GWPF Newsletter - Matt Ridley: The Rise Of Fake Science

Climate Law Threatens To Blow Apart Germany’s Coalition Government

In this newsletter:

1) Matt Ridley: The Rise Of Fake Science
The Spectator, 28 February 2019
 
2) Climate Law Threatens To Blow Apart Germany’s Coalition Government
Politico, 28 February 2019 

 
3) Germany’s Renewable Energy Sector Faces Uncertainty As Subsidies Expire
Clean Energy Wire, 28 February 2019 
 
4) Climate Alarmists Should Cool Off About The Warm Weather
Spiked, 27 February 2019 
 
5) Insectageddon: Don’t Believe The Hype
Reaction, 26 February 2019 
 
6) Polar Bear Numbers Reach New Highs
Gaia Fawkes, 27 February 2019 

Full details:

1) Matt Ridley: The Rise Of Fake Science
The Spectator, 28 February 2019

Pseudoscience is on the rise – and the media is completely hooked

‘The whole aim of practical politics,’ wrote H.L. Mencken, ‘is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’ Newspapers, politicians and pressure groups have been moving smoothly for decades from one forecast apocalypse to another (nuclear power, acid rain, the ozone layer, mad cow disease, nanotechnology, genetically modified crops, the millennium bug…) without waiting to be proved right or wrong.

Increasingly, in a crowded market for alarm, it becomes necessary to make the scares up. More and more headlines about medical or environmental panics are based on published scientific papers, but ones that are little more than lies laundered into respectability with a little statistical legerdemain. Sometimes, even the exposure of the laundered lies fails to stop the scare. Dr Andrew Wakefield was struck off in 2010 after the General Medical Council found his 1998 study in the Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism to be fraudulent. Yet Wakefield is now a celebrity anti-vaccine activist in the United States and has left his long-suffering wife for the supermodel Elle Macpherson. Anti-vax campaigning is a lucrative business.

Meanwhile, the notion that chemicals such as bisphenol A, found in plastics, are acting as ‘endocrine disruptors’, interfering with human hormones even at very low doses, started with an outright fraudulent study that has since been retracted. Many low-quality studies on BPA have pushed this theory, but they have been torpedoed by high-quality analyses including a recent US government study called Clarity. Yet this is of course being largely ignored by the media and the activists.

So the habit of laundering lies is catching on. Three times in the past month, pseudo-science flew around the world before the scientific truth had got its boots on (as Mark Twain did not say, but Jonathan Swift almost did): in stories about insect extinction, weedkiller causing cancer, and increased flooding. The shamelessness of the apocaholics is increasingly blatant. They know that even if a story of impending doom is thoroughly debunked, the correction comes too late. The gullible media will have relayed the headline without checking, so the activists have made their fake-news hit, perhaps even raised funds on the back of it, and won.

Take the story on 10 February that ‘insects could vanish within a century’, as the Guardian’s Damian Carrington put it, echoed by the BBC. The claim is, as even several science journalists and conservationists have now reported, bunk.

The authors of the study, Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris Wyckhuys, claimed to have reviewed 73 different studies to reach their conclusion that precisely 41 per cent of insect species are declining and ‘unless we change our way of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades’. In fact the pair had started by putting the words ‘insect’ and ‘decline’ into a database, thereby ignoring any papers finding increases in insects, or no change in numbers.

They did not check that their findings were representative enough to draw numerical conclusions from. They even misinterpreted source papers to blame declines on pesticides, when the original paper was non-committal or found contradictory results. ‘Several multivariate and correlative statistical analyses confirm that the impact of pesticides on biodiversity is larger than that of other intensive agriculture practices,’ they wrote, specifically citing a paper that actually found the opposite: that insect abundance was lower on farms where pesticide use was less.

They also relied heavily on two now famous recent papers claiming to have found fewer insects today than in the past, one in Germany and one in Puerto Rico. The first did not even compare the same locations in different years, so its conclusions are hardly reliable. The second compared samples taken in the same place in 1976 and 2012, finding fewer insects on the second occasion and blaming this on rapid warming in the region, rather than any other possible explanation, such as timing of rainfall in the two seasons. Yet it turned out that there had been no warming: the jump in temperature recorded by the local weather station was entirely caused by the thermometer having been moved to a different location in 1992. Whoops.

Of course, human activities do affect insects, but ecologists I have consulted say local populations of some species are often undergoing huge changes, and that some species regularly die out in one location and are then regenerated by migrants. This is not to be confused with species extinction. The real evidence suggests that insect species are dying out at a similar rate to mammals and birds — which means about 1 to 5 per cent per century. A problem, but not Armageddon.

Curiously, 41 per cent cropped up in another misleading story the same day, 10 February. This is the claim that exposure to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup weedkiller, increases the incidence of a particular, very rare cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). ‘Exposure to weed-killing products increases risk of cancer by 41 per cent,’ said the Guardian’s headline.

Once again, this paper is not a new study, but a desktop survey of other studies and its claim collapses under proper scrutiny. According to the epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat, the paper combined one high-quality study with five poor-quality studies and chose the highest of five risk estimates reported in one of the latter to ensure it would reach statistical significance. The authors highlighted the dubious 41 per cent result, ‘which they almost certainly realised would grab headlines and inspire fear’.

Full post (subscription required)
 
See also "Hyper-Alarming" Study Was Hype -- London, 11 February:The scientific paper behind newspaper claims that insect populations were threatened with extinction was based on data known to be unreliable. That’s according to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which today called for the paper to be withdrawn.
 
2) Climate Law Threatens To Blow Apart Germany’s Coalition Government
Politico, 28 February 2019 
Kalina Oroschakoff

Germany's new draft climate law is turning into a political weapon that could tear apart the country's coalition government.

That's because the draft — presented last week by Environment Minister Svenja Schulze, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) — is about more than climate and energy policies. It's also a way for the battered SPD to try to gain political traction ahead of May's European election and a series of state polls in eastern Germany later this year.

Under Schulze's proposal, Germany would cut emissions by at least 95 percent by 2050 and introduce emission budgets for the country's major economic sectors such as transport, agriculture, buildings and energy.

During coalition talks last year between the SPD, and the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU), all the parties agreed to pass a new climate law this year in order to hit the country's emissions goals. The country's climate plan, issued in 2016, calls for a 2050 emissions reduction target ranging from 80 percent to 95 percent.

Schulze went for the very top of the range, and added in a provision that put political and financial responsibility on specific ministries to ensure the sectors they oversee meet their climate goals.

Conveniently for the SPD, most of the ministries facing that crunch are under the control of the CDU/CSU.

That means if a particular ministry, say transport, fails to hit its emission reduction targets by not clamping down hard enough on Germany's powerful car industry, then the ministry pays fines from its budget.

"The proposal is hitting the ministries run by the conservatives," said Kai Bergmann of Germanwatch, an NGO.

The result is outrage on the right.

Anja Weisgerber, the CDU/CSU group spokesperson on climate, said Friday the proposals are an “empty shell” that “lacked concrete measures” and policymakers “mustn’t get tied up in battles over sector-specific goals, budgets, and penalties.”

Full story
 
3) Germany’s Renewable Energy Sector Faces Uncertainty As Subsidies Expire
Clean Energy Wire, 28 February 2019 

Much of Germany’s renewable power capacity is facing uncertainty regarding its business models as generous feed-in tariffs for many wind, solar and biogas plants end in the 2020s. With the country needing more, not less, renewable power to meet its climate targets, new legislation, direct marketing schemes and blockchain solutions are being floated, experts told an industry meeting in Berlin.

Between 2021 and 2025, 16,000 megawatts (MW) of onshore wind power capacity will stop receiving guaranteed payments, as will over a million small-scale solar PV producers during the 2020s, according to experts at an event organised by the Clearingstelle EEG|KWK in Berlin.

Renewable power producers will retain many of their legal rights – such as the feed-in priority of green power compared to conventional electricity – Jan Sötebier, lawyer at the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) said.

The 2000 Renewable Energy Act guaranteed generous feed-in tariffs for renewable power for 20 years, fuelling a rapid increase in new wind, solar and other renewable capacity. For many installations, that two-decade guarantee is set to expire just as Germany wants to boost the share of renewables in power consumption to 65 percent.

Philine Derouiche from Germany’s wind power association BWE said a range of options were being considered to keep wind parks profitable, such as using the power they produce on site, or building power lines to connect them directly to industrial consumers. But most promising, Derouiche said, were proposals to adapt existing direct marketing schemes, either on the electricity exchange or by selling the electricity to targeted consumer groups.

Small-scale solar power producers, such as the many homeowners who feed power on to the grid from rooftop PV panels, might struggle to organise such direct marketing schemes, since, individually, they don’t produce enough power to interest direct marketing companies, Sötebier said.

Full post
 
4) Climate Alarmists Should Cool Off About The Warm Weather
Spiked, 27 February 2019
George Harrison

It goes without saying that the normal reaction to unseasonably warm weather is to leg it to the nearest beer garden and have a pint. But while us reasonable folk in Britain have been busy enjoying the warm spell, the climate alarmists have all gone into meltdown.

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has already used the weather as an excuse to wheel out the old clichés about global warming being the greatest threat to our species. ‘We shouldn’t be enjoying a heatwave in February’, reads the breathless headline on her article for the Independent. ‘This is what climate breakdown feels like’, she says. In the Guardian, journalist Jonn Elledge asks: ‘Am I the only one who’s terrified about the warm weather?’

It is true that it was a first when temperatures topped 20 degrees centigrade this week. We’ve now had the warmest February day on record. But that is only alarming until you consider that the previous hottest February day came in 1998 – over 21 years ago.

The inconvenient truth for the green lobby is that the current unseasonal spell of warm weather is just that: weather. The Met Office has already said the cause of the current hot spell is a high-pressure front dragging warm air over from Africa, not global warming. And yet the same alarmists who claim that unseasonal cold spells can’t be taken as proof that global warming isn’t real are now asserting that the current warm spell proves beyond all doubt that we’re heading for the end of the world.

The Earth’s temperature does seem to be increasing, and there’s no use denying that. However, the current rise is likely to just be part of the uncontrollable natural cycle of heating and cooling which the planet has always endured. It is also true that a small amount of this temperature increase is likely to be caused by human activities, although the extent to which global warming is man-made remains disputed.

What’s missing in our discussion of climate change and environmental issues is an acknowledgement of the trade-off between human progress and environmental damage. Millions of people in the global South have been lifted out of poverty in the past few decades largely because of cheap and readily available fossil fuels – the same fossil fuels the green lobby would gladly see banned. With 10 per cent of human beings still living in extreme poverty, more fossil fuels will need to burn before everyone can enjoy the living standards and modern comforts we in the West have grown so accustomed to. […]

This week’s lovely weather is not worth worrying about. The bottom line is that one February hot spell does not mean the world is dying, and climate alarmists would be better off if they dropped the doom-mongering and just enjoyed the sun like the rest of us. This is Britain, after all, and the rain is guaranteed to be back in no time.

Full post
 
5) Insectageddon: Don’t Believe The Hype
Reaction, 26 February 2019 
Andrew Montford

There has been a spate of headlines in the media in recent weeks about insect apocalypses. The idea that insect populations are under threat has become something of a new disaster meme in recent years, with newspapers repeatedly publishing lurid headlines such as “insectageddon” and the like.

The most recent surge of interest was centred around a scientific paper that said, on the basis of a review of the entomological literature, that 40% of insect species could go extinct within just a few years. Newspapers screamed about an impending “collapse of nature” (The Guardian) and a “catastrophic collapse of ecosystems” (the Irish Times), while the BBC gave it both barrels, featuring the story in the flagship Today programme as well as in its Inside Science show, the latter talking of “one of the greatest threats that humankind faces”, with consequences that would be “apocalyptic”.

Within hours of the headlines appearing, however, there seemed to be a measure of backtracking. The BBC’s environment correspondent implicitly criticised the coverage, saying that there was “loose talk” going on.

And over the next few days, it got worse. An ecologist from Australia pointed out that the way in which the original authors had selected papers for review was so limited as to make their conclusions completely untenable: they had searched the literature for papers that included the words “insect” “survey” and “decline”, a presumably reliable way of avoiding most papers that found increases in population. Then, most of the results they had looked at were from European studies, but this had not prevented them from extrapolating their results to the rest of the world.

I pointed these problems out to the team at Inside Science, suggesting that they made the paper suspect, and was gratified to get a response from Professor Adam Hart, an entomologist who had taken part in the show. Professor Hart took exception to my characterisation of the paper, although he said that it had “important limitations”, which he had discussed on air. Unfortunately, when I listened to the show again, it turned out that he hadn’t discussed the paper’s key failing – the search term – at all. Nor had he criticised the obvious hyperbole. He seemed keen to impress listeners with how reliable the paper was. The results were “quite stark and quite convincing”, he said. The only caveats were that some species were increasing and that the papers had a geographical bias towards Europe.

Unfortunately, when I asked why the biased search string didn’t make the paper “dodgy as hell”, I didn’t get a response, although Professor Hart did tweet that his timeline was

…now full of people retweeting blog posts that dissect the insect decline paper & discuss its limitations. The take home message for some of them is that the paper is “dodgy as hell” & that insects are fine. Which they aren’t.

If the exchange with Professor Hart was unsatisfactory, it is important also to point out those who got it right. So an honourable mention should go to science journalist Ed Yong, who as far as I can tell is the only journalist to explain the problems with the search string. He concludes, correctly in my view, that the hyperbole about the paper cannot be justified by the data. “Absurd” was how he described its predictions of mass extinction; not even plausible.

Full post 
 
6) Polar Bear Numbers Reach New Highs
Gaia Fawkes, 27 February 2019 

A new paper written by zoologist Dr Susan Crockford to mark International Polar Bear Day today has found that global polar bear numbers have continued to rise. Numbers have been steadily increasing since 2005, with 2018 data estimating the highest number of polar bears globally since they were protected by international treaty in 1973.

Numbers are so high that Inuit leaders have been pleading with he Canadian government for more polar bear population control as violent attacks against native populations have dramatically risen in recent years. Far from the 2007 predictions of a 67% decline in global polar bear numbers, the new report reveals that numbers have risen to the highest levels in decades. Happy International Polar Bear Day! 

The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.