Climate Facts or Leaps of Faith? Governments Can’t Tell the Difference
We have no hard evidence of a crisis. Only expert opinion and best estimates.
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | February 17, 2021
Governments are currently fighting climate change to the tune of billions. For this to make sense, each idea in the following chain of reasoning needs to be bulletproof:
#1 – scientists know there’s a climate crisis
#2 – scientists know it’s humanity’s fault
#3 – scientists know we can alleviate the crisis by changing our behaviour
But each of these amounts to a leap of faith. Let’s start with the conviction that something unusual is going on. This planet is more than 4 billion years old. The climate was marching to its own drummer long before humans appeared. It has changed numerous times – sometimes gradually, sometimes violently. Twenty thousand years ago, much of North America was covered by ice.
Because humans weren’t recording and analyzing those billions of years of climatic history, today’s scientists have no way of knowing if anything unusual is going on now.
They can surmise. They can speculate. They can extrapolate. But they have no smoking gun. I’ve written two books about the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That organization says it’s “extremely likely that more than half” of the global warming between 1951 and 2010 was caused by human activity. It talks about its “best estimate.”
click to enlarge; source here
Please note the startling imprecision here: Extremely likely. More than half. Best estimate. These aren’t facts. They’re educated guesses. They’re opinion. It’s absolutely crucial that we grasp this point: the IPCC has no hard evidence of a crisis. It has no math that can be examined and verified. It has only expert opinion. Estimates.
If you choose to take this leap of faith, you’re immediately invited to take another – to embrace the notion that the alleged climate crisis was triggered by human activity. As I’ve just outlined, the IPCC can’t prove this. It merely believes humans caused more than half of the warming over a 60-year period. That’s a long way from demonstrating clear human responsibility for imminent catastrophe.
On these two decisive questions – is there really a climate problem, and are humans really to blame – the IPCC has nothing definitive to contribute. Governments have, nevertheless, taken these leaps of faith.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that scientists are fallible. Like the rest of us, they know a great deal about their own field, but can be surprisingly misinformed about broader trends. Like the rest of us, they are susceptible to groupthink. Many IPCC personnel subscribe to a belief system that regards human activities as unnatural and therefore automatically threatening to the natural world. But belief systems are not proof.
Leap of faith #3 – the idea that humanity can fix whatever is currently going on with the climate – is equally dubious. Even if something alarming is happening, even if it is our fault, that doesn’t mean it lies within our power to influence, interrupt, or steer the powerful natural forces that have already been set in motion. It certainly doesn’t mean there’s only one sure-fire, anointed fix – slashing greenhouse gas emissions.
Governments are obsessed with greenhouse gases because they signed a UN treaty back in 1992. Long before the IPCC had produced its multi-thousand-page reports the cart was put before the horse. The UN – a political body – decreed that human-generated emissions were a problem that governments should do something about. The IPCC has struggled ever since to build a scientific case in support of that position.
No one actually knows whether reducing emissions will work. No one knows how long it might take to ‘stabilize’ the climate via this means. Yet governments are piling on the carbon taxes. Year after year, they divert billions away from healthcare and education to fight climate change with ever-expanding emissions reduction policies.
In 1992, the UK was led by John Major, Germany was led by Helmut Kohl, America was led by George H.W. Bush, and France was led by Francois Mitterrand. The Internet barely existed in 1992, the founding of Google was still years away.
That treaty belongs to a different era. There is no shame in walking away from outdated, 30-year-old thinking.
Truth Slips Out in Coronavirus Vaccine Deaths ‘Fact Check’?
By Adam Dick | February 17, 2021
The big money media that have been working for a year to stir up maximum fear of coronavirus have been taking the opposite tack regarding coronavirus vaccines. These experimental vaccines, which are not even vaccines under the normal understanding of what qualifies as a vaccine, rushed to the public without the regular testing, the big money media insists, are safe and should be taken by everyone.
Yet, even in this Pollyanna coverage of the experimental vaccines, occasionally the truth slips out.
On February 3, ABC News ran an article by Stephanie Widmer titled “Fact-check: No link between COVID-19 vaccines and those who die after receiving them.” The main thrust of the article is that all the people who die after taking the experimental coronavirus vaccines would have died anyway: The vaccine never caused the death no matter how soon the death occurred after a person received a shot or how out of the blue and strange the circumstances of the death. The deaths are all just a coincidence, the article suggests. Plenty of people — around 8,000 people according to the article — die each day in America, you know.
This seems like some fanciful thinking. And the thinking is the opposite of the thinking employed in attributing deaths to coronavirus. With coronavirus, the presumption generally employed by government and big money media in America is that coronavirus is the killer if a person who tested positive for coronavirus dies, no matter what other health problems he had and irrespective of coronavirus tests producing many false positive results.
Still, there is some value in this ABC News article for people not interested in reading yet another big money media article promoting everyone having an experimental vaccine injected into his arm. Around halfway through the article is a sentence that suggests something much less fanciful to explain the conclusion that the experimental coronavirus vaccines kill nobody. The article states. “Every time someone gets sick or dies shortly after getting a vaccine, government agencies investigate to ensure there’s no link.” Is this the truth slipping out?
Copyright © 2021 Ron Paul Institute
A Doctor’s View About the New mRNA Vaccines
By Thomas Siler | American Thinker | February 15, 2021
It’s important to know both what we know about the new vaccines and what we don’t know.
I’ve practiced for 35 years. I am always honest with my patients, even if conversations are difficult or confrontational. I will also be honest about saying “I don’t know.” This happens when a diagnosis is not readily apparent or when there are limits to the help I can give. With the passage of time, I’ve learned that what we don’t know about medicine outweighs what we do know.
I’ve always been a proponent of older, more established vaccines. However, they are imperfect and, like all medical treatments, can have side effects. Unfortunately, in the conversation about the new COVID-19 vaccines, the tenets of honesty and a willingness to admit ignorance are being compromised.
Operation Warp Speed was remarkable, but it leaves an uncomfortable question: Is it a good thing to rush a vaccine (or medicine) to the public without the usual safeguards? Operation Warp Speed might be a great business objective or military goal, but is it great for a medical treatment?
The pharmaceutical industry, government health authorities, and the media insist the new vaccines are safe and effective. While the initial results are promising, this is not the whole truth. Both honesty and acknowledging ignorance require answering a few questions.
What do we know about the new TYPE of vaccine being given?
Pfizer and Moderna were the first COVID-19 vaccines to be approved. Both use a new technology called mRNA vaccine, which has never been broadly given to a human population to prevent any disease.
Let that sink in for a moment.
All previous vaccines take a weakened virus or a piece of the virus and inject it into humans to induce an immune response sufficient to prevent a disease. Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines inject mRNA, which is a protein code that instructs the body to make a part of COVID-19’s spike protein that will then induce an immune response.
Our bodies daily use our own mRNA to carry instructions from DNA to make various proteins the body uses. While this new vaccine science sounds intriguing, it has never been tried in humans in this scope. It may be a breathtaking scientific advancement heralding a new path for all vaccines. It may also be less effective or have currently unknown side effects.
Is the mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 safe?
So far, the limited study of the vaccines approved for emergency use (one major study for each vaccine approved) has shown some short-term side effects. The vaccine is a two-shot series and side effects were prominent after the second shot. Side effects were more common if the recipient was younger than 65 years old.
Side effects
Pain at the injection site has usually gone away in 4-5 days. The other side effects resolve, on average, in 2-3 days.
Early reports after giving the vaccine have also included allergic reactions ranging from mild to a few cases of anaphylaxis (serious allergic reaction). Allergy may be to mRNA itself or the lipid nanoparticles/PEG vehicle it is housed in. The long-term side effects are not currently known, as the main study length and follow up have only been four months.
Is the mRNA vaccine effective?
In the main study from Pfizer’s vaccine, 8/17,000 patients got symptomatic COVID-19 in the treatment group during the short follow up. In the placebo group, 162/17,000 patients got symptomatic COVID-19 during the study time. There was also a trend towards those getting the vaccine having a less severe disease and needing less hospitalization.
The Moderna study had 30,000 patients split into treatment and placebo arms. In the vaccine group, 11/15,000 patients came down with COVID-19. In the placebo group, 185/15,000 patients came down with COVID-19.
It was hard to ascertain death avoidance in these small studies. However, the two initial studies are favorable and show a 95% efficacy. Now that more information about the studies is known, Peter Doshi, associate editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote an editorial that the true efficacy may be much lower because the study excluded people with COVID-19 symptoms but a negative test and other factors.
How long does immunity last?
This is unknown. Injected mRNA goes away in days, but it is thought that the immune response will be long lasting. Whether patients will need boosters at some point is not known.
What about mutations in the COVID-19 virus? Will the vaccine still work?
Viruses always mutate and scientists following COVID-19 estimate it mutates, on average, twice a month. Most of these mutations are minor and will likely not change the vaccine effectiveness. These mutations also usually do not make the virus more deadly.
What is antibody dependent enhancement?
COVID-19 is in the family of Coronavirus that causes the common cold. The pharmaceutical industry has been trying without success for the last two decades to make a vaccine against the common cold. A safe vaccine against the common cold would make some company a lot of money!
One problem in the animal studies on coronavirus family vaccines was “antibody dependent enhancement.” When animals were inoculated, they developed a robust immune response, which is a good result.
However, when the animals were later exposed to the coronavirus against which they were vaccinated, their immune system went into overdrive, and they developed an overwhelming, fatal immune response called a “cytokine storm.” Fatal cytokine storms also happened to some COVID-19 patients when their infection was severe.
Human responses do not always correlate to animal responses. So far, there have been no signs that humans have a cytokine storm when exposed to COVID-19 after receiving the vaccine. Obviously, this would be catastrophic for any vaccine.
Should we be concerned about other long term side effects from mRNA vaccines?
A concern that deserves mention is the possibility that a cross-reaction and immunity to other parts of the spike protein could cause auto-immune disease or other problems.
A former Pfizer VP, Dr. Michael Yeadon, who has over 30 years of experience in immunology and drug research, filed a Stay of Action petition with the European Medicine Agency (like our FDA) to halt the trials of mRNA vaccines over concerns it might affect sterility in women.
Yeadon is worried that the mRNA vaccine was coded for a region of the spike protein that was similar to Syncytin-1, which is a protein that is essential for the development of the placenta. If a woman’s body makes antibodies to this protein, she could become sterile when vaccinated for COVID-19. This is a theory, not a proven fact, and no one has studied it. Yeadon’s insistence on more studies to make sure this will not happen seems reasonable.
What to make of all these concerns?
Medicine is always about a risk/benefit analysis, subject to the first maxim of “do no harm.” Usually, new medicines or new vaccines are used only after multiple studies show over long periods of time (for vaccines, at least five years) prove they’re safe and better than the older treatments.
While the new mRNA vaccines have good initial results and may be a breakthrough, they should be viewed as experimental and would best be used in high-risk patients (older patients or those with health conditions raising COVID-19 mortality) until we know more. Patients should receive extensive informed consent to understand the risks and benefits. Patients also need to know that if they have a serious complication, Congress already protected the pharmaceutical companies from litigation around emergency vaccines.
The mantra of “safe and effective” is not only incomplete, but it also ignores other pathways out of the pandemic. For healthy people, early outpatient treatments are being developed to treat COVID-19. These would be a safer option than taking an experimental vaccine. Young people (<60 years old) who have very low mortality from COVID-19 should approach getting the new vaccine as if they were consenting to be in an experimental trial of a new vaccine.
Our history shows there are good reasons why new medicines and vaccines are not rushed into widespread use until we have multiple studies and time to assess the safety and efficacy of the new treatments. If the death rate from COVID-19 were much higher, it might make the risks acceptable to try an experimental vaccine. Given that the COVID-19 death rate is a little higher than a bad flu, my opinion is that younger and healthier people need a more rigorous risk/benefit analysis before taking the mRNA vaccines.
Leaked Tape: Zuckerberg Told Facebook Employees ‘Vaccines Modify DNA and RNA’
Rules for thee, but not for me?
21rst CENTURY WIRE | FEBRUARY 17, 2021
This latest reveal leaves many asking the question: while his social media platform aggressively censors anyone asking legitimate questions regarding the safety and efficacy of corporate pharmaceutical products, will Mark Zuckerberg and his family will be taking the new experimental mRNA vaccine?
In new leaked tape from Project Veritas reveals how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promoted his own ‘anti-vax’ position to his companies staff, which according to his own draconian rules, would be in violation of his own platform’s latest censorship policy update.
How deadly is COVID19?
By Dr Malclm Kendrick | February 17, 2021
I have spent large chunks of my life trying to untangle medial data and research. COVID19 has long since defeated me. I have been unable to make any sense of the information we are bombarded with daily. So, I decided to go back to basics.
At the start of the COVID19 saga, I was interested to know what the infection fatality rate (IFR) was likely to be. I felt I could then have a go at comparing it to other diseases, primarily influenza.
The infection fatality is the number of people infected with the virus who then die. This is very different to the case fatality rate (CFR), which is the number of people infected with the disease who become unwell enough (sometimes, but not always) to be admitted to hospital – the ‘cases’. Who then die.
Before COVID19 appeared, there used to be a reasonably clear distinction between the infection fatality rate (IFR), and the case fatality fate (CFR) and it is important that they should not get mixed up. Because the case fatality rate is almost always far higher than the infection fatality rate – as you would expect. People who are ill enough to go into hospital are far more likely to die than people who do not suffer any symptoms. Bear this in mind.
Another thing to bear in mind is that, at the start of any epidemic it is simpler to establish the case fatality rate, because most people who are seriously ill end up in hospital and/or will have tests to see if they have the disease in question. Those with no symptoms may never cross the path of a medical professional and are very unlikely to be tested.
What is the ratio between the two? It depends on the virus. With Ebola the infection fatality rate and case fatality rate are closely matched – more than fifty per cent of people who are infected, die. With the common ‘coronavirus’ cold, the spread is far wider, maybe a hundred to one, or a thousand to one – perhaps more.
The fact that most infections are never noted, is one of the reasons why the infection fatality rate for previous flu epidemics can vary so wildly from paper to paper. However, with influenza the CFR/IFR ratio has generally been estimated to be about ten to one. By which I mean that, for each ten infections, one will be severe, and it is amongst the severe infections that you get the deaths.
Armed with such knowledge, and assuming COVID19 had a similar case: infection ratio to influenza you could have a go at working out the infection fatality rate. Always bearing in mind that people with no symptoms, who are not tested, are very unlikely to appear in any figures.
You are always guessing – to some degree or another.
However, you always know three things:
1: The infection fatality rate must always be lower than the case fatality rate.
2: The case fatality rate will appear to fall as less severely infected people are tested.
3: The infection fatality rate will also appear to fall as more people with no symptoms are found to have had the infection.
For example, in China, at the start of the COVID19 pandemic, the infection fatality rate was reported to be three to four per-cent. This rapidly fell. Then it went up a bit, then it fell, then it went up. Then, everyone started giving different figures. The highly influential Imperial College group, led by Professor Neil Ferguson, decided to use an infection fatality rate of 0.9% for their modelling.
Somewhat later on, John Ioannidis, an influential figure in the world of medical research, estimated the infection fatality rate to be 0.27%. This was a couple of months after the Imperial College figure was published 1.
Peter Gotzsche, who established the highly regarded Nordic Cochrane collaboration, put the figure even lower than this. He looked at a study in Denmark, where blood donors were tested for antibodies. Using these data, the researchers established an infection fatality rate of 0.16% 2. Other figures came in higher, some lower.
The most tested population in the World – per head of population – is Iceland. Last time I looked, Iceland had 6,033 ‘cases,’ and twenty-nine deaths. This represents a case fatality rate of 0.5%, which suggests an infection fatality rate of 0.05% 3.
However, these figures I am quoting from Iceland come from a time after everything changed. At some point, difficult to put an exact date on this, it was decreed that if you had a positive PCR COVID19 test, with or without symptoms, you were to be defined as a case. No matter if you had symptoms, or not. This had the result of making the infection fatality rate, and case fatality rate, the same thing. Suddenly, all cases are infections, and all infections are cases.
Which means that any comparisons of the infection fatality rate with COVID19, and other diseases became virtually meaningless. The infection fatality rate suddenly shot up to match the case fatality rate, which point I gave up trying to work out the infection fatality rate. I doubly gave up when I tried to find out the accuracy of the PCR tests. Were these tests over-diagnosing, or under-diagnosing?
So, I thought I would turn my attention to the population fatality rate instead. That is, how many people has COVID19 killed in a population, or country. This figure is the bald, unvarnished, death rate. It does not, necessarily, tell you how many people have been infected. It does not tell you the percentage of cases, that die. It simply tells you how many people have died… with COVID19 written somewhere on their death certificate. [Or even not written on their death certificate]
At present, in the UK, the total number who have died is one hundred and seventeen thousand. This represents a population death rate of 0.17%. if you knew how many people had been infected, in total, you could work out the infection fatality rate from this. But we don’t know how many people were infected, and now we never will. Because so many people are now being vaccinated. They will show antibodies, and it will not be known if that is because of an infection, or due to vaccination.
So, where to turn to next. If you look at the entire world, the current figure of COVID19 deaths, on the fourteenth of February, stood at 2,406,689 3. Which is a little over one in three thousand, or 0.033%. How many people in the world have been infected? Nobody knows that answer to this question. There are some countries that have done very little testing, others far more.
On the basis that there are so many questions, with very few clear-cut answers, I thought I would try to compare the two point four million figure with previous influenza epidemics.
A study was done in 2016, looking at the influenza epidemic of 1957 – one of the worst in recent history. They extrapolated the mortality figures from 1957 to 2005, because the World’s population doubled during that time period (I am not entirely sure why they chose 2005). Their conclusion was that a flu epidemic of similar magnitude to that of 1957 could kill two point seven million people.
‘In conclusion, our study fills a gap in the availability of global mortality estimates for historical influenza pandemics, which can help guide pandemic planning. Our model extrapolates 2.7 million influenza-related deaths (95% CI, 1.6 million–3.4 million deaths) should a virus of similar severity to the 1957 pandemic influenza A(H2N2) virus return in the 2005 population, which is intermediate between global estimates for the 2009 pandemic (0.3 million–0.4 million deaths and a devastating 1918-like pandemic (62 million deaths; range, 51 million–81 million deaths)’ 4.
Extrapolating onwards to 2020, where the population is significantly greater than in 2005, then the figure from the 1957 epidemic would now be just over three million deaths. Which means that, up to this point COVID19 has been thirty per-cent less deadly than the influenza epidemic of 1957 – per head of population.
If the Imperial College infection fatality rate of 0.9% is accurate, once around eighty per cent of the world’s population has been infected [at which point population wide immunity would be reached] we should see fifty-four million deaths. We are currently nowhere near that figure, and at the current rate of deaths, per year, it will take twenty-two and a half years to reach the fifty-four million figure.
Of course, people will argue that this outbreak is far from over, and millions more will certainly die. Yes, more people will die, but the current number of new cases and deaths is falling pretty rapidly worldwide, rather than rising. We may reach three million, we may not. It is exceedingly hard to believe we would ever have reached fifty-four million even without any vaccines.
So, how deadly is COVID19? It seems, so far, to be equivalent to a bad flu pandemic. Worse than most in recent times. However, it seems to have had an extremely variable impact.
In Singapore, there have been nearly sixty thousand ‘cases’ and twenty-nine deaths. A case fatality rate of around one in two thousand, or 0.02%. The UK has had four million cases and one hundred and seven thousand deaths. A case fatality rate of 3%. Therefore, if you get COVID19 you are one hundred and fifty times more likely to die of it in the UK, than in Singapore 3.
Yes, I went back to basics and the figures still didn’t make any sense.
1: https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf
2: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4509/rr
America’s future is in the hands of inept cretins while creativity and innovation are needed more than ever
By Helen Buyniski | RT | February 16, 2021
The US’ future looks grim indeed in the face of a ‘Great Reset’ proposed by the same powers that steered it into a deadly economic quagmire. Why are Americans allowing those who broke their world the privilege of ‘fixing’ it?
Americans with more power and connections than sense have rushed forward over the last year, attempting to seize the right to ‘fix’ a society broken by shockingly stupid responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entire generations are being rendered suicidally depressed, unemployable, hopelessly alienated, and worse, while the likelihood that the current generation of children will mature into functional adults is rapidly shrinking. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for such a heterogenous population, and this moment calls for an unprecedented degree of creativity and imagination if we are to survive as a society.
So why are those most victimized by this system running into the arms of the same crew of unimaginative, solipsistic sociopaths who have repeatedly wrecked society in the first place? Whether it’s the ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks who asset-stripped the American middle class in 2008, overloading the country’s already fragile social safety net and driving a stake through the heart of the once-achievable American Dream, or the World Economic Forum, a breeding ground for selfish and self-interested corporate hacks who just want to fly their private jets in peace with the option to lecture the ground-bound hoi polloi on their carbon usage, those who’ve put themselves in charge are precisely the wrong ones for the job.
Indeed, the WEF – whose conveniently-timed book Covid 19: The Great Reset surfaced just in time to be seized upon by world governments as a supposedly better-than-nothing playbook for lifting humanity out of a mess even its writers admitted wasn’t nearly as disastrous as it seemed – was the first to claim experimental sovereignty over the poor unfortunates its leaders consigned to misery. Acknowledging they were putting humanity through the largest psychological experiment in history, one which technically violates the Geneva Convention and Nuremberg Code given that informed consent from its experimental test subjects was never obtained, is perhaps the worst possible messiah substitute to lead humanity into a brighter future.
Certainly, no one elected the WEF to guide Americans through the troubled times its members have largely created. The US is trapped in an identity crisis, crushed between the media establishment’s portrait of Our Democracy™ having narrowly escaped orange-tinted fascism and a newly-inaugurated administration that literally admitted to stealing the election on the front cover of Time Magazine. Joe Biden’s administration has claimed for itself the right to ‘Build Back Better’, its plagiarism-prone president once again ripping off his battle cry, this time from the World Economic Forum itself. A scriptwriter who submitted such an on-the-nose screenplay to their producer would be fired on the spot, yet Americans are expected to live with it.
Far from ushering in a golden age of democracy, Biden and his henchmen have held the reins of power in Washington for decades, bringing nothing but suffering to the American people. Despite his cabinet’s swaddling the iron fist of neoliberalism in warm fuzzy buzzwords like “inclusion” and “sustainability,” Biden himself is in large part responsible for the Patriot Act, which stripped American citizens of their most important constitutional rights. He also authored the 1994 crime bill that set up mandatory minimum sentencing for minor drug infractions, funneling tens of thousands of mostly black men into lifetime prison sentences. While he’s finally admitted the latter was a “mistake,” he nevertheless tried to dodge responsibility for having written the disastrous legislation by blaming individual states for how they implemented it. Expecting him to lead Americans into a bright new future is like expecting immaculate table manners from a starving grizzly bear.
Barely unable to keep from gibbering and squealing about a proposed new plan to tackle “domestic extremism,” Biden and his diversity all-stars – whose diversity stops at skin level as they march in ideological lockstep – are as much a menace to American society as the WEF member corporations pulling their strings behind the scenes. Americans seem helplessly caught in the vicious cycle of an abusive relationship, unable to flee the “devils they know” despite full awareness they will come away from their next encounter with a black eye (or an empty bank account, or utter social collapse). Embracing the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ – a future of “fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity,” according to the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab, who further clarified this involves technology that can “intrude into the hitherto private space of our minds, reading our thoughts and influencing our behavior” – is perhaps the worst possible future humanity could enter. Yet we are sleepwalking into precisely this outcome, unaware that we have any other options.
Even as Americans emerge from the fear-based fog that has consumed them for the better part of a year, they’re still – whether they know it or not – following the directions of the same class of authority figures that led them into this mess in the first place. But these figures have no idea what they’re doing any more than those who are merely following their “leaders” out of habit. Why, having suffered so under the leadership of these utterly worthless figures, would they continue to follow? There is no precedent among the current generation for the economic collapse that has seized the US and no evidence that the WEF, or a wildly incompetent presidential administration, or corona czar and resounding failure Dr. Anthony Fauci, have any idea what to do about it.
At this point, diverging from the dysfunctional and downright deadly paths forged by these repulsive figures is not even a matter of making the right choice – it is a matter of survival.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Telegram.
NY Times’s Klein Ponders Having to ‘Dim the Sun’ to Fight Climate Change
By Joseph Vazquez | NewsBusters | February 10th, 2021
The New York Times has taken eco-nuttiness to a new level by publishing a podcast speculating whether the solution to fighting climate change will include — wait for it — dimming the sun.
Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein took his new interview podcast of global warming fearmonger Elizabeth Kolbert and turned it into an op-ed. Klein began his piece with a creepy quote from environmentalist Stewart Brand, “‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’” He later spewed that one solution he was obsessed with for fighting climate change was “solar geoengineering … Are we really going to dim the sun?” [Emphasis added.]
Klein’s predominant disagreement with Brand was that he was “overly optimistic. We did not get good at [being gods]. We are terrible at it, and the consequences surround us.” In effect, according to Klein, we should consider that we may end up having no other choice than to be “gods” and “dim the sun.”
“Dim[ming] the sun” sounds about as realistic as when climate change extremists were advocating for “melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot” to stave off global cooling in the 1970s. The idea is also just as crazy as when George Soros-funded economist Mariana Mazzucato raised the possibility of a global “climate lockdown” if the world didn’t undergo a “green economic transformation.”
Klein had to quickly defend his position on the possibility of dimming out the thing that makes life possible on Earth by scolding people who only want comfortable solutions:
[A]ny reasonable analysis of the mismatch between our glacial politics and our rapidly warming planet demands that we deny ourselves the luxury of only contemplating the solutions we would prefer. With every subsequent day that our politics fails, the choices that we will need to make in the future become worse.
The transcript of Klein’s interview with Kolbert was just downright scary:
Ezra Klein: You have a wonderful quote in the geoengineering chapter of your book from Andy Parker, who is a project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative. He says, ‘We live in a world where deliberately dimming the [expletive] sun might be less risky than not doing it.’ That feels like quite an indictment of the human race and where we’ve gotten ourselves to with all our knowledge and all our power.
Elizabeth Kolbert: I think that does sort of sum things up. We are in this very deep — there are only wrong answers, only hard choices at this point. Nothing easy from here on in.
Ezra Klein: What do you think of geoengineering?
Elizabeth Kolbert: I very consciously avoided coming down very clearly on that. But some very, very smart people are thinking about it and are very worried that it may be our best option at a certain point. And I think they may, unfortunately, be right — but wow, it’s dimming the [expletive] sun, you know?
How the Gates Foundation seeded America’s COVID-19 policy catastrophes
By Jordan Schachtel | The Dossier | February 16, 2021
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is finally facing the heat for his botched and criminally negligent coronavirus response policies, yet no one seems to be asking why Cuomo and select governors made the fateful decisions that led to the excess deaths — and the coverup campaigns — of tens of thousands of senior citizens in New York and elsewhere across the United States.
After being awarded an Emmy and writing a book on his supposedly heroic response to the pandemic, Cuomo is finally receiving the very necessary inquiries into his handling of the crisis. Cuomo is perhaps the most egregious example of abuse and neglect (given his refusal to use the Javits Center or a Navy hospital ship), he is far from the only governor who executed the “nursing home death warrants.” Governor Cuomo was accompanied by the governors of California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere.
The common thread seen in the United States is the delegation of state policy to prediction modeling forecasts from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a Washington State-based institution that is wholly controlled and funded (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars) by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In March and early April, politicians were informed by the modeling “experts” at Gates-funded IHME that their hospitals were about to be completely overrun by coronavirus patients. Modelers from IHME claimed this massive surge would cause hospitals to run out of lifesaving equipment in a matter of days, not weeks or months. Time was of the essence, and now was the time for rapid decision making, the modelers claimed.
On two separate April 1 and April 2 press conferences, Cuomo made clear that his policy decisions were based off of the IHME model.
“There is a group that is funded by the Gates Foundation. Thank you very much Bill Gates,” Cuomo said on April 1 in discussing ICU needs and how he was using Gates models to make other healthcare policy decisions.
“There’s only one model that we look at that has the number of projected deaths which is the IHME model which is funded by the Gates Foundation,” Cuomo said on April 2, adding, “and we thank the Gates Foundation for the national service that they’ve done.”
In an April 9 briefing, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer referred to the IHME model in order to project deaths and the PPE resources needed for the supposed surge.
It was the same story with the government of Pennsylvania. The PA Health Department exclusively uses IHME models to forecast coronavirus outcomes.
Governor Phil Murphy, another nursing home death warrant participant, used IHME models to navigate the state’s policy response.
It wasn’t just state governors relying on this data, federal bureaucrats Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, both of whom have substantial ties to the Gates network, used the IHME COVID-19 forecasting models (which Birx endorsed specifically as the best prediction modeling outfit) to make policy recommendations to states. In her White House briefings, Birx, who simultaneously had a seat on the board of a Gates-funded institution, almost exclusively relied on IHME models to project outcomes.
These models, and the policy decisions that were made by relying on them, set off a chain of events that led to indefinite lockdowns, complete business closures, statewide curfews, and most infamously, the nursing home death warrants.
States across the nation went to extremes, resorting to full bunker mode while waiting for bodies to start dropping in the streets, but the IHME modeling never panned out. Hospital capacity was never threatened. Most states that had created “surge capacity” pop-up health care centers never even used these facilities. IHME, for its part, regularly “adjusts” its models, and has never acknowledged their routine failures to forecast outcomes.
Bill Gates has never discussed the catastrophic failures of his prized “health metrics” forecasting organization, and how it has contributed to the suffering of millions of Americans. Instead, he has seamlessly washed his hands of COVID mania, and has moved on to demanding that the western world sacrifice itself in the name of the latest “crisis” that is climate change.
Bill Gates: Rich nations should shift entirely to synthetic beef In his new book, “How to Avoid a #Climate Disaster,” Microsoft cofounder lays out tech breakthroughs and sweeping policies we’ll need to take on global warming. #vegan #animals #sentientism 
In December, however, Melinda Gates acknowledged that “we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts “ of demanding that people stay locked in their houses indefinitely, among other policy requests demanded by Gates Inc.
The IHME models that demanded lockdowns and other insane restrictions relied entirely on sketchy COVID-19 data coming from the city of Wuhan, China. The early statistics concerning deaths, hospitalizations, and overall age stratification have not come close to matching the actual data on the virus. For example, IHME used a 3+% death rate when the real number *from* COVID-19 is only around 0.1%. IHME’s risk projections, which they presented as sound science, were all incredibly overinflated.
The buck does indeed stop with the elected leaders who made the fateful decisions to send sick COVID patients into nursing homes, lock down their states, and mask up their citizens in perpetuity, but that’s only half of the story. The bad data they used almost exclusively came from the Gates network, which has trafficked in pseudoscience and has demonstrated complete incompetence and reckless forecasting since the beginning of last year.
The Hague court sides with activists, tells Dutch government to IMMEDIATELY lift ‘illegitimate’ curfew
RT | February 16, 2021
The Dutch government has been told by the court to reverse its coronavirus pandemic curfew after The Hague ruled there was no legal basis for it and called it an infringement on people’s rights.
In a statement, The Hague declared that the government’s use of the Extraordinary Powers of Civil Authority Act – an emergency act which allows the state to bypass the legislative process to impose a curfew in “very urgent and exceptional circumstance” – was not justified in this case during the Covid-19 crisis.
“The Preliminary Relief Judge ruled that the introduction of the curfew did not involve the special urgency required to be able to make use of the [act],” the Hague continued, noting that the government had had time to discuss such a curfew beforehand, before ruling that “the use of this law to impose curfew is not legitimate.”
“The curfew is a far-reaching violation of the right to freedom of movement and privacy and (indirectly) limits, among other things, the right to freedom of assembly and demonstration.”
The country’s Justice Ministry says it is now studying the ruling.
After the Dutch government imposed the curfew on January 23, citizens were legally required to stay home between the hours of 9pm and 4:30am unless they had a valid excuse, and they were warned that they could face fines if they refused to do so.
Valid excuses to go outside during the curfew included emergencies, essential work, to seek medical assistance, and to walk a dog on a lead.
The Hague’s decision was made after a group known as the Virus Truth Foundation filed a lawsuit arguing that the curfew was an infringement on human rights and the Dutch constitution.
The Netherlands experienced several nights of rioting over the curfew, which resulted in burnt cars, looted business, clashes with police, and hundreds of arrests.
UC Berkeley Reverses Its Absurd Ban On Outdoor Exercise
By Thomas Lifson | AmericanThinker | February 15, 2021
Five days after instituting an embarrassing ban on students exercising outdoors, the University of California, Berkeley, reversed itself and reinstated the ability of 2000 students isolated in dorm rooms to leave them for the purpose of exercise. Angela Ruggiero of the San Jose Mercury-News reported Friday, Feb. 12:
UC Berkeley has reversed a ban on students exercising outdoors that was imposed earlier this week after a rise in coronavirus cases on campus.
About 2,000 students isolated in their dorm rooms will now be allowed to exercise outside again, Cal announced on Friday afternoon. However, students are still under a strict lockdown imposed Feb. 1 that is in effect until Monday. The exercise ban went into effect this week, along with stricter restrictions as the university saw a rise in daily coronavirus cases.
“New positive COVID-19 cases have slowed and as a result we are permitting some limited additional activities for students who are in self-sequester,” read an email sent out to students Friday.
Only those that are not under isolation or quarantine may leave their door rooms to exercise outside during daylight hours, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Student athletes also may now leave to practice as directed and monitored by Cal Athletics.
The exercise ban had followed on and strengthened an earlier ban on leaving dorm rooms had been imposed Feb 1, and extended on Feb 8.
The exercise ban made national and international headlines, and elicited surprise, laughter and even scorn.
“‘Even prisoners get to exercise!’ UC Berkeley bans solo outdoor exercise for dorm-bound students,” headlined RT.
Campus authorities may have been embarrassed when The University of Pittsburgh published a report the day before the ban was reversed that headlined,
“COVID-Related Depression Linked to Reduced Physical Activity”
New research from the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and University of California, San Diego, found that 61% of surveyed university students were at risk of clinical depression, a value twice the rate prior to the pandemic. This rise in depression came alongside dramatic shifts in lifestyle habits.
“Our findings indicate the pandemic has led to a dramatic increase in the rate of anxiety and depression among young adults, especially among college students. It’s disheartening to see, since it’s been well-documented, even before the pandemic, that university-age young adults are reported as experiencing more mental health issues than previous generations,” said Osea Giuntella, assistant professor of economics at Pitt and research co-author.
There is no Hippocratic Oath for campus bureaucrats, but if there were, the injunction “First, do no harm” would certainly apply to the exercise ban. The survival rate for people in their 20s, which would include nearly all students living on dormitories, is in the upper reaches of the 99th percentile, while, the effects of depression, including suicide, are severe.
The University claimed its initial ban and subsequent strengthening, and then 5 days later loosening of it, were based on a “spike” in on-campus cases:
UC Berkeley saw a spike of 164 cases the week of Jan. 31, including 154 undergraduate students, according to the university’s coronavirus dashboard. The number of cases has dropped to 84 this week, as of the latest data on Thursday, when 19 more people tested positive on campus. From Sept. 10 to Thursday of this week, the university has seen a total of 757 positive cases.
But an examination of the dashboard reveals that it counts any positive test result as a case:
The dashboard shows the number of positive cases for tests performed at UHS. It does not include saliva tests that were performed through the Innovative Genomics Institute’s FAST Study.
This appears to go against the WHO’s change in its definition of a case that was announced one hour after President Biden was inaugurated:
The guidance warned against diagnosing someone as having the virus just because he tests positive if he does not present with symptoms of COVID-19. It also warned about the high risk of false positives: “The cycle threshold (Ct) needed to detect virus is inversely proportional to the patient’s viral load. Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology.”
“As disease prevalence decreases, the risk of false positive increases. The probability that a person who has a positive result (SARS-CoV-2 detected) is truly infected with SARS-CoV-2 decreases as prevalence decreases, irrespective of the claimed specificity,” the WHO continued.
The University’s own dashboard reveals that the rate of positive tests on campus is lower than in the surrounding City of Berkeley, where people freely shop and move about.
(source)
There doesn’t appear to be a lot of science behind the drastic restrictions on students at Cal Berkeley, as locals call it. Did the campus bureaucrats panic?
The University of California, Berkeley has a solid claim to worldwide standing as one of the leading producers of scientific research in the world. No fewer than ten Nobel laureates (all in the hard sciences and economics) currently teach on its faculty, including two 2020 laureates. But the University’s draconian reaction to the Covid has embarrassed it and diminished its luster.
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Fanatical Followers of the Covid Regime: A Jim Jones-Style Cult?
By Professor Roger Watson and Dr. Niall McCrae | The Daily Sceptic | November 15, 2021
As scholars at leading British universities over recent decades, we witnessed the replacement of critical thinking and debate by narrative: facts are discrimination and scientific method is imperialism; truth, instead, is derived from ‘progressive’ values. This educational trend may be a major contributory factor to the ease in which society has been inculcated to the Covid ‘new normal’ of masking, testing, and repeated doses of vaccines for a disease of similar risk to severe influenza.
One doesn’t need much critical reasoning to observe the flawed logic of some vaccination enthusiasts, such as people who respond to experiencing any side effects, however debilitating, by saying “at least I know it’s working”, or, after contracting the disease despite their promised inoculation (over 90% effective, according to initial drug company claims), “I’d have been worse off without the jab.” … continue
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- Met Office Caught Fabricating Daily Temperature Record Claims
- Merck Virologists Admitted to Falsely Certifying Vaccine Efficacy
- Mandatory Folic Acid for every man, woman & child
- Pro-Palestine protesters arrested outside UK’s ruling Labour Conference in Liverpool
- Mauritius denies landing permit to flight from Israel, forcing cancellation: Tour operator
- Israeli finance minister calls for genocidal war on West Bank, annexation of south Lebanon
- If Americans Knew
- Christian Leader Responds To Netanyahu’s Claims Regarding Palestinian Christians
- In Gaza, ‘Whoever Survives the Bombing Won’t Survive the Rubble’
- Israel kills more Palestinians, amid push to resettle Gaza – Daily Update
- Israel forces Gazans to live in constant peril – Daily Update
- Deconstructing Netanyahu’s pants-on-fire UN rant – Daily Update
- Trump betrayed voters with his campaign lies and prioritized a foreign country once he took office
- Netanyahu calls Israel’s war in Gaza ‘opposite of genocide’ in UN speech to near-empty hall
- Settler Kidnappings: Torture, Sexual Abuse and Terrorisation of Palestinian Abductees as Israel Deepens Annexation of West Bank
- Gaza winter nears as 162,000 tents become unusable, raising fears of humanitarian crisis
- Netanyahu says, “It’s the opposite of genocide”; UN says Gaza economy is world’s ‘most severe crisis on record’ – Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
