Fake News and Fires in the Amazon
Media outlets are supposed to be more reliable than your brother-in-law, but that seems less true every day.
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | August 28, 2019
Politicians and government officials like to talk as though it’s possible to stamp out fake news. It isn’t.
Fake news is as old as humanity. After Aristotle incorrectly claimed women had fewer teeth than men, generations of highly educated people believed it.
Rajendra Pachauri was called “the UN’s top climate scientist” by the BBC – and a “Nobel laureate” by the New York Academy of Sciences magazine. Neither statement was true.
Pachauri’s doctorate wasn’t in climatology, but in industrial engineering and economics. And the fact that he accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the UN organization he chaired doesn’t make him or any other person affiliated with that organization a Nobel laureate.
Published in 2008 and 2009, these inaccurate statements have never been corrected. In other words, we’re surrounded by fake news. And always will be. Humans are frequently mistaken. Organizations, as well as individuals, post things on the Internet before double-checking.
While media outlets are supposed to be more reliable than your brother-in-law, that seems less true every day. Over the past week, people have shared a CNN headline on Facebook that declares: “The Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate” (see the screengrab from my own Facebook feed, at the top of this post).
If you click through to the CNN website, you’ll find a few extra words: “… research center says.” But the primary statement is misleading. Which means that millions have been alarmed unnecessarily – including a lovely, smart, young mother of my acquaintance.
Over at the website of National Geographic, a headline falsely declares: Brazil’s Amazon is burning at record rates – and deforestation is to blame. The second half of that assertion is vigorously disputed here.
On Twitter, the President of France used an image taken by a photographer who’s been dead for 16 years to represent the current situation. Let me just emphasize that point: the head of a G7 country is spreading fake news about events unfolding on another continent.
That doesn’t, for one minute, mean anyone should have the power to shut him down. Not Twitter, Facebook, the EU, the UN, or anyone in his own government.
Like it or not, we’re stuck with fake news. Our best defense is to read widely and maintain a high level of skepticism. On this question, here’s some counterbalance to the recent tsunami of alarmism:
Why Everything They Say About The Amazon, Including That It’s The ‘Lungs Of The World,’ Is Wrong
Amazon fires: how celebrities are spreading disinformation
Is Amazon Rainforest Burning At Record Rates? What Is The Way Forward?
Lies, Damn Lies, And Rainforest Fear-Mongering
Annual Amazon farmland burn sets records for international outrage
Amazon fires: What about Bolivia?
Stop Sharing Those Viral Photos of the Amazon Burning
The Three Most Viral Photos of the Amazon Fire Are Fake. Here Are Some Real Ones to Share.
What Satellite Imagery Tells Us About the Amazon Rain Forest Fires
Creator Of Global-Warming’s Infamous “Hockey Stick” Chart Loses ‘Climate-Science’ Lawsuit
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 08/27/2019
Update 1: Michael Mann disputes the notion that he lost (and more): “There have been some wildly untruthful claims about the recent dismissal of libel litigation against Tim Ball circulating on social media.”
There have been some wildly untruthful claims about the recent dismissal of libel litigation against Tim Ball circulating on social media. Here is our statement (https://t.co/8tGoBZnE3Y): pic.twitter.com/ySeJcOktX9
— Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) August 23, 2019
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Update 2: technology.news has a rather different take than Mann, noting that further legal steps are on their way.
Penn State climate scientist, Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann commits contempt of court in the ‘climate science trial of the century.’ Prominent alarmist shockingly defies judge and refuses to surrender data for open court examination. Only possible outcome: Mann’s humiliation, defeat and likely criminal investigation in the U.S.
The defendant in the libel trial, the 79-year-old Canadian climatologist, Dr Tim Ball … is expected to instruct his British Columbia attorneys to trigger mandatory punitive court sanctions, including a ruling that Mann did act with criminal intent when using public funds to commit climate data fraud. Mann’s imminent defeat is set to send shock waves worldwide within the climate science community as the outcome will be both a legal and scientific vindication of U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims that climate scare stories are a “hoax.” (snip)
Michael Mann, who chose to file what many consider to be a cynical SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) libel suit in the British Columbia Supreme Court, Vancouver six long years ago, has astonished legal experts by refusing to comply with the court direction to hand over all his disputed graph’s data. Mann’s iconic hockey stick has been relied upon by the UN’s IPCC and western governments as crucial evidence for the science of ‘man-made global warming.’ (snip)
The negative and unresponsive actions of Dr Mann and his lawyer, Roger McConchie, are expected to infuriate the judge and be the signal for the collapse of Mann’s multi-million dollar libel suit against Dr Ball. It will be music to the ears of so-called ‘climate deniers’ like President Donald Trump and his EPA Chief, Scott Pruitt.
As Dr Ball explains:
“Michael Mann moved for an adjournment of the trial scheduled for February 20, 2017. We had little choice because Canadian courts always grant adjournments before a trial in their belief that an out of court settlement is preferable. We agreed to an adjournment with conditions. The major one was that he [Mann] produce all documents including computer codes by February 20th, 2017. He failed to meet the deadline.”
Punishment for Civil Contempt
Mann’s now proven contempt of court means Ball is entitled to have the court serve upon Mann the fullest punishment. Contempt sanctions could reasonably include the judge ruling that Dr. Ball’s statement that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State’ is a precise and true statement of fact. This is because under Canada’s unique ‘Truth Defense’, Mann is now proven to have wilfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake. As such, the court must then dismiss Mann’s entire libel suit with costs awarded to Ball and his team.
* * *
Authored by Thomas Lifson via AmericanThinker,
Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that appears to show global temperatures taking a noticeable swing upward in the era when humanity has been burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
The graph was first published in 1998, prominently featured in the 2001 UN Climate Report, and formed part of Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth.
The graph’s methodology and accuracy have been and continue to be hotly contested, but Mann has taken the tack of suing two of his most prominent critics for defamation or libel.
One case, against Mark Steyn, is called by Steyn likely to end up in the Supreme Court. But another case, against Dr. Tim Ball was decided by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, with Mann’s case thrown out, and him ordered to pay the defendant’s legal costs, no doubt a tidy sum of money. News first broke in Wattsupwiththat, via an email Ball sent to Anthony Watt. Later, Principia-Scientific offered extensive details, including much background on the hockey stick.
The Canadian court issued it’s final ruling in favor of the Dismissal motion that was filed in May 2019 by Dr Tim Ball’s libel lawyers.
Not only did the court grant Ball’s application for dismissal of the nine-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit, it also took the additional step of awarding full legal costs to Ball. A detailed public statement from the world-renowned skeptical climatologist is expected in due course.
This extraordinary outcome is expected to trigger severe legal repercussions for Dr Mann in the U.S. and may prove fatal to climate science claims that modern temperatures are “unprecedented.” […]
Dr Mann lost his case because he refused to show in open court his R2 regression numbers (the ‘working out’) behind the world-famous ‘hockey stick’ graph (shown above).
Real science, not the phony “consensus” version, requires open access to data, so that skeptics (who play a key role in science) can see if results are reproducible. Of course, there are no falsifiable experimental data associated with the global warming predictions of doom, so it doesn’t really stand as science as Karl Popper defined it.
This is an important victory in the process of debunking the warmist scare.
You’ll Never Be Lonely Again
By Helen Buyniski | Helen of Destroy | August 26, 2019
The pathologization of emotion has been on the march for decades, especially in the US, where fully one sixth of the adult population takes an antidepressant or other psychiatric drug. But with depression “conquered” by medication – even as both diagnosis rates and suicides are at an all-time high – the mental-health industry has a new target: loneliness. With pharmaceutical and even technological “cures” in the pipeline for this “condition,” once considered part of the normal human emotional experience but now framed as a dire health risk on the level of obesity and smoking, our very ability to think for ourselves hangs in the balance, and if that sounds like hyperbole, read on.
Nearly half of Americans polled last year by health insurer Cigna said they lacked meaningful relationships or companionship, while a third of people in industrialized societies report they are lonely, and this state of mind appears to significantly shorten one’s lifespan. A solutions-based society might examine why so many people feel alienated from their peers despite the constant connectivity of smartphones and internet. A symptom-focused model, however, simply looks to stop them from feeling that way by any means necessary – never mind the cause, and never mind the consequences.
Loneliness is “worse than obesity,” according to a raft of studies that have emerged linking the emotion to increased risk of premature death – as much as 50 percent, says one meta-analysis by Brigham Young University professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad – and a dramatically lowered quality of life. And like obesity – big business not just for Big Pharma, but for gastric bypass surgeons, weight-loss gurus, and other parasitic professionals who have monetized the American public’s lack of self-control – anything that deadly requires medical intervention.
THERE’S A PILL FOR THAT
The University of Chicago’s Brain Dynamics Laboratory recently began an eight-week trial of the hormone pregnenolone, rounding up volunteers with “off-the-chart” scores on a psychological loneliness scale. Basing their treatment on animal studies suggesting the chemical can reduce the exaggerated threat reactions that they say characterize loneliness, they hope to normalize the lonely person’s self-centered hyper-vigilance, which drives them to both desire human connection and deal poorly with it.
Researchers insist the intention is not to cure loneliness with a pill, but the trial sets a precedent for doing just that. Oxytocin, the “love hormone,” is also being considered as a potential treatment based on promising animal studies. Enterprising psychiatrists have previously medicalized aspects of loneliness as “social anxiety” and prescribed tranquilizers or antidepressants, but loneliness itself has never been so directly in the pharmaceutical crosshairs.
And if the hormone trials flop, there’s always Prozac. Already, doctors have claimed antidepressants make patients more sociable, and these drugs have for years been used (and abused) for conditions aside from depression – off-label prescribing of the antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin was the basis of the largest pharmaceutical company lawsuit in history. If loneliness is not an emotion but a crisis to be resolved, in which the ends justify the means (however barbaric and harmful they may be), why not bring out the heavy artillery?
Mental health professionals writing about the loneliness epidemic discuss behavioral interventions, community programs, and counseling, but the introduction of a pharmaceutical solution may prove too tempting for a profession that has learned to love the quick fix a pill provides. Like depression, loneliness has myriad possible causes, some of which are natural and healthy reactions to life circumstances. Other, obviously situational, causes would (before the magic pill, at least) call for clear behavioral solutions. Would a psychiatrist reach for her prescription pad when confronted with a lonely person who only socializes through Facebook, even though social media use has been found to correlate strongly with loneliness and studies have shown that just a week away from the platform can bring “significant” improvements in well-being? In this case, at least, correlation equals causation. A solution to the patient’s loneliness seems obvious. But why force him to change his life when a pill will do the trick?
The loneliness plague is a real problem – the number of Americans who say they have no one to talk to has tripled since 1985, and the negative health effects are real. Alienation is epidemic. But medicalizing it will only make the situation worse, just as it has with depression. When the profit motive enters the equation and medicalization gives way to monetization, the incentive to get rid of the problem vanishes, replaced by the incentive to diagnose as many people as possible with the condition in order to “treat” them while the relevant drugs are still under patent. Nor is there any incentive to (or expectation of) cure – unlike most patients diagnosed with a treatable disease, individuals deemed mentally ill tend to remain on medication for years, if not for life. Each newly-diagnosed individual thus represents a sizable wad of cash on the table.
In a quick-fix society that prefers to treat the symptoms while ignoring the disease, a pill for loneliness will be embraced with all the fervor with which antidepressants were greeted before people began to realize that they cause suicidal and homicidal behavior, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, and a host of other problems – and that they don’t actually cure depression. Those drugs are still doled out like candy, even after the scientific explanation for their effect (and that effect itself) have been debunked, because it’s easier to take a pill than to come to terms with one’s reasons for being depressed in the first place, especially if they’re reasonable responses to environmental factors. Nearly half of Americans struggle just to cover their basic financial needs every month; expecting the chronically stressed to enjoy the feel of the system’s boot on their necks is unrealistic. With a similar array of thorny societal causes as depression, loneliness is just as likely to be pharmaceutically exploited.
A loneliness pill would not address Americans’ emotionally unhealthy digitally-addicted lifestyles, a society-wide sickness and source of significant stress. It would instead allow them to socialize exclusively in an online sphere whose boundaries are set by billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, without experiencing any of the discomfort they would naturally feel at having their gregarious impulses folded, spindled and mutilated to fit an increasingly stringent set of behavioral restrictions. Nor would it confront societal programming that equates solitude with loneliness, with abnormality, and teaches children that if they are not driven to socialize, they are defective. It’s no coincidence that fictional dystopias from 1984 to the Handmaid’s Tale minimize the amount of “alone time” their citizens are permitted – time alone with one’s thoughts is time the state cannot control. But the police state of today is working to change that.
As human contact, including real-life socializing, has become a luxury – so says the New York Times, explaining that humans are expensive, screens and robots are cheap, and expecting the unwashed masses to be able to afford access to living, breathing humans like themselves is simply unrealistic – the “digital pets” millennials had as children have matured to “digital friends,” even digital lovers as they themselves have grown up. And these digital companions double as the eyes and ears of a shockingly intrusive surveillance state.
BRIDGING THE UNCANNY VALLEY
If the “loneliness pill” doesn’t work out, AI is waiting in the wings. Already seen as the future of at-home healthcare for aging populations under the care of cash-strapped governments, friendly, helpful robots could find their way into the homes of the lonely. And everyone gets lonely sometimes! Certainly, the mass deployment of robo-buddies circumvents the surveillance hurdle faced by in-home AI snoops like Amazon’s Alexa, which many Americans find creepy (and not just for its tendency to burst into sinister laughter unprovoked). Frame the intruder as a medical benefit, however, and some of that opposition falls by the wayside. After all, loneliness kills, and no one wants to die.
As lonely humans become accustomed to conversing with their robot pals, their expectation for real human contact will diminish, and their sense of loneliness with it. After all, you can’t miss what you never had. Already, given the stunted level of discourse on social media, many of us have found ourselves tricked into talking to bots, sometimes exchanging several messages before realizing our interlocutor is not human. The Voight-Kampff Test used by Philip K Dick’s “blade runners” to determine whether a suspect was human or android can be graded on a curve.
As the bar for “meaningful relationships” is lowered to the point where chatting with an AI can qualify, the loneliness epidemic vanishes – on paper, at least, and in US public health policy, sometimes that’s all that matters.
LONELY OR JUST ALONE?
The pathologization of loneliness will inevitably elide the difference between being alone and being lonely, as the mental health industry runs out of lonely people to treat with whatever therapeutic weapon wins this particular arms race and is forced to look further afield for patients. “Loners” – those dangerous types who actually enjoy solitude – are stigmatized as unpredictable weirdos who need to be brought into the fold. The man who shot up a Walmart in El Paso earlier this month was an “extreme loner,” according to media reports. Would we be reading about it if he was an “extreme extrovert,” someone so addicted to the company of other humans he couldn’t stand to spend a second alone? Extroversion is a characteristic of the psychopathic personality, yet extroverts are not stigmatized for this, or treated as potential serial killers because they feel compelled to socialize – instead, the “introvert killer” trope is reliably trotted out after every tragedy, even though it has been repeatedly debunked.
With no loneliness pill on the market – yet – it is impossible to predict what’s next for the creeping medicalization of the human emotional experience. But the surveillance state is muscling into the “mental health” sphere as never before. The Trump administration has reportedly embraced a new Health Advanced Research Projects Agency, modeled after the Pentagon’s DARPA, that will develop a method for analyzing “neurobehavioral signs” to determine whether someone is “headed toward a violent explosive act.” HARPA’s proposal suggests a “multi-modality solution, along with real-time data analytics” to be garnered from technologies like Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo, and Google Home. And Amazon’s Alexa has moved one step closer to the companion-robot model, rolling out a medical feature earlier this year which could conceivably be deployed to “check on” individuals at risk for loneliness. The devices that have been surveilling us for years may thus become empowered to have us committed – for our own good, of course, and the good of society.
In the aftermath of recent mass shootings, Trump declared open season on the “mentally ill,” floating the idea of involuntary confinement and institutionalization, while governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo have proposed mental health databases that would affix an indelible scarlet letter to anyone seeking help with a psychological issue – effectively driving many of the people who actually need help away from the system out of fear of the repercussions for their personal and professional lives. The idea that “extreme loners” might find themselves medicated against their will, as a preemptive measure, is not far-fetched.
And Elon Musk’s Neuralink device proposes bringing the AI directly to your brain, “merging biological intelligence with machine intelligence,” so you never have to feel lonely again – or experience any inconvenient emotions. Musk envisions a future in which customers will have the devices installed in shopping mall kiosks, no more intrusive than an ear-piercing. Social scientists fear it’ll be “suicide for the human mind” – while no one knows for sure where consciousness resides, if it’s anywhere near our squishy grey matter, it doesn’t stand a chance against cold silicon precision. Even Musk acknowledges that Neuralink is an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach to a future AI takeover.
Implantable AI hands the state the tools to control our thoughts. Indeed, we will no longer be able to tell which thoughts are “ours,” and which come from the device implanted in our skull. Transhumanists speak glowingly of “merging with the machines,” forgetting (or perhaps deliberately omitting) that the machines have programmers, and those programmers work hand in glove with the military-industrial complex. If they get their way, you’ll never be able to feel lonely again, because Big Brother will take up residence inside your skull. Solitude – like privacy before it – will be a distant memory, assuming you’re permitted to remember it at all. And like privacy, children born today may never know what it is like to experience loneliness – nor will they ever have the pleasure of being alone with their thoughts.
(originally published in much shorter form on RT)
Dr. Tim Ball wins @MichaelEMann lawsuit – Mann has to pay
By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | August 22, 2019
Readers surely recall that the easily offended Dr. Michael Mann launched a court case for defamation against climate skeptic Dr. Tim Ball of Canada.
In Feburary 2018 there was a complete dismissal in the lawsuit brought against Dr. Ball by Andrew Weaver of Canada, also for “defamation”.
The Weaver defamation case involved an article Ball wrote saying that the IPCC had diverted almost all climate research funding and scientific investigation to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This meant that there was virtually no advance in the wider understanding of climate and climate change. Ball referenced an interview with Weaver and attempts by a student to arrange a debate. Ball made some comments that were not fully substantiated, so they became the base of the defamation lawsuit.
That case was completely dismissed, you can read more here.
Now in the Mann case, which goes back to 2011, there’s also a complete dismissal. Ball wrote to me less than an hour ago, asking me to announce it here.
He writes:
Hi Anthony
Michael Mann’s case against me was dismissed this morning by the BC Supreme Court and they awarded me [court] costs.
Tim Ball
This is a developing story, I’ll add more as we know more.
Petitioning Against Climate Alarmism Goes Global
By Larry Bell ~ PA Pundits – International ~ August 21, 2019
A petition being submitted by hundreds of independent climate scientists and professionals from numerous countries to heads of the European Council, Commission and Parliament declares “There is No Climate Emergency.”
Briefly summarized, the request for consideration conveys five urgent messages:
- Climate change is real and has been occurring with nature-driven cold and warm cycles for as long as the planet has existed.
- There should be no surprise that the Earth has been warming through natural causes since the last Little Ice Age ended around 1870. Actual temperature increases, however, are far less than predicted by theoretical climate models.
- There is no real evidence that anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2 emissions are a major or dangerous warming influence. They instead offer great benefits to agriculture, forestry and photosynthesis that is the basis for life.
- There is also no scientific evidence that increasing CO2 levels are causing more natural disasters. However, CO2-reduction measures do have devastating impacts on wildlife (e.g. wind turbines), land use (e.g. forest clearance), and vital energy systems.
- Energy policies must be based on scientific and economic realities — not upon a harmful and unrealistic “2050-carbon-neutral policy” driven by unfounded climate alarm.
The petition concludes by recommending the recognition of clear difference in policies addressing the Earth’s environment through good stewardship versus Earth’s climate, the latter of which “is largely caused by a complex combination of natural phenomena we cannot control.”
This recent petition to EU leaders signed by approximately 100 Italian scientists from many prominent organizations urges recognition of the same basic realities.
The Italian petition calls attention to the fact that the planet has previously been warmer than the present period, despite lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Warming periods have been repeated about every thousand years, including “the well-known Medieval Warm Period, the Hot Roman Period, and generally warm periods during the Optimal Holocene period.”
Most recent climate warming observed since 1850 followed the Little Ice Age – the coldest period of the last 10,000 years. “Since then, solar activity, following its [previous cooling-influence] millennial cycle, has increased by heating the Earth’s surface.”
The notification advises that climate, “the most complex system on our planet,” needs to be addressed with scientific methods that are “adequate and consistent with its level of complexity.”
This system “is not sufficiently understood. And while CO2 is indisputably a greenhouse gas, “according to [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC itself, the climate sensitivity to its increase in the atmosphere is still extremely uncertain.”
The petition states that “In any case, many recent studies based on experimental data estimate that the climate sensitivity to CO2 is considerably lower than estimated by the IPCC models.” Accordingly, all evidence suggests that such models “overestimate the anthropic [human] contribution and underestimate the natural climatic variability, especially that induced by the sun, the moon, and ocean oscillations.”
Likewise, alarmist media claims that extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and cyclones, are increasing in frequency are entirely inaccurate and typically far more directly tied to natural ocean oscillation cycles.
Again, the Italian signatories from numerous universities and research organizations take strong issue against “deplorable propaganda” claiming that carbon dioxide is a pollutant rather than a molecule that is indispensable to life on our planet.
Accordingly, given “the crucial importance that fossil fuels have for the energy supply of humanity,” the petitioners urge that the EU should not adopt economically burdensome and unwarranted CO2 reduction policies under “the illusory pretense of governing the climate.”
The petitioners also emphasize that while credible facts must be based upon scientific methods, not determined by numbers of supporting theorists, there is no alleged “consensus” among specialists in many and varied climate disciplines suggesting that human-influenced climate change presents an imminent danger. They point out that many thousands of scientists have previously expressed dissent with alarmist anti- fossil energy conjecture.
More than 31,000 American scientists from diverse climate-related disciplines signed a Global Warming Petition Project rejecting limits on greenhouse gas emissions attached to the 1977 Kyoto Protocol and similar proposals. The list of signatories included 9,021 Ph.D.s, 6,961 at the master’s level, 2,240 medical doctors, and 12,850 carrying a bachelor of science or equivalent academic degree.
A 12-page petition attachment was introduced with a cover letter issued by Fredrick Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Sciences and former president of Rockefeller University. It read, in part:
“This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.”
The letter added, “The proposed agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations around the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to over 4 billion people in technologically undeveloped countries.”
Gratefully, an American Congress at that time listened to that sage advice and unanimously agreed. We can only fervently hope that more current legislators will continue to be equally wise.
Larry Bell contributes posts at the CFACT site. He heads the graduate program in space architecture at the University of Houston. He founded and directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture. He is also the author of “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax.”
Greenland’s ‘Record Temperature’ denied – the data was wrong
Greenland’s all-time record temperature wasn’t a record at all, and it never got above freezing there.
By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | August 12, 2019
First, the wailing from news media:
NYT : https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/climate/european-heatwave-climate-change.html
Climate Progress : https://thinkprogress.org/greenland-hits-record-75-f-sets-melt-record-as-globe-aims-at-hottest-year-e34e534e533e/
Polar Portal : http://polarportal.dk/en/news/news/record-high-temperature-for-june-in-greenland/
Now from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), via the news website The Local, the cooler reality:
Danish climate body wrongly reported Greenland heat record
The Danish Meteorological Institute, which has a key role in monitoring Greenland’s climate, last week reported a shocking August temperature of between 2.7C and 4.7C at the Summit weather station, which is located 3,202m above sea level at the the centre of the Greenland ice sheet, generating a spate of global headlines.
But on Wednesday it posted a tweet saying that a closer look had shown that monitoring equipment had been giving erroneous results.
“Was there record-level warmth on the inland ice on Friday?” it said. “No! A quality check has confirmed our suspicion that the measurement was too high.”
By combining measurements with observations from other weather stations, the DMI has now estimated that the temperature was closer to -2C.
The record temperature ever recorded at Summit is 2.2C, which was reached in both 2012 and 2017. But -2C is still unusual at the station.
Shoot out the headlines first, ask questions later.
Google, Groupthink & the Media
The media fosters intellectual conformity. Is Google taking the same path?
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | August 7, 2019
Two days ago I wrote about Google Camp, a secretive, high-security, annual extravaganza involving the hyper wealthy and the world famous. This year’s theme was climate change. Ironic, given that participants arrived aboard more than 100 private airplanes.
While the UK press judged this event to be newsworthy, most of the US and Canadian media said not one word about it. Making climate warriors look bad isn’t what North American journalists do.
But there are other reasons it should have been reported on aggressively. Google is the kind of multinational tech giant that may be getting too big and too powerful for society’s good. It wields enormous influence, yet is subject to few checks and balances.
There are many ways in which companies such as Google can covertly influence elections, undermining democracy itself (see here and here). From this perspective, sustained scrutiny of Google may be even more important than scrutiny of a particular government or a particular political leader. Presidents come and go. Google remains, accreting and accumulating.
What is the purpose, one wonders, of throwing a no-expense-spared party for the massively privileged each year? What does Google get out of it? What does it expect in return?
It seems to me this is a soft way of encouraging conformity of opinion amongst film stars, musicians, and athletes who all have their own Twitter and Instagram accounts. Not sure climate change is a big deal? For heaven’s sake, don’t say so publicly. You wouldn’t want to get on Google’s ‘naughty’ list and never be invited back.
But conformity of opinion is not a social good. If one of the world’s most powerful corporations is nurturing groupthink, what are the consequences for the larger community?
This isn’t a new concern. Back in 1978, when future Google founders Sergely Brin and Larry Page were cute five-year-olds, legendary Soviet human rights activist Alexandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a commencement address at Harvard.
By then he’d been in the West long enough to compare and contrast with the totalitarian East Bloc. In his view, Western journalists were incredibly influential. Yet rather than using their freedom to ignite wide-ranging debate, their everyday choices produced narrow conformity. Strangely, people who should have been endlessly curious about the world, chose not to be:
the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
… someone coming from the East…gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment…the sum effect being not competition but unification.
… Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.
… There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. [bold added]
The world needs fearless, original thinkers – not conformist androids singing from the same chapter of the same hymn book.
Is Bernie Sanders Planning to Use Climate Catastrophism to Accelerate Agenda 21 and Global Governance?
By Barbara McKenzie | October 10, 2018
Bernie Sanders, who is on the campaign trail, has just released a video, Why Is There a Climate Change “Debate” in Washington?
Bernie Sanders utters one great truth in this broadcast and makes one portentous announcement.
The Great Truth
‘The debate over climate change in Washington really has nothing to do with science.’
The debate on ‘climate change’ never had anything to do with climate change, at least on the part of climate alarmists. The purpose of the narrative was always to fulfill a political agenda, to divert more and more wealth to the already rich and powerful, and to divest more and more power away from nation states and their citizens to the bloated and corrupt United Nations bureaucracy, which is essentially controlled by the rich and powerful.
The global warming idea is a project of the (very) elitist Club of Rome, whose members have included Al Gore, Ted Warner, George Soros, Bill Gates and members of the Rockefeller and Rothschild families. The Club of Rome is the active division of a group of entities serving a globalist agenda, which have played the major part in the establishment of the United Nations, the European Union and NATO. They include the Bilderberg Group, the Committee on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (see Robert Galyon Ross on the ‘Elite Conspiracy’).
(Windows on the World, Climate Catastrophobia – The Big Lie)
The global warming project enables further enrichment of the already very wealthy, through the carbon trading scheme (Al Gore was projected to become the first carbon millionaire). However, United Nations publications such as Agenda 21 make it very clear that climate alarmism has another purpose: to enable and justify expansion ofUN bureaucracy, the empowerment of NGOs, inevitably controlled by the globalists, and to control and contain the populace, all in the name of the Earth and the ill-defined ‘sustainability’.
‘The Global Warming debate […] is a concept by the New World Order to justify the dismantling the industrial society and returning the mass of humanity to obedient serfdom.’ (The Great Climate and Global Warming Fraud invented by the Club of Rome)
Bernie Sanders usefully lays out the false, fallacious, or intellectually dishonest arguments for eco-catastrophism.
- ‘99% of scientists agree that climate change is real and man-made and that it is already causing devastating harm.’ Scientists do indeed agree that climate change is real, but careful analysis by Lord Monkton and others has shown that while claims of 97% or 99% of support for the Club of Rome’s alarmist narrative are certainly made, the reality is more like 0.3%.
- ‘The scientific debate is over’: Scientific debate is never over – that’s the thing about science – but moving on
- ‘The real issue is politics’: Yes.
- ‘… and the power of the fossil fuel industry’. Rather than cater to the wealthy and powerful special interests in the fossil fuel industry ….’ Well, no. The empirical evidence shows that wealthy and powerful interests associated with the Club of Rome, such as Ted Warner, the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and Bill Gates, have successfully invested in controlling the climate debate, far beyond anything Big Oil has even attempted.
- ‘A group of internationally renowned scientists, the IPCC ….’ Back in 2007, New Zealander Dr Vincent Gray, a long-time IPCC reviewer, declared that the IPCC was too blinkered and corrupt to save. His assessment has only been confirmed with time, see this from 2014. The latest report has been slammed by top climate scientists who have trashed the methods, findings and claims of the IPCC. The climate data set they used has turned out to be an embarrassment, using freezing tropical islands, boiling towns and boats on land. As regards the scientists themselves, it has been observed that amongst the authors, ‘there are very few of what could be described as “climate scientists, but lots of geographers, energy analysts, economists, sociologists, engineers, sustainability experts and the odd Eco-Psychologist thrown in for good measure, together with considerable UN and World Bank affiliations’.
- ‘We have 12 years […] to stop the worst impacts of climate change’: The UN and climate catastrophists have been giving us points of no return for decades, but all the ridicule in the world makes no difference. Given that the world still has not recovered sufficiently from the Little Ice Age to regreen Greenland, highly fertile back in the Medieval Warm Period, projecting only 12 years to bring the world past that point to dangerously hot seems pessimistic.
- ‘Increase in extreme weather disturbances’: Even the IPCC agrees that there has been no increase in extreme weather events.
- ‘More acidification of the oceans’: Scientists have found that higher Co2 and lowered pH levels (acidification) have little to no effect on ocean-dwelling organisms.
- ‘More rising sea levels‘: Vincent Gray reported in 2007 that in response to Gore’s warnings about the island of Tuvalu sinking below the waves, scientists at Flinders University, Adelaide, were asked to check whether this was true. They set up new, modern, tide-gauges in 12 Pacific islands, including Tuvalu, confident that they would show that all of them are sinking. ‘Recently, the whole project was abandoned as there was no sign of a change in sea level at any of the 12 islands for the past 16 years. In 2006, Tuvalu even rose.’ There was a similar story with the Maldives which have, however, recently built another sea-level airfield. Sanders makes no specific mention of global warming per se – very wise, as warming leveled out around 1998, and in fact the climate appears to be cooling, leading to dire predictions of a new ice-age, so what actually is causing these rising sea levels is unclear.
- ‘Hundreds of millions of people [will be] forced to leave own communities, in order to find the food and water they need to survive:” Given the above, it is not quite clear why.
- ‘We have a President and a Republican leadership who reject science’: Trump’s crime was to say, in answer to the accusation that the climate is changing, ‘it will change back’. Which shows a better grasp of science than almost any other Western politician.
- ‘Trump is a conspiracy theorist’: Trump has said that alarmists have a very big political agenda.
- ‘They do not have a political agenda’: Yes, they do.
The Portentous Announcement: an action plan to address this fictional problem – flagged, not specified
- ‘Unless we take bold and drastic action …’
- ‘The action we need to take has no historic precedent.’
- ‘In the coming months I will be working with fellow senators to bring forth the most sweeping climate change legislation ever introduced in the senate.’
- ‘We need unprecedented legislation …’
Bernie Sanders is clearly in tune with the globalist agenda. Of course the legislation he has in mind here may simply be to raise fuel taxes and build more bird-killing windmills, in which case this is a lot of hype. On the other hand he may be planning moves in accordance with Agendas 21 and 30, to give more power to the UN and NGOs, and to accelerate the Wildlands Project, forcing people increasingly out of the countryside and into the ‘more sustainable’ cities.
Sanders’ sweetener is that renewable energy, he says, creates more jobs than fossil fuel industries, and is actually cheaper, claims which require more analysis to say the least. Even so, Bernie Sanders supporters could be turkeys voting for Christmas.
Prince Harry in Overpopulation ‘Doomsday Cult’
Sputnik – August 1, 2019
Prince Harry, who became a father this year, prompted a Twitter storm after he professed a desire to only have two children in order to help save the planet. After mouthy UK journalist Piers Morgan mocked him over the statement, his colleague Julia Hartley-Brewer also weighed in with a critical remark.
“TalkRADIO” host Julia Hartley-Brewer has insisted that there is no evidence of looming overpopulation when she discussed Prince Harry’s pledge to father only two children for the planet’s sake with Green Party peer Baroness Jenny Jones.
“In what way do we think there is any evidence to claim that this planet can’t sustain the population we’ve got right now? Or indeed a bigger population with predictions of it hitting nine or ten billion before it plateaus out in the next, say, 50 years?” the journalist asked.
She also showed some bewilderment over the overpopulation alarmists, apparently including the prince, who, with his wife Meghan, became a parent of a baby boy only recently. The journalist said that she cannot perceive how it might feel “to go through life basically as part of a doomsday cult, thinking the world is in such a terrible position”.
“I understand being concerned about renewable energy and replacing fossil fuels and clean the air and polluting the sea and all that. Absolutely that all makes sense to me but I find this idea that this view that human beings are effectively parasites on the planet, I find it such a depressing thought… I am really glad that I have a much more positive view of life”, she noted.
Co-host of Good Morning Britain Piers Morgan earlier also mocked the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, referring to rumours about the then-pregnant Meghan Markle flying back home to Prince Harry on board a private jet after a baby shower in a plush New York hotel.
“Is this the same Harry who uses helicopters to go from London to Birmingham & whose wife uses celebrity mates’ private jets to cross the Atlantic?” Morgan tweeted, while some commenters supported his stance, branding the prince’s remarks “hypocrisy at its finest”.
Aletho News 