Tag Archives: Misinformation

Voice of America Is a Superspreader of Misinformation About Human Health and Climate Change

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By Linnea Lueken

Healthcare and medical business concept

Voice of America (VOA), a U.S. government funded international news agency, posted an article titled “Heat, Disease, Air Pollution: How Climate Change Impacts Health,” which claims that climate change threatens human health because it worsens extreme heat, air pollution, infectious diseases, and mental health problems. Each claim is false, with none being supported by existing evidence. Each of these health problems existed before the industrial revolution and amidst modest warming most are getting better.

The article reports that the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared climate change the “single biggest health threat facing humanity,” and that avoiding a temperature rise exceeding 1.5°C warming above pre-industrial levels as countries committed to in the Paris climate agreement is essential to prevent catastrophic health impacts.

Four categories of health threats are particularly highlighted in the VOA article, the first being “extreme heat.”

VOA writes that this year is “widely expected to be the hottest on record,” and heat “is believed to have caused more than 70,000 deaths in Europe during summer last year,” and also cites a Lancet study that claims by 2050 five times more people will die of heat each year if 2°C warming occurs.

There has been a lot of media coverage claiming that this year is the “hottest on record,” focusing on individual months and the northern hemisphere in particular. However, the data used is suspect, not only because the land-based temperature record is flawed and contaminated with the urban heat island effect, but also as discussed in “Media Fails to Examine Actual Data in Making “Hottest Summer Ever” Claims,”  media conflate measured average temperatures with average temperature anomaly measurements, which are not interchangeable.

The planet began modestly warming even before the industrial revolution began, meaning 2023 is just a continuation of a multi-century trend. Blaming emissions for this year’s heat in particular ignores other natural factors, like increased water vapor from a massive volcanic eruption, an the onset of a powerful El Niño, and increased solar activity.

As described in Climate at a Glance: Temperature Related Deaths, because research shows that cold temperatures actually kill between 10 and 16 times more people than hot temperatures, the slight warming over the past century has likely reduced premature mortality related to temperatures by as many as 166,000 people from 2000 to 2019. The clear evidence shows that cold temperatures kill far more people than hot temperatures and, as a result, as the Earth has modestly warmed, deaths related to non-optimum temperatures have declined significantly.

The next category of health threats discussed by VOA is air pollution. The VOA cites the WHO to assert that outdoor air pollution driven by fossil fuel emissions kills “more than four million people every year,” partially in the form of PM2.5. This figure is not supported by real world data.

Worse still for the claim, VOA admits that deaths from air pollution have fallen over time, not increased, even as the Earth has warmed. As a result, it’s unclear how this category even relates to climate change at all. According to the IPCC, there is no consensus on even the existence of any effects of global warming on “air pollution weather,” or temperature inversion conditions that may cause ground level ozone.

The claim that infectious diseases are on the rise due to climate change has been refuted at Climate Realism many times, for example, here, here, and here, and VOA makes no new claims in this regard. VOA claims that because of animal migration, the risk of infectious disease will spread, especially those spread by mosquitos like dengue, chikungunya, Zika, West Nile virus, and malaria.

The fact remains that no matter what the computer models say, more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies demonstrate that temperature alone is not enough to guarantee migration or longer survival of mosquitoes or mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria. Human interventions like the use of DDT, emptying standing water, mosquito netting, and other methods, far outweigh any effect of temperature.

Paul Reiter, a scientist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explained in a paper that “it is facile to attribute this resurgence [of malaria in some regions] to climate change.”

Looking at other animal sources of disease outbreaks like the Bird Flu, the exotic animal trade and wet markets are much more likely candidates.

There is no evidence that modest warming has caused disease outbreaks due to animal migration nor that continued modest warming it threatens to do so in the future.

VOA devotes only a small section to the final category, mental health, writing “Worrying about the present and future of our warming planet has also provoked rising anxiety, depression and even post-traumatic stress — particularly for people already struggling with these disorders, psychologists have warned.”

This shouldn’t be hard to explain, since media and government alarmism has been significantly ramped up over time. Despite data to the contrary, the mainstream media has increasingly used words like “catastrophe,” “crisis,” and “uninhabitable” to describe the condition of the planet. Some media outlets have tried pointing out that this scaremongering is counterproductive, but it hasn’t stopped, with CNN recently declaring that “no place in the US is safe.”

In the light of this near daily the barrage of climate scare stories, it is no wonder that people struggling with or prone to mental illness in particular are deeply afraid. Survivors of a natural disaster may also struggle with PTSD or similar ailments, but it doesn’t mean that climate change is the cause, as discussed in “Wrong, Mainstream Media, Climate Change is Not Causing PTSD.”

In the end, objective scientific data does not show that human health is being negatively impacted by climate change, and it is certainly not the biggest health threat facing humanity. Because almost every claim in the story is refuted by hard data, it actually throws suspicion on much of the good work unrelated to climate alarm that the VOA and the WHO do. It is especially bad that VOA included the WHO’s unverified mental health claims in the story, since it is fearmongering by mainstream media outlets, like VOA, that are the source of climate (reporting) related mental health problems, not climate change itself.

Linnea Lueken

Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy.

While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”

Linnea Lueken

The post Voice of America Is a Superspreader of Misinformation About Human Health and Climate Change appeared first on ClimateRealism.

The Westminster Declaration

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But around the world, there are governments and those wielding power who find many ways to obstruct it.

This post appeared first on CFACT.

We write as journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics to warn of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms.

Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.

This abuse of these terms has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists, and dissidents in countries all over the world.

Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.

Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’

This complex often operates through direct government policies. Authorities in India[1] and Turkey[2] have seized the power to remove political content from social media. The legislature in Germany[3] and the Supreme Court in Brazil[4] are criminalising political speech. In other countries, measures such as Ireland’s ‘Hate Speech’ Bill[5], Scotland’s Hate Crime Act[6], the UK’s Online Safety Bill[7], and Australia’s ‘Misinformation’ Bill[8] threaten to severely restrict expression and create a chilling effect.

But the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance. They have done so with the full support of ‘disinformation experts’ and ‘fact-checkers’ in the mainstream media, who have abandoned the journalistic values of debate and intellectual inquiry.

As the Twitter Files revealed, tech companies often perform censorial ‘content moderation’ in coordination with government agencies and civil society. Soon, the European Union’s Digital Services Act will formalise this relationship by giving platform data to ‘vetted researchers’ from NGOs and academia, relegating our speech rights to the discretion of these unelected and unaccountable entities.

Some politicians and NGOs[9] are even aiming to target end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.[10] If end-to-end encryption is broken, we will have no remaining avenues for authentic private conversations in the digital sphere.

Although foreign disinformation between states is a real issue, agencies designed to combat these threats, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States, are increasingly being turned inward against the public. Under the guise of preventing harm and protecting truth, speech is being treated as a permitted activity rather than an inalienable right.

We recognize that words can sometimes cause offence, but we reject the idea that hurt feelings and discomfort, even if acute, are grounds for censorship. Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny.

Speech protections are not just for views we agree with; we must strenuously protect speech for the views that we most strongly oppose. Only in the public square can these views be heard and properly challenged.

What’s more, time and time again, unpopular opinions and ideas have eventually become conventional wisdom. By labelling certain political or scientific positions as ‘misinformation’ or ‘malinformation,’ our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defense against disinformation.

The attack on speech is not just about distorted rules and regulations – it is a crisis of humanity itself. Every equality and justice campaign in history has relied on an open forum to voice dissent. In countless examples, including the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, social progress has depended on freedom of expression.

We do not want our children to grow up in a world where they live in fear of speaking their minds. We want them to grow up in a world where their ideas can be expressed, explored, and debated openly – a world that the founders of our democracies envisioned when they enshrined free speech into our laws and constitutions.

The US First Amendment is a strong example of how the right to freedom of speech, of the press, and of conscience can be firmly protected under the law. One need not agree with the U.S. on every issue to acknowledge that this is a vital ‘first liberty’ from which all other liberties follow. It is only through free speech that we can denounce violations of our rights and fight for new freedoms.

There also exists a clear and robust international protection for free speech. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)[11] was drafted in 1948 in response to atrocities committed during World War II. Article 19 of the UDHR states, ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’ While there may be a need for governments to regulate some aspects of social media, such as age limits, these regulations should never infringe on the human right to freedom of expression.

As is made clear by Article 19, the corollary of the right to free speech is the right to information. In a democracy, no one has a monopoly over what is considered to be true. Rather, truth must be discovered through dialogue and debate – and we cannot discover truth without allowing for the possibility of error.

Censorship in the name of ‘preserving democracy’ inverts what should be a bottom-up system of representation into a top-down system of ideological control. This censorship is ultimately counter-productive: it sows mistrust, encourages radicalization, and de-legitimizes the democratic process.

In the course of human history, attacks on free speech have been a precursor to attacks on all other liberties. Regimes that eroded free speech have always inevitably weakened and damaged other core democratic structures. In the same fashion, the elites that push for censorship today are also undermining democracy. What has changed, though, is the broad scale and technological tools through which censorship can be enacted.

We believe that free speech is essential for ensuring our safety from state abuses of power – abuses that have historically posed a far greater threat than the words of lone individuals or even organised groups. For the sake of human welfare and flourishing, we make the following 3 calls to action.

  • We call on governments and international organisations to fulfill their responsibilities to the people and to uphold Article 19 of the UDHR.
  • We call on tech corporations to undertake to protect the digital public square as defined in Article 19 of the UDHR and refrain from politically motivated censorship, the censorship of dissenting voices, and the censorship of political opinion.
  • And finally, we call on the general public to join us in the fight to preserve the people’s democratic rights. Legislative changes are not enough. We must also build an atmosphere of free speech from the ground up by rejecting the climate of intolerance that encourages self-censorship, and that creates unnecessary personal strife for many. Instead of fear and dogmatism, we must embrace inquiry and debate.

We stand for your right to ask questions. Heated arguments, even those that may cause distress, are far better than no arguments at all.

Censorship robs us of the richness of life itself. Free speech is the foundation for creating a life of meaning and a thriving humanity – through art, poetry, drama, story, philosophy, song, and more.

This declaration was the result of an initial meeting of free speech champions from around the world who met in Westminster, London, at the end of June 2023. As signatories of this statement, we have fundamental political and ideological disagreements. However, it is only by coming together that we will defeat the encroaching forces of censorship so that we can maintain our ability to openly debate and challenge one another. It is in the spirit of difference and debate that we sign the Westminster Declaration.

More at the NY Post

Signatories

  • Matt Taibbi, Journalist, US
  • Michael Shellenberger, Public, US
  • Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist, NYU, US
  • John McWhorter, Linguist, Columbia, Author, US
  • Steven Pinker, Psychologist, Harvard, US
  • Julian Assange, Editor, Founder of Wikileaks, Australia
  • Tim Robbins, Actor, Filmmaker, US
  • Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law, NYLS, US
  • Glenn Loury, Economist, USA
  • Richard Dawkins, Biologist, UK
  • John Cleese, Comedian, Acrobat, UK
  • Slavoj Žižek, Philosopher, Author, Slovenia
  • Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University, US
  • Oliver Stone, Filmmaker, US
  • Edward Snowden, Whistleblower, US
  • Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, USA
  • Stella Assange, Campaigner, UK
  • Glenn Greenwald, Journalist, US
  • Claire Fox, Founder of the Academy of Ideas, UK
  • Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Psychologist, Author, Canada
  • Bari Weiss, Journalist, USA
  • Peter Hitchens, Author, Journalist, UK
  • Niall Ferguson, Historian, Stanford, UK
  • Matt Ridley, Journalist, Author, UK
  • Melissa Chen, Journalist, Spectator, Singapore/US
  • Yanis Varoufakis, Economist, Greece
  • Peter Boghossian, Philosopher, Founding Faculty Fellow, University of Austin, US
  • Michael Shermer, Science Writer, US
  • Alan Sokal, Professor of Mathematics, UCL, UK
  • Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, Oxford, UK
  • Jay Bhattacharya, Professor, Stanford, US
  • Martin Kulldorf, Professor of Medicine (on leave), Harvard, US
  • Aaron Kheiriaty, Psychiatrist, Author, USA
  • Chris Hedges, Journalist, Author, USA
  • Lee Fang, Independent Journalist, US
  • Alex Gutentag, Journalist, US
  • Iain McGilchrist, Psychiatrist, Philosopher, UK
  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Human Rights Activist, Author, Netherlands
  • Konstantin Kisin, Author, UK
  • Leighton Woodhouse, Public, US
  • Andrew Lowenthal, liber-net, Australia
  • Aaron Mate, Journalist, USA
  • Izabella Kaminska, Journalist, The Blind Spot, UK
  • Nina Power, Writer, UK
  • Kmele Foster, Journalist, Media Entrepreneur, USA
  • Toby Young, Journalist, Free Speech Union, UK
  • Winston Marshall, Journalist, The Spectator, UK
  • Jacob Siegel, Tablet, US/Israel
  • Ulrike Guerot, Founder of European Democracy Lab, Germany
  • Heather E. Heying, Evolutionary Biologist, USA
  • Bret Weinstein, Evolutionary Biologist, USA
  • Martina Pastorelli, Independent Journalist, Italy
  • Leandro Narloch, Independent Journalist, Brazil
  • Ana Henkel, Independent Journalist, Brazil
  • Mia Ashton, Journalist, Canada
  • Micha Narberhaus, The Protopia Lab, Spain/Germany
  • Alex Sheridan, Free Speech Ireland
  • Ben Scallan, Gript Media, Ireland
  • Thomas Fazi, Independent Journalist, Italy
  • Jean F. Queralt, Technologist, Founder @ The IO Foundation, Malaysia/Spain
  • Phil Shaw, Campaigner, Operation People, New Zealand
  • Jeremy Hildreth, Independent, UK
  • Craig Snider, Independent, US
  • Eve Kay, TV Producer, UK
  • Helen Joyce, Journalist, UK
  • Dietrich Brüggemann, Filmmaker, Germany
  • Adam B. Coleman, Founder of Wrong Speak Publishing, US
  • Helen Pluckrose, Author, US
  • Michael Nayna, Filmmaker, Australia
  • Paul Rossi, Educator, Vertex Partnership Academics, US
  • Juan Carlos Girauta, Politician, Spain
  • Andrew Neish, KC, UK
  • Steven Berkoff, Actor, Playright, UK
  • Patrick Hughes, Artist, UK
  • Adam Creighton, Journalist, Australia
  • Julia Hartley-Brewer, Journalist, UK
  • Robert Cibis, Filmmaker, Germany
  • Piers Robinson, Organization for Propaganda Studies, UK
  • Dirk Pohlmann, Journalist, Germany
  • Mathias Bröckers, Author, Journalist, Germany
  • Kira Phillips, Documentary Filmmaker, UK
  • Diane Atkinson, Historian, Biographer, UK
  • Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck, University of London, Canada
  • Laura Dodsworth, Journalist and Author, UK
  • Nellie Bowles, Journalist, USA
  • Andrew Tettenborn, Professor of Law, Swansea University,  UK
  • Julius Grower, Fellow, St. Hugh’s College, UK
  • Nick Dixon, Comedian, UK
  • Dominic Frisby, Comedian, UK
  • James Orr, Associate Professor, University of Cambridge, UK
  • Brendan O’Neill, Journalist, UK
  • Andrew Roberts, Historian, UK
  • Robert Tombs, Historian, UK
  • Ben Schwarz, Journalist, USA
  • Xavier Azalbert, Investigative Scientific Journalist, France
  • Doug Stokes, International Relations Professor, University of Exeter, UK
  • James Allan, Professor of Law, University of Queensland, UK
  • David McGrogan, Professor of Law, Northumbria University, UK
  • Jacob Mchangama, Author, Denmark
  • Nigel Biggar, Chairman, Free Speech Union, UK
  • David Goodhart, Journalist, Author, UK
  • Catherine Austin Fitts, The Solari Report, Netherlands
  • Matt Goodwin, Politics Professor, University of Kent, UK
  • Catherine Liu, Cultural Theorist, Author, USA
  • Stefan Millius, Journalist, Switzerland
  • Philip Hamburger, Professor of Law, Columbia, USA
  • Rueben Kirkham, Co-Director, Free Speech Union of Australia, Australia
  • Jeffrey Tucker, Author, USA
  • Sarah Gon, Director, Free Speech Union, South Africa
  • Dara Macdonald, Co-Director, Free Speech Union, Australia
  • Jonathan Ayling, Chief Executive, Free Speech Union, New Zealand
  • David Zweig, Journalist, Author, USA
  • Juan Soto Ivars, Author, Spain
  • Colin Wright, Evolutionary Biologist, USA
  • Gad Saad, Professor, Evolutionary Behavioral Scientist, Author, Canada
  • Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, USA
  • Jill Glasspool-Malone, PhD., USA
  • Jordi Pigem, Philosopher, Author, Spain
  • Holly Lawford-Smith, Associate Professor in Political Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Australia
  • Michele Santoro, Journalist, TV host, Presenter, Italy
  • Dr. James Smith, Podcaster, Literature Scholar, RHUL, UK
  • Francis Foster, Comedian, UK
  • Coleman Hughes, Writer, Podcaster, USA
  • Marco Bassani, Political Theorist, Historian, Milan University, Italy
  • Isabella Loiodice, Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Bari, Italy
  • Luca Ricolfi, Professor, Sociologist, Turin University, Italy
  • Marcello Foa, Journalist, Former President of Rai, Italy
  • Andrea Zhok, Philosopher, University of Milan, Italy
  • Paolo Cesaretti, Professor of Byzantine Civilization, University of Bergamo, Italy
  • Alberto Contri, Mass Media Expert, Italy
  • Carlo Lottieri, Philosopher, University of Verona, Italy
  • Alessandro Di Battista, Political activist, Writer, Italy
  • Paola Mastrocola, Writer, Italy
  • Carlo Freccero, Television Author, Media Expert, Italy
  • Giorgio Bianchi, Independent Journalist, Italy
  • Nello Preterossi, Professor, University of Salerno, Scientific Director of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies, Italy
  • Efrat Fenigson, Journalist, Podcaster, Israel
  • Eli Vieira, Journalist, Genetic Biologist, Brazil
  • Stephen Moore, Author and Analyst, Canada

Footnotes

  1. Pahwa, Nitish. ‘Twitter Blocked a Country.’ Slate Magazine, 1 Apr. 2023, slate.com/technology/2023/04/twitter-blocked-pakistan-india-modi-musk-khalistan-gandhi.html.
  2. Stein, Perry. ‘Twitter Says It Will Restrict Access to Some Tweets before Turkey’s Election.’ The Washington Post, 15 May 2023, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/13/turkey-twitter-musk-erdogan/.
  3. Hänel, Lisa. ‘Germany criminalizes denying war crimes, genocide.’ Deutsche Welle, 25 Nov. 2022, https://www.dw.com/en/germany-criminalizes-denying-war-crimes-genocide/a-63834791
  4. Savarese, Mauricio, and Joshua Goodman. ‘Crusading Judge Tests Boundaries of Free Speech in Brazil.’ AP News, 26 Jan. 2023, apnews.com/article/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-government-af5987e833a681e6f056fe63789ca375.
  5. Nanu, Maighna. ‘Irish People Could Be Jailed for “Hate Speech”, Critics of Proposed Law Warn.’ The Telegraph, 17 June 2023, www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/06/1  7/irish-people-jailed-hate-speech-new-law/?WT.mc_id=tmgoff_psc_ppc_us_news_dsa_generalnews.
  6. The Economist Newspaper. (n.d.). Scotland’s new hate crime act will have a chilling effect on free speech. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2021/11/08/scotlands-new-hate-crime-act-will-have-a-chilling-effect-on-free-speech
  7. Lomas, Natasha. ‘Security Researchers Latest to Blast UK’s Online Safety Bill as Encryption Risk.’ TechCrunch, 5 July 2023, techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/uk-online-safety-bill-risks-e2ee/.
  8. Al-Nashar, Nabil. ‘Millions of Dollars in Fines to Punish Online Misinformation under New Draft Bill.’ ABC News, 25 June 2023, www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-25/fines-to-punish-online-misinformation-under-new-draft-bill/102521500.
  9. ‘Cryptochat.’ Meedan, meedan.com/project/cryptochat. Accessed 8 July 2023.
  10. Lomas, Natasha.’Security Researchers Latest to Blast UK’s Online Safety Bill as Encryption Risk.’ TechCrunch, 5 July 2023, techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/uk-online-safety-bill-risks-e2ee/.
  11. United Nations General Assembly. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). New York: United Nations General Assembly, 1948.

Reposted under a Creative Commons License from WestminsterDeclaration.org

Science Hero-Worship

Why It Happens and 5 Things You Can Do About It

From Climate Scepticism

BY JOHN RIDGWAY

Science hero-worship became deadly in 2020. Many political leaders unquestioningly supported what scientists claimed to be effective prevention measures. Over the course of the pandemic, people died believing the vaccines to be 100% safe and effective.

Science hero-worship is not new, of course. But it is more important than ever to understand why some people uncritically accept scientific explanations – and what can be done to create critical barriers to the blind acceptance of science.

In my soon to be written book “Science Hero-Worship: Why It Happens and 5 Things You Can Do About It,” I will offer ways for you to understand and combat the problem. Despite a lack of credentials in psychology, I still know that everyone is susceptible to forms of science hero-worship. Most importantly, I know there are solutions.

Here’s my advice on how to confront five psychological challenges that can lead to science hero-worship.

But before I go any further, I have a confession to make. There will be no book, and what you are reading here is very far from being an original article. What I am actually doing is taking an article you can find on The Conversation, titled “Science Denial: Why It Happens and 5 Things You Can Do About It”, and tweaking it ever so slightly to show just how easy it is to turn the weapon on the owner. Keeping that in mind, please continue reading but feel free to consult the original to see how little needed changing in order to do the old switcheroo. Anyway, back to ‘my’ article:

Challenge #1: Social identity

People are social beings and tend to align with those who hold similar beliefs and values. Social media amplify alliances. You’re likely to see more of what you already agree with and fewer alternative points of view. People live in information filter bubbles created by powerful algorithms. And when journalists share misinformation, you are more likely to believe it and share it. Misinformation multiplies and science hero-worship grows.

Action #1: Each person has multiple social identities. I talked with a climate change catastrophe believer and discovered he was also a grandparent. He opened up when thinking about his grandchildren’s future, and the conversation turned to economic concerns, caused by thoughts of Net Zero. Or maybe someone is unaware of the invalidity of the ONS data on vaccines because so are mothers in her child’s play group, but she is also a caring person, concerned about the potential dangers of vaccines to immunocompromised children.

I have found it effective to listen to others’ concerns and try to find common ground. Someone you connect with is more persuasive than those with whom you share less in common. When one identity is encouraging blind acceptance of the science, leverage a second identity to make a connection.

———————

Okay, I’m going to have to stop right here because there are such things as copyright laws, and the switcheroo was so ridiculously simple that I have probably overstepped them already. There are, of course, four more challenges listed in The Conversation article with four corresponding actions to be taken. You will just have to take my word for it that very little would need to be changed within the remainder of the article to switch it from being half-baked instruction on how to tackle ‘science denialism’ into half-baked instruction on how to tackle blind faith in what scientists say – or, more to the point, what journalists say about what scientists say. Specifically, we have:

Challenge #2: Mental Shortcuts

In which the authors claim that ‘science denialism’ stems from people not bothering to take their time to think seriously about the science, preferring instead to fall back on lazy System 1 thinking. This is, of course, referring to the concept of System 1 and System 2 thinking devised by Kahneman and Tversky, and popularised in their book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the authors that intuitive System 1 thinking and deliberative System 2 thinking are equally relevant to decision-making, and that we all take advantage of their complementary nature regardless of where we fall on the denialist/believer axis. In fact, the easiest way to avoid System 2 thinking is to fall back on trusting the guy in the white coat carrying the clipboard. Remember, the authors are both psychology professors and so they have no excuse for committing such a gaffe.

Challenge #3: Beliefs on how and what you know

In which the authors repeat the canard that the bewildering and rapidly changing advice given out by scientists during the Covid crisis was just science working at its best and that to think otherwise betrays a failure to understand how science is supposed to work. Science, the authors patiently point out, is not about certainties.

The rise of ‘science denialism’ is also blamed on an imagined cohort of fair-minded journalists who, by presenting both sides of arguments, are giving the false impression that there is still debate to be had in areas where the science has already been settled. Science, the authors patiently point out, is all about certainties, as exemplified by the well-known 97% consensus on climate change.

Challenge #4: Motivated reasoning

In which the authors, as you might expect, seem to think that ‘science denialists’ are uniquely guilty. As per the advice they gave against employing mental shortcuts, the ‘science denier’ is encouraged to read around a subject before drawing a conclusion. Damn it! That’s where I have been going wrong all these years.

Challenge #5: Emotions and attitudes

In which the authors warn against letting one’s emotions play too great a role in one’s decision-making. Once again, this is a trait that is supposedly unique to the ‘science denier’ and could not possibly play a role in one’s willingness to swallow uncritically everything that scientists say about a posited existential threat. After all, since when has fear been an emotion?

In summary, the article in The Conversation, is yet another piece of sceptic-bashing nonsense in which the authors extol the benefits of critical thinking whilst failing miserably to employ it themselves. The two professors concerned make much of the dangers of ‘living in information filter bubbles’ whilst giving every impression of occupying one of their own. They warn against mental shortcuts but certainly seem to have fallen under their spell when seeking to interpret the relevance of System 1 and System 2 thinking. They bemoan the failure of the general public to understand the true nature of the scientific enterprise, but I see very little evidence that they have any greater understanding, despite (or because of?) their academic background. They chastise those who engage in motivated reasoning but I suspect that their own reasoning is as motivated as it gets. And, whilst they lay claim to an understanding that emotion is important in decision-making, as long as it is not allowed to get out of hand, one wonders how strongly their own emotions were running when they saw fit to produce such an obviously partisan piece.

There is a serious debate to be had regarding the relationship between science and the general public, but one of the greatest polluters of that debate is a large group of academics who insist on pathologising scepticism, and yet seem incapable of offering any legitimate insights regarding genuinely distinctive traits. Whether it be major offenders such as Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook, or relatively small time felons such as the individuals who wrote this article, all seem to be very much part of the problem whilst purporting to offer the solution. Sadly, therefore, I will not be rushing out to buy “Science Denial: Why It Happens and 5 Things You Can Do About It”. Instead, I will wait for the much more promising, “Psycho-babble Books: Why They Are Written and 5 Things You Should Prefer to Spend Your Money On”.

Conspiracy of Silence: MSM Runs Protection Racket for Wind & Solar Rent-Seekers

From STOP THESE THINGS

The glaring fault with the mainstream media is not so much what they publish, it’s what they refuse to publish. The truth runs a distant third to woke memes and fashionable mantras.

How we found ourselves in a world where power prices are simply unaffordable, and power can only be delivered according the vagaries of the weather, isn’t all down to rent-seeking crony capitalists and politicians, on the take. No, the mainstream media have been in it, up to their necks. They still are.

Notwithstanding the renewable energy driven disaster unfolding in Europe – that in turn is driving a nuclear power renaissance – and the near total collapse of the offshore wind ‘industry’, the MSM keep dishing up propaganda memes about wind power being cheaper than coal (it isn’t) or that the ‘transition’ to an all-wind and sun powered future is simply ‘inevitable’ – plus or minus a few million (near-mythical) mega lithium-ion batteries. Notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Another classic line is about such and such wind farm ‘powering’ 100,000 homes. Which is clearly meant to give the impression that those homes will be powered exclusively by wind power, generated around-the-clock and available on demand, irrespective of the weather. The list of fantastic fictions presented by the MSM is only limited by the deluded imagination you’d expect to drive a deranged cult.

The Australian’s Chris Mitchell identifies the conspiracy of silence that has allowed the wind and solar ‘industries’ to ply their subsidy-soaked trade for far too long.

Journos are failing the public in their reporting on renewables
Chris Mitchell
The Australian
17 September 2023

The main sources of misinformation on Australia’s renewable energy transition are journalists from the ABC and the Nine newspapers.

And it’s not just about exaggerated reporting of natural disasters. Think about preconceptions among environment writers about the rights of people directly affected by the renewables grid expansion. Add to that journalists who ignore inconvenient facts about what is really happening to emissions around the world, and especially in China and India.

This column suggested last year that editors should send reporters into regional Australia to look at the reaction of rural communities affected by the rollout of more than 10,000km of poles and wires to connect renewables projects to the eastern states’ grid. This column has also pointed many times to misreporting of China’s renewables expansion while ignoring its rapidly expanding CO2 emissions.

The piece examined the plight of landholders affected by Transgrid’s HumeLink transmission project. Middap explained what fourth-generation Snow Valleys land holder Dave Purcell sees from his farm: eight to 14 steel towers, up to 76m high, carrying cables crisscrossing his cattle property.

Even Minister for Energy Chris Bowen sympathised with the plight of such farmers. “In my experience, most concerned community members are not anti-renewables, anti-transmission or anti-progress. Nor in most cases are they opposed to projects going ahead if their concerns are addressed,” Bowen was quoted saying.

National environment and climate editor Nick O’Malley savaged the new NSW Labor government’s decision to extend the life of the Eraring power station in the Hunter Valley. This is the country’s largest power source and the likelihood it would need to remain open beyond the 2025 date owner Origin Energy has flagged for closure has been known for years.

O’Malley quoted NSW Minister for Energy Penny Sharpe on social licence and renewables. “As Sharpe says, transition involves dispersing energy production that was once centralised mostly in the Hunter Valley across the state. Objections to new solar farms, wind turbines and transmission lines from landholders across the east coast are increasing.”

The piece, a full page, went on to quote several green energy lobbyists and planning experts about the slow processes of the NSW Department of Planning. From people whose land is being dissected by such projects – not a word. The renewables industry lobby owns the SMH’s journalism.

Reporting about the renewables commitments of the No.1 and No.3 global CO2 emitters, China and India, is just as lacking. Too many environment writers focus on increasing renewables use while ignoring that both countries are expanding their coal capacity.

In fact, The Telegraph in London on September 6 said China had this year started on new coal capacity greater than the entire existing US coal fleet. Yet in much media here it is Australia that is the emissions pariah.

At least The Guardian was honest enough to publish the truth on August 29. Quoting analysis by the Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research of Energy and Clean Air, The Guardian said “… in the first half of 2023 (China’s) authorities granted approval for 52 gigawatts of new coal power, began construction on 37GW of new coal power, announced 41GW worth of new projects and revived 8GW of previously shelved projects.”

Yet ABC radio’s flagship morning current affairs program, AM, on September 11 reported – po-faced – that Australia was being left behind by China’s energy transition as renewables industry leaders here pleaded for subsidies to help compete with US President Joe Biden’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act spending on US emissions reduction.

Reporter Annie Guest interviewed Tim Buckley from the consultancy Climate Energy Finance who called for $100bn in government investment in renewables and critical minerals such as copper and lithium. Buckley believed the Future Fund should become an equity holder in renewables projects.

John Grimes, CEO of the Smart Energy Council, told Guest China was leading the world in the production and export of solar panels, wind turbines and EVs. “The rest of the world is in China’s dust,” he said.

Indeed, China has been the biggest beneficiary of the global energy transition across the West, even though it has increased domestic coal consumption by 300 million tonnes a year and last year increased emissions by 10 per cent over the pre-Covid peak set in 2019, according to The Conversation on July 10.

It is the biggest emitter by far, has the fastest-growing emissions and yet is the winner from commitments in Europe, East Asia, North America and Australia to reduce their emissions. In effect, the rest of the world is exporting its industrial base to China for no net gain on global emissions.

In fact, several European car makers, including German giant Volkswagen, have warned in recent months that European car production is on the verge of collapse in the face of cheap imported Chinese EVs and conventional cars and soaring power prices in Europe.

Now President Biden is using the Inflation Reduction Act to get a piece of the action China has been enjoying and European vehicle, electronics and chemical companies are moving manufacturing facilities to the US. Renewables lobbyists here want government subsidies so they can get some of the cake too. But what if it all fails?

AM was incurious about China’s rising emissions, the dangers of governments picking winners, the severe economic downturn in China, and the possibility Biden’s green agenda may just be a trillion dollar act of self-harm.

An editorial in The Wall Street Journal on September 4 warned many projects that were made possible only by Biden subsidies are now seeking large price increases from utility ratepayers to compensate for higher interest rates and soaring investment costs. Offshore wind developers in New York are seeking a 48 per cent rise in their power delivery contacts.

“The Alliance for Clean Energy NY is also requesting an average 64 per cent price increase on 86 wind and solar projects,’’ the Journal said. It noted growing demand nationally for renewables projects in the wake of Biden’s subsidies had driven inflation in the prices of renewables components.

So the laws of supply and demand apply even in the green economy? Who knew.

Good journalists should cast a sceptical eye over the self-interested claims of people wanting government handouts to boost private profits. Many consumers don’t pay for their media, relying on free sources such as the ABC and The Guardian.

It is incumbent on such sources to test the claims of those who stand to profit from new technologies. ABC consumers may be astounded to know there is as yet no economically viable technology pathway to green hydrogen. Nor would many realise most energy specialists expect all countries will continue to rely on gas for decades to firm renewables.
The Australian

The BBC Seminar That Banned Discussion Of Climate Change

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ralfellis

Hardly a week goes by without yet another glaring example of BBC bias, misinformation or just outright lies on climate issues.

Arguably the roots of this lay in a notorious seminar organised by the BBC in 2006. Some of us may remember this, others may not have been aware of it. Either way, it’s worth re-telling the story.

The high level seminar was held on 26th January 2006 for the purpose of deciding how the BBC should cover reporting and discussion of climate change in the future. According to a BBC Trust report (P40) on impartiality the following year:

“The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus”

Ever since this policy has continued to be followed, with the virtual exclusion of anybody not signed up the BBC’s idea of a consensus, no matter how highly qualified they might be.

However, some began to be a little bit suspicious about who these “best scientific experts were”. After all, science should never be about consensus, and proper scientists should always welcome debate.

It was a blogger named Tony Newberry who decided to file a FOI asking for the list of names of those who attended. Little did he know that he would end up in court in 2012, still trying to force the BBC to release the information. With the help of a team of lawyers, the BBC won the case.

But it was a hollow victory, because just days later another blogger, Mauricio Morabito, used his initiative and found the list of attendees anyway with the help of the Wayback Machine.

This is the list he published at the time:

January 26th 2006,

BBC Television Centre, London

     
Specialists:
Robert May, Oxford University and Imperial College London
Mike Hulme, Director, Tyndall Centre, UEA
Blake Lee-Harwood, Head of Campaigns, Greenpeace
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen
Michael Bravo, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Andrew Dlugolecki, Insurance industry consultant
Trevor Evans, US Embassy
Colin Challen MP, Chair, All Party Group on Climate Change
Anuradha Vittachi, Director, Oneworld.net
Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation
Claire Foster, Church of England
Saleemul Huq, IIED
Poshendra Satyal Pravat, Open University
Li Moxuan, Climate campaigner, Greenpeace China
Tadesse Dadi, Tearfund Ethiopia
Iain Wright, CO2 Project Manager, BP International
Ashok Sinha, Stop Climate Chaos
Andy Atkins, Advocacy Director, Tearfund
Matthew Farrow, CBI
Rafael Hidalgo, TV/multimedia producer
Cheryl Campbell, Executive Director, Television for the Environment
Kevin McCullough, Director, Npower Renewables
Richard D North, Institute of Economic Affairs
Steve Widdicombe, Plymouth Marine Labs
Joe Smith, The Open University
Mark Galloway, Director, IBT
Anita Neville, E3G
Eleni Andreadis, Harvard University
Jos Wheatley, Global Environment Assets Team, DFID
Tessa Tennant, Chair, AsRia


BBC attendees:
Jana Bennett, Director of Television
Sacha Baveystock, Executive Producer, Science
Helen Boaden, Director of News
Andrew Lane, Manager, Weather, TV News
Anne Gilchrist, Executive Editor Indies & Events, CBBC
Dominic Vallely, Executive Editor, Entertainment
Eleanor Moran, Development Executive, Drama Commissioning
Elizabeth McKay, Project Executive, Education
Emma Swain, Commissioning Editor, Specialist Factual
Fergal Keane, (Chair), Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Fran Unsworth, Head of Newsgathering
George Entwistle, Head of TV Current Affairs
Glenwyn Benson, Controller, Factual TV
John Lynch, Creative Director, Specialist Factual
Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy
Jon Williams, TV Editor Newsgathering
Karen O’Connor, Editor, This World, Current Affairs
Catriona McKenzie, Tightrope Pictures catriona@tightropepictures.com

Liz Molyneux, Editorial Executive, Factual Commissioning
Matt Morris, Head of News, Radio Five Live
Neil Nightingale, Head of Natural History Unit
Paul Brannan, Deputy Head of News Interactive
Peter Horrocks, Head of Television News
Peter Rippon, Duty Editor, World at One/PM/The World this Weekend
Phil Harding, Director, English Networks & Nations
Steve Mitchell, Head Of Radio News
Sue Inglish, Head Of Political Programmes
Frances Weil, Editor of News Special Events

,

http://web.archive.org/web/20121114230012/http://omnologos.com/full-list-of-participants-to-the-bbc-cmep-seminar-on-26-january-2006/

The army of BBC bosses who attended tells us just how significant the seminar was to them. It clearly was not just a talking shop, but a major milestone in their editorial policy.

But more important was the list of “best scientific experts”.

It included two Greenpeace campaigners, several other environmentalist activists, representatives of business, charities, the Church of England, BP and Npower Renewables, economists, media people and politicians.

As for climate scientists they were very thin on the ground.

There clearly could have been very little, if any, debate on the actual science.

The very real suspicion is that the event was deliberately designed from the very outset to come up with the result that it did– ie that “the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus”

Climate Activists Defend Spreading Computer Malware to Educate Skeptics

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

It started a month ago, when a group of climate activists invited kids to deceive climate skeptic family members into downloading malware disguised as a cookie recipe.

First published JoNova;

Climate Skepticism Is Increasing – What If We Could Hack Our Way Out Of That?

Two terrible things have happened: the world has entered the ‘global boiling’ phase of climate emergency; and climate skepticism has increased in the past four years, worldwide. Australia is the sixth most skeptical country in the world (following Saudi Arabia, Norway, Russia, USA and the United Arab Emirates). When I tell you I was shocked to read those stats… in the passionate, optimistic bubble that is the Zee Feed audience, it can feel easy to ignore the climate deniers, delay-ers or skeptics as a vocal minority. Trouble is, that cohort of voices, the way they are supported by media and the mechanics of social algorithms are big reasons why policy progress is so. damn. slow.

The survey reveals a huge 42% of Australians are climate skeptics – so chances are you know someone who thinks this way. We can’t let this group get any bigger… which is why Zee Feed and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition is asking you to help us cheekily and sneakily change their minds with NewsJacker.

Why did you say… sneaky?

Even though you probably know a skeptic, having a direct conversation with them is not that simple. Only 31% of young Australians (10-24) feel their parents are consistently listening to their concerns on the topic. 

…

Climate skeptics are victims of a misinformation echo chamber. NewsJacker is an attempt to hack them out of it, without them even noticing!

NewsJacker is a cheeky website which covertly increases your climate skeptic’s exposure to more factually accurate news. On the surface, it will look like you’re simply sharing an online recipe for easy homemade cookies. But when they visit the link, specially designed technology built into the site updates their online cookies… now telling The Internet that they are seriously pro-climate action. Because of this, as they browse they will see more search results for accurate climate change stories and be targeted by more pro-climate ads and content.

…Read more: https://zeefeed.com.au/climate-skepticism-australia-newsjacker/

This brazen act of computer hacking attracted criticism;

Malware Is Not Ok, No Matter Your Cause

Climate activists think distributing malware is “clever”

by Lushington D. Brady 29 September, 2023 11:30 am

If you think it’s a clever idea to send out a malware bot as a major recruitment campaign and still barely manage to suck in more than a couple of thousand confused Boomers, you just might be a “youth climate activist”.

The “clever” online campaign was the brainchild of the “Australian Youth Climate Coalition” — who are about as youthful as a middle-aged porn actress putting her hair in pigtails and claiming to be a “teen”. Although at least the porn actress is making an honest living.

…

Like all criminals, the climate con artists think their ends justify their dodgy means.

Grace Vegesana, AYCC’s director of climate & racial Justice, told The Australian that for young Australians, “climate change was the biggest fight of our lives – so we aren’t afraid to get creative in how we take action”.

“Ultimately, we’re taking action to create a fair and just world, with a stable climate and healthy environment for our communities and future generations – and don’t mind being a bit cheeky in the ­process,” she said.

…Read more: https://thebfd.co.nz/2023/09/29/malware-is-not-ok-no-matter-your-cause/

The “youths” have apparently defended their actions, on the grounds that they are not attempting to harm the targets of their deception, but all the stories I found mentioning this are behind paywalls.

Doesn’t this kind of desperation just scream “loser”?

The climate panic is dying. The climate panic is no longer useful to scoundrels who use such public panics as props to decieve voters, so it is just not getting the attention it once did. These days the only people who take the climate panic seriously are people who already intended to vote for the scoundrels.

But for a handful of true believers, this general collapse in interest, even amongst politicians they once thought were reliable supporters, spells the literal end of the world. People just don’t care that everything is collapsing!

I guess we can all look forward to a few years of increasingly frantic activism like this attempt to spread malware, if not violence and outright terrorism, during the final death throes of the climate scare.

UN Set to Agree New Political Declaration on Pandemics Next Week – and it’s a Horror Show

From The Daily Sceptic

BY DR DAVID BELL

In four days’ time, on Wednesday September 20th, our representatives meeting at the United Nations will sign off on a ‘Declaration’ titled: ‘Political Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.’

Final-text-for-silence-procedure-PPPR-Political-DeclarationHerunterladen

This was announced as a “silent procedure”, meaning that States not responding will be deemed supporters of the text. The document expresses a new policy pathway for managing populations when the World Health Organisation (WHO), the health arm of the UN, declares a future viral variant to be a “public health emergency of international concern”. The WHO noted in 2019 that pandemics are rare and insignificant in terms of overall mortality over the last century. Since then, it decided that the 2019 old-normal population was simply oblivious to impending annihilation. The WHO and the entire UN system now consider pandemics an existential and imminent threat. This matters, because:

  1. They are asking for far more money than is spent on any other international health program (your money);
  2. This will deliver great wealth to some people who now work closely with WHO and the UN;
  3. The powers being sought from your Government will reimpose the very responses that have just caused the largest growth in poverty and disease in our lifetimes; and
  4. Logically, pandemics will only become more frequent if someone intends to make them so (so we should wonder what is going on).

Staff who drafted this Declaration did so because it is their job. They were paid to write a text that is clearly contradictory, sometimes fallacious, and often quite meaningless. They are part of a rapidly growing industry, and the Declaration is intended to justify this growth and the centralisation of power that goes with it. The document will almost certainly be agreed by our Governments because, frankly, this is where the momentum and money are.

Whilst the Declaration’s 13 pages are all over the place in terms of reality and farce, they are not atypical of recent UN output. People are trained to use trigger words, slogans and propaganda themes (e.g., “equity”, “empowerment of all women and girls”, “access to education”, “technology transfer hubs”) that no one could oppose without risking being labelled a denier, far-Right or colonialist.

The Declaration should be read in the context of what these institutions and their staff have just done. It is difficult to summarise such a compendium of right-speak intended to veil reality, but it is hoped this short summary will prompt some thought. Wickedness is not a mistake but an intended deception, so we need to distinguish these clearly.  

Fomenting darkness behind a veil of light

Put together, the following two extracts summarise the internal contradiction of the Declaration’s agenda and its staggering shamelessness and lack of empathy:

In this regard, we:

PP3: Recognise also the need to tackle health inequities and inequalities, within and among countries…

PP5: Recognise that the illness, death, socio-economic disruption and devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic…

‘Recognition’ of devastation is important. SARS-CoV-2 was associated with mortality predominantly within wealthy countries, where median age of Covid-associated death was between 75 and 85 years. Nearly all of these people had significant co-morbidities such as obesity and diabetes, meaning their life-expectancy was already restricted. Most people contributing significantly to economic activity were at very low risk, a profile know in early 2020. 

These three years of socio-economic devastation must, therefore, be overwhelmingly due to the response. The virus did not starve people, as the Declaration’s writers would like us to believe. Deteriorating disease control was predicted by WHO and others in early 2020, increasing malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malnutrition. Economic disruption in low-income countries specifically results in more infant and child deaths.

In Western countries, adult mortality has risen as expected when screening for cancer and heart disease are reduced and poverty and stress increase. Knowing this, WHO advised in late 2019 to ”not under any circumstances” impose lockdown-like measures for pandemic influenza. In early 2020, under the influence of its sponsors, it advocated them for COVID-19. The Declaration, however, carries no note of contrition or repentance.

Undeterred by incongruity, the Declaration goes on to describe COVID-19 as “one of the greatest challenges” in UN history (PP6), noting that somehow this outbreak resulted in “exacerbation of poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty”. In fact, it acknowledges that this caused:

(a) negative impact on equity, human and economic development across all spheres of society, as well as on global humanitarian needs, gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, the enjoyment of human rights, livelihoods, food security and nutrition, education, its disruption to economies, supply chains, trade, societies and the environment, within and among countries, which is reversing hard-won development gains and hampering progress (PP6)

To restate the obvious, this does not happen due to a virus targeting sick elderly people. It occurs when children and productive adults are barred from school, work, healthcare and participation in markets for goods and services. Economic, social and health catastrophe inevitably results, disproportionately harming poorer people and low-income countries, conveniently far indeed from the halls of Geneva and New York.

No, we were not all in this together.

Not all were negatively impacted by this catastrophe. People and corporations who sponsor much of the WHO’s health emergency work, and that of its sister organisations such as CEPI, Gavi and Unitaid, did very well from the policies they advocated so strongly. Software and Pharma companies made unprecedently high profits while this mass impoverishment played out. The international agencies have also gained; construction and recruitment are strong in Geneva. Philanthro-capitalism is good for some.

The main aim of the Declaration is to back the proposed WHO International Health Regulation (IHR) amendments and treaty (PP26), key to ensuring that viral outbreaks that have such small impact can remain highly profitable. An additional $10 billion dollars per year in new financing is requested to support this (PP29). There is a reason why most countries have laws against scams. The UN and its agencies, fortunately for its staff, are outside of any national jurisdiction.

Based on their sponsors’ assessments, the staff of these agencies are doing their job well. For the rest of humanity, their work is an unmitigated disaster. In 2019 they said never lock down, then spent 2020 defending top-down lockdowns and mandates. For three years, they theatrically pretended that decades of knowledge on immunity, disease burden and the association of poverty with mortality did not exist. Now they write this UN Declaration to fund their industry further through taxpayers they so recently impoverished. Once tasked to serve the world’s vast populations, particularly the poor and vulnerable, the UN vision has been consumed by public private partnerships, the allure of Davos and a fascination with high-net-worth individuals.

When words are used to obscure actions

While the Declaration underlines the importance of educating children during pandemics (PP23), these same organisations backed school closures for hundreds of millions of children at minimal risk from COVID-19. Among them, several million more girls are now being farmed off to nightly rape as child brides, others in child labour. Women and girls were disproportionately removed from education and from employment. They weren’t asked if they supported these policies!

The girls are being raped because the people paid to implement these policies did so. They know the contradiction, and the harm. But this is a job like many others. The only unusual aspects, from a business standpoint, are the sheer amorality and lack of empathy that must be engaged to excel in it.

To justify wrecking African children’s lives, the UN claims out that the continent has “over 100 major public health emergencies annually” (OP4). Africa has a rising burden of endemic diseases that dwarf mortality from such outbreaks – over half a million children die every year from malaria (increased through the COVID-19 lockdowns) and similar burdens from tuberculosis and HIV. By contrast, total COVID-19 deaths recorded in Africa over the past three years are just 256,000. The 2015 West African Ebola outbreak, the largest such recent emergency pre-Covid, killed 11,300 people. MERS and SARS1 killed less than 1,000 each globally. However, induced poverty does cause famine, raises child mortality and wrecks health systems – is this the health emergency that the UN is referring to? Or is it simply making things up?

Through the IHR amendments, these agencies will coordinate the locking down, border closures, mandated medical examinations and vaccination of you and your family. Their Pharma sponsors reasonably expect to make several hundred billion more dollars from these actions, so we can be confident that emergencies will be declared. By claiming 100 such events annually in Africa alone, they are signalling how these new powers will be used. We are to believe the world is such that only the abandonment of our rights and sovereignty, for the enrichment of others, can save us.

The UN and WHO do recognise that some will question this illogic. In PP35, they characterise such scepticism as “health-related misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatisation”.

The WHO recently publicly characterised people who discuss adverse effects of Covid vaccines and question WHO policies as “far-Right”, “anti-science aggressors” and “a killing force”.

https://x.com/WHO/status/1602991915808456705?s=20

This is unhinged. It is the denigration and hate speech that fascist regimes use. The reader must decide whether such an organisation should control his or her freedom of expression and decide what constitutes truth.

It is not helpful here to give details of all 13 pages of right-speak, contradiction and fallacy. You will find similar rhetoric in other UN and WHO documents, particularly on pandemic preparedness. Straight-talk is contrary to business requirements. However, the first paragraph in the Declaration’s ‘Call to Action’ sets the tone:

We therefore commit to scale up our efforts to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response and further implement the following actions and express our strong resolve to:  

OP1. Strengthen regional and international cooperation, multilateralism, global solidarity, coordination and governance at the highest political levels and across all relevant sectors, with the determination to overcome inequities and ensure the sustainable, affordable, fair, equitable, effective, efficient and timely access to medical countermeasures including vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics and other health products to ensure high-level attention through a multisectoral approach to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics and other health emergencies, particularly in developing countries;

There are 48 more. You paid taxes so that someone could write that!

Those millions of girls suffering at night, the hundreds of millions of children who had their futures stolen, the mothers of those malaria-killed children, and all suffering under the increasing burden of poverty and inequality unleashed by this farce are watching. The Declaration, like the IHR amendments and pandemic treaty it supports, await the signatures of the Governments that purport to represent us.

Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PANDA.

“97% Consensus” — What Consensus?

From The CO2 Coalition

By: Gregory Wrightstone – Executive Director CO2 Coalition

You have likely heard that 97% of scientists agree on human-driven climate change. You may also have heard that those who don’t buy into the climate-apocalypse mantra are science-deniers. The truth is that a whole lot more than 3% of scientists are skeptical of the party line on climate. A whole lot more.

The many scientists, engineers and energy experts that comprise the CO2 Coalition are often asked something along the lines of: “So you believe in climate change, then?” Our answer? “Yes, of course we do: it has been happening for hundreds of millions of years.” It is important to ask the right questions. The question is not, “Is climate change happening?” The real question of serious importance is, “Is climate change now driven primarily by human actions? That question should be followed up by “is our changing climate beneficial or harmful to ecosystems and humanity?”

There are some scientific truths that are quantifiable and easily proven, and with which, I am confident, at least 97% of scientists agree. Here are two:

  1. Carbon dioxide concentration has been increasing in recent years.
  2. Temperatures, as measured by thermometers and satellites, have been generally increasing in fits and starts for more than 150 years.

What is impossible to quantify is the actual percentage of warming that is attributable to increased anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2. There is no scientific evidence or method that can determine how much of the warming we’ve had since 1900 that was directly caused by us.

We know that temperature has varied greatly over the millennia. We also know that for virtually all of that time, global warming and cooling were driven entirely by natural forces, which did not cease to operate at the beginning of the 20th century.

The claim that most modern warming is attributable to human activities is scientifically insupportable. The truth is that we do not know. We need to be able to separate what we do know from that which is only conjecture.

What is the basis for the “97% consensus” notion? Is it true? 

Hint: You can’t spell consensus without “con.”

If, indeed, 97% of all scientists truly believed that human activities were causing the moderate warming that we have seen in the last 150 years, it would be reasonable for one to consider this when determining what to believe. One would be wrong, however.

Science, unlike religion, is not a belief system. Scientists, just like anyone else, will say that they believe things (whether they believe them or not) for social convenience, political expediency or financial profit. For this and other good reasons, science is not founded upon the beliefs of scientists. It is a disciplined method of inquiry, by which scientists apply pre-existing theory to observation and measurement, so as to develop or to reject a theory, so that they can unravel as clearly and as certainly as possible the distinction between what the Greek philosopher Anaximander called “that which is and that which is not.”

Abu Ali ibn al-Haytham, the natural philosopher of 11th-century Iraq who founded the scientific method in the East, once wrote:

“The seeker after truth [his beautiful description of the scientist] does not place his faith in any mere consensus, however venerable or widespread. Instead, he subjects what he has learned of it to inquiry, inspection and investigation. The road to the truth is long and hard, but that is the road we must follow.”

The long and hard road to scientific truth cannot be followed by the trivial expedient of a mere head-count among those who make their livings from government funding. Therefore, the mere fact that climate activists find themselves so often appealing to an imagined and (as we shall see) imaginary “consensus” is a red flag. They are far less sure of the supposed scientific truths to which they cling than they would like us to believe. “Consensus,” here, is a crutch for lame science.

What, then, is the origin of the “97% consensus” notion? Is it backed up with research and data?

The earliest attempt to document a “consensus” on climate change was a 2004 paper cited by Al Gore in his allegedly non-fiction book, An Inconvenient Truth. (Gore attended natural science class at Harvard, but got a D grade for it.) The author of the cited paper, Naomi Oreskes, asserted that 75% of nearly 1,000 papers she had reviewed on the question of climate change agreed with the “consensus” proposition favored by the IPCC: “Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.” None, she maintained, dissented from this line of reasoning.

The Oreskes paper came to the attention of Klaus-Martin Schulte, an eminent London surgeon, who had become concerned with the adverse health effects of his patients from their belief in apocalyptic global warming.

Professor Schulte decided to update Oreskes’ work. However, he found that only 45% of several hundred papers endorsed the “consensus” position. He concluded: “There appears to be little basis in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for the degree of alarm on the issue of climate change which is being expressed in the media and by politicians, now carried over into the medical world and experienced by patients.”

The primary paper that is often trotted out in support of the notion of “97% consensus” was written by John Cook and his merry band of climate extremists. Published in 2013, it is the most widely referenced work on the subject of climate consensus and has been downloaded more than 1.3 million times.

Cook runs a climate website that is a smorgasbord of climate fear rhetoric, specializing in attacks—often personal and spiteful in tone—on all who have proven effective in leading others to stray from the dogma of impending climate doom.

The project was self-described as “a ‘citizen science’ project by volunteers contributing to the website.” The team consisted of 12 climate activists who did not leave their climate prejudices at home. These volunteers, many of whom had no training in the sciences, said they had “reviewed” abstracts from 11,944 peer-reviewed papers related to climate change or global warming, published over the 21 years 1991 – 2011, to assess the extent to which they supported the “consensus view” on climate change. As Cook’s paper said,

“We analysed a large sample of the scientific literature on global CC [climate change], published over a 21-year period, in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).”

The paper concluded,

“Among abstracts that expressed a position on AGW [anthropogenic global warming], 97.1% endorsed the scientific consensus. … Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.”

The paper asserted—falsely, as it turned out—that 97% of the papers the reviewers examined had explicitly endorsed the opinion that humans are causing the majority of the warming of the last 150 years.

When one looks at the data, one finds that 7,930 of the papers took no position at all on the subject and were arbitrarily excluded from the count on this ground. If we simply add back all of the papers reviewed, the 97% claimed by Cook and his co-authors falls to 32.6%.

A closer look at the paper reveals that the so-called “97%” included three categories of endorsement of human-caused climate change (Figure 1). Only the first category amounted to an explicit statement that humans are the primary cause of recent warming. The second and third categories would include most skeptics of catastrophic anthropogenic warming, including the scientists of the CO2 Coalition, who accept that increasing CO2 is probably causing some, probably modest, amount of warming; an amount that is likely rendered insignificant by natural causes of warmer weather. Only by casting a wide net could Cook conclude that there is any type of “consensus.”

Figure 1 – Categories of endorsement – Cook 2013

Agnotology is defined as “the study of how ignorance arises via circulation of misinformation calculated to mislead.” This is how David Legates and his co-authors (2015) describe the Cook paper and similar attempts falsely to promote the notion of broad scientific consensus surrounding the subject of a looming, man-made, climate apocalypse.

They reviewed the actual papers used by Cook and found that only 0.3% of the 11,944 abstracts and 1.6% of the smaller sample that excluded those papers expressing no opinion endorsed man-made global warming as they defined it. Remarkably, they found that Cook and his assistants had themselves marked only 64 papers—or 0.5% of the 11,944 they said they had reviewed—as explicitly stating that recent warming was mostly man-made (Figure 2). Yet they stated, both in the paper itself and subsequently, that they had found a “97% consensus” explicitly stating that recent warming was mostly man-made.

“Agnotology has the strong potential for misuse whereby a ‘manufactured’ consensus view can be used to stifle discussion, debate, and critical thinking.”

—  Legates 2013

It appears that Cook and his co-authors manipulated the data to present an altogether untrue narrative of overwhelming support for catastrophic human-caused warming.

Note that the official “consensus” position—supported though it was by just 0.3% of the 11,944 papers reviewed—says nothing more than recent warming was mostly man-made. Even if that were the case—and the overwhelming majority of scientists take no view on that question, for it is beyond our present knowledge to answer—it would not indicate that global warming is dangerous.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

— Joseph Goebbels

From the information we have just reviewed, the percentage of scientists who agree with the notion of man-made catastrophic global warming is significantly less than advertised. Several unbiased attempts have been made to assess what the actual number might be. One of the largest petitions concerning climate change was the Oregon Petition signed by more than 31,000 American scientists, including 9,029 holding PhDs, disputing the notion of anthropogenic climate alarmism (Figure 3).

(Edward Teller’s signature at http://petitionproject.com)

More recently, in 2016, George Mason University (Maibach 2016) surveyed more than 4,000 members of the American Meteorological Society and found that 33% believed that climate change was not occurring, was at most half man-made, was mostly natural, or they did not know. Significantly, only 18% believed that a large amount—or all—of additional climate change could be averted.

Science does not advance through consensus, and the claim of consensus has no place in any rational scientific debate. We ask: What do the data tell us? What does it mean? Can we reproduce the results? 

If those promoting man-made climate fear need to resort to an obviously flawed consensus opinion, rather than argue the merits of the science, haven’t they already conceded that their argument cannot be won through open debate?

“Cook’s 97% nonsensus [sic] paper shows that the climate community still has a long way to go in weeding out bad research and bad behavior. If you want to believe that climate researchers are incompetent, biased and secretive, Cook’s paper is an excellent case in point.”

—  Professor Richard Tol

“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”

—  Michael Crichton

References

Cook J, Nuccitelli D, Green SA et al (2013) Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environ Res Lett 8(2):024024

Legates DR, Soon W, Briggs WM (2013) Learning and Teaching Climate Science: The perils of consensus knowledge using agnotology. Sci Edu 22:2007–2017, doi:10.1007/s11191-013-9588-3

Legates DR, Soon W, Briggs WM et al (2015) Climate consensus and ‘misinformation’: a rejoinder to ‘Agnotology, scientific consensus, and the teaching and learning of climate change. Sci Edu 24:299–318, doi: 10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9

Oregon Petition (2008) http://petitionproject.com 

Oreskes, N (2004) The scientific consensus on climate change. Science 306, 1686

Schulte K-M (2008) Scientific consensus on climate change? Energy Environ 19(2)

Many thanks to Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount of Brenchley for his valuable additions to this commentary/analysis.

Media Spews Misinformation About Emperor Penguin’s Breeding Failure

From ClimateRealism

Editors note: Many news outlets fell for this flawed science paper and didn’t bother to check facts before publishing news stories claiming the penguins will become extinct by 2100. 

Guest essay By Jim Steele

The recently published paper by Peter Fretwell titled Record Low 2022 Antarctic Sea Ice led to Catastrophic Breeding Failure of Emperor Penguins, set off a wave of misinformed doomsday articles, as his introduction stated “Recent efforts to predict emperor penguin population trends from forecasts of sea ice loss have painted a bleak picture, showing that if present rates of warming persist over 90% of emperor colonies will be quasi-extinct by the end of this century.

A sea ice physicist at the British Antarctic Survey added to the fearmongering stating “This paper dramatically reveals the connection between sea ice loss and ecosystem annihilation. Climate change is melting sea ice at an alarming rate.”

However, there was absolutely no evidence the lack of sea ice was due melting from global warming.  All previous research has shown because of the extreme cold melt ponds are rarely observed in Antarctica. The annual loss of fast-ice (ice fastened to the shore) that Emperors often use for a breeding, is largely due to breakouts, not melting. And a careful examination of the 5 colonies that Fretwell analyzed, strongly suggest the paper’s claims were just promoting the climate crisis hoax.

Nonetheless, the dishonest doomsday internet activist GoGreen@ecowarriorss pounced on the misinformation and tweeted “Emperor penguins suffer ‘unprecedented’ breeding failure as sea ice disappears Ultimately, they cannot survive in an ever warming world and neither can we or most other species bar cockroaches and a few other hardy species. MSN.com fearmongered, ‘Emperor penguins are running out of ice to breed on.’

Click bait media like USA Today headlined, “Climate change hits emperor penguins: Chicks are dying and extinction looms, study finds’  stating “due to the dramatic loss of sea ice, several colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctica face “quasi-extinction” in the decades to come.  And as expected CNN wrote, “‘Catastrophic’ loss: Huge colonies of emperor penguins saw no chicks survive last year as sea ice disappears.’

But Fretwell’s 5 colonies in the Bellingshausen Sea (circled region) were NOT huge as illustrated by the small circles. Furthermore, climate scientists had determined that atmospheric circulation variability over the Amundsen-Bellingshausen Sea is larger than in any other region of the Southern Hemisphere, which is why the fast-ice extent is so variable there and so prone to the early breakouts that happened in 2022. The regions instability also suggests the 5 colonies were likely only temporary.

  • Satellites first discovered the Bryant Coast colony in 2014, but there were no penguins observed there in 2010.
  • The Pfrogner Point colony was only discovered in 2019. Its estimated population of 1200 pairs bred on a stable ice shelf, not on fast ice. Yet they still abandoned the colony in November.
  • There was no breeding failure on the Rothschild Island colony because there, fast-ice persisted as needed until the end of December.
  • Smyley Island colony was first discovered in 2009, and its populations vary wildly, between 1000 and 6500 breeding pairs.
  • The Verdi Inlet colony was first discovered by satellite in 2018 and its population also varied wildly.

Tremendous sea ice variability in the Bellingshausen Sea is caused by the shifting location and strength of the quasi-permanent pressure system, known as the Amundsen Low. As seen in the illustration, the Amundsen Low’s clockwise circulation caused reduced sea ice (red) in the Bellingshausen Sea and above average sea ice (blue) in the Amundsen and Ross seas. Also notice there was no other loss of sea ice along the coast where Emperors breed. Low sea ice elsewhere (red) was caused when weaker winds did not extend the pack ice further away from the coast.

Years when the Amundsen Low is stronger, the winds in the Bellingshausen Sea that blow towards the coast prevent sea ice expansion.  Those stronger winds also carry more moisture and cause some of Antarctica’s most intense snowfalls. Heavy snowfall insulates the fast-ice and prevents warmer ocean heat from ventilating. That trapped heat then reduces the normal thickening of the fast-ice, making fast-ice in this region more vulnerable to breakouts.

Finally, the Amundsen Low is very sensitive to El Nino and La Nina events that shift the winds location and strength. The fast ice breakouts of the 5 colonies had nothing to do with a climate crisis but were driven by natural atmospheric circulation patterns unique to the Bellingshausen Sea.

Shame on all the alarmists that weaponized weather and natural penguin struggles to push a climate crisis!

Emperor Penguin Chicks

Hurricane Hilary Unprecedented? The BBC Would Like You To Think So

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

There are huge amounts of misinformation in this BBC report:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-66566483

The BBC want you to think this is all record breaking and unprecedented. It is not.

Hilary is a very similar event to the 1939 tropical storm, El Cordonazo,which followed a similar path and dumped similar amounts of rain.

Indeed that was one of four tropical storms to hit Southern California in 1939, although the others did not make landfall.

So much for the silly little theory from Ms Treseder, our ecology expert. Maybe the BBC should get advice from proper hurricane experts in future, who would tell them that these storms are rare, but sometimes happen.

The claims about record rainfall are bogus as well. The BBC focus heavily on “record rainfall” in Palm Springs, but even that is a fake claim. They say that 3.18” fell on Sunday, but that was less than the 3.22” recorded in 1926:

In any event, one cherry picked station does not prove anything at all, The BBC also claim that this was the wettest August day on record:

This, of course, is utterly dishonest, as it was nowhere being a record in Los Angeles, or California as a whole, merely a record for August at most.

In Los Angeles, for instance, daily rainfall of 2” is nothing unusual at all:

As for California’s wettest day, this is an outright fraud .Hilary dumped 11” or so up in the mountains, but at lower levels it was around 2 or 3”  at most, as the BBC map indicates:

http://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/discussions/nfdscc4.html

But the 1939 storm was much more devastating, with 5” in Los Angeles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_California_tropical_storm

And the devastation from Kathleen in 1976 was even greater:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Kathleen

Rainfall from Hilary has not reached anything like the 375mm recorded in 1976.

So once again we find that the BBC can get away with playing fast and loose with the facts, just so that it can promote its political agenda.