The cancer stories you never hear

This story makes me think of the heroes among us who work, mostly quietly, to overcome the bureaucracies of government and the endlessly tangled health care outcomes created by the thousands of controls imposed by government and their regulators, and then by the companies and professionals subject to those regulations. It seems that no matter where you live these days, the remnants of individual rights and freedoms are being eroded and the barriers between patient and medical professionals are growing.

Who among us has not witnessed a family member or friend do battle with health care bureaucracies to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it? Time is money. Time is life. Precious individual lifetimes and lives are being sacrificed to the idea that collectivist/altruist fantasies of health care are better than a system where the people with the power are the patient and the medical professional. A system that protects individual rights and never violates them. A system known as freedom and which has been branded as capitalism.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-cancer-stories-you-never-hear

Climate of injustice

 A response to a letter in The Low Down, Sept 14-20, 2022 titled "Together for climate justice"

I am responding to the seemingly endless demands by the La Peche Coalition for a Green New Deal to forcefully implement policies to combat the gas of life - carbon dioxide. It is sad to read so many letters based on ignorance of science, economics and most of all a proper ethical framework.

For over 20 years I have closely followed the evolution of scientific knowledge about our climate by reading many books written by eminent scientists and subject-matter experts and keeping an eye on many of the thousands of studies connected to the Earth's climate. Long ago I could tell from a broad review of the literature that climate alarmism was based on distortions, bad statistical and scientific methodology, and most of all bad ideology. The premise that the Earth is a delicate nurturer best left untouched by man's activities is contrary to the nature of human life, which is to apply reason to the challenges of survival in a naturally dangerous and deficient environment. Humans thrive only by reshaping and improving our world. I have come across thousands of studies and many basic facts of reality that directly contradict the idea that there is any kind of climate crisis and anyone who does a broad reading of the literature would easily find the same. I encourage readers to see for themselves, perhaps starting with the recent book "Fossil Future" that provides an irrefutable case and moving on from there for those who want more technical information.

Economically, fossil fuel energy presently makes up more than 80% of the world energy supply and is always the best and preferred way for poor countries to solve their problems of starvation, disease and suffering. Three billion people have less energy than a typical refrigerator and have a massive need for more energy. Alarmists almost always ignore the massive benefits of fossil fuel energy and focus only on the manageable side-effects, like focusing only on vaccine side-effects and ignoring the benefits. Wind and solar may have a small role to play in generating electricity but due to their intermittent, dilute and unreliable nature they are spectacularly unsuited for economical grid-scale power, plus require massive mining projects mostly in third world countries and dictatorships, leading to horrible pollution problems. A call to end fossil fuel energy is a call for the continuation of uman suffering for the billions of people who do not yet enjoy our level of energy capability and te mass murder of those who would lose the life-giving energy from fossil fuels we now enjoy. 

Politically, a call for a green new deal is a call for fascism, as few populations will voluntarily choose societal suicide for very long. Witness the dramatic policy reversal in the UK when it became clear that mass suffering would quickly result from the loss of reliable, cheap energy. If all state coercion and subsidies was removed from the energy market and humans were free to produce and trade, I know there would be almost no wind and solar infrastructure built and human progress would leap forward.

Ethically, the right framework is one of respect for human rights: your right to peacefully pursue your own values and to keep the product of your work. It is unethical to lie about the state of scientific knowledge in an effort to achieve power over the lives of others, unethical to call for the destruction of a safe, cheap and reliable energy system that sustains the lives of billions of people with no viable replacement in hand, unethical to cry for the use of political force against billions of innocent people trying to live in peace. The right ethical path is one towards an objective assessment of reality, the recognition of the ability of individuals to think for themselves and to produce values to trade with others and a government whose function is to protect our rights and never violate them. We have a long way to go but a move in the right direction would be a good start. It begins with every individual thinking.

A response to "The horrible possibility of a sixth extinction event"

When my news feed delivered an article titled "The horrible possibility of a sixth extinction event" written by a man who is stated to have spent the last few years writing a book on climate change I took a peek and then because the article was so heavy on politics and projections while being short on science and reason I was moved to write a short rebuttal.

At the bottom of the article there is a list of 22 references but they are almost all links to political bodies, political documents or opinion pieces. Not one of them is a link to an observation of meaningful observations of reality in the full context. I will quote from the article and provide well-known scientific data such as you can find in the scientific literature or textbooks for each to illustrate just how far from reality are the claims made in the article and presumably the author's book.

Statement 1. "Everyone is aware of the fires and floods and dire predictions for the future."

Rebuttal 1. Awareness of news does not mean it is a fact. Since we have access to news about everywhere and everything all the time it is easy to mis-perceive reality without objective measurements to put information into context and make it knowledge. The study below clearly shows a large decrease in North American wildfires since the industrial revolution. This is due to factors such as better land management, fire detection and suppression technologies, all powered by abundant affordable and scalable fossil fuel energy.

The same goes for drought, by the way, with a steady decline over recent decades due to technologies like irrigation, fertilizers, weather forecasting and the like.

When it comes to floods, I presume the author refers to floods caused by sea level rise. In this case, like the others I will touch on, the full context includes looking at the historical record rather than models projecting doom. The graph that follows shows sea level over the last 24,000 years and highlights the effect of the end of the last glaciation that led to a sea level increase of 120 meters as most of the ice sheets covering land melted. The last few thousand years include a very gradual and steady rise, although this varies significantly depending on where the measurement is made. Tectonic plates move and collide steadily and some land masses are still rebounding from the mass of ice that pushed them down for millennia. Thanks to abundant machine energy humans can modify their shorelines and even raise buildings and cities if needed. With sea level changing slowly and steadily we have plenty of time to adapt to local changes. People in the Netherlands have managed to live below sea level for centuries and more people than ever before are choosing to build and live at the edge of the oceans.

Statement 2. The extinction of all living things is pretty well guaranteed unless our species starts acting now.

Rebuttal 2. There is literally no scientific data to support this statement and not even the biased IPCC science report makes any such assertion. In contrast, all measures of pollution and environmental damage decrease once a society reaches a sufficient level of wealth and this phenomenon is known as an Environmental Kuznets Curve. Seventy five years ago cities in the western world that were filled with air and water pollution are now far cleaner and safer and this occurs wherever freedom is allowed to grow and energy production flourishes.

Statement 3. Nature has always produced Co2 and methane, and it stored it through natural processes. This production and storage cycle was carefully balanced until we humans came along.

Rebuttal 3. This statement anthropomorphizes nature by using the word "carefully." Yes, there are many factors in balance in nature but nature, both living and inanimate is also constantly in change. Not only it is well established that the greenhouse effect of CO2 is a logarithmic one with further amounts having an ever-diminishing effect since a saturation point for the absorption of specific wavelengths is reached, the future effect of increasing Co2 is calculated to be about 0.5C. The graph that follows shows the geological history of Earth over the last 60 million years and CO2 has almost always been much, much higher than today and we can see that the correlation between CO2 and temperature is negligible. When CO2 is higher plant life flourishes and thus so does animal life. The graph shows the present CO2 level is close to a record low while there are periods of much higher CO2 and lower temperature. Over the shorter time scale of the last six hundred thousand years, Antarctic and Greenland ice core studies show that warming occurs first and CO2 level follows with an average lag of 600 years. 

Statement 4. News reports of wildfires, floods, hurricanes, droughts, melting ice fields, deaths by hyperthermia and killer pollution have become the new normal. 

Rebuttal 5. While it is true that news reports of natural disasters are the new normal, this is because we have so much more news, not because people are dying at a greater rate. In fact, it is just the opposite - and dramatically so. Deaths from extreme weather events have declined over the last hundred years - not by a factor of two or five, not even by a factor of ten, but by a factor of fifty - a 98% drop in deaths. This is due to our machine power that enables us to build resilient infrastructure, warm us of coming weather events, mobilize resources to support people at risk and rescue those in imminent danger. Deaths from cold are more than five times greater than those from heat, so a slight warming has saved lives. 

Statement 5. Once past the tipping point, global warming will keep on increasing beyond control. The eventual destruction of the Earth’s ecological systems will then eliminate the Earth’s supply of breathable air and potable water, and critically reduce habitable lands.

Rebuttal 5. There is no evidence for such a tipping point, it is pure and arbitrary speculation. Since CO2 in the atmosphere has been many times higher and no runaway warming occurred and since as pointed out above the potential impact of further CO2 is so small, this assertion is simply fear-mongering.

Statement 6. The August 2021 IPCC report stated, “Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level.” 

Rebuttal 6. There is no science to support this. This is a political statement and not a scientific one. For example, the graph below shows satellite data for the Antarctic since the start of the satellite era and it shows no change. Sea level was discussed above.

Statement 7. Can the human species become extinct? Why not? 

Rebuttal 7. The first question is a rhetorical statement since humanity's survival is not guaranteed by nature but rather is a constant struggle against a naturally dangerous environment. The second question is a matter of mastering machine energy, since with enough energy humanity can colonize the Moon, Mars and other planetary bodies and build starships that would enable us to leave our solar system. Heavier than air flight was invented just a short time ago (when my grandmother was born) and in just a few of my grandmother's lifespans we have advanced our knowledge and machine power more than in all of prior human history. Today a SpaceX ship is close to launch that is two thousand times cheaper to operate than NASA's best effort. 

Conclusion: for every assertion of danger or doom in the article it is easy to find hard evidence of the contrary or else the statement can be seen as lacking evidence - to be an arbitrary assertion. Since the statements are so consistently wrong, we must conclude there is a strong bias present in the writer's mind. If the statements were only partly wrong or were wrong in different directions then at least we could say there has been an honest effort to discover the truth. 

Energy is life. Energy is progress. Energy is the future of human flourishing. With energy mastery all is possible. In the name of all that is good about human life we need the freedom to explore all sources of energy, to experiment, to fail, discover new methods and applications. Today, fossil fuel energy powers 80% of all humanity's energy needs and those needs are growing fast, as is fossil fuel energy. Fossil fuels provide safe, dense, flexible, industrial scale energy that powers all other industries. Nuclear energy of some type is the most likely successor but has been criminalized by pressure from environmental advocacy groups since its discovery and is unsuitable in many applications. No other substitute for fossil fuels is know today.

All proposals to stop energy progress in the name of the weather, climate or pollution ignore all the fantastic advantages of energy capabilities. Such forecasts of doom are always based on hypotheses that have been proven false or upon models that have failed to predict real-world measurements. For humanity to flourish we require thinking that is firmly rooted in observations of reality, that are objective instead of subjective or arbitrary. 

Regulators must not act now to forestall climate disaster

 The March 2022 edition of Canada's Investment Executive trade newspaper published an Editorial that was so badly done I had to comment. I sent them a letter to the editor but don't expect it will be published. Here is what I sent.

It is a disservice to the readership served by the Investment Executive that the editor promotes political IPCC climate alarmism rather than proven science on this subject. 

There are many sources if you want to learn about the state of scientific knowledge related to our climate, including the reports of the Non-Governmental International Panel On Climate Change (NIPCC), the annual “the State of the Climate” report, dozens of carefully researched books such as those by Bjorn Lomborg, Alex Epstein, Patrick Moore, Steve Koonin and of course thousands of articles from the peer-reviewed scientific literature demonstrating that the hypothesis for dangerous man-made global warming is false and the proposed political actions are destructive. The IPCC Summary For Policymakers is as far as many journalists go, and this document is not scientific but political. 

When it comes to climate-related risks, by far the greatest is that of government and regulatory interference. A perfect example of this is playing out these days with huge increases in energy prices caused by years of governments attacking the most abundant, cheap, dense, flexible and scalable energy known to man: fossil fuels. Now that the folly of relying on the Russian dictator for oil and gas is apparent and the insanity of relying on dictators in China for the minerals required for intermittent and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar is becoming apparent, economically and scientifically illiterate politicians who have threatened to “end fossil fuels,” promoted net-zero and pushed ESG are blaming high energy prices on the very businesses they have been trying to destroy. 

Human beings, left free to innovate and produce (especially in the energy field that powers all other industries) has easily and can continue to adapt even better to the historically modest changes recently seen in our climate. When coercion is used against producers and one-size-fits-all political rules are made, then risks become systemic instead of diversified. The editors of a newspaper giving voice to the investment sector should do proper due diligence instead of promoting ideas that are demonstrably false and causing great damage to human flourishing.