Climate Change > CO2 has no impact on global warming - top scientific study

 

Camus

@newstart_2024

A major new study has debunked the narrative that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activity is causing so-called “global warming.”

The study, published in Science Direct, confirms what “climate scientists” should have told the public a long time ago. 

The warming effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is naturally limited, according to the new study. In fact, that limit has already been reached, decades ago. 

The study found that carbon dioxide emissions have zero impact on the Earth’s global temperatures. 

Even if we dug up all the world’s coal and extracted all the world’s oil and burned it in one giant pyre, its CO2 emissions wouldn’t heat the planet. 

The findings of this study directly conflict with the globalist “climate crisis” narrative being promoted by the United Nations-funded “science” community. Even the taxpayer-funded National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) continues to push these “global warming claims.”

7:57 AM · Jul 16, 2024

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Bits and Bites > Left Wing Madness blends with Spectacular Stupidity; Surprising Results from Stupid Study

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Left Wing Madness blends with Spectacular Stupidity

Jeff Charles, Olive Garden's Favorite Person

@JeffOnTheRight

BREAKING: Progressive groups call for national boycott of Olive Garden after Italy elects "fascist" Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

"Pizza and pasta are now symbols of worldwide white supremacy," they wrote. "We must stand against any establishment serving this fascist food."

Safe-sex study delivers surprising result

Young people who were texted about safe sex ended up catching diseases

through sex more than those who weren’t, research indicates

A man poses holding a selection of condoms. ©  AFP / Leon Neal

Sending text messages encouraging safe-sex behavior to young people who have recently experienced a sexually transmitted infection (STI) is unable to prevent them from getting reinfected, a British study has found out.

The effectiveness of the Safetxt project, which is aimed at reducing reinfections of chlamydia and gonorrhea, has been tested by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

They published the results of the study, which involved more than 3,000 people aged between 16 and 24, in the medical magazine BMJ on Wednesday.

The participants were separated into two groups, with one of them being sent frequent messages from Safetxt and the other not getting any texts at all.

The researchers found out that 22.2% of those who had received the texts became reinfected with chlamydia or gonorrhea, compared to just 20.3% among those who hadn’t.

“The Safetxt intervention did not reduce chlamydia and gonorrhea reinfections at one year in people aged 16-24 years. More reinfections occurred in the Safetxt group,” the paper acknowledged.

The authors said that their findings “highlight the need for rigorous evaluation of health communication interventions.”

They also advised the World Health Organization (WHO) that recommends the use of such messaging to “revise its endorsement of digital behavior change communication for strengthening health systems, to specify which topics and content WHO endorses.”

This shows how far out-of-touch are the experts at the WHO and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Maybe they should talk to some young people occasionally.

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Muslims Leading the Antisemitism Surge in Europe - Study

Muslim Extremists Are Main Perpetrators of Antisemitic Violence in Western Europe, Major Norwegian Academic Study Concludes

This article is 2 years old but needs to be read. If anything, the situation is much worse now.

by Ben Cohen
Algemeiner

French Muslim youths rioting in Paris during a July 2014 anti-Israel demonstration. Photo: Twitter.

A newly-published report from a leading Norwegian university on antisemitic violence in Europe has concluded that in six of the seven countries it surveyed, “individuals with backgrounds from Muslim countries stand out among perpetrators of antisemitic violence in Western Europe.”

“Antisemitic Violence in Europe” — authored by Johannes Due Enstad of the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo — examines incidents of antisemitic violence in France, the UK, Germany, Russia, Norway, Sweden and Denmark between 2005-15. 

Only in Russia — where the lowest level of violence against Jews was recorded during that ten-year period — do far-right skinheads and Neo-Nazi extremists predominate overwhelmingly among the perpetrators of these acts.

“Attitude surveys corroborate this picture insofar as antisemitic attitudes are far more widespread among Muslims than among the general population in Western Europe,” Enstad wrote.

I have been warning Europe for years that their open doors policy toward Muslims will result in increased antisemitism, and here it is documented with data from even before the mad rush of migrants beginning in 2015. It will only be worse now, and will continue to worsen as Muslim birth rates are much higher than native Europeans. The end result may very well rival that of the 1930s and 40s. Isn't it amazing that we could easily repeat one of the great sins of the world in just 100 years?

The report will make for particularly grim reading in France, where over 4,000 incidents — classified as “physical violence against individuals and serious attacks on buildings that potentially threatened human life,” and not including vandalism or verbal harassment — were recorded. France is currently in the throes of a media and political scandal around the brutal murder of Parisian Jewish pensioner Sarah Halimi by an Islamist intruder in April (2017).

The report stressed that in France especially, Jews in general felt far less safe and were much less likely to visibly identify as Jewish. “France scores much higher than the other countries on questions on considering emigration, worrying about being physically attacked, and regarding antisemitism as a major problem in the country,” the report said.

Manfred Gerstenfeld — a leading global authority on antisemitism and the author of Europe’s Crumbling Myths: The Post-Holocaust Origins of Today’s Antisemitism — told The Algemeiner on Friday, “That France is the Western European country where the problems of antisemitism are greatest has been evident since the year 2000.”

“Most murders since then of Jews — all by Muslims — because of their being Jews have been in France,” Gerstenfeld continued. “Currently the French authorities try to ignore or downplay the antisemitic character of the murder of Sarah Halimi, again by a Muslim.”

The report also highlighted concerns with the UK — which came second to France with almost 3,900 incidents in the 2005-15 period — and the situation facing the tiny Jewish communities in the Scandinavian countries, above all Sweden. “Measured in number of reported incidents per 1,000 Jews — a measure indicating exposure, or Jews’ chances of being subjected to antisemitic violence — Sweden comes out on top with a score four times higher than France, with Germany and the UK in the middle,” the report stated.

The role of Muslim extremists in engaging in antisemitic violence was the key finding of the report, Gerstenfeld said.

#PCMadness

“Antisemitism experts have stated these facts since the beginning of this century,” he noted. “The politically correct Western European establishment has been considering the mention of this evidence about Muslim antisemitic attitudes and criminality a taboo subject.”

In its examination of data provided by law enforcement and communal agencies for France, the UK, Germany and Sweden, the report found that “right-wing extremists, who are often associated with antisemitism, in fact constitute a clear minority of perpetrators. Respondents in all four countries most often perceived the perpetrator(s) to be ‘someone with a Muslim extremist view.'”

The report added: “It is also worth noting that in France, Sweden and the UK (but not in Germany), the perpetrator was perceived to be left-wing more often than right-wing.”

Not to protect far-right extremists, they deserve to be punished hard for antisemitic acts. But the #PCMadness crowds cry relentlessly that it is right-wing extremists who are the biggest problem in the west. This insane protection of Muslim criminals is very likely what leads to the creation of far-right extremist groups. A little truth and sanity is desperately needed.

Religion Can Help Improve Children’s Mental Health, New Study Finds

Surprised to find this story on a national news network in Canada

By Laura Hensley Global News

People who grew up in a religious household reported fewer symptoms of depression. Getty

Children who are raised with religious or spiritual beliefs tend to have better mental health into their adulthood, a new study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found.

According to the study’s findings, people who attended weekly religious services or prayed or meditated daily in their childhood reported greater life satisfaction in their 20s. People who grew up in a religious household also reported fewer symptoms of depression and lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder.

On top of the mental health benefits, researchers found that religious subjects weren’t as likely to smoke, use drugs, or contract a sexually transmitted infection compared to people who had a less spiritual upbringing.

The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, followed more than 5,000 youths between the ages of eight to 14 years.

Why does religion benefit mental health?

According to Dr. Tyler J. VanderWeele, the study’s senior author and a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, attending religious services, like church, for example, may benefit youth because it’s a shared experience with people who hold similar beliefs and values. Community is thought to be beneficial to well-being.

VanderWeele also said that being involved in a religious community may offer adolescents role models and mentors other than their parents.

When it comes to the positive effects of prayer and meditation, VanderWeele said it’s likely that the practices “give rise to an experience of God or of transcendence so that an adolescent need not turn to drugs or risky sexual behaviours in their search for something more.”

“That experience of God may fundamentally make a person more other-oriented, leading to greater volunteering, forgiveness, and a sense of mission, and these things ultimately make one happier and protect against depression,” he told Global News.

“Adolescence is a particularly critical time of development and self-understanding, and the establishing of these practices may shape health and well-being throughout life.”

Religion also helps people think about their health in a holistic way, where the mind, body and spirit are all connected, said Jane Kuepfer, a specialist in spirituality and aging at Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo.

“[With religion], when one aspect of ‘who we are’ suffers, the whole suffers. And when one aspect is healthy and vital, ‘all that we are’ benefits,” she said to Global News. “Religion teaches us to value life, and to respect and care for our physical bodies.”

Kuepfer also stressed the importance of belonging and feeling connected to others as a factor contributing to well-being. Social isolation and loneliness are harmful to anyone’s mental health, but particularly to vulnerable populations.

“A sense of belonging is really important, and something we don’t always get in our society in other places,” she said. “[Religion] also gives you a larger perspective and connection across generations.”

Even for those who don’t attend religious services, spirituality benefits health

While attending regular religious services was key to well-being, the study also found that daily meditation and prayer greatly benefited mental health — even in adolescents who didn’t attend service as often.

VanderWeele, the study’s co-author, said that previous studies of adults showed that religious service had the strongest effects on health. But with kids, both service attendance and prayer and/or meditation were strongly associated with well-being.

“For some outcomes, the associations with prayer and mediation were even stronger than for service attendance,” he said. “This is different from adult populations.”

Kuepfer said prayer and meditation are known to be calming and can help people cope with stress. They also offer people a chance to connect with something larger than themselves and work through problems they’re dealing with.

“Religion or belonging to a faith community and participating in spiritual practice helps to slow us down and get perspective,” she said. “We realize that life isn’t all about us, and we don’t have to carry the world on our shoulders. It takes the pressure off.”

There is another aspect that has been completely ignored in this article, and that is that children, or adults, who pray and practice their faith, are living, generally speaking, in obedience to God, that is, 'in His Will'. As such, God may offer extra levels of protection from temptations and from evil. God may also very well bless those people in many various ways and direct their steps if they are listening to Him.

Christian prayer and church attendance are not just healthy exercises; they are ways of connecting to the living God, and preparing for Eternity, which is the real purpose for our existence on this earth.

People’s Egos Get Bigger After Meditation and Yoga, Says a New Study

A study found that meditation doesn't necessarily reduce ego. (Form via Unsplash)

BY Olivia Goldhill

According to Buddhist teaching, the self is an illusion. The religion preaches a fundamentally selfless worldview, encouraging followers to renounce individual desires and distance themselves from self-concern. To advance this perspective, millions of people around the world practice yoga and meditation.

But a recently published psychological study directly contradicts that approach, finding that contemporary meditation and yoga practices can actually inflate your ego.

In the paper, published online by University of Southampton and due to be published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers note that Buddhism’s teachings that a meditation practice helps overcome the ego conflicts with US psychologist William James’s argument that practicing any skill breeds a sense of self-enhancement (the psychological term for inflated self-regard.)

There was already a fair bit of evidence supporting William James’s theory, broadly speaking, but a team of researchers from University Mannheim in Germany decided to test it specifically in the context of yoga and meditation.

They recruited yoga 93 students and, over a period of 15 weeks, regularly evaluated their sense of self-enhancement. They used several measures to do this. First, they assessed participants’ level of self-enhancement by asking how they compared to the average yoga student in their class. (Comparisons to the average is the standard way of measuring self-enhancement.) Second, they had participants complete an inventory that assesses narcissistic tendencies, which asked participants to rate how deeply phrases like “I will be well-known for the good deeds I will have done” applied to them. And finally, they administered a self-esteem scale asking participants whether they agreed with statements like, “At the moment, I have high self-esteem.”

When students were evaluated in the hour after their yoga class, they showed significantly higher self-enhancement, according to all three measures, than when they hadn’t done yoga in the previous 24 hours.

A second study of 162 people who practiced meditation, recruited through Facebook groups devoted to meditation, found that the practice had similar impacts on self-enhancement as yoga. In this study, participants were asked to evaluate themselves based on statements like, “In comparison to the average participant of this study, I am free from bias.” The study found that participants had higher self-enhancement in the hour following meditation, than when they hadn’t meditated for 24 hours.

Researchers also evaluated participants’ well-being using two measures, the satisfaction with life scale and the eudemonic well-being measure, which evaluates satisfaction with autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance. They found that well-being increased along with self-enhancement, suggesting that self-enhancement is linked with the increased sense of well-being that many get from meditation.

These findings suggest that spiritual Buddhist practices like yoga and meditation may not do what proponents typically say they do, according to the study authors. “Ego-quieting is a central element of yoga philosophy and Buddhism alike. That element, and its presumed implications, require serious rethinking,” they write. “Moreover, ego-quieting is often called upon to explain mind-body practices’ well-being benefits. In contrast, we observed that mind-body practices boost self-enhancement and this boost—in turn—elevates well-being.”

There is an alternative explanation, though. It’s possible the study participants were doing meditation and yoga wrong. All of the participants were based in Germany, and various academics have theorized that western practitioners of Buddhism fail to practice with an eye towards the selflessness that should characterize the goals of these efforts. Though yoga and meditation were originally intended as ways to calm the ego, many non-Buddhist practitioners do these activities with an eye to self-improvement or calming personal anxieties.

Meditation can indeed be narcissistic, notes Buddhist writer Lewis Richmond in The Huffington Post. “The act of sitting in silence, eyes closed or facing a wall, attention focused on the inner landscape of breath, body, and mental activity, could at least be characterized as self-absorbed,” he says. Those who practice meditation with a self-centered perspective will likely become more self-interested, not less.

The notion that yoga can feed rather than diminish the ego won’t be surprising to those who’ve met holier-than-thou yoga devotees clad in designer athlesiure. But the psychological study didn’t examine whether Buddhist teachings themselves influenced this ego boost. Yoga alone may not be enough to dissolve the ego, but one psychological study does not invalidate thousands of years of Buddhist teaching and practice.

US Life Expectancy Lowest of High Income Countries and Expected to Lag Behind Further

Study says children born in the USA in 2030 will die 

4-4.5 years sooner than Canadians

© Brendan McDermid / Reuters

Lack of access to universal health coverage, high rates of obesity, and homicide, all contribute to lagging life expectancies for American men and women. The US is predicted to fall farther behind other countries in the next 20 years, researchers say.

While the overall study found life expectancy is likely to rise in all 35 industrialized countries with at least 65 percent for women and 85 percent for men, the size of the increase varies.

Led by Imperial College London, the study was conducted in collaboration with the World Health Organization and published in medical journal The Lancet on Tuesday.

The United States is likely to see only small improvements: Rising 2.1 years (from 81.2 in 2010 to 83.3 in 2030) for women and 3.0 years (76.5 to 79.5) for men. US life expectancy is already lower than most other high-income nations and by 2030 is predicted to lag behind countries such as Croatia and Mexico.

“The USA has the highest child and maternal mortality, homicide rate, and body-mass index of any high-income country, and was the first of high-income countries to experience a halt or possibly reversal of increase in height in adulthood, which is associated with higher longevity,” the study’s authors wrote.

Life expectancies of both men and women in the US will rise in 2030 to almost exactly equal to 

Canada's life expectancies in 2010. Canada's life expectancies will increase by about 4.5 years by then.

Among their findings: Life expectancy for Korean women born in 2030 in South Korea will expect to have life expectancy of 90.8 years, French women 88.6 years, and Japanese women 88.4 years. South Korean men will have a higher life expectancy of 84.1 years, Australian men 84.0 years, and Swiss men 84.0 years.

“Many people used to believe that 90 years is the upper limit for life expectancy, but this research suggests we will break the 90-year barrier,”said lead author Majid Ezzati, a professor in the School of Public Health at Imperial College in a statement. “I don’t believe we’re anywhere near the upper limit of life expectancy – if there even is one.”

Life expectancy is calculated by assessing the age at which people die across the whole population. A country with high childhood mortality rates will lower national life expectancy.

The team used 21 models based on weather forecasting techniques to analyze long-term patters of mortality and longevity in 35 industrialized countries, and combined the results depending on how well the models performed.

Ranking the countries by predicted rises in life expectancy from 2010-20130 for women and men places the US in the bottom four in each case, along with Japan, Bulgaria and Macedonia.

In countries where life expectancy is likely to increase the most, the increases are considerably higher. A baby girl born in 2030 can expect to live 6.6 years longer in South Korea, 4.7 years longer in Slovenia, and 4.4. years longer in Portugal than a baby girl born in 2010. For baby boys, the highest predicted increases in life expectancy are 7.5 years in Hungry, 7.0 years in South Korea and 6.4 years in Slovenia.

The study’s authors held that the high rates of increase in South Korea could be a result of rising economic status, which has improved children’s nutrition, lowered blood pressure, decreased levels of smoking, and increased access to healthcare and medical technology. In the US, the authors found that large socioeconomic inequalities and the lack of universal health care contributed to declines in the US.

Researcher Retracts Landmark Same-Sex Marriage Study, Claims Co-author 'Fabricated' Data

Professor Donald P. Green (Courtesy of Donald Green; Reuters)

It was a study that made headlines — partly because it was so hard to believe. Last December, researchers revealed in the journal Science that one brief conversation with a gay rights canvasser could change someone's mind about same-sex marriage.

The highly publicized article stunned political scientists, but has now been retracted on the request of one of the study's co-authors, Columbia University professor Donald Green.

"I have strong reason to believe that the data, particularly the survey data, were fabricated," Green tells As It Happens host Carol Off. "The data were ostensibly from a very-large scale Internet panel survey… the total number of respondents was more than 10,000. But there's no evidence that any respondents were actually interviewed."

When the study "When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality" was published, the results made big news. Stories ran in The New York Times, The Washington Post and many other media outlets, including on the public radio program This American Life. Many researchers believed the methods used by the canvassers could be used to sway public opinion on other contentious issues.

The survey data was provided by Green's co-author, UCLA graduate student Michael J. LaCour. When another research team tried to replicate the study's findings, they couldn't. They published their own independent research paper, titled "Irregularities in LaCour (2014)."

Green continues: "When my colleague and UCLA professor Lynn Vavreck, who is Michael LaCour's dissertation advisor confronted him with the allegations… He was unable to produce any such raw data, nor was he able to render them from his hard drive, nor was the Qualtrics [database] representative able to verify that the data ever existed. So I can only conclude that they did not exist."

LaCour responded to the allegations on his personal website and on Twitter: "I'm gathering evidence and relevant information so I can provide a single comprehensive response. I will do so at my earliest opportunity."

"I asked [LaCour] yesterday whether he was prepared to admit that the data were fabricated and he said no," Green says, adding that the likelihood that LaCour could prove otherwise is "very, very" small.

In "Irregularities in LaCour (2014)," Green told the independent researchers that he confronted LaCour and that he "has confessed to falsely describing at least some of the details of the data collection."

Green says he doesn't know what might have motivated the alleged fabrication.

"I wonder whether if this is one of those instances where someone commits a little fraud and has to commit more fraud to cover up the first fraud and it grows and grows and grows."

He's not sure if it could have been connected to furthering same-sex equality. 

This reminds me of the study published, also in Science, in 1993 which claimed that genetic researcher Dean Hamer, had found markers for a gay gene. The story went as viral as a story could go in 1992, and almost immediately nearly all news agencies and departments began treating homosexuality as something you are born with.

The following year the study was mercilessly trashed by honest genetic researchers. The report was printed in Science, and some news agencies mentioned it, but with nothing near the excitement and energy of the bogus report. Nevertheless, the damage had been done, perhaps quite intentionally, and the media unequivocally became sympathetic with gays and lesbians.

Hamer, himself, will now tell you that there is no single gay gene, but that it probably has to do with a complex combination of genes. The Independent 1 Nov 1995, - "Dr Hamer does not himself believe in a gay gene despite trying more than any other scientist to prove the existence of a genetic - and therefore inherited - component to sexual orientation."

Hamer now says that environmental factors are not related to sexual orientation in spite of Alfred Kinsey's conclusions otherwise, and the Kinsey Institutes reproduction of those findings 30 years later. Environmental factors include relationships (distorted relationships) with one or more parent, or other influential people in the early years of a child.

Personally, I am convinced that there can be a spiritual element to homosexuality as well as environmental factors.

The episode also revealed the willingness (indeed, an enthusiasm) of the media to believe anything that runs counter to conservative Christianity, even respectable scientific journals.

"I've never been really clear if he had that kind of ideological or political agenda," he says. "It has not come through strongly in my conversations… it may be that he was just interested in demonstrating persuasive effect."

Green is expecting the study retraction to have a negative effect on his own reputation as an academic researcher.

"It's certainly going to be with me until I reach my grave," he says. "I think this will always be something that people will say about my research for good or ill. My hope is that something positive can come out of this, mainly that I can use this experience to think about, and perhaps help others think about, ways of preventing this sort of thing from happening again. What kinds of procedures can we put in place to prevent the huge waste of resources that occurred as a result of this fabrication?"

He also thinks that if LaCour is unable to produce data to support his research, that he will face severe career consequences.

"I expect that he will be subject to an academic investigation. He has not yet received his Ph.D; I think that it's unlikely that he will receive it. I think he will probably not, in the end, take the job that he was offered at Princeton. I'm guessing that as the process unfolds, he's likely to have that offer rescinded."