Global Warming Causes Kidney Stones?

Timothy Birdnow

I about fell off my chair when I read this article this morning.

This Epoch Times article was discussing the rise in kidney stones amount children and youths. I was interested, having enjoyed the exciting and rewarding challenge of passing uric acid stones myself (and not passing them, but rather having to have them cut out of me quivering innards)

They gave good reasons for why kidney stones are increasing among kids; poor hydration since few actually drink WATER any longer, too much salt, and activity levels comparable to a sessile creature, like an oyster or clam. (I had a cat who never moved and he wound up with such stones and had to have surgery to clean a huge number of stones out of his bladder and urinary tract, and it was just because he simply refused to move.)

But I was taking a sip of coffee and spit it all over the dining room table over this:

You may pick your jaw up off the floor now. Do close the mouth too lest you catch flies.

This isn't the mindless drivel coming from Democratic Underground or The Huffington Post. It's from THE EPOCH TIMES for crying out loud!

I know; they are just summarizing another article but for the love of all things holy they owed everyone at least an emoji denoting shock and amazement at so ridiculous a claim.

Now, the Earth has warmed perhaps 2* F. over the last hundred years, according to the very biased NOAA, and that is assuming the 1930's was cooler than today - an unsupportable assertion made by NOAA and NASA only after jimmying their data because they couldn't find a way to explain that it was warmer when there was less co2. It also is certainly no warmer than the height of the Medieval Warming Period which was 2* F. warmer than today. While we may not have good records on kidney stones during the Middle Ages we certainly have no indication there was an increase in them from any literature available.

But even if that is so, so what?

First, the climate models themselves make the case that most of the planetary warming (and they are giving us a GLOBAL average) occurs in the polar regions and around the tropopause in the atmosphere. (No tropospheric hot spot has been found, btw., contradicting climate models.) Very little of the warming is FELT at ground level. What's more most of this warming is diurnal, meaning warmer nights in summer and winter (something we just aren't seeing). This is what the models all predict.

So the kids are sweating more when they are in bed?

I hate to point out to this dim-witted author (one Sheramy Tsai) that we now have a little thing called air conditioning. When I was a kid we didn't have air conditioning at all, not in my home, or in our cars. Yes, you could get it in bars or supermarkets or whatnot, and many homes did have it, but we didn't. I remember trying to sleep in a furnace, sweat soaking my bedsheets. Air conditioning became ubiquitous in the '70's. I remember my father getting a car with a/c (which he refused to use because it used up gas). I also remember when we moved into a home that had two window units; they didn't work that well but it was a dream come true for us WHEN MY PARENTS LET US PUT IT ON and then it had to be above 95*. When we got central air installed it was so very much better, but still my parents rarely put it on.

At any rate, kids now live most of their lives indoors and are always in air conditioned conditions. So how is "climate change" leading to more kidney stones? These kids sweat less, not more.

This alone made me disregard the whole article, and the author.

She also discusses "microplastics" as a possible cause of increasing kidney stones. But we didn't see the rise in kidney stones until just a few years ago and plastics have been used for over half a century in large amounts. (BTW I miss the old days of returnable soda or beer bottles; beverages tasted SO much better in glass than in plastic! But you had to worry about cutting your lip on a chipped bottle, and returning them was a pain. When I first started working at age 16 I worked for a grocer and hated having to mess with bottle returns; they were always broken and you had to watch out lest you cut your hand. But I still think it was wise to use returnable glass over plastic.)

According to the Kidney Foundation:


Do note there is little concern about the disparity based on sex (not "gender") because men are taking tthe brunt of it.

At any rate this does correlate to the rise in plastic containers, notably the use of plastic water bottles (many people now refuse to drink tap water, which is ridiculous as it is frequently as good or better than the stuff you get claiming to be "spring water" in a plastic jug.) But correlation does not equate to causality.

In point of fact plastic consumption has never been definitively proven to cause health problems. While I tend to think it's probably not a good idea, there is no solid science linking health concerns with plastic ingestion. We ingest worse things than plastics sometimes. But plastics are blamed for every and any health issue, from autism to cancers, metabolic disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and fertility issues to ingrown toenails. But there is no science that definitively proves this linkage.

No, climate change and "microplastics" are not the cause of kidney stones in children. Bad parenting and sloth and terrible eating habits are. Let's call a spade a spade here.

I despair of human stupidity. One day I'm going to move to trash island and live there atop the alleged huge island of plastic trash (supposedly three times the size of France, so why don't ships run aground on it?) in the Pacific. Maybe I'll create my own country "Trashsylvania".

Shoot; the Aztecs used to build rafts and grow crops on them - mobile farms - which they rowed to market. Why not a giant country floating on plastic waste? Much of America is essentially a trash heap these days after all.

You may say I'm a dreamer but at least I'll be rid of the incessant flood of imbecility coming from even people ostensibly on our side (as this writer for the Epch Times is assumed to be).

Here is a list of things allegedly caused by "climate change" as asserted by media, by the Ruling Class, and by government agencies. Kidney stones is in there somewhere if you have the time to page through this massive laundry list.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 01:08 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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