Rabbit Delusion, The Retirement of Judith Curry (Howard Cork Hayden, The Energy Advocate)

The Energy Advocate A monthly newsletter promoting energy and technology February 2017 (Vol. 21, No. 7) P.O. Box 7609, Pueblo West, CO 81007 Copyright © The Energy Advocate Publisher: Vales Lake Publishing, LLC. Editor Howard Hayden, Ph.D., (for identification only) Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Connecticut. The Energy Advocate, PO Box 7609, Pueblo West, CO 81007. ISSN: 1091-9732. Fax: (719) 547-7819, e-mail: corkhayden@comcast.net. Website: http://www.EnergyAdvocate.com. Subscription $40 for 12 monthly issues.

Excerpts from February 2017 issue

The Rabbit Delusion This story about the persistence of bad science begins with rabbits in 1913 and continues with climate delusions in 2017. We will quote heavily from David Gillespie [1].

In 1913, a Russian scientist named Nikolai Anitschkow “was trying to reproduce humanlike arterial lesions in animals. He theorised that the lesions formed in response to inflammation or injury in the arterial wall, in much the same way a scar forms when we cut our skin” [1]. He fed some rabbits meat, cheese, and eggs, and eventually found that the cholesterol from egg yolks, diluted in sunflower oil (which was experimentally ruled out as causative), caused the rabbits to develop “lesions that looked a lot like the atherosclerosis found in human sufferers of heart disease.” He went on to discover that the rabbits never had heart attacks, and further that when dogs were fed the same diet, they did not develop the same lesions. Carnivores, after all, have a different digestive system than herbivores.

Anitschkow did good scientific work, and the subsequent intellectual failures of others cannot be blamed on him. Nevertheless, the low-fat diet that has been the mainstay of the medical and nutrition professions can be traced back to his work with rabbits.

Step forward to World War II. Ancel Keys, after whom Krations are named, was assigned the job of determining the least amount of food that a soldier needed to maintain his life and vigor. “Overnight, Ancel Keys became one of the first ever experts in human nutrition” [1].

His experiments with conscientious objectors produced a surprising result: “as food supplies reached starvation levels, the death rate from coronary heart disease dropped significantly.” From this, Keys concluded that coronary heart disease was caused dietary fat and cholesterol.

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To bolster the notion, Keys presented a graph with data from 22 countries showing a near-perfect correlation between the incidence of heart disease and the dietary percentage of calories from fat. It all sounds so logical, especially if you consider Anitschkow’s work showing that cholesterol produced cardiac lesions in rabbits.

The trouble is that Keys omitted data from 15 countries. When they’re included, the correlation becomes pretty weak. If he had presented data from Israel, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, it would have shown a strong negative “correlation between fat and heart disease – the more fat you eat, the less likely you are to have a heart attack” [1]. Moreover, Keys ignored the facts that rabbits did not have heart attacks, and that carnivores did not develop lesions when fed a diet of cholesterol.

Upon such cherry-picking of data rests the anti-fat craze that has dominated dietary guidelines for many decades. We have been admonished to eat lean meat, drink skim milk, avoid eggs, and shun butter. Food producers are required to label their products with such information as the amount of cholesterol, caloric content, and especially what percentage of the calories come from fats.

Meanwhile, Type-2 diabetes has been on the rise because people have to get their calories from somewhere , mainly from carbohydrates, including sugars (fructose, glucose … indeed any organic chemical ending in ose .)

Climate In 1895, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius presented a paper entitled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid [CO2] in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” He was trying to figure out the causes of ice ages and warm periods. He correctly surmised that the absorption of infrared by CO2 has a heating effect on the atmosphere. (As an aside, he thought it to be beneficial.) Fast-forward to 1990 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first of five (by now) Assessment Reports, the purpose of which is to find the human causes of climate change ( not to learn natural causes of climate change).

Some facts routinely ignored by climate alarmists are the absence of the “hot spot” in the upper troposphere of the tropics; the fact that all climate models overestimate temperature rise; the fact that the very existence of models (in the plural) proves that the science is not settled; the fact that CO2 has never been able to keep the earth from going into glacial periods; the fact the increases in CO2 concentration have always come after temperature increases; that cyclonic storms have not increased as models calculate; and that sea level rise has stubbornly refused to obey the climate model predictions. As with the rabbit delusion, the paradigm is that the world is supposed to behave the way the “scientists” believe it should.

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[1] Gillespie, David. Big Fat Lies: How The Diet Industry Is Making You Sick, Fat & Poor (Kindle Locations 1730-1732). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Judith Curry Judith Curry has just resigned her professorship at the Georgia Institute of Technology because of her open-minded view of climate change. She has been described as a “lukewarmist,” a person who admits that humans are probably responsible for some warming of the earth, but not of the amounts that alarmists are talking about.

Dr. Curry has made the (political) mistake of questioning claims made by the IPCC, and that has put her at odds with un-collegial colleagues in her own department; she felt that she walked around with knives in her back. Suffice it to say that Hockey-Stick-Michael Mann says, “She has played a particularly pernicious role in the climate change denial campaign…” Long Live Judith Curry!

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