Guest Opinion by Kip Hansen — 3 October 2024 – 850 words/3 minutes

From the annals of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation comes this beauty of a headline above a news story (h/t Matt Briggs) :

Global Stroke Burden Continues to Rise, With Climate Change Gaining Influence

And the news?  Nothing really, just yet another Global Burden of Disease paper in the Lancet:  “Global, regional, and national burden of stroke and its risk factors, 1990–2021: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021” 

John Hopkins says: 

“A stroke, or brain attack, happens when blood flow to your brain is stopped. It is an emergency situation.”  

There are generally three different types of strokes:

“Strokes can be classified into 2 main categories:

    Ischemic strokes. These are strokes caused by blockage of an artery (or, in rare instances, a vein). About 87% of all strokes are ischemic.

    Hemorrhagic stroke. These are strokes caused by bleeding. About 13% of all strokes are hemorrhagic.”

          And two sub-types:

          “Hemorrhagic strokes occur when a blood vessel that supplies the brain ruptures and bleeds….

Intracerebral hemorrhage. Bleeding is from the blood vessels within the brain.

Subarachnoid hemorrhage. Bleeding is in the subarachnoid space (the space between the brain and the membranes that cover the brain).”

One more piece of information:

“The occurrence of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is a devastating cerebrovascular event that accounts for 5% of all strokes”

You may be asking yourself this question: 

“What could be the possible causal connection between Climate Change and the occurrence of stoke in the general worldwide population?” 

And a good question is far more valuable than a good answer.

My answer?  There is no causal connection – not even a barely biologically plausible connection or association.  Nothing whatever.

But as always, The Science must have its way and The Science insists that if something is bad – as in undesirable – then it must be caused by Climate Change.

And sure enough, a dedicated group called “GBD 2021 Stroke Risk Factor Collaborators” (a list of authors 1,700 long) wrote the Lancet Neurology report linked in the first paragraph.  

Usually, I suspect immediately that the journalist, in this case, Todd Neale, has paraphrased something he thinks the authors have said.  But no, the paper includes this:

“These findings are in line with research showing that rises in ambient temperature (including heatwaves) and climate change are associated with increased stroke morbidity and mortality. Because ambient air pollution is reciprocally associated with the ambient temperature and climate change, all of which synergistically influence cardiovascular disease (including stroke) occurrence and overall health, the importance of urgent climate actions and measures to reduce ambient air pollution cannot be overestimated. Experts have recommended that governments increase implementation of a clean-energy economy, promote unprocessed plant-based food choices, and globally phase out industrialised animal farming.”

If one ever needed additional proof of John P.A. Ioannidis’ finding that “Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” – this is it.

And what is the evidence on which the 1,700 authors base this statement? Here is their visual summary:

[click here to see larger image in new tab/window]

There it is – The Science.  Let’s look carefully and see if we can find climate change as a “risk factor” on the left-hand side of each of the four sections.

NOTE:  Risk factors are not themselves causes.  Risk factors are conditions or behaviors that have been found to be associated with an increase in incidence of some outcome.  The graphic above shows risk factors and not causes.

Ah, there is no occurrence of Climate Change as a risk factor.  In fact, in the panels A, B and C, there are no risk factors that are components of climate at all – not even components of weather. 

But, there is always a way where the outcome is predetermined!

Down on the right, in panel D, which is about risk factors of Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), which represents 5% of all strokes, we see at the bottom of the list, Low Ambient Temperature and High Ambient Temperature. 

Yes, by golly, those are components of weather (and long-time weather adds up to climate). 

And we can see that they have found that Low Ambient Temperature (How low? Who knows?) to be a risk factor in 4.5% of the 5% of strokes worldwide.  This means that COLD may be a contributing factor in 0.225% (0.00225) of the Global Burden of Stroke.

And High Ambient Temperature?  (How high? Who knows?)  A risk factor in 1.1% of SAH stokes, which are, to repeat, only 5% of total Global Stroke Burden. This brings the risk factor of High Ambient Temperature for the Global Stroke Burden to a frightening 0.055% (or   0.00055). 

Hey but where is the evidence for CHANGE?  As in Climate Change? 

There is none. 

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 Author’s Comment:

I wish I could say that this kind of reporting is an anomaly – the exception.  Unfortunately, it is not.  It is now the norm.

We are fed a constant stream of propaganda in place of news – propaganda in place of science news – propaganda in place of science research findings. 

Don’t ask me about politics.

Thanks for reading.

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From CFACT

By David Wojick

America faces a growing threat from grid scale lithium battery fires. Construction of huge battery arrays with no concern for potentially catastrophic fires is out of control. There are no established standards to follow and local permitting authorities seem oblivious to this very real danger.

What follows is a brief introduction to the issue. To begin with look at this photo of an existing grid battery array called Desert Sunlight: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desert_Sunlight_(52290008686).jpg#file

The batteries are teamed with a big solar facility because until recently that was the only way to get the battery subsidies. Each lithium battery unit is the size of a tractor trailer or big shipping container and there are well over a hundred of them, with a rated storage capacity of 230 MW. This is a medium sized storage facility.

That these units can spontaneously burst into flames is well established. The question is how to design and prepare for this destructive event?

To scale the problem consider the following event. A battery powered tractor trailer rig recently crashed and it’s battery burned on an interstate in California. Lithium battery fires cannot be put out so this one burned for around eleven hours. In order to keep the fire from spreading to create a wildfire the fire crew continuously sprayed it using a reported 50,000 gallons of water in the process. The interstate was closed due to the toxic fumes from the fire.

One of these grid scale battery units is easily 10 to 20 times the size of that truck battery. If the water usage required to keep a grid battery fire from spreading scales with size that is 500,000 to a million gallons of water. The actual amount is an engineering calculation that needs to be established and incorporated into battery facility design standards.

Note that we are not talking about the fire spreading to create a wildfire although that is certainly a concern. The vital need is to keep it from igniting the nearby batteries. If this happened the whole facility could go up with a hundred or more giant batteries burning. That would be truly catastrophic.

So now look at the Desert Sunlight photo and note there is no water tank. There should be something like a million gallon water tank with a high volume system to deliver that water to every unit in the facility. Clearly there is not.

There is also the engineering question of how far apart these units should be to enable that water to work keeping the fire from spreading. I doubt the Desert Sunlight spacing is even close to big enough. It looks like just room to walk between them.

Now let’s turn to permitting these facilities where I have another example that speaks volumes. This is a facility that just got permitted by Washington State. It is a combined wind, solar and battery project with a proposed storage capacity of 300 MW, which is considerably bigger than Desert Sunlight. It might have 200 huge lithium battery units. That number is not disclosed.

The project is named the Horse Heaven Wind Farm despite its massive solar and battery components. The name, usually shortened to Horse Heaven, is truly ironic because it will be no place for horses. Horse Hell might be better.

The permitting authority is the Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council or EFSEC for short. The permit is called a Site Certification Agreement or CSA and Horse Heaven just got one, with a big push from the Governor.

The astounding point is that there was no discussion, or even recognition, of the fire threat posed by this enormous lithium battery facility. The CSA has numerous requirements for lots of issues, big and small, right down to the facility having water to keep the road dust down. There is nothing on having a million or so gallons to prevent a catastrophic conflagration, nor on the environmental impact of such.

This is wildfire country so there should be liability insurance for harm to others from a fire. Other potential sources of harm are huge amounts of contaminated water runoff as well as toxic air emissions, especially if the whole facility burns.

This neglect no doubt flows from the Horse Heaven Application. The App is over 500 pages long and I can find just one sentence about battery fires. Buried in a long paragraph on PDF page 366 we read “Lithium-ion battery storage may pose a risk of fire and explosion due to the tendency for lithium-ion batteries to overheat.”

This single sentence does not even refer to the project. For that matter there are only a few paragraphs about the battery facility in the entire App, mostly just describing it in general terms. There is nothing about the number of giant battery containers or that it is a huge project in its own right, posing an equally huge fire threat. In fact the App says they might double deck these container sized battery units which is absurd given the risk of setting off a chain reaction in the whole complex.

One can easily think from the Application that the batteries are of no significance and that appears to be exactly what has happened at the EFSEC.

This systematic neglect looks to be what is happening around the country. We desperately need a national code or standard covering this issue. The National Fire Protection Association says it is working on one, but it is up to the permitting authorities to make something happen.

The growing threat of grid scale battery fires is a very serious issue calling for equally serious action.