Category Archives: Science

Stop blaming climate change for Spain’s disastrous floods

We can’t let the authorities off the hook for this horrific tragedy.

Article by Rob Lyons.

Excerpt:

As with all disasters, lessons must be learned and changes made so that human suffering can be reduced in the future. Furthermore, even if there is an element of truth to the claim that human-created climate change made the floods worse – and that’s a big ‘if’, according to the IPCC – we still have to learn to cope with the problems that the weather throws at us. With ingenuity and investment, we are more than capable of doing so.

Net Zero means zero growth

Interview (podcast) on spiked-online.com with Jon Moynihan. Interviewer is Brendan O’Neill.

Introduction of the written excerpts:

Britain, the nation that birthed the Industrial Revolution, is now a world leader in deindustrialisation. The power stations, oil refineries and steelworks that helped make the UK wealthy are now closing down and moving abroad. High energy prices are crippling industry and hurting households. Yet politicians are doubling down on precisely the policies that have brought us here. Reducing carbon emissions, they say, must be the nation’s priority. Apparently, we need to embrace a Net Zero future, no matter what it costs our economy.

Loss of Faith: The Coming Break-Up of the Nation-State

Article by Gary North from 23rd September 2011.

Excerpts:

In 1953, his [Robert Nisbet’s] book, The Quest for Community, was published by Oxford University Press. It received some attention, mostly favorable, but it was hardly a bestseller. He asked these questions: “Why was it that the modern world had turned to totalitarianism in the middle of the 20th century? What had taken place in the societies that gave birth to totalitarianism?” He concluded that it had to do with the breakdown of social order. Those institutions to which men had given allegiance throughout history, such as the family, the church, the guild, the fraternal order, and similar voluntary institutions, had faded in importance in the twentieth century. This left only the isolated individual and the modern nation-state. Men gained a sense of belonging through their participation in mass-movement politics. Totalitarian leaders began to attract individuals who were isolated, even though they were living in large cities. These leaders were able to offer a sense of brotherhood to millions of people who felt alone in the midst of cities. The modern totalitarian state functioned as a substitute for the family, church, and voluntary associations that for millennia had given people a sense of purpose and participation. So, totalitarianism was born out of radical individualism, institutionally speaking, even though as a philosophy, totalitarianism is completely opposed to individualism.

Man is cut off from any source of positive or negative sanctions in response to a transcendent system of morals. So, with the triumph of Darwinism and secularism, faith in transcendental morality has disappeared among the intellectuals. This in turn has undermined their faith in progress. There is no way to define progress unless there is a universal scale of values, meaning good, bad, and worst: the guides for mankind. The god of any society is the source of its laws and the enforcer of these laws. In the Darwinian universe, this means collective mankind. The trouble is, mankind cannot be trusted, precisely because mankind is afflicted with moral perversity.

Then he raises a crucial issue. This is the issue of what he calls religious renewal. “Whatever their future, the signs are present — visible in the currents of fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, even millennialism found in certain sectors of Judaism and Christianity. Even the spread of the occult and the cult of the West could well be one of the signs of a religious renascence, for, as it is well known, the birth of Christianity or rather its genesis as a world religion in Rome during and after the preaching of Paul was surrounded by a myriad of bizarre face and devotions.” There are also other signs. “By every serious reckoning the spell of politics and the political, strong since at least the seventeenth century, is fading. It is not simply a matter of growing disillusionment with government bureaucracy; fundamentally, it is declining faith in politics as a way of mind and life” (p. 356). With politics fading as a religion, there could be a revival of supernatural religion. That, too, was basic to the replacement of Roman empire by Christendom, although Nisbet never said this explicitly.

Woodstock for the Adventurous and Responsible 

Jordan Peterson interviews Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying.

Stuff about “narratives” starts at about 40 minutes in.

Content:

(0:35) Intro (3:36) Bret and Heather at Peterson Academy (6:19) The social media approach to learning: iterative feedback (12:01) Combating the evolution of corruption (17:37) The benefits of recorded lectures, future goals for in-person conventions (20:27) Cost of entry, managing bad actors, and the hierarchy of curation (26:04) Why Hillsdale College has a 1% dropout rate in the first year (30:36) The difference between censorship and refereeing, leveraging evolution to continuously self-improve (32:58) Elon Musk: adapting solutions faster than those who seek to game the system (34:45) The orthodoxy of the past and predicting the future (36:21) Rescue the Republic – “We’re hoping this will be an event the way Woodstock was a music festival” (40:02) The propositional must be surrounded by the imagistic, the opportunity for discovery (42:14) Propositional intelligence — and what actually makes you wise (45:57) The edge traversed by comedians, the advent of the laugh track (53:03) The radical distortion of music, “music used to be a living entity” (57:35) Putting forth the pillars of our civilization, the exhausted middle (1:00:14) A secular thinker on the spiritual battle we are all engaged in (1:04:11) The necessity of narrative, translating for the secular (1:09:49) The title toward the demonic, using AI to map the pattern of the Logos (1:11:16) Prayer, revelation, and the spirit of the question (1:14:25) Brick-in-the-wall science, hypothesis generation (1:17:59) The relation between openness and divergent associations, hierarchies of mutational repair (1:20:49) A new convergence on a shared perspective, the need of God to answer prayers (1:22:50) Richard Dawkins, winning with your own audience rather than making substantive progress (1:27:41) What the ancients knew about the delusion of being, metaphorical models in science (1:34:40) Dawkins’ one error in “The Selfish Gene”

There is now no doubt that Covid leaked from a lab

Article by Matt Ridley.

He ends with these words:

In short, those of us who argue that the pandemic began with a laboratory accident have comprehensively won the debate. I do have some sympathy with the virologists who have waged a four-year battle to suppress, censor and delete all discussion of a laboratory leak. If my livelihood depended on this kind of research, I too would probably find it hard to accept that a lab leak had happened. Scientists, politicians, businesspeople and even journalists have a vested interest in hoping the subject just fades from memory.

Why was Grenfell covered in cladding? Climate targets

There is a refusal to acknowledge the role green policy played in this tragedy.

Article by James Heartfield.

Excerpts:

Yesterday’s phase-two report from the inquiry, led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, rightly highlights Rydon and Harley Facade’s evasion of basic safety oversight, and the complicity of both Kensington and Chelsea council and the UK government’s housing ministry. What it does not do is ask the obvious question – why was the cladding installed in the first place?

Grenfell Tower was part of this trend. In 2012, engineer Max Fordham wrote a report on renovating Grenfell for the Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council with sustainability in mind. His aim was ‘to identify how, as part of the Grenfell Tower refurbishment scheme, the current energy and environmental-comfort problems can be addressed, and how the chosen solutions sit within the London Plan’s aim to bring existing housing stock up to the mayor’s standards on sustainable design and construction’. ‘The poor insulation levels and air tightness of both the walls and the windows at Grenfell Tower result in excessive heat loss during the winter months’, Fordham explained, and ‘the London Plan July 2011 aims to conserve energy’. Fordham argued that the council should have a ‘hierarchy’ of goals for the renovation. At the top of that list, it should: ‘Be lean: use less energy, in particular by adopting sustainable design and construction measures.’

After the overcladding was completed, the council boasted that it had clad ‘a high-rise block in the north of the borough’ – namely, Grenfell Tower – as part of a ‘greener housing’ strategy to ‘mitigate’ the causes of climate change. It admitted that because of the borough’s ‘limited capacity for new housing, we acknowledge the importance of seeking reasonable alterations to the existing building stock to mitigate the causes… of climate change’.

Since the Grenfell Tower fire, no new cladding has been put on to tower blocks to reduce climate change. Presumably, those CO2 targets were never quite as important as they seemed. Indeed, millions of pounds have since been spent removing dangerous cladding from these blocks. Billions more has been earmarked to complete the de-cladding of more than 500 buildings that are still considered dangerous.

There is no doubt that 72 lives were lost mainly because unscrupulous companies and legislators cut corners to slap cheap and dangerous materials on the sides of large working-class estates. But as wicked as the cost-cutting surely is, we cannot ignore why it was felt at the time that this cladding was necessary. This was a disaster fuelled by climate targets.