normal. Recent work postulates this will change as the ozone hole recovers. Seok-Woo San and his colleagues at Columbia University speculated in Science that a full recovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica in the coming years could significantly boost warming of the atmosphere over and around the icy continent. Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, confirm these results, reporting that simulated atmospheric temperatures at altitudes between 10 and 20 kilometers would be as much as 9 degrees C warmer after the ozone hole has recovered than they are today. This certainly would mean in increase in warming at ground level in Antarctica.

Planting the wrong trees could also affect global warming

If you’re going to plant a tree to save the Earth, you better make sure to plant the right kind of tree. Trees affect the reflectivity of the Earth and its availability to bounce back some of the sun’s heat into space. Covering large swatches of light ground with dark trees could lead to more heat being absorbed, boosting temperature. Gregory Asner and his colleagues note that only trees planted in equatorial regions are likely to produce a net benefit. Those planted further away—especially in high latitudes where snow is common—are likely to lead to increased global warming. Also, non-native trees invading a rainforest can change its basic ecological structure, rendering it less hospitable to the myriad plant and animal species that depend on its resources.

Summary

Robert Matthews sums this up quite well. “The upshot of all this is clear: when it comes to the environment, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. What isn’t at all clear is whether it will ever be possible to have sufficient knowledge to make big environmental policy decisions with any confidence.”

Toxic, But Important Body Gases

2008-08-20T15:19:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

“Gases commonly known for their noxious effects at relatively high concentrations are produced by the body continuously and in minute quantities and are capable of exerting crucial physiological activities.” (1)

Carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and nitrogen oxides can be toxic, yet it has been recently demonstrated that they are important endogenous (originating within the body) molecules that have profound effects on the human body.

High levels of carbon monoxide interfere with cellular respiration and pollute the environment. Hydrogen sulfide, another chemical asphyxiant, paralyzes the sense of smell and at lower levels produces the rotten-egg stink prized by children using their first chemistry sets. Nitric oxide, the unstable free-radical, is an industrial gas and environmental pollutant found in cigarette smoke and smog. (1)

Over the past 20 years or so, research into the growing array of so-called gasotransmitters has fundamentally altered classic views of intercellular signaling. Gasotransmitters are a family of endogenous molecules of gases or gaseous signaling molecules, including CO, H2S, NO and others. These particular gases share many common features in their production and function but carry on their tasks in unique ways, which differ from classical signaling molecules in the human body. (2)

Mark Greener reports, “They act in systems as varied as gastrointestinal, circulatory, and nervous. Gasotransmitters are not stored in vesicles; rather, exquisitely regulated biosynthetic enzymes are activated when signaling is initiated. Moreover, while the proteins that sense the gases are diverse, the architecture seems highly conserved. The research offers a fresh perspective on processes as diverse as neural control, blood vessel diameter, and embryonic development. It also raises numerous new therapeutic and diagnostic opportunities. In fact, physicians already prescribe drugs modulating gasotransmitters to manage erectile dysfunction and angina.” Greener predicts that the number of gases produced within the body is likely to grow. (1) Recent evidence suggests that ammonia is a vascoconstrictor, possibly by acting through intercellular alkalinization. Sulfur dioxide, produced by bacterial metabolism may also have some value.

Carbon Monoxide

Although carbon monoxide inhalation can be lethal, our bodies make the molecule naturally in small amounts when an enzyme called heme-oxygenase-1 (HO-1) breaks down a portion of the blood protein in hemoglobin. (3) Ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in intensive care units. The stress-inducible gene product, HO-1 and carbon monoxide, a major by product of the oxygenase catalysis of heme, have been shown to confer potent anti-inflammatory effects in models of tissue and cellular injury. Tomas Dolinay notes, “The data from this work leads to a tempting speculation that inhaled CO might be useful in minimizing VILI.” (4)

Small amounts of carbon monoxide might alleviate symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a study in mice suggests. This finding may offer a treatment for MS, which strikes when a person’s immune system damages the fatty sheaths that protect nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord. (3)

Other studies of laboratory animals suggest that carbon monoxide in small doses can prevent injury to blood vessels caused by surgery. In this research, rats that inhaled carbon monoxide-laced air for 1 hour before angioplasty had much less subsequent artery blockage than did rats not receiving the gas. Rats that underwent a vessel transplant also fared significantly better if given carbon monoxide before and after the surgery. (5)

Hydrogen Sulfide

Hydrogen sulfide, the compound that gives rotten eggs their odor, can be lethal at high concentrations. It is not something you would think to pump into sick or injured people, but that’s exactly what some scientists plan to do. Mitch Leslie reports, “The molecule has proven to be an influential physiological signal, with effects on everything from blood flow to hormone secretion. Eager to capitalize on these newfound capabilities, scientists are trying to exploit hydrogen sulfide to tame the side effects of common painkillers.” (6)

Researchers in Seattle reported that exposure to hydrogen sulfide gas can lower the heart rate, metabolism, and body temperature in lab mice. (7) Mice in the study revived and appeared healthy when exposure to the gas ended. This is one step in helping researchers understand about hibernation and torpor in animals. (8)

Why is this of interest? Some animals regularly slow down their metabolic rates, or the speed at which their bodies function. Every day, certain types of hummingbirds go into a state called torpor where their heart rates drop, breathing slows, and body temperature plunges. Bears go into a similar type of hibernation for entire seasons. This type of suspended animation could offer protection for humans after a heart attack or stroke, and it could help people survive battlefield situations. Soldiers with severe blood loss could be treated with an IV of hydrogen sulfide, possibly lowering their need for oxygen until enough blood could be transfused. Jeanne Erdmann notes that this work is in clinical trials in Australia. (9)

Hydrogen sulfide could also help in cases of erectile dysfunction. A study with primates showed that injection of sodium hydrogen sulfide increased penile length and was capable of dilating with blood to bring about the erection of a body part. (10) Studies with nitric oxide, discussed next, led Pfizer to develop Viagra. (11)

Nitrogen Oxides

Nitrogen oxides are major components of air pollution from auto exhaust and industrial combustion. Ground level ozone is formed by a photochemical reaction of nitrogen dioxide to yield nitric oxide and an oxygen atom. The nitrogen oxides also contribute to the formation of acid rain. Obviously, nitric oxide is a part of a family of bad gases. Or is it?

This industrial gas and environmental pollutant was named “Molecule of the Year” by Science magazine in 1992. Editor Daniel Koshland wrote, “In the atmosphere it is a noxious chemical, but in the body in small controlled doses it is extraordinarily beneficial.” (12) In 1998, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded for discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system. Tiny puffs of nitric oxide mediate an extraordinary range of biological properties in our bodies, ranging from destruction of tumor cells to the control of blood pressure. It relaxes blood vessels, quells inflammation, nudges the hypothalamus to release hormones, and even transmits signals between the brain’s neurons. (13) There’s also Viagra as mentioned above.

Summary

Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst is a strong proponent of hormesis, a scientific term that means low doses help and high doses hurt. He’s concerned that if researchers don’t begin regularly probing the effects of agents at very low doses, scientists will continue to miss important health impacts—both good and bad of pollutants, drugs, and other agents. Janet Raloff points out, “Regulatory agencies don’t require scientists to evaluate a poison at exposures below that at which no harm is apparent. This dose is referred to as the NOAEL, for ‘no observable adverse-effects level.” (14)

Two obvious benefits can accrue from testing effects at low doses: 1- medical help might be found from items otherwise known to be toxic and 2- if traces of certain pollutants are not as dangerous as previous estimates had suggested, perhaps some overly stringent regulations could be changed.

References

1.Mark Greener, “Now You’re Signaling With Gas Gasotransmitters Opens a Window on Biology and Drug Development,” The Scientist, 18, 20, September 13, 2004
2.“Gasotransmitters,” Wikipedia; accessed June 13, 2008
3.Nathan Seppa, “Good Poison?” Science News, 171, 53, January 27, 2007
4.Tamas Dolinay, et al., “Inhaled Carbon Monoxide Confers Anti-inflammatory Effects Against Ventilator-Induced Lung Injury,” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 171, 1318, 2005
5.Nathan Seppa, “Carbon monoxide may limit vascular damage,” Science News, 163, 126, February 22, 2003
6.Mitch Leslie, “Nothing Rotten About Hydrogen Sulfide’s Medical Promise,” Science, 320, 1155, May 30, 2008
7.Eric Blackstone, Mike Morrison, and Mark B. Roth, “H2S Induces a Suspended Animation-Like State in Mice,” Science, 308, 518, April 22, 2205
8.Ben Harder, “Perchance to Hibernate,” Science News, 171, 56, January 27, 2007
9.Jeanne Erdmann, “Rotten Remedy,” Science News, 173, 152, March 8, 2008
10.B. Srilatha et al, “Possible role for the novel gasotransmitter hydrogen sulfide in erectile dysfunction- a pilot study,” European Journal of Pharmacology, 535, 280, March 27, 2006
11.Anne Kuhlmann Taylor, “Nitric oxide- From pollutant to product,” Chemical Innovation, 30, 41, April 2000
12.Daniel E. Koshland, Jr., “The Molecule of the Year,” Science, 258, 1861, December 18, 1992
13.Carl Djerassi, NO (New York, Penguin Books, 1998), 2
14.Janet Raloff, “Counterintuitive Toxicity,” Science News, 171, 40, January 20, 2007

Major Contributors to Greenhouse Gases- It Isn't Cars

2008-08-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

“It’s a silent but deadly source of greenhouse gases that contributes more to global warming than the entire world transportation sector, yet politicians almost never discuss it, and environmental lobbyists and other green activist groups seem unaware of its existence,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “Livestock are a leading source of greenhouse gases. Why isn’t anyone raising a stink.” (1)

In ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow,’ (The Report) released in 2006, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations reported that raising and processing cattle, hogs, poultry and other animals produces 18 percent of greenhouse gases; by comparison 13 percent comes from trucks, cars, and other transportation. And greenhouse gases—those produced directly by animals, and indirectly through the need to transport grain and meat—are only part of the problem. (2)

Carbon dioxide and all the bad things we do with fossil fuels is what we hear about, not that cows and other ruminants, such as sheep and goats, are walking gas factories that take in fodder and besides putting out carbon dioxide also contribute methane and nitrous oxide. The livestock sector generates 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide , which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of carbon dioxide. Most of this comes from manure. And it accounts for respectively 37 percent of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as carbon dioxide), which is largely produced by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 percent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain. (3)

So what’s a ruminant? Much of the world’s livestock are ruminants—such as sheep, goats, camels, cattle, and buffalo—who have a unique four-chambered stomach. In the primary stomach, called the rumen, bacteria break down food. John Postgate reports, “The rumen is a sort of continuous culture of anaerobic microbes, including protozoa and bacteria, which collectively ferment the starch and cellulose of grass to yield fatty acids, methane and carbon dioxide. Rumen juice is extremely rich in microbes—up to 10 billion organisms/milliliter is commonplace—and they are very active: an ordinary cow produces 150 to 200 liters of gas a day and a large, a well-fed lactating cow is almost a walking gasworks at 500 liters a day. (The gas, by the way emerges from the mouth as a belch, not from the rear end?”(4)

To put this in perspective, on a daily basis, each one of Britain’s 10 million cows pump out the equivalent of up to 4,000 grams of carbon dioxide. This compares with 3,419 grams of carbon dioxide pumped out by a Land Rover Freelander on an average drive of 33 miles. (5)

Livestock now use 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture but also including 33 percent of the global arable land used to produce feed for livestock, The Report notes. As forests are cleared to create new pastures, it is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 percent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing. (2)

At the same time herds cause wide-scale land degradation, with about 20 percent of pastures considered as degraded through overgrazing, compaction and erosion. This figure is even higher in the drylands where inappropriate policies and inadequate livestock management contribute to advancing desertification.

Yet, as Gelder and Wilcox note in their excellent review of The Report, it also points out that the production of livestock has enormous economic importance. Besides being big business at the industrial level, it is a crucial source of income and a means of survival for vast numbers—nearly a billion—of the world’s poor, for whom it is the only livelihood available. (6)

What To Do?

The Report suggests a number of ways of remedying the situation including programs looking at minimizing land degradation, increasing efficiency of livestock production, improving efficiency of irrigation systems, better ways of treating animal waste, etc. (2)

Researchers are trying to find a diet for cattle to help cut their emissions. One example- giving cows the hormone recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST), which boosts their milk production, has been discovered to cut their emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane by 7 percent per liter of milk. Switching a million cows to somatotropin would be equivalent to taking 400,000 family cars off the road. (7)

What can you do as an individual? Become a vegetarian! A University of Chicago study examined the average American diet and found that all the various energy inputs and livestock emissions involved in its production pump an extra 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide into the air over the course of a year, which could be avoided by a vegetarian diet. The researchers found that cutting out meat would do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than trading in a gas guzzler for a hybrid car. (8)

On this issue, Tony Wardle of the UK says, “This blows a gaping hole in the government’s global warming rhetoric and the action plans of big environmental organizations—even the Green Party. They have known the facts for years but have been terrified of confronting them for fear of losing support. People don’t mind being told to recycle their bottles, use solar panels, cycle to work or switch to a smaller car—but tell them to go vegan…” (9)

Lastly, in a huge document released in July 2008, the EPA lays out the thousand of carbon controls with which they’d like to shackle the whole economy. Although none of it has the force of law yet, the EPA is alarmed by emissions from domestic livestock. A farm with over 25 cows would exceed the EPA’s proposed limits. (10) So if this does become law, the cost of meat will skyrocket. More reason to become a vegetarian.
References

1.“Killer Cow Emissions,” Los Angeles Times, latimes.com, October 15, 2007
2.Henning Steinfeld, et al., “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, 2006
3.Christopher Matthews, “Livestock a major threat to environment,” FAONewsroom, November 29, 2006
4.John Postgate, Microbes and Man, 4th Edition, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133
5.“How to stop cows burping is the new field work on climate change,” timesonline.com, July 10, 2007
6.Austin Gelder and Lauren Wilcox, “The Carbon Hoofprint,” WORLD ARK, May/June 2008, Page 18
7.“Can cow hormone help battle climate change,?” New Scientist Print Edition, July 2, 2008
8.Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin, “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming,” Earth Interactions, 10, 1, 2006
9.Tony Wardle, “Global Warming-Livestock More Damaging Than Vehicles,” November 20, 2006, http://www.veggies.org.uk/page.php?ref=917
10.“The Lawnmower Men,” The Wall Street Journal, July 19-20, 2008, Page A8

Aniline Dyes- Unintended Consequences Extraordinaire

2008-07-26T15:27:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From a series on unintended consequences)

Aniline dyes are perhaps some of the best examples showing how many divergent paths can lead to unintended consequences. Painting a wooden fence with coal tar to keep dogs from a yard led to what was the first of a multitude of unexpected discoveries. In another case, instead of finding quinine, one researcher essentially founded the synthetic dye industry. Another dye, indigo, was synthesized because a thermometer broke and the spilled mercury catalyzed a reaction that caused collapse of the Indian indigo industry. (1) In another example, some dye accidentally spilled on a bacteria culture dish led to the new science of bacteriology. (2) Noting that some dyes killed certain parasites, one scientist developed the concept of chemotherapy. (3) Work on distilling fractions of coal tar also led to the discovery of carbolic acid, used first in antisepsis by surgeons like Lister in Edinburgh, who developed methods of spraying the liquid. (2) The study of dyes also helped launch the “French Impressionist” painting movement.

One could also argue the case that dyes were responsible for Germany developing into a power that could dominate World War I. By the time the war came along, some leading German companies had made such profits from the dye industry that they were able to branch out into pharmaceuticals and explosives. (4) In the United States prior to World War I, job opportunities for chemists were extremely limited since dyes and drugs were imported from Germany. As a result, the typical American research chemist, among the lower paid professions in the country, studied soils for the US Department of Agriculture. (5)

James Burke sums all this up well, “Aniline dyes are a particularly good example of the interactive and unforseen way scientific and technological discovery is triggered.” (2) In this essay we’ll concentrate on the early beginnings of the synthetic dye industry; some others dye-related activities are covered in subsequent articles. First, an answer to the question—what are aniline dyes? They are artificial dyes derived from coal tar, which was the messy residue left after lighting gas from coal or after obtaining coke (for iron making) from coal. Since there was so much of the stuff around, folks were trying to find uses for it. Most likely, the earliest event came when Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge (1794-1867) tried to keep the neighborhood dogs out of his garden. He erected a wooden fence which he painted with coal tar (creosote) as a preservative. As an added inducement to keep the dogs from lifting their legs against his fence he scattered calcium hypochlorite all around to present a chlorine odor. When he inspected the fence the next day there were blue streaks on the white powder, obviously from the trajectories from dog urine jets. Runge discovered that the blue color was the result of oxidation of the hypochlorite by some constituent of the coal tar. He called the blue substance Kymol. Years later, Professor August Wilhelm Hofmann showed that the parent compound in the coal tar was aminobenzene, or aniline, and Kymol was the first synthetic prototype of a dye. (1)

However, the really pioneering event in this field is attributed to William Henry Perkin (1838-1907), a student at the royal College of Chemistry in London. At age seventeen he was trying to derive quinine from coal tar chemicals. The reason for this was that many English in the tropics were dying from malaria and the curative, quinine, wasn’t available in England’s colonies. (2) Perkin’s professor, August Wilhelm Hofmann, a German chemist who came to London at the personal invitation of Queen Victoria (the same Hoffmann mentioned above when discussing Runge), suspected that perhaps quinine could be derived form coal tar. (6)

An ambitious sort, Perkin had his own laboratory at home. During an Easter, break he mixed some aniline with potassium bichromate and ended up with a messy substance. Perkin noted, however, that this material had a purple tinge. He added alcohol to this concoction and a beautiful purple color appeared. It was a synthetic dye. He called it Tyrain purple, later it was called mauve. He realized that this would be a good dye for textiles. (7)

Perkin patented his process for the preparation of the dye and financed by his father, started a dye factory near London. This was the beginning of the synthetic dye industry. It was monumental in that it rescued the poor and middle classes from the age old austerity of hues. For the first time in history, inexpensive dyes became available and people, other than the rich, no longer had to live their lives in untreated drab and dingy fibers. (8) Although the new industry had started in Britain, it operated mainly in Germany up to World War I.

But Perkin did more than just find a synthetic dye. He essentially was responsible for a new way of doing scientific research. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne notes, “Perkin’s mauve spawned the world’s dye and pharmaceutical industries. His synthetic dye was the first in a cascade of colors that institutionalized scientific research, professionalized chemists, changed the economies of vast regions, and helped make turn of the century Germany the world’s leading industrial power. Perkin was an adolescent college dropout, but his work dramatized the technological power of science and ushered in our uniquely science-oriented epoch. The discovery of mauve by Perkin has been credited with starting the tremendous development of organic chemistry in the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially in Germany. With the possible exception of Apple creators Steven Jobs and Steven Wozniak, college dropouts who developed the first ready-made computer in their teens and twenties, it is difficult to imagine a young person’s invention that has started such an enormous revolution.” (9)

There’s more as James Burke notes, “German expertise with color lead to discoveries in apparently unrelated fields, such as that of medicine: the investigation of the chemistry of color led to systematic thinking about the structure and effects of chemicals, and this led directly to drugs like aspirin and to techniques for staining tissue for diagnosis. It was this use of tissue staining to identify potential sufferers from syphilis that led to the disease being treated successfully with the stain chemical itself. The new drug was called Salvarsan.” (10)

While on the subject of color, here’s one last item of note. French chemist M. E. Chevreul, working with dyes, invented an extraordinary new color tool. By taking the three primary colors, red, blue and green and interspersing them with twenty-three color mixtures, he got a chromatic circle of seventy-two colors, his ‘law of simultaneous contrast.’ Then he toned each color by adding a black or white, thereby creating 15,000, the tone-chromatic circle used by all dyers ever since. (11) In addition, as Burke also points out, “Chevreuls’s placement of color for effect did much more then help the textile industry. It also changed the world of art by triggering the French ‘scientific’ impressionist movement. Painters like Seurat, Signac, and Pissaro used Chevreul’s new law of contrast in their work. They placed spots of different colors next to each other to create the impression of a third color, and in doing so achieved the distinctive shimmering effect for which impressionism is famous. (11)

So Perkin, in looking for a cure for quinine, started us down the road to many and varied unintended consequences. And concluding with Perkin, by the age of twenty-three he was rich and famous and by age 35, already a millionaire, he left manufacturing to return to the scientific research he had loved in his youth. In his private laboratory he synthesized coumarin, the first perfume from coal tar, and prepared cinnamic acid by a method so generally useful that it became known as the Perkin reaction. (12)

References
1.Walter Gratzer, Eurekas and Euphorias, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), 45

2.James Burke and Robert Ornstein, Axemaker’s Gift, (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Son’s, 1995), 197

3.James Burke, The Pinball Effect, (New York, Little, Brown and Company, 1996), 155

4.Stephen Van Dulken, Inventing The 19th Century, (Washington Square, New York, New York University Press, 2000), 188

5.Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, (New York, McGraw-Hill, 2001), 111

6.Sharon Bertsch MeGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, 15

7.Alexander Kohn, Fortune or Failure, (Cambridge, MA, Basil Blackwell, 1989), 46

8.Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, 9

9.Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, 10

10.James Burke, Connections, (Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1978), 204

11.James Burke, The Pinball Effect, 93

12.Royston M. Roberts, Serendipity, (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1989), 70

Pesticides and Fear

2008-07-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

“Pesticides have one indisputable effect: they cause emotions to boil over. That’s just what happened when a group of golfers noticed that a chemical sprayer was out on the course as they were completing their round. By the time they got into the clubhouse, several were complaining of headaches, rashes, and general malaise and angrily approached the superintendent to protest what they believed was an irresponsible activity. The golfers linked their symptoms with the chemicals being sprayed on the grounds because they were convinced that the use of pesticides is inherently unsafe.” Joe Schwarcz asks, were they right? (1)

If you believe the health and environmental claims devised by scaremongers you could understand the golfers’ reactions. As Terence Corcoran of Canada notes, “It’s easy to generate a junk science scare. You make stuff up, exaggerate the risks, politicize the subject and spin it into a corporate and ideological battle. And, above all, you ignore the facts. For more than a decades the likes of Greenpeace, the Ontario College of Family Physicians, The Globe and Mail and scores of activists and city politicians have waged a relentless campaign against pesticide use. (2)

Here’s one example. The Audubon Magazine showed a large colored picture of a belching smokestack and reported the following: “Pesticides have become more toxic and their use more widespread. Since 1945 global use of pesticides has risen 50-fold. In the US, more than 220,000 people die each year as a result of pesticide exposure.” (3)

Wow! That’s half as many as the number of deaths from automobile accidents each year. Is there something wrong with this picture? You bet. In the following Audubon issue, a correction was made in an obscure spot not highlighted with a belching smokestack: “In ‘Death by Breath,’ we reported that 220,000 people in the United States die each year as a result of pesticide exposure. In fact, the figure is a worldwide estimate.”

With further digging one finds that more than 90 percent of these deaths are suicides, but this wasn’t reported by Audubon. Joe Schwarcz observes, “Believe it or not, about a million people in the world do away with themselves every year. More than three-quarters of these are in Third World countries, where life can be so miserable that the alternative seems more attractive.” (4) So, yes pesticides can kill, but not at the levels approved for routine usage.

By the way, just what was that dastardly chemical being sprayed on the golf course, the one that caused such severe reactions in the golfers? Good old water! “Fear itself can sometimes be hazardous,” notes Schwarcz. (1)

Now, here’s a story on pesticides that wasn’t picked up by the media. On May 16, 2008Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PEMA) released its final re-evaluation of 2,4-D, the leading pesticide in use in Canada. It was one of the most comprehensive science reviews in Canadian history, carried out exclusively by Health Canada scientists. The conclusion; 2,4-D is safe when used as directed. The decision on 2,4-D was consistent with that of regulators in other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, including the United States, New Zealand and countries of the European Union, as well as the World Health Organization. (5)

Terence Corcoran notes, “No major media—not one—picked up the story, even though it systematically demolished every health and environmental claim the scaremongers had dumped onto a gullible community of journalists. Almost two weeks later, the Ottawa Citizen’s Dan Gardner wrote a column on how the media missed the story. Still no reaction.” Think of how the reaction would have been if Health Canada had concluded that 2,4-D was harmful. The media and environmentalists would have had a field day. Corcoran adds, “The limited fallout from Mr. Gardner’s report is instructive. A Global News reporter picked it up and raised the Health Canada report with officials in Toronto. Health Canada’s conclusions were dismissed by a city council member, and the views of an activist with the Toronto Environmental Alliance were repeated; ‘Many studies have linked 2,4-D to some serious health concerns such as cancer reproductive developments in our children and even birth defects.’ One of the most comprehensive scientific reviews in Canadian history, carried out exclusively by Health Canada scientists and reviewed by independent government and university researchers trashed in 30 seconds by an activist repeating claims rejected by the review. All that work and the last media report ends with repetition of the junk science Health Canada had spent millions disproving.” (2)

In commenting on why the Health Canada report wasn’t taken up by the media, Dan Gardner states that this is a typical reaction. He notes, “The media routinely gives prominent play to research that comes to very scary conclusions while downplaying or ignoring studies that find there’s nothing to worry about. It’s frightening to watch a major debate involving a scientific question move from stories in newspapers to politicians’ speeches to legislative action—all with little or no connection to the best science as interpreted by the best scientists.” (6)

In another column Garner reported, “Some folks objected to the reports conclusion that 2,4-D is safe ‘when used as directed.’ People may misuse it, they said, and then it would be harmful. That potential is reason enough to ban it. This ignores two things. First, literally any substance is potentially harmful. Oxygen can, in some circumstances, cause blindness. Drink too much water and the body’s sodium and potassium levels will be thrown off, leading to seizures, coma and even death. And don’t get me started on what coffee can do the human body.” He adds, “Of course, we have to drink huge quantities of water to be harmed by it so water is quite safe. Obviously, pesticides—and lots of other substances—are not so safe. But what most people don’t realize is that regulators build a wide safety margin into their standards. In the case of pesticides, the potential level of exposure can be no more than 1/100 of the dose that showed no effect in animals.” (7)

A final note on pesticides. If you worry about these types of things, this will really set you off. We get much more natural pesticides than synthetic pesticides in our diet. Bruce Ames and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, report that about 99.99 percent of all pesticides in the human diet are natural pesticides from plants. All plants produce toxins to protect themselves against fungi, insects and animal predators, such as man. Tens of thousands of these natural pesticides have been discovered, and every species of plant contains its own set of different toxins, usually a few dozen. When plants are stressed or damaged (such as during a pest attack), they increase their levels of natural pesticides manifold, occasionally to levels that are acutely toxic to humans. Ames estimates that Americans eat about 1,500 mg per person per day of natural pesticides, which is 10,000 times more than we eat of synthetic pesticides. He also estimates that a person ingests annually about 5,000 to 10,000 different natural pesticides and their breakdown products. (8)

References

1.Joe Schwarcz, The Fly in the Ointment, (Toronto, Canada, ECW Press, 2004), 39
2.Terence Corcoran, “The pesticide report that nobody read,” nationalpost.com, June 16, 2008
3.Gretel H. Schueller, “Death by Breath,” Audubon Magazine, 101, 16, January-February 1999
4.Joe Schwarcz, Let Them Eat Flax, (Toronto, Canada, ECW Press, 2005), 80
5.“Health Canada Releases Final Re-evaluation Decision on 2,4-D,” Pest Management Regulatory Agency Information Note, May 16, 2008
6.Dan Gardner, “On Pesticides, Science and Fear,” The Ottawa Citizen, May 28, 2008
7.Dan Gardner, “The Science of Uncertainty,” The Ottawa Citizen, June 7, 2008
8.B. N. Ames and L. S. Gold, “Paracelsus to parascience: the environmental cancer distraction,” Mutation Research, 447, 3, 2000

Acetylene- Champion of Unintended Consequences

2008-06-22T20:04:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, California

(From a series on Unintended Consequences)

Acetylene could perhaps take the prize for how knowledge, intuitiveness, serendipity, and a mix of unintended consequences all came together in various parts of the world at different times to produce a variety of unexpected materials. In 1892, Canadian researchers Thomas Willson and James Morehead, attempted to produce aluminum in an electric furnace. They started with a mixture of coal tar and lime reasoning that the lime would be converted to calcium which, in turn, would strip the oxide away from aluminum oxide leaving pure aluminum. Upon opening the furnace they saw a dark residue, not the shiny aluminum they were expecting. When the mixture was thrown into a stream near their lab (this was long before the days of environmental concerns and regulations), bubbles formed and a plume of water shot into the air. They had discovered calcium carbide and acetylene. (1) On the other side of the world, Henri Moissan, a Frenchman trying to make artificial diamonds also discovered calcium carbide and acetylene. (2) But these scientists weren’t the first in this area of invention. Friedrich Wohler, a professor of chemistry at the University of Gottingen, had made calcium carbide around 1862 by heating calcium with charcoal to a high temperature. He observed that it formed acetylene when it reacted with water. However, his method of making the materials wasn’t efficient, so the discovery lay dormant until the 1890s, the era of the gaslight. (1) When it was realized that acetylene burned with a far more brilliant flame than kerosene, and efficient ways of making carbide were available, a vast new market opened up. As Joe Schwarcz reports, “By 1895 Thomas Willson had founded the company that eventually became Union Carbide, one of the biggest chemical companies in the world. Soon consumers were able to purchase lamps based on calcium carbide, clever devices in which water dripped into a container of carbide and generated acetylene gas. This gas, in turn, flowed to a nozzle where it could be ignited. A mirrored surface behind the flame increased the intensity of the light.” (3)

Then Thomas Edison came along with his electric light and the bottom dropped out of the acetylene market. Enter Fritz Klatte, working in Stuttgart at Greisham Electron. He was trying to find a material for weatherproofing aircraft wings. Working with a mixture of acetylene, hydrogen chloride, and mercury, he was unsuccessful, and set the mixture on a sunny window sill. Later he noticed that it formed a milky sludge which eventually turned solid. He convinced his firm to file a patent on the mixture and they did, but nothing was done to commercialize the discovery. In 1925 the patent lapsed. (4) It should also be noted, that as with acetylene, PVC had originally been discovered long before Klatte came along. French physicist Henri Victor Regnault was the original discoverer in 1835 but nothing was done with the product.

Back to Klatte. A year after his patent expired (1926), an American chemist, Waldo Semon, working at B. F. Goodrich, independently reinvented PVC. He envisioned that this material would make a perfect shower curtain so he and his colleagues at Goodrich patented the process (Klatte’s team apparently never filed for a patent outside Germany). It turns out PVC was much more than shower curtain material. It became the forerunner of many plastics without which modern industrialized nations could no longer function. (5)

These days PVC is everywhere. It’s one of the most widely used plastics in the world. It is also the cheapest and probably the most versatile plastic. Some uses include pipe and pipe fittings (the largest scale use), floppy computer discs, garden hose, building sidings, wire and cable insulation, food packaging, automobile seat covers, shower curtains, and many other household uses. (6)

Other Uses For Acetylene

In 1895, the same year Willson established his company, French chemist Henry-Louis Chatelier, discovered that when acetylene was burned with an equal volume of oxygen, a flame with a temperature over 3000 C was obtained. This temperature, high enough to melt steel, was much higher than achievable with any other gas and introduced the concept of welding. Oxyacetylene welding was a boon to the construction industry and is widely used today.

Joe Schwarcz adds, “About half of all acetylene produced today goes towards the production of other organic chemicals. Adding hydrogen cyanide to acetylene, for example, yields acrylonitrile, which is used in the production of acrylic fibers. Acetylene can also be converted into vinyl acetylene, which is the raw material needed for the manufacture of neoprene, one of the most useful synthetic rubbers.” (7) But once again, this wasn’t a finding that came easily or was predictable. Wallace Carothers, a chemist at Du Pont challenged one of his assistants, Arnold Collins, to make synthetic rubber. You guessed it—acetylene was the key starting material. Reacting it with hydrochloric acid produced something they called vinylacetylene, and one weekend when a mixture was left setting in a flask, by the following Monday it had turned into a tiny, cauliflower-type mass. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne notes, “Collins stuck a wire into the glass vessel and fished a few cubic centimeters of the substance out. It felt strong, resilient, and elastic, much like vulcanized rubber. Almost without thinking, Collins threw the mass against his laboratory bench. It bounced like a golf ball. Collins had made chloroprene in his test tube, and over the weekend it had spontaneously polymerized into the high-grade synthetic rubber that Du Pont would market as Neoprene.” (8)

DuPont promoted it cleverly as a specialty rubber, more durable than natural rubber and more resistant to oil, gasoline, solvents, sunlight, and heat. Neoprene was also great for making balloons, like the ones used in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. It also gave chemists the impetus to develop other synthetic rubbers. (7)

So from experiments originally intended to produce aluminum in one case and cheap diamonds in another, acetylene, a key player in the plastics, chemistry, and metallurgical industries, was discovered. This then led to PVC and other plastics, many organic chemicals, and oxyacetylene welding. Besides all this, both acetylene and PVC had been discovered a number of times before their value was really known. Is there any doubt why this should not put acetylene at, or near the top of the unintended consequences list?

References

1.Joe Schwarcz, The Genie in the Bottle, (New York, Henry Holt & Company, 2002), 154

2.James Burke, Connections, (Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1978), 209

3.Joe Schwarcz, The Genie in the Bottle, 155

4.James Burke, Circles, (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000), 220

5.“Poly(vinyl chloride),” http://www.pslc.ws/mactest/pvc.htm

6.Royston M. Roberts, Serendipity, (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1989), 185

7.Joe Schwarcz, The Genie in the Bottle, 156

8.Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, (New York, McGraw-Hill, 2001), 131

Global Warming Goes Round and Round

2008-05-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From Hawaii Reporter, May 28, 2008)

A very powerful case that the climate trend we’re currently seeing is part of a product of a solar-linked cycle that creates harmless naturally warmer conditions approximately every 1500 years is made in a recent book, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery. It has 459 references, a glossary and an index. This well written book is arguably the best book to date on the politics and science of global warming. In addition to presenting evidence for the 1,500 year solar cycle, first proposed by European researchers in the mid 1990s, the authors address both the Greenhouse and Solar/Cosmic Ray theories of climate change.(1) Singer and Avery maintain that there are natural cycles of cooling and warming going back at least a million years. These are small excursions of global temperature, much smaller than the ice ages, which is why they haven’t been noticed until the last 25 years or so.

This was reported in 1984 with the first analysis from the Greenland ice cores. Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oescher published their analysis of the oxygen isotopes in the ice cores extracted from Greenland. These cores provided 250,000 years of the Earth’s climate history in one set of ‘documents.’ The scientists compared the ratio of ‘heavy’ oxygen-18 isotopes to the ‘lighter’ oxygen-16 isotopes, which indicated the temperature at the time the snow had fallen. (2) As Singer and Avery report, “They expected to find evidence of the known 90,000 year Ice Ages and the mild interglacial periods recorded in the ice, and they did. However, they did not expect to find anything in between. To their surprise, they found a clear cycle—moderate, albeit abrupt—occurring about every 2,550 years running persistently through both. (This period would soon be reassessed at 1,500 years plus or minus 500 years.)” (3)

Since this early discovery, its fingerprints have been found all over the world, both in ice cores and sediments. (4)
- An ice core from the Antarctic’s Vostok Glacier, at the other end of the world from Greenland, was brought up in 1987 and showed the same 1,500 year climate cycle throughout its 400,000 year length.

- The 1,500 year cycle has been revealed in seabed sediment cores brought up from the floors of such far-flung waters as the North Atlantic Ocean and the Arabian Sea, the Western Pacific, and the Sargasso Sea.

- One seabed core near Iceland goes back a million years, and the 1,500 year cycle runs through the whole million years, roughly 600 of these moderate, natural cycles.

Over the last 1,200 years there has been a “Medieval Warming” (900-1300), when Greenland was green; a “Little Ice Age” (1300-1850), when New York harbor froze and people could walk from Manhattan across the ice to Staten Island a mile away (in 1780); and the current global warming (1850-??). Rather than ‘global warming,’ a better term for this phase of the solar cycle is “Modern Warming.” Since 1850, temperatures have risen 0.8 degrees C, most rapidly in 1850-1870 and 1920-1940. Temperatures in the 1,500 year solar cycle fluctuate within a 4 degree C range—two degrees above and two degrees below the norm. An added important point is that three-fourths of the present warming occurred before 1940, which was before most of the human emitted carbon dioxide we hear so much about these days.

So today’s global warming is part of a natural 1,500-year plus or minus 500-year cycle operating for at least a million years. The Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled nine times in the past 12,000 years in lock step with the waxing and waning of the sun’s magnetic activity. (5) The linkage with the sun has been verified by correlation between the Carbon 14 and Beryllium 10 isotopes in the ice with sunspot numbers.

The modern warming is not confined to this planet. Mars ice caps are melting and Jupiter is developing a second giant red spot, an enormous hurricane-like storm. Jupiter’s original Great Red Spot is 300 years old and twice the size of Earth. The new storm-Red Spot Jr. -is thought to be the result of a sudden warming on our solar system’s largest planet. Some parts of Jupiter are now as much as 6 C warmer than just a few years ago. (6) Neptune’s moon, Triton has heated up significantly since 1989. Parts of its frozen nitrogen surface have begun melting and turning to gas. (7) Even Pluto has warmed slightly in recent years, if you can call -230 C warmer than
-233 C.

All of this prompts Lorne Gunter to ask, “Is there something all these heavenly bodies have in common? Some one thing they all share that could be causing them to warm in unison? Hmmmm, is there some, giant, self-luminous ball of burning gas with a mass more than 300,000 times that of Earth and a core temperature of more than 20 million degrees C, that for the past century or more has been unusually active and powerful? Is there something like that around which they can all revolve that could be causing global warming?” (6)

Singer and Avery also cover a number of other issues:

- A particularly interesting chapter focuses on common sense regarding the extinction of species. The authors explain that most of the world’s animal species evolved 600 million years ago, so we know most of today’s species have successfully dealt with ice ages and global warming periods that have sent temperatures much higher and much lower than today’s temperatures. (8)

- The authors look at history and confirm that the frequency and severity of hurricanes, droughts, thunderstorms, hail and tornadoes have not increased in recent years. (9) John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, in testimony before Congress noted, ‘that the most significant droughts in the Southwestern United States occurred more than four hundred years ago, before 1600.’ He stated that before 1850, American’s Great Plains were called the ‘Great American Desert,’ and experts at the time said the region couldn’t be farmed. Weather just seems unusual and dangerous these days, said Christy, because of the increased media coverage of major storms.

Summary

Jay Lehr sums it up quite well, “Singer and Avery shatter the greenhouse gas theory, making it clear humanity’s modest addition to the atmosphere’s small amount of carbon dioxide does not hold up to a significant alteration in temperature. Obviously, all of this does not square with efforts to get us to reduce our use of cars, air conditioners, and fertilizer in order to reduce carbon in our atmosphere.” (10) So, regardless of what you do to reduce your carbon footprint, Mother Nature really doesn’t care.

References

1.S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, (New York, Rowman & Littlefield publishers, 2008), 24

2.W. Dansgaard et al., “North Atlantic Climatic Oscillations Revealed by Deep Greenland Ice Cores,” in Climate Processes and Climate Sensitivity, J. E. Hansen and T. Takahashi, Editors, (Washington, DC, American Geophysical Union, 1984) Geophysical Monograph 29, 288-90

3.S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, 2

4.S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, 3

5.Gerard Bond et al., “Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene,” Science, 294, 2130, December 10, 2001

6.Lorne Gunter, “Breaking: Warming on Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, Neptune’s Moon & Earth Linked to Increased Solar Activity, Scientists Say,” National Post, March 13, 2007

7.J. L. Elliot, et al., “Global Warming on Triton,” Nature, 393, 765, June 25, 1998

8.S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, 163

9.S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, 201

10.Jay Lehr, “Careful Review of Science Refutes Global Warming Myths,” Environment & Climate News, 10, 12, March 2007

Looking For Germs? Check Your Money.

2008-05-15T19:31:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From Hawaii Reporter, May 15, 2008)

The legal tender in your pocket or purse definitely carries some germs and most likely also has some cocaine. Researchers at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio collected 68 dollar bills from people at a grocery store and a high-school sporting event. According to Dr. Peter Ender, lead researcher, sixty-four (94%) of the bills were contaminated with bacteria known to cause either serious or mild illness. Five bills (7%) were found to be contaminated with bacteria which can cause infections in healthy people. Those bacteria included Staphylococcus aureus and Klebsiella pneumoniae, both of which can cause pneumonia or blood infections. Fifty-nine bills were contaminated with bacteria that are usually harmless in healthy individuals, but can still trigger serious illness in those with depressed immune systems, such as people undergoing various types of medical treatment or those with HIV. (1) However, Ender stressed that real health risks to the average consumer are pretty low, adding that US dollar bills may be no more or less covered in microbial goo than, say, doorknobs, pens, or computer keyboards. But he points out that US currency, especially ‘finds its way into all areas of the world.’ “With the rapid dissemination of money in the era of drug-resistant bacteria, perhaps a resistance clone could be spread from one geographic location to another,” he concludes. (2)

Philip Turner adds, “Many studies, including two of my own, have shown that money can be effective for germ transaction. ABC’s “20/20” asked me to help them prepare a segment on this issue, and I devised a plan for collecting money from street vendors, shops, restaurants, and other establishments in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, DC. After each transaction, the bills received were put directly into newly purchased wallets, which were then sealed in plastic. The bills were tested and found to be contaminated with germs of fecal, respiratory, and skin origin. Although the risk of contracting a serious infection from dirty money is low, the germ count is high enough to make it easy to contract a cold, a bout of diarrhea, and similar ailments.” (3)

Depending on where you are in the world you might get a different reaction to this issue. Disease experts in northeastern India issued a recent report that said ‘overused and soiled’ currency can transmit tuberculosis, pneumonia and other lung infections. British health authorities and travel guides regularly warn tourists in the region to wash their hand following every financial transaction. (4)

By contrast, Dr. Frank Vriesekoop, from Ballarat University in Australia, reported that there are generally very few pathogenic bacteria on banknotes and coins. He found low levels of common bacteria on the currency that were traded through various food outlets in Australia and New Zealand. He claims that it would be impossible for them to cause diseases like diarrhea, vomiting, or other gastric symptoms as usually believed, as their numbers were so insignificantly small, and that fears about currency hygiene were unwarranted. (5)

So, what can you do? Well, thorough washing of your hands is most important. Or, you could travel to Japan or Australia. In Japan you can go to a ‘clean ATM’ and get your yen pressed between rollers for one-tenth of a second at 392 F, enough to kill many bacteria. (6)

The dirtiness of bills in one reason Australia is leading the charge to use a plastic currency that is supposed to be inhospitable to both germs and counterfeiters and four times as durable as paper notes. Australia introduced the rubber-feeling bills in 1998 and now prints them for 33 other countries, including Romania, Malaysia, and Mexico. (7)

Another option is to launder your money—literally, like the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which took emergency action in an effort to stop the spread of SARS. They put into effect a policy of holding money for twenty-four hours before re-circulating it—long enough for the germs to die. Money is also sterilized by being placed under ultraviolet light for an hour. (1)

Or, you could just carry coins. Patricia Gadsby reports that anything that is very hard and dry isn’t terribly hospitable to bacteria, and many metals have antibacterial activity. Pennies often are sterile, presumably due to the copper, and most US coins are also about 75 percent copper. (6)

Best recommendation is perhaps from Laura Lee, “Then again, none of these extreme measures is really necessary, say the experts. Although the germs on money have the potential to contaminate people, there are no documented cases that it has. Instead of avoiding or cleaning money, the best protection is to wash your hands regularly.” (1)

Cocaine

“The probability that every single person in the United States is carrying drug-tainted money is almost certain,” says Dr. James Woodford, forensic chemist from Atlanta. Woodford cites a 1989 experiment by Miami toxicologist Dr. William Hearn, who gathered 136 dollar bills from banks in twelve cities. Of these 131 had traces of cocaine.

A study conducted at the Houston Advanced Research Center in Texas and the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois examined currency (mostly singles, but also fives, tens, and twenties) in Miami, Chicago, and Houston. This project found an overall 70 to 80 percent contamination rate in the three cities, with single dollar bills more commonly contaminated than the higher denominations. Overall, the more worn the bills, the more coke was found on them. In very old bills, the contamination rate was closer to 90 percent. A recent look at money circulating in northern Illinois, found even higher rates: close to 93 percent of the sample, and 100 percent of the $20 bills tested positive for cocaine. “In fact, most Americans handle small amounts of cocaine every day, not as packets sold by drug dealers, but on the dollar bills that line their pockets,” were conclusions from this study. (6)

J. Oyler and colleagues reported that cocaine was present in 79% of currency samples analyzed in amounts above 0.1 microgram and in 54% of the currency in amounts above 1.0 microgram. Contamination was widespread and was found in single dollar bills from a number of US cities. Cocaine amounts were highly variable and ranged from nanogram to milligram amounts. The highest amount of cocaine detected on a single dollar bill was 1327 milligrams. These results indicated that cocaine contamination of currency is widespread throughout the United States. (9) The reason for this contamination relates to the exchange of illicit cocaine for money by drug dealers. During this exchange there is ample opportunity for paper currency to become contaminated.

Should you worry? Not at all. Cocaine on cash is so commonplace that the courts have ruled that police can no longer use a drug-sniffing dog’s signal to nab a suspect or to confiscate money because it’s deemed drug-related. (7)

References

1.Laura Lee, 100 Most Dangerous Things in Everyday Life, (New York, Broadway Books, 2004), 140
2.“Bacteria Study Gives New Meaning to ‘Dirty Money’”, Reuters, May 23, 2001
3.Philip M. Turner, The Secret Life of Germs, (New York, Pocket Books, 2001), 104
4.Steve Newman, “Currency Health Risk,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 4, 2002, Page C10
5.“Research Shows That Money May Not Harbor Many Pathogenic Bacteria,” medindia.com, July 13, 2006
6.Patricia Gadsby, “Filthy lucre-money is contaminated with bacteria,” Discover, 19, 76, October 1998
7.Carol X. Vinzant, “The Secret Life of the Dollar,” money.aol.com; accessed January 30, 2008
8.Kathryn Garfield, “Stinking Lucre,” Discover, 28, 15, February 2007
9.J. Oyler, W. D. Darwin, and E. J. Crane, “Cocaine contamination of United States paper currency,” J. Anal. Toxicol., 20, 213, 1996

More Pressing Issues Than Global Warming

2008-04-07T14:56:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From Hawaii Reporter, April 7, 2008)

“As often happens—especially these days with Web-based media—contentious issues such as global warming become politicized to the point that the discourse trivializes to an alarming extent. Indeed, all one seems to hear about climate change are essentially useless debates between believers and skeptics, along with unrealistic and grotesquely draconian proposals that would force us back into the Stone Age in an effort to mitigate carbon dioxide production,” says Michael Shaw. He adds, “Assertions by zealots and politicians, who should really know better, that climate change is the ‘most important environmental problem facing the world,’ ought to be subjected to the cold light of reason. Before untold resources are spent, shouldn’t we at least compare climate change to other problems facing mankind?” (1)

Let’s look at some of these other problems facing mankind. Ten of the most serious challenges facing the world today include: access to education, climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, corruption and governance, financial instability, hunger and malnutrition, migration, sanitation and access to clean water, and subsidies and trade barriers. The Copenhagen Consensus explored opportunities for addressing these issues. This group, organized by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, is an attempt by leading economists (including three Nobelists) to set priorities for spending using traditional cost-benefit analysis. They were asked to address the challenge areas and to answer the question: ‘What would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of developing countries, supposing that an additional $50 billion of resources were at governments’ disposal?’ Challenge papers, commissioned from acknowledged authorities in each area of policy, set out more than thirty proposals in descending order of desirability. In ordering the proposals the panel was guided predominantly by consideration of economic costs and benefits. (2)

The results? Compared to other issues such as communicable diseases, malnutrition and hunger, sanitation and water, and the rest, climate change ranked last on the list. Vernon Smith, Professor of Economics and Law, George Mason University, provided this summation: “It is clear from both the science and the economics of intervention that those of us who care about the environment are not well advised to favor initiating a costly attempt to reduce greenhouse gases build-up in the atmosphere in the near future based on available information. Although the ultimate dangers may turn out to prompt action, the current evidence indicates that it is much too soon to act relative to the many other important and pressing opportunities that demand immediate attention.”(3) (Smith’s italics, not mine)

Indur M. Goklany, whose resume includes stints with federal and state governments, think tanks, and the private sector for over 30 years, has also analyzed this issue. He examined certain risks to humanity, and compared the contributory effects of climate change to non-climate factors. His most significant conclusion: “Climate change is clearly not the most important environmental, let alone public health problem facing the world today, nor is it likely to be the most important environmental problem confronting human or environmental well-being, at least through the foreseeable future. Hence, the argument that we should shift resources from dealing with the real and urgent problems confronting present generations to solving potential problems of tomorrow’s wealthier and better positioned generations is unpersuasive at best and verging on immoral at worst.” (4)

Goklany provides data from the World Health Organization (WHO). Similar to the conclusions from the Copenhagen Consensus mentioned earlier, climate change doesn’t even make the top ten global health risk factors related to food, nutrition, and environmental occupation exposure. Specifically, the WHO provides the following information:

Malaria (2001) 1.12 million deaths
Malnutrition 3.24 million deaths
Unsafe water, inadequate sanitation,
and hygiene 1.73 million deaths
Indoor air pollution from heating and cooking
with wood, coal, and dung 1.62 million deaths
Urban air pollution 800,000 deaths
Lead exposure 230,000 deaths

How many deaths from climate change? No one knows. However, a review paper published in Nature in 2005 claims that global warming may have been responsible for about 170,000 deaths worldwide in 2000. (5) This estimate is based on an analysis which was put out under the auspices of WHO. However, as Goklany notes, “The 170,000 estimate should be viewed with skepticism since science was admittedly sacrificed in hot pursuit of a predetermined policy objective.” (4)

Let’s look at malaria. Some alarmists promote the idea that tropical diseases like malaria will spread because of global warming. However, the geographical spread of these diseases has very little to do with climate. (6) Throughout the Little Ice Age, malaria was a major epidemic disease in Europe and far into the Arctic Circle. (7) In the nineteenth century, malaria, cholera, and other diarrheal and parasitic diseases were prevalent around the world, including northern Europe. (7) Malaria was endemic in England until the late 1800s and in Finland until after World War II. Malaria in the US was still endemic in 36 states until after World War II. (6) Today this disease is a problem only in countries where the necessary public health measures are unaffordable or have been compromised. Past history reveals that combating malaria is primarily a question of development to ensure efficient monitoring of the disease and resources to secure a strong effort to eradicate the mosquitoes and their breeding grounds. Wealth and a functioning public health system is what matters when it comes to combating tropical diseases. (7)

Malaria is functionally eliminated in a society whose annual per capita income reaches $3,100. Even under the poorest scenario prediction, the average GDP per capita for developing countries is projected to be $11,000. Hence, few, if any countries ought to be below the $3,100 threshold in 2085. (4) According to the UN Millennium project, a 75% reduction in malaria deaths can be achieved for $3 billion/year, with a program focused directly on malaria prevention. Talk about a better bang for your buck! (1)

Summary

By focusing our priorities on future generations, we focus less on improving the lives of people who are alive today. These future generations bear no closer relationship to us than those now living in developing countries whose lives we disdain to save. Why are we not feeding people in the world who are hungry? Why are we not giving clean water to the almost one billion people who don’t have clean water? The greatest source of environmental degradation is poverty. Why aren’t we helping eliminate poverty? One answer is that perhaps it is a lot easier worrying about future generations than trying to fix present day problems.

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization which is providing much of the doom and gloom about global warming, raises the flag about future generations. This is the same IPCC whose scenarios predict that by 2100, nations that are poor today will at least by as rich as we are at present, and more likely will be 2 to 4 times more wealthy. The IPCC makes this important point about developing countries: “If we take aggressive action to limit climate change they may regret that we did not use the funds instead to push ahead development in Africa, to better protect species against the next retrovirus, or to dispose of nuclear materials safely…Alternatively, if the developed countries choose to embark on an aggressive control regime now, and if this cuts into their growth rates, the result will shrink export markets for developing countries and thus reduce growth there. In addition, if developed countries view their greenhouse effects as, in effect, aid to developing countries, they may cut back on other programs (sanitation, education for women, etc.) that have a more immediate impact on life expectancy, health and well-being.” (8)

Bjorn Lomborg observes: “Imagine if you were a rich Chinese or a rich Rwandan or a rich Bolivian in 2100, looking back on 2004, saying how odd that people of 2004 were so concerned about helping me a little bit through climate change and so relatively unconcerned about helping my grandfather and my great-grandfather who needed the help much, much more. (9)

References

1.Michael D. Shaw, “A Rational Look at Climate Change,” healthnewsdigest.com, February 10, 2008
2.Global Crises, Global Solutions, Bjorn Lomborg, Editor, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004) 605
3.Global Crises, Global Solutions, Bjorn Lomborg, Editor, 635
4.Indur M. Goklany, “What to do about climate Change,” Policy Analysis No. 609, Cato Institute, February 5, 2008
5.Jonathan A Patz et al., “Impact of Regional Climate Change on Human Health,” Nature, 438, 310 2005
6.Martin Ague, “Is Kyoto a good idea?” in Adapt or Die, Kendra Okonski, Editor, (London, Profile Books Limited, 2003), 77
7.Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), 291
8.Wilfred Beckerman, “The precautionary principle and our obligation to future generations,” in Rethinking Risk and the Precautionary Principle, Julian Morris, Editor, (Oxford, Butterworth Heinemann, 2000), 53
9.Marc Morano, “Ignore Global Warming Says Former Greenpeace Member,” cnsnews.com, December 14, 2004

No Consensus on Global Warming

2008-04-01T20:18:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From Hawaii Reporter, April 1, 2008)

“Rashomon,” a celebrated Japanese film, presents four witnesses observing a single crime. Each witness perceives the situation so differently that the audience experiences what appears to be four distinct events. Current discourse on climate change, or if you prefer, global warming, raises a “Rashomon-like” specter of competing perceptions. On the one side are those of see the world in a heap of trouble. As Lynn Scarlett notes, “They focus on the moment, see despoliation, and predict doom. They believe we can evade doom, but only through sweeping changes, wrought through single-minded pursuit of an environmental imperative.” (1) They are convinced that mankind is responsible for the earth’s surface warming about 0.7C over the past century. These are the folks in the ‘consensus category’ that Al Gore and the media talk about. According to Gore, “The science is settled on climate change. The planet has a fever and its cause is too many cars, power plants, factories, and other human-related sources putting too many emissions into the atmosphere.” (2)

On the other side are the ‘disbelievers.’ These folks posit that warming is part of Mother Nature’s natural cycle and there isn’t a whole lot we can do about it. Although they are a ‘minority,’ there are many more scientists that fit this category than most people realize. They aren’t given much media attention since the media for the most part belongs too the ‘consensus’ group. After all, you don’t get attention by saying that things are just fine; you need to spruce news up with doom and gloom stories. More than 22,000 scientists signed the dissenting “Petition Project” which urges political leaders to reject the Kyoto Protocol or other similar proposals that would mandate draconian tax and regulatory measures aimed at virtually all human economic activity. The petition states there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other green house gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. (3)

According to a January 1, 2007 New York Times article by Andrew Revkin, a new middle stance has emerged in the debate over climate change. Revkin reports that more scientists are distancing themselves from the extreme fear mongering and exaggerated claims of the climate-change alarmists. (4)

Marc Morano notes that after a May 16, 2007 vote in the Senate on global warming, “there is a shift taking place in climate science. Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The media’s fear factor seemingly grows louder even as the latest science grows less and less alarming by the day. It is also worth noting that the proponents of climate change fears are increasingly attempting to suppress dissent by skeptics.” (5)

In December 2007, over 400 scientists from more than two dozen countries voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC, and Al Gore in a report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The report lists the scientists by name, country of residence, and academic/institutional affiliation. It also provides their own words, biographies, and weblinks to their peer reviewed studies and original source materials as gathered from public statements, various news outlets, and websites in 2007. (6)

And more recently, scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears met at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York City. The March 2-4 groundbreaking conference featured about 100 speakers with over people in attendance. Key items discussed at the conference included:
- Most of climate change is caused by natural forces.
- The human contribution is not significant.
- Solar activity changes are the main cause of climate change.

William Jasper reports,”The advocates of Kyoto and other schemes to super-regulate the planet frequently try to portray the scientists who dispute their claims of global warming peril as fringies, fogies, and ‘nut cases’ who shouldn’t be taken seriously. However, as brutal scientific facts have poked holes in their hypothetical global-warming models, the Gore camp has become more strident and abusive. Rather than answer the scientific critiques, they have tended simply to accuse opposition scientists of being in the pay of energy companies. Even worse, they have adapted the tactic of labeling scientists who dispute their claims as being ‘climate-change deniers,’ on a par with ‘Holocaust deniers.” The more radical elements of the climate-change alarmist movement have targeted dissenting scientists for vilification and harassment, even trying to deprive them of their jobs, research grants, and tenure. The most virulent ‘Greens’ call for them to be tried as ‘traitors.’ (2)

Many of the scientists feature in the Senate Report issued in December 2007 consistently stated that numerous colleagues shared their views, but they will not speak out publicly for fear of retribution. Atmospheric scientist, Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of almost 70 peer-reviewed studies, explains how many of his fellow scientists have been intimidated: “Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media.” (6) Another example is Dr. Robert Giegengack of the University of Pennsylvania, a geologist who studies ancient atmospheres and finds no relationship between global temperatures in the past and carbon dioxide levels. He says other scientists have told him to just stop broadcasting that finding saying, “People come to me and say, ‘Stop talking like this, you’re hurting the cause.’” (7)

Looks like William F. Buckley, Jr., wasn’t far off the mark with his comment: “The heavy condemnatory breathing on the subject of global warming outdoes anything since high moments of the Inquisition.” (8)

Some Final Words

Assertions by zealots and politicians, who should really know better, that climate change is the ‘most important environmental problem facing the world,’ ought to be subjected to the cold light of reason says Michael Shaw. Before untold resources are spent, shouldn’t we at least compare climate change to other problems facing mankind? (9) What about issues like communicable diseases, malnutrition and hunger, sanitation and access to clean water? Many, if not all, of these demand immediate attention and can aid folks in serious need at present, not some future generations, that may or may not be affected by the weather in the 2100s.

Lastly, 30 years ago we were supposedly headed into a cooling cycle akin to the Little Ice Age. (10) Now, it’s an unprecedented heating cycle. If you ask me, that’s an awfully quick time for a flip-flop on the weather. If the 14 billion year cosmic history were scaled to one day, then 100,000 years of human history would be 4 minutes and a 100 year life-span would be 0.2 seconds. (11) So, in less than 0.1 second in cosmic time we’ve switched on climate change. Seems like we need a few more cosmic time seconds to gather more data.

References

1.Lynn Scarlett, “Clear Thinking About the Earth,” in Environmental Gore, John A. Baden, Editor, (San Francisco, Pacific Research Institute, 1994), 249
2.William F. Jasper, “2008 Climate Debate,” The New American, March 31, 2008
3.William F. Jasper, “Analyzing Global-Warming Science,” The New American, February 18, 2008
4.Andrew C. Revkin, “A New Middle Stance Emerges in Debate Over Climate,” The New York Times, January 1, 2007
5.Marc Morano, “List of global warming activists, now skeptics,” Spero News, May 16, 2007
6.“United States Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007; Senate Report Debunks ‘Consensus’”, December 20, 2007
7.William J. Broad, “In Ancient Fossils, Seeds of a New Debate on Warming,” in The Best American Science Writing 2007, Gina Kolata, Editor, (New York, Harper Perennial, 2007), 252
8.William F. Buckley, Jr., National Review, March 31, 2007
9.Michael D. Shaw, “A Rational Look at Climate Change,” healthnewsdigest.com, February 10, 2008
10.Stephen H. Schneider, The Genesis Strategy, (New York, Plenum Press, 1976), 90
11.Max Tegmark, “We’re Not Insignificant After All,” in What Are You Optimistic About?, John Brockman, Editor, (New York, Harper Perennial, 2007), 4

Friendly Bacteria and the Hygiene Hypothesis

2008-02-07T17:25:00.000-08:00

Jack W. Dini
Livermore, CA

Our immune system needs a certain amount of bacteria or we get get into trouble. These days we can even purchase foods containing these friendly 'probiotic' bacteria.

Over 400 distinct species of micro organisms inhabit the various regions of the human digestive tract, making up nearly four pounds of every individual’s total body weight. This vast population of micro organisms far exceeds the number of tissue cells that make up the human body. It has been estimated that an adult carries 90 trillion microbes, a figure that outnumbers the body own cells by nearly 10 to one. (1)

With all of this we should normally have a balance of about 85% probiotic bacteria (friendly bacteria) and 15% harmful bacteria, but many people are so far off that their intestinal tract contains only 15% probiotic bacteria and 85% harmful bacteria. We need to have a large population of probiotic bacteria to aid with digestion and to keep harmful disease-causing micro organisms in check. If the percentage of good bacteria is too low, compared to the bad bacteria, our bodies function poorly. Over time we are likely to have many health problems. (2)

Have you heard about bugs in baby food, or microbes in your milkshakes? As Lindsey Tanner reports, these are not the latest health food scares, but rather a growing trend in foods designed to boost health, not make you sick. These products contain probiotics, the ‘friendly bacteria’ similar to those found in the human digestive system. (3)

Tanner also reports, “There are supplement pills, yogurts, smoothies, snack bars and cereals, even baby formula and chocolate. Sold by major names like Dannon and Kraft, they’re spreading like germs on grocery store shelves and in supermarket dairy cases. In 2007, more than 150 probiotic and prebiotic commercial food products were introduced in the US, compared with about 100 in 2006 and just 40 in 2005. Even without all the answers from science, probiotics are a multibillion-dollar global industry. In the United States alone, retail sales of probiotic-containing foods and supplements totaled and estimated $764 million in 2005 and are projected to reach $1 billion in 2010, according to the market firm BBC Research.” (3)

Jessica Synder Sachs adds to the success list of this futuristic approach: “a ‘probiotic’ nasal spray imbued with beneficial bacteria that helps prevent chronic childhood ear infections; a bioengineered strain of mouth bacteria that prevent rather than cause cavities; and a so-called Dirt Vaccine that appears to ease a range of chronic inflammatory disorders and also jolts the immune system into a cancer-fighting mode. Some scientists are even dreaming about ‘probiotic’ cleaning products- each detergent, cleanser, or air spray formulated with its own patented mix of protective and health-enhancing microbes.” (4)

University of Michigan researcher, Gary Huffnagle calls probiotics ‘ a new essential food group’ in his book, The Probiotics Revolution. (5) Huffnagle does advise consumers to by wary of probiotic containing products that don’t specify how much or what type of bacteria. Evidence suggests the bugs need to be alive and ingested in huge amounts, generally between 5 billion and 10 billion daily. (3)

This is all fairly new. On a spring morning in 2003, a middle-aged Dutch farmer had swallowed his first twice-daily handful of ten small capsules, each filled with some 10 billion cells of the cheesemaking bacterium Lactococcus lactis. That small act entered the Dutchman into the history books as the first human deliberately colonized with transgenic bacteria. The live bugs he swallowed carried and expressed the human gene for the immune calming cytokine interleukin-10. The farmer had been debilitated with Crohn’s disease for more than twenty years. When consumed in dairy products, ordinary L. lactis disappears from a person’s intestinal tract within a day or two. The farmer noted a dramatic reduction in his symptoms. A follow-up trial with ten other patients also proved successful. Further studies are planned in the Netherlands this year with the hope that government regulators will allow this next trial on an out-patient basis. (6)

In perhaps the ultimate illustration of how far things have come, Joel Weinstock, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Iowa, recently ran a preliminary clinical trial in which six patients suffering from Crohn’s disease were treated with a dose of live parasitic worms. In five of the six, the disease went into complete remission in the period when the harmless microbes were in the patients’ bodies. The sixth patient also showed a significant improvement. (1)

This is all part of the so-called hygiene hypothesis, first voiced by a British epidemiologist, D. P. Strachan in 1989. The hypothesis is that our immune system needs a certain amount of bacteria on which to flex its muscles. Deprived of it, the white cells that are designed to fight bacteria fail to develop, and the other white cells, those designed to make antibodies to defend the body against microbial dangers as well as to produce allergic reactions—will take over. (7) One scientist has likened the immune system to the brain. You have to exercise it, that is, expose it to the right antigenic information so that it matures correctly. Excessive hygiene, therefore, may interfere with the normal maturation of the immune system. (8)

Here are some examples of the hygiene hypothesis:
•The hygiene hypothesis can be used to explain the Louisiana Purchase. In Haiti, the 1801 uprising of African slaves was successful because yellow fever killed twenty-seven thousand French troops while leaving untouched the African-born slaves, who were relatively immune because of their exposure earlier in life. Napoleon, discouraged by the loss of his Haitian colony, gave up his American ambitions and sold his remaining territory, the Louisiana Purchase. (9)
•Dirt and infection don’t just make you less allergy prone, they can fight off some cancers. Dairy farmers are as much as five times less likely to develop lung cancer. Working in a cotton factory protects you against lung, breast, liver, and other tumors. (10)
•A Canadian study published in November 2007 suggested that fermented milk containing Lactobacillus acidophilus and Lactobacilius caseli could prevent antibiotic-related diarrhea. (11)
•A 2007 study in Finland found that an oat drink containing Bifdobacterium lactis bacteria helped bowel function in nursing home residents. (11)
•Scientists in Argentina are investigating whether milk fermented with lactic acid bacteria might reduce amounts of cancer-causing substances in the intestine. (11)

Wine and Microbes

John Postage postulates that few people are aware that beers, wine, cheeses, and so on are prepared by allowing microbes to act on foodstuffs; even fewer recognize that food goes bad through the actions of microbes. (12)

Today, modern wine making techniques are wiping our Racodium cellare, a benign mold, once seen as the sign of a good Tokay cellar, since it helps keep the cellar air fresh. Stainless steel barrels prevent alcohol from evaporating, cutting off the Tokay mold’s food source. It is also under threat from modern standards of hygiene, which aim to create laboratory-like levels of cleanliness in wine cellars. Some vineyards, however, still go out of their way to encourage it. However, it seems to have disappeared from the UK. “I am very sorry to never have found Racodium in Britain,” says Henry Tribe of the University of Cambridge, who has studied the mold. “Even the cellars of St. John’s College are too hygienic. Hygiene is reaching stupid proportions.” (13)

Space Travel

John Postage provides this interesting information about microbes and space travel. “A space ship with a few astronauts taking a year-long trip to Mars would be a physically isolated community and a peculiar thing happens to the commensal microbes of people in such communities. One type of microbe tends to become dominant, from mouth to anus, and if this germ happens to be pathogenic the situation can be dangerous. Likewise, immunity to infection by ordinary microbes tends to be lost. It seems probable that astronauts will have to keep cultures of the varieties of microbes they started out with, and will need to deliberately re-infect themselves at intervals.” (14)

Next they will probably be telling us that when we go on long car or airplane trips we should carry our own satchel of personal microbes for ingestion after a certain number of hours. Think of all the fits this would create with airport security.

References

1.Garry Hamilton, “Why We Need Germs,” The Ecologist Report, June 2001
2.“Probiotic Bacteria and Your Health,” http://www.ghchealth.com/probiotic-bacteria-and-your-health.html; accessed December 25, 2007
3.Lindsey Tanner, “The next craze: ‘good’ germs in your food,” Honolulu Advertiser, December 10, 2007, Page A3
4.Jessica Snyder Sachs, Good Germs, Bad Germs, (New York, Hill and Wang, 2007), 12
5.Gary B. Huffnagle, The Probiotics Revolution, (New York, Bantam Books, 2007)
6.Jessica Snyder Sachs, Good Germs, Bad Germs, 206
7.Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt On Clean, (New York, North Point Press, 2007), 290
8.Thomas R. DeGregori, The Environment, Our Natural Resources and Modern Technology, (Ames, Iowa, Iowa State Press, 2002)
9.E. Fuller Torrey and Robert H. Yolken, Beasts of the Earth, (New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 2005), 20
10.Jessica Marshall, “Filthy Healthy,” New Scientist, 197, 34, January 12, 2008
11.Lindsey Tanner, “Products With Good Bacteria Get Popular,” Examiner.com; December 10, 2007
12.John Postgate, Microbes and Man, Fourth Edition, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), 133
13.“Wine cellar mold,” New Scientist, 194, 57, June 9, 2007
14.John Postgate, Microbes and Man, Fourth Edition, 353

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Hysteria Over Minuscule Amounts of Chemicals Is Unwarranted

2008-02-02T10:02:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(From Hawaii Reporter, February 1, 2008)

Imagine one dime in a stack reaching from the Earth to the Moon and half-way back. This is equivalent to one part in 1019, a detectability level for one atom of cesium in the presence of argon atoms reported by Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists. (1)

These days scientists can find any thing in anything and this leads to a problem. The minute that something is found in food, in someone’s blood, etc., some folks get very concerned and start creating a lot of fuss. The very act of being able to measure something can give the impression that if it’s quantifiable, it’s dangerous. (2)

Todd Seavey observes, “When regulators began looking for traces of potentially harmful substances to ban a half-century ago, scientists were capable of finding traces as small as parts per million. Unfortunately, activists continue to panic—and make news—each time science improves our ability to detect minuscule traces, even if there’s not new evidence that these smaller and smaller traces can harm us. Now it isn’t hard to find traces of virtually any substance on the planet in virtually any place on the planet.” (3)

Here’s a great example of selectively picking data to arouse panic. Bill Moyers did a PBS special on plastics in January 2002. During the program a scientist reported that a sample of Moyers’ blood had been analyzed and about 400 chemicals were found that would not have been found in his blood 40 years ago. The inference was that all of this had come from big, bad industry. No mention was made of concentration levels. No mention was made of the fact that 40 years ago we were analyzing in the parts per million range (equivalent to finding 1 second in 12 years), whereas today we routinely report in the parts per trillion range ( 1 second in 32,000 years), and even greater as mentioned in the opening sentence of this article. No mention was made about the 1000 natural chemicals in coffee; no mention about the 2000 natural chemicals in chocolate.

Another naysayer, Lewis Smith reported, “Traces of a cocktail of toxic chemicals linked to cancer and fetal deformities are being eaten even in the healthiest of diets. Man-made pollutants and chemicals were found in every one of 27 food products, including staples such as bread and eggs, that were tested by experts in further tests carried out by WWF, formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature. Every one of 352 people who provided blood samples over the past five years was found to be contaminated with toxic chemicals. All the contaminants found in the samples were at low levels, well within legal limits, but there are serious fears for long-term health.” (4) How low were the levels? Not mentioned. Parts per million? Parts per trillion? Parts per quadrillion? Just low levels, and no references, other than mentioning WWF, an advocacy group well known for its chemophobia leanings.

This type of reporting led a number of Britain’s leading poison experts to denounce pressure groups for mounting a ‘hysterical scaremongering’ campaign against dangerous chemicals in the environment. They accused the groups of acting irresponsibly by publishing reports claiming most people have blood swimming with toxic compounds. Said Alan Boobis of Imperial College, London, “Most chemicals were found at a
fraction of a part per billion. There is not evidence such concentrations pose any threat to people’s health.” (5)

Anthony Trewavas points out that by failing to provide the full information on how minuscule these chemicals are, the public is deprived of the necessary information to make a balanced judgment. He adds, “Worse, a cardinal rule of toxicology is ignored: All chemicals are hazardous, depending on the dose. Drinking six pints of water quickly will kill the average adult from hyponatremia; an aspirin a day helps circulation but 40 stops it for good; you get the point.” (6)

Lastly, from Joe Schwarcz, “Evidence for the presence of a substance is not evidence of harm. After all, we don’t avoid apples even though their seeds harbor the deadly toxin cyanide; we happily eat strawberries although they contain acetone, a known neurotoxin; and we are not deterred from toast by the presence of 3,4-benzopyrene, and established carcinogen. The toxic properties of these chemicals are indeed real. When test animals are exposed to high does of acetone, or 1,4-dioxane, they certainly show neurological damage or tumor growth. But that doesn’t mean small doses will have a similar effect. In fact, they may have a significantly different effect. (7)

1.Mark S. Lesney, “Chain Reactions: Harvest of Silent Spring,” Today’s Chemist at Work, 8, (3), 63, 1999
2.Eric Dezenhall, Nail ‘Em, (New York, Prometheus Books, 2003), 41
3.Todd Seavey, “Undetected, Unmeasured Disaster,” HealthFactsandFears.com, November 19, 2004
4.Lewis Smith, “Man-made toxins are found in even the best diets,” timesonline.com, September 22, 2006
5.Robin Mckie, “Poison experts attack ‘hysteria’ over chemicals,” observer.gurdian.co.uk, September 18, 2005
6.Anthony Trewavas, “Chemical Warfare,” The Wall Street Journal, November 2, 2005, Page 14
7.Joe Schwarcz, Let Them Eat Cake, (Toronto, Canada, ECW Press, 2005), 159

Computer Models Don't Always Work

2008-01-30T18:50:00.000-08:00

Jack W. Dini
Livermore, CA

From: Plating & Surface Finishing, May 2005

What grade would you give someone who was correct 20 percent of the time? Not passing for sure. However, being right 20 percent of the time got some authors published in the prestigious journal Science. (1) They were trying to account for the decline in global temperatures from the end of World War II until the late 1970s. As an aside, in case you don’t remember, the 70s were the times we were supposedly headed for an ‘ice age.’ Newsweek highlighted this with an article titled, “The Cooling World.” (2) Anyhow, getting back to the present, it turns out that computer models have a difficult time producing cooling with the multitude of variables in the mix. The authors of the Science article, Delworth and Knutson, found that all they had to do was run their model many times, compare the output with observed temperature history, tweak some of the input, and go back for another run. After five such runs they concluded, “in one of the five GHG [greenhouse gases]-plus-sulfate integrations, the time series of global mean surface air temperature provides a remarkable match to the observed record, including the global warmings of both the early (1925-1944) and latter (1978 to the present) parts of the century. Further, the simulated spatial pattern of warming in the early 20th century is broadly similar to the observed pattern of warming.” (1)

In discussing this work, Robert Davis says the following, “Yes, it’s possible to get a model to reproduce anything you choose merely by tweaking a few parameters and running it enough times. But the model that reproduces the temperature history screws up precipitation, and the model that gets rainfall correct can’t generate the proper wind or pressure fields. The reason is actually quite plain: We don’t understand the physics of the atmosphere well enough to model climate change. That is the grim reality that at least four out of five climate models chose to ignore.”(3) John Christy adds: “Keep firmly in mind that models can’t prove anything. Even when a model generates values that appear to match the past 150 years, one must remember that modelers have had 20 years of practice to make the match look good. Is such model agreement due to fundamentally correct science or to lots of practice with altering (or tuning) the sets of rules in a situation where one knows what the answer should be ahead of time?” (4)

Science writer James Trefil echoes this thought. “After you’ve finished a model, you would like to check it out. The best validation is to apply the simulation to a situation where you already know the answer. You could, for example, feed in climate data from one hundred years ago and see if the GCM predicts the present climate. The fact that GCMs can’t do this is one reason I take their predictions with a grain of salt.” (5) A comparison of nearly all of most sophisticated climate models with actual measurements of current climate conditions found the models in error by about 100 percent in cloud cover, 50 percent in precipitation, and 30 percent in temperature change. Even the best models give temperature change results differing from each other by a factor of two or more. (6)

Reliability is in Question

While on the topic of global warming, which in a large part has been made a major scientific and political issue because of complex models, here are other examples of the poor predictability of some of those models:
•The models that served as the scientific background for the 1992 Rio Treaty implied that the world should have warmed 1.5 C since the late 19th century. In actuality, the world has warmed only 0.5 C, so the models were off by a factor of 3. (7)
•As computer simulations have become more sophisticated, projections of rising sea levels have become much smaller. A 25 foot increase predicted in 1980 fell to three feet by 1985 and then to one foot by 1995. (8)
•Computers forecast a warming of the troposphere of 0.224 C per decade, when actual measurements showed a warming of only 0.034 C per decade. Predictions were off by almost a factor of 7. (9)
•Computer models of ocean circulation did not predict temperature changes which occurred in the deep sea south of the Aleutian Islands. Keay Davidson observes; “At the very least, the findings indicate that computer models of ocean circulation—which are vital for monitoring climate change—are badly in need of a tune-up. The discovery was not explicitly predicted by any known computer models of ocean circulation.” (10)
•Carbon buildup has slowed during the past 10 years. Original predictions were that it would be up to 600 ppm by the year 2100, but that number has been reduced to only 500 ppm. (11)
•Atmospheric temperatures at the stratopause and mesopause regions (the atmospheric layers at about 30 and 50 miles altitude, respectively), at the Earth’s poles were found to be about 40-50 degrees F cooler than model predictions. (12)
•Jane Shaw reports that since “computers have to treat large areas of the earth as if they are on one elevation, their findings don’t give good descriptions of regions that may be hundreds of miles wide. Mountain ranges have an enormous impact on climate; their cooler air causes snow and rain to fall, drying out the air as it moves over the mountains. Yet most computer models do not distinguish mountain ranges from prairies. The building blocks for the models are not fine-grained enough; the mountains have to be flattened in the models and the valleys filled in. The predictions for the wet, mountainous forests of the Pacific Northwest are not much different than the predictions for the dry desert in Nevada. Because they are unable to make such distinctions, the climate descriptions may be distorted.(13) Here’s an example. Martin Wild and his colleagues recently proposed that melting over Greenland should remain negligible, even with doubled carbon dioxide.(14). Why the big difference from past assessments? The short answer is resolution as discussed above. Even the best models end up representing Greenland as a gently rounded mound rather than as a steep walled mesa. And, because melting takes place only as lower elevations, the area prone to melting gets exaggerated in the models.(15) So is Greenland really melting? Here’s some data that I bet you haven’t heard; the West Greenland Ice Sheet, the largest mass of polar ice in the Northern Hemisphere, has thickened by up to seven feet since 1980.(16)

Other Examples

Global warming isn’t the only situation where computer models exhibit shortcomings. The best model available at the time of the Chernobyl accident did not describe a major feature of the radioactivity deposition 80 miles northeast of the plant, and it was mostly in this region that children ingested or inhaled radioactive iodine and developed thyroid cancers.(17)

Predictions of the plume from the Kuwait oil fires (February 1991 to October 1991) were reasonably well described, but some individual deviations where air masses turned westward over Riyadh in Saudi Arabia were not well predicted even after the event.(17)

A program researchers were using for studying the effects of airborne soot on human health produced enormous results that went unchecked for years. A team in Canada estimates it will change its data on the impact of airborne soot on mortality downwards by 20-50%. Other groups throughout the world using the same tool are now redoing their calculations.(18)

Stuart Beaton and his colleagues note that an EPA model, which treats all cars of a given model year as having the same odometer reading, the same annual mileage accumulation, and an equal likelihood of emission control problems, has little success in predicting urban on-road vehicle emissions. This leads them to conclude, “lack of linkage between EPA’s model and real-world measurements leads to inappropriate policy decisions and wastes scarce resources. If we want to maintain public support for programs that claim to reduce air pollution, those programs must do what they claim in the real world, not just in the virtual world of the computer modeler.”(19)

Jerry Dennis reported this about the Great Lakes, “One recent computer model projected a period of drought and heat continuing through the twenty-first century, resulting in even lower water levels. Another predicted more heat and precipitation, resulting in the Great Lakes staying at the same level or even rising a foot or so above average.”(20) Take your pick.

A Sacrilegious Thought

Naomi Oreskes and her co-authors argue that large computer models with multiple inputs should probably never be considered ‘validated.’ They argue that verification and validation of models of natural systems is impossible because natural systems are never closed, and because models are always non-unique. “Models can only be evaluated in relative terms, and their predictive value is always open to question.”(21) They quote Nancy Cartwright who has said: “A model is a work of fiction.”(22)

While not necessarily accepting Cartwright’s viewpoint, Oreskes et al., compare a model to a novel. Some of it may ring true and some may not. “How much is based on observation and measurement of accessible phenomena, how much is based on informed judgment, and how much is convenience? Fundamentally, the reason for modeling is a lack of full access, either in time or space, to the phenomena of interest.”(21) It’s obvious that in some cases we still have a long way to go with modeling.

References

1.Thomas L. Delworth and Thomas R. Knutson, “Simulation of Early 20th Century Global Warming,” Science, 287, 2246, March 24, 2000
2.Peter Gwynne, “The Cooling World,” Newsweek, 85, 64, April 28, 1975
3.Robert E. Davis, “Playing the numbers with climate model accuracy,” Environment & Climate News, 3, 5, July 2000
4.John R. Christy, “The Global Warming Fiasco,” in Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths, Ronald Bailey, Editor, (Roseville, CA, Prima Publishing, 2002), 15
5.James Trefil, The Edge of the Unknown, (New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996), 46
6.Jay Lehr and Richard S. Bennett, “Computer Models & The Need For More Research,” Environment & Climate News, 6, 12, July 2003
7.Robert W. Davis and David Legates, “How Reliable are Climate Models?,” Competitive Enterprise Institute, June 5, 1998
8.“The Global Warming Crisis: Predictions of Warming Continue to Drop,” in Facts on Global Warming, (Washington, DC, George C. Marshall Institute, October 15, 1997)
9.TSAugust, www.tsaugust.org/Global%20Warming.htm, accessed January 19, 2004
10.Keay Davidson, “Going to depths for evidence of global warming,” San Francisco Chronicle, A4, March 1, 2004
11.Jane S. Shaw, Global Warming, (New York, Greenhaven Press, 2002), 23
12.C. S. Gardner, et al., “The temperature structure of the winter atmosphere at the South Pole,” Geophysical Research Letters, Issue 16, Citation 1802, August 28, 2002
13.Jane S. Shaw, Global Warming, 60
14.Martin Wild, et al., “Effects of polar ice sheets on global sea level in high-resolution greenhouse scenarios,” Journal of Geophysical Research, 108, No. D5, 4165,2003
15.David Schneider, “Greenland or Whiteland?,” American Scientist, 91, 406, September-October 2003
16.David Gorack, “Glacier melting: Just a drop in the bucket,” Environment & Climate News, 2, 6, May 1999
17.Richard Wilson and Edmund A. C. Crouch, Risk-Benefit Analysis, Second Edition, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2001), 74
18.Jonathan Knight, “Statistical error leaves pollution data up in the air,” Nature, 417, 677, June 13, 2002
19.Stuart P. Beaton, et al., “On-Road Vehicle Emissions: Regulations, Costs and Benefits,” Science, 268, 991, May 19, 1995
20.Jerry Dennis, The Living Great Lakes, (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 137
21.Naomi Oreskes et al., “Verification, Validation, and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sciences,” Science, 263, 641, February 4, 1994
22.Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983), 153

Water Can Be Too Pure

2008-01-24T20:55:00.000-08:00

Jack W. Dini, Livermore, CA

(This appeared in Hawaii Reporter, January 24, 2007)

Can water be too pure? If you’re a farmer the answer is yes. Desalinated water is one example. The purity drawback is that desalination not only separates the undesirable salts from the water, but also removes ions that are essential to plant growth. When desalinized water is used to replace irrigation water, basic nutrients like calcium, magnesium, and sulfate at levels sufficient to preclude additional fertilization of these elements is missing.

An example is a new facility in Ashkelon, on Israel’s southern Mediterranean coast. Although the Ashkelon facility was designed to provide water for human consumption, because of relatively modest population densities in southern Israel, a substantial percentage of the desalinated water was delivered to farmers. Recent evaluation of the effect of the plant’s desalinized water on agriculture, however, produced some surprising, negative results. Water from the Ashkelon plant has no magnesium, whereas typical Israel water has 20 to 20 mg/liter of magnesium. After farmers used the desalinated water, magnesium deficiency symptoms appeared in crops, including tomatoes, basil, and flowers, and had to be remedied by fertilization. To meet agricultural needs, missing nutrients might be added to desalinized water in the form of fertilizers, adding additional costs. If the minerals required for agriculture are not added at the desalination plant, farmers will need sophisticated independent control systems in order to cope with the variable water quality. (1)

Farmers can also be affected by run-off water that is too pure. Snow-melt run-off from the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, or other mountains can be too pure. For irrigation to be effective it needs to penetrate into the soil supplying enough water to sustain the crops until the next irrigation and the most important factor for water penetration is salts (or lack thereof) present in the water and/or soil. A lack of calcium in the majority of soils due to snow-melt irrigation water, or poor quality subsurface water, is leading to serious problems in California. Danyal Kasapligil, agronomist in Fresno, CA, reports, “What we are seeing in the field is, not only are there more and more water penetration problems, but crop quality is also rapidly declining because of a lack of calcium in our irrigation water.” (2) Brent Rouppet adds that for irrigation water to penetrate deeply into the soil, the electrical conductivity of the water needs to be greater than approximately 0.60 dS/m (decisiemens per meter). Irrigation water with less than 0.60 dS/m conductivity contributes to loss of soil structure and increased water penetration problems. The snow-melt run-off from the Sierra Nevada Mountains is so pure that its electrical conductivity can be 0.02 dS/m, or less. This water lacks calcium, essential for good soil structure, and any calcium existing in the soil profile is over time leached below the root zone or used by the crops and is typically not being replaced in quantities required. (2)

Here’s another example where absolute purity of water can be a problem. Philip West of Louisiana State University notes, “With productive waters, it is quite apparent that absolute purity is out of the question. If the Mississippi River passing Baton Rouge and New Orleans consisted of distilled water there would be no seafood industry such as we now have in Louisiana. With copper ‘contaminating’ the water there would be no oysters. Traces of iron, manganese, cobalt, copper, and zinc are essential for the crabs, snapper, flounder, shrimp and other creatures that abound in Gulf waters. As unpleasant as it sounds, even the run-off from the fertilized fields of the heartland’s and the sewage discharges into the Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi River systems pollute and thus ultimately nourish the waters.” (3)

One last item. Are you a bottled water fan? If so, you could be giving up a primary source of fluoride which is the public health system’s main weapon against tooth decay. What comes in the bottle has either been filtered to remove impurities or is spring water that is reputed to purer than tap water. But the filtering process also takes out fluoride. Not only does fluoride occur naturally in water, but about half the nation’s public water supplies are supplemented with additional fluoride. The recommended level of fluoride set by the EPA for municipal water systems is 0.7 to 1.2 parts per million (ppm). The maximum acceptable level is 4 ppm. If a water supply contains less than 0.7 ppm of fluoride, dentists recommend the use of a fluoride supplement, in tablets or liquid, from birth unto the later teen-age years. (4)

When researchers in Ohio sampled more than 50 brands of bottled water for fluoride content, they found that 90 percent of them had levels below the recommended range for dental health. (5) In South Australia, a study found a 71 percent rise in tooth decay in children which was attributed to the lack of enamel strengthening fluoride in the bottled water that has become so popular in the area. (6)

References

1. U. Yermiyahu et al., “Rethinking Desalinated Water Quality and Agriculture,” Science, 318, 920, November 9, 2007
2.Brent Rouppet, “Irrigation Water: A Correlation to Soil Structure and Crop Quality?” Crops, August 2006, Page 22
3.Raphael G. Kazmann, in Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Jay H. Lehr, Editor, (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), 311
4.Marian Burros, “Eating Well; Bottled Water: Is It Too Pure?” nytimes.com, November 22, 1989
5.“Fluoride Alert,” Runner’s World, 35, 32, July 2000
6. Verity Edwards, “Bottled water a dental disaster,” Australiannews.com, August 2, 2006

Scurvy and Paprika

2008-01-22T15:10:00.000-08:00

Jack W. Dini
Livermore, California

What famous scientist do you think of when one mentions vitamin C? My guess is that it’s Linus Pauling because of his much publicized efforts at labeling vitamin C as a remedy for cancer and the common cold. The early history of vitamin C reveals that there were some other good scientists and interesting events that led to the understanding of this vital ingredient.

If you travel to Hungary, one item you might bring home with you is some paprika. At least that’s what a lot of folks did on my recent trip to that country. Hungary is famous for its paprika. What’s all this have to do with vitamin C? Think scurvy. Joe Schwarcz reports, “The first vitamin-deficiency disease to be recognized was scurvy, described as early as 1550 BC by the Egyptians in the Ebers Papyrus. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when long ocean voyages became common, thousands of sailors died from scurvy, which is characterized by spongy gums, loose teeth, and bleeding into the skin and mucous membranes. The first clue that scurvy was a diet related disease came from North American Indians who showed French explorer Jacques Cartier that a brew made for pine needles could cure the condition.” (1)

James Lind, a Scottish physician, had been inspired to work on this issue when he heard about a British Navy expedition that had gone terribly wrong. James Burke provides the story, “In 1740 Captain George Anson had sailed from England with six ships and over a thousand men. His mission: to head for the Pacific and clobber the Spanish wherever he found them. He did so, in spades, attacking Spanish ports and ships, laying waste right and left in the usual manner, and coming home four years later with so much treasure it took thirty wagons to haul it from the docks to the Tower of London for safekeeping. Every crew member walked off Anson’s ship rich for life. There was a lot more booty than originally planned for each man to share because, of the original six ships and one thousand crew, only one ship with 145 men made it back. Scurvy had killed the rest.” (2)

Lind proceeded to carry out what was probably the first properly controlled trial in the history of clinical nutrition. For fourteen days he kept six pairs of scurvy patients on the same diet, but gave each pair a different medicine: cider, elixir vitriol, vinegar, seawater, a ‘medicinal paste’ or oranges and lemons. The citrus fruit was the cure and in 1753 Lind published A Treatise of the Scurvy. (2) It took another 50 years but the British Navy finally got around to requiring sailing vessels to carry supplies of lemons or limes. Besides solving the scurvy problem, this led to the slang term ‘Limeys’ for British sailors. (1) The upside for the British besides the saving of many lives is that according to historians, many a naval victory claimed by the ‘Limeys’ resulted because these sailors, unlike their enemies, were protected form scurvy. (3)

So what was the magic ingredient in the citrus fruits? This gets us back to paprika since it played a key role in helping isolate the anti-scurvy factor found in citrus fruits. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi was a Hungarian physician studying plant chemistry around 1925. He noted a similarity between the darkening of damaged fruit and skin discoloration in patients suffering from Addison’s disease, an adrenal gland disorder. He had observed that certain fruits like oranges did not turn brown and their juice prevented others from discoloring. He isolated the substance that prevented browning and suggested the name “Godnose” for it. This wasn’t accepted very well so he changed the name to hexuronic acid. Szent-Gyorgyi wanted to do more research on this material but he needed large amounts of it. Along the way he accepted a university position in Szeged, which is the paprika capital of the world. As Joe Schwarcz reports, “To live in Szeged is to be surrounded by the sights and smells of paprika. Szent-Gyorgyi couldn’t help but wonder if paprika, like oranges and limes, might also contain his hexuronic acid. Did it ever! (3) (Fresh red peppers have more than seven times as much vitamin C as oranges, but the very high heat of drying destroys much of its vitamin C.)(4) Within a short time, Szent-Gyorgyi had isolated a kilogram of the stuff and determined that it was identical to the anti-scurvy factor found in citrus fruits. He rechristened it ‘ascorbic acid.’ Today we know it as vitamin C. Why name it vitamin C? Because the practice of naming vitamins by letter had been introduced some twenty years earlier and A and B were already taken. (3)

Some last words on Szent-Gyorgyi. He left an impressive legacy as a highly admired biochemist, winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his biological combustion discoveries. He is credited with saying. “Very often, when you look for one thing, you find something else.” (5)

References

1. Joe Schwarcz, The Fly in the Ointment, (Toronto, ECW Press, 2004), 122

2. James Burke, Circles, (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000), 235

3. Joe Schwarcz, That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles, (Toronto, ECW Press, 2002)

4. “Paprika”, http://www.theepicentre.com/Spices/paprika/html

5. “Know Your Strengths”, http:www.dailycelebrations.com/063001.htm

Many Weather Stations in the US Yield Incorrect Data

2008-01-22T14:58:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, California

(This appeared in Hawaii Reporter, December 3, 2007)

Imagine if you were tasked with measuring and tracking the global average per capita income. Then imagine if one year, hundreds of your offices including many in Africa shut down, and so you would simply get no information from this region. Would you be surprised if you added up all your numbers that year and suddenly your ‘average per capita income’ was higher? Would you consider that data reliable? Christopher Horner asks, “Would you expect some media skepticism if suddenly people read your numbers and declared that the word was getting much richer?”

When an analogous course of events unfolded in the world of climate science, the skepticism was notably absent. When the Soviet Union was falling apart from 1989 to 1992 folks there didn’t much care about keeping temperature monitoring stations. Thousands were closed and it’s important to note that many of these were in cold regions. Others around the world closed at the same time. Could this have helped making the decade that followed the ‘hottest decade’ ever?

Have you read about this in the media? I doubt it, although the inadequacy of sampling has not gone unnoticed. A 1997 conference on World Climate Research resulted in the statement in a resulting book Adequacy of Climate Observing Systems, “Without action to reverse this decline and develop the Global Climate Observation System, the ability to characterize climate change and variation over the next 25 years will be even less than during the past century.” It also mentioned that “The climate research community relies on a number of disparate observation systems to assemble a data base that it uses to analyze climate variability and change. A few of these systems function well, but for the most, there are clear warning signals that much be heeded if climate variability and change is to be observed with sufficient fidelity over the next decade.” Today, more than ten years after these observations, it’s not clear much has changed.

Enter Anthony Watts, a northern California meteorologist who is garnering national attention for his project of checking the condition and placement of weather stations used to monitor the nation’s climate. To date, Watts and his volunteers have found and photographed over 500 of the 1221 stations. This information is available on Watts’ site, surfacestations.org. The concern is that objects near a station affect what thermometers record. Buildings, parking lots, air conditioners, and sewage treatment plants near weather stations may emit heat and ultimately skew readings. Photos show some stations placed in parking lots near cars, on rooftops, next to diesel generators, and at non-standard heights. Clearly, many are far from meeting the guidelines to qualify as properly maintained temperature stations.

Others besides Watts are concerned about locations of weather stations. One is Roger Pielke Sr., a highly published geologist. Pielke and his colleagues reported in a recent paper, “the use of temperature data from poorly sited stations can lead to a false sense of confidence in the robustness of multidecaddal surface air temperature trend assessments.” They concluded that there are large uncertainties associated with surface temperature trends from the poorly sited stations.

A last note on this topic- Assume that there was evidence that some weather stations around the country were underestimating temperatures. Noel Sheppard asks, “Would a media fixated on expanding climate change alarmism investigate and report this phenomenon to demonstrate that the planet was actually warmer than people think? ‘60 Minutes,’ ‘Dateline’ and others would have all done rather lengthy exposes into the matter, correct?”

Polar Bears Are Not Disappearing- The Rest of the Story

2007-12-26T06:53:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA
December 14, 2007

Abstract- There are a number of facts about polar bears that Al Gore and other alarmists haven't shared with us. Polar bears are not disappearing, are very mobile, and have survived through much warmer periods thana we are experiencing today.

Al Gore- “The melting of the ice represents bad news for creatures like polar bears. A new scientific study shows that, for the first time, polar bears have been drowning in significant numbers.”

Marlo Lewis- “I found the study. The study found four drowned polar bears in one month of one year after an abrupt windstorm. Have been drowning—that suggests an ongoing problem. Significant numbers suggests that it’s enough to affect the overall population dynamic. That’s an exaggeration.” Also, the sighting occurred in an area where polar bear numbers are increasing.

We’ve all seen the heartrending photo of a lonely bear apparently stranded on a melting ice floe. It’s become the poster centerpiece for environmentalists and the media. Time magazine chose this mammal as the cover boy for one if its issues (April l3, 2006) declaring: “Be Worried. Be Very Worried,” and Al Gore offered a computer-generated bear flailing about for icy salvation in his movie.

In April 2007 Time added, “With sea ice vanishing, polar bears—prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones are starting to turn up drowned.” “There will be no polar ice by 2060,” says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. “Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out.”

Let’s look at some facts that Al Gore and Time either missed or conveniently forgot to share with us. It’s true in Baffin Bay, one or possibly two subpopulations of polar bears out of twenty are declining. However, here’s the rest of the story-- more than half are known to be stable, and two subpopulations are actually increasing around the Beaufort Sea. In addition, the overall bear population has increased from about five thousand in the 1960s to twenty-five thousand today. But here’s the real kicker that you haven’t heard from our doomsayers—the two populations in decline come from areas where it has actually been getting colder over the past fifty years, whereas the two increasing populations reside in areas where it is getting warmer.

Here are some more facts about the region where bears are ‘declining.’ The best studied polar bear population, living on the western coast of Hudson Bay has seen its population decline 17 percent, from 1,200 in 1987 to under 500 in 2004. This is the group that has gotten most of the press. Yet, have you heard that the population of this group was only 500 in 1981 and that 300 to 500 bears are shot each year?

And speaking of shooting polar bears, in the Davis Strait of Nunavit, this topic is on the agenda because of too many bears. Nunavit is home to 12 of Canada’s 13 polar bear populations totaling an estimated 14,780. Dr. Mitch Taylor reports, “There are maybe even too many bears now. That’s not theory. That’s not based on a model. That’s observation of reality.” With this increase, folks could be looking at the possibility of increasing hunting quotas.

Talk to some Churchill, Manitoba residents, the so-called Polar Bear Capital of the World, and you also get a different view than Al Gore and Time present. These folks base their opinions on personal experience rather than fancy charts and computer models put out by scaremongers. And getting back to famous photograph mentioned earlier of the polar bear teetering precariously on an Arctic ice-floe in the depths of winter. Seems that the doomsayers forgot to mention that it was taken three years ago during the height of summer. Clearly, when the rest of the story is examined, the relationship between polar bear populations and temperature is the opposite of what we’ve been hearing.

Polar bears are also known to be very mobile. They wander thousands of miles every year on paths in enormous private northern arcs. At least one bear has been tracked pacing the ice 3,000 miles from Alaska to Greenland, then back. So, if one part of their territory is changing, they are quite capable of changing their routes and moving elsewhere.

One last item. Recent discovery of what may be the oldest known remains of a polar bear have been discovered in the Arctic. Professor Olafur Ingolfsson from the University of Iceland says this confirms that the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago. Between then and now there’s been at least one interglacial period (Eeemian) and it was much warmer than our present Holocene. Existence of polar bears today is proof that they survived long periods of time when the climate of the Arctic was much warmer than at present. So why didn’t they go extinct? A World Climate Reports suggests the most likely explanation is that they modified their behavior to adapt to the changing conditions, probably by spending more time on land foraging, hunting, and denning. There is evidence that these are precisely the kinds of adaptations that bears are making to best cope with today’s warmer climate. So instead of perishing, polar bears will be quite capable of adapting.

Double the Fun at the Honolulu Marathon

2007-12-21T20:35:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA
December 11, 2007

I was alone, ahead of the pack for 11 miles during the Honolulu Marathon. How was this possible for someone whose pace is one mile in 20 minutes? Easy. Start early! Knowing that it was going to take me 9-10 hours to cover the course (new metal knee), I decided to avoid the masses at the start and begin the race at 2 AM, three hours before the official start time.

What fun! Along the way I passed many parties—after all it was still in the wee hours of the morning. A number of street folks (homeless) were kind enough to wish me well after asking when the race would start, and not a one panhandled me (quite different from what would have happened to me at 2-3 AM in San Francisco). Some folks on Ala Moana Blvd were waiting at different bus stops. I didn’t think they would ever see The Bus; at least I didn’t for 2 miles (40 minutes). Many volunteers were getting instructions and setting up their stations in a flurry of activity. And, of course, there were many police persons at the various intersections. Once, when a heavy rain stated falling, I was able to duck into one of the porta-potties and sit out the storm. After all, no one else was waiting to use my selected toilet since the other runners hadn’t yet started.

Around mile 10.5 the first wheel chair racer passed by in what looked like a high-speed chase to me. He was preceded by two bicyclists with flashing lights and bells and followed by two other folks on bicycles. I later learned that this was Masazumi Soejima of Japan who finished the race course in 1:33. That’s about a 17 mph pace, so no wonder I was impressed with the speed. Three other wheel chair racers passed before the first runners appeared. They were a group of four who seemed to just glide along. They were so close to one another that if one fell they all were going down. Very quite, effortlessly cruising along, they made it look much easier than it really is (to me, at least.). These four were well ahead of the rest of the pack but after another 30 minutes or so, the mob had caught up to me. From then on, the race seemed like a typical marathon—folks passing me left and right. Before I finished, just short of 10 hours, I’m sure most of the folks who didn’t start until 3 hours after I did had passed me by. So what? I had a great time, both at the front end and at the back.

Thanks Honolulu and all your volunteers for another great race.

Superfund Sites Yield New Drugs/Tourist Attractions/Physics Laboratory

2007-12-02T06:42:00.000-08:00

Superfund Sites Yield New Drugs/Tourist Attractions/Physics Laboratory

Jack Dini
Livermore, California

In 1993 Travel and Leisure Magazine ran an article on the Continental Divide. It was tough on Butte, Montana: “the ugliest spot in Montana…despite a spirited historic district amid the rubble, the overall picture is desolate.” It called nearby Anaconda “a sad sack mining town dominated by a smelter smokestack.” (1) Today things are somewhat different for these two sites.

Butte, Montana- Lake Berkeley

Edwin Dobb reports, “At one time Butte provided a third of the copper used in the United States—all from a mining district only four miles square. Eventually open-pit mining was used and the pit became the world’s largest truck operated mine, along the way displacing some Italian and Serbo-Croatian neighborhoods. Mining came to a halt in the early 1980s, as did the pumps that had been sucking groundwater out of the mines for a century. The flooding began.”(2)

The 1.5 mile wide, 1,800 foot deep pit, part of the nation’s largest Superfund site, has been filling for the last 20 years with a poisonous broth laced with heavy metals—a legacy of Butte’s copper mining days. When mining officials abandoned the pit and stopped the pumps that kept it dry, they opened the spigots to about 3 millions gallons of water per day. Today, the lake is about 850 foot deep and contains more than 3 billion cubic feet of water. (3)

Lake Berkeley, also known as The Berkeley Pit, covers almost 700 acres of the former open-pit copper mine. It holds some 30 billion gallons of highly acidic, metal-laden water. It’s the country’s largest and most unusual body of contaminated water, with a pH of 2.6 and metals such as aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, copper, iron, manganese, zinc, and others. (1) Yet, as New Scientist reports, “Every cloud has a silver lining.” The contaminated lake designated hazardous is turning out to be a source of novel chemicals that could help fight migraines and cancer. (4)

In recent years more than 40 small organisms have been discovered in the lake and these hold much potential for agriculture and medicine. It’s even thought that some of these organisms can be employed to reclaim the lake and other similar contaminated waters by neutralizing acidity and absorbing dissolved metals.

Andrea and Don Stierle and their colleagues have found a strain of the pithomyces fungi producing a compound that bonds to a receptor that causes migraines and could block headaches, while a strain of penicillium fungi makes a different compound that inhibits the growth of cancer cells. In July 2006 the Stierle team revealed that a novel Berkeley Lake compound called berkelic acid from another new strain of penicillium fungus reduces the rate of ovarian cancer cell growth by 50 percent. (5)

How is this possible? Essentially, some organisms actually flourish in the presence of acidity and make use of some of the dissolved metals in the lake. These are called extremophiles (liking extremes), because they not only tolerate, but even thrive in extreme conditions. Extremophiles can tolerate heat, very cold climates, high pressure, and low pH and high pH solutions. Japanese scientist Koki Horikoshi has found a variety of chemically tolerant extremophiles in the deepest parts of the ocean; some of them can even degrade hydrocarbons while thriving in water containing up to 50% solutes such as toluene, benzene, or kerosene. (6)

Why do extremophiles show new antibiotic and anticarcinogenic activities? Best guess is that some of them have evolved powerful toxins to attack an enzyme associated with a particular fungal growth phase. Another possibility is that they are particularly adept at sticking tightly to surfaces and this is one of the attributes researchers look for in anti-cancer drugs. (7)

Anaconda, Montana—The Old Works Golf Course

Twenty-five miles down the road from Lake Berkeley is the town of Anaconda, another Superfund site. The Anaconda smelter was once one of the shining stars of the American mining industry employing thousands of people. The facility first began copper smelting operations in 1884 and the smelter rose quickly to national prominence because of its noticeable annual copper production. However, this all came at a price to the environment. The land was left gouged with mines and extensively contaminated with heavy metals. The Anaconda smelter was demolished after its closure in 1981. However, the smelter stack, the tallest and possibly largest free-standing masonry structure in the world, remains standing. The site is now a Montana State Park. (8)

And speaking of parks and tourism, these days the town of Anaconda has redefined itself turning to tourism and recreational pursuits to attract visitors and provide jobs for its citizens. A major attraction is the Old Works Golf Course built on the site of the copper smelter. Jack Nicklaus, hired to design the course, reportedly called the site the ugliest he had ever see. One of the most expensive golf course reclamation projects ever undertaken, the $15 million project included capping the entire area with crushed rock, clay, and topsoil. Lakes were created to catch and filter water, and plastic liners were installed to protect trees, greens, and bunkers. (9)

The course includes capped slag and tailing pipes and some of the landscape’s century old flues and smelting ovens. Sand traps are black, a clever use for more than 14,000 cubic yards of inert smelting slag ground to the texture of sand. Massive stone furnace walls line some of the fairways. For the non-golfer, a historic hiking trail highlighting Anaconda’s smelting heritage and giving hikers an insight into copper mining techniques of years past winds its way around the course.

Some Other Sites

The Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota, site of a spill of six to seven tons of cyanide-laced tailings into a creek in 1998, has been selected as the preferred site for a $500 million Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. (10) Because of the up to 8000 foot depth in the mine, this would make it the best shielded laboratory in the world for neutrino studies and a major advance in sensitivity in the search for proton decay.

An artificial lake in El Salvador brimming with sewage and industrial waste is mystifying scientists by attracting thousands of migratory and sea birds. Built in 1974 to drive El Salvador’s biggest hydroelectric project, the 33,360 acre Cerron Grande reservoir collects some 3,800 tons of excrement each year from sewage pipes, as well as factory run-off and traces of heavy metals like chromium and lead. What surprises scientists is the fact that some 150,000 seabirds from more than 130 species have chosen to make the reservoir their home. At least 90 of the species are migratory birds arriving from as far away as Alaska. (11) Birds do not survive in Lake Berkeley. So what’s the difference between the two lakes? Could it be the 3,800 tons of excrement?

References

1. Florence Williams, “Butte, Montana, seeks a new life,” High Country News, Volume 25, November 29, 1993
2. Edwin Dobb, “New Life in a Death Trap,” Discover, 21, 86, December 2000
3. Mark Matthews, “Could a Toxic Lake Yield Life-Saving Microbes?” The Washington Post, March 8, 1999, Page A09
4. “Dirty old mine has rich seam of drugs,” New Scientist, 191, 19, July 15, 2006
5. Andrea A. Stierle, Donald B. Stierle, and Kal Kelly, “Berkelic Acid, A Novel Spiroketal With Selective Anticancer Activity From an Acid Mine Waste Fungal Extremophile, J. Org. Chem., 71, 5357, June 10, 2006
6. Carol Stone, “Extremophiles, Life at the Edge,” ChemMatters, 17, 14, December 1999
7. Michael R. Taylor, Dark Life, (New York, Scribner, 1999), 119
8. “Anaconda Smelter Stack,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnacondaSmelterStack
9. Alex Markels, “The Greening of America,” Audubon, July-August 1998, Page 42
10. Geoff Brumfiel, “Deep science strikes gold after latest site is named,” Nature , 448, 232, July 19, 2007
11. Alberto Barrera, “Contaminated Salvador Lake is Mystery Brid Magnet,” http://planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/42010/story.htm, May 21, 2007

Myths

2007-11-23T09:08:00.000-08:00

Myths

Jack Dini

Free to choose what we believe, Americans choose myth over reality every time, says Dayton Duncan. (1) He adds, “Americans are dreamers, and a myth after all, is merely a dream of the past rather than the future. Our national dreams have always edited out any nightmarish realities and rewritten popular history whenever our actions fall short of our ideals.”

Some examples: In the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Senator Ranse Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) returns to the city of Shinbone in the Wild West to go to the funeral of his friend, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Stoddard is something of a celebrity in this town having spent time there before eventually moving to Washington. When talking to some journalists, who are wondering what the senator is doing in Shinbone, he reminds them how his career started as ‘the man who shot Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin).” He goes on to tell the press that it was John Wayne who really shot and killed Liberty Valance. The press folks say- we will never report this- you’ve become a legend and when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

We’re all familiar with the image of the wild west during the years of the cattle boom. Gunfights, lawlessness, and so on, gave places like Dodge City its fame and this lives in our memories. Much of this is a myth. In all the years of the cattle boom, fewer people were shot or stabbed in Dodge City then died violently in New York City in three days. There were 15 homicides in Dodge City during the years of the cattle boom; about 5 people a day died of violence in New York City in 1987, the year Ian Frazier reported these facts. (2) One reason Dodge City got its fame was the fact that the town had several weekly newspapers chronicling each gunfight and its aftermath in detail. This was then picked up by other media in the rest of the country. Eventually, Hollywood got into the act, and as Paul Harvey would say, ‘that’s the rest of the story.’

Another myth that has become accepted wisdom is that we should drink at least eight glasses of water a day. This universal advice that has made guzzling water a national pastime is more urban myth than medical dogma and lacks scientific proof, reports Joel Best.(3) The 8 x 8 rule is lavishly followed. Everywhere, people carry bottles of water, constantly sipping from them; it is acceptable to drink water anywhere, anytime. A pamphlet distributed at one southern California University even counsels its students to “carry a water bottle with you. Drink often while sitting in class.” This had its origin in an analysis that did, in fact, recommend the eight glasses level of water intake. But the analysis also noted that most of this water would ordinarily come from food (bread, for example, is 35 percent water), and meats and vegetables contain even higher proportions of water. However, the notion that food contained most of the water needed for good health was soon forgotten, in favor of urging people to consume the entire amount through drinking. (3)

Myths, if they die at all, die slowly, stubbornly, clinging tenaciously to life even in the face of incontrovertible facts. We see and hear a lot of this today in the areas of health and environment. High doses in animal testing provide myths about the so-called dangers of foods. When rodents are tested for exposure to chemicals and food additives they are often given very high doses, averaging 380,000 times the dose humans would be given. A person would have to drink 800 cans of diet soda in a day to equal the saccharin dose given to rats, or a 155 pound person would have to eat 82,600 slices of bread every day for a lifetime to be exposed to a dose of furfural comparable to that which causes cancer in rodent tests. One could go on and on with many of these types of examples, and I have in a previous column. (4)

The beloved ‘good old days,’ a pristine pre-human landscape, frozen in time and space as a sort of base point from which to measure change is as good a myth about the environment as you can find. (5) This pastoral idea, embodying the belief that a simple life, without technology, commerce, or industry, was man’s natural state, ensuring peace, health and happiness, and that it had existed in a Golden Age from which society had deteriorated, simply never existed. (6) The ‘good old days’ simply weren’t that good. The past world was in no way spared the problems we consider horrendously our own, such as pollution, addiction, or urban blight. This subject alone could cover an entire book. For a shortened version see my column in the June 1998 issue of this journal. (7)

Another example of an environmental myth is the tropical rain forest. As Philip Stott reports, “Tropical ran forest does not exist as an object: it is a human construct and is thus subject to myth making on a grand scale.”(8) He adds, “Our attachment to the tropical rain forest has grown over the past hundred years from a minority colonial pursuit to mainstream environmental obsession. The tropical rain forest has variously been assumed to be the world’s largest repository of biological diversity and the lungs of the planet.” (9)

Stott and others say there is not one shred of recent scientific evidence to support the powerful historic and mythic language employed about ‘rain forests.’ Bjorn Lomborg observes that we will not lose 50 percent of all species as claimed by many, but more like 0.7 percent. (10) James Trefil adds, “For the record, I think it would be truly astonishing if something as far-reaching as the effect of human activity on the planet didn’t drive some species to extinction. Whether the rate of extinction is truly unprecedented, however, is not so clear. I have to confess that I have this sneaking suspicion that animals have probably been becoming extinct at a high rate for hundreds of millions of years. After all, an animal so specialized that it can only survive on one part of one kind of tree is not a good bet to win the Darwinian sweepstakes. And, of course, since we have no idea how fast they became extinct in the past, we have no way of knowing whether their extinction rate is going up or down today.” (11)

The ‘lungs of the planet’ claim is also mythical. Lomborg explains that plants produce oxygen by means of photosynthesis, but when they die and decompose, precisely the same amount of oxygen is consumed. Therefore, forests in equilibrium neither produce nor consume oxygen in net terms. (10)

More from Stott; “The Northern environmentalists conception of the tropical rain forest is far removed from the ecological realities of the places it purports to denote. Most of the ‘million year old forest’ to which environmentalists sentimentally refer turns out to have existed for less than 20,000 years. During the last ice age the tropics were colder and drier than today and probably more closely resembled the savanna grasslands of East Africa. (9)

Yet, here’s an example where the statement about “millions of years old forest” is used. It’s from a 1992 textbook by Chris Park, Tropical Rainforests, which is widely employed in schools and colleges throughout the UK.
“Tropical rainforests are the most complex ecosystems on earth. Rainforests (better known to many people as jungles) have been the dominant form of vegetation in the tropics for literally millions of years and beneath their high canopy lives a diversity of species which is unrivaled anywhere else on earth.” (12)

E. F. Bruenig, Emeritus Professor of Forestry, Hamburg University, says this, “Knowledge of ecology and forestry is poor among the public and understanding of ecosystem properties is almost absent while myths abound especially with respect to tropical rain forests and their peoples. There is a certain unwillingness to bridge the knowledge gap and abandon inherited or newly developed myths if they serve self-interests.” (13)

References

1. Dayton Duncan, Out West, (New York, Penguin Books, 1987), 55

2. Ian Frazier, Great Plains, (New York, Penguin Books, 1989), 151

3. Joel Best, More Damned Lies and Statistics, (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2004), 20

4. Jack W. Dini, “Of Mice and Men,” Plating & Surface Finishing, 91, 30, September 2004

5. Steven F. Hayward, Index of Leading Environmental Indicators 2005, (San Francisco, Pacific Research Institute), 9

6. John Lenihan, The Crumbs of Creation, (New York, Adam Hilger, 1988), 30

7. Jack W. Dini, “The Good Old Days,” Plating & Surface Finishing, 85, 88, June 1998

8. Philip Stott, Tropical Rain Forest, (Lancing, West Sussex, Great Britain, Hartington Fine Arts Limited, 1999), 8

9. Philip Stott, Tropical Rain Forest, 4

10. Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), 115

11. James Trefil, Human Nature, (New York, Times Books, 2001), 122

12. Chris C. Park, Tropical Rainforests, (London & New York, Routledge, 1992), 1

13. E. F. Bruenig, Paper presented at Oxford University, May 15, 1998

Is Environmentalism Dead?

2007-11-23T08:44:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

An April 20, 2004 Gallup poll showed that only 1 percent of Americans believe the environment is the most important problem facing the nation today. That finding followed a 2000 poll reporting that 41 percent of Americans believe environmental activists are ‘extremists,’ up from 32 percent in 1996. (1)

A recent online report, The Death of Environmentalism, by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus offers some thoughts about the reasons for the American public’s declining support for environmental activism. They say activist groups today are too extremist, too polarizing, and too lacking in credibility to achieve the broad-based support of the American people. “The institutions that define what environmentalism means boast large professional staffs and receive tens of million of dollars every year from foundations and individuals. Given these rewards it’s no surprise that most environmental leaders neither craft nor support proposals that could be tagged ‘non-environmental.’ Doing otherwise would do more than threaten their status; it would undermine their brand.” (2)

In reviewing the report, Orson Aquilar agreed, ‘Environmentalists give ‘I Have A Nightmare’ speeches and offer technical proposals far removed from the lives of ordinary Americans.” (3) Rick Johnson, executive director of the Idaho Conservation League, added, “While our movement does much good, and conservation measures actually did well in the recent elections, we should be mindful of our failings, be they real or perceptions increasingly held by the public. Environmentalists are often viewed as detached from the lives of regular people, and in a public interest movement, this is very bad news. Most people wake up in the morning trying to reduce what they have to worry about. Environmentalists wake up trying to increase it.” (4)

The Gallup results mentioned earlier closely tracked a BBC poll in Britain, where respondents ranked global warming last among a list of issues including health care, crime, and education. (5) A tie-in with this is The Copenhagen Solution (Consensus) which was developed by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg. The Consensus is an attempt by leading economists (including three Nobelists) to set priorities for spending using traditional cost-benefit analysis. The group explored opportunities for addressing ten of the most serious challenges facing the world today: climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, access to education, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, migration, sanitation and access to clean water, and subsidies and trade barriers. They were asked to address these challenge areas and answer the question, ‘What would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of developing countries, supposing that an additional $50 billion of resources were at governments’ disposal?’ Challenge papers, commissioned from acknowledged authorities in each area of policy, set out more than thirty proposals in descending order of desirability. In ordering the proposals, the panel was guided predominantly by consideration of economic costs and benefits. (6)

The results? Compared to other opportunities such as communicable diseases, malnutrition and hunger, sanitation and water, and the rest, climate change ranked last on the list. (7) Vernon Smith, Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University, provided this summation, “It is clear from both the science and the economics of intervention that those of us who care about the environment are not well advised to favor initiating a costly attempt to reduce greenhouse gases build-up in the atmosphere in the near future based on available information. Although the ultimate danger may turn out to prompt action, the current evidence indicates that it is much too soon to act relative to the many other important and pressing opportunities that demand immediate attention. (8) (Note, the italics are Smith’s, not mine.)

Back to The Death of Environmentalism report. As might be expected this caused considerable uproar among the environmental movement community. Carl Pope, the Sierra Club’s executive director, was ‘deeply disturbed and angered by it.’ (9) Other leader of environmental groups also expressed varying degrees of dyspepsia over the fracas. (5)

An interesting point is that both Shellenberger and Nordhaus run consulting businesses that ‘strategize for foundations’ and ‘craft strategic initiatives aimed at reframing old debates.’ William Tucker notes, “It is not insignificant that The Death of Environmentalism was released at the retreat of the environmental Grantmakers Association in Kauai last October [2004]. What’ really at stake here is the millions of dollars that liberal foundations hand out each year in search of a cleaner environment. Far from re-examining the purposes of environmentalism, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are making their own pitch.” (10) Here’s some of what they offer in the report:
“One tool we have to offer is the research we are doing as part of our Strategic Values Project, which is adapting corporate marketing research for use by the progressive community…Readers of this report who are interested in learning more about Strategic Values Project…should feel welcome to contact us.” (11)

So is environmentalism dead?

A famous quote of Mark Twain sums up my view. “The report of my death is greatly exaggerated.” I surely don’t think environmentalism is dead. The international environmental movement is now a $6 billion per year industry and it will not just fade away. (12)

The major upset for the movement at present is that global warming, to them the mother of all environmental scares, hasn’t been taken more seriously. As The Wall Street Journal has noted, “Adopting the Kyoto Protocol to curb carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, might reduce warming to 6.1 degrees C by the year 2300, compared with an anticipated 7.3 degrees warming if nothing is done. This ‘achievement’—a world that is on average 1.2 degrees cooler than it otherwise would be in 300 years—comes with a price tag of about $94 trillion (in 1990 dollars). The benefits of tackling climate change are far into the future and the substantial costs are up front and immediate. The uncertainties associated with both the projections and the consequences of change cannot compete with other urgent issues we confront. (13) Obviously, one could help a lot of hungry folks with poor sanitation for $94 trillion 1990 dollars rather than spend is on something that may or may not be a problem many years down the road.

I’m encouraged that some folks in the movement seem open to change. Being green is no longer as simple as it used to be. Some major conservation groups are beginning to realize that the old hard-line protectionist approach simply doesn’t work. (14) One example; the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace apparently have reversed their long standing opposition to the use of DDT to fight malaria. (15)

Fred Pearce notes, “The WWF is just one among many science based environment groups that are engaged in a savage reappraisal of their philosophy. In their self imposed task of saving everything from rainforests and medicinal plants to elephants and whales, they are coming to a heretical conclusion: conservation- at least in its hard line forms- is its own worst enemy. Far from saving endangered species and their habitats, it often accelerates their destruction, because it alienates local people and forces trade underground. You would never guess this upheaval was going on when you read the organizations’ promotional literature on the fight to preserve the planet’s last wilderness. But the truth is they are beginning to think that banning hunting and fishing, erecting fences around the forests to keep out poachers, and outlawing trade in endangered species are about the least effective ways of saving threatened species. Sometimes the best way forward is to dismantle existing protection laws and start again.” (14) So, we get mixed messages from these organizations. I wish I could be more optimistic about the directions of the environmental movement, but I still have a lot of doubt. Regardless, environmentalism isn’t dead.

References

1. James M. Taylor, “Death of Environmentalism Essay Ignites Dissent,” Environment & Climate News, 8, 13, June 2005

2. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism,” September 29, 2004, page 11. This report can be downloaded at; www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf

3. Orson Aquilar, “Why I am not an environmentalist,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 19, 2005, Page B9

4. Rick Johnson, “The Death of Environmentalism,” ONEList online, December 7, 2004

5. Steven F. Hayward, Index of Leading Environmental Indicators 2005, (San Francisco, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 2005), 16

6. Global Crises, Global Solutions, Bjorn Lomborg, Editor, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), 605

7. Global Crises, Global Solutions, Bjorn Lomborg, Editor, 606

8. Global Crises, Global Solutions, Bjorn Lomborg, Editor, 635

9. www.sierraclub.org/pressroom/messages/2004december_pope.asp

10. William Tucker, “Environmentalism’s Nervous Breakdown,” The American Enterprise online, www.taemag.com, April 19, 2005

11. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism, 7

12. Paul Driessen, Eco-Imperialism, (Bellevue, Washington, Free Enterprise Press, 2003), 134

13. “The Copenhagen Solution,” Opinion Journal from The Wall Street Journal editorial page, June 11, 2005

14. Fred Pearce, “A greyer shade of green,” New Scientist, 177, 41, June 2003

15. Nicholas D. Kristof, “It’s Time to Spray DDT,” New York Times, January 8, 2005

A Strong Antiseptic that Became a Famous Mouthwash

2007-11-23T06:26:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

An antiseptic that could only be used with great care lest it damage the surrounding tissue went on to become America’s must advertised mouthwash. It all stared when physician Joseph Lister realized that fractures that broke through the skin would often become infected, whereas those that did not pierce the skin healed nicely. He also became aware of Louis Pasteur’s work which had shown that rotting and fermentation could occur in the absence of oxygen as along as microorganisms were present. Heat killed the microorganisms but Lister knew that heating a patient was not a viable approach, so he tried some phenol (carbolic acid). It worked, and soon Lister was washing his instruments with phenol. He also developed a sprayer which allowed him to disinfect his operating room. The results were immediate: the mortality rate from amputations dropped from 50 to 15 percent.(1)

However, Lister’s discovery of antisepsis was initially ignored in both England and the United States, in part because he was a doctor working in Glasgow and England and was felt to have a limited outlook. This aspect of science was considered outside his field of expertise. Lister wasn’t the first person to be treated this way by the scientific community. As Broad and Wade report, “George Ohm, the nineteenth-century German who discovered the law of electrical resistance, was a math teacher at the Jesuit Gymnasium in Cologne; his ideas were ignored by scientists at German universities. Mendel’s genetic laws were ignored by professionals in his field for thirty-five years, in part because, as an abbe’ with an experimental plot in his backyard, he seemed to be a mere amatuer, and Louis Pasteur met with violent resistance from doctors when he advanced his germ theory of disease; they regarded him as a mere chemist poaching on their scientific preserves.” (2) So, it took time to convince others. Pasteur and Lister eventually won the battle, persuading the medical profession that germs really did exist.

In the United States, Jordan Wheat Lambert, synthesized a less powerful version and asked Lister if he could use the already famous name, Lister, for the product. Lister agreed and Lambert added the “ine’ suffix which he felt made the product sound more scientific. (3)

Lambert’s Listerine was used for much more than minor surgical procedures. It was a good floor cleaner, an after-shave, a nasal douche, a cure for gonorrhea, and even a scalp treatment for dandruff and baldness. Eventually it was discovered that Listerine was also good at killing oral germs. In 1895 it was marketed to the dental profession and in 1914 became one of the first prescription products to be sold over the counter. But there was no hint for use as a mouth deodorant because at that time there was no such thing as bad breath. Certainly at that time people had various diseases, bad teeth, unpleasant mouth odor, but as advertising scholar James Twitchell points out, “It was not considered socially offensive.” He adds, “Recall that until the 1920s, most Americans bathed only once a week (on Saturday night in anticipation of the Sabbath), and that hair was rarely washed. Soap, still made of animal fats, often smelled worse than body odor!” (4)

Enter Gerard Lambert, one of Jordan’s sons. This marketing genius was looking for an advertising hook, so he asked his company chemist if Listerine was good for bad breath. The chemist showed him a clipping from the medical journal, British Lancet, that discussed halitosis. Gerard asked; what is halitosis? He was told that this was the medical term for bad breath. A light went off in Gerard’s head. “This is something we can hang our hat on!” From Twitchell, “As it turned out, he hung more than his hat on halitosis. He hung the entire company on it. He poured money into putting halitosis into every American mouth. Lambert made a pledge to increase his advertising each month by the same percentage as the increase of his sales. He claimed he would stop this only when sales leveled off. For as long as he owned the company, they never did. From 1922 to 1929 earnings rose form $115,000 to more than $8 million. By the time of the stack market crash, Listerine was one of the largest buyers of magazine and newspaper space, spending more than $5 million –almost the exact amount of yearly profits. In all that time the product’s price, package, and formula had not changed a whit.” (3)

The ad campaign was particularly inventive. “If You Want the Truth- Go to a Child,” Twitchell asks the question,“Has there ever been an ad so deliriously nasty as this? Like a baby robin, the youngster looks up to her caregiver for tenderness and gets a whiff of foul breath instead. The body copy makes clear that here is yet another case of ‘a young woman, who in spite of her personal charm and beauty never seemed to hold men friends.’ The quizzical child, however appears determined to confront whether spinster aunt is ashamed of: Auntie is ‘broadcasting bad breath.’ No wonder men stay away. Dreaded halitosis has gotten in the way of love.” (5) Other ads took this similar tack; “Often a Bridesmaid but Never a Bride,” Halitosis Makes You Unpopular,” Could I be happy with him in spite of that?”

This was one of the first times that advertising really did create a ‘cure.’ But you couldn’t cure something unless you had a disease. “Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis.”(5)

So there you have it- from a potent antiseptic (phenol) to a product (Original Listerine) that an unprecedented 99% of all mouthwash users have tried. One final footnote to this saga; phenol would save thousands of lives, but it would also end many, for scientists quickly discovered that phenol could be converted into the potent explosive trinitrophenol (TNT). (1) Gargle on this thought.

References

1. Joe Schwarcz, Radar, Hula Hoops, and Playful Pigs, (Toronto, ECW Press, 1999), 58

2. William Broad and Nicholas Wade, Betrayers of the Truth, (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1982), 136

3. James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads That Shook the World, (New York, Three Rivers Press, 2000), 62

4. James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads That Shook the World, 63

5. James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads That Shook the World, 60

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George Dantzig- Mathematical Genius and Urban Legend Hero

2007-11-22T17:08:00.000-08:00

Jack Dini, Livermore, CA

Imagine you’re a graduate student taking a mathematics course at the University of California, Berkeley. One day you oversleep and are late for class, so late that everyone has gone. However, there are two problems on the blackboard. You assume these are homework problems and you copy them down. The problems are harder than usual and it takes you quite a while to finish them. When finished, you take them to your professor to see if he still wants the work. He tells you to throw it on his desk and you do so reluctantly because the desk is covered with a heap of papers. You fear that your homework will be lost forever. About six weeks later, on a Sunday morning you are awakened by someone banging on your front door. It’s your math professor with papers in hand, all excited. “I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it our right away for publication.” You initially have no idea what he is talking about. It turns out the problems on the blackboard which you had solved thinking they were a homework assignment were, in fact, two famous previously unsolved problems in statistics. (1)

This sounds like an urban folklore legend, and some folks have promoted it as such. It’s also been used by ministers in sermons, most famously by the Reverend Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral and television fame. Schuller embellished the story by claiming the problems were part of a final exam and that the high scorer in the test would get a job in the math department. (These were the depression years and jobs were very coveted and hard to come by). Schuller also reported that even Einstein had been unable to crack the problems. (2)

The story has also been used as the setup of the plot in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, as well as in one of the early scenes in the 1999 film Rushmore showing the main character daydreaming about solving the impossible question and winning approbation from all. (3)

Well, the young graduate student who solved the problems was George Dantzig. The unintended consequences of this action was that besides showing that it was possible to do the ‘impossible,’ the problems also led to his Ph.D. in statistics. When he was searching for a thesis topic, his advisor, Jerzy Newman, told him to wrap the two problems in a binder and he would accept them as his thesis. (1)

Dantzig went on to have an illustrious career in mathematics. He created the field of linear programming from his ‘simplex method,’ an algorithm for solving complex problems that revolutionized scientific computation. Here’s what the Stanford Magazine reported after his death in May 2005, “Combined with the calculating power of today’s computers, Dantzig’s algorithm is a tool that allows businesses and governments to identify optimal solutions to problems involving many variables. Linear programming applies to thousands of diverse applications—from pricing products, scheduling shipments and workers, assigning personnel, rotating crops and targeting weapons. Professor of management science and engineering Arthur R. Veinott, Jr. calls Dantzig’s simplex method the single most widely used algorithm originated in the last six decades.” (4) The iron and steel industry has used a Dantzig programming method to evaluate iron ores, explore the addition of coke ovens, and select products. The Federal Energy Administration is using his method to evaluate energy policy alternatives, and linear programming has also been used or suggested for controlling water and air pollution. (5)

His 1963 book, Linear Programming and Extensions, which explains his methods, is still in print 43 years later. He also co-wrote Compact City: A Plan for a Livable Urban Environment, and after retiring from Stanford in 1997, completed two volumes on linear programming and wrote a science fiction novel. In 1975, President Gerald Ford awarded him the National Medal of Science.

Besides his math legacy he leaves us with some key motivational help. Because no one had told him that it couldn’t be done, he did it. He probably would not have thought positively if he had known the two problems were famous unsolved works. A person is limited only by the thoughts that he or she chooses.

References

1.More Mathematical People, Donald J. Albers, Gerald L. Alexanderson and Constance Reid, Editors, (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 67

2.The First Christian News, Volume 53, Issue 31, August 3, 2005

3.“Way Out Research on Obscure Topics,” Flat Rock.org; accessed December 18, 2005

4.“Math Whiz Transformed Resource Management,” Stanford Magazine, September/October 2005

5.“INFORMS Mourns Death of OR Pioneer George B. Dantzig,” www.newswise.com: accessed December 18, 2005

Poison or Medicine—Toxin or Drug?

2007-11-22T17:04:00.000-08:00

Jack W. Dini
Livermore, California

“Poison surrounds us. It’s not just too much of a bad thing like arsenic that can cause trouble, it’s too much of nearly anything. Too much vitamin A, hypervitaminosis A, can cause liver damage. Too much vitamin D can damage the kidneys. Too much water can result in hyponatremia, a dilution of the blood’s salt content, which disrupts brain, heart, and muscle function,” reports Cathy Newman. (1)

However, more and more research studies are revealing that a little bit of some poisons can be quite helpful to human health. Examples include botulinum, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and epibatidine, the toxic that native Indians use to make poison darts.

Botulinum

Botulinum is one of the most poisonous substances known (see Table 1 for comparisons). A gram of botulinum toxin, if dispersed and ingested could kill 20 million people (1). Yet, do you know anyone who has had Botox treatment to remove wrinkles? This is botulinum in extremely dilute form. Other applications include relief of migraines, a cure for crossed eyes, and a treatment for the spastic conditions of multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy. Researchers in Britain report that the combination of botulinum, and a protein from the Mediterranean coral tree could provide a treatment for the chronic pain that afflicts millions of people, including cancer patients. (2)

Leon Fleisher, one of the world’s premier concert pianists became afflicted with focal dystonia, a misfiring of the brain that causes muscles to contract into abnormal, and sometimes painful positions. This career threatening disorder often strikes those who depend on small motor skills: musicians, writers, and surgeons. After treatments with botulinum toxin, Fleisher is performing and touring again, and recently released his first two-handed recording in 40 years. (1)

Table 1- Hold a nickel in your hand. Here’s how many lethal doses
equal that nickel’s weight*

Thallium 5
1080 Rat Poison 7
Cyanide 25
Strychnine 50
Nicotine 111
Botulinum 100,000,000
Anthrax 500,000,000

*Cathy Newman, “12 Toxic Tales,” National Geographic, 207, 2, May 2005

Carbon Monoxide

Carbon monoxide is an example of a ‘pollutant’ that is important for human existence. This deadly gas that kills thousands each year offers potential help for a number of medical conditions. (3)

Although carbon monoxide inhalation can be lethal, our bodies make the molecules naturally in small amounts when an enzyme called heme-oxygenase-1 (HO-1) breaks down a portion of the blood protein hemoglobin. (4) Ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in intensive care units. The stress-inducible gene product, HO-1 and carbon monoxide, a major by product of the oxygenase catalysis of heme, have been shown to confer potent anti-inflammatory effects in models of tissue and cellular injury. Tomas Dolinay notes, “The data from this work leads to a tempting speculation that inhaled CO might be useful in minimizing VILI.” (5)

Small amounts of carbon monoxide might alleviate symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a study in mice suggests. The finding may offer a treatment for MS, which strikes when a person’s immune system damages the fatty sheaths that protect nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord. (4)

Other studies of laboratory animals suggest that carbon monoxide in small doses can prevent injury to blood vessels caused by surgery. In this study, rats that inhaled carbon monoxide-laced air for 1 hour before angioplasty had much less subsequent artery blockage than did rats not receiving the gas. Rats that underwent a vessel transplant also fared significantly better if given carbon monoxide before and after the surgery. (6)

Hydrogen Sulfide

Hydrogen sulfide, the compound that gives rotten eggs their odor, can be lethal at high concentrations. Yet researchers in Seattle reported that exposure to hydrogen sulfide gas can lower the heart rate, metabolism, and body temperature in lab mice. (7) Mice in the study revived and appeared healthy when exposure to the gas ended. This is one step in helping researchers understand about hibernation and torpor in animals. (8)

Why is this of interest? Some animals regularly slow down their metabolic rates, or the speed at which their bodies function. Every day, certain types of hummingbirds go into a state called torpor where their heart rate drops, breathing slows, and body temperature plunges. Bears go into a similar type of hibernation for entire seasons. This type of suspended animation could offer protection for humans after a heart attack or stroke, and it could help people survive while waiting for an organ transplant. (9)

Epibatidine

Epibatidine is the toxic chemical which a tropical frog arms itself against its predators. Not only is epibatidine very toxic, and the reason it is used by native Indians to make poison, but it also turns out to be a superb painkiller. Its two hundred times stronger than morphine.(10)

The chemical formula for epibatidine is C11H13N2Cl. Notice that it contains chlorine, which makes it an organochlorine compound. Bad stuff, let’s get rid of it, say many environmentalists. Jonathan Adler notes, “The campaign to phase out the use of chlorine, a staple of modern industrial chemistry, perhaps best illustrates environmental groups’ absolutist approach to risk assessment and their success at building political support. The anti-chloride crusade was a fringe campaign initiated by Greenpeace, but it has attracted adherents from throughout the environmental community.” It’s endorsed by varying degrees by the National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, US Public Interest Research Group, National Audubon Society, Citizens for a Better Environment in Chicago, and World Wildlife fund.” (11)

Since epibatidine comes from frogs, what do you do to get rid of this chlorine product? As John Emsley points out, “Epibatidine is an organochlorine compound, which confounds somewhat environmental activists’ belief that organochlorines are entirely manufactured chemicals that cause disease and damage the environment. Epibatidine is highly dangerous, but it is perfectly natural. It would seem a little unfair on the frogs to eradicate them because they are making a dangerous organochlorine molecule.” (10)

The epibatidine story is only just starting. As Emsley notes, “It might well end a better painkiller, or a pill that smokers can take if they want to stop smoking. It might even result in a pill that will enhance learning or improve our enjoyment of intellectual pursuits.” (10)

Summary

Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst is a strong proponent of hormesis, a scientific term that means low doses help and high doses hurt. He’s concerned that if researchers don’t begin regularly probing the effects of agents at very low doses, scientists will continue to miss important health impacts—both good and bad of pollutants, drugs, and other agents. Janet Raloff points out that regulatory agencies don’t require scientists to evaluate a poison at exposures below that at which no harm is apparent. This dose is referred to as the NOAEL, for ‘no observable adverse effects level.’ (11)

Two obvious benefits can accrue from testing effects at low doses: 1- medical help might be found from material otherwise known to be toxic and 2- if traces of certain pollutants are not as dangerous as previous estimates had suggested, perhaps some overly stringent regulations could be changed. Dream on…

References

1. Cathy Newman, “12 Toxic Tales,” National Geographic, 207, 2, May 2005

2. James Randerson, “Botulinum toxin soothes chronic pain,” New Scientist, 178, 14, April 19, 2003

3. Liz Geltcher, “Life’s a Gas,” New Scientist, 172, 39, November 24, 2001

4. Nathan Seppa, “Good Poison?” Science News, 171, 53, January 27, 2007

5. Tamas Dolinay, et al., “Inhaled Carbon Monoxide Confers Antiinflammatory Effects Against Ventilator-Induced Lung Injury,” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 171, 1318, 2005

6. Nathan Seppa, “Carbon monoxide may limit vascular damage,” Science News, 163, 126, February 22, 2003

7. Eric Blackstone, Mike Morrison, and Mark B, Roth, “H2S Induces a Suspended Animation-Like State in Mice,” Science, 308, 518, April 22, 2005

8. “Putting a Mouse on Pause,” http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20050427/Note2.asp

9. Ben Harder, “Perchance to Hibernate,” Science News, 171, 56, January 27, 2007

10. John Emsley, Molecules at an Exhibition, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), 84

11. Janet Raloff, “Counterintuitive Toxicity,” Science News, 171, 40, January 20, 2007

Change the Health Rules- Scare the People

2007-08-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

Jack W. Dini
Livermore, California

(This appeared in HealthFactsandFears.com of the American Council on Science and Health, August 13, 2007, http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.1022/news_detail.asp)

Be cautious when you hear that some disease has all of a sudden increased in numbers. Someone may have changed the rules. Examples include Alzheimer’s, blood pressure, diabetes, autism, and obesity.

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) substantially changed the data for many causes of death in 1999. One was Alzheimer’s which jumped by at least 55 percent above the level reported in 1998. This increase did not reflect a sudden surge in mortality but a change in classification which has a substantial bearing on the epidemiology of the disease. (1)

According to Marcia Angell, high blood pressure was defined for many years as above 140/90. An expert panel then introduced something called prehypertension in 2003, which is something between 120/80 and 140/90. Overnight people with blood pressure in this range found they had a medical condition. (2)

While on the subject of heart disease, Robert Ehrlich notes that a so-called epidemic of heart disease was said to have occurred after World War II in the US. Since this was also a period when meat became increasingly available it might appear to have supported the heart-diet theory. But as Ehrlich notes, “there was no epidemic at all. The risk of dying from heart disease was unchanged for any given age group. The real change was that people were living longer to the age when they were more likely to die from diseases of old age such as coronary heart disease.” What also happened was that physicians in the post-war era began to catch on to the new terminology and were more likely than before to write coronary heart disease on death certificates. In one single year, 1948 to 1949, the addition of the term ‘arteriosclerotic heart disease’ to the International Classification of Disease had the effect of raising the CHD death rate by 20 percent in white males and 35 percent in white females. (3)

Fast forward to the present and a July 21, 2007 report in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Julia Hippisley-Cox and her colleagues concluded that misdiagnosis of heart disease has led to massive over-prescribing of drugs. (4) Flaws in the way doctors routinely calculate risk led to misinforming patients they were in danger of developing life-threatening heart diseases. The researchers tracked 1.28 million healthy men and women aged between 35 and 74 over a period of 12 years to April 2007. As Polly Curtis reports, “The traditional way of calculating risk from heart disease involves a score based on smoking, blood pressure, and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cholesterol, along with age and sex. The BMJ study compared this measure against a new, more sophisticated test, which also takes into account social deprivation, genetic factors and weight. It found that the former over-predicted the number of people at high risk of developing cardiovascular diseases by 35%. It concludes that 3.2 million adults under the age of 75 are at risk of developing cardiovascular illnesses compared with the 4.7 million previously estimated.” (5) This indicates that anti-cholesterol drug statins are massively and needlessly over-prescribed in the UK.

Another ailment that’s up in the last last twenty years is diabetes. Aggressive educational programs designed to encourage more testing, and mass screenings of millions of Americans have contributed to the increase. However, most importantly, the definition of diabetes has been changed from a fasting blood sugar of 140 to a blood sugar of 126. So, just like with some of the previous health issues, millions of Americans became diabetic overnight. (6)

Why is Autism on the rise? Scott Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz suggest changes in diagnostic and legal practices have played a key role. For decades it was 1 in 2,500, then from 1993 to 2003, a 756% increase occurred. Now it is 1 in 166. In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association manual listed six of six criteria that defined autism. In 1994 the manual required any eight of sixteen criteria. In addition, the 1980 version contained only 2 diagnoses relevant to autism while the 1994 version contains 5 such diagnoses. Legal changes cited by Lilienfeld and Arkowitz relate to an amended version of the Individuals With Disabilities Act, passed by Congress in 1991. This required school districts to provide precise counts of children with disabilities and resulted in sharp surges in the reported numbers of children with autism. Yet, these numbers are not based on careful diagnoses of autism or on representative samples of populations. They note, “As a consequence, researchers rely on ‘administrative based estimates’ which come from government data submitted by schools, and will arrive at misleading conclusions about autism’s prevalence.” (7)

If folks reading this are a representative sample of the US population, 2 out of every 3 of you are either overweight or obese. I, for one, am included in the overweight category. In my case it happened overnight in 1998. Perhaps the same thing happened to you. It wasn’t because I had gone on a binge of eating and drinking. Rather it was because a committee convened by the National Heart Institute redefined overweight to be a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or more for both men and women. (Body mass index equals your weight in kilos divided by the square of your height in meters. If you prefer to use English units, its your weight in pounds divided by the square of your height in inches, then multiplied by 703). I had a BMI of 25.8, so now I was overweight. Before 1998, a man was officially overweight with a body mass index of 27.8 and a woman at 27.3, but now the rules had changed and all of a sudden many more people were ‘overweight.’

BMI is solely a function of height and weight. It does not distinguish between men and women, between 20 year olds and 80 years olds, or between people of radically different bone structures or musculature types. Former National Football League Jerry Rice (now a famous dancer) is 6’2” and weighs 200 pounds. His 25.7 BMI puts him in the ‘overweight’ category. (At a BMI if 25.8 you can see I’m in good company). Paul Campos calculates that ‘97% of the players in the NFL are either overweight or obese. I doubt you would think of Hollywood stars such as Richard Gere, Pierce Brosnan and Kevin Costner as being overweight, yet with their respective BMI’s of 26.1, 27.1, and 29.2, Gere and Brosnan are overweight and Costner is borderline obese. George W. Bush, known for his good health, is ‘overweight’ since his BMI is 26.3. (8) One could go on and on with these kinds of examples, but I think by now you get the point.

Here are some interesting calculations. University of Virginia professor Glenn Gaesser points out that “studies have consistently failed to find any correlation between increasing BMI and higher mortality in people sixty-five and over 78% of the approximately 2.3 million annual deaths in the United States occur among people who are at least sixty-five. Thus 78% of all deaths lack even the beginning of a statistical link with BMI.” (9)

W. Wayt Gibbs reports, “Three surveys—medical measurements collected in the early 1970s, late 1970s, and early 1990s, with subjects matched against death registries nine to nineteen years later—indicate that it is much more likely that US adults who fall in the overweight category have a lower risk of premature death than do those of so-called healthy weight. The overweight segment of the ‘epidemic of overweight and obesity’ is more likely reducing death rates than boosting them.” (10)

Here’s one final bit of information on overweight. For years the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) have reported that 400,000 Americans die each year because of obesity. Guess what happened recently? The CDC changed the 400,000 number to 28,000. David Brooks sums it up quite well, “The chief moral lesson I take away from the recent CDC report is that Mother Nature is happy to tolerate marginally irresponsible behavior. She doesn’t want you to go completely to seed. If you’re truly obese and arouse hippos when you visit the zoo, you could still punch your ticket at any moment. But she does want you to eat the occasional Cinnabon, so long as it isn’t bigger than Delaware.” (11)

Summary

Many folks concerned about their health have only a ‘headline or TV news’ awareness of the issue of concern. More often than not, these headline news stories overemphasize minute risks about which little can be done and ignore those that readers can do something about. Repeated often enough, these scares eventually become myths and most people never hear the full story. Sometimes the rules for diagnosing diseases are changed but this gets lost in all the fear-mongering.

So my suggestion for you is, the next time you hear some new science or health scare fact, try to find the rest of the story. What was the sample size? Did some committee change the guidelines for an illness or disease? There are not mad cows on your block. Ebola is not lurking in your drain and you are not going to die from SARS, West Nile Virus, or bird flu. Your family is not threatened by chemical assaults. They’re threatened by people with a blood alcohol level of 0.25 driving 2 tons of steel.

References

1. Rodger Doyle, Scientific American, 284, 26, May 2001

2. Marcia Angell, The Truth About Drug Companies, (New York, Random
House, 2004), 85

3. Robert Ehrlich, 8 Preposterous Propositions, (Princeton, NJ,
Princeton University Press, 2003), 273

4. Julia Hippisley-Cox et al., “Derivations and validation of QRISK, a
new cardiovascular disease risk scare for the United Kingdom: prospective
open cohort study,” British Medical Journal, 335(7611), 136, July 21, 2007

5. Polly Curtis, “1.5M wrongly told they risk heart disease,”
Guardian Unlimited, July 6, 2007

6. Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth, (New York, Gotham Books, 2004), 22

7. Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz, “Autism: An Epidemic?”
Scientific American Mind, 18, 82, April/May 2007

8. Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth, 132

9. Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth, 17

10. W. Wayt Gibbs, “Obesity: An Overblown Epidemic?” Scientific American,
292, 70, June 2005

11. David Brooks, “Survival of the not quite fittest,” The Times-Picayune,
New Orleans, April 26, 2005, page B-7

Food and Chemical Priorities

2007-07-06T08:23:00.001-07:00

Jack Dini
Livermore, CA

(This appeared in Plating & Surface Finishing, 94, 27, May 2007)

Which of the following would trouble you most:

Food poisoning by unknown agents.
Animal excreta in your food.
Infinitesimal amounts of different chemicals in your body.
Infinitesimal amounts of different chemicals in your drinking water?

Here is some additional information to help you make your decision:

Food poisoning- Eric Schlosser in his book, Fast Food Nation, notes, “Every day in the US, roughly 200,000 people are sickened by a food borne disease, 900 are hospitalized and 14 die. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than a quarter of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning each year.” (1)

Animal excreta in food- Experts at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decide on how much contamination is to be allowed in foods sold for human consumption. There is no question regarding ‘how much’ since it would be impossible to produce food that had no contaminants whatsoever. Here are FDA guidelines for maximum levels of certain ‘impurities’ in some foods: Brussels sprouts- 10 aphids per ounce, Shelled peanuts- 1 insect per 5 pounds, Golden raisins- 20 whole or equivalent insects per pound, Tomato juice- 3 fly eggs per ounce, Whole pepper- 1 mg or more mammalian excreta per pound, Popcorn- 2 rodent hairs per pound, Fig paste- 4 insect heads per ounce, Peanut butter- 9 insect fragments per ounce, Sesame seeds- 5 mg or more mammalian excreta per pound, Cocoa beans- 10 mg or more mammalian excreta per pound. (A Whole insect includes separate head, or body portions with head attached. (2)

With chemicals, we talk about a few parts per million, parts per billion, or even parts per trillion. With animal excreta, note that 10 mg per pound is equivalent to 20 parts per million. Serious parts per million!

Infinitesimal amounts of different chemicals in your body- Now that new lab techniques allow us to find compounds that occur in mind-bendingly tiny amounts, advocacy groups assert a whole new array of doubts. This, coupled with the fact that the media, unaware of the fact that it is common scientific knowledge that traces of environmental chemicals, both synthetic and natural make their way into our bodies, enter the spin zone of the advocacy groups and present the information as if were new shocking news. (3)

Infinitesimal amounts of different chemicals in your drinking water- As new technology enables detection of infinitesimally smaller doses of chemicals in the environment, Southern California water quality officials have learned that an array of hardy pharmaceuticals are defying even the most sophisticated sewage treatments in use. Although the amounts discovered are in the parts per trillion range (equivalent to one second in 32,000 years) folks still get concerned. “The contamination raises questions about the safety of reclaimed water consumed by the public and the health of wild creatures that inhabit waterways,” says the Los Angeles Times. (4)

So what would you be most concerned about? Would you ignore the food poisoning which clearly is documented as a real issue, or body parts and turds in food, and accept the present scare tactics that deem that any amount of any newly discovered chemical in food or water is a real problem. If so, I feel sorry for you, since as scientists get more and more clever, you’re going to find more and more to worry about. Your ‘chemophobia’ will continue to raise itself to new levels.

Every piece of food we eat, every breath we take, every move we make results in the ingestion of a chemical of some sort. Every chemical has the ability to kill, but only if the quantities are high enough. As the Swiss physician Paracelsus stated: “What is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. It is only the dose that makes a thing a poison.”

Perhaps the simplest answer to chemophobia is this. It is based on a misperception. Everything is made up of chemicals. A report by the National Research Council noted that about 5,000,000 different chemical substances are known to exist. Of those 5 million, less than 30 have been definitely linked to cancer in humans, 1,500 have been found to be carcinogenic in tests on animals and about 7,000 have been tested for carcinogenicity. Again, if you missed those number, less than 30 out of five million known chemical substances have been definitely linked to cancer in humans. (5)

References

1. Eric Shlosser, Fast Food Nation, (New York, Perennial Press, 2002), 195

2. The Food Defect Action Levels, Food and Drug Administration, Washington, DC, May 1988. (See http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/dalbook.html).

3. Todd Seavey, “A ChemicalOver Reaction,TechCentral Station, January 20, 2003. (See http://techcentralstation.com/,search “Todd Seavey”).

4. Maria Cone, “Traces of Prescription Drugs Found in Aquifers,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 2006

5. John Adams, Risk, (London, University College, 1995), 45

The Revenge Effect of Too Much Purity

2007-07-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini

(This appeared in Plating & Surface Finishing, 90, 24, November 2003)

In our zeal to remove every last bit of contaminant from everything we eat, drink, or breathe, we may be doing a disservice to our health.

Thomas DeGregori reports, “We may have been too successful in creating a more hygienic environment leading to other problems. Good hygiene makes good sense but obsessive hygienr---‘the antibacterial craze’---can be counterproductive since it is as meaningless to be free of all microorganisms, including the sometime harmful ones, as it is to be free of all ‘chemicals.’ Some researchers have found a correlation between too much hygiene and increased allergy. Studies have revealed an increased frequency of allergies, cases of asthma and eczema in persons who have been raised in an environment overly protective against mircroorganisms.” (1)

Fernando Martinez adds. “There is now convincing evidence indicating that the prevalence of allergic diseases in general, and of asthma in particular, is on the rise in high income societies. Many hypothesis have been proposed to explain these increases, but the most widely discussed and the most controversial is the so-called ‘hygiene hypothesis.’ This hypothesis was first enunciated in quite straightforward terms: the Western lifestyle has succeeded in markedly decreasing the incidence of infections in early life, and these infections may have a protective effect on the subsequent development of allergies.” (2)

Bjorn Lomborg lists the following findings that seem to support the ‘hygiene hypothesis.’ (3)

· Children who suffer many infections (and get their immune system exercised) apparently face a smaller risk of getting asthma.
· The youngest children in large families face a smaller chance of getting asthma because their older siblings have passed many infections on to them.
· A recent Italian study showed that men heavily exposed to microbes were less likely to experience respiratory allergy.
· Several other studies have also shown that exposure to measles, parasites, and tuberculosis seems to reduce the risk of getting asthma.
· Children receiving oral antibiotics by the age of 2 were more susceptible to allergies than children who had no antibiotics, and children with early and repeated viral infections seem to have a reduced risk of developing asthma.

Doctors in England have suggested that mass vaccination against chicken pox would bring on a more serious epidemic of shingles in adults. Their studies have shown that adults who don’t live with children, or who live with immunized children, are much more likely to develop shingles. (4)

These recent studies aren’t the first time that epidemiologists have found that cleanliness wasn’t the cure-all for disease prevention. In the 1920s and 1930s, cleanliness, far from combating polio, was promoting it. Edward Tenner observes, “When all infants acquired the virus in the first days of their lives, while still protected by antibodies from their mothers’ blood, paralysis was almost unknown.” (5) Tenner goes on to add that German measles only turned into a serious disease after fewer and fewer children were infected with it. He also notes, “that the more casual French attitude toward exposure to germs makes their effects less severe in late life.” And speaking of the French, you’ve undoubtedly heard or read that the French have a low incidence of heart disease. Many folks suggest this is because of the wine they drink. I wonder if it could be because of dirt and here’s why. Lynn Payer has written a fascinating book, Medicine and Culture, wherein she compares different cultural approaches to health and illness. She notes, “The English and Americans have a saying, ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness,’ The French don’t. While Americans assume that if it’s clean it must be healthy, the French are quick to point out the health advantages of dirt, or at least the health advantages of tolerating dirt.” (6) She adds, “The French don’t get turista when they travel, according to one French doctor, because they’ve acquired the immunity at home.” The French life-style can allow exposure to certain germs, a form a natural vaccination favored by the French over man’s vaccination. (7)

Chemotherapy, which is often effective against many forms of cancer can have the undesired effect of suppressing the immune system, leading to bacterial infections that the weakened immune system cannot contain. (8) Children with leukemia experienced a significant drop in their antibody levels against measles and rubella as a result of chemotherapy. (9)

Here are some other examples where absolute purity isn’t the answer. Raphael Kazmann quotes Philip West of Louisiana State University, “Turning now to productive water, it is quite apparent that absolute purity is out of the question. If the Mississippi River, passing Baton Rouge and New Orleans consisted of distilled water, there would be no seafood industry such as we now have in Louisiana. Without copper ‘contaminating’ the water there would be no oysters. Traces of iron, manganese, cobalt, copper, and zinc are essential for the crabs, snapper, flounder, shrimp and other creatures that abound in Gulf waters. As unpleasant as it sounds, even the sewage discharges into the Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi River systems pollute and thus ultimately nourish the water.” (10)

With animals, chemically induced hormetic (beneficial at low doses) effects have been claimed for crabs, clams, oysters, fish, insects, worms, mice, rats, ants, pigs, dogs and humans. E. J. Calabrese and his colleagues report, “The range of agents employed in such studies has been wide, including numerous antibiotics, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), ethanol, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heavy metals, essential trace elements, pesticides, and a variety of miscellaneous agents, including chemotherapeutic agents, solvents such as carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, cyanide, sodium, and others.” (11)

Arsenic poisoning from drinking water in Bangladesh has been called the largest mass poisoning of a population in history by the World Health Organization (WHO). Rebecca Rawls notes that the poisoning may be exacerbated by the lack of certain metals in the drinking water, which, if present, might mitigate some of arsenic’s ill effects. (12) Two of these ‘missing’ metals are selenium and zinc. Selenium, which can inhibit arsenic toxicity, was not found in 92% of the water samples tested and zinc, which promotes the repair of tissues damaged by arsenic, could not be found in 18% of the samples.

References

1. Thomas R. DeGregori, The Environment, Our Natural Resources, and Modern Technology, (Ames, Iowa, Iowa State Press, 2002), 130
2. Fernando D. Martinez, “The coming –of-age of the hygiene hypothesis,” Respiratory Research, 2, 129, 2001
3. Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), 187
4. “It’s Good To Be Around Sick Kids,” Discover, 24, 35, January 2003
5. Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back, (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 56
6. Lynn Payer, Medicine and Culture, (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 67
7. Lynn Payer, Medicine and Culture, 69
8. Michael Shnayerson and Mark J. Plotkin, The Killers Within, (New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 4
9. Anna Nilsson, “Consider reimmunizing children after chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia,” Hem/Onc Today, 3, 10, October 2002
10. Raphael G. Kazmann, “Environmental Tyranny-A Threat to Democracy,” in Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Jay H. Lehr, Editor, (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), 311
11. E. L. Calabrese, Margaret E. McCarthy and Elaina Kenyon, “The Occurrence of Chemically Induced Hormesis,” Health Physics, 52, 531, 1987
12. Rebecca L. Rawls, “Tackling Arsenic in Bangladesh,” Chemical & Engineering News, 80, 42, October 21, 2002

A Dangerous Pollution Source

2007-07-04T09:09:00.000-07:00

Jack Dini

(This appeared in Plating & Surface Finishing, 92, 34, May 2005)

We spend billions of dollars in an attempt to minimize pollutants such as formaldehyde, 1,4-dioxane, trichloroethylene, chloroform, cyanide, hydrochloric acid, radiation, hypochlorite, hydrogen peroxide, ozone, and nitric oxide. What do all of these have in common? One answer is that they all bring to mind scary, perhaps carcinogenic agents, created in most part by industry. Another answer is that these are all created by ourselves, within our own bodies, without any help from outside forces such as industry or the environment. They are all unintended consequences of pollution. So here’s the dilemma if you’re one of those folks who dream of a pristine place, free of industry and other pollution created by humans—you can’t get away from these contaminants. By virtue of being human you create them every day. There’s more: the average human body contains enough sulfur to kill all fleas on an average dog, carbon to make 900 pencils, potassium to fire a toy cannon, fat to make 7 bars of soap, phosphorus to make 2,200 match heads, water to fill a ten gallon tank, and enough iron to make a 3 inch nail.(1)

Science writer James Trefil sums our body pollution problems quite succinctly, “Surprisingly, the greatest number of carcinogens facing human cells do not come from outside the body, but are normal by-products of human metabolism.”(2)

As a result of metabolism, formaldehyde is present in our blood at concentrations around 3 ppm. Many organic compounds of concern to the EPA are normal byproducts of mammalian metabolism. At least 15 of these products, including 1,4-dioxane, trichloroethylene (TCE), and chloroform are on the “List of Hazardous Air Pollutants” regulated under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act. The EPA concerns itself at ambient air concentrations less than one-ten thousandth the level found in normal intestinal gases.(3) Think about this for a moment; if EPA were to regulate our metabolism we would be out of compliance by a factor of about 10,000!

Human metabolism itself is capable of providing the body with 70 mg of nitrate per day, equivalent to that coming from outside sources. Cyanide and thiocyanate are naturally present in urine and blood but this does not necessarily indicate poisoning. Courtney Young reports that potassium cyanide reacts with water and ammonia under pressure to produce adenine, which is a building block to DNA. Hydrogen cyanide promotes polypeptide formation from amino acids; polypeptides than complex to form proteins. In this regard, cyanide is necessary to all forms of life and its presence does not mean imminent illness or death.(4)

At the concentration secreted by the stomach lining, hydrochloric acid (pH less than 1) is deadly to living cells and powerful enough to dissolve zinc. This raises the question, why don’t we just corrode ourselves from the inside out? The answer isn’t really known but the acid and accompanying enzymes are kept at bay by an alkaline lining of mucous on the stomach wall. If this lining is breached, the acid and enzymes go to work on the stomach, and the result is a gastric ulcer.(5)

Each of us excretes a minimum of 1.5 grams of phosphorus per day, so that the annual input to the environment is more than one-half billion pounds as phosphorus pentoxide. It was this fact that led the Soap and Detergent Association to investigate economical treatment techniques for the removal of phosphates from sewage.(6)

Radiation

Our blood contains potassium 40, from which we get an internal dose of around 30 millirems of radiation in one year. For comparison purposes, some other radiation exposures include, 40 millirems per year from annual medical X-rays, 65 millirems per year for living in the mile-high city of Denver, and 5 millirems for every transcontinental round trip by air. The yearly safe limit of radiation exposure has been set at 5000 millirems per year, so all of these exposure are not problematic. Further, as James Muckerheide notes, “the damage to cells from metabolism is millions of times more damaging than that of radiation.”(7)

Ozone is a familiar component of air in industrial and urban settings where the gas is a hazardous component of smog. Guess What? Recently, investigators at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) reported that the human body makes ozone. One hypothesis is that we do this as part of a mechanism to protect ourselves from bacteria and fungi.(8)

Lastly, nitric oxide, an industrial gas and environmental pollutant, is extremely important to our bodies. It regulates our bodily activities from our head to our toes. Every moment of our life, our body generates a constant supply of nitric oxide molecules, none of which last more than a few seconds.

So there you are. We continue to try and remove pollution from the world around us, and yet our own bodies are serious culprits in creating some of the very pollutants we strive to eliminate.

References

1. “The Incredible Human Body, Part 2,” www.bibleufo.com/humanbody2.htm; accessed September 9, 2004

2. James Trefil, Human Nature, (New York, Times Books, 2004), 99

3. Jane M. Orient, “Microorganisms, Molecules, and Environmental Risk Assessment: Assumptions and Outcomes,” Chapter 12 in Standard Handbook of Environmental Science, Health, and Technology, J. H. Lehr, Editor, (New York, McGraw-Hill, 2000), 12.50

4. Courtney A. Young, “Cyanide: Just the Facts,” in Cyanide: Social, Industrial and Economic Aspects, Courtney A. Young, Larry G. Tidwell and Corby A. Anderson, Editors, (Warrendale, Pennsylvania, The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society, 2001), 97

5. Philip Ball, Life’s Matrix: A Bibliography of Water, (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 247

6. William McGucken, Lake Erie Rehabilitated, (Akron, Ohio, University of Akron Press, 2000), 75

7. James Muckerheide, “The Beneficial Effects of Low-Dose Radiation,” 23rd Annual Meeting, Doctors For Disaster Preparedness, Las Vegas, NV, July 17, 2005

8. “Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute Make Strides in Addressing Mysteries of Ozone in the Human Body,” The Scripps Research Institute, February 28, 2003, www.scripps.edu/news/press/022703.html

Fearing Frog Deformities-Media and Environmentalists Croaking in the Wind

2007-07-03T09:12:00.000-07:00

Jack W. Dini
Livermore, California

(This appeared in Plating & Surface Finishing, 94, 37, December 2007)

Hideously deformed frogs, multiple legs sprouting from their various body parts, are the poster amphibians of the environmental movement. Their fragile eggs are supposedly poisoned by agricultural pesticides and other insidious chemical slough, exposed to global warming, and to radiation streaming through the ozone hole. Frogs are utterly defenseless against man’s corruption of the environment.

So, what’s your reaction when you hear about these deformed creatures? A lot of folks would respond the way researcher Stanley Sessions of Hartwick College did when he heard about deformed frogs in Minnesota. “Actually, when I first heard about the Minnesota situation, I immediately suspected a chemical substance,” Sessions admitted. “That’s the first thing everybody thinks of. You see a screwed-up animal in the field and that’s the conclusion you jump to.”(1) Not even Sessions, who ultimately debunked the chemical substance issue with frogs, could ultimately resist the temptation.

Following this line of thought, let’s go on an excursion into the world of frogs to see how the public consciousness has been shaped by the media and environmentalists.

Yellow-legged frogs of the High Sierra

Bonner Cohen reports, “The mountain yellow-legged frog, Rana muscosa, began disappearing from the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the first half of the twentieth century, and the amphibian’s decline has become even more pronounced in recent decades. Today, the frog is absent from almost all the Sierra Nevada’s high-altitude lakes where it once thrived. The frog’s seemingly inexplicable demise has provoked much speculation in the media and among scientists, with parasites, ultra-violet radiation, fungal disease, and especially pesticides blamed for the frog’s troubles. (2)

Pesticides and herbicides drifting into the mountains from California central valley farmlands became the favored culprit, and the media and environmentalists played it to the hilt. A minimal amount of data, generated by the US Geological Survey (USGS) was all it took to spawn the inevitable lawsuits by environmental activists. They sued the California Department of Pesticide Regulation and the EPA for failing to review the impact of pesticides on California frogs and other amphibians. Alex Avery reports, “Collectively, these lawsuits have already cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are far from over.” (3)

However, as Paul Harvey would say, here’s the rest of the story. It turns out that the disappearance of the yellow-legged frogs has an entirely different explanation. Folks had been stocking the lakes, rivers, and streams in the West with all types of fish, starting as early as the 1880s. As part of this action, trout were introduced into the glacial lakes of the Sierra Nevada and by 1924 wildlife biologists noted that mountain yellow-bellied tadpoles and trout were rarely seen in the same lakes. This continued with thousands of fingerlings being dropped by aircraft in high altitude lakes where there had been lots of frogs but not fish at all. (4) Guess what happened? The frog populations decreased.

Vance Vredenburg of the University of California at Berkeley began removing trout from five separate High Sierra lakes in the late 1990s. He saw frog population explosions and reported, “There are at least 10,000 lakes in the High Sierra. Ninety to 95 percent of them hold introduced species of trout but no more frogs at all. And there may be plenty of lakes that have plenty of frogs, but few or no fish. So the answer is pretty straightforward, and it doesn’t get much simpler: with no trout you get an immediate and dramatic response.” (5)

Minnesota frogs

In 1995, a group of middle school pupils in Minnesota found some deformed northern leopard frogs and posted pictures of the poor creatures on the Internet. Mark Rosen observes, “The frog story had all the elements that make a newspaper reporters’ ears perk up: children—to provide excellent visuals and add just the right amount of ‘cute’ factor, a defenseless victim—the frogs, an ultimate evil—pollution, and a possible danger to everyone—the frogs could ostensibly be ‘canaries in a mineshaft.’” (6) By 1997, an alarming number of newspaper articles had been written on the topic, enough that Stanley Sessions, mentioned earlier in this article, was prompted to comment, “I have never seen a scientific or biological phenomenon grow so fast with so few publications.” Later in 1998 in a letter to Science magazine, Sessions noted that “Approximately half of the recent reports of deformed amphibians in the United States and Canada are from a single study (my own) of one site in California published in 1990.” (7)

In September 1997 the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) announced the results of tests at a press conference attended by the national media, including PBS and ABC’s “Nightline.” The MPCA officials announced that they had found water from sites where malformed frogs has been reported and it was very potent in deforming frogs in their laboratory experiment. However, they weren’t able to identify what it was in the water that had caused the problem. They then offered bottled water to families concerned about the wells in their areas. (4)

Bonner Cohen notes, “Bottled water may have eased the fears of local residents, but MCPA’s tests soon came under withering criticism from scientists with the EPA. According to EPA, it was simply a natural lack of calcium and other salts in Minnesota water that was deforming the laboratory raised African clawed frog embryos, not a chemical contaminant.” (8) As lead EPA researcher Joe Tietge put it; “You could probably take tap water from any county in Minnesota and get results like this. In science, spurious correlations happen all the time,” and they are “one of the weakest forms of evidence to support a hypothesis.” (9) Added another EPA researcher, “Results don’t mean anything if they are interpreted improperly. Anybody with a tropical fish aquarium knows that if you fill it with tap water it will kill the fish. That doesn’t mean your tap water isn’t safe to drink.” (10)

Looking for the real culprit? It appears to be a parasitic flatworm called trematodes. Two papers that appeared in Science in 1999 proposed a parasite theory. (11, 12) As Alex Avery notes, “Northern leopard frogs in the wild are afflicted at an early age by a tiny parasitic flatworm called trematodes (Ribeiroia). The parasites are shed by snails in ponds where they are picked up by frog tadpoles. Once in the tadpoles, they cause cellular dislocations that lead to deformities in adult frogs.” (3) The parasite theory was first proposed by Stanley Sessions who initially blamed chemicals. Sessions says of the trematodes, “It’s about as close to using an egg beater on the limb bud cells as you can get.” (13)

After publishing his theory, Sessions met with high skepticism. He concluded that the entire frog investigation was being manipulated and important evidence ignored in efforts to promote further research funding. He suggested that other researchers were tilting their hypothesis toward a chemical contaminant in an effort to garner more funding. (14)

More recent reports support Sessions’ findings. Pieter Johnson and colleagues noted that the extent and frequency of the frog deformities was not all that unusual. They surveyed museum frog specimens collected 100 years ago and found similar rates and kinds of deformities. (15)

Time magazine’s report on global warming’s effect on frogs in Costa Rica

Jumping on the global warming scare, Time magazine published a special report in their April 3, 2006 issue. Here’s what they say about frogs, “With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too…Last year, researchers in Costa Rica announced that two-thirds of 100 species of harlequin frogs have vanished in the past 30 years, with the severity of each season’s die off following in lockstep with the severity of that year’s warming.” (16)

Courtesy of Marlo Lewis, here are some facts Time didn’t report, “The frogs are not perishing from heat. Annual Costa Rican temperatures have remained remarkably flat during 1979 to 2005. Rather, the frogs are dying from a fungal infection carried by a class of organisms known as chytrids. Time argues global warming is increasing cloud cover, which limits the frogs exposure to sunlight—a natural disinfectant that ‘can rid the frogs of this fungus.’ However, there has been no observed change in Central American cloud cover between 1984 and 2004. So what is causing the frogs to perish in Coast Rica? According to the journal Diversity and Distribution, the chytrid fungus was most likely introduced by humans, possibly eco-tourists and, or field researchers, wrote University of Virginia climatologist Patrick Michael’s in a January 11 story in World Climate Report.” (17)

Lastly, on the topic of global warming, recent research indicates that global warming isn’t triggering a fungal disease killing off Arizona frogs. The culprit in this case also appears to be the chytrid fungus (18).

Leopard frogs and atrazine

Alex Avery describes Dr. Tyrone Hayes, a California researcher, as “the newest media darling in the supposed ‘global frog crisis.’ Over the past four years, Hayes has been profile by National Geographic magazine, Discover magazine, National Public Radio, and virtually every major newspaper in the country.” (3)

Hayes claims that traces of atrazine, one of the most widely used farm weed killers in North America, are affecting frogs from California to the Carolinas. Avery points out, “The media has run with this theory, placing it at the heart of all supposed frog ills. Hayes doesn’t’ argue that atrazine kills frogs or causes deformities. Instead he says that atrazine feminizes male frogs, chemically castrating them. Therefore, Hayes agues, atrazine ‘likely has a significant impact on amphibian populations’ and should be banned.” (3)

Contrary views: Hayes can’t explain why after 30 years of extensive atrazine use, frog populations are still thriving in the areas where it is heavily used. Nor can he provide any field evidence that atrazine has harmed a single frog anywhere. Further, and most importantly, scientists from four universities have been unable to reproduce Hayes” laboratory results. (3)

Summary

This short trip into the world of frogs provides one example of how public consciousness has been shaped by the media and environmentalists. Whether frogs are disappearing in California, Costa Rica, or Arizona, or deformed in Minnesota, the popular assumption is that a chemical or global warming is the cause. (19) When you dig deeper into this issue, other explanations backed by sound scientific evidence provide a different view.

References

1. William Souder, A Plague of Frogs, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 227

2. Bonner Cohen, The Green Wave, (Washington, DC, Capital Research Center, 2006), 114

3. Alex Avery, “Rachel Carson Syndrome: Jumping to Pesticide Conclusions in the Global Frog Crisis,” Hudson Institute, May 2007

4. Bonner Cohen, The Green Wave, 116

5. V. Vredenburg, “Reversing introduced species effects: Experimental removal of introduced fish leads to rapid recovery of a declining frog,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 101, 7646, 2004

6. Mark Rosen, “The Mysterious Vanishing Frogs of North America,” MIT Open Courseware, Writing and the Environment, Spring 2005

7. Stanley K. Sessions, Science, 279, 459, January 23, 1998, (In Letters)

8. Bonner Cohen, The Green Wave, 117

9. William Souder, A Plague of Frogs, 245

10. William Souder, A Plague of Frogs, 244

11. S. K. Sessions, R. A. Franssen and V. L. Horner, “Morphological Clues From Multi-Legged Frogs: Are Retinoids to Blame?” Science, 284, 800, April 1999

12. P. T. J. Johnson, et al., “The Effect of trematode infection on amphibian limb development and survivorship,” Science, 284, 802, April 30, 1999

13. Kristin Leutwyler, “Biologists figure out what accounts for certain side-show frogs,” ScientificAmerican.com, May 3, 1999

14. William Souder, A Plague of Frogs, 229

15. P. T. J. Johnson, et al., “Limb deformities as an emerging parasitic disease in amphibians: Evidence from museum specimens and resurvey data,” Conservation Biology, 17, 1724, 2003

16. Jeffrey Kluger, “The Tipping Point,” Time, 167, 28, April 3, 2006

17. Marlo Lewis, “Time’s Climate Change Issue Rife With Deception,” Environment & Climate News, 9, 11, June 2006

18. Tony Davis, “Arizona frog fungus not blamed on warming,” Arizona Daily Star, January 23, 2006

19. Bonner Cohen, The Green Wave, 118

Coal Fires- A Major Pollution Source

2007-07-03T09:08:00.000-07:00

Coal Fires- A Major Pollution Source

Jack W. Dini
Livermore, CA

“Scrapping all the cars, SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks in America could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 2%. Extinguishing the fires that burn unchecked at coal deposits around the world could reduce emissions by 2-3% without the economic devastation.”(1)

Are you doing your best to minimize your carbon footprint? If so, that’s commendable. However, it’s not going to make a hoot of a difference in the big picture. For example, here are three facts about the impossibility, or futility, of controlling emissions:

1-Uncontrolled fires in China’s abandoned coal mines release as much carbon dioxide as the entire country of Japan does from useful fuel consumption. (2)

2- The third world is growing. China has 30,000 coal mines and is opening a new power station every five days until 2012. India is right behind in present and future energy consumption; it’s annual demand for coal has been steadily increasing over the past decade, and is now nearly 50% greater than it was a decade ago.(3)

3- People with empty bellies don’t have the luxury of a Western middle-class moralist to worry what may or may not happen 50 to 100 years down the track. If their economic salvation, as in China, is a factory belching goo into the atmosphere, they’re happy to live with that to put bread on the table. (4)

Whatever the West does to ‘save the planet’ is mere gesture unless the rest of the world agrees to give up its right to grow as we’ve grown. The Al Gore machine seeks to limit each person to 1 ton of carbon per year. The proposal is to create a system of carbon allowances that will be rationing cards of the future. (2) This is an admirable goal for folks in developed countries, but what is left unstated is that the remaining four fifths of the world’s population (almost 5 billion people) are doing their best to feed themselves and emulate our present lifestyle and aren’t about to stop.

Coal Mine Fires

Let’s look at coal mine fires, which are underground smoldering of coal mines. Mine fires can burn for very long periods of time (months or years), until the seam in which they smolder is exhausted. They propagate in a creeping fashion along mine shafts and cracks. Because they are underground, they are extremely difficult and costly to reach and put out.

Michael Woods reports, “Underground coal fires are relentlessly incinerating millions of tons of coal around the world. The blazes spew out huge amounts of air pollutants, force residents to flee their homes, send toxic runoff flowing into waterways, and leave the land as scarred as a battlefield.” (5)

Around the world, thousands of inextinguishable mine fires are burning, especially in China and India. “A global environmental catastrophe,’ is how geologist Glenn Stracher, of East Georgia College in Swainsboro, describes these fires. Stracher co-organized an international symposium on the topic at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. The AAAS estimates that mine coal fires, started mainly by human activity, contribute significantly to carbon dioxide emissions—as much as 3% of the world output deriving from such fires in China alone. (6)

One of the worst underground fires in the United States, the Centralia, Pennsylvania mine fire, has been burning since May 1962. The fire was started when the local city council set trash ablaze in an abandoned strip mine that had been used as an illegal dump. The fire burned along a coal seam into tunnels located beneath Centralia, sending smoke and toxic fumes into the air. Kevin Krajick reported in 2005, “A hellish landscape is about all that remains of the once-thriving town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. Forty-three years ago, a vast honeycomb of coal mines at the edge of the town caught fire. An underground inferno has been spreading ever since, burning at depths of up to 300 feet, baking surface layers, venting poisonous gases and opening holes large enough to swallow people or cars. The conflagration may burn for another 250 years along an eight mile stretch encompassing 3,700 acres, before it runs out of the coal that fuels it.” (7)

The fire was brought to national and international attention in 1981 after a 12 year old boy fell into an open steaming hole. By that time Centralia had been irreversibly damaged by the fire: in 1980 poisonous gases had begun to infiltrate a local elementary school and several homes in Centralia and whole sections of streets and yards were near collapse from the tremendous heat of the fire. In 1983 a group of concerned citizens eventually won relocation for those who wanted to leave. Most of the 1,000 residents of Centralia chose this option. David DeKok describes the trials and tribulations of Centralia residents in his book, Unseen Danger. (8)

Pennsylvania has over 250,000 acres of abandoned mine lands and has 1/3 of the nation’s mine problems. There are over 45 mine fires burning across Pennsylvania; five underground fires in Allegheny County, five in Percy County, one in Westmoreland, and others in more isolated areas. (9)

Pennsylvania isn’t alone. The US harbors hundreds of blazes from Alaska to Alabama. Near Glenwood Spring, Colorado, an old coal mine has burned for the past 100 years. In the summer of 2002, the blaze ignited a forest fire that consumed 12,000 acres and 43 buildings. Putting it out cost $6.5 million, and the mine still burns. (6) The underground coal seam that ignited the fire has been burning for about 100 years. It was also responsible for the infamous 1994 Storm King Mountain fire that killed 14 firefighters. (6)

China and India

The fires in the United States pale in comparison to those in China which has an estimated 56 coal conflagrations. (10) One, in northern China, consumes up to 200 million tons of coal each year. For comparison, coal consumption in the United States during 2000 was just about one billion tons. (11)

A team from the Netherlands studying the environmental effects of these fires concluded that they release up to 360 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, equal to two to three percent of global carbon dioxide releases. (6)

Soot from the fires in China, India, and other Asian countries are a source of the ‘Asian Brown Haze.’ It’s a 2 mile thick cloud of soot, acid droplets and other material that sometimes stretches across South Asia from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka. (5)

Kevin Krajick reports, “India, where large scale mining began more than a century ago, accounts for the world’s greatest concentration of coal mine fires. Rising surface temperatures, and toxic byproducts in groundwater and soil, have turned the densely populated Raniganj, Singareni, and Jharia coal fields into vast wastelands.” (7) The Jharia is an exclusive storehouse of prime coke coal in the country, consisting of 23 large underground and nine large open cast mines. The mining activities in these coal fields started in 1894 and had really intensified in 1925. The history of the coal mine fire in Jharia can be traced back to 1916 when the fire was first detected. At present, more than 70 mine fires are reported in this region. (12)

Fighting the Fires

Michael Woods notes, “Mine fires are frustratingly difficult and costly to extinguish. Weapons range from backfilling mine shafts to cutting off the oxygen supply with a new foam-like grout that’s squirted into mine shafts like shaving cream and then expands to sniff out the fire. Most are simply left alone to burn until they eventually exhaust their fuel supply.” (5)

Regarding the fighting of the Centralia fire, Krajick reports, “Over some 20 years, firefighters tried eight times to put it out. First they dug trenches, but the fire outpaced them. Then they attempted ‘flushing’—a process that involves augering holes into or ahead of a fire, and pouring down wet sand, gravel, slurries of cement and fly ash to cut off oxygen. Next, state and federal geologists drilled hundreds of exploratory boreholes to define the fire, then dug a huge trench across its supposed path. But the fire had already spread beyond the trench. Flooding the area with water was rejected: it is nearly impossible to inundate a large underground area, especially one as complex and well drained as Centralia. A final solution, to dig a pit three-quarters of a mile long deep as a 45 story building would have cost $660 million, more than the value of the property in the town. It too, was rejected.” (7)

These days remote sensing technology makes it possible to detect coal fires and study their effects. Thermal and optical images along with field-based measurements are used to determine the location, size, depth, propagation direction, burning intensity, temperature and coal consumption of a fire. This information has been useful for fighting fires in northern China. (13)

In the case of the Jharia coalfields in India, measures include bull dozing, leveling and covering with soil to prevent the entry of oxygen and to stabilize the land for vegetation. Fire fighting in this area requires relocation of a large population, which poses to be a bigger problem than the actual fire fighting operations. (12)

Summary

While the United States is cutting its own emissions, some nations, especially China and India, are belching out more and more dirty air. As a result, overseas pollution could partly cancel out improvements in US air quality that have cost billions of dollars. (14)

In November 2006, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected that China will become the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in 2009, overtaking the United States nearly a decade earlier than previously anticipated. Coal is expected to be responsible for three-quarters of that carbon dioxide.(15) Also, according to the IEA, by 2030 coal-based power generation is projected to more than triple while providing roughly one-third of global electricity generation. (16) Do you think this will mean less underground, uncontrolled fires? I surely don’t.

References

1. “Coal Fires,” Civil Defense Perspectives, 23, 2, January 2007

2. Vlado Bevc, “Global warming nothing but a paper tiger,” The Times, Walnut Creek, CA, January 27, 2007, pA23

3. “An Energy Summary of India,” Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, http://www.cslforum.org/india.htm; accessed February 13, 2007

4. Daryl McLure, “Climate Change the Latest Doomsayer Call,” http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/20070213/20070213_02.html, February 10, 2007

5. Michael Woods, “Underground coal fires called a catastrophe,” post-gazette.com, Pittsburgh, PA, February 15, 2003

6. “A burning issue,” http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Action/press109.htm; accessed February 4, 2007

7. Kevin Krajick, “ Fire in the hole,” Smithsonian, 36, 52, May 2005

8. David DeKok, Unseen Danger, (Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986)

9. Pennsylvania Mine Fire Facts, http://www.fifedrum.org/rhinohug/Otherfires.html; accessed February 15, 2007

10. Mike Meyer, “Flaming Dragon,” Smithsonian, 36, 58, May 2005

11. Glenn B. Stracher, “Coal Fires: A Burning Global Recipe for Catastrophe,” Geotimes, October 2002

12. “The Jharia coal field fire,” http://edugreen.teri.res.in/EXPLORE/n_renew/jharia.htm; accessed February 1, 2007

13. Glenn B. Stracher, Tammy P. Taylor, and Anupma Prakash, “Coal Fires: A Synopsis of Their Origin, Remote Sensing Detection and Thermodynamics of Sublimation,” in Case Histories of Mine Reclamation and Regulation: Environmental Technology for Mining, S., Shannon, Editor, (Vancouver, BC, Robertson GeoConsultants Inc.), 1

14. Traci Watson, “Air pollution form other countries drifts into USA,” USA Today, March 14, 2005, 1

15. Peter Fairley, “China’s Coal Future,” Technology Review, 110, 56, January-February 2007

16. “Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate: Coal Mining Task Force Summary of Action Plant and Projects,” http://www.state.gov/g/oes/rls/fs/2006/75376.htm, October 31, 2006