Reuters Investigation Exposes New Science Scandal

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In a Special Report published on June 14, 2017, investigators at Reuters uncovered the shocking fact that an American scientist, Dr. Aaron Blair, the Chairman of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) Monograph 112 on glyphosate, suppressed critically important science.

The hidden science in question is recent data from the Agricultural Health Study (AHS), the largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted on pesticide exposure in humans. Evidence shows that Dr. Blair withheld updated data from the study which evaluates the pesticide exposure of more than 50,000 farmers and their families.  The updated data reinforces the study’s original conclusion in 2005 that there is no evidence linking glyphosate exposure to cancer incidence.

The AHS was led by scientists from the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), including Dr. Blair himself! Under oath, Blair admitted that had IARC considered the study, it likely would have changed its conclusion on glyphosate: “[the] data would have altered IARC’s analysis.”  Even so, IARC told Reuters it will not reconsider its conclusions on glyphosate, which are out of step with every other world regulator that has studied glyphosate.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that Dr. Blair, as an author of the AHS, was aware that this updated data existed since 2013.  Incredibly, he claimed that this critical data had not yet been published due to spacing constraints.

According to Reuters’ investigation, the data was not published in time because “there was too much to fit into one scientific paper.”  Since IARC made its determination based, in part, on “limited evidence” of cancer in humans, this data would have been significant.

WHY THIS MATTERS

This bombshell revelation is important for three reasons:

• It shows that IARC leaders do not abide by fundamental principles of science when forming conclusions, bringing into question the agency’s scientific integrity.

The fundamental tenets of a scientific approach are to identify a problem, form a hypothesis, objectively gather and analyze data, and come to a conclusion (whether one’s hypothesis is right or wrong) based on the analytical results. The Reuters investigation shows that IARC, a World Health Organization (WHO)-affiliated entity, failed to honor a key scientific principle of objectivity in gathering and analyzing data.

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June 23, 2017 at 03:58AM

Hinkley Point nuclear deal ‘risky and expensive’ 

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Planned nuclear power station at Hinkley Point

For some reason the UK has chosen to pay a lot more for its new nuclear power than anywhere else, using untried and complex technology, and now even the country’s own auditors are complaining about it. The fear seems to be that it could prove to be a vastly expensive pig in a poke.

UK government plans for a new £18bn nuclear power station have come under fire from public auditors, who call it “a risky and expensive project”, BBC news reports.

The case for the Hinkley Point C plant in Somerset was “marginal” and the deal was “not value for money”, according to the National Audit Office (NAO). The NAO said the government had not sufficiently considered the costs and risks for consumers.

The government said building the plant was an “important strategic decision”. The report comes nine months after the government granted final approval for the project, which is being financed by the French and Chinese governments.

State-controlled French energy firm EDF is funding two-thirds of the project, which will create more than 25,000 jobs, with China investing the remaining £6bn. Critics of the deal have warned of escalating costs and the implications of allowing nuclear power plants to be built in the UK by foreign governments.

Case ‘uncertain’

The NAO’s report centred on the role of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) in finalising the deal in 2016. At the time, said the NAO, the department’s own value-for-money tests showed “the economic case for Hinkley Point C was marginal and subject to significant uncertainty”.

“But the department’s capacity to take alternative approaches to the deal were limited after it had agreed terms,” the NAO added.”The government has increasingly emphasised Hinkley Point C’s unquantified strategic benefits, but it has little control over these and no plan yet in place to realise them.”

It added that consumers were “locked in” to years of paying for the plant.

Continued here.

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June 23, 2017 at 03:15AM

Hinkley Nuclear Deal ‘Cost Public £15Billion More Than It Should Have’

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The government’s deal for a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point has “locked consumers into a risky and expensive project with uncertain strategic and economic benefits”, according to a damning report by the National Audit Office.

Households will be forced to pay for Hinkley’s power via energy bills for 35 years and the total costs have risen from £6 billion to £30 billionEDF ENERGY/PA

Ministers failed to consider alternative ways of financing the plant, which could have halved the overall cost to households, the public spending watchdog found.

Households will be forced to pay for Hinkley’s power via energy bills for 35 years and the total costs have risen from £6 billion to £30 billion, the equivalent of £15 on the average annual bill.

The plant is under construction in Somerset and is due to open in 2025, supplying 7 per cent of Britain’s electricity. However, the NAO report recommends that the government produce a “plan B” to fill the gap in power generation if the project is delayed or cancelled. It notes that projects using the same reactor design in France, Finland and China “have been beset by delays and cost overruns”.

The NAO also recommends that the government reconsider whether more nuclear plants are needed. It says that a review of the strategic case for supporting nuclear power should be carried out every five years.

It warns that Brexit could result in taxpayers being forced to pay billions of pounds in compensation to NNB Generation, which is building Hinkley Point and is owned by the French and Chinese governments. The government’s plan to withdraw from Euratom, the European atomic energy regulator, could “trigger a compensation clause” in the deal the government signed with the company last September.

The government did not sufficiently consider the costs and risks of the deal for consumers, the report says.

Ministers took a political decision to keep the project off the government’s balance sheet by requiring the company to take all the risk during the construction phase. But they had to agree in return to pay a guaranteed price for the electricity for 35 years, which is double the current market price.

The overall cost to consumers could have been halved if the government had agreed to fund half the £18 billion construction cost, the NAO calculated.

The case for building Hinkley Point weakened while the government negotiated the final deal, partly because alternative low-carbon sources of power, such as wind and solar, became cheaper, the NAO says.

Theresa May decided to press ahead with it last September despite the government’s own analysis showing that the economic case was marginal. The result is that “consumers are locked into paying for [Hinkley Point], even if other technologies have become better value, long after 2030”, the NAO says.

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June 23, 2017 at 02:58AM

David Whitehouse: The Global Warming Hiatus Is Real

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The global warming ‘hiatus’ is the most talked about and researched topic in climate science

Few things illustrate the poor state of the communication of climate science better than the reaction to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s comments about global temperatures in the past 20 years. It was made in written comments to the Senate following his confirmation hearing. He wrote, “over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming.” Has the temperature increase of the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere “stalled” in the past 20 years or so? Does this change our view of climate change?

Condemnation of these comments was swift. A study was quickly put together for the journal Nature Scientific Reports to disprove Pruitt’s comments. It looked at satellite measurements of the temperature of the atmosphere close to the ground back to when such data first became available in 1979. It concluded that Pruitt was wrong and many media outlets reported that conclusion.

But had reporters looked a little deeper into the data, and talked to more scientists, they would have uncovered a far more fascinating story more in keeping with the way science actually works, as climate scientists attempt to decipher real-world climate data. They would have discovered that Pruitt has a point: The world’s surface has not been warming as expected in the past two decades. A great many scientists accept what the data are saying and are seeking to explain it. Others are sure there has been no slowdown, but the problem is they are often not even-handed in their analysis.

The Nature Scientific Reports study reached its erroneous conclusion by considering short-term natural fluctuations to be part of long-term global warming. We have just experienced a few years of strongly elevated global surface and lower atmospheric temperatures due to an El Nino.

El Ninos are natural quasi-periodic events originating in the equatorial Pacific that have worldwide consequences. This is not global warming. However, its elevated temperatures at the end of a temperature-data set skews estimates of how much long-term warming is taking place, making it seem more dramatic than it actually is. Taking this into account, and not assuming that the global temperature increase since 1979 has been constant at the same rate, allows the remarkable stability of the lower tropospheric temperature, and the surface temperature as measured by weather stations and ocean buoys, to become apparent.

Although many prominent climate scientists will not countenance its existence, the so-called “hiatus” is the most talked about and researched topic in climate science. It is a significant mystery for which there have been many explanations proposed with a growing suspicion that perhaps the oceans are involved in some way.

Writing in the journal Nature recently, Gerald Meehl, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, said the many adjustments of the surface temperature data sets — adjustments that invariably eliminate the hiatus — have not been as definitive as some suggest. He says the claims of “no hiatus” rest on questionable interpretations of forced climate change due to greenhouse gasses and their relationship with inter-decadal and decadal natural climate variability. The hiatus is clear, he says, and not an artifact of the data.

This means that in the past 20 years or so the anthropogenic warming signal is being obscured by decadal climatic variability and it could be several decades before man’s influence emerged and exceeded nature. As the journal Nature Climate Change said recently, “Longer-term externally forced trends in global mean surface temperatures are embedded in the background noise of internally generated multidecadal variability.” Pruitt’s comments recognize that.

Some are adamant that the “hiatus” does not and never has existed, and will never change their minds. But the evidence is irrefutable. As a large number of influential climate scientists have just said in the journal Nature Geoscience, since the turn of the century there has been a substantial slowdown in warming that computer climate models did not predict or can explain. In fact, such models predict a warming twice that observed. This confirms what Pruitt has said. If anyone tells you that the science is settled tell them that this is just the start of climate science and not its end.

Some scientists and campaigners may find it inconvenient and uncomfortable but the EPA’s Pruitt has a point backed-up by science.

David Whitehouse is a writer and broadcaster, and science editor of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Financial Post, 23 June 2017

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June 23, 2017 at 02:58AM