Debunked: J. Marvin Herndon's "Geoengineering" Articles in Current Science (India) and IJERPH

[Trailblazer]

Interesting update

Lisa, where did he post that? I don't see it on his Facebook page.

 

[skephu]

I first wrote Dr Herndon, pointing out the flaws in his paper. He didn't reply. Then I sent the same comments to the editor, recommending the withdrawal of the paper. He refused, claiming that the paper was peer reviewed by an editor who is a good geochemist. Instead, he sent my comments to dr Herndon for an answer. He actually wrote a lengthy answer, which also included his suspicions that I am a CIA disinformation agent. Then I received an email from the editor that my submission was accepted and will be published along with Dr. Herndon's reply. This I refused, as my email was not intended for publication.

 

[Trailblazer]

I first wrote Dr Herndon, pointing out the flaws in his paper. He didn't reply. Then I sent the same comments to the editor, recommending the withdrawal of the paper. He refused, claiming that the paper was peer reviewed by an editor who is a good geochemist. Instead, he sent my comments to dr Herndon for an answer. He actually wrote a lengthy answer, which also included his suspicions that I am a CIA disinformation agent. Then I received an email from the editor that my submission was accepted and will be published along with Dr. Herndon's reply. This I refused, as my email was not intended for publication.

Interesting. A shame, though, that your rebuttal to Herndon's paper will not be published. It would have been nice if they had also published his accusations that you are a CIA agent - that sort of thing would surely do more to discredit him than simple scientific rebuttal!

 

[Trailspotter]

OK here's a confession for you guys. It's me.

Yes, I thought it probably was you while cycling to work. But you have confessed before I got there (and checked my inbox)

 

[Hama Neggs]

I first wrote Dr Herndon, pointing out the flaws in his paper. He didn't reply. Then I sent the same comments to the editor, recommending the withdrawal of the paper. He refused, claiming that the paper was peer reviewed by an editor who is a good geochemist. Instead, he sent my comments to dr Herndon for an answer. He actually wrote a lengthy answer, which also included his suspicions that I am a CIA disinformation agent. Then I received an email from the editor that my submission was accepted and will be published along with Dr. Herndon's reply. This I refused, as my email was not intended for publication.

Why not write one which you would release for publication?

 

[skephu]

Why not write one which you would release for publication?

I know a geochemist who may be interested in writing a rebuttal, so that may happen.

 

[Critical Thinker]

Published on 8/11/15 in MDPI

What is MDPI.com?
MDPI.com, the website of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, is a platform for peer-reviewed, scientific open-access journals operated by MDPI AG, based in Basel, Switzerland.

Link

Evidence of Coal-Fly-Ash Toxic Chemical Geoengineering in the Troposphere: Consequences for Public Health
J. Marvin Herndon

Abstract
The widespread, intentional and increasingly frequent chemical emplacement in the troposphere has gone unidentified and unremarked in the scientific literature for years. The author presents evidence that toxic coal combustion fly ash is the most likely aerosolized particulate sprayed by tanker-jets for geoengineering, weather-modification and climate-modification purposes and describes some of the multifold consequences on public health. Two methods are employed: (1) Comparison of 8 elements analyzed in rainwater, leached from aerosolized particulates, with corresponding elements leached into water from coal fly ash in published laboratory experiments, and (2) Comparison of 14 elements analyzed in dust collected outdoors on a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter with corresponding elements analyzed in un-leached coal fly ash material. The results show: (1) the assemblage of elements in rainwater and in the corresponding experimental leachate are essentially identical. At a 99% confidence interval, they have identical means (T-test) and identical variances (F-test); and (2) the assemblage of elements in the HEPA dust and in the corresponding average un-leached coal fly ash are likewise essentially identical. The consequences on public health are profound, including exposure to a variety of toxic heavy metals, radioactive elements, and neurologically-implicated chemically mobile aluminum released by body moisture in situ after inhalation or through transdermal induction.

 

[skephu]

MDPI is a dubious publisher.
Chinese publisher MDPI added to list of questionable publishers

I have added the Chinese publisher MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) to my list of questionable publishers. This is not a decision I have taken lightly.

There is increasing evidence that MDPI is a highly questionable scholarly publisher, evidence that compels me to add the publisher to my list and to recommend that scholars:

• Not submit papers to any of the MDPI journals
• Not accept invitations to serve as journal editors or editorial board members, including as guest editors for the publisher's many "special" issues
• Resign from any MDPI editorial boards they are currently serving on, and resign as editors

3. Because its mission is to earn as much money as possible through article submissions, the publisher regularly accepts questionable papers, resulting in a kind of "controversy of the month" for MDPI that draws attention – both wanted and unwanted – to the publisher.

 

[Trailspotter]

My main concern is that the Academic Editor (of the paper?) Paul B. Tchounwou is a distinguished scientist, a recent AAAS awardee:
http://www.aaas.org/news/2013-aaas-mentor-award-goes-paul-b-tchounwou-jackson-state-university

 

[Trailblazer]

In what world are these element ratios even remotely similar???

Bear in mind that the horizontal axis on the chart has a logarithmic scale - a deliberate attempt to make the ratios seem more similar. But even with the log scale, the ratios are wildly different.

For instance, just eyeballing from the chart (as he doesn't give the original data):

The Sr/Al ratio is about 0.2 for the rainwater, and close to 1 for the leachate.

The Fe/Al ratio is about 0.025 for the rainwater, and again close to 1 for the leachate.

 

[skephu]

My main concern is that the Academic Editor (of the paper?) Paul B. Tchounwou is a distinguished scientist, a recent AAAS awardee:
http://www.aaas.org/news/2013-aaas-mentor-award-goes-paul-b-tchounwou-jackson-state-university

It may mean nothing. MDPI invites distinguished scientists as editors, who then don't do any actual work for the journal. See from the same link as my previous post:

The report also reveals an email exchange involving MDPI owner Shu-Kun Lin in which Lin offered the editorship of one of his many journals to a Chinese scholar, promising the scholar that "It does need an editor to do a lot of work, however I won't bother you to do anything." The new editor responds, "It is very good that I don't need to work to be an editor. I like being lazy."

Also, he may not even know he's an editor:

The publisher claims that that several Nobel Laureates serve on its editorial boards, but one investigation found that they didn't realize they were listed.

 

[skephu]

In what world are these element ratios even remotely similar???

View attachment 14360

Bear in mind that the horizontal axis on the chart has a logarithmic scale - a deliberate attempt to make the ratios seem more similar. But even with the log scale, the ratios are wildly different.

Basically, the average compositon of Earth's crust also has the same "signature" by these criteria.

 

[skephu]

Also, he may not even know he's an editor:

He does know, he lists it on his web site:
http://www.jsums.edu/biology/files/2012/08/TBoard.pdf

 

[Trailspotter]

Also, he may not even know he's an editor:

He is named there as

Editor-in-Chief

Prof. Dr. Paul B. Tchounwou

Molecular Toxicology Research Laboratory, Jackson State University, 1400 Lynch Street, Box 18750, Jackson, MS 39217, USA
E-Mail: paul.b.tchounwou@jsums.edu

 

[Trailblazer]

Herndon also links to this flawed HEPA air filter analysis: http://losangelesskywatch.org/lab-test-results

This analysis takes the percentages of metals in the collected particulate matter and then compares them to maximum containment limits in drinking water (actually, MCL values for water, arbritarily doubled to give "maximum safe limits for air").

This is like measuring the salt content of sea water by boiling down an unknown quantity of it and then analysing the resultant crystals, and claiming the water must be >95% salt.

 

[Trailspotter]

Herndon acknowledged Ian Baldwin "for many helpful discussions, criticisms, and advice". I hope that this is not the Ian T. Baldwin, a very respected scientist.

 

[Trailblazer]

Herndon acknowledged Ian Baldwin "for many helpful discussions, criticisms, and advice". I hope that this is not the Ian T. Baldwin, a very respected scientist.

Maybe more likely the "community evaluator" mentioned at the bottom of this page?

http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/climate-geoengineering-the-secret-spraying-of-our-skies/

http://www.chelseagreen.com/about-us-company-news


Edit: almost certainly, I would say. http://issuu.com/2vrmagazine/docs/2vrfinal041115

 

[Mick West]

We should write a summary post to go at the top of this thread, and covering both papers. I'll start it here for now (in my next post) and solicit corrections/suggestions.

 

[skephu]

Dane Wigington is very happy about the new paper, and republished it on his web site:

New Science Study Confirms Contamination From Climate Engineering Assault

The "International Journal Of Environmental Research And Public Health" has just published an in depth research report from Dr. Marvin Herndon that directly implicates the use of highly toxic coal fly ash with 99% certainty as base material in the ongoing climate engineering programs.

 

[Belfrey]

I'd like to retract my analysis on post 44. I was just going back through the Moreno leachate data, and I discovered that I'd made a column-sort error in Excel that threw the ratios off. Herndon's figures are still wrong, but not by as many orders of magnitude as I thought. Apologies, all. I'll post the numbers after I go through it again.

 

[Lisa P]

Lisa, where did he post that? I don't see it on his Facebook page.

F/B, I will see if I archived it, I have a friend...

p.s. It is from Facebook but it is not public and it won't let me archive. Any suggestions on how to archive it anyone?

 

[Landru]

We should write a summary post to go at the top of this thread, and covering both papers. I'll start it here for now (in my next post) and solicit corrections/suggestions.

Hell Mick, why not work on a collaborative paper for submission?

 

[deirdre]

F/B, I will see if I archived it, I have a friend...

p.s. It is from Facebook but it is not public and it won't let me archive. Any suggestions on how to archive it anyone?

i wouldnt worry about it. if people want to see it for themselves they can friend him.

 

[Belfrey]

I'll post the numbers after I go through it again.

Here are the Al, Ba, and Sr leachate numbers for the 23 sites reported in Moreno et al (2005). I converted units between micrograms and nanograms as appropriate, and calculated the ratios:

If I plot those (now double-checked) Sr:Ba numbers against the values from Herndon's chart, I get this:

The real data from Moreno shows a ratio that is about 10 times higher than that shown in Herndon's first article:

I notice that in this newer paper, Herndon used (unpublished?) analyses of rainwater from San Diego, rather than the sources used previously. I haven't had a chance to go through it in detail, but this stands out for me:

First of all, his Sr/Al and Ba/Al ratios that he shows for the Moreno leachate data are, again, way off. Second of all, when he says that "At a 99% confidence interval, the two sets of data have the same mean (T-test)," that is also misleading. The T-test is a test for significant difference, not significant sameness. If your sample size is poor, the variance too large, etc., you're not going to find a statistically significant difference even if a true difference exists. And if you make the things more stringent by choosing an especially-high 99% percentage on the confidence interval (or an unusually low p-value of 0.01), you make it even less likely that you're going to find a significant difference. Failing to find a significant difference is not the same as finding evidence of sameness.

 

[skephu]

First of all, his Sr/Al and Ba/Al ratios that he shows for the Moreno leachate data are, again, way off.

Why do you think so? They seem correct to me.

 

[skephu]

Second of all, when he says that "At a 99% confidence interval, the two sets of data have the same mean (T-test)," that is also misleading. The T-test is a test for significant difference, not significant sameness.

Exactly. It is not even possible to prove by statistics that two means or variances are equal. It is only possible to show that the difference is below some threshold.
Herndon's statistical analysis is fundamentally flawed. It's even worse that the 99% confidence interval he used was translated by Dane Wigington into a statement that it was shown with 99% certainty that they spray coal fly ash.
Also, what is badly missing in Herndon's analysis is the use of any kind of control. If he wants to show that there is coal fly ash in the rain, it's not enough to compare the rain with coal fly ash. He should have compared the rain composition with a number of other substances of geological origin, and then show that coal fly ash is the closest in composition to the rain. Without control, the analysis is invalid.
Too bad nowadays anyone can publish any rubbish because so-called "open access" journals will publish anything for the money.

 

[Trailblazer]

Exactly. It is not even possible to prove by statistics that two means or variances are equal. It is only possible to show that the difference is below some threshold.
Herndon's statistical analysis is fundamentally flawed. It's even worse that the 99% confidence interval he used was translated by Dane Wigington into a statement that it was shown with 99% certainty that they spray coal fly ash.
Also, what is badly missing in Herndon's analysis is the use of any kind of control. If he wants to show that there is coal fly ash in the rain, it's not enough to compare the rain with coal fly ash. He should have compared the rain composition with a number of other substances of geological origin, and then show that coal fly ash is the closest in composition to the rain. Without control, the analysis is invalid.
Too bad nowadays anyone can publish any rubbish because so-called "open access" journals will publish anything for the money.

He neatly sidesteps the control issue (at least in terms of "contaminated" vs "non-contaminated" rainfall)...

 

[Belfrey]

Why do you think so? They seem correct to me.

It looks to me like he took the mean value for each element across all 23 sites, and then divided mean Ba and Sr by mean Al to get his ratios. But that's the ratio of the means, not the mean of the ratios. There is a difference, and unless I've miscalculated in the spreadsheet I posted, it changes the result by two orders of magnitude. Edit: And presumably he would have used the individual site/sample ratios for any statistical test...

 

[Hama Neggs]

He neatly sidesteps the control issue (at least in terms of "contaminated" vs "non-contaminated" rainfall)...

I've seen it many times. They say they tested something "...after a heavy spray day...", but when I ask about a test done BEFORE spraying, they never have one.

 

[Jay Reynolds]

I've seen it many times. They say they tested something "...after a heavy spray day...", but when I ask about a test done BEFORE spraying, they never have one.

here are several tests predating the 1997 inception of the chemtrails hoax:

 

[skephu]

It looks to me like he took the mean value for each element across all 23 sites, and then divided mean Ba and Sr by mean Al to get his ratios. But that's the ratio of the means, not the mean of the ratios. There is a difference, and unless I've miscalculated in the spreadsheet I posted, it changes the result by two orders of magnitude. Edit: And presumably he would have used the individual site/sample ratios for any statistical test...

Yes, I think he shows the ratios of the means in the figures.

 

[cmnit]

The latest Herndon's paper on Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health is currently touted in Italian social media as "absolute evidence of toxic tropospheric chemtrails by the US National Agency for Environment and Health"! Primary culprit "zret" aka one of the Marcianò brothers ...

 

[Steve Funk]

We had an earlier thread on the suggestion from HAARP report that chemtrails are coal ash. https://www.metabunk.org/claim-chemtrails-are-coal-ash.t5691/
Problems with this idea are that coal ash or fly ash would be a lousy geoengineering material. The percent aluminum oxide varies from 5% to 35%. The rest would be dead weight. It is a binder used in the manufacture of portland cement, which would probably cause it to aggregate and fall from the sky almost immediately.

 

[George B]

Did Herndon ever specify how the ash was transported, loaded and injected into the troposphere? Seems like an enormous physical operation. Seem there would be some minimal gesture to investigate just how this is accomplished worldwide.

 

[Efftup]

People who come up with these things never really think through the implications of their ideas.

 

[George B]

People who come up with these things never really think through the implications of their ideas.

IMHO that is the proof of the pudding. The logistic trail is enormous. How many locations, how many aircraft, how many crew members. How many people to load, transport and secure operations. How to keep everyone quiet and paid. Just to mention a few difficult issues.

 

[JRBids]

Did Herndon ever specify how the ash was transported, loaded and injected into the troposphere? Seems like an enormous physical operation. Seem there would be some minimal gesture to investigate just how this is accomplished worldwide.

No and that was the first thing I was looking for when I read his paper earlier.

In the spring of 2014, the author began to notice tanker-jets quite often producing white trails across the cloudless blue sky over San Diego, California. The aerosol spraying that was happening with increasing frequency was a relatively new phenomenon there.

It is interesting that he only "began to notice" traile in spring of 2014. Supposedly the "program" has been going on for how long? Some people say the 50s, some the 90s. He says these are tanker jets but never says how he identifies them as tanker jets. That's enough for the chemtrail crowd though. They've posted the paper everywhere.

 

[Jay Reynolds]

MDPI is a dubious publisher.
Chinese publisher MDPI added to list of questionable publishers

I have added the Chinese publisher MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) to my list of questionable publishers. This is not a decision I have taken lightly.

3. Because its mission is to earn as much money as possible through article submissions, the publisher regularly accepts questionable papers, resulting in a kind of "controversy of the month" for MDPI that draws attention – both wanted and unwanted – to the publisher.

I had a gander at this article about a paper which was published by another one of the MDPI family of journals which published Herndon's article.

http://www.popsci.com/science/artic...-paper-provokes-kerfuffle-hullabaloo-foofaraw

The story seems to go that there is a huge demand for publication by Chinese folks who need to advance their careers. They generally are seeking publication in a "foreign" or "international" journal. MDPI satisfies that need for a price paid by the author.

A recent development in scientific publication called "Open Access"(OA) came out wherein journals derive income not from people paying to read the papers but rather from authors paying the Journal to publishthe work and anyone in the public can read the paper for free.

Before OA Journals, a publisher had to be selective about what they published and maintained high standards so that discriminating consumers(readers) would be willing to pay up front for something they expect will be of high quality. In the case of the MDPI journals, the authors pay up front to get published so they can amass a laundry list of quickly shoved together stuff they can use to build a resume.

 

[George B]

Yes, I think they will cite it everywhere; and that might not be a bad thing. Why?

1) It gives them a motive to further investigate science as a tool to support their positions.

2) This particular paper can be challenged using sound scientific principles which they now have ownership of. A position they have, until now, rejected except in the most limited ways. Turning to fringe websites and YouTube videos instead of NOAA, NASA, FAA, and academic sources, etc.

 

[cloudspotter]

No and that was the first thing I was looking for when I read his paper earlier.

In the spring of 2014, the author began to notice tanker-jets quite often producing white trails across the cloudless blue sky over San Diego, California. The aerosol spraying that was happening with increasing frequency was a relatively new phenomenon there.

It is interesting that he only "began to notice" traile in spring of 2014. Supposedly the "program" has been going on for how long? Some people say the 50s, some the 90s.

Chemtrails Over San Diego
From Fred Gunn
November 28, 2002

Hi Jeff,
My family and I recently moved from Hawaii where we saw only one chemtrail there in 5 years, and that was just last year. Now, in San Diego, we are unfortunately given one "hell" of a show on almost a daily basis.

http://www.rense.com/general32/san.htm