California judges provide stage for kangaroo court justice over Roundup weedkiller San Francisco area juries have awarded cancer patients some $80 million each, based on claims that the active ingredient in Roundup weedkiller, caused their cancer – and that Bayer-Monsanto negligently or deliberately failed to warn consumers that the glyphosate it manufactures is carcinogenic. (It’s not.) Judges reduced the original truly outrageous awards of $289 million and even $1 billion per … [Read more...]
Can Government Agencies Protect Us from Lying Scientists and Sycophantic Media?
Newspapers, politicians and pressure groups have been moving smoothly for decades from one forecast apocalypse to another (nuclear power, acid rain, the ozone layer, mad cow disease, nanotechnology, genetically modified crops, the millennium bug…) without waiting to be proved right or wrong. So wrote Matt Ridley at the start of "Lying with science: a guide to myth debunking," in The Spectator back in March. Well, not quite the start. He actually began with a famous quote from H.L. … [Read more...]
Does the San Francisco Jury Verdict against Monsanto Spell Doom for Roundup?
Now that jurors in a San Francisco court have awarded a man $289 million in damages in his lawsuit against Monsanto (and its parent company Bayer) claiming that his exposure to Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller gave him cancer, some people wonder whether the Cornwall Alliance will reverse its view that Roundup (the brand name for the active ingredient glyphosate) is not a carcinogen. The answer: No. The reason: Because the case provides no convincing evidence that glyphosate causes … [Read more...]
European farmers and eaters 1, Luddites 0
Luddites lost a big one in Europe last week. The European Union voted to re-license the herbicide glyphosate (commonly known as Roundup®), one of the best gifts of science to man (because it makes food more abundant and affordable) and nature (because it minimizes the amount of cropland needed to grow food), despite howls of protest by those who wrongly claim it's a dangerous carcinogen. Mark Lynas hits the nail on the head with the title of his blog piece about it at the Cornell Alliance for … [Read more...]
Does Monsanto’s Roundup (Glyphosate) Cause Disease?
Recently a friend asked me to evaluate an apparently scientifically substantial article that concluded that glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup, one of the world’s most widely used artificial pesticides—has caused a dramatic increase in a variety of diseases such as autism, inflammation, immune disorders, gluten intolerance, celiac disease, and cancer. I’ve been shown various “studies” in the past making similar claims but have always seen quickly that they weren’t based on sound … [Read more...]
