Empty credentialism

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Nov 23

RE: More gas plants threat to health. Op-ed by Dr. Mili Roy. The Hamilton Spectator 18 Nov 23.

If there is anything remarkable about the op-ed penned by Professor Dr. Mili Roy, it is how casually she exposes her complete ignorance of the subject she is writing about.  It is as if no serious professionals familiar with the matter and the allegations this which eye doctor is making don’t read the popular press.

Her analysis of an alleged looming climate crisis is nothing rldr but the usual banal nonsense you read about in the mainstream media. She’s either unaware of, or dismisses out of hand, claims by dozens of famous scientists who say there is no climate crisis, the claims of global warming are vastly overstated, and are nothing to worry about.

Her claims about natural gas (methane) display a particular lack of refinement. There’s the lab and then there’s the real world. Methane is not a dangerous greenhouse gas: first, it’s only present in the atmosphere at 2 ppm concentration; it’s infra-red absorption is in a low-energy part of the infrared spectrum, and that absorption peak is itself overlapped by a water vapor band besides.

Her claims of health harms are absurd. Methane is clean-burning, has none of the potentially harmful chemicals that are found in raw coal, and produces no particulates upon combustion. That’s why natural gas stoves can be safely used in the home.  The claim that “air pollution causes 6,600 premature deaths in Ontario each year” is a canard first floated by the OMA in 2005, when they claimed 1,500 premature deaths per year to support their demand that Ontario shutdown her coal fired power plants in Nanticoke and Lambton. When I challenged the OMA’s claim, demanding to see death certificates, the OMA responded vigorously to obscure their admission that there weren’t any. Quite obviously, the adjective ‘premature’ creates a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.

There is absolutely nothing to Dr. Roy’s claims; hers is just another example of waving the authority of her eye doctor credentials to pretend to authority in physics and chemistry. And she's obviously never seen a natural gas stove.

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