Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

CLIMATE CHANGE – THE FACTS

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | October 28, 2019

1) Global Temperatures

It is generally reckoned that global temperatures have risen by about 1C since the late 19thC. This however is only a guesstimate at best, as most of the world had very little climate data in those days

According to satellite data, temperatures have not increased since 1998.

2) Little Ice Age

Any discussion of temperature rise since the 19thC needs to be put in the context of the Little Ice Age, which lasted around 500 years and ended in the late 19thC.

Scientists believe that this was the coldest period since the end of the Ice Age, and evidence shows that it was a worldwide event, although timings were not always the same.

The Little Ice Age succeeded the Medieval Warm Period, which again appears to have been a global event, during which temperatures were at similar levels as today.

3) Glaciers

Melting of glaciers is often held up as “proof” of global warming. But in fact they began retreating in the 19thC, long before current “man-made” global warming. There is particularly strong evidence of this fact, as Alaskan and Alpine glaciers were already being closely surveyed as early as the late 18thC.

As the glaciers in Alaska retreat, they are uncovering the remains of ancient forests, which have been carbon dated back to the Middle Ages, indicating the glaciers were much smaller then. Exactly the same has occurred in Patagonia.

Evidence from around the world, including South America and New Zealand, confirms that there was a massive growth in  the size of glaciers between the Middle Ages and the end of the Little Ice Age.

Glaciologists have established that many glaciers in both Greenland and Iceland reached their post ice age maxima during the 18th and 19thC.

4) Arctic

We hear a lot about temperatures rising in the Arctic, and icecaps melting.

In fact, temperatures around the Arctic are little different now to what they were in the 1930s and 40s. Subsequently they fell sharply in the 1970s and 80s, before rising again. This cycle appears to be connected to multi-decadal ocean cycles

Arctic sea ice retreated as a result until 2007, since when it has remained stable. Satellite data for sea ice extent is only available since 1979, in the middle of the colder interlude, and therefore cannot provide reliable long term trends.

The ice cap in Greenland has also been slowly melting, but the amounts involved are extremely tiny in relation to the total ice mass. Again, long term temperature records in Greenland show that temperatures were as high in the 1930s and 40s.

On a longer timescale, scientists also know that temperatures throughout the Arctic have been much higher than now for the last 10,000 years.

5) Antarctica

Sea ice around Antarctica has been stable since 1979, if anything increasing slightly.

NASA have established that the Antarctic ice cap has actually been growing since 1992, because snowfall has more than offset thinning glaciers.

6) Sea levels

Since the ending of the Little Ice Age in the late 19thC, global sea levels have risen by about 8 inches. Sea levels around the UK give a similar result, after allowing for vertical land movement. (Most of England has been sinking since the ice age).

The recent rate of rise has been slightly higher, about 10 inches per century, but sea levels were also rising at a similar rate in the mid 20thC.

7) Extreme weather

There is no persuasive evidence that extreme weather is getting either more common or severe:

a) According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is no evidence of any long term increase in hurricane activity.

b) US data confirms that tornado activity has declined since the 1970s, when proper records began. Notably data also shows that there are now fewer of the most violent tornadoes.

c) The IPCC also report little evidence that flooding is getting worse.

d) Equally they find little proof that droughts are becoming worse globally, though there are inevitably regional differences.

e) Wildfires, contrary to popular myth, are claiming many less acres than they did in the past.

One of the biggest sources for the myth of extreme weather is 24/7 media coverage, which now brings events into our homes which would have gone unreported not long ago.

In the UK, long term data also provides no evidence of an increase in extreme weather, such as storms, floods and droughts.

8) UK climate trends

According to official Met Office data, UK temperatures stopped rising about fifteen years ago. The summer of 1976 remains the hottest on record, as well as having the most intense heatwaves.

Furthermore there is no evidence of any significant changes in rainfall trends, other than in Scotland which has experienced higher rainfall in recent decades.

9) Climate projections

All of the scary forecasts concerning temperatures, sea level rise etc are based on computer modelling of the climate. However these models have consistently grossly overestimated the small rise in temperatures actually experienced.

10) UK Climate Change Act

The 2008 Climate Change Act committed the UK to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050.

Since the Act was passed, the UK’s CO2 emissions have reduced by 183 Mt, representing 31% of 1990 levels. However this has come at a great cost.

This year, subsidies for renewable energy are forecast to hit £12.2bn, equivalent to about £450 per household.

This year however, Parliament approved changes to the Act which alter the target  from an 80% cut to 100%. Official estimates put the cost of  this at £50bn a year by 2050, some £1800 per household.

11) Global emissions

While UK emissions have dropped by 183 Mt since 2008, global emissions have increased by 3,389 Mt. UK emissions are now only a tiny 1% of global ones.

Despite the hype, the Paris Climate Agreement, signed in 2015, won’t do anything to reduce emissions, as most countries plan to carry on increasing them until at least 2030. Notably these include China and India, who account for 35% of the world’s carbon dioxide.

October 29, 2019 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Washington FDA Says, ‘Let Them Eat Cotton’

Gossypol, “in most animals, provokes infertility”

By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 29.10.2019

US Government regulators have approved a genetically modified cotton variety as a “potential solution to human hunger.” The radical decision is to permit consumption by humans, in addition to animals, of seeds of a GMO cotton developed at Texas A&M University, with no independent long-term testing. It opens grave new concerns about the safety of our food chain. Soon, as a result, the world food chain may well be contaminated with the GMO cottonseeds whose dangers have been simply ignored by authorities.

The USA Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just approved a new type of GMO cotton for unregulated release. The type, called TAM66274, has been genetically modified supposedly to make the seeds fit for human or animal feed by suppressing the presence of a dangerous toxin in the seed, while allegedly leaving the toxin only in the rest of the cotton plant.

With FDA approval the GMO cottons seeds will now be allowed as food for people or animals. The project has been led by Keerti Rathore, a plant biotechnology protégé of the late Norman Borlaug, at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research Center.

Rathore says the group will now seek approval in other countries starting with Mexico. He calculates that, “There are approximately 10.8 trillion grams of protein locked up in the annual global output of cottonseed. This is enough to meet the basic protein requirements of over 500 million people at a rate of 50 grams of protein per person per day.” He says the GMO cottonseeds can also be used to feed pigs, poultry or farmed fish or shrimp. His group sees it as a major new source of protein for consumption, as well as profit for cotton growers. It is not surprising that Cotton Inc., the US cotton lobby group is sponsoring the GMO project.

Cotton Inc. and Monsanto have a history of cooperation as well. Rathore says for every pound of cotton fiber, the plant produces about 1.6 pounds of seed. The annual global cottonseed production equals about 48.5 million tons. If that can now be turned into cottonseed oil or meal for human and animal consumption and sold, it adds a huge profit boost to cotton producers. The world’s largest purveyor of cotton seeds for planting cotton is Monsanto, now part of Bayer AG.

“The kernels from the safe seed could be ground into a flour-like powder after oil extraction and used as a protein additive in food preparations or perhaps roasted and seasoned as a nutritious snack,” Rathore said.

On October 1 the FDA released its summary of findings for the Texas application which had been made in 2017. That gives the impression the Government researchers were making an intensive testing of the highly controversial issue of whether to permit human consumption of the GMO cotton seeds or not. Far from the case. As the FDA states in their findings of October, 2019, the FDA declaration was simply copied from the tests given them by the producer, Texas A&M and its biotech research group, funded by the US cotton industry group, Cotton Inc.

Highly toxic gossypol

The FDA approval, made with no apparent independent testing of the results given them by the group at the A&M AgriLife Research center, is notable given the fact that cottonseeds contain a highly toxic substance in the seeds known as gossypol. Because of gossypol, previously much of the weight of cotton plants was wasted or usable only for limited animal feed only after special treatment. The seeds were deemed unsuitable for human consumption.

The A&M GMO cotton was modified using what is called RNA interference technology, RNAi, to “silence” a gene that supposedly, again according to its developers, “greatly” reduces gossypol from the cottonseed. Rathore claims to have suppressed the gene of a cotton plant to produce cotton with gossypol in everything but its seeds: “We have eliminated this gossypol from the seed without affecting its levels in other parts of the plant,” said Rathore. “With the toxin removed from the cottonseed, it can potentially feed 500 to 600 million people per year.” Well, almost eliminated it, to be more accurate. They admit that about 3% gossypol remains in the seeds.

Now we are entitled to eat the “low” gossypol seeds which are said to be protein rich and supposedly safe. There are several alarming aspects to this FDA decision to release the GMO cotton variety for human and animal consumption.

Not Adequately Tested For Safety

First of all, as researcher Claire Robinson points out in an excellent analysis, the RNAi procedure for cotton is hardly proven to be safe. She notes scientific research that shows risks of GMO RNAi crops. One study found that RNAi molecules in food plants can survive digestion and enter the body of the human or animal eating it, and even affect the gene expression of the human or animal with unpredictable side effects. Robinson stresses that the FDA made no adequate thorough tests for safety of the GMO cotton, nor did Texas researchers. She notes, “No toxicity testing in animals has been done on the seeds that are intended for consumption. The application only refers to testing in mice of the NPTII antibiotic resistance gene product, though it does not mention how long the tests lasted.”

Not only are the range of tests submitted by the Rathore group deficient or inadequate, they admit that their GMO variety has not entirely eliminated the presence of toxic gossypol in the cottonseeds, hence they term it “low” gossypol cotton seed, with an estimated 3% gossypol. Absent are any tests long-term on mice or other animals of effects of 3% or low gossypol GMO cottonseeds.

Population Reduction?

Gossypol among other traits is a human contraceptive. A study published in the journal Contraception notes that gossypol, “in most animals, provokes infertility, and in man it causes spermatogenesis arrest at relatively low doses… Gossypol should be prescribed preferably to men… who would accept permanent infertility after a few years of use.” It seems to be irreversible for many.

Another study published in The Scientific World Journal notes that among other toxic effects, “… free gossypol may be responsible for… respiratory distress, impaired body weight gain, anorexia, weakness, apathy, and death after several days. However, the most common toxic effect is the impairment of male and female reproduction. Another important toxic effect of gossypol is its interference with immune function, reducing an animal’s resistance to infections…”

Now according to the FDA, we humans are animals too for purposes of consuming GMO cottonseeds. Is a presence of 3% gossypol in now “edible” GMO cottonseeds enough to cause stealth contraception in humans, or any of the other grave symptoms? We simply don’t know as none of the responsible US regulators, neither at USDA nor FDA, have apparently bothered to seriously test.

What has the FDA done to safeguard the health and safety of potential human or animal consumers of the GMO cotton? A careful reading of the FDA testing summary of October 1 shows the entirety of their evaluation, as noted, is lifted directly from the test results given them by Rathore’s group at Texas A&M. And Rathore omits details of the length of their testing, which can conceal negative effects that only show up after longer time tests. Other tests are superficial and inconclusive.

Speaking of his hopes for the application of his new GMO cotton type, Rathore declares, “My personal preference as we move forward would be to follow the ‘Golden Rice’ example in terms of its use for humanitarian purposes.” The only problem with that example is that the Philippines project financed by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1990s to develop Golden Rice, supposedly high in Vitamin A, was a colossal failure that was later abandoned by its creators. It was simply used as a GMO PR stunt. It could well be that the inadequately tested GMO cottonseeds end up blended into our food like so many such ingredients with us being none the wiser. The precautionary principle seems to have been shredded by scientists at FDA.

October 29, 2019 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Expertology

Corbett • 12/03/2011

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

The experts always know best…or do they? Join us today on The Corbett Report podcast as we scrutinize the media’s ready reliance on “experts” to say what the establishment wants to be said, and what this practice means for the rise of the scientific dictatorship.

October 27, 2019 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Australian legislator uncovers Bureau of Meteorology fiddling with temperature records to hype warming

By Thomas Lifson | American Thinker | October 26, 2019

If global warming is real and a threat to the world, why do people keeping temperature records keep “adjusting” or “rectifying” the data to make it look like warming is increasing?

From Down Under, a member of the federal House of Representatives named Craig Kelly — a member of the Liberal Party, which is conservative — has caught that nation’s Bureau of Meteorology altering graphs showing the number of very hot days so as to obscure the fact that 1952 had more of them than recent years and adding a newly “discovered” hot day to a more recent year to make it appear that they are increasing.

I quote and use graphics from his Facebook account:

Not only did the Bureau’s graph showing the year 1952 as having the highest ‘number of very hot days’ (and the year 2011 with the lowest number) disappear down a memory hole — but a new ‘rectified’ graph has appeared in another section of their website.

And surprise, surprise — the year 1952 no longer has the highest ‘number of very hot days’. The old graph recorded 21 very hot days in 1952, while the new ‘rectified’ graph shows only 16 very hot days.

Further, for the year 2011 — which embarrassingly for Alarmists previously had the lowest ‘number of very hot days’ going back to 1910 — the Bureau has skilfully been able to find another very hot day for 2011, (I wonder where it was hiding ?) so that year no longer holds the lowest record !

As Orwell foretold in the novel 1984:

”There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

October 26, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Pentagon Grants Earth Another 20 Year Reprieve

By Tony Heller | Real Climate Science | October 24, 2019

The Pentagon says the world could end in 20 years because of global warming.

U.S. Military Could Collapse Within 20 Years Due to Climate Change, Report Commissioned By Pentagon Says – VICE

This is good news, because in 2004 they said the world would end in 2020.

Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us | Environment | The Guardian

And the new date is 65 years after the CIA said global cooling was going to kill us.

Daily News – Google News Archive Search

October 24, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Has climate change jumped the shark?

Climate Discussion Nexus | October 23, 2019

You might not think so, with time running out for deniers (again) except perhaps as psychiatric patients. But there are signs of fatigue with it in the political system. In Australia, a senior Labour figure has caused turmoil in his party by suggesting they not run in the next election on the hugely ambitious plans that cost them the last one. And when CNN and the New York Times sponsored the 4th, 3-hour debate among contenders for the Democratic nomination, the moderators didn’t ask a single question about climate and the candidates didn’t make it an issue. You might think it’s because everyone agrees. But what if it’s because nobody has anything useful to suggest and most people secretly don’t care?

Voters claim to be anti-global-warming, of course. But as we learned including from the Yellow Vest upheaval in France, and Canadians’ views on carbon taxes, and any number of similar issues in other countries, citizens aren’t willing to pay any significant price to take action against greenhouse gases, suggesting they don’t really think there’s a problem.

Except when all-in politicians push the agenda too far. For instance deep blue California’s governor is now in big political trouble over high gas prices and unreliable power. And remember, high prices for less available energy is a feature not a bug of the climate alarmist movement, soothing talk of wind power notwithstanding.

The problem isn’t really the cost of alternative energy, because except by accident politicians are not willing to raise the price of energy to levels that would discourage its use. There was some kerfuffle over a study finding that green energy policies cost Britain £9 billion per year, or £340 per household. But while an increase in energy bills means hardship to the poor, Britain is rich, and most households may resent the extra cost but are not unable to pay it. The problem is how much more it’s going to cost to try to get renewables up from their current trivial share… or what happens when you just can’t. (Wind farms, like solar farms, have thus far been cherry-picking sites.) On which politicians have little to say that is not both stale and unconvincing.

The hardcore believe that if voters are not willing to pay high carbon taxes and otherwise do without the conveniences of modern life, they are short-sighted idiots and democracy itself must give way in this climate emergency. Meanwhile most voters are happy just to virtue-signal, if only to avoid fights with their grade-schoolers trained to correct their pronunciation of Thunberg (it’s Toon-BUIY not THUN-berg). But they simply aren’t convinced that it’s the end of the winter and the world as we know it because out their window things are going pretty much as they always have. And since politicians are repeating implausible mantras about what’s supposedly happening and how to fix it painlessly, a lot of them just tune it out and go about their business.

Passionate opposition to climate change coupled with timid or nonexistent proposals to fight it must inevitably become a stale punchline.

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Clouds ain’t so cool

Climate Discussion Nexus | October 23, 2019

Some climate models say greenhouse gases cause a lot of warming and others don’t. Yet they all fit 20th century temperature data equally well. How is that possible? Simple: They all have an offsetting fudge factor based on the cooling effects of tiny pollution particles called aerosols. Not the observed effects, you understand. The high-sensitivity models simply assume aerosols do a lot of cooling by promoting extra cloud formation, and the low sensitivity models assume they don’t. So the key question is how much cooling aerosols actually do. If it’s not much, then greenhouse gases can only cause a little warming, given how little warming happened over the 20th century. And now we know it’s not much.

New evidence published in July is truly devastating. It doesn’t just say the cloud response to aerosols is very weak, though it does say so. It says aerosols do the opposite of what has been assumed and what they must do to make the models work. Instead of bundling liquid water up inside the clouds, which would lead to strong cooling of the Earth’s surface that might counteract a hypothetical strong impact of warming from GHGs, extra pollution aerosols cause clouds to expel water, weakening their overall cooling properties. Here is the authors’ exact wording (emphasis added).

The cooling of the Earth’s climate through the effects of anthropogenic aerosols on clouds offsets an unknown fraction of greenhouse gas warming. An increase in the amount of water inside liquid-phase clouds induced by aerosols, through the suppression of rain formation, has been postulated to lead to substantial cooling, which would imply that the Earth’s surface temperature is highly sensitive to anthropogenic forcing. Here we provide direct observational evidence that, instead of a strong increase, aerosols cause a relatively weak average decrease in the amount of water in liquid-phase clouds compared with unpolluted clouds. Measurements of polluted clouds downwind of various anthropogenic sources—such as oil refineries, smelters, coal-fired power plants, cities, wildfires and ships—reveal that aerosol-induced cloud-water increases, caused by suppressed rain formation, and decreases, caused by enhanced evaporation of cloud water, partially cancel each other out. We estimate that the observed decrease in cloud water offsets 23% of the global climate-cooling effect caused by aerosol-induced increases in the concentration of cloud droplets. These findings invalidate the hypothesis that increases in cloud water cause a substantial climate cooling effect and translate into reduced uncertainty in projections of future climate.

If this study is correct, and science we remind everyone proceeds skeptically by challenging findings including congenial ones, it is one more piece of evidence that most climate models predict too much warming in response to greenhouse gas emissions. The models with high sensitivity only get to stay in the game by having a big cooling offset in the form of aerosol-induced cloud formation, otherwise they’d have predicted so much warming over the 20th century we’d be fried to a crisp by now.

Up to now no one has been sure how much cooling happens from aerosol pollution because it is hard to measure (although there has previously been research showing that aerosol cooling is weaker than modelers usually assume). This new study knocks the legs out from under the modelers who want to keep a high climate sensitivity in their models.

And since the paper was published in Nature magazine, it will be hard for the IPCC folks to dismiss, though we don’t doubt they’ll try to find a way.

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Facebook’s False Fact Check

There’s no guarantee scientific research is credible or accurate just because it has been peer-reviewed. Why is Facebook promoting this lie?

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | October 23, 2019

Much of what we read, online and elsewhere, is incorrect. That’s life. But Facebook, a platform that helps people socialize, thinks it’s in the business of setting the record straight. It calls this process fact checking, but its fact checkers don’t know what they’re talking about.

A story from NaturalNews.com recently appeared in my Facebook feed. I don’t consider that website a reliable source of information, but that’s beside the point. The story was titled Climate change hoax COLLAPSES as new science finds human activity has virtually zero impact on global temperatures. It begins by talking about a paper written by two Finish academics who say there’s “no experimental evidence” for the idea that humanity significantly affects the climate.

Facebook inserted two “related articles” directly after that Natural News story in my feed, describing it as “incorrect” and “false” (see the screengrab at the top of this post). The first was from ClimateFeedback.org, which talks loftily about accurate information being “the foundation of a functioning democracy.”

According to ClimateFeedback,

Some news outlets are publishing articles stating that this claim is based on a new study. In reality, there is no new published study. The claim comes from a six-page document uploaded to arXiv, a website traditionally used by scientists to make manuscripts available before publication. [my italics]

Ideas exist independently of whether or not they’ve been published somewhere. They exist even if people dismiss them as a six-page document. Peter Ratcliffe, one of three individuals who shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine, had his research rejected because a reviewer didn’t think his findings were sufficiently significant.

click to enlarge

Was his Nobel-quality research wrong just because Nature chose not to publish it? Of course not.

ClimateFeedback neglects to mention that the availability of the Finnish research on ArXiv.org is a good sign. That platform is used by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, and others who are seeking feedback from the wider community. People post their work there specifically so that others can help them strengthen and sharpen it prior to submission to a scientific journal.

ClimateFeedback carries on:

This means that this article has not been peer-reviewed, so there is no guarantee to its credibility. [my bold]

I’m sure they intended to say there’s no guarantee of its accuracy. But either formulation is nonsense. I recently wrote about research that navigated the peer review process and got published in Nature. A mere 19 days later, the authors conceded it contained multiple errors. It has since been fully and formally retracted.

RetractionWatch.org provides ongoing coverage of faulty and fraudulent research that nevertheless made it through the peer review process. In other words: PEER REVIEW IS NOT A GUARANTEE. Not of credibility. And not of accuracy. Fact checkers who say otherwise are profoundly misleading the public.

Facebook labels the Natural News article false – and then promulgates a gigantic falsehood of its own.

But since we’re on the topic of unpublished research, this is a good time to recall that, when James Hansen delivered his famous global warming testimony back in 1988, he cited unpublished research. The larger scientific community had been given no opportunity to scrutinize his work, to decide if it was brilliant or bollocks. It had been accepted by a journal, but it hadn’t yet appeared.

Similarly, the anti-aerosol movement was kick-started by a 1974 New York Times front page story. It quoted a Harvard scientist who claimed aerosol products were destroying the Earth’s ozone layer. Lots of people apparently didn’t notice the sentence that said no one had yet taken “a hard look at the Harvard calculations,” since the research was still in the process of being submitted to a scientific journal.

Then there’s the world’s most influential climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has long relied on unpublished research when writing its reports (see here, here, here, here, and here).

There is a history, in other words, of taking research findings seriously before they’ve been published in scientific journals. But this only seems to apply when people are preaching doom, gloom, and alarm.

According to Facebook and ClimateFeedback.org, those Finns are just too audacious. No one should pay them the slightest attention. Heavens, their work is still unpublished!

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

University Feels No Need to Explain: Crockford Story Part 2

The University of Victoria receives hundreds of millions of tax dollars, yet refused to answer a single question about the firing of Susan Crockford.

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | October 21, 2019

I recently wrote about Susan Crockford, a world-renowned Canadian zoologist. After serving 15 years as an unpaid Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria (UVic), her adjunct status has now been revoked. First she was banned from participating in UVic’s Speakers Bureau. Then she was excommunicated from UVic altogether.

In an era in which others bite their tongues and keep their heads down, Crockford courageously disputes the claim that polar bears are at risk from climate change. She has now paid a heavy price.

It’s time to remind ourselves that UVic is a public institution funded by tax dollars. According to its most recent budget document, it spends more than half a billion a year. 52% of its general operating revenue comes directly from provincial and federal government grants. An additional 37% of its revenue comes from student fees – which themselves rely heavily on government grants.

The UVic budget document says a great deal about government funding, but not once does it use the word taxpayer. This institution appears to have forgotten that it owes its very existence to ordinary Canadians. Money is taken away from ordinary people, in the form of taxes, and handed over to UVic to spend.

Publicly funded entities have a special obligation to be transparent. Under British Columbia law, for example, they must publish the salaries of everyone earning above $75,000 a year (see UVic’s annual Financial Information Act report, posted online here).

Crockford was purged even though she didn’t cost UVic one red cent. Compare that to the $188,510 in salary plus $14,583 in expenses Ann Stahl earned last year. While serving as chair of the Anthropology Department, Stahl stopped Crockford from giving free lectures via UVic’s Speakers Bureau.

Compare Crockford’s pricetag to the $145,532 plus $17,272 in expenses April Nowell earned last year. Nowell was chair of the Anthropology Department when it excommunicated Crockford altogether.

We can also compare Crockford’s unpaid position to the $85,851 salary of Paul Marck, the UVic spokesperson I dealt with. He advised me that UVic department heads earning the salaries mentioned above aren’t allowed to speak to journalists working on stories for national newspapers. Everything has to go through Media Relations and Public Affairs, he said, inviting me to e-mail him written questions. That was on September 13th.

I submitted questions the same day. Two dozen of them. Do you know how many Marck answered? Zero. Zip.

I began by asking him to confirm that Crockford had been an adjunct professor for 15 years. He refused to say. After a ridiculous delay of 18 days, a man who’s paid $85,000 annually replied to my long list of questions with a single paragraph. Here’s his October 1st response, in its entirety:

Hello Donna;

Yes, you are correct that Dr. Susan Crockford held an appointment as a non-remunerated, adjunct assistant professor with the University of Victoria’s Department of Anthropology. Under the constraints of provincial privacy legislation, the university is unable to provide personal information relating to the status or renewal of adjunct appointments. For clarification, those who hold adjunct positions are neither faculty members nor employees of the university. As to your remaining questions, the university does not disclose identifying or personal information about our faculty members, staff or students including information about internal processes. We respect the privacy rights of all members of our campus community.

Sincerely,

Paul

My first group of questions merely attempted to verify dates and basic information. Double-checking facts with both sides of a story is important, but UVic made that impossible. If my understanding of events was inaccurate, this was UVic’s opportunity to let me know. Instead, it chose to stonewall, refusing to say if the Speakers Bureau had ever given Crockford negative feedback, or if anyone in the Anthropology Department had advised her she was at risk of losing her adjunct status.

My next six questions were emphatically not about identifiable individuals. I asked how many people had been on the committee that revoked Crockford’s adjunct status. How many had voted for her versus against her. How many were zoologists? How many adjuncts had the Anthropology Department severed ties with over the past decade? How many adjuncts had UVic as a whole severed ties with? I also asked about safeguards that would prevent adjuncts from being punished for politically incorrect views.

Answering those questions would have violated the privacy of absolutely no one. It’s hilarious that, when I then asked how many UVic professors had matched Crockford’s achievement by being recently published in a prestigious scientific journal, UVic declined even to answer that. University PR people spend their days boasting about this sort of thing. They normally send journalists press releases begging for celebratory coverage.

My final group of questions concerned Crockford’s banishment from the Speakers Bureau. The first one asked why Stahl had refused to endorse – and had therefore silenced – Crockford. This clearly involved identifiable individuals, but the eight questions that followed did not. Here are four of them, typo and all. I’ve inserted the italics here:

ii.   Since 2017, how many other UVic adjunct professors (within and beyond the Anthropology Department) are no longer participating in the Speakers Bureau due to a similar refusal on the part of their department chair?

iii.   Since 2017, what percentage of UVic graduate students participating in the Speaker’s Bureau have been similarly required to secure written endorsement from their department chair?

iv.   How many of these graduate studetns have been refused? [sic]

ix.   What mechanisms exist to vet the content of Speakers Bureau presentations, particularly regarding controversial topics such as climate justice, renewable energy, Israeli-Palestinian relations, restorative justice, and so forth?

That last issue is of particular importance. Either there’s a system to vet presentations or there isn’t. I was seeking basic information, trying hard to understand what’s normal, sincerely trying to sort out what had transpired. UVic felt absolutely no need to explain, to reassure Canadian taxpayers that it had behaved honourably and fairly.

Let me repeat. The University of Victoria was given ample opportunity – 18 bleeping days. Like an untouchable and unaccountable monarch, it chose not to answer a single question.

October 21, 2019 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Lies, Damned Lies, and Government Nutrition Advice

Corbett • 10/19/2019

Watch this video on BitChute / DTube / YouTube or Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES:

Health Benefits of Dark Chocolate

Heart Month Tip: Health benefits of red wine

Red Wine, Chocolate For Health Benefits? New Study Says No

New Study On Health Benefits Of Drinking Coffee

A new study says drinking too much coffee is bad for you

Study: Reducing red meat intake can improve heart health

New research claims eating red meat poses no health risk

New study about red meat ‘fundamentally flawed,’ expert says

Experts Say “Experts Say” Headlines are Propaganda – #PropagandaWatch

The Crisis of Science

The Sugar Conspiracy

R.I.P. food pyramid

A Brief History of USDA Food Guides

Dietary Guidelines: The First 25 Years

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

Pure, White, and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It

Episode 227 – The Regulation Trap

FLNWO 35 – Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

A Brief History of Food, Nutrition & Government Policy in America

What’s Wrong with the Food Pyramid?

October 18, 2019 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Climate ‘limits’ and timelines

By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | October 16, 2019

Some thoughts in response to a query from a reporter.

I received the following questions today from a reporter, related to climate change and ‘timelines.’ These questions are good topics for discussion.

My answers are provided below:

From your perspective, have the early warnings about how hot the Earth is getting turned out to be accurate? Have they been adjusted higher or lower than expected?

Early predictions of warming were 0.2 to 0.3 degrees Centigrade per decade are too high relative actual observations. Further, blaming all of the recent warming on carbon dioxide emissions is incorrect, in my opinion.  Solar indirect effects and multi-decadal oscillations of large scale ocean circulations have been effectively ignored in interpreting the causes of the recent warming.

What is the best figure that explains how we will know when things are really irrevocably bad? Is it the 2ºC limit, as some have reported?

‘Bad’ is a value judgment, and regions are affected differently by climate variations and change. Most of the so-called ‘bad effects’ of climate change relate to the natural variability of weather, and there is little to no evidence that extreme weather events have been worsening, against the large variations of natural climate variability.

The single adverse impact that is unambiguously associated with warming (whatever the cause) is sea level rise.  Since 1900, global sea level has risen about 8 inches. There is substantial temporal and spatial variations of sea level rise, associated with large scale ocean circulation patterns, glacial rebound, weather and tides. Projections of sea level rise by 2100 beyond several feet require: implausible scenarios of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, climate models that have implausibly high warming sensitivity to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and invocation of scenarios of collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet associated with speculative and poorly understood processes.

The 2C limit relates to expectations for long-term (many many centuries) melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The issue of the 2C limit is better described as ‘planetary diabetes’ rather than extinction or other dire characterizations. Another way of thinking about the so-called 2C limit is by analogous to a high-way speed limit. If the speed limit is 65 mph, exceeding that by 10 or even 20 mph is not guaranteed to cause a crash, but if you exceed the limit by a lot, your risk of a fatal crash certainly increases.

How do the actions (or inactions) of the Trump administration, such as withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, affect that timeline? If Democrats win the government in 2020, would implementing the Green New Deal (if it even passed) be too little, too late?

The political actions of President Trump have essentially made no difference to this timeline. Most of the signatories to the Paris Agreement are falling far behind in their commitments (the U.S. has been doing relatively well in terms of its emissions cuts.) Any future success of the Green New Deal relies on both politics and technology. Overwhelming Democratic control of the U.S. government wouldn’t necessary help with the needed technology developments.

1.5 C

Larry Kummer has a post today Did the IPCC predict a climate apocalypse? No.

Excerpts from the IPCC Special Report on 1.5C, Summary for Policy makers.

B1. Climate models project robust differences in regional climate characteristics between present-day and global warming of 1.5°C, and between 1.5°C and 2°C. …

B1.1. Evidence from attributed changes in some climate and weather extremes for a global warming of about 0.5°C supports the assessment that an additional 0.5°C of warming compared to present is associated with further detectable changes in these extremes (medium confidence). …

B1.3. Risks from droughts and precipitation deficits are projected to be higher at 2°C compared to 1.5°C global warming in some regions (medium confidence). …

B2. By 2100, global mean sea level rise is projected to be around 0.1 metre lower {4″} with global warming of 1.5°C compared to 2°C (medium confidence). …

B2.1. Model-based projections of global mean sea level rise (relative to 1986-2005) suggest an indicative range of 0.26 to 0.77 m by 2100 for 1.5°C global warming, 0.1 m (0.04-0.16 m) {4″} less than for a global warming of 2°C (medium confidence). …

B3. On land, impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems, including species loss and extinction, are projected to be lower at 1.5°C of global warming compared to 2°C. …

B3.1. Of 105,000 species studied,9 6% of insects, 8% of plants and 4% of vertebrates are projected to lose over half of their climatically determined geographic range for global warming of 1.5°C, compared with 18% of insects, 16% of plants and 8% of vertebrates for global warming of 2°C (medium confidence). …

B3.2. Approximately 4% (interquartile range 2–7%) of the global terrestrial land area is projected to undergo a transformation of ecosystems from one type to another at 1ºC of global warming, compared with 13% (interquartile range 8–20%) at 2°C (medium confidence). …

B4. Limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2ºC is projected to reduce increases in ocean temperature as well as associated increases in ocean acidity and decreases in ocean oxygen levels (high confidence). …

B4.1. There is high confidence that the probability of a sea-ice-free Arctic Ocean during summer is substantially lower at global warming of 1.5°C when compared to 2°C. With 1.5°C of global warming, one sea ice-free Arctic summer is projected per century. This likelihood is increased to at least one per decade with 2°C global warming. Effects of a temperature overshoot are reversible for Arctic sea ice cover on decadal time scales (high confidence). …

B4.4. Impacts of climate change in the ocean are increasing risks to fisheries and aquaculture via impacts on the physiology, survivorship, habitat, reproduction, disease incidence, and risk of invasive species (medium confidence) but are projected to be less at 1.5ºC of global warming than at 2ºC.

Larry Kummer’s comments:

“Most of the findings in the SPM of this Special Report are of two kinds. First, stating that the effects of 1.5°C warming are less than those of 2.0°C warming. Pretty obvious, but it means little unless we know the effects of 2°C warming. It seldom quantifies the difference in effects from that extra 0.5°C warming, which is the key information necessary to know when assessing the cost-benefit of limiting the coming warming.

Second, there are more specific findings – bad but not disastrous – given at a “medium” level of confidence. The IPCC uses five levels of confidence: very low, low, medium, high, and very high. “Medium” is a weak basis for extreme measures to restructure society and the global economy. Especially since it is human nature to overestimate confidence more often than to underestimate it.”

JC note: with regards to IPCC confidence definitions, see my previous post A crisis of overconfidence

“There is nothing in this Special Report justifying belief that the world will end, that the world will burn, or that humanity will go extinct. It has been misrepresented just as past reports have been (e.g., the 4th US National Climate Assessment). The disasters described the Climate Emergency and Extinction Rebellion activists are those of RCP8.5, the worst-case scenario in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment report – or even beyond it. RCP8.5 is, as a worst-case scenario should be, a horrific but not apocalyptic future that is improbable or impossible.”

JC note: with regards to RCP8.5, see my previous post What’s the worst case? Emissions/concentrations scenarios

JC conclusion

Bottom line is that these timelines are meaningless. While we have confidence in the sign of the temperature change, we have no idea what its magnitude will turn out to be. Apart from uncertainties in emissions and the Earth’s carbon cycle, we are still facing a factor of 3 or more uncertainty in the sensitivity of the Earth’s climate to CO2, and we have no idea how natural climate variability (solar, volcanoes, ocean oscillations) will play out in the 21st century. And even if we did have significant confidence in the amount of global warming, we still don’t have much of a handle on how this will change extreme weather events.  With regards to species and ecosystems, land use and exploitation is a far bigger issue.

Cleaner sources of energy have several different threads of justification, but thinking that sending CO2 emissions to zero by 2050 or whenever is going to improve the weather and the environment by 2100 is a pipe dream. If such reductions come at the expense of economic development, then vulnerability to extreme weather events will increase.

There is a reason that the so-called climate change problem has been referred to as a ‘wicked mess.’

October 16, 2019 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

The Excommunication of Susan Crockford

Polar bear expert purged from the University of Victoria

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | October 16, 2019

An accomplished scientist and role model for young women has been expelled from the academic community. Like geologist Bob Carter before her, Susan Crockford has been stripped of her Adjunct Professor status by a university with which she has a long history. Why? Because she promotes facts and eschews climate activism.

In May, Canada’s University of Victoria (UVic) advised Crockford that an internal committee had voted to end her 15-year stint as an Adjunct Professor. Having undergone hip surgery in the interim, only now is she going public.

When the matter was last considered, the committee voted unanimously in her favour. What changed? Talks she was invited to give to schools apparently “generated concern among parents regarding balance.” That concern was “shared with various levels of the university,” according to an April 2017 e-mail from Ann Stahl, then chair of the Anthropology Department.

These vague accusations, leveled by an unknown number of unknown individuals who may or may not have been garden variety climate activists, were first used to expel Crockford from the UVic Speakers Bureau. They then became the impetus to expel her from the UVic academic community altogether.

I’ve written about this scandalous development in today’s Financial Post, the business section of Canada’s daily newspaper, the National Post.

On the subject of balanced presentations, please see my recent commentary, U of Victoria’s Speakers Bureau. Many of the talks it promotes are one-sided, activist, and controversial. Someone with no science background has, for years, been giving lectures about ocean chemistry. Yet the eminently qualified Crockford was purged.

While UVic has deprived its students of her expertise, this weekend Crockford begins a European speaking tour. Audiences in Oslo, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Munich will have the opportunity to hear her firsthand.

Read the full report here (click).

October 16, 2019 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »