Medicine in black and white: BiDil®: race and the limits of evidence-based medicine

by George Ellison

ABSTRACT
When the US Food and Drug Administration licensed the drug BiDil® in June 2005 it was hailed as a significant step towards “personalised prescribing”. This is because BiDil® had been patented, tested and approved for use by just one group of patients: those “of African descent”. George Ellison examines the statistical evidence that underpinned the development of BiDil® as a “racial drug” and finds it less than satisfactory.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118592621/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

No, they don’t.

I’ll look forward to your published journal article debunking all these scientists. Otherwise, I’m wasting my time.

The explanation for why CO2 lagging behind temperature does not prove temperature causes CO2 to rise which you linked to makes sense but that leaves us with just correlation with no proven causality either way.

The only real evidence is mentioned in your second link (http://www.tinyurl.com/heatisonline) but even that is hardly conclusive. All those studies rely on unverified climate models – models which have never been shown to successfully predicted global climate.

Without experimentally verified models it’s impossible to prove what impact man made emissions have on global warming and predict how climate will behave in the future.

For example despite CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) concentration increasing during the last decade warming greatly slowed down proving there is a powerful mechanism capable of offsetting the greenhouse effect of man made emissions. None of climate models managed to predict this slowdown which means they fail to account for this mechanism and probably many others, predictions and conclusions based on incomplete models are simply not trustworthy.

For evidence to be convincing climatologists have to produce a model capable of predicting global average temperature during the 20 century with reasonable accuracy from first principles – using only climate data from previous centuries and data on human emissions (without any fudge factors). Science has seen plenty of sensible models which turned out to be spectacularly wrong, comparing model predictions with reality is the *only* way to verify whether the model is right.

Once some model is proven to correctly predict climate it can be used to reliably asses the effect of man made emissions by running simulations with and without them.

Until such a model is developed man made global warming will continue to be only a plausible hypothesis.

Coby Beck has a writeup on that common objection.

Your second “evidence” is just a writeup on scientific *opinion*…

My second evidence are these studies: http://www.tinyurl.com/heatisonline

My *third* evidence is scientific opinion of dozens of scientific organizations worldwide–interestingly, no dissenting opinions. From where we sit as laypeople, that’s evidence. It would take a pretty astounding conspiracy for every single scientific organization worldwide to be wrong.

My fourth is, yes, Republicans and Democrats in the senate. For all Republicans to be agreeing there’s a problem chances are there’s some serious evidence. As there is.

There is no objective evidence that man made emissions significantly contribute to global warming.

Yes, there’s plenty. See my link above: http://www.tinyurl.com/heatisonline

Wattsupwiththat’s Anthony Watts is a meteorologist at KPAY 1290 AM radio in Chicago, not a climate scientist.

Your second “evidence” is just a writeup on scientific *opinion* which is certainly not evidence in any sense. You can find scientists on both sides and even if those who promote global warming are more numerous this doesn’t prove anything.

Finally your third “evidence” – senators opinion carries even less weight then scientific opinion.

There is no objective evidence that man made emissions significantly contribute to global warming. It is possible but far from proven.

PS. To Errasmusimo the resident AGW prophet (AGW is now officially a religion http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/04/its-official-climate-change-beliefs-now-have-religious-status/) of this forum who is bound to appear any moment now: I know you disagree but I have no time to discuss your dishonest arguments.

Um, except this evidence, and all this evidence, and all these scientists saying the evidence is overwhelming, and all these senators from both parties saying it’s a big problem, etc. etc.

Then journalism schools came along, and the newsrooms gradually became filled with folks that had bachelors and masters degrees in journalism, and no experience, training, depth, or contacts what-so-ever in the areas that they covered as journalists.

This was a big factor in the great “dumbing down” and cheapening of all news media in the U.S. The journalists didn’t know what they didn’t know, including all branches of science. Thus, they couldn’t know what were important events and what were trivial, or what was bullshit and what was true and rigorous. And they merely pass this incredible ignorance along to their readers.

In my opinion, this is a large reason that the human-caused global warming theory has been such a mindless religion with the media, despite absolutely no evidence that the airborne CO2 concentration (and nothing else in all the heavens or the earth) might cause the average air temperature of the world to go up or down in the next 10, 40 80, or 150 years.

In addition, it is much cheaper, faster and easier to be lazy, and to practice simplistic and sensational journalism, rather than spending weeks studying complex topics, then explaining all the subtle nuances to the readers. For every Mozart, there are 100 Britney Spears.

If modern journalists had even a little background, or spent more than four hours per topic, they might find (and care) that many of their sources are using them for a hidden agenda, or that some of their sources are lying nutjobs, or some or their sources just want to be famous for a few days, and so on.

People no longer trust, respect or believe journalists, and they shouldn’t.