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The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind exper

by viggity 10y ago

The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive. Climate Science is a bunch of computer models are not testable. When they're run and compared to what actually happened they're always off. e.g. Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98? Climate Scientists don't release their model's code. They don't release the exact data that went into their model. Shit, isn't that one of the complaints about Wansink? That he isn't sharing his data? I'm not saying climate change isn't real, I'm saying that the level of certainty that climate scientists proclaim is problematic. I'm saying that labeling dissenters as deniers (reminiscent of holocaust deniers) is beyond the pale. I'm saying that fossil fuels have done more to advance the human condition than anything else in history of mankind.

nonbel 10y ago
>"The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive." I tried to find this a few years ago in the case of measles and it turned out to seem no such studies existed. Have you seen one?
- viggity 10y ago
  it took a little searching, but I found one for an alternative manufacturing process of the measles vaccine. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01536405?term=AMP&rank=12 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01536405?term=AMP&ran...
  - nonbel 10y ago
    Thanks, it looks like this one was done after I was searching. This study doesn't really have the outcomes we need to measure though. There is no placebo group, they didn't check for measles diagnoses (by doctors who didn't know whether they were vaccinated), and they only measured antibody levels for 1.5 months after 1 vaccine dose in children 12-23 months old (ie before going to school when exposure usually occurs). Unfortunately, I really don't think this study offers us anything about whether "vaccines work". You can see that the main concern is whether doctors are much more likely to diagnose measles when they do not believe a vaccination occurred, and whether introduction of the lab tests made the diagnostic definition more stringent: “This was not a blind study, since the investigators knew which children had received measles vaccine. It seems probable that the occurrence of so much ‘measles-like’ illness in the vaccinated children was a reflexion of the difficulty in making a firm diagnosis of measles in the African child at one visit.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/ “A likely reason for this is that the case may have been misdiagnosed as a non-specific viral illness. Measles has become relatively uncommon in Singapore with two decades of widespread measles vaccination, and especially after the second dose policy was implemented in 1998. Many primary care doctors may not even see a single case of measles in a year. This makes diagnosis more difficult. [...] As only approximately 7% of the clinically-diagnosed cases of measles reported locally turned out to be measles by laboratory testing, there is a need for laboratory confirmation of measles to avoid misidentification of cases and improve disease surveillance.(2)” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829
  - nonbel 10y ago
    Here is another one, apparently we can get a drop of up to 99.5% just by switching to lab tests from clinical diagnosis: "Indeed, an average of only 100 cases of measles are confirmed annually [32], despite the fact that >20,000 tests are conducted [28], directly suggesting the low predictive value of clinical suspicion alone." http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S185.full http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S185.... I just don't think these alternative explanations have been investigated very well, and the blinded RCT (vs placebo) is missing. Another thing, the various proxies for "vaccine success" they use do not correlate with each other... "Our data demonstrate that regression analysis shows only limited correlation between NT results and the ELISA values. This is in agreement with other reports [4]. Similar limitations in the correlation were also reported for other viruses like Cytomegalovirus (CMV) [10]. In case of the gamma globulin samples, the low correlation might reflect the wider spectrum and heterogeneity of the involved or measured measles antibodies." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17308917 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17308917
    - mattkrause 10y ago
      That's not a sensible interpretation of that measles data. Since measles is very contagious, there's a lot of effort putting into identifying and isolating cases. This necessarily involves screening many cases where the disease is only weakly suspected. On top of that, the current protocols cast a really wide drag net. Australia, for example, tests every susceptible patient who shared a waiting room with a measles patient, as well as those who entered less than two hours after the index case left. In a busy hospital or practice, this could be a lot of children. Thus, the high ratio of tested to confirmed cases doesn't mean doctors are bad at diagnosing measles; they may just be cautious.
      - nonbel 10y ago
        So how large do you think such a diagnosis effect may be? That other paper reported only 7% of clinical diagnoses were lab positive for measles in Singapore. And yet another effect to deal with is that people used to spread measles on purpose: “Before the introduction of measles vaccines, measles virus infected 95%–98% of children by age 18 years [1–4], and measles was considered an inevitable rite of passage. Exposure was often actively sought for children in early school years because of the greater severity of measles in adults.” http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S4.full http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S4.fu... I think for these reasons it is clear the effectiveness of measles vaccines has been overstated, it is only a matter of how much.
MarkMc 10y ago
> I'm saying that fossil fuels have done more to advance the human condition than anything else in history of mankind. I don't think this point is relevant to your argument.
throwaway729 10y ago
> Climate Science is a bunch of computer models All of science is eventually a bunch of models. > models [that] are not testable. When they're run and compared to what actually happened they're always off You do realize these statements contradict one another, right? Also, you're wrong. There have been plenty of successful predictions: https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/successful-predictions-of-climate-science/ https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/successful-p... > Climate Scientists don't release their model's code False. Some publish code before/with their papers, some don't publish at all, and some publish code with a lag after publication (to clean up the code, tussle with legal about IP and/or political issues, etc. Fair IMO as long as the code is eventually published). The major models, including the NASA one, are open source. Google it. > Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98? Predicting century-long trends and predicting 5 or 10-year variations within that trend are extremely different tasks. It's certainly possible that we have models that are exceptionally accurate on the scale of 20 or 50 or 100 years but cannot make accurate predictions over the course of 5 or 10 years. In fact, in a stochastic system, that's exactly what you would expect to be the case -- trends that are globally but not locally discernible. More-over, opponents to the climate change thesis don't bother to provide their own models and predictions for falsification. And when they do, they're just as wrong on small time scales and much more wrong on long time scales. > I'm saying that labeling dissenters as deniers (reminiscent of holocaust deniers) is beyond the pale. This largely depends on what is being denied: - CO2 effects climate (requires extraordinary new evidence -- we have both historical Earth data and inter-planetary data). - Temperatures are changing (requires new evidence -- the '98 "hiatus" as largely played out and skeptics failed to make any predictions that made it through the decade). - CO2 is causing temperatures to change on earth (again, requires new evidence). - Concrete predictions about near and mid-term effects of climate change. IMO fair game, but I'm not sure what the point is from a climate policy perspective unless we're really that selfish. There's also an important difference between skepticism and denial. Being skeptical of Newtonian physics and providing a competing model against which we can compare is of course fair game. Denying Newtonian physics in favor of "no particular opinion on how the world works, and let's not try to figure out" is of course worse than useless. In other words, make your own predictions or get off the pot.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98? Wouldn't that be a failure of the model? http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38513740 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38513740

by viggity 10y ago

nonbel 10y ago

>"The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive." I tried to find this a few years ago in the case of measles and it turned out to seem no such studies existed. Have you seen one?

viggity 10y ago
it took a little searching, but I found one for an alternative manufacturing process of the measles vaccine. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01536405?term=AMP&rank=12 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01536405?term=AMP&ran...
- nonbel 10y ago
  Thanks, it looks like this one was done after I was searching. This study doesn't really have the outcomes we need to measure though. There is no placebo group, they didn't check for measles diagnoses (by doctors who didn't know whether they were vaccinated), and they only measured antibody levels for 1.5 months after 1 vaccine dose in children 12-23 months old (ie before going to school when exposure usually occurs). Unfortunately, I really don't think this study offers us anything about whether "vaccines work". You can see that the main concern is whether doctors are much more likely to diagnose measles when they do not believe a vaccination occurred, and whether introduction of the lab tests made the diagnostic definition more stringent: “This was not a blind study, since the investigators knew which children had received measles vaccine. It seems probable that the occurrence of so much ‘measles-like’ illness in the vaccinated children was a reflexion of the difficulty in making a firm diagnosis of measles in the African child at one visit.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/ “A likely reason for this is that the case may have been misdiagnosed as a non-specific viral illness. Measles has become relatively uncommon in Singapore with two decades of widespread measles vaccination, and especially after the second dose policy was implemented in 1998. Many primary care doctors may not even see a single case of measles in a year. This makes diagnosis more difficult. [...] As only approximately 7% of the clinically-diagnosed cases of measles reported locally turned out to be measles by laboratory testing, there is a need for laboratory confirmation of measles to avoid misidentification of cases and improve disease surveillance.(2)” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829
- nonbel 10y ago
  Here is another one, apparently we can get a drop of up to 99.5% just by switching to lab tests from clinical diagnosis: "Indeed, an average of only 100 cases of measles are confirmed annually [32], despite the fact that >20,000 tests are conducted [28], directly suggesting the low predictive value of clinical suspicion alone." http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S185.full http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S185.... I just don't think these alternative explanations have been investigated very well, and the blinded RCT (vs placebo) is missing. Another thing, the various proxies for "vaccine success" they use do not correlate with each other... "Our data demonstrate that regression analysis shows only limited correlation between NT results and the ELISA values. This is in agreement with other reports [4]. Similar limitations in the correlation were also reported for other viruses like Cytomegalovirus (CMV) [10]. In case of the gamma globulin samples, the low correlation might reflect the wider spectrum and heterogeneity of the involved or measured measles antibodies." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17308917 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17308917
  - mattkrause 10y ago
    That's not a sensible interpretation of that measles data. Since measles is very contagious, there's a lot of effort putting into identifying and isolating cases. This necessarily involves screening many cases where the disease is only weakly suspected. On top of that, the current protocols cast a really wide drag net. Australia, for example, tests every susceptible patient who shared a waiting room with a measles patient, as well as those who entered less than two hours after the index case left. In a busy hospital or practice, this could be a lot of children. Thus, the high ratio of tested to confirmed cases doesn't mean doctors are bad at diagnosing measles; they may just be cautious.
    - nonbel 10y ago
      So how large do you think such a diagnosis effect may be? That other paper reported only 7% of clinical diagnoses were lab positive for measles in Singapore. And yet another effect to deal with is that people used to spread measles on purpose: “Before the introduction of measles vaccines, measles virus infected 95%–98% of children by age 18 years [1–4], and measles was considered an inevitable rite of passage. Exposure was often actively sought for children in early school years because of the greater severity of measles in adults.” http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S4.full http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S4.fu... I think for these reasons it is clear the effectiveness of measles vaccines has been overstated, it is only a matter of how much.

MarkMc 10y ago

> I'm saying that fossil fuels have done more to advance the human condition than anything else in history of mankind. I don't think this point is relevant to your argument.

throwaway729 10y ago

> Climate Science is a bunch of computer models All of science is eventually a bunch of models. > models [that] are not testable. When they're run and compared to what actually happened they're always off You do realize these statements contradict one another, right? Also, you're wrong. There have been plenty of successful predictions: https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/successful-predictions-of-climate-science/ https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/successful-p... > Climate Scientists don't release their model's code False. Some publish code before/with their papers, some don't publish at all, and some publish code with a lag after publication (to clean up the code, tussle with legal about IP and/or political issues, etc. Fair IMO as long as the code is eventually published). The major models, including the NASA one, are open source. Google it. > Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98? Predicting century-long trends and predicting 5 or 10-year variations within that trend are extremely different tasks. It's certainly possible that we have models that are exceptionally accurate on the scale of 20 or 50 or 100 years but cannot make accurate predictions over the course of 5 or 10 years. In fact, in a stochastic system, that's exactly what you would expect to be the case -- trends that are globally but not locally discernible. More-over, opponents to the climate change thesis don't bother to provide their own models and predictions for falsification. And when they do, they're just as wrong on small time scales and much more wrong on long time scales. > I'm saying that labeling dissenters as deniers (reminiscent of holocaust deniers) is beyond the pale. This largely depends on what is being denied: - CO2 effects climate (requires extraordinary new evidence -- we have both historical Earth data and inter-planetary data). - Temperatures are changing (requires new evidence -- the '98 "hiatus" as largely played out and skeptics failed to make any predictions that made it through the decade). - CO2 is causing temperatures to change on earth (again, requires new evidence). - Concrete predictions about near and mid-term effects of climate change. IMO fair game, but I'm not sure what the point is from a climate policy perspective unless we're really that selfish. There's also an important difference between skepticism and denial. Being skeptical of Newtonian physics and providing a competing model against which we can compare is of course fair game. Denying Newtonian physics in favor of "no particular opinion on how the world works, and let's not try to figure out" is of course worse than useless. In other words, make your own predictions or get off the pot.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98? Wouldn't that be a failure of the model? http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38513740 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38513740