Environmental battles

Environmentalism and ‘Science’: Failures, gravy trains, lies, hidden agendas and alarms such as ‘Climate Change’, 5G and GSMs.

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New documentary thoroughly debunks the ‘climate crisis’ baloney … again

Climate: The Movie New documentary thoroughly debunks the ‘climate crisis’ baloney … again – www.cairnsnews.org 30 March 2024

Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) is a new documentary by the British filmmaker Martin Durkin, who previously in 2007 made The Great Global Warming Swindle. Producer of the new film is climate podcaster Tom Nelson. The Clintel Foundation organised the Dutch premiere of the movie on March 14 in the Figi Theatre in Zeist, The Netherlands. The theatre was fully packed with 570 visitors.

Clintel was not involved in the production of the movie, but helps with the distribution by providing subtitles in many different languages. So far we have: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Danish. If you want to help making a subtitle in your language, please contact Evert Doornhof, evert.doornhof@clintel.org. The film can be watched on the Youtube channel of Clintel.

Introduction of the movie by Tom Nelson
This film exposes the climate alarm as an invented scare without any basis in science. It shows that mainstream studies and official data do not support the claim that we are witnessing an increase in extreme weather events – hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and all the rest. It emphatically counters the claim that current temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 are unusually and worryingly high. On the contrary, compared to the last half billion years of earth’s history, both current temperatures and CO2 levels are extremely and unusually low. We are currently in an ice age. It also shows that there is no evidence that changing levels of CO2 (it has changed many times) has ever ‘driven’ climate change in the past.

Why then, are we told, again and again, that ‘catastrophic man-made climate-change’ is an irrefutable fact? Why are we told that there is no evidence that contradicts it? Why are we told that anyone who questions ‘climate chaos’ is a ‘flat-earther’ and a ‘science-denier’?

The film explores the nature of the consensus behind climate change. It describes the origins of the climate funding bandwagon, and the rise of the trillion-dollar climate industry. It describes the hundreds of thousands of jobs that depend on the climate crisis. It explains the enormous pressure on scientists and others not to question the climate alarm: the withdrawal of funds, rejection by science journals, social ostracism.

But the climate alarm is much more than a funding and jobs bandwagon. The film explores the politics of climate. From the beginning, the climate scare was political. The culprit was free-market industrial capitalism. The solution was higher taxes and more regulation. From the start, the climate alarm appealed to, and has been adopted and promoted by, those groups who favour bigger government.

This is the unspoken political divide behind the climate alarm. The climate scare appeals especially to all those in the sprawling publicly-funded establishment. This includes the largely publicly-funded Western intelligentsia, for whom climate has become a moral cause. In these circles, to criticise or question the climate alarm has become is a breach of social etiquette.

The film includes interviews with a number of very prominent scientists, including Professor Steven Koonin (author of ‘Unsettled’, a former provost and vice-president of Caltech), Professor Dick Lindzen (formerly professor of meteorology at Harvard and MIT), Professor Will Happer (professor of physics at Princeton), Dr John Clauser (winner of the Nobel prize in Physics in 2022), Professor Nir Shaviv (Racah Institute of Physics), professor Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph), Willie Soon and several others.

The film was written and directed by the British filmmaker Martin Durkin and is the sequel of his excellent 2007 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Tom Nelson, a podcaster who has been deeply examining climate debate issues for the better part of two decades, was the producer of the film. #ClimateTheMovie will be available for free at many online locations starting on March 21 2024. Subtitles for numerous languages are currently being created by the Clintel Foundation. Follow @ClimateTheMovie and @ClintelOrg for updates.

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Dramatic Recovery Of Coral Calls Into Question Integrity Of Science, Media

Dramatic Recovery Of Coral Calls Into Question Integrity Of Science^J Media  By Chris Morrison, Principia Scientific International, 12 February 2023

For decades, scientists and their trusted media messengers have hyped up the temporary loss of coral to promote climate Armageddon and the need for a Net Zero political solution

Last year the story suddenly disappeared from the headlines as coral on the Australian Great Barrier Reef (GBR) showed its highest level since records began in 1985.

Professor Peter Ridd, who has studied coral on the GBR for 40 years, has published a damning report charging that “serious questions” are raised “about integrity in science institutions and in the media”.

The GBR – the reef for which we have the most consistent and longest record – “has never been in better shape”.

Professor Ridd notes that coral usually takes at least five to 10 years to regrow from a major event, so the record high coral levels in 2022 suggest reports of massive mortality events were erroneous.

“An uncharitable observer might conclude that periodic mass coral mortality events, which are largely completely natural, are exploited by some organisations with an ideological agenda and a financial interest,” he observed, adding: “this includes many scientific organisations”.

He said that the periodic mass loss of coral is visually spectacular, emotionally upsetting and makes gripping media stories. The slow but full recovery is rarely reported, he added.

It is often claimed that coral reef systems are particularly sensitive to ‘human-caused climate change’. As the ‘canary in the coalmine’, they have become a major poster scare story in the fight to introduce a command-and-control Net Zero agenda.

Ridd recalls that in 2018, the IPCC wrote “with high confidence” that coral would decline worldwide by 70-90 percent with a 0.4°C increase in temperature, and another 0.5°C would wipe out 99 percent.

These figures have been repeated everywhere, from media reports to school teaching material. But, states Ridd, research has shown that coral bleaching “is part of a remarkable adaptive mechanism that makes coral potentially one of the organisms that is least susceptible to rising temperatures”.

In June 1999, George Monbiot told his Guardian readers that marine biologists had reported 70-90 percent of the coral reefs they had surveyed in the Indian Ocean had just died. Within a year, much of the remainder was likely to follow.

From this, Monbiot concluded that “at least one of the world great ecosystems is now on the point of total collapse”. Monbiot is an acknowledged leader in catastrophic climate prose, but his doom-laden diatribes are repeated endlessly across both science and mainstream media publications.

However, Ridd has much good news to impart. Data are less reliable outside the GBR, but it seems that across the globe there has not been a major drop in coral cover. Data for the East Asia Seas coral bioregion, with 30 percent of the world’s coral reefs and containing the particularly diverse ‘coral triangle’, shows no statistically significant net coral loss since records began in 1985.

The above graph from the Ridd report shows coral on the GBR at its highest level since local records began, despite four much publicised bleaching events.

The author notes that of the 3,000 individual reefs, none have been lost. All have excellent coral, although there are large fluctuations in cover from year to year, mostly as a result of cyclones and starfish predation.

Bleaching is noted to occur when corals expel symbiotic algae that live inside them, often subsequently replacing them with a different species when they recover. The process is said to make them “highly adaptable” to changing temperatures, and most corals do not die. This latter point is “rarely made by science institutions or the media”.

The coral story is a classic of its kind showing how a laudable environmental concern is hysterically hyped to promote an elite collectivist vision of economic and societal change.

Reefs are under threat in parts of the world, but the damage is largely caused by planned human activities Ridd identifies the physical destruction of reefs for the development of ports and airports and quarrying for cement.

It might be noted that such reef destruction has been carried out by Pacific islanders, claiming, often erroneously, that their homes are disappearing beneath the waves due to ‘climate change’ and demanding ‘reparations’ from wealthier nations. The author also notes the recent destruction by China of entire reef tops for military bases in the South China Sea.

On a wider front, Ridd says we cannot expect the coral reef science community to admit that it has exaggerated threats of bleaching or has been wilfully negligent in reporting recent research that show corals’ remarkable adaptability and toughness.

There is little possibility that eminent scientists who have built their reputations on ‘crying wolf’ will suddenly admit they have got it wrong.

“Tens of thousands of jobs depend on the proposition that the reefs of the world will be gone sometime in the future – but not too distant future,” he adds. There are many scientific issues, such as the broader climate debate, “where one can suspect that the scientific advice is not as reliable as it could be, and that the scientists are now mostly motivated by ideology”.

See more here dailysceptic.org

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Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

 

Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise  By Richard Smith, 31 August 2022

Health research is based on trust. Health professionals and journal editors reading the results of a clinical trial assume that the trial happened and that the results were honestly reported. But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong. As I’ve been concerned about research fraud for 40 years, I wasn’t that surprised as many would be by this figure, but it led me to think that the time may have come to stop assuming that research actually happened and is honestly reported, and assume that the research is fraudulent until there is some evidence to support it having happened and been honestly reported. The Cochrane Collaboration, which purveys “trusted information,” has now taken a step in that direction.

As he described in a webinar last week, Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published. When Roberts contacted one of the journals the editor responded that “I wouldn’t trust the data.” Why, Roberts wondered, did he publish the trial? None of the trials have been retracted.

Later Roberts, who headed one of the Cochrane groups, did a systematic review of colloids versus crystalloids only to discover again that many of the trials that were included in the review could not be trusted. He is now sceptical about all systematic reviews, particularly those that are mostly reviews of multiple small trials. He compared the original idea of systematic reviews as searching for diamonds, knowledge that was available if brought together in systematic reviews; now he thinks of systematic reviewing as searching through rubbish. He proposed that small, single centre trials should be discarded, not combined in systematic reviews.

Mol, like Roberts, has conducted systematic reviews only to realise that most of the trials included either were zombie trials that were fatally flawed or were untrustworthy. What, he asked, is the scale of the problem? Although retractions are increasing, only about 0.04% of biomedical studies have been retracted, suggesting the problem is small. But the anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that 73 (14%) had false data, and 43 (8%) he categorised as zombie. When he was able to examine individual patient data in 153 studies, 67 (44%) had untrustworthy data and 40 (26%) were zombie trials. Many of the trials came from the same countries (Egypt, China, India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey), and when John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, examined individual patient data from trials submitted from those countries to Anaesthesia during a year he found that many were false: 100% (7/7) in Egypt; 75% (3/ 4) in Iran; 54% (7/13) in India; 46% (22/48) in China; 40% (2/5) in Turkey; 25% (5/20) in South Korea; and 18% (2/11) in Japan. Most of the trials were zombies. Ioannidis concluded that there are hundreds of thousands of zombie trials published from those countries alone.

Others have found similar results, and Mol’s best guess is that about 20% of trials are false. Very few of these papers are retracted.

We have long known that peer review is ineffective at detecting fraud, especially if the reviewers start, as most have until now, by assuming that the research is honestly reported. I remember being part of a panel in the 1990s investigating one of Britain’s most outrageous cases of fraud, when the statistical reviewer of the study told us that he had found multiple problems with the study and only hoped that it was better done than it was reported. We asked if had ever considered that the study might be fraudulent, and he told us that he hadn’t.

We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary. Some supporting evidence comes from the trial having been registered and having ethics committee approval. Andrew Grey, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Auckland, and others have developed a checklist with around 40 items that can be used as a screening tool for fraud (you can view the checklist here). The REAPPRAISED checklist (Research governance, Ethics, Authorship, Plagiarism, Research conduct, Analyses and methods, Image manipulation, Statistics, Errors, Data manipulation and reporting) covers issues like “ethical oversight and funding, research productivity and investigator workload, validity of randomisation, plausibility of results and duplicate data reporting.” The checklist has been used to detect studies that have subsequently been retracted but hasn’t been through the full evaluation that you would expect for a clinical screening tool. (But I must congratulate the authors on a clever acronym: some say that dreaming up the acronym for a study is the most difficult part of the whole process.)

Roberts and others wrote about the problem of the many untrustworthy and zombie trials in The BMJ six years ago with the provocative title: “The knowledge system underpinning healthcare is not fit for purpose and must change.” They wanted the Cochrane Collaboration and anybody conducting systematic reviews to take very seriously the problem of fraud. It was perhaps coincidence, but a few weeks before the webinar the Cochrane Collaboration produced guidelines on reviewing studies where there has been a retraction, an expression of concern, or the reviewers are worried about the trustworthiness of the data.

Retractions are the easiest to deal with, but they are, as Mol said, only a tiny fraction of untrustworthy or zombie studies. An editorial in the Cochrane Library accompanying the new guidelines recognises that there is no agreement on what constitutes an untrustworthy study, screening tools are not reliable, and “Misclassification could also lead to reputational damage to authors, legal consequences, and ethical issues associated with participants having taken part in research, only for it to be discounted.” The Collaboration is being cautious but does stand to lose credibility—and income—if the world ceases to trust Cochrane Reviews because they are thought to be based on untrustworthy trials.

Research fraud is often viewed as a problem of “bad apples,” but Barbara K Redman, who spoke at the webinar insists that it is not a problem of bad apples but bad barrels if not, she said, of rotten forests or orchards. In her book Research Misconduct Policy in Biomedicine: Beyond the Bad-Apple Approach she argues that research misconduct is a systems problem—the system provides incentives to publish fraudulent research and does not have adequate regulatory processes. Researchers progress by publishing research, and because the publication system is built on trust and peer review is not designed to detect fraud it is easy to publish fraudulent research. The business model of journals and publishers depends on publishing, preferably lots of studies as cheaply as possible. They have little incentive to check for fraud and a positive disincentive to experience reputational damage—and possibly legal risk—from retracting studies. Funders, universities, and other research institutions similarly have incentives to fund and publish studies and disincentives to make a fuss about fraudulent research they may have funded or had undertaken in their institution—perhaps by one of their star researchers. Regulators often lack the legal standing and the resources to respond to what is clearly extensive fraud, recognising that proving a study to be fraudulent (as opposed to suspecting it of being fraudulent) is a skilled, complex, and time consuming process. Another problem is that research is increasingly international with participants from many institutions in many countries: who then takes on the unenviable task of investigating fraud? Science really needs global governance.

Everybody gains from the publication game, concluded Roberts, apart from the patients who suffer from being given treatments based on fraudulent data.

Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously have proved to be false, and, 40 years on from Lock’s concerns, we are realising that the problem is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond. It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary.

Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.

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Submission to the Climate Change Bill Inquiry

Submission to the Climate Change Bill Inquiry  By Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts, 25 August 2022

Opening Hearts and Minds to COVID Mis-management

On Wednesday 17 August my office hosted 12 hours of interviews with medical, legal and human rights professionals, pharmaceutical experts, lawyers, academics and politicians to focus on the threats to the doctor-patient relationship, treating long COVID and the aftermath of COVID injection injuries.

The mis-management of COVID and the mandating of experimental “vaccines” are global issues.  My national and international guests provided compelling testimony on many deeply concerning issues.  All interviews and transcripts can be found on my website. Below are a few very worthy testimonies.

Brook Jackson: Pfizer Testing Regime
Dr Phillip Altman: Death Data and Fertility Rates
Julian Gillespie: Is the doctor-Patient Relationship Under Threat?
Peter Fam: Human Rights
Professor Iain Benson: Medical Ethics

 

As elected members of parliament we have a shared solemn duty to behave with integrity.

This embraces our duty to ensure legislation and policies are solidly based on accurate and objective data so that the consequences on our constituents and nation are safe, affordable, reasonable and fair.

Yet Attachment 1 shows there has never been, and there remains no, factual scientific basis presented in parliament for legislation cutting or limiting the production of carbon dioxide from human activity. Parliament has never debated the climate science.

The term logical scientific point means the empirical scientific data within a logical scientific framework proving causality. Senators and members of parliament have never been presented with the necessary logical scientific points to justify legislating the cutting or limiting of carbon dioxide from human activity. Nor has parliament ever been presented with the specific, quantified effect of carbon dioxide from human activity on any aspect of climate or weather.

Attachment 2 shows that CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and The Chief Scientist have never produced the logical scientific points needed as the necessary and essential basis for climate change legislation. The supporting detailed scientific documents are Attachments 6 and 7.

I acknowledge and thank Senator Arthur Sinodinos as then Minister for Science and his predecessor Mr Greg Hunt for supporting me in arranging for my science and senate office teams to cross-examine government climate science agencies.

Attachment 3 concisely summarises facts explaining that no government, institute, agency or entity of any kind anywhere has produced the necessary logical scientific point. Together with climate scientists and climatologists internationally and within Australia we have held agencies, institutions, universities and individual academics accountable.

Attachment 3 notes that Maurice Strong was the United Nations Under-Secretary-General who triggered and fanned global climate alarm. He did so while having many serious conflicts of interest including being a director / shareholder of the Chicago Climate Exchange trading global Carbon Dioxide credits and being disgraced for his involvement in the UN Oil-for-Food program. Following allegations of serious breaches of American law he fled from American law enforcement agencies to exile in China. The United Nations Environment Program that he founded and led stands accused of contradicting scientific evidence and causing the avoidable deaths of 40-50 million people from 1972 through 2006.

Attachment 4 reveals the repeated results of two global natural experiments and prove that cutting carbon dioxide from human activity can have no effect. The associated limited summary of the science introduces concepts explaining why the cutting of carbon dioxide from human activity can have no effect on global or regional climate or weather. Included are basic facts on Earth’s essential, natural atmospheric trace gas that is the focus of legislation before our parliament.

Attachment 5 presents the fundamental basis for policy and legislation and for measuring progress toward achieving legislative aims and targets. This is combined with core questions that are at the heart of senators’ responsibilities to our constituents and I ask the committee to consider and deliberate upon these fundamental questions that must precede any consideration of the climate change legislation.

Attachment 6 summarises the staggering and sometimes crippling cost burdens of climate and energy policies.

Attachments 7 and 8 provide details underpinning Attachment 2. Attachment 7 provides a detailed scientific report documenting our discussions with CSIRO, an entity whose advice politicians claim is the basis for climate and related energy legislation. Attachment 8 cites associated peer-reviewed scientific papers in a scientific and statistical analysis of CSIRO’s presentations of its climate science claimed to underpin legislation. Please note particularly our scientific analyses of Marcott (2013), Lecavalier (2017), Harries (2001) and Feldman (2015) being papers upon which CSIRO relies and note the conclusions.

Attachment 9 provides detailed supporting statistics and analysis for Appendix 6. It cannot be sensibly refuted since the data was professionally and independently sourced from federal and state government budget papers and reports.

The attachments prove that the effect of Australia’s human production of carbon dioxide has never been specified or quantified in any way. Yet sound legislation should be based on quantified and measurable evidence so that we can assess its cost-benefit and measure implementation to track whether the legislation is effective and achieves the desired outcomes.

This is impossible with current climate and related energy policy and the government’s latest climate change bill.

I hope that you, as a fellow member of parliament, share my commitment to doing our due diligence in fulfilling our duty to serve our constituents, state and nation. I hope that the attachments are of assistance to you in fulfilling our duty to the people of Australia.

I would welcome meeting with the committee and welcome an opportunity for me and my team to address the committee in its hearings to afford senators an opportunity to scrutinise our scientific team. We welcome you holding us accountable

Our principal scientist has legally gathered 24, 000 datasets worldwide on climate and energy from peer-reviewed scientific papers, institutes and government agencies including CSIRO and BOM. He is the recipient of an Order of Australia Medal for his services to research.

I hope every member of the committee agrees that in assessing legislation we each have the onus to produce the logical scientific points including the specific, quantified effect of carbon dioxide from human activity on climate or weather. As senators and before endorsing legislation we each have the onus to prove that carbon dioxide from human activity needs to be cut as proposed in government legislation currently before the committee and before all senators in parliament.

The attachments reveal the need for detailed scrutiny and serious consideration of all climate and related energy legislation.

Our Earth’s climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years. Historical empirical scientific evidence shows there is nothing unusual or unprecedented about our current temperatures or weather events.

Climate science has been hijacked. Special interest groups pushing ideological societal change, rent-seekers wanting to profit from taxpayer subsidies and politicians looking for easy new ways to tax citizens are hijacking our nation’s governance and sovereignty. Alarmingly, once highly regarded agencies such as the CSIRO and BOM, have allowed themselves to become a part of the climate change industry and have failed to provide government with robust competent science advice, upon which to base policy.

There is no logical scientific point with empirical evidence linking carbon dioxide from human activity as the cause of climate variability. No entity or person has ever proven that the ongoing natural climate variability is not entirely natural.

This lack of vigorously tested evidence has allowed governments to create policy that is permanently damaging our once cheap and reliable electricity system. Our manufacturing industries are disappearing overseas, families are struggling to pay their exorbitant power bills, farmers are under pressure, and our once reliable electricity system is on its knees, due to government regulations forcing intermittent wind and solar into the electricity grid.

Even our children are not safe from this alarmism, with eco-anxiety finding its way into the innocent world of our children.

Nor is the environment safe due to the lack of recycling of many solar, wind and battery components with relatively short working lives and due to other inherently damaging aspects of solar and wind.

I implore you to apply the utmost of analytical and sceptical scrutiny to the claims underpinning climate and related energy policy. The effects of climate policy are historic, and Australia has never before faced such a fundamental and arguably monumental change to our way of life and lifestyle. Your extra scrutiny on the claims underpinning climate and related energy policy could be the difference between millions of Australians suffering if the proposed legislation is passed, or alternatively, having a more prosperous nation if existing climate and related energy legislation is rescinded.

I sincerely hope that your decision on legislation is mindful of the costs and burdens on our constituents, on our nation and on our national security. Your vote if in favour of the climate change bill will prevent sound governance while your vote against the bill will enable sound governance, fairness and integrity.

A mandate for a policy and legislation lacking the claimed scientific basis is a mandate based on lies or misrepresentations. As such it is not a mandate.

Every one of us though has a mandate and responsibility to tell the truth and to vote with integrity.

CONCLUSION

After 14 years studying and investigating climate science, along with in-depth research into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and profound cross-examining of CSIRO and BOM, we know there is no empirical scientific data as evidence proving that carbon dioxide from human activity has changed or will change temperature or any climate or weather factor.

Importantly, the effect, if any, of carbon dioxide from human activity on any climate or weather variable has never been quantified.

In its presentations to my team and I, the CSIRO stated that there is no danger from carbon dioxide from human activity and that there is nothing unprecedented about our planet’s temperature.  Therefore, there is no scientific justification for any government to introduce policies designed to reduce carbon dioxide from human activity.

We are calling for all climate-based policies and subsidies for renewable energy to be rescinded. The consequences of climate alarmism cost the Australian economy in productivity and growth, and in our ability to compete in the highly competitive international arena.

Clearly, it is time to change our approach to climate change.  These Bills must be rejected.

Yours sincerely,

Malcolm Roberts

Enclosures: Attachments 1 through 9

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The Australian Academy of Drama Queens

The Australian Academy of Drama Queens  By Tony Thomas, Quadrant Online, 3 May 2021

The green-left Australian Academy of Science has produced another outburst of climate doomism: “The risks to Australia of a 3 degC warmer world.” Nearly 50 years ago the same Academy was assessing the risks to Australia of a cooling world that climate scientists feared might nip crops and leave us shivering under our Doonas. Who would deny that climate science is a slave to fashion? [1]

The Academy report of last March opens and closes with scary pics of fire-blackened bushland. It’s a vanity project, with the authors citing their own works multiple times, especially chair Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (16 self-citations), Mark Howden (11 times) Lesley Hughes (10 times), Will Steffen (10 times), and David Karoly and John Church (8 times). Even Sarah Perkins-Kilpatrick, who is supposed to be reviewing the document, is reviewing herself as she’s cited seven times in the references.[2] Reviewer Jason Evans is cited nine times. Another reviewer is Martin Rice, who works for Tim Flannery’s propaganda outfit Climate Council, but he features only four times in the body of the report.

Perkins-Kilpatrick is convinced by her climate models that warming is turbo-charging everything (but apparently not our cool summer of 2020-21, nor the current deep freeze in the Northern Hemisphere).[3] She’s so confident about the modelling that she’ll mortgage her house and happily bet her kids lives on it.[4] I will necessarily win this bet as the RCPs (Representative Modelling Pathways or official scenarios) she uses are discredited and climate models have overshot actual warming to date by a factor of at least two.[5] I’ll enjoy her house but I promise not to slay her kids.

The above-mentioned Will Steffen’s co-authored piece on “climate tipping points”, was headlined, “The growing threat of abrupt and irreversible climate changes must compel political and economic action on emissions.” The Nature paper included political rodomontade like:

In our view, the consideration of tipping points helps to define that we are in a climate emergency and strengthens this year’s chorus of calls for urgent climate action — from schoolchildren to scientists, cities and countries.

The Australian Academy’s 3deg scare paper in March, also co-authored by Steffen, draws on that Steffen et al Nature article and re-produces its text and graphics of tipping point “domino effects”. Five months after the Nature paper was published, the journal had to grovel horrifically because the seven apex climate scientists had screwed up.[6] Here’s the grovel – try to restrain your mirth (emphasis added):

Correction 09 April 2020: The figure ‘Too close for comfort’ in this Comment incorrectly synthesized and interpreted data from the IPCC. The graph labelled the temperatures as absolute, rather than rises; misrepresented the levels of risk; misinterpreted data as coming from a 2007 IPCC report; extrapolated the focus of a 2018 report; and was not clear about the specific sources of the data. The graphic has been extensively modified online to correct these errors.

Mercifully, Hoegh-Guldberg, Steffen et al have pasted the corrected graphic into their Academy report, not the discarded FUBAR version.[7] Maybe climate science isn’t so “irrefutable” after all.

Just in case, the Academy has given itself a free card to exaggerate and scaremonger:

We adopted the precautionary principle: if a potentially damaging effect cannot be ruled out, it needs to be taken seriously.

The Academy’s authors failed to heed the devastating critique of their scenario methods in a paper last May led by Roger Pielke of University of Colorado, titled “Systemic Misuse of Scenarios in Climate Research and Assessment.”  The Academy paper has about 20 mentions of official but discredited scenario RCP8.5 and about 50 mentions of other RCP scenarios. Typical:

RCP8.5 assumes little mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and is associated with global warming of 4°c or more above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Up to now, anthropogenic emissions have tracked the RCP8.5 pathway most closely…

Graphics misleadingly show the various scenarios as consistent and comparable. And RCP8.5 is used in the body of the report to imagine horrible warming outcomes, e.g. hailstorms, p32.

Pielke, who is not a climate sceptic, says that, at worst, the extreme and implausible projections of RCP8.5 are touted as “business as usual”. He wrote:

The misuse of scenarios in climate research means that much of what we think we know about our collective climate future may be incomplete, myopic or even misleading or wrong, and as such, ‘uncomfortable knowledge’.

Pielke tracked 4,500 scientific papers misusing the most extreme scenario RCP8.5. The dud scenario featured in 16,800 scholarly articles since 2010. In January-February 2020 alone, more than 1300 studies quoted RCP8.5, at the rate of about 20 per day, with serious misuse at the rate of two studies per day.

The consequences of RCP scenario misuse include a myopic perspective on alternative futures and a correspondingly limited view on policy alternatives, the creation of a vast academic literature with little to no connection to the real world, and an unwarranted emphasis on apocalyptic climate futures that influences public and policy-maker perspectives.

The objective of understanding scenario misuse is not to apportion or assign blame, but to understand how such a pervasive and consequential failure of scientific integrity came to be on such an important topic, how it can be corrected and how it can be avoided in the future.

Pielke and co-author Ritchie sheet some blame home to the incestuous connections among prominent climate scientists.

The IPCC scenario process has been led by a small group of academics for more than a decade, and decisions made by this small community have profoundly shaped the scientific literature and correspondingly, how the media and policy communities interpret the issue of climate change.

The Academy paper, with its incestuous group of self-citing authors-cum-IPCC-contributors, could be a case in point.

Their chair Hoegh-Guldberg is a climate activist par excellence. As the ABC put it in a fawning interview in 2009 “Hoegh-Guldberg’s work has been embraced by the likes of Al Gore and David Attenborough” and “his mission now is to travel the globe as he fights to raise awareness of what we stand to lose.” He’s been forecasting the bleaching death of the Great Barrier Reef from climate change since 1998, when his modelling put the Reef’s demise as early as 2030 – less than a decade from now. He lamented that his science peers were giving his research bad reviews: “They were meant to be anonymous but someone slipped them to me, and they were very scathing …” Climategate’s cynical emails of 2009 threw plenty more light on this “anonymous” and gamed peer-review system.

In the same 2009 interview Hoegh-Guldberg forecast the disappearance of Arctic sea ice by 2019. He argued with Andrew Bolt: “This is four million kilometres square of ice that’s disappearing. It’s not a tiny thing! But wouldn’t you say that’s a bad sign?” Fact Check: Hoegh-Guldberg confused square miles with square kilometres – but in any event the ice extent last month was 5.7 million square miles or 14.8 million square kilometres. (Hoegh-Guldberg’s “This is four million kilometres square of ice” could not be more wrong. What he said, but doesn’t mean, is a square with sides of 4 million km to give a total area of 16 trillion sq km.)

The ABC interviewer spliced in tape of Hoegh-Guldberg addressing a conference in Saudi Arabia (of all places) and saying, “Let’s now change the world.”

Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise has provided detailed history on Professor Hoegh-Guldberg, under the header, The WWF Activist in Charge at the IPCC (March 30, 2014). Among other things, she accuses him of using “drama queen language”, such as this (you be the judge):

The world is currently facing the greatest challenge of all time … Humanity is at the crossroads. The message is quite simple and the choice stark: act now or face an uncertain, potentially catastrophic future … World leaders can change the history of the planet and directly influence the survival of millions upon millions of people … Basically, the future is looking very gloomy unless we act immediately and decisively.

Laframboise wrote,

The fact that he has spent his career cashing cheques from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was no impediment to him participating in the latest [Fifth] IPCC assessment. The geniuses there decided he wasn’t merely lead-author material, but that he deserved to be placed in charge of a chapter it’s called  The Ocean.

WWF Australia published a spiffy, 16-page brochure titled “Lights Out for the Reef”. Hoegh-Guldberg’s photo and biographical sketch are one of the first things you see. In the foreword, he says that unless we “increase our commitment” to caring for the Great Barrier Reef, it “will disappear.” He knows what the future holds – and he knows it’s apocalyptic. Not content to merely express his own opinions, he presumes to lecture the rest of us. We need to “take action” and “act now.” We need to “deal decisively with climate change.” Behind all of this, of course, lurks a threat: if we don’t follow his advice, we’ll be really, really sorry.

Hoegh-Guldberg’s Queensland University biography lists four reports he did for Greenpeace from 1994-2000. After Laframboise’s post, Hoegh-Guldberg penned yet another tract for WWF, “Reviving the Ocean Economy – the Case for Action – 2015” and the following year he conducted a WWF seminar. The president and CEO of WWF (US), Carter Roberts, recalled schmoozing with him on a diving trip and:

Ove showed us maps tracking elevated levels of CO2 in the oceans, and how those levels corresponded with the declining health of the world’s coral reefs. If current trends continue, he told us, we will watch corals around the world wink out year after year until the only reefs left alive are found in a small remote spot in the South Pacific…

James Cook University’s Professor Peter Ridd was sacked in 2017 for demanding audits of alleged systemic flaws in Barrier Reef scientists’ methodology. He’s now taken his case to the High Court. As a further example of contested reef science, researcher Dr Jennifer Marohasy has challenged the standard methodology of assessing GBR coral die-back from the window of an aeroplane overflying at 120 metres. She says this is too high to give realistic results and when she has dived or used a drone on the same reefs, she’s found the corals perfectly healthy.

None of the Academy folk doing the 3deg report noticed that they were reinventing the (square) wheel. In 2007 climate guru of the era Dr Barrie Pittock wrote a 16,000-word tract for WWF headed: “Dangerous Aspirations: Beyond 3degC warming in Australia”. It’s full of the same guff and doomism as that of the Academy’s folk, who toiled a year over their “Risk to Australia of a 3degC warmer world” lookalike.[8]

The supposedly dispassionate Academy paper makes no mention whatsoever of nuclear power, and just one passing mention of China – whose emissions will swamp whatever cuts Australia tries to make.[9] The Academy paper appears even more ridiculous when set against the views this month of Obama’s chief scientist of the Energy Department, physicist Steven Koonin, who is by no means a sceptic. He expects only 1degC more warming this century – hardly worth spending trillions to combat and easy to adapt to. Further, he says the scientists, politicians and the media have generated a narrative that is absurdly, demonstrably false. That includes the “extreme weather” meme which the IPCC itself rates as “low confidence” – and which the Academy paper touts at least 27 times. The models can’t even agree on the current actual global temperature to within 3degC while claiming 1 per cent precision on key variables. The modellers’ guesses on the temperature impact of doubled  CO2 have not improved in 40 years and are now diverging even more widely, Koonin gripes.[10] The darling of catastrophists circa 2019 was David Wallace Wells with his scare book The Uninhabitable Earth. But even he is calling on fellow activists to revise their advocacy “in a less alarmist direction.”

The Academy – its members are overwhelmingly taxpayer-funded – wants to force Australia’s blue-collars, tradies and non-public servant middle classes into unpalatable and dark-green lifestyle changes. One example: “large-scale adoption of EVs [electric vehicles].” Let’s check the data (the report does not).

EV sales last year were just 6,900, up a mere 182 cars on 2019. That 6,900 total was not even 1 per cent of car sales. To date in 2021, EV sales (excluding Teslas at $73,000 upwards but including hybrids) are just 0.6 per cent. Last year 50 per cent of sales were fat gas-guzzling SUVs, up from 45 per cent in 2019. The Academy wants to push us into EVs via government subsidies and by penalties/restrictions on normal cars.

Ponder the  EV handwaving by the Academy, as evident in the passage below, taken from Academy paper March 31, 2021 (emphasis added):

On current estimates, lifetime costs of electric vehicles (EVs) are similar to those of conventional internal combustion engine vehicles and are likely to fall further.

Now check back into the real world, as described in a Federal Department of Industry, Science and Energy paper published last February:

Currently, closing the total cost-of-ownership gap with battery electric vehicle subsidies would not represent value-for-money. Analysis shows that this would be expected to cost the taxpayer $195-747 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent, depending on the vehicle type and usage. This is high when compared to the Emissions Reduction Fund price of $16 per tonne of carbon emitted. This translates to around $4,500 to $8,000 over the life of the vehicle, or around 10-40 cents per kilometre over a 10 year vehicle life.

The Academy leaves it to the omniscient government to fix the “adjustment challenges” to jobs and industries arising from its pro-EV policies. Otherwise, “Australia will be left with an inefficient car fleet, dependent on mostly imported oil, for many years to come.” What’s “inefficient” about my little family car Hyundai i30 (price new, $23,000)? It carries us like a charm on a whiff of petrol.

The Academy calls for “an immediate halt to new thermal coal mines and coal-fired power stations” and expects the bureaucracy to somehow find coal workers better jobs or earlier retirement. But anyway, it cites its own author, economist John Quiggin,

Thermal coal mining is not a major employer in Australia’s overall labour market and most employees in the industry have skills that make them employable in a wide range of industries. Only a small number of communities, mostly in central and northern Queensland, depend critically on coal mining…

Those thermal coal miners whom the Academy is happy to disappear, number about 20,000, out of about 40,000 coal miners in total, plus, of course, their household and commercial dependents. Nevertheless, the Academy continues:

Many coal-dependent workers and communities will be better off under a compassionate, pro-active transition program than by simply carrying on with ‘business as usual’ (Wiseman et al. 2017).”

Professor John Wiseman works at the dark-green end of Melbourne University at its Sustainable Society Institute. The title of one of his co-authored publications, “The Degrowth Imperative: Reducing energy and resource consumption as an essential component in achieving carbon budget targets” gives the flavour. “Degrowth” means reducing living standards like GDP per capita. As Wiseman’s co-author, Samuel Alexander, puts it, “And can we come together to build resilient, relocalised economies as globalised, carbon capitalism comes to an end in coming years and decades?” Wiseman’s also a writer on climate change and mental health, e.g. “And while many people feel grief and despair about the prospects of climate change, others see transformational hope…”

The Academy report starts with a full-page 230-word kow-tow to Aborigines, including a homily by Aboriginal Dr Emma Lee, one of the 15 members of the expert panel of authors. (The Academy signed up to a “Reconciliation Action Plan” in August 2019 to burnish its woke credentials). Dr  Lee told a conference in March about living in Country with ancestors “every day watching our midden sites along the coast getting washed away with increasing tides.”[11] One of the oldest-tide gauge benchmarks in the world is at Port Arthur in south-east Tasmania. CSIRO says it shows 160 years of sea rise there totalling a mere 13.5cm, or about two-thirds of my palm and fingers. A more precise study put the rise there at 1mm a year or 10cm per century. I had no idea that modern Tasmanian Aboriginals could so closely detect the tides increasing.

I checked other recent Academy reports for apologies for squatting on Aboriginal land, without success. One report reviewing “Decadal plans for Australian Astronomy” has 90 words of acknowledgements to whites but not one mention of Aborigines or the pioneering work of Aboriginal astronomers , now being dinned into Australian schoolkids by the ABC and officialdom.

How left can the Academy get? Last November it bagged President Trump and threw in its lot with the doddering fraud Joe Biden:

He will restore funding to environmental and climate programs and, most importantly for Australia, pressure other nations to raise their emissions reductions ambitions…

The [Trump] administration has also harmed the free movement of scientists and ideas. Travel restrictions have made it more difficult for foreigners from different countries to work or study in the US… Rising concerns about Chinese technological advancements have resulted in investigations into links between US-based scientists and China, leading to Chinese claims of McCarthyism—a claim familiar to Australians” (My emphases).

What? Why is the Academy recycling propaganda from China intended to minimise the Communist Party’s wholesale stealing of Western know-how? I sought clarification from the Academy but got no response. [12]

And what’s behind the Academy saying that the China-alleged “McCarthyism” is a “claim familiar to Australians”? That comment appears to derive from a Senate committee hearing last October. Liberal Senator Eric Abetz asked three Chinese-Australian researchers whether they were prepared to “unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship”. One of them, a Labor candidate for Melbourne’s deputy mayor, later called the question “race-baiting McCarthyism.” [I make no suggestion that the three witnesses are in any way disloyal]. The Venona code-breaking transcripts proved that in the US, Senator McCarthy was not just imagining nests of traitors within the post-war establishment.

The Academy’s climate doomism is squandering prestige built over half a century. Someone there should have run a check on its 3degC warming nonsense before the Academy does any more damage – to itself.

Tony Thomas’s new book, Come To Think Of It – essays to tickle the brain, is available here as a book ($34.95) or an e-book ($14.95)

 

[1] The fourteen Academy people wrote sagely in 1976, “We conclude that there is no evidence that the world is now on the brink of a major climatic change. There is ample evidence that the world’s climate has changed widely during the geological past, and while there is every expectation that it will continue to change in the future, the time scale of these changes is in the range of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years rather than decades or centuries.” (My emphasis).

[2] There is scientific etiquette that a reviewer does not review his/her own prior publications, yet here we see senior climate scientists doing just that.

[3] The UK is copping its frostiest April in at least 60 years, CO2 notwithstanding, according to its Met Office.

[4] At 1.10.00secs in the video.

[5] IPCC’s Third Report 2001: “In climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” (Chapter 14, Section 14.2.2.2. )

IPCC’s Fifth Report, 2014: 111 out of 114 model runs showed temperatures above actual data. [chapter 9, text box 9.2, page 769]

[6] “The Australian Academy of Science comprises 550 Fellows whose common link is their exceptional scientific achievement.”

[7] Fouled up beyond all recognition.

[8] The Pittock biography incorrectly credits him with a share in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which the ABC’s Sophie Scott elevated even further to describe Pittock as a “Nobel Prize winner”.[8]

[9] China, pretending at the Paris talks to be a less-developed country, intends to reach peak emissions only in 2030. It’s burning more than half the globe’s thermal coal consumption and is planning or starting 247 gigawatts of new coal-fired power, six times the total coal-power use of Germany and equal to about 80 Loy Yang power plants.

[10] The last official IPCC statement was a footnote in IPCC, 2013: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. SPM page 16. It reads ‘No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.’

[11] at 1.24.40sec.

[12] In a marvellous each-way bet, the Academy’s anti-Trump document says

  • This analysis has the endorsement of the Secretary for Science Policy, President and Chief Executive of the Australian Academy of Science.
  • “Views expressed in this feature remain those of the authors.”

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A Mass Deception Of Virology & Vaccines: Case Proven?

A Mass Deception Of Virology and Vaccines  By John O’Sullivan, PrincipiaScientific.com, 28 April 2021

Last year we posted an article that triggered both ridicule and debate. It dared to question the accepted narrative of viruses and vaccines; that COVID19 did not exist and terrain theory would topple germ theory when the world awakens from the nonsense of the fake pandemic. Is the passage of time vindicating us?

Today, a clear and undeniable fact persists to annoy the defenders of Louis Pasteur’s theory and undermines all the claims that COVID19 is a deadly virus requiring mass global vaccinations as a remedy.

Have you ever questioned Germ Theory? Our whole society is based on it. The whole medical profession – especially virology – is based on it. It is why they give us vaccines.

One year on, the Achilles Heel for medical science and virology remains: no lab anywhere in the world has provided a gold standard isolate of the SARS-CoV-2 virus – alleged to cause COVID19 – a supposedly novel respiratory disease but with identical systems to colds and flu.

Our own inhouse expert, Dr Saeed Qureshi, has been at the forefront of exposing that telling omission. It is why we are strong supporters of the Statement On Virus Isolation (SOVI).

Moreover, as our corrupt governments and media keep telling us, cases and deaths from COVID run into the millions but we note a strange corresponding collapse in reported cases and deaths from influenza. How is that possible?

Did the novel virus somehow act as an antidote to other respiratory diseases that have plagued humans for millennia?

Hardly.

 

So, as this is the anniversary of our publication of the controversial article,  it behoves us to take stock.

Herein we post the empirical, proven outcomes. The most telling of which, in terms of discrediting virology as pseudo science, may be in this German video presentation of a controlled experiment that exposes a cornerstone of virology as not only unreliable, but patently false.

As reported in thefreedomarticles.com:

“German virologist Dr. Stefan Lanka, who won a landmark case in 2017 which went all the way to the German Supreme Court. Lanka proved in the highest court of the land that measles was not caused by a virus, and that there was in fact no such thing as a measles virus. Lanka is still busy working, and he wrote this article earlier this year (translated into English here) entitled ““The Misconception called Virus”” in which he explains the history of how mainstream science went horribly wrong with its conclusions (really assumptions) to demonize the humble virus and to falsely ascribe pathogenicity to it when there is none.”

Watch the video by Dr Stefan Lanka and Dean Braus and judge for yourselves:

If these lab tests are validated elsewhere, then it would seem that Drs Lanka, Andrew Kaufman, Judy Wilyman, Qureshi, et al. are vindicated.

They have shown us that virology incorrectly states – without proof – that viruses originate outside the body, then ‘hijack’ the RNA or DNA of the cell, and then replicate whilst attacking cells indiscriminately.

If this were true, viruses would replicate endlessly, eventually attacking all healthy cells, but they do not. We know that antibodies, a type of white blood cell, regulates the virus.

There exists no video evidence of viruses hijacking cells, except for 3D renders, and animations based on theory

As so-called “conspiracy theorist” the aforementioned mavericks stayed true to the scientific method and insisted upon actual verifiable proofs as to the nature and cause of the most economically devastating pandemic in modern human history. Their persistence and methodological acumen appear to have saved the world from an evil Big Pharma lie that has corrupted medical science for over half a century.

As thefreedomarticles.com neatly puts it:

“When modern scientists are working with diseased tissue, they think the presence of a virus is causing the disease, instead of realizing that the tissue in question has been cut off and isolated from its host, then doused with antibiotics, and that this separation and poison make it diseased and kill it, rather than any virus. Lanka writes:

“All claims about viruses as pathogens are wrong and are based on easily recognizable, understandable and verifiable misinterpretations … All scientists who think they are working with viruses in laboratories are actually working with typical particles of specific dying tissues or cells which were prepared in a special way. They believe that those tissues and cells are dying because they were infected by a virus. In reality, the infected cells and tissues were dying because they were starved and poisoned as a consequence of the experiments in the lab.”

” … the death of the tissue and cells takes place in the exact same manner when no “infected” genetic material is added at all. The virologists have apparently not noticed this fact. According to … scientific logic and the rules of scientific conduct, control experiments should have been carried out. In order to confirm the newly discovered method of so-called “virus propagation” … scientists would have had to perform additional experiments, called negative control experiments, in which they would add sterile substances … to the cell culture.”

“These control experiment have never been carried out by the official  “science” to this day. During the measles virus trial, I commissioned an independent laboratory to perform this control experiment and the result was that the tissues and cells die due to the laboratory conditions in the exact same way as when they come into contact with alleged “infected” material.”

In other words, the studied cells and tissues die with or without the presence of a virus in exactly the same way; therefore, the virus cannot be the cause of the morbidity and mortality. Interestingly, this exactly what many health experts have stated, namely that there are only two causes of disease: deficiency and toxicity.

  • Viruses are not living organisms or living microbes
  • Viruses do not have a respiratory system, nor a nucleus or digestive system
  • Viruses are not alive and viruses are not contagious
  • Thus, the fear behind COVID19 is wholly unwarranted

At Principia Scientific International, our words live or die by the scientific method. If claims cannot be verified empirically then they should be taken with a grain of salt. Viruses do not multiply on their own. When added to fertile petri-dishes that sustain cellular life, no additional viral protein structures appear.

Dr Lanka has yet to share all the experiment’s details including SOPs, copies of original run sheets, batch records, solutions, concentrations, incubation times, etc. of the CPE experiment. For that reason, we pose the title of this article as a question. It awaits wider confirmation.

Likewise, we urge the medical community to hold true to Koch’s Postulates: if there is no isolation of a virus, there is no purification. Without purification you have only speculation – and that is not solid science!

About John O’Sullivan John is CEO and co-founder (with Dr Tim Ball) of Principia Scientific International (PSI).  John is a seasoned science writer and legal analyst who assisted Dr Ball in defeating world leading climate expert, Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann in the ‘science trial of the century‘. O’Sullivan is credited as the visionary who formed the original ‘Slayers’ group of scientists in 2010 who then collaborated in creating the world’s first full-volume debunk of the greenhouse gas theory plus their new follow-up book.

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GMO SEEDS ALREADY OBSOLETE?

 

GMO SEEDS ALREADY OBSOLETE  By Joseph P.Farrell, 3 March 2021

 

If you’re a GMO seeds proponent, or an employee of Mon(ster)santo or I.G. Farbensanto, don’t say we didn’t warn you. Our warning was that by trying to create genetically modified crops that would repel pests, that nature would adapt to the modifications faster than research laboratories could adapt GMOs to nature’s adaptations, thus rendering them not only potentially obsolete, but by creating a pest problem, endangering the food supply (and don’t forget those falling crop yields-per-acre that the University of Iowa documented a couple of years ago with respect to GMO yields: falling yields + higher costs to maintain GMO crops = GMO failure, and cost effectiveness makes natural seeds over the long term a better investment. Now it’s officially come home to roost, according to this article shared by B.:

The coming obsolescence of GMO seeds

There’s much to note about this article, but there was one thing that it stated that leaped out at me:

For the $55 billion genetically modified seed industry, the news hasn’t been good lately. The great “successes” of Bt corn and cotton seeds are turning to failure as insects such as corn rootworms and cotton bollworms are developing resistance to the GMO crops. As a result, farmers have to spray more toxic insecticides to kill the resistant insects.

The situation has become so bad that the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed phasing out more than 40 varieties of Bt corn and cotton over the next three to five years as a way to reduce the insect resistance.

Meanwhile, herbicide-tolerant GMO soybeans are facing massive weed resistance problems. With U.S. farmers spraying 300 million pounds of glyphosate on their fields each year, weeds have naturally developed resistance. Monsanto and other biotech companies’ solution was to develop new GMO seeds that would work with dicamba and 2,4-D herbicides, which are more toxic than glyphosate and prone to drift, causing damage to other crops.

The result has been a disaster. Dicamba has damaged millions of acres of non-dicamba tolerant soybeans as well as other crops, fruit orchards, millions of trees, and gardens in the past four years. The largest peach producer in Missouri lost 30,000 trees to dicamba drift damage. He sued Monsanto, now Bayer, and won a $265 million settlement. One farmer even murdered another over a dicamba drift dispute.

GMO seeds are failing because GMO technology is short-sighted and supports a failing system of agriculture. GMOs still dominate U.S. corn, soybean, and cotton production but I believe their days are numbered. They are going against the trends in agriculture, which are toward regenerative and organic methods.

A growing number of farmers are focusing on practices to build soil health such as planting cover crops and diverse crop rotations and grazing livestock. Because of those practices, regenerative farmers find they no longer need the GMO seeds, and they are also able to slash their use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers.(Boldface emphasis added)

“… a failing system of agriculture”: Let those words sink in. And let the other words “the result has been a disaster” sink in too. But wait, there’s more:

The main point is that soil health and regenerative practices are the leading trends in agriculture today, and as farmers journey on the path to soil health, many don’t see the need to plant GMO seeds.

GMO seed technology was designed to work with a system of industrial agriculture whose toxic effects—pesticides that threaten human health, depleted and eroded soils, polluted waterways from fertilizer runoff, greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change, among others—are becoming more apparent and threatening to the world. As more farmers move away from this system toward regenerative and organic practices, the use of ag chemicals and GMOs will fall away.

Biotechnology proponents point to the emergence of gene editing, and say that new gene edited seeds and crops will be developed. They say these crops will increase crop yields, produce more nutritious foods, reduce pesticide use, and help to “feed the world.” Wait, wasn’t that the promise of the “old” GMO seeds? Gene editing supporters say the technology is precise. But a study published in Nature magazine last July found that gene editing of human embryonic cells caused “chromosomal mayhem.” That isn’t precise. Similar genetic mayhem has been seen in gene edited rice and other crops. Gene edited crops will have the same problems as the older GMO crops, and consumers will likely reject them.(Boldface emphasis added)

In other words, human genetic tinkering is creating chaos in agriculture; think of the growing number of stories about adverse reactions to the mRNA covid “vaccines” and transfer that to crops and you get the picture: we are playing with systems which in spite of our vaunted “science” we do not yet completely understand, and in our rush to “play” with them and “improve” them, are creating a mess, possibly one that could threaten the food supply. And in both cases, crops and “vaccines”, the model used is one to maximize profits of a few big corporations. Why sponsor hydroxychloroquine for covid, when it’s so cheap, when profits can be maximized for a “vaccine” which comes with all sorts of health risks. Why sponsor ordinary seeds, when GMO seeds and their associated pesticides are so much more expensive, and can maximize profits?

Similarly, note the response to these models: “organic” crops and “holistic” medicine. In other words, more and more involved in the practice of farming or medicine are turning away from technological and artificial fixes more natural ones. Note that Russia, for example, not only turned very deliberately away from GMOs, but that its vaccine is not an experimental one tinkering with messenger RNA and human genetics.

And also note the response of “Big Agribusiness” (or as we like to call it here, I.G. Farbensanto or Mon[ster]santo) and Big Pharma (or as we like to call it, Muck Pharmaceuticals) to those who’ve opposed their agendas: Mon(ster)santo would sue farmers if one of their plants was spotted on their fields (meaning that Mon[ster]santo was actually spying on people), and Muck Pharmaceuticals? Well, it’s a curious thing that so many holistic doctors were being murdered in the years running up to the covid planscamdemic, and we all saw how apopleptic some doctors and media became at the mere mention of hydroxychloroquine, vitamin d, or zinc.

So yes, perhaps we need a new model of doing things. One that isn’t anti-science, but skeptical of rushed scientism, of rushed promises of “a better world” and “cures” without adequate testing and skepticism. In this, the whole GMO panacea has been a lesson in the dangers of rushed technologies, lack of inter-generational testing, and bought-off and corrupted “corporate science” and media promising the utmost safety of their witches’ brews.

Or to put that lesson more succinctly, no more Mon(ster)santo’s, and no more “Operation Warp Speeds” either. And here’s the good news:

The good news is that a seed industry independent of the big biotech/pesticide companies—Bayer, BASF, Corteva, and Syngenta—is growing stronger, worth an estimated $10 billion. This includes organic seed companies such as Albert Lea Seed, Great Harvest Organics, High Mowing Organic Seeds, and others. There are also seed companies emerging to meet the demand for non-GMO corn including SureFlex Hybrids in Minnesota, Spectrum Non-GMO in Indiana, Hybrid85 in Nebraska, and De Dell Seeds in Canada, to name a few.

Now, hopefully, we’ll see the emergence of doctors’ and physicians’ consortia that will treat their covid patients with things other than questionable “vaccines”. We’ve seen a few individuals questioning the whole narrative, but the whole idea of other points of view should, perhaps, become a business model.

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Senate inquiry is bringing evidence about state of Great Barrier Reef to the surface

Senate inquiry is bringing evidence about state of Great Barrier Reef to the surface  By Professor Peter Ridd, an independent scientist, The Australian, 16 September 2020

 

Editor’s note: Professor Ridd was sacked by James Cook University, Queensland, for challenging some university colleagues regarding the accuracy of their reports concerning the Great Barrier Reef.  Ridd challenged this in court and won a resounding victory in which the judge castigated JCU. An appeal by JCU was lost based on some convoluted points.  Ridd is escalating an appeal to the highest Australian court.  Over $760,000 has been collected for Ridd’s appeal in a Go-Fund appeal. Ridd is pushing in particular for a far better level of quality control in science.

The Senate committee inquiry into the regulation of farm practices impacting water quality on the Great Barrier Reef has yielded some remarkable confessions by science institutions about the state of the reef. It has been the first time many of the scientists have been asked difficult questions and publicly challenged by hard evidence. They have been forced out of their bubble.

It was revealed by Paul Hardisty, boss of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, that only 3 per cent of the reef, the “inshore reefs”, is affected by farm pesticides and sediment. He also stated that pesticides, are a “low to negligible risk”, even for that 3 per cent.

The other 97 per cent, the true offshore Great Barrier Reef, mostly 50km to 100km from the coast, is effectively totally unharmed by pesticides and sediment.

This has been evident in the data for decades but it is nice to see an honest appraisal of the situation.

Why has this fact not been brought to the public’s attention in major documents such as the GBR Outlook Report produced by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority? Why has everybody been deceived about the true extent of the problem?

AIMS was also forthcoming on other important points. Records of coral growth rates show no impact from agriculture. Large corals live centuries, and have annual growth rings like trees. They record their own rate of growth. If farming, which started about 100 years ago on the reef coast, was damaging the it, there should be a slowing of the growth rate. The records show no slowing when agriculture started a century ago, or when large-scale use of fertiliser and pesticides began in the 1950s.

I have written previously that AIMS has been negligent in not updating the GBR-average coral growth data for the past 15 years. We have the scandalous situation that there is data going back centuries – but nothing since 2005. AIMS claimed coral growth rates collapsed between 1990 and 2005, due to climate change; however, there is considerable doubt about this result because AIMS changed the methodology for the data between 1990 and 2005. At the Senate inquiry, under some duress, AIMS agreed it would be a good idea to update this data if the government will fund the project.

Updating the coral growth rate data will be a major step forward. It will prove or disprove the doubtful decline between 1990 and 2005. It will also give the complete record of how the GBR has fared in the past 15 years, a period when scientists have become more strident in their claims that it is on its last legs.

Hardisty, to his credit, has recently implemented red-blue teams within his organisation to help with quality assurance of the work that AIMS produces. A red team is a group of scientists that takes a deliberately antagonist approach to check, test and replicate scientific evidence. A genuine red team is a far more rigorous quality assurance approach than the present system used in science – peer review – which is often little more than a quick read of the work by the scientist’s mates. What AIMS has done internally is similar to what I have been proposing – an Office of Science Quality Assurance that would check, test, and replicate scientific evidence used for public policy.

Unfortunately, Hardisty’s commitment to quality in science was not reflected by many other important witnesses at the Senate inquiry. Many are in denial and resorted to shooting the messengers. An extract from a letter signed by Professor Ian Chubb, a former Australian chief scientist, was read out by Senator Kim Carr.

Disputing the conventional wisdom on the reef was likened to denying that tobacco causes cancer, or that lead in petrol is a health risk. Worse still, the reason sceptics do this, apparently, is “usually money”. Scientists such as Dr Piers Larcombe, the pre-eminent expert on the movement of sediment on the reef, with decades of experience, is thus written off as a corrupt charlatan.

It is scientific “cancel culture”. It is easier than confronting Larcombe’s evidence that farming has very limited impact on the GBR.

It is customary to be very cynical of our politicians, but it was senators Roberts, Rennick, Canavan and McDonald who forced some truth from our generally untrustworthy science institutions. Only our politicians can save us from them.

The evidence about the reef will not be buried forever. All the data indicates agriculture is having a negligible impact on the reef, and recent draconian Queensland legislation against farmers is unwarranted. And this issue will be influential come the Queensland state election on October 31.

(Professor) Peter Ridd is an independent scientist.

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We need an inquiry into climate alarmism

 

We need an inquiry into climate alarmism  By Chris Kenny, The Australian, 29 August 2020

I hope you are sitting down; this foray into political and media madness over bushfires and climate change starts with recognising some excellent, forensic journalism by the ABC. Investigating last summer’s devastating Gospers Mountain fire, journalist Philippa McDonald took us to the very tree where the fire is believed to have been started when it was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm.

McDonald used this to give us the brilliantly counterintuitive opening line; “It began not with fire, but ice.” In a series of reports, McDonald and her team retraced the history of the fire over a number of weeks, how it was almost extinguished by rain, how bushwalkers in the wrong place at the wrong time thwarted a backburn that might have stopped it, how another prescribed burn got out of control and destroyed houses, and how a fortuitous wind change stopped it encroaching on suburban Sydney.

We might quibble with some of the alarmist language — repeating the silly new “megafire” term and pretending that when fires meet they join and get bigger when, in fact, this reduces the number of fronts and total length of fire perimeter — but overall the reporting was factual and admirable because it explained the many variables in fire behaviour and the factors that can influence whether a fire can be contained or extinguished before weather conditions turn it into an unstoppable beast. Surprisingly, and refreshingly, the reports did not dwell on climate change.

When it comes to our bushfires climate change is so close to being irrelevant, it should hardly warrant a passing reference — we have always faced disastrous bushfire conditions and always will. If climate change makes the worst conditions either marginally more or less common, it matters not; we still need to do the same things to protect ourselves.

In previous articles I have detailed the leading scientific analysis showing the main precondition for the NSW fires — a long drought — cannot be attributed to climate change. Unless climate activists want to argue Australia could do something to alter the global climate sufficiently to reduce our bushfire threat, they are exposed as cynical campaigners who used the sure bet of bushfires to advance their political scare campaign.

The NSW bushfire inquiry released this week took a dive into the climate science — as it was tasked to do — and found, predictably enough, that climate change “clearly played a role in the conditions” that led up to the fires and helped spread them. But thankfully it did not waste much time on climate in its recommendations, merely suggesting climate trends need to be monitored and factored in.

Apart from exercises in politically correct box ticking — Indigenous training for evacuation centre staff so they are “culturally competent”, wildlife rescue training for firefighters, and signs to promote ABC radio stations — most of the recommendations were practical. Better equipment for firefighters, more water bombers, more communication, public education and most importantly, a range of suggestions on fuel reduction around settled areas and planning controls on building in fire prone areas.

The bottom line has always been obvious: the one fire input we can control is fuel, so where we want to slow blazes or protect properties, we must reduce fuel. Planning is also important to prevent housing in indefensible locations, but one crucial phrase missing from the report was “personal responsibility”.

Houses on wooded hilltops or surrounded by bush cannot be protected and their residents should not expect others to risk their lives trying to do so.

People must be educated to clear extensively around properties, sufficient to withstand not a moderate fire but a firestorm, otherwise they must be prepared to surrender their homes and escape early.

“Hazard reduction is not the complete answer,” said report author Mary O’Kane. “People do need to take responsibility, they need to realise that if they live in certain areas it can be very dangerous, and we try to give a strong message of, if you are in a dangerous area and there is one of these big, bad megafires, the message, is get out.”

O’Kane is right, of course. But it seems a hell of a waste to hold a full inquiry only to be told we should do more fuel reduction, be careful where we build houses, and get the hell out of the way rather than try to fight firestorms. We knew all this.

The push for an inquiry was largely driven by the climate catastrophists. Remember, they wanted to blame the blazes on the axing of the carbon tax, and on Scott Morrison. It was inane and rancid stuff.

They will be at it again, this fire season. They love making political capital out of disasters, although they go as quiet as Tim Flannery when it comes to full dams and widespread snowfalls.

The area of land burned in the Australian summer has now been revised down by 25 per cent, and the claims about wildlife deaths revised downwards too, to factor in the mind-blowing realisation that animals actually escape fire when they can — birds fly, wombats burrow, kangaroos hop and even koalas can climb to the treetops and escape all but a crowning blaze.

Remember we had articles in The Guardian, The New York Times, and on CNN and the BBC, saying the bush might never recover. Take a drive through the Blue Mountains, Kangaroo Island or the Australian Alps and see how their predictions turned out.

The sclerophyll forests of southern Australia are not just adapted to fire, they are reliant on it. Therefore, the wildlife also is reliant on it for the rejuvenation of the vegetation — why does basic ecology escape the climate activists? If it is any comfort, the same madness is now playing out in California. Similar climate, similar history of bushfires, and the same maddening political debate. With fires burning more than a million acres in northern California this month, the state’s Democratic Governor, Gavin Newsom, sent a recorded message to his party’s national convention; “If you are in denial about climate change, come to California.” The trouble is that while these are bad wildfires, they are not unusual in the natural and settled history of that environment.

Like the Australian bush, the redwood forests that US journalists suggest are being destroyed by fire, depend on fire for propagation. Just like here, one of the issues has been the suppression of bushfire by human interference, leading to the unnatural build up of fuel that can explode when a wildfire does get away in bad conditions.

Environmentalist and author of Apocalypse Never; Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Michael Shellenberger says the climate is warming but the impact of this on fires is overstated. In an article for Forbes.com he quoted Scott Stevens of the University of California, Berkeley, saying climate change is not a major factor, as well as other experts scoffing of the idea that severe fires are anything new.

“California’s fires should indeed serve as a warning to the public, but not that climate change is causing the apocalypse,” wrote Shellenberger. “Rather, it should serve as a warning that mainstream news reporters and California’s politicians cannot be trusted to tell the truth about climate change and fires.”

Ditto for Oz. I have detailed previously how Fran Kelly told ABC audiences in November that “the fire warning had been increased to catastrophic for the first time ever in this country” — but that was wrong, wildly wrong.

Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John accused his political opponents of being “no better than arsonists” and other Greens and Labor MPs said Australia’s climate policies were exacerbating bushfires. Insane as this might be, it was amplified rather than interrogated by most media.

The thick smoke haze in Sydney was portrayed as something “unprecedented” — if it has not been on Twitter before it must never have happened — but a quick search of newspaper files found similar bushfire-induced shrouds in 1951, when airports were closed, and 1936, when a ship couldn’t find the heads.

Fires in rainforest areas of southern Queensland and northern NSW were not “unprecedented” either, with archived reports noting similar fires in the spring of 1951 and even the winter of 1946.

Despite 200,000 media mentions of “unprecedented” tracked by media monitors across December and January, the facts showed none of this was new. Greater areas were burned in 1851 and 1974-75, and human devastation was either as bad or worse on Black Saturday in 2009, Ash Wednesday in 1983, Black Tuesday in 1967, Black Friday in 1939 and Black Thursday 1851.

Bushland was not destroyed forever, koalas were not rendered extinct and Scott Morrison was not to blame. We should have an inquiry into climate alarmism, political posturing and media reporting — we would learn a lot more from that than we have from relearning age-old fire preparedness from yet another bushfire inquiry.

CHRIS KENNY

 

ASSOCIATE EDITOR (NATIONAL AFFAIRS)

Commentator, author and former political adviser, Chris Kenny hosts The Kenny Report Monday-Friday 5pm, and Kenny on Media, 8.30pm Friday, on Sky News. He takes an unashamedly rationalist approach to national a… Read more

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Alarmism in New Zealand


Alarmism in New Zealand  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR.com, 25 July 2020

Fear is a natural survival instinct and arguably more motivating than logic and reason. It can also be used to great effect to shift the mindset of communities and nations.

While such manipulation is, of course, not uncommon, what is surprising is how blind societies are to recognising when fear is being used as a tool for political persuasion.

We recently saw this in the Government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic when the Prime Minister used alarmist computer modelling to justify her “Captain’s Call” to lock the country down.

Claiming “tens of thousands of New Zealanders” could die, the PM rejected Ministry of Health advice to stay at Level 2 for 30 days, and imposed what we now know to be the most stringent policy response in the world.

Instead of relying on cost benefit analyses and regulatory impact statements from trusted government agencies to inform her decisions, the PM chose inaccurate computer models that grossly exaggerated the number of deaths.

It has now been revealed that the modelling she relied on did not take into account the contact testing and tracing that was central to the health response being implemented by Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the Director General of Health.

The explosion of predicted deaths that resulted, was then used by the PM to scare the country into accepting her hard-line lockdown.

This is not the first time the Prime Minister has used scaremongering to force her policy agenda onto the country. Her whole response to climate change has been based on fear.

Climate change is, of course, a natural process influenced by a wide range of factors including the sun, clouds, and ocean currents. Throughout history, the Earth’s climate has been far hotter than it is today and far colder. Sea levels have been far higher and far lower. Carbon dioxide – the trace gas used by plants to manufacture food – has existed at far higher atmospheric concentrations and far lower.

But the United Nations’ climate models that are being used to redefine economic policy around the world, only focus on the minuscule proportion of carbon emissions produced by humans. In doing so, they disregard not only the 97 percent of carbon dioxide produced from natural sources, but also the overwhelming influence that other crucial factors such as the sun have on the climate.

These alarmist models, which blame climate change on humans, are being used by politicians – including our Prime Minister – to implement the UN’s socialist agenda: state control of all economic activity through the regulation of carbon emissions.

Fortunately, most scams motivated by scaremongering are eventually exposed – often by the very people who pioneered the movements before they were captured by political extremists.

This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator Michael Shellenberger is a leading American climate activist, who, having promoted global warming propaganda for almost three decades, has decided to stop the lies:

“On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

“Here are some facts few people know: Humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction’; Climate change is not making natural disasters worse;  Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level; Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change; Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels…

“I know that the above facts will sound like ‘climate denialism’ to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.”

Michael Shellenberger explains how difficult it has been to speak out against the climate scare:

“I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an ‘existential’ threat to human civilization, and called it a ‘crisis’.

“But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public…

“But then, last year, things spiralled out of control. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said ‘The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.’ Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed ‘Climate Change Kills Children…

“As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change. Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened. I thus decided I had to speak out.”

While Michael Shellenberger deserves credit for speaking out and exposing the misrepresentation, those activists who lie should be held to account – particularly by the media. It is therefore regrettable that so many in the media have decided their interests are better served by aligning with the popularists, rather than adhering to the bedrock values of their profession.

Prime amongst New Zealand’s serial alarmists is the Green Party’s Climate Change Minister James Shaw. Not only does he knowingly describe carbon dioxide – the cornerstone of life on earth – as a “pollutant”, but he also continues to claim that as a result of climate change, adverse weather events are getting worse, which is another alarmist fabrication that is simply untrue.

But as the late Stephen Schneider, a Stanford University Professor who had been a lead author for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explained, for advocates of climate alarmism the truth is not a priority: “…we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination.  That entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

Fearmongering, of course, has been an effective tool to manipulate the public throughout history.

The myth that population growth will deplete food and resources, and ultimately destroy the planet, can be traced back to the writing of the Reverend Thomas Malthus in 1798.

These idea gained unprecedented traction following the 1968 release of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, an entomologist at Stanford University. The book incited such fear of overpopulation that it triggered waves of repression around the world.

The facts, however, tell a different story. Population growth has been slowing for more than three decades. Forty years ago, while the average woman had between five and six children to ensure the survival of the next generation, she now has between two and three. Women are having fewer children because better healthcare means that most babies now live to grow up. As a result, half of the world is already below the long-term replacement level.

Concerns over ‘peak oil’ have also been in and out of vogue over recent decades. Driven by the theory that the world would run out of oil, the reality is that scarcity has been the result of geopolitical disruption rather than resource depletion.

The Club of Rome, an Italian-based think tank established in 1965, investigated resource scarcity in their highly influential book The Limits to Growth. Using computer modelling, they forecast apocalyptic economic and environmental disaster.

Ironically, it has now become clear that, contrary to what they were predicting, the best way to improve humanity and the environment is through more growth, not less. As countries improve their living standards, so too they improve social, economic and environmental wellbeing. It is the resourcefulness of free markets to innovate and maximise the efficient use of resources that results in a progressive improvement in living standards.

What is also bizarre is that while in the 1970s climate computer models predicted that the burning of fossil fuels would trigger another ice age, nowadays they are claiming the exact opposite – that the burning of fossil fuels will cause the planet to dangerously overheat.

This contradiction has not stopped our politicians – with fossil fuels identified as the villain, their policy response of an increasing carbon levy, has effectively imposed socialist state control over all economic activity.

When the Prime Minister and Climate Change Minister introduced their Zero Carbon Act last year, they boasted about imposing the harshest restrictions on carbon emissions of any country in the world. Then last month, they amended the Emissions Trading Scheme to cap carbon emissions, causing the price of carbon to jump from around $25 a tonne to $33.

At $25, New Zealander motorists were paying an ETS levy of around 4c for every litre of petrol they bought. At $33, the levy is now around 7 cents a litre, and at $35, it will be around 9c a litre. Such price hikes will flow right through the economy, increasing the cost of living.

The Climate Change Minister expects carbon prices will go much higher.

Meanwhile the price of carbon has had a major impact on vegetable affordability, especially tomatoes. With hothouses no longer economical in some areas, local growers are being forced to close. As a result, New Zealanders will see an increase in produce imported from countries with no carbon costs.

With the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change specifying that measures introduced to enable countries to meet their carbon targets must not reduce food production, Minister Shaw is clearly breaking the rules.

Governments can only get away with imposing socialist control under the guise of climate change because of their scaremongering. Endlessly claiming that burning fossil fuels is causing dangerous global warming, they promote renewable energy as the only sustainable alternative.

In a controversial new film, Planet of the Humans, which climate activists have tried to ban, filmmaker Michael Moore provides a devastating indictment of the renewable energy scam, explaining it is not clean, green, nor sustainable, but is more destructive than the energy sources it seeks to replace.

The film shows how wind, solar and biofuel projects destroy wildlife habitats, rare and endangered species, and millions of acres of forests, deserts and grasslands.

It exposes bogus claims about the benefits of renewable energy and explains that electricity for a small city of 50,000 households requires 15 square miles of solar panels, along with wind turbines, and a huge array of batteries – or a coal or gas power plant – for nights and cloudy days.

Paul Driessen, a senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow has reviewed  the film and describes the turbines:  “Each one is comprised of nearly 5,000,000 pounds of concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, plastic, cobalt, rare earths, fiberglass and other materials. Every step in the mining, processing, manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance and (20 years later) removal process requires fossil fuels. It bears repeating: wind and sun are renewable and sustainable; harnessing them for energy to benefit mankind absolutely is not.”

While some of the film’s conclusions are questionable, Michael Moore raises concerns about the merits of alternative energy that alarmists have conveniently ignored: “We’re basically being fed a lie.” Maybe we’d be “better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place,” than doing all of this.

Although dissenting voices are not yet dominating the debate about climate alarmism, there is enough concern for political leaders to stop the headlong rush into policy extremism and exercise some common sense judgement.

With New Zealand already struggling to recover from the harsh lockdown, the last thing this country needs is climate policy based on scaremongering to undermine our fragile economic recovery.

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Sorry for misleading you, but I cried wolf on climate change

Sorry for misleading you, but I cried wolf on climate change  By Michael Shellenberger, The Australian, 1 July 2020

I have been a climate activist for 20 years but on behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created.

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the past 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by the US congress to provide ­objective testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to serve as a reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologise for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know: Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”;

The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”;

Climate change is not making natural disasters worse;

Fires have declined 25 per cent around the world since 2003;

The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska;

The author’s new book.

The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California;

Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany and France since the mid-1970s;

The Netherlands became rich, not poor, while adapting to life below sea level;

We produce 25 per cent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter;

Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change;

Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels;

Preventing future pandemics requires more, not less, “industrial” agriculture.

I know the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism. In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those ­conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the Inter­national Union for the Conservation of Nature and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this, imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s co-operatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

Green beginnings

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to ­invest $US90bn into them. Over the past few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions.

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I ­referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilisation, and called it a “crisis”.

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke Jr, a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favour of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his ­research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse. But then, last year, things spiralled out of control. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “climate change kills children”.

Turning point

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilisations”. Mainstream journalists ­reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world”, and that deforestation was like a ­nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity ­extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence. And so my formal ­apology for our fearmongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany and France since the mid-1970s.

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialisation, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

  • Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress.
  • The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land.
  • The most important thing for reducing pollution and emissions is moving from wood to coal to petrol to natural gas to uranium.
  • 100 per cent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 per cent to 50 per cent.
  • We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities.
  • Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 per cent.
  • Greenpeace didn’t save the whales — switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did.
  • “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 per cent more emissions.
  • Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon.
  • The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants.

Why were we all so misled? In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the ­financial, political and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable”. And status anxiety, depression and hostility to modern civilisation are behind much of the alarmism.

The most important thing for reducing pollution and emissions is moving from wood to coal to petrol to natural gas to uranium.

Reality bites

Once you realise just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavoury motivations, it is hard not to feel duped. Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it. The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop. The ideology behind environmental alarmism — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to ­believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.

A real crisis

The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, COVID-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people [Editor’s note 1: There is compelling evidence this figure is grossly inflated due to dubious practices and methods of measuring] and shattered economies around the globe [Editor’s note 2: It is the related governmental regulations that have ‘shattered economies around the world’, not COVID-19].

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicisation of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform. Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilisation is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilisation that climate alarmists would return us to.

Greenpeace didn’t save the whales — switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did.

The invitations from IPCC and congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another one has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists and ­environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely ­important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning ­author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science, Tom Wigley.

“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love’: a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”

That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist and progressive felt the need to speak out against the alarmism. I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.

Michael Shellenberger is president of Environmental Progress, an independent research and policy organisation. He is the author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, published by Harper Collins

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Links to previous articles

    • derailing-the-marrakech-express  By Michael Kile, Quadrant Online, 20 November 2016
    • finally-warmists-find-a-real-threat  By Tony Thomas, Quadrant Online, 15 November 2016
    • cp-editorial-on-agw-distortions-011116 – by Andrew Bolt, Going cold on climate science, 1 November 2016
    • cp-editorial-271016  By Julian Tomlinson, Cairns Post, 27 October 2016
    • bjorn-lomborg-take-those-organic-food-claims-with-a-grain-of-salt  By Bjorn Lomborg, The Australian, 16 October 2016
    • like-all-cults-climate-alarmism-will-fail-when-its-prophecies-dont-materialise  By Peter Campion, 14 September 2016
    • Young Heads Filled With Green Mush  By Tony Thomas, Quadrant Online, 3 August
    • Brexit threatens Climate Gravy train – time for Clexit  By Jo Nova, joannenova.com.au/, 3 August 2016
    • Golden rice, the miracle crop Greenpeace hates  By George Harrison, Spiked Online, 23 July 2016
    • A fantasy green-tech future  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 19 July 2016
    • The positive effects of CO2 – there is no crisis  By Anthony Watts, WattsUpWithThat  website, 23 June 2016
    • The Reef’s Self-Serving Saviours  By Dr Walter Starck, Quadrant Online, 19 June 2016
    • Exaggeration, hyperbole and even lies, by Julian Tomlinson, Cairns Post, 2 June 2016
    • How climate and environmental propaganda works  By Paul Driesson, Townhall, 3 May
    • How Greens kill off industry by stealth  By Alan Oxley, Quadrant Online, 31 March
    • Are Environmentalism and Global Warming Effectively Religious Socialism  By Dr. Tim Ball, 23 February 2016
    • The economic costs of excessive environmental legislation  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZ Centre for Political Research, 18 February 2016
    • Climate change, CSIRO realigns after groupthink fails  By Michael Asten, The Australian, 12 February 2016
    • Climate change science RIP  By Don Aitkin, 7 February 2016
    • Bureau of Meteorology needs to open its records to audit  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 1 February 2016
    • Chilling climate of UN control  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 28 December
    • Paris talks – agreeing to dodge democracy – By Ben Pile, Spiked Online, 19 December
    • Ruinous water plan based on environmentalist lies  By Ron Pike, Quadrant Online, 18 October 2015
    • Global warming zealots blamed for deadly diesel fiasco  By Steven Glover, The Daily Mail, 25 September 2015
    • Killing people versus cheating EPA regulations  From Zerohedge, 22 September 2015
    • Oxfam’s real agenda – destroy Australian coal industry  By Henry Thomas, Quadrant Online, 14 September 2015
    • The Green Scare Problem  By Matt Ridley, The Wall Street Journal, 14 August 2015
    • Nobel Prize-Winner dissents on global warming claims 1 July 2015
    • Greens destroy world’s wildlife  By Christopher Booker, The Telegraph, 7 July 2015
    • Greens infiltrate the classroom  By Gary Johns, 1 July 2015
    • Climate science, the settled careerist variety  By Walter Starck
    • Why the Left needs climate change  By Steven Hayward, Forbes, 13 June 2015
    • IPCC is to science is what FIFA is to soccer  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 9 June 2015
    • Terrible news for climate catastrophists  By James Delingpole, 6 June 2015
    • 25 years of dud tipping point predictions  Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 19 May
    • The Greek Orthodox Creed of Warmism  By Michael Kile, Quadrant Online, 5 May
    • Are you now, or have you ever been, a climate contrarian  By Brendan O’Neill, Editor of spiked, 2 May 2015
    • Putting the acid on the Great Barrier Reef doomsayers  By Patrick Moore, The Australian, 13 April 2015
    • Flashback 1971, burning coal will cause ice age  By Michael Bastasch, 7 April 2015
    • UN, depopulate the planet to combat climate change  By Steve Watson, 7 April 2015
    • Time to Put Warmists Under Oath  By Walter Starck, Quadrant Online, 3 April 2015
    • ‘Greens’ plans to return to the Stone Age  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 31 March 2015
    • Global warming consensus claim fraudulent  By Richard Tol, The Australian, 25 March
    • When environmentalism becomes a crime against humanity  By Ivo Vetger, 18 March
    • To be ‘green’ or progressive, you can’t be both  By Tim Black, Spiked, 14 Mar 2015
    • EPA Chief cannot answer climate questions  Editorial, Investors Business Daily, 7 Mar
    • GM, the scientific argument is over  By Matt Ridley, The Times, 5 Mar 2015
    • Montana bill kills UN’s Agenda 21 by KLXF.com, 25 Feb 2015
    • The ‘Green Blob’ is threatening lives in Africa  By Matthew Holehouse, 24 Feb 2015
    • ‘Science’ destroys its own credibility  By Garth Paltridge 17 Feb 2015
    • The biggest science scandal ever  By Christopher Booker, The Telegraph, 7 Feb 2015
    • How to make a pyre of the bush  by Roger Underwood, Quadrant Online, 8 Feb 2015
    • Beware, ‘green’ danger ahead   by Andrew Montford, The Spectator, 6 Feb 2015
  • The left’s gravy train derailing  by Maurice Newman, The Australian