A reminder that Webdiary is meant to be a place for engagement, not personal abuse. Call me New Age, but there’s plenty of sites specialising in that style and Webdiary isn’t one of them.
Still, it’s a funny how publishing Greens Senator Kerry Nettle’s maiden speech has developed into all-out war on the effect of plutonium on human beings. Today, Dr Aaron Oakley replies to John Wojdylo’s attack inDirty Bombs and you. Could this please be the last word on the subject?
But to begin, a favourite Webdiarist, David Eastwood, on what he wants in a new political party and the acerbic Jim West describes Webdiary’s mix of characters. To which group do you belong, Jim?
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The secret party of us
By David Eastwood, Sydney
Margo, given your increasingly broad portfolio and presence you must resent Felsy being called a media tart! 😉 But seriously…
The party of us is the party of Karvan and the Party of Fels.
Claudia Karvan’s brief but compelling speech at a magazine sponsored womens’ forum (at smh) was a superb capturing of modern liberal humanist values – compassion, reasonableness, maturity, a considered view argued engagingly.
Allan Fels has developed the ACCC into a truly modern regulator, a countervailing force managing and limiting the rationalist economics of big business within a robust (but far from perfect) legal framework. He has used the modern media tools and techniques of big business, recognising that public opinion now matters in this arena (as do Virgin Blue – why else run ads in the popular press in their dispute with Macquarie?) recognising, empowering and promoting public engagement in a win for democracy.
Meanwhile, he has done a fair job of recognising economic reality and the necessity to avoid imposing artificial constraints on economic progress. Fels’ commission represents a glimmer of proof that a third way can work, and how indeed it might.
Combine Felsy and Claude and there’s a secret party of us just waiting to get out! Meg?
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Jim West
I believe that over the last week or so, Webdiary has shown signs of recovery. Finally, a return to the old formula of arrogant turds indulging in slanging matches, tragicomic calls by old hippy chicks for a return to the barricades, to fight anew the good fight, miscellaneous lefties making excuses for the bad behaviour and irresponsibility of every form of delinquent, criminal and sleazebag in the world as long as they aren’t white and male, all leavened by some truly world class nitpicking and the odd gruff rightist interjecting something along the lines of , “Leave it alone, or it won’t grow”.
I especially enjoyed John Wojdylo’s “rebuttal” of Aaron Oakley’s piece on the great Plutonium Thought Experiment, which so inspired me that I would like to make official my bid to enter the arrogant-turds-indulging-in-slanging-matches section.
Whilst I must agree that Oakley’s original claim that “not only would this amount of plutonium not give anyone lung cancer” was either really dumb, or a typo (I suspect he meant “everyone”, not “anyone”), the assumptions made by Wojdylo in his pseudo calculations (especially extending the non-expulsion of the Plutonium from the alveoli to mean that the same grain of Plutonium would remain adjacent to the same strands of DNA within the alveoli over a period of weeks or years) are exactly the sort of intellectually dishonest crap that Oakley was originally complaining about.
Wojdylo’s impressively sophisticated and believable misuse of numbers was especially refreshing, taken against the more customary amusingly innumerate standards of the average modern lefty (not many budding Klaus Fuchs amongst the bolshies these days, mainly Margaret Meads).
I also loved Oakley’s point in his later follow up, that the greenies claims have been shown to be false by the lack of (non-smoking related) lung cancer epidemics followed the release of several tonnes of plutonium into the atmosphere during all the atomic tests of the 40s, 50s, and 60’s. What a spoil sport, wrecking a perfectly good scare campaign about the possible horrifying consequences of a theoretical future scenario by pointing out that a vastly worse scenario has already been played out, we’ve had half a century to mull over the consequences, and by and large they have been relatively under whelming. Arrogant, right wing bastard!
An interesting possibility arising out of this debate is that some enterprising young science/law grad might be able to make a lucrative living out of combining the facts and theories of both protagonists, and providing expert testimony to defend tobacco companies. How? As follows:
1) Fact: Tonnes of Plutonium have been released into the atmosphere (Oakley).
2) Theory: Minute quantities of plutonium held fixed in place against the same strands of DNA cause lung cancer with a certainty of 99.9%. (Wojdylo).
3) Fact: Cigarettes fill lungs with sticky gunk.
4) Theory (and defence): Cigarettes thus do not cause lung cancer; only provide the means to hold the plutonium in place against the same strand of DNA for years. Thus it is the Atomic Bomb boys who are ultimately responsible for the correlation between smoking and lung cancer, therefore the outrageous compensation claims currently being awarded against innocent tobacco companies must cease immediately.
5) Fact: Time for me to leave it alone, that it might grow. (West)
A final note. I, like Richard Moss, am grateful that Tam Long found time to write such an extensive and well argued answer to Tony Kevin’s conspiracy drivel. Unfortunately, Mr Moss will be probably disappointed in his hope that the drivel will end. The SIEV-X debate is not one where facts and reasoned argument have the ability to persuade the opposite side of the error of their beliefs. It has more in common with the usual between evolutionists Vs. creationists “debate”. The other side really, truly believes that the dinosaurs are in the lower stratigraphic layers because they were slow and sluggish and thus didn’t get far up the hills when Noah’s Flood arrived.
Is such a belief supportable in the face of facts and logic? No. Do otherwise apparently sane people really believe in such nonsense? Absolutely. Can you change their mind through gathering even more and better evidence? NEVER.
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Aaron Oakley
Watch out everyone! With all the ferocity of a doberman, John Wojdylo attacks me for apparently misrepresenting the science of plutonium.
To get the ball rolling, Wojdylo engaged in an ad hominum attack.
“If all the world’s dickheads had wings, the sky would be black. This line from Raul Ruiz’s marvellous film, “Three Crowns of a Sailor”, comes to mind when reading Aaron Oakley’s remarks on plutonium and cancer in Puffing the Greens.”
Such erudition, John! You’ve obviously been studying at the Paul Keating school of invective.
John then chucks a full blown wobbly:
“He can regain a measure of credibility in my eyes by showing good thinking, rather than his trademark poor thinking, and this is the challenge I lay before him. He doesn’t have to be an infallible expert; but he really ought to display a higher level of competence. I will then return his title in my references to him.”
Oh, boo-hoo. Get over your temper tantrum. Luckily, John doesn’t have the power to summarily strip me of my academic title. With this attitude, I think John would have been right at home in Stalin’s Russia, where academics with “incorrect” views had their lives as well as their academic titles stripped from them.
John continues his temper tantrum with this:
“Meanwhile, arrogantly asserted ignorance a la Rationalism makes people like Oakley look like some wet-behind-the-ears boffin who’s just read the latest issue of Redneck Skeptics Daily during his lunchtime break and then regurgitated a few lines for the pleasure of the sycophants in his guffawing redneck collective.”
Redneck Skeptics? Go back on your prozac, John, before you blow a fuse! At least I don’t get my physics off the back of a cereal carton!
John then segues into a discussion on Chernobyl:
“Apart from the death of workers exposed to extremely high levels of radiation, Chernobyl didn’t really cause much harm at all, these skeptics say. Indeed, it had “numerous health benefits”. Naturally, certain groups have an obvious vested interest in vocally promoting the view that low-level radiation is harmless, and, indeed, beneficial to human health. But people should have no doubt that even a tiny grain of radioactive substances can kill – and under easily realisable circumstances, it probably will. “
How did Chernobyl get into this? Anyone with any scientific training would know that Chernobyl totally irrelevant to what I wrote. But perhaps John doesn’t have the necessary scientific background that would have made this obvious.
After 657 words of blather, John finally gets onto plutonium:
“Oakley categorically rejects the possibility that this amount of plutonium can cause lung cancer. He is wrong.”
As Homer Simpson would say: D’oh! I never categorically rejected the possibility that plutonium CANNOT cause cancer. Where did I say otherwise? What I rejected was the absurd possibility of half a kilo of plutonium causing cancer in everybody on the planet in the manner prescribed by Giz Watson.
John says:
“The thought experiment alluded to by Greens MP Giz Watson involves taking half a kilo of plutonium and dividing it up evenly into as many pieces as there are people in the world.”
Maybe John needs remedial classes in basic English. May I recommend “Dick and Dora”? It worked a treat for me when I was in grade 1. Now what Watson ACTUALLY SAID, if you go back and read my original post, as you should have done in the first place, was that plutonium is so deadly that 1/2 a kilo, if SPREAD EVENLY AROUND THE WORLD, is enough to induce lung cancer in everyone on earth. She did NOT say “dividing it up evenly into as many pieces as there are people in the world”. Thus, misrepresenting what Watson actually asserted, Wojdylo misrepresents my rebuttal. All I can say is that if John is incapable of reading the original claim with comprehension, then he has no business getting involved in this debate. How he drew that idea from Giz Watson’s original assertion is beyond me. Maybe they share a psychic bond.
Watson’s original assertion probably derives from a comment by US environmentalist Ralph Nader in a debate with radiation pioneer Ralph Lapp. Nader said that “a pound of plutonium could kill every human being on Earth.” Lapp replied “So could a pound of fresh air, Ralph.”
What were they getting at? Nader’s comment actually contains a nanoscopic grain of truth. In order to give everyone on the planet cancer with one pound of plutonium, you would need to line up every person on Earth (they will need a lot of port-a-loos to service that queue), and a doctor would have to inject a fine aerosol mist containing one five-billionth of a pound of plutonium into the lungs of each person.
We would then have to wait several decades (protecting everyone from other life-threatening influences such as malnutrition, disease, drowning, car accidents, cancers resulting from other causes, and green propaganda), until they died of lung cancer.
Lapp’s statement also contains a similar grain of truth. In order to kill everyone on earth with a pound of air you would need to line everyone up (again) and have our murderous doctor inject a tiny bubble of air in the correct place in their chest such that a fatal embolism would develop.
In effect both statements are true, but completely hypothetical and utterly ridiculous. In real life, not a single death has occurred from plutonium poisoning, despite scores of workers during the last several decades having been exposed to its dust.
Lets go back to Wojdylo’s first claim about me:
“Oakley categorically rejects the possibility that this amount of plutonium can cause lung cancer. He is wrong.”
Since Wojdylo has misrepresented my original claim it is he who is wrong, not I. I never rejected the possibility that ” this amount of plutonium can cause lung cancer”. If you read my above (and previous) statements, you will see that I do acknowledge the possibility that a speck of plutonium could cause lung cancer-over a life-time.
John continues with an irrelevant digression on Chernobyl. Finally he gets back to Plutonium, and discusses the possibility of a speck of plutonium lodged in the lung. Once again, he indulges in a load of irrelevant blather. Let’s cut to the chase. Wojdylo says, finally that:
“In summary, Oakley categorically denies that 40 million alpha particle – and 100,000 gamma photon – hits each week, every week over a lifetime, to a fixed piece of soft tissue in the lung can cause cancer. He truly has great faith in the defence mechanism of the human body – a faith that is both irrational and absurd. It is no different to faith in a god; and resembles the supernaturalistic pseudoscience practised by many medical doctors. “
Of course, since I never made the claim that plutonium injected DIRECTLY INTO THE LUNG CANNOT cause cancer, John owes me an public apology, retraction of statements he falsely attributes to me, and a retraction of his various smears and libels he applied to me with wild abandon. I won’t hold my breath.
While a small amount of plutonium lodged directly in the lung could possibly increase the risk of lung cancer over a lifetime (once again, I emphatically DO NOT, and have never denied this), it is worth examining real world experiences of workers exposed to plutonium. Medical observation of hundreds workers at American atomic weapons facilities who were exposed to plutonium dust, has shown that, as one report concluded “no plutonium-based tumour has been unequivocally identified in a human”. Indeed these workers enjoy, on average, better health that the general community. Perhaps back-of-my-cereal-carton-radiation-health-expert John Wojdylo could explain why this is so. Perhaps he might even find an expert to explain it to him.
The bulk of John’s anti-plutonium rant is based on the discredited “hot particle” theory, whereby one single particle of plutonium was expected to eventually cause a cancerous lesion. It is worth mentioning that prior to 1963, SEVERAL TONNES of plutonium were distributed in the atmosphere due to above-ground nuclear tests. Needless to say, life expectancies have not crumbled to the ground since then. Nor will they.
The toxicity of plutonium is, in reality quite unimpressive. One man, Prof. Bernard L. Cohen, went so far as to volunteer to eat as much plutonium as aforementioned anti-nuclear activist Ralph Nader would caffeine in an attempt to demonstrate the folly of severe toxicity claims. Nader did not take Cohen up on his challenge. As far as dangerous radionuclides go, Plutonium-239 (the isotope John and I focus on) is not even in the top ten most dangerous. The naturally occurring isotope actinium-227 is the most dangerous. In fourth place is thorium-232. This is a very common isotope found naturally in beach sands. In the Handbook of Toxicology of Metals, plutonium-239 rates only a passing mention in connection with Uranium.
If John is really afraid of radiation, I suggest he stop eating food. Food contains natural radioisotopes such as potassium-40, carbon-14, etc, which are obviously in intimate contact with the body once eaten.
Finally let us go back to Giz Watson’s actual claim, and I quote verbatim: “plutonium is so deadly that 1/2 a kilo, if SPREAD EVENLY AROUND THE WORLD, is enough to induce lung cancer in everyone on earth.”
Can you read that, John? It says EVENLY AROUND THE WORLD, not “dividing it up evenly into as many pieces as there are people in the world and injected straight into their lungs”. Would you like me to translate it into stupidese for you, John?
It is interesting that Wojdylo mentions Chernobyl, because this accident has been the subject of more green fallacies (or should I say lies) than any other environmental accident. Let me take this opportunity to expose yet another green lie.
In the pages of Australia at the Nuclear Crossroads published in February 1999 by the Australian Conservation Foundation, it was claimed that “250,000 people have died as a result of the Chernobyl tragedy”. Apparently ACF honchos can’t even get the story straight amongst themselves, because in The Age in April, 2001, ACF president Peter Garrett attributed 30,000 deaths to the Chernobyl accident. Obviously, ACF people come from the think-of-a-number-and-double-it school of numerical accuracy.
The most authoritative report on Chernobyl comes from UNSCEAR (The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation). UNSCEAR reported in June 2000 that apart from 1800 cases of thyroid cancer in children exposed at the time of the accident (which themselves would have been prevented had the soviets dispensed iodine tablets to those affected), there is no evidence of increased overall cancer incidence or mortality fourteen years later. As it stands, most if the children who contracted thyroid cancer were cured. About 10 children have died from thyroid cancers, bringing the total death toll to about 40. So once again we see that the greens have distorted the truth in order to terrify people.
Perhaps Mr Wojdylo could explain where UNSCEAR has erred. I wonder if his next analysis will include terms such as “redneck” and “dickhead”.