Tag Archives: Economic costs

Patrick Brown: The Social Feedback Loops Constraining Climate Science

From Watts Up With That?

Patrick Brown of the Breakthrough Institute has written an excellent article: The Social Feedback Loops That Constrain Climate Science

If researchers were perfectly dispassionate reasoners with no motivations other than truth-seeking, their published papers could be taken as a direct, objective view into reality. But as I argued not long ago in an essay in The Free Press, that idealized notion of science is a fantasy. Stemming from a frustration that I felt about not being able to take high-impact climate science at face value, I decided to call out what I see as one problem: The highest-profile research is heavily influenced by cultural forces and career incentives that are not necessarily aligned with the dispassionate pursuit of truth.https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-20-spring-2024/the-social-feedback-loops-that-constrain-climate-science

In the realm of climate science, the focus is often on the environmental feedback loops that intensify global warming. However, the social feedback loops influencing the creation and dissemination of climate science are equally potent and far less scrutinized. These social mechanisms significantly shape the research landscape, often prioritizing narratives that align with certain political and social agendas over a balanced and comprehensive understanding of climate issues.

The Allure of High-Impact Publications and Their Consequences

Brown discusses how research, fundamentally a social endeavor, relies on communication through publications in peer-reviewed journals. The prestige associated with journals like Nature and Science significantly influences the research they choose to publish. These journals, acting as gatekeepers, preferentially select studies that support prevailing narratives, such as the imperative of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, as outlined in the Paris Agreement.

This selection bias is not without consequence. It subtly coerces researchers into framing their studies in ways that are likely to be viewed favorably by high-impact journals, often at the expense of a more nuanced or comprehensive approach. For instance, studies might focus on how climate change negatively impacts an environmental phenomenon while neglecting other significant factors. This methodological tunnel vision can lead to a distorted portrayal of climate science in the public sphere.

The article elaborates on this issue, stating:

“Framing research in a way that at least directionally supports the predominant narrative makes the path to a high-impact publication much less treacherous… rather than ask, ‘What is the magnitude of the influence of climate change on the phenomena I am studying relative to all other influences?’ it is more prudent to ask, ‘How does climate change negatively impact the phenomena I am studying?’”https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-20-spring-2024/the-social-feedback-loops-that-constrain-climate-science

The Economic Costs of Climate Policies: An Overlooked Narrative

Brown notes that one of the most glaring omissions in current climate science literature is a balanced discussion on the economic impacts of climate policies. High-profile journals frequently publish papers that discuss the benefits of stringent climate policies without a corresponding analysis of the costs. For example, a paper might highlight the economic savings from adhering to the 1.5°C limit without considering the substantial costs of such rapid decarbonization.

This lack of balanced analysis could potentially mislead policymakers and the public about the true costs and benefits of climate policies. Research that does attempt to present a more balanced view often finds it difficult to gain traction in high-impact journals, likely because it challenges the prevailing narrative.

The article touches on this issue as well, explaining:

“Our study showed that when costs were considered alongside benefits, the conclusion of the benefit-only analysis was overturned: the Paris Agreement targets would impose net harm on the world economy through 2100… It was the finding of the study, rather than the topic, that was unwelcome.”https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-20-spring-2024/the-social-feedback-loops-that-constrain-climate-science

The Role of Political and Editorial Bias in Shaping Climate Science

Editors and journal policies significantly influence the kind of research that is published. High-profile journals not only reflect but also shape scientific discourse, pushing a narrative that aligns with certain political goals. For instance, endorsements by journal leadership of political figures and policies clearly signal an alignment with specific policy agendas, such as those encapsulated in the Paris Agreement.

This alignment raises questions about the purity of scientific inquiry within these publications. When journals overtly associate with political agendas, they risk compromising their objectivity and the trust of the scientific community and the public.

The article critically notes:

Leadership at Nature and Science have made it clear that they endorse the political goals of the Paris Agreement — to rapidly transition the world’s energy and agricultural economies so that global warming remains below 1.5°C (or at most 2°C) above preindustrial levels.https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-20-spring-2024/the-social-feedback-loops-that-constrain-climate-science

…

Nature as an institution officially endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, citing, among other reasons, his policies in support of the Paris Agreement. Facing some pushback on their explicit embrace of politics, Nature subsequently doubled down on their political statements. The current editor-in-chief of Science, Holden Thorpe, has defended the idea of scientific journals endorsing policies and politicians — implying that the authority of science subsumes the entirety of the climate problem all the way through to the amount of power that the government should yield in dictating a solution.https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-20-spring-2024/the-social-feedback-loops-that-constrain-climate-science

Breaking the Feedback Loop: Proposals for a More Equitable Scientific Discourse

Brown offers potential solutions, such as, to counteract the bias introduced by social feedback loops, several structural changes are necessary. One approach could be to alter the publication process to focus more on the research question and methodology rather than the results. This could help mitigate the publication bias where only results that fit the predominant narrative are favored.

Additionally, increasing transparency in the peer review and editorial decision-making process could help reveal any biases in the publication process. Publishing peer reviews and editorial decision letters, even for rejected manuscripts, could foster a more open and equitable scientific dialogue.

Conclusion

The social dynamics within the climate science community significantly impact the research agenda and the resulting literature. A thorough examination of all aspects of climate science can lead to a deeper understanding of the complexities and potential biases within this field. Both the scientific community and the journals that disseminate research must strive for greater neutrality in their approaches to the publication and discussion of scientific research. This is essential for fostering a more comprehensive and critical approach to climate science, enabling a more robust and informed scientific discourse that can serve the diverse needs and concerns of global society.

Dr Brown’s essay is well worth reading in its entirety.

Why is the WHO Asking Doctors to Lie to Promote Climate Alarm?

From The Daily Sceptic

BY BEN PILE

Last month, everybody’s favourite intergovernmental agency, the World Health Organisation (WHO), published a “new toolkit empowering health professionals to tackle climate change”. The toolkit is the latest attempt to enlist one of the most trusted professions into the climate war. But not only is this transparently ideological and condescending ‘toolkit’ lacking in fact, it requires ‘healthcare professionals’ to use their authority to eschew science and lie to their patients and politicians. The climate war is, after all, political.

The problem for climate warriors of all kinds since the climate scare story emerged in the 1980s and became orthodoxy in the 1990s and 2000s has been the rapid improvement of all human welfare metrics the world over. On the one hand, all life on Earth and the collapse of civilisation hangs in the balance – that is supposedly the implication of data that shows the atmosphere has got warmer. But on the other hand, people living in economies at all levels of development are today living longer, healthier, wealthier and safer lives than any preceding generation. The era of ‘global boiling’, as UN Secretary General António Guterres put it, also happens to be the era in which unprecedented social development has occurred.

That is a paradox if you accept the green premise that economic development comes at the expense of the climate. The UN, which has staked its authority on being able to address ‘global’ issues such as environmental degradation, is committed to defending the ‘global boiling’ narrative. But, at the same time, actively trying to retard the development of low-income countries risks undermining its authority in the developing world.

The statement made by the WHO’s introduction to its new toolkit epitomises the feeble efforts to square this circle, which try to spin interference in the development of low-income countries as being for their benefit:

Our world is witnessing a concerning trend of warming temperatures, extreme weather events, water and food security challenges and deteriorating air quality. The frequency and intensity of these events are surpassing the capacity of both natural and human systems to respond effectively, resulting in far-reaching consequences for health.

Surprisingly, for a ‘toolkit’ aimed at people such as doctors, who have a proven capacity to understand scientific literature, the toolkit offers little evidence in support of these claims. It says that “changing weather patterns and extreme weather events can reduce crop yields, potentially leading to food insecurity and malnutrition” and that the “breeding window for mosquito-borne disease is broadening due to changing weather patterns”. The reference for both of these claims is given in a footnote, which provides a link to the 2023 IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, which says in relation to the first claim:

The occurrence of climate-related food-borne and water-borne diseases has increased (very high confidence). The incidence of vector-borne diseases has increased from range expansion and/or increased reproduction of disease vectors (high confidence).

But dig a little deeper into the IPCC’s discussion on vector-borne diseases and you find the following figure depicting mortality risk of various climate-related factors for six regions of the world.

As the data clearly show, since 1990 there have been radical reductions in mortality caused by malaria, malnutrition, diarrhoeal disease, natural disasters and exposure to temperature extremes. The only departure from those trends is dengue, which in any case is of far less significance than the other factors, claiming approximately just 1.75 lives per 100,000 per year, compared with malaria, which claims more than 50.

How do these data compare with the WHO’s claim that “the frequency and intensity of these events are surpassing the capacity of both natural and human systems to respond effectively, resulting in far-reaching consequences for health”, and the “occurrence of climate-related food-borne and water-borne diseases” and the “incidence of vector-borne diseases” have increased? They do not compare. In Africa, deaths from malnutrition have fallen by three quarters between 1990 and 2017. Diarrhoeal disease mortality has fallen by two thirds in the same period. Malaria deaths have halved. Consequently, more than 10,000 fewer infants die in the world each day than died each day in 1990.

This is, or ought to be, all the more remarkable to anyone who tracks developmental data, because of the WHO’s longstanding attempt to link these diseases of poverty to climate change. In the 2002 World Health Report, the WHO claimed that 154,000 deaths were attributable to climate change, almost exclusively in High Mortality Developing Countries (HMDCs) – a figure obtained by estimating climate change’s impact on each of these diseases of poverty. Yet despite the radical progress that has been shown since 2000, the WHO has shown no interest either in revising its understanding of climate change or in developing an understanding of what has driven these improvements in global health, in spite of its name. Instead, it has doubled down on the climate-health narrative.

A similar ‘paradox’ can be shown by comparing the WHO’s statements on food security with other UN agencies’ data. There is no evidence of climate change adversely affecting agricultural production in vulnerable economies.

Yet the WHO’s toolkit urges “health professionals” to “communicate” the urgent climate crisis to ordinary people and to use their authority to influence politics:

Things you could say to a policymaker: Climate change is here now, and I am already seeing the impacts on my patients’ health. The health of some people is affected more severely, including children and elderly people, disadvantaged communities, remote communities, and people with disabilities or chronic illness.

People are living longer and healthier lives. Infant mortality is way down. Far fewer people are living in poverty. But the WHO wants doctors and nurses to claim that the opposite is true. And worse than that, the toolkit advises those doctors and nurses not to debate:

Don’t debate the science Don’t get caught up in conversations that question climate science. It’s not up for debate. If conversation veers into this territory, redirect it back to your professional expertise and the links between climate change and health.

But there are no “links between climate change and health”. And if there appear to be, these local or regional health trends run counter to the global trends. Therefore, there must be a better explanation than ‘climate change’. It may well be that extreme weather afflicts a place, or even that unusual weather causes the population of that place a number of problems, as it always has. But ‘extreme weather’ is both rare and as yet not attributable to climate change, on the IPCC’s own analysis. And so, if small changes in weather are coincident with negative economic change or health metrics, the cause is less likely to be meteorological than political in nature. For example, incompetence, especially that of undemocratic regimes’ bureaucracies, is very often the cause of hunger, thirst and the lack of basic services. And in their haste to find politically expedient correlations between weather and welfare metrics, researchers fail to consider alternative causes, despite the knowledge that humans are far more sensitive to economic forces than to nature’s whims.

Don’t believe me? Well, the evidence is extremely stark. Whereas the WHO wants to persuade doctors to ignore science to claim there are “links between climate change and health”, by far the strongest predictor of health is in fact wealth. Accordingly, the WHO 2002 report found practically no climate-related deaths in ‘Low Mortality Developing Countries’ and ‘Developing Countries’. There are no deaths “from climate change” where malaria, malnutrition and diarrhoea are eliminated by rising income levels.

Seen from this perspective, the WHO’s mobilisation of health professionals looks very much like a political campaign against wealth. Only such an ideological – and anti-science – aversion to wealth could put such emphasis on the link between health and weather, because whereas doctors can and should say that income and health are linked, the WHO presses them not to: the best thing that can be given to poorer people is ‘stable weather’, apparently, not higher incomes. The toolkit even anticipates this criticism, advising people how to answer the argument that “climate action is perceived as detrimental to the economy”. According to the WHO, this is “an untrue and unhelpful perception held by some people… which was repeated by some businesses and governments to delay the implementation of climate solutions”. A conspiracy theory, no less, which is supported only by the highly dubious claim that “for every dollar spent on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, approximately $2 are saved in health costs”.

Any doctor who took such an extraordinary and unevidenced claim about a new drug at face value and promptly started prescribing it to their patients would have his or her licence taken away. Britain, for instance, spends around £10 billion per year on subsidising its green electricity transition alone, yet there is no evidence of the NHS budget benefiting by £20bn. An analysis of Germany’s Energiewende estimates the annual cost at €45 billion, yet per capita expenditure on healthcare rose from €3,500 in 2009 to €5,700 in 2021 – an increase of 62%. Moreover, Germany’s green deindustrialisation has come at a heavy price, signalling to the world that not even a first-tier industrialised and wealthy nation can survive such environmentalism, with far reaching consequences looming for similar policies in the rest of Europe. The country’s status as Europe’s deep-green policy champion has passed and now half of Germans believe that lower prices should be put before emissions-reduction policies. German tractors, and for that matter French and Dutch ones as well, aren’t heading to the capital’s streets to protest against green economic and health miracles. The WHO’s claim is simply mad.

The reason the WHO’s toolkit is so bereft of evidence and logic is because it’s just political propaganda. The document credits authors who are not medical doctors and climate scientists, but psychologists at the Centre for Climate Change Communication located at George Mason University, led by Dr. Ed Maibach. As I have pointed out previously in the Daily Sceptic, climate shrinks’ unwelcome intrusion into climate politics does nothing to improve debate and only serves to antagonise increasingly intense conflicts. And their involvement in producing the WHO’s toolkit is no exception. This remote, conflicted intergovernmental agency claims the authority of ‘experts’, but its guidance instructs doctors to eschew science, evidence and debate – it literally advises them not to engage in debate – and instead to promulgate green ideology: the mythical claim that there are ‘links’ between climate and health, that the green ‘transition’ will improve health and that complying with emissions targets is cheap as chips.

The toolkit may give ‘healthcare professionals’ the justification to lie to the public and politicians, but that’s not ‘empowerment’, it’s just fibs. And its recruitment of psychologists to mobilise doctors and nurses as the instruments of a political agenda is yet more evidence of the urgent need to dismantle the WHO, for the sake of billions of people’s health and wealth.

Subscribe to Ben Pile’s The Net Zero Scandal Substack here.

Britain is Leading the World in Committing Economic Suicide

From The Daily Sceptic

BY DAVID CRAIG

As our leaders bicker over how fast Britain should get to Net Zero, you’ll hear politicians, eco-zealots and media pundits claiming that Britain is leading the world in reducing our country’s CO2 emissions. This is one of the few statements about climate made by our ruling elites which does actually appear to be true. Since 1990, Britain’s CO2 emissions have almost halved from 604 million metric tons to just under 350 million tons by 2022. That equates to a drop from 10 metric tons per capita in 1990 to below five tons per capita:

While celebrating this great supposed ‘success’, our politicians, media and eco-activists often seem less keen to explain how this reduction in CO2 emissions was achieved.

Here’s another chart. It shows the share of the U.K.’s GDP made up by manufacturing:

Since 1990, the year U.K. CO2 emissions started falling, the percentage of U.K. GDP from manufacturing has also halved from just over 16% to around 8%.
Moreover, during the same period, the number of people employed in U.K. manufacturing has dropped from 4,963,000 to just 2,601,000. A cynic mighty be tempted to wonder what happened to all those hundreds of thousands of highly-skilled, highly-paid green jobs that our rulers promised us would be created in Britain by the energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewables.

For years the U.K. has had some of the world’s highest energy prices due to our replacement of cheap, reliable fossil fuels with expensive, unreliable and intermittent supposed ‘renewables’. In 2022, in the U.K., which gets only 42% of its electricity from fossil fuels, household energy cost $0.41/kWh. In France, where 70% of its electricity comes from cheap, reliable nuclear, electricity costs were just $0.21/kWh – almost half the U.K. price. In the U.S., which generates about 60% of its energy from fossil fuels, the price was $0.18/kWh – less than half the U.K.’s cost. In China, where 55% of electricity comes from coal and a total of 83% comes from fossil fuels, household electricity costs are only $0.08/kWh – a quarter of the U.K.’s cost. There is a similar picture in India, where over 75% of electricity generation is from fossil fuels, of which three quarters comes from cheap, energy-rich coal, household energy costs only $0.07/kWh – a sixth of the U.K. cost.

So, just to put all of this into context, we can look at how much of the U.K.’s GDP comes from manufacturing – making real things that people in Britain and abroad want to buy – compared to our major competitors. In 2022, 8% of the U.K.’s GDP came from manufacturing compared to 9% for France, 12% for the U.S.A., 13% for India, 14% for Italy, 18% for Germany and a massive 28% for China.

A picture is emerging which suggests that the more a country relies on renewables for its electricity, the higher are its energy costs and the lower is the percentage of its GDP made up by manufacturing.

Economist Richard Salsman wrote: “The science of economics is clear: the production of money and debt is not equivalent to the production of real wealth. To claim otherwise is to follow fantasy, not reality – or science.”

As we in Britain enthusiastically print money and increase national debt in pursuit of our Net Zero goals, we seem to be wrecking U.K. manufacturing with high energy prices thus committing economic suicide as U.K. manufacturing moves to countries with lower energy costs. It’s more than astonishing that not a single one of our politicians and media supposed ‘experts’ seem to understand or are willing to admit what is actually happening and how the U.K. is committing an extraordinary act of self-mutilation by cutting the country’s CO2 emissions.

If there really was a climate crisis, the U.K.’s economic suicide to supposedly save the planet might be justified. But as I try to explain in my most recent book There is No Climate Crisis, there is no emergency that warrants such extreme actions. Yes, the Earth has probably warmed up a little since the freezing 1960s and 1970s when many experts were panicking about global cooling and the advent of a new ice age, which experts predicted would cause crop failures, mass starvation, the migration of millions from the cooling North towards warmer countries and wars over scarce food supplies. But this warming is just part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling driven mainly by the Earth’s rotation, solar activity and cloud cover. Moreover, the ice caps aren’t melting, in spite of the Guardian and the New York Times regularly predicting their demise. The polar bears are doing fine. In fact there may be so many of them that they may have difficulty finding sufficient food. The Great Barrier Reef has record levels of coral. Around five times as much U.S. forest burned each year in the scorching hot 1920s and 1930s as is burnt now. Even the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) admits that there has been no acceleration in sea level rise for the last 100 years. And the number of people killed by extreme weather events has fallen by over 95% in the last 120 or so years in spite of the world’s population quadrupling from under two billion in 1900 to almost eight billion now.

It’s a pity that those dragging us towards their Net Zero nirvana aren’t a bit more forthcoming about the economic devastation that their deluded policies are inflicting upon us.

David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.

Glasgow’s Strict Ulez-Style Scheme Under Fire After Air Pollution Rises 10%

From The Daily Sceptic

By RICHARD ELDRED

Despite being implemented to improve air quality by restricting older vehicles, Glasgow’s Low Emission Zone has resulted in a 10% increase in traffic-related pollution levels. The Telegraph has the story.

Pollution levels of gases linked to traffic rose by about 10% in the centre of Glasgow after the SNP set up a ‘draconian’ Ulez-style scheme, official figures show.

Nitrogen dioxide levels in the city’s Hope Street, which has repeatedly had the country’s worst air quality, were measured at an average of 34 micrograms per cubic metre between June and August this year.

This compared with a figure of 31mg in the same period last year, before the city’s low emission zone (Lez) was introduced – a rise of 9.7%. The legal limit is 40mg.

Levels of another pollutant from motor vehicles, known as fine particulate matter, surged by 11.5% over the same period, from 5.2mg to 5.8mg per cubic metre.

The SNP-run Glasgow City Council said the weather could be responsible for the surge, but the figures prompted further questions about whether cars should be included.

Experts said buses and coaches are the largest polluters and they have been subject to the Lez since the end of 2018. Enforcement of other vehicles started on June 1st this year.

One air quality­ expert, who did not wish to be named, told the Scottish Mail on Sunday: “Buses are the main polluters, hence the reason levels remain more or less the same as before, and therefore y­ou have to question the point of banning cars given all the cost, disruption and inconvenience.”

The Glasgow scheme is stricter than London’s controversial ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) as drivers in older vehicles are banned from entering the city centre, rather than being given the option to pay a daily fee.

An older car entering the zone each day would face penalties of £60, a penalty that doubles with each subsequent breach of rules up to a daily cap of £480 for cars and vans and £960 for buses and HGVs. The fine is reset to £60 if there are no breaches for 90 days.

It emerged last month that the city council was spending £100,000 on renting vehicles to replace those within its fleet that did not comply with the new rules.

Worth reading in full.