HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
When papers came out stating that cutting back on red meat didn't make any difference in your real risk of getting cancer, because a normal diet did not cause any more cancer, it came under fire by critics who had spent an alarming chunk of their careers criticizing modern diets.
Once upon a time a food company spent years in court defending itself against a government lawsuit about a marketing claim on their package that looked misleading. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission told Kraft they could not advertise that their cheese "singles" contained 5 ounces of milk because of the implication the cheese might have as much calcium as 5 ounces of milk when, in fact, they really only had as much calcium as 3.5 ounces of milk.
Sounds trvial, right? Not at a time when the
FTC and FDA defended the public from even subtle marketing deceptions.Fast forward to today, when plant juice calls itself milk and Non-GMO Project sells a non-GMO rock salt to a consumer base that does not know that in salt, there is no O for a G to M.
A new review of other papers claims that unless women stopped drinking alcohol a year prior to conception they probably gave their kids future congenital heart disease.The authors are not kidding. And binge drinking was correlated to 52 percent higher birth defects for males. The confounders are obvious, as they are for any exploratory paper: drinking was self-reported, congenital heart diseases are the most common birth defects, and the authors hand-selected studies that affirmed their hypothesis.
The organic food industry, even large players like Whole Foods, created a disturbing trend; lying to customers about whether or not organic food uses pesticides or chemicals.In reality, organic food is covered in pesticides. If they were not, instead of only being an average of 13 percent more expensive than regular food (thanks to Amazon squeezing efficiency, it was 20 percent and higher when Whole Foods was a separate company) it would be 80 percent. Pests and other natural blights would devastate their crops.
A few years ago, France's International Agency for Research on Cancer, a United Nations body with a checkered scientific and ethical history, used statistics to suggest that red meat was bad for health. It was easy. All they had to do was gather together studies that used rows of foods to meet columns of diseases and create a statistical link. Since they didn't have to do any actual science, they were able to declare that bacon was just as dangerous as plutonium or World War I mustard gas.To IARC, it's safer to drink glyphosate than to eat a hot dog
Union of Concerned Scientists is only really in top form when a Republican is in the White House because when the GOP is in control, they can be angry outsiders, but when a Democrat is in control, a bunch of their employees leave and join the administration. After the Obama election, they even lost their President to Department of Energy - ironic, because they hate energy, but preventing nuclear and natural gas was a cornerstone of their work so it made sense to officially engage in that effort.
A new paper looked at farm workers in Hawaii and found that before 1999 some of them had more heart attacks than non-farm workers and concluded the reason must be safe levels of pesticide exposure creating "subtle effects" over time.Epidemiology can achieve anything, like show that autism is linked to organic food, if the correlates are tortured enough. The confounders are obvious, like that the level of exposure to pesticides made no difference, but the authors declare their correlation is probably valid because a similar link was created in Taiwanese men who were exposed to high levels of pesticides.
Though age is the big risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, an analysis of Swedish twins has led some to believe that half of individual differences in Alzheimer's disease risk may be environmental.Chemists, toxicologists, and biologists note that we would have gone extinct long ago if our bodies had not been able to absorb, metabolize, ignore, or excrete trace substances but since 2005, when a new salvo against public trust in the modern world was opened, there has been talk that an "exposome" can cause all kinds of diseases.
Environmental Working Group, the trial lawyer organization that claims modern pesticides are killing us but the old kinds labeled as "Organic"(™) create healthier families, has a new conspiracy tale out, this time that a "chemical cocktail" in plain old drinking water is causing 100,000 cases of cancer per year.While USA Today (they'll blame Trump) and New York Times (they'll blame scientists) are sure to cover it, you don't need to be concerned. Like everything EWG does, this is manufactured hype.
Eight years ago I wrote about how environmental lobbyists working for environmental lawyer groups kept the federal government in such a tail-chasing frenzy nothing could ever really get accomplished.My frustration was over the Paiute cutthroat trout, a rare High Sierra fish that everyone agreed needed help. The government agreed, sportsmen agreed, the courts agreed, environmentalists agreed, but then it was environmentalists preventing it from happening.
Twitter is widely considered a cesspool because any unhinged crackpot can claim science is a vast corporate conspiracy, but at least claim they let everyone lie equally. Except U.S. political conservatives don't believe that is really true, they contend Twitter is biased against them.Gab hopes to take out the bias against political pundits that Twitter management happens not to like, promising a completely unregulated platform championing "free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online" but a new analysis by academics says that Gab still has its own hierarchy and elitism, it is just created by the free market rather than hidden Twitter employees turning knobs.
A recent analysis of 204,796 news articles about 204 mass shootings(1) over a 40-year period found that President Trump is not inventing things when he mentions a link between shootings and video games. He got it from mainstream media.Is corporate media racist? They found that 6,814 articles that mentioned video games when discussing mass shootings and video games were 8X more likely to be mentioned in media accounts when the shooting occurred at a school and the perpetrator was white male than when the shooter was African American, found the authors.
