In this newsletter:
1) Back To The Dark Ages: British Universities Adopt Communist Censorship Rules
The Times, 10 July 2020
2) China's Great Firewall of Censorship Is Already Going Up Around Hong Kong
Vice, 8 July 2020
3) “5 Years To Climate Breakdown”: How To Generate Computer Model Scares
GWPF Observatory, 10 July 2020
4) Paris Agreement May Kill Boris Johnson’s ‘Unlawful’ Green Recovery Plans
GWPF & The Guardian, 9 July 2020
5) Green Energy Prof Faces $600.000 Legal Fee Over Failed Attempt To Silence His Critics
Retraction Watch, 9 July 2020
Retraction Watch, 9 July 2020
6) Matt Ridley: Against Environmental Pessimism
Property and Environment Research Center, July 2020
7) And Finally: Bonfire Of The Left
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2020
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2020
1) Back To The Dark Ages: British Universities Adopt Communist Censorship Rules
The Times, 10 July 2020
A group of British universities is devising courses in line with the censorship rules of the Chinese government.
The Times, 10 July 2020
A group of British universities is devising courses in line with the censorship rules of the Chinese government.
Four institutions are piloting a new online teaching platform for students in China which will allow them to continue or start degrees at UK institutions even if they stay at home in the autumn term because of the pandemic. However, the students will receive only government-approved materials.
The pilot scheme involves King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London, and York and Southampton universities. It is run by Jisc, which provides digital services for higher education. The teaching link has been provided for free by Alibaba Cloud, the Chinese tech giant, creating a virtual connection between students and the online network of their UK university.
China’s internet censorship laws, known as the Great Firewall, are notoriously draconian. Search engines and social media platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube and Google, are banned. References to Winnie the Pooh have previously been outlawed after bloggers made irreverent comparisons to President Xi.
Full story (£)
2) China's Great Firewall of Censorship Is Already Going Up Around Hong Kong
Vice, 8 July 2020
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Zoom have all said they will stop complying with government orders to hand over data — a move that will likely see them blocked.
And on Tuesday the government in Hong Kong was granted sweeping powers to censor, block, and erase online content while secretly tracking your digital footprints.
It's been less than a week since Beijing’s draconian new national security law came into effect, but already Hong Kong’s online world has been altered dramatically.
“We are already behind the de facto firewall,” said Charles Mok, a lawmaker representing the technology sector, tweeted.
For ordinary citizens, the new rules have rendered them silent. Social media accounts and WhatsApp groups are being erased, with many fearing that Beijing will use what they say online against them.
Full story
3) “5 Years To Climate Breakdown”: How To Generate Computer Model Scares
GWPF Observatory, 10 July 2020
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
Shock, horror: According to the WMO and the Met Office, there is a 3% chance of the forthcoming five-year global temperature average exceeding 1.5°C
There are several definitions of hustle. One of them is to use forceful actions to promote an action or point of view. It’s everywhere of course and in all aspects of climate change. It’s all to apparent when scientists want grants, jobs and headlines. It’s no new discovery that combining hustle with statistics can get you anywhere.
The recently released news from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), prepared by the UK Met Office, that there is a “growing chance” of the world exceeding the “Paris threshold” of 1.5°C in global temperature above pre-industrial levels is a prime example of this. It says there is a 20% chance that one of the next five years will exceed 1.5°C, and a 70% chance a single month will during the same period.
Another way of saying this, statistically equally justifiable, is that there is an 80% change that global annual average temperatures will not increase statistically significantly over the next five years. There are no headlines saying that.
Just for a moment think what this means. If there is no significant change in global average temperature by 2025, we will be able to look back thirty years (the official definition of climate) and note that the two major warming episodes, 1998 and 2015, were both due to natural climatic variability, in this case two El Nino events. In many ways, the WMO report is more a testament to the importance of natural climatic variability than it is to long-term anthropogenic warming.
What’s more this forecast has been tested by reversing the direction of time in the computer models and seeing how successfully it “predicts” the past. One would expect any model to be good at this because past observations have already been incorporated into the model which has evolved to have no serious disagreements with it.
In such a complicated system as the climate – and the WMO report actually stresses the uncertain and poorly understood nature of internal climatic variability – looking into the future is an entirely different thing. Good hindcasts do not imply good forecasts.
In other reports of the same WMO document the statistics get even more suspicious. One says that there is a 3% chance of the forthcoming five-year global temperature average exceeding 1.5°C. Three percent implies a very accurate predicative ability, especially when it is accompanied by no error statement. Again, any journalist looking at these figures objectively would find that the real story is that there is a 97% chance that the average of the next five years will remain what it is now! And yet the Ecologist website proclaims we have five years to climate breakdown.
A story like this is a kind of litmus test for journalists. They can take the press release and wave it through to their website with minor changes and supporting statements. Or they could look at the statistics and — how can I say this — ask questions. I have a feeling that the era of unquestioning journalist environmental advocacy which began in the early years of this century, is gradually fading away.
Perhaps they could start to be guided by the empirical data and the messages it has been sending us for years; we do not understand natural climatic variability; our models are nowhere near as accurate as some maintain and forecasts of future temperatures more often than not end in ignominy.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
4) Paris Agreement May Kill Boris Johnson’s ‘Unlawful’ Green Recovery Plans
GWPF & The Guardian, 9 July 2020
Green campaigners are threatening to sue the UK government over its green recovery plan which they claim fails to comply with the Paris Agreement and is just ‘a fig-leaf for polluters’.
Just as the third runway of Heathrow Airport was ruled unlawful because of the Paris accord, this legal threat by green campaigners may further stifle Britain’s economic recovery.
Boris Johnson’s much-vaunted green recovery plans are inadequate and “clearly unlawful” as they do not match up to the government’s legal obligations under the Paris climate agreement and the UK’s own net zero emissions target, green campaigners have said.
On Tuesday, a letter threatening court action was sent to the prime minister and the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, by the pressure group Plan B, which successfully took the government to the appeal court this year over its green light for the expansion of Heathrow airport.
Sunak will set out £3bn of green spending, focusing on improving energy efficiency in homes and public buildings, in his summer statement on Wednesday. But the letter contrasts this sum with the billions committed to airlines and carmakers in the taxpayer-funded coronavirus recovery package, and funding for fossil fuels.
“The proposed approach is quite clearly unlawful … it is no more than a fig-leaf for the government’s new deal for polluters,” wrote Plan B in a letter before action, a legal first step that gives ministers a chance to reply before instigating formal legal proceedings.
If there is no response by 17 July, the campaigners will take the next step, which is to send a “pre-action protocol letter”, which would oblige the government to respond within 21 days.
The campaigners argue that the Heathrow case – in which the government’s go-ahead for a third runway was deemed unlawful by judges as it failed to take into account the UK’s obligations under the 2015 Paris agreement – sets a precedent that forces ministers to assess the impact of their Covid-19 stimulus plans on the climate crisis.
Full story
The pilot scheme involves King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London, and York and Southampton universities. It is run by Jisc, which provides digital services for higher education. The teaching link has been provided for free by Alibaba Cloud, the Chinese tech giant, creating a virtual connection between students and the online network of their UK university.
China’s internet censorship laws, known as the Great Firewall, are notoriously draconian. Search engines and social media platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube and Google, are banned. References to Winnie the Pooh have previously been outlawed after bloggers made irreverent comparisons to President Xi.
Full story (£)
2) China's Great Firewall of Censorship Is Already Going Up Around Hong Kong
Vice, 8 July 2020
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Zoom have all said they will stop complying with government orders to hand over data — a move that will likely see them blocked.
And on Tuesday the government in Hong Kong was granted sweeping powers to censor, block, and erase online content while secretly tracking your digital footprints.
It's been less than a week since Beijing’s draconian new national security law came into effect, but already Hong Kong’s online world has been altered dramatically.
“We are already behind the de facto firewall,” said Charles Mok, a lawmaker representing the technology sector, tweeted.
For ordinary citizens, the new rules have rendered them silent. Social media accounts and WhatsApp groups are being erased, with many fearing that Beijing will use what they say online against them.
Full story
3) “5 Years To Climate Breakdown”: How To Generate Computer Model Scares
GWPF Observatory, 10 July 2020
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
Shock, horror: According to the WMO and the Met Office, there is a 3% chance of the forthcoming five-year global temperature average exceeding 1.5°C
There are several definitions of hustle. One of them is to use forceful actions to promote an action or point of view. It’s everywhere of course and in all aspects of climate change. It’s all to apparent when scientists want grants, jobs and headlines. It’s no new discovery that combining hustle with statistics can get you anywhere.
The recently released news from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), prepared by the UK Met Office, that there is a “growing chance” of the world exceeding the “Paris threshold” of 1.5°C in global temperature above pre-industrial levels is a prime example of this. It says there is a 20% chance that one of the next five years will exceed 1.5°C, and a 70% chance a single month will during the same period.
Another way of saying this, statistically equally justifiable, is that there is an 80% change that global annual average temperatures will not increase statistically significantly over the next five years. There are no headlines saying that.
Just for a moment think what this means. If there is no significant change in global average temperature by 2025, we will be able to look back thirty years (the official definition of climate) and note that the two major warming episodes, 1998 and 2015, were both due to natural climatic variability, in this case two El Nino events. In many ways, the WMO report is more a testament to the importance of natural climatic variability than it is to long-term anthropogenic warming.
What’s more this forecast has been tested by reversing the direction of time in the computer models and seeing how successfully it “predicts” the past. One would expect any model to be good at this because past observations have already been incorporated into the model which has evolved to have no serious disagreements with it.
In such a complicated system as the climate – and the WMO report actually stresses the uncertain and poorly understood nature of internal climatic variability – looking into the future is an entirely different thing. Good hindcasts do not imply good forecasts.
In other reports of the same WMO document the statistics get even more suspicious. One says that there is a 3% chance of the forthcoming five-year global temperature average exceeding 1.5°C. Three percent implies a very accurate predicative ability, especially when it is accompanied by no error statement. Again, any journalist looking at these figures objectively would find that the real story is that there is a 97% chance that the average of the next five years will remain what it is now! And yet the Ecologist website proclaims we have five years to climate breakdown.
A story like this is a kind of litmus test for journalists. They can take the press release and wave it through to their website with minor changes and supporting statements. Or they could look at the statistics and — how can I say this — ask questions. I have a feeling that the era of unquestioning journalist environmental advocacy which began in the early years of this century, is gradually fading away.
Perhaps they could start to be guided by the empirical data and the messages it has been sending us for years; we do not understand natural climatic variability; our models are nowhere near as accurate as some maintain and forecasts of future temperatures more often than not end in ignominy.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
4) Paris Agreement May Kill Boris Johnson’s ‘Unlawful’ Green Recovery Plans
GWPF & The Guardian, 9 July 2020
Green campaigners are threatening to sue the UK government over its green recovery plan which they claim fails to comply with the Paris Agreement and is just ‘a fig-leaf for polluters’.
Just as the third runway of Heathrow Airport was ruled unlawful because of the Paris accord, this legal threat by green campaigners may further stifle Britain’s economic recovery.
Boris Johnson’s much-vaunted green recovery plans are inadequate and “clearly unlawful” as they do not match up to the government’s legal obligations under the Paris climate agreement and the UK’s own net zero emissions target, green campaigners have said.
On Tuesday, a letter threatening court action was sent to the prime minister and the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, by the pressure group Plan B, which successfully took the government to the appeal court this year over its green light for the expansion of Heathrow airport.
Sunak will set out £3bn of green spending, focusing on improving energy efficiency in homes and public buildings, in his summer statement on Wednesday. But the letter contrasts this sum with the billions committed to airlines and carmakers in the taxpayer-funded coronavirus recovery package, and funding for fossil fuels.
“The proposed approach is quite clearly unlawful … it is no more than a fig-leaf for the government’s new deal for polluters,” wrote Plan B in a letter before action, a legal first step that gives ministers a chance to reply before instigating formal legal proceedings.
If there is no response by 17 July, the campaigners will take the next step, which is to send a “pre-action protocol letter”, which would oblige the government to respond within 21 days.
The campaigners argue that the Heathrow case – in which the government’s go-ahead for a third runway was deemed unlawful by judges as it failed to take into account the UK’s obligations under the 2015 Paris agreement – sets a precedent that forces ministers to assess the impact of their Covid-19 stimulus plans on the climate crisis.
Full story
5) Green Energy Prof Faces $600.000 Legal Fee Over Failed Attempt To Silence His Critics
Retraction Watch, 9 July 2020
Stanford prof ordered to pay legal fees after dropping $10 million defamation case against another scientist
Mark Jacobson
A Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million — then dropped the suit — has been ordered to pay the defendants’ legal fees based on a statute “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
Mark Jacobson, who studies renewable energy at Stanford, sued in September 2017 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for defamation over a 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that critiqued a 2015 article he had written in the same journal.
He sued PNAS and the first author of the paper, Christopher Clack, an executive at a firm that analyzes renewable energy.
At the time, Kenneth White, a lawyer at Southern California firm Brown White & Osborn who frequently blogs at Popehat about legal issues related to free speech, said of the suit:
"It’s not incompetently drafted, but it’s clearly vexatious and intended to silence dissent about an alleged scientist’s peer-reviewed article."
In February 2018, following a hearing at which PNAS argued for the case to be dismissed, Jacobson dropped the suit, telling us that he “was expecting them to settle.” The defendants then filed, based on the anti-SLAPP — for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation” — statute in Washington, DC, for Jacobson to pay their legal fees.
In April of this year, as noted then by Forbes, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Carroll Wingo, who has been presiding over the case, ruled that Jacobson would have to pay those fees. In that ruling, Wingo wrote that the Court
finds that the three asserted “egregious errors” are statements reflecting scientific disagreements, which were appropriately explored and challenged in scientific publications; they simply do not attack Dr. Jacobson’s honesty or accuse him of misconduct.
Jacobson appealed that decision, but Wingo upheld it in a June 25 order.
Jacobson could be on the hook for more than $600,000, the total of what the plaintiffs have told the court were their legal costs — $535,900 for PNAS, and $75,000 for Clack.
Full story
see also GWPF coverage of Mark Jacobson’s lawsuit against his critics
Retraction Watch, 9 July 2020
Stanford prof ordered to pay legal fees after dropping $10 million defamation case against another scientist
Mark Jacobson
A Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million — then dropped the suit — has been ordered to pay the defendants’ legal fees based on a statute “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
Mark Jacobson, who studies renewable energy at Stanford, sued in September 2017 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for defamation over a 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that critiqued a 2015 article he had written in the same journal.
He sued PNAS and the first author of the paper, Christopher Clack, an executive at a firm that analyzes renewable energy.
At the time, Kenneth White, a lawyer at Southern California firm Brown White & Osborn who frequently blogs at Popehat about legal issues related to free speech, said of the suit:
"It’s not incompetently drafted, but it’s clearly vexatious and intended to silence dissent about an alleged scientist’s peer-reviewed article."
In February 2018, following a hearing at which PNAS argued for the case to be dismissed, Jacobson dropped the suit, telling us that he “was expecting them to settle.” The defendants then filed, based on the anti-SLAPP — for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation” — statute in Washington, DC, for Jacobson to pay their legal fees.
In April of this year, as noted then by Forbes, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Carroll Wingo, who has been presiding over the case, ruled that Jacobson would have to pay those fees. In that ruling, Wingo wrote that the Court
finds that the three asserted “egregious errors” are statements reflecting scientific disagreements, which were appropriately explored and challenged in scientific publications; they simply do not attack Dr. Jacobson’s honesty or accuse him of misconduct.
Jacobson appealed that decision, but Wingo upheld it in a June 25 order.
Jacobson could be on the hook for more than $600,000, the total of what the plaintiffs have told the court were their legal costs — $535,900 for PNAS, and $75,000 for Clack.
Full story
see also GWPF coverage of Mark Jacobson’s lawsuit against his critics
6) Matt Ridley: Against Environmental Pessimism
Property and Environment Research Center, July 2020
Doomsday thinking about the environment has been popular for decades. A rational optimist lays out the many reasons we can be hopeful about the future of the planet.
Property and Environment Research Center, July 2020
Doomsday thinking about the environment has been popular for decades. A rational optimist lays out the many reasons we can be hopeful about the future of the planet.
In 1980, the year that PERC was founded, I spent three months in the Himalayas working on a wildlife conservation project. The purpose was to do wildlife surveys on behalf of the Indian government in the stunningly beautiful valleys of the Kulu region in northern India, among forests of deodar cedar and evergreen oak. One species of particular interest was a bird called the western tragopan, a large, spotted gray forest pheasant with red plumage around the neck and bright blue skin on the male’s throat. The bird was found only in a few places and thought to be teetering on the brink of extinction.
Though we saw other pheasant species, we never saw a tragopan that year, but some of the people we met knew of the bird, and one even handed me the remains of a tragopan that had been shot for food. I feared it might be the last one. I wanted to come back in the spring when the birds’ mating calls might give them away in the deep bamboo thickets they preferred, but work prevented me.
If you had asked me in 1980 to predict what would happen to that bird and its forest ecosystem, I would have been very pessimistic. I could see the effect on the forests of growing human populations, with their guns and flocks of sheep. More generally, I was marinated in gloom by almost everything I read about the environment. The human population explosion was unstoppable; billions were going to die of famine; malaria and other diseases were going to increase; oil, gas, and metals would soon run out, forcing us to return to burning wood; most forests would then be felled; deserts were expanding; half of all species were heading for extinction; the great whales would soon be gone from the oil-stained oceans; sprawling cities and modern farms were going to swallow up the last wild places; and pollution of the air, rivers, sea, and earth was beginning to threaten a planetary ecological breakdown. I don’t remember reading anything remotely optimistic about the future of the planet.
Today, the valleys we worked in are part of the Great Himalayan National Park, a protected area that gained prestigious World Heritage status in 2014. The logo of the park is an image of the western tragopan, a bird you can now go on a trekking holiday specifically to watch. It has not gone extinct, and although it is still rare and hard to spot, the latest population estimate is considerably higher than anybody expected back then. The area remains mostly a wilderness accessible largely on foot, and the forests and alpine meadows have partly recovered from too much grazing, hunting, and logging. Ecotourism is flourishing.
This is just one small example of things going right in the environment. Let me give some bigger ones. Far from starving, the seven billion people who now inhabit the planet are far better fed than the four billion of 1980. Famine has pretty much gone extinct in recent decades. In the 1960s, about two million people died of famine; in the decade that just ended, tens of thousands died—and those were in countries run by callous tyrants. Paul Ehrlich, the ecologist and best-selling author who declared in 1968 that “[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over” and forecast that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death”—and was given a genius award for it—proved to be very badly wrong.
Remarkably, this feeding of seven billion people has happened without taking much new land under the plow and the cow. Instead, in many places farmland has reverted to wilderness. In 2009, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculated that thanks to more farmers getting access to better fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology, the area of land needed to produce a given quantity of food—averaged for all crops—was 65 percent less than in 1961. As a result, an area the size of India will be freed up by mid-century. That is an enormous boost for wildlife. National parks and other protected areas have expanded steadily as well.
Nor have these agricultural improvements on the whole brought new problems of pollution in their wake. Quite the reverse. The replacement of pesticides like DDT with much less harmful ones that do not persist in the environment and accumulate up the food chain, in addition to advances in biotechnology, has allowed wildlife to begin to recover. In the part of northern England where I live, otters have returned to the rivers, and hawks, kites, ospreys, and falcons to the skies, largely thanks to the elimination of organochlorine pesticides. Where genetically modified crops are grown—not in the European Union—there has been a 37 percent reduction in the use of insecticides, as shown by a recent study done at Gottingen University.
One of the extraordinary features of the past 40 years has been the reappearance of wildlife that was once seemingly headed for extinction. Bald eagles have bounced back so spectacularly that they have been taken off the endangered list. Deer and beavers have spread into the suburbs of cities, followed by coyotes, bears, and even wolves. The wolf has now recolonized much of Germany, France, and even parts of the heavily populated Netherlands. Estuaries have been cleaned up so that fish and birds have recolonized rivers like the Thames.
Global Greening
Here’s a question I put to school children when I get the chance: Why is the wolf population increasing, the lion decreasing, and the tiger now holding its own? The answer is simple: Wolves live in rich countries, lions in poor countries, and tigers in middle-income countries. It turns out that we conservationists were wrong to fear economic development in the 1980s.
Prosperity is the best thing that can happen to a country’s wildlife. As people get richer, they can afford to buy electricity rather than cut wood, buy chicken rather than hunt bushmeat, or get a job in a town rather than try to scratch a living from a patch of land. They can also stop worrying that their children will starve and start to care about the environment. In country after country, first in Asia, then in Latin America, and now increasingly in Africa, that process of development leading to environmental gains has swiftly delivered a turning point in the fortunes of wild ecosystems.
Full essay
Though we saw other pheasant species, we never saw a tragopan that year, but some of the people we met knew of the bird, and one even handed me the remains of a tragopan that had been shot for food. I feared it might be the last one. I wanted to come back in the spring when the birds’ mating calls might give them away in the deep bamboo thickets they preferred, but work prevented me.
If you had asked me in 1980 to predict what would happen to that bird and its forest ecosystem, I would have been very pessimistic. I could see the effect on the forests of growing human populations, with their guns and flocks of sheep. More generally, I was marinated in gloom by almost everything I read about the environment. The human population explosion was unstoppable; billions were going to die of famine; malaria and other diseases were going to increase; oil, gas, and metals would soon run out, forcing us to return to burning wood; most forests would then be felled; deserts were expanding; half of all species were heading for extinction; the great whales would soon be gone from the oil-stained oceans; sprawling cities and modern farms were going to swallow up the last wild places; and pollution of the air, rivers, sea, and earth was beginning to threaten a planetary ecological breakdown. I don’t remember reading anything remotely optimistic about the future of the planet.
Today, the valleys we worked in are part of the Great Himalayan National Park, a protected area that gained prestigious World Heritage status in 2014. The logo of the park is an image of the western tragopan, a bird you can now go on a trekking holiday specifically to watch. It has not gone extinct, and although it is still rare and hard to spot, the latest population estimate is considerably higher than anybody expected back then. The area remains mostly a wilderness accessible largely on foot, and the forests and alpine meadows have partly recovered from too much grazing, hunting, and logging. Ecotourism is flourishing.
This is just one small example of things going right in the environment. Let me give some bigger ones. Far from starving, the seven billion people who now inhabit the planet are far better fed than the four billion of 1980. Famine has pretty much gone extinct in recent decades. In the 1960s, about two million people died of famine; in the decade that just ended, tens of thousands died—and those were in countries run by callous tyrants. Paul Ehrlich, the ecologist and best-selling author who declared in 1968 that “[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over” and forecast that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death”—and was given a genius award for it—proved to be very badly wrong.
Remarkably, this feeding of seven billion people has happened without taking much new land under the plow and the cow. Instead, in many places farmland has reverted to wilderness. In 2009, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculated that thanks to more farmers getting access to better fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology, the area of land needed to produce a given quantity of food—averaged for all crops—was 65 percent less than in 1961. As a result, an area the size of India will be freed up by mid-century. That is an enormous boost for wildlife. National parks and other protected areas have expanded steadily as well.
Nor have these agricultural improvements on the whole brought new problems of pollution in their wake. Quite the reverse. The replacement of pesticides like DDT with much less harmful ones that do not persist in the environment and accumulate up the food chain, in addition to advances in biotechnology, has allowed wildlife to begin to recover. In the part of northern England where I live, otters have returned to the rivers, and hawks, kites, ospreys, and falcons to the skies, largely thanks to the elimination of organochlorine pesticides. Where genetically modified crops are grown—not in the European Union—there has been a 37 percent reduction in the use of insecticides, as shown by a recent study done at Gottingen University.
One of the extraordinary features of the past 40 years has been the reappearance of wildlife that was once seemingly headed for extinction. Bald eagles have bounced back so spectacularly that they have been taken off the endangered list. Deer and beavers have spread into the suburbs of cities, followed by coyotes, bears, and even wolves. The wolf has now recolonized much of Germany, France, and even parts of the heavily populated Netherlands. Estuaries have been cleaned up so that fish and birds have recolonized rivers like the Thames.
Global Greening
Here’s a question I put to school children when I get the chance: Why is the wolf population increasing, the lion decreasing, and the tiger now holding its own? The answer is simple: Wolves live in rich countries, lions in poor countries, and tigers in middle-income countries. It turns out that we conservationists were wrong to fear economic development in the 1980s.
Prosperity is the best thing that can happen to a country’s wildlife. As people get richer, they can afford to buy electricity rather than cut wood, buy chicken rather than hunt bushmeat, or get a job in a town rather than try to scratch a living from a patch of land. They can also stop worrying that their children will starve and start to care about the environment. In country after country, first in Asia, then in Latin America, and now increasingly in Africa, that process of development leading to environmental gains has swiftly delivered a turning point in the fortunes of wild ecosystems.
Full essay
7) And Finally: Bonfire Of The Left
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2020
Now that the purge of conservatives from America’s intellectual institutions is almost complete, new enemies are needed, and it’s no surprise that the left is descending into mutual back-stabbing.
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2020
Now that the purge of conservatives from America’s intellectual institutions is almost complete, new enemies are needed, and it’s no surprise that the left is descending into mutual back-stabbing.
America’s liberal intelligentsia thought the election of Donald Trump meant America would re-enact “1984,” but it’s starting to look more like “Homage to Catalonia,” George Orwell’s account of the left’s internecine savagery during the Spanish Civil War. Witness the spectacular online meltdown that followed a liberal open letter opposing left-wing attacks on free speech.
“A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” published Tuesday by Harper’s, opens with anti-Trump throat-clearing. It then accurately describes the ferocious campaign of coerced conformity sweeping America’s liberal institutions as they purge dissent from the hard-left line. “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class,” says the statement signed by more than 150 writers and academics.
The online left, which can’t decide whether left-wing censorship is a myth invented by its enemies or a necessary tactic for destroying them, erupted at the betrayal. It wasn’t long before the renunciations began. Jennifer Finney Boylan, a frequent New York Times contributor who had signed the letter, pleaded for forgiveness on Twitter. She had not realized that not all the signatories were of the caliber of the socialist intellectual Noam Chomsky, she wrote. “The consequences,” she added, “are mine to bear. I am so sorry.”
A Tufts University historian, Kerri Greenidge, tweeted that she did “not endorse” the counterrevolutionary document (without denying having signed it) and asked that her name be removed. Others may yet face consequences. Matt Yglesias, a co-founder of the millennial progressive website Vox, was among the signatories. One of his colleagues wrote in an open letter to the publication’s editors that because the Harper’s letter was signed by “several prominent anti-trans voices” Mr. Yglesias’s signature “makes me feel less safe at Vox.”
Tom Wolfe couldn’t have devised a more pungent satire of mutual recriminations among liberal elites. There is a significant layer of hypocrisy here; many free-speech liberals tolerate left-wing mobs when their furies are aimed at conservatives. But now that the purge of conservatives from America’s flagship intellectual institutions is almost complete, new enemies are needed, and it’s no surprise that the left is descending into mutual back-stabbing.
Our hope is that the moderate elements can fend off the woke attack. Society benefits when both its left and right coalitions accept basic free-speech principles. Yet if the intolerance turns out to be self-perpetuating and unstoppable, we have a humble suggestion for any remaining signatories of the Harper’s letter: Consider a political belief system that is not premised on the transformation of society, that is built on the sanctity of traditional rights, and that abhors the certainty of revolutionary vanguards.
Full editorial ($)
“A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” published Tuesday by Harper’s, opens with anti-Trump throat-clearing. It then accurately describes the ferocious campaign of coerced conformity sweeping America’s liberal institutions as they purge dissent from the hard-left line. “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class,” says the statement signed by more than 150 writers and academics.
The online left, which can’t decide whether left-wing censorship is a myth invented by its enemies or a necessary tactic for destroying them, erupted at the betrayal. It wasn’t long before the renunciations began. Jennifer Finney Boylan, a frequent New York Times contributor who had signed the letter, pleaded for forgiveness on Twitter. She had not realized that not all the signatories were of the caliber of the socialist intellectual Noam Chomsky, she wrote. “The consequences,” she added, “are mine to bear. I am so sorry.”
A Tufts University historian, Kerri Greenidge, tweeted that she did “not endorse” the counterrevolutionary document (without denying having signed it) and asked that her name be removed. Others may yet face consequences. Matt Yglesias, a co-founder of the millennial progressive website Vox, was among the signatories. One of his colleagues wrote in an open letter to the publication’s editors that because the Harper’s letter was signed by “several prominent anti-trans voices” Mr. Yglesias’s signature “makes me feel less safe at Vox.”
Tom Wolfe couldn’t have devised a more pungent satire of mutual recriminations among liberal elites. There is a significant layer of hypocrisy here; many free-speech liberals tolerate left-wing mobs when their furies are aimed at conservatives. But now that the purge of conservatives from America’s flagship intellectual institutions is almost complete, new enemies are needed, and it’s no surprise that the left is descending into mutual back-stabbing.
Our hope is that the moderate elements can fend off the woke attack. Society benefits when both its left and right coalitions accept basic free-speech principles. Yet if the intolerance turns out to be self-perpetuating and unstoppable, we have a humble suggestion for any remaining signatories of the Harper’s letter: Consider a political belief system that is not premised on the transformation of society, that is built on the sanctity of traditional rights, and that abhors the certainty of revolutionary vanguards.
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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.
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