Give it up James Cook University – Even The Guardian Sympathises with Climate Skeptic Peter Ridd
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | June 11, 2018
Dr. Willie Soon – the opportunity for James Cook University to salvage what is left of its academic reputation is closing fast.
Peter Ridd’s academic union is backing him, senior Australian politicians have spoken out against James Cook’s heavy handed actions, and now The Guardian is concerned about what Peter Ridd’s dismissal means for academic freedom.
Peter Ridd’s sacking pushes the limit of academic freedom
James Cook University may have damaged its reputation with a heavy-handed approach to the academic with minority views on climate change and the reef.
Gay Alcorn
Tue 5 Jun 2018 11.59 AEST
I hate to say it, but the sacking of professor Peter Ridd by James Cook University does raise issues of academic freedom. Not simple issues, and ones that can be refuted as the university is doing, but ones that matter nonetheless.
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His trouble started in April 2016 when he received a “formal censure” for “misconduct”. It was a curious incident: the university had got hold of an email that Ridd sent to a news.com.au journalist a few months before. In it, he urged the journalist to look into work Ridd had had done suggesting that photographs released by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority indicating a big decline in reef health over time were misleading.
Ridd couldn’t help a dig: The photographs are “a dramatic example of how scientific organisations are quite happy to spin a story for their own purposes”. The authority, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies – based at James Cook University –“should check their facts before they spin their story … my guess is that they will both wiggle and squirm because they actually know that these pictures are likely to be telling a misleading story – and they will smell a trap.”
This was enough for the university to censure Ridd on the grounds that he breached the code of conduct by “going to the media in your professional capacity in a way that was not collegial and did not respect the rights of others or uphold professional standards”. It was a warning. Ridd could make public comments but they “must be in a collegial manner that upholds the university and individuals’ respect”.
As a journalist, I find this uncomfortable. He had strong opinions, strongly put, in an area which he had professional interest and expertise. Foolishly, the journalist forwarded the entire email to an unnamed professor, who complained to the university.
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James Cook University, for all its worries about its reputation, seems to have diminished its own. As the national tertiary education union’s Queensland secretary, Michael McNally put it a few days ago: “All management have done is to feed a right-wing media narrative that universities are conformist and actively suppress heterodox views on topics such as climate change.”
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For all the university’s sensitivity about its brand and reputation, you have to wonder if it has damaged its own standing with its strident calls for “collegiality” and its repeated insistence that Ridd stay mute.
The other way would be for academics not to complain about Ridd’s impolite turn of phrase, but to reject his arguments, loudly and with evidence. For Australia’s premier reef research institutions to keep doing good work, and keep explaining it to the public, and to treat Ridd as little more than a thorn in their side. And for the university to put up with their troublesome academic and to not be obsessed with process and its own self importance.
As this has dragged on, that was the way that was lost.
James Cook University IS feeding a narrative that universities actively suppress non-conformist views on climate change. The mistreatment of Peter Ridd adds evidence to concerns that other scientists have also been punished for politically inconvenient views.
Frightening scientists into silence by threatening their livelihood every time they say something inconvenient is an attack on science.
I can think of countless advances which only occurred because courageous scientists stood against mainstream thought.
Lives have been saved because of academic courage – one of my heroes Aussie medical scientist Barry Marshall risked his own life to overturn decades of misdiagnosis and misery, by deliberately infecting himself with Helicobacter Pylori to prove ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection.
Peter Ridd’s contribution is no less important.
Farmers in Queensland are threatened with increasingly costly draconian restrictions on farming practices, which are justified as vital to protect the endangered Great Barrier Reef. It is likely some farm businesses won’t survive if those restrictions are tightened further. It is also likely that some farmers in this predicament won’t survive the stress of seeing their businesses destroyed.
If Peter Ridd is right, if the problems with the reef have been exaggerated, then some or even most of these draconian restrictions on farming practices are unnecessary. There is no doubt in my mind that if Peter Ridd is right, his courage will save lives, will contribute to the happiness and wellbeing of countless rural families.
Peter Ridd deserves a fair hearing, not abuse, threat and censure.
George Monbiot: selling the 1% agenda in a Green box
George Monbiot NOT shilling for corporate interests
By Catte | OffGuardian | June 8, 2018
The neoliberals of today specialise in using concepts of concern and inclusiveness as a cover for their frankly fascist agenda. Censorship is being repackaged as “anti-hate”. The destruction of the core idea of “innocent until proven guilty” is being repackaged as protecting (mostly female) victims from their persecutors. Reasonable doubt is being repackaged as “denialism.” Minority opinion is being repackaged as treachery or subversion. Facts that contradict a current state-sponsored agenda are repackaged as “fake news.”
Conformity is being encouraged, presented as a cosy and reassuring “consensus blanket”, under which we can all snuggle together, safe from confusion, doubt or the horrendous experience of having our cherished beliefs called into question. Most journos operating in the mainstream have already opted to crawl in and curl up for the long snooze into intellectual and ethical oblivion, while others, the kapos, are actively herding the remaining doubters inside.
George Monbiot is one of the latter. The last few years have outed this one time supposed anti-establishment figure as nothing more than a fully establishment goon, posturing in the sad tatters of his “dissident Green” cosplay. His performance during the Syria crisis made this too obvious. His sub-intelligent smears on those independent journalists daring to question the narrative made his real allegiances, and limitations, more than clear. His preparedness to brazenly lie and his refusal to debate the people he smeared in an open forum cemented this view.
Monbiot is revealed as the guy the establishment uses to try and lure the Left-Greens out in support of the latest agenda roll-out by the likes of Soros, Gates and the Atlantic Council. He’s booked for the same gigs as Avaaz. His brief, as ever, is to sell fascism – but this time in a Green box.
Today George is busy selling us on veganism.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Veganism is fine. It’s a human choice and it has a place. This is not an attack on veganism, or vegans.
But we need to separate what a thing is from what it’s being used for. Everything, even the best things, can be exploited. And we can’t let loyalty to the thing itself stop us from seeing when its being used for less than good ends.
Veganism is being promoted right now by the usual suspects. There has been a rash of articles in the Guardian and elsewhere about the supposed health and environmental benefits of giving up meat and dairy. Even if we happen to be vegan, we’d be insane not to wonder why. Especially when Monbiot is getting involved.
George is a poster child for the New Wave Vegan. Strange, perhaps, given he’s only a “97% vegan” himself. But let’s just ignore the 3% carnivore, since it’s only road kill. The more important point, anyway, is that George wants us all to think he’s a vegan. Because a salesman has to be seen to use the product he’s promoting. His latest article breaks no new ground on this really. He’s said most of it before, as have others. But still, given the mounting evidence for the political mobilisation of veganism, it’s a good idea to look at what he says.
He starts by offering a binary choice – between the current wasteful and insane industrial farming system and a somewhat poorly defined alternative in which everyone eats a plant-based diet, which he implies without really saying, will put an end to this insanity. He tells us not only will this choice fix the problem of worldwide food shortage (because plant-husbandry produces far more calories per hectare than animal husbandry), but it will also remove the problem of all that unused animal waste currently pouring into rivers and creating massive pollution.
George’s ideal future will also be gratifying for the processed food industry. Because vegans need ready meals!
Unless you can cook well – and many people have neither the skills nor the space – a plant-based diet can be either boring or expensive. We need better and cheaper vegan ready meals and quick and easy meat substitutes
And fake meat grown in a lab!
The big shift will come with the mass production of cultured meat.
George recognises the latter will be a tough sell, but he’s up for giving it a try. An objection to this might be that “artificial meat is disgusting”, says George, but:
If you feel this way, I invite you to look at how your sausages, burgers and chicken nuggets are currently raised, slaughtered and processed. Having worked on an intensive pig farm, I’m more aware than most of what disgusting looks like.
Mmmm… Lab-grown pseudo-meat, pink-dyed and not quite as disgusting as something even worse! Lovely Roundup-saturated veggies [silage] processed into some approximation of the kind of protein humans can digest, and piped into microwavable sachets.
Who knew utopia would end up looking quite so much like – now? Who knew the new way would be just like the old way but with more “progressive” slogans?
George uses twisty self-contradictory arguments to claim one minute that eliminating livestock farming would “be a chance to break our complete dependence on artificial nitrogen”, while in his very next para admitting the exact opposite will in fact be the case.
the transition to plant protein is unlikely to eliminate the global system’s need for artificial fertiliser
Though he throws us a bone in the shape of
the pioneering work of vegan organic growers, using only plant-based composts and importing as little fertility as possible from elsewhere
This is blatant bait and switch. Green or green-sounding proclamations being swapped out for their very opposites with a deftness he hopes will fool us. We may, in some misty future time, not need to rely entirely on synthetic chemicals – but yes, OK, for now we will still be sucking up carcinogens with our lovely all veg diet.
Of course we could just use the animal manure to fertilise our veggies, which would entirely eliminate the need for chemical fertilisers… But let’s not think about that too much. Let’s instead soften that focus and just picture fields full of lovely cruelty-free plants waving in the even lovelier breeze…
In case you haven’t noticed, George’s entire article is hand-waving nonsense predicated on a lie, or a system of lies, and his trademark nifty footwork.
His claim that we need to produce more food is used as a blanket rationale for everything he advocates, but it’s a lie. We don’t need to produce more food. We currently produce more than enough food to feed the world. What we need and don’t have is equitable distribution. And that is because of the stranglehold of the minority interests George is carefully eliding.
His initial binary choice is a lie. We don’t need to choose between intensive animal farming and intensive cereal/veg farming. We have the option of non-intensive farming methods that treat the land, the animals and the crops with respect, and use age-old, sustainable methods to produce chemical-free and healthy food.
His dishonesty is nowhere more apparent than when he tries to elide this simple truth. Look at how he acknowledges the illogicality of unused animal waste
Today, the link between livestock and crops has mostly been broken: crops are grown with industrial chemicals while animal slurry stacks up, unused, in stinking lagoons, wipes out rivers and creates dead zones at sea.
but dodges away from the obvious solution – use the “slurry” to fertilise the land in place of synthetic chemicals – with a weak excuse:
When it is applied to the land, it threatens to accelerate antibiotic resistance.
Notice how he avoids mentioning the fact non-intensively reared animals don’t need to be pumped full of antibiotics in the first place. He even links to the source for sustainable husbandry I cite above, but does so only to dismiss it (without data) as “worse” than anything else on offer, by using, once again, the fake claim about the need to produce more food per hectare:
More damaging still is free-range meat: the environmental impacts of converting grass into flesh, the paper remarks, “are immense under any production method practised today”. This is because so much land is required to produce every grass-fed steak or chop
And adding that it’s also bad for the environment
Those who claim that “regenerative” or “holistic” ranching mimics nature deceive themselves. It relies on fencing, while in nature wild herbivores roam freely, often across vast distances. It excludes or eradicates predators, which are crucial to the healthy functioning of all living systems. It tends to eliminate tree seedlings, ensuring that the complex mosaics of woody vegetation found in many natural systems – essential to support a wide range of wildlife – are absent
You thought Monsanto, GM, monocultures and the ripping up of hedgerows was the problem? Nah. It’s fences. And herbivores eating the grass they’re designed to eat. And implicit in this nonsense of course is the greater nonsense that massive veggie monocultures drowned in pesticides and herbicides, are just teaming with wild life, tree seedlings and predators.
Just as he used frank lies to promote the Soros-backed White Helmets as unsung “heroes”, here, in the fake guise of promoting a healthy, organic, back-to-nature solution to the world’s problems, George is promoting the current power system of Big Ag and Big Food monopoly. Just as Avaaz sells us imperial regime change as grass roots activism, George is selling us industrial farming and denatured food as a return to Eden.
Don’t buy what he’s selling. Don’t surrender your sense of the real to this snake oil salesman. Go vegan if you want – that’s a fine personal choice. But not at the expense of the small producers who are already struggling to survive without the subsidies the big guys get. Don’t vote for some future “meat tax” that will drive them out of business, and penalise the poor, just as Big Ag wants. Don’t buy into this soft focus dreamland where our entire livestock herd disappears bloodlessly and completely from our landscape without being killed or culled, and is somehow better for it. Don’t be whispered into campaigning for a new and self-imposed serfdom, in which 7 billion compliant vegans munch their potage or their shrink-wrapped lab-grown Soylent Green, while the 1% quietly eat grass-fed steak and snigger with duping delight.
Claim: $220 Billion “Family Planning” Equivalent to a Trillion Dollars of Climate Tech Investment
Displaced Rohingya people in Rakhine State. By Foreign and Commonwealth Office – Flickr, OGL, Link
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | May 22, 2018
Family planning charities suggest helping poor women “control their fertility” will save as much CO2 as a trillion dollars of investment in low carbon technologies. But provision of family planning wrapped around a higher purpose has a long and ugly history.
Worried About Climate Change? Investing in Reproductive Health Must Be Part of the Solution
Monday, 21st May 2018
Chris Turner
…Since the invention of the contraceptive pill in the 1950’s, access to modern contraception has driven some of the key demographic and social changes in history. It has delivered improved health outcomes for mothers and babies as women are able to wait longer between births or delay having their first child. It created demographic shifts, as populations have fewer dependents and a more productive labour force. It has empowered girls and women to stay in school longer, seek higher education and participate in the formal economy. And now recent research has determined that contraception also has a key role to play in addressing climate change.
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Poverty reduction and strengthening economies
When women can exercise reproductive choice, they are more likely to participate in education and the workforce. In most developing countries, female participation in the formal economy has increased as fertility has fallen. Women’s participation in the economy promotes economic growth and economies that are strong are better able to absorb the disturbances of climate change and recover from climate-related events.
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Women’s participation and leadership
Women’s participation and leadership is important to climate change preparedness, resilience and action. Enabling women to control their bodies and reproductive health can help create opportunities for women to participate, lead and contribute to the conversation.
As a climate change mitigation strategy, family planning programs are also more cost-effective than other conventional, energy-focused solutions. One study found that $220 billion spent on providing family planning to those with an unmet need would reduce 34 gigatons of global carbon emissions, compared to $1 trillion for a similar outcome if spent on low carbon technologies.
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Regardless of your position on birth control and abortion, I think we can all feel a sense of unease when efforts to provide “family planning” are offered as part of a larger mission to reduce population, rather than placing the interests of the recipients of the medical aid first.
Provision of birth control to poor people has a long, ugly history. For example, consider this Guardian story about the Bangladesh government’s recent efforts to offer sterilisation services to inconvenient Rohingya refugees displaced by ongoing political turmoil in Burma.
Bangladesh to offer sterilisation to Rohingya in refugee camps
Family planning authorities have asked the government to launch vasectomies and tubectomies for women in Cox’s Bazar, where 1m refugees fight for space.
Bangladesh is planning to introduce voluntary sterilisation in its overcrowded Rohingya camps, where nearly a million refugees are fighting for space, after efforts to encourage birth control failed.
More than 600,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh since a military crackdown in neighbouring Myanmar in August triggered an exodus, straining resources in the impoverished country.
The latest arrivals have joined hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who fled in earlier waves from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where the stateless Muslim minority has endured decades of persecution.
Most live in desperate conditions with limited access to food, sanitation or health facilities and local officials fear a lack of family planning could stretch resources even further.
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Many of the refugees told AFP they believed a large family would help them survive in the camps, where access to food and water remains a daily battle and children are often sent out to fetch and carry supplies.
Others had been told contraception was against the tenets of Islam.
Farhana Sultana, a family planning volunteer who works with Rohingya refugees in the camps, said many of the women she spoke to believed birth control was a sin.
“In Rakhine they did not go to family planning clinics, fearing the Myanmar authorities would give medicine that harms them or their children,” Sultana said.
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You could reasonably argue that refugee women having 19 children each is unsustainable. But I doubt the first concern of the Bangladeshi authorities is the well-being of the Rohingya. I suspect the Bangladeshi authorities would be overjoyed if the Rohingya refugee problem just quietly disappeared.
Over zealous family planning doesn’t just occur in poor countries. The USA has experienced domestic scandals in the past related to forced sterilisation, and scandals with the practices of organisations like Planned Parenthood, including accusations of medical racism.
My point is I personally have no problem with women having access to the medical services they need to create a better life for themselves and their families. I understand some people likely have different opinions about reproductive issues, what is an is not acceptable, to myself.
But surely we can all agree that mixing family planning with another mission like reducing humanity’s global carbon footprint creates a horrifying risk that the welfare of patients will not be the top priority. There are many ugly historical examples to support this concern.
University Professor Sacked for Telling-the-Truth
Peter Ridd as a first year undergraduate science student at James Cook University back in 1978 – forty years ago.
By Jennifer Marohasy | May 19, 2018
BACK in 2016, when I asked Peter Ridd if he would write a chapter for the book I was editing I could not possibly have envisaged it could contribute to the end of his thirty-year career as a university professor.
Considering that Peter enrolled at James Cook University as an undergraduate back in 1978, he has been associated with that one university for forty years.
Since Peter was fired on 2 May 2018, the university has attempted to remove all trace of this association: scrubbing him completely from their website.
But facts don’t cease to exist because they are removed from a website. The university has never challenged the veracity of Peter’s legitimate claims about the quality of much of the reef science: science on which billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research is being squandered. These issues are not going away.
Just yesterday (Friday 18 May), Peter lodged papers in the Federal Court. He is going to fight for his job back! […]
Peter deliberately choose to frame the book chapter about the replication crisis that is sweeping through science.
In this chapter – The Extraordinary Resilience of Great Barrier Reef Coral and Problems with Policy Science – Peter details the major problems with quality assurance when it comes to claims of the imminent demise of the reef.
Policy science concerning the Great Barrier Reef is almost never checked. Over the next few years, Australian governments will spend more than a billion dollars on the Great Barrier Reef; the costs to industry could far exceed this. Yet the keystone research papers have not been subject to proper scrutiny. Instead, there is a total reliance on the demonstrably inadequate peer-review process.
Ex-professor Peter Ridd has also published extensively in the scientific literature on the Great Barrier Reef, including issues with the methodology used to measure calcification rates. In the book he explains:
Like trees, which produce rings as they grow, corals set down a clearly identifiable layer of calcium carbonate skeleton each year, as they grow. The thicknesses and density of the layers can be used to infer calcification rates and are, effectively, a measure of the growth rate. Dr Glenn De’ath and colleagues from the Australian Institute of Marine Science used cores from more than 300 corals, some of which were hundreds of years old, to measure the changes in calcification during the last few hundred years. They claimed there was a precipitous decline in calcification since 1990, as shown in Figure 1.2.
The LHS chart suggests a problem with coral growth rates – but the real problem is with the methodology. When corals of equivalent age are sampled, there has been no decline in growth rates at the Great Barrier Reef – as shown in the RHS chart.
However, I have two issues with their analysis. I published my concerns, and an alternative analysis, in the journal Marine Geology (Ridd et al. 2013). First, there were instrumental errors with the measurements of the coral layers. This was especially the case for the last layer at the surface of the coral, which was often measured as being much smaller than the reality. This forced an apparent drop in the average calcification for the corals that were collected in the early 2000s – falsely implying a recent calcification drop. Second, an ‘age effect’ was not acknowledged. When these two errors are accounted for, the drop in calcification rates disappear, as shown in Figure 1.2.
The problem with the ‘age effect’, mentioned above, arose because in the study De’ath and colleagues included data from corals sampled during two distinct periods and with a different focus; I will refer to these as two campaigns. The first campaign occurred mostly in the 1980s and focused on very large coral specimens, sometimes many metres across. The second campaign occurred in the early 2000s due to the increased interest in the effects of CO2. However, presumably due to cost cutting measures, instead of focusing on the original huge coral colonies, the second campaign measured smaller colonies, many just a few tens of centimetres in diameter.
In summary, the first campaign focused on large old corals, while, in contrast, the second campaign focused on small young corals. The two datasets were then spliced together, and wholly unjustifiable assumptions were implicitly made, but not stated – in particular that there is no age effect on coral growth…
Dr Juan D’Olivo Cordero from the University of Western Australia collected an entirely different dataset of coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef to determine calcification rates. This study determined that there has been a 10% increase in calcification rates since the 1940s for offshore and mid-shelf reefs, which is the location of about 99% of all the coral on the Great Barrier Reef. However, these researchers also measured a 5% decline in calcification rates of inshore corals – the approximately 1% of corals that live very close to the coast. Overall, there was an increase for most of the Great Barrier Reef, and a decrease for a small fraction of the Great Barrier Reef.
While it would seem reasonable to conclude that the results of the study by D’Olivo et al. would be reported as good news for the Great Barrier Reef, their article in the journal Coral Reefs concluded:
Our new findings nevertheless continue to raise concerns, with the inner-shelf reefs continuing to show long-term declines in calcification consistent with increased disturbance from land-based effects. In contrast, the more ‘pristine’ mid- and outer-shelf reefs appear to be undergoing a transition from increasing to decreasing rates of calcification, possibly reflecting the effects of CO2-driven climate change.
Imaginatively, this shift from ‘increasing’ to ‘decreasing’ seems to be based on an insignificant fall in the calcification rate in some of the mid-shelf reefs in the last two years of the 65-year dataset.
Why did the authors concentrate on this when their data shows that the reef is growing about 10% faster than it did in the 1940s?
James Cook university could have used the chapter as an opportunity to start a much-needed discussion about policy, funding and the critical importance of the scientific method. Instead, Peter was first censored by the University – and now he has been fired.
When I first blogged on this back in February, Peter needed to raise A$95,000 to fight the censure.
This was achieved through an extraordinary effort, backed by Anthony Watts, Joanne Nova, John Roskam and so many others.
To be clear, the university is not questioning the veracity of what ex-professor Ridd has written, but rather his right to say this publicly. In particular, the university is claiming that he has not been collegial and continues to speak-out even after he was told to desist.
New allegations have been built on the original misconduct charges that I detailed back in February. The core issue continues to be Peter’s right to keep talking – including so that he can defend himself.
In particular, the university objects to the original GoFundMe campaign (that Peter has just reopened) because it breaches claimed confidentiality provisions in Peter’s employment agreement. The university claims that Peter Ridd was not allowed to talk about their action against him. Peter disputes this.
Of course, if Peter had gone along with all of this, he would have been unable to raise funds to get legal advice – to defend himself! All of the documentation is now being made public – all of this information, and more can be found at Peter’s new website.
Talk on “Extreme Weather and Extreme Politics”
By Roger Pielke jr. | The Climate Fix | May 1, 2018
Earlier this month I gave a talk at the University of Minnesota. It was my first public talk on climate since being “investigated” by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) in 2015.
It is also the first and only invitation I’ve received to give a public talk on climate at a US university since 2015.
Before that I received about 2-3 invitations per month.
Delegitimization works.
You can see my slides from Minnesota at:
Much of what I presented (and more) will appear in the 2nd edition of Disasters and Climate Change.
Below I document a key episode in my own experience that I have never looked back on in detail. The timeline is of use to me, shared here for anyone else who might be interested.
A Look Back at the Holdren-Pielke Debate of 2014
- One of the more bizarre experiences I’ve had in the climate debate was when President Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, posted a weird, 6-page screed about me on the White House web site.
- Here is a reconstruction of and look back at those events, and an evaluation how they look from vantage point of 2018.
- This look back is mainly just for me, as when you are in the spin cycle it can be hard to see what has happened at the time.
- The Holdren episode ultimately led to me being investigated by a member of Congress with a major impact on my life and career.
- I’ve not taken a close look back at this episode, it’s time for me to document exactly what transpired. If you are not interested, this would be a good place to take the exit ramp.
- In July 2013, I testified before the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on extreme events.
- You can see my 5 minute statement below and read my full written testimony here in PDF. That testimony was widely discussed.
- I followed that testimony up with similar testimony before the US House a few months later, in October 2013.
- I wrote a blog post explaining that the science on these issues was solid. Even so I argued that “zombie science” (to the contrary) would always be with us.
- On February 14, 2014, Holdren was quoted as saying: “We really understand a number of the reasons that global climate change is increasing the intensity and the frequency and the life of drought in drought-prone regions. This is one of the better-understood dimensions of the relationship between global climate change and extreme weather in particular regions. . . There are other, more subtle, ways climate change may be affecting the prevalence of drought; scientists are still arguing about those. The three I just described are more than enough to understand why we are seeing droughts in drought-prone regions becoming more frequent, more severe and longer.”
- Two weeks later Dr. Holdren was asked about these statements by Senator Jeff Sessions before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the same committee that I had testified before the previous July.
- The full exchange between Sessions and Holdren can be found here, but below are the key excerpts.
- After some sparring on what Dr. Holdren said or didn’t say a few week previous, Senator Sessions said:
- “Well, let me tell you what Dr. Pilkey (sic) said, who sat in that chair you are sitting in today just a few months ago, he is a climate impact expert, and he agrees that warming is partly caused by human emissions. But he testified “It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate change time scales either in the United States or globally.”
- Holdren replied with a delegitmization effort, saying that I was
- “not representative of the mainstream scientific opinion on this point. And again, I will be happy to submit for the record recent articles from Nature, Nature GeoScience, Nature Climate Change, Science and others showing that in drought-prone regions droughts are becoming more intense.”
- Of course, Holdren was incorrect.
- My views are 100% consistent with those of the IPCC, the very definition of “mainstream scientific opinion.”
- Holdren promised to submit scientific evidence for the hearing record in support of his views, Sessions said he looked forward to it.
- Three days later Holdren’s missive about me was posted on the White House website, titled Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr ” (here in PDF).
- Holdren singled out just 2 statements that I had made in my testimony:
- “It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.”
- Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less, frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century”. Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”
- The quotes in blue above are from the US National Climate Assessment (former) and a Nature paper (latter) on global drought trends.
- Holdren explained his objections:
- “I replied that the indicated comments by Dr. Pielke … were not representative of mainstream views on this topic in the climate-science community; and I promised to provide for the record a more complete response with relevant scientific references. “
- The slide below shows the entirety of my discussion of drought in my 2013 Senate testimony, which consisted only of quotes from the IPCC, the US CCSP and an image from the CCSP report.
- Holdren did not mention hurricanes, floods or tornadoes in his 6 pages of response.
- Holdren’s response blew up the internet (or at least the tiny part of it involving issues related to climate).
- When the White House posts 6 pages about you, it gets noticed.
- For my part, in response I wrote a blog response which you can read here.
- In that post I noted:
- “It is fine for experts to openly disagree. But when a political appointee uses his position not just to disagree on science or policy but to seek to delegitimize a colleague, he has gone too far.”
- This was, as far as I am aware, the first time that a Science Advisor to the US President used his platform to seek to delegitimize an academic with whom he disagreed.
- I am aware of no such comparable use of the authority and reach of the White House against a researcher.
- The fact that I was singled out by the president’s science advisor was not reported on or commented on by the mainstream scientific media. Leading scientific organizations said nothing.
- I found this pretty amazing, but c’est la vie.
- If John Marburger, say, had gone after James Hansen, it’d have been a story.
- I responded more forcefully in an article in The New Republic a few days later.
- None of this mattered, I quickly learned that a lone academic is no match for the bully pulpit that is the White House and the powerful echo chamber of the online climate debate.
- A few weeks later the campaign to have me removed as a writer for 538 was underway and 11 months later the investigation motivated by Rep. Raul Grijlava (D-AZ), which he indicated was the result of Holdren’s missive, was launched.
- One of my close colleagues said to me at the time: “I’d love to come to your defense, but I don’t want them coming after me.”
- Fair enough.
- Let’s quickly take a look at the state of the science in 2018 on drought.
- The 2017 US National Climate Assessment, prepared under the direction of John Holdren in the last months of the Obama Administration and released after Donald Trump became president concluded the following about drought:
- “drought statistics over the entire CONUS have declined … no detectable change in meteorological drought at the global scale”
- “Western North America was noted as a region where determining if observed recent droughts were unusual compared to natural variability was particularly difficult.”
- Right.
- It was an interesting experience.
- I’m still here.
EU To Spend Quarter Of Budget On Climate Policies
Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 30, 2018
Bear in mind this is only the tip of the iceberg, as individual countries are already standing the major costs themselves of climate policy.
The EU Budget is about 150bn euro pa. If anything shows how fatuous the whole EU project is, this must be it:
Climate-Linked Spending Set to Rise to a Quarter of EU Budget
Bloomberg | April 30, 2018
- European Commission to present 2021-2027 budget proposal May 2
- Climate to be component of regional aid, transport spending
The European Union’s executive is poised to propose spending 25 percent of funds available in next EU multiannual budget on activities related to climate protection, making sure new economic and political challenges don’t weaken the bloc’s resolve to fight pollution.
The European Commission’s blueprint for the 2021-2027 budget, to be proposed on May 2, will boost the so-called climate mainstreaming from 20 percent in the current multiannual financial plan, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The funds for reducing emissions and adapting to climate change will be earmarked under policies such as regional aid, transport, research and external relations, said the person, who asked not to be identified because talks on the draft budget are private.
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From the Archives
MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) – Vaccine Risk Statement
MMR Vaccine (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) Is It Safer Than Measles, Mumps and Rubella?
Physicians for Informed Consent | December 2024
… It has not been proven that the MMR vaccine is safer than measles, mumps, and rubella. The vaccine package insert raises questions about safety testing for cancer, genetic mutations, and impaired fertility. Although VAERS tracks some adverse events, it is too inaccurate to measure against the risk of measles, mumps, and rubella. Clinical trials do not have the ability to detect less common adverse reactions, and epidemiological studies are limited by the effects of chance and possible confounders. Safety studies of the MMR vaccine are particularly lacking in statistical power. A review of more than 60 MMR vaccine studies conducted for the Cochrane Library states, “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.”19 Because permanent sequelae (aftereffects) from measles, mumps, and rubella are so rare (especially in children with normal levels of vitamin A and infected after birth),6,15-17 the level of accuracy of the research studies available is insufficient to rule out the possibility that the MMR vaccine causes greater death or permanent disability than measles, mumps, and rubella. – Read full article
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Sheikh al-Asadi warns of Iraqi government compliance with US demands
- How to MAKE THE CONSPIRATORS PAY for their crimes! Dan Dicks with James Corbett on Solutions Watch
- There’s a drought in academia: A drought in honest research on the subject of drought and other weather extremes
- Department of War Awards $20.7 Billion Contract to Raytheon for Air-to-Air Missiles
- ‘Distance yourselves from Israel’: IRGC urges US population to question govt policies
- America’s Greenland deal has a radioactive backstory
- The RAF Fairford ‘terror plot’: Unpacking escalation in the UK echo-chamber
- EU Council Advances Chat Control 2.0 Scanning Proposal
- Ex-Greek MEP files complaint against Israeli spyware firm over alleged Pegasus surveillance
- Troubling ideas throughout the Torah, Talmud, Mishneh Torah and Tanya
- If Americans Knew
- New Report: “Scholasticide and Genocide in Gaza: Assessment, Testimonies and Legal Analysis”
- Ex-Biden officials are desperate for a Gaza scapegoat
- Israeli “settlers” Invade Al-Aqsa; Pour Boiling Water on 75-Year-Old
- Israel Has Kidnapped Another American Teenager
- US arms sales to Israel worth $21.6 billion in 20 months
- Three Palestinians Killed in Israeli Attacks on Gaza
- Revealed: German “Anti-Semitism Expert” Driving Crackdown on Palestine Solidarity is Former Israeli Spy
- Egypt’s Warning to Israel Before Oct 7
- Israel’s siege signals another cruel winter for 1.8 million Gazans – Daily Update
- Netanyahu Asked UAE Leader to Deny Report on Oct. 7 Warning in Secret Visit, Sources Say
- No Tricks Zone
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