2 Minutes of “Experts” Being WRONG About the COVID Vaccine
To those who still repeat the Big Pharma lie that “Nobody Ever Said The Vaccine Would Stop The Transmission Of Covid Virus”
Here are many people saying it!
Nonstop Media Bias From Russiagate to the Biden-Crime-Family Coverup
By Victor Davis Hanson | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 4, 2023
Joe Biden lied repeatedly when he claimed he knew nothing of his son Hunter’s influence-peddling businesses.
The president further prevaricated that he had no involvement in Hunter’s various shake down schemes.
Yet, the media continued to misinform by serially ignoring these facts.
Had journalists just been honest and independent, then-candidate Joe Biden might have lost a presidential debate and even the 2020 election.
The public would have learned that Hunter’s business associates and his laptop proved Joe was deeply involved in his son’s illicit businesses.
Later, as the evidence from IRS whistleblowers mounted, the White House stonewalled subpoenaed efforts and sought to craft an outrageous plea deal reduction in Hunter’s legal exposure.
Reporters ignored the Ukrainians who claimed Joe Biden himself talked to them about quid pro quo arrangements.
They again discounted Hunter’s laptop that explicitly demonstrated that Hunter was whining that he had handed over large percentages of his income to his father Joe — variously referred to as the Big Guy and a “ten percent” recipient on many deals.
They played dumb about Joe Biden’s use of pseudonyms and alias email accounts to hide thousands of his communications to Hunter and associates.
They attacked the former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who now claims Biden was likely bribed by Ukrainians.
Yet the media can no longer hide the reality that the president of the United States likely took bribes to influence or alter US policy to suit his payers.
Those two crimes — bribery and treason — are specifically delineated in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.
In denial, the media has instead pivoted with hysterical glee over various weaponized prosecutions of former President Donald Trump.
But now, to use a progressive catchphrase, the proverbial “walls are closing in” on Joe Biden.
So will we at last expect the media finally to confront the truth?
Answer — only if Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical health continues to deteriorate geometrically to the point that he can no longer finish his term or run for reelection — and thus becomes expendable.
Such a cynical view of the media is justified given their record of both incompetence and unapologetic deceit.
From 2015 to 2019, we were suffocated 24/7 with lies like “Russian collusion,” “Putin’s puppet,” “election rigging” and the “Steele dossier.”
When all such “evidence” was proven to be a complete fraud cooked up through Hillary Clinton’s stealthy hiring of and collusion with a discredited ex-British spy, a Russian fabulist at the Brookings Institution and a Clinton toady in Moscow, did the media apologize for their untruth?
Was there any media confessional that perhaps Robert Mueller and his leftwing legal team (the giddy media-dubbed “all-stars,” “dream team,” and “hunter killers”) proved a colossal waste of time?
Not at all.
Instead, the media went next right on to “the phone call” and “impeachment.”
The country then wasted another year.
The same biased reporters now claimed that the heroic Andrew Vindman had caught Trump fabricating lies about the Bidens — given Joe Biden was a possible 2020 opponent — to force Ukraine to investigate them or lose American foreign aid.
On that accusation Trump was impeached.
Then the truth emerged that unlike Joe Biden, Trump never threatened to cancel aid, but merely to delay it.
Trump was right that the Bidens were knee deep in Ukrainian bribes and influence peddling.
And that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of the Trump call but was spoon fed a script cooked up by the gadfly Vindman and California Rep. Adam Schiff.
The result was journalistic glee that we impeached a president for crimes that he did not commit but exempted another president, Biden, who had likely committed them.
Then came the next hoax of the Russian fabricated facsimile of Hunter’s laptop.
The FBI later admitted it had verified the authenticity of Hunter’s laptop.
The 2020 Biden campaign along with an ex-CIA head rounded up “51 intelligence authorities” to mislead the country into believing that Russian gremlins in the Kremlin had fabricated a fake laptop.
Ponder that absurd fantasy: Moscow supposedly had created fake nude pictures, fake photos of Hunter’s drug use, and fake email and text messages from Hunter to the other Bidens.
The media preposterously convinced the country that the Russians and by extension Trump had once again sandbagged the Biden campaign.
No apologies followed when the FBI later admitted it had kept the laptop under wraps for more than a year, knew it was authentic, and yet said nothing as the media and former spooks misled the country and warped an election.
Now we are enmeshed in at least four court trials on cooked-up charges that could as easily apply to a host of Democrats as to Trump.
For the last eight years, a discredited media has never expressed remorse for any of the damage they did to the country. And they will not again, when their latest mythological indictments are eventually exposed.
The climate scaremongers: Playing fast and loose with the facts
By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | September 1, 2023
Climate alarmists love summer. It gives them an opportunity to exploit every heatwave, wildfire and hurricane. It is much harder to scare people in winter, when snow is supposed to be a thing of the past, and who doesn’t welcome a nice spring day or Indian summer?
So here are some of the silly scare stories which have appeared in the few weeks while we’ve been away.
1 Wildfires in Portugal
THE BBC went into full alarmist mode after some fires during a bit of hot weather in Portugal early last month. They reported: ‘Firefighters in Portugal are battling to contain wildfires engulfing thousands of hectares amid soaring temperatures. Around 800 personnel attended a fire near the southern town of Odemira overnight on Monday, with more than 1,400 people having to evacuate. At least nine firefighters have been injured tackling the fires. Temperatures in excess of 40C (104F) are expected to hit much of the Iberian peninsula this week.’
The BBC would like you to believe that hot weather is somehow unusual in Spain and Portugal! And as usual they provide no context at all. The big fire near Odemira burned 6,700 hectares (16,500 acres) but this is a tiny figure compared with the annual wildfire area in Portugal each year. And the data clearly shows there is no upward trend.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/08/09/shock-news-its-hot-in-portugal/
As for temperatures of 40C, what is so unusual about that? Temperatures of 39C in Cadiz are certainly not unheard of:
2 Wildfires in Hawaii
THE media quickly tried to link the wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui to global warming, with the BBC blaming a ‘dry summer’. The Guardian went one step further saying the fires were made worse by the climate crisis.
Summers in Maui are always dry. But as local experts have been warning for years, the intensity and rapid spread of this fire was the direct result of the spread of savanna-type grasslands in the last couple of decades.
Clay Trauernicht, a professor of natural resources and environmental management at the University of Hawaii, said it would be misleading simply to blame weather and climate for the blazes. Millions of acres of Hawaii was cleared for plantation agriculture in the early 20th century, principally pineapple and sugar cane. Plantations were by and large fairly resistant to fire. However since 1980 they have shut one by one because of economic pressures, and now there are barely any left. In their place have come uncontrolled invasive species of savanna plants, such as Guinea grass which grows rapidly in the wet winters to a height of 10ft. In summer, these grasses quickly dry out, creating a tinderbox. All it needs is a spark and a strong wind to spread it, and the inevitable disaster will follow, just as it did last month.
Local fire and agricultural experts issued this very warning in a 2014 report, and recommended that the grasslands be properly managed and fire breaks be constructed. The authorities did nothing.
I doubt if you will read any of this in the Guardian.
3 The heatwave that never was
CAN the Met Office become an even bigger laughing stock than they are already?
On Wednesday August 16, they and the clowns at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) announced a Yellow Heat Alert for most of England, saying that temperatures would peak at 28C (82F) on Friday the 18th. This in itself was absurd as 28C is hardly life-threatening!
Friday arrived, and most of us were trying to keep warm under grey skies and rain. If you were lucky enough to find a bit of sunshine, you might have got temperatures of 23C.
How can the Met Office have got it so wrong? Maybe in future they might try getting their forecasts right instead of spending their time pumping out global warming propaganda.
4 The storm that never was
ON THE same day that the Met Office announced the Yellow Heat Alert, they also issued a Yellow Warning for Storm Betty, as the Irish Met Office were to name it, which was due to hit us on the day on Saturday August 19.
According to the Met Office forecast on Friday morning, we could expect up to 80mm (3in) of rain and winds in excess of 70mph in exposed places, and 50mph more widely, particularly in West Wales which would see the strongest winds.
The reality was much more mundane. Ballypatrick in the hills of Northern Ireland saw the most rain, 36mm (1.4in), and the extremes in England and Scotland were much less. As for winds, the Met Office managed to find a handful of extremely exposed sites. Capel Curig, for instance, at an altitude of 216m (708ft) in the middle of Snowdonia, recorded 66mph.
Down in the real world it was no more than a breezy day. Even on the West Wales coast, which was supposed to be worst affected, gusts reached only about 20mph, with sustained winds of about 10mph. According to the Beaufort Scale, that would be described as a ‘gentle breeze’.
But Gentle Breeze Betty does not have quite the same ring about it!
5 It does rain in Southern California
TROPICAL storms rarely hit California, but that does not mean they never do. The reason has nothing to do with climate, it is simply that Eastern Pacific hurricanes usually head west, away from the coast.
Last week, Hurricane Hilary headed north instead, and made landfall in California as a weaker tropical storm. Naturally the BBC went into full alarmist mode, blaming it on climate change in an article full of misinformation. They claimed that rainfall records had been broken across the state and in particular in Palm Springs, though why one solitary town should be of any consequence is a mystery to me.
To push home their message, they said that Los Angeles was in ‘recovery mode’ after 2.48 inches of rain, a record for August apparently.
In reality, Hilary was no wetter than other tropical storms to hit California, and 2in of rain in a day is not unusual at all in Los Angeles:
As for Palm Springs, even that record claim does not stand up to scrutiny, since it was wetter in 1922.
The September 1939 tropical storm, El Cordonazo, followed the same path as Hilary, and dropped twice as much rain on Los Angeles as Hilary, as well as larger amounts elsewhere. Hurricane Kathleen in 1976 is generally accepted as by far the wettest to hit California, with the 14.76 inches that fell on Mount San Gorgonia in a day still the official state record. Kathleen was described as a 1-in-160-year event, with hundreds of homes damaged and parts of California declared a disaster area. The highest rainfall recorded from Hilary was 11.74 inches, and the damage was considerably less than in 1976.
So once again we find that the BBC is playing fast and loose with the facts so that it can promote its political agenda. The same applies to the MSM and the Met Office.
“You Don’t Listen to the Press . . . I’m Telling You”: Post Columnist Strikes Out at Those Questioning Prior False Claims
By Jonathan Turley | September 1, 2023
I recently wrote how the Washington Post issued a statement that declared that the newspaper was “standing by” columnist Philip Bump on his proven false claims on subjects ranging from Lafayette Park to Russian collusion. Bump’s prior claims have not only been conclusively shown to be false but other major media outlets have now rejected those claims. However, the Post claimed this week that they are in fact true in response to one of my earlier columns.
Now, Miranda Devine at the New York Post has written about a meltdown by Bump in a podcast interview with Noam Dworman, owner of New York’s own Comedy Cellar. Dworman had asked Bump to explain some of his claims and Bump offered one of the most vivid examples of the new media and it is chilling. After declaring that “I’m gonna lose my mind,” he stormed out of the interview after refusing to address the contradictions and dubious claims in his prior columns.
Dworman’s podcast interview stands as one of the most revealing and vivid examples of how the media has changed in the age of rage. Bump moves quickly from the conversational to crazed when simply asked about the basis for his claims in the Washington Post.
Dworman was asking about the mounting evidence and contradictions in the Biden corruption scandal. Some of us have said that there is evidence of obvious corruption and influence peddling, but more investigation is needed to establish any basis for impeachment or criminal charges involving President Biden. Bump, however, will have none of it. The Post writer (who demanded investigations of a wide array of Republicans on false stories with little evidence) is vehement that there is nothing to see here . . . and the public just has to take his word for it.
Dworman remains polite and pushes Bump to simply engage him in explaining some of the countervailing evidence. Bump responds “I just I’m gonna lose my mind. I’m gonna lose my mind.”
As the interview shuts down, Dworman asks “is there nothing we can talk about … half the country believes this stuff.”
Bump: “I know, because half the country doesn’t actually dig into the issues.”
Dworman: “Here’s your chance to disabuse people. They don’t read the Washington Post.”
Bump will have nothing of it as Dworman continues to try to get him to explain his controversial writings: “There’s just no point, because all you want to do is you want to have me here as the putative expert so that you can present me with things that have been debunked multiple times that I’ve written about.”
Dworman: “What’s been debunked?”
Bump: “These, these claims. I’ve written about this, this argument about his dad calling him. I’ve written about this. Did you read what I wrote?”
Dworman: “It’s not debunked. Neither of us were there.”
Bump: “Well, I debunked it in the standpoint that I’ve already addressed this and presented the counterarguments to it.”
Of course, Bump has been repeatedly shown to have pushed false claims and then refused to admit to his errors. Moreover, he has repeatedly been criticized for not honestly presenting the counterarguments.
Dworman makes another valiant effort: “I have two issues here. One is Joe Biden’s behavior and one is the issue of the press. The press actually bothers me more than Joe Biden.”
Bump, however, has all but left the building: “Because you don’t listen to the press. I’m sitting here and I’m telling you, you’re wrong about these things, and you don’t listen, and you continue to insist upon things that are, you know, parsing of language. And it’s just, it’s this is why I keep saying it’s silly.” He then says that he is leaving.
Dworman responded “Well, it’s a shame because this is a good conversation.”
Bump: “It’s not a good conversation, because you refuse to listen to what I’m saying to you. You asked me on to present evidence. I keep telling you.”
However, what he “keeps telling” Dworman and the public is to just accept his conclusions and not question his support and analysis.
Bump then walks out with a statement that captures perfectly the new media. He first attacks independent journalist Matt Taibbi and says that he has “an agenda.”
Dworman delivers a haymaker in response and states “You have no agenda.”
That is when Bump delivers his exit line that foreshadowed the Post statement on my column: “I do have an agenda … My agenda is to do my best to try and present accurate information to the public. And I have an institution behind me to hold me to account when I don’t do that, which I think is an important consideration.”
Indeed, the Post would then stand entirely behind Bump and claim that all of his false statements were true. Even when other media have acknowledged that these claims were false, the Post insists that they remain true. Thus, the Post is now saying that the following are true despite findings by inspector generals and special counsels to the contrary: (1) Bill Barr did order the clearing of Lafayette Park for the Trump photo op, (2) Barr also lied when he denied the use of tear gas by federal personnel in Lafayette Park, (3) there was never any spying on the Trump campaign by the FBI, (4) Hunter Biden’s laptop was seeded with Russian disinformation, and (5) the Clinton campaign was not behind false Russian collusion claims. It is all now deemed true by the Post. It appears that, if “Democracy dies in darkness,” journalism more often dies in the light of day.
After all, the problem is not that they are false but that people just “don’t listen to the press. I’m sitting here and I’m telling you, you’re wrong about these things, and you don’t listen.”
Eris vaccine marketing hits Germany, complete with panic about a nonexistent August “Covid wave”
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | August 20, 2023
We will not be free of the virus until we are free of the vaccinators.
The leftist taz newspaper on 17 August: New German Wave: The new Covid variant Eris has arrived in Germany. Concerns about a new wave are growing – but the country is not well prepared.
The pandemic is over, but the virus is still dangerous: Reports of the new variant EG.5.1. seem to confirm this analysis. EG.5.1. (Eris) has been considered a “variant of interest” since 9 August. According to the WHO, the phenotype does not differ fundamentally from other Omicron lineages and does not require special public health measures …
With the announced end of the pandemic, virtually all mandated protective measures have been lifted in Germany. The most important instrument in the fight against Covid-19 is thus the immunisation of the population through infection or vaccination.
Das Erste, state media, on 19 August: Covid Variant “Eris”: How Dangerous is the New Mutation EG.5?
The World Health Organisation WHO has upgraded the new Covid mutationEG.5. This variant, called “Eris,” now belongs to the “variants of interest.” …
As WHO Covid expert Maria Van Kerkhove explained in Geneva on Wednesday, more severe outcomes have not been observed with Eris, but vaccination confers less protection than with other virus variants. …
Even though the new variant is unlikely to cause severe disease, the [German vaccine regulatory authority] STIKO still recommends getting vaccinated – above all to avoid possible long-term consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection and to protect employees in medical and nursing care.
n-tv, a subsidiary broadcaster of RTL, on 18 August: The Number of Coivd-19-Cases Continues to Rise.
The pharmaceutical company Moderna has announced that its updated Covid vaccine according to an initial study is effective against the Eris sub-variant. The company now expects to launch the new vaccine in time for the autumn vaccination season. Approval from vaccine regulators however is still pending.
Moderna, like vaccine manufacturers Novavax and Pfizer, has developed versions of its vaccines with Biontech SE that target Eris subvariants. Shortly before, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer had reported that its revised vaccine had been effective against Eris in a study with mice. …
Most recently, it was suspected that the cinema hype surrounding the feel-good film “Barbie” and the gloomy biopic “Oppenheimer” may have caused many infections. At the same time, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) recorded an increase in the number of reported Covid infections. Experts, however, see no reason for concern so far.
Frankfurter Rundschau, a regional Frankfurt paper, on 17 August: Covid comeback with “Eris”: First experts demand return to masking.
Is Covid on the attack again? There are indications that the virus is once on the rise once more. …
British doctors are already calling for a return to masking. [Relentless virus charlatan and deranged hypermasker] Trisha Greenhalgh suggests that, “in view of the spread of new variants,” masking in high-risk situations should be considered.
The [virus surveillance] of the Federal Ministry of Health shows that the numbers are also on the rise in Germany. … “Eris” is already responsible for every fourth corona infection, according to new figures from the RKI. “The number of Covid-19 cases reported to the RKI .. seems to be related to the increasing circulation of this ‘variant of interest’,” the Robert Koch Institute says.
The increase in the case numbers – at least in Great Britain – coincides with the opening of the blockbusters “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” in British cinemas, which has given rise to talk of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon. It is well known that larger crowds in enclosed indoor spaces are associated with an increased risk of corona infection. So is it time for a mask renaissance?
In the USA, more and more voices calling for one. [Relentless virus pest] Eric Feigl-Ding … used the hashtag #MaskUp on Twitter to call once again for protecting oneself from Covid infections with masks. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach shared the post, warning that the latest Covid data from New York is “worrying.” …
“There is still a risk that a more dangerous variant will emerge, which could lead to a sudden increase in cases and deaths,” emphasises WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Not only adapted vaccines that take the new variants into account, but also wearing a mask would then help to protect oneself and others, Frankfurt virologist Martin Stürmer told Spiegel.
tagesschau, state media, on 17 August: Covid Case Numbers are Rising Again.
The number of laboratory-confirmed Corona cases in Germany is rising again – but at a relatively low level. This development has been ongoing for around a month, reports the Influenza Working Group at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) … According to the report, about 2,400 confirmed cases of Covid-19 were reported nationwide last week. This is more than double the number reported in the week ending 9 July, when there were about 1,000. …
According to the RKI report, the activity of acute respiratory diseases in general in the population was “at a low summer level.” … “Anyone with symptoms of an acute respiratory infection should stay at home for three to five days and until the symptoms have clearly improved,” advises the RKI. …
Despite all of this obnoxious verbiage, absolutely nothing of virological note is happening in Germany. Official Covid testing has been all but abolished here, forcing our journaloids to unearth statistics from RKI influenza surveillance – something they refused to do during the pandemic itself, because the flu people routinely posted data that undermined their panic narrative. Here, I’ve circled in red the scary rise in infections from the latest RKI report that we’re meant to be worried about:
This microscopic uptick is dwarfed by the February/March wave that peaked between weeks 8 and 13. Our media luminaries took next to no notice of this frightening late-winter surge, and as I type this, Covid diagnoses have not even re-achieved their June levels. The difference between the state of things now and the state of things in February is not the unremarkable Eris variant. XBB was also debuting across Europe early this year, driving the post-February case peak, and nobody cared. The only thing that is different now, is the proximity of the autumnal vaccination liturgy and the prospect of new, updated vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Novavax. That is why we are hearing about variants and masks and Long Covid all over again. It is also why many of these articles contain buried within them somewhere the advice to line up for the shiny new anti-Covid juice this Fall. This whole thing is, very plainly, a psy-op, if a very low-effort one.
There are several patterns in the German reporting that are worth noting. First of all, the latest hysteria was unleashed on 17 August, prompted by a report on Eris from the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Particularly in the realm of routine reporting, the news agencies are a powerful coordinating force, and their influence here means that the full media panic machine is not engaged. We’re looking instead at pieces thrown together by low-level staff desperate to fill column inches. Second, all the German stories are firmly downstream from Anglophone sources, going so far as to recycle from British tabloids the improbable theory of a “Barbenheimer” wave (it is painful even to type this stupid word). Third, at least German health authorities – Karl Lauterbach excepted – resolutely refuse to provide virus doom quotes. Thus the Frankfurter Rundschau had to appropriate the tweets of Anglosphere mask hysterics like Greenhalgh and Feigl-Ding to make Eris sound scary.
I know there are rumours that American authorities are planning to bring back mask mandates and other restrictions in the coming months, and I’ll be honest: We should be so lucky. If the pandemicists try to kick up another round of non-pharmaceutical interventions this fall, they’ll be flirting with self destruction. There are important prerequisites for virus panic: You need a plausibly novel pathogen, the risk of which can be exaggerated. You need a prevailing sense of stability, with nothing else much going on, because the public health interventions themselves have to seem new. Risk, excitement and the prospect of a break from routine are important enticements. That’s all gone now. Covid is not a new scary virus anymore; nearly everyone has had personal experience with it. Solid majorities everywhere have learned to hate lockdowns, despise masking and avoid the mRNA vaccines. The pandemicists need a plausibly new virus to reopen the circus, and they need a lot of people to forget about what a misery the last pandemic response was. They’ll have another chance in ten or fifteen years, I’d guess. Then, it’ll be time to worry.
The Green Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think — Or Not
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | August 19, 2023
Among the media sources serving as propagandists and cheerleaders for the “green energy transition,” two of the most prominent are the New York Times and Bloomberg News. To get an idea how the “transition” is going, let’s take a look at the latest from those two.
From the Times, in this morning’s print edition, we have a feature article that apparently first appeared online a couple of days ago, August 17. The headline is: “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.” The sub-head continues the excitement: “The United States is pivoting away from fossil fuels and toward wind, solar and other renewable energy, even in areas dominated by the oil and gas industries.”
But then Bloomberg News comes out yesterday with an editorial that seems to reach the exact opposite conclusion. Headline: “Net Zero Is Stalling Out. What Now?”
So which is it? Is the green energy future arriving “faster than you think,” or “stalling out”? Both can’t be right. Who has the better side of this?
Let’s look first at the Times piece. It is an uncritical litany of every possible piece of good news for the generation of electricity from wind and sun in the U.S. It is filled with more than twenty photographs and charts designed to impress you with the great progress being made: massive wind turbines, vast solar arrays, rows of EV charging stations, teams of serious-looking workers in a modern factory working away on some unnamed but clearly complex piece of equipment.
On the other hand, the piece is devoid of meaningful data on how the “transition” is progressing. Are wind and solar electricity actually making progress toward supplanting fossil fuels? You won’t find the answer to that here.
I’ll give you a few choice excerpts so you can get an idea of the technique:
Delivery vans in Pittsburgh. Buses in Milwaukee. Cranes loading freight at the Port of Los Angeles. Every municipal building in Houston. All are powered by electricity derived from the sun, wind or other sources of clean energy. . . . The nation that burned coal, oil and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels. A similar energy transition is already well underway in Europe and elsewhere. . . . Wind and solar power are breaking records. . . . Automakers have made electric vehicles central to their business strategies and are openly talking about an expiration date on the internal combustion engine. Heating, cooling, cooking and some manufacturing are going electric.
So what are these Bloomberg people talking about when they say that the “Net Zero” thing is “stalling out”? It turns out that they have plenty of data points, mostly (but not entirely) from Europe, and all relating to collapsing public support as costs become apparent:
[V]oters have legitimate questions about net-zero policies: How much will they cost? What benefits will they bring? Will they actually work as advertised? Such skepticism is already changing politics, from the recent losses suffered by Germany’s Greens to the fall of the Dutch governing coalition, which was partly fueled by farmers’ anger over forced reductions in nitrogen-oxide emissions. Even some avowed environmentalists — such as the governor of New Jersey and the leader of the UK’s Labor Party — have lately been siding with voters who feel aggrieved at the costs of environmental policies.
Can we get any actual data as to whether wind and solar energy are rapidly increasing their market share for energy production in the U.S.? The best source of information is the Energy Information Administration (part of the Department of Energy). The most recent two full years for which they have data are 2021 and 2022. Here’s the 2021 chart showing U.S. primary energy consumption by source:
Add up the percentages for petroleum (36%), natural gas (32%) and coal (11%), and you get 79% from fossil fuels in the aggregate.
And how about 2022? The chart is in a different format that is more difficult to read, but here is the key line of text: “Fossil fuels—petroleum, natural gas, and coal—accounted for 79% of total U.S. energy consumption in 2022.” Oh, that’s the exact same percentage as in 2021. It didn’t budge by even 1%.
Here is the chart they provide for 2022. As you can see, it is not so easy to calculate the percentages by source from this chart, but the general result is still obvious:
For 2023, EIA has put out monthly data through April as part of its Monthly Energy Review. There are no pretty charts, but through April fossil fuels have generated 26.082 quadrillion BTUs out of total primary energy consumption of 33.209 quadrillion BTUs. That would be 78.53% for fossil fuels. In other words, to the nearest whole percent, it’s still 79%. All the billions upon billions of government subsidies don’t seem to be moving the needle in any noticeable way.
To be fair, these figures reflect little if any of the massive subsidies brought forth by the big federal green energy bill (“Inflation Reduction Act” [sic]), which was signed a year ago on August 16, 2022 and is just getting cranked up. Will those subsidies move this needle at all? You would think that they couldn’t help moving the needle at least a little. But my own prediction is that the percent of primary energy from fossil fuels will decrease only minimally.
Over at Bloomberg, while they report honestly that Net Zero seems to be stalling out, they are not happy about it. What is the remedy? Obviously, the government planners directing the green energy transition need to go about this in a more “purposeful” and “strategic” manner:
If the government is going to ban the sale of gas boilers in 2035, as it says, it will need to make sure that cheaper alternatives are available. Likewise with a planned ban on new gas and diesel cars: It’s a fine goal, but it won’t go anywhere unless consumers have compelling incentives, charging infrastructure can meet demand and the government has otherwise laid the needed groundwork. . . . Above all, what’s needed is leadership. Decarbonization can drive economic growth, create jobs and bring substantial benefits to the environment and public health. But it must be done purposefully and strategically.
It’s the usual touching faith that central planning really is going to work this time, because it will be done more intelligently. No amount of real world failures will ever convince the true believers otherwise.
The “Wellness-to-Fascism Pipeline” Baffles Experts as Truth Marches On
Congregating and Caring about Your Health is Dangerous to our Democracy
BY IGOR CHUDOV | AUGUST 13, 2023
Be careful with your workouts! An article from the Guardian alerts us to a “wellness-to-fascism pipeline.”
“People who study conspiracy theories” are worried that joining gyms and trying to get healthy makes people descend into what these experts describe as fascism, explains author James Ball.
James has a peculiar idea of what fascism is, however:
According to James, only fascists question masks, lockdowns, or the BBC. Good people mysteriously become “fascists” when they join gyms or look after their wellness.
Some of the most dangerous people, believe it or not, are personal trainers!
Some people’s problems escalated when their personal trainer learned about their work. “I had three successive personal trainers who were anti-vax. One Belgian, two Swiss,” I was told by a British man who has spent most of the past decade working in Europe for the World Economic Forum, which organises the annual summit at Davos for politicians and the world’s elite.
The poor WEF chap above was even dropped by his personal trainer when his employment at the WEF was revealed:
When the trainer found out the man worked for the World Economic Forum, he was immediately cut off.
Most worryingly for the “conspiracy expert” Peter Knight, people of all political persuasions, right or left, end up in the same place when they realize that “everything is a lie”:
Peter Knight has the strangest explanation, by gender, as to why people “get sucked into conspiracy theories.”
He explains that men are drawn into conspiracies because of the “involuntary celibacy” movement.
It is not that difficult to imagine why young men hitting the gym might be susceptible to QAnon and its ilk. This group spends a lot of time online, there is a supposed crisis of masculinity manifesting in the “incel” (involuntary celibacy) movement and similar, and numerous rightwing influencers have been targeting this group.
Mind you, at the beginning of the article, James Ball discussed how personal trainers are the superspreaders of conspiracies. Have you ever seen an involuntarily celibate gym personal trainer?
His explanation of why women believe the same theories could not be more different! Women, it turns out, believe the same conspiracies as men because of the “female data gap”!
“Far too often, we blame women for turning to alternative medicine, painting them as credulous and even dangerous,” she says. “But the blame does not lie with the women – it lies with the gender data gap. Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as the default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body.”
There is a much simpler explanation as to why people believe the “Covid was lab-made” conspiracy theory, “Covid vaccine does not work” conspiracy theory, or “15-minute cities are promoted by the World Economic Forum” theory.
The explanation is that these theories are true. Both genders are capable of critical thinking, seeing the truth, and sharing it.
This simple explanation does not insult millions of thinking men by portraying them as “incels,” nor does it portray women as stupid creatures confused by the imaginary “gender data gap.”
Trying to find explanations for complicated but important events affecting us and not believing dishonest press is not fascism. God gave us brains for a reason – to think for ourselves! Critical thinking is the opposite of fascism, which requires uncritical obedience to the state ideology.
Despite its stupidity, the Guardian’s article exposes the most important social network that the press, fact-checkers, and the powers-to-be cannot control.
This social network is people physically and directly interacting with each other and sharing news and opinions.
It cannot be suppressed by means other than drastic lockdowns, which kept people at home in 2020. The gyms, far from being uniquely instrumental in developing critical thinking, are simply places where people congregate and share stuff while doing something pleasant. Thus, not surprisingly, gym-goers share explanations of current events with their peers without any censorship or any algorithmic intermediary.
The Guardian recognizes this:
Society’s discussion of QAnon, anti-vaxxers and other fringe conspiracies is heavily focused on what happens in digital spaces – perhaps too much so, to the exclusion of all else. The solution, though, is unlikely to be microphones in every gym and treatment room, monitoring what gets said to clients.
The conspiracy experts are baffled by this development and ironically blame “isolation,” even though the phenomenon they observe is rooted in physical interaction between people:
Jane has her own theory as to why her wellness group got radicalised and she did not – and it’s one that aligns with concerns from conspiracy experts, too. “I think it’s the isolation,” she concludes, citing lockdown as the catalyst, before noting the irony that conspiracies then kick off a cycle of increasing isolation by forcing believers to reject the wider world.
“It becomes very isolating because then their attitude is all: ‘Mainstream media … they lie about everything.’”
I do not think of myself and my dear subscribers as isolated: we congregate here, we read newspapers, although critically, and we interact with friends or relatives. Anyone can say anything they want in the comments. Am I wrong?
Ukrainian soldiers underestimated Russia – Western media
By Lucas Leiroz | August 12, 2023
Apparently, the Ukrainian armed forces were not aware of the defense capabilities of the Russian Federation, having underestimated the enemy during the counteroffensive. According to an article recently published by CNN, Ukrainian soldiers did not expect their opponents to be so efficient on the battlefield, which is supposed to explain why Kiev’s counteroffensive was so overrated – and is now being so criticized for its irrelevant results.
The article was written by on the ground reporters, war correspondents who interviewed Ukrainian troops to find out their opinion on what is happening in the frontlines. In the text, the interviewees unexpectedly “admitted” to have underestimated the Russian opponents, virtually assuming responsibility for the failure of the counterattack.
“It won’t be as easy as in [Russia’s tactical retreat from] Kharkiv. Here the enemy was ready, unfortunately. Everybody chatted for months that we would move here (…) We expected less resistance. They are holding. They have leadership. It is not often you say that about the enemy”, a tank unit commander named “Lotos” told CNN’s journalists. Also, “Vlad”, “a medic with the 15th National Guard”, stated: “You shouldn’t honor the enemy (…) But don’t underestimate him”.
The article, however, also shows some optimism about the future of the counteroffensive. It is said that the Ukrainians already learned “not to underestimate their enemy” and now they can do something really efficient, despite the difficulties. Interviewees claim that there is a kind of “thirst for revenge” that motivates them to keep fighting, which is why “CNN saw a palpable improvement in morale”.
Julia, another military medic interviewed by CNN, states that her colleagues are optimistic about the future of the offensive, since “revenge” and “hatred” would be motivating them. According to her, now there is a different optimism, possibly more realistic, knowing the enemy’s capacity, but still very strong, since the Ukrainians are enthusiastic about the possibility of attacking, as they spent more than 18 months just defending themselves. She says, for example, that the wounded soldiers she takes care of are eager to return to the front and resume their duties as their “thirst for revenge is very strong”.
“We are still optimistic but not as we used to be. Assaulting is emotionally easier. It was very hard standing in defense for 18 months (…) They (wounded Ukrainian troops) know it’s not going to be the same – they won’t be in the assault squad. But they want to come back. Because thirst for revenge is very strong. Hatred is very strong”, she said.
It is curious to read this type of information in the Western media when, on the other side, prisoners of war captured by the Russians claim that they learned about the existence of a “counteroffensive” through TikTok, since their officers had not told them anything on the battlefield. There is clearly an inconsistency between the data. Soldiers who were not aware of the counteroffensive cannot have overestimated the attack or underestimated the enemy. They did not even know what they were doing to have any critical assessment of the topic.
CNN’s interviewees speak as if they were to blame for military failure, when in fact those responsible for calculating the chances of victory are not military personnel on the frontlines, but intelligence officers who have access to sensitive data about the enemy. What seems most likely is that the media is manipulating the reports made by the sources saying that there were errors in calculating the possible results of the counteroffensive, blaming the Ukrainians and trying to clean up their own image.
Along with Ukrainian state officials, the Western media were primarily responsible for spreading the narrative that a large-scale attack was being planned by Kiev. Western journalists overestimated this alleged attack more than any Ukrainian military and now they seem to be trying to save their own credibility by bringing new “explanations” about what supposedly prevented the move from succeeding.
Furthermore, it is hard to believe that there really is so much motivation and high morale among the Ukrainian troops after so many recent defeats. What has been seen in recent months is a series of pessimistic statements by the Ukrainian military, with fewer and fewer people believing in any possibility of victory. In fact, the tendency is that territorial losses and battlefield defeats generate deterioration of credibility, moral discouragement and capitulation, not “thirst for revenge”.
In this sense, it seems more likely that the Western media itself is initiating a new propaganda campaign, focused on asserting that there will be a new wave of counterattacks in the near future, which is supposed not to repeat the errors of the previous one. An indication of this is the fact that in the article CNN journalists also made some criticisms of NATO’s weapons sent to Ukraine, stating that they are “donated” ones, “not always kept at NATO service standards”. This appears to be a psychological move to convince public opinion that what has been sent to Kiev so far is still “not enough” for the counteroffensive to succeed, and there needs to be more efficient, lethal weapons in the military aid packages.
In the end, the Western media outlets seem to be doing once again what they have been doing throughout the entire conflict: encouraging war, demanding more weapons and trying to disguise their own analytical errors.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
Claims that ‘Global Boiling’ Led to “Shocking” Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet are Nonsense
The Ice Sheet is Currently Bigger Than Normal
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 8, 2023
The new era of ‘global boiling’ has brought a return of the much loved climate scare story featuring the imminent demise of the Greenland ice sheet. The Daily Mail recently ran a headline noting the ‘Impact of Global Boiling‘, saying it has “shocking” photos showing how much the ice sheet has melted during the “hottest month ever recorded on Earth”. Snow melt is said to be higher than the 1981-2010 average.
But, alas, those who strive for accuracy in these matters are likely to quibble. The Earth is not “boiling” – that is the unhinged raving of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres – the claim about July comes from a computer model, while “ever” refers to data of varying quality going back barely 150 years. Furthermore, the surface balance of ice on the Greenland ice sheet is higher than the 1981-2010 average, and could improve on last’s year performance, when there was little or no loss of the surface mass after the brief summer melting season.
If the Mail is “shocked” by how much the Greenland ice sheet has melted this year, it probably didn’t consult the polar portal site run by Danish meteorologists, which updates an accurate record on a daily basis. Both graphs above show the effect of a cold June where the ice loss was considerably lower than the previous year. Warmer weather arrived from the south in late June in time for the peak summer melt season.
As the second graph shows, the accumulation of surface ice on Greenland is more than the 1981-2010 average, and a big improvement on a decade ago. But as the Daily Sceptic noted recently, the current improvement can be seen in an even better light. A number of scientific institutions still use a decadal 1981-2010 average for comparison purposes, despite data to 2020 being available. The cynical might note that the ice sheet lost just 51 gigatonnes a year in the 1980s, compared to an annual loss of 244 gts in the 2010s. Updating the average figure would greatly amplify the recent, and continuing, recovery in the surface ice mass.
The ”shocking” before and after photos revealing how snow melts in the summer, even in Greenland, were taken by NASA satellites over the Frederikshab Glacier running down to the warmer south-west coast. The information and photos came from a NASA blog aimed at educators headed ‘Wasting Away (Again) in Greenland‘. More than halfway through the 2023 melting season, reports NASA, “Greenland has seen a substantial transformation of its snow cover”. This line – if it’s summer in Greenland, the snow melts – is readily taken up by the Mail. “According to scientists, snow falls on the Greenland ice sheet every winter… but experts say hotter summer temperatures are reducing the amount of snow cover.” The NASA blog is heavily quoted: “More than halfway through the 2023 melting season, Greenland has seen a substantial transformation of its snow cover. … Changes are the result of the increasing warmth of summer weather that took hold across the region in late June.”
Hold the front page – snow melts during the summer in Greenland, not many dead.
It is not difficult to find areas of rock in Greenland, especially in the south-west where most of the population of 55,000 live. The climate in this area is characterised as ‘low Arctic’ and temperatures are well above freezing in the warmest months. Ice in the Arctic waxes and wanes on a cyclical basis, while the long-term Greenland temperature is fairly stable. At a time when the planet has seen a gentle period of warming over the last 100 years, Greenland even held back slightly on the general trend. The five-year moving average of -18.57°C in 1929 compares with a measurement in 2021 of –17.96°C. The largest boost, as with other areas of the world, occurred in a short period in the 1980s and 90s, as the World Bank graph below shows. Since that time, as elsewhere, the rate of warming has considerably declined.
The Greenland ice sheet is the alarmist scare story that keeps on giving because water flowing off the land can increase sea levels. The Mail notes that scientists have already warned this year that the Greenland ice sheet is the “hottest it has ever been” and will cause global sea levels to rise by 20 inches by 2100 if it keeps warming at the same pace. In fact this information is linked to an earlier article that referenced a science paper quoting temperatures between 2000-2011. The next paragraph of the current story reports a rise of four feet or 1.2 metres by 2300, “even if we meet the 2015 Paris climate goals, scientists have warned”. Scientists might “warn”, but all these opinions of greatly increased sea level rises are produced by climate models, often assuming outlandish future scenarios.
Again, as we have noted in numerous articles, sea level rises are notoriously difficult to calculate since land rises as huge weights are lifted from it. Many areas in the northern hemisphere show falls in coastal sea levels, and this process is ongoing since the Earth is currently in an interglacial phase. In fact, current rises of 2mm a year are tiny compared with the huge boosts between 12,000 to 4,000 years ago.
Again, hold that front page – shock 2mm annual rise will lead to civilisation being inundated in the next century by a catastrophic seven inch increase in sea levels. Not many expected to die.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
The Infuriating Climate Alarm
By Iain Davis | OffGuardian | August 8, 2023
In the UK, we all know that this summer has been rubbish. We had a few weeks of glorious sunshine in June and since then it’s been bloody miserable. It’s been cold, wet and the dog has got trench-foot. Which isn’t great because he stinks at the best of times—bless him.
Yet, according to the UN Secretary General and blithering buffoon, António Guterres, we’ve entered the “era of global boiling.” Though not in the UK—or anywhere else for that matter
Just as we were during the pseudopandemic, we are once again invited to reject the evidence of our own senses and “trust” whatever we are told by the “experts,” although Guterres is not a meteorologist. Mind you, Bill Gates isn’t an epidemiologist and everyone “trusted” his “expert” opinion during the pseudopandemic, so who cares?
I know! I know! Weather isn’t climate change. While climate constantly changes, the process can only be understood through the accumulation of evidence revealing a highly complex system that is subject to radiative forcing.
It is safe to say that no one who seriously questions “climate change” alarm, denies that climate changes. What they question are the claims made by organisations like the UK Met Office:
The evidence is clear: the main cause of climate change is burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal. When burnt, fossil fuels release carbon dioxide into the air, causing the planet to heat up.
There isn’t one, published scientific paper, anywhere on Earth, that empirically proves that increased atmospheric CO2 precedes and causes global warming. The evidence is far from “clear.”
Climate change alarmists offer all kinds of convoluted arguments, usually by applying highly questionable statistical models, in their attempt to prove causality. Yet this very basic, empirical scientific proof is notable only for its absence.
But let’s not let scientific facts get in the way of a good story. The planet is boiling I tells ye!
If CO2 is the problem then the solution seems pretty simple, not to mention quite pleasant: plant as many trees as we can, wherever we can, and don’t cut them down to burn in biomass power plants that emit more CO2 than brown-coal fired power stations. But that is not a “solution” that anyone in power is interested in.
If CO2 is the problem then the solution seems pretty simple, not to mention quite pleasant: plant as many trees as we can, wherever we can, and don’t cut them down to burn in biomass power plants that emit more CO2 than brown-coal fired power stations. But that is not a “solution” that anyone in power is interested in.
No, the proposed solution to supposed planetary vaporisation is Sustainable Development debt slavery. Which all raises a few questions about, for example, UK Met Office gibberish. It’s almost as if there’s some sort of agenda at play. Which, of course, there is.
But we’re not going rehash arguments about the climate change woo-woo Science™. There’s no point anyway. Climate change alarm is a death cult, not an exercise in intellectual honesty.
Instead, let’s look at just a few examples of obvious climate alarm tripe. As we do, we’ll also ponder why, if anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory is so sound, so-called “climate scientists” and the mainstream media—legacy media—feel the need to perpetually lie about its alleged effects.
In 2009, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, which provides much of the HadCRUT data underpinning the IPCC’s climate change models, was caught fiddling the climate data in order to “prove” AGW theory.
Scientific fraud was evident and key “climate scientists” involved were subsequently unable to provide any data to support their misleading conclusions. Something that was later proven in court. Yet still the legacy media (LM), in this instance represented by the appalling propagandists at the Guardian, manage to deny the blatant scam.
This is all irrelevant because, irrespective of the fake science, all scientists agree that the planet is being cooked like a hard boiled egg. Except the Nobel laureate physicists who don’t. Oh, and all the other scientists who don’t either.
They are not “real” scientists and therefore must be cancelled and definitely barred from explaining to the IMF that the IPCC’s modelled predictions are drivel. Global financial institutions are set to profit from “da climate Science™” and are not interested in having their plans undermined by pesky, Nobel prize winning scientists.
Gutteres’ boiling planet yarn is based upon the recent LM alarm about the Cerberus and Charon heatwaves that supposedly plagued central and southern Europe. The LM used scary colours on their maps to make sure everyone soiled themselves. As if naming the summer after mythical devil-dogs and boatmen for the dead wasn’t enough.
Reuters said ambulances had been put on standby to rescue people from the sunshine; Sky warned that the fingerprints of climate change were forcing people to “shelter from the heat;” CNN reported that the heat was at “unbearable levels” and the constantly petrified Guardian, alleging that “human-caused climate crisis is supercharging extreme weather around the world,” added:
The European Space Agency (ESA) said the next week could bring the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe.
While the Guardian mentioned the ESA, they neglected to report its subsequent data clarification. The ESA made it clear that they were providing satellite readings of “land surface temperatures” not the “air temperatures” that are commonly given in weather reports.
On a hot day, land surface temperatures tend to be considerably higher than air temperatures. The degree of difference varies, depending on numerous factors such as the heat absorption and radiation properties of the surface material and so on. As pointed out by the pro-climate alarm website SkepticalScience :
[. . .] on a sunny day in a heatwave, many land surfaces become hotter than the air – that’s how tarmac can melt in a sunny spot.
Contradicting themselves, and ignoring the ESA clarification completely, SkepticalScience then said that the reported air temperature high of 48.8°C on July 17th “did happen.” However, as pointed out by the genuinely sceptical What’s-Up-With-That (WUWT), this claim presents us with a major conundrum.
The LM consistently reported “air temperatures” that were the same as the ESA’s reported “land surface temperature.” The air temperature should have been notably lower, but wasn’t reported to be so.
Quite simply, that just can not be true. It is all very odd, because the actual recorded air temperatures were lower than those reported by the LM, such as the Guardian and the BBC.
This is not to say that it wasn’t very hot in southern and some parts of central Europe and the US. But the ridiculous, exaggerated LM claims that July was the hottest month in 125,000 years were unmitigated claptrap. As Kit Knightly, writing for the OffGuardian, rightly observed, there is simply no way to know this.
The University of Alabama and Hunstsville (UAH) Global Temperature Record is also a key data set for the IPCC. The UAH measures temperature anomalies and, using this measure—which is not the same as a consistent average—confirmed that July 2023 was the hottest July and the hottest single month since 1979, when satellite records began. Given, for example, that an “air temperature” anomaly of 50°C was recorded in Paris in August 1930—before satellite records began—the “hottest ever” claims don’t remotely stack up, even from an anomaly perspective, and certainly don’t constitute any evidence of the “ravages” of CO2 driven climate change.
Reports from European holiday makers that they had to avoid the midday sun, as they mingled with the crowds enjoying the lovely weather, is hardly a sign of the end-times. Noel Coward wrote the song “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” advising people to avoid sweltering midday temperatures, in 1931. It went down well because it was funny and something people could relate to. Probably because the 1930s was the hottest decade of the 20th century.
SkepticalScience is among the climate alarm pushers who assert that the heatwave was obviously caused by climate change. As noted by James Corbett and James Even Pilato, that notion is speculative to say the least.
Both NASA and the ESA reported that the Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano eruption in January 2022 increased the amount of stratospheric water vapour by a minimum of 10%, possibly up to 30%. So vast was this expulsion of H2O that it is likely to increase average global temperatures for several years to come.
If you are looking for LM reports on the staggering global climate impact of this event, don’t bother. There aren’t any.
Instead, the BBC, for example, published an article on July 14th 2023 which spoke about the amazing expulsion of lava and ash and the spectacular associated volcanic lightening. They even linked to the NASA report which said the additional volume of atmospheric water vapour was enough to “fill the equivalent of 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.” But the BBC propagandists couldn’t bring themselves to report the rest of the quoted NASA statement, which read:
The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.
Just eleven days later—July 25th—BBC amnesiacs told the world that the European and US heatwaves would have been “near impossible” without climate change. Despite previously citing the NASA and ESA findings which clearly show this claim is totally groundless.
The BBC offered a ludicrous report from World Weather Attribution (WWA)—deceptively calling it a “study”—to supposedly “confirm” that “climate change” had increased the heatwaves by 2.5°C. Based upon nothing but LM reports and speculative computer models, the WWA report was scientifically illiterate dross that presented absolutely no evidence at all to support any of its wacky conclusions.
The Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption and the ESA spawned media “confusion,” over the difference between surface and air temperatures, was entirely ignored by the BBC as it pumped out its climate change propaganda. Rounding off its disinformation, the BBC wrote:
[. . .] increased temperatures from burning fossil fuels was the main driver in the more intense heatwaves.
A conclusion, it is worth reiterating, for which there is no evidence. The BBC’s role is to make you imagine that the evidence exists.
SkepticalScience, which isn’t sceptical enough to explore atmospheric science or check what its scientific sources really said, didn’t deem it necessary to mention any of this either. But it did ram home that anyone who questions climate alarm is a “climate denier”:
People who create and/or circulate such myths are denying plain reality. That reality is that it got extremely hot across southern Europe for a prolonged period in July 2023. Such prolonged heat is a serious health-hazard, never mind the appalling wildfires.
Aah, the wildfires!
Presumably ignited by the 40+°C heat. Or so the LM would have us believe.
Reporting the “end of the world,” the BBC were certain that the “heatwave spreading across Europe is fuelling wildfires in Portugal.” Someone should tell the Portuguese the end of the world is nigh, because comments from people in Portugal during the “catastrophic heatwave” don’t give rise to any cause for alarm.
This is all reminiscent of the climate alarm that spewed out of the LM during the Canadian wildfires in June that sent a pall of smoke across the US eastern seaboard. The New York Times said this provide us with a “grim climate lesson;” CBS said that the fires were started by lightening caused by dry hot weather as “climate change continues to warm the planet” and the always unreliable BBC wrote “climate change increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires.”
But the prize for most outstanding baloney must go to the Guardian for its unhinged piece, “Canada’s Wildfires are Part of a New Climate Reality.” Claiming that the fires were the “harbinger of our climate future” and that climate change could “double the acreage burned by wildfires each year,” the Guardian exposed itself when it revealed that its headline “new climate reality” was “sourced” from a tweet by US politician Bernie Sanders. Probably after he read a New York Times or other LM article that told him what to think.
None of these wildly inaccurate LM affirmations were remotely plausible. In a fully referenced article, weather forecaster Chris Martz, outlined the many reasons why there is no foundation for the claims that the Canadian boreal forest wildfires were, in any sense, attributable to CO2 caused “climate change:”
Headlines and armchair experts articulated with boastful confidence that the primary cause of the Canadian fires [. . .] was climate change. Despite the fact these claims are neither supported by the greater body of peer-reviewed work nor the observational record.
The actual reasons for the Canadian wildfires were the encroachment of human settlements into woodland areas—increasing the human ignition risk, decades of poor forestry management and inclement weather conditions that produced the lightening strikes which appeared to simultaneously ignite some of the fires.
Prior to the heat driven thunderstorms, Canada had been experiencing average or below average temperatures for the time of year. As Martz accurately observed:
This justifies the case that the fire weather conditions were a transient response to ongoing weather conditions which primed the environment, not a long-term pattern that could be altered by the climatic base state.
Martz reported the Canadian government’s forest burn area records from 1959 to date. Contrary to all the claims spewed out by LM disinformation agents, the records clearly show that total burn areas and fires peaked in the late 1980s. They have steadily decreased ever since. There is, once again, no correlation with increased CO2 levels nor any evidence linking the boreal wildfires to “climate change.”
Like most people who question climate alarm, Martz is concerned about the environment and recognises that the obsession with CO2 reduction does nothing to address the real environmental problems. He wrote:
Sitting on our hands and blaming climate change for every abnormal environmental event is a waste of time when our efforts would be better spent on addressing how to manage risk and mitigate vulnerabilities.
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 programme yesterday morning, some numpty—sorry, I didn’t catch her name—claimed that the seas were boiling. Because climate change … Duh! I’m sure she is a learned numpty, but seemingly clueless nonetheless.
This followed on from the usual BBC climate bunk highlighting that Florida seawater surface temperatures had achieved 37.8°C. This, we were authoritatively informed, was all caused by climate change. The Guardian piled in to ramp up the terror. That being said, Guardian columnists also think we should end farming to save the planet, so perhaps taking the Guardian’s word for anything isn’t the wisest course.
Both the BBC and the Guardian had simply parroted a story fed to them by the newswires. There was no more “journalism” than that. They investigated nothing, didn’t verify anything and just published whatever they were told to publish.
The high water temperature reading was taken from just one censor buoy in Manatee Bay, near Key Largo. Writing for WUWT, Jim Steele pointed out that the temperature reading of the same buoy had dropped to 29°C within a day. Other measurement buoys in the surrounding waters were consistently reporting much lower water temperatures. This was due to the fact that the Manatee Bay buoy floats in a sheltered, coastal “solar pond,” largely protected from cold water flows.
If CO2 propelled climate change caused the buoy reading to climb to 37.8°C, then it must have caused it to cool down again the next day. Equally, “climate change” must also be responsible for the much cooler waters surrounding Manatee Bay. This is, of course, an absurd contention. As Steele highlighted:
Clearly those water temperatures were being driven by dynamics other than rising CO2.
Clearly! So why couldn’t the LM figure that out? Are they all irretrievably stupid or is there something else going on?
As we noted earlier, weather is not climate change. Except when it’s really hot.
While it was scorching in Europe and the US, the LM regaled us with an slew of climate change fairy tales. However, as soon as the weather in the same European and US regions returned to at or below average temperatures they fell stony silent. According to LM propagandists like the Guardian, “climate change” always reverts back to weather when it is chuffin’ freezing.
Wherever we look, those who are pushing the idea that climate change threatens some sort of cataclysm just can’t stop misleading, manipulating, deceiving and propagandising. The question is why. If we accept that climate change is a concern, why do they feel the need to constantly lie about its alleged impacts?
It is never ending. Frankly, it has become infuriating. Maybe that’s the point.
Every nonsensical climate alarm story we have discussed deploys applied behavioural psychology to convince you to believe evident insanity. You are supposed to unquestioningly accept that the planet is “literally” on fire. Or, as the the UN Secretary General insists for no apparent reason, that the era of “global boiling” is upon us.
We are very close to climate lockdowns to “save the planet.” None of this has anything to do with climate change.
The only thing that is “literally” true is that the net-zero, sustainable development solution is “literal” population control. The mind-bending propaganda can only succeed if you ignore the view from your own window, which invariably reveals that it is actually pissing down.
When the farcical climate lockdowns arrive, may I suggest you dress for the weather, grab a bottle of water, and go out and enjoy yourself. What are they going to do? Lock us up in our own homes again?
I’ll see you out there.
BBC Admits to Smearing Anti-Ulez Protesters as ‘Far Right’
BY IAN PRICE | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 4, 2023
The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) has responded to complaints about its news coverage of an anti-Ulez protest in London’s Trafalgar Square on Saturday, April 15th, 2023. BBC London News broadcast at the time that:
Local protestors and mainstream politicians were joined by conspiracy theorists and Far Right groups.
I was among many people to complain at the time, disgusted at the BBC’s smear. I was at the protest myself, the first of any kind that I had attended. Since my previous exposure to similar protests – such as those against the lockdowns over the course of the pandemic – was limited to watching clips on Twitter, I was slightly anxious. Were things likely to kick off? Were the police going to ‘kettle’ us all in a side street off the Strand?
I could not have been more wrong. I was overwhelmed by how many families were there, abundant small children clambering up the bases of Landseer’s lions. There were a handful of Tory politicians some of whom spoke from the platform, but there was no other political presence whatsoever.
When I saw the BBC London news coverage, I was therefore appalled. I wasn’t too concerned about the claim that there were a few conspiracy theorists there – quite a few placard-holders were plainly ‘Team James’ – but “Far Right groups” seemed to me something for which there was no evidence at all. This appeared to be an attempt on the BBC’s part to suppress dissent towards the Ulez expansion by smearing opponents. This struck me as a sinister turn from the national broadcaster and so I complained.
On April 21st, the BBC responded to my complaint as follows:
BBC London had deployed a reporter to the protest and she witnessed, and documented, first hand, motifs on tabards and placards with explicit Nazi references, along with other epithets about world order and democracy.
I walked around the protest for about three hours on April 15th and I must have missed the explicit Nazi references, presumably displayed by the “Far Right groups”. I complained again, asking for evidence.
On May 12th the BBC rejected my additional complaint as follows:
We remain satisfied our BBC London reporter gave an honest account of what she witnessed that day.
At this point, I escalated the complaint to the ECU, one of 44 people to do so on the grounds of both accuracy and impartiality. Today the BBC acknowledged the following:
In relation to “Far Right groups”, we recognised that the [conspiracy theory] groups named above might have Far Right (or indeed Far Left) adherents, but did not consider this to be evidence of the presence of “Far Right groups”. The programme-makers directed our attention to the deployment by some demonstrators of Nazi imagery, symbolism and slogans directed against the Mayor of London which we accepted was consistent with tactics used predominantly by certain Far Right groups, but we saw no grounds for concluding that they were used exclusively by such groups. We also noted the presence of an individual who seemed, from social media postings, very likely to have been associated with the presence of a Far Right group at a previous demonstration, but the evidence fell short of establishing that he was an adherent of that group, and we saw no evidence that other representatives of the group were present. While it was clear from our dealings with the programme-makers that the statement about the presence of Far Right groups was made in good faith, we assessed the evidence differently. In our judgement it was suggestive of the presence of Far Right groups but fell short of establishing that such groups had in fact been represented among the demonstrators. This aspect of the complaint has been upheld.
This shows pretty clearly that the idea of “Far Right groups” being present at the protest was a complete fiction. Feelings are running high about Khan and some placards quite possibly likened his administrative style to infamous dictators of the past but for anyone to have spun this as evidence of “Far Right groups” is a stretch to say the least. As for the “individual who seemed, from social media postings, very likely to have been associated with the presence of a Far Right group at a previous demonstration”, the words ‘straws’ and ‘clutching’ spring to mind.
In addition to upholding the complaint about accuracy, the BBC has also partially upheld the complaint on impartiality which derives from the close resemblance of the BBC’s language in its news report to that of Khan himself at a People’s Town Hall in Ealing in March. When asked about people’s misgivings about the Ulez expansion, he said that its opponents were “in coalition with the Far Right” and “joining hands with some of those outside who are part of a Far Right group”.
The BBC has now acknowledged the “impression of bias” and upheld this part of the complaint, while spinning it as something of an accident, something that “might well have been perceived as lending a degree of corroboration to the Mayor’s comments”.
While it is a step in the right direction for the BBC to uphold two aspect of the complaints, there remain unanswered questions about its broader coverage of Ulez and to what extent its coverage is being unduly influenced by Sadiq Khan.
Consider the article in the Daily Express published on 24th June about a senior producer at the BBC that made contact with Reform U.K. London Mayoral candidate Howard Cox to blow the whistle on the BBC’s suppression of coverage critical of the Ulez expansion. (Cox, by the way, was also in attendance at the April demo but had not at that point declared as a Mayoral candidate):
The leak to Reform U.K. Mayoral candidate Howard Cox… reveals that Mr. Khan had applied pressure on the BBC over reporting the issue. It said that journalists wanting to run stories now needed top level clearance over something that is set to be a major electoral issue in the London Mayor election and general election both next year.
The Express article went on to explain email exchanges that the senior BBC producer had received:
The BBC producer was told in an email to news staff from Dan Fineman, Senior News Editor BBC South East: “If any platforms are doing a story on Ulez charges in the South and Southeast we now need to do a mandatory referral to Jason Horton or Robert Thomson (re) outstanding complaint with the Mayor of London which is very live at the moment.”
Jason Horton is the BBC’s Director of Production for BBC Local Services and Robert Thomson is Head of the BBC in London and the East. This suggests a level of collusion between very senior staff at the BBC and Sadiq Khan with a direct influence over editorial approaches to news coverage of anti-Ulez protests.
It was also reported by the whistleblower that a BBC London investigation into Ulez was now been paused because of the Mayor of London’s pressure on the BBC.
In short, Khan appears to be exercising at the very least some form of influence over the BBC’s coverage of anti-Ulez protests. This is not an “impression of bias” – this more closely resembles a real, undiluted bias against anti-Ulez campaigners on the part of the nation’s publicly-funded broadcaster at the behest of the Labour Mayor of London. The BBC has come up with a partial and grudging apology but I suspect that the truth about its willingness to suppress dissent with “Far Right” smears is more extensive than it’s prepared to admit. I hope that doesn’t make me a “conspiracy theorist”.
A Round-Up of the BBC’s Climate Howlers of the Past 12 Months
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 6, 2023
The annual Paul Homewood review of the BBC’s climate howlers is always an enjoyable read, even for those keen students who follow his investigative work during the year. But with the consensus starting to crumble for the insane Net Zero collectivist project, this latest instalment of Tall Climate Tales from the BBC seems to have attracted a wider audience. Talk TV and the Daily Express have both given extensive coverage to the latest set of BBC bloopers.
How we laughed when Julia Hartley-Brewer read from the list on her TalkTV morning show. Such as the report from the Norfolk village of Happisburgh where “extreme weather linked to climate change” has eroded the soft sand cliff rock. No mention of the finding of the British Geological Society that it is likely the Norfolk cliffs have been “eroding at the present rate for about the last 5,000 years”.
Or the report that the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season was the third most active on record. Nothing of the sort, of course, with Homewood observing that since 1851 there have been 32 years with a higher count of hurricanes. There was also an evidence-free claim in September 2022 on the BBC Verify that hurricanes were getting more powerful. The U.S. weather service NOAA states in its latest review that “there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity”.
Your own correspondent’s personal favourite made the list with news that bee-eaters had turned up in Norfolk to the delight of local twitchers. But the BBC was worried, reporting that rare ‘rainbow birds’ trying to breed in the UK was a worrying sign of how our climate is changing. It was an “unmissable sign”, no less, that the climate emergency had reached our shores. As any half-knowledgeable bird watcher could have told the BBC, bee-eaters have frequently visited England in the past. One archive alone lists 80 sightings between 1793 and 1957. Then there’s a story about trees in British cities that a study said were at risk of drought due to climate change. There is no evidence that the areas were getting drier, nor is there any evidence they will. “Once again, the BBC is uncritically presenting a controversial study as factual,” commented Homewood.
It is the common practice of the BBC to reproduce the most extreme climate claims without challenge, without providing supporting data, and without reporting on the views of scientists who disagree, writes Homewood. In fact, the practice continues almost daily. In March, the BBC said that Antarctica ocean currents were heading for collapse – “a new report warns”. The article proceeded to go into full Day After Tomorrow mode with “previous research” suggesting a slowdown in the North Atlantic current causing Europe to become colder.
Modern climate science/activism is awash with clickbait predictions looking for a suitable home in useful idiot mainstream media. As recent research from the Clintel Foundation revealed, about 42% of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate impact statements are based on a computer model that assumes temperatures will climb by 5°C in less than 80 years. Even the IPCC itself admits this is of “low likelihood”. About half the published climate papers are thought to use this 5°C input, leading to a festival of misinformation for gainfully employed journalists content to append “scientists say” to fanciful copy. The latest giant of modern science to rain on this parade is last year’s joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics Dr John Clauser, who calls the climate emergency narrative a “dangerous corruption” of science that threatens the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has “metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”, he observes.
The state broadcaster has followed this path of eco-extremism for over 20 years, providing covering fire for politicians to promote a Net Zero project. As audiences continue to decline, the BBC increasingly operates as a club of eco-fanatics intent on signally their virtue to fellow members of the cult. It fails to cover the scientific process at almost every level, discounting the views of any scientists that don’t adhere to the party political line. As with Covid, there seems to be an irrational belief in the output of computer models. Such belief leads to a preposterous acceptance that ‘attribution‘ models can link individual weather events to supposed human involvement.
As we have noted, large areas of science are now closed for debate for fear that any competing views will cast doubt on the unproven but ‘settled’ hypothesis that humans cause all or most climate change. Natural variation in the climate is largely ignored, while stories of once fanatical interest suddenly disappear from the carefully constructed catastrophe playlist. These include polar bears – more than you can shake a stick at these days – the recovery in Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet, and spectacular coral growth on the Great Barrier Reef.
In Homewood’s view, the BBC’s coverage of climate change and related policy issues such as energy “has long been of serious and widespread concern”. In his latest review, Homewood notes that all of the BBC’s factual errors could easily have been avoided with a bit of basic research. And he asks, who is editing all this “fake reporting”? Where are the highly paid executives who let all this continue? “It is apparent that nothing has changed in the last 12 months,” he says.
One more for the road – another personal favourite of mine. It was dry in February this year, despite an average amount of rainfall over the winter. Banging the drum for drought, the BBC produced a picture of an empty reservoir labelled “water levels in rivers, reservoirs and groundwater levels were abnormally low in February”. Alas, the picture showed trees in full leaf, which wasn’t surprising since it was taken in September 2021, a time when reservoirs can be seasonably low. “There’s nothing like a fake image to fool the public,” comments Homewood.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Stop Press: Paul Homewood has produced a summary of his latest report about the BBC’s climate howlers for the Express.
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Israeli rabbi says ‘kill everyone in Gaza, including babies’
The Cradle | March 24, 2024
Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of the Shirat Moshe yeshiva (religious school) in the occupied city of Jaffa, called on the Israeli army to kill everyone in Gaza, including babies.
During a conference on 8 March, Mali said that “according to the halachic principle (a religious-ethical system of legal reasoning in Judaism), all residents of Gaza must be killed.”
When asked during the conference if babies should be killed as well, he said: “The same thing. You can’t be clever with the Torah. Today he’s a baby, tomorrow he’s a fighter. There are no questions here. Today’s terrorists were previously 8-year-old children.”
“Those who create the terrorists” should also be killed, he said in reference to women in Gaza.
The Rabbi went on to explain that Israel’s war on Gaza is a “Mitzvah war,” which is defined as a war of “commandment” in Jewish tradition. According to Jewish law, this kind of war does not require permission from a “Sanhedrin,” also known as a council or assembly, such as the war against Amalek – previously declared in a biblical reference by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the start of the war on Gaza.
“There is a difference between a civilian population in other places and a civilian population in Gaza. In Gaza, according to estimates, 95 to 98 percent want us destroyed.”
“Since this is a sensitive issue, and I was told that it is being uploaded on the Internet, I want to be ahead of the curve and say that the bottom line is that you have to do exactly what is said in the IDF’s order,” Mali added.
The rabbi’s students in the Shirat Moshe yeshiva serve in the Israeli army. The Yeshiva is sponsored by the Israeli government. … Full article
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