Scientists can be lying bastards too

A number of people have derided my somewhat sceptical stance on global warming—including this former head of Channel 5 News and current journalism lecturer who dismissed your humble Devil on 18DS as a "flat earther" (one of the other guests described Mr Monck as "the kind of man who watches himself in the mirror whilst wanking")—often citing this "global scientific concensus".

Not only does this concensus not exist, but people seems to imbue scientists with the wisdom of the gods. In ancient Greece, these same people would be wandering around predicting certain doom because "the priest saw it in the bird entrails. I don't know how it's done but the priest must be correct."

Part of the trouble is the woeful scientific knowledge of the general population, especially amongst journalists and politicians; because they do not understand how scientific theories are constructed and tested and because they do not understand what the raw data presents, they tend to accept the bite-sized summaries that scientists publish for them.

And the trouble is that scientists are neither infallible nor incorruptable. Most scientists in this country compete for the increasingly scarce government hand-outs and are thus under pressure to overstate the importance of their work and, indeed, its validity.

Let us take the BSE scandal which was one of the first things that I studied on my Microbiology degree course (and have written about before); remember how thousands were going to die of vCJD? If you'd care to look at the Wikipedia write-up on CJD, you will find some very strange ideas.

It usually affects people aged 45–75, most commonly appearing in people between the ages of 60–65. The exception to this is the more recently-recognised 'variant' CJD (vCJD), which occurs in younger people.

Really? So specific a time period? You'll have to take my word for this, but I remember seeing an article about a man killed by "vCJD": he was 47. This is well within the accepted constraints of normal CJD.

Anyway, the fact is that after the BSE scare, we were all doomed. Tens of thousands of people were going to die, remember? And do you remember how that actually hasn't happened? Since the BSE scare in the late 80s, 148 people have died in Britain of CJD.

CJD occurs worldwide at a rate of about 1 case per million population per year.

So, since 1987 until 2004, 148 people have died in Britain. However, in that 17 years—assuming the population of Britain to be 60 million—the number of people who should have died, given the above incidence, is actually 17 x 60 = 1020.

Faced with a total fucking lack of Armageddon, scientists had to continue to justify their grants. "Ah," they said in a panic, "actually vCJD probably has a 50 year incubation period." Really? Right For Scotland debuncked this in massive detail.

He also tackles the concept of prions.

Now, the vCJD fear peddlers would have us believe that we can catch Mad Human disease by eating infected meat. What a load of crap.

When you cook the heat denaturises the protein contained within it. As BSE is a prion disease characterised by a folded protein cooking would denaturise it (or as Wikipedia put it “Once denatured, a protein loses most, if not all of its biological activity”).

Even then we have to be eating offal. Those of us eating steak remain unaffected.

But then the meat is in your stomach. These alleged scientists would have us believe that the protein, having survived being denaturised, will now be able to plant itself in your brain where it will make you loopy then kill you.

However, scientists have come up with the concept of prions as a vector for CJD. In order to do so, they have described a protein type that acts utterly unlike any other; one that can apparently survive not only intense heating (if you've ever handled raw meat and cooked meat, you'll understand that there is a quite substantial difference in texture and structure), but also survive the digestion process ("Ingested proteins are broken down through digestion, which typically involves denaturation of the protein through exposure to acid and degradation by the action of enzymes called proteases").

This amazing molecule, having totally resisted two processes that destroy all other known proteins, then makes its way to the brain (how? A protein molecule would find it very difficult to enter the bloodstream) and then acts only on that organ. Is it sounding far-fetched yet?

Here are the facts: prions are present in the brain of those with CJD, but scientists do not know what the transmission vector for CJD is. Essentially, we have been subbject to a massive con by scientists.

You could, of course, maintain that I am not qualified to say this stuff, but let's go over to EU Referendum for anecdotal proof of scientists lying.

When he arrived at the farm to conduct a field investigation, however, the epidemiologist had told the farmer's wife that, "I'm almost a hundred percent sure it was caused by eggs". He then proceeded to "prove" just that.

But there was a slight problem with his thesis. The event had actually been styled as a "paté party" and several home-made patés have been made by villagers for the event, one of which was made with chicken livers from a broiler flock. This, subsequently, had been found to be contaminated with exactly the same type of salmonella as had infected the guests.

Thus, when the epidemiologist carried out a statistical analysis of the data, using a technique called a "cohort study", three of seventeen people who had been ill had not eaten the ice-cream but had eaten a paté. In a private letter to the farmer, he was forced to conclude that the source of the infection "was impossible to prove epidemiologically".

The trouble was that it did not end there. Some months later, an outline of the investigation appeared in the authoritative Communicable Disease Report, attributing the source of infection to eggs, details of which were subsequently published in the equally authoritative Epidemiology and Infection and the British Medical Journal, later forming part of the official government evidence.

In the published account, however, there were important changes to the data. The epidemiologist had removed any reference to the sufferers who had not eaten the ice-cream and had re-worked the calculations, which now demonstrated a very strong statistical association between the consumption of a product made with raw shell-eggs and the illness.

On that basis, the outbreak was submitted as official government evidence to the House of Commons select committee investigating the affair and became subsumed, unchallenged, as part of the core evidence "proving" the link between salmonella and eggs.

The point being that, even were there a scientific concensus on climate change, which there is not, it is not only possible, but probable, that scientists, especially those funded by the state, are subject to poilitical pressures too. Either that, or they are prepared to distort the evidence in order to earn a living.

In short, scientists can be lying bastards too and especially when their wages are paid by those manipulating, biased, venal Whitehall scum.