Writers

Poisons of the Mind and other writing by Jon Franklin

UFOs Cause Global Warming by Michael Crichton


Misc

Who's Fueling Whom?

Whatever You Do, Don't Forget to Panic

Fluorescent vs. incandescent? Environmentalists can't decide

100+ Facts about DDT

How Lincoln saved the world

Poor Sweden

The World is Getting Better

James Watson Tells Inconvenient Truth

Is There Anything Good About Men


Climate

Cosmic Rays and Earth's Climate

The Critical Flaw with Catastrophic Global Warming Theory

Ten Questions About Global Warming

Fortnight Of The Undead

Year of Global Cooling

Global Temperatures are Uncorrelated with Carbon Dioxide Trends This Last Decade

Clouds

Ozone and CO2: Deja vu *

Nature's Thermostat

Greenhouse Effect by the Numbers

The Deniers:

Statistics needed

Warming is real - and has benefits

The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science

Polar scientists on thin ice

The original denier: into the cold

The sun moves climate change

Will the sun cool us?

The limits of predictability

Look to Mars for the truth on global warming

Limited role for C02

Climate change by Jupiter


Health

How We've Come to Believe That Overeating Causes Obesity

The Myth of Sloth

Inquiring Minds Want to Know: When are Food and Health Claims Real?

Our Healthiest Weight is Not What we Think

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus

Asbestos *

The Great Cholesterol Myth

Don't Bother With Polyunsaturated Food

The Obesity Paradox *

The Salt Wars

Good Salt, Bad Salt...

Second-hand Smoke and the Power of Gross Statistical Fraud *

The Science of Sweets

Fat and Happy

Four Big, Fat Myths

Is Atomic Radiation as Dangerous as We Thought?

On Obesity, What the Researchers Didn't Find


* Reproduced as original source not available

Classics


Poisons of the Mind

Let me tell you a war story. Around 1980, when I was on The Baltimore Sun, I was assigned to cover the developing Agent Orange scandal. People were saying the defoliant had not only poisoned the Vietnamese countryside but our own soldiers...

So you can imagine my horror when this story, the biggest of my life, began to slip through my fingers like so much journalistic quicksilver. I couldn't substantiate anything... anything at all...

Get full story: Poisons of the Mind


UFOs Cause Global Warming

My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today...

Get full story: UFOs Cause Global Warming


Newest


Cosmic Rays and Earth's Climate

...Such claims of solar variation insufficiency survive because indications of feedback mechanisms were supported only by historical records and statistical associations but were not empirically demonstrated (never mind that situation applies particularly to the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis, the simple fact is that hypothesis is currently politically correct and hence requires no evidentiary support). This situation has now changed because Svensmark and the team at the Danish National Space Center have experimentally demonstrated the very mechanism they proposed a decade ago.

How big a deal is this indirect cloud effect? Huge, actually. In just 5 years it was responsible for a 2% decrease in low clouds (the kind that reflect incoming solar radiation by day) which, in turn, equates to an increase in surface warming of 1.2 Wm-2 from incident radiation -- equivalent to some 85% of the IPCC's estimate for the effect of all carbon dioxide increase since the Industrial Revolution...

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How We've Come to Believe That Overeating Causes Obesity

The bipartisan Mississippi legislation, which proposed to ban restaurants from serving fat people purportedly to help them lose weight, has highlighted the most popular misconception about fat people. One that even a lot of fat people have been led to believe: that they overeat and that's why they're obese.

This concept has been drilled into us and "everybody knows" it to be true. But is it? Suppose we've been convinced of this by the continuation of a fundamental misinterpretation of anecdotal evidence and certain studies — suggesting that a correlation between overeating and some obese people means that overeating causes obesity. You're about to learn that this common fallacy of logic is precisely what has misled conventional wisdom to believe something that isn't true — when, in fact, the science and far sounder clinical research for more than half a century has disproven it...

Get full story: How We've Come to Believe That Overeating Causes Obesity


The Critical Flaw with Catastrophic Global Warming Theory

...Climate catastrophists often argue that global warming theory is "settled science." And they are right in one respect: We have a pretty good understanding of how CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas and cause the earth to warm. What is well agreed upon, but is not well communicated in the media, is that a doubling of CO2, without other effects that we will discuss in a moment, will heat the earth about 1 degree Celsius (plus or minus a few tenths). This is not some skeptic's hallucination -- this is straight out of the IPCC third and fourth assessments. CO2, acting alone, warms the Earth only slowly, and at this rate we would see less than a degree of warming over the next century, more of a nuisance than a catastrophe...

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The Myth of Sloth

...Next, look closely at how "activity" is defined. The BRFSS survey asks only about leisure time activity -- activity engaged in "when not working." That does not mean that those without abundant leisure time to exercise are not active -- but for this survey, activity done in the course of a workday doesn't count.

So, a housekeeper, construction worker, gardener, delivery person, store stocker, medical worker, handyman, rancher/farmer, nurse, and even that aerobic instructor who moves practically nonstop all day would not be considered active. Their activity isn't during leisure time to count...

Get full story: The Myth of Sloth