European Commission Rejects ‘Climate-Related Conditions’ For Covid-19 Recovery Aid
In this newsletter:
1) Benny Peiser: It Is Time To Adopt A ‘Red Team’ Approach In Science
Global Warming Policy Forum , 13 May 2020
2) Daniël Lakens: Pandemic Researchers — Recruit Your Own Best Critics
Nature, 11 May 2020
3) European Commission Rejects ‘Climate-Related Conditions’ For Covid-19 Recovery Aid
Reuters, 12 May 2020
4) Most Americans Don’t Believe Climate Change Will Damage U.S. Economy
Global Warming Policy Forum, 12 May 2020
5) Clean Energy And Climate Change Unlikely To Lead American Recovery Funding
Axios, 11 May 2020
Global Warming Policy Forum , 13 May 2020
2) Daniël Lakens: Pandemic Researchers — Recruit Your Own Best Critics
Nature, 11 May 2020
3) European Commission Rejects ‘Climate-Related Conditions’ For Covid-19 Recovery Aid
Reuters, 12 May 2020
4) Most Americans Don’t Believe Climate Change Will Damage U.S. Economy
Global Warming Policy Forum, 12 May 2020
5) Clean Energy And Climate Change Unlikely To Lead American Recovery Funding
Axios, 11 May 2020
6) Ben Pile: Covid-19 Is A Frightening Dress Rehearsal Of The Climate Agenda
Spiked, 12 May 2020
7) Computer Modelled Scaremongering Ain’t Going To Cut It Any More
Craig Kelly MP, Spectator Australia, 12 May 2020
Spiked, 12 May 2020
7) Computer Modelled Scaremongering Ain’t Going To Cut It Any More
Craig Kelly MP, Spectator Australia, 12 May 2020
8) GWPF Webinar: The Net Zero Threat to Economic Recovery
Global Warming Policy Forum
Global Warming Policy Forum
Full details:
1) Benny Peiser: It Is Time To Adopt A ‘Red Team’ Approach In Science
Global Warming Policy Forum , 13 May 2020
The coronavirus crisis is causing the biggest economic and scientific crisis since the end of the Second World War. After the pandemic we need a radical reformation of the way science is organised and funded.
Global Warming Policy Forum , 13 May 2020
The coronavirus crisis is causing the biggest economic and scientific crisis since the end of the Second World War. After the pandemic we need a radical reformation of the way science is organised and funded.
While tens of thousands are dying from the Covid-19 virus and hundreds of millions of people around the world are facing the loss of their jobs and livelihoods, the scientific community is deeply divided over the nature, spread and health risks of the Covid-19 virus.
The evident divisions and contradictory results published in thousands of new studies in recent weeks (and the conflicting scientific advice provided to governments) is causing growing confusion, anger and disarray both within the scientific community and the general public.
Scientific models and predictions based on widely differing assumptions are exposed as fatally flawed as never before. As a result, institutional science is hemorrhaging trust around the world while the way research is conducted and published is facing an existential crisis. In many ways, the coronavirus crisis has triggered the biggest crisis of science in modern history.
In light of this evident disarray, calls for a radical reform of quality control of scientific methods and claims and the introduction of institutional Red Teaming are gaining ground. In a compelling article in the journal Nature, Professor Daniël Lakens sets out the arguments for a radically new way to conduct quality-control of scientific research and its methods.
The evident divisions and contradictory results published in thousands of new studies in recent weeks (and the conflicting scientific advice provided to governments) is causing growing confusion, anger and disarray both within the scientific community and the general public.
Scientific models and predictions based on widely differing assumptions are exposed as fatally flawed as never before. As a result, institutional science is hemorrhaging trust around the world while the way research is conducted and published is facing an existential crisis. In many ways, the coronavirus crisis has triggered the biggest crisis of science in modern history.
In light of this evident disarray, calls for a radical reform of quality control of scientific methods and claims and the introduction of institutional Red Teaming are gaining ground. In a compelling article in the journal Nature, Professor Daniël Lakens sets out the arguments for a radically new way to conduct quality-control of scientific research and its methods.
The introduction of institutional red teams into the way science is organised and funded in open societies should be the top priority of a scientific reformation after the end of the Covid-19 crisis (see Red Teams Can Save Climate Science From Itself). This kind of scientific paradigm shift will be absolutely essential if we want to learn the biggest lesson of the coronavirus disaster. It would also help to ensure that free nations can avoid repeating similar catastrophic mistakes and disastrous policy decisions based on fallacious modelling and flawed predictions.
Benny Peiser, 13 May 2020
2) Daniël Lakens: Pandemic Researchers — Recruit Your Own Best Critics
Nature, 11 May 2020
Benny Peiser, 13 May 2020
2) Daniël Lakens: Pandemic Researchers — Recruit Your Own Best Critics
Nature, 11 May 2020
As researchers rush to find the best ways to quell the COVID-19 crisis, they want to get results out ultra-fast. Preprints — public but unvetted studies — are getting lots of attention. But even their advocates are seeing a problem. To keep up the speed of research and reduce sloppiness, scientists must find ways to build criticism into the process.
Finding ways to prove ourselves wrong is a scientific ideal, but it is rarely scientific practice. Openness to critiques is nowhere near as widespread as researchers like to think. Scientists rarely implement procedures to receive and incorporate pushback. Most formal mechanisms are tied to the peer-review and publishing system. With preprints, the boldest peers will still criticize the work, but only after mistakes are made and, often, widely disseminated.
An initial version of a recent preprint by researchers at Stanford University in California estimated that COVID-19’s fatality rate was 0.12–0.2% (E. Bendavid et al. Preprint at medrXiv http://doi.org/dskd; 2020).
This low estimate was removed from a subsequent version, but it had already received widespread attention and news coverage. Many immediately pointed out flaws in how the sample was obtained and the statistics were calculated. Everyone would have benefited if the team had received this criticism before the data were collected and the results were shared.
It is time to adopt a ‘red team’ approach in science that integrates criticism into each step of the research process. A red team is a designated ‘devil’s advocate’ charged to find holes and errors in ongoing work and to challenge dominant assumptions, with the goal of improving project quality. The team has a role similar to that of ‘white-hat hackers’ hired in the software industry to identify security flaws before they can be discovered and exploited by malefactors. Similarly, teams of scientists should engage with red teams at each phase of a research project and incorporate their criticism. The logic is similar to the Registered Report publication system — in which protocols are reviewed before the results are known — except that criticism is not organized by journals. Ideally, there is a larger amount of speedier communication between researchers and their red team than peer review allows, resulting in higher-quality preprints and submissions for publication.
Even scientists who invite criticism from a red team acknowledge that it is difficult not to become defensive. The best time for scrutiny is before you have fallen in love with your results. And the more important the claims, the more scrutiny they deserve. The scientific process needs to incorporate methods to include ‘severe’ tests that will prove us wrong when we really are wrong.
An example of a large-scale collaboration that applies a red-team approach is the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA), a global network of more than 500 psychology laboratories. The PSA has solicited research projects on questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and has offered to assist with data collection. Projects range from effective risk communication to cognitive-reappraisal interventions. After researchers develop protocols, the PSA assembles a red team of experts in research ethics, measurement, data analysis and the project’s field to offer criticism and to allow researchers to revise their protocols.
I reviewed one of these protocols after it had been submitted to a journal. I later saw the PSA reviews and learnt that I had repeated many criticisms, such as the generalizability of the stimulus and flexibility of the data analysis, that the red team had made — and that the researchers had opted to ignore.
This shows that assembling a red team isn’t enough: research teams need to commit to addressing criticism from the outset. Sometimes, this is straightforward — items on checklists are absent from a proposal, or an independent statistical analysis yields different results, for example. Usually, it will be less clear whether criticism merits changing a protocol or including a caveat. The key is that, when results are presented, the team transparently communicates the criticism that the red team raised. (Perhaps incorporated criticism could be listed in the methods section of a paper, and unincorporated criticism in the limitations.) This will show how severely a claim has been tested.
Pushback on each step of a research project should be recognized as valuable quality control and adherence to scientific values. Ideally, a research team could recruit their own red team from group members not immediately involved in the project.
Incentives for red teams in science deserve special consideration. A red team might identify major flaws that mean a study should not proceed, so including a team member as a co-author on a future publication by the group would be a conflict of interest. In the computer-security industry, a red team is often paid if it uncovers serious errors. Computer scientist Donald Knuth famously gave out ‘bug bounties’ to people who uncovered technical errors in his published work. (Recipients often kept the small cheques as souvenirs, suggesting that social credit works as an incentive.) To investigate incentivized criticism, my group is now recruiting red-team members and offering financial rewards (https://go.nature.com/3frPBJq).
With research moving faster than ever, scientists should invest in reducing their own bias and allowing others to transparently evaluate how much pushback their ideas have been subjected to. A scientific claim is as reliable as only the most severe criticism it has been able to withstand.
3) European Commission Rejects ‘Climate-Related Conditions’ For Covid-19 Recovery Aid
Reuters, 12 May 2020
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union’s top climate official encouraged governments on Monday to attach green conditions to public support for coronavirus-hit companies, after the bloc’s executive opted not to do so at the EU level.
The European Commission, which approves state support schemes, updated its temporary rules on Friday for firms receiving government aid during the pandemic.
The new rules ban dividends, share buybacks and bonuses for bailed-out companies, for so long as the state holds a stake in them.
They do not attach climate-related conditions to EU approvals of state aid – despite calls from lawmakers and green groups to do so – and instead leave it to national governments to choose to add “green strings” to bailouts. […]
The EU executive has said its “Green Deal” plan to cut net EU greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 will guide the bloc’s economic recovery.
But it has proved unwilling to use state aid rules – which are designed to avoid distortions of competition – to link countries’ support schemes to climate goals. EU competition regulators said the current objective was to help virus-hit companies cope with liquidity and solvency issues.
Under its revised temporary state aid framework, unveiled on Friday, large firms must report on how they use public funds in line with the EU’s green goals. The framework does not require firms to use state funds to become greener, or oblige governments to attach climate conditions to support.
Member states are “free to design national measures in line with additional policy objectives” such as climate aims, it said.
Full story
4) Most Americans Don’t Believe Climate Change Will Damage U.S. Economy
Global Warming Policy Forum, 12 May 2020
Despite decades of climate alarm and relentless scare-mongering by campaigners and the news media, two-thirds of U.S. Americans don’t think that climate change will have a negative impact on the U.S. economy.
Finding ways to prove ourselves wrong is a scientific ideal, but it is rarely scientific practice. Openness to critiques is nowhere near as widespread as researchers like to think. Scientists rarely implement procedures to receive and incorporate pushback. Most formal mechanisms are tied to the peer-review and publishing system. With preprints, the boldest peers will still criticize the work, but only after mistakes are made and, often, widely disseminated.
An initial version of a recent preprint by researchers at Stanford University in California estimated that COVID-19’s fatality rate was 0.12–0.2% (E. Bendavid et al. Preprint at medrXiv http://doi.org/dskd; 2020).
This low estimate was removed from a subsequent version, but it had already received widespread attention and news coverage. Many immediately pointed out flaws in how the sample was obtained and the statistics were calculated. Everyone would have benefited if the team had received this criticism before the data were collected and the results were shared.
It is time to adopt a ‘red team’ approach in science that integrates criticism into each step of the research process. A red team is a designated ‘devil’s advocate’ charged to find holes and errors in ongoing work and to challenge dominant assumptions, with the goal of improving project quality. The team has a role similar to that of ‘white-hat hackers’ hired in the software industry to identify security flaws before they can be discovered and exploited by malefactors. Similarly, teams of scientists should engage with red teams at each phase of a research project and incorporate their criticism. The logic is similar to the Registered Report publication system — in which protocols are reviewed before the results are known — except that criticism is not organized by journals. Ideally, there is a larger amount of speedier communication between researchers and their red team than peer review allows, resulting in higher-quality preprints and submissions for publication.
Even scientists who invite criticism from a red team acknowledge that it is difficult not to become defensive. The best time for scrutiny is before you have fallen in love with your results. And the more important the claims, the more scrutiny they deserve. The scientific process needs to incorporate methods to include ‘severe’ tests that will prove us wrong when we really are wrong.
An example of a large-scale collaboration that applies a red-team approach is the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA), a global network of more than 500 psychology laboratories. The PSA has solicited research projects on questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and has offered to assist with data collection. Projects range from effective risk communication to cognitive-reappraisal interventions. After researchers develop protocols, the PSA assembles a red team of experts in research ethics, measurement, data analysis and the project’s field to offer criticism and to allow researchers to revise their protocols.
I reviewed one of these protocols after it had been submitted to a journal. I later saw the PSA reviews and learnt that I had repeated many criticisms, such as the generalizability of the stimulus and flexibility of the data analysis, that the red team had made — and that the researchers had opted to ignore.
This shows that assembling a red team isn’t enough: research teams need to commit to addressing criticism from the outset. Sometimes, this is straightforward — items on checklists are absent from a proposal, or an independent statistical analysis yields different results, for example. Usually, it will be less clear whether criticism merits changing a protocol or including a caveat. The key is that, when results are presented, the team transparently communicates the criticism that the red team raised. (Perhaps incorporated criticism could be listed in the methods section of a paper, and unincorporated criticism in the limitations.) This will show how severely a claim has been tested.
Pushback on each step of a research project should be recognized as valuable quality control and adherence to scientific values. Ideally, a research team could recruit their own red team from group members not immediately involved in the project.
Incentives for red teams in science deserve special consideration. A red team might identify major flaws that mean a study should not proceed, so including a team member as a co-author on a future publication by the group would be a conflict of interest. In the computer-security industry, a red team is often paid if it uncovers serious errors. Computer scientist Donald Knuth famously gave out ‘bug bounties’ to people who uncovered technical errors in his published work. (Recipients often kept the small cheques as souvenirs, suggesting that social credit works as an incentive.) To investigate incentivized criticism, my group is now recruiting red-team members and offering financial rewards (https://go.nature.com/3frPBJq).
With research moving faster than ever, scientists should invest in reducing their own bias and allowing others to transparently evaluate how much pushback their ideas have been subjected to. A scientific claim is as reliable as only the most severe criticism it has been able to withstand.
3) European Commission Rejects ‘Climate-Related Conditions’ For Covid-19 Recovery Aid
Reuters, 12 May 2020
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union’s top climate official encouraged governments on Monday to attach green conditions to public support for coronavirus-hit companies, after the bloc’s executive opted not to do so at the EU level.
The European Commission, which approves state support schemes, updated its temporary rules on Friday for firms receiving government aid during the pandemic.
The new rules ban dividends, share buybacks and bonuses for bailed-out companies, for so long as the state holds a stake in them.
They do not attach climate-related conditions to EU approvals of state aid – despite calls from lawmakers and green groups to do so – and instead leave it to national governments to choose to add “green strings” to bailouts. […]
The EU executive has said its “Green Deal” plan to cut net EU greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 will guide the bloc’s economic recovery.
But it has proved unwilling to use state aid rules – which are designed to avoid distortions of competition – to link countries’ support schemes to climate goals. EU competition regulators said the current objective was to help virus-hit companies cope with liquidity and solvency issues.
Under its revised temporary state aid framework, unveiled on Friday, large firms must report on how they use public funds in line with the EU’s green goals. The framework does not require firms to use state funds to become greener, or oblige governments to attach climate conditions to support.
Member states are “free to design national measures in line with additional policy objectives” such as climate aims, it said.
Full story
4) Most Americans Don’t Believe Climate Change Will Damage U.S. Economy
Global Warming Policy Forum, 12 May 2020
Despite decades of climate alarm and relentless scare-mongering by campaigners and the news media, two-thirds of U.S. Americans don’t think that climate change will have a negative impact on the U.S. economy.
Harris Poll reveals few Americans believe the U.S. economy will be impacted by climate change
Most Americans are underestimating both the potential economic impact of climate change and the role that entrepreneurs and investors can play in rectifying it, according to Inerjys Ventures, a global climate solutions investment firm.
A new survey among over 2,000 U.S. adults, conducted online by The Harris Poll on behalf of Inerjys Ventures, found fewer than two in five Americans (38%) believe climate change will damage the U.S. economy if it is not addressed and about one in five Americans (19%) think it will cost more to solve climate change globally than it will to fix the problems that arise from it.
Full story
5) Clean Energy And Climate Change Unlikely To Lead American Recovery Funding
Axios, 11 May 2020
Economists, investors and environmentalists are calling on the United States — and the world — to inject big clean energy and climate policy into recovery plans.
Reality check: Such prospects face uphill battles almost everywhere, and especially in the United States, where proponents are on defense while the Trump administration and lawmakers are in crisis mode.
Full post
Most Americans are underestimating both the potential economic impact of climate change and the role that entrepreneurs and investors can play in rectifying it, according to Inerjys Ventures, a global climate solutions investment firm.
A new survey among over 2,000 U.S. adults, conducted online by The Harris Poll on behalf of Inerjys Ventures, found fewer than two in five Americans (38%) believe climate change will damage the U.S. economy if it is not addressed and about one in five Americans (19%) think it will cost more to solve climate change globally than it will to fix the problems that arise from it.
Full story
5) Clean Energy And Climate Change Unlikely To Lead American Recovery Funding
Axios, 11 May 2020
Economists, investors and environmentalists are calling on the United States — and the world — to inject big clean energy and climate policy into recovery plans.
Reality check: Such prospects face uphill battles almost everywhere, and especially in the United States, where proponents are on defense while the Trump administration and lawmakers are in crisis mode.
Full post
6) Ben Pile: Covid-19 Is A Frightening Dress Rehearsal Of The Climate Agenda
Spiked, 12 May 2020
If there is a term for this political order designed by institutional science, remote technocrats, idiot green journalists and vapid politicians, it is eco-feudalism. The pandemic is being used to advance the ‘transition’ to this new political order.
Months into the pandemic and many unknowns still cloud our understanding of the virus. The basic parameters of its transmission rate are still contested by scientists. Rather than shedding light, experts from prestigious institutions descend into acrimonious, politically charged, point-scoring debates. Even the grim daily ritual of the body count is slated as either an overestimate or a grotesque underestimate. But the biggest unknown yet is the damage the virus and attempts to control it have done to society and the economy, and how we will recover. From this wreckage, the green blob has re-emerged from an all-too-brief period of obscurity with a list of demands that will destroy any hope of recovery.
From the outset, there has been a palpable sense of green jealousy of the virus as it stole attention from the climate fearmongers. For half a century, greens have been prognosticating the imminent collapse of society. Yet with each new generation, deadlines to stop the destruction of the planet pass without event. In reality, the world’s population has become healthier and wealthier, and we live longer lives than ever before. Panic about the virus achieved in days what greens have been demanding for years: grounded planes, empty roads, and a halt in economic growth.
Countless lives and livelihoods throughout the world have been destroyed – either by the virus or by the draconian policies intended to stop it. But anti-population campaigner, David Attenborough, has still managed to complain that human beings have it too good. ‘Human beings have overrun the world’, he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr. Attenbourough said that living ‘in a more modest economic way’ should be an ‘ambition’: ‘The world is not a bowl of fruit… if we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.’
Of course, the natural world has endured despite all the green forecasts of its demise. But experience of coronavirus shows that the kind of fear, panic and mistrust ramped up by doom-laden forecasts have had severe consequences for humanity. Fear of the virus has threatened to dissolve the essential relationships of mutual dependence between human beings, almost in an instant – and on a greater scale than anything Gaia can throw at us in her angry revenge. Greta Thunberg’s maxim – ‘I want you to panic’ – should cause environmentalists to pause and consider what they actually want for society.
But such reflection is unlikely to be forthcoming. After all, lockdown gives greens what they have always wanted: the abolition of flight, and of travel deemed ‘unnecessary’ by technocrats; and the prohibition of goods which have been designated ‘non-essential’. Indeed, this is apparently what a green utopia looks like. Green pundits have marvelled at the clean air – ignoring the boarded-up shops, bars, restaurants and cafes that may never reopen. They have cheered the empty blue skies, while human life is confined to the home and neighbourhood. We may have endless free time, but we have no money and no freedom to go anywhere. Naturally, George Monbiot is delighted.
The virus of green thinking has infected political leaders and their plans for the economic recovery, too. ‘No one hesitates to make very profound, brutal choices when it’s a matter of saving lives’, French president Emmanuel Macron told the FT: ‘It’s the same for climate risk.’
Meanwhile, an unconvincing Dominic Raab, standing in for the prime minister, appeared to contradict him. ‘There is no choice between cutting emissions and growing our economy – that’s a myth the UK has helped to shatter over the past decade’, he said in a Twitter address from 10 Downing Street. Climate policy, promised Raab, was an ‘essential element to our strategy to rebound’ from the pandemic.
But which will it be? Raab’s green growth or Macron’s ‘brutal choices’? It cannot be both. The Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat – France’s undemocratic climate assembly, set up by Macron to develop climate policy – has called for the strict rolling back of industrial society to be part of the post-coronavirus ‘recovery’. Its proposal even includes the abolition of out-of-town supermarkets. But then, what would you expect? No politician, anywhere, has ever been able to explain how green restraints on an economy – and hence material constraints on people, including price rises and travel restrictions – can allow, much less create, growth.
Green platitudes are nothing more than a veneer of bullshit for no-mark politicians to hide behind. ‘We can turn the crisis of this pandemic into an opportunity to rebuild our economies differently and make them more resilient’, said the unelected president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen while promoting her ‘EU Green Deal’. Undemocratic technocrats everywhere – from every national and global political institution, from the UN to the town hall – are agreed on the necessity of rebuilding and redesigning economies along green lines. But they cannot answer how they will rebuild them. Who will pay for it? What do we, the people, get out of it? And when do we get to vote on it?
We do not get any say on it, of course. Political necessity, not democracy, shall dictate the action. The climate agenda rescues Macron from his deep domestic crises. Climate change even makes Raab look like he stands for something. And it gives the hollow European project purpose. The green agenda is being brought forward, and the viral crisis is being rolled into the climate crisis, because the pandemic has revealed the emptiness of the political class. Not only are the elites devoid of any ideas for kickstarting economic growth — they have even run out of ideas for how to sustain economic stagnation. […]
Indeed, the pandemic has played out as a time-lapsed rehearsal of the climate crisis. It has revealed that governments that lack any sense of direction of their own are very easily panicked into making impulsive decisions with catastrophic long-term consequences. And as with climate change, the scientific modelling supplies the main tool of fearmongering – the precautionary principle. The scientists themselves turn out to be as petty, vindictive and self-serving – and as hopelessly divorced from reality – as any politician. Much of their advice has been spurious and unscientific. The supranational WHO, which was supposed to see these emergencies coming and to bring the world’s expertise to bear to solve the crisis, instead dragged its feet.
On this time scale, we can see that far-reaching and regressive political agendas are hidden behind a preoccupation and oversensitivity to risk. And whereas the green agenda has played out in years, we can see in mere weeks that policymakers are indifferent to our lives and livelihoods, and will cynically embrace crises to advance their own interests. There will be no chance of an economic recovery if Britain, the EU and the rest of the world follow their existing climate-change agendas – there will only be a lockdown, or something like it, forever.
Full post
7) Computer Modelled Scaremongering Ain’t Going To Cut It Any More
Craig Kelly MP, Spectator Australia, 12 May 2020
The entire Climate Cult is built upon doomsday computer model projections which the naïve and gullible have been tricked into believing are infallible.
Spiked, 12 May 2020
If there is a term for this political order designed by institutional science, remote technocrats, idiot green journalists and vapid politicians, it is eco-feudalism. The pandemic is being used to advance the ‘transition’ to this new political order.
Months into the pandemic and many unknowns still cloud our understanding of the virus. The basic parameters of its transmission rate are still contested by scientists. Rather than shedding light, experts from prestigious institutions descend into acrimonious, politically charged, point-scoring debates. Even the grim daily ritual of the body count is slated as either an overestimate or a grotesque underestimate. But the biggest unknown yet is the damage the virus and attempts to control it have done to society and the economy, and how we will recover. From this wreckage, the green blob has re-emerged from an all-too-brief period of obscurity with a list of demands that will destroy any hope of recovery.
From the outset, there has been a palpable sense of green jealousy of the virus as it stole attention from the climate fearmongers. For half a century, greens have been prognosticating the imminent collapse of society. Yet with each new generation, deadlines to stop the destruction of the planet pass without event. In reality, the world’s population has become healthier and wealthier, and we live longer lives than ever before. Panic about the virus achieved in days what greens have been demanding for years: grounded planes, empty roads, and a halt in economic growth.
Countless lives and livelihoods throughout the world have been destroyed – either by the virus or by the draconian policies intended to stop it. But anti-population campaigner, David Attenborough, has still managed to complain that human beings have it too good. ‘Human beings have overrun the world’, he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr. Attenbourough said that living ‘in a more modest economic way’ should be an ‘ambition’: ‘The world is not a bowl of fruit… if we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.’
Of course, the natural world has endured despite all the green forecasts of its demise. But experience of coronavirus shows that the kind of fear, panic and mistrust ramped up by doom-laden forecasts have had severe consequences for humanity. Fear of the virus has threatened to dissolve the essential relationships of mutual dependence between human beings, almost in an instant – and on a greater scale than anything Gaia can throw at us in her angry revenge. Greta Thunberg’s maxim – ‘I want you to panic’ – should cause environmentalists to pause and consider what they actually want for society.
But such reflection is unlikely to be forthcoming. After all, lockdown gives greens what they have always wanted: the abolition of flight, and of travel deemed ‘unnecessary’ by technocrats; and the prohibition of goods which have been designated ‘non-essential’. Indeed, this is apparently what a green utopia looks like. Green pundits have marvelled at the clean air – ignoring the boarded-up shops, bars, restaurants and cafes that may never reopen. They have cheered the empty blue skies, while human life is confined to the home and neighbourhood. We may have endless free time, but we have no money and no freedom to go anywhere. Naturally, George Monbiot is delighted.
The virus of green thinking has infected political leaders and their plans for the economic recovery, too. ‘No one hesitates to make very profound, brutal choices when it’s a matter of saving lives’, French president Emmanuel Macron told the FT: ‘It’s the same for climate risk.’
Meanwhile, an unconvincing Dominic Raab, standing in for the prime minister, appeared to contradict him. ‘There is no choice between cutting emissions and growing our economy – that’s a myth the UK has helped to shatter over the past decade’, he said in a Twitter address from 10 Downing Street. Climate policy, promised Raab, was an ‘essential element to our strategy to rebound’ from the pandemic.
But which will it be? Raab’s green growth or Macron’s ‘brutal choices’? It cannot be both. The Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat – France’s undemocratic climate assembly, set up by Macron to develop climate policy – has called for the strict rolling back of industrial society to be part of the post-coronavirus ‘recovery’. Its proposal even includes the abolition of out-of-town supermarkets. But then, what would you expect? No politician, anywhere, has ever been able to explain how green restraints on an economy – and hence material constraints on people, including price rises and travel restrictions – can allow, much less create, growth.
Green platitudes are nothing more than a veneer of bullshit for no-mark politicians to hide behind. ‘We can turn the crisis of this pandemic into an opportunity to rebuild our economies differently and make them more resilient’, said the unelected president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen while promoting her ‘EU Green Deal’. Undemocratic technocrats everywhere – from every national and global political institution, from the UN to the town hall – are agreed on the necessity of rebuilding and redesigning economies along green lines. But they cannot answer how they will rebuild them. Who will pay for it? What do we, the people, get out of it? And when do we get to vote on it?
We do not get any say on it, of course. Political necessity, not democracy, shall dictate the action. The climate agenda rescues Macron from his deep domestic crises. Climate change even makes Raab look like he stands for something. And it gives the hollow European project purpose. The green agenda is being brought forward, and the viral crisis is being rolled into the climate crisis, because the pandemic has revealed the emptiness of the political class. Not only are the elites devoid of any ideas for kickstarting economic growth — they have even run out of ideas for how to sustain economic stagnation. […]
Indeed, the pandemic has played out as a time-lapsed rehearsal of the climate crisis. It has revealed that governments that lack any sense of direction of their own are very easily panicked into making impulsive decisions with catastrophic long-term consequences. And as with climate change, the scientific modelling supplies the main tool of fearmongering – the precautionary principle. The scientists themselves turn out to be as petty, vindictive and self-serving – and as hopelessly divorced from reality – as any politician. Much of their advice has been spurious and unscientific. The supranational WHO, which was supposed to see these emergencies coming and to bring the world’s expertise to bear to solve the crisis, instead dragged its feet.
On this time scale, we can see that far-reaching and regressive political agendas are hidden behind a preoccupation and oversensitivity to risk. And whereas the green agenda has played out in years, we can see in mere weeks that policymakers are indifferent to our lives and livelihoods, and will cynically embrace crises to advance their own interests. There will be no chance of an economic recovery if Britain, the EU and the rest of the world follow their existing climate-change agendas – there will only be a lockdown, or something like it, forever.
Full post
7) Computer Modelled Scaremongering Ain’t Going To Cut It Any More
Craig Kelly MP, Spectator Australia, 12 May 2020
The entire Climate Cult is built upon doomsday computer model projections which the naïve and gullible have been tricked into believing are infallible.
To cult members, these computer models forecasts are not only irrefutable, but tenets of their faith carved in stone.
However, the hopelessly inaccurate computer modelling of the Wuhan Flu, where the world’s supposedly leading computer modeller Neil Ferguson has been exposed as a crackpot, an international laughing stock and forced to resign, has provided the public with a valuable lesson of the golden rule of modelling; garbage in, garbage out – and that computer modelling is often more about the politics than it is about the science, no more accurate than a clairvoyant reading the entrails of a freshly sacrificed chicken.
The alarmist climate change computer models, such as those Tim Flannery used to prophecies that Warragamba Dam would never again fill, or the models that foretold of 50 million climate refugees by 2010, or the models that predicted the entire Maldives would be underwater by now, generally forecast events a decade or longer into the future, so their absurdity takes time to become apparent. In comparison, the computers models for the Wuhan Flu are on fast forward.
Take the ABC coronavirus ‘expert’ scaremonger Dr Norman Swan, who on March 21 (when Australia had just over 1,000 coronavirus cases) used computer models to predict that the number of cases in Australia would be “7,000 – 8,000 by next weekend’’. So sure was the ABC’s ‘expert’ of the computer models he added “Primary school maths. No magic fairy will bring that down”, warning that we were just “14-21 days behind Italy” which on that date had recorded 4,825 deaths.
However, by “next weekend”, 28/29 March, Australia only had 3,378 cases on the Saturday and 3,809 cases on the Sunday — not the numbers Swan foretold. So in just over a week, the ABC expert’s computer models were more than 100 per cent out. Faulty predictions of such scale would make even Tim Flannery blush….
Internationally, we have witnessed similar alarmist failures... Ultimately, no one will ever be able to tally the total unnecessary cost, the hardship, the suffering, the increased poverty, the economic and social damage, and the all extra (non-Wuhan Flu) deaths and illnesses that have resulted from treating doomsday computer models as gospel during this current crisis….
Let’s hope that having been burnt so badly this time, the world will learn a valuable lesson and treat the failed and failing political Climate Alarmist’s computer models with the scepticism they deserve – and if so, we can drive yet another nail into the climate alarmists’ coffin.
Full post
However, the hopelessly inaccurate computer modelling of the Wuhan Flu, where the world’s supposedly leading computer modeller Neil Ferguson has been exposed as a crackpot, an international laughing stock and forced to resign, has provided the public with a valuable lesson of the golden rule of modelling; garbage in, garbage out – and that computer modelling is often more about the politics than it is about the science, no more accurate than a clairvoyant reading the entrails of a freshly sacrificed chicken.
The alarmist climate change computer models, such as those Tim Flannery used to prophecies that Warragamba Dam would never again fill, or the models that foretold of 50 million climate refugees by 2010, or the models that predicted the entire Maldives would be underwater by now, generally forecast events a decade or longer into the future, so their absurdity takes time to become apparent. In comparison, the computers models for the Wuhan Flu are on fast forward.
Take the ABC coronavirus ‘expert’ scaremonger Dr Norman Swan, who on March 21 (when Australia had just over 1,000 coronavirus cases) used computer models to predict that the number of cases in Australia would be “7,000 – 8,000 by next weekend’’. So sure was the ABC’s ‘expert’ of the computer models he added “Primary school maths. No magic fairy will bring that down”, warning that we were just “14-21 days behind Italy” which on that date had recorded 4,825 deaths.
However, by “next weekend”, 28/29 March, Australia only had 3,378 cases on the Saturday and 3,809 cases on the Sunday — not the numbers Swan foretold. So in just over a week, the ABC expert’s computer models were more than 100 per cent out. Faulty predictions of such scale would make even Tim Flannery blush….
Internationally, we have witnessed similar alarmist failures... Ultimately, no one will ever be able to tally the total unnecessary cost, the hardship, the suffering, the increased poverty, the economic and social damage, and the all extra (non-Wuhan Flu) deaths and illnesses that have resulted from treating doomsday computer models as gospel during this current crisis….
Let’s hope that having been burnt so badly this time, the world will learn a valuable lesson and treat the failed and failing political Climate Alarmist’s computer models with the scepticism they deserve – and if so, we can drive yet another nail into the climate alarmists’ coffin.
Full post
8) GWPF Webinar: The Net Zero Threat to Economic Recovery
Global Warming Policy Forum
Global Warming Policy Forum
In what now seems like a different era, the EU and a few other governments announced radical plans to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero. Today, in a global coronavirus-induced recession, attention is turning to how policymakers can assist economic recovery once the pandemic is over.
The European Commission and environmental activists are demanding that we need to see a 'green recovery'. But what does this actually mean? Can and should 'Net Zero' ambitions be sustained in the face of deepening economic hardship, or could they stifle a rapid recovery?
Joining the GWPF's Harry Wilkinson to discuss these vital questions are Rupert Darwall, John Constable and Lord Lilley.
Thursday, 14 May 2020 17:00 BST/ 12:00 EDT/ 09:00 PDT
To join our webinar please register here
The European Commission and environmental activists are demanding that we need to see a 'green recovery'. But what does this actually mean? Can and should 'Net Zero' ambitions be sustained in the face of deepening economic hardship, or could they stifle a rapid recovery?
Joining the GWPF's Harry Wilkinson to discuss these vital questions are Rupert Darwall, John Constable and Lord Lilley.
Thursday, 14 May 2020 17:00 BST/ 12:00 EDT/ 09:00 PDT
To join our webinar please register here
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment