Category: News

Article Tags: TreeGate

Tree rings were thought to prove global warming – now climate-change deniers say they show the reverse. Both views are flawed

As every amateur naturalist knows, trees provide a record of their own history, in the pattern of rings seen in a horizontal cross-section. Trees growing at the same time will show similar patterns, and each year is distinctive enough to allow those who study tree rings – dendrochronologists – to date the rings, establishing chronologies stretching back thousands of years.

But trees tell us more than just when they were growing – they also reveal what the climate was like. Rings are formed as the tree grows, adding layers of new wood beneath its bark. How thick that layer – and how wide the resultant ring – depends on various factors, but most importantly the climate. A warm, wet summer will result in a wide ring; a cold summer or drought will produce a narrow ring.

Trees can therefore function as archives, invaluable sources of information for climatologists – and for those attempting to prove or disprove climate change.

And that’s where it gets controversial. It turns out not all trees hold a reliable record of temperature. But as temperature-related data is hot property in the climate change debate, scientists who suggest that some tree data may not be helpful risk being accused of hiding important findings.

Last month, Queen’s University Belfast was ordered by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office to hand over data from 40 years of research into Irish tree rings to Doug Keenan. A City banker turned climate analyst – and climate change denier – Keenan believes the Irish tree-rings could provide evidence that there was a “medieval warm period” 1,000 years ago. If this were true, it would disrupt the notion that warming during the 20th century is unique and man-made.

Source: independent.co.uk

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Filed under: Sex, Love & Relationships, How to Be Happy

After baby number two, sex-pert Dr. Trina Read found her sex life way off base. So she and her husband decided to try a six-month sex challenge (she blogged about it on her site) to have sex once a week – no small feat with two small kids and when … Read more

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Sex feels good, and the proper amount of sex can help maintain physical and emotional health. But balance is the key. Both having too little or too much sex can lead to unhealthy conditions. Let us look at the effects of too much sex, too little sex, and what the proper amounts should be based on your age and condition.

How Much Sex Is Too Much?
The theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) warn that a man who engages in too much sex can become what is known as “kidney jing deficient.” Jing is a term that refers to the body’s essential fluids, distilled by the kidneys from what we eat and drink. The kidneys are thought of as the body’s “batteries” and the place where jing is stored. Chinese health theory suggests we are actually equipped with enough jing (life essence) to live 120 years. The problem is we exhaust this essence through poor diet, lack of rest, lack of exercise, the effects of stress, disease and… an unhealthy amount of sex.

Signs and symptoms of kidney jing deficiency include a weakening of the bones, hair loss, a graying of facial color, loosening or loss of teeth, soreness in the lower back, weakness of the legs (particularly behind the knees), poor memory, loss of libido, impotence and a general lack of sexual desire. If you are suffering from any of these signs and symptoms, perhaps you should consider if too much sex is killing you… or at least weakening you.

With too frequent ejaculation, jing (semen, the essence of pure fluids and life energy) is depleted from the body. Moreover, as a man passes middle age, the excessive loss of jing can cause the disastrous effects described above. Like contact sports, sex is a young man’s game. Middle aged and older men need to retain their jing (semen essence) and ejaculate less frequently. (There is an entire art in Yogic and Taoist traditions of men learning to come to orgasm while not releasing a single drop of semen. (More on this in another article)

Two-thousand years ago Su Nu Jing, the classic text on TCM, was published. It advised how much sex/ejaculations are safe for a man to have. For example, a healthy 20-year-old can ejaculate twice per day with no adverse effects. Also, to maintain proper health, the 20-year-old should have a minimum of one ejaculation every four days.

The following chart suggests the sex guidelines from that classic text:

Of course, these are rough guidelines set forth within the theories of TCM. This gives you an idea of the frequency a man should have sex in order to maintain good health and balanced emotions.

The average 20-year-old male who is engaging in masturbation three times a day is probably overdoing it. This could possibly affect his grades (poor memory) or affect his tennis match (with weak knees and sore low back).

If you are a 40-year-old executive thinking of having that affair with the 24-year old-intern, you might want to consider if you are in good enough health to survive an extramarital affair. You could wind up suffering from hair loss, aging of the face, low back soreness, weak legs, poor memory, loss of libido, impotence and lack of sexual desire that could cost you your career and your health… not to mention your marriage (if applicable).

How Much Sex Is Too Little?
Keep in mind that no sex at all is unhealthy. Psychologically, it can cause resentment, depression and anxiety. Sex is important for relationships, not just emotionally, but for the organ systems as well. Ladies, when men tell you they feel like they are dying from lack of sex, it’s partially true. In reality, the choked up emotions and lack of connection can cause him to suffer what is known in TCM as liver qi stagnation.

According to TCM theory, the liver functions to move the qi (life energy) freely in the body. So, liver qi stagnation is a pathogenic flow of qi manifesting in some of the following signs and symptoms: feeling of distension in the chest and hypochondrium, sighing, hiccup, melancholy, depression, moodiness, unhappiness and feeling of a lump in the throat. Often the etiology of this syndrome includes emotional problems, a state of anger, frustration and/or resentment.

If this condition persists it can grow into what is called liver fire. The signs and symptoms associated with live fire include irritability, anger, shouting, ringing in the ears, temporal headache, bitter taste in the mouth, dream disturbed sleep, a red face and red eyes. This is the result of long-standing emotional states of anger, resentment or frustration. This can cause problems like high blood pressure, tinnitus, insomnia, migraine headache and the like.

Good sexual relations are a part of good health. Overdoing it can be detrimental to health, and so can too little of it.

My advice: Be happy and be wise in the ways of lovemaking.

—Dr. Mark Wiley

It could be caused by thick or sludged blood due to dehydration. If the blood is thick or sludging, high blood pressure follows. Water thins the blood and lowers high blood pressure. Drink more water.

Results of a new Kansas State University study suggest that adding certain spices to ground beef may help lower the accumulation of dangerous compounds that are known to cause cancer.

For the study, lead author Scott Smith and his colleagues sought to identify natural ways to reduce the carcinogenic compounds that are commonly produced when ground beef is grilled, fried or boiled. Known as heterocyclic amines (HCAs), these compounds have been proven to increase the risk of developing colorectal, stomach, pancreatic and prostate cancers.

"Cooked beef tends to develop more HCAs than other kinds of cooked meats such as pork and chicken," Smith said. "Cooked beef patties appear to be the cooked meat with the highest mutagenic activity and may be the most important source of HCAs in the human diet."

Working off of the theory that antioxidants can help combat dangerous carcinogens, the researchers tested the effectiveness of several spices in inhibiting the formation of HCAs. They found that fingerroot, rosemary and turmeric were the most successful.

In fact, rosemary extract was able to reduce HCA formation by 61 to 79 percent.

Diabetic patients who are prescribed the drug metformin may be at an increased risk of developing a vitamin B-12 deficiency, according to a new European study.

Lead author Coen Stehouwer believes that individuals who take the medication should routinely monitor their vitamin B-12 levels and may want to consider taking nutrient supplements.

For the study, the research team recruited 390 patients with type-2 diabetes and assigned them to take either metformin or a placebo three times each day for four years.

At the point of follow-up, participants who were prescribed the diabetes medication experienced a 19 percent reduction in their vitamin B-12 levels. A total of 17 once-healthy participants developed a severe nutrient deficiency over the course of the research.

"Our study shows that it is reasonable to assume harm will eventually occur in some patients with metformin-induced low vitamin B-12 levels," said Stehouwer. "Our data provide a strong case for routine assessment of vitamin B-12 levels during long-term treatment with metformin."

Vitamin B-12 deficient patients often experience fatigue, anemia and significant mental changes.

Although he has been called "the darling of the Tea Party," Rand Paul’s select comments since his win in the Kentucky Republican primary last week have some GOP members scratching their heads.

Just hours after Paul declared his victory, he gave an interview in which he implied that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 limited businesses’ rights to set their own policies and decide which customers or clients to serve.

Although he later tried to qualify his statement by saying that he supported the act and would not press to repeal it, the damage appeared to be done.

Criticism came not only from Democrats but also many Republicans, with Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, saying Paul’s philosophy "is misplaced in these times."

"I don’t think it’s where the country is right now. The country litigated the issue of separate but equal," Steele told the Fox News Sunday show. "I think in this case Rand Paul’s philosophy got in the way of reality."

However, the controversy has not stopped there, as Paul stirred more controversy by saying that President Obama’s criticism of British Petroleum for the Gulf oil spill was "un-American."

Prior to the primaries, the Senate Republican leadership failed to endorse Paul, instead throwing its support behind his opponent Trey Grayson.

While some advocates claim that a ban on cross-dressing amounts to the violation of transgender people’s rights, a family organization has presented the opposite argument while commenting on a recent American Eagle Outfitters case.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo successfully challenged the clothing retail chain to change its policies to be more transgender-friendly. According to The New York Daily News, the company will abandon the rule about employee "personal appearance" that banned men from wearing women’s clothing and vice versa.

"If more places would follow behind American Eagle’s experience, a lot of us would be able to work more," said Joi-elle White, a transgender member of Make the Road New York, adding that "there would be less of us on the street or on the internet risking our [lives] just to survive."

However, Family Research Council (FRC) president Tony Perkins has expressed his disappointment with the outcome, and linked the case to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), currently under consideration in Congress.

"Every American who believes in the right of employers to set dress and grooming standards for their employees should be alarmed by how this attorney general has used bullying tactics and litigation to impose cross-dressing policies on American Eagle Outfitters," Perkins warned.

Several human and civil rights organizations sent a letter to top officials at the Pentagon demanding the reversal of the ban on several reporters covering military commission hearings of foreign terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay.

The letter was prompted by the ban imposed on four journalists from the United States and Canada for publishing the name of an interrogator in one of the cases.

The four, who include reporters from The Miami Herald, The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and Canwest News Service, allege the ban is "illegal and unconstitutional," because the name of the interrogator was already in the public domain, and publishing it did not constitute a violation of the Pentagon’s rules, according to media reports.

In their intervention, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the National Institute of Military Justice said that "this [decision] not only runs counter to the U.S. administration’s stated commitment to transparency in government, but will also bring the military commissions into further disrepute, internationally and within the U.S."

The Pentagon has said the newspapers in question can continue to cover the story, which involves detainee Omar Khadr, but they must send other journalist to do so.

Keep your eyes focused on the rogue corporatist Congress over the next couple of weeks as the reconciliation process takes place to merge the House and Senate versions of the financial reform legislation in a conference committee.

While the provisions in the two bills which further centralize control over the financial system in the hands of power-grabbing chief executive are bad enough, a provision in the House version that has nothing at all to do with finance has really caught our attention and must be defeated.

It’s an amendment that would give the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) the authority to require supplement companies perform at least two human studies before making any claims for their products, according to the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH). Currently, supplements are regulated under the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA).

The amendment to HR 4173 was introduced by Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and has nothing to do with the financial services industry. But it will limit your ability to acquire and use natural health supplements.

The trials the amendment requires are time-consuming and beyond the financial means of most supplement companies, according to the ANH. And even if the companies could find the money, the FTC could require more and more costly versions of these studies, or more of those studies. At each stage, fewer supplements would be available, and those available would cost more and more, until they became as costly as drugs.

The decisions about supplements would then be placed in the hands of five unelected FTC commissioners who could issue binding regulations in a wide range of areas. And companies that didn’t comply with the new rules could be put out of business.

It’s not an unusual tactic as the FTC has done this before with other companies who didn’t toe their line.

“According to renowned constitutional attorney Jonathan Emord, ‘The provision removing the ban on FTC rulemaking without Congressional preapproval contained in H.R. 4173 invites the very same irresponsible over-regulation of the commercial marketplace that led Congress to enact the ban in the 1980s. FTC has no shortage of power to regulate deceptive advertising; this bill gives it far more discretionary power than it needs, inviting greater abuse and mischief from an agency that suffers virtually no check on its discretion.’” (www.anh-usa.org)

Waxman is an enemy to freedom, choice in medical decisions and to the supplement industry. On his website, Waxman writes: “I am troubled that the FDA lacks the basic information necessary to protect consumers from unsafe dietary supplements. The FDA clearly needs to have more resources to give consumers real protection. I intend to work with my colleagues in Congress to ensure that FDA has the tools it needs to address this and other important public health missions.”

What he means is that big pharma doesn’t profit from natural supplements so Big Brother needs to quash them. By the way, the top four industries contributing to Waxman’s campaign in the 2009-2010 cycle are: hospitals/nursing homes; health services/health maintenance organizations (HMOs); lawyers/law firms and health professionals.

While it’s bad enough that Congress’ elected elitists are more interested in protecting their sugar daddies (large financial firms that slip large amounts of cash into their pockets) than Average Joe; what’s worse is their desire to limit your freedom to make choices about which natural health supplements you can take.

We urge you to call your Senators and member of Congress this week and tell him or her to make sure no provisions restricting the use of supplements get included in the final version of the financial reform bill. You can find your member of Congress here.

And finally, I’m often struck (or saddened) by the comments from some who post on this site who fail to see how their government moves past socialism toward fascism on a daily basis. They often ask—sometimes by logging in under several different names and carrying on a conversation with themselves in an effort to disrupt a discussion—exactly what freedoms are being taken away by an overreaching corporatist government.

Well, here’s one: the ability to make your own decisions about your health and how you choose to remain healthy.

There are many others: like freedom of speech, freedom of association, gun ownership, the ability to own property (if you are required to pay a tax in order to keep it, is it truly yours?), freedom to operate a business as you see fit, freedom to pass along your earnings to your children and the freedom to decide whether your children are given potentially harmful vaccinations (enforced through rules requiring vaccinations to enroll in public schools).

If you are too blind to see that these things are happening daily, then may God help you, because you are incapable of helping yourself.

After barely clearing the 60-vote threshold to end debate, Senate Democrats passed a financial reform bill last week that will revolutionize the way that large banks operate.

The legislation, which now needs to be reconciled with the House version that was passed in December, will increase the role of federal regulators, establish new procedures to prevent bailouts and limit the use of derivatives, according to CNN.

"To Wall Street, it says: No longer can you recklessly gamble away other people’s money," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). "It says the days of too big to fail are behind us. It says to those who game the system: The game is over."

While the majority of Republicans agree that reform was necessary, most feel that the measure will negatively impact the marketplace.

"This bill doesn’t listen to the American people—it promises massive government overreach in ordinary business transactions," said Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). "The decisions we’ve made will have an impact on the lives of Americans for decades to come."

Republicans leaders also heavily criticized the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nation’s two largest mortgage companies, will be virtually unaffected by the new measures. Due to last year’s Federal bailout, both corporations are now government-affiliated.

It’s still not clear that anyone really knows what a cyberwar is, beyond a way for some gov’t contractors to scare up hundreds of millions of dollars, but Slashdot points us to the news that the US has now appointed its first “cyberwar general.” The report also notes that “the US Air Force disclosed that some 30,000 of its troops had been re-assigned from technical support “to the frontlines of cyber warfare”. I recently heard an interview with the head of the US Air Force academy, where he repeatedly noted that the Air Force was in charge of “cyber” warfare as well. And yet, we still haven’t seen any details about what this cyberwarfare threat is. We just keep hearing amorphous claims about hacking attacks that are clearly annoying, but hardly to the level of “warfare.” All of this seems to be an attempt to build up malicious computer hacking to make it seem like a bigger “threat” than it really is.

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Filed under: Morning Scoop

Each morning, we dish out a few links we love.

Is washing your lettuce enough to get rid of harmful bacteria? Here’s the scoop on the safety of your produce.

Good news — a girl’s night out can actually be good for your health … and your … Read more

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Article Tags: Lord Monckton

For what is believed to be the first time ever in England, an audience of university undergraduates has decisively rejected the notion that “global warming” is or could become a global crisis. The only previous defeat for climate extremism among an undergraduate audience was at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland, in the spring of 2009, when the climate extremists were defeated by three votes.

Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, the world’s premier debating society, carried the motion “That this House would put economic growth before combating climate change” by 135 votes to 110. The debate was sponsored by the Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington DC.

Serious observers are interpreting this shock result as a sign that students are now impatiently rejecting the relentless extremist propaganda taught under the guise of compulsory environmental-studies classes in British schools, confirming opinion-poll findings that the voters are no longer frightened by “global warming” scare stories, if they ever were.

Source: sppiblog.org

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The main subjects of my recent analysis — The non-hype about climate change (and malaria) — have chosen either to support my key conclusions or not refute them.

NYT opinion blogger Andy Revkin, whose challenge to cover the original Nature paper led to my first post, opens his follow up:

The climate blogger Joe Romm and I agree (breaking news): Scientific research and assessments examining the link between human-driven climate change and malaria exposure have, for the most part, accurately gauged and conveyed the nature of the risk that warming could swell the ranks of people afflicted with this awful mosquito-borne disease.

Thank you!  Case closed.

A key reason I filed my post under “media” along with “health impacts” is that my main critique was with the media coverage, which created the distinct impression that this new Nature paper was somehow undermining allegedly rampant exaggeration or hype in scientific research and assessments.  But it is hard to undermine a myth that simply doesn’t exist.

Now what I didn’t realize until I read this study very closely and checked the footnotes was that the study itself help create this misimpression, with these lines:

The quantification of a global recession in the range and intensity of malaria over the twentieth century has allowed us to review the rationale underpinning high-profile predictions of a current and future worsening of the disease in a warming climate….

In marked contrast, however, are model predictions, reported widely in global climate policy debates^{3, 6, 7}, that climate change is adding to the present-day burden of malaria and will increase both the future range and intensity of the disease.

Any reader of this study would be led to believe that these footnotes advance model predictions “that climate change is adding to the present-day burden of malaria and will increase both the future range and intensity of the disease.” But, in fact, they don’t.

Further, Footnote 6, the IPCC report, Climate Change 2007: Working Group II: Impacts, Adaption and Vulnerability? and footnote 7, the Technical Support Document for the EPA endangerment finding, are easily the two highest profile references in the paper, and thus again the reader is somehow left with the notion that those two reports make claims that in fact they don’t.

This misleading footnoting may thus have contributed to some of the bad media coverage.

The second author on the study, David Smith, commented on the second DotEarth piece:

Good science reporting (or blogging) requires some degree of critical assessment of the controversy. Joe Romm never contacted any of the authors of our study, but he does make some angry accusations. For the record, I’ve read the IPCC report, including the relevant sections. I’m part of the consensus that believes the world is warming and that human activities are the main cause.

Since he does not refute my primary critique, I am left to assume at this point that he cannot, particularly since he does attempt to refute critiques made by others.  Oddly, he chooses to refute a secondary, inferential critique of mine, “I doubt that the authors of the Nature article even bothered to go back to read the IPCC report they cited or spend a few minutes searching it for the word ‘malaria,’ since that would have made clear it is utter BS to cite it as they did.”

That “refutation” is baffling.  I defy anybody to read the relevant sections, which I excerpt at length here, or search WGII for every single use of the word “malaria,” and see how it could possibly be used to support the sentence in the Nature piece where it appears.  It cannot.  Quite the reverse, in fact.  And it certainly is not a high profile prediction of a current and future worsening of the disease in a warmer climate.  Quite the reverse.

His comment — along with Revkin’s email to me — seems to suggest that I thought he was not “part of the consensus that believes the world is warming and that human activities are the main cause.”  Aside from the fact that I don’t like the word consensus, I never thought that.  Just about anybody who is a serious enough scientist to get published in Nature shares the basic understanding of climate science in the literature.  I did infer, “I suspect the authors just swallowed the media/disinformer myth that the IPCC has overhyped the malaria-climate link and threat.”  But I don’t see how that can be interpreted as suggesting the authors don’t share the basic understanding of climate science.  I was just trying to come up with a theory to explain the baffling mistake of citing WGII the way they did.

Now while sloppy footnoting is not normally a big deal, it must be said that the IPCC has had its credibility thrashed over and over again in the media over little more than poor citations like this.  So the anti-science crowd should be all over this study.  Seriously, though, I think the authors need to admit they made a mistake in using these two citations this way — or explain how the language in those citations support that sentence.

Finally, Revkin distorts my critique, but that is par for the course. He also tries hard to find one high-profile report that somewhere, somehow oversells the malaria-climate link:

Using malaria risk as an argument for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, given the subtleties in that area of science, appears bound to backfire. That hasn’t stopped some pretty high-profile institutions from trying to do so.

Yes, the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2007/8 qualifies as “pretty high profile,” and the summary Revkin links to does contain this single phrase (italics added):

Among the threats to human development identified by “Fighting climate change”:

*  The breakdown of agricultural systems as a result of increased exposure to drought, rising temperatures, and more erratic rainfall, leaving up to 600 million more people facing malnutrition. Semi-arid areas of sub-Saharan Africa with some of the highest concentrations of poverty in the world face the danger of potential productivity losses of 25% by 2060.

*  An additional 1.8 billion people facing water stress by 2080, with large areas of South Asia and northern China facing a grave ecological crisis as a result of glacial retreat and changed rainfall patterns.

*  Displacement through flooding and tropical storm activity of up to 332 million people in coastal and low-lying areas. Over 70 million Bangladeshis, 22 million Vietnamese, and six million Egyptians could be affected by global warming-related flooding.

*  Emerging health risks, with an additional population of up to 400 million people facing the risk of malaria.

But is the UNDP using the malaria risk as a primary argument for cutting greenhouse gas emissions?  Not exactly.  In a Box on page 29 of the full report, we find this:

Second, the environment is not only a matter of passive preservation, but also one of active pursuit.  We must not think of the environment exclusively in terms of pre-existing natural conditions, since the environment can also include the results of human creation. For example, purification of water is a part of improving the environment in which we live. The elimination of epidemics, such as smallpox (which has already occurred) and malaria (which ought to occur very soon if we can get our acts together), is a good illustration of an environmental improvement that we can bring about.

So the UNDP believes that we could eliminate malaria if we wanted to “very soon.”  Hard to make the case that the UNDP is arguing in this report that malaria risk is a major argument for cutting GHGs as opposed to a major argument for just getting off our butts and doing a bunch of non-GHG-related stuff.  And that is pretty much the point of the Nature paper!  Doh!

And so we are left with this broad agreement:

Scientific research and assessments examining the link between human-driven climate change and malaria exposure have, for the most part, accurately gauged and conveyed the nature of the risk that warming could swell the ranks of people afflicted with this awful mosquito-borne disease.

From a climate perspective — contrary to much of the media misreporting — this entire episode was dog bites man or, I suppose, mosquito bites man.

Filed under: Health, Healthy Eating, Eat This

Noni is a tropical fruit that was originally native to Polynesian islands, but is now grown in many tropical regions around the world. It has been widely regarded in the traditional cultures of these regions to have medicinal properties. And it has a … Read more

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Diamonds aren’t just a girl’s best friend – they also boast outstanding physical properties that makes them an ideal material for industrial applications such as cutting and polishing. It is extraordinarily hard, conducts heat well and is practically inert to chemical substances. Ceramics – particularly high-performance ceramics – are likewise able to demonstrate special qualities. They are robust and withstands high temperatures. Researchers have now created a diamond coated ceramics composite material that combines the best of both materials.
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Continue Reading Diamonds combined with ceramics to create super high-wearing material

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