by John Dale Dunn
American Thinker
We took one for the team by reading Particles of Truth: A Story of Discovery, Controversy, and the Fight for Healthy Air, by C. Arden Pope III, Douglas W. Dockery, so you won’t have to suffer through it.
The book has twelve chapters plus references and index. It is written by academics from Brigham Young and Harvard University. The publisher, MIT Press, describes the book as “A compelling, real-life account of how scientists uncovered air pollution’s deadly impact on human health — and the contentious battles to use key scientific evidence in the critical fight for clean air.”
One gets a quick sense of the book’s nonsense by reading the three-page Forward by infamous email-deleting Gina McCarthy, former Obama-appointed administrator of the EPA. She states “…Arden Pope and Doug Dockery are unsung heroes in the field of air pollution.” Hardly true, but anyhow…
In stark contrast, the 2016 Scare Pollution. Why and How to Fix the EPA by Steve Milloy and the 2021 National Association of Scholars (NAS) Shifting Sands report burrowed into EPA bureaucratic malfeasance and academic junk science dangers of “trust the science” small particle health effects research.
This research is rooted in bad science, including potential data manipulation (p-hacking) and false creation of convenient hypotheses post-analysis (HARKing). The NAS report also highlighted the replication crisis in academic research, including small particle health effects research.
