Dumb and Dumber

I am not so secretly amused by the emergence of the term “warmist“.

“Global warming” is a dumb name for a single, highly academic globally averaged measure of one of the many harmful effects of mankind’s pollution of our environment. Focusing on global warming is like focusing on smoke damage to your drapes during a house fire. Pollution is the problem to be solved.

The big polluters are very pleased that the rest of us are wasting time calling each other names instead of looking for a sensible common ground.

Ever wonder where all that road salt went?

Stroud Water Research Center has the the skinny.

A couple of years ago a salt truck driver decided it was quittin’ time and dumped the end of his load in a two-foot deep dune across Upper Pike Creek Road, where it impeded traffic more than the snow it was supposed to be melting. After a while I went out and shoveled it up into a couple of garbage-bag-lined steel trash cans, and I’ve been using it ever since to melt ice at the local Unitarian Church (don’t want those elderly church ladies to slip, they are the backbone of the nation!).

I’d be happier if the USA gave up on salting and plowing roads entirely, but perhaps our people don’t have enough common sense and imagination to survive winter in the real world any more. Certainly most Americans I meet can’t realistically conceive of a world without road salt or snowplows… a world that we once took for granted.

Fighting “Doubt Science”

In 2010 Dr. Laura Welch wrote an exhaustively researched and documented amicus brief to the Michigan Supreme Court titled “Asbestos Exposure Causes Mesothelioma, But Not This Asbestos Exposure” exposing the practice of “doubt science”. The brief was signed by 51 other notable physicians and medical researchers.

…the vast amount of additional scientific information regarding asbestos and mesothelioma, provides more than sufficient evidence to allow someone to conclude within a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that a mesothelioma in a mechanic who worked with asbestos-containing brakes was caused by that asbestos exposure. Since 2000, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler have paid over $30,000,000 to hire consultants for the purpose of generating the very papers they rely upon, and for testifying regarding those papers in Courts.

One of the main industry experts has acknowledged that the papers were conceived and authored for the purpose of buttressing testimony in court cases involving mechanics suffering from mesothelioma.

The same expert also acknowledged that this business model is a pattern he has also followed with dioxin, benzene, hexavalent chromium, beryllium, formaldehyde, and glycol ethers. Recent revelations regarding undisclosed involvement of the employer of these experts in connection with publication of a paper favorable to the chromium industry have been well publicized and led to the retraction of that paper.

It is in no way surprising that the experts and papers financed by these manufacturers conclude that asbestos in brakes can never cause mesothelioma. To the contrary, the exoneration of the sponsoring industry is the expected conclusion of doubt science.

Robert Kehoe, Charles Kettering and Thomas Midgley created doubt science so that General Motors and DuPont could knowingly poison the world with tetra ethyl lead. Over the years the Merchants of Doubt have become an accepted part of the American dialogue, and doubt science is used in courtrooms, newspapers and bar-rooms to justify and applaud all sorts of vicious, completely avoidable crimes against humanity knowingly committed by the wealthy corporations that own our political leadership in order to marginally increase their profits.