Collusion

Civil Defense Perspectives 33(2): March 2018

After spending untold millions of taxpayer dollars, the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller has yet to turn up any evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian regime to steal the Presidential election from Hillary Clinton.

If Democrats care about foreign (especially Soviet or Russian) infiltration of our government, the focus and timing is indeed odd. Overwhelming evidence of Soviet influence from the days of Franklin Roosevelt forward has already been gathered (see Diana West, American Betrayal: the Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character) and generally ignored. If members of Congress had to pass a background check on foreign influences, how many could be seated? Continue reading “Collusion”

U.S. Unprepared for Nuclear Event, States Physicians for Civil Defense

An article in the Mar 29 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine asks “Are We Prepared for Nuclear Terrorism?” The answer is obviously “no,” states Physicians for Civil Defense president Jane M. Orient, M.D. “But the article will only make the perilous situation worse.”

“For decades, NEJM has been opposing life-saving preparedness for a nuclear attack, coupled with opposition to American weapons systems,” Dr. Orient recalls. “This article appears to be inspired by the Trump Administration’s plans to upgrade the U.S. arsenal. The sentence ‘Russia is taking parallel steps to increase its nuclear attack capabilities’ obscures the reality that those steps are evidently in the deployment, not the planning phase.”

“The U.S. has, in a sense, already succumbed to nuclear terrorism,” she states. “Irrational fears of insignificant doses of radiation have crippled our nuclear industry and will contribute to panic following any radiation release. The NEJM authors fan these fears by lengthy discussion of potential attacks on nuclear power plants. Yet the very worst incidents at nuclear facilities killed very few people.”

In contrast, the use of nuclear weapons could cause many thousands or millions of direct casualties. “Planning a medical response to an attack with weapons like these is futile,” the authors write. Such an attack is “not properly defined as terrorism,” they state, and is thus beyond the scope of preparedness. While advocating “prevention,” they neglect any mention of measures that could prevent millions of casualties in a nuclear explosion, Dr. Orient observes, the most important being, “If you see a bright flash, drop and cover.”

The NEJM authors mention that in the event of an incident, “exposed persons will almost certainly not have monitoring devices.” The medical community needs to ask why that is, Dr. Orient states.

“In the 1990s, the federal government discarded millions of dollars’ worth of instruments that state emergency managers maintained during the Cold War, and did not replace them,” she notes. “Much better technology exists, available from private sources, but is not widely deployed because of government and public apathy.”

“Preparedness for nuclear terrorism or war is a self-help endeavor in the U.S.,” Dr. Orient warns. “And the most prestigious mouthpieces of the medical profession are partly responsible for this appalling lack of concern for American lives.”

Physicians for Civil Defense distributes information to help to save lives in the event of war or other disaster.

Endangerment

Civil Defense Perspectives 33(1): January 2018

The basis for draconian anti-carbon regulations by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the Endangerment Finding issued in 2009. This finding created a statutory obligation to regulate carbon emissions on the basis that greenhouse gas emissions, especially CO₂, endanger human health and welfare.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has recently acknowledged that agency staff short-circuited the science review early in the regulatory process. Sen. James Inhofe (R, Okla.) had asked the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, in April 2010, to assess the adequacy of the peer review of the Technical Support Document, writes Ross McKitrick (https://tinyurl.com/y7tjz2tv). The OIG found that the EPA had violated its own rules, but agency staff responded with a preposterous legal fiction that the docu- ment was not a Highly Influential Scientific Assessment that should have been reviewed as such.

A petition requesting reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding (https://tinyurl.com/y7aokaqm), filed by the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council, states that the lines of evidence on which the Finding is based have all been invalidated. The essential “greenhouse fingerprint” or “tropical hot spot” is not to be found. If the theory of how greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic warming is correct, it is “critical and necessary” to see evidence in the tropics that the upper tropo- sphere is warming faster than the lower, which is warming faster than the surface because of greenhouse gases blocking heat trans- fer into space. But we don’t see this. Models are not evidence.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) also filed a Petition (https://tinyurl.com/ya68nab3). It emphasizes that “there has been no statistically significant atmospheric warming despite a continued increase in atmospheric [CO₂] levels.” The “warmest year on record” (2016) was reportedly 0.02 °C warmer than 1998, only one-fifth as much as needed to be statistically significant. A warming of 2 °C would fall within the natural range of variability over recent geological time. Moreover, “at the current level of

~400 ppm we still live in a CO₂-starved world. Atmospheric lev- els 15 times greater existed during the Cambrian Period (about 550 million years ago) without known adverse effects.”

The Four Fears

On Dec 10, 1948, the 3-year old-UN adopted in its Univer- sal Declaration of Human Rights what Eleanor Roosevelt called the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Now, it appears that a principal purpose of the UN is not to protect freedoms, but to promote fears. The Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report, of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR-5, 2013 & 2014) for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPPC) predicts a dire future from continued use of carbon-based fuels. The four phantom fears, based on never-validated models, are:

Fear of Dire Temperature Increase
Fear of Sudden Sea Level Rise
Fear of Ocean Acidification (change in chemistry) and
Fear of Famine

These are debunked by Ken Haapala (The Week That Was 12/9/17, https://tinyurl.com/y9k8yv2w), and also in the Cli- mate Change IQ Project of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (www.ddponline.org).

Global Health and Welfare

Since 1950, as atmospheric CO₂ has climbed, the percentage of the world’s population living in absolute poverty (a condition of severe deprivation of basic human needs) has decreased from around 72% to less than 10% in 2015 (https://tinyurl.com/ yb7q45ms). Since 1990, hunger, illiteracy, and child mortality have all declined (https://tinyurl.com/ybnbj8fg).

Poverty is the world’s greatest killer. Income rises with CO2 emissions, and life expectancy rises with income (https:// tinyurl.com/y9dumthf). Also necessary is the legal and eco- nomic system that provides incentive to work, invest, and inno- vate: free markets (https://tinyurl.com/yacmbckg). The de- struction of capitalism is the expressed goal of Christiana Fi- gueres, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (https://tinyurl.com/yabex9wr).

Insurance, or Suicide?

Will Happer, Director of the Office of Science in the U.S. Dept. of Energy from 1991-1993, compares the climate change consensus to Pascal’s Wager (https://tinyurl.com/yak8o93t). As with the existence of God, the stakes are said to be so high that it is far better to act and discover it was not necessary, than not to act and discover it was. Cutting CO₂ emissions is just an “insurance policy.” However, as John Christy pointed out in testi- mony to Congress, a total elimination of U.S. emissions would have a near zero impact on global climate despite devastating economic consequences. Happer writes:

But the insurance salesmen, like the Laputan professors of Gulliver’s Travels, “instead of being discouraged, … are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair.” This is a protection racket, not insurance.

The German Energiewende provides a preview of the results (http://www.nber.org/papers/w22467). Electricity cost Ger- man households $0.30/kWh in 2016, vs. $0.17 in France. Wind and solar supply 16% of German electricity and 3.5% of total energy. Wind production was 5.85 GW (installed capacity, 35.92 GW); solar 3.7 GW (installed 37.34 GW). Volatility is buffered by conventional plants, which cannot operate profitably and must pay feed-in tariffs guaranteed for 20 years to assure “fairness.” The viability of huge power companies is at risk (also see p 2).

“If [Matt] Ridley is right and the earth is slowly slipping back into a proper ice age,” writes Maurice Newman, former head of Deutsche Bank, in The Australian, “our successors will need a plentiful supply of cheap, reliable energy, impossible given to- day’s intelligentsia’s religious objection to low-cost fossil and nuclear fuels. It’s not carbon dioxide that threatens us with ex- tinction but blind ideology dressed up as science” (https:// tinyurl.com/y8ugb7xv).

Publication Schedule

Civil Defense Perspectives (formerly DDP Arizona Newsletter) was continuously published as a bimonthly from November 1984 until September 2015, although the later issues were often written months after the issue date. The editor constantly fell behind owing to other obligations, especially work on the fifth edition of Sapira’s Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis, which should be re- leased by Wolters Kluwer around April 2018. Volume 32 con- tains three issues: #1 (November 2015), #3 (March 2016), and #6 (September 2016). No issues were published in 2017, so volume 33 will commence with this issue.

Physicians for Civil Defense continued to work during 2017. We sent nine news releases through PR Newswire, which were viewed 1,936 times by the public, 763 times by media outlets, and more than 41,000 times by webcrawlers. (Click “press releases” tab on www.physiciansforcivildefense.org.) In addition, we provide substantial support to the annual meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (www.ddponline.org.)

Numbers

$40 billion: amount spent by U.S. government on Climate Sci- ence, including funding of IPCC, without finding hard evidence that CO₂ is causing dangerous global warming (TWTW11/25/17, sepp.org.) See Searching for the Catastrophic Signal: The Origins of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by Bernie Lewin and https://tinyurl.com/y6v7wh64 for IPCC history.
$100 billion: amount spent by S. to “fight climate change” (ibid.). Climate is still changing.
$350,000,000: annual operating budget of Greenpeace,

<$200,000 for the CO₂ Coalition (a “CO2 Anti-Defamation League”) (https://tinyurl.com/ya5zxrwb).

800,000 German households: number unable to pay the elec- tric bill (the “second rent”) (https://tinyurl.com/y8majnlw).
$77 million: active EPA research grants held by scientists on EPA scientific advisory boards over the past 3 years prior to di- rector Scott Pruitt’s policy to exclude them from such positions (Science 11/9/17).
8: number of manufacturing jobs lost in Ontario per “green job” (often temporary) created by government policy (TWTW 11/11/17).
220 tonnes: coal needed to produce steel for 1 MW wind elec- trical generating capacity (or 220 small cars).
000014%: amount by which Virginia cap-and-tax plan would reduce global CO₂ emissions by 2030 (AP 11/16/17).
18%: reduction in production of wheat, maize, rice, and soy-

beans that would result from return to pre-industrial temperature and CO2 levels, with serious consequences for food security (TWTW 11/18/18, www.sepp.org).

The Great Manure Crisis

In 1894, the London Times predicted that in 50 years, every street in London would be buried under 9 ft of manure. In New York City, about 100,000 working horses produced 2.5 million pounds of manure per day. About 20,000 New Yorkers died each year of diseases related to this. Fortunately, the government did not intervene by subsiding steam engines. Free markets brought the far superior internal combustion engine (WSJ 11/13/17).

New York City et al. Sue Exxon/Mobil

Along with several California jurisdictions, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio has sued Exxon/Mobil and other oil majors for climate conspiracy covering up the claims that CO₂ is causing dangerous climate change. Exxon/Mobil is pointing out to the court that these plaintiffs either ignored the “irreparable” harms in its bond offerings, which would be a severe securities violation, or claimed that risks were unpredictable. Exxon also calls the municipalities “eager consumers of energy” that emit substantial amounts of greenhouse gases. (https://tinyurl.com/y9q55vrw).

Buffering Volatility of Wind and Solar

The unreliability of wind and solar electricity places an upper limit on wind and solar generation. Without relying on neighbor- ing nations, if Germany tried to handle the volatility of wind and solar production without using stores, while replacing all nuclear and carbon-based fuels, on average 61%, and at the margin 94% of wind and solar capacity would have to be wasted, states Hans- Werner Sinn, one of Germany’s top economists (NBER, op. cit.). The best form of storage of excess power production is pumping water to a higher reservoir—pumped-storage plants or PSPs, of which Germany has 35 and few additional potential sites. To expand wind/solar to 100% would require 39,854 PSPs. The round-trip efficiency of storage is about 75%.

The “Norwegian solution”—relying on Norway’s huge hy- droelectric dams for backup—has several constraints. The trans- mission capacity would have to be increased 60-fold relative to today and 20-fold relative to what has been planned. Also, hy- droelectric plants can’t run in reverse (ibid.).

Sinn also believes that the cost of the Energiewende will end up far exceeding the earlier government estimate of 1 trillion eu- ros. Moreover, he says that Germany is also transforming its idyl- lic landscape into a large industrial park. Journalist Holger Doug- las commented: “In the ensuing discussion [after Sinn’s presenta- tion] one of the gravest consequences of the Energiewende emerged: the credibility of science. At almost every single re- search institute experts have been making every effort to dodge the fundamental laws of physics and nature in order to justify the Energiewende after the fact” (https://tinyurl.com/y8e2dspt).

Endangerment from Wind Power

Toxic spill. Four giant batteries, installed to help the Royal Adelaide Hospital in southern Australia meet its emissions stan- dards while providing power when the wind wasn’t blowing, ex- ploded, spilling 80 liters of sulfuric
Ice Throws. A wind turbine can throw a 400-pound chunk of ice 1,000 feet. The American Wind Energy Association calls the danger a myth, but large chunks of ice are seen on the ground and steel steps leading to the turbine have been broken. Uses of property—such as children’s swings—are restricted. Some call it “trespass zoning” (https://tinyurl.com/yaxadvcr).
Sleeplessness: In diaries kept by families near a wind farm in south Australia, sleep disturbance was the most common symp- tom. Some awakenings were from “sensations,” not audible noise. Disturbances did not occur during 10 days when turbines were shut down. More events occurred during changes in power level (https://tinyurl.com/y6vgv6dx).

Scientists Petition American Museum of Natural History to Stand against ‘Climate-Change’ Agitators

More than 300 scientists have sent a letter and background information to the president of the American Museum of Natural History in response to demands to remove Rebekah Mercer, a generous donor, from the Board of Trustees, reports Physicians for Civil Defense.

These demands come from agitators waving signs in front of the museum and an open letter circulating on the internet that amassed signatures from self-styled scientists. These include well-known proponents of the catastrophic, human-caused global warming (now climate change) hypothesis, along with many with no apparent scientific credentials, observes Physicians for Civil Defense president, Jane M. Orient, M.D.

The protestors complain that the Mercer Family Foundation has donated to politicians they don’t like and to supporters of scientists who dissent from the climate-change narrative, defaming them as “ringleaders of climate denial.” In fact, dissent is essential to science, and those who attempt to silence it are truly anti-science, Dr. Orient stated.

The letter to AMNH reads: “The case for harm from catastrophic global warming is growing weaker as more is learned about the Earth’s climate system, and about the poor predictive power of computer climate models. The Earth has supported abundant life many times in the geological past when there were much higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is quite likely that future generations will benefit from the enrichment of Earth’s atmosphere with more carbon dioxide. And there is no doubt that policies advocated by many of the protestors will cause economic harm across the world, especially to those hoping to climb out of poverty.”

Signers of the letter include two Nobel laureates, Ivar Giaever (physics, 1973) and Kary Mullis (chemistry, 1993), and many other esteemed, highly accomplished scientists, notes Dr. Orient. “The American Museum of Natural History should not tarnish its long and honorable tradition by allowing political pressure and street theater to dictate its policy,”

Physicians for Civil Defense distributes information to help to save lives in the event of war or other disaster.

Hiroshima Nuke Survivor Urges Americans to Prepare, Reports Physicians for Civil Defense

Contact: Jane M. Orient, M.D., (520) 323-3110, janeorientmd@gmail.com

TUCSON, Ariz. In Hiroshima, citizens had no warning, and no inkling about what a single atomic bomb could do. As a result, tens of thousands died unnecessarily. Americans were just warned again in Hawaii, and have known about nuclear weapons effects since 1945, states Physicians for Civil Defense president Jane M. Orient, M.D. “Yet few have done anything to prepare.”

“All Americans should heed the words of Toshiharu Kano, author of Passport to Hiroshima, whose mother was pregnant with him at the time of the Hiroshima bomb,” Dr. Orient stated.

Kano writes: “I am the last, closest to ground zero (800 meters from hypocenter), living survivor of Hiroshima atomic bomb of August 1945. Many of the tens of thousands of victims there tragically perished from an unfamiliarity of how to protect themselves from the unique effects of a nuclear bomb’s flash, blast and radiation. As a US citizen living in Middle America today I see a hauntingly similar vulnerability growing among the general public here ever since Civil Defense was discontinued after the Cold War era.

“The ‘Good News About Nuclear Destruction’ is that if all Americans were trained again in the…basics of what to do and not do if nuclear weapons were ever unleashed again, we could instantly make all nukes 90% less lethal. “Ideally, while I’d like to see a world free of nuclear weapons someday, in the meantime we should all embrace rejuvenating public Civil Defense to greatly minimize their lethality.”

In the three days between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, survivors spread the word that a bright flash would be followed in seconds by a deadly shock wave. This information saved many who took the appropriate action: to drop and cover, stated Dr. Orient. American schoolchildren used to know this, but few Americans remember.

“After Hawaii’s false alarm, we’re investigating the cause of the error,” she observed. “But what about the lack of basic knowledge and simple life-saving actions? What about the public policy of leaving Americans undefended and uninformed, assuring the maximum number of casualties if we are attacked?” she asked.

Physicians for Civil Defense distributes information to help to save lives in the event of war or other disaster.

What If Hawaii’s Accidental Alarm Had Been an Accidental Launch?

At 8:07 a.m. on Saturday, Jan 13, citizens in Hawaii received a mobile alert: “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii, seek immediate shelter.

This is not a drill,” according to The Hill. The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (EMA) sent out another message 38 minutes later calling the initial alert a false alarm.

That interval was more than enough time for a missile from North Korea to reach its target.

Some citizens scurried to take shelter as in an underground parking garage, or even a storm drain, as pictured on RT.com. Some sped to try to reach home in their car. Some jammed phone lines to say good-by to family.

White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters referred to the missile alert as a “state exercise.” At change of shift, somebody apparently “pushed the wrong button.”

“What this exercise shows is the disarray in the EMA and the appalling unpreparedness of the U.S. in these days of nuclear proliferation,” stated Jane M. Orient, M.D., president of Physicians for Civil Defense. “Outside the zone of maximum destruction, most people could survive if they knew what to do. But most lack the basic information drilled into schoolchildren in the 1950s.”

“The knowledge that would save more lives than anything else is to drop and cover if you see a bright flash,” she said. “If you have warning, take the best available shelter, underground if possible, or in the interior of a building. Dirt, concrete, or mass of any type is a radiation shield.”

“A storm drain or parking garage could save your life. Driving around in a car is one of the worst things to do.”

Some nations, such as Russia and Switzerland, have an extensive shelter system. “But the U.S. abandoned its shelter survey decades ago,” Dr. Orient said.

After the initial detonation, there might be fallout danger. Physicians for Civil Defense has equipped many first responders with expedient “dot monitors” to detect dangerous levels of radiation. The U.S. has no robust national fallout monitoring net, and the Cold War radiation monitoring instruments maintained by states were retired decades ago and not replaced.

“The current Hazmat instruments are for interdiction. They would be offscale and worse than useless in a post-attack environment,” Dr. Orient stated.

“It is not safe to assume that rulers like Kim Jong-un will be deterred from using their nuclear arsenal by threat of retaliation,” Dr. Orient stated. “Americans need to consider what they will do if the mobile alert is for real. Even first responders told Stephen Jones on his coast-to-coast bike ride for civil defense that they had no training for this contingency.”

Physicians for Civil Defense distributes information to help to save lives in the event of war or other disaster.

Contact: Jane M. Orient, M.D., (520) 323-3110, janeorientmd@gmail.com

As Nuclear Threat Grows, Shelter Signs Removed in NYC

Contact: Jane M. Orient, M.D., (520) 323-3110, janeorientmd@gmail.com

TUCSON, Ariz. The threat of a nuclear strike by ballistic missile from North Korea appears to be here now—not years into the future.

Russia and China have much greater capability, but they are not openly threatening to use it immediately, unlike North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

For some reason, New York City officials have chosen this moment to “remove misleading nuclear fallout shelter signs” dating from the 1960s, according to a Reuters report.

During the Cold War, the U.S. had a program to survey buildings that had space with adequate radiation protection, mark it with distinctive yellow signs, stock it with essential supplies such as food and water, and provide radiation monitoring instruments. Now the only thing that remains is some of the old signs.

The Office of Civil Defense was subsumed into the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and abolished in the 1970s.

What do we have instead? According to Reuters, Eliot Calhoun of the NYC Emergency Management agency has spent years finessing a 90-character message to flash as an alert onto cellphones. The current form is: “Nuclear explosion reported. Shelter in basement/center of building, close windows/doors.”

“This advice is better than staying outdoors or in a car,” states Physicians for Civil Defense president Jane Orient, M.D. “And cellphones might be working—or not. But it is shocking that Americans are completely unprotected from this threat.”

The Doctors for Disaster Preparedness 60-second training card is much better, states Dr. Orient, starting with the knowledge that could save more lives than anything else: “Drop and cover when you see a flash.”

Physicians for Civil Defense distributes information to help to save lives in the event of war or other disaster.

WW III Danger Ignored in Presidential Debate

In the Oct 9 debate between U.S. presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Russia and Syria were mentioned a few times, but the prospect of an imminent trigger for World War III in Syria apparently had not occurred to either candidate, states Physicians for Civil Defense president Jane Orient, M.D.

When asked about Aleppo, Clinton said that “there is a determined effort by the Russian Air Force to destroy Aleppo in order to eliminate the last of the Syrian rebels who are really holding out against the Assad regime.” She favors a safe zone, a no-fly zone, leverage against the Russians, investigating Syrians and Russians for war crimes, and arming Syrian rebels.

Trump responded that “she doesn’t even know who the rebels are.” He remarked that both Assad and Russia are fighting ISIS. Continue reading “WW III Danger Ignored in Presidential Debate”

Zika Virus Disease

Civil Defense Perspectives March 2016 Vol 32 No 3

The new public health panic, which the World Health Organization (WHO) elevated to the same level as Ebola—a Public Health Emergency of International Concern—(www.who.int/emergencies/zika-virus/en/) is a previously little known disease called Zika virus disease (ZVD). Zika virus (ZIKV) is carried by same mosquito, Aedes aegypti, as other Third World diseases, including dengue and chikungunya.

ZIKV is a flavivirus that was first identified in humans in 1947 in Uganda’s Zika Forest (http://tinyurl.com/hl3u53e). Other flaviviruses are yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, West Nile, and Japanese encephalitis. Possible cross-reactivity of antibodies complicates diagnosis. There is also concern that previous infection with or vaccination against one flavivirus might mediate antibody-dependent enhancement of a second infection. (Haug et al. NEJM, http://tinyurl.com/hwfuh3b). Continue reading “Zika Virus Disease”

War In Paris

Civil Defense Perspectives November 2015 Vol 32 No 1 [published March 6, 2016]

In November 2015, Paris, once the capital of a great world power, was the scene of two battles in the war on the West: one waged by Islamic jihadists, and one by wealthy globalist elites. Terror attacks were followed by the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change [global energy rationing and wealth redistribution].

Superficially, rampaging terrorists mowing down random civilians with assault rifles or knives do not resemble bathed, well-dressed delegates with briefcases, arriving by private jet and luxury limousine. But both have the same enemy: the West, especially the U.S. They despise the institutions that arose in Christian Europe: individual freedom, limited government, private property, and capitalism. Both aim for totalitarian rule: one under the will of Allah, as determined by the caliphate, and one by a global bureaucracy claiming to know what is best for the Planet and Society. Both have zero tolerance for apostasy. Jihadists inflict instant death; climate extremists so far just murder careers or businesses. The ultimate death toll from either could be massive, even if the Green socialists don’t follow the road of the Reds to mass purges, through wrecked economies and energy starvation. The West is guilty, and must pay for its sins. Continue reading “War In Paris”