So you don't actually accept the findings of the study. Gotcha.
I accept their observational data. I disagree with their tortuous conclusion that doesn't match their data:)
They observed no such thing. If you wish to prove otherwise, kindly cite the relevant finding.
Sure they did. They came up with a crass explanation for it, but it was quite clear that they observed that the more scientifically informed one was, the less likely one was to believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause unprecedented, catastrophic global warming.
Ignorant of what?
Believers are ignorant of the basic premise of the scientific method - that one must start off with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
So again: What new information or model disproves the established science concerning the anthropogenic causes of climate change?
You're having a hard time reading, aren't you:) I answered this question -
"It's actually quite old information - the "established science" on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming fails to meet even the most basic requirements of a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Similar to your gleeful quote of the article's wild postulation based on their observations, you've got an entire "science" of AGW/CAGW that simply places ad hoc special pleading after ad hoc special pleading out whenever predictions are refuted by observation, or when observations are troublesome to the central conceit of their natural climate change denial."
You've claimed repeatedly in the past that climate science has no falsifiable hypothesis - and been refuted, by myself and others.
You're being obtuse again. Firstly, simply disagreeing with me isn't a refutation, it's simply a contradiction. Secondly, "climate science" is exactly the kind of broad, generalization that leaves only straw men to critique. Be *specific* in what your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement is regarding human CO2 emissions, and any possible catastrophic climate change they may cause. Waving your hands wildly doesn't constitute specificity:)
3. The study then proposes (paraphrasing here) that these results support an alternate theory "cultural cognition thesis" which asserts that people deny climate change because it challenges an underlying worldview - even scientifically literate, analytical people exhibit cognitive dissonance. In other words - sceptics aren't ignorant. They are in denial.
You're confusing their postulation with their observed data. They *observed* that the more scientifically informed you are, the less likely you are to believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause unprecedented, catastrophic global warming. They postulate that the reason for this is that skeptics are in denial - they avoid addressing the obvious conclusion that believers are ignorant:)
Whereas you are claiming that scepticism arises from being informed, by substituting the concept of 'literate' with the concept of 'informed'. Hence my direct challenge to your assertion based around the information. If you can't actually front up that information, then your assertion is disproved.
You're being obtuse again - I've given you the key bit of information that discriminates between the scientifically informed mind, and the scientifically ignorant one: the understanding of the falsifiable hypothesis as the basis for the scientific method. Being so in formed, you seem to be hell bent on remaining ignorant of this very basic premise:)
What new information is there that would cause us to question the established science on anthropogenic climate change?
It's actually quite old information - the "established science" on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming fails to meet even the most basic requirements of a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Similar to your gleeful quote of the article's wild postulation based on their observations, you've got an entire "science" of AGW/CAGW that simply places ad hoc special pleading after ad hoc special pleading out whenever predictions are refuted by observation, or when observations are troublesome to the central conceit of their natural climate change denial.
I'll ask you again - have you a clearly necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement you'd wish to stand up for? Or is your fervent belief in a lack of natural climate change simply based on a general feeling inside your cockles?
You claimed The more scientifically informed you are, the less likely you are to believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause unprecedented, catastrophic global warming. Where is this new information?
You're being obtuse - the claim I made was clearly based on the cited article. The "new information" you're asking for is on step removed from the "new information" that the study purports to have found. The study found that the more scientifically informed you are, the less likely you are to believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause unprecedented, catastrophic global warming. What you're asking for is "what is the scientific information that people found that made them doubt apocalyptic predictions of doom"?
I'll assert to you that they key factor is that the more scientifically informed you are, the better you understand that science begins with a falsifiable hypothesis. Understanding that basic part of the scientific method naturally leads to skepticism of prophets of doom who don't have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement for their assertions.
Why do you continue to deny natural climate change? Why so hush hush about your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement?
Well, if you believe the apocalyptic predictions, the people who predict a 1mm rise/year rather than a 100mm rise/year will pay for their short sightedness by having their property flooded when the end times come. They've got skin in the game, the prophets of doom don't.
Please note the difference between observing that the sun comes up in the morning, and the foolish idea that it is that way because a rooster has crowed and somehow telekinetically affected a flaming ball of gas millions of miles away.
Warming happens naturally sometimes. Cooling happens naturally sometimes. Do you deny this?
Which was more flawed, the model saying it will get warmer, or the idiots saying global warming was not happening?
False dichotomy. The model saying it will get warmer because humans now control the weather, and natural changes no longer happen, does not become true simply because it happens to naturally get warmer.
If you want to play science, you have to start off with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement, which neither CAGW nor AGW has.
The problem is all about the consequences of being wrong.
The precautionary principle is emotionally compelling, but intellectually bankrupt. As per Pascal's wager (believing in God because if he was wrongly atheistic, naught but eternal fire and brimstone awaited), one simply cannot base one's actions upon apocalyptic predictions of doom, whether or not they are made by proto-Christians or new-age environmentalists.
Imagine the worst case scenario is that the sea will rise 100m. Now I've prevented building anywhere in the continental US. Trillions of dollars of economy wiped out, but you're talking hundreds of millions of lives and tens of trillions of dollars if we do rise 100m...so should we work on depopulating the continent and moving to the himalayas?
My problem is that these speculative predictions of sea level rise simply aren't based on anything falsifiable. If they predict 1m, and it only goes up 1mm, they'll whip out a few ad hoc special pleadings (volcanoes they didn't anticipate, or solar variations that fuddled their guess), and still insist that "oh noes, it's worse than we thought!"
Unfortunately, there is no consequence for the alarmists when sea level doesn't rise as they predicted. This lack of accountability means that anything goes, and bias rules the roost.
As for predictions of cataclysmic AGW, what is the earliest reference you can find in the past 150 years?
It is certainly true that in the past you have attempted, via rhetorical means, to shift the burden of proof on to others
Projecting much?:)
The burden of proof is in the affirmative. You're claiming that as of say, 1950, natural climate change is overwhelmed by human induced climate change, and that in the future, we can expect natural climate change to similarly be overwhelmed. If you want to play the science game, rather than the Church of Global Warming Apocalyptic Prediction game, start off with your falsifiable hypothesis statement. Until then, it's all religion and hand-waving on your part:)
If that were the case, then logically there must be available information which suggests that the current warming is not caused by human emissions, and thus, the last 150 years of scientific research into the issue is wrong.
I'd argue that it's mostly the last 20 or so years of scientific research, with their unattributed fiddling with data, hiding declines, and so on that is wrong...the other 130 years don't contain the assertions of cataclysm.
Most pertinently of course is that you, personally, have been repeatedly requested to provide proof of your assertion
And you, sir, have been repeatedly personally requested to provide your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement, so we can at least agree on what we're talking about:) So far, no such luck!
The problem lies not with carbohydrates as such, but rather with the sheer amount of refined carbohydrates in everything and our collective tendency to over-indulge in them. This gives our body a large surplus of energy and it deals with that in the only way it knows to: storing it as fat for later use in times when food is scarce. But food is never scarce in the western world, hence people just put on more and more fat.
Gary Taubes talks about this "obesity from prosperity" trope by citing the Pima indians.
Originally, the Pima were wealthy, and had plenty of food - so much that they were contracted to provide provisions to travelers through their lands. During this time, they were lithe and skinny.
A period of famine set in, as settlers upstream diverted water, and their lands dried up, and during this time, when they had to subsist on government rations of flour, sugar and coffee, they became thoroughly obese. By your hypothesis, under scarce food conditions, the Pima should have *lost* weight. Instead, they ballooned up, in a society that was arguably more physically active than anything modern man deals with, without any modern conveniences, like running water. The answer to this conundrum is to realize that the flour and sugar caused their fat cells to accumulate fat, *not* an abundance of food.
Another example Taubes brings up is obese women in Haiti with starving children. One could posit that these women are somehow hoarding calories for themselves (in order to get fat), and failing to give those calories to their children, but everything we know about maternal instincts goes against that - what woman would sneak that snickers bar for herself rather than feeding her child? Of course the insulin hypothesis addresses this as well - the woman is fat not because she is *over* nutritioned, but because she is *mal* nutritioned - she has nothing but cheap carbohydrates, and while she feeds herself and her child (probably feeding her child more than herself), her insulin resistance turns into fat, and her child simply starves.
The other good example Taubes gives is lipodistrophy, where the top of a woman is emaciated (not accumulating fat), but her bottom is significantly obese. Should we tell the top half to eat more, and the bottom half to eat less?
And the real question is this: is there any evidence that the climate denial community would ever accept as definitive proof of global warming? And the answer is no.
Let's be specific in terms here - global warming happens all the time naturally, you're trying to assert that recent warming was primarily driven by man. As for "definitive proof", I would ask first for a falsifiable hypothesis statement, and then a ruthless attempt to falsify it. To date, the AGW crowd has neither.
""Lord knows I don't want to tell anybody not to eat their fruits and vegetables.""
Ah, the cherry picked, misinterpreted quote - a favorite of the church of global warming:) Let's examine some context for a moment. Polland was talking about all the things they could agree on, and started touting fruits and vegetables, and Taubes interrupted:
"At the risk of sounding heretical, one of my favorite things to do, The key words in all these, say again, lord knows I don't want to tell anyone not to eat their fruits and vegetables, but it's always "likely" protective, "likely"...transfats are "likely" to be bad.
And again, the reason we have to say "likely" is cause when they do laboratory studies and they can isolate factors in the food that seem to be protective against cancer for instance in test tubes...you can do comparative studies where you take two groups of people and you say the groups who eat more margarine, more trans fatty acids are less... seem to have more heart disease than people who don't.
But these are all associations, and they don't answer the actual questions."
So when he says "lord knows I don't want to tell anyone not to eat their fruits and vegetables", he's covering himself because he *is* telling them that there isn't any proof that fruits and vegetables are "good". It may be "likely", but that's a cheap hedge.
Apparently your bullshit detector isn't calibrated properly:) Would you like to try a different Taubes quote out of context?:)
If you think she's right, then show me validated data that demonstrates that the prevalence of heart attacks is greater in poorer countries than in richer countries.
You're missing the point I think - from Minger's critique:
"Oversight of a third, potentially significant disease cluster. Myocardial infarction, hypertensive heart disease, stroke, brain and neurological diseases, and diseases of the blood and blood-forming organs share strongly statistically significant correlations with each other and with shared nutritional variables, such as non-rice grain consumption, while correlating inversely with the variables associated with diseases of affluence. Despite this, Campbell forces myocardial infarction into a disease cluster it does not naturally align with, and ignores the remaining diseases rather than attempt to explain their anomalous nonassociation with other Western conditions."
In other words, myocardial infarctions have less to do with diseases of affluence as it does to other nutritional variables, such as non-rice grain consumption. Yes, you can point out a correlation from myocardial infarction to affluence, but the *stronger* correlation is with shared nutritional variables.
"On pages 78-79 of “The China Study,” Campbell writes:
As blood cholesterol decreased from 170 mg/dL to 90 mg/dL, cancers of the liver, rectum, colon, male lung, female lung, breast, childhood leukemia, adult leukemia, childhood brain, adult brain, stomach and esophagus (throat) decreased.
However, citing the same univariate correlations, he could have also written:
As plasma glucose decreased, cancers of the liver, rectum, colon, male lung, female lung, breast, childhood leukemia, adult leukemia, childhood brain, adult brain, stomach, bladder, and cervix, as well as childhood and adult lymphoma, decreased."
So the alternate hypothesis of disease (that it is related to plasma glucose rather than blood cholesterol), is *just as supported* by the China Study as the hypothesis they chose to highlight (if not more, as you look at the data itself).
Minger's point isn't that poor nations have more heart attacks - it's that heart attacks correlate more with nutritional variables that Campbell dismissed than with the economic variables he chose to highlight.
Because of course, we're going to drive CO2 from 390ppm to 100,000ppm with human emissions, right?:)
How about you come up with the maximum CO2 concentration you can possibly imagine if we burnt every last bit of petroleum and vegetation down *right now*, and then we'll see just how scary things are:)
I'll suggest the way to arbitrate this is to first come up with a clearly falsifiable hypothesis. Battling quotes may be fruitless if you simply cannot agree on what the proposition is.
Of course by "falsifiable hypothesis", I mean all necessary and sufficient statements, not just "show that humans don't exist", since without humans, of course you can't have AGW, but the mere presence of humans doesn't imply AGW.
Start with a falsifiable hypothesis, and see where you get then.
So wait, should we be cutting down those damn oxygen producing plants because they're polluting?
I'll posit this - either both CO2 and O2 are pollutants because they are excrement of life (either plant based or animal based), or *neither* CO2 or O2 are pollutants because they are the engines of life (either plant based or animal based). Making the case that one is a pollutant, while the other is not, is difficult.
The more scientifically informed you are, the less likely you are to believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause unprecedented, catastrophic global warming.
The less scientifically informed you are, the more likely you are to believe that the past 60+ years of climate change has been mostly driven by human CO2 emissions, and that continued CO2 emissions will cause catastrophic global warming.
The talk about preconceived cultural bias goes for *both* sides - assuming that what we have is a large group of uninformed people who happened on the *right* answer, without actually being as well informed as those who assert the opposite answer, is a stretch, to say the least.
Of course, when push came to shove, we'd rather eat chronic toxins than starve, but make no mistake, paleolithic man ate more meat than plant. The genetically selected "fruit" we see in the stores has *no* resemblance at all to fruit in its natural state - that "healthy" and "natural" apple you see sitting in the produce section was genetically selected, and only continues to be available because we *graft* clones of it. On top of that, the year-round abundance of plant foods is completely unprecedented in human history - at least back in paleo times, after you finished eating all the nuts off a tree, you were out of nuts until time passed and more grew.
My argument is this - chronically elevated insulin levels cause disease. The only food that appreciably elevates insulin levels are digestible carbohydrates (we'll give spinach and celery and broccoli a pass here). Ergo, digestible carbohydrates are chronic toxins, that can be tolerated by some people, but to which others are particularly sensitive.
Carbohydrates are not and will never be a "toxin" to humans. It is the primary fuel for muscle activity. They are necessary for biological life as we know it. Toxins, my hat.
Actually, carbohydrates are chronic toxins. And thanks to the miracle of gluconeogensis, carbohydrates are completely unnecessary for human life. Our body will *make* glucose out of both protein and fat to supply a stable amount of blood sugar. Various people can tolerate various levels of this chronic toxin, but at the end of the day, there is simply no such thing as an essential carbohydrate.
3/4 of the population can't handle bread or similar carbs?
Yeah, there are apparently 4 quartiles of insulin resistance, with 25% that can pretty much tolerate any amount of toxic carbohydrates, and 25% that is incredibly hurt by carbohydrates, and two other quartiles that are somewhat hurt by carbohydrates. You'll notice this as the obesity rate plateaus to a maximum.
"Percent of adults age 20 years and over who are obese: 33.9% (2007-2008) Percent of adults age 20 years and over who are overweight (and not obese): 34.4% (2007-2008)"
So, close to 70% by the latest statistics from the CDC, but you can slice it a number of ways.
Do you believe that Campbell's clustering should be based on rates disease prevalence or not?
His clustering is arbitrary and capricious, in order to defend his primary conceit (i.e., plant-based diets are good, animal-based diets are bad). As per the quote before from Minger, "Despite this, Campbell forces myocardial infarction into a disease cluster it does not naturally align with, and ignores the remaining diseases rather than attempt to explain their anomalous nonassociation with other Western conditions."
Campbell is not consistent or justifiable.
And don't forget, this is a study of *correlation* - Campbell not only makes arbitrary decisions about what correlations he highlights, in order to preserve his thesis, but on top of that, implies (if not outright claims) that the relationship is *causal*. That is, even if one were to agree to his arbitrary clusters, it could be that he's showing that people more likely to die are more likely to choose to eat meat-based diets (perhaps in some attempt to self-medicate with the healing properties of animal flesh).
Minger's critique is thorough, well referenced, and stands as a full refutation of any claim of wisdom from the China Study. If you have a specific bone of contention with her analysis (a *specific* bone, not just "she seems snarky"), I'd love to hear it.
But at this point you can go back to papers written decades ago and validate their accuracy in predicting the warming trend we have experienced.
So say we have 5 papers, all of which have the basic conceit that CO2 drives global warming (rather than the other way around). 4 of them are falsified by observation. 1 of them is consistent with observations. Have you thereby proven the basic conceit, or have you hedged your bets by not having an actual falsifiable hypothesis?
When you have say, 26 major GCM models, should I be surprised that one of them might match observation for some limited period of time?
Name a specific observation that would falsify AGW or it's great grand-daddy CAGW (and be sure to make sure that it is not just necessary, but *sufficient* - yes, AGW and CAGW are false if humanity is shown not to exist, but the mere existence of humanity does not imply AGW or CAGW)
Not even Taubes goes so far as to say this
Have you read Taubes?
p454, "Good Calories, Bad Calories"
"1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization.
2. The problem is the carbohydrates in the diet, their effect on insulin secretion, and thus the hormonal regulation of homeostasis - the entire harmonic ensemble of the human body. The more easily digestible and refined the carbohydrates, the greater the effect on our health, weight and well-being."
The first clearly shows that the proposition that animal meats and fats are bad is absurd in his measure, and the second clearly shows that the proposition that fruits and vegetables are good is absurd in his measure.
some of the healthiest people I know eat wheat bread for lunch every day, and occasionally for breakfast as well, with no ill effects.
It's absolutely true that a percentage of the human population, most likely about 1/4, is able to tolerate the chronic toxins we call carbohydrates with little or no ill effects. I'm not too worried about them - they'll keep ticking no matter what they eat. It's the other 3/4 of the population, who cannot stand the ill effects of high insulin levels because of their insulin resistance, that need the stern warnings. I mean, imagine if we treated hemophiliacs just like they were normal people who could clot blood - they need to be extraordinarily careful because of the inherent weaknesses of their body. Same thing with *all* fat people -> they might not be able to eat as much wheat bread as you can, without ill effect, and need specific, actionable information to help them with their problem.
So, while not everybody may have a problem with the modern "civilized" diet, everyone who *does* have a problem has it because of the effects of chronically elevated insulin levels.
Slashdot Mirror
I accept their observational data. I disagree with their tortuous conclusion that doesn't match their data :)
Sure they did. They came up with a crass explanation for it, but it was quite clear that they observed that the more scientifically informed one was, the less likely one was to believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause unprecedented, catastrophic global warming.
Believers are ignorant of the basic premise of the scientific method - that one must start off with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
You're having a hard time reading, aren't you :) I answered this question -
"It's actually quite old information - the "established science" on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming fails to meet even the most basic requirements of a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Similar to your gleeful quote of the article's wild postulation based on their observations, you've got an entire "science" of AGW/CAGW that simply places ad hoc special pleading after ad hoc special pleading out whenever predictions are refuted by observation, or when observations are troublesome to the central conceit of their natural climate change denial."
You're being obtuse again. Firstly, simply disagreeing with me isn't a refutation, it's simply a contradiction. Secondly, "climate science" is exactly the kind of broad, generalization that leaves only straw men to critique. Be *specific* in what your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement is regarding human CO2 emissions, and any possible catastrophic climate change they may cause. Waving your hands wildly doesn't constitute specificity :)
You're confusing their postulation with their observed data. They *observed* that the more scientifically informed you are, the less likely you are to believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause unprecedented, catastrophic global warming. They postulate that the reason for this is that skeptics are in denial - they avoid addressing the obvious conclusion that believers are ignorant :)
You're being obtuse again - I've given you the key bit of information that discriminates between the scientifically informed mind, and the scientifically ignorant one: the understanding of the falsifiable hypothesis as the basis for the scientific method. Being so in formed, you seem to be hell bent on remaining ignorant of this very basic premise :)
It's actually quite old information - the "established science" on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming fails to meet even the most basic requirements of a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Similar to your gleeful quote of the article's wild postulation based on their observations, you've got an entire "science" of AGW/CAGW that simply places ad hoc special pleading after ad hoc special pleading out whenever predictions are refuted by observation, or when observations are troublesome to the central conceit of their natural climate change denial.
I'll ask you again - have you a clearly necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement you'd wish to stand up for? Or is your fervent belief in a lack of natural climate change simply based on a general feeling inside your cockles?
You're being obtuse - the claim I made was clearly based on the cited article. The "new information" you're asking for is on step removed from the "new information" that the study purports to have found. The study found that the more scientifically informed you are, the less likely you are to believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause unprecedented, catastrophic global warming. What you're asking for is "what is the scientific information that people found that made them doubt apocalyptic predictions of doom"?
I'll assert to you that they key factor is that the more scientifically informed you are, the better you understand that science begins with a falsifiable hypothesis. Understanding that basic part of the scientific method naturally leads to skepticism of prophets of doom who don't have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement for their assertions.
Why do you continue to deny natural climate change? Why so hush hush about your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement?
Don't you want to share your truth with others? :)
Well, if you believe the apocalyptic predictions, the people who predict a 1mm rise/year rather than a 100mm rise/year will pay for their short sightedness by having their property flooded when the end times come. They've got skin in the game, the prophets of doom don't.
Please note the difference between observing that the sun comes up in the morning, and the foolish idea that it is that way because a rooster has crowed and somehow telekinetically affected a flaming ball of gas millions of miles away.
Warming happens naturally sometimes. Cooling happens naturally sometimes. Do you deny this?
False dichotomy. The model saying it will get warmer because humans now control the weather, and natural changes no longer happen, does not become true simply because it happens to naturally get warmer.
If you want to play science, you have to start off with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement, which neither CAGW nor AGW has.
The precautionary principle is emotionally compelling, but intellectually bankrupt. As per Pascal's wager (believing in God because if he was wrongly atheistic, naught but eternal fire and brimstone awaited), one simply cannot base one's actions upon apocalyptic predictions of doom, whether or not they are made by proto-Christians or new-age environmentalists.
Imagine the worst case scenario is that the sea will rise 100m. Now I've prevented building anywhere in the continental US. Trillions of dollars of economy wiped out, but you're talking hundreds of millions of lives and tens of trillions of dollars if we do rise 100m...so should we work on depopulating the continent and moving to the himalayas?
Prophets of doom simply don't impress me.
My problem is that these speculative predictions of sea level rise simply aren't based on anything falsifiable. If they predict 1m, and it only goes up 1mm, they'll whip out a few ad hoc special pleadings (volcanoes they didn't anticipate, or solar variations that fuddled their guess), and still insist that "oh noes, it's worse than we thought!"
Unfortunately, there is no consequence for the alarmists when sea level doesn't rise as they predicted. This lack of accountability means that anything goes, and bias rules the roost.
Of course. But leaked emails that show scientific malfeasance do: http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php :)
As for predictions of cataclysmic AGW, what is the earliest reference you can find in the past 150 years?
Projecting much? :)
The burden of proof is in the affirmative. You're claiming that as of say, 1950, natural climate change is overwhelmed by human induced climate change, and that in the future, we can expect natural climate change to similarly be overwhelmed. If you want to play the science game, rather than the Church of Global Warming Apocalyptic Prediction game, start off with your falsifiable hypothesis statement. Until then, it's all religion and hand-waving on your part :)
I'd argue that it's mostly the last 20 or so years of scientific research, with their unattributed fiddling with data, hiding declines, and so on that is wrong...the other 130 years don't contain the assertions of cataclysm.
And you, sir, have been repeatedly personally requested to provide your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement, so we can at least agree on what we're talking about :) So far, no such luck!
Funny, that's exactly what I think about things like cap and trade.
Wait, wait, the CO2 molecule cares where it came from before it decides that it can be used by plants?
Is H2O created by hydrogen powered vehicles a pollutant because it was a *choice* made by humans? Shall we now ban dihydrogen monoxide? :)
Gary Taubes talks about this "obesity from prosperity" trope by citing the Pima indians.
Originally, the Pima were wealthy, and had plenty of food - so much that they were contracted to provide provisions to travelers through their lands. During this time, they were lithe and skinny.
A period of famine set in, as settlers upstream diverted water, and their lands dried up, and during this time, when they had to subsist on government rations of flour, sugar and coffee, they became thoroughly obese. By your hypothesis, under scarce food conditions, the Pima should have *lost* weight. Instead, they ballooned up, in a society that was arguably more physically active than anything modern man deals with, without any modern conveniences, like running water. The answer to this conundrum is to realize that the flour and sugar caused their fat cells to accumulate fat, *not* an abundance of food.
Another example Taubes brings up is obese women in Haiti with starving children. One could posit that these women are somehow hoarding calories for themselves (in order to get fat), and failing to give those calories to their children, but everything we know about maternal instincts goes against that - what woman would sneak that snickers bar for herself rather than feeding her child? Of course the insulin hypothesis addresses this as well - the woman is fat not because she is *over* nutritioned, but because she is *mal* nutritioned - she has nothing but cheap carbohydrates, and while she feeds herself and her child (probably feeding her child more than herself), her insulin resistance turns into fat, and her child simply starves.
The other good example Taubes gives is lipodistrophy, where the top of a woman is emaciated (not accumulating fat), but her bottom is significantly obese. Should we tell the top half to eat more, and the bottom half to eat less?
http://reflow.scribd.com/6eq7pqq3pcyshyf/images/image-16.jpg
Let's be specific in terms here - global warming happens all the time naturally, you're trying to assert that recent warming was primarily driven by man. As for "definitive proof", I would ask first for a falsifiable hypothesis statement, and then a ruthless attempt to falsify it. To date, the AGW crowd has neither.
Ah, the cherry picked, misinterpreted quote - a favorite of the church of global warming :) Let's examine some context for a moment. Polland was talking about all the things they could agree on, and started touting fruits and vegetables, and Taubes interrupted:
"At the risk of sounding heretical, one of my favorite things to do,
The key words in all these, say again, lord knows I don't want to tell anyone
not to eat their fruits and vegetables, but it's always "likely" protective,
"likely"...transfats are "likely" to be bad.
And again, the reason we have to say "likely" is cause when they do laboratory studies
and they can isolate factors in the food that seem to be protective against cancer
for instance in test tubes...you can do comparative studies where you take two groups
of people and you say the groups who eat more margarine, more trans fatty acids are less...
seem to have more heart disease than people who don't.
But these are all associations, and they don't answer the actual questions."
So when he says "lord knows I don't want to tell anyone not to eat their fruits and vegetables", he's covering himself because he *is* telling them that there isn't any proof that fruits and vegetables are "good". It may be "likely", but that's a cheap hedge.
Apparently your bullshit detector isn't calibrated properly :) Would you like to try a different Taubes quote out of context? :)
You're missing the point I think - from Minger's critique:
"Oversight of a third, potentially significant disease cluster. Myocardial infarction, hypertensive heart disease, stroke, brain and neurological diseases, and diseases of the blood and blood-forming organs share strongly statistically significant correlations with each other and with shared nutritional variables, such as non-rice grain consumption, while correlating inversely with the variables associated with diseases of affluence. Despite this, Campbell forces myocardial infarction into a disease cluster it does not naturally align with, and ignores the remaining diseases rather than attempt to explain their anomalous nonassociation with other Western conditions."
In other words, myocardial infarctions have less to do with diseases of affluence as it does to other nutritional variables, such as non-rice grain consumption. Yes, you can point out a correlation from myocardial infarction to affluence, but the *stronger* correlation is with shared nutritional variables.
You can see her graphs of the actual data here:
http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/08/06/final-china-study-response-html/
Again, from her critique:
"On pages 78-79 of “The China Study,” Campbell writes:
As blood cholesterol decreased from 170 mg/dL to 90 mg/dL, cancers of the liver, rectum, colon, male lung, female lung, breast, childhood leukemia, adult leukemia, childhood brain, adult brain, stomach and esophagus (throat) decreased.
However, citing the same univariate correlations, he could have also written:
As plasma glucose decreased, cancers of the liver, rectum, colon, male lung, female lung, breast, childhood leukemia, adult leukemia, childhood brain, adult brain, stomach, bladder, and cervix, as well as childhood and adult lymphoma, decreased."
So the alternate hypothesis of disease (that it is related to plasma glucose rather than blood cholesterol), is *just as supported* by the China Study as the hypothesis they chose to highlight (if not more, as you look at the data itself).
Minger's point isn't that poor nations have more heart attacks - it's that heart attacks correlate more with nutritional variables that Campbell dismissed than with the economic variables he chose to highlight.
Because of course, we're going to drive CO2 from 390ppm to 100,000ppm with human emissions, right? :)
How about you come up with the maximum CO2 concentration you can possibly imagine if we burnt every last bit of petroleum and vegetation down *right now*, and then we'll see just how scary things are :)
Because of course we can expect human CO2 emissions to drive us from 390ppm to 500,000ppm?
How about just put yourself in a room with 0% CO2 and 0% O2 :)
I'll suggest the way to arbitrate this is to first come up with a clearly falsifiable hypothesis. Battling quotes may be fruitless if you simply cannot agree on what the proposition is.
Of course by "falsifiable hypothesis", I mean all necessary and sufficient statements, not just "show that humans don't exist", since without humans, of course you can't have AGW, but the mere presence of humans doesn't imply AGW.
Start with a falsifiable hypothesis, and see where you get then.
So wait, should we be cutting down those damn oxygen producing plants because they're polluting?
I'll posit this - either both CO2 and O2 are pollutants because they are excrement of life (either plant based or animal based), or *neither* CO2 or O2 are pollutants because they are the engines of life (either plant based or animal based). Making the case that one is a pollutant, while the other is not, is difficult.
The more scientifically informed you are, the less likely you are to believe that human CO2 emissions are going to cause unprecedented, catastrophic global warming.
The less scientifically informed you are, the more likely you are to believe that the past 60+ years of climate change has been mostly driven by human CO2 emissions, and that continued CO2 emissions will cause catastrophic global warming.
The talk about preconceived cultural bias goes for *both* sides - assuming that what we have is a large group of uninformed people who happened on the *right* answer, without actually being as well informed as those who assert the opposite answer, is a stretch, to say the least.
Of course, when push came to shove, we'd rather eat chronic toxins than starve, but make no mistake, paleolithic man ate more meat than plant. The genetically selected "fruit" we see in the stores has *no* resemblance at all to fruit in its natural state - that "healthy" and "natural" apple you see sitting in the produce section was genetically selected, and only continues to be available because we *graft* clones of it. On top of that, the year-round abundance of plant foods is completely unprecedented in human history - at least back in paleo times, after you finished eating all the nuts off a tree, you were out of nuts until time passed and more grew.
My argument is this - chronically elevated insulin levels cause disease. The only food that appreciably elevates insulin levels are digestible carbohydrates (we'll give spinach and celery and broccoli a pass here). Ergo, digestible carbohydrates are chronic toxins, that can be tolerated by some people, but to which others are particularly sensitive.
Actually, carbohydrates are chronic toxins. And thanks to the miracle of gluconeogensis, carbohydrates are completely unnecessary for human life. Our body will *make* glucose out of both protein and fat to supply a stable amount of blood sugar. Various people can tolerate various levels of this chronic toxin, but at the end of the day, there is simply no such thing as an essential carbohydrate.
Yeah, there are apparently 4 quartiles of insulin resistance, with 25% that can pretty much tolerate any amount of toxic carbohydrates, and 25% that is incredibly hurt by carbohydrates, and two other quartiles that are somewhat hurt by carbohydrates. You'll notice this as the obesity rate plateaus to a maximum.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/overwt.htm
"Percent of adults age 20 years and over who are obese: 33.9% (2007-2008)
Percent of adults age 20 years and over who are overweight (and not obese): 34.4% (2007-2008)"
So, close to 70% by the latest statistics from the CDC, but you can slice it a number of ways.
His clustering is arbitrary and capricious, in order to defend his primary conceit (i.e., plant-based diets are good, animal-based diets are bad). As per the quote before from Minger, "Despite this, Campbell forces myocardial infarction into a disease cluster it does not naturally align with, and ignores the remaining diseases rather than attempt to explain their anomalous nonassociation with other Western conditions."
Campbell is not consistent or justifiable.
And don't forget, this is a study of *correlation* - Campbell not only makes arbitrary decisions about what correlations he highlights, in order to preserve his thesis, but on top of that, implies (if not outright claims) that the relationship is *causal*. That is, even if one were to agree to his arbitrary clusters, it could be that he's showing that people more likely to die are more likely to choose to eat meat-based diets (perhaps in some attempt to self-medicate with the healing properties of animal flesh).
Minger's critique is thorough, well referenced, and stands as a full refutation of any claim of wisdom from the China Study. If you have a specific bone of contention with her analysis (a *specific* bone, not just "she seems snarky"), I'd love to hear it.
So say we have 5 papers, all of which have the basic conceit that CO2 drives global warming (rather than the other way around). 4 of them are falsified by observation. 1 of them is consistent with observations. Have you thereby proven the basic conceit, or have you hedged your bets by not having an actual falsifiable hypothesis?
When you have say, 26 major GCM models, should I be surprised that one of them might match observation for some limited period of time?
Name a specific observation that would falsify AGW or it's great grand-daddy CAGW (and be sure to make sure that it is not just necessary, but *sufficient* - yes, AGW and CAGW are false if humanity is shown not to exist, but the mere existence of humanity does not imply AGW or CAGW)
Have you read Taubes?
p454, "Good Calories, Bad Calories"
"1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization.
2. The problem is the carbohydrates in the diet, their effect on insulin secretion, and thus the hormonal regulation of homeostasis - the entire harmonic ensemble of the human body. The more easily digestible and refined the carbohydrates, the greater the effect on our health, weight and well-being."
The first clearly shows that the proposition that animal meats and fats are bad is absurd in his measure, and the second clearly shows that the proposition that fruits and vegetables are good is absurd in his measure.
It's absolutely true that a percentage of the human population, most likely about 1/4, is able to tolerate the chronic toxins we call carbohydrates with little or no ill effects. I'm not too worried about them - they'll keep ticking no matter what they eat. It's the other 3/4 of the population, who cannot stand the ill effects of high insulin levels because of their insulin resistance, that need the stern warnings. I mean, imagine if we treated hemophiliacs just like they were normal people who could clot blood - they need to be extraordinarily careful because of the inherent weaknesses of their body. Same thing with *all* fat people -> they might not be able to eat as much wheat bread as you can, without ill effect, and need specific, actionable information to help them with their problem.
So, while not everybody may have a problem with the modern "civilized" diet, everyone who *does* have a problem has it because of the effects of chronically elevated insulin levels.