> If Monsanto caused it with such certainty for you, given the widespread use of Roundup, you'd expect vastly more cases.
Monsanto has settled 40,000+ cases, that’s significant and a lot of cases.
I’m not sure your threshold of vastly more cases but when you consider Roundup only came to market in 1976 it’s even more staggering, whereas some of the major tobacco companies had been around 100+ years before losing similar lawsuits.
Also it’s not very clear what your threshold of “certainty” is, but my guess is you are trying to apply a higher standard of proof than the courts and law require.
> However decades of testing have shown no such effects.
That’s just not true, the most complete study published concludes that using glyphosate increases the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma by 41 percent.
There's 181 studies citing that one on Google scholar. I think the science has moved past the paper you claim as the most complete study. You should look through them instead of latching onto a single paper when there's ample rebuttals in the literature.
You can find climatologists that deny global warming. Thus it's not credible to pick one of thousands of results as the truth. Pick the majority of expert opinions, not the outliers.
> You can find climatologists that deny global warming.
It sounds like your argument is that if people can deny climate change, you can deny roundup causes harm…apparently without the need to cite anything. How many of those 181 studies citing the first concluded something completely inconsistent with the first study?
If you think there is a more complete study disproving the 41% increased cancer risk, why not cite or link the study?
> Pick the majority of expert opinions, not the outliers.
In the case of Roundup/Glyphosate we can skip our own interpretations of hundreds of studies, do you know why? Because the company that manufactures the product in question settled ~96,000 claims for ~$10B. Therefore, we can confidently conclude that after taking into consideration the opinions of their own expert witnesses that they hired and who reviewed all available studies, and could have relied on only the most favorable studies at trial, their opinion was Roundup/Glyphosate causes harm and they should settle.
And DOW Corning made a huge settlement over breast implants--but the science eventually showed the whole issue was a complete bust--the women with implants had fewer cases of the reported problems that women without.
Deep pockets + obviously hurting "victim" ends up being guilty until proven innocent and rarely can innocence be proven in the courtroom.
> In the case of Roundup/Glyphosate we can skip our own interpretations of hundreds of studies
This is a completely insane conclusion for anyone who knows anything at all abut the American legal system. Businesses and individuals settle lawsuits or plead guilty when they are innocent constantly because they believe the end result of doing so is likely to be better for them than the alternative. It is not at all hard to imagine a scenario where a company decides to settle a complicated lawsuit rather than trust a jury to make the right decision and give the press an even bigger field day with dragging their name through the mud.
I have no love for big ag, but this is just an obvious fact about how legal conflicts work in the United States.
> This is a completely insane conclusion for anyone who knows anything at all abut the American legal system.
From the sound of it, you’re just regurgitating things you have heard but don’t have much 1st hand experience with. If you are a lawyer, it doesn’t sound like you have worked on billion dollar cases. I helped nearly 1,000 claimants on one of the largest tobacco jury verdicts and it was was only an award of ~$800M. So it’s not a knock and I could be wrong, you might be a lawyer too with a plethora of experience in billion dollar cases, it’s just extraordinarily rare and I don’t see someone with that experience making your comment.
There is a difference between a plea deal on a criminal case and even a settlement on your average personal injury case where legal fees might outweigh judgments, and cases that involve over a hundred thousand plaintiffs/claimants and billions of dollars in damages. While maybe 90% of cases do settle, billion dollar cases don’t often settle, and this settlement ranks among the largest settlements in history (top 3 or 4). Basically you have cases like the BP oil spill and other big tobacco cases exceeding this settlement. No one settles for $10B because they are worried the jury will get it wrong, nor did these companies settle because they were worried about press having a field day.
Your claim to authority here is helping out claimants on a tobacco case, a situation where the companies were unquestionably guilty.
With Monsanto, you have to look at the context. They have been repeatedly sued and lost jury trials, with absurd damages into the hundreds of millions awarded to individual claimants. With any jury trial, the chance of Monsanto losing is (empirically) well above 90%. If you can settle 100k claims at a cost on the order of one percent of what individual claimants are making in their lawsuits against you, it's not unreasonable to take that.
As others have repeatedly said, the question has nothing to do with whether or not the science is on Monsanto's side. Expecting a corporation to act on the basis of moral integrity is pretty laughable, as I'd expect you agree. They're acting on the basis of what they think they can get a jury to accept. If it turns out that juries are particularly awful at interpreting and respecting scientific research, you have to take that into account. If it turns out that settling a class action for way less than claimants have been making in individual lawsuits solves a lot of problems for you, it's reasonable to do that.
Note that I'm not claiming that glyphosate is safe. I'm only claiming that you can't act as if the results of jury trials (or settlements made to avoid jury trials) settle the scientific question.
> Your claim to authority here is helping out claimants on a tobacco case, a situation where the companies were unquestionably guilty.
I’m not claiming authority, in fact I did the exact opposite, I highlighted my lack of experience in billion dollar plus cases. However, my experience is enough within the industry to provide alternative insights to someone who thinks billion dollar cases settle like your average rank and file case, or even more unrelated like plea deals in criminal cases.
And no the tobacco companies were not “unquestionably guilty.” First “guilt” is a criminal term and immaterial as we are talking about civil cases and civil liabilities. Second some tobacco cases still go to trial, the companies actually win some despite being “unquestionably guilty.”
As it relates to liability with respect to the tobacco cases the studies tend to show tobacco products increase lung cancer risk anywhere from 15-30% and the glyphosate study I referenced concluded a 40% NHL cancer risk increase. So naturally I’m curious about the standard you apply when you say the tobacco companies were “unquestionably guilty” unlike glyphosate manufacturers, when the increased risk of a given cancer is higher as a total percentage for glyphosate than tobacco. If tobacco companies were “unquestionably guilty” and glyphosate is shown to increase cancer risk as a total percentage more than tobacco, please enlighten me about the science.
Everyone here who has responded to my comment is talking about “the science”, including you, whereas I’m the only one that bothered to reference a single statistic from a glyphosate study and no one else has bothered to address that study on the merits, except one response that accepts the 40% increase risk as true, but argues that’s a “small increase.” Finally, I’m not acting as though the jury trial settles the science, but when I’m the only one to reference a study and the replies don’t dispute the study or bother citing any studies of their own, then 90,000+ voluntary settlements by the product manufacturer are useful enough for this discussion on HN.
Monsanto doesn't trust those three groups of non-scientists to think like scientists, especially when the prosecution is going to be pulling on the heartstrings.
The decision you've made is to trust a party of non-scientists (Monsanto lawyers) who work in a non-scientific field (jury trials) over the actual body of evidence built by actual scientists doing actual science. Perhaps because the science doesn't support your position.
All the won lawsuits kind of support the link between cancer and Roundup. Also stuff like this makes believe that there are many cases out there:
"the lawyer for the RoundUp Virginia plaintiffs had been charged with extortion after offering to stop searching for more plaintiffs if he was paid a $200 million consulting fee by a manufacturer of glyphosate."
Bad faith question. You don't need science credentials to understand that court rulings aren't scientific evidence. It's either a true statement or it isn't (and it is).
It seems to me that the companies producing these chemicals have a very strong vested interest in _proving_ that there is no connection between the chemicals they produce and any kind of serious health effects.
On the other hand, there are many published studies that strongly support negative health effects:
> The team determined that exposure to glyphosate may increase the risk of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma by as much as 41 percent [0]
So, I found Hodgkin lymphoma at 2.43%. Increased by 41%, 2.43% * 1.41 = 3.43%.
Now any increase in cancer risk is alarming, but this is a small increase. More important question would be. How many people are getting increased exposure to glyphosate? If it's only 1000 people annually, then it looks like ten more people gets cancer. If it's a global exposure, then yes, we have a big problem.
Edited to correct math mistakes, thanks tomsmeding
"Clusters of correlation" is another way of saying random clusters occur from mere statistics with no input from Monsanto, but you want to blame them anyway?
If cosmic rays cause some rate of cancer, then clusters will occur, and you can then blame anything for "clusters of correlation."
Or we can simply look at the hundreds of studies showing that Monsanto is not causing this, studies done fully aware of proper statistical methods, and realize what the science community has known for decades.
Correlation doesn’t mean causation but that also doesn’t mean correlation is random noise. It just means there’s an unknown relationship between facts.
And a non-random data set will produce clusters of correlations which don’t have causal explanations. I’m well aware of this axiom which is why I found it important to address.
Correlation most certainly does not imply an unknown relation between facts.
In fact, there are more completely unrelated correlations than there are correlations caused by related things. This is simple statistics.
Proof? Consider M things related that show a correlation. Suppose some other thing randomly by chance correlates, and that thing has N items correlated by some other set of related facts. Then all the not causally related cross correlations between the M and N items vastly outnumber the causally ones.
So no, correlation absolutely does not imply an unknown relation. It points to a place to look.
However decades of testing have shown no such effects.