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Australian Liberals Oppose Carbon Trading
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Climate Change Summit in New York
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Posted by jennifer, January 8th, 2009 - under Humour, News.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change
“A COLD front is sweeping across Europe after gripping swathes of North America last month, but the deep freeze does not mean the threat of global warming has abated, caution scientists.” [Read more here.]
But at least one cartoonist in Belgium appears to be fed-up with the pronouncements from the warmaholics, inparticular Al Gore. [Via Anthony Watts.]
Gordon,
If you look at all fields of science, you will find the contrarians. No one knows why or how they exist, I guess it’s just a statistical inevitability.
Even I can tell you where Duesberg is wrong on one point. There is no vaccine for the HIV virus yet because it has two advantages over other viruses.
It can change it’s ’shape’ more quickly than another virus that uses the same trick, the flu virus. (That’s why we have to have a new flue vaccine every year, and why it can’t work as well as other vaccines do).
It targets the actual immune system. Most other viruses don’t. By directly attacking the immune system, HIV has a deadly head start.
Why is it not contagious like other diseases? The HIV virus is very weak, it cannot survive long in the open air. It is transmitted in bodily fluids.
SciAmerican has a link about the problems with making an HIV vaccine. It’s not well written, but it is correct. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=where-is-the-aids-vaccine
“SciAmerican has a link about the problems with making an HIV vaccine. It’s not well written, but it is correct. ”
There you are, the man has spoken!
SJT: “If you look at all fields of science, you will find the contrarians. No one knows why or how they exist, I guess it’s just a statistical inevitability.”
Usually is the case when the data don’t fit the theory – but I like the derogatory term “contrarians” – why I am beginning to wonder whether the man even deigns to reply to us.
AGO has you tasked to rattle sceptical cages on this blog SJT?
SJT:
“Luke has put in many hours preparing posts with references to scientific evidence. The more work he put in to them, the more he was ignored. He knows a lot more about the subject than you realise, I think.”
I’d be more comfortable with Luke’s posts if he answered some of my direct questions, rather than ignore them or dance around them. And if he stopped cherry picking, and if he treated the discussion with intellectual honesty, rather than as a debating contest (where rhetorical tricks are employed on equal footing with logic).
Also, I’m not sure why you and Luke respond repeatedly to the comments of Louis and Gordon– which only encourages them, as if they needed encouragement. They are both “nutters” who love the attention, and you both feed them endless attention, as if you two have unlimited amounts of free time. Do you both work for the government? :-)
A bit mystifying…
Once in a while I get holidays, and I’ve been stuck in bed for nearly a week now with a virus.
After the treatment Luke has had here, I’m guessing he thinks it’s mostly a waste of time putting in the effort for a real response. If you convince him you really do want an answer, he may put an effort in. To create a real response to a real question is not a trivial job.
I’m just curious how many people agree with Gordon and Louis. It appears there are a few more at least, and no-one here will call them on it if they do disagree. For a blog that’s supposedly about ’science’, I would have thought there would be some more people defending science. Jennifer has gone AWOL, and yet there are people on her blog, once again, creating an embarressment for the IPA. I wonder if John Roska knows, as he tilts for Paliament and the prime seat of Kooyong, that the Science wing of his IPA is hosting anti-science opinions. Could be damaging if it ever got out.
“Could be damaging if it ever got out.”
His name is Roskam his preselection is by no means assured.
This is a public blog monitored by all the monitoring services, so never fear, all info IS out.
Will – we used to debate but this is now just sledging. There are no rhetorical tricks. If you can drop-kick Louis you do it any chance you get. He likes it if you pander to his nightmare fantasy about lefties so we just make it come true for him. So given the cold war is over and Western Mining Corp doesn’t exist anymore – he has something to fight for.
So the blog you see is like the loal pub – you just drop in to have a few pints an do some sledging with the denialist scum.
But occasionally it gets good – so this is just shadow boxing if you like before a real contest.
You could also see the blog as a “training ground” for AGW wars. Have you seen the Alien Vs Predator movies? This is THE model. A virtual battle ground?
I guess SJT and I will be the Aliens and the denialist scum can be the Predatosr.
What did they say about the Alien in the first movie of the series- 1979 –
” Lambert: You admire it. Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor. Unclouded by conscious, remorse, or delusions of morality. ”
That’s us !!!
Of course Ash ended up being an android. Perhaps Dear Will – maybe we’re actually Androids…. programmed by the IPCC?
Heaven knows – Louis see that we fail the Turing test?
So if you want to do some serious discussion I’ll have to spruce myself and get some better clothes on. And swap out of Terminator mode.
Will Nitschke
Gordon and I are nutters? I suppose that is a consensus view, which, if you have any idea of history is to not back anything that consensus backs, since the consensus has always been wrong in the long term.
Love the attention? – no, no one likes being verballed and ad hommed but it does serve a purpose – it shows the rest here just what Luke, SJT and the AGW crowd are really like – so baiting them has its purposes. Especially when they hide behing pseudonyms.
As for Luke and his Western Mining Corp obsession – I stopped working for them in 1977 – what’s that, over 30 years ago? So I have no idea why he carps on about it – and I am supposed to be the nutter?
I doubt either Luke or SJT will desist from commenting here – both are government employees (SJT works for the AGO as a computer programmer) and obviously with plenty of time – one suspects they might even be employed to verbal climate sceptics here as part of their job description.
And I see you have no issue with Luke labelling us as denialist scum, as you us nutters. Brushes you with the same tar, doesn’t it.
SJT “Even I can tell you where Duesberg is wrong on one point. There is no vaccine for the HIV virus yet because it has two advantages over other viruses.
It can change it’s ’shape’ more quickly than another virus that uses the same trick, the flu virus. (That’s why we have to have a new flue vaccine every year, and why it can’t work as well as other vaccines do).
It targets the actual immune system. Most other viruses don’t. By directly attacking the immune system, HIV has a deadly head start”.
From what I have read, you are wrong on both points. Regarding the first point, Duesberg is one of the world’s experts on retroviruses. As I have pointed out, he has won awards for his work in the field. If you read through the literature on the link I supplied to his site, he’ll explain why HIV cannot do the things you claim UNLESS is it a new strain of virus that no one has ever encountered. That’s possible, but as the IPCC are fond of saying, highly unlikely.
That’s the contention of the pro HIV/AIDS advocates, that HIV is a super-elusive virus that does not conform to the rules established for all other viruses. Way back in the 1980’s, Luc Montagnier, the scientist co-credited with finding HIV, changed his mind on its action. He claimed HIV could not cause AIDS acting alone. He developed a new theory that a ‘co-factor’ must be working with it because it did not seem possible for HIV alone to defeat the immune system. That partly vindicated Duesberg’s insistence that HIV did not have the ability to overcome the immune system, especially considering it was outnumber 800 to 1 by T-Cells even in a person with advanced AIDS.
The HIV/AIDS advocates then moved to produce another far-out theory for why an outnumbed virus could do such drastic destruction, a practice Duesberg termed, ‘moving the goalposts’. The theories they have come up with to explain the elusivity of this virus come close to science fiction. Why not consider the possibility that no such virus exists and look in another direction? Would it hurt if a parallel approach was taken? Would that not be a better explanation for why vaccines don’t work…there is no virus? I’m just asking.
With respect to your second point about HIV attacking the immune system, Duesberg claims HIV is the only virus claimed to do that. He said that a virus killing its host makes no sense since it needs the host to survive. This is what Duesberg says about it:
“Retroviruses are typically not cytocidal (my note – cytocidal = causing cell death…gr). On the contrary, they often promote cell growth. Therefore, they were long considered the most plausible viral carcinogens (9). Yet HIV, a retrovirus, is said to behave like a cytocidal virus, causing degenerative disease killing billions of T cells (15, 18). This is said even though T cells grown in culture, which produce much more virus than has ever been observed in AIDS patients, continue to divide (9, 10, 18)”.
It’s tough to point the finger at an entire group of scientists and claim they are collectively stupid. However, consider one of their better observation. They treat people with chain terminators like AZT and observe a reduction in HIV cells. Doh!! Chain terminators kill ‘all’ cells. AZT was designed as a drug for chemotherapy in cancer and is highly toxic. Its modus operandi is to kill the patient while killing the cancer cells faster.
Would you not expect a reduction in HIV, if it was there? They are killing the entire body’s cell mass and cherry-picking the reduction in HIV cells. Duesberg has called treatment by AZT ‘AIDS by prescription’. He claims AZT is causing AIDS, not HIV. Another scientist, who helped design the more advanced cocktails called protease inhibitors, claimed he would not put them in his body.
One day, they’ll probably find that the torture we know as chemotherapy was bizarre and unnecessary. We are not far, in many cases, from attaching leeches to people to bleed them. That used to be a cure for many things…bleed them. Today, we bombard the body into submission with chemotherapy and radiation. The notion of trying to eradicate HIV with toxic chemicals surely comes from practices in the field of cancer therapy.
In many cases, if not most, chemotherapy in cancer treatment simply does not work. The patient eventually dies. The question arises as to why cancer patients are tortured, knowing they will die anyway. One of the more blatant cases involved Linus Pauling. In his work with the Scottish surgeon, Ewan Cameron, they started treating cancer patients with 10 grams Vitamin C, after surgery. They found a few had spontaneous regressions of the cancer but they could not put Vitamin C forward at that stage as a cure. They did find that patients treated with large doses of Vitamin C were pain free in the days before they died.
Years later, a researcher by the name of Moertell, claimed he replicated the Cameron/Pauling experiment and found no benefit. When Pauling enquired as to his methodology, Moertell told him he gave 250 milligrams (2.5% of the Pauling dosage) to terminally ill patients who were still on chemotherapy. When Moertell was asked by an astounded Pauling, why he would keep terminally ill patients on chemotherapy, Moertell replied that he wanted to give the impression that something was still being done.
Good grief, you have someone dying of terminal cancer and you’re still poisoning them? That, to me, is exactly what is going on with people diagnosed with HIV. If a person has full blown AIDS, it means he has picked up an opportunistic infection that has attacked him while his immune system is depleted. There is little hope for that person. A person diagnosed with HIV usually has no such infection, but it is theorized he will develop one within 10 to 15 years. So, he is treated with cell killers in an attempt to eradicate the HIV. it might be noted that most of the opportunistic infections listed under the AIDS umbrella are not caused by a virus. In fact, many of them like tuberculosis has a standard treatment, but if you have HIV, they ignore that treatment and poison you.
Here’s a what if. What if HIV is not the problem? Guess what? Thousands of people have been killed by chain terminators like AZT. The Centre for Disease Control in the States has slowly cottoned on to that possibility and they are now suggesting treatment be held off on people newly diagnosed with HIV. No kidding!! There are many people with an HIV diagnosis who are alive and well 20 years later because they received no treatment. Here’s a better one. There are people with AIDS who have no sign of HIV in their bodies.
Louis “Gordon and I are nutters”?
Louis…since I admire your intelligence and imagination, I am happy to be included with you as a fellow nutter.
SJT “the Science wing of his IPA is hosting anti-science opinions”.
You keep harping about anti-science, and I keep providing you with references for emminent scientist with distinguished records. Yet you dismiss them as contrarians without being able to discuss their opinions intelligently. From your rebuttals on HIV/AIDS, I can tell you know nothing about the paradigm.
At the same time, you support a paradigm that has had absolutley no success in 25 years. They haven’t even come close to a cure for AIDS. One could say the same about cancer but some inroads are being made there. They tried blaming cancer on a virus, and the same guy, Gallo, who came up with the HIV/AIDS theory and the viral cause for cancer, had to quickly retract the latter theory, with his tail between his legs. Why they have allowed him 25 years of no results, with essentially the same theory, would be a better description of anti-science.
Your response to the HIV/AIDS boondoggle typifies your position on global warming, and that’s the whole point. You guys just don’t have the facts to support your theory, so you resort to ad homs, quick answers and any means at hand to divert attention away from your lack of understanding. Over at realclimate, they talk down to the bloggers as if they are schoolchildren, which seems quite apt.
Will Nitschke “Also, I’m not sure why you and Luke respond repeatedly to the comments of Louis and Gordon– which only encourages them, as if they needed encouragement. They are both “nutters” who love the attention, and you both feed them endless attention, as if you two have unlimited amounts of free time. Do you both work for the government”?
This coming from someone who claims to have a background in psychology. Hopefully you don’t work in psychotherapy. I can see you telling a client, “your problem is that you’re a nutter”.
You claim to have no background in science yet you feel free to make comments about people who do have such a background. Does that not strike you as odd? You have a background in psychology and SJT is a computer programmer, yet the two of you lead the pack with criticism of people with scientific backgrounds.
I criticize people outside my field but I’m careful to cite sources who are in the field, or who have a valid argument. You criticism is based on a purely gut reaction. You provide no evidence to prove I am a nutter. It just seems to bother you deeply that I am critical and skeptical of certain facets of the status quo. Do I detect a neurotic tendency here? Have you had your 10,000 mile libido check?
What’s the equivalent saying in psychology for ‘physician, heal thyself’? Or are you only presenting yourself as a psychologist? You did not even have a come back when I talked about your field. Now, I’m suspicious.
Maybe I am a nutter, involved in a dialog with a professional troll.
Gordon : “Louis…since I admire your intelligence and imagination, I am happy to be included with you as a fellow nutter.”
As Jimmy Durante might have said, ” Nutts to ‘em”.
Thank you! :-)
Gordon,
one reason the rabble are reticent in their rhetoricisms might be because their Luke (Ken) Walker (Day) has be caught “publicus”.
Some problems in science are hard. HIV just happens to be hard. You can’t blame the scientists for that, I have already linked to the reasons why it is hard. You can read them, or ignore them. That’s up to you.
My response to HIV/AIDS is exactly the same as my response to AGW? Thank you. I’d like to think my position on matters scientific is consistent.
Ha ha louis I jsut got your Avatar!
“Lois the fly, Louis the fly, straight from rubbish tip to you!” hmmm is that the junk science tip?
I think maybe Luke should adopt a can of Mortein as his Avatar!
lol.
“You claim to have no background in science yet you feel free to make comments about people who do have such a background. Does that not strike you as odd? You have a background in psychology and SJT is a computer programmer, yet the two of you lead the pack with criticism of people with scientific backgrounds.”
I had some training in physics as well. It was enough to be able to detect delusional thinking, such as Miskolczi, and to realise that the high percentage of people who will so willingly accept delusional thinking on the ’sceptics’ side are wrong, and are not sceptics at all but deniers.
“I criticize people outside my field but I’m careful to cite sources who are in the field, or who have a valid argument. You criticism is based on a purely gut reaction. You provide no evidence to prove I am a nutter. It just seems to bother you deeply that I am critical and skeptical of certain facets of the status quo. Do I detect a neurotic tendency here? Have you had your 10,000 mile libido check?”
My evidence that you are wrong is that you stand in the face of accepted science when the evidence is so compelling, and the authorities you cite are not authorities at all. The “Perth Group” is just a motley collection of people who have nothing like the experience of the teams around the world who are doing the actual research. (The “Perth Group” doesn’t actually undertake any of the work that real medical researchers undertake).
I can spend a few weeks chasing up google if you really want, to list all the research groups, etc, but it would be a waste of time, since you and I already know it will list major research gruops from public and private labs, publishing numerous papers. Against them will be a ‘list of signatories’, that will be eerily similar to Inhofe’s list, or the list of scientists who believe in creationism, etc. Why are there scientists who believe wacky things? I don’t know. That Linus Pauling example you gave was a good one. A man of undbouted talent and genius, who just happened to go a little barmy in his later years. Apparently due to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome after he suffered a sever illness. These things happen. That’s why science doens’t depend on the word of an individual, why there his a scientific process, that, while flawed, does offer a level of objectivism we can’t achieve with individuals.
MattB
Obviously you do not frequent ClimateAudit otherwise you would know why I changed my avatar. It’s all there in black and white.
Gadfly.
SJT
Have you ever tried to address your posts to the person concerned? Your last one is best described as a soliloquy.
SJT “Some problems in science are hard. HIV just happens to be hard. You can’t blame the scientists for that…”
There’s no argument there. My beef is with the advocates who resist any attempt by a skeptic to be heard. Duesberg’s record in retroviral research alone should be enough to get him taken seriously. Instead, his career has been ruined.
HIV may be ridiculously hard to decipher, or it may be as ridiculously simple as acknowledging the current paradigm about it has borne no fruit. Coupled with the difficulty in isolating HIV and even seeing it, perhaps we need to begin considering the notion that it ‘might’ not be there. Maybe it’s time we went back to considering the first notions about the cause of AIDS, that it’s a lifestyle issue. We’ve ignored that possibilty for 25 years.
I find it a bit tough to accept outright what Duesnberg claims, that AIDS is a product of drug abuse. Even Mullis doesn’t agree, thinking it may be due to a bacterial overload. One thing we know is that AIDS in North America and Europe involves 90% males, and according to Duesberg, those figures come from the US Centre for Disease Control. The WHO (World Health Organiztion) are claiming an epidemic in Africa, with an equal number of males and females involved. However, the WHO are using…guess what??…a computer model to predict that epidemc.
Duesberg went looking for the epidemic using the actual number of deaths in Africa. The death rate for AIDS related deaths in Africa, from a population of over 600 million, was less that one half of one percent, hardly an epidemic. A reporter from Rolling Stone Magazine, taking exception to Duesberg’s insistence that HIV could not cause AIDS, went home to his native South Africa to check the situation out. He came up with the original idea of checking the graveyards in South Africa. He found out they were laying gravediggers off due to a slow down in the death rate, and no one in the business had noticed an unusual increase in mortality.
Africa has always had problems with clean drinking water and malnutrition. A common illness in Africa has been Slim’s Disease, or wasting syndrome, generally attributed to both of those problems. Till recently, there was no talk of AIDS in Africa till this international hysteria began. Suddenly, Africans had sexually transmitted HIV infections and were dying in epidemic proportions from AIDS. Most of the HIV diagnoses, however, were done without the two tests required in North America for such a diagnosis. In other words, the diagnoses were made on appearance and intuition.
Before the focus turned to Africa, over 95% of AIDS deaths in North America involved two high risk communities: the male homosexual community and the IV drug user community. If you go to the page for the US Centre for Disease Control you will see that is still true today. They have fiddled the categories to include a group of people who hang out with IV drug users, thus breaking the clear 60% – 35% ratio of homosexual to IV drug AIDS deaths into a separate ratio including the groupies.
The question I am asking is this: if we know most AIDS deaths in North America involve male homosexuals and IV drug users, why are we messing around in the general population looking for a viral cause, that is supposedly sexually transmitted, when we already know certain high risk behavior in the homosexual and IV drug communities cause immune-related problems? The predicted spread to the heterosexual community has never materialized. Why are we creating a red-herring by changing the focus to Africa? Is it because the paradigm didn’t work in North America and Europe, and Africa is an easy target?
We already know amyl nitrate, a muscle relaxing inhalant popular with male homosexuals causes lung cancer, which is an AIDS opportunistic infection. We know Kaposi’s sarcoma is due to lifestyle and have considered removing it from the list of AIDS infections. We know some male homosexuals and all IV drug users abuse drugs to the the extent that immune function is impaired. We know IV drug users get themselves into states of malnutrition and some people in the high risk groups suffer from chronic sleep deprivation due to their on-going party lifestyle. We know there are sanitation issues in both lifestyles. I’m not implying all male homosexuals live that way, then again, only 16% of them get AIDS. IV drug users are a different story, getting themselves into such stupors they don’t know where they are most of the time. One female IV user admitted to going as long as a month without food.
In this politically correct world of today, it’s a no-no to criticize the homosexual lifestyle. When John Lauritsen, a homosexual, tried to spread the news in a homosexual community that amyl nitrate was dangerous, he was told to mind his own business. High risk lifestyles become so ingrained that some people would rather die than give them up. Have you ever tried to talk someone into stopping smoking?
We need to take a closer look at this blind pursuit of an elusive virus and re-examine the problem.
SJT “My evidence that you are wrong is that you stand in the face of accepted science when the evidence is so compelling, and the authorities you cite are not authorities at all. The “Perth Group” is just a motley collection of people who have nothing like the experience of the teams around the world who are doing the actual research. (The “Perth Group” doesn’t actually undertake any of the work that real medical researchers undertake)”.
I disagree with you on the Perth Group. This interview with Eleni Papadopulos is one of the best recitals I have read regarding the history of HIV/AIDS.
http://www.theperthgroup.com/INTERVIEWS/cjepe.html
The lady obviously knows her stuff whereas the judge in the case to which you refered was basing his assessment on people paid to discredit her. Even Duesberg, an expert on retroviruses, and who is supposedly on her side as a skeptic could not put up a realistic argument against her. He was willing to settle for partial science as proof of the existence of HIV.
I know she has a degree, not a Ph.D, but a degree in related science. I don’t give a hoot whether she has a degree ot not. If she can put forward a compelling argument based on science, that should be enough. Besides, Stefan Lanka has a degree in microbiology and is an expert on viruses. He backs her argument and takes it even further. Based on the qualifications I cited from the rest of the Perth Group, all of whom have degrees, I think it’s emminently unfair of you to ad hom them as ‘a motley collection’.
It’s that sort of disrespect that bothers me with both AGW and HIV/AIDS types. I would dearly love to say what I think of the crowd at realclimate, using my construction site vernacular, but I hold it down to ‘activist’ or ‘pseudo-scientist’. Even at that, I try not to single out someone like Gavin Schmidt for abuse. I don’t like the guy but I respect his abilities as a mathematician. I just don’t agree with a mathematician presenting himself as a representative of the ‘new science’, while relegating someone like Lindzen, who knows infinitely more about the atmosphere, to the level of ‘old science’.
The people at the Perth Group extended an invitation to you to examine their work and tell them what is wrong with it. So far, all you’ve done is ad hom them. You could use that argument about me, that I wont go to realclimate and argue with them based on fact. I wont do that because they disbar people if what they say does not agree with their POV. They wont even let Steve McIntyre have his say and he has never insulted them.
You claim that I stand in the face of accepted science. Who said it is accepted science, the media, the IPCC, realclimate? What about Lindzen and his work at MIT? What about Spencer and Christy and their traditional observations based on the scientific method? What about Michaels and his colleagues at the University of Virginia who study climate based on hindsight rather than on prediction? How about the several hundred, or maybe several thousand scientists who disagree with this so-called new science?
I have only heard the term ‘new science’ used twice. Once was by you, the other time by Gavin Schmidt.
Gordon, “I have only heard the term ‘new science’ used twice. Once was by you, the other time by Gavin Schmidt.”
Not totally accurate – one of the AGW commentators here, Ender, accused me of doing Nu-Science here, though I hardly think he would have meant Schmidt’s interpretation of the term.
A really good website is Henry Bauer’s on the AID/ HIV issue – http://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/
It has some very topical posts.