Quote: (11-10-2013 08:28 AM)thegmanifesto Wrote:
Chernobyl Death Toll: 985,000, Mostly from Cancer
It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. That is between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow.
This number of almost 1 million excess deaths from Chernobyl is completely incredible and fails the most basic common sense tests. Does anyone really believe that
1 million excess deaths from radiation related cancers can go unnoticed?
Here is a good review demolishing the nonsense book on which this is based (abstract and full pdf, respectively):
http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/32/2..._2_181.pdf
http://www.nyas.org/asset.axd?id=8b4c4bf...2459270000
Incidentally, the website that posted this 985,000 number ("Global Research") is a lunatic hard-left environmentalist propaganda shop. Their other articles are parody level screeds about "weather warfare", "Gaza students appeal to the world", "pact with the nuclear devil" and so on. This is where you really have to question the source.
Chernobyl was a real disaster, and the 4,000 number may be somewhat of an underestimate. But 985,000 is sheer lunacy.
This stuff gets tricky. Some stats really are manipulated for ideological or other purposes. You have to look at the quality of the research, what methodology was used, what other people are saying about it. You also have to look at whether the conclusions pass the common sense test.
For example, G is quite right to be suspicious of claims of "prostitution epidemics" and of "bullying epidemics". These are exactly the kinds of shoddy studies that use bad methodologies to arrive at ideologically pre-determined conclusions. They are also easy to debunk by a bit of observation. Is there really bullying all around us? Are the really underage sex slaves in every other basement? These ideas are self-evidently ludicrous and can only be sustained by willful suspension of disbelief.
In the case of the studies that I cited about the Gulf recovery, this is solid research done by good scientists. The special interests are on the other side -- environmentalist loons who are motivated to hype every disaster.
By the way, one thing that is being lost in all the back and forth is that the science behind the Gulf research is actually
fascinating and would probably interest a lot of guys here. What they found is that there is a huge number of species of bacteria that live in the Gulf that basically
digest the oil. When there is a big spill, these bacterial populations explode exponentially (because there is more food for them) and they soak up the oil at exponentially faster rates than would be possible before the spill.
It's really not that surprising when you think about it, because there's always been seepage of oil into the Gulf, and over time these species have evolved to take advantage of it. In this way, the Gulf ecosystem, like so many others, is self-regulating and self-stabilizing. What people are finding more and more is that natural ecosystems are much more resilient than anyone understood. One can even use the faddish Taleb idea of "anti-fragility" in this context. Natural ecosystems are precisely the sort of thing that's expected to have built in anti-fragility.
The ecogenomics that is used to study these bacterial populations is something that I do know quite a bit about and it's fantastic cutting edge science. There will be a lot more of that in years to come.