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”.
Let them sail yachts: Why Greta Thunberg and the environmental elite hate you
By Graham Dockery | RT | July 31, 2019
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg will sail across the Atlantic by boat to attend two climate conferences. But the teenager’s carbon-neutral odyssey reveals the disregard – even contempt – the elite have for the rest of us.
Thunberg shot to fame for organizing school walkouts against climate change last year. A series of talks lamenting her generation’s impending doom have since made her the poster child for a strange, apocalyptic brand of environmentalism, with British lawmakers nodding along to her declaration that “we probably don’t even have a future anymore” in April, and the world’s power-brokers listening intently to her exhortation that they should “feel the fear I feel every day,” made at the World Economic Forum in Davos several months earlier.
She offers only one path to salvation: an immediate halt to all carbon emissions – there can be no compromise.
Thunberg practices what she preaches, though, and eschews all forms of internal combustion while she treks from climate conference to parliamentary speech. Rather than fly to the UN Climate Action Summit in New York next month, Thunberg will sail, a journey expected to take two weeks.
However, the young proselytizer will not cobble together a boat from upcycled oil drums and driftwood. Instead she’ll be traveling on the Malizia II, a 60-foot racing yacht. The Malizia II is loaded with eco-friendly innovations, like a lightened hull and an array of solar panels powering a backup turbine.
Its crew are also a far cry from the ragtag band of crusties you might imagine. The Malizia II will be captained by renowned yachtsman Boris Herrmann and Pierre Casiraghi, grandson of Monaco’s late Prince Ranier III and actress Grace Kelly. The boat, too, was once named the Edmond de Rothschild, after the financial baron and founder of a fleet of racing yachts. Its construction cost upwards of €4 million.
Despite the cheers of bourgeois bugmen, Greta’s trip of a lifetime reveals the feckless elitism at the heart of her activism. Sailing across the Atlantic on a multimillion dollar racing yacht is a wonderful stand against climate change when you’re Greta Thunberg. But to dock in New York and demand the miserable masses give up car and air travel is the ultimate in anti-humanitarianism.
Us common folk don’t have access to vessels like the Malizia II. In Thunberg’s utopia, we’d have to row. And even if we did, how many of us can take two weeks’ annual vacation just to get to America to see our friends? Or hire actual Monegasque royalty to get us there in one piece?
The airplane and the automobile have democratized travel, and Thunberg wants to take that away from us. Troublingly, Thunberg is not a lone crusader. As she addressed the British parliament in April, the streets of London were thronged with ‘Extinction Rebellion’ climate protesters. Holding placards demanding an end to fossil fuels, meat eating and, seemingly, modernity itself, these activists visibly and forcefully demanded the government strong-arm them into being green. “Please tread on me,” they may as well have cried.
In the US, 104 members of Congress have co-sponsored the ‘Green New Deal,’ an ambitious piece of legislation that calls for a complete abolition of fossil fuel consumption by 2050, alongside government-mandated wealth redistribution programs. An earlier draft of the Green New Deal also called for the immediate elimination of air travel and “farting cows,” and for the dismantling of industry.
The green fervor preached by Thunberg et al. has two potential outcomes. In one scenario, the political elite will listen to her sermons, clap politely, pose for selfies and then go back to doing nothing: case in point, her meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, who rode to power promising environmental reforms, but found his cities almost razed by protesters when he tried so much as a fuel tax hike last year.
The second, more terrifying outcome, is that Thunberg’s pontification will become policy. And, if the world’s governments decide to commit civilizational hara-kiri like this, they already have a propaganda department working overtime to bludgeon the masses with their message.
The elite don’t just want to regulate how you travel and how you heat your home. They want to control what you eat and how you breed, too. Open the pages of any mainstream magazine; turn on your television; scroll through any mainstream news site and you’ll see headlines like “To feed the world, why not eat bugs?,” “Eating insects is good for you – and the planet!,” “To Confront Climate Change, the Modern Automobile Must Die,” and “Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children.”
Thunberg, her elite backers, and their court scribes – if they’re to be taken at their word – want you alone, immobile and, literally, eating insects in the name of environmentalism.
California Dreaming and Erosion “Crises”
California’s spectacular coastline attracts tourists from around the world. Headlands of granite or basalt resist erosion, defiantly jutting out into the sea. Pocket beaches form where focused wave energy bites into softer sandstones and uncemented stream sediments. Relentless waves undermine and steepen cliffs bordering 70% of California’s shoreline. Over hundreds and thousands of years, natural erosion sculpted our awe-inspiring undulating coast.
But beauty is in the eye of the beholder – likewise the magnitude of a “coastal crisis”. The Los Angeles Times recently published ‘California coast is disappearing under the rising sea. Our choices are grim’. They inaccurately painted natural erosion as a recent crisis due to CO2 induced climate change. However, California’s erosion “crisis” must be understood within a greater timeframe.
Since the end of the last ice age, sea level has risen 400 feet. Over 18,000 years, San Francisco’s regional coastline marched 25 miles inland, advancing 7 feet a year – more than twice California’s average. My beautiful home town of Pacifica was featured in that Times’ article because it lost several homes unfortunately built on loosely cemented sand and gravel deposited 100,000 years ago when sea level was 20 feet higher. Although the ocean’s landward march has slowed over the past 5000 years, northern Pacifica’s fragile coastline still retreated by over 7 feet per year between 1929 and 1943. Despite a warming world, the average rate of cliff retreat then markedly declined since 1943.
The ill-fated Ocean Shore Railway, initiated in 1905, foreshadowed California’s erosion problems. To give tourists awesome views, tracks were laid on a ledge dug into steep coastal cliffs. But landslides were common, and costly repairs forced the railway to close. Today, only 25% of the railway ledge built by 1928 still exists. Undeterred, designers of California’s scenic Pacific Coast Highway hoped to give automobile travelers similar breath-taking views. Again, landslides were common. Only 38% of the highway constructed by 1956 still remains. Geologists tell us such landslides constantly altered California’s modern coastline for hundreds of years.
There are few straight lines in nature. Our coastlines undulate. Likewise, our climate oscillates, and coasts erode episodically. Between 1976 and 1999 (the warm phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation), California experienced more frequent El Niños. Over 70% of California’s 20th century disappearing coastline eroded during El Niño events. El Niños bring more storms and more destructive waves. El Niños bring more rains that saturate soils and promote landslides. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation then switched to its cool phase. It brought more La Niñas and more drought, but fewer winter storms and less erosion. In 1949, also a time of less erosion, Pacifica’s government believed homes setback 65 feet from the edge of a bluff would be safe. They never suspected a single El Niño event would move the cliff edge 30 feet landward 50 years later.
There are some who see human structures as a blight on California’s natural coastline. In response to natural erosion, they suggest we abandon the coast. They argue California’s only choice is “managed retreat” versus “unmanaged retreat”. Although well engineered seawalls can protect homes and businesses, some environmentalists called seawalls a coastal “crisis”. California’s Coastal Commission recently pledged seawalls will “only be permitted if absolutely necessary”. But the Commission’s policy only fosters a mishmash of emergency fixes. Randomly armored properties deflect destructive waves downstream, accelerating erosion in a neighbor’s unprotected property. Coastal cities must construct well-engineered sea walls, without any gaps.
Because sea walls prevent erosion, the Commission ill-advisedly fears local beaches will be lost if denied locally eroded sand. The Times parroted that belief writing, ‘for every constructed seawall, a beach is sacrificed’. But is that true? San Francisco’s O’Shaughnessy sea wall built in 1929 prevents erosion of the fragile sand dunes supporting Golden Gate Park. Yet SF’s north ocean beach continues to grow. Without a seawall, San Francisco’s south ocean beach rapidly eroded, and threatened infrastructure now requires a sea wall.
Sources of beach sand fluctuate, and simplistic sea wall analyses are very misleading. Sand is stored and transported to beaches in many ways. Streams and rivers supply the most sand needed to nourish a beach, but mining SF bay’s sand has deprived nearby coastal beaches. Furthermore, ocean oscillations shift winds and the direction of currents that transport sand. Beaches grow for decades then suddenly shrink. Although some argue our beaches face a rising sea level “crisis”, archaeologist determined that despite more rapidly rising sea levels 5000 years ago, many California beaches grew when supplied with adequate sand.
Lastly, it’s interesting to note scientists suggested Pacific islands also face an erosion crisis due to rising sea levels. But the latest scientific surveys determined 43% of those islands remained stable while land extent of another 43% has grown. Only 14% of the islands lost land. So, I fear exaggerated crises only erode our trust in science.
Jim Steele is director emeritus of the Sierra Nevada Field Campus, SFSU and authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
Hoaxing Academic Journals Now Forbidden
Portland State University says submitting fake papers to journals explicitly to assess their rigour is an ethics violation.
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | July 29, 2019
Peter Boghossian teaches critical thinking at Portland State University. Last October, he and two research colleagues revealed that seven satirical/hoax papers they’d authored had nevertheless been successfully published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Concerned about “ideologically-motivated scholarship,” the trio set out to demonstrate that some academic fields utter gibberish can get published so long as it employs large amounts of identity politics jargon.
One paper is described by Boghossian as “a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf…rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory.” Another discusses dog parks, rape culture, and the patriarchy using “incredibly implausible statistics.”
This project intended to ring alarm bells, to call attention to what the researchers insist is a widespread problem:
Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview.
Rather than celebrating the Boghossian team as satirists par excellence, since last October Portland State University has subjected Boghossian to three separate investigations. One determined that no animals were harmed. Another found “no implications of plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification.” A third, however, determined that he violated “human subjects’ rights.”
In the weirdo world of contemporary higher education, people who run journals, and individuals who perform peer-review are now considered human subjects. Secretly submitting fake papers in order to assess the rigour of those journals is now considered human experimentation.
Such experimentation isn’t allowed unless one first secures the approval of an internal Institutional Review Board, an often lengthy and cumbersome process that will almost certainly undermine the secrecy upon which such research depends.
A few years ago, I wrote a report titled Peer Review: Why skepticism is essential. It cites a wide body of research, extending back decades, that highlights the often arbitrary, biased nature of the peer review process.
For example, a famous 1982 study attached fictitious author names to 12 papers that had already been published during the previous 18-32 months. The duplication was noticed in three cases, but peer reviewers working for the same journals gave thumbs down to eight out of nine remaining papers the second time around.
A 1990 study found female reviewers significantly less likely to recommend publication of male-authored papers compared to female-authored papers. Other research determined that a manuscript’s fate depends a great deal on whether its conclusions confirm or challenge a reviewer’s own theoretical perspective.
All of these findings provide important insight into how ‘official’ knowledge gets created. But now that journal editors and reviewers are considered human subjects whose rights shall not be violated, it’s doubtful whether such important work could still be conducted.
EU food authority found hiding health risks of world’s top sweetener
RT | July 24, 2019
The world’s favorite artificial sweetener may pose severe health risks, University of Sussex researchers have found. They claim that the European food authority has been bottling up the alarming data for a while.
The study focused on aspartame, an artificial sweetener used worldwide in everything from diet soft drinks to chewing gum, and sold under brand names including NutraSweet, Candarel and Equal.
UK researchers analyzed the most recent report regarding the safety of the sweetener by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). They discovered that the panel dismissed the results of numerous studies detailing the harmful effects of the sweetener, while focusing their final assessment almost entirely on positive studies. For instance, out of the 73 papers that deemed aspartame dangerous, all 73 were thrown out by EFSA, while 84 percent of studies providing no evidence of its harm were found to be true.
Since 1974, when aspartame was approved for consumption in the United States, studies claimed that the sweetener caused a number of health problems, including liver and lung cancer, brain damage, and seizures.
However, the majority of health authorities worldwide claim the sweetener is safe. Sussex scholars believe that many of the studies deemed to be dubious by the EFSA panel provide far better empirical evidence on the harmful effects of the sweetener than those they relied on, so they see the entire assessment as false.
“This research adds weight to the argument that authorization to sell or use aspartame should be suspended throughout the EU, pending a thorough re-examination,” the study states.
US & UK doctors warn against hormones/surgery for trans-identified kids
RT | July 23, 2019
Medical professionals in the US and UK are sounding the alarm about the growing use of “hormonal and surgical interventions” for children who are confused about their gender identity, saying that more studies are required.
Members of the conservative childrens’ advocacy group the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) wrote a letter on Monday to the Surgeon General of the United States, warning about the effects of gender-reassignment surgeries and hormonal drugs on minors, saying such interventions have “not undergone long-term study.”
The ACP called the issue a “grave public health concern” and said that the drastic methods have become the new “standard of care” in lieu of “ethical psychotherapy” for children and teens who present with gender dysphoria (GD).
The ACP letter cites research which claims that 61-98 percent of youth affected by GD will “outgrow” it “if allowed to progress through natural puberty.”
The group also laments that healthcare professionals are “increasingly prohibited from investigating psychosocial factors” which may have led to GD symptoms and fear being penalized or accused of discrimination.
Dual warnings
The warnings are coming from both sides of the pond. Earlier this month, the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) cautioned that there is a lack of “robust evidence” about the long-term effects of puberty-blockers and hormonal drugs.
In a 12-page position paper, the RCGP complained that family doctors were under pressure to provide gender dysphoria services that “lie outside the remit” of their generalist expertise. The paper advises that more research is needed on the pros and cons of medical treatment vs. a less dramatic “wait and see” approach.
Medical treatment of children with GD often begins with the prescription of puberty blockers, which are given to halt normal onset of puberty. Next, the child is given “cross-sex hormones” – in other words, hormones which match their stated identity rather than their biologically assigned sex. At a later stage, the patients undergo gender-reassignment surgery.
The side-effects of these interventions can include “sterility, sexual dysfunction, surgical complications, thromboembolic and cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, malignancy, and persistently elevated rates of suicide,” the ACP advises.
‘Surge’ of GD in girls
The medical warnings come as the UK’s only child gender clinic, the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), reported significant increases in the numbers of children seeking to transition to the opposite gender – an overwhelming majority of them (74 percent) being young girls seeking to transition to a male identity.
The Sunday Times reported on the “surge” last month, noting that the majority (54 percent) of the children referred to the clinic are 14 or under. In the UK, 17 year-olds are now allowed to be seen in adult gender clinics and to independently consent to treatment. The newspaper also recalled that a “review” into the new wave of girls seeking to transition had been ordered by the former equalities minister Penny Mordaunt last year, but “little has been heard of it since.”
While transgender rights activists argue that the huge increases are due to growing public acceptance of a previously taboo issue, skeptics say that impressionable children are being confused by activists who ‘promote’ the idea of changing genders and who pressure health professionals to immediately accept a child’s assertion that he or she is the opposite sex, rather than first exploring psychological reasons why a child may feel that way.
Whistleblower
The RCGP warning was shortly followed by claims from a National Health Service (NHS) psychologist who said poor and potentially abused children are being misdiagnosed as transgender. Dr Kirsty Entwistle, a former GIDS worker, said children can present with GD due to “traumatic early experiences,” including sexual abuse, but those cases are not being investigated properly because medical professionals fear being labeled “transphobic.”
Entwistle said she left GIDS after being accused of transphobia herself, after raising concerns over the skyrocketing numbers of young people identifying as transgender. She also claims that GIDS staff tell parents of children that the effects of puberty blockers are “fully reversible” despite a lack of evidence on the effect the drugs have on children’s brains.
The BBC reported on Monday that GIDS lowered the age it offered kids puberty blockers based on a study which is being investigated by the Health Research Authority. The drugs, which are given to children as young as 11 years-old in Britain, could be linked to increases in suicidal thoughts.
De-transitioning?
Some recent reporting has also explored the phenomenon of the “detransitioners”; individuals who believed themselves to be transgender before changing their minds and deciding to transition back to their original biological gender. The detransitioners are thought to make up a very small number of the adult trans population.
But the story seems to be different for children. A study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that two-thirds of adolescent patients at a clinic in Amsterdam ended up identifying as their original birth-assigned gender. Another study, often called into question by trans activists, found that up to 80 percent of trans kids eventually identified as their birth sex. Canadian sex researcher James Cantor wrote in a blog post in 2016 that “only very few trans-kids still want to transition by the time they are adults.”
Instead, he claimed, “they generally turn out to be regular gay or lesbian folks.”
NOAA on water vapor – 2019 edition
Tallbloke’s Talk Shop | July 22, 2019
NOAA’s latest offering on this topic is here. Of course we’re pitched into the world of ‘greenhouse gas’ theory. But it seems to be a world of considerable uncertainty, if the phrases highlighted (by the Talkshop) are anything to go by. Most attention is given to CO2 in the media, but it’s only a very minor player in the atmosphere (0.04%). There’s no accepted figure for ‘water vapor’ as exact data doesn’t exist, although ballpark estimates from various readings can be found. Why do greenhouse gas believers obsess about CO2 when they don’t know a lot about what’s going on with water vapor, which is on the face of it far more important to their theory?
Water Vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, which is why it is addressed here first. However, changes in its concentration is also considered to be a result of climate feedbacks related to the warming of the atmosphere rather than a direct result of industrialization.
The feedback loop in which water is involved is critically important to projecting future climate change, but as yet is still fairly poorly measured and understood.
As the temperature of the atmosphere rises, more water is evaporated from ground storage (rivers, oceans, reservoirs, soil). Because the air is warmer, the absolute humidity can be higher (in essence, the air is able to ‘hold’ more water when it’s warmer), leading to more water vapor in the atmosphere.
As a greenhouse gas, the higher concentration of water vapor is then able to absorb more thermal IR energy radiated from the Earth, thus further warming the atmosphere. The warmer atmosphere can then hold more water vapor and so on and so on. This is referred to as a ‘positive feedback loop’.
However, huge scientific uncertainty exists in defining the extent and importance of this feedback loop. As water vapor increases in the atmosphere, more of it will eventually also condense into clouds, which are more able to reflect incoming solar radiation (thus allowing less energy to reach the Earth’s surface and heat it up).
The future monitoring of atmospheric processes involving water vapor will be critical to fully understand the feedbacks in the climate system leading to global climate change. As yet, though the basics of the hydrological cycle are fairly well understood, we have very little comprehension of the complexity of the feedback loops.
Also, while we have good atmospheric measurements of other key greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, we have poor measurements of global water vapor, so it is not certain by how much atmospheric concentrations have risen in recent decades or centuries, though satellite measurements, combined with balloon data and some in-situ ground measurements indicate generally positive trends in global water vapor.
