Category Archives: Science

Judith Curry: How Climate “Science” Got Hijacked by Alarmists

Interview with John Stossel here.

From the video description:

Curry was a department chair at Georgia Tech when she spread alarm about climate change. The media loved her then. She claimed there was an increase in hurricane intensity. But then some researchers pointed out gaps in her research: years with low levels of hurricanes. “Like a good scientist, I went in and investigated.” When she acknowledged a lack of evidence that hurricane intensity had increased, she was ruthlessly attacked by climate alarmists. Her career suffered. Now Curry reveals nefarious ways “the science” about climate change has been corrupted.

Two Princeton, MIT Scientists Say EPA Climate Regulations Based on a ‘Hoax’

Article by Kevin Stocklin, quote:

Citing extensive data (pdf) to support their case, William Happer, professor emeritus in physics at Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), argued that the claims used by the EPA to justify the new regulations are not based on scientific facts but rather political opinions and speculative models that have consistently proven to be wrong.

Why is the West so Weak (and Russia so Strong)?

The role of human capital and western education

Article by Gaius Baltar.

I suggest that the cause of this unfolding disaster is a serious structural problem in the West – which Russia seems to have largely avoided. This structural problem is a necessary condition for the current western system and has been purposely created to bring it about and maintain it. This problem is the subject of this article – as well as the “mechanism” behind it. This is unfortunately a long article, but the subject matter demands it.

How science (doesn’t) work

Todd Hayen has written an article in Off-Guardian.org on (supposedly) “Knowing All that We Need to Know“.

Excerpt:

There is really nothing new to learn, and what we cannot explain, we will relegate to “promissory materialism”—a term invented to say that if we can’t explain now through material means, one day we will be able to—we now know the building blocks of reality, nothing is a true mystery.

Now, not all scientists are so arrogant to believe this. Some just while away in their labs with their theories, their experiments, and their reliance on the “scientific method” to prove or disprove their hypotheses. These are the true scientists. But they too have their traumas, which are always trying to get the best of them. They are constantly attacked in academia by other scientists trying to prove they are wrong—thus go the wars of falsification, a constant in the world of academic science—a necessary constant.

But this relentless battle can have its deleterious effect on those engaged in it. Trauma is trauma, and it all has negative effect in some way. These scientists get hardened, and often are unwilling to let go of treasured beliefs. They fight hard for what they hold to be truth about the mechanisms of the natural world, and the longer they hold a truth, the more difficult it becomes to pull it down from its exalted pedestal.

God forbid, then, politicians get involved. Any person of authority will grab any sort of scientific “idea” (which they will call truth) that supports their agenda, and they will run with it. They will do whatever they can to support the false idea that the “science is set” and that any contrary idea is thrown in the waste bin by vilifying the notion, the purveyor of the notion, or censoring the contrary idea altogether. “We know everything!” They spout out. “It is all figured out, follow the science!”

I would suspect that a lot of real scientists that hear this sort of thing rub their chin and say, “well, that isn’t exactly right . . .” but they want to keep their jobs at the lab, or their tenured position at the university, or their stature among their peers and instead mutter, “yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.” Some of them are probably even unconscious that is what they are doing.

Never Forget: Leftists Showed Their True Authoritarian Colors During Covid

Article by Brandon Smith

Excerpts:

And why did so many Americans (mainly leftists) jump on the authoritarian bandwagon when it comes to lockdowns and forced vaccination?

I want to explore the psychology of such people here, because I think it’s the natural inclination of the public today to move on quickly from the discomfort of terrible events and ignore the deeper implications. We cannot move on from this, because the ultimate problem was never solved. These same leftists and globalists were never admonished for their behavior, they never had to admit they were wrong and they WILL attempt the same draconian measures again in the future if left unchecked.

[. . .]

The political left uses the mentally ill as a bludgeon, an easily manipulated tool for chaos. During the lockdowns and restrictions the establishment and the media stoked the fires of paranoia.  By themselves they have no power; they need the crazed mob as a weapon to keep the rest of the country afraid and in line. They needed good little Stasi, always watching, always correcting, always screaming at those without masks, attacking those that refused to get vaxxed and mocking those that spoke out about scientific inconsistencies.

And, in return, the establishment made the mentally ill feel as if they were normal. For a fleeting moment in time, the most unstable and narcissistic people on the planet were made to feel like THEY were on the right side of history and rationality. It was a parasitic feedback loop that almost destroyed the last vestiges of America.

[. . .]

All of this could very well happen again. The big tyrants and tiny tyrants are still out there, waiting for the next crisis; the next panic event to take the public off their guard. Another viral event is unlikely, but they do seem anxious to use climate change, war and economic turmoil as the next great “reset” button. In the end, there will have to be a dramatic shift in how the liberty minded interact with the authoritarian left. It is clear that we cannot share the same country, or the same civilization. Our values are fundamentally at odds. It’s only a matter of time before a single spark ignites a firestorm.

The real crisis is global gaslighting

Forget global boiling – it’s global panic-mongering we should be angry about.

Article by Brendan O’Neill.

Excerpts:

The mainstream media may have been awash with images of wildfires in Greece, Cyprus and Portugal over the past fortnight, and newsreaders might be wringing their manicured hands over the blistering temperatures in southern Europe and the stern homilies for wicked humanity contained in such heat, but the fact is that less of our planet is on fire than was the case 20 years ago. In the early 2000s, around three per cent of the Earth’s land caught fire. It’s been trending downward since. In 2022 just 2.2 per cent of land caught fire – a ‘record low’. Yes, in places like Canada more land has been consumed by nature’s flames, but in much of the rest of the world, including Africa and Europe, we’ve seen ‘lower burning’, Lomborg reports.

Climate-change alarmists are wrong about everything. Not only are they wrong when they say today’s heatwaves are uniquely destructive. They were also wrong when they said the Great Barrier Reef was dying. They were wrong when they predicted a New Ice Age. They were wrong when they said a ‘population bomb’ was about to go off. They were wrong about ‘acid rain’. They were wrong about ‘deforestation’: in truth, 618,000 square kilometres of forest has been added to our planet each year since 1982.

The Infuriating Climate Alarm

Concerning, amongst other things, the stupid remark about "global boiling"

Article by Ian Davis.

In the UK, we all know that this summer has been rubbish. We had a few weeks of glorious sunshine in June and since then it’s been bloody miserable. It’s been cold, wet and the dog has got trench-foot. Which isn’t great because he stinks at the best of times—bless him.

Yet, according to the UN Secretary General and blithering buffoon, António Guterres, we’ve entered the “era of global boiling.” Though not in the UK—or anywhere else for that matter

Just as we were during the pseudopandemic, we are once again invited to reject the evidence of our own senses and “trust” whatever we are told by the “experts,” although Guterres is not a meteorologist. Mind you, Bill Gates isn’t an epidemiologist and everyone “trusted” his “expert” opinion during the pseudopandemic, so who cares?

Continue reading here.

Scotland’s Covid inquiry is destroying the case for lockdowns

See here.

Excerpts:

Croft is similarly downboat about the vaccines, which I think is unwarranted. He says it ‘remains unclear as to whether or not Covid-19 vaccination has resulted in fewer deaths from Covid-19’. But it seems fairly clear that vaccines did break the link between cases and deaths in the spring and summer of 2021. Still, Croft is right to say that the protection they offered was brief and incomplete. Long before vaccine passports were imposed on Scots in autumn 2021, there was abundant evidence that vaccines did not stop infection and transmission. This should have blown the bottom out of the case for vaccine passports. That it failed to stop them is a disgrace.

Unsurprisingly, Croft’s report hasn’t gone down well with the lockdown-supporting press in Scotland. He has been attacked as being ‘not an expert’ in viral pandemics. I don’t know Croft and hold no personal brief for him, but his CV indicates a much longer experience of microbiology-related public health than, say, public-health academic Devi Sridhar, who exerted much influence on Scotland’s Covid response. Military medicine – where he spent his career – takes a great interest in epidemics. They have stopped many armies, from Charles VIII at Naples (syphilis) to Admiral Vernon at Cartagena (yellow fever).

No Western public-health agency advocated lockdowns for a respiratory viral pandemic before 2020. The approach was adopted ad hoc during the Covid pandemic because, as Professor Neil Ferguson (who has scant prior coronavirus experience) infamously told The Times, the government realised it could ‘get away’ with a China-style lockdown after Italy imposed one in February 2020.