Google News today is promoting articles (see the Google-promoted PhysOrg article here, for example) about a speculative World Bank “study” claiming climate change is threatening crop production in the Middle East. The World Bank study is full of speculation but short on facts. Real-world data show crop yields per acre and total crop production are consistently and dramatically rising in each of the Middle East countries examined by the World Bank study.
In its study, titled “Water in the Balance,” the World Bank says, “[w]hile information about water scarcity at present and in the future is available there is little knowledge of what this increasing scarcity means for Middle Eastern … food security. Agriculture will suffer because of climate change and water scarcity….”
In particular the World Bank asserts water scarcity caused by climate change will reduce farm production in Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. The available evidence strongly suggests that will not happen.
Had the study’s authors examined real-world data concerning crop production in the Middle Eastern countries, they would have found, even amidst substantial strife in the region, crop yields and overall production have increased dramatically. More food is being produced even as thousands of acres of agricultural lands have been abandoned during regional conflicts.
Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show during the period of modest warming since 1989:
It is clearly good news – and not a climate crisis – that Middle Eastern countries have increased crop production despite the fact that many of them have been embroiled in internal political strife, outright civil warfare, and external conflicts. That good news is ignored in the World Bank’s doom-and-gloom report.
Global warming lengthens growing seasons, reduces frost events, and makes more land suitable for crop production. Also, carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer for plant life. In addition, crops also use water more efficiently under conditions of higher carbon dioxide, losing less water to transpiration. The latter fact should have allayed the World Bank’s concern about climate change induced water shortages leading to crop failure.
The benefits of more atmospheric carbon dioxide and a modestly warming world have resulted in 17 percent more food being available per person today than there was 30 years ago, even as the number of people has grown by billions. Indeed, the last 20 years have seen the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, and starvation in human history.
Sorry, World Bank, Google, and PhysOrg, but that does not equate to a climate crisis.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute. Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, most recently as a senior fellow in charge of NCPA’s environmental policy program. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations, including serving as a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission.
No doubt this will be wheeled out at the end of the year by the Met Office to bolster its “extreme weather” propaganda. But was it really the wettest day? How do we know?
Quite simply, we don’t, because the Met Office have never published a database of UK daily rainfall. Instead we are expected to take their word for it. Would you trust a company claiming that it had just made record profits, when it had never published any accounts? Of course not.
We also know that the Met Office has recently included several high altitude sites in its rainfall database, which have inevitably skewed upwards rainfall totals.
However, although they do not publish UK daily rainfall data, we do have daily data from the England & Wales Precipitation Series back to 1931. This series categorically shows that October 3rd was not a record, nor anywhere close.
Rainfall totalled 28.48mm on that day, well below the record of 43.23mm which fell in August 1986. Last month’s “record” was in fact only the tenth wettest day.
Even the England & Wales series is of limited value, as it still only has 90 years of data. There will undoubtedly have been many other extremely wet days earlier.
In fact, as the Met Office admits, the rainfall on 3rd October was not particularly intense anywhere, simply widespread across the whole country.
For instance, Oxfordshire was one of the wettest spots in England, and they had about 60mm that day:
To be fair, Scotland got a real drenching that day, which may have tilted the UK figures up from the England & Wales ones. However, as I have frequently pointed out, Scotland has become wetter in recent decades, but that does not mean that the rest of the UK has.
The Met Office’s Mark McCarthy gives us the usual weasel words:
“We can’t make any definitive statements specifically about the attribution of this particular event on October 3,” said Dr McCarthy.
“There’s a general expectation that under our warming climate, we would expect to see increases in some types of extreme rainfall and rainfall events and we’re expecting to have wetter winters overall, we could expect increases in these types of extremes.”
If what he says is true, we would expect to see a pattern of increasingly extreme wet weather in England & Wales, and not just Scotland. The fact is that there is no such pattern, either in these intense daily events, or for that matter monthly totals.
As Angus McFarlane shows in a 2018 well researched wattsupwiththat.com web post (McFarlane, 2018), some 65% of the peer-reviewed climate papers, that offered an opinion, published between 1965 and 1979 predicted that the global cooling seen at the time would continue. He references and is supported by a Notrickszone post by Kenneth Richard (Richard, 2016).
Attempts to erase the “global cooling scare” from the internet by the notorious William Connolley, who has rewritten 5,428 Wikipedia articles in a vain attempt to change history, failed. As James Delingpole explains in The Telegraph, Connolley systematically turned Wikipedia into a man-made global warming advocacy machine (Delingpole, 2009). He rewrote articles on global warming, the greenhouse effect, climate models and on global cooling. He tried to erase the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. In the Wikipedia pages he trashed famous climate scientists who were skeptical of man-made global warming like Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. He also blocked people from correcting his lies.
William Connolley is friends with Michael Mann and his Hockey Team, which includes Phil Jones and Raymond Bradley. He is also a cofounder of the alarmist website Realclimate.org. Obviously, Connolley made sure that Mann and Bradley received glowing praise on Wikipedia until he was fired in 2009 and removed as a Wikipedia administrator (Delingpole, 2009).
We are not surprised that Connolley shows up as a co-author on the peer-reviewed paper, “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” in BAMS, written by Thomas Peterson, William Connolley and John Fleck (Peterson, Connolley, & Fleck, 2008). The paper is nonsense and made no difference because facts are stubborn things. That the paper passed peer-review illustrates how corrupt climate science has become. The paper begins with this:
“There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.” (Peterson, Connolley, & Fleck, 2008)
Figure 1. The U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia global average temperature reconstruction since 1850. It shows, like other reconstructions, global cooling of about 0.09°C (0.16°F) from 1944 to 1977.
The global cooling scare of the 1960s and 1970s did exist, both climate scientists and the public were afraid that the global cooling trend, that began in the 1940s (see Figure 1), would continue and the world would turn very cold, maybe even return to a glacial period like the one that ended about 11,700 years ago at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch.
The Peterson, et al. paper carefully cherry picks 71 papers and claims that only seven papers between 1965 and 1979 disagreed with the “consensus” position that global warming would occur in the future. They found 20 that took a neutral position and 44 that agreed with the global warming consensus. But the world was cooling then and had been since 1944. Kenneth Richard researched this and expanded the time frame to 1960 to 1989. Richard found 285 papers that disagreed with the “consensus” position that global warming would occur in the future (Richard, 2016).
Of these 285 papers, 156 discussed the cooling since 1940 and predicted future cooling. Seven tried to show that CO2 might be causing the cooling. A complete list of papers can be downloaded from Kenneth Richard’s post. The alarmists fudged the numbers to show a 97% consensus that man caused global warming, then they fudged the global cooling consensus in the same way.
Angus McFarlane took the databases created by Kenneth Richard and Peterson, et al., merged them (there were 16 duplicates) and then did an independent search of his own. He found two additional relevant papers that were not already in one of the two databases. Then he eliminated the papers that were outside the original Peterson et al. period of 1965-1979.
McFarlane’s database is smaller than Richard’s and only has 190 relevant papers, but this is 119 more than Peterson, et al. found and it covers the same period. McFarlane’s review of the papers found that 86 predicted future cooling, 58 were neutral, and 46 predicted warming. Of the 86 cooling papers, 30 predicted a possible new “ice age.” Strictly speaking, we are in an ice age, what they mean is a new glacial period where ice advances to a major new maximum extent like 19,000 years ago in the last major glacial maximum. The 86 cooling papers are 45% of the total. If we ignore the neutral papers, like John Cook, et al. did (Cook, et al., 2013) in his 97% consensus study, then cooling papers are 65% of the papers that offered an opinion. Using Cook’s rules, we can comfortably claim there was a global cooling consensus in 1979.
However, once the mid-twentieth century cooling trend reversed and became a warming trend, it did not take long for the “consensus” to reverse as well. The global surface temperature trend changed to warming (about 0.017°C/year as shown in the graph) around 1977, and the peer-reviewed climate papers from 1977-1979 changed to a ratio of 52% warming to 48% cooling, a bare majority of warming papers, ignoring the neutral papers. During the 1980s the papers quickly changed to pro-warming.
The press in the mid-seventies reported that a consensus of climate scientists believed the world was cooling and the cooling would continue (Struck, 2014). Articles on the cooling consensus appeared in Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, and National Geographic. A landmark story by Peter Gwynne in Newsweek April 28, 1975 was typical (Gwynne, 1975). It was entitled “The Cooling World.” In the overheated style of Newsweek, the article begins, “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically.” Later in the article Gwynne breathlessly explains “… the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. … and the resulting famines could be catastrophic.” Gwynne’s cited sources include the National Academy of Sciences, Murray Mitchell (NOAA), George Kukla (Columbia University), James McQuigg (NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment) (Gwynne, 1975).
George Kukla of Columbia University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory did not change his view of a long-term global cooling trend, like many of his colleagues did. When he sadly passed away May 31, 2014, he still believed that a new massive glacial period would begin in the future, perhaps 5,000 years from now. Javier Vinós, in his blog post on “The next glaciation,” (Vinós, 2018) predicts that the next major glaciation will begin in 1500 to 2500 years. It is fortunate that both predictions are far in the future.
When the next global cooling period begins, as it inevitably will, will climate scientists write more global cooling papers? Why should we believe climate scientists who say the world is warming dangerously now, when just 50 or 60 years ago they were saying it was dangerously cooling? A reasonable question. What direct evidence has arisen that convinced them to reverse course? We had a consensus for cooling when the world was cooling, now we have a consensus for warming and the world is warming. Is that all there is to it? Both are hypotheses, what makes them become facts or theories?
Hypotheses are speculative ideas. A real scientist asks, “Is that so? Tell me why you think that.” A rigorous scientific process must be used to demonstrate why observed events, such as global warming or global cooling, are occurring. To show they are potentially dangerous takes even more work.
Consensus is a political thing. The public forms a consensus opinion, then vote and make laws or rules that reflect the opinion. In science, we first form a hypothesis or idea that explains an observed natural phenomenon, such as warming or cooling. The next step is to attempt to disprove it. If we fail the idea survives. We publish what we did, and others attempt to disprove the idea, if they fail to disprove it, it survives. Once this has gone on long enough, the idea becomes a theory. A scientific theory simply survives, it is never proven, it must always be subject to testing.
We mentioned above that seven of the papers examined by Angus McFarlane and Kenneth Richard suggested that CO2 might be causing global cooling. A good example is Sherwood Idso’s, 1984 paper in the Journal of Climatology. The paper is entitled “What if Increases in Atmospheric CO2 Have an inverse Greenhouse Effect?” (Idso, 1984). Idso speculates that additional CO2 will encourage plants to move into more arid areas, because additional CO2 causes plants to use less water per pound of growth. Idso thinks that this might change Earth’s albedo (reflectivity) in such a way as to lower temperatures. In a similar way, Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi speculated that additional CO2 would increase humidity in the tropics and thus cloud cover (Lindzen & Choi, 2011). Extremely small changes in average cloud cover can have a large cooling effect during the daytime.
Peter Webster presents an interesting discussion of Sherwood Idso’s work in his Climatic Change paper, “The Carbon Dioxide/Climate Controversy: Some Personal Comments on Two Recent Publications” (Webster, 1984). Besides an interesting discussion of the emotions involved in the human-caused climate change debate, we can see from Webster’s discussion, and Idso’s paper, how little we really know about the impact of additional CO2 in the real world. Tiny changes in Earth’s albedo, whether due to cloud cover or the distribution of plants can make a huge difference.
Empirical estimates of ECS (the change in air temperature due to doubling the CO2 concentration) have never matched theoretical calculations from climate models. The empirical values (like Idso’s or Lindzen and Choi’s) are normally about half of model estimates, and can be negative, like Idso’s. This is likely because the models are missing something and possible future changes in albedo due to changing cloud and plant cover are likely candidates.
“I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others… Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”
~ Sherlock Holmes – The Adventures of Silver Blaze
Is it possible to make sense out of nonsense?
So much these days is an incoherent mess. It’s complete nonsense.
Page 1 excitedly beams about a glorious rebound in GDP. Yay economic growth!
Page 2 worryingly notes the near complete failure of Siberian arctic ice to reform during October and that hurricane Zeta (so many storms this year we’re now into the Greek alphabet!) has made punishing landfall.
Each is a narrative. Each has its own inner logic.
But they simply do not have any external coherence to each other. It’s nonsensical to be excited about rising economic growth while also concerned that each new unit of growth takes the planet further past a critical red line.
These narratives are incompatible. So which one should we pick?
Well, in the end, reality always has the final say. As Guy McPherson states: Nature bats last.
So better we choose to follow the narrative that hews closest to what reality actually is, vs what we desperately want it to be.
‘They’ Don’t Care About Us
While issues like climate change and economic growth may be difficult to fully grasp and unravel, direct threats to our lives &/or livelihoods are much more concrete and something we can react to and resist.
Such immediate and direct threats are now fully in play and, once again, they’re accompanied by narratives that are completely at odds with each other. I’m speaking of Covid and the ways in which our national and global managers are choosing to respond (or not).
It’s a truly incoherent mess about which both social media and the increasingly irrelevant media are working quite hard to misinform us.
The mainstream narrative about Covid-19, in the West, is this:
It’s a quite deadly and novel disease
There are no effective treatments
Sadly, no double-blind placebo controlled trials exist to support some of the wild claims out there about various off-patent, cheap and widely available supplements and drugs
Health authorities care about saving lives
They care so much, in fact, that along with politicians they’ve decided to entirely shut down economies
There’s a huge second wave rampaging across the US and Europe and there’s nothing we can do to limit it except shut down businesses and people’s ability to travel and gather
You need to fear this virus and its associated disease
All we can do is wait for a vaccine
The alternative narrative, one that I’ve uncovered after 9 months of almost daily research and reporting, is this:
It’s not an especially dangerous disease and it’s certainly not novel
There is a huge assortment of very effective, cheap and widely-available preventatives and treatments including (but not limited to)
Vitamin D
Ivermectin
Hydroxychloroquine
Zinc
Selenium
Famotidine (Pepcid)
Melatonin
Use of a combination of these mostly OTC supplements could reasonably be expected to drop the severity of illness and the already low mortality rate by 90% or (probably) more
Western health authorities have shown either zero interest in the results of studies mainly conducted in poorer nations on these combination therapies or…
They have actively run studies designed to fail so that these cheap, effective therapies could be dismissed or…
Set up proper studies but which started late, have immensely long study periods and most likely won’t be done before a vaccine is hastily rushed through development.
By the way – every single one of my assertions and claims is backed by links and supporting documentation from scientific and clinical trials and studies. I am not conjecturing here; I am recounting the summary of ten months’ worth of inquiry.
The conclusion I draw from my narrative (vs. theirs) is that we can no longer assume that the public health or saving lives has anything to do with explaining or understanding the actions of these health “managers” (I cannot bring myself to use the word authorities).
After we eliminate the impossible – which is that somehow these massive, well-funded bodies have missed month after month of accumulating evidence in support of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, NAC, zinc, selenium and doxycycline/azithromycin – what remains must be the truth.
As improbable as it seems, the only conclusion we’re left with is that the machinery of politics, money and corporate psychopathy is suppressing life saving treatments because these managers have other priorities besides public health and saving lives.
This is a terribly difficult conclusion, because it means suspending so much that we hold dear. Things like the notion that people are basically good. The idea that the government generally means well. The thought that somehow when the chips are down and a crisis is afoot, good will emerge and triumph over evil.
I’m sorry to say, the exact opposite of all of that has emerged as true.
Medical doctors in the UK NHS system purposely used toxic doses of hydroxychloroquine far too late in the disease cycle to be of any help simply to ‘make a point’ about hydroxychloroquine. They rather desperately wanted that drug to fail, so they made it fail.
After deliberately setting their trial up for failure, they concluded: “Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help, and it even makes things worse.”
Note that in order to be able to make this claim, they had to be willing to cause harm — even to let people die. What kind of health official does that?
Not one who actually has compassion, a heart, or functioning level of sympathy. It’s an awful conclusion but it’s what remains after we eliminate the impossible.
Getting Past The Emotional Toll
Science has proven that cheap, safe and significantly protective compounds exist to limit both Covid-related death and disease severity.
Yet all of the main so-called health authorities in the major western countries are nearly completely ignoring, if not outright banning, these safe, cheap and effective compounds.
This is crazy-making for independent observers like me (and you) because the data is so clear. It’s irrefutable at this point. These medicines and treatments not only work, but work really, really well.
However most people will be unable to absorb the data, let alone move beyond it to wrestle with the implications. Why? Because such data is belief-shattering. Absorbing this information is not an intellectual process; it’s an emotional one.
I don’t know why human nature decided to invest so much in developing a tight wall around the belief systems that control our actions and thoughts. But it has.
I’m sure there was some powerful evolutionary advantage. One that’s now being hijacked daily by social media AI programs to nudge us in desired directions. One that’s being leveraged by shabby politicians, hucksters, fake gurus, and con men to steer advantage away from the populace and towards themselves.
The neural wiring of beliefs is what it is. We have to recognize that and move on.
Some people will be much faster in their adjustment process than others.
To move past the deeply troubling information laid out before us requires us to be willing to endure a bit of turbulence. It’s the only way.
For you to navigate these troubling times safely and successfully, you’ll need to see as clearly as possible the true nature of the game actually being played. To see what the rules really are – not what you’ve been told they are, or what you wish or hope they are.
The Manipulation Underway
The data above strongly supports the conclusion that our national health managers don’t actually care about public health generally or your health specifically.
If indeed true, then the beliefs preventing most people from accepting this likely include:
Wanting to believe that people are good (a biggie for most people)
Trust and faith in the medical system (really big)
Faith in authority (ginormous)
There are many other operative belief systems I could also list. But this is sufficient to get the ball rolling.
Picking just one, how hard would it be for someone to let go of, say, trust in the medical system?
That would be pretty hard in most cases.
First not trusting the medical system might mean having to wonder if a loved one might have died unnecessarily while being treated. Or realizing that you’re now going to have to research the living daylights out of every medical decision before agreeing to it. Or worrying that your medications might be more harmful to you over the long haul than helpful (which is true in many more cases than most appreciate). It might mean having your personal heroes dinged by suspicion — perhaps even your father or mother who worked in the medical profession. It would definitely require a complete reorientation away from being able to trust anything you read in a newspaper, or see on TV, about new pharmaceutical “breakthroughs”.
Trust, which is safe and warm and comforting, then turns into skepticism; which is lonelier and insists upon active mental involvement.
But, as always, hard work comes with benefits — with a healthy level of skepticism and involvement, the families of those recruited into the deadly UK RECOVERY trial could have looked at the proposed doses of HCQ (2,400 mg on day one! Toxic!) and said, “Not now, not ever!” and maybe have saved the life of their loved one.
Look at that tangled mess of undesirables that comes with unpacking that one belief: regret, uncertainty, shame, doubt, fallen idols, and vastly more additional effort. Are all up for grabs when we decide to look carefully at the actions of our national health managers during Covid.
Which is why most people simply choose not to look. It’s too hard.
I get it. I have a lot of compassion for why people choose not to go down that path. It can get unpleasant in a hurry.
But, just like choosing to ignore a nagging chest pain, turning away in denial has its own consequences.
The Coming ‘Great Reset’
My coverage of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) and Covid-19 (the associated disease) has led me to uncover some things that have made me deeply uncomfortable about our global and national ‘managers’. Shameful things, really. Scary things in their implications for what we might reasonably expect (or not expect, more accurately) from the future.
Once we get past the shock of seeing just how patently corrupt they’ve been, we have to ask both What’s next? and What should I do?
After all, you live in a system whose managers are either too dumb to understand the Vitamin D data (very unlikely) or have decided that they’d rather not promote it to the general populace for some reason. It’s a ridiculously safe vitamin with almost zero downside and virtually unlimited upside.
Either they’re colossally dumb, or this is a calculated decision. They’re not dumb. So we have to ask: What’s the calculation being performed here? It’s not public safety. It’s not your personal health. So… What is it?
This is our line of questioning and observation. It’s like the short story by Arthur Conan Doyle in Silver Blaze that many of us informally know as “the case of the dog that didn’t bark”. As the story goes, because of a missing clue – a dog who remained silent as a murder was committed – this conclusion could be drawn: the dog was already familiar with the killer!
The silence around Vitamin D alone is extremely telling. It is the pharmacological dog that did not bark.
One true inference suggests others. Here, too, we can deduce from the near total silence around Vitamin D that the health managers would prefer not to talk about it. They don’t want people to know. That much is painfully clear.
Such lack of promotion (let alone appropriate study) of safe, effective treatments is a thread that, if tugged, can unravel the whole rug. The silence tells us everything we need to know.
Do they want people to suffer and die? I don’t know. My belief systems certainly hope not. Perhaps the death and suffering are merely collateral damage as they pursue a different goal — money, power, politics? Simply the depressing result of a contentious election year? More than that?
We’ve now reached the jumping off point where we may well find out just how far down the rabbit hole goes.
A massive grab for tighter control over the global populace is now being fast-tracked at the highest levels. Have you heard of the Great Reset yet?
If not, you soon will.
In Part 2: The Coming ‘Great Reset’ we lay out everything we know so far about the multinational proposal to transform nearly every aspect of global industry, commerce, trade, and social structure.
If you read on, be ready and willing to let go of cherished beliefs and to suspend what you know to be true. Because none of us has that in hand. It’s going to be a wild ride from here.
Something very big is afoot and I suspect that Covid-19 is merely an excuse providing cover for a much bigger power grab over the world’s wealth and peoples.
I have been covering the fraud that happens every year with how the CDC tracks incidents and deaths due to the annual influenza for almost a decade now.
The numbers used each year to scare the public into getting the flu vaccine are based not on actual data, but estimates of number of people who die from the flu according to the CDC. Basically, anyone dying from “influenza-like” symptoms are all lumped together into supposed flu deaths each year. Autopsies are seldom performed to prove cause of death.
The CDC has admitted publicly in the past that these numbers are just “estimates.” If the real number of those infected with the influenza virus, and resulting deaths, were vastly lower than what the CDC reports based on their “estimates,” the public would have no way of knowing it.
So this has presented quite a dilemma for the CDC for the first couple of weeks of the 2020-21 flu season, which have just passed.
Because “flu-like” symptoms could also be attributed to COVID-19, and they have the now widely known ineffective COVID PCR test to back up these claims, which also kicks in federal funding for hospitals to treat COVID patients.
As one might expect, with the media widely reporting that cases of COVID are now increasing just as flu season starts, reports of flu cases have dropped dramatically during the same time period last year. Across the globe, it has been reported that incidents of influenza have dropped by about 100%. (Source.)
Whoops! How did the CDC allow these numbers to be published?
In an apparent response to media reports about the fast declining flu cases here at the beginning of the 2020-21 flu season, the CDC did what any corrupt agency would do which doesn’t want the public to know the truth: They decided to “suspend data collection for the 2020-21 influenza season.” (Source.)
To my knowledge, this is unprecedented, and has never happened before.
Correlation Between Flu Shot and Senior Deaths Allegedly due to COVID
It is important to remember that most of the deaths in the U.S. attributed to COVID have occurred among those over 70 years old, with co-morbidity factors.
Another factor to consider is that seniors over 65 in the U.S. get a different flu shot than everyone else each year, one that is much stronger.
Most of the initial deaths attributed to COVID in early 2020 occurred in nursing homes or assisted care facilities for the elderly, where the flu vaccine is routinely given every year as a matter of policy.
Deaths in these facilities are common every year just after administering the flu vaccine, but never reported in the corporate media.
Health Impact News had a nurse whistleblower contact us in 2014 to report that 5 seniors in a Georgia assisted care facility died the same week the flu shot was given. We were threatened with a lawsuit for reporting this. See:
A recently published study out of Mexico confirmed the correlation between senior flu shots and COVID deaths.
A recently published study in PeerJ by Christian Wehenkel, a Professor at Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango in Mexico, has found a positive association between COVID-19 deaths and influenza vaccination rates in elderly people worldwide.
According to the study, “The results showed a positive association between COVID-19 deaths and IVR (influenza vaccination rate) of people ≥65 years-old. There is a significant increase in COVID-19 deaths from eastern to western regions in the world. Further exploration is needed to explain these findings, and additional work on this line of research may lead to prevention of deaths associated with COVID-19.”
To determine this association, data sets from 39 countries with more than half a million people were analyzed. (Read the full article.)
Verified Death Statistics Will Tell the True Story
Once 2020 is complete, it will probably be seen that total deaths that have been recorded will be similar to previous years.
The difference will be the number of deaths attributed to COVID to justify all the government fear and tyrannical actions, as deaths by other causes will drop so that the end result will be about the same.
These kinds of stats are becoming more and more difficult to find, but here is one projected total compared with total deaths from the previous 3 years.
I am not sure of the original source of this graph (it is most likely a compilation of available health statistics), but the graph was published here.
There has been a great deal of controversy over claims that Kary Mullis, the creator of the PCR technology that is being widely used to test for so-called ‘cases’ of COVID-19, did not believe the technology was suitable for detecting a meaningful presence of a virus.
Those making these assertions were attacked and ‘fact checked’ (deemed inappropriate by propagandists) by news outletsclaiming that Mullis’ comments had been taken out of context.
So when a video surfaces with Mullis talking about the efficacy of the technology it is worth paying close attention to what he is saying. He died last year, so it is the best ‘fact check’ available. In the video, Mullis is discussing AIDS. He first deals with a criticism from the audience that the PCR technology is being misused [timestamp – 48:40].
“I don’t think you can misuse PCR. [It is] the results; the interpretation of it. If they can find this virus in you at all – and with PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody.”
Mullis does not explicitly say that the PCR technology is unsuitable for detecting a meaningful presence of COVID-19. How could he, given that he died before it came to light? But such a conclusion can safely be inferred:
“It starts making you believe in the sort of Buddhist notion that everything is contained in everything else. If you can amplify one single molecule up to something you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there is just very few molecules that you don’t have at least one single one of in your body.”
Mullis then addresses the question of what should be considered meaningful, which is the central issue with the use of the PCR tests. Do the ‘case’ numbers being used around the world by governments to impose police states and egregious lockdowns of the population, especially in my home state of Victoria, actually mean anything? The answer seems to be ‘no’:
“That could be thought of as a misuse: to claim that it [a PCR test] is meaningful. It tells you something about nature and what is there. To test for that one thing and say it has a special meaning is, I think, the problem. The measurement for it is not exact; it is not as good as the measurement for apples. The tests are based on things that are invisible and the results are inferred in a sense. It allows you to take a miniscule amount of anything and make it measureable and then talk about it.”
Mullis also addresses, by implication, another question about the incidence of ‘cases’. If you test positive – and Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration has admitted that they do not know if this means you are infected or not – are you actually sick? In the past that is what the word ‘cases’ has meant: someone unwell from a disease. Mullis’ position is clear [emphasis added – timecode 51:49]:
“PCR is just a process that allows you to make a whole lot of something out of something. It doesn’t tell you that you are sick, or that the thing that you ended up with was going to hurt you or anything like that.”
Mullis’ comments are unsurprising for anyone who has been paying attention to the behaviour of the authorities during the COVID-19 catastrophe. The technology relies on amplifying results many times over. If they are amplified less than about 35 times, no-one will test positive. If they are amplified 60 times, everyone will test positive. The flawed thinking is obvious enough.
Why is there such a concerted effort to quell anyone exposing problems with the use of the technology? There is no doubt that these attacks are designed to deceive (including predictable use of that shoddy ad hominem phrase ‘conspiracy theory’, a rhetorical trick to insult people rather than address their arguments).
Look closely at the ‘fact checking’. The Reuters article uses a mixture of a straw man argument and a red herring. It asserts it was wrong to claim that Mullis said that: “PCR tests cannot detect free infectious viruses at all”. This is obviously a deliberate misrepresentation intended to wrongly characterise the opponents’ argument and then ‘expose’ it as false.
Then we get the red herring. The Reuters article claims that: “The quote is actually from an article written by John Lauritsen in December 1996 about HIV and AIDS, not COVID-19 (here).” Neat trick. Assert that your opponents got their sources wrong, and then dismiss them because of their poor research.
It is transparently untruthful, but why are these news outlets pushing such propaganda?
In one way, it could be said to be just business as usual. For those of us who have worked in newsrooms, especially in the finance and business sections, being subjected to propaganda is as routine as the daily cups of coffee.
The techniques are endless: outright lying, misleading but true facts, half truths, quarter truths, lack of context, lack of corporate memory, deceptive jargon, false statistics, lobbying by astro-turf organisations, threats of legal action, threats to complain to the editor or proprietor, threats of removal of access to important sources, promises of getting first access to important stories, subtle requests from former colleagues for assistance, and, of course, my favourites – free lunches at expensive restaurants and travel junkets.
The situation, always bad, has worsened with the destruction of the media’s business model by Facebook and Google, who have taken half the world’s advertising revenue. It has forced the hollowed out newsrooms to rely more on outside news feeds. And, as Matt Taibbi has noted, mainstream media organisations are, for commercial reasons, no longer interested in “selling a vision of reality they perceive to be acceptable to a broad mean”.
Instead, they deliberately sow division and only appeal to niches. Forget facts; inciting prejudice comes first.
But none of that explains why there is such intense propaganda about COVID-19.
The endless spin inflicted on media organisations is transparently related to satisfying greed or enhancing power, but what is the motive here? True, the US health system is one of the biggest profiteering exercises in the world, corrupting health everywhere. Health accounts for 16 per cent of US GDP, which is about twice the level of, say, Australia or the UK (countries that have universal care).
That extra eight per cent equates with $1.6 trillion in profiteering, or about two per cent of the global economy – an eye-watering scam conducted by pharmaceutical companies, hospital conglomerates, insurance companies, lawyers, consultants and so on. Those vultures will be trying to control the media to profit from a vaccine and who knows what else.
But they will only be one group of players and probably not the main ones. The most important question is who is funding the ‘fake news’ that COVID-19 is an existential threat and what is their agenda? Most countries have been greatly harmed. It has resulted in a medical dictatorship that has shut down Victoria; health bureaucrats may, absurdly, be given police powers.
There is a very sinister international agenda here, but the outline of it is, so far, only blurry.
Just so that people understand, Dr. Kary Mullis winds up dead just weeks before the Gates Foundation, World Economic Forum, and John Hopkins (Michael Bloomberg) School of Medicine held their “Event 201.”
If you want to avoid dying of COVID19, one of the most important things you can do, if you are overweight, is to shed the pounds
‘…. in the first meta-analysis of its kind, published on 26 August in Obesity Reviews, an international team of researchers pooled data from scores of peer-reviewed papers capturing 399,000 patients. They found that people with obesity who contracted SARS-CoV-2 were 113% more likely than people of healthy weight to land in the hospital, 74% more likely to be admitted to an ICU, and 48% more likely to die.’ 1
Why? Well, the ‘why’ centres around the damaging effect of raised blood glucose on endothelial cells and… it gets complicated.
For now, though, the most important thing is not to understand the complex metabolic and physiological pathways involved, it is simply to help people to lose weight, and this is where Dr David Unwin comes in.
For years now he has believed, as I do, that the main driver of weight gain, leading on to type 2 (T2) diabetes, is a high carbohydrate diet.
This, of course, is the exact opposite of what we have been told for decades by the ‘experts’ who demonise fat and promote carbohydrates. We have the ‘eat-well’ plate, and the ‘food pyramid’, and hundreds of thousands of dieticians around the world, all promoting carbohydrates as the ‘healthy’ option.
Dutifully following this advice, the entire population of the western world has become fatter, and fatter… and fatter. By the way, this is not a coincidence; it is cause and effect.
Getting back to Dr Unwin, years ago he despaired of ever getting any of his patients to lose weight. It was so disheartening that he furtively studied his pension plan, and dreamed of retirement, so fed up was he becoming. Then one day a patient came in who had lost a lot of weight and kept it off.
At first this woman was reluctant to say how she had done it, as she feared the inevitable criticism. In the end, she told Dr Unwin that she had lost weight, and kept it off, by eating a low carbohydrate diet. In Dr Unwin’s own words:
‘A few years ago, I was interested to find out how a patient had improved her diabetic control. She confessed she had ignored my advice and learnt a much better way to look after herself, from the internet. I suppressed my wounded pride and looked at the Low Carb Forum on Diabetes.co.uk There were thousands of type two diabetics on there ignoring their doctors – and getting great results (now that is just not allowed).’ 2
Yes, Dr Unwin did not criticize, instead he was intrigued. Could this possibly be true? It went against everything he had been told about healthy eating, and weight loss, and T2 diabetes. Fat has twice the calories, per gram, as carbohydrates and suchlike. Eating fat, he believed, makes you fat, and then you develop diabetes, and heart disease.
Dr Unwin did more research, then he made the decision to work with patients, mainly those with diabetes, to see if a low carbohydrate diet could be beneficial. Lo and behold, it was … very beneficial. It was like a miracle cure.
In 2014 he published a paper on his results on a small number of patients.
‘Low carbohydrate diet to achieve weight loss and improve HbA1c in type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes: experience from one general practice.’
‘It was observed that a low carbohydrate diet achieved substantial weight loss in all patients and brought about normalisation of blood glucose control in 16 out of 18 patients. At the same time, plasma lipid profiles improved, and BP fell allowing discontinuation of antihypertensive therapy in some individuals…
Conclusions Based on our work so far, we can understand the reasons for the internet enthusiasm for a low carbohydrate diet; the majority of patients lose weight rapidly and fairly easily; predictably the HbA1c levels are not far behind. Cholesterol levels, liver enzymes and BP levels all improved. This approach is simple to implement and much appreciated by people with diabetes.’ 3
Now, he has published results of a much larger study, on nearly two hundred patients over a six-year period. It is called. ‘Insights from a general practice service evaluation supporting a lower carbohydrate diet in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and prediabetes’ Published in BMJ nutrition 4.
Here are the main findings, which I nicked directly from the press release:
46% drug-free T2 diabetes remission
Significant improvements in weight, blood pressure and lipid profiles
93% remission of prediabetes
£50,885 annual saving on the Norwood GP practice NHS diabetes drug budget
If every GP practice in England spent the same on drugs for diabetes per patient as Norwood the NHS could save £277 million!
Older patients can do as well as younger ones with a low carb approach.
The participants who started with the worst blood sugars saw the greatest improvements in diabetic control
Four individuals came off insulin altogether
Total weight loss for the 199 participants was 1.6 metric tons!
This paper will be attacked, of course. There are massive financial interests involved here. As stated, if every GP practice in the UK used the low carb approach, the NHS could save £277 million (~$350m) in drug costs. Scaled up to the US, with much higher drugs costs, one could be looking at around $2Bn/year. Around the world, who knows, but vast sums of money.
So, you can imagine the joy that this paper will be met with in pharmaceutical company boardrooms around the world. The words ‘lead’ and ‘balloon’, spring to mind. Equally the massive low-fat, high carb food manufacturers will be throwing their hands up in horror – ‘my bonus, my bonus… nooooo.’ You can take your low carb yoghurts and….
As for the rest of us. I can assure you that Dr David Unwin has only ever been interested in one thing. Working out how to help people lose weight and control their diabetes. He has achieved this.
Will his research now be taken up by the authorities around the world? Will we move away from promoting a high carbohydrate diet? You have to be joking. There is far too much money to be lost by companies who exert tight control over the world of medical research, and whose lobbyists swarm around the politicians in rich countries.
Which is a damn shame, because more than ever in this endless COVID19 pandemic, obesity represents a health crisis. This paper, and the tireless work by Dr David Unwin, clearly tells us what we need to do, now, urgently. His approach won’t work instantly, and it won’t work for everyone – nothing ever does. However, it represents hope. It could save hundreds and thousands of lives. Better than any vaccine?
Thank you, once again, Dr Unwin. A man who I think of as a friend. Your research should be shouted from the rooftops. I can only do my bit.
Finally, good healthcare news in 2020: Scientists from two universities in Samara have discovered a method of diagnose cancer using a spectroscopic technique that performs a biopsy on a single drop of blood in a matter of minutes.
Published in the peer-reviewed, US-based Journal of Raman Spectroscopy, the research details how blood can be analyzed by looking at how light interacts with molecules in the liquid. The technique can also rapidly test for many other diseases, which normally require hours to be diagnosed in laboratories.
“Light interacts with biological molecules, the building blocks of our body,” said Ivan Bratchenko, an associate professor at Samara University, the institution that developed the method alongside specialists from the nearby Samara State Medical University. “If you know exactly how this interaction occurs, you can track how the body’s composition changes, and whether any pathologies exist in a single drop of blood.”
According to Bratchenko, this method of diagnosis is less accurate than testing in a laboratory, but is faster, can be done using portable equipment, and can be used to perform mass screenings.
“Using a liquid biopsy, you can quickly identify people who are just beginning to develop a pathology, and send them to the appropriate specialist,” the professor said. “You can also monitor the condition of patients who are already undergoing treatment.”
Samara University is one of the country’s leading institutions and, during the Soviet period, when the city was known as Kuybyshev, was famed for its work with the space program. In 1966, when it was then known as the Kuibyshev Aviation Institute, it was named after Sergey Korolev, a rocket engineer who played a prominent role in the Space Race. Earlier this year, scientists from the university created a biomaterial to restore bones in sufferers of osteoporosis.
The New York Times(NYT) published an October 27 article accusing President Trump of fighting “against climate science,” while the NYT itself misrepresents climate science.
In the article titled, “As Election Nears, Trump Makes a Final Push Against Climate Science,” the NYT implies the Trump administration is fighting against climate science by appointing research meteorologist Ryan Maue, Ph.D., as chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and appointing David Legates, Ph.D., former state climatologist for Delaware, as deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction at NOAA. Maue’s appointment is problematic according to the NYT because he “has criticized climate scientists for what he has called unnecessarily dire predictions.”
A google scholar search of Maue’s publications shows he is well qualified for the position of NOAA chief scientist. Maue has authored or co-authored more than 30 peer-reviewed articles discussing climate change. Simultaneously, Maue served as a meteorologist at WeatherBELL Analytics, a widely used weather forecasting service. Much of Maue’s research presents real-world data to demonstrate that human-induced climate change is not causing more powerful and more frequent hurricanes.
A Google Scholar search of Legates’ name shows he has authored or co-authored 140 peer-reviewed climate-change-related articles. The topics of Legates’ papers range from the earth’s climate sensitivity as shown by actual measurements, the validity of climate models, drought and flood patterns across the United States, and the impact of warming on polar bear populations. Once again, the objective record shows Legates is well qualified to direct and inform government research on climate related matters.
The NYT is not the first mainstream media outlet to criticize the Maue and Legates appointments. For example, Climate Realism refuted the ad-hominem charges leveled against Legates by National Public Radio shortly after his appointment to NOAA. The author of that Climate Realism article wrote, “The very definition of science, in its most-basic sense from The Enlightenment to 2020, is ‘questioning the basic tenets’ of current assumptions. [Legates has] examined the data for many, many years and has not seen persuasive evidence that humans are the chief drivers of climate change.”
NOAA is charged with assembling the National Climate Assessment every four years. The report includes input from 13 federal agencies and outside scientists, supposedly to present objective knowledge concerning the causes and consequences of climate change. Rather than being objective, NOAA’s 2018 report referenced the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) worst-case scenario to claim climate change poses an imminent and dire threat to the United States. The IPCC itself has disavowed its worst-case scenario, admitting it has only a three-percent chance of becoming a reality.
NOAA’s Climate Assessment ignored hundreds of unalarming peer-reviewed articles and books published by dozens of prominent researchers including, for example, physicists Will Happer, Ph.D., Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., Willie Soon, Ph.D., and atmospheric scientists, John Christy, Ph.D., Pat Michaels, Ph.D., and Roy Spencer, Ph.D. These scientists, and many others, have published research showing that the human impact on global temperatures is and will be, at most, minimal. According to these scholars, natural factors, such as, cloud formation, solar activity, and large-scale ocean circulation patterns are the dominant drivers of climate shifts. Other studies have concluded, based on measurable data, that the modest climate change the Earth has so far experienced has been beneficial. Research also indicates a continued modest increase in temperatures is highly unlikely to result in extreme weather changes.
NOAA has also previously ignored findings of the 14 peer-reviewed volumes produced by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. In particular, NIPCC’s Climate Change Reconsidered series presents a comprehensive literature review of the peer-reviewed evidence indicating human influence on climate is minimal and that present climate change is not catastrophic. NIPCC’s reports are written and/or reviewed by hundreds of researchers, yet the past political leadership of NOAA has ignored them and the thousands of peer-reviewed papers they reference.
The appointments of Maue and Legates to NOAA present an opportunity to reinforce the proper use of the scientific method in government research. The Scientific Method demands that researchers question self-proclaimed consensus science. In the field of climate research, this means carefully considering the broad range of evidence concerning the causes and consequences of climate change when federal reports are developed. This would represent a shift from NOAA’s previous practice, in which it referenced a narrow body of research to support the politically predetermined conclusion that dangerous human-caused climate change is happening.
It is not surprising that the NYT dismisses the Trump administration’s attempts to defend the Scientific Method from doctrinaire views of climate change. Trump’s previous efforts to bring transparency to scientific research and to prevent corruption in the funding process for scientific research have been similarly critiqued by climate alarmists. Left-leaning mainstream media outlets, academics who’ve learned to manipulate the current closed system, and political partisans who use the cloak of “following the science” to promote their personal political agendas reject transparency and support self-dealing.
As the peer-reviewed research by Legates, Maue and hundreds of other scientists makes clear, there is an active scientific debate concerning the causes, extent, and consequences of climate change. Trump’s appointments of Legates and Maue may bring justified and necessary balance to federal reports on the state of climate science.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently admitted that lockdowns cause more harm than good. Following this announcement, one would have expected American politicians to immediately end the lockdowns. After all, the WHO ‘s pronouncements are considered infallible, so much so that social media sites silence anyone who dares challenge the great and powerful WHO. Yet, governors, mayors, and other government officials across the country are ignoring the WHO’s anti-lockdown position.
Instead of admitting that the lockdowns were a mistake, many in the political class, which includes a disturbing number of medical professionals whose positions and prestige depend on government, claim that we cannot return to normalcy until a coronavirus vaccine is in wide use. This suggests that people among the majority of Americans who do not wish to be vaccinated will remain under lockdown or be forced to be vaccinated against their will.
The assault on our liberty will not end with deployment and use of a vaccine. Moncef Slaoui, the chief adviser of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a “public-private partnership” in charge of producing and delivering a coronavirus vaccine, has said that those who receive a vaccine will be monitored by “incredibly precise … tracking systems.” Slaoui has also indicated that tech giants Google and Oracle will help the government keep tabs on the vaccinated individuals. So, the vaccine program will lead to an increase in government surveillance!
Slaoui is just the latest “expert” to endorse forcing the American people to relinquish their few remaining scraps of privacy to stop coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have urged development of a digital certificate for those vaccinated for coronavirus. People without the certificate would find their liberty severely restricted.
Those who think that the new surveillance system will be limited to coronavirus should remember that Social Security numbers were only supposed to be used to administer the Social Security program. They should also consider that the PATRIOT Act’s expansion of warrantless wiretapping was supposed to be limited to stopping terrorists. However, these powers have been used for a wide variety of purposes. Whenever government is given power to abuse our rights for one reason it will inevitably use that power to abuse our rights for other reasons as well.
Fauci and Gates’ digital certificate could, and likely will, be expanded to include proof individuals have received a variety of other vaccines and medical treatments. The digital certificate could even extend to monitoring a person’s lifestyle choices on the grounds that unhealthy habits make one more susceptible to diseases.
The digital certificate could also be tied to the REAL ID program to deny individuals who have not been vaccinated the right to travel. It could also be combined with a future mandatory E-Verify system to deny unvaccinated individuals the right to hold a job. Those who consider this “paranoia” should consider Britain is already developing a covid passport.
Liberty lost in the “war on covid” will not be voluntarily returned when the coronavirus threat ends — assuming the government ever stops moving the goal posts and declares the coronavirus threat is over. Instead, the people must be prepared to take back their liberty from the politicians. Fortunately, we still have the ability to do so by the peaceful means of educating our fellow citizens and pressuring our elected officials to reverse course. We must all do what we can to use these peaceful tools before we are in a “dark winter” of authoritarianism.
Trump administration Covid-19 adviser Scott Atlas ripped public-health officials for “egregious” policy failures – only to be forced to apologize after mainstream media deflected his points by attacking him for appearing on RT.
On Saturday, the Stanford University doctor, who has emerged as President Donald Trump’s top adviser on responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, called the lockdown policies an “epic failure” and argued they are “killing people,” while speaking with Afshin Rattansi on RT’s Going Underground show.
“The public-health leadership have failed egregiously, and they’re killing people with their fear-inducing shutdown policies,” Atlas told RT.
“The lockdowns will go down as an epic failure of public policy by people who refuse to accept they were wrong – were wrong, refused to accept they were wrong, didn’t know the data, didn’t care. And it became a frenzy of stopping Covid-19 cases at all costs, and those costs are massive,” he said.
“The argument is undeniable: The lockdowns are killing people.”
Atlas then pointed to job losses, rising suicides, rising drug abuse and the harm being done to young people, tying the issues to the Covid-19 restrictions put in place. One study showed that 25 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 thought about killing themselves in June “due to the lockdown,” he said.
“We’re creating a generation of neurotic children, forcing them to wear masks and be six feet apart from their friends, or not even have school in person.”
While Atlas’ counter-narrative comments might have been fodder for a serious discussion of public-health policy, mainstream media outlets instead spun the interview into a controversy over a Trump administration official granting an interview to a Russian state-owned outlet.
Reporters such as CNN’s Jim Acosta, Politico’s Ryan Lizza and NBC’s David Gura immediately pounced, ignoring the substance of his comments and breathlessly telling their followers that he spoke to an alleged Kremlin mouthpiece. “White House Covid adviser appears on outlet that is described by US intel as one of the Kremlin’s main propaganda platforms,” Washington Post national-security correspondent Greg Miller said.
Senior WH official tells me Doctor Scott Atlas did not have approval from the WH before going on RT. Atlas did it “on his own” without seeking approval from WH. Senior aides have raised concerns that Atlas would appear on the Russian outlet, the official said.
Scott Atlas is having an interesting week. Here he is on the Russia propaganda network RT, which casually opens the segment with some facts about US imperialism. https://t.co/M467aEvaum
On the heels of an interview with Russian propagandists, Dr. Scott Atlas, a partisan radiologist who has the president’s ear, spitefully subtweets Dr. Anthony Fauci, an actual expert on infectious diseases: https://t.co/wvmBXe124O
The controversy was so fierce that Atlas was forced to apologize. “I recently did an interview with RT and was unaware they are a registered foreign agent,” he said Sunday on Twitter, adding that he now “regrets” doing the interview and also apologizing “to the national-security community who is working hard to defend us.”
I recently did an interview with RT and was unaware they are a registered foreign agent. I regret doing the interview and apologize for allowing myself to be taken advantage of. I especially apologize to the national security community who is working hard to defend us.
The apology wasn’t accepted. Christian Science Monitor reporter Dan Murphy tweeted that Atlas, who he has called a “lying Trump goon,” was lying about not knowing about RT’s foreign registration. Illustrator Chris Morris mocked Atlas for supposedly not knowing what “RT” stands for. CNN analyst Sam Vinograd said the interview “raises a lot of counterintelligence red flags.”
1. He’s lying. 2. There’s an enormous federal bureaucracy devoted to informing and coordinating the media appearances of hacks like Atlas. 3. RT the least important part. The deadly Trump propaganda he spreads is disqualifying whether on RT or VOA or Fox. https://t.co/ieum3otqVl
No explanation was offered for how voicing opinions on a Russian-funded television outlet might jeopardize US national security. None was needed.
Democrats and mainstream media outlets have repeatedly squashed discussion of undesirable information or viewpoints, by alleging a nefarious Russian plot behind the report. Such tactics were used, for example, to dismiss damning information about the Hillary Clinton campaign – released by WikiLeaks in 2016 – and recent revelations about alleged influence-peddling by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s family.
Media critic Mark Dice pointed out that no objections were raised when US Representative Adam Schiff (D-California) and other Democrats appeared on RT in the past.
The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal tweeted he was “surprised it took this long for the US center-right opposition to merge Covid panic with Russia hysteria.”
MSNBC host Matt Negrin may have revealed just a hint of anti-Trump media vitriol when he responded to Atlas’ apology by saying, “Are you the dumbest motherf***er in the f***ing world?”
Everyone is freaking out about Scott Atlas doing an interview with RT but @afshinrattansi actually held his feet to the fire with tough questions. People should watch it and judge for themselves, frankly. I doubt most people commenting have even seen it https://t.co/Z36Ez9irr7
Atlas told RT he wrote about the issues discussed in the interview back in April or May, long before he joined the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
“I wasn’t the villain of the world when I wrote it, but when you come up and you stand next to the president of the United States – in an attempt to help the country in the biggest crisis in the world – you must be destroyed by the media in the United States. And so it’s a sad statement on America that the US is hysterical over this.”
Book Excerpt – Chapter 3: “Pulled from Thin Air”: The 97 Percent “Consensus” (Page 27)
A Harvard Consensus
In 2017 Princeton Professor Emeritus of Physics William Happer drew parallels to today’s man-made climate change claims. “I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the consensus on climate change and the consensus on witches. At the witch trials in Salem, the judges were educated at Harvard. This was supposedly 100% science. The one or two people who said there were no witches were immediately hung. Not much has changed,” Happer quipped.
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Economists versus Climatologists
“You take 400 economists and put them in the room and give them exactly the same data and you will get 400 different answers as to what is going to happen in the economic future. I find that refreshing because it tells me that these guys don’t have an agenda. But if you take 400 climatologists and put them in the same room and give them some data about a system which they understand very imperfectly, you are going to get a lot of agreement and that disturbs me. I think that’s arguing with an agenda.” —geologist Robert Giegengack of the University of Pennsylvania.
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Dubious Evidence for a Ubiquitous Number
The alleged “consensus” in climate science does not hold up to scrutiny. But what about the specific claim that 97 percent of scientists agree? MIT’s Richard Lindzen has explained the “psychological need” for the 97 percent claims. “The claim is meant to satisfy the non-expert that he or she has no need to understand the science. Mere agreement with the 97 percent will indicate that one is a supporter of science and superior to anyone denying disaster. This actually satisfies a psychological need for many people,” Lindzen said in 2017.
But what is the basis for this specific number, and what exactly is this overwhelming majority of scientists supposed to be agreeing on? In 2014, UN lead author Richard Tol explained his devastating research into the 97 percent claim. One of the most cited sources for the claim was a study by Australian researcher John Cook, who analyzed the abstracts of 11,944 peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between 1991 and 2011. Cook and his team evaluated what positions the papers took on mankind’s influence on the climate and claimed “among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” The 97 percent number took off. This 97 percent claim was despite the fact that 66.4 percent of the studies’ abstracts “expressed no position on AGW” at all.
“The 97% estimate is bandied about by basically everybody. I had a close look at what this study really did. As far as I can see, this estimate just crumbles when you touch it. None of the statements in the papers are supported by the data that is actually in the paper,” Tol said. “But this 97% is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever.” Tol’s research found that only sixty-four papers out of nearly twelve thousand actually supported the alleged “consensus.” Tol published his research debunking the 97 percent claim in the journal Energy Policy.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts summed up Tol’s research debunking Cook’s claims. The “97% consensus among scientists is not just impossible to reproduce (since Cook is withholding data) but a veritable statistical train wreck rife with bias, classification errors, poor data quality, and inconsistency in the ratings process,” Watts wrote.
Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation had authored a critique of Cook’s claim the previous year. “The consensus as described by the survey is virtually meaningless and tells us nothing about the current state of scientific opinion beyond the trivial observation that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent,” Montford found. “The survey methodology therefore fails to address the key points that are in dispute in the global warming debate.”
Climatologist Roy Spencer and Heartland Institute’s Joe Bast noted that even if a certain study accepts the premise of man-made global warming, that paper may not even study how CO2 impacts temperatures: The methodology is “flawed,” noted Spencer, adding, “a study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers.”
In 2015, former Margaret Thatcher advisor Christopher Monckton also examined the 97 percent claim. Monckton’s analysis found that “only 41 papers—0.3% of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0% of the 4014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1%” had actually endorsed the claim that “more than half of recent global warming was anthropogenic.”
As Monckton explained, “They had themselves only marked 64 out of 11,944 of the papers as representing that view of the consensus, and that is not 97.1% that’s 0.5%…. There is no consensus.” The 97 percent claim is “fiction. ‘97 percent’ was a figure that was arrived at many years ago by the people who’ve pushed this ‘agenda,’” Monckton noted. “They then realized that they needed some sort of support for it, so they did a couple of very dopey papers.”
In 2013, climatologist David Legates from the University of Delaware and his team of researchers had also challenged Cook’s 97 percent claims. “The entire exercise was a clever sleight-of-hand trick,” Legates explained. “What is the real figure? We may never know. Scientists who disagree with the supposed consensus—that climate change is man-made and dangerous— find themselves under constant attack.”
Another survey that claimed 97 percent of scientists agreed was based not on thousands of scientists or even hundreds of scientists … or even ninety-seven scientists, but only seventy-seven. And of those seventy-seven scientists, seventy-five formed the mythical 97 percent consensus. In other words, in this instance the 97 percent of scientists wasn’t even ninety-seven scientists. This was a 2009 study published in Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union by Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, a student at the University of Illinois, and her master’s thesis advisor Peter Doran.
As Lawrence Solomon revealed in the National Post, The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers—in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.
The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth—out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers. That left the 10,257 scientists in disciplines like geology, oceanography, paleontology, and geochemistry that were somehow deemed more worthy of being included in the consensus.
This was “a quickie survey that would take less than two minutes to complete, and would be done online.” And still less than a third of those surveyed even sent in an answer! The questions, as Solomon noted, “were actually non-questions”:
1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
As Solomon explained, those two points do not give a complete picture of what’s at issue. They don’t even mention carbon dioxide—which, as we’ll explore at length in the next chapter, is the heart of the climate change debate. “From my discussions with literally hundreds of skeptical scientists over the past few years, I know of none who claims that the planet hasn’t warmed since the 1700s, and almost none who think that humans haven’t contributed in some way to the recent warming—quite apart from carbon dioxide emissions, few would doubt that the creation of cities and the clearing of forests for agricultural lands have affected the climate,” Solomon pointed out.
The Israeli Political Spectrum From The “Liberal Left” To The Far Right, Is United In Genocide
The Dissident | May 5, 2026
… The fundamental issue of Israel is not Benjamin Netanyahu, but the fact that Israel is overwhelmingly a bloodthirsty, war-ready, genocidal society.
Historian Zachary Foster has documented that the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis have supported every Israeli war since the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, writing:
2006
86% of the Israeli adult population justified “the IDF operation in Lebanon against Hizbollah,” or 2006 Lebanon War, in which Israel killed 1,191 people, the vast majority civilians according to HRW (Note that the % of Jewish Israelis who supported the war was even higher)
2008-2009
82% of the Israeli public thought that the 2008-9 war on Gaza was justified (in which Israel killed 1,417 Palestinians, the vast majority civilians.) Note that the % of Jewish Israelis who supported the war was even higher
2012
90% of Israeli Jews supported war on Gaza ( in which Israel killed 160 Palestinians, 66% civilians)
2014
95% of Jewish Israelis believed the war on Gaza was justified (in which Israel killed 2,310 Palestinians, 70% civilians)
2021
72% of Israelis believed the war on Gaza should continue (as of May 21) after Israel had already killed 250 Palestinians in Gaza, vast majority civilians. The % of Jewish Israelis who supported killing more Palestinians was much higher.
2024
A January poll found 95% of Jewish Israelis thought the Israeli military was using either the “appropriate” amount of force or “too little” force in Gaza at a time when Israel had already killed >25,700 Palestinians in Gaza.
2024
In September, 90% of Jewish Israelis supported the war on Lebanon (in which Israel killed 800+, including hundreds of civilians)
2025
In March, 82% of Israeli Jews supported the forced expulsion of residents of Gaza, Israel’s main goal in it’s genocide & war on Gaza.
2025
In June, 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the war on Iran known as the “twelve day war”
2026
On March 4, 93% of Israeli Jews expressed support for the war on Iran. 97% of “right-wing” Jewish Israelis support it, compared with 93% in the center and 76% on the left.
The overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis also have openly genocidal views towards Palestinians.
Polls in Israel have shown that:
84% of the (Israeli )public gives the IDF an excellent or very good grade regarding the moral conduct of the army
75% of Jewish Israelis agree with the idea that ‘there are no innocents in Gaza.’
A vast majority of Israeli Jews – 79 percent – say they are ‘not so troubled’ or ‘not troubled at all’ by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.
The fundamental problem in Israel is Zionism, not Benjamin Netanyahu. – Full article
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