Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“Legalization linked to fewer suicides, traffic fatalities, and opioid deaths. A new paper on the public health effects of legalizing marijuana finds “little credible evidence to suggest that [medical marijuana] legalization promotes marijuana use among teenagers” and “convincing evidence that young adults consume less alcohol when medical marijuana is legalized.””
“Extreme weather events of the past few years — including the 2022 heat wave that sent temperature records tumbling across much of Europe, and the floods that devastated Pakistan last year — have surprised some of the world’s top climate scientists with just how far they sat outside the normal range.
Experts still know relatively little about when and where these types of extreme climate events will happen. Or what happens when two events, like a drought and a heat wave, hit one place simultaneously. That’s because scientists have tended to look at broader averages across regions, rather than the most intense extremes in specific locations.
“We haven’t asked the models [to] come up with an outrageously high temperature number, like 50 degrees in Canada” — a mark reached during a heat wave in 2021 — “and work out how likely that is or if that’s possible,” said Friederike Otto, an author of the IPCC report and senior lecturer at Imperial College London. “And I think that’s why these are surprises.””
“he U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international body made up of the world’s leading climate scientists. Its latest report on the science and consequences of global warming was seven years in the making, writes POLITICO’s E&E News reporter Chelsea Harvey.
“The report clearly notes that the effects of climate change grow worse and worse with every little incremental bit of additional warming,” Chelsea told Power Switch. “So it’s imperative to reduce emissions as swiftly as possible in order to limit even worse outcomes in the future as much as we can.”
The assessment sends a warning that the effects of climate change are already happening. And humanity is not on track to curb carbon pollution from fossil fuel production, agriculture and other sources enough to halt warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the most ambitious international target.
In fact, at the rate the world is burning carbon, the 1.5 C threshold will likely arrive in the next decade.
The world has already warmed 1 degree since the preindustrial era. Wildfires, floods, droughts and hurricanes are growing more severe. Sea levels are swelling as coastal communities and island nations face existential threats from encroaching waters.
Intensifying droughts and agricultural disruptions are creating food and water insecurity. Infectious diseases are surging. And people around the world are increasingly being displaced by climate-fueled disasters.
Human mortality rates from climate disasters were 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions of the world, compared with more developed places, the report found.”
“The Dickey Amendment, first attached to the 1996 omnibus spending bill, for example, famously prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding gun violence studies for decades. A new interpretation of that amendment in 2018 changed that, but Dickey wasn’t the only thing making it hard to study gun violence.
Instead, the researchers told me, the biggest impediment to demonstrating whether gun control policies work is the way politicians have intentionally blocked access to the data that would be necessary to do that research.”
“The wearing of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses had almost no effect at the societal level, according to a rigorous new review of the available research.
“Interestingly, 12 trials in the review, ten in the community and two among healthcare workers, found that wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to influenza-like or COVID-19-like illness transmission,” writes Tom Jefferson, a British epidemiologist and co-author of the Cochrane Library’s new report on masking trials. “Equally, the review found that masks had no effect on laboratory-confirmed influenza or SARS-CoV-2 outcomes. Five other trials showed no difference between one type of mask over another.”
That finding is significant, given how comprehensive Cochrane’s review was. The randomized control trials had hundreds of thousands of participants, and made useful comparisons: people who received masks—and, according to self-reporting, actually wore them—versus people who did not. Other studies that have tried to uncover the efficacy of mask requirements have tended to compare one municipality with another, without taking into account relevant differences between the groups. This was true of an infamous study of masking in Arizona schools conducted at the county level; the findings were cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as reason to keep mask mandates in place.”
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“While individual mask wearers might get some benefit for a while if they consistently, perfectly wear masks, this does not comport with the aggregate experience.”
“That review, published by the Cochrane Library, an authoritative collection of scientific databases, analyzed 18 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that aimed to measure the impact of surgical masks or N95 respirators on the transmission of respiratory viruses. It found that wearing a mask in public places “probably makes little or no difference” in the number of infections.”
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“The authors suggest several possible explanations for these results, including “poor study design,” inconsistent or improper mask use, “self-contamination of the mask by hands,” “saturation of masks with saliva,” and increased risk taking based on “an exaggerated sense of security.””
“For over a decade, scientists have been grappling with the alarming realization that many published findings — in fields ranging from psychology to cancer biology — may actually be wrong. Or at least, we don’t know if they’re right, because they just don’t hold up when other scientists repeat the same experiments, a process known as replication.
In a 2015 attempt to reproduce 100 psychology studies from high-ranking journals, only 39 of them replicated. And in 2018, one effort to repeat influential studies found that 14 out of 28 — just half — replicated. Another attempt found that only 13 out of 21 social science results picked from the journals Science and Nature could be reproduced.
This is known as the “replication crisis,” and it’s devastating. The ability to repeat an experiment and get consistent results is the bedrock of science.”
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“This is where the Transparent Replications project comes in.
The project, launched..by the nonprofit Clearer Thinking, has a simple goal: to replicate any psychology study published in Science or Nature (as long as it’s not way too expensive or technically hard). The idea is that, from now on, before researchers submit their papers to a prestigious journal, they’ll know that their work will be subjected to replication attempts, and they’ll have to worry about whether their findings hold up. Ideally, this will shift their incentives toward producing more robust research in the first place, as opposed to just racking up another publication in hopes of getting tenure.”
“Activists have convinced Americans that “organic” food is better—healthier, better-tasting, life-extending.
As a result, poor parents feel guilty if they can’t afford to pay $7 for organic eggs.
This misinformation is spread by people like Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director of the Organic Consumers Association. She says organic food is clearly better: “The nutrition is a huge difference.”
But it isn’t. Studies find little difference.
If you still want to pay more for what’s called “organic,” that’s your right. But what’s outrageous is that this group of scientifically illiterate people convinced the government to force all of us to pay more.
Congress has ruled that GMOs (genetically modified food) must be labeled. Busybodies from both parties supported the idea.”
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“The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says the GMO labelling will cost from $598 million to $3.5 billion.
“But the public wants GMOs labelled,” say advocates. “Surveys show that.”
Of course they do.
Ask people if DNA in food should be labelled, and most say yes. Yet DNA is in everything.
Polling is a stupid way to make policy.
The idea of modifying a plant’s DNA may sound creepy, but people have cross-bred plants and animals for years.
“The corn we have today, there’s nothing natural about that,” I say to Baden-Mayer in my new video. “What native people ate, we’d find inedible.””
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“In poor parts of the world, half a million people per year go blind due to lack of vitamin A in their diets. Many die.
Scientists have created a new genetically modified rice that contains vitamin A. This “golden rice” could save those people.”
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“Sadly, in some countries, people listen to advocates like her and believe that Americans want to poison them. One group of GMO fearful protesters invaded a golden rice field in the Philippines, ripping up all the plants.”
Substance Use and Intimate Partner Violence: A Meta-Analytic Review 2016. Bryan M. Cafferky, Marcos Mendez, Jared R. Anderson, and Sandra M. Stith. Psychology of Violence. https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/59511278/Cafferky_201820190604-60960-qtu1qv-with-cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1643220750&Signature=JmFWS~QkCg86Icul9oqw-3Sz9j5uO~LzKP~HsVRSKQtNbZcNthwDy3nCgpG9yKXqPN2J2hs4tBs5pXVaD7cqLr9OXk9MDuEs37O1A0-c1-ZxX7EWjD16pZdSF3uKci5vDn4Geu2DhSduZ-Jqd~qkfmjK~NJybrESL7vvuiyszzVMhd~XjwQUQKw-PDdYiOY8qMD4oA~ecbZKCSVF~Rmxm5aFaYmnHAtWJb6Xc221n2SG5db3vXeECkCW3Ym09t7YAkY2b-Sg~sjKhHe3vGbUVcPkSj3aMKjsjBuA~mGK6xynPEQkGlmRJ0Htg22yJsh02QBtbqf51KqlGMKsk0L4uA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA ALCOHOL USE IN FAMILY AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Ashlee Curtis et al. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1111/dar.12925 The Role of Illicit