JunkScience forces Fake News to retract attack on California PM2.5 study

Our California study is the best-conducted PM2.5-mortality in existence. It debunks $600 million worth of EPA funded science fraud. Yesterday, the Fake News Media tried to smear it. I fixed that.

Here’s our study:

It is the best-conducted PM2.5 study chiefly because among other reasons:

• It compares death death counts with daily PM2.5 levels — no other study does that for anything close to a 13-year period. A few other studies examine a few days at most.
• It is one of the largest studies ever conducted and includes virtually every death that occurred in California between the years 2000-2012 vs. examining only deaths in cherry-picked cities — i.e., like the infamous Harvard Six-City study.
• It relies on cause-of-death data from official death certificates vs. Medicare data which includes no cause of death information.

Yesterday, the Fake News media (specifically the ClimateWire trade rag of Energy & Environment Publishing), as part of an attack on EPA Chief Scott Pruitt’s move to renovate EPA’s science advisory process, slammed our California PM2.5 study as follows:

Moving past the false “tobacco advocate” comment and on to the important issue, I wrote to ClimateWire reporter Scott Waldman:

Hi Scott,

Among the errors in this paragraph for your Climatewire article today, I am requesting correction of at least the highlighted sentence.

I have never heard ANYONE offer ANY criticism of the California study, let alone what you reported. Your sentence is entirely unsupported.

You need to cite specific names and criticisms and then explain how this constitutes “largely rejected by mainstream scientists.’

Thanks,

Steve

Waldman wrote back:

To which I responded:

Hi Scott,

First, the study was only rejected by one journal, PLoS. The reason given for that rejection was that EPA had already decided the PM2.5 issue in the 1990s — clearly a bogus reason which is debunked by subsequent spending by EPA of about $600 million on PM2.5 studies — plus the human research. No technical/substantive reason was offered by PLoS.

Also, if you know anything about this issue, you know that EPA admitted in court with me that its PM2.5 epidemiology proves nothing.

I’m don’t think you can fairly impugn industry-funded research without also casting the same sort of aspersion over EPA-funded research. Are you seriously maintaining that EPA-funded researchers have no bias?

In any event, I am aware of no one who has offered any sort of substantive or technical criticism of the California study.

You need to support or retract/correct/explain your claim that the study was “largely rejected by mainstream scientists.” Who are the “largely”? Who are the un-largely? What is their criticism?

Steve

Waldman finally replied:

The correction looks like this:

So the lessons here are:

1. There is NO support for the notion that the California PM2.5 study has been “rejected by mainstream scientists.”
2. The Fake News media is just that.