"The whole aim
of practical politics,
wrote H.L. Mencken,
is to keep
the populace alarmed
(and hence clamorous
to be led to safety)
by menacing it with
an endless series
of hobgoblins,
all of them imaginary."
Newspapers, politicians
and activist groups
love apocalyptic forecasts.
Climate change is one
in a long series of fake
boogeymen, that the media
published without question:
DDT, nuclear power,
acid rain, the hole
in the ozone layer,
global cooling,
global warming.
mad cow disease,
genetically modified
crops, etc.
The predictions of doom
have been 100% wrong !
In 2010, Dr Andrew Wakefield's
1998 study was refuted by the
General Medical Council.
His 1998 study in the Lancet,
claimed a link between
the MMR vaccine and autism.
But his study was
found to be a fraud.
In spite of that, Wakefield is
a celebrity anti-vaccine activist
in the United States !
The claim that
bisphenol A,
found in plastics,
acts like a
‘endocrine disruptor’,
interfering with
human hormones,
started with a
fraudulent study
that has since
been retracted.
It was refuted by a
high-quality analyses,
included in a recent
US government study,
called Clarity, ignored
by the media, and the
anti-BPA activists.
People who promote
apocalyptic claims
know that even if a
story of impending doom
is thoroughly refuted,
the correction comes
too late.
The mainstream media
will have published the claim,
without checking, and
gullible people will believe it
Last month a study claimed
that ‘insects could vanish
within a century’, featured
on the BBC in Great Britain.
The claim was nonsense.
The authors of the study,
Francisco Sánchez-Bayo
and Kris Wyckhuys,
claimed to have reviewed
73 different studies to
reach their conclusion
that 41% of insect species
are declining and
‘unless we change
our way of
producing food,
insects as a whole
will go down the path
of extinction
in a few decades’.
The pair started by putting
the words ‘insect’
and ‘decline’
into a database,
completely ignoring
all papers finding
insect increases,
or no change
in their numbers.
They misinterpreted
source papers to blame
insect declines on pesticides,
when the original paper
did not know the cause,
or found contradictory results.
They also relied heavily on
two recent papers claiming
to have found fewer insects today,
than in the past, one in Germany,
and one in Puerto Rico.
The Germany study did not compare
the same locations in different years,
so its conclusions are meaningless !
The Puerto Rico study
compared samples
taken in the same place
in 1976 and 2012,
finding fewer insects
in 2012, and arbitrarily
blaming this on
rapid warming
in the region.
In fact there was no warming:
The jump in the temperature,
recorded by the local weather station,
was caused ONLY by the thermometer
being moved to a different, warmer
location in 1992 !
Last month, there was a study
on glyphosate, the active ingredient
in Roundup weedkiller, claiming
a 41% increase in the incidence
of a very rare cancer,
non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).
This was based on a review
of six other studies.
Epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat
said the paper combined
one high-quality study,
with five poor-quality studies.
To reach statistical significance,
the authors had to choose the
highest of five risk estimates
reported in just ONE of the
poor quality studies, and then
ignore all the other estimates,
to make their obviously phony
41% claim.