Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

How Come Washington’s Humanitarian Concerns Always Result in Population Control

By Jean Perier | New Eastern Outlook | 11.11.2016

Alleged humanitarian efforts have always been a rather important aspect of the state propaganda campaign carried out by the White House and its media. We’ve seen Washington using its pocket NGOs to fight against the alleged “humanitarian crimes” of the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and other states that Washington declared its enemies.

This large-scale campaign that is said to be driven by “common human values” has been supported by a number of modern American oligarchs.

Among those “humanitarian champions” one may find the founder of Microsoft and, perhaps, one the richest businessmen in the world, Bill Gates, who likes to be represented as a benevolent philanthropist of some sort. By using the so-called “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” this richest man on earth is trying to put on a mask of the official representative of the US political elites that is carrying on the fight against poverty, food shortages and diseases in Africa and other poor regions of the world.

However, in reality such “activities” of Bill Gates and the White House are focused on the use of progress to reverse the effect of humanitarian projects, namely to reduce the population of the planet, or, in other words – to pursue eugenics.

This statement is confirmed by Gates’ remarks to the invitation-only Long Beach, California TED2010 Conference, in a speech titled, “Innovating to Zero!” Along with the scientifically absurd proposition of reducing manmade CO2 emissions worldwide to zero by 2050, approximately four and a half minutes into the talk, Gates declares, “First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.” (emphasis added).

Thus, one of the most powerful men in the world has openly declared that he expects vaccines to reduce the world population. Mind you, that when Bill Gates speaks about vaccines, he knows what he is talking about. In January 2010 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Gates announced that over the next decade his foundation would allocate 10 billion dollars to develop and deliver new vaccines to developing countries.

We’ve heard this position on the control over the world population by pursuing the “reduction of the number of third-world inhabitants” before. Australian microbiologist and Nobel Price laureate Macfarlane Burnet in 1947 urged the Australian government to develop and unleash biological weapons against “over-populated countries of Southeast Asia.” In particular, during a closed meeting in 1947 with The New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee microbiologist recommended to create a group with a mandate to create secret biological weapons components that could affect food in such a way that it would allow Canberra to control the population of Indonesia and other Asian countries.

A similar objective was pursued by the secret program code-named Project Coast, during which US intelligence agencies started testing such viruses as Ebola and Marburg fevers on the South African black population. The US Centers for Disease Control was delivering those viruses from its secret laboratories to Africa in a bid to create biological and chemical weapons, which were aimed at sterilizing and even exterminating the black population of this African country, while murdering political opponents of the apartheid.

Today, in the age of high-tech novelties, Bill Gates has pioneered the electronic direction of eugenics, offering to implant the “undesired” part of the population with an electronic remotely controlled chip that would deprive women of reproductive capacity for a total of 16 years.

However, this is hardly the whole truth about the “humanitarian concerns” of the White House and its “humanitarian patrons”, who, under the guise of fighting for the greater good, continue searching ways to control the population of the planet, using both the advances of modern science and armed conflicts, like those that we’ve witnessed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other countries.

November 11, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

IPCC, Climate Science And The Crisis of Peer Review

Foreword to Donna Laframboise’s new report Peer Review: Why Skepticism is Essential

By Christopher Essex and Matt Ridley – GWPF – 31/10/16

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly and falsely claimed that it depends entirely on peer-reviewed papers. Donna Laframboise used volunteers to check this claim and found that a significant part of the references in the fourth assessment report of the IPCC were to ‘grey literature’ – that is, press releases, ‘reports’ from pressure groups and the like, which are not remotely the normal peer reviewed scientific literature.

Yet even if all the citations used by the IPCC were peer-reviewed, this would not mean they were infallible. Peer review is not, never was, and never can be a general protection against prejudice, error, or misconception about scientific matters. That it seems otherwise to some people is a misapprehension on their part, reflecting widespread myths about the reality of human investigations into the natural world.

It is startling for non-scientists who actually visit the sausage factory of science for the first time. There, peer review proves to be an often biased, prejudicial, and perfunctory process contrary in every respect to popular expectations about science. But scientists know that no increased regulation or standards can ever improve things, because there are no higher authorities to appeal to in a domain of human endeavour where no one knows or ever knew the answers – hence the name ‘peer review’ and not ‘expert correction’.

Donna Laframboise observes that, ‘There is a reason publishing insiders are among peer review’s most derisive critics. They know it’s mostly just a game. Everyone is pretending that all is well despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.’ Most scientists grudgingly tolerate peer review because they cannot think of anything better. Experienced ones do not expect much from it, even if they must play along to succeed given modern customs (until about the mid-20th century it hardly existed).

Most scientists cringe when they hear other scientists claim that because their work is peer-reviewed, they do not have to respond to criticisms, even those from qualified colleagues, whether peer-reviewed or not. Some surely do make such claims:  ‘…many academics insist that the research they present to the world has been fully vetted. Indeed, they often behave as though it meets a standard unrivalled elsewhere’, observes Laframboise.

Furthermore, those same scientists retreat to the truth about the state of human knowledge of Nature when facts go against their claims. She points out that: ‘On the other hand, they take no responsibility when information they’ve produced turns out to be mistaken. In such cases everyone is then reminded that scholarly publishing is vii really just an exchange of ideas.’ Few competent scientists regard current scientific thinking as anything more than provisional. It is always fully open to challenge.

Peer-review is also abused as a form of gatekeeping to defend orthodox ideas from challenge, as Laframboise says: ‘Alternative schools of thought are more likely to encounter scorn than a fair hearing, and the secretive nature of peer review provides ample cover for intolerance and tribalism. . . It places unconventional thinkers at the mercy of their more conventional colleagues. Indeed, this approach seems designed to extinguish – rather than nurture – the bold, original thinking that leads to scientific breakthroughs.’ Many unorthodox ideas prove to be wrong, but they are the lifeblood of scientific advance. They challenge our orthodoxies, either sharpening them or overthrowing them. Thus the notion of challenging the orthodox is accepted in science by necessity, even if grudgingly.

Gatekeeping against the unorthodox is not remotely a new problem. Oracular mediocrities down the centuries have doggedly resisted human advances in knowledge from Galileo to Semmelweis to Einstein, and thousands of other cases that only the most learned science historians will ever know. Spectacular scandals come and go, but science is in the end a long game of the generations, not something played out in news cycles. So why then has the public debate about the perfunctory, crony, gate-keeping aspects of peer review grown in volume in the media now? Partly it is because science has become a ‘bigger’ and more centralized endeavor, with massive budgets invested in conventional wisdom, and more politicians involved in pushing certain conclusions. How else can one comprehend the term ‘orchestrated’ used by one founder of the IPCC to describe how scientific opinion was designed to be treated for the use of policymakers?

It is clear that people who have never studied the history of science, or have never been on the unfashionable side of a scientific debate are in for a shock upon encountering this messy and sordid reality for the first time. Not least in for a shock is the media, which has been busy identifying heartbreaking science scandals in medicine, social science, neuroscience, and economics. But curiously they offer none from the subject of climate, despite it being one of the most policy driven and lavishly funded branches of science today.

Is this because there are few examples of bad practice, irreproducibility, retraction, pal review and gatekeeping in climatology? Far from it. The Climategate emails of 2009 revealed gatekeeping at its most blatant. Who can forget Phil Jones writing to Michael Mann on 8 July 2004 ‘can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!’ Or Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick struggling to publish (leading to a US Congressional hearing, no less) their comprehensive demolition of the statistical errors and data-selection issues in the infamous ‘hockey stick’ paper? Or Richard Tol’s exposure of the practices employed in the Cook et al ‘97% viii consensus’ paper? Again and again, peer-reviewed climate papers have fallen apart under post-publication scrutiny from the likes of McIntyre, Willis Eschenbach, Donna Laframboise, Judith Curry and Nic Lewis. And these do not even touch on the challenge of independently reproducing climate model output without the machinery and resources necessary to do so, as Laframboise rightly observes in the following paper.

Indeed, the field of climate science could supply a rich harvest of examples of this crisis of scientific credibility all on its own. Yet it is the scandal that dare not speak its name. The discussions of the crisis in peer review in Nature, Science, the Economist and elsewhere studiously ignore any examples from climate science. Why is this? It is an article of faith among certain scientists and science journalists that because climate scepticism is also a position supported by those on the right of politics, so nobody in science must give fodder to the sceptics.

This is nothing less than the modern manifestation of gatekeeping continuing its ancient legacy, driven by sheer ignorance and self-delusion, to keep the forces that actually advance science away from the door. Scientific research stretches human faculties to their limits, and it is at such limits where human frailties become most prominent.

Humans are fallible. That is one of the greatest lessons from the history of science. The message to be taken from these heartbreaking scientific scandals and absurdities is not one of chagrin and a temptation to adopt cynicism. The true authors of such scandals are the laymen, academics, journalists, and policymakers who do not give a fair hearing to the many highly trained scientists motivated by alternative views who would put such dubious claims to the test. A pervasive uneducated appeal to science as a monolithic incomprehensible authority, assessed only in terms of moral purity rather than factual accuracy, has made such a fair hearing nearly impossible, and done great harm to science and us all.

November 7, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Former Ambassador Andrew Young Calls for End to Water Fluoridation, “Civil Rights Issue”

By Brandon Turbeville | Activist Post | November 1, 2016

Anti-fluoridation activists in Georgia received a major boost of support when former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter, Andrew Young, sent a letter to Georgia Governor Nathan Deal and House Speaker David Ralston demanding hearings to investigate why water fluoridation is being continued in the state despite all the reasons to end it.

Ambassador Young is asking for a written response. His letter was also sent to the CEO of the American Water Works Association, David LaFrance.

“What’s clear to me is that we need a repeal of Georgia’s water fluoridation law, and hearings to look into how fluoridation has continued all these years, long after there were plenty of reasons to end it,” Ambassador Young wrote.

“This is a civil rights issue, and the people have the right to have the full story given to them, rather than highly edited, misleading talking points.”

Young also addressed the sketchy nature of the pro-fluoridation argument when he wrote,

When someone’s story keeps changing, there are quite often motivations behind their changed stance that may not be aligned with the best interests of the public. The story offered by water fluoridation promoters keeps changing… and changing… and changing. There are key groups such as seniors, kidney patients, diabetics, communities of color, thyroid patients and people who drink a lot of water due to their occupation that are especially effected by Fluoridegate.

“I am calling for Fluoridegate hearings, here, in Georgia and I am calling for a repeal of Georgia’s fluoridation law, immediately,” Young added.

You can read the full text of Young’s letter here. We congratulate Ambassador Young on having the courage to speak out on this issue and we eagerly await the written response to it. Even more important, we are looking for an end to water fluoridation in Georgia.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies,Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President.

November 1, 2016 Posted by | Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Science Is In Trouble

By Donna Lamframboise – Global Warming Policy Foundation – 27/10/16

We’ve all heard the buzzword. Whether it’s an anti-bullying program in Finland, an alcohol awareness initiative in Texas, or climate change responses around the globe, we’re continually assured that government policies are ‘evidence-based.’ Science itself guides our footsteps.

There’s just one problem: science is in deep trouble. Last year, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, admitted that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” In his words, “science has taken a turn toward darkness.”

Medical research, psychology, and economics are all in the grip of a ‘reproducibility crisis.’ A pharmaceutical company attempting to confirm the findings of 53 landmark cancer studies was successful in only six instances, a failure rate of 89%. In 2012, a psychology journal devoted an entire issue to reliability problems in that discipline, with one essay titled “Why science is not necessarily self-correcting.” Likewise, a 2015 report prepared for the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve concluded that “economics research is usually not replicable.” Its authors were able to verify the findings of only one third of 67 papers published in reputable economics journals. After enlisting the help of the original researchers, the success rate rose to a still dismal 49%.

Government policies can’t be considered evidence-based if the evidence on which they depend hasn’t been independently verified, yet the vast majority of academic research is never put to this test. Instead, something called peer review takes place. When a research paper is submitted, journals invite a couple of people to evaluate it. Known as referees, these individuals recommend that the paper be published, modified, or rejected.

If one gets what one pays for, it’s worth observing that referees typically work for free. They lack both the time and the resources to perform anything other than a cursory overview. Nothing like an audit occurs. No one examines the raw data for accuracy or the computer code for errors. Peer review doesn’t guarantee that proper statistical analyses were employed, or that lab equipment was used properly.

Referees at the most prestigious of journals have given the green light to research that was later found to be wholly fraudulent. Conversely, they’ve scoffed at work that went on to win Nobel Prizes. Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, describes peer review as a roulette wheel, a lottery, and a black box. He points out that an extensive body of research finds scant evidence that this vetting process accomplishes much at all. On the other hand, a mountain of scholarship has identified profound deficiencies.

Peer review’s random and arbitrary nature was demonstrated as early as 1982. Twelve already published papers were assigned fictitious author and institution names before being resubmitted to the same journal 18-32 months later. The duplication was noticed in three instances, but the remaining nine papers underwent review by two referees each. Only one paper was deemed worthy of seeing the light of day the second time it was examined by the same journal that had already published it. Lack of originality wasn’t among the concerns raised by the second wave of referees.

Anyone can start a scholarly journal and define peer review however they wish. No minimum standards apply and no enforcement mechanisms ensure that a journal’s publicly described policies are actually followed. Some editors admit to writing up fake reviews under the cover of anonymity rather than going to the trouble of recruiting bona fide referees. In 2014, a news story reported that 120 papers containing computer-generated gibberish had nevertheless survived the peer review process of reputable publishers.

Politicians and journalists have long found it convenient to regard peer-reviewed research as de facto sound science. If that were the case, Nature would hardly have subtitled a February 2016 article: “Mistakes in peer-reviewed papers are easy to find but hard to fix.” Over a period of 18 months, a team of researchers attempted to correct dozens of substantial errors in nutrition and obesity research. Among these was the claim that the height change in a group of adults averaged nearly three inches (7 cm) over eight weeks. The team reported that editors “seemed unprepared or ill-equipped to investigate, take action or even respond.” In Kafkaesque fashion, after months of effort culminated in acknowledgement of a gaffe, journals then demanded that the team pay $1,700 in one instance and $2,100 in another before a letter calling attention to other people’s mistakes could be published.

Which brings us back to the matter of public policy. We’ve long been assured that reports produced by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are authoritative because they rely entirely on peer-reviewed, scientific literature. A 2010 InterAcademy Council investigation found this claim to be false, but that’s another story. Even if all IPCC source material did meet this threshold, the fact that one out of an estimated 25,000 academic journals conducted an unspecified and unregulated peer review ritual is no warranty that a paper isn’t total nonsense.

If half of the scientific literature “may simply be untrue,” then half of the climate research cited by the IPCC may also be untrue. This appalling unreliability extends to work on dietary cholesterol, domestic violence, air pollution – in short, to all research currently being generated by the academy.

The US National Science Foundation recently reminded us that a scientific finding “cannot be regarded as an empirical fact” unless it has been “independently verified.” Peer review does not perform that function. Until governments begin authenticating research prior to using it as the foundation for new laws and huge expenditures, don’t fall for the claim that policy X is evidence-based.

Donna Laframboise is the author of Peer Review: Why Skepticism is Essential, a report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

October 30, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

British government admits marijuana extract has medicinal effect

RT | October 12, 2016

The British government has announced that a chemical compound found in cannabis can be considered medicinal. The compound, known as CBD, does not produce a “high,” but is said to have beneficial effects.

Cannabidiol (CBD) is a cannabinoid which accounts for 40 percent of the marijuana plant’s extract. It does not contain the ‘high-inducing’ psychoactive THC, but is said to have the same health benefits as other forms of cannabis, according to the government’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

“We have come to the opinion that products containing cannabidiol (CBD) are a medicine,” an MHRA spokesman told The Huffington Post.

The agency found that Cannabidiol has a “restoring, correcting, or modifying” effect on “physiological functions” when administered to humans, The Independent reported. Campaigners claim the compound helps with diseases including cancer, depression, Crohn’s disease, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

MHRA stressed that any future products containing CBD “will have to meet safety, quality and effectiveness standards to protect public health.”

The body’s review of the cannabinoid followed discussions with CBD vaporizer company MediPen.

MediPen’s managing diretor, Jordan Owen, told The Independent that the company has “worked hard to obtain our goal of breaking down the negative connotations surrounding cannabis to lead to a reform in the law for medicinal use… now this is finally becoming a reality.”

It comes less than two months after a report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group of Drug Reform concluded that the refusal to recognize the medicinal value of cannabis is “irrational.” A petition in July 2015 gathered enough signatures to prompt a debate in parliament on the sale, production, and use of cannabis.

October 13, 2016 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Why did John Gross claim he had no evidence of high temps in the WTC rubble?

OffGuardian | October 1, 2016

Underground it was still so hot that molten metal dripped down the walls… Ken Holden, director NY Dept of Design & Construction, excerpted in video above

This video shows John Gross, a NIST engineer who played a central role in the investigation of the WTC collapses, claiming he has seen no evidence of molten steel or excessively high temperatures in the WTC rubble. His interview – in which he displays obvious signs of discomfort – is intercut with eyewitnesses at Ground Zero describing red-hot, white-hot, or specifically “molten” steel in the rubble.

Such eye-witnesses are numerous, too numerous to all be quoted in the video, and they include firefighters, structural engineers and physicists. Dr Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl was one. Permitted to examine some of the structural steel before it was taken away for melting down, he reported many anomalies:

If you remember the Salvador Dali paintings with the clocks that are kind of melted–it’s kind of like that… That could only happen if you get steel yellow hot or white hot–perhaps around 2,000 degrees Dr Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, professor of civil and environmental engineering UCal Berkeley,

And he was far from being a lone witness:

The debris pile at Ground Zero was always tremendously hot. Thermal measurements taken by helicopter each day showed underground temperatures ranging from 400oF to more than 2,800oF. Jeffrey W. Vincoli CSP, CHCM et al

Typically, when steel bends, it buckles and tears. The smooth bend on this piece shows the steel became malleable — a pretty good indication of how hot it was. Mark Wagner, architect

It looked like an oven, just roaring inside… firefighter, interviewed in video above

Eight weeks later we still got fires burning… at one point I think they were about 2800 degrees firefighter, interviewed in video above

Underground it was still so hot that molten metal dripped down the walls… Ken Holden, director NY Dept of Design & Construction, excerpted in video above

Are we supposed to conclude all these observers, including respected professionals, were mistaken? This is a vital question because ordinary fires can’t reach temperatures sufficient to produce the effects on steel observed by these witnesses. So, if their observations and recordings are true there is clearly some phenomenon going on at Ground Zero unaccounted for by simple office fires.

It’s not necessary to espouse a conspiracy theory in order to recognise more investigation is needed.

October 1, 2016 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Prominent Latin American Scientists Say Bill Gates’ Golden Rice Is a Total Failure

By Christina Sarich | Underground Reporter | September 27, 2016

Nobel Laureates who have been pushing the genetically modified organism agenda deep into scientific circles are being lambasted by a group called the Union of Latin American Scientists Committed to Society and Nature (UCCSN-AL).

A whopping third of Nobel laureates recently slammed Greenpeace for its anti-GM campaign, claiming that the issues which Greenpeace has highlighted “misrepresent the risks, benefits, and impacts” of genetically altered plants.

The UCCSN-AL thinks we should be aware of the true aims of companies like Bayer, Monsanto, Syngenta, and Dow Agrochemical, and others, even with glowing reviews from signatories who make GM-promoting claims without data to back them up.

Whether the public at large will take any anti-GM advice based simply on the Nobel pedigree remains to be seen, especially considering that email trails recently revealed that many high-level professors at universities and scientific journals were either bribed or funded by Dow, Syngenta, Monsanto, Bayer AG, and other chemical-ag champions.

The public reprimand against these laureates concerns transgenic crops, and ‘Golden Rice,’ a highly touted Gates Foundation experiment which has been proven to be deceptive in its claims to help feed the world and stop Vitamin A deficits in poor populations. Truly, if the aim of the Gates Foundation and other corporations was to stop hunger and end vitamin deficiency, why would they continue to patent crops which have been shown to have lower levels of the vitamins and essential minerals that humans need for better health? Many transgenic crops are known as chelators of important minerals from the soil itself.

The Gates’ argue,

“The foundation is supporting the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and partners to develop Golden Rice, a type of rice that contains beta carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A. This grant builds on previous foundation funding, and supports a range of activities to develop Golden Rice varieties that are suited for the Philippines and Bangladesh. It is hoped that Golden Rice will help improve the health of millions of children and adults across the Philippines and Bangladesh.”

However, detractors attest that a simple Vitamin A supplement would be cheaper, easier to provide, and would not require patented, transgenic seed. There is also the suspicion that since rice is a staple food in more than two thirds of the world, that the monopolization by genetically modified rice seed would obliterate ancient varieties, making farmers and those they feed reliant upon GM companies for food.

Similarly, 59 varieties of indigenous corn were recently put at risk in Mexico by the same type of campaign to push ‘much needed GM food’ onto people who were already feeding themselves without it.

The UCCSN-AL states in reference to these transgenic crops,

“[Transgenesis] cannot be considered an advanced science anymore because it is based on fallacious and anachronistic assumptions. Its defenders have oversimplified the scientific rationale behind GMOs to the point that the technology cannot be considered valid anymore: they have discarded rigorous science. The lack of scientific ground that justifies GMOs is also the reason why its promoters deny complex systems of knowledge, such as indigenous peoples’ cultures and livelihoods. Transgenic technology is the geopolitical instrument for colonial domination of our time.”

The UCCSN-AL continues,

“Scientific work must be developed with ethical responsibility and it must be committed to nature and society, and because of that, we reject the concepts stated in the letter and denounce the genocidal role of industrial farming based on GM crops, and we stress the need to defend, promote, and multiply the modes of food production that were culturally developed by the peoples of our region, and therefore are vital to ensure autonomy, environmental sustainability, safety and food sovereignty.”

Furthermore, the premise upon which Golden Rice was developed is provably false. Most genetically modified crops are grown to feed animal livestock and corn ethanol as a subsidized ‘alternative’ fuel for oil companies. These crops aren’t being developed to feed the world, but to feed the greed of elite corporate families which have no interest in whether a child in Bangladesh goes blind, or a food production system robs indigenous groups of ancient farming techniques which yield bumper crops of non-GM food.

If you want an autonomously-fed society, you don’t give them Golden Rice. A thousand Nobel winners that have been paid by the industry to say GMOs are good, likely won’t sway indigenous farmers away from their current opinion.

September 28, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Your Time Is Up “Professor” Wadhams

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | September 17, 2016

image

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-collapse-sea-ice

Time’s up, so-called Professor Wadhams.

It is now exactly four years ago that you forecast the demise of Arctic sea ice this summer:

One of the world’s leading ice experts has predicted the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer months within four years.

In what he calls a “global disaster” now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever recorded, Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University calls for “urgent” consideration of new ideas to reduce global temperatures.

In an email to the Guardian he says: “Climate change is no longer something we can aim to do something about in a few decades’ time, and that we must not only urgently reduce CO2 emissions but must urgently examine other ways of slowing global warming, such as the various geoengineering ideas that have been put forward.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-collapse-sea-ice

So, what does the Arctic actually look like now?

CICE_combine_thick_SM_EN_20160916

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/thk.uk.php

Of course, this was not the first time you made a fool of yourself, was it? At various times in the last few years, you have issued many predictions of ice free Arctics by 2013, and then 2015.

Even as recently as June this year, you were still forecasting:

“The Arctic is on track to be free of sea ice this year or next for the first time in more than 100,000 years”

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/arctic-could-become-ice-free-for-first-time-in-more-than-100000-years-claims-leading-scientist-a7065781.html

Be honest. You are not actually very good at your job, are you?

September 23, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

NYTimes & Zika: a brief case study on climate change hype

By David Wojick | Climate Etc. | September 20, 2016

The folks who make their living by hyping the supposed threat of runaway global warming use a lot of scary language in the process. Here the ever creative New York Times has set what may be a new standard in scary climate change hype, by tying it to the Zika outbreak.

In our Framework Analysis of Federal Funding-induced Biases we point to the press exaggerating unproven scientific hypotheses that support government policies. Policies that depend on scaring people are especially subject to this kind of press bias. The NYT has provided a fine example of this sort of scientific distortion, one that is worth analyzing to see just how the game is played. Not surprisingly, they do this in what they call a “Science” article.

It begins with this ever so scary headline:

In Zika Epidemic, a Warning on Climate Change

Zika itself is pretty scary, so that sets the stage. They then combine this with “epidemic” and “a Warning on Climate Change.” So instead of unsubstantiated possibilities we now have warnings and threats. This is a rhetorical flourish that we have not seen before, especially warnings.

Note that most people will only read this headline, which contains no science whatsoever. They will be told, falsely, that the Zika outbreak is a warning of a supposed climate change threat.

Beyond the scary headline, the article itself is a study in rhetorical structure. It begins with innuendo and ends with standard speculation, but in between it manages to provide some solid science regarding several mosquito borne diseases. The latter is to the effect that these various disease outbreaks and increases are likely due to increased urbanization. You would never guess this from the headline or the first paragraph, which uses a question to make an accusation, a classic form of innuendo:

“The global public health emergency involving deformed babies emerged in 2015, the hottest year in the historical record, with an outbreak in Brazil of a disease transmitted by heat-loving mosquitoes. Can that be a coincidence?”

The answer turns out to be probably, but it takes a lot of reading to realize this. Even worse, the article simply assumes that there will be extensive future warming, all due to human emissions. None of this is known to be true, or even likely. In fact this is a standard rhetorical set piece. Assume great human-induced global warming and prophesy the worst.

Not surprisingly the key prophesying quotation comes from an activist-scientist at the National Science Foundation-funded Nation Center for Atmospheric Research. NSF is the Obama Administration’s leading proponent of the unconfirmed hypothesis that human emissions are creating dangerous global warming. NCAR has even issued a Zika forecast for 50 US cities, based as usual on an unverified computer model.

We also get a juicy quote from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which assumes that a warmer and wetter world lies ahead. What happened to those pesky droughts?

They even throw in a picture of a sick baby and a Brazilian with dengue (not Zika). In our view tying this hyperbolic “climate change threat” rhetoric to the real misery created by Zika and related diseases is simply despicable.

September 23, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Why did NIST decide WTC steel could not conduct heat?

By Loop Garou | OffGuardian | September 17, 2016

The National Institute of Standards & technology (NIST) was engaged by Congress and by FEMA, shortly after the events of 9/11, to produce a report on the destruction of the three WTC towers.

While it did pursue some initial real-world experimentation (which should be discussed in turn), NIST built its conclusions on the collapse primarily on the basis of computer models.

It follows their conclusions can only be as good as those models.

Let me explain first how a predictive computer model works. It’s virtual reality. If you are building a model to predict anything from the stock market to building collapses you are essentially telling a computer a set of rules that enable it to construct a real-world simulation of your money markets or your building. The most important thing to understand is the result you get is only as reliable as the data you input, because computers are quick but not smart.

If you input garbage, you will output garbage. If you punch in wrong values a computer won’t realise they make no sense, it will just run its program with those values and produce a result that has no connection to the real world, and can even be downright ridiculous. There’s no fail-safe or common sense override. Punch the wrong data into your computer model and you will get “proof” cars can drive on water, or birds can fly through solid rock.

Any computer model of anything is only as good as the parameters fed into it.

NIST’s models can’t be assessed independently as a whole because NIST refuses to release any data about them. Their claimed reason for this is that releasing the docs might endanger national security. However NIST did disclose some limited information about their parameters in the body of their reports, most perturbing and inexplicable of which is their acknowledgement they assigned all the steel in their WTC model a thermal conductivity of zero, or close to zero.

To explain to a non-science-based readership what that means, just consider what you would expect to happen if you placed one end of a steel bar in a fire and kept hold of the other end. Would you expect:

A) the end you were holding to gradually heat up to the point you could not keep it in your hand?

B) the end you were holding to remain cool no matter how hot the end in the fire becomes?

Believe it or not, NIST chose the second option. Here it is in their own words:

“The steel was assumed in the FDS model to be thermally-thin, thus, no thermal conductivity was used.” NCSTAR 1-5F, p 20

“The interior walls [including insulated steel columns] were assumed to have the properties of gypsum board [0.5 W/m/K].” NCSTAR 1-5F, p 52

“Although the floor slab actually consisted of a metal deck topped with a concrete slab… the thermal properties of the entire floor slab were assumed to be that of concrete [1.0 W/m/K].” NCSTAR 1-5F, p 52

You don’t need to be a professional scientist to know this is bunkum and a total disregard of basic physics.

Why does this matter? It matters a LOT. Changing the assumed conductivity of steel from its actual figure to zero would allow the model to produce much higher temperatures in the steel directly exposed to fire than would be possible in reality. It’s like calculating the amount of water you could get into a sieve at any one time by assuming the sieve has no holes. The model will show the sieve can be filled to the brim, but that is just so much garbage with no real-world application.

Just so with the temperatures of the steel. NIST needed to produce a model that allowed cool office fires of around 800deg to somehow produce enough heat in localised areas to weaken and buckle steel girders and struts. If they’d allowed the steel to behave normally and wick the heat away along its length they simply could not achieve this aim. Only by turning the assumed thermal conductivity to zero (the equivalent of assuming the sieve has no holes) could they get their model to create enough heat to do the buckling and weakening.

This is a huge problem. In fact it could not be a bigger problem. This bogus assumption that steel has zero thermal conductivity not only renders the NIST report as a whole deeply suspect, it entirely nullifies even the flawed basis for its “collapse by fire” hypothesis.

This is why so many scientists are calling for another investigation. They aren’t saying the gumment did it, they aren’t claiming a conspiracy, they just see huge errors in the previous investigation and want more work to be done.

Bottom line is NIST punched in false data that totally invalidated their model. The zero thermal conductivity issue alone is sufficient grounds for a new investigation.

This article is based on a comment LG posted on another 9/11 thread. We welcome replies and rebuttals, please send them to submissions@off-guardian.org, marked “9/11”

September 17, 2016 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

NIST finally admits free fall of WTC7

OffGuardian

David Chandler, physics teacher and member of AE9/11 Truth describes the journey toward NIST’s public admission that their initial calculations were incorrect and that WTC7’s first eight floors did descend at free-fall speed.

This concession by NIST (see section 11) raises many additional questions about the plausibility of the fire-induced progressive failure explanation for WTC7’s collapse that NIST published in 2008.

September 15, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Heresy and the creation of monsters

By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | October 25, 2010

I’m having another “Alice down the rabbit hole” moment, in response to the Scientific American article, the explication of the article by its author Michael Lemonick, Scientific American’s survey on whether I am a dupe or a peacemaker, and the numerous discussions in blogosphere.

My first such moment was in 2005 in response to the media attention associated with the hurricane wars, which was described in a Q&A with Keith Kloor at collide-a-scape. While I really want to make this blog about the science and not about personalities (and especially not about me),  this article deserves a response.

The title of the article itself is rather astonishing.  The Wikipedia defines heresy as: “Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma.” The definition of dogma is “Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from.” Use of the word “heretic” by Lemonick implies general acceptance by the “insiders” of the IPCC as dogma. If the IPCC is dogma, then count me in as a heretic.  The story should not be about me, but about how and why the IPCC became dogma.

And what exactly is the nature of my challenges to the dogma? Lemonick made the following statement: ““What I found out is that when [Curry] does raise valid points, they’re often points the climate-science community already agrees with — and many climate scientists are scratching their heads at the implication that she’s uncovered some dark secret.” This statement implies that I am saying nothing new, nothing that climate scientists don’t already know.  Well that is mostly true (an exception being my recent blog series on uncertainty); I am mostly saying things that are blindingly obvious to everyone. Sort of like in the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” A colleague of mine at Georgia Tech, a Chair from a different department, said something like this:  “I’ve been reading the media stories on the Georgia Tech Daily News Buzz that mention your statements.  Your statements seem really sensible.  But what I don’t understand is why such statements are regarded as news?”

Well that is a question that deserves an answer. I lack the hubris to think that my statements should have any public importance.  The fact that they seem to be of some importance says a lot more about the culture of climate science and its perception by the public, than it says about me.

The narrative

Why am I being singled out here?  Richard Lindzen and Roger Pielke Sr. have been making far more critical statements about the IPCC and climate science for a longer period than I have. And both score higher than me in the academic pecking order  (in terms of number of publications and citations and external peer recognition).

The answer must be in the narrative of my transition from a “high priestess of global warming” to engagement with skeptics and a critic of the IPCC.  The “high priestess of global warming” narrative (I used to see this term fairly frequently in the blogosphere, can’t spot it now) arose from my association with the hurricane and global warming issue, which at the time was the most alarming issue associated with global warming.

The overall evolution of my thinking on global warming is described in the Q&A at collide-a-scape (the relevant statements are appended at the end of this post.) My thinking and evolution on this issue since 11/19/09 deserves further clarification. When I first started reading the CRU emails, my reaction was a visceral one. While my colleagues seemed focused on protecting the reputations of the scientists involved and assuring people that the “science hadn’t changed,” I immediately realized that this could bring down the IPCC. I became concerned about the integrity of our entire field: both the actual integrity and its public perception. When  I saw how the IPCC was responding and began investigating the broader allegations against the IPCC, I became critical of the IPCC and tried to make suggestions for improving the IPCC.  As glaring errors were uncovered (especially the Himalayan glaciers) and the IPCC failed to respond, I started to question whether it was possible to salvage the IPCC and whether it should be salvaged.  In the meantime, the establishment institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere were mostly silent on the topic.

In Autumn 2005, I had decided that the responsible thing to do in making public statements on the subject of global warming was to adopt the position of the IPCC. My decision was based on two reasons: 1) the subject was very complex and I had personally investigated a relatively small subset of the topic; 2) I bought into the meme of “don’t trust what one scientist says, trust what thousands of IPCC scientists say.” A big part of my visceral reaction to events unfolding after 11/19 was concern that I had been duped into supporting the IPCC, and substituting their judgment for my own in my public statements on the subject. So that is the “dupe” part of all this, perhaps not what Lemonick had in mind.

If, how, and why I had been duped by the IPCC became an issue of overwhelming personal and professional concern. I decided that there were two things that I could do: 1) speak out publicly and try to restore integrity to climate science by increasing transparency and engaging with skeptics; and 2) dig deeply into the broader aspects of the science and the IPCC’s arguments and try to assess the uncertainty. The Royal Society Workshop on Handling Uncertainty in Science last March motivated me to take on #2 in a serious way. I spent all summer working on a paper entitled “Climate Science and the Uncertainty Monster,” which was submitted to a journal in August. I have no idea what the eventual fate of this paper will be, but it has seeded the uncertainty series on Climate Etc. and its fate seems almost irrelevant at this point.

Monster creation

There are some parallels between the “McIntyre monster” and the “Curry monster.” The monster status derives from our challenges to the IPCC science and the issue of uncertainty. While the McIntyre monster is far more prominent in the public debate, the Curry monster seems far more irksome to community insiders. The CRU emails provide ample evidence of the McIntyre monster, and in the wake of the CRU emails I saw a discussion at RealClimate about the unbridled power of Steve McIntyre. Evidence of the Curry monster is provided by this statement in Lemonick’s article: “What scientists worry is that such exposure means Curry has the power to do damage to a consensus on climate change that has been building for the past 20 years.” This sense of McIntyre and myself as having “power” seems absurd to me (and probably to Steve), but it seems real to some people.

Well, who created these “monsters?” Big oil and the right-wing ideologues? Wrong. It was the media, climate activists, and the RealClimate wing of the blogosphere (note, the relative importance of each is different for McIntyre versus myself). I wonder if the climate activists will ever learn, or if they will follow the pied piper of the merchants of doubt meme into oblivion.

A note to my critics in the climate science community

Let me preface my statement by saying that at this point,  I am pretty much immune to criticisms from my peers regarding my behavior and public outreach on this topic (I respond to any and all criticisms of my arguments that are specifically addressed to me.) If you think that I am a big part of the cause of the problems you are facing, I suggest that you think about this more carefully. I am doing my best to return some sanity to this situation and restore science to a higher position than the dogma of consensus. You may not like it, and my actions may turn out to be ineffective, futile, or counterproductive in the short or long run, by whatever standards this whole episode ends up getting judged. But this is my carefully considered choice on what it means to be a scientist and to behave with personal and professional integrity.

Let me ask you this. So how are things going for you lately? A year ago, the climate establishment was on top of the world, masters of the universe. Now we have a situation where there have been major challenges to the reputations of a number of a number of scientists, the IPCC, professional societies, and other institutions of science. The spillover has been a loss of public trust in climate science and some have argued, even more broadly in science. The IPCC and the UNFCCC are regarded by many as impediments to sane and politically viable energy policies. The enviro advocacy groups are abandoning the climate change issue for more promising narratives. In the U.S., the prospect of the Republicans winning the House of Representatives raises the specter of hearings on the integrity of climate science and reductions in federal funding for climate research.

What happened? Did the skeptics and the oil companies and the libertarian think tanks win? No, you lost. All in the name of supporting policies that I don’t think many of you fully understand. What I want is for the climate science community to shift gears and get back to doing science, and return to an environment where debate over the science is the spice of academic life. And because of the high relevance of our field, we need to figure out how to provide the best possible scientific information and assessment of uncertainties. This means abandoning this religious adherence to consensus dogma.

Addendum: reproduced from my Q&A at collide-a-scape

“Circa 2003, I was concerned about the way climate research was treating uncertainty (see my little essay presented to the NRC Climate Research Committee).

I was considered somewhat quixotic but not really outside of the mainstream (p.s. the CRC didn’t pay any attention to my essay, they went off in a different direction that focused on communicating uncertainty and decisionmaking under uncertainty). During this period, I was comfortably ensconced in the ivory tower of academia, writing research papers, going to conferences, submitting grant proposals. I was 80% oblivious to what was going on in terms of the public debate surrounding climate change.

This all changed on September 14, 2005, when I participated in a press conference on our forthcoming paper that described a substantial increase in the global number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes. The unplanned and uncanny timing of publication of this paper was three weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. While global warming was mentioned only obliquely in the paper, the press focused on the global warming angle and a media furor followed. We were targeted as global warming alarmists, capitalizing on this tragedy to increase research funding and for personal publicity, a threat to capitalism and the American way of life, etc.

At the same time, we were treated like rock stars by the environmental movement. Our 15 minutes stretched into days, weeks and months. Hurricane Katrina became a national focusing event for the global warming debate. We were particularly stung by criticisms from fellow research scientists who claimed that we were doing this “for the money” and attacked our personal and scientific integrity. We felt that one scientist in particular had crossed the line and committed a series of fouls, and this turned the scientific debate into academic guerrilla warfare between our team and the skeptics that was played out in the glare of the media. This “war” culminated in an article published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, “Debate shatters the civility of weather science” on Feb 2, 2006 . . . This article became a catharsis for the hurricane research community, that engendered extensive email discussion among scientists on both sides of the public debate. We did an email version of a “group hug” and vowed to stop the guerilla warfare.

I had lost my bearings in all of this, and the Wall Street Journal article had the effect of a bucket of cold water being poured over my head. I learned several important lessons from this experience: just because the other guy commits the first “foul” doesn’t give you the moral high ground in protracted academic guerilla warfare. Nothing in this crazy environment is worth sacrificing your personal or professional integrity. After all, no one remembers who fired the first shot, all they see is unprofessional behavior.

I took a step back and tried to understand all this craziness and learn from it. I even wrote a journal article on this, “Mixing Politics and Science in Testing the Hypothesis that Greenhouse Warming is Causing a Global Increase in Hurricane Intensity.” This paper got quite a bit of play in the blogosphere upon its publication in Aug 2006, and at this time I made my first major foray into the blogosphere, checking in at all the blogs where the paper was being discussed. See esp realclimate and climateaudit (but I can no longer find the original thread on climateaudit ).

At climateaudit, the posters had some questions about statistics and wanted to see the raw data. I was pretty impressed by the level of discussion, and wondered why I had not come across this blog before over at the realclimate blogroll. Then I realized that I was on Steve McIntyre’s blog (I had sort of heard of his tiff with Mann, but wasn’t really up on all this at the time). I was actually having much more fun over at climateaudit than at realclimate, and I thought it made much more sense to spend time at climateaudit rather than to preach to the converted at realclimate.   Back in 2006 spending time at climateaudit was pretty rough sport (it wasn’t really moderated at the time). When I first started spending time over there, the warmist blogs thought it was really funny, and encouraged me to give ‘em hell.

I was continuing my overall thinking on how to better deal with skeptics and increase the credibility and integrity of science. I gave an invited talk at Fall 2006 AGU meeting, entitled “Falling out of the ivory tower: Reflections on mixing politics and climate science.” This is where I first started talking about circling the wagons, etc. I don’t think this was quite what the convenors had in mind when they invited me to give this talk, but at the time I still had pretty solid status as a survivor of vicious political attacks during the hurricane wars and was a heroine for taking down Bill Gray.

When the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report was published in 2007, I joined the consensus in supporting this document as authoritative; I was convinced by the rigors of the process, etc etc. While I didn’t personally agree with everything in the document (still nagging concerns about the treatment of uncertainty), I bought into the meme of “don’t trust what one scientist says, listen to the IPCC.” During 2008 and 2009, I became increasingly concerned by the lack of “policy neutrality” by people involved in the IPCC and policies that didn’t make sense to me. But after all, “don’t trust what one scientist says”, and I continued to substitute the IPCC assessment for my own personal judgment [in my public statements].

November 19, 2009: bucket of cold water #2. When I first saw the climategate emails, I knew these were real, they confirmed concerns and suspicions that I already had. After my first essay “On the credibility . . .” posted at climateaudit, I got some emails that asked me to be sensitive to the feelings of the scientists involved. I said I was a whole lot more worried about the IPCC, in terms of whether it could be saved and whether it should be saved. I had been willing to substitute the IPCC for my own personal judgment [in public statements], but after reading those emails, the IPCC lost the moral high ground in my opinion. Not to say that the IPCC science was wrong, but I no longer felt obligated in substituting the IPCC for my own personal judgment.

So the Judith Curry ca 2010 is the same scientist as she was in 2003, but sadder and wiser as a result of the hurricane wars, a public spokesperson on the global warming issue owing to the media attention from the hurricane wars, more broadly knowledgeable about the global warming issue, much more concerned about the integrity of climate science, listening to skeptics, and a blogger (for better or for worse). . . People really find it hard to believe that I don’t have a policy agenda about climate change/energy (believe me, Roger Pielke Jr has tried very hard to smoke me out as a “stealth advocate”). Yes, I want clean green energy, economic development and “world peace”. I have no idea how much climate change should be weighted in these kinds of policy decisions. I lack the knowledge, wisdom and hubris to think that anything I say or do should be of any consequence to climate/carbon/energy policy.”

September 14, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »