Usefully Useless

After being published in Lancet in 1998, Dr Andrew Wakefield caused one of the biggest health scares in years. His finding was that the MMR vaccination was closely correlated with, even caused, autism spectrum disorders.

It causes vaccination takeup rates to plummet and caused the deaths of hundreds of children from easily preventable diseases.

Dr. Wakefield failed to disclose that he was being paid by lawyers looking for someone to blame autism on, failed to disclose that he’d paid children £5 at a birthday party for blood samples (hardly clinical accuracy or professional integrity) and carried out invasive tests on children “against their best clinical interest”. The General Medical Council ruling that Wakefield had acted with “callous disregard for any pain they might suffer” and considered the case proven on both counts in a ruling made public yesterday (27th Jan).

As the medical world geared itself up for another ‘thalidomide’ type case in 1999, researchers around the world started to discover that they weren’t able to reproduce Dr. Wakefield’s results. If there was a link between MMR and autism, they couldn’t find it. Nobody could. Only Dr. Wakefield and the lawyers paying him were able to find a link. How surprising is that?

After numerous independent doctors called into question Wakefield’s study, Lancet came out and admitted it didn’t meet standards of integrity and accuracy and should never have been published. Lancet’s reputation took quite a beating in the aftermath.

Even a newspaper got in on the story, The Times of London, bringing up clinical abuses and inconsistencies in the way Wakefield had conducted the study and demanding he be held to trial for it.

The end seems in sight for the corrupt doctor’s career, as he seems certain to be struck off by the General Medical Council as the two and half year investigation draws to a close, with a verdict of “serious professional misconduct” being almost predetermined at this point.

In this case, it was greedy lawyers who bought off a corrupt doctor, but it wasn’t just the lawyers. Wakefield also had financial interest in a company who was trying to market an alternative to the MMR vaccine. However, the alternative vaccine was less effective and hadn’t been adopted anywhere. If Wakefield could discredit MMR, then he stood to make a fortune. The end result of their greed has been dead babies.

In the end, science roots out bad eggs due to its distributed, competitive and independent nature. But there’ll always be bad eggs in science or any field of human endeavour. Ill-informed or outright ignorant parents are just as much to blame, however.

When evidence, facts and truth do not fit in with what the Government wants, simply sack those who’re promoting them! Not wanting sound scientific and medical principles clouding his judgement, home secretary Johnson has got rid of the head of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs, Professor Nutt.

The home secretary said that Nutt had been “lobbying for a change in policy”, citing this as his reason. Now I don’t know about you, Mr Johnson, but I thought the entire point of independent scientific advisors is to tell you politicians – and you are politicians, not medical professionals or scientists – what you should be doing. If that’s “lobbying for a change in policy” then the people doing things wrong are the politicians, not the scientists and doctors.

Alan Johnson, home secretary in question, stated “I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy” – yet he did not explain why policy is running contrary to scientific advice and if he thinks that science is at the whim of one man or is in any way belief based, he is sorely mistaken, because Nutt’s successor is going to be telling Johnson (or, more likely, his Conservative replacement) the exact same things based on the same data, the same evidence, the same reality.

This has been coming ever since Brown took office and started spouting nonsense like “Cannabis is lethal” and “Cannabis kills”, to which the Advisory Committee got back to Brown saying “we’ve reviewed the evidence, the medical data and there’s just no support for your claims” – Brown was not happy. How dare reality not respect Brown’s beliefs? It is the hallmark of failed leaders throughout modern history that they ignore independent scientific advice, from Napoleon’s dismissal of the steam ship to Bush’s promotion of “abstinence only” sex education. If a policy is not science based, not reality and truth based, then what exactly is Brown basing his policies on?

For his part, Professor Nutt is predicting that more of the ACMD advisors will be quitting, citing government interference in the scientific process. In this case, it seems the impact of facts and truth with politics has left reality in the worst shape, with politics blundering on as usual.

Nutt in particular believes that politicians wanting to appear “tough on drugs” for simple popularity reasons is undermining the entire purpose of drugs regulation:

There’s no point in having drug laws that are meaningless and arbitrary just because politicians find it useful and expedient occasionally to come down hard on drugs. That’s undermining the whole purpose of the drugs laws.

That’s right folks, Brown and his motley gang have no intention of making useful and working laws, they simply want to hoodwink people into liking them. I can think of another party which does the same, headed by a certain Griffin.

With all the media frenzy over the Mexican swine flu virus, I thought it might be nice if someone actually explained what’s going on and why. So I did.

The first thing many people ask is “What the hell does H1N1 mean?”. It’s the first thing I asked anyway. These are subtypes of the influenza A virus, we know about sixteen of each H and N. The H is a type of protein known as haemaggluttinin, the N is a protein called neuraminidase, both are the external face of the virus, what the immune system (and cells under attack) see.

All our modern flu is descended, at least in part, from what was quite literally the mother of all flu – The H1N1, so numbered because that was the first one we studied. This was the Spanish flu of 1918 where two in five were infected, globally, and 50 million people died. This H1N1 never went away, it’s the seasonal flu that seems to go around every winter, not quite as deadly as it was back then.

Due to every fundamentalist’s worst enemy, evolution, flu changes rapidly but even for a virus, which evolve at lightning pace anyway, influenza A is something special. It has numerous subtypes which stick to certain species. The main three we’re concerned with are human flu, avian flu and porcine (swine) flu.

The virus’ structure is very simple, it consists of a genome of 4,400 amino acids made into RNA, consisting of just under 14,000 bases. It has just eight genes, and each gene is modular, the virus can be assembled by just tossing the genes together, they’ll arrange themselves, this is how genes are so mobile between species in influenza A.

We initially thought the devastating pandemic of 1918 was caused by intermediate shuffling. As pigs can get BOTH avian and human viruses (humans don’t get avian viruses and birds don’t get human viruses) it’s common for the two viruses to share the same host. Due to how a virus replicates, when both viruses are in the same cell, the results will be a random shuffling of their genomes. We believe this to be how flu gains new genetics, it shares between the avian and human lines (and the pig lines!) while in pigs, the pig being an intermediary.

In 2002, it was revealed that of the 4,400 amino acids in H1N1 (which before 1918 was a bird strain) less than 30 of them changed to make it transmissible in and deadly to humans. Normal bird flus, which are usually strains of H5N1 and H5N2 these days, cannot transmit from human to human (they cannot cross the lining of the lungs) so the bird flu scare of a few years back ONLY infected humans who had direct contact with the birds, it was not contagious from human to human. The scare was that it would encounter a H1N1 variant and so gain the ability to transmit in humans, this appears not to have happened.

This means that the H1N1 Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 did not use a porcine intermediary, it gained its ability to kill and travel with humans while still in birds. We’re worried that H5N1 will do that.

We need to be on alert because, even if this variant of H1N1 from Mexico does turn out to be fairly benign (we believe it will), it’s spreading so rapidly that it will inevitably encounter the H5N1 “bird flu” in pigs, pigs in China already carry H5N1. Once this happens, it’d be like adding the right two chemicals together to make a bomb.

Flu is constantly evolving at a phenomenal rate, even by virus standards (only HIV evolves faster, but that’s because HIV is an extremely unstable virus), we added the antigen H16 in 2005 and N9 was discovered in the 1980s. Drugs which worked very well against it in 1994 (95% effective) are now (2008 research) less than 1% effective. Each strain constantly shuffles its genes around and obtains new versions of them (or reobtains older ones) and so changes ever so slightly.

In all, don’t worry too much H1N1 is a common variant of flu and most of us have partial immunity to it.

So, for various types of the flu virus:
H1N1 is everywhere and usually appears each winter, it was the Spanish flu of 1918, a variety of it is also the Mexican swine flu everyone’s so fussed about.
H1N2 is also endemic to humans (and pigs), like most H1N1s, it is not usually fatal.
H2N2 was the Asian flu of 1957 and is thought to have died out (though a virus with the same H and Ns could reappear)
H3N2 was the Hong Kong flu of 1969 and is still sometimes seen in pigs.
H5N1 was a threat in 2006 but did not gain the ability to transfer from human to human.
H7N7 can infect species of animal most varieties of flu cannot, but does not infect humans.

With all that out of the way, why is this particular flu so worrying? Part of it is in the body’s response to it. Most of the time, we just feel lousy and sneeze a lot, then get better a week or two later. H1N1 and H5N1 can, however, become “cascade reaction” forms where the body sends FAR too many lymphocytes to the lungs to combat the virus, these form mucous which coats the inside of the lungs and makes it hard, if not impossible to breathe. The victim then asphyxiates. So far it’s unclear (and unlikely – Spanish flu H1N1 lost this ability to become the common H1N1 of today) whether this strain does that, but all flus can be deadly due to opportunistic effects, where an unrelated infection (such as pneumonia) takes advantage of the body’s defences being busy with the flu.

To kill some myths that have been travelling around Twitter and Facebook:
- You cannot catch the flu from eating pork, bacon or another porcine product, even if you eat it raw like the bloody Germans do. Not only is the virus not present in muscle tissue, but it cannot survive our digestive tract, is destroyed by freezing and cooking and is generally extremely fragile outside a living host.
- You’re very unlikely to catch it from a live or dead pig, the risk is in human to human transfer.
- No, it won’t kill half of everyone. It caused most trouble in Mexico where it interacted with another local form of flu. Cases in the United States have so far been no more pathogenic than normal flu.
- No, it is not a strain of H1N1 escaped from a lab, it’s a purely wild-derived strain.

From The Telegraph is a rather well written article which has about as much scientific accuracy as that American Creationist museum.

Point by point rebuttal mode engaged!

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

“It hasn’t risen in 50 years”, right? See right. 118 tidal gauges all agree the sea level has indeed risen in 50 years. More here. Study after study, experiment after experiment, measure after measure: All of them show rising sea levels. How stupid does this guy think we are?

The next argument used is “latent heat needed to melt ice”. It’s got just enough physics in it to seem plausible, so I’ll explain what it is. When we heat ice, it warms linearly with energy put in, until it starts to melt. Then the ice stops warming, the energy isn’t raising temperature, it’s driving the state change from solid to liquid.

Now how this supports Mr ex-scientist’s junk I’m not quite sure. Nobody’s saying that melting ice will (or has) contribute much to sea level change, at least not in the short term (hundred years or so). The sea level rises will come from temperature changes. Warm water is larger than cool water, all liquids expand as they warm, just as solids and gases do. This is the principle that a thermometer works on and this knowledge is ladled out daily to children in elementary schools worldwide.

We don’t worry about melting ice raising sea levels (yet), we worry because it changes the energy we get from the Sun. Ice is white and reflects heat very efficiently back out into space, if we lose the ice, we absorb more heat. This melts more ice and…you get the picture.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on “going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world”.

Tidal gauges are pretty “real world” to me. Now why is it, Mr fired professor, that whenever an ex-scientist wants to draw some attention to himself, he always goes straight to the media. He doesn’t publish a paper. He doesn’t show any data. He goes to spin a yarn. This is what we see here, no paper, no data, no measurements, just a lot of hot air.

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Another common tactic to use is “The Man is repressing me!” and here we see it used well. The Maldives aren’t worried about rising mean sea level, they’re worried about storm surges. We predict that tropical storms and hurricanes will become much more frequent. As New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina showed, a storm surge can temporarily raise sea level catastrophically. That’s what the Maldives are worried about. Mörner’s madness is irrelevant to them, same with Tuvalu.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

Nicely cherry-picked examples from our deceptive doctor. Unfortunately, as shown from the reams of data I linked above, he’s lying. The sea levels around Tuvalu have dropped in recent years (five of them!) but in the last 50 years, they’ve risen about 4 cm, as shown by tidal gauges at Tuvalu. That’s not much of a rise because sea temperature at Tuvalu hasn’t risen much.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC’s favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a “corrective factor” of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they “needed to show a trend”.

This is just wrong. Deceptive and very wrong. Satellite evidence has shown an upward trend since we started using it. IPCC scientists did not use a “corrective factor” to sneakily adjust the data. Satellite data needs to be calibrated to subtract things like storm surges, natural fluctuations due to warm and cool currents, seasonal variation and so on. If we didn’t, the chart would be up and down as a mess of noise. That’s why we “need to show a trend”, a trend up or down is lost when the data is very noisy. We eliminate the noise using “corrective factors”. High school students do this daily when they run an experiment several times and average their results. Using the raw noisy data will show no trend, it’ll show nothing. Suddenly, with a bit of understanding on our side, Dr Disaster’s claims seem to be no more than smoke and mirrors.

For more information, see Dr Mörner on YouTube (Google Mörner, Maldives and YouTube); or read on the net his 2007 EIR interview “Claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud”; or email him – morner@pog.nu – to buy a copy of his booklet ‘The Greatest Lie Ever Told’

Incredible! He’s selling something! You’d never have guessed!

It’s been floating around the last few days. Quite obvious on Google Earth 5 is a rather artificial looking grid just east of north Africa in the Atlantic. Click the image for a broader look.

The crazies were quick to snatch on to it without ever once engaging brainpower as being the lost city of Atlantis, an ancient myth.

Never once did their brains, were they to exist, realise that such a thing was impossible. The area with the pattern is clearly oceanic crust, not submerged continent. The patterns, described as “roads” are three kilometers wide and appear as trenches. I’ll let Google say what really is there:

“In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artefact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor.”

The lines? The paths of the boats.

So much for “Atlantis”. Google Earth is a wonderful thing and many new things have been discovered with it. It, however, cannot create reality from myth, nor can it operate independently of commonly known geology.

It’s all over the web.

Scientists, especially in the field of climate change, are a conservative bunch. They put in the most favourable, the least changing data and work from that, it’s part of the scientific method’s defences against sensationalism. However, sometimes it means that results are too conservative.

As it is with climate modelling. Supercomputers or even your computer are put to task to model how the future climate will play out given the climate records of history. When put on the weather records of the 19th century, for example, they can successfully predict the weather records of the 20th century, even if the computer was given no knowledge of them.

Just last year a team of respected scientists predicted that the summer Arctic would be ice-free by 2040, but they’d grossly overestimated how much ice was actually there. Mapping the extent of ice is easy, but mapping its volume is not and they’d hugely underestimated the actual volume of ice. (To make this simpler, they’d overestimated the ice area but underestimated the ice depth)

Now, a new study from Maslowsky et. al. from the Naval Postgraduate School in California, USA, have used the most accurate and up to date data yet and arrived at a shocking conclusion; There will be no ice over the arctic at all in just five to six years. They used data from 1979 to 2004, even ignoring 2005 and 2007, where more ice was lost in the summer than ever before. If anything, their estimate is already too timid.

Maslowski is, however, known for undercutting the dates of most other researchers but never by this much. He contends that other models had overestimated the volume of ice and also underestimated the heat delivered by ocean currents and convection. He points out that ice loss from 2000 to 2004 was far in excess of the current models but his model predicted them most accurately.

The BBC also sought comment from Professor Wadhams of Cambridge University, who uses data from Royal Navy submarines to measure arctic ice. Wadhams believes that older climate models have not been using actual reality as enough of a guide. His data shows that the arctic ice is thinning faster than it is shrinking and that ice reflects heat back into space, so a loss of ice causes greater loss of ice.

The last word remains to be said and, like all science, Maslowsky’s work will need to be confirmed and scrutinised by independent researchers who are most likely already hard at work. If he’s right, however, the polar bear will be extinct in the wild by 2015.